by Laura Hunter
Across the room, his father spoke in bits. “My son.” He spoke softly. “Mona?” The force of a low cough, much like the sound of a full gourd rattle, lifted him from the bed. It was as if his own breath was trying to force a beast from his chest but failed. His face turned dusty blue, and he died.
Beloved Mother whirled to face Two Tears, fists balled for battle. She opened her mouth to scream. Instead, a high-pitched keening rose from deep within. She dropped her clutched hands as her eerie wail shattered the room’s stillness. Beloved Mother fell across her son’s body.
Two Tears backed toward the open door.
“Out!” Beloved Mother spoke into the quilt. “Get off the land of my people.” Beloved Mother lifted her head and, without facing Two Tears, uttered through clinched teeth. “Go back to your white man.”
“What white man, Mama?” Briar cowered behind his mother. “Who’s Mona?” he whispered.
Two Tears shushed him. Fury held her between her son and her mother-in-law. “You’re not a Beloved Mother. Beloved Mother honors life. She builds harmony. You’re not doin’ that.” Two Tears caught her breath and inhaled deeply. “She keeps spirit mists in place.”
Beloved Mother stood to challenge Two Tears.
Two Tears wrapped her arms around Briar. “She don’t let her only son die.” She buried her face in Briar’s disheveled hair and muttered, “Oh my God, what have we done to my husband?”
Beloved Mother came closer. “You,” she spit out. “You only bring grief. First the village. Now my son.” She circled around and faced the bed where her son lay. “How did I ever let you and your wicked ways in my house? Tall Corn?” She spoke to her son’s dead body. “She has bled her evilness on our people.” Beloved Mother brandished her fist. “I curse you, woman.”
Sister Sun ducks behind a low bank of white fluffy clouds she has called in for a day of fair-weather. Great Spirit sleeps on.
Beloved Mother slammed her fist into Tall Corn’s mattress. The force elevated the covering from Tall Corn’s leg in a puff. The odor of rotting flesh escaped and wafted across the room. Beloved Mother’s head slumped. She cried, “I curse you and all your family. I swear on the Great Spirit. Hear me, O Great Spirit. As I am the Beloved Mother.”
Sister Sun sneaks from behind the cloud and nudges Great Spirit awake. “Can she do that?”
Great Spirit grunts.
Two Tears grabbed Briar’s arm and pushed him toward the barn. They climbed the wooden ladder to the loft and buried themselves in prickly hay. There they would wait for darkness so they could slip away.
From near the large cornfield where Tall Corn fell came the pounding of hammer to nail. Two Tears knew the ritual. Beloved Mother would gather wood to prepare a bier for Tall Corn. She would stay beside him to keep carrion away until he was ready for burial beneath the floor of the white man’s house Tall Corn had built for her.
Mid-day. Two Tears awakened Briar from a fitful sleep. They slipped into the house and gathered clothes in a croker sack. As they passed through the room where Tall Corn’s body lay, she paused before the mantle and glanced around for Beloved Mother. With no one in sight, she went to Tall Corn, lowered the quilt and kissed his cheeks. Back at the mantle, she slipped the carved cedar box into her pocket and slid a thin leather-backed book into her bosom.
A few steps down the trail, Briar broke his hand free from his mother’s. He ran into the house and returned with Tall Corn’s Winchester. He paused before Two Tears, his hand caressing the blued steel barrel. Its American walnut stock rested at his feet. He rubbed his hand over etched images of animals his father had killed with the gun. The rifle reached as high as the boy’s forehead. Uncertain, he gazed at his mother.
Two Tears nodded. “It’s right you should share your father’s life,” she said.
By nightfall, they were well down the trail toward Knoxville before they curved north to Elizabethtown.
The Foot of Turtleback Mountain
Turtleback Mountain has inexplicable ways to outfox even the smartest. Those with a mind toward the truth say it will conquer even the hardiest of men. Men tell of mountains, like this Turtleback, that hover like flocks of blackbirds and watch as people climb to a top flat and bury whomever the land has broken. As they trudge up and down the mountains with their shovels, wind and rain cover them in their own mountain dust, the dead and the living alike, payback for the rape of the miners’ pickaxes. These mountains, they watch, but they do not stir. They welcome generations of death unmoved. Yet men continue to come.
