Bone's Gift

by Angie Smibert

  Text copyright © 2018 by Angie Smibert

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact permissions@highlights.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Boyds Mills Press

  An Imprint of Highlights

  815 Church Street

  Honesdale, Pennsylvania 18431

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-62979-850-9 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-68437-136-5 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949841

  First e-book edition

  Design by T. L. Bonaddio

  The text of this book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro.

  H1.0

  To the Forever Girl in all of us

  September 1942

  BIG VEIN, VIRGINIA

  1

  BONE PHILLIPS FLOATED in the cool, muddy water of the New River up to her eyeballs. The sky above was as blue as a robin’s egg, and the sun was the color of her mama’s butter-yellow sweater.

  Her mother was still everywhere and nowhere Bone looked.

  She let herself sink under the water and swam along the river bottom toward shore—toward Will.

  In the shallows, her hand brushed against something hard and jagged on the silky river bottom. An image poured over her like cold bathwater. A young boy had hit his head on this rock. He struggled for air. The current grabbed at him—and her, pulling her along back in time. Bone snatched her hand away from the rock and came up for air with a gasp.

  Not again.

  The object had a story in it. This one wasn’t as bad as the first. That one, back in July, had been downright awful. Still, Bone didn’t care for the experience one bit. She felt like she’d been tossed into the river to sink or swim. And no one was there to pull her out—except maybe Will.

  As Bone stood half out of the water, trembling, eyes bored into her. Will hadn’t looked in her direction. He was still fishing from the downed log, lost in his own thoughts. Bone looked up the bank, to the road. Her cousin Ruby straddled her bicycle in one of her store-bought dresses, staring at Bone. Ruby turned away as two girls and a boy rode up on their bikes. The boy pulled Bone’s overalls off the nearby branch. Ruby grabbed them back from him and threw them to the ground. The others rode off, laughing. Ruby lingered for a moment. She picked up Bone’s clothes from the dirt and hung them back in place. With a shake of her head in Bone’s direction, Ruby pushed off after her friends.

  Bone ducked back under the brown water and shut her eyes tight. She didn’t want to see the long-ago boy hitting his head—or the here-and-now Ruby shaking hers. Bone pushed all the sounds and images down deep where she couldn’t hear or see them. Then she pictured tales of princesses, wandering Gypsies, and frontier fighters, flickering in her mind like movies. Those were the stories Bone liked to tell. Those stories calmed her like still waters.

  Silent Will Kincaid listened to her stories. His silence was better than most people’s conversation. He was like one of those big rocks out in the middle of the river she liked to sun herself on, solid and warm and always there. And her words flowed around him like the burbling waters of the New River.

  Bone surfaced next to Will. One of his overall straps dangled down in back. She reached up to tug him into the water, but his hand was already there, waiting to pull her up beside him. He hauled her onto the tree and kept fishing.

  Bone stretched herself along the trunk and let the early September sun bake dry her skin and the cut-off long johns and T-shirt she swam in.

  The lonesome wail of a train whistle blew as the Virginian wound around the bend on the other side of the river.

  “You know that big rock face over yonder?” Bone shouted above the din of the long line of coal cars rattling along the tracks.

  Will began to reel in his empty line.

  “Well, that was once called Angel’s Rest. Jilted lovers used to jump off of it and dash themselves to bits on the rocks below.”

  Will packed up his fishing gear. Bone knew he had other things on his mind, and they needed to get to the commissary before it closed. Still, she started in on a tale of two fateful lovers. It wasn’t the real story. Uncle Ash had told her a mother died trying to save her child. Bone didn’t like tales about dead mamas.

  As she wound through the end of her story, Will was climbing to the road. Bone scrambled up the bank to where her overalls still hung from a branch, thanks to Ruby. Bone hopped into them, yanking them on over her still-damp underclothes and fastening them as she ran after him.

  “And that’s why the train whistle sounds so lonesome coming around that bend.” Bone caught up with Will, and they walked along the gravel road together not saying another word. She was content in Will’s stony silence.

