by Shauna Seliy
At my dad's wake, our house was the brightest I'd ever seen it. Before, you could see that the place was worn-out from all the years of miners living in it and casting coal dust on everything. After the accident, and before my mother went into her long sleep, she took down the curtains and scrubbed the walls and floors. I noticed at the wake that the floor wasn't the dark brown I'd always thought it was; it was lighter, almost yellow. I noticed it because Slats's sister Kaya was standing on it in blue shoes in a pool of light. She was singing a song. It was hard not to look at Kaya when she sang, because her voice didn't fit the way she looked. She looked pretty much like she'd always been happy, but her voice was the saddest thing I ever heard come out of a person's mouth.
She'd learned a couple of songs in Croatian in honor of my father's passing. I half expected to see him peeking in the door trying to get a look at who was singing, because he would have liked the songs and he would have liked the way she sang them. "Where is that angel noise coming from?" he might have said.
I looked out the window. It was bright out. My eyes blurred with bare branches and sunlight and snow. I closed them and put my head down on my desk. I fell asleep and walked right inside a dream. Great-grandfather was standing at the classroom door in mining clothes, big boots, a hard hat. He waved to me to follow him. I got up out of my chair and went to him. He led me out to the King mine. It was a slope mine—you didn't need a lift to get down into it—so we just followed the sloping entrance down into the deeper partings. He pulled a loose match out of his breast pocket and lit it by scraping it across the rough surface of his palm. We passed the second room on the right, the third room on the right, R2 and R3, rooms my dad used to work. We went farther and farther into the mine, but instead of things getting darker and darker, everything got brighter and brighter.
We turned into one of the rooms off the tunnel. Greatgrandfather got down on his knees and dug his hands into the coal. It moved away from him as if it were soft, like ashes. He pulled a box up out of it and dusted it off. It was a glass box, and inside was hair. The box was just like he'd told me, but the hair wasn't a thick blond braid; it wasn't in a braid at all. It was loose and a little wavy and dark brown. I opened the glass door and took the hair out of the box. I looked at it for a while, the strands of it twisted through my fingers. I brought it closer to my face so that I could smell it to be sure, and then I was sure. It was my mother's hair.
Chapter 9
When the Archangel Michael booted the devils out of heaven, the ones that fell into the woods turned in to leshie, and the ones that fell into ponds and lakes became vodianye. The ones that landed on houses and barns turned into domovye, or what some people called Tot-to, That One. The way Great-grandfather explained it, all the other devils, the ones who didn't fall the whole way to the earth, were flying through the sky above us, winged, on fire, ready to make trouble. He said I might have heard their wings brush past me; that maybe it was one of them who rigged the fireshot so that when my father lit it, he came apart.
The leshii took charge of the animals and trees of the forest where he fell. He wore regular clothes, except he never wore a belt because at any minute he might change shape; he could shrink down as a seed if he wanted to, and then the next second he could be towering over the trees. He carried a whip. You know those wrinkles on the caps of mushrooms? Great-grandfather said those were from a leshii taking a whip to them. If you wandered into his woods he might make noises that sounded like someone calling for you, and pull you off your path until you were so far lost you would never get found. But every so often, he did a good turn, made the path through the trees that took you home safe. The thing was, though, you never knew what he was up to, never knew if you were being led home, or led farther away.
The vodianoi never did a good turn, his only business was drowning people. Great-grandfather would never let anyone swim in the pond unless he was right there to watch and make sure they were safe. He said the one in his pond was long and blue and naked and part-man and part-fish. He didn't do anything but lie at the bottom of the pond, and look up through the water hoping to see someone touch the surface so he could pull them down, and stuff their lungs with water.
Tot-to, That One, protector of the house and farm, didn't even have a body. He was just there—you just knew. He made sure you knew. The Tot-to at the farm had it in for mirrors and goats. When he had anger to unleash, they were the first things he went after. Great-grandfather said this was why I kept finding Valentina bucking at the barn door or gnawing at the fence, she was trying to escape. And it was also why he'd woken up to find all the mirrors in the house turned over and the one in the upstairs bathroom cracked and looking like a field of spiderwebs.
