When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  I m not going.

  "All right, all right. We'll stop over at your house first. Okay? Just for a minute. We can't loiter over there. We don't have the time.

  "You got the key? Let me see the key."

  "Jesus H. Christ." She held her keys out.

  We got in the car and started out on the road toward my house. Slats said, "He's old, you know."

  "Who?"

  "My father."

  "How could I not know he's old? I got eyes don't I?"

  "But you don't know what it means. You don't know. Think you know things, but you don't."

  "I know things. I know Zoli’s not doing what you said, hiding out in his house. It's all locked up. He's driving around looking for my mother. Probably he'll find her. Maybe he already did."

  "He won't find her."

  "Who knows what he'll do or has already done to her if he found her."

  "He won't find her."

  "How do you know?"

  "He just won't."

  "You know where she is then?"

  "I didn't say that. I just said he won't find her. And quit asking me that. I told you already, I don't know."

  "You do too."

  She hit the brakes and took a sharp turn onto a road that cut through the Banning mine woods. "What're you doing?" I said.

  She didn't answer me.

  "This isn't the right way. Where are you going?"

  "I'm going to see my sick dad."

  "You said we could go to my house."

  "Well, you're stubborn and I lie."

  We didn't talk the rest of the way.

  The Banning mine was the mine our town was named after. It had been shut down for years and years. They'd grown their own timber, and their woods were a little ways off from where the mine was. Since they'd used sycamore to hold up the roofs in their tunnels, their company woods were thick with sycamore trees. On a quick look, these woods seemed just like a regular patch of forest, but when the car slowed down to take a corner, you could see it wasn't quite right—it was too organized. All the trees were about the same height, and they grew in straight rows, like pews in church.

  Closer to Great-grandfather's, the houses started to thin out and everything opened up like a book, just fields and animals and loose woods with trees all different sizes and not even two of them lined up straight. Then we got to Great-grandfather's farm, with the house and the barn and the pond, and the pear tree—still standing, but black, with pieces of glass shining like little lights along the ground.

  Pulling in the drive, we could see other things weren't right besides the tree. The barn door was swinging open and shut. When it opened, I could see Valentina, the gray goat, jerking around, and then bolting back in surprise when the door swung toward her. She was trying to knock her way out. The dogs ran barking up to the car. Slats pushed them away, but they kept after her. "Find them something to eat," she said, shoving at them, trying to get to the house.

  I went inside the barn. Except for Valentina, all the animals were gone. I saw that they were scattered around the fields, hunting for food. I fed the goat. I filled a bucket with feed to take up to the other animals. I thought Valentina would follow me, but she went back to pressing her head against the door.

  When the animals saw that bucket, they made a run for me. Two goats jostled their way through the sheep, climbing and bucking at them. The cows slowly waded through the crowd. The goats started in on the hem of my jacket and my pants pockets, their eyes wild. They tore the bucket away from me and knocked it on the ground. They nosed up under my jacket and chewed on my shirt. It was as if someone had replaced all of Great-grandfather's nice animals with a whole different set of fierce ones. "Get off me," I shouted.

  Eli must have been walking nearby and heard. He came out to the field, took my arm, and pulled me away from them. We left them fighting each other and tearing up the bucket. We walked back to the barn, and when we got there, I sat down on a bale of hay and opened my jacket. Half of my shirt was missing. "Jesus. They ate up my clothes."

  "Ha. They're smart, you know. They make a food out of anything. We are lucky they don't eat two of us."

  He put out feed and water for them, and threw down some straw. To the animals, he called out, "If you are behaved and leave Luca alone, you are invited. We have food for you." They didn't come. He called out to them again, this time in Russian. We waited. First the goats and then all the rest came into the barn and ate.

  Valentina was bucking against the door, trying to get out. He stood by her for a few minutes, his hand on her head, then he led her away from the door. "You are such good animals," he said. "You make me regret I was never farmer." He propped open all the barn doors, and it filled with air and the last of the day's light.

