The Unquiet Earth

by Denise Giardina

  Outside I walk the railroad track a hundred yards in the wrong direction and watch, hunkered on the track, to see if anyone is following me, before I go on to Number Thirteen. I stop first at Brigham’s to tell him what happened, and since he is not drinking I say, “Keep an eye on Rachel’s,” then I cross the street.

  It is like she knows. She has fixed pork chops and fried potatoes and blackberry cobbler, my favorite supper. After Jackie goes to bed, we make love, kick back the sheets and let the air from the window cool our damp bodies. Now is the crudest time to tell her, and that is my only hope. I reach for my shirt, draped over a chair beside the bed. I hold her hand open a moment, run my thumb along the soft flesh of her palm, then place the bullets there and close her fingers over them.

  I say, “I dug these out of my door post. Somebody shot at me tonight.”

  “Oh, God,” she says. She raises her hand like she will throw them away, then stops, but one bullet falls on the bed. I grab her hand and make her hold the bullets tight.

  “This is what’s real,” I say. “I’m not coming back here after tonight. It’s too dangerous for you and Jackie right now. Besides, I’ll be moving around at night.”

  “How can you fight the company and the union both?” she says. “You don’t even know who’s shooting at you.”

  “They’re the same right now,” I say, “so it don’t matter.”

  “Can’t you back off? Is it really worth it?”

  I drop her hand and sit up. I feel sick.

  “That’s just the opposite of what I needed from you,” I say.

  She turns her head away. “I can’t be what you want,” she says. “You want me to be pleased someone tried to kill you.”

  “No. I want you to be upset. But I want you to say you’ll do what it takes to stand by me.”

  “You want to stand alone. You love it. You’ve waited your whole life for it.”

  “That aint true.”

  “Don’t deny it, Dillon, I know you. Nobody knows you better.”

  “You know me,” I say, “but you don’t understand me.”

  “So,” she says, “we’ve got a problem, then.”

  She stands up and looks out the window.

  “Get away from the window!” I say.

  She shrinks back.

  “Brigham’s keeping an eye on the house,” I say, “if he aint drunk. Be careful just in case.”

  She starts to cry. “If you get killed,” she says, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  I wrap my arm around her waist and draw her back to the bed.

  “It won’t last forever,” I say. “These fellows that have got hold of the union now, they’re thugs doing the company’s dirty work. That kind never lasts.”

  “It won’t matter if they kill you first.”

  “I’ll be careful as I can. Just be patient.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what will you be doing in the meantime? How many tipples will you burn? Who will you shoot at? Number Eight tipple burned last week. You were behind it, weren’t you?”

  She lays her hand on my cheek and turns my face toward her. “Weren’t you?” she asks.

  I look at her, staring back a warning.

  “I’m afraid of how I’ll feel about you when this is all over,” she says.

  “If you stand back from it,” I say, “I’m afraid of how I’ll feel about you.”

  In the morning I find Jackie on the back porch playing with her cat.

  “I got to go soon,” I say. “Can’t hang around this morning.”

  She jumps up and hugs me. I set my hand to her forehead and tilt her head back.

  “Can we talk just a minute?”

  “Sure,” she says.

  I sit on the porch steps. “I won’t be coming by here for a while. I won’t be seeing you. And I don’t want you coming around my house, not for any reason. You understand?”

  She stares at me. “Don’t you love me any more?”

  “Of course I love you. This has got nothing to do with you, honey. I’m in trouble right now and I don’t want you messed up in it, that’s all.”

  “How come you’re in trouble?”

  “It’s hard to explain. But I’m trying to help people around here, the miners and their families. Only the coal company don’t want me to.”

  “Can’t you come and play a game sometimes?”

  “No, I can’t do that for a while. Maybe not for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe a year. Maybe even longer.”

  Her mouth goes tight and her chin trembles.

  I say, “I know that sounds like a long time to a youngun. But it will go fast.”

