I want to say Stop talking, you are using the air, but I don’t because the stories are important too. I pick up the bone and bang. The taps answer. “They sound closer,” I say. “Talk, Sim. Tell a story.”
“You ever see that monument at the Davidson cemetery?” Sim says. “Monument to all them miners blowed up at Number Six. Got a list of all the names carved in stone, says they give their lives for American Coal. Some of them names got the letters COL after them. Time I ask my momma what that meant, she say Colonel. She say it meant they was all officers in the army. Didn’t want to tell me what it really was, Colored. Didn’t want me to know they marked us different like we was leftovers. I wanted to know it. And I wanted to know they was Negroes in that mine. This is my place too.”
“Colored man blows up just like a white man,” Homer says.
“My daddy was shot when I was a youngun,” Sim says. “Killed when the coal operators run a machine gun through the camp on a train car. Him not even a miner. Him a bartender for old man Ermel Justice.”
“Jesus I’d like a drink,” Brigham moans. “Did your daddy make a fine drink?”
I can feel Brigham trembling against me.
“It’s hard to breathe,” he says. “Hard.”
And I notice my chest hurts like someone is setting on it.
“Air’s bad,” I whisper.
Sim sits up and strikes a match. It sparks and then flicks out.
“Jesus,” he says. “Jesus.”
Brigham cusses, “Goddamngoddamnsonofabitch.”
Sim staggers to his feet toward the wall of bone. I see the spark of another match. Nothing. The orange sparks move to the right. Nothing. Nothing. Soon Sim will be out of matches. I grope through my pockets and I don’t have any.
Then a tiny pearl of orange flame catches with a puttering sound, high up on our right. “Here!” Sim calls. “Here!”
I reach him first, stand on tiptoe, and stick my nose in the narrow crevice. A cold clear blast of air freezes the inside of my nose. We scrabble at the bone with our bare hands, but we can’t make the opening bigger.
“They’s just room for three,” Sim says. “Step up, y’all, put your nose to it. When I can’t go no more I’ll tell you. We’ll take turns.”
I stand on tiptoe between Brigham and Homer, our arms around each other’s waists for balance. The air is so cold it burns all the way down.
“Can’t go no more,” Sim says behind us.
Brigham lets go of me and stands back. Sim is too short to reach the crevice so Brigham finds a hunk of bone for him to stand on. Sim’s cheek rubs mine, the stubble of beard dry and scratchy. We breathe. Brigham pulls me away and takes my place.
I keep count of how many times I step back but lose track after ten. The pounding beyond the wall is loud, you can breathe to its rhythm. But the bouts without air weaken me. I see red stripes then white ones and my ears buzz. I don’t want to bother Homer any more Homer has a new wife he doesn’t need me to bother him I lie down because my head is pounding the others are breathing and I will let them.
“I aint told my story yet,” I say. “I fought in the war I killed a man point blank I killed a man I should never have come out of Egypt.”
I can hardly hear my voice for the pounding.
I didn’t save Rachel I didn’t save the Homeplace I killed a man I should have saved him I should have died in the river I should have died in Egypt.
The bars of light blind me the angels lift me up and bear me away.
GOD’S BONES 1945 – 1946
RACHEL, 1945
In the army, you have to have a story. Everybody looks the same from the neck down, and from the forehead up. You have only your eyes nose and mouth to say who you are and that is not enough without a story.
Tommie and I had no problem. Every place we went—Fort Jackson, Camp Anzio, Corregidor, Leyte, Manila—we were the only nurses from the mountains. People kept saying, How funny your accents are, Does your father make moonshine, Are those the first shoes you ever had on? At first we laid it on good. I said our family mule slept in the living room, and Tommie told one GI that she never saw a pair of panties until she joined the army. It was fun for a while but then it got old.
The GIs came around all right. In the Solomons they were so grateful for a woman’s company they didn’t seem to mind if you said you only wanted touching and wouldn’t go all the way. They looked strange with their scalps shining through their close-cropped hair, but they were cute with their caps or helmets on. Tommie had her boyfriends wear their helmets when they made love.
