At Easter we walk through the streets. My babies, their faces shine. We bear the relics, the bones, the blood, the images, all wrapped in gold. There are many priests; they wear red or white. They stop to sip wine. I go home and bake eggs in my bread, eggs whole in their shells.
Francesco comes home from the mines. He is so dirty. He bathes but his face is not clean. His eyes are dark all around, like the ones in the moving pictures. Here, bambino, I say. I dip the rag in turpentine and wipe the soft skin beneath his eyes. It burns, he says. He squeezes my hand.
Senore Davidson has hearths of marble. Like the big house my mama cleans in Palermo. Rosa, he says, you are my best maid. Better than in Philadelphia. He smiles. His face is round. His hair is gray, but his face is like a little boy.
He comes to see me here. Once.
He lives in Philadelphia sometimes. He lives here sometimes. His wife will not come. Dirty, she says. How can you stand these people? Come home. And he goes. But he comes back. I must run my business, he says. If I don’t look after my interests, who will? Eh, Rosa?
I wear my white chemise when I work for him. He stretches out his hand and touches the cutwork. So pretty, he says. Punto tagliato, I say. I do it myself.
Rosa, will you stitch the pillowcases? he says. Make them pretty.
The butterflies speak to me. Their mouths are very small, but still I hear them speak. Take care not to break the wings, they say. They sound like mama.
Mario plays the baseball. The grass smells sweet when it is cut. The ball runs through it like a snake. Home plate, they cry. Home plate.
The ball leaps but Mario has it. He flings it away as though he cannot bear to touch it. That is why he is so good, Antonio says.
I like to hit the ball, Mario says. I like to hit the son bitch and watch it fly away.
Mama sends the reliquary to me. She saves the money to buy it. I carry it in from the wagon. “Now God is in the house,” I tell Luigi. Mario throws the baseball to Carmello. It skips across the rocks. The pieta is inside the reliquary, behind the purple glass. The holy water is inside, and the candles. The priest gives me Christ’s body to live with us. Mario comes in with my babies. We eat pasta and butter. I put on my brocade vest. I light the candles and tell my beads.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
The candlelight dances on the glass. Mario sits in the corner. He says nothing. He holds the baseball, strokes it with his fingers. The candlelight flows over his trousers like water.
Eight
RONDAL LLOYD
SOMETIMES I WISH I COULD GO BACK TO AGE SEVENTEEN AND start all over again. I’d study medicine, wear a tie, and go around tapping people on the chest and saying, “Mm-hmmm.” Would C.J. have been satisfied then? I doubt it.
From as early as I can remember he preached two things to me—medicine and the United Mineworkers. He never understood that I couldn’t have both, that I had to choose. Whichever I picked, C.J. was bound to be disappointed.
Isom was drunk the night C.J. and I had the argument over whether I would study medicine or go down in the mines. I had been drinking too, as much as Isom, but I was never so cold sober in my life. I walked straight to the house from the Alhambra without a stumble, and took Isom right into the setting room with me. C.J. and Violet were making fudge with the girls. C.J. stood up, angry.
“Aint I told you never to come in like this when you been drinking?”
“I aint drunk,” I protested.
“I am,” Isom said, “but I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”
“Violet,” C.J. said coldly, “put the younguns to bed and go make some coffee.”
Isom snatched off his hat as the girls left. “’Night, Gladys.”
Gladys, who was five, giggled and waved at him. He was a great favorite of hers, always teasing her and bringing her candy. She often proclaimed she would marry him some day, and he would clasp his hands to his chest and cry, “I’m a-pining for ye, Gladys.”
When they had gone, C.J. stirred the coal fire with a poker.
“We got to talk,” I said.
“You know I’m ready any time. But wouldn’t you rather be sober?”
“I can say what I got to say right now. I cant be no doctor, C.J. I aint going to Huntington.”
His face fell, his shoulders slumped and he looked as crushed as I had known he would.
“Why ever not?”
“He’ll take on airs ifn he goes down there,” Isom said.
I told him to shut up.
