The Evening Hour (4 page)

“Rebecca, you heard anything from Ricky?” his grandmother asked.

She said she'd been able to talk to him the other day. “He says he's fine.” But her eyes flickered with uncertainty.

Cole thought his younger cousin was crazy to sign up for the army, especially when he knew he'd just be shipped over to Iraq or Afghanistan. His grandmother said he was patriotic; Kay said it was his only way out. There's got to be other ways, Cole had argued, but then couldn't come up with any.

“Oh, I worry,” his grandmother said. “I pray for him every day.”

Naomi got up for a glass of water, and Cole reminded her to get it from the plastic jug on the counter. The water that came out of the faucet was sometimes black, sometimes orange. They didn't drink it, but they bathed with it. “We're likely all to be poisoned,” his grandmother said.

This got Naomi started on why she should sell the land, and Rebecca asked her if she'd given any more thought to moving in with her and Larry.

Cole looked up, caught eyes with his grandmother.

“I don't want to go anywhere yet,” she said.

Rebecca and Naomi argued with her, explaining why their father needed to go into a nursing home, why she shouldn't be living here. “Mama, we live too far away to drive over here whenever he acts up or whenever something goes wrong,” Naomi said.

“I'll do it,” Cole said. “I help, don't I, Grandma?”

“Yes.” She added, “But I wish you'd come over here more.” She sounded tired. “Your granddaddy would like that. You could read scripture to him. On Sundays, since you don't go to church—”

“You know I usually work—”

“You could come over here instead of that running around you do.”

A hotness sprang to Cole's cheeks like he'd been slapped. He looked at his grandmother, and she didn't blink. He felt shaken, even betrayed. Everyone was quiet. Then Naomi changed the subject to her kids, and Rebecca joined in, trying to smooth things over. His grandmother looked away, and then she looked at him again.

“Would you hand me the salt?”

He shouldn't have come over. Maybe it was her daughters pestering her that caused her to snap at him. She looked worn down. Even her dress was frayed at the neckline. Cole wished his aunts would leave her alone. He handed her the salt shaker, then reached over to help his grandfather, who was having trouble keeping his sandwich together. He was making a mess of his plate. Cole peeled the sliced ham off the bread, and cut it up into small pieces for him.

As he was trying to think of something else to say, something that would make his grandmother happy and make the aunts back off, the warning siren sounded.

“Oh, Lord,” his grandmother said.

A moment later, a blast from the mountain ripped through the silence like the reports of a million rifles. Bigger than that. Bombs. Cole dropped his butter knife. The house vibrated, windows rattled. The water glasses shivered, and Aunt Rebecca let out a shriek. Then the sound rolled on down the valley, its echo calling back to them, taunting.

Nobody said anything at first. They all had to catch their breath. Straighten the plates. Swallow hard. Wait and make sure it was over. Nervously, Cole turned his eyes to his grandfather. They were all looking at him, and he glared at them like he was about to hand down a judgment from God. Gunky potato salad all over his face. They waited. He picked up another slice of cheese.

“See, this is what we're talking about, Mama,” Rebecca spoke up. “I don't know how you and Cole stand it. My nerves are rattled to pieces.”

His grandmother left the table and returned with her notebook. “Look at this,” she said, flipping the pages.

“You should sue,” Kay said.

His grandmother had already dragged Cole with her to an office in Charleston, where a lawyer, a woman, was friendly and sympathetic, and offered to represent them. But they couldn't afford it; they'd need to pay for engineers and surveyors and who knew what else. Even if they could afford it, the case would be tied up for years, and would probably be settled out of court, the land already ruined.

“No, you shouldn't sue. Mama, you've got to let go,” Rebecca said. “You've got grandsons and son-in-laws that work for Heritage. You can't be messing with their jobs.”

“She's right,” Naomi agreed. “I just heard where Tom Wallace got fired from Heritage. Now why do you think? Because his cousin is Janey Burfield, and she's been trying to sue and cause a ruckus.” She shook her head. “You best just think about moving.”

