All Their Yesterdays

by Ninie Hammon

  Of course, he also figured out along the way that he couldn’t use just any old piece of coal to do his arts because most of it was either too soft and flaky, or so hard and brittle it shattered. For his statues, he needed cannel coal, the dull, black coal you could break a piece off of and light it afire like a candle. There wasn’t a whole lot of cannel coal in the shafts around here and he used to go to the railroad tracks and dig through the coal piles for hours to find pieces of it.

  But over the years, word got out about Jamey’s carvings. Other miners’d ask him about them on lunch breaks down in the mine. And after a while, miners started to bring him pieces of cannel coal they’d come across, hunks big as pumpkins or small as lemons. And sometimes—not very often, mind, but sometimes—a miner would bring him a piece of jet! Jamey hadn’t never seen none of it his own self when he was working, but jet was fine indeed. It was real hard and you could polish it smooth and shiny as a piece of glass. JoJo looked it up in the encyclopedia at school, said it was a form of lignite coal. Said it was a semiprecious stone, too, and it sure enough was precious to Jamey! The biggest piece of it ever found was 21 feet long. Of course, Jamey never got his hands on that much of it, but when he did get pieces, he always carved images into the jet instead of carving the jet into the image of something else. It was real easy to break, but if you was careful, you could carve jet into murals—relief was what JoJo called it—more detailed even than his statues.

  “Who are you, hidin’ in there?” he asked the lump of coal. “You a dog or a squirrel? You a goat, maybe, or a skunk?”

  He fixed his attention on the black rock in front of him and tried to see with his heart the image that was buried inside. He’d explained to JoJo once that carving wasn’t nothing more than chipping away all the pieces of the rock that wasn’t the statue inside.

  As he placed the rock in the vice screwed down to his worktable, he thought of JoJo’s late husband, Darrell, who had built the table for him out of two sawhorses and the back side of an old wooden door. He picked up his mallet and one of his chisels—the one that looked like a little scoop, like a fingernail turned upside down. Darrell had got him that, too, and all his other chisels and carving tools—paid his cousin who worked in a machine shop in Pikeville to make them special.

  Darrell’s face swam in front of Jamey for a moment, with the sideways grin he had that reminded Jamey of a pirate. He could almost hear Darrell’s laugh, the kind of laugh that made everybody around him laugh too, even when they didn’t know what was funny. Jamey didn’t like who JoJo hooked up with next. Avery smelled bad, but it wasn’t a stink you could sniff with your nose.

  Jamey and Darrell had just got to be real good friends when the roof fall got him. It was a petrified tree stump, a big one. Miners was all the time finding the bottom parts of petrified trees in the roofs of their shafts because the trees grew alongside the plants that made the coal. Trees was funny looking when you seen them from the bottom side, from under the roots. And the stumps looked like they was outlined in Magic Marker because a thin coat of coal always formed around the outside of them.

  There was miners found a petrified snake in a mine up Hazard one time, said the head of it was big as a basketball and there was all these little snakes around it. Jamey hadn’t never run across no petrified snakes in the 3 years he’d been mining—just the ferns. The outlines of plants was all over the slate mine roofs, ferns and leaves, and such. And the stumps, of course. Jamey carried chalk in his pocket same as all the other miners did so he could draw a circle around them. Then the roof bolters would see and put a heavy metal strap across them to keep them from falling.

  The stump that got Darrell had been marked and strapped proper, but it come down all the same, crushed him so’s they had the satin cloth pulled all the way up to his chin at the funeral home and when JoJo tried to fold it down, Granny’d stopped her and said she didn’t need to see what was underneath of that cloth.

  Jamey had the growing feeling that what was hiding inside this piece of coal was a face—so maybe it was Darrell’s face. But Jamey didn’t think so. Only time would tell, of course, but Jamey suspected he was about to free up from this lump of coal the face of somebody he’d never met.

