If I’d a knowed before I courted
that love would be so hard on me,
I’d a put my heart in a box of silver
and locked it up with a golden key
– Mountain Ballad
Covington, Virginia
Mid-spring, four years later. Anna crept across the linoleum-covered floor, groping her way toward Ruth’s bed. She hunched down to see if her sister was asleep. The hump under the quilts did not move. She wrapped her reddish blonde hair into a knot and pinned it in place with a tortoise shell comb. It was her mother’s best comb, but Anna needed it. So she took it.
Anna bent low and sneaked quickly across the room. When she opened the window, no breeze dissipated the fishy smell that filled the alley behind the Parson’s house. She hated this town with its black dirt and hovering mountains. Tonight she was leaving. Clint would be at the corner. He had promised to take her to Bristol where streets were paved and dirt was clean, not black or oily. There, men wore suits and had no ringed eyelids, men who offered white hands without coal-filled cuticles. There, she would not have to listen to Ruth carry on about a man who cared not one whit about her.
Ruth was older and, by right, should marry before Anna. Anna did not consider Mona the oldest sister. Mona had left fourteen years ago when Anna was two, too long ago for Anna’s remembering. Ruth and Anna did not know where Mona was, if she had married some stranger or been murdered along some wild trail.
A breeze from Broken Rock Creek picked up. It blew the sheer cotton curtain into the room, bringing with it a strong stench of water poisoned by green mine slush that washed down from Spencer’s Mountain mines. Rancid water came from the east before it merged with streams coming from Turtleback Mountain at the head of the cove. A strong whiff might awaken Ruth. Anna stepped out the window onto ground so wet that a constant damp kept its moss tender. As she reached back inside the window for her clothes, a hand gripped her shoulder. She stifled a scream and fell back against the outside wall.
Ruth, clad only in a gauzy nightgown and underpants, appeared ghostlike from behind the old maple tree.
“Where you think you’re going?” Ruth demanded.
“None of your business,” Anna said. “Get your hand off me.”
“Tell me.” Ruth spit words through her teeth.
Anna jerked away. “Leave me be.”
Clint walked up from the alley that bordered Broken Rock Creek. “What’s going on?” he asked in a loud whisper.
Ruth waited for Anna to answer. When she did not, Ruth spoke to Clint, “She’s been sneaking out for over two weeks after you brought me home. I want to know where she’s going.” She shot an angry look at Anna.
Ruth, twenty-three, stood half-hidden by the maple’s trunk. She crossed her arms over her near-naked bosom and planted her feet. The March chill teased her nipples. She pulled her gown tight and clasped her arms over her breasts so Clint could not see. Her ash-blonde hair hung in clumps on her shoulders, ridged around her face from the thick hairnet she was required to wear when cooking at the drugstore lunch counter. In the shadow, her eyes looked navy blue, almost black, as the clarity of the event she had interrupted emerged.
Anna stood apart from the two, her arms straight against her narrow hips, her hands balled into fists. “You tell her, Clint.” She spread her arms and twirled so Clint could see her purple dress. “You like my new dress?” She grinned.
“This ain’t my doing. This ought to be twixt you two.” Clint etched a line with his shoe across the dirt. Close by the river, an acorn landed like a shot on a tin-roofed cowshed. Anna jumped. Ruth ignored the crack.
“Tell her,” Anna said. Night’s coolness seeped through her dress. “Tell her you love me and not her.” She cocked her head toward Ruth, much like a mockingbird looking for a nest to raid.
Ruth slapped Anna’s cheek. “What do you mean tempting him with your sassy talk?”
This was not how Anna had imagined it. “He wants to marry me and get out of this dirty old town.” She stepped aside for Clint to confirm her answer.
“Marry you?” Ruth sputtered out her response. “Why, you’re just a baby.” She tilted her head and said, “Clint?”
Clint stepped up. “I…” He opened and closed his fists. “I been meaning to tell you, but you seemed so set on our courting.” He lowered his head.
Ruth’s face went white as a full winter moon. “Set?” She raised her voice. “Set?”
“Shh,” Anna whispered. “Don’t wake Pa.”
When Ruth spoke again, her voice was low. “I never asked you to the drugstore morning after morning for me to cook you eggs and sausage.” Anger sputtered her words. “I never walked you home.” She hiccupped. “I never kissed you on the bridge.”
He rubbed his hand over his hair.
