by Ninie Hammon
She imagined pouring lighter fluid all over the orderly who was so rough when he moved her from the bed to the wheelchair that he left bruises on her arms. Chain him up and light a candle and set it next to him and watch it burn down to nothing ‘til it finally lit the trail of lighter fluid. He’d watch the candle burn down, too, knowing what was going to happen to him when it did. Scared of how bad it would hurt. That’s why she’d picked that fate for him, ‘cause every time she saw him come into the room, she knew how bad it would hurt when he dumped her like a sack of flour into the chair.
“… listening to me?”
Stink Bug had been talking. Rosie spent so much time in her head, imagining a world that wasn’t there, that she sometimes found it difficult to attend to the one that was. On-purpose dementia. Dementia she’d picked her own self ‘cause it was better’n living in a reality that wasn’t worth living in, hadn’t been for so long she could barely even recall that time.
Rosie looked past Stink Bug to the man standing in the doorway, a big black man with a pleasant face.
Last name Jackson.
“You know Thelma Jackson, do ya?” Rosie asked him.
He looked so surprised she thought at first he didn’t know who she was talking about. Then she realized he was surprised that she did know.
“She’s my wife,” he said, venturing into the room and doing a remarkably good job of pretending he didn’t notice how much the room looked like some hole a creature’d dug in the ground where it dragged all its prey to kill and eat them.
“Mr. Jackson, Miss Rosie has to agree to—”
“I agree, I agree. Go on now and leave us be. I decide to die while you’re gone, I’ll send him to fetch you.”
Cotton Jackson. A visitor. The husband of one of only a handful of other visitors Rosie had had since she was admitted to Sunny Acres, or Moonlit Fields or whatever they called the place these days. Every five years or so they changed the name.
“You gonna sit down or you gonna make me to look up at you til I get a crick in my neck and have to look at my lap for a week ‘cause I can’t move my head?”
He sat. The look of surprise remained on his face, so he musta expected to meet somebody ‘thout the sharp edges Rose Topple had. Most people wasn’t expecting what they got when they first seen her — “attendants,” and orderlies and the occasional actual, no-kidding, stethoscope-wearing doctor in a white coat. She had fantasies about how she’d kill them, too, every last one of ‘em, rid the earth of the bottom-feedin’ carp, scavengers, white-coated monsters who thought they was God and had the power to prove it.
Doctors who could unhook machines so people would “die with dignity.”
Her mama didn’t want to die with dignity. She wanted to live — any way that presented itself. If she’d wanted to die with dignity she’d have gone off into the woods after the Vanishing and kilt herself somehow. She didn’t. Just ten years old, but she clawed and scratched out a life ‘thout no help from nobody. Had got pregnant after them men caught her that time, and raised up her baby girl in an unforgiving world where you had to scrape out a life best as you could, taught Rosie all about that and all the rest of it, the private stuff, the magic stuff. And then she give up Rosie for the Hendersons, who lived on the other side of Hazard Bluff in Crawford County, to raise so the little girl’d have a decent life. That was dignity.
In the end, Rosie’d gone home, though, to her mama. When she was a woman growed, had gone to school and worked a job and had a life … she went back to the mountains, to Fearsome Hollow. And Mama would have lived a right smart while after that if Rose’d had the sense not to trust the white-coated monsters. Mama didn’t have to die at eighty-seven — shoot, Rosie was ninety now and still kicking and her mama was tougher than Rosie’d ever be. Rosie’d learned, of course, but it’d been too late to save Mama.
Rosie wouldn’t need savin’. She’d step on outta this life whenever and however it suited her. But right now it didn’t suit her. Right now what suited her was talking to this Cotton Jackson fella who’d come here to pick her brain about Mama. That’s all anybody ever wanted to talk about and he was upfront about it, said right out that he wanted to hear about the Witch of Gideon.