“That old Satan,” his grandfather suddenly cried. He slapped his hand on the table hard. His voice was loud, slow. “That old Satan.”

“Clyde?”

He pushed back his chair and stood and stumbled, and everyone jumped up as if to catch him. He waved them away, his hands batting at them like they were a swarm of gnats. Then he shuffled out of the kitchen, his wife behind him. Cole and Kay and his aunts looked at each other.

“Good Lord,” said Rebecca.

They followed them into the living room. His grandfather sat in the recliner, his grandmother next to him. Cole looked at them in their house that he knew so well and could not imagine them in any other place. As a little boy, he used to sit between them at the dinner table. It was always the three of them.

His grandmother whispered something in the old man's ear, and he held her hand and they looked up. Husband and wife, hands entwined like a twisted, deformed vine, staring at their children and grandchildren, and on their faces was the same look Cole saw on the folks at the home every day. They knew it, all old people did: they'd been abandoned and betrayed.

His grandmother's eyes filled with sudden tears. “I don't think he's gonna remember who any of us are much longer.”

“That won't happen,” Cole told her, but it would, he saw it all of the time at the nursing home.

Rebecca and Naomi went over to comfort her, and Kay tugged on Cole's arm.

“Come on.”

He followed her outside. The air tasted hot and thick and bitter. They sat on the steps and looked up toward the ridge, dust raining down and swirling in silver clouds. Cole's eyes burned and itched. He ran his finger through the sticky coal dust that clung to the house no matter how often his grandmother swept.

“I can't wait to get out of here.” Kay looked at him. “You just gonna stay here forever? Granddaddy being the way he is, the whole goddamn mountain falling on your head? Look at that shit. I can taste it. It's in my teeth.”

Cole thought about Charlotte asking him to leave with her.
There is another world out there.
She didn't really mean it.

“I don't know what I'll do,” he said.

“You ever seen the sludge dam?” she asked. “You ever go up to the mining site?”

“No. You can't get up there. Anyway, I don't want to see any of it.” He stared at the smoke coming from the mountain. “It's just the way it is. You live with it.”

“You don't have to.”

“Granddaddy never wanted to sell.”

“It's over now, Cole.”

He remembered the first time the coal men had come to the house. His grandfather had invited them in for coffee and pie, but before they could say a word, he started preaching, and they didn't know how to respond when he said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” The men had offered to help him relocate, far away from the coalfields, and he'd just laughed: “Why would I want to live on land that my people never walked on?”

Cole shook his head. “He'll never last if he goes in the nursing home.”

“He's not supposed to last forever.”

They each lit a cigarette, then Kay rested her head on his shoulder. “Cole, you ever wonder where your mom is?”

“No, not anymore. Why?”

“I don't know, I just wondered.” She hesitated. “When I was little, I used to wish I had a mom like that. It seemed cool, her being out there, traveling.”

“Better to have one that sticks around.”

Cole's mother was sixteen when she got pregnant and ran off. She came back only once. He was ten years old and she blew into town for a week and showered him with junky gifts. Sea monkeys, candy cigarettes, baseball cards, Shrinky Dinks, and cheap T-shirts that were too small, as if she'd picked them out for a four-year-old. But Cole didn't care. He stretched the shirts over his chest and arms, making them fit and wearing them until his grandfather threw them away.

“You ought to get out,” Kay said. “Like she did.”

“What do you expect me to do out there?”

“What you've been talking about.”

“What's that?”

“Be a nurse.”

“Shit.”

“Why not? Get away from all this. You could come up to college with me.”

“Don't you think I'm a little old?”

“This is something you want.”

He stood up and brushed off the seat of his jeans. He thought of his grandmother accusing him of running around. Did she really think that the money he gave her came from working at a nursing home?

“It's all talk,” he said. “I couldn't never get in.”

“You don't know.”

“Oh, yes I do know. I know.”

