“Time enough to go in the mines,” Brigham continued, loud. “Goddamn mines. Boy’s smart he’ll never go in.”
“Aw, hit aint so bad.” Homer Day grinned. “Good money right now.”
I wished that everyone else would go away. “Dillon, where are you living?”
“I’m at Number Five. I’m boarding with Brigham. His wife just left him and he’s got room.”
“It’s not ten miles from here,” I said. “I can’t believe you’ve been so close.”
“I started once or twice to come see you. But I needed some time first.”
“Why?”
He shrugged and didn’t answer.
Tommie was looking at her watch. “I got to run and get ready,” she told me. “Arthur Lee’s taking me dancing tonight. You going out with Tony?”
“No. He’s in Bluefield on business.”
“I aint going back with you boys.” Dillon looked at Brigham and Homer. “I’ll thumb a ride home tonight. Why don’t you go on?”
“Suit yourself,” Brigham said.
And then they were all gone and Dillon bought me another cherry coke. “Let’s go to a movie,” he said. “Let’s get a hamburger and then go to a movie.”
“I haven’t got money. Not even for a postage stamp to write Mother.”
“I got money. I make a dollar a day now and Brigham don’t take much of it.”
The movie was Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Tommie had read in a movie magazine that they hated each other and Merle Oberon told Laurence Olivier he made her sick, but you’d never have known it. When Cathy died standing up in Heathcliff’s arms, looking out that window, I cried. It was the best movie I’d ever seen, better even than Gone with the Wind. Then when Heathcliff died and found Cathy on the moors I glanced at Dillon, and his eyes gleamed wet in the movie light. I never knew a boy to cry at a movie, and I looked away quickly so he wouldn’t know I’d seen him.
Afterward we sat on a stone bench on the courthouse lawn high above the town, in the shadow of the trees. Justice showed so many lights it looked like a big city, at least I could imagine it was.
Dillon sat with his legs straight out in front of him and his hands at his sides, holding onto the edge of the bench like he might fall off.
“Who’s Tony?”
“A fellow. A friend of Tommie’s boyfriend.”
“I mean what’s his whole name?” When I told him, he said, “He’s bookkeeper at Jenkinjones.”
He sounded like a lawyer after a witness.
“That’s right.”
“I don’t like him,” Dillon said.
“Do you know him?”
“Not personal. But I know of him. I pump his gas. He’s too soft. They aint nothing there that I can tell.”
“I don’t think it’s fair to judge somebody you don’t know. I like him. He’s polite and he’s never been nothing but a gentleman to me.”
“He’s got another girl. I seen them together in Annadel not two weeks ago.”
My stomach turned over at that, because Tony had said there was no one else, but I tried to sound calm. “We don’t have an understanding yet.”
“Do you love him?”
I hesitated. It was a question I’d asked myself and not yet answered. “I don’t know. He’s hard to get to know because he doesn’t talk much. But he’s had a hard life and I feel sorry for him. And I like it when he kisses me.”
“You can’t let him kiss you!”
He grabbed my wrist. I tried to pull my hand away and he gripped it harder.
“You don’t have to break my bones in two!”
He dropped my hand like it was red hot. “I aint meaning to hurt you.”
Then he had hold of my hand again like he wasn’t even thinking what he was doing. I could only see one side of his face. It was screwed up like he was in pain.
“You can’t kiss nobody but me. I love you! I always loved you!”
I stared at him. “You can’t,” I whispered.
He leaned over and kissed me on the mouth and the tip of his tongue flicked mine, tasted fresh as a sprig of mint. He pushed against me, one leg between mine, pressed me against the back of the bench. I threw my arms around him and held on tight. He opened his mouth against my neck, tore the top button from my blouse and slipped his hand inside.
“I want to make love to you,” he said in my ear and I felt my body molten like Tommie said it would be.
“Dillon, we’re first cousins. We couldn’t have babies, there might be something wrong with them. And we can’t marry, it’s against the law.”
“Hell with the law and hell with marriage. We’re above all that, me and you. We can make love this very night.”
