by James Still
“Look at that ole martin-bird picking his teeth with a straw,” Fletch said.
The guinea eggs hatched. The speckled fowls were wild as partridges. They were swift as granny-hatches in the pennyrile. We rarely saw them. The grass tops shook where they fed. The metal clink of their voices grew. Once when it rained they roosted noisily under the house. We looked at them through a floor crack. There were fourteen biddies, and we remembered there had been twenty-six eggs.
“That ole guinea hen hain’t got a grain o’ sense,” Mother said. “She’s running them little ’uns square to death, a-taking off through the weeds like a ruffed grouse, a-potter-racking and giving them chicks nary a minute to pick their craws full.”
“That’s their born nature,” Father said. “Guineas are hard raising. Bounden to lose some. Hit’s the same way with folks. Hain’t everybody lives to rattle their bones. Hain’t everybody breathes till their veins get blue as dog-tick stalks.”
“Next guinea eggs I set are going to be under a chicken hen,” Mother said.
I chose a guinea, claiming it for my own, but afterwards I was never sure which one was mine. Euly chose the littlest. Its feathers were covered with pale freckles thick as hops. “Aye, now,” Fletch said, sticking out his lips. “They’re all belongen to me.”
“Just so I get in on the eating,” Father laughed. “I bet one would be good battered and fried, tender as snail horns.”
“Hain’t nigh big enough,” Mother said. “Would be wasting meat.”
Father lifted his head from the crack. There was hunger in his eyes, a longing for meat that our garden patch could not cure. “If I had some gun shells, I’d go hunting a coon,” he said. “I seed some tracks this morning.”
“I got a fine mess o’ squash cooking for dinner,” Mother said.
Father sat down on the meatbox. “Recollect the time we had boiled gourds for dinner?” he asked Mother.
“I do right well. I come across four gourds one day growing behind the barn when we lived on Quicksand Creek. Yeller and pretty they were, looking a sight like summer squash, not having any necks to speak of.”
“Oh them beans tasted like a gall pie. Recollect?”
“Chickens wouldn’t even touch ’em.”
“A fowl’s got a taster like folks. You never seed one peck a gourd.”
Father got off the meatbox and pushed the lid aside. He plowed his hands through the salt lumps. “Hain’t even a pig knuckle here,” he said. “This box holds nothing but a hungry smell.” He dug deeper, straining the loose grains through his fingers. Something clung to his hand, a thin white stripping, a finger wide. “Looks like a johnny-humpback,” he said. It did look like a worm.
“Hell’s bangers,” Father said. “It’s a scrap o’ meat.” He rubbed the salt off and held it up. “Sowbelly,” he said, and it was.
“Wouldn’t fill your hollow tooth,” Mother scoffed. “It’s that little.”
Mother washed the meat string. She held it over the pot. It dangled in her hand. We watched. It looked pine-blank like a johnny-humpback.
“Wait,” Father said. “It hain’t big enough to give a taste to that pile of squash-mush. Bile it up in a little broth for the baby.”
The Butterfly Mine loaded its first gon of coal the last week in June. Word came up the river, drifting back into the creek hollows. Scratchback Mine put fifty men hauling fallen jackrock and setting new timbers. The Elkhorn blew its steam whistle one morning at three o’clock. The blast rose out of Boone’s Fork, across He Creek and She Creek, lifting into the hills of the upper Kentucky River country. A shift of men was going into the diggings for the first time in eight months. Roosters waked, crowing. Our guinea hen flew noisily out of the black birch.
Father got up and lighted a fire in the stove. The shagged splinters trembled in his hands. He piled in wood until flames roared up the rusty pipe. The top of the stove reddened, the cracks and seams of the cast iron becoming alive, traced like rivers on a map’s face. Hoofs clattered along Carr Creek before daylight. Men came down out of the ridges in twos and ones, hats slanted, feet out of the stirrups, riding toward Elkhorn and Scratchback. A pony went by, shoeless, feet whispering on the rocky ground. A man rode bare-bones.
“They’re wanting coal up at the big lakes,” Father said. “Hit’ll be going over the waters to some foreign country land.”
