Whisper Hollow (21 page)

Walter shrugged. “All right. Want me to drive you back in?”

“Naw, you go on.” He turned and raised a hand without looking over his shoulder.

Walter nodded. He
was
tired. All of them were. Seamlessly, they’d moved from the darkness of the pit into the dark of night.
Cracking jokes and ass-slapping on the way to the changing room, they then drifted out and ambled down the hill toward their waiting wives and sleeping children, work clothes balled into rolls under their arms, swinging empty dinner buckets. Nothing visible but the fiery ends of their cigarettes burning like red stars in the night.

Liam turned and re-entered the mine.

At 6:00 a.m. the phone sounded like a siren coming from the kitchen. Alta was already up but was in the bedroom changing from her nightclothes to her slacks and sweater, wrapping her short hair in a cloth, preparing for the work of morning. She ran downstairs to answer it.

“Hello?”

Static, for a second. Then silence. “Morning, baby.”

She turned quickly toward the window, cupped her hand over her mouth, and hushed her voice to a whisper. “John. Why are you calling me here? What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing. I need to talk to Walter. Is he up?”

“He’s moving around. What’s the matter? What are you going to say?”

“Nothing, baby. Nothing. It’s work. Lemme talk to him. It’s work is all.”

“You sure? You’re not going to say anything.” The weight of their argument from the previous night was still heavy on her mind.

“No, no. Course not. Just work stuff.”

“You promise.” She took a deep breath, straightened her already straight shoulders.

“I promise.”

She stood, tense as a sentry, wearing her worry on her forehead. “All right then. Hold the phone a minute. I’ll get him.”

“Alta,” John said.

“What.”

“Alta, I’m sorry about last night. I’m sorry I said those things I did. I swore to myself after last time I’d never bring it up again, but …” His voice trailed off. She could hear the morning song of a bird through the phone line. “Alta — ”

“Hold the line. I’ll get Walter for you.”

She cradled the phone and called out, trembling, to her husband.

A moment later, Walter picked up the phone. “Hello?” he said, wiping the cream off his shaven face.

“Walter, it’s Johnny. Sorry to bother you this time of day, so late in the morning.”

“It’s only six.”

“I hate to ask a favor, but I gotta skip out of this morning’s shift. I know Soup’s scheduled for foreman, but I can’t raise him by phone so I called you. They’re gonna need an electrician. I can’t do it, I’m sick as a dog. All night.”

Walter shifted his weight onto one leg, leaned against the counter. The smell of bacon grease and eggs filled the kitchen. Kinking the phone against one shoulder, he pulled up one strap of his overalls and hooked them to the breast. “I’m not on today, it’s Soup’s crew.”

Alta’s hands shook slightly as she shoveled scrambled eggs onto his plate. Bacon. Biscuits she’d made earlier. She called aloud to Abel, low and loud as she could without disturbing Walter’s conversation. Adding more to Walter’s already-full plate, she topped off his short glass of orange juice. She didn’t roam more than three feet away from the telephone pressed against her husband’s ear.

A beat of silence and static on the line. “I realize it. I’m calling because I was thinking you might be able to take my shift. They’re gonna need somebody but there’s no way I can make it down. I know you worked second shift yesterday and I hate to ask it but I just can’t do it. I’ve got to send somebody in my place.”

Walter didn’t sigh. He didn’t complain. There was no sense of irony when he said to John, “I’ll go. I’ll get Abel to go on with me. We could use the extra pay.” Then he looked down at his heaping plate and added, “I’ll ask Alta to take you up some biscuits and such. Keep your strength.”

“I thank you, Walter. And, uh, no need to trouble your wife with anything. I’ll be fine. Back down on Monday for certain,” he said, nerves riding to the end of his voice. “Sorry again to ask the favor.”

“No trouble. You go on and get yourself feeling better, hear?”

“Thank you, Walter. Safe down there today.”

They hung up and Walter leaned against the counter. “Guess you heard, I’m taking John Esposito’s shift. I’d call up Liam Magee and see if he could take it, but knowing him, he’s likely facedown drunk somewhere,” he said. He clapped his hands once and rubbed them together, as though to mark his decision. Then he called up to Abel, “We’re going on dead work, son. Get dressed and eat up.”

