The Well and The Mine Page 3

  Albert walked in while I was kneading the biscuit dough, flour up to my elbows, fingers grasping and pressing. Flip, punch, mash mash. Flip, punch, mash mash.

  “Never understand how you do that in the dark,” he said from just behind me. He tucked a stray hair behind my ear.

  “Same way you know your way round Number eleven.” I nodded toward the fire. “And it ain’t dark.”

  I knew without looking that he’d picked up the girls’ pitcher where I’d left it on the table, planning on filling their washbowl himself, and I caught his arm when he stepped toward the porch. “Take it from the reservoir,” I said, pointing him toward the stove.

  He looked puzzled, then nodded and walked over to the side compartment of the stove where the water heated. It couldn’t have been too hot yet, but I felt better for making the effort.

  “Ain’t no need to heat the water,” he said. “It ain’t gone bad.” But I only handed him a dipper, and he went on. By the time he came back from the bedroom, the coffee on the stove was boiling. I pulled his coffee cup from the cabinet and poured over the sink, with the heat from the cup warming my fingers as the brew rose to the top. Just a ground or two floating. Black as night, so hard looking it didn’t seem right that a spoon could move through it.

  “Must taste like coal,” I said under my breath, stopping up the pot’s spout with a bit of cloth and setting it back on the stove to keep warm.

  “Coffee?” He took a sip, smiled, and closed his eyes as he leaned back. “No, ma’am. Tastes like daylight.”

  Since I was twelve, I could make biscuits in five minutes flat. My oldest sister taught me, and it took me a while to get the feel of it. You feel a good dough in the tips of your fingers—when you need to add more milk, when to throw in more flour. It’s gotta be soft like a child’s cheek, but not so dry it’ll crack. I never even looked as I poured in flour and milk at the same time, tossed in a pinch of baking soda, salt, cut in the lard.

  I threw the biscuit circles in the iron skillet and set ’em in the door of the stove. Ten minutes. Lay a couple of slices of ham in another skillet—the Hudsons had brought us a part of their pig. Not much left, but enough for everybody to have some to go with their biscuits. A jar of pear preserves on the table, slab of fresh-made butter. The children didn’t smear it on their bread like they used to before they started churning it, so it lasted longer. From the back of the cupboard, I took a jar of honey. Albert saw it, and his eyes, blue like robins’ eggs, lit up.

  “Thought we were out.”

  “Just told them that.” Honey was too precious to have it dripping on them from head to toe after one piece of toast. Albert loved it.

  We sat there, not touching, as he sipped his coffee. “I heard Henry Harken’s boy is sweet on Virgie.”

  “Ain’t they all?” he answered me. “You’d swear that girl was walkin’ an inch off the ground. Pretty as a picture.”

  We didn’t ever mention Virgie being beautiful, partly because we didn’t want Tess to feel like she was any less beautiful, and partly because we didn’t want Virgie getting a swelled head. Sometimes it was hard to ignore, though, especially since she was getting older. I’d often look over to tell her to fetch something for me, and she’d just take my breath away, like fireworks or fresh snow. She never fit in a town where everything was covered in a layer of black dust.

  “You’re gone have to beat the boys off with a stick soon,” I said.

  “Likely.”

  I looked at Albert, with his lovely eyes, his lined face pale from lack of sunlight, his jaw still crooked where it had been shattered. I looked at my own hands, always cracked and dry from doing dishes, and thought of my tired face, leathery from too much sun.

  “How’d we make her?” I asked, half to myself.

  “Looks just like you did,” he answered immediately, talking around his cup. “Ain’t no surprise.”

  I pointed at his right eye, gone weak from a stray rock in a cave-in. It looked normal, but he saw less and less out of it each year. “You done lost your memory, well as your sight.” I looked to check for the girls, then kissed him quickly on the forehead. He smiled.

  I took out the biscuits, forking two on his plate. He smashed the butter into a pool of honey as it streamed down on his dish. He scooped a forkful of the golden stuff on top of a biscuit half as I put out plates for the children and slid the biscuits onto a plate in the middle of the table. I covered them with a towel to keep them warm.

