Storming Heaven Read online

  “Damnable thing is, business at my store has never been better. I make more in a week than I used to all year. No sense in farmin much this year. I’ll be makin money outen this mess anyhow. They’re a blastin and a tamin the mountains, and I’m a gittin rich.” He shook his head. “I’m glad my daddy has passed on so he cant see it.”

  When we arrived at Justice, I jumped down from the train, wobbled along the station platform, and lost my breakfast beside the baggage rack.

  Three year later, Vernie Lloyd’s people lost their land on Island Creek to another coal company, and Clabe brung his family back acrost Peelchestnut Mountain. They come the way they left, in a mule-drawn wagon laden with their belongings. Little Rondal set up between his mother and father on the buckboard, and Vernie held two younguns on her lap, Talcott and Kerwin, the baby. They stopped over with us for the night. Ermel laid out a salty brown ham in their honor. Isom, Ermel’s son, and Rondal, who was the same age, glared at one another acrost the table. Isom screwed up his round face and stuck out his tongue, trying to establish his territorial rights. Rondal pursed his lips defiantly and made a fist. Isom laughed to show he didn’t care and attacked a heap of fried apples.

  “I seen you added to your store,” Clabe said.

  Ermel replied with a shrug.

  “We’re doin a right smart trade these days,” said Annadel. She looked sideways at Ermel. “He dont like to talk about it.”

  “I dont like what they’re doin,” Ermel said. “I dont like makin money offn it. We was doin all right before all this here happened.”

  “Well, the folks need a place to trade,” Annadel said mildly. “All else they got is them company stores, and them is dear. You should see their prices, Vernie. Twenty-five cent for a pound of coffee.”

  “I swan!” said Vernie.

  “Them miners cant trade with me no ways,” Ermel said grumpily. “They git paid in that company money, got to trade at the company store. Scrip, they call it. Aint no good to me. Most of my trade is with the other folks that come in here with them.”

  We moved out onto the front porch. The sun disappeared behind Peelchestnut, and the dense evening light lingered like it come from no source and was drawed gentle into the purple mountain. Annadel bounced her baby, Pricie, on her knee and sang beneath her breath, deedle-um deedle-um deedle-um day. Pricie had red hair, the color of the flames on the hearth.

  “Look, girlie, at the lightnin bugs,” Vernie crooned.

  She caught two, and set one each on the bare arms of Kerwin and Pricie. The smooth baby skin glowed golden. The river rustled nearby. Rondal ran in circles before the front stoop. He stopped, teetered on tiptoe, and plucked a lightning bug from the dusk. Trapped in his fist, it lit the crevices between his fingers like a woodfire in a mysterious cave.

  “Where yall goin to settle?” Ermel drew on his pipe.

  “Back to the homeplace,” said Clabe. “Or what’s left of it.”

  “Winco.”

  “That’s what them coal companies call it. Reckon I’ll go down the mines there. Leastways we’ll be back on our land.”

  “You aint goin to like what you see,” said Ermel.

  “Lookee here!” cried Isom. He pried open Rondal’s fist and grabbed the lightning bug. Holding it careful by the head, he cut its body in half with his fingernail and stuck the luminous tail on the back of his middle finger.

  “Lookee here! I got on a ring!”

  Rondal flew at Isom and knocked him down. Isom kicked, and punched Rondal hard in the belly. Rondal yelled.

  Clabe and Ermel hauled them up like sacks of meal.

  “What the hell?” said Clabe.

  Rondal sobbed. “He kilt my lightnin bug.”

  “I’s just showin him how to make a ring,” Isom said. “He lit into me.”

  “You should have asked Rondal first,” said Ermel. “Now you beg his pardon.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Isom, his anger already spent.

  Clabe shook his son. “Cryin over a damn bug! Now you tell him you’re sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rondal said, not meaning a word of it.

  I picked him up and held him in the light of the lantern hanging on the porch post. He looked ornery, his lips pressed together, his eyes long slits. I grinned.

  “Danged ifn this boy dont put me in mind of Dillon.”

  “Law, I hope not,” Vernie said fretfully. “Dillon’s my kin by marriage, but he never was right in the head.”

