by Ninie Hammon
Harlan #7 wasn’t a big operation, though. It ran a day shift from 7 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon and a night shift from 3 until 11. A skeleton crew did maintenance on the graveyard shift after midnight.
“I got my bossin’ papers a few years back,” Lloyd said to Will. “Still go down in the mine ever day.”
“But you two ain’t had no time—”
“There’s no hurry,” Will said. He rose and turned to Lloyd. “I’ll walk you out to your truck.”
Lloyd led the way out the door and down the steps. Will actually held his temper in check until the two of them got all the way out into the yard.
“WHAT WAS THAT about?” Will demanded, his angry voice quiet so Granny couldn’t hear.
Lloyd opened his truck door but made no effort to get into it. Instead, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, lit one, and blew a plume of white smoke at Will as he spoke. Will noticed that his hands shook.
“What was what about?”
“Oh, come on, Lloyd! It’s me you’re talking to. All that stuff about rocks and…”
Will stopped, collected himself. He hadn’t meant for it to go this way, didn’t want to fight. He just hadn’t been prepared for this much anger, though he probably should have expected it. He cleared his throat and started again in a more reasonable tone. “Lloyd, I was going to come see you, so we could talk—just you and me. As soon as I got settled I was—”
“But you got too busy, didn’t you. Come waltzin’ in like you owned the place and they throwed you a party, everybody makin’ over you,” the venom in his voice would have killed a rattlesnake.
“It’s been 20 years. Of course, Granny was glad to see me.”
Lloyd leaned toward Will and snarled. “How glad you think she’d be if she knowed what we know?” He took another long drag off his cigarette; his hands still trembled. “What’d you have to come back for? I thought you’s dead that day under the mountain. All this time you been gone, everybody thought you’s dead.”
“I was dead,” Will said quietly. “I have been for two decades. I came home because—”
“Home? Home? You left.” Lloyd hissed the rest through clenched teeth. “I stayed.”
“You want a medal, Lloyd? I’ll see if I can drum you up one.” Will was instantly sorry he’d said it.
“You wasn’t here when the air hung so heavy with grief you almost couldn’t get your breath. When women would burst out cryin’ in the grocery store, or walkin’ down the street, or faint dead away in church. When fifth-grade kids took to wettin’ the bed. And nobody laughed about nothin’. Ever!”
He spoke in a harsh, near-whisper. “I was here when the only thing left of 27 miners to give to their families was the tags they left on the board when they went in.” He paused, then growled, “Where was you all those years?”
“For most of them, I was up under a bridge somewhere, blind drunk.”
His frankness stopped Lloyd momentarily.
“Well, everybody’d be better off if you’d stayed drunk. Why’d you have to come back here and ruin everything.”
“What am I ruining?” Will stepped back and studied Lloyd. “Why do you care that I’m here? I’m not hurting you.” Will paused, then eased into it. “In fact, I was hoping to talk to you, try to work things out between us so—”
“Work things out? All that booze musta’ pickled your brain, Will, ’cause there ain’t no working out to be done ’tween me and you. Nothin’ you say or do will ever—”
“You think I don’t know that! Look, I’m not trying to earn anything by doing the right thing or saying the right thing now, after all this time. I know I bring absolutely nothing to the party. I’m just…here.”
“You shouldn’t a-come.”
Will looked out over the hollow. “When I heard they’d reopened #7, I...Lloyd, what happened down there that day can’t stay buried under Black Mountain forever.”
“What are you sayin’?” Lloyd demanded. All at once, his voice was high-pitched and strained, his little black eyes wild. “Whadda you think they’re gonna find when they dig out them roof falls?”
“What are you talking about, Lloyd?”
Lloyd’s voice raised in volume and intensity with every word. “You shouldn’t never have come back here!” He jabbed at the air inches from Will’s face with the fingers that held his cigarette. “You shoulda’ stayed away, stayed dead!”