Her hands still shaking, Alta filled her son’s plate. “I’ll put the biscuits in your buckets,” she said, as she did every day. “Eat what you can now. I’ll pack extra.”

Alta always packed their dinner buckets full to brimming. The bottom half was filled with water, and then on top was a drop section for dry food. Walter never ate a full meal, despite his bulk, and instead offered what she packed to the miners
whose wives came up short. Times were lean — again, still — and some men lived on little more than pinto beans and corn bread and wild ramps fried in bacon grease. Every shift some hungry man shyly accepted what Walter claimed he couldn’t possibly finish.

When they were dressed and fed and full, she leaned across the chasm between them to kiss her husband goodbye, her lips barely touching his cheek, and handed him his bucket. Then she took her son into a full embrace until he wriggled gently away. He kissed her, then, and took his lunch.

Alta’s heart had just started to settle back to a normal pace when Walter turned at the door and said, “You might want to run some dinner up to John, if you’ve got some time. He’s been sick all night he says. He doesn’t have a woman at home anymore, so he probably could use a decent meal.”

Alta clenched the embroidered towel Walter had used to wipe his face. Giving a slight nod in response, she lifted her hand slowly in a gesture of goodbye a moment too late — their backs were already turned. Then, with a bang, the screen door closed behind them and they were gone.

It was a few minutes past seven o’clock when Walter and Abel arrived at the entrance of the mine. Everyone else was there, drinking coffee and smoking, grousing about the earliness of the Saturday, laughing occasionally, flicking cigarette butts, talking about their women and money or lack thereof. Bones snuck up on Pie Eye — who looked a little drunk, as usual, from the night before — and grabbed his pack of Lucky Strikes out of his back pocket.

“Hey! Hand it over!” Pie Eye slurred. “You gonna owe me sixteen cents, you don’t give it.” He lunged toward Bones, who laughed and made a show of staggering out of the way.

“All right, men,” Walter said with one hand aloft, as though raising the flag. Though Soup Piontkowski was technically supposed to be running the shift, he leaned against the wall of the mine office with a mild, sleepy smile, watching the guys cut up.

The men let their laughter dissolve into chuckles, then huffs, then reverberating silence. They dragged on their cigarettes as if they were taking their final breaths, then stamped them into the soot. After they all assembled together, Soup finally said, “Let’s load up. We’ll be adding track into Three West and setting up stoppings along Two East.” He pointed to a pile of concrete blocks and eight-foot cedar ties, steel spikes, and tools. “Pile in those blocks and timbers, then we’ll get going.”

Grumbling again, they began hauling equipment into the empty coal cars all coupled up and hooked to the flat-headed electric engine that would pull them underground. It was only about waist-high, a miniature of the trains that leave the tipple full of processed coal, then thunder through and beyond the mountain to parts unknown. The mine itself, just over five feet at its highest point, forced most of the men to crouch. Piggy was the only one who could stand up to his full height for those eight long hours.

When they’d loaded everything, the men slowly climbed in, too. They all took a last glance at the lightening sky, then Fossil turned on the motor and fed them all to the hungry, hallowed mountain.

John said goodbye and hung up, glad to be free of Walter’s plainspoken kindness. Relieved, too, that he’d be taking his shift. The only sickness he’d felt since Alta stormed out of the cabin the night before was heartache. Watching her gather up her clothes and hold them to her chest as though suddenly embarrassed — for the first time in six years — to be naked in front of him.

“You’ve got no right to keep demanding it of me, John. I’ve loved you since I first saw you sleeping in that damned rocker in the middle of the woods. Before that, even. And I knew I always would. But you’ve no right to keep asking me to walk away from my husband and my son. Not until I’m ready.”

He leaned forward, the covers falling away. “Loving you gives me the right! How do you expect me to go on like this, never knowing if you’re going to leave him? How am I supposed to love you like I do and think there’s a chance you’ll end up spending your whole life under his roof, in his bed? How am I supposed to live every day with that, Alta?”

She twisted and stamped her foot into her soggy boot. Ran her fingers through her bed-mussed hair. They were farther apart than they’d ever been. “Someday, he’ll … pass on. And then, I can marry you. But not before,” she said. “I couldn’t live with myself if I broke Walter’s heart. He’s a good man, a good father. He lost his mother young and if I left him, too …” She shook her head. “My heart belongs to you, but I can’t do it. It would be too cruel.”