“No! It’s trashy! It’s sinful and ugly!”
“Don’t say that!” He kissed me again. “Don’t you like that?”
“Yes!” I turned my face away from him. “No!”
He put his hand under my skirt, between my thighs. I tried to run away, but he grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled me to my knees, twisting my arm and ripping the sleeve of my blouse, knelt beside me, and wrapped his arms around me. I struggled to free myself.
“Let me go!” I tugged at his arms. “Don’t force me, Dillon, or I’ll hate you forever!”
“Don’t say that!”
He loosened his grip and I pushed him away, managed to stand up. I felt my body return cold and hard and unyielding, and a wave of shame overwhelmed me. I tried to catch my breath and started to sob.
“You got no right to do me like this,” I said.
He stayed where he was, sprawled on the ground, his face covered by one arm.
“I only wanted to love you,” he whispered. “I thought it was what you wanted too.”
“You hurt my arm. You treat me like I’m someone cheap. You—” I searched for anything to say to keep me from running to him, “you’re bad as any hillbilly trash from the head of the holler. Mother always said so.”
He turned his face toward the moonlight. It was frozen into something like the cadavers I’d seen in the morgue.
“I don’t care for nobody who says such things about their people,” he said. “If you believe that, then go to hell.”
I left him and walked up the hill. When I reached the Nurses’ Home I looked back toward the courthouse. He was gone.
The first week in April I received two letters. One was from my father, postmarked Hampton Roads, Virginia. It was three pages long and between each page was a worn dollar bill, smooth and precious like a dried leaf.
The second letter was from Aunt Carrie. Dillon had gone to Canada and joined the British Army so he could fight in the war.
Don’t blame me if you die, I thought. It will be your own fault.
CARRIE FREEMAN, 1940–1942
My boy Dillon joined the British Army, and he was stationed first near London. I could see him there for he has a face that is fine and sharp-featured like you would find in Dickens. His father was Welsh, a Lloyd, and I thought he might discover some of his people there. But before he could visit Wales, he was sent to Egypt and I could not imagine that. I kept a map of the world on my bedroom wall, and pins from Flora’s sewing basket to show where he’d been and where he was. We listened to the radio for any mention of the British Eighth Army in North Africa. It was hard to get news. So many people did not care about the war except to keep America out, and Dillon’s letters were censored, but I knew enough to tell he was suffering in the hot sun and in mortal danger. A mother knows that without being told.
We stayed in Kentucky while Ben worked the shipyards at Hampton Roads, but then Flora had her first stroke. I came back from delivering a baby at Kingdom Come to find her keeled over on the parlor carpet, her left hand drawn up tight beneath her chin and her eyes wide open. After a spell in the Grace Hospital with me and Rachel tending her, she came to herself but she will never talk and will have to sit a wheelchair the rest of her life. Ben came home and Rachel’s friend Tommie Justice got him
a job managing the company store at Jenkinjones coal camp in West Virginia. Tommie’s fiancé was the new superintendent at the Jenkinjones mine, running the place for the American Coal Company. So we ended up on silkstocking row in a six-room house, much obliged for the kindness of younguns half our age.
The coal camps are strung along Blackberry Creek like beads on a necklace, and each looks much the same. Every house is painted white with black trim. Some of the houses hang from the hillsides, their fronts supported by fragile columns of brick and wood. Others sit in the creek bottom on streets of mud and red dog from the slate dumps, raised at four corners by short brick piles with space beneath the house for spare tires and sleeping dogs. Fences of wood and wire separate each house. In winter a truck comes from the mine and fills the coal houses in the corner of each yard so people can feed their stoves. Several times a day the black trains scream through the camps, and often the whistle at the mine blows for an accident. It is the same at Carbon, Davidson, Number Thirteen, Number Ten, Number Six, Number Five, Winco, Felco, and Jenkinjones. It has been the same since I can remember.
