Chapter 7
By 1940, Anna Goodman, almost nineteen, had grown into a tall, girlish woman. A woman steeped in plain, her only jewelry a wide gold band Clint put on her finger a month after they moved into Breakline Mining Camp. Her square face was not unpretty. It was a face that sat solid on her shoulders. Her blue, blue eyes looked out from beneath pale brows. She brushed her hair up and wound it into a loose yellowish knot. She still attached the bun to the crown of her head with her mother’s tortoise-shell comb. Fine and silky, her hair escaped its bonds with every movement of her head. She constantly tried to capture its restlessness by pushing a strand behind an ear or wrapping one around the comb. By nightfall and bedtime, she had to dig through the tangles to find the buried comb and unwind her hair from its teeth.
Anna came to think of Clint’s promise of Bristol like his comment about Ruth’s fried eggs and sausage, something she had expanded in her imagination. Clint argued Breakline Camp was where they needed to be. Working underground paid good money. The well-stocked commissary gave Anna no reason to wander out of the valley. Sure, the dirt was black, but had she ever seen dirt any color but black? Bristol lay in the mountains, in its own way, so she still would have been in the mountains. And these Virginia mountains put out coal better than a cow gave milk. She had a husband, and a husband’s a husband no matter his calling. To question a husband’s thinking was, for Clint, a slap against his say-so.
Anna, up since before dawn, stood at the kitchen table and packed Clint’s lunch bucket with two Spam sandwiches and a baked sweet potato. Last night when she had gone to bed, Clint told her again that she had no weight in deciding where they would live or where he would work. She awoke with his words still on her mind.
Clint entered the kitchen and reached for his tin bucket, a round topped container that looked more like a loaf of bread than a lunch bucket.
Anna put her hand on the lunch pail. “You not eating breakfast?” she said. “I made you eggs and grits. Or I got cornbread and milk.”
Clint picked up his lunch and opened the kitchen door. “No. I got work to do.” He shut the door against an unusually brisk air. “You think on it today, Anna. We are where we are and that’s it. That daydreaming you been doing? It’s over.”
Anna took the plate of eggs and grits from the stove warmer. She walked to the sink and threw eggs, grits and plate hard against the metal sink wall. The plate broke. One piece popped out and hit the floor. Clint jerked away to avoid the flying crockery.
The day ahead promised nothing for Anna. Nor had any previous days. The previous night’s anger reignited, and she glared at him. “You might rule what I say, but you can’t rule what I think.”
Clint whirled around and pushed her back against the square, porcelain-topped metal table. It stood so steady against the wall that Anna, rather than the table, fell. Clint knelt over her crumpled on the flowered linoleum rug and let his bucket drop beside her. “Anna. My Anna. I never meant…”
“Go on to work, Clint.” Anna set her head against him. “I’m not ready to talk to you yet.”
“Anna?”
“Just go and leave me alone.” She waved him back with one hand.
Clint left, his back bowed as if he crawled through shadowy tunnels.
As soon as she could lift herself off the floor, Anna wandered up the rise behind their frame house. Her back throbbed from the lick she had taken when she hit the table. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, and as she climbed her legs weakened. At a wooded thicket, she dropped onto leaves moist from the morning frost and shivered as she pulled her sweater close. She glared up, past the uppermost limbs and stared at the rising sun until tears burned her eyes. Her sorrow was so deep she could not rise up against the grief. Drained, she crawled to a rock ledge and dangled her feet over the edge. Seeing nothing worthy of her attention, she lay down to rest.
She awoke mid-afternoon. Though she did not see eyes, she felt them. They were there. Or they had been there. The cords in her neck tightened. She studied the camp below nestled in its long valley and let her eyes follow the road that led up Turtleback and out of the mining camp. She tilted her head to see what or whom she had felt. There was nothing out of the ordinary, just a pearly light emanating from the sun.
Sister Sun has watched Anna since she left the house. She has watched her throughout days as she sits immobile on the front porch. She considers talking to Great Spirit about the possibility of one of his own who is burning from the inside out. A flicker of Anna’s resentment has shown itself to Sister Sun. She knows it will flame. The anger Anna harbors within fuels her bitterness more each day. But Brother Moon tells her that her job is to follow the path of Great Spirit, not to direct his route. So Sister Sun waits.
Anna and Clint had run out of things to talk about by their third year. Clint told the story of how his mining father, his back rounded from walking crouched through low-ceilinged tunnels, had the appearance of a large mole. As a youngster, Clint had rubbed his father’s legs to ease cramps from toe-walking with knees bent as his father hunched on his calves and shuffled deeper into the earth. In time, his father lay before the fireplace coughing out his black lung until the disease refused him another breath of clean air and shut his lungs down for good.
His father had been what Clint thought a father should be. He had provided a house, food and clothing for his wife and children. Clint, like his father, accepted that forces beyond his control altered lives, no matter how men fought against them. With the slow, smothering death of his father, Clint saw no reason to fight. His father had lost. Why would his life be any different?
He spoke of his half-Cherokee mother and her isolation by the camp wives and of two babies, a brother and a sister, lost to summer flux. “Honest folk,” he said. “Good honest people. Just had no luck. No luck a’tall.”
It took Anna more nights of memory and talk, for she could dig into several generations of history before reaching her own. She told how her great-great grandfather, this Uriah Parsons, had come from his time with General Washington and crossed the ice-bound river at Trenton. Parsons came with frostbitten toes, without two left fingers that had been shot off by a Redcoat during an ambush in Pennsylvania. He came with Long Hunters who moved like a slender, black snake over mountains that first appeared low in the distance but proved deceitful when reached. Mountains’ posturing insinuated an outstretched welcome for strangers but beat men down with ravines and wild beasts and unpredictable weather. Other mountains appeared to bow before this majestic Turtleback, deceptive mountains that hid their power beneath the virgin forests.
