by Terri Kouba
I stood up in the back of the red truck that had picked us up at the train station. Pa held on to my skinny legs at the knees, his rough hands large enough to wrap fully around the knobs. The truck bounced down the dirt road, rocking from side to side as the wheels skipped in and out of the ruts made from a thousand passings before. Black air whipped at my face and my eyes watered as tiny particles of coal dust became trapped in their tears.
I refused to close them. I could not tear my eyes from the row upon row of red houses stacked like sugar tins against the side of the mountain coal mine. The rusty, tin shanties leaned precariously against each other. If I sneezed they would topple over. Their rusted sides billowed in the explosion from deep within the mine and then settled back against each other after a release of black dust.
The truck lurched to a stop. I pulled my legs from my father’s grip and leapt from the back. I fell and scraped my knee but ignored the pain and ran to the gate that was quickly closing. I wrapped my fingers around the blackened wire and struggled to push it open.
“We can’t live here,” I shouted. “Let us out!”
My father’s hand crushed my shoulder.
“The devil dwells in a red house. We can’t live here.”
I pushed and pulled at the locked gate, trying to rock it open.
I looked over my shoulder at the row of red houses. They smiled in anticipation.
“Hush, child,” my father’s gravel voice whispered behind my ear.
“Nana said! Nana said we should never live in a red house. The devil dwells there.”
“Nana’s dead,” my father said. His fingers pressed against my collarbone. He pulled and ripped my tiny fingers from the wire fence. A barb caught, digging a deep gash into my left palm. I held it up and saw my hand grow as red as the devil houses.
I spun around to stare at my father’s thighs. “Nana’s dead because you didn’t want her anymore!” I had heard him whispering to my mother on the ship. Nana had turned sick the day we set out to sea and after three weeks she barely had enough energy to breath.
I dipped the edge of my skirt in water and wrung it dry over her parched lips. Sometimes the water trickled down her throat. Other times she coughed and vomit out all of the water I had spent the last hour feeding her, drop by drop.
I had heard my father ask my mother why her mother was still hanging on. Nana had heard him too. I saw her eyes flash black. Her body was cold when I woke along side her the next morning.
My father’s eyes flashed black like Nana’s at my words. His hand hit my cheek and my thin body sprawled across the black dirt. I rolled and hit my head against the truck’s tire. It was still warm from the friction of the ride from the train station.
My father was big, but he was fast. It was deceiving to look at his huge body and then see him move. His hand had snapped out and hit my face even before my eyes had seen his fingers twitch. To look at his arms, as big as tree trunks, a body would think he’d be as slow as he is big. But it was just wasn’t true. His body was thick but he moved like the wind.
On Sundays after church we used to all stand behind Pa. All of us. My four brothers, Nana and me. Mama would call for us and call for us, wondering where we could all have gone. Then we’d jump out from behind Pa and we’d all burst out laughing and Mama would pull my head into her waist and I’d smell the anise cookies she had baked earlier that morning.
That was before my brother Antov had died. And Nana. And before we had to pack everything we owned into a bag we could carry and come across the huge ocean to America. To a place I couldn’t pronounce called Pennsylvania where they had rows and rows of red houses in which the devil could dwell.
I pulled myself to my feet using the truck to steady my legs until the white balls left my vision. I looked at Pa’s red face and I knew that the devil had scurried out one of the red houses and had found a new place to dwell. I spat at Pa’s feet and ran to a clump of trees behind a big black rock.
I had lost Nana. And now the devil had Pa. I had to live in a red house and my dress was streaked with red blood. I clenched my tiny fingers around the gash on my palm, sheltering it. “I won’t let the devil inside me,” I whispered. “I’ll die first.”
“My daddy killed me.”
I spun around, thinking the devil had heard me and wanted to trick himself inside me through my bloody wound. Before me sat a girl no older than I. She clutched her knees to her chest and I could see dried blood streaked on the bottom of her dress. Her eyes were as dark as the coal strewn across the ground but her face was as white as a snow goose. Her face said she was six, maybe seven. But her eyes were older than Mama’s. Maybe even older than Nana’s.