"Did you see what Tot-to did in night?" he asked me.
I was setting a steaming bowl of water on his lap. "You got to put this towel over your head and lean over this bowl. Slats says."
I walked around the house to see what had happened. When I got back to the room, he said, from under his towel, "I didn't do. I swear. I go to look at my handsome face in bathroom this morning and I see That One has been at work on his revengence."
He took the towel away from his head and handed the bowl back to me. His skinny arms shook and the water splashed everywhere.
"Be careful. You know who'll have to clean that up? It's not you.
He shrugged and frowned.
I said, "So, what do you want me to do? Turn those mirrors back the right way?"
He threw his arms up in the air. "He'll just do again. And too I think he must know I hate to have everythings be so much quiet because the silence here, Lucas, you should hear at night after you and your grandmother leave, so much quiet, is like already I'm in grave, that quiet. I was wrong about Tot-to. I thought he was just to going away, but since we let the tree where he was living get burned, I think first he wants to visit us with griefs."
I went from room to room and turned the mirrors back. They were mostly light slips of glass hanging from nails and all I had to do was flip them over. In the front room downstairs, there was a heavier mirror with a thick wood frame. It was nice-looking and would have been the first thing you saw when you came in the house if we ever used the front door. It was a full-length mirror and too heavy to hang from a nail, it just leaned against the wall. When I turned it over, I saw that it had a big crack running from top to bottom. I stood away from it and looked at my reflection. One eye was higher than the other. I looked like someone had split me in half and put me back together not exactly right.
I leaned in closer. I took a long look at the white patch of scar under my right eye. I ran my finger around its edges.
Upstairs, I asked Great-grandfather, "How'd that big mirror get turned around?"
"You think I did, don't you? How could I? I can't do nothing but sleep and choke on this ghost."
"It doesn't make sense."
"You think there's someplace where things are making sense?"
"No place where you are."
"Ach. Go take some raisins from kitchen and bring to Valentina. Carry happiness to at least some one person."
Outside, I noticed that he was right about the quiet. It was always quieter at the farm than in the part of Banning where the mine was. Even with just King running, pulling coal out of the seam was a noisy business. The sounds of the tipple and the mantrips and all the cutting machines and dynamite didn't reach the farm, wrapped like it was in acres of trees and fields. Usually, the farm had its own noises, animals calling out, tractor engines humming, trees creaking in the breeze. The only sound just then, though, was my shoes hitting the ground.
The animals weren't right either. Benci was supposed to be coming around to check on them, but they were skinny and jittery. When I walked into the barn, they ran up to me and tried to eat their way into the pockets where I'd put Valentina's raisins.
The feed bin and water trough were both cleaned out. I couldn't find any food for them in the barn. I went back in the ho
use and looked through the refrigerator, where I found nothing but all kinds of old soup in pots and jars. Digging through the pantry, I found a box of cereal, some apples Slats had left behind, and a bag of leftover candy bars from Halloween. I unwrapped half the candy bars and carried them and the apples and the cereal out to the animals. I found the hose and got them some water. They ate all the food and drank the water in about four seconds. They went back to watching me, waiting for me to do something else for them. "What do you want from me!?" I said. "Can't you feed your own damn selves like the animals in the woods?"
I went out to look for Valentina. She wasn't working at the fence where I'd seen her other times. I saw that she'd chewed up a good-sized hole there. I climbed through it and knew that meant she could have gotten through too. I walked into the fields along the driveway. When I was close to the county road, a stray dog, not one I thought was ours, came running close, barked at me, then ran off. All of a sudden I understood why the farm was so quiet—the dogs were gone.
I went back to the farmhouse to make sure. They weren't in the barn or anywhere around the house. I didn't see them up in the fields or hear any of their far-off barks. I had a bad feeling that wherever they'd gone, Valentina had gone too.
