by Ninie Hammon
Though Granny still wasn’t likely in the running for Gloria Steinem’s Liberated Woman of the Year Award, she had mellowed over the years. The old ways once held firm in this house and in the rest of the mountain culture. Girls who grew up in the hollows married young; boys who grew up here became miners.
Granny was a bride at 15 and Stella had been born a little over a year later. Granny had three little girls before she was 24 and four grandchildren before she was 40. She wasn’t unique. What else was a girl in the Eastern Kentucky mountains to do except get married and have babies?
And regardless of the danger, boys went underground to dig coal. Those jobs paid the bills. Will knew a lot had changed in coal mining in two decades, but he was equally certain it still wasn’t a safe occupation. There never had been and never would be a safe coal mine. It was an oxymoron, like a safe game of Russian roulette. There would always be poorly maintained machines, overlooked safety procedures, malfunctioning equipment, fatigue, inexperience and the constant pressure to produce more.
Among all the miners he knew, Will could name fewer than half a dozen men who still had all their fingertips. It used to seem to him that the more bunged-up miners got, the more determined they were to go back in—even when men got killed. The day after Harlan #7 blew, miners all over the mountains put on their helmets, grabbed their lunch pails, and went back underground to dig coal.
“You want lemon in your ice tea, Mr. Gribbins?” JoJo asked.
“Will, please. But no lemon for me.”
She reached out to fill the tea glasses and her long blond hair brushed the table. Unlike the mountain girls of Will’s generation, JoJo was not of the big hair and heavy makeup persuasion. Her face looked scrubbed; her hair hung straight, parted in the middle. It was the same color as Jamey’s, which was a shade lighter than Ricky Dan’s had been. These two were true cotton-tops. JoJo’s features were a feminine version of her father’s, straight nose and high cheekbones, but her mouth was heart-shaped like her mother’s. Ricky Dan had been, in the vernacular of the 1980s, a stud. Jamey was innocent handsome; JoJo’s beauty was fragile and haunting.
Though the two were remarkably similar, they were also profoundly different. Jamey was fire; JoJo was ashes—sunrise and sunset—the bright promise of a day and the despair of approaching darkness. Looking into Jamey’s bright green eyes was like looking through a window into Disneyland, but there was a dead, vacant quality in JoJo’s pale green eyes—the color of lime sherbet—that was disturbing. There was something else disturbing about her eyes. They had almost no lashes. After a while, Will noticed that she constantly plucked at them, unconsciously pulled the lashes out. She bit her fingernails down to the quick, too, and picked at her cuticles—had sores on her hands from it.
Will shook his head. Ricky Dan had children. How could he possibly do what he’d come here to do now? Jamey and JoJo made his mission here exponentially more difficult. As if it could be any harder. One look at Granny—the name seemed right to him now—and he was in a puddle. What in the world had made him think he’d be able to break that sweet old lady’s heart?
And then there was the statue.
He and Granny’d agreed they wouldn’t talk about it until after supper, but he couldn’t imagine what there was to say that would explain the phenomenon. The boy had to have seen a picture of Will—somewhere—sometime.
That was a good, rational explanation. Trouble was, it didn’t fit reality. Granny’d said Jamey had set their house on fire when he was 4 years old and the blaze took everything she had, including her pictures. Besides, Will couldn’t even remember if there’d ever been a picture of him in the Sparrow home. A snapshot of him and Ricky Dan together, maybe, but it would have been stuffed in a drawer somewhere. It certainly wouldn’t have hung on a wall in Ricky Dan’s room! Those had been slathered with posters of Charlie’s Angels. Ricky Dan had had a thing for Farah Fawcett.
But let’s say there had been a photo, and let’s say 4-year-old Jamey had gotten a look at it before the fire—how had he managed to age-enhance the image 20 years?
Will broke out in a sudden sweat.
The statue has the scar on my chin.
He reached up and felt the lump he’d gotten when his chin came into close, personal contact with the granite fist of an exceedingly large man in a bar in Sarasota.
There was no way Jamey could have known about that scar.
I need a drink!