“And when will this wedding be?” Ruth asked.
“Tomorrow. What time is it, Clint?” Anna didn’t wait for him to answer. “Today. At the County Seat in Wise.” She took Ruth’s hands in hers. “But you can’t tell Ma or Pa. They won’t understand.”
“What’s to understand?” Ruth slumped against the maple. She stared up at Clint standing by Anna. “You asked me to fry you eggs every morning for the rest of your life. You said so.”
“Ruth,” he said. “It was just talk. Just jawing back and forth. You must’ve known that.”
“No.” Ruth stood up. “I didn’t.”
Clint took Anna’s arm. “Where’s your sack?”
Anna reached into the open window and brought out a pillowcase heavy in the bottom with two folded dresses, underpants and a coat. Clint followed Anna toward the road leading out of the valley.
Ruth’s voice shook as she spoke from the base of the tree. “I’ll tell. I swear. I’ll tell.”
Clint said to nobody, “Not my fault. I ain’t done nothing wrong.” He pulled away from Anna and stuffed his hands into his pants pockets.
Anna turned back and glowered at her older sister, now crouched on all fours. She strode back to face her. She spoke nose to nose so quietly only awakening pre-dawn birds could hear. “You want to make me look like a baby. Well, I’m sixteen now. I’m not thirteen like Mona was.”
“Anna. You’re my little sister.” Ruth dropped her face into her hands. “Running off like that sorry Mona. You were a baby. You can’t remember how bad it was. What it did to Ma and Pa. I was there. I saw it all.”
Anna walked away from Ruth’s voice and followed Clint as he led the way out of Covington.
Sister Sun hears the last of Anna’s reply. She slows her entry over the mountain so as not to shame Ruth in broad daylight. Brother Moon slides down the western sky, intent on making his regular rounds. Neither asks the other about where Great Spirit might be.
Breakline Mining Camp
Seventeen years after the mine at Breakline Camp near the eastern Kentucky border opened, a lone woman walked up from the south. A skinny boy followed, wearing a sharpened hatchet in his belt and carrying a black bag.
Dressed as if she had stepped out of the previous century, the scar-faced woman wore a long cotton skirt banded in purple and blue. A deep pink shirt much too large for her size flapped about her arms. Her dull hair, beginning to streak with grey, had been wound into an untidy knot at the nape of her neck. She no longer walked with life in her step but pulled her feet along in workmen’s boots made heavy by caked dirt from her travels.
While there, she said little to the people of Breakline. Instead, she cleaned and cooked at the yellow three-story house on the rise, a Queen Anne structure, distinguished by its rounded turret covered with purple shakes. When she finished each day, she gathered her due and disappeared up Turtleback. The next morning she walked back in, often with the boy trailing behind. The year was 1937.
Across the big water, Great Spirit watches armies prepare to fight what will become another World War. He calls to leaders who pride themselves on being dogmatic and omnipotent. They stuff their ears with ambition and refuse to pay attention. Great Spirit shudders at their foolishness, at their mistaken conception that they can attain immortality by simply shedding blood.
Hawks played on wind currents, dipping and gliding to stave off boredom. Briar Slocomb, now twelve, perched on an angled limb midway up an oak tree where he could overlook the long hollow and study the scene below.
Breakline Mining Camp spread out through a stretch of dip between Virginia’s Turtleback and Kentucky. A tall tipple rose at the far end of the hollow, near the mouth of the mine. Briar thought it should rightly stand at the center of the community. Without its constant hum, the camp would die.
Angled chutes spread out from the metal tipple like multiple support arms. It was here every hour of every day that coal was crushed, washed and separated from slate. For Briar, the purified coal took on a life of its own once miners axed it from its bed and set it apart. He thought of the tipple’s constant rhythm, whamp, swish, swish, swish, as one breath after another rising from the camp. So strange was this other-worldly music that it imbedded itself in Briar’s memory long after he left his oak for home. Briar came to think of the tipple as a living, breathing thing, a monster nestled within the mountains, a creature that sustained itself on the sooty coal-infested water it spewed through the camp.
The tipple towered over the camp, even shadowing the house where Winston Rafe lived. As supervisor for the three mines owned by Breakline Coal Company, Rafe enjoyed the best of what life offered and used his name and position to see that he got it. Rafe strutted around like he owned every spot of dirt and every person who walked the same path. And he did own everyone, everyone but Briar Slocomb and Briar’s mother Two Tears.
