Oral History (9781101565612) (31 page)

—The sycamore stands hugely white and stark against the dark mountain beyond it, the lowering sky. The Cantrell homestead, nestled high among the three mountains, has a snug dreamy other-worldliness; a ribbon of mist clings to the peak of Snowman Mountain.

—The store at Tug, added onto now in several different directions, squats on its patch of litter-covered bare clay like something built by ignorant children out of whatever came to hand, the people around it stopped dead in their tracks to stare at the camera and beyond it with their habitual resigned distrust, their old wariness.

I found myself astounded by the changes along the road. Tiny ugly frame houses and makeshift shacks had mostly replaced the log cabins I remembered; or those cabins had been fronted and boarded out of all resemblance to the kind of homemade simplicity I used to love. Nothing had been done with thought or care of consequence, I noted—lumber stripped and the land left, machine parts everywhere rusting, trash and refuse out in the yards in front of the homes, if you could call them that, and children—children everywhere, ragged and dirty, in the road and in the filthy bare yards along it. Even the creek itself looked different, brown and swollen, trash along its banks where evidently it had flooded, and not so long ago. I drove slowly and deliberately up the hazardous hairpin turns of Hurricane Mountain; rounding a final curve, I found myself on a kind of overlook from which I could make wide-angle shots of the Blackey Coal Camp which occupied now the entire holler where the old woman named Granny Younger used to live.

I had never seen anything like it. The lumber companies had stripped the timber out all the way up the mountain, on both sides of the holler. They were doing it, I recalled, logging this holler, even while I was here, the logs on the narrow-gauge line going down to the Levisa River, filling it bank to bank, the loggers waiting for high water to raft them down to Catlettsburg, Ky. Somehow I had thought nothing of it at the time, which caused me to wonder what else I might have missed! what else might have made no impression. I did not enjoy the uneasiness which this idea produced, nor the way this holler made me feel, this coal camp.

One mountainside was layered with small identical company houses, rickety coal-blackened flimsy squares each with its door in the middle, its two windows giving out onto the porch, the porch itself on stilts as the houses were set back against the steep mountain. Dogs and chickens, sometimes children, could be glimpsed beneath the houses. The houses appeared to be in imminent danger of falling off the mountain. The unpaved roads leading up to them were muddy, full of potholes. Trash, rusting machine parts, and bodies of cars lay everywhere, along that road, in all the yards (where no grass grew!). At the bottom of the holler stood a structure of yellow bricks—the company store—surrounded by other cement-block and frame buildings which appeared to be offices. Behind these, the jumble of trucks and equipment, the railroad, the coal cars, and the giant black hulk of the tipple hanging over it all. The air was acrid, sulfurous. Looking up beyond the tipple to the top of the mountain, I saw the hulking slag heap, black and vast and smooth and slightly smoking, always on fire. The sulfur came from there.

My vantage point on the hairpin turn of Hurricane Mountain, facing this coal camp, made me feel omniscient: I could view it all and view it whole, the people tiny, not real people, not at all, the cars and trucks nothing but toys. I was taking wide-angle shots when the man approached me silently, the way they always come, and hunkered down to watch me for a while before he spoke.

“You got some business here, buddy?” The voice was flat and nasal, absolutely without intonation.

I whirled, almost dropping the camera.

The man hunkered silently, watching. He was so still he looked of a piece with the mountainside, rock cropped bare and left there weathering, his face seamed, the telltale black circles of coaldust ringing his pale colorless eyes so that he resembled, I thought, some giant ominous raccoon. Before I could stop myself, I was giggling wildly! Cold sweat prickled under my arms.

“What's so goddamn funny?” The man stood up slowly, then advanced. “Nothing,” I said finally. “Nothing.” I stood poised by the automobile, my hand on the door.

The man looked at me. “You'll be one of them government fellers, I reckon,” he said.

Christ, yes! “W.P.A. Administration.” I fell into it quickly. “From Charleston.”

The man came closer, squinting at me. “Then I'll tell you some things,” he said. “I'll tell you some things. We been eating wild greens at my house since January this year, greens that the goddamn pigs eat. The children needs milk and we can't get none of it, you hear me mister? None of it.”

“But surely,” I protested, “at the company store . . .” I gestured toward Granny Younger's holler.

“Store, my ass,” the man said. His voice was so flat that he might have been saying “It's going to rain”: he might have been saying anything. “I owe that store so much I ain't never going to pay it, I'll die owing the company everthing I got. You got to buy your powder from the store, see, you can't blast coal without no powder, and you can't get it no-place but the store, and it keeps going up on you—then they pay you by the ton, see, and then they have went and gone up on the ton too.” The man fell silent, looking out at the coal camp.

“You can't win for losing,” he said.

I confess I have never been able to hold my peace when I should.

“But the union,” I protested. “This new man, Lewis, don't you think—”

“I don't think shit,” the man said. “Ain't nobody paying me to think.”

“I guess not,” I stammered. “I mean, I guess so.”

“Hell, they talk big,” the man said, “but they ain't done nothing yet. The only thing they done so far is get Mr. Blossom all riled up so he's got him some Gatling guns and a bunch of Pinkertons up here. Hit's coming on fer a bad time,” he said, almost as if to himself, then suddenly grinned a wide feral grin, exposing his yellowed broken teeth. “You heard enough?” he asked. “You want to hear some more?”

“I have to be on my way,” I responded quickly. “Perhaps I could ask you, however, do you know the family of Luther Wade? I'm told they live up here someplace.”