  “Not gone eat with me?” he asked.

  “I’ll eat with them,” I said.

  The rooster crowed, and Albert gobbled down his second biscuit, using the sorghum syrup on it instead of the honey. He wanted to stretch that honey out for another few weeks. I took his plate from him, waited for him to drain his coffee, and set the dishes in the basin. He pecked my cheek, looking out the window behind me at the sky. “Not gone have time to do the milkin’ today, Leta-ree. Promise I’ll make it out in time tomorrow.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “Lord knows I’m down there with the rest of the animals anyway.” He did the milking most mornings, knowing that I didn’t enjoy it. Not many men did the milking before they headed to the mines.

  I could hear the girls stirring, and they’d wake Jack so I wouldn’t have to. That boy could sleep through a cyclone, even if he was swirling around in it. I could do the milking and feeding and get the eggs before the children left for school.

  Before I got out the door, Virgie called to me, sitting on the floor and pulling on her shoes with the curling rags still sticking out of her head. “Want me to get the eggs, Mama?”

  “You eat your breakfast and get your brother ready. We’ll see about them eggs after that’s all done.” I knew I’d have time to gather them before they finished up.

  She looked at me sideways. “You eat yours with Papa?”

  “I had all I wanted.”

  I headed out to the cow. She’d be suffering if I didn’t get to her before proper sunrise. The sky was already touched with pink, but I stopped at the chickens to throw them a handful of feed. Moses whipped her head around to greet me, rumbling deep in her throat. That signaled a bad mood, and I gave a wide berth as I grabbed the stool and approached her from the side. After a little cooing and stroking, she seemed calmer. I rocked forward on the stool, unevenly balanced on its three legs so you could flip backward if the cow was more ornery than you thought. She stayed still, and I pulled the pail under her udders. She was heavy with milk, and I welcomed the chore, the peace and routine of it. There’s a rhythm to good milking, like stitching at the Singer. Your fingers settle in to do the work, and your mind purely floats away.

  When Virgie was seven and Tess just a toddler, I’d been run to death trying to take care of the two of them, plus I was getting rounder and rounder every day with Jack. Tess had the croup, and I had to go feed the animals. So I had Virgie sit in the rocking chair pulled right up close to the fire, and I told her to hold Tess and not to move. I said, “She can’t get cold, now. She’s got to stay warm, so you don’t move from this fire. Don’t you move a bit.”

  By the time I came back, she’d baked them both good. Faces red as a sunburn. Tears in Virgie’s eyes, and when I started to fuss at her, she said, “You told me not to let her get cold, Mama. You told me not to move.”

  It’s funny—you’d think with that porcelain doll face, she’d be a selfish one. But Virgie’d lay down on a fire-ant hill if it’d help us, especially the younger ones. Ever since Tess was born, she’s been like that. Like one look at those mewling little faces woke something in her that tied her to them for good.

  Albert I CRANKED UP THE MODEL T, SLID ONTO THAT ALMOST-LEATHER seat, threw my coveralls and boots and cap on the floor. Every morning I made the drive to work I was glad for it. I watched my parents scratch and claw in the dirt in a little shack on land the Tennessee Company owned and promised myself and God it’d never be me, with my family and my home at the mercy of the same grabbing hand
s that decided my paycheck. To be a man, you need your own home, not company-owned land. Need your own land for crops and a few animals so strike or no, you’ve got some sureness of food. Built the house with my own hands, and pulled in every favor I was owed from brothers and friends. Always wanted to add a second story, but never seemed to be any extra.

  I didn’t bother closing the window flaps unless it was raining—I liked the feel of the sunrise to hit me on my face. I just barely got to see a bit of pink in the sky before I headed down No. 11. Those drives to work, with the bounces from the ruts in the road, cool smell of the wet grass, and the taste of sorghum still on my tongue, was the best time I had to myself. And usually I’d give somebody a lift, so it wasn’t really to myself. Then again, I wasn’t friends with many big talkers. Wished it took me half an hour to get to the mine instead of fifteen minutes. I’d drive the back way, keeping out of town and its waking-up sounds, just rolling through the almost-dark, trees on either side. I didn’t care much for town at all, to be honest, not like my girls, who were always wanting to go for penny candy or get a soda for a treat. Too much all crowded together for my taste.

