A Brilliant Death Read Free

day with the Pledge to the Flag and the Lord’s Prayer, and no one ever made a fuss about whether it was constitutionally or politically correct. It was just something you did.
    Graduates of Brilliant High School hung their blue and white graduation tassels on their rearview mirrors and left them dangling until they had faded gray. Most Brilliantites had lived there all their lives, and they supported the town. Everyone bought raffle tickets from the Little Leaguers, chocolate peanut clusters from the Scouts, and light bulbs from the Lions Club. On Saturday afternoons in the fall everyone went to the Blue Devils’ football games, which held nearly the same magnitude of importance as a baptism.
    I miss my hometown and those simpler times. But the Brilliant I grew up in no longer exists. The steel mills up and down the river have folded, and the once-proud communities that lined the Ohio River have been reduced to decaying shells of grander days. I don’t get up the river much anymore. As editor and columnist for the Morning Journal , most of my working day is spent in the office in Wheeling. My two young daughters seem to gobble up whatever time is left. My parents moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina a few years ago and, except for an occasional class reunion, there is no reason to go back. But, when I do go visit, I always take the back road by way of Hunter’s Ridge.
    At the spot where the car left the road, at the entrance to the park, the adult Bible study class from the Brilliant United Methodist Church placed a white cross made of four-by-fours, with the initials “T.F.B.”—Travis Franklin Baron—on the crossbar. I helped Jim Gilmartin haul the cross to the park entrance in the back of his International Harvester pickup truck. We took turns working through the rocky earth with a post hole digger to get below the frost line, and dumped a bag of quick-drying cement into the hole, along with water he brought in empty milk jugs. When he was sure the cement was set and the cross true, he asked me to bow my head, and he said a brief prayer, asking God to give Travis a better life in heaven than he’d had on earth. Two days later, I left for college. As the years passed and Travis Baron grew distant in the memories of many, the letters faded, the cross bleached out, and it was eventually claimed by the hillside.
    Like the steel mills, Travis is gone. The loss of the mills and my friend only serves to remind me of the fragile state of life, whether it was a hulking, smoke-belching steel mill or an auburn-haired kid with a crooked smile.

CHAPTER TWO
    Saturday, June 12, 1971
    The Colerain Coal & Gas Company bought the mineral rights to Tarr’s Dome in the early 1950s. Within a year, it was a dome no more. The dozers and power shovels stripped it clean, grading flat the crown of the hill, leaving it cratered and looking like the surface of the moon. Over the years, the grass and foxtail returned to the top of the hill. Wild blackberry and locust bushes and assorted other brambles took root and sprouted, followed by some sickly pines and maples that could never get solid purchase in the scarred earth. The craters left behind filled with water, forming a chain of interconnected ponds that stretched across the top of the hill. For reasons that are unknown to me, they were referred to as the Tea Ponds.
    The Tea Ponds were shallow and a heavy rain would send water streaming over their banks and down the east face of the hillside. Over the years, the falling waters had created rutted paths that one minute could look like a dried creek bed and the next be home to a torrent that could dump tens of thousands of gallons of water down the backside of Brilliant, filling the air with the pungent smell of sulfur. After the spring thaw or a late summer downpour, the muddy swill would rush down the streets, washing gravel out of parking lots and driveways on its way to the floodplain. The Brilliant Church of Christ was built in