The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  THE MUSIC WAS a train that moved through the church, circled their feet and about their heads, pressed against their faces. It was a real thing that they could feel all through them. It caused their heads to jerk back, forced their legs to take off running up and down the aisles. This song seemed impossibly fast, the piano keys hit so quickly that one note overlapped the other above the moaning of the guitars and the steady beat of the drums. The drummer’s arms moved in a great blur, his foot tapping the drum pedal with such force that the boomp of the bass drum could be heard over everything else. They couldn’t help but dance, listening to music like that. Easter wondered sometimes if it was the spirit or the music that caused them to holler out. It didn’t matter; whatever it was caused an exhilaration like she had never felt before. She threw her arms up into the air, closed her eyes, and swayed back and forth a moment before dancing down the aisle, all the way up to the front of the church, where the preacher jumped off the altar and put his hand on her forehead. And then she fell onto the floor, pushed down not by the preacher’s hand but by the very breath of God. She was sure of this. She lay on the floor and convulsed as one of the women snatched a towel off the pile in the first pew and spread it over Easter’s thighs.

  Now everyone was on their feet and they were all dancing, crying, waving their hands. Ecstasy was a real thing, so palpable that Easter couldn’t understand how it wasn’t seeable. The music grew louder, so forceful that she thought the walls of the church might give out and simply fall over. But the music would keep the roof from caving in on them. The music would cause the roof to rise up and be carried off. She imagined it landing somewhere far away. In the ocean, perhaps. People would stand on the beach and put a straight hand to their brow as they watched the roof float by, the steeple like a grand sail.

  Easter had gone back to church the Sunday after the argument, feeling lost and disoriented, but everyone there had come out of their seats to hug her. She had not been inside the church in two years, but they all acted as if it was only yesterday that she had been such a large part of the congregation. That was the thing she had always known about church people—you didn’t even have to ask them to forgive you.

  But she realized that she would have to ask El to forgive her for running him off. And somehow that didn’t seem right. Because she hadn’t really forgiven him in her heart. After she went back to her pew, and the preacher started preaching and people kept getting more and more anointed, she sat there and cried. People thought she was crying because of the preaching, because of the emotion in the room, but it didn’t have anything to do with the service. She was crying because she was no fool. She knew that if El didn’t change, she would have to quit him, baby or not. She wouldn’t stay with a man who drank and didn’t respect her religion just because it was the right thing to do for the church or for the baby—in fact, that would be even harder on a child. Nor would she stay because of her own pride. And she missed her sister.

  After the service was over, the pastor took Easter’s hand and leaned into her ear. “You’ll be baptized again and rededicate your life?” he said. His breath smelled like a damp basement.

  “Not yet,” Easter said. “But soon.” She couldn’t be baptized until she had forgiven Anneth. No matter how much she missed her, she still hadn’t forgiven her.

  ANNETH UNBUTTONED HER waitress uniform and let it fall around her feet and then sat down in the horsehair chair by the open window in her slip. Here she could feel the breeze off the river. She let her photo album lie on her lap for a long time before opening it. It was November and the air held that burning-leaves smell of late autumn, but it was a nice evening and the wind was not so much cold as merely cool. For her supper she shook a bag of peanuts into a Coke and smoked two cigarettes, all the while looking down at the little plaid cover. This plastic photo album was small enough to fit in her purse but large enough to hold her family’s history. Finally she opened it.