  The chill autumn wind clawed at the side of the shed with dry-leaf fingernails, then slid under the door and tickled Jamey’s shoelaces. But he didn’t notice. He was in that place he went to when he did his arts, that space outside the dusty shed, where he didn’t hear scratchy leaves or ValVleen’s song, didn’t smell the coal he was working on. When he come back from that place, he’d find what he’d released from the rough-edged lump of coal, but he’d have very little remembrance of the part he’d played in setting it free.

  RUBY BENT OVER slowly, picked up the newspaper off the floor and set it back on top of the mail on the counter, face down so’s she didn’t have to look at the headline about the memorial service.

  But she hadn’t got to be an old woman without figuring out somewhere along the way that ignoring a thing didn’t make it go away. With the mine reopened, one of these days some suit-’n-tie from Black Gold Mining, the company that bought the property from Wilson Cooper, would come knocking on her door to tell her they’d found…something. All miners had nametags braded into their belts. Ruby shook her head, remembered how the other miners used to tease Ricky Dan because he couldn’t keep up with his belt, said he’d got that gold tooth just so he wouldn’t wind up under the wrong headstone someday. That hadn’t been the way of it, of course. Ruby’s mama’d passed first and when her daddy crossed over, his gold wedding band come down to Ricky Dan, him being the favorite grandson. Trouble was, that boy’d have lost his head if it wasn’t tied on his shoulders, and he was scared he’d lose that ring. Then he figured a way to keep up with it! Went into Hazard and had a dentist make it into a gold cap over the front tooth he’d chipped when he was 8 years old.

  Maybe that’s what they’d bring her, that gold tooth. Ruby shivered at the thought of it. No, that’s not why. She’d shivered because she knew they wouldn’t bring her a tooth. With an understanding she’d never spoken out loud to a living soul, Ruby was one hundred percent certain that when they come, it’d be to tell her they’d found Ricky Dan. All of him.

  Out on the front porch, Bucket began to bark. The dog was Jamey’s—followed him everywhere he went. But he must have slept through it when Jamey left this morning because he was outside the door, making such an awful racket he woke up Crawdad. The big tomcat stretched slow and lazy, then got up and wandered toward the front door to check out the ruckus, his tail stuck up in the air behind him straight and stiff as a flagpole.

  Ruby listened to the rise and fall of the old hound’s howl like it was a song. Dog music. She knew all the big, lop-eared mutt’s tunes and the high peel of this one was his “stranger warning.” Since the near-blind animal knew everybody in the hollow, whoever was out there on the road was from away from here.

  Surely, it wasn’t nobody from the mining company. They hadn’t even started to dig out the roof falls yet.

  Ruby opened the door and looked out through the screen. A lone man in jeans and a blue shirt, a skinny fellow, walking down from the top of the hollow, a poke of some sort slung over his shoulder. She couldn’t see a vehicle; he must have come down out of the woods. But he wasn’t no deer hunter, didn’t have a bow. Gun season was still 3 weeks off.

  She watched the man as he got closer. He looked out of place and right at home at the same time, like he didn’t fit a-tall and like he had leave to be here.

  She opened the screen and stepped out on the porch.

  “Shush up, Bucket.” The hound kept barking, the high, keening sound he used to make when he chased coons in the woods. “I said hush!” She reached down and gave his collar a yank. “You be quiet now, hear.”

  The dog paid her no mind, never did anymore, got more ornery every year. She hung onto his collar—in an effort to shut him up, not for fear he’d attack the man on the road
. You’d have to set that old dog’s tail on fire to get Bucket off the porch. Wouldn’t do no good if he did go after the stranger. Didn’t have nary a tooth left in his whole head. But you’d never know it by the way he barked. The closer the fellow got, the more energy the dog put into announcing his presence.

  A sudden, tickling chill ran down Ruby’s spine. The way the man walked, long easy strides, smooth, almost graceful, but with his feet splayed out to the sides a mite, just short of a swagger.

  Her heart suddenly rattled in her chest like a hummingbird fluttering around in there. She kept hold of Bucket’s collar and moved around the rocking chair to the edge of the porch as if she intended to step down. She didn’t, though, just teetered on the edge of the top step staring. Then she slowly raised her free hand and called out, “Hidy!”

  The man stopped.

  She knew.

