The Well and the Mine (22 page)

I don’t know if he saw me struggling to put words together and keep my eyes dry, but he kept on talking without waiting for me to collect myself.

“The doctor showed me his X-ray goggles—with green leather and green glass, too. And people can whack my cast and I won’t even feel it. Go on, thump it. Go on.”

He held out one stumpy arm toward me, fingers wiggling. I worked up a smile myself and patted the plaster. “Anybody hits you, you’ll knock the fire out of ’em with that thing.”

“Yessir.”

“He’ll need to stay here another week,” the doctor said. And, may God forgive me, my first thought was that we couldn’t afford it. But there just wasn’t nothing extra, not even enough for a new winter dress for each of the girls, and I knew about hospital bills. It’s why I’d set my own arm with plaster powder when I was younger, and why I still let the Galloway doctor tend to me. Not that I’d have wished that on my boy—he needed to be fixed right, and fixed permanent. But I heard those words and my whole body started to ache, starting at the bones and working out.

“I want him to have whatever he needs,” I said. “But I got to ask you—how much is that bill gone run me?”

“You’d need to check at the front desk,” he said without any expression. I didn’t answer, and he added with a little more kindness, “It’ll run around seventy-five dollars.”

That was four months work if it was a day.

“Keep him as long as he needs,” I said.

Before we even made it home that first full day after Jack was hit, everybody knew what had happened. And they didn’t need the front desk to know what a hospital stay meant. The fellows passed the word along, and almost everybody let me have one of their shifts, whatever they did. That was a chunk that’d be missing from their own dinner tables, and I closed my eyes at the thought of the charity, but it was better than a handout. This way I was working for the money at least. I worked every single day of the ten days Jack was in the hospital, mostly double backing. Those double shifts were a lot of loading—I’d take whatever I could get—and I felt it like I hadn’t in years. I’d gotten softer just talking and watching and managing the men. I worked nearly every day the two weeks after the accident—I counted up two hundred and fifty hours that month.

The first week was the hardest, then enough numbness set in to deaden the aches. Sleep was the real weakness, harder to shut out than pain. And it started to win out by the second week, my eyelids drooping, muscles jerking. I missed the car once, slinging coal against the far wall. Nobody said nothing. And I kept on, no pain, the shovel as much a natural part of me as a leg or a hand.

Jack used to fit in the palm of my hand, his neck-to-tail-bone no bigger than wrist-to-elbow.

Neck snapping forward, eyes heavy and dry. The fuzzy memory of a soft bed, Leta’s back against mine. The thought of scrubbed skin and sun on my face and clothes not stiff with dirt and sweat—it all made my thoughts jumble. Usually I didn’t have many thoughts while I loaded, made my mind go blank and still. But those days with Jack in the hospital, my brain balked at the strict schedule, wandering off to dream even if I was awake and shoveling. I’d see Jack chubby and bawling, held up in one hand like a gift. Then I’d see him in the hospital bed. I wondered if that tooth he lost was still on the side of the road. More than once I got it into my head that I should try to find it after my shift was over. Then I’d come to my senses. Did that truck driver have nightmares like Tess when he got back safe to his warm bed that day? I hoped so. I hoped he’d gotten a good look at Jack’s round face, seen how small he was across the shoulders. I hoped he couldn’t shake the memory of him.

My feet went to sleep every so often and I’d bend my knees a different way. But that only let the air hit them, aggravating the damp that had seeped in. Thousands or millions or more years the coal was here, laying and waiting for us. Us with lives no more than a flicker and a flash. Really only fuel ourselves, burned up quick enough, the moving on to somewhere else as something else, something less solid. Smoke and warmth drifting up.

Fuel for the fire, sacrificed like Abraham offered up Isaac. Held his boy on an altar and readied hisself to slit the boy’s throat. Jack again, wiggling in my hand.

“Hand’s bleedin’, Albert,” called Ban behind me. Sure enough it was—I’d scraped my knuckles hard enough on the wall to take the skin off. But the dirt would clog up the blood. I left it be.

Jack grinning up from his hospital bed, proud of his casts and his bruises. I did that to him, made him think pain was a trophy. A friend. It was more of a reminder. A constant nagging whispering to me that it would win some day, that my body—stubborn and weak and hateful and all-important—wouldn’t have me keep it harnessed and bridled forever. It would tumble, burnt up as sure as the chunks sliding into my shovel.