After breakfast Father got out his mine lamp, polished the brass with spit and a woolen sleeve. “Hit’s been a long dry spell,” he said, “but they’ll be working at Blackjack soon. Any day now, aye gonnies. Tipple’s been fixed. A new spur o’ track laid up to the driftmouth. Patched up the camp houses a sight too.”
“It’s only two miles down to Blackjack,” Mother said. “I figger you could walk it of a day. Pity to fotch the baby off into a camp, and it so puny.”
“We’ll get a house yonside of the slag pile this time, away from the smoke,” Father said.
“Smoke blowing and a-blacking, no matter where you set down in Blackjack holler. I recollect the last move we made into the camp. Tobacco cuds stuck in the cracks, snuff dips staining the room corners, and a stink all over. I biled water by the pot and tub, washing and scrubbing, making hit so you could draw a healthy breath.”
“Living here, it’ll get me home after dusty dark. I reckon we ought to move down.”
Father started off toward Blackjack. We watched him move along the creek road, his long restless stride eating dirt, pushing the distance back. The grass birds droned out of the bottom fields as he approached. The fork-turn swallowed him, and we went into the garden to pick bugs. The baby crawled between the bean vines, pulling at the runners. I gave him a wax bean to nibble with his new milk teeth. He gobbled it down, wanting more. I gave him a yellow tomato. He bit it, making a wry face. He sucked the tender pulp cut and then cried because I feared to give him another. Mother came from the far potato rows. She sat down on a crabgrass clump and opened her bosom. The baby jumped in her lap, beating tiny fists in the air.
“He’s might nigh starved,” I said, scared the bean and tomato were going to colic him.
“When your pap sets to work, I can buy me a tonic,” Mother said. “The baby will fatten up then. I been taking ’sang tea, but it does me no good.”
I got more worried the baby would get sick. I made a whistle from a young hickory sprout for him. I found a June bug and tied a sewing thread to its legs, letting him hold the thread while the bug flew around and around, wings humming like a dulcimer string. But Green didn’t get sick. He ate two bean leaves before I could snatch them away.
Father came home in early afternoon. His arms were full of pokes. We ran to meet him, even Mother going down the path a way. We grabbed the pokes Father carried, running ahead, shouting up to Mother, holding the shuck-brown bags aloft. We emptied them on the table. There was a five-pound bucket of lard, with a shoat drawn on the bucket. Brown sugar in a glass jar. A square of sowbelly, thin and hairy. A white-dusty sack of flour, and on it a picture-piece of a woman holding an armful of wheat straws. And there was a tin box of black pepper and a double handful of coffee beans.
We looked in wonder, not being able to speak, knowing only that a great hunger crawled inside of us, and that our tongues were moistening our lips. The smell of meat and parched coffee hung in the room.
“I start digging tomorrow,” Father said, drawing himself tall and straight. The string of red peppers hanging from the rafters tipped his head. “They put my name on the books, and I drawed these victuals out of the commissary on credit.”
A lean hand reached toward the table, blue-veined and bony. It was Mother’s, touching the sugar jar, the red-haired meat, the flour sack. Suddenly she threw an apron over her head, turning away from us. She made hardly a sound, no more than a tick-beetle.
Euly held the sugar jar over the baby’s head, and he reached toward it with both hands. “Twelve pears hanging high,” she said.
“We hain’t moving down to the camp after all,
” Father said. “Leastways, not before winter sets in. That Blackjack school won’t open up till September, I heered.”
Father lighted a fire in the stove. I fetched three buckets of water from the spring, not feeling the weary pull of the hill, not resting between buckets. The nobby heads of the guineas stuck out of the weeds behind the house, potter-racking. The smell of frying meat grew upon the air, growing larger than the thought of ripe pears, or the body of any hunger.
Two Eyes, Two Pennies
“A fair place you’ve got here,” Uncle Lott said. He sat in the kitchen after supper, under the white bloom of the lamp, his chair leaned against the wall. We had moved out of the hills into the coal camp at Houndshell two days before, and he had come to stay a spell with us. His eyes rounded, looking. Three fly-bugs walked stupidly across the ceiling, wings tight against their bodies, drunk with light. Fern peered through the smoky windows into strange dark. Lark crawled around the table, pushing a matchbox, playing it was a coal gon. “Never you lived in such a branfired good house as I’ve got reckoning of,” Uncle Lott said. “Aye gonnies, there’s window glasses looking four directions.” He tipped the blunt end of his mustache with a thumb. It was a knuckle joint long now, combed out stiff and thin, the hairs as coarse as a boar’s whiskers.
