The Unquiet Earth Read online

  “The store’s gone too,” he said. “Your mother and your Aunt Carrie are settled in a little house at Henryclay. It will do for the time being. I’m on my way to get work.”

  I wiped my eyes and led him to the settee. “Can’t you teach like you used to?”

  “No, honey. They’ve got different rules now. You need a college degree.”

  “You’re not going in the mines?” It was the question I dreaded to ask. I couldn’t imagine him in the mines. He was too gentle, with no hard edges to him. I thought the mountains would recognize such softness in a man and crush him as soon as he set foot in a tunnel.

  “I thought on it,” he said. “I can’t do it. I can’t go down in a hole. But there isn’t much else around here. So I’m jumping a freight train, going to Norfolk.”

  “What’s in Norfolk?”

  “Shipyards. They’re begging for men. That war in Europe, you know. I’ll send for your mother after I get on my feet. I doubt your Aunt Carrie will move. By then I reckon she and your mother will be sick of one another. They’ve not got on well lately.” He looked away. “There’s no money for your train ticket at Christmas. Can you batch it here?”

  My first Christmas away from home. But there was no home anyway. I nodded. “Don’t you worry about me. I can go home with someone from school.” Then I said, cautiously, “You haven’t mentioned Dillon.”

  “It’s what else I had to tell you. Dillon is gone, too. Run away the day before the bank foreclosed. He was talking crazy about standing off the bankers with a gun, so your Aunt Carrie took and hid his hunting rifle. Next morning he was gone. He left a note, said he’d not be there when it happened. Left a letter for you, too. I brought it.”

  He took the envelope from his coat pocket. The paper was wrinkled and smudged with ink. Dillon was never one for neatness.

  “Rachel,” he wrote, “you are a coward for leaving. And now I am as big a coward. I could have stayed and fought if you would have. But if you don’t want it, why should I?”

  He didn’t say “Dear Rachel.” He didn’t say “Love, Dillon.” There were only the hard words and the smudges. I crumpled the paper and put it in my uniform pocket. Damn you, I thought, I cannot even mourn without you adding to my burden.

  Father was looking at me.

  “He’s feeling hard,” I said.

  “It’s one reason your mother and Aunt Carrie have been at it. Your mother told Aunt Carrie that Dillon was brought up poorly.”

  “Mother doesn’t care for Dillon,” I said.

  “No. He’s kin so she loves him, but she’d rather him be at a distance. She told me there’s something about him that frights her.”

  Me too, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. I wasn’t sure if I was frightened of him or frightened for him. We sat for a while. Father’s hair was grayer than I recalled and the skin on his hands was spotted and loose. I talked him into staying for supper at the Nurses’ Home and slipped him some extra fried chicken from the kitchen. Then he left for the railyard, passed under a streetlight, and disappeared into the darkness. I fled to my room. The mountains on the Kentucky side were black beneath a full moon, and clouds moved across the sky like spirits rising and departing from the land.

  When Tommie Justice teased Miss Kurtz about penises stiff as bones, she spoke from experience. She had a weakness for the minor league baseball players who came to Justice town every spring and summer, and to hear her talk she had seen every stiff penis that ever wore Cardinal red. Tommie’s grandfather owned most of the nearby town of Annadel, West Virginia, as well as the Justice baseball team. But it was her dead father who brought Tommie and me close. One day I met her coming out of the five-and-ten downtown and we walked back to the Nurses’ Home together. We’d not said two words to one another before, because I was shy and slow to make friends. When we passed the stone county courthouse on the hill with its coat of dark ivy, Tommie said, “My daddy was shot right there on those courthouse steps. My mom was just pregnant with me, didn’t even know I was on the way.”

  I stopped walking. Aunt Carrie’s stories, told before the Homeplace hearth, ran through my head. I could look at the stone steps carved into the hill and see men in black suits and hats waiting at the top with their hands inside their coats.

  “Your daddy was police chief at Annadel,” I said. “He was protecting the miners’ families from the company guards and killed some company men in a shootout. The other company men shot him on those steps on his way to trial.”

