Will Lloyd’s death break the effort? Or galvanize it?
“It’s Tom … he was taken by a Pink,” says Jurgis Sacovech, coming up behind her, his expression drawn with weariness and anger.
Marvena gasps. “Why? When—” She doesn’t bother to ask, By whom? They don’t know the Pinks’ names.
“He was grabbed at dinner break, just after noon yesterday. Taken to the holding cell,” Jurgis says, referring to the small iron-barred room inside Ross Mining headquarters, a narrow building that also holds the pay office and Luther Ross’s office.
Marvena sees her brother, Tom: tall, thin, ruddy face, nose twisted left from some fight or another, his fine, sandy hair. The sight of him, even in her imagination, turns her heart tender. But she pushes her heart back into its own holding cell. “What reason was given for the Pinks taking him?”
“Word is he was caught talking to Lloyd and some other miners,” Jurgis mutters.
“I’ll talk to Daniel—”
Jurgis snorts. “Your special friendship with the sheriff ain’t gonna do you any good. Looks like he’s taken his stand—but different than what we’d hoped. I went to the cell early this morning before work. Tom was gone. A Pink took pleasure in telling me that Sheriff Ross had been there even earlier, just after dawn, to transport Tom to the Kinship jailhouse.”
“There must be another explanation. I trust Daniel. He don’t want no Blair Mountain.”
Jurgis shudders at the reference to the bloody standoff between miners and management just four years before in West Virginia. It was legendary and had nearly killed off unionization efforts across America.
“We need to hold off on the next organizing meeting, what with Lloyd—” Jurgis says.
“No! That’s all the more reason to meet—”
Another whistle. The five-minute warning.
“You tell Daniel where, yet?” Jurgis asks.
Marvena clenches her teeth. “No.” Even Daniel doesn’t know about the cave, well hidden behind her moonshining still. But he knows her cabin, of course, makes regular visits there. Knows of her moonshining and looks the other way.
“Well, you need to stop the sheriff coming down here to Rossville till we know for certain where he stands. Especially with Tom gone.”
“How else am I to talk with the wives? Prepare them?”
“You’re drawing suspicion. Lay low, Marvena.”
Another whistle. One minute.
Marvena expects Jurgis to hurry down the dirt road. But he stares at her, resolute.
Finally, she nods. “Fine. But Daniel’s coming to see me this afternoon. He’ll come out on our side. Make everything right. Mark my words.”
Should she tell him now that when she and Tom had seen Daniel last week he’d said he was at least going to talk with an old friend who works in the Bureau of Mines about safety violations, someone he served with in the Great War?
But Jurgis’s face softens into another expression. Pity.
So she says nothing as he walks off.
CHAPTER 3
LILY
Three days after Daniel’s been found, Lily holds the hands of her children—Micah and Jolene—as they walk from their house, past the county courthouse next door that fills the corner of Main and Court streets, and down to the Kinship Presbyterian church. The trek is not even a block, and yet Lily’s stride slows with each laborious step, her heart pounding as if she’s run as she had as a child in the woods behind her grandparents’ buckwheat farm, down to Coal Creek and the Kinship Tree.
Mama waits for them at the edge of the crowd by the church, a far bigger crowd than Lily had anticipated. She stops short, even as Mama gives her a look: Come on, young lady.
Lily looks down at her children. Jolene is trying her best to look brave—a pinch-faced imitation of Mama—but Micah is sniffling. Both stare up at her, startled by so many people pressing in, studying them.
Of course the people of Bronwyn County are curious, fascinated by such tragedy, shocking even in a farming and coal county where tractors overturn and mine walls crumble, crushing or suffocating workers in minutes or hours. But those are expected deaths.
This is different: their sheriff of seven years shot with his own revolver by an escaped prisoner, his body left on Kinship Road near his automobile to be found by Rusty Murphy, one of Ada Gottschalk’s farmhands, on the western prong of the hairpin turn by the Gottschalk farm. The prisoner he was transporting long gone. A manhunt is under way, but so far there are no leads.