Cole walked over to the land where his aunts and uncles had once lived. The air was still heavy with dust. It smelled of chemicals. He coughed, spat. The aunts' houses used to be hidden from each other by towering oaks and hemlocks, but Heritage had burned the trees and demolished the houses, leaving behind a mess of upturned earth and monstrous bulldozer tracks with pools of black, brackish water collecting in the ruts. The gardens were torn out. The henhouse was gone too, so was the barn that had once housed the milk cow and goats. It was hard to remember the way the land used to look. A valley, a little stream. Gone, buried.

Most of the mining land had already been swindled from the people more than a hundred years ago, but the coal companies always wanted more. After Heritage pressured the widow Shirley Scott, who lived at the head of the holler, into selling, then it was easy enough to get rid of everyone else, either by buying them out or making their lives hell. The first thing they did was clear-cut the forests. Bulldoze the trees, burn them. Oaks, hickories, everything. Then they drilled giant holes into the earth and filled them with explosives, and after they blasted, they dumped the rocks and rubble into the valleys. One day, not long after Heritage got its first permit, Cole was driving to town, and as he crested a hill he looked over and saw the felled trees covering the hillside like graves and he knew then that what was coming was too big to stop.

He walked through the tall weeds over to the path that they'd always called Church Lane. A black slickness rose up in certain places where he stepped, and he went carefully as if the land was rigged with mines.
Wasteland
. The church was still standing, but barely. Last year a flash flood had rushed down from the barren hillside and smashed into it. Cole had helped his grandmother fill out FEMA forms, and they collected about half of what they needed, using the money for bills instead of rebuilding. Up behind the church was a little family cemetery on a half acre that the coal company wanted but would never get. Cole thought about the little cemeteries all over the mountains and hollows, protected by law from the coal companies. Maybe in the end it would be the dead that saved the land.

The church was once a sturdy, box-shaped building without stained glass or a fancy altar, nothing like the churches on TV, or the ones his aunts now went to. This was just a bare room with aisles big enough for the ladies to fall down into fits of passion. Until he was seventeen, Cole went to church every Sunday, and usually Monday and Wednesday nights as well. His grandfather had preached his last service two years ago. Cole was not there, but his grandmother told him that his granddaddy had grabbed the sides of the pulpit as if he was afraid of falling, and, confused, had asked, “Who are you?”

Cole pushed a pile of branches out of the way and walked through the vine-strangled doorway. The roof was partly caved in, the walls warped and stained yellow, the windows shattered. The church had been stripped of its pictures of the Last Supper and of Jesus on the cross. Even the mismatched folding chairs, which they had used instead of pews, were gone. Squirrels scurried along the rafters. He walked to the front, his boots crunching shards of glass and twigs. The pulpit was still in its place. Cole stood behind it and faced an invisible congregation.

When his grandfather preached, he often went on for hours. He talked more fire and brimstone than most Holiness preachers, and his strict, dour ways, combined with his quick temper, also set him apart from the more joyous types. Cole had once overheard a churchgoer describe his grandfather as Holiness with a strong dose of Baptist. He was the old-timey gaspy kind of preacher, sucking in and spouting out air, ending practically every line with an inflection. “It's a glorious day-ah for those who have felt the Holy Ghost-ah, I'm saying the Holy Ghost-ah.” On special occasions, snakes were kept next to the pulpit. Sometimes they were quiet; sometimes they rattled their cages. The scripture they followed was a simple verse:
They shall take up serpents
. Bites were rare, but his grandfather's wrist had been grazed, and Uncle Larry had lost a couple of fingertips. The rattlers would kill.

His grandfather never touched a snake unless he was anointed, which meant that God was moving through him. Then he could do anything. He would reach into the hissing, slithering pile as if in a trance and hold a snake above his head and shout. At first, the congregation would hush, a quivering silence falling over them, and then a collective rush of sound would follow—gasps, praises to God. Some would go forward and pass the serpents hand to hand. Cole had seen them draped around a person's neck like jewelry. People shouted, wept, danced. Once he watched an old man drink strychnine and never blink.