by Gin Phillips
THE WELL AND THE MINE
The Well and the Mine
A Novel
Gin Phillips
HAWTHORNE BOOKS & LITERARY ARTS
Portland, Oregon
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
New York
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
THE WELL AND THE MINE
Copyright © 2007 Gin Phillips
All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 1-101-05293-7
To Virginia Kirby,
Clara Trimm,
Roy Webb, and
Carson Webb
You are
better than fiction.
I love you.
Contents
Introduction
1 Water Calling
2 Daylight
3 Cicada Shells
4 No Pay for Slate
5 Jonah
6 Picking Cotton
7 Telling Stories
8 The Well Woman
9 Coffee and Supper
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I first met Gin Phillips in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1997 while serving as co-chair of the Birmingham-Southern College GALA weekend Women of Distinction awards. She was the student assigned as my escort for the weekend, and while walking from function to function, she mentioned briefly that she wanted to become a writer. Having heard that from students so many times in the past, I wished her well and honestly forgot all about it. When I received a letter from Hawthorne Books asking if I would be willing to read a book by a young Alabama writer, I was surprised and delighted to find out it was Gin Phillips and that instead of just talking about it and thinking about it, she actually sat down and wrote a book—not only a book, but a wonderful book!
I know Alabama well, and The Well and the Mine takes me back there. But this story doesn’t so much re-create a place as it does a life—lives, really—a town and a family full of hopes and oddities and hidden fears. Life is boiled down to its fundamentals for the Moores—hard work, family, the taste and smells of land and home. Their whole world consists entirely of Carbon Hill, population three thousand. No Fireside Chats yet, no money to get a newspaper, and only the occasional Grand Ole Opry on the radio. Alabama in 1931 assumes a texture in these pages, palpable and alive. It’s a texture made up of the details of domesticity, from the way a mother washes her floors to the way lights crackle in an electrical storm. It’s a texture thick with the mechanics and fatigue of coal mining. And it’s a texture dotted with young girls’ imaginings and plottings.
There could be a tendency to idealize this past, to give in to nostalgia and turn this story into The Waltons. And, admittedly, it is an alluring past, with unlocked doors and a close-knit family and dinners spent talking and laughing around the table without a television in sight. But it isn’t a one-dimensional ideal. This is a past that’s ripe with complications, be they racial barriers or a baby down a well. Right next to the sweet tea and long porch nights, tragedy is always lurking, so close and so possible. For a miner, the thought that you might not make it home from work that day is as much a part of your morning as a cup of coffee. The Moores have no safety net, no protection against the worst other than Albert Moore’s good health and paycheck.
This is a book that opens with a baby thrown down a well. It’s also a book that’s funny. So, speaking of texture, it’s not exactly a predictable pattern.
When you watch Tess and Virgie scouting Carbon Hill for the Well Woman, when you follow Albert down into the mines or Leta on the way to a Birmingham hospital, you step into their lives. When you close the book, you’ll miss these characters. But The Well and the Mine doesn’t just give you characters who stay with you—it gives you a whole world.
FANNIE FLAGG
Author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
THE WELL AND THE MINE
1 Water Calling
Tess AFTER SHE THREW THE BABY IN, NOBODY BELIEVED me for the longest time. But I kept hearing that splash.
The back porch comes right off our kitchen, with wide gray-brown boards you can lose a penny between if you’re not careful. The boards were warm with heat from the August air, but breathing was less trouble than it was during daytime. Everybody else was on the front porch after supper, so I could sit by myself, nothing but night and trees around me, a thin moon punched out of the sky. The garden smelled stronger than the leftover fried cornbread and field peas with onions. And the breeze tiptoed across the porch, carrying those smells of meals done and still to come, along with a whiff of Papa’s cigarette and snatches of talk from out front. It was the best time of the day to sit with the well, its wooden box taking up one corner of the porch and me taking up another.
I loved the well then.
I leaned against the kitchen door and looked through the wood posts of the railing, even though I couldn’t see anything but black. There weren’t clouds covering that slice of moon or the blinking stars, but they still didn’t throw enough light. The light from the kitchen door let me see to the edge of the porch. But the woman she didn’t see me, I guess. Sometimes the Hudsons down below got their drinking water here—they didn’t have their own well—and I thought it was Mrs. Hudson at first. But she was like a bird, and this was a big, solid woman, with shoulders like a man. She climbed the stairs two at a time. Then she hefted that heavy cover off the well, like a man would, with no trouble.
I couldn’t see the baby at first ’cause it was underneath her coat. But she took it out, a still, little, bean-shaped bundle wrapped up like it was January.
