by Ninie Hammon
Chapter 9
Carter and Piper sat together in the porch swing as evening draped a gauzy cape of twilight over the trees. There were no sunrises or sunsets here, of course. Night settled over the valley in ever-deepening shadows, a gentle exchange of dark for light as the pale blue sky cycled through navy to black to pitch and became a long, thin slice of coal sprinkled with starry sequins above their heads. The day had been hot and the cool evening breeze felt as refreshing as a spring rain.
The swing was old, sagged in the middle when two people sat in it, but held firm. The bare wood had been polished a smooth, matte gray by the backsides of the Addington/McCullough family. It was suspended from the porch ceiling with chains attached to S hooks and groaned a tempered eek-eek, eek-eek as it swung slowly back and forth.
Piper liked the sound. She remembered it from years ago. The first time Carter’d brought her home to meet the family, they had sat uncomfortably together in the swing. It was a couple of months before Carter’s father had…died. The old man had sat across from the couple, stiff in the cane-back chair, and Piper had felt very small and vulnerable. She’d wanted to slip her hand into Carter’s for support but hadn’t dared.
Piper stopped breathing. She’d almost done the same thing just now, had almost slipped her hand into Carter’s! She rose abruptly, walked to the porch railing and looked out over the valley, where shadows pooled and thickened in the growing dark.
“Maggie sure looks cute in those overalls,” Carter said. Piper had remembered that the Craddocks had a little boy about Maggie’s size. The family lived on Northfield Road—named, of course, for the coal company that built it—which ran the whole length of Sadler Hollow, through Sadlerton and the other coal-camp towns to the county seat. She’d stopped at the Craddocks’ on her way back home and borrowed a pair of little Abe’s overalls and a T-shirt. He was taller than Maggie, but Piper’d rolled up the pants legs, and the overalls fit fine. “And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sunshine as…as…” Carter couldn’t seem to find the words.
“As happy? Bubbly? Giddy, maybe?” She turned to face him.
“Yeah, as giddy as she was tonight playing house with Maggie. She and Maggie are like twins separated at birth.”
They were silent.
“You’re afraid Deputy Higgins is going to come get her tomorrow, aren’t you?” Carter asked.
Piper turned back around. “Uh-huh.”
Carter didn’t speak. The only sound was the chirp of the evening’s first crickets under the porch and the comforting eeh-eeh of the swing. Piper sighed and turned back to Carter.
“You saw her, the marks on her. You know how those people up in the mountains are.”
She saw Carter fight a smile.
“Okay, so people in Charleston say the same thing about us. But Carter, I can’t send her back to a home where they’ll hurt her.”
“What are you going to do, keep her here and hide her under the bed when anybody drops in? Be reasonable, Piper. Her parents are probably frantic. You have to—”
His gaze shifted to the road over her shoulder, and his face darkened. She turned to see headlights on Turtle Road, a pickup truck trailing a plume of dust behind it like the tail on a kite. The truck rumbled muffler-free up the final hill and stopped in a cloud of dust in front of the house.
It was a beat-up truck. The black paint was peeling all the way down to rusted bare metal in spots, a spiderweb of cracks spread out across the windshield, and the back bumper was affixed to the vehicle by an ingenious configuration of duct tape. A young man stepped easily down out of the driver’s side of the truck. He was tall and slender, willowy, wearing a faded chambray shirt and battered jeans in need of patching at the knee. His West Virginia University cap was pushed back to reveal black curls peeking out from under the brim. The smile on his face was wide and stapled to his cheeks with deep-dish dimples just like Sadie’s. He took a few steps toward the house, then stopped, and the smile slid down off his face.
“Zeke!” Piper cried and hurried down the porch steps to greet the young man. He was considerably younger and taller than she was, but one look at his face and it was clear he was kin.
She stopped in front of him, slipped her finger into his shirt pocket and looked inside. Then she pulled the pocket on the right side of his jeans inside out.
“What are you—?”
