The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  She didn’t want to think too much about it or it might all start to make sense. She would never believe the way Anneth and El did—that church really wasn’t necessary as long as you believed in something—but she found herself seeing their side of things. That was a mistake, not because she intended to be small minded, but because thoughts like that were not really thoughts at all. Instead, they were temptation.

  She cleared her mind and focused on her line, waiting for another nibble.

  “Do you think Anneth’s all right?” she said.

  “Why wouldn’t she be? She’s a grown woman.”

  “She’s never been away from home, though. Running off to Nashville like some wild fool. Always looking for some kind of adventure.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” El said. His worm made a plop in the water as he cast his line out again.

  “I worry about her, though.”

  El gave her a quick glance, then went back to staring at the water. After a long silence he said, “You worry about everything. About Anneth. About the church.”

  She hated it when he said this, and he said it all the time. She didn’t want to be seen that way, didn’t want to be known as the worry-wart old woman. She had been seen that way all her life, not only as a worrywart but also as old. Even when she was twelve, people had treated her like an adult, had laid burdens on her that were too much for a child to bear. She was sick of feeling this way. And perhaps that was why skipping church and giving herself over to fate, just throwing her soul out on the air the way a fishing line could be sailed across the sky with the flick of one’s wrist, was suddenly so very appealing.

  “When you married me, you knew that I went to church, El. You can’t expect me to change now.”

  El reeled his line in and found a cleaned hook. He sat quietly while he baited his line. “I didn’t know you went every time the door was cracked, though,” he said. “I believe in God, Easter. Prayer’s the only thing that got me through my time in Korea. But I can’t abide going all the time. I can’t live my life inside a church house.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to,” she said. A breeze rose up and caused their boat to turn. She could hear the creak of the anchor rope.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You go out with me like this every once in a while and I’ll go to church with you now and then. I know that Bible pretty good, Easter, and it seems to me that Jesus spent as much time fishing as he did preaching.”

  “I don’t recall him ever being in a honky-tonk, though. I imagine you’d like for me to go there with you on occasion, too.”

  “There’s two things that give me a whole lot of pleasure, Easter: a cold beer and a day fishing. I can’t deny that.”

  Before she could answer she felt a tug on her line. The fish pulled the end of her pole down toward the water, nearly jerking the reel out of her hands. “I got another one!” she hollered, and standing up, she began to crank the line in.

  THEY DROVE INTO Nashville at daybreak.

  Anneth was driving, and Matthew was slumped against the door, sleeping. She glanced at him but decided that she would not wake him for a while. She wanted to experience seeing Nashville for the first time alone. He had been to cities before; he had played in Cincinnati and Knoxville. But she had never been anywhere. She came over the hill and saw the skyline glistening there in the light of morning, and it made her feel like crying. She had never seen anything so strange and wonderful in her life. It was all laid out before her like a painting and she thought it strange that she was looking down on a place where thousands of people lived, all within one view. She imagined what the people inside the houses were doing right now. Most were probably still asleep. It was a Sunday morning and they had probably been up late. Some were in their kitchens frying up breakfast, getting ready for church. Others were throwing back their bedcovers and touching their feet to the floor for the first time this morning. These people were doing the same thing that people back home were doing. It struck her that she had never really thought of cities as places where people lived. She had always pictured cities as office buildings and lawyers on the street and nothing else. But now she could see the houses standing close as gravestones on the ridge. In the downtown there were the tallest buildings Anneth had ever seen. As she crossed the bridge, she saw that the city was tucked into the crook of the river, which was wide and green. She drove slowly and looked at the river. Sunlight caught in the whitecaps and sent glints of brightness up to her. Even without the sign, somehow she knew it was the Cumberland River, the same river that snaked around in her part of the world. If she got on a boat and rowed against the current, she would eventually get back to Crow County. She would come to the confluence of the Black Banks and Cumberland rivers and she would be home again.

  Now here they were, but she didn’t know where to go next. She saw a sign that said RYMAN AUDITORIUM, so she went that way. She figured if she got them to the Grand Ole Opry, that was a good place to start. Since it was early on a Sunday, the streets were empty. She’d figured cities would be places of great commotion at all hours of the day. But she passed only a couple of cars as she went down Broadway. She passed bars and record stores and churches with spires that pierced the sky. At the stoplight there was another sign. She glanced down the street the sign pointed toward and there it was—the Grand Ole Opry, just as she had seen it so many times in magazines. She couldn’t believe it was real. And it was so huge. She ignored the stoplight and turned anyway. Another car came speeding through the intersection, and the driver laid on the horn as he passed behind her, barely missing her bumper.

  Anneth slid the car alongside the curb and turned off the ignition. She rolled down her window and listened. There was nothing. Complete silence, right in the middle of the big city. It was cold in the shadow of the Ryman, but she liked the way it felt. She got out of the car quietly and lit a cigarette and stood peering up at the building as she smoked. She thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life. All those bricks, hundreds and hundreds of them. It seemed like a holy place to her, although she knew it was a sacrilege to think so. She thought of all the singers who had been through those doors and all the times she had sat listening to them on the radio back home.