I could have reached her in five or six steps. If I’d moved.
She held the bundle like a baby for a minute, tucked under her chin like she was patting it to sleep, whispering. The blanket fell back from its head, and I saw a flash of skin. Then she tossed it in. Just like that. Not long after the splash—just a quiet, small sound—she lifted the square cover again and fit it back into its cut-out space, set
tling it in with careful little touches. Even with all that weight, the porch boards didn’t creak when she left.
The splash wasn’t so much the sound of the baby hitting the water as it was the yelp my well made; it sounded shocked and upset knowing something inside it was awful. Wanting my help.
I felt my teeth dig into my bottom lip, maybe drawing blood, but I was quiet as a mouse and stiller than one. Mice scatter like marbles.
After I don’t know how long, Virgie pushed at the door. I knew the sound of her feet on the floorboards. I scooted up, and she poked her head out.
Virgie wore cicada shells, pinned like brooches at her collar. We used to wear them all the time, rows of them like buttons down our shirts during summer, but since she’d be going to the high school next year, she wouldn’t wear them to school no more. She’d gotten too old.
“We’re all out front—why’re you hidin’ back here?” She looked down at me, then up at the well. “I swear, you’d marry that well if it’d give you a ring.”
Beyond it was pitch. The kind of black you think you’d smash into like a wall if you were to run into it. The woman was gone.
“Some lady threw a baby down it,” I said.
Virgie looked at me some more. “Down the well?”
I nodded.
She laughed, and I knew without looking at her she was rolling her eyes. “Hush up and go inside.”
“She did!” My mouth was still the only part of me I could make work—it felt like I’d taken root in the floorboards.
“Nobody’s been near our well. Quit tellin’ stories.”
She knew I didn’t tell stories. I swallowed hard, and it loosened my feet. I pushed myself up and took a step toward the well. “She was, too! A big woman with a baby in her arms. And she threw her baby in without sayin’ a thing.”
“Why would she do it with you watchin’ her?” She said it like she was grown-up, not just fourteen and only five years older than me.
“She didn’t see me.” My voice was high, and my chest ached with wanting her to believe. At the well, I tried to slide the cover back, but it was too heavy. “Look in here.”
“You don’t have a lick of sense.”
“Virgie…” I was begging.
She looked a little bit sorry, and came over to stroke my hair like Mama did when I got upset. “Were you daydreamin’? Maybe you saw somebody walk by the porch and you imagined it.”
“No. We have to look in the well.”
“How do you know it was a baby?”
“It was.”
“Was it cryin’?”
“No.”
Finally she looked worried, looking out at the night instead of looking at me. “Somebody mighta thrown some garbage or somethin’ in there outta spite. But who’d do it?”
“It wasn’t garbage. It was a baby. And I’m gone tell Papa.”
I turned and marched off toward the front porch, going back through the house with Virgie right behind me. That last week in August, the nighttime wind was enough to cool your face but not enough to carry off a day’s worth of sunshine. The sun was twice its normal size at the tail end of summer. We’d all stay outside until it was about time to go to bed. Papa and Mama were in their rockers, with Mama shelling peas and Papa smoking a cigarette. They were lit from the lights in the den—Papa was still smudged, even though he’d washed and washed his face and hands. He was bluish instead of black.
Virgie announced it before I could. “Tess says she saw somebody throw somethin’ in the well.”
Papa caught my arm and pulled me over to him. He curled one arm around my waist and set me on his lap. I reached down and felt the leather of his hand, snuggled closer to him.
“What did you see, Tessie?”
“It was a woman, Papa. And she had a baby in her arms, wrapped up, and she threw it in the well.” I spoke slowly and carefully.
Papa used his knuckle to nudge my chin up. “It’s awful dark out back. Maybe you just saw some shadows.”
I shook my head until a curl popped loose from my ribbon. They were always coming loose. (Virgie had gotten her blond angel hair bobbed to her shoulders and she curled it like in magazines at the newsstand.)
“I saw her. I did. I was sittin’ by the door, and I was gettin’ too chilled so I was gone come in, but then I saw her walkin’ up the back road. I didn’t know her, but she was comin’ right straight here, so I sat and waited and nearly said hello to her when she got to the steps, but then she didn’t walk towards the door at all. She stopped at the well. She looked around, moved the cover, and tossed a baby in. And then she left.”
“I think maybe somebody tossed an old sack of trash or maybe a dead squirrel or somethin’ in there just for meanness,” Virgie said.
I looked straight at Papa. “I swear, it was a baby.”
