Chapter 13

The next morning before dawn, first a tapping on the door, then three heavy fist licks, and Anna woke.

“Mrs. Goodman, open up the door. It’s me, Seth White. Juanita’s old man. Open up.” The voice spoke in a loud whisper.

Anna opened the door, clutching her quilted housecoat, arms crossed over her bosom. The earthy smell of dry dirt overwhelmed her. Clint lay on the porch, his left leg folded up under his body. Dried blood covered his forehead and left ear.

“We found him when we was going to the mines a while ago. Looks like one of the coal trucks must have hit him.” Seth White rolled his felt hat with both hands. “He was almost in the ditch.”

“Thought you’d want to know before we took him to Doc’s,” said a voice out of the darkness.

Anna stared at Clint’s face. His dark eyes looked like silver buttons on a white shirt. But big. Big like white balls. They bulged out as if something had slammed against the back of his head making his eyes try to pop out the front. His body seemed so small, like a child’s, like it had shrunk since he left last night for work. It was the first time in months that he hadn’t worked a double shift, and he came home like this.

Inside the house, Lily cried out from a night fright.

“What’s the matter with him?” she asked.

 

Great Spirit calls out to Brother Moon. “Where have you been? You were supposed to tell Sister Sun to brighten the sky early today. Why is she lagging behind?” He speaks to himself, “Or did I forget and order a storm cloud for this morning?” He scratches his head with a massive lightning bolt.

“I told her, Great Spirit, but you know how it is with her. She gets caught up in her sparkle and loses track of time.”

“Looks like I’ll have to throw a few asteroids out her way. Get her attention,” Great Spirit says as he moves away. “Seems nobody does anything right these days.”

 

The men looked around at each other. “He’s dead, Mrs. Goodman,” Seth whispered. “Hit by a loaded truck.”

“Somebody run him down.” Anna twisted her hands round and round each other. “I know it.”

“No. A accident. Nobody to blame.” Seth searched for the right words to calm Anna. He waited for her to scream. “Maybe it was the light,” Seth offered. “Maybe Clint was on the fringe.” He skimmed the faces behind him. “Nobody around here wanted Clint gone. He’s a good man. A good worker.”

Anna’s eyes squinted against the pre-dawn sky. Such a deep, deep black. Was this the darkness that Clint lived in every day? She squatted on the porch at Clint’s feet. “What’s wrong with his leg?” She looked up to Seth. “Why don’t you fix his leg?” She extended her hands, palms down, and moved them back and forth, as if to cover him or swat away some unknown creature and keep it from lighting on his body.

“Yes ma’am, Mrs. Goodman. I’ll do just that.” Seth signaled for the men to back away. “Here you go.” He lifted her. “Just let’s go back in the house. I should’ve brought Juanita with me. I’ll send one of the men for her right now.” He nodded to a shadow in the crowd.

Lily cried again, more demanding.

“I’ll have her mix you up strong toddy, and she can sooth the little one.” Seth half-walked, half-dragged Anna into the house and left her lying on Clint Goodman’s bed.

Anna tossed about. “Go,” she mumbled. The word tolled in her head like an iron gong announcing a community death.

“No. You stay right here,” Seth said.

Without looking, Anna reached for the company Bible by the bed and clutched it to her chest. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. The Word of God rattled in her head like a loaded train on uneven crossties.

Juanita found Anna glaring at the ceiling, unresponsive. She reached into her sweater pocket and brought out a small vial of belladonna berry juice.

Winston Rafe propped against the thick trunk of a sugar maple. His jacket, a pale gray, blended into the bark of the tree. Although it was a warm day, he pulled his head into the collar and looked under his brows at the group of mourners by Clint Goodman’s open grave.

 

“Sister Sun, are you looking after that child?” Great Spirit calls.

