It Happened in Silence

by Jay, Karla M

  “Hobos. They’ll jump one of the freight cars behind, catch a free ride.”

  Is that illegal? I write small, not wanting to fill my paper. Hmm. Maybe they will distract the policemen.

  “Sure. But the railroad detectives are too busy to catch them all. This joblessness. Thousands of men set loose, looking for jobs anywhere a train will take them.”

  The headlines I read back home say the illusion that the country enjoyed prosperity had run its course. Menfolk, who had served during the war, have set out foraging for work anywhere they can find it. Foraging. Makes me think of those poison mushrooms. That sinful Mr. Coburn. The start of all my troubles.

  Anyway, not much ever changes for us in our mountains, but the bold headlines from the valleys below say men are feeling as useless as buttons on a hat.

  Ms. Alice Burns smooths her blue skirt.

  “You’re meeting your brother, and I’m meeting my beau in Gainesville.”

  No wonder she seems like she has her trotting harness on, going someplace special.

  I take up the pencil again. You getting married?

  “Not while we’re in the South, but yes, once we return to St. Louis. He’s a defense lawyer there and often writes for the St. Louis Post. I work for the new Legal Aid Society. I’m a social worker. But right now, I just want to relax and let my mind go. Do you drink?”

  She reaches into her bag, and I worry she’s gonna offer me alcohol. I quickly shake my head no. I’m already in trouble with the law.

  “Good. You’re too young.” She bumps my shoulder and winks. “But if you ever find yourself in a speakeasy, order a Gin Gimlet. It’ll put the razz in your jazz. Anyway, I’ll bet you enjoy a little chinwag about what women think.” She chuckles, holding up a magazine, Town Topic.

  “Gossip is the new drink everyone’s clamoring for. The articles are frivolous, but tabloids like this are quite popular.”

  She hands me a magazine. The publication’s contents are probably suggested by the cover—a good drawing of two women, their shoulders naked, one reading the magazine while the other reads over her shoulder. Right under the words, The Journal of Society. They’re surrounded by ads for flowers, fancy dresses, and Bromo-Seltzer which is announced as a cure for “club, banquet, and holiday headaches.”

  Mama and I would have gotten a laugh looking through this magazine. Sadness tugs at the corners of my mouth.

  I glance out the window as layers of dark-blue mountain fly past, stacked afar off. I try to imagine the world I know nothing about. A Golden Rule person, washed in the good Lord’s commandments of right and wrong, could lose their way in the pages of a magazine like this. I don’t want to offend Miss Burns, so I open the magazine and slowly flip pages. The buy-me temptations are boxed in lacy designs around the stories. I read that La-Mar Reducing Soap will wash away my fat and take years off my age. I can apply WINX eye makeup to look more mischievous or choose from one of eleven scented tins of Rigaud rouge.

  Mama and I would’ve laughed over these, and Ruthy would cluck her tongue at the shamefulness of women so caught up in their appearance. We all know these products are as useless as the H in ghost.

  Miss Burns is reading over my arm.

  “Oh, don’t do this one.” She points to an ad with a sad woman viewing a man walking out the door. It reads, “Spoiled marriage? You must have neglected your feminine hygiene. Use Lysol Feminine Douche to put the loveable back in you.” She adds, “I had a friend end up in the hospital after trying that.”

  The ads feel wrong. Why are strangers shaming women for every part of their life?

  I fumble for my pencil and write, Are women sad about these messages?

  “Not all. But in my opinion, it does strike a chord with way too many. I personally don’t like these advertisements, but they pay the cost to keep the magazine going. There are some important articles in here women need to read. There’s one about women taking new kinds of jobs and not just keeping with the professions of schoolteachers, social service workers, nurses, or secretaries. Like me. I lead a growing women’s group taking on social issues. You could open a storefront, Willow. What would you sell?”

  Her perfume floats around me. Something from the sweet rose family. My mind is spinning with so many newfangled notions, big oak-tree ideas for a girl no more than an uncurled fern, hoping for a sliver of sunlight. The thought that I could own a store was as far-fetched as turning over a frog and finding udders. And thinking too much of oneself and too little of others is the hefty sin of arrogance. The devil’s pride.

