The Unquiet Earth

by Denise Giardina

  Around two-thirty his car pulled in front of the house. I ran to the clothes closet and hid behind the coats and long bathrobes. I heard his key rattle in the lock, heard the creak of the door and the snap of the light switch. He walked slowly through the dark to the bedroom, turned on the light, and walked to the closet. I held my breath while he hung up his coat, left the door standing open. When he stopped near the bed I parted the clothes and peered out. He was reading the note. Then he dropped it in the wastebasket, undressed, stretched, turned off the light, and got in bed. A few minutes later he began to snore.

  I slipped out to the living room where I curled up on the couch, wrapped in an afghan I’d just made, and cried myself to sleep. The next morning I cooked his breakfast in silence, waiting for him to speak. He just ate and read the morning paper as though nothing had happened. Finally I said, “Didn’t you wonder where I was last night?”

  He looked up. “Nah! I knew you was all right.”

  “Didn’t you wonder if I was out with another man?”

  He laughed. “I knew you wouldn’t do that.” He went back to reading his paper.

  He continued to stay out most nights. After he was gone I’d walk the quarter-mile to my parents’ house. Sometimes Dillon would be there, visiting Aunt Carrie. We were polite to one another. Sometimes, if I saw his truck parked out front, I’d turn around and walk back home. Aunt Carrie said he was dating a waitress in Justice town but he didn’t seem serious about her. I was relieved when she said it and angry at myself for being relieved. I longed to talk to Aunt Carrie about Tony’s absences, but I was too proud to admit anything to her. My own mother was no help. She sat silent and forbidding in her wheelchair like a statue in a pagan temple.

  Tony and I fell into a routine. He stayed out late on the weekends and I tried not to think about what was going on. On week nights he came in around ten and I knew he had only been playing poker. His reverence for money kept him from wagering large sums, so his losses never amounted to much. For Tony, gambling was a chance to watch money change hands, to fondle it and see it fondled by the coarse hands of other men. If he won, he let me alone and went silent to bed, satisfied. If he lost, he berated my cooking, my housekeeping, my family, and after haranguing me to tears demanded sex as though I owed him compensation. When he was on top of me I held tight to the bed frame behind my head and tried to think of pleasant things. Mostly I thought about children. I spent the daytime thinking about them as well, hoping and praying for fat babies smelling of milk and talcum. I even asked Tony for sex at certain times of the month, because I wanted children so badly, but the babies never came. I sought out doctors as far away as Charleston. They could find nothing wrong with me, although one was not pleased with the way my heart sounded and said it would bear watching, especially if I got pregnant.

  “The problem may be with your husband,” another suggested. “He may have a low sperm count or even be sterile. He should be checked.”

  I waited for a winning poker night and raised the subject with Tony as we were getting ready for bed. He laughed. “You’re crazy,” he said. He proved his point with an hour of sex, poking and prodding, then said, “Nothing wrong with that, was there?”

  Arthur Lee Sizemore came back from the army to be superintendent of the Jenkinjones mine. He was the youngest superintendent in the state, American Coal’s boy wonder. His first year back he ran for County Commission with the company’s blessing and money, and of course he won. Arthur Lee also played poker with the other coal men at the Moose Club, and rumor had it he was overly fond of liquor. One evening he had car trouble and Tony drove him home from the card game. When they entered our living room for a late cup of coffee, Arthur Lee brought the sweet smell of whiskey with him.

  I was already in my bathrobe. I made the coffee as quickly as possible and tried to slip into the bedroom but Arthur Lee said in a loud voice, “Where are you going, honey? Sit down here and visit. I aint seen you in a ‘coon’s age.” He patted the couch beside him. He was sprawled out so I’d have had to squeeze up close to him. I sat on a chair instead, perched uncomfortably on the edge.

  “Tony, that’s a pretty wife you got,” Arthur Lee said, his voice slow and wet-sounding.

  Tony was smiling. He didn’t say anything.

