The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  He sat up quickly, his eyes squinting against the light. “What?”

  “I want to go home. I miss home too bad.”

  Matthew grabbed her hand but she pulled it away and knocked the ashtray off onto the floor. She climbed out of bed, stepped over the mess of ashes and butts, and pulled her suitcase out of the closet. She jerked the top drawer out of the dresser and dumped its contents into the suitcase. Matthew grabbed her from behind. He pressed himself against her back.

  “Lay back down for a little while. You’re not thinking right.”

  She pulled away and opened the next drawer, scooped up an armful of panties. “I know what I’m doing. I’ll catch a bus to home. There’s one leaving the station at six.”

  “You’re just getting into one of your spells again. It’s just them old blues talking.”

  She spun around and stood very close to his face, trying not to look into his eyes. “No. You know as well as I do. How can you possibly love me? I don’t understand how you could continue to be good to me, the way I treat you.”

  “That’s what being married is like. It’s work,” he said, and she realized that he was completely awake. She had the sudden urge to reach out and smooth her hand down his chest.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up at him. He refused to sit, stood there with his hands on his hips. She thought he looked both ridiculous and beautiful standing there in his underwear.

  “I don’t love you,” she said.

  “Don’t say that,” he said, moving closer, his hands out.

  “You’re too good for me, Matthew. I can’t stand to go on lying to you, because you’re a good man. You deserve somebody who will love you back.”

  He sat down on the bed next to her and put his arm across her shoulders. She covered her face with her hands, knowing that he thought she was crying. But she wasn’t. She felt exhausted by the charade she had made for herself and for him.

  “I’ve got that audition. I’ll get a contract—I know I will. And we’ll be out of this apartment. I’ll buy us a little house. Before you know it we’ll have a mansion like that Belle Meade you love to look at. We were going to sing together.”

  “No, we can’t sing together,” she said, and stood again. She kept her back to him as she gathered her things. “I’m going home.”

  He didn’t say anything while she packed her clothes. She folded her dresses neatly and found a string to tie four shoe boxes together. There wasn’t much to pack. She hadn’t brought anything with her and had long ago stopped talking about sending for her things. It was so quiet in the apartment that she fancied she could hear the waves of the river washing up on the bank below them. The windows were open but there wasn’t even the sound of a car passing by or the distant laughter of drunks or anything. The night was completely still.

  When she turned around, he was still sitting there, his palms upturned on his knees. “If it’s home you want, I’ll leave the record deal and everything. I’ll go back and mine coal if it means having you.”

  Here was the kind of love she had been looking for all her life. But still, she couldn’t make herself love him back, no matter how hard she tried. She leaned down and put her hand on his face. “There’s no way I’d let you do that,” she said. She pulled her gown up over her head and lay back on the glowing sheets. “Just lay here with me until daylight. Lay here with me and then tomorrow we’ll go our separate ways.”

  He stretched out beside her, his long legs stiff and warm beside her own. She moved his underwear down without a word from him, let her hand linger as it cupped the heat between his legs, and then spread herself atop him. She held him as tightly as she could and spoke with her lips against the skin of his neck. “Love me one more time,” she said.

  ANNETH’S BUS CROSSED the Kentucky state line at noon. She sat up on her knees in the seat and propped her arms on the open window. The September air was warm against her face. Here there were hills that rose up with stripes of mist lying across the ridges. She could smell the earth and the leaves, water in unseen creeks that bubbled in distant valleys. “I’m home, by God,” she said aloud, but no one noticed because it was so hot that all the windows were down. There was only a scattering of people on the bus, anyway, and most of them sat looking straight ahead, as if caught in a state between sleep and awareness. There was an old woman who sat across the aisle from her, sleeping with her mouth thrown wide open. Two little boys held on to the backs of their seats and made faces at Anneth. She stuck her tongue out at them and looked away. Behind her there was a young girl with eyeglasses and a pink scarf stretched tight over her head—she couldn’t have been more than seventeen—who had held her baby ever since the bus picked her up outside Oak Ridge. Anneth had bought the girl a Dr Pepper, a slice of pickled baloney, and a pack of saltines at their last stop because she could tell the girl didn’t have a dime.