He has returned to Turtleback weary from listening to what is spinning around in Benjamin Spock’s head. He realizes that he should have listened more closely before letting him send out a manuscript for a how-to book on what man should already know. Maybe he needs to stop the publication. Common Sense Book of Baby & Child Care. Humph. It just might turn out like that artificial snow somebody made up in Mt. Greylock. Those Massachusetts people will have people thinking they can change the weather on a whim. Even had the gall to use one of my own clouds. Now every other person will be believing they can change the world into being what they want. Great Spirit mumbles on, until he sees Clint Goodman’s gaping grave. And he remembers it all.

“Yes sir. I truly am,” says Sister Sun.

 

At least forty off-shift miners and their wives waited for the service to begin. Their backs created a dark hedge blocking Winston’s view of Anna. Unable to see Anna, Winston stepped from behind the tree and walked to the edge of the crowd. Anna sat in a folding chair the funeral director has draped in green felt.

Anna’s hair, blonde as the day he met her, hung across her face. From time to time, a puff of breeze lifted loose tendrils, fanning their length, pointing toward him. He willed his feet not to walk closer.

Wind wafted the minister’s lamentations across the cemetery. The July air hit Winston and drew his attention to the minister. The man had a reputation for using the right words at the right time. He could quote scripture out both sides of his mouth, some said. Winston had sent Gabe to Covington to get him and tell the man to say what Anna needed to be said. All the afterlife promises and such. Gabe paid the man with a ten-dollar bill. He better be good, or Covington Presbyterian Church would be finding another preacher.

Buying a minister was the best he could do. He should not have tempted Fate by delaying Clint’s transfer to Covington. Anna had family in Covington. Maybe she would go now. But if she left, he had to know she would be safe. And the child. The child needed to be safe. He might not be able to make them happy, but surely, surely he could keep them safe. He walked toward the crowd as they moved away so the diggers could cover Clint’s pine box.

Gabe stepped up from behind Anna and placed his hand lightly on her shoulder. Rafe walked to Gabe and gripped his shoulder. Gabe was his son. He would do what Rafe told him.

Anna returned to their camp house after the funeral. The effects of Juanita’s belladonna berry juice had left her groggy, and she wobbled when she tried to walk. She needed to lie down with Lily and rest. She couldn’t remember a full night’s sleep since Winston had sent her to Clint’s bed a little over a year ago.

The night when she refused to leave Breakline plodded through her memory. She questioned refusing to leave. She questioned Winston and who he was away from her. Winston would not have had one of the miners run Clint down with a coal truck, but the possibility played in her mind. The fact that she had been so adamant about staying would not leave her alone. Such thoughts muddled through her mind and clogged her ability to think about what to do.

Anna knew the regulations. Dead miner. Widow had two weeks to get out of the camp. Winston had told one night about a disabled miner over in Kentucky who had been allowed to stay in his camp house and was paid for a job he never did. The mine owner fired the miner, the supervisor and the commissary worker, all the same day. Here in Breakline, Winston was the owner, at least in word. Gladys wouldn’t know if Anna was allowed to stay on.

She had not seen Winston at the funeral. Clint had been one of his best workers, one of the most respected miners in camp. She felt it right that Winston should come. He at least owed Clint that much. But had he come, Seth or Gabe might have seen the real Winston. Yet she questioned why she would think that anyone else would see through Winston Rafe. She had not. Or she had ignored what she had seen. Her mind shifted back and forth, arguing with itself about what to believe. Conflicted, she wasn’t able to rest.

Two days after Clint Goodman was laid in the ground behind Unity Church, Anna packed a satchel, tucked Lily in the Red Ryder wagon Clint had bought her and set off for the commissary. As she neared the building, guilt and fear forced her eyes to the ground. Uncertainty dogged her. Did her actions have the power to kill another person? Before Clint’s death, she had put God and His power to control lives out of her mind. It had been one way of allowing herself time with Winston. Might Clint’s death have been her doing? Might Clint’s death be her punishment from God? Her pa once said, “Not doing something at all can be as bad as doing something, even when it’s wrong.” She had defied Winston by not leaving. She had defied God with her adultery. And now Clint was dead and buried.

