Sim and I are traveling all around to meetings of miners, planning how to get rid of the crooks running the union in Washington. We meet in peoples’ houses, because the union halls are closed to us. We drive at night, the headlights follow close behind us, and I wonder. I carry a loaded pistol in the glove compartment.
Hassel finds me by telephone at a house meeting in Whitesville.
“Jackie called,” he says. “Rachel’s took to the Grace Hospital. It looks real bad.”
It is not him talking, it is her.
Sim is watching me. He sees my face.
“Sim,” I say, “can you thumb back to Blackberry?”
“Sure,” he says. “Is someone sick?”
I can’t say her name. I leave without a word.
She is going back to the Homeplace and she is going without me. It isn’t what I wanted. I planned on dying first and I would roam the earth for her, grab her by the neck and drag her back with me.
Three hours to Justice town. Headlights from oncoming cars slap across the windshield.
I try to think what will happen. Jackie will be there, and my mother. And Arthur Lee. What will Arthur Lee do? He will let me see her or I will have the place down about our heads.
At the hospital I run from the parking lot and up the steps. It is after midnight. The lobby is dark except for a single light at the information desk. No one is there.
I run my finger down the list that lies open on the desk. Room 316. The old elevator is goddamn slow and I hear it clank as it descends the shaft. I lean against the door, willing it to open.
The room is empty.
A nurse walks down the hall, holding a tray. Her glasses flash as she passes under a ceiling light.
She says, “They took her to Charleston in a company helicopter. There’s a new cardiac unit there and Mr. Sizemore managed to get her in.”
I am already heading back to the elevator. The nurse is behind me saying, “They only have three beds. Mr. Sizemore was on the phone for an hour, I think he had to pull some strings,” and I can’t listen to her, can’t wait any longer so I take the stairs two at a time.
Three hours to Charleston and I take every curve as fast as I dare. I wrestle the steering wheel. My tires wail as though they are mourning.
Arthur Lee can’t let her go without turning her dying into a way to show what a big shot he is. Goddamn him to everlasting Hell. If Rachel dies before I get there, I will strangle him.
The lights in the hospital lobby are dim and the waiting area outside the cardiac unit is in shadow. Arthur Lee is dozing on one couch, his head resting on his rolled-up jacket. My mother lies on the other couch. She sits up when I come close.
“Thank God,” she says.
“Where is she?”
She nods toward two double white doors. “Last bed on the left,” she says. “Jackie’s with her.”
I start for the door.
“We have to go one at a time,” Mom says. “Send Jackie out.”
Hell with that. I open the door quietly and glance around. Most of the space is taken up with white curtains hanging from metal rods. At the end of the room a nurse sits at her desk, writing on a chart, her head resting in her hand. I can see the white-clad legs of another nurse under the curtain to the right. I tiptoe in the opposite direction and pull back the last curtain. Jackie looks up.
“Stay there,” I whisper.
A bank of machines stands guard over Rachel’s bed like metal men with eyes all blinking green, or waving black arrows back and forth like long lashes. Rachel’s arm is wrapped tight with bandages holding an IV needle, and her hands lie at her side, palms up as though she is pleading. Her breath comes in short wet gasps. A plastic oxygen tent covers her head and shoulders and her eyes are shut.
I take her hand. It is hot.
Jackie says, “The doctor thought she’d be gone by now, but she keeps holding on. Do you know how she’s dying? Her lungs are filling up with water. It’s like she’s drowning slow in her bed.”
Drowning. I raise the oxygen tent and touch Rachel’s face. The skin is drawn tight across her forehead. I run my finger along her taut brow, brush the hair from her temple.
Jackie is behind me. “I don’t know what I’ll do without her,” she says. “But I can’t bear to see her like this.”
She goes out.
Rachel breathes more slowly. I look around, afraid Arthur Lee will wake up and come in.
“Rachel,” I say.
She opens her eyes. I turn her head, turn it ever so gently on the pillow, so she looks at me.