Chapter Eleven
Skeeter Burkett had been coming to this spot in the Rolling Fork River to fish since he was ten years old. Him and Buford. They hadn’t been friends that first time, when they both showed up with cane poles and plastic corks ready to wet a hook in the same spot that summer afternoon. Skeeter was a native, Buford was from Away from Here, his parents having moved to Nowhere County from Beaufort County when his granny died and left them a little piece of bottom land in Dragonroot Hollow.
Skeeter didn’t take to strangers. Nobody did. And some strange kid showing up at his spot in the river to fish was more’n anybody’d ought to have to stand. He told Buford if he valued his hide, he’d hightail it outta there and not look back.
Buford asked real sarcastic-like if Skeeter owned the river.
“I own this here piece of it.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. I been fishing here every day, every summer for the past ten summers.” Which wasn’t technically true but it was close enough. “Where was you fishing last week?” Before Buford could answer, he put in, “I’ll warrant wasn’t here or you’d a been sitting in my lap and I recon I’d remember a thing like that.”
The two of them had dropped their poles on the shore and were doing the little-kid dance, chest out, trying to look big like a rooster with its feathers ruffled. Skeeter didn’t remember who shoved first. They’d been arguing that point for going on fifty years now and wouldn’t neither one of them give an inch.
Buford said Skeeter shoved him. Skeeter maintained it was t’other way around.
The kids they’d been wasn’t all that different from the old men they grew up to be and even now wouldn’t neither one of them give an inch. After that first shove they was rolling around in the dirt, throwing wild punches that didn’t land solid anywhere, rolling over and over …
Buford always told the story that it was Skeeter rolled the two of them off into the river. Skeeter, of course, knew it’d been Buford that’d done it.
And then they was friends. Just like that. They’d both done what they had to do, stood up for themselves as would make their daddies proud. They’d give as good as they’d got and wasn’t neither one a winner or a loser.
So they’d climbed out of the river, sat down dripping on the bank, picked up their poles and tossed their worm-encrusted hooks into the water, like they’d been friends for years.
Skeeter found that he was smiling at the memory. When he couldn’t keep his gaze from straying to the empty spot on the riverbank beside him, the smile drained off his face like water out of a pail with a hole rusted in the bottom.
Buford had been in Cincinnati visiting his daughter on J-Day. They’d gone fishing the day before, though. Sat quiet side-by-side on the riverbank, in that way of men who’d known each other for so long wasn’t no need to mess up communication with talk. Skeeter’d caught enough fish for supper, had ridden Buford hard that he was gonna go home hungry.
Now, he sat on the riverbank thinking about the exchange — “How can a man sit here all afternoon and not get a single nibble? You done lost your mojo.” Mojo was a word they laughed over, one of them words the young ones used that the two old men’d snatched for themselves because it was a right handy word to use in the right circumstance.
Hadn’t been but two weeks, of course, this Jabberwock thing. It could roll back out of here any time now. Any time.
It wouldn’t, though. Skeeter didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. That woman who’d got all up in Viola Tackett’s face at that meeting said folks was vanishing and he knew that to be true, too. Folks was disappearing, and it’d keep happening ‘til wasn’t nobody left.
And would that be such a bad thing? No sense sitting out here by himself for the rest of his life.
He’d rather disappear and be done with it.
He reached up and wiped tears off his cheeks — the glare off the water’d made his eyes water, that’s all. He seen it then. Something had washed downriver from Ironwood Mountain and got hung up in the reeds about fifty yards upstream. A big something.
He approached it, but wouldn’t let himself know what it was, even when he knew for almost certain, until he’d got right up on it and there wasn’t no denying the truth of it. It was a body. A woman drowned. Wasn’t no way to tell who she was, though, ‘cause wasn’t no face left on the front of the head. Skeeter turned his head aside and lost his breakfast soon’s he seen that part. Then he took out running best as he could across the field to the neighbors, the Reynolds. Them boys was gonna have to help him get that dead woman out of the river ‘cause she was fat as a boar hog.
Chapter Twelve
The man got right to it. Rosie appreciated that. Cotton Jackson didn’t pussyfoot around, didn’t try to make it sound like he really was interested in Rose and not her mother. He sat down, looked her honest in the eye and wanted to know what her mama’d told her about Gideon.