This is all Lily knows of Daniel’s death, all Martin or Elias has told her. No more than what was reported in a small article in the Kinship Weekly Courier. It is not enough. She will see this through—burying her husband—and then she will demand to know more, until she is satisfied that she knows all there is to know about his death.
Even now, Lily finds herself scanning the crowd, looking for Rusty or even Ada.
“Go, child.” Mama nudges her, using her shoulder, since her arms are full with Caleb Jr., Mama’s change-of-life baby. Lily’s little brother is the same age as her own son, Micah. But Lily won’t be pushed. Micah sniffles. Lily kneels, pulls from her purse the handkerchief Mama insisted she bring to daub her proper tears, which have yet to come for she fears that if she lets her sorrow loosen and run free it will sweep her away. She wipes Micah’s nose and kisses the top of Jolene’s head.
Even as she forces herself to stride toward the women’s door, habit overrules propriety and Lily looks to the men’s door; the sight of it triggers a familiar tug of resentment: on Sundays, Daniel always parted from them so easily, smiling and shaking hands with the other men, wives and children separate, unseen, easy to forget.
Suddenly a miner rushes toward her. “Mrs. Ross!” he cries out.
Lily stares at him, startled. She doesn’t know this miner, but he gets close enough for his smell—years of coal dust steeped into his clothes, his skin—to sting Lily’s eyes and nose, and she tightens her grasp on Micah and Jolene. Respectfully he pulls off his hat, a battered and dusty relic, revealing fine hair like a young man’s, but his eyes are ancient, hollowed out. His worn brown coat, frayed at collar and cuffs, hangs shamefully loose on his tall, too-thin frame, like an old woman’s shawl.
“I just want to tell you how sorry I am, we all are, and I wanted to ask—” He stops, overtaken by coughing. He pulls from his pocket a handkerchief, stained red and yellow. As he brings his handkerchief to his mouth, a Pinkerton from the crowd grabs him.
It’s the Pinkerton man from the other night, the one with the harelip and the jagged scar by the corner of his left eye.
A low buzz snarls through the crowd. Lily’s heart beats up into her throat. She’d seen, twice in her youth, how quickly a crowd can turn into a mob.
The Pinkerton pulls back his fine gray wool coat, enough to reveal the grip of a holstered revolver. Lily turns the other way, wanting to run with her children—and Mama and her baby brother, too—back home, but she’s blocked by the crowd.
Several other Pinkerton men push toward the miner as the buzz rises, tightens, hovers in fearful balance with sudden stillness.
Then someone shouts, “Goddam Pinks!”
The scornful tag is enough for the Pinkerton to pull out his revolver, for his compatriots to reach for theirs. Most of the crowd shrinks back. Lily draws her children closer, but both Micah and Jolene start crying.
“Enough!” The voice is loud but not shrill.
For just a moment, Lily is bemused—hearing her mama’s commanding voice—and then she realizes as the crowd stares that it is her own voice that has risen.
The Pinkerton holsters his revolver and releases the miner, who quickly disappears. Then, as if orchestrated, the crowd shrinks back and a path to the church reappears.
“Go on,” Mama hisses at Lily, and gives her a prod, as if she blames Lily for this disturbance. Mama does not like spectacles.
So Lily makes herself walk through the entrance and slowly down the
aisle, same aisle she’d hurried down eight years before for their wedding, eager to get to Daniel’s side. She slides into the front pew on the women’s and children’s side. Even as she stares at the cold, pitiless stained-glass window to their right, she feels the probing eyes of the people coming in behind them, people who for this occasion have tried especially hard to wash coal and dirt from skin and clothing. They’ve been given the day off; even Luther Ross is not so foolish as to insist on labor on this day. And so they’ve come, in automobiles, on horseback, in mule-drawn wagons.
Soon so many people are packed standing-room-only in the tiny church that their body heat brings forth the smell of their lives from deep within their own flesh; their body heat coaxes from wooden pews and leather Bibles smells of other sinners and mourners who’ve gathered there time and again. The smells stuff Lily’s nose, and she gasps softly.
