The Well and The Mine

by Gin Phillips

  I had to take a few deep breaths before I could call for anyone. I’d heard grunts and shouts down the tunnel a ways while I was digging. I’d ripped a few fingernails off and had to tear off a piece of shirt to bandage my fingers up. They kept on bleeding, and a few times I tried to clear my eyes of the dust and got an eyeful of blood instead. Digging in a cave-in ain’t nothing like in a garden. The dirt was full of splinters and chunks of wood, coal and rock, a few bits of metal. Once I got to wrapping up my fingers, I saw my hands were bleeding from a few other places, so I wrapped them all up, sort of like loose mittens.

  I’d called to the others while I was bandaging. A few fellows answered back. They was mostly fine. We lost three men in that collapse, and one of them I saw his hand, glove knocked right off it, sticking up out of the dirt. The only part of him aboveground. But the rest of us did all we could do—started heading up. We had to lift a few beams that’d blocked the tunnel, and I gouged one of those empty fingernail holes good. Nearly screamed. End of the day, I don’t think the broken ribs hurt as much as the durn fingernails.

  I knew I was sore all over, and my side did pain me something awful, but I kept on—wasn’t no other choice. Once we were on the surface a doctor came and figured I had the broken ribs, plus my ankle had swole to the size of a ham. That was the start of my back trouble, too, I reckon. (Wasn’t ’til later that I near broke it, and after that it never stopped acting up.) I hadn’t felt any of it, though, not before I saw daylight. Can’t say we ever mentioned sitting down and waiting to be rescued. We all kept climbing and digging and cursing—I don’t hold with cursing, but sometimes I felt like saying “Amen” at the way those other fellows could string a good one together—and bleeding and sweating and praying. Still and all, it was them aboveground that got to us; we heard the yelling and tap-tapping on the rocks above. Took half a day for them to dig us out. Leta was there with all the women, with food and water and tea for the ones trying to get us out. I drank a pitcher of tea and nearly threw up.

  Rain blowed onto the porch, hard, stinging droplets more like shards of ice than water. Water ran over to my boots. Drops dinged into the bucket by my feet—buckets cost a heap less than a new roof. Lightning flashed and thunder cracked almost at the same time, and I saw the lights flicker in the sitting room. Leta must’ve taken the children in there. I stood, feeling a sharp slap of rain with every heavy gust, and tried to imagine just laying in the dirt and coal and lumber and not getting up. And I realized I hadn’t known Jesse Bridgeman at all. Just knew a name and a face.

  Tess MY KNEES STUCK UP OVER THE OLD WASHTUB, MY ELBOWS hanging over the side. It fit pants and shirts and drawers a lot better than it fit me. The sheet was hung across the kitchen from cupboard to cupboard so I’d have privacy, but Papa and Jack knew not to come back there anyway. That washtub was confining, and a waste of good water. (At least it was warm since Mama had boiled two pots to add to the water straight from the well.) Men folks would bathe in the creek, but me and Virgie and Mama had to bathe in the washtub.

  I tried to wash up as fast as I could, keeping my shoulders underwater, which meant my legs hung out. But I scrubbed the lye soap over them, laying the goose bumps to rest. I took time between my toes. Then I got soap under my toenails and had to kick them underwater to shake it loose.

  I could hear the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, just a hum. I couldn’t hear good with all my splashing, plus the radio was at the front of the house.

  “Turn it up louder, Virgie,” I yelled.

  Mama stuck her head around the sheet a few seconds later. “Don’t yell so, Tess,” she said, frowning. “And keep the water in the tub.”

  Her head disappeared, but the music got louder. I heard a banjo, a bow dancing over the strings…Uncle Dave Macon playing “Rockabout My Saro Jane.” I scooted up, shoulders above water and legs mostly below it, soaping and rinsing in rhythm. Uncle Dave’d break up the fiddling with clogging, yelling and whooing as his feet stomped fast and hard. I moved on to my head, rubbing the bar over my hair, then running my fingers through it. Mama always said to rub especially hard behind your ears. I did and dunked my head.

