“Aw, honey, it’s just a saying. If Jesus means to call me home, I’ll go, whether I’m down in that mine or sleeping in my bed. Besides, we aint had but one day so far this week. I got to work.”
Now I didn’t say a word, but I put a store in omens and bad feelings, especially Louelly’s. Homer went on to work the next day and nothing happened. But they aint no law says an omen has to come to pass on schedule. It was two weeks later I was under a Chevy draining the oil when Junior come out from the garage at the Esso.
“Get cleaned up,” he said. “Hit was Louelly on the phone. Homer’s hurt and carried to the hospital.”
I sat up and rubbed my hands on my pants. My stomach hurt like I’d swallowed an ice cube. “Bad?” I asked.
“Sounds it.”
I walked past him toward the washroom and he grabbed my arm. “Send the younguns around to Mommy’s if you need to,” he said.
I nodded and patted him on the back.
They had Homer in a ward, last bed on the right. One side of his skull was stove in and he had white bandages wrapped all over. His eyes was the only thing that showed and they was shut so tight the lids had turned dark blue. Louelly set beside the bed, her hands a-hold of his arm, and Ethel and Toejam shared one chair in the corner, so close Toejam was almost in her lap.
Louelly looked up at me and I seen she was too shocked yet for tears.
“Roof?” I said.
She nodded. “Like he said. I hoped he might just have a coal tattoo like Uncle Brigham got that time, but I reckon hit caught him more than a glance.” She looked at Homer. “He don’t wake up. I keep talking to him but he don’t wake up.”
Toejam started to whimper from the chair. Louelly said without looking at him, “Don’t you fret, son. Ifn the Lord calls your daddy home, we’ll just have to accept it.”
An elder from Homer’s church come with about twenty more of the faithful and had the prayers. They was a man in the next bed with a hernia so we tried to be quiet, and the “Yes Lords” and “Thank You Jesuses” was soft as sobs. Louelly still yet didn’t cry, only the younguns, who couldn’t stop and held tight to each other. Once in a while Toejam said, “Oh, please Daddy.” The church people left and the man with the hernia turned on the television. The “Beverly Hillbillies” was on.
Junior come along later and took the younguns to his house. Homer passed on in the morning around three. His chest stopped heaving and Louelly peered over the rail of the bed. “He’s gone on home,” she said. Then she set to bawling and would have tore down that rail and laid on top of him but I held her off. I was crying myself, my throat all clogged up to keep from yelling. I wanted to pull off the bandages and see his face but there was only the blue eyelids.
Homer laid a corpse in the front room of the house. All the neighbors come by with food, hams and fried chickens and deviled eggs and potato salad and chocolate pies, until Louelly had to send some of it to Rachel Honaker’s house to put in her big freezer. It was enough food to make do a month on, and that is the way folks are.
Arthur Lee Sizemore come to pay his respects. He brung a big ham from the company, and Louelly made him eat a plate of food. After he eat and picked his teeth, he pulled some papers out of his jacket.
“Louelly, I’m real sorry,” Arthur Lee said.
Louelly kind of ducked her head and didn’t say anything.
“Hassel, you can have off work a week and I’ll still pay your salary,” Arthur Lee said. “I know this family needs you right now.”
“I’m obliged,” I said.
He handed me the piece of paper. “I come with a form for Louella to sign. It’s just a formality.”
I read the paper quick as I could. It had lots of long sentences like lawyers use to take up room, and then it said that the American Coal Company was in no way responsible for the injury or accidental death of said employee, Homer Raymond Day.
“It’s what we always do,” Arthur Lee said. “It just means this was an accident and there are accidents in coal mines. You know that, Hassel. Always have been and always will be.” He looked at Louella. “I’m just as sorry as I can be. Homer was a good man and a hard worker.”
Toejam was setting on the floor beside the coffin, taking in every word.
“Hit weren’t no accident,” he said.
Arthur Lee looked at him funny. “Now, son,” he said.
