The Well and The Mine

by Gin Phillips

  Jack used to fit in the palm of my hand, his neck-to-tail-bone no bigger than wrist-to-elbow.

  Neck snapping forward, eyes heavy and dry. The fuzzy memory of a soft bed, Leta’s back against mine. The thought of scrubbed skin and sun on my face and clothes not stiff with dirt and sweat—it all made my thoughts jumble. Usually I didn’t have many thoughts while I loaded, made my mind go blank and still. But those days with Jack in the hospital, my brain balked at the strict schedule, wandering off to dream even if I was awake and shoveling. I’d see Jack chubby and bawling, held up in one hand like a gift. Then I’d see him in the hospital bed. I wondered if that tooth he lost was still on the side of the road. More than once I got it into my head that I should try to find it after my shift was over. Then I’d come to my senses. Did that truck driver have nightmares like Tess when he got back safe to his warm bed that day? I hoped so. I hoped he’d gotten a good look at Jack’s round face, seen how small he was across the shoulders. I hoped he couldn’t shake the memory of him.

  My feet went to sleep every so often and I’d bend my knees a different way. But that only let the air hit them, aggravating the damp that had seeped in. Thousands or millions or more years the coal was here, laying and waiting for us. Us with lives no more than a flicker and a flash. Really only fuel ourselves, burned up quick enough, the moving on to somewhere else as something else, something less solid. Smoke and warmth drifting up.

  Fuel for the fire, sacrificed like Abraham offered up Isaac. Held his boy on an altar and readied hisself to slit the boy’s throat. Jack again, wiggling in my hand.

  “Hand’s bleedin’, Albert,” called Ban behind me. Sure enough it was—I’d scraped my knuckles hard enough on the wall to take the skin off. But the dirt would clog up the blood. I left it be.

  Jack grinning up from his hospital bed, proud of his casts and his bruises. I did that to him, made him think pain was a trophy. A friend. It was more of a reminder. A constant nagging whispering to me that it would win some day, that my body—stubborn and weak and hateful and all-important—wouldn’t have me keep it harnessed and bridled forever. It would tumble, burnt up as sure as the chunks sliding into my shovel.

  I was cold all the time. Sweaty under my arms and my back soaked, but trying not to shiver. One second I’d be digging, then a second later I’d have an auger in my hand and be drilling into the coal face. Just like that, the shovel would be out of my hand, another tool there instead. I learned to use whatever I was holding and not be too puzzled by it.

  But I started getting antsy about using the blasting caps when I was fading in and out like that.

  Wrote a little poetry when I was courting Leta. She never cared much for me saying her hair poured down her back like honey, and I felt foolish for trying my hand at it anyway. Couldn’t even write the words down proper. But I liked the sound of some things, liked how they echoed in my ears until I could feel them going down my throat. One bit I always turned around in my head was how alike we were—man and rock—black and buried underground, hardening more every day until we were chipped into bits. I thought about it when I walked into the showers, all of us looking for all the world like we were turning into what we were digging up.

  Jonah was next to me.

  “You got a sharp mind,” I said to him. Then I wasn’t sure if I had said it or thought it. So I said it again, making sure it was out loud.

  “Heard you the first time, Albert. Just took me aback,” he said. “But I thank you.”

  He didn’t seem to be looking at me, but I wasn’t bothered. “Ain’t never asked you what you thought about nothing outside the mines,” I said. “But I thought a lot about what you said about what kind of woman would put her baby in the well. Smartest thing anybody said on it.”

  He didn’t say nothing, and it might have been an hour or the next shift or another day when I thought to finish the conversation.

  “Before all this with Jack, I was wantin’ you to come over for supper.”

  “My guess is you might not be thinkin’ straight right now,” he said. He didn’t seem to be sweating at all, and his coveralls was hardly dirty. I wondered how long he’d been there.

  “Naw, naw,” I said. “I mean it.”