  “Well, hidy-do there…” Her soft voice began to tremble. “…Will!”

  WILL STOOD QUIET, lost in thought, the silence of the hollow broken only by a woodpecker in the woods and the lazy bark of a coon dog on the porch of a trailer house down the road.

  It was one thing to acknowledge intellectually that everything in Aintree Hollow would be different after 20 years. It was quite another to see the changes face up, changes that shattered the mental snapshots he carried in little plastic sleeves in the back pocket of his mind.

  The ruin of the house where he’d grown up had upset him. It shouldn’t have. It was only his “home” by the strictest of definitions. He’d spent most of his growing-up years in Ma Sparrow’s house after his mother left and his father won the Black Lung lottery, or lost it. A lifetime of breathing coal dust didn’t affect some men at all; for others, it was a death sentence. And Black Lung took a long time to kill a man.

  Still, that was the house in the picture labeled home Will carried around in his head. An ordinary house in the shade of a mulberry tree, white paint flaking even then, distinguished only by a lone rose bush by the front porch and suicide swings in the backyard. Daddy’d made the swings from discarded tires he picked up at the filling station at the bottom of the hollow, suspended them on ropes from the limbs of oak trees facing each other across a 15-foot stretch of weedy grass. So if you timed it just right, and you got going real good in your swing and another kid got going real good in his—the two of you could smack together in mid-air.

  Will remembered the time he and Lloyd had…He smiled.

  The tire swings were gone now, of course. So was the house he remembered. In its place sat a battered shack with no rose bush and no front door, shattered windows and an uprooted mulberry tree dangling in to the living room through the hole its demise had cleaved in the roof.

  The home place had not gone gently into that good night, though. It still fought tendrils of morning glory and honeysuckle vines and the voracious kudzu that had captured its front walls and was marching like a resolute soldier into the interior.

  He wondered who owned the place now. Did he? Surely, the county had sold the land for taxes after his father died.

  Yeah, right. Like somebody’d buy this place!

  Didn’t he give up his right to it when he never claimed it?

  The sight of his own house wrecked should have prepared him for what lay down the road where the Sparrows’ house was. Actually, where it wasn’t anymore. There was nothing at all on the spot where it had sat but weeds and a few broken foundation stones that peeked up through them like a row of rotten teeth.

  But was it really reasonable to expect to find anybody there after all this time? Ma would be in her 70s by now. And with the men gone, what would she do in that old house all by herself? She’d probably gone to live with one of the girls, if she was still alive at all.

  What if she was dead?

  For a moment, the swell of relief at not having to face her carried him along in a riptide of liberation. It was quickly replaced by a lonely ache that expanded like a Navy dinghy in his chest, growing instantly huge, as if grief were the food of giants.

  Will wasn’t accustomed to the flood of feelings that had clobbered him ever since he got here, one after another, with the force of a series of concrete Volkswagens dropped out a third-floor window on his head. Over the years, he had perfected a method of dealing with feelings that was simple and efficient—he anesthetized them! He had slathered varnish on his emotions, coat after coat, imprisoned them like mosquitoes in drops of amber. Every input on a caring level hit the slick surfaces and slid off.

  And every output on a caring level was expressed the same way—rage. At what? Who did he have a right to be mad at? In any objective analysis of his life, he certainly wouldn’t be labeled the injured party. He wasn’t the victim. So why was he so furious?

  Occasionally, he’d experience a moment of clarity when he was in that illusive state of inebriation where all pretense had been stripped away but he wasn’t yet too tanked to think. In such moments, he knew the whole focus of his blinding rage was the watery-eyed drunk he got glimpses of now and then reflected in store windows. Or beer mugs.

  The image of a frosty beer mug actually made his mouth water.

  He needed a drink! And that wasn’t going to happen. So he hefted his bag and continued down the hill. On the porch of a trailer up ahead, a coon dog’s unconvincing bark started to ramp up. Will was too preoccupied to pay any attention to it.