  Tommie’s face quickened. “How did you know?”

  “My Aunt Carrie was married to the preacher that was shot alongside your daddy.”

  So we had that between us, bloody family history. As we walked up the hill she linked her arm through mine. “I aint known what to make of you. You’re such a pretty little thing but so quiet. I thought maybe you had your nose in the air.”

  By November Tommie’s roommate had left for homesickness and I moved in with her. It was a corner room on the third floor of the Nurses’ Home. From our window we could see the rooftops of Justice like terraces descending to the stone and brick buildings downtown. Early in the mornings, the distant mountains of Kentucky emerged from the fog like they were being born anew each day. Our room held two narrow iron beds and two dressers painted black. The window trim was black as well, for the trainyards in the bottom were always busy with gondolas of coal switching tracks, coupling and uncoupling, and each bang and crash sent clouds of black dust over the town and up the mountain. Our windowpanes were streaked, and if we slept with the windows open, we woke to a fine dusting of black on our white pillows.

  Tommie told me stories about her hometown of Annadel, which had once been a wild place famed for union politics and whorehouses, but she said it had quieted down considerably. The newspaper had been shut down by the government, her grandfather’s hotel was closed, and only a few beer joints and one whorehouse were left to maintain Annadel’s reputation. I told Tommie about Dillon, how a union organizer named Rondal Lloyd who’d lived in Annadel made Aunt Carrie pregnant out of wedlock.

  “I heard my mommie talk about that man,” Tommie said. “They say he was a devil with the women.”

  Then I talked some more about Dillon until Tommie finally said, “He sounds like a sweetie. Maybe you ought to spark him.”

  “He’s my first cousin,” I reminded her.

  “Aint you heard tell of kissing cousins?” When I didn’t laugh, she shrugged. “That’s too bad, though.”

  Tommie teased me about being a virgin and kept asking me to double date with her. “I feel sorry for the fellow you end up marrying,” she’d say. “You aint going to know diddley.” She started me thinking. But while she talked, it was as though my mother heard, even at a distance, and wrote to warn me to behave myself and only attend the Methodist or Episcopal or Presbyterian churches as those were the places where gentlemen of quality worshiped. I read her letters fast and threw them in the trash, wanted to write her and say, “Mother, I am a grown woman, so please mind your own business.” But I wanted a husband, and even more, I longed to have children. It was what every woman wanted, I thought. And Mother was older than Tommie and married and knew better how to get married and raise a family. So I wouldn’t go with Tommie.

  Then she got a new beau, one she seemed serious about. His name was Arthur Lee Sizemore, and he worked in the business office of the American Coal Company. I met him one Sunday afternoon when we were allowed to sit in the first floor parlor with our young men. He had a way of holding tight onto Tommie’s elbow that I didn’t care for, but Tommie liked him. She said he came up hard, one of twelve children from Jolo, and put himself through school in Huntington, so poor he ate only milk gravy for days on end. I thought that might account for his pasty complexion; Tommie approvingly called him “pale.”

  “He’s a coming-on young man, everybody says so.” She sat on the edge of her bed that night, black leather shoes dangling off the ends of her toes, and smoked a Lu
cky Strike. “You know, I aint even slept with Arthur Lee yet. I will, but not till he’s good and hooked.” So I thought Mother must be partly right after all. Tommie opened her mouth and swallowed some smoke. “He’s got a friend. Want to go out with us?”

  I sat slumped against my desk and idly flipped the pages of my chemistry book. “Who’s that?”

  “Bookkeeper for the coal company. Older man, twenty-seven. Dark and handsome.” She grinned. “Italian.”

  “Italian! Good lord! I’ve never even met an Italian!”

  “They say they’re the sweetest men. Honey, you aint never heard tell of Rudolph Valentino?”

  I had to admit I was intrigued. It was something different. “What’s his name?”

  “Tony Angelelli.”

