Ed veers toward the shop. “See you at meal. Think you can get me a glass of milk?”
This is the thing I barter—the sweet, creamy milk of Kilby cows. Their milk is too good for us. It’s bottled and sold in Montgomery for profit, but sneaking it is not so different from sneaking electricity. When there’s a surplus, it’s easy to siphon off a bit.
Kilby trades its milk for money, and I trade mine for cigarettes and turned heads. The guards and employees aren’t fed much better than we are, and I act as if I were just delivering what they’re already entitled to when I bring them their milk. No one’s entitled to a bottle of these Guernseys’ milk unless they’re paying royally, though. They’re the best cows in the state.
“I’ll get us some milk,” I tell Ed, as I join the group of men heading toward the barn.
THE dairymen have different jobs, and we rotate through them. One day, I’m mucking stalls, scooping out the straw the moment the heifers soil it. Under the eyes of so many folks, the dairy can’t stand for any contamination—no dirt or manure or any other foulness in the milk we ship off. Other days I’m tending calves, getting them ready for sale, weaning them from their mothers, who bawl as I lead them back to the milking bays. Then there’s the milking. We’re tasked with applying the milking cups, connecting the cup lines to the pail caps, and hanging those pails from leather straps we loop over the cows’ backs. Foreman Bondurant’s proud of those caps on his pails. “Latest invention,” he tells every new man. “Our milk never touches human hands. Only time it comes in contact with the open air’s when you pour it into the storage containers.” Hanging the pails is another precaution, too. The cows can’t kick over a hanging pail, can’t spill that precious liquid out across the hard dirt floor.
As much as I’d hated farming, I don’t so much mind the barn, with its tug and pull of noise, calves mewling and heifers lowing and the soft-piston grunt of the milking machines. There are raking sounds and the pitch of hay and straw, boots in the mud and boots on the hard dirt, the murmurs of men with animals: “Stop your bellowing. It’s all right now. You’re used to this show, old gal. Keep that tail out of my face.” Bondurant walks through calling out orders we already know, and the barn guards keep their feet up on hay bales most of the day. We’ve never had a runner from the dairy. Maybe it’s the animals that keep us here.
The barn makes me think about my father, who had always made it clear that we were not farmers. We had a respectable home on some land. My father made that distinction clear. “Not a farm,” he reminded us, “a respectable home on a bit of land.”
“We are not farmers,” we repeated.
The barn makes me think of my sisters, too, all three of them. Three is not the number Marie knows. She knows me only as the older brother to Catherine, the girl who did as our father wanted—married a coal miner—and stayed in Alabama with that coalman long enough to see our father die. He only got a year with them, but my mother always said it was plenty. “Finally got a mining son,” she loved to say. “It was all he wanted before he went.”
My middle sisters died of pneumonia in late grammar school while our father was away working. He was gone a month that time, and he missed it all. My middle sisters were only ten months apart, and they shared everything, so it was fitting that they went together. When the two started their fierce coughing, my mother sent Catherine and me to the barn to live.
No cows lived in our barn, no pigs or sheep. A few laying hens perched in the coop along the back, but no animals lived inside. We had horses, but they were pastured, and they took their shelter under trees when sun or rain pushed them to hiding. My father allowed these animals to share our land only because their services were so easy and immediate.
“We use our horses for transportation,” my father said. “And a man’s got to have fresh eggs come morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
My father’s barn was dusty with neglect. My sisters and I had grown out of playing there years before, so when Catherine and I found ourselves back among its stalls and loft, we set out in opposite directions to rediscover its corners. I found two dead doves in the hayloft, seven mice, and the remains of what must have been a cat. The doves were freshly dead, their bodies just starting to sink down. A few of the mice were powdered mummies, a few newly felled. The cat was well gone, nothing but a skull and ribs and a few final tufts of hair.
I used a rusted pitchfork to pile the bodies together, the noise of my steps and pitches bringing my sister up the ladder. She came to stand next to the pile, watching as I shook the last mouse on top.
“There’s more of them in the stalls and tack room,” she said.
