Lily slips back out to the mudroom, pulling on an old sweater of Daniel’s kept on a peg by the door; it may be spring bright, but the day still holds the chill of winter not quite past. She grabs a basket and eases the back door open to mute the hinge’s squeak. She starts the small trek up the slope of their backyard, her focus drawn to slender jonquil stems and buds poking up by the jailhouse’s stone foundation. Has her daughter seen them? She’d told six-year-old Jolene last fall that they’d never grow there and immediately regretted it when her little girl’s face fell. Jolene had insisted on planting the bulbs anyway. Such faith.
The hens cluck and stir as Lily gathers eggs. A smile finds her lips, even as she fusses back at them, as the morning—before the nastiness with the prisoner—comes back, whole: the floor creaking as Daniel rose before dawn to prepare for his journey to fetch a prisoner. She had reached for him, pulling him to her. His hesitation, concern writ across his brow: Lily, he’d said, letting her name fall like a sigh; then the baby, and she’d smiled and shaken her head to show she found his concerns sweet but foolish. They had, after all, made love through all but the first of her other pregnancies.
So she’d unbuttoned his pants. He’d blushed. How she managed to make a man like him blush she never could figure, but it pleased her. They’d made love after all, reconciliation after the previous night’s squabble, the past week’s uncharacteristic tension. They’ve never been able to deny each other.
After, he’d smoothed back her hair, kissed her forehead. I’ll be back by lunch, he’d said, and I’m hankering for buttermilk pie.
She’d laughed. She’s the one who should have cravings, yet Daniel’s been fussing for days for that pie. His favorite. But also his ploy to get her to eat more. Even a queasy stomach can handle buttermilk pie.
Now, still smiling at the memory, Lily glances into her basket. Six eggs. There, in the nesting box, a seventh! Enough for the children’s breakfast and Daniel’s buttermilk pie.
So Lily gently scoops up the seventh egg. She envisions this afternoon, how Daniel will proclaim this bounty of eggs a good sign, part of the lore he’d learned from his own mama. She’ll tease him, tell him such things are old wives’ nonsense, that likely she’d missed some eggs the morning before. He’ll tease her back—such a modern woman—and she’ll pout playfully until he moans appreciatively at the first bite of pie.
But as she latches the coop door, a man’s hand falls heavily on her shoulder, and her daydream dissolves. Lily’s right hand reflexively forms a firm fist: thumb outside, knuckles up, as Daniel has taught her. She spins around to see it’s Elias.
Lily, relieved at not upsetting the basket of eggs, smiles as she always does at her husband’s uncle, an uncle who is more like a father to Daniel. She is about to greet him when Elias says, “Daniel’s been found.”
Then she sees the daub smeared across the chest of Elias’s gray overcoat, the smudge of blood on his cheek, sees the shake in his hand as it falls from her shoulder and returns to the brim of his hat. He pulls the hat up to block the stain on his chest. The hat is not big enough.
“I wanted to be the one to tell you.…”
She looks from the spot rising like a blood moon above his hat’s brim to Elias’s face. In the sudden, stunted silence she hears the men—Martin, Daniel’s main deputy, is speaking, and there’s a quiver to his voice, and she hears another man grunt a reply—coming around the side of the house, past the jail, up the rise of the yard.
Only then do the stiff planes of Elias’s face crack and wrench, as if this is what is too much: that he’s failed to be the one to bring her the full news of Daniel’s fate.
But he needn’t say more. She knows. She knows just what Daniel’s been found means.… Daniel isn’t lost; he knows every damned rut and route and turn and stream and hill and holler of the Appalachian Mountains in Bronwyn County, Ohio. He hasn’t run off. He isn’t ill.
Lily hears a smack, sees that her arms have fallen to her sides, her basket of eggs to the ground. She drops to her knees, tries to scoop the eggs back up. She digs at the goop, clawing so hard that her nails quickly fill with yolk and cold spring dirt.
“Lily, Lily, stop, please.…” Elias’s voice, as if from a great distance.
Then a loud squeak—the back door that Daniel had promised to fix.
“Mama?” Little Jolene’s voice, piping up the rise from the back stoop like an echo of that back door hinge. Somehow as near as if Jolene whispers in her ear.
