Storming Heaven

Near the base of Blair Mountain, Rondal takes Carrie to a one-room schoolhouse which Carrie and Doc Booker will be using as a hospital. Rondal isn’t sure how the men will cross Blair Mountain, knowing the police have it pretty well guarded. As Rondal leaves, Carrie panics and runs to Doc Booker, who is setting up the hospital in the schoolhouse, and tells him that she is pregnant with Rondal’s baby. Doc Booker insists that it is a good thing Carrie didn’t tell Rondal about the pregnancy, and that all she can do now is care for her patients at the hospital. That evening, Carrie and Doc Booker hear from another doctor, Dr. Mason, that the men fighting back against the union members includes not only Baldwin-Felts guards, but wealthy townspeople and college boys, who are all heavily armed. Dr. Mason hears that they are also building bombs. Carrie watches about 80 miners in red bandanas pass the hospital on the way to Blair Mountain, who, “unlike the men on the first day out of Charleston, they did not joke or call out, but trudged silently, their faces set” (266). Later, the first dead miner arrives at the hospital, shot in the head, followed by several wounded men.

Rondal has been on Blair Mountain for three days with hardly any luck of crossing. Talcott is in charge of a group of men near an abandoned mine. The guards’ machine guns are constantly firing. Rondal meets up with Talcott where they hide with Talcott’s men in abandoned tin sheds and try to talk strategy. Talcott notes that crossing over the mountain would take everything they've got:

‘Ever man we got, going up in the face of them machine guns, knowing full well that half of them will git kilt in the charge. Then hand-to-hand combat at the top. And the only thing that will make a man do such a durned-fool thing is ifn he knows for sure they’s a firing squad waiting ifn he disobeys’ (268).

Later that night, Talcott calls to Rondal and tells him to come down. Talcott’s men have captured a young man who was fighting alongside the guards. The man insists that he is a miner just like them, and that he would have joined the union if he could, but the coal companies forbade it and made him fight on their side instead. Talcott and Rondal notice that the man is drunk and learn that all of the men they’re fighting against have been drinking. Talcott and Rondal plan to make it look like they’re backing off, counting on the guards and armed men to keep drinking, weakening their defense.

Rondal and Talcott send word for more men to join them. They shoot sporadically, hoping the defense will keep wasting their bullets. However, Talcott tells Rondal that he heard the U. S. Army is being sent in, possibly with bombs, and that there’s no way to win against them. Rondal insists on not giving up, grabs his gun, and runs up the mountain. But he is quickly shot in the belly and is left “strung out tight, like a hog to be gutted, like a squirrel to be skinned” (271).

At the hospital, Carrie sees an airplane passing by overhead. Soon, a bomb is dropped near the schoolhouse, shooting out the windows along one wall and leaving an enormous crater in the earth. Doc Booker and Carrie continue treating wounded men. That evening, Talcott arrives, carrying Rondal. Doc Booker and Carrie knock him out with anesthesia and Doc Booker manages to remove the bullet, but Rondal’s legs are paralyzed. Talcott wants to take Rondal to Charleston, but Carrie insists on taking him back with her to the Homeplace. When Rondal wakes up, he chooses to go with Carrie to the Homeplace. It’s dangerous to cross through Justice County to Kentucky, but Carrie says if anyone gives her any trouble, she’ll say she’s on the side of the coal companies. Talcott buys Carrie two mules and a cart, and as she travels up the mountain, she sees men turning back and realizes the march is coming to an end. Carrie passes a large car with a spacious backseat with a man and a woman standing beside it, who tell her they’re reporters from New York. Carrie tells asks for a ride to the train station in Logan, saying she needs to keep Rondal hidden in the back because many people still want him dead. The reporters agree, and as they drive, Carrie tells them her side of the story and asks them to print it. In Logan, Carrie tells the reporters that she wants to find her brother Miles, and they say that if he is in town, he’s probably staying at their hotel. When Carrie finds Miles, she begs him to get Rondal onto a train to Kentucky. On the train, Miles tells everyone that Rondal was one of his men who volunteered to fight against the union, and they offer Rondal Lytton Davidson’s study on the train. Soon, a man named Malcolm Denbigh comes by to thank Rondal for supporting the coal companies. Rondal recognizes Malcolm as one of the men who threw Johnson, one of the early union organizers, into the furnace, and pulls out his red bandana. Malcolm is furious that a union member is riding in their train, but Miles says it would be illegal to throw out an injured man. Soon, the train passes through Annadel, and Rondal and Carrie watch it pass out the window one last time.