  "You didn't like being an engineer?" I said.

  He sat down next to me on the square of hay. "What's to like? When I went into mine my hair is heavy black, as the sky at night." He touched his white hair and said, "And when I come out, it's this."

  We watched the animals for a while. He nodded his head back toward the house, "Our old person friend is not doing so good."

  "He has a cold or something."

  "He isn't been coming out here, you know. I think you better look after farm for now."

  "Me? The only reason I'm here is Slats tricked me. I don't like it here."

  "She so smart to trick you?"

  "She's not smart. She just. . . you can't believe nothing she says." I saw that his fingers were all blackened at the tips. I pointed to them, "Is that from being in the mines?"

  He spread his hands out in front of him. "This? This is from charcoal, from drawing. A kind of mine, but all its tunnels are in here," he said, and tapped his head.

  "You draw with charcoal?"

  "Why pay money for pencils when the whole forest is full of free branches."

  "You draw with branches?"

  He hunted around on the ground, picked up a twig, and took a flame to it. He smudged it out on the ground before it burned up. The floor of the barn was mostly dirt, but there was a slab of concrete under one of the hay piles. He pushed it aside and drew for a few minutes. Because of the way he was leaning over, I couldn't see how the drawing was shaping up. After a while, he stepped back. There was a small ghost of a face. It looked just like me.

  "Hey, that's good," I said.

  "You think is good? Must be then." He took a quick bow and made like he was tipping a hat at me.

  "Where'd you learn how to do that? Someone show you?"

  He looked at the twig in his hand and shrugged. "Myself shows me."

  "You didn't learn it in school? Or your dad showed you how?"

  "My father? No, no. He didn't show me. He was a sort of crazy person. He wasn't like your father, working hard. I teach myself."

  "You knew my dad?"

  He nodded, "Some little." He pointed to the picture of me.

  "The animals will have you as foreman now, and they need to grow comfortable to your face. They can look here at drawing and make examination of you."

  "Benci will do it. He'll take care of them."

  He shrugged, handed me the stick he'd drawn my picture with, and left.

  Closer up, I saw that the drawing looked more like some combination of me and my father than a picture of me, a kind of guess at what I might look like someday. I got down close to it and wrote my name on the concrete: Lucas Lessar.

  I heard Slats coming. I buttoned up my jacket so she wouldn't notice that I'd had my shirt eaten. I threw straw over my picture. I didn't want her seeing it. She came into the barn, sat on the hay bale, and didn't say anything for a long time, which wasn't like her; I knew from staying at her house that she even talked when she was alone.

  She said, "He's so skinny, if I held a light up to him, I could see straight through him. You should have come inside."

  I pulled some hay out of the bale and twisted it around my hand.

  "He would have liked you coming in. How come y
ou didn't?"

  I didn't answer her.

  "You're holding a grudge? Well, sue me. I didn't feel like going over to her house. All their things. I miss her too, you know. Miss both of them." She got up and walked out of the barn.

  I followed her. I said, "If you miss her, how come you aren't looking for her? I mean, we should try to find out where she is."

  "Look for her? You can't do that. You hear me? In her note, she asked for you not to. She said for you not to do that."

  We got in the car and she started it up and switched on the headlights. They lit up the grass and the trees just in front of us, and they were powerful enough to shine some light out toward the pear tree. She held her hands in front of the heater and rubbed them together like she was standing in front of afire.

  She took a long look out the window. She said, "You know, when we were kids, we weren't allowed to climb that tree, or throw balls or sticks anywhere around it, because of the bottles mostly, but he would yell at us to be careful of That One too. That's what he was talking about the other night, that word he kept saying. He was talking about that thing he thinks lived inside that tree—Tot-to. It wasn't like a good fairy; you could make it mad and then it would get after you." She turned toward me and said, "Can you imagine the kind of mind that makes up a guardian angel you have to be afraid of? That's the kind of mind my father has. He'd tell us it bit off fingers if it got mad. You wouldn't know you'd disturbed it, you'd just wake up in the morning with no fingers. Of course nothing like that happened. We all still got our fingers. And no good things happened either. I mean, think about it. We aren't getting any extra help up here. What about poor Lukacs wandering around in the snow getting himself frozen? Zoli setting things on fire? Any protecting spirit worth its salt would have pitched in a little more."

