Undiscovered Country

by Kelly O'Connor McNees

  It was too much, a Gothic melodrama, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself. When we finally returned to the car, I nearly wailed with relief.

  “Now you understand what I was trying to tell you,” Clarence said as he switched on the ignition. “If only I could get other people down here to see it too. What we need to do is get these folks out of this polluted hollow. I’ve written letters about it to just about everyone I can think of, including the Roosevelts. And now they sent you here, which I’ve got to think means someone is listening.”

  I gave him a weak smile, afraid to make any promises. “All I can tell you is that this report will be one for the ages, Mr. Pickett,” I said. But what a meager offering that was—a government report hardly anyone would read.

  We retraced the dark mountain roads, and Clarence drove me to my hotel in Morgantown. He parked the car and stepped out, fitting his hat on his head.

  “I’ll be back in the morning to collect you,” he said after he opened my door and helped me out of the car, “and we’ll go see a settlement near Cassville.”

  There’s more? I thought, not sure I could take it. He took my suitcase from the compartment beneath the rumble seat, and before he could offer to carry it inside, I grasped the handle.

  “I just have the one,” I said.

  “Are you sure? You’ve got your portable to carry too.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, and thought of the promise of sweet relief secreted in my suitcase like the glimmer of quartz in an old stone. I was afraid the sound of its slosh would give me away.

  “Have you got anything to read?” He seemed to be stalling, as if he were a little worried about leaving me on my own. “It’s good if you can do something to take your mind off it.”

  We were both thinking the same thing: How do you sit down to a good meal after that? How do you brush your teeth and take a hot bath after you have seen a naked child with weeping sores and no doctor in sight?

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ve got my report to type up, and I’ll go get a sandwich. I brought a mystery novel too.” The Case of the Empty Bottle, I thought.

  He nodded once. “All right. I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, and crossed back to the driver’s side door.

  “Clarence?”

  He looked back at me, his face open and gentle as the moon.

  I felt a welling in my heart for him, for the steadfast way he went out to see those people day in, day out. And all the while, I had been lounging in my New York apartment listening to opera records, blissfully unaware. “You are doing good work out there. My hat is off to you, sir.”

  “Well, it has been a long haul,” he said. “But now that you are here, Miss Hickok, maybe we’ll see some progress.”

  My throat closed up a little at his words. I didn’t like to imagine being responsible for delivering what those mining families needed. What if no one listened to me? What if I couldn’t make anything happen? Why in the hell had I let Nora talk me into this job? “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  He gave me a grim smile. “I hope so. We’re counting on you.”

  Clarence waved as he drove away. I trudged into the hotel and checked in as quickly as I could. With immense relief, I lugged my bag to my room, where I closed and locked the door. Immediately I fished a glass out of the bathroom. Too tired—hell, too eager—to go in search of ice, I unearthed bourbon and poured.

  With my portable set up on the desk, I began recording all the details I could remember from the day. When he had hired me, Hopkins had warned me never to sugarcoat the details in my reports for his sake, and I didn’t. I described the shacks and the people I had met—the naked, infirm children; the out-of-work men; the barefoot women. I passed along what Ruth had said about the fishy last-week-of-the-month business. The gardens, I explained, were set in the side of a hill so steep, the seeds must have been shot into it with a gun in order to make them stick.

  I took a break to freshen my drink and stood at the window, looking out through the gap in the gauzy peach drapes at the gravel parking lot and the green mountains beyond. The dense trees made me think of the forests of New Brunswick, where, at the end of our vacation, Nora and I had spent a whole day driving as we made our way to Maine and points south. It was late in the day as we barreled through a tunnel of dark forest, no houses in sight, when we emerged suddenly into a bright clearing. What I saw made me gasp. All around the car, in every direction, stood thousands of blackened tree trunks. The ground too was covered in soot and nothing moved among the desiccated poles, no birds or butterflies or rabbits. I had never seen the remnants of a forest fire—back in Bowdle there were not enough trees to burn—and the destruction was staggering. Nora slowed the car and we watched as the black trunks passed one after another, hypnotic like the succession of frames in a moving picture.

  “It will take a long time,” Nora had said, giving me an uneasy look, “but the trees will grow back.”

  And I’d nodded, too haunted to speak. It was fitting, I’d thought darkly, that we would end our heavenly vacation in such a harrowing way. I wanted to believe her—I wanted to believe that eventually it would rain and the ground would give up the sprouts, and the soot would be concealed beneath the fresh layer of bark that would grow on the trees. Perhaps in a few years we could drive that same stretch of road again and not know the forest had been ravaged. But the trees would know. They would carry the memory in their bodies.

  Standing at the window in the Morgantown hotel, I felt around the inside of my mouth with my tongue and, just as Clarence had predicted, felt the grit of coal dust. I took my drink back to the desk and sat down once more at the typewriter. The paper curled in the miserable humidity that made everything droop, and, as my hands went to the keys, I realized what was getting under my skin, just like that soot got under the trees: Ruth was the kind of woman I knew down in my bones. Ruth was my mother, my grandmother. And if I hadn’t left Bowdle, hadn’t found my way to the newsroom, I could have wound up just like her.