“Just checking to see if you had a hug in there anywhere for your big sister.”
He grinned in spite of himself and wrapped his arms around her. But he was looking at Carter.
“What’s he doing here?” Zeke asked.
“Hello. This is his mother’s house, Zeke.”
“I mean why now, today? It’s Friday. I thought he stayed down in Charleston ’cept on weekends.”
“You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not here, or deaf,” Carter called out, and rose out of the swing. “I came home to see my ma. You got a problem with that?”
The edge in his voice cut through the evening air like a saber. Piper felt Zeke stiffen. Anger rose in her throat, and she pulled out of her brother’s arms.
“Stop it! Both of you, stop it.” She looked up into Zeke’s face. “Carter has every right to be here.” She spun around and looked at Carter. “And my little brother has every right to come here to visit me. If either one of you has a problem with that, you can both leave.”
The screen door opened and Maggie stepped out, almost as if she’d come specifically to interrupt the rising tension. And maybe she had. The swelling around her right eye was gone, though she still had a shiner. Sadie rested on her hip, and she hiked the toddler up to keep her from sliding. She had pulled Sadie’s hair back into two curly dog-ears that hung down her back.
As soon as Sadie spotted the young man, she squealed, “Unka Zeke!” Her face was instantly wreathed in a double-dimple smile, and she wiggled down out of Maggie’s arms. Then she raced across the porch, down the steps, held up her hands and cried, “Unka Zeke. Sabie go wheeee!”
Zeke took both her hands and spun her gently around in a circle, crying, “Wheeeee!” Her dog-ears flew out behind her like twin flags.
When he set her down, she held onto his hand and dragged him toward the porch.
“Come see my Mabie, Unka Zeke,” she said. “Mabie loooves Sabie.”
“Nan Marian’s got fresh lemonade,” Maggie said. She looked down at Sadie. “With extra sugar, just the way you like it.” Beneath the flaming red hair, her freckles practically glowed in the spill of light from the doorway.
Zeke unconsciously reached up and pulled his cap off his head the way he’d have done if Marian herself had stepped out on the porch.
Piper knew Zeke liked Marian, and that was saying something, her being a McCullough. Sure, it was hard to hold a grudge against an old woman whose grip on this life was so tenuous she might let go of it at any minute and rise up to the sky before your very eyes. But Zeke liked her because she’d welcomed him the day he’d shown up about a month after Piper moved in, just there one day, looking very young and vulnerable. Piper had wondered what she’d do if she saw him, when she saw him, because surely she would run into him eventually. Wondered what he’d do. After all, she was the one who’d left home without a word when he was only ten years old.
She needn’t have wondered what either one of them would do or say. As soon as he got out of the truck in front of the house, the same battered truck their brother Riley’d had when she left, Piper had run out the door, down the steps, and thrown herself into his arms, almost bowled the boy over. She’d hugged him fiercely and he’d hugged her back and then she’d started babbling and crying at the same time, explaining how she couldn’t tell him she was running off with Grayson, couldn’t tell anybody. If he’d let it slip to Riley…and then he’d stopped her and said he understood, and she realized she may have left behind the boy she’d raised as a son after their mother died, but she’d come home to a young man.
“You’re Mabie, little pre
tty one?” Zeke asked Maggie, returning her smile.
“Maggie,” she corrected.
Zeke turned to Piper. “Who—?” he began, but a slight shake of her head stopped him.
“Nan Marian said to ask if you brought Nellie,” Maggie said. “Did you? And who’s Nellie?”
“Sugar, I don’t go nowhere ’thout my banjo,” Zeke said.
“A banjo!” Maggie exclaimed. “Really? Will you play me a song on it? Pleease!”
Her little blonde sidekick chimed in, “Peease, Unka Zeke.”
Maggie turned to Carter. “You wouldn’t mind a bit of music, would you now, Mr. Carter?”
Piper couldn’t stifle a smile. Clearly, both men had been outnumbered, outmaneuvered and outgunned by two little girls.