  The car was finally warmed up. She put it in gear, but before we pulled away, she put her hand on my arm and said, "He's not sick from some spirit going away, or some ghost stuck in his lungs, like he thinks. Nothing's in that tree but sap, seeds, whatever it is they have in trees. He's sick from drinking too much and staying out in the cold and not eating. I'm going to feed him and make sure he stays warm and out of the liquor cabinet. He's going to be fine. He's going to be running laps around us." The more she went on about how good things were going to get, the tighter she squeezed my arm. "And you're going to help me."

  "Let go of me," I said. "You can take care of him yourself."

  She squeezed my arm tighter. "You ever think of who'd be feeding you if it weren't for me?"

  I pulled my arm loose.

  "It's not right to say that, but you're making me." She put her hands on the steering wheel and squeezed it tight. "This is how it is—I'm all you've got. Unless you want to go live with the nuns in the mission, you're helping me."

  Chapter 6

  In the woods all around Banning were left-behind blasting caps, lamps, hard hats, signs in ten different languages saying Danger, saying Watch Your Head. Abandoned block ovens and beehive ovens, empty boiler houses, wash houses, lamp houses, and machinery sheds. Pieces of mantrips, machine loaders, coal cutters, and pickaxes. Sometimes filing cabinets, chairs, blueprints, folders full of maps and lists of numbers, big old heavy black telephones with letter exchanges written on them. It was as if there were a sea someplace nearby full of all you needed to make a mining town and that it washed up in Banning, and then the water ran back to where it came from, clean and empty.

  Banning was one town in a line of towns on a crooked spine of hills that stretched up and down the coal seam. South of us was Mineral, then a long space of empty hills, then West Virginia. North of us was Black Lick, where there were no mines anymore, but instead a giant pale green box of a paper mill; then Brilliant, where there was everything; then Luna, where a mine fire had been burning off and on in an abandoned shaft for close to fifty years. When my mother was a girl, she thought the Luna fire was the fire she'd heard about at school that burned at the center of the earth, and that the center of the earth was not far from Banning; it was just up the road, roaring away like a furnace. Past Luna were farms and cornfields, more space, folded hills that hid everything but the top of the choking smokestack of Bedford, the state mental hospital. Past that was Hunker, where there was the county jail and two more glass factories—one plate, one decorative.

  The whole way from Mineral through to Hunker, no matter what else was in the towns, or around the towns, there were ovens in the hills, most of them big, empty beehive ovens with dark open mouths. They used to cook the coal in them and turn it into coke. They'd ship the coke to the mills in Pittsburgh or Wheeling, where they used it to cook iron ore and make steel. Once they had steel, they didn't need to turn it into anything; it was just itself, the thing they were after all along.

  The day after we went to Great-grandfather's, I cut school to look for my mother. I walked out into the Bluebird woods and climbed up into the boney piles. From the top, I could see the whole town, all of my part of Banning—Mr. D'Angelo's place, the Markovics' house, my house, and Marko's black Nash covered with patches of snow. Past all that was the black roof of the Croatian Club and the Banning boney pile. I could see the King mine tipple and the tops of the trees in its woods. Even from the Bluebird piles, though, the tallest ones we had, I couldn't see beyond Banning in any direction. Where there weren't real hills keeping me from seeing the other towns, there was boney. I couldn't even see the smoke twisting out of the mine in Luna.

