by Chris Cander
Lidia watched as Danny considered the mine explosion as though for the first time.
Danny had slid into the midst of their ruin long after the wounds had reconciled into scars. He’d moved to Verra from New Jersey when he was sixteen, so he hadn’t grown up with the rumors of conspiracy and blame that ended lifelong friendships, or the wringing, huddled fear that made the survivors age double-time, or the decay that had crept into the town and filled the gaps left when the prosperity and possibilities drained out.
Danny and his mother had come because of his grandfather, but they didn’t intend to stay forever. He planned on college and then law school, and never meant to slip underground like the rest of them, but here he was, covered in dust, muscled from installing roof bolts that supported the mine’s haulage ways, and nicknamed Timber, even though they hadn’t used timber supports in the mine since the accident. After Lidia told him his fate that night three and a half years ago, Danny never spoke about becoming a lawyer again. Going underground was the easy decision for someone who now had people to provide for. “It’s called a ‘mine’ for a reason,” he’d said to her shortly after he’d proposed. “ ’Cause everybody’s working to support their own. I’ll be working to support mine.” He’d held both of her hands in his when he said this, giving them a single, gentle pump after he was finished that meant she shouldn’t feel guilty about his becoming part of the town’s crumbling history.
But how could she not feel guilty? She loved her husband, but was that enough to pardon her for making him a father to a child that wasn’t even his? She turned her head away from him as he sat there trying to fathom it, the fate of those husbands and sons he’d never known and the crime that stole all their lives. Alta lost her husband in that accident. Her son. The course of her life irreversibly altered because of the selfishness of one man, that Sparky Magee.
And here was Danny, hers by love, yes, but also by entrapment. The course of his life irreversibly altered because of the selfishness of one woman. What might he have chosen, if she hadn’t chosen for him?
“I’m so sorry, Danny,” she said. Her eyes were still closed and her voice choked.
He looked up, startled from his contemplation, and moved quickly to her to wipe her misinterpreted tears. “Liddie, it’s okay. You’ll be fine. Doc’ll be here any minute now, get you fixed right up. And anyway, it’s not your fault. It was just an accident is all. Just an accident.”
She thought of Gabriel. Of Eagan, who’d ended up in the army after all, after she refused to take him in, then died six months later from malaria-carrying mosquito bites in the marshes of South Vietnam. That was more than two years ago. She thought of Danny, who would cook their dinner tonight and then get up and go back underground in the morning. She thought of her father, alone at home, and her mother, six years gone.
It wasn’t her fault. It was just an accident. But who besides herself could she blame?
March 15, 1969
Anyone else might have started thinking about adding to his brood of one by now. But Danny Pollock, in spite of his being a young and hardworking man with decent means, sincere ambition, a reasonable Catholic upbringing, and the love of his wife of not quite four years, found himself too fascinated by his three-and-a-half-year-old son to entertain such a greedy idea.
Danny didn’t know much about other people’s children. Even the other men close to his age, twenty going on old, whose nights were filled with diaper changes and teething and worried wives, whose days were spent on work and worry and the occasional — when they could afford one — drink, didn’t speak out loud of their upended lives and the babies who’d turned them into men. But he noticed other kids his son’s age, saw them sucking on their fingers and pulling on their mothers’ skirts. Watched them stumble and trip, screech and bawl. Heard them crying and whining and begging in pidgin for whatever unmet needs they had.
Not Gabriel. Gabriel started speaking so early Danny couldn’t recall a time when he didn’t know exactly what his son was thinking in clear, concise speech. No made-up words and baby talk. Milk was milk. Tree was tree. Daddy was Daddy. The only thing that went by another name was his special blanket, that raggedy yellow one that had belonged to Eagan and then Lidia and had become for Gabriel, for some unknown reason, “Bobby.”