  There was a picture of Vine, although Vine had never consented to having her photograph taken. It was an old superstition of hers. Serena had sneaked and taken this picture one day when they had both ventured to Vine’s old homeplace on Redbud, which wasn’t even a place anymore. Nobody called it that, at least. Now it was a coal-mining camp, Altamont, a dirty sprawl of houses that were shipped in on railcars. In the picture, Vine was standing near an old fence line, her fingers held out to a bush of touch-me-not flowers. Serena had taken the picture just as Vine began to look up, so that her face was lost in a blur, but Anneth thought she could see a glimmer of Vine’s beauty, anyway. It was almost like her own face, lost there in that shadowy place. She liked the fact that Vine hadn’t let her face be caught. No one would ever be able to look into her eyes and wonder what she was thinking when that picture was taken or try to ponder the secrets she kept hidden. And Anneth loved seeing the straight way that Vine stood, her long black skirts and her rough old brogans. But most of all, Anneth loved the way Vine held her hand out to the flowers, tempting them to open up and see the world. Vine had such beautiful hands; Anneth could remember them in Vine’s old age, but here she could imagine them young and smooth, so graceful and long fingered, like a piano player’s.

  There was a picture of her grandfather Saul in his casket. She never could understand why people took funeral photographs. After Serena’s death, Easter had taken down all the funeral pictures in the living room. Serena had decorated the whole front room with them and had hung them very high, some up over the windows. Anneth had read in a magazine that a picture was supposed to hang at eye level, and after she told this to Easter, her sister had redone the whole house that way. But she had not put the funeral pictures back up. Now they were stacked up in the top of the hallway closet, a dark place where they belonged. Anneth knew that it was mostly because Easter had to live with the dead, anyway. Anneth knew how Easter was visited by ghosts. It was an unspoken truth between them.

  Anneth had studied this picture of her grandfather many times. There was nothing to see, really. Just a peaceful, strong-boned face and a pin-striped shirt with suspenders, which she thought was an awfully stupid thing to put on a dead man—especially Saul, as she knew that below the waist he had been crushed by the coal that had fallen in the mine and killed him. Easter had told her all about the way he died. He had bored a makeshift mine into the mountain behind their house so they’d have easy access to coal for their stove, and one day the earth simply swallowed him. Vine and Serena had dug him out, working for two whole days until they reached his death chamber. At that, Vine had thrown down her shovel and run up onto the mountain, leaving Serena to pack him out by herself. When Vine came back down she simply sat in her chair for a week, talking about their family’s being cursed by her own sins. Nobody ever knew what she was talking about, so they ignored it. “I loved him like air,” she had said, standing by his grave as the first clod of dirt was thrown onto his casket.

  Anneth wished she had known him. Everybody attested to what a good man he had been. There were still people in Crow County who would bend over backward for Easter and Anneth just because he had been their grandfather. His goodness haunted them somehow, hung over their heads and caused them to want to be better people. On the rare occasion when Anneth felt guilty about drinking or running wild, he was the first person she thought of, even though she had never known him.

  Many times, Anneth had sat at Vine’s feet and listened to her talk about Saul, how she couldn’t have asked for a better man. Vine had told how he drove her to North Carolina to see her people on the Cherokee reservation. Whenever she started telling that story, Vine always collapsed in tears, as if that memory was too intimate to put into words. Even as a child, Anneth had begged Vine to tell her more about that trip because it seemed like such an adventure to take off across the mountains. But Vine would never say more.

  There was Serena, laughing with her mouth open, one hand on her thigh, the other up to the side of her face. Anneth had never noticed before that between the fingers of
that hand stuck a cigarette. She realized that she was probably more like Serena than anyone, although she had always identified with Vine. But Serena had been wild at one time—Anneth had heard tales—and had even gotten a divorce from her first husband, Whistle-Dick, back in the early twenties. She had eventually married Dalton, Whistle-Dick’s brother, when she got pregnant with Paul. Anneth had only one real memory of her two grandmothers’ being together, although they always were, of course. They were all the time at each other’s house, breaking beans or quilting or going to town together. But there was only one time that she could recall vividly, when she was ten.

