Jackie Kolwiecki
Mrs. Tom Kolwiecki
all over three sheets of note paper.
RACHEL, 1965
Brenda Lloyd ran up the steps to our house, her bare feet smacking the rough wood. When she saw me standing in the screen door she stopped.
“Mrs. Honaker! Dillon’s at our house! They let him out of jail on parole and he thumbed all the way from Atlanta!”
I held onto the door frame and felt my heart flutter like it was trying to leave my chest.
“You want to come down and see him?” she said. “Mommy’s baking a chocolate cake.”
“No,” I said. “Tell him I’m glad he’s home. Tell him he’s welcome up here.”
“Yes’m.” Brenda looked around me to see if Jackie was in the living room.
“Jackie’s upstairs reading,” I said. “Tell Dillon she’s here if he wants to see her.”
I went back to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, then went upstairs. Jackie was stretched out across her bed, her chin almost touching an open book.
“Jackie, Dillon’s back from prison.”
She sat up quickly. “Is he downstairs?”
“No. He’s at Uncle Brigham’s. I guess he’s going to stay there until he can find his own place.”
“He doesn’t want to stay with us?”
“I think he would have come here first if he did.”
She turned back to her book.
“I sent word by Brenda to invite him up.”
“I don’t care,” she said.
Then I heard the knock at the door. My heart was still pounding, and I had been feeling short of breath for a while, so I took my time going down the steps.
He looked thinner than I recalled and his hair was streaked with gray. He wore jeans and a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“Rachel,” he said.
“Dillon.”
I opened the door and stepped back away from him. He came inside but didn’t try to touch me.
“Sim’s last letter from Remetha said you weren’t feeling well.” His voice was distant, polite.
“I’ve felt run down for a while,” I answered, and thought, Damn you for asking after nearly three years. Goddamn you.
He looked around. “Where’s Jackie?”
“Upstairs.”
He glanced up, then looked at me like he expected me to call her.
“You never wrote,” I said. “Not even on her birthday.”
He walked to the bookcase, restless, then turned back toward me quickly, eyes wary, as though he didn’t trust what I’d do behind his back. “I didn’t know if you’d want me to write. Some people wouldn’t care for their daughter getting letters from prison.”
“I’m not just anybody, Dillon, and neither is she. Besides, you never wrote me either.”
“I was alone,” he said. “I went out on that bridge knowing I was alone. And I didn’t want your pity after.”
He had brought the stink of prison with him, the fear and anger. Suddenly I wanted him out of my house.
“She’s only a child,” I said. “She loved you. Punish me if you want to, Dillon Freeman, because I can’t live up to your expectations, but when you punish my child, you make an enemy out of me.”
“I wasn’t trying to punish her. Matter of fact, I did write her, but I tore the letter up each time. You know why? Because I wrote things you wouldn’t let her hear. I told her whose daughter I think she is. I couldn’t write a letter that left that out.”
“I was ready to tell her,” I said. “And we would have written every week, we would have come to visit. If you were alone during the strike, if you were alone in prison, it was because you wanted to be.”
He shook his head. “If I’d had a letter from you saying you quit that county job and told Arthur Lee Sizemore to go to hell, I’d have written you back in a minute. But I never heard that from you. So I finally stopped needing you. I decided to be strong and not need anything from you ever again.”
“You were practicing that before you went to any prison,” I said. “You want all the world to need you and you not need a thing. It won’t work, Dillon. The world will pass you by. I’ve learned to do without too.”
We could have gone on like that, coming at each other from awkward angles, probing and poking and doing nothing but harm. I didn’t have the strength for it and I was the first to turn away. There was no sense in either of us asking if we still loved one another and if Dillon had not gone to prison it would still likely have come to this. Love is different when you are older, it is not something to die for but rather a comfort, and a hot wounding passion will be a solace to no one.
He stood beside the staircase, looked up. “I want to see her.”