“Oh, she told me everything. When I’s a little girl, she told me about her whole life. Musta told me a hundred times. Five hundred. Wasn’t nothing else to talk about. Told me so often that when I think about it now, it’s almost like it was me and not Mama lived it.”
Lily’s cough is better today. Some days, she hacks and hacks, makes such a racket Mama makes her go outside to keep her from waking wee Willie from his nap. Hawks up huge hunks of black goo that feel like they’s ripping a hole out of her chest when they finally come loose.
Today, Rory went down with Pa. At twelve, her brother is only two years older than she is but he’s a lot bigger so the foreman would rather have Lily. She can squeeze into places Rory can’t, can get between the coal wagon and the shaft wall when don’t look like there’s enough room for a rat to get through. Won’t be long ‘fore Rory’s so big they’ll put him to work with the men and then Lily will have to go down every day. And then the cough won’t never get better, breathing the coal dust in the mine for ten hours a day every day, it won’t never ease up.
But she can breathe today and there’s that and she ain’t gonna think about later. Ma says ain’t nothin’ to be gained from borrowing trouble. The Good Book says every day has enough trouble of its own ‘thout you going out there into the future and hauling a load of it back with you into today.
Soon’s Ma takes the basket of laundry out into the backyard to hang on the line, Lily sneaks away, wants to see what happens when Mr. Milliken from MAC comes. He’s the one who’ll get to decide what to do, of course. Monroe Addington Coal decides everything — where you live, when you work, what you get paid — settles up your account with the company store.
Pa hadn’t never been able to get square with the company, not one time since he’d brought her and Rory and Ma and the twins down from McDowell County. The company’d hired a couple dozen miners from the Flat Top fields in West Virginia, paid off what they owed and set them up with houses in Gideon, promised they could work off the debt in a year. Course, they never did. They had to eat, put clothes on their families, had to buy everything from the company store and at the end of every month what they owed was always more’n what they’d earned in wages. Even when Rory worked with Pa, and then Lily. Only one of the twins was able to work, the other one always poorly, lips blue and couldn’t hardly do for herself at all. But even with little Sarah working sometimes, there was always more owed to the store than the company owed them.
When Lily rounds the corner beside the O’Leary house, she sees him, and wonders as she so often has if the devil really is a man — the mine foreman, Horace Tackett. He has an ugly, mean face with bright blue eyes that look at you like you’re a smashed slug he’s wiping off the edge of his shoe so’s he won’t track the goo into the house. He calls the Irish miners and their families “mackerel snappers.” Says they should be glad of mining jobs deep down in holes under the mountains ‘cause they smell so bad wasn’t no other work they could do. He says every business run by decent folks had signs out front, “No Irish need apply.”
Mr. Tackett always makes sure the miners know he’s the biggest frog in the pond. Folks say he has bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling of one whole room in his house in Killarney, claim he has read every one of them. He likes to prance around, lording it over the miners, is always making fun of them. He calls them superstitious bobolynes — fools — because they b’lieve they’s haints in the mist and are a’feared of them. He says ain’t no such thing, that being scared of haints is like being scared of the “Jabberwock.”
Course didn’t nobody know what a Jabberwock was — that was the point of him saying it. Proving he knew things the miners didn’t, was smarter than they was, better than they was. Come from some book, he said, a pretend creature in a story. Said the haints was like that, nothing but made-up monsters only stupid people believed in.
Lily knew the haints wasn’t make believe. They was real. She had heard them her own self with her own ears! Lots of times. It was the horriblest thing she’d ever heard. It was always at sundown, when the mists formed above the creeks and in the trees. Her house was on the edge of town and she could hear the haints calling out to each other, crying in the nearby woods. Her mama’d always hold the little ‘uns tight in her lap and rock fiercely back and forth in her rocker, hollering out Scripture and singing hymns nonstop until the sounds was gone.
