“Daddy’s got food,” she said. “Let’s look for them guns. I bet they keep them in the basement.”
“I’m scairt to,” Gladys protested. “Where is everbody? They may be hiding down there.”
“Ifn they are, they’re scairt to death. Hit’s just old men and women that work here anyway.”
I snatched up a small side of bacon and a sack of flour before I went downstairs. Ermel may have food, but Albion did not. I caught up this booty in my skirt. Then I edged my way down a wooden stairway and into the pitch darkness of the basement. Pricie heard me and yelled, “Do you know where they’s a light switch?”
“I seen one at the top of the stairs.”
“Go turn it on. They’s guns here. Shells too, and another machine gun. Go git some more of the girls to help carry them.”
I groped my way back and found what I thought was the door to the stairway. When I yanked it open, I heard a sharp intake of breath. Then a woman’s voice pleaded querulously, “Go on and leave us be. Please leave us be.” Someone else sobbed softly in the dark.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and closed the door gently.
I found the right entrance and rushed upstairs, tripping on my skirt and hitting my knee painfully. I turned on the light, but I couldn’t bring myself to follow the ones who went down after the guns. I went out onto the porch. Women ran back and forth on Felco’s lone paved street, the street of big houses where the doctors and bookkeepers lived, dragging pillowcases filled with food. Cecil Nunally’s widow emerged from the doctor’s house with a chocolate layer cake.
I heard the whine of motorcars approaching from down the creek. I ran to the machine gun and sat down behind it, careful to place my food on the ground close beside me. Three state police cars churned up the road through Colored Bottom. I swung the machine gun back and forth, surprised at how easily it moved. The metal trigger froze my finger clear to the bone.
The cars drew up below the store. Black sludge clung like icing halfway up their sides. The doors swung open and policemen jumped out. I squeezed the trigger, spun the gun wildly back and forth, kicked up globs of black mud at their feet. The first men out whirled around, tackled those behind them, piled back into the cars. They backed up and sped away, the rear ends of the cars waggling as they slid back down the road.
I sat still. My body buzzed from the racketing of the gun. I smelled burnt oil. Straight ahead, across the railroad tracks, I could see the row of houses where I had lived. Hundreds of women gathered there, too, so far away they appeared to walk on water. Scab miners came from the drift mouth to see what was happening. The women met them, beat them about the head with their sticks and frying pans, swiped at them with axes, and the men fled behind a row of empty black coal cars.
I gathered up my food. The bacon had been sliced and wrapped in slick butcher’s paper, perhaps waiting to be picked up by the paymaster’s wife. Even now she might be cowering in the basement.
Pricie and Gladys struggled out the door, carrying a machine gun between them.
“I hear shooting?” Gladys asked anxiously.
“Mmmmm,” I answered. I was counting the bacon strips. Twenty-four slices. Enough for ten days if I could keep it frozen.
I lay stiff beside Albion and couldn’t sleep. His hand rested inside my dress, upon my breast. I raised it to my lips, kissed it, and sat up.
“What?” he mumbled.
“Cant sleep. Got to walk. I’ll be back in a little while.”
I pulled on my cracked leather boots and went outside. The moon was full and the sky littered with stars. I wandered toward the railroad track, met Sam Gore, who stood sentry on the edge of the camp. Sam’s house had been burned by the Baldwin guards and he lived with us now.
“What you doing up?” he said.
“I had to walk.” I studied his gun. “You kilt anybody yet, Sam?”
“No. But way I feel right now, I wouldnt mind to.”
“I almost did today. I shot a machine gun at some state police.”
He grinned. “Yeah, I done heard tell of it. That there would have been something to see.”
“I didnt know how to aim the thing. Didnt know nothing about it. I could have blowed their heads off as easy as what I did. Didnt really care, neither.” I hugged myself and bounced on my toes to keep warm. “My brother used to take me hunting when I was a youngun. First time I kilt a squirrel I cried for hours. Wouldnt eat it or nothing. But I got used to it and went hunting all the time. I wonder if it’s that way with killing people. I wonder if you can git used to it.”
