CHRISTMAS IN CULM: Three Stories
by Vincent C. Martinez
Copyright ©2014 Vincent C. Martinez. All Rights Reserved.
This short story collection was corrected and revised July, 2015.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Discover other titles by Vincent C. Martinez at his official author webpage.
CONTENTS
THE TRAILER
I. The Fields
II. The Darkest Night
III. Fred
IV. The Night of Snow and Stones
V. The Whitest Day
VI. The Forever Island
LEMONTREE LANE
I. The Routine
II. The Cottage, the Coin, the Pen, and the Shapes
III. Ms. Simmons
IV. The Messengers
V. The Coldest Christmas
VI. The Endless Journey
DEAR VIVIAN . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE TRAILER
I. The Fields
The black field looked like a tear in space stretching for almost two miles—though sometimes a toothpick tree would break its surface—and trees clustered round its perimeter, hiding abandoned mining equipment or unsealed holes into which people would sometimes fall and disappear. Farther away from the field, clumps of homes called patches dotted the hillsides. When the mines were still open, miners walked to work, but when the mines had been exhausted of all coal, the patches remained, and the miners had nowhere to go.
We called the black fields culm dumps, waste coal that didn’t burn well for steel mills or power plants, coal cheaper to dump than to use. It was piled high, filling forests and fields until they left behind black scars.
We were told to avoid the fields, told that sinkholes could swallow us whole, or that old blasting caps littered the landscape.
There was a culm pile that towered so high it looked like a mountain to my ten-year-old eyes. Kids called it Sky Hill, and during summer days some of us would climb the pile, reach the summit, and survey the black fields below us, the green hills of the Northeastern Pennsylvania valley, the towns of Duryea and Avoca, the brown Susquehanna River snaking through Pittston. Up there, everything seemed so far away and untouchable, everything except the clouds.
We’d grab pieces of thick cardboard, sit on them, pull ourselves to the edge of the summit, and slide down, coating our skin and clothes in dark dust. I tumbled down the hill more than once, and my skirts offered no protection against the sharp coal edges. I’d wander home in the late afternoon, legs burning from sweat and scrapes, happy that for a few seconds I felt I was close to being airborne.
But by the time I’d arrive home, I’d stare at the white front door, the two darkened windows on either side like dead eyes. I’d walk up the cracked concrete pathway, my ears listening for his voice, listening if he was wandering room to room, inspecting corners for stray dust or dropped socks, listening if something he was eating was too cold or too hot or too salty or too . . . anything. Extra beats would thump in my heart, and a panic would settle in my chest. Sometimes I’d stand outside and stare at the house as the sun dipped below the horizon, and the sky turned purple, and the front porch light turned on.
I’d just stare, thinking of places to hide.
***
When hiding, I noticed how certain colors blended well with certain shadows, how twilight made it difficult to see someone walking over fields or through forests, how sometimes you can hide just by sitting still, remaining silent, and not making any quick moves.
My first hiding places were basic: blankets slipped over my head. I knew anyone looking could still see my thin frame, but it shrouded me in darkness, and if I closed my eyes hard enough, I could pretend I was elsewhere, and if I closed my ears tightly enough, I could pretend not to hear Mom crying in her bedroom and the slams of Dad's hands against the walls. I discovered how I could fit the space under my bed and that I could enclose myself in walls of pillows and folded clothes. I discovered the door to the old coal room at the front of the basement and figured out how to lock it from the inside. One March I swept it out when he wasn’t home and wiped clean the narrow window that was once the coal chute. It was still cold, damp, and sooty, but the room was quiet, and the space was mine.
When Mom found me sitting in the coal room one day she asked, "Jane? What’re you doing down here, Honey?"
I looked at her pale face in the gray light, the long bruises on her neck and said only, "I’m hiding."
"From what, Honey?"
I said nothing, looking out the narrow window again at the pine tree in the front yard, knowing he’d be home soon.
Mom never mentioned the coal room to him, even when he pushed her against the wall and screamed at her about the dark smudges on my dresses, even when he walked the room wanting to know where I was, his deliberate pace creaking through the floorboards above my head.
I found hiding spaces in the forests around the culm dump: from the circular clearing surrounded by tall birches, to the thickets of high blackberry bushes behind the house where I sat and escaped in books by Bradbury, L’Engle, and LeGuin. If I looked hard enough, there’d be a space into which I could fit, a shadow into which I could slide, a wall behind which I could duck.
Then there was the rusting red semi-trailer at the far edge of the culm field.
Lots of the kids knew it was there, its decaying hulk surrounded by knotty trees and tall weeds, but most steered clear of it after one boy had wandered into that section of the field and blown off his right hand with a blasting cap and another who’d fallen into a small sinkhole. It rested on eight wheels, the old Firestone tires frayed and deflated or deflating from years of exposure to the seasons. Someone had placed wooden chocks behind and in front of each set of wheels, which had become overgrown with ivy and thistle. The paint had no markings save for a blocky white number 13 on its side. The rear doors were sealed by two large, rust-encrusted locks that had frozen in place. Around the locks, gouges like claw marks were cut into the trailer’s red skin, failed attempts at entry.
