The Well and the Mine (9 page)

“Don’t you get sick of it?” I asked.

“Nah. Too many kinds.”

In the corner house, Maxine Horner stood in her doorway with a broom and dustpan, wearing a stylish jacket the color of buttercups. She and her husband, Bob, ran the Pastime theater, which was two streets up. She hadn’t had a baby recently.

I’d only been in the Pastime once, for a Saturday afternoon Western.

“Afternoon, Virgie,” she said. Her eyebrows arched a little, and she smiled when Henry turned toward her enough for her to get a good look at his face. “And afternoon to you, Henry.”

We both smiled and waved, and I knew everybody’d know he’d walked me home by tomorrow morning.

“Did you see
Frankenstein
?” he asked after a bit.

“No, I haven’t been to the theater in a while.”

“
Dracula
’s coming next week. With Bela Lugosi. Do you like vampires?”

“Don’t know as I’d say I’m fond of them.” I was afraid he’d ask me to go with him, but he didn’t. Just went on about vampires for a while. Awful—whoever heard of liking such things.

The Brasher Hotel seemed busy enough, and men were standing in line to get into the restaurant on the top floor. I looked up and had a clear view of a man’s behind perched on the railing. From my angle, it didn’t look like a behind at all, all misshapen and smooshed, and I craned my neck a little as I kept walking. I didn’t crane it for too long.

The sidewalk and the paved street stopped there, so we were back on red rock. I watched my skirt switch against my legs, and I tried to make my feet stir up as little dust as I could manage. If I put down my toes before my heels, I barely made a puff. I could see Henry’s feet moving alongside mine. He kicked up great storms of dust, but I kept concentrating on toe-heel, toe-heel.

We walked past Nigger Town, the little group of shotgun houses that ran up the hill. No coloreds were out that I could see, but the path didn’t take us too close. The high school had a Kiwanis minstrels group that would make your sides hurt from laughing. They’d paint their faces black and dance around stage, mispronouncing things and falling all over one another. One year we had a group of real Negroes come and perform for the grammar school near Christmastime, and they weren’t nearly so funny. They didn’t seem to know at all how colored folks were supposed to act.

Tess
SUNDAY DINNERS WERE THE BEST DINNERS. WE ALMOST
always had mashed potatoes, piles of them, so much you could take seconds or even thirds. And Mama also made gravy. Usually I liked white gravy the best, but I loved brown gravy on potatoes. And also you could put scoops of English peas in the middle of your potatoes and make a bird’s nest. And that didn’t count as playing with food.

That Sunday Virgie walked home with Henry Harken I had fun with it. Jack, too. Soon as Virgie got in, Mama called us to dinner. Papa asked Jack to say the blessing—“Dear Heavenly Father thank you for this food this day and all your many blessings in Jesus’ name, Amen.” Girls could only say the blessing if no men were at the table.

Jack shoveled in some potatoes and said, “You gone marry him, Virgie?” Then we watched her turn red.

“Hush,” she said.

“Did he kiss you?” I asked. “I hope you didn’t let him kiss you.”

“You two don’t be talkin’ foolish,” Mama said, even though she was trying not to smile.

“No,” said Virgie, trying to look all proper.

I saw how the boys looked at Virgie, how they’d get flustered and punch each other in the arm when she walked by. Sometimes they couldn’t look her in the eye, which worked fine because she never looked at them either. It was an interesting thing to watch, and I felt sure no boys would ever act quite so ridiculous around me. They only act all stupid when you’re beautiful.

“Did you want him to kiss you?” Jack asked.

“That’s enough,” said Papa.

I just couldn’t help it. “If he does kiss you, I bet you smell pomade.”

Papa looked at me until I started shoveling potatoes in myself.

But Jack added one more before Papa gave him the that’s-really-enough look. “You could name your babies Henrietta and Henry and maybe another Henry. Those Harkens are big on Henrys.”

4 No Pay for Slate

Jack
OF COURSE WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT IT WAS TO BE
hungry. Not really hungry. With Papa having land, food was never hard to come by. At least not for us kids—we just ate whatever Mama sat in front of us, after she and Papa had sweated and labored to get it out of the ground and clean it and can it and cook it. No meat, but with Mama’s cooking you never noticed what wasn’t on the table.