  Two

  RONDAL LLOYD

  EARLIEST THING I RECALL FROM WHEN I WAS A BOY IS DADDY coming in from the mines and taking his bath. It always scared me when he came in. It would be way after dark, and I’d be asleep with Talcott and Kerwin in the bed in the front room. Most nights he’d come in quiet, just lay himself down, coal dust and all, on a mat behind the cookstove in the kitchen, so as not to track dirt into the rest of the house. He would be back out before dawn anyway, so there was no need to bathe. But on Saturday, Mommy boiled water, rattled coal in the buckets to throw on the fire, pulled out the Number Three wash tub. I could never sleep through the noise. I always lay on the side of the bed next to the door, so I could hang my head over the edge and watch her. Daddy would stomp onto the back porch, peel off his boots, and bang them against the steps to knock off the crusts of mud and coal dust. He stripped off his clothes and left them in a heap for Mommy to wash the next day. She never washed his mine clothes with the rest of our things. Then Daddy came inside. His face and hands were black and shiny; the rest of him was pale and waxy like lard. The whites of his eyes were vivid. He tossed his pay envelope on the kitchen table.

  “Snake again,” was all he would say, meaning he hadn’t been able to mine enough coal to pay off the bills at the company store, that he still owed for food and doctoring and his work tools and blasting powder, that his paycheck had a single wavy line where the money figures should have been. But I learned about those things later. At that age, I thought he meant he had seen a copperhead, and that was why his eyes looked so wild and frightful. I lived in terror of snakes.

  Daddy sank slowly into the round tub of hot water, moaning as he went down. The tub was just large enough for him to sit in if he drew up his knees under his chin. The edge of the tub scraped his backbone just above his fleshless buttocks. Mommy stood over him pouring water from her pots and kettles. She scrubbed his face like he was one of us babies but never got all the coal dust off. His face was gray on Sundays like a newspaper photograph.

  We lived in Winco, West Virginia, once our homeplace. American Coal Company owned our house. Richmond and Western Railroad owned our land. Mommy never talked about the old days, but Daddy told me how it used to be. Our cabin had set on the same piece of ground as the company store, which was three stories high, wood painted white with black trim, with stone steps trailing up to plate glass windows. “American Coal” was painted in gold on the glass door. Daddy said the cabin used to creak when it was windy, but the company store stood firm and unyielding. The railroad track, its ties oozing tar, ran through Mommy’s vegetable garden. Most of the houses were built around the hill where the cow and sheep had grazed.

  “The creek was clear as glass, and we used to git trout outen it, and bullfrogs,” Daddy said. “You aint et till you had frog legs. Now the creek wont run clear till kingdom come, I reckon. We let it git away from us.”

  We never ate trout or frog legs, but mostly beans, biscuits, and gravy. The creek water was black with mine drainage and raw sewage, and acid stained the rocks orange.

  On Sundays in the spring, Daddy and Mommy took us for walks up around the mountain, searching for wild mustard, poke, and creasy greens for supper. Mommy carried Kerwin on her back. She had broad cheekbones and brown hair pulled back in a bun so that the top of her head appeared flat. We followed the road the company had gouged out of the mountainside. Mommy said there had only been a path there once. The Negroes lived in the houses on that road. Their houses were tinier than the small
ones the company provided for white people. Each Negro family was crammed into two rooms of a four-room double house. The company never painted these houses, and so they were streaked with black. In summer the windows stood open and faded pink or green curtains flapped out in the breeze. The colored people had no porches, so they hunched on their front stoops when they wanted to take some air. Their outhouses were not built over holes, but hung out over the hillside. One night a man broke his arm when white boys toppled over the privy while he was inside.

  Skinny yellow dogs barked and lunged at us as we trudged by those houses, and the colored people watched us silently from their stoops. Mommy always walked with her head down, never speaking, for she didn’t like the colored people. Daddy said they never would have come if the coal company hadn’t brought them in.

  When we were past the colored houses, we’d start gathering greens. Talcott and I took turns holding the paper poke. Sometimes we went farther up the mountain to the Lloyd family cemetery. Daddy carried a scythe and cut away the weeds from the graves.

