by Laura Hunter
Each day, Briar climbed Old Oak, overlooked the valley and watched people who looked not much larger than birds going about their lives. He listened to life that lifted itself out of the valley and merged with the tipple’s singsong lullaby. Hidden within Old Oak’s branches, Briar imagined the music of the valley melding with that of the mountain. Since settling here, he accepted that he was searching for something, some event, some person, anything that would give him the feeling of belonging he had left behind in the Carolinas three winters ago. So far, nothing had spoken to him.
What he had heard spoken in camp taught him not to speak the Cherokee words his mother spoke. “Month of the Planting Moon” or “Month of the Green Corn Moon” became “summer.” Never could he allow himself to think on “Month of the Ripe Corn Moon,” for it was within this month that carelessness had overtaken him and left Briar believing he had killed his father.
Initially, camp boys laughed at his long black hair and strange words. They clustered and shushed each other, then they intoned “Silent Wolf, Silent Wolf,” with each chant growing louder than the last. They chunked clods of dirt at him for being a “dirty Indian.” One, in a fit of laughter, threw a piece of coal at Briar. It struck him behind his left ear. Blood ran down his neck. He crossed the ditch bridge and walked toward the end of the valley. There he used the tipple drain-off to wash the blood away. He scotched the cut with Breakline’s black dirt. The scar reminded him of his mother’s facial scar. He thought of her each time he rubbed the nubby skin. The scar lay hidden beneath his long hair. Once he went to Old Oak, the tree wrapped him in limbs and leaves and hid him from any passersby. Only there did he sit at ease.
In Breakline Mining Camp, Briar hid the secret killing of his father. But for Briar, the past was never dead. It was not even past. He rarely thought in shades of grey. He had left the planting hoe in the cornfield. A slip and it impaled itself beneath Tall Corn’s kneecap. The event was his doing. No amount of telling would convince him different. Deep inside, he knew the truth. He was Tall Corn’s son. His high cheekbones bore that out. He had murdered his father as surely as if he had put a rifle to Tall Corn’s head and pulled the trigger. His carelessness had thrown him into a shadow of himself. That shadow fed on his guilt and grew.
Each day, dusk pushed Briar out of the tree and sent him up the snaking road to Flatland. Each day, he would use his fake bone-handled pocketknife to notch a deep line into Old Oak’s trunk, a reminder that this magnificent tree belonged to him.
Summer days mapped out the same for the mining camp. The ear-shattering whistle pulled miners out of company-owned houses lined up the walking path and led them to the shack where they donned boots, coveralls and hardhats for entering underground. Within minutes, they spilled out and walked stiff-legged to the mine. Each wore a blackened jumper with thick cloth made brittle by days of hardened dirt imbedded from crawling through the tunnels’ mud. Their hardhats, topped with carbide lamps, bobbed with each step. They lined up by twos and boarded trams that shuttled them down slanted rails into the earth. There they remained, hunched over, sometimes crawling on their knees in icy water, to where they whacked black seams of prehistoric oily rock out of tunnel walls with pickaxes and shovels.
Twelve hours later on days without accident or death, the same men trudged out of the hole and removed their mining duds. Several hiked up Turtleback’s side, stripped down, and bathed in tin washtubs they left on the banks of a constant spring. They wound their way back down to their families, with a few stopping by the company store for tobacco, before they faced tending the gardens behind their houses.
Each day, Briar watched camp kids, his age and younger, race down the banks of a ditch that carried dirty water from the chutes. Children chased debris they threw into the ditch to check the water’s speed as it led to the mine pond outside the camp. The ditch, with three wooden bridges interspersed down the valley, spanned no more than four-feet across and three-feet deep. Its water reflected light the color of black glass. The ditch separated unpainted camp houses from rail tracks that carried coal-filled hoppers to B&O railcars and out of the valley.
