But something would break inside him when I went to turn him, or to help him into his wheelchair.
“Well, you got me right where you always wanted me,” he’d sneer. “Right under your goddamn thumb.”
He asked for whiskey and at first I gave it to him, hoping it would ease him. But when he drank more and more, and threw an empty jug at me one night, I kept it out of the house. He berated me for that, too.
I wanted to have him carried down to the Homeplace from time to time for a visit, but he wouldn’t go, not even at Christmas. I spent Christmas Day listening to his stubborn silence, and crying to myself. Ben and Flora brought the children for a visit but he was so disagreeable that we were all uneasy. On Old Christmas Eve, I decided to leave him and walk to the Homeplace by myself.
“What the hell’s Old Christmas?” he asked as I was preparing to leave. “I aint heard of it.”
“Hit aint observed much these days,” I said, “but Aunt Becka allays did like it. Hit’s the day the wise men brought their presents to the Baby Jesus. And the night before, that is, tonight, the animals go down on their knees in homage. Some even say the animals talk on Old Christmas Eve. Once when I was a youngun I went out to the barn at midnight. And the animals did kneel. I saw it myself. It was like a miracle.”
His lip curled scornfully and when I bent to kiss the top of his head he looked away. I went on, determined that he would not ruin my evening. When I returned a few hours later, he said, “Let’s go out to the barn at midnight.”
“What?”
“I want to see them animals kneel. Ifn they can kneel, maybe I can stand up.”
“I dont think—Rondal, hit will be so cold, and you’re up late already.”
“We can wrap up warm. And I aint tired.” His eyes challenged me. “You’re the one claims it happened. Well, I want to see it. I want me a miracle.”
I dressed him in two layers of clothing and wrapped several quilts around him. At eleven-thirty I wheeled him out the door and down the ramp Ben built for his chair. We only had a milk cow, because I borrowed Ben and Flora’s mules. I positioned his chair near the cow’s head. I expected more backtalk from him but he ignored me and watched the cow intently. I sank down into the hay and shivered, wondering what had possessed me.
He fell asleep well before midnight, his chin dragging on his chest. I looked back and forth from my watch to the cow. She still stood and nuzzled her feed bag at ten after midnight. I wheeled him back inside and dumped him into his bed.
When I woke the next morning he was already awake and watching me across the room. I scuttled across the cold floor, my teeth chattering, to build the fire.
“Werent that something?” he said.
I paused at striking the match.
“What?”
“You must have fell asleep,” he said.
I was weary to death of his mocking. “I dont see your legs moving,” I said, astonished at my cruelty even as I spoke. I turned back to the stove.
“I seen what you seen,” he said stubbornly.
He was quiet all the day. He read Life on the Mississippi and fixed a wobbly chair for me. When I put on my nightgown he said, “Sleep over here tonight. I want to feel that baby kick.”
I went to him, laid my head on his shoulder and twined my fingers in the hair of his chest. The next morning, slowly and awkwardly, we made love.
When our son was born in April, Rondal wanted to name him Dillon.
“I reckon I ought to marry you,” he said. “Make you and the boy respectable.”
He said it like I should be grateful.
“No,” I said. “I want him to have Albion’s last name. Albion deserves that much.”
He looked surprised, then suspicious. “Hit aint because I’m a cripple?”
I kissed him and held his face in my hands. “I think you’re worth ten of any other man I know.”
The wrinkles on his forehead smoothed away.
“Dillon Freeman,” he said. “Dont sound too bad.”
He loved to tend the baby while I was out working the garden. He changed diapers, and rode around the cabin in his chair with the baby in his arms, its head craned back and its eyes open wide to take in every detail of the room. When both of them tired, Rondal hoisted himself onto the bed, lay on his back, and stretched the baby out on top of his chest. They slept that way for hours.
They were asleep when Rondal was taken with one of his breathing spells. From the vegetable garden out back, I heard him gasp. By the time I reached him, he had stopped breathing. The baby was snoring peacefully, one hand wrapped tight around Rondal’s thumb.
