by Ninie Hammon
Maggie held up the braid she’d been working on and it did, indeed, need help. Piper quickly pulled out the awkward twists and winds of the three strands of hair and began to braid it. The child’s hair was more than simply red. It was a riot of different shades and tones with strands of copper, gold and orange—individual notes that blended in a symphony of color.
“Mr. Grayson went down to the creek.” Maggie said. “He took a towel and a bar of soap, said he was going to scrub himself raw and couldn’t do a proper job of it in that wee tub.” She paused. “Least that’s what he told Nan Marian. He didn’t talk to me.”
The women in the house had been tiptoeing around like cat burglars all morning so as not to disturb Grayson where he slept on the couch. It was almost ten o’clock before he finally woke. When he did, he was instantly awake, didn’t merely open his eyes but sat bolt upright, looked around frantically, then slowly relaxed.
Marian was seated at the table, making a stab at snapping beans from the garden into a pot in her lap. But she had little strength and the movement was painful. Piper knew that all she really wanted was to sit somewhere near him so she could stare at Grayson sleeping on the couch.
Piper couldn’t blame her. It was all she could do to keep herself from hovering over him, touching him. She didn’t want to leave the room because the joy of seeing him there filled her heart to overflowing.
Maggie had kept Sadie quiet that morning by reading to her in her room from the big book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. And by taking her out to the back porch to teach her a new skill.
“Lookit me, Mommy,” Sadie’d cried. Her smile stapled deep dimples into her cheeks. She squeezed both her eyes tight shut and popped them instantly back open again. “I winkin’.”
Then Maggie and Sadie took a watering can out to “gib the begables a drink—they thirssy.”
When Piper settled the toddler in for her morning nap, she hoped Sadie would sleep long. The child had been up and down all night, and she would miss her afternoon nap when Piper went into town for groceries. Piper’d planned supper in her head as she walked the floor with the fretful child, intended to fix Grayson’s favorite meal—fried chicken, mashed potatoes and milk gravy. A big salad with not-thirssy-anymore vegetables from the garden—tomatoes, carrots, red and green peppers, and sweet onions. She had broccoli, too—he liked it steamed, crisp, not squishy—corn on the cob and okra fried in corn meal. Pie, of course—chocolate, his favorite.
She’d stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at Grayson, who was sleeping deeply on the lumpy couch. When he sat up, wide awake, she’d meant to offer to make him whatever he wanted for breakfast. Then Maggie came in the house with Sadie and the watering can and everything went south.
Sadie took one look at her father and ran screaming out of the room. Maggie took off after her, and Grayson bluntly asked Piper if she was going to take the little girl back in to the sheriff’s office today.
It had been stiff and awkward after that. She sensed that Grayson didn’t really understand what she was upset about any better than she understood why he was behaving as he did.
Piper wove the last strand of hair into the braid, this time successfully moving her hand in time with Maggie’s head so it didn’t slip out.”
“Hold still one more minute.” She was discovering Maggie could be as much a wiggle-worm as Sadie was. “There,” Piper said as she finished the bow. Maggie scooted off the porch and into the house trailing a “thank you, Miss Piper” behind her as she went.
Piper turned and saw Grayson coming toward the house. That explained Maggie’s quick exit. His damp hair fell in the beloved widow’s peak over his forehead. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Both were too big for him. He’d lost so much weight! And his skin was red where he’d scrubbed it. In fact, his right hand was bleeding.
“What did you—?” she began, reached out and tried to take his hand, but he pulled it away.
“Washed a little too hard. I’ve got…it’s a fungus we called…jungle rot. Everybody gets it. I didn’t expect to bring it…I figured I’d be back stateside long enough for it to heal before I came home.”
He looked into her eyes.
“I’m sorry about last night. It was…a leech. Jungle’s full of them. They’re flat as paper, can get in the tops of your boots and up your sleeves even when you keep the cuffs on your shirt tight. You can’t feel them bite you—they inject some kind of natural anesthetic. That one was right where I couldn’t see it or feel it.”