“Well, no, I…” Carter began.
“Get Nellie,” Piper said, “and let’s all have some lemonade.”
*
Carter sat beside his mother on the lumpy couch in the parlor with what he hoped was an appropriately benign look on his face as he watched Zeke show off his skill at “Turkey in the Straw” and “Orange Blossom Special.” If Jesse was right, the cocky teenager believed he’d be as adept at making moonshine as he was at playing the banjo.
Zeke was perched on the edge of the table with Piper seated nearby in a chair she’d pulled out from it. Sunshine was playing on the floor at his feet. Maggie was refilling their glasses of lemonade.
Carter knew his mother was in pain, could see it in the pinched set of her mouth and her squinted eyes. But there was a smile firmly planted on her face, and she at least appeared to be enjoying the music.
Then Carter glanced at Piper, and he softened. She couldn’t seem to drag her eyes off the boy, caressed his face the way a proud ma…well, she was the mother he remembered best. Zeke’d been four years old when his father and Uncle William died in a hail of gunfire. Five when his mother’d had a heart attack—Piper said the lack of strain did it, that when the tension of living with a monster was released, something had just come loose inside her.
Piper had stepped up and become a woman that very day—at thirteen. She’d told Carter about it when they’d started dating two years later, described how her little brother’d cried himself to sleep for weeks, woke up two or three times a night screaming from nightmares and how she’d finally moved his little cot into her room right up next to her bed and went to sleep every night for months holding her little brother’s hand. She’d cared for Zeke all on her own, too, certainly had no help from that good-for-nothing older brother, who was mean as a sack of rattlers.
“Would you like this last wee bit of lemonade?” Maggie asked Carter, proper as a maître d’ in a fancy restaurant.
He held his hand out over the top of his glass. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Are you, Mr. Carter?”
He turned and really looked at her then.
“What?”
“Are you good?” she said. “I want to be good, but I don’t know how you learn a thing like that.”
The child’s eyes were such a luminous green that—her eyes! There were daisies in them. Flakes of yellow extended out from the black irises like the petals of a flower. Like a daisy.
“Do you?” she asked.
“Does he what?” Piper asked, then motioned for Maggie to follow her into the kitchen to fill the empty pitcher.
“Does he know how to play the banjo?” Carter replied. “And the answer’s no, he does not. But he is a talented fellow for all that…and if you give him a minute, he’ll think what it is he can do that will amaze and entertain.”
“You talk real good,” Zeke said, as he fit the pick beneath the strings on the neck of the banjo and pulled a package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “Sound like a city boy.”
“I heard that,” Piper called from the kitchen. “I worked hard to lose my accent, too. Do I sound like a city girl?”
“You don’t sound funny like he does. Carter here…it’s like he’s some kinda college professor. Ain’t exactly amazin’, but it is entertainin’ to listen to.”
On its face, there was nothing offensive about what the young man said, but the underlying sarcasm was thick enough to spread on toast. Carter grabbed hold of his anger, though, and pretended he didn’t notice.
“I have a better idea. How about instead of talking, I ask questions and you talk. Actually, it’s only one question. Have you heard about what happened Tuesday in Wales?”
Before Zeke could answer, there was a clatter in the kitchen, the sound of breaking glass. Then he could hear Piper talking to Maggie.
“It’s okay, sweetheart, accidents happen. Go sit down and let me clean it up. I don’t want you to cut yourself on the glass.”
Maggie came back into the room, her eyes on the floor. “I dropped—“
“You didn’t drop it,” Piper called from the kitchen. “I did.”
“One of your glasses slipped, Nan Marian, when I was handing it to Miss Piper, and it broke. I’m sorry.”
“Now don’t you worry ’bout a little thing like that.” Marian patted the couch next to her. “Come sit here by me”—she turned back toward Carter, seated on the other side—“while Carter tells us about something that happened in Wales.”
“No, I’m not going to tell you. I want you to tell me. What do you think about it?”
