The Well and the Mine (2 page)

“Shhh. You’re having a nightmare.”

She rolled to the left suddenly and,
thump,
she was on the floor. I lurched toward her, peering over the bed. Soon a head popped up.

“I fell out of bed,” she announced. She shifted and the moon hit her so that I saw the tears streaked down her face. I didn’t say anything.

She looked around, looked at me, looked at her empty pillow, and repeated—for no good reason—“I fell out of bed.”

My mouth started twitching then, and so did hers, and soon we were sniggering so hard we had tears rolling down our cheeks. She climbed back in bed, and we both struggled for breath.

Finally we settled down, tugging the covers back over us, burrowing down in the feathers, and I felt sleep pulling me down. “I dreamed I was in the well with him,” she whispered, but before I could answer, we were asleep.

Albert
THE THING WAS, YOU’D HAVE TO WORK TO TAKE THE
cover off the well. That cover was a square of wood no bigger across than from my elbow to my fingertips—just big enough to let the bucket go down—but it was wedged tight into its slot. I’d sawed it out of the center of the wooden piece that made the well top, before I nailed the top onto the wooden sides, so the cover always fit snug. Rain blowing on it over the years had warped it, making it mighty hard to pry out, especially on muggy days. Plus it was heavy, thick pine, unwieldy enough to make Leta gasp when she moved it, strong as she is for a woman. You had to grab it just right, wedge your fingers underneath, and lift in one great pull. And I worried that only somebody who’d seen us do it, who knew how it worked, would be able to get it off in one tug. Wouldn’t be no spur-of-the-moment thing.

Tess
I MISSED MY WELL. THERE WASN’T MUCH SPACE IN
the house for five people, even when one of them was as small as Jack. At the front of the house was the sitting room on one side, with a door leading out to the porch; the bedroom where Virgie and I slept was on the other side, with another door to the porch. Our bedroom connected to Mama and Papa’s bedroom through a big, open space with no door—from our pillows we could see just their heads, small and still against the big curlicued headboard at night—and off from their bedroom was the dining room connected to the kitchen. Five rooms for five people. The two fireplaces, one in each bedroom, shared a chimney, and we closed the doors during the winter so only the bedrooms stayed warm. No use wastin’ heat, Mama would say as she went around tugging doors shut, them scraping against the frames before they clicked,
shiiii-shunk.
Jack got his own bed because he was the boy, but it was just a pallet near the fireplace. Ours was a feather bed like Mama and Papa’s. Not from our chickens—Grandpa Tobin made it for Mama when she got married. I felt sorry for those hens, naked and cold and wanting to curl up with us in their stolen clothes.

But, still and all, Jack had his own place. Mama had her rosebushes. Virgie took off for long walks in the woods. Papa had the mines…even though he wasn’t really alone there and sometimes walls fell in and killed bushels of men. He still had a place that was separate. And I had my well.

The well was really only a planked-in holeful of creek—a part you could keep and watch and have, like a June bug on a string. Underground, a little stream trickled into the well, stayed awhile, and went on its way, but you could pull up a bucket of that stream anytime you wanted. After sunset, the back porch was quiet and closed in by trees; the sounds of frogs and crickets reminded me of when I stayed too late swimming and had to run back for supper. Of course, I couldn’t swim in the well water, but sometimes I could draw up a bucket and take a swallow straight from it, even though Mama told me it wasn’t right to drink from something that hung where bugs could land and crawl on it. (I saw flies land on the tea pitcher sometimes when we’d forget to lay the cloth back over it, but Mama’d just wipe it off and still pour from it. But that was inside and different somehow.) She always poured the water from the tall, narrow well bucket to the inside bucket, shorter and squatter, and only from there would it splash into our washbowls and pitchers and cooking pots. But I’d take long, cool mouthfuls at night, then dump the rest back into the well’s black mouth.

I was the only girl who would swim in the swimming hole, and first all the boys went off for a while, telling me they’d never come back if I was gone be mucking around, but they did. Papa didn’t like me swimmin’ with them, but I started taking Jack with me, and that made him feel better. Jack’d play with the boys if they were around his age, and I’d stay separate, seeing how deep I could dive, pushing my arms back and forth through the water to make butterfly wings, letting my hair swirl around me and pretending I was a sea witch with seaweed hair.

But you couldn’t go to the creek just anytime. The well was always there, waiting. I could smell the water in it, and I knew that at the bottom it was cool with slippery moss like on creek rocks. I used to stare down it and imagine that we might scoop up mermaids or talking fish with the bathwater.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

After the dead baby, I didn’t like to stare down there anymore. I didn’t think about talking fish. I thought about the nightmares. They started with me diving down underwater with my eyes open, and then I’d see a baby reaching for me. I was running out of breath, but I couldn’t swim up because the baby’s hands were in my hair, and I couldn’t move him. I couldn’t see his face at first, but when he lifted his head, I could see he had black holes where his eyes should be. It was the first nightmare I could ever remember when I woke up. And I’d remember it all day long until I fell asleep the next night.

