Beneath the Apple Leaves

by Harmony Verna

  Andrew glared at the man, pulled his gaze to the stalls. “When you turn so soft, Kijek?” he asked acidly.

  “Ain’t soft, son.” He patted the young man on the shoulder. “But a dog knows when he’s owned.” Kijek turned back to his box of rusty tools. “Out with you now. Get to school and cool down. You can trim the hooves when you get back.”

  * * *

  In class, Andrew was restless, still agitated from the morning. He was the only son of a coal miner who still attended school at his age and he’d graduate in the spring, top of his class. Most boys followed their fathers underground by the time they were fourteen.

  Seated in the back row, he ignored the lessons and filled out the college application. He tried not to think of the beaten mule and the old man who cared for her. Instead, Andrew focused on what he planned to become. He would not pick coal. He would not work for a mine that charged a man for the tools he used or broke—for a mine that put the value of black rock above a man or animal. He’d work and study and build a place in the country for his parents—a place where his mother’s flowers wouldn’t wilt from bad air and where his father could sit under the sun until his skin tanned and wrinkled.

  He pressed the pen harder into the paper. The mine company controlled all. They owned the houses; they owned the wood in the forest and the coal underground; they owned the bank and school and post office. They owned the miners and the food they ate. Andrew would not be owned.

  A tap came to his shoulder and he looked up, startled. The classroom was empty save for Miss Kenyon, who hovered over his desk. He hadn’t even heard the other students leave. “Want to tell me what you’ve been working on for half the day?” she asked.

  He handed her the college application and she smiled. “Good.” She read through his answers and folded the paper neatly. “You deserve better, Andrew. You’re a special young man.” Miss Kenyon was only a few years older than he and a slight blush came to her cheeks with the compliment. “I’d like to write you a personal reference, if I may.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Thank you.”

  “I’ll do it today, then mail it out for you.” She reached for a handkerchief just as a sneeze erupted. “Sure enough, caught my first cold of the season.” The coal stove in the corner had chilled and she shivered. “Would you mind refilling the coal chute for me before you go?”

  Outside the school, Andrew returned the shovel to the toolshed. Two tiny shoes jutted out from behind a skinny oak tree. He inched his way over to the child, wiping his sooty hands on his trousers. “Denisa, what are you still doing here?”

  The little girl shrugged her shoulders and didn’t look up. Andrew knelt in the cold grass to meet her at eye level, waited for her to speak. She shrugged again and finally raised her weary face. “Jus’ tired.”

  Andrew glanced at the thin dress and the scratches and bruises along her stockingless legs. “You eat supper?”

  She shook her head.

  “Breakfast?”

  The tiny shoulders shrugged again. Andrew scratched his temple. Denisa was the youngest of ten children, her mother a widow who worked a ten-hour laundry shift at the boardinghouse. Andrew opened up his food pail, pulled out the sandwich crusts he was saving for the hogs. “It’s not much, but—”

  Denisa grabbed the bread and stuffed the crusts into her mouth, chewed fiercely in case one tried to escape. She swallowed, licked the crumbs from her lips, shamefaced.

  He tapped her on the knee. “Come to our house from now on. If you’re hungry, you come over, all right?” The girl nodded, her tongue dabbing the corner of her mouth for a final morsel.

  Andrew turned and curled his back. “Now, up you go, girlie.” When she didn’t move, he slapped his shoulders. “Come on! Giddyap time.”

  The tiny hands clutched his shoulders as she climbed upon his strong back. He glanced back to a full grin as she wrapped her arms around his neck and he straightened, supporting her legs with the crook of his arms as he took off with a bouncing trot.

  Along the road, his worn boots crushed the pebbly ground toward the first houses of the patch. He breathed heavily against the steely air and hoped the child was warm enough. The air promised snow and he glanced into the gray sky expecting to see flakes.

  A whistle cut the air in two.

  The shrill tone pierced the eardrum. Denisa’s nails dug into his shoulders. Movement stopped. Breathing halted. Eyes turned automatically toward the blank distance of the mine center.

