The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  She heated up the coffee Anneth had left on the stove and was sitting at the kitchen table when Sophie appeared at the back door, breathing hard in her attempt to hurry. She stepped in the door apologizing for taking so long, but Easter just took a drink of her coffee and waited for Sophie to notice that she had cut off her hair.

  “I’m up,” Easter said. “I’m awake now.”

  EASTER KNEW ANNETH didn’t want to go back to her apartment in Black Banks, but it was obvious that she did want to get back to seeing Liam, that mine foreman she had taken up with down at the lake. Easter didn’t know much about him but she knew that Anneth was sleeping with him. She could tell by Anneth’s eyes. So it wasn’t too hard to force Anneth out of the house. Easter missed her: her loud music and cigarette smoke and high laughter. The way she whistled the whole time she washed dishes or fried an egg. But Easter needed to be alone, and most of the time, after they were all duped into believing she had recovered, she was left to do what she wanted. And all she wanted to do was nothing. She sat and remembered the baby’s funeral. It had been the hottest day of the year and the leaves had wilted in the sunlight. The heat had lain in white stripes across the graveyard ridge. The littlest casket, impossibly little. The scent of the soil so rich and present on the hot air. Nothing but the songs of birds. That was all she heard. She didn’t hear a word the preacher said or the singing or anything. Just the birds. A redbird that sat on a high branch and called, “Birdie, birdie, birdie.” Its song was her mother’s name.

  Even when she went to church, her mind drifted above her and cowered in the high corners of the room, looking down at her as she sat motionless in her pew. It wasn’t right for her to be there, anyway. She still hadn’t made the move to be baptized again and she never felt really whole. It wasn’t right for someone to leave the church, do their sinning, and come back without having had their sins washed away. No matter if she had been baptized way back when she was a child. She needed that cleansing again. But how could she do that now when she secretly doubted God’s very existence? For weeks she refused to go up and sing. People stood during services and requested that she sing particular songs, but she only looked at the preacher and shook her head no.

  No.

  She sat in church with the people singing and shouting around her, the preacher’s voice reverberating through the building like the dynamite blasts from the Altamont mine, but she wasn’t there. Not really. She was floating above them all, a ghost that hovered with her back to the ceiling. And while this happened she thought of Anneth.

  Anneth was wild and didn’t care which way the wind blew. She was selfish and looked out for her own happiness, no one else’s. True, she had stayed with Easter and tried to nurse her, but some days Easter could see that Anneth’s heart wasn’t in it. Still, Anneth had had plenty of men—Easter seriously doubted if Matthew Morgan and Liam Trosper were the only men Anneth had ever slept with—but she had never gotten pregnant, only to suffer a stillbirth. If Anneth had a desire to get pregnant, no doubt she would. Anneth always got what she wanted. Things just fell into her lap as if she had a special deal with the world: Let me have a big time and I’ll grace you with my presence. In the event that Anneth were to get pregnant, if she wished she wasn’t, the baby would be magically taken away. God would do that for Anneth. He would snap His fingers and Anneth would miscarry and that would be that. But it would only be because Anneth wanted to miscarry. That’s how it seemed to work. Because things always worked out that way for Anneth. But not for Easter. No matter how hard she tried. No matter how hard she worked to serve God, to sing, to play the piano for His glory. No matter how much she followed Christ’s example and treated everyone with compassion. No matter her sacrifices or anything else, nothing ever went the way she wanted, and her only really selfish wish—to be a mother—had been taken from her.

  She knew that she would never carry another child. She could feel her womb withering within, like an orange that is tossed out on the yard. It was just like that, like an orange that shrinks in on itself and becomes a grayish white hollow thing. Withered. That was the perfect word; that word said exactly the way she felt inside.

  But not Anneth. God smiled on Anneth. Easter didn’t know why, but it seemed that way. The preacher was constantly saying that good things come to those who serve the Lord, but it wasn’t true. It seemed to Easter that sinners had it better than anyone. They didn’t make any sacrifices, and things just seemed to go the way they wanted. It was high time she admitted it to herself. Why couldn’t everyone else see that this was the way it was? They had all been fooled. God didn’t watch out for Christians. On the contrary, He let them suffer while the sinners got everything they wanted.

  Of course, Anneth thought she wasn’t a sinner at all. As long as she prayed to God and was aware of His presence and tried to be a good person, Anneth figured she would get into heaven. Easter had been exhausted long ago by such foolishness. If that was the case, then everyone would get into heaven, wouldn’t they? Because if it was that easy, everyone would sign up.

  Her mind raced with these thoughts all the time, so much that she feared she might be going mad. She thought of these things when she drove into work at the school cafeteria, as she took the students’ lunch money, as she told her co-workers good-bye. She watched autumn play out, and then winter, and then spring, and her thoughts never varied. She thought about her loss when she cooked, when she ate with her family, when she stopped for groceries and perused the aisles as if she was really interested in what she bought. Sometimes she got home from the store and put up the groceries and realized that she didn’t even remember taking these things from the shelf. She ended up buying things that neither she nor El ate: limes, sardines, canned corn.

