The Coal Tattoo

  Finally the cook tapped his palm against the bell and the soldier’s order was up. When she leaned over his shoulder to sit his plate down in front of him, she caught his scent. His skin smelled like the mountains on fire.

  “There you go,” she said, and he immediately picked up the sandwich in both hands. She saw now that the cook had forgotten to cut it in half, but this didn’t seem to bother the soldier at all. “You need anything else, just let me know.”

  “What time do you get off work?” he asked, and took a bite of the BLT. For a brief moment his lips shined with the juice of the tomato. His tongue darted out around his lips.

  “I’m working a double today,” she said. She felt foolish, standing here while he ate, but he seemed starved to death.

  He held on to the sandwich. “I was wondering if you’d want to go to the movies with me,” he said. “My next train doesn’t leave for three hours.”

  “You sure don’t beat around the bush, do you?” she said, but already she was thinking whether it would be possible for her to leave. They wouldn’t be busy this evening; already the crowd was thinning out, and since another train didn’t run until much later, there would be no crowds. Besides, she was the boss now. She could leave when she wanted to, really. The waitresses could handle it. They certainly weren’t busy right now. They were standing behind the counter, laughing at themselves as they sang the chorus of “Dizzy” along with the radio.

  “I’m going to Vietnam,” he said. “I don’t have time to beat around the bush.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  He started to extend his hand, then wiped it on his thigh with a sheepish grin. He put his hand out again and when she put hers within it, his fingers closed over her own and caused a ripple to run up her entire arm. “I’m Bradley Stamper,” he said.

  She held on to his hand for too long, and when finally she let it go he dipped a french fry into his ketchup and looked up at her with anticipation. Before she even realized she was going to say anything at all, she said, “All right, then.”

  TODAY WOULD HAVE been her baby’s sixth birthday. Easter pictured what he might have looked like as she climbed the mountain up to the wildflower field. He would have looked like El: hair black as a thousand nights, broad shoulders, and big hands. She thought he might have had Anneth’s eyes—green as river water—and her own voice. He would have been able to sing. And maybe they would have done this together, walking along this path. He would be used to her bursting out in song and would still be at that age where he wasn’t ashamed to join in with his mother. He would have been solid and long limbed, his posture that of a grown man as he walked along with a straight back and a confident gaze, studying the world around him like a young prince who recognized how blessed he was. She could almost see him there, moving in front of her on the narrow path, pausing only long enough to quell his curiosity about a spiderweb stretched between two trees or the quartz that sometimes washed up out of the earth along the path. He seemed so real that she felt the momentary urge to run up behind him just as they reached the top of the mountain. She wanted to scoop him up in her arms and twirl him around until he laughed.

  And maybe they’d sit there and talk. At six he would be old enough to carry on a real conversation with her. She would call him Little Man and tell everyone how they had long discussions and how it amazed her because talking to him was just like conversing with a grown-up. She wondered what he would talk about. A six-year-old’s greatest interest would most likely be the woods—bugs and birds and the wonderful possibility of spotting a snake stretched out on a big rock, sunning itself.

  But when she picked up her speed and bent low, running fast to that spot where she thought he was, there was nothing. Not even so much as a ghost. It seemed to her that when she put her hands out to take hold of him, there was a crackle in the air, a moment of something changing forever.

  She stood in the middle of the field and then turned very slowly, taking in everything around her. On one side of this mountain Serena had lived and raised Easter’s father. And on the other side had been Vine’s home, where Easter’s mother had grown up. She wondered if her parents had sneaked off and met here. Perhaps they had had many secret rendezvous here, so in love that they didn’t even speak but ran toward each other through the flowers, anticipating the feel of the other’s mouth on their own. Sinking down into the flowers, electrified by the touch of naked skin. And her grandmothers had come here so many times to sort out their troubles. Vine had always said that this was a magic place, that a person could understand things better when she was on top of a mountain, surrounded by flowers. Even though it had been a year since Liam had announced his plans to strip-mine this mountain, Easter knew that it was only a matter of time. These things moved slowly. She had already been to the courthouse and written letters to the governor, but she was anticipating the day when she would hear the first bulldozer. And she already knew what would have to be done to save their land.

  Easter sat down and dotted her finger onto the bumpy surface of a Queen Anne’s lace. There were tiny bugs that worked furiously amongst the hundreds of small flowers that made up the lace. They had been blooming everywhere the day Vine had brought her up here and told her about stillness. She had said that being still was a thing easily gained, a thing that could heal. Easter didn’t remember why her grandmother had told her such a thing, but she could see Vine’s mouth forming these words plainly, as if she were remembering it from only yesterday. “Stillness saved me once,” Vine had told Easter, and the Queen Anne’s lace had swayed like curtains around them. Easter had been ten and had not been ready for the things that she would be shown, but as soon as these words escaped Vine’s mouth and Easter began to wonder what her grandmother had been saved from, she knew. It all came to her like images stretched out across the summer sky. She saw all of it: the door of her grandmother’s house being thrown open, a man coming in to grab her by the arms and push himself down between her legs. And then the glint of the knife as Vine pulled it across his neck. Easter saw the blood and his last breath and everything.

