Storming Heaven

by Denise Giardina

  We went downstairs for breakfast. Isom and Gladys were already there. Isom stood up and motioned us to join them. A red carnation peeked from the pocket of his pin-striped jacket. His hair was curly and long in the back.

  “Eat up, younguns,” he said. “Hit’s on Daddy.”

  “Ermel and Annadel done gone up to the courthouse,” Gladys said.

  “Daddy wants a front row seat, and you know that there place will be full as a tick’s belly.” Isom flipped a cloth napkin so hard it cracked, settled it across his knees. “I got me a telegram.”

  He dug into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled yellow paper. “From Rondal.” He tossed it across the table. I read, “Hog-eyed man fiddles too fast for thugs.” It was signed “Sally Ann.”

  Isom laughed his short, hacking laugh. “I used to call him Sally Ann all the time. It’s his favorite fiddle tune. I know it’s killing him to miss this.”

  A waitress brought heaping platters of fried eggs, ham and red-eye gravy, biscuits and sourwood honey. She lingered by the table.

  “Yall the ones being tried?” she asked shyly.

  “That’s right.” Isom smiled proudly at her.

  “I just wanted to wish yall luck. My daddy was a miner. He was kilt up at Carbon Number Two, ten year ago.” She fidgeted with a button on her white blouse. “Them gun thugs had it coming. Everbody says so, excepting the big shots.”

  Gladys nodded her head. “That jury wont convict,” she said.

  “Not a Justice County jury,” agreed the waitress. “Yall need anything else? I’ll bring some more coffee.”

  Albion cut his eggs into tiny pieces. The yellow yolk ran into the red-eye gravy and he sopped it all up with a biscuit.

  “Aint this nice?” he said. “I dreamed of fresh eggs for months now.”

  “We got to thank your daddy,” I said.

  “Didn’t want your belly to growl in court,” Isom said.

  The waitress poured fresh coffee. Isom studied his watch. “Half an hour yet,” he said and winked. “We dont have to worry about no crowd. We got seats saved.”

  When we stepped outside it was already hot. “I hope they got paper fans,” Gladys said.

  We crossed the street and walked alongside the high courthouse wall. The gray stone building with its single tower crowned the top of the hill. A flight of steep steps led up to the lawn, where a crowd of men stood about.

  “They’s some aint got seats yet,” Gladys said. “Law, I’m commencing to git nervous.”

  “A lot of them fellers hanging around up there is Baldwins,” Albion said. “I seen some of them before.”

  There was something about the way they stood that marked them—hands on hips and dark suit jackets pulled back, legs apart like they stood in the camps. Albion’s hand was moist in mine. “Here’s where it starts,” he said.

  Isom stopped, looked up at the men. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then his face cleared. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “Come on.”

  He pulled Gladys along with him. She looked over her shoulder at me, worried. She had a folded pink parasol clutched tightly in one gloved hand and held across her waist instead of down at her side, and when she turned to climb the steps, she poked Isom in the side with it.

  “Damnation!” he exclaimed. “Them bastards try to git smart I’ll just let you stab one of them.”

  We must have climbed two dozen steps and I was breathless at the top. The Baldwin men stared at us. Albion took my hand, placed it in the crook of his arm like we were at a dance. Isom spied someone he knew, raised his hand, grinned. The Baldwins stepped forward, pulling guns from inside their vests. When I cried a warning, the guns grew larger, the noise they made filled the whole world.

  A wet spray struck my cheek. Albion’s arm stiffened beneath my hand and he stumbled and fell. I tried to hold him up by the arm but he fell away so the arm was twisted behind him and I feared I had broken it. Each time I screamed another crimson gash ripped through his chest. In the ringing silence that followed I cried out for help. People ran from the courthouse, but they stopped short when they spied us and turned away with their hands over their faces.

  Isom lay face down beside Albion in a pool of blood. Gladys knelt over him, her face frozen and contorted. She stared straight ahead, the pink parasol open in front of her like a shield. One of the gunmen, a short man with a long, curled moustache, strolled up. He leaned over, put his gun to the back of Isom’s head. Gladys swung the parasol wildly.

