The Unquiet Earth

by Denise Giardina

  “Naw,” he says. “That’s too dangerous.”

  “No it aint. Nobody ever gets hurt.”

  “Jackie, I know what I’m talking about. They’re a bunch of drunks that works for carnivals. They take them rides down every week and put them back together too fast. Half the screws is loose. That car might fly right off of there.”

  “Everybody gets to ride it. Mommy rode it with me last year. You ride it with me.”

  Now I’ve made him mad. “I aint getting on one of them rides.” He looks at the woman. “It’s silly.”

  But I know he’s scared of the rides, like he is scared of spiders.

  Jean is still smiling. “I’ll ride with her,” she says. “She’ll be my little girl.”

  I run to buy a ticket. When we climb in the car, Jean puts her arm around me and holds real tight. “Now you won’t go anywhere,” she says. Her skin is warm under her dress and I can smell her stinky deodorant. I am already figuring how I can get back at my dad for Harold and Darold.

  I tell my Mom everything. She says, “Your father is visiting your grandmother this afternoon. We’ll just go over there and see about this.”

  As soon as we get to my grandmother’s house, Nona Teresa comes on the porch. She has a bowl of tomatoes that she holds against her hip. She doesn’t like Mom. Mom tries to keep on her good side because she says my grandmother tells my dad how to wipe his bottom. When Mom sees Nona on the porch, she gets out and stands beside the car, says, “Hello, Nona.” Nona throws a tomato at her but it misses and splats all over the windshield. Mom gets back in the car real fast and says, “I guess your father already told her.”

  When my dad comes home, they fight right in front of me.

  “Her brother is one of my Moose buddies,” my dad says. “She’s a friend. Can’t I have friends?”

  “If you have an affair, that’s your business. If you want a divorce, I’ll give it to you. But why was that hussy making up to my daughter?”

  “Aw,” says Dad.

  Then Mom sends me to my room. I shut the door and laugh my head off. I know she will ask him about sex. If I lay down flat on my stomach I can hear them under the door. The rush of air from the kitchen makes my ear cold.

  “You’re sleeping with her.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t care, do you understand? But you don’t bring my daughter into it.”

  “She’s my daughter too,” my dad says.

  And there is dead silence in that room.

  After a while my mom says, “You never acted like it before.”

  “That ain’t true. I pay the bills, don’t I?”

  “I pay half of them.”

  “I pay for the food that goes in her mouth. I correct her when she needs it.”

  “You’ve never been a father to her.”

  “My mother don’t like you,” my dad says. He’s good at changing the subject that way. He’s not trying to be smart, he just can’t think in a straight line. “I took Jean to see my mother. This Sunday I’m taking Jean and Jackie to see her.”

  “The hell you are,” Mom says, and when she cusses you know she is mad. She comes through the door so fast I have to roll out of the way. She turns on the light and stares at me, sprawled on the floor beside the bed.

  “Pack a bag,” she says. “We’re leaving.”

  We go to stay with Aunt Carrie. Aunt Carrie used to live at Jenkinjones but now she lives on Kingdom Come Creek in Kentucky. In Kentucky there are mountains and coal mines just like West Virginia but it is different because the license plates on cars are white instead of blue and gold, and the names of towns are on white signs instead of green ones. After we cross the Levisa Mom asks, “Would you be upset if I divorced your father?”

  “No.”

  “You wouldn’t miss him?”

  “I’d like it better.”

  “We won’t have much money.”

  She holds the steering wheel with both hands. I think what a good driver she is, and how I am never afraid to ride in the car with her.

  “I don’t care,” I say.

  “We’ll have to move, but I promise we’ll stay on Blackberry Creek. You won’t have to switch schools.” She glances at me. “When Dillon hears about it, he’ll want us to live closer to him.”

  I bounce up and down and say “Yea!”

  “You like Dillon, don’t you?”

  “I wish Dillon was my dad.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a long time. Weeds grow thick in the ditch beside the road. We cross a high mountain and I can’t see the bottom of the hollow below us. If we went off the road we’d fall forever.

