Storming Heaven Read online

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Good King Harry

  Storming Heaven

  DENISE GIARDINA

  Storming Heaven

  A NOVEL

  W • W • NORTON & COMPANY • New York • London

  Copyright © 1987 by Denise Giardina

  All rights reserved.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario L3R 1B4.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Giardina, Denise, 1951-

  Storming heaven.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.I136S76 1987 813’.54 86-23764

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07626-4

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

  500 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10110

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY LTD.

  37 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, LONDON

  WC1B 3NU

  For Mernie King, Perk Perkins, Tricia Perkins, and Jim Lewis

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the following people who contributed to the writing of this book in many ways, large and small.

  Colleen Anderson, Fred Barkey, Ann Barth, Billy Ray Belcher, Patty Flo Belcher, Bill Blizzard, Nancy Brallier, Harry Brawley, Tony Burgess, Steve Cohen, Rob Currie, Kate Fitzgerald, Charli Fulton, John Gaventa, Dennis Giardina, Leona Whitt Giardina, Frank Giardina, Joe Bob Goodwin, Dale Grimmett, Joe Hacala, Jerry Hardt, Bill Harrington, Ken Hechler, Faith Holsaert, Myles Horton, Freda Jones, Opie Jones, Tod Kaufman, Terry Keleher, Lorrie Lane, Judy Lewis, David Liden, Kate Long, Hermer Lucas, John McFerrin, Dr. Jimmie Mangus, Connie Marcum, Homer Marcum, Jim Marcum, Walter Marcum, Linda Martin, Bob Noone, Mary Kay O’Rourke, Joe Peschel, Mary Ratliff, Alec Reynolds, Paul Sheridan, Susan Small, Bob Spence, Joe Szakos, Kristin Layng Szakos, Jim Waggy, Susan Weber, Mary Beth Wells, Elmo Whitt, Ertel Whitt, Lois Whitt, Rodney Whitt, Bob Wise.

  Also the West Virginia Department of Culture and History, the Library of Congress, Mayor Bob Cruikshanks and the Town of Pratt, the Highlander Center, the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia, Sojourners Fellowship, the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition, the West Virginia Land Ownership Study, the Charleston Gazette, and the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund.

  A special thank you to George Garrett for his unselfish efforts on behalf of young writers, to Jane Gelfman for her patience and encouragement, and to my editor, Kathy Anderson.

  And in grateful memory of Ned Chilton, publisher of the Charleston Gazette, whose fighting spirit inspired the Annadel Free Press.

  I am indebted to the following books and their authors: Life, Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields, David Alan Corbin; Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, John Gaventa; Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War 1920–21, Lon Savage; Bloodletting in Appalachia, Howard B. Lee; Struggle in the Coal Fields: The Autobiography of Fred Mooney; King Coal, Stan Cohen; Civil War in West Virginia, by Winthrop D. Lane for the New York Evening Post; Land of the Guyandot, Robert Y. Spence; Sodom and Gomorrah of Today: Or a History of Keystone, West Virginia, by an anonymous Virginia “Lad,” 1912.

  Contents

  Part One

  One: C. J. MARCUM

  Two: RONDAL LLOYD

  Three: CARRIE BISHOP

  Four: ROSA ANGELELLI

  Five: C. J. MARCUM

  Six: CARRIE BISHOP

  Seven: ROSA ANGELELLI

  Eight: RONDAL LLOYD

  Part Two

  Nine: CARRIE BISHOP

  Part Three

  Ten: C. J. MARCUM

  Eleven: CARRIE BISHOP

  Twelve: C. J. MARCUM

  Thirteen: CARRIE BISHOP

  Fourteen: ROSA ANGELELLI

  Fifteen: RONDAL LLOYD

  Sixteen: ROSA ANGELELLI

  Seventeen: CARRIE BISHOP

  Part Four

  Eighteen: CARRIE BISHOP

  Nineteen: RONDAL LLOYD

  Twenty: CARRIE BISHOP

  Twenty-One: RONDAL LLOYD

  Twenty-Two: CARRIE BISHOP

  Twenty-Three: RONDAL LLOYD

  Twenty-Four: CARRIE BISHOP

  Twenty-Five: CARRIE BISHOP

  AFTERWORD

  Part One

  One

  C. J. MARCUM

  THEY IS MANY A WAY TO MARK A BABY WHILE IT IS STILL YET in the womb. A fright to its mother will render it nervous and fretful after it is birthed. If a copperhead strikes, a fiery red snake will be stamped on the baby’s face or back. And a portentous event will violate a woman’s entrails, grab a youngun by the ankle and wrench a life out of joint.

