A Sky for Us Alone

by Kristin Russell

  “Shhh,” I said, and rubbed her back for a few seconds. “You did the best you could. He knew that.”

  “There’s a lot I wish was different,” she said.

  “You can’t think about all that right now, Mama. You just can’t.” I knew she wished Nate had never had to help her as much as he did when she stopped with the pills. It was almost six years ago, a year after her back surgery when Nate was a senior and Daddy couldn’t take off work. It was a bad time for all of us, but we got through it.

  “Tell your daddy we need help carrying him out,” she said.

  Once we had Nate dry and on the couch, Mama taped the wound on his chest with duct tape so that he wouldn’t bleed through his one nice blue shirt and dress pants that we’d bury him in. His secrets were taped shut in there too. I still needed for him to tell me so much.

  Chapter 3

  DADDY ANSWERED THE KNOCK at the door and then led the Murray brothers into the room with the casket. It was already getting light outside, and people would be arriving for the service very soon. When you bury at home without the stuff to preserve a body, things have to happen fast.

  “Might be a little tight,” Bobby Murray said, looking at Nate’s body on the couch, “but it should do.”

  He was right, Nate barely fit inside the coffin. I knew he would have hated feeling so cramped, and wished that I could set him free. It wasn’t a fancy casket, and it wouldn’t have taken the Murrays that long to make a bigger one.

  “I think it’s best if we say our goodbyes to him before everyone else gets here,” Daddy said. “If we leave it open, we’re only asking for more chatter from the neighbors.” He gave the Murrays their money, asked them to wait outside, and closed the door behind them.

  Mama stood over Nate’s casket and covered her mouth as if to muffle the sounds that were trying to come out of her. Daddy tried to steady her, but her trembling was too strong for his hands. When the crying took him over too, he hunched over Nate’s casket, covering his eyes. I stood a few yards from Nate’s feet, feeling like maybe Mama and Daddy needed to say some things to him without feeling that I was listening. He was their firstborn, and there were memories only the three of them shared before I came along seven years later. After a few minutes, Mama looked up and motioned for me to come closer. The two of them scooted aside to make room for me by his head, and then stepped farther back to give me a little of my own privacy with him.

  I thought that seeing Nate in his casket wouldn’t be any harder than seeing him on the porch or in the tub, but I was wrong. It made it even more real that he was leaving me. That he was already gone. I sat down beside his coffin on the floor and cried, my thoughts still trying to catch up with the spin of time. There were so many things I wanted to say to him, but none of them seemed good enough. Finally, I just started talking because I knew we needed to bury him soon. “Remember when you took me to see Avatar in Griggin when I was, like, ten or something, and while you were getting popcorn that kid made fun of the coat I was wearing—one of your old ones? All you had to do was walk back over to me, and he apologized before you could even ask why I was upset.” The tears slid down my wrists while I held my face in my hands and talked to him. “That was how I always felt with you. As long as you were beside me, everything was okay. And now I—” I looked at his face and mine drew so tight with crying that my head pulsed against it. “I should have been there to help you the way you always helped me.”

  The front door opened and Betsy Lawry, Mama’s best friend, walked through carrying a Piggly Wiggly bag of white roses. She rushed to Mama and then looked down at Nate’s casket and me on the floor. She wrapped her arms around Mama, and then wiped away her own tears from her face.

  “Can you give us another minute?” Daddy asked her.

  “Of course. I’ll just tell anyone who comes to wait,” Betsy said, and went back out onto the porch.

  “We should get cleaned up now,” Mama said to me, and I followed her down the hall. Daddy began to nail the lid shut. Each hit of the hammer echoed through my insides and made them ache. Mama stepped inside the bathroom and grabbed some cleaner to scrub the tub. When she leaned over, the container and white powder spilled across the floor, the sharp smell of it flying into my nostrils. Her hands shook so hard that she couldn’t keep anything in them.

  “Go lie down a spell,” I said. “I’ll do this part.”

