Work Like Any Other

by Virginia Reeves

  Ed was hesitant. “I tell you, Ross, your Marie is a fine cook. Made me a hell of a meal. But there wasn’t much said, you see.”

  “You said she wasn’t home.”

  “Easier that way.”

  “You lay with my wife, Ed?”

  “She wasn’t your wife, Ross. Hadn’t been for a while.”

  Like my young Marie, this new Ed was my own making. I remember knowing that then. His words were mine—words I was putting in his mouth.

  “She stopped being your wife when she lost all those future children.” He was right. Even in the good times after the power first came, Marie had remained a ghost, a hollowed-out tree, something waiting for its escape.

  “Why am I here?” I asked Ed.

  He shook his head—about all anyone could do for me those days. I’m accustomed to the quiet that rises now, the lack of words that comes from comfort and stillness, but in that field with Ed, all the silent head-shaking built upon itself like the frustration that drove bruises into Gerald’s arms and threw insults at Reed. I pulled the drawknife, anger wobbling my grip on the handles, the blade sloppy across the pole, my knuckles against the rough bark. I didn’t register the skin coming away, the red imbuing the pine.

  I pulled Marie into my anger, and I wanted her there to answer for herself.

  Maggie whined at my side, her nose against my knee.

  “Back!”

  My blood would stay in the grain of the wood even after I’d scraped it again. Only one strip was left. Maggie nosed me again, and I kicked her fiercely in the chest.

  “Back, goddamn it! Back!”

  Then, just as quickly, I was on my knees, crawling to her as the coward I was, as the coward I fear I still am, at least on certain days. She let me grab her round her neck, press my face into the soft fur of her chest, pull on her ears like chords or ropes, like things to climb.

  “Good dog. Good. You are a good dog.”

  She tried to lick my hands, but I lifted them out of her reach and went inside to get her a fresh bone. She took it, but dropped it immediately, watching me go to the basin where I pumped water into the bowl, setting my hands in it to soak. They ached. The water clouded pink.

  I ripped strips from an old shirt to use as bandages, and when I gripped the drawknife again, pain seared up my arms. “You know this,” I told my hands. “Go through the movement.” I gripped and pulled, and blood crept through the layers of cloth. Still, I struggled against the pain, against myself, against Marie, the cottage, Kilby, even the village there on the Coosa—against everything that had brought me to that pole in that meadow.

  WHEN it was time to start digging, I went to the big house to borrow a shovel.

  “Help yourself to anything in the shop,” Wilson told me. It was morning, and Moa and Wilson were on the porch again, a couple taking a moment to enjoy the start of the day.

  “Not anything,” Moa added.

  “Just a shovel, Moa. I promise.”

  The thresher greeted me in the musty shop—intimate, but also distant. I felt nervous, the way I would should Marie appear. I placed my hand on the machine’s metal, cool there in the dark, and I saw it moving with its electric engine, turning power into food into sales into salvation. I should have felt guilt. I should have hated that beast of a machine. But I was still proud. I could still recognize the accomplishment, and I wanted—right then, more than anything—to be acknowledged for the success I’d brought.

  I picked out a narrow-bladed shovel with a thin shoulder.

  The muscles of my left arm took the bulk of the digging, my bad shoulder weak and useless in this task. The hole needed to be deep. The cloth around my knuckles kept my hands from blistering too badly, but nothing saved my thumbs. They opened into sores before I’d finished, and I had to stop to soak my hands in cold water again. Maggie followed me inside.

  I made more bandages from the same shirt, my hands so thick with cloth that I could barely operate my fingers. If my hands would just do this last bit of the first hole, I’d go back inside and eat an entire jar of peaches. I would lie down on the thick mattress and try to sleep. I would give my body anything it wanted.

  When I finally finished, I let out a cry that brought Maggie to my side. My thumbs had bled through, and the scabs that had formed on my knuckles were broken open.