  “Dillon’s wild,” Mom says. “I want you to love him but I don’t want you to be like him. Don’t you tell him or Aunt Carrie I said so. You hear? It would hurt their feelings.”

  I say yes because I hardly ever disobey her, not when it is something important. Mom is all I have and if I don’t act right, maybe God would take her away to punish me. When I read in the newspaper about kids whose mothers have died, I wonder how they keep from going crazy.

  Aunt Carrie lives in a white farmhouse with an open porch around two sides and a screened-in porch at the back. She has a well with wire over the top to keep you from falling in, and a hand pump. Next to the house is a falling-apart barn where the milk cow lives. I don’t like the milk from the cow because it has big globs of fat in it and hairs floating on top. When I come visit, Aunt Carrie buys real milk from the store.

  We take our suitcases inside and then Mom makes me go out to play. I can tell she is about to cry. Aunt Carrie puts her arm around Mom’s waist and guides her through the kitchen door. “Does Dillon know?” she asks. I can’t hear what Mom says back.

  Later Aunt Carrie comes outside and sits on the front steps. She sits easy even though she’s so old. All the skin on her arms and neck is loose and empty.

  “Your mama is lying down,” she says. She sits still and looks out over the yard like she comes from someplace else. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tony Angelelli’s all wrong for your mother,” she says. “I don’t want you to blame yourself. Hit’s one of those things should never been, but good may come of it yet.”

  I nod. “I’m glad she left him,” I say. Then I start to cry too. She puts her arms around me. She smells old and musty like a suitcase that has been shut up for a long time.

  “Law, child,” she says. “They’s so much I’d like to tell you.”

  After supper I look at Aunt Carrie’s photo album. I love the pictures, all faded and brown and pasted on the black pages of the photo album with white stickers at each corner. Aunt Carrie and Mom sit on the couch while I stretch out beside the fireplace with a plate of peanut butter fudge. The room is quiet because Aunt Carrie won’t have the TV on when she has company.

  The names under the photographs are familiar. Carrie and Flora, 1938. Two women wearing dresses with their arms around each other. They stand in front of the old Homeplace on Grapevine. Dillon on crutches, 1944, from where he got wounded in the war. All the pictures are of Mom’s family, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles. They are tow-headed, all except Dillon who takes after his daddy. I don’t look like Mom’s people either because my dad has black hair.

  “I want my maiden name back,” Mom says. “I’m going to be a Honaker again. And I want to change Jackie’s name too. Jackie Honaker. How would you like that, honey?”

  “I’d like it fine,” I say. It will be fun at school. I will fool everyone.

  I try to wish myself into the pictures, fall asleep, and wake up when the telephone rings. Aunt Carrie, sounding far away, says, “Dillon will be here tomorrow morning.” Mom carries me upstairs and lays me on the featherbed. I burrow deep beneath the quilt so that I lie in a black spider’s tunnel that leads backward. When I wake up I will be inside the pictures and hold hands with all my kin.

  RACHEL

  Dillon was forty years old the year I left Ton
y. He was still thin but he had a chest like a barrel, the way miners do after they’ve worked underground for years, like he had been pumped full of water. He sat at his mother’s breakfast table and cut his fried eggs so the yolk ran into the red-eye gravy from the country ham, made yellow and red swirls with his fork, and sopped the whole thing up with his biscuit.

  “You could move in with me,” he said.

  Jackie clapped her hands.

  No,” I said sharply. I kicked him under the table and he looked at me with his eyes narrowed. “I’ve been bullied by a man for fifteen years, and I want to be on my own.”

  Aunt Carrie kept frying eggs and trying to pretend she wasn’t interested in the conversation.

  “Well then, the doctor’s house in Number Thirteen has been empty for a spell,” Dillon said.

  I’d been waiting for this too and was determined to put up at least a show of resistance. “Number Thirteen is a hard place to live with that bridge out. Jackie would have to walk a mile to the school bus. Anyway, I can’t afford to buy a house on my salary. I was thinking about renting an apartment in Justice town.”

  “Only four thousand dollars,” he said.

  “Four thousand—You mean down?”