“Camp houses setting on three sides and hills blacking the other,” Mother said. “Can’t see a thing beyond.” Her words were dolesome, though not complaining. She glanced at Uncle Lott as she dried the dishpan, and Father looked, too, from where he sat beside the stove. A thready web of veins was bright on Uncle Lott’s cheeks. His hands rested on his knees, fat and tender, and they had none of the leathery look of a miner’s. I remembered then what Mother had said to Father before supper, whispering in the kitchen while Uncle Lott napped in the far room.
“Fifty years old if he’s a day,” she said, “and never done a day’s work. Man of his years ought to be married, keeping his own. A shame he’ll put up on his kin when there’s work a-plenty, not lifting a hand. Oh I always wanted to bring up my chaps honest, never taking a thing unbelonging to them, never taking a grain they don’t earn. It’s folks forever setting bad examples that turns a child wrong.”
Father had frowned. “If Lott ever got started digging—” he began, and then turned away, saying no more.
Lark was listening behind the stove. “Now, I never tuk a thing unbelonging,” he had said.
Father reached into the woodbox for a soft splinter to whittle. Thin slivers curled under the blade of his knife until he held a yellow stalk bright with wooden leaves.
Lark came from under the table to claim the splinter, taking it back for his play. We heard him blowing, shaking the leaves with the wind of his breath.
Father snapped the blade into its case. “It’s a sight how good the mining business is getting,” he said. “Big need for bunker coal up at the lakes, afar yonder. Jobs laying around loose for them with the notion to work.”
Uncle Lott looked frightened. The veins on his cheeks burned full and red.
“Lott, if you want me to speak to Sim Brannon, I will,” Father said. “He’s foreman at Number Two, and the best man to work for I ever had. I was raised up with Sim, and I figure he’ll take on any of my kin if I just say the word.”
“I seed Sim Brannon this morning,” Lark said under the table. “He’s the biggest man ever was.”
Uncle Lott settled the front legs of his chair on the floor. He hooked his thumbs together, pulling one knuckle against the other. A muffled cough came out of his throat. He grunted. “I hain’t been well lately,” he said. “A horn o’ Indian Doctor tonic I’m taking after every meal.”
“I got Harl and Sid Middleton put on today,” Father said. He weighed his words as he spoke. Mother glanced swiftly at him. Her mouth opened in dismay, knowing suddenly that Father’s cousins would come to live at our house, too, making us fretful with their dark and stubborn ways.
“They were setting in wait for me at the drift mouth this morning,” Father went on. “I spoke to Sim Brannon for them. I said, ‘Sim, here’s some of my kin. I’d take it as a favor if you’d give them a little mite o’ something to do.’ And by grabbies if he didn’t put them to snagging jack rock.”
Lark raised his head above the table, holding the shagged splinter aloft, and looking at Uncle Lott. “Recollect the time Harl and Sid cut yore mustache string off?” he asked.
Uncle Lott’s face reddened. He tipped his mustache ends and sat up angrily. “I thought them two were holed up at Yellow Creek mine for the winter,” he grumbled. “I heered somebody say it.”
“The Yellow is just a one-horse mine,” Father said. “Always a-hiring and a-firing.” Then his voice dropped, holding the words low in the small of his throat. He looked guiltily at Mother. “I reckon they’ll be boarding here with us. Might be along hunting a bed tonight.”
Mother’s eyes hollowed. Her hands grew limp about the dishrag. I tried to remember Harl and Sid, wondering why Mother did not want them to board with us. I thought of our four rooms, square and large, believing them enough for us all, and I could not think why Mother would want us to live lonesome and apart. I thought of Harl and Sid and Father sitting before the fire on winter evenings, legs angled back from the blaze, speaking after the way of miners. They would brag a little, drawing back the corners of their mouths. “I loaded four tons today if I shoveled one chunk.” . . . “I heard a little creak-creak, and hell’s bangers if a rock size of a washpot didn’t come down a-front o’ me. Hit scared my gizzard, I tell you.” . . . “I set me a charge o’ dynamite, lit the fuse too short and got knocked flat as a tape.” . . . And Uncle Lott would speak from where he sat behind them, scornful of the mines, telling of what he had heard at the storehouse, and the others would listen as though a child had spoken.
