The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  She felt the blues moving in on her—all at once, out of nowhere, like a wind that moved in and out of her body whenever it took the notion. It crept down the backs of her arms and up her neck. Her face felt flat and square; her mouth, drawn. She wanted to go somewhere and lie down and cry, and she didn’t know why, but it was a real, solid thing that felt like a slow wave washing down into the pit of her stomach. It took the shine off everything.

  She saw Easter coming back from the dance floor with that good-looking man but she slipped through the crowd and took her coat from the table near the door. She swung the door open, and the cold air hit her like a slap in the face. Anneth shoved her hands into the deep pockets of her coat and went down the steps two at a time. The men all tipped their hats to her and smiled, but she didn’t acknowledge them. She passed them by and went to the purple shadows of the woods, where she struck a match and lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. She sucked in the smoke, hoping this deep breath would calm her, but it only made her more nervous.

  She liked the winter air that slid up her legs. Her ears were in that state of cold between numbness and pain, and she liked that dull hurt, too. The sky was so big above her that it seemed like something that could come down and settle over every person on earth and smother them to death.

  She heard footsteps approaching and reluctantly looked away from the sky. The lights of the schoolhouse lit the person from behind and Anneth couldn’t tell who it was. As he came closer, she recognized the language of his body, the confident way he carried himself. Before he even spoke, she knew it was Matthew. “Hey,” he said.

  She took a long draw from the cigarette and listened to its crackle on the night’s stillness before replying. “You’re always saying that to me,” she said.

  “We finally took a break from playing,” he said. “I been wanting to talk to you all night.”

  “I appreciated you playing that song for me,” she said, staring him in the eye. “First time I ever heard rock ’n’ roll in person. Just on the radio before.”

  “You like Elvis Presley, huh?” he said. His face was lost to the shadows, and she longed to see his eyes.

  “I like all of it,” she said, and looked skyward again.

  “What’re you doing out here by yourself?”

  “I just wanted to be alone. Wanted to look at the sky.”

  “You want me to go back in, then? If you want to be alone.”

  “No,” she said, and put her hand on his chest. She liked the way he smelled. He was wearing Old Spice. When she went to Conley’s Drugstore, she always smelled all of the men’s colognes. Easter said Anneth couldn’t possibly remember her father’s scent, but she did. She still missed his smell. He had worn nothing except an aftershave he sometimes splashed on. The drugstore didn’t carry that brand anymore. More than that, he had smelled of coal—a rich, black smell that he couldn’t wash out of his skin.

  “I like the way you dance,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you ever since I saw you up at the pine patch.”

  “I’ve thought about you, too,” she said, and moved her hand on up into the warmth of his neck. She felt along his square jawline, and he didn’t move. Her thumb fit perfectly into the dimple in the center of his chin. Something in her didn’t want her to have this good moment. But then again she wanted so much to touch him. She didn’t care what anyone thought. She took a step closer to Matthew and told him her name.

  “I already know your name,” he said. He didn’t move, as if he was afraid of her. She breathed in the whiskey on his breath.

  “When you was up there playing that rock ’n’ roll song, I was wishing that you were kissing me,” she said.

  He put one big hand on the small of her back and cradled her shoulder with the other. He pressed himself against her and put his mouth on hers. It seemed he was eating at her lips. She had never been kissed like this before, but she let him. She opened her mouth and let his tongue in. She put her hand against his back and pushed him closer against her, arching her leg into him. When he was done, she rested her head against his chest. The blues were still there, strewn out across her shoulders.

  He put his face into her hair and took a deep breath. “God almighty, girl. That was about the best kissing I ever had in my life. And you are flat-out beautiful.”

  “So are you,” she said, thinking of his eyes, blue as glass. She felt drunk and distant, like she was watching herself from very far away.

