The Cahill Mining Disaster

Mallory Daniels had died with a broken heart. She had never reclaimed the joy which she had experienced in her twenties. Forty years earlier she had been a happily married young woman who relished her role as a wife and also had aspirations of one day becoming a mother.

Mallory’s husband, Scott, was a coal miner. It was a dirty, dangerous job that did not pay all that well. She had urged her husband to do something else for a living, but he was a proud and stubborn man who wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father. There was no way that she could sway him so she just decided that she would deal with it.

Scott and Mallory were very much in love. They were high school sweethearts and had never dated anyone else. There was a special spark when their eyes met or when they touched each other. People could not help but notice how in love that they were.

One day while Mallory was busy hanging laundry on the clothesline in back of the couple’s trailer home, the phone rang. Normally she would have just let it ring and finished with her chore, but on that afternoon she had a feeling that she needed to answer the call. She left her basket of wet laundry and headed in.

“Hello?” she said into the old rotary dial phone.

“Hello, Mrs. Daniels. This is Tom Fordiss, down at the mine. There’s been an accident and five miners are trapped. Scott is one of them…..you might want to get down here.”

Mallory dropped the phone, grabbed her keys off of the table, and sped off to the Cahill Mine. She left in such a hurry that she never locked the house or even shut the front door for that matter. All that she cared about was Scott.

The mine was a madhouse. There were news crews and family members milling about, along with tons of volunteer and rescue workers. She was told that there had been an explosion and that five miners were not accounted for. They had been at the deepest part of the excavation and were trapped very far beneath the surface. If they were still alive, rescuers would only have a very small window of opportunity to save them.

As days went by, Mallory watched that window get smaller and smaller and then finally saw it slam shut. It was determined that the mine shaft was too unstable to attempt a rescue and that the men could have not survived such a lengthy interment in the bowels of the coal laden earth. The five workers were declared dead.

Mallory went into a severe state of depression. The love of her life was gone. She was all alone.

The Cahill Mining company continued to operate, but that section was closed down. A memorial marker was put up and the area was considered to be a grave site, as well as a tribute to all of the other workers who had perished in the coal mines. Mallory spent many days at the memorial, showering it with her lonely tears. It would be years before she would move on with her life.

The years did pass, and so did her twenties. As Mallory headed toward middle age, she began to feel the need to raise a child. She did not want a husband. She could never find anyone to take the place of Scott. She just wanted to be a mother.

Mallory began a pattern where she would go on a couple of dates with a man, have sex and then not call him again. Her reasoning was that if she dated enough men and then got pregnant, then no one would know who the father was and be able to lay claim to the child. It gave her a reputation as the area slut, but it also gave her exactly what she had yearned for. A perfect little child. A beautiful daughter.

Mallory raised her daughter as a single mother. She worked two jobs to make ends meet and relied heavily on babysitters to watch little Emily. It was a tough life, but she was proud of herself and knew that Scott would have approved of her ability as a mother.

As Emily grew up, Mallory filled her head with stories about how she had lost her one true love, and eventually took her daughter to the miner’s memorial. Emily hated to hear her mother tell her these stories because of the sorrow with which they were told. Mallory was a good provider, but never had a positive outlook on life. Everything to her was either not good or a waste of time, and boys were just guys who died on you and ruined your life. Emily never developed any close relationships or really even dated much as she grew up. It was tough on her to go her entire life without seeing her mother smile or laugh. She always pitied Mallory.

In early 2009, Mallory passed away form heart failure. She was 66. Friends and family knew that her death was really just the end result of a broken heart. Everyone who knew the situation of the Cahill Mine disaster understood her lifetime of sorrow.

Emily Buried her mother at the Shady Elm Cemetery on a cloudy, misty day. Only a few people had come to the actual burial. One of them being her husband.

She had overcome her mother’s years of negativity and had finally broken out of her cold shell. She had gotten married and was expecting a child. Emily was heartbroken that her mother would never get to see her grandchild. She thought that maybe it would have brought her a few years of happiness, but it was never meant to be.

In April 2010, the Cahill Mining company contacted the relatives of the five miners and asked permission to exhume the remains and return them to the families. It was not out of the goodness of their hearts that they did this, but instead it was because of greed. The closed down section was rich in coal deposits and the company needed to access it. Greedy or not, four of the five families wanted the remains of their relatives.

Emily had been contacted by the mining company for her permission to exhume Scott Daniels. She was not his blood relative, but her mother was Scott’s wife and he had no other living relatives. Emily knew what she had to do.

In June of 2010, Emily, her husband, and her one month old son looked on as a casket was lowered into the ground right next to Mallory’s resting place. The headstone had been changed and now bore both of the names of Scott and Mallory Daniels, with the inscription: Two souls bound together forever .

The sky was blue and the weather was perfect as the birds sang melodic songs in the nearby tree. Emily looked up at a billowing cloud and swore that it was smiling back at her. She knew that her mother was now happy and it warmed her heart. She smiled at her own husband and gazed down upon her son who she cradled in her arms. She gave him a gentle kiss on the forehead.

“You ready to go take a nap, Scotty?” she asked the baby with a smile on her face.

All was right in her world, now.