The Unquiet Earth Read online

  So I grew up with the understanding I would leave the mountains, and as I got older the idea seemed more pleasing. But my ideas about leaving were different than my mother’s. I listened to the radio and twice I had been to the movies in Shelby. I knew the way people in other places talked and I practiced sounding like them. I wanted to drink chocolate malteds when I was in one mood and martinis when I was in another, and wear silk hose with seams down the back and pierce my ears and smear the world’s reddest lipstick on my mouth. I wanted to be a stewardess. A stewardess was the most glamorous thing a woman could be, next to an actress. That meant following in Aunt Carrie’s footsteps at the nursing school in Justice, West Virginia, because in those days, stewardesses were nurses.

  In the meantime I tended our cows in the pasture across the river. I used the time to dream about flying and going on dates with men who smelled like cologne. In good weather I would lie on my back in the hillside pasture, my arms spread wide, and feel the earth move and spin beneath me. Sometimes the clouds moved so fast it felt like the mountain would roll and hurl me right off it. I tried to imagine what the mountains would look like from the window of an airplane, over the shoulder of a man in a suit, a man with a clean-shaven neck. I would pour his cup full of rich, dark coffee, and the steam would rise and tickle my nose as I bent over his cup. I would take care of him and he would be grateful and ask me to marry him.

  In winter I fetched the cows as quickly as I could to their shed. I rode my mule Mag across the ford at the shoals, tethered her to a tree, and climbed the hillside with a long switch like a magic wand in my hand. The cows knew me and I only had to tap at their ankles to move them down the hill, their moaning heavy with longing and relief, to the barn. With each tap of the wand I tried to change them into handsome princes, but they remained cows.

  DILLON FREEMAN

  I can tell when Rachel is ready to come home because the cowbells across the river sound clean and clear and then fall silent. Sound seems to carry even farther after a rain, it cuts the flat air like cracking ice with a hammer. I was on the riverbank the last February day of my fourteenth year, setting out lines for bass. The river was frozen gray but the edges of the ice were thin and transparent and had pulled away from the bank. I heard the cowbells across Grapevine, then the silence. Soon Rachel would cross the shoals downstream. I stuck chunks of tough fatback onto my hooks and tested the ice with one foot. The shelf gave way easily and I would have stepped in the cold water if I hadn’t grabbed a birch sapling.

  When the lines were set I scrambled up the bank. Then I heard a loud crack like an explosion farther upriver. I stood still. There was another crack, two more, then a long loud rattle like an avalanche of boulders.

  I ran the half mile to the Homeplace over our mudspattered road.

  The ice has broke! Rachel! The ice has broke!

  Uncle Ben and Aunt Flora were at the store so only my mother heard. She ran ahead of me, her skirt whipping around her legs until she caught it up and ran harder. When we reached the ford Rachel was halfway across, riding on Mag.

  Rachel! The ice!

  But she could already hear the gnawing tearing sound coming closer. She kept turning her head to look. The mule’s ears were laid back and her teeth showed at the bit. The water rose in waves, lapped at Mag’s belly, then to Rachel’s knees. I plunged down the bank but Mom grabbed my arm.

  Let me go!

  I yanked my arm away but she grabbed me by the coat collar and hauled me down. I fought her but she held me so tight around the chest I couldn’t breathe. Only a mother could be that strong to hold you back, and maybe only my mother.

  “Pray God the mule will bring her over!” Mom was breathing short and hard. “You go in, you got nothing to keep you from being swept away.”

  A wave washed over the mule’s back and Rachel slipped off. Her head went under but Mag surged forward, swimming now, and Rachel’s head broke the surface. When Mag lunged again Rachel’s finger caught fast in the ring on the mule’s harness. Floes of gray ice bobbed around the bend of the river.

  Goddamn you let me go goddamn you!

  Then Mom let go of me so sudden I sprawled headlong. She waded into the shallows where Mag had found her footing, grabbed Rachel by the wrist and hauled her to shore. Rachel was gleaming wet and insensible. I slipped into the numbing cold water and wrapped my arms around her chest. I could feel the curve of her breasts. Mom put her hand on my arm.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said.