  He kissed Anneth again and then walked her back so that she was leaning against a beech tree. She put her hands up into his hair and then held them flat against the sides of his face. He had shaved recently and the stubble felt good to her, like rough lumber. Then she pulled away. This felt too good, and she couldn’t stand out here kissing him all night. She wanted to go home. She wanted to lie down, to be safe in her bedroom with the quilt pulled up to her neck.

  “I need to go,” she said.

  He grabbed her hands and ran his thumbs over her wrists and looked into her eyes, even though she could not really see his face. “You want to get out of here?” he whispered.

  “No, my sister is waiting on me. I have to get on home.”

  “No, I don’t mean from the dance. I mean from here, period. I’m going to Nashville to play music.”

  She looked at him a long moment. She knew that she should say he was crazy, that she barely knew him. But she understood him; she could hear in his voice that he had a dream and he meant to pursue it, and she liked that. “I wish I could,” she said. “I can’t leave Easter, though. She needs me.”

  AFTER MIDNIGHT, WHEN they had all stood in a circle and sung “Auld Lang Syne,” Easter let El drive them home. All three of them sat in the front seat, with Easter in the middle, looking at him while he talked. She held Anneth’s hand, though. She knew that something was wrong. She had known the minute she saw Anneth come back into the school. When Anneth had the blues, it was spelled out plainly on her face. Easter could simply feel it. It was as if there was a warm air that moved off of Anneth, letting Easter know what she was going through. Sometimes Anneth missed school and lay in her bed until past noon, crying into her pillow. Easter could remember their mother doing this, inconsolable in her grief for their dead father. Yet Anneth had never known a grief so large. Sometimes Easter wondered if her sister had sucked up some of their mother’s sorrow and carried it around with her. Nothing helped Anneth except, sometimes, Easter’s singing.

  Anneth barely spoke on the drive home. Occasionally El leaned forward and asked her a question, but she only answered yes or no and kept her forehead leaned against the cold glass of the window. She held tightly to Easter’s hand, occasionally gripping it harder, as if pains were shooting through her.

  El was a talker, and Easter liked the way he talked. He talked to her like she was another man. Like they were equals. There was none of this mush that a man usually fed a woman when he was trying to get her. He talked about his family and the hard way he was brought up and the new job he had just taken as a truck driver for Appalachian Freight, hauling coal over the mountains. And he asked about her, too, which was different from most men she talked to. He wanted to know all about her people and the way she was brought up and all that, but she couldn’t bear to talk about it. There was too much to tell.

  When they pulled up into Free Creek and El put the car into park, Anneth got out and slammed the door. Easter rolled the window down with the glass rattling against the frame and leaned out. “Anneth, ain’t you even going to tell El thanks for the ride?”

  Anneth waved a hand without turning around. “Thanks for the ride, El.”

  Easter rolled the window up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She gets like this sometimes. Next time you see her she’ll be friendly as can be.”

  El leaned toward her a little. “It don’t matter.”

  Easter held her purse in her lap. For the first time, she felt as if she had run out of things to say to him. His car heater was pumping out a warm flow on
her legs and she hated to leave the closeness of the car and step out into the cold. And she didn’t know how to say good-bye.

  “I’ve sure enjoyed meeting you, Easter,” he said.

  “I’ve enjoyed it, too.”

  “You going to let me come back and see you?” he said. Even in the darkness she could see his smile. “I know where you live now, so you can’t really keep me from it.”

  “I want you to,” she said, and then felt foolish. “Come up one evening this week. I get home from work about three-thirty.”

  Then he leaned forward and kissed her without taking his hands from the steering wheel. She had not been kissed in a long time—not since high school—and it caused a knot to unlace in her chest. She kept her mouth tightly shut and her hands on her purse. She was very aware of the sound of the heater. He went to put his arms around her, but she backed away. She patted around on the door until she found its handle. “I’ll see you,” she said, and stepped out into the cold.

  She listened to his tires splashing through the mudholes until he reached the paved road, where they hummed into the night. Then she could hear the sound of movement on the mountain behind their house. Limbs snapped underfoot, and last fall’s leaves rustled as someone stomped on them. She knew it was Anneth, climbing up to the bald. Easter walked across the backyard and stood at the foot of the mountain. The black trees glowed in the moonlight.

