The Unquiet Earth Read online

  The Unquiet Earth

  Also by Denise Giardina

  GOOD KING HARRY

  STORMING HEAVEN

  The Unquiet Earth

  DENISE GIARDINA

  A NOVEL

  W • W • NORTON & COMPANY • NEW YORK • LONDON

  Copyright © 1992 by Denise Giardina

  All rights reserved

  The text of this book is composed in Janson Alternate

  with the display set in Eve Light

  Composition and Manufacturing by

  The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Giardina, Denise, 1951-

  The unquiet earth : a novel / Denise Giardina.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.I136U57 1992

  813’. 54—dc20 91-46495

  ISBN: 978-0-393-03096-9

  W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

  For Gabe, Erin, Mary, and Sara Anne

  and for Christine Reynolds Whitt

  The writing of this book was supported by the Funding Exchange and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  The story of the Blackberry Creek Food Co-op grows from events described in Huey Perry’s book, They’ll Cut Off Your Project. I am also indebted to the following books and authors: Everything in Its Path, by Kai T. Erikson; Death at Buffalo Creek, by Tom Nugent; and The Buffalo Creek Disaster, by Gerald M. Stern.

  I appreciate the invaluable support and advice of Laurel Goldman, Alex Charns, Bubba Fountain, Elizabeth Stagg, Kathleen O’Keeffe, Dabney Grinnan, Mary Moore, Jay Mazzocchi, Martha Pentecost, Bill Hastie and the writer’s workshop at Duke University Continuing Education. Thanks also to Buck Maggard, Anne Johnson, Jerry Johnson, Herb Smith, Andy Garrison and the other folks at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, to Joe Szakos and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, to the Institute for Southern Studies, Tom Campbell, John Valentine, Helen Whiting, Susan Southern and Randy Campbell at the Regulator Book Shop in Durham, North Carolina, to the Rev. Jim Lewis, Joe Hacala, S.J., and especially Jane Gelfman and Mary Cunnane.

  Finally a thank you to the people of the Appalachian coalfields, especially in McDowell and Mingo counties, West Virginia, Floyd, Pike and Letcher counties, Kentucky, and the Massey and Pittston strikers of southwest Virginia and West Virginia, whose rich lives inspired this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Its characters have grown from an imagination influenced by many actual people, but they have taken on a life of their own in a very headstrong manner. Therefore, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; it was full of bones.

  And he led me round among them; and behold, there were very many upon the valley; and lo, they were very dry.

  And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

  And I answered, “O Lord God, thou knowest.”

  —Ezekiel 37:1–3

  Contents

  Book One

  The Ice Breaks 1930s

  Rats’ Alley 1939 – 1944

  God’s Bones 1945 – 1946

  Trace Mountain 1946 – 1951

  The Child 1959 – 1961

  Book Two

  The Roving Pickets 1962

  Book Three

  Number Thirteen 1963 – 1968

  Death by Water 1969 – 1971

  Book Four

  Exile 1980 – 1982

  Bridges and Dams 1985 – 1986

  Kudzu Jesus 1986

  God’s Bones 1987

  Waiting for Lech 1988 – 1989

  Till Human Voices Wake Us 1990

  The New World

  Book One

  THE ICE BREAKS 1930s

  DILLON FREEMAN

  When my daddy died I was an infant, lying on his chest with his thumb caught tight in my fist. I try to remember properly. I try to remember to hold on tighter to that thumb, to keep the warmth from seeping out. If I squeeze hard enough I’ll recreate him, thumb first, then the rough hand, the forearm with its thick brown hair, the soft fold of skin over his throat, the chin stubbled coarse with beard. But I stop there because it is all I can bring to life. I don’t know his face. And the quickening wanes again until only the thumb is warm, and then not even the thumb.