I was cold all the time. Sweaty under my arms and my back soaked, but trying not to shiver. One second I’d be digging, then a second later I’d have an auger in my hand and be drilling into the coal face. Just like that, the shovel would be out of my hand, another tool there instead. I learned to use whatever I was holding and not be too puzzled by it.

But I started getting antsy about using the blasting caps when I was fading in and out like that.

Wrote a little poetry when I was courting Leta. She never cared much for me saying her hair poured down her back like honey, and I felt foolish for trying my hand at it anyway. Couldn’t even write the words down proper. But I liked the sound of some things, liked how they echoed in my ears until I could feel them going down my throat. One bit I always turned around in my head was how alike we were—man and rock—black and buried underground, hardening more every day until we were chipped into bits. I thought about it when I walked into the showers, all of us looking for all the world like we were turning into what we were digging up.

Jonah was next to me.

“You got a sharp mind,” I said to him. Then I wasn’t sure if I had said it or thought it. So I said it again, making sure it was out loud.

“Heard you the first time, Albert. Just took me aback,” he said. “But I thank you.”

He didn’t seem to be looking at me, but I wasn’t bothered. “Ain’t never asked you what you thought about nothing outside the mines,” I said. “But I thought a lot about what you said about what kind of woman would put her baby in the well. Smartest thing anybody said on it.”

He didn’t say nothing, and it might have been an hour or the next shift or another day when I thought to finish the conversation.

“Before all this with Jack, I was wantin’ you to come over for supper.”

“My guess is you might not be thinkin’ straight right now,” he said. He didn’t seem to be sweating at all, and his coveralls was hardly dirty. I wondered how long he’d been there.

“Naw, naw,” I said. “I mean it.”

He never answered at all. Then he was gone, and Ban was there or Oscar or Red or any of twenty other faces. Ban and Oscar would come over to supper if I asked ’em; they wouldn’t think I was off-kilter. I could picture their houses, their dinner tables, their wives putting spoons in the bowls of vegetables. I couldn’t see Jonah’s house inside or out. Couldn’t even think of how many kids he had for sure. But it seemed like he wasn’t never there for me to ask—just all those other faces. They’d be next to me for a while, then gone. I’d turned into one of the pillars connecting the ceiling to the floor.

There was talk about the union still wanting a minimum weekly wage. Only a word here and there, never said too loud. Still never knew when the bosses might have ears of their own in the mines, ready to turn in anybody that mentioned the UMW. I couldn’t get worked up about it, much as I believed it was a step we had to make for anything to improve much. My mind was filled with wanting sleep, wanting home, wanting my son well, and I couldn’t seem to hold on to bigger thoughts of what John Lewis was planning. Wants pushed out the thoughts more and more every night.

I told myself there was no shame walking into the hospital with the coal still under my nails and in the coal tattoos where the dust had settled in the nicks on my hands and arms. I felt some people looking at me, but I had no energy left for it.

Tess
I SAT AND COUNTED THE STREETCARS AS THEY PASSED
by. Jack wasn’t awake, and I kept accidentally catching the eyes of people in the other beds when I looked around the room. Virgie wouldn’t leave Jack’s bedside, and there wasn’t really enough room for us and Mama, too. (At least Mama had a chair. She said it was as comfortable as a bed and she slept real well in it.) A man two beds down from Jack had a black leg that stuck out from his sheet. And next to him a boy about Virgie’s age moaned real soft all the time. So I eased myself onto the window sill looking over the street and the streetcar line. It was a big window, wide enough for me to lean back against one side and fold my knees underneath me.

“There’s only the one, you know,” came a voice from behind me. Aunt Celia.

I turned around and hugged her before I realized what she’d said. “Only one what?”

“One streetcar. Same one keeps coming by on that one track.”

I wanted to know how it moved since it looked like part train and part car, but I already felt foolish for having counted up to sixteen of them.

“Jack got an X-ray done,” I said. “He said it wasn’t a bit like that fancy shoe fitters they have in Jasper where you can see your feet inside the shoe. This one had a screen and you didn’t have to look into the goggle doohickeys.”

I liked the room better with Aunt Celia in it. It had felt cold before, all white and metal, with pale people and straight-faced nurses who scolded me for trying to make Jack laugh by tickling his belly. Even the nurse Virgie liked seemed nervous about me moving around too much.