The instant craving was so overwhelming it actually catapulted Will out of the chair as effectively as the broken recliner mechanism. Longing drove him toward the front door and he barely managed to bank left into the bathroom instead, where he stared at his reflection in the mirror. He saw the same haunted, vacant look in his own eyes that he had seen in JoJo’s.
Will whispered through clenched teeth to the gray-faced man in the mirror over the sink, a man barely clinging to his sobriety and his sanity, “I need to talk to my sponsor—bad!”
Couldn’t have that either. Will didn’t have the money to pay Granny for a long-distance call.
He splashed cold water into his face, dried it, and walked back into the family room. Granny, JoJo, and Jamey stood at the table behind their chairs holding hands.
“We was just gettin’ ready to give thanks,” Granny said. Will heard the distant echo of Ricky Dan’s whispered voice in his ear—“…’cause eatin’ unblessed food’ll make you sterile.” Will smiled. Ricky Dan was forever saying things to make Will laugh and get him in trouble. A stern look from Bowman was worse than taking a licking.
He crossed the room, joined the circle between Granny and JoJo, and bowed his head with a far greater respect for what he was about to do than he’d ever had as a kid.
There was a pause before Granny spoke. Her quiet tone had always lent gravity to her words, like whatever she said was important. It was even more pronounced when she prayed.
“Thank you, Jesus, for bringin’ Will back to us. And thank you for this food. We know they’s folks ain’t got ’nough and we’re grateful for what we got. Amen.”
There was nothing perfunctory about the way Granny said grace. She didn’t mouth words; she talked to an old friend. But she didn’t presume upon that relationship. Will had barged in on her once when she was kneeling in prayer. As she stood up, she’d told him. “You got to get down on your knees ever now and again; helps you keep in mind who it is you’re talkin’ to.”
As soon as Will raised his head, Jamey burst out, “Please, sir, tell me ’bout my daddy. Granny said you was his best friend, knew him better’n anybody—’cept maybe her…and my mama.”
Granny’d said that? Will’s heart swelled in his chest. He’d never seen himself as Ricky Dan’s best friend. Annoying younger brother, maybe, but a friendship was a bond between equals. He never considered that he was Ricky Dan’s equal—though after Will turned 18, whenever Ricky Dan got a beer out of the refrigerator, he’d offer Will one. Just like that, never said anything, just did it. Granny wasn’t keen on anybody drinking beer in her house, but she didn’t get hung up on something as silly as a “legal drinking age.” If a man was old enough to dig coal out of the ground, he was old enough to drink a beer.
But a beer every now and then notwithstanding, Ricky Dan was less Will’s friend than his hero.
Will took the offered platter of French fries, deposited some on his plate and passed it on to Jamey. The young man’s face wore that quality of expectation you see on the faces of a theater audience just as the curtain begins to rise. Will shook his head to clear it. It was way more than creepy to hear “Ricky Dan” ask for stories about Ricky Dan.
“I’m sure the whole world has told you he looked just like you, smiled like you, too.” Ricky Dan’s dimpled grin had been so bright the glow had probably been visible from outer space. “And he had this…I don’t know…way about him that made everybody love him.” He turned to Granny. “I remember you used to say folks wanted Ricky Dan to be—”
She finis
hed for him, “the groom at ever weddin’ and the corpse at ever funeral.”
As far as “grooms” went, Ricky Dan had avoided capture—his word—until he was 25, and that was old for the mountains. He went through girlfriends as casually as he rotated the tires on his old Buick. When he finally settled on Joanna, there wasn’t a girl for 30 miles in every direction whose heart wasn’t broken.
“Your mama was blond, too, and Ricky Dan’d deck anybody who called them Barbie and Ken.”
Jamey’s delighted, musical laugh filled the room. JoJo even smiled. It was the first time all night.
What Will didn’t tell them was that Joanna hadn’t been an obvious choice, though now Will understood why Ricky Dan had made it. She was…average. You got the sense when you were around the two of them that she saw Ricky Dan as a prize beyond all reasonable expectation. Will was saddened, but not surprised, that she couldn’t countenance life without him.