Will realized Lloyd was very close to taking a swing at him. Will was taller and quicker, and Lloyd had once been a whole lot stronger. Not anymore, though; his muscles had all gone to fat. But Lloyd was definitely angrier. Will determined he’d take one punch if Lloyd decided to throw it, wouldn’t fight back. Lloyd was certainly entitled to that much.
Then he thought about Granny. She didn’t need to see the two of them duke it out in her front yard.
He took a deep breath and spoke quietly—calmly—the way you’d talk to a wounded animal so it wouldn’t bite you when you tried to help it.
“Just about every day for the past 20 years I’ve wished I’d died when you thought I did, wished I’d gone with the others. I didn’t. Neither did you. We have to live with that.” Then Will’s voice took on a hard edge. “But I can tell you right now, Lloyd, I’m not going to live with it for the next 20 years the same way I have for the past 20.”
“Neither am I,” Lloyd said, his voice just as steely. “One way or the other, it’s gonna end now.”
Will knew what he’d meant by what he’d said, but he had no idea what Lloyd might be talking about. Whatever it was, though, Lloyd’s determination seemed to calm him.
“Do what you got to do, Will. If you come here to save your soul, have at it. You’re gonna find it’s a whole lot harder’n you think it is.” He turned as if to get into his truck and then turned back, tossed the cigarette in the dirt and ground it out with his heel. “And as for me and you, we’re quits.”
He did get into his truck then, slammed the door, and drove away in a spray of gravel. Will watched him until he was out of sight at the bottom of the hollow.
CHAPTER 10
THE SHED WHERE Jamey did his arts was in the woods about a hundred and fifty yards up a slope behind the house. The path led past the garden and a stand of poplars and around a rock outcrop. The shed sat right behind the outcrop. You could miss it if you weren’t looking for it, though. The years had so aged the wood it blended perfectly into the dappled forest.
The building had been there as long as anybody could remember, a simple two-room, wood-frame structure built with rough-hewn boards that carried the marks of hand tools. Granny said it had probably been somebody’s house back when folks first moved into the mountains, but it’d been abandoned for years when Bowman decided to fix it up as a place to store garden tools and seed. He and Ricky Dan patched the roof leaks, remounted a door they could put a padlock on, boarded up the building’s only window and built shelves to store Granny’s Mason jars full of strawberry jam, green beans, corn, carrots, and peas she’d canned for winter.
When it became obvious years later that Jamey needed somewhere to work, Lloyd had helped clear the brush away from the old building and he and Jamey had repaired the floorboards and the biggest of the wall cracks to help keep out the chill in the wintertime. There was a stone fireplace on one wall of the larger room, but Granny said not to light a fire in it, that birds had nested in the chimney.
Jamey paused a few feet from the shed door and listened. Bucket stopped, too, and plopped down in the dirt at his feet. The old dog always looked for an excuse to lie down. The woods were quiet in the autumn. Peaceful. Jamey liked this time of the year best of all, when the only sound was the sigh of the wind, the rustle of dry leaves, and sometimes a woodpecker digging for food. Summers was noisy! The squalling cry of cicadas filled the whole hollow then, buzzing loud as the chain saw Lloyd’d used to cut the brush that was all tangled up around the shed.
The piece of jet Lloyd had left fo
r Jamey lay beside the door on the small front stoop. Lloyd couldn’t take it inside because the door was locked. Jamey had a key, kept it safe and secure in the right front pocket of his jeans. After he unlocked the door and fastened the padlock back together, he carefully replaced the key in his pocket, proud that he’d been trusted to take care of it.
The lock on the door wasn’t so much because there was anything in the building to steal—unless somebody had a hankering for coal carvings and sculpture tools. Mostly, the lock was to keep out teenagers, who Granny said would use the shed for drinking and doing drugs and other things that made Jamey blush to think about.
He leaned down and picked up the piece of jet and cradled it in his arms as tenderly as he’d have held a newborn baby. Not that it’d break, of course. You had to hit it real hard with a hammer to break it, but it was a rare, precious thing so Jamey treated it like one.
