from Before the Revolution—1960
For the second time in my life I saw Jake Catlett—not that I knew it. It would take years for me to recall a sixteen-year-old boy, old Jake's least one, who looked, in his Sunday suit, like Ichabod Crane.
At the jail that late afternoon I only saw the back of the man who had murdered my brother, and I wanted, in a surge of hate, to kill him, stamp him out. He was leaning on the jail windowsill, watching downriver through the bars. When Jack opened the cell door he didn't look around or speak, even when Jack said, “Somebody to see you,” and then, “Catlett, you got a visitor.” I saw his back arch as Jack walked toward him.
“Let me talk to him by myself,” I whispered. When I heard his name I only connected it with the Catlett that my mother said brought her papa downriver on a shutter.
He turned around. The man who stood there, watching me, was tall and quiet. The grief in his black eyes under heavy brows was so deep it could have been mistaken for aloofness. His face was gaunt and made without fat, his black hair fell long on his neck, the sideburns made his cheeks hollow. He needed a shave. He was spare-boned, straight, skinny as a rake; his head jutted forward as he took me in slowly, then Jack, and said, low, like a man not used to speaking, “I don't want to talk to nobody.”
I was afraid Jack would say something to make the man retreat into the isolated mountain of himself.
“Can I stay for a minute, by myself?” I begged.
Jack knew when he was shut out. He made one last try. “Okay, Catlett, you're in enough trouble.”
“I ain't gonna bother no lady,” Jake Catlett told him.
We could hear the rattle of Jack's steps as he went across the iron floor and clanged the outside cell door, and sat down within hearing in case I raised my voice.
Like any other cage, the cell had bars; the sun drew them in great shadows across the sleeping face of a man in the next cell. The place smelled of urine and Lysol. We stood, watching each other. What had happened did not show with him. He was just waiting, shut away from the river; he kept on glancing at it, clenching and unclenching his long spare hands.
“You from the newspaper?” he finally asked.
“No.” I sank down on the end of the rack, becoming small, obliterating anything that might rouse his distrust, because he had to tell me what he didn't know himself. I was in an agony of guile.
“What did you come for, then?” His voice came on strong. He was rooted out, ground-hog cornered.
“Catlett, shut up.” The man in the next cell turned over and went to sleep again.
“Don't pay him no mind. He's full of sneaky pete.” Jake Catlett stared at the man's scrap-bag back.
“It was my brother,” I whispered.
He looked at me as he would look at a wounded or frightened animal. I, stone-cold, willed him to it harder, using everything I'd lady-learned.
“I never meant to,” he muttered. “I never even knowed him. I never knowed he was your brother.”
I watched him.
“Look, lady. I never meant it. Why, I'm thirty-eight years old. I never done nuthin’ like takin’ on to scrap like that since I was a boy. You…”
“Tell me!” I had to force him back to where it had to begin, the key, the point, the place.
Jake Catlett sank down on the rack beside me and put his gaunt head between strong hands that could work a coal face, hold a woman hard by the shoulders, or hit Johnny. The black hair on the sunburned back of his fist stood out. That hand was the source—one hand, clenched, one strike—from that one hand, all the questions, a life that would never be the same again, not for him, not for us. I couldn't stop watching it.
We sat so long that the outdoor sounds came in and surrounded us: the beep of a car horn, across the river the whistle of Number 6 as it drew into the station. We were getting used to the smell of each other. The time tightened into the insistence between two people dwelling in the same needs—he to tell, me to learn. I had a dim urge to take his hand.
I broke the tightening stillness. “I heard he said something.”
