When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  "What's wrong with you? We're already in America. That's your idea?"

  "This is here, the place I was going all that time?"

  "This is Banning. You're in Banning. You've been here a long time."

  He sighed and leaned back heavily into his pillow. "Every-things was happen very quickly to me."

  I tried to hold some ice against his head. It seemed like heat was coming off of him, all over.

  "Then I want again to go. This time, you with me." He put his hand on top of mine. "We going to there together. Not so much lonely this time, because this time with you."

  "Whatever you want."

  "Will it be beautiful when we get to there? The Hungarians says so, says I won't believe what my eyes see. It's their idea I go to Banning, to here, to Pennsylvania. We leave soon?"

  "Sure."

  "How soon? Now? Where is my boots? Today we are go there?"

  "Not today."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "All right, whatever you say."

  "Tell my boots that tomorrow, we are going. We have to get there. I have to start buying animals, planting things for them."

  "Tell your boots?"

  "Make them ready."

  He made me go downstairs and bring his boots up to him. They were brown and worn and heavy—farming boots. They were clean though; he took good care of them. He pointed for me to put them on the floor by his bed.

  He leaned down and inspected my tennis shoes, running his finger along the sides. "Ach," he said.

  "What?"

  "It's long walk," he said. "Far. You need stronger shoes."

  "I could make it okay. These shoes are all right."

  "And when we are get to there, you need to buy heavy boots for mine. We have to start digging in mine. Make money to buy farm. Sheep. Goats. In mine, the bosses are make us wear at first painted green helmets. Because we are green! We are as babies. We know nothing."

  "All right," I said.

  He grabbed my hand and looked hard at me with his glassy blue eyes. "Will it be beautiful when we get to there, like the Hungarians says to me?"

  I didn't answer him.

  "What about Mirjana? My first grandchildren? She is where? Still disappeared?"

  "I'm going to find her," I said. "I'm trying to find her."

  "You'll bring her here to see me?"

  Slats came in downstairs and up to his room. She took one look at him and set to rooting through all the drawers and cabinets until she found a thermometer. His temperature was sky-high. We packed up more rags with ice and held them to him.

  Every so often he'd look at us as if we'd just gotten there and say, "Oh, hi." He tossed around, stared at the ceiling, and coughed and coughed. With him flitting around in his bed like a bird, it was hard to keep ice on him. He said a few more nonsense things. He got out of bed and tried to put his boots on. Slats fought him back at first, but then she let him get up and put them on, and she helped him tie the laces. Since he was hot, he'd pulled his pajama pantlegs up over his knees. His legs looked like little white sticks stuck inside the heavy boots. Walking around the room, he could hardly lift his feet.

  Her voice shaky, Slats said, "Try to get some sleep, Dad.

  Okay?"

  I couldn't tell if he'd heard her or not, but after a while he got into his bed, propped his boots up on the footboard and dropped into sleep with his mouth wide open.

  I found a big flashlight in the basement and went outside to look for the animals. "Sobaka," I called for the dogs, like saying the word would make them turn out of the air. I gave up on them pretty quick and went back inside and fell asleep on the couch.

  I don't know how long I slept. Slats woke me up. "Lucas," she was saying, shaking my arm. "His fever's down now. It's fixed. But he's not breathing right. We got to make a mustard plaster."

  "It's like the middle of the night."

  "He's not breathing right. We got to."

  "Leave me alone."

  She grabbed my shoulder. I was about to pull away from her, but then upstairs, Great-grandfather let out a round of coughing. "All right," I said. "All right."

  In the kitchen, she busied herself with the flour and water and mustard powder. Then the two of us sat at the kitchen table with the light buzzing above, taking turns mixing it with a long wooden spoon. It smelled terrible. She said, "He called up at the Glass today, Zoli. Called the foreman's office."

  She handed me the spoon and said, "The foreman wasn't there, but the office girl took a message. He didn't say anything really, just called, and said he'd call again." She spread out her hands in front of her and looked at them. She started to say something then stopped.