  Me and Dillon Lloyd spoke of such things on the night Rondal was borned. It was eighteen and ninety, the year the railroad come in and took up the land, two year before the land was give out from under us to the coal company. Dillon seen it coming. We perched out on the hillside and spied for shooting stars, while Dillon told me how Rondal, his brother’s first child, come into the world.

  “Hit was fast for a first youngun, and the granny woman was too late. Clabe werent back from fetchin her down from Raven. Werent nary a soul to help birth him but me. He cried out when I smacked him but then he got real quiet. I held him up and he looked me right in the eye. Wouldnt look away. Them’s blue eyes he’s got, long and down-turned.”

  Dillon carved on a slab of hickory, fashioning the slender neck of a banjo for the baby. I caught curls of wood as they fell and flung them out into the moonlight.

  “How you know he’s goin to take to the banjer?” I asked. “Maybe he aint got the gift like you.”

  “I seen them hands. That one will be a picker. Them fingers was curved and he was movin them back and forth slow like. He’s goin to love the feel of this here neck. And the strings will be soft. I’ll git the guts from that old tabby in the barn. And I’ll tan its hide for the head. Hit’s too old to mouse these days.”

  “How can you pick on them strings when you know where they come from?”

  “Dont bother me none. I wisht I could be put to some use when I die, stead of moulderin in the ground. My skin for a banjer, my bones for a scythe or a flail to clear paths in this here world.”

  I loved to hear him talk that way. Dillon Lloyd was always a free-talking man. He lived alone in a cabin back up the hill from his brother Clabe. They worked the land together, one hundred acres at the mouth of Trace. Dillon’s thick black hair hung down between his shoulder blades like an Indian’s. People said that he had the second sight, that he could set the Evil Eye on a body. He went abroad at night, not hunting, just walking. Vernie, Clabe’s wife, was scared of him. Dillon laughed at her behind her back.

  When my papaw could spare me from chores, I rode my mule up Blackberry Creek to the Lloyd homeplace and spent the night. Dillon took me out after dark, coon hunting or bullfrogging, or maybe just walking. Later I’d lie alone in the loft of his cabin. The summer breeze would rush through the window and rustle the bedclothes, bearing the flailing of his banjo like the sound of the river running yonder.

  When Rondal was borned, Dillon let me stay out with him all night. The moon on the wane was giving light enough to show the creek rippling silver where it joined Trace Fork. My mind’s eye could see all the land—the mountain wrapped like a protecting arm around the cabin, the prickly grass in the pasture up Trace where the cows and sheep grazed, the dark fields fanning out along the bottom, soon to be dense with corn, the wall of mountain across Blackberry, the side of it rearing straight up from the creek bed.

  “Bad times comin,” said Dillon. “That youngun will suffer it. He was in the womb when the papers was signed.”

  “My papaw says it too. He dont trust them railroad men. And he aint took no money neither.”

  I was proud of it. My papa
w, Henry Marcum, had refused to sign the paper giving the minerals to the railroad. He hadnt knowed what the minerals was, but when he heard they was on his land, he wanted to keep them. Still he was scared, like most people. The railroad men claimed they owned all the land, had bought it off somebody in Philadelphia whose papaw had fought in the Revolutionary War and been give it as a gift. According to them, they owned most of Justice County, and McDowell County, too. Then they come around, fat, smooth-faced men in black suits, and vowed they’d leave us the land if we’d sign over the minerals. Vernie signed one day when Clabe was gone hunting. Clabe didnt chastise her.

