Big Cherry Holler Read online

“I can’t add in my head,” Etta says sadly.

  “Mrs. Mac, do you have them peanut-butter balls?” Billy asks. Finally, a child that can shake off catatonia and defeat with his sweet tooth. We know our way out of the studio, and it’s a good thing. Perky Kim has disappeared. Even a television producer out of Bristol, Tennessee, knows when to remove herself from the stink of failure.

  Even though we lost, the tension is gone, so the ride home is more fun than the ride over. The blue hills of Tennessee give way to our familiar black mountains as we curl through the darkness in our big green van with the Sacred Heart of Jesus painted on the side. A lot of good the religious shield did us. And what about the Saint Anthony medal that Father Schmidt gave to Etta for good luck? Did he forget to bless it? Where was Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, when my daughter forgot how to add?

  The kids are gathered around Fleeta in the back of the van while she tells them a ghost story. Etta has already forgotten all about Kiddie Kollege, and that makes me happy. Preparing for that stupid show was an ordeal, anyway. No more cramming for questions tacked on that godforsaken wheel. No more flash cards. No more watching the show every week and taking notes. Etta’s moment in the sun came and went in the same night. The kids eat pepper sandwiches, chewing slowly; Fleeta cackles like a witch. Occasional passing headlights cast weird shadows on her and make her even more scary. Mrs. White has tucked her raincoat into a neat square pillow and sleeps against the window. Iva Lou hums to a Janie Fricke song playing softly on the radio. I lean across and rub my husband’s neck as he drives.

  “That’s okay,” he says.

  “No. I want to,” I tell him.

  “Really. It’s okay.”

  I remove my hand from my husband’s neck and place it on my lap. I look out the window. I’m afraid I might cry. He puts his hand on mine. This time, I pull away.

  “I’m sorry,” he says softly.

  “It’s not my fault,” I tell him without looking at him. But I don’t believe it. I think everything is my fault, including the demise of the coal industry in Southwest Virginia. I am the woman in this family; I’m supposed to make everything work. What I can’t seem to say aloud is that I’m failing.

  “We’ll be all right,” Jack says, which upsets me even more. I hate when he downplays important things, the most important things! I’m furious with him, yet I’m also angry at myself. I saw this coming. I tried to talk to him about this many times, and he wouldn’t discuss it. Why didn’t I beg Jack to quit the mines when the layoffs became routine and the coal companies shrank their staffs and the train whistles carrying coal out of these hills became less and less frequent? I want to turn to him and say, “I told you this was going to happen!,” but I can’t. We have a van full of kids and Etta’s teacher and my friends. So instead of shouting, I bury my rage. I turn to him and tell him calmly, “I can work more days at the Pharmacy.”

  Jack doesn’t say anything. He looks at me quickly and then focuses his eyes back on the road. “Well. What do you think?” I say, realizing it sounds more like an accusation than a show of support. He does not answer me. As he drives into the dark valley, he checks the rearview a lot. But there is nothing behind us. We’re the only vehicle on the road. Thank goodness the shrieks and giggles of the kids fill up the quiet.

  The road to our house is so bumpy it wakes Etta, who has been sleeping since we hit the hill into town. She slept through dropping off her teammates at their houses and our guests at their cars outside the elementary school.

  “We have to fix this road,” I tell my husband.

  “Put it on the list.”

  Jack lifts Etta out of the van and carries her up to the house as I clear the sandwich basket, the tote bag, and Etta’s book bag. Jack takes Etta to her room, and I go to the kitchen. As I flip the light switch, I hear a thump. Shoo the Cat has jumped from his perch and is looking up at me.

  “I forgot your food!” I fill the dish, pet him, and apologize over and over. There was too much to think about today. Jack comes into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator.

  “There’s leftover macaroni and cheese,” I tell him. Jack pulls out the casserole and puts it in the oven. “We need to talk,” I tell him.

  “Not now. I’m tired.” Jack uncaps a beer and looks out the kitchen window. I don’t know what he’s looking at, the field is pitch black, and tonight there’s no moon.

