The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  Like everything else lately, it made her think of Easter. Whenever Easter peeled potatoes, she always slipped a raw piece into her mouth midway through her work and crunched it between her teeth, turning it over on her tongue. There was nothing in the world that Easter liked better than raw potatoes. A palpable grief curled up in Anneth’s gut. Sophie had told Anneth that Easter was pregnant. “But don’t go up there and upset her, now,” Sophie had said.

  Many afternoons when she got off work she would drive up to Free Creek and sit in front of the house, hoping for Easter to come running out the door to greet her and tell her to come in. But if Easter knew that Anneth was out there, she must have stood to the side of the window, peeking out without giving up her grudge. Now it had been nearly eight months. Every time Anneth had the thought of never talking to Easter again, she felt the blues threaten to spread out over her body at any moment. She tried not to think about Easter or the baby, but lying here on the lake with the good sun warm on her back, she could think of nothing else.

  She rolled over, sat up, and lit a Lucky Strike. Israel and Lolie were standing waist-deep in the water, splashing each other. There was a scattering of children playing near the water’s edge: collecting rocks, using a stick to write their names in the sand. Several boats had pulled up on the bank. Men sat in them, smoking and drinking beers. Anneth’s mouth watered at the prospect of a cold Blue Ribbon; Lolie hadn’t brought a thing but several bottles of RC and Anneth had already had three of them. She was cotton mouthed, and the cigarette was only making it worse.

  The music went off and a man came on to announce the news in a monotone: something about the Cubans and JFK and Asia, the same thing that had been in the news for months now. After that it seemed the station just faded out of existence; first there was dull static and then nothing, and she could hear all their voices clearly down at the water. Above them all there was Lolie’s high, clear laughter. Israel laughed, too, and Lolie punched his arm playfully and swam away.

  Anneth closed her eyes as a cooling breeze drifted in off the lake. She could hear it passing through the leaves of the sycamores. Far away there was the sound of a boat motor, and closer, more laughter, and even before she opened her eyes she could hear Lolie’s wet feet slapping on the sand. Lolie sank down onto the towel next to Anneth’s and lay back as if exhausted.

  “What’re you laughing about?” Anneth said.

  “Israel. I swear, he ain’t got a brain.”

  “I wish he’d bum us a beer off some of them fellers down there.”

  Lolie sat up and put a hand to her brow to block the sun. “Them’s coal-company men. Israel wouldn’t ask them for nothing.”

  Anneth eyed the men more closely. They had pulled their boats in very close together and they leaned over the sides to talk to one another. One of the men was incredibly brown—Anneth wished she was that dark—and good looking, from what she could see. He had hair the color of a penny and he was wearing sunglasses. She had never seen a man wear sunglasses before. He leaned down and brought up another beer, then made two holes in the top with a church key. He caught her looking and nodded his head.

  She held his gaze while she talked. “See that one staring me right in the eye? I bet he’d give me a beer.”

  “He ought to take a picture—it’d last longer,” Lolie said. She tapped Anneth’s box of Lucky Strikes and caught a cigarette between her teeth. “Don’t you dare ask him for no beer. He’s the mine foreman.”

  “He’s tall. Look at them long legs.”

  Lolie elbowed her. “But he’s a company man.”

  “Who cares? He’s still sharp to look at.”

  “His daddy is one of the owners of the Altamont mine. They sent him down here from West Virginia to straighten him out, I heard. He was so wild that his daddy put this big job on him. He lives in that old house overlooking the camp, two stories and gingerbread on the porch. A real prick, Israel says.”

  Anneth got her bottle of baby oil and squirted out a handful, then coated her arms and the tops of her breasts and her belly. Her skin shone in the stark light.

  “You’ll burn up, all the iodine you put in that oil,” Lolie said, and lay back down.

  Anneth stood up and popped the back of her bottoms so they weren’t riding up on her cheeks. “I’m going to get me a beer. You want one?”

