I glanced at Jackie in the living room, stretched out on the couch with a book. “I could ask you the same thing,” I said in a low voice.
“You know they took the boys to work at gunpoint.”
“How could I miss it? It was happening right under my windows.”
“They didn’t get me because I wasn’t home. I was sleeping in the back of my truck up at our hermit’s cabin.”
“Is that so?” I tried to sound calm, distant.
“Brought back memories,” he said. “I wished you were there.”
I ignored that. “Where are you now?”
“Pay phone up to Annadel. Rachel, can I come by tomorrow night?”
I waited a moment before I answered, wanting to make him worry and suffer as I had. “I thought you were going to stay away.”
“Is that what you want?” I could hear the hurt in his voice.
“It’s what you wanted, not me. I don’t want it unless your being here is going to put my child in danger.”
“I have to talk to you one more time. I’ll slip in after dark and be real careful. No one will know I’m there.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll have supper for you.”
Later I stood in the door of Jackie’s bedroom and watched her sleep. I wanted to see Dillon, wanted to see him badly. But it wasn’t talk I wanted. I dreaded the talk. What I wanted was for him to take me in his arms. And I hated myself for wanting it.
The next day I had paperwork in the health department office at Justice. Arthur Lee called at ten o’clock.
“I’m coming into town today. Can we have lunch? I want to talk to you.”
So does everyone, I thought. I said I’d meet him at the Tic-Toc Grill. He was already there, looking tired, when I arrived. We ordered cheeseburgers and fries.
“I’ll come right to the point,” he said. “You see much of that cousin of yours?”
“You mean Dillon?”
I was having trouble getting the catsup to come out of the bottle and he took it from me, smacked it hard with the butt of his hand. A bright red stain spread across my plate.
“Your cousin’s in trouble,” Arthur Lee said. “The FBI is building a conspiracy case against him. That means time in a federal penitentiary if they make it stick.”
My stomach was turning over but I forced myself to eat a French fry. “What do you want?” I said.
Arthur Lee laughed. “Want? Honey, I aint in a position to want nothing. My mines are shut down, I got thousands of dollars in equipment and building losses. Those boys are in charge. They’re calling the shots.”
“What do you want?” I said again.
Arthur Lee leaned over the counter. “I want you to tell that bone-headed cousin of yours that he won’t be a free man much longer unless he calls a halt to all this foolishness. Tell him the Justice Department won’t be fooled with. And tell him we can work something out.”
“What can you work out?”
“I can keep him out of jail. And I can make sure his buddies at Number Thirteen aint treated too bad.
“You mean you’ll keep the union?”
“Union.” Arthur Lee laughed. “It’s the union is messing over those boys. Why do they want to worry with the union anyway? I mean, I’ll take care of them personal. Will you tell him?”
“I’ll tell him,” I said. “I don’t think it will make a difference.”
“There’s something else.” He put his hand beside mine on the table. “I been watching you for a while, Rachel. I like you, always have. For a long time I thought it was because of Tommie. You know how I loved her. But it’s been years, honey, years. I try to recall what she looks like and I can’t picture her. Terrible, aint it? We think we’ll remember and save the dead thataway, but it don’t work. When I try to recall Tommie these days, I see your face.”
I put my hand in my lap. “I’m not Tommie,” I said.
“No. You’re something better, a flesh and blood woman. I’m asking you to court me, Rachel. I’d ask you to marry me right out, but I don’t want to go too fast for you. I spoke to Tony, by the way. Me and him are still buddies, and I didn’t want to make him mad. You know he’s living in Logan now, took a job over there, married to that Jean. He won’t mind if we keep company. I’ll be good to you, honey. And I’ll love that little girl like my own. I can send her to any college she wants to go to.”
I wanted to get up and run away. I tried to drink my CoCola so I wouldn’t have to look at him but my hands were shaking so bad I set down the glass and hid them in my lap.