“Jesus took my daddy,” Toejam said. “Jesus don’t make no accidents. Hit’s all a-purpose with Jesus.”
Arthur Lee kind of laughed and looked relieved. “Louelly,” he said, and held out his hands.
Louelly had her arms folded acrost her chest like she does when she’s feeling muley. “Toejam’s right,” she said. “I can’t sign.”
“Hassel,” said Arthur Lee, worried again. “You see that casket your brother’s laying in. That there is the best casket money can buy, courtesy of the company.”
“We’re much obliged,” I said.
“You’re a good worker,” he said again.
“Thank you,” I said.
Arthur Lee looked like he couldn’t think what to do. “I’m sure Homer would want Louella to sign,” he said, looking at me instead of her.
“I won’t sign,” said Louelly. “Hit were a bad roof.”
And I thought Arthur Lee would faint dead away. “Now, Louella,” he said, “you got no proof of that.”
She nodded toward the casket. “It’s what he said. That’s my proof. But don’t you fret none. We won’t file no claims. The Lord settles such like.”
I could tell Arthur Lee was relieved at that, but some people will not fear the next world until it is right up on them.
We did appreciate that there coffin from the company. It was silver and so smooth that when we shut it to carry Homer out of the house to the church, Louelly threw herself on it and slid right off. The coffin had white satin insides, and Homer was laid out in his best brown suit. The bandages was off and his head and face was puffy like he’d gained a lot of weight, so you wouldn’t have knowed him. We had a fine preaching and the church was full. Brother Ed Marcum from Daisy Creek preached the sermon and saved two people at the altar call. Then I heard a coal train clanging and banging outside, and I knew they’d be trouble.
The church sets on the hillside behind the tracks, and trees and underbrush all around except where the wood steps go up. Sometimes the trains set on the track waiting to be loaded at the tipple. Mostly the train just sets still, but this one was taking on coal.
After the preaching, the pallbearers talked what to do.
“Why not walk this side of the track?” said Brother Marcum.
I told him how folks could walk that side but it got close to the hillside and would be rough going with a coffin. “Maybe we ought to wait,” Junior said.
“They might be an hour or two,” I pointed out. “And that hearse is a waiting up to Winco bottom and we got that long walk ahead of us with this here coffin. I reckon we ought to start on and climb over while the train is stopped.”
So we carried Homer out of the church and down the steps to the train. It was moving slow and then it jerked to a stop with a loud clang and boom all up and down the track.
“Come on now,” I said. “Hit will stay still while they load a car.”
We hoisted the coffin on our shoulders. Uncle Brigham and Brother Marcum climbed over the train hitch and waited.
“You be careful,” Louelly called. “His head might fall off the pillow. He always did have a stiff neck and he couldn’t abide to sleep without a pillow.”
We had just started to poke the coffin through, resting it on top of the hitch, when the train took another jerk forward. The coffin slid back toward us too fast to catch hold of, and we just did get out of the way. One end of the coffin fell on the track and the old greasy train wheels ran right over it. Hit looked like a tube of toothpaste that has been squeezed from the bottom.
Louelly took a shaking fit so bad she had to take some nerve medicine before she could go o
n to the cemetery. I stood beside Junior and watched that squashed coffin put in the ground.
“Junior,” I said, “if we had that car bridge, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“If we had that car bridge,” he said, “we still yet would have had to get past that train.”
“But we wouldn’t have tried to hurry so much,” I said.
I could see it, even if he couldn’t. And I took another vow to get it built, and call it the Homer R. Day Memorial Bridge.
JACKIE, 1963–1964
Something awful happens between sixth and seventh grade. In sixth grade the boys will like you because you’re smart and because you can tell a joke and you can step in at first base and dig a bad throw out of the dirt. Then you get to seventh grade and the girls you haven’t seen all summer have bumps on their chests and giggle behind their hands, and the boys hang around them instead. The boys don’t care any more if you can catch a baseball or make them laugh. If you haven’t turned all lumpy and silly, you are a loser.