  Lolie put her hand around Anneth’s ankle. “Them company men won’t fool with no waitress. They’re all highfalutin.”

  Anneth jerked her ankle away. “I’m not wanting fooled with,” she said, and tapped her toe against Lolie’s waist. “I’m wanting a beer.”

  He watched her closely as she walked down the beach toward him. But they were all watching her. She liked that, liked having so many eyes upon her. Some of the men who stood with women in the water even paused to look at her. The radio got staticky again and she could hear choppy voices—an announcer giving the end of the tobacco report, and then one talking about the Stanley Brothers playing a show in Bristol. Out on the lake a boat went by with a skier behind it, a white-capped wake trailing out behind.

  She stopped at his boat and put one hand on her hip. “Hey, buddy,” she said, “you got an extra beer?”

  He fished down into his cooler and held one by the top, extending the bottom toward her. “Come and get it.”

  THE PAIN HIT Easter as if someone had shot her in the stomach and ripped her wide open. She was standing in the kitchen, fixing El’s lunch pail. The tearing ran through her like a zipper and she dropped the ladleful of pinto beans she had been dipping into the pail. The beans and hot juice covered the top of her feet and she focused on this as she bent over, thinking it might ease the pain.

  She fell back onto the floor and ran her hands over her big belly in long, quick motions. The blood spread across the linoleum like a blooming stain on cloth. Before she had even realized there was bleeding at all, the blood was in her hair and its metallic smell was rising up, making its way into her mouth.

  “El,” she hollered, but it only came out as a gurgle. But he was there all at once, still buttoning up his shirt.

  THE DRIVE TO THE hospital seemed to pass her in a blur of houses and cars and mountainsides. By the time he carried her into the emergency room lobby, she had passed out. The pain was too much to bear.

  When she came to, she saw the nurses’ faces and she didn’t even have to ask. She had known even before awakening. It was as if she had seen every bit of it: the doctor cutting open her belly and lifting out the baby, which was so blue it was nearly gray, then a scrambling about in the operating room as they tried to save the child. It was like a dream to which she couldn’t recall all of the details.

  A nurse came and took hold of her hand. She leaned over and said something, but Easter didn’t really hear. The woman was saying, “Honey, I’m sorry,” or “We did all we could,” or something to that effect. Easter didn’t have to hear her, for the nurse’s face held all these sentences in the gathered wrinkles of her brow.

  “I wanted him so bad,” Easter said.

  The nurse nodded and ran her thumb over Easter’s knuckles.

  “I want to see him.”

  “Are you sure about that, Mrs. McIntosh?”

  “Bring him to me,” Easter said in a whisper. The nurse stood there looking down at Easter as if she were some strange sight to see, and Easter mustered all the voice she could and screamed: “Now!”

  El crept into the room as if she was something he feared. His face was stretched tightly across his skull and she could tell that he was trying not to show how hurt he was. But his pain couldn’t equal hers; there was no way. They had torn the baby right from her, cut it away from her own live body, and how could he possibly know what that was like, to have a part of you lifted out of yourself, dead and blue? There was no way. She wanted him there, but at the same time she didn’t want to share her grief with anybody. Not with him, not right now. He came to her bed and just fell over, his face against her breasts. She could feel hi
s tears hot on her thin gown but she made no move to comfort him. She looked at the ceiling and squinted hard, as if she might be able to see God hovering over her. “Why?” she said. She thought of saying, I beseech you! the way the preacher often did; it sounded like the epitome of pleading, to beseech for something, but she couldn’t muster any more words. She rose up a bit, wanting to understand, trying so hard to do so, but she couldn’t and she felt her faith drifting up out of her, right through her heart and her chest and El’s face and on up, up, until she realized that what she was reaching for was that very thing. She was trying to catch hold of her faith and not let it escape, but it was gone. It burned through the ceiling. She could hear it sizzle through the wood.

  The baby was wrapped tightly in a striped blanket, so that she couldn’t see any of him as the nurse stood there in the doorway, pausing before coming forward.

