The man got right to it. Rosie appreciated that. Cotton Jackson didn’t pussyfoot around, didn’t try to make it sound like he really was interested in Rose and not her mother. He sat down, looked her honest in the eye and wanted to know what her mama’d told her about Gideon.
“Oh, she told me everything. When I’s a little girl, she told me about her whole life. Musta told me a hundred times. Five hundred. Wasn’t nothing else to talk about. Told me so often that when I think about it now, it’s almost like it was me and not Mama lived it.”
Lily’s cough is better today. Some days, she hacks and hacks, makes such a racket Mama makes her go outside to keep her from waking wee Willie from his nap. Hawks up huge hunks of black goo that feel like they’s ripping a hole out of her chest when they finally come loose.
Today, Rory went down with Pa. At twelve, her brother is only two years older than she is but he’s a lot bigger so the foreman would rather have Lily. She can squeeze into places Rory can’t, can get between the coal wagon and the shaft wall when don’t look like there’s enough room for a rat to get through. Won’t be long ‘fore Rory’s so big they’ll put him to work with the men and then Lily will have to go down every day. And then the cough won’t never get better, breathing the coal dust in the mine for ten hours a day every day, it won’t never ease up.
But she can breathe today and there’s that and she ain’t gonna think about later. Ma says ain’t nothin’ to be gained from borrowing trouble. The Good Book says every day has enough trouble of its own ‘thout you going out there into the future and hauling a load of it back with you into today.
Soon’s Ma takes the basket of laundry out into the backyard to hang on the line, Lily sneaks away, wants to see what happens when Mr. Milliken from MAC comes. He’s the one who’ll get to decide what to do, of course. Monroe Addington Coal decides everything — where you live, when you work, what you get paid — settles up your account with the company store.
Pa hadn’t never been able to get square with the company, not one time since he’d brought her and Rory and Ma and the twins down from McDowell County. The company’d hired a couple dozen miners from the Flat Top fields in West Virginia, paid off what they owed and set them up with houses in Gideon, promised they could work off the debt in a year. Course, they never did. They had to eat, put clothes on their families, had to buy everything from the company store and at the end of every month what they owed was always more’n what they’d earned in wages. Even when Rory worked with Pa, and then Lily. Only one of the twins was able to work, the other one always poorly, lips blue and couldn’t hardly do for herself at all. But even with little Sarah working sometimes, there was always more owed to the store than the company owed them.
When Lily rounds the corner beside the O’Leary house, she sees him, and wonders as she so often has if the devil really is a man — the mine foreman, Horace Tackett. He has an ugly, mean face with bright blue eyes that look at you like you’re a smashed slug he’s wiping off the edge of his shoe so’s he won’t track the goo into the house. He calls the Irish miners and their families “mackerel snappers.” Says they should be glad of mining jobs deep down in holes under the mountains ‘cause they smell so bad wasn’t no other work they could do. He says every business run by decent folks had signs out front, “No Irish need apply.”
Mr. Tackett always makes sure the miners know he’s the biggest frog in the pond. Folks say he has bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling of one whole room in his house in Killarney, claim he has read every one of them. He likes to prance around, lording it over the miners, is always making fun of them. He calls them superstitious bobolynes — fools — because they b’lieve they’s haints in the mist and are a’feared of them. He says ain’t no such thing, that being scared of haints is like being scared of the “Jabberwock.”
Course didn’t nobody know what a Jabberwock was — that was the point of him saying it. Proving he knew things the miners didn’t, was smarter than they was, better than they was. Come from some book, he said, a pretend creature in a story. Said the haints was like that, nothing but made-up monsters only stupid people believed in.
Lily knew the haints wasn’t make believe. They was real. She had heard them her own self with her own ears! Lots of times. It was the horriblest thing she’d ever heard. It was always at sundown, when the mists formed above the creeks and in the trees. Her house was on the edge of town and she could hear the haints calling out to each other, crying in the nearby woods. Her mama’d always hold the little ‘uns tight in her lap and rock fiercely back and forth in her rocker, hollering out Scripture and singing hymns nonstop until the sounds was gone.
Horace Tackett laughed at their fears, but he didn’t laugh when Rufus Giddings come running out of the mine yesterday, hollering and carrying on about what he’d found. When folks heard, they got so up in arms about it they was near to hysterical. The miners flat-out refused to work. Mr. Tackett couldn’t calm them down, so he’d called in his boss, Mr. Milliken, to talk to them.
By the time Lily gets to the center of town, a large crowd is already congregated at the meeting place: the Carthage Oak. The gigantic gnarled tree must be almost a hundred feet tall, with limbs spread out from a trunk so huge Pa took out a tape once and measured around it, said it was nigh onto twenty feet. A big hole near the base is so large that children can play inside it.
The man from the company is already there. Mr. Tackett stands beside two big duffel bags, the ones miners use to haul their equipment — shovels, picks, helmets, headlamps, axes and lunch buckets — into the mine.
He picks them up, one after the other, and dumps all the contents on the ground. There is a clattering sound, bones clacking against each other as they fall out onto the dirt. Big bones, little bones, jawbones, leg bones, fingers, skulls and ribs, the remains of at least a dozen people — no, more than that, two dozen. The bones aren’t very big — from small people, children, too, looks like. Everybody standing near jumps back and the crowd gasps. One of the little skulls rolls like a ball toward Maggie McCarthy and she squeaks out a scream.
“See what I mean,” Mr. Tackett says. “I couldn’t get a man jack of ‘em to lift a pick soon’s we found them bones. They think the mine’s haunted.”
Mr. Milliken grimaces in disgust.
“How’d you come upon these bones?” he asks Rufus.