  “Always did think she was pretty. Bet she’s good in bed.” He leaned toward me, shaky like he might tip over, and put a hand on my knee. “Are you, honey? Do you like to fuck?”

  I stood up and retreated to the kitchen. “Tony,” I said.

  Tony was still smiling, his face red. “Now, Rachel.” he said. “Now.”

  “Tony, get him out of here.”

  “Aw,” Tony said. “It’s Arthur Lee. You be nice to him.”

  Arthur Lee spread his arms wide. “I didn’t mean nothing!”

  “See,” Tony said, relieved. “He didn’t mean nothing. She knows you don’t mean nothing, Arthur Lee.”

  “If Dillon was here, he’d lay you low,” I said. “Both of you.”

  I went in the bedroom, slammed the door, and leaned against it, breathing hard.

  I was loading groceries in our car at the Jenkinjones company store when Arthur Lee stepped out of his office.

  “I’m sober,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”

  I looked away.

  “Please,” he said. “For Tommie’s sake if not for mine.”

  I slammed the trunk shut and faced him. “What do you want?”

  “I want to apologize. I was way out of line. You’re a lady and I know that. It was the drink talking. This aint no excuse, but I been tore up ever since I lost Tommie. You can’t believe how much I loved that girl. When I’m drinking, she comes to me real clear. When I’m sober she’s just a blur. Don’t excuse it, I know. I got to learn to control it.”

  He looked so pitiful I couldn’t stay angry. I accepted his apology.

  “Can I ask you a question? Did she love me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She had other boyfriends, I know she did. She said as much in her letters, said she didn’t take them serious, that it was something fun. I thought maybe she didn’t love me, that I was something fun too.”

  “She loved you.” I thought a minute. “Tommie never knew her father. I always thought she was looking for him with all those men. But she would have married you. It’s what she planned on.”

  “It aint supposed to be this way. It’s the man supposed to get killed in the war and leave the woman behind. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Me too. Life goes on. I’m seeing someone in Bluefield now. It’s okay.” He shrugged. “Well, I won’t keep you.”

  He called me a week after our conversation and offered me a job with the county as a health nurse. I would give shots to children in one-room schools and visit the homes of tuberculosis patients and elderly shut-ins.

  “I told the other commissioners they wasn’t a better nurse in the county than you,” said Arthur Lee. “Interesting work and pays good. Put some money of your own in your pocket and get you out of that house. Tony won’t dare fuss if the offer comes from me.”

  I said yes, and whatever else Arthur Lee Sizemore did, I would remember that kindness.

  RACHEL, 1950

  It is a different world on Trace Mountain. There are two ways to get back in. You can go up the Pliny Branch past the slate dump at the head of Jenkinjones hollow, or you can drive past Number Thirteen camp on Lloyds Fork and go back up on the mountain at Raven. Any way you go is dirt road and ruts where you would not take a car. I drove an army surplus jeep provided by the county.

  People on Trace Mountain make a living tending apple orchards and honeybees. Some make moonshine on the side, and a thin gray line of smoke hanging in the sky can mean a house chimney or a still. Other people live down over the ridgetop in little coves where their houses of wide boards blend into the landscape. They have chickens in the yard and slatted-wood pig pens—or let the pigs
forage—and ’coon dogs and patches of potatoes and corn, and beans growing up round the cornstalks. Some of them are descended from people who couldn’t abide the coal mines and took to the hills to avoid them. Others are disabled miners or miners’ widows put out of their company houses and forced to squat on whatever piece of land they could find that was out of the company’s eyesight. They are people you might see twice or three times a year in town and then never again unless you went looking for them. Looking for them was my job.

  Tuberculosis was common on that mountain, and polio. One March day, I visited a one-room school, Trace Ridge, to check the children from consumptive families. It had been warm for the time of year and yellow crocuses bloomed alongside the wooden building. The children were outside on recess when I drove up. The younger ones crowded around, wrapped their arms around my legs and waist. I savored the closeness of their small bodies and tried to make the visit last as long as possible.