  When I came up, he’d switched songs, calling out, “If they beat me to the door, I’ll put them under the floor / Keep my skillet good and greasy…” His voice was like the twang of that banjo.

  I was nearly rinsed off, the water cool and cloudy, when I heard the first bolt of lightning. My hair didn’t squeak yet, so I checked the light dangling over my head and dunked myself under again real quick. I wasn’t sure where my towel was.

  Papa was the first on our street to get electricity. Those droplights would be so warm and inviting at night, little balls of light hanging from the ceiling. It seemed like magic to light the house with just a pull of a cord, but in a storm, those lights would pop and fly, with sparks and whole strings of electricity shooting out. No long lines were coming out yet, but the one above the tub sent a spark a foot away from me. The taste of metal stung my mouth. Marianne at school said a man in Jasper was eating cereal at his kitchen table during an electrical storm, and a bolt of electricity came right down the bulb and landed on his head and killed him dead. I wondered if he landed in his bowl.

  Electricity was like old Mr. Gordon at church, who had a cottonball’s worth of white hair sprouting out of his ears and was prone to catching you by surprise. Sometimes that meant he’d have a peppermint stick in his pocket that he’d give you for no reason, just stick it in your face so quick you were afraid you’d lose an eye. Other times he’d thump you on the back of the head during service, even if you were sitting right beside your parents and you weren’t talking at all, just shifting a little from side to side. On the one hand you didn’t want to sit close enough to him to get thumped, but if you played it too safe, you’d never get a peppermint either. It kept things interesting.

  Normally I wouldn’t have worried too much about a storm. We got to move the buckets around to catch the roof leaks when they sprung, and we all tried to be first at spotting them. Jack was probably out there getting to do all the bucket moving—Virgie wouldn’t fight him for it.

  I even sort of liked the electrical sparks, and I loved the feel of the air when it crackled. And I liked the water. I’d never understood why I couldn’t have all of it at the same time, even if that one man happened to have bad luck while he was eating breakfast. But this time I really wanted out of that tub. I was scared, and the feeling snuck up on me like it had been waiting nearby to pounce. Nothing used to scare me. But after that baby, it seemed like I wasn’t ever safe. I didn’t know from what, but I even checked under the bed at night before we turned out the lights.

  I hopped out sopping wet, only spotting the towel draped over a chair after I’d left footprint pools across the floor. I watched the sparks fly off the lights, keeping my head turned toward them as I stepped back to the washtub and wrung my hair out. I was still standing there hunched over when Mama yanked back the sheet again.

  “What are you still doing in here, girl? You better…” She stopped all of a sudden, looking surprised, even upside down like I saw her. “Huh—well at least you’re out of the tub. Never saw a girl so stubborn about ignoring an electrical storm. Maybe you’re learnin’. Anyway hurry up and get in the sitting room with the rest of us…and get out from under these lights! If it gets much worse, we’ll go down to the storm cellar.”

  Leta THE BED WAS COOL, AND I PRESSED AGAINST ALBERT soon as he lay next to me. In the beginning, I hated the smell of the mines on him, hated the coat of dust on his skin. Then it turned into his smell, not the mines’, and there was a comfort to it.

  We sank into the mattress, with the weight of two bodies and all the tiredness and the work and the bills to be paid. Usually he’d squeeze my leg and I’d nuzzle his neck and we’d fall into sleep without saying a word. All the words and all the moving and all the thinking were used up by dark.

  That night we lay there breathing, him not complaining about my cold fee
t sliding under his long johns. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, making a nice lullaby. But neither of us slept. I could tell by the children’s breathing that they’d drifted off already. Albert rolled toward me, lifting my hair away from my ear. His breath came from above me since he breathed better when he slept on two pillows.

  “I been thinking about that baby,” he said. At night, his words blew out like smoke curling around my ear. Didn’t want to wake the little ones. “You?”

