The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  Still, every time she found one of Anneth’s postcards in the mail, she couldn’t help but cry. She had never thought that Anneth would leave, certainly not leave the state altogether. But she had a shoe box full of postcards to prove that Anneth was gone. Each card was different: the Grand Ole Opry, the Tennessee Capitol, the Parthenon, the Cumberland River, one with gold records on it, another with a view of the bars all along Broadway. Anneth wrote on the back of each one as if in a great hurry—as if her life in the city was far too busy to linger over her written thoughts or her penmanship. “We are living the high life!” Or “Here is where Matthew is playing right now!” Or “Oh, Easter, I miss you so, but it is so exciting here. You would never get over it in your life!” Easter knew better, though. Surely Anneth was homesick. Surely she missed Easter. She had to.

  To lose herself, Easter listened to the radio all the time and learned every song that came on. El came home from work with a new record album every time he got paid: Marty Robbins, Patsy Cline, and Brenda Lee. Those were her favorites. One day he brought home an album by Wanda Jackson that Easter ended up secretly loving. Sometimes when no one was there with her, she would put on “Fujiyama Mama” and hold her hairbrush like a microphone, singing and moving along to the music. She had seen Wanda Jackson one time on television and was downright shocked, not only at how beautiful she was, but also at how subtly she used her body to emphasize every word of the song. She didn’t do anything more than tap her foot, but there was all that fringe on her dress that made it seem as if she was moving all over the place. She was a presence to behold. Easter stood in her bathroom with the record player turned up as loud as it would go and growled into the mirror, though she would never have done this in public—the song was too dirty. But she loved the way it made her feel.

  El talked her into driving over to Hazard for a talent show, and she won by audience applause—there was a big meter onstage that moved up and down with the intensity of the clapping. Then they went to Pikeville and she opened up the show for Conway Twitty, and one thing led to another and before long she found herself in Knoxville, Tennessee, on that Cas Walker show that everybody watched in the mornings. Hanging behind the stage was a backdrop painted with four raccoons up a tree and a man standing under them with a gun, which she thought a strange thing to sing in front of. They had to be there at four-thirty in the morning to begin taping, but she was wide awake when the big television camera moved near and a man leaned over to whisper, “Five, four, three,” and then mouthed the rest of the numbers silently, counting them down on his fingers with great exaggeration.

  As soon as she opened her mouth to sing “Sweet Nothings”—which everyone said she could sing just as good as Brenda Lee—she realized that thousands and thousands of people were watching her. She had heard someone say that the show broadcast to four states. Surely everyone back in Black Banks was seeing her. The Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour was the most popular show on television and people tuned in as much to see Cas Walker, a rich grocer, talk bad to people who owed him money as they did for the music, so that everybody not only watched this show but also talked about it. Why hadn’t she thought of this before stepping before the camera? But what difference did it make, anyway? She wasn’t going to church anymore, so they knew she was up to something. Her secret had been out long before she realized it. Instead of freezing at this realization, however, she sang louder. She broke loose and began to move around in a way she never had before. There was only a scattering of crew members and a couple of other people sitting in the folding chairs in front of her, but they were dancing around in their seats, too. She leaned back into the song, closed her eyes, and let the words rip from deep within. She smiled for the camera and winked to a woman sitting out there—she didn’t know her, of course, but she had seen singers do this before and thought it looked professional.

  When she was finished, the few people who were there jumped up, clapping and whistling. A man hit a switch and recorded applause filled up the studio. Cas Walker himself came out and put his huge hand in the small of her back. She stood there smiling into the camera without knowing what else to do. “Now that gal can sing,” Cas said in his raspy voice. He tapped her back with the tips of his fingers and somehow she knew this was her sign to exit, so she moved out of the camera’s range and Cas held up a piece of notebook paper and began to rattle off a list of people who had recently written bad checks at his groceries in Knoxville.

  As soon as Easter was offstage, a man in a leather jacket grabbed her by the arm and led her down the hallway, back toward the waiting room. She didn’t see El anywhere. “Honey, you can sing better than anybody I ever heard. Better than Kitty Wells.”