  She took her hand away and pointed at the jagged jostling ice floes. “You’d be drowned stone cold this minute if you’d gone after her.”

  What does she know? We carried Rachel to the Homeplace. Mom laid Rachel before the fire, stripped off her wet clothes, and now she is bathing her. I stand outside and watch through the window. Rachel is white except for her rosebrown nipples and the swatch of brown hair between her thighs. A towel covers her head like a turban. She shivers, opens her eyes and raises her head, then relaxes. She folds her long arms across her breasts. Mom wraps her in quilts.

  I long to go inside and warm her with my breath, to take her fingers into my mouth until they are ruddy with life. Her index finger, the one that caught in the ring and saved her, is broken. No one notices until she wakes in a fever and complains that it hurts. Then Aunt Flora cries when she sees how bent and twisted it is. That finger will be crooked the rest of her life. It will ache when the weather turns cold. Every day I plan to tell her I love her, then I see her finger. I remember how I failed to save her and my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth.

  RATS’ ALLEY 1939 – 1944

  RACHEL HONAKER, 1939–1940

  The week before I was to leave for nursing school, Dillon sat on the edge of my bed while I mended a pair of underdrawers. I would have died before I let any other boy watch, but I was glad to have Dillon there that night. Lately he had been cold with us all, not cruel, but distant.

  “Don’t go to school,” he said abruptly. “Stay here.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Everything’s settled.”

  “Mom says we’re about to lose the Homeplace. She says the bank’s coming for it any day now. How can you leave at a time like this?”

  I stopped sewing. “Dillon, if I stayed home from school it wouldn’t change one thing.”

  Dillon got up and shut the bedroom door, then sat close beside me on the bed. “I love your daddy, but he’s a weak man. If he had some backbone, things wouldn’t have gone as far as they have.”

  “That’s mean of you to say. Daddy has put food on your table.”

  “And I’m beholden, even though I don’t like to be. He’s a good man. But he aint a fighter. Me and you, we’re different. I got a hunting rifle. Anybody sets foot on the Homeplace to take it, we’ll defend what’s ours.”

  “You can’t just shoot somebody!”

  “I can if they try to take this land.”

  “You’re talking crazy and I won’t humor it. I’m going to school, and that’s that.”

  He turned away. “If you leave, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  His talk had alarmed me, but I thought he was mostly just letting off steam. His face, though, had grown so hard and stubborn that I became angry.

  “It’s my life, not yours,” I said.

  He came off the bed so suddenly I bounced and stabbed my finger with the needle. “You got no right to the Homeplace!” he yelled. “You don’t deserve it!” Then he noticed the bead of blood on my fingertip. “It’s the finger you broke,” he said. He took my hand and gripped my finger tight so the bead grew larger, then put my finger to his lips and sucked. A shiver started in my toes and traveled the length of my body. When he stopped my finger throbbed but the flesh was white and the bleeding was done.

  He dropped my hand. “That’s the last thing I’ll do for you,” he said. He avoided me the rest of the week.

  My sister Jane and her husband sent fifty-six dollars for uniforms and books, my father gave me
two dollars spending money, and I set out over Johnnycake Mountain. I said goodbye to Aunt Carrie the night before, and she gave me her copy of Gray’s Anatomy as a present. When I asked after Dillon she said, “He’s squirrel hunting.”

  “I reckon I’ll get no goodbye from him,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No. Dillon don’t know how to say goodbye proper, not when it’s something he cares about.”

  Later, Mother stood at the bedroom door and watched me pack.

  “I want you to go,” she said, “but not to that nursing school.”

  She’d made her feelings known to me on a number of occasions. Nursing was a common, nasty occupation, fine for Carrie who was always wild and headstrong, but the odors and sick, naked people could not be pleasant for the lady she wanted me to be. It didn’t help when I said I wanted to be a stewardess.