  The whistle wailed again.

  Denisa started to weep; four of her brothers were down there. Andrew put her to the ground, his heart thundering in his chest. He clutched her by the shoulders. “Go home, Denisa. Do you understand?” She nodded stiffly, her chin wrinkled. “Only home.”

  He let go of her shoulders and then he ran. The sound of his boots running thumped in his head, chased him. There were no thoughts. Just running forward. The pounding of his feet below, the brown houses blurring. Running. Running.

  Andrew did not go home. There was no need. Everyone would be at the mine. The whistle blew again and his insides fell. Gray smoke billowed into the sky. Andrew rounded the corner where the next line of houses lay sunk in the valley, one by one, like wooden dominoes. The crowds rushed—waves of mothers, children, men. The mine police—the yellow dogs, they were called—were shouting, barking, pushing people aside for the ambulance wagons.

  Andrew weaved through the bodies, looked for his mother when the first surge of miners crawled out of the black hole. Smoke rose and curled feebly, the choking fumes wafting through the air and stinging the eyes. A woman screamed. Crying, waffling in and around the gray clouds, seeped into the air and shuddered the earth. Through crowding bodies and pushing elbows and hips, Andrew rushed the mine entrance. A policeman grabbed him by the backs of his arms. “You can’t go in there!”

  “My father’s down there!” He struggled against the thick arms that held him tight. He thought of Kijek; he’d be down the shaft with the mules. “I work here!” he shouted.

  An explosion. The ground rattled under their feet. The policeman let go, whistled frantically, waved more officers forward.

  “Andrew!” Carolien Houghton floundered from the crowd, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to her, her body shaking in spasms. “He’s not out yet.” Her voice fluttered high, then dropped. “Okay. It’s okay. He’s just behind. He’s coming, Andrew. He’s coming out. I know it.”

  Blackened men trickled out, coughed and choked and stumbled to find oxygen. The crowd loosened. The stream of miners emerging dwindled. The ambulance wagons sat idle, the horses stiff and immobile with waiting. The dark, moving figures slowed like the last drips from a well pump.

  Until they stopped.

  Carolien Houghton’s hands dropped from her son, her eyes fixed upon the mine’s mouth that would announce her husband’s fate as if with words. Only smoke pillowed now. Nothing more. Nothing.

  Carolien Houghton collapsed to her knees.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lily Morton carried in the firewood, the splinters scraping against her forearms. She loaded the logs into the already-stacked fireplace. The flames jolted up the chimney flue, her face burning with the rush of searing heat. Claire and her husband, Frank, were in town and Lily didn’t have much time.

  The cardboard boxes were already disintegrating, layered in dust and taped at the corners. She picked out the old photos first, tossed them in the fire, the sepia edges browning and curling, the faces cremating. A cry erupted from her throat and her hands trembled with urgency. Get out!

  She lifted the box and shook the contents out into the flames: letters, ancient promissory notes, old deeds, scraps of scribbled paper. Get out! The tears choked as she banished the ghosts. They haunted her, lingered in the old house and clawed at her while she slept. Her skin itched with the curses and she wanted to throw her dress into the sparks, to run naked to the forest, without memories, without thorns.

  The papers—her family’s
slim, ugly history—turned to ash and blew near the rug. Lily was born a Hanson, forced to become a Morton after her sister married. Branded by both, the names seared into her skin and scarred her flesh. Get out! Hanson. Morton. Ugly men and ugly lies now melting in the fires they started.

  Lily picked up the iron poker and stabbed at the logs, shoveled the charcoaled reminders beneath the burning wood. Her tears stopped. The smoke filled her nostrils and tasted like burnt cedar in the back of her throat.

  She sat in front of the fire. She didn’t blink and her eyes grew dry and she was glad for it. She was tired of the tears. People grieved all the time; this she knew. They mourned the loss of family, of lovers. But the wounds healed over time. But for Lily, the grief was reversed. She did not ache for what was taken away but for what was never given. And for this, she did not know how to heal.