Mother’s lips began to tremble. She hung a dishrag on a peg and went swiftly out of the room, her clothes rustling above the fry of the lamp wick. Father leaned forward in his chair, and then he strode through the door, following Mother.
Fern turned from the window where her hands had been cupped against the light. “I just saw a woman pass along, a-walking by herself,” she said. “I bet she’s the fortuneteller, going somewhere in the dark of the night.”
Uncle Lott’s eyes lighted up. They opened round and wide. “Has she gone beyond sight?” he asked.
“Gone off down the road,” Fern said.
“Rilla Todd, it might o’ been,” Uncle Lott said. “She’s a widow woman, fair as a picture piece. She goes a-traipsing all hours, selling broadsides with verses writ on them.”
“What do them verses say?” I asked.
“They’re writ about her man getting killed in the mines,” Uncle Lott said. “I forget how the lines run, but they’ve got rhymy words on the ends. It’s music not set to notes.”
“Wish I had me a broadside,” I said.
“For any piece o’ money, be it a penny or greenback, she’ll shuck off one from a little deck she’s got,” Uncle Lott said.
Fern turned from the window, blinking at the light. “If I had some money, I’d get my fortune told,” she said, “a-knowing who I’ll marry, dark or fair, and who’ll be coming to my wedding.”
“I know where they’s a mess o’ pennies,” Lark said, “but you’d better not touch ’em.” He held the shaggy splinter high, pointing toward the mantelpiece in the front room. We remembered the four pennies he had found once. They were stacked inside the clock, behind the pendulum. “Was somebody to die, them’s the pennies to put on their eyes,” Lark said.
Uncle Lott laughed, the web of veins ripening on his face. “Never takes more’n two,” he said. “Two eyes, two pennies.”
“Hush,” Fern said, listening. We pricked our ears, hearing only the lamp wick’s clucking for a moment. Then brogans shuffled outside, came nearer, and stopped. There was no sound of feet on the doorsteps. We waited, knowing it was Harl and Sid, wondering how they moved so quietly. Suddenly Fern sprang b
ack from the window, her face paling, fright catching in her throat. Lark dropped the splinter, breaking off the shags. Uncle Lott jumped, too, being as scared as the rest of us. Two faces were pressed against the glass. Eyes looked in through a fog of breath; noses were tight against the pane, looking like wads of dough.
“Them two are born devils,” Uncle Lott said.
“Sim Brannon’s a dog, if there ever was one,” Harl said.
Harl and Sid stood on the porch with Father, kicking heels of mud from their boots, scraping dirt crumbs from hob toes. It was Saturday and they had come home from the mines with silver rattling in their pockets. I heard their feet grinding the floor and I came out from under the porch where I had been hunting doodlebug holes.
“Sim always has been square with me,” Father said, rolling the pouch holding dynamite caps into a ball. “Little troubles are bounden to happen.” He bent down, carving the mud away with the long blade of his knife.
“He’s set us digging a vein not thick as a flitter,” Sid said, his mouth full of scorn. “Hit’s eighty feet off the main tunnel, mixed up with jack rock, and a feller’s got to break his back to wedge in.”
“Feller can’t make brass, a-digging that vein,” Harl said. “For a pretty I’d set a fuse and blow that trap in.”
“Stick and dig,” Father said. “You’re the last fellers tuk on. Sim can’t give a pick and choose. I say dig that coal out, and don’t start pulling any rusties.” He shucked his boots off, taking them under his arm, and went inside in his socks.
I climbed the steps. Harl was shaking his feet like a cat come in out of the dew, his thin lips speaking against Sim Brannon.
“I’ll wash your boots for a penny,” I said, “and shine them till they’ll be nigh like a looking glass.”
They cocked their heads, their eyes dark as chinquapins under the bills of mine caps. “What would you buy with such a bag o’ money?” Sid asked. They laughed, shaking their pockets, jingling their pay.
