JACKIE, 1985
I bought a camp house in upper Felco with firm wooden floors and a deep front porch. It had once lodged the store manager and so it was built solid. From the porch I could see the shell of Arthur Lee’s Esso that had become an Exxon and then closed for lack of business as people moved away. A line of close-together houses for black miners stretched beyond the low concrete blocks where the gasoline pumps once stood. The white people still called this Colored Row.
Some of the camp houses that remained on Blackberry were in better shape than I recalled from my childhood. Over the years people had worked hard to spruce them up, covering weathered boards with aluminum siding, adding storm windows. But many camps had been torn down. On my first day back I drove up Blackberry Creek and would round a curve expecting to see houses and find a weed-choked bottom instead. It was like returning to a city that had been bombed and learning which neighborhoods had gone up in flames.
Each day I drove the hollow to work, past Number Ten bottom that once hosted the carnival but now held a nursing home, past boarded-up brick schools and the crumbling houses at Carbon camp, to Justice town. I walked to my office past the gaping hole filled with scattered brick and broken glass that marked the spot where the Pocahontas Theater burned. The Flat Iron Drugstore was still open but the soda fountain had been ripped out and the store was filled with jumbled shelves of toiletries and pills. A rusting padlock clasped the door of a barber shop across the street. When I was a child the shop boasted a revolving striped pole held in a frame of gleaming brass. I recalled watching the barber cut Dillon’s hair, the dark locks falling like feathers to the green linoleum floor. The stacks of white towels, the room-length mirror, and the shoeshine stand supervised by a bent old man had spoken to me of sophisticated big cities. Now the barber pole was dented and crusted with coal dust. Looking through the clouded glass of the door was like squinting through an old camera. Two chairs stood empty, yellowed cloths draping the arms. A shaving brush lay beside the sink. Bits of litter were scattered over the floor. I saw my ghost reflected dimly in the mirror.
At Number Thirteen, the company store had been gutted, its roof caved in, girders exposed naked to the sky, brick walls streaked black. Some people had left and their houses had been reduced to piles of wood and cinderblock by American Coal. But most of the houses still stood. Boards salvaged from torn-down houses and collections of useful auto parts were stored on the porches and in former outhouses as Number Thirteen went about the business of taking care of itself.
Around the bend on Lloyds Fork, the American Coal tipple, crenelated like a castle and engorged by coal from the strip mines all around, had expanded toward the houses like a giant octopus. I often sat on the porch of Dillon’s trailer. I could see the new buildings and conveyor lines, but I tried not to look in that direction. It was spring when I returned to Blackberry Creek. The new leaves were out and smelled strong in the gray evening. A chorus of peepers cried loudly from water-logged ditches topped with green scum. Past the black walls of the Dew Drop Inn, past the wood and wire fences, past Hassel Day’s submarine trailer, the green grass of the golf course had come alive in the warm rains. A lone golf cart skirted a white sand trap. I sat with a long-necked beer, waiting for Dillon to come home so we could visit, and was happy despite Tom’s absence. I knew the romantic songs that moaned “just can’t live without you” were lies. On Blackberry Creek I would gain strength and color, like a starving person fed rich broth.
My office was a storefront on the hill below the courthouse. There were two rooms, the back room with cabinets filled with advertising files and a board for layout, the front with a computer and printer and a desk for Betty Lloyd, who I hired to take care of subscriptions and phone calls. We could look out the window and see the courthouse steps where my Aunt Carrie’s preacher husband was gunned down by coal company thugs. Sometimes when it was dusk and I had been working a long time I would look up and think I caught glimpses of ghostly gunmen, their coattails flapping as they moved toward the steps.
One hot September evening as I was leaving the office after working late, the phone rang. Tom Kolwiecki said, “Hello,” as clear and familiar as if I’d only seen him yesterday.
“You sound close,” I said, and felt my throat get tight.
“I am. I’m at the Pizza Hut.”
“Here in Justice? In the United States of America? Good God! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“Spur of the moment trip. Tell you more when I see you. That is, if this is a good time.”
“Be there in five minutes.”
The Pizza Hut was on a narrow lot at the edge of town where the mansions of Edgewood run up against the ragged edges of Carbon coal camp. I picked out his car, an old orange Datsun with Maryland tags. He was waiting inside on a dark brown bench, wearing jeans and a Georgetown University T-shirt. He swept me up in a hug. I held on tight and he sighed, his mouth near my ear.
We huddled over frosted mugs of beer, our elbows sticking to the plastic checked tablecloth. We could look through the smoky window glass across Blackberry Creek at swaybacked houses in an abandoned section of Carbon. It had been sunny outside, but the gray glass made it appear a storm was brewing.
“You’re looking well,” he said.
“It’s done me good to come back.”
He watched me closely. “Has it?”
“Yes. Somehow I’m more myself here.” I started to tell him he was also looking well, but I wasn’t sure it was true. He was fit and tanned, but his face was deeply lined and there was something wary in his eyes that I had never known before, like an animal unsure of its surroundings. Instead I said, “How long are you in this country?”