“You know I had a drinking problem,” Arthur Lee said. “I licked it, though. Go to AA meetings at the Methodist church once a week. I aint touched a drop in four years. I knew I’d not find a good woman to marry unless I quit, so I done it.”
“I’m glad you quit,” I said.
He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke away from me, waved away a fly that tried to light on the remains of my French fries.
“It was hard to quit,” he said, “but I can do a thing like that if I set my mind to it. I am strong willed, Rachel. I generally accomplish what I set my mind to. I thought you’d appreciate that.”
“I do,” I managed to say.
“You aint eating,” he said.
“Oh.” I grabbed my cheeseburger and nibbled at the edges of the bun. “It’s a lot, Arthur Lee. I’m flattered. It’s a lot to take in, what you’re saying.”
He was watching me with a smile on his face and a hard look in his eyes, not mean but determined.
“You want these mines to be union?” he said suddenly.
“I don’t know much about it,” I said. “It’s what these men want. Dillon says the union is corrupt but he thinks the miners can fix it. If it’s gone, he says there’s nothing to fix.”
“I got nothing against a union,” Arthur Lee said. “Sometimes it even helps if you know who you got to talk to. These big boys in Philadelphia, they don’t understand that. They don’t talk to nobody, not even me. Sometimes I think I need my own damn union.” He smiled and tapped his cigarette against the ash tray. “Tell you what. You talk to Dillon, I’ll talk to the union and the big boss in Philly. Honey, don’t look at me like you seen a ghost. They aint no catch and no promises either way. You got a little girl needs a daddy and a cousin you want to keep out of trouble. This community needs peace and quiet. Think on it for a little while, then we’ll talk again. Okay?”
I nodded my head. He stood up and laid a ten dollar bill on the table. “Got to run,” he said, patted my hand, and strode out the door of the Tic-Toc like he was entering a world he owned.
He came late, after Jackie was in bed, ate cold fried chicken and potato salad and green beans I heated on the stove. When I carried his dirty dishes to the sink, he followed me, stood behind me and put his arms around my waist.
“It’s been lonely,” he said.
“For me too,” I said. “Louella and Betty see their husbands.”
“Nobody’s singled out Homer or Brigham.”
I turned around and leaned against him but didn’t hug him. “You said you wanted to talk.”
“You know what the women did day before yesterday, stopping the coal trucks? They’ll do it again. It’s not some big strategy, it’s just what they’ll do when they have to.”
“I can understand it,” I said.
“I want more than that from you. I want you with them.”
I pulled away and poured him a cup of coffee. “You know I can’t do that. I’d lose my job. I wouldn’t even get on at the hospital because they’ve got coal people on their board.”
“You’d find something. I’d help you out meantime.”
“You? Dillon, you haven’t got two nickels to rub together right now. How are you going to help me pay my bills?”
“You’re living high. Look around you, what people are going through. They’re starving, Rachel. You were raised poor. You can give up something.”
“And Jackie? What do you want her
to give up?”
“She doesn’t have to eat steak twice a week like she is right now. She doesn’t need new clothes and new toys every time you turn around. You spoil her rotten.”
“That’s my business. She’s my daughter and I want her to have nice things. I also don’t want her mixed up in this strike, and she would be if I got involved. What if I got put in jail?”
“She’s old enough to handle it. She needs to know what the world is like.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand you, Dillon. I thought you were staying away because you didn’t want us involved.”
“I don’t want you involved with me. If those bastards decide to take me out, it will be with a bullet or a bomb, and anyone close by is liable to get hit too. But that doesn’t mean you can’t support the strike. It would mean so much to me, knowing you was involved.”
“I am involved. I nurse the families of those men every day. I keep the radio on everywhere I go, listening for the local news, praying to God they won’t announce that somebody has shot you. But I can’t wear out a truck driver with a switch. You’re asking me to go against my nature and I just can’t do it. I’m not a miner’s wife either. I don’t even spend much time with them.”
