by Ninie Hammon
“And if the fan’s gone…” Lloyd exchanges a glance with Ricky Dan.
Will looks from one to the other. “What?”
“If the explosion blew out the ventilation fan, they can’t do nothing ’til they fix it,” Ricky Dan says. “Or put in a new one. Remember what happened in Scotia.”
Four years earlier in the Scotia Coal Mine in Letcher County, 15 miners at work 3.5 miles underground were killed in an explosion. Later that day, 11 miners sent to rescue the first crew were killed when methane build-up caused an even bigger blast than the first. A mine explosion releases methane from the coal and fills the air in the shafts with coal dust—making subsequent explosions much more likely. Without a functioning fan to suck out the smoke and gas, it would be too dangerous for rescue workers to set foot in Harlan #7.
“Then…?”
“Say it takes ’em three—” Lloyd begins.
“Four,” Ricky Dan corrects.
“Four hours to get the fan up and runnin’…well, there it is. Seven hours gone and they ain’t even started to look for nobody yet. It’ll take ’em another 3 or 4 hours to put seals back in, working their way down the shaft from the entrance to the face so’s the fan’s suckin’ bad air outta—”
“We ain’t gonna make it, Will,” Ricky Dan says quietly, still strangely disconnected, like he’s just told Will his ice cream cone will melt before he has time to eat it. “We ain’t got enough air to last ’til they get to us.”
Will feels like he’s falling. Down, down, down into some dark place, into deep black water, cold water, cold as death. He’s nauseous, but has no food in his stomach to throw up. He hears himself begin to pant. He breathes faster and faster, but he still can’t seem to get in enough air to keep from choking.
Then a memory skitters across his mind on small, clawed feet.
He was probably 5 or 6 years old the one time, the only time, his father ever took him fishing. They’d slung cane poles over their shoulders and walked 3 miles to a sandbar in the middle of Lizard Lick Creek. Will hooked a catfish. It was the first fish he’d ever caught and not very big, but he was pumped up and proud he’d landed it. His father took the fish off the hook and tossed it over into the grass while he threaded another fat, black worm onto Will’s hook. Will watched the catfish flop around in the grass, saw its mouth open and close as it struggled to breathe. He was both fascinated and horrified by the fish’s fight for life. It seemed to take forever for the fish to stop struggling and lie still in the grass. Still and dead.
“But…isn’t there anything…? I mean, there must be something we can do.” He hates the pitiful, whining tone in his voice. He sounds like a frightened child. Feels like one, too.
“What? We wouldn’t last 30 seconds out in that.” Ricky Dan gestures toward the front shaft. “I chalked ‘Men Here’ on the curtain. Rescue team will come in down the rail shaft. So they’ll find us. When they do come, they’ll find us.”
“Can’t we—?”
“There ain’t nothin’ to be done, Will. I’m sorry.” There is a flat finality in Ricky Dan’s words, like the ominous peal of a bell. A death knell.
Lloyd speaks then, his voice still shaky. “Well, there is one thing…”
CHAPTER 24
LLOYD SLOWLY ROLLED off the shattered trellis into the dirt. The thorns and broken boards had torn the skin on his back and arms and left deep, bleeding scratches. He remained on his belly for a long time. There was a buzzing sound in his ears he couldn’t turn off, like the hum of an old refrigerator. It wasn’t from a blow to the head, though. He hadn’t hit the trellis or the ground that hard. Probably lack of sleep. He hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours in the past three nights, ever since Li’l Bit told him Will Gribbins was home.
Will.
His mind refocused. He’d been so surprised to see Will standing on his porch, he’d about wet himself, like Will done that time they lay under the coal train on the trestle. He’d been certain Will knew he’d shot at him in the woods yesterday afternoon, that somehow Will had seen him, knew he was the “poacher” who’d accidentally fired three rounds at him from a 30.06.
Lloyd sat up slowly. He was so tired it was hard to think, hard to keep his attention focused. His thoughts were like water spiders on a still pool. They flitted around from one spot to another, never stopped long enough for him to make sense of anything.
