by Laura Hunter
“What’re you doing here?” The man lit a Lucky Strike and shook out the match. Smoke breathed out his nostrils.
Gabe, taller than his mother and thinner, moved forward. So. This was his father.
Rafe put on a slack-jawed grin at the sight of his son. “You got your mama’s hair, boy,” Rafe said. The cigarette bobbed in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. He offered his hand. “Been a long time.”
Gabe ignored the invitation and pushed his glasses up his nose with his index finger. He stuck his chin out. He didn’t give his mother a chance to dump him. He took the initiative on his own. “I’m here to stay. Ma’s new man says he won’t feed no other man’s kid. She had to pick and she picked him.”
“Now, Gabe, that’s not how it is.” Jenny patted her green felt hat tighter on her red hair. “It’s that…”
“Want a dope, Jenny?” Rafe asked. “You look all dried out.” He lifted the cooler lid and popped the metal cap off an orange Nehi. The metal clinked when it landed in the cap reservoir.
Jenny shot Rafe a flash of anger. “No. You got to understand. All these years…”
Winston pushed the drink into Jenny’s hand. “Swallow. Better swallow, Jenny. You look pale.” He motioned toward an overturned barrel. “Sit down over here.”
“Quit telling me what to do. You got to see…”
“I see you rode up here from South Georgia to tell me something you could’ve sent in a three-cent letter. Now take another swallow.”
Air bubbles inside the orange drink disappeared into his mother’s mouth. Gabe watched his mother’s throat constrict as they went down. Water droplets from the melting block of cooler ice slid down the bottle and onto her arm. He licked his lips.
“Gabe’s right,” Jenny said. “He is here to stay. You chased everything in a skirt and left me to raise him. I got him this far. Now you can do your…”
“Jenny. Jenny. Jenny. You don’t understand. I got three mines to run here. I can’t take on a half-grown kid.” He turned to Gabe. “How old are you anyway?”
Gabe hesitated. His mouth was so dry he wasn’t sure he could speak.
“Answer the man,” Jenny said.
“Twelve,” Gabe muttered.
Rafe’s left eye-brow dropped.
“Do with him what you will. His belongings and them dogged books of his are on the porch.” Jenny walked outside and waited by the car’s passenger door for Lloyd to open it.
Freeman tipped his Panama hat to Rafe and grinned.
“Moving up in the world,” Rafe called to Jenny.
“That’s Lloyd. Lloyd Freeman,” Gabe said to Rafe’s back.
Jenny’s answer was a slammed door. Freeman cranked the car, turned it around, and headed up Turtleback.
The sun over the mountain brought no heat. Cold air made Anna shake. She took the jar from Gabe. She tightened the lid and slid it into her pocket. “I’ll hold your secret. Don’t you worry none.” She grasped the post that supported the roof. “Why don’t you go back in and get some more sleep.”
“You can sleep in the office,” Rafe said as he ground his un-smoked Lucky Strike into the floor. “I’ll get you some bedding,” he said, turning to walk away. “Then I’ll decide how I explain you to my wife.”
Gabe waited until he heard the back door close. He crept to the cooler, took out a grape Nehi. He favored its sting over the co-cola’s sweet. He popped it open and stepped out the door. He pushed his clothes aside and searched through his box of books until he found The Grapes of Wrath. He opened the dog–eared copy to chapter seventeen and plopped down on the overturned barrel. He took a deep swig and felt the tension he had not realized had stiffened his back slowly recede.
In chapter seventeen the migrants are moving west to the “Promised Land.” When he had stopped reading on the bus, Gabe reflected on his ride through the Appalachians. These mountains didn’t look much like a promised land, but they would have to do.
When Gabe looked back, Anna had stepped off the porch. She walked a fast trot toward the mountainside.
Anna slid on ice when she hit Juanita’s porch. She slapped her hand against the liquor to hold it steady and opened the door without a knock. In the middle of the room, Two Tears was spinning, her colorful shirt spread out like a rainbow around her feet. She had removed her shoes and stripped Juanita of her muslin sheet.
Juanita lay naked on the bed, the child within her belly pushing against her skin so strong that Anna could see its head appear here, then there. Juanita no longer moaned.