  She didn’t answer but squeezed my arm before going to her room. I fought getting sick while I cleaned and scrubbed as fast as I could. The powder mixed with Nate’s bloodstains, and I looked away while the pink swirled down the drain. I did my best to get rid of any traces, but there were some spots that just wouldn’t ever come clean.

  I picked Nate’s clothes up off the floor, and before carrying them to our room, felt the weight of his phone and wallet in the pockets. I took them out and left them on our desk, then showered and got dressed for his funeral.

  Daddy had already taken Nate’s casket outside with the Murrays’ help, and Betsy was making coffee in the kitchen. People started filing in, and soon covered our table with casseroles, sweets, and bottles of liquor and shine. I was polite and thanked them for their kindness, but really I just wanted them all to go away. I wanted everything that was happening to stop and disappear. Daddy and Mama came back into the kitchen in fresh clothes and I moved over to the couch where I would be less obvious and wouldn’t have to talk as much. The Draughns walked through the front door and Mama Draughn gave the room a fast once-over. She walked straight toward me as soon as her eyes landed on the couch.

  “Don’t get up,” she said, leaning over and pulling me into a hug. “I hate it, Harlowe,” she said. “I hate it.”

  I wiped my eyes, but they filled again before I could finish. “I can’t see anything straight,” I told her.

  “You just hold on to us until you can.”

  Pastor John from Strickland Baptist called everyone’s attention and said it was time for the service. The air in our trailer was already hotter than it would have been without all of the bodies crammed inside, and I felt dizzy and nauseous from the heat and no sleep and the constant pang inside my chest that my brother was never coming back.

  As soon as I got to the bottom of the stairs, Jacob and Red found me. Jacob hugged me first. When he pulled away, his eyes were swollen from crying and he chewed the inside of his mouth. “God, Harlowe. I don’t know what to—” he said, and stopped, looking like he wanted me to finish the sentence for him. Nate had always been like a big brother to Jacob, too.

  “I know,” I said, because it was all I could manage.

  “We’ll get through this.” He wiped his nose. “Won’t we, Red?” he said. “Nate would want us to look out for you, now. I know that much.”

  Red looked up at me and squeezed my shoulder. “It’s true. Same as y’all did for me.” It was less than a year since his daddy died in the dragline accident at the mine.

  The pastor gathered everyone around Nate’s grave next to Grandma Smithson’s in our front yard. While I walked toward it, part of me felt like it wouldn’t move with me, but was staying behind. Listening to the pastor’s voice and looking at our friends and neighbors, time sped up and slowed down, all at once. The words came to me through a long tunnel, and only some of them made it all the way, the others lost where I’d never remember them. I spent most of Nate’s funeral thinking that it couldn’t really be happening. I had seen him, held him, and cleaned his blood, but all of those things felt like a movie I should have never seen. Pastor John led the group in singing “This World Is Not My Home” and then said a final prayer. I wanted to scream that it was too fast a goodbye, that it couldn’t really be over, but I stared straight ahead, swayed on my feet, and wiped the mix of sweat and tears from my face.

  “You all right?” Jacob cleared his throat. “You look like you might pass out. Should we get you out of here?”

  “Yeah,” I said, wishing I could just lie down. “Let me tell Mama.” While I
walked through the crowd, I nodded at the people brushing my shoulders and offering condolences, but kept my sight straight ahead on her.

  In her hands she held one of the white roses Betsy brought and looked down at Nate’s casket, already in the ground. She pulled me to her side before dropping the flower on the cedar box. I hugged her and wished that I could say something to make her feel better, but I knew those words didn’t exist for either one of us. I was just about to tell Jacob that I’d changed my mind about leaving when she said, “You were strong, Harlowe. I know it was awful for you to see him that way.”

  “Not any worse than it was for you though,” I said.

  “You need to get away from the crowd now, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Just promise me you’ll be careful. Stay to yourself, understand?”

  “Of course,” I said. She meant don’t go looking for Tommy.

  While I walked over to Jacob’s wheeler, I realized that Amos Prater hadn’t come. You would have thought that he’d at least show up for the funeral of one of his best employees, especially if he cared anything about clearing Tommy’s name from it.

