Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  Bessie died at home, like she wanted to, with me right there beside her. And after she died, I started reading. The more I read, the madder I got.

  An Act of God. That is what the coal company said had caused the flood, caused that sticky black water to go rushing down the seventeen miles of the Buffalo Creek Valley, tearing out houses and railroad tracks, picking up cars and trucks like they were toys, rubbing out roads and schools and lives.

  An Act of God.

  Now, if I were God, I’d be upset by that. I think I’d be plenty riled up, getting blamed that way. Because that wasn’t any Act of God. It was an Act of Greed.

  What happened was this: The coal company needed someplace to put the waste material. After coal comes out of the mine, it is washed at the tipple, and then it drops into the railroad cars and off it goes. But the waste material that comes off in the washing is a real problem. It’s solid and liquid both—it’s rock and slate and coal waste and black water. Some of it sort of burns and smolders, too, because of the coal. At the Buffalo Creek tipple, which started up in 1947, there was about a thousand tons a day of refuse. They’d truck it over to the mouth of the valley and dump it, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, making a dam of liquids and solids. According to what I read, the dam got to be about two thousand feet high and four hundred feet wide. It must’ve hung over the people in that valley like a bad dream, the worst bad dream in the world. Just a big, awful, oily pile of junk.

  And then it started raining.

  * * *

  Male and female: they died. Fat and skinny: they died. Smart and dumb: they died. Generous and stingy: they died. Good people, bad people: they died. Didn’t matter who you were, or how you were. If you lived in that valley, chances were, you died or saw somebody close to you die.

  A hundred and twenty-five people died that day. More than four thousand people lost their homes and had nowhere to go. A whole community—sixteen coal camps were there in the valley, stretching from Lundale, where we lived, to places like Saunders and Pardee and Latrobe and Robinette and all the rest—wiped out.

  Gone. Just gone.

  The thing is, the coal company knew it wasn’t doing right by that dam. They knew they ought to keep an eye on it, giving that filthy water a way to drain away instead of just letting it build up with all the other crap in there, too, bigger and bigger, higher and higher, more and more dangerous. But they didn’t. They didn’t because they didn’t care. They could make more money if they just let it be. Fixing it, getting rid of that coal waste a different way, would cost money. So they just kept piling up the junk. Who cared about the people of the Buffalo Creek Valley? We were just coal miners and coal miners’ wives and coal miners’ children. We were refuse, no different from the refuse piled up at the mouth of the valley. The coal company let the black wall rise. Until the day when all hell broke loose.

  “People ought to get to die one by one,” Bessie said to me. This was right before she passed. Lying in her bed, desperate to breathe, every breath a rasp and a gurgle, her eyes all blurred up from the painkillers that didn’t really kill the pain but just put it on a high shelf for a while, where she could still see it. “Matter of dignity. People getting to die one by one. Dying in a big gang like that—it ain’t right. Not what the Lord intended.”

  It wasn’t an Act of God. It was a crime. It was mass murder—but nobody went to jail.

  So you can see, can’t you, how I got this darkness in me? This angry part of me, that won’t leave? You can see why I do things sometimes and don’t know why I do them.

  These companies, they want to say that they’re like people. I read about this. They want to say they’re citizens, too, so they can make all these political contributions. Just like people can. Well, fine. But you show me the person who can pay money and stay out of jail for murder. If a company wants to be like a person, then that company ought to be punished just like a person is punished. The president of that coal company, the head of mining operations, the board of directors—they should have been sent to jail for murder.

  They say I killed a man. That is what they say. Well, if I did, then why can’t I just pay a fine like the one the coal company paid, and then be on my way? Tell me. You tell me.

  The coal company paid some money, but nobody went to jail. That’s a crime, too, and maybe a worse one.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Twenty-four

  She was going to be sick. Bell felt the sour acid leap up into her throat, felt her stomach start to lurch and churn, and only through an intense and focused effort was she able to keep from throwing up, right then and there.