  From the school I drove three miles around the ridge to see Shep and Bertha Ingram. It took me an hour to reach them, for the spring rains had cut ridges two feet deep and sharp-edged in the road. I left the jeep on the ridge road, pulled on a pair of boots, and hiked the quarter-mile down to the Ingram’s, who lived at the bottom of a slick muddy track. Shep was paralyzed with a back injury from the mines and Bertha had TB. She should have gone to the sanitarium in Beckley, but I didn’t push for it because Shep needed her and she never got out to infect anyone else. Bertha moved slow, walked without lifting her feet from the ground, but she said the house was so small it was easy to clean and she had all day to tend the garden and put up her preserves. Her niece brought groceries and a neighbor boy chopped wood for the stove and brought a mule for springtime plowing.

  While Bertha cooked Shep’s dinner I checked him for bedsores, bathed him, and changed his bed linens. We listened to his bedside radio while I worked. When the CBS News came on at noon, Shep said, “Dinner time.”

  “Almost done with you,” I said. “Just in time for Bertha’s cornbread hot from the oven.”

  The radio announcer talked about the war in Korea, then said, “Actress Ingrid Bergman was denounced from the floor of the U.S. Senate today. The international star of such films as Casablanca remains at the center of a storm following the news that she is expecting a child by a man not her husband.”

  Shep nodded at the radio. “Hit’s a shame the way they carry on these days,” he said.

  The announcer said, “Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado told his colleagues today that Bergman’s wanton behavior was ‘an assault upon the institution of marriage.’ Johnson called the actress ‘a powerful influence for evil.’ Bergman is in seclusion with the father of her child, Roberto Rosselini, amid reports that her actions have brought an end to her fabled film career.”

  “Her daddy ought to horsewhip her,” Shep said.

  “Now Shep,” I said. “What about that man she ran away with? Nobody’s fussing about him.”

  “Fellow’s got to have his fun,” Shep said.

  I was glad to finish with him and go back in the kitchen. I took Bertha’s sputum sample to send to the state lab and climbed the hill to the jeep.

  My last call was to Granny Combs. Granny lived seven miles in and two miles from her closest neighbor. She was eighty-seven years old and spry, still able to pluck a chicken or render lard. My supervisor thought I should talk Granny into a nursing home. But if you took Granny off that mountain she would have collapsed and vanished like a long-buried body that is dug up and disintegrates when it is exposed to the air. Granny’s face was wrinkled and ridged as the mud road and she smelt faintly of wood smoke and urine. She had strength in her grip and her eyes were clear and active. I figured she’d go until something busted inside her and she keeled over and that would be that.

  Granny had a cold in February but the March warmth had dried her up. I listened to her thin chest with my stethoscope and heard her breath come in a clear rush.

  “Dosed that cold with honey and corn liquor and camomile tea,” she said.

  I drank a cup of her camomile tea myself. It is still the best thing for a cold, so soothing for a cough and clears the sinuses too. They will not teach that at nursing school and call you a hillbilly if you recommend it, but they will suffer the colds.

  I finished the tea and went back to the jeep. I turned the key and the ignition clicked but nothing happened. I twisted the key harder and pumped the gas pedal. Nothing. I sat back, shut my eyes, and listened to a pair of jays screech. When I opened my eyes Granny stood by the jeep.

  “Is your vehicle poorly?”

  I nodded. “Worse than a stubborn old mule, isn’t it?”

  She looked scornfully at the jeep. “I wouldn’t have one.”

  “Where’s the closest telephone, Hatfield’s Orchard?”

  “That would be it. They’re on a party line.”

  It was over two miles to Hatfield’s. At least I had my boots and the day was fine. I accepted a square of cornbread spread with molasses and set out to walk. It was four-thirty by the time I reached the orchard. Troy Hatfield gave me a cold CoCola and pointed out the telephone on the wall of a storage shed. I sat on an empty packing crate and called Tony’s office.