Some thought it contained old mining equipment or television sets. Some thought it contained stolen decorations from the nearby Party Time factory in Duryea. Kids had their ideas about its contents, each idea more exotic than the next.
But aside from the dormant weed-covered railroad tracks a few yards away, the semi-trailer sat alone, marking the years with new layers of rust and new tangles of weeds.
Beneath the trailer, I could cool myself in its shade, keep myself dry from rains, and could sit against its softening tires and read until the afternoon sunlight died. One day, I decided to name it Fred. Because it seemed like a Fred. I’d not known any Fred’s, but if I had I’m sure they would have been like the trailer: simple, solid, dependable.
I’d pull the weeds and the ivy from Fred’s wheels and clear away the trash from the clearing surrounding it. I’d bring an old towel from home and sit against its wheels and read whatever I’d brought with me, or I’d draw pictures of islands in my sch
ool tablets, islands with pine trees, islands with lighthouses, islands with just two houses: one for me, and one for Mom.
Or sometimes I’d talk to Fred. I’d ask it how lonely it was out there, or where it came from. I’d tell it where I was from, tell it about my small house in the patch just outside Duryea, about my hiding places, about the nights of screams and the days of tears. I’d tell it how Mom would spend her days keeping the house clean and keeping the refrigerator filled with cooked food, or about how she spent hours looking in the bathroom mirror trying to match makeup colors to her skin color so she could cover the marks that appeared almost every week, or about how she sat alone and waited for Dad every night, her head in her hands, her green eyes staring at the front door.
I’d tell Fred everything.
And it would listen, whistling, rattling, and squeaking in the breeze, but saying nothing.
***
One mid-December I walked to Fred, my worn jeans making loud thwick sounds over the quiet culm field. In my gloved right hand, I carried a library copy of Dune, in my left was a dried pussy willow branch with which I cut the air like an épée. The southern skies were green-grey with clouds, but the skies overhead were brilliant blue, and I pushed my thick wool cap back while staring into the cold sun and swiped at it with the branch.
Fred whistled as the icy breeze whipped around its skin, and its doors rattled as if someone inside was pushing its way. I walked around Fred’s tires, running my gloved hands over the metal before stopping and placing my book on the ground. Around me, trees wavered like sea plants caught by invisible waters and dropped their few remaining leaves to the black earth where they spun in cyclones at my feet. Here, there were no screams or no tears. Here, my heartbeats were slow and steady. Here, I’d no reason to hide.
I began to clear weeds and ivy from around the tires again, burrs sticking to my gloves and skin. As one set of tires was cleared, I moved to the next set, pulling at weeds and ivy, clearing the deflating tires, then pushing the culm back into place before I threw the weeds into a pile under a creaking maple. I didn’t realize that I’d been sweating or that hours had passed or that the sky was now dark with heavy clouds. I shivered in the wind, picked up my book, and leaned against the rear gate of the trailer.
"I don’t want to go home, Fred," I whispered. I began to cry and brought my twig-covered gloves to my face, as if I could hold back the tears or the words or if I had pressed the gloves hard enough against my eyes, the world would somehow shift and re-order itself like a puzzle, create a new pattern where I didn’t have to hide, where my mother didn’t have to cower, where our biggest concern would be what we’d be putting on the Christmas tree or if we’d be staying up late on New Year’s Eve.
But when I pulled my gloves away from my eyes, and as the tears rolled down my cheeks, and the flurries of snow began to fall, I saw that the sky was still dark from clouds, that the trees were still bending in the winds, and that Fred was sitting quietly, its only sound the winds over its skin and the soft rattling in its doors.
II. The Darkest Night
Mom was like the coal underground: quiet, solid, dark. Years of pressure will do that—take something once was alive and press it, mold it, and solidify it. She was born in and lived in the nearby Wyoming Valley ever since. She was part of the last generation of mining families, her father dying from black lung, her mother dying from liver failure. She’d worked at the ammunition factory in Scranton, the party favor factory in Duryea, the mattress factory in Old Forge, all of which had either closed or downsized until she found herself at home all the time with a daughter, a small house, and an ever-darkening husband.
I’d seen pictures of Mom and Dad in the photo albums: wedding photos, birthday photos, night-out-on-the-town photos. At the beginning of their marriage, the photos cluttered every page, but quickly tapered off until the final photo album’s last three pages remained empty. Looking through the photographs was like thumbing through a cartoon flip book—a man becoming more stone-faced, a woman becoming more stone. She’d once had short brown hair—the same color as mine—but it became mostly gray in less than twelve years. She’d once had smooth, fine skin, but it eventually turned a bloodless white-gray. When Mom showed me the old pictures, she’d point at herself, remark how young she used to look not long ago, then say, "That’s what life does to you, Sweetheart."