  First had come the ringtone. She’d grabbed for the cell with one hand, rubbing her eye with the other. Pulled herself up into a sitting position. Black room. She swung her legs over the edge of her bed. Jesus—why were people always calling her in the middle of the freakin’ night? Daytime was nice, too. Daytime was a perfectly fine time to conduct business. The bedroom floor felt slick and cold under her bare feet; it was like a sidewalk, but not really. Different from that. Was she still dreaming?

  She had listened to the voice on her cell. Heard the words. Absorbed the information, whereupon the bottom fell out of her life.

  The fact that she was sitting meant that she could thrust her head between her knees, fighting the heavy pull of nausea, fighting not to faint. Her body was turning inside out, trying to empty itself. The shock was so tremendous—the initial hit and its reverberations, spiraling out like the frantic arms of a pinwheel—that she was dizzy, unstable. Disbelieving. The floor under her feet was still cold but now it was moving, too; it was wavy, it was undulating, it started to shift and buckle.

  Nick Fogelsong was in critical condition. Gunshot wound to the chest. Not expected to survive.

  * * *

  In the aftermath, Bell would have no clear memory of this day. Other people would tell her that she had done fine in court, that the judge was satisfied, that the trial had gotten off to a solid start, but she would have no independent recollection of any of it. She would only know that she had done her job—and then had gotten the hell out of there. Somehow she had propelled her way through the time, plowed headlong through the hours, until court was recessed for the day and she was able to go to the hospital.

  Mary Sue Fogelsong had reached her on her cell just after three that morning. She delivered the impossible, unbelievable news: Nick, interrupting a drug deal in the parking lot of the Highway Haven, had been shot in the heart. He’d lost a massive amount of blood. He was still in surgery. “Bell,” Mary Sue said, “they don’t think—they won’t say if—They won’t look me in the eye, Bell, and you know what that means. My God—my God, Bell, what’re we going to do if—”

  Bell was groggy, sleep-webbed, when she answered the call, but suddenly she was as alert as she’d ever been in her life. She was grateful for the cold floor beneath her bare feet, glad for its stark bracing hardness. She fought the nausea. Beat it back, thrashed at it. Go away. Not now. She cut off Mary Sue’s last sentence. “Don’t say it. Don’t you say that.” She fumbled for the switch on the lamp, pushing back against the sickness that tried to tilt her sideways. “I’ll be right there.”

  “No,” Mary Sue said. “That trial starts today, doesn’t it? Royce Dillard’s trial.”

  “Screw the trial. I’m coming.”

  “No, Bell—no. He’s likely to be in surgery for a long time. That’s what they told me. There’s no point—you won’t even be able to see him. Nobody can.” Mary Sue had recovered her poise. It was as if, by hearing Bell’s voice, she had found the ground again. “You do what you need to do. Come over later. When you can. If anything happens before then, if it turns out that he—” She stopped herself. “I’ll call you. I will. If I can’t reach you, I’ll tell Lee Ann.”

  “Your word on that.”

  “Yes. Yes. Of course.”

  “Mary Sue,” Bell said, needing to ask one more question. The prosecutor in her was
now wide awake, too. “Did they catch the bastard who shot him? Tell me they got him.”

  “No. They didn’t. They’re still looking. It’s Collier County, which is good.” Mary Sue was—had been—a sheriff’s wife, and she knew that Collier County had seven deputies to Raythune County’s two. It made a difference.

  Dammit, Bell thought, wishing the shooter was in custody, wishing she could have a crack at him. Her anger temporarily displaced her anguish. Then the anguish came surging back, overwhelming her. All at once she wasn’t sure she could stand up. Or speak. Or take her next breath. Breathing seemed beyond her right now, its simple mechanics lost in the blur of the incomprehensible thought that Nick Fogelsong might die.

  My God—he can’t—

  But he could. Of course he could. On or off the job, it was always there, the possibility that this was how it would end. Just as it was for anybody. Nothing guaranteed that our ends would be commensurate with the way we ran our lives, that good people would go with dignity and peace, bad people with chaos and pain. Nothing. And so, Bell realized with sick dread, there was nothing to prevent Nick Fogelsong from dying in the parking lot of a gas station in the middle of the night, and not in a place reminiscent of those noble battlefields that he so loved reading about—San Juan Hill, Little Round Top, the beach at Normandy. He could perish just as easily on a patch of oil-stained concrete, amidst trash pushed around by the wind. Cigarette butts. Beer cans, crushed double.