He went through the door with Bucket on his heels and set the rock down on the workbench. Bucket collapsed on the old rug Jamey’d put on the floor for him to lie on and let out a sigh of foul-smelling doggie breath. Jamey’s eyes hadn’t got used to the sudden dark of the building, but there wasn’t a whole lot in there to trip over—only his worktable and stool, and he could have found them with his eyes closed.
Jamey didn’t need bright light to do his arts. Good thing, too, because there wasn’t no bright sunshine here in the woods, and the building’s only window was boarded up. Jamey worked by lantern light. Half a dozen coal oil lanterns sat on shelves around the room. The largest rested on the far end of the door-on-sawhorses worktable. When Jamey started carving, he’d light them all and then move the biggest one down on the table near him.
It wasn’t just because there wasn’t no sunlight or electricity that the shed was lit by lanterns. Jamey often worked on his for-sale statues on the front porch or the back deck of the house. Those wasn’t real art. But for the carvings that mattered to him, Jamey worked in the flickering flames of a lantern. The dancing light made the shiny coal sparkle like stars in the sky on a summer night. And Jamey didn’t tell nobody this part—because wouldn’t nobody understand what he meant—but he was certain that only lantern light revealed the images in the coal it was his job to set free.
Jamey went around and lit each of the lanterns until the room was aglow in a golden light. He used kitchen matches and blew each one completely out. Stomped them on the floor, too. Jamey had learned to be careful with fire! Then he closed the door and sat down on his stool and was very still for a long time. He stared at the shiny piece of jet, studied and enjoyed it. His first task would be to chip carefully at it to remove slivers of the surface, make it flat and smooth—enough for a relief mural. Only after it was smooth, could he begin to carefully remove pieces of stone to reveal the art buried inside.
“Whadda ya think, ValVleen?” he asked the yellow bird that had perched tranquilly on his shoulder all the way up the hill. “What do you ’spect is in there?”
The bird chirped, whirred, and whistled a reply that was so close to words it made Jamey’s mind itch trying to understand it. Sometimes he pretended like he did; didn’t want to hurt ValVleen’s feelings, make her think didn’t nobody listen to what she said.
“Yeah, I think you’re right, ValVleen,” he told the bird, his face serious. “I think there’s a mural in there with lots of people in it.”
Where did that come from?
“And if ’n there’s lots of people in it, I sure hope they’s happy people.”
Jamey lifted his eyes and looked at the door that led into the only other room in the building. Not much bigger than a closet, the room contained drying racks for ginseng, wooden crates that held potatoes and turnips from the garden and a handful of ratty old pillowcases Jamey used to cover his murals. But it also held a mural Jamey kept secret, one Granny said he couldn’t never let nobody see—ever.
He’d carved the hidden mural right after he’d done the one of Granny’s wedding that she hung on the wall in her bedroom. She didn’t hang this one up, though, but she did keep it in the house for months looking at it. Didn’t never let JoJo see it, and sometimes when JoJo was in school, Jamey’d come down from the shed and find Granny at the kitchen table looking at the mural…and crying. First time he found her like that he got real upset, too, wanted to know what it was in the mural made her so unhappy. She’d wiped her eyes and told him, “never you mind, now,” and put the piece of jet back in a pillowcase and shoved it under her bed.
“I ain’t never gonna carve nothin’ like that ever again,” he’d told her and tried real hard not to cry his own self. Granny’d come over and sat down on the couch next to him. She’d taken his face in her hands and looked so deep into his eyes it had made him dizzy.
He remembered exactly what she’d said to him that day.
“What you carved didn’t come outta’ yore head, Jamey.” Her voice was kind of thick sounding. “So I got to b’lieve the good Lord put it in that piece of jet. And he wouldn’t a-put it in there if ’n he didn’t intend for you to get it out.”
She’d told him he had to dig into whatever rocks he was give and release what God had hid inside them. That even if folks didn’t like what was in them rocks, it was still his job to carve them.
