“Charlotte, where you at?”
He found her around back.
She took a long drag on her cigarette. Cole sat next to her in the grass. They stared at the trees, the folds of hills. It was impossible to see out across the land. Nothing was flat. You could only look up. Patches of sky.
“I don’t know why you stay here. It’s just one big wasteland.”
“It don’t look like a wasteland to me.”
“But you know it is.” She sighed. “I don’t know why I came back. I’ve got to get out of here.”
“That’s what you keep saying.”
“Back to Cleveland. Or maybe New York City. One of my friends in Ohio moved to Brooklyn. She said I could stay with her.”
He tried to imagine her outside of these mountains and valleys, outside of this state. All he knew of big cities was what he saw on TV: sparkling skyscrapers where queers and rich people lived, or housing projects overrun by foreigners and gangs. This was all he knew, all he’d really ever known. There was a time, after high school, that he’d tried to leave. He’d lived in the state capital for a few months and hated everything about it, the strangers, the noise, the buildings pressing in from all sides. He felt cut off from the land and from himself. He came back here, feeling like he’d failed, and the old man had met him at the door. “You come back to get saved?” he asked. But Cole just wanted his mother’s land. His grandfather practically spat at him: “I ain’t stopping you.” When he was a little kid, Cole used to dream of running away with his mother, and then later, he and Terry made plans to bust out of here, until one spring day all of that burned up in Cole’s hands.
He stretched out on the ground, and Charlotte lay down next to him.
“You could come with me.”
“What?”
“You’ve got money. Then I wouldn’t have to wait. We could go now. We could get us a nice little apartment.”
“I like it here.”
“It’s a wasteland.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“There’s another world out there.”
Cole closed his eyes. The sun was so bright that he could see the orange flesh of his eyelids. He smelled the grass and dirt. He felt her stand up, the shadow of her falling over him like a cape, then she was walking away and he did not call her back. He could stay here all afternoon, just him and the land. She slammed the car door, and then he heard the rattle of the engine. She was gone. He still didn’t open his eyes. He used to hunt, fish. When he was a kid he and his grandfather would hike up the mountain, digging ginseng roots, picking mushrooms. His grandfather used to go up there to get closer to God. Fasting, praying. When he’d come back down, his face would be shining with love. The times that he took Cole with him, he was unusually soft-spoken and kind. They sat next to each other in the rising light of the sun, and his grandfather told him that God was all things good. Cole hadn’t been up there in a long time. The mining site now sprawled across some of those places where he used to hike and hunt. The sludge dam too. But he couldn’t see any of that from here. There was one time that he had started to go up to get a closer look, but the forest floor was so cracked and eroded that he stopped halfway, didn’t want to see anymore.
He pulled the bed out about a foot from the wall so he could reach the safe that was bolted to the floor. He ran the combination and popped it open. Warren’s fifties, the ticking wristwatch, and a few stray Percocet. A bottle of OxyContin. More pills divided into plastic baggies. Pictures, a strand of pearls, an emerald ring, stacks of greenbacks. Although he deposited his measly work check into a bank account, whatever else he earned he squirreled away like the old folks who’d lived through the Depression and hid their money all over until they eventually forgot about it, people like Warren Fletcher, who didn’t trust banks and thought that old socks would keep their money safe. Cole counted out six hundred bucks and slipped the bills into an envelope.
Then he walked up to his grandparents’, his boots clacking along the cracked dirt road. From the high weeds, a rabbit peered at him, its eyes so placid and deep, they looked to be without color. The animal twitched, scampered away. Cole stopped at the footbridge to finish his cigarette and gazed at his grandparents’ clapboard house. It used to be bright yellow, but now it was dull and dreary, the color of dried cornhusk. The paint was peeling away, and the front porch sagged on one side. But the tall sugar maples and pignuts were blooming, little buds like eyes, and the daffodils leaned toward the sun. Maybe he should turn around. He’d thought that only his cousin Kay and aunt Naomi were coming over, but Rebecca and Larry’s truck was here too. He glanced at the shallow creek, the strange silvery sheen. There were no fish in it anymore. He wondered if anyone had seen him. Could he just walk away?