Though he still took Gabriel up the hollow near Alta’s cabin to fish for rainbow trout, more and more Danny liked taking him into town to show him off — though he wouldn’t admit that was what he was doing. Danny taught him how to extend his hand when he met or greeted someone, to look them in the eye and say, “Nice to meet you.” Or, when offered a soda or a piece of candy, “Thank you very much.” It was charming, that straight-faced etiquette coming from such a little boy.
“That’s a mighty fine son you got there,” people would say. Gabriel withstood the rough hands tousling his hair, smiled politely, but always quickly retreated behind his father’s legs when he’d had enough. Except when he got to go to the hardware store.
Charlie Stickley, who’d inherited the store from his father a decade ago, was tall and bearded with enormous hands that looked oddly like a child’s. He loved his job, and he was good at it, gifted with the ability to identify the length of a board or a screw or a nail within millimeter accuracy just by looking at it. Charlie could build anything, fix anything, and was happy to advise anyone who needed help on how to do it themselves. If they still couldn’t do it after he gave his laborious, detailed instructions, he’d likely end up at that person’s home on a weekend or an evening to do the job himself. Men tended to congregate at the store, even if they didn’t need anything, just to share the latest gossip or talk shop or pass an idle bit of time. Most often they ended up buying something anyway, perhaps to justify their having been too long away from home.
“Afternoon, Mr. Stickley,” Danny said after the jingle on the door settled down.
Gabriel trailed behind his father, dragging his fingertips lightly across the display of tin buckets filled with nuts and bolts, nails and screws, until he arrived at the end of the counter, where Stickley was sharpening someone’s knife on a long strap of leather.
“Afternoon,” he said to Gabriel. “How’s my favorite customer?”
“Fine,” Gabriel said. “We came to buy spinners. We’re going fishing tomorrow.”
“Nothing like fishing with your daddy on a Sunday. You’re going out in the morning?”
Danny nodded. “Gonna try shallow, then go deeper after the sun comes up.”
“Trout, or smallmouth?”
“Brookies.”
Stickley turned to Gabriel. “Brookies like the cold water, but you gotta move your bait real slow, make it easy for ’em to take it.”
“Yessir.”
“I got some nice size number-two Mepps back here. Want to come take a look? Pick a couple out?”
Gabriel nodded and followed Stickley around the organized maze of boxes of merchandise.
“You catch something, you let me know.” Stickley winked at Danny, who lagged behind on purpose. “Better yet, you invite me to Sunday dinner and we’ll eat ’em up together.”
Gabriel took the tin of spinners and spoons that Stickley held out, and he began fingering through them. “You go on and pick a couple out, let me get back to that knife, hear?”
Gabriel nodded, taking the job of choosing the right equipment as one of solemn consequence. Meanwhile, Danny joined in the conversation among the other men. Toot and Bones sat across from each other at a folding card table that Stickley had set up. Frail and concave as his name suggested, Bones leaned forward on sharp elbows, folding and unfolding the corner of the Charleston Sentinel, talking out of the side of his mouth that wasn’t affected by palsy. Toot leaned back in his chair with one muscular calf draped across the corner of the table and his arms crossed, making his usual snide remarks about things and people, even if they were standing within earshot.
“Anybody happen to see Jethro Kaveck last day or so?” Stickley asked
.
They shook their heads no and Toot asked, “Why?”
Stickley shrugged. “He came in what, Monday? Needed some chain and bar lube for his chain saw. Clearing land, I think. He raises chickens, right? Anyway, he asked me how fast I could get some and I said I could have some by Friday but I’d have to special order it from Charleston and he said that was fine. Paid extra, too. Then he never showed up. He’s a good customer, doesn’t even use credit. Just strange is all, even to let it go a day, the way he was talking.”
Gabriel came out from behind the counter then with twelve shiny spinners, more than they would need, but Danny hadn’t specified a count. He laid them out on the counter side by side, adjusted the angles very slightly so they lay in a perfect row, like a stringer of trout on an imaginary line.
