The Widows

by Jess Montgomery

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  To David, the love of my life, now and always

  PROLOGUE

  September 20, 1924

  A hawk soars over Devil’s Backbone. Her sharp eyes peer through the softening light of dusk down to the old Rossville Cemetery, closed a decade past, when the dead had filled every apportioned spot.

  There: a chipmunk scuttling among the gravestones, some still upright and tended by descendants, some cracked and broken, like scattered teeth.

  The red-shouldered hawk spots it, but a thunderstorm is rolling in, great coal-dark clouds churning across the sky from the west. Rain comes sudden, hard. And so she veers east, toward the entry to Ross Mining Company’s Mine No. 9, nicknamed the Widowmaker after the 1888 cave-in killed forty-two men.

  Six weeks ago, though, the mine was reopened, for deep in the western slope of this Appalachian foothill, in her seams and fissures and walls, rests anthracite coal of the highest grade, coal that will command the best market price. A select portion of the company’s coal miners labor to reopen the Widowmaker, building tracks for mule-pulled wagons, and supports for walls and ceilings.

  Now the miners trudge out after a nine-hour day. Theirs is a good weary, born of the ache and pull of hard work done well. Since the start of the project they’ve each received an extra ten cents per day of company scrip—issued instead of good old U.S. cash, and the only tender the company will accept for rent or in its company stores. In a few days, the additional scrip can buy yeast at the company store. In a week, tinned milk. In a few weeks, cheese. Enough that men who labor away in the company’s other mines closer to Rossville are envious.

  But what the men don’t know, what no one knows, is that methane gas—nonodorous, undetectable—is building up near the newly reopened entry, just as it had in 1888.

  Now the hawk soars above the entry.

  There: a squirrel scuttling among the brush near the man-made mouth into the mountain.

  Three men emerge, heading toward the donkeys and wagons that will take them back to Rossville proper. Most of the others, seeing the light, pick up their pace, eager to get home.

  Two miners, though, lag so deep in the shaft that they still use their coal-oil lanterns to light their way through the dark, as deep and still as midnight.

  “You lollygagging for a purpose?” asks the one farthest along. It is not like his friend to dally. He knows his friend’s baby’s been sick. He wonders if there’s bad news to share that his friend doesn’t want the others to hear.

  The second man does have a reason, but not about the baby—she’s taken a turn for the better. Another subject presses on his heart and mind and he’s not sure how to broach it. Still, if he doesn’t speak up now, he’s not sure he’ll ever get the courage. “John says—”

  “Don’t go tellin’ me about John!” The first man waves his hands as if to fend off the very mention of the organizer who’d helped unionize the Mingo Mines up in northeastern Ohio and was now working among the men at Ross Mining. “My woman’s got a chopped steak waiting, for my supper, first one in a month of Sundays. I ain’t risking decent pay for once.”

  The second man thinks how his wife and their four-year-old son were delighted by their first tastes of ice cream at the company store just a few days ago. He’d had a taste, too.

  But he presses on: “Good for now, but what about a week from now, a year from now? They ain’t paying us extra for easy work.”

  Outside, the squirrel scurries down the slope, away from the mine’s entrance, oblivious to the hawk circling above. The squirrel is simply following its instinct to prepare for winter, one acorn at a time, and for a moment the squirrel is lucky.

  Lightning strikes near the entrance to the Widowmaker. The strike ignites the methane, and the explosion demolishes the entrance.

  The two lollygaggers hear the explosion and the crash and the cries of their comrades farther up the shaft. The two men stop, stare at each other.

  Before they can move or decide what to do, Devil’s Backbone gives a great shake, as if trying to rid itself of some pest. The support frame over the first man buckles and then crashes.

  The second man falls to the ground, clasping his helmet. Rocks, dirt, and splintered wood fall on his hands and back. He sits up, slowly, gingerly. His right arm throbs. It is broken in two places, just above the elbow and again at the wrist.