  Anneth had been miserable. For three days the mountain had been on fire and they had worked all night to make sure it didn’t cross the ridgeline. Nobody knew how the forest fire had started—lightning or a carelessly thrown match—but everybody in God’s Creek and Free Creek had come together to save the mountain that divided the two places. They hauled buckets of water up on the ridge and dashed it onto the ground, over and over, a monotonous circle of everyone Anneth had ever known in her life. All her cousins and Sophie and Paul and Gabe and Lolie and the preacher and just everybody. She wondered where so many buckets had come from. She had been given the worst one of all, a wooden bucket that leaked and had a rope handle, which cut into her hands. She knew that they had to keep the fire away, though, and she didn’t complain until Vine noticed that her hand was bleeding. Vine ripped a strip from her apron and wound it about Anneth’s hand, and just when Anneth thought she’d send her on back to the house, Vine simply traded buckets with her. Vine’s wasn’t much better—lighter, since it was aluminum, but the handle was thin metal that seemed to bite into Anneth’s cut.

  “I’m sorry, Anneth Gail, but we need ever hand we can get,” she said, and tilted back her head, pointing her chin down the mountain to the finger-shaped garden. “I’ve worked too hard on them crops to give them over to fire.”

  So Anneth kept on packing the water, watching the shape of Easter in front of her, her hair hanging down in her face, her face black with soot. Anneth dashed her water out and paused for a minute, watching as Serena and Vine worked side by side, digging at the ditch line the men had formed around the ridge. Their big hands, their hoes, worked in unison, as if they had memorized each other’s movements. She had felt like she would pass out from fatigue when the sky finally turned peach with daylight.

  Then Serena and Vine and all the men stood with their elbows propped on their hoes and seemed satisfied that the fire had been kept away. Serena unwrapped the apron strip from Anneth’s hand and kissed her on the palm. Her kiss felt like something that might heal her. “Bless your heart,” she said. “But look what you done. Saved this big mountain. Kept our garden safe.”

  When they got back down to the house, it had turned into the most beautiful summer day that Anneth had ever seen. It was as if all the smoke had been absorbed by the sunrise, and there was even the song of birds amongst the trees—a sound she hadn’t heard since the fire had begun three days earlier. She was so tired she felt as if she was watching the world in snapshots. She was vaguely aware of Easter’s arm around her shoulders.

  “I don’t believe I’ll be able to sleep on such a pretty morning,” Vine said, her hands on her hips as she leaned back and looked at the sky.

  “We’ve been up all night,” Serena said, pushing the girls along toward the back porch. “These children are killed.”

  “Let’s go to the swimming hole, though,” Vine said, and a smile broke out on her face. “To get rid of this smoke from ourselves.”

  They walked up the crooked dirt road to the place where the creek widened and deepened, a round place with high banks covered in ivy and trumpet vines. Vine stripped off her blackened dress and left it in a clump on the ground, then climbed up on the bank. She stood for a moment, lit from behind, so that they could all see right through her slip. Anneth didn’t look away from her grandmother’s shape, the dark buttons at her breasts, and the black triangle below her belly. Vine put her hands together in front of her and dove into the water, her skin so brown and smooth it looked like something that had been baked for the exact right amount of time. When she came up out of the water, her long hair floated on the water behind her. She ran her hands over her face and called for Serena to hurry up. “It feels so good!” she hollered, and her voice echoed against the damp banks.

  “Come on, girls,” Serena said. “Shed them old dirty dresses.”

  “We can’t strip down right here in front of God and everybody,” Easter said, shoving her hands into her armpits as if she was already naked.

  “There’s nobody to see,” Serena said, and stripped down to her slip. She didn’t climb up on the bank but ran right into the water from the shallow sandy beach where they stood. She went under, then burst forth from the water with her shift sticking to her.

  “You all coming?” Vine called, and before they could answer, she started splashing Serena. They had a water fight, just like two girls, and for the first time Anneth realized that they had once been young and carefree. Anneth jerked her dress over her head, ran right on up to the bank, jumped off, and caused a huge splash with a cannonball. When she came up, Easter was still standing on the bank fully dressed, but she was laughing. Finally Easter waded into the water, dress and all. They splashed each other, and Anneth did a dead man’s float to much applause, and Easter won the contest of staying under the longest. Anneth remembered her grandmothers then sitting on the ivy-covered bank together, clad in their wet shifts, leaning back as they watched their granddaughters caught up in the happiness of simply being alive.