  “I sure hope so,” Easter said. She couldn’t stand to hear Kitty Wells sing.

  “I want to sign you up for a record deal.”

  Easter laughed and pulled her arm away from him. “Shoot, buddy, you must be out of your mind. I just do this for fun.”

  “Fun?” he said, holding his cowboy hat with both hands. Easter thought cowboy hats were a stupid thing for country singers to wear. No one she knew wore them—and all she knew were country people. “We could make a fortune.”

  “There’s no way I’d go on the road and do all that. I’ve got a husband and a home and people that I could never leave.”

  The man’s face seemed to be growing redder. He shook his head and laughed, then clicked a business card out between two fingers, as if he had pulled it from his shirt cuff. “If you ever decide to, you let me know. I can make you into a star.”

  He was wearing cowboy boots and they made a hollow sound as they faded away down the hall. She thought he looked pathetic walking away with the fringe on his white leather coat swinging in rhythm with his footfalls.

  She stood there listening to the show as it went on behind her. The studio was enclosed by a thick wall, but she could hear the muffled sounds of banjos and guitars, two young girls singing in harmony. She tried to picture Anneth and smiled at what she imagined. She could see her sister walking down the streets of Nashville, swinging her purse and looking up at the buildings, holding on to the arm of Matthew, who had his guitar slung over one shoulder.

  “I miss you bad,” she said to the air, to no one. And then finally there was El with his proud grin. She felt something stir in her and suddenly she knew she was doing all of this for him as much as for her own enjoyment.

  In the car, Easter didn’t speak as she watched the big buildings going by. She sat up straight in her seat and peered down the road. “We’re not too far from Nashville, are we?” she asked. “We could go see Anneth.”

  “God almighty, no,” he said. “Nashville’s way on the other side of the state.”

  He pulled into a Krystal and got them a sack of cheeseburgers to eat later, when it was lunchtime. The smell of grease and onions made her want to throw up. She rolled her window all the way down and positioned her head so that the warm breeze would hit her in the face. She closed her eyes, feigning sleep.

  THE FIRST TIME Easter had hollered out in church, she was eleven years old, at a camp meeting she had gone to with her grandmothers.

  Serena drove them in her battered car all the way over to Harlan, where the camp meeting had been set up, near the shoals of the Cumberland River, a perfect location for baptizing those who got saved during the services. It looked the way Easter imagined a Civil War army camp might have looked—rows and rows of white cloth tents on a flat piece of land in the crook of the river. They had left Free Creek in the blue dark of early morning and arrived here just as the smells of breakfast spread through the camp. At each tent, people sat huddled around small fires, drinking coffee and watching as their bacon fried. Everyone nodded or waved as Serena drove by, until she came to an empty spot where they could pitch the tent they had borrowed from the church.

  The preaching started at noon and went until suppertime, then resumed again and lasted until midnight, sometimes later. They stayed at the camp meetin
g three days and nights, and Easter spent most of that time in the huge, open-sided tent that had been stretched for the preaching. It was the music that had drawn her here first. All those voices rising together, the clapping, the fast rhythm of the guitars and the tambourines. Such energy flowed out of that music that it overtook Easter: she could not sit still when she heard it. It made her aware of God churning all around her. And then the preaching was just as wonderful. Each day there were four different preachers, but the one who preached at night was her favorite. He wore a full suit and had wavy black hair and he had an amazing talent for balancing the open Bible on one outstretched palm as he paced back and forth in front of the crowd.

  Easter went to the services even when her grandmothers did not. In fact, she realized that they had come to the camp meeting more for a getaway than to celebrate the Lord. They didn’t even go to the services much, instead spending a lot of their time at the tent, where they braided each other’s hair and laughed like girls. They spent hours down at the river, picking flowers or sitting and talking. She got angry with them when they tarried after supper, lying back on their bedrolls to sup their coffee or nibble on dinner biscuits smothered in molasses.

