The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  Now, as she leaned against the door, with rain beating on the windshield and El thinking she was sound asleep, Easter remembered the kindness in her grandmothers’ eyes when they were handing out the quilts and the turnovers. She tried to decide which had been the best feeling—what they felt when they helped those people, or what she felt that first time that God swooped down and caught her under the ribs. She thought it might be the same feeling, the way goodness feels.

  Nine

  Leaving on Your Mind

  “WE ARE STILL HAVING the biggest time ever!” Anneth wrote on a postcard, then drew a line through her words. That wasn’t enough. She scratched the nib of the pen back over the sentence so many times that the ink turned into a black mess on the heavy paper. She turned the postcard over and looked at it: a view of the Nashville skyline against a bright summer sky. She tore the card in two, then again, and let the pieces fall out over the table.

  She had a whole stack of postcards she had bought at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. She picked up another one—on the front was a picture of a banjo being strummed—and wrote:

  Dear Sister,

  I am so homesick I think I will die. I don’t love Matthew. I have tried to, but I just don’t. There’s nothing I can do to change this. I miss you so bad I don’t believe I can stand it.

  Yours, as always,

  Anneth

  She tore that one up, too. She laid the pen down and watched as it rolled off the table and onto the floor. A cool breeze rose up from the river and washed through the open window and across her face. The closeness of the river was her favorite thing about their apartment. She liked to sit at this window, watching the barges go by, looking at moonlight that sometimes caught in the waves. If it wasn’t for the Cumberland, she didn’t think she would have made it this long in Nashville. Every other apartment they had considered either overlooked downtown or had no view at all except for the brick side of a building. All those places were nicer—some of them even had a separate bedroom—but she had chosen this one because of the river. The river was the only thing good about this place. The apartment was no bigger than that motel room they had stayed in at Jellico on their wedding night. There was nothing but this card table pushed up against the window, and their bed and two chairs. Their kitchen was more like an open closet with a half sink, a two-burner stove, and a refrigerator so small it looked like something that belonged in a child’s playhouse.

  They lived above Frosty’s Pub, downtown where Broadway nearly ran into the river, and now Matthew played in the pub four nights a week. There was no one named Frosty that Anneth knew of, but the pub and their apartment were owned by a man called Sloan. He was shaped like a Jim Beam bottle and had one good eye; the other was covered by a white glaze, the result, Sloan often explained, of his holding a lit firecracker that exploded too close to his face.

  Sloan was good to her. On the nights that Matthew played, Sloan let her drink on the house. He had been unaware of the amount she was able to drink, and she thought that he probably regretted his offer now. She had drunk Sloan himself under the table once or twice. Everyone at Frosty’s was good to her, actually—the fry cook, Chester, who made the best cheeseburgers she had ever eaten, and the bartender, who flirted with her all night long, and even the waitresses. They were good old girls, all wild as bucks. She liked the way they strutted around in their short skirts and checked blouses that looked like those red and white tablecloths people took on picnics. She had entertained the thought of hiring on as a waitress at Frosty’s, but she enjoyed sitting there drinking and watching Matthew too much. Although she sometimes didn’t know how to feel about him, she never doubted his power onstage. She liked for everyone in the bar to know that she was his wife, even if she didn’t particularly enjoy being married. Matthew said she didn’t need a job, anyway. Sometimes in bed at night, he would lie with his hand under her gown, and say, “You don’t need to work. One of these days we’ll have so much money you’ll be able to hire one of those girls to keep house for you.”

  He sure wasn’t making much money right now, but that didn’t bother Anneth. But sometimes she found herself flinching at his touch. Their lovemaking had held them together; no matter how much they fought or how badly she missed home, his body had always been a comfort to her. Somehow it reminded her of home. His skin possessed the scent of the mountains, a clean, sharp smell like leaves baking on summertime hickories. His mouth tasted like the water of Free Creek, so cold and metallic. Yet now she had begun to turn away from him.

  She didn’t know why she didn’t love him. He was a good man, full of dreams and big notions. Sometimes he’d get up real early—even after playing late at Frosty’s—and go down to the street vendor to buy her some flowers. She’d awake with him standing over her, the flowers held out. “Wildflowers, just like back home,” he’d say. He wore the same two pairs of Levi’s all week, interchanging them every other night, but he insisted that Anneth buy herself a new dress or skirt each time Sloan paid him. The only things he bought for himself were record albums, and most often he let her pick those out, too. A couple of times he had interrupted his set to dedicate a song to her, and everyone in the pub had turned to look at her as she winked at him. He wrote her little notes when he arose and left before she had awakened: “I watched you sleep while I had my coffee. You are so beautiful it hurts.”

  One night he asked her to come up onstage to sing with him. She jumped up and climbed the wobbly wooden steps to the stage, not realizing that her night of drinking bourbon had affected her until she looked out over the crowd. Matthew leaned toward her and whispered, “Let’s do ‘Let It Be Me,’ okay?” They were always listening to that Everly Brothers record. Sometimes they even sang it when they walked down the street looking in shop windows. Once, he had insisted that they both sing it into the telephone when she called Easter to check in. Easter had said they sounded good, but went right back to talking as if it was nothing special. Anneth moved in close to him, her shoulders arched toward the silver microphone that they had to share.