  He never answered at all. Then he was gone, and Ban was there or Oscar or Red or any of twenty other faces. Ban and Oscar would come over to supper if I asked ’em; they wouldn’t think I was off-kilter. I could picture their houses, their dinner tables, their wives putting spoons in the bowls of vegetables. I couldn’t see Jonah’s house inside or out. Couldn’t even think of how many kids he had for sure. But it seemed like he wasn’t never there for me to ask—just all those other faces. They’d be next to me for a while, then gone. I’d turned into one of the pillars connecting the ceiling to the floor.

  There was talk about the union still wanting a minimum weekly wage. Only a word here and there, never said too loud. Still never knew when the bosses might have ears of their own in the mines, ready to turn in anybody that mentioned the UMW. I couldn’t get worked up about it, much as I believed it was a step we had to make for anything to improve much. My mind was filled with wanting sleep, wanting home, wanting my son well, and I couldn’t seem to hold on to bigger thoughts of what John Lewis was planning. Wants pushed out the thoughts more and more every night.

  I told myself there was no shame walking into the hospital with the coal still under my nails and in the coal tattoos where the dust had settled in the nicks on my hands and arms. I felt some people looking at me, but I had no energy left for it.

  Tess I SAT AND COUNTED THE STREETCARS AS THEY PASSED by. Jack wasn’t awake, and I kept accidentally catching the eyes of people in the other beds when I looked around the room. Virgie wouldn’t leave Jack’s bedside, and there wasn’t really enough room for us and Mama, too. (At least Mama had a chair. She said it was as comfortable as a bed and she slept real well in it.) A man two beds down from Jack had a black leg that stuck out from his sheet. And next to him a boy about Virgie’s age moaned real soft all the time. So I eased myself onto the window sill looking over the street and the streetcar line. It was a big window, wide enough for me to lean back against one side and fold my knees underneath me.

  “There’s only the one, you know,” came a voice from behind me. Aunt Celia.

  I turned around and hugged her before I realized what she’d said. “Only one what?”

  “One streetcar. Same one keeps coming by on that one track.”

  I wanted to know how it moved since it looked like part train and part car, but I already felt foolish for having counted up to sixteen of them.

  “Jack got an X-ray done,” I said. “He said it wasn’t a bit like that fancy shoe fitters they have in Jasper where you can see your feet inside the shoe. This one had a screen and you didn’t have to look into the goggle doohickeys.”

  I liked the room better with Aunt Celia in it. It had felt cold before, all white and metal, with pale people and straight-faced nurses who scolded me for trying to make Jack laugh by tickling his belly. Even the nurse Virgie liked seemed nervous about me moving around too much.

  We had plenty of visitors, some coming by the house and leaving food and coming to the hospital, too. Not many people had cars, though, so we usually came home to a pile of food left on the front porch, and then we’d have maybe one or two families trickle in to see Jack while we were at the hospital. For the first time since summer, nobody brought up the dead baby. All anybody talked about was how wonderful Jack was and how terrible the truck driver was. They’d go back and forth—after saying “bless his heart” and “he’s the sweetest thing” a few times about my brother, they’d start calling the truck driver a no-account and “the worst kind of a man” and “pure evil.” Missy and her mother came, Missy’s mother wearing a fur of all things. To a hospital. (They didn’t have the maid with them, so I didn’t have to worry about what to call her.) From one day to the next you could go from being the fortunate ones because you had a po
rch full of cotton to the needy ones because you didn’t have furs or gold bracelets.

  “Can I go over there to Sloss Furnaces and see if I can catch sparks?”

  “Why would you want to do a fool thing like that?” asked Aunt Celia. I could smell peppermint on her breath, and it was lots better than snuff. They didn’t let you dip or spit in the hospital, and I figured she needed something to keep her mouth busy.

  “I’ve never seen it rain sparks like that before.”

  “You’d burn your hands, probably set yourself on fire, child.”

  “But I’d catch some sparks.”

  I wanted to get myself on the other side of that window. I wanted to see where that streetcar went. Nobody would let me out by myself, though, and Virgie didn’t want to leave the hospital. The streets had so many lights at night. And everything was bigger and louder. I couldn’t hardly take it all in.

  “Don’t you love Birmingham, Aunt Celia?”