“Why’d you haul me over here if you dont want my help?” he said plaintively. But he sank down on the maroon sofa and ate a piece of fudge.
“Look here,” I said. “If I go off, I’ll be gone for years. When I come back things wont be the same. I wont be the same. Folks will treat me different.”
“They’ll treat you with respect.”
“They’ll treat me different. Look at Doc Booker. You cant tell me folks treat him like any other nigger. They treat him like a dressed-up nigger.”
“You dont use that kind of talk in this house.”
“I am making a point, goddamn it!” I waved my arms. “You are so damn pure, C.J. You got so many standards and ideals. Well, maybe I picked up some of them. Maybe I picked em up because I love and admire you. And maybe I decided I want to help bring the union in here. Aint no doctor going to bring in no union.”
“Look at Doc Booker and the paper.”
“What about it? Aint no ten million Doc Bookers going to bring in the union. Hit’s coal miners will bring in the union. If I aint one of em, how can I help?”
“I aint no miner. You saying I cant help?”
“I’m saying they aint a miner on this holler that you got an in with. And I’m saying they is all kinds of missionaries up in Boston can come down here and be a doctor for all us poor folks on Blackberry Creek. I’m saying we got to bring the union in for ourselves.”
“Rondal, you’re still yet a youngun. Ten year from now you’ll look back and regret it if you dont take this chance to better yourself. I lay awake at night sometimes and think about the chances I missed.”
“I got to do what’s best for me. I cant live on what happened to you.”
“He goes off, I’ll lose my best buddy,” Isom said from the couch. “Hell, even if he comes back here, he wont be no fun no more.”
C.J. glared at him. “Hit’s one reason I want him to go. Git him away from these whorehouses and such.”
“Git him among quality folks,” Isom mocked. “Like them coal operators.”
I was frightened at the anger on C.J.’s face. I had always assumed he loved Isom as I did, but at that moment I thought he hated him.
Then he leaned against a chair, looked down at his hands, thoroughly beaten.
“I been saving money for your schooling,” he whispered.
“C.J., I cant pay you back for all you done. But dont make me go. I’ll be so lonesome. This here is my home. Dont send me away.”
He was crying. I had never seen him cry.
“Oh, God, C.J. I aint meaning to hurt you. Werent it you taught me about the union, about the coal operators? Aint they made this place a burden to bear? I’m scairt if I go off, I wont never settle here again. Hit would be too easy to turn tail, like Uncle Dillon.”
He raised his head. “Dillon never turned tail. You heard that offn your buddy there. Dillon’s living the old way.”
“We aint got the old way no more. We got the new way. That’s what I got to live. Only I cant bear to think I disappointed you. Say you aint disappointed.”
“I aint never been disappointed in you. You do what you got to do.”
He took a long time to say this last, and his voice held no ring of conviction. I felt like Judas. C.J. went into the kitchen to sit with Violet.
“Hey, dont worry,” Isom said. “You’re growed up now, and he aint even your daddy. He aint got no say so over you.”
There was nothin
g I could have said to hurt C.J. Marcum any more than to tell him that he carried no influence with coal miners, that he was not one of them. If I hadn’t been drinking, I would never have said it. But it was true. It was ironic, for C.J. had been on Blackberry all his life, before the companies came in. But it made no difference. To the miners, he was an outsider because he didn’t share their life. He was a businessman; he had money.
I was more at home with the miners than C.J. was. To them, I was Clabe Lloyd’s boy, even if I did live at Annadel. Isom and I spent time with them in the beer joints and whorehouses. We first ventured into Everett Day’s when we were fifteen and lost our virginity to a pair of amused colored girls. We were regulars for a while until Ermel found out and called us into his office at the hotel.
“So you boys want the clap,” he said.
We smirked and studied our hands.
“I go to Lizzie Mae ever time,” Isom said. “She aint got the clap.”
“So she says. If she aint got it now, she will have. You boys want your peters to shrivel up and fall off, just keep on going to Everett’s.”