  “What’s your passion? Is it writing a book? Art? Everyone has a dream”—she shifts to face me—“For me, I want every woman to be educated. White, black, blue, or red.”

  Miss Burns is a very knowledgeable lady if she knows about the blue people in the deep hollers of Kentucky. Forever, they’ve hidden from outsiders, like it was a command from God Almighty.

  “Women need to know they can do whatever they want without being told they don’t have the sense to make decisions. And voting.” Her face is flushed with pink. “Women won that right in this country eight months ago, but did the state of Georgia let its women have a say last November? No ma’am. They did not. Our government has a love affair with its history of chains.” She sinks back into the seat and closes her eyes.

  Seems to me she’s worn her words out. But my heart did get riled up with her ideas. To calm my stormy pulse, I settle my eyelids to darkness, then picture fluttering green leaves dancing to a pleasant breeze in the tops of trees. And think. People in towns and cities have mighty demanding worries. Keeping a husband by putting sink cleansers up your private parts, women starting businesses alongside men, and the state of Georgia still owns too many chains. I shake my head, trying to clear the jumble of concerns Miss Burns planted there. We have only three worries back home—uncontrollable weather, uncontrollable crop failure, and uncontrollable death. Other than that, we pull joy from each morning and enjoy contentment with each night.

  I watch Miss Burns’s head drop to the side. She’s asleep. I was so taken up by her I haven’t noticed the others aboard. Three rows up and facing my way, two boys not much older than me play cards on the seat between them. They wear tweed derby hats, loose jackets, and dressy britches. When one looks my way and nudges his friend, I drop my eyes and feel my face flame six shades to Sunday. Their laughter lingers too long, bouncing along the curved ceiling of the train.

  An old couple sleeps holding hands, and I think of Mama and Poppy. It was a rare evening when they didn’t have some hand-holding time, rocking on the porch or in the parlor by the stove. I worry about Poppy. He doesn’t know how to do for himself with household chores unless we’re there. What if he was alone in the cabin and something should befall him?

  Thomas Monahan, the man who shod everyone’s mountain horses, died after he broke his back trying to mend a hole in his spongy barn roof. The coroner said Thomas, who lived alone after his wife died, was most likely alive and suffering for two to three days. The scratches and drag-trails in the dirt told how hard he tried to return to the cabin before dying. Was only when he missed Charlie Howser’s shoeing appointment that anyone went looking and found him twenty feet from his front steps. What a sad day. Jesus, please take care of my poppy.

  The rest of the coach hosts young couples, some with children. Men in fine suits are reading or talking to each other. The man seated in front of me looks to be traveling alone. He’s kinda lardy with a head to match. The gray hair that remains fixed above his left ear is brushed up his head, over the top, and ends at his right ear in a few cobwebby strands. He sure needs to buy a hat. That overstretched hair is not gonna keep that head warm. He explores the fleshly cranny of his right ear with his pinky finger, and even over the clicking of the train’s wheels, I can hear the faint sucking sound as he twists it in and out.

  The train rumbles on, bellowing qu
ick horn bursts at railway crossings. I eat the peanut brittle, and my throat tightens round the thought this was the last of the candy Mama made. Miss Burns doesn’t stir until the vehicle slows and comes to a hissing stop at the Gainesville Depot. She stretches. Smiles at me.

  “It’s a new world out there. People are tired of girding up their loins. They are looking for freedom and fun.” She pats my leg. “You and your brother stay safe but go enjoy yourselves.” She digs around in her pretty bag again and hands me a card with her name and phone number. “If you ever need anything, write or have someone call for you. I like to help brave young girls like you.”

  Miss Burns has no way of knowing that my brother and I face a long stretch of mourning. First, I have to shake the trouble I’m in. I smile, tap the card, and touch my chest.

  “Again, my pleasure.”

