It appeared his parents had a sense of humor, his full name was Thadious S. Swarthski. He hated that name.
Plus his older sister was named Teanna F. Swarthski, not much better.
He was around age 9 or 10 when he asked his Dad what the initial stood for.
"Tea was first and you was second." His father guffawed like that was somehow funny. His Dad had a really strange sense of humor. A huge man, his face always looked dirty from working in the mines.
By the time he was 18 Thad was using the nickname "Sec." His sister had already gotten herself knocked up and ended up married, she was actually quite tickled about that.
Her husband Dale was tall and lanky and also worked in the mines, nearly everyone did. Tea took one look at him and pursued him relentlessly, finally cornering him in one of the barns at exactly the right time.
The young man had at first resisted the idea of getting married, but Dad had done a bit of encouragement.
Sec inherited his Father's square jaw and broad shoulders, so did Teanna. The biggest difference between Sec and his sister was that she had longer hair. Same heavy build, the same heavy eyebrows, she was just as tall as Sec was. However she was female, and in the company camp that appeared to be good enough. Most of the women in the town were solid, big, hardened from heavy work.
Life was hard living in the mountains and working for the company. All of the tiny little houses were rented from the company, food was purchased at the company store, the company owned the gas station, clothing store, everything. They even stocked the local meeting hall that doubled as a bar on Friday and Saturday nights and church on Sunday, it somehow always ran out of booze by late Saturday and it was always a week before any more arrived.
The company store didn't even stock beer, a truck rolled in at around shift change on Friday with enough for the weekend and that was it.
Somehow many men in the camp managed to have something to drink around anyway, almost everyone had a Corn patch.
The grocery had canned goods and staples, plus meat from time to time. Nearly everyone just went out and shot something when they wanted meat. The hills were full of skinny mean little Pigs, the meat was tough but tasty. There were Deer, too, getting one of those was a treat. If one showed up nearby it didn't last very long.
Hunting required a truck, there were very few animals near the town except for some giant Rats. Any animals that got too close quickly became dinner.
Sometimes the Rats ended up in a stew pot if they weren't quick enough.
There was just one Doctor, Jeremiah Cox, also on the company payroll. He was a rough and crabby old guy, most of the time he set broken bones and sewed up cuts.
He even delivered a few babies, but if anything serious cropped up, or something he didn't know what to do about they were loaded in the company station wagon that doubled as a hearse and hauled down the mountain to the city.
There were a few stories that went around about old Jeremiah, he apparently tended to be on the friendly side with the female patients. For one thing, he didn't have any plastic gloves, or a nurse, and the standing joke was that if any female went in for even the sniffles, she got a pelvic exam.
But if anyone needed a Doctor for anything, he was it so nobody ever really said much except to snicker about it. A few of the housewives also knew that if they tolerated his typical business practices, they didn't have to pay him the ten dollars it cost.
Sec heard all the stories from the other kids in camp, nobody really said too much though. Things were just the way they were.
Sec knew what his fate in life would be, and right on schedule at age 18 his Dad handed him a hard hat and told him it was time for him to start paying his own way.
He didn't like that one bit, Sec had a serious problem.
He was claustrophobic. He even had a struggle using the outside johns, when the door swung shut his body would break a sweat and he just had to get out of there.
So Sec did his business way out in the woods.
"Something wrong with that boy!" His Dad would say when Sec took off with some paper and a shovel, then promptly forget about it. All his Dad ever did was sit around the cabin and drink his beer until he fell asleep, then he would go to work in the mines the next day.
He wasn't a bad father really, except for the fact that he just never paid much attention to the two kids, he left them to fend for themselves.
But he did provide, there was always food, clothing, all of the usual essentials. Heat was no problem, everyone just brought home coal.
Tea did all the cooking and cleaning, but one day her belly started to swell and Dad spotted that. There was a bit of a fuss, and Dad went down and had that discussion with the young man and his family.
Their Mother had taken off years before, she had been there one day and then she was gone the next. A tall man had come to town selling pots and pans, household goods.
It seemed he also did a lot more than just sell pots and pans, when he left, Sec's Mom went with him. They did that when Sec's Dad was at work down in the mines, otherwise the odds were high the salesman would have probably stayed around somewhere, most likely in one of the canyons up in the hills.
That was something that just was not talked about around their house.
When Tea was gone the cooking and cleaning fell to Sec to do. It was just the way things were.