  Me and Mom still live in the cabin where he died. She dragged the deathbed outside and burned it like a funeral pyre. He was already buried in the Homeplace cemetery with the rest of her people. But it was like she had to see something go up in flames. She wouldn’t have dreamed to throw herself on the fire, though, like Teacher says those women do over there in India. My mother, Carrie Freeman, wouldn’t turn her back on life for nobody, not even a man she loved so desperate she slept with him and them not married and traipsed over mountains to be with him.

  I am the child of that love. A woods colt, as we say in these Kentucky mountains. Nobody troubles me over it. Nobody dares because I am a steady fighter. People here don’t get het up over such things anyway, except a few of the meanest church women. Besides, my mother was married to a preacher before she and Daddy made me, and I ended up with the preacher’s last name, so that as good as sanctified the whole proceedings.

  My daddy was a union organizer over in the West Virginia coalfields, and he was in a battle with the state police and company thugs and took a bullet that snapped his spine clean in two. That’s how he came to die slow and in bed with me sprawled atop him. Rachel, who is my cousin, says she recalls him. I don’t believe she could recall much, she was barely two. But she says she remembers being scared of the Aunt Jane Place because a mean man lived there. Mom says Daddy was bad-tempered for being paralyzed and Rachel was skittish of him. It does put me in awe of Rachel a little, it makes me jealous because I should be the one to remember him. I should remember grabbing onto that thumb. But I don’t hold Rachel’s memory against her. I just stay as close to her as I can.

  Rachel gets uncomfortable when I talk about Mom and Daddy making me. She was raised more proper. Rachel is a Honaker, and she lives on the Homeplace just down Grapevine nigh to the shoals. We are first cousins—our mothers are sisters, Carrie and Flora. Me and Mom live at the Aunt Jane Place. It is all the same land, just two different houses, theirs the white wood farmhouse, ours the cabin that creaks in the wind and smells of woodsmoke. Uncle Ben says move down to the Homeplace, he’ll build on an extra room and the older younguns will be moving out soon, but Mom won’t hear of it. I think she wants to stay in the house of Daddy’s last breathing.

  Uncle Ben is worried about whether we can live on our land at all. He says the taxes have gone up because the coal companies are buying land, and he has taken out a mortgage to pay them. Then he opened a general store at the mouth of Scary to help pay the mortgage but the store is not doing any good. Mom says Ben would pick the depths of the Depression to open up a store. Uncle Ben is a smart man but him and Aunt Flora have got no business sense, Mom says, and they give too much credit. In these times we are living in, lots of folks need credit. So the sacks of flour disappear from the dusty shelves as soon as they are set out, and Ben cannot keep the pokes of already baked-and-sliced lightbread that caused such a stir when they first arrived. A poke of sliced lightbread is prized, for it means you can afford to spend money to replace the biscuits and cornbread people bake themselves, but Ben even gives credit for lightbread, so everyone is the same.

  At school Rachel has fried egg sandwiches on lightbread with store-bought mayonnaise or sometimes mayonnaise by itself which nobody else has. She doesn’t
take on about it. Mom will not have lightbread in the house, she says even if we had the money it’s just as tasty as a handkerchief and she sends me to school with yellow cornbread. Some younguns who bring cornbread hide what they have because they are embarrassed to be poor but I won’t do that because it would shame my Mom.

  Mom says she gives the store less than a year, then she smiles and says, “That Ben, he’ll feed the hollow while it lasts.” There’s things we don’t get from the store. We grow our corn and vegetables and raise our own pigs and chickens and milk cows. We put up preserves in mason jars for the winter, or I should say the women do. They stand over the cast-iron stoves in the heat of summer and stir the great boiling pots of tomatoes and beans, dip their ladles into the roiling red and green liquid, and wipe the sweat from their faces with one corner of their aprons. They slice the apples and sun-dry them into leather-sweet strips. They take a needle and thread to the beans and hang them in rows to dry from the porch rafters. Me and Uncle Ben and his big boys plow and hoe and plant and haul. Rachel tends the chickens and cows.