  “Nah,” she said, the candy in her mouth clacking against her teeth, which she was probably going to rot out by the time Jack went home. “Too much dirt and racket. I get ticked off at enough idiots back home—twenty times as many idiots here to set me off.”

  “It’s so different,” I said.

  “Ain’t that what I just said?”

  I kept looking out the window, watching the big monsters of buildings stand guard over the city. “Those sparks from the furnaces could catch the wind and fly all the way to Carbon Hill. They could pick out a nice chimney, sail down like they was dropped off by a stork, then grow into big fires their very own selves.” I waved toward Sloss. “Baby fires,” I called to the sparks.

  Aunt Celia had pulled out her hunk of peppermint and was holding it close to her face. “Spit in my mouth tastes better than this,” she said, glaring at it.

  I pointed to the other side of the city, hardly hearing her. “And I bet if you climbed those smokestacks at the steel mills, you could snatch a bird right out of the air.”

  Aunt Celia kept her candy between her thumb and finger and shook it at me like she was dotting i’s in the air. “Anybody ever told you, Tessie, that you got a way of paintin’ pictures without ever puttin’ brush to paper? Might not be pictures that make any sense, but they sure can make you smile.”

  Sometimes Aunt Celia—even holding a spit-covered piece of candy—seemed like the most wonderful woman in the world to me. I liked the thought of that, of pretty pictures hovering in the air after I talked.

  “They call it the Magic City,” I told Papa on the way home one night.

  He and Mama looked at each other, tired and something else. Something sadder than tired. “Men are sleepin’ in the coke ovens here, Tessie,” he said. “Miners ain’t even got houses to sleep in if they lose their jobs. Company owns it all. Don’t care for their brand of magic myself.”

  But I did. Even with men in the coke ovens. It didn’t matter if it was ugly, it was sure exciting.

  Leta WHILE ALBERT WAS WORKING—WHICH WAS MOST ALL the time during that October—I shored up everything around the house. Funny how for once there didn’t seem to be enough to do.

  Once the children were asleep, I worked by candlelight, not wanting to waste electricity. I was keeping late hours partly to fill the nights and partly to keep Albert from seeing me mending shoes. I couldn’t seem to close my eyes for any length of time. I’d listen to the children breathe, needed to listen to them. I found myself propped up on one elbow, not wanting to lay down, much less sleep, when they were there for the watching. Jack couldn’t sleep well, shifting this way and that to stay off his arm, and not being able to rest on his leg. I’d hear him cry out in his sleep, the only time he’d cry out. About to pop his buttons he was so proud of those broken bones. The sleepy whimpers sounded all the worse because he never made a peep all day long. And I noticed the difference in the sleep sounds more than I’d ever thought I would, although the whimpering wasn’t as bad as when there were no Jack sounds at all.

  The quiet made me think what if there weren’t never more Jack sounds. Never again. Only a Jack as still and quiet as those bricks left on the side of the road. But we couldn’t go after the brick company. Albert didn’t want to. Not that I’d argue with the idea that we didn’t need to be causing people trouble, but every time I raised my head, I saw the trouble that driver had caused my boy. Albert didn’t want to hear it, but I sure wanted to say it. What I did instead was ask it, only once. When he said no, we didn’t need to be thinking on that anymore, I only nodded. Not like Celia. She nagged at him, argued with him, sighed at him. I didn’t see as that nagging moved him any more than not nagging. He’d made up his mind and that was that.

  I could keep at him, be quiet and cold and make him miserable, make us both miserable, or I could leave it be. I wanted to keep as much smoothness in our life as I could. Too much was already pulled and yanked out of place.

  So I tried to smooth out my own thoughts at least, keep them pressed and folded. For a week, there’d been the shoes to do, which at least took my mind off why I couldn’t bear to have my children out of my sight even to sleep.

  It was only five cents for one of those stick-on shoe soles, and the holes in Tess’s winter shoes was only getting bigger. But I hated to spend a single cent, at least not until Albert’s hours had slacked off and we’d paid a good chunk of the hospital bill. Not that he’d have begrudged new soles. Just the opposite. If he’d seen me here cutting a piece of cardboard to fit inside her shoe, he’d have had a fit and gone to Bill’s store himself. The cardboard only lasted a day, so I was back at the same spot every night, cutting a new piece. Tess didn’t complain, even though she must’ve felt the damp on wet days.