From his perch within Old Oak, Briar observed a life unlike his own. Girls drew squares in the dirt and jumped one after the other from box to box, their pigtails slapping their backs. Boys formed teams and used a board to knock a chunk of coal into the group and try to outrun each other. A mother would call to an older child to get that baby away from the ditch before he drowned himself. Several children would stop their play, lift the toddler and set him back on his camp house porch.
The scenes of families interacting within their small circles, children laughing and chasing each other back and forth through broom-swept yards, mothers patting children on the head and standing in the doorway waiting for their men to come home, all reminded Briar that he did not know the world of play, that his mother was not a hugging mother. Nor had she ever been.
When he tired of watching camp people, Briar took out the knife Tall Corn had given him and carved animals he remembered from his father’s gunstock. He started his first piece as a full relief mountain lion, but a slip of the blade forced the carving into a wolf, with ears erect and a wispy tail. Into each finished sculpture, he bored a small hole, inserted a piece of twine, and tied it to one of Old Oak’s upper limbs. Over time, if anyone looked close, the tree seemed to be sprouting small animals among its leaves.
On an early June afternoon, voices beneath him drew Briar away from his whittling. He closed his knife and spread flat on the limb, more bobcat than boy. There on the road stood a tall man, his dark hair thick and wavy, and a younger woman, her hair near the color of his mother’s, but brighter. She wore her hair much like his mother’s, wound into a bun, but it sat on top of her head and was held in place with an intricately carved red and black comb.
“That’s it?” the woman asked the man as she surveyed the camp.
Briar looked in the direction she had turned. All looked as it had every day. At Breakline’s center sat the company store. A rectangular mercantile with three steps leading to the long porch with one middle door. The back of the building sat flush against the ground, creating a crawl space under the front where dogs spent days away from the sun.
“It’s just till we get started, hon.” The man placed his hand in the small of her back.
“But, Clint, it’s so dirty.” She stared down the mountainside. “So dingy.”
“But the jobs pay good money.”
Briar squinted as if trying to see the camp through her eyes.
“We’ll put some money aside and move to Bristol. Like I promised.”
“Well, this is sure not Bristol, Clint. It don’t even look like a real town.” She backed away from the man, and Briar watched her face. Furrows creased her brow as she scrutinized the scene below. “Is that black water down the middle of the camp?” She wiped her forehead with her palm. “I hear the streets of Bristol are paved in long black strips with little pebbles on each side and cars and a three-story hotel at the far end.” Her body wavered back and forth. “Even Broken Rock Creek’s not black.”
“That black is pure gold. Gold spilling out of that tipple over yonder,” he said. “Good as that Texas oil you hear about.” He reached for her.
She pulled away and sat on a moss-covered rock beside the road and glanced up. For a moment, Briar feared she had seen him. Clint dropped a cardboard suitcase and knelt in front of her.
“Be patient, Anna.”
“I’m not going down there,” she said. “Covington’s better than this.” She stared again at the camp. Cows roamed from yard to yard. “At least our cow has her own shed.”
“But they ain’t jobs in Covington,” he argued. “Not none for me.”
“This is not what you promised.” She hid her face in her arms.
“No need to cry. This is what we got to do for now.” The man stood. “So let’s get on with it.” He lifted the suitcase.
Briar gripped the limb t
ighter.
“I already set it up for us to have that house at this end of the valley. Look. It’s the one set apart from the rest. So you can have your own yard.”
“You mean you meant all the time to come here?”
“It worked out that way, Anna. It’s what it has to be for now. So get up and let’s get to walking before dark catches us up here on this mountainside.”
Briar glanced toward the near end of the valley as the two walked down Turtleback. There stood the house, not unlike any other camp house except that it set a good bit farther up the mountainside than those facing the center ditch. Behind it projected a flat rock ledge so white against the dark trees that it looked like a knife scar. All in all, it seemed a much better house than the abandoned church where Briar lived with his mother.
Separating this house from the rest of the camp was Unity Church graveyard, a smattering of graves for the dead with no place to go. Headstones seemed to spill down the mountainside and disappear under the back of Unity Church. He and his mother had never been there. She said Great Spirit would not approve, but Briar wondered.