But his grandmother was counting on him, and it had been a while since he’d seen anyone else in the family.
She was in the kitchen, laying out slices of Colby cheese on a plate. A basket of sandwich buns. Country ham. A large bowl of yellow potato salad. “I thought you weren’t going to turn this into a big deal,” Cole said.
“It’s not much. Just sandwiches.”
“Where is everyone?”
“In there with Clyde, I think.”
“Larry and Rebecca are here too?”
“Just Rebecca.” She added, “Esther was supposed to come, but she’s sick with a cough-cold.”
Cole glanced behind him. “Here.” He withdrew the envelope from his back pocket.
“You sure?” she asked, then took it and hid it away somewhere inside her dress just as his aunts walked in.
“Would you look at that hair,” said Naomi.
“I’ve never seen a Freeman with hair like that,” added Rebecca, the oldest of the sisters. She was only in her fifties, but sometimes looked as old as his grandmother, her flat pancake face etched with worry lines.
Naomi patted her own disheveled mane. “I kind of would like to try going blond myself.”
“You’d have more fun,” Cole said.
She laughed, gave him a hug. Naomi had always been his favorite aunt. The one closest to his mother, she had tried to look out for him when he was a kid, whereas Rebecca was overly stern and Aunt Esther was too busy taking care of her brood to pay attention to Cole. The aunts didn’t hold strictly to the old ways, like their father did, and occasionally Cole would sneak over to Naomi’s to watch reruns of The A-Team or MacGyver.
Each of his aunts had between three and nine kids, giving Cole a heap of cousins, and now several of them had babies of their own. He was the odd one, without parents, siblings, or offspring.
Four daughters, no sons. Cole’s grandfather had named the first three after women in the Bible, but his grandmother had picked out the name for Cole’s mother. It was one of the few times she stood up to her husband. And maybe feeling defeated that he’d been given yet another girl, he relented, allowed his youngest to be called a secular name. Ruby. The color of blood. A jewel hidden deep in the earth in foreign parts of the world. Cole’s grandmother had taken the name from a country song that she heard on the radio, listening when her husband wasn’t home.
“I reckon it’s time to eat,” she said. “Go get your granddad, Cole.”
His grandfather was in the recliner. Next to him on the floor sat Kay, reading a book. She wore her hair in a ponytail, and her face, dotted with freckles, looked serious and still. She was Naomi’s youngest, and the only one of his cousins that he truly felt close to. In the fall she would be the first in the family to go to college.
“Hey girl.”
“Long time no see.” She grinned. “You go out drinking last night? You look like you tied one on.”
“For your information, I stayed in. Reading.” He winked. “Help me with Granddaddy?”
She looked at him skeptically. “What do we have to do?”
“Get him up.” Cole leaned over his grandfather. “It’s time to eat, Granddaddy. Grandma wants you in the kitchen.” The old man stared. “Com
e on, now.” Cole held him by the arm and motioned for Kay to get the other one, and they helped him stand. Once he was up, he shook his arms free and walked, baby steps, into the kitchen.
Cole felt relieved that none of his uncles or other cousins had shown up. When he was younger, they had big Sunday dinners and crowds of kids were always around, and even then, he felt like an outsider. Though his cousins lived on the same land that he did, he was, in a way, his grandfather’s child, the weird kid who didn’t play sports, who rattled off Bible verses.
They crowded around the Formica table, and Cole sat between Kay and his grandfather.
“Cole, you say the prayer,” his grandmother instructed.
This was tradition; the man of the house said the blessing. But this was not Cole. He looked at his grandfather. His mouth hung open like a child waiting to be fed. Then his eyebrows knitted together, and he glared at Cole. His grandfather wouldn’t speak, but he still held the scripture inside of him, as hard and brittle as bone.