“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream …,” Gabriel sang low, nearly under his breath as he moved the spinners again, by threes, as though down the treble clef. “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily …” And the first five he shifted again, like a stair step. “Life is but a dream.”
He repeated the chorus, moving the spinners again as he did, slow but strict, matching the notes. “Row, row, row …,” he sang, a whisper, the spinners becoming boats going merrily down the stream of wood, ending where Stickley had picked up a third knife and slap slap slapped it up and down the leather strop at exactly the same pace as the spinners moved along the clef.
“Life. Is. But. A. Dream.”
Danny pulled out a thin fold of dollars from his front pocket to pay for the dozen spinners that would keep him and Gabriel waist-deep in Brookies for the next year. The door opened, bells jingling, and another one of the old-timers came in.
“Afternoon, boys,” he said, raking from his bald head an imaginary plague of hair. “Guess you heard about old Jethro Kaveck?”
“Stickley here was just asking about him,” Toot said. “What’s going on there?”
“Evidently went up to Pleasant Lake bass fishing Thursday. Took along a cousin of his from somewhere up in Mineral County — Keyser, I think. Buddy somebody. Anyway, they’s going after some old bass bastard named Ole Joe, and Jethro hooked him and they tussled out there, him standing up in the boat and Ole Joe wrestling himself away, and according to some bystanders out there but not near close enough, Jethro got himself tripped up on the edge of the boat and tumped it over, him and his cousin and all, and both of ’em drowned. Right there, in the middle of Pleasant Lake, hanging on to his rod and Ole Joe swimming away like some no-account. Can you imagine?”
Stickley shook his head and said, “Well ain’t that the damnedest thing. Here we’s just talking about him and now we find out he’s gone to meet his Maker.”
They sat quiet for a moment, except for Gabriel.
“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream …,” he sang, then gathered the spinners one at a time until they were nothing but a thick stack of silver in his hand. All the men turned toward him.
“Thank you, Mr. Stickley,” Danny said quickly, pocketing his change. “Let’s go on now, Gabe. Mama’ll be wanting us home for dinner.”
Gabriel extended his hand and looked Stickley in the eye and smiled.
“… merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily …,” he sang.
Stickley took Gabriel’s hand without a word, just looked at him as though he’d never seen the little boy before.
“I’ll catch us a big one,” Gabriel said, still smiling. “Big as Ole Joe.”
Stickley dropped his hand and looked at the other men, who only stared.
“Take care, Mr. Stickley,” Danny said without looking at him, and led Gabriel by the hand out the door, which jingled its pentatonic chime.
“Life is but a dream.”
March 24, 1969
Monday mornings were always busy for Lidia. It was the day she changed the sheets and mopped the floors, cooked a stew from Sunday leftovers if there were any, and drove downtown to the A&P to do the week’s shopping.
She helped Gabriel put on his coat and gloves and led him to the Coronet, which no longer held a shine but was as sturdy and reliable as her husband. Gabriel bounced into the seat, and when she closed the door, he blew a squall of hot breath onto the window and got as far as G-A-B-R before the steam evaporated.
“Want to help me remember the list?” she said as she turned the ignition.
Gabriel nodded and smiled enough to show the dimple on his left cheek she could never resist poking.
“Pot roast,” she said.
“Pot roast.”
“Ground beef. Peanut butter. Spam.”
Gabriel nodded. “More.”
“Corn. Vienna sausages. Bread. Baby shampoo. Rice. Did you like the applesauce I made?”
“Yes!”
“Apples, then.” The late-morning sun made diamonds out of shallow puddles of mostly melted snow along the curbs, but the road was dry and the temperature was headed toward sixty. Lidia cracked her window and let a rush of outside in, tipped her chin toward it. “What a beautiful day. Just downright beautiful. Bacon. Eggs. Butter. Corn Flakes.”
“And a Hershey bar.”
Lidia laughed out loud. It would be fifty-one cents over their budget, she knew. “And a Hershey bar.”
