by Carson, Tom
Of course the cuke-encumbered miners just hated having the wildcats down there, not only from superstition—“We’re supposed to be bad luck,” Josie said. “Cain’t say what that makes you, Miz B.”—but for the implied reproach. In a vital industry, they were exempt from the draft. Their fool friends Dave and Steve had enlisted anyway, leaving them to share these bowels with Dave or Steve’s uncoupled ball and chain.
Willing to wink patriotically otherwise at the law, management drew the line only at women handling explosives. Viv told me that would’ve provoked a mass walkout, war or no war. I so desperately wanted the image for “To the Ends of the Earth” that I described unidentified “hands” planting a charge, not outright misleading my readers but letting them picture Babe packing dynamite in the plug Josie’d just bored before Viv twisted the detonator. I wouldn’t do it today, but I wouldn’t need to.
As promised, Pam got passed on from crew to crew, gritting my teeth at every wave of a gloved hand or wobble of a headlamp that sent me between two pillars past light-scarred curved rails, barrows’ oncoming trundles, or an acetylene torch’s gassy blue flute solo. Even the rattle of pneumatic drills and hungry gondolas on their way back from the shaft’s base didn’t drown out the dim and, to me, unpredictable blasts when a charge got set off in some other gallery.
Since they couldn’t leave their own jobs to lead me to my next underground heroine, my heart was always in my throat until I spotted an identifiably female strand of cinder-crisped hair straying from a hard hat, an upper loll of overalled but recognizably female bosom above a billowing belly and under a pivoting two-by-four in the gang detailed to roof and timber a passageway between two galleries, a bulge of unmistakably female hip bent over a jackhammer at the face, or an irrevocably female crook-toothed grin at the controls above a rolling caravan of coal-crammed bins. Nothing else proved to me that I too could exist down here.
Then ego stole back in. Even as I crouched, clutched stanchions, or measured my vocal volume for “Babe, can you talk during this?” or “Tell me about yourself, Tess,” the fear I’d now managed to squelch thanks only to their nearness was thrilling me at how I could function. Trust me, there’s nothing like your first day down a coal mine to trigger narcissism’s inner shrieks. It helps one hell of a lot when you know going in it’ll be your only one.
Came noon at last. Since the cars shuttled us back to the big, higher-ceilinged chamber at the shaft’s base for lunch break, Pam’s flooding sense of reprieve (the elevator cage wasn’t moving, but it was there; it could be scrambled onto and its button smacked in a jiffy as everyone else died horrible deaths) was doubtless one culprit in turning me Pamidiot. Another was my small picnic hamper from Riceville’s lone hotel, as out of place among their scuffed and scoured lunchpails as were its contents—biscuits, cold fried chicken, thermos, frayed but clean cloth napkin—among slablike ham sandwiches on bread less white than gray. Just as bad, while I should’ve been and was grateful the wildcats ate as a group, once we were sharing two benches I couldn’t shake a feeling I’d convoked them.
Food makes women talk about sex just as women’s presence makes men think of food. But my God, those Tennessee Gargantuas! Time’s blurred some of their vocabulary but not its lubricity. With a coal-dusted hand, Josie wiped crumbs and a worm of errant fat from her lips: “Now, my Andy was always a Saturday nighter. Two beers at Prew’s an’ it’s hello Mommie with his pants ’round his ankles. An’ now he’s sandily committin’ the sin of O-nan in O-ran.”
“Armored, ain’t he? They ain’t in O-ran anymore.”
“Engineers. But he just better not be dippin’ it in some belly dancer’s snuffbox. He don’t know where that’s been since the Bible.”
“Sunday was always Stevie’s and my day for the old hunchy-punch,” Tess reported. “Man, I felt like a bowling alley. I do hate goin’ to church with nothin’ to look forward to.”
“Nothin’? I can think of somethin’.” Those fingers waggled, and Josie must’ve weighed two hundred pounds! You didn’t want to picture her trips to the devil’s playground. For weeks I couldn’t help it even on mine: those Andean slopes, that overhung El Dorado.
“That ain’t an occasion, Josie. That’s like brushin’ your teeth and callin’ it dinner.”
