Through the Eyes of Children

By Melissa Ludtke

EVERY SUNDAY MORNING DAVID Nelson's family attends church on nearby Williams Mountain, where his father Larry, a coal miner, was born 39 years ago. Inside the small Advent Christian church that his father and mother Joy, 36, helped build, David joins his brother Stephen, 7, and his sister Nancy, 13, in a Bible class. Later in the day, the family drives an hour and 15 minutes to another Advent Christian church at the top of a distant and twisting hollow. David's parents, who are licensed to preach, lead the service, which lasts nearly two hours.

Tears well up in Joy's eyes as she stands at the pulpit one Sunday evening offering testimony to all that God has done for her family. David sits in the pew behind Nancy, combing his sister's curly blond hair, inattentive to his mother's preaching. Nancy blows bubbles with thick pink gum. Stephen lies across a nearby pew, asleep. "Boring," Nancy says. Only David stands with his father to sing the final hymn.

"It's hard having two preachers for parents," says David, who feels the twin yoke of religion and strict parental supervision. David describes the biggest lesson he has learned from his parents. "Not to cuss or go to beer joints or girly bars. Well, they haven't told me not to go to girly bars, but they wouldn't like it. They don't like for us to do anything that a Christian wouldn't do. If I did that, they'd kill me."

Prenter, W. Va., where David lives, is a tiny coal camp of a town some 40 miles and a mountain pass south of Charleston. A single paved street runs through the town. One-story look-alike houses with green shutters, rickety porches and peeling paint are squeezed between the road and the steep hills. No traffic light. No police station. No firehouse. No school. That is ten miles down the road, where Prenter Creek empties into Big Coal River.

For David Nelson, a pudgy, serious, persistent boy, there was never any question that he would be a coal miner like his dad, who came back from Viet Nam in 1971 and followed his father and grandfather into the coal mines. When David was younger, Larry took him for his first look at the mines. "He was ridin' me around," David recalls, "and I looked up and there was this big ! mountain covered with coal. I thought about working there someday."

His choice is more than a mere wanting. It is a profound longing, a matter of identity. David's younger brother Stephen wants only to play football for West Virginia and go on from there to play professionally, even if it means leaving the hills and the coal mines. David wants his father's identity, his land and context.

He may not be able to have it. Last winter David's father, like many other miners, lost his job. Unemployment pays him less than half his union wage. "Yeah, I want to be a coal miner," David says, "if they ain't shut down."

Even at his age, David understands that workers are being replaced by machines that can mine more coal more cheaply. His father has been laid off twice, the previous time for three years, so David worries about coal's future as well as his own. "I'm afraid," he says, "that later on the dead trees and plants won't be able to produce coal and everybody will be losing their jobs."

The West Virginia hills cradle families in cozy, isolated hollows. Mining is dangerous, and children worry when their fathers go into the mines. But a different kind of hardship comes when the mines close down; often families split up when breadwinners depart to look for jobs. Children remain behind, wondering if they too will one day have to leave the security of land and family.

"These are my hills," a Coal Valley News editorialist wrote more than 30 years ago. His words are no less pertinent today: "I do not hold title to the lands, but I reap every benefit and every injury to them. Believe it or not, you and I are the guardians of these hills. They are God's hills and we are the keepers. More than that, we shall inherit the manifold blessings of the hills. They are our hills."

When he is working, David's father drives a buggy in the mines and carries a shovel, which he derisively calls "an ignorant stick." To work in mining, David's generation will need to operate computers. In Prenter only four out of ten children graduate from high school. "I will either get a house here or build one on a big piece of land up there on the mountain," says David, imagining his future. Then the vista darkens: "But if there is no work here, I would have to move away, find a new job or somethin'."

After Larry was laid off last winter, he began cooking, cleaning and putting the three children to bed. To help out with expenses, Joy took a job selling + coupons for photographs door to door. She drives to distant hollows, logging nearly 1,800 miles during the five or six days she works each week. She takes in about $240 a week before taxes and expenses, barely breaking even after car repairs and other costs. Now Larry thinks about heading north to look for work in a factory.

"I have a little difficulty being a househusband," says Larry, who struggles to balance the powerful image of older, more macho times with current necessity. "But I love being with the kids. I also believe it is good for them to see me doin' housework, so they don't keep believin' that outside work belongs only to the man and inside is the woman." This is quite a change in attitude for a man who insisted his wife quit nursing school after he and Joy married.

