I sat on the floor, my back against the glider, my fingers tracing patterns in the coal dust on the floor. He told the story of the Big Toe again but he didn’t grab me. I pretended like I was scared but he didn’t laugh.
HASSEL DAY
I am the mayor of Number Thirteen. It’s what I tell them at that county courthouse. It’s what I tell anybody that asks. Now Hassel, they say, you know you aint never been elected mayor. That’s because we don’t have no election, I tell them. If we had one, I’d be elected. So there.
American Coal owns the land and they used to own the houses until just here a bit ago. When they let things go, somebody had to look after folks, and I like to do that. I never finished the ninth grade and the mines won’t take me because I was working under a car in Junior Tackett’s yard and slipped a disc. Company is afraid I’d hurt my back again and they’d get the blame, so they won’t hire me on. It was touch and go for a while how I’d make a living. Lucky I got kin and I could eat off my brother Homer and his family. Or Junior would help. Junior stays at the trailer sometimes. Then we will fight and he’ll go back to his mommy’s for a while. But he generally comes back.
Arthur Lee Sizemore opened his Esso station at Felco, and Junior got me a job pumping gas. Junior is the best mechanic on Blackberry Creek, he could fix a motor with Band-Aids and rubber bands, so his word counts for something with Arthur Lee. It is nice work pumping gas because you see the world pass by, but they aint no mental exercise to it except counting out change. I like a challenge, so in my spare time I look after Number Thirteen.
Number Thirteen was built sturdy, but coal dust and hard living will wear a place down. We had a company store but American shut it up and boarded up the windows. Our houses all got four rooms and a porch, except for the double houses around the hill and the big house where the doctor used to live. The outsides of them houses is peeling, and aint nobody can afford a can of paint. Still yet it is a fine place. I know every man jack that lives here, know their wives and younguns, know the insides of their houses like I know my own trailer. I set and drink coffee with everybody and they tell me their troubles. Wouldn’t you know, the folks that has the most problems makes the best coffee. It’s funny the way life works out.
My trailer sets on the Free Patch. The Free Patch is five acres between Number Thirteen and the ninth hole of the golf course that don’t belong to the coal company or the land company or the railroad. Nobody knows who owns it. I tried once to look up the title, but a heavy feeling come over me while I turned the pages of the deed books and I got short of breath, so I stopped. Some things is best not known or searched out.
My trailer is old, green, and round at the edges and looks like a submarine that took a wrong turn at the beach. I built me on a little porch, and I got a vinyl couch in the yard that I put the plastic on when it rains. I got my own private CoCola machine propped against the trailer under the porch awning. Since the company store closed, everybody uses my Coke machine and I make a little money off it. In the evenings, when it’s warm enough, I open my door and turn on my record player. Then the kids come a-running. I got over a hundred 45s. They aint the real thing, like I got Harvey Frolic singing “Ring of Fire” instead of Johnny Cash, but it sounds good and if you get to laughing and carrying on, you can’t tell the difference.
I only make twenty dollars a week at Arthur Lee’s, but I got a car that I share with my kin. It’s a 1951 black Studebaker and Junior Tackett created its innards from scratch out of three old junkers in his yard. I call it the Batmobile. Louelly says the Lord give us the car. She took red paint and printed GOD IS LOVE on the front bumper and THE END IS NEAR on the rear to witness and to cut down on tailgating.
Louelly is tall and bony, and has a long ponytail she pulls back with rubber bands. When Homer is at the mine and the younguns are in school, she drops me at the Esso and goes off in the Batmobile looking for pop bottles. She will get right in the ditch with a gunnysack, sorting through the weeds. One time a copperhead bit her on the hand and she drove herself to the Grace Hospital. She claims she seen Jesus in the rearview mirror, setting up in the back seat while she drove, ready to grab the steering wheel in case she fainted.
One time Louelly had me to drive her up Peelchestnut Mountain. When we got to the top she said, “Now stop right here.”
I pulled over onto the wide shoulder. They was trash all over the place, tin cans and cigarette packs and candy wrappers. And lots of bottles.