That scared us and we decided to take his advice. Isom was smitten with a new colored girl at Everett’s named Aquanetta Jones. He set her up working the ticket office at the Roxie and she promised not to run with other men. I settled into an affair with Ruby Day, Everett’s daughter. She wasn’t a whore but her daddy’s business had certainly made an impression on her. She made few demands on me, and I liked that.
Daddy came up occasionally and I bought him a beer. It was the only way he could afford it.
“You come on back home anytime,” he always said. “You was a good buddy when you was working with me.”
But Talcott was the member of my family I saw most often. He came to Annadel every Saturday and stayed the night, for he was courting Pricie Justice, Isom’s little sister. Talcott, Isom and I had formed a band and played for pay in the places round about Annadel and up Lloyds Fork. Isom played the fiddle, Talcott the guitar, and I picked the banjo. We called ourselves the Blackberry Pickers. Some folks said we were the best in the county.
Talcott was saving the money he made from playing because he wanted to marry Pricie and move into his own house. He was sixteen, she was fourteen. We were drinking beer at Cesco Thompson’s on Lloyds Fork after a performance, and Isom had gone off to play cards, when Talcott told me of it.
“What does Ermel say?” I asked.
“I dont care what her old man says. We’re gitting married.”
“Dont you think you ought to ask Ermel?”
He shrugged. “I reckon. But sometimes he says things about me hanging around too much. Maybe he thinks a coal miner aint good enough for her.”
“Naw, Ermel aint no snob. Maybe he just thinks you’re too young. Besides, you dont have to stay down in the mines. Ermel can take you on to work for him.”
Talcott lit a cigarette, tapped his fingers on the table. “I aint interested in no soft job. I like it down there. Aint nobody on my back.”
He looked older than me. Pouches hung beneath his eyes and his nose was long and pinched.
“If I hadn’t left home,” I said, “you wouldn’t have worked in there with Daddy all these years.”
“Hell, I’d a gone in there sooner or later. What’s the difference?”
“You wasnt never mad at me?”
“Hell, no!”
He sucked on his cigarette. A blue heart was tattooed on the back of his right hand.
“Any of the boys at Winco talk about the union?”
He laughed. “Union? That’s just a bunch of fellers in offices up at Charleston. I dont need them to fight my battles.”
C.J. blamed Isom for my decision, but Talcott was the main reason I decided against going away to school. At the Justice farm he borrowed Isom’s pistol and practiced with it, shooting at bottles, squirrels, possums. Once when Annadel went to wring the neck of a chicken for dinner, he shot it in the head before she could catch it. At the Alhambra he pulled a knife on a drunk who heckled his singing. “Shit!” Isom yelled, and floored him with one punch. Talcott jumped up and was after him, but Isom kept leaping out of his way and laughing until Talcott wept with rage. After a while he wore himself out and calmed down. I took him to the station and put him on a train for Winco.
“Goddamn Isom,” he said, almost cheerful. “He’s lucky I didn’t slit him open.”
“He’s lucky,” I agreed. I hugged him to me.
“You’re a good brother,” he mumbled.
I left him once. I wouldn’t do it again.
When I first went back to Winco, Mommy made it clear that there was no room for me at the house. I tried not to show how hurt I was and went to live at the boarding house for single miners. They gave me a tiny room beside the kitchen that always smelled of hot, greasy dishwater. At least I didn’t have to eat there, but stopped by the house each morning to eat breakfast and pick up my dinner pail.
Mommy grew kinder as she saw how my return stretched her credit at the company store. But it was a remote kindness that offered me little comfort. I saw her only at meals. She would pour my coffee, stand behind me while I ate my eggs and bacon, heap seconds of fried potatoes on my plate. Then she went to the corner and said not a word. When I mentioned it to Talcott, he said, “Hell, she’s always like that. She dont love nobody but Jesus.”
That wasn’t quite true. She adored our little brother Kerwin. He was fourteen and she kept him in school despite Daddy’s repeated claims that he should be working. I was jealous. But I would not have wanted to be the meek creature Kerwin had become. He took his religion after her. They went to church together on Sundays and spent all day at it. In the evenings he read the Bible to her while she mended our clothes. He grew up skinny and round-shouldered with a thin face and wavy light brown hair. I never heard him raise his voice.
