The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  “My hands are tied,” he said.

  “Get out of my house,” she said. “Don’t you ever foot my doorstep again.”

  He took the last drink of his coffee and looked up at her when he set the cup down. She thought he would say more, that he would try to convince her that he was a good man who couldn’t fix this. But instead he got up and walked to the door without a word. By the time he stepped off the back stoop, he had disappeared into the smoke of midday.

  ANNETH WAS BEGINNING to believe that all of her marriages would end with her running away. First Matthew, and now she was trying to get away from Liam, too, but this time she was driving in her own good car and Liam was not crying. That wasn’t his style. Instead he had screamed and raged, raking his arm across the dining room table to send dishes crashing to the ground. He hadn’t known whom he was messing with; Anneth sailed a plate past his head, releasing it with a click of her wrist the way she used to skip rocks on the Cumberland River. If it had hit him just right, it could have decapitated him in one clean cut, she thought. She felt strangely ecstatic. She knew one thing for certain: she’d never have to live in this place again. She could leave this noise and grime behind her. She stopped in the camp only long enough to tell Jewell good-bye and promise her that she’d be back to see her.

  Now she was rolling out of the camp with two suitcases and three cardboard boxes in the backseat. She’d have to go after the rest of her stuff later. All she had taken the time to round up was a few clothes and shoes, all her record albums, the Bible box in which she had been keeping souvenirs since she was a child, and her family pictures. Upon moving to Altamont she had been so lonesome that she had taken all the pictures out of the photo album she kept in her purse, and put them into frames. They were all back there in a box now except for the one of Vine that she loved so much, the one that showed Vine in this very place, sticking her hand out to brush the petals of touch-me-not flowers. Since she had come to Altamont, her connection to her grandmother had grown stronger. She must have absorbed some of the strength that was left behind in the soil.

  She stopped her car for just a moment on the bridge. Down there was the confluence of the river and the creek where her grandparents had become engaged. It was so strange to think of them being young there, so many years ago. They could never have imagined that they would have a granddaughter who would pause here and look at that place and wish herself back in time. How the air must have smelled then, and how light must have gathered in that triangle where the two waters came together. She saw them down there on a summer’s day as heat bugs screamed in the trees, the water so white and wild. Now the creek had been weakened and made orange by the mines. The river’s banks were the place where the people in the camp dumped their garbage.

  She pressed hard on the gas and flew around the curves, the huge mountains slumped on either side of the road. A thin rain had fallen and seemed to make the smoke from the forest fires thicker and more acrid. The scent seeped in through her heater vents and filled the cab of her car. It was only four in the afternoon but she had to turn on her headlights because of the smoke. They didn’t help.

  She drove and was barely aware of driving, her mind churning. She couldn’t believe she had married a man who was going to tear up the land she had loved all her life, a man too stupid to see that she loved that land more than him. He couldn’t even fathom the idea of loving a place, and she couldn’t comprehend the idea of someone’s not understanding how that felt, to love a place so much that you could cry for it, that you could hurt for it.

  “It’s just a mountain, you fool,” he had said, the veins in his neck pulsing up. “Trees grow back.”

  Liam could have stood up to his father, could have told him that this was his wife’s land they were dealing with. It was his one chance to be his own man. If he loved her as much as he had said he did, he would have quit the company in protest and tried his best to keep her. But that still wouldn’t have been good enough for Anneth. Not really. Because if it wasn’t her family’s land, then it would be someone else’s, wouldn’t it? And how could she be married to a man who would do that to anybody? Mining was one thing, but going in and stripping somebody else’s land was another. She had seen the strip mines before, horrible scars on the face of the earth. It just wasn’t right.

  When she pulled down into Free Creek she let the car slosh through the mudholes of the narrow road and took her time pulling into the driveway. The smoke was thicker here, since the fires were closer. Maybe this rain would drown the forest fires and stop any more destruction. Some people were saying that the Altamont Mining Company had set the fires themselves because it was on land that they had been fighting to strip-mine. Anneth thought it possible.

  She walked around the back of the house and listened to all the familiar sounds of Free Creek: A dog barking far up the road and then being answered by the echo of its own bark against the cliffs. The rush of the creek and the high sound of someone striking a wedge with a sledgehammer to split kindling. Other than that, there was silence and she had never been so glad to hear it in her life. Up at Altamont there had been the ever-present drone of the coal cars. People said you got used to it after a while but she had lived there a year and had never stopped being aware of the groan of machinery.

  Instead of setting down the cases to take hold of the doorknob, she balanced herself on one leg and tapped the toe of her shoe against the back door three times. “Easter!” she hollered. “Open the door!”

  Easter opened the door and Anneth pushed past her. “Oh, honey,” Easter said. “He told you, didn’t he?”

  She stomped on down the hall to her old bedroom. “Yeah, and I left the sumbitch, too.”

  EL GOT HOME from his trip at dark and brought with him an autumn thunderstorm that shook the earth. As soon as he stepped in the back door, lightning lit up the backyard and thunder boomed up the valley, repeating itself in echoes as it shuddered along the mountainsides. The sky opened up and a hard rain began to pelt the earth. Anneth and Easter were sitting at the kitchen table waiting for him, already clad in their coats and galoshes.