  But we get lard and salt from the store, and baking soda and flour, and nails and needles for piercing. And Goody’s Headache Powder that Aunt Flora eats like it is candy.

  Sometimes when the hens are laying good, Rachel has two eggs to trade at the store. Aunt Flora makes her trade even though the store is theirs, because she says it is proper. Rachel trades for a Three Musketeers. Each of us pops one chocolate Musketeer in our mouths and we break the third exact down the middle. I like to see the nougat heart. Or Rachel trades for a CoCola in a little green bottle, what some call a dope and others call a sodypop but Rachel always calls by its right name. Ben’s store has a big metal sign nailed to the front wall with a raised red oval that reads Coca-Cola in curlicued white letters. The red paint has faded in the sun and there are dents where younguns throw pebbles to hear the clang. The best sodypops come from Ben’s ice chest and you sit on the front stoop where the bottle catches glints of sunlight and you look at the green mountain that hovers over the store. It is best when your feet are dusty from the road. Rachel and I share sodypops and the neck of the bottle is warm and tastes the way I guess her mouth would taste.

  A long time ago Uncle Ben was the teacher at the Scary Creek School. I am glad he doesn’t teach anymore because I despise school and if he was the teacher I’d have to despise him. I am not a bad student, I learn what I am supposed to, but still I don’t care for it. You have to hold your pencil a certain way even though it’s cramped as hell and if you don’t do it right, Teacher wraps your fingers around the pencil hard and like to breaks every bone in your hand. You learn spelling rules and grammar rules and that the way you talked all your life is ignorant even though it seems to suit most people fine, and when Teacher goes on and says we live in a free country it’s just a little hard to believe. Nobody admits it but school is to teach you how to get bossed. I reckon I could read some books on my own and learn what I want, but my mom sets a store by school.

  Rachel is the best student. She is sixteen and I am only fourteen-and-three-quarters. But I am right behind her at school. Rachel is very thin and has wavy light-brown hair that comes to her shoulders. She wears very nice clothes because Aunt Flora cuts pictures from the mail-order catalog and makes dresses to look like them. My mom says it’s a good thing I’m a boy because she can’t sew and she would send me to school in potato sacks. Most of what I wear is hand-me-downs from Uncle Ben’s boys.

  Once Aunt Flora got hold of some old window drapes and clothes from a missionary box. Missionaries from up North are always sending us boxes of old things like we aren’t even Christian. I wouldn’t touch a thing in those boxes nor my Mom neither, but Aunt Flora says why waste, she can make the things nicer than when they were sent. She took some drapes of slick red material and made Rachel a coat that looked like the Chinese wear. Then she cut down a big white wool skirt and jacket into a dress with a high collar and red buttons down the front. Rachel wore the red coat and white dress to school on Class Day when we all had to recite poems. Rachel’s dress had long narrow sleeves and a long skirt down to her boot tops. When she stood up to recite, she looked like a queen.

  RACHEL HONAKER

  I wore the white dress and red coat on Class Day to impress the teacher, who was young and fresh from Transylvania College and in the mountains for some kind of adventure. He was a Bennett from Louisville and my mother said they were quality people. She knew about the Bennetts from the Society pages of the Courier-Journal, which she read faithfully even though we didn’t know a soul in Louisville.

  It rained on Class Day and we had two miles to walk to school. I carried an old umbrella but the wind blew the rain sideways and the umbrella went inside out. Dillon offered to throw his coat over me but I said no he would catch his death. It was November and the rain was cold and gray like the storm clouds had set right down on top of us. We walked and my dress got heavier and the mud pulled at my feet. By the time we got to school I was wore out.