Briar saw himself as true Cherokee, but had he picked up his mother’s medicine book, had he been able to read Cherokee and Tall Corn’s family heritage, he would have known he could not have been Tall Corn’s son. Though not blood Cherokee, his time with Tall Corn had given him a well-developed Cherokee judgment of what to avoid and whom to trust, so he kept out of Rafe’s way. Briar sensed a sorryness within Winston Rafe, as palpable as a summer’s swollen boil.
Briar failed to tell even his mother that he told the camp boys he was “Silent Wolf,” the name his father had given him. Inside, he was “Silent Wolf,” son of Walks in Tall Corn, from the land of the Cherokee somewhere within the Carolinas.
The oak grew off the road to itself. Briar saw it the first time he and Two Tears climbed Turtleback. Huge compared to other trees around it, its limbs clustered so close that wind could not pass through its thick, green leaves. Briar could imagine the wind lifting up and over its top and spiraling into the sky, rocking the stars themselves. The canopy stood as tall as a three-story house and twice as wide. Beneath the thick limbs, ground lay soft with seasons of building moss. It was not the first live oak Briar had seen, but it was the largest. He knew as soon as he saw it that it was his. Amazed at its wide girth, he named the tree “Old Oak.”
Each day, Briar climbed Old Oak, overlooked the valley and watched people who looked not much larger than birds going about their lives. He listened to life that lifted itself out of the valley and merged with the tipple’s singsong lullaby. Hidden within Old Oak’s branches, Briar imagined the music of the valley melding with that of the mountain. Since settling here, he accepted that he was searching for something, some event, some person, anything that would give him the feeling of belonging he had left behind in the Carolinas three winters ago. So far, nothing had spoken to him.
What he had heard spoken in camp taught him not to speak the Cherokee words his mother spoke. “Month of the Planting Moon” or “Month of the Green Corn Moon” became “summer.” Never could he allow himself to think on “Month of the Ripe Corn Moon,” for it was within this month that carelessness had overtaken him and left Briar believing he had killed his father.
Initially, camp boys laughed at his long black hair and strange words. They clustered and shushed each other, then they intoned “Silent Wolf, Silent Wolf,” with each chant growing louder than the last. They chunked clods of dirt at him for being a “dirty Indian.” One, in a fit of laughter, threw a piece of coal at Briar. It struck him behind his left ear. Blood ran down his neck. He crossed the ditch bridge and walked toward the end of the valley. There he used the tipple drain-off to wash the blood away. He scotched the cut with Breakline’s black dirt. The scar reminded him of his mother’s facial scar. He thought of her each time he rubbed the nubby skin. The scar lay hidden beneath his long hair. Once he went to Old Oak, the tree wrapped him in limbs and leaves and hid him from any passersby. Only there did he sit at ease.
In Breakline Mining Camp, Briar hid the secret killing of his father. But for Briar, the past was never dead. It was not even past. He rarely thought in shades of grey. He had left the planting hoe in the cornfield. A slip and it impaled itself beneath Tall Corn’s kneecap. The event was his doing. No amount of telling would convince him different. Deep inside, he knew the truth. He was Tall Corn’s son. His high cheekbones bore that out. He had murdered his father as surely as if he had put a rifle to Tall Corn’s head and pulled the trigger. His carelessness had thrown him into a shadow of himself. That shadow fed on his guilt and grew.
Each day, dusk pushed Briar out of the tree and sent him up the snaking road to Flatland. Each day, he would use his fake bone-handled pocketknife to notch a deep line into Old Oak’s trunk, a reminder that this magnificent tree belonged to him.
Summer days mapped out the same for the mining camp. The ear-shattering whistle pulled miners out of company-owned houses lined up the walking path and led them to the shack where they donned boots, coveralls and hardhats for entering underground. Within minutes, they spilled out and walked stiff-legged to the mine. Each wore a blackened jumper with thick cloth made brittle by days of hardened dirt imbedded from crawling through the tunnels’ mud. Their hardhats, topped with carbide lamps, bobbed with each step. They lined up by twos and boarded trams that shuttled them down slanted rails into the earth. There they remained, hunched over, sometimes crawling on their knees in icy water, to where they whacked black seams of prehistoric oily rock out of tunnel walls with pickaxes and shovels.