I sat by them until evening light, when Dillon woke and cried to be fed. Then I went to the Homeplace to tell Ben and Flora and Aunt Becka. I walked past the cemetery where Rondal would at last have a place of his own. The headstones did not stand in tidy rows on that slope beside Scary mountain. They were placed companionably, as people will sit together and talk—Aunt Jane beside Uncle Alec, Albion facing them beneath a spreading oak, Florrie’s dead baby at his feet. The elements had already worn the names from the older stones and they leaned at gentle angles as though conferring with one another. Butterflies and honeybees tended the violets and sweet clover that grew over the graves.
It was a tranquil place, but no one could ever imagine a quiet slumber for the dead in that earth. They are not a people made for eternal peace, and even if they were, the mountains would not let them rest. The mountains are conjurers, ancient spirits shaped by magic past time remembered. The dead walk abroad in the shaded coves, or writhe in their graves, pushing up with strong arms and legs, waiting for the day.
AFTERWORD
AFTER THE BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN, THE LEADERS OF U.M.A. District 17 were arrested and tried for treason. Their trials were held at Charles Town, in the same courthouse that saw the conviction of John Brown. Popular sentiment was on their side and they were eventually acquitted, but the union was broken throughout West Virginia, even at mines that had once been organized. Justice County’s miners endured another winter in the tents before drifting away, defeated. Not until the administration of Franklin Roosevelt twelve years later was the union given the freedom to organize and the mine guard system abolished.
Dr. Toussaint Booker died at Institute, West Virginia, in 1931. Gladys Marcum Justice bore a daughter after Isom’s death. She continued to live at the farm. My Uncle Talcott and Aunt Pricie lived on Campbells Creek until 1934, when the Justice County mines were organized. They moved back to Blackberry Creek that very year and settled at Winco.
Rachel Honaker, Ben and Flora’s daughter, my first cousin who was more like a sister to me, married a grandson of Rosa Angelelli and set up housekeeping in the coal camp house at Winco where the Lloyd family once lived. By that time the mines had been mechanized and Winco had been reduced to ten families. Rosa was ignored by her own family, and only Rachel, who was a nurse, went to see her. Once I went along to visit Rosa in the state hospital where she was kept for so many years. I wrote down her story as I remember she told it, her mottled brown fingers gripping my arm, her long fingernails digging into my flesh as she called me by the name of a long-dead son.
In 1929, my uncle Ben opened a general store at the mouth of Scary Creek near the Aunt Jane Place. The store failed in the early years of the Great Depression. Not long after, Imperial Collieries claimed to have purchased all mineral rights to the land the year that Orlando Bishop was killed, and laid claim to the Homeplace. Uncle Miles, who had gone to work at his father-in-law’s bank, could do nothing. My mother, Uncle Ben and Aunt Flora were forced to move, and lived at five different places in Paine and Justice Counties until their deaths. Aunt Flora suffered a stroke after the third move in the early 1940’s, and died in 1957 at the age of 71. Uncle Ben passed away in 1962.
Although the timber was clear-cut, coal was never mined at the Homeplace. The land was purchased by the federal government to build a dam, which was constructed in 1969. But the flood
waters never reached the Homeplace and it stands empty to this day, held for some unknown reason in the control of a distant power beyond our ken. The houses are gone and I can only find the site by searching out a row of willow trees.
In Justice County, I am president of my local union. American Coal refused to honor the latest United Mine Workers contract, and we have been locked out for over a year. I have used the time, when not on the picket line, to put together this story from the yellowed newspaper clippings of articles written by C.J. Marcum and the journal where my mother recorded the events of her life and the stories of my father. Last month, scab miners were brought in to take our place. The young boys who laughed at the old-timers’ stories of Blair Mountain are applying for food stamps.
Carrie, my mother, lived into her eighties. She never remarried.
The companies still own the land.
—Dillon Freeman, 1987
Winco, West Virginia
Storming Heaven Page 30