  People are leaving the carriage. I follow them out onto the small raised platform and try to stay in the middle of the group as I check my surroundings. Had Deputy Vissom supposed by now I’ve caught a train, or does he think I returned home? I have a heap of stories to straighten out soon as I get back.

  Signs point me to a waiting place for Marietta. This platform is crowded, so it’s easy to hide in the mess of folks standing here. Across the empty tracks, I spot Miss Alice Burns. She’s chattering away, walking next to a light-skinned Negro man dressed in a fine suit and hat. He’s smiling wide. Their bodies are bumping into each other. Playful-like. Her face is rosy, and she looks plumb happy next to her beau. I picture them married, saving $600 to buy a new house from the Sears, Roebuck & Company catalogue. They’d both have their very own typewriters at home, but maybe that’s pushing my fantasizing mind too far. One is enough. Her beau holds open the door to the street, and they disappear into their forever after.

  The next part of my travels goes smoothly. I sit alone in a near-empty coach, content to watch the stations and farms blur by.

  And just like that, I’m stepping off the train into dusty air, onto a crowded platform in Marietta filled with noise like I never heard. Even my breathing sounds louder here.

  But I don’t have time to give another thought about the city as a man grabs hold of my arm and spins me around to face him.

  “Willow Stewart?” He’s a policeman with an angry scar running down one side of his cheek.

  I swallow. Must remember to breathe and do nothing to let him know he spoke my name.

  He pulls my hat off, and my braid tumbles free.

  “Sure as shootin’ you’re the gal they’re all in a fuss about. You’re slipperier than oysters in a pan of butter.” He pulls me away from the arriving train. “Before, you were just going to a nice home for other girls like yourself.” He shakes his head. We’re now outside the station and he’s walking me to a police car. “Now you’re going to jail until the judge decides what’s best for you.” His voice is swampy green.

  There’s no dam for my tears. They fall unbidden from my eyes as shame sits heavy in my soul. Not only is Briar not coming home, but I’m not either.

  Briar Stewart

  “I piss in the barrels ever so often,” Tuck says to me while we walk the outer edges of today’s cutting. “’Bout the only way to get the mad out of me without getting killed.”

  I chuckle. “Thousands of barrels going to the naval store’s depot. It’d be hard to trace, I reckon.”

  A light rain, not much more than a mist, dims everything afar off. The thunk of hacks V-cutting the pines sounds like woodpeckers at a once-a-year church picnic. All’re talking and trying for the world to catch up on gossip before the day ends. I stop to check the fresh cuts and cups. Don’t think we’ll ever get this part done by the end of the day if’n the rain drives us out now. I study the sky. Looks heavy with darkening clouds. It sure ain’t gonna blow over. Taggert gave the order. No matter the weather today, we keep at it.

  “Keep their sorry asses out there. These white and black boys can work in the rain…they ain’t gonna melt.”

  Taggert’s under the tent overhang, smoking. Busy making his way through the logbook, corrupting the figures on the amount of sap collected. He answers to the Pearson-Gysse Company that has a contract with County Prison Camp. He needs to make sure they don’t go looking elsewhere for workers if they don’t like the results. And that would put us all back in stripes, busting rocks or mining coal, and Taggert back at the prison as a guard. No more special treatment for him. No girls brought in for his abuse. Same old food. Same old shit-tasting cigarettes.

  A small creek chucks down the hill nearby and I think of them Russian brothers. Tuck gets his revenge for the unfair sentence he carries by pissing in the merchandise. But I got mine by knowing I helped the fellers out a week back with Taggert none the more aware. For those few hours that day, I was a free man. I’d never felt so good.

  “Nice job,” I say as we pass the cutters and bucket carriers.

  We’ve got a solid laboring crew now. Turpentining is damn hard work. Fourteen hours some days. But most of these here convicts done seen the other penal job. They understand fresh air beats rock dust in your eyes and mouth. And nightly beatings by the lead whipper just for his amusement. Hopefully, all the beatings and killings is behind us.

  Lucy, the friendly magpie up at our cabin, is most likely still tapping the window glass in the morning, wising Mama or Ruthy it’s time to throw out the dinner leavings from the night before. Poppy said magpies live some twenty-five, thirty years. This bird’s been round at least ten.