“No, I’m not good at it. You say it.”
His grandmother sighed. “Now, Cole—”
“I’ll do it,” Kay spoke up. “Granddaddy’s just going to have to suffer and listen to a woman.”
Their grandmother didn’t argue. They bowed their heads and Kay said a quick prayer, and then they passed the food and filled their plates. Cole wondered how many times he had sat here at this table, in this very spot. Night after night, the heavy King James opened before him and his granddaddy pacing behind him. Cole would turn the thin pages, and when he got to the right place, he’d lick his lips and try to recite without stuttering. His grandfather taught him early on what to fear. Once a soul fell into outer darkness, there was no hope. No light, no peace.
Sometimes he would call out a passage to be recited from memory. That came easy for Cole, and his granddaddy, occasionally pleased, called him a quick study. It was the speaking that gave him trouble. The lessons went on for at least an hour, and the later it got, the worse his stuttering. Finally, his grandmother would remind his grandfather that Cole had schoolwork, and so he would let him go, although Clyde Freeman didn’t think much of book learning. Cole didn’t either. Instead, he’d go to his room and hide under the covers and look at the postcards from his mother, the faraway and foreign places.
“Rebecca, you heard anything from Ricky?” his grandmother asked.
She said she’d been able to talk to him the other day. “He says he’s fine.” But her eyes flickered with uncertainty.
Cole thought his younger cousin was crazy to sign up for the army, especially when he knew he’d just be shipped over to Iraq or Afghanistan. His grandmother said he was patriotic; Kay said it was his only way out. There’s got to be other ways, Cole had argued, but then couldn’t come up with any.
“Oh, I worry,” his grandmother said. “I pray for him every day.”
Naomi got up for a glass of water, and Cole reminded her to get it from the plastic jug on the counter. The water that came out of the faucet was sometimes black, sometimes orange. They didn’t drink it, but they bathed with it. “We’re likely all to be poisoned,” his grandmother said.
This got Naomi started on why she should sell the land, and Rebecca asked her if she’d given any more thought to moving in with her and Larry.
Cole looked up, caught eyes with his grandmother.
“I don’t want to go anywhere yet,” she said.
Rebecca and Naomi argued with her, explaining why their father needed to go into a nursing home, why she shouldn’t be living here. “Mama, we live too far away to drive over here whenever he acts up or whenever something goes wrong,” Naomi said.
“I’ll do it,” Cole said. “I help, don’t I, Grandma?”
“Yes.” She added, “But I wish you’d come over here more.” She sounded tired. “Your granddaddy would like that. You could read scripture to him. On Sundays, since you don’t go to church—”
“You know I usually work—”
“You could come over here instead of that running around you do.”
A hotness sprang to Cole’s cheeks like he’d been slapped. He looked at his grandmother, and she didn’t blink. He felt shaken, even betrayed. Everyone was quiet. Then Naomi changed the subject to her kids, and Rebecca joined in, trying to smooth things over. His grandmother looked away, and then she looked at him again.
“Would you hand me the salt?”
He shouldn’t have come over. Maybe it was her daughters pestering her that caused her to snap at him. She looked worn down. Even her dress was frayed at the neckline. Cole wished his aunts would leave her alone. He handed her the salt shaker, then reached over to help his grandfather, who was having trouble keeping his sandwich together. He was making a mess of his plate. Cole peeled the sliced ham off the bread, and cut it up into small pieces for him.
As he was trying to think of something else to say, something that would make his grandmother happy and make the aunts back off, the warning siren sounded.
“Oh, Lord,” his grandmother said.
A moment later, a blast from the mountain ripped through the silence like the reports of a million rifles. Bigger than that. Bombs. Cole dropped his butter knife. The house vibrated, windows rattled. The water glasses shivered, and Aunt Rebecca let out a shriek. Then the sound rolled on down the valley, its echo calling back to them, taunting.
