Three ink blots on the eastern map of Pennsylvania, between the Delaware and the Susquehanna Rivers, represent three narrow valleys; together covering an area less than five hundred square miles, that produced every single ounce of the hundreds upon hundreds of millions of tons of hard, slow-and-hot-burning, highly prized anthracite coal in America.

Alternate layers of rock and coal are piled one upon the other; layers of a cake, thick layers of rock separated by the thin filling of a coal seam. The rock layers vary from a few feet to two hundred, the coal seam from a foot high to thirty and more.

Anthracite had powered much of the industrial might of a nation. The steel mills and the foundries, the railroads, the furnaces and the boiler rooms in the plants and schools and offices and homes of a nation had a voracious appetite and the collieries aimed to please.

The smallest of the valleys, lying along the north branch of a river, is just four miles wide and twenty long, its limits so geology sharply defined that one could pass in five minutes through any notch in the surrounding mountain walls and find oneself as much out of the coal regions as if a hundred miles away.

To Evelyn Anne Murphy Holmes, as to her mother Mary Anne Ryan Murphy, the valley had felt ever so much more narrow than even that, and hundreds of miles would never be far enough away.

Evelyn’s oldest brother was her first cousin, James.

It never made sense, but does life, after all, make sense? Evelyn knew the answer all too well.

A miner’s life starts as a boy in the breaker, and ends, as an old man, in the breaker.

The breakers squat upon hillside and valley like enormous preying monsters, eating the sunshine, the grass, the green leaves. Smoke from their nostrils, dragon-like, ravages the air, leaves scant surviving vegetation miserable, half-strangled; along the line of the mountain the rare silhouettes of a few unhappy trees are etched against moonlit clouds.

As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, grandfather Jack Murphy came with his father and brothers from Ireland. Jack started in the breaker, like most, at the age of nine. It was no longer legal for a boy that young to work in the mine, so he lied about his age; he was, he said, “twelve, goin’ on thirteen.” He had been well-coached by the other boys..

The foreman knew he was lying, anyone could tell just to look at him; but he didn’t care.

Jack’s alternative was legal work in the silk mills; the mining laws were the obstacle. But the silk mills didn’t pay so well and the future was much more limited; one couldn’t become a miner working in the silk mills

So Jack Murphy, a boy of nine, walks to work in the predawn; a breaker looms above, a huge and towering frame of blackened wood, tipped in a curious little peak; along its sides a profusion of windows at unexpected points. Through these openings come glimpsing flashes of whirring machinery.

A mighty gnashing tears at the ear.

With terrible appetite the huge and hideous monster sits imperturbably munching coal, mammoth jaws grinding out their hellish, monotonous uproar.

To one side, from the mine itself, men with blackened face and garments issue, the bright, flickering little tin lamps on their hats the sole counterpoint to the grime. They walk stolidly, carelessly swinging lunch-pails; the marks upon them of their forbidding calling fascinate young eyes ‘till they pass from view. They are warriors of the grim battle waged in sunless depth. They are the night shift on the way home; the day shift in relief, scant relief it be.

In the breaker, dust lies deep on anything unmoving, clouds of it billow, turn the air dark; the crash and thunder of machinery is like the roar of an immense and violent tempest. The very structure is a-tremble with the sweep and circle of ponderous machinery. It is a place of infernal din, the sounds of hell.

At the top laborers dump an endless procession of cable-drawn coal carts into the creature’s voracious maw. Huge black boulders of coal slide as if reluctant to begin their journey down through the building. Great teeth on massive revolving cylinders catch and chew them; breaking them apart, providing namesake to the structure. Pulverized coal slips through sizing grates, each lump into its proper chute, until at the end the entire mass emerges in carefully sorted fragments. All except the ubiquitous dust, of course.

Down in the midst of hell sit the urchins, working hard for their fifty-five cents each day. These little men are a terrifically dirty band - they look precisely like the imps of hell.