She patted the dirt and I sat down next to her. I leaned my back against the rock and a tree trunk pressed against my side. She picked up my hand to inspect the wound. The blood had slowed to a trickle but the gash was stuffed with pebbles and leaves and dirt. Coal dust made my blood a red so dark it looked like the coffee Nana used to drink; black and thick.
She reached into her sock and pulled out a knife. It wasn’t very sharp but it would do if it had to. She looked into my eyes and pulled the knife across her hand. At first nothing happened but then I saw red blood well out of the new wound. She clasped my hand tightly in hers. “Together. Against the devil.” Her voice sounded like a goose in pain, the words honked from her raw throat. She had been crying.
I thought about the devil in the red houses. In my Pa. In her Pa too, since he had done something to make her feel like she had died. I felt her hot blood mingle with mine. I felt it enter my body, move up my arm to my elbow and past my shoulder. It tickled my belly and warmed my shoeless feet. Her blood swirled around in my head and I looked into her old black eyes.
I felt power in her blood, in her words, in her eyes, and I knew we would win. The devil might dwell the red houses. He might be in our Pas. But he would never, ever be in us. As long as we stuck together, clasped as tightly as our hands were at this moment, the devil could never get in us. He would never reach us. We would win.
Darla and I became inseparable. We ate at our own houses, for neither of our Pas wanted to feed another mouth, but we were together at all other times. We sat next to each other at church and when the room wasn’t used for blessings, the altar turned into the teacher’s desk where we learned our letters and numbers together. We spent most nights at my house and sometimes I spent the night at Darla’s, but never when her Pa was home. He spent a lot of nights at the bar or over at his girlfriend’s house. A couple of times he had stumbled home, drunker even than my Pa, and Darla had woken me up and made me crawl out the crack in the tin wall in her room and run home. In the middle of the night! When I was ten I found out why.
“My Pa killed you,” Darla whispered, her hot tears joining my own. I vomited into the pail she kept in the corner of her room. My skin felt on fire but my bones were as cold as ice. I shivered and sweated at the same time. “It’s not your fault, Petra.” Darla stroked my gnarled hair away from my wet face. “The Devil is inside my Pa. That’s why he does it.”
I shuddered as I remembered Darla’s Pa inside me. He put his hand over my mouth and his eyes flared red. His body was heavier than a tree when he forced my legs apart and rolled on top of me. He stank of coal and cheap moonshine and old sweat. He smelled red.
The room turned dark but as he moved on top of me his red eyes lit up. I cried no and pleaded with him to stop but every time I told him it hurt, his red eyes would get brighter. His eyes turned into red lanterns and the room was cast in a pink glow. Then he rolled over and the lanterns blinked out.
Afterwards Darla said she was sorry, but her eyes were pink when she said it so I knew she was lying. She just wanted someone to share her shame. And now I had her shame too. I bled down there for three weeks before I got all of the devil out of me. Or so I thought. Two years later the devil started to visit me once a month and I would bleed his red juices to remind me of my shame and of his power.<
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The devil never got inside Mama, but his darkness did and she’d just spit him right out. I came home from school one day and she was lying on the floor, propped up against the kitchen cupboard. Her face was the color of our bed sheets right out of the wash; a grayish yellow that made me think of boiled chicken bones. She struggled to breathe and her glassy eyes barely saw me. Her entire face was streaked with the devil’s black spittle. Most of it had already dried and it flaked off as I wiped it away.
She coughed and left another wad of black phlegm in the towel. Mama said it was her asthma – she never called it the Black Death - but I knew what it really was. The devil had been sitting on her chest again, trying to get inside her. That’s why it was hard for her to breathe. Mama fought him for a year, but one day the devil sat on her chest so hard that she just stopped breathing.
I guess the devil became bored with Pa because he killed him the next year in a mine blast. But I wasn’t fooled. The devil didn’t die with Pa. He scuttled into my brother Andrei. The day we buried Pa, Andrei came home late and staggered into our rusty shack, banging around like a pebble in a tin can, his breath smelling like bad vinegar and his fists itching for my face.
On my thirteenth birthday, Andrei came home with gifts. Expensive gifts. He wore a long yellow jacket – he called it suede – and he wouldn’t let me touch it until I washed my hands. Twice. Then he gave me my present: a pair of warm mittens. He held them in his large hands as if cradling a chicken egg.
“For my Petra, who deserves more than she gets.”