He seemed to be studying her face, looking for…what? Revulsion, maybe. Well, it was disgusting. Some kind of fungal rot and a leech—yuck! But she had no intention of letting Grayson know how she felt.
She reached out and took his hand, which he reluctantly allowed her to touch. She turned it over, examined the bloody sores on the bottom edge of his palm stretching from his little finger to his wrist, then saw there were bloody places on both elbows, too.
“Did you try hydrogen peroxide?”
“No, there’s this white powder called Dapsone to treat it, but I didn’t stop to grab any when I was running to catch that plane.”
While Piper had made his meatloaf sandwich last night, Grayson had explained what’d happened to bring him home and described his marathon journey.
“I bet hydrogen peroxide will do the trick, but if it doesn’t, we’ll find something that does.” She squeezed his hand, and he looked from it to her face.
“It’s okay, honey,” she said tenderly. “You could have come home wounded, missing an arm or a leg or…do you honestly think I’m upset over a little fungus!”
He smiled and the relief she saw on his face broke her heart.
“But I am upset over one thing you didn’t bring home.”
He looked confused.
“All those pounds you left on the other side of the planet. But since you left those behind, I shall have to find some brand new ones to put on you.”
He grabbed her and hugged her fiercely. Was he trembling? His voice was husky.
“I’m sorry about the rest of it, too. I had a flashback. After a firefight, sometimes, a guy’d suddenly get this blank look on his face and start hollering, and you knew he was reliving it. More vivid than remembering—reliving. You can’t control it, don’t know when—”
“It’ll pass, honey. It’ll take time. And that’s one thing we have an abundance of now.” She pulled back out of his arms and looked up into his face. “We’ve got the rest of our lives, sweetheart. You’re home, safe—for good! Nothing else matters. Whatever is wrong, we’ll work it out together.”
His eyes were moist; he leaned down and kissed her. Tenderly at first, then with growing passion. She leaned into him, melted into him, got lost in the feel of his arms around her, his lips on hers.
She didn’t hear the door open behind them and wasn’t aware of Maggie’s presence until Grayson finally released her, breathless.
Then the child spoke. “Did you have a good wash in the stream?” she asked politely.
Grayson went rigid, then turned in something like slow motion to gawk at her. Piper wondered what exactly it was that he saw when he looked at the child. It was clear he didn’t see Maggie because his reaction made no sense.
“What do you want with me?” he asked, his voice hard and cold. “Why are you here?”
Nguyen stares up at him with wide, wondering eyes.
“You wash good in stream, Grape?” she asks. And for a moment he catches a whiff of the putrid stink of human feces that still clings to his skin though he’d scrubbed at it as hard as he could with soap and sand.
“What do you want with me? Why are you here?”
But of course he knows. She wants him to help her, to protect her. After all, she’d helped him. She’d risked her life to hide him, had cared for him. Now she wants him to hide her from the enemy. But he can’t do that. There’s a reason he can’t help her, but right now he can’t remember what it is. He reaches up and rubs his throbbing t
emples.
“You think I can just load you up in my backpack and haul you out of here. Is that what you think?”
She says nothing and merely looks at him. But she isn’t substantial; it’s like you can reach right through her. Wraithlike. Nguyen is like a film, like an overlaid image, a double-exposed photograph. There is Nguyen, her eyes dark, her black hair hanging in her eyes. And there is the little red-haired girl—Maggie—with braids and freckles. The child before him is both and neither, a ghostly image in a real world.
Grayson gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. Gradually, he began to hear the cicadas in the trees and feel the sun on his arm—hot but not jungle-sticky. The breeze was surprisingly cool. There was no stench; he couldn’t hear gunfire or the incessant noisy creatures of the jungle. Haystack had always been curious about them, wanted to know what animal or bug made the eech-eech-eech sound and what made the argh-wah, argh-wah sound and what…but Gray’d had no desire to get up close and personal with the teeming hordes of strange flora and fauna beyond the campfire light.
