by Silas House
Most of all, Anneth loved going into the record store and buying three or four albums at once. Nobody else in town did that. Used to, she had to save up her tips for weeks just so she could buy one single record after she had paid all her bills. But now when she left town she strutted down the street with so many bags and boxes that she could barely carry all of them. Most days she sat in the house with nothing to do but play solitaire or listen to her records. She liked to read but rarely found books that satisfied her. She had a stack of magazines that arrived in the mail with her catalogs, but they were mostly things like Silver Screen and Look and Life. The pictures didn’t take very long to look at.
When she couldn’t work up the energy to drive all the way into town and couldn’t stand sitting in the house any longer, she went for long walks up onto the ridge that Vine had explored as a girl. She sat down in the woods and listened to the world. Mostly all she could hear was the drone of the coal tipple down there in the valley, but sometimes she could find a cove between two mountains where the noise of the coal camp was not able to enter. Here she could hear the growth of ferns and the clicking of the earth beneath her back and the music of falling water. She studied the sky through the bobbing leaves and ran her hands down the trunks of trees. She listened to the songs of birds as if they might be telling her something important and cupped her hands to drink from a creek—spewing the water back out, since it was now tinged with sulfur dredged up from the mining. She walked along whistling and was sometimes aware of being followed. She would turn very quickly, expecting to see Vine trailing along behind her, but there was nothing but the trees, although sometimes she thought they were watching her, too.
And sometimes she went down to the camp and visited with a few people she knew. She hesitated to do this because it made her feel like they thought of her as the rich lady who came down to study the poor, although she didn’t feel this way at all. She would have traded places with them in a heartbeat. Those little coal-camp houses held much more warmth than her big house on the hill with the long hallway and the gingerbread on the porch.
The only place she felt truly at home in the camp was at Jewell Stubefield’s. Jewell was married to one of the miners and had her camp house fixed up with doilies on the furniture, and nice cotton curtains she had sewn herself. Jewell was the kind of person who kept fresh flowers on the kitchen table. When Anneth was especially bored she went to Jewell’s house for a long while. They played records and danced or worked in Jewell’s flower garden and sometimes Jewell would read to Anneth from whatever book she happened to be obsessed with that particular week. Once a week, Anneth took her into Black Banks to check books out of the library.
Jewell was much more beautiful than she realized. Anneth thought she looked like a country version of Grace Kelly with her blond hair curling in and her big blue doe eyes. Jewell got up every morning at daylight to fix her husband a big breakfast; then she started cleaning her house so that she was finished by noon. After that, she read the books she got at the library. Jewell wanted to be a writer. Usually when Anneth got there, she could tell that Jewell was happy to see her but also a bit disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to spend her afternoon reading. She always met Anneth at the door with a novel in her hand.
“What you reading this time?” Anneth said.
Jewell held the paperback up. “A Long and Happy Life,” she said. Anneth liked the cover. It showed a good-looking boy with a motorcycle and a girl in a pretty red skirt. They both looked wild and free. “And this one is mine. I bought it this weekend when we went to Pikeville. It’s the best book I’ve ever read in my life.”
Jewell said this about every new book that she found, and Anneth told her so.
“No, I’m serious about this one. It’s about people like us, Anneth. You’d like it.”
Anneth tapped Jewell lightly on the arm. “You’re serious about everything, Jewell Lynn.” Anneth opened the refrigerator and helped herself to a bottle of Pepsi. “I’m bored out of my skull. Why don’t you get ready and let’s go to town? I’ll take us out to lunch.”
“I can’t today,” Jewell said, and marked her place in the book with a grocery receipt. She placed it carefully on the little shelf with her other paperbacks. “It’s too late. We’d never get back in time for me to have supper ready.”
“I can’t stand just setting around the house,” Anneth said. She took a long drink from the bottle. “It drives me crazy.”
“Just wait till wintertime,” Jewel said. “They’re saying it’s going to be bad this year. You got lucky this past winter. It barely snowed. Hey, you got a smoke?”
