by Lee Smith
I looked up and saw a man in white pants and a striped shirt and a tie, the best looking man you can immagine! At first I thought I was dreaming. I couldnt see him too good for the sun in my eyes. So I sat up real fast but he said, Oh no, stay right there, you look so comfortable, and so I did. And he sat down on the rock beside me, real close.
You’re Ivy Rowe, he said.
I felt a chill at that moment, in spite of the heat.
How do you know that? I said.
I came in the store Monday, he said, and saw you, and asked around and found out who you are. You had on a blue dress, he said, which was true. He leaned down real close over my face, grinning. He has very white teeth and dark eyes with the longest eyelashes ever, and perfect slicked-back black hair. He smells too good for a man.
Is that a fact, I said. I felt short of breath and couldnt think of much to say.
I’ve been looking for you, he said. I only came to this thing because they said you would be here. He took my wet hand in his hand and held it. His hand was the soft white hand of a man who has never worked in his life. He wears a gold wristwatch.
You seem mighty sure of yourself, I said, snatching my hand away. I dont even know who you are.
He laughed and leaned closer and brushed my cheek with his lips. You will, he said. I flicked some water in his face and laughed while he sat up and wiped it off with a clean handkerchief. I didn’t care if I got him wet or not.
I like that, he said, grinning. I like my horses and my girls to have some spirit—which made me so mad that I leaned way over and splashed black water all over him and got his white pants dirty. Then I got up and ran off through the woods laughing, with him hollering curses after me. I didnt care either.
I ran home wet as could be but the breeze had nearabout dried me off by the time I made it back up the hill. My feet were killing me from running on the red-dog road, which is what you call a road made of the cinders left when a gob pile burns out. That’s what the company makes roads but of. If Tessie Porter thought I looked funny when I got home, she never said a word about it, and Joli held out her little arms the minute she saw me.
So I watched the fireworks the way I wanted to in the first place, Ethel, sitting on the front porch holding Joli on my lap, and I bet it was the finest place in Diamond Va. to watch them from. They’d shoot up from the dark bottom, up and up and up the mountain side, and then burst open against the night sky so pretty you’d have to catch your breath. Little John Arthur came out and sat on his blanket—that blanket he carries everyplace—by my feet, and Joli never cried once. She laughed, though. She thought the fireworks were funny. I thought they were so beautiful. Pale green shining shooting sparks against the black, then red pinwheels, then pink, and then a shower of gold. I sat right there and watched them. I think the night air in summer smells so sweet, anyway. I like to sit out. Joli went to sleep in my arms and I carried her in the house and put her down. After the fireworks were over, a great cheer went up, and then you could hear car horns and glass breaking someplace, and somebody yelling. It was clear there’d be some fighting, that night. So I stood on the porch as bye and bye everybody came back up Company Hill, and lights went on, and you could hear kids crying and people arguing and carrying on, and music welling up all around so it seemed, from these dark close houses right up to the dark night sky.
Next door, Rush Gayheart started fiddling The Devil’s Dream. He never says much, Rush, just fiddles and frowns a lot. Beulah and Curtis don’t like him. They don’t like Violet either. Curtis and Beulah think they are too good for the Gayhearts, but if they dont watch out, they will get too good for everybody if you ask me. That night, Curtis had stayed to play poker with some company men, so I reckon he was in hog heaven, but after while Beulah came marching up the hill by herself, fit to be tied.
Ivy! she hollered, and when I answered Yes real quiet from practically under her nose, she jumped a foot.
Hush or you will wake up John Arthur, I said, for I had made him up a pallet on the porch. Dont you remember how much we liked to sleep out on the porch of a summer evening? I asked Beulah, and she said Yes, and then burst into tears.
Well Beulah, whatever is the matter? I got up and hugged her and made her sit down on the step with me.
Oh everything! Her words came tumbling out like Diamond Creek running down the mountain over rocks. Everything. I try my best to get away from Sugar Fork and I never can it seems like, it’s not fair, I’ve always got something like that right next door to remind me. I knew she meant Rush fiddling. I knew she was thinking of Revel and Daddy, like I was. Oh I want to leave here, she said. I want to go up in the world so bad, I want oh I want—but here, she broke down in crying. So I held her head and kind of rocked her, and then she said, Ivy, I am going to have another baby.
No! I said.
Yes! she said. And I have done everything I know to do, but nothing worked.
What do you mean, nothing worked? I asked.
I mean like a coca-cola douch or taking Milk of Magnesia, she said, and I said, Dont even tell me.
Dont tell Curtis, Beulah said. Then she flung something out in the yard—I couldn’t see what, in the dark, and started crying again.
There’s your shoes! she said.
Where? I was so surprised.
Out there, you dont care anyway, you left them at the creek, she said. You dont care about a thing but yourself. You are so selfish, she said. She cried awhile longer. Then she said, Ivy, dont you know who that was, down at the creek today? Dont you care? That was Franklin Ransom, that’s who, the superintendent’s son, he’s just visiting here now. Curtis said he’s been asking everybody who you are, and where you live, and finally somebody told him to ask Curtis, and Curtis told him. So see what a chance you had? and to throw it all away like that, like you always do—I cant stand it, Beulah said. It’s like you get everything in the world on a silver platter, and then you throw it down in the mud.