  I think I said yes because of his name, it was that pretty. And maybe because I knew Mother would have conniption fits. He turned out to have black curly hair, a round fleshy face, and what Tommie called bedroom eyes. I decided if he had a mustache, he’d look like a short Clark Gable. We went to see The Wizard of Oz at the Pocahontas Theater and sat in the back row under the balcony. About the time Judy Garland stepped into full color he took my hand and scraped one fingernail across my palm. Tommie and Arthur Lee were already necking. Tony tugged on my hand, and I ducked my head toward him. “I don’t know you very well,” I whispered. He nodded and sat quietly, scratching my palm and seeming perfectly content with that. I had to admit he had nice fingernails and a backscratch would have felt just fine. I wondered if that meant I was falling in love.

  He asked me out again, by ourselves. We went to see Stagecoach. After two dates and two movies we still hadn’t talked much, just sat in expectant silence while the flow of light played over our faces, then he had to take me back to the Nurses’ Home for curfew. Finally we went to Gone with the Wind and the line was so long we had to converse.

  “Do you like your job?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What do you do?”

  He smiled and his face glowed golden from the running marquee lights. “Look after the company’s money.” He explained a little about bookkeeping, then fell silent again. He didn’t ask me about nursing school. That was all right, I thought, the woman was supposed to draw out the man. If he wouldn’t talk, it was my fault. On the way home I kept trying, asked him more questions. He usually answered “yes” or “no,” or, if that wasn’t appropriate, he shrugged and smiled. His round face looked jolly when he smiled. At the front door I let him kiss me. It was my first kiss and I liked it.

  After we’d dated for a month Tony took me to meet his mother, who lived in Number Ten bottom. I thought it would be an adventure, for the coalfields seemed exotic to me. Justice town, with its narrow curving streets and stone buildings decked out with carved gargoyles and other folderols, and the stone walls and bridges carved by Italian masons, reminded me of pictures of European hill cities I had seen in library books. At main Davidson there was a Russian church with an onion-shaped dome of gold leaf. And when we drove Tony’s green Pontiac around the mountain above Number Ten, a sharp loop in the road brought a sea of headstones with floating stone crosses into view. We parked at the foot of the hill and walked past the graves at the edge of Number Ten bottom. The tombstones held photographs of people set beneath ovals of glass. I didn’t see a word of English on the stones, and sometimes I didn’t even recognize the alphabet for it was all cut sharp and turned backwards.

  The house of Tony’s mother seemed just as strange. It was dark inside, the windows hung with heavy brocade curtains and kept shut even in daytime. The walls were covered with dozens of crucifixes, calendars, and pictures of Franklin Roosevelt, the Virgin Mary, and the Pope. The wallpaper was peeling, the top layer adorned with roses the size of my hand and bright purple peeping from underneath. Heavy plastic covered all the furniture so that you stuck to it if you sat very long. I preferred the kitchen because of its odors. I had smelled nothing like it, and only later came to identify the garlic, the oregano, the olive oil.

  Tony’s mother was short and stout, with breasts that sagged to her waist beneath a yellow satin dress. She spoke little English, and so she chattered in Italian while we ate fresh bread from the oven with melted butter. Tony didn’t talk much. His mother kept looking at me and I gathered she was not impressed. She never smiled and waved her arms while she held a wooden spoon, like she wanted to hit me with it.

  “Capisce?” she said, after each long speech. “Capisce?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Tony answered.

  On the way home I asked Tony what she’d said about me.

  He smiled. “She said you’re too skinny. She said you must not know how to cook.”

  “She said more than that.”

  He shrugged.

  “Is she a good cook?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said proudly. “She used to work at Ricco’s Bakery in town, and before that she cooked for rich people in the old country. I take care of her now so she don’t have to work. I got a good job.”

  “That’s nice of you,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “She’s scared if I get married I won’t be able to afford to take care of her.”

  “I think your wife would understand,” I said.

  He smiled and squeezed my hand.