The first time I lived on Blackberry was 1917. Since then the main road has been paved for automobiles. There is a new coal camp called Number Thirteen on Lloyds Fork, and a country club on the hill overlooking it. It is strange to drive past the rusting tipple at Number Five, past the tumbledown camp at Winco, and come upon a nine-hole golf course taking up the bottom land. It is the only large patch of cut grass you see. The greens are shiny and clean like they’ve been washed. Men in bright plaid pants and caps stand on the greens. The golf course is built up both sides of Lloyds Fork between Number Thirteen and Winco, and a curved white footbridge connects the two halves. The railroad runs along the mountainside beyond the golf course fence, and a towering bridge of wood and black steel siding carries the coal trains over the course where Lloyds Fork joins Blackberry Creek. I asked Ben who ever plays golf, and he said doctors and lawyers, store owners and coal operators from Justice town. Arthur Lee Sizemore told Ben he should learn to play, but Ben said he is too old and he cannot get used to the idea of working so hard to go home empty-handed.
Jenkinjones, where we live, is the poorest of the camps. There is no bottom land and the houses are squeezed together along a creek so narrow you can cross it in two strides. The paved road ends abruptly at a wall of steep mountainside. You can bear left past the company store and follow a narrow dirt road up the side of Trace Mountain past the tipple and portals. As you climb Trace you see the side of the mountain below is covered with black slate from the mine. Smoke rises from it, for slate burns when you make a pile of it. The fire will burn for years and cannot be put out. The black pile is streaked orange with charred slate, which we call red dog. It smells acrid, like singed raw sewage, and on a damp morning the stench fills the camp. You can only get away from it by rising above it toward the clean fog on Trace Mountain.
The company store Ben manages is red brick with stone steps and a wide porch. Inside it has a green linoleum floor, hanging ceiling fans, and a skylight. Clothes and shoes are on the left behind glass cases, and furniture is on the right. Groceries are at the rear, and a soda fountain. You can sit and sip your sodapop and smell the blood from the butcher’s block. Ben seemed happy enough the first week, but on Friday he came home quiet, his face drawn and old looking. He sat and watched while I fed Flora her supper.
“I had to draw off the men’s pay today,” he said. I knew what was coming for I’d lived in the camps. I nodded and kept spooning mashed potatoes. “Had to go to that Italian bookkeeper with the store accounts and watch while he took what the men owed the store out of the pay envelopes. Lot of them envelopes was left empty. Ones that did have something in them, it was company money.”
“Scrip,” I said. They would be large coins with an American flag and “American Coal Company” stamped on each side.
“There’re two families I can’t sell groceries to this week. Owe too much on into next week’s pay. It’s the women come buy the food and I got to tell them they can’t have it. The Italian bookkeeper says it’s too bad but it’s not our lookout.” He stood up and walked around, sat back down.
“Reckon this is one store I won’t ruin with loose credit,” he said.
Ben still called Tony Angelelli the “Italian bookkeeper,” even though he was courting Rachel and had come to dinner several times. It was a long time before Rachel brought Tony for a visit, because Flora didn’t approve of her daughter keeping company with an Italian. Rachel asked me to talk to her mother.
“I can’t argue with her now that she’s crippled,” Rachel said. “She wins without a fight.”
I started to say, Rachel, you never could argue with her, but I let it pass. It was true Flora was even more difficult since her stroke. She had always been a gentle person on the surface, quiet and even tempered. But she had her own ideas she held to fiercely, her own notions of what was good and proper, especially where Rachel was concerned. She knew how to get what she wanted. Now she had lost her weapons. The sweet voice had been replaced by a hideous grunting rasp, the self-effacing gesture that invited compliance had become a withered shrunken arm that was hard to look upon. Flora responded to these changes with a bad grace and a stubborn, sour disposition.
I spoke to her about Tony while I was feeding her her breakfast. I had the upper hand, towering over her wielding spoonfuls of oatmeal. She knew it and resented it.
“It’s not right to be prejudiced against Rachel’s young man just because he’s Italian,” I said. “You ought to judge him on his own merits.”