“Rachel,” I say again.
She says, “Dillon.”
She shuts her eyes and gasps, opens them again.
“You been waiting for me,” I say. “I know you have and I know what it’s cost you. You’re my brave Rachel.”
She squeezes my hand. The crooked finger she broke in the mule’s harness lies across my palm. I bend my head and kiss it.
“You can go now,” I say. “You don’t want to die with Arthur Lee. I punished you, and then you punished me, but that’s done with. You want to die with me, Rachel, not with him. I’ll unplug these damn machines if I have to, but I’d rather you did it yourself.”
I put my arm under her shoulder and lift her close to my chest. Her hand falls across my arm and she holds my shirt sleeve between two figners. I brush her hair back.
She smiles.
“Go on, Rachel. Go on now. Wherever you’re going, I’ll come after. I swear I’ll find you.”
She never takes her eyes off my face. And then she stops breathing.
I hold her that way for a moment, then I close her eyes and lay her back down. I fold her hands, palms flat, across her chest. Then I walk to the door.
“Nurse,” I say.
The nurse stands up and comes toward me. I go out into the hall. Jackie and my mother are huddled together on the couch. Arthur Lee is sitting up and rubbing his eyes. When he sees me he starts forward.
“You’re too late,” I say. “She never was yours, and she never will be.”
Book Four
EXILE 1980 – 1982
JACKIE, 1980
When my mother died, I knew something had passed between her and Dillon, something I had no part in. When Dillon told us she was gone, his face was strained with grief but also filled with a triumphant pride that both puzzled and frightened me. Arthur Lee sensed it too and looked on Dillon with pure hatred. I turned away from them both to weep on Aunt Carrie’s shoulder.
We buried my mother at the Homeplace cemetery. We went against Arthur Lee’s wishes. He wanted her in a plot he’d bought in the large new cemetery at Justice town. But she told him before she died where she wanted to be buried, and I had it in writing, in a letter she sent me at school. Arthur Lee could do nothing but stand to one side in a black coat and gray hat, head down and hands clasped tight behind his back, while her bronze coffin was set in the Kentucky earth.
Dillon was the first to arrive at the cemetery, had helped with the digging, and took for himself the place at the head of the coffin. Arthur Lee left as soon as the service was over, but Dillon lingered to help fill the grave, so possessive I thought he might climb in with her. I couldn’t bear to watch him.
So I left the cemetery alone, drove back to school empty and forlorn, with no plans to set foot in the mountains again. My mother had staked an early claim to me, she had made her life a fortress to protect me, and she was my safe place. I thought she suffered Arthur Lee only for my sake, and with her gone, I wanted no part of him. I still loved Dillon, but I couldn’t bear the way he wore her death like a badge. I wanted to escape for a while to places unfamiliar to my people. It was easier that way to pretend she and they had never existed.
I took my journalism degree, studied in England for a year, and then signed on as press secretary to a West Virginia congressman. I saw Dillon only once in all that time, at Aunt Carrie’s burial at the Homeplace cemetery. Again he stood beside an open grave
and I could imagine he had never left the cemetery, had remained there through the years and weathered, so old and beaten did he look. He was only fifty-three then, and it may have been the grief that aged him so. I thought it might also be loneliness, but I didn’t want to admit it for the guilt I might feel. I blamed hard work. The union had been cleaned up, the mines were working full blast thanks to the energy crisis, and Dillon was running a continuous mining machine underground. A man his age had no business going back down in a coal mine, and I said so.
He said, “Work underground and leave, it calls you back. Just like if you live in the mountains and leave, they call you back.”
“Maybe,” I said, and got away from him as soon as I could. There was still an uneasiness between us. I kept remembering how he always seemed disappointed in me and my Mom but never said why and how they went their separate ways. Mom never tried to turn me against him, but I always assumed he had done something to hurt her terribly. And I still recalled the way she died with him, and the sight of him brought back the bad memories.
