The Truce

by Angie Smibert

  And Mr. Sherman.

  But she’d also known what to do wasn’t the real problem either. “Mamaw, I can’t bear some of the stories,” she finally said. Especially if they’re about Uncle Ash dying.

  “Ah, Bone, honey,” Mamaw said. “You’re kindly like that hot rod Mattie drives. Don’t be afraid of the power under your own hood.”

  It wasn’t the power she was afraid of, exactly. It was feeling all those bad things—like she did when she saw Mama die. She lost her all over again, and it about drowned her. She wasn’t ready to feel that way again, especially about Uncle Ash.

  It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him.

  “You’ve had more than your fair share of loss.” Mamaw took her hand. “But I expect that’s another reason how come you got this Gift. You’re strong, and what you’ve been through will help you help other folks.”

  “Help tell their stories?” Bone sighed. That was easier said than done. But it was her Gift. And if Uncle Ash was truly gone, she’d want his story told. She’d want to tell it herself.

  Mamaw kissed Bone’s forehead as she rose to pour herself another cup of tea.

  “Who will take over all this?” Bone swept her hand around the cabin. Not only did the shelves brim with the fruits of Mamaw’s labor, but folks needed her. They drove from all over to get a salve to ease their arthritis, a syrup to fight a cold, or a tea to help with their monthlies.

  “I’d hoped one of my granddaughters would’ve had the same Gift.” Mamaw pushed a white cookie toward Bone. “But Poppy, Queenie’s granddaughter, wants to learn.”

  That made Bone happy. All this magic her grandmother grew, distilled, infused, and loved shouldn’t disappear from the world. And Poppy had the right name for the job.

  The cookies tasted like butter and the tea like peppermint. That made her think of Uncle Ash again. “I keep expecting him to come through that back door with Corolla.”

  Mamaw nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  Bone needed to read that dog tag. She needed to tell his story.

  BY THE TIME MAMAW DROPPED Bone at the boardinghouse, the sheriff had come and gone.

  And Uncle Junior was waiting for her—alone—in the parlor. The fire crackled, and the radio was playing the war news.

  He opened his hand. A single round pewter dog tag with bits of leather cord lay in his palm. The tag said SGT ASH REED on it sure enough.

  Bone had seen one like it around Uncle Ash’s neck many a time. He probably hadn’t taken it off since the Great War.

  “Uncle Ash told me never to touch them.” She knew she needed to, though.

  Junior clenched the tag in his fist. “I know it’s asking a lot, Bone. I’ve thought long and hard about this. I’d never ask it if I didn’t think it was him.” He opened his hand again, the outline of the tag dug into his palm like a trench. “I need to know who killed Ash.”

  She’d thought about it, too. She’d thought about how horrible it would be to see her favorite person in the world die. She shook herself. It wasn’t him. But she needed to know for sure—for herself, for Uncle Junior, and for Mr. Sherman.

  Bone held her hand over the tag. A powerful wave of feelings hit her. Surprise. Blackness. Anger. Sadness. It had a familiar yet foreign feel at the same time. She snatched her hand back.

  “Bone?” Uncle Junior asked quietly. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to do this.” He took the dog tag back.

  Bone held her hand out, and he gently placed the disk in hers.

  Images flooded her. She took a deep breath and asked a question, just like Uncle Ash had taught her. What happened to you? In the darkness, something rumbled. Rocks, coal fell like a black waterfall. Then came nothingness. Bone pushed back a little farther back. Where were you before this? The heat was sweltering in a small, cramped space. Men laughed. Loud music thundered over the roar of an engine. Everything felt like it was going to smother him…her. Standing, the wearer popped his head up into the fresh, yet still sweltering air. Bone felt his exhilaration as they raced and bounced across enormous sand dunes. He licked the salt from his lips. The sand blasted his skin, but he didn’t care. He was free as a dog running along a beach. Sweat rolled down Bone’s face.

  Then everything jerked to a stop—and he wasn’t free anymore. Men in different uniforms pointed guns at him—and he didn’t seem entirely unhappy about it.