“The Lord told me about this here place,” Louelly said. “This is where the sinning goes on. This is where they park with their girls, and neck, and drink beer. The Lord said, ‘They have made this place a desolation, but the righteous shall gather up the manna in the wilderness.’ ”
I will go to hear Homer preach, but I aint religious in some ways myself. Still I will never question them that are. You never can tell what somebody else has seen or heard, especially Louelly. I put on the emergency brake and we each grabbed a gunnysack. Wasn’t long before we had the trunk half full of bottles. I started to shut the lid but Louelly said, “Not yet. They’s more down below.”
“Down below?”
She motioned down over the hill. “That’s why I brought that there rope in the back seat.”
She told me to tie the rope to the back bumper beside THE END IS NEAR and the other end around her waist. Then I braced myself against the Batmobile and let her slowly down over the mountain. She went backwards, with her legs held straight and wide apart and the gunnysack over her shoulder. She had on some brown polyester pants and one of Homer’s plaid hunting shirts for a jacket, and she went slow to watch for briars and to search out the bottles. Lucky it was the fall of the year. Everything was stripped to the branch and the snakes was asleeping. I let her down as far as the rope would reach, maybe a hundred-fifty feet, and she picked up bottles along the way. Then I got in the Batmobile, started the engine, and hauled her back up. When she come over the edge she was on her knees but she still had hold of that gunnysack. She went down twice more and we filled the trunk and part of the back seat too. Then we took the bottles to the Pick-and-Pay at Annadel that Arthur Lee Sizemore owns, where they fetched eleven dollars worth of groceries.
Now I’m working at the Esso, I can help look after Homer’s family. They got it rough. The mine is only working one day a week, union scale is twenty-four dollars a day, and Homer has a wife and two younguns to feed. Ethel is thirteen and she’s already tall as a grownup and eats like one. Her momma is big-boned too. Ethel likes to play baseball. When Ethel is catching you have to take care about stealing because her throw to second will come in head-high and she don’t care who she hits.
Jewell is the young one but we call him Toejam. He is skinny like his daddy and me. Toejam’s got a blue pump knot on his forehead where Doyle Ray Lloyd hit him with a hunk of red dog. Toejam’s got the toughest feet in Number Thirteen. All the kids go barefoot in warm weather. You got to walk tender at first, roll your ankles and shift your weight around where the red dog cuts. It takes two weeks to get toughened up. But Toejam, he walks straight from day one, like he don’t feel a thing. His feet’s the only part of him that don’t get hurt though. Toejam is what you would call accident-prone. He is always pounding his thumb with a hammer or stepping into yellow-jackets’ nests or falling on the red dog and cutting open his knees. Louelly says Toejam shouldn’t never work in the mines because he wouldn’t last a day.
It was Toejam that got me determined about the bridge. We lost our car bridge at Number Thirteen back in 1958—flood took it out. So folks have got to leave their cars in the bottom below Dillon Freeman’s house at Winco, then walk the mile along the railroad track and up Lloyds Fork. You can drive along the railroad right of way, but it is steep and your car will ride sideways. When a coal train come by while old Sam Chernenko was driving the right-of-way, he edged too far from the track and his car turned over. So folks walk most of the time.
All that’s left of the old bridge is a steel g
irder from bank to bank. It’s only a foot wide and people stay off it except for the younguns, and you know how a youngun will do. But when Toejam was nine, he took on that newspaper route for the Justice Clarion. They always leave Toejam’s papers at the golf course clubhouse across the creek and Toejam’s first day he walked across the girder because it is that much closer. He didn’t stop to think it would be different coming back over with a bag full of newspapers. He was just a little ways across when he fell twenty feet and landed near the bank where the water is still yet shallow. His left leg and wrist was broke and he fractured his skull. The doctors at the Grace Hospital said it was the bag of newspapers he landed on that saved him, and Louelly claimed it was Jesus. We went and tore that girder out so no other younguns would get hurt on it.