“Should we sleep up here then?”
She nodded. I believe she was eight, then, and I was about to turn thirteen. I didn’t know my time as a child was almost over, that I’d start working the mines in another year, and do that work until I couldn’t stand a moment more of it.
I imagined our father as a hovering presence, a wisp of himself that arrived in the solid man’s absence. I felt him watching me in the barn with my sister, collecting that pile of animals. He was there as I shoveled them out the hayloft door, onto the ground below, where they scattered and broke, dust and feathers and bone. Our mother brought us bedrolls and we laid them down on the rough boards of the loft, keeping close to each other for fear of the scratching and hoots and calls. Catherine didn’t sleep well the first night, but I told her stories on the second, and she fell asleep in the midst of them. They were recycled stories—“Jack and the Beanstalk” and “The Fox and the Cat,” and later “Cinderella” and “Snow White”—but she credited me their authorship and I didn’t right her assumption. Let her think her brother was one of the Grimms. My father hovered nearby, judging my dishonesty, my stories, my willingness to comfort a small girl.
She’s old enough to get herself to sleep, I could hear him saying.
And now look at you. My father laughs at me in this Kilby barn. Hooking mechanical cups to these damn cows’ teats. That electricity led you straight, now didn’t it? Got you knee-deep in cream and dung, an abandoned wife and child, the death of a man on your shoulders. Straight as an arrow, I tell you.
Just a wisp of him, but it’s loud.
It’d’ve been bad enough if you’d worked your damn wife’s farm, but now you’re working a state farm, no better than the niggers in my shafts.
“Damn it. Stop.”
My cow turns her head to peer at me, blinking her eyes. They are a pretty breed, honey colored and shining.
“Not you,” I say, folding my words into a few more sounds for the barn. “You’re doing fine. Let’s get these cups attached. There we go.”
I continued telling Catherine stories after our sisters died, but when our father returned, he came in person to tell me to stop: “Keep quiet. We’re trying to get some damn sleep in this place.” Catherine had taken to sleeping in my room, sneaking in after our parents had gone to sleep. My father found her there, and he pulled her from my bed, dragging her to her own room, rich with the emptiness of the sisters she’d shared it with.
“You’re both too big for this,” he shouted.
I waited for the house to settle itself down, then I snuck down the hall and knelt at the head of Catherine’s bed, telling her again the whispered story of the cat who could jump high into the branches of a tree to escape the hunter and his dogs, while the fox with his bag of a hundred tricks died in their clutches. She liked this one best because the cat survived on its own.
Nearly three weeks after our sisters died, I found Catherine asleep when I came to her room. She was asleep again the next night, and I didn’t come again.
Only once was that time in the barn mentioned after it had passed. I was meeting Catherine’s husband at their wedding. He had the blackened hands of the mines and a towering height.
“Pleasure to meet you,” he said when we
shook hands. “Catherine told me about that time you two had to spend in the barn when your sisters took ill. I appreciate you looking after her.”
Catherine had hold of his arm, and she smiled broadly. Those days in the barn were some of the last ones with any shared intention between us. She hadn’t understood my leaving coal any better than my parents had.
“She looked after me, too,” I told her husband.
Catherine laughed. “What could I have possibly done, Roscoe? I was a little girl!”
This got a laugh from her husband, too, and they took it as their parting jest, turning their attention to the other guests—mine foremen and owners and the elegant women standing alongside them. You’d never guess they were in the coal industry, clean and kempt as they all were. Only the men’s hands gave them away, and even then rarely. These men had left the tunnels a long time back. My father was across the room, standing next to my mother. When I approached them, he walked away.
We are born with some things in our veins, coal for my father and farming for Marie’s and a deep electrical current for me. My father’s draw started from need, I suppose, and Marie’s father’s from land, and mine from glowing Birmingham streetlamps. I had stared at those bulbs the first time I saw them, the streets lit by a force greater than any I’d known—bigger than me, bigger than my father, bigger than his tunnels even.
“I want to work with electricity,” I remember telling him.
“Them lights are burning because of coal, Son.”
