'Snake again,' was all he would say, meaning he hadn't been able to mine enough coal to pay off the bills at the company store, that he still owed for food and doctoring and his work tools and blasting powder, that his paycheck had a single wavy line where the money figures should have been. He tossed his pay envelope on the kitchen table. His face and hands were black and shiny: the rest of him was pale and waxy like lard. She never washed his mine clothes with the rest of our things. He stripped off his clothes and dropped them in a heap for Mommy to wash the next day.

I always lay on the side of the bed next to the door, so I could hang my head over the edge and watch her.ĭaddy would stomp onto the back porch, peel off his boots and bang them against the steps to knock off the crusts of mud and coal. But on Saturday, Mommy boiled water, rattled coal in the buckets to throw on the fire, pulled out the Number Three washtub. He would be back out before dawn anyway, so there was no need to bathe. Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven and Unquiet Earth give fictional story lines to the real-life persons, places, and events of her youth in this part of. Most nights, he'd come in quiet, just lay himself down, coal cust and all, on a mat behind the cookstove in the kitchen, so as not to track dirt into the rest of the house. It was way after dark, and I'd be asleep with Talcott and Kerwin in the bed in the front room. The historical novel is a fiction-based recount of the bitter labor. As with Storming Heaven, the novel is written from the first hand perspective of several narrators, enabling readers to clearly understand the characters views. ' Earliest thing I recall from when I was a boy is Daddy coming in from the mines and taking hisīath. Storming Heaven is Denise Giardinas second and award winning novel, published in 1987.

Storming heaven denise giardina summary