  “We need to talk about the mines.” I try not to sound impatient.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Well, what’s your plan?”

  “My plan?”

  “Yeah. What are you going to do?”

  “Well, I’m going to be out of work.”

  “I know that. Have you thought about something else to do? Some other job?”

  “No.”

  “Jack, maybe it’s time to come up with something.”

  “Maybe it is.” Jack shrugs. He is not listening to me.

  “I know this is hard for you—”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do. I know mining is in your blood.”

  “Ave. Stop. Let’s just forget it.”

  “Forget it? Why are you mad at me? What did I do?”

  “You think I get up at dawn and disappear into a mountain, and ten hours later I come out and wash it off of me and come home to you. I don’t tell you the half of it.”

  “Whose fault is that? You have to talk to me. I’m tired of pulling information out of you. I’ve worried every day you’ve left this house. Especially lately.” As the bigger companies pulled out, safety became less important. I would panic every time I heard a wildcat company was coming in to reopen old mines for quick access to more coal. I knew they weren’t following codes; it was common knowledge around here. I look at my husband, who is studying the label on his beer. I hear myself raising my voice; he looks at me. At least I have his attention now. “I worried myself sick. Of course, you have no idea what I’m thinking because you never ask me.”

  “Maybe that’s because I know what you’re thinking.” He takes a swig.

  “Look, I’ve had a very—” I begin to say “tough day” but stop myself. I look at my husband, and he is wounded down to his bones.

  “Ave, you don’t come from coal.” Jack says this matter-of-factly. He’s right. I’m not a descendant of these folks, even though I was born and raised here. I am a ferriner. I do have a different point of view. I don’t accept the power of a big company over a community. I don’t believe in waiting until the last drop of coal is pulled from these mountains before having a plan. I don’t rely on anybody for anything. If I can’t work for it myself, I won’t have it.

  “That’s not fair.” This is all I can come up with?

  “When my grandpap took me down in the mine the very first time, he wanted me to hate it. But I got into the transport car with him, and from the first second daylight was gone and we were inside the mountain, I loved it. I loved the smell of the earth, the white dust on the walls where the coal was taken from, and the men all together in there, figuring out how to beat the mountain. How to outfox it. How to get that coal out without anybody getting hurt.”

  “Jack,” I start to say, but he’s turned away to pull the casserole out of the oven and doesn’t hear me.

  “When they talk to us like we’re idiots, it takes a piece out of me. I saw simple men in there solve complex problems and prevail. And that’s what I wanted my work life to be.” Jack sits down. I sit down too and reach for him across the table.

  “You can still have that. You can go back to school and become an engineer. Whatever you want.”

  Jack throws back his head and laughs.

  “Do you have any idea who you’re married to?” He tilts the kitchen chair, balancing on the back legs, and looks at me, challenging me to answer. Why do men do this? Why do they pretend to be strong when they’re hurting? And why am I angry when
he’s hurting? I resist the urge to push him off the chair.

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “See there? We agree on something.” Jack picks up his fork and eats.

  I give up. I leave the kitchen and stop when I get halfway up the stairs. I didn’t want to walk out of the room, I wanted to stay and work things through. Why did I leave? Why do I always leave the moment things get really hard? I sit down in the dark to think.

  The storm is back, and the rain hits the house in gusts as thunder breaks over us in loud crashes. Lightning pierces the darkness, sending jagged shadows across me like sharp fingers. I pull myself up by a dowel of the old banister and take one step down to go back into the kitchen. I am determined to fix this tonight. I am going to tell him that I trust him to take care of us. But something stops me. I go up the stairs, choosing to go to my daughter instead of comforting my husband. I have the feeling it’s a decision I will regret, but I do it anyway.

  “Hey. You’re supposed to be asleep,” I tell Etta. She’s looking out the window and watching the storm.

  “The thunder woke me up.” Etta crawls into her bed.

  “It sure is loud,” I tell my daughter as I tuck the blanket in; I hope it was loud enough to drown out the fight between her father and me.

