The Unquiet Earth

by Denise Giardina

  “Hell with my neighbors. Come on in.”

  She eyed my robe. “You’re not dressed.”

  “Aw, come on, we been buddies a long time. We’ll just set and talk, that’s all.”

  Started to set her down in the front room, but I decided a woman will talk more easy in a kitchen. My dirty dishes were in the sink where I left them for Alberta to get in the morning. Rachel sat down at the table and rested her elbow on it, then raised it up and looked down. Bread crumbs stuck onto her bare elbow.

  “Sorry,” I said. I grabbed a dish towel and wiped the table. “Aint cleaned up proper after my meal. Need a woman around here, I reckon. Been a long time since one set at that table.” She didn’t seem to notice, just looked away. I said, “I really am sorry about Dillon’s house. Reckon the union just had enough of him.”

  She stood up quick. “Goddamn, you, Arthur Lee. I didn’t come here for bullshit. I know the union is working with the company on this one.”

  “Honey! Sit back down!”

  She didn’t move, just stood beside the table. I’d never heard Rachel even come close to cussing. I turned away in case she could see the swelling under my robe, poured coffee into two red cups. “Them FBI boys have been chomping at the bit too. I told you I can’t control them.”

  She still stood. “You sent armed men to Number Thirteen to take the men to the mine.”

  “That’s right,” I said, my back still to her, “because the old man in Philly told me to. I tried to talk him out of it. It’s pouring salt on a wound, my very words. He don’t know how stubborn these boys can be. He said fight fire with fire, intimidate them just like they intimidate us.”

  She sat down. I carried the coffee to the table and sat down across from her, awkward and one foot stuck out straight. I touched myself with one hand under the table and sipped coffee with the other. Coffee was strong and rich, one thing I know how to do in the kitchen.

  Rachel sipped slow, eyes down. Must be forty and still yet a handsome woman, younger looking than some you will see at thirty. I could picture her on my arm when the governor invited me to the Mansion in Charleston.

  She said, “You asked me to marry you, Arthur Lee. I can’t do it and I came to tell you why. You can fire me if you want to.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table and felt a little sick. “Why would I want to fire you? You’re the best nurse in the county. Only don’t turn me down yet, honey. Think on it until this trouble is over. I don’t want that between us.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t love you.”

  “You like me?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I like you a lot.”

  “It’s liking that counts,” I said. “You can love someone and have a hell of a life together.”

  She is so still and looks so scared I know I have hit a nerve.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Is there someone else?”

  “Yes,” she said, and bit her lip.

  “Who?”

  She changed the subject. “I don’t understand why you have to do these miners this way. You can be kind when you want to be.”

  I leaned forward. “Honey, I’m all that stands between these miners and Philadelphia. If I go, it’ll be some smart ass from Harvard running the show from away off somewhere.”

  “And how would things be different then?”

  I grinned. “I’d be poorer.”

  “That’s just it.”

  “Rachel, I’m honest with you. You want me to be honest, don’t you? It won’t help the world or me if I lose my job. That’s the long and short of it.” I reached out and touched her hand. “Now you be honest. Who is it you’re in love with?”

  “It’s Dillon.”

  “Dillon?” I laughed. “Dillon’s your first cousin, honey.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I stared at her.

  “I haven’t told anyone else,” she said.

  Leaned way back in my chair, dick getting bigger and harder. Woman with the hots for her cousin, Jesus Christ.

  “I expect you’ll be wanting my resignation,” she said.

  Narrowed my eyes and looked at the ceiling. “Honey,” I said, hoped my voice sounded normal, “the last thing I would do is send you away.”

  “I don’t want him hurt,” she said. “You hear me, Arthur Lee? If you care about me at all, you keep them off him.”

  “I hear you.”

  “I’d better go,” she said.

  “Okay,” I croaked. When she reached the kitchen door I was still in my chair. I said, “You’ll be at work?”

  “If you want me there,” she said.

  “You’ll be doing me a favor,” I said.