  “Belfa,” Mary Sue said. Had she sensed Bell’s distress? Did she realize that Bell wasn’t breathing, that she was sitting on the edge of her bed frozen with fear?

  “Belfa,” Mary Sue repeated, and that was the key, somehow, to the unlocking of Bell’s limbs. And her breathing, too. Mary Sue, saying her name. Her real name.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got to go,” Mary Sue said. “And—listen. Listen to me. You know that he’d want you to do your job. You know that. If Nick ever found out that you put a personal tie ahead of your job, why he’d—”

  “He’d skin me alive,” Bell said, and they both had a brief restorative bit of laughter, the kind that skims just enough tension off the top to allow life to go on, even in the wake of catastrophe.

  After Mary Sue hung up, Bell still sat on the bed, holding her cell. She heard a noise. Goldie padded into the room and stood there, looking at her. Bell had completely forgotten she had a dog in her house. Goldie moved closer. Closer still. There was a brief, interrogative tail-wag.

  Before Bell was really aware of what she was doing, she slid down onto the floor, wrapping her arms around Goldie’s torso, burying her face in the thick warm fur of the dog’s side. Then Bell did something that was so unusual for her that she knew the exact number of times—three—that she had done it before, and never in front of another living creature.

  She wept.

  * * *

  Judge Ronnie Barbour was a tall, rangy man who might have been Daniel Boone in a previous life. The first time Bell had handled a case in his courtroom, she’d thought: Switch out the black robe for a fringed buckskin jacket, plop a coonskin cap on his head, and jam a rifle in his hands, and you’d swear you were in the presence of the frontier legend. Barbour had a lean, hard face separated into strips by vertical wrinkles. His eyes were the color of cast iron, his nose was as straight as a sheared-off side of rock ledge. His gray hair was a little too long, and a little too scraggly. He wore it swept back from his forehead and hooked behind his ears. A small scruff of curls crowded up along his collar.

  “Royce Enoch Dillard,” the judge said, “you are hereby charged with the first-degree murder of Edward Jerome Hackel. How do you plead?”

  A flurry of whispers erupted between Serena Crumpler and her client, who was dressed today in a not-new blue suit, white shirt, and pale gray tie. His hair had been parted on the side and wet-combed into temporary submission. Serena hissed something sharp and admonishing in Dillard’s ear, advice he seemed to accept only grudgingly. He stood up straighter, looked down at the defense table, and he said, “I ain’t guilty, if that’s what you’re asking me. But for the record, that Hackel was a lying, no-good sack of—”

  “Thank you, Mr. Dillard.” Judge Barbour turned his black eyes to Serena. “Ms. Crumpler, that’s the last time I will permit a non-responsive addendum by your client. Are we clear?”

  “Clear, sir.”

  “Good. Mrs. Elkins?”

  Bell stood impassively in front of the wooden table, hands clasped, face raised toward Judge Barbour’s high bench. She was wearing a black suit with a black blouse, dark stockings, black heels. So self-contained was her demeanor, so blank her expression, that few people would have guessed that on the inside, she was in utter disarray and mad panic, screaming silently at the possibility that Nick Fogelsong was already dead, that he had died in surgery without regaining consciousness, and that she would never see him again in this life. The things that had kept them separated these last few months—his decision to give up the sheriff’s job, her pride and her anger—were nothing, less than nothing. And she would never be able to tell him so.

  “The county strenuously opposes bail, Your Honor,” she said in a flat voice. “Mr. Dillard is accused of a violent assault that resulted in the death of a husband and father of two children. Mr. Dillard lives alone and has few, if any, ties to the community. Therefore we feel bail should be denied.”

  “Ms. Crumpler?”

  “Mr. Dillard is not a flight risk. He owns property in Raythune County and he has no prior record of any kind.”