  But he can breathe. He can breathe.

  He gulps in great gasps of air, staving off nausea triggered by waves of pain.

  He calls for his friend. No answer. Calls again. Silence.

  He realizes his lamp is gone. With his shaking left hand, he reaches into the pocket of his bibbed overalls, feels past his cigarette, the one he’d carefully rolled at break time for smoking at the end of the workday. A flick, and the lighter’s flame is sufficient to reveal that behind him, too, is a cave-in. He doesn’t see the lamp. Likely it was crushed. This tiny flame is his only light, but it is sufficient to reveal that he has about a five-foot circumference around him.

  The light burns steady, unwavering. There is no fresh air coming through this new chamber.

  For a moment, he considers standing up, leaning against the wall, and smoking his cigarette. No use dying while wishing for tobacco. There is, he reckons, maybe two hours of good air left. It’s gonna take longer than that for help to reach him. And by then he’ll be suffocating on his own exhaled fumes.

  But then—though it is bad luck for a woman to come into a mine—he conjures the image of his wife. Sees her smiling at their son, spooning up ice cream.

  He flicks off the lighter. He sits down, breathing shallowly and slowly as possible, trying not to waste precious breath with gasps of pain. He closes his eyes. Somehow the darkness behind his closed eyes—not a shade different from the dark around him—is better. He can just pretend he’s sleeping, that his own shallow breaths are hers, sleeping next to him.

  On the other side of the rubble, his friend lies still, too, but he’s already dead, his legs and spine crushed by fallen rock, his arms splayed forward, his skull split on the floor.

  Farther up, near the collapsed mouth of the mine, three other men are also already dead. But the crew leader, nearest the front, sees pinpricks of light in the tumbled entry, like stars. Then he hears one of the men outside, calling that they will go for help.

  Outside at the bottom of Devil’s Backbone, just as the squirrel reaches the bank of Coal Creek, the hawk finally swoops, talons outstretched, and snatches her prey.

  CHAPTER 1

  LILY

  Six Months Later—March 25, 1925

  Lily sweeps the jail cell for the next prisoner, set to arrive in a few hours. There’s so much to do on this fine March day. Besides readying this cell, she needs to turn the garden soil, beat the rugs, and clean the sooty glass shade of the hanging coal-oil lamp in the dining room.

  Her side stitches—sudden, hard. Lily gasps, forgetting her list of spring-cleaning chores. S
he steadies herself with the broom and swallows, fighting back a wave of nausea.

  Queasiness has found her early this time around. At twenty-six, carrying a child is harder than when you’re young! That’s what Mama would say—if she knew. Lily has yet to share the news of this child with anyone other than Daniel.

  “Hey, lady, gimme more coffee afore you keel over!”

  Lily starts sweeping again, harder now, so dust and debris skitter past the tidy pile she’s made in the empty cell and into the occupied one. The prisoner jumps back, giving Lily grim satisfaction. She wishes Daniel hadn’t needed to leave this morning, but duty had called her husband, the sheriff, to fetch another prisoner from the farthest corner of Bronwyn County.

  “You trying to ruin my breakfast?”

  Usually, prisoners are respectful toward her. But not Harold Johnson. She knows his name because as jail mistress one of her duties is to keep a record of each prisoner who comes through the Bronwyn County jail. Her records are meticulous, to the point of pridefulness.

  “I been held too long already. More’n twenty-four hours!”

  Less than twelve hours. Every prisoner thinks he’s held longer than is rightly fair.

  Lily leans her broom by the cell door and expertly flips the straw mattress.

  “And I—I need a doctor!” he yells before belching loudly.

  Another wave of nausea hits Lily. She swallows hard again and steps toward the large quilt chest in the corner behind her desk, opens the chest, and pulls out a clean sheet, pillow, and blanket for the just-turned straw mattress. He wolf-whistles at her bent-over form and laughs.