  The old Ford pulled into the lane, the engine parts shouting and grunting like an old married couple. Lily tucked the loose hairs behind her ears, put another log in the fireplace and went to the kitchen to start dinner.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ninety-eight miners were killed that day. The fire started from the kerosene torches placed along the mine walls. Kijek had dropped the bales of hay down the hoist to feed the animals stationed underground. A daily habit, except a torch slipped from its bearing and ignited the hay. The miners had their escape route blocked. The dynamite exploded. The workers were suffocated or blown to bits, their bodies disintegrated. Kijek died trying to save his mules. James and Donald McGregor and half the young men from the baseball team were killed. And Frederick Houghton’s remains could only be identified by his brass miner tags.

  The same day as the accident, the call for new miners was sent out across the state. Widows and mothers of the deceased were given thirty days to vacate the housing unless another male in the home was old enough to take a spot underground. And so, a week after his father’s funeral, Andrew Houghton placed his new brass tag around his neck, overlapping the black and warped one of his father, and followed Frederick Houghton’s footsteps into the mine.

  “I won’t have you picking coal. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You never come down here again. Promise?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The memory of those words snapped like brittle sticks as Andrew broke the vow he had made to his father so long ago. And Andrew knew with each sickening step he took into the pit Frederick Houghton writhed in despair.

  Weeks and months passed in unfiltered darkness. There was not enough air in the caves and Andrew’s lungs starved to expand, the weight of the ground above making him claustrophobic, nearly driving him insane. He worked next to the new miners, dark men who kept to themselves and picked at the endless black walls that glistened like oil in the lamplight. And Andrew shoveled the shiny black rocks into the cars, rocks that stunk like poison and crumbled to a fine dust that choked the throat. But it was the lack of air that plagued him. When he opened his mouth to bring in more the coal dust gagged, and when he kept his mouth closed he thought he might pass out. So, he buried his mouth in his shirt and concentrated on each inhale, one after the other, until his ten-hour shift was completed for the day.

  He would not pick coal. He would not be owned by the mine—the words he had recited since childhood. And here he was, underground. But he would not stay in this pit. Andrew shoveled harder, wheezed against the coal dust in defiance. He was better than this. He would not allow a future that stretched plain and dark; a future that would swell with little more than black rock, shoveling and loading, of hunched and broken spine, of cherished and waning sunlight amid a world of darkness. And it was this knowing that kept him from dying every time his body drowned and sank beneath the earth.

  Aboveground, full winter swept into Fayette County subtly as if called forth through the grief of tragedy. The air was cold without snow, a gravel-colored sky with hard wind. Andrew finished his shift and came home, dropped his boots and coat on the narrow porch before entering the house. His mother spoke rarely now, only insignificant details about food or bills, topics that dropped from the tongue mechanically. She wasn’t confined to work underground, but Carolien suffocated just the same.

  In the kitchen, the zinc washbasin waited, the steam from the water rising and glistening the ceiling. Andrew stripped to his waist and knelt. Carolien bent over the strong back and scrubbed the shoulders and the neck with the hard soap and brush. She had done the same ritual to his father for as long as Andrew could remember and now she repeated the service for her son.

  He cringed knowing his mother’s back tweaked with the scrubbing and her hands stung from the soap. He turned his head and tried uselessly again, “You don’t need—” but she gently placed her hand on his crown and turned him forward again until she had finished. Then she stood and handed him the soap and stretched the square sheet that acted as the only wall for privacy.

  Andrew shed the rest of his clothes, stepped naked into the tub, his knees bending against his chest as his six-foot frame contorted to fit. The clear water gleamed black within moments, highlighting the pale skin that hid beneath the soot.

  In the hot water, his muscles relaxed, gave rise to the pain between his shoulder blades and lower vertebrae from constant stooping under the shallow tunnels. He ran his hands along the ripples of the water; the skin along the palms hardened. His fingers were still slender—the fingers of a surgeon, his father had always said. Now the nails were rough, the cuticles black, the object of Andrew’s surgery the endless walls of bituminous coal.