I sat down on the steps off the kitchen. After a while, the headlights of Slats's car tossed light on the rocks and trees as she came down the driveway. She drove an old Impala she'd named the Lusitania, but mostly she called it Brown Lu because of its color, one shade lighter than milk chocolate. The interior was a cream color with a heavy plastic covering on all the seats that I think she was supposed to take off but never did; she said she appreciated the way it kept things tidy. You weren't allowed to eat or take drinks in it. She had some problems with people even sneezing in there.
She got out of the car and looked at me over the roof. "What'd I tell you about leaving him to his own devices?" She swung her door shut hard.
"He sent me out here," I said.
"Of course he did. He's probably crawled inside the liquor cabinet by now."
"The dogs are gone," I said.
She looked around her feet, where the dogs usually would have been. She looked toward the barn, turned around, and walked out a little ways up the driveway, then came back and stood over me. I was going to tell her about Valentina, but before I could, she grabbed a piece of my jacket and said, low and quiet, "Don't you say anything to him. Not one word. It'll push him over the edge."
She went inside and let the door slap shut behind her. I followed her through the kitchen and down into the basement. "What are you doing?" I said.
She switched on the lights. There were piles of clothes all over the floor. She said, "Will you look at this? He has everything all mixed up. I was just trying to find some clean towels and sheets for him." She walked over to a pile of clothes, picked up a big dress, and held it up to the light. "Oh my," she whispered. "What is this doing here?" She ran her hand over it. "This was my mother's. She wore it all the time." She laid it down, carefully, on top of the pile. "All the time."
"Is she dead?" I said.
"What's wrong with you? You remember her, don't you? You remember when she died?"
"Not your mother," I said. "Mine."
Chapter 10
I caught Mrs. D'Angelo in my dreams that night. She was standing at the edge of the boney pile in her backyard, crushing a cigarette in the snow. "Where you been?" I said. She turned away without answering. I followed her through a field of sycamores. A breeze kicked up. Wide flakes of snow drifted down from their branches. "You seen my mother?" I said. She kept walking without answering me. "She was a friend of yours." The collar of her green coat was turned up around her. She was whispering secrets, too low to hear. I got closer to her. I thought I heard her say a few words of Croatian. I knew she couldn't speak it when she lived in the neighborhood, but I understood, in the way you understand things in dreams, that she'd changed; she'd become a traveler going from place to place in a stolen Nash.
After my mother and I helped Mrs. D'Angelo leave Banning, Mr. D'Angelo looked for her and waited for her. Whenever he saw me, he'd slow down his patrol car and give me a hard stare. Even after Mrs. D'Angelo was gone long enough that everyone could see she wasn't coming back, he still drove around in the hills looking for her. I'd hear him late at night, or early in the morning, his car door opening and closing. Some nights I'd wake up and watch him out the window. Before he'd go inside, he'd walk up and down the street or sit on the hood of the car.
Then, instead of going to the police station one morning, he took a lawn chair out of their garage and set it up in his backyard, facing the Bluebird mine's boney piles. He stopped going to work altogether. He didn't seem to do anything but sit in that lawn chair. I'd see him there on my way to school, and on my way back. A few weeks later, two policemen showed up and drove off with his patrol car.
His red hair grew out longer and longer, and his beard grew in. My mother decided he was up to something. "Maybe it's a penance," she said.
"For what?" I said.
"For the sins he did against Rose. Or maybe he really did love her, despite not having a thought in his head about how to let her know that."
"A penance from a priest?"
"L, what kind of priest would tell you to sit in a lawn chair for a penance? I mean one he made up for himself."
"You can do that?"
"I don't see why not. He's the one knows best what he ought to be sorry for and how sorry."
She told me to stay away from him, but whenever I could, I'd go over there and see how close I could get before he noticedme. He stared and stared at those boney piles. I think he wasexpecting her to come walking over them.