John sprang from the bed. “Damn it, Alta! Why’s it all right for you to be cruel to
me
? Wait till he’s dead? That’s what you want me to do? Well, I don’t know if I can wait that long!” Then he picked up the rocking chair that he’d fallen asleep on — fallen in love with her on — raised it above his head, and hurled it down with such force that it didn’t even send splinters in all directions. It just collapsed into itself right there on the floor.

With her hand on the yanked-open door, she looked at him with her lips parted as though she were about to say something else, but thought better of it. Then she just walked away, letting the door groan to a close behind her.

He’d been stunned at them both, too stunned to move until she was long gone, but by the time he realized he wanted to run after her, beg her forgiveness until she agreed to come back,
it was too late. She would be already too far down the well-worn path through Whisper Hollow and across the creek and up toward the home she shared with her family. He had to let her go, couldn’t risk raised voices or any ado that might inform any gossips on witness this late at night. There’d be no explaining such a scene. So he spent the rest of the night lying awake on her side of the bed, thinking about how to make it up to her.

Asking Walter to take his shift was the first part of his plan, because it would mean she’d be left home alone. Walter had said he’d take Abel on the shift with him, a bonus, so he knew there’d be no disturbing them. He could paint the picture of her morning routine in his mind. Even though he’d never eaten a meal in her kitchen, never partaken of her domesticity, he knew Alta as well as he knew himself — unlike Myrthen, who had remained an unsolved mystery for the fourteen years they were married. Alta always stayed home in the mornings, he knew, to roll out dough for the next meal, tend her garden, clean and set her home to right, do the wash. Only after her chores were done, her house and husband and son taken care of, would she allow herself some time to take a walk, or paint, or — at least three times a week while Walter and Abel worked the second shift — slip out her back door and make her stealthy way up the mountain to the cabin where John lived alone and which he considered theirs equally.

John quickly shaved and dressed, and almost ran down the hill toward the Polish bakery on Main Street. There was a chance that he’d be seen, and his sudden return to health might get back to Walter, but the odds were slight, and anyway, it was worth the risk.
She
was worth it. The long night had assured him of one thing: he would wait for her as long as he had to.

The scent of hot-oven yeast collided into him at the door. The butler’s bell rang above his head and Callie Kaminsky, the dimpled wife of the second-best Polish baker in town, as
she would say of her husband, met him at the counter, wiping her hands on her apron. No doubt she’d been up since the wee hours making walnut tortes and gingerbread with candied orange peels, potato and cheese pierogies, thick spinach quiches. It smelled so good that he smiled in spite of the night that splayed out behind him like a cooling corpse.

He asked for a half dozen of Alta’s favorite pastries —
rogale świętomarcińskie
— rolls filled with white poppy seeds, walnuts, and cream that were available throughout autumn and winter but were traditionally eaten on November 11, St. Martin’s Day. November 11, 1944, was the day they’d met in the woods, just shy of six years ago. Maybe the fresh Martinmas rolls, if not the pleading apology he’d rehearsed, would warm her heart to him again.

“
Dziękuję!
” he said to Callie when she handed him a folded paper sack filled with the rolls. He and Alta had traded their second-generation knowledge of their parents’ native languages over a bottle of wine one night shortly after they’d first started meeting with predictable regularity at the cabin. Callie laughed out loud at his thanks, pleased by his effort and entertained by his mispronunciation.

John laughed along, too, feeling optimistic. The butter from the rolls had already stained the brown paper sack, which, even though folded, could not contain its yeasty steam. He imagined Alta in her kitchen with her hair pulled back in a kerchief, chopping carrots and onions, peeling potatoes. He would pick some wildflowers on the way, he decided. She loved blue vervain and aster, evening primrose and moss pink and wild live-forever. There were plenty of places between downtown and Alta’s house to pick a handful. He imagined himself stealing through her garden, glancing left and right for the watch of female neighbors. She would accept his gifts, place the flowers into a jar or a vase, then pull out a chair at
her table. He would insist that she be the one to sit down in it while he found the plates, the napkins and forks. She’d laugh at his fumbling in the kitchen, would lean forward with her chin resting on threaded fingers, waiting. Her smile would herald his second chance.