Sam nodded. “It be like a war, I reckon. Aint nobody care for it, but it be here on us. Me, I’d rather be playing baseball than toting this here gun.”
I smiled. “I seen you play baseball. Seen you pitch. You beat Davidson.”
“Yeah, we sure enough did beat Davidson.”
I walked on down the track.
“Dont go too far now, hear?” he called after me.
I waved at him and walked the rail, setting one foot carefully in front of the other. It was comforting, as though keeping my balance on the rail would make everything all right. The rail vibrated. I looked up, surprised because there was no sign of a headlight, and slipped off onto the gravel track bed. Then I heard the engine. It sounded like the slow train, but it was too late for that. Well, I thought, if no one is leaving the camp, someone may be arriving. Suddenly I was sure that it was Rondal, that he would leap from a swaying boxcar and be with us again. I ran down the slope of the track bed and walked backward, never taking my eyes off the approaching train.
“What the hell is that?” I heard Sam yell.
Then the engine drowned him out. It still did not show a headlight, but the smoke from its stack gave off a light of its own. I searched the darkness in vain for a hand dangling a red bandana. Then the engine was past me and I saw the iron boxcar with its door slightly ajar. I ran toward Sam.
“Hit’s Rondal come back,” I called, and turned back to see if it was so, to watch him leap. I caught a glimpse of dark metal, and then the boxcar spat fire.
I fell onto my back and hit my head in the gravel. I saw Sam Gore kneel and fire his rifle. Then he jerked backwards like a rag doll and lay twisted and still. I tried to scream but the clatter of machine guns was deafening. Bullets ripped open the tents with great tearing sounds; those closest to the tracks collapsed.
I wept at the pain in my arm. A pool of blood spread darkly across the ground near my shoulder. I turned my head so I wouldn’t see it. The gravel was sharp against my cheek. Then I passed out.
I recall Albion’s face near mine, and a numbness in my arm, which I later learned was from his belt wrapped tight to stop the bleeding.
I must have questioned him, for he told me Sam was dead and he had seen several other bodies. My next memory is of a hospital ward. Albion and Miles stood beside my bed and argued.
“You going to pay for everbody else that got shot up?”
“You can’t deny her medical care if I’m willing to pay for it.”
“Didnt say I would deny her. But it aint right for the hospital to put folks out that has been shot.”
“—can’t answer for the hospital. I suppose they’re overcrowded.”
“She wouldnt want to go with you. I hate to say it, but it’s true.”
“—not in any shape to be particular.”
“—take her myself, but I cant leave the county until the trial.”
Ben Honaker’s face hovered over mine. His fine blond hair looked soft as a baby’s.
“Honey, you want to go home?”
I tried to smile and nod my head.
“—wrap her up good.”
“Aint cold no more,” I whispered. “Hot.”
I saw my room at the Homeplace, the familiar oak chest, the gray checked wallpaper. Aunt Becka put spoons to my mouth, Flora bathed my face. I slept, and was content.
I took the pneumonia on top of the gunshot wound. I was near death for over a
week and slept for most of a month without memory. Then I woke to see the window standing wide open. The white curtains flowed like water. Flora perched on the edge of the bed, set her hand to my cheek.
“Hit aint even April yet, but it’s turned unseasonable warm.”
“Hit’s lovely,” I said.
She started to cry and called for Aunt Becka.
By early April I was able to sit on the porch in the afternoon sun wrapped in one of Flora’s quilts. I wondered about Albion, how they were in the camps, if the warm weather had heartened them. I stared for hours at the folded mountains. The trees were white as bones and tipped with red buds, as though they had been turned upside down and dipped in blood.
Albion wrote that the trial was scheduled for June 12. He urged me to stay away until then. “Nothing you can do here. Medicine is about gone. The warm weather is keeping the pneumonia down. Twenty families have left, moved away. Funny how they put up with all that cold, and then it’s the warm that breaks them. But most everybody else is dug in. Folks keep saying the worst is over. I pray to God they are right.”