When Mommy invited me back into the house at last, I knew it was because she saw me as a powerful weapon in her fight to keep Kerwin at home.
It was fearsome going down in the mines again. I spent the first month in terror of a roof fall, and talked little so I could listen to the grinding and moaning of the coal seam. But time brought disregard for danger and even a mocking sort of courage. I would look up after the powder had blown and dare the son of a bitch roof to come down.
I saw C.J. most Saturdays. He usually heard us play if we were in Annadel. It was awkward at first, but there was too much between us to keep us apart. Once he said, “The money is still yet there if you change your mind.” Then he didn’t mention school again.
Isom and Ermel came after me one spring night as I was about to hop in bed with Ruby. I pulled my pants back on and went outside with them.
“Talcott and Pricie have run off.” Isom did all the talking. Ermel just stood behind him, grim and quiet. “Gone to Virginia, we reckon. Hit’s easy for younguns to git hitched down there. We’re going to fetch em back. Want to come?”
We took the train to Grundy but we were too late. When we got back to Justice County on Sunday afternoon they were at the farmhouse.
“Dont be mad, Daddy.” Pricie cowered on a chair and twisted a handkerchief in her lap.
“We’re old enough,” Talcott said. “I got me a house in Felco and a job. I’ll take real good care of her.”
Pricie’s red hair stuck out all over her head from where she had slept on the train. She took Talcott’s hand.
“I’m going to have a baby, Daddy,” she said shyly.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said Ermel.
Annadel sat on the back stoop and flung cracked corn at the chickens. I hadn’t noticed before how loose and stringy the skin was under her chin.
“Why couldnt she fell for you? You’re such a steady feller. You’ll make somethin someday. I had hopes for the two of you.”
“Law, Annadel, I aint no kind of feller for a woman to settle with. I can be mean as a striped-ass snake to a woman. Talcott there, he works hard.”
S
he shook her head. “What will happen to them younguns?”
“They’ll do all right. They both got kin that loves them.”
“Is that there enough in this day and age? I just dont know.” She smiled, a bleak smile. “Well, hit’s done, aint it? We’ll just have to git behind them now.”
Mommy was upset too, but not for Talcott’s sake. She met me at the door when I got home and pulled me into the kitchen where Daddy sat slumped over a cup of black coffee.
“Yall aint taking my boy down in that hole.”
Kerwin stood by the stove and stirred a pot of soup.
“Talcott loaded a heap of coal,” Daddy said wearily.
“This boy cant load no coal. He’s too skinny. Look at him. Jesus has set his mark on him. You cant have this boy.”
“Mommy, we aint said we was taking him in.”
She rounded on me. “Nor dont you think you will, neither.”
“I want him in school,” I said.
“That damn Talcott,” Daddy said. “Why’d he do such a durn fool thing?”
“I dont mind going in,” Kerwin said in a small voice. “The Lord will watch over me. Aint it so, Mommy?”
She started to cry.
“You aint going in,” I said.
I worked two years in the mine, biding my time. Then I wrote to the union in Charleston, the state capital, and begged them to send us an organizer. I sealed the letter in one of the Flat Iron Drugstore stationery envelopes and posted it in Justice so that it wouldn’t get into the wrong hands.
A month before I wrote the letter, I watched two dozen blue-uniformed guards get off the train at Winco. They worked for the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency in Bluefield. C.J. said their presence meant that the union was making plans to move into the Levisa coalfield. Davidson and the other operators would be taking no chances.
American Coal had always employed its own policemen, frightened little bullies who liked to throw their weight around. We always laughed at them behind their backs. The Baldwin-Felts guards were different. They were not local men, and they were professionally trained. While many of them had been policemen in Virginia, others had been taken off the streets of big cities and boasted openly of prison records. We came to call them “gun thugs.” They would beat a man for no other reason than he had met their eyes in what they judged to be a forward manner. Gatherings of more than two people who were not family members were forbidden. A colored man at Felco who came home drunk one night and threw red dog at a Baldwin guard was shot to death.
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