by Laura Hunter
“Outside. Asleep in her wagon.” Anna glanced around the commissary. Briar, whom Anna had once jokingly told Winston was part wolf, moved soundlessly toward the back door.
“What’re you reading now?” Anna asked. Had she heard the back door close? She questioned herself.
“Of Mice and Men. It’s about this gentle giant of a man whose name is Small. Can you believe that Steinbeck guy? And traveling workers who…”
“Sister Sun, get over here and look after this girl-child,” demands Great Spirit.
“Look at this. Leaving her baby outside by itself. I’m not sure this woman knows yet that she’s a mother.”
“Yes sir.” Sister Sun rolls in as fast as her solar winds allow. “She does seem a bit addled.”
“Is Mr. Rafe here?” Anna interrupted.
“No’m, he’s off over in Covington working on some machinery project he’s dreamed up,” Gabe said. “You welcome to wait. I’ll go fetch Lily.”
Anna wandered among the counters, running her hand over tops of canned goods: milk, fruit, vegetables, sardines, Vienna sausages. At one point, she drew back her hand and noted how clean her fingers were. No dust gathered under Gabe Shipley. No wonder Winston valued him so.
She drifted toward the back near the meat counter. If Winston came in, he would come through this door. She could speak without Gabe hearing her. A sound much like scratching on wood came from inside the office. She should tell Gabe. He wouldn’t suffer a rat after his round of cheese.
Anna shifted from foot to foot, growing more and more frustrated as she looked at chunks of meat held aloft by sturdy iron hooks: pale chicken, brown duck, pork shoulders, legs of lamb, flitch of bacon. All aligned so a rotating fan kept flies from settling. To the side hung a slender boning knife, a thick cleaver, and honing steel for sharpening dull edges. Her eye went back to the cleaver.
“Somebody ought to kill him,” she murmured. A flash vision of Winston coming in the back door and meeting her wielding the cleaver at him, hacking, slashing, and chopping, startled her. The gruesomeness of her envisioned attack ran cold over her body.
Gabe slammed the screen door and walked toward her, Lily riding his hip. His lop-sided grin cut his face in two. “Don’t mind if I hold her a mite, do you?”
“No,” Anna said. “Think I heard a mouse back by the cheese.”
“Probably the Slocomb kid. Cleaning up in the office.”
Anna needed to leave. She didn’t want people to know why she was here. Briar Slocomb or anyone else. “Maybe you can help me, Gabe.” She spoke above a whisper.
He nodded. “I might.”
“I need to know where I stand with money.” Anna took a deep breath. “I’m a widow now with this child to raise.” She glanced around the store. She saw no one. A fresh jar of pickled eggs, now full, held their place on the shelf where she had last noticed them. They looked no more appetizing then they had before. “I got to know what, if anything, Clint put aside.”
Gabe nuzzled his cheek against Lily’s hair to make her giggle. “Counting receipts is about all I do with money. Mr. Rafe could help you more than me. Why don’t you sit on this stool and wait a bit? He ought not be gone much longer.”
Anna wavered. “I’ll just come back tomorrow. He be here tomorrow?”
Gabe shook his head. “I don’t know. Comes and goes. Gone more than usual lately.” He cuddled Lily. “Acts like he’s got a lot on his mind. What with all this bombing in Europe.”
Anna reached for Lily. “Reckon I can say to you what I want to say to him as you’ll be getting what I need.” Lily struggled to be let down, but Anna settled her head on her shoulder. “I want all the money Clint earned his last week. I want his first pension check. I want all the money he put aside for Lily and me. I want ten dollars in ones and the rest in bigger bills. I don’t want clink. Or script. I want real money.”
“I don’t know ’bout that, Mrs. Goodman. Mr. Rafe’ll have to okay that kind of deal.” Gabe busied himself with wiping the counter.
“You tell Mr. Rafe I’m leaving the camp, and I want what’s due Clint.” A tinge of resentment entered her voice without her approval.
“You leaving? You taking little Lily with you?” He reached for the child.
Gabe. Always gentle Gabe. Anna smiled. “Wherever I go, Lily goes. She’s my baby.”