Anna edged to the table under the window and put the liquor down. She eased toward Two Tears and reached out to catch the woman in her circling. Two Tears did not see Anna, for she had thrown back her head and closed her eyes. What sounded like a rippling intoning kept the room from being starkly silent.
On the third try, Anna grasped Two Tears’ sleeve and stopped the spin. She expected the woman to drop from her dizziness, but she stood still as a tree. “I got the liquor,” Anna said.
For a moment, Anna thought Two Tears had no idea that Anna was standing before her. Anna stepped aside for Two Tears to pass. With Anna’s movement, light returned to Two Tears’ eyes. Two Tears opened the bottle and drank heavily from the brown liquid. She recapped the bottle and set it aside.
“Get the butcher knife,” Two Tears said.
Anna took a knife from the kitchen cabinet and handed it handle first to Two Tears. Two Tears slid the knife under the mattress and brought a bucket of steaming water from the stove.
“Get here on her bosom and when I say so, push this baby out.”
“No. I might…” Anna stepped back.
Two Tears yanked Anna’s arm and splayed out Anna’s hands. She slapped them against Juanita’s upper belly and said, “Push.”
Anna climbed up on the bed and squatted over Juanita’s chest. Her heart beat so fast she felt faint. She pushed. Juanita screamed. Anna’s wrists, cramping under the intensity, sent rays of pain up her arm. She refused to look at what Two Tears was doing. Each time the woman said push, Anna strained and forced her hands against Juanita’s belly. She smelled the sweet scent of fresh blood. She concentrated on blocking out Juanita’s screams. In less than an hour, a baby’s squeal against his entrance into bitter mountain air told Anna Two Tears had done her job. Shaking and exhausted, Anna dropped to the floor.
Juanita was bleeding heavy. Her blood dripped from the sheet to the floor. Two Tears stuffed cotton stripping to slow the hemorrhage. The baby wailed his displeasure at being forced to stand on his head and drop into the world naked and hungry. Two Tears stepped into the kitchen and made him a sugar tit to stave off his hunger until his mother could nurse.
A young boy, Anna guessed to be about thirteen or fourteen years old, appeared at the door. “I heard a baby,” he said. He looked at the flushed baby, his mouth agape.
“This is no place for a boy,” Two Tears said. She turned her back, washing Juanita’s arms.
“My God,” Anna said, her eyebrows raised. “You’re a granny.”
“I’m…I’m a Beloved Mother,” she said. “I’m Cherokee.”
The black-haired boy stepped up behind Two Tears.
Two Tears continued Juanita’s bath. “She don’t need to be having no more babies.”
The boy tugged at his mother’s shirt. “But, Ma,” he said.
Two Tears yanked his hand away and squeezed it so hard he flinched. “Hand me that liquor from over there, boy,” she said.
Anna crinkled her nose at the strong odor. The granny drank and lowered the bottle, now empty.
Within two days, word had spread through the mining camp that Mrs. Rafe’s cleaning woman could midwife. Rumors flew high and fast, high enough to reach a woman of Gladys Rafe’s stature. As soon as she heard Two Tears had birthed a camp woman’s baby while she should have been working on the Rafe’s dime, Gladys Rafe fired her.
Over time, the camp doctor’s baby business slowed because never did she lose a baby. In
whisperings around kitchen tables, women also admitted that she never refused a woman who wanted or needed to drop a baby.
Women now found Two Tears in the abandoned church at Flatland, a grassy bald spot atop the more prominent summit of Turtleback between Breakline and Covington. Women came up Turtleback for a dropping under cover of night. The boy Briar would vanish into the darkness. He reappeared the next morning, as if he could sense the absence of strangers.
On Flatland, the granny farmed bees from the hive she had found in the chimney when she and Briar first moved into the old church. She captured the queen and set up a hive near the edge of a clearing that led off the mountain. The capture of more queens and transfer of their swarms meant she and the boy could farm honey easy enough. Days she would sit alongside the B&O tracks on the western edge of Covington or out past Unity Cemetery. Women waited to buy her prized wadulesi, what Granny Slocomb called her honey. She bargained at the camp commissary with the manager, Gabe Shipley, to have her own shelves. These she kept filled with her wadulesi, with and without comb, by season.
