by Ninie Hammon
The raw, ragged pain had sliced her open like she’d only that minute felt the ground commence to shake under her feet. She’d felt absolutely empty; all her insides was gone. Wasn’t nothing at all in her belly, under her bones, except wind blowing through with a whistling sound. And the empty had terrified her.
The empty terrified Granny now. But it wasn’t the empty inside her this time; it was the empty outside. The big, empty world was so huge she couldn’t breathe.
With every bit of will and strength she possessed, she gripped Bucket’s collar and staggered along through the storm beside him, around the edge of the garden and onto the mud-slick trail leading to the shed.
She was certain that if she let go of Bucket’s collar even for an instant, she would die.
JAMEY SET VALVLEEN’S cage down in the break next to the end of the belt line just as the steel teeth of the continuous miner dug into the coal seam at the face. Two shuttle cars waited to haul the coal from the miner to the feeder, where it would be crushed and slowly fed onto the conveyor belt for transport out through the center of the mine’s three shafts. The belt line was like a rubber band stretched on rollers that ran in a continuous loop. As the belt line greaser, it was Jamey’s job to keep those rollers lubricated; the friction of a belt sliding across locked-up rollers could cause a fire. He also shoveled up coal that had fallen off the belt and loaded it back on.
It wasn’t the most high-risk job in the mine, but it was more dangerous than it might appear. Mashed, broken and mangled fingers were common among belt line greasers who didn’t watch what they were doing around the five-pound rollers. Jamey knew better than to get distracted, but he couldn’t help it today. He couldn’t stop thinking about Lloyd. Why’d he act so funny? He didn’t want to hear about the arts Jamey’d made with the piece of jet he’d found in Big Sandy—how come? It was like Lloyd didn’t want to see him at all, like it upset him something fierce that Jamey’d showed up for work.
Jamey put down his grease gun and stepped over to ValVleen’s cage. He didn’t like closing her up in there like she was in jail, but without she was in a cage, they wouldn’t let him bring her into the mine.
“You think Lloyd’s mad at me about some’m?” he asked her, his voice loud to carry over the rumble of the miner and the clatter of the coal. She’d been particularly cheery today, sang to him and JoJo in the car all the way down the hill. “Maybe I’d ought to say sorry even if I don’t know what I done. Ya think?”
She cocked her head to one side and tweeted. But the noise ate her reply. Jamey shrugged and went back to work. The noise in the mine didn’t bother him. Like static on the radio, it filled up his mind so there wasn’t no room for thoughts. And sometimes thinking was tiresome; it was good to let go of it for a while.
His mind was all full up with static when the shuttle driver arrived with a load of coal for the feeder. But Jamey’s headlamp happened to land on the right spot and he seen it. The surprise jolted his mind awake.
Must have been some trick his eyes played on him. Headlamps did that in the dark, made you see things wasn’t really there. Still…
He put his grease gun down again and moved where he could get a better look. And his eyes hadn’t played no trick on him. It was there, just like he thought it was. He made his way around the feeder, turned down the last break, came up behind the shuttle car, and spoke to the driver.
“Can I be so bold as to ask where it was you got that thing?” Jamey pointed to the ribbon tied around the miner’s upper arm.
“You didn’t get one?” the man said. “They’s givin’’ em out all over town yesterday. Folks is wearin’ ’em to the memorial service today. They was a box of ’em sittin’ inside the door of the lamp house this mornin’. You didn’t see it?”
“No sir, I didn’t for a fact. Could I see yourn?”
“Shoot, you can have the thing, Jamey.” The shuttle man reached up and untied it and held it out to him. “Your daddy and granddaddy was two of the men died when she blew 20 years ago. You’d oughta be proud to wear it.”
Then the man put the shuttle in reverse, backed up and turned around, and headed toward the continuous miner for another load.
Jamey sat down with a plop in the dirt and stared at the ribbon. It was black, with the number 27 printed on it in silver letters. And Jamey’d seen that ribbon before. Oh, yes sir, he had surely seen that ribbon before! In the arts he finished last night, the one he made from the piece of jet Lloyd give him. The miner in it wore an armband just like this one.