  “Nora, just what in the hell—did I lose a bet I don’t know about?” I tried to keep my voice light, but I was tired and a little drunk and it was hard to breathe in the enclosed space of the phone booth in the hotel lobby. It was about nine that evening and I had just wired my report— an opus in three pages fueled by sore feet and despair—to Harry.

  Nora’s voice was bright. “There, you see? I told you it wouldn’t be as dull as you feared. Now, I have to run. We are dining with the attaché to Panama, and I just popped up here to check my messages before they serve dessert.”

  Her breeziness annoyed me. It had been such a trying day, and here she was off to crème brûlée and hot chocolate from a silver pot. “Nora, hang on for just a moment. I think you need to know that— well, something is very wrong down here in coal country. The way these folks are being forced to live … I knew it was going to be bad, but it’s so much… worse.”

  I heard talking in the background and then the crackle of Nora pressing her hand over the mouthpiece and giving someone an instruction. Another crackle, and she came back on. “And this is exactly why you’re there, Hick. Put it all in your report. Wire it to Harry—then the wheels will start to turn.”

  I sighed, annoyed.

  “I’m sorry, darling, I wish I could talk longer, but I really do have to go.”

  “Nora,” I nearly shouted. “Wait. Just a minute. And listen. The report is in. But it’s not enough …” In a rush, I told her everything I had witnessed on my tour with Clarence. And I could almost see how, as the horror tumbled out of my mouth, she paused in her rush to get back to the party, sat down with the phone cradled against her shoulder. I dared to hope she began to take notes.

  “And no doctor has been out to see them?” she asked.

  “No. Clarence says they won’t come unless they are guaranteed payment. And of course these people don’t have a penny. I just don’t see how a three-page report is going to do them any goo
d. This is a goddamn emergency down here,” I said. “Like a natural disaster— except there’s nothing natural about it.”

  Nora was quiet for another moment and then I heard more rustling, the squeak of a hinge. “Just a minute,” she called to someone.

  “I know you have to go,” I said. “I know you are surrounded, every minute, by people who want something from you.”

  She did not reply and I heard still more noise, someone calling from the hallway. The suffering in Scotts Run was desperate, and I wanted Nora to conclude, as I had, that the situation was urgent, based on the facts at hand. But I had more selfish aims too: I wanted it to matter that those facts were coming from me in particular. What if the distance had eroded our connection? Only weeks ago we had been on a kind of honeymoon, but now she felt remote. What if I had become just one more voice in the throng, pleading for her attention?

  I switched the earpiece to my left side and wiped my clammy cheek with the back of my hand. With the toe of my shoe, I wedged the door of the booth open to get some air. The lobby smelled of mildew and pipe smoke. Nora, I knew, would be fresh with lilac perfume, the lemon juice in which she soaked her nails to bleach them white.

  “I’m sorry, darling—they are calling for me and I have to go.”

  And then she hung up the phone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  August 22, 1933

  When the alarm went off in the morning, I was tempted to slap it with my hand and roll over—I certainly had a headache for the ages. But then I thought of Ruth rising at dawn to scrape another day out of the dirt and it was enough to get me to the sink, where I marveled at the running water and my toothbrush and the unimaginable luxury of soap bubbles.

  After all, I had a job to do. I tried not to think of Nora. When I did, I reminded myself that she was just one person. She could not be in a dozen places at once, and each demand on her time was a worthy one. The women garment workers and the NAACP and the children’s literacy people and the delegation from some tiny nation plagued by a mysterious disease. All of them mattered too, and I had to try to understand and bide my time. President Roosevelt would not be president forever, and someday Nora and I would have our cottage, our porch swing, all our private dreams. She had promised me.

  With more than an hour to kill, I dressed and walked across the street to a diner in the hot morning sun. My shadow was long and lean behind me, a funhouse mirror twin trying to sneak up on me. Inside, at the chipped counter, a woman with silver hair and a faded uniform was just opening for the day. She raised her eyebrows in lieu of smiling and said, “What can I get you?”

  “Black coffee and eggs, please,” I said. I would have liked beef hash or bacon too, but somehow I felt it would mark me as a highfalutin out-of-towner to order meat with breakfast.

  She nested a heavy porcelain cup on its saucer and poured my coffee, busied herself wiping down the counter that was already clean. I could hear the murmur of news coming from a radio somewhere in back, the hiss of the griddle, and I remembered the diner in Potsdam, where Nora invited me to ride the train with her for the first time.

  “Did you grow up around here?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Lived here my whole life.”

  “In town, or … ?”

  She moved from one booth to the next, opening the blinds to the morning sun. “My daddy was the janitor at the city hall. We lived in a little house down the street.”

  “So he wasn’t a coal miner?” I said with a smile, because of course she knew I was from out of town—there was no hiding that fact around here—and she was probably sick to death of the assumption that every West Virginian man walked around with black-smudged cheeks.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment as she moved back behind the counter. Finally, her tone stiff, she said, “No. But that’s honest work.”