Twelve hours later on days without accident or death, the same men trudged out of the hole and removed their mining duds. Several hiked up Turtleback’s side, stripped down, and bathed in tin washtubs they left on the banks of a constant spring. They wound their way back down to their families, with a few stopping by the company store for tobacco, before they faced tending the gardens behind their houses.
Each day, Briar watched camp kids, his age and younger, race down the banks of a ditch that carried dirty water from the chutes. Children chased debris they threw into the ditch to check the water’s speed as it led to the mine pond outside the camp. The ditch, with three wooden bridges interspersed down the valley, spanned no more than four-feet across and three-feet deep. Its water reflected light the color of black glass. The ditch separated unpainted camp houses from rail tracks that carried coal-filled hoppers to B&O railcars and out of the valley.
From his perch within Old Oak, Briar observed a life unlike his own. Girls drew squares in the dirt and jumped one after the other from box to box, their pigtails slapping their backs. Boys formed teams and used a board to knock a chunk of coal into the group and try to outrun each other. A mother would call to an older child to get that baby away from the ditch before he drowned himself. Several children would stop their play, lift the toddler and set him back on his camp house porch.
The scenes of families interacting within their small circles, children laughing and chasing each other back and forth through broom-swept yards, mothers patting children on the head and standing in the doorway waiting for their men to come home, all reminded Briar that he did not know the world of play, that his mother was not a hugging mother. Nor had she ever been.
When he tired of watching camp people, Briar took out the knife Tall Corn had given him and carved animals he remembered from his father’s gunstock. He started his first piece as a full relief mountain lion, but a slip of the blade forced the carving into a wolf, with ears erect and a wispy tail. Into each finished sculpture, he bored a small hole, inserted a piece of twine, and tied it to one of Old Oak’s upper limbs. Over time, if anyone looked close, the tree seemed to be sprouting small animals among its leaves.
On an early June afternoon, voices beneath him drew Briar away from his whittling. He closed his knife and spread flat on the limb, more bobcat than boy. There on the road stood a tall man, his dark hair thick and wavy, and a younger woman, her hair near the color of his mother’s, but brighter. She wore her hair much like his mother’s, wound into a bun, but it sat on top of her head and was held in place with an intricately carved red and black comb.
“That’s it?” the woman asked the man as she surveyed the camp.
Briar looked in the direction she had turned. All looked as it had every day. At Breakline’s center sat the company store. A rectangular mercantile with three steps leading to the long porch with one middle door. The back of the building sat flush against the ground, creating a crawl space under the front where dogs spent days away from the sun.
“It’s just till we get started, hon.” The man placed his hand in the small of her back.
“But, Clint, it’s so dirty.” She stared down the mountainside. “So dingy.”
“But the jobs pay good money.”
Briar squinted as if trying to see the camp through her eyes.
“We’ll put some money aside and move to Bristol. Like I promised.”
“Well, this is sure not Bristol, Clint. It don’t even look like a real town.” She backed away from the man, and Briar watched her face. Furrows creased her brow as she scrutinized the scene below. “Is that black water down the middle of the camp?” She wiped her forehead with her palm. “I hear the streets of Bristol are paved in long black strips with little pebbles on each side and cars and a three-story hotel at the far end.” Her body wavered back and forth. “Even Broken Rock Creek’s not black.”
“That black is pure gold. Gold spilling out of that tipple over yonder,” he said. “Good as that Texas oil you hear about.” He reached for her.
She pulled away and sat on a moss-covered rock beside the road and glanced up. For a moment, Briar feared she had seen him. Clint dropped a cardboard suitcase and knelt in front of her.
“Be patient, Anna.”
“I’m not going down there,” she said. “Covington’s better than this.” She stared again at the camp. Cows roamed from yard to yard. “At least our cow has her own shed.”
“But they ain’t jobs in Covington,” he argued. “Not none for me.”
“This is not what you promised.” She hid her face in her arms.
“No need to cry. This is what we got to do for now.” The man stood. “So let’s get on with it.” He lifted the suitcase.
Briar gripped the limb tighter.
“I already set it up for us to have that house at this end of the valley. Look. It’s the one set apart from the rest. So you can have your own yard.”
“You mean you meant all the time to come here?”
“It worked out that way, Anna. It’s what it has to be for now. So get up and let’s get to walking before dark catches us up here on this mountainside.”