Jamey’d studied and studied that mural, looked at it ever which way, but he never could find nothing in it that’d make a person cry.
The next summer, he found out it had the power to do more than make Granny cry. It was during a big storm. Thunder woke Jamey up, a rumbling, booming sound right outside his window that near scared him to death. He was already trembling when his night light blinked out, left his room dark as a lump of coal except when the lightning lit up the sky and made scary shadows on the floor. He wanted to run fast as he could and get in bed with JoJo, but she had spent the night with her friend, Becca. Then a glow come under the door from the living room; Granny must have got out a flashlight or lit candles. He wanted to run in there and sit real close to her on the living room couch, but he was too scared to move. So he hid under the covers in his room and listened to the storm rage outside.
Then Granny’d screamed.
It was the terriblest sound Jamey ever did hear in all his life, like the cry that raccoon made when they’d backed over it that time—before Granny killed it with a rock. And scared or not, Jamey leapt out of bed, ran to his door and yanked it open. Just as he did, the electricity come back on and the light was so bright it blinded him. Out of squinty eyes, he seen Granny in front of the table, with a chair laying on the floor beside her that maybe she’d knocked over when she jumped up. She stared at the table with the awfulest look on her face, like there was a rattlesnake curled up on it or a black widow spider. But wasn’t nothing on the table but a couple of candles and Jamey’s mural, the one that’d made her cry. She had her hand clamped over her mouth and her shoulders shook but she didn’t make no sound at all.
Jamey went up to her and put his hand on her arm. Then he couldn’t help it—he started to cry, too. She turned around and hugged him, but she didn’t hush up. The two of them stood in the middle of the kitchen and cried, but only Granny knew what they was crying about.
The next day, she had the mural wrapped back up in its pillowcase and she told him to take it up to the shed and hide it underneath the potato and turnip boxes in the little storage room. Said to leave it there and not never let nobody see it.
He’d asked her if she wanted him to take the sledge hammer to it and smash it—though it would have tore him up to do that. Ever one of his arts was precious to him, even one that made Granny cry. But she shook her head. “Ain’t no sense smashin’ the mirror just ’cause you don’t like what you see in it,” she’d said, and he didn’t have no idea what that meant.
He looked down at the shiny black jet on the table and felt that fluttery feeling in his belly he got before he started to work. But this fluttering wasn’t excited; it was something else. Felt like there was little critters with
wings flying around inside him, but they wasn’t birds or butterflies; they was wasps or yellow jackets, something mean and nasty.
“ValVleen, you s’pose this ’un is gonna make Granny cry?” The bird cocked its head to one side, looked at Jamey and let out a lone chirp, a single note.
“Yeah,” Jamey said with a sigh. “I think so, too.”
He picked up his chisel and his mallet and started to work.
CHAPTER 11
GRANNY DIDN’T PRETEND she hadn’t watched Will and Lloyd, didn’t jump back from the window and act like she’d been clearing the table or doing the dishes. She faced Will when he walked back in the front door.
“You ’n Lloyd was hard at it.” It wasn’t a question so Will said nothing. “You need to know his nose was already outta joint ’fore you got here. He’s got reason enough to be acting peculiar.”
As Granny described what had happened to Lloyd’s family, Will watched another cherished illusion go down in flames.
When he was drunk, he’d pitied Lloyd; when he was sober, he’d envied him. And sometimes it was the other way around. He felt slobbering sorry that his friend still dug coal deep in a dark hole in the ground, still lived paycheck to paycheck, still got laid off, went on strike, got hurt, and breathed dust into his lungs every day. At the same time, he had conjured up a Courier & Ives fantasy of the loving wife and beautiful children who waited to welcome Lloyd home at night. Will had squandered two decades of living, had thrown away the simple dignity of hard work and caring for a family. Now, it was clear that wasn’t always what it was cracked up to be either.
Granny mused out loud, as she had often done when he was a boy, in a stream of consciousness that covered everything and nothing and all points in between. It had been a soothing sound that he hadn’t listened to then. He listened now.