When she arrived at the commissary steps, she stopped. She could not remember what she had intended to say, nor to whom she intended to speak. She gazed at the three wooden steps between where she stood and the closed screen. She realized she could not get the wagon with its large wheels up the steps, and she would not disgrace herself by calling for Winston Rafe to come out and face her. She wiped unexpected tears from her face and rolled her daughter back over the packed dirt path to the company-owned house she had shared with Clint Goodman these past eight years.

 

The week after Clint’s death, what Anna had believed was secret erupted throughout the camp much like a flash fire. No one she knew would benefit from the telling. She eliminated people she knew one by one. Winston would never have spoken. He valued his status too much. She had rarely seen Granny Slocomb after Lily’s birth. The granny’s son, Briar, who wandered the camp and worked at cleaning the commissary? No. She had never heard him speak. But the women now knew and they let her know they knew. Wives glanced away when she met them in the camp. A tall, brown-headed woman grabbed her children by the hand as they started across the ditch bridge Anna was crossing and shooed them in the opposite direction.

Alone, except for her baby and Juanita who stayed mostly inside, Anna found herself helpless against stares. She began rousing Lily and going to the commissary as early as possible, trying to squeeze in a time while other mothers were setting their children down to breakfast. While there, she glanced up each time she heard the door open. If she did unintentionally meet some woman, she slipped into a narrow aisle and turned away as if she could not be seen.

Anna loaded her burden of guilt on her back and staggered through each day under its weight. She prayed to her God that Gladys would not hear the truth. If word climbed the rise to the big yellow house, she, like Hagar, Abraham’s whore, would be cast into the wilderness.

Anna did not know where she had garnered the strength to accept the beginning nor could she recall the precise time when she decided that she had no choice but to accept the leaving. What would drive her out of Breakline Camp was the touch of her child’s hand, the smell of clean hair when she pressed her face to Lily’s head as the child slept in her arms. It was the knowledge that to place her child gently in her crib would be time never regained, so she rocked her infant, cradled her in her arms in a selfish need for her own comfort.

Two more weeks passed before she attempted to see Winston. Turtleback, ever a shadow over the camp, trapped the night’s coolness in its shade and held it there, awaiting the sun. The idea that Winston might be at one of his mines rather than the commissary had not come to her. Again, she tucked Lily in her wagon. At the commissary, she wrapped Lily tight in a light blanket, parked the wagon in the shade by the porch and mounted the steps.

Gabe, at his usual place behind the cash register, opened his mouth to reprimand whoever had slammed the screen door. When he saw Anna alone, he asked, “Where’s my little Lily?”

“Outside. Asleep in her wagon.” Anna glanced around the commissary. Briar, whom Anna had once jokingly told Winston was part wolf, moved soundlessly toward the back door.

“What’re you reading now?” Anna asked. Had she heard the back door close? She questioned herself.

“Of Mice and Men. It’s about this gentle giant of a man whose name is Small. Can you believe that Steinbeck guy? And traveling workers who…”

 

“Sister Sun, get over here and look after this girl-child,” demands Great Spirit.

“Look at this. Leaving her baby outside by itself. I’m not sure this woman knows yet that she’s a mother.”

“Yes sir.” Sister Sun rolls in as fast as her solar winds allow. “She does seem a bit addled.”

 

“Is Mr. Rafe here?” Anna interrupted.

“No’m, he’s off over in Covington working on some machinery project he’s dreamed up,” Gabe said. “You welcome to wait. I’ll go fetch Lily.”

Anna wandered among the counters, running her hand over tops of canned goods: milk, fruit, vegetables, sardines, Vienna sausages. At one point, she drew back her hand and noted how clean her fingers were. No dust gathered under Gabe Shipley. No wonder Winston valued him so.