Briar glanced toward the near end of the valley as the two walked down Turtleback. There stood the house, not unlike any other camp house except that it set a good bit farther up the mountainside than those facing the center ditch. Behind it projected a flat rock ledge so white against the dark trees that it looked like a knife scar. All in all, it seemed a much better house than the abandoned church where Briar lived with his mother.
Separating this house from the rest of the camp was Unity Church graveyard, a smattering of graves for the dead with no place to go. Headstones seemed to spill down the mountainside and disappear under the back of Unity Church. He and his mother had never been there. She said Great Spirit would not approve, but Briar wondered.
Briar thought Breakline Camp a bustling place, a city compared to his home on the Carolina mountain where the nearest village was a day’s walk away. Now looking at the mining camp through Anna’s eyes, he had to agree with the woman. Breakline Camp was not a pretty place.
He hid his knife in a deep notch he had cut into Old Oak’s trunk and climbed down as soon as the two were out of sight. He made his way up the road to Flatland where he and his mother stayed. Two Tears would expect him to be there when she returned.
Anna felt judgmental eyes from every direction as she walked through the camp. Damn him. Clint had brought her to live in a long, narrow bowl. He pointed out their square house and left her standing alone while he reported to the commissary. Higher up the mountain, a thick ledge of limestone, much like a scar, cut through the greenery.
Everything around her was black. The road, the dirt, the ditch that separated two rows of houses like the one Clint had claimed for them. She had moved into a world that drew its ugliness from the earth’s core.
A few wives walked the road along the ditch. Each carried a cloth bag with handles in one hand and led a child with the other. The women dressed in their droopy sweaters and lace-up shoes appeared so similar that Anna decided they must have agreed on their costumes before leaving their box houses. With her back to the women, she tucked her pillowcase under her arm and crossed the bridge farthest from the tipple. Its rattling and whomping followed her to the bottom of the steps that led up the rise to the house.
Wooden steps from the road’s end to the porch made the hill less steep. The steps had one landing but no railing. Perhaps Clint could add rails to keep the walk down less dangerous, especially during winter months. Unless the back of the rise slanted more, she could imagine herself trapped inside. A house lower in the valley would have suited her more.
As she climbed the steps, she realized the house was neither down nor up. It wasn’t in the valley. It wasn’t up the mountain. Atop a higher rise and behind the commissary was the home of somebody important, a home so tall it reached for the sky. Anna had dreamed of such a home. Perhaps when they moved to Bristol she would have one.
The house had little inside to make it homey. A dirty horsehair sofa sat against the living room wall. Across the room was a cold pot-bellied stove, a cast iron kettle on its eye. The kitchen had a striped skirt gathered across the opening under the sink. A calendar with a picture of hounds across the top hung on the wall. Anna looked closely. It was a year out of date. The kerosene lamp centered on the metal table had a soot-coated chimney that would require hard scrubbing before it could be used.
Nights when Clint worked the hoot owl shift, Anna read by the lamp. Or she reminisced about what she had left behind. When she thought back on her ma and pa, she saw the reality of her mother’s life. Hers had been a life of acceptance, a woman’s lot. Were Anna to go back to Covington, Ma would tell her that she had made her bed, and now she was to lie in it. She longed to be more like Abraham’s Sarai. Sarai made her own decisions. She ran that hussy Hagar and her bastard son off and changed history.
Breakline was not the life she had bargained for. At the time, she knew no more about the bargain than she knew about making bread dough. She had yearned for the change so intently that she twisted the bargain as truly as had Clint. She wanted out of Covington more than she wanted Clint. Misery was not a congenial companion, but he was a steady one.
On a bleak February day, almost a year into her marriage, Anna pounded on the door of the Queen Anne mansion, calling for help. A hard freeze the night before had iced over the camp and sent tree limbs popping through the dark. A scarred woman opened a slight crack and peeped out the door.
“Juanita White. My neighbor.” Anna panted and grasped her throat. “Having her baby. Its feet are showing. Awful pain and pushing, but nothing’s happening.” Anna paused to catch her breath. “Doc Braxton’s gone. Over the mountain. Into the next county.”
Anna stared at the woman’s facial scars and splotched skin. She wanted to ask her for details that might draw them closer together, woman to woman, so the woman would help Juanita, but she did not ask. A flicker of last year’s pre-dawn argument with Ruth passed across her memory. A woman’s past is a woman’s past.
Two Tears glared at her. “Who are you?”