  “Mrs. McIntosh,” the nurse said, her voice caught somewhere amongst her teeth.

  “Bring him to me,” Easter said. “I have to see my baby.”

  It was as if the nurse became nonexistent and El dissolved into thin air, too, and there was nothing but the baby drifting toward her. She put her hand up and he came to rest in the crook of her arm and she pulled the blanket away from his face. Perfect. Perfect in every way, fully formed, the fingers of his left hand slipping out to reveal a tightly clenched fist. Little nostrils and downy eyebrows and the prettiest lips. And right there on his forehead, a curved blue line burned into his skin, a mark that she had seen before.

  The nurse was beside her again, and she was aware of El down at the foot of her bed, his hands on her legs, as if he wanted to be near for comfort but couldn’t bear to look at their son’s face.

  “He has a coal tattoo,” Easter said.

  She was aware of the nurse’s nodding. “We see them every once in a while.”

  “But it’s a sign of survival,” Easter said, speaking aloud for herself, not for El or the nurse or anyone else. She felt as if she was speaking just to convince herself that she was still there, that she was alive. “My brother has one, from being in a mine cave-in, when the chunks of coal fell on his arm. He never could get rid of that blue mark it left.” She flashed back to when she was a child and had seen a man with such a blemish for the first time, Serena leaning down to tell her not to stare, that it was something for the man to wear proudly. Serena had whispered, “When the coal breaks your skin, it becomes a part of you.”

  “Babies have them sometimes,” the nurse said. “Nobody really knows why.”

  “It’s a sign that you’re meant to live, though,” Easter said, her voice trailing out of her mouth as if she could see the words forming themselves on the air, letters that came together and snaked out across the room to plaster themselves on the wall. She could see the words back there on the whiteness between the two long windows. The only word she focused on was live.

  She heard Serena whispering in her ear again: But it’s a sign of sacrifice, too. Easter pushed Serena’s voice away from her, actually put a hand into the air as if to shove her grandmother aside.

  “Easter, please. Let him go,” El said, but his words meant nothing to her. She thought he was a coward, standing down there where he wouldn’t have this baby’s face burned into his mind forever. She had already memorized that face, the big eyes and fat cheeks and most of all the coal tattoo, a faint blue line like the jagged edge of a leaf, stamped onto his temple. She leaned over and kissed him on the coal tattoo. And there her lips felt a coldness that she had never known before, a cold like darkness stretched out eternal.

  She dropped her head and held the baby up just enough so that it could be a sign for the nurse to take him. She knew if she didn’t let him go now, she would sit here and hold him all night. She would hold him until they put him in the ground. She wasn’t even aware of the nurse over her until her arms were empty—a great, barren lightness there on her chest where he had lain.

  “What am I to do?” El was asking at her ear then, his voice a whisper, a call from very far away.

  When she opened her mouth it felt as if her tongue was coated with chalk. She spat the word out, as if she were coughing up two pieces of coal: “Anneth.”

  Thirteen

  Bone Moon

  ANNETH SEEMED ABNORMALLY aware of noise this morning. It was suffocating and loud, coming at her from all sides. She had been out too late the night before with that mine foreman, Liam, but it was more than just being tired; every sound ran all through her. Someone was playing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on the jukebox, and even though she loved that song, she still thought it was too early for the Kingston Trio. A baby was crying; Anneth’s boss, Gloria, was shouting out an order; and four men who had gotten off the seven o’clock train were being particularly obnoxious with riotous laughter. When she took their order they had made fun of her accent—raising their eyebrows and shooting knowing looks to one another when she spoke—and that was enough to make her hate them, besides their laughter, which was so loud and jovial that it seemed fake. She could hear the sizzle of the grill and the chairs scraping on the floor, forks clattering against plates, a girl who chomped on a cud of gum and popped her bubbles with the flat of her hand, then went about the task of pulling the bubblegum off her nose and cheeks. The sharp ring of the bell when an order came up. Too much noise. She needed a break and she had only been there an hour.