  A sound like thunder broke that silence. The skies were clear, and the mines were closed for another day. In the summer, the men worked other jobs, picking fruit or milling lumber, or they hunted, farmed, and fished to put food on the table. Come the first Friday after Labor Day, both the mines and schools opened. So, that sound could mean only one thing. Bone and Will raced up the road, over the train tracks, and into the coal camp.

  The thunder grew more deafening as they whipped past the tipple and the mine entrance. The sound couldn’t drown out the hoots of Warren “Jake” Lilly as he flew down the black slate pile on a sled made from a scrap of sheet metal no bigger than a hall rug. He hit the dirt and skidded some yards before he spilled out into the grass at Will’s feet. Clay Whitaker leapt down from his perch on the timber frame of the tipple, the chute that loaded coal onto the trains. He scratched out the spot where Jake’s sled had stopped its forward motion.

  “A new record,” he declared.

  Jake beamed as he knocked the coal dust and dirt from his dungarees.

  “Want to give her a try?” He nudged Will. A slow smile dawned over Will’s face, and he followed Jake and Clay. It made Bone forget where he’d be going.

  The boys climbed the slate pile in giant strides as if they were kings of the hill. Near the top, Will tugged on Jake’s sleeve and cocked his head toward Bone. The other boys stopped to consider her.

  Jake shrugged.

  “She’s just a girl.” Clay scrambled to the top.

  Bone stared at the back of their heads for a moment and reached down for a rock, half intending to hurl it at the back of Clay’s fat little head. Instead, she studied its thick veins of black sandwiched by even thicker layers of brown. The stone was more rock than coal. Like her. Her fingertips tingled. A vein of a story ran deep through the rock. But it didn’t overwhelm her. It teased her. The story was more like the faraway trickle of a stream, tempting her to come closer. She didn’t fall for it.

  Bone dug deep in her brain for a better tale. One that would make the boys (and her) laugh. One far from the one in the rock. She latched onto a story her Uncle Ash had told her the last time she was over to Mamaw’s house.

  “Well, y’all have fun without me,” she called after the boys. “I was going to tell you this story I heard about a prank gone terribly wrong.” She turned and started to head slowly toward the commissary. “It had mules and outhouses and everything.”

  She heard them stop. Jake Lilly called out her name. She kept walking.

  “All right, come on, then,” Clay relented. “It better be a good one.”

  Bone stuffed the stone in her left pocket and chased up the pile after the boys. She promised to tell the story over a cold drink at the store after they finished. “Loser buys the pop.” />
  Will beat Jake’s mark by a few inches.

  When her turn came, Bone clung to the metal and dove headfirst onto the rocks. The whang of the sheet metal against stone nearly deafened her, but she could still hear Jake and Clay cheering as she tore down the pile. Sharp edges jabbed at her through the thin metal. The coal whipped by her face. Bone held on tighter and closed her eyes. She was flying down a soft mountain of snow rather than a crag of black rock.

  She skidded past Jake’s and Will’s marks in the dirt and spilled out into the grass by the commissary.

  The boys ran down the hill and collapsed in a heap next to her.

  “Damn, Bone. Thought you’d killed yourself for sure.” Jake had a new respect in his voice.

  Clay shook his head as he scraped a fresh line in the dirt. “Another record.”

  Bone brushed the gravel from her torn overalls. Then she hooked her thumbs in the straps and strutted back toward the slag pile. She was king of the hill.

  “Your daddies ought to switch you,” a sharp voice rang out from the commissary steps, sending all the boys except Will running. It was Mrs. Mattie Albert, the preacher’s wife and, unfortunately, Bone’s aunt on her mother’s side.

  Bone beat the coal dust from her overalls, sending tiny billows of black in her aunt’s direction. It wasn’t enough to ward her off. In times like this, Bone liked to reflect on Uncle Ash’s wise words about his own big sister. He’d always say, “You can’t pick your family, but you sure as hell can pick your own nose.” He knew that got Aunt Mattie’s goat and made Bone smile.