Virgie
PAPA SAID IT WAS AN ABOMINATION WHAT THAT WOMAN
did. That God would judge her. But I wondered did that woman think she couldn’t scare up enough food for another lunch, and with the others barefoot and winter coming, this would be the better way? Or did he just cry and cry until she thought her head would burst? Was it that she couldn’t handle it anymore, that this was the fifth or the sixth or the tenth little one underfoot and it was more than she could stand?

I wondered did Mama ever stand by the well and think how her life could be easier.

Tess
NOBODY TALKED MUCH AT SUPPER THAT NIGHT. MAINLY
the forks and knifes went
clank, clank.
Then there’d be chewing, tea-swallowing sounds, a little smacking from Jack. Then Mama’d say, “Don’t smack your food, Jack.” Then
clank, clank.
Good yellow squash and sugar snap peas and some fried ham and biscuits. We hadn’t had ham for months and we didn’t even have to kill a pig, Mama said. She told us to tell the Hudsons thank you when we saw them.

Finally, Papa wiped his mouth. He was always the first one finished. “Enjoyed it, Leta.”

We all echoed him, telling Mama how good it was. She smiled and said “thank you” as fast and soft as she could. Then she looked at my plate and frowned. “You’re not eatin’ much, Tessie.”

“You still upset?” asked Papa.

I didn’t know how to answer that. “Just not too hungry.”

“You’re leavin’ your ham on your plate?” asked Jack, sounding like it was the same as taking my head off and leaving it there.

“’Course not,” I said. I started to nibble on the ham again. You didn’t leave anything on your plate.

“Don’t know why a baby in the well’s got anything to do with eatin’ ham,” he muttered.

“You shouldn’t talk about the poor thing like that, Jack,” said Mama. “It was a child, same as you or Virgie or Tess.”

Papa put his hand on mine, the one that wasn’t holding my fork. “Tessie, you got every right to be upset. Must’ve been a shock to you. Still is. It don’t matter about the ham.”

“I’ll eat it,” said Jack.

I kicked at him under the table. “Not if I eat it myself, you little pig.”

But that kick didn’t have much feeling behind it; I only managed it out of habit. I couldn’t get worked up over Jack being a bottomless pit. I knew Papa was feeling guilty. Mama, too. Wasn’t no reason to—I knew they didn’t have space in their heads to be thinking on babies being in the well.

“I’m gettin’ better ’bout it,” I told Papa.

“I heard you tossin’ in your sleep,” Mama said. “You were whimperin’ like a baby.”

I put my fork down. “Just bad dreams,” I said.

“Aren’t y’all thinking about it?” Virgie asked, looking back and forth from Mama to Papa. “’Bout who did it? Why she’d do it?”

Mama and Papa looked at each other but didn’t really answer. I couldn’t bring myself to pick up my fork again, even if Jack did get to eat my ham. Mama noticed that I’d wiped my mouth and given up.

“Sure you don’t want her ham, Albert?” asked Mama. Papa shook his head and flicked his hand toward Jack. “Go on then, Jack,” she said.

“I can’t imagine,” Virgie said as Jack forked my ham.

“But eat your squash,” Mama said to me.

2 Daylight

Jack
WE COULD HEAR THE TRAIN FROM OUR HOUSE, EVEN
though we couldn’t smell the coal burning. Our place was just before you got to the painted “Welcome to Carbon Hill” sign, down a rutted road that made your head nearly hit the car roof on the drive to church.

My first memory of town is the train whistle blaring. The wind from the wheels or the cars themselves or maybe everything together blowing hot on my face. The train seemed terrifying and alive and it blocked out the sun and the whole town, and I couldn’t look away. That was a knee-high child’s version of the Frisco Railroad, where we’d see our grandma Moore when she came back from visiting Pop’s oldest brother in Tupelo. The train would head on through Jasper into Birmingham and on to parts foreign and strange to us. Later it’d take me to St. Louis for an accounting course—which I hated—and then to Washington, D. C.—which I loved—to work in J. Edgar Hoover’s office as a typesetter in the months before Pearl Harbor.

But in those days, the days when Virgie and Tess and Mama and Pop made up the known corners of my world, all the Frisco line did was bring Grandma back to us.

The whole town ran down the hill it was named for, with churches and houses a little farther up the hill, then all the shops lining Front Street. The railroad ran beside Front Street straight through town, with all the offshoot tracks or truck routes leading to the mines like so many legs and arms off a backbone. Galloway was the biggest company, and its commissary was on the corner of Front Street and Galloway Road, across from the Brasher Hotel. You’d head left up the Galloway Road for a couple of miles and hit the main mine. Or if you kept going a little farther down Front Street and turned right at the tracks, you’d curve around and find the No. 11 mine where Pop worked most of the time.