  Chapter 4

  JACOB DROVE US UP to Falk’s Crag. I put my feet on the dash and closed my eyes. The wind cooled my skin a little but couldn’t soothe my mind. Red tapped my shoulder from the back seat and handed me a lit joint. I only took half a hit before passing it over to Jacob. Getting high wouldn’t unscramble my thoughts, and adding paranoia to the mix was sure to make everything worse. Jacob drove pretty fast up the trail, and I jumped at the sound of low-hanging tree limbs snapping above us. When he parked in our usual spot in the middle of the clearing, I took a deep breath and cleaned the red dust from my face with the edge of my shirt.

  Without saying anything to either one of them, I got out and started walking. We’d all been here together only a week before, drinking and goofing off with some fireworks left over from the Fourth. Now, it all seemed like a waste of time. I stopped walking where the trees opened, and looked down across our valley. To the right lay the mines and two big swaths of brown rock where the mountain had been cut clean into for the coal beneath it. They were each almost a mile across, speckled with a few of the twenty-story draglines that carry the rubble away to the valley fills spilling out onto the surrounding land. I’d never seen a twenty-story building before, and when I’d first heard the phrase as a kid I thought it meant there were twenty different tales about how those things got so big.

  Nate and Daddy had said there were plans for a couple more surface mines before next year. Soon, it seemed there’d be nothing left of our mountains to remove. Used to be, you couldn’t see anything from here but trees that grew tall and thick. Now there were patches and holes of brown where once there was only green. The replanting efforts didn’t last long, even though it was supposed to be upheld by law. Like most things in Strickland, no officials ever came back to monitor it. I guess in the grand scheme of things we seemed too small to matter much.

  “You’re standing a little close to the edge there,” Jacob said.

  “I was just thinking the same,” Red added. We started calling him Red after he spray-painted daisies in place of red roses and left them in Missy Higgins’s locker for Valentine’s in sixth grade. When she opened the door, the flowers fell on her new white jeans and left red streaks all down her thighs that sent her screaming. Red didn’t get the girl, but his nickname stuck better than the paint did.

  I took a few steps backward. “Thanks,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”

  “We got ya covered,” Jacob said, and took a flask from his pocket. He wiped his mouth after a sip.

  When he passed it to Red, the open cap rattled in his trembling hand. I could tell he was trying to hold things together for me as best he could, but it was getting harder for him to do.

  “Do you need to talk about last night or anything?” He looked down at his feet.

  “No. I don’t think so. Except. Powell was wrong. If Tommy found Nate somewhere and brought him home to us because it was right, then why wouldn’t he have said something? Nate was shot in the chest, not in the head, and there’s no way that he would ever—” My voice rose and then cracked, and I stopped to steady it. “He had too much going for him, he just wouldn’t.” I realized I was rambling, trying to piece my thoughts together as they came to me, however jagged the edges were.

  “Was anyone else with Tommy?” Jacob asked.

  “No, he was alone. Unless someone was hiding in the truck. He didn’t seem worried about me recognizing him, though.”

  “Because he knows you can’t do shit. Nothing ever sticks to Praters,” Red said.

  “Last time Amos was in prison was a joke,” Jacob said. “They held him for, what, two days for killing his brother Charles on Christmas at the founders’ parade? Self-defense my ass.”

  “They got everyone on their line one way or another. For mine jobs, pill poppers, and whatever else Amos is bringing in now,” Red said.

  “You can’t say all the pills are coming from him,” Jacob said. “That’s like saying all the shine in Strickland comes from one mill, when everyone here can make it with their eyes closed. There’s the pain clinics, and doctors, too.”

  I rubbed my forehead to try to make the ache go away. “Still, I’m sure they’re making more from pills than the mines or logging or anything else now,” I mumbled, wishing I hadn’t brought any of it up.

  “Seems like all it would take to put them away is one person knowing where they keep everything,” Red said. “At least by the FBI, or someone like that.”

  “No. Amos is too smart to have some warehouse they could bust wide open,” Jacob said.