  “I mean four thousand period. Company’s unloading all its houses or else tearing them down. This one would have been only three thousand, but your boss Arthur Lee is tacking a thousand dollars on everything he sells. Says it’s his reward for faithful service to the company. Maybe Arthur Lee will cut you a deal since you’re such good buddies.”

  “You won’t convince me by giving me a hard time about Arthur Lee,” I said. “He gave me a job back when I was desperate to get out of the house.”

  “I wouldn’t mind walking to the school bus,” Jackie said. “I like that house. I could have the doctor’s office for a playhouse. And we could walk to Dillon’s real easy.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  Dillon was smiling. I pulled him aside while Jackie helped Aunt Carrie with the dishes.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think we’ll be together every night.”

  “I can walk to Number Thirteen if you don’t want to come to Winco,” he said.

  “I won’t have it. I won’t sleep with you and my daughter in the same house. She’d know.”

  “Maybe it’s time we told her.”

  “Told her what? That her mother doesn’t even know who her father is? That her mother has been pretending to work at the hospital on Friday nights while she carries on with her first cousin? I’m trying to raise her properly, Dillon.”

  “And you’re doing too damn good a job,” he said. “You’ll make a little nun out of her.

  “That’s for me to say. I’m her mother.”

  His jaw was tight like always when he is angry. “Let’s get blood tests. We’ll settle this once and for all.”

  “No. Maybe when she’s grown up. Then she’ll know enough to keep a secret if she needs to, and if things don’t turn out the way we want, she’ll handle it better. But not now.”

  “I want to know for me, not her. If I knew that girl was mine, I’d have run Tony Angelelli off a long time ago.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  Aunt Carrie wanted Dillon to cut weeds at the Homeplace cemetery, so she packed fried baloney sandwiches and dried apple pie into a paper poke. We squeezed into the cab of Dillon’s pickup. Jackie rode in the bed, perched on the spare tire. Dillon rarely got out of third gear, for the roads were pocked with potholes gouged out of the asphalt by coal trucks. It was early April and the trees were dotted with green buds. Here and there sprays of white dogwood and sarvice quickened the gray mountainsides. At the mouth of Scary we crossed a one-lane bridge and parked beside the railroad track.

  “Train track wasn’t here when we was younguns,” Dillon told Jackie. “They brung it through in the forties. We’ll walk it on up Grapevine. You sure you’re up for it, Mom?”

  “I can still yet walk you into the ground,” Aunt Carrie said.

  Dillon carried a sickle and the paper poke with the sandwiches. Jackie walked on the track rail, arms out, pretending she was on a circus tightrope. I felt suddenly lighthearted, watching her, enjoying Tony’s absence and knowing it was permanent. I joined Jackie, balancing on the rail.

  Aunt Carrie showed Jackie where the Aunt Jane Place had been. “Dillon and me lived here,” she said. The bottom was dense with ironweed, blackberry bushes, and untended canebrakes, and the cabin was gone.

  Dillon kept looking off to the left, his eyes narrow against the sun. “Nobody’s been on this land yet,” he said.

  “No,” said Aunt Carrie. “Last I heard the bank had sold the mineral, but nobody’s come for it, thank God. Still, it’s only a matter of time.”

  We found the cemetery path but I said, “Let’s walk on a tad longer. I want to show Jackie the shoals.” So we went on another quarter mile until the bottom narrowed and disappeared at the curve of the river. Beyond a stand of birch saplings, water purled in white ripples. I told Jackie how Dillon and I had fished here, and Aunt Carrie and my mother before us. Once there was a pool above the shoals for swimming, and a ford. Now the river was shallow and black with sludge. Pieces of tires and rusting metal drums littered the bank.

  “I nearly drowned here,” I told her. “I got caught crossing the ford while the ice was breaking upstream. My mule saved me. I caught my finger in the bridle ring and broke it.” I held up my crooked finger for Jackie to see. “I loved that old mule and I never forgot how it saved my life. I cried when your Papaw had to put it down.”