But digging up fuel wasn’t what I meant.
When I left my father’s mine, I went back to Birmingham, and I found an electrician named Wheeler who took me on as his apprentice. My mother answered my letters only occasionally, and my father’s voice was never present. He’s eleven years dead now, and my mother six. Catherine doesn’t write, and I haven’t seen her since her wedding.
My other sisters were named Anna and Margaret. I feel that’s important to say.
CHAPTER 5
Years pass quickly in times of fortune. They fill up with kernels and furrows and sprouts, new fields and crops, beautiful glass-shaded lamps from Birmingham, and meals under wide chandeliers. There is always one more room to wire (never the library), and one more fixture to pick out, the thresher to clean, the lines to check. For two such years Roscoe found himself working the farm—electrical components, yes—but also ordering and oversight and sales. He liked to see the numbers in Marie’s ledger, the productivity so easily measured and displayed.
Marie was a teacher again, and Roscoe was an electrician, and Gerald was a boy who loved his father. In addition to all that, the family farm was prosperous. The county talked about the prosperity, all those other people and farms full of envy at the family’s acquisition of electricity, at Roscoe’s connections with Alabama Power.
In Rockford, Marie tried to downplay their privileges, pointing instead to Roscoe’s and Wilson’s strengths as farmers. She watched Roscoe become respected in their small community. The murmurings about his laziness waned. Whispers about his incompetence ceased. Roscoe T Martin was a farmer. He’d given more to the farm than Marie’s father even. The people remained envious, but they were in awe, as well.
WHEN the sheriff came, Roscoe was eating dinner with Marie and Gerald. They were eating a beef pie, one of Marie’s specialties, with corn on the side.
Marie tilted her head in the direction of the sound. “Who would be calling at this time of day?” She folded her napkin into a rectangle before tucking it next to her plate. “You gentlemen keep eating. I’ll see to whoever it is.”
She put her hand on Roscoe’s shoulder and leaned down to kiss his mouth. Roscoe watched their son look away. The boy had had to grow accustomed to his parents’ intimacies over the past two years, foreign things before that. Roscoe had watched him stare at the first hands held and kisses exchanged, the first lengthy embraces, Marie’s head tucked neatly under Roscoe’s chin. Roscoe could see jealousy in Gerald, and he could also see confusion and betrayal. Marie had been Gerald’s alone, her arms around him, her lips grazing his features, her voice drowning him in its love and care. Then she’d suddenly given her affections to someone else. Roscoe understood Gerald’s need to look away. He’d suffered the same emotions in the years after Gerald’s birth, and he now felt torn between empathy for his son and conquest over his competition.
They’d developed their own new bond as well, and Roscoe could see his son equally torn between hatred of his rival and love of his newfound father.
Roscoe squeezed Marie’s hip as she took herself toward the door, then he tucked back into his meal, whispering through the food in his mouth, “Who do you think it is?”
Gerald was nine, bursting with tales of adventure. “A pirate,” the boy whispered back. “He’s missing an eye, and he’s come for our gold.”
“We’ll have to fight him, then. You want to be the distraction or the sword fighter?”
“Sword,” Gerald whispered, grabbing hold of his dinner knife.
Roscoe could hear the squeak of the door opening, then the whine of the screen. There were voices—Marie’s and a man’s—but no words, something hushed and solemn in their tones. Roscoe worried about a neighbor in need of help he wasn’t interested in giving, not because of laziness or lack of neighborly concern, but out of dislike for the tasks. Rural neighbors needed help hauling broken-legged horses and sick cows. They needed help raising barns and plowing fields. Back in the village the roles were different. Marie had delivered pies, and Roscoe had helped with electrical flukes. Marie had tutored children struggling with their letters, while he had taught husbands how to wire their sheds and shops. He preferred the village tasks.
The voices stopped.
“We may have missed our chance,” Roscoe whispered.
Then Marie was in the dining room doorway. “It’s Sheriff Eddings,” she said quietly. “For you, love.”
Roscoe looked at his son, whose face had gone taut with curiosity and fear. “Bet you didn’t know Sheriff Eddings was a pirate, did you?”