  I turned away from them and looked out into the holes of our valley again. I wanted them to stop talking, but what Red said got me thinking.

  I jumped when he shrieked behind me. “Did you see that?” Red pointed to the brush ahead when I turned around.

  “It’s just a garden snake,” Jacob said, and took another swig from the flask, then coughed. “No rattlers out here in the open.”

  Red was terrified of rattlers, with good reason, since his grandfather was a snake handler who finally died of the fate he’d always tempted. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Sorry, Harlowe. You can come to my place if you don’t want to go home yet.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m ready to go. Drop me at the Sip N Sak if you don’t mind, Jacob.” The conversation and the sun against my back made me feel sick. “I need a cold Coke and a different view.”

  Chapter 5

  THE PAINT ON THE side of the cinder-block building flaked away, and where there used to be letters spelling “Sip N Sak” there were now only gray spaces left behind. Mrs. Devin leaned over the counter and flipped through a magazine. She looked up at me over the rims of her glasses when she heard the door chime, and pity filled her eyes. I had hoped that maybe we wouldn’t have to talk about Nate, but I also knew I’d be answering a lot of questions for a while to come.

  “Get over here, Harlowe,” she said, and stepped out from the register to hug me. “Won’t ask you how you’re doing. I can’t stand it when people ask questions when the answer is plain enough.”

  Since her husband, Kenny, died in a blasting accident—got trapped after an explosive went off and then died from the fumes, the report told her—Mrs. Devin was always the first one to support mine widows, but also anyone who suffered tragedy in general.

  She went in for the hug and I let her, even though it made me feel a little worse. I hoped I wouldn’t stay stuck in the sadness the way she had all these years. I was sure Nate wouldn’t like that at all.

  The bell on the door chimed, and I broke the hug before she did. I didn’t turn to see who was there, but instead scooted over to the back aisle of pickled vegetables and eggs in case it was someone I didn’t care to see. I stared at the dusty jar of pigs’ feet and wondered how long they’d been there and who the hell still ate them.<
br />
  “Can I help you?” Mrs. Devin asked, which meant she didn’t know who had walked in. That never happened. Nobody came through Strickland on the way to somewhere else. It was a dead-end street that ran straight into the mines.

  “I hope you can help us,” a girl’s voice said. I couldn’t see the door from where I was hiding behind the pickles. “My little brother might chew my hand off if we don’t get something for him fast. Omie, give this lady our list, please.”

  I stepped around the edge of the aisle only long enough to steal a quick look at them. There were two heads of blond hair. Hers was long and straight, and the little boy at her side had a thick bunch of it sticking out in all directions.

  “Let’s see what you need here.” Mrs. Devin straightened her glasses and held up the piece of paper. “Well, we don’t have everything, but we got most,” she said.

  “As long as it’s not moldy or expired, it will do for the night.”

  I glanced back at the dusty pigs’ feet again.

  “I’m sure we look a mess right now,” the girl added. “We’ve been traveling all day.”

  “You got Cocoa Puffs?” The little boy stood on his toes and shouted up at Mrs. Devin.

  “Hush,” the girl said. “Remember what we talked about.”

  “Mind my manners,” the little boy said, and swung one of his feet back and forth in front of the other.

  Part of me wanted to sneak out the door without them noticing. I was red-eyed, worn down, and in no state to make a good impression, but the rest of me wanted to stay and find out more about them. It felt a lot better than it would back at home.

  “Harlowe, will you come on out here and help them find what they need?” Mrs. Devin yelled, and settled my question for me.

  I looked down at the wheeling dirt on my shirt and ran my hands over my mussed-up hair, then walked over to where they stood. The little boy smiled up at me right away. The girl looked aside from the piece of paper she was holding, with a funny expression on her face that made me realize my mouth was open, so I shut it fast. I must have looked as surprised as I felt. I couldn’t help it, because the blue of her eyes was startling. That along with the fact that she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, and I don’t mean just in Strickland—prettier than anyone on TV too. It was a lot to take in. On that day in particular.