“Go on up,” I said coldly. “But don’t expect her to be excited to see you. And if you tell her anything about us, I’ll deny it.”
I watched him climb the stairs, hesitated, and then followed. Dillon stood in the doorway of Jackie’s room.
“Jackie,” he said. “It’s been a long time. You’re grown up.”
I heard her say, “Are you going to live around here?” trying to sound like she didn’t care one way or the other.
“I’m going to put a trailer on the Free Patch near Hassel’s. I wanted to put it where my house used to set but the company won’t let me.”
“Oh. You going to work in the mine?”
“They won’t hire me back right now, and I’m on the union blacklist too. Don’t know yet what kind of work I’ll get.”
“Are you going to move away if you can’t find a job here?”
“No. I’ll figure out a way to stay.”
“I thought you wouldn’t want to come back here any more. You didn’t write.”
“Jackie, I don’t know if you’ll understand this. I was shut in like an animal in a cage, without a friend except for Sim and I couldn’t see much of him. The people there didn’t care if I lived or died. I could hear them screaming in their cells at night. In prison you learn to depend on yourself for everything you need in this world or else you don’t make it.”
I stood in the hall and fought against the desire to strike him, wanted to cry, Honey, don’t listen to him!
“Prison sounds even worse than my school,” Jackie said. I couldn’t see her face but I heard the hurt slip away in the rising of her voice. “You could stay with us until you get a job.”
“I don’t think I better. Sim’s got a spare bedroom at Jenkinjones and we need to do some serious talking. We’re going into business together. It’s something we talked about in prison. Don’t worry. You’ll see a lot of me after I get my trailer in.”
“What kind of business?”
“Sim’s got an idea for a car wash. One of them automatic kind. Plenty of dirty cars around here with all the coal dust.”
I turned and went back downstairs. In the kitchen I poured a cup of coffee. Jackie’s room was above me and I could hear their voices, low and indistinct. I didn’t want to understand them. After a while Dillon came back downstairs. He stood beside me and touched my arm, as though speaking with Jackie had warmed him some. I pulled away.
“A child forgets so easy,” I said. “Don’t expect me to. Nothing will be the same as it was.”
“No,” he said.
“Let me tell you about Arthur Lee,” I said. “That night you blew up the bridge, I’d already been to tell him I couldn’t marry him. I guess that wasn’t enough for you. Anyway, he’s kept on proposing. He asks once every three or four months. I always turn him down. But he never gets mad, never tries to force himself on me. He’s kind to me. And you needn’t have thought I’d give up a job I enjoy and my daughter’s financial security just because you’re jealous of Arthur Lee.”
“I gave up everything,” he said. “You wouldn’t give up a goddamn thing. I don’t know why you didn’t marry the sonofabitch while I was in jail if financial security is so important to you.”
“I wouldn’t ac
cept him until you came back. I had to know for sure that we were done with each other.”
“Sounds like we are.”
I blinked back tears and shook my head. “You’ve never understood or appreciated when I’ve tried to be loyal to you. I’ll tell you something. There’s some that would save the world and think nothing to hurt those around them, and you’re that way. There’s some would be damned for their politics will be saved by their human kindness. Arthur Lee’s that way.”
“Goodbye, Rachel.” He walked out. I heard the front door shut. My chest hurt. I sat down and started to sob until I shook and it was hard to breathe. That night I lay in bed on my back, thinking about Jackie. My chest still hurt.
I stopped at Arthur Lee’s office in Jenkinjones on my way up Trace to work. He smiled when he saw me and pulled up a chair.
“Dillon’s back and he’s trying to open a car wash with Sim Gore,” I said. “I’m thinking they’ll try to get a bank loan and I know they’ll get turned down, unless you help—behind the scenes, of course. Dillon would die if he knew.”
Arthur Lee stuck his lips out and narrowed his eyes.
“There’s something else I’ve come to tell you,” I said. “I’ll marry you. But only if you promise to take care of Jackie if anything happens to me.”