Miners came to these mountains through a narrow gap in the 1850s. They followed Broken Rock Creek to the head of the valley and set up a camp on the lower banks. There they picked large chunks of glistening coal from the water. Spring rains and melted snow washed men and tents back down to the mouth of the gap. Determined, men hacked their way back up the valley, creating one road down the riverbank. The only road in. The only road out. Eventually they would run their rails beside the road, beside the river, around the feet of Turtleback and Spencer’s Mountains, creating staggered yet connected niches in the land covered with mountain bluffs that obstruct travel. Their camp inside the pass would become Covington, a mining town entrenched in the bend of the river.
Houses still collect soot tags in rooms closed off for the winter. These tags grow so long in a season that, when a door opens, they sway in the breeze. Bring in an outsider and they mistake the tags for singular black strings hung from the ceiling.
The girl returned a woman, full-grown, her ashy-brown hair marked by early grey and braided against her back. She walked into Covington, past the center square statue of the miner, his pickax raised toward the sky, and knocked on the door where she grew as a child. People said she had two scars down one cheek, one white, one black.
Old man Parsons answered the door and stuffed his hands into the bib of his overalls. Parsons glared at her. He seemed not to know who she was. Before him stood a woman of indeterminate age, her face browned and wrinkled by days in the sun, her cheek scarred dark and light. Her eyes suggested a woman younger than her face. Her dingy white blouse, tucked into a long skirt bordered in strips of pinks and blues, covered her arms and neck. She wore rimless glasses and carried a pine needle-woven basket mashed against her breast as if it held some hidden treasure.
She spoke in a tentative voice. “I’m Mona. Your daughter.”
He answered back, “We don’t say that name in this house” and closed the door.
The woman was last seen climbing Turtleback Mountain. She was twenty-three years old. Following closely behind her was a thin boy barely nine, his eyes dark as his hair, his skin brown like a peanut. Townspeople who saw them watched until they disappeared into a mist slipping down the mountainside. The woman carried a small basket. The boy lugged a worn black valise.
Part II
Chapter 6
If I’d a knowed before I courted
that love would be so hard on me,
I’d a put my heart in a box of silver
and locked it up with a golden key
– Mountain Ballad
Covington, Virginia
Mid-spring, four years later. Anna crept across the linoleum-covered floor, groping her way toward Ruth’s bed. She hunched down to see if her sister was asleep. The hump under the quilts did not move. She wrapped her reddish blonde hair into a knot and pinned it in place with a tortoise shell comb. It was her mother’s best comb, but Anna needed it. So she took it.
Anna bent low and sneaked quickly across the room. When she opened the window, no breeze dissipated the fishy smell that filled the alley behind the Parson’s house. She hated this town with its black dirt and hovering mountains. Tonight she was leaving. Clint would be at the corner. He had promised to take her to Bristol where streets were paved and dirt was clean, not black or oily. There, men wore suits and had no ringed eyelids, men who offered white hands without coal-filled cuticles. There, she would not have to listen to Ruth carry on about a
man who cared not one whit about her.
Ruth was older and, by right, should marry before Anna. Anna did not consider Mona the oldest sister. Mona had left fourteen years ago when Anna was two, too long ago for Anna’s remembering. Ruth and Anna did not know where Mona was, if she had married some stranger or been murdered along some wild trail.
A breeze from Broken Rock Creek picked up. It blew the sheer cotton curtain into the room, bringing with it a strong stench of water poisoned by green mine slush that washed down from Spencer’s Mountain mines. Rancid water came from the east before it merged with streams coming from Turtleback Mountain at the head of the cove. A strong whiff might awaken Ruth. Anna stepped out the window onto ground so wet that a constant damp kept its moss tender. As she reached back inside the window for her clothes, a hand gripped her shoulder. She stifled a scream and fell back against the outside wall.
Ruth, clad only in a gauzy nightgown and underpants, appeared ghostlike from behind the old maple tree.