“A while,” he said. “I’ve been kicked out of Honduras. It happened so fast I’m still trying to get my bearings.”
“When?”
“Three weeks ago. A jeep pulled up with some Honduran military officers. Except the driver was American, and the jeep was American. The Hondurans handcuffed me and took me straight away, wouldn’t even let me get my things.”
“Tom, they could have killed you. You could have just disappeared.”
He was turning his beer mug round and round and not even aware of it.
“I wouldn’t have been the first,” he said. “A Honduran Jesuit disappeared the year before I got there. He’s never turned up.”
“Where did they take you?”
“Don’t know exactly. They put a blindfold on me. It was dark when they took it off.” He looked away. “They were pretty rough.”
“What happened?”
He shook his head fast like he was trying to wake himself up. “I’d rather not talk about it. But when they were done with me, I ended up in the waiting room of the Tegucigalpa airport with a one-way ticket to Miami in my pants pocket. I was a mess, blood on my clothes, cuts and bruises on my face. People sat as far away from me as they could.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re safe.”
“Safe,” he said bitterly. “Yeah, I suppose I’m safe now.”
I poured beer in his empty glass. He picked it up but his hand shook and beer sloshed onto the table. He set the mug down quickly.
“Sorry I filled the mug too full,” I said.
“Will you stop apologizing for every damn thing!” he snapped.
I looked down, hurt. The pizza came, thick and studded with bits of green pepper and black olives. He chewed slowly, not like the old days in Washington when he would eat two slices to my one. After a while he picked up the glass of beer carefully and sipped off the top. I watched him closely, like a mother whose child has fallen and hit its head.
He said, “How’s everyone at Number Thirteen?”
“Struggling,” I said. “Nothing much has changed.”
“You don’t know what struggling is. I had a friend in Yoro who reminded me of Hassel. President of our farming co-op. He was shot in the back three months ago. The landowners call it deer hun
ting.”
I opened my mouth to say I was sorry and shut it again. Instead I said, “Are you going back?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The Honduran bishops don’t want me and the Jesuits are trying to put pressure on them, but it’s—” He shook his head, seemed like he wanted to say more, then repeated, “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it.”
He was drinking beer steadily. I waited.
“Day before yesterday I went to see that statue in the cemetery in Arlington. Only when I got there, the lights were out. The caretaker said some teenagers broke out all the bulbs. It was so dark I couldn’t even see the stone unless my headlights were right on it. And then it was like Jesus was staring into space and didn’t even see me. So I thought, what the hell, I’m on my own.” He leaned back. “I don’t pray any more” he said.
“You need some time,” I said.
“The Jesuits assigned me a spiritual adviser and that’s the same damn thing he said. You know what else? He says, ‘Can’t you go home and take it easy for a while?’ I said, ‘Where the hell is home?’ ”
“Here,” I said.
“Sure.” He laughed. “I’m forty-three years old and I spent a couple of years of my life here. That makes it home all right.”
“Why’d you come, then? If this isn’t home, get in your car and go on back to Washington.”
He stared at me.
“Go on,” I said. “I’m not going to beg you to stay.”
“You’re getting mean in your old age. Must be from hanging around Dillon.”
He stood up, pulled a twenty out of his pocket and tossed it on the table, then headed for the door. I followed him. When he reached his car, he stopped and leaned his elbow on the roof.
“I didn’t want you to misunderstand my coming back here,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Sometimes I used to think you expected certain things from me.”
“I loved you,” I said. “I still do and I won’t apologize for it now. It’s a natural human feeling, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“You loving me has nothing to do with my life,” he said. “It’s irrelevant. If that sounds cold and arrogant, I don’t care. God put me here for a purpose.”
“Except now you’re scared to death what it might be,” I said.
“No. I’m at a dry place spiritually, that’s all. I keep questioning how God could allow a place like Honduras to happen. I can’t go back there until I’m sure about my vocation again. But I’m not scared.”
“Like hell,” I said.
“Don’t tell me how I feel.”
“You drove over here looking for some kind of comfort.”
“Not from you. I wouldn’t ask for that from you. It’s been a while and I wanted to say hi. That’s all.”
“You could have sent a postcard.”
I left him. When I drove away, spinning my tires in the gravel of the parking lot, he was still standing beside his car.
Three weeks later, he came by my office with a red rose stuck in a white bud vase. He set it on my desk.
“I want to apologize,” he said. “I was an asshole when I was here last time.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
He sat down. “I’m back for a while.”
“What?”
“Honduras is still up in the air and the provincial thinks it will be good for me here, a place I was happy before. The local bishop says okay. The only catch is, he wants me to hold Mass on Sundays, try to get people to come.”
“Can you do that? You said you were having trouble praying.”
“The Mass is still the Mass,” he said. “It doesn’t depend on my faith. That’s about all I’ve got left right now.”
I said, “I’ll come to Mass.”
The wariness was back in his face. “Why? You’re not Catholic.”
“I went to Mass at the Catholic Worker house in DC,” I reminded him, but I promised myself then I’d not go near him on Sunday morning without an invitation.
