“Ask me now.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“He hasn’t mentioned a girlfriend.”
“He’ll find one,” she said. Her voice was frantic. “I know he will. He’ll forget about me.”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
Then she began to cry, not soft but loud and wild. I took her in my arms. Ben came to see what was wrong but I waved him away. When she could speak she said, “He’ll get killed over there! I know he will!”
I touched her hair. “Pray God he won’t.” It was all I could say. He was still in Egypt and Rommel was closing in.
Pearl Harbor changed everything. Once we were into the war it was easy to forget that a lot of big shots like the president of American Coal in Philadelphia had been saying Hitler wasn’t so bad, that he was fighting communism and the unions, and we might learn something from him. Once we were into the war, Hitler’s buddies waved the flag and forgot they had said such things. Then I was proud of Dillon, because he got into the fight before such people. He hated the Fascists because that is the way I raised him and because it is his nature.
All the young people left. Arthur Lee Sizemore went into the army, and the old superintendent came out of retirement to run the mine. Tony Angelelli became an interpreter, stationed in North Africa until the invasion of Italy. Rachel claimed she didn’t care he was gone. Tony had finally confessed about the girlfriend in Bluefield, and Rachel wouldn’t see him anymore. Just as well, we all said, and breathed sighs of relief.
Rachel and Tommie graduated in the spring and signed up as army nurses. Together they caught the train for Fort Jackson, small and trim in new cotton suits, each clutching a suitcase. When a young woman is set for an adventure, a suitcase is a marvelous thing, so small yet full of all that is necessary for a life—clean underwear, earrings, a pretty nightgown, a book, and toothbrush and comb. I watched them stroll along the station platform, arm in arm, and I longed to go with them.
Rachel had not been gone a week, had just had time to send a postcard of South Carolina pine forests, when the yellow telegram arrived from the British Army. Regret to inform. Your son Dillon Freeman. Wounded in action. Will inform further.
I folded the telegram, laid it on top of the bureau, and waited.
Dillon came home with a limp from the bullet that shattered his leg above the knee. I met him at the train station in Justice. He was pale and thinner than I’d seen him since boyhood. He stumped along the platform on a single crutch, his uniform hanging on him like a sack. His first word, after he hugged me, was “Rachel?”
“Gone to the South Pacific. She’s on a hospital ship this minute.”
He clutched my shoulders and swayed slightly. “The Japanese have sunk hospital ships,” he whispered.
“I know it.”
“It’s bad luck for her, water. She almost drowned at the Homeplace.”
“I recall.”
He leaned back on his crutch. I thought he was falling and I grabbed his arm but he shook me off. Then he asked me how I was. I said there would be time to talk later, he was still weak and needed to get off his feet. I led him to the car.
The first week back he took to his bed with his face to the wall. He said his leg was not hurting terribly but he could not make himself get up. It had taken his mind’s strength to get himself back across the ocean and he had nothing left. I coaxed him with chicken soup and cornbread. He ate a little but didn’t say much.
I sat on the front porch swing on a new spring evening. A girl rode by standing on the pedals of a bicycle that was too large for her, bouncing over mud puddles and chunks of red dog. Dillon came onto the porch and sat beside me. He had a box of Falls City beer.
“First time you ever drank in front of me,” I said. “I reckon my little boy is grown up.”
“Ben brung it from the store. Wasn’t happy about it but I reckon he figured a soldier is entitled to some vices. Want one?”
“No thank you. I never picked up a taste for it. Your daddy was the one for a beer.”
I thought it pleased him that I mentioned his daddy, but he didn’t say anything.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said.
He smiled briefly and sipped his beer, looked up and down the quiet street. “You can’t sit here and know what it was like,” he said.
“No. But I’ve seen some things in my time I don’t like to talk about either.”
