The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  It was January and winter had set in like a chill that gets under the skin. The trees stood black and stark, the mountain shrunken with the loss of leaves. Vine told Easter and Gabe to get sweaters on while she dressed Anneth. They were going outside to see the bone moon and to check on Samuel.

  Samuel lived far up in Free Creek and was rarely seen, but in the winter he often got drunk and started walking down the holler as if he had somewhere to go. Most people made fun of Samuel or downright hated him—they leaned out their car windows and threw pop bottles at him and called him an old drunk—but Vine and Serena tried to watch out for him. During warm weather he busied himself with the biggest garden in those parts, but once the winter sky took over, he turned to the bottle more and more. That night, Vine had wrapped up a chunk of corn bread in a piece of waxed paper for Samuel and was carrying it in her apron pocket.

  “It’s the bone moon,” Vine said, and squatted down to put her hands on the back of each girl. “Look how full and white. But that’s not why it’s called a bone moon.”

  “Why, then?” Easter asked. She stared at the sky, and Anneth thought that she could see the moon reflected in her sister’s eyes.

  “It got its name because it always rose in the month when people were about to starve to death. They’d gnaw on bones to get by, or make bone soup,” Vine said, and stood on popping knees to take hold of the girls’ hands. “I wanted you to see it, to remind you how lucky we are, to always have plenty to eat.”

  They all stood there looking up in silence for a long moment before Vine squeezed the girls’ hands. “Let’s go make sure old Samuel’s not passed out by the creek again,” she said. “I worry about him when it starts getting cold.”

  “Samuel’s crazy as a lunatic,” Gabe said, walking behind them. He thought he was too big to have his hand held.

  “Samuel’s in a bad way,” Vine said. “We have to be good to people who are in that kind of shape.”

  Anneth studied the sky and wondered if a bone moon put out more light than others, because it was the brightest night she had ever seen. The skeletal tree limbs were touched with silver and the dirt road was white. She put her hand in front of her face, and her skin seemed to glow in the moonlight. As they walked, Vine hummed beneath her breath a song that Anneth didn’t recognize.

  “Samuel!” Gabe hollered, cupping his hands around his mouth. His voice echoed up the mountain, over and over.

  When his voice had died out up on the ridge, there was complete silence for just a moment. Then the gunshot broke apart the night, and Vine jerked Anneth and Easter up and held each of them by the waist, pressed against her hips as she ran back to the house amidst more gunfire. She screamed for Gabe to run, to run as fast as he could, and then there was the sound of men hollering and cussing and all at once the night seemed very dark as the girls were pushed into a closet. One block of light fell on Vine’s face as she leaned down to them. “Don’t move from here,” she said before she closed the door. Anneth scrambled over shoes and boxes, trying to reach Easter again, but she couldn’t find her. She called out her name in a great panic before Easter’s arms slid around her. “Be quiet,” Easter said. They listened to the hollering on the other side of the closet door—Serena telling Gabe to get in the closet, to get down—and to Vine’s heavy shoes clomping across the floor to get the shotgun. A pounding on the door, a man hollering outside.

  “Shh,” Easter said, patting Anneth on the back. Anneth marveled at her sister’s bravery. Only ten years old, but already so old, it seemed. Easter prayed silently, but Anneth knew what she was doing because she could feel Easter’s lips moving against the back of her head. She could feel the prayers filling up the closet around them.

  “Send him out here,” yelled a man.

  “I told you, Samuel’s not here,” Serena shouted. “It’s just me and Vine and these children. You’re drunk and out of your mind, ever one of you.”

  “He can’t just run off from a poker game without paying his debt, Serena.”

  “John Henry, I want ever one of you to leave this place, now,” Vine said, and in her mind’s eye, Anneth could see Vine holding the shotgun up, keeping the men at bay.

  “We know you hiding him,” the man called. “I seen him run on your porch.”

  Vine’s voice, big and bold: “Get off our land or I’ll blow your brains out. You know I will, too.”