  They harmonized beautifully, their two voices merging into one palpable force as they drifted out over the crowd. She gave the song everything she had, hitting her pitch, going high and then low, remembering what he had told her: “When you talk, you do it from your throat. Singing comes from your belly.” But she was amazed to find that she didn’t really enjoy being up there onstage with him. She didn’t know why, but it wasn’t as exciting as she had thought it would be. To sing well, she had to close her eyes and not look at the audience. Most of them were watching in silence or dancing, but there were others who went right on arguing or laughing or slamming their glasses down on the table. She couldn’t stand the thought of their not paying attention to the words of the song, so she sang higher and prettier. She opened her eyes on the final verse and saw that Matthew was staring at her, completely love-struck, singing every single romantic word to her and only her. The audience didn’t even exist to him. And that’s when she knew that he loved her too much.

  They had been in Nashville only two months but she had spent two weeks of that in bed, pinned to the mattress by sadness, as if someone had gathered all the furniture in the room and stacked it on her chest. In one thirteen-day stretch, she got up only once. She walked down to the pay phone on the street, clad in nothing but her nightgown—barefooted, even—and called Easter. But the phone had rung and rung before Anneth realized that it was only noon and Easter was still at work.

  She lay in the apartment all day with the curtains pulled together so tightly that when Matthew came in and jerked them back, the room was filled with a blinding light that caused her to pull the covers over her head, screaming at him until he made the room dark once again. Matthew sat on the bed for hours at a time, running his hand down the back of her head. “What’s wrong, baby?” he’d say, his voice a coo, the voice he used on soft love songs. The only reason she’d remain still at all was that it took her a while to build up the strength to push
him away. Once, she caught him off guard, and he fell right onto the floor when she pressed both her hands against his back. Even that did not anger him. She knew that he was good and that he loved her. But still, it was his devotion, his very goodness, that caused the gulf to rise up between them. Or maybe it was not possible for her to ever be satisfied by anything or anybody. It was the way she was made.

  Everyone loved Matthew at Frosty’s, though. All up and down Broadway there were plenty of singers and bands, but most of them were standard country groups that wore sequins and cowboy hats and did covers of Johnny Horton or Don Gibson. Sloan had put a big sign out in front of Frosty’s that read ROCKABILLY MUSIC WITH MATTHEW MORGAN and the bar was packed every night he played. Matthew had three good honky-tonk shirts set off by pearl buttons, and he always wore cuffed jeans and loafers. He didn’t wear a cowboy hat, either. Sometimes he played in his white T-shirt, his pack of Chesterfields rolled up in the left sleeve. No one else was playing songs by the Everly Brothers or Buddy Holly, either. And if it had a beat he admired, he’d cover a song even if it had originally been sung by a woman. “Stupid Cupid” was one of his most popular numbers. It was just him and his guitar. The women loved him because of his eyes and the way he moved around on the stage, and the men loved him because he got the women all hot and bothered.

  During the day, Matthew haunted Music Row, trying to get into the offices of big producers. He was sure that if he could just get on as a demo singer, someone would snatch him up for a contract. He had managed to get into the offices of the Louvin Brothers and claimed that he had met Loretta Lynn there, but the next time he went, the secretary wouldn’t let him in. No amount of rejection got to Matthew, though. “It’ll happen,” he’d say, climbing into bed. “If you work hard enough you can have whatever you want.” Lately his optimism made Anneth roll her eyes.

  Now that the blues had left her—simply lifted and flown away without her knowing why they had given up and moved on—Anneth made a habit of going down to the river while Matthew was traipsing the sidewalks with his guitar slung over his shoulder. She needed water in her life. Back home she had had the creek, which was so reliable and present, right there across from their house. It was strange, how she could go just a few steps from the bustle of Nashville to the riverbank, where it was quiet and still, as if the willows on the bank soaked up the noise from the streets above. She loved it down there, but it made her homesick. It was the only thing that resembled countryside in this concrete-and-brick place. Trees and grass and sand. There were lots of birds, too, although she never heard a whip-poor-will, even when she went down there after dark. And here was a winding path home. If the water flowed the other way, she could put one of her postcards on the river and it might find its way to Free Creek. She pictured Easter leaning over to pluck it off the rocky bank. The ink would be washed away, but the picture on the front—of the Nashville skyline or the Opry or banjos—would be intact and Easter would know that Anneth had sent it to her by way of moving water.

  Nashville was loud and exciting and full of dancing and singing. She liked strolling down the sidewalks late on Saturday nights, when the drunks stumbled out of Tootsie’s, and she loved waiting out behind the Opry to see which stars would hurry out the back door into waiting cars. But she couldn’t stand it here. It wasn’t home and that was all there was to it.