When he’d opened the door and there stood Will, Lloyd was sure Will had come to settle the score; actually wondered if he could get to his gun before Will pulled whatever weapon he’d brought with him.
But that’s not why Will had come to see him. In fact, Lloyd still had no clear understanding of why Will had come. It didn’t have nothing to do with the shooting yesterday, though. Will didn’t even mention it. He’d just said the same thing he’d said out in front of Granny’s trailer the first time Lloyd had seen him in two decades. Talked about working things out between them. Like that was possible. Lloyd’d stayed here and done what was right; Will had run off and now he was being treated like a king because he decided to come back.
Of course, that was only a small part of why Will’s return had turned Lloyd’s world upside down. And not the most important part.
Lloyd got slowly to his feet, like a man who’d had his bell rung good when in fact Will hadn’t hit him at all. It wasn’t until he was standing up that his mind fully registered what Will did say when he was here. He’d come to tell Lloyd that he planned to confess! He said he was going to tell Granny the whole story, tell her what happened in the dark under the mountain—where what’s done in the forever-night needs to remain buried with the dead.
Lloyd rubbed his hands over his face, dug his knuckles into his eyes the way he used to do when he’d awakened with a headache after a Saturday night of partying.
It was all over now. Lloyd was done for. He would go to prison, maybe to death row.
And everybody’ll know!
A chill sank through his body at that thought, freezing him all the way down. Everybody would know!
What could he do—run? Where? The mountains and hollows were the known universe. There might be a big old world beyond them, but he was too old to pull up stakes and make a new life out there in it. He’d always harbored a mild curiosity about life outside the mountains, but he had never entertained for a minute the notion of moving away. This here was Lloyd Jacobs’s world, and his world believed in him. His church had made him an elder! What would they do when they knew he’d…
And his kids?
Well, yes, and Norma Jean, too. She was still his wife after all, wasn’t nothing final yet. How could he face her?
He shook his head, muttered, “No.”
He couldn’t do that, wouldn’t live with the looks he’d see in people’s eyes when they found out Lloyd Jacobs was not the man they thought he was.
So?
He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t get a line of thought going and keep it going long enough to figure nothing out. But it seemed obvious even from where he sat now that there was only one way to avoid prison. And it wasn’t by shooting somebody else!
How could he possibly consider…?
It felt like he stood on ice, like what formed a couple times on the deep pools in Ugly Betty Creek when he was a kid. Only it wasn’t strong enough to hold him, he could hear it cracking and breaking and any minute it would shatter and dump him into the cold, dark depths.
He used to have nightmares about that.
“Am I going crazy?” he wondered aloud. No, he had heard once that only a sane man would question his own rationality; a crazy man would be convinced there wasn’t nothing wrong with him.
He wasn’t no madman. He seen reality clear as a dewdrop on a rosebud and there wasn’t no getting around it. Either he’d spend the rest of his life in prison—with everybody knowing what he’d done—or…
Or what?
Die.
Some reasonable, rational part of his brain immediately protest
ed the mere consideration of that option. But the rest of his mind, the black despair, understood with chilling…what?—relief!—that it was time for Lloyd Jacobs to leave this veil of tears.
Tomorrow would mark the twentieth anniversary of the day that set him on the course that had led here, that had funneled his life, squeezed it in tighter and tighter until he was as trapped as he’d been in that break all those years ago. Only there, he’d struggled to figure out a way to stay alive; now he intended to design the method, manner, and time of his own death.
And the time of his death must be tomorrow. Yes! He’d cheated death out of a victim on that day two decades ago; maybe it was time to pay up.
Take a bunch of ’em with you.
Lloyd actually turned around, looked behind him to see who had spoken. He could feel his pulse begin to throb in his temples; his mouth went dry. Somebody had spoken words. Out loud. This wasn’t like in church, when people said they heard the voice of God, but what they really meant was God spoke to them in their heads or hearts. Not out loud.
He’d heard a voice, an audible voice…or had he?
Take a bunch of ’em with you.