How did you get those shoes? I asked her, and finally she said that she was in the store with Curtis, after the fireworks, when Franklin Ransom came in with them, and said to give them to me along with his kindest regards. You could tell he was mad, she said.
Then Beulah grabbed my arm so hard that her fingernails almost drew blood. Listen here, she said. This is one chance you will not throw away. Oh if I was you . . . if I was educated like you . . . if I’d had the chances you have—well, if he does come back, if he comes up here again, you be nice to him, you hear me?
So Ethel, that started it.
Of course he came back and took me riding in his car, and then riding again, and then out to the picture show. Big Curtis and Beulah are tickled to death.
And in the meantime, two funny things have happened. One is that Tessie, who never says one word, came up to me the other day and said Missy—this is what she calls me—Missy, I just want you to know, that boy is no good. What boy? I said, but Tessie was skittering off by then like a waterbug down the hill, scared to death. You knows which one, she hollered back over her shoulder.
And the other thing is that Oakley has pitched a fit. You know he is always so nice and so easy-going, Ethel—you know how Oakley is. But he came over here Tuesday after he saw me out riding with Franklin Ransom, who has a blue Ford car, and busted right into the kitchen where I was washing my hair in the sink, wearing some old wrapper of Momma’s.
Ivy! he yelled, and pulled me up by the hair so hard that it hurt, and I stood there dripping water on Beulah’s floor. It’s real bad to waste water because you have to haul it up from the pump yourself, so naturally I got mad at Oakley.
What’s this about Franklin Ransom? he said. His whole face was black, he’d come straight from the mine.
None of your business, I said. I was about to cry because I had soap in my eyes, and Oakley was acting so high-handed.
You’re my girl, Oakley said, and I said right back, I am not!
The hell you aint, he said, and pulled me over to him and kis
sed me. Now this was the first time he has kissed me since we were kids, Ethel. So you know I am not his girl. It made me so mad I pushed him, and he slipped down on the wet floor, and pulled me down with him. Right then Joli came toddling in and started laughing and I started laughing too. She thought we were all playing.
Oh come on, Oakley, I said, You are my best old friend, now dont be crazy. But he wouldn’t laugh with me or even smile. He just stomped off, kicking the screen door on his way out, leaving me and Joli sliding around in the floor.
And Oakley has not been by here, or said one word to me since! He knows when I am working down at the store, and he walks by the soda-fountain sometimes but does not speak, he is so childish. How Oakley Fox thought for even one minute that I was his girl is beyond me! I am not anybody’s girl, Ethel. And I know Oakley and me will be friends again one day.
But now Franklin has asked me to come up to his parents house for dinner, and Beulah is all excited. You would think it was her, not me. She says it is about time I made a good thing out of a man. She acts like I am an old maid not a girl of 19. But poor Beulah, she is pregnant again and not herself. I have not got the heart to tell her that Mr. and Mrs. Ransom are in New York City right now. So I know what will happen if I go up there. What would you do, if you was me? Well, on second thought, I know what you would do. You would do exactly what you wanted to! But I have Joli to take care of now, and I am beholden as well as ruint. I will let you know what happens.
And in the meantime, what about Victor?
Can you and Stoney do anything?
I remain your worried sister,
IVY ROWE.
Dear Franklin,
To answer your question, Yes.
If you can keep a civil tongue in your head and your hands to yourself for a change.
In haste,
IVY.
Dear Geneva,
I have to say I am not sorry to hear about you losing Sam Russell Sage, nor surprised either one. It is just what I would expect! A man that taken with himself will try to get as many women as he can, in my view, and that is a lot with the Lord on your side. I still recall how awful he was, how he left those little black hairs all over the sink and then acted like it was an honor for me and Ludie to get to clean them up! I think Sam Russell Sage just uses the Lord to get money and women. I think you are better off without him but I am sorry you found out in such a way. What was she like? What was her mother like? It takes a lot of nerve to just come up and knock on your door like that. I would love to have been a fly on the wall and heard you all talking and seen you drinking a dope. I would love to have seen his face when he walked in and found you all there! I am not surprised to hear about Ludie or some of the others, not even the married ones except for Mrs. Presley up the street, now that is a surprise to me. I am also surprised that he pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes for so long. I wish there was some way to get Garnie away from him, but Garnie is wellnigh grown now, as you say, and anyway I have come to think that anything is better than going down in the mine. Well, almost anything. Playing the piano in a roadhouse is certainly better, for who are we to say, maybe Johnny can go on from there. He may go back to school yet. I would rather have him playing in a horehouse than going in the mine, Geneva that’s the truth!