  Vine didn’t go to church anyway. She couldn’t stand being inside for that long and told Easter that she liked camp meetings, tent revivals, and brush arbors because they were at least out of doors, where God could see you without obstruction. Serena went enough that the preacher knew of her wonderful voice; he always asked her to sing when she attended. No one could sing “The Great Speckled Bird” with as much conviction as she could, but she was not a devoted churchgoer. This embarrassed Easter; she felt as if both her grandmothers were heathens. She didn’t know why she was so devoted. She simply was. She had always loved church. But it was at the camp meeting that she first felt that electricity run up her back. It was there that she was convinced that God was completely real and big, and that he could cause her to take off screaming and running the aisles.

  On the last full day of the camp meeting, Serena awoke Easter very early, before the sun—or the rest of the camp—was up. When Easter opened her eyes, she smelled the sweet tang of apples frying. She breathed in the dampness of the tent; a thick dew had settled on it in the middle of the night.

  “Get up now, Little Bit,” Serena said. “We’re going into town this morning.”

  Easter stepped out of the tent into a purple morning. It was late September, and cool, so she held her gray sweater together at the neck. Vine bent over the orange fire, stirring the apples. “Come here, baby,” she whispered.

  Easter stepped forward and Vine kissed her on the forehead. Her lips were cool. Vine nodded to the box of supplies they had brought. “Get that flour out, baby, and make us up a big biscuit dough.”

  Easter obeyed, sleepy eyed. She paused from her chore only long enough to drink the chicory coffee Serena had made. It was an adult taste that Easter wasn’t used to. She had drunk only creamed coffee before, and felt that this was a sign that she had been accepted as a woman among them. She mixed up a dough and began to push it out across the small wooden table they had brought from home.

  “No, bigger than that. Make a big old dough. Don’t cut out biscuits, though,” Vine said when Easter had rolled out the dough. She added a dollop of butter to the apples, stirred them again, then stepped over to Easter. “Look here, we’re going to cut them out for turnovers.”

  Vine sliced the dough into squares, dropping a spoonful of apples onto each. She hummed to herself as she carefully folded each one into a neat triangle, pinching her fingers along the edge to seal the apples within. Vine put lard in a skillet and showed Easter how to fry the turnovers. As others began to get up and build their fires, red light showed at the horizon, but daylight was still some time away. The morning smelled wonderful. The riverbank was covered in kudzu, and the vines still held the purple scent of grapes. Easter noticed everything, as if the morning air amplified her surroundings.

  “Eat one right quick if you want to,” Vine said, handing Easter a turnover. Easter bit into the pastry and thought it the best thing she had ever tasted, the dough fried golden and lightly dusted with flour, the hot apples oozing into her mouth with each bite. She watched as Vine wrapped the rest of the turnovers—there must have been two dozen when she was finished frying them all—in waxed paper and stacked them in an egg basket.

  They drove into town just as daylight completely overtook the sky. Light touched the buildings one by one as they drove down Main Street and then to the other side of town. They had to sit and wait as a train lumbered by; then they drove on around winding curves.

  “Where we going?” Easter asked, but Serena only glanced back in the rearview mirror and said, “You’ll see.”

  Easter scooted up and put her chin on the back of the seat. Far up the road she could see a line of campfires glowing in the light of early morning, and then she could see people sitting on the side of the road. They all stood when the car approached.

  Some of them were holding shotguns. They were mostly men, but there were a few women, too. Their eyes looked dead. There was a grayness to their faces that Easter had never seen before. They stepped toward the car, but Serena got out quickly and said something to them that Easter could not hear. Vine looked over her shoulder and smiled at Easter. “It’s all right, baby,” she said. Easter could see that the people relaxed as Serena spoke to them. It was as if the tension went out of their shoulders, and their brows smoothed out. Easter thought it strange that there were no children about whatsoever, although there were at least twenty-five people.