Only that didn’t make no sense. That arts showed what it’d looked like that October day in 1980 when his daddy and granddaddy and all them other miners got blowed up.
He got up slowly and went back to where he’d left the shovel and grease gun, but he didn’t go back to work. That wasn’t like Jamey. He didn’t never sit around doing nothing. But he did today. He sat down beside ValVleen’s cage, picked it up, and talked to her.
“ValVleen, I got me a confusion. How did that miner in my arts get one of these here armbands? Shuttle man said they give ’em away yesterday and this mornin’. Wasn’t nobody givin’ armbands away 20 years ago.”
ValVleen sat in the cage looking at him. She didn’t make a sound. Jamey’s heart began to pound and he didn’t know why. The longer he thought about the confusion, the more upset he got. It didn’t make sense, but it had to make sense. It was important that it make sense—maybe the most important thing in his whole life.
CHAPTER 35
BUCKET WAS AN old dog but he was big and still strong and the sheer force of him in motion kept Granny moving, too, long’s she held onto his collar.
Her eyes was pinched so tight shut the tears she cried could barely squeeze out from under her eyelids to disappear in the rain that washed over her face. Her knuckles were white from her grip on the leather strap and her breath hitched in and out of her chest—like she was a little kid who’d been sobbing for hours.
Though she couldn’t see with her eyes shut tight, she could smell—wet leaves and damp earth. Even through the rain. Part of her love of the garden was the smell of it, and now she fancied she could smell the tomato plants, pole beans, squash, and pumpkins on the back side of the garden that she’d seen from the back porch. She could smell watermelon, too! Couldn’t be imagining that; it was so real. Must be one broke open somewhere near.
Granny’s eyes fluttered open instinctively for an instant to see the watermelon. What she seen instead was emptiness. And herself exposed in it, outside the circle. She gasped, her legs collapsed out from under her and she went down in a heap on the muddy ground. Her knee struck a rock and pain shot up her leg—almost paralyzed her.
And she lost her grip on Bucket’s collar.
She was all alone now. Out here in the open. She curled up in a tight ball in the mud, whined that kitten mewling sound as the rain battered her. She hadn’t felt this lost and hopelessness since Will left. They’d had him in bed for nigh on a week and by the time they let him go, it was all over. The rescue had shut down; the mine had closed. And Aintree Hollow staggered from one minute to the next with holes all over it where men was supposed to be but wasn’t no more, holes you was all the time stepping in. Them holes was black pits of despair that the women folk had to get out of, and go around them next time so they didn’t keep falling in again and again until they was so wore out they couldn’t climb back out.
Will’d come home for one night. The next morning he was gone. She didn’t even hear him leave. She’d took to staying in bed late, until almost seven o’clock, because she didn’t sleep but a couple hours a night, lay there buggy-eyed as hot tears run out the sides of her eyes and into her hair. She’d expected to see Will asleep on the couch, looked forward to getting his breakfast, was glad for some company in that too-quiet house where you felt like you’d ought to tiptoe because it was so still.
But when she cut on the light in the living room, she seen he wasn’t on the couch. Wasn’t nowhere. Ha
dn’t took nothing with him; all his stuff was still there in the bottom two drawers of Ricky Dan’s dresser. She could have believed he’d just gone out for a while, that he’d be right back. She didn’t, though. Soon’s she seen the quilt on that lumpy old couch and him not lying there underneath of it, she knew. Will was gone and he wouldn’t come back for a long time, though she never dreamed it’d be 20 years—until later. When she figured out why he’d run, she feared he never would come home.
Something round and warm nudged her neck; something wide and warm wiped across her cheek. It was Bucket, poking her with his nose and licking her face. He barked a single “woof!” right in her ear. Granny reached up, felt around in her self-imposed blindness until she located his collar. Clasping it tight in her left hand, she used her right to push herself up out of the mud to her knees, then staggered to her feet.