The men with no land, the ones living in mining camps or renting property, didn’t have that cushion. When the mines started closing, there was nothing to go on the table. No other jobs, either. And there was nowhere for those men or their families to go. Maybe a handout from a church or free meals from a relative, but that didn’t last. Day in and day out, as weeks stretched into months, what hungry people mainly did was starve.

We didn’t see any of that. Not for a while. All Papa’s brothers farmed at least little patches of land, and Mama’s sisters had married men with clean white shirts who always had pens in their pockets.

Lola Lowe’s boy Mark was my age, and he had a tough time of it in school. A lot of the really poor boys had the advantage of being tough and hard and mean as snakes. No one would mess with them. But Mark was always small, and he never seemed healthy. He just seemed poor and pitiful and uncomfortable, the kid who everybody’s mother told you to be nice to. And frankly nobody was too mean to him—there would’ve been no sport in it—but nobody sat with him or asked him to play ball, either.

In third grade, he turned orange, like he’d been colored with a crayon. And he had a potbelly on him. That thin body, nothing but bones, but an inflated belly you couldn’t help but notice. He stopped coming to school, from embarrassment more than sickness, I think.

It turned out all they had growing in the garden was carrots, and that was all he’d eaten for months. And then they had the doctor bills from all the tests run to figure out what had turned him orange. A few of Lola’s other children turned splotchy with rickets. By the time I graduated, she’d lost her four youngest. Different names to what killed them, but poor nutrition at the root of it. Mrs. Lowe handled losing the husbands a lot easier than she did the children. I barely remember her from childhood, but when I was in college, Mama started having me take Thanks giving dinner over to her.

To me Lola Lowe was the stooped, thin woman who never said anything but “Fine head of hair on you, Jack. Thank you. And tell your mama thank you.”

She was two sentences to me.

Albert
BIRDS KNOW FIRST WHEN THERE’S A STORM COMING
up, and I could hear them hollering. I’d heard the cawing from the kitchen, and when I stepped out on the porch, I could feel the storm in the air myself, the wind whipping around the porch, smelling of electricity. The jays and crows and martins sounded their warnings to one another while I stayed out there, standing, waiting for the rain to hit. Nothing like the minutes before an electrical storm, all the force of it making the hairs on your arms stand on end, the trees nervous and shaking. I crossed my arms and waited until the sheet of rain slammed into the yard. The first line of lightning cracked. The birds went quiet, hiding.

At shift change at 6 p.m., the men coming on told us both banks in town never opened that morning. Word got around quick that they’d closed without a word of warning to anyone. Doors locked, shades down, everybody inside just gone. Supposedly weren’t going to open again period. None of us at the site had any money in ’em anyway, but the town was chock-full of fellows banging on the doors trying to get their money. A few went over to Jesse Bridgeman’s house to bang on it for a while. Figured since he ran the bank, he was to blame. They banged for most of the afternoon, though, because he went home and killed himself early that morning. Wife died a couple of years before and kids were at school, so nobody noticed until finally one of the fellows walked around and peeped in the back window. Jesse was laying in a heap on the ground, hadn’t even sat down to pull the trigger.

’Course in ’29, banks wobbled and shook, businesses shut down all along Main Street. Went broke. Must’ve been a quarter of those storefronts boarded up. Didn’t make much difference to me. Mines stayed open—with a few less men put to work in ’em—and life went on. No better, no worse.

I knew Jesse—not so as we’d do more than nod to each other in passing, but I’d thought he was a solid man. Didn’t under stand it. He had two boys and a girl, the youngest one of them about Virgie’s age. I didn’t know how you shrugged that off. Thought maybe it was different when there was money. Maybe the wife had rich parents who’d take care of the children.

I’d been in a few accidents, but the only one that I thought I might not get out of was in No. 5, down at Chickasaw.