  “Sit down back there!” the bus driver hollered when he finally noticed that Anneth had her whole head out the window, drinking in the rushing air, but she ignored him until she was good and ready to get back in her seat. She watched the little towns race by: Williamsburg and Rockholds and Woodbine and Corbin, all interrupted by long stretches of countryside. People pumping gas and cutting down their cornstalks. Women sweeping their yards and hanging clothes on the line. Men who didn’t look up from their bucking tractors, shirtless boys who waved and wolf-whistled as they stood amongst the tobacco plants they were supposed to be tending. The farther the bus went, the higher the mountains became—purple in its own shadows—and more and more creeks snaked alongside the highway.

  It was three o’clock by the time the bus pulled into Black Banks. She had been gone for three months but it felt like ages, so she was surprised to see that absolutely nothing had changed. She felt the urge to run into the Depot Café and see everyone she had once worked with, but she didn’t want to face them right now; her boss, Gloria, was probably still upset that she had run off. She used the pay phone at the bus depot, relishing the sound of her nickel dropping in.

  “Come get me,” Anneth said when Easter answered.

  “What’s happened?”

  “I just want to come home,” Anneth said, trying not to laugh.

  “Well, I guess we can be there by late tonight.”

  “I can’t wait that long, Easter. I’m dying to see home, to see you.”

  “Well, honey, it’ll take me a big long while to get all the way to Nashville.”

  Anneth cackled, catching the attention of the other people who had gotten off the bus to stretch their legs before going on to their stops. The girl with the baby smiled, and the old woman, finally awake, shook her head.

  “I’m home, in Black Banks,” Anneth said. “I just got off the bus.”

  Ten

  Trouble

  BLACK BANKS WAS A boomtown now. Just when coal was petering out everywhere else, a new seam was discovered on the outskirts of town, and people drove from neighboring counties to stand in line for work at the Altamont Mining Company. On Mondays the foreman came out and walked down the line of men, spitting a stream of tobacco juice at their feet and sizing them up. Then he’d climb up on the porch of the office, lean on the rail while he conferred with his assistant, and run his finger through the air, stopping it to point at the strongest men. “You, you, you, and you,” he would say around his cud of tobacco. “And you two boys there, you brothers? You all, then, too.”

  The timber business was booming, too. The lumber company felled trees and brought steam shovels in on the backs of eighteen-wheelers, their brakes smoking by the time they had made their way down the mountain. Coal trucks lumbered down Main Street, grinding holes into the pavement and belching out black fists of smoke that stained the yellow bricks of the courthouse, which sat in the square like a slumped cake.

  But most of all it had become a crossroads. Trains and buses came in every hour, letting off people who squinted in the sunlight and seemed taken aback by the bustling streets of su
ch a small town. Only about twelve hundred people lived in Black Banks, but sometimes it seemed as if there were twice that many milling about the train and bus station. When there weren’t passenger trains, there were slow-moving freights burdened with their solid loads of coal and lumber. Sometimes cattle cars passed through, leaving the town with the rich green smell of manure and the cries of the live cargo, bawling and mooing at their rickety means of transportation. But mostly it was the passenger trains that kept the town alive. Women on their way to visit their families in Virginia had two-hour layovers that they spent in the dress shops along Main Street. They extended their slender feet to Lolie and asked for the latest pump while she tried to steer them toward the higher heels. Soldiers who were going to Ashland for assignment leaned against the magazine racks at the drugstore and propped their feet up on the backs of the seats at the movie theater. Shaking out newspapers and carrying briefcases, men from Baltimore and Cincinnati who had bought out the mineral rights from people twenty years earlier came to see how their mines were doing.