Will took the plate of crispy, brown salmon patties, speared one and dropped it next to his French fries.
“I promise I’ll tell you all sorts of tales about your dad.” He eyed Granny. “Some your grandmother doesn’t even know.”
“I wouldn’t bet the farm on that if I’s you,” she said.
“But first…I have to know the story on that canary you got riding your shoulder.”
The bird had been there since Jamey came into the room. It had made no effort to fly away, merely paced up and down his shoulder like a guard on sentry duty. It was silent now, but it had sung for a little while before they sat down to supper. Of course, that had been when Jamey was playing video games, so maybe its sweet song was actually a cry of excruciating pain in bird-speak. The only thing Will hated more than trailer houses was video games.
“ValVleen? She’s my bestest frien’ in all the world. She’s a mine canary, the kind they usta take down under the ground to sniff out poison gas.”
Will had heard an old miner say once that the life of a mine canary could be described in three words: short but meaningful.
“I had her ever since I was 9 years old. Lloyd give her to me. Said a boy with the last name of Sparrow had oughta have a bird.”
“He told Jamey he’d asked for an eagle, but they was fresh out,” JoJo said. “I b’lieved that for years.”
“Lloyd Jacobs?” Will hadn’t spoken that name out loud in two decades.
When they were kids, Lloyd had lived in a house on the first side street off the road that led down the hollow into Aintree. There was all manner of junk in the front yard of the house. A beat-up refrigerator missing a door; three old stoves, also missing doors; a couple of cars set up on concrete blocks, absent wheels; a wringer washing machine; washtubs and various pieces of miscellaneous, unidentifiable rusting metal somethings. Lloyd’s miner father was a loudmouthed, abusive drunk who regularly beat his wife and son. His mother was a vacant-eyed, defeated-looking woman with a soft voice and a broken spirit. Lloyd and Will were the same age and were best friends. Lloyd hung out with Will and Ricky Dan at the Sparrows’ house, ate there, played there—would have moved in just like Will if he could have. Granny welcomed him; she was always picking up strays.
But Will had often spotted something odd in Lloyd’s too-small brown eyes, though he was never able to put his finger on exactly what it was. Envy, perhaps—that Will had escaped into the care of the Sparrows and he hadn’t. Rage over something Will didn’t understand and Lloyd couldn’t express. Or maybe it was simpler than that—maybe his eyes were merely the windows on a soul filled with inexplicable darkness.
“Yes, sir. Lloyd brung her in a cage with a bitty bowl for a birdbath. ValVleen takes a bath ever day, sometimes in the bowl and sometimes in the dew on the grass ’fore the sun’s up. She still sleeps in the cage, but I leave the door open. And this here string…”
For the first time, Will noticed the piece of white yarn, with one end tied around the bird’s left leg and the other wound around the top button on Jamey’s shirt.
“…she don’t need it. She ain’t never tried to fly away, stays right here on my shoulder.”
“Yeah, right there crappin’ on your shoulder,” JoJo said and wrinkled her nose. “In case you was wonderin,’ ain’t no way to potty train a canary. We tried.”
Granny sighed. “That boy’s spent near his whole life smellin’ like the floor in a hen house.”
“I don’t mind,” Jamey said with a wide grin, then he paused and the cheeriness left his voice. “She’s real old for a canary, though. They don’t usually…her bein’ old and all is why she don’t sing much as she usta.”
“And her name is…what did you say it was?”
“ValVleen.”
“All we can figure is that he heard somebody talk about changing the oil in their car,” JoJo said. “And he got it in his head that ‘Valvoline’ was a name like Darlene, Pauline, Jolene...”
“ValVleen is a name,” Jamey responded in a pout. “It’s ValVleen’s name.”
Will didn’t even wait until Granny and JoJo got the supper dishes cleared away. As soon as everyone finished eating, he blurted out the questions he’d ached to ask ever since Jamey placed a lump of coal in his hand that had his own face carved into it.
“Jamey, how did you do that—with that statue?” He wanted to ask where a boy who’d obviously dropped out of grade school had learned to carve at all, but he let that ride for now. “How did you carve it to look just like me when you’ve never met me?”