  “Where are you?” he asked twice and twice I answered Hatfield’s Orchard. I knew he wouldn’t come after me. Tony had never been back up on Trace, had a knack for getting lost, and knew nothing about fixing cars.

  “Can’t someone there fix it?” he said.

  “Troy Hatfield knows cars,” I said. “But I think it needs a new starter. He’d have to go off the mountain to get one.”

  “I was going to the Moose Club,” he said.

  “Fine. You’re always a big help.”

  “I don’t know what to do. I was going to the Moose Club.”

  “Of course you were. You go right on.” I hung up the receiver, quiet, before he had a chance to answer, not slamming it but trying to hurt him with my patience. It wouldn’t work. He was impervious to such things. Other men would feel guilty and bring the part. Tony would go on and not think another thing.

  Troy Hatfield came over, a chain saw in his hand. He was clearing brush. “I can drive you off the mountain,” he said. “You could bring a mechanic up tomorrow.”

  Of course he could, and Junior Tackett would come up from Arthur Lee’s new Esso station and fix the starter. But Troy had work to do, and Junior would have work to do. Besides, they were not my people.

  “I hate to put you out,” I said. “Let me make one more phone call.”

  Dillon was just home from the day shift when I rang. After I told him what had happened, he said, “Why’d you call me? Don’t you have a husband?”

  I started to hang up. I pressed the phone to my chest. Then I listened again. The line was silent.

  “Dillon?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “I’m not begging you. I didn’t beg Tony and I’m sure not begging you. I thought you might help me. You’re kin.”

  “So you kept telling me.”

  I did hang up then, slammed the receiver hard and wished I could tear the phone out of the wall. I went to look for Troy but I heard the whine of the chain saw off in the woods and I hated to bother him. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need help from Troy or anyone. I would get off the mountain under my own power. I set out to walk. I would do for myself, do everything in this world for myself.

  DILLON

  The sun is behind her as she walks down the mountain. I put my hand to my forehead. When I finally make out her face it is set and angry. She walks past my truck so I have to stop and put it in reverse. It is rough, backing down that road, but when she sees I will follow her, she stops.

  “I can walk,” she says.

  “I know you can.”

  “I don’t need to be rescued. And I sure don’t need you.”

  I rub my chin, which is rough with stubble because I didn’t take time to shave this morning.

  “You
want to fix the jeep or not?” I say. “I brought a starter from the Esso.”

  “Why’d you decide to come?”

  “Why’d you call in the first place?”

  She turns away.

  I say, “Rachel, you asked for help. I’m sorry I was smart with you on the telephone. When you need help, you know I’ll always be here for you.”

  The truck door creaks when she pulls it open and the seat squeaks when she sits down. She may be crying but I can’t say for sure because her face is turned away from me.

  “That’s why I called,” she says.

  I let off the brake and ease up the rutted road.

  It is the starter, all right. Rachel always had good sense about cars. I squint in the evening light and make quick work of it. In the house Rachel and Granny Combs are cooking soupbeans and cornbread and creasy greens. Rachel comes outside and picks wild onions. Lightning bugs rise from the spargrass, like bits of lost moonlight seeking their source.

  “Almost done?” Rachel asks. She stands beside me with a bunch of onions in each hand.

  “Just about.”

  I hop in the jeep and turn the key. The engine jumps and roars, then settles into a low rumble.

  “Good,” she says, and goes in the house.

  I can still smell the onions, strong and tart, and I am thinking Homeplace, the years are rolling away and we are children on our land. I know she has been thinking it too. I know Rachel though she does resist my knowing.

  I wash my fingers at the pump. Cold water will not much cut black grease, so I wipe my fingers on my T-shirt. In the house Rachel has the table set and Granny dips the beans. I ask Granny if she gets company.

  “Yes sir,” she says. “I get company here. Course I don’t want folks around all the time. I like to run around in my nightie.”

  Then she hollers laughing.