Chapter 9

Three months after she bought the lard, Anna slipped off her wedding ring and put it in the dresser drawer for safekeeping. If she wore it with Rafe near, and if he looked at it, the ring might meld his reflection into the gold. “You belong to me,” Rafe had once whispered to her outside the commissary. The idea had set itself so deep that Anna saw Rafe’s face every time she looked at her wedding band. She feared that one evening, in the gloaming, Rafe’s face would appear in the ring across the table from Clint, and Clint would know.

She closed the back door and walked through moonlight, up the mountainside where she sometimes went to escape the house. She expected Rafe would be there. A nod here and a seemingly innocuous comment there let each of them know when and where to meet.

No argument with Clint sent her. Loneliness opened the back door, and Anna walked out. She wished Clint had a mistress. She could contest another woman, but she had no idea how to cope with the black maw he entered every night.

The cry of train whistles reminded her they were going somewhere she could not go. Whistles told her repeatedly that she was trapped by the regularity of living by a clock that ran, not by minutes and hours, but by coal and its constant rumbling out of the ground beneath her. She found herself housebound by a way of life she had never bargained for. Many days she waited for the ground to open to a mined-out tunnel and swallow her without anyone’s notice.

A narrow path led through a Virginia pine thicket below the tree line. The thicket’s treetops were heavy with needles, needles so full that, from Anna’s back door, they gave the illusion of softness. The higher she climbed toward the ledge the less her common sense dragged her down. Once she reached the ledge, she kicked free what little had managed to trail her and sent it tumbling back down the path.

There on a rock ledge above the camp, she found with Rafe the simple grace she was missing in her marriage to Clint. That one trip led to the next and the next to the next. Anna found herself preparing each day of each week for her next Tuesday night when she would come home to bathe off the smell of crushed moss and tender ground.

After a month of meetings, Anna whispered to Rafe, “Somebody followed me,” she panted. “Up the rise.”

Rafe chuckled.

“I heard steps. On leaves,” she insisted. “I could feel somebody watching.”

“Nobody knows this place,” Rafe said. “Unless you talked.”

“It’s like hands want to reach out from the underbrush and drag me into the briars,” Anna said. “Not just coming up here tonight.” Anna chewed the inside of her cheek. “I dream dreams,” she continued. “The wives, they chase me and I run and they run faster and I can’t breathe and they run faster and faster. This woman in a pink striped apron has a butcher knife, waving it in the air and one catches me by the ankle and I fall on my face and my nose bleeds. All at once I know I have black, black eyes. And though they don’t turn me over, I recognize they are huge gray wolves and their claws get tangled in my hair and pull it out in big clumps and they slobber on me and I’m crying.”

“Stop it, Anna,” Rafe said as he reached for her. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

“But my hair is all over the ground and I can see it though I’m on my face. I pray to God to save me, and he says, ‘that’s not the question,’ and I say, ‘what’s the question?’ and he says, ‘that’s not the question.’ And I don’t know the question so he won’t save me, and I wake up crying and Clint wants to know what’s wrong, and I can’t say the words to him.”

“You’re imagining things,” Rafe told her.

“I ruined our night. I’m sorry.” Anna hung her head. “You’re the only one I can talk to.”

“Don’t be sorry. Here, I’ll walk around to see if anybody’s been here.”

“No. Don’t leave me.” She reached to pull him back.

“I’ll be back. I’ll always be back,” Rafe assured her. “Nobody who knows me would dare question where I go or why. Stay put.” He returned after finding no one.

Anna believed him. She wanted to believe that she mattered to Winston Rafe in some significant way. She needed to believe he would protect her. From Tuesday until Tuesday, she made up a life that didn’t exist.

By winter, a thin crack appeared in her fantasy. Anna felt the fracture deep within her gut.

 

In February, she came late to the rock ledge, carrying a rolled blanket. A pink dusk had slipped behind Turtleback, and the moon had yet to come out. The sky had a blackness about it that only appeared with an oncoming storm or the absence of both sun and moon.

Rafe stiffened his back when she touched him. “Where’ve you been?” he said.

She spread the blanket on the ledge and sat. She shuttered as she unbuttoned her dress. “Something cold in the air tonight.” She slid across the blanket. Rafe did not chuckle. A problem at one of the mines, she assumed, and lifted off her dress.

“We got to talk,” he said. “Sit down.”

When Anna did not move, he took up the dress, lifted her off the blanket, and pulled the dress back over her head, tearing down her hair. He forced her arms into the sleeves.

Buttoning her bodice, Anna stepped away. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I expect people to do what I say. That’s all. Sit down.”

Anna sat.

Winston lit a Lucky Strike. Its tip glowed red in the dark. Anna wanted to question someone seeing the glow, but she chewed the inside of her lip and said nothing.

“I’ve been thinking and it’s only fair you know.” He paused, as if giving Anna time to ask what he had been thinking about. “If there’s a baby, I can’t help you.” His words spilled out in one breath. “So that’s about it.”

Anna stared out at the camp houses below. In the distance, only one had a light burning. Perhaps a sick child. She would never know. Wives of the camp had begun to ignore her. Her days had grown dim, even in the brightest sunlight.