When David turned ten last year, he was finally old enough for a Nelson family ritual, deer hunting. He had waited impatiently for the birthday. David's father had not been allowed to hunt with his father until he was ten. The waiting and expectation give importance to the ritual. David and his father went up on Old Brammer Ridge to search for a buck with antlers big enough to be legal. "We got to where we's goin'," David remembers. "We couldn't find no deer." There were more deer when he was a boy, Larry told his son. The note of elegy, of an age gone and irrecoverable, lingered in the autumn air.

David recalls what happened next: "Then this big buck come up there, and Dad goes, 'David, there's a buck!' And he just threw his gun up there and he went ka-pow! He got him. He's layin' there kickin', and Dad goes, 'Shoot there!' And I put a bullet in the gun and I go boom! And the bullet hits the dirt. I go, 'I think I missed it.' I put another one in there and I aim again. Ka-pow! I say, 'Dad, I think I missed again.' We went down there, and it stopped kickin' and stuff. And Dad, he just started guttin' it. Dressin' it. It was the first time I saw that. I about threw up. It stunk. The intestines. The heart. The lungs. The stomach. I was right beside it. I was glad I wasn't no deer."

Larry wants his kids' upbringing to mirror his own. "I try to work with my boys to revert them back to my childhood," he says. "When I was small, I ran in the mountains. We went into the creeks and dammed up a swimming hole. I try to get them to relate to nature themselves. Try to show them there are other things out there than alcohol and drugs. David, he is respondin' real well, fishin' and huntin'. A lot of parents, they say they want to raise children different than the way they themselves were raised. I'm proud of how I was raised. Only had two pair of pants, but I had a pride about me. My parents gave me love. Today we livin' in such a rat race. We don't take time to love the kids, to pass on what we have been taught."

Trying to reproduce a cherished past is difficult when so much has changed. Larry's childhood swimming hole long ago was filled with silt from the mines. The movie house is gone too, displaced by cable television and the VCR. The Nelsons have both. Out of fear for their safety, the Nelsons do not allow their kids to explore the woods by themselves, as Larry did, or even walk or ride their bikes too far from home alone. "There was a lot more they was allowed to do back then, like go out in the woods and not be afraid of bein' kidnaped or gettin' shot at or somethin'," says Nancy. "Here in Prenter, this old man he pulled up and tried to pick up this girl. He grabbed her leg and tried to pull her in his car. Her dog bit him, and she got away. She hit him with a rock too."

Larry and Joy Nelson's Fundamentalist Christian faith imposes strict rules on their children. What they watch on television is strictly monitored: no soap operas, no shows with a hint of sex. The children will not be allowed to date until 16, even though many girls in Nancy's seventh grade already wear boys' rings.

"Sometimes when me and Joy come by the high school, the kids be like white on rice wrapped around one another," says Larry disapprovingly. "Several gotten pregnant. I think America as a whole has dropped her values. Now it seems all right to have premarital sex. Mothers goin' along with it. I believe it is our responsibility to teach our children the values when they are much younger."

David shares a bedroom with his siblings. The room is barely large enough to fit the three beds. In the winter, cold air knifes through the spaces between the clapboard walls. The children sleep under layers of homemade patchwork quilts. No door separates their bedroom from the living room, a small rectangle dominated by the wood stove that is the sole source of heat for the house.

There is one thing David desperately wants, an object of desire he shares with Nancy, Stephen and his parents: a house of their own. The family's current four-room dwelling, for which they pay $30 a month in rent, is owned ! by a coal company. Taped to the kitchen wall is a newspaper article with a drawing of a house with floor plans. Nancy calls it "our dream house." With its dormer windows and steeply pitched roof, the structure looks more suited to suburbia than to this West Virginia hollow. But it has four bedrooms.

On that happy though ever distant day when David moves into his new house, one item will surely go with him. It is the mounted head of the nine-point buck he and his father shot last fall. David remembers: "We came to skin the deer, and Dad looks at it and says, 'I'm going to have that mounted.' Then he was tearin' the skin off, and we found where I had shot it real close to the tail where it went through the backbone and came out the other side. And Dad says, 'If you goin' to shoot a deer, you got to shoot it up around the shoulder or neck.' I say, 'I know.' You see, it was really Dad's deer."

The head now hangs in the living room with a plaque inscribed LARRY AND DAVID NELSON, NOV. 23, 1987. The trophy, just to the right of the mantelpiece, has a place of prominence in the house. "Goin' huntin' with your son is something a father can't explain," Larry says. He looks up at the deer. "I downed the deer, and David put it away. It was a special time for us. Maybe 20 years from now David will look back and recollect the times we had together."