“Where you think you’re going?” Ruth demanded.
“None of your business,” Anna said. “Get your hand off me.”
“Tell me.” Ruth spit words through her teeth.
Anna jerked away. “Leave me be.”
Clint walked up from the alley that bordered Broken Rock Creek. “What’s going on?” he asked in a loud whisper.
Ruth waited for Anna to answer. When she did not, Ruth spoke to Clint, “She’s been sneaking out for over two weeks after you brought me home. I want to know where she’s going.” She shot an angry look at Anna.
Ruth, twenty-three, stood half-hidden by the maple’s trunk. She crossed her arms over her near-naked bosom and planted her feet. The March chill teased her nipples. She pulled her gown tight and clasped her arms over her breasts so Clint could not see. Her ash-blonde hair hung in clumps on her shoulders, ridged around her face from the thick hairnet she was required to wear when cooking at the drugstore lunch counter. In the shadow, her eyes looked navy blue, almost black, as the clarity of the event she had interrupted emerged.
Anna stood apart from the two, her arms straight against her narrow hips, her hands balled into fists. “You tell her, Clint.” She spread her arms and twirled so Clint could see her purple dress. “You like my new dress?” She grinned.
“This ain’t my doing. This ought to be twixt you two.” Clint etched a line with his shoe across the dirt. Close by the river, an acorn landed like a shot on a tin-roofed cowshed. Anna jumped. Ruth ignored the crack.
“Tell her,” Anna said. Night’s coolness seeped through her dress. “Tell her you love me and not her.” She cocked her head toward Ruth, much like a mockingbird looking for a nest to raid.
Ruth slapped Anna’s cheek. “What do you mean tempting him with your sassy talk?”
This was not how Anna had imagined it. “He wants to marry me and get out of this dirty old town.” She stepped aside for Clint to confirm her answer.
“Marry you?” Ruth sputtered out her response. “Why, you’re just a baby.” She tilted her head and said, “Clint?”
Clint stepped up. “I…” He opened and closed his fists. “I been meaning to tell you, but you seemed so set on our courting.” He lowered his head.
Ruth’s face went white as a full winter moon. “Set?” She raised her voice. “Set?”
“Shh,” Anna whispered. “Don’t wake Pa.”
When Ruth spoke again, her voice was low. “I never asked you to the drugstore morning after morning for me to cook you eggs and sausage.” Anger sputtered her words. “I never walked you home.” She hiccupped. “I never kissed you on the bridge.”
He rubbed his hand over his hair.
“And when will this wedding be?” Ruth asked.
“Tomorrow. What time is it, Clint?” Anna didn’t wait for him to answer. “Today. At the County Seat in Wise.” She took Ruth’s hands in hers. “But you can’t tell Ma or Pa. They won’t understand.”
“What’s to understand?” Ruth slumped against the maple. She stared up at Clint standing by Anna. “You asked me to fry you eggs every morning for the rest of your life. You said so.”
“Ruth,” he said. “It was just talk. Just jawing back and forth. You must’ve known that.”
“No.” Ruth stood up. “I didn’t.”
Clint took Anna’s arm. “Where’s your sack?”
Anna reached into the open window and brought out a pillowcase heavy in the bottom with two folded dresses, underpants and a coat. Clint followed Anna toward the road leading out of the valley.
Ruth’s voice shook as she spoke from the base of the tree. “I’ll tell. I swear. I’ll tell.”
Clint said to nobody, “Not my fault. I ain’t done nothing wrong.” He pulled away from Anna and stuffed his hands into his pants pockets.
Anna turned back and glowered at her older sister, now crouched on all fours. She strode back to face her. She spoke nose to nose so quietly only awakening pre-dawn birds could hear. “You want to make me look like a baby. Well, I’m sixteen now. I’m not thirteen like Mona was.”
“Anna. You’re my little sister.” Ruth dropped her face into her hands. “Running off like that sorry Mona. You were a baby. You can’t remember how bad it was. What it did to Ma and Pa. I was there. I saw it all.”
Anna walked away from Ruth’s voice and followed Clint as he led the way out of Covington.
