The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

  She could see that one of the men was Liam. He must have known that they would put up some resistance or he wouldn’t have come. The mine foreman never went out on jobs like this. He had on his work coat, and his hands were shoved in the pockets as if he was freezing. His head was slightly bowed so that he didn’t have to look them in the eye until he was standing very near. The other man hung back, hesitant to approach them.

  “Why are you all doing this, now?” Liam said, shifting his feet. He looked into each of their faces. “You know this is just going to cause trouble.”

  “That’s what we intend to do,” Easter said. “We’re going to cause you as much trouble as we can to stop this.”

  “It won’t stop us,” Liam said. His words sounded rehearsed. “The law is on our side.”

  “You prick,” Anneth said, but it seemed that something stopped her from saying more, as if her throat had filled up with dirt.

  “Sophie, you need to get these girls out of here,” Liam said. “I don’t want to have to call the law.”

  “What are you telling me for?” Sophie said. “I’m the ringleader.”

  Liam shook his head and looked hard at the men behind him. They turned back toward the truck, Liam throwing his hand into the air to make a signal for the driver of the bulldozer, who tapped the gas again.

  “Let’s go,” Easter said. They moved forward together and climbed into the dozer scoop without difficulty, settling in as if it was a wide, deep porch swing. They sat back against the cold metal. Easter brought her hands up and saw red soil on her palms, like clots of blood. She closed her eyes and started praying: Lord, keep us in the palm of your hand. Sophie was between the two sisters now and they both leaned against her, holding hands, unable to speak. There was too much to say. Within the scoop they could feel the vibration of the motor. The driver hollered but they couldn’t make out his words, so he tapped the gas again to startle them. Easter flinched at the sudden jolt but steeled herself against the dozer bucket. There was no way she was going to move now.

  More hollering, and then the scoop lifted and swung out, dumping them onto the ground in front of the dozer. Easter fell on all fours and saw Sophie tumbling down to land beside her. But Anneth held on to the edges of the scoop, wedging herself in and refusing to let go.

  “No!” Easter screamed as the scoop rose higher, the driver pulling the lever back and then forward so that Anneth would fall out. “She’s pregnant!” But Easter’s voice was lost to the roar, so she prayed into the loudness. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another truck pulling in down there by the road. On its trailer sat a second dozer. The men climbed out of the high truck and went about undoing the chains as if they had to fight off three women every time they starting mining a new piece of land. Easter looked back at the mountain, its winter trees black and skeletal. She thought the mountain might rise up and avenge them, but it didn’t. She thought of the birds that were usually gathered here and figured they had moved back into the deepest parts of the forest.

  The driver brought the scoop down, a great heaviness being released. When it hit the ground, Easter could feel the impact in her ankles and up the backs of her calves. Sophie was beside her, hanging on to her arm, hollering words that were lost on the air. Anneth still had her feet firmly planted against the edge of the scoop, and her back pressed against the metal. There was nothing to read on her face. She had her eyes closed and Easter thought she might be praying, too. The driver swung the scoop in the air and brought it down again, the sound of its striking the ground a dull, wide vibration through the earth.

  And then Anneth was tumbling out of the scoop, rolling toward them with her arms out to soften the blow of the ground. Easter pulled her up onto her lap, wiping dirt away from Anneth’s face.

  “I’m all right,” Anneth said, pushing her away. “Get away. Don’t let them think they’ve hurt me.”

  “But the baby,” Easter said. “I want you to go back to the house.”

  “If you think I’d leave you all now, you’re crazy.”

  Easter took in everything in flashes, as if her eyes closed between images: The dozer rolling toward them now, chunks of dirt caught in the metal tracking that wound about the wheels. The trees, their limbs bending down in a slight breeze as if leaning over to watch the action below. The sky rolling gray and low. And then as the dozer rolled closer and closer, they all knew what they had to do.

  They interlocked their arms and sat down. The driver didn’t stop until he was so close that Easter could smell the soil caked across the bottom of the scoop.