  Andrew rubbed the soap into his neck and his face, plunged his face into the dark water and cleaned his hair. The muscles in his arms and stomach were defined now but left him feeling weak and unhealthy. They were the hard muscles of work that stressed the body instead of strengthening it. He rubbed his arms. He ran a hand through his dark hair. His blue eyes stared back in reflection. The smell of his mother’s cooking brought his stomach rumbling, though the fight to sleep was stronger than that to eat.

  He climbed from the tub and dried off, his skin instantly tight from the harsh soap, and changed for dinner, unclipped the sheet and emptied the black wash water, bucket by bucket, out the front door.

  A plate of roasted rabbit and glazed carrots centered the table. He looked up in surprise at the delicacy and saw his mother had been crying, her face pale with long pink streaks against her cheeks. The woman drifted in a grief-gutted dream and yet this was the first time he had seen her cry.

  She sniffled and shook her head, stared at the browned, dead rabbit, its flesh shiny and taut as the skin over her knuckles. Between them, the night swelled in the house, the cold winter air permeating between termite-ravished boards. Carolien’s eyes lifted to his, held him in a memory. “I’ve made arrangements for us, Andrew.”

  He waited. Under the table, he gripped his knee just to know it was still there.

  “I’ve written my sister, Eveline. In Pittsburgh.” She looked as if she had said enough, as if he understood what she had left out. Her blue irises set in red-rimmed eyes scanned the room as if she were seeing it for the last time. “We can’t stay here.” Her voice deadened. “I can’t live like this anymore.”

  The wind wheezed through the slats. The smell of the food disappeared. His mother folded her hands on the table. “Eveline’s husband, Wilhelm Kiser, has a good job with the railroad. He’s agreed to give you an apprenticeship.”

  The room spun and stood still all at once. “College.” The word simply dribbled out. “I—I have my application in.”

  Her face twisted in near disgust. “College?” Disbelief brought a short laugh to her throat. “Are you a fool, Andrew?

  “Are you?” his mother asked again, sincerely perplexed. “You’re not going to college.” Her tone unrecognizable, foreign and harsh. “You never were.”

  “We were saving.” Andrew’s ears burned. “We have—”

  “We,” she shouted, “have nothing!” Carolien
grabbed the open empty metal box and shook it upside down violently. “You were never going to college, Andrew! Your father was cruel to put those thoughts in your head.”

  His mother’s lost, weary eyes looked as ancient as her twisted fingers. “You can spend the rest of your life picking coal underground or you can take this apprenticeship on the railroad. You have no other options.”

  The college application, the old, worn veterinary books, fanned on his bed caught fire in his mind, burned behind his eyes, the smoke stinging and hot. “I don’t know anything about the railroad.” It was all he could think of to say, his own voice dead.

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re smart and will learn. A job on the railroad pays well.” Her vision grazed the empty chair sitting at the table. “It’s safe.” His mother stretched out her neck as if she were trying to swallow something that did not taste right. “My sister and I aren’t close, Andrew. We haven’t spoken in over a decade. But she’s a good woman and has promised to take care of you in my absence.”

  “Your absence?”

  She broke, sobbed in a short burst. Her head rested upon the heel of her palm and she smacked her forehead ruefully. Her lips stretched over her teeth as she tried to speak. “I can’t . . . I can’t stay here.” Her palm rubbed hard against one bloodshot eye and then the next. “I’m going back to Holland. Your father had enough saved to pay for one ticket.”

  The fire rose up Andrew’s neck again. “He saved that for my schooling.”

  “That’s enough!” She pounded her hand on the table. “I won’t hear of it again, Andrew.” She scanned the tiny kitchen. “I can’t live here without your father. I can’t. I can’t even be in this country anymore. I just want to go home. I hurt all the time.” Her face begged. “I just need to go home.”

  Her crying slowly subsided and she was resolute, the decision made and now accepted. She carved into the rabbit. “My sister sent money for your train ticket. Once I have enough saved, I’ll send for you.” She put the pale meat on his plate, the knife trembling between her fingers. “Will only be for a few years.”