The Well and The Mine Page 17

  “Sipsey?”

  “A fellow over there a few years back got to one of the back rooms and snuck off by hisself for just a few puffs, nobody else around. He lit up, least they figure that’s what happened, and the match caught carbonic acid and blew him clean out of his boots. Couldn’t even recognize him. The room next to him caught fire, too, burned up a couple of other fellows. Nothin’ but cinders. Three families left with no man. You ever heard that told?”

  “I don’t recall it.”

  “Just want to be sure you understood there bein’ the rule is all.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’m gone take these,” I said, holding up the matches. “Nothin’s gone come of it. But if I ever get wind of this again, I’ll have you leave that second, not even give you time to get your things. You understand?”

  “Yessir.” He put a lot of effort into his nodding. “Honest about it bein’ an accident.”

  I left the two of them shoveling. Red never did say a word while I was in earshot. I walked back to the supervisor’s office near the elevator. Just a chair and a desk in there, with the door next to the board where we hung our tags when we went on shift. I knocked to get his attention, and he waved me in.

  “Found these,” I said, and tossed the matches on his desk. His one giant eyebrow raised up on his forehead.

  “See who had ’em?” he asked.

  “Just found ’em. I didn’t want nobody to pick them up.”

  He let that go. I’d been in that supervisor’s office a couple times myself in smaller mines. I’d done about everything but dynamite. Started as a boy sorting the coal from the slate for the tipple. I knew my way around the pit mules by the time I quit grammar school for good—poor blind creatures that must’ve thought they were born and raised in hell. We didn’t use them no more once the electric cars came around, with the chains hauling the cars up to the top. I’d run the cutting machine, which was good money, but you had to get hold of the machine first. I was a second-shift tipple boss for quite a while at Moss and McCormick. Galloway had the tipple at the surface, but we also had the new chute on the Frisco line, right off 78, that we only got in ’29. The fancy-looking wood and concrete outsides covered up more chutes and belts than I’d ever seen.

  When I stopped for lunch I swung by Jonah’s room and saw he was still eating. So I nodded and walked over. Took a swig of water before I sat down.

  “Not too bad today,” Jonah said.

  “Passable.”

  The trick was to not hold your sandwich but one place. I once saw a man waste a few sips of water trying to wash his hands off, and he never did live it down. Might as well have worn a dress. I unwrapped my biscuits, saw the hunks of onion in the bottom, and two hard-boiled eggs. With just a thumb and one finger, I slid a piece of onion in the biscuit (Leta’d already cut it open) and picked up the sandwich. Finished it off in three bites, then started on the next one.

  Jonah and I squatted a few feet apart, resting on the balls of our feet. You didn’t want to break too long. Sitting down just made it harder to get up.

  “Ham’d be mighty good,” Jonah said, looking from his biscuit to mine. I nodded, smiled partly. Mentioning who had meat and who didn’t could be a touchy subject with some of the men, but we knew each other’s buckets as well as we knew our own.

  “Ain’t forgotten about payin’ you back,” he said. “Comin’ straight out of my paycheck first thing.”

  “I ain’t even thought about it,” I said. I had, of course—dollars weren’t so common that I didn’t miss two. But I wasn’t worried about getting it back. I really wanted to talk to him some more about how he imagined the woman with the baby. I found myself needing to hear him say more. Even stranger, I’d like to have asked him if his oldest daughter was seeing boys yet. See what he thought about handling the boys calling. I didn’t want to interrupt his eating, though, and nobody hardly talked while we worked. Distracting.

  Jonah made a surprised sound, and I looked up, my mouth full.

  “Baked apple,” he said, and held it up. The juice was running down his fingers, and I could smell it. My biscuits weren’t quite as tasty then.