  “Dont shoot him again! Please dont shoot him again!”

  I pulled Gladys toward me so she wouldn’t see, and the gunman fired. A piece of skull struck me in the face and opened a cut on my cheek. Gladys screamed and struggled against me.

  Then Violet Marcum was there. She knelt, gently took Gladys from me and wrapped her arms around her.

  “Oh, Mommy, Mommy,” Gladys moaned.

  Violet smoothed Gladys’s hair back from her damp forehead and rocked back and forth with her daughter in her arms.

  “Where’s Ermel and Annadel?” I asked.

  “In the Courthouse. Annadel took a spell and passed out. Ermel’s still with her.” She touched the cut on my cheek with the tip of one finger. “Dont be fretting over them right now. You got to cry too. Go back to yourn and cry.”

  I stared at her. For a moment I had thought I might turn from their sorrow to seek comfort from Albion. But he lay still, staring at the sky. I stroked his cheek.

  “Please wake up,” I pleaded. “Dont be gone from me.”

  The force of the blows he had suffered gave his face a look of anger that had never been upon it in life. I raised his head to my lap. My hand came away wet with blood and I soon felt the dampness soak through to my thigh.

  “I love you,” I whispered. “You allays knowed that.”

  My throat closed tight and I sobbed. A forest of legs blacked out the light. Strong arms lifted me up. I kicked, struck out with my fists.

  “Murderers!” I screamed. “Bastards!”

  The men holding me laughed. Two others put a pistol in Albion’s hand and carefully wrapped his limp fingers around it. A man in a blue suit with a camera snapped pictures. Then they took the gun away and left.

  Someone leaned over me and said, “God in heaven.”

  I looked up into Miles’s ashen face.

  “I swear I never knew anything about it,” he said.

  “Git away from me.”

  “Oh, God, Sis, let me get you away from here. You got blood all over you. There’s nothing can be done for him now.”

  “Dont you touch me,” I hissed. “Hit’s you needs doing for. I hope you burn in Hell.”

  He stared at me. “I swear—” He stood up. A man in a black suit was with him. “You can’t tell me the Association didn’t know about this,” Miles said.

  The man shrugged, looked away. “I suppose Tom Felts didn’t trust the court. He lost both his brothers, you know.”

  Miles turned back to me. “Sis, we got to send for an undertaker. I’ll help you take him back to the Homeplace.”

  He had his arms around me, pinned me to his chest. The smell of him was familiar, like sweet mown hay in the summer. Then I cried, with great racking sobs so that I couldn’t breathe. I clung to him, terrified, struggled for breath while my throat closed as though I were being strangled. I heard talk of a doctor and I felt a stinging on my arm.

  We buried Albion as close to Alec May as we could. Miles stayed two days, then packed to return to Justice.

  “You aren’t going back to those tents?” he asked me. “I’m not sure it’s safe for you. This was all a message, you know, that they won’t be challenged anymore.”

  “Albion wanted me here,” I said. “And I heard tell the union has sent another nurse.”

  “Good. There isn’t any more you can do. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. Coal is here to stay and the sooner folks cooperate, the sooner we’ll get back to normal.”

  He carried his s
uitcase to the wagon where Ben waited. Flora and Aunt Becka followed him, hugged him. I stayed on the porch.

  “Carrie,” he said.

  “Quit that job, Miles. They’s other things you can do.”

  “Carrie, I’ve got two children now. I’ve got a good future with the company. They’re not a bad company, not like some of the others. I can’t just throw everything away. If the union will just quit pushing, things will be all right. I’ll try to get to the bottom of all this. Those men murdered Albion and they ought to be punished. I promise I’ll look into it, even though I won’t be too popular for it. I promise.”

  I went into the house. Flora followed me into the bedroom. “He’s your brother. Try to forgive him.”

  I turned on her. “Goddamn you! You sound like Albion! How can I forgive somebody that aint sorry?”

  She turned pale and fled. I threw myself across the bed and lay there until I heard the wagon rattle off into the distance.