  She ducks her head, picks up the black-and-white cat, and sets it on her lap. The cat purrs and raises its chin. Jackie won’t look at me.

  “Jackie, I’m sorry.”

  She rubs the cat’s ears.

  “Socks is going to have kittens,” she says.

  “Is that right?”

  “I’ll be real busy taking care of them.”

  “I reckon you will.”

  “I’d probably be too busy to play games anyway.”

  “All right,” I say. “We’ll play games when this mess is over and the kittens are grown up.”

  I kiss the top of her head. She doesn’t move. I go back in the kitchen. Rachel has been watching out the window.

  “You’re as bad as Tony,” she says.

  “That’s damned unfair. It’s different altogether.”

  “Whatever the difference is, it doesn’t matter to her.”

  “One of these days she’ll understand,” I say. “Even if you don’t.”

  “I’m trying,” she says. “Are you?”

  She cooks breakfast but I barely taste the food. Jackie disappears before I am done eating.

  On the way home I get a wheelbarrow of scrap metal from Junior Tackett. That afternoon I build a three-foot-high wall of sheet metal around my bed.

  I am frying potatoes and I hear the car pull up beside my house. I shove the iron skillet off the burner and drop to the floor. A car door slams, feet tromp up my porch steps, and comes a hard knock on the door. I get to my knees and peek out a window, see the back end of a white Chevrolet with federal plates, say “Shit.”

  The man has on a gray suit. I know before he opens his mouth and says my name that he is FBI. Your regular run of government men do not have that kick-ass look. He has a square head, and short black hair, and a scar on his forehead.

  He says, “Agent Temple, Federal Bureau of Investigation,” flips open a leather folder and flashes a badge and snapshot, snaps the folder shut and puts it back in his coat pocket before I have time to open my mouth.

  “Hold on,” I say. I won’t be run over by them, it is what they want, to talk fast and loud, to keep you off balance. I say, “Let me see that again. I want to make sure who I’m dealing with.”

  “Don’t get smart with me,” he says.

  I grab hold of the door frame in case he gets rough, I say, “If you’re FBI, show me and I’ll talk to you. If you aint, then get the hell off my porch.”

  We stare like it is some kind of contest, then he takes out the folder slow, pretending to be real polite, polishes the plastic, and sticks the badge under my nose. I step back and study the picture, unmistakably that of FBI Agent Shirley Temple.

  I look up, say, “Shirley Temple?” I choke back a giggle, try to cover by taking a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and sticking it in my mouth.

  Agent Temple glares at me. “You want to see something funny? I’ll show you something funny if you don’t shut your trap.”

  I stare at my feet and chew on the cigarette. I am shaking scared and the tension seems to make me drunk. I giggle again, can’t help it, and almost drop my cigarette.

  Temple grabs my shirt, pushes me against the door, and sticks his face so close I can smell his Dentyne chewing gum. />
  He says, “I came to tell you one thing, tough guy. The FBI is on this case now. We got no proof yet, but we know you’ve been behind all the trouble. One false step and we’ll arrest your ass in a New York minute. Maybe you’ll find something to laugh at in a federal penitentiary. And by the way, we’ve got an injunction. Tell your boys anybody caught shutting down a mine will be up on federal contempt charges.”

  Temple pushes me away and walks down the steps. He looks around, says, “Some little shack you got here. Looks like a goddamn firetrap to me.”

  “You better be careful who you threaten,” I say. “I got friends on this hollow.”

  Shirley Temple smiles, says, “Is that so? I’d like to meet them. I’d like to point out to them that I’m the law now, Mr. Freeman.”

  HASSEL

  When the FBI come in with that there injunction, the boys decided to lay low for a spell, see if things cooled off. We was still yet feeling good since hardly any coal was moving, not even from the union mines. Everybody just stayed home. Only the strip miners kept at it, and they was brought-in men from Kentucky and Virginia.