  "What?" I said.

  She put her hands down on the table. Her wedding ring knocked on the Bakelite. "I'm guessing that he's calling in to say his case and that he's going to make up some story or other for himself to see if they'll let him come back to his shift." She looked at her hands again.

  "Where'd he call from?"

  "He didn't say."

  "Maybe he called to quit."

  "He can't quit. He doesn't know how to do anything else besides cause trouble, and he's not smart enough to make any money at that." She got up from the table, took a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard, and poured a glass. She splashed some water in it from the tap, then came back to the table. "It's been a long while. He hasn't been to work since the first week of January. We're already most of the way into February. Maybe they won't let him come back to work. Then he won't be able to get a foothold back here and he'll drift away again. He won't have a job anymore . . . or a girl—"

  "He'll have a house, though. He still has a house."

  She nodded and drank more of her whiskey.

  Even though the plaster was ready to go, I kept stirring it until my arms were tired. After I quit, we both sat there for a while under the buzzing light without saying anything. It seemed like the longer we sat there, the more certain it was that he was on his way to us. I could practically hear the dull roar of the Skylark.

  Great-grandfather coughed again and Slats and I both sat up straight and looked at each other. We carried the bowl and a cloth up to his room. He was stretched out on top of his covers, his head propped up on the headboard. He didn't say anything to us when we came in, didn't nod or wave.

  Slats sat down on the chair by the side of the bed and put the bowl on her knees. She opened out the cloth on the bed to spread the mustard over. She used the wooden spoon to spread it, but some of it got on her hands. "Oh shit," she said. "Jesus Goddamn Christ. . ." She squinted up her eyes in pain. It was stinging her cuts from the Plate Glass. I took the bowl off her lap, and she went to the bathroom to clean her hands and curse.

  Hearing her seemed to cheer Great-grandfather up a little. "Ha. She sounds like sailor." His voice was scratchy, quiet.

  She stayed there for a long while. I said, "You ever coming out of there?"

  "I'm not sure. Ask me something else."

  Great-grandfather said, louder, "Where you learn all those swearings?"

  "Let's see, one or two or probably all of them from you."

  "Not true," he said. "Not one grain of true."

  Slats said, "Lucas, I can't be near that stuff. I'm almost killed in here. You're going to have to do it yourself."

  "You do," he said to me.

  "All right," I said, but I didn't move. I didn't want to touch his skin. He sat up and coughed. He was having a hard time breathing in between.

  Slats came into the room. She had towels wrapped around her hands like mittens.

  "What if it stings me too?" I said.

  She said, "We'll take you to the slaughterhouse and cut off your hands at the wrist."

  Great-grandfather said, "She's probably not joking. You hear her swearing in there? She's look like nice person, but her inside, her heart, Lucas, brutal, black as coal." He smiled.

  I spread the mustard out over the cloth. She told me how to fold it up so that none of it would t
ouch Great-grandfather's skin—it'd burn him. He unbuttoned his pajama shirt. His skin was falling away from his bones. I folded up the cloth into a square and made sure none of the mix was leaking out. I put the cloth on his chest, under his chin.

  Slats told him to breathe in the smell of the plaster, that it would break his cough. He said, "It won't help, but you are manager of me."

  He made a big production of it, raised his arms up in the air and breathed in a long, loud breath. His face turned white, then whiter, and then it started up, a coughing that didn't sound anything at all like the coughing he'd done before or like anything I'd ever heard. They were deep noises, almost like a machine was making them, a machine with its pieces breaking apart and coming loose.

  "Holy hell," Slats said, "Take it off him."

  I leaned over and put my hands on the plastered cloth. My hand crossed over his heart. I could feel it drumming, banging away, reeling around like a drunk man pounding on the floor of a dance hall.

  Taking away the plaster didn't make things better. He coughed and strained for air. He rolled over, put his face down into the bed, grabbed all the sheets and pulled them toward him off the mattress. Slats yelled at me to go to the kitchen and get him a glass of water. Downstairs, his coughing rang all through the rooms, ricocheting off the walls and the photographs and the dishes and the windows.

