He leaned across to me and lowered his voice.
“I belong to the Socialist Party. You heard tell of it?”
I nodded my head.
“I git a newspaper from them, the Appeal to Reason. It come out of Kansas. They’s a lots of sense in it.”
“I dont know,” I said. “I always thought a man should own his land. I’d have to think about that there socialism.”
“Hell, let him own a little bit of land. Long as everybody got some that want it. But the man that does the work should own the coal mine. He should receive the fruit of his labor, like the Good Book say.”
“Aint many folks here would go along with it. How would socialism git that woman back yonder to share the fruits of her labor with a Negro?”
“I aint sayin that would be easy. But what’s called for is education. Education is the key, education and necessity. That woman Ethel need a doctor for her youngun, she dont care if it’s a Negro. She got a sick baby, that’s all. When you git right down to it, these folks wont have no hard time with socialism. Hell, they been socialized for years. They git the crumbs from under Lytton Davidson’s table, and them crumbs is parceled out pretty equal. They got socialized soup beans, socialized cornbread, socialized gravy. What we got to work for is socialized pork chops.”
I laughed. “I can go for that.”
“I want to start me a newspaper. And I want you to help.”
I whistled. “That would take some money.”
“Let’s go talk to Ermel. He got the money.”
“Ermel? Payin for a socialist newspaper?”
“He wont give a damn whether it be socialist or not, long as it aint for prohibition.”
Ermel laughed when we put the proposition to him, said he’d think about it. Nothing happened for over a year. Then the Justice Clarion announced it would no longer accept advertisements from his businesses, because “they flout the laws of propriety with regard to the separation of the races, and promote an unhealthy atmosphere by the dispensing of alcohol and the operation of gaming devices.”
Ermel was furious. We promised him free advertising if he would help us buy a printing press. And in 1906, the Annadel Free Press was born, with Doc Booker as editor and me as business manager and associate editor.
In the meantime, I become a socialist. Doc give me a lot of books by Karl Marx to read, and I fell asleep every time I tried to read one. They was just too dry for me. But I voted for Eugene Debs.
Six
CARRIE BISHOP
I HAD A DREAM THE NIGHT MILES CAME HOME FROM BEREA. I dreamed one of Flora’s quilts hung on the clothesline to dry. It was the double wedding band, neverending loops of purple and red on white backing, paths leading back into themselves, mountain paths that refused to run straight. The quilt did not sag on the line but was taut as if nailed onto an invisible wall. Something moved at its center; it was the point of a knife thrust from the back. The knife cut easily as through butter, with no sound of tearing. I knew Miles held the knife.
“Why are you cutting up Florrie’s quilt?” I asked him.
“To make little covers for the baby’s bed,” he answered cheerfully. “It’s all for the new baby.”
Miles always said “it” now, never “hit.”
“It sounds ignorant to say ‘hit.’ They shamed us out of it at school. Same with ‘aint.’ Educated people don’t use those words.”
Ben sat by the fire and whittled. “Chaucer said ‘hit,’” he observed.
Miles looked startled, then said, “That’s different.”
“Why?” Ben asked.
“He’s been dead a long time. He was medieval.” He said this last word as though it described a very disgraceful condition. “This is the scientific age.”
It rained all that September evening. Daddy, Miles and Ben sat up late, deep in conversation about what Miles called “business affairs.” I listened from the front porch.
“Subsistence farming,” Miles said. “That’s what this is. You can’t make it on subsistence farming any more. The economy is changing. Prices are going up. It’s the miners’ wages doing it. They see more cash than you do, Daddy, a whole lot more. When Pond Creek opens up over here, you won’t be able to make it without more cash.”
Miles planned to move to Pond Creek in November to become superintendent of a new coal mine that was owned by a Boston family, relatives of one of his professors at Berea. That is what education is about, Miles said. To prepare mountain youth to take their place in the modern world. We must not be left behind, he said. Who better to oversee a coal mine than someone who had grown up in the area, someone who understood the men he would supervise? Miles had spent the summer in Boston getting acquainted with his employers and learning what he called their “business philosophy.”