  Vine took Easter around to the trunk of the car and took out the box of apple turnovers and told Easter to hand them out. The people moved forward eagerly but stuck their hands out with trepidation, as though they didn’t know if they ought to take the turnovers or not. Serena was unloading a stack of quilts from the car. In the weeks before the camp meeting, Serena and Vine and several other women had worked feverishly, producing twelve quilts in a matter of a month. They were not beautiful—just simple crazy quilts—but they were thick and sturdily made.

  Vine was moving amongst the people, patting their arms and speaking to them in quiet tones. Easter longed to know what she was saying. It must have been words of wisdom or comfort, for the people all looked at her with thanks in their eyes. A couple of the women cried. Easter watched both her grandmothers and she could see the kindness in their faces. They were doing something good here; she knew that much. She felt this knowledge swimming around her, as surely as she had felt the Holy Spirit all about the camp meeting the night before.

  When they got back into the car and headed toward the camp meeting again, Easter waited before speaking. A reverent sort of silence had filled the car since they had left the people, and Easter hated to break it. They were going back over the railroad tracks, and far down them she could see a deer, nuzzling at a tuft of grass that had pushed up through the tracks. She couldn’t stand any more curiosity. “What were they doing, setting outside like that?” Easter said.

  “They’re on strike from the coal company,” Serena said. “They’ve been treated like dogs.”

  Only then did she notice that Vine was crying quietly into her handkerchief.

  That night, Serena and Vine both went to the late service with Easter. There was a woman with white eyes—Serena said she was an albino—who stood and sang without any music. Easter thought it the most amazing thing she had ever heard in her life. This woman’s voice didn’t seem to come from her mouth, but from her very soul:

  When the labor here is over at last

  And I lay these burdens down

  I’ll sail away home to Heaven above

  For my savior I have found.

  I’ll lay these burdens down at his feet

  And exchange them for a crown.

  I’ll leave this world of trouble and sorrow

  When the sun of my life goes down.

  The song started off very slo
wly, very peacefully, and then there was a shaking of a tambourine, and then a stomping of feet and the riff of a guitar, and the woman leaned back and let the words come more quickly, more joyously, until that was what filled the air: joy. It was unmistakable.

  It all happened as if by explosion. It seemed everyone was singing along, clapping—their arms rising up from the sides of their bodies—and moving, churning like waves in a white-capped river. It seemed that energy took on a form, and although Easter could not see it, she was aware of it. She could see it coming from a long ways off, at the front of the tent. It began up there, where the wavy-haired preacher stood shouting over the music. His voice was lost to her, lost in the song, but Easter could see his mouth and she could imagine what he was saying, a beautiful prayer. The energy was the Holy Spirit and it began to move toward Easter, swimming up and over the crowd, knocking them back as it came. Some of the women shook their heads so furiously that Easter could see the bobby pins falling from their hair. Their carefully wound-up buns came loose and their long hair shook free.

  Easter took hold of her grandmothers’ hands. They stood on either side of her, singing along. She stayed focused on the energy that was moving toward her, closer and closer. And then it came to her and she hollered out—whether it was in fear or in ecstasy, she never knew. It was a guttural cry, the best feeling she had ever had, although it also felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. She let go her grandmothers’ hands and began to dance in place at her seat, swinging her arms. Then the crowd rushed forward and their hands were upon her and it felt as if she was being lifted above them all. She felt as if the light of God shone upon her, and it was the warmest, most comforting feeling. It was peace, and even a child could recognize that.

  When the feeling left her, she was so tired that she collapsed into tears, slumping against Vine. She vaguely remembered their leading her back to the tent. She fell into a dreamless sleep and awoke before daylight as Serena poked the fire, the sparks popping and growing brighter. Her grandmothers were up early, waiting to see the sun rise. She could see their shadows on the wall of the tent, huge, made bigger by the distortion of light. They leaned into each other, whispering while they sipped their coffee. They were so much like sisters that it caused her to have a pang of homesickness: she missed Anneth, who was back home with Aunt Sophie and Uncle Paul. Easter watched Vine and Serena, hoping that she would grow up to be like them.