  Miles wrote me from Vulcan to say that no one had been arrested for the shootings. He’d had no luck asking questions and made a few people angry. The state police were gone and hundreds of Baldwin-Felts guards roamed the hollers. Even he was afraid to say anything more. The union must see that it was hopeless, he said, they must let things be or the guards would remain and there would never be peace.

  No one wrote to me from Annadel, and I was left to imagine how Gladys must grieve, how Ermel would be old and broken, how hungry they all must be.

  Part Four

  Eighteen

  CARRIE BISHOP

  NO ONE HAD LIVED IN THE AUNT JANE PLACE FOR YEARS. Weeds grew close and dense in the yard and hung in tangles beneath each of the front steps. Inside, spiders draped their webs over the rough-hewn rafters and dustballs caught on splinters in the floor. I was so pleased when I moved in. I craved the roughness and untidiness.

  I could see the headstones of the May family cemetery from my front window—Alec May, my mother, Aunt Jane, baby Orlando, Albion. The man who preached Albion’s funeral spoke of the worms splintering the pine wood of coffins and devouring flesh, of sin and corruption. His words were oddly comforting. I couldn’t have abided silliness from him.

  Flora’s children stopped by every day, just as Flora and Miles and I had visited Aunt Jane. I fed them blackberry pie and buttermilk, and told them stories about Uncle Albion. Once a month on Sunday we walked the eight miles to Tater Nob, to visit their Papaw and Mamaw Honaker. And in the evenings we popped corn, made fudge, pulled molasses candy, read aloud or told stories by the firelight. Often visitors stopped for the night. Flora and Aunt Becka were excellent cooks, and the Honaker farm gained a reputation as a good resting place for travelers. Ben had added a fifth room to the house, and if it was still crowded, Aunt Becka walked up Grapevine and spent the night in my big featherbed.

  One evening in early August we had just sat down to supper when there came a knocking on the screen door.

  “Company!” Jane called. Luke knocked over his chair as he ran to answer the door. When he came back his eyes were wide.

  “They’s a man on the front porch with a funny hat. He wont come in. Says he wants to talk to Aunt Carrie.”

  “Whoever could it be?” Flora circled the table, spooned mashed potatoes onto each plate with a sharp swatting motion.

  “Dont let your supper git cold,” Aunt Becka warned. “Bring him on in here.”

  Even with his back turned I knew him at once. He wore overalls, a red plaid shirt and a cloth cap. His dark hair curled over his collar. I pushed the screen door open and he turned around.

  “Aint you a sight?” he said, and grinned.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Come for my banjer.”

  “Then I’ll go fetch it.”

  “And I come to see the meanest woman in east Kentucky. They kilt my fiddle player and they kilt the preacher. But you’re still yet here. I had a hankering to see you.”

  I wrapped my arms around a porch post and looked out across the river.

  “Besides that, I need nurses.”

  “I knew you wanted something,” I said, “else you wouldnt be here, hankering or no.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Carrie?”

  Ben stood in the doorway, the warm yellow light of the kitchen behind him.

  “Everthing all right?”

  “Course it is. This here is a friend of mine from West Virginia, Rondal Lloyd. This is my brother-in-law, Ben Franklin Honaker.”

  Ben did not smile, and I remembered that he knew the name, that once I had spoken of how Rondal hurt me. Ben stood aside and held the screen door open.

  “Yall better come in and eat before it gits cold.”

  “I just stopped by to say hello,” Rondal said. “I werent meaning to put nobody out.”

  “In this neck of the woods, they aint no such thing as putting people out,” Ben said. “Florrie’s done set a place for you.”

  We took him in the kitchen.

  “You all, this here is Rondal Lloyd,” Ben said. “He’s from West Virginia.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Flora stuck out her hand.

  Aunt Becka set an extra chair between her and Luke. “You’re welcome,” she said.

  The children watched him expectantly while his eyes roamed the table. Except for fried bacon and hunks of cornbread, everything was fresh from the garden—corn on the cob, new potatoes, green beans, kale, slices of red tomato as thick as slabs of meat.

  “Yall know how to eat,” Rondal said. He cut a slice of tomato slowly with his fork, but he chewed fast.