  One day we climbed to the cemetery but were stopped by a gate and barbed wire fence strung across the road, and a sign which read, NO TRESPASSING. PROPERTY OF AMERICAN COAL.

  We never went to the cemetery again.

  I attended the Winco School and did well. When I was in the third grade, the teacher, Miss Radcliffe, invited the ten best students to her apartment for oatmeal cookies. She lived in the clubhouse, a building most of us had never entered. It was reserved for the unmarried teachers, nurses, and bookkeepers of the company.

  Miss Radcliffe, tall and gray-headed, led us single-file up the stairs and ushered us into her rooms with the air of a genie revealing a treasure. We tiptoed across a rug Miss Radcliffe said was oriental and settled in miserable silence upon her purple-striped sofa and chairs. Miss Radcliffe smiled proudly as we craned our heads to take in the high cherry bookcases with glass doors, the purple-flowered wallpaper, the grandfather clock with gold trim on the door.

  She served the cookies on bone-white china, and we had hot tea served in delicate cups with handles so small that even a child could not get a proper grip without being burned. Miss Radcliffe talked about the importance of an education, about how we had the obligation to raise ourselves above our parents and save our mountain people from ignorance. She reminded us that Abraham Lincoln had been as poor as we were. Then she gave us our assignments for Class Day, when our parents would visit the school. I was to memorize the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.

  Cookie crumbs kept falling down the front of my overalls and I couldn’t fish them out without spilling my tea. I was afraid they would drop on Miss Radcliffe’s carpet when I stood up, and she would call me “slovenly,” one of her favorite terms of disdain. When the grandfather clock struck four, we escaped. I wrapped three cookies in my bandana to share with my brothers after supper, and ran down the hill to our house. When I went inside, I smelled grease. Mommy was scraping the bacon leavings in the iron skillet for gravy. I scuffed my bare feet across the gritty wood floor, sprinkled with coal dust despite Mommy’s daily scrubbings. Yellowing newspapers plastered the wall to keep out the cold.

  Talcott and Kerwin wrestled on the bed in the front room.

  “Yall lookee here,” I said. “I got a surprise treat for after supper.”

  When they reached for the bundle I held it high above my head.

  “After supper,” I said.

  I stuck the cookies beneath my pillow, dared them to touch it. Then to show I was not so strict, I hugged Talcott to me and tickled his belly. He wriggled and laughed. The back of his neck smelled of dried perspiration, sweet like a field in summertime. I sighed, lay back on the bed, and was glad to be home.

  Our house was one of three that sat in the bottom beside Trace Fork. A narrow strip of grass and a fence of wood and wire separated the houses. Daddy put up a swing on the front porch where Mommy could sit of an evening and shuck the beans that she grew in the company garden. Ivy grew on one end of the porch, and flower boxes full of red and white petunias lined the bannisters. Coal dust speckled the flowers. Each day Mommy splashed the petals with water and gently wiped them clean with a dry cloth.

  Daddy didn’t work on Sundays. He would have liked to, because he was paid by the ton and would make more with an extra day’s work. But the mine owner, Mr. Davidson, who was an Episcopalian, said the miners owed the Lord a day of rest. At first Daddy slept on Sundays, but as I grew older he spent most of the day drinking.

  Sometimes C.J. Marcum, a friend of our family, paid the train fare to bring Talcott and me to Annadel. Annadel was seven wooden buildings put together so poorly they all leaned in opposite directions—Ermel Justice’s store, stable and smithy, three private dwellings, and two taverns. The main town straddled the forks of Blackberry half a mile from the Justice farmhouse. C.J. and his mamaw, Missouri, still lived at the farmhouse at that time.

  Talcott and I loved to play with Isom Justice and his sister Pricie. We climbed the mountain behind the Justice farm to a cave overlooking the railroad cut. Inside, we crouched together, the rough stone wall chafing our backs where we leaned. Isom told haint stories. When he stood close to the cave’s mouth, framed by the sunlight beyond the darkness, the ridges and peaks of his curly mop of hair formed a silhouette like a miniature mountain range.