Gerald grinned, and Roscoe tousled his son’s hair before walking over to Marie.
“What’s this about?”
“Nothing.” Roscoe placed a hand on her shoulder, kissed her forehead. “It’s nothing.” Roscoe assumed the sheriff was there about the electricity—it was bound to happen sometime—but the offense was small, a negligible siphoning of power in exchange for such great progress. Roscoe saw the farm becoming the forerunner for rural electrification. The State would see their great success and make rural lines a priority.
Marie squeezed his hand, and he squeezed her shoulder, and then he pulled away.
“Finish up your supper. I’ll be back before bedtime.”
Sheriff Eddings stood on the newly painted porch, his hands clasped behind his back. He had the same bad scalp he’d always had, the same dander on his shoulders. His nostrils were plugged with the same brown hair, but the boil on his left temple had grown since Roscoe had last seen him.
“Roscoe.”
“Sheriff.”
He took hold of Roscoe’s arm, just above the elbow, firmly, the way Marie’s father had at their wedding. “You know why I’m here?”
“Imagine it’s about the electricity we have running in.”
“That’s the start of it.”
“It’s so little we’re taking, Sheriff.” They were walking down the steps. “I can prove how little. We can easily pay it back.”
“It’s more than the electricity, Roscoe.”
“How’s that?”
They reached the drive and the sheriff’s new car. The man’s grip shifted and he reached for his handcuffs. “Would you put your hands out front for me?”
“Sheriff.”
“I’m sorry, Ross, but I have to cuff you. No way around it.”
Roscoe held his hands out.
Even though Sheriff Eddings placed them loosely, the metal felt dense and tight round Roscoe’s wrists.
“Go ahead and sit up front.” Eddings opened the door, and Roscoe climbed in, his hands awkward and heavy. Eddings stood still, holding the door like a servant. “It’s a goddamn shame,” he said, looking at his feet.
“What am I missing, Sheriff?”
The man shook his head. “I’ll give you the whole thing on our ride down to Montgomery.”
“Not Rockford?” The county jail was in Rockford.
“It’s out of my hands.”
Roscoe watched the sheriff walk round the hood of the car. He took slow steps, worry cracking his forehead into deep lines. What piece of Roscoe’s work could cause such deep concern? If a transformer had blown, every light in the house would’ve gone out. They’d have been eating under a dark chandelier, the dim shadows of evening getting the better of the room.
The sheriff opened his door and heaved himself into the vehicle. He drove them down the lane that connected Marie’s property to Old Hissup Road, and they continued all the way to 22 before the sheriff spoke.
“Wish to hell it weren’t me had to tell you this. And you’ll be hearing it all again from the State boys soon as we arrive, but I figure you should have yourself prepared. See, I didn’t want to cause too much commotion back there with Marie and your boy, and that’s why I asked that they let me take you in myself. You’re under arrest, Roscoe. This ain’t about me asking you a few questions. And it ain’t about the power, either. It is at its base, of course, but it’s much more than that. You’d be right about it being a small thing should it’ve just been the taking of some electricity, but you’re being charged with a man’s death. That’s the sum of it. Some fellow working for the power company was checking lines, and he came across your handiwork and electrocuted himself. I saw the poor bastard in person. Worst death I’ve witnessed in my life, Roscoe. Ugly as all hell.”
Roscoe forced himself to meet the sheriff’s eyes. He lifted his shackled hands, holding them chest level, unsure of his intentions. Maybe he was going to set his palms together, readying himself for a plea. Maybe he was making to form fists to pound on the dash of the car. His hands might be leaning toward the door handle, pulling it, that latch letting go, and then shifting to a push that pitched his whole body toward the roadway. He saw himself hit and bounce and roll, limbs loose and shuffling, rocks taking bites out of his skin. He saw himself dead there on the ground, half on the paving and half in the rough grasses along the side, the sheriff pressing hard on the brakes, jumping out before the car fully stopped, then running toward the mess that had been Roscoe T Martin.
Work Like Any Other Page 5