At twenty-eight, Granny gardened her own herbs and plants and went monthly into Breakline and Covington to sell her cures and potions. Many an unfaithful husband lay moaning alone in his marriage bed after his wife visited Granny Slocomb. Her most powerful spells she never sold but administered herself.
Neither town nor camp had ever asked where she came from or who she was. Had they asked, they would have received no answer. She, who had once been Mona Parsons, then Mona Parsons Slocomb to hide her shame, now chose to be the mountain granny. Granny Slocomb fit her as fine as being Two Tears had when she lived with Tall Corn in the Carolinas. Circumstances had forced a new identity, and circumstances might force it again.
Chapter 7
Breakline Mining Camp
By 1940, Anna Goodman, almost nineteen, had grown into a tall, girlish woman. A woman steeped in plain, her only jewelry a wide gold band Clint put on her finger a month after they moved into Breakline Mining Camp. Her square face was not unpretty. It was a face that sat solid on her shoulders. Her blue, blue eyes looked out from beneath pale brows. She brushed her hair up and wound it into a loose yellowish knot. She still attached the bun to the crown of her head with her mother’s tortoise-shell comb. Fine and silky, her hair escaped its bonds with every movement of her head. She constantly tried to capture its restlessness by pushing a strand behind an ear or wrapping one around the comb. By nightfall and bedtime, she had to dig through the tangles to find the buried comb and unwind her hair from its teeth.
Anna came to think of Clint’s promise of Bristol like his comment about Ruth’s fried eggs and sausage, something she had expanded in her imagination. Clint argued Breakline Camp was where they needed to be. Working underground paid good money. The well-stocked commissary gave Anna no reason to wander out of the valley. Sure, the dirt was black, but had she ever seen dirt any color but black? Bristol lay in the mountains, in its own way, so she still would have been in the mountains. And these Virginia mountains put out coal better than a cow gave milk. She had a husband, and a husband’s a husband no matter his calling. To question a husband’s thinking was, for Clint, a slap against his say-so.
Anna, up since before dawn, stood at the kitchen table and packed Clint’s lunch bucket with two Spam sandwiches and a baked sweet potato. Last night when she had gone to bed, Clint told her again that she had no weight in deciding where they would live or where he would work. She awoke with his words still on her mind.
Clint entered the kitchen and reached for his tin bucket, a round topped container that looked more like a loaf of bread than a lunch bucket.
Anna put her hand on the lunch pail. “You not eating breakfast?” she said. “I made you eggs and grits. Or I got cornbread and milk.”
Clint picked up his lunch and opened the kitchen door. “No. I got work to do.” He shut the door against an unusually brisk air. “You think on it today, Anna. We are where we are and that’s it. That daydreaming you been doing? It’s over.”
Anna took the plate of eggs and grits from the stove warmer. She walked to the sink and threw eggs, grits and plate hard against the metal sink wall. The plate broke. One piece popped out and hit the floor. Clint jerked away to avoid the flying crockery.
The day ahead promised nothing for Anna. Nor had any previous days. The previous night’s anger reignited, and she glared at him. “You might rule what I say, but you can’t rule what I think.”
Clint whirled around and pushed her back against the square, porcelain-topped metal table. It stood so steady against the wall that Anna, rather than the table, fell. Clint knelt over her crumpled on the flowered linoleum rug and let his bucket drop beside her. “Anna. My Anna. I never meant…”
“Go on to work, Clint.” Anna set her head against him. “I’m not ready to talk to you yet.”
“Anna?”
“Just go and leave me alone.” She waved him back with one hand.
Clint left, his back bowed as if he crawled through shadowy tunnels.
As soon as she could lift herself off the floor, Anna wandered up the rise behind their frame house. Her back throbbed from the lick she had taken when she hit the table. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, and as she climbed her legs weakened. At a wooded thicket, she dropped onto leaves moist from the morning frost and shivered as she pulled her sweater close. She glared up, past the uppermost limbs and stared at the rising sun until tears burned her eyes. Her sorrow was so deep she could not rise up against the grief. Drained, she crawled to a rock ledge and dangled her feet over the edge. Seeing nothing worthy of her attention, she lay down to rest.