  I went back upstairs with the water. He drank some, but the next cough sent all the water out of his mouth and all over us in a big spray. Slats dried the water off me and him and his bed. He curled up like a baby and coughed, and it seemed like he was crying. "Raisa," he choked out, his voice hoarse, "I have enormous love for you, my first of my daughters."

  She threw the towel down on his bed. "Why are you saying that?"

  The coughing went on and on. Slats went downstairs to get the whiskey.

  I was alone with him. "Lucas," he said, and then coughed for a long time. He grabbed me and said in my ear, "This place . . . My farm . . ."

  "Yes?"

  He was coughing too hard to talk. Slats came back. In between his runs of coughs, she poured about a whole bottle of whiskey into him. Sometimes he spit it out, sometimes it spilled and ran down his chin. Enough of it got in him that he calmed down some and his coughing started to sound like normal coughing, and then it slowed down and almost stopped. When he talked again, his voice was faint and hoarse, and with every word it got fainter and fainter. He whispered to Slats, "I think I am getting my talking taken away by this sickness, Raisa. I am through of talking. For my last words, I pick to say that you are the one of them that was what I liked best in all this living, you and my unkind boys, and Mirjana, and all my boys struck down by fever." He looked at me. "My Lukacses."

  Slats started to say something to him, but then she ran out of the room.

  He stared me down. My heart was pounding against my chest and my neck. He reached his long arms out to me, put his hand on the back of my head, and pulled me toward him. "This place. Make everything that is disappeared come back to here. To this place." He kissed my forehead. "Make farm again to be what it was." He kissed both of my cheeks. "Animals, dogs, grasses, sunlights." He kissed my hands and leaned back against his pillow.

  I thought of a million things to ask him, if he really was going to stop talking. Finally, I said, "How?" and then, louder, almost shouting, "How? How am I going to do that?"

  He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  Chapter 14

  They went at our coal room by room, threw up pillars, worked it out of the walls, made some more pillars, made some more rooms, pulled out more coal. They blasted it out of the seam with dynamite, threw it onto conveyer belts, rolled it to the tipple, poured it into trains. Fires used to burn all the time in the coke ovens carved into the hills, and all of Banning was a cup of light and singing noise. But before the fireshots and the metal hitting metal there were hundreds of millions of years of everything being quiet. Coal is trapped sunlight that got caught up in the leaves of gigantic swamp ferns, leaves that made shade when Pennsylvania had dragonflies with thirty-inch wingspans. When you burn coal, that trapped sunshine is what makes the heat, that old, old sunshine locked up for all that time, coming loose.

  When they first found it, there were thirty billion tons of coal in our bituminous fields spread out over three big seams—the Upper Freeport seam, the Lower Kittanning seam, and the Pittsburgh seam. And it's our seam, the Pittsburgh seam, that's the biggest; its coal lies in four- to six-foot beds. A lot of it has been carried up out of the ground by bare hands, scorched out with dynamite and hammers and picks; its dust everywhere on the outside of the miners and then later inside of them too, in their lungs, in their blood, in all their memories of the world.

  In my father's dreams, lakes were always filled with water black as oil, snow fell in black flakes, and the sun sometimes rose black and spread dark instead of sunshine. He thought he was in such terrible love with my mother for his whole life not because of her good looks, but because of how dark her eyes were, almost black.

  After she took up with Zoli, when she couldn't sleep, she'd wake me by putting shoes on my feet. It'd be the middle of the night or nearly morning, I'd feel something pressing on my soles, and when I looked up, she'd be tying my shoes. I'd get up and follow her. I didn't say much on these walks, but she did. That was when I learned about the coalfields and how the coal was inside my father's dreams.