He took a deep breath, let it out and slowly opened his eyes. Before him stood a little red-haired girl staring up at him with wide green eyes, an odd shade of green with yellow flakes. He’d barked at her, and she was cowering back from him, like he might hit her, and he felt instantly guilty. When she spoke, her voice was soft and tentative. Compassionate.
“Yer bum’s out the window, Mr. Grayson, sir,” she said.
“Huh?”
“She said your butt’s out the window,” his mother translated from the doorway. She leaned against the frame, her face pale. “Means you’re not making no sense. And you ain’t.”
“It’s all happening too fast. I’m sorry.”
“You know what you need,” Piper said. “You need to take off into the woods, get away by yourself for a while. Why don’t you go squirrel hunting? I know the season doesn’t open for another couple of weeks, but who’ll care?”
Hunting? How could he possibly—
But he could. Strange as it seemed, the thought of holding the old .22 that hung over the mantle sounded comforting. He’d actually feel normal with a rifle in his hands. Oh, he understood that response might not be rational, but emotionally…yeah, he’d like to go hunting. Not today, though. He was too tired.
Piper must have seen him slump.
“Today’s probably not the best time, but…” She paused. “Marian has a doctor’s appointment in Charleston on Thursday. All the women could go into town, leave you here in peace, and you could spend the whole day in the woods.”
“Yes,” he said. And as he heard the word escape his lips, he felt the growing conviction of it in his heart. He’d rest up, putter around the house for the next couple of days. Get re-acclimated. He’d seen the dead tire swing leaned up against the trunk of the oak tree, a piece of broken rope dangling from the limb above. Sadie wasn’t too young for a tire swing, was she?
Sadie. He’d dreamed for months of gathering the child up in his arms and nuzzling her soft hair, inhaling her glorious baby smell, but she wouldn’t let him near her.
She held out her arms to Carter, though.
Carter. He and Piper had to talk about what he’d seen when he walked up the road in the twilight last night. As he’d examined the memory, he’d realized that in point of fact, Carter had kissed Piper, not the other way around. True, she hadn’t instantly reacted, but she had shoved him away, clearly upset. It was plain he’d taken advantage of her at a weak moment.
He felt his hands begin to ball into fists at his side, but he forced himself to relax. Not now.
Sadie. Piper. And Carter. Yeah, he had a couple of bridges to mend, all right, and another that might need to be blown completely out of the water!
He resolutely planted a smile on his lips.
“Honey, I wouldn’t have thought of going squirrel hunting, but I think I’d like that very much.”
He leaned over and planted a kiss on her nose, then glanced at Maggie.
“You’re taking Maggie with you when you go to the sheriff’s office today, right?”
“Of course,” Piper snapped and stepped away from him. “Wouldn’t want to trouble him to come get her.” Then she shooed Maggie into the house and followed her.
He’d stepped in it again. Surely, Piper didn’t think she could just keep the little girl!
“Piper sees herself in Maggie, son,” his mother said, her voice quiet and pain-filled. “And wasn’t nobody there to rescue her from Rooster Campbell.”
She turned slowly and started toward the couch, and he hurried inside to take her arm and ease her down onto the cushion where the spring wasn’t broken.
Maggie came down the hallway with Sadie, who’d just awakened from her nap. As soon as his daughter caught sight of him, she started to wail.
* * *
Nelson Warren moved the unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and read again the last line of the report from Carter Addington about the reaction in Sadler Hollow to the landslide in Wales that had buried an elementary school.
“Based on the interviews I conducted, no one in Sadler Hollow has in mind to seek out a federal inspector and complain that Northfield Coal’s slurry dams are unsafe. But they don’t like the dams, never have, and they don’t trust them. If one of the dams developed a substantial leak, say, and the rising creek flooded their homes, they’d yell foul. The houses in Sadlerton are clustered close around the creek, and while the people there would remain tightlipped to a federal inspector, they’re a little more accustomed to strangers than mountaineers deeper in the mountains. If they were approached right, they might cheerfully give an earful of complaints to a newspaper reporter.”