  “You might as well not take your shoes off,” Easter said, and stood up. “We have to go up to Sophie and Paul’s.”

  “What are you all up to?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you when we get up there,” Easter said, “so I don’t have to tell it twice.”

  They ran up the road in the pouring rain, splashing through the mudholes. The plastic umbrella that Anneth carried turned inside out and was jerked clean of her hands to bob down the road. She ran on, ignoring its wild dervish behind her. Lightning cracked down the length of the creek as they stomped up onto Sophie and Paul’s high porch.

  They stood crowded up under the porch for a moment to catch their breath and saw one another only when the lightning lit the world up as though a photograph was being taken. Without the flash, all was lost and black.

  El hollered over the tail end of thunder. “What’s all this about, now?” He was about to get mad. He hated suspense so much that Easter had once caught him looking for his Christmas presents in the hall closet.

  “Altamont’s wanting to take the mountain,” Easter said. She took off the plastic bonnet she had fastened around her head and shook it out.

  Sophie appeared in the doorway with her glasses glinting in the lightning. She held the door open against the driving wind. “Get in here!” she said, and wouldn’t step aside until each of them had filed in. She stood small beside El. “I kept you a plate back from supper,” she said.

  El nodded and sat with Paul at the kitchen table while Sophie warmed his plate in the oven. Anneth and Easter took off their wet coats and galoshes to drain beside the door and came in, lifting their hair and wiping the water from their eyes, as Sophie withdrew an apricot-nectarine cake from the oven. They didn’t speak of the real reason they were all together as they went about cutting the cake and pouring out glasses of buttermilk and seeing that El had everything for hi
s supper.

  Eventually Easter wiped the milk from her lips and leaned her elbows on the table to explain everything to all of them. Then Anneth told them how she had left Liam, her voice so loud and dramatic it seemed to stand in the room for a long time, since no one made any reply. They were all thinking of what they could do to save their land, but nobody said anything, and it seemed they had all silently agreed to listen to the dying storm as it moved away across the mountains toward Virginia.

  After a long time, Paul spoke. “Usually they take years to mine the land even after they notify you.”

  “What if they don’t wait years, though?” Easter said. “What if tomorrow morning they’re up there with their dozers?”

  Paul gave her a defeated look. “I read in the paper about one family that wrote to the governor and he stopped a company from stripping their land.”

  “Governor won’t help nobody else,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “That was just to look good in the paper, and he won’t do it twice.”

  “I could talk to Liam about this,” El said, talking around a toothpick. “You know, man-to-man.”

  “Or we could fight,” Easter said.

  “We could lay down right in front of them dozers,” Anneth offered.

  El plucked the toothpick from his mouth and held it between forefinger and thumb. “They’d run right over you, too.”

  “They’ll have to, then,” Easter said. “Because there’s no way I’ll let them tear down that mountain. I’ve been going to that field of wildflowers since I was a little baby, and my mother went there, and so did her mother. So you might as well get ready for a fight. Because that’s what they’re going to get.”

  She didn’t say more and she didn’t have to. They all knew that she was serious and they all knew what she wasn’t saying—that their land was the most important thing they had besides one another. That loving the land was a given, not something one could choose, the same way you love your sister or brother even when you don’t want to.

  Twenty-three

  Another New Life

  EASTER WAS LEANED over the side of the bathtub with her head under the faucet, washing her hair, when she heard Gabe call for her. She kept scrubbing at her head, trying to put this sound out of her mind. It was a sign, she knew. Gabe was off in Dayton and something had happened to him and now she was being made aware of it. His voice was so plain to her, even under the torrent of water running over her head. She rinsed all the shampoo from her hair and was wrapping a towel around her head when she heard him again. And then she knew that he was really there, in the house.

  Holding the lopsided towel, she bounded out of the bathroom with water still running down into her face, and there stood Gabe and Evelyn in the kitchen. She hadn’t seen them in more than a year. He hadn’t come home once since moving to Ohio; he couldn’t get off work long enough to make the long trip down and back up. She didn’t say a word, simply went to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. Still holding on to him, she put one hand over his shoulder to take hold of Evelyn’s chin.

  “Are you all home for good?” Easter could tell by their stance that they were. This was no short visit back to Free Creek.

  “We couldn’t stand it anymore,” Gabe said. “I come home from work yesterday and told Evelyn to pack everything we had because we was going home.”

  “I was tickled to death,” Evelyn said.

  They sat at the table and drank coffee and told her of their adventures in Ohio while Easter went about cooking. Both Evelyn and Gabe had told her not to, claiming they had stopped at the Burger Boy in London. Easter said they needed some home cooking. She cut up potatoes and fried them in a cast-iron skillet, opened a can of salmon and shaped it into patties that she slid into popping grease, stirred up a bowl of corn bread. Evelyn went on about the way all the houses were clumped together right on top of one another.