  RACHEL

  Maybe it was stupid. Maybe I am as naive as Dillon thinks. But I held him more precious for nearly losing him. If Arthur Lee had a shred of decency, if he cared for me at all, he would protect Dillon now. And I had declared myself. I would let Dillon take me some place where we could be married, would come back and face with him whatever gossip, whatever persecution, there might be. Only I would not whip a coal truck driver and I would not quit my job. I was clear about everything and drove back to Winco bottom with a sense of relief.

  Outside my car the air was crisp, an early touch of fall, and still smelled of wood smoke from the ruins of Dillon’s house. I turned on my flashlight and let the beam play over the ruins. The embers were charred and cracked like petrified wood.

  I walked the track to Number Thirteen, stopped at Brigham’s house to pick up Jackie. Brigham came out on the porch while Betty roused Jackie from sleep.

  “Have you heard from him?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Brigham said. “Aint no one heard nary a word.”

  “If you hear from him, tell him I have to talk to him. Tell him it’s important.”

  “You’ll hear before I do,” Brigham said.

  “No. He’s mad at me right now. That’s what I need to talk to him about.”

  “I’ll tell him. But blamed if I know where he is.”

  “Brigham? Are you all going to win this strike?”

  He laughed and lit a cigarette. “Law, no. Not with injunctions, and the FBI in here, and them marching us to work every day on the end of a rifle. Coal’s running again. It’s going on out of here. Even old Dillon has run out of ideas, I reckon.”

  DILLON

  I have kept the box at Junior Tackett’s, under the bottom shelf of his tool shed beside the old car batteries. No one knows about it except Hassel and Junior. They’re the only ones I trust not to talk: It is something they have learned together, I think.

  Inside the tool shed I stumble against a barrel. Junior’s hounds set up a racket in their pen but they quiet soon enough. They know my scent. I find the box without striking a light, set it on the table and reach inside, touch the caps, the jars, the rolls of baloney dynamite. I cradle the box against my belly and walk slow and easy. When Rachel was big pregnant with Jackie she walked with a rolling gait and her shoulders thrown back. Now I understand why.

  Junior’s house is near the riverbank. I climb down carefully by a path near the old bridge site and wade into the water. I am wearing my hip boots, like a fisherman, and I go out until the water reaches above my knees. The bottom is slippery with silt: Sometimes my feet sink to the ankles and sometimes I slip to my knees, so I might as well not have the boots on. When I slip, I raise the box to keep it dry. It is like lifting weights, and after a while my arms ache.

  The sky is filled with clouds that pass over the face of the full moon so that waves of light throb across the black water. I slosh out of Lloyds Fork into Blackberry Creek and the water is above my waist, deeper than I expected. I hold the box above my head, pain shoots through my arms as I edge toward the bank, haul the box onto the ground, and rest near the end of the golf course fence. It is still a ways, a quarter mile to Winco and another half mile downstream. I am tempted to walk the railroad track, but I am afraid of being seen by company men or the FBI or railroad
detectives. I rub my arms until the muscles relax, then I pick up the box and step back into the water. When I pass beneath the car bridge at Winco, I think of the Japanese skull and the red fox buried beside the ruins of my house. I say a prayer.

  Finally the railroad bridge is ahead. It is black and rests on great piles of brown stone that carry it over the highway. I recall Rachel saying Jackie was scared of the bridge when she was little, she would cover her eyes with her hands when they drove under it.

  I wait until I am under the bridge and then I climb the bank. I rest again, then crouch and look and haul myself up on the track.

  The gravel between the ties gives way to empty space and I hear the rush of water below. I straddle the rail with my legs dangling between the ties like I am riding the bridge and work by moonlight.

  The jars of nitroglycerin slosh a little when I take them out of the box. I wedge them with the dynamite between the track and the steel frame of the bridge, bite down on a cap and taste bitter metal, and string out the fuse, fumbling with it a little.