But I didn’t believe her. Life doesn't do that to you. Dad does.
She’d said how he was once romantic, how well he used to dance, how he funny he was, his jokes leaving her in laughter for hours, but it only made me think of a cat that once lived in the forest behind our house. It was sleek and gray, with golden eyes and a soft purr. I used to feed it scraps from the kitchen, leave it bowls of water, and the cat would purr and let me pet it Until the day it didn’t, when it swiped at me with both front claws then ran into the underbrush where it disappeared forever.
Things hide their nature until they don’t have to anymore.
Mom never said when Dad changed his. Maybe there was no single event, no single act that signaled things had changed. Maybe it happened when he had to take a new job towing cars in Scranton. Maybe it happened when he moved us into a house that needed more repairs than he thought. I never saw the change. It happened before I came into their life, which made me realize what the change was: me. Mom never said so. She never would.
Eventually, Dad had become something dark that crossed the floor or covered the walls with a form that held no substance but made its mark wherever it rested, like the marks on Mom’s neck or face, or the limp in her leg, or the pains in her side that would make her stop and suck in air while she gripped the edge of the kitchen sink. Sometimes I’d see his form through the blankets thrown over my head or through the curtains as he walked through the backyard. Sometimes even when he sat at the kitchen table, where we all ate quietly, he was a darkness that seemed to shift shape in the daylight, his brown eyes glaring at me when I dropped my fork too loudly, his jaw tightening when Mom asked me what we were doing at school that week.
Fridays, the nights would be quiet, with only the sound of the television piercing the silence. And then, behind their bedroom door, I’d hear the strange calmness in his voice, an even tone that would only rise slightly in volume, and I’d hear the slow response of her voice, a soft questioning that became a rapid spill of words that would end with a sharp snap of skin against skin or a loud thud against the wall. And I’d slide under the bed and seal myself in with clothes and pillows, or I’d crawl into the corner of my closet, quietly slide the door shut, push my hands to my ears, and wait for Mom’s cries to trail off into the night's darkness.
Every night I hid. Every night I’d stare out at the stars and think about my dream island with just two houses. A house for me. And a house for Mom.
***
By the time I arrived home, the kitchen was filled with steam from the sink and the stove. Mom moved along the countertop, slowly pouring green beans into a glass bowl and setting it aside. She checked the red potatoes boiling on the stove, stabbing at them with a fork to make sure they weren’t too soft or too hard, the texture that Dad liked. She moved to the sink and rinsed a bowl, looking out the fogged window at the darkening evening, then looking back at me. "Could you set the table, Jane?" she asked, hair pulled slightly over her right eyebrow, which looked purplish and swollen. Her voice was quiet and ragged, her movements repetitive and robotic. I stood in the doorway for a moment, still swaddled in my coat and hat and gloves, and watched her move through the kitchen. I wondered if she was thinking about the snow and the sun outside or about the days before I’d entered her life, the days when she could do anything and go anywhere. Maybe a new job. Maybe somewhere out west. California. Texas. Places where the land stretched into forever.
I set the table the way he wanted, used the plates he wanted, the utensils he preferred, the paper toweling instead of the flimsy napkins, and Mo
m placed the bowls and plates on the table and sent me to my room to hang up my coat. When I walked through the living room, I opened the curtains to see the neighbors’ house across the street. They’d strung Christmas lights around the window frames, and the lights twinkled and illuminated the snowflakes that fell upon the windowsills, spattering their front yard with splotches of red, yellow, blue, and green.
***
When we finished dinner, Mom and I cleared the table and cleaned the kitchen while Dad sat in the living room watching the news, saying something about the weather and people being too dumb to know how to place chains on their tires properly. Afterwards, Mom sat in the living room and looked out the window at the neighbors’ Christmas lights and said quietly how pretty they looked.
Dad said nothing, his face locked on the television screen.
As I walked to my bedroom, he stood up, walked to the window, and closed the curtains.
***
Sometimes even the best hiding places can’t stop the sounds.
Even though I closed the closet door behind me and pushed myself into the farthest corner when I heard the first slap and threw a heavy comforter over my body and a pillow over my face and my hands over my ears, I could still hear her scream and feel the hard thumps, the vibrations rippling through the wall beams and the sheet rock. I could still hear his voice, so strangely calm but deep, his footsteps steady and heavy.
I heard her ask him to stop, but he didn’t for twenty minutes, pausing for periods to ask in his monotone, "You going to keep asking me about money? Are you? You going to keep asking me about money?"
I didn’t sleep that night. I waited until sunlight peeked under the closet door; until the sounds of the front door opening and closing; until the sounds of Dad’s car starting, pulling out of the driveway, and fading down the street before I slid the closet door open and left my room. The house was quiet except for the tinny drip of snow melting off the roof. I walked to my parents’ bedroom door and opened it. Mom sat on the bedside in darkness, facing away.