  She missed her grandmothers too much to look at either of their pictures for very long. She turned the page to her parents’ wedding picture. They both looked so solemn. It was impossible to tell by this picture how much in love they had been, but from all accounts they had worshipped each other. They had grown up together, after all, and must have known each other better than anyone else in the world. Her mother was so beautiful—half-Cherokee and half-Irish, with black hair that fell in corkscrew curls down to her waist and blue eyes that nearly pierced the gray confines of the picture. And her father was equally beautiful. Big shoulders and a square jaw, dimples and one big hand propped up on her mother’s shoulder. How she wished for a love like the one that had existed between them. It was no wonder her mother went mad when he died. It must have been like walking around with only half of herself.

  And of course the next picture was of her and Easter and Gabe, their mother’s elegant handwriting on the back:

  Gabe—10

  Easter—5 ½

  Anneth—5 months

  At Free Creek, Kentucky, July 1940

  They were all three barefooted. They always went barefooted in the summer, even though they had shoes. Easter had told her that they had been poor back then, but not so poor as to not have shoes, like some others. The mountain was full of leaves behind them, so lush that she could almost remember the warmth of the summer day when the picture was taken. Gabe already thought he was a man, standing behind his two sisters with his dark eyes and fretted brow. He leered at the camera as if he had better things to do. And Easter looked pitiful in her heavy, out-of-season dress, holding Anneth in her arms.

  She slammed the album shut.

  If Vine and Serena were here, they would tell her to go to Easter, to beg for forgiveness. But she knew Easter better than that. Easter rarely got mad, but when she did, her heart became stone. She had to come around on her own, and if Anneth went to her, words would be said that might cause unhealable wounds. So she would just have to wait. And she knew what her grandmothers would want her to do in the meantime: live. She wasn’t going to let herself be trapped inside her own mind.

  She jumped out of her chair and went to her record collection, knowing that music healed her the same way water could. She put on a Coltrane album and turned it up as loud as it would go.

  She gave herself what Serena had always calle
d a whore’s bath—standing at the sink with a soapy washrag to clean all the important places—and pulled on her red honky-tonking dress as she shimmied to the music. She put on lipstick and ran a brush through her hair, took just a moment to study herself in the mirror over the tiny bathroom sink. She pictured herself walking into the Hilltop, waving with the same hand that clutched her purse.

  PART THREE

  Coal Tattoo

  When coal flashed bright as diamond,

  men might rise in the mineshaft’s

  after-silence, lift themselves

  from their cairns, these men who seemed

  marked for death now marked for life

  by those black bruises or streaks

  called coal tattoos, and claimed them

  certain signs of God’s favor,

  the best good luck charms if curved

  up like a horseshoe—though most

  came slower, rubbed in the way

  quickwater wears stone, and all

  part of the dark they entered

  to bury their waking lives in.

  —Ron Rash, “The Marked”

  Twelve

  Live Forever

  ANNETH LAY ON THE beach at Blackhawk Lake in her gingham two-piece bathing suit and cat’s-eye sunglasses and felt her back cooking in the sun. The heat was almost painful on her skin but she was too comfortable to move. There was nothing better than this, nothing more relaxing. She loved lying here upon this sand, everyone splashing in the water just below her, people singing along to songs that came onto the transistor radio that Lolie had hung high on the branch of a hickory so that the sound would carry farther. Right now “Hey Baby” was playing and it seemed everyone here knew it. Anneth loved watching all these coal miners and old mountain boys joining in to sing together as they stood in the water. They slapped one another on the shoulder or wrapped their arms about one another’s necks and closed their eyes to sing as loudly as they could. She took a deep breath of the lake air—a clean, green scent—and when she moved her teeth, there was the grit of sand in her mouth. It tasted good, like raw potatoes.