Horace Tackett laughed at their fears, but he didn’t laugh when Rufus Giddings come running out of the mine yesterday, hollering and carrying on about what he’d found. When folks heard, they got so up in arms about it they was near to hysterical. The miners flat-out refused to work. Mr. Tackett couldn’t calm them down, so he’d called in his boss, Mr. Milliken, to talk to them.
By the time Lily gets to the center of town, a large crowd is already congregated at the meeting place: the Carthage Oak. The gigantic gnarled tree must be almost a hundred feet tall, with limbs spread out from a trunk so huge Pa took out a tape once and measured around it, said it was nigh onto twenty feet. A big hole near the base is so large that children can play inside it.
The man from the company is already there. Mr. Tackett stands beside two big duffel bags, the ones miners use to haul their equipment — shovels, picks, helmets, headlamps, axes and lunch buckets — into the mine.
He picks them up, one after the other, and dumps all the contents on the ground. There is a clattering sound, bones clacking against each other as they fall out onto the dirt. Big bones, little bones, jawbones, leg bones, fingers, skulls and ribs, the remains of at least a dozen people — no, more than that, two dozen. The bones aren’t very big — from small people, children, too, looks like. Everybody standing near jumps back and the crowd gasps. One of the little skulls rolls like a ball toward Maggie McCarthy and she squeaks out a scream.
“See what I mean,” Mr. Tackett says. “I couldn’t get a man jack of ‘em to lift a pick soon’s we found them bones. They think the mine’s haunted.”
Mr. Milliken grimaces in disgust.
“How’d you come upon these bones?” he asks Rufus.
“I’s diggin’ at the face and knocked a hole into the back side of a cave. Wasn't very big, maybe forty, fifty feet wide and they was light shining in, around whatever was covering up the opening on the other side. Then I seen what was on the floor — bones. Skeletons of people.”
Mr. Tackett describes how he got a crew of men to dig through the thick brush and move the rock away from the cave entrance and gather up the bones. But the miners still refused to go back into the mine, afraid they’d desecrated an Indian burial ground and now the ghosts of the savages would come for them in the tunnels, slit their throats or scalp them in the dark.
“This all you found, just the bones, all in that one cave?”
“Yes, sir,” Rufus says.
Mr. Milliken mak
es a humph sound in his throat.
“Then these aren’t Indian bones. The Cherokee don’t bury their dead all together in caves. They bury them one at a time, dig holes in the ground so the bodies can nourish the earth. The Chickasaw put bows and arrows and pottery — all kinda stuff in the graves, things they'll need in the afterlife.”
He pauses, thinking, then spits out words like they taste bad in his mouth. “These must be the bones of some of them Shakers.”
He curls his mouth in a repulsed sneer, and growls, “A bunch of jitter-dancers. No-good, filthy Yankee abolitionists. They had a little town by the waterfall once ‘til the Indians killed ‘em off — good riddance.”
He gestures at the tangled pile of bones — all that remained of a whole bunch of people. The littlest skull is the size of the apples Lily picks off the tree by the creek.
“You dragged me all the way out here for this? You might as well have found a pile of rat bones.”
Lily can’t pull her eyes away from the chalky white bones. The empty eye sockets seem to stare accusingly up at the crowd of people gathered around them.
Mr. Tackett speaks up then, all arrogant-like, making it clear him and Mr. Milliken are the only people present who aren’t stupid.
“They’re afraid of haints, scared of ghosts in the mine like they was Jabberwocks sneaking up on them in the dark.”
From the look on Mr. Milliken’s face, it seems for an instant that the company man doesn’t know what the word Jabberwock means, and Lily feels a thrill of victory well up in her chest. But then he either remembers or bluffs.
“No need to fear ghosts, men,” Mr. Milliken says sternly to the miners. “There's no such thing. People leave their spirits behind when they die, their souls, sure, destined for heaven or hell. But jitter-dancers don’t leave anything behind because they aren’t people. They aren’t human. They have no souls!” He leans over and spits on the pile of bones. “Get rid of these and get back to work.”