I have had some fine accomplishments as mayor. One of the biggest was when me and Dillon and Brigham and Homer hauled a TV antenna all the way to the top of Trace Mountain so Number Thirteen could get all three stations. But after Toejam fell into the creek, building a car bridge become my main goal.
RACHEL
I saw what was happening. Dillon would claim later that I was blind to it, but that wasn’t so. Who better to see than a nurse?
I knew the machines and strip mines had taken the jobs of the miners, who were getting only one or two days’ work a week. Every day I drove past the empty houses they left behind when they moved to Ohio or Michigan. I saw the weed-choked fields where entire camps were torn down to the foundations, saw the boarded-up stores and movie theaters in the smaller towns, the loaded coal trucks from the new strip mines rumbling through Justice like great iron elephants and shaking the buildings, as though the town was being ground to dust. I was sad that Jackie would miss the Italian bakery, the fish market, the tailor shops and little groceries, the dark maroon passenger trains with elegant white window shades. There had been wonderful things in the world, and they were no longer.
And I saw the people. I saw as much as Dillon saw, and more. I talked Arthur Lee into letting the county set up a free clinic one day a week at the Felco company store, now closed and empty save for a row of empty display cases with broken glass. I don’t know where Arthur Lee got the money; I suspected it was from some funds he’d skimmed off the county coffers for his own use or taken from the coal companies to do their political bidding. I didn’t ask, I just bought the medicines and supplies.
People came to the clinic who had worked all their lives, who had paid their own way and never taken charity. They came because their children were hungry and sick, because they were hungry and sick, the men in work clothes, the women in shapeless polyester dresses, the children with swollen bellies beneath thin T-shirts. They sat on hard folding chairs or stood against the wall when the chairs ran out, waiting for hours to spend ten minutes with me. They were unused to leaning and they did it awkwardly, as though afraid to trust the wall they rested against.
I saw them in their homes, old people who wheezed and coughed while I laid a cold flat stethoscope on their chests, who slept in camp houses where the wind whistled through the cracks, with coal stoves for heat only the company no longer provided the house coal, and so they picked up the leavings shed from the fast-moving trains and overloaded trucks. They were men who had worked in the mines until their lungs filled with dust or their backs gave out, women who had cooked and scrubbed the coal dust from kitchen floors and listened for the accident whistle to blow, who finally depended upon their children for food only now their children had nothing to give.
I also watched the television. I heard President Kennedy talk about stamping out poverty in America and learned for the first time that I lived in a place called Appalachia. It was a strange feeling to think my home had been named without asking anyone who lived here, but I was glad someone was paying attention. Dillon called me naive. I didn’t care. When I finished with my patients they moved to the next line to receive the white-wrapped blocks of commodity butter and cheese sent from Washington. Of course it was demeaning; of course it wasn’t enough. Of course Arthur Lee gave cheese and butter to all his buddies, would have given it to me if I’d taken it. But children don’t care for all that, and a cheese sandwich will fill a child’s stomach.
I was a good nurse. I could diagnose as well as any doctor and I didn’t panic in a crisis. I kept county medical supplies at home in the old doctor’s office because people in Number Thirteen would come to me in the evenings. I even did veterinary work, sewed the hind leg back on a black tomcat that had been caught by dogs. The leg was dangling by the bone but Hassel Day wrapped the cat’s head and body in a thick towel and held it while I sewed with a plain needle and thread, careful to match the layers of fat and sinew, like piecing a quilt. Later the cat walked without a limp. I could have made a surgeon, if women had thought to do such things in my day.
One summer evening I sat down to a glass of iced tea and the newspaper. I heard Jackie outside yelling, “Mom! Mom!” and went out to the front porch. Jackie and Toejam Day were beside Brigham Lloyd’s house, standing in the middle of a pile of old lumber Brigham was using to fix his porch. Toejam was perched on a small board, his legs close together, and Jackie had her arms around his chest.
“Toejam’s stuck!” Jackie called. “I think he stepped on a nail.”