  Judge Barbour’s gavel was brought down with a clean stroke between his first and second sentences: “Bail is denied. I know you have several motions, Ms. Crumpler, related to suppression of the evidence collected at Mr. Dillard’s place of residence. I’ll consider those now, and then if there’s time today, we’ll start jury selection.”

  So on it had gone throughout the morning, the motions and counter-motions, the presentations and the objections, as the formal apparatus of a criminal trial creaked and lumbered along like an overloaded wagon, moving in spurts and stops and the occasional surprise turning, covering more distance sideways than forward, or so it seemed. The ancient courtroom with its taupe plaster walls and yellowing pressed-tin ceiling was drafty; cold slipped in through the corners of the old windows. Moisture always gathered on the inside frames of those windows and warped them, leaving long, branching splits in the wood. The frames were painted white every spring but then peeled again the very next winter.

  Bell was aware—half-aware, really—of who was there among the spectators, seeing the faces when she turned away from the judge and went back to the prosecutor’s table. She saw Diana Hackel—eyes moist, lips pinched, arms wrapped around her torso—and she saw Carolyn Runyon. The two women stayed on opposite sides of the courtroom. She saw three or four strangers, men in dark suits, sitting in the row behind Runyon; she assumed they were associated with Mountain Magic. She saw the retired people who haunted the halls of the courthouse and shuffled into almost every trial, looking for diversion, entertainment.

  The ancient radiators under the windows chuckled and sizzled. And on this first day of the proceedings that would determine Royce Dillard’s fate, Bell did what she had to do, said what she needed to say, at the time she needed to say it. Her mind was elsewhere. Rhonda Lovejoy was beside her; she understood that her boss was functioning on professional autopilot and if Bell hesitated, if she forgot what came next, Rhonda would hastily whisper a word or two, reminding her, and Bell would nod and go on.

  Earlier that morning, just before they walked into the courtroom, Rhonda had offered to handle the proceedings of this first day by herself. That way, Bell could be at the hospital. The answer was no—just as Rhonda had known it would be. This was the prosecutor’s job. And Bell Elkins would not, could not, abdicate her responsibilities, despite the fact that the man who had saved her life so many years ago was now fighting for his.

  “Bell,” Serena sa
id, approaching her immediately after Judge Barbour announced a brief lunch recess. “I just got a text about Nick Fogelsong. Oh, my God—I’m so sorry. I know how much he means to you. To the whole county. Is there any word from—”

  “He’s in surgery.” Bell cut her off. She couldn’t talk about it. Not if she hoped to get through the afternoon session. She knew she was being unreasonable, but she resented Serena for even bringing it up. This was her crisis, her tragedy—hers and Nick’s and Mary Sue’s—and she didn’t want anyone else touching it or even being close to it. Or commenting on it. She was afraid that the more people discussed it with her, even to express concern and support, the more real it would become.

  “I’ll agree to a recess for the rest of the day if you want to propose one,” Serena said. She was trying. She didn’t know what to say, what to do, but she was trying.

  “No. Let’s move on.”

  “Are you—”

  “Yes.” Fiercely. “Totally sure.”

  Serena looked at her, sympathy giving way to curiosity. She’d never been able to figure out Bell Elkins. She doubted she ever would. Somehow the courtroom didn’t feel quite so chilly anymore; it was downright balmy, compared to what she’d seen in the prosecutor’s eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  At last it was over. Judge Barbour’s gavel descended with a level bang that left no echo and the atmosphere in the courtroom instantly shifted. It grew slack and disordered, unraveling into separate enclaves of coat-gathering and scarf-knotting and glove-tugging and murmured conversations. Bell rose and reached for the legal pads strewn across the tabletop, but Rhonda, still seated, put a hand on top of her hand and looked up at her, mouthing a single word: Go.

  She would have no memory of the trip to the hospital. Later, it would occur to her that perhaps she should not have been driving in that state of mind; violently preoccupied, she was probably a danger to herself and others. She did not remember turning into the parking lot or running inside or pushing the elevator button with the heel of her hand, punching at it repeatedly and with such force that she would find a bruise there several hours later, and she would stare at the purplish yellow mark on her skin and wonder where the hell it had come from.