There it was again! Out loud. But it wasn’t the same voice. The first had been high-pitched, like the simple suggestion of a small child. But the second. The second had been no small child. It had been deep and rumbling, as if it had bubbled up from the very bowels of the earth.
And maybe it had.
All at once, Lloyd sensed the presence of an evil that thickened the air, made it difficult to breathe. It had risen from a deep cavern in his own heart, thrown off the chains that had shackled it all these years and now it walked free in the world. Lloyd knew it was of his own making, his to rein in or release. But he sensed its kinship with forces he couldn’t restrain or control.
He had spent more than a decade of his life in a single-minded, determined effort to please God—worked so hard to atone for what he’d done, to earn redemption by living upright and moral. But obviously all he had to offer wasn’t near payment enough. He was still looking down the barrel of a shotgun—loaded and cocked.
If his life wasn’t good enough to earn redemption, to convince God to let him off the hook, maybe it was time to try to please somebody else.
And in that moment, a simple, ordinary moment, Lloyd Jacobs crossed over.
Take a bunch of them with you. What did that mean?
Then Lloyd smiled, an ugly, crooked smile that looked like it had been cleaved in his face with a hatchet. All those people mourning what happened 20 years ago in that mine. Well, Lloyd would give them something to memorialize 20 years from now.
He knew how, too! It had all appeared in his mind in a flash, as complete and detailed as the assembly instructions for a backyard barbecue grill. Insert Tab A into Slot B and the whole world would go boom!
He burst out laughing, then. Howled harder and harder until he had to put his hands on his knees and gasp for breath. After a while, he wasn’t sure anymore if he was laughing or crying.
CHAPTER 25
WILL SHIVERED AND pulled his windbreaker tighter around him. The light jacket had been fine in Florida, but didn’t cut it here in the mountains. It was all he had, though, and he’d wanted to see the night sky. He needed to stare into the depths of it to clear the day’s clutter out of his head.
He had driven from Lloyd’s house this morning straight to the grocery store in Aintree, put a quarter in the slot of the pay phone on the back wall and called Deke—collect.
His hand trembled on the receiver. What if Deke wasn’t home? The store sold beer, cold, out of a big cooler by the door. His gaze was drawn to the cooler like a bee to honey…no, more like a maggot to death.
“Well, hello there, Will. You all right? No, of course you ain’t. If you were all right you wouldn’t be callin’ me collect.”
“I…, Deke, I…” He had no voice, which was fine because he no longer had anything to say.
“You don’t have to talk. The silence tells me everything I need to know. You’re hurtin’, man. Wantin’ a drink so bad the blood in your veins feels like it’s drying up.”
“Deke, I don’t think I can…” The desperation he heard in his voice frightened Will more than the words he said with it.
“Listen to me, Will. You don’t have to go the rest of the day without a drink. All you gotta do is get through right now, the next 5 minutes. Are you with me? I’ll talk you through it. Just 5 minutes.”
And so it went, 5 minutes by 5 minutes.
Then 15, 20. Deke calm and firm, as easy-going as a Golden Retriever on Valium.
By the time Will’s hands stopped shaking, he’d been on the phone for almost 2 hours.
“Deke, I’m sorry. Your phone bill will…”
“Not a problem. I can take out a second mortgage on the house.”
Will managed a small smile.
“Thanks, man.”
“Just pass it on.”
Then he let the little smile take over the rest of his face.
When he left the grocery store, he drove JoJo’s car to the Jiffy Stop and did what Deke had told him to do, exactly what Deke told him to do. That’s what sponsors were for—to think for you when you were too sick to think for yourself. If the big, black man had told Will to strip naked, put on a Mexican sombrero and stand in the median of the four-lane whistling “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” Will would have started puckering.
That’s not what Deke said. He told Will to walk.
Keeping to the edge of Turkey Neck Creek, Will headed upstream. He didn’t go into the woods, of course; the poacher/sniper would have to find somebody else to use for target practice today. When he came to a dirt road that crossed the creek, he took it. He banked left at the next one and then aimlessly wandered the dirt roads that wound up through the mountains for the rest of the afternoon.
As he walked, he soaked up the autumn colors like a paper towel absorbing water off a countertop. Breathed in the aroma of cedar and pine trees and the damp, foresty smell of wet leaves. Slowly, the tension began to drain out of him, the itch that so desperately needed scratching eased. At least for now, and that was enough.
He stayed gone all day, just like Deke told him to, and later sat on the bottom step of Granny’s porch in companionable silence with the night. The darkness kept its own counsel. Spread out above was a sky as black as one of Jamey’s arts, and the chill wind had polished it until it sparkled. This should be a place to find peace if there really was such a thing in the world.
The door squeaked open and JoJo stepped out onto the porch carrying a Snoopy coffee mug. She was smiling. No, she had stretched her lips like a clothesline across her face and pinned them at both ends with dimples, but it was plastic and lifeless, a Miss Kentucky smile.
She came down the stairs and handed Will the mug.
“Granny said to bring you this.” It was hot chocolate. Granny used to fix it for him and Ricky Dan in the fall when they’d come home from sangin’ or deer hunting. “She couldn’t give it to you her own self, you know, couldn’t come all the way down to the bottom step.”
That was true, but Will knew it wasn’t the only reason JoJo had been dispatched with the steaming mug. Granny’d wanted Will to spend time with the girl. She had mentioned again this morning her growing concern for JoJo. “That chile is burdened some’m fierce. It’s like there’s mist all around her. She’s hid in it and I cain’t find her.”
“Have a seat,” Will patted the step beside him. When she handed him the mug, he got a close look at her cuticles, raw and bleeding where she’d picked at them. “Has Granny been like this for long, where she can’t even leave the porch?”
“It’s been comin’ on my whole life, but here lately seems like it’s gettin’ worse faster.” JoJo sat down beside Will. “On the Fourth of July, we us had a potluck doin’s, a big crowd and all kind of food.”
“The girls and their tribes?”
“You do know they’re coming to
Sunday dinner, don’t you—to see you?”
Will nodded. Granny had told him she planned to “gather the family for a proper welcome.” He also knew she wouldn’t be anxious to celebrate his presence after tomorrow morning.
“In July, it was more than my aunts, uncles, and cousins, though. Granny invited the whole holler. There was people everywhere, kids underfoot and runnin’ around like wild Indians. And Granny played! You ever hear Granny play the mandolin?”
“Once or twice.”
The aroma of roasting meat floats over the house from the backyard where Bowman and Ricky Dan have dug a pit and filled it with hot coals. The deer suspended on a spit above the coals is the doe Ricky Dan shot yesterday; it’s been cooking since late last night.
Women in aprons bustle around. They arrange on two big tables made of boards and sawhorses the covered dishes they brought from home. There are bowls of potato salad—both the mustard and the mayonnaise kind; crisp, brown, fried green tomatoes; turnip greens with big hunks of ham hock; deviled eggs lined up in neat rows on platters; beans—green, brown and navy; black-eyed peas, ears of corn cooked in the husk, fried okra—both cornmeal and batter-dipped, plates of cookies and brownies and every pie and cake imaginable.
Squealing children thread their way through the crowd of grown-ups, teenage boys stand around awkwardly, pretending not to gawk at equally awkward teenage girls. Men talk and spit, the low mumble of their voices mingling with the clang of a game of horseshoes.
But all the commotion stops at the first clear, high note from Bowman’s fiddle. He is a master. The big man stands on the porch beside Tugboat and his banjo. Earl Calhoun, the stand-up base player, is seated off to the side watching wistfully, his arm in a sling, broken in four places by a roof fall. Ricky Dan is perched on the porch railing with his guitar; Ma sits in a straight-back kitchen chair cradling her mandolin. Bowman taps his foot—one, two, three, four—and the music starts. Foggy Mountain Breakdown. Salty Dog. Orange Blossom Special. The pure, haunting sound of bluegrass floats from the porch up into the mountains, its melodies as much a part of the listeners as the blood in their veins and the accent on their tongues.