  Easter did not want to know family history such as this, but there was nothing she could do about it. The vision came to her like a sudden flurry of birds that flew down to overtake everything. But now, all these years later, she began to understand it all better. Be still and know that I am God, she thought. Her favorite Bible verse. And stillness had saved her grandmother once. So that’s what she had to do as well, to be still and let everything fall back into place on its own. For six years she had been walking around telling everyone that she was all right because it wasn’t acceptable for a woman to mourn too long over a child that had never even uttered one cry, a child who had never even moved. Still-born, she thought. He was still. So what kind of knowledge must he have possessed, if stillness brought one closer to the recognition not only of God but also of one’s true self? Perhaps the baby knew too much, so he never made an effort to open his eyes. “Stillness is a habit easily gained,” Vine had whispered.

  So that’s what Easter tried to do. She lay down on her side in the middle of the field and pulled her knees up toward her chest. She put both hands together as if in prayer. The wind moved over her like a cool hand and all around her the sounds of the world intensified. Birdcall and the scratching together of leaves. It seemed she could hear the red ants that moved along the ground in front of her face, carrying white granules that looked like rice. And she even thought that she could hear the slow, gradual growth of the flower stems. She was eye level with the stems of the Queen Anne’s lace, delicate and thin and green. The flowers weren’t delicate at all, though. They survived just by being still. People thought that they had to always be in motion, had to always be working. People thought that if you were too still, you would die. But Easter knew now that this was a way to gain life back. She had been keeping busy and only acting as if she were alive for the past six years, and it had been exhausting. She lay there surrounded by the
flowers, waiting for her womb to be healed.

  Twenty-five

  A Comfortable Silence

  “LET’S NOT GO to the movies,” Anneth said as she came out the door of the café. Bradley had gone on out and waited for her on the sidewalk bench. “It’s a good day for a drive.”

  He followed along behind her as she walked quickly down the street. “You’ve changed clothes,” he said. He made a show of taking in her peasant blouse and bell-bottoms. “How’d you do that so quick?”

  Her car keys clinked together like wind chimes in her hand. “I have a little apartment there on the back of the café,” she said.

  When she opened the door to her Falcon he paused for a moment and laid his hand flat on the shiny roof as though he was savoring the warmth of metal. “This is sharp,” he said.

  “It’ll fly, too,” she said. She fired up the engine and floored it, peeling out to prove to him that the Falcon had plenty of power. Just a short distance, and they were out of town and on the winding roads through the mountains. She held on to the steering wheel tightly and sped around the curves. She wanted to show him how her car could make you feel as if you had taken flight.

  “My favorite thing in this world is just going for a drive,” she said, glancing at him and then back to the road. He looked completely comfortable over there, as if he were accustomed to having someone else drive him everywhere he went.

  “You’re an easy girl to please, then,” he said, smiling at her with that chipped tooth, which she wanted to run her own tongue over.

  “I love the movies and dancing and the lake, but what I really love is just driving along and looking at these mountains,” she said. “Sometimes I drive all the way to the state line just so I can see all the churches and little houses and lives that I pass by. People out in their yards going about their business. Kids on their bicycles. Rows of corn just stretching on and on down in the bottomlands. There’s so much to see.”

  “That’s the way I’m trying to look at the war. Something new to see,” he said quietly.

  “Are you scared?”

  He nodded and rubbed his palms together like he was cold, then relaxed against the car door, propping one arm up on the window frame. “Sure I am. Anybody’d be crazy to not be scared of going off to war. Especially with all that’s happened lately. All that mess at My Lai. Even people who supported the war are against it now.”

  “Lots of people are against it, but even some of them support the troops.”

  “You can’t have it both ways,” he said, looking out at the horizon. “You can’t be against the war and support the troops, too. It can’t be separated.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. She had never thought of it this way, but none of it made any sense to her. To her way of thinking, protesting the war was supporting the troops. War was something she didn’t understand at all and she always thought it was a bit odd anytime people acted as if they did understand. But she liked the confidence he had, the way he believed in what he was about to do. Somehow Bradley made more sense to her than President Johnson or Walter Cronkite ever had. She didn’t know how she felt about Vietnam, but she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  “So where do you come from?” she asked, and as the road straightened to follow the length of a long valley, she balanced her wrist atop the steering wheel.

  He told her that he was from the next county over and on his way to Ashland to be deployed, just as she had suspected. His mother and sister had cried for a solid week when he got back from boot camp, after realizing that his being drafted was a real thing and that he was actually headed for war. It hadn’t seemed real to them before. He couldn’t bear to watch them grieve anymore, so he told them he had to leave two days earlier than planned.

  “I have a cousin in Ashland I’m going to stay with until I’m shipped out on Sunday,” he said.