The girls are mean, too. They can tell when you don’t know what is going on, and they will cut you dead. It is like they formed into groups during the summer and had secret meetings to grow their breasts and figure things out, only I never knew about it. So I tried to see where I fit in, but it was too late. I even begged my Mom for a training bra, even though it is the most uncomfortable thing in the world, like a T-shirt that is too short and tight. It didn’t help.
Brenda Lloyd was in the same fix. She sat by herself on the gym bleachers where we wait for the school bus and studied her math book. We all have to wait for the bus in the gym, it’s a school rule. Davidson High School has lots of rules, like you can’t go to the bathroom without a hall pass and everybody has to join two clubs but nobody can join more than that. There is a fence all around the building with barbed wire strung along the top, and if you could escape over the fence you would land in the river. Adolf Hitler would have loved our school.
In the gym, the boys sit together on the top bleachers and the girls are at the bottom. The girls giggle all the time and look up at the boys, then look away real fast. Brenda sits by herself near the door with her head in her book. I sat with the giggling girls but I couldn’t figure them out so I just watched them. Mostly I watched Lila Cummings who has blonde hair and makeup and red lipstick that looks really stupid except to boys.
At the end of the first quarter, I got five A’s and a B in math. Brenda got straight A’s. None of the other girls was even close. While we waited for the bus, Lila Cummings kept looking at Brenda and talking to the other girls. They didn’t giggle and they talked so I couldn’t hear them. After a while they moved in a bunch to where Brenda sat. I straggled along behind.
“Your grades are too good,” Lila Cummings told Brenda.
Brenda looked up, her mouth open.
“The teachers are grading on a curve,” Lila said, “and you’re keeping everybody else from making good grades. If you don’t stop scoring so high”—she stuck a piece of hair under her pink knit headband—“no one will ever talk to you again. And the boys already hate you.”
They marched to the other end of the bleachers and dissolved into gales of high laughter. Brenda had closed her book and ducked her head. The corner of her mouth tugged down like she was fighting tears. One of the boys at the top of the bleachers threw a paper wad at her. It hit her shoulder and bounced off. She didn’t look around. The girls had their heads together, whispering, and Lila looked at me.
I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I climbed the bleachers and sat beside Brenda, all the time looking daggers at Lila Cummings.
“They’re idiots,” I said. “You don’t need them. You and me are still friends.”
She opened her math book. “I don’t care about them either.”
I opened my book too and we studied, right there in front of them. I reckon it’s the bravest thing I ever did. We both made 100 on the next test, studying extra hard for spite so we could mess up the grading curve. The class treated us like lepers in the Bible. Now we are in the eighth grade and nothing has changed. I still don’t have any breasts or periods either. Me and Brenda have our own group, just us.
I don’t care how the girls treat us because they are stupid anyway. And I don’t care about the boys either because they are stupid for liking the girls. So maybe I will never have a date in my life. I’ve got pictures of Paul McCartney on my bedroom wall, but he isn’t real. I don’t understand flirting anyway. The way it should be, somebody likes you or they don’t. If I like a boy, I tell him so. It worked in sixth grade. In junior high, it doesn’t.
I have kissed a boy once, but he was not from around here. He was Betty Lloyd’s nephew from South Point, Ohio. It was the only time I ever tried to flirt. The kids were playing baseball, but I wouldn’t play because I didn’t want him to think I was a tomboy. Then I pretended I didn’t know about baseball and asked him what a squeeze play was, but he didn’t know and I couldn’t stand anybody to be so dumb so I had to tell him. He didn’t even seem interested. Later on we stood close together under the train trestle and he stuck his tongue right in my mouth where it took up all the room. It was real messy, like using somebody else’s toothbrush, and I got away from there as fast as I could.
I learned from a Dear Abby book for teenagers that this is called a French kiss. I guess they are not too clean in France. I wanted to ask Mom about it but I didn’t want her to think I am bad. I am all she has and if I am bad she won’t have anybody. I can’t ask Dillon because he isn’t here. I don’t care to ask him anyway. He never writes us. He was real country, and he was always listening to hick music. Sometimes his face will flash by in my mind like when you change TV channels fast, but mostly it’s hard to remember what he looks like.