  “The girls still are,” I said, looking at the ceiling. I could hear the train whistle, and I knew I hadn’t answered his question exactly.

  “Don’t you wonder who could do it, Leta-ree?”

  Even when we were courting, he never called me “honey” or “sweetheart.” I didn’t care for sugary words anyway. But once he heard my father call me “Leta-ree,” short for my middle name, Reanne. He didn’t say a word about it, but picked it up from then on.

  “What’s the use in that?” I asked. “Wonderin’ don’t get any more food on the table than wishin’ or cussin’.”

  He pulled away from me slightly, his mouth still close to my ear, but our bodies no longer touching. “It’s likely somebody we know.”

  I thought about the women parading through my kitchen, picking through women they sat next to at church like they’d pick through a mess of greens looking for mites. “It’s poison, Albert. Nothin’ to come from that kind of thinkin’ but hate. Better to leave it be.”

  “Don’t know how you can do that,” he said, turning on his side, his back to me. “Just put it out of your mind like that.”

  He lay there grinding his teeth. Nervous habit. Liked to drove me crazy.

  “Just can,” I said finally.

  He only lay there, his whole body stiff. I couldn’t relax with him like that. “Don’t be blamin’ me for needin’ to get through the day,” I said.

  Nothing from him, but I could feel him melt a little, body slowly settling into the mattress. Then he rolled back to me, arm against my side. My feet slipped between his calves. Warm. We just breathed for a while.

  “Virgie say anything to you about that boy?” he asked against my ear.

  “I don’t think she cared much for him,” I whispered. I could almost hear his smile.

  “Why not?”

  “Snooty. Bragged he could get all the candy he wanted. He thought that’d win her over.”

  Albert shifted and stifled a laugh, maybe a groan. The ribs he’d broke in No. 5 a few years back had never healed up right, and it hurt him to lie on his left side. Didn’t have no hospital payments for that—hoped eventually UMW would get back on its feet and there might be some union insurance up at Norwood.

  “Might be a boy with free candy now, but he’ll be a man with rotten teeth,” he said. “Eat nothin’ but soup by the time he’s forty.” That idea seemed to please him, and he got silent.

  “She’s gone end up with one,” I couldn’t help saying. “Got to sooner or later.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather it be later?”

  “Why’d you let him walk her home, then?”

  “Don’t know,” he said, sighing. “Couldn’t rightly say no with him asking so politely, just walking her back from church. Seemed nice enough.”

  “Then why’re you lookin’ forward to him gummin’ his meals?”

  “A walk from church is one thing. Her bein’ sweet on a fella—fallin’ under his sway—is somethin’ different. You don’t know what’s behind the toothy smiles and combed-back Sunday hair.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “That don’t scare you?”

  Albert WHEN I FIRST SAW HER, LETA HAD HER BACK TO ME. We were in Townley, where she’s from, on land owned by neighbors of hers. They were clearing out a field that hadn’t been used in a few years, burning all the brush in a great rush of flame you could see for a mile. It was October. I’d come with a second cousin, Emory. Fuzz, we all called him, after some rabbit hunt from when we was kids. I’d only been in the mines a few years then, still smooth-faced and easy-moving.

  I walked up to the fire to warm up, along with a dozen or so others, and there was a girl standing by herself, wrapped in a shawl. Don’t remember the color. Something cheerful. She was replaiting her dark hair, and the firelight was throwing all sorts of colors on it. The waves of hair fell past her waist. That hair was like nothing I’d ever seen, and my mouth went dry at the sight.

  I couldn’t believe she was alone. Townley was as rough a place as Carbon Hill, no work but hard work, and beauty was a rare thing. But I wasn’t going to question good luck—I walked over. There must have been six other single fellows around that fire, and as far as I was concerned, they must have been blind or slow-witted.

  When she turned toward me, I was glad I’d hustled over. Virgie’s always been almost too pretty, nearly unapproachable-there’s a chance that’s my own wishful thinking. Leta wasn’t less beautiful, but she had this kindness in her face, a wide-openness. She made you want to make her smile.