“I’ll tell you what I think about it soon’s you tell me what it is,” Zeke said, lit the cigarette and sent a plume of smoke up toward the ceiling. “You ain’t making no more sense than a drunk chicken.”
Carter’d found out what he wanted to know.
“There was a disaster in the village of Gaynor, in a valley in Wales, Monday. A pile of coal slurry let go, liquefied, and slag slid down the hillside into a village. A lot of people were…” He glanced at Maggie, who’d lifted her eyes when he began to describe the disaster, and edited the rest of what he was going to say. “People were hurt.”
“And you’re wondering if we’re wondering whether No. 1’s gonna bust loose?” Zeke said and gestured toward the back of the house in the direction of the structure that was now nothing more than a deeper shadow on the dark mountainside. “Like maybe your boss is wondering if we’re all upset about it. Might make us some signs, like them commie war protestors, and march around in circles?”
In spite of himself, Carter was impressed. Zeke had a good aw-shucks routine going, but he was smarter than he looked. He might be a more formidable competitor in the shine business than Carter’d given him credit for.
“Are you?”
“Why would I be upset about that dam? The whole thing let go, wouldn’t get nobody’s feet wet in Cricket Hollow.” He looked from Piper to Sadie and then to Marian and Maggie on the couch. “But if I’s you, I’d be upset. I’d be asking all kinda questions if my family lived in harm’s way.”
Carter felt his face flush.
“Are you saying—?”
“I’m sayin’ if I’s you, I never woulda went to work for Mr. Nelson Warren and the Northfield Coal Company in the first place, the way they done bled this whole county dry.”
The boy’d said it in a normal, pass-the-salt tone of voice that Carter acknowledged was remarkably skillful passive aggression. You couldn’t fault him. And if you lost your temper, he’d be the victim and you’d be the bad guy.
Two can play at this game, son.
“Well, that’s the difference between you and me, I guess.” He favored the teenager with a “Baby Bear” smile—not too hard, not too soft—just right. His voice was as even and level as the boy’s had been. “I’d rather be the big dog than the bush he lifts his hind leg on.”
*
Piper watched them spar, a jab here, a punch there. Back and forth. She’d dared to hope that maybe they’d both relax enough to realize they didn’t have a thing against each other personally. If they’d been two strangers sitting together on a bus, they’d have enjoyed chatting.
Still, it wasn’t as bad as it cou
ld be. As it used to be. Ten years ago, you couldn’t have put a Campbell in the same room with a McCullough unless both of them had been dead for three days.
Carter and Zeke went at each other, but with words, not with fists and not with guns! That was something. Actually, it was quite a lot. But she was growing weary of the confrontation. The blasted testosterone! She stepped into the room and put her hand on her brother’s shoulder.
“Thanks for the concert, Zeke, but you’d best be on your way. I got a little girl to put to bed, and you being in Riley’s truck…”
Zeke popped up off the edge of the table like a jack-in-the-box. If somebody chanced to tell Riley they’d seen his truck turn up Turtle Road… He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table and leaned down to snuggle Sadie.
“Bye-bye,” he said.
“Bye-bye, Unka Zeke,” she said and gave him what Grayson had called her “gnat-snatcher” wave—opening and closing her little fingers as if she were trying to catch a bug in the air. She’d waved that way as a baby when she’d first learned “bye-bye,” and she never changed.
“Thank you for the lemonade, Mrs. Marian,” he said as he gathered up Nellie.
“You come back real soon, Zeke.”
He turned to go, then turned resolutely back.
“Carter,” he said, and nodded his head almost imperceptibly.
“Zeke,” Carter said.
“Can I walk out to your truck with you?” Maggie asked.
“Why, sure you can, Baby Girl.”
Zeke shot a questioning look over the child’s head at Piper. She answered with a shrug, then stood at the door and watched the tall, lanky teenager and the little red-haired girl walk out into the gloom. Maggie reached up and took Zeke’s hand and was chattering away about something. What could the child possibly have to say to Zeke?
