Hours after Jackson left, I couldn’t rest, had to keep moving, couldn’t help marveling at the new feeling of love, its energy.
I checked on the baby many times, fed her and changed her cloths. Honey must’ve felt it all too because she wouldn’t go back to sleep. She wasn’t crying or fussing neither. I picked up Milly-Molly-Mandy and began to read to her. “Once upon a time.” I flipped open the storybook and stopped. “See the girl, Honey?” I pointed to the picture of the young’un dressed in a frock. Honey blinked and stared at it. “Her name is Milly-Molly-Mandy.” I lightly scratched Honey’s chubby tummy, and she squirmed and cooed. “Look at your pretty, smart self.” I smiled. “You’re eager to learn all the words.” When I finished the first chapter, she closed her eyes and quieted.
Out on the porch, I folded diapers and hummed a ditty, the tingle of Jackson’s kiss still fresh on my lips. In a bit, I picked up a book on the table and flicked through it. The lantern cast a soft light across my busy fingers, my mind near bursting, picturing the three of us reading together. I’d show Honey my route one day and introduce her to my patrons. I thought of the opportunities the young’un would have. How the Pack Horse library, its books, had opened my eyes to places and folks beyond these hills, breathed a new life now with Jackson. Honey’d have it all. Books’ll learn you were Angeline’s last words to Honey, and I vowed to give the babe all the books. Give her what dear Angeline wanted, and the dreams I was desperate for her to have. Lighthearted, I shut the book and returned to my task.
The tittering neighs of someone’s mount brought me back. I looked up from my laundry and saw the ghostly lit lanterns, two mules approaching, and what trailed behind them scraping the ground.
The cloth fell to the boards, and I slowly rose, swallowing my cheerful thoughts, the fear weighing my legs, stitched tight in my belly. One of the beasts was harnessed with a stretcher.
I squinted at the men’s dark, drawn faces and flew down the steps feeling the gallop of my heart reach my ears.
“Pa? No, Pa…Pa—” I ran into the yard and collapsed by the stretcher, shook his shoulders. “Pa? Oh, Pa, wake up.” I kneeled over him screaming, then shook him, my voice an ugly crackle, strained from pleas to wake his lifeless form, my hands desperate to bring the dead back to life. “Please.” I clutched his coal-stained shirt, shook harder, clawed at the coarse fabric, the remnants of the mine breathing its last deadly breaths of coal dust into the air. “Don’t leave me. Wake up and let me tell you about the courter. Pa! I’m getting married.” I grasped his cold lifeless hand and cradled his coal-stained head with my other one. “Pa, oh, Pa, the stick held the fire.” I leaned into his face. “Took hold fine. And he’s a fine one you picked. Pa, don’t leave us,” I begged. “Please don’t leave.” I laid my wet, burning cheek against his hard, cold one.
The beast’s nervous brays, nickering mingled with my rasping cries, spirited into gusts of grieving winds that plucked at the house boards, old chinks, and window cracks, carrying bursts of the night madness through pines.
“Ma’am,” a man’s soft voice called above. I peered up as the coal miner dismounted and approached with a lantern. “Ma’am. Uh, Miss Cussy, I’m Howard Moore. Mighty sorry to be bringing him home like this.” He grimaced and shook his head, squeezed his red eyes shut. “We was pulling pillars tonight.”
It was one of the most dangerous jobs of a coal miner, one that most shirked from: the Company’s last job where the men took out the pillars of coal that held up the roof of the tunnel to keep the top of the mountain from collapsing.
“Elijah got trapped. Mighty sorry.” Mr. Moore set down the lantern, played with the carbide helmet a second. He brushed off the coal dust on Pa’s lamp, then held it out. “Your pap was one of the best, ma’am. Volunteered to pull pillars with me when no one else would. A good, hardworking man who took care of us all. He made me get out first. Insisted. Then I couldn’t find him at the mouth… By the time I got back to him, he weren’t long for this world—” The miner choked and rubbed a tight fist across his coal-stained mouth. “I held Elijah’s hand, and we prayed and talked a few minutes ’fore the Lord took him. He will be sorely missed and will cast a long shadow over these ol’ Kaintuck mountains.”
Soft murmurs of the other men echoed the miner’s.
He wiped Pa’s hat on his sleeve, handed it to me, and I clutched it to my cheek, pressed the sooty helmet to my trembling lips.
The miners trudged up the hill to our small family cemetery and dug hard into the night. Later, when I heard them talking softly on the porch, I peeked out and saw them passing drink. A coal miners’ tradition. One or more would stay with the body, keep watch over their fellow miner, never leave the dead man to face his last earthly moments alone until he was tucked good ’n’ safe into the ground.
Around 5:00 a.m., I heard a horse’s high whinny and opened the door.
Someone rode into the yard on a horse-drawn cart. I walked out to the porch, raised my lantern, and saw the coffin it carried. Then I saw the man who had ridden it.
Jackson.
I raced down the porch steps. Jackson jumped down from the wagon and opened his arms, taking me in with his strong clasp. “I stopped in town to have a late meeting with Amos Dalton about timber when I heard about the mine accident. I’m sorry, Cussy Mary. I saw the miners leaving for your place. I wanted to help. They chipped in and made sure Elijah would have a fine coffin, and I borrowed the cart from Amos to get it here. We’ll see Elijah has a proper burial. Preacher will be out at first light.”
To have lost Henry and Angeline in such a short time, and now my only parent. The grief spilled forth, swallowing me. Jackson drew me closer and I buried my face in his chest, and huge sobs racked my body while he held on to me, his arms steady and healing.
At dawn, I found Mr. Moore sitting on the grass beside Pa’s covered stretcher while the others were half-asleep on the porch. The men roused and told me Jackson had gone off to ride in with the preacher.
The sky turned into a gray beast. The winds whipped off hats, plucked at our overcoats, and whistled prayers through the treetops as we laid Pa to rest on the knoll up in our old, small Carter cemetery beside Mama and the other Blues.