by Amy Stuart
“Mrs. Cunningham?”
Louise looks up and squints in an obvious effort to process who Clare might be.
“Clare O’Dey. I walked you home yesterday from the Merritt trailer. Remember?”
“Yes. Of course.” Louise holds her hand out in front of her, then retracts it before Clare reaches her. “There’s no one here.”
“That’s fine,” Clare says. “I’m here to see you.”
When Louise crouches to pick up her trowel, Clare spots it, the cuff around her ankle. A length of rope coils to the house. A leash. Wilfred has tied her up.
“Is everything okay?” Clare asks.
“I’m weeding. Lots of rain means lots of weeds.”
“Can I help?”
Louise looks around at the gardening tools scattered at her feet. If she notices the tether, it doesn’t seem to bother her.
“Is Wilfred home?”
“No. He’s at work. Did I not say that already?”
“How long have you been out here in the garden?”
“Let’s see.” Louise looks up to the sky. “The sun was behind the mountain when I came out. And now it’s not. An hour?”
“I can’t see the sun,” Clare says.
“Over there, behind the clouds. Just a blot.”
Clare motions to the garden. “You’ve got enough here to feed an army.”
“Tomatoes are impossible. They like sun. We don’t get much sun. Peppers too. Lettuce we end up with too much. I give it away. The trick is to space your seeding so the harvest is spaced too.”
“I remember that,” Clare says. “My parents had a big garden.”
“Your parents? Where are they now? In town?”
“My mother’s dead. Cancer.”
“Oh dear. And your father?”
“We aren’t very close.”
“Well,” Louise says, crouching to pick up another trowel. “I could use some help over by the romaine.” The rope slithers behind her, pulling taut as she walks. Wilfred must have measured it to extend to the far end of the garden and not beyond. She hands Clare the tool, then wanders back to her own perch and drops to her knees to dig at the soil. Clare stands there dumbly. It is impossible to imagine Malcolm here in her place. How might he proceed in the face of Shayna’s mother? Eliminate the obvious possibilities first. On the drive back to Blackmore Clare waded through their conversation and felt a growing compulsion to defy Malcolm’s warning. How can she keep her distance? Avoid immersing herself? She navigates the rows until she’s among the budding heads of lettuce, then she too drops to her knees.
They work in silence, Clare bending back the heads of lettuce and yanking out the weeds underneath, a rote task she easily remembers. She never bothered planting her own garden after she moved in with Jason. Instead she spent long spring and summer Sundays helping Grace tend to hers. They were twenty-six when Grace came home to set up her medical practice at the hospital where Clare worked as a cleaner, Grace settling down with her fiancé in a rambling farmhouse just down the road from Clare and Jason. Despite the great disparity in their rank at the hospital, it was Grace who sought out Clare’s company in the cafeteria, and Clare counted on Grace to keep an eye on her, to keep her from the cups of pills that lay next to the patients as they slept. Most of Clare’s friendships fell away after high school, but for some reason Grace persisted, and Clare loved her for it, but hated her too, punished her even, the straight and happy path of Grace’s life a constant reminder to Clare of her own failings.
Louise’s face is set in a frown as she works. Clare must take her chance while she has it.
“Does Shayna live here with you?”
“No. She lives in town.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
Louise plops back so she is seated in the dirt. She wipes her brow with her forearm, thinking.
“Yesterday. We had tea.”
That was me, Clare thinks.
“Do you see her much?”
“Their house is a terrible mess,” Louise says. “Wilfred can’t take it. He won’t even darken their door.”
“You mean Shayna and Jared?”
“You can’t bring a baby into that kind of place.”
“Were— Are they expecting a baby?” Clare asks.
Louise shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “No baby. She promised. And it can’t happen now.”
“Why not?”
“Because Shayna’s alone. She won’t see him.”