He wanted to buy Daddy’s trees for his coal company.
“We’ll be building houses, using timbers inside the mine. A coal company always needs trees. Daddy, it will be more money than you’ve ever seen. You can even build a new house for Ben and Flora and their children. You get some of the boys from Scary next winter and cut the trees, float them down to the sawmill at Catlettsburg. We’ll pay you cash right there. I can draw up the contract first thing when I start work.”
Daddy spoke so low I couldn’t hear what he said. But he came out on the porch after a while to smoke his pipe and take a breath of air.
“You going to do it?” I asked.
“Aint much to do that time of year no way,” he said.
“I dont think you should. The trees is too pretty.”
He looked at me. “Where’s the women?”
“Gone to the Aunt Jane Place.”
“Why aint you with them?”
“I wanted to hear yall talking.”
“Aint nothing for a girl to hear. Go on down there with them.”
I ignored him, as I did more and more in those days. He was usually scornful of me as well. It had started not long after Albion left, when Daddy learned I was doing most of the hunting. He led me way up on the mountain, pretending we were going to hunt together, then he took my gun and left me without a word. I sat and cried for a long time and listened to the report of his gun on a distant ridge. Then I stumbled down the mountain alone.
He told me he didn’t expect me to find a husband. I was not “deferrin” enough, my tongue was too sharp and I was too forward in my ways. I didn’t believe him. Aunt Jane was not “deferrin” and she had been married. Most of the women I knew on the creeks were strong and fiesty and they all had men. Still he hurt my feelings. I held myself distant from him and from other men who might treat me the same.
The boys I knew didn’t interest me. I still waited for Heathcliff and felt nothing for Arley Whitt or Billy Good. None of them paid attention to me either. Aunt Jane said I had my nose up in the air. Flora said I was too shy to flirt properly. Only Aunt Becka said nothing, and her silence frightened me. Did she think us kindred spirits?
I rocked back and forth after Daddy went inside. Rain hammered the roof and drowned out the voices of the men. Spray from the bannisters left tiny wet spots on my cheeks. I closed my eyes and pretended they were the kisses of a man. I couldn’t see his face, but he would be brave and charming, and I would marry him. I put my finger to my lips and pretended he had touched me.
“I love you,” I said softly, to no one.
Flora’s first baby was due in May. By the time the men began cutting the trees she was too large for her regular dresses. She and Ben lived with Aunt Jane. Ben had stopped teaching when Miles left home so he could help Daddy work the land. Now he was timbering and would ride the logs down the river. Sometimes, we heard, trees fell on men, or ran them over as the trunks were dragged to the river. And the trip to Catlettsburg would be the most perilous part of all. Flora fretted so over Ben that she became distracted. Aunt Jane took to gathering the eggs each day, because Flora would drop them or rattle them so hard in the basket they cracked.
From the
Aunt Jane Place, the distant axes sounded like slow woodpeckers. The men cleared the mountainside down Grapevine from the Homeplace. Daddy planned to use it for a new ground or pasture. They cleared it rough. The tree stumps, some of them five feet across, were fresh and raw like proud flesh, and the falling trunks smashed the dogwoods and rhododendron. Trimmed branches fell in untidy heaps and the gashed carcasses of white oak and poplar were dragged to the riverbank. There the men wielded their cant hooks and called to one another in a strange language they had only just learned, crying of tie poles and chain dogs. They slid the logs over the bank and into the water. The logs would float in a pen until high tide when the men would lash them into rafts for the trip downstream.
We cooked all day to feed the men who had come from all over Scary and Grapevine to work on the hillside. We grumbled as we worked.
“I’m scairt for this here baby,” Flora confided. “Hit’s a-trying to grow all the while they’re a-cutting and slashing. Hit’s aiming to be borned while its daddy is putting himself in mortal danger. When them trees holler and crash down, this here baby kicks.”