Her fists clench in her lap as she stares at the cedar box. It’s closed. Good. At least the undertaker had listened to her insistence on that. She bites her lip, hard, as she recollects: the undertaker had said, People will want to see. Mama, Elias, Martin had agreed, muttered about convention and expectations.
But as Lily had taken in the sight of Daniel’s body at the undertaker’s, as much of it as she’d been allowed to view, she’d thought, What about my expectations? She’d expected that he would come back that morning. Now she knows not to hold expectations close anymore.
Even when she’d seen Daniel’s body, his death seemed unreal. The decisions she’d been pressed to make seemed like garish details from a foolish nightmare.
But the encounter outside the church has broken that illusion.
Lily unclenches her fists and instead spreads her arms like wings around her children. They quiver with such force that her arms tremble, too. The rest of her is still as stone.
CHAPTER 4
MARVENA
Marvena stands at her wood-fired cookstove, trying to scoop up the specks of bacon in the drippings she’d saved in a cup, all that’s left of the meat that Daniel had brought on his last visit.
She spoons the grease into her cast-iron frypan and, as she waits for it to sizzle, chops potatoes and onions. When the grease pops, she dumps in the vegetables. She slices bread and makes two sandwiches—a lavish two slices of bologna each—and wraps them in wax paper.
As she works, she thinks of the owl that had come to the crab apple tree at dusk the night before. Marvena, outside at the well, had seen it fly from the forest, over the clearing around her cabin, then alight on the tree, right beside her porch. Unnaturally close. It had begun calling. A bad sign. A portent of, perhaps, death.
The memory from the night before now brings to her mind her brother, Tom, taken away. Her daughter Eula, surely still at the boardinghouse, turning her heart fallow day by day, night by night. She’d said as much on their last bitter visit just six weeks ago. Daniel had come by as they were arguing, had calmed scared Frankie, offered Eula one of his little rustic dolls dressed in a scrap from the cloth Marvena’d used to make Eula’s dress for her sixteenth birthday—before the Widowmaker collapse upended Eula’s view of the world and what it offers to women like them. But Eula’s fury had boiled over. She’d tossed the doll back at Daniel, run from the cabin. Daniel had stopped Marvena from following her.
Her heart clenches with fury and urgency at both the memory and Eula; she knew she could wait no longer for Daniel to come to her. She’d have to go to him. Ask if he’d truly gone to the boardinghouse to check on Eula. If what Jurgis accused him of was true—had he picked up Tom in Rossville, then taken him to the Kinship jailhouse?
The sandwiches made, Marvena goes to wake Frankie. It takes several nudges and gentle shakes. The child could sleep through anything, even thunderstorms or dynamite booms from the other side of the mountain. It’s a trait that Marvena, who’d tossed and turned all night, envies.
“We’re going to Kinship today,” Marvena says. Frankie swings her feet around off the bed and bounces on the straw mattress, making the wood slats squeal. She’s never been to Kinship, only heard of it from Daniel.
“To find Eula?” Frankie’s face lights up, just saying her big sister’s name, and Marvena can see that it is not the last bitter meeting that composes Frankie’s memory of Eula, but happier times. Seeking woodland berries and greens for supper. Playing fetch with their coonhound, Shep. Eula patiently teaching Frankie how to braid her hair or lace her shoes when Marvena was just too tired.
“To find Uncle Daniel.”
Though spring is nudging its way in, winter yet strokes the cabin door, licks the window, and lurks in the corners of the room. After breakfast, Marvena bundles Frankie in layers and a hat that Eula had left behind. Pulls on her own thin brown wool coat—a worn hand-me-down from Mama, God rest her soul; she’d died of heart trouble when Marvena was eight.
On the front porch, Frankie pets Shep and says what she always does when they leave to hunt greens or mushrooms, rabbit or squirrel: “Be good’n watch our cabin!” Then she feeds Shep the potato peelings.
Eula had found the dog—a mix of coonhound and who knew what—when he was but a pup, abandoned in the woods, half-starved. It was a miracle a coyote hadn’t gotten him. Marvena had protested—they barely got by with four mouths to feed. But Eula begged for the beast: He’ll be a good watchdog! And so Marvena had given in.
