by Ninie Hammon
Gradually, the commander winds down. A whistling teapot taken off the stove, his built-up steam finally sputters out.
“I’ve read your file, sailor,” the commander says. “You’ve been written up…let’s see…” He picks up the folder and begins to thumb through it. “…three…four…five…” He drops it back on the table. “I’ve read every one of them. You refused to sleep in your assigned berth. You tried to punch out Seaman Perkins because he closed the door of the head on you. You…” He sighs. “Besides the fact that you’ve got some serious anger-management issues, there’s a common thread in all these incidents. And I think I’ve figured out what it is. I’m just not sure what I’m going to do about it.”
His eyes riveted straight ahead, Will can still see out of the corner of his eye that the commander is studying him. The man says nothing, looks at Will for what seems like a very long time, then leans back in his chair like he’s come to some kind of decision.
“Says here…” The commander tapped the file. “That you’re from Aintree Hollow, Kentucky.” He paused. “I know what happened in your hometown a couple of weeks before you enlisted.”
Will must have looked surprised.
“You hillbillies don’t get out much, do you? That coal mine explosion made national headlines; the whole country heard about it. Twenty-five miners killed, wasn’t it? Or thirty. I know only two made it out alive. I remember reading that part, and one of the survivors had this odd last name that stuck with me.” He paused again for a beat. “Gribbins.”
The commander leaned toward him. “That wasn’t a brother or an uncle or a cousin was it? It was you.”
“Yes, sir.” Will struggles to hold onto his composure—to remain emotionally as well as physically rigid.
The officer is silent for a few moments, then asks softly, “Son, why in the name of common sense did you join the Navy?”
“Commander Burkhead recommended I be transferred—to supply. I worked on the dock in Norfolk—outside!—drove a forklift until my hitch was up. Even went to college at night and took a few classes. In history. Thought maybe I could teach, but...”
Will was silent for so long after that Granny finally asked softly, “What did you do then?”
He didn’t answer.
“Will…?”
“I crawled down into a bottle of booze and never came back out—at least I wouldn’t have if it’d been up to me.” He lifted his faded blue eyes to meet hers and saw such compassion there he had to look away. “I became a drunk, Granny. Not all at once. It takes a while. Lost my first job after the Navy—worked construction—because I showed up late. Lost the next one because I didn’t show up at all for two days. Tried a change of scenery—the geographic cure. Hitched from one city to the next to the next, crashed in flophouses as dreary and featureless as all the nameless cities. Went from bourbon to cheap wine to…eventually I ended up a filthy, slobbering, falling-down, homeless, under-a-bridge drunk.”
Granny’s eyes sparkled with tears. “Oh…Sugar.”
“I went as far down as you can go. It was me and a bottle and dying.”
He didn’t realize he was still talking until it was too late to hold it back. “There at the end, I could actually see his eyes, Granny. A gray wolf with yellow cat-eyes circling around me, growling and drooling.”
Will had never admitted that, never said it out loud to another human being. Not even to his sponsor. Granny wasn’t the only one who’d bared her soul today.
He pushed resolutely ahead into the silence that followed.
“Then one day, I couldn’t keep on keepin’ on anymore.” He looked up at her. “I was done.”
He felt a little like that now; he was finished. He’d finally been honest. He hadn’t said all that he needed to say, but what he had said was the truth. “My life was ending, Granny, and I was glad it was over.”
CHAPTER 19
Will is certain he’s dying. You can just tell a thing like that. It was like that time he went camping and could feel the air mattress under his sleeping bag slowly collapse. He can feel himself deflating, sinking. Out some little hole somewhere, what little is left of his life is silently whishing away, and when it is all gone, he will be, too.
And he’s okay with that. He is waaay okay with that. Let’s ring the curtain down on this baby so we can all go home.
All around him is white light and shiny metal and he can hear bustling activity, the swish of hurrying feet and the babble of urgent voices. He doesn’t know what they’re saying, though. He might be able to tell if he concentrated, but what’s the point? He’s dying. He wants to tell these people that there isn’t any rush, they can calm down and slow down; he’ll be gone soon.
