by Tawni O'Dell
Her eyes were the only things about her that had changed. Her voice was the same. She still kept up her physical appearance. She still did her work. She did more than her usual work. She helped the women who couldn’t cope. Our house was filled with kids.
A stranger wouldn’t be able to tell there was anything wrong with her, except for her eyes. They were her nakolki. They made me feel the same way I did when I used to trace the outline of Dad’s Stalin tattoo: a respect and admiration for what he had survived, but also the sadness of isolation, knowing he had been through something I could never understand that made him somehow better and stronger than I was.
“Okay,” Val would say to her. “I’ll do that.”
From the day of the explosion to the day he left for Vietnam, I only remember one time when he spoke about my mother without his feelings’ being in the form of a question about a chore he could do for her.
It was the day before the miners’ funeral. He had come home earlier than usual. There were still a couple hours of daylight left.
I was sitting on the bottom step of our back stoop looking at my Wonders of Nature book. The stoop was made of concrete, and my mom was always warning me this time of year not to sit on it or I’d catch the same death of a cold that Maxine was always warning Val about.
I could never quite figure out why the cold you caught from sitting on something cold could kill you but a regular cold could be easily vanquished with St. Joseph Chewable Aspirin for children and Vicks VapoRub. Whatever the reason, it was a fear all mothers seemed to harbor, and I usually respected it, but that day Mom had forgotten to warn me.
Val saw me sitting there and motioned me over. I was surprised and happy to see him home early and not sprawled out on the ground asleep. I put my book down and ran over to him. Being around Val made me feel like I was part of the men. Before the explosion I didn’t mind being part of the women and children, but now it felt like a betrayal.
He started stripping off his filthy work clothes. During his regular shifts, he always cleaned up at the bathhouse, but these past couple days working on the rescue crew, he came home dirty.
He didn’t stop until he was wearing only his underwear. Sitting on the edge of his back porch was a scrub brush and a hard blue-gray chunk that looked and felt like granite but was actually soap. He grabbed both and turned on the water spout on the side of his house where the hose was attached in summer and stuck his head beneath the freezing-cold water.
He made a noise like a dog that’s been kicked, then set about vigorously scrubbing his head, face, hands, and arms with the rock-hard soap and wire brush.
When he finished and he was glowing a raw red, he shook his head hard and walked to the back door, dripping and covered in goose bumps. I could see a towel hanging inside on a coat hook. He grabbed it and went inside, returning a few minutes later dressed in jeans, a clean flannel shirt, a Penzoil ball cap, and his dress pair of boots, usually reserved for social occasions, a soft yellow suede with bright red laces.
“You want to go for a ride?” he asked me.
“Sure,” I replied instantly.
“Go ask your mom.”
He was already sitting in his truck when I came running back. We drove in silence. I didn’t mind it, except for one point where I had a sudden intense longing to hear him belch the alphabet, but I let it pass without mentioning it to him.
We parked on the side of a road with nothing around us, for apparently no good reason. He got out and started scaling the hill, and I followed him into the woods. We walked along for a while, until we came to a spot with a good view of my school.
Today was the day they were removing the bodies to get them ready for tomorrow’s funeral.
The remains of sixty-four men meant sixty-four coffins. Sixty-four coffins meant sixty-four burial plots, sixty-four headstones, sixty-four hearses, sixty-four preachers delivering sixty-four eulogies.
Coal Run didn’t have a funeral home. The nearest one was in Centresburg. We didn’t have a big empty cemetery waiting to be filled all at once. People buried their dead sporadically in church graveyards. We didn’t have a morgue where we could store the bodies while we figured out how to bury them. The school needed the multipurpose room back for gym class and lunch period.
The widows couldn’t afford expensive coffins and plots in pricey private cemeteries, although a few did drain their savings accounts or used a chunk of precious insurance money to buy a fancy casket.
Taking into consideration all these factors, everyone agreed that the miners should be laid to rest all at once. It only made sense that these men who worked and played and lived and drank together should be buried at the same time, in the shadow of the same hillside, with the same words said over them.
A local lumber company donated enough wood for sixty-four coffins. Every man with carpentry skills donated his time. Mike Muchmore’s dad donated ten acres of land he owned between Coal Run and Centresburg to be used as a cemetery for the miners and eventually their families. Packard Mining Equipment donated their flatbed trucks to transport the coffins.
J&P wouldn’t provide any of their own trucks. It had something to do with insurance reasons. They posted a memo on the Gertie office door explaining their decision. It hung between the memo telling the families of the dead miners that they could keep their numbered work tags and the one reminding everyone that J&P was no longer obligated to provide money for burial costs, since the union had voted against the mandatory burial fund.
Val and I stared down at the coffins stretched out in a seemingly endless line running the length of the school parking lot and far enough down the road that we lost sight of them. Each man’s last name was painted on top. Fathers and sons were given first initials, too. I tried to find my grandfather and Uncle Kenny, but I couldn’t. They had both been identified. Uncle Kenny was in one of the baby coffins.