  “I’m glad Mr. DeBoard didn’t ask me if I had any brothers and sisters. He does that sometimes, you know.”

  “Yeah, he does.” I sit down on the bed. “Joe would’ve been very proud of you tonight.”

  “No, he wouldn’t. We lost.”

  “Okay. Right. He probably would have teased you and called you a big loser all the way home.”

  Etta smiles as she turns over and looks at me. “He would have loved it when the desks flipped over.” She lies back on her pillow. “Joe’s been gone so long, sometimes I forget about him.”

  In Etta’s life, three years is a long time. For me, it’s a heartbeat. Joe was only four years old when he died. He and Etta were so close in age, folks often thought they were twins, even though they could not have been more different. I got pregnant with him three months after I had Etta. You should’ve heard the jokes in town. “Honey, must’ve been nice to get wet after that drought o’ yorn!” one of Jack’s coal mining buddies said to me at a football game. Oh yeah. They had a good old time talking about the Former Spinster turned Baby-Making Machine. I guess they thought I got myself a little taste of the honey and had to have the whole hive.

  When Joe was born, Jack took one look at him and said, “The Eye-talian genes have landed!” And it was true. Joe had curly black hair and chocolate-chip eyes. He had my father’s regal nose and slight overbite. His chin was square and prominent, but it curved at the bottom as though a cleft should form there. He had a deep dimple near his eye when he smiled (we don’t know where that came from). He was so different from Etta. Joe was loud, funny, and exasperating. Once he even pulled down the Christmas tree. He drove me crazy. And I would give everything I own to have him back, driving me crazy.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll never forget your brother.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I promise. I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you loved your brother. And love never dies.” I say this to my daughter as plainly as I might tell her to carry her umbrella when it’s raining. Now if only I believed it. I turn off her bedside lamp and switch on the nightlight.

  “Ma, stay till I’m asleep.”

  I lie down with my daughter and wrap my arms around her. She is warm and safe. I hope that, wherever my son is, someone is holding him. I have prayed to my mother to find him and take care of him. I have to trust that my prayers have been answered, but every night, even as I say them, I am not so sure.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The headline on the front page of the Big Stone Gap Post says WESTMORELAND PULLS OUT, which causes a round of jokes in town that do not bear repeating. In the week since the announcement, The Post has been printing helpful articles for the miners about their benefits, insurance, and black-lung programs.

  On the Almost Fame and No Fortune front: AREA KIDS TAKE SECOND PLACE ON KIDDIE KOLLEGE is the delicately worded headline. Perhaps the editor, Bill Hendrick, placed it under PRAYERS REQUESTED FOR MAXIE BELCHER AND PEBBLE FIG so that folks could get a little perspective. We hate to lose, even at the elementary school level. The picture of our team is sweet; thank God they took it before the show, in happier times. It’s taken a full week to shake defeat. Etta had almost forgotten about the loss, until she heard an old man point at her in a Buckles Supermarket, “Right ’ere’s one of ’em kids that lost for us on the Kiddie Kollege show!” I fold the newspaper neatly into a basket filled with canned goods, fresh eggs, and milk.

  It’s my turn to leave staples for the Tuckett twins. Edna and Ledna are somewhere in their eighties and don’t get out much. I leave the basket inside their screen door. When I get back to my Jeep, I hear the creak of their front door, letting me know that they got the basket. All these years, the sisters made pies and cakes for all the families in town: from birth to death and in between, you could count on the Tuckett twins and their cobblers. Now they find it hard to take what they consider “charity.” But it isn’t charity; as far as the folks in town are concerned, it’s payback time.

  Town is busier than usual. The first thing that happens when bad news comes out of the mines is that folks come into town to talk to the businesses where they have credit. Everyone from Zackie Wakin to Gilley’s Jewelers renegotiates their terms in a time of crisis. Barney Gilley often tells his customers that without coal, there would be no diamonds; and without the coal miners, he’d be out of business, so he’s happy to refinance.

