Tom stood quiet for a minute. Then he went in his room and shut the door and he didn’t come out for hours.
DILLON, 1967
The VISTA is standing on the front steps of the Holiness church. He looks through the door but doesn’t go in. I watch him from behind the curtain of my trailer on the Free Patch. He has on blue jeans and a white T-shirt with grayish damp spots between his shoulderblades.
I light a cigarette and step out my front door. Cigarette smoke is useful on a summer evening, it will keep away the gnats. As I climb the steps to the church, I can hear the clinking of the out-of-tune piano through the open door. Jackie is playing for the Vacation Bible School. She doesn’t go to the Holiness church, but the regular piano player works the evening shift at Number Five so she is filling in to help Louella Day.
I stand beside the VISTA. Louella is directing the children, and they are practicing for their program on Sunday, singing, “Everybody Ought to Know Who Jesus Is.”
I say, “You watching the younguns, or you watching Jackie?”
The VISTA turns his head but he doesn’t look straight at me. He puts his hand on the door frame.
“What kind of question is that?” he says.
“The kind you don’t like to answer.”
Then he goes a little way down the steps. I say, “Come on to Hassel’s place. I want to talk to you.”
He doesn’t say anything and I walk down the steps to the Dew Drop, wondering if he will follow me. He comes behind me and when we go inside he heads for a booth in the far corner. There are two men at the bar talking to Hassel. I buy a pitcher of Stroh’s and carry it to the booth. The VISTA is leaning forward with his hands on the table, fingers laced tight together like he is praying.
“You heard what happened?” he says.
“Of course I heard.”
“They were going to send the Selective Service after me, then they found out I’m 4-D. That really pissed them off so they decided on criminal charges. They say they’ll drop charges if the co-op shuts down and I scram.”
“Never let it be said the government don’t take a personal interest in folks.”
“Louella Day got a notice her food stamps have been cut off,” he says.
“Shouldn’t surprise you. You come in here and stirred up a pot of shit, now these people are stuck with the smell.”
“You’re a fine one to talk.”
“That’s different. I knew I was coming back here. You aint never planned to stay.”
“This isn’t the only place in the world with problems, you know. There are places that need me worse.”
“Need you? Nobody needs you. Who the hell do you think you are?”
He blinks like I hit him. “You can be damn cruel,” he says.
“Never mind,” I say. “It’s Jackie I want to talk about. She’s upset at you leaving.”
He rubs his finger around the rim of his glass mug. “I know it, and I’m sorry. It’s a schoolgirl crush that’s worried me for a while now. But I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
I say, “You want to sleep with Jackie.”
“You’re crazy! I told you, she has a crush on me. She’ll get over it.”
“Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. I aint talking about her right now, I’m talking about you. You’ve known right along you were going to be a priest, and you’ve known how she feels about you. You aint done a thing about it. And I’ll tell you why. I think you enjoy it. Makes you feel good, don’t it? Makes you feel like a man.”
He stands up. “Goddamn you,” he says.
I stand up with him. “Why do you want to be a priest? I see how you are with her. You ought to be moving heaven and earth to have her.”
“Why are you talking like this? God, Jackie’s your relative!”
I say, “You think my relatives don’t make love?”
“She’s just a kid.”
“Old enough to feel,” I say. “Old enough to love. But you turn away from her, you don’t deserve her.”
“My feelings for her are not like that,” he says.
Fool, I think. I know what I have seen, how you held her in my truck, how your fingers moved up and down the soft flesh of her arm.
He pulls a wrinkled dollar bill out of his jeans pocket and tosses it on the table, then goes to the door like he will leave. But he stops in the doorway, black against the evening light. I come up behind him.
Jackie has come out of the church and is walking toward the Dew Drop, slim, her hair long and dark brown. She has new contact lenses so the thick eyeglasses don’t hide her large green eyes anymore. She waves her hand slowly in front of her face as clouds of gnats rise from the dandelions. She is almost sixteen, the age I saw her mother stretched naked before the Homeplace hearth, and that breaks my heart.