  “Anneth!” she hollered. “Come down from there.”

  Something was wrong. Otherwise Anneth would answer her. She eyed the mountain again, and thought there was probably enough light for her to find her way on the path. She put her purse on one of the porch chairs and walked toward the mountain.

  Despite the light of the full moon, it was still dark. She heard small animals moving around in the brush on both sides of her. She was moving quicker than Anneth and could hear her clearly. It seemed that Anneth wasn’t on the trail, though; there was the sound of too much brush being trod upon. It sounded as if Anneth was just climbing the mountain wildly, crashing through laurel bushes and letting branches snap off as she walked through them. Once, Easter heard the dull thud of rocks clattering down the side of the mountain, and she knew that Anneth was scrambling up the cliff face. Easter began to walk faster, nearly running. “Anneth!” she said again. This time she did not yell; she knew that her voice would be carried all the way to the top of the mountain on the New Year’s night.

  Slowly Easter made out her sister’s shape in the darkness, at the bald. The field held thousands of wildflowers in the spring but now it was just a brown meadow full of sawbrush and dried weeds. Vine and Serena had always taken them there as children; Vine said it was a magic field, that flowers bloomed there out of season so they could show their colors all at the same time.

  Anneth was sitting on the ground with one leg pulled beneath her. Her auburn hair shone in the moonlight and her face was hidden behind her hands. As Easter walked closer—cautious now, like someone approaching a deer—she could hear Anneth crying.

  “Anneth?” Easter said, squatting down on the ground. She put her hand on Anneth’s back and started at the cold her coat held. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was hoarse. “I’m so sad I don’t think I can stand it.”

  Easter looked out at the field full of moonlight. There was no use in looking at Anneth; her face was lost to the shadows. “Did something happen at the dance?”

  “No,” Anneth said. “I was having a good time, but all at once, something just came over me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Easter.”

  Easter rubbed Anneth’s back. As they sat, their breath plumed out into the air before they sucked it back in. The night seemed desolate and frozen. Far across the next ridge there was the cry of a screech owl, like a woman screaming for her life.

  Anneth brought her leg down and ran her hands over her face. “I don’t understand what happens to me. I can be having the best time, and then something hits me right in the belly. A great big sadness moves in on me and just overtakes everything.”

  Easter took Anneth’s chin in her hand and held her face up so that the moonlight fell upon it. Anneth’s face glowed within her hand. “You’ve got no reason in this world to be unhappy. Look at you—how beautiful.”

  Anneth ran the back of her hand over her eye and let out a shuddered breath. “Sometimes when I see the night sky, I get that feeling you have when you think about eternity. You know what I mean?” She looked from the moon to Easter. “And I can’t understand it, because it’s so pretty to me.”

  “You just notice things more than other people,” Easter said, and put her forehead against Anneth’s. “You always have.”

  “I know I’ve got no reason to be unhappy,” Anneth said, and got up. She stood with her hands behind her back, looking at the sky again. “But somehow I just feel like nobody will ever love me. Nobody but you.”

  “Good Lord, Anneth. Everybody who knows you can’t help but love you.”

  “It don’t feel that way,” Anneth said, and started walking down the path. Before Easter even had time to get up and follow, Anneth was lost to the shadows of the woods.

  Five

  Things Change

  ON NEW YEAR’S MORNING, the sky turned gray as the back of a tarnished spoon, gathered itself low and moaning over the mountains, and stayed that way for three months. The creeks froze solid enough to walk on. Snow fell big as torn pieces of paper, drifting down like it might never stop, as if the world might eventually be made completely of ice. If a woman had stood on the highest mountain in those parts, she would have seen a thousand columns of coal smoke making their way skyward. The wind tore through the valley, pushing drifts up next to porches, creating occasional twisters of white in the road. A trip outside took ten minutes of getting ready: wound scarves and high boots and two pairs of socks. A walk into the yard for a bucketful of coal or an armload of firewood caused chapped lips that caught like cockleburs against a scarf. The cold seeped through gloves like water.