I missed him terribly and longed to tell him so. But it was useless writing to him, for the strikers’ mail was intercepted, read and destroyed. I couldn’t quite bring myself to go to him. After an initial period of strangeness the Homeplace had begun to assume magical proportions, as though I had never seen any of it before, as though it were a mythical kingdom I had stumbled upon after years of weary wandering. They wouldn’t let me do heavy work. I passed lazy hours on the riverbank, fishing and reading Ben’s books, until Flora called, “Carrie! Supper!”—her voice clear as a bell. Then, after the fried trout and potatoes and shucky beans, Flora and I gathered up the children, Jane, Luke, Mabel, John Henry and baby Rachel, and we went to call the cows home.
The path took us past the Aunt Jane Place, empty now. I’d often say, “When that strike is over, I’m going to bring Albion Freeman back here and live in that house. You see if I dont.” Flora smiled and led the way to the meadow on Scary. We caught a granddaddy longlegs, asked it which way the cows had gone and followed the waving of its leg. We heard the tinkling of the bells before we saw anything.
“Old Bess!” Mabel would cry, and Jane and Luke ran ahead swinging their sticks and leaping over hummocks of weeds on their long slender legs.
It was impossible to explain to Ben and Flora what Blackberry Creek was like. I wearied of saying, “Hit’s coming to us,” and hearing Ben reply, “I hear there’s no coal on Grapevine anyway.”
“Who says so? Miles?”
“Carrie!” Flora said. “That aint a tone of voice for talking about your brother.”
“Things will change here too. You wait and see.”
“They already changed some,” Ben said. “Folks with big families, their homeplaces cant support all of them. Used to be some would move on to new land. But the land is all taken up now. What are they supposed to do? The world will move on.” He shook his head. “This violence, I dont understand it.”
“Hush!” Flora said. “Carrie aint needing to be reminded about all that.”
Aunt Becka seemed to understand better than the others.
“I was just a little child during the War Between the States,” she said, “but I recollect a few things about it. Everbody was hungry back then, because the soldiers took everything. They was a whole family up Scary kilt by the Yankee men. Even the younguns. We was mostly Yankee sympathizers, but everbody said how terrible it was. Still they werent nothing done to stop it. Both sides shot men while they worked in their fields. Shot them dead in front of their families. Then they was Alec May, kilt because he wouldnt fight. Hit was terrible times, and folks was so mean to each other.” We rocked on the front porch and listened to the peepers. “Alec was an abolitionist,” she continued, “but he couldnt see killing. Said the rebels was barefoot boys like him. That’s why the Yankees shot him, left Jane with a baby to raise by herself.”
“My mama.”
“That’s right. Your mama. It was a hardship on Jane, but I cant say Alec done wrong. He done what he had to. Live by what you believe is right and you bring the world down on your head.”
I felt ashamed. “I shot at people,” I said. “That aint like Uncle Alec.”
“Aint like Carrie Bishop neither,” she said gently. Then she patted my knee. “When the world’s turned around, sometimes up looks like down. I dont recall much about Alec. I was just a youngun when he was kilt. But I heard enough of him to know that you’re Alec May’s granddaughter and he wouldnt mind to claim you.”
She hugged me. She smelled like woodsmoke from standing by the fireplace.
“Child, child, what will become of you? But you wont go back on your raising.”
I saw her then, walking fifty miles through the rain to reach the Homeplace after she left her husband, her hair hanging in wet clumps and her drenched skirts slapping her legs.
I joined Albion at the Mingo Hotel in Justice on the evening before the trial. Isom and Gladys stayed in the room across the hall. It was all Ermel’s idea. The Baldwin-Felts people and the coal operators took up two whole floors of the Carter Hotel on Main Street. He’d not have his boy arriving at the last minute, rumpled and tired from the train, while the coal operators strolled up the hill in newly pressed suits.
Albion had little to say until we were alone in our room. Then he pulled me down beside him on the green chintz bedspread.