Jack climbs the long, steep, cleated ramp paralleling the coal chutes with their tough endless iron troughs, laden with the broken offerings of the far away miners, the fruits of their dark toil passing endlessly by as boys crouch on wooden slat seats, straddling the flow, bending for hours at a time, wearing callused fingers and nails against iron, grabbing deftly at bits of slate mixed with coal, tossing them aside into the tailing chutes. He finds his place and sits. There are five or six boys, one above another, over each trough. The coal is expected to be pure after it passes the final boy. It is as a form of religious duty, all pay homage to the coal.

He laughs, and when he does, his face is a wonder and a terror, white eyes and gap-toothed grin startling contrasts in face of lamp black night; through ragged shirt glimpses of shoulders, black as the coal they serve.

The breaker boys have an air of supreme independence,. They swear long oaths with skill and seem proud of their villainy. They inhale the dust until lungs grow heavy and sick. The clamor rings in ears until it is wondrous they have hearing at all.

When he gets a break he plays baseball, out on the culm heap, or fights with boys from other breakers or among his companions, as opportunity presents, while overhead arches a sky of soft pastel blue, incredibly distant from his somber life.

He is uncowed; he swaggers. Like his peers, he is very ambitious.

Before the breaker boy always is hope one day of being a door-boy in the mine; and, later, mule-boy; and later yet, laborer and helper to the miner, each step bearing a higher wage and exacting a yet higher price in return. Finally, if he be grown to a great and powerful man, he may become a real miner.

And if he is so lucky, his eventual fate is to escape a shattered old man: burdened with "miner's asthma," fit only for work in the breaker, robbed in the end even of the dignity of manhood, of being a miner.

And if he is not so lucky, he may get squeezed.

Mary Anne Ryan was an educated woman. She had come from Ireland to be governess to her nieces and nephews, a high school graduate and qualified to teach in the convent school, a woman who spoke three languages, and even if one was lowly Gaelic, another was French.

A woman with prospects she was - until she was raped by her aunt’s husband, her uncle, a rich and successful businessman with connections, father to the children in her care. Such shameful doings were not to be spoken of, and a woman who could not look after her virtue was presumed complicit. Her aunt showed her the door, never wanting this young, pretty nineteen year old with her narrow waist and fine features and wide brown eyes and educated ways and airs in her home in the first place.

There were no jobs for a fallen governess, and no Irish teaching credential would serve anywhere but the parochial school. A pregnant unmarried girl teaching in a Catholic school? In that day even the public schools wouldn’t have even taken an unpregnant married woman!

So Mary Anne had found Evelyn’s father, became a coal miner’s wife, better than washerwoman or whore, her primary career options, the best available alternative. A man to give a name to her illegitimate, incest-spawned son; and to six more children of his own. It was a bitter marriage, a loveless aching life for a smart woman who had once had prospects. Her husband for all his rough upbringing was mad in love with her. Too bad she did not share the feeling.

She visited the curse of intelligence upon her children, her youngest Evelyn included, raised them with culture, took them to movies and plays when possible, read to them, sent them to parochial schools, taught them herself. Perhaps it would have been better not to do so, perhaps a life of ignorance is preferable to one knowing and never being able to reach, never to connect, never to achieve. What need a coal miner’s son or daughter for culture?

Ignorance is bliss, or so they say.

Evelyn’s father was a sweet man, she would later say, he loved his little garden behind whatever ramshackle house they rented, tended to it with a religious fervor, and as well he was a devout Catholic. He held her in his lap, sitting in the old wicker chair on the porch, softened on Sundays only, with her mother’s hand-embroidered needlepoint cushions, and sang to her in a fine Irish tenor after church. That was what she remembered best, that was what kept her sane after, when life as a coal miner’s daughter revealed itself to her, unfolded upon her, strangled her.

Of course, grandfather was long gone then, squeezed in a small disaster, a poorly shored section of mine collapsed, unremarkable among a similar dozen accidents in the valley that year. Five other men were squeezed with him in the cold and wet and impenetrably dark bowels of the valley, sent to heaven directly from hell with a subtle incense of blasting powder smoke, coal dust, oil, and earth, on that cold and wet and impenetrably dark day.

There was no workmen’s compensation, no disability insurance, no life insurance, no social security, no survivors benefits; the mine would not even pay to bury him, that was the union’s job. He died leaving a pregnant wife, three children, Evelyn’s father the eldest.