  Lily slaps the linens back into the chest. Then she steps to the cabinet against the back wall, opens the narrow drawer labeled “J,” and pulls out Harold’s card. She slams the drawer shut so hard that the cabinet shudders, and then sits down in her chair. She crosses her left leg over her right knee and pulls her skirt up just far enough to reveal the small derringer strapped to her ankle—a gun so compact that it’s nicknamed a stocking pistol. A woman’s gun, with only a single round, but sufficient, should a prisoner get out of hand. So far, she’s never had to use it.

  Lily reads from the card the notations made in her own neat, angular handwriting. “Says here, the sheriff brought you in yesterday for public disturbance at the Kinship Inn, where you busted up two of the more elegant chairs in the lobby and left the proprietor with a severely disjointed nose. Hit poor Mr. Williams hard enough to sprain your own wrist!”

  Still, the prisoner sure isn’t having any trouble wolfing down his biscuits and gravy, using the hand poking out of the sling she’d given him for his sprained wrist the night before. He had not been rude then, for Daniel had stood by watchfully.

  Lily puts the card down on the table, picks up a pencil, and taps its point on the card. “Now, you can choose to either act respectably, or I can add harassment to your charges.”

  With a filthy fingertip of his good hand, Harold taps the silver, eagle-shaped Pinkerton National Detective Agency badge on his tattered lapel.

  “See this here? This means you can’t treat me like just any prisoner. You hafta show me respect, woman!” He tosses the plate, with his half-eaten breakfast, to the floor. The tin plate skitters, unbroken, toward the bars. “I want a new breakfast! And I wanna see Mr. Ross!”

  He doesn’t mean her husband, Bronwyn County Sheriff. He means Luther, Daniel’s half brother and manager of Ross Mining, over in Rossville. Luther would undoubtedly take up for Harold, even egg him on. The very thought of Luther makes her want to shudder.

  But Lily does not move. The door to the jailhouse is open, and from outside come the clucks of chickens in her yard—many housewives in town still keep backyard chickens and gardens, a money-saving effort left over from the Great War—and the sounds from Kinship’s main street of foot traffic and horses and the occasional automobile driving by. She allows herself a moment to take in the comforting sounds of an ordinary morning, now well under way. When she speaks, it’s so quietly that the prisoner has to lean toward the bars to hear.

  “You have no authority. That badge means nothing here.”

  As sheriff, Daniel was supposed to handle any miners who caused property damage or committed other crimes on Ross Mining land—which encompassed all of Rossville. But the rest of Bronwyn County was also under the sheriff’s jurisdiction. With only a part-time deputy, Daniel had grudgingly accepted Luther’s decision to bring in hired police agents from the Pinkerton agency, as restlessness grew after the Widowmaker deaths.

  Lily has overheard Daniel complain to Martin Weaver, his deputy, that the Pinkertons are desperate men who can’t get work elsewhere either because of their own dark pasts or lack of skills or because they are immigrants no one wants to hire outside of mining.

  “You know, I been watching you, and not just ’cause you’re a pretty thing. You’re fixing up that cell, but there’s two cots in here. So why not just have your husband”—somehow, he turns the word lurid—“toss the new fella in with me? Easier on you. I figure either you got a woman prisoner coming, and that’s mighty unlikely, or the prisoner ain’t someone you want mixed in with me.” He widens his grin, wolflike. “I reckon the sheriff got himself a coal miner.”

  With that, he spits a foul wad through the bars, into the cell Lily has just cleaned.

  For a long moment, Lily stares at the man. He’d pieced together a good bit. For last night, after they’d locked up him up, they’d had a surprise visitor come during suppertime. Another Pinkerton man whom Daniel talked to in the parlor.