  “Oh, of course it is,” I fumbled. She had misunderstood: I was trying to tell her I saw the complexity of the people here, that I didn’t lump them all into one narrow category, but instead she thought I was making fun of them. “Of course it is.”

  A fan in the corner with a bent blade wobbled around its axis with a whine. It felt like eons passed, but finally my eggs came up and she set the plate in front of me on the counter. “You here with them Quakers?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  The waitress shook her head. “I don’t see it doing any good. Those folks out there in the holler, they’re too far gone. Children eating scraps? Never seen a man with a job? How you gonna do anything to fix that?” She said it not so much with empathy as with the particular disdain of one only a couple hard-earned rungs up the social ladder from the folks under discussion.

  I nodded. “It’s as bad as all that and worse,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

  “All the do-gooding in the world won’t amount to anything.”

  “Is that really what you think?” I asked.

  “It is. Of course it’s sad to think of people living that way, especially the children, but nothing can be done about it.”

  I took a bite of my eggs, chewed. “Well, if you’re right,” I said, and the dark part of me had a hunch she might be, “then I am wasting my time down here.”

  Reporters typically were cynical as hell because they had seen it all and then some. Redemption was always temporary, so why bother working for it? But Scotts Run had me losing my edge. If we could improve life for these people, even by ten percent, by one percent, it would be something. I tried to think of what Nora would say if she were here. How did she answer the refrain of hopelessness that seemed to echo from every corner of the nation? I made my best attempt to let her voice speak through me to the waitress: “But what about this: What if the way things are for the people in the mining camps—the pollution, the unemployment, the lack of schooling and health care— aren’t just bad luck? What if those problems are the result of choices the government made? And, if that’s true, what would happen if the government made different choices?”

  She stared at me with one eyebrow hooked toward her hairline, like I might be the most feeble-minded individual she had yet encountered.

  “Are you talking about President Roosevelt now?” she said with a laugh. “You think he’s going to come down here and do something for those hillbillies?”

  I shrugged. “You never know,” I said.

  When she took my dishes into the back, I set the money for breakfast plus a sizable tip on the counter and left. I’d had enough pleasant small talk for one day. Back in the room, I lit a Pall Mall and looked at a map of the region to see where I’d be touring that day. Then I made my bed and put my notebook and pen in the pocket of my skirt. Since Clarence struck me as the sort of man who was always early, I looked out the window just before nine, expecting to see his car idling in the lot.

  Instead, I saw a tall woman emerging from a blue convertible.

  I watched in amazement as Nora pulled off her smart tan driving gloves and smoothed her hair from her forehead. She disappeared from view as she strode toward the lobby of the hotel, and delight bloomed in my chest.

  A minute later, I heard her soft knock on my door and opened it to find her in her crisp white blouse, tanned from the drive. “Nora.”

  “Good morning, Hick,” she said and stepped into the room. I went to embrace her and imagined calling Clarence to let him know we’d be a little late getting down to the lobby, but something in her demeanor made me keep my arms at my sides.

  “How did you get here so quickly?” I tried to do the math. “It must be seven hours’ drive.”

  Nora nodded. “I slept for a bit after the party and left about three.”

  I gaped at her. “In the morning? The president let you leave at three in the morning? What about the Secret Service?”

  She gave me a little shrug. “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. I stopped on the road and called when I knew he would be at his morning swim. They’ll get the message to him. And Mr. Pickett knows I
am coming—I called him last night after I hung up with you.”

  I couldn’t believe it. She had come to me—and faster than I would have dared to hope. “Oh, Nora.” I took her hand and laced my fingers through hers. “Won’t you sit down? I’ve missed you like hell.”

  We sat side by side on the edge of the bed. “Yes, darling. I’ve missed you too,” she said, but the response sounded a little vague, a little diffuse, while my longing was a magnetic field pulling my mouth toward hers. I embraced her and she kissed me; then she smiled in a polite way that filled me with disappointment. She didn’t move to take off her hat.

  “He should be here any minute,” she said, and looked at her watch. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Who?” I was trying to play it cool, but inside I was reeling. It was only nine o’clock, but I’d already experienced despair, stubborn determination, and a surprise that delighted the hell out of me. Now I saw that her reason for making the trip had nothing to do with her feelings for me and everything to do with her work.

  “Clarence Pickett.” She stood up and smoothed her jacket. “He’ll take us around the camp near Cassville today—I have to see as much as I can before anyone finds out that I’m here.”

  “Right. Of course,” I said. I tamped down my disappointment. Nora was focused, that was all, and I should be grateful. And she was right about the need to move quickly. As soon as people realized the first lady was tromping around out in the mining camps, the logistics of our day would get much more complicated. “I know he will be delighted to see you.”

  We went down to the lobby and out into the parking lot to wait. Nora took her blue satchel—the bag that seldom left her side—out of the car and secured the convertible top just as Clarence pulled in. Through the windshield of his car, I could see the grin playing at the edges of his mouth, but he retained his dignity as he stepped out to greet us.