“Anna Goodman. I don’t know what to do.” Anna wadded her hands into her coat pockets. “Juanita’s going to die. Where’s Mrs. Rafe?”
“Gone.” The woman edged back to close the door.
Anna lifted herself on her tiptoes to see behind the woman, to find Mrs. Rafe. “When will she be back?” The room behind the woman held no light. Anna’s eyes widened. “Oh God, Juanita’s going to die. What can I do?”
“I will come.” She pulled a Cherokee blanket from behind the door and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Get a pint of liquor from the commissary. Tell Gabe it’s for birthing.” She closed the door behind her.
Gabe Shipley hated opening doors. It reminded him of the day he had returned from Georgia. Whoever it was rattled the door again. He hesitated, then unblocked the lock as a memory from five years earlier swept through his mind.
Gabe’s mother opened the commissary door. Jenny Shipley. She entered the commissary with a twelve-year-old Gabe following. Gabe straightened his glasses to peer into the semi-darkness. The place looked empty. He stopped beside his mother and placed his hand on her shoulder. Her emerald green dress lay smooth under his palm. A satin ribbon attached two peacock feathers to the felt hat she wore. The peacock eyes bothered Gabe. He didn’t like being watched. But he had told his mother that she looked beautiful as a princess out to find her prince.
“You’re too sweet, honey.” She ruffled his hair.
He meant his comment to cut, as she often brought another man into their lives. His mother and her one-track mind missed his ridicule, but he grasped her attempt to dissuade him from what was happening.
“Where you going?” he had asked when he found Jenny trying on the dress.
“To see your father next week,” she answered, tugging at the dress waist.
“Where’s that?” He scuffed the toe of his shoe against the floor. At twelve, the only memory he had of his father was a tall man who always had a lit cigarette between his first and second fingers.
“Virginia,” she said. “It’ll be a good trip.”
The bus ride from Macon had tired Gabe. His gangly legs refused to fit between the seats. The Georgia sun had saved its highest temperature for this day. Rhythm of rubber tires on uneven asphalt lulled him. Diesel fumes blew in the windows and nausea set in. He dosed off and on until they changed buses in Atlanta.
From Atlanta, they rode to Chattanooga and on to Bristol. Gabe had hoped his mother intended to stay with his father, that they could be a regular family, one without her newest man Lloyd Freeman. Gabe looked out the window at the Bristol Greyhound Bus Station and saw Freeman’s white Lincoln. At that moment, he saw that his mother’s plan and his were not the same. She didn’t have to speak the words. She had made her choice.
Lloyd Freeman offered his hand to Jenny to help her off the bus. “You must be hungry,” he said and laughed more than he needed. He bought hamburgers and what he called “co-colas.” The cold drink settled Gabe’s stomach, but the car ride from Bristol to Breakline Camp, up and down and around the mountains, stirred Gabe’s queasiness again. He longed for stable ground.
Anna Goodman stood in the cold. Icicles a foot long hung behind her like translucent swords.
“Mrs. Goodman,” Gabe said. “You’re out mighty early. Sun’s not yet over the mountain.”
“I need liquor.” Anna tugged at the screen. It didn’t open.
“Commissary ain’t open yet. Give us a bit.” The panic on the woman’s face made Gabe release the screen.
“I got to have it now. The woman up the house on the hill wants it. Juanita White’s baby ain’t coming right.” She twisted her hands and poked them into her coat pockets. “I ain’t got money. You’ll have to do what you do to take care of it, but I got to have the liquor.” She stepped toward the doorway. The sun announced itself over the mountaintop with stark shafts of light.
“I can’t let you in, Mrs. Goodman. Mr. Rafe’s rules and all, but I’ll get you a pint of shine. Wait here.” He closed the door and disappeared into the store. When he opened the door again, he had a pint jar of clear liquid in his hand. “Don’t you be telling nobody where you got this. Mr. Rafe don’t know. He don’t approve. If his miners need to get drunk, he wants them drunk in Covington at O’Mary’s Bar.” He ran his hand through his red hair as his childhood memories continued to shadow his thoughts.
A tall, slim man dressed in a starched white shirt and grey slacks came out of the commissary’s back office.
“What’re you doing here?” The man lit a Lucky Strike and shook out the match. Smoke breathed out his nostrils.
Gabe, taller than his mother and thinner, moved forward. So. This was his father.