  So I was laying in bed at my trailer early one morning, but I am a light sleeper, and I had the window throwed open to take the cool breeze. I heard the footsteps tromping down the railroad track from the coal tipple, walking hard like an army, and I heard a man giving orders in a low voice. It sounded like a TV show, like it wasn’t real. But when I set up and peeked out the window I seen about twenty of them heading into Number Thirteen and they was each toting a rifle.

  I pulled on my pants and run right outside without a shirt on. The men was already past my trailer and didn’t see me come out. Turned out they wasn’t interested in me no way, because I aint a miner. They passed right by Rachel Honaker’s big house and ignored old Sam Chernenko’s on the hill. But when they come to a miner’s house they went right in the front door. Most folks here don’t lock up at night, but if them men come on a locked door, they bashed it right in with them rifles.

  When I seen two of them go in Homer’s, I hid around the corner of the house and looked for what would happen, wondering if I ought to go back to my trailer and fetch my pistol. I heard the younguns screaming and hollering inside like they was scared to death, and then them fellers come back out on the porch with Homer at the end of their rifles. His hair wasn’t combed and his shirttail was hanging out like he’d just throwed on his clothes.

  I pressed flat against the house and hollered, “Big brother, what’s going on?”

  The men stopped and turned toward me but they kept them rifles flush on Homer.

  “If you got a gun,” one of them said, “I’d advise you not to use it.”

  “I just want to know where you’re taking my brother,” I said.

  “This here is company business. These boys has been playing hooky,” one man said. “We’re the truant officers come to make sure they go to school.” He poked Homer in the back with the rifle. “Let’s go.”

  “Go on back home,” Homer said. “They’re taking us to the mine to work.”

  “You aint even got your dinner pail,” I said.

  “It aint our fault if his old woman won’t cook for him,” said the other man. They headed off. I hollered after them, “Hit’s a damn shame, going right in a man’s home like that!” They ignored me. The street was filling up with men marching off at gunpoint. The doors of all the houses was throwed open and I felt right then like I wasn’t the mayor of Number Thirteen, and the company could see right inside my head.

  When Homer come home that night, he said the air inside had been close because the fans had been shut off so long. He had put in a twelve-hour shift with nothing to eat and he said the guards would be back every day.

  “Every day!” I said. “You wasn’t working every day before all this happened.”

  “Wasn’t working half pay neither,” he said. “But don’t you worry. Dillon will figure out something.”

  Louelly was setting in the corner reading the scriptures. She looked up. “While Dillon’s figuring,” she said, “I got an idea of my own.”

  And I listened close because Louelly don’t often get an idea, but when she does, hit’s generally a good one.

  The scab coal truck drivers is from out of state like the scab strip miners. The West Virginia scabs is over in Kentucky breaking up strikes and the Kentucky scabs is over here doing the same thing. It is the way the companies like it. They know it is hard for a man to live with his next-door neighbor if he takes food out of his mouth.

  In summer, the coal truck drivers have got their windows rolled down and their radios on loud. They sing along with their arms hanging out the window and pat the sides of their cabs in time to Hank Williams. They run between the new strip mine up on Trace Mountain and the cleaning plant at the Number Thirteen tipple. The drivers are plenty happy because the company pays big money to haul scab. They drive like they are plenty happy, fast around the curves when they are empty, running cars off the road, and tearing up the road when they are full to overloaded. I can set in that vinyl couch outside my trailer and hear them brakes squeal as they come down the last grade off the mountain onto Lloyds Fork two miles away.

  Now I am standing at the foot of the grade with a crowd of women, so many they fill Lloyds Fork road all the way to the curve. They are all miners’ wives, around three hundred of them, that Louelly has rounded up. They have on shorts and T-shirts and tennis shoes with holes in the toes. Some of them are toting baseball bats, but most of them have got thin peeled-off switches stripped from green saplings, like you will wear out a youngun’s legs with if he misbehaves.