Bucket stood quiet, as the rain soaked into his shaggy coat, until she had her footing, then he started out again for Jamey’s shed. The old dog seemed to understand she couldn’t move very fast. Usually, he’d bound up the hill, his tail wagging. Even old as he was, that dog’d run through solid rock and tree stumps to get to Jamey Boy.
Jamey!
Down there in that mine and it about to…
Oh please, Lord, not Jamey Boy.
He was just a little boy all dressed up to look like a grown-up. He’d put on them miners’ clothes of a morning and she’d watch him through the window as he walked down the hill with his lunch bucket clutched up tight in his arms like he was askeered somebody’d steal it. She couldn’t lose him, too.
But even if she got to the shed in time, would Will really go into #7 to get him?
Granny’s foot caught on a piece of wet tree trunk and she went down again on one knee. She wasn’t sure how much farther she could go. Then she heard a scream. JoJo! Her eyes flew open and there was the shed, right in front of her. Bucket had brought her the whole way.
Maybe there was still time! Maybe his arts was a warning to keep Jamey Boy safe. Maybe…
“Will!” she cried, loud as she could holler. “You got to come quick!
WILL GROANED, PUT his hand up over his ear and reflexively stepped back from JoJo. The explosion in #7 hadn’t ruptured his eardrum like it had Lloyd’s, but it had done some damage. Over time, it healed, but like duct tape on a hole in a snare drum, the scar tissue kept his eardrum from vibrating properly. He could hear—well enough to get into the Navy—but sudden loud noises, particularly high-pitched ones close to his head, caused excruciating pain.
JoJo neither noticed nor cared that her wail had hurt Will’s ear. Her attention was riveted to the piece of jet on the table. Her eyes were open so wide they looked like whitewalls around a hubcap and the look on her face…it was a mixture of surprise, fascination and horror. In the end, horror won out.
Will hadn’t been examining the mural as carefully as JoJo had. He still couldn’t look at it straight up. He’d had a hard time even glancing at it long enough to see what Granny’d seen, what Jamey’d “seen” with his strange, timeless vision.
But Will did look at the rock after JoJo screamed, his eyes washed over the scene Jamey had frozen in time and he could see nothing in it that would elicit that kind of response.
“What…?”
“Right there—there!”
JoJo didn’t point to the portion of the sculpture where the raised, relief characters were frozen. The relief was off center, with about 5 inches of border around it on the left and 10 on the right. The area outside what Jamey had carved in relief had been carved as well, an intricate web of lines that showed the strata of coal seams in the rock pillar behind the three men gathered around a helmet upside down in the dirt.
JoJo reached out and touched the coal wall that formed the background of the scene. Her finger shook.
“Don’t you see it?”
Will saw nothing.
He hated those optical illusion pictures that showed two different images. One was obvious. But to see the second, you had to work at it. He’d only once been able to see any other image in a picture, and had it not been for that time, he would have contended the people who saw two images either needed glasses or long-term psychiatric care.
“I don’t see—”
“The lines. Will, look at the lines!”
JoJo was near hysteria. Whatever she saw in the rock, or thought she saw there, had so upset her he could feel her whole body tremble beside him. Will studied the crosshatch of lines Jamey had painstakingly etched to form the texture of the coal seam on the pillar. But he couldn’t see anything. If there was an image of some kind in there, he couldn’t find it.
He bent down closer, then slowly pulled back, farther and farther away, tried to keep his eyes unfocused. The flickering light played with his vision; an image formed in the lines on the rock. But it was gone again before he could make out what it was. Before he could move back into the position where he’d seen it, he heard a voice right outside the shed. Someone called his name.
Granny!
GRANNY WAS WET and chilled to the bone, shivering, too, but not from the cold outside. There was a deeper cold inside, spreading out from her belly into the rest of her body, down her legs to her feet, out her arms to her hands, up her chest to her head. If the cold terror got all the way to her fingers, her toes and the top of her head, she would die.