  “Mister, that there sure is a funny hat,” Luke said.

  “They dont see nothing but wide brims,” I explained.

  Rondal pulled the cap from his pocket and set it on Luke’s head, tugged on the bill so it came down over Luke’s eyes. Luke giggled and glanced at Aunt Becka. Aunt Becka didn’t even allow hats in the house, much less at the supper table. But she didn’t say anything.

  “Yall know that banjer I got up at the Aunt Jane Place?” I said. “That there is Mister Lloyd’s banjer. Maybe if I fetch it after supper, he’ll pick for us.”

  “I dont care to sing for my supper,” Rondal said.

  “Do you know our Aunt Carrie?” Jane asked.

  “Sure I do. I knowed her longer than you have.”

  “No you aint. I knowed her all my life.”

  “That so?” He winked at her. “Reckon you got me beat then.”

  Ben pushed back his plate and propped his elbows on the table. “Where’d you come from?”

  “Oh, lordy, I been all around Henry’s barn. Took the train from Charleston over through Huntington and up to Louisa, walked to Inez, rode a mule for a feller I know into Shelby, sold it and sent him the money, then walked all the way up here.”

  “Just to pick up a banjer,” I said sweetly.

  “That’s right.” He stopped eating and looked at me. “Hit’s a special banjer. My Uncle Dillon made it for me when I was just a baby like that one there.” He pointed at Rachel, in Flora’s arms.

  “You got any stories to tell?” Jane asked. “Lots of strangers that come through tells us stories.”

  “They been spoiled,” I said apologetically. “They come to expect it. You dont have to.”

  “That’s all right. I reckon I might come up with a story. I could tell one about when I was an organizer out in Colorado.”

  I looked at Ben, who raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  “What’s an organizer?” Luke asked.

  “That’s somebody that gits other folks doing things together. Like when you and your buddies is outside and one says ‘Let’s go pick berries’ and figures out where to git the berries and how many buckets to take. That there is an organizer.

  “Well sir, I went to Colorado to be an organizer. Colorado is one of them states away out west.”

  “I heard tell of it in school,” Luke said. “They got big mountains.”

 
; “And lots of dust,” Rondal said. “Anyway, I went to be an organizer with the coal miners. Only they is some rascals out in Colorado that cant stand an organizer. They cant bear to see folks get together. They are just plain mean and they want folks to be all spread out sos they can just pick them off, one by one.” He grabbed Luke by the collar. “Like that!” Luke jumped, then giggled.

  “Like the booger man!” Jane exclaimed.

  “That’s what they are,” Rondal said. “Booger men. They aint nothing they like better than to sink their teeth into a nice, juicy organizer for breakfast. Any how, I went to be an organizer in a town called Trinidad. Now aint that a pretty name? And you best believe I was keeping a sharp lookout for booger men.

  “I went to organizing, and I was doing such a fine job that I knew the booger men would be after me before long. Sure enough, one day I was in my hotel room, just minding my own business, when I heard a automobile drive up outside my window, and everything got real quiet down on that street. I looked out the window and what did I see but a whole car full of booger men—big ole fellers with green scabby skin and pointy teeth.”

  “Yuck,” said Mabel.

  “Next thing I knew them rascals was coming up the stairs to my room. Coming slow up the stairs. Thump. Thump. Thump.” He struck the tabletop with his fist. “Then I heard them outside my door breathing real heavy. ‘Organizer,’ they said. ‘Organizer. We know you’re in there.’ ‘That’s right,’ I answered. ‘You come to git me?’ ‘We’re going to bite off your toes and suck out all your blood,’ they said.

  “‘Well now,’ I says, ‘that’s all right. But before you do, I got one last request.’ ‘What’s that?’ they say. ‘Seeing how they aint nothing I’d rather do than organize, I’d like to organize one more time before you suck my blood.’

  “I could hear them snickering on the other side of that door. ‘Aint nobody here to organize but us,’ one said. ‘You’ll do just fine,’ I replied.

  “They just hollered laughing when they heard that. ‘How you going to organize us? One thing you can say about us booger men, we are already organized.’