He moved into the empty half of old Sam Chernenko’s double house with the whitewashed rocks in the yard. He decorated the rooms with posters of Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Sandino, taped a brown sign on his refrigerator that said “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living—Mother Jones.”
A battered wooden table in the living room held thick brown candles, a plate and chalice of slate blue pottery. Tom nailed signs to telephone poles at Annadel and Felco and Number Ten that announced
Catholic Mass
10:00 A.M. Sunday
St. Francis’s Mission
Number Thirteen
Each Sunday he lit the candles and set out wine and bread. No one came.
He told me that he celebrated by himself. I hoped the Church was right, that the bread and wine did become the body and blood of Christ and would be strong medicine for Tom.
HASSEL, 1986
I never did think of Tom Kolwiecki as a drinking man. When he lived with me, he always enjoyed his beer and would have a couple while he watched the television or when folks come to visit, but I never seen him drunk.
This time back, though, he’s took to drinking hard. I know because he gets his beer from me. I meet the beer trucks at Winco bottom in an old pickup of Junior’s that is so far gone it will not hurt it to drive the right-of-way regular. So Tom buys a twelve-pack from me instead of going to the store and hauling it up the railroad hisself. It seems like he gets a pack real often, and he will pick up a fifth of Jack Daniels to go with it.
Then he took to visiting the Dew Drop around six o’clock. Mostly the place is empty. Business is so bad I am only open four nights a week now. Tom set on a stool, all leaned over the bar, and would drink five or six Rolling Rocks without stopping except to toss down a shot of whiskey. He left wet circles all over the bar where he set the bottles down. When he has had too much, he don’t get crazy or silly like a lot of people will. He just gets real quiet and when he does talk, his words are a little blurry. But the first time or two, he didn’t say much. It was like he’d got something on his mind but wouldn’t say what it was.
The third time he come drinking in the Dew Drop, he set on the bar stool and drank three beers without hardly a word and asked for the fourth. When I give it to him, he said, “Hassel, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. My mother has got a drinking problem, you know.”
I said, “Want me to take it back?”
“No,” he said. “This is just temporary.” Then he said, “Hassel, why am I here?”
“Because we want you here,” I said. “And you do a lot of good.”
“Like hell. I don’t do a goddamn thing, and neither does anybody else around here. It’s like everybody’s asleep.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
It kind of hurt my feelings because I still yet try to help folks out, and I have been trying again to get that bridge built. But it is true Tom has tried to start a Concerned Citizens again, and nobody has been much interested. I reckon they have been disappointed too many times before, and it is all most people can do to figure out where the next paycheck is coming from. They will not talk against the strip mining like they used to, because that is about all the jobs left any more. Number Thirteen and Jenkinjones are the only deep mines working on the hollow. So Tom sends out his notices about Thursday night meetings at the Holiness Church, and only me and Junior and Louelly will show up. Tom will say, “No point in wasting our time,” and we just go on home.
So Tom drank more beer and said, “Here I sit. I offer a Sunday Mass that nobody’s interested in. I call meetings nobody comes to. I lie safe at night in my bed. I should be back in Honduras.”
He stared into the mirror behind me. When I turned to get a rag to wipe the counter I seen his face looking old and drawed out in the glass.
“Hassel,” he said, “I’m a coward.”
“Why ever would you say that?”
But he just shook his head and wouldn’t
answer. When he left I stood in the door and watched him walk up the road. He stumbled once but then he walked straight. After that he took to drinking in his house again.
I am going to Charleston and ask that state government to build the Homer Day Memorial Bridge. They was a time I would have been scared to try and talk to the governor of the whole state of West Virginia, but I am more confident these days. Back a few years they was a little library built up to Annadel, before Ronald Reagan stopped such things. I put in my time there. First I read that World Book Encyclopedia all in alphabetical order. Then I went through them Time-Life home fix-it books and the Nations of the World. Now I am plowing through the novels. I even read that there War and Peace last July, although I don’t recommend it in the summer time. Anyway, I reckon now I can handle that state government.
Besides, they is something in Charleston I have aimed to see, ever since I read about it in the Justice Clarion last month. It is a pair of dressed fleas. Some Russian fellow dressed them back in 1909, and they was in the museum in the state capitol basement since World War I. Then they built a fancy new museum across the street and them fleas wasn’t good enough for it. They wanted paintings and sculptures and such, and they was going to throw the dressed fleas in the trash can. But the secretary of state, he rescued the fleas, and he keeps them in his office. I read about that and tried to figure how you would get clothes on a flea and what a dressed flea might look like. So I reckon I will look them up after we see to the bridge.
I invited Tom. I know his heart aint in it, but I reckon the trip might do him good, and he said he would come along for the company. He has got on that black shirt and white collar like priests wear, and you would think them state people would be afraid not to listen to him.
But no, the highway people say, We done spent all the money we’re going to spend in Justice County this year. Pleased to meet you.
So there is nothing to do except find that governor’s office. The first room where you wait has got a big chandelier and a thick blue carpet that makes you just want to walk slow and be quiet. The receptionist is blonde and looks like Cheryl Tiegs on the magazine covers.
The Unquiet Earth Page 29