Now Shep gobbles the last of the peelings and stares at her. Marvena sighs, pulls a sandwich out of her pocket, and gives Shep a bologna slice. By the time she’s rewrapped the sandwich, Shep’s settled down and Frankie has already started running down the rutted lane.
“No, child!” Marvena’s voice barks harsher than she means it, so that Frankie stops and stares back with eyes full of hurt, and Shep—who is partial to Frankie—startles to alertness.
“We can’t go through Rossville as usual,” Marvena says, forcing her voice to softness.
“Why?”
She doesn’t want to frighten the child by telling her that Jurgis had warned her away. “Never you mind. I know a back way.”
So Marvena and Frankie go round to the back of their scant, spare cabin and climb out of their holler through the woods up the hill, then sidle down unnamed dirt paths, until at last they come alongside Coal Creek, moving slowly between ice-crusted banks. Whipsaw wind slices through thin coats and thinner skins to gleefully tap their bones. Frankie sings them along—hymns, mining songs, ballads. She’d learned most of the music from John. The child never forgets a song.
But then she stops. “Mama?” Frankie says, dancing from foot to foot, her tiny face suddenly desperate under the brim of Eula’s old hat. “I have to pee!”
Marvena eyes the slick, narrow path along the steep bank, the dense growth on the rise on the other side. She knows a safer place for Frankie to relieve herself, along the footpath they’ll need to take anyway up to Kinship Road. “Hold it for a bit. We’re right near the turnoff.”
They continue on, silent then, Marvena wedging her body between the steep, slippery bank and Frankie. Then she spots it, the sharp curve up ahead, where Coal Creek joins Kinship River and the waters tumble together toward the great Ohio River. Marvena’s heart, beating a steady thrum during the miles they’ve already come, suddenly pounds in her throat at the sight of that curve, at the memory it brings. She grasps Frankie’s hand. Then they’re around the curve, and there it is—the Kinship Tree.
Frankie gasps when she sees it. She’s never seen anything like this before, and Marvena can’t help but smile at her reaction. The tree grew from three saplings—sycamore, maple, and beech—fusing and twining over uncounted seasons until their fates bound in one trunk and their boughs shadowed the bank where water pooled, still and dark and deep.
“Go on up a bit and do your business. Mind that you’re neat!”
Frankie hurries up the path, well worn from people coming to visit the tree. It’s cold, and early, and quiet except for woodland sounds, but Marvena hollers an additional admo
nishment anyway: “And keep an eye out for people!”
Lovers have marred the Kinship Tree with carvings of their initials. Marvena presses her fingertips to one such set. She’ll give Frankie time and then come up the path to the hairpin turn in Kinship Road, and from there they’ll take the main road to Kinship. For a moment, though, she allows herself the luxury of turning to rest against the fused trunks, closing her eyes.
The morning after her thirteenth birthday, Marvena slipped away from their small cabin to escape the fight between Tom and Daddy, now out of prison, over Tom’s desire to work for Ross Mining. Drifting away down Coal Creek seemed the fastest way out.
She grabbed a dead tree branch from the ground and jumped in. Marvena didn’t know how to swim well, but after the initial shock of cold water she drifted easily, arms hooked over her branch, and she reckoned the creek could carry her down to Kinship River and from there to the mighty Ohio.
Then, suddenly, the water churned faster and at last pulled her, tumbling, over rapids, knocking her loose from her branch. She bobbed up at the other end, where the water again ran slow and steady. But deeper. She could not touch the bottom. She saw a figure on the distant bank, staring at her. She screamed and went under until someone clenched her around the waist. Gasping, she saw that it was a boy, holding her so that she was floating. Soon they were under the shade of a tree whose limbs canopied over a still pool along the bank.
When she could breathe evenly she sat up and took in his fine shirt, breeches, suspenders. The good leather shoes, now ruined. He introduced himself—Daniel Ross. The name struck her, hard as a slap. “Ross? Like Ross Mining? Rossville?” she asked, and he’d nodded proudly—that was his daddy’s company. His town.
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