Aunt Jane shook her head in agreement. “They’s something about it aint right. Hit’s one thing to clear for a new ground, but this here, I dont know.”
“They aint nothing wrong with providing for your family,” Aunt Becka said. She was always especially fond of Miles. But even she spoke without conviction and her forehead was wrinkled with worry.
I hated the ugliness of the cleared mountain. But most of all I was angry about missing school to cook. I thought about my neglected books lying in the loft and burned with resentment at the bedraggled men who trooped in to dinner each midday. It often rained that winter, and the men shook themselves like dogs before they came into the house, so many of them that the four of us women had to stand bunched together in the corner near the stove until they went out again, and make do with the scraps they left.
“Put up with it now,” Miles said when he came for a visit. “This time next year there’ll be a big new house.”
I resented his part in this disruption, but I couldn’t be too angry with him. When I complained about the school I had missed, he looked at me thoughtfully.
“You like school, don’t you, Sis? You ought to go off and study like I did.”
“I’d love to,” I said. “I want to be a nurse. They’s a nursing school over at that new hospital at Justice.”
“I’ll pay for it, if that’s what you want to do.”
“You mean that?”
“Sure. I haven’t got a wife or children to worry about yet. Why shouldn’t I help you out? That’s what family is for.”
I daydreamed about nursing school. When I mentioned it to Daddy he laughed. I knew it meant nothing to him, but I also knew he wouldn’t oppose it as long as he didn’t have to pay for it.
The thaw came in March. The river was up, lashing at the low-hanging branches of trees, running so wide and fast that the whole earth seemed to move with it. The men roped the logs into rafts and prepared to leave. We gave them cool goodbyes, for to cling and weep would be to acknowledge the danger they would face.
We didn’t cook elaborate meals while they were gone. We were weary of cooking and food did not interest us anyway. We sat around the table at the Homeplace and nibbled on sliced ham, cold biscuits, and boiled eggs. Sometimes we opened a jar of preserves.
We fed the animals, milked the cows, chopped wood. Aunt Becka hitched up our mule Mag and plowed the vegetable garden. I would come laden with water buckets from the well or from bringing in the cows and see Aunt Jane walking beside Aunt Becka, talking earnestly to her and sometimes draping an arm across the younger woman’s shoulders.
School was done for the year. I tried to read on my own to make up for what I had lost, but it was hard to concentrate. It was unsettling to have the men gone. I had no doubt that we women could take care of one another. But I missed their maleness. They were kin and a vital part of our kinship had been torn away.
A man passed through on his way to Letcher County. He had been down the river. He told us a man had fallen from the rafts on the Levisa and been killed. He heard the man was from Paine County, but he didn’t recall the name.
“Happened four days back,” he said.
“Nigh to Louisa. They went on to Catlettsburg,” he said.
“Probably werent one a yourn,” he said.
We shoved his food at him. He slept in the barn and left the next morning.
“He was likely mistaken,” said Aunt Jane. “Besides, they’s a heap of men in Paine County that run logs.”
Flora began to cry. She sat hunched forward so long that I wondered if a baby could be squashed inside of its mother.
Flora spied them first. “They’re a-coming!” she hollered.
We found her on the porch, clutching a post, her belly pressed against it. From a distance the men seemed to float over the bottom land like ghosts. They were too far away to tell who was who.
“Oh, lordy,” Flora prayed, “please let Ben be all right.”
They came on slowly.
“There’s Ben!” I cried. “I spy Ben!”
Flora pressed her hands to her cheeks.
“Who else, child?” Aunt Becka pleaded. “Your eyes is better than mine.”
“There’s Farrie Whitt, and Clarence. And there’s Moscoe and Amos Maynard. Vance McCoy. Lee Slone. And Miles! Miles has come back with them.”