  He wouldn’t say much else about his family. But Arthur Lee Sizemore told me Tony’s father and uncles were all killed at the same time in the big Number Six explosion, when Tony was a little boy. Tony’s grandmother moved in with Tony and his mother, but she had lost her mind and kept scavenging coal at mine sites and piling it in the back yard, trying to move all the coal in the world off the never-found bodies of her sons, so she was finally sent to the state asylum. I decided Tony was kind, a good son, and if he was too silent it was because the gift of words had been shocked early from him.

  Tommie wore saddle oxfords and a green fishtail coat with a skirt that swayed when she walked. When we went downtown sometimes I fell a step or two behind just so I could watch her coat. She’d turn her head and say “Come on, slowpoke,” and I’d pretend to be interested in whatever was in the window of the store we were passing.

  In those days there were plenty of stores in Justice town, for the mines were booming, thanks to the war. Nobody minded the war because we weren’t fighting it, just making a living from it. According to what we heard from Europe, there wasn’t much happening in early 1940 anyway. The streets of Justice were filled with endless lines of cars, and you couldn’t walk without bumping into somebody. Barbershop poles twirled and neon beer signs blinked, the yellow lights on the theater marquee flowed like a waterfall, and red passenger trains clanked through the middle of town and pulled into the brick station at the foot of the hill. On a brisk March day when the air was like a sheet of ice about to crack, it was hard to stay inside and study.

  On just such a Saturday afternoon we sat at a round table in the Flat Iron Drugstore and drank cherry cokes that Tommie bought. She always treated because I never had any money, and I paid her back by ironing her uniforms. We sat giggling and talking low to ourselves because we had just started giving baths to men and it was new enough that we thought it was funny. Then I heard my name and across the room Dillon stood up. I went toward him, not sure if I meant to slap him or hug him until he caught me in his arms and held me tight.

  “How dare you?” I grabbed his shirt in tight bunches between my fists and buried my face against his chest. “How dare you worry us sick and blame me for it?”

  “Don’t be mad,” he said. “Aint you missed me?”

  “I thought about you every day,” I said. He smiled.

  I took him over to our table and introduced him to Tommie, who fairly twinkled at him.

  “You’re Rondal Lloyd’s boy,” she said.

  “How’d you know that?” He looked at me like I’d let out some big secret.

  “I told her. She’s my friend. And Isom Justice was her daddy.”

  He looked at her differe
ntly then, softer. “Isom Justice was my daddy’s best buddy,” he said.

  “I know,” Tommie said. “I heard all the stories.”

  I’d had enough of small talk. I grabbed his arm and pulled him down onto a chair. “Where have you been?”

  “I been with my daddy’s people on Blackberry Creek. Over yonder’s my cousin Brigham and his buddy.”

  We moved to a bigger table and waved for them to join us. They were miners. You could tell by their cracked and blackened fingernails and something about their skin that seemed rough and rubbed up in the light and the way they moved, tender and wary as cats. I knew because it was all we saw at the hospital, miners sick and miners hurt and miners visiting their sick kin. These two were older than Dillon, in their twenties. Brigham Lloyd was stocky, with thick black eyebrows at a slant and a V-shaped hairline. His buddy Homer Day was skinny with a shock of curly brown hair. They were smoking Camels and shared them with Dillon and Tommie.

  “This is Rachel?” Brigham said. “You look like Ingrid Bergman. Homer, don’t she look the spitting image of Ingrid Bergman?” He nodded at Tommie. “And you’re Gladys Justice’s girl up to Annadel. She’s a good woman.”

  “I know you,” Tommie said. “I see you in the drugstore at Annadel.”

  “That’s right. And you’d see me in Ruby’s Lounge if you went in such places.”

  “Maybe I do see you there,” Tommie said. They laughed. I knew she didn’t go in Ruby’s Lounge, but she wouldn’t be assumed about.

  Dillon sat smoking and watching me. “You’re not mining coal?” I asked.

  “Naw!” said Brigham before Dillon could speak. “He tried to get hired on but I told the boss he wasn’t old enough.”

  Dillon looked away and flicked his cigarette. “I’m pumping gas at Annadel. It’s dull as hell. I’m thinking I might go off and fight in the war. I don’t care for that Hitler.”