The Well and The Mine Page 16

  My papa couldn’t grow roses worth a flip. He struggled even with the vegetable garden. One time he grew radishes as big as oranges, completely hollow on the inside. He said the problem was they grew so fast that they didn’t have time to fill up. He’d worked the mines when he was younger, but by the time I came around, he farmed full-time, so you’d have thought he’d get the hang of it.

  My mother had started the rosebushes, planting one special for each of us. She’d planted me a pink tea rose before she died, although I couldn’t remember her doing it. But the bush itself was one of my first memories. I was so fond of it that the same year I started school, I started taking rose clippings and tending them in a bucket. Since my older sisters had only barely managed to keep their own roses alive, I took over when I was eight or nine.

  Funny how even with sunshine falling straight on them, the petals are always cool.

  Now when I was a little thing, I did like pink. I was the youngest, so my sisters took care of most of the housework, and that left me free to tend the roses. They coddled me a bit, too, me being the baby, and they’d try to keep from laying any work on my shoulders even after I was old enough. So I had years steeped in my roses from morning until night, talking to them when I wasn’t tending to them. I had names for them that I never told my sisters about—Esmerelda for the flashy bright pink one desperate for attention; Beulah for the solid, strong red; Virginia for the delicate white one that’d wilt with too much sun. I’d prick my finger on them and we’d be blood sisters. I’d put rose petals in my pillow case so I could smell them while I slept.

  It was an odd attachment that puzzled me: the grown-up married me looking back on it from a distance. I had three sisters who doted on me, but I told my secrets to the roses. They were so beautiful, and they pulled you in every which way—the smell of them, the look of them, the softness of them. And they were the only part of the house that still had my mother printed on them, or at least I felt that way then. I suppose their smell and feel became hers in my mind. Janie, two years older than me, would sit with me—she couldn’t remember Mama much neither, so we’d imagine her together. (I did have the one clear memory of her lying dead on the bed, but I mostly kept it covered and put away.) We were always wanting Merilyn and Emmaline to tell us stories about her. But since they were busy cooking the meals and running the house, we were on our own a lot. We’d collect fallen petals and try to make a carpet, pushing each petal into the ground after we softened it with a little water.

  I was lucky to have those years, so fanciful and pointless. My last year in grammar school, though, Janie got typhoid. She’d been tired and poorly, but when she showed Papa the rose-colored spots on her sides and belly, he nearly knocked over his chair snatching her up and yelling for my brother to hitch up the mule and go find the doctor.

  Later on, I heard that the bad sewage in town was to blame. Some of the business houses and hotels downtown emptied directly into the storm sewers, giving off an awful smell. You’d walk past a manhole, and you’d swear you’d been picked up and set in an outhouse. Plenty of children fought off the runs and dysentery, but that summer was the first my papa could remember that typhoid caught on.

  At any rate, we all took antityphoid serum, which I guess we should’ve had anyway, and I could hardly sleep for the ache in my arm. I shook with fever for the next couple of days, cold under all my blankets, and wondered if I’d got the typhoid. But they told me it wasn’t sickness, it was just from the serum. It turned out our oldest sister, Emmaline, had got it, though—you didn’t hardly ever see her without Janie right at her heels. Emmaline dressed us all in the morning, packed our lunch buckets, put cold rags on our heads when we had fever. She was busy every minute, and looking back, she should have had a beau already instead of minding us. But she was always there, first up in the morning and last in bed at night. She gave us lemon juice and honey for sore throats. And she could do four or five cartwheels in a row.

  Janie got better bit by bit, but Emmaline died. I woke up one morning and Papa was standing in the doorway telling us all she’d died in the night.