  Who are you? She still couldn’t really see his face.

  A fair-haired woman twirled by in a wedding dress. Towheaded children kicked a ball across a green field, strange black dogs bounding with them after it. A blur of stone buildings. Singing. Snowcapped mountains in the background. Men drinking big glasses of beer. And uniforms Bone didn’t recognize.

  “Is it Ash?” Uncle Junior whispered.

  Bone was about to shake her head. Then the scene shifted as if in answer to his question. Snow fell on muddy trenches. Running, dogs on his heels. The mud splatting as bullets whizzed into the sides of the trench. Mortars exploding. Deafening roar. Diving into a hole. Loud thud overhead. Rumbling. Darkness. Panic. Guns echoing above.

  Bone set the dog tag down. They were the guns in Uncle Ash’s head, what he’d heard when he was trapped in the tunnel.

  “I see the Battle of Cambrai…” She saw so much else, though. Someone else?

  Uncle Junior sunk to the floor.

  “There’s other stuff that doesn’t make sense,” Bone said. But Uncle Ash was wearing this tag when he’d gotten buried alive in that tunnel in 1917. The other memories came after that, didn’t they? Where did they come from? Had Uncle Ash been in the desert? Bone picked up the tag again, holding it just by the leather cord. She pictured Uncle Ash worrying his dog tags whenever he talked about the war, which wasn’t often.

  Dog tags. Plural.

  “Where’s his other tag?” Bone asked. Uncle Ash wore two tags, one like this and the other a bit bigger. She could see him tucking them into his red flannel shirt—and lighting a shaky Lucky Strike.

  Uncle Junior looked up, a glint of hope in his eyes.

  Bone told him about the other things she’d seen. The desert. The woman. The kids. The dogs.

  “You’ve got the damnedest Gift, Bone,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. “That last part don’t sound like Ash.”

  Bone threw up her hands in confusion. She couldn’t see the wearer clearly. That puzzled her. The last memories didn’t feel like Uncle Ash’s, though.

  “Did you see who killed him?” Uncle Junior whispered.

  She asked the tag. It showed her a train pulling away. The man stepped out of the darkness, and something hit him from behind. Then the coal fell.

  But one thing was sure. The wearer died under the tipple at Big Vein.

  That’s the only place rocks or coal rained down like water.

  BONE COULDN’T SLEEP for thinking about what she’d seen in that dog tag. It was telling her a jumbled-up jigsaw puzzle of a story—with big chunks missing. She leafed through the pieces in her mind, turning them every which way trying to force them together. Finally, she grasped at an edge piece: what happened at the tipple. She could start there. She needed to know more about it, and Jake and Clay had cleaned up a mess of coal under the tipple two days later.

  Bone lay in bed until she heard Uncle Junior quietly go down the stairs. Mrs. Price was stirring in the kitchen making his breakfast. Bone quickly got dressed and crept down the back stairs.

  Mrs. Price flipped eggs over in the cast-iron skillet, bacon sizzling alongside them. Bone’s stomach grumbled.

  “Bone, what are you doing up at the crack of dawn?” Uncle Junior asked over the morning paper. He was wearing his bank clothes, and his dinner bucket sat on the counter, waiting for him.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Bone answered. She touched the bucket lightly, bracing herself, but all she saw was Uncle Junior sitting in the cut in t
he near dark, eating a fried bologna sandwich, the beam from his headlamp bouncing off the dark walls of the mine as he laughed at a story Daddy told him. When he was done eating, he wiped away the crumbs and laid one hand on the dank surface of a wall. Inside his head, he could see dark veins of coal spidering through the mountain. “We need to blast up thataway,” he told Daddy. And they did.

  Bone smiled seeing a glimpse of Uncle Junior’s Gift in action.

  Mrs. Price laid a plate of eggs and bacon in front of Uncle Junior and another in front of her own place at the table. “What can I get you, honey?”

  “Bacon and maybe some toast,” Bone said, slipping into her chair. She didn’t think she could stomach the eggs, but the bacon did smell good.

  Mrs. Price took the bacon and toast off her plate and set it on one for Bone.