  He still had some money left. He could walk down to the mine and catch a coal truck back into Pineville, or on into Benham or Lynch, and find somewhere to stay the night. Tomorrow, he could come back and try to track down Ricky Dan’s relatives—his people. His three older sisters would be nearby, likely still in the hollow. Families stuck close; those who left usually didn’t go far or stay gone for long. His absence from Aintree Hollow might have set some kind of record.

  “Hidy.”

  The voice fastened him in shackles. He turned slowly toward the porch where the dog was making such a racket.

  “Well, hidy-do there…Will,” Ma Sparrow said.

  CHAPTER 6

  IN A PRINT dress buttoned all the way to the neck under a blue sweater, Ma Sparrow looked exactly like she always did. Okay, not exactly, but she had weathered the past two decades far better than Will had. Tall, 5-10 maybe, and big-boned, she still carried herself as erect as a plumb line. Thinner, though, fragile-looking, so her big, strong hands, knobby with arthritis now, looked even more man-ish. Her feet were clad in the kind of clunky black shoes Ricky Dan had called “old-lady clodhoppers” and her unruly curls were tamed in a braided bun at the back of her head—just like always. They’d been the color of a 10-penny nail when Will left; now her hair was the white of creek mist on a summer evening.

  But her heavy eyebrows were still thick slashes of coal black beneath a widow’s peak on a long, narrow face—plain, bordering on homely. Her cinnamon-colored eyes set deep inside an elaborate spiderweb of smile wrinkles gazed at him with a look that was more than surprise, a complicated look he couldn’t read.

  “You gonna stand out there in the road ’til the mailman comes ’long tomorrow mornin’ and runs you over?” She spoke so softly he barely caught her words. For a big, raw-boned woman, her voice was amazingly quiet and gentle, the kind that should have made folks ask her to speak up. But nobody ever did. They leaned in, got still and concentrated so they wouldn’t miss a word. He’d always loved watching a room fall instantly silent when she started to speak.

  Ma Sparrow could yell without raising her voice, could yank a rowdy boy’s chain up short with a single soft word.

  For a moment, she turned her attention to the barking dog she held by the collar, a big tan mutt with the woebegone face, floppy ears and doleful eyes of a coon hound on the body of a scraggly German shepherd.

  “Hush up, Bucket!” She swatted the dog lightly on the snout and he yelped like she’d stabbed him. Then he plopped in a heap next to the rocking chair and fell instantly silent.

  In that silence, Will finally
managed to find his voice.

  “You’re as beautiful as ever, Ma.”

  She cocked her head to one side and the smile that graced her face was even warmer and more inviting than he remembered. And just as close-lipped. Sometime long before Will had come into her life, Ma Sparrow had perfected a smile that showed no teeth—because she had no teeth to show. Well, precious few, and the ones she had were blackened, broken, and twisted—like the teeth of the rest of her generation of mountain women who’d gone from cradle to grave without ever laying eyes on a dentist.

  When she laughed, she always put her hand up over her mouth. He wondered if she still did. But the pleat that used to staple her dark eyebrows together whenever she was peeved about something—that much hadn’t changed.

  “Didn’t I teach you not to story to me, Will Gribbins? You never was no good at it and ’pears you ain’t growed into it none.” She pulled the faded blue sweater closed around her, hugged herself against the chill in the breeze. “And it ain’t Ma no more, it’s Granny. Got me so many grandkids and great grandkids now they’re gonna have to start wearin’ nametags.”

  She’d knitted that sweater; Will was certain of it. He had no memory of her that her hands were still. They peeled potatoes, snapped peas, scrubbed floors, planted flowers in the front yard and vegetables out back. But they’d always looked too large for any kind of delicate work, too big to fit on a mandolin, too awkward to evoke the haunting melodies of mountain music on summer evenings as Ricky Dan played his guitar and Bowman made a fiddle sing.

  Her hands had looked odd when they expertly piloted knitting needles, sewed on a button or patched a hole in a pair of his or Ricky Dan’s jeans—back before holey jeans were a fashion statement. He’d watched her examine their clothes every night to make sure there were no rips or tears that might catch on something, get hung on a machine in the mine. She had cut up old shirts and sewn the pieces together for extra padding in the knees of their work pants. The knees always wore out first.