  “I read about stewardesses,” she’d said. “Men take all kinds of liberties with them. What do you expect, a woman who will fly all over creation?”

  “I can handle a forward man,” I said.

  “Can you? What do you know about it?”

  “Aunt Carrie has told me,” I said, and could have bit my tongue right off. I hastened to add, “I’m sorry, but I know you don’t like to talk about such things, so I asked her.”

  “I love Carrie,” she said softly, “but I hope you’ll not do as she did. She picked a hard row to hoe, and she’s still yet paying the price, alone, and raising a boy that’s turned out wild as a buck. You don’t want that, nor to traipse all the world round. You want to marry quality.”

  Then she proceeded to tell me about men, how they are only after one thing, and once they have it they will leave a girl high and dry.

  “What about Father? Did he only want one thing?”

  “Ben Honaker married a virgin.” Her cheeks were flushed red, and I blushed too because I had never heard her use such a word. “Do you think he’d have married me otherwise, and him a respectable man? Most men will try to take advantage of you, it’s in their nature, even the best of them. But if you say no, they’ll see there’s no choice but to marry, or else forget about you. A man of quality wants a girl who’s pure.”

  And that was all we said to each other. Next morning she stood on the porch and kissed me on the cheek. She wiped her eyes on her apron, went back inside, and left me standing. Father had hired the postmaster’s son to drive me to Justice, and they put my suitcase in the back seat of the car. Dillon was nowhere to be seen. I hugged Aunt Carrie, climbed into the car, and we drove away.

  I did lose the Homeplace when I went to school, and it had nothing to do with banks or coal companies. It was the inevitable loss known by those who are not tied to the same patch of earth for all their days. I mourned but I could not say I had done wrong. Land is so fragile—it can be taken by flood or fire or a piece of banker’s paper—that it is best to build a life inside oneself that can be planted anywhere and held onto until the last breath.

  It was with this hope that I arrived at the Grace Hospital on the mountaintop above Justice town. The building was yellow brick with small dark windows and the look of the warehouses that lined Back Street along the Levisa. An alley that stank of garbage bins separated the hospital from the Nurses’ Home, where the students lived. We gathered in the lounge for soda pops and sandwiches, frightened country girls from West Virginia and Kentucky away from home for the first time. Miss Kurtz, a short, stocky woman, was the new director of nursing students. She introduced herself by saying she was from Pittsburgh and had come to the mountains to do her mission work. She held a heavy book against her chest.

  “This is Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History,” she said. “Arnold Toynbee is a British historian, one of the preeminent scholars of our day. And why should young nursing students be familiar with Arnold Toynbee? Because Professor Toynbee has written about these Appalachian Mountains.”

  She looked around the room, then began to read. “ ‘The Scotch-Irish immigrants who have forced their way into these natural fastnesses have come to be isolated from the rest of the World. The Appalachian Mountain People are at this day not better than barbarians. They are the American counterparts of the latter-day White barbarians of the Old World, the Kurds and the Pathans and the Hairy Ainu.’ ” Miss Kurtz shut the book. “If you are to make nurses, you must overcome your backgrounds. You must rise above the handicaps of inbreeding and the filthy living conditions you are used to. At this hospital, we expect you to keep yourselves clean.”

  I sat angry and shamed, wishing I could say something, but I had been taught not to backtalk a teacher. The girl beside me raised her hand. Miss Kurtz looked at her over her glasses.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but what’s a Hairy Ainu?”

  “Well,” said Miss Kurtz after a slight hesitation, “I’m not sure I know or want to know.”

  “I just wondered because my cousins over on Greasy Creek, they’re all inbred like you said, and they’re cross-eyed and they got hair all over their bodies, even on their penises. I just wondered if they might be part Hairy Ainu?”

  This was the first I saw of Tommie Justice, who was little and blonde and appeared to be twelve years old. You would look at Tommie and never believe she’d heard of a penis, much less say the word out loud to the director of nursing students. Some teachers would have taken her head off, innocent-looking or not, but Miss Kurtz acted faint. She said, “You will please not use the word ‘penis’ in that manner.”