  Uncle Junior poked at his egg as he read the paper. Bone nibbled her toast while Mrs. Price dropped more bacon into the pan.

  “Uncle Junior?” Bone asked.

  “Hmm?” He looked up from the war news.

  “How does the tipple work?” There was still something niggling at Bone about the whole business under the tipple, besides of course somebody dying under it.

  Uncle Junior laid the paper down. “It loads the coal on the trains.”

  “I know, but how?” Bone bit into a crisp piece of bacon.

  Mrs. Price exchanged a look with Uncle Junior as she refilled his coffee.

  Uncle Junior stared at Bone for a moment before the light bulb came on. “Why don’t you walk me to work?” He gulped down his coffee as he rose. Mrs. Price handed him his lunch pail—and an extra piece of toast—as he pulled on his jacket. “We can talk shop on the way.”

  Bone gobbled down the rest of her bacon before grabbing her coat from the peg in the back hallway.

  * * *

  Outside, the sky was still coal black, and the air was sharp. Right airish, some folks would call it. The gravel crunched under their feet as they walked up the road to the mine.

  “You thinking about what you saw?” Uncle Junior asked.

  “Yes. Pieces of the story don’t fit together. It’s like Uncle Ash wore the tag, but so did a completely different person.” Bone turned up the collar of her coat. “But whoever it was, he died under the tipple.”

  Soon they were standing in front of the mine—and the sun was just beginning to peek over the mountain to the east. Uncle Junior clicked on his mining lamp and shone it at the tipple. The structure stretched across the train tracks and one lane of gravel road like a covered bridge over a small stream.

  “Some part of the tipple runs most of the time during a shift. We fill up the mine cars down below, and a conveyor belt carries them up from the mine. We used to have to send them up there and tip them over ourselves. That’s why it’s called a tipple.” Uncle Junior pointed to the side of the covered bridge-like structure that was closest to the mine. “Nowadays the outside man throws a lever, and the mine car opens up and drops its load into the crusher. It breaks the coal down into different-sized pieces, and they get sorted and washed. Then they get dumped into holding bins, waiting on the trains and trucks.” He shone his light on the part of the bridge over the tracks. “When a train or truck comes, the outside man flips another lever to load the hoppers and drop the coal.”

  Right now, the conveyors, crushers, and bins were quiet.

  “Anybody ever stolen coal off the tipple?” Bone studied the tipple. She’d seen it a thousand times but never really looked at it. Somehow getting to the coal this way didn’t seem likely—or else it was a lot of work.

  “Not that I recall.” Uncle Junior studied the tipple, too. “But during the Depression folks stole it right off the trains. Usually when they were in the railyard or on a side spur like this one. Sometimes the railroad leaves coal cars on the spur until there’s enough to make the trip worthwhile.”

  The coal cars were never covered. Someone could easily scoop up some coal at night from a parked train—or one that was being loaded.

  “You going to school?” Junior asked. He shone his light on Bone.

  She shrugged. She still wanted to talk to Jake and Clay, but she didn’t want to sit through class all day.

  Uncle Junior clicked off his mining lamp. “I’ll do a little snooping myself,” he added thoughtfully. “Something’s bothering me about this, too.” He pecked her on the forehead and headed toward the change house.

  * * *

  Bone lingered, staring at the tipple as the early fingers of sunlight began to illuminate it.

  If someone was stealing coal, why not take it off a parked coal car? Stealing off the tipple, even late on a Saturday night, seemed like more trouble than it was worth. And somebody was bound to have seen something. Perhaps somebody did.

  Bone walked back to the school and parked herself on one of the picnic tables.

  Ruby and the Little Jewels were coming up the road, bundled against the chill. Ruby stopped but waved Opal and Pearl to go on in.

  “How can you go to school like nothing happened?” Bone asked.

  Ruby frowned. “Mother is forcing me,” she said finally. “She wants to make sure Robbie Matthews asks me to the dance.”

  Bone sprang off the picnic table. “How can she be thinking about that now?” Aunt Mattie obviously didn’t care a wit about Uncle Ash, her own brother. How could she ever have declared a truce with Mattie?

