25 Forgotten Lunch Pail Sandwiches Appalachian Coal Miners Carried Every Day (I Carried Two)

Every evening of my childhood, my father walked home up the hollow from the mine with his dinner bucket in his hand. And every evening there was one bite of something still left inside it. A man who has loaded coal for ten hours is never full. That bite was left in there on purpose, and for twenty years I did not know why. I grew up at the head of a hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky. My father carried a round tin dinner bucket into the mine for thirty one years, and I carried one myself for five, until the mine let forty men go and I was one of the forty. My mother packed every one of those buckets by lamplight at four in the morning, wrapped in wax paper, folded tight at both ends. So sit down with me and I will count them down, the way a man counts down a shift. The mayonnaise sandwich when payday was four days off. The ketchup sandwich the winter the strike ran long. Peanut butter and onion, cold soup beans on light bread, the hard fried egg, the jam biscuit that was worth half a pork chop on our crew, pimento cheese hot enough to make a grown man cry in the dark, souse, fried canned meat, the Monday bird, and the Sunday roast with cold gravy. And I will tell you about number one, and about the square of wax paper I found in my own bucket at noon on my first day underground, in handwriting I had almost never seen. Tomorrow, wrap your lunch in wax paper, and whatever it is, save the last bite. Then come tell me what your father or your grandfather carried in his dinner bucket, where he worked, and what he called it.