As Lily turns from the broken eggs, her eyes scrape past the carriage house and jail, her gaze seeming to take forever in its trek down to the back stoop and to their children—Jolene and Micah—standing there, still in nightgowns, no doubt awoken by that damned squeaking door and the men tromping around the front of the house.
Four-year-old Micah leans into his sister. Normally Jolene would push him away, annoyed, but now she pulls him to her. Jolene says again, cracking the word in half: “Ma-ma?”
Daniel’s been found.…
Lily stands, rubs her hands on her skirt, rushes down the hill to her children, reaching for them even as she runs.
CHAPTER 2
MARVENA
Marvena wants to comfort the sobbing woman, cowering in a corner of the dark, dank bedroom, but she dares not move. She’s pressing down with all of her slender weight on the slash in the dying man’s gut, as if she can hold his innards together with just her hands.
“Lloyd, you stay with us now, you hear me?” Blood bubbles up from the miner’s wound, around the heels of her hands, seeping into the cuffs of her dress.
Rowena, his wife, weeps loudly.
“Now listen, both a you! Nana will be here soon.” Well, at least Marvena hopes she will. She’d sent her little girl off to fetch Rossville’s midwife and healer woman. Surely the child had noted the urgency and not gotten distracted by something that caught her fancy—a peculiarly shaped rock, or a spring flower. “Nana will have her herbs; she’ll find a way.…”
But Lloyd’s eyes are already wide ashen pools floating in his coal-blacked face, gazing through Marvena to someplace afar on the other side.
“Goddammit, Lloyd, we need you. The cause needs you!” Marvena cries.
By missing meals to set aside food for his wife and children, the man had made himself so weak he’d stumbled onto his own damned pickaxe. Then, back on the job today after just three days off, he’d spit up blood and bile and careless words like organization and union and cause, only to get beaten and rended anew by two of Luther Ross’s hired thugs. They might go by the fancy name of Pinkertons—but that’s all they were. Thugs.
So earlier that morning, Marvena had trekked down from the eastern side of Devil’s Backbone, the hill on which their scant, spare cabin nests high above Rossville. She’d brought her younger daughter with her, not daring to leave her alone with only their hound, Shep, and a small pistol for protection, not these days.
Not so long ago, she’d have left Frankie in the care of her big sister, Eula. But shortly after the Widowmaker explosion on the western side of Devil’s Backbone this past September, Eula had left home to take a position in the Rossville boardinghouse. And now the fool child had run off from even that.
This morning, Marvena had shaken off her worries about her sixteen-year-old daughter and come down Devil’s Backbone with her six-year-old in tow to meet woman-to-woman with the miners’ wives. Seeing little Frankie with her serves as a reminder of the burdens the women would face if they, too, were widowed. The support of the miners’ wives is key to convincing the men to organize, and Marvena’s goal is to rally the women to offer that support, to coach them on how to stretch already thin means. If the miners walk off the job—union or no union—they will be thrown out of their company-owned houses. A few miners and their families, who’ve run up too much debt at the company store and can’t pay rent, already have set up tents made from tarps and quilts and such. Marvena had been in several tent cities, working alongside John—h
er husband by common law—and seen the wretched conditions, the danger of fire and illness among people huddled together in such a makeshift way.
John had been such a talented organizer that at first it seemed his death would gut the local movement. It had been too heartbreaking—for her and the community—the loss of John and another volunteer trying to rescue the miners deepest in the collapsed tunnels in the Widowmaker explosion September last. But a month later, Marvena and Jurgis Sacovech—John’s best friend and right-hand man—took up the cause again, their efforts flagging until Lloyd and Marvena’s brother, Tom, took to quietly rallying Rossville miners.
At first, their meetings drew scant numbers to the cave tucked away in the hills near her moonshining still. But since February, with rumors of management reopening the Widowmaker, the meetings had grown—near on twenty last time. They’d had three meetings now, notice spread carefully by word of mouth to trusted allies.
Marvena tries again, her voice an incanting whisper. “The cause, Lloyd…” She stops, considers another tactic. “And your wife and children. They—we—all need you.”