There’s a rumble up the drive. Clare stands and brushes the clumps of mud from her knees. Only when the truck reaches the house and the brakes squeal does Louise lift her head. Wilfred’s window is rolled down. He’s spotted them. Even from this distance the damage to his face from last night’s fight is plain. He drives until he is nearly upon them, then jams the truck into park and jumps from the cab, covering the final distance in a limping half jog.
“You,” he says, his finger at Clare. He stops short and bends down to remove the tether.
“In the house,” he says to Louise.
“I’m not done out here,” Louise says. “Didn’t you have lunch down at the mine?”
Wilfred gives his wife a withering look.
“No. I didn’t.”
“You must be starved.”
“I am. Can you fix me something?”
If his tone is derisive, Louise doesn’t pick up on it. She pulls off her gardening gloves and sets them in the dirt next to the tools, then heads for the house, leaving Clare and Wilfred alone in the garden.
“You can’t go tying her up,” Clare says.
“Who sent you here?” Froth has built up at the corners of Wilfred’s mouth.
“No one,” Clare says.
“I’ll go get my gun. Jesus.”
“I’m not a Merritt, Mr. Cunningham. Get that through your head.”
Wilfred appears stunned at the force of Clare’s words.
“She could get tangled up. Disoriented,” Clare continues. “Hurt herself.”
“You know nothing about it. I’m keeping her safe.”
The gash over Wilfred’s lip has split open, the blood mixing with the spit that flies as he speaks. He wipes it with the cuff of his shirt.
“I could help you,” Clare says. “I could take care of her for an hour or two a day. Give you a break so you can get a few things done. I used to work at a hospital.”
“A hospital.”
“I was a cleaner, but . . .”
“A cleaner.” Wilfred scoffs. “You’re kidding me.”
“You’ve got too much on your plate. You must be looking for Shayna.”
Wilfred’s face goes scarlet. “You don’t talk about her. Ever. To me. To Louise. Understand?”
“I get it. I’m just saying, I’m sorry. I’d like to help you. I took care of my own mother for a lot of years when she was sick. I needed help and no one offered. I’m offering. I can help you.”
The clothes Wilfred wears are streaked with dirt, as though he’d been gardening along with them. Clare has known many men of the same ilk, and so she responds as she knows best. With composure, deference. Like a tree, her mother would say. Bend in their wind. Clare knows that Louise is her only way back into the Cunningham home, into their family life and its secrets.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Wilfred says, deflated.
“Your wife has been kind to me. You’ve gone through a lot. I’d like to help.”
Wilfred presses his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. Clare can see the cuts on his hands.
“Why don’t I come back in the morning?” Clare asks. “You can decide then.”
Wilfred grumbles something, then spins and strides to the house. He did not say yes to her offer, but he did not say no either. He left her here on his land, a sign the door might be nudged open. It is difficult to summon what sort of relationship this man would have had with his addicted daughter, the wars surely waged between them, an obstinacy that likely
runs in the family. Clare pulls her camera from her pocket and, without lifting it to her face, aims it in his general direction and clicks.
The woods around Clare are not soundless. She tries to inure herself to the noises by identifying them. The wind. A dead branch set loose from the tree. What sort of wildlife lives around here? Squirrels, bears, rabbits. Cougars. Clare should know better than to be afraid of animals in the woods. Outside the trailer she makes a basket out of the bottom of her shirt and fills it with the empty beer cans from last night. If she had her gun, she might find a log to line them up, ping them off one by one. Instead she carries them down the hill. She will leave them for Charlie. Halfway down, she stops. Two new sounds come at her. Banging. Barking. Once in the clearing, she sees Sara on Charlie’s porch, Timber in round sprints on the lawn.
“Sara. Hi.” Clare sets the beer cans down next to her own car. “You’re early.”
“I came to let Timber out. You ready to go?”
“Sure,” Clare says. “Why don’t we take the dog with us? Go on foot.”
“It’s over two miles,” Sara says.
“I could use the walk. You up for it?”