Tommie was engaged to Arthur Lee Sizemore, but she still had lots of boyfriends. Arthur Lee was in Italy, so who knew when she’d see him again. Life goes on, she said, and there are good looking men in the world who never heard tell of Arthur Lee. I always felt sorry for Arthur Lee when she said that.
I dated around a while but in Manila I settled on one boyfriend. His name was Fred Sullivan. Fred grew up rich in New Orleans where his family owned a jewelry store, and he told me things I’d never heard of—like people eating the tails of crawdads and dead people buried above the ground and mulattos and octoroons. And wearing tuxedos to dinner sometimes. Fred said I was dainty and trim and had delicate hands like a lady should have, which he didn’t expect to find in a girl from the mountains. This last made me mad, but I feared to argue for I had written to my mother about him. She wrote back, “Your new friend sounds so nice. I know you have been taught to behave properly and I’m sure he appreciates that. I’m very proud of you.” The letter was short and her writing was large and shaky, for her right side was paralyzed and she was still awkward with the left. She was more precious to me for being halfway around the world. I kept the letter because she had touched it.
Fred was a first lieutenant in charge of the colored troops. The Negroes lived in their own compound and Fred was the only white man who stayed with them. All the barracks were built on stilts because of the floods, and Fred’s little wood house sat on the highest stilts of all so he could see out over the compound from his window. He had a Filipino cleaning woman, and he told her “his boys” were really white men who had been injected with dye so they could fight at night without being seen.
Fred didn’t like the Filipino cleaning woman or any other Filipinos. He called them gooks. I’d never heard that word until the army, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it because everyone called the Filipinos gooks. Fred said anybody with slant eyes was one except for the Japs, who were a breed apart, “really nasty devils.” When I wrote Dillon I told him what Fred said, thinking it was interesting. He wrote back and said I should be ashamed, and what was I doing spending time with someone like Fred, and didn’t include a single kind word for me, not even to wish I was safe. I was so hurt I tore up the letter and decided not to write him again.
When I asked Fred how he liked being in charge of the Negroes, he said, “Honey, it’s like teaching first grade. You’ve got to tell them every little thing. The guys at the Officer’s Club say I’ve got the patience of Job. But I can’t complain. They only trust my outfit with the easy jobs, and I get to watch. It beats wading around in the jungle getting my tail shot at.”
I didn’t know any Negroes, but Tommie said there were lots of them at Annadel, where she grew up, and they were not at all the way Fred claimed.
“I aint sure I care for your Fred,” she said.
“You don’t know him.”
“So introduce us. Or are you ashamed of your hillbilly friend?”
“I’m from the mountains too.”
“And from what you’ve told me, he likes you because you’re different from the rest of us. You getting above your raising?”
We were sitting on my cot. Tommie held my foot in her lap and was painting my toenails bright red. The rush of air against the wet nail polish made my feet feel cool. I sank back on my pillow.
“I get tired of being different,” I said. “I get tired of people thinking I’m s
tupid just because of the sound of my voice. Nobody knows us here.”
“It don’t help to hide where you’re from. If Fred don’t like it, it’s because he’s a snob.”
“You sound like my Aunt Carrie, always criticizing the men I date.”
“Rachel, I think the world of you. But honey, you got bad taste in men.”
“I dated Tony,” I said. “Tony is Arthur Lee’s friend.”
“He’s Arthur Lee’s puppy dog, that’s what he is. You wasn’t in love with Tony and you aint in love with Fred.”
“Is that so?”
“I’ll tell you who you’re really sweet on. It’s that cousin of yours.”
I sat up so fast that Tommie painted a streak of red nail polish across the top of my foot. I grabbed a towel and tried to wipe it off. “That’s a damn lie!”
“Ooh! Rachel’s cussing!”
I scrubbed harder at my foot. “I love Dillon, but not like you think.”