“You never been in the desert,” he said. “You don’t know how the heat can make a man crazy, how he sees things that aint there.” He shifted his weight and slowly straightened his bad leg. “We were coming off leave in Cairo, and they sent us to relieve a unit that had come under heavy fire and been pinned down for several days. When we found them boys, they was wild-eyed, hadn’t had no sleep. While they was packing up, I went behind a burnt-out tank to take a crap. When I finished, next I seen was a fellow coming toward me. One of ours. His face was all black with grease and sweat and his helmet was gone. He was yelling stuff that didn’t make no sense at all. He took his rifle off his shoulder. I raised my hand and said Friend, but he yelled, Goddamn Kraut! and aimed his rifle. I pulled my pistol out of my belt and dodged and took the bullet in my leg. Fired back and hit him in the thigh. Just wanted to stop him. He fell but then he raised back up and lifted the rifle again. So I killed him.”
We stopped swinging back and forth and sat still. “No one would blame you,” I said.
“Oh.” He smiled. “I blame myself. He was an American, joined early like I did. But it aint him being an American that bothered me. Way I see it, an American aint no more valuable than any other human being in God’s eyes. But I had a choice. It was him or me, him or me. I chose me.” He drained the bottle of beer and opened another. “They said the fellow’s best friend had his head blown off right in front of him, and he’d been on the verge of cracking all week. They was going to send him to the hospital in Cairo soon as they got some help. Nobody blamed me. I found out what I could about him. He was Ed McCamey from Centre Hall, Pennsylvania. Sounds like a damn estate, don’t it, Centre Hall?”
“It happens in war,” I said.
“Yes it does.” He answered quick, like he was ready to agree with anything I said as a way to mock a mother’s comfort. “And why did I choose me instead of him? Because that’s the way people do, aint it? It’s natural as breathing I should choose me so Carrie Freeman can sit on the porch with her son and Ed McCamey’s mother can lay the flowers on the grave. You’d rather be setting right here, wouldn’t you?”
I resolved to say nothing else. He finished another beer quickly and opened the third.
“You know what I done while I was laid up in the hospital? I read the Bible. Now that’s something you aint known me to do, is it? You never thought of me as religious, and I aint in the church-going way. But I believe in God, and I believe they’s a fire running through everything that lives. When that Bible starts throwing rules at me, I laugh, but when it tells how sin burns and says turn the other cheek and when God gets hung on that cross, buddy I’m right there. I chose me and that’s sin. I aint no better than a goddamn Nazi. That’s what they do, choose themselves. And the rich people that keep what they got, they do the same. It’s sin and the only way you burn it out is to die. Only it don’t work if you just die for yourself, it’s got to be for somebody else.”
I sat quiet. He drank two more beers without a word, and the dusk turned to heavy darkness.
“I’m going in the mines,” he said.
“Why? To punish yourself?”
“You can call it that if you want to. I want to work with buddies that are like to die at any time, and me with them. I don’t want to get separated from them. That’s what happened to me in that desert. I got separated. That’s Hell, don’t you know.”
“What about your leg?”
“It’s healing. They’ll take me, they’re begging for men right now.”
He found a cigarette in his shirt pocket and smok
ed it, looked at me sideways with his eyes at a squint like he dared me to talk him out of it. He should have known I was too practiced at letting go to take him up on it.
“Your cousin Brigham has married again and just got on at Number Thirteen mine,” I said. “It’s a new camp built since the war started. That union local is full of troublemakers because all the miners expect to make money now.” I smiled. “Sounds right for you. You ought to get on there.”
“I done asked,” he said.
DILLON, 1943
In this place there is barely room to stand, and only four feet between us and a wall of rock. We were ready to load bone when a rumble like a train ran above our heads and long shards peeled off the roof. We just had time to make this hole. You can only see one wheel of Homer’s buggy, mashed flat so it looks sculpted from a section of the floor. The buggy has been crushed beneath the roof fall.
I sit with my back against a seam of coal and my knees drawn up to my chest. Brigham sits beside me, so close our arms and legs touch. Beyond Brigham is Homer Day, our buggy man, Brigham’s buddy from way back. To my left is a Negro name of Sim Gore. None of us know him. He has only worked Number Thirteen a month and just started loading bone in our section. Bone is slate. The company has no use for it, so Sim loads it and it goes out of the mine to be dumped over the hillside. There is a bone pile at the head of the hollow above Jenkinjones that is near as high as the mountain.