But he can’t seem to get all the different muscle groups necessary for speech to cooperate. So he does concentrate for a moment, tries hard to focus.
“It’d take a whole roll of duct tape to fix what’s broke in me.” The accent of his raising colors his speech now, slides out from under the rock he’d shoved it under, and takes over. “I’m plumb wore out now. I’m tired. S’over.”
He pauses. “Shhhhhh. Listen…” He pauses again. “Cain’t you hear it. I’m whizzin’ away.”
Then a thought brings him momentarily all the way out of the fog.
“Don’t you send my body back to Aintree Holler when I’m dead! You cremate me! Scatter my ashes over Jim Beam Distillery in Bardstown. Don’t you put me in a hole in the ground! I done got out of a dark grave once and I ain’t goin’ back.”
The burst of energy is all he has. The air’s almost gone.
Then a face appears above him, huge above him, the way faces used to look when he was a kid and peaked at everybody through an empty toilet paper roll.
“You’s in Harlan #7 when she blew, weren’t you?” a voice behind the face asks.
The words are ice water poured over Will’s head and the fuzzy edges of the room snap instantly into focus.
“Figured as much.” The face leans so close it fills all of Will’s sight. “So tell me some’m. If you was in #7 and got out, what are you giving up for now? There’s 27 dead miners wish somebody’d give them the chance you got—to pick livin’ ’stead of dyin’.”
Those words plug up the leak, the hole in Will’s soul, snug as a gob of Bondo.
That was the day Will met Deke Asher, whose broad shoulders, heavily muscled arms, bald head, and earring had earned him the nickname “Mr. Clean”—even though he was as black as a lump of coal. It turned out Deke had grown up on the other side of the mountain from Aintree—in Lynch, “where the blade from the ventilation fan landed when it blew off #7 that day,” Deke used to tell him. “Barely missed the outhouse in my granddaddy’s backyard, and he was usin’ it at the time.”
As soon as Will’d opened his mouth, Deke had him pegged for a hillbilly. The big man with a boom in his voice and kindness in his touch was one of the EMTs who’d brought Will into the emergency room of Gulf Coast Hospital in Ft. Meyers, Florida, more dead than alive from massively infected rat bites on his leg.
“You do know we found you ‘under a bridge,’ don’t you? I mean that literally. A homeless drunk under a bridge. That ain’t very original.”
Deke visited Will every day he was in the hospital. Sick from the infection and going through DT’s coming off booze, Will wasn’t exactly Mary Poppins to be around. That’s what Deke said. And when he was at a point where he could hear it, Deke told him other things, too.
“You got a chance, man, right now, clean and sober for the first time since…you fill in the blank. While you got a clear mind, you might want to come ’long with me and meet a friend of mine. Name’s Bill W.”
Will didn’t know that was code for Alcoholics Anonymous until Deke walked him into his first meeting, where a beat-up old man sitting by the door fixed him with a penetrating stare.
“You need to go back out there and drink some more, son,” the old man said matter-of-factly. “You still got a watch.”
Deke became Will’s sponsor, moved Will into a spare room above his garage that had been home to countless other recovering drunks over the years. Deke’s wife was a sweet woman who’d been in a wheelchair for a decade with rheumatoid arthritis. Her father owned a construction company and when Will’s leg was healed, Deke got him a job there.
Will began to piece his life back together “one step at a time.”
The big EMT hauled out another AA mantra one evening a few weeks after Will got out of the hospital while the two of them sat in a booth at Denny’s after a meeting.
“You know, you’re only as sick as your secrets,” Deke said.
“Easy for you to say; you don’t know my secrets.”
The big black man leaned his shiny bald head back and roared with laughter, a sudden rumbling sound that always reminded Will of a bowling ball slamming into pins.