  Inside the wood schoolhouse we took off our coats. Everyone stared at me and I looked down. The coat had wept and left red splotches all over my white dress. It was like I’d been shot, like I’d been through bloody battle. My throat got hard but I was too old to cry. I put the coat back on. We crowded around the stove with our hands out, trying to get warm, and my damp wool dress smelled like an old sheep. I held my mouth straight and got madder and madder to keep from crying. Then Dillon whispered in my ear.

  “Take your coat off. Nobody will dare laugh at you.”

  His breath warmed my frozen ear lobe. I couldn’t look at him and went to my seat. But when it came my turn to recite the Ode on a Grecian Urn, I threw back my coat and stood in front of everyone with my back to the teacher. I faced Dillon.

  I said,

  Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

  Though winning near the goal, yet do not grieve:

  She cannot fade; though thou hast not thy bliss,

  Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.

  Dillon sat with his hands clasped on the desk in front of him. His straight brown hair was combed to one side and he had a small sharp nose that looked too delicate for a boy. He watched me carefully, his narrow eyes bright. I felt heat building under my armpits, between my breasts and down my backbone. My dress was still wet and sticky and I thought the steam must be rising from me.

  My mother, Flora Honaker, never allowed me to call her Mom. It sounded country, she said. She was Mother. I used to ache inside when Dillon called Aunt Carrie “Mom.” When he was little, he could fall and skin his knee and Aunt Carrie picked out the bits of twig and gravel with a needle, bathed the bloody skin with a cloth dipped in warm soapy water, and afterward kissed the mottled flesh before she bandaged it. When I fell my mother said I was too wild and turned back to peeling potatoes. Her hands looked white and cold from the rinse water. After a while, when I fell or was bee-stung, I walked all the way to the Aunt Jane Place, choking on my sobs, so that Aunt Carrie could bathe me and Dillon could kiss the wound.

  But my mother made a house pretty. Our floors were rough wood but she scrubbed them on her hands and knees. She hung lacy curtains and brought flowers inside to stick in jars of water. She knew all the wildflowers and grew roses and pansies and snapdragons around the house. “You can tell there is love in a house when you see flowers,” she used to say, and so I assumed neighbors with dirt yards always screamed at one another. Mother took the Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s and the Pictorial Review. At night, while we listened to Lum and Abner on the radio, she sat beside a lamp turning the pages slowly, her head bent reverently over the glowing photographs. Sometimes she would touch the page with her finger and look up as though about to speak, then drop her eyes quickly.

  She learned out of her magazines how to fold a napkin, how to set out the silverware just so and lay the knife so the curved side faces the plate. “See here,” she told me, “when you pick up the knife you don’t
have to turn it over, it is ready to cut your meat.” She stood over me while I laid the table, until she could trust me with it.

  I was her main project. My older sisters were gone, Mabel to Berea College, Jane married to a principal and teaching school in Danville. Mother longed for me to go to Berea, where she hoped the offending hillbilly would be whipped out of me and I would marry a future doctor or lawyer and live in Lexington or Louisville. I wished I could talk to my sisters about it, but they were far away.

  When I was six, I’d said, “I’m going to marry Dillon when I grow up.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Mother said. “Dillon is your first cousin. You want to have babies that aren’t right?”

  “What do you mean, babies that aren’t right?”

  “I mean simple in the head. Deformed.”

  “Dillon says a man gives a woman babies with his peter. And Dillon’s not simple, so if he gave me a baby, it would be all right.”

  She hit me so hard my mouth was bruised for days. I never recall her hitting me another time. I wept until I couldn’t breathe.

  “That wild boy! I’ll speak to his mother. If she’s not going to raise him properly, she can at least see he behaves around you. As for you, young lady,”—she always called me young lady when she was mad at me—“don’t let me ever hear such filth come out of your mouth again. You aren’t some trash from the head of the hollow.”

  Whenever the Kentucky Derby was run she sat close to the radio. While the announcer described the horses, she told me how the women present would all be wearing hats and what they would look like, to prepare me for the day when I would join them. Women who wore hats always had perfect babies.