“I’s diggin’ at the face and knocked a hole into the back side of a cave. Wasn't very big, maybe forty, fifty feet wide and they was light shining in, around whatever was covering up the opening on the other side. Then I seen what was on the floor — bones. Skeletons of people.”
Mr. Tackett describes how he got a crew of men to dig through the thick brush and move the rock away from the cave entrance and gather up the bones. But the miners still refused to go back into the mine, afraid they’d desecrated an Indian burial ground and now the ghosts of the savages would come for them in the tunnels, slit their throats or scalp them in the dark.
“This all you found, just the bones, all in that one cave?”
“Yes, sir,” Rufus says.
Mr. Milliken makes a humph sound in his throat.
“Then these aren’t Indian bones. The Cherokee don’t bury their dead all together in caves. They bury them one at a time, dig holes in the ground so the bodies can nourish the earth. The Chickasaw put bows and arrows and pottery — all kinda stuff in the graves, things they'll need in the afterlife.”
He pauses, thinking, then spits out words like they taste bad in his mouth. “These must be the bones of some of them Shakers.”
He curls his mouth in a repulsed sneer, and growls, “A bunch of jitter-dancers. No-good, filthy Yankee abolitionists. They had a little town by the waterfall once ‘til the Indians killed ‘em off — good riddance.”
He gestures at the tangled pile of bones — all that remained of a whole bunch of people. The littlest skull is the size of the apples Lily picks off the tree by the creek.
“You dragged me all the way out here for this? You might as well have found a pile of rat bones.”
Lily can’t pull her eyes away from the chalky white bones. The empty eye sockets seem to stare accusingly up at the crowd of people gathered around them.
Mr. Tackett speaks up then, all arrogant-like, making it clear him and Mr. Milliken are the only people present who aren’t stupid.
“They’re afraid of haints, scared of ghosts in the mine like they was Jabberwocks sneaking up on them in the dark.”
From the look on Mr. Milliken’s face, it seems for an instant that the company man doesn’t know what the word Jabberwock means, and Lily feels a thrill of victory well up in her chest. But then he either remembers or bluffs.
“No need to fear ghosts, men,” Mr. Milliken says sternly to the miners. “There's no such thing. People leave their spirits behind when they die, their souls, sure, destined for heaven or hell. But jitter-dancers don’t leave anything behind because they aren’t people. They aren’t human. They have no souls!” He leans over and spits on the pile of bones. “Get rid of these and get back to work.”
Then he stalks back to his carriage with his white handkerchief up around his nose. He always keeps it there, every time Lily has ever seen him. Ma says he thinks the miners smell like pole cats.
The arguments start then, soon’s Mr. Milliken is out of earshot, standing by his carriage talking to Mr. Tackett.
“I don’t care what he says, I ain’t going back in there.”
“We need to bury them bones, put up a cross!” Those words hit the crowd like a drop of water in hot grease.
“Wasn’t you listening? It was Shakers as laid out their dead in that cave – wasn't Christians. You can’t put a cross on the grave of heathens.”
One of the Irish speaks up. “I’ll not be puttin’ the likes of these in holy ground!” All the Irish are Catholic.
“We need to throw them bones away like Mr. Milliken said.”
“They deserve a decent burial!”
“Jitter-dancers don’t deserve nothin'.”
Then Oran Smalley says in his squeaky voice, “They ain’t people, but even if they was, takes more’n just one bone from a person for a proper haunting.” Oran is a know-it-all who couldn’t pour dirt out of a shoe if the instructions was on the heel. “The bones from a whole body got to be all together in one spot or there ain't enough … well, whatever it takes to make a ghost.”
The others grab hold of the idea and run with it.
“Yeah, all we got to do is scatter them bones out, so ain’t no full skeletons. Throw them bones around in the woods, toss them all over the place.”
A couple of miners – Pa is the loudest of them -- argue with the idea. Pa says it ain't right and proper for good Christian people to dishonor folks as had passed on like that. But they are outnumbered.
“Hey, it ain’t like they was human. They was just Shakers.”
Lily doesn’t know what Shakers are, but whatever they are, she feels a kinship of sorts with them because Mr. Tackett and Mr. Milliken act like the miners and their families ain’t human, neither.
As she turns to go back home, Mr. O’Malley calls out, “Go get yourself a gunny sack to carry 'em." He points to the small stand of thick trees that stretches from Troublesome Creek to the rocky base of Buzzard Knob. "Throw 'em in them woods, scatter 'em out.”
While Rose’d reeled out the story of her mother going to the Carthage Oak that day to hear what the man from the coal company had to say, Rose had been watching Cotton, the husband of Thelma Jackson who’d come to ask her questions years ago.
She’d told Thelma all about the “Jabberwock,” ‘cause that was the fanciest word Rose’d ever heard and she hardly ever got a chance to use it. But she hadn’t said nothing at all about the bones. Oh, no, not that part. The most important part. Rose hadn’t been altogether sure she could trust Thelma, hadn’t been as good as she was now at reading people.
When you sat day after day, month after month for years waiting to die, just watching people and not participating in conversations, after a while you learned how to read what was in people’s heads and hearts even when it wasn’t the same thing at all as what come out their mouths.
Rose could see through the sugar-sweet acts of them social workers who come to visit every now and then, pretending they cared what was happening to you and how you felt about it when they didn’t give a fig if you dropped dead in front of them.
They phony smiles hung on they faces like them masks surgeons wore when they cut into you. She could spot phony ten miles out.
This Cotton fella, though. Wasn’t nothing phony about him. Might be he wasn’t telling her everything there was to tell, but she was convinced everything he did tell her was true.