Thus her father, led a life fractionally less hard than his father; had instead of a third grade education a fifth grade education; had only to work sixty hours instead of seventy-two each week. And yet still he came away with little or no money, his pay owed to the company store, docked away before he saw it, and any left over went to drink, the only escape from this life of dark drudgery, this life in hell.

This was the calculus of a coal miner’s life, for inside a man the hard lumps of anthracite would remain unbroken, exacting instead an inevitable, internal toll.

And yet, life goes on and much of the beauty of math is how unexpectedly elegant results will now and then issue from static equations.

Evelyn grew, surpassing her mother in beauty and intelligence and ambition, none of which was any advantage in this coal-sodden valley. Finally she married beneath her ambitions - little choice she had - another grandson of Ireland, another progeny of the coal fields, Thaddeus Holmes, a man of demeanor equally meek to her father’s example, accepting his fate as passive mate to an unhappy, sharp-tongued, religiously obsessed wife.

Well, she was pretty, and she bore pretty children, five of them before he too was squeezed, two limbs lost to machinery and death from shock and blood loss and infection a few days after. The mines had become a safer place by then, but not safe enough.

But at least once he was gone there was no reason to stay in this narrow valley, this Iron Maiden, this filthy place. She moved, north and west, to a city, a place of culture and industry and wealth, even if it was colder, and most of all a place without coal mines, coal dust, coal miners, coal memories.

Wealth did not, of course, mean wealth for her. A widow with a tenth grade education, eight children and social security - pittance that it was, based on her husband’s meager wages - had no career paths to pursue, no matter how sharp her mind. Or tongue.

Even here Evelyn was a very frustrated woman, her intelligence and ambition smoldered in an airless world where her lack of formal education and her gender ensured she would never find fulfillment.

A brief procession of men, better heeled than her dead husband, more able to appreciate her mind, yet none wished to be saddled with five, then six, then seven, and finally eight children of other men.

In this new place Evelyn moved often, as each of her last three children were born. In a big city any reputation can be buried in indifference with fair ease and short distance. For though she did what she needed to make ends meet, she would contain her sins, she would not commit the unspeakable murder of the unborn, nor would she compound and double her sins with contraceptives.

The mines flooded. Careless mapping led one company to blow out the wall to the river; the other mines closed when a rising flood swamped the area, shifted the river itself and cascaded into the shafts. The jobs gone, the lives played out, the breakers abandoned, the tired land sank into an even greater poverty. The churches and the parochial schools closed, the convent her sister Mary belonged to transferred her to this city where Evelyn lived and sinned. Two brothers followed.

Her father’s sweet tenor was far away.

Evelyn’s last born, Barry Michael Holmes, would have been a delight to any mother not so badly used, so worn by time and events and frustration, one not so inured to a hard life, to one less familiar with the taste and burn of her father’s leather belt in her mother Mary Anne’s wielding hand, one not so burdened with the crushing weight of her own sins and God’s retribution.

One might think a pretty boy, to a woman whose brother was a cousin, a boy with his mother’s wide brown, innocent eyes, his grandfather’s sweet disposition, and a wicked sharp mind, would be a blessing, a comfort, a hope for the future - a better future for a child is what all parents want, is it not? That’s what they say.

To Evelyn he was one more mouth to feed on too little money, one more soul to be damned for her sins, for her mother’s sins, for her uncle’s sins, one more reminder, in his successes, of her failures.

When Barry was singled out and sent to special schools, when he was offered scholarships to Princeton and Harvard, when his genius at mathematics emerged and his world opened wide it was more than she could bear. And when he finally left, sixteen, on scholarship to a big University in the South, it was no happy day for her, rather a vile one.

After she finally learned of Barry’s sins, she determined to save her son from sin, to do one thing in her life right. She saw that otherwise he was destined to burn in hell, knew it for her fault, knew in her heart it was God’s punishment, God’s curse on her and her family, she now deserted by all of her ungrateful children, left with only a pittance of Social Security as a widow and a small monthly check from her oldest son.

She, like the breakers, like the very mines, was abandoned.