They carried on like that for the five-minute drive, her thinking up all the things they needed to buy and him memorizing them. What started out as a teaching game had become useful in an unexpected way — it had been weeks since she’d written out a list.
She pulled into a parking spot and let Gabriel out. Inside, he picked a cart and climbed into it. He knew the A&P as well as she did, and so he sailed the cart through the aisles with the pirate-point of his index finger. Chocolate first, lest it be forgotten or decided against at the last minute. Then the butcher counter. Dairy. Dry goods. He announced all the items that she’d said she needed.
“I’m forgetting something,” Lidia said after she’d filled their cart with as much as she could afford.
“Baby shampoo.”
“Oh yes.”
She wheeled the cart toward the aisle with baby goods. Just as she rounded the corner, Lidia collided carts with a woman named Susan Forrester, enormously pregnant — all the way up to her face — with her fourth child, and arrogantly observant of a certain formality she’d learned from reading too many works of romantic fiction.
“Well, hello there,” Susan said with affected sweetness. “It’s Lidia, isn’t it?”
Lidia backed her cart up. “I’m sorry.” Everyone was vaguely scared of Susan, even if they knew her only by reputation. Though she acted kind enough to people’s faces, she possessed an ugly talent for gossip, especially when combined with her affinity for homemade wine.
“What a handsome fellow.” She nodded her head toward Gabriel, who turned his head into Lidia’s shoulder. “Shy, is he?”
“No. I mean, yes,” Lidia said.
Susan was married to a miner whose buddies called him Chick when she wasn’t around, because he was so mercilessly henpecked. “He’s a handsome one,” she said again. “What’s his name?”
“Gabriel.”
Susan nodded. “That’s what I thought. Listen, I know we’ve only just met.” Susan leaned forward, pressing her bulk against the handlebar of her cart. “But as someone who’s active in the Church and in the community,” she said, “I feel it’s my Christian duty to tell you something. I’m sorry to have to say it in front of your boy.”
Lidia pulled Gabriel closer, covered his exposed ear with her hand. “What’s that?”
“Some scuttlebutt that’s got to do with your boy here that’s made certain folks uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s really not my place to talk about it, but I feel it’s important that you know what people are saying.”
Lidia glanced from side to side, feeling exposed. How could anybody know what Eagan did? He was gone, their secret buried with him. She’d never told anyone — not even Alta.
“I’ve heard tell,” she said,
“that your son has been … talking about things he shouldn’t.” She dropped her voice to a hiss. “Things he shouldn’t know.”
Lidia exhaled, but the relief she felt was complicated by confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Evidently your son’s been telling people things about themselves … about their people and such. You ask me, I’d say it’s from a lack of godliness in his life.” She patted her enormous belly, as though underneath that monsoon of flab she carried the Son of God himself.
Lidia gathered up all her dignity and folded it into the overpowering instinct to defend her child. The hand that wasn’t covering Gabriel’s ear gripped the handle of the cart, as though she might catapult it forward if she didn’t hold it back. “There’s nothing wrong with Gabriel.”
Susan leaned forward and patted Gabriel’s head. “No, no. Of course not,” she said.
“Then I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.” Lidia backed her cart up a few inches and changed the angle to prevent Susan from reaching for Gabriel again.
“I understand you don’t go to church.”
Lidia thought of the conversation that had taken place a few months earlier, the day she’d sprained her ankle. The way Myrthen Bergmann had said in that strange, haunting way, “Especially a child like this needs to learn communion with God.”
There was nothing wrong with Gabriel.
Was there?
And you should unburden yourself as an example.
“No, we don’t go to church.”
Susan frowned, making the row of lines around her mouth — unusually deep for someone of childbearing age — stand out like exclamation points. “This way he has of talking about things, it makes people nervous. It makes them wonder where he gets it. Now I, being a Christian woman, believe everyone should have a personal relationship with God, but what I’m saying to you is people are talking about your boy and I believe they’d all feel a lot better if he was attending Sunday services on a regular basis.”