I looked up at Val. I couldn’t read his expression. He was staring in the fierce, vacant way a man stares at something he can’t believe he’s seeing.
“You ever been to Ocean City?” he asked me out of the blue.
I shook my head. “My dad always said he was going to take us to the ocean someday. He said everybody should see it. He came across it on a boat once.”
“They have this thing called a boardwalk,” he went on. “It’s for people to walk on along the beach. It’s up high on stilts so you got a good view of the ocean on one side, and the other side has restaurants and games and souvenir shops and all the hotels behind it lit up at night.”
He pointed at the line of wooden boxes stretched out below us. A dog was sniffing around them.
“It looks like that.”
He quickly found a rock and let loose with a rocket throw. He had a great arm and perfect aim. He hit the dog square in its side. It twisted its body around and gave a high-pitched yelp before loping off.
From above me I heard him say, “I’m glad we didn’t find your dad. I’m glad she didn’t have to see him.”
I looked up and saw his eyes gleaming. I had never seen Val cry. It didn’t even occur to me that his eyes could be wet with tears. It seemed more like they had been varnished with something that could seal in his sorrow.
“Is my mom always going to be sad?” I asked him.
He picked up another rock.
“She’ll stop being sad someday. But I don’t think she’ll ever be able to be happy again.”
This time he threw the rock purely for distance. I watched it disappear across the road, behind the school, and beyond the boardwalk of coffins. I wondered if there was some bug over there, minding his own business, who had just been crushed beneath it.
———
The hills bordering Union Road have been strip-mined for as long as I’ve been alive. There’s a section farther north where they’re still mining and a section farther south where the replacement saplings have finally begun sprouting sporadically on the bare hillsides like a crew cut.
Here they s
topped working about three years ago. The land hasn’t been backfilled yet. In some spots the terrain is as barren and lifeless as photos sent home from the Mars probe, but without the red haze.
No one inhabits this stretch of road except for Bert Falls and his lawn-mower graveyard.
His half acre of land is blanketed with mowers of all colors in various stages of rust and mobility. Push, tractor, self-propelled. They are parked in packed lines and from a distance provide a festive splash of color against the bleak landscape. Up close they’re alive with snakes and rats.
Bert’s not licensed to run a repair shop. To my knowledge no one has ever seen him work on a mower. But whenever someone wants to get rid of one, they bring it here, knowing it will get a good home. If he’s around and awake and feeling ambitious, he’ll come outside of his small, mint green shoe box of a house to greet the donor and gesture with a glowing cigarette where to park it.
Across the road from Bert’s place is an abandoned house that used to belong to one of the Gertie miners and his family. I don’t know his widow’s specific story, but I imagine she was one who couldn’t find a job or a new husband and couldn’t make ends meet on her own, so she took her kids and left. It happened to a lot of people. I could never understand why the bank didn’t just let them keep the houses. No one new was going to move here and buy them. They were just going to sit here empty as reminders to those who got to stay that some were forced to leave, and that’s what happened.
I can tell that this house was no prize to begin with, or maybe it was until the death of the husband and then it went from being a happy home to a constant reminder of grief and a source of fear.
An elm tree, stricken in its youth, leans against the front of the house, dead but not down. Its bark has fallen away in patches, and the wood underneath is the greasy black color of the mummified faces I saw in the ancient-Egyptian exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum when I went there on a tour the day after signing my contract with the Bears.
Except for the tree sagging into the sagging roof, the yard is empty. No shrubs. No weeds. No wild carpet of briars and underbrush. Grass barely grows. For some reason nature has decided not to reclaim this place.
Val’s truck is parked next to the house on a section of yard that used to be a driveway. I park on the road behind Jolene’s car.
She’s sitting inside it with her head bobbing in time to some music she’s playing on the radio.
After our talk at her house this morning, I’m not sure how she’s going to treat me. She was civil to me on the phone when I called to tell her I’d found Val, but civil from Jolene is a bad sign. It’s like getting a piece of cake without frosting.
She gets out of the car.
“For Christ’s sake,” I say.
“What’s wrong?”
“Could you be any more transparent?”
“You have a problem with this dress?”
She’s wearing one of her most attractive dresses: a short, low-cut, fuzzy, pale pink sweater dress. Eb calls it her cotton-candy dress. Harrison calls it her man-candy dress.
“Where’s your uniform? You told me on the phone you weren’t able to get much of a break. How were you able to go home and change?”
“I drove home with my uniform unzipped. I had it off before I reached the staircase. I pulled this dress over my head as I was running back downstairs. Then I had to run back up and grab my shoes out of the closet, but that only took a second, since I keep these ones up front. I don’t wear them too often, since they’re pink and they don’t go with much, but I love them, so I keep them up front where I can look at them when I want to.”
She looks down at her shoes, turning her feet this way and that.
“How long have you been sitting here?”
“Five minutes.”
“He hasn’t come out?”
“He’s probably sleeping.”