  Anyone who had any money found his way into the Depot Café, so that Anneth was right at the center of all the commotion that Black Banks was becoming known for. She had managed to talk Gloria into giving her back her old job, and she liked being a waitress. She got the best tips of all the girls. The city men liked to watch her and she didn’t pander to them and treated everybody the same, whether it was a broke college girl on her way back home or a Detroit lawyer who shook his head at the lack of fine cuisine. She refused any of the businessmen who asked her to accompany them on time-killing trips to the movies or for a drive to the lumber camp. She slapped the face of a man who couldn’t resist the urge to pinch her on the ass. She sneaked grilled cheese sandwiches to young boys who asked for nothing more than a glass of water, even though she knew they didn’t have any money.

  After spending six months riding back and forth to town with Lolie every day, she had saved up enough money to buy a candy-apple red Falcon that Lonzo Morgan had for sale. This was her favorite part of being back home—being able to just get in a car and drive around curvy roads, putting her arm out the window so that her hand fluttered up and down in the rushing wind, her radio turned up as loud as it would go. Now that she had her car she could do anything she wanted to, could go anywhere without asking anybody for a ride. Her Falcon gave her a freedom that she could never have found in Nashville.

  She had been home a year and was living with El and Easter, happy to be back on Free Creek. She knew that she was an intrusion—although they never made her feel that way—but she wanted to be in her old room with the sound of the creek, able to go out the back door and climb the mountain up to their field.

  Apparently Easter had accepted that Anneth was a grown woman now, because she didn’t chastise her too much on the nights she came in at three in the morning, drunk and hollering out in the yard. Then again, there wasn’t much Easter could say, since she had quit church herself, a fact Anneth couldn’t get over. Anneth didn’t tell Easter, but this saddened her. She had always felt safe in the knowledge that Easter was praying for her, that Easter was living the good life and was happy doing that. It had never occurred to her that Easter might not enjoy going to church anymore. It hadn’t even seemed possible.

  Although Anneth went partying and came home singing and hollering, she had never drunk anything at the house before the evening of the heat wave, when El invited her to sit down with him on the back porch and have a beer. He held up the can of Pabst Blue Ribbon as she came around the back of the house, just getting home from work. “Want one?” he asked.

  “I believe I do, buddy,” she said. She sat down in the chair beside him, kicked off her shoes, and tilted the beer back. She wished that she didn’t love the way it tasted, but she did.

  EL PULLED ANOTHER beer from the ice chest and poked a pair of holes into the can with two quick stabs from the church key. “Match me?” he said, and Anneth nodded. They both turned up their beers and drained them in one long drink. Anneth wiped her mouth on the back of her arm and El sat back in his seat, letting out a long, jagged breath.

  “I never seen a girl drink like you before,” he said.

  “I never seen a man who couldn’t drink no more than you,” she said, and tapped the corner of his chair with the bottom of her bare foot.

  Easter stood behind the screen door and watched them. They had been out there drinking all afternoon. El had the day off from work before going out on a five-day haul to Pittsburgh and said it was too hot to do anything else but sit in the shade and drink. It was hot, a freak day of heat in mid-October. The mountains were at the height of their color and the red and yellow leaves baked in this sudden burst of warmth. Usually by now the first frost had fallen and Easter was already cutting down the cornstalks for fodder. She liked the idea of a heat wave settling down over the valley when everyone was already preparing for winter. This was God’s way of letting people know that He was still in charge. Still, the heat was only an excuse to drink for those two.

  Used to, Anneth wouldn’t have dreamed of leaning back in a chair on their grandmother’s back porch and getting drunk. Easter supposed Anneth thought it was all right now, since Easter didn’t go to church anymore.

  Easter had hoped that Anneth would chide her about not going to church, would cave in and tell her that she had respected her sister’s reverence all these years, even though she had always said the opposite. But Anneth seemed glad that Easter had quit. Easter figured Anneth would have liked it even better if Easter was still going out to sing at the honky-tonks, but now she was caught in some of kind of purgatory between going back to the church and actually sinning. Easter cringed at the idea that it was sin that joined them so much closer than before.