Rafe put on a slack-jawed grin at the sight of his son. “You got your mama’s hair, boy,” Rafe said. The cigarette bobbed in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. He offered his hand. “Been a long time.”
Gabe ignored the invitation and pushed his glasses up his nose with his index finger. He stuck his chin out. He didn’t give his mother a chance to dump him. He took the initiative on his own. “I’m here to stay. Ma’s new man says he won’t feed no other man’s kid. She had to pick and she picked him.”
“Now, Gabe, that’s not how it is.” Jenny patted her green felt hat tighter on her red hair. “It’s that…”
“Want a dope, Jenny?” Rafe asked. “You look all dried out.” He lifted the cooler lid and popped the metal cap off an orange Nehi. The metal clinked when it landed in the cap reservoir.
Jenny shot Rafe a flash of anger. “No. You got to understand. All these years…”
Winston pushed the drink into Jenny’s hand. “Swallow. Better swallow, Jenny. You look pale.” He motioned toward an overturned barrel. “Sit down over here.”
“Quit telling me what to do. You got to see…”
“I see you rode up here from South Georgia to tell me something you could’ve sent in a three-cent letter. Now take another swallow.”
Air bubbles inside the orange drink disappeared into his mother’s mouth. Gabe watched his mother’s throat constrict as they went down. Water droplets from the melting block of cooler ice slid down the bottle and onto her arm. He licked his lips.
“Gabe’s right,” Jenny said. “He is here to stay. You chased everything in a skirt and left me to raise him. I got him this far. Now you can do your…”
“Jenny. Jenny. Jenny. You don’t understand. I got three mines to run here. I can’t take on a half-grown kid.” He turned to Gabe. “How old are you anyway?”
Gabe hesitated. His mouth was so dry he wasn’t sure he could speak.
“Answer the man,” Jenny said.
“Twelve,” Gabe muttered.
Rafe’s left eye-brow dropped.
“Do with him what you will. His belongings and them dogged books of his are on the porch.” Jenny walked outside and waited by the car’s passenger door for Lloyd to open it.
Freeman tipped his Panama hat to Rafe and grinned.
“Moving up in the world,” Rafe called to Jenny.
“That’s Lloyd. Lloyd Freeman,” Gabe said to Rafe’s back.
Jenny’s answer was a slammed door. Freeman cranked the car, turned it around, and headed up Turtleback.
The sun over the mountain brought no heat. Cold air made Anna shake. She took the jar from Gabe. She tightened the lid and slid it into her pocket. “I’ll hold your secret. Don’t you worry none.” She grasped the post that supported the roof. “Why don’t you go back in and get some more sleep.”
“You can sleep in the office,” Rafe said as he ground his un-smoked Lucky Strike into the floor. “I’ll get you some bedding,” he said, turning to walk away. “Then I’ll decide how I explain you to my wife.”
Gabe waited until he heard the back door close. He crept to the cooler, took out a grape Nehi. He favored its sting over the co-cola’s sweet. He popped it open and stepped out the door. He pushed his clothes aside and searched through his box of books until he found The Grapes of Wrath. He opened the dog–eared copy to chapter seventeen and plopped down on the overturned barrel. He took a deep swig and felt the tension he had not realized had stiffened his back slowly recede.
In chapter seventeen the migrants are moving west to the “Promised Land.” When he had stopped reading on the bus, Gabe reflected on his ride through the Appalachians. These mountains didn’t look much like a promised land, but they would have to do.
When Gabe looked back, Anna had stepped off the porch. She walked a fast trot toward the mountainside.
Anna slid on ice when she hit Juanita’s porch. She slapped her hand against the liquor to hold it steady and opened the door without a knock. In the middle of the room, Two Tears was spinning, her colorful shirt spread out like a rainbow around her feet. She had removed her shoes and stripped Juanita of her muslin sheet.
Juanita lay naked on the bed, the child within her belly pushing against her skin so strong that Anna could see its head appear here, then there. Juanita no longer moaned.
Anna edged to the table under the window and put the liquor down. She eased toward Two Tears and reached out to catch the woman in her circling. Two Tears did not see Anna, for she had thrown back her head and closed her eyes. What sounded like a rippling intoning kept the room from being starkly silent.
On the third try, Anna grasped Two Tears’ sleeve and stopped the spin. She expected the woman to drop from her dizziness, but she stood still as a tree. “I got the liquor,” Anna said.
