by Laura Hunter
“Stop it, Anna,” Rafe said as he reached for her. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
“But my hair is all over the ground and I can see it though I’m on my face. I pray to God to save me, and he says, ‘that’s not the question,’ and I say, ‘what’s the question?’ and he says, ‘that’s not the question.’ And I don’t know the question so he won’t save me, and I wake up crying and Clint wants to know what’s wrong, and I can’t say the words to him.”
“You’re imagining things,” Rafe told her.
“I ruined our night. I’m sorry.” Anna hung her head. “You’re the only one I can talk to.”
“Don’t be sorry. Here, I’ll walk around to see if anybody’s been here.”
“No. Don’t leave me.” She reached to pull him back.
“I’ll be back. I’ll always be back,” Rafe assured her. “Nobody who knows me would dare question where I go or why. Stay put.” He returned after finding no one.
Anna believed him. She wanted to believe that she mattered to Winston Rafe in some significant way. She needed to believe he would protect her. From Tuesday until Tuesday, she made up a life that didn’t exist.
By winter, a thin crack appeared in her fantasy. Anna felt the fracture deep within her gut.
In February, she came late to the rock ledge, carrying a rolled blanket. A pink dusk had slipped behind Turtleback, and the moon had yet to come out. The sky had a blackness about it that only appeared with an oncoming storm or the absence of both sun and moon.
Rafe stiffened his back when she touched him. “Where’ve you been?” he said.
She spread the blanket on the ledge and sat. She shuttered as she unbuttoned her dress. “Something cold in the air tonight.” She slid across the blanket. Rafe did not chuckle. A problem at one of the mines, she assumed, and lifted off her dress.
“We got to talk,” he said. “Sit down.”
When Anna did not move, he took up the dress, lifted her off the blanket, and pulled the dress back over her head, tearing down her hair. He forced her arms into the sleeves.
Buttoning her bodice, Anna stepped away. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I expect people to do what I say. That’s all. Sit down.”
Anna sat.
Winston lit a Lucky Strike. Its tip glowed red in the dark. Anna wanted to question someone seeing the glow, but she chewed the inside of her lip and said nothing.
“I’ve been thinking and it’s only fair you know.” He paused, as if giving Anna time to ask what he had been thinking about. “If there’s a baby, I can’t help you.” His words spilled out in one breath. “So that’s about it.”
Anna stared out at the camp houses below. In the distance, only one had a light burning. Perhaps a sick child. She would never know. Wives of the camp had begun to ignore her. Her days had grown dim, even in the brightest sunlight.
The present darkness over the world around her slipped down and blackened the camp, leaving it bleak and still. Take away the tipple at the far end of the valley, silence its rhythmic, mechanical sound, and there would be no one left but Winston and Anna and one tiny yellow glow from a camp house window.
Once Rafe began his speech, he couldn’t stop. “If there’s a kid, you’ll have to convince Clint the baby’s his. I might be able to get you money from time to time, but I can’t recognize a kid.” He took a long draw on his cigarette. A cylinder of ash fell to the ground. “Gladys rightly owns these mines. She’d divorce me, and there goes the mines and I’m out on my ass.”
After a moment, Anna spoke. “I know that,” she said. “I can make it on my own. The problem will be getting Clint home long enough to think he’s making a baby.” She tried a chuckle and failed. “What with him working double shifts and all.”
“You’ll have to do it. That’s all.” Rafe blew cigarette smoke out his nose.
“I’ll do what I can.” She clamped her hands together.
“You’ll do it,” Rafe stood up. “Or you’ll have to see a granny.” He walked back down the mountain.
Someone in the little house below turned off the light.
By the time Brother Moon comes into view, Anna sits alone on the ledge. He smells the scent of soft moss she has pulled from the ground. She places narrow rectangles side-by-side in a straight row, as if planting them, as if she expects them to grow on rock. He will need to ask Sister Sun if moss grows on hard rock. He does not understand daylight dealings. He can’t even help her down the mountain.