I thought he was going to hit me again, but he just ruffled the hair on my head instead. I sneezed in the loose dust. They were warmest, softest thing I had ever felt. I put them on and rubbed them against my face. They tickled my cheeks. They were the first things I had ever owned that didn’t belong to someone else first. They were a nice gift, except they were red mittens. The devil would hold my hands all winter long.
That was my last winter in the coalmines. Andrei had paid for these expensive gifts by selling me to a man in St. Louis. I was to go there in the spring – Andrei had already purchased the three connecting bus tickets I would need for the trip. Andrei said the coalmine was no place for a woman and in St. Louis at least I’d live long enough to see my own children grow up. But I clutched my fists inside my new red mittens and knew the devil was behind it all.
I left in May. Andrei, my brother who used to try to protect me from my father, beat me for the last time the night before I left. He didn’t hit me on the face, so no one could see what he had done, but the devil wanted me to carry him with me when I left in the bruises on my ribs and back. Andrei left for the mines like it was a normal day, except he turned back at the door, pecked me on the forehead and wished me good luck. His eyes flared red before he could turn his face away.
I got in the back of the Red Sun delivery truck and it dropped me off at the bus stop. It wasn’t a real bus station. It was a Texaco gas station, with their red sign and red gas pumps and red cola box, which served as a bus stop too.
The bus came four hours later, right on time. The driver asked me if I wanted to clean up in the restroom before I boarded, but I just shrugged. Everything I owned was caked with rancorous coal dust and I had nothing clean to clean up into.
Twenty hours later I stepped off the bus in St. Louis. The man behind the counter told me to get on another bus and get off at Main and 23rd. I watched his eyes, but they never turned red. I hoped I could trust him, despite his red vest.
I hopped off at the stop the friendly bus driver said was mine. There was a park across the street. The colors! They were so bright that they hurt my eyes. The trees were green instead of coated in black. Children played on swings. And they were laughing. I had never heard so many children laughing before.
I heard a noise and looked up in the green tree above me. A bird sat watching me. He was blue. A blue bird. Who could have dreamt such a thing?
My knees knocked against each other as I sat on a smooth wooden bench. I felt the grime from the mines slough off me like an old ratty coat. I took a breath so deep that my ribs threatened to burst out of my skin and I let it out without a cough – something I had never been able to do in the hills.
I reached inside my bag, which was really the pillowcase mama had died on, and pulled out Andrei’s gift. I gently set the red mittens on the bench beside me. I stared at my past life for a long time without blinking, until my eyes dried up and then started to water.
I stood up but could not walk away. My hand hovered over my red mittens, my trembling fingertips barely caressing the fluff rising from their lushness. I closed my eyes. I could hear the devil whispering, urging me to pick up my precious, supple mittens. They belonged to me. I couldn’t just leave them on the bench. They were the only things I ever had that were truly mine.
No! I wasn’t going to do it. I curled my hand in a fist so tight that my fingernails dug into my palm. They left white crescents but didn’t draw blood. I bit my lip but no red flowed forth. My legs jerked as I forced myself to walk forward. I walked away and left the devil behind me, sitting on a park bench.
I turned when the street sign read Chestnut and gasped. It was beautiful. The house on my left was white with blue trimming and the house on my right was blue with white trimming. The next house was the color of this city’s sun; a bright yellow that hurt my eyes to look at it. I saw a house made of wood and another the color of peaches.
Every house was surrounded by lush, green grass. It reminded me of the churchyard back home, before we came to America. It reminded me of the last time I was happy.
All of the houses had flowers blooming in more colors than I could name. Their doors had shiny knockers and some houses even had white fences around their yards. The colors swirled around my eyes, overwhelming my senses and making me so dizzy I had to stop walking.
I leaned against a tree with purple leaves and delicate white flowers with yellow hair in the center. They looked so fragile that I was afraid to touch them.
“Move along, little girl.” I guess the owner didn’t like the dirty girl who smiled and giggled under his tree.
I turned on Rose Street. My footfalls stopped. My sweaty hands dried cold. I touched my pocket that held the street address of my new home but I didn’t need to look at the piece of paper.
I knew which house was mine.
In the middle of the block, in a sea of white and blue and yellow houses, was a big red house. The devil dwells in a red house.
The End
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