Briar thought Breakline Camp a bustling place, a city compared to his home on the Carolina mountain where the nearest village was a day’s walk away. Now looking at the mining camp through Anna’s eyes, he had to agree with the woman. Breakline Camp was not a pretty place.
He hid his knife in a deep notch he had cut into Old Oak’s trunk and climbed down as soon as the two were out of sight. He made his way up the road to Flatland where he and his mother stayed. Two Tears would expect him to be there when she returned.
Anna felt judgmental eyes from every direction as she walked through the camp. Damn him. Clint had brought her to live in a long, narrow bowl. He pointed out their square house and left her standing alone while he reported to the commissary. Higher up the mountain, a thick ledge of limestone, much like a scar, cut through the greenery.
Everything around her was black. The road, the dirt, the ditch that separated two rows of houses like the one Clint had claimed for them. She had moved into a world that drew its ugliness from the earth’s core.
A few wives walked the road along the ditch. Each carried a cloth bag with handles in one hand and led a child with the other. The women dressed in their droopy sweaters and lace-up shoes appeared so similar that Anna decided they must have agreed on their costumes before leaving their box houses. With her back to the women, she tucked her pillowcase under her arm and crossed the bridge farthest from the tipple. Its rattling and whomping followed her to the bottom of the steps that led up the rise to the house.
Wooden steps from the road’s end to the porch made the hill less steep. The steps had one landing but no railing. Perhaps Clint could add rails to keep the walk down less dangerous, especially during winter months. Unless the back of the rise slanted more, she could imagine herself trapped inside. A house lower in the valley would have suited her more.
As she climbed the steps, she realized the house was neither down nor up. It wasn’t in the valley. It wasn’t up the mountain. Atop a higher rise and behind the commissary was the home of somebody important, a home so tall it reached for the sky. Anna had dreamed of such a home. Perhaps when they moved to Bristol she would have one.
The house had little inside to make it homey. A dirty horsehair sofa sat against the living room wall. Across the room was a cold pot-bellied stove, a cast iron kettle on its eye. The kitchen had a striped skirt gathered across the opening under the sink. A calendar with a picture of hounds across the top hung on the wall. Anna looked closely. It was a year out of date. The kerosene lamp centered on the metal table had a soot-coated chimney that would require hard scrubbing before it could be used.
Nights when Clint worked the hoot owl shift, Anna read by the lamp. Or she reminisced about what she had left behind. When she thought back on her ma and pa, she saw the reality of her mother’s life. Hers had been a life of acceptance, a woman’s lot. Were Anna to go back to Covington, Ma would tell her that she had made her bed, and now she was to lie in it. She longed to be more like Abraham’s Sarai. Sarai made her own decisions. She ran that hussy Hagar and her bastard son off and changed history.
Breakline was not the life she had bargained for. At the time, she knew no more about the bargain than she knew about making bread dough. She had yearned for the change so intently that she twisted the bargain as truly as had Clint. She wanted out of Covington more than she wanted Clint. Misery was not a congenial companion, but he was a steady one.
On a bleak February day, almost a year into her marriage, Anna pounded on the door of the Queen Anne mansion, calling for help. A hard freeze the night before had iced over the camp and sent tree limbs popping through the dark. A scarred woman opened a slight crack and peeped out the door.
“Juanita White. My neighbor.” Anna panted and grasped her throat. “Having her baby. Its feet are showing. Awful pain and pushing, but nothing’s happening.” Anna paused to catch her breath. “Doc Braxton’s gone. Over the mountain. Into the next county.”
Anna stared at the woman’s facial scars and splotched skin. She wanted to ask her for details that might draw them closer together, woman to woman, so the woman would help Juanita, but she did not ask. A flicker of last year’s pre-dawn argument with Ruth passed across her memory. A woman’s past is a woman’s past.
Two Tears glared at her. “Who are you?”
“Anna Goodman. I don’t know what to do.” Anna wadded her hands into her coat pockets. “Juanita’s going to die. Where’s Mrs. Rafe?”