His face softened and he smiled. He reached across his desk and took my hand in his. “I’ll treat her like she was my own,” he said.
DILLON, 1965
In prison I thought about going someplace where not a soul would know me. There are places where a man can go and be bitter, where it has been done before. There’s Key West, where you can work a fishing boat in the hot sun and knock back liquor in salt-rimmed glasses. Or a big city like Chicago. I would take a little room no bigger than my jail cell, lock myself inside, and never come out except to get groceries. Rachel and Jackie would look for me but they wouldn’t find me.
I came back here instead. I knew it was right when I stood in what once was my yard, beside the ruined wire fence where I buried the skull and the red fox. I have come back to watch over them and to keep company with the ghosts of my people who lived on this land, my Papaw, my great-uncle Dillon the hermit, and especially my daddy. I have come back to dance with the ghost of my love for Rachel, who drowned in the ice-swollen Levisa when we were children only I would not see it. And I want to watch this skinny, brown-haired girl who may be my daughter, to learn by knowing her what blood tests will not tell.
I hitchhike over to Kentucky to see my mother. She is seventy-two now, the only person I wrote from prison. I walk the last two miles up the hollow to her place and she is sitting on the front porch. She spies me from a distance, stands up, and watches me come on with her hand over her mouth. When I reach the porch steps I stop. She has been stringing green beans and the pan sits beside her chair.
“Got enough beans for two people?” I ask.
She nearly stumbles when she comes down the steps and I catch her to me. She clutches my arm with one hand and pats my chest with the other.
She says, “I dreamed about you last night, and when I woke up, I knew you was either dead or coming home.”
Then she steps back. “Rachel?” she asks.
I shrug and say, “I seen her. Whatever we had is over.”
My mother says, “Whatever you had, you killed. And the way you done it, it’s a sin in this world.”
I sit on the porch step and say, “You think I shouldn’t have blowed that bridge?”
“That aint what I’m talking about,” she says. “You done what you had to do. It’s your coldness after that I mean.”
“She wasn’t faithful. What would you have done? If it was my daddy leading that wildcat strike, if it was my daddy blowing up that bridge?”
“I would have been by his side,” my mother says. “Wild horses wouldn’t have kept me away.”
“See there,” I say. Then I hunch my shoulders against the pain but it is no good. I grab her and cry against her shoulder. “Why wouldn’t she do that for me, Mommy?”
“I’m me,” she says, “and Rachel is Rachel. Who’s to say what’s best. There’s plenty to admire in Rachel, only you won’t see it now.”
“No,” I say. “I won’t see it.”
I cry myself out. Then she takes me to the garden and I hold a bowl while she picks cucumbers and tomatoes and ears of yellow corn. She slices the tomatoes thick as steaks, lays out the cucumbers, the corn with butter and salt, the beans cooked with ribboned fatback and chunks of steamed potato, and the crusty hot cornbread. She won’t let me do anything except set the table, talks while she gets the food, tells me her second cousin has kept the weeds cut in the Homeplace cemetery, that she has the arthritis in one knee but she takes a hot water bottle to bed, that she still delivers a baby now and then and visits shut-ins, asks, “How are you going to live, son?”
“Me and Sim Gore are going to open one of them Robo car washes between Davidson and Justice town. We already got us a loan. Fellow at the bank thinks they’ll be lots of trade for a car wash, and it don’t take but a scrap of land to set it on. I’ll be able to help you out.”
“I don’t need help,” she says. “I got my Social Security and my garden, and now and then folks pay me for the nursing. You look after yourself.”
She sets a plate of vegetables in front of me. Then she takes a blackberry cobbler from the pantry. “Baked it this afternoon because of that dream,” she says.
I stay the night in her spare bedroom, in the same featherbed I slept in when I was a boy.
HASSEL, 1966
So we have our Concerned Citizens and we are going to start a food co-op but we need some money to buy the first batch of groceries. We figure the best way is to have a road block, but Tom don’t know what that is. You’d think that there government would teach a VISTA such a thing, but I have to do it.