  And then more gunfire, three reports of a pistol. Anneth heard a bullet zip through the air of the closet. She thought she could feel the wind off the shot.

  Someone was knocking on the back door, but not pounding. Just a peck that grew weaker and weaker until it was nothing at all, until it seeped into complete silence. Then the back door creaked open. A thud. Anneth shuddered with tears, afraid that every one of them had been killed. Perhaps she and Easter were the only people left in the world. She felt movement and then a line of light and then she realized that Easter was opening the closet door and peeking out. Through the thin opening they could see Serena and Vine sitting down on the floor at the back door with Samuel stretched out across their laps. Gabe was hiding beneath the kitchen table, his eyes large as he watched the blood from Samuel’s chest seep out onto the floorboards.

  “They’ve killed him,” Vine said, her voice a sob that barely escaped her mouth. “Over poker money.”

  Easter pulled the closet door closed again and put her arm back around Anneth’s shoulders. “Just sit here, baby,” Easter said. “Set right here with me.”

  Anneth relaxed against Easter’s chest and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness she realized that a stripe of the light from the bone moon was stretched across the tops of their feet, coming in through the space at the bottom of the door.

  ANNETH CAME AWAKE with a start, but she didn’t jump from the bed or even move. It was the middle of the night and she was asleep in Easter’s hospital bed with Easter lying there beside her. She could tell by the gray pallor of the night sky through the open window that it was nearing dawn. She eased from the bed and walked backward to the door, feeling her way through the room with her hands as she watched for any sign of Easter’s waking up.

  The lights in the hallway seemed very stark. Out here was the noise of the hospital: nurses’ plastic soles squeaking on the tiles and an IV cart being wheeled down the hall. An old man moaned.

  Anneth wiped the sleep from her eyes and straightened her wrinkled blouse on her shoulders as she walked. She needed a cigarette and a Dr Pepper. In the waiting room off to her right was El, asleep and gray faced as he sat in an orange plastic chair, leaning against the wall. Anneth realized that she hadn’t even asked him how he was. He had lost a child, too. She felt so sorry for him, asleep like that. He wouldn’t leave Easter’s side, which was more than she could say for herself. Why hadn’t she tried to make up with Easter, knowing that she was pregnant? Anneth would never forgive herself for being so proud and stupid. Yet Easter had forgiven her.

  Anneth only had to put her hand on El’s arm to rouse him. He jumped and swiped one hand through the air as if knocking someone aside.

  “What is it?” he said.

  Anneth put her hand on his shoulder so he wouldn’t get up. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just me.”

  She sat down in the chair beside him. “I’m so sorry, El. It’s just not right, this happening.”

  “I hate it, Anneth,” he said, and put his face into his palms. “I hate it so bad.”

  Anneth ran her hand around his back. “I know it,” she said, suddenly aware that she had to be strong right now. Funny how Easter had always been the strong one, always taking care of everybody else. People thought that Anneth was a strong woman—the way she could drink so much and fight when that was called for and stay up all night partying. But she wasn’t strong at all. And maybe people didn’t think this, anyway, she reasoned. Perhaps she had been the only one to think that, while everyone else knew that Easter really was the backbone for both of them.

  “Some
how this was all meant to be,” Anneth said, and tapped her cigarette pack against the meat of her palm so a Lucky Strike would slide out. “Who knows why.”

  “Did she tell you about the coal tattoo?” he said, looking at her as she lit her cigarette. There were unshed tears in his eyes.

  She shook her head no. “We never spoke a word,” Anneth said.

  “She kept saying how it was a sign of survival, that the tattoo alone should have made him live,” El said, “but she didn’t understand what else that mark can mean.”

  “What?” she asked. She had seen lots of people with coal tattoos, but never a baby.