“Every drunk I ever met thinks he’s got the biggest, baddest, meanest story in the junkyard.” He must have seen the stricken look on Will’s face. “I ain’t making light of it, Will. I’m just tellin’ you, whatever you got to say, I’ve heard worse.”
So Will told him, unloaded. For the first time in two decades, he said it out loud, tacked words onto the dark night of his soul. In one, long semihysterical stream, he described in graphic detail what had really happened under the mountain in Harlan #7 that day.
When he was finished, Deke told him, “Sounds like you got Number Four down pretty good, and tonight you got a leg up on Number Five.”
The fourth step in AA’s 12-step program requires that you make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of yourself. Number Five demands that you admit to God, to yourself, and to another human being “the exact nature of your wrongs.”
Then Deke spoke in a quiet voice so intense it felt like he was shouting. “Understand this—if you never understand anything else in your whole life—booze will take everything you have and then it will kill you.” He paused, leaned closer. “You work the steps or you die, Will. It’s that simple. Work the steps or you’re gonna leave this life alone in some alley, lying in your own puke. And that’s if you’re lucky. That’s if you don’t take somebody else with you.”
Deke sat back like he was finished. But he wasn’t.
“I got 17 years sobriety. Quit the day I went roarin’ east in the westbound lane of I 90 right outside Syracuse. In a blackout. Plowed into a station wagon—a mother and three children on their way to a family reunion. I don’t remember nothin’ about the accident, just woke up after, and this cop yelling at me that I’d killed a 4-year-old kid. Found out later I’d paralyzed his mother, too.”
The big man stopped, glanced away. “Served 7 years of a 10-year sentence for vehicular homicide.”
Then he turned his gaze back on Will. “His name was Samuel. The kid, he was Sam. He’d be 21 now, about to finish college, maybe. Working nights to save up for a road trip to California or a ring so he can propose to his girlfriend.” His eyes were still pointed at Will, but that wasn’t what he saw. “I carry Sam around with me everywhere I go, every day of my life. I knew when he should have started first grade, when he’d have gotten his driver’s license or gone on his first date.”
His eyes refocused, grabbed Will’s gaze, and drilled the next words into his soul. “Seventeen years, and every day, every single day I am only one drink away from turnin’ back into the man who killed him.”
Silence.
“When you’re ready,” Deke said, his voice gentle now, “I’ll help you work step Number Eight.”
Will knew what that step was: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.”
Will did his 90-in-90, 90 meetings in 90 days, and as 3 months became six and six became nine, he began to hear the first notes of a song his heart hadn’t sung in years—a melody set to the sweet music of hope.
It was Deke who told Will that they’d reopened #7. And about the twentieth anniversary memorial service for the miners killed when it blew. Deke’s mother still sent him the Harlan Daily Enterprise. The big man didn’t push, but said he’d pay Will’s way back to Kentucky if he had in mind to go. And he’d see to it Will’s job was waiting for him afterward, if he still wanted it.
Will knew it was time to take the eighth step. He had to go back and face the persons he had harmed, admit what he’d done, and do whatever it took to make amends.
CHAPTER 20
JAMEY GOT UP early, as the sky began to change from black to blue. Finding out what was in a piece of rock was like an itch, like his whole arm had felt that time he got into poison ivy. It was hard for him to rest or think about anything else when his mind itched so about that rock.
His breath made white clouds in front of his nose and frost crunched beneath his feet as he made his way up the trail to the shed in the woods. Though it’d warm up later today when the sun cleared Black Mountain, it was cold now. ValVleen’s feathers was all puffed up but it didn’t seem to bother Bucket none. The old dog followed along behind him and sniffed the frosty ground as he went.
Jamey really needed a coat instead of just his tattered blue hoodie. Of course, he wouldn’t even know he was cold as soon as he started to work. Fact is, more times than not, when he finished a carving, he was soaked in sweat, like he’d chopped firewood all afternoon.
Jamey unlocked the padlock on the shed door and put the key back in his pocket. He patted it with a smile and said, “The end.”