  Down at the river she could spend an hour studying the sky, the way some people might look at a painting they love but secretly do not understand. Sometimes she perched on one of the big rocks down there and read. One of the waitresses had lent her a battered paperback copy of Peyton Place. But most often she skipped rocks, the way she had as a child. She got so caught up in it that the act made her feel as if she was floating back in time. She expected to turn around and see Vine standing up in the yard, her face dark in the light of the gloaming, hollering for her to come in to supper. She spent a long time choosing the perfect stone. It had to be flat, preferably oval or rectangular, and about the size of a coaster. She gathered a stack of suitable rocks and held them in one hand while she skipped with the other. She curled her hand, then let the rock fly with a flick of the wrist. She could make one skip six or seven times. Back home the creek was so narrow that she could make the rock bounce up the opposite bank, but here the river was too wide for that and the last splash left its mark on the water, a ring that moved out and out and into nothingness.

  One afternoon, as she was about to let loose the last rock, Matthew caught her elbow in his hand, causing the stone to fly out and sink immediately. He stood behind her and kissed her cheek, but she turned her face away.

  “Good news,” he whispered into her ear.

  She took a deep breath, not out of anticipation, but only because she wanted one last smell of the river before her thoughts were completely broken apart.

  “A producer from Decca let me audition for him.”

  “Really?” She turned around and was caught up in his arms. She was so glad for him, yet she didn’t feel that it was happening to both of them, the way she knew she should have.

  He held her close and talked into her ear, as if it was a secret he didn’t want the river to overhear. “He wants me to come back in and sing for a couple of his people tomorrow.”

  “It was bound to happen,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”

  Then he kissed her, his fine lips on hers, his cold tongue moving into the warmth of her mouth, but she barely felt it at all. She kissed him back, but she wasn’t even there, as if she was a part of the river running by the city, a river with no comprehension of what its waves touched or changed along its course.

  EASTER COULDN’T SLEEP. The whip-poor-will was calling incessantly, and each time he made his mournful song, Easter pictured Anneth. She looked into the blackness settled over her bed and saw her sister lying on a riverbank, stretched out on a slender gray rock.

  Heat radiated off El’s long body lying beside her. She listened to his breathing—steady and peaceful—to see if he was asleep or not, but couldn’t decide. It was a comfort knowing he was there, because the room was so dark that she couldn’t even see him. All the windows were open and the night sounds came in and pressed into every corner of the room.

  “El? Are you awake?” He didn’t answer. She put her palm on his stomach, nearly starting at the warmth there. She shook him a little. “El. Wake up.”

  “What is it, baby?” His voice was clogged by sleep.

  “I can’t sleep. Let’s get up and go outside.” She sat up on the edge of the bed and found his hand, interlaced her fingers with his own. She tugged at him. “Come on.”

  She could hear him climbing out of the bed behind her, and as she led him down the hallway he tightened his grip on her hand. “Have you lost your mind?” His words were nearly lost in a yawn.

  She opened the back door and stepped out into the darkness. The cool air made her feel as if she were stepping into a sort of cleanliness. There was more light out here but it was still strangely dark. The moon was lost to the clouds of an impending thunderstorm. She looked around and laughed when she saw the brightness of El’s underwear. That was all he had on.

  He sat down on one of the porch chairs and she positioned herself on his lap, her back to him as she looked out on the yard, trying to distinguish the shape of the black mountain from the black sky.

  “What time is it?” El asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and leaned back against him. “Three or four.”

  “What’re we doing?”

  “I just couldn’t sleep,” she said, speaking so low that her words were nearly lost to the cries of crickets and cicadas. “I wanted you with me.”

  The whip-poor-will called, over and over, and each time it did, the katydids and frogs grew silent for a moment. It was the most lonesome sound, but also soothing somehow. It sounded less like a bird perched up there on the old locust than it did like a small woman who was trying to tell them something.

  “El, do y
ou know what I want more than anything else in this world?” she said.

  “I know what I’d like,” he said. “To go to bed.”

  She turned to face him, although she could barely make out the shape of his face. “No, I mean it,” she said with a little laugh in her voice. “Listen to me. I want a baby. So bad.”

  “Well, you know what a person has to do to get babies, don’t you?” Now he was laughing at her.

  She lay back against him and he latched his hands around her waist. She could feel his breath on her neck. With one hand he held her hair in a long hank. “We have to stop going to these bars and places, El. It’s just not me. What I want is our own little family. Me and you and a child. That’s what I want more than anything in this world.”

  He rubbed his chin against her shoulder, a motion so slow and intimate that it made her love him more than she ever had before. She took this as her answer. A promise made by skin against skin.

  ANNETH SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the bed and smoked three cigarettes in a row with the ashtray perched on her knee. It was four o’clock in the morning and she watched Matthew in the gray shadows of the room. He lay on his stomach, naked to the waist, with the covers kicked down around his feet, and he was so brown that the sheets seemed to glow around him. She ran her hand down the cleft of his back, reached over, and snapped on the lamp, and then shook him awake.

  “I have to leave, Matthew.”