She drifted toward the back near the meat counter. If Winston came in, he would come through this door. She could speak without Gabe hearing her. A sound much like scratching on wood came from inside the office. She should tell Gabe. He wouldn’t suffer a rat after his round of cheese.

Anna shifted from foot to foot, growing more and more frustrated as she looked at chunks of meat held aloft by sturdy iron hooks: pale chicken, brown duck, pork shoulders, legs of lamb, flitch of bacon. All aligned so a rotating fan kept flies from settling. To the side hung a slender boning knife, a thick cleaver, and honing steel for sharpening dull edges. Her eye went back to the cleaver.

“Somebody ought to kill him,” she murmured. A flash vision of Winston coming in the back door and meeting her wielding the cleaver at him, hacking, slashing, and chopping, startled her. The gruesomeness of her envisioned attack ran cold over her body.

Gabe slammed the screen door and walked toward her, Lily riding his hip. His lop-sided grin cut his face in two. “Don’t mind if I hold her a mite, do you?”

“No,” Anna said. “Think I heard a mouse back by the cheese.”

“Probably the Slocomb kid. Cleaning up in the office.”

Anna needed to leave. She didn’t want people to know why she was here. Briar Slocomb or anyone else. “Maybe you can help me, Gabe.” She spoke above a whisper.

He nodded. “I might.”

“I need to know where I stand with money.” Anna took a deep breath. “I’m a widow now with this child to raise.” She glanced around the store. She saw no one. A fresh jar of pickled eggs, now full, held their place on the shelf where she had last noticed them. They looked no more appetizing then they had before. “I got to know what, if anything, Clint put aside.”

Gabe nuzzled his cheek against Lily’s hair to make her giggle. “Counting receipts is about all I do with money. Mr. Rafe could help you more than me. Why don’t you sit on this stool and wait a bit? He ought not be gone much longer.”

Anna wavered. “I’ll just come back tomorrow. He be here tomorrow?”

Gabe shook his head. “I don’t know. Comes and goes. Gone more than usual lately.” He cuddled Lily. “Acts like he’s got a lot on his mind. What with all this bombing in Europe.”

Anna reached for Lily. “Reckon I can say to you what I want to say to him as you’ll be getting what I need.” Lily struggled to be let down, but Anna settled her head on her shoulder. “I want all the money Clint earned his last week. I want his first pension check. I want all the money he put aside for Lily and me. I want ten dollars in ones and the rest in bigger bills. I don’t want clink. Or script. I want real money.”

“I don’t know ’bout that, Mrs. Goodman. Mr. Rafe’ll have to okay that kind of deal.” Gabe busied himself with wiping the counter.

“You tell Mr. Rafe I’m leaving the camp, and I want what’s due Clint.” A tinge of resentment entered her voice without her approval.

“You leaving? You taking little Lily with you?” He reached for the child.

Gabe. Always gentle Gabe. Anna smiled. “Wherever I go, Lily goes. She’s my baby.”

 

The next morning, Anna returned. She opened the screen to the sweet smell of new honey. To Anna’s left, the granny’s shelf, which had been empty the day before, was filled with jars of fresh amber honey. The morning sun shone through the granny’s honey and cast golden stripes across the floor, so perfect they looked ethereal.

Gabe heard Anna enter the screen door and called out, “Be right with you, Mrs. Goodman.” He finished Juanita White’s order of sugar and lard and tallied her bill. Biting her tongue, Juanita signed the tab hard so her signature would mark through the carbon. Anna waited, straddling Lily from one hip to the other.

“Morning, Anna,” Juanita said. “Little one’s growing like a weed.”

“I reckon so,” Anna said. “But so is Jason.”

“Come by for coffee this evening, and we’ll put them down for a nap and visit.”