  “I thought it was a medical term, ma’am,” said Tommie.

  “—and not to be used casually,” Miss Kurtz said and changed the subject. But her voice held a tremor during the rest of her talk. We knew her then for a coward.

  Tommie took other occasions to make her look like a fool. Miss Kurtz taught anatomy. She would stand beside the hanging skeleton and hold up its arm like it was an old friend, fingering the carpals and metacarpals familiarly while we called out their names. She had just explained that the narrow pelvis indicated the skeleton had been a man when Tommie raised her hand and, wrapping one blonde curl around her finger, asked what had happened to the bone in the piece of anatomy she wasn’t supposed to mention casually. While Miss Kurtz turned red and we snickered into our hands, Tommie added, “Excuse me, ma’am, but it has to be stiff for a man to have sex. Medically speaking, of course, if it’s not a bone in there, what is it?”

  So Miss Kurtz had to explain in a strangled voice how a penis got hard. And Tommie, face solemn, said yes she understood now, and of course a bone made no sense anyway because how would a man put his pants on. Miss Kurtz would have loved to kick Tommie out, but Tommie made good grades and her grandfather gave lots of money to the nursing school.

  Three girls left school the first week, and by month’s end, ten were gone. Homesickness took them away. It is something you see often in the mountains, for we are tied to kin and land as closely as any people ever were. It is a belief we have, as strong as any religion, that home can be preserved forever and life made everlasting if we only stay put. And school was not like home. The teachers, even those kinder than Miss Kurtz, were there to goad us on, to judge and criticize, where many of us had known only petting and praise. I felt it myself, the sweet anguished longing for home and for those who loved me without judgment that made me cry in my pillow at night. But I never thought of going back. I could not return as only Rachel Honaker, daughter of Ben and Flora. I must be able to call myself by some other name. All I knew of nursing was what I knew of Aunt Carrie, that her work took her into homes up and down Grapevine and into the lives of other people, that it made her a party to a mysterious body of knowledge, like an initiate in a secret society. I wanted that life. I wanted to be Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell all wrapped up in one, to fly around the world and return to become the comforter of every sick soul on every creek in the mountains, and I wanted to be married as well, to a brave man whose face had not yet come clear to me. Silly dreams, but they kept me in school.
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  So I tried not to think about the Homeplace, tried to lose myself in my studies. We were dissecting cadavers sent up to us from St. Mary’s Hospital in Huntington. The gray flesh wept clear liquid around the edge of my scalpel, and formaldehyde scalded the inside of my nose. But what bothered me was to think the gutted corpse on the slab had no people, no one to put it in the ground and weep hot tears, no one to shield it from the uneasy wise cracks of eighteen-year-old girls. Tommie Justice worked with me. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Lord, didn’t you reckon a uterus would be bigger than that? It looks like an old woman’s pocketbook that wouldn’t hold a handful of change, much less a baby.” And I wanted to stuff that flimsy uterus back inside that poor woman and haul her off to the Homeplace cemetery for a decent burial.

  In the hospital I saw people dying, their loved ones gathered around them. Death would not come as a surprise; everyone was waiting for it, expectant. And yet when the chest stopped heaving and the arm fell limp, the cries of those left behind always held a note of astonishment. So I waited to hear that the Homeplace was gone, reconciled myself to it, but when I was called out of pharmacy class with the news that my father was waiting in the parlor at the Nurses’ Home, I stopped in the alley and found myself trembling.

  My father stood beside the coal stove looking small and thin and cold. He hugged me tight about the shoulders, squeezing then letting go then squeezing again.

  “The Homeplace is gone, honey. It’s gone.”

  I started to cry against his chest.

  “It happened two weeks ago. I didn’t write because I didn’t want to upset you any sooner than you had to be.”

  I wished I’d known. It was two weeks I’d been thinking of home as though there still was such a place, dreaming on a lie. But it was like him to wait to tell me. He never was easy with pain and hated to inflict it.