MOTHER JONES CLUTCHED HER chest. The floor swayed beneath her as she clanged the telephone back onto its cradle. The planks swooned with the walls, blood lurched in her brain. The call had awoken her—a Union official, delivering the news. The War Department had ordered the United States Army to West Virginia. Not guards or reservists, but crack infantry units.
“War.”
She whispered the word, staggering backward from the telephone, clasping her breast with both hands now. “War.” She felt a terrible wound there, like she’d been hit with a sledge. A grave blow. The hardest she’d felt since ’67, when the yellow jack struck down her little ones, when Memphis was a city of the dead and she dressed each of her children for burial and her husband, too. That wound, never healed—she felt it blow wide open, sending her reeling.
“My babes. My babes.”
Mother’s heart faltered. The whole bedchamber had gone dizzy around her, swimming in dim lamplight. The windows were shuttered and she felt trapped, not just in the room but inside the cage of her own bones, her own failing flesh. She was clawing at her breast. The pain there unutterable, a lead slug or driven pike. Worse. She’d forgotten you could hurt this bad. She couldn’t breathe. Fear, that little snake she’d kept at bay so long, kept lockered and starved, came speeding through her veins, coiling around her ribs, squeezing the very air from her chest, and oh Christ oh Mary she couldn’t breathe.
Mother wanted to make it to the window. To cast open the shutters. To see the black trees and blue streets and white buildings of the capital city, moon-pale in the darkness. They still held such promise, she believed. The prospect of justice on earth. Every man, woman, and child respected, equal in the eyes of the law. The freest state in the history of the world.
She was dying. She wanted to see it all a last time. That dream.
Mother stumbled again and grabbed the bedpost. The window was too far. Her hands were tingling, her fingers numb. Her spirit straining against her bones, her heart trying to hammer its way out of her, to burst through the wound in her chest. Oh Christ oh Mary it hurt.
Is this what it felt like for Sid?
Her hands were curling up like an old crone’s, cramping and seizing. Her feet were leaden, dead in her slippers, her knees giving way, buckling beneath her. She was sliding down the bedpost, grasping it like a lover. Saliva ran from the corner of her mouth, hanging from her chin. She’d been struck down, she had, sure as an assassin’s bullet.
God damn them all. King Coal and the Baldwins and the rest. They wanted the Army, they did. They wanted the cudgel to come down. The hammer. They want the Union to be crushed, buried, never to rise again, no matter how many broken bodies it took.
The walls were shrinking around her, turning dark at the edges. There was not enough air in the room, the house, the world. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to call for help. Her friends downstairs. No sound from her throat, no croak. No breath in her lungs. Her voice had betrayed her, her hands and her feet. Her heart was broken, split like a stone.
Mother lay retching, gasping, clutching her breast. Her temple pressed to the ground. The boards were racing away from her. She could see an opening in the floor, ragged at the edges, trembling like the surface of a well. A portal, hailing her into the long night where her babes slept, her husband. She could almost see the other side, the shadowlands beyond the pale.
She’d thought it was fear stealing her breath, twisting her own ribs around her heart. But here, at the brink, Mother realized she was not afraid to slip the flesh, to walk in those dark and nameless hills. If there be thugs in those lands, she’d fight them, too. The demons and the haints would flee before her. The Devil would know her name.
No, her fear was not for herself, but for those she left behind. Those who still needed her, her words and spirit. Mother closed her eyes. She couldn’t go. Not yet. She must cast her voice across the land once more. She must make herself heard. Perhaps now, with the veil so thin, they might hear her, her voice bridging the expanse. They might listen.
Mother creaked open her iron jaw. She spoke the very name of her heart.
“My boys. My boys.”