  “Laurel Grace Phillips, whatever are we going to do with you?” Her aunt pulled out a compact mirror from her purse and held it up to Bone. “You look like a wild thing. I despair of making a lady of you.”

  Bone saw long, damp, stringy blond hair. Tanned and freckled skin. Muddy long johns and dusty, torn overalls. She stuck her tongue out at herself.

  “No wonder they call you Bone.” Mattie Albert snapped her compact closed and put it back in her purse.

  Bone couldn’t remember exactly when folks started calling her that. It might have been after Mama died. Bone didn’t care. She liked her name.

  “Laurel looks fine, Amarantha.” Daddy stepped out onto the store’s porch with a new pouch of tobacco in hand.

  Aunt Mattie stiffened at her given name, as she always did when Bone’s daddy called her that. And he always called her that.

  “Now, Bay, we all know you’ve done as well as you could raising Laurel without benefit of a woman’s influence, but there comes a time when she’s got to lay aside childish things …” She slathered it on as thick as Karo syrup. “She has to think about her future. No self-respecting young man will want to marry …”

  Bone lost track of what her aunt was saying. It was what she always said. Bone had to wear dresses. Act like a lady. Learn to cook and sew. All so she could be a good Christian wife and mother someday. Daddy nodded as Aunt Mattie talked, but he held himself like he was taking a switching and didn’t want to let on how much he was feeling it. Bone plunged her hand deep into her pocket. She still had that stone, and it seemed smoother after her journey down the hill. The smooth stone reminded her of a story. David and Goliath. The boy David had chosen five smooth stones from the stream before he faced the Philistine. As she stared at the middle of Mattie Albert’s forehead, Bone wished she had a slingshot.

  At that moment, Aunt Mattie’s voice dropped to a hushed whisper. “You know Willow was about her age when—”

  Bone’s father flinched ever so slightly. “Bone ain’t Willow,” he snapped. “And you know my mind on the subject.” He stood straight as a rod now, and his look dared her to say another word. “Superstitious nonsense,” he muttered.

  Bone had no idea what Aunt Mattie was on about, probably something to do with church. Daddy thought everything was superstitious nonsense. Even church.

  Aunt Mattie closed her mouth.

  It was the only part of her that looked remotely like Bone’s mother. Other than that they had nothing in common. Everyone loved Mama. She had a feeling for people, Daddy always said with a sad look in his eye.

  The stone in Bone’s hand had a thick vein of black coal winding through it like a river. The stone was whispering a story. It was her story, their story—hers, her father’s, her mother’s, and even her aunt’s—running through that rock. The weight of time and loss and the mountains had made it hard.

  It was a big vein.

  The words of the story grew louder in Bone’s head. She closed her eyes and thought about princesses and Gypsy curses and flying rabbits. Anything really but what the object was trying to tell her. When Bone opened her eyes again, her father and aunt were staring at her. Bone could see now that her Aunt Mattie had her mother’s eyes.

  Unfortunately, those eyes were looking at Bone like she was something that needed fixing.

  2

  BONE FELT A TUG on her overall strap. It was Will, and she knew what was on his mind. “Daddy, we got to get Will his gear.”

  Her father took the rock from Bone’s hand. He held it up and peered at the thin vein of coal running through the mostly brown stone. “Will, now this here is the kind of stone you don’t want in your handcar at the end of the day.” He pitched it back toward the slag pile.

  Aunt Mattie peered at Bone like she wanted to say it: bone. That’s what that rock was, the worthless stone that’s left behind when the coal’s gone. That was her. Bone peered back hard at her aunt, daring her to say anything. Mattie looked away.

  Will was all ears as he listened, nodding like Daddy’d said the wisest thing on earth. Bone’s father was the day shift supervisor at Big Vein Superior Anthracite Mine and soon to be Will’s boss. So he’d better listen. Bone didn’t want to lose both of them.