The present darkness over the world around her slipped down and blackened the camp, leaving it bleak and still. Take away the tipple at the far end of the valley, silence its rhythmic, mechanical sound, and there would be no one left but Winston and Anna and one tiny yellow glow from a camp house window.

Once Rafe began his speech, he couldn’t stop. “If there’s a kid, you’ll have to convince Clint the baby’s his. I might be able to get you money from time to time, but I can’t recognize a kid.” He took a long draw on his cigarette. A cylinder of ash fell to the ground. “Gladys rightly owns these mines. She’d divorce me, and there goes the mines and I’m out on my ass.”

After a moment, Anna spoke. “I know that,” she said. “I can make it on my own. The problem will be getting Clint home long enough to think he’s making a baby.” She tried a chuckle and failed. “What with him working double shifts and all.”

“You’ll have to do it. That’s all.” Rafe blew cigarette smoke out his nose.

“I’ll do what I can.” She clamped her hands together.

“You’ll do it,” Rafe stood up. “Or you’ll have to see a granny.” He walked back down the mountain.

Someone in the little house below turned off the light.

 

By the time Brother Moon comes into view, Anna sits alone on the ledge. He smells the scent of soft moss she has pulled from the ground. She places narrow rectangles side-by-side in a straight row, as if planting them, as if she expects them to grow on rock. He will need to ask Sister Sun if moss grows on hard rock. He does not understand daylight dealings. He can’t even help her down the mountain.

 

The fourth April of their affair arrived, and Anna had not bled for two months. She could not say if she felt happy or sad. She wanted Winston’s child—more than she wanted Clint’s. Yet the idea of birthing another man’s child frightened her. Winston’s threat haunted her during the days and kept sleep away in the nights.

Every miner’s wife had tales of how domineering Winston’s wife was. How he spent his days at the commissary and his nights checking the mines or drinking beer out of self-preservation in O’Mary’s Saloon in Covington. Anna wished there was a different bar in Covington, one where miners didn’t go. She feared a wife would let a comment slip or a husband would get so drunk he would speak out in front of Winston and a miner would lose his job. That would lead to whispers and questions throughout the camp. She had to convince herself that wives did not know where he was every Tuesday night. Assuming they did know, worries of job security might keep them from talking.

The wives knew Winston Rafe was a tyrant. Most of the wives avoided him. Like a cancer, he could eat an individual from inside out, leaving a shell before the man knew he was infested. The company was the town. The company put bread on the table. With the Great Depression killing any possibility of moving to another company, Anna counted on wives shutting their eyes and speaking only behind closed curtains. They were bound to the mine as tightly as were their men.

Anna had to tell Winston she was pregnant. She waited on the ledge for him to show. He appeared after the moon rose. She took a deep breath and told him. His response was what he had promised. “There’s a Cherokee granny at Flatland on the Turtleback.” He lit a cigarette. “She knows what she’s doing. She knows to keep her mouth shut.” He took a deep draw and swallowed the smoke. “I’ll bring money next Tuesday.” He reacted as if he were handling some off-hand business deal with a stranger, one that would have little bearing on his future or the future of the company.

Anna slapped him hard, hard enough to twist his head. “You bastard,” she said.

Winston grabbed her wrist and squeezed it. The next morning there would be bruised fingerprints on the underside. She would wear a long-sleeved dress for a week so Clint could not see.

“Anna.”

She tried to pull her wrist away.

“I can’t claim this baby. Gladys would have a fighting fit.” He released his grip and rubbed her wrist. “We’ve talked all this out. If you won’t go to Granny Slocomb, you’ll have to convince Clint this is his baby.” Winston released Anna’s arm and palmed his forehead. Anna could tell he was angrier at himself than at her. He had let this slip. He had always been more careful.

“It’s because I’m a miner’s wife,” Anna shot her words through tight lips.

“Damn it, Anna. It’s because you are a wife. Wife of one of my best men. Clint Goodman’s wife.” He clinched his fists and breathed deep. “Not my wife, Anna,” he said.

Anna recalled a time as a child when she had questioned her pa about why the Old Testament Abraham would take his son up the mountain to lay a knife to his throat.

Pa told her a ram showed up, so he didn’t have to sacrifice his son.

“But why would he even think about killing his own son?” she asked. “Especially if he loved him as much as he said.” Anna twitched. “I wouldn’t have killed my son.”

“Men do what they have to do, Anna. It’s different with a woman. She’s softer and needs a man to make her choices,” he told her. “God was his boss, so Abraham did what God told him to do. You don’t question. You just do.”

An owl called Anna back to the rock hardness of the ledge. She looked up. Winston stood over her.

“You have to handle this.” Winston’s eyes flickered.

That night, she took the long way home. At some point, she came upon a puddle from yesterday’s melted snow. Its shallow water reflected the full moon. She was tempted to disturb the water, but she stepped around it. She left the moon’s image intact, floating like a silver balloon. She did not cry until she stepped on a stone hidden by a sprinkling of snow. Her foot twisted and pain shot up her ankle. Once she started crying, she was unable to stop.