A touch rustles Marvena’s sleeve, and Marvena knows without looking that it’s Nana Sacovech, Jurgis’s mama and Rossville’s unofficial healing woman, drawing on some mysterious combination of local herbs and the lore of her home country of Lithuania. Half the time all that Nana could offer was soothing clucks, but that was better than anything the quack company doctor—usually drunk and whoring at the so-called boardinghouse—ever provided. Marvena knows deep down that Nana isn’t going to be able to offer more than soothing now.
Yet Nana’s voice is a quavering wisp. “Marvena, please … Leave him be.”
“You could stitch him up again,” Marvena says. “Use more of your herbs, your salve…”
“He should never have gone back into the mines,” Nana says. “He never shook his fever after infection set in from the wound. I did my best.”
Lloyd makes a gurgling sound. His death is imminent. Yet Marvena stares into his eyes. “The cause…,” she whispers.
“Let him go in peace,” Nana whispers. “Let his wife—”
As if on cue, Rowena’s wails crescendo.
Marvena gently eases her hands from Lloyd’s gut. She turns and looks into the eyes of the old healer woman. Most things about Nana—her squat build, her apple dumpling face, her white hair so fine and thin that her pink scalp peeks through the strands pulled back for a bun—make her look simple and weak. But there’s a steel to her pale blue eyes, harder than the pick end of a miner’s axe.
Marvena doesn’t have to say anything. Nana nods. She knows what she has to do. Give the man a tincture of her strongest painkiller. She’s already reaching into her tote bag when Marvena turns to face Lloyd’s wife, to ask if that will be all right.
The dank corners and dark walls of the tiny bedroom twist and rush up to Marvena. The smells of the room—chamber pot, mildew, death—jam her nose like foul snuff. She swallows hard to keep from gagging, as her gaze desperately seeks the one grimy, square window in the bedroom. Rowena, or maybe the wife of the previous miner renting this house from the company, had tacked a curtain trimmed with a spare bit of precious hand-crocheted lace—once white, now a pale gray—over the window, then tied back the curtain with bits of twine.
To let in light.
But though it is a bright late morning, no light comes through. The window is smeared with a patina of coal dust, like everything in Rossville. In the scummy glass, Marvena sees the silhouettes of other miners and neighbors moving restlessly on the porch. Lloyd’s bloody undershirt lies on the dresser under the window. Marvena shudders, imagining the man staggering home, his work injuries rended anew by a bloody beating. The grayness and smells of the room press in closer. Marvena bites her lower lip. God.
John.
She thinks of him last September, giving her his lopsided grin before rushing down from her cabin on one side of Devil’s Backbone to the Widowmaker on the other, intent on rescuing the miners caught in the collapse. She’d chided him—Why d’you have to rush in?—and he’d chuckled, Who’d trust an organizer who wouldn’t? and she’d told him fine, but she’d not hold the venison stew for him, and he’d laughed again and kissed her before heading out the door.
But John and another rescuer never brought the miners out. A second explosion crushed and buried them, too. Seven men, all told, dead. After a bitter month of mourning, fury finally pulled her from sorrow, and she’d taken up the cause again, alongside Jurgis Sacovech.
Marvena gasps, suddenly desperate for air. Lloyd, and near on a hundred more like him, go down, down, down under the earth through tunnels just slightly bigger than their bodies, and into chambers lit only with coal-oil lanterns, and she can’t muster the breath she needs in the bedroom of a dying man?
A sob draws Marvena back to the moment. Rowena is staring at Marvena’s hands, sticky and slick with Lloyd’s blood. She plunges her hands into the bowl of the washstand, Lloyd’s blood curdling in the shallow water. She sees blood has tinged the cuffs of her blouse. Later, she will need to scrub that out on her washboard. Now she dries her hands and cuffs on her skirt.
Marvena grabs Rowena and gives her a quick shake. The woman, startled, silences.
“Honey, there’ll be time for wailing later,” Marvena says. “Not that it’ll do any good. Now he needs you to be calm. Nana has something to ease his pain, if’n it’s all right by you—”
Rowena jerks free of Marvena’s hold. Her face slacks with defeat, deepening the lines that run like claw marks down her cheeks and across her brow. She rubs her eyes, pushes back her hair—hair that is still thick and dark and long. Rowena is, Marvena figures, about ten years younger than her, maybe twenty-five.