  Three trucks loaded from the strip mine are coming toward us, so close I can read the names painted on their cabs—Captain America, Big Bertha, and Bucket of Guts. They will keep pistols in their cabs, but I am hoping they will not go for them because they know the men are in the mines and they will think they are not afraid of women. They stop their trucks, stick their heads out the windows, and call to one another, laughing, but they look a mite worried to me. Then Bucket of Guts hollers, “You broads want to move it?”

  Instead the women go closer. Louelly stands right up against the truck door. She is so tall she can almost see in.

  “You better dump this here load of coal,” she says.

  Bucket of Guts laughs. “Sure, sister. You girls know about the injunction?”

  “Injunction says miners,” Louella says. “We aint miners.”

  He laughs again but it is real high and nervous. He looks around, then lets off the brake a little like he will try to ease forward but there are women as far as he can see, they wrap their arms across the radiator and press against the humps over the front wheels, and he will have to crush forty or fifty of them to get anywhere. They are banging on the truck with their baseball bats, with their fists. He pulls on the emergency brake, leans sideways, and hollers over the racket, “Goddamn bitches, you all gone crazy? Get out the motherfucking road!”

  “Boy, that aint no proper language to use,” Louella says. “We’re here to teach you what your mommy didn’t.”

  She wrenches open the truck door before that surprised Bucket of Guts can think to lock it. Ten or twelve women have got a hold of him and haul him out. He scrapes his knees when he hits the ground and then he is so covered up by women I can’t see a scrap of him. Comes a high singing sound when the women start to whipping him and Bucket of Guts twists and turns and squalls, so I know his legs and backside must feel like they are on fire. But he can’t fight clear of the women—there is nowhere to go except into the arms of more mad women—then they haul him up like a sack of flour and dump him in the ditch.

  Big Bertha’s driver has rolled up his window, but them women climb right up on the cab and smash the windshield with baseball bats until he opens the door and slips out with his arms over his head, and him and Captain America end up beside Bucket of Guts in that green scummy ditch water. Big Bertha has lost his cap and his face is scr
atched and bleeding up one side. The truck cabs is full of women, pushing buttons, pulling levers. The truck beds rise up slow and we scatter away as all them tons of coal pour into the road. Meantime more trucks is backed up since the road is blocked, and the women are moving down the line.

  RACHEL

  When the guards marched the men at gunpoint to the mine, I heard the commotion, the men cussing and the women yelling out the windows after them. I ran to Jackie’s room and she was just sitting up in bed.

  “Don’t look out the window, honey,” I said.

  “What’s going on? Is it something bad?”

  “There are company men outside who’ve come to take the miners to the tipple, only they don’t want to go so everyone is angry.” I shut her window and sat on the edge of her bed.

  “Why can’t I look?”

  “Because I said so.”

  I didn’t want her to know how frightened I was and how worried, didn’t want her to see the guns pointed at Uncle Brigham across the street, to see Betty Lloyd standing on her porch, face twisted with hate, shouting obscenities. I thought, a child should not grow up in a place where such things happen. My child should not. And if it weren’t for Dillon, I might have moved to a town with neat brick houses and white picket fences. But Dillon—

  “Where’s Dillon?” Jackie asked. “He’ll get away, I bet.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. After making sure Jackie would stay in the house, I walked across the street. Betty Lloyd, still mad and red in the face, said she hadn’t seen Dillon among those taken to the mine. I called the health department to say I would miss work that day, because I didn’t want to leave Jackie in Number Thirteen with Louella Day, who usually babysat for me in the summer. I decided to get away, to take Jackie swimming at the pool in Justice town. First I called Arthur Lee’s office. He would know if Dillon had been hurt or arrested. But Arthur Lee was out. We listened to the radio on the way to the pool, but there was no mention of Dillon or of the armed roundup.

  He called that night, while I was washing the supper dishes.

  “Where you been all day?” he said.