“So I noticed. You keep to yourself too damn much, like you’re above them or something.”
“If you don’t like the way I am, then what are you doing here?”
“I’m here because I love you. And even though you aint my wife in the eyes of the law, I think of you like you are. I want my wife on the picket line, not sucking up to Arthur Lee Sizemore. That’s all.”
“Did you ever stop to think that Arthur Lee Sizemore might be able to protect Jackie and me or that he might help all three of us?” I heard the catch in his breathing and I tried to talk fast to head off his anger. “Listen to me, Dillon. Arthur Lee told me the FBI is after you and they’ll put you in a federal prison if you don’t call this off. He says if you calm things down he’ll work something out.”
“Sure. What’s his price?”
“He just wants to run the mines like usual. He’ll take care of you personally and everybody at Number Thirteen.”
Dillon smiled. “Rachel, you are so damn naive.”
I looked away. “I’m telling you what he said. And he said a union isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He said he’d talk to the company.”
Dillon put his hands on my shoulders. “You don’t understand. Arthur Lee can talk until he’s blue in the face. If the same crooks are running the show, it don’t help a bit unless we’re all willing to look the other way like we always done, while the crooks bleed the union dry and the companies tear Blackberry Creek apart.” Then he noticed something in my face. “Is that all Arthur Lee said?”
I shook my head.
“Did the sonofabitch threaten to fire you if I didn’t go along with him?”
“Of course not. He wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“Hell he wouldn’t. He’s capable of anything.”
“He asked me to marry him.”
I looked down so I couldn’t see his face.
“You told him to go to hell?” Dillon said in a choked voice.
“I couldn’t tell him that! He was serious, Dillon. The man has feelings like anyone else, and I can’t be cruel to him.”
“Rachel, I thought you loved me.”
“Of course I love you. But I don’t hate Arthur Lee. I like him. And he can bring the union back to Number Thirteen. He can keep you out of prison. The FBI—”
Dillon threw his coffee cup across the room. It shattered against the door frame and a brown stain spread across the wallpaper. “Fuck the FBI! And fuck you if you’re even talking to Arthur Lee Sizemore!”
Jackie called from her bedroom, “Mommy!”
I held the back of my hand against my mouth and turned toward the stairs. Dillon grabbed my arm and yelled, “No way that bastard is putting a hand on you. I’ll see him dead first. And you can’t stop what’s happening on this creek, do you hear, it’s the only thing they understand. If you’re not for me, you’re against me. You got to decide, Rachel, you got to decide right now.”
“Mommy!” Jackie cried again.
I pulled away and ran up the stairs to Jackie’s room. I held her to me. The floorboards creaked in the hall, and I knew he was there but I wouldn’t look at him.
“Now, Rachel,” he said. “Tell Arthur Lee to go to hell, and quit your job.”
“Dillon—”
“Mommy,” Jackie said, “is Dillon mad at us?”
“Rachel. Do it.” He walked down the stairs. The front door slammed.
Arthur Lee stuck his head in my office door.
“Talk to your cousin?” he said.
I stopped writing my report and looked away. “He won’t listen.”
“Then I can’t account for the FBI, Rachel. I just can’t account for them.”
I couldn’t speak, pretended to write.
“You thought about us?” he said.
I started to sob. “It’s too much! You’re all asking too much!”
“Honey, honey.” He came over and put his hand on my shoulder. “They aint no rush. You’re worth waiting for.”
DILLON
I lie on my back in my bed with the iron wall around it. I feel like I am in my goddamn coffin. I hear the car motor, the tires crunching across the red dog in Winco bottom.
I climb over the iron barrier and pull on a pair of pants, peer outside with my pistol in my hand. Agent Shirley Temple is sitting in his white Chevrolet. All the lights in the house are out, and the car is idling but it is dark too, except for the inside light. I can see Temple is smoking a cigarette. Another man is in the car with him.