“How is it, then?”
I thought a minute. “I love Dillon because he’s my flesh and blood. Kin will love you no matter what. But Dillon wants to know every little thing I’m thinking and wants it to be just like what he’s thinking. He’s bossy and he doesn’t have one bit of a sense of humor. He gets mad and sulks if he doesn’t get his own way. He’s—”
Tommie put her hand over my mouth. “You’re crazy about him,” she said, and smiled a wicked smile.
Then my eyes filled with tears and she moved closer to me. “Rachel, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“When he was wounded I thought I’d die from worry and it was the same when I got the letter that he’d been trapped in that roof fall. All I could think was what if he’d died before they got him out and I never got to see him again. I miss him so bad. But he’s my cousin, so we’ve got no future.”
“That makes it more romantic! It’s like in a book, star-crossed lovers. Do you write him?”
“No. He wrote me a mean letter because I told him some things about Fred and I won’t write him again.”
“Well of course he got mad,” Tommie said. “If you’re trying to run him off, you’re doing a good job.”
Then I stubbed up and wouldn’t talk about Dillon any more. I wanted Tommie to meet Fred. I was determined she would like him better than Dillon. The next time he took me walking, Tommie went along. We went to Manila Harbor. Green foam like moldered candy floated on the cloudy water. A crowd of ragged brown children had followed us, tugging at our sleeves crying, “Chocoletto, Joe!” We didn’t have any candy bars so we gave them all the gum we had and a nickel apiece, then Fred waved his arms at them like he was shooing chickens out of the barnyard and they fell back. They sat on the sea wall twenty feet from us, their naked legs dangling and their jaws working hard at the gum.
“So did you tell Fred what happened to your cousin Dillon in the coal mine?” Tommie said. She had this glint in her eye like she was trying to provoke something.
“Rachel doesn’t talk much about her family,” Fred said.
Tommie poked me. “Tell him.”
I told him how Dillon had been trapped by a roof fall and nearly died. I was getting to the part about how he was rescued when Fred said, “Your cousin didn’t go on strike back in forty-three?”
“No. He was still in the service when that happened.”
“Good. They should have lined up those miners and shot them for treason.”
Tommie turned red and reared back. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”
“They went on strike while our boys were dying over here.”
“They’re dying too,” Tommie said.
“Lazy bums. Unions are full of Reds anyway. They damn near took over the country in the thirties.” Fred spoke to me as though Tommie wasn’t there. She kept kicking me in the shin like she wanted me to say something and I knew I should but the words wouldn’t come. After a while she left us and walked home on her own.
“Your friend has a big mouth,” Fred said, watching her go.
“She’s entitled to her opinion,” I mumbled and looked at the ground.
“Is that so?” He studied me for a moment, then laughed and kissed me on the forehead. “You’re cute when you get mad.”
“Am I mad?”
“You’ve got this look on your face.”
“I don’t feel well,” I said. “Maybe you better take me home.”
When I got back to the barracks, Tommie was sitting on her cot reading a magazine.
“Fred is a bastard,” she said.
I turned my back and started to undress. “You can’t expect him to know about the coalfields,” I said. “He’s never been there.”
“It don’t matter. You can tell how a person treats people, no matter how much they know. And you sat there like a bump on a log and let him say those things.”
“I didn’t like what he said, but I didn’t know what to say back. I don’t know enough about such things to argue.”
Tommie lit a cigarette. “When I first met you, I thought you was a shy little mouse. But I learned that you’re strong underneath all that. You don’t let women push you around, not if something’s important to you. You don’t let Dillon push you around, that I can tell. Why can’t you stand up to Fred?”
“My mother says men don’t like a pushy woman.”
“Rachel, your mother aint always right.”