  The driver jumped down and came to lean over them, his hands on the tops of his legs. Now she could see that it was Lonzo Morgan. Easter had known him all his life and started to say as much but didn’t speak.

  “Stop this now, girls. Please. You’re going to cause me to lose my job because I can’t do this. I won’t,” he said. His brow was fretted and his eyes were full of frustration. “When I tell them that, they’re going to fire me.”

  “I’m sorry, Lonzo,” Easter said. “But this is your mountain, too. Everybody that lives here—it belongs to them as much as it does us. It always has.”

  “Please,” he said, but Liam grabbed his shoulders and caused him to stand straight up. Liam talked so close to his face that Easter thought their lips might touch.

  The three women lay down as the dozer continued to tremble at their feet. The men all came and stood around them, as if they were women who had fallen from the sky. Easter closed her eyes and knew that Anneth and Sophie were doing the same. The ground was cold and filled with the hum of the dozer. In an odd way the vibration was comforting. Easter remembered all the times she had walked this old mountain, all the songs they had sung as they climbed its paths. All the times she had run in the field of wildflowers that swayed there in spring and summer. Anneth laughing as she fell back in the purple asters. Her mother walking out of the field clutching a handful of jonquils. Her father holding Easter when she was just a baby as he looked out over the view below them.

  There was a flash of whiteness above her, and when she opened her eyes she saw a photographer leaning down with his camera.

  And then there were hands on her. She pivoted her head back to find the sheriff and his four deputies, their pistols hanging from their sides. Down by the road she saw their police cars, the lights flashing against the mountainside. The sheriff, Lee Storms, and one of his men had hold of Anneth, and the deputies gathered around Easter and Sophie. Easter had known Lee for as long as she could remember. Serena had campaigned relentlessly for his election; he had been sheriff for more than twenty years.

  “Just go limp,” she hollered to Anneth and Sophie. “Be still.”

  They were carrying Sophie away, one man holding on to her ankles and the other with his hands in her armpits, carrying her away like a gutshot deer. Sophie had followed Easter’s advice and simply relaxed as they carried her away. They had tried to grab Anneth but she had gotten to her feet and was backing away as they closed in on her, telling her to just go with them peacefully. But she wouldn’t.

  Easter saw Lonzo Morgan climbing down from the dozer, hollering. One of the deputies was holding him back, too. “Let go of her, by God!” Lonzo hollered.

  Easter let them lift her and felt each flash of the camera as they carried her away, but then she saw a policeman grab Anneth from behind, his forearm caught under her neck in a choke hold as she fought against them. Easter bucked out of their grip, falling to the ground and scrambling to her feet. She ran toward Anneth. As she did, she said a short prayer, asking that God be in her hands.

  WHEN THE MEN caught hold of her, Anneth imagined that she was drowning. She was sinking down and down, to the very depths of Blackhawk Lake, to the bottom of the Cumberland River, giving herself to every body of water she had ever known on intimate terms. She saw herself putting her arms out and being carried away by the current of Free Creek, washed against the rocks. There was no going back to the surface;
there was no strength left in her legs to burst back up to the top of the water, where sunlight would be white and blinding. The man she loved was dead, and the baby in her belly would never know his father. She had failed at everything in her life. The cop had his arm clamped tightly beneath her chin and held both her wrists within one big hand. She relaxed against him, drifting down and down and down into blackness. She had been trying to act strong for as long as she could remember and now she was tired.

  It was not surrender. Not really. Because hadn’t Easter told Anneth that the best way to defeat the company was to let them think that she had been beat? The only way to win against something so large was to fool them. She might lie still and be carried away in peaceful protest, but no one would ever keep her down.

  She thought of water swirling around her, the pulls and eddies of a river nudging her southward. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Sophie being carried away. The sheriff was hollering to his men and walking backward with his arms hooked through Sophie’s, the heels of her shoes making little rows in the leaf-covered ground. Anneth could see that Sophie was making herself appear even smaller and more fragile than she really was for the benefit of the reporter, who ran alongside, snapping pictures.