  Lucy set up her home in the white maples round the family cemetery before reaching the bald outcropping on our homestead. Each year, she brought the young’uns around once they learned their wings. Got so Lucy recognized each of us as different and knew what we tolerated. When Poppy played his fiddle, Lucy stood on the porch rail and shifted her feet, a dance of some sort. Rewarded with corn, she two-stepped many a summer’s eve. And she teased Mama by pulling loose the wooden pins from the clothesline.

  I recollect the day that dang bird tugged Billy Leo’s empty boots off’n the porch by their laces, making him search high and wide for ’em. All’s while cackling from a tree branch above as he come closer and closer to finding them. Sometimes, she hopped behind me down the dirt rows I laid out in the garden, grabbing up bugs and worms, twittin’ at my back when it was slim pickings.

  But it was Willow who got the closest. Lucy ate berries out of my sister’s open hand.

  Tuck elbows me. “You thinking ’bout the gal back at Miss Lily’s Threads & Things? Got a stupid smile on your face.”

  “Naw. Was thinking ’bout my baby sister, though she ain’t a baby no more. She’s fifteen now.” I shake my head. Seemed not long ago we was running in the woods, talking, using our hand signs. “Trained a big magpie to eat outta her palm.”

  We reach the edge of the cutting area and head uphill to circle back another way. The air is thick with steam, but heavier rains stay to the horizon for now.

  “She have a sweetheart?”

  “Not when I left fifteen months ago. Could’ve changed by now.”

  It crosses my mind that when I get out of prison in September, I’ll head on up to visit the folks, spend a day or two before leaving west again. We was a close family, even though I know I disappointed Poppy most my life. Couldn’t never live up to Luther Junior’s skills. He could do pert near everything, and I looked up to him too. Well, mostly. He didn’t know enough about gases in mines to turn back when someone yelled. Weren’t the unlit dynamite in his hands that blew him clean apart. Was the firedamp, the methane gas from the new opened chamber behind him that exploded.

  “Your sister better looking than you?” Tuck says it with a smirk on his face. “Might need to come calling one day.”

  “Willow’s a natural beauty. A rose with red hair.”

  Tuck slashes at underbrush with a stick.

  Month ago, we had to
clear the underbrush before starting. Back then, the land was jigsaw puzzles of hard clay. Fires start easily round turpentine. But with our off and on rain, it ain’t been a problem of late.

  “Tell me again where you live.” He chuckles but I think he’s only half joshing.

  “Hold on there. You’re off to lawyer school far, far away. And, I need to add, she can’t talk.” I raise my eyebrows in an aren’t-you-surprised movement. I’m trying to keep her from heartbreak down the road.

  “Not a word, or she is shy?”

  “Not nary a one. Never has. Never will.”

  “I’m sorry. That must be hard.”

  “Not at all. Willow is smarter than the rest of the family. Reads everything she can lay her eyes on. Is a great writer. And we’ve a made-up hand speaking we use. Mama, Willow, and me is the best at it, but the others cipher good ’nough.”

  He shakes his head. “Well, don’t that just beat all! Show me something.”

  I move my hands. “That there means ‘Let’s go fishing.’”

  He does the movements. “Like you’re casting fishing line.”

  “Yup. This is ‘A storm’s a-brewing, we need to hurry.’” He copies my clawed fingers, moving up and down in front of me, then fingers cutting off to the side.

  “I like this.” He’s running his fingers round in the air in front of him. “How many of these do you have?”

  “Me and her can talk all day. Specific names, she’s got to write down. Like if she reads something in the newspaper before me. She’s gotta write the names of places or people I ain’t heard of.”

  “Show me more.”

  “Sure.” I teach him a dozen more sayings as we move onto a deer trail, watching the laborers off to either side. “We spell with letters in the air, but you gotta do it backward, so’s the person facing you sees it right.”

  Tuck tries out his name in front of him. He slows for the K. “Makes you think, don’t it?”