We had plenty of visitors, some coming by the house and leaving food and coming to the hospital, too. Not many people had cars, though, so we usually came home to a pile of food left on the front porch, and then we’d have maybe one or two families trickle in to see Jack while we were at the hospital. For the first time since summer, nobody brought up the dead baby. All anybody talked about was how wonderful Jack was and how terrible the truck driver was. They’d go back and forth—after saying “bless his heart” and “he’s the sweetest thing” a few times about my brother, they’d start calling the truck driver a no-account and “the worst kind of a man” and “pure evil.” Missy and her mother came, Missy’s mother wearing a fur of all things. To a hospital. (They didn’t have the maid with them, so I didn’t have to worry about what to call her.) From one day to the next you could go from being the fortunate ones because you had a porch full of cotton to the needy ones because you didn’t have furs or gold bracelets.

“Can I go over there to Sloss Furnaces and see if I can catch sparks?”

“Why would you want to do a fool thing like that?” asked Aunt Celia. I could smell peppermint on her breath, and it was lots better than snuff. They didn’t let you dip or spit in the hospital, and I figured she needed something to keep her mouth busy.

“I’ve never seen it rain sparks like that before.”

“You’d burn your hands, probably set yourself on fire, child.”

“But I’d catch some sparks.”

I wanted to get myself on the other side of that window. I wanted to see where that streetcar went. Nobody would let me out by myself, though, and Virgie didn’t want to leave the hospital. The streets had so many lights at night. And everything was bigger and louder. I couldn’t hardly take it all in.

“Don’t you love Birmingham, Aunt Celia?”

“Nah,” she said, the candy in her mouth clacking against her teeth, which she was probably going to rot out by the time Jack went home. “Too much dirt and racket. I get ticked off at enough idiots back home—twenty times as many idiots here to set me off.”

“It’s so different,” I said.

“Ain’t that what I just said?”

I kept looking out the window, watching the big monsters of buildings stand guard over the city. “Those sparks from the furnaces could catch the wind and fly all the way to Carbon Hill. They could pick out a nice chimney, sail down like they was dropped off by a stork, then grow into big fires their very own selves.” I waved toward Sloss. “Baby fires,” I called to the sparks.

Aunt Celia had pulled out her hunk of peppermint and was holding it close to her face. “Spit in my mouth tastes better than this,” she said, glaring at it.

I pointed to the other side of the city, hardly hearing her. “And I bet if you climbed those smokestacks at the steel mills, you could snatch a bird right out of the air.”

Aunt Celia kept her candy between her thumb and finger and shook it at me like she was dotting
i
’s in the air. “Anybody ever told you, Tessie, that you got a way of paintin’ pictures without ever puttin’ brush to paper? Might not be pictures that make any sense, but they sure can make you smile.”

Sometimes Aunt Celia—even holding a spit-covered piece of candy—seemed like the most wonderful woman in the world to me. I liked the thought of that, of pretty pictures hovering in the air after I talked.

“They call it the Magic City,” I told Papa on the way home one night.

He and Mama looked at each other, tired and something else. Something sadder than tired. “Men are sleepin’ in the coke ovens here, Tessie,” he said. “Miners ain’t even got houses to sleep in if they lose their jobs. Company owns it all. Don’t care for their brand of magic myself.”

But I did. Even with men in the coke ovens. It didn’t matter if it was ugly, it was sure exciting.

Leta
WHILE ALBERT WAS WORKING—WHICH WAS MOST ALL
the time during that October—I shored up everything around the house. Funny how for once there didn’t seem to be enough to do.

Once the children were asleep, I worked by candlelight, not wanting to waste electricity. I was keeping late hours partly to fill the nights and partly to keep Albert from seeing me mending shoes. I couldn’t seem to close my eyes for any length of time. I’d listen to the children breathe, needed to listen to them. I found myself propped up on one elbow, not wanting to lay down, much less sleep, when they were there for the watching. Jack couldn’t sleep well, shifting this way and that to stay off his arm, and not being able to rest on his leg. I’d hear him cry out in his sleep, the only time he’d cry out. About to pop his buttons he was so proud of those broken bones. The sleepy whimpers sounded all the worse because he never made a peep all day long. And I noticed the difference in the sleep sounds more than I’d ever thought I would, although the whimpering wasn’t as bad as when there were no Jack sounds at all.