Anthracite Chance

A tremendous tale from an anonymous friend.
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 It being a cold winter’s night, it’s … storytime! “The Punk Meets the Godfather," or, how a kid from coal country discovers the connection between his shanty-Irish forebears and la famiglia Corleone.

Backstory. I was delivered into this vale of tears in the northeast Pennsylvania town of Carbondale—a god-forsaken place, I’m not kidding, though populated by determinedly godly people, no doubt about that. It wasn’t always like that; back in the days when anthracite was king and the rails were humming, it likely wasn’t so bad a community, aside from the streets being littered with the corpses of poverty-stricken alcoholics who died of black lung as they crawled their way to another day in the mines. But never mind about that, because this is a happy story! Returning recently to these my dank roots, I visited my elderly aunt, my deceased mom’s sister, and mentioned how much I liked a clock hanging in her foyer. She told me that in the Thirties it hung in the bar at the Hotel American, an ancient Carbondale establishment which a great-great aunt of mine ran. I never knew that. Imagine: a relative of mine, a barkeep.

So I told my Dad what I learned, and he tells me that HIS uncle James rented out the top floor of the place and turned it into a gambling joint—wheels, cards, numbers. Apparently it was a rollicking operation, and since James extended credit by the week, come Friday, part of that week’s wages, garnered either in the rail yards or the mines, went to my great uncle.

Enough, apparently, that a coterie of unhappy miners’ and roundhouse laborers’ wives approached James' father, my great-grandfather, with their tale of woe. I have a newspaper clipping with a pic of this gentleman, whose name was Patrick Timothy Martin, describing his 62 years in the mines without having missed a day’s work. “And still going strong.” He also maintained serious gardens and a small stand of Yellow Delicious apple trees, which were still bearing terrific fruit when I was a kid, and he would load up the produce in the wheelbarrow, and he and my dad, a child at the time, would trundle through the neighborhood, delivering free food to the homes of families whose menfolk had been mangled, or rendered lifeless, by the mines.

That’s just to give you a picture of the kind of man Patrick Timothy Martin was. My Dad worshipped him—his own dad flew the coop early on, so gramps was his de factor father; my mom told me that on the night they moved in together after getting hitched, he put a framed 8x10 B&W—I still remember it—of his grandpa, sitting in a dark suit in a rocking chair, on their dresser. She promptly took it down and said no more of that, she wasn’t having him in the bedroom. In any case, no accident that I’m named Patrick Timothy myself.

As for James, the only other story I heard about him occurred when my Dad was going into the service. James asked him if he was going to play cards. My dad, no gambler, said no. James replied, “Well if you ever do, you let me know. Because if you’re going to play cards, you’re going to play cards.” Just to complete the picture of the kind of guy James was.

Anyway, old Patrick Timothy Martin considered gambling a damnable vice to begin with, never mind that his son was running the local operation. So after listening to the ladies, after hours, he picks up an axe, walks downtown, breaks into the suite, and takes the axe to everything. Smashes the whole operation to smithereens. (James later said there was nothing bigger than a matchstick left). Then he walks back home and goes to sleep.

James hears about this first thing in the morning. He goes to the hotel, surveys the damage, and, being of a philosophical bent, simply shrugs, walks downstairs, goes next door and buys a one-way ticket on the next bus to Manhattan. Gets into town and winds up managing a club for Frank Costello, who served as Puzo’s prime model for Don Corleone.

I never knew either James or my great-grand-dad, but I’ve brooded on this a bit. Quoth Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Coming from a pious, priest-ridden family—“Sister This” and “Monsignor That” it was, each time there was a family gathering—I feel rather reassured to discover a Runyonesque strain among my ancestors. Shanty Irish that I’ll remain all the way to the grave, it’s helpful, in some small way, to know that I’m the product of the same strands of DNA that created both Patrick Timothy and James—the axe in one hand, while the other cuts the deck. Complicated creatures we are, each one of us, and ever so much at the mercy of the mort main, the dead hand.