For a moment, Anna thought Two Tears had no idea that Anna was standing before her. Anna stepped aside for Two Tears to pass. With Anna’s movement, light returned to Two Tears’ eyes. Two Tears opened the bottle and drank heavily from the brown liquid. She recapped the bottle and set it aside.
“Get the butcher knife,” Two Tears said.
Anna took a knife from the kitchen cabinet and handed it handle first to Two Tears. Two Tears slid the knife under the mattress and brought a bucket of steaming water from the stove.
“Get here on her bosom and when I say so, push this baby out.”
“No. I might…” Anna stepped back.
Two Tears yanked Anna’s arm and splayed out Anna’s hands. She slapped them against Juanita’s upper belly and said, “Push.”
Anna climbed up on the bed and squatted over Juanita’s chest. Her heart beat so fast she felt faint. She pushed. Juanita screamed. Anna’s wrists, cramping under the intensity, sent rays of pain up her arm. She refused to look at what Two Tears was doing. Each time the woman said push, Anna strained and forced her hands against Juanita’s belly. She smelled the sweet scent of fresh blood. She concentrated on blocking out Juanita’s screams. In less than an hour, a baby’s squeal against his entrance into bitter mountain air told Anna Two Tears had done her job. Shaking and exhausted, Anna dropped to the floor.
Juanita was bleeding heavy. Her blood dripped from the sheet to the floor. Two Tears stuffed cotton stripping to slow the hemorrhage. The baby wailed his displeasure at being forced to stand on his head and drop into the world naked and hungry. Two Tears stepped into the kitchen and made him a sugar tit to stave off his hunger until his mother could nurse.
A young boy, Anna guessed to be about thirteen or fourteen years old, appeared at the door. “I heard a baby,” he said. He looked at the flushed baby, his mouth agape.
“This is no place for a boy,” Two Tears said. She turned her back, washing Juanita’s arms.
“My God,” Anna said, her eyebrows raised. “You’re a granny.”
“I’m…I’m a Beloved Mother,” she said. “I’m Cherokee.”
The black-haired boy stepped up behind Two Tears.
Two Tears continued Juanita’s bath. “She don’t need to be having no more babies.”
The boy tugged at his mother’s shirt. “But, Ma,” he said.
Two Tears yanked his hand away and squeezed it so hard he flinched. “Hand me that liquor from over there, boy,” she said.
Anna crinkled her nose at the strong odor. The granny drank and lowered the bottle, now empty.
Within two days, word had spread through the mining camp that Mrs. Rafe’s cleaning woman could midwife. Rumors flew high and fast, high enough to reach a woman of Gladys Rafe’s stature. As soon as she heard Two Tears had birthed a camp woman’s baby while she should have been working on the Rafe’s dime, Gladys Rafe fired her.
Over time, the camp doctor’s baby business slowed because never did she lose a baby. In whisperings around kitchen tables, women also admitted that she never refused a woman who wanted or needed to drop a baby.
Women now found Two Tears in the abandoned church at Flatland, a grassy bald spot atop the more prominent summit of Turtleback between Breakline and Covington. Women came up Turtleback for a dropping under cover of night. The boy Briar would vanish into the darkness. He reappeared the next morning, as if he could sense the absence of strangers.
On Flatland, the granny farmed bees from the hive she had found in the chimney when she and Briar first moved into the old church. She captured the queen and set up a hive near the edge of a clearing that led off the mountain. The capture of more queens and transfer of their swarms meant she and the boy could farm honey easy enough. Days she would sit alongside the B&O tracks on the western edge of Covington or out past Unity Cemetery. Women waited to buy her prized wadulesi, what Granny Slocomb called her honey. She bargained at the camp commissary with the manager, Gabe Shipley, to have her own shelves. These she kept filled with her wadulesi, with and without comb, by season.
At twenty-eight, Granny gardened her own herbs and plants and went monthly into Breakline and Covington to sell her cures and potions. Many an unfaithful husband lay moaning alone in his marriage bed after his wife visited Granny Slocomb. Her most powerful spells she never sold but administered herself.
Neither town nor camp had ever asked where she came from or who she was. Had they asked, they would have received no answer. She, who had once been Mona Parsons, then Mona Parsons Slocomb to hide her shame, now chose to be the mountain granny. Granny Slocomb fit her as fine as being Two Tears had when she lived with Tall Corn in the Carolinas. Circumstances had forced a new identity, and circumstances might force it again.