“I didn’t carve it to look like nothin’.” Jamey reached over and plucked the lone remaining French fry off the platter. Chewing with his mouth open, he continued. “I don’t never try to make the coal be what it ain’t. I usta, but not no more.” He maintained eye contact for a moment, then glanced away and examined the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets as he spoke. “I carve away what’s on the outside to let out what’s on the inside. You was in that piece of coal ’fore I ever put a chisel to it. I just turned you loose.”
Now, there was a conversation stopper.
“We don’t know how he does it,” Granny said quietly, offering an explanation that was no explanation at all. “And as you can see, he don’t neither.”
“But he’s been doing it his whole life,” JoJo said. “Used to scratch pictures in the dirt with a stick when he was a little bitty kid.”
“I’m not asking how he can carve coal. He’s obviously got incredible talent. There are people called…” He thought better of mentioning idiot savants. “…people with minds like Jamey’s who can do all sorts of amazing things—play chess or the piano or violin. Do mathematics in their heads, paint incredible pictures. That part I can understand. But how did he put my face on it when he’s never met me?”
Granny let out a long breath. “I done tol’ you, Will, we don’t know how he does it. He ain’t never done ’xactly this before, carved somebody before he ever met ’em. But he’s done other things…”
“What things?”
Granny and JoJo exchanged a look, then Granny spoke to the girl in an unusually soft voice. “Go get the mural off ’n the wall in Jamey’s room.”
“You ain’t gonna tell him, show him…?” JoJo’s eyes were wide.
“He done seen this much,” Granny gestured to the statue with Will’s face. “’Sides, Will’s family.”
JoJo paused for another beat, then reluctantly got to her feet, went into Jamey’s room and returned with a mural like the one above the mantle. It was an equally astonishing work of art; the photographic accuracy of the detail was stunning. It showed a basketball team—the Harlan County High School Black Bears; Will recognized the uniforms—in a gym, huddled together around a gigantic trophy.
“Jamey carved this when we was 12,” JoJo said.
“Twelve?”
She nodded.
“Harlan County won the state championship that year,” Granny said. She pointed to the gym in the background of the mural. “This here’s the inside of Rupp Arena in Lexington with all t
he players holdin’ up the trophy.”
“Jamey wasn’t at the game,” JoJo said. “He’s never been to Rupp Arena.” Will didn’t like where this seemed to be going. Didn’t like it one bit.
“But he knew the team members, at least the ones from Aintree Hollow, didn’t he? And maybe he heard people talk about the game. There must have been pictures in the newspaper—”
“You still don’t get it, Mr. Gribbins—”
“Will.”
“All right, Will. Jamey carved this 3 days before the game.”
Will felt his stomach drop, like he’d plummeted five floors in a runaway elevator.
“Well…he wanted the Bears to win, right? He carved a wish, a hope, a—”
“Will…” Granny stopped him and pointed to the upper left hand corner of the mural, above the head of the tallest kid on the team. “This here’s the scoreboard.”
Will’s elevator fell the rest of the way down and crashed into the concrete floor in the basement.
Harlan County 68; Marion County 64.
Will lifted his eyes from the mural and looked at Granny; he managed to croak, “…and that was the score?”
Granny, JoJo, and Jamey all nodded their heads with the perfect unison of a chorus line.
Later, when Will tried to reconstruct the remainder of the conversation, he discovered that order and logic stopped as soon as he saw the numbers on the scoreboard in Jamey’s mural. After that, he walked out on a pier and stepped off into another world where all the elements reacted in different ways, where wind went drip, drip, drip out of the faucet in the middle of the night, where seas of flame lapped against sandy beaches and gusts of water pulled leaves off trees and flapped flags on poles.
Granny and JoJo continued to speak. But Will’s mind only managed to capture bits and pieces of what they said, stories written on glass that shattered when he touched it, sent out fragments in all directions, each one exceedingly sharp. The only way to see the whole of it was to put all those little pieces back together, but he knew his hands would be sliced to ribbons if he tried.