HASSEL, 1965
Some youngun name of Tom Kolwiecki has showed up like he dropped out of the sky and calls hisself a VISTA worker. He told me what that VISTA stands for but I can’t keep it in my head, although I can recall anything important. Nobody could figure out what Tom was here for, so I come right out and asked him. He said the VISTA is something the government thought up like the Peace Corps, only for this country. The VISTA is supposed to help end poverty. I got a hoot out of that. “No, really,” said Tom, and he started laughing too, like he didn’t believe a word of it. That started me to really wondering about him.
Uncle Brigham is offended by the VISTA. He don’t like to think we need help like they do in Africa, and he says, “Here I am a growed man getting grayheaded and some shirttail youngun is supposed to save me? And him sent by the government and what if hit’s the government I need saved from?” He asked Tom how come he didn’t just stay in New Jersey where he was from, and Tom said the government likes you to go someplace different from where you grew up so you can learn new things. I reckon that is fine for the VISTAS, but I don’t see where it does us much good.
I reckoned it was my mayorly duty to find out more about Tom, about his people and such. Besides that, I figured if the government was going to all the trouble to send a fellow to Blackberry Creek, they might be something useful in it.
So I set Tom down on the vinyl couch outside my trailer with a Falls City beer. The summer sun was disappearing behind the mountains and the heat was getting softer.
I said, “So you’re from New Jersey?”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Paterson, New Jersey.” He said it “Juisey.”
“You look like you’re from someplace like that,” I said. Tom has got black hair a little longer than a crew cut, and a nose with one of them crooks in them like the Italians do, even though he claims he’s Polish. “I reckon it’s a whole lot different from here.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “but we got some things in common. I heard you guys had a big strike a few years back. We had lots of strikes in Paterson, big strikes. Lots of factories. My grandfather was a shop steward in a shoe factory. My mother’s father. He was Greek. That’s where I got this nose.”
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��And your daddy was one of them Polish people?”
His face got all sad. “Yeah, his people were from Katowice. My dad coached football at Rutgers when I was a kid. He died of a heart attack when I was thirteen.”
He jiggled his beer bottle and looked around like he didn’t care to say anything else about it.
I said, “You one of them college boys?”
“Just graduated from Boston College. I had a football scholarship, caught twenty-three passes last fall and got all my front teeth knocked out.” He grinned and showed his teeth. “I’ve got bridgework.”
“You can’t tell it,” I said. I do admire a good set of teeth, and I know they cost some money. “So how come you didn’t get a fancy job somewhere? How come you joined up with this VISTA?”
Tom leaned back. “In a couple years I’ll be going back to school. But first I wanted to work with people, you know, not sit at a desk all day. See if I could raise a little hell. After VISTA, I’m going to become a Catholic priest. I’ve just been accepted by the Jesuits.”
That set me up straight. “And you’re drinking that beer?” I nodded at the bottle he was about to open.
“Don’t you know?” he said. “Catholics love a good beer.”
I ought to have remembered that. There is a Catholic church down to Davidson, but nobody this far up the hollow goes to it. I recall the Catholics, they can drink and carry on as long as they tell the priest about it afterward. Still I was confused. “You been around a week,” I said. “If you’re going to be a preacher, how come I don’t see you praying and talking about Jesus?”
Then he laughed right out. “Don’t you remember? Jesus said to pray in a quiet corner and don’t show off.”
I said, “Don’t tell Louelly that. She is Holiness and they pray out big and loud.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “They’re in their own church. That’s like their home.”
So he seemed like he was used to thinking on things and polite and a Christian on top of it. I reckoned they wasn’t a thing wrong with Tom and told Uncle Brigham so. He weren’t impressed, but Brigham will be hardheaded. I said, “Treat him right, Brigham, he might get us a bridge built.”
The Unquiet Earth Page 19