  I tossed the last bit—the one with black fingerprints—to a mine rat skulking against the wall. They always came out at lunchtime. Saw one riding on the edge of a car one time, resting against a pile of coal, watching us all like we was scenery from a train window. Handy animals, even if they were filthy. Couldn’t blame ’em. And they paid you back their snack. When they got to moving, you knew there was trouble. Those rats could feel the shifting and shaking of the shafts sooner than we could. When they started running, so did we. And they got a full lunch of everybody’s black-stained last bite. I didn’t hold to superstition, but there wasn’t no need to spit on common knowledge. It kept you alive. Mind the rats. Steer clear of any mine where a woman had been. Mind your flame. A lamp would flicker out if you hit a pocket of dead air, and you best back out fast, keeping low to the ground, if you didn’t want to be just as dead.

  Tess MAMA HAD A WAY OF MASHING UP BUTTER AND SUGAR in the sweet potatoes that made your toes curl. The potatoes were still steaming, and the sweet butter juice would run out on your plate.

  “These are good, Mama,” I said. “Real good.”

  Everybody nodded and um-hmed. “Can I have another?” asked Jack.

  Mama got up and pulled him another out of the warmer. Sweet potatoes weren’t hard to come by.

  “I could eat these every day,” I said. I wanted to make myself clear.

  “They’re as good as a pie,” said Virgie, and Mama looked down like she always did when we complimented her too much.

  “Sure are,” said Papa. “I been thinkin’ about baked apples, Leta-ree. Think we might could have some sometime?”

  And we all knew we’d be having apples the next day.

  7 Telling Stories

  Jack POP ALWAYS DID LOVE JOHN LEWIS. FOR MOST OF THE miners, he fell somewhere between Jesus and Roosevelt. And The Great Man came to Birmingham in 1933, drumming up support for the UMW after Roosevelt had given it a second wind.

  In nineteen hundred and thirty-three

  When Mr. Roosevelt took his seat,

  He said to President John L. Lewis,

  In union we must be.

  Hooray! Hooray!

  For the union we must stan’

  It’s the only organization

  Protects the laborin’ man.

  That was the song they’d sing late that year after the eight-hour day and five-day week became law and after scrip was banned.

  Pop drove to see Mr. Lewis that day in Birmingham. I was supposed to go with him, to get a sense of the power of Lewis and his ideas, but I’d come down with some flu or something, hardly able to get out of bed without my knees buckling.

  Pop was gone all day, and by the time the sun started dipping behind the trees, I was feeling clearheaded enough to get impatient. To wonder what I’d missed. I lay there listening for his car, and, finally, just as Mama was turning the lights on, I could hear him coming up the road. He came straight to my bed—probably kissed Mama first, but I didn’t see that—and he started telling about the speech before he even had his hat off his head.

  I could see Lewis, a big man with bushy eyebrows that threatened to take over his whole face. He towered over the crowd, talking to them like he was some Old Testament prophet. Pop built up the suspense of it all, standing over my bed, shaking his fist in the air, his voice deep and rumbling and not his voice at all. Then, he said, in the middle of Lewis’s speech about the power of the masses, a man in the front row threw a raw egg that smashed against Lewis’s temple, running down his face. Mr. Lewis hardly paused, only wiped off the egg with one huge hand and continued with his speech. When he finished his remarks, with the applause still full throttle, he walked off the stage and punched the egg thrower in the face.

  When Pop stopped laughing, he wiped his eyes and reminded me that I should always turn the other cheek.
He swiped at his face and added, “Mostly.”

  I’d get Pop to retell that story year after year, to any new boy that I happened to bring home for supper or any new girl who I happened to be talking to at church. And eventually I would have sworn I had been in that crowd: I had watched that egg sail through the air. I had heard the wet smack it made against Mr. Lewis’s forehead. I had cheered and clapped until my hands hurt when Mr. Lewis decked that drunken egg thrower. (I’d surely gotten just a whiff of whiskey even from where I was standing.)

  I’d listened to Pop good enough to make his story mine.

  Albert I KNEW IT WAS LIKELY THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW THE woman had even had a baby. Nobody’d mentioned any missing baby; for a couple of months, everybody’d been checking their neighbors’ kids—with all sorts of excuses handy—to be sure they were all accounted for. There was talk about it being some young girl still in school wanting to keep the baby a secret, even though Tess would tell anybody who’d listen that the woman was too tall and broad to have been some young thing. Wasn’t the sort of talk I wanted to listen to. And it wasn’t the kind I could forget. It rattled around in my head without ever shaking loose.