  “Evenin’, miss.”

  “Hello.” She continued her braiding, her fingers working quickly and hypnotizing to watch.

  I nodded toward the fire. “Ought to stay plenty warm for a few more hours yet.”

  “I’d say so.” She’d meet my eyes for a second at a time, long enough to give me hope that she’d look a little longer next time.

  “I’m Albert Moore, here with my cousin Fuzz, that is, Emory Beasley. We call him Fuzz. He’s from around here. One of the Beasleys.”

  “I went to grammar school with Emory,” she said, acting as if I hadn’t tripped all over my tongue. Before she could say her name, an older man strode up, taking long, fast steps until he reached her side. He situated himself almost between us.

  “Son,” he nodded. “I’m Rex Tobin.”

  “Hello, sir.” I was slightly taken aback, wondering if this was an older husband.

  “See you’ve already introduced yourself to my daughter.”

  I hoped he took my smile as being friendly, not relieved. “Yessir. Albert Moore.”

  Leta hooked her elbow through her father’s arm. “I didn’t introduce myself, Daddy. Leta Tobin.”

  “Pleasure,” I said.

  It took a month of calling on her at home until we went walking by ourselves. That night I stood and talked more to her father than to her. She was embarrassed, she told me later, that she’d let down her hair, which she’d thought was slatternly. But a spark had flown into it, and she’d mussed her braid trying to put out the spark. I mentioned that spark in my prayers that night.

  Lying next to her in bed, I could feel her hair falling across my arm. Cool and heavy. I couldn’t see her face. Just the slope of an ear and a chin and the soft spot of a cheek in the dark. All shadows.

  I wondered how I really saw her that first night and how much was me shaping that memory, patting it down until it was tidy. For years I thought of her sweetness as written there in the darkness of her eyes, the softness of her mouth. Remembered—imagined?—that from that first night, I knew her small hands would mend a pain in my neck as sure as a swig of whiskey, that the crook of her elbow would fit a baby like God had carved it purely for that purpose.

  I’d been so sure of that always, sure of the rightness of it all. And that all of a sudden seemed like some made-up magic thing Tess would come up with. Did God really work like that, steer your woman into your life? Match you up like bookends? Did he steer that woman to our well or help Jesse Bridgeman remember where he kept the bullets for his gun?

  Maybe she was just a beautiful girl with a pleasing way about her. No hand of God pulling me to her, no future written on her face. It made me cold there in our bed, layered with quilts and warm with our bodies, to think that it could have been nothing but blind man’s bluff.

  “Leta,” I called to her, real quiet, hoping she’d turn to me, that I’d see her face.

  “Um.” She’d breathed out her answer, not even managing a real word.

&n
bsp; “Leta-ree.” She shifted that time, tilting her head enough that I could see her lips just barely smack together before she answered me.

  “Y’alright?” she said.

  Her voice was enough then. Didn’t need her face. My mind emptied, lay flat and calm. I settled, easing closer to her. “Fine,” I said.

  Virgie INSIDE MY HEAD, I REPEATED HOW I WOULD APPROACH Lola Lowe. “Hello, Mrs. Lowe,” I’d say. “We just thought you might like some apples.”

  I thought about saying that Mama thought she’d like the apples, but that would be an outright lie. She’d be pleased to get the apples anyway, and that might get us some goodwill. I was pretty sure she’d just say “thank you” and ask us in and we would see whether or not her new baby was there.

  I was holding the basket tight enough that it cut into my fingers.

  “You want me to knock?” asked Tess.

  I’d said I would do this. That I would talk and handle things.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I made my back ruler-straight and fixed a smile on my face and rapped twice.

  Lola Lowe said, “Leta Moore’s girls,” instead of hello when she opened the door. Even though she wasn’t really fat, she was soft all over with loose skin hanging. The backs of her arms shook when she moved. I tried not to look at them. Children lay around, outnumbering the furniture, standing, sitting, draped across the floor playing jacks. I didn’t see the baby.