Anna spoke of deeds, signed and certified by all the right pens, verifying that her family owned all of the huge Turtleback and to the mountainside homestead Uriah called Boone Station. Acres of land. Tens of thousands of acres deeded by the Governor of the Virginia Colony, given free to whoever would settle west. She spoke of ancestors buried at Flatland on the top of Turtleback and how Uriah Parsons’ son set the stakes for the town of Covington. How she grew up with whatever she favored in the dark, two-story, limestone blockhouse that closed the end of the road through the town.
Clint’s eyes grew smaller with her telling. He had little history to bring to the table. What history he had paled before Anna’s listings of heroics and fame. He did not believe her. His sense of who he was shouted out at her over the supper table after she put food before him. “You slighting my family with all your explorers and founders and such?” He pushed his plate of poke sallet and peas aside and stared over his coffee as it grew cold.
“No,” Anna said. “You asked. I’m telling.”
“I ain’t got no famous folk in my lineage. I guess that makes you more important than me, huh? I guess that explains why you’re so set on moving to a big city like Bristol.” Clint looked down at his coal-encrusted hands. They looked like the dirty hands of a twelve-year-old girl.
“I am not, Clint. You going into the belly of the earth day after day is eating you inside. You don’t ever see sunlight. You live in a black, cold world that you expect me to like. I can’t. I need sunshine inside me. There ain’t no sun in this place till day’s half gone.” As she left the room, she said, “I want to go home.” In the next room, she plopped down on the edge of the bed. If she had to tell Clint what she needed, it didn’t count.
“Ain’t nobody at home that’ll take you back, Anna,” Clint said. “You burned that bridge when you come away with me. You know that.”
When Clint spit out such hurtful words, Anna wondered where the Clint who had enthralled her had gone. He had joked and mussed her hair when she laughed as she sat on the front porch to chaperone him and Ruth. He had brought her a fistful of wild roses once, not as large as the one he brought Ruth, but big enough to make her smile. The old Clint had disappeared without her notice. Now that he was gone, Anna was not sure she loved this dark, moody man who insisted on bossing her. She was not even sure she liked him anymore.
Mornings after an argument, Anna would sit at her kitchen table, ready to write Ruth to ask for forgiveness. She should have left Clint to Ruth, but she lacked the courage to acknowledge that what she had thought was love was petty jealousy. As her pa often said, “Just leave sleeping dogs lie.” She never took pen to paper. Someone might mention to Clint that she had written a letter home. He would not approve.
It had happened the February Clint was ten years old. The day had been overcast. The wind, bitter. Rain had threatened all day. He spent the afternoon brushing his grandfather’s mule and cleaning its stall, so dark crept upon him unawares. He knew he should be home before his father came from work at six o’clock, so he left his grandparents’ farm before supper. To get home on time, he took the shortcut across the stubbled cornfield.
Midway through the trek, slow icy rain changed to a steady downpour. Clint pulled his woolen coat over his head, leaving enough room for him to see and retrace the path. At one point, the rain stopped. From his left, he heard a whimper. Leaving the trail, he picked his way over corn stobs and found a young pup huddled against a dead corn plant. He lifted the pup from the mud and tucked it into his coat. The closeness of Clint’s body eased the pup’s shivering, and it relaxed.
At home, he took the pup out and looked at it. Its ribs pushed themselves out of its chest. He ran his hand over its coat. Mange had taken large patches of fur away, leaving its skin scratched and bloody. His father could fix that with a bath of sulfur and motor oil. The pup’s nose, dry to Clint’s touch, was runny and hard. When it coughed, its lungs pumped against its chest. He could give it some of the tonic his mother bought at the commissary for his colds.
He offered the pup a biscuit. It refused to eat. A saucer of milk. The dog refused to lap. He wrapped the pup in a ragged, plaid flannel shirt and laid it on the floor by the coal heater. He sat beside the pup and stroked its side until it slept.
His father said, “You needn’t bother. Death’s done got to it. Best you put it out and let it die in peace.”
“I ain’t going to let it die,” Clint said.
In the kitchen, fatback sizzled and popped in the skillet. The odor of grease gnawed at Clint’s belly, but the dog did not respond to it. His mother called Clint to the supper table. He said he wasn’t hungry. “I’ll wait here for my puppy to wake up.” Clint stayed by the dog as dark drew on. Outside sleet ting, ting, tinged on the tin roof.
Throughout the night, whenever Clint’s head nodded, he jerked himself awake. Each time he checked to see that he had not moved his palm from the dog’s side. If he kept his hand firm against the pup’s body, a part of him would transfer itself to the dog. He would will the dog to live, even if in so doing he lost a part of himself.
The puppy stopped breathing just before dawn. With his hand on its chest, Clint knew when its last breath came. He wrapped the dead puppy in his own flannel blanket and cradled it under his chin, too hurt to cry.
His father rose before daylight to go into the mine for the day. He took the wrapped pup from Clint. It was then Clint let himself cry. He had no control over whatever force his puppy had encountered before Clint’s attempt at salvation. He had no control now. He did not ask what was going to happen. The puppy would be buried, or more likely, thrown in the fifty-gallon barrel where his daddy burned trash. The puppy was gone. With it went Clint’s conviction that he had some power over life. That much he knew. That much he grieved.