  But then Anneth heard Easter cry out, “Let her go!” She turned her head, saw her sister breaking away from the other men.

  She had never seen Easter move so fast before. She was heading for the men who held on to Anneth. Anneth felt like putting her hand up and saying, No! Let them! But she didn’t. As soon as Easter reached them she drew her hand back, and her mouth formed words that Anneth couldn’t make out, and then Easter delivered a blow to the side of the man’s head. He dropped Anneth’s ankles and crossed his wrists in front of his face for only a second before grabbing for Easter. She was screaming at them, her face knotted up in rage, and moving toward the other man who still held on to Anneth.

  Anneth put one hand on her belly to protect the baby, and with her other hand she reached up behind her head to grab hold of the cop’s groin. She found what she was looking for and twisted the mound of flesh with all the strength she could muster. He dropped her like a sack of flour, and she came down hard on the frozen ground.

  They had Easter now—one of the cops was carrying her, his arms wrapped around her waist as she kicked at the tops of his thighs. Anneth caught the brightness of a camera flashbulb again. There was the sound of the dozer’s motor being revved up and a cacophony of yelling and confusion.

  “Now, ma’am,” one of the deputies said, running up to calm Easter, but she spat in his face. She brought her legs up and kicked him in the stomach. He stumbled back and then rushed forward, snatching up her moving legs. The two men carried Easter toward the police car, and Anneth couldn’t do anything but stand there on what was left of the place she had known all her life.

  THE MEN PACKED them down the mountain like corpses, like dead bodies they had found lying in the woods. The women were completely still. Easter closed her eyes against the white morning sky and kept them closed until she was in the back of the police cruiser, holding on to her sister.

  Thirty-one

  A Convergence of Voices

  The Louisville Courier-Journal

  WOMEN PROTESTERS JAILED

  BY SHIRLEY O’MALLEY

  THREE EASTERN KENTUCKY WOMEN were arrested and removed from their ancestral land yesterday after lying in the path of a bulldozer that was about to start strip-mining the mountain under the protection of a broad form deed.

  Easter McIntosh, 33, Sophie Sizemore, 54, and Anneth Trosper, 28, all of Crow County, resisted arrest when police were called in to remove them from the path of the dozers. The fight resulted in two of the deputies being hit in the face and stomach. McIntosh was the only woman jailed after being charged with assault and trespassing. Trosper and Sizemore were released on bond but refused to leave the jail without McIntosh. When Sheriff Lee Storms refused to allow the women to stay in the jail without being charged, Trosper slapped his face, thereby forcing him to arrest her as well.

  Trosper was visibly pregnant (see photographs below, courtesy of the Black Banks Tribune) when deputies forced her down to the ground and carried her to an awaiting cruiser. A midwifery team from the Black Banks Hospital was called in to examine her at the jail but declared that she had not been harmed. Citing her pregnancy, Storms declined to jail Trosper despite her assault.

  “We never had any intention of hurting Mrs. Trosper or the other women,” said Storms. “The situation was handled with the utmost professionalism. You should note that my deputies are the ones who suffered scratches and bruises, while the women showed no marks.”

  In the past few years, eastern Kentucky residents have been rising up in opposition to broad form deeds and strip-mining practices, citing irreversible damage to the environment. The most sensational of these confrontations occurred in 1965 when a 61-year-old woman named Widow Combs was arrested while trying to protect her farm. Combs went on to be a major voice for landowners’ rights. Fifteen arrests have been made in five counties in the last six months alone.

  The three women will be given a court date on Monday.

  Easter awoke to singing.