I was loading then, shot the coal myself and then filled car after car. Like most things, your body fell into it after a while, scooping up the chunks of coal—slate, too, that’d be sorted out up on top. Didn’t get paid for slate. Hefting it all into the car, I didn’t hear a single voice, only coughing from time to time. Or the frustrated sound of a shovel hitting a slab of slate that wasn’t jarred loose. No clock, no such thing as time or minutes, only a shovelful and the next and the next. And you settled into the bosses’ system alright—how long didn’t matter, only how much. One ton per car. We filled them regular and smooth, me and Jonah, knowing to ignore the aches and soon enough they’d give up and quiet down.

The prop under one of the blasts wasn’t set right, and the whole side of the tunnel caved. Floor and ceiling seemed like they met each other in the middle, and I was blinking the dirt and dust out of my eyes, spitting it out of my mouth, blowing it from my nose. When I reached up to wipe it off, I couldn’t move my hands. Buried in it to my chest. It didn’t take me half a second to figure out that was the first problem needed to be solved. First I worked on wiggling my fingers, getting them loose enough that I could start to twist my hands. Then I hollowed out a bigger space by circling my wrists. That freed up my arms below the elbows some, and bit by bit I could feel the earth breaking up below my shoulders. I kept moving and shifting, pulling loose the same way the cat ate the grindstone—a little at a time. Once I had my arms out, it got easier. Then I could use both hands like a dog digging up a bone to push the dirt away from my body. I carved out a space around me until I got to below my hip bones, then I heaved myself out.

I had to take a few deep breaths before I could call for anyone. I’d heard grunts and shouts down the tunnel a ways while I was digging. I’d ripped a few fingernails off and had to tear off a piece of shirt to bandage my fingers up. They kept on bleeding, and a few times I tried to clear my eyes of the dust and got an eyeful of blood instead. Digging in a cave-in ain’t nothing like in a garden. The dirt was full of splinters and chunks of wood, coal and rock, a few bits of metal. Once I got to wrapping up my fingers, I saw my hands were bleeding from a few other places, so I wrapped them all up, sort of like loose mittens.

I’d called to the others while I was bandaging. A few fellows answered back. They was mostly fine. We lost three men in that collapse, and one of them I saw his hand, glove knocked right off it, sticking up out of the dirt. The only part of him aboveground. But the rest of us did all we could do—started heading up. We had to lift a few beams that’d blocked the tunnel, and I gouged one of those empty fingernail holes good. Nearly screamed. End of the day, I don’t think the broken ribs hurt as much as the durn fingernails.

I knew I was sore all over, and my side did pain me something awful, but I kept on—wasn’t no other choice. Once we were on the surface a doctor came and figured I had the broken ribs, plus my ankle had swole to the size of a ham. That was the start of my back trouble, too, I reckon. (Wasn’t ’til later that I near broke it, and after that it never stopped acting up.) I hadn’t felt any of it, though, not before I saw daylight. Can’t say we ever mentioned sitting down and waiting to be rescued. We all kept climbing and digging and cursing—I don’t hold with cursing, but sometimes I felt like saying “Amen” at the way those other fellows could string a good one together—and bleeding and sweating and praying. Still and all, it was them aboveground that got to us; we heard the yelling and tap-tapping on the rocks above. Took half a day for them to dig us out. Leta was there with all the women, with food and water and tea for the ones trying to get us out. I drank a pitcher of tea and nearly threw up.

Rain blowed onto the porch, hard, stinging droplets more like shards of ice than water. Water ran over to my boots. Drops dinged into the bucket by my feet—buckets cost a heap less than a new roof. Lightning flashed and thunder cracked almost at the same time, and I saw the lights flicker in the sitting room. Leta must’ve taken the children in there. I stood, feeling a sharp slap of rain with every heavy gust, and tried to imagine just laying in the dirt and coal and lumber and not getting up. And I realized I hadn’t known Jesse Bridgeman at all. Just knew a name and a face.

Tess
MY KNEES STUCK UP OVER THE OLD WASHTUB, MY ELBOWS
hanging over the side. It fit pants and shirts and drawers a lot better than it fit me. The sheet was hung across the kitchen from cupboard to cupboard so I’d have privacy, but Papa and Jack knew not to come back there anyway. That washtub was confining, and a waste of good water. (At least it was warm since Mama had boiled two pots to add to the water straight from the well.) Men folks would bathe in the creek, but me and Virgie and Mama had to bathe in the washtub.