  There’re no houses nearby and rarely a car on the road this time of night, but I stop to listen. A breeze kicks up and whistles in my ears. No other sound except night creatures up on the mountain. I strike a match, light the fuse, and run, head down. When I reach the track I keep running toward Winco until the ground throws me.

  RACHEL

  I climbed into bed for the few hours of sleep left to me, but it was no good. Dillon should have called or sent word, he should have let me know he did not die in that fire.

  If he didn’t die.

  I lay on my back and stared at the dark ceiling. I hated him and wanted him.

  The window shattered. I rolled off the bed and lay on the floor. At first I thought someone was shooting. Then I heard it, a long faraway roll like thunder,

  I stood up slowly. Splinters of glass littered the floor, and one long shard lay like a clear dagger across the foot of my bed.

  DILLON

  I think I know where I am. I am sitting on the railroad track, waiting.

  He is walking toward me. His gun is in his hand but his arm is down at his side.

  “Hands behind your head,” says Shirley Temple.

  I lace my fingers together. My middle finger is swolled stiff and hurts like fire. I put my hands behind my neck.

  “You got here fast,” I say. My voice sounds thick.

  “No wonder,” says Shirley Temple. “Heard you all the way to Justice.”

  “Is it gone?”

  He says, “Appears you took out the entire midsection.”

  I smile. “We’re even,” I say.

  “Mr. Freeman,” he says, “nothing is even in this world.”

  Book Three

  NUMBER THIRTEEN 1963 – 1968

  RACHEL, 1963

  I was sitting in my jeep on top of Trace Mountain, eating a cheese sandwich and listening to the radio, when a news bulletin said President Kennedy had been shot. No one knew if he was dead, but they thought he’d been hit in the head and I knew what that meant. I threw my sandwich out for the birds and drove down the mountain. It was a cold, rainy day, and a skin of yellow leaves covered the road. The jeep took a curve too fast, slid like it was on ice, and spun half around, finally stopped up against the bank. I hunched over the steering wheel, breathing hard, and then I started to cry.

  By the time I reached the foot of Trace, the voice of Walter Cronkite, solid and solemn as a tolling bell, said the president was dead. I wondered if Dillon had heard. I pictured the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, endless rows of stone corridors and iron bars, men locked behind the metal doors, pacing, or lying upon low cots in fetal positions, staring at the wall. Would some of them have radios, would they pick up a signal behind those thick walls? Would the guards walk the corridors calling out the news like a town crier, “The president is dead, long live the president”? Would Dillon care? Or would his bitterness extend even to this? I couldn’t know. He never wrote.

  I took Jackie to his trial in Huntington. We sat on the second row in the federal courtroom, on hard wood pews beneath a gold seal set like an amulet against a dark blue wall. Dillon looked around once but he turned away without smiling or acknowledging us. When he was sentenced to five years he didn’t turn to look again. Jackie huddled in the back seat on the way home and pretended to sleep, but I could hear her quiet sobs. I vowed I’d never forgive him for that.

  But I wrote anyway, for Jackie’s sake. I begged him to write her, even if he was angry with me. I told him how I’d turned down Arthur Lee. The letter came back by return mail.

  Sometimes I heard of him from Sim Gore’s wife, Remetha. Sim had been arrested the day after Dillon blew up the bridge and charged with conspiracy. So Sim was in Atlanta with Dillon, serving a three-year sentence in the same cell block. I gave Remetha news of Jackie and she passed it on in her letters. Sim wrote Remetha that Dillon kept to himself, mostly reading and writing in a diary or working in the prison laundry, ironing and folding. I could not imagine him doing that day after day.

  The talk at Number Thirteen was that Sim had been railroaded by American Coal because Arthur Lee wanted the strongest union leaders out of the way.

  “Arthur Lee seen his chance and took it,” Brigham Lloyd told me one day.