  When that Pinkerton had gone she asked Daniel, What does he want with you?, and he muttered, Gotta fetch a new prisoner from Rossville. Usually Daniel just drove to Rossville a few times a week to collect any miners held for violations of the law, but when she said, Why did a Pinkerton come here? That’s never happened before … he’d uncharacteristically snapped, Enough! Then Daniel had been quiet through supper with Lily and their two young children, leaving Lily to muse how agitated he had seemed for the past week.

  Now Harold lunges to the cell bars, as if he wants to squeeze through them and come for her. “You think mixing me and a dirty-dog coal miner up in one cell would be bad? Well then, you better tell your husband to start coming down harder on those miners. Everyone knows he harbors a soft spot for ’em since the Widowmaker.”

  Lily keeps her expression placid. She’s learned, over the years, that silence invites the guilty and the nervous to talk too much. Sometimes that yields only gibberish. Sometimes it yields vital information.

  “It’s gonna be war.” The glint in Harold’s eyes turns from lusty to needful. He’s world-weary, but she estimates he’s younger than her, too young to have served in the Great War. Like too many who romanticize battle, he thinks it would be exciting.

  Lily could tell him it would not be. Daniel doesn’t speak about his time in the army. But even seven years later, he still occasionally calls out at night from some terror-filled war dream. As a good wife, she’d learned to calm him and then not speak of it in the brightness of morning.

  “A real war,” Harold says. “And then, rule of law won’t matter. Those miners who resist, why, we’ll put ’em down like rabid dogs.”

  Lily returns the prisoner’s card to its proper place in the “J” drawer. Then she walks back to Harold’s cell door. “Hand me the plate.”

  Instead, he reaches his good hand through the bars to grab for her. But Lily seizes his wrist before he can touch her breast and yanks him so hard into the bars that one side of his face smashes into the iron. He glares at her through his narrowed, bruised eye, like a walleye fish. He tries to jerk away, but Lily, stronger than her five-foot-three frame suggests, holds tight. He brings his sprained arm around to grasp a bar, but pain stops him.

  Still, he gasps: “I’m telling Mr. Ross!”

  She twists his wrist. He quiets, except for whimpering.

  “Tell Mr. Ross anything you like. I’m only defending m
yself, as is my right,” Lily says. “You and your kind will not bring war down upon my county. Sheriff Ross will see to that.”

  For a moment, he is a trapped, wounded animal waiting for its next opportunity to strike back. Lily had seen that, hunting with her daddy. Lily calculates: she will need to jump back and let go of his wrist at the same time. She counts to three and does so.

  Harold stumbles backward, falls to the floor. He scrambles over to the tin plate and slings it at her through the bars, missing widely.

  “When the sheriff returns, you will clean that up. And you’ll scrub the other cell’s floor.”

  He curses her as she lifts the key ring off the peg by the jailhouse door. Quickly, she steps out and then closes and locks the door, sliding the ring over her narrow arm like a bracelet.

  Lily gives herself a moment to adjust to the brightness of this early spring morning. She gazes west, over the roof of the old carriage house that now shelters Daniel’s automobile and her garden tools, past the outhouse and water well, over to the bell tower of the court building next to their home. Then she walks the few paces from the jail, an L-shaped attachment to the sheriff’s residence, and opens the back door. It squeaks loudly behind Lily as she steps into the screened mudroom. Daniel has been promising for weeks now to take a look at that faulty hinge.

  In the kitchen, as she thoroughly washes her hands with bar soap under the cold water at the pump sink, she tries to calm herself by refocusing on the tasks at hand: it is nearly time to rouse the children, get them washed up, dressed, and ready for the day. There’s laundry; Jolene can tend Micah while Lily uses the wringer washer in the mudroom. Both children can help hang clothes and linens to dry on the line out back. But she’ll read to them, too, one of her favorite activities with the children.

  Yet as she dries her hands, she’s still rattled, not so much from the distasteful encounter with the prisoner. Such occasional bouts are to be expected. She just can’t shake his cruel glee at the prospect of a coal miners’ uprising and the bloody battles that would surely follow.