  I waited on the porch for Virgie to come home from the basketball game.

  “You’re back in one piece,” I said.

  “Yessir.”

  “Did you win?” Guin wasn’t never as good as Carbon Hill.

  “We did.”

  “By how much?”

  She screwed up her face, looking closer to four than fourteen. “I don’t know.”

  I wanted to ask her what she thought of that Olsen boy, whether he had tried to hold her hand, whether he had stared at her hair.

  “I been thinkin’, Virgie, about you goin’ to the game with the what’s-his-name Olsen. This one time with all you girls together was alright for a special occasion, but I don’t want you seein’ boys like that again. Not for a while longer,” I said.

  “Alright,” she said, sounding happier than I expected. She nearly turned to walk away, then stopped and cocked her head. “Why not, Papa?”

  “You’re too young yet. No need to be runnin’ around with boys.”

  She still didn’t look upset, running her fingers through her hair and tucking it under like she always did. “Yessir.”

  “So if any other boy asks you, you just tell him not until you’re in high school.”

  “But he didn’t really ask me proper, Papa. I told you that. It was just a group of us, remember? Ella and Lois talked to him, not me.”

  I did know all that. I’d given her permission. I was just regretting it.

  “I know what it was,” I said. “And I don’t want you doing it again.”

  “But you said…”

  “I know what I said. I’m sayin’ somethin’ different now.”

  “We were only…”

  “I didn’t figure you to back talk,” I said.

  “No, Papa, but…”

  “Listen to me!” I yelled, and I slammed my open hand against the wall hard enough to make the floors shake. Virgie jumped, and I heard Leta call my name in the bedroom. I felt all the temper run off me and pool around my feet. Never raised my voice to Virgie—never even spanked her. She never needed it.

  “I don’t want to hear any more. I know about boys, Virgie,” I said. My face was turning red, but it was too dark for her to tell. This was Leta’s place, not mine, but I’d speak my mind enough for her to understand. “Not one of ’em’s good enough for you.”

  “I don’t want one, Papa,” she said, and I realized she was pink, too. A fine pair we were. “I don’t like Tom or anyone special. I just enjoy being with my friends. And they go with boys. So to do things with them, it’d be nice to have an even number.”

  “I don’t want you gettin’ mixed up with some fellow at your age.”

  She looked a little afraid of me, but she answered anyway, quiet and calm. “I won’t. I promise. We’re only havin’ fun, Papa. All of us.”

  Leta turned to me, her hair falling on my arm cool and smooth, when I lay down a few minutes later. I knew my yelling and slamming walls would have woken her. But she didn’t say anything about that. “Don’t worry for nothin’,” she said. “That’s an old soul inside that young body. She ain’t gone do nothin’ foolish.”

  I sighed and bent my leg so that it touched hers. Couldn’t sleep. All wound up.

  “And she don’t care for any of them anyway,” she whispered. “Pickiest girl I ever seen.”

  “Don’t want her goin’ with that boy. She’s too young.”

  “Alright,” she said. “Sets fine with me.”

  I thought she was drifting off, but she spoke again, her voice sleepy and thoughtful.

  “I wonder if she had a nice time,” she said.

  I hadn’t asked.

  Virgie I CALLED FOR AUNT MERILYN TWICE BEFORE I FINALLY pushed open the back door. I caught the screen door with my elbow so it wouldn’t slam, then looked around the kitchen and called her name once more before I stepped all the way in.

  “You in here, Aunt Merilyn? It’s Virgie.”

  No answer. The butter churn sat in the middle of the kitchen, a chair beside it. I could smell the cream. Aunt Merilyn’s blue-flowered dishes were stacked in the basin, bits of eggs on them. I could see the unmade beds in the back, sort of embarrassing, all personal with their sheets hanging out. Aunt Merilyn wasn’t much for housekeeping. She’d clean when she had the time, but she’d gladly set it aside to chat, have a glass of tea, run to the post office. She went there most every day and stayed nearly an hour. Mama said if it weren’t for women congregating at the post office, we’d find Aunt Merilyn down at the henhouse, desperate for clucking.