“You know I do, honey,” Anneth said, and pushed her purse across the kitchen table.
Jewell lit the cigarette as if famished. “Anyway, you remember the winter before last? That’s when me and Doug moved in up here. The longest winter I’ve ever seen in my life. Just snow and more snow. And so cold you couldn’t stick your foot out. I thought I’d crack up. I like being in the house all day, being able to read and write, but knowing that I can’t get out, that’s what kills me. I didn’t leave this house for two months solid, Anneth. The company sent in groceries for us because the road was too bad to get out.”
Last winter, Anneth and Liam had still been newlyweds, so she hadn’t paid much attention to the weather. But now she thought of the road: ten miles of dirt and mud from the main highway. If a bad winter was on the way, it would undoubtedly be impassable.
Jewell closed one eye against the smoke that washed over her face as she exhaled. “How’s life with the big boss man?”
“He’s good to me, gives me whatever I want. Leaves money just laying around like it’s nothing at all,” Anneth said. “I didn’t even know he made so much money. But I hate that house. And I hate this place. I never thought I’d live in a coal camp way up in the head of nowhere.”
Jewell held the thin curtain back from the kitchen window and peered out. Her face glowed in the light that fell there. “I kind of like it here. I never do get lonesome. I like hearing the coal cars running all day long and the way the whole place is lit up at night by all the lights on the tipple. And even how we’re all stuck here together in the winter. It makes you appreciate your neighbors more. I love it when Doug comes home in the evenings and pulls off all his clothes behind the screen right there on the back porch.”
Anneth leaned forward, smiling. “You love him, then, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” Jewell said, and looked at her strangely, about to say more. But there was a big ruckus out on the porch, someone stomping their feet as if they were clogging. Jewell mashed out her cigarette and hurried to the door. “What’re you doing? Don’t worry about muddy shoes. Just come on in. It’ll sweep up.”
A broad-shouldered man stepped in and Anneth couldn’t take her eyes off him. He had style. He wore a necktie and a pressed white shirt with the sleeves folded up a cuff or two. He also had on a hat, the kind men had worn when Anneth was a child, but he looked to be about her age. He wasn’t a bit good looking, but he had a nice smile, which he immediately showed to Anneth. It seemed to overtake his whole face, running up to wrinkle out his forehead and cause laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. He tipped his hat to her without taking it off his head. “Hidy there.”
“Hidy,” Anneth said, and took another drink of Pepsi while Jewell introduced her.
“And this is my brother, Glenn,” Jewell said. “He delivers bread for Sunbeam, so he comes to see me every time he brings a load out to the company store.”
“I might come more often, now that you’re here,” he said, eyeing Anneth. She just smiled and tilted up her bottle again, taking a long chug of the pop.
“Anneth is married to Liam Trosper, Glenn,” Jewell said, chiding him with her eyes.
Glenn changed the subject. “I mostly come so she’ll fix me a bite to eat for dinner,” he said. Anneth noticed his hands, folded over the back of the kitchen chair where Jewell had been standing. His fingertips were wide
and square. The noon whistle sounded up at the coal tipple and they all turned that way for a moment as if they would be able to see something accompanying this noise.
Anneth snatched her purse up off the table and scooted out of her chair. “I guess I better go on, if I’m going to town, before it gets too late,” she said to Jewell, and then added to Glenn: “You got a good little sister here, Glenn. She keeps me from going crazy, living way back in these big mountains.”
“She’s going to be a writer,” Glenn said, and put one of his big hands on the back of Jewell’s neck. Anneth kissed her on the cheek and gave Glenn a crooked smile as a way of saying good-bye.
Once she was in her little Falcon, speeding down the crooked road toward town while “Paint It, Black” played on the radio, she found herself smiling. Maybe it was the fact that Glenn had been flirting with her. Men hadn’t flirted with her much since she hooked up with Liam, because he was the mine foreman. Or maybe she was just smiling at Jewell, who was such a good friend to her, in some ways even better than Lolie. Or maybe it was that she was flying down the road in her own little car with the Rolling Stones on the radio and it was warm enough to have all the windows down and her billfold was full of cash in her purse. Either way, she was happy and she said a quick, eyes-open prayer that it would last.