  “Come out here and sit with us!” Anneth called, spying Easter as she studied them. “You ever drunk a beer before, Sister?”

  “Hell, no,” El said. “She used to go right in them bars and sing her heart out, but never touched a drop of anything. I don’t see how she did it.”

  Easter stepped out onto the porch as the screen door slammed behind her. She still held the damp towel she had dried the supper dishes with. She took two clothespins and latched it to the little line stretched between the porch posts. “I don’t need to drink to have a good time,” she said.

  Anneth slapped her sister on the hind end. “Sit down here and talk to me,” she said. “You never do sit still for a minute. Always working.” Easter could see she was drunk. There was that permanent smile that made it so plain for everyone to see, that special laugh that Anneth reserved for when she was drinking. “Tell me what happened between Gabe and that Jimmie woman of his. I stay at the café so much that I never know what’s going on.”

  “They quit is all I know,” Easter said. “He’s out running wild, and them not even divorced yet, hitting every honky-tonk between here and Hazard.”

  “Kind of like me!” Anneth laughed. She propped one foot up on the corner of El’s chair and her dress rode up to her knee. It was a thin dress, anyway, a cream fabric with a sprinkling of violets, and was almost transparent at the neck, where Anneth had sweated. Easter felt like slapping Anneth’s leg down. It didn’t look right, the way her foot occasionally touched the side of El’s knee. “You’re the only one of us three that’s worth a dime. Even if you did backslide, you’re still the good one.”

  “I’ve been miserable since I left the church,” Easter said. “And I intend to go back as soon as I get my head on straight. I’m done with singing in them honky-tonks. It’s not how I’m made.”

  Anneth and El knew not to say anything when it came to matters of the church, but Anneth couldn’t resist. She leaned over and rubbed Easter’s back with her free hand. With the other she took a long drink of her beer, then propped the can on her lap. “Let’s not get all serious, now. Tell me something funny.”

  “I thought it was pretty damn funny why Gabe and that woman quit, myself, considering the way Gabe b
rags about pleasing his woman and all that,” El said. He was drunk, too. He never talked this much and certainly didn’t cuss. Easter hated seeing him this way, that stupid smile etched across his face. Even his posture disturbed her. He looked as if he was about to slide out of his chair. “He walked right in on her with another man.”

  “You’re lying!” Anneth squalled, leaning out so far that her foot dropped off the corner of the chair. “Surely not!” She turned in her chair to face Easter. “You never told me that part. Did he, Easter?”

  “That’s what he said,” Easter told her, and tried not to sound as stiff as she felt, although she wanted to grab their beers and pour them out. She couldn’t say much about their sitting here drinking. She hadn’t exactly been a saint lately, and she was paying for it now. Her backsliding had given El the chance to do what he’d wanted to ever since they got married, anyway. Be himself. How was it that she had thought he wouldn’t want to drink and carry on? She had been a fool. Just because he hadn’t done it when they were courting, she had thought he was different from every other man she had ever known.

  “It’s a wonder Gabe didn’t blow that man’s brains out,” Anneth said. “And Jimmie’s, too.”

  “It hurt him too bad for that, I guess,” Easter said. “He said he just walked out and got in his car and left. Went straight and filed for a divorce.”

  “Poor old Gabe,” Anneth said. “I guess we’ll be divorcés together. What’s the odds of two black sheep in one family?” Then all at once Anneth jumped out of her chair and stood twisting around on the porch, snapping her fingers and bringing one arm up over her head. “Hey, Easter, I want to hear you sing a rock ’n’ roll song.”

  “I don’t sing no rock ’n’ roll.”

  “You ought to hear her sing ‘Seven Lonely Days,’ though,” El said, and fished down in the ice for another beer. “She can do it better than Patsy Cline ever thought about. That’s what everybody says.”