“Why not?” Sara says.
Somewhere in the folder Malcolm gave Clare are pictures of the Blackmore Coal Mine, a large bowl gouged out of the mountain, cement buildings and chain-link fences crisscrossing it, an industry built up over fifty years and then closed in a single day. Clare runs back up to the trailer to fetch her camera. At first Sara’s clip is quick, but they only make it to the road before she is out of breath, wheezing.
“Are you okay?” Clare asks.
“Fine,” Sara says, leaning, hands on her thighs. “It’s been a bit of a rough week.”
“I’ve had a few of those.”
“This morning my father-in-law told me I look like I have liver disease,” Sara says. “He’d know. That’s what killed his wife. Three years ago I weighed fifty pounds more than I do now. And it wasn’t like I was fat.”
“We can go back and get the car if you want,” Clare says.
“I’m fine.” Sara’s tone is sharper.
Beyond the Cunningham driveway the road to the mine climbs and winds in a pattern that disorients Clare. Sara appears to have settled into a rhythm, walking with her arms crossed a few paces ahead, bent forward with the effort of the ascent. Last night there had been an openness between them that Clare can’t detect today. She will have to pry.
“Have you thought about rehab?” Clare asks.
“Did you ever try it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I never felt totally out of control,” Clare says, a half-truth. “I felt like I could stop if I really needed to. Eventually I did.”
“Lucky you,” Sara says, sarcastic.
“I’m just saying. I get it. I know the feeling. It took me years to quit. I was a kid when I started. Too dumb to know any better.”
Sara plucks a wildflower from the side of the road, pulling off its petals one by one, eyes down. Clare can almost hear it, Sara’s inner voice debating what trust might be had between them. Clare plucks a flower of her own and pulls off its petals too.
“Michael was clean as a whistle,” Sara says finally. “He used to stop me after two glasses of wine. We’d never have stuck around here if he’d made it out. We’d have found someplace better. He’d have made sure of it.”
Clare searches for the sun behind the clouds. The blot, Louise called it. Jason was never one to stop Clare, happy as he was to have her debilitated, beholden to him to bring her more.
“Derek would love for me to go to rehab,” Sara says.
“The doctor?”
“He sent Shayna to rehab over and over again. He’s trying to get me to go now too. To give me strategies, he says.”
“You never know. He could be right.”
“Shayna went six times. Six bloody times. Always came back worse off. She told me they have dealers who’ll meet you behind a tree in the Serenity Garden and sell you a fix at a premium. Got a problem with ox? Try heroin instead. If the rehab worked at all, she’d come home and stay sober for a week, then relapse in a huge way. Worse than before. Derek’s like a dog biting down on a dead rat. He insisted she’d get better if she just kept going. He’s a one-trick rehab pony.”
“It can take years for some. To get clean.”
“I’d rather kick it on my own. I’m not leaving Danny and leveraging my house to go spend a month at some junkie spa where pushers jump out of the bushes.”
Sara and Clare both laugh, a pressure valve released between them that allows for the right kind of silence. It takes thirty minutes of steady climb to reach the gate marking the entrance to the mine. A heavy chain is woven through the links of the fence, and a sign dangles: ABANDONED MINE: DO NOT ENTER.
“It’s locked,” Clare says.
“There’s a key in a can somewhere. Charlie pried a hole too. We could squeeze through. Timber?”
The dog sniffs out the opening where the fence meets the trees, the links cut and pried apart. Clare secures her camera against her when she crouches to wedge herself through. Sara does the same, then continues down the hill at a march, ten paces ahead. Clare is slowed by her sense of disquiet, the death this place holds. All those men, ghosts under her feet.
The first structure they come upon is the parking lot, two stories of cement jutting out of the mountainside. The entrance is sealed with another chain-link fence. A sea of empty spaces, yellow lines still visible but much faded. Before the mine closed, hundreds must have worked a single shift, a logjam of pickup trucks at this very entrance, miners with their Thermoses and packed lunches on the passenger seats, hard hats and headlamps too.