  And then he went on as if he needed to tell someone his entire history. He told her about growing up in Laurel County and about his father, who was a strict Pentecostal preacher. “But a good man,” Bradley said, looking at her. “Not a hypocrite like some of them.” And then more about his mother, whom he seemed to worship, and his sister, who was sixteen and desperately trying to be a hippie. He told her about getting drunk in Hazard and having to spend the night in jail when he was only eighteen; told her about the time he spoke in tongues when he was twelve. She didn’t interrupt with her own stories but simply listened to his voice full of carefully chosen words and emphases. She realized the power that storytelling gave him; she knew that if he told his stories he would become immortal in a kind of way, and wasn’t that what anyone ought to do when faced with going off to war—share their lives with someone and make their stories a solid thing that could be carried on and given to others?

  As they drove, the light began to change and the sun sank lower in the sky. Before long there was a line of red at the horizon, and even though darkness was still a couple of hours away, the world was bathed in an eerie kind of twilight. Glancing over, she saw how the strange light emphasized his cheekbones and the straight line of his nose so that she realized how much younger he was than her. She was twenty-eight now and he was at least seven years younger, but that didn’t matter. He talked to her in a way that most men her age had no idea about. He went on and on but it didn’t seem as if he was only talking about himself to brag or to inform her. It seemed as if he was sharing a piece of himself.

  They rode along in a comfortable silence for a long while as he looked out at the mountains and she kept her eyes on the road. It didn’t seem that they had run out of things to talk about at all. On the contrary, it was like they were relishing the close space they both occupied. He stretched his arm out across the seat and then his thumb rested on the back of her shoulder. This seemed the most intimate thing to her, the ease he felt between them so that he didn’t even notice touching her in this way. When they went over potholes or little bumps in the road, her shoulder rocked back so that his hand became more obvious there against the thin fabric of her blouse. All the way the radio had been playing quietly, turned down so low that she could barely make out the music, but then she was aware of the soft voice of Paul McCartney singing “Blackbird.”

  She turned the radio up and tapped her thumb against the steering wheel and sang along. Bradley joined in and sang the last verse in his deep, smooth voice. “Blackbird, fly,” he sang, stretching the words out, and it seemed he was saying these words right to her. There was something so sad about that song that she wanted to cry, yet it also made her feel like she could do anything she set her mind to. What she really wanted to do was pull to the side of the road and kiss Bradley. She wanted to run her hands down the angles of his face, and more than anything else, she wanted to just lay her head on his chest and be still with him as dusk settled on the land.

  “I guess I need to take you back,” she said. After all, there was a war waiting. “Next time I’ll take you to the state line and show you the place where I always stand and look back at the mountains.”

  He turned and looked at her as she drove. When she looked at him he said: “Just keep driving.”

  “But you’ll miss your train.”

  “I can catch the later one. Right now what I want more than anything is to be with you.”

  By the time they crossed the state line and got out of the car, the air had cooled and the sun had spread itself out across the far horizon. They stood beneath the purpling sky and looked at the ridges, stretching for miles and miles, as if the whole world was made up of mountains. As the gloaming moved in, Bradley looked at the sky as if everything was new and different to him. “There really is something about the light in August, just like they say,” he said. She thought this the most beautiful phrase she had ever heard in her life.

  The wind rose up and slithered around them, pushing Anneth’s hair back in a wild flurry. He put his hand on the small of her back. Then she saw the strip mine over there, a great, barren spo
t amongst the dark green hills. The whole top of the mountain had been chewed away by dozers, and all the trees had been cut to reveal acres and acres of yellowish red dirt. There was a layer of coal that had been left exposed by the workers, who had left for the day. Anneth couldn’t bear to look at it. She caught the glint of dying sunlight shining on the river far down in the valley and focused on this, but Bradley had seen the strip mine, too.

  “I can’t understand anybody doing that,” he said, and when she looked at his face she saw that sadness lived there. “Tearing up the land like that. It just kills me.”

  And it was that easy, that instant. In that moment she knew that she loved him more than she had ever loved anyone else. She knew what this would look like to others. Easter would say that Anneth fell in love with every boy she had ever met. But this was the first time she had ever felt anything, right in her soul.

  Twenty-six

  The End of the World

  HE DIDN’T CATCH the train that ran later that night. And then didn’t catch the one the next day, either.

  After they drove back into town that first night together, she invited him into her apartment and he changed out of his uniform and into a pair of jeans and a madras shirt, which made him look even better, she decided. It wasn’t the uniform after all, she thought. They sat out on her porch, watching the river while they talked. They drank all the beer from her refrigerator but never felt drunk. Anneth fixed a stack of 45s on her record player so that the only real silence was in that moment just before the single dropped and the needle found its way to the groove.

  There was so much to talk about. Anneth told him things that she had never told anyone, not even Easter. As they talked she could feel herself healing inside. She saw suddenly that she had been afflicted—not only by her blues, which came and went as they pleased (and which she enjoyed in a strange way), but also by a need to feel that she was part of somebody else. She had never, ever thought she needed that. In fact she had relished being different, being a rebel. She had liked it that women talked about her behind cupped hands, that men turned to watch her walk down the sidewalk. But now, sitting here with Bradley, she realized that what she loved most about him was that he accepted her for just who she was. He didn’t raise an eyebrow when she told them that she had been married and divorced twice.