  She couldn’t imagine how she could ever have gone to sleep, anyway. She had never expected to find herself in jail, but here she was, awaking on a slab of a bed beneath a green blanket that looked as if it had been washed so many times it would crumble the next time it was taken from the washer. The jail smelled of concrete—a cold, damp scent like the inside of a cave. She took the cell in and then stood on her bed and looked out the square window over her bed. The window was simply glass crisscrossed by embedded wires. There was a latch on the window so that it could be opened for an inch of air. When she pushed the window out as far as it would go, the volume of the singing heightened, and through the crack she could see people crowding the street in front of the jail. There must have been a hundred people out there, all their voices rising up into one. They were singing “They’ll Never Keep Us Down.”

  She could see people that she went to church with—everyone in the congregation must have been out there—as well as Anneth, hanging on to the arm of a man Easter did not know, and Sophie and Lolie. Everyone she had known her entire life, and faces she didn’t recognize. There were deputies out there, too, pushing the people back, moving about in the crowd. Reporters and photographers. Then she saw El, pointing his finger at the deputies lined up along the sidewalk. He was shouting at them but his words were lost to the singing. She put her hand against the glass, her fingers spread apart, and whispered, “El.” She tapped her knuckles against the glass, but none of them could see or hear her. They sang louder and louder as if with each verse they garnered more strength in their lungs, more power behind the words.

  She closed her eyes to soak in their singing and then slid down the cold wall and sat in the middle of her hard bed. It amazed her that people had gathered like this. She had never seen anything like it. They were all fed up and had grown used to seeing people protest over the past few years. Now it was their turn. The best weapon they had was their singing. The crowd sang every song that Easter had ever known. The songs were all full of the same power, each word so strong that all those voices together could have broken down the walls of the jail if they took the notion. Sometimes in between singing she could hear Anneth yelling at the police or the people chanting, “Let her go! Let her go!” or the booming voice of the pastor who led everyone in prayer. It must have gone on for an hour.

  The door at the end of the hall opened on creaking hinges and then she could hear footsteps coming toward her. Everything was amplified against the gray cement floor. She pulled her knees up to her chin, situated her skirt so that her legs were covered, and leaned against her legs with her eyes closed. She heard a harsh scraping across the floor and when she finally looked up she saw the sheriff sitting backward in a heavy desk chair in front of her cell. He shook his head and tapped one finger against th
e chair’s back.

  “You’ve caused me an awful lot of trouble, Easter,” he said. “All this mess has had me on the phone to reporters in Louisville and Nashville and everywhere all morning.”

  “Good,” Easter said. “You’ve good enough sense to know that that’s the whole reason we did it, Lee. How do you think the photographers came to be there? I called them.”

  “You’re a smart woman, Easter. But the law says that they have the right to mine that mountain.”

  “The law’s not right, and you know it.”

  “I don’t want to keep you in here,” the sheriff said. He shook his head again, looking away. Easter was suddenly very sorry for him, his bald head catching the glare of the bare bulb hanging over him, dark circles beneath his eyes. He looked like a good man who was trying to do the right thing; this was spelled out clearly on his face. “I didn’t want to put you in here at all, but you didn’t give me much of a choice.”

  “There has to be something you can do to keep them from mining that mountain, Lee. You’re the law in Crow County. That land has been in my family for a hundred years. If I lose that mountain, I lose a part of myself.”

  From outside she heard Anneth begin to sing “This Land Is Your Land.” The crowd was silent around her. Both Easter and the sheriff looked toward the window the way someone would face a radio to hear it better. Anneth had always loved that song. In the seventh grade she had been given a paddling for singing it; the teacher said it was something only Communists sang. It was a dangerous song that some people were afraid to love. She had heard Anneth sing it many, many times before, but it had always been to the accompaniment of the record. Here her voice was distinct and powerful on its own. There was an uncertain quaver in her delivery, but somehow this caused the words of the song to make much more sense than they ever had before. This is your land we’re fighting for, too, Anneth was saying to all of them. Easter would have given anything to have seen Anneth’s face; she knew that it was full of conviction. She wondered if everyone out there was turned toward Anneth, watching her.