They walked to the lift that first morning, climbed onto it for the long trip down. Sec never made it, the thing had not gone more than 50 feet and he simply freaked out.
They probably would have tried to force him to ride all the way down and go to work but Sec had become quite a strapping young man. The other men on the lift quickly gave up, reversed the thing and let him off.
"Something wrong with that boy." He heard his father say as Sec stood there gasping for breath.
If a man didn't work, he didn't stay in the company housing though. So Sec took a shift working in the power plant, shoveling the coal in to keep the fires hot. He hated that, he could taste the stuff all day every day. But both ends of the firehouse were open, it was something he could do.
Then the manager came by and asked Sec if he wanted to work as the company cop.
Sec agreed, it was something he could do, also. It wasn't really hard, there were a few bad apples in the town once in awhile. His job was to see to it that they either straightened up and toed the line, or they left.
There was a jail, all it was was cement blocks, no light, no heat, not even a chair or bed. There were a couple of windows, just areas that they left the blocks out. The toilet was a hole in the floor in the corner, no lid. It got pretty cold and miserable in there in the Winter and stifling hot in the Summer, no one wanted to be put in there at all, not after one time.
The company never bothered with trials, either. Management just looked at any problem and made a decision.
The rest, if someone got out of line, Sec beat them up. He had learned how to fight very well, growing up with other kids that were all on the rough side. He also carried an old double barrel 10 gauge shotgun, loaded with buckshot. He never had to use it, not one time.
Early on back in school one of the bigger kids had been harassing him, of course that led to a scrap. The kid had taken Sec down and pinned him, it was a mistake. The panic had set in, Sec exploded off the ground and threw the much larger boy into the air, then waded in. The results were rather serious.
Next the boy's Dad had come down to teach Sec a lesson, with the same result. Sec's own Dad had sat on the porch and watched that, sipping on his beer. He never said a single word, just grinned.
Most of the time things got settled that way, no need for lawyers and courts, besides, there weren't any.
None of the other boys around his age really messed with Sec much after that. Later on he just grew to be so large the idea didn't even cross their minds.
By age 19, Sec was a solid 240 pounds. Some of the older men didn't show very much respect to an 19 year old Cop, and since any real cops were a good four to five hours away if anyone could get them out there at all, Sec spent a few weeks proving himself.
So a half dozen or so of them learned respect the hard way. After that, it got a lot more peaceful.
The job wasn't hard, in fact Sec really liked it. There were just the few incidents, fights, things like that.
No one ever stole anything, although there had been a few cases of things that happened over the years. If it was a really serious situation, the canyons had some secrets that no one was likely to ever discover. Sec had heard the stories but he never had to deal with anything like that himself.
There was that problem with one of the miners that tended to get drunk and ended up hitting his wife. That was a pain in the ass because it always seemed to end up out in the street in front of everybody.
She probably had it coming since she hopped around the camp from one guy to the next, everyone knew that. There were a half dozen women like that, some of them single and some not, working in the different stores. Quite a few of the men were single too, so having a few women available was important. Sec ignored that mostly because it helped to keep the peace, and he was sure the guy knew about what his wife was up to, and he only acted up when he was drunk. In fact, he figured they picked up some extra cash that way, since she had even suggested to Sec once that for ten bucks he could have a little fun. She opened her shirt and showed Sec her breasts, they sagged heavily, the nipples pointing straight down.
Sec wasn't interested. Yep, probably she had it coming.
But the man couldn't go hitting her, not in public. That stuff always caused a fuss.
Sec warned him the first time, then the second time when it happened again a week or so later he dragged the man out into the street and slapped him over and over, asking him each time how he liked it.
Sometimes there were other nasty fights, nearly always over one man's wife in another man's bed. One woman did it enough times and created so much trouble that finally Sec told her to head on down the road. She did, carrying a backpack, her husband following along behind meekly, bent over with their worldly possessions strapped to his back.
He shook his head at that one.
Then there was the man that liked to get drunk and stand in his window nude, and he did that when some of the more conservative women were passing by. While there were always the loose women in the town, a larger portion of them were ordinary housewives. Sec thought of dragging the man out into the street naked and working him over, then he realized the guy just might like that.
Instead, he went over there and hauled him down to the little bridge over the river and dumped him over the edge of it. It was about 10 feet to the stream. That might have not been too big of a deal except it was around 20 degrees out at the time.