  More than saving money, it was something I could do. That nickel wouldn’t make much of a dent in the seventy-five dollars we owed. But it about killed me to see Albert come in half dead at all hours of the night or morning, not even knowing what time it was, just knowing his shift was done and he needed to be back in however many hours. One night he’d walked in asking what was for breakfast when it wasn’t even sunset yet. And we bought so little, it was hard to scrimp. I wasn’t going to cut back on Albert’s coffee. We couldn’t do without the dry ice for the icebox. And nothing else was bought regular. I was used to working longer days than Albert, mending or cleaning supper dishes while he sat and smoked, and I didn’t take to sitting while he sweated and strained. The empty space beside me made the bed seem harder, the clock ticking seem louder. It left me with a helpless feeling, all the worse for Jack tossing in his bed and me not able to help him.

  So I cut that cardboard perfectly, not veering in the least from the lines I’d traced around the shoe. When it was done, I was tempted to patch some more shoes whether there was a hole in them or not. But I didn’t. I didn’t even put the sewing scissors down. I held them in my lap, Tess’s shoes side by side in front of me. I didn’t blow out the two candles next to me, but I didn’t really need the light. I sat there cross-legged in the middle of the front room, no fire going, not tired, not really thinking of anything much. It was easy to not think those wide-awake nights. I could turn my mind off and be an empty body. I stayed there and felt the cold floor under me until Albert pushed the door open.

  “What’re you doin’ home in the middle of the night?” I asked, almost forgetting to whisper.

  He whispered back, head to the side, “It’s five, Leta-ree. Rooster’s about to crow any second.”

  I’d always known that rooster better than he knew hisself. I didn’t know what to say. The night pure got away from me.

  “What’re you doin’ sittin’ in the middle of the floor?” Albert asked. “And still in your nightgown. Jack alright?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “You feelin’ poorly?”

  I pushed myself to my feet, blowing out one candle and holding the other one toward Albert. Deep circles under his eyes. Even after a night of staring at Jack’s bruises, one look at Albert’s eyes sapped out a
ny bitterness I’d worked up over who ought to be paying for this.

  “Just wandered out here,” I said, knowing he wasn’t in no shape to press me on it. “When you headed back?”

  “Night shift tomorrow.”

  “So you can sleep in?”

  He nodded, already headed toward the bedroom. I followed right behind him with the candle. He’d changed after showering at the mines, so he only stripped down to an undershirt and his long johns, then fell into bed.

  “Jack sleepin’ through the night?” he mumbled, head in the pillow.

  “See for yourself,” I answered, just barely poking his side. “Tosses a little, but he’s sleepin’ good.”

  Lifting his head and turning it toward the boy took a few seconds, but he managed. His eyelids stayed open long enough for him to look over Jack from head to toe, then he flopped back down. “He knows I want to be here, don’t he?”

  “’Course he does. He knows you got to work.”

  “I ain’t seen him awake in three days. What’s he supposed to make of that?”

  “That you ain’t got no choice.”

  He pulled at the hem of my nightgown, inching me closer to his face. He’d remembered he hadn’t kissed me, and he pecked my cheek when I got low enough that he didn’t have to raise his head.

  “Shoulders sore?” I asked.

  He grunted, eyes closed. The girls weren’t moving, but I thought Virgie might be playing possum. She woke at the littlest sound. Tess slept like Jack—might as well have been carved out of wood once they hit the bed.

  “Want me to rub ’em?”

  He more hummed than grunted that time. I sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my hands together to warm them. Between the cold air and showering after every shift, the skin at Albert’s neck was dry like newsprint. The muscles underneath had turned to concrete, no give in them at all, and I knew his arms would be the same. But he started snoring before I even made it past his shoulders. Shoulders maybe harder, stronger than when I met him. Thought he could run into a rock wall and the wall’d give before he did.