I tried to wash up as fast as I could, keeping my shoulders underwater, which meant my legs hung out. But I scrubbed the lye soap over them, laying the goose bumps to rest. I took time between my toes. Then I got soap under my toenails and had to kick them underwater to shake it loose.

I could hear the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, just a hum. I couldn’t hear good with all my splashing, plus the radio was at the front of the house.

“Turn it up louder, Virgie,” I yelled.

Mama stuck her head around the sheet a few seconds later. “Don’t yell so, Tess,” she said, frowning. “And keep the water in the tub.”

Her head disappeared, but the music got louder. I heard a banjo, a bow dancing over the strings…Uncle Dave Macon playing “Rockabout My Saro Jane.” I scooted up, shoulders above water and legs mostly below it, soaping and rinsing in rhythm. Uncle Dave’d break up the fiddling with clogging, yelling and whooing as his feet stomped fast and hard. I moved on to my head, rubbing the bar over my hair, then running my fingers through it. Mama always said to rub especially hard behind your ears. I did and dunked my head.

When I came up, he’d switched songs, calling out, “If they beat me to the door, I’ll put them under the floor / Keep my skillet good and greasy…” His voice was like the twang of that banjo.

I was nearly rinsed off, the water cool and cloudy, when I heard the first bolt of lightning. My hair didn’t squeak yet, so I checked the light dangling over my head and dunked myself under again real quick. I wasn’t sure where my towel was.

Papa was the first on our street to get electricity. Those droplights would be so warm and inviting at night, little balls of light hanging from the ceiling. It seemed like magic to light the house with just a pull of a cord, but in a storm, those lights would pop and fly, with sparks and whole strings of electricity shooting out. No long lines were coming out yet, but the one above the tub sent a spark a foot away from me. The taste of metal stung my mouth. Marianne at school said a man in Jasper was eating cereal at his kitchen table during an electrical storm, and a bolt of electricity came right down the bulb and landed on his head and killed him dead. I wondered if he landed in his bowl.

Electricity was like old Mr. Gordon at church, who had a cottonball’s worth of white hair sprouting out of his ears and was prone to catching you by surprise. Sometimes that meant he’d have a peppermint stick in his pocket that he’d give you for no reason, just stick it in your face so quick you were afraid you’d lose an eye. Other times he’d thump you on the back of the head during service, even if you were sitting right beside your parents and you weren’t talking at all, just shifting a little from side to side. On the one hand you didn’t want to sit close enough to him to get thumped, but if you played it too safe, you’d never get a peppermint either. It kept things interesting.

Normally I wouldn’t have worried too much about a storm. We got to move the buckets around to catch the roof leaks when they sprung, and we all tried to be first at spotting them. Jack was probably out there getting to do all the bucket moving—Virgie wouldn’t fight him for it.

I even sort of liked the electrical sparks, and I loved the feel of the air when it crackled. And I liked the water. I’d never understood why I couldn’t have all of it at the same time, even if that one man happened to have bad luck while he was eating breakfast. But this time I really wanted out of that tub. I was scared, and the feeling snuck up on me like it had been waiting nearby to pounce. Nothing used to scare me. But after that baby, it seemed like I wasn’t ever safe. I didn’t know from what, but I even checked under the bed at night before we turned out the lights.

I hopped out sopping wet, only spotting the towel draped over a chair after I’d left footprint pools across the floor. I watched the sparks fly off the lights, keeping my head turned toward them as I stepped back to the washtub and wrung my hair out. I was still standing there hunched over when Mama yanked back the sheet again.

“What are you still doing in here, girl? You better…” She stopped all of a sudden, looking surprised, even upside down like I saw her. “Huh—well at least you’re out of the tub. Never saw a girl so stubborn about ignoring an electrical storm. Maybe you’re learnin’. Anyway hurry up and get in the sitting room with the rest of us…and get out from under these lights! If it gets much worse, we’ll go down to the storm cellar.”