And then, all of a sudden, he went away. Some people said he heard those miners crying in the Bluebird pit and walked over to a toadhole and jumped in. Other people said that he walked into the Bluebird woods, stopped wearing clothes, let the hair get heavy on his chest and back, and took to walking around on all fours.
When he came back a couple of weeks later, though, we found out that he'd just gone to West Virginia to visit a brother. He cleaned himself up, got his job and his patrol car back. Everything was normal again, except that he would still cut me a hard look when he saw me around town. If I saw his patrol car coming, I always ducked behind someone or slipped into an alleyway.
Every so often, I would say to my mother that we should go back to that town in West Virginia and look for Mrs. D'Angelo. She would shrug and say if she wanted to see us, she knew where to find us. But after my father died, there were a few times when she said we should drive down there and try to find Rose D'Angelo and see how she was. We never did, though.
When she stopped being able to sleep, we took to walking late at night all around town. We'd walk past everyone's dark houses, into one of the mine woods, or the Monkey Dumps. She always walked in front of me, guided us. After a while, I noticed that she seemed to be getting smaller and smaller—her coat looked to be swallowing her. High up in the Bluebird boney piles one night, we looked down at Mr. D'Angelo's house. I'd never told my mother, or anyone else, that I'd seen Rose D'Angelo walk off alone that afternoon in West Virginia. It was my secret. My way of keeping her with me, I guess.
We stayed there for a few minutes. Before we walked away, my mother said, "Sometimes I get the strangest feeling that the whole world is emptying out."
The morning after Mrs. D'Angelo showed up in my dream, I walked past the doors of the school and kept going down the hill. Kids pointed at me, saying didn't I know I was headed the wrong direction, saying they were going to tell someone. At the bus stop, I watched them working their way up the hill, slow, carrying bags, some of them holding a smaller kid's hand. The sun leaned over them so that each of them looked like dark comets, and their shadows like long twisting comet tails.
On the days my mother kept me home from school, we nearly always drove to Brilliant, but every so often, if the car was in the shop, or if she just felt l
ike it, we'd take the bus. I didn't remember ever waiting too long for it to come, but that morning, in the cold, it seemed like it would never get there. When it finally did show, the driver opened the door and raised his eyebrows at me. I looked away from him and put my money in the box.
He picked up speed once we got out on the county road that ran flat for a while past the big green paper mill in Black Lick. The driver slowed down and wound up and down the hills, coke ovens pocking all of them. When my father was at the high school, they'd already shut down the Banning and the Brilliant mines, but they hadn't covered the mouths with concrete yet. When he wanted to go to Brilliant, if it was raining, or just for kicks, he and Marko would take a flashlight and walk the whole way there underground, through the mines.
When the bus came into Brilliant, we passed the broken-apart house of the man Zoli had talked about on the phone, the miner who'd done himself in with dynamite. I looked up at the blackened wood, the broken roof. The night before, I'd told Slats what Zoli'd said and she cupped my face in her hands and made me look at her. "Don't you say things like that about your mother. Don't you think them either. You got to trust her. She said she'd come back. She will."
In town, I walked into the department store, straight through to the restaurant where we used to eat all the time. Two waitresses were leaning against the wall by the kitchen talking to each other. I sat down at the counter. Without really looking at me, they put out two place settings and two menus and went on with their conversation.
While I was looking at the menu, an older, familiar-looking waitress came out from the back.
"Oh," she said, when she saw me. She smiled. "Sprung from school again? I, for one, am glad about that. Hadn't seen you two in too long." She looked behind me, must have thought my mother was maybe in the ladies' or still shopping. She whispered, "I heard some talk that she wasn't doing real good, having a hard time of it. Well, you must have been a nice help to her through that?" She smiled and patted my hand. "Sometimes people can't bounce back after a thing like that, but she had you. Lucky for her that she had you. I'll go mix up a coffee the way she likes it."