The next morning, Anna returned. She opened the screen to the sweet smell of new honey. To Anna’s left, the granny’s shelf, which had been empty the day before, was filled with jars of fresh amber honey. The morning sun shone through the granny’s honey and cast golden stripes across the floor, so perfect they looked ethereal.
Gabe heard Anna enter the screen door and called out, “Be right with you, Mrs. Goodman.” He finished Juanita White’s order of sugar and lard and tallied her bill. Biting her tongue, Juanita signed the tab hard so her signature would mark through the carbon. Anna waited, straddling Lily from one hip to the other.
“Morning, Anna,” Juanita said. “Little one’s growing like a weed.”
“I reckon so,” Anna said. “But so is Jason.”
“Come by for coffee this evening, and we’ll put them down for a nap and visit.”
“Got a dirt smell here somewheres,” said Gabe. “There’s some taters back of Granny’s honey. She’ll have a fit if somebody finds fault near her honey. Let me get rid of this box. Get warm and they spoil overnight,” Gabe said as he lifted a box and continued to talk as he walked toward the back. “Strange thing ’bout taters. One rotten tater ruins ever’ one it touches.”
“Maybe another day,” Anna responded to Jaunita’s invitation. “I got to get some things settled, what with Clint dead and all.”
“Yes, another day,” Juanita said and left, her lard bucket in one hand, her sugar in the other.
Gabe returned, grumbling. “Can’t keep that Briar on one job long enough to get it finished and he’s off again.” He carried a sagging leather pouch and ten one-dollar bills. “’Bout cleaned us out,” he chuckled. He handed the stash to Anna and winked. When Anna did not answer, he continued. “You be careful with all this money, you hear? I ain’t telling nobody and you ain’t talking neither.”
Anna put out her hand to shake Gabe’s. He rubbed his palms down his pant legs.
“Why you being so fancy all at once?” Gabe asked.
“I don’t know,” Anna said and started for the front door. She heard the hinge on Winston’s office door squeak, as if opening.
Gabe called to her. “Where you going?”
“I don’t know.”
Winston strode up behind her as she met the steps. He took her arm. “Anna, wait.”
Anna eyed the road, up and down. The road stood empty. “What do you want from me, Winston?”
“I want you to stay.” He scratched the wooden step with his shoe. “No. That’s not right. I need you to stay.”
“He’s about as reliable as a let-loose meteor,” Sister Sun says. “I should blast him with a solar flare.”
“He is who he is,” answers Great Spirit.
“Can’t you change him?” asks Sister Sun.
“Should I want to?”
“What about Gladys?” Anna watched him shuffle back and forth, foot to foot, a piece of tobacco stuck on his lower lip.
“I can’t worry about what I can’t change. I just know I need you to stay.” He focused on her eyes, blushed, and cleared his throat. “You’ll be safe here in Breakline. I’ll see to it.”
“No. I don’t think so, Winston.” Anna looked away. She didn’t want him to see her face. “What would people think? Women are already…”
“Nobody here questions my decisions.” He frowned. “They know I’m boss.” He spoke as if words came to him with each breath. “Anybody bother you, you let me know.”
Anna shook her head. “I don’t know what to do. I think yes and then no.” She had seen side glances as she passed when she was pregnant with Lily. Since Clint’s funeral, camp wives walke
d out of the commissary when she walked in.
“For a while at least,” he begged. “Till you find some place safe to stay.” He reached out and ran his hand through Lily’s hair. His thumb caught in a tangle, and she twisted her head away. “She’s got the hair. ‘The color of honey hit by the sun,’ as my mama would say.” He rubbed Lily’s head. “Beautiful as you, Anna.”
Dawn had appeared draped in a royal purple cape. When Anna closed the camp house door, her first thoughts had been on where she could go. Winston was right. She had no place. Where she went should not matter, for Clint was dead and Winston was slowly killing her with his intermittent attention.
Sometimes people want something so bad they convince themselves a lie is the truth. She had not considered herself a liar when she took Clint from Ruth eight years ago, but now an inside gnawing told her she had lied and that she continued to do so. She lied each time she faced a Breakline wife and stumbled about trying to think of a reason why she, a non-working widow, had been allowed to stay these past weeks while others in her position had moved on.