When he did begin to speak his voice was gentle. He was thinking aloud. He seemed to have forgotten who I was. “I been settin’ here figurin'—goin’ over and over it. He was just standin’ there, and that feller kept callin’ on Jesus—I figured I had to shut him up, leave me time to think. Gawd knows, I needed it even if I had to get locked up. That old man kept on and on—he's just lookin’ out through them bars. I seen his face and his clean white coat in the light from the toilet. That was over at the City before they moved me over to the County. This here is the County. I ain't never been to jail before…Gawd, when I think about Loretta and Maw and Paw…”
He stopped for a minute, then came back from his thinking. “I reckon I flew red. Couldn't nothin’ be done to shut that old feller up. He's the only one I could see. I took and hit him one and he—you know, when you shoot, a bird seems to linger in the air for the longest time, only it ain't more than a second. I seen him standin’ before he fell and he looked kind of surprised. Then he said, Thank you.’ He said a real quiet thank you, and just sighed down on the floor and hit that iron rack. Jeez Christ, I hated him when he said that, that thank you, lording it over a goddamn drunk tank. I never hit him hard. Just blowed off the last of my steam. I figured he was makin’ fun of the rest of us…”
“How long had you been standing there looking at Johnny before you hit him?” It was such a curious question, not what I had meant to ask him. I wasn't seeking the power in one Saturday-night pint, but the power behind that.
“Just about all my life.” He looked at me then.
I began to laugh. It insulted him. I managed to stop laughing.
“Y'ought to be ashamed of yourself. Settin’ there laughin’ with your brother not cold in his grave. I can sure see you two are brother and sister.”
“That's the trouble with all you damned people who strike out blind. Your fist is packed for an enemy, so you hit the first person who looks like him.” Disgust of the man beside me made me stand up to get away from him.
He looked up at me and studied me for a while as he must have studied Johnny. “You people make me sick. When you spit you hawk coal dust same as us.” He was taking the bandage of wariness and grief and surprise from his eyes, and they showed clear, clean hate—lit up with it—something honest to deal with.
“What got you into it, Jake? What put the chip on your shoulder?” I questioned fast, before he could retreat again.
That curious tenderness of quiet men, even with the hate there, made him get up and put his hand on my shoulder. His grip was viselike.
“Now look here, lady. I'm goin’ to tell you. It's too late not to, ain't it?”
“Yeah, it's too late not to.” Our hands had the same shape. Behind us we could hear Number 6 pull out of the station, going west.
“I've about had enough. Here I end up with ten thousand dollars’ bail and I ain't never had nuthin’ since we sold the farm but a few acres of ridge land and Loretta's womb and Gawd knows ye cain't borry money on that. Looks like a man works hard all his damn life and things are goin’ along all but Loretta's womb.”
He sat down and folded his hands in his lap and told himself the story, as he seemed to have told it forever, over and over. “Loretta come to Jesus and took to gettin’ sick along about the same time. She had fifteen operations, that purty little gal; she come from up around Beulah—Slavish people. Come here in the mines. Ever time she'd get in the hospital she'd get purty as she ever was. Then she'd come home and get drug down again and takin’ to goin’ to bear witness on Wednesdays, gettin’ up there in public tellin’ how she had all them operations and come to Jesus and Maw fussin’ and fumin’ tell her that kind of carryin’ on wasn't like no Jesus she ever knowed. They'd fight and argue about Jesus never shut up. Maw is Baptist, and that there womb of Loretta's must'a had a rock in it that couldn't nobody find start in to draggin’ her down again, that thing must'a weighed a ton.” He paused long enough to fetch a deep sigh. “Then this July the union ruled you couldn't have no Number 8 for the hospital, unemployed over a year. I been out of work one year last Saturday, that damn Number 8 was all we had worth a red cent. I was a good coal-face man. I been makin’ coal up and down this here valley since I was fifteen years old.” He remembered me and accused, “They ain't a damn thing, ain't even that dress on your back didn't come off the coal-face and don't forgit it. You people puttin’ on to act high and mighty…”
From his own coal-face all the way down his life he was getting to Johnny. But his voice had dropped so low that what he had to say ran out toward the floor and I had to lean almost into his lap. He didn't even notice, for he was no longer talking to me.
“We're good people. Come from upriver, up around Lacey Creek. Sold out up there. We had to. Even Paw saw that. Automation come in and we read out to move. Ain't nary a thing left now. They done stripped it. We come down here and Paw bought a little piece of property. Old Carver place…I got me another job.”
I could see the hill farm at Beulah, the neglected fall field rippling, the lespedeza, the orchard covey wurtling in the air, before it was all thrown away, stripped down to bedrock like the Catlett place on Lacey Creek, or this man's face, this distant cousin stranger. “You're Mr. Jake Catlett's son,” I told him. “We're kin, a long way back.” He didn't even hear me.