  She felt a sudden pang at not having Easter here with her to experience this. Easter claimed not to like country music, but Anneth knew that she secretly did. Anneth had seen Easter tapping her foot along to Patsy Cline, even singing the words to some of Hank Williams’s songs. And she felt bad that she was out seeing the world while Easter had never even left Crow County. Anneth missed home already, but she wanted to see as much as she could. She wanted to see cities and oceans and deserts. She wanted to go up in the Empire State Building and stand on the lawn of the White House. She wanted to swim in the Pacific and wade in the Atlantic. And she intended to stand backstage at the Opry. She would be standing in the wings as Matthew made his debut. Maybe he’d let her sing backup for him. The possibilities were limitless. They were in Nashville now, and anything could happen. That’s what Matthew had kept saying on the drive down from Jellico to Knoxville. He had stretched his arm out and laid his wrist on the steering wheel, leaning back with his leg propped up so that his knee was as high as the dashboard, smoking one cigarette after another. “When we get to Nashville, it’s untelling what will happen,” he kept saying. “This is the sort of place where your dreams can come true.”

  She walked down the side of the auditorium and saw the windows with their different colors of glass. The air smelled of the river—green and sweet, like the inside of a hickory-nut shell. She walked back around and hopped up onto the hood of the car and sat there looking at the Ryman. She sat so long that she slowly became aware of the streets’ growing more and more crowded. She glanced at her watch and realized that it was eight o’clock—she had been sitting there for more than an hour. People would be going to church before long and then the streets would be full. She would never have anothe
r moment in Nashville like this, when the city belonged to her. When everything was quiet and she could take it all in without being disturbed.

  Anneth got back in the car and sat on her knees in the seat, studying Matthew. He had reclined his seat as far back as it would go and had wadded up his coat to make a pillow. In his sleep he had hunched up his shoulders as if he were cold. His chest rose very slowly, so slowly that she could barely see any movement there, and she had a momentary panic that he might have died as she drove across Tennessee. Matthew looked completely different when he was asleep. Watching him, it was easy to question why she was with him. She wondered if she loved him. Sometimes she was sure of it—love swelled in her chest when she saw his beautiful eyes. His face was so square and roughly hewn, but in his eyes she saw the child he had been. Within his eyes she saw the kindness that lurked inside Matthew, and that was what she believed in. That was what she loved. And she loved his hands, which could play a guitar better than anybody she had ever seen. She loved the way his fingers danced across the strings as if barely touching them, like a Jesus bug walking across the river. Now, even his hands were different, because on one of his fingers was the wedding band she had put there. It didn’t look right; it was so new and shiny that it looked fake.

  “Matthew,” she said, and shook him gently. “Wake up.”

  Matthew rose up with a start, his eyes still half-closed. His knuckles popped against the windshield. “What is it?” he said. He opened his eyes all the way and looked around the cab of the car as if he didn’t know where he was.

  Anneth fell back against the driver’s seat and folded her arms across her chest. “Well, I got us to Nashville.”

  Eight

  Why They Call It Falling

  SHE LOVED THE WAY it felt, to be standing up here with everyone listening to her. Of course, people always listened to her when she sang in church, too, but this was different. In church her voice stirred the Holy Ghost up and caused it to spread out over the people, and they fell back, slain in the spirit, pushed back by her singing, but still, they only cried out to the Lord. It had nothing at all to do with her, as was only right.

  But here! Here the people were dancing and raising their beer bottles high and wolf-whistling to her. They leaned into one another and said she sounded like Patsy Cline, even better than Patsy. “Listen to that girl sing, hot damn, has she got a voice! Sing it, honey!”

  She was singing a song she had heard only a few times—“Walkin’ After Midnight”—when Anneth had played it on her record player in her bedroom as loudly as it would go. She couldn’t help herself from growling out the words and leaning into the microphone and closing her eyes to feel every word of the song. The music took control of her and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

  So this was what backsliding was like.

  Easter had heard people whisper about it all her life. She remembered when she was a child: a woman who was thought to be the most devoted churchgoer had given in to temptation and gotten pregnant out of wedlock. A backslider. And only recently, a man who gave his tithes every first of the month had suddenly broken down and gone back to drinking and dancing. Another backslider. And here she was, singing in a honky-tonk. Singing a country song, a song she hadn’t even realized she knew all the words to until she had been prodded up onto the stage and opened her mouth. She couldn’t even fathom how she had gone from simply missing church to singing in a bar with a bunch of drunks dancing down below her. But here she was.