The fourth April of their affair arrived, and Anna had not bled for two months. She could not say if she felt happy or sad. She wanted Winston’s child—more than she wanted Clint’s. Yet the idea of birthing another man’s child frightened her. Winston’s threat haunted her during the days and kept sleep away in the nights.
Every miner’s wife had tales of how domineering Winston’s wife was. How he spent his days at the commissary and his nights checking the mines or drinking beer out of self-preservation in O’Mary’s Saloon in Covington. Anna wished there was a different bar in Covington, one where miners didn’t go. She feared a wife would let a comment slip or a husband would get so drunk he would speak out in front of Winston and a miner would lose his job. That would lead to whispers and questions throughout the camp. She had to convince herself that wives did not know where he was every Tuesday night. Assuming they did know, worries of job security might keep them from talking.
The wives knew Winston Rafe was a tyrant. Most of the wives avoided him. Like a cancer, he could eat an individual from inside out, leaving a shell before the man knew he was infested. The company was the town. The company put bread on the table. With the Great Depression killing any possibility of moving to another company, Anna counted on wives shutting their eyes and speaking only behind closed curtains. They were bound to the mine as tightly as were their men.
Anna had to tell Winston she was pregnant. She waited on the ledge for him to show. He appeared after the moon rose. She took a deep breath and told him. His response was what he had promised. “There’s a Cherokee granny at Flatland on the Turtleback.” He lit a cigarette. “She knows what she’s doing. She knows to keep her mouth shut.” He took a deep draw and swallowed the smoke. “I’ll bring money next Tuesday.” He reacted as if he were handling some off-hand business deal with a stranger, one that would have little bearing on his future or the future of the company.
Anna slapped him hard, hard enough to twist his head. “You bastard,” she said.
Winston grabbed her wrist and squeezed it. The next morning there would be bruised fingerprints on the underside. She would wear a long-sleeved dress for a week so Clint could not see.
“Anna.”
She tried to pull her wrist away.
“I can’t claim this baby. Gladys would have a fighting fit.” He released his grip and rubbed her wrist. “We’ve talked all this out. If you won’t go to Granny Slocomb, you’ll have to convince Clint this is his baby.” Winston released Anna’s arm and palmed his forehead. Anna could tell he was angrier at himself than at her. He had let this slip. He had always been more careful.
“It’s because I’m a miner’s wife,” Anna shot her words through tight lips.
“Damn it, Anna. It’s because you are a wife. Wife of one of my best men. Clint Goodman’s wife.” He clinched his fists and breathed deep. “Not my wife, Anna,” he said.
Anna recalled a time as a child when she had questioned her pa about why the Old Testament Abraham would take his son up the mountain to lay a knife to his throat.
Pa told her a ram showed up, so he didn’t have to sacrifice his son.
“But why would he even think about killing his own son?” she asked. “Especially if he loved him as much as he said.” Anna twitched. “I wouldn’t have killed my son.”
“Men do what they have to do, Anna. It’s different with a woman. She’s softer and needs a man to make her choices,” he told her. “God was his boss, so Abraham did what God told him to do. You don
’t question. You just do.”
An owl called Anna back to the rock hardness of the ledge. She looked up. Winston stood over her.
“You have to handle this.” Winston’s eyes flickered.
That night, she took the long way home. At some point, she came upon a puddle from yesterday’s melted snow. Its shallow water reflected the full moon. She was tempted to disturb the water, but she stepped around it. She left the moon’s image intact, floating like a silver balloon. She did not cry until she stepped on a stone hidden by a sprinkling of snow. Her foot twisted and pain shot up her ankle. Once she started crying, she was unable to stop.
Chapter 10
Anna set out up the mountain the next morning before light, trusting her instinct to lead the way. She had not traveled this road before. Once the sun topped the ridge, leaves damp and flat from a midnight rain reflected early light and glistened like glass. She feared she would slip and fall. Logic told her she walked not on glass but on dying leaves, but fear kept her from hearing what logic said.