Neither are you, I thought. I got in bed. “I’m really tired. Let’s talk about it some other time.” I pretended to sleep. But I lay thinking about Tommie and how loose she was with men, about Mother and the way she had taught me to be. I thought that Mother was my true flesh and blood, not Tommie, and I recalled my mother’s smell, like dried flowers, and missed her. I wanted to make her happy so she could forget she was bound to a wheelchair and wouldn’t worry what would become of me. And Tommie was my friend, but there were some in the barracks who whispered about her behind her back and called her a tramp. I always defended her if I heard them, but I didn’t want to be like her.
In Manila we sewed evening dresses from parachutes and mosquito nets. We dyed the dresses purple with gentian violet from the hospital laboratory, and yellow with Atabrine, the tablets we took to keep away malaria, filched from the mess hall tables. We went dancing in nightclubs in our mosquito net dresses, ate carabao steaks at candlelit tables, while girls sang love songs in cracked English and Tagalog.
At night we slept under the mosquito nets. It was like having our very own screened-in porch, a tiny house in the country just large enough for one. Beneath the mosquito net I dreamed of home and it was always the Homeplace I saw. The air was soft and the mosquitoes grew large and benign and turned into lightning bugs.
We rose before dawn to go to the wards at Pasay, walked a mile and a half past the long canvas bags hung from iron poles that collected rainwater for drinking. The hospital was a string of long wooden buildings, walls open at top and bottom so the air could circulate. From the outside you could see the white shoes of the nurses and their white caps, as they walked the length of the wards.
We dressed lots of bayonet wounds, for the jungle fighting was close, nursed men gutshot with rifles, with jaws shot away, with arms and legs ribboned into bloody strips by grenades. The soldiers lay beneath the mosquito nets like a long row of white cocoons. We raised the nets and draped them over our shoulders, leaned close into a private world of suffering. A sharp smell of carbolic acid permeated the wards, but beneath the nets the odor was sweet with blood and sweat.
We worked twelve or more hours at a time and were exhausted. Once I went from the wards to dance with Fred and fell asleep on his shoulder as he moved me around the dance floor. But we were young.
While we worked at the hospital, Filipino women came to make our beds and clean the barracks’ toilets. They stole us blind. I tried not to care because I knew they sold things for food. I thought about buying food for them, but I recalled the mission boxes we received at home, how angry Aunt Carrie would be and
the shame I would feel, the way my mother convinced herself she was superior to the givers because she could make do with what others cast aside.
One Sunday I went for a drive with Tommie and her latest beau to a slum where people lived in houses of cardboard and plywood and corrugated tin. They were like the wood and tarpaper houses up the hollows at home, only all gathered in one place and jumbled close together instead of spread out along the creek. Most of Manila was a pile of stone from the bombings, but at least the houses of the poor were makeshift and easily rebuilt. We parked our jeep and walked past vendors hawking stunted green bananas. It was the only food we saw for sale. When we returned for the jeep it was gone. I was glad. I knew how a man at home could take an old car, set it in his yard, and use it forever. Dillon said an automobile carcass was a poor man’s auto parts store. I saw the jeep stripped and dispersed, its metal innards reborn as rice and fish balls. I decided it is better for a person to steal what they need than be given it, because when they steal they are at least doing for themselves.
In August, America dropped the bomb and the war was finished. We didn’t think much about what had happened to Hiroshima, only that we were going home. We drank, we danced in the summer heat until we were sticky with sweat, we strolled arm in arm along the streets of Manila like good-hearted children. The nurses stayed to tend the men released from the prison camps, so Fred left before I did. On his last night he wanted me to go to bed with him, but I wanted to lose my virginity in a nice hotel on my wedding night, the way ladies did. So I said no. Fred promised he would write in care of my parents, and as soon as I returned to the States he would come to West Virginia and marry me.
I packed his suitcase for him because he said a woman was neater than a man, and it seemed a wifely thing to do. He pulled a box from under his cot. While I sorted pairs of socks he snuck up behind me and dropped a skull in my lap. I jumped but I didn’t scream out or act silly because a nurse who has been through a war has seen everything.
The Unquiet Earth Page 6