She sees us standing in the door and stops. She holds her mouth tight like she is about to cry.
“I’m sorry, Jackie,” says the VISTA. “I’ve got to go pack.”
He turns and walks away toward Hassel’s trailer, leaves her standing.
Fool, I think again.
“Honey,” I say, “he aint worth it.”
Her face goes hard.
“Don’t you talk to me,” she says. “Don’t you. I hate you because you’re mean to him. And I hate Arthur Lee for running him off.”
She turns and walks down the railroad track. She will sit by herself in the bottom at Winco and cry until Rachel comes to pick her up. Or perhaps it will be Arthur Lee. They say Arthur Lee drives her places sometimes, takes Rachel and Jackie to the movies. It won’t do any good now. Jackie will always despise him.
And will despise me too, but that is different. It is hate and love together, and nothing is stronger.
DEATH BY WATER 1969 – 1971
HASSEL, 1969
Tom left and things went downhill for a spell. Louelly lost her food stamps and the government was threatening to take my liquor license if I didn’t behave. Then Arthur Lee organized his own Concerned Citizens, only he called it Citizens for Good Government, and them fellows in Washington sent all the Poverty money to them. Arthur Lee dug out the hillside behind his house and put in a swimming pool.
Me and Junior spent a lot of time in front of the TV set. We watched them Smothers Brothers until they got took off the air for being too sassy. We watched Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy get shot. The Russians was beating up on folks over in that there Czechoslovakia and the police was beating up on younguns up in Chicago. They all wore helmets that looked just alike. Junior said it was a whole passel of coal companies running things all over the world, so we was just as well to set tight.
But around here, there is always something. Uncle Brigham had the black lung bad. He’d take a hard breathing spell where the fluid would build in his lungs and go in the hospital to be hooked up on all them machines. Then he’d come home and get around on a metal walker and several times a day Betty would strap him into some portable oxygen machine.
One day when he was feeling stronger, we drove him to a demonstration in Charleston. We went in the Batmobile which is doing fine, although I haul an extra radiator in the trunk just in case. It was Sim and Dillon and me took him, and Louelly’s Ethel skipped school and went too. Uncle Brigham was too weak to go on the protest march, but he set in a lawn chair beside the fountain at the capitol building and held a sign. It had a skull and crossbones, and said “Black Lung Is Killing Me.”
We had Uncle Brigham wrapped up because it was a cold day. They was thousands of coal miners there, all shivering in their old coats and hunting jackets. Some had on them caps with the ear flaps or brown hats with little feathers in the band. Some didn’t have on no hats at all and their ears was red. I had me on a red toboggan said Davidson High Coaldiggers, and I was glad for it because my hair is still yet crew cut. Junior cuts it by running one of them electric razors over my scalp. I don’t have to worry about being took for no hippie.
While we was standing there listening to the
speakers, a man come up that said he was a doctor from Beckley. He carried a jar with a dead miner’s lungs inside that had turned black like the leavings in a iron skillet.
He said, “Aren’t you Dillon Freeman?”
Dillon looked him over a minute, then said, “I might be.”
“I know some people would like to meet with you,” that doctor said. “There’s still a union needs cleaning up.”
“I tried once,” Dillon said.
“You’ve got more friends now,” the doctor said.
So they went off together to talk, that doctor with the jar of lungs tucked under his arm. It is a marvel what this world is coming to when they are doctors carrying on like that. Junior says it is the sixties for you.
Ethel was looking around. She has been in trouble, Ethel, getting in fights at school and wanting to drop out.
“You know what,” she said. “I want to be a miner.”
Uncle Brigham laughed and coughed. “Aint no girl can be a miner. It’s hard work. Besides, a woman is bad luck in a mine. Causes roof falls.”
“That’s silly,” Ethel said. “You already got roof falls without women.”
“They’d be more,” said Uncle Brigham.
