“What kind of books did you read?”
“Ev’ry kinda book they was. History books and geography, ’n’ books ’bout philosophy and science. Law books ’n’ medical books and books of poems and books that’re fiction. Adventure books. Every kind of book you can imagine.”
“Was Miss Rebecca important to you?”
“She was the one helped me t’ learn. She came thair when I were nine yairs old. Yes ma’am, she were most important t’ me.”
“As important as your mother?”
“Well, m’ maw was … uh, kind of… well, she were of a single mind, m’ maw was, and it was that all men were born t’ work in the hole.”
“The hole?”
“Uh-huh. Was like, there was no other way but that, y’know? You were a man, you went to the hole. That was it. She knew I feared the hole but it never made any diff’rence t’ her.”
“You feared it?”
“Yes. I feared the hole most.”
“What was the hole, Aaron?”
“It’s the coal pits. M’ paw and Samuel worked thair. All the men worked thair.”
“Samuel’s your brother?”
“Was. Samuel was killed in a car accident.”
“Tell me about the hole.”
“Ever since I can remember anything, I was afeared of the hole. I don’t remember ever a time when just th’ thought of goin’ down thair din’t strike me cold. From when I first knew what the hole was, I dreamt ’bout it and dreaded of ’t.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Like goin’ down to hell, critters crawlin’ all over me, demons hidin’ in the darkness, no air t’ breathe. I read this verse once—’What torments of grief you endured, from evils that ne’er arrived.’ Emerson wrote that.”
“You’ve got a very good memory.”
“I remember things I like, that ’un in partic’lar ’cause it reminded me what I felt like, tormented by that fear. That’s the way ’twas ’tween me and the hole. ’Cept the evil did arrive.”
“So you did go into the hole?”
He nodded.
“And you thought that was wrong?”
“When I were nine yairs old, on my birthday, when I woke up? On the chair next t’ my bed, there was a hat with a lamp on it. M’ paw got it made especially for me. I sat thair on the bed and I cried ’cause I knew it was gonna be that day, that was the day he was gonna take me down. At breakfast it