When Brigham and Sim breathe, their arms move against mine. I wish they would breathe at the same time, the unevenness puts me on edge. The light on Homer’s cap bobs up and down. The dust is still flying, it clots the beams of the lamp and smothers the light.
“Hit’s all closed off,” Homer says. “All closed off. Aint no place big enough for a piss ant to crawl through.” He sniffs loudly. “All closed off,” he says again.
“Shut the hell up,” says Brigham. He digs an elbow into Homer’s rib cage. Homer grunts.
“Got to be quiet, breathe slow,” says Sim Gore. “Got to conserve the oxygen.”
“Shut up, nigger,” says Brigham.
I feel Sim’s body go stiff against mine.
“We dug our own grave,” Homer says. “Just like the songs say. Dug our own grave.”
I say, “They’ll be coming for us. I been in the army. This aint so different from being trapped in a foxhole. The Nazis has dropped a bomb on us, see. But our boys will be in to dig us out. In the meantime we got to be calm.”
“Calm!” Brigham coughs. “God, I’d love a shot of whiskey.”
I crawl away on my hands and knees, scrabbling over chunks of bone. I find one of the dinner pails Brigham and I brought in.
“Homer, where was your dinner pail?”
“With the buggy.”
“Tuna fish pancakes if you can find it,” says Brigham.
Sim Gore doesn’t say a word. I can’t blame him. I crawl back.
“We’ll get out,” I say. “We’re already goddamn lucky. Could be us instead of the buggies. Y’all know the procedure. We got to take turns banging with something. Maybe they’ll hear us.”
I prize open the battered dinner pail, dump out its contents. Homer has me in his lamplight.
“Your head’s bleeding,” he says.
“Must not be bad. I don’t feel nothing.” I hold up two fried baloney sandwiches. “Half for each of us. But not just yet.”
“Who says when?” Brigham asks.
“I do.”
“Who appointed you?”
I ignore him and hold up a can of Vienna sausages and a package of chocolate cupcakes.
“One Vienny apiece right now, and we’ll save the crackers. Half a cupcake apiece, but not now. Two sips of coffee. We’ll save the water for later.”
“Who appointed you?” Brigham says again. “Hit’s my bait.”
“I been in the war,” I say. “I had practice at this.”
“Leave the boy be,” says Sim Gore. “He’s making sense.”
I give Homer a hunk of bone because he is still sobbing and needs something to do. He shifts to the front of our place, bangs three times against a boulder, waits, bangs again.
I hand out the Viennas, sit back against the coal face. A glob of jelly clings to my sausage. I catch the jelly on my tongue and hold it until it melts. I eat small bites, try to make it last. We sit in silence and listen to Homer bang.
Bang. Bang. Listen. Bang. Bang. Listen.
Brigham says, “That pounding is driving me nuts.”
“You do it a while,” I say. I am thinking Homer is getting tired anyway.
I lean against Sim Gore. “Where you from?”
“Live at Jenkinjones,” he says. “Was raised up yonder to Annadel.”
He doesn’t say anything else. Brigham keeps pounding.
Rachel is beading toward the Philippines from Corregidor. She is on the ocean where there is nothing but air and water. I want to be with her on a boat and swim with her and after she dries in the sun I will lick the salt from her skin I want to spread her legs and taste the saltiness there
I read the letters she writes Mom. She writes, “There was a full moon over the ship tonight but it was wasted because we aren’t allowed to talk to the sailors and they’re all awfully nice and sweet.”
I can’t stand it because those sailors are taking care of her and I’m not.
She can be so damn silly. In the middle of an ocean in the middle of a war she writes, “You should see the tan I’m getting. My legs look like I have leg makeup on.”
She never writes me. She wouldn’t dare write me that crap.