“Gone.” The woman edged back to close the door.
Anna lifted herself on her tiptoes to see behind the woman, to find Mrs. Rafe. “When will she be back?” The room behind the woman held no light. Anna’s eyes widened. “Oh God, Juanita’s going to die. What can I do?”
“I will come.” She pulled a Cherokee blanket from behind the door and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Get a pint of liquor from the commissary. Tell Gabe it’s for birthing.” She closed the door behind her.
Gabe Shipley hated opening doors. It reminded him of the day he had returned from Georgia. Whoever it was rattled the door again. He hesitated, then unblocked the lock as a memory from five years earlier swept through his mind.
Gabe’s mother opened the commissary door. Jenny Shipley. She entered the commissary with a twelve-year-old Gabe following. Gabe straightened his glasses to peer into the semi-darkness. The place looked empty. He stopped beside his mother and placed his hand on her shoulder. Her emerald green dress lay smooth under his palm. A satin ribbon attached two peacock feathers to the felt hat she wore. The peacock eyes bothered Gabe. He didn’t like being watched. But he had told his mother that she looked beautiful as a princess out to find her prince.
“You’re too sweet, honey.” She ruffled his hair.
He meant his comment to cut, as she often brought another man into their lives. His mother and her one-track mind missed his ridicule, but he grasped her attempt to dissuade him from what was happening.
“Where you going?” he had asked when he found Jenny trying on the dress.
“To see your father next week,” she answered, tugging at the dress waist.
“Where’s that?” He scuffed the toe of his shoe against the floor. At twelve, the only memory he had of his father was a tall man who always had a lit cigarette between his first and second fingers.
“Virginia,” she said. “It’ll be a good trip.”
The bus ride from Macon had tired Gabe. His gangly legs refused to fit between the seats. The Georgia sun had saved its highest temperature for this day. Rhythm of rubber tires on uneven asphalt lulled him. Diesel fumes blew in the windows and nausea set in. He dosed off and on until they changed buses in Atlanta.
From Atlanta, they rode to Chattanooga and on to Bristol. Gabe had hoped his mother intended to stay with his father, that they could be a regular family, one without her newest man Lloyd Freeman. Gabe looked out the window at the B
ristol Greyhound Bus Station and saw Freeman’s white Lincoln. At that moment, he saw that his mother’s plan and his were not the same. She didn’t have to speak the words. She had made her choice.
Lloyd Freeman offered his hand to Jenny to help her off the bus. “You must be hungry,” he said and laughed more than he needed. He bought hamburgers and what he called “co-colas.” The cold drink settled Gabe’s stomach, but the car ride from Bristol to Breakline Camp, up and down and around the mountains, stirred Gabe’s queasiness again. He longed for stable ground.
Anna Goodman stood in the cold. Icicles a foot long hung behind her like translucent swords.
“Mrs. Goodman,” Gabe said. “You’re out mighty early. Sun’s not yet over the mountain.”
“I need liquor.” Anna tugged at the screen. It didn’t open.
“Commissary ain’t open yet. Give us a bit.” The panic on the woman’s face made Gabe release the screen.
“I got to have it now. The woman up the house on the hill wants it. Juanita White’s baby ain’t coming right.” She twisted her hands and poked them into her coat pockets. “I ain’t got money. You’ll have to do what you do to take care of it, but I got to have the liquor.” She stepped toward the doorway. The sun announced itself over the mountaintop with stark shafts of light.
“I can’t let you in, Mrs. Goodman. Mr. Rafe’s rules and all, but I’ll get you a pint of shine. Wait here.” He closed the door and disappeared into the store. When he opened the door again, he had a pint jar of clear liquid in his hand. “Don’t you be telling nobody where you got this. Mr. Rafe don’t know. He don’t approve. If his miners need to get drunk, he wants them drunk in Covington at O’Mary’s Bar.” He ran his hand through his red hair as his childhood memories continued to shadow his thoughts.
A tall, slim man dressed in a starched white shirt and grey slacks came out of the commissary’s back office.