  It was cold. No one was out. The streets and porches were empty. It seemed that except for those pieces of dust still drifting around Banning that were my father, I was all alone in it. There was a song he used to like to sing when we were doing work in the yard or walking someplace. I couldn't remember all of it. I whispered a few words, just saying them, not singing, because I didn't know the tune the whole way through. I said them first in Croatian, "Moja mala nosi cizmice" then I changed them into English. "My love wears boots. They are red all over, red and have beads."

  I climbed down off the pile and walked to the mouth of each oven in the hill, my voice echoing back. "My girl wears a vest. So silky and colored and has buttons. So she tells me, come here, my dear."

  The ovens were big, had tall ceilings and walls blacked with coal dust. You heard stories from time to time about people hiding out in them. A few draft dodgers had lived in them instead of going to Vietnam before they got rides up to Canada. During the Depression, when almost all the mines were shut down for a while, whole families used to live in them. Sometimes I'd find things they'd left behind: old empty food tins, a piece of baby doll. When Mrs. D'Angelo left town, Mr. D'Angelo looked for her in them. I watched him from our porch.

  I worked my way up to the lamp house. I'd been in it a hundred times before, cleaned it out of everything, all its old glass lids and blasting caps. This time I saw a cabinet I'd never noticed before, locked up. I kicked and kicked at it, and worked at the song. I still couldn't get in. I went outside and got a heavy rock and wailed it against the cabinet until I broke through.

  Inside there were cans and cans of carbide. Miners used to use carbide to charge their lamps. When you mix it with water the right way, it makes a steady acetylene flame. But if you mix it a different way, it explodes—no sparks or fire or anything, just a big sound. They were made of tin with lids you snapped back to open. When I came across a batch of them, I'd always blow up just one or two and squirrel the rest away in a coke oven.

  My mother could hear that sound every time, no matter where she was. She would know what it was, and a lot of times she would know it was me, and she'd come running. If I made a lot of noise out of it, I was asking for trouble.

  I'd never seen so many all at once. It was as if they'd been waiting there all along for me to find them. I pulled them out. I was singing pretty loud by then, in Croatian, then in English, and back again, "My girl wears a little skirt. It's red all over, red, and has a lace trim."

  I carried the cans farther back
into the woods, past the sewn-up mouth of the pit, to a little clearing. Fallen leaves poked through the snow. I thought if I started setting the cans off, wherever she was, she might hear it. She would know it was me. She'd come looking. I opened one, put a handful of snow inside, smashed the lid down, and booked. Boom. Dogs barked, birds kicked out of the trees. In her note, she'd said she was going far away. I looked toward the mine buildings, and into the woods, and up at the tops of the trees leaning against the white undersides of the clouds. The town snapped shut around me. I hardly knew what far away meant. I couldn't picture it.

  I pulled up the cap on the second one and did the same, and instead of stopping and putting the rest of them away like I usually would have, I did it again and again. She would come out from the dark line of trees, I thought. I looked for her. I worked at the song until it was past singing, was just shouting. My throat stung with dust. I pulled open another lid, threw snow inside, smashed it down. Boom.

  "Cut it out," a lady yelled from someplace far off.

  It got so it seemed that every dog in Banning was losing its mind. I couldn't hear anything but the snap of the can opening, my foot going down, the boom, the dogs making a big howling roar.

  Someone was saying, "Hey, Uncle."

  I opened a can, snap, put snow inside, slammed the lid.

  "Uncle, it's me. It's Marko." He put his hand on my shoulder. "I am here." I could hardly hear him. His words were too quiet to deserve answering. I walked away from him, picked up more snow to put in the can. He kicked it over. I grabbed the one next to it. He pulled it away from me. "Lucas!" he yelled.

  In my head, there were just explosions. Boom. Boom. The song I'd been singing, low and quiet, echoing underneath. "Moja mala nosi cizmice."

  He was wearing a long blue bathrobe, pajamas, plastic slippers. He was shivering. His wavy brown hair was hanging down in front of his eyes. "I already have a headache like someone put a knife in my head, and then you are making so much goddamn noise."