I can reach out and touch the limit of my world. I measure each slow breath and wait to die. But nothing in the world has tasted so good as the Vienna sausage I just ate. It’s a good thing we will die or life would be worthless, we wouldn’t even know what it is. Except I don’t want to die this soon.
Sim and Brigham and Homer sleep, and I crack the bone against the wall. Our hands have worn the bone clean and smooth.
Sim wakes and takes the bone. I lie down beside Homer. It is cold and I fold myself into the curves of his body.
We eat the rest of the Viennas, and I hand out a Saltine apiece because it is our big meal.
“How long you think it’s been?” Sim asks.
“Ten hours,” says Brigham.
“Got to be more,” Homer wails. “Hit seems like eternity.”
Silence.
“Jawbone seam,” says Brigham. “Good seam of coal to work. High coal. Pretty coal, got a little whorl in the grain.”
His voice has a flow to it like when he tells a story. Brigham tells a good story.
“Keep talking,” I say. “Why’s it called jawbone seam?”
“Jawbone of the Devil.” Brigham coughs, spits. “Don’t you know we’re digging the Booger Man’s bones, boys?”
“Why the Booger Man’s bones?” asks Sim.
“Because they’re black as pitch.”
“I’m black,” says Sim—his voice with an edge to it—“and I got nothing to do with the Devil.”
“Don’t you?”
They lean toward each other over me.
“My daddy hated a nigger,” says Brigham.
I push my arms against his chest. “What I heard tell, your daddy hated everybody and everything,” I say. “Probably hated you, too.”
“You son of a bitch,” says Brigham. “You didn’t know him.”
“He was my daddy’s brother.”
“You didn’t know your own fucking daddy.”
I suck in my breath. “I heard the stories,” I say.
“Brigham’s daddy was a mean one,” says Homer. “Would cuss you out soon as look at you. Used to split Brigham’s skin with a strap.”
“Sons of bitches.” Brigham leans back again. “I’d beat the shit out of all of you if they was room.”
Silence.
“Booger Man a-laying in the ground,” Brigham says like he’s chanting, talking real low, breathing short b
reaths like he’s not even inhaling. “Poor feller digs up the Booger Man’s big toe, thinks it’s a ’tater, poor starving feller. Takes that toe home, cooks it, and eats it. Booger Man comes that night and claims the feller’s soul. Devil’s bones in the ground.”
“That don’t mean this is the Devil’s Bones,” says Sim, sipping the air. “Could be God’s bones. God’s bones a-holding up the world, and we got a powerful nerve to be messing with them.”
“What kind of God would do that way?” I ask. Answers fill the inside of my head. A dead God who raged against dying and left his cursed bones behind? A God who knows that death is the spice of life, who lives on our dying and sucks our sorrow for sustenance?
“God’s ways is not our ways,” Sim says. “His time is not our time, his reasons is not our reasons. God have a majesty.”
“I’m saved,” says Homer. “Brothers, I hope you are all saved. We will be going from this hole to live with Jesus.”
I have the bone. Bang. Bang. Then we hear it, away off in another world. Two answering taps.
We listen.
Brigham grabs the bone from me. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Lord Jesus, they hear us!” Sim cries.
“Long way off,” says Brigham. “Long way.”
We piss in the empty dinner pail and close it to keep down the smell. We squat and crap and cover the shit with chunks of bone, like we are big cats. The smell comes anyway and at least reminds us we are alive. We lay huddled together because the cold is in our bones.
“I was borned in a whorehouse,” Homer says. “Yonder to Annadel. My mommy was a loose woman. Ruby Day was her name. She run off to Cincinnati and left me. Then she got pregnant with my brother Hassel down there and sent him up to me. Vernon Finley took us in and raised us like we was his own. We kept our last name though, Day. I was seventeen when I was saved. Was bad to drink before that but Jesus set me right. He struck me down while I was setting a timber in the mine. I seen his face in the wood by the light of my lamp. I come back away to kneel and pray, and the roof fell where I’d been standing. I knowed right then Jesus had me in his care.”
The Unquiet Earth Page 5