Toejam didn’t say anything. His face had gone white and the blue pumpknot stood out on his forehead like a robin’s egg. When I reached him, he clutched my arm and tottered on the board.
“Lift your foot a little,” I said.
He raised his foot an inch and the board came with it. I knelt and grasped the board gently.
“Pull again.”
This time his foot came away. A wet, rusty nail stuck up from the board. Toejam tottered on one leg, his eyes shut, and scraped my arm with his fingernails. I held his ankle and leaned over to look at the bottom of his bare foot. The hole was perfectly round, its edge crusted with dust. For an instant I thought I could see far up the miniature tunnel past the moist tissue to the white bone. Then the hole filled with blood.
By that time Louella Day had heard the commotion and come running from her house. She held the foot up and looked. “Oh, law,” she said, her hand over her mouth, “hit’s just like when they nailed Jesus to the cross.”
Toejam’s eyes grew wide. Then he began to shriek.
We carried him up the hill to the doctor’s office. He kept up a steady sobbing, his cries gathering in intensity when I cleaned the wound with stinging alcohol and filled a syringe with tetanus vaccine.
“Hush now,” Louella said. “You want to get that there lockjaw? You want your jaws to grow together and you won’t never be able to get them apart nor eat again and you’ll die slow that way?”
He didn’t want it but he didn’t want the shot either. It didn’t help when Louella said he was too big to cry, trying to shame him. He was still in tears when Jackie took him to the kitchen for cookies and milk.
I gave Louella a glass of iced tea in the living room. “What do I owe you?” Louella said.
“Nothing. The county provides tetanus free. But you ought to take him to the Grace and get it checked.”
Louella sighed. “Leastways it happened now. Pretty soon we may have to come to that clinic of yourn when we take the sickness. I aint sure we’ll have the union medical much longer.”
I was surprised. “Why ever not? Homer’s still got his job even if the mine is working slow.”
“Aint you heard? The union has cut a deal with American Coal and we might get dropped. So even if Homer has a job, hit would be nonunion.”
“Dillon hasn’t said a thing about that.”
“Don’t know why. Hit’s all the talk at the bathhouse.” She stood up and called, “Come on, Toejam. Me and Hassel got to wag you down to the hospital.”
Toejam wailed.
The longer Dillon and I spent together, the more clear our differences became. I have never cared much for politics, nor thought deeply about why the world works the w
ay it does, why some are rich and some are poor, why the coal companies do what they do. Dillon is obsessed by such things, will watch the evening news and get so angry you think he could throw something through the TV screen.
On the other hand, I am more practical than he is. He would have loved me openly, with never a thought for what people might think, of what that might do to Jackie. Tony had remarried and moved to Logan County, and he never bothered us. But I heard from Arthur Lee that his new wife was having trouble getting pregnant. Suppose he heard I was carrying on with my first cousin and tried to get custody of Jackie? But Dillon would never think of such a thing.
And my parents were dead, but what of my standing in the community? I was well thought of by my patients, and I took Jackie to the Felco Methodist Church every Sunday. No one knew the sin I was engaged in. For I was certain it was sin, all my raising told me so, and the Bible told me and the world around told me. Dillon did not care a whit for sin, he was the kind to laugh in the face of it, but I must be ashamed of it, even though I couldn’t stop. For I could no more send him away when he came to the house in the evening than I could stop breathing. He had the bedroom downstairs, and no one thought anything, neither Jackie nor the neighbors. It was natural that a woman by herself would like a man around now and then, and Dillon was my only kin. When Jackie was asleep, I slipped down the back stairs and into his bed. I told him it was better that I come to him, I could walk more quietly and we didn’t have to worry about the sound downstairs waking Jackie. Still I had nightmares in which Dillon and I lay naked in my living room, and I would rise up to find Jackie watching me, and then Jackie turned into Tommie before my eyes. But I still went to him, I went to him of my own free will. I had no excuses to offer for what I was doing, and someday I shall pay. I hope God will be merciful, because I did love Dillon.
The Unquiet Earth Page 13