“Where’s Orlando?” Aunt Jane asked.
Flora raised her head. “Where’s Daddy?”
We stood still for a moment. Aunt Becka staggered down the steps, almost fell.
“Where’s my brother?” she cried. “Where’s my little brother?”
Then Ben was with us, he said our daddy was dead. Flora and I clutched one another and wailed.
Aunt Jane, who knew what it was to lose husband and daughter, remained calm.
“Aint you brung back his body?” she asked.
“We had to bury him right there. We wasn’t near no place and he was all tore up. They was a blockade and he was throwed off and caught between two rafts. Hit was all we could do to git the corpse out of the river. We went on to Catlettsburg, sold the logs, and come on back here with Miles.”
Aunt Becka commenced to keening. “Orlando’s gone. Oh, Jesus, he’s gone, my poor little brother that I carried in my arms oncet. And all for a handful of silver.”
Flora went into labor that night, three months before her time. I stayed at the Aunt Jane Place but couldn’t sleep, and sat watching the lights burn in the windows of the Homeplace. I thought of my father. Had he lived and another of us died, he would have been no comfort. He would have kept his own counsel and gone out to tend the cows. I was not sure that I had loved him. I mourned his death, but it was because no one else could be Father, and because there would be no more chances to earn his love.
Miles came up sometime after midnight.
“I thought you’d be awake,” he said.
I nestled against him. His shirt smelled of sweat.
“The baby’s dead,” he said. “It was a boy. Lived less than an hour. Ben held him when he died.” He began to cry. “It’s my fault. I should never have talked Daddy into selling his trees.”
“How could you know what would happen?”
“Aunt Becka thinks it’s my fault. I’m scared she hates me.”
“Course she dont. Aint you her kin? Aint we all kin?”
“I love you, Carrie.”
I patted his back. “I love you, too, Miles.”
“I loved Daddy. I did. I swear I loved him.”
“I know it.”
We named the baby Orlando and buried him in the May cemetery at the mouth of Scary Creek. He lay next to Tildy May Bishop, our mother. It was as though he had been conceived for just this purpose, a stunted effigy to lay in place of his missing namesake.
Flora did not go to the burying and did not leave her bed until a month afterward. When she finally v
entured outside, she would have nothing to do with caring for the animals. She was afraid, she said, that she would accidentally do them some harm.
Ben built a house of wood with the money from selling the trees. It had six rooms and a large front porch all painted white. Ben said it was the last thing our daddy did for us.
Seven
ROSA ANGELELLI
I POLISH THE GLASS CASES WHICH HOLD THE BUTTERFLIES, in Senore Davidson’s big sunny room with all the books.
Look, he tells me. He points to the butterflies. I catch this one in this place, and that one in that place. Gold. Africa. Purple. Louisiana. He goes everywhere for the butterflies.
Rosa, he says. You should know some of these names. They are Latin. Your Italian language is from Latin.
I shrug my shoulders and smile. Still, I do not know it.
See this one. I go all over the world for it and never find. Then I catch it here, on Blackberry Creek. What do you think of that?
I look at it. Argynus Diana. I will name my daughter Diana. Now I have only sons.
We move to the town of Davidson. It is better, Mario says. New town. Bigger house. Mario works outside the mine. He does not go down in. It is because he plays the baseball. What an arm, says Senore Davidson.
There is a sign above the bridge in Davidson. Francesco reads it to me. American Coal Company. Man Hours Lost Due To Accident, 1909. Safety Is Our Motto. Beneath that, the numbers. They change the numbers every day. My babies go down in and I pray.
There is a priest in Davidson, a church. Our Lady of Victory. We live at Number Six. It is one mile to the church. I stop on my way to clean for Senore Davidson. My little baby Luigi is with me. Francesco, Antonio, Carmello go to school. I smell the incense in the church. It is like my mama’s scent. Our Lady of Victory. I light the candle every day. I leave the penny. I steal the penny from Mario.
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