“Why would you want to be a miner?” I said.
“I like all these men,” she said. “I like being with them. They put me in mind of Daddy.”
After more speeches at the capitol we went to Shoney’s for coffee and hot fudge cake. That is the best stuff you’ll eat, hot fudge cake, the sauce all gooey and the ice cream between the layers of cake, and the coffee was so hot it felt like I was pouring it all the way down to my toes. Uncle Brigham tucked his paper napkin into the neck of his shirt like it would really cover him.
“Damned if I wasn’t in one of them demonstrations,” he said. “Reckon I’ll just have to be a hippie now. Reckon I’ll grow my hair long.”
“You aint got no hair,” Ethel pointed out.
“I’ll get me a wig. Get me a necklace with one of them peace symbols.”
We laughed at that, because Doyle Ray Lloyd went straight from the reform school at Pruntytown into the army and now he’s in Vietnam. Uncle Brigham gets real mad when he sees one of them peace demonstrations on the TV.
On the way home I kept looking in my rear mirror and seen Ethel talking to Sim Gore. Every time I looked she was still yet talking to him. Uncle Brigham was asleep beside me and after while Dillon was snoring too. Ethel and Sim kept talking until we dropped Sim at the Robo. When we got to Winco it was dark. Uncle Brigham was plumb wore out so I drove the Batmobile all the way into Number Thirteen, tilted sideways on the railroad bed. They was no trains running because the whole mine was out in a wildcat over the black lung. Dillon went to eat beans and cornbread at Brigham’s, and I took Ethel home. I was wanting to watch that TV news, looking to see if we was on, but Ethel said, “Let’s go for a walk, Hassel. I got to talk to you.”
“It’s late and kindly cold, aint it?” I said.
“Please.”
So we went out and walked a ways up toward the tipple and set on the track. That rail was so cold it made my butt numb real quick. Ethel took out a box from inside her jacket and was digging around inside it.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Pot,” she said.
“Ethel Ann! Where did you get that there?”
“Bought it myself with what I make at the car wash.”
I knew she was working weekends at the Robo, her and Sim Gore’s boy Leon.
“Aint that a waste of money,” I said.
“You can’t preach, Hassel. You sell liquor every night except Sunday. This aint no worse.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s against the law. And it’s hippies smoke it.”
“It aint just hippies.”
I had to admit I was interested watching her rummage that box. I am curious turned. She was raking out what looked like little BBs, only she said it was the seeds. She stuck the seeds in her pocket and rolled the rest in a cigarette paper.
“Try a joint?” she said.
I shrugged and took it. I will try anything oncet. I smoked it down to the nub, until the little bit of paper was hot against my lips. Then I dropped it.
“No!” Ethel said. She felt around in the dark. “You got to save them roaches, Hassel. Keep enough of them and you got another joint.” She peered at me. “How you feel?”
“I don’t feel a goddamn thing.” I rolled my shoulder blades around. “You are wasting your money on that there pot. Give me a beer any day.”
Then I started to giggle.
“Hassel,” Ethel says. She slaps her knee. “Hassel, you are stoned and don’t even know it.”
“If Louelly finds out about this, she will have a conniption,” I said.
Ethel was smoking her own joint. “Hassel, I’m pregnant,” she said.
I giggled again. “Well, shit, Ethel.” Then it wasn’t very funny. I looked at her. All I could see was her nose and mouth lit orange by the joint.
“Mommy will kill me,” she said.
I couldn’t stop staring at her orange-lit nose, it was that pretty, like a Christmas light.
“Ethel,” I said, “they’s something you don’t know, but maybe you should. Hit aint no shame to be pregnant. Your daddy and mommy had to get married because Louelly was pregnant with you.”
“I figured that out a long time ago,” she said. “I can count, you know.”
“Well then, it aint the end of the world. Only thing is, you be sure and finish school. You only got until June. Then you can marry your fellow and raise that there youngun.”