“Well, I sure ain’t sure how much longer I’m supposed to keep it parked,” said Babe. “On our first date ever, Dave told me I look like Mary As-tor. Live by the sword, die by the sword, what I say.”
“Ain’t Dave stationed at Benning? Shit, that ain’t so far. Meet ’im in Chattanooga and he could Astorize the living whimsy out of you.”
“Naw, they’re gone. Shippin’ out for hairy old England, I think. Anyways, Viv, we know you got nothin’ to complain about. Even with Dolph splashin’ around for pure laughs wherever in the South Pacific.”
“I still got plenty to complain about,” Viv said tensely as I reheard her dawn jeers at the shift boss with new insight. “Dolph done it to me first, you know that. And in peacetime. How ’bout you, Miz Buchanan? We all seen that ring.”
“And we were lookin’ too,” said Tess. “Where’s your man serving?”
“Oh, he’s back in New York.” I was startled. Could I lie Bran out of his dressing gown? Decided I couldn’t. “He’s not part of this, though,” I said clumsily.
“Just sitting it out? Where, Park Avenue?”
I knew it was a movie address and not a real location. “Something like that.”
“Well, now. Lucky you.”
“Could’ve fooled me!” I chirped—and pay close attention, Panama. I’m about to commit the first of two Pamidiocies that only seeing “To the Ends of the Earth” in print cured me of cringing at. “I envy you.”
Two of them snorted and three knocked wood. “Havin’ a good time with us, Miz Buchanan?” Viv asked.
“Sure, who wouldn’t?” I said, misunderstanding. “I can’t help thinking of that old cartoon.”
“I’m sorry. Which old one?”
“You know. With the two miners, and one of them saying, ‘For gosh sakes—here comes Mrs. Roosevelt!’”
Do I bless myself for not saying “In The New Yorker?” Every day. To the last wildcat, eating or not, they looked—and what a surprise this is too—stupefied.
“Why, I’m not sure as I see why that’s funny,” said Viv. “It’s true she ain’t been down here yet. But even Mrs. Roosevelt can’t be ever’where at once.”
“Not even Mrs. Roosevelt,” Babe nodded.
“Anyway you know she would if she could,” said Josie. “She’s just doin’ what her husband cain’t like we are.”
“You know something?” said Tess. “I sometimes sort of tell myself she is here. It helps on them hard days.”
“You too?” said Josie. “And Babe, you?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I’m sorry again,” said Viv to me. “I’ve learned in this war that it takes all kinds. But what is your quarrel with Mrs. Roosevelt?”
“Why, not a thing,” stammered I.
“Then please don’t speak against her in this mine.”
Posted by: Pameleanor
One price I paid was a considering look from Viv as everyone got ready to go back to the face. Discarded helmets seized, gloves replucked and retugged. “You could just wait here if you want, Miz Buchanan,” she offered. “We’ll only be doin’ a lot more of the same, and we know a lady like you ain’t used to the dust. All mornin’ I’d hear you comin’ when I heard you coughin’.”
I wasn’t sure whether the possum’s good opinion of Pam qua Pam was salvageable. The Pamela Buchanan who only materialized when led by a By was the version of me that had to be saved.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Hell, Viv, why don’t you take the afternoon off too? So far’s I can tell, they don’t need you around here at all.”
/>
Not that it matters, since “To the Ends of the Earth” would have been written regardless. Still, who knows? Maybe she was a bit fond of me in my exotic way herself. Her face split in a proud smile.
“Now that’s a point of view. Drink tea,” she suggested. “Maybe go get our hair done.”
“No. Why don’t we go to the movies? See what Myrna Loy’s up to.”
“All right. If that’s what you like to do. Haw!”
“What’s funny, Viv?” Tess turned to ask as the shuttle cars jolted.
“Why, me and Miz Buchanan are goin’ to the picture show. Don’t it look like it, though?” Viv shouted back as we started rattling down the tunnel in earnest.
You could say none of the rest of them ever came back, not in movies or anywhere else. Between them Viv and Josie agreed on at least a half dozen other pits employing wildcats for the duration, something only a summoning telegram from Roy stopped me from confirming. But I’ve never found a history book, Mr. Catton—or Google hit, bikini girl—that mentions the lewd and massive female Tennessee coal miners of World War Two. They’ve stayed underground.
If Eleanor Roosevelt Rigby had only visited them, Tim Cadwaller would’ve had all the documentation he needed. Instead, never reprinted since 1943, by Pamela Buchanan’s “To the Ends of the Earth” is the only record Viv, Tess, Babe, Josie, and their sisters ever existed—unlike Jackie Cochran, Nancy Love, Oveta Culp Hobby, Edith, or for that matter Raoul Aglion, Adrien Tixier, Alexis Leger, and Count Sforza. Reliable news source though Regent’s was at the time, since the revelation that finally sank Roy’s by then moribund magazine two decades later only pertained to the cold war, at least one letter to the editor accused me of making the whole thing up. All Pam can say is that, five years before H*ll*ry Cl*nt*n’s birth—if only as a visitor, if only for a day—I was down in that mine with them.
Posted by: Pam
If not for Roy’s Western Unioned no place like home and no time like now, handed to me in unexpected exchange for the picnic hamper at Riceville’s lone hotel, your Gramela might’ve come back from Tennessee with a more earthshaking tale to tell, not that Regent’s or any other publication would have printed it. In fact, I’d have been lucky Gitmo didn’t exist back then.
I’d nearly forgotten the vague tip I’d passed on by the time Roy and I went out for a bite after putting “To the Ends of the Earth” to bed. His choice of eatery was a Regent’s joke, since nothing made him seem more Ohioan than rejoicing in the Carnegie Deli after spending half his life in Manhattan. Long after the war, when I suggested popping in for some cheesecake to his ex and my agent, Cath Charters goggled as if I’d asked Queen Elizabeth whether she’d like her picture snapped at the Tower of London. Then she hailed a cab to introduce me to a chic pâtisserie four avenues over that came and went in a year, nicely summing up the difference (taxi too? Taxi too, since we could’ve walked it in less time) in how those two Midwestern transplants took to New York.
Anyhow, Roy’s gaze ignited with back-burner concern after his last pleased burp of pastrami. “Something I can’t forget to tell you. That girl whose family got kicked off their land? It never happened and you didn’t hear it. My confidential sources went mesugar.”
“Meshuggah,” our ancient waiter growled as he slapped down the bill. “Jesus.”
Only two weeks later, I needed a blink or two. Babe! Who did indeed look like Mary Astor if you’d knocked out one of Mary Astor’s front teeth, given her a voice like syrup, and steamrollered her face on a very wide piece of bubble gum. When I’d crouched down next to her in midafternoon, she’d been laying ventilation pipe.
“Can you talk during this?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Tell me about yourself. Where’s your family?” In that bygone America, believe it or not, knowing where people came from was still widely believed to establish something useful about them.
Well, that was a story. Marriage had brought her to Riceville, but her kin had owned land nearby for a century. Now they were in a Knoxville boardinghouse and unhappy about it, notwithstanding that Uncle Paul had already found work in a sawmill. The government had ejected them and dozens of other families in Roane and Anderson Counties just weeks earlier.
“And we don’t know why and we ain’t supposed to talk about it, even to complain,” said Babe in three-quarter profile, her irritated eyes the two “a”’s in Mary Astor’s name as she huffed. “I bet Mrs. Roosevelt don’t know. There’d be hell to pay if she did! We’re Americans.”
Oh, Panama! The Manhattan Project. Babe was talking about Oak Ridge. Our government had taken over those tracts of land in eastern Tennessee to build the plants that were going to produce the enriched uranium for Fat Man and Little Boy out of anyone’s sight. Ten miles from where we knelt in darkness, the appalling future that crowned our victory was hauling its engines into place.
That bomb never went off in your Gramela’s work, then nor ever. “They even wanted Babe’s real name,” Roy warned. “Luckily, I could tell them in all honesty I didn’t know it. But Regent’s is now officially sworn to secrecy, you at the top of the list. I vouched for your ability to put any and all disquieting intimations in your war reporting out of your head, but don’t be too surprised if someone looks you up to make sure. Shall we go?”
Once we’d parted—hatless Roy headed at a fast clip (the pastrami must’ve protested) back to the office, Pam on her bundled way to the Plaza for a newly apprehensive drink with Oliver Watson, my newly acquired divorce lawyer—I found myself waiting on a light at 57th and 7th next to a familiar profile, furred for a concert and coiffed for a beheading.
I suspect we’d both have preferred pretending the other was a museum display. But you can only sneak so many peeks before you mistime one. “Hello, Mrs. H.,” I said a tad grimly.
“Oh! Hello, little Pamela,” said the Lotus Eater. “Dreadful slush, isn’t it? At least your shoes won’t be much of a sacrifice. Are you going to the Ellington concert? No, you can’t be in that.”
I was in my perfectly respectable daytime pumps, Rosalind Russellish skirt suit and camel coat, and deep enough into my career to feel bewildered by the reminder that some women still had a use for evening gowns, jewels, and satin heels. She was forty and extravagantly moneyed, thanks to the surprisingly kindly looking gent who’d pulled off a glove to beamingly prepare for an introduction his wife didn’t want to make. Now he was doing his best to mistake it for a white kitten with five playful feet. Unlike the L.E., he looked as if he might be looking forward to Duke Ellington’s music, not merely adding his starched and studded shirtfront to the de rigueur event the herd across 57th was pawing each other’s bracelets to congratulate itself for attending.
“I’ve been,” I said, which was true. Bikini girl, I’m sorry I dismayed your dad by confessing I don’t much remember it. We were all simply living our lives, for God’s sake! Not deliberately trotting from one of Tim’s future stations of the 20th-century cross to the next. Joy Sterling long since forgiven, Jimmy Bond had taken me to the debut concert two nights earlier. Then he’d written the Regent’s appraisal—“Taking the Genteel Train,” a knock at the Carnegie crowd’s belief that its plaudits were in any sense a promotion for Ellington—that drew a few protesting letters from the East Side when it came out in the same issue as “To the Ends of the Earth.”
“Why, then! Then good for you to show the flag in spite of your domestic troubles,” said the Lotus Eater. “Of course I haven’t seen Bran Murphy since—oh, sometime in the Twenties. But I have to admit I’m surprised my old beau took so long to realize you’ve got more hair on your chest than he does.”
“Excuse me?”
“Good Lord, it’s a compliment. I know I couldn’t have done all that scrambling around for Regent’s at your age. Too frightened every last minute. That’s death! Wouldn’t your mother be proud o
f you, though?”
“Oh, you’re Pamela Buchanan!” her husband eagerly broke in as the light changed. “Such a pleasure, I’m afraid I’m an avid—”
The L.E. and I were glaring at each other, ignoring the mink and velvet swarm toward condescension. “Why don’t you go ask her, you witch?” I said. “You know where to find her.”
It shook the Lotus Eater more than I’d have believed the Lotus Eater could be shaken. “You were so little. You misunderstood everything—saw it all exactly backwards,” she blurted wretchedly, her face newly Camilled in its chinchilla collar. Then she and her husband plashed through the slush as Pam stood there baffled by whether I’d just heard an honest delusion or the L.E.’s last trick.
While I probably caught sight of her in Manhattan a half dozen times afterward between then and the Sixties, I don’t recall us ever exchanging another word but for arctic greetings when the igloo was too confining for mutual obliviousness. But by Roy’s and my final meal at the Carnegie Deli, which was in late ’66 or early ’67—my God, twenty-four years after “To the Ends of the Earth”—I was in a sable coat myself. Cadwaller’s gift on our eighth anniversary.
I’d just come from Cath Charters’ office after signing my contract for luckless but lovable Lucky for the Sun, something I knew better than to mention. The informal contest between them over expat Ohioism and pastless New Yorkery had been settled on Cath’s terms. Its sine qua non had been that they both were successes and Roy was one no longer. Most likely he’d have retired by then anyway, but he hadn’t expected to do so in disgrace as his magazine foundered.