Twenty-two
Out of the Smoke
OCTOBER, AND THE MOUNTAINS were on fire. The fires had not come to Crow County but they were so vast and raging that the smoke covered half the state, and the world could only be seen through a gray haze. The smell was thick but oddly comforting, like the scent of a campfire. It was not especially cold, but someone peering out the window might think as much; the sun was a white orb sliding in and out of smoke.
Easter had been in the house for three days, waiting for the smoke to lift, when she decided she couldn’t stand it any longer. She didn’t care what the radio said—breathing this faraway smoke couldn’t be any worse than what people did to their lungs on a daily basis, she thought. She put on her mackinaw and ventured out to work in her garden. The corn was long gone and its fodder needed to be cut and gathered. She went down the rows chopping with a tobacco knife, and the stalks fell like dominoes, collapsing onto one another, the scratch of their dry leaves making much noise. She stood up the piles of stalks, big enough for her to barely reach her arms around. She took a length of rope and tied the fodder, as if she were latching a belt onto a friend too large to do so herself. Before long, six fodder shocks stood in each row. She hoed out the old bean vines, which crackled like twisted paper, and the dead tomato plants, and she took the tobacco knife to the thick stalks of the sunflowers, too.
She worked like a woman who had to be done in time to go somewhere important, the chop of the hoe beating out a rhythm in the soil. She did not sing or even hum. She hated this death in her garden and wanted to rid the ground of these old vines and plants. She couldn’t stand seeing their brown skeletons standing in the rows she had so carefully prepared last spring. They reminded her of the baby, of her own womb, just as dead and parched. Of course, everything reminded her of the baby. It had been almost three years and she still thought of it more often than seemed normal. She had only now begun to accept that she would never be able to carry a child. She said the word aloud—barren—and found that it was the dullest word she had ever uttered. There was nothing beautiful about it at all, which was only right, since it meant such an ugly thing.
She relished the feel of the hoe’s strike and heard nothing but the bite of metal into dirt. She snapped out of her reverie when she felt someone behind her. She let the hoe dive into the loose soil and turned, her eyes trying to find the shape of a man amongst all the smoke, which was funneling into the valley like a morning mist now.
Liam came walking out of the smoke with one hand to his brow, as if leaning against a strong wind. “Easter?” he hollered.
Easter leaned on her hoe and breathed out with exasperation. She knew that the dread she had carried in her belly like a stone would see the light of day now. She didn’t know what Liam would tell her—something bad, real bad, like Anneth being dead or the fires coming into Free Creek, or something that would change them forever—but she knew that she had been waiting for this moment for a year now, ever since that last bad headache.
“Easter?” he called again, as if he could not make her out plainly, although only the backyard lay between them. The smoke seemed to distance them in every way. Even his voice seemed to come from very far away, as if she stood at the mouth of a mine and he called out to her from the very heart of a mountain.
She grabbed hold of her hoe and carried it like a shotgun, propped up on her shoulder, as she walked across the yard to see what was the matter.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Do you have time to set down and have a cup of coffee?” Liam said. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.
“Tell me if something’s wrong, Liam. Is it Anneth?”
“No,” he said, eyeing her with suspicion. “Everything’s fine. I just need to talk to you.”
In the house she struck a match to the gas ring and warmed up the coffee. She shed her coat—the scent of smoke rolling off it—and hung it on the back of a chair at the kitchen table while he sat down. He kept his coat on, a blue painter’s coat with a patch on either side of the zipper. The one over his heart read WILLIAM—his real name—and ALTAMONT MINING COMPANY read the one opposite.
“El on the road?”
“He took a load of coal up to Cincinnati.” She poured coffee into two cups, and steam curled up over her arms as she carried the cups to the table. “Where’s Anneth?”