I light a cigarette, go outside, and stand on the porch. We watch each other and smoke and listen to the car grumble. After a while, Shirley Temple lights another cigarette but he doesn’t smoke it, he tosses it lit toward the house, backs up and drives to the end of the bridge, where he waits.
I understand. It is the most I can ask for, really, and I feel like thanking the sonofabitch. I ransack my drawers for pictures of Rachel and Jackie and my mother, grab a shirt, a change of underwear and my wallet and toss everything into a paper bag.
HASSEL
I am setting up to Homer’s playing rook and we hear the dull boom of the explosion and the windows rattle. When we go out on the porch we can see the tops of the flames flicking at the sky beyond the lower slope of Trace.
By the time we run the mile to Winco bottom, Dillon’s house is about burnt up. All we can do is stand and watch while the roof beams fall and throw out flames like orange foam. Then Rachel Honaker comes a-screaming down the railroad track, and I have to grab a hold of her to keep her from going too close.
“His truck aint here!” I holler in her ear, over and over. “His truck aint here!”
Louelly gets a hold of Rachel then and takes her to set in the Batmobile. When the fire burns down I go closer, walking careful. I can feel the heat through the soles of my shoes, so I find a long stick to reach in and poke around with.
After while I come back and tell Rachel, “They aint nothing in there that could have been a man. Nothing at all.”
“You can’t tell,” she says. “Not with that heat.” She aint crying now but her voice aint got a bit of feeling to it.
ARTHUR LEE
I live in the big red brick house on the hill at Annadel that used to belong to Tommie’s family. They were the Justices, had more money than anybody except the coal companies. Admired the hell out of them. All dead now, Tommie in the war, then her momma took cancer and went in a nursing home in 1956. Talked her into selling me the house before she died. Always loved this house. Old lady knew it, knew I loved Tommie too. Said she wouldn’t have sold to nobody except me.
Threw out the knickknacks but kept the furniture. Old furniture, comfortable. Aint much of a housekeeper, but I hired a colored girl to come up from Spencers Curve and do for me. I l
ike things neat.
Keep the front room for company, which I don’t get much of. Got a den at the back where I watch the TV and work late at night, got a fireplace and desk and couch with big pillows. Got a fat old cocker spaniel, Baby, likes the rug in front of the fire. Baby has started to smell bad in her old age. If you rub her belly, which she dearly loves, you can feel her tits have turned hard as rocks. Sometimes she piddles on the floor, never used to. Alberta that does for me complains about Baby ever chance she gets. Had Baby since just after the war, though, hate the idea of putting her to sleep.
Baby can’t climb the stairs any more, so sometimes I sleep on the couch beside her. I like to do that. Funny when you live by yourself, how you can sleep in a different place in the same house and feel like you’re not you, like you took a vacation or got a new life. Wake up and feel refreshed.
I was asleep on the couch and the banging on the front door woke me up. Baby didn’t even hear, she is stone deaf. Got my flashlight but didn’t turn it on, got my pistol. Crazy miners running around, don’t always feel safe. Deputies drive by the house regular.
But when I reached the living room, saw it was a woman. Porch light showed her outline through the door glass. Went back and put away the pistol, pulled on my robe, and tied the belt. Opened the door and it was Rachel.
“What do you know about this?” she said first thing.
“Know about what? Rachel, good lord, it’s near two in the morning.”
“Dillon’s house. What do you know about it?”
Scratched my head, knew I’d been stupid. Should have expected her to come at me. “Dillon’s house? What about Dillon’s house?”
Her face is yellow in the porch light. “Somebody blew it up tonight,” she said.
I said, “Was he inside?” And for a minute I was scared, I thought, Those idiots have fucked up. They wasn’t careful and this woman will be hating my guts.
“We don’t think he was home,” Rachel said. She started to cry.
“Honey, don’t stand out there all upset,” I said. “Come on in and I’ll make some coffee.”
“I better not. What if your neighbors see me go in?”
The Unquiet Earth Page 17