  “Who-o-o!” he cried at the climax of the story. He rolled his head upon his neck and waved his arms. Pricie would scream with fear and delight. But Isom could never match the shrieking of the trains that roared through the cut and blew their whistle on the approach to Annadel. These were like the cries of evil fairies Mommy sometimes warned us about, the henchmen of the Unseelie Court seeking lost souls. Even I was frightened of the trains, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to abandon the cave above the tracks.

  Often we would swing across the fifty-foot precipice on grapevines. The vines, gray and scaly, creaked like an old wooden floor as they bore our weight out over the cliff. We launched ourselves from a moss-covered root, and if we misjudged our return, our bodies slammed into the broad oak that harbored the vine. Too shaken to swing out again, we must wait to be hauled up to safety.

  I helped with the blacksmithing, taking turns with Isom cranking the blower. The blower kept the fire roaring, the fire where Ermel laid his slender lengths of black iron. The hot irons glowed orange and appeared fragile and clear as glass. Ermel plucked a length of iron with his tongs, laid it across the anvil and tapped it into a graceful curve with his hammer. Then he dipped it into a tub of cold water where it sizzled and spat before surrendering in a cloud of steam. A line of finished horseshoes hung beside the tub.

  “You remember, boys,” Ermel said, “anything will bend if you put enough fire to it. You remember that.”

  Sometimes C.J. and Ermel took us squirrel hunting. Isom and Talcott were better shots than me. Talcott, Ermel claimed, was the best he had seen. Besides the squirrels, we shot rabbits, and possums for baking with sweet potatoes. I would take some dressed back home to Mommy. It was the only meat we got except bacon and an occasional chicken or ham on holidays.

  I loved to hunt, to tramp through the woods with my friends, to climb the mountains far away from the coal camps and wonder which mountain my Uncle Dillon lived on. But I didn’t like to shoot the squirrels, though I was ashamed to admit it. Isom always whooped when he hit one. Sometimes I would have a squirrel in my sights and remember what it would look like dressed out, naked and long limbed like a skinny little man. I would miss on purpose and the others would tease me for being a bad shot. Then I would be mad and go out of my way to shoot another one, never wavering as I pulled the trigger, then feeling a wave of remorse when I retrieved the warm body. I dressed my squirrels quickly and cut them into pieces, for then they were not something that had lived, they were meat that would feed Mommy and put color in her cheeks.

  We always ate a big supper before we went back to Winco, and we played music afterwards. I to
ok my banjo that Uncle Dillon made me before he went off. Garmon Tackett taught me to play, and Isom learned the fiddle from Ermel. We liked especially to play “Sally Ann.” But the first song we learned was “Boil That Cabbage Down,” because it was easy. Talcott, not yet big enough for the guitar, sang along. Isom sawed the fiddle hard, elbow flying to and fro. I learned to flail and drop my thumb. Boil that cabbage down, bake that hoecake brown.

  I took my banjo to school one day and picked and sang “Cripple Creek” for Miss Radcliffe. I hoped she would let me pick instead of reciting the Declaration of Independence. But she only said “How nice,” and pressed her lips tightly together.

  C.J. Marcum used to come visit on Sundays, sit on the front porch with me and sip iced tea he brought up from Annadel.

  “One of these days…” he was always saying. “One of these days we’ll git that land back. One of these days you’ll go off to school and come back and help your people.”

  C.J. and Miss Radcliffe were the only ones who talked about “my people.” I wasn’t sure who “my people” were. Were they my kin, most of them scattered when the land was lost? Were they the old-timers who had been around before the companies came in? What of the Italians and the Poles and the Hungarians and the Negroes, hauled in by the trainload to dig the coal? Were they my people too?

  I studied the Italian children in my school. They were different from me, talked different, smelled different. While we brought biscuits spread with sorghum for our dinner, they ate hard white bread soaked with olive oil. Their skin was darker, their hair shiny and thick like a groundhog’s coat. They wore garlands of garlic around their necks, instead of asaphidity bags, to ward off colds. They were bigger than we were, for their difficulty in understanding English caused them to be held back in school. Big Italian boys beat me up on several occasions.