  Jonah was walking by the side of the road not a quarter mile from the site, so I stomped the brake and pulled over.

  “Ride on in with me,” I yelled as he turned around.

  “’Preciate it.” He climbed in, cap in his hand, already wearing his coveralls. The colored part of town was fairly near the mines, maybe a half-hour walk. “Doin’ alright?” he asked.

  “Fair.”

  “Heard about that baby there in y’all’s well. Family takin’ it hard?”

  “Alright, I s’pose.”

  Jonah’s father worked the mines and was still going down below when I started with Galloway Coal. Might say the father got pushed into the line of work—learned it in prison. Convict lease. Six years for vagrancy, and he spent that six years treated worse than a pit mule. Jonah’s papa served his time and made it out alright, but mining paid better than farm work, which was the only other work about any colored man could get. So he left off the prison uniform and headed back down. Union man. Jonah growed up in Dora, in what folks there started calling Uniontown. Negro strikers all of ’em, who got pitched off company housing during the strike of 1920 and cobbled together shacks out of trash, boards, rotten timber, whatever they could find. Said they’d never again live in a house they could get throwed out of. And even after the strike was over and they headed back to the mines, they never did go back to company housing. Jonah said they’d stuff paper in the cracks when it rained, watch the stars out of the holes in the roof when it was clear.

  Me and him rode on in, hearing the mine—smelling it, too—before we saw it spring up around a curve in the road. The gob pile, just a wide, long hill of the trash sorted out of the coal, gave off a heavy sulfur smell that hung low in the air. The clang of the cars bumping into each other, the clatter of the conveyor belts, yells from men hollering to one another. All the aboveground workings were clear as a bell, bared to the sunshine and anyone who happened to walk by. The tipple stood above it all, part wood, part machine, the wood supports of it seeming too tricky—like a spiderweb from a distance—to be so solid. The sorters and washers worked on the coal when it went past them on the rumbling belts, the good coal rising higher to the top of the tipple, where it got dumped into storage. Finally it’d be loaded into the coal cars to make its way down to the depot. Nothing but dust and smoke and wood and metal, nothing green or growing anywhere in sight. Nothing alive but men. And them just another part of the big machine of it all.

  All the day shift was filing in, with just a few of the men looking at me funny on account of Jonah being in my car. I reckoned it didn’t make no difference if I offered a man a ride to work as I was passing him on the road. It would have been different if I’d gone by his house and picked him up. I’d only been to Jonah’s house once, when his first child died one night in his crib. Only time I’d ever been through those Negro houses, just boards slapped together. It was a shame Jonah had to live like that—he was a good man, a hard worker, good to his family. Had my kids call him Mr. Benton, not by his first name like some boy who ain’t never shaved a beard.

  Jonah and me didn’t say a word climbing out of the car. He nodded and went on, and I hung my legs out the door while I pulled on my coveralls. Cracked my back as I stood up, trying to loosen up my spine.

  I pulled my cap off the seat and unhooked the lamp. Spit in the top chamber a few times, unhooked the bottle of carbide from my belt, and poured a bit in the bottom. The oil and spit would come together and make the gas that reflected off the face. The old kerosene lamps wobbled this way and that like a drunkard. A carbide flame was a steady thing.

  Bosses’d have you believe you were part of something special, toting the world on your shoulders at Galloway Mine No. 11, with four hundred men going into its belly every day and prying out Galloway Lump. One of the biggest coal basins in the world here in Carbon Hill, they said. Always heard tell that long after Pennsylvania and Virginia mines had been picked clean, Alabama would supply the world. Was hard to conjure the future by the light coming off my cap.

  Tess COAL WAS SCATTERED AROUND THE GROUND LIKE BEETLES, all shiny black shells. My hair was that color, not corn-silk yellow like Virgie’s or silver like Papa’s or dirt-road-colored like Mama’s. Coal colored.

