I work for a Pittsburgh newspaper, copy editing, concentration, concentration. It is what I need.
At night I remember. I lie on my bed with the window open to the summer breeze and a calico cat at my side. Above the incessant noise of traffic on the street outside my apartment I listen in vain for the lone whistle of a train bearing coal out of a distant hollow. I close my eyes and try to smell a summer evening when the heat has been swallowed up and the fresh breezes blow off the mountains. I imagine the lightning bugs floating by and the peepers calling from ditches green with algae and the root steps that lead to the Homeplace cemetery and the peak of Trace Mountain rounded and unscarred.
And Tom.
And my mother and my father.
I can no more go back than I could dig up a corpse and blow life into it.
The phone rings. It is Hassel.
“Jackie?” he says. “How you been?”
“Fine,” I say, short, and nothing else.
He tells me about Number Thirteen. He calls once a month and tells me about Number Thirteen. I don’t have the heart to ask him not to call.
He tells me the company has built a new road up Blackberry Creek, straight and broad because now there are no houses to take up space in the bottoms. The coal trucks are running in fleets from the strip mines.
He tells me Winco bottom is filled with drab green-and-white trailers, brought in by the government to house people who lost their houses in the flood.
He says, “They’s lots of people to look after. It keeps me hopping. I’ll have a person talk to me straight on and then they’ll bust out crying for no reason at all, or younguns will take screaming fits.”
He says, “Me and Junior are scavenging. We go to old tipples and tear them up for scrap metal, cut up old machinery that’s been left behind. Toejam and Louelly help. They pick up chunks of coal off the road that the trucks has dropped and we sell it for house coal.”
He says the government replaced the bridge at Winco bottom but not Number Thirteen. He has written the United Nations to ask for help building a bridge.
He asks, “Think you’ll be back?”
I say, “I don’t know.”
“Come on home,” he says. “We’ll still yet be here.”
After I hang up the phone, I lie on my back in the darkness while the traffic flows away below me and try to see pictures on the ceiling.
The Unquiet Earth Page 37