Sister Sun hears the last of Anna’s reply. She slows her entry over the mountain so as not to shame Ruth in broad daylight. Brother Moon slides down the western sky, intent on making his regular rounds. Neither asks the other about where Great Spirit might be.
Breakline Mining Camp
Seventeen years after the mine at Breakline Camp near the eastern Kentucky border opened, a lone woman walked up from the south. A skinny boy followed, wearing a sharpened hatchet in his belt and carrying a black bag.
Dressed as if she had stepped out of the previous century, the scar-faced woman wore a long cotton skirt banded in purple and blue. A deep pink shirt much too large for her size flapped about her arms. Her dull hair, beginning to streak with grey, had been wound into an untidy knot at the nape of her neck. She no longer walked with life in her step but pulled her feet along in workmen’s boots made heavy by caked dirt from her travels.
While there, she said little to the people of Breakline. Instead, she cleaned and cooked at the yellow three-story house on the rise, a Queen Anne structure, distinguished by its rounded turret covered with purple shakes. When she finished each day, she gathered her due and disappeared up Turtleback. The next morning she walked back in, often with the boy trailing behind. The year was 1937.
Across the big water, Great Spirit watches armies prepare to fight what will become another World War. He calls to leaders who pride themselves on being dogmatic and omnipotent. They stuff their ears with ambition and refuse to pay attention. Great Spirit shudders at their foolishness, at their mistaken conception that they can attain immortality by simply shedding blood.
Hawks played on wind currents, dipping and gliding to stave off boredom. Briar Slocomb, now twelve, perched on an angled limb midway up an oak tree where he could overlook the long hollow and study the scene below.
Breakline Mining Camp spread out through a stretch of dip between Virginia’s Turtleback and Kentucky. A tall tipple rose at the far end of the hollow, near the mouth of the mine. Briar thought it should rightly stand at the center of the community. Without its constant hum, the camp would die.
Angled chutes spread out from the metal tipple like multiple support arms. It was here every hour of every day that coal was crushed, washed and separated from slate. For Briar, the purified coal took on a life of its own once miners axed it from its bed and set it apart. He thought of the tipple’s constant rhythm, whamp, swish, swish, swish, as one breath after another rising from the camp. So strange was this other-worldly music that it imbedded itself in Briar’s memory long after he left his oak for home. Briar came to think of the
tipple as a living, breathing thing, a monster nestled within the mountains, a creature that sustained itself on the sooty coal-infested water it spewed through the camp.
The tipple towered over the camp, even shadowing the house where Winston Rafe lived. As supervisor for the three mines owned by Breakline Coal Company, Rafe enjoyed the best of what life offered and used his name and position to see that he got it. Rafe strutted around like he owned every spot of dirt and every person who walked the same path. And he did own everyone, everyone but Briar Slocomb and Briar’s mother Two Tears.
Briar saw himself as true Cherokee, but had he picked up his mother’s medicine book, had he been able to read Cherokee and Tall Corn’s family heritage, he would have known he could not have been Tall Corn’s son. Though not blood Cherokee, his time with Tall Corn had given him a well-developed Cherokee judgment of what to avoid and whom to trust, so he kept out of Rafe’s way. Briar sensed a sorryness within Winston Rafe, as palpable as a summer’s swollen boil.
Briar failed to tell even his mother that he told the camp boys he was “Silent Wolf,” the name his father had given him. Inside, he was “Silent Wolf,” son of Walks in Tall Corn, from the land of the Cherokee somewhere within the Carolinas.
The oak grew off the road to itself. Briar saw it the first time he and Two Tears climbed Turtleback. Huge compared to other trees around it, its limbs clustered so close that wind could not pass through its thick, green leaves. Briar could imagine the wind lifting up and over its top and spiraling into the sky, rocking the stars themselves. The canopy stood as tall as a three-story house and twice as wide. Beneath the thick limbs, ground lay soft with seasons of building moss. It was not the first live oak Briar had seen, but it was the largest. He knew as soon as he saw it that it was his. Amazed at its wide girth, he named the tree “Old Oak.”