  “My uncle had a coal tattoo,” El said, and pushed up his sleeve. He tapped a finger on the whiteness of his forearm. “Right there, just a faint little hint of blue, like a permanent bruise. One time, me and him got drunk together. Just set and drunk all night long, talking and playing cards. I knowed he had been in a mine collapse, that he had survived what had killed a dozen other men. He never did like to talk about it, but I was drunk, so I said how he must have been proud of his coal tattoo, that it was a sign of survival. But he said he didn’t think of it that way at all. To him it was a sign of sacrifice. He said, ‘It reminds me of all them other men who died down there, died trying to make a living to put food on the table for their family.’”

  Anneth looked away. Out the window she could see daylight spreading across the sky like a bloodstain. “But what could that baby be sacrificing itself for?” she asked.

  “That’s not what it means,” El said. “That mark was a sign to her—to us—that a sacrifice was on its way to help us.”

  Anneth thought that El might be talking out of his head, so racked by grief that he wasn’t thinking clearly, but she nodded anyway. She patted the top of his hand as she got up. “Well, I believe you need some breakfast,” she said, and put her cigarette out in the ashtray that stood in front of the seats. “Let’s run down to the café while she’s resting good and get you a bite.”

  “I don’t want to leave her,” he said.

  “She knows that, but you need to eat.” She put out her hand to help him up.

  Fourteen

  When No One’s Around

  EASTER TOLD EVERYONE that she was all right. She clasped her hands together in front of her and was aware of putting on her most saintly face when she said, “I lost the baby for a reason,” and “God works in mysterious ways.” She didn’t believe either of these things. Especially about God’s working in mysterious ways. This just was not true to her mind anymore. God worked in blunt, obvious ways. There was no mystery to it at all. He had not allowed her baby to live because He hadn’t wanted to. He didn’t want her to have a child. Because He didn’t feel like it. Because He could.

  She would never have said any of these things aloud because that would have made it too real. If she put it into words, she might start to completely believe what she said. She hadn’t told El the way she felt. Not even Anneth—especially not Anneth. Despite their reconciliation, there were still days when Easter couldn’t bear to speak Anneth’s name aloud.

  She peeled potatoes without watching her hands. Her eyes focused on the invisible air, like someone in a wide-eyed coma. She sat like that, her hands moving knowingly, but in her mind there was only one thought that kept repeating itself over and over, like a record when the needle’s stuck in a groove: It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. She cleaned the house and hung clothes on the line and tended to her garden with this mantra in her head: My baby is dead. I did everything right but my baby is dead. But most of the time she blamed herself. It was because she had backslid. But surely God couldn’t be that cruel, cruel enough to punish someone in such a way.

  Everyone tried to make sure that she was never alone, as if they knew how her mind worked when the house was all silence. When Anneth and El were at work, Sophie came down to sit with her. Anneth moved back in with them, and for a month she slept in the same bed with Easter. At first, El took off from work, but then he realized that Easter had no use for him, so he spent most of his time on the road. When he was home, Anneth cooked for him and sometimes they sat in the kitchen talking long after the meal was over. Easter could hear them, even though they were whispering.

  “I’ve never seen her like this,” Anneth said. “I know it’s a hard thing on a woman, but I’m starting to worry.”

  El’s chair scraped against the linoleum as he got up, and Easter reckoned he did this so that Anneth wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye. Easter thought he most likely went to stand at the sink, leaning on the counter as he looked out the window on the backyard. What did he see there? Their dying garden. The locust where her mother had hung herself. “It’s been almost three months. Maybe she ought to go back to the doctor.”

  “Doctors don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground,” Anneth said. The clink of her coffee cup being put on the saucer. The scratch of her lighter flint. A loud exhalation of smoke. “Her grief is too thick to bear.”

  The next morning, Easter awoke to find Anneth sitting on the edge of her bed, studying her face. Tears fell down Anneth’s cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away.

  “What is it?” Easter said.

  “I need you to get up, now, Easter,” Anneth said. “You need to get up and go to church and start living again. If you don’t, I don’t believe I can stand it.”