  I didn’t answer him, but wanted to defend Arthur Lee. When he came by the health department I asked him about it. He laughed. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” he said. “What would I get out of putting that boy in prison? Miners still got their union, aint they? Company even brought back the local at Number Thirteen mine, and the union boys in Washington didn’t care for that. It was my doing, you know. Over in Kentucky the union’s gone. But I told them in Philadelphia I couldn’t run a mine with all them shenanigans going on.” He winked at me. “And I sure can’t run coal out of a hollow that don’t have a railroad bridge. That cousin of yours got some attention, that’s a fact. Can’t say much for his methods, though.”

  So the men had their local union and their benefits, even though they were back to only one or two days work and more people left to look for work in Ohio and Michigan. And Arthur Lee sent me flowers on my birthday and always had a kind word. I began to think more of him. But I wouldn’t encourage him, not while Dillon was in prison. I couldn’t do that to any man, no matter how he hurt me.

  I reached Winco just as Jackie was getting off her school bus. The children were subdued as we walked toward Number Thirteen, even Doyle Ray Lloyd, whose eyes looked red from crying. Ethel Day said, “Mrs. Honaker, did you hear about President Kennedy? What are we going to do? He taken an interest in us.”

  I thought of the FBI and of the picture of President Kennedy on Louella Day’s kitchen wall. I said yes, he did. Jackie walked along silently, sometimes kicking gravel along the railroad ties. She went so slowly that the others were soon ahead of us.

  “Honey, are you all right?”

  She nodded. “I don’t care about it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t care if he got shot.”

  “Jackie! That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “I don’t care! He didn’t do a thing for nobody. Not a thing. He just talked big.” She kicked the gravel. “He put Dillon in jail.”

  “That’s not true.”

  She stopped walking. “I heard what they said at the trial. They said it was the United States versus Dillon Freeman.”

  “Dillon went to prison because he blew up a bridge,” I said. “He never denied that he did it.”

  “He did it to help the miners,” she said. “They shouldn’t put him in jail for that.”

  “He still had to pay for what he did. He didn’t help the right way.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want him to pay for it.” Then she started to cry. “Why doesn’t he write me? Doesn’t he love me anymore?”

  How do you explain spite to a child?

  “He does love you,” I said. “But some people are prideful and stubbo
rn. They don’t want any dealings with people when they’re hurting because they think it makes them weak. Dillon is like that.”

  Jackie sniffed and wiped her nose. “I wish he’d escape,” she said. “Why doesn’t he escape?”

  HASSEL, 1963

  The night the picture fell, Homer set at the kitchen table. His forehead was so wrinkled that his scalp looked like it had stretched out too big for his head.

  “Hit’s different at the mine with Dillon Freeman gone. Dillon kept the company off our backs.”

  I knew what he was talking about. Me and Junior has heard Arthur Lee talking to his buddies up to the Esso station. They hang around the office on Saturdays for a hobby, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and watching us work. They act like we aint even got ears to hear. Arthur Lee said, “You don’t break a union, you tame it. Easy as pie. Put ’em back to work union and starve ’em out. Then where do they go?” So the boys are back to working short weeks, and the union safety man is a company suck.

  Louelly was at the sink washing dishes. Homer leaned way over his coffee cup and talked low like he didn’t want her to hear. “My roof aint safe.”

  That’s when Toejam come through the back door, slammed the screen door hard, and the picture fell off the wall. We all jumped like we’d been shot. It was the picture of President Kennedy, the only one with glass over it because Louelly said a president ought to have glass over his picture to keep the coal dust off and bought a frame from the Murphy store for ninety-nine cent.

  “Mommy, I’m sorry,” Toejam said, and his face screwed up like he was about to bawl.

  Louelly’s arms was fuzzy white with soap suds up to the elbows. “Don’t fret,” she said. “Now go on back out to the coal house and bring me a bucket. It’s a-getting chilly.”

  Toejam went and Louella still stood, not even wiping the suds from her arms. “Hit’s a bad omen,” she said. “Picture falling off the wall means somebody will die. I didn’t want to say it in front of Toejam else he’ll blame hisself.” She looked fearfully at Homer. “Dad, don’t go to work tomorrow. I got a bad feeling.”