  Her rosebush was the white one, Virginia. I cut off ten long stems for the funeral, even trimmed off all the thorns, meaning to lay them in the casket. But my nerves on end, I picked them apart as I stood listening to the preacher. Emmaline was blurry to me even by the time I had Virgie—I remembered she was pretty, but I could hardly picture a single feature. And all we had was one family photograph with her in it, a square no bigger than a lady’s compact, taken before I was born. She’s not even smiling, though I do remember her having a crooked, catchy smile. Of course, nobody wanted to hold a smile long enough for those photos to take, so if you judged by that little square, we were sure enough a sober, grim-faced family.

  Roses last long into the fall, too, another thing that pleased me as a girl and as a woman. My jasmine smells as sweet, but once there’s a nip in the air, it falls to pieces. Still and all, I’ve always loved the scent of it drifting into the kitchen. I never let the girls touch the jasmine, which I planted right near the lavender bush so the smells would mix.

  Papa was sort of lost with all those girls, but he was a kind man. His fingers always had dirt under them, not coal stain like Albert’s, and he had a fine singing voice that we’d wake up to in the morning sometimes. Once he built a trellis for me when I wanted to try climbing roses, and the only thing I really remember from that afternoon is when Papa tried to fix my pigtail. He did an awful job, his big fingers clumsy with the ribbon, and the pigtail stuck off to the side of my head. I left it in anyway.

  Albert hadn’t ever tried fixing the girls’ hair as far as I knew. I was sure he’d do a pitiful job of it. Much as he loved my hair, loved touching it, brushing it off my face. Covering his hands with it, even, when we were first married and it was a strange new thing for him to wake up with a pillowfull of hair all around him.

  I still let it down at night, of course, but I didn’t think he’d had much time to notice my hair in a long spell. A boy might stare at some young girl’s hair, but there wasn’t such staring between a man and his wife.

  I used to love Albert’s shoulders. I’d push as hard as I could at the muscle, seeing if I could make it give. If my hair was fascinating to him, the hardness of his shoulders (arms and back just as solid) was a new world to me. You could look at a man’s shoulders all day long and never know they felt like that.

  I stepped on a rock just sharp enough to make me look down and notice the filthiness of my feet. Covered in dust and—I lifted one behind me—black on the bottoms. Tess would love to see me, love to be able to tell me to go wash my feet. If I could remember, I’d let her catch me before I cleaned up.

  All the softness of my roses rubbed off soon enough.

  Emmaline’s dying started it. Then Papa took sick the year after Albert and me married. It was different than when Emmaline died: Then nobody came to call, keeping their distance from the house. With Papa gone, both his house and our house was full up, with the dinner table piled high with casseroles and chicken and pies and cakes. It took me months before I could taste sugar without feeling queasy.

  I worked my way down the row of roses, curving around the east side of the house. Before I moved on to the section under the kitchen window, I sized up what I’d already done, making sure I’d fertilized them all even and smooth. I had, but I hefted the shovel again and spread a little extra manure on Virgie’s bush. It had been planted last, after she asked for a pink one for her birthday. The blooms were smaller than the rest, and I worried that it wasn’t getting enough sun, maybe catching too much shade from the eaves.

  That same year Papa passed away, Robert, the only boy among us, died in the Great War when he was nineteen. That made two out of the five of us children gone. Funny that the roses never made me think about dying, even though we always cut bunches of them to take to the cemetery.

  Instead I found myself drifting off while I pruned them, and I’d feel Emmaline
standing next to me, calm and quiet. Sometimes I’d fancy I felt Papa standing behind me, that I’d feel him tug my hair, trying to make me jump. Or I’d imagine Janie scampering down the steps, begging to help me with the cuttings. Ideas not fit for anything. I kept them out of the house, but they could creep up on me outside.

  I always hoped that I’d die in summertime, or fall maybe. All my papa could talk about his last few weeks was how much he wanted to taste a pear, crisp and juicy. It was January, and the closest we could get was some pear preserves on toast. With your teeth about gone and your stomach not handling much, I could see how fruit would be on your mind, how a taste of sunshine and breeze might hold you over when you’re wrapped up in blankets, sore from not leaving the bed for so long. When you pass away in the summer, they can bring the summer in to you. Pears and nectarines and peaches and tomatoes, as much as can fit on your bed stand. They could leave a big enough pile so you could feed yourself for days—you wouldn’t even be much trouble.