Nobody said anything at first. They all had to catch their breath. Straighten the plates. Swallow hard. Wait and make sure it was over. Nervously, Cole turned his eyes to his grandfather. They were all looking at him, and he glared at them like he was about to hand down a judgment from God. Gunky potato salad all over his face. They waited. He picked up another slice of cheese.
“See, this is what we’re talking about, Mama,” Rebecca spoke up. “I don’t know how you and Cole stand it. My nerves are rattled to pieces.”
His grandmother left the table and returned with her notebook. “Look at this,” she said, flipping the pages.
“You should sue,” Kay said.
His grandmother had already dragged Cole with her to an office in Charleston, where a lawyer, a woman, was friendly and sympathetic, and offered to represent them. But they couldn’t afford it; they’d need to pay for engineers and surveyors and who knew what else. Even if they could afford it, the case would be tied up for years, and would probably be settled out of court, the land already ruined.
“No, you shouldn’t sue. Mama, you’ve got to let go,” Rebecca said. “You’ve got grandsons and son-in-laws that work for Heritage. You can’t be messing with their jobs.”
“She’s right,” Naomi agreed. “I just heard where Tom Wallace got fired from Heritage. Now why do you think? Because his cousin is Janey Burfield, and she’s been trying to sue and cause a ruckus.” She shook her head. “You best just think about moving.”
“That old Satan,” his grandfather suddenly cried. He slapped his hand on the table hard. His voice was loud, slow. “That old Satan.”
“Clyde?”
He pushed back his chair and stood and stumbled, and everyone jumped up as if to catch him. He waved them away, his hands batting at them like they were a swarm of gnats. Then he shuffled out of the kitchen, his wife behind him. Cole and Kay and his aunts looked at each other.
“Good Lord,” said Rebecca.
They followed them into the living room. His grandfather sat in the recliner, his grandmother next to him. Cole looked at them in their house that he knew so well and could not imagine them in any other place. As a little boy, he used to sit between them at the dinner table. It was always the three of them.
His grandmother whispered something in the old man’s ear, and he held her hand and they looked up. Husband and wife, hands entwined like a twisted, deformed vine, staring at their children and grandchildren, and on their faces was the same look Cole saw on the folks at the home every day. They knew it, all old people did: they’d been abandoned and betrayed.
His grandmother’
s eyes filled with sudden tears. “I don’t think he’s gonna remember who any of us are much longer.”
“That won’t happen,” Cole told her, but it would, he saw it all of the time at the nursing home.
Rebecca and Naomi went over to comfort her, and Kay tugged on Cole’s arm.
“Come on.”
He followed her outside. The air tasted hot and thick and bitter. They sat on the steps and looked up toward the ridge, dust raining down and swirling in silver clouds. Cole’s eyes burned and itched. He ran his finger through the sticky coal dust that clung to the house no matter how often his grandmother swept.
“I can’t wait to get out of here.” Kay looked at him. “You just gonna stay here forever? Granddaddy being the way he is, the whole goddamn mountain falling on your head? Look at that shit. I can taste it. It’s in my teeth.”
Cole thought about Charlotte asking him to leave with her. There is another world out there. She didn’t really mean it.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said.
“You ever seen the sludge dam?” she asked. “You ever go up to the mining site?”
“No. You can’t get up there. Anyway, I don’t want to see any of it.” He stared at the smoke coming from the mountain. “It’s just the way it is. You live with it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Granddaddy never wanted to sell.”
“It’s over now, Cole.”
He remembered the first time the coal men had come to the house. His grandfather had invited them in for coffee and pie, but before they could say a word, he started preaching, and they didn’t know how to respond when he said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” The men had offered to help him relocate, far away from the coalfields, and he’d just laughed: “Why would I want to live on land that my people never walked on?”
The Evening Hour Page 4