“Still asleep when I left this morning,” he said, and sipped his coffee. “I reckon she’s at the house.”
“So what brings you up here, Liam?” There was no use beating around the bush, she thought. She realized she had never had a conversation with him in the year he had been married to her sister.
“I wanted to come up here and talk to you in person,” he said. He didn’t look her in the eye but watched his left hand. He traced and retraced the ivy print on the tablecloth. “Do you know what a broad form deed is, Easter?”
“That’s what a mining company uses to mine coal on land that don’t belong to them,” she said, and then she realized why he had come. The knowledge washed over her like cold water.
“Well, not really. Mining companies buy the mineral rights to a piece of property, and this is all written up on a broad form deed. Your great-uncle—Aaron Sullivan—sold the mineral rights to the mountain that runs behind your house, that whole ridge that runs between Free Creek and God’s Creek.”
“My grandfather’s brother? His brother disappeared ages ago. Left his wife and baby.”
Liam nodded. “Before he left he sold the rights.”
“This is nineteen sixty-six, Liam. That was almost fifty years ago. And he didn’t even own this land.” She looked at Liam and realized that this meant nothing to him. He couldn’t care less. “So you all intend to put a mine in there and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Well, that broad form deed gives the company the right to mine it, and it’ll stand up in court,” he said. “But I’m here to tell you that we’ll do it as proper as we can. It’ll just be the ridge and we won’t be mining on any of the land around your yard. Just up on the mountain.”
“You make it sound like you’re doing me a favor,” Easter said. “Where will the mine entrance be?”
“Well, that’s the thing, Easter,” he said. He slipped his finger in the coffee cup handle and tapped his thumb against the cup’s brim. “No, the coal business is in bad shape now, Easter. The boom is over. So they’re all turning to strip mining. It’s cheaper. They’ll cut down all the trees and then they’ll come in and doze the mountain down until they get to the coal. There won’t be a mine entrance. The whole mountain will be dozed.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘they’ when it’s you that
will be doing it?” She could feel heat spreading up her neck, taking over her face.
“I don’t have a say in it, Easter. You know good and well that my father is only a part owner in Altamont. I’m trying to do right by you, to come up here and tell you in person.”
“To tell me in person,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “To tell me that the land my family has owned for as long as anybody can remember is going to be tore down. That I’ll look out my back door and see a mountain cut down to nothing, hear bulldozers and steam shovels all day long. And you can just take it. You know them broad form deeds are dirty. They probably bought that land for a quarter an acre.”
“They probably did,” he said, his voice level and calm. He was a businessman, she saw. He was talking about all of this so easily. And he really thought that he was being a big man for telling her face-to-face. “But the fact is somebody in your family got the money and they spent it ages ago.”
“But they just sold it thinking a mine would go back in the mountain. Not that it would be destroyed. Once you strip that land, it’ll be changed forever. All those trees, the field of wildflowers up there.” She was trying not to talk loudly, but she couldn’t help it. Her voice kept rising up and up. Her own father had given his life for Altamont and now they were going to destroy her land. Almost everyone in her family was dead and now her land was going to die, too. “This is your own wife’s land. She’ll quit you over this.”
“I’m sorry, Easter, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” he said, displaying both his hands palm-up now. “Nothing.”
“You do something,” she said, her voice deepening as she spoke.
“I knew it would be this way,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to—”
Easter rose from her chair. “Don’t you come in here and act like you’re being the good guy, Liam. We’ll fight this with all that’s in us. My grandmothers loved that mountain more than anything. They would have killed anybody over it, they would’ve—” And then her words dissolved into tears and she chided herself for letting her emotions overcome her this way. She hadn’t wanted to break down in front of him. He would think they were the tears of a simple woman and he’d not have the sense to see that she was crying because she was so angry. He wasn’t smart enough to see that with each tear she shed, the heat of vengeance rose up in her breast. She felt like grabbing him by the shirt collar and throwing him out the back door.