“I missed you so much,” he said. “I been so worried. I knew if anything bad happened, Ben would git word to me. But still—”
“I’m fine. I had it easy. My arm gits a little sore is all. But you, you’re still yet so thin. Who’s doing your cooking for you?”
“I done some myself,” he said proudly. “And Annadel Justice fed me some.”
“You dont say. Well, you dont need me around.”
He laughed. “That aint so.”
I pulled his shirt up and ran my hands up and down his back. I felt the mole on his left shoulderblade and rubbed it with one finger, rejoicing in its familiarity. “I know something Annadel Justice aint done for you.”
He kissed me. “I been hungrier to taste your mouth than any kind of food,” he said.
He was restless that night, finally sat up in bed.
“Sorry,” he said. “I know you had a long trip today. I reckon I cant git used to a bed after them cots.”
“Hit’s all right. I wasnt sleepy no way.”
“I been going over everything in my mind.”
I twisted my fingers in the short curly hair of his chest and buried my nose in the soft flesh of his underarm.
“We got to face the worst,” he said. “They may convict.”
“We dont have to fret about that yet. The trial will take a while, and you’ll be out on bond the whole time.”
“But that trial will be crazy, Carrie. They’s newspaper people coming, and they’s already folks pestering me on the streets. We aint going to have much time to ourselves.”
“Aint had none anyway since the strike.”
“I know it. And that’s why we got to say some things to each other. They could put me in prison for life. They could hang me.”
“They wont,” I said quickly. “Ermel says even ifn they convict, the circumstances aint right for first degree. The judge will make them reduce it.”
“They brung the charge,” he persisted.
“They wont do nothing like that,” I said.
“Ifn they do, I want you to promise me you’ll go back home. I know how much you love that place. Hit was such a joy to see you git offn that train today, to see the color in your cheeks, and your eyes bright. I know what put the life back in your face.”
“Hit was seeing you again.”
“No it werent. It was the Homeplace. If they convict, I want you to go back there. I cant bear the thought of being in prison and knowing you’re in that tent. I want you back on your land with your people. Promise me, Carrie.”
&nb
sp; “Only if you promise you’ll go back there with me when the strike’s over. Leave the coal mines, go back there and be there for good.”
He lay back on his pillow and didn’t speak for a very long time. I put a finger gently to his lips and he kissed the tip.
“I cant see that far ahead,” he murmured. His lips moved against my finger. “After the trial.” He turned his head toward me. “Hit’s like the refiner’s fire, this here trial. Hit will leave everything clear, if I do like God says. They’ll be gun thugs at that trial, Carrie, and the brother of them two that was shot. And they’ll be hating me and Isom. They’ll look at me and I’ll see that hate in their eyes. I got to look back at them without hate. I got to be able to smile and speak gentle, and when the lawyers ask me questions, I got to answer with respect. And ifn I can do that, maybe I can live at the Homeplace.”
I shook my head. “I dont understand. What does living as perfect as Jesus Christ have to do with the Homeplace?”
“Dont you see, Carrie, the Homeplace is lost.”
I stiffened. “Dont say that.”
“But hit’s true, and we got to face it. I dont mean this year or next year, or even ten year from now. But you seen all this and you know it’s true. Because the Homeplace aint Heaven, Carrie. Hit’s part of the creation and hit’s fallen and hit suffers just like we do. And the only way to live on it happy is to love everthing else that’s fallen. And ifn I cant love them gun thugs, God wont call me back to the Homeplace, because I’ll love all the wrong things about it, I’ll love it because they aint no gun thugs there and because there I can turn my back on all the suffering, and I’ll make an idol outen it, and worship it.”
He had raised up while he talked and turned from me, and set his feet on the floor. I touched his back. It was damp with sweat.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you so much.”
We dressed as soon as it was light, then sat on the side of the bed, quiet. Most of our clothes had been lost when we were evicted from the house at Felco. I wore a new dress Flora made me before I left home, pink cotton with tiny white stripes sprinkled with red rosebuds. Albion had on Ben’s suit that I’d brought with me. It was a little short on him, but not too noticeable.
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