  Inside, I built a fire and set pots to boiling on the stove. Wilson and Moa must have added the bathing room during their time there, and I gave them my thanks as I lowered myself into the hot water. My hands burned and then went quiet, like the muscles in my arms and legs, my shoulders and neck. The steam from the water felt warm and good in my lungs, and I listened to my breaths, each a Dear Roscoe, the Dear strung longer than the Roscoe. Dear coming in, and Roscoe going out. I could hear Marie’s voice, there in that tub. To Ed she was saying, “Oh? You shared a cell with Roscoe? Come in.” She was saying, “Come.” And to me she said, “Dear Roscoe. Dear, dear Roscoe. I’ve been canning like mad this season. The harvest was grand, and we had money for more peaches than we knew what to do with.”

  Then I heard my young Marie come, not in person, but in a voice just slightly off from her older counterpart’s. “Take the blame. Get yourself a permanent place here in Kilby. There’s nothing for you when you get out.”

  The water went cold before I left it, my body turned to a shriveled kernel. The cottage towels were on the thin side, but still thicker than anything we saw in Kilby, and I rubbed myself dry before pulling on my same pajamas.

  Maggie was by the stove when I came into the main room, her body hot to the touch. Kilby had given her a rusty pen, long hunts in the woods, the onerous strain of whelping, where here she had bones and ham scraps, grass and floors to lie on, stoves, pallets. There was nothing of conflict for her in that new life of ours.

  I pulled her a foot away to keep her from catching on fire.

  I hung my washed bandages across the back of a chair and blew out the lamps. I went to the thick mattress in the bedroom, but it took only a few minutes of shifting and turning to drive me to the pallet, and then just a few minutes of cold to drive me to the stove. I dragged the thin sleeping pad out, with its sheets and blanket and pillow, and I slept on the floor with my dog.

  MAGGIE had curled herself against my legs in the night, her body up on the pad. I reached down to pet her when I woke and then rose to work on my throbbing hands. I was anxious to start the wiring and even more anxious to start the leaving, sure that my time there was temporary, a stopover while I waited to hear my real sentence.

  Maggie lay close by in the grass while I worked. Toward evening, she lifted her head at the sound of footsteps as Jenny emerged into our clearing. “Dinner.” The girl lifted the bundle in her hands. “I’ll leave it by the door.” Jenny hadn’t visited before.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank my mama.”

  “Thank your mama for me, then.”

  Maggie wandered over to sniff at the hem of Jenny’s skirt, and the girl crouched down to pet her.

  “Mr. Roscoe?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a favor I need to ask of you.”

  The sentence startled me. I didn’t seem the type to grant favors. “What can I do?”

  “Papa hasn’t told you because he’s ashamed, but Charles was—” She scanned the trees as if looking for words. “He was—­incarcerated? Like you were. Sent to prison? And, well, we don’t know where he’s been sent. Papa thought you might have some connections at the prison and could do some asking round. We’d be awful grateful.”

  “What did he do?”

  Jenny twisted the fabric of her skirt. “He drank too much and he—assaulted a man?”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  She nodded quickly. She must’ve been twenty, maybe nineteen, and I found myself growing angry with Wilson and Moa for making
her deliver this request.

  Now, of course, I understand why Jenny was given the job.

  “I’m happy to do you the favor, Jenny, but tell your parents they’re welcome to ask anything of me, too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir.”

  “All right.” She crouched back down to pet Maggie. “I wish people would stop leaving,” she whispered.

  “Where’s Henry?”

  “He’s married.” She smiled. “And he has a little girl that he named after Mama. She’s six months old and the most beautiful thing. He’s sent a photograph.”

  “And where is he?”

  Her face returned to its quiet melancholy. “They’re in New York City. Mama and Papa are very proud. Ms. Marie helped him get into college, like Gerry, and he has a real job there as a teacher. Ms. Marie sent us all up on the train to see his graduation.”

  That would’ve been about a year before.

  “And why haven’t you left, Miss Jenny?”