I would have tried to clear the air if I’d known how. But our lives were lived too far apart. I wept for Aunt Carrie, then returned to Washington and tried to close the door on my past.
I was no better with boyfriends than I was as a teenager. After years of running scared in college I finally got the nerve to sleep with a staffer for an Iowa senator. I didn’t think he was really interested in me, but he was good-looking and I was curious so I took my clothes off for him on the first date. It was over so quickly I wasn’t sure if I was technically still a virgin, and I never heard from him again.
Then I got drunk at a party and invited a Post reporter to my apartment. I enjoyed the kissing and snuggling and rubbing, but when he rolled on top of me the awkward rearing and wild gyrations, not to mention the sounds, were so funny I forgot to feel anything and started giggling. I decided men don’t have a sense of humor about sex and I didn’t care if he was offended. In the morning I was glad when he left for good so I could read the newspaper in peace.
And there was the musician who turned out to be gay, which I had guessed all along, but I still spent a year pursuing him. And the two friends at the office who I thought might be attracted to me but were also happily married. I was still my mother’s daughter and wouldn’t have dared proposition them for fear her ghost would visit me in the middle of the night and tell me how disappointed she was. I guessed they would have turned me down anyway.
I’ve always been a sucker for parades, so I went to Ronald Reagan’s inauguration even though I despised him. I got off the bus at Fourteenth and Constitution wearing my heaviest coat, a knit hat, and a scarf wrapped around my nose and reached Pennsylvania Avenue just in time to see Reagan ride by, waving his arms and grinning, surrounded by Secret Servicemen going at a half-trot and the looks on their faces saying the whole thing was a big pain in the butt. I thought of Arthur Lee. The only time I ever remember him is when I see some politician showing off. It’s more nostalgia I feel than anything else.
As I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue the show changed from block to block. Anti-abortionists carrying jugged fetuses emerged from subway elevators at the National Portrait Gallery, Young Spartacists ranted at the FBI building, vendors sold Uncle Sam hats and jars of red white and blue jellybeans.
I turned back in the direction of the White House, searching for a place to watch the parade, but people lined the street four and five deep. Finally I reached the National Theater and found a gap in the crowd. The Marine Corps band was passing, resolutely playing “From the Halls of Montezuma.” Across the street a group of Hare Krishnas moved in the opposite direction, clad in saffron robes that quickened the gray stone buildings behind them. The Krishnas went to a lilting drumbeat sprinkled with tinkling bells, ta-ta ti, ta-ta ti, ta-ta ti-ta-ti-ta-ti. They leaped in unison on the last ta-ti and their ponytails flew into the air. The ponytails reminded me of Louella Day. Krishnas and Marines met, refused to notice one another, and went on in opposite directions.
Then I noticed the demonstrators in the open area across from the theater. I waited until a high school band from Sheridan, Wyoming, passed by and crossed the street to hear what was going on.
“Ronald Reagan doesn’t care about human rights,” said a long-haired woman with a bullhorn. “And he’s proud of it. But we’re here to say No to the CIA war on the Third World.” Gloved applause. People held color-coordinated posters for different countries where the US supported repression—red for Chile, green for Iraq, blue for South Africa, purple for South Korea.
The demonstrators were chanting “No more imperialist war, US out of El Salvador.” I noticed a priest, his white collar showing above his coat and his dark hair flecked with gray, holding a brown sign for Honduras.
I went up to him, said, “Excuse me, but you look like someone I knew a long time ago.”
The priest stared, then said, “Jackie?”
It was Tom Kolwiecki.
We took the bus to a bar on Eighteenth Street called Millie and Al’s, a shabby place with dark wood booths and a pastel jukebox. We ordered a pitcher and a pizza. Tom was tall and still slim, with dark hair cut short above his ears in a style that looked almost medieval except he didn’t have a tonsure. He was a Jesuit, although he had not yet taken his final vows and would not be ready to for several more years.