  One day in late March, she came home with groceries for a baby. She took each item out of the bag very slowly: boxes of baby cereal, zwieback toast, and animal crackers; a bunch of bananas; and thirty-two jars of Gerber baby food in every known flavor. She gathered all of it around her on the floor and sat in the middle of it, rocking back and forth without crying.

  Later, she bagged the baby groceries up and put them on the porch of the church, hoping somebody who needed them would find the bags and think they had been sent there by God. She hurried back up the road—moving quickly, as if she didn’t want to be seen leaving food for a baby on a church porch—and realized that the ghosts she had known all her life were scurrying alongside her. Her mother was there. Easter couldn’t see Birdie, but she could feel her. As Easter walked up the road, Birdie walked in perfect stride with her. She put a hand out and placed it in the small of Easter’s back. It was like being touched by the Holy Ghost itself, a jolt that passed all through Easter’s body. The touch felt like peace, like the promise of contentment spreading through her bones.

  In that moment Easter saw that it was time to stop this. The realization came to her as quickly as that, and it felt as if she had let out a breath that she had been holding for nearly a year.

  She looked at the mountains, red with buds that promised to open and usher in spring, and felt a wave of gratitude wash over her—because she had survived this, hadn’t she? She would never be completely over it, of course, but she had made it through to the other side. She hadn’t gone mad, the way her mother had. She was alive. Still, she felt two holes in herself. There was the place where her womb had been. Now it wasn’t even so much as an empty place, because it wasn’t a place at all. It was a place that used to be. But the other hole was deep and round and black: the place where her faith had resided. She remembered now, watching her belief and trust in God floating up through the hospital ceiling. She didn’t know how one went about rescuing something that had floated so far away.

  Fifteen

  Big Time

  ANNETH AND LIAM were a dangerous couple. Dangerous because there was so much excitement balled up in their relationship that it threatened to explode at any minute. Liam was exactly like her in one major way: he liked to have a big
time all the time. He liked nothing better than to be traveling the open road, pushing the gas against the floorboard as hard as it would go, sailing by other cars even on the curviest roads, the radio turned all the way up. He would drink a beer in one long pull, only to slam the bottle onto the bar with such force that the glass threatened to crack. He spent money as if he couldn’t stand to have it in his pockets. When Anneth said she had always wanted to go to Cincinnati just to shop in the nice dress stores up there along the river, he insisted that they get into his car and drive there. When she read in a magazine that Natalie Wood had once stayed in the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, Liam took the day off from work and escorted her into the hotel’s ornate lobby and rented the biggest room they had. They drove down to Knoxville and danced in every bar, went to Mammoth Cave and crept through the damp caverns while drinking from the flask he had sneaked in. Their life together was a wild, drunken ride.

  Lolie disliked Liam because he was the foreman, but she couldn’t deny that he knew how to have a good time. At the Hilltop Club he danced to every song and bought every round of whiskey and beer that was brought to their table. By the end of the night, Israel and Liam were all hugged up, singing as they staggered toward the car. Their friends would not even come over to their table because of Liam’s being there, though. They disliked him because he was the boss over the biggest job-supplier in Crow County and that was all. He had a job to do and he did it well. If they couldn’t see past that, Anneth thought, if they couldn’t look and see that he was a normal guy just like the rest of them, then that was their problem and she didn’t care.

  In the spring, Liam finally took Anneth to meet his parents in Huntington, West Virginia. As soon as they turned onto the driveway that took them atop Huntington’s highest mountain, Liam changed completely. He sat up stiffly, turned the radio down low, and took the curves with careful calculation. Once they stepped into the mansion, Anneth couldn’t understand Liam’s trepidation. His parents seemed as welcoming as they could possibly be. A lifetime of witnessing the snobby antics of rich people in movies had not prepared her for their friendliness; she had imagined them turning their noses up at her red dress and the camellia in her hair. Liam’s mother, Edith, wore a ring on every finger and kept a sloe gin fizz in her hand, but she had embraced Anneth upon meeting her, even kissing her on the cheek. His father, Stanton, was just as outgoing and gave a wink to Liam. “You’ve finally found a real looker,” he said. He was tall and dignified with his salt-and-pepper hair and well-fitted suit. It was strange to see people dressed up for dinner, but this made her feel sophisticated.

  She did not like the house, though. The rooms were meant to be beautiful but didn’t strike Anneth that way at all. It felt like a museum. There were antiques in every room, and Anneth wouldn’t have been surprised to find velvet ropes and little signs instructing her not to sit on anything. There were fresh-cut flowers in every room, though, and their perfume filled the air. Back home there was a rumor that the owner of the Altamont Mining Company had a bathroom completely made of coal—walls, tub, vanity, even a commode—but she looked through the entire house and could find no evidence of such extravagance.

  Still, she quickly noticed that Liam’s big spirit shrank in that house. Talking to his father, Liam hunched his shoulders, his thoughtfully nodding head the opposite of his usual hyperactivity. At dinner he sat across the table from her and instead of rolling his eyes at some pretentious comment his father made, as he would usually have done, Liam kept on nodding in agreement. He spread the cloth napkin on his lap with such formality that Anneth laughed out loud. She couldn’t help it.