  “I’m not book-smart like Henry. I like this work.” She reached again for Maggie’s ears.

  “Listen, next time you bring my supper, bring some paper and a pencil, too. I know who we can write to at the prison to find out about Charles.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Roscoe.” She kept herself back for a moment and then stepped over Maggie to give me a wide embrace. I hadn’t held a woman of any color or age or size for nine years, and I didn’t know what to do with my body. She pulled away as quickly as she’d come forward. “I’m sorry,” she said, smoothing out her skirt. “Will you stay? Will you stay here until we find out?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good. I best get back, now. I’ll bring that paper and pencil as soon as I can.”

  “Jenny,” I said before she started off, “do you know why I’m here?”

  She was quiet as her father had been when I’d asked a similar question, and I expected her reply to be vague and hazy, but instead she said, “I suppose it’s because this is your home, Mr. Roscoe.”

  She headed down the trail toward the big house, and just before she vanished, she yelled, “What would you like for supper tomorrow?”

  I was thinking about homes. “Anything. Anything you and your mama want to cook.”

  INSIDE the cottage, my body was all memory. I couldn’t recollect the specifics of Jenny’s touch, only the roar of it. I wanted that girl’s arms around me again, and then once more every day after. I didn’t know how much I’d needed a simple embrace.

  That feeling has finally lessened some.

  Ashamed, I unwrapped our supper package and scraped Maggie’s portion into the pie tin that served as her bowl. Then I fell to my own dinner, not realizing my hunger.

  I dug my holes, all three, and I bolted the crossarms firm in their notches.

  “You’ll need help,” Wilson told me the morning I planned to put the poles up, surprising me with his appearance in the meadow.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Jenny’s been giving us updates.”

  “She your spy?”

  “She speaks highly of you, Ross.”

  “That’s kind of her.”

  I’d numbered my poles and laid them out in order, each gently decreasing in height as it neared the cottage. Wilson joined me at the first and said, “You take the arm. I’ll get the end. I’m the one holding it up, though. No way I’m packing in the ground.”

  “I have braces. They can hold it while I tamp.”

  He lifted his end and anchored it against his side. The ghost of his left forearm and hand reached forward, sliding down. “Get your side.”

  Wilson had been my woodworker when we raised poles along the north field. He’d felled the trees and stripped them, cut the crossarms, notched the poles, bolted the arms in place. I’d held the poles while Wilson filled in the dirt.

  “Already leaning to the right,” Wilson said. “Too far left. Just a bit now. Too much again.”

  “We have time for final tweaks.”

  “You’re the one who wanted them straight at the start.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  That was all we said about it.

  He held the pole, his left arm applying pressure from the front while his right hand wrapped round the back, and I settled into a quick rhythm—six shovelfuls, then tamping two times round the circle. Shovel, tamp, again. When the hole was half-full, the pole stood on its own.

  Wilson stepped away. “Looks plum. Straighter than the tree it was before.”

  Filling the hole wasn’t as bad as the digging, but the tamping jolted my weak shoulder. The next two would leave me broken by the day’s end.

  “You act like you know what you’re doing, Ross.” Wilson leaned against a pine. “You dig some holes at Kilby?”

  “None this deep.”

  “How’s it you knew how deep to make these ones?”

  In between blows with the bar I said, “I’m a keen observer.”

  Wilson chuckled. “The tamping wasn’t mine to do at Flat Top. Powder was the property of the white folks. Couldn’t trust none of us with the explosives. I’d drill their holes, get it all good and ready, but then some fellow from ground level would come running down with his fuses and cotton and charges. We weren’t far up the shaft when those charges would go.”

  I had been waiting for this, for Wilson to show me his time underground. “How long were you in the mines?”

  “Just under three years.”

  Wait, my mind said. Wait. We’d been convicted in ’22, and the leasing stopped in ’28. I’d pictured Wilson working or dead in those mines for at least six years, sitting with the knowledge that I’d put him there, that I’d written him those long, dark days. My guilt had let me live a bit easier with Marie’s silence. I’d cost a man his family. What right did I have to one of my own?