He pulled the white plastic tab out of his clerical shirt and waved it.
“This is not the real me,” he said. “I hate these dog collars. But for demonstrations it’s good to dress up. It calls attention.”
He unbuttoned his shirt and I noticed dark brown hair straggling over the top of his white undershirt.
He said he was the director of a place called the Cervantes Center.
“I thought priests had churches,” I said.
“Jesuits do lots of different things,” he said.
“So what is this Cervantes Center?”
“We organized that demonstration,” he said. “We’re into tenants’ rights here in the city, lobbying on the Hill, sending food and supplies to Central America, stuff like that. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure anybody’s paying attention. Last winter I drove a truck full of medical supplies down to Honduras. It opened my eyes for damn sure. That’s where the real work of the Church is being done. I’ve been thinking about asking for a transfer.”
“It’s dangerous there,” I said.
“Yeah, it is.” He said it like I’d paid the place a compliment.
The beer worked on me, warming me. I studied his fingers resting lightly against his mug, the nails neatly trimmed, smooth and oval. Rivulets of water ran through the frosting on the glass and wet his hand.
He said, “What about you? You like your job?”
“It was exciting at first,” I said, “but not any more. I trained as a journalist, but I spend all my time making a mediocre congressman look good. I feel like a fraud. And sometimes I’ll see something in the news, about a mine accident or a flood in the mountains, and I’ll think, What am I doing here?”
“Why don’t you move back to Justice County?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid to. For one thing, my mom died several years ago, and it wouldn’t be the same without her.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I shrugged. “Anyway, I love it there, but I hate it too. I despise it. I’m afraid it would take too much out of me to live there, especially without kin. Dillon’s all I’ve got left, and he’s so hard to get along with sometimes.”
“Same old Dillon, huh?”
I told him Uncle Brigham had died of black lung, that Doyle Ray Lloyd had come back safe from Vietnam, and Hassel was still trying to get a bridge built.
“Good old Hassel,” Tom said. He refilled our mugs from the pitcher. “What else?”
We ate the pizza, drank more beer, talked, odds and ends of catching up. I told him in college I’d been an exchange student in London.
“In seventy-two? I
was studying in Rome the same time. Just think, if we’d known, we could have met halfway in Paris. Wouldn’t that have been something?”
I didn’t like to imagine it. It made me feel how much of life we miss while time passes. Then neither of us could think of anything to say for a while. Someone put coins in the jukebox and the blowsy voice of George Jones crooned “Take Me” with Tammy Wynette. I looked up to find Tom’s dark eyes on me, and he looked down quickly.
“Do you like being a priest?” I said.
He smiled and his face warmed with pure pleasure. “I love it. God knows I hate the Church sometimes. But I can’t imagine being anything else. It’s the most challenging life there is.”
I tried not to show I was disappointed. He looked around for a waitress and asked while he was turned away, “I suppose you’ve got a boyfriend?”
“Oh,” I said. “Not right now. I’m probably too picky. Or busy. Or something.”
He looked back at me. “These guys around here must be crazy.”
“Thanks,” I said, and blushed.
“You get lonely sometimes?”
I didn’t like to admit it. “A little. My job doesn’t leave a lot of time for socializing.”
“That’s one thing about the Jesuits. You can have people around when you want them. It’s like a built-in family.”
“I wish I had something like that.”
We went outside. The street lights glowed in the early evening dark. Tom said, “Where do you live?”
“Townhouse in Alexandria, just off Seminary Road.”
“I live a few blocks from here. I’ll round up one of our cars and take you home.”
He lived near Malcolm X Park in a gray stone building he shared with five other Jesuits. I waited in the long hallway, bare except for a coat rack, chair, and a telephone on a stand, while he fetched the car keys. The air smelled of varnish and musty carpet, as though the windows were never opened. Once a man came down the stairs and looked surprised to see me standing there, said Hello, and went out the front door. Tom came soon after with the key.
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