She awoke mid-afternoon. Though she did not see eyes, she felt them. They were there. Or they had been there. The cords in her neck tightened. She studied the camp below nestled in its long valley and let her eyes follow the road that led up Turtleback and out of the mining camp. She tilted her head to see what or whom she had felt. There was nothing out of the ordinary, just a pearly light emanating from the sun.
Sister Sun has watched Anna since she left the house. She has watched her throughout days as she sits immobile on the front porch. She considers talking to Great Spirit about the possibility of one of his own who is burning from the inside out. A flicker of Anna’s resentment has shown itself to Sister Sun. She knows it will flame. The anger Anna harbors within fuels her bitterness more each day. But Brother Moon tells her that her job is to follow the path of Great Spirit, not to direct his route. So Sister Sun waits.
Anna and Clint had run out of things to talk about by their third year. Clint told the story of how his mining father, his back rounded from walking crouched through low-ceilinged tunnels, had the appearance of a large mole. As a youngster, Clint had rubbed his father’s legs to ease cramps from toe-walking with knees bent as his father hunched on his calves and shuffled deeper into the earth. In time, his father lay before the fireplace coughing out his black lung until the disease refused him another breath of clean air and shut his lungs down for good.
His father had been what Clint thought a father should be. He had provided a house, food and clothing for his wife and children. Clint, like his father, accepted that forces beyond his control altered lives, no matter how men fought against them. With the slow, smothering death of his father, Clint saw no reason to fight. His father had lost. Why would his life be any different?
He spoke of his half-Cherokee mother and her isolation by the camp wives and of two babies, a brother and a sister, lost to summer flux. “Honest folk,” he said. “Good honest people. Just had no luck. No luck a’tall.”
It took Anna more nights of memory and talk, for she could dig into several generations of history before reaching her own. She told how her great-great grandfather, this Uriah Parsons, had come from his time with General Washington and crossed the ice-bound river at Trenton. Parsons came with frostbitten toes, without two left fingers that had been shot off by a Redcoat during an ambush in Pennsylvania. He came w
ith Long Hunters who moved like a slender, black snake over mountains that first appeared low in the distance but proved deceitful when reached. Mountains’ posturing insinuated an outstretched welcome for strangers but beat men down with ravines and wild beasts and unpredictable weather. Other mountains appeared to bow before this majestic Turtleback, deceptive mountains that hid their power beneath the virgin forests.
Anna spoke of deeds, signed and certified by all the right pens, verifying that her family owned all of the huge Turtleback and to the mountainside homestead Uriah called Boone Station. Acres of land. Tens of thousands of acres deeded by the Governor of the Virginia Colony, given free to whoever would settle west. She spoke of ancestors buried at Flatland on the top of Turtleback and how Uriah Parsons’ son set the stakes for the town of Covington. How she grew up with whatever she favored in the dark, two-story, limestone blockhouse that closed the end of the road through the town.
Clint’s eyes grew smaller with her telling. He had little history to bring to the table. What history he had paled before Anna’s listings of heroics and fame. He did not believe her. His sense of who he was shouted out at her over the supper table after she put food before him. “You slighting my family with all your explorers and founders and such?” He pushed his plate of poke sallet and peas aside and stared over his coffee as it grew cold.
“No,” Anna said. “You asked. I’m telling.”
“I ain’t got no famous folk in my lineage. I guess that makes you more important than me, huh? I guess that explains why you’re so set on moving to a big city like Bristol.” Clint looked down at his coal-encrusted hands. They looked like the dirty hands of a twelve-year-old girl.
“I am not, Clint. You going into the belly of the earth day after day is eating you inside. You don’t ever see sunlight. You live in a black, cold world that you expect me to like. I can’t. I need sunshine inside me. There ain’t no sun in this place till day’s half gone.” As she left the room, she said, “I want to go home.” In the next room, she plopped down on the edge of the bed. If she had to tell Clint what she needed, it didn’t count.