  But he’d been gone only three years, a third of my time.

  “I met a fellow who was over in the Peerless mine when it blew,” Wilson was saying. “Sparks from a saw set that one off. His name was Conrad, and he was hoping on a homeward ticket, what with his burns, but they just patched him a bit and shuffled him off to Flat Top. It’s only if you can’t do the work anymore that they let you go, and only then if they don’t have the papers to hold you.”

  I rested the bar against my chest and looked at him.

  “Best finish that hole off. Got two more, if I counted right.”

  “That’s right.” I was nearly done. Scoop, I told my arms. Pitch. Scoop. And then, Set the shovel down. Grab the bar. Hold it firmly, damn it. Hold it. Now, strike. Again. Even with Wilson there, it was just work—work like any other, like milking and cleaning stalls, building pens and running dogs, rolling carts down narrow aisles, organizing cards, memorizing numbers. It was picking at coal veins on your side and breathing rushes of coal dust, awaiting explosions, lifting and loading. It was tamping and shoveling and pitching. And work is measured in time as much as it is measured in pay. I am uncertain how many hours of running equal a man’s hand, his wrist, and forearm and elbow. How many books must be stacked in exchange for one finger? How much milk driven into a pail? How many holes dug, how many dogs pulled from the ground and then buried back even deeper? How many wives and sons?

  I am still unsure of my debts.

  I finished up and moved to the second hole. Wilson was talking now, more than I’d heard. “There are these stories that are passed round the mining camps.” We walked with the second pole. My right arm was battening itself down, the shoulder tightening its leash. I wouldn’t be able to turn my head the next day. “All the stories from all the mines that’ve come and gone. All those men bought from the State. It’s like ghost stories. Watch that stump there. That one of the ones you cut down?”

  I shook my head and stepped around it.

>   “Like the Banner mine,” he said.

  I’d been the first person to tell Wilson about the Banner mine, passing it along as the curse it was.

  I turned the pole over to Wilson and set to shoveling. Our shared knowledge of Banner didn’t have anything to do with the time Wilson and I had served or the new time we were serving together, there on the farm.

  “You ever been in a tunnel sucked clean of oxygen, Ross?”

  “You know I haven’t. If I had, I wouldn’t be alive. Why’d you make Jenny come with your request about Charles?”

  “You telling me to shut my mouth?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled at that. “It’s good having you here. Moa and I both feel that way. It’s surprised her.”

  I threw my own silence into the mix of communication.

  The ground firmed up round the pole. “Thanks for your help,” I told Wilson. “The last one’s shorter. Imagine I can get it in on my own. Gotta wait till tomorrow anyway.”

  “You sore?”

  “I am.”

  “Hard work, setting poles.”

  I moved past him, and he followed me awhile before turning toward the big house. I felt him at my heels. I heard his breathing and the fall of his steps in the dirt and grasses, not so different from Taylor on his horse.

  I had just lowered myself into the tub when Maggie let loose with whines of excitement. Visitor, she said. Someone at the door. I still hadn’t fixed its slant.

  It was hard to leave the hot water. I’d been boiling potfuls for the past hour.

  “Quiet.”

  Maggie shushed and sank to her haunches. I’d wrapped a rough towel round my waist, expecting Wilson, ready to talk more. I knew I would listen, just as I would listen again while he held the third pole the next day. I’d listen with my head down and my arms and hands aching, both my arms, both my hands. He’d tell more ghost stories of black damp and cave-ins, and I’d think about Stevens’s side blown to bits from Hughes’s shotgun or that single piece of shot in Jennings’s kidney that had poisoned his blood.

  “Mr. Roscoe?” It wasn’t Wilson’s voice, but Jenny’s. “Am I disturbing you, Mr. Roscoe?” The door creaked open.