An icy morning wind pushed her up the mountain road. Juanita had talked to her and told her to look for a wooden cross to show the way. “Funny looking thing,” Juanita had said. “It’ll appear over the trees, leaning sideways. You take that road.”
Anna turned east when she spotted the cross. Weak and rotted over time, it pointed away from the mine and its camp. With little sunlight out, Anna hesitated. The road led straight up. Undergrowth inched its way in from both sides, fashioning impenetrable black walls. Ancient oaks spread their limbs over the road, interlacing side to side, creating a roof. She took one deep breath after another and counted her steps to force herself on.
First step one, then step two. Three and seven and twenty-eight. On she plodded, up the mountainside. From this angle, she could see why Long Hunters, the first white surveyors, or perhaps the Cherokee before them, had named the mountain Turtleback. The road rounded and ridged and rounded again as if the end hid somewhere in the hovering mist. From her vantage point, she could see nothing that might lead to flat land.
Then it appeared. Before her lay a singular geographic feature, four acres of cleared ground. The land lay so level it seemed a heavy log had rolled out any dips or rises. Anna decided she could put a glass of water down and it would not topple. Flatland consisted of four rectangles that zigzagged from north to south, each abutting and angling down from the next so that birds flying overhead would see a series of steps. The rectangles had been cleared so precisely that one did not overlap any other.
In the second rectangle stood the old church, facing the morning sun. Behind it stood a row of fir, much like a green wall. The space around the building had been broom-swept for so long no plant dared grow there. Someone had built a slant tin roof over the door and added a plank floor to resemble a porch, and a thick rock slab so heavy only God could have moved it served as a step. Across the back was a small lean-to room, its windows boarded inside.
A diminutive, un-chinked log house, a smokehouse perhaps, placed here to distance the smells and smoke from Boone Station, sat almost in front of the church. Two stripped tree trunks supported the roof overhang across the front. At the base of the threshold, lay a little carved bird. Anna bent and held the bird. It had a small hole bored into its head. The bird sat round as an egg in Anna’s left hand. She fingered its feather ridges, its wood firm yet airy, almost alive. She rolled it over. Sculpted without feet, it fit in her palm as snugly as if it had rested in its nest. Anna blew away the dust and eased it in her pocket, intending to set it on her mantel. This carving was too beautiful to waste.
Anna peered through the open door. Inside was a packed dirt floor. The ceiling was rafters with iron hooks that once held meat. Clusters of last season’s tobacco leaves, as large as full-grown bass, now hung from the hooks. In the back corner lay a corn-shuck mattress and a woolen blanket, woven in reds and blues. The room’s musky stench kept Anna from stepping inside.
Outside the squatty building sat a large, iron-footed black pot. As Anna came close, a wisp of wind picked up grey ash left from fire under the pot and blew it onto her face. She smudged a grey streak down and across her forehead with the back of her hand, much like the shape of a cross. She turned to face the church. The cleared land unnerved Anna. That and the silence. She wiped sweat from the nape of her neck. The climb had not been easy.
Anna walked toward a stand of new growth that had begun to invade two abutting rectangles. Around the corner lay a grassy patch of land. Wooden boxes, the granny’s bee yard, offered no sound of activity. Perhaps the bees were off foraging. A narrow footpath led away from the bee boxes, into the woods and disappeared down the mountain. She heard her first sound, water gurgling through the pebbles of a stream.
She returned to the church. To her right lay the graveyard, an area where weeds worked to reclaim the land. Short grasses moved in the breeze as if they welcomed this unexpected visitor. Anna lifted her hand in a half-wave toward the gravestones and walked in. Flat headstones, some on the ground, some making their way down, very few upright, marked graves dated by nail scratchings in the rock as early as 1816.
On the southern side of the slat church, a mass of green sprouted from freshly hoed ground. A garden for the new season. The church door stood ajar, but Anna, winded from the climb, did not go in. She dropped on a damp stone slab that had served as a step since Uriah Parsons had built this church for his family. Anna waited to gather her breath.