  Standing in front of the boney one night by the Bluebird pit, she told me about how when she was a kid, she would toboggan down the piles on sheets of tin. It was always her and Marko and my dad. They would try to get the coal dust off her before she went home, but Slats always knew and gave her hell for ruining her clothes. My mother told me a lot of stories then. I know now that she was getting ready to go away, and the stories were what she was going to leave me with.

  The night Great-grandfather spoke his last words in my ear, I felt my mother putting my shoes on. I sat up and saw that my room was empty and silent. I put my shoes on anyway. I sat on my bed for a while and listened to the town, its noises floating along in the air—people walking home talking, someone's car going past, the hum of machines at the Plate Glass.

  I couldn't tell if Slats was asleep or not, but to be sure I didn't get stopped, I climbed out the window. I was probably still halfway asleep until I walked into the club, into its smoke and shouting and lights. There was a band playing one of those old sad Croatian songs that my dad liked so much. I saw Walter right away. He was standing behind the bar. I might have said something to him, asked if he could come with me, but it seemed to me that all I did was walk into the club and look at him and then we were running through the Monkey Dumps. The vines were swaying in the breeze, making the shadows move, and Walter was all the time just in front of me, his yellow hair shining.

  At Zoli's, Walter found a piece of metal wire on the ground and he tried working the back door. I tried the windows. They were still locked up tight. I went around to the front of the house and that's when I caught sight of the outline of a man standing on the edge of the Monkey Dumps. My breath burned in my throat. I thought it was Zoli. He came closer.

  "Marko?" I said.

  Walter came running up behind me. "Where?" he said.

  "Marko?" I said again.

  "Dad," Walter said, "hey, Dad."

  I thought Walter would be in trouble for leaving the club, but Marko didn't seem interested in him. He was staring at the house. He looked like if the breeze picked up, he'd fall over.

  "Dad," Walter said. "Hey, Lessar here doesn't believe about how you did that show, how strong you are."

  "Lessar? Jimmy? Where?" He looked around.

  "No, not him. Lucas. The other one's not around anymore. Remember the blowup? How they didn't find nothing of him but his foot in his shoe?" Walter looked at me. "Sorry," he said.

  "Show him the poster," Marko said.

  "He already saw it."

  "Show it again."

  "
How am I going to show him a poster? We're in the woods in the middle of the night."

  He kept staring at the house. "Another time then."

  "Show him how strong you are," Walter said. "We need to get into Zoli's house. Break something open for us."

  "Zoli? Is he in there? You in there?" he shouted. "Mirjana?"

  "No one's in there," Walter said. "No one's in there with nobody."

  Cold air ran down the hill out of the Dumps. I could hear pieces of a song. The cold seemed to sober Marko up a little. He nodded. "Okay. We'll get inside."

  "I'll find something to help you pry open a window," Walter said and ran away from us.

  Marko pulled open his coat. "Look, Uncle. Always the heaviest rock he could find, he puts here. It's no problem for me. Then he takes the big heavy hammer and lifts it up and up, and then it comes down on me again, and then again until he breaks the rock. In the audience, the people yell. But it's easy for me . . . You know how I got to be so strong?"

  "You ate iron shavings."

  He squinted at me. "No. Of course not. I ate regular foods . . . Where's Zoli?"

  "We're trying to get inside and find out, remember? Walter told me you thought he was locked up in Bedford, grieving over my mother or something, but I—"

  "Walter told you that?"

  "Maybe there's something in there that says where he went to, and that's where she'll be."

  "I don't know why Walter tells you that. That's not what I said. I said Mirjana, her grief, from losing Jimmy. Maybe she is there at Bedford. Mirjana grieving, maybe she had to go there."

  I felt like I must have heard him wrong. "What?"

  "I found her sometimes, two, three times, walking alone, nothing there, not herself. Nothing like herself—"

  "What are you talking about?"

  Walter rushed up behind us, "Shut up, Dad!" he shouted. "You're too drunk to talk."

  "I was trying to tell about how I became so strong."

  I said, "How could she be there? Why would she be up there?" My voice was shaking.