  “We lived in these tract houses and they all looked alike,” Evelyn said. “I never could tell them apart, and the first week we were there I went into the wrong house. I had three bags of groceries and pushed the front door open with my hind end and there set a whole family, looking at me like I was crazy.”

  Gabe laughed around a mouthful of coffee.

  There was something different about both of them. Gabe looked defeated, somehow, as if he had been away too long and had been broken by too much work and not enough respect. Evelyn seemed to have gained some strength in Ohio, though. She held herself differently, sat up straighter, finished Gabe’s sentences. Maybe she had gone up there and gained some independence, too. Easter was glad for this.

  “We saved just enough money to buy us a little house trailer,” Gabe said. “Didn’t save much, rent was so high. But enough. I have to find work somewhere, though.”

  “You’ll find something,” Easter said, and didn’t look up as she coated the potatoes with a layer of salt. “And you move that trailer in right here beside the house. No use paying lot rent.”

  “You read my mind,” Gabe said. “I was going to ask you.”

  “You don’t have to ask. This is your land, too.”

  Gabe got up to pour another cup of coffee. He tipped up the pot and a thick mahogany stream gurgled out. “What’s old Anneth up to these days?” he said. “She still with that sorry Liam?”

  Easter flipped the salmon patties. “Oh, Lord. You don’t want to know.”

  GLORIA WAS WIPING down the counter and kept her eyes on the wet rag instead of Anneth. “Do you think you can just waltz in here and get your job back anytime you want it?” she said.

  Anneth took a drink of coffee and a pull off her cigarette before answering. With an exhalation of smoke, she said, “You know I was the hardest-working waitress you ever had.”

  “What am I supposed to do, fire one of the girls to make room for you?” Gloria’s tone was firm but Anneth could tell that there was a little smile on her face. She knew that Gloria would hire her back.

  “No,” Anneth said. “But if you hire me back you could stay at home like a proper old woman and not be down here every day. You let me run this restaurant for you, Gloria, and I’ll do it for the same wage I had when I was a waitress. The only other thing you have to give me is to let me stay in the apartment out back for free.”

  “I don’t have to let you do jack shit,” Gloria said, and came around to sit on one of the red stools next to Anneth. She took a drink of Anneth’s coffee and cringed at the sugar Anneth had poured in. “But I’m going to, out of the goodness of my heart.”

  Anneth leaned over and wrapped her arm around Gloria’s neck. “I knowed I could count on you.”

  “But I’ll tell you something, Anneth Gail,” Gloria said, pulling away and making her face serious. “You’ve quit this job twice now. Once to run off to Nashville like some kind of fool, and again to marry that prick, even though we all told you he was bad news. So if you leave me again, I’ll flat-out never speak to you again. Am I clear?”

  “Crystal,” Anneth said.

  Gloria jumped down from the stool and walked up to the front door to turn the sign around from OPEN to CLOSED. “And I’ll need you to work late tomorrow and help me put up these Christmas decorations.” She lifted a line of shining garland from a box on the table by the door and then turned to pull down the shades on the plate-glass windows. “Now, why’d you quit Liam?” she said, with her back to Anneth.

  Anneth stubbed out her cigarette. “Because the company’s planning on mining the ridge behind Easter’s house and he wouldn’t put a stop to it.”

  Gloria peeked out the side of the shade to watch the passersby. The gold letters on the window glass made backward silhouettes against the glowing shade: .

  Gloria spun around on one heel to face her. “Is that why?”

  “Mostly.” Anneth laughed. “Why, do you know of a better reason?”

  Gloria looked at her without smiling.

  “What?” Anneth said, and slid down from the stool.

  “I didn’t w
ant to tell you, Anneth, until you figured it out on your own,” Gloria said. She went back to the counter and started rolling up silverware in paper napkins. Fork, spoon, and knife, then roll. “But I’m going to tell you now because you’ll have an easier time of divorcing him this way. The state won’t give you a divorce on the grounds of him not helping you with that land.”

  “He had somebody else,” Anneth said, and felt as if someone had poured cold water over her head. She couldn’t believe she had been so stupid, and in front of her face she saw a dozen different hints that she should have recognized: the way he sometimes stayed out all night, how he couldn’t face her when they were eating breakfast, the way he went weeks without touching her.

  “I just didn’t want to hurt you,” Gloria said, and put her hand atop Anneth’s. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. I thought you’d surely know it before long.”

  “Who is it?”

  “There’s no use in—”

  “If I’m going to use it against him in the divorce, I have to know.”

  “You promise me you won’t go down there and whup her? I don’t want you landing in jail.”

  Anneth crossed her arms. “I can’t promise you nothing. Just tell me who it is, now, Gloria.”

  “Sissy Goins.” Lolie’s boss down at Shoes Galore. Lolie had been hating old Sissy ever since she had started working there and would most likely cheer Anneth on if she went down there. Still, Anneth could hardly believe that Liam would want somebody like Sissy, who walked around like she had a corncob up her ass. What in the hell had been the attraction? She’d never, ever understand the way people’s minds worked. Anneth grabbed her purse off the counter and started toward the door.