Sister Sun sends a cooling cloud from time to time over where Anna rests, but she doesn’t make it comfortable enough to encourage Anna to stay or so uncomfortable that she will feel she has no choice but to leave. She waits for Anna to make her decision.
In the quiet, Anna recognized a rustle. Among the headstones flitted a pair of early season bluebirds. They hopped from stone to stone, as if surveying the area for danger. When Anna looked closer, she saw why. Two dark blue chicks waddled about, noticeable only because their color stood out against weather-streaked headstones. On a fallen stone covered with thick moss, one chick’s tiny black eyes followed the smaller adult. The other in grass no taller than its breast hopped once and sipped dew, ignoring the adult birds.
The mother bird moved to a tombstone, its grave occupant’s name made illegible by streaks of water and time. She dropped to the ground and scuttled the two chicks together, then spread her wings and returned to her rock. The papa bird sat on a taller, upright tombstone two yards away. He twisted his head from side to side, his vigil intent. He lifted high into the breeze and circled.
The fledglings spread their hollow-boned wings and tried to boost their weight off the ground. They fluttered a bit and failed. The mother bird lit before the attentive one and flapped her wings in the little one’s face. The chick tried again and, with difficulty, lifted itself to the branch of a low bush. The second followed course, and the papa bird joined his chicks within the leaves. Dancing across branch to branch near the ground, they vanished. The mother bird remained and scratched into the grass. She drew out a dark, round bug and followed her mate and chicks into the brush.
Anna sucked her lower lip so she wouldn’t cry. Clint had no reason to think this baby was not his. One day, this child will be all she would have of Winston Rafe. She wiped the drip from her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed.
The breeze slackened, almost disappeared. Nausea popped sweat out on Anna’s face. She rubbed her hand across her forehead and noticed that she removed ash. Anna Goodman, she reprimanded herself, you dirty-faced fool. You think you belong in his world? Fancy trips to Bristol. Pearls and slinky clothes. For sure, I am no more than a miner’s wife, but I don’t have to quit because of that.
The graveyard bush rustled. The mother bluebird escaped and took flight, headed for a hemlock, black with age. Anna fingered the bird carving resting in her pocket as the bluebird disappeared in the tree.
As Anna walked back to Breakline Mining Camp, the breeze picked up again. This time Anna fac
ed it. Her decision to keep the baby lay easy. She could keep their secret. Rafe would have to take it or he could leave her be. Nothing could ever be as it was before. He had to accept that.
The next morning when Clint returned from the hoot owl shift, Anna met him at the kitchen door in her softest cotton gown, the one with lace she had tatted around the hem.
Chapter 11
Anna entered the commissary and glimpsed around to see if any wives were there. Seeing only Gabe, his grin as wide as ever, she stopped behind the cloth bolts and fingered the texture of a cotton plaid. Green and blue irregular plaid. Her favorite colors. The blocks appealed to her Scot-Irish heritage. This one was as soft as a chick’s down. It would make a beautiful top. She looked at the end of the bolt. Twenty-five cents a yard. Dan River Mills. No wonder. An irregular plaid would make the top more expensive. It required extra yardage to match the plaid, and she had yet to buy a pattern. She moved down the counter and, from the bottom shelf, drew out a yellow cotton covered with small blue flowers. Ten cents a yard. No matching and this would give her a few cents over to pay for the pattern. Rising, she tucked the bolt under her arm.
She went to the shoes. Last night, she and Clint had talked about her wearing shoes with a firm sole. The commissary sold old lady shoes she had seen on women at Unity Church. She wanted flat-soled shoes, a guarantee that the baby would not have crossed eyes. She knew the idea was superstition. She told Clint she didn’t believe it, but why take a chance?
That night as she lay in bed next to Clint, it came to her that she never referred to the child as “our baby” or “my baby.” The child growing within her was “the baby.” Her mother had called her “my baby girl” until Anna left to marry Clint. After the ceremony and before Breakline, when they came to tell her ma and pa, Ma had said to Clint, “She’s yours now. See you take good care of her.” She had risen from her rocker and said, without turning back, “She ain’t my baby no more.”