Oatmeal dribbled from the corner of her twisted mouth. I wiped it away with a damp cloth. She rolled her eyes like she had something to say and I gave her a pad and pencil. She wrote in a shaky left hand, “They are not clean people.”
I started to say, How many Italians do you know? But Rachel was right. You cannot reason with someone whose every answer is so laboriously given and whose mind will not be changed because stubbornness is the last refuge of her strength. I gave it up.
Ben didn’t care for Tony either. “There’s something wrong with the boy,” he said. “Although I shouldn’t say boy, because he’s ten years older than her. Too old.”
“Age isn’t important,” I said. “It’s love that counts.”
“Love.” Ben smiled a tight-lipped smile. “She doesn’t love him.”
I still thought he was as prejudiced as Flora until I met Tony Angelelli. Then I knew he was one of those damaged people who look perfectly fine on the outside, smiling and pleasant, but there is something missing inside. At first I thought him a person incapable of love. As time passes I see he is something even more tragic—he will care, on rare occasions in his life, but he cannot say it or show it or perhaps even acknowledge it to himself. He will hurt because he is not loved in return, but he will not know why he hurts. He is like a telephone whose cord has been cut and you scream into the dead receiver and hear only silence.
On the Sunday of Pearl Harbor, we were at the table eating fried chicken when Arthur Lee Sizemore telephoned, said, “Y’all turn on the radio,” and hung up. As the radio voice, crying out above sirens and explosions, described the swarming Japanese bombers, the battleships become infernos, we stood up, left the table, and gathered around the dome of the radio. Only Tony sat, still gnawing the gristle from a chicken bone. He broke it in two and sucked on it. Ben turned to watch him.
“Son, is that all you can do?”
Tony laughed as though surprised. “Might as well.” He moved his chair closer to the radio, chicken leg in hand, and kept eating with a foolish smile on his face.
Ben looked at me, then went out on the porch and sat in the swing.
I went to Rachel’s room that night. She sat brushing her hair before the mirror.
“What do you see in Tony?” I asked.
She set down the brush and looked at her lap. “He’s had a lot of sadness in his life,” she said. “He wants looking af
ter.”
“You look after your patients and your younguns, when you have them,” I said. “Don’t marry Tony. You deserve better.”
“Maybe I won’t have any other chances. I don’t see any other men coming around.”
“Don’t talk foolish. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Anyway, no marriage is better than an unhappy marriage. A woman can make a life for herself.”
“A lonely life.”
“Some of the loneliest people in the world are married women,” I said. “Your momma’s fancy magazines may not tell you that, but it’s true.”
She started brushing her hair again, with her head ducked down. “I was thinking of breaking up with him anyway. Dillon said Tony’s seeing someone in Bluefield, and Tommie told me it’s true. Arthur Lee told her. He said Tony proposed to the woman so she’d go to bed with him. I asked Tony and he denied it, but I know he’s lying.”
“It’s just as well to find it out now. It shows what he is.”
“Maybe all men are like that,” she said coldly.
“No,” I said.
“Wasn’t Dillon’s daddy?” She looked at me so straight and hard I had to fight back the urge to slap her. She knew it and grabbed my wrist. “Don’t hate me!”
“I don’t hate you, child. Not ever. I loved Dillon’s daddy better than anyone in this world. Still he was a hard man to live with. If he hadn’t been paralyzed I’d have kicked him out. No, that’s not right, he’d have left on his own. He dreaded to be close to someone.”
“Dillon’s something like that. He’ll try to hold someone so close he’ll squeeze the life from them. But it’s not because he needs them. He just wants to claim them.”
“And when you pushed him away, he couldn’t bear to be around you and he left to punish you.”
“How did you know?” she whispered.
“Child, I’ve got eyes.”
“It’s impossible, what he wants. It’s not right for cousins to love. I told him that and now he won’t forgive me. He never writes. I don’t know what’s happening to him except what you tell me, and there’s more I want to know but I’m afraid to ask.”
The Unquiet Earth Page 4