Fair and Tender Ladies (27 page)

Dear Franklin,

 

To answer your question, Yes.

If
you can keep a civil tongue in your head and your hands to yourself for a change.

 

In haste,

 

IVY.

Dear Geneva,

 

I have to say I am not sorry to hear about you losing Sam Russell Sage, nor surprised either one. It is just what I would expect! A man that taken with himself will try to get as many women as he can, in my view, and that is a lot with the Lord on your side. I still recall how awful he was, how he left those little black hairs all over the sink and then acted like it was an honor for me and Ludie to get to clean them up! I think Sam Russell Sage just uses the Lord to get money and women. I think you are better off without him but I am sorry you found out in such a way. What was she like? What was her mother like? It takes a lot of nerve to just come up and knock on your door like that. I would love to have been a fly on the wall and heard you all talking and seen you drinking a dope. I would love to have seen his face when he walked in and found you all there! I am not surprised to hear about Ludie or some of the others, not even the married ones except for Mrs. Presley up the street, now that is a surprise to me. I am also surprised that he pulled the wool over everybody's eyes for so long. I wish there was some way to get Garnie away from him, but Garnie is wellnigh grown now, as you say, and anyway I have come to think that anything is better than going down in the mine. Well, almost anything. Playing the piano in a roadhouse is certainly better, for who are we to say, maybe Johnny can go on from there. He may go back to school yet. I would rather have him playing in a
horehouse
than going in the mine, Geneva that's the truth!

When I first came here, I thought this was Paradise. Well, let me tell you, it is a far cry from Paradise. Now that the war is over they are laying men off left and right, and working part weeks, and taking off shifts, and people don't know what to do with themselves. They have given up their land, those hardscrabble places we all came from, and they have noplace to go back to. They have lived here so long they have forgot how to garden anyway, or put up food, or trade for goods, or anything about how they used to live. So they have got nothing now. They have got nothing but what they owe to the company which is so much they will never pay it off. The men lay around and drink in the daytime, and play cards and run cockfights up on the mountain, and get in fights themselves. They will bet on anything. If there's two birds on a washline, they will bet as to which one will fly off first. I heard a man say out loud in the store that he gets along so good with women because he makes it a practice to frail them with a stick. Nobody in there batted an eye when he said it, I believe this trashy behavior is common. There are outlaw people here now that care for nothing, and men that swap wives just like they are swapping horses. On payday, you have to stay in the house at night because everybody is milling around out there drunk, and most of them packing guns. I thought I was coming over here to raise my baby on this mountain like we were raised, but it is not so.

It is no good to raise kids here. The big ones run together like a pack of wild dogs, they get into everything. They climb all over the old tipple and slide down the chute, which is so dangerous, and yell at their elders, they don't know no better kind of life. The real bad boys get sent to the reform school over at Greendale where they whip them on a barrel I am told, until they come back and make good miners. You can go in the mine at 15. Go in the mine and never come out, is what I say! I am glad I have got a little girl. Now, that mine has come to look like a big old mouth, swallowing boys whole.

And I guess you can not expect too much from children that have been raised on this hill by their mamas who don't know any better themselves, who never see their men except to send them off in the pitch black morning to the mine, and try to get the coaldust out of the house and keep up with the little kids all day long, this kind of a life will make you crazy. No wonder Myra Ramey down the road ties her baby to a chair leg so she can go to the store by herself. No wonder there's so many wives that drink, and marriages that break up here, it is not any kind of a life to have. Curtis and Beulah keep themselves above it all of course, they are looking to move on up in the company. But I work in the store all day, I see everybody, and know what's going on.

Violet Gayheart tried to tell me the truth when I first came over here and could have left I reckon, and she was right. Now I have seen Violet's husband come home from the mine when he has been working in water, with his clothes froze to where they will stand up by theirselves when he takes them off, like a headless man standing there in the kitchen floor. And now I have seen Oakley Fox's brother Ray, that is so sweet, get a facefull of little holes like the face of the moon, from shooting his coal too close. You carry a breast auger and drill a hole for every ton you want to shoot, and then you put four sticks of 40 percent dynamite in each hole, and shoot it. After you get your coal loose, you have got a fresh cut to mine, and a big man like Ray Fox can load 8 to 10 tons a day. But it is awful work. The safety rules have never been too grand, and now that times are so hard they are not paying much attention to them at all, and it is every man for himself and so much of the neighborness is gone. No wonder the wives get to drinking and crying, they are living in constant dread of that high-pitched whistle that means an accident, that a timber has give way or that the gas has caught on fire. If a man gets disabled, the company will move him out, just kick him right out of his house. But if a man gets killed, the company will let his wife live on in his house, and this hill is pocked with widows, Geneva. I know one that takes in washing and one that takes in men. Life is so hard here that it leads many right to church, Oakley and Ray Fox for an instance, and Beulah and Curtis too but they go down the river road to the Presbyterian Church because that is where the company folks go. But I am like Momma I reckon, and do not seem to have much use for church. What I like to do of a Sunday is stay home and play with Joli. Sometimes Violet and me will sit out in the yard on a quilt and play poker while Rush fiddles. I have gotten real close to Violet even though Beulah won't have a thing to do with her. So whenever Beulah and Curtis go someplace, I go next door.