  But Papaw sucked loudly on his teeth when he heard what Clabe and Vernie had done. Wouldnt no good come of it, he said. He’d already wrangled with the railroad men. When he told them about the deed he held at the courthouse, they laughed at him. Junior patent, they kept saying. Senior patent is what we own. That takes precedence. Ask any judge.

  The judges we was supposed to ask was a way far off, so most folks signed. The railroad men vowed they’d not bother us no more. We’ll see, Dillon said. He sat on the mountain on the night of Rondal’s birth and said it again. We’ll see.

  The railroad men spoke true—they didnt bother us no more. Instead they give the minerals over to the coal companies and the coal companies took our land two year later. Omar Kane, sheriff of Justice County, come around and said everyone had to move, that he had an order. American coal took a lease from the Richmond and Western railroad. Railroad owns the mineral. Mineral owner has precedence over the surface owner. He tacked a notice on Clabe’s cabin door, on Dillon’s, and most everyone’s on the holler. When he passed us by, my papaw was pleased with himself.

  “I told them other durned fools, but they wouldnt listen. Hit’s what comes of bein greedy, Cincinnatus. You remember that.”

  Papaw Henry always called me Cincinnatus, only person that did, Cincinnatus Jefferson Marcum, after the two greatest men that ever lived.

  “Farmers and freemen,” he called them. “You be just like em, boy.”

  Papaw had the naming of me because my daddy died of the pneumonia before I was borned, and the childbirth took my mother away right after. I was sent to school at Justice in the winters. Papaw had it in mind that I would read for the law someday.

  “Cincinnatus, fetch some honey jars up the hill.”

  That was the last thing Papaw ever said to me. The jars was dusty and I went to the well to wash them while he climbed the hill. Mamaw and me heard a shot. We run and found him toppled over into one of the hives. We was both stung all over when we pulled him out of there by the legs. He was shot once through the head.

  Sheriff come round in three days and nailed the notice to vacate on our cabin door.

  “What gives you the right, Omar?” Mamaw said.

  Sheriff wouldnt look at her. “Henry set his mark to a paper, didnt he?”

  “His mark?” I said scornfully. “He didnt have no call to make no mark. My papaw could read and write.”

  “I dont know about that,” Sheriff muttered.

  I wanted to kill him. He was the same man I had known all my young life, Omar Kane from Justice town, who give me a molasses candy when Papaw went to the polls to vote. I wanted to get my squirrel rifle and shoot him. When he rode away and I had not done it, I despised myself for a coward.

  The fields was half plowed when we packed to go, leaving the homeplace the Marcums settled in 1801 when they first come to West Virginia, on the little creek called after us, Marcums Branch. We left my papaw buried atop the ridge behind the cabin in the Marcum family cemetery. They wasnt no preacher due for a while and we knew that this time he’d not come by for the summer funerals, so me and Mamaw each said our own goodbyes and trusted the Lord would hear them. I read a little from the scripture about folks raised up on the Last Day. I throwed the first dirt on with my hands, then shovelled the hole full. I pictured the Last Day, when Papaw would come busting through the very dirt I piled on him. He would fly straightway to strangle Sheriff Kane and all the smooth-faced railroad men.

  We wasnt sure where to go. Some folks had left for Kentucky or Tennessee to look for farms to buy there. Others heard tell they was mountains like ourn out in Missouri and Arkansas. But most was living makeshift until the new coal camps was built. The men was promised jobs cutting the timber, putting up the houses, and then working the mines. But mamaw said she wouldn’t let me do that. I didnt care to no how.

  We finally settled on moving to the Justice farm. Ermel was Papaw’s cousin and, like Papaw, he hadnt signed no paper for the railroad. So far, nobody had bothered him. Even before the coal companies come, Ermel Justice held more land than anyone on Blackberry. His fields stretched more than a mile up past where Pliny forked off. At the forks, Ermel had set up a mill to take advantage of the rush of water. He also built a blacksmith’s forge and a general store. Folks come from Peelchestnut Mountain, from Pliny Fork and Lloyds Fork to trade with Ermel, a tithe of meal for the miller, a gallon of linn honey for bought goods. The post office inside the general store was named after Ermel’s wife Annadel, who was postmistress.