  “How is that boy going to work in the mines?” Aunt Mattie asked.

  Bone put her hands on her hips. Will was as smart and as good as anyone. Better than most.

  “Hush, Amarantha,” Daddy said. “He don’t need no voice to dig coal.” Bone’s father blew smoke in Aunt Mattie’s face and headed down the road.

  She sputtered something about hopeless cases and strode off in the other direction in a huff.

  Bone caught Will by the arm. “Don’t pay her any mind.” She pulled him toward the door.

  Bone couldn’t recall when Will had stopped talking. Folks said it was after his daddy got caught in that cave-in back in ’33 and died down in the depths of Big Vein. Bone didn’t remember, seeing as she was only three at the time. Will couldn’t have been more than five. Most folks let Will be. Some thought he was simple. Some joked he didn’t have anything to say yet. Bone liked to tell people he had a Gypsy curse cast upon him. Most folks said the acorn didn’t fall far from the tree. Will’s daddy had been a quiet man, too, they said.

  Will held open the screen door as Bone marched into the store, past the old men playing checkers on the cracker barrel, past the RC Colas frosting in the cooler and Red Goose work boots stacked on the shelf, right up to the counter. Uncle Junior and Mr. Price were standing there jawing with Mr. Scott, who ran the commissary.

  Bone cleared her voice. “Mr. Scott, Will Kincaid here has himself a job at Big Vein,” she announced.

  “I got what he needs, Miss Bone.” Mr. Scott grinned. He looked Will up and down a bit and then went into the back room. Will shifted from foot to foot while the men hanging about the store slapped him on the back and shook his hand.

  “We can use a big, strong ’un like you down there,” Mr. McCoy said.

  Will stood even taller as Uncle Junior shook his hand. Will was half a head taller than most of the men in the room—except of course Uncle Junior. Both of Mama’s brothers were like trees blowing in the wind.

  “We take care of our own, Will,” Uncle Junior said. He winked at Bone, which made her feel better. Her uncle had been in the mines even longer than her daddy, and he’d look after them both. But she also knew he’d meant something else.
Will was only fourteen, but on account of his size and his daddy’s death, the mine super had turned a blind eye to Will’s age when he scratched sixteen on the form. Everyone in the Big Vein camp knew how old everyone else was, but they also thought Will would never make it through high school or get drafted or even get a job at the powder plant over in Radford. Not without a voice.

  “With the war on now, we don’t have near enough men to do the job,” Mr. McCoy added. The men fell to discussing whether there were enough hands to mine more than one shift this year, like they did before the war.

  “We’re going to lose more and more as the war goes on.” Uncle Junior creased the newspaper and stuck it in his back pocket.

  One of the headlines read Draft Gearing Up.

  Mr. Scott emerged from the back of the store with an armful of goods. He laid the bank clothes and other things out on the counter and said he’d be back directly. He disappeared into the storeroom again. Will swelled up a bit looking at it all. Two pairs of long handle underwear. Bib overalls. Shirt. Overall jacket. Brogan shoes. Miner’s cap. A light. A leather belt with a loop on it. A small pickaxe. A whistle. Will pulled the cap on and hefted the pickaxe. He looked like a regular miner.

  Bone didn’t like the look of him all grown up, even if it meant he could help his mother out. He could put food on the table, he’d written on a little scrap of paper the other night. Bone couldn’t argue with that. But she didn’t have to like it.

  She snatched the cap off his head and put it on hers.

  Mr. Scott emerged from the back carrying a battered tin pail.

  “Will, this here dinner bucket was your daddy’s.” Mr. Scott limped around the counter to hand it to Will.

  “Scotty and Will Senior were down in shaft twenty-three together that day,” Uncle Junior whispered to Bone.

  “William would’ve wanted you to have it when you was ready to go down in the mines,” Mr. Scott said. “It was his father’s before him.”

  The bucket had “W. Kincaid” scratched across the lid.