He put the sheet of paper back down on the pile in the neat manila folder and sat back in his chair.
Bottom line: if—when—dam No. 2 started leaking and water began to pour over the dam at the top of the hollow, there’d be flooding in Sadlerton, maybe in every other coal camp downstream, too. Northfield would be on the hook for millions in damages. Every lazy mountaineer who “threw his back out” trying to wrestle the five junk cars and the doorless refrigerator out of the front yard and up to higher ground would file a lawsuit. The company would be tied up in court for years. But Addington had put his finger square on the issue of primary importance to Warren. When the leaking dam flooded the homes of a bunch of dirt-poor coal miners, Northfield Coal would be eaten alive by the state press and probably some of the national media, too.
And he couldn’t have that! Not right now.
Nelson Warren had never cared what the press had to say about Northfield Coal—good or bad. He still didn’t, but it mattered now that he had aspirations beyond the presidency of the second-largest coal company in the state, ambitions that would transport him out of Charleston, West Virginia, and deposit him in Washington D.C.
Those plans likely hinged on how he was perceived by the press—and that, of course, meant how his coal company was perceived.
He was a Charleston native, the son of the man who built Northfield Coal with the sweat of his own brow in the coal mines. Nelson had never sweat in a coal mine, though he had worked in one briefly as part of his grooming to take over the company, which had prospered under his leadership. Now fifty-three, Warren was ready to cash in his business success for a heaping helping of power.
West Virginia Senior Senator Laythrope P. Cavanaugh, who had strung an amazing five consecutive terms in office together, had recently announced to his inner circle that he would not seek reelection, and the man that group endorsed would be elected to replace him. By hook or crook, as the saying goes, their political machine would make it happen. Nelson Warren was in that inner circle. Trouble was, he wouldn’t be their first choice as a candidate. There was a feisty young lawyer who was making quite a name for himself in Wheeling. He’d stepped into the limelight when he agreed to represent—pro bono—twenty-five victims of an apartment building collapse in a class action suit a
gainst the huge real estate conglomerate whose shoddy workmanship had been at fault.
He’d won that case handily, garnered millions in damages for his clients, and had come out the other side with a gleaming Champion of the Masses image. Warren had to trump that image. And as he stared down at Carter Addington’s report, he was certain his strategy would do just that. If he executed everything perfectly, he’d be able to swoop down and rescue way more of the great unwashed than that snot-nosed Wheeling lawyer.
When some vandal—teenagers who wanted to see what a couple of sticks of stolen dynamite would do, maybe, or some out-of-work miner with an ax to grind—blew a hole in Impoundment Dam No. 2, the lives of thousands of people would be affected. He’d call in every chip he had with the newspapers—even the Charleston television station—to give maximum coverage to the efforts of blameless Northfield Coal to rescue suffering families with two feet of water in their living rooms! Not forced by law, but only as a compassionate neighbor, a good corporate citizen.
Under his hands-on leadership, of course, the company would immediately launch a valiant though futile effort to patch the leak in No. 2 before water from it filled up No. 1. (But he would insist that they evacuate the endangered citizens below the dam “just in case.”) And when the worst-case scenario did, indeed, come to pass, Northfield Coal would respond to the rising flood waters by providing temporary housing, warm blankets, hot coffee and untold numbers of photo ops featuring company president Nelson Warren passing out bowls of chicken soup to bedraggled grownups and cookies to their damp kiddies.
The amount of money to fund such an operation would be negligible. The company wouldn’t be on the hook for any real, concrete damages—nothing of substance, merely bright-colored, photogenic Band-Aids.
And the payoff for this magnanimity would be a seat for Nelson Warren in the United States Senate!
He’d already set in motion the first part of his plan by scheduling an inspection tour Tuesday of Logan County mines where there would be substantial stores of dynamite on hand. He smiled, reached across the wide expanse of his desk and punched the button on the intercom.