Holding the door for Bucket, he stepped in behind the dog and lit all the lanterns. Then he sat down at his worktable and leaned over the dark stone, close to it, his lips puckered up like he was about to give the carving a kiss. Instead, he blew out a puff of air that chased away the thin layer of dust that had settled during the night.
The flickering light of the lanterns brought the shiny black rock to life, changed it into something that moved and breathed.
“Reckon them folks is a-dancin’ in there, ValVleen?” Jamey whispered in awe, as he stared at the light that reflected off the planes of the unfinished carving. But he knew better.
Jamey picked up a mallet and a chisel. The shed, the dog, and the little yellow canary faded away.
Perhaps only a few minutes passed; maybe it was hours. Jamey figured hours was more likely because his back ached from bending over, there was a lot of bird poop on his shoulder and his butt was numb.
He picked up a work rag and wiped his shoulder. ValVleen hopped over his hand as he cleaned. Then he scooted away from the worktable; the stool’s legs made a screechy sound on the old wood floor. He stood and stretched, then stepped back and looked at the arts on the workbench.
He hadn’t never seen nothing like it in his life.
“I think this here’s a bad ’un,” he whispered to the bird, like he didn’t want the arts to hear. “Maybe even worser’n the other’n I had to hide.” He glanced at the closed door of the little storage room.
Then he studied the images—the people—that had climbed out of this rock when his hands had removed what held them prisoner. And he was glad didn’t none of them have faces, at least not yet. If they’d had faces, Jamey was sure the looks on them would scare him, keep him awake of a night or crawl into bed with him to hitch a ride in his dreams.
He began to shake his head back and forth, wasn’t even aware of it until he heard his voice say, “No.” Only the one word. He knew then he couldn’t keep working on that carving.
“I ain’t gonna do no more t’hout Granny tells me to,” he announced firmly. ValVleen cheeped at him; Bucket was asleep.
But that didn’t feel any better. To stop now, in the middle…the thought filled him with a nameless fear. All this time them folks had been buried and finally they was fixin’ to crawl out. How could he leave them trapped, frozen half in and half out of the rock?
He shivered, then shook off the trembles and picked up the piece of jet, surprisingly light for all its hardness.
“ValVlee
n, we’re gonna go ask.” He nudged the sleeping dog with his toe. “Com’on, Bucket.”
Jamey put the carving in one of his pillowcases and carried the stone down the path that led to the house, around the stand of poplars—where Bucket paused to leave his mark. As he passed along the side of the garden, Jamey’s mind whirled around and around in his head. He hadn’t never stopped in the middle of one of his arts. He hadn’t never showed one before it was done. He hadn’t never left an art unfinished.
Jamey didn’t like nevers.
Granny heard the back door slam, knew it was Jamey Boy, but bit her tongue. He’d been slamming the back door for 15 years and she’d been telling him to close it gentle the whole time. Came a point you needed to stop beating a dead horse.
Jamey Boy went into the living room carrying something—likely a carving—wrapped up in a pillowcase. Will and JoJo sat together on the couch. JoJo didn’t have to go in until noon today but she was already dressed in her red Jiffy Stop smock. Playing cards were spread out on the table in front of them and Will was trying to explain to JoJo why she hadn’t ought to draw to a inside straight. Jamey Boy had missed breakfast, but that didn’t surprise Granny none. When he worked, it filled up his whole head and he didn’t have room up there for other things.
Granny had tried to stay out of Will and JoJo’s hair so they could talk. She’d rearranged the silverware drawer, defrosted the freezer, and was about to clean the oven. Letting them get to know each other had turned into a lot of work.
She could tell Will had done what she’d asked him to, that he’d worked real hard to get past the wall JoJo always kept up between her and other people. And it looked to Granny like he’d either climbed over it or she’d let him in the gate because the two of them appeared to have hooked up in some way. Granny wasn’t surprised. They both had holes in they hearts all full up with suffering they didn’t talk about. Their wounds was different from Granny’s, but they was deep and painful. Pain was pain. Didn’t matter much what caused it.