  Albert WE WAS LUCKY TO HAVE A CAGE. IN THE PUSH MINES, those men had to crawl on their knees or even their bellies to get to the mine face, not making a red cent for all that time and effort. We had the one trip down.

  The wire cage took me down, and I could imagine Ole Sol operating it in the next life, taking you past the coal and down into the fire below. But every morning we stopped at the midpoint—somewhere below land but a little above hell. I stepped into the dark, stooping over right away so I wouldn’t hit my head, and headed toward the last room, lights bobbing ahead of me and around me and behind me. Carbide made for underground lightning bugs, with no man recognizable from more than a few yards away unless you could tell him by the height of his lamp.

  The light from my own cap spread out in front of me. It flashed over the roof made of coal and rock, shored up with timbers, pillars of left-behind rock and coal shooting down from the ceiling to hold it up as the coal was cut out. As section foreman, I’d made the marks on the walls myself yesterday evening, then the coal-cutting machine had come through the room after we’d cleared out, ripping cuts in the seam with that circle of dull teeth. It struck the first blow, riled up the coal, let it know who was boss. Then came the men drilling holes for the dynamite, holes about six or eight feet apart all the way along a wall of rock. The shooters would come and put the shots in, and everyone would back out. It’d blow, heaving coal and rock and dust. Time to time the coal might get in a lick of its own, taking a roof or a few men with it as it blew apart. But not lately. The drillers and the shooters had been doing their jobs fine, and by the time my boots were walking where theirs had been, the blasting powder, smoke, and coal dust had settled.

  I’d done plenty of loading, worked side by side with plenty of the men filling up the rooms. Now I didn’t have a room of my own, and I didn’t get paid by the tonnage. Got paid hourly, which suited me just fine. Most of the men worked in pairs assigned to one room, and I’d put in plenty of time with Jonah over the years, tagging my number—72—to the side of the car when we finished her up. The bosses would add up those circles of “72”—brass checks—and those checks turned into dollars on the paycheck once the coal got weighed.

  Supervising, though, I’d go from room to room checking on the pace of the work, seeing if all the supports were steady, if the equipment was running like it should, who’d hit a snag, if the men were getting along. Some days it was just as hard on the back as loading. Safety was big and I’d need to keep an eye on nearly a hundred men spaced out in dozens of rooms, some no bigger than the storage space under the house. I’d get a shout from someone saying the air seemed stale, smelled off, and I’d check the ventilation. Or a pump would break down or a shovel handle break or sometimes some argument would break out. But mostly I was walking and bending and poking and prodding, in one room and out the other, saying hello occasionally, usually just nodding. Checking the seams and timbers and haulage system and listening and smelling for things I hoped I wouldn’t hear or smell.

  I’d made my way into one of the larger rooms and noticed a crack in one of the posts near the ground. I was glad it was a big room—I could get on my knees with my back straight up, cap not even brushing the ceiling.

  I always was wearing off the knees of my overalls, but Leta never did say a word about it.

  The four-by-eight post was solid enough, and the crack didn’t look to be spreading. Not deep, either—could hardly wedge a thumbnail in it. While I was still on my knees, one of the boys came up to me, a good-natured, slow-moving Negro. Red his name was, and I never knew why. There wasn’t a red spot on the man. I moved around to the other side of the post, running my hand down it, waiting for him to speak.

  “Mr. Albert,” he said.

  “What’s the trouble, Red?”

  He didn’t waste no time, I’ll give him that. “Figure I saw some matches on B.”

  I straightened up as much as I could, knees cold and stiff from the ground. B’s given name had enough letters and sounds that it was more trouble than it was worth to say. By the time you got to the end of calling it, the whole roof could’ve caved. I hadn’t ever had trouble with him or anybody sneaking in matches—the fellows here stuck to the rules. I couldn’t think what had got into the boy.