For Violet is like you, Geneva, or like Ethel. She will call a spade a spade. I should have listened to Violet way back when. Instead I had my head all full of notions, it's the way I am, I reckon—full of notions. I wonder if I will ever get over it. One reason Violet is so bitter I think is that she had one baby that died before I moved over here, and now her little girl Martha has got something bad wrong with her. But the older boy R.T. is okay I reckon. Rush has lost his nerve though. This is how Violet describes it. She says Rush used to talk your ear off and cut up like crazy, that he was the biggest ladies man in East Tenessee when she met him, and famous for fiddling. Rush is right much older than Violet. But when his daddy died and left the farm to Rush's no-account brother, because of Rush carrying on so, then Rush decided to come over here and get in on the ground floor so to speak and make a quick buck to set him and Violet up in housekeeping. They did not figure on staying.

What happened, though, was that the very first month he was here, the methane gas—what they call the firedamp—built up in the shaft he was in and blew the man next to him all to hell and trapped Rush in there with that man's body on top of him for a day and a half. Can you immagine this? Can you think of what went on in his mind then, on that freezing cold wet mine floor with a dead man on top of him like a lover? I can not.

Rush came out of the mine a different man, and then right after that, their baby died. Now Rush is a shadow of himself, Violet says. He is still a big good-looking man but his coal-ringed eyes are so sad, they look dark and old. He is dreamy a lot. He owes too much to leave, even if he had the will to. They have still got a big doctor bill they are paying off, on the baby that died.

So Violet is real mad, she's been mad for years, but she can't get Rush to buck up and think of any way out of here. This seems to be the way of it. When you go down in the mine so long, something happens in your head so that you cannot immagine another life. It's the only thing you know to do, the only way you know to live. You get scared of the mine and scared of everything else.

Still and all, some times are real good. One day last week, Beulah and Curtis went off to town taking little Curtis Junior and the new baby Delores with them, and me and Violet spread a quilt in the yard between the houses like I was telling you, and laid out in the sun which felt so good after this long hard winter, and watched the kids playing in the yard. Joli is tough as nails I'm proud to say, and can hold her own with any boy. She is a
sight,
Geneva—may be she takes after you! She will go right up to John Arthur and grab whatever he's got that she wants. She is not scared of a thing. Anyway we were laying out there drowsing while Rush fiddled slow, and then he speeded up and we sat up, and Joli came over to play patacake. The sun laid over us like a blanket, although it was scarcely spring.

Listen here, Violet said all of sudden. I think it is Groundhog Day. She got up and ran in the house and looked in the almanac and sure enough, it was.

Well, what is it? she asked. I forget how it goes.

But I remembered of course, Lord knows I heard it from Granny a million times.
If he can see his shadow, it's six more weeks of winter,
I said.
If he can't, it's an early spring.
So I reckon that this here is just unseasonal, I said.

Hell fire, said Rush.

Play Ivy's song, Violet said, and then he fiddled and Violet sang

When Rush sings, you can see what a handsome man he used to be. Then he sang my verse.

Then Violet took a dive and started tickling me, and we rolled over and over on the quilt laughing. I do not feel too ruint when I am with Violet and Rush who have been through
everything.

Then Oakley came by in a clean blue shirt, I bet he'd been doing something down at the church again. He never says much about going, but he's there every time they crack the door, he is faithful as the day is long. He is not a bit like Sam Russell Sage though, believe you me! And it don't seem to bother him that I won't go. Nothing I do seems to bother Oakley. In fact he is so nice that sometimes I want to hit him in the face, it's the same way I felt about him years ago.

Ever since I told Oakley I am not his girl, he has not said another word about it, or tried to kiss me again, or anything. But he does come by here right much even though Beulah is not always nice to him. Sometimes he brings things to Joli, a plastic brush or candy or a little book. She just loves Oakley. Sometimes he brings things to me, like Colliers Magazine. He still lives with his brother Ray in the bunkhouse and does not seem to want any more out of life than he has. He never asks me to go anyplace with him, and if he knows when I go with Franklin—he
must
know!—he never says a word.

Franklin does not come here ever, he sends me word where to meet him, or sometimes he will come by the store. Oakley never mentions Franklin, so I don't either. Why should I? But I am caught between a rock and a hard place, in all truth. Franklin is not any good and I know it. Oakley is real good but I dont love him. I don't. And anyway I can't quit on Franklin while Beulah and Curtis are still here, they still think Franklin is somebody for me to marry, and I am still beholden. Thank God they will be moving to Huntington soon.

Although, Geneva, just between you and me—I don't know how they will fare over there. Curtis is a good steady man, but Beulah wants
so much
that I don't know if there is enough in the world to satisfy her, I honestly don't. And also she is so scared, and ashamed of herself someway. Last week she got invited up to Mrs. Bolin's house to make an alter cloth for the church, this is the kind of thing that is so important to Beulah. But then she fretted and fretted so much that she would say the wrong thing, or do something wrong, that she ended up flat on her back with a sick headache, and missed it all. And yet to see her, you would think Beulah more of a lady than any of these. She reads all the magazines and gets herself up just so, you know how well she can sew and always could. But somehow it's like she is still playing party and doesn't believe it herself. So I don't know how she will do in Huntington, Geneva, I honestly don't.