She had lied to Clint, letting him think she loved him as he loved her, even during his rages. She lied each time she told Lily a story about Clint, letting her believe Clint was her daddy. She searched for an image of herself that she could remember, but the bedroom mirror that had distorted Winston the night he came to look at Lily that first time refused to warp her face into the person she once thought she was.
Wives talked. They would continue to do so. But Winston was right. Anna had nowhere to go. She had come down this path only to find there was no return. She handed Lily to Winston and opened the door. Without glancing back, she went inside to re-deposit her money.
Chapter 14
The next three months wore on Anna. She grew more and more isolated. She watched Lily play with Jason. Juanita watched Jason play with Lily. That was their world. They might as well have lived in another country, except when Anna went just past daybreak to make her commissary purchases. She succeeded in avoiding most of the camp community. She hoped God was testing her loyalty, that one day she would be rewarded.
Days spent talking with Juanita repeated each other with Anna’s beginning, “I need to leave this place.”
Followed by Juanita, “Me, too.” A thought later, “But we ain’t got no choice.”
“Never been a pretty place,” Anna would say.
“That’s the way of mining country. Everything coal touches turns drab, dingy. What light escapes is black light. Coal-black light.”
“Ground stays black with coal dust that grinds itself back into the dirt when it rains. Never washes itself clean.” Anna might sip her coffee.
“Can’t nobody keep heavy grit from tracking in the house. Jason ’specially,” Juanita said.
“You’d think it’s trying to return from where it was before miners come. The way it is, this land. Dust with a mind of its own, I reckon.” Anna added, “Won’t come out of clothes or off a bare foot.”
“Rims Seth’s eyes like some old pharaoh’s paint and seeps deep,” Juanita added. “Wiggles itself into your pores and sticks.”
“No washing it off, it’s so oily and slick.” Anna said, “Here to stay.” She poured another cup. “Like us.”
“Maybe it’s payback,” Juanita suggested.
“Payback is a fact of life,” Anna agreed. “God’s going to see to that.”
Their reoccurring word battles set them against Breakline Camp. An army of two against the people and the mountains themselves.
Anna rarely saw Winston. He came to the back door under darkness when he said he could, and she, fool that she was, took him in. For all, except Juanita and Winston and Lily, she no longer existed.
In time, Lily would start first grade at Unity Church school. Gladys’ daughter, Cecelia, would be there. In the same building. Maybe in the same room. She needed to ask Winston if, in light of his initial fear of the girls favoring, he had considered they might meet. Had he contemplated the possibility of his girls pushing each other on the playground swings? Or jumping rope?
Nights with Lily sleeping inside, Anna pulled up her straight-backed chair and from her porch watched the lights that lit up the valley. One by one, camp house lights went out. On the rise, in the yellow house where Winston lived with Gladys, the lights glowed brighter and lasted longer than those in the camp. Anna could rely on the routine. The first floor lights went out soon after the valley darkened. The second floor followed a while later in all rooms except one, the light in what must have been their bedroom. It weakened bit by bit as if someone blew out a series of lamps and finally went black. Once Anna knew the yellow house had shut down for the day, she went inside and slept.
With each new day, the camp came alive in the same way. Miners walked to the shack and on to the mouth of the mine. Wives sent children, little ones hand-in-hand, up the valley to school. Women spent mornings weeding and hoeing backyard gardens. Afternoons, they gathered on porches against the heat of the sun to talk or sew. Nothing changed.
As she viewed the rise and fall of camp life, Anna was more convinced she should have gone when she had more anger to push her forward. She might have found a place in Covington or moved on to Bristol. When she agreed to stay, she had expected her need for Winston to wither as her life with Clint had. But Winston Rafe had rooted himself in her innermost being. Her days centered on hoping to catch sight of him; nights, haunted by memories. And her need grew. As it expanded, her grief spread within and gouged out a wound, cutting deep gashes on her soul, deeper than had the death of Clint Goodman.