When I first came here, I thought this was Paradise. Well, let me tell you, it is a far cry from Paradise. Now that the war is over they are laying men off left and right, and working part weeks, and taking off shifts, and people don’t know what to do with themselves. They have given up their land, those hardscrabble places we all came from, and they have noplace to go back to. They have lived here so long they have forgot how to garden anyway, or put up food, or trade for goods, or anything about how they used to live. So they have got nothing now. They have got nothing but what they owe to the company which is so much they will never pay it off. The men lay around and drink in the daytime, and play cards and run cockfights up on the mountain, and get in fights themselves. They will bet on anything. If there’s two birds on a washline, they will bet as to which one will fly off first. I heard a man say out loud in the store that he gets along so good with women because he makes it a practice to frail them with a stick. Nobody in there batted an eye when he said it, I believe this trashy behavior is common. There are outlaw people here now that care for nothing, and men that swap wives just like they are swapping horses. On payday, you have to stay in the house at night because everybody is milling around out there drunk, and most of them packing guns. I thought I was coming over here to raise my baby on this mountain like we were raised, but it is not so.
It is no good to raise kids here. The big ones run together like a pack of wild dogs, they get into everything. They climb all over the old tipple and slide down the chute, which is so dangerous, and yell at their elders, they don’t know no better kind of life. The real bad boys get sent to the reform school over at Greendale where they whip them on a barrel I am told, until they come back and make good miners. You can go in the mine at 15. Go in the mine and never come out, is what I say! I am glad I have got a little girl. Now, that mine has come to look like a big old mouth, swallowing boys whole.
And I guess you can not expect too much from children that have been raised on this hill by their mamas who don’t know any better themselves, who never see their men except to send them off in the pitch black morning to the mine, and try to get the coaldust out of the house and keep up with the little kids all day long, this kind of a life will make you crazy. No wonder Myra Ramey down the road ties her baby to a chair leg so she can go to the store by herself. No wonder there’s so many wives that drink, and marriages that break up here, it is not any kind of a life to have. Curtis and Beulah keep themselves above it all of course, they are looking to move on up in the company. But I work in the store all day, I see everybody, and know what’s going on.
Violet Gayheart tried to tell me the truth when I first came over here and could have left I reckon, and she was right. Now I have seen Violet’s husband come home from the mine when he has been working in water, with his clothes froze to where they will stand up by theirselves when he takes them off, like a headless man standing there in the kitchen floor. And now I have seen Oakley Fox’s brother Ray, that is so sweet, get a facefull of little holes like the face of the moon, from shooting his coal too close. You carry a breast auger and drill a hole for every ton you want to shoot, and then you put four sticks of 40 percent dynamite in each hole, and shoot it. After you get your coal loose, you have got a fresh cut to mine, and a big man like Ray Fox can load 8 to 10 tons a day. But it is awful work. The safety rules have never been too grand, and now that times are so hard they are not paying much attention to them at all, and it is every man for himself and so much of the neighborness is gone. No wonder the wives get to drinking and crying, they are living in constant dread of that high-pitched whistle that means an accident, that a timber has give way or that the gas has caught on fire. If a man gets disabled, the company will move him out, just kick him right out of his house. But if a man gets killed, the company will let his wife live on in his house, and this hill is pocked with widows, Geneva. I know one that takes in washing and one that takes in men. Life is so hard here that it leads many right to church, Oakley and Ray Fox for an instance, and Beulah and Curtis too but they go down the river road to the Presbyterian Church because that is where the company folks go. But I am like Momma I reckon, and do not seem to have much use for church. What I like to do of a Sunday is stay home and play with Joli. Sometimes Violet and me will sit out in the yard on a quilt and play poker while Rush fiddles. I have gotten real close to Violet even though Beulah won’t have a thing to do with her. So whenever Beulah and Curtis go someplace, I go next door.
For Violet is like you, Geneva, or like Ethel. She will call a spade a spade. I should have listened to Violet way back when. Instead I had my head all full of notions, it’s the way I am, I reckon—full of notions. I wonder if I will ever get over it. One r
eason Violet is so bitter I think is that she had one baby that died before I moved over here, and now her little girl Martha has got something bad wrong with her. But the older boy R.T. is okay I reckon. Rush has lost his nerve though. This is how Violet describes it. She says Rush used to talk your ear off and cut up like crazy, that he was the biggest ladies man in East Tenessee when she met him, and famous for fiddling. Rush is right much older than Violet. But when his daddy died and left the farm to Rush’s no-account brother, because of Rush carrying on so, then Rush decided to come over here and get in on the ground floor so to speak and make a quick buck to set him and Violet up in housekeeping. They did not figure on staying.
What happened, though, was that the very first month he was here, the methane gas—what they call the firedamp—built up in the shaft he was in and blew the man next to him all to hell and trapped Rush in there with that man’s body on top of him for a day and a half. Can you immagine this? Can you think of what went on in his mind then, on that freezing cold wet mine floor with a dead man on top of him like a lover? I can not.
Rush came out of the mine a different man, and then right after that, their baby died. Now Rush is a shadow of himself, Violet says. He is still a big good-looking man but his coal-ringed eyes are so sad, they look dark and old. He is dreamy a lot. He owes too much to leave, even if he had the will to. They have still got a big doctor bill they are paying off, on the baby that died.