“That second row of houses over there,” the man said, pointing. “The one on the end,” he said. “I reckon you come up here to hear him sing. You gonna write it down or what?”

“Something like that.”

“They was some other fellers up here already, doing that.”

I remained silent, vastly relieved.

“Didn't none of them have a car like thisun, though.”

I got into the automobile and locked the door.

“Didn't none of 'em have such a fancy car.”

The man pulled a gun (!) out from somewhere—shoulder holster?—and looked at it, turning it in his hands. The gun was black and seemed to absorb the sunlight. The man looked at it carefully, blew in the barrel.

“Look, you want money?” I said—I think I said. “Is that it? Here.” I struggled with my overcoat.

“I don't want nothing you've got.”

Carelessly, grinning, the man lifted the gun and shot out the rearview mirror attached to the car on the driver's side. Glass splintered against the car and down onto the packed red clay.

The sound of the gun ricocheted deafeningly from the mountain wall.

The man grinned.

I threw the car into gear and screeched off down the narrow road into the holler, not the way I had intended going, not at all, but the man stood behind me there in the middle of the road still grinning so I could not turn the car and I had simply no choice at all.

Children ran beside me as I drove past the company store; everybody stared. I drove on, ascending now, at last almost within shooting range of the house I knew to be hers, then braked and turned and put the automobile out of gear and leaned out for a couple of quick shots.

By this time, the light was nearly gone. This series of photographs has an indistinct, grainy surface, as if coal dust were blowing palpably through the air.

The first photograph shows the house itself with the clothes flapping on the line beside it, children out playing in the dirt of the yard, such as it is, beyond the fence, children taking a trip of their own in the rusted-out Dodge or part of a Dodge in the yard.

—Then two lovely girls, apparently twins, holding hands as they come down the steps, frail and angelic: they've got no business here in this darkening yard. The twins, their dresses, and the wringer washer on the porch all seem to glow in this photograph; the yard, the house, the other children blurry and dark.

“You girls!” she called. “Sally! Lewis Ray! Billy! You all come on, now.”

I drew my breath in sharply, clicking away.

But these pictures did not turn out because the light had gone by then! because Dory, at the door, picked just that moment to turn her head. She was reduced to an indistinct, stooped shape, the posture of an older woman—they age so fast in those mountains any way—or perhaps it was simply the angle of her head and the way she stood at the door, her head a mere bright blur.

Even when I blew it up, there was nothing there.

I drove for most of the night, beyond Claypool Hill and Tazewell to a hotel outside Christiansburg, desperate to put as much distance as possible between myself and the mountains. When I awakened the next day, in the late morning after seven hours of deep black sleep, I felt exhausted, drugged. Driving on, I was suddenly struck by the way my splintered rearview mirror fractured the noonday sun and sent it out in a splatter of light: like a prism, in all truth. I stopped the car and stared into this phenomenon until I was nearly blinded, and when I looked back at the rolling landscape of Lynchburg around me, it appeared all different, all new, as if cleansed by a silvery wash. I felt as I had felt several years ago upon hearing the news that a ninth planet—Pluto—had been found revolving around the sun, a planet that of course
had been there
all along: oh God! I thought. Nothing is ever over, nothing is ever ended, and worlds open up within the world we know. I was anxious to rejoin my family. Yet I sat there for quite some time, just east of Lynchburg, looking out at the first faint springing green on the earth's wide rolling field.

There's two things I like to do better than anything else in this world, even at my age—and one of them is talk. You all can guess what the other one is.

A while back, Roy and me were in the bed—that's my husband, Roy—and I said this out loud to him it is something I have thought to myself for a while.

“Roy,” I said, “when you get right down to it, honey, there's not a lot worth doing, is there, outside of this and talking?” and Roy wrinkled up his eyes in that way he has, and thought for the longest time, and then he said, “Well, Sally, I guess there's sports.” Sports! I laughed so loud.

But that's Roy for you. He'd roll over and die if he missed a bowl game on TV. One time he didn't get up from that recliner for seven hours solid and his knees went right out from under him when he stood up when the news come on.

Roy has a good time, that's the thing I like about Roy. He's a lineman for the Appalachian Power and he likes that job fine, no complaints, turned down a promotion because it meant he'd have to wear a tie and spend half time at the office.

“Count me out,” was what Roy said.

Roy likes his sports and he likes my kids and he likes pepperoni pizza and he likes to have some beer of an evening—I do too—and he'll grow him some tomatoes every year out there by the garage, he likes tomatoes, and he likes engines better than any man you ever saw. Any kind of engine. He made Davy the cutest little dune buggie, and got him a helmet to go with it. Roy likes cars and boats. And Roy can fuck your eyes out, Roy can, and talking all the time. “Talk to me,” he says. Well I like that.

My first husband came from a family up in Ohio that didn't believe in talking to women and he never said one word, just roll over and go to sleep.

I didn't run into Roy until I was over the hill—I had this other husband first, as I said—but by God I know a good thing when I see it.

I jumped right on it.

Because him and me we are two of a kind and sometimes when we're there in the bed it's like it all gets mixed up some way, like you kind of forget where your body stops and his starts or who did what to who and who came when and all that. I said we are two of a kind.

Another way we are, Roy and me, is
down to earth
. I've always been like that basically and so has Roy, even before we took up with each other. Sometimes we play a little poker with Lois and Ozell Banks and sometimes we go to Myrtle Beach. We don't want the moon.