“Got a dirt smell here somewheres,” said Gabe. “There’s some taters back of Granny’s honey. She’ll have a fit if somebody finds fault near her honey. Let me get rid of this box. Get warm and they spoil overnight,” Gabe said as he lifted a box and continued to talk as he walked toward the back. “Strange thing ’bout taters. One rotten tater ruins ever’ one it touches.”

“Maybe another day,” Anna responded to Jaunita’s invitation. “I got to get some things settled, what with Clint dead and all.”

“Yes, another day,” Juanita said and left, her lard bucket in one hand, her sugar in the other.

Gabe returned, grumbling. “Can’t keep that Briar on one job long enough to get it finished and he’s off again.” He carried a sagging leather pouch and ten one-dollar bills. “’Bout cleaned us out,” he chuckled. He handed the stash to Anna and winked. When Anna did not answer, he continued. “You be careful with all this money, you hear? I ain’t telling nobody and you ain’t talking neither.”

Anna put out her hand to shake Gabe’s. He rubbed his palms down his pant legs.

“Why you being so fancy all at once?” Gabe asked.

“I don’t know,” Anna said and started for the front door. She heard the hinge on Winston’s office door squeak, as if opening.

Gabe called to her. “Where you going?”

“I don’t know.”

Winston strode up behind her as she met the steps. He took her arm. “Anna, wait.”

Anna eyed the road, up and down. The road stood empty. “What do you want from me, Winston?”

“I want you to stay.” He scratched the wooden step with his shoe. “No. That’s not right. I need you to stay.”

 

“He’s about as reliable as a let-loose meteor,” Sister Sun says. “I should blast him with a solar flare.”

“He is who he is,” answers Great Spirit.

“Can’t you change him?” asks Sister Sun.

“Should I want to?”

 

“What about Gladys?” Anna watched him shuffle back and forth, foot to foot, a piece of tobacco stuck on his lower lip.

“I can’t worry about what I can’t change. I just know I need you to stay.” He focused on her eyes, blushed, and cleared his throat. “You’ll be safe here in Breakline. I’ll see to it.”

“No. I don’t think so, Winston.” Anna looked away. She didn’t want him to see her face. “What would people think? Women are already…”

“Nobody here questions my decisions.” He frowned. “They know I’m boss.” He spoke as if words came to him with each breath. “Anybody bother you, you let me know.”

Anna shook her head. “I don’t know what to do. I think yes and then no.” She had seen side glances as she passed when she was pregnant with Lily. Since Clint’s funeral, camp wives walked out of the commissary when she walked in.

“For a while at least,” he begged. “Till you find some place safe to stay.” He reached out and ran his hand through Lily’s hair. His thumb caught in a tangle, and she twisted her head away. “She’s got the hair. ‘The color of honey hit by the sun,’ as my mama would say.” He rubbed Lily’s head. “Beautiful as you, Anna.”

Dawn had appeared draped in a royal purple cape. When Anna closed the camp house door, her first thoughts had been on where she could go. Winston was right. She had no place. Where she went should not matter, for Clint was dead and Winston was slowly killing her with his intermittent attention.

Sometimes people want something so bad they convince themselves a lie is the truth. She had not considered herself a liar when she took Clint from Ruth eight years ago, but now an inside gnawing told her she had lied and that she continued to do so. She lied each time she faced a Breakline wife and stumbled about trying to think of a reason why she, a non-working widow, had been allowed to stay these past weeks while others in her position had moved on.

She had lied to Clint, letting him think she loved him as he loved her, even during his rages. She lied each time she told Lily a story about Clint, letting her believe Clint was her daddy. She searched for an image of herself that she could remember, but the bedroom mirror that had distorted Winston the night he came to look at Lily that first time refused to warp her face into the person she once thought she was.

Wives talked. They would continue to do so. But Winston was right. Anna had nowhere to go. She had come down this path only to find there was no return. She handed Lily to Winston and opened the door. Without glancing back, she went inside to re-deposit her money.