“I used to meet Mikey here,” Sara says. “He’d skip out on lunch down at the mess hall and eat up here with me.” She laughs. “We’d make out in the cab of his truck like a couple of teenagers. I guess we were basically teenagers.”
“How old were you when he died?”
“Twenty-three. Eight months pregnant.”
“Jesus. I can’t imagine.”
“Neither can I. Nothing. The funeral, the birth, nothing. I have a picture of Danny and me in the hospital. I swear it’s my only proof that I’m the one who gave birth to him, because I have no memory of any of it. Blanked it all out.”
“Of course you did. How would you cope otherwise?”
“I didn’t cope. Mike’s dad coped for me. I’m still not coping.” Sara crouches to pet the dog. He licks her face.
From the parking lot the road curls around a sheer rock wall, then comes to a bowl and zigzags down from there. Below is a larger building and scattering of smaller structures, a long conveyor belt that would have carried the coal from the shaft to the trucks. The mine has an air of flash abandonment, as if the workers dropped everything and ran, leaving it to rot and crumble back into the ground. The clouds overhead churn and descend the mountainside like spilled milk. Clare pulls her camera out and snaps a picture.
“That camera’s older than you are,” Sara says.
“It’s professional grade but still pretty small. I like that I can jam it into my pocket.”
“Doesn’t exactly look pro.”
“It’s vintage pro,” Clare says. “And I prefer real film.”
“You’d have to drive for a week to find a place to develop it.”
“I develop it on my own. I have a portable kit.”
“No you don’t.”
“It’s easier than you’d think,” Clare says. “My brother taught me.”
Sara nods as if humoring Clare. The road overlooking the bowl makes for a good perch. They sit, feet at the edge. Sara points down into the bowl where the remains of the mine structures sit tilted and rotting.
“You see that tower? That used to be made of timber.”
At the sound of his name, the dog barks.
“The year I was born they built the steel one,” Sara says. “My dad used to s
ay it’d take fifty lifetimes to get at all the coal out of this mountain. I suppose they were figuring on that. Just keep digging. No one figured the whole thing would blow up.”
Clare takes a long breath and decides to risk it. “Can I ask what happened between Charlie and Wilfred?”
Sara hugs her knees to her chest.
“It goes way back. Charlie’s dad, Russell, he hated Wilfred. They were third cousins. Came to Blackmore around the same time. Russell bought the land right next door to Wilf. They were warring neighbors for a generation. They both worked at the mine and jockeyed for position all the way up. Wilfred got the foreman job and Russell didn’t. A few months later the mine blew up on Wilfred’s watch. Charlie’s dad and his younger brothers all died. A week later his mom walked out to the field and put a rifle in her mouth.”
“That’s horrible.”
“She was a shrew. Mean-looking woman if there ever was one. Louise Cunningham heard the shot. She found the body. Charlie shows up at the hospital and there’s Wilfred with his hat in his hand. I heard Charlie slapped him right across the face. We all got settlements from the company after the accident, but Charlie burned right through his. Bought that dumb truck and spent weeks at a time in the city on crazy binges. Got it in his head to sue Wilfred in civil court. And he won. Some jury from three towns over found Wilfred guilty. Culpable, they said. For the Merritts’ deaths. They ordered him to pay Charlie two million dollars.”
“Jeez. But insurance must have covered it?”
“It was personal culpability, something like that. The mining company declared bankruptcy years ago, after the initial settlements. So Charlie gets a lien on everything Wilfred owns. Including his land.”
“So how come the Cunninghams still live there?”
“Because the judge took pity on them. Because of Louise. It’s her house too, she’s on the title. He put a stay on the proceedings to buy Wilfred some time. But if Shayna’s dead and Louise goes into a nursing home or dies, then Wilfred’s the sole owner and the property transfers to Charlie.”