  But on Free Creek, heat bloomed in the breast of Easter Sizemore. She was so aware of the fever glow that she feared it might show up—a white pulsation that people could see from a long ways off. She felt as if light could shoot right out of the ends of her fingers. She couldn’t stop herself from falling in love with El.

  She awoke one morning and knew this. The realization was just as sudden as her sitting up in the bed. She sat there and watched morning light move around the room and thought of El. She had dreamed of him all night. It seemed she had spent the whole night walking alongside him, holding his hand as they made their way up a long dirt road with cedars on either side of them. The scent of the cedars had been overpowering and the light had been strange and beautiful, lavender colored. In this purple tint she had been able to see El’s face in a new way. She could see below his skin, behind his eyes. And what she had seen pleased her: kindness. She had looked into his chest and seen a good heart.

  She wanted to tell Anneth of her discovery, wanted to let her sister know that she finally felt something more, but once she let her feet touch the cold floorboards and walked down the hall, she saw that Anneth had gotten out of bed first and was already gone. The remnants of a hastily eaten breakfast—toast and a half cup of coffee—sat on the kitchen table, like a note to let Easter know that she had already left for the day. Anneth had taken a job working weekday evenings and weekends at the Depot Café in town, and she was devoted to going in for overtime when school was canceled because of snow. Every morning she arose early and caught a ride with Lolie. Lolie worked at Shoes Galore and spent her days frustrated not only by her omnipresent boss, Sissy Goins, but also by the fact that no one bought pretty shoes in the winter—only galoshes and heavy boots. Lolie was not afraid of driving in the snow. She had Israel put chains on her tires and she hit the road as if it were completely dry.

  Easter’s legs were sore. It felt as if she had really spent the whole night walking, just like in
her dream. Once, she had dreamed of swimming in a great black lake—this was just before Serena died—and had awakened with her hair soaking wet. Another time she had a dream of flying through a snow-covered valley, and when she awoke, her room had been so cold that she had seen her own breath, even though the stove roared with fire in the living room. She had told no one about her dreams—not even Anneth—fearing that she would end up telling everything she saw and knew.

  She lit the gas ring and put the coffee back on to heat. Outside, the mountain stood humpbacked in the new coating of snow. Red-birds flitted around in the yard.

  Easter made herself a bowl of oats and sat at the kitchen table. She felt giddy. She couldn’t wait to see El. She wanted to tell him that she loved him. She didn’t know how people went about doing such things. It was something she had wanted yet feared all of her life.

  Easter’s mother had loved too much, and it had killed her. Everyone knew how big the love had been between her parents; it terrified Easter to think that she might be following her mother. She knew what had happened to her mother, although her grandmothers had never told her. She had seen it play out many times in her dreams, seen from high above, as if she was motionlessly perched in a tree and watching all of it in silence. She knew that it had happened just this way.

  Easter was ten and Anneth just five. Serena was working in the house after she had fixed the girls breakfast and seen them off to school. Vine had gone off to Black Banks to check their post office boxes. Serena was so caught up in her chores that it took her a while to realize how silent the house was that morning. Birdie was always so noisy. If she wasn’t crying she was usually sitting on her bed, combing out her hair and singing. That had always been a comfort to Serena—Birdie in there singing, “I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free.” But that morning there was nothing.

  Serena went down the hall and found Birdie’s room empty. The bed was made and Birdie’s silver hairbrush and comb and mirror were all lined up neatly beside one another on the dresser. The little vial of lavender she kept in her pocket was sitting there, too. Serena hurried through the house, opened the back door, and looked out. There was Birdie, hanging from the locust tree in the backyard, long dead. A hen pecked at the grass beneath Birdie’s feet.