Years ago when she had been no more than a tot, Anna had slipped down Broken Rock Creek riverbank and landed in a Brer Rabbit kind of briar patch. Her squirming and thrashing so confused the briars that they lost sight of their direction and entangled her totally. Pa had taken his pocketknife and cut her out as she screamed against the pain. He took her home, sniveling, her skin dirty and bleeding, uprooted plants dangling from her skinny body. He set her down on the edge of the back porch and spit out words like careless, stupid, fool, adding more sting than that any briar had inflicted. Now she heard those names rolling around in her head more clearly than she heard her own. She could now add whore to the list when she thought that some, if not all, of her money came from Winston Rafe, in one way or another. Self-loathing bonded with depression. The two kept her inside more and more, talking to herself and her child.
The letter came in late fall, 1946. Gabe brought the envelope by late on a Monday night. It had appeared without notice. Gabe, as camp mailman, would know this was the first letter Anna had received at the camp. Though Anna tried to hide it, he must have seen shock slap her face when she scanned the handwriting on the envelope. She didn’t ask Gabe to come in or to sit while she read the letter. He touched his index finger to his dingy Irish cap and bade his goodnight.
Anna had written her family in Covington a year before to tell them that Lily had been born and that Clint was dead. It would have been nice, Anna thought, for them to at least write back saying they received the letter. Ruth could have written the letter, as their ma and pa, like most of their generation, were not highly schooled. Over time, Anna forgot that she had written to Covington. And now she received a letter.
Anna pulled up her straight-backed chair. Its oak-woven seat crunched when she sat. She held the letter facedown while she gathered up a willingness to face it. Darkness crept up on the far edge of the porch. As it drew nearer her chair, she turned the envelope over.
Her mother had scribbled Anna Parsons Goodman, Break Line Mine Camp, Virginie across the front. Pa must be dead. Maybe somebody she knew in her past had dropped into a dark, open mine shaft. They for sure were not inviting Anna to stop by and have a bite to eat. Or they had forgiven her for helping Clint jilt Ruth because Lily was born. A baby would make everything better.
The sun dropped just below the mountain, leaving rosy bands across the sky. The evening breeze wound itself around he
r chair as she sat there on the porch. Anna brought a kerosene lamp out and placed it on the floor and sat on one leg, dangling her other over the porch edge. She ripped open the seal, tearing the letter inside. Her hand shook as she drew out one page, written in pencil, front and back. Two brittle pages slipped out of the envelope and fell to her lap. Holding the torn letter together, she read.
Septumber 21 1946
Daughter,
We burried yur sister Ruth yesterdy on that slope that clum up the rise from Broken Rock Crick. Her rising will be towards the sun when she shall see that Jordan river on Judgement Day to come. We aint got no marker as yet for Horns business went bust when he dropped Sue Ella Watkins stone on his leg and mashed it up bad. Pa says he might jest put in a stake to mark where she lays. He put her under that ole cherry tree yur great granddaddy William set out. He was the boy of Uriah who settled this land. And dont you forget it as you are the onliest air left now that me and Pa is getting on an Ruth is alaying in the ground. No telling where that wild Mona is. Last I heared was she was in the Carolinas with some injuns. All I see is rotten cherries fallin on Ruths grave but I aint saying.
Frowning, Anna let the letter fall to her lap. Writing a letter was so unlike her mother, especially a letter that filled a page and half its back. But it read like Ma. Rigid. Harsh. It read like Pa, but she doubted that Pa knew about either letter.
Ruth is dead of a river drownding some folk say. Sherif Youell says hes alooking fer some feller who comes off the mountain and carpenters of a day. Says he was over by the bridge afore Ruth come in from working. Says her pocketbook was alaying on the sidewalk open and all and there warnt no money but ther weren’t be no money no how cause she never carried no money as it was a Friday when she would of been paid fer. She used that crazy man Hudson’s bank for holding her pay stead of layin it aside in some hidey-hole like a reasonable person. But Im her mama and Im asaying shes dead of a broke heart as any rightful woman would be who had her man stole right out from under her by her own sister. I see in my own eye that she give up when she heared that you birthed Clints youngun and jumped off that bridge on her own. No matter no how as her neck is broke as hard as her heart and she is dead and burried. I had my say now and you made yur bed so lay there in your black mining camp. Im sending these here deeds with this letter.