“Ease him on, you mean,” Rowena says. “And then what. I go back to my folks in West Virginia, they’ll take me in, but not all these young ’uns. I reckon I could leave Junior; he’ll pass for thirteen; some family’d want his scrip.…”
Though she knows Rowena is babbling in desperation, Marvena’s throat tightens at the suggestion. “No. No. He’s too young; that’s just what we’re fighting against—”
“Fighting got my man hurt. You and Jurgis and that brother of yourn, keeping stirred up what your man ought never have started, foolish talk of better days.”
Marvena inhales sharply, ready as always to defend John, Jurgis, her brother, Tom, herself, and especially the movement—but a deep gasp from Lloyd draws their attention.
Rowena drops her head for a moment, then looks up at Nana and gives a small nod. Nana spoons up some of her mixture to Lloyd’s lips.
Marvena goes into the other room, where the children sit on the floor. With them is her younger daughter, Frankie, showing the miner’s children her doll, spinning some story or other.
She stops when she sees Marvena, her face lighting up. Marvena gives her a small smile. The oldest of the children—Junior, the one not quite old enough by law to go into the mines—stares at Marvena, his eyes serious under thick eyebrows that are just like his father’s. Marvena nods. He sighs, gestures to the other children, and they file after him into the tiny bedroom.
Marvena opens her arms wide, and Frankie runs to her. “Thank you for fetching Nana,” she whispers in her daughter’s ear before walking out onto the porch.
There she sees the hard faces of the men, the strained faces of their women. Frankie settles down on the front step, heedless of the filthy boots and patched shoes around her. She’s playing with her doll again, a whimsical concoction of chestnut face and moss hair and twig body, dressed in a scrap of fabric. A doll that Daniel had made for her. Just like the dolls Daniel used to make for Eula, Marvena’s older daughter.
Beautiful, strongheaded, willful sixteen-year-old Eula.
An image of Eula rises, twirling in the dress Marvena had made for the girl’s sixteenth birthday last August, the pale blue cotton patterned with tiny red flowers costing a rare pretty penny. Eula, begging to go
to a barn dance. Eula, giddy over meeting a boy—a seventeen-year-old miner named Willis Boyle. Eula, sobbing into Marvena’s shoulder over her stepfather’s, John’s, and Willis’s deaths in the Widowmaker collapse last September. But then Eula, wrung out of tears, turning bitter, even after Daniel began visiting them again, after all the years apart, coming once a week or so after John’s death, trying to get her to smile and laugh as he had when Eula was a little girl and delighted in his visits. Then the day after Christmas last, Eula left and took up in the Rossville boardinghouse. She still came to visit on Sundays—her bitterness had not extended to cutting off Frankie—until six weeks ago, mid-February.
Daniel promised a week ago that he’d check on Eula at the boardinghouse, come by this afternoon, and tell her what he’s learned. Marvena had not gone to check herself because too many Pinks stay there and Marvena is known as the common-law wife of John, the region’s best organizer before he died. Marvena hopes Daniel will come up to her cabin today, tell her Eula is fine.
Frankie coughs, drawing Marvena back to the sorrows at hand, and Marvena chides herself for not having bundled the child up better this chilly morning.
But then Frankie starts singing a hymn of comfort: “As I went down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way—”
At the sound of Frankie’s voice, a long bright silken thread, the faces of the men and women on the porch ease, soften.
Suddenly a wail rises from inside the cabin. All on the porch lower their heads. The miners who still have on their hard hats take them off.
As the widow’s cry fades, a whistle sounds, warning that just ten minutes are left for lunch break. An uneasy hush follows the whistle, and then the miners and the women shuffle off the porch.
Marvena presses her eyes shut, calculates: Lloyd makes the eleventh miner exposed as organizing for a union by Luther’s Pinkerton thugs, posing undercover as new miners, since February of 1924, when her husband, John, had started the organizing efforts in Rossville. The first ten had been beaten, then with their families turned out of their company houses, forced to live in tents outside of Rossville but keep mining to work off the scrip they owe the company store.
The Widows Page 2