  He gave her a look and she tried hard to remain quiet as long as she could. But when Liam’s father started talking about the mines—asking how production was coming along, instructing Liam that he had to prepare for the change from deep mining to strip mining—she felt the need to say something. As soon as her words escaped her mouth she realized it was the wrong thing for her to have said here, but she didn’t give a damn.

  “If you switch over to strip mining, people are going to turn against the company,” she said.

  Their forks all became still, even Edith’s, which was halfway up to her mouth. Edith returned her fork to her plate and took a drink of her gin.

  Liam’s father finally spoke. “Why is that?”

  “Because strip mining tears up the land too bad,” Anneth said. She took a bite of her salad and chewed gingerly around her words. “People there are used to deep mining because it’s hidden—back in the mountain. But strip mining, it’s too hard on the land.”

  Liam’s father held his fork and knife over his plate as if posing for a picture. “Well, strip mining is much less expensive.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t have to live there and look at it, do you?” She got angrier with each word she spoke.

  “There’s just a lot you don’t know about coal mining, Anneth,” the man said.

  “I’d hate to think I don’t. My daddy was killed in the Altamont mines,” she said loudly, and before she knew it she had jumped up, causing her chair to fall backward. She stood leaning on the table, waiting for him to say something else. He looked completely taken aback. “So I know plenty about mining, buddy.”

  “Nobody’s died in those mines since I bought them,” Liam’s father said, choosing each word carefully. “I take care of my men.”

  Anneth felt stupid, standing there while the rest of them sat looking up at her. She bent and righted her chair, then sat back down and picked up her silverware again. She took another bite and chewed with her eye on Liam. She didn’t know what she expected him to say. To her dissatisfaction, he didn’t say a word. She turned back to Liam’s father. “All I’m saying is that you have to do right by the people who live near your company.”

  “I have always tried my best to do that,” Liam’s father said, and smiled at her. She saw what a practiced smile it was, the face of a businessman, a door-to-door salesman. “And besides, with strip mining, the accident rate is cut in half, at least. When you don’t have men going back in the mountain, you don’t have to worry about roof collapses and disasters like the one that killed your father.”

  Edith reached a hand across the table and patted Anneth on the wrist. “I’m so sorry about your father,” she said. “You have every right to be angry.” Her rings were cold against Anneth’s skin.

  Liam’s father seemed to think it best to forget Anneth’s outburst and go forward with the conversation. “We need to start going through all the broad form deeds that came under our ownership when we bought into Altamont,” he said, looking Liam in the eye.

  “Those broad form deeds are dirty,” Anneth said before Liam could reply. She knew all about these deeds, which had been in the news so much lately. Bought by the companies ages ago, the deeds were to the mineral rights to people’s property. A person could own his land and see his whole yard mined right around his house and not be able to do a thing about it. She knew that this was not a proper thing to say to Liam’s father but she didn’t care. Somebody needed to tell him. Those sloe gin fizzes that Edith had pushed on her had given her just enough prodding to say what she wanted.

  “What do you mean, dear?” Edith said, and kept her eyes on Anneth as she tilted her head back for another drink.

  “Everybody is against them,” Anneth said. “Most of those deeds were bought for a quarter an acre or something. And then fifty years goes by before the company comes back and says they’re ready to mine the land. It’s not right.”

  All three of the Trospers were exchanging looks now, as if Anneth were part of the museum exhibit currently occupying their dining room, an exhibit that had unexpectedly opened its mouth and spoken out, not only once, but twice now. Suddenly she didn’t like any of them.

  Liam’s father was looking at her with such a strange grimace on his face that she thought he might have taken a bite of something obscenely bitter. “Well, the thing is, they did sell the mineral rights,
” he said after a long silence broken only by the loud click of the grandfather clock’s pendulum. He had a way of speaking that made him sound as if he were on the news, explaining something very important to the simpletons who watched him. “So the law is the law, Anneth.”

  Anneth didn’t like the familiar tone he took with her. Liam’s parents had both told her to call them Edith and Stanton, but she had not told them to call her Anneth. It had never crossed her mind to do such a thing because no one back home called you by anything but your first name, anyway. But now she was insulted by his boldness, the way his mouth curled around her name like she was a child he had to call down. “That doesn’t make it right, Stanton. That’s just a shitty way to act.”

  Liam put the tip of his shoe against her leg. She wadded up her napkin and threw it on her plate, then got up and walked out of the room as if she were off to simply take a stroll on the veranda. She decided that her exit had been too graceful, so when she got to the door she slammed it behind her. She stood on the porch and lit a cigarette and wished that their visit hadn’t turned out like this, but there was nothing she could do about it now. She wasn’t going to sit there like a dog and just take whatever was dished out to her, and they could go to hell if they didn’t like it. She sure wasn’t about to go back in there and spend the rest of supper with nothing more than the silver sound of forks clattering between them.

  Liam came walking backward out the door, kissing his mother on the cheek. Liam’s mother stood within the crack of the door and looked at Anneth with longing, as if she knew her very well and was sad to see her go. She bent her fingers twice in a wave and slowly shut the door.