  But there was no coal rock in our yard, only down past the chickens. They were the start of the animals, who were all in a line down the hill—chickens then Moses then Horse then smelly pigs. Then outhouse. And then creek. Our part of outside was as neat and tidy as inside the house: The yard was swept hard and smooth, a brown, still lake with rosebush islands. It wasn’t hardly ever dusty because Mama swept it every day. It shined like peanut butter when it rained.

  We’d got home from school, and Virgie’d gone straight to see if Mama needed anything. I hugged Mama then headed right to the warmer over the stove, cracking open its door to see what Mama left for us. Biscuits, still soft and warm. Mama’d always make a few too many at breakfast or lunch; they made for the best eating after school, once you ripped one apart and spread pear preserves inside. I was licking my fingers by the time I headed to the outhouse, walking a wide path around Moses, who was always sharpening her hooves to stomp me or gritting her teeth into points to snap at me. Mama nor Papa neither one would listen to me, but that cow was full of hate and vinegar. Virgie and me both knew it. Once maybe she was a good cow, pure white like her milk, but then some evil spirit came on her, eating her up inside and turning her soul black as sin. That’s when the black splotches started spreading over her hide. That cow always looked like she’d like to tear me to bits, even though without me, she wouldn’t have had a name.

  I didn’t like the outhouse. You had to hold your breath, and it was dark and my bottom was bony and might could’ve fit through the hole, I thought. (It was a two-seater, but both the holes were adult size.) Before I pulled the door open, I took a deep breath, then jumped in and hiked down my bloomers just as fast as I could, counting the whole time. I could only hold my breath up to sixty-three.

  Usually by forty, I’d finished my business, pulled out the bit of Sears Roebuck catalog I’d carried down in my pocket, and got out with a good ten seconds to go. If I could, I held my breath till I was back up by the horse instead of gulping air by the pigs.

  I was done by thirty—Aunt Celia was coming, and I didn’t want to miss seeing her spit—and I leaned down for my bloomers. But right on the seat next to me was a fat spider—not a daddy long legs or a little grass spider, but something foreign. It wasn’t like nothing I’d ever seen before, all legs and squirming body the size of a finger. I jumped up and thumped it hard, and down it went, disappearing down the hole. It made me scream, and once I started, I couldn’t seem to stop. I hollered and hollered, took a gulp of air, and hollered again.

  Virgie MR. DOBSON SHOWED UP AT THE DOOR, SACK OF PEARS in one hand, his straw hat in the o
ther. He nodded at me, just a blink with his whole head.

  “Thought I’d bring your ma some pears.”

  “I’ll get her, sir.”

  Mr. Dobson stood still, like he wasn’t even breathing, except for his right foot tapping. He’d do that until Mama got to the door. He brought pears about once a week, and I always paid attention to that foot. He looked somewhere over my head, at some spot on the wall that wasn’t at all interesting, and I didn’t feel it was right to look him in the eyes when he was doing such a good job of avoiding mine. So he watched the wall and I watched his foot and it was a few seconds before I remembered I needed to run get Mama.

  She hated for us to holler for each other in the house like we were calling dogs.

  The Dobsons didn’t have much besides their three pear trees. Mama would give him a basketful of vegetables and probably some cornmeal to take back with him. She always acted too happy about those pears, her smile wide and bright, and I knew she hoped the cheery, cheery pleasure in her voice—which made her sound like someone who wasn’t my mama at all—could distract Mr. Dobson from thinking about how he got a basket a lot fuller than the one he brought.

  Mama was on her hands and knees in front of a bucket of sudsy water, and she said she’d just rinse off her hands and be right out. I passed that along to Mr. Dobson, whose foot was still beating a rhythm on the porch. He thanked me, then jerked his head toward the creek.

  “Might be somethin’ wrong with Tess—I hear her yellin’.”

  By the time Mama came through the doorway, I was headed down the hill, wondering what had happened to Tess. She always hated the outhouse. When she was little, she used to sneak and go in the bushes instead until Mama told her it wasn’t ladylike.