“Don’t ever swear, Tess,” he said with a little shake of his head, looking back toward the dark. Two lightning bugs went off at the same time.
Mama looked puzzled, the lines in her forehead deeper than usual. “Why would she throw it in our well?”
Virgie looked mad at me. “Now you’ve upset Mama.”
Albert I DIDN’T BELIEVE HER WHEN SHE TOLD ME. EVEN though her face was white as chalk and her eyes big as silver dollars. They’ve all got Leta’s eyes, wet-earth eyes. Rich like good soil.
She was always a dreamer, but the girl never made up tales. Didn’t look for attention. Some girls her age did that, though. And it didn’t make no sense what she was saying. Land’s sake, no woman’d toss her baby in a well.
But Tessie kept on about it, nagging me. Not like her one bit. There was a sweetness about Tess. She liked to please, didn’t like to upset nobody. Not to say she lacked spirit. She’d bend, but that girl wouldn’t ever break.
The night she was so wrought up, I lifted the cover off and looked down in there, but she just said, no, I couldn’t see proper without any light. I ain’t never home during good daylight when I’m on the day shift, so I told her the next night I’d shine a lamp down there and we’d have a good look.
If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s shining a light in the dark. I know the dark. I’m stained with it. It’s caked permanent in the creases of my elbows, in the lines on my hands, under my fingernails. I can taste it deep down my throat and I cough it up in the middle of the night. Up in the daylight, men sort and clean the coal we bring up, picking out slate while they squint in the sun and crisp their skin, and I am no part of them. I wasn’t that much older than Tess when I started tending to the mules, getting used to hours without the sun, headed down and down and down, my boots clomping along next to the hooves. I got used to the heft of an axe and the smell of burned powder and the burn of dirt falling in my eyes and every bit of it was in pitch black with the fuzzy weak lamps on our heads and on the walls making just the slightest dent in that pitch. So you would think this one thing my baby girl asked of me, this one time she wanted me to shine my light in the dark for her, I could have done it as easy as breathing. Wouldn’t have cost me nothing but a little time. But I didn’t have it for her. Thought there wasn’t nothing to it, no reason to give up those few precious minutes of sitting in my chair and letting the day roll off me.
’Course then the next day afore I got home, Leta felt the bucket hit something when she was getting water to boil the corn. Pulled up the bucket, and it had a blanket in it.
Leta I THOUGHT SURE WE’D GET SICK. CAN’ T EVEN THINK about it—the poor little thing. But in the drinking water.
I waited ’til Albert came home from work. When I pulled up the blanket with the morning water, I knew Tess had been telling the truth, and we’d all ought to have known that. She’s a good girl. I didn’t let the bucket down again, just sat the blanket on the side of the well. I hurried to the store and bought a new tin bucket, too, thinking I wouldn’t want to be using that one again if the night passed like I thought it would. When the girls and Jack came home from school, I told ’em we’d be having cornbr
ead and milk for lunch. Couldn’t do much else with no water, and I wasn’t touching what I’d already drawn.
“You found it, didn’t you, Mama?” Tess asked. Her voice was hoarse, and she was chewing on her braid. I didn’t get on to her for it.
“Found a blanket. We’ll get it all straightened out when your papa comes home.”
“You believe me now, don’t you?” She seemed concerned, like I might actually still say she was making things up. I knelt down, took the braid from her mouth, and kissed her forehead—dirty already from who knows what.
“I believe you, Tessie. Get washed up for dinner.”
I poured fresh milk over dewberries for dessert. None of them complained.
With the last touches of sun in the sky, backs sore from peering in and eyes tired from squinting, we thought we’d have to find some netting. Then, when we’d lost count of how many times we’d tried, Albert pulled it up with a tiny, pale arm hanging over that tall tin bucket. It was naked, and it was a boy.
My mama died when I was four, and I remember her laying there with the blood soaking the sheets and the sweat not even dried off her face. I saw the baby she’d had die two days later, its face blue and its body shrunk like a dried peach. I’ve seen men carried home from the mines with eyes torn out and arms just about ripped clean off still hanging by pieces of skin. None of it stuck in my head like that little swollen thing that used to be a baby hanging over the side of our water bucket.
Virgie I THOUGHT SHE MADE IT UP AT FIRST. TO FEEL IMPORTANT. Tess was the hatefulest thing when she was little. Mama would leave me watching her, and she’d wander off and I’d have to drag her back just a’screaming. The white fence around the yard had to be built to keep her in. Then she just learned to unlatch the gate. She wouldn’t mind worth a flip. And after Jack came, she didn’t ever get tired of tattling on him. But she never told lies.