  When she glanced up and saw that El had stepped in, it seemed the place grew even louder. He stood there looking about helplessly for a moment, as if he had never been in a restaurant before. There was something wrong. She could tell by his face. Of course there was. Why else would he come into the café? He had never been in here before as far as Anneth knew. It felt strange to see him, to be watching him across the room. It was as if she and El really had done something wrong, something like Easter had thought that evening, because she felt guilt wash over her. For a moment she considered running into the kitchen to hide from him, but then he saw her and as soon as their eyes locked she knew for sure that something was wrong.

  “What is it?” she said, holding her tray against her chest. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was going to call you but I just didn’t think it would be right,” he said. He couldn’t look her in the eye.

  She put her hand on the ball of his shoulder, shaking him a little. “El, tell me,” she said, hearing the pleading in her own voice. “Is it Easter?”

  “The baby,” he said, and looked away. “She’s lost the baby.”

  Anneth rushed back across the room past the table of laughing men. She could sense them making a great show of turning to watch her walk past. The old man raised his coffee cup in the air and said, “Miss?” but Anneth went on past him without a word. The cook tapped his palm against the bell, which sent out its singular, high ring. She squatted down behind the counter to get her purse but took a moment to close her eyes and suck in a deep breath. When she got up again, El was still standing just inside the door as if he was waiting for someone to seat him.

  “Let’s go,” she said. She breezed past him and threw the door open.

  Outside, the air was damp with heat, so humid that it was hard to take a breath.

  El was right at her heels. “Now wait a minute, Anneth,” he said, trying to catch her elbow in his hand. “I’m not so sure you ought to just bust right in on her. It’s been months since you seen her.”

  “I should’ve gone up there to see her. I was so damn afraid she’d run me off.” She stopped and looked up and down the street, her voice swelling in her chest. “Where the hell’s your car at?”

  “Let’s talk about this, now, Anneth. Wait one damn minute here.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and didn’t say anything else until she was still, looking him in the eye. “She’s asked for you.”

  “But you don’t want me going to her?”

  “I’m just not certain it’s the right thing,” he said. “You all ain’t even made up since that big fig
ht.”

  Anneth spotted El’s Chevy sitting in front of the shoe store and hustled toward it. “Sisters don’t make up, El. They just go back to the way things were.”

  SHE HAD NOT felt as if she could completely break down until Anneth came. Now a great release moved up out of Easter’s heart. She could feel it rising, bursting forth, when Anneth leaned down and wrapped her arms around Easter’s shoulders. Anneth held Easter as tightly as she could. They cried with a grief that Easter reckoned could be felt all throughout the hospital.

  She knew that their mourning was growing and growing until it became an actual, physical thing. It rose from them and moved out the window, a great wind that whistled through the trees down the mountain until it reached the town. There this wind of grief kicked newspapers along the sidewalks and blew the hats from the heads of a group of men leaving the Depot Café. It blew up the skirts of women on their way into the dress shop, caused trees to bend, set waves to peaking on the river. People felt it come out of nowhere, turned to watch it pass. The trees showed the white sides of their leaves to its approach, and as it moved across the hills the wind tore damp clothes from lines where they had been hung to dry. Tomato plants broke in two and tufts of leaf lettuce were lost. Their collected grief moved up the dirt road and took shingles from their own little house on Free Creek.

  Anneth stretched out on the bed there with Easter, one arm behind Easter’s neck and the other thrown across her waist. Before long, darkness overtook the world outside the long windows, and gray shadows moved about the room. By that time they had both fallen asleep, exhausted by their heartbreak.

  ANNETH DID NOT really ever dream. It was more like remembering while she slept. She always saw the past in her dreams. Tonight, once again, she was observing something that had already happened. She was aware that this was a part of her life she was looking at, although it was something that she had only heard spoken of a couple of times. Asleep but not asleep, she stood in the middle of the road at Free Creek just as she had when she was five years old.