“It aint so easy. The daddy is a colored boy.” She blew out some smoke, white like her breath. “Sim Gore’s Leon.”
“Oh, Lordy,” I said.
“Hassel,” she said, “Uncle Brigham’s dying, aint he?” Then she busted into tears.
Louelly cried and carried on when she heard Ethel’s news, and I heard tell that Sim and his wife wasn’t too pleased neither. Leon was set to go to Bluefield State in the fall and Sim wanted that education for him. I didn’t blame Sim, and none of us was looking for a marriage after all. Ethel said she didn’t mind because she wasn’t in love with Leon Gore. They had just been fooling around. So she had baby Tiffany and me and Louelly are helping to raise her. She is a pretty baby with brown eyes and skin like a good suntan. Ethel has kept on working at the Robo, although she don’t make much.
Now it is fall again and the leaves have turned the trees to puffs of red and orange so bright they like to put your eyes out. I can set outside my trailer and see the green golf course and the creek and the mountains beyond like piles of patchwork quilts, and I declare Number Thirteen is the prettiest place on God’s earth. I keep thinking on that trip to Charleston for the black lung rally and making plans. I am thinking why do I have to mess with Arthur Lee? One day I will go back up there and ask that state government to build a bridge.
DILLON, 1970–1971
Some say there is a curse on these mountains. When I was a boy, a map hung on the wall of the Scary Creek School that showed where Indians once lived—pink for the Iroquois, green for the Cherokee, orange for Shawnee. There was a gray blank over these coalfields, and the word “Uninhabited.” The Indians came to hunt in these hollows but never settled. It was a spirit land, sacred and dangerous. You can feel it still.
Summer is kind. The green hills rustle gently in the warm breeze. But then winter strips the leaves from the trees and the gray mountains are revealed, grizzled and hoary, their ridges edged with jagged stone teeth. In England I saw the burial mounds, the ancient stones set in circles by long dead sorcerers. The mountains are great barrows, the tombs of a long lost race, crowned by megaliths placed by God.
We have had hard winters of late, each with its own disaster. In 1967 a bridge collapsed and killed two score. The next year a mine blew and seventy-eight men burned alive. In sixty-nine, another mine explosion. Now I am listening to my truck radi
o on the way to Annadel. Yesterday, Marshall University’s football team was killed in a plane crash at Huntington. I am thinking of Jackie, who goes to Marshall now and writes for the school newspaper.
I pull into the parking lot of the Pick-and-Pay and I see Rachel. She stands beside her car, looking small in her black coat, while a boy loads the trunk with bags of groceries. Her face is as gray as the mountains and has a look as tired as death. She looks up and sees me. we stand for a moment, watching. Then I walk over.
I say, “Jackie’s all right?”
“She’s upset,” Rachel says. “A friend of hers was killed. But she’s all right. She had no reason to be on that plane, thank God.”
I nod at the trunk, say, “How you going to get all those groceries in the house?”
Her breath comes in short white puffs. “I’ll manage,” she says.
“I’ll follow you up the hill and tote them in for you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she says.
“Rachel,” I say, “I know we aint been on speaking terms all these years. But I’m still yet kin if I aint nothing else. Up on Trace Mountain I told you I’d always be there if you really needed me. I meant it.”
“Right now,” she says, “I don’t really need you.”
Then she gets in her car and drives away.
They say Arthur Lee is good to her. He took her to the Grand Ole Opry and to the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs once or twice. Things I could never afford.
I hear she is having heart problems, that she is having tests done, that she tires easy and Arthur Lee hired a woman to cook and clean for her. And since I saw Rachel at the Pick-and-Pay, I hear she quit her job. She never quit for me, she would never have quit for Arthur Lee, and I know it can only mean one thing.
I had been living as though she was already gone. I watched the ice floes carry her down the river and banished her from my thoughts. Now she’s started dying by bits, far away where I cannot reach her.
The Unquiet Earth Page 25