“You stand in the road at a turn where cars has to stop,” I say, “and you hold out your tin can and wave your sign. Then folks drop their change into the can.”
“Does it work?”
“Sure. They just raised two hundred dollars for Little League uniforms with a road block up to Annadel.”
So we go on up to Annadel, me and Louella and Betty Lloyd and Tom in the Batmobile. The road block lasts ten minutes and we raise less than two dollars between us when the Annadel town cop drives up. It is Luther Beasley who used to work the Jenkinjones mine before he got half his foot cut off. Luther keeps some white ointment smeared all over his nose because he gets the sunburn real bad.
“Y’all got to move on,” Luther says. “Hey, Hassel,” he adds so they’s no hard feelings.
“How come?” I say. “Y’all had road blocks before.”
“That’s different. Them was fund raising. This here is panhandling. It’s a public nuisance.”
Louelly steps up. “Who says? Arthur Lee?”
“Now Louelly, you know I can’t engage in that kind of speculation.” Luther squints his eyes at Tom. You can tell the sun is bothering him. “You that VISTA I hear tell of?”
“That’s me,” Tom says.
“I heard tell you was a Communist. You do look Communist.”
“It’s the nose gives me away,” said Tom.
Luther grins. Then he pulls a straight face like you see them TV cops do. “What would that be you’re passing out?”
“It’s information about our food co-op,” Tom says. “We’re giving one to everybody who donates.”
“Food co-op? What’s that?”
“Well, we’ll buy food together and sell it cheap. It’s nonprofit.”
“Sounds Communist to me. You’re under arrest.”
Tom is so surprised he just stands there, and I throw my Cincinnati Reds cap right in the road. “Luther, what the hell are you doing? You can’t arrest a man when he aint done nothing.”
Luther gets all testy. “Don’t tell me how to do my job, Hassel. I got my orders.”
“From who?” says Tom.
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“Just never you mind.”
So he takes Tom to the Annadel city hall and charges him with panhandling, obstructing traffic, and handing out seditious literature. Tom is mad as hell. It is a hot day and the little beads of sweat are all over his forehead. He claims he gets one phone call, but instead of calling a lawyer, he calls his supervisor in Washington. Then they put him in Annadel’s one cell that is the size of a broom closet until a deputy sheriff can carry him down to the county jail at Justice town.
It’s Arthur Lee’s doing, of course. When Junior comes home from the Esso, he says Arthur Lee stopped by and was laughing about it on the telephone, talking so loud his voice carried all the way out to the gas pumps. “Yeah! Seditious activities! Yeah! They was planning on selling red tomatoes, hee, hee!”
So Tom is in jail and his supervisor in Washington calls me because Tom give him my number. The supervisor says he is very concerned. He says Arthur Lee has called his senator and his congressman that American Coal always gives lots of money to, and the senator and congressman called Sargent Shriver and then they all called the supervisor. The supervisor is talking real fast and I have to listen fast to keep up. He says, What the hell is going on down there? I am all excited to think Sargent Shriver has been talking about us but I don’t want to get Tom in trouble so I think real hard before I say anything. I say, “What does Arthur Lee say is going on down here?”
“Mr. Sizemore claims there are food stamp recipients picketing the county courthouse and intimidating public officials in their offices. He claims there have been complaints filed against the American Coal Company because of their strip mining practices. He claims you’re starting a food cooperative on the Soviet model that will drive private merchants out of business. He says he’s got nothing against Tom Kolwiecki personally but he wants him out of Justice County. And he suggests that we need bright young men like Tom in Vietnam where they can do their country some real good.”
I listen so long I have to keep changing ears with the phone. “That last don’t sound too good,” I say.
“No, it doesn’t,” says the supervisor. “What the hell is Tom doing to get that kind of reaction?”
The Unquiet Earth Page 21