  My boss, Pearl Grimes, is sweeping the front walk when I pull into the parking lot of the Mutual Pharmacy. Pearl is a very mature twenty-four years old; if you just met her, you’d swear she was older. She looks polished and slim in a simple taupe A-line skirt and white blouse. Her smock is pressed and tied at the sides in small bows. Fleeta and I also wear the smocks, which Pearl designed, white with an embroidered pine tree on front (a salute to John Fox, Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine). Pearl has permed her brown hair into a curly ’do, and she uses lots of spray on it. She has grown into her face, once round and girlish, now more chiseled, and she has mastered the art of well-placed rouge, which gives her cheekbones. Her soft brown eyes still have a sadness, but there is also a determination now, which is very attractive.

  As Pearl has transformed, so has the Pharmacy. With Pearl’s cum laude degree in business administration from the University of Virginia at Wise, she has transformed Mulligan’s Mutual from a pharmacy that sold beauty aids to a full-service personal-needs department store. She began by talking to our customers and asking them how she could improve business. Then she goosed the staff (Fleeta permanent, and me part-time since Etta went to school) and set out to make the place more professional. We wear smocks (even though Fleeta rebels by keeping hers untied so it flaps like a vest on a construction worker). No more smoking behind the counter or eating lunch on packing boxes. No more Fleeta chugging back peanuts and Coke while sizing up a customer. No more putting the WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK sign on the door to hit a yard sale.

  Pearl considered every aspect of the business before she made her changes, including ambience. She removed the garish fluorescent tubes installed by Fred Mulligan (the original owner and the father who raised me). “Soft light and music draw business,” Pearl promised. And she was right. Some days we can’t get rid of the browsers. Pearl even thought to stock Estée Lauder cosmetics, which attracted new clients who used to have to drive all the way over to Kingsport for that sort of high-end specialty item.

  Pearl outdid herself with the window dressing this month. In her homage to autumn, she built a papier-mâché tree festooned with leaves spray-painted gold. A mannequin dressed like a farmer (he’ll be Santa Claus come Christmas) holds a rake next to the tree. It’s a simple concept, but Pearl put it ov
er the top by burying a fan in a fake mound of dirt to blow the autumn leaves around. What a scene. It looks so real that Reverend Edmonds, in awe of the artistry, rear-ended Nellie Goodloe as he drove past one morning.

  “I got an idea,” Pearl says as she sweeps leaves into a dustpan.

  “Fleeta and I are not doing a floor show to attract more business.”

  “I’m not entirely sure that would attract business.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I have a better idea. Did you know that there used to be a soda fountain back in the storage room?

  “When I was little, Fred Mulligan closed it. Said it was too much work.”

  “The pipes are still in the wall. And they work. It wouldn’t take much to put in some appliances and reopen the kitchen. We could serve breakfast and lunch. Keep the menu small at first. The only place to gather in town is Hardy’s. How many sausage biscuits can you eat?” I don’t want to disappoint Pearl, but the answer to that question is: a lot. Brownie Polly holds the record—fourteen sausage biscuits in one Sunday morning.

  Pearl continues, “It would be fun for the town. It would be profitable for us. I think we should do it.” She rattles off the list of positives with such enthusiasm, I can tell she has already made her decision.

  “It sounds like you did your research.”

  Fleeta sticks her head out the door. And what a head it is this morning. Her hair is piled high on her head in waxy brownette curls. A tightly woven braid encircles the curls like a licorice tiara. A cigarette dangles from her mouth. In the daylight, Fleeta’s rouge is so bright, it sits atop her cheeks like little orange bottle caps.

  “Mornin’, Cleopatra.” I pat my cheeks, which makes Fleeta pat hers. She feels the two pink “X’s” of tape holding down her spit curls and rips them off. The curls lie against her cheeks like commas.

  “Somebody want to tell me what the hell is going on?” Fleeta pulls her smock over her head, neglecting to tie the side ribbons, as usual.

  “Pearl’s reopening the soda fountain.”