  The first couple of minutes of the song she had been enraptured by this, had let their admiration take over her better senses. But now, in this last verse, she realized that she was backsliding. She would not be able to go back to church without rededicating herself. She would have to start over from scratch, get baptized again and wash away her sins. An ache came over Easter, a fist that curled its fingers up in her very gut. She kept singing, but the initial thrill had gone. The people should have realized it, too—they should have known that she had lost the spirit of the song, but they were all drunk. When the final word of the song was sung, it was not even hers anymore. Her guilt had taken the joy away from her, and as they applauded wildly, cheering and stomping their feet on the wooden floor, some of them even standing on their chairs, their cigarettes clamped between their teeth as they clapped, she sped across the stage, looking away from them.

  Even though she tried to push past El, he caught her in his arms and kissed her on the ear. His breath on her face smelled of whiskey. “They loved you, baby,” he said.

  Easter stepped back. She wanted to leave right then, but the crowd was still clapping and cheering. It seemed they wouldn’t stop. The band was strumming along and looking to her. The lead guitarist hooked his thumb through the air, motioning her back.

  “They’re wanting you to sing another one,” El said, smiling. For the first time she noticed that his teeth were large and filled up his whole mouth. She had thought she knew his whole face as well as her own.

  “No,” she said, and although she meant for it to be forceful, her voice came out as only a whisper.

  She saw an exit door off to the side of the stage. As she opened it she heard the guitarist say to the audience, “Looks like she’s a little bashful,” and then the door slammed behind her and there was the sudden, complete silence of late fall. She folded her arms across her chest and looked out at the rows of cars. She wanted to cry but couldn’t.

  The door opened briefly and she heard the chorus of a George Jones song—she couldn’t remember the name of it—and then El was right behind her. He put his hands on her hips and she could feel his breath on the back of her head as he spoke. “What in the hell’s wrong with you?”

  She turned around quickly. She felt like slapping his face. “That was wrong, El. It was wrong of me to even come to this place. I told you that I was a churchgoing woman,” she said. Her mouth was full of so many words that she didn’t know if she’d be able to piece them all together correctly. “And you ought to have respected that. You shouldn’t have asked me to come here with you.”

  “We’re young,” he said, cooing to her, the way he talked when he wanted to get in the bed. “Got plenty of time to go to church.”

  “You should have married Anneth,” she said. “Not me. You’re just like her.”

  El put his hands on his hips. “Maybe you are, too,” he said. “But you’re too damn proud to admit it.”

  “I want to go to the house,” she said, and started walking. She looked about the parking lot, trying to find their car. There were so many cars that it looked as if a church revival was going on inside. “Right now.”

  But then he was kissing her, and she felt herself relax in his arms. And all at once his mouth tasted good, and she had a sudden memory of when she was sick and her grandmother had made her drink whiskey and honey mixed together. It was the only time she had ever had liquor. She remembered the soothing feeling of it on her throat, and the way it made her drift off into a perfect, dreamless sleep. Her eyes were shut very tightly and she could see Serena leaning over her with the bottle. A flannel nightgown, her hairpins glinting in the firelight, Anneth peeking around her hip. “It’ll make you feel so much better,” Serena had said. “It’ll cure you.”

  He guided her to the car and then they were in the backseat and he was moving on top of her. She opened her eyes and saw that a light misting of rain had fallen on the windows. She could smell the rain and El, and they seemed to mix into one clean scent that she wanted to drink up. His head was at her neck and then at her breast and she found herself moaning. She thought, I am young. And to her surprise, she saw that she had never felt this way before.

  AFTER THAT NIGHT, her life was a stack of papers scattered by a strong wind. There was no recapturing every piece of it, no possible way of knowing when each page was sucked up into the sky. She had no idea how it all happened so fast. She kept going with El to the clubs and honky-tonks on Saturday nights and started sleeping in on Sunday
mornings. Sometimes she would get up in time to make it to church but was too ashamed to go. Once or twice, she had gotten ready and even gone as far as putting her hand on the church’s doorknob but had pulled away with a start, as if she had touched something hot. She couldn’t possibly go back in there. The preacher’s wife, Helen, came to the house, but Easter stood behind her heavy curtains and watched as her old friend knocked and peeked into the three rectangular windows on the front door. Helen stayed out on the porch so long that Easter thought she might never leave, but finally she turned, eased back down the steps, and walked across the yard to her car, looking back as if she knew Easter was watching her. Easter stopped answering the phone because she feared it was somebody from church, asking why she wasn’t there. She always made El answer, and when the caller was someone from church, she made El say she wasn’t home. The sins just kept piling up.

  People started coming to the club especially to hear her sing. When she didn’t want to go onstage, the crowd chanted her name, the men hitting their beer bottles against the tables. When she sang, people danced. Women stood at the edge of the dance floor with their eyes closed and sang along with her. It was a little bit like being in church, this feeling of unison, of being part of something bigger, and she liked that. It made her feel buoyant.

  Standing up there singing, she wondered what Anneth would do if she saw her like this. She’d probably pass out, Easter thought. Anneth couldn’t even have imagined Easter up on the stage, moving her hips, belting out songs. Easter didn’t know if she would be able to do this with Anneth in the audience. Maybe Anneth’s leaving had freed Easter in some strange way.