Galloway was the pair of thick-muscled legs that moved the whole town, then there were the spindly little arms, local mines that didn’t have the staying power of Galloway. Howard Mine was up Fish Hatchery Road, and there was Brookside and Hope and Chickasaw, all with truck after truck packed with coal that ran down to the main depot, where the chute would empty the coal straight to the railcars. By 1931 those small ones were suffering, mostly shut down. Galloway struggled on with fewer men and fewer tons.

My memories of that summer aren’t too clear. I remember a red-headed boy at school whose father had died the year before, that a beam had broken him nearly in half when it collapsed. I worried about that.

The Warrior Coal Field, north and west of Birmingham, covering all of Walker County, was rich with coal deposits. A gift for a state that otherwise was mostly prying vegetables and cotton out of the land. But it was a gift with strings attached. Its coal seams tended to be thin and broken up, so it was harder to mine. Too much slate and shale meant cleaning the coal took more time. So more men picking and loading and more men washing and sorting. All that came together to mean that ten men in Alabama produced the same amount of coal that three and a half men could produce in Indiana.

I read that when I went away to college. I assumed they didn’t want to publicize that in Alabama. Sort of demoralizing.

I worried off and on as a boy, afraid of things that were really just shadows in my head, not full-out ideas or images. But I knew we were on the edge of something. That Pop was between us and falling. Just falling and falling until we smashed into some terrible bottom that people only whispered about.

Accidents happened all the time. I remembered when Pop broke his jaw, and we all knew he could barely see out of his right eye anymore. Plus he’d broken both arms and a leg and both his ankles and torn something in his back. That was all before I was born. I wouldn’t have known about any of that if it weren’t for Mama asking him about the aches sometimes. He just kept quiet about it and pretended he was in one piece.

But I knew it was likely he wouldn’t come back through the door at night after he left in the morning. And then I’d be the man. Some boys my age were already in the mines. Pop wouldn’t let me. He said I should go to school.

I couldn’t figure out how I’d get the money to support the family if something happened to Pop. Needed to be twelve, maybe eleven, to get a paper route. I could’ve gotten paid to stack shelves at the commissary, maybe to deliver orders. I could do a man’s work at the mines at twelve if I lied a little. But that wouldn’t have been good enough. Not if Pop was killed before then. I thought Virgie could get a teaching job somewhere way out in the country, even without teacher’s college maybe. Tess was too little to do anything. Nobody would hire a little girl.

We had the farm and the milk and the chickens. That would feed us. Might have to let go of the electricity. Could always sell the car.

Nothing ever did happen to him, nothing dramatic or sudden or tragic. But I never felt like I was away from the edge of that cliff until long after I was earning a man’s paycheck.

Leta
I USUALLY WOKE UP A MINUTE OR TWO BEFORE THE
rooster crowed. I hated that rooster, and many a morning I thought of twisting his neck and turning him into soup. That little bit of meanness shoved at me and got me out of bed. My braid was long enough to twist into a bun and I could sleep on it without it coming loose, but I’d usually sleep with my hair completely down. Albert had a foolish liking of how it covered my pillow. I obliged him, even though I’d wake in the middle of the night and have to yank at my hair and push at my husband to get free of his weight. Before my feet hit the floor, I was plaiting it again, twisting it into a bun, and grabbing a pin from the nightstand to hold it in place.

My green housedress hung in the wardrobe, and I slipped it on without a sound louder than cotton sliding against skin. Albert stirred at the splash of water from the pitcher hitting the porcelain basin. Spring and summer, he’d sleep past me, not needing to build the fire to warm the room before the children woke. I washed my face, patted it dry with the towel, fingering a hole that needed to be patched. I hated using the pot on the porch unless I couldn’t wait—instead, I stopped at the outhouse on my way to feed the animals.

Opening the door softly, I walked the eight steps to the kitchen without needing a light. The stove fire was my doing. I stoked it, then drew a bucket of water to fill the girls’ pitcher so they’d have fresh water for their faces. But instead of taking it to their dressing table, I poured it into the stove reservoir. Albert would lay there another ten minutes, and the children would sleep until the rooster crowed, probably another thirty minutes, about 5:30. I didn’t ask the girls to help me with breakfast—it gave Albert and me a few minutes, a little silence before even the sun joined us. His coffee—tasted like poison to me—would be ready by the time he dragged himself over to his chair by the stove. I preferred to work by firelight in the kitchen instead of turning on the overhead bulb. Electricity’s too harsh for early morning. Even the sun knows to start gentle. After I got the fire built in the belly of the stove, I measured out the grounds and set the coffee on to boil.

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.”