  Anneth wiped her face with the back of her hand and leaned down to kiss Easter on the forehead, and then she was gone. When the room became still with her exit, Easter wondered if she had truly been there.

  Easter got out of bed and sat down at her dressing table, the same dresser Serena had used since she was very young. Easter ran her fingers over the hard maple, trying to feel the history that lived within the wood. She wondered what heartaches Serena had pondered sitting here. Easter saw that her face was completely changed, marked by this curse that had befallen her family for so long now: death. Her grief was stamped into her eyes. She had always been serious, even as a child, but her eyes had once been wide with wonder for the world. They weren’t anymore. All her life she had believed in magic just as strongly as Anneth had, but now that was gone. There was no magic in this life, only grief and an occasional glimmer of joy. She hadn’t pinned her hair up in weeks and it hung limp on her shoulders, down to the small of her back. It had once been the color of honey but now it seemed darker, as if it had darkened in soaking up all her grief. She lifted it up and watched as it dropped lifelessly to settle against her gown again.

  The Bible said that a woman’s hair was her glory. The church had taught them to never cut their hair, to display it for God’s pleasure. Suddenly this struck Easter as incredibly stupid and contradictory. The church spoke against vanity, yet the women tried so hard to make their hair grow long and beautiful. It was hypocrisy that fell around her shoulders, and she felt as if it would smother her to death.

  Her sewing kit sat there on the dresser, and she unlatched the lid and withdrew a pair of scissors. It didn’t take long to cut her hair to shoulder length. With each slice of the scissors she felt lighter. If she cut it short enough, she might lose her anchor to the earth and simply float away. People would be out in their yards and sense her drifting over them like a balloon that has escaped a child’s grip. She’d simply put her arms out and let the air carry her. She’d close her eyes and be lost forever, content to swim away through the sky.

  When she finally stopped cutting her hair, she plucked it from her lap and shoulders and cupped it in her hands. She held the hair to her face. She didn’t cry, though. She didn’t have any tears left. She let the hair fall onto the dresser and collected herself, patting the jagged edges of her new hairstyle. She remembered the little net full of her great-grandmother Lucinda’s hair, in the cedar box. She thought she might put her own locks there, too, but she wanted rid of it. She would throw it onto the yard, and the birds could use it to build nests. She looked in the mirror and let out one choked laugh. Wom
en always cut their hair when they wanted a fresh start, didn’t they?

  The house was impossibly quiet with both El and Anneth gone off to work. She knew that Sophie would be down here any minute to sit with her. El had given strict instructions for her not to be left alone. Was she on suicide watch? She wondered if El and Sophie and Anneth sat in the living room together and whispered about the way her mother had gone mad and how Easter might do the same.

  She moved through the rooms as if walking in a dream, her feet unaware of which way they would step next. Outside, it was already autumn. She had no memory of the summer’s fading away after the baby’s funeral. The cold ground felt good against her bare feet, though. She stepped quickly through the yard, grinding the heels of her feet into the sand as she crossed the road. She climbed down the crooked rocks and waded out into the creek. The water sent a chill all the way up to her thighs. Maybe her mother had chosen to exist somewhere outside herself. Maybe that’s why she had stood in the creek stripped of clothes. Easter wished she could make her mind go to this place, but she couldn’t. She was completely aware of standing in the creek, clad in her nightgown, with her head dizzy from its new and unexpected lightness. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the weak sun. No cars passed on the road; Sophie still hadn’t made her way up here. No one to see her and think that she had finally lost her senses. After a long time she scrambled back up the rocky bank.

  She’d start trying to live again. Even though she knew it was a false start. She was sure that she wasn’t ready yet. She couldn’t put her heart into it, but she could make a show of getting up. So she would go about acting as if she felt better, when in fact she felt worse than ever. She didn’t want Anneth and El to be hemmed in by her grief. There was no use in four lives’ being lost.