  “Say anything to him?” I asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Where’s he got ’em?”

  “Pants cuff.”

  “Get on back then,” I said. “I’ll go see about it.”

  Red nodded and turned around and started making his way back to the deeper room they was in. I took off behind him, stooping into the same hunched-back walk he’d started. Some of the Birmingham mines had men to check miners for matches before they set one foot down the shaft. Every man among us smoked, and every man missed his cigarettes belowground, but trying to sneak a smoke was plain foolish. Plenty did it anyway, especially if the air was thick with smoke after a blast—that was the time to work in your cigarette. But it was still stupid, particularly because some fool would usually sneak off somewhere, and you didn’t need to be heading off to some nook of the shaft and striking a match. Some of the smaller mines weren’t so strict, but Galloway had too much money invested in the whole operation to have patience with a man’s weakness. If a man was caught with matches, he’d be fired that same day.

  B was working hard, at least. It took him a second to see me—he’d been moving over to give Red room to settle back in.

  “Need to talk to you, B,” I said. Red wasn’t looking at B, just staring straight at the coal he was aiming for.

  “Yessir?” B leaned on his shovel.

  I watched him for a few seconds and took my time. I couldn’t see his pants legs good without aiming my light straight at them. “You know about bringin’ matches down here,” I said.

  “Yessir.”

  He’d know Red snitched on him no matter what. I thought about saying I’d seen the matches myself, but that wouldn’t hold water. I’d followed right behind Red. But then again, Red was a grown man—I’d leave him to patch over any hurt feelings.

  “You got some matches in your cuff there?” I said, pointing.

  B didn’t answer.

  “I ain’t gone turn you in for that,” I said. “But I’ll cut you loose here and now if you lie to me.”

  “I do got some, Mr. Albert,” he said.

  “You stark ravin’ mad or just stupid?”

  He didn’t answer again, only looked down toward about my knees.

  “Pull ’em out,” I said.

  He reached down, hiked up his pants leg, and fished out a pack of matches from between the stitches of the cuff.

  “Hand ’em here.” He did, not ever getting his eyes up to my shoulder, much less my face. I couldn’t figure him. I’d known him for a couple of years, and he’d never taken a step wrong at work. Sure, I’d hardly said five words to him apart from “good mornin’” and “afternoon to you” and “I’d move on down a ways,” but this kind of stupid was hard to hide.
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  “What got into you, B?” Nothing. “Ain’t gone hurt none to answer me.”

  Wasn’t no easy thing to have a dead-serious conversation hunched over halfway with lights stuck on your head glaring at each other. We couldn’t look each other in the eye, so aiming a stern look at him didn’t do me no good.

  “B?”

  “Plumb forgot,” he said finally.

  “Forgot you had matches?”

  “Yessir. I went straight home without changin’ yesterday. Wanted to try and catch me a rabbit or squirrel or somethin’ before dark. I jus’ stuck ’em in there soon as I got home. I swear I wasn’t intendin’ to smoke. Don’t even have a cigarette.”

  “You sayin’ you didn’t recollect those matches one time between gettin’ out of bed and when I walked over here?”

  “No sir.”

  Well. Didn’t know what to say to that. I knew he might be lying straight to my face. And as for not carrying smokes, paper to roll and a little pouch of tobacco could be anywhere on him. It put me in a mind to check his other pants cuff. But the thing was he had four kids hisself, none much more than knee-high, and he’d been lucky to get this work. If I pulled him off my team or told the supervisor, he’d have nothing. No land, so no food. Never find more work with half the town already heading up to West Virginia and Kentucky trying to find something, anything, and still not making enough to send something home.

  “You hear about what happened over at Sipsey?” I asked finally, and it caught him off guard enough that he looked right in my face, blinding me for that second before he moved his head.