“Or maybe he’s spying on you with a compact.”
Our eyes meet, and I search hers to see if she’s still mad at me. I’m not assuming she didn’t mean what she said in her kitchen—I just want to know that there are no hard feelings between us.
“Very funny,” she says, and starts toward the house.
She doesn’t hate me.
As we walk across the yard, I realize it’s not bare at all. My boots crunch over scraps of wood, rusted tool parts, bits of trash, and beer cans crushed flat that have become fossilized into the dirt. Val’s not the first person to have bunked down here for a night or two.
The front-porch steps are newer than the rest of the house but not as well made. Someone has built them recently. They’re poorly constructed of wood that was probably already rotting when it was nailed together. The bottom step is split down the middle. The second is stained on one side with a red crust of animal guts.
Despite the outward appearance, there’s a calm lingering here. Unlike well-tended, valued homes that reject decay, this place has slipped easily and gratefully into collapse, like the very old greet the realization of painless death in their sleep.
Before we can knock, the front door opens with a yank and a musty groan. Val’s suddenly there, not six inches from me, behind a brittle black screen, in a pair of torn jeans and no shirt. He’s not wearing the hat. He has his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looks better in the hat; it muffles his stare.
He’s in his bare feet. I take a second look and realize he’s in his bare foot. The other jean leg is tied in a knot above where his knee should have been. He’s holding a rifle in one hand, with the stock on the floor, using it as a crutch.
He looks Jolene up and down, then looks at the brown paper bag she’s holding that has the photo from Zo in it and one of the boxes of cigars I took from Marcella’s.
“I don’t get Meals on Wheels anymore,” he says.
“We’re not with Meals on Wheels,” Jolene tells him.
“Then maybe this is a new way to help the homebound? Feels on Wheels?”
“If that’s a reference to my appearance,” she says, smiling, “I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“You take it as a compliment that a guy would want to cop a feel from you?”
“Why not?”
His eyes rest briefly on her face, then flick past her at the shifting shadows of lawn-mower vermin across the road.
“Do I get an extra feel since I’m a decorated war hero?” he asks, scratching his chest.
Jolene watches his fingers rake back and forth beneath the dark hair.
“What were you decorated for?” she asks.
“Christmas. The guys put tinsel in my hair and used me for a tree.”
“I suppose it was hard to find an evergreen in Vietnam,” I jump in, trying to become part of the conversation.
I regret the comment instantly, even though I’m not sure what was wrong with it. He’s still physically standing in front of me, but the person I was talking to vanishes. He doesn’t turn hostile. He doesn’t even seem outwardly upset. He just disappears behind the same untouchable, dark calm I witnessed at the funeral home.
“You want to know about ’Nam, go rent Platoon. I don’t have time for that shit.”
“I wasn’t asking about ’Nam. I don’t care about ’Nam.”
I regret this comment instantly, too. I do care about ’Nam. I care a great deal about ’Nam, for purely selfish reasons. The war there took him away from me, and it’s always been easier for me to blame the war than to blame him for the fact that even after it was over, he never came back. He never wrote either. He promised he would write, but he didn’t.
He wrote to his mom. I saw those letters. They were always brief, and the words didn’t seem to come from him. I imagined the army handing out form letters for each soldier to copy in his own hand and sign his name to. He talked about how the war was coming right along, as if it were a worthwhile project requiring a lot of time and a lot of men, like the building of a bridge. He talked about the weather being hot, the food being terrible, the guys i
n his platoon being okay, the rain coming suddenly in thick sticky downpours like a gush of gray milk, the Vietnamese people being nice, the terrain being jungles and rice paddies and slick red mud, all of it hard to maneuver in. He never wrote about the fighting. He never wrote about death. He never wrote about an enemy.
He always ended by saying he missed everybody, but he never specified anyone in particular. He never asked about me.
“I don’t mean I don’t care about it. I don’t mean it’s not important. I just mean you don’t have to talk about it.” I fumble miserably with my words, all of them seeming to be the wrong ones. “That’s not why we’re here.”
“This is for you,” Jolene interrupts, trying to save me.
She holds up the bag.
“Well, well,” he says.
He pushes open the screen door with his free hand and grips his gun more firmly.
“This must be pretty damn special to warrant a police escort and one of Centresburg’s finest and most beloved waitresses taking time away from her coffeepot to get all dressed up and drive the whole way out here to deliver it to me.”
He looks directly at Jolene.
“Course we both know the real reason you did that.”
She moves a step closer to him.
“Why is that?”
“Because I’m the first man you’ve ever had more than a three-word conversation with who didn’t try and get into your lacy pink panties.”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“It has everything to do with it. You didn’t come out here to be nice to me. It isn’t in your fuzzy pink biogenetic makeup to give a rat’s ass about some one-legged freak show. It’s all about those lacy pink panties. Proving to yourself how goddamned precious they are.”
“Stop saying that. You don’t know anything about my panties.”
“I know they’re pink and lacy.”