She held onto Bucket’s collar and shouted above the wind and rain, called out for Will, hollered loud as she could, which might have been nary a whisper in the real world. She was past being able to tell such things.
It seemed to take a long time for everything to happen, like it was half an hour between one eye blink and the next as if the terror inside her had chilled time so it couldn’t move proper, made the passage of seconds slower than a herd of turtles.
The door to the shed suddenly burst open. Will and JoJo stood there, shocked, then Will jumped out into the rain and wrapped his arms around her.
“What are you doing here?”
She swayed; her knees were about to collapse like a folding chair and dump her on her backside into the mud.
“Is some’m wrong, Granny? Why…?” JoJo asked from the doorway.
Will didn’t wait for Granny to answer. He swept her off her feet like she didn’t weigh nothing at all, turned back to the shed, set her just inside the door and stepped in after her. Then the three of them stood together in the flickering lantern light of Jamey’s shed while Granny gathered her wits about her to speak.
“You got to go!” she gasped at Will.
“Go where, Gran—?”
“To the mine! You got to warn ’em.” She dragged in a great lungful of air. “You gotta tell ’em to run, to get out of there!”
She looked up in terror into his eyes. “Oh, Will! She’s gonna blow! Number seven’s gonna ’xplode.”
“Explode? How do you—?”
“Jamey’s arts you brung down a little while ago. The one he made outta the jet Lloyd give him.”
“Was there faces in it?” JoJo asked. “You told Jamey to finish it anyway, even if Granddaddy’s and Daddy’s faces was there—’member?”
“’Course I ’member,” Granny snapped. “But we was wrong. You got to listen to me. Jamey’s arts wasn’t the ’xplosion happened 20 years ago. It was a ’xplosion today.”
She turned back to Will and clutched his arm so tight she felt her fingernails dig into his skin like the talons of an eagle.
“Them armbands! The ones with 27 on ’em they’s handin’ out yesterday and today. They’s one of them armbands on a miner in Jamey’s arts! That ’xplosion’s happenin’ today!”
Granny watched the color drain out of Will’s face as understanding dawned.
Then he and JoJo spoke at the same time, both their voices anguished.
“Jamey!”
Granny let go of Will’s arm and took his hand. She looked up into his eyes and spoke in a voice barely loud enough to be heard over the rain on t
he roof.
“One of them miners gettin’ blowed up was wearin’ a watch that said 12:18. There’s still time. Will, you got to go down there and get Jamey and them other miners out.”
He froze, still as one of Jamey’s statues. Didn’t even breathe. But Granny could see emotions fighting on his face, all tangled up like a pair of JoJo’s pantyhose in the dryer. He seemed to stay frozen for the longest time, but it probably wasn’t more than a few seconds.
Then he turned to JoJo. “Your car keys… I need your car!”
“They’s in the ignition.”
Without another word, Will turned and bolted out the door of the shed and down the hill in the pouring rain, his long legs pumping like they done when he and Lloyd and the neighbor boys played football out in that field at the top of the hollow.
In the silence Will left behind him, Granny heard JoJo whimper.
“It’s all right, child,” she said, reached out a wet, trembling hand to stroke the girl’s fine blond hair. “Will’s gonna warn ’em. He’s gonna get them out ’fore…”
But Granny read in the fear on JoJo’s face the thoughts she’d refused to listen to, the voice whispering in her ear that she ignored as she held onto Bucket’s collar and climbed the hill. When Jamey carved something, it always happened just like he carved it. Every time. Was it possible to change what the good Lord had put in that rock for Jamey to dig out?
“You got to get back to the house and into some dry clothes,” JoJo said. She picked up Will’s rain jacket off the hook and draped it around Granny’s shoulders. “This ain’t much, but you don’t need to get no wetter than—”
“Ain’t no such thing as wet-er, child,” Granny said, still trembling all over. “Either you’s wet or you ain’t. I’m wet. Let’s git.”