  Dillon had already turned and was walking back up Grapevine. He appeared to be in a huff, the way he walked so fast and left us, but I couldn’t tell why. We followed him back to the mouth of a narrow ravine that climbed a low shelf of the mountain. A path twisted up between the trees, its steps sculpted from roots and rocks. Then a clearing opened beneath the pine trees. Dillon was waiting, standing quiet and watching us climb. He talked to Jackie, acted like his mother and I weren’t there. “If you want to find a cemetery, alwayslook for the pine trees. They fancied evergreens around a burying ground.”

  The graveyard was surrounded by a wire fence, rusty and sagging on one side. Brambleweed and broomsedge grew around the tombstones, which were jumbled together as though dropped from the air and planted where they landed.

  “These are your kin,” Aunt Carrie told Jackie. She turned in a slow circle, pointing. “Aunt Jane. Aunt Becka. My mother Tildy. Papaw Alec May that was killed during the Civil War. Your Mamaw and Papaw Honaker, new graves. And them two—” she nodded at two old headstones set side by side. Albion Freeman, 1880–1921. Rondal Lloyd, 1890–1922. “My husband that give Dillon his last name, and Dillon’s true father.”

  I’d told Jackie that Carrie had not been married to Dillon’s father and that she was not to ask about it. She didn’t say anything, just looked at the graves.

  “My mom and dad wasn’t married,” Dillon said. “Does that make them bad people, Jackie?”

  “Dillon!” Aunt Carrie said, sharp and low.

  I wanted to smack him. Jackie looked at him, then at me, and I saw the confusion on her face. I’d taught her it was wrong to have sex outside of marriage. I knew it was hypocritical, but I wanted her to act better than I had, to be a lady the way my mother had taught me.

  “Dillon’s just teasing you, honey,” I said. “Don’t pay him any mind.”

  I looked hard at him. He knelt and wiped the graven letters on the stones with his handkerchief. Clumps of dirt and cobwebs clung to the white cloth. Then he set to clearing the weeds from the graves, swinging the sickle wide like he was cutting slices of air, ignoring the rest of us.

  “Dillon keeps this place neat,” Aunt Carrie said, trying to sound cheerful. “He always liked a burying ground.”

  “Not me,” I said. I kept looking hard at Dillon. “I don’t care for dwelling on the past nor to think on death. It makes a person tedious.”


  “I like a burying ground,” Jackie said. “I wish all them people would stand up so I could see what they looked like.”

  “You wouldn’t care for what they look like now,” Dillon said.

  I said, “Stop it! You’re scaring my daughter to death!”

  “And you’re being self-righteous. As usual.”

  Aunt Carrie sat on the ground and leaned against a fencepost. “If they’s some reason why you all are at each other’s throats, I wish you’d figure it out and leave me and the child in peace.” She opened the poke and handed Jackie a sandwich. “Us two are the only ones with a lick of sense. We’re going to eat lunch.”

  JACKIE

  I always thought they liked each other, but maybe they were just pretending. Me and Aunt Carrie are sitting right here and they seem like they forgot.

  “Tell me you don’t give a damn about the past,” Dillon says. “Why’d you show Jackie the shoals?”

  “I wanted her to see the shoals. I don’t want her to wallow in them.”

  “And because I care about this place and my flesh and blood that’s buried here, I’m wallowing?”

  “You act like I don’t care. I care too. But sometimes I think you’d dig up a grave and dance with a skeleton. And not for any reason except to lay claim on it.”

  Dillon stabs a tree trunk with the sickle, so deep the point sticks and holds. Aunt Carrie looks at me. “Dillon, you are scaring this child,” she says.

  “You see,” Mom says. She sits beside Aunt Carrie and eats a sandwich. Nobody says anything for a while. Mom and Dillon don’t look at each other.

  Aunt Carrie says, “I wish Jackie could see the house.”

  “The foundation might still be there,” Dillon says. “But that bottom is awful grown up. I don’t know if we could find it or not.”

  “I can see the willows from here,” Aunt Carrie says. “The house was near the willows. Why don’t you younguns go? I wouldn’t mind a spell by myself with these graves.”

  Mom tries to act like she isn’t interested, but I can tell by her face that she is. We leave the railroad track and aim for the green willows. Beggar’s lice sticks all over my clothes and briars scratch my arms and legs, but I keep going.