  Ermel’s great grandfather built the two-story log farmhouse in 1818. The porch was added in 1852 by his papaw, who had so many younguns to help with the chores that he could afford to sit in a rocking chair on a soft summer evening and survey his holdings.

  Ermel was glad to have me because his one brother was gone off and all he had was little younguns. He had to hire out to work the land. He let a few other families settle in as well, Garmon Tackett and Tennis Farley and Everett Day. He wanted Clabe and Vernie and Dillon, but Vernie was bound to go back to her people on Island Creek, acrost Peelchestnut. And Dillon wouldnt have no more to do with Blackberry. He planned to head back into the hills. He come to visit us once more and brung little Rondal, two year old, with him.

  Dillon vowed he was going way back in, beyond Daisy.

  “That will be hard livin,” Ermel observed.

  “Our people allays lived hard,” Dillon replied. “That there is what makes us.”

  “You keepin that moonshine still?”

  “Maybe.”

  Ermel rubbed his chin. “All this new trade comin in, they’ll be a call for liquor.”

  “I might trade,” Dillon said. “Long as I dont have to set foot on this creek. Hell, you wont even find a coon in the holler time all that mining starts up. I cant bear to see it, all mud and ugly, men sellin their souls for the almighty dollar.”

  “Take me with you!” I pleaded. “I dont want to see it neither.”

  Dillon just laughed. I was so hurt, I went off to the creek and cried. By the time I got back, they was leaving. Rondal run up to me on his bow legs and stretched out his arms.

  “Hwing me, C.J.!”

  I held him by the wrists and swung him round and round. When I set him on his feet, he staggered and fell. I picked him up and held him clost to me. He was still for a moment and I felt the rise and fall of his chest against mine. Then he set his hands to my shoulders, pushed himself back and looked at me. Something passed between us then, I vow it, though he was only a baby. Rondal was marked at his birth and easy marked every day after.

  “You tell your daddy not to stay on Island Creek,” I said. “You tell him to bring you back to Blackberry.”

  He smiled and poked my nose with his finger.

  I worked right beside Ermel in the fields. I craved the company of a man, an older man, to take the place of Dillon and papaw. In the afternoon we would stop work, come set on the porch steps and take a glass of cold cider from the springhouse. Annadel had hung leatherbritches on one end of the porch, row after row of drying green beans dangling on strings, thick as a screen.

  No one come for his land. Every day we expected to see the sheriff, and Ermel kept his rifle close by at all times, but the sheriff never come. Later we heard from a new man come to trade at the store that they was no coal in reach of the forks. That saved us. The railroad did come in
1893 to negotiate a right-of-way up to the head of Pliny Branch, where American Coal would build a camp. Ermel sold the right-of-way, but he never signed away his mineral rights and nobody never claimed he did.

  “We’re still yet here,” Ermel would say.

  He would rub his balding head. Ermel is the kind of man who shows sun, and his scalp was raw-looking all through the summer, like it had been scrubbed with a wool carder.

  “We’re still yet here,” he’d say again. “Hit wont never be the same though.”

  I got riled when he said that, though I never let on. I tried to tell myself that nothing was changed, except that my papaw was gone. On Ermel’s farm it was easy to think it, most of the time. But when I would pause in the field, lean against my hoe, and the wind would stir and bear a shriek, thin and ghostlike, from up Pliny—the death cry of some huge tree, fallen to make mine timbers and houses for American Coal—then my dream of sanctuary on the farm seemed a mockery and a reproach.

  One day in the springtime, Ermel took me on the new train to Justice town. Lumberjacks had shaved the mountainsides for fifteen mile, sliced the trees into boards or strewn them about in tangled heaps. The bushes was growed up, the flanks of the hills gashed and sticky with mud. At the mouth of Marcums Branch, long stone buildings rose from the oozing ground, and on the ridge where the Marcum cemetery had been, a tall structure of wood stood like a giant tombstone. Ermel said it was a coal tipple. He talked the whole time, while I sat with my arm acrost my belly to hold it still, because of the jostling of the train.