  “Really, I think she just wants me out of the house.” Ruby shivered. “Coming in?”

  Bone shook her head. “Tell Jake and Clay to meet me Saturday night after supper. Me and Will are going to stake out the tipple.” It felt good to at least be doing something.

  Ruby started to answer, but Robbie Matthews sidled up beside her. “I got something to ask you,” he told her, ignoring Bone. He guided Ruby toward the classroom door.

  “I’ll tell them,” Ruby called over her shoulder.

  Bone stomped back toward the boardinghouse. She had half a mind to stop by the parsonage and give Aunt Mattie another piece of her mind.

  She didn’t.

  MRS. PRICE KEPT BONE BUSY most of Friday and Saturday, baking, cleaning, and washing clothes for the impending funeral. It was just as well. All she could think about, all she wanted to think about, was solving this mystery. Who was this man? What happened to him?

  It was not Uncle Ash—even though folks were going to bury that body like it was him.

  * * *

  Come Saturday evening, Will knocked on the back door of the boardinghouse as usual. She slipped out without anyone noticing. They were all lost in their own thoughts.

  Uncle Ash would’ve noticed—and probably followed them.

  Jake and Clay—and, to Bone’s surprise, Ruby—were waiting up the road. Ruby held out a thermos. “Hot chocolate,” she whispered. It was chilly, and the breeze blowing down the mountain was icy. Ruby shivered in her skirt and bare legs, but she did bring an old blanket.

  “Bet you wish you owned a pair of dungarees about now,” Bone whispered back.

  Will pointed to the woods and pressed a finger to his lips.

  “Hot dog.” Jake elbowed Clay. “We’re gonna be regular Sherlock Holmeses.”

  “Hush,” Bone told the Sherlocks and herded them toward the trees. Once they were a few feet into the woods, Bone flicked on the flashlight. Will led the way to the spot he’d staked out on the edge of the woods across from the tipple. Bone clicked off the light, and Ruby spread out the blanket. The boys scoffed at it—until they had sat on the cold ground for about five minutes. Soon everyone was crowded on the blanket. Will shaded the light as he checked his watch: 8:07. The only sounds were the river below—and the distant chug of the train still miles away.

  “Will,” Bone said. “Something’s been bothering me about what Mr. Matthews said.”

  Will cocked his head to one side.


  “You found the body and it had rock dust all over it. Mr. M said it would eat away the body like in the movies.”

  Jake laughed, and Clay socked him on the arm.

  “Shush,” Ruby said.

  “Why’s that funny?” Bone whispered.

  Will whispered back, “Rock dust ain’t the same as quicklime.”

  “Rock dust is ground-up limestone,” Clay explained.

  “Miners get that on them all the time,” Jake said. “Doesn’t eat their faces off.”

  “Oh!” Bone said. “But quicklime would?”

  Will nodded.

  Somebody evidently thought covering the body in rock dust would destroy the evidence. That somebody, though, didn’t know the difference between lime and quicklime.

  “Don’t think the mine even has quicklime anymore,” Clay said. In the old days, he explained, quicklime was used to break up rock—before dynamite. Some folks used it mixed in fertilizer or to tan hides, too.

  “How did Mr. Matthews not know the difference?” Ruby asked.

  This time Will laughed. “Never seen him down the mines.”

  The boys agreed. “Never saw him up top neither,” Jake added.

  Big surprise that Robbie Matthews’s father didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Will tapped his watch again: 8:13.

  Moonlight shone on the tipple.

  A screech shattered the silence.

  Ruby about jumped out of her skin, spilling hot chocolate on Jake.

  “It’s just a barn owl,” Bone whispered.

  “I knew that.” Ruby dabbed up the hot chocolate with the edge of the blanket.

  “Well, I about peed my pants,” Clay said.

  Jake punched him in the shoulder. “Me, too. Granddaddy says they’re an omen of death.”

  Will leaned in. “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?” Bone asked.

  “Owl.”

  “Owl who?”