  Mama had a strict schedule with her work, each thing done or put away as soon as it had served its purpose. Dishes done soon as we finished eating. Beds made soon as we finished sleeping. And nobody sat back down on her beds after she’d made them. When women came by, she might wipe her hands on her apron and talk for a minute, but if they wanted to visit for any length of time, they best trot along after her while she folded clothes or swept the floors. Her sisters all teased her for having a cleaning sickness.

  I had closed the door behind me and got back to the road when I saw Aunt Merilyn ahead. Small and quick like Mama, she barely kicked up any dust as she walked. Her hair, dark and chin-length, shifted and bounced; her arms swung, a stack a letters in one hand. She was all movement—backward, forward, side to side, every direction appealing to her.

  She waved when she saw me, both hands flapping happily, letters and all. “Virgie, dear! Get on back to the house and I’ll feed you some tea cakes.”

  I turned myself around, climbed back up the steps, and waited on the porch for her. I realized I hadn’t seen any of my cousins inside, and they weren’t with her. She had two girls, Naomi and Emmaline, both pretty and popular. Big talkers, both of them.

  “’Afternoon, Aunt Merilyn. Where is everybody?”

  She shrugged, hugging my neck before she pushed open the door. “Out and about. Girls went with me to the post office, then wanted to run around town by themselves. Lord knows where the boys are. Off snatchin’ the legs off bugs or throwin’ each other in the creek or some such. Your uncle’s at the store.”

  Uncle Bill’s store seemed like no work at all to me. Instead of darkness and dirt, he spent the day surrounded by fabrics and trinkets and sweets. I’d never even seen him sweat.

  We stepped into the kitchen, and Aunt Merilyn didn’t seem at all embarrassed by the mess. She let out a little “hmph” that sounded more pleased than frustrated as she set down her letters and glanced over at the sink full of dishes. The next second she started opening cupboards, pulling out an empty saucer from one shelf and a towel-covered plate from another.

  I could have found my way around her kitchen as easy as our own. Mama and Aunt Merilyn saw each other nearly every day and Papa and Uncle Bill got along like peas in a pod. Uncle Bill had a great, be
llowing voice that could shake the walls when he sang, and their youngest daughter loved to play the piano. They were the only people I knew with a piano. Sometimes Tess and I would come over after supper—sometimes all of us would come—and listen to Emmaline playing while Uncle Bill sang. They didn’t even have a radio.

  “I been meanin’ to talk to you for weeks now,” Aunt Merilyn said. “Your mama told me you and Tess went by to see Lola.”

  “We did,” I said. “We didn’t stay long.” She slid the plate of cookies in front of me, and I picked one that was almost a perfect circle, just barely brown around the edges. Then I realized something strange. “How come Mama to know that?”

  “Lola came by the house. Brought back y’all’s basket. Your mama didn’t tell you?”

  “No.” She hadn’t said a word. “When did she come by?”

  “Lord, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Last week, I reckon.” She shook her head like there was a bee on it. “But you’re gettin’ me off track. You ever been to her place before?”

  “No, ma’am.” I looked over at the not-quite butter. “You want me to churn that for you?”

  “It’ll keep,” she said.

  “Or I s’pose you want to be startin’ supper…” Mama’d probably be starting ours, and I’d rather have been elbow-deep in cornmeal than talk to Aunt Merilyn about Lola Lowe.

  “It’ll keep,” she repeated. “Virgie, why in the world did you go over there? And why take Tess with you?”

  I hesitated. I could have said we were being neighborly. I could have told her we knew the Lowe girls from school and wanted to visit.

  “Virgie?” she prompted.

  “We thought her baby might be the one missing.”

  She didn’t look too surprised at that, just reached for a tea cake. Her other hand stayed still, almost touching her chin; she had a habit of relaxing her hand and curling her fingers toward her in a way that seemed like a fan. (I thought it looked elegant, and I practiced it at home in front of the mirror.) She took a nibble of the cookie, then held it as she talked.