by Ninie Hammon
“That’s when you was gettin’ ready to draw rocks, ain’t it?”
Will didn’t answer. He couldn’t speak. His eyes were fixed on a particular detail in the mural, a detail that stood out on the black surface like headlights coming at you on a lonely road at night.
JoJo’s eyes were drawn to it, too, and recognition registered on her face. She looked up and said to Granny, “That there’s how you knew, ain’t it?”
Granny nodded.
The detail that gripped their attention was the right hand of the miner whose back was turned. The man held his hand casually behind his back, palm open. And lying there, clearly visible, were two white rocks. White imbedded in the black surface of the jet.
“I asked Jamey about them soon’s I seen ’em,” Granny said quietly. “He said they was in that piece of jet, that lotsa times they’s other rocks stuck in the jet he’s carvin’ and he has to chisel them away. But he said the white rocks in this ’un was a part of what he dug out of the rock. Said they was right there and he just carved the hand around ’em.”
“How did you know…how did you figure out what all this meant?” JoJo asked.
Granny took a deep breath.
“I knowed it was Ricky Dan right there.” She pointed to the miner on the right. “Recognized him right off ’cause of his helmet—where he painted the UK thing with a X across it. And I knew this had to be the day of the ’xplosion ’cause Ricky Dan painted that thing on there the night before.”
She stopped, gathered herself and went on. “That there’s Lloyd’s helmet, see?” She reached out and put her finger on the UK symbol on the helmet lying in the dirt, then pointed to the miner leaned against the wall. “And that’s Lloyd, cause you can tell some’m ain’t right with his foot and his boot’s gone.”
The miner’s left foot was twisted, lying at an odd angle.
“That’s how I knowed this was after the ’xplosion, cause that’s how Lloyd broke his ankle.”
Her voice got so quiet it was little more than a whisper on a breath. “Which meant Ricky Dan hadn’t got killed in the ’xplosion. He was alive after #7 blew.”
It was quiet then. Again, the three seemed to be frozen in one of Jamey’s arts. Finally, Granny dropped soft words into the silence.
“This one had to be you, Will,” she said, pointing to the miner with the rocks in his hand. “Who else could it be? All the other miners got blowed up.”
She sat back, said nothing. Will couldn’t look at her. JoJo didn’t speak, either. Finally, Granny took up the story where she’d left off.
“I studied on it for the longest time, got it out ever night and looked at it for hours sometimes. I knowed them white rocks right where they was in that piece of jet—that wasn’t no accident. After a while, it finally come to me what musta happened.” She turned to Will. “You boys was decidin’ who was gonna do something none of you wanted to do. I didn’t know what it was ’xactly, but whatever it was…it got Ricky Dan kilt. ’Cause when all was said ’n done, you and Lloyd was the onliest ones come out of that mine alive.”
She reached out and patted Will’s hand. He still couldn’t meet her gaze. “I studied and studied on them white rocks you was holdin’. Two of ’em. I knowed you only needed one white rock to pick the loser. So what was you doin’ with two—hiding ’em behind your back?” Her voice was soft as duck down and hard as bone. It laid Will’s soul open as effectively as a surgeon’s scalpel—or a warrior’s sword. “I watched you practicin’ them coin tricks. It’d a been a simple thing for you to switch rocks like you done them coins.”
She took a deep breath, obviously intent on getting it all said, on eating her own frog.
“In the end, one thing was clear. Some’m happened down there you boys wanted to hide ’cause neither one of you ever told a soul Ricky Dan was alive in that mine after it blowed.” She squeezed Will’s hand. “And you run off. You wouldn’t a-left your whole life less’n you’d done some’m you’s powerful ashamed of.”
Will finally lifted his head, forced himself to look into her eyes.
“What I did, Granny, it was unforgiva—”
“Ain’t nothin’ unforgivable.”
She smiled a little, not enough to show teeth even if she’d had any. “You ’member them potlucks we usta have when you’s a kid?”
Will nodded. Granny’s eyes shifted to a scene her mind painted out in the air in front of her.
“Ever woman in the holler fixed up her best recipe—us all tryin’ to outdo each other—and we’d have food laid out on them long tables, ever good thing you could think of, and you could load up your plate with whatever you’s partial to.” She paused and the smile got wider. She didn’t put her hand up to her mouth to hide it. “An’ then we’d play music. Me and my mandolin, Ricky Dan with his guitar, and Bowman on his fiddle.”
Bowman. She spoke his name in that special sighing way she had. Will had never heard another woman say a man’s name the way Granny said Bowman’s. He never expected to, either.
But he had no idea what her point was with the story, if indeed she had one. He’d tried to catch the train of her thought but it had pulled right out of the station without him.
Will’s face must have shown his confusion because she stopped. The scene she’d painted in the air vanished and she connected the dots for him and JoJo.
“Honey, the Bible ain’t no potluck dinner! It ain’t like you’re ’llowed to be choicey, pick only the parts you like—nothin’ but cherry pie—and ignore the hard parts. Either it’s all true or ain’t none of it is. And the Bible says we got to forgive. Not it’d be nice if we did. Or we’d oughta if ’n we feel like it. Says we got to. That there’s the beginnin’ and the end of it.”
The room was quiet. Will could think of nothing to say and didn’t think he had the air in his lungs to say anything even if he’d wanted to.
Then Granny spoke into the stillness. Like rocks pitched one at a time into a creek, each word landed with a separate plop in his heart.
“I forgived Lloyd, too.”
“What did Lloyd do that you had to forgive, Granny?” JoJo asked. “He didn’t cheat.”
“And I waited for him to come to me and man up to it, so’s I could tell him I’d already forgive him, too. But he never come. All these years, ever day, and he never said a word.”
“What are you talking about, Granny?” Will had that feeling again, like something was hurling at him in the darkness.
Granny sighed.
“I’s sittin’ here one night, lookin’ at this carvin’, studyin’ it. Cryin’ over it. And there come up a storm; lightning knocked out the ’lectricity.”
She looked at JoJo. “You might ’member it. You’s spendin’ the night at Becca’s.”
JoJo shrugged and Granny continued. Her voice was level, but Will could hear deep undertones in it—of what he wasn’t sure. Sadness, perhaps. Grief. And something else, too. Something very like fear.
“So I lit me some candles ’cause Jamey Boy was askeered of the dark. And after I got ’em all lit, I sat back down at the table and looked at this here arts.”
She stopped again and the silence grew, stretched out like the shadow of the mountain in the evenings.
“Then I seen it,” she whispered, her voice ragged. “I screamed and jumped up. And Jamey Boy come runnin’ and then the ’lectricity come back on and I’s standing there cryin’. He started to cry, too, but he didn’t know why we’s cryin’.”
Will had no idea what she was talking about. He looked at JoJo and didn’t think she did either.
Granny came back from the memory, squared her shoulders and said firmly, “I done opened up this can and we’re gonna eat all of it.”
She stood and picked up the white-rock carving. “I want you and JoJo to take this here arts up to Jamey’s shed. I want you to close the door and light the lanterns. Then look at it real hard, stare at it, study it and see what you see.” She took a deep, trembling breath. “Lotsa t
imes over the years I’ve wondered my own self if it’s really there. I only seen it the one time.”
CHAPTER 31
AS LLOYD BOUNCED along on the mantrip deeper and deeper into the forever night of the mine, he considered again the mystery. He had wallowed it around in his head for years. Why had he been able to work out what had to be done the day #7 blew and come up with a way to do it when the other two wasn’t even thinking those thoughts? The best he could figure was that he had a more well-developed sense of self-preservation than they did. Years of beatings had honed his instinct to survive, sharpened it to a razor edge.
Will is leaned up against the coal pillar. Lloyd can see him shake even in the dim light, can tell he’s so scared he’s about ready to jump out of his own skin.
Ricky Dan sits on the pile of rocks mourning his daddy, and Lloyd don’t blame him one bit for that, but the thing is, there ain’t time to worry about dead people when the three of them’s on the edge of joining them.
Maybe the agony in his ankle has kept him alert, won’t let his mind pad itself in cotton and look away from hard truth. Maybe he’s just seen more brutality and meanness in life than they have. If you understand—no, not just understand—experience random brutality and aimless violence, it clears all the clutter out of your mind quick, helps you focus instantly on what you have to do to keep from getting killed. Whatever the reason, he looks around and sees he’s the only one of the three intent on figuring out how to stay alive.
He measures the room with his eyes—20 feet of width, 4 feet of height. Pile of rocks sticking out 8 feet. Twenty times 4 times 8. Six hundred and forty. Divide that by 27. The answer’s roughly 24. Twenty-four hours of air. Divide that by the 3 of them and you come up with 8 each. Be conservative, say 7. Seven hours of air.
The number kicks him in the belly so hard he’s seized by a fit of coughing that shakes his whole body and lights a flame of renewed agony in his ankle. By the time he gets his breath back, his face is wet with tears. Well, some of it is blood from the his split lip. He reaches up and tries to wipe the wet—tears or blood—off his face with his sleeve.
Seven hours ain’t long enough! He’s already done that math in his head, too. Need 10 hours at least. Twelve is safer. But with 7…the 3 of them will be long dead before the rescue team gets here; won’t be nothing for them to do except haul out the bodies.
But Lloyd refuses to accept some inevitable end, roll over and die because there ain’t nothing to do about it. If he’d had that attitude, he wouldn’t have survived long enough to be sitting here with nothing between him and certain death but two pieces of yellow plastic.
So what’s to be done?
Only two things you can do. You either got to find more air or reduce the number of people breathing what you already got. Three men got 7 hours. Two men would have 12. Well, less than that. You’d have to divide up whatever air you had left after you got rid of the third man.
He comes up short at that thought, like he’s outside himself watching and listening and he’s surprised by what he sees.
Why Lloyd Jacobs, will you listen to yourself! “Get rid of” one of your two best friends…your two only friends? You put either one of them out in that poison air, you’d be commitin’ murder.
A cold, reptilian voice in his soul reminds him calmly that it wouldn’t be the first time.
A small, private smile spreads over Lloyd’s face. Even here, in the pit of a mine, his life dangling by a thread, he is still warmed and cheered by the memory of killing his father. Soon as Mama died, that man’s days was numbered. Lloyd believes his father saw it coming, is convinced he saw fear in his father’s eyes every time Lloyd entered the room, fear like his father’d seen in his eyes all those years. Maybe not, but there was certainly fear in his eyes at the end, fear and pleading as he begged for his life. Every time he cried out for mercy Lloyd hit him again with the claw end of the hammer, over and over until the man lay in a pool of blood quiet and still. The day he chucked his father’s body down that old mine shaft was the first day of real freedom Lloyd Jacobs had ever known.
It wasn’t hard to kill his father; it was a delight beyond all thought and reason. But it will be hard to kill Will or Ricky Dan. Hard, but necessary. Self-preservation. One of them dies or Lloyd dies, and Lloyd doesn’t intend to die. He has avoided the Reaper before; he can do it again.
Lloyd looks from Will to Ricky Dan. Ricky Dan is in a bad way, must have got a extra dose of bad air somehow or for some reason it’s affected him worse. His breath wheezes in and out like a buck that’s been lung shot. And that ain’t good, him panting like that. He’s using up precious air with every breath.
But Lloyd must be patient, come up with a plan. He won’t save himself with brute force; it will require cunning. And he understands on a fundamental level that he is the only one of the three of them who is capable of cunning.
By the time Ricky Dan and Will start to do the math, Lloyd already has his strategy mapped out. He describes the escape hatch “only 90 feet away,” plays the hand very carefully, doesn’t push. And for all he knows there might actually be a break full of air. The curtain nobody bothered to remove—that part’s true. Trouble is, Lloyd has no idea where he saw it. It was somewhere along the belt line, in this area as he recalls, but he couldn’t pinpoint it to save his life—or to save anybody else’s.
When Ricky Dan plunges out into the dark, smoky shaft in a futile act of heroism, Will stares longingly, expectantly at the curtain. Waiting. Hoping. Lloyd knows he will never see Ricky Dan again.
But Lloyd is wrong.
WILL AND JoJo went down the back porch steps and headed toward the path that led around the garden and up into the woods. The rain was holding off—for the moment—and there was a biting chill in the air, the kind that announced winter was packed up and ready to return—just hadn’t got the car loaded yet.
Any minute now the dirt trail would get another good soaking and turn into what Granny’d always called a “lob-lolly.” Will would have to return to the house through sticky, ankle-deep goo, and he was wearing the only pair of shoes he…
The thought skittered away and was gone.
All his thoughts were like that. Mundane thoughts. Profound thoughts. Painful thoughts. All jumbled together, spinning around in his head like they’d been tossed into a blender set for puree. He’d try to grab one and think it, but before he had a chance it would…
Granny had known all along. For years. Her words from that first day came back to him: “I know what you come home for, son. But you don’t. You think you do, but you’re wrong.”
He’d believed he’d come home to ask for forgiveness. But he’d actually come home so she could tell him he already had it.
Will had played out in his head a thousand times how Granny would react when he confessed, admitted what he’d done to her son. And how she did react certainly hadn’t been on his list of conceivable outcomes! Oh, it wasn’t that her response was out of character. It was just unimaginable. Because it wasn’t possible that she knew. Nobody knew he had cheated Ricky Dan. Or so he thought.
“I ain’t mad at you, if that’s what you’re wonderin’,” JoJo said. Will turned and looked at her blankly. His mind was like Deke had described a heart in fibrillation; it wasn’t really thinking, just quivering uselessly. “I ain’t got no dog in the fight. I never knew my daddy so there’s no reason for me to harbor ill will toward you for some’m you done to him.”
Will shook his head to clear it.
“Now Granny…that’s another thing altogether. My daddy was her little boy and that woman can love some’m fierce. The force of it near knocks you over sometimes.”
“And losing them all like she did, it’s remarkable she survived,” he heard himself say. Where was he going with this? “An old woman can only take so much heartbreak and loss, though…” Then he figured it out. With a grinding mental effort, he silenced his inner turmoil, slammed the door on it and focused on JoJo. “…only s
o much dying—”
“Don’t start! We ain’t talkin’ about that.”
“Have you thought about what it will do to Granny to lose—?”
“You think I ain’t concerned about Granny! That I ain’t worried about her. That I…” She paused and he watched her grab hold of her temper. “You got all the answers, you tell me. What’s it gonna do to that old woman to watch me go crazy ’fore I die? To have to look after me like I’s a baby, worn out as she is? To know Jamey’s next? If my mama’d lived, she’d have turned into a skinny, but her dying like she done, we all got spared—”
He exploded on her.
“Spared? Are you actually telling me that you’d trade a childhood full of…of scraped-knee kisses and putting bows in your hair and calling out your spelling words and…holding your head while you threw up for not having to—?”
“I said I ain’t gonna talk about that!” She sounded like a little kid with her fingers in her ears chanting, “I can’t hear you; I can’t hear you.”
Before Will could continue, she changed the subject, shifted the focus back on him. “Did it ever occur to you, Mr. Gribbins, that my daddy had a 50 percent chance of gettin’ that white rock even if you hadn’t cheated?”
“Yeah, but I stole his chance at life.” He stopped and turned to face her. “Now you, on the other hand, are chucking your chance—”
“You say one more word to me about what I’m fixin’ to do and I’ll…” She realized she had no bargaining chips.
“You’ll what? Mark my name off your Christmas card list?”
“I’ll let you go look at this rock all by your own self.” She turned and marched up the path toward Jamey’s shed. Will caught up with her in a couple of strides and they walked together in silence, made their way around the top edge of Granny’s garden where squash and gourds peeked out from under dripping foliage and big round pumpkins waited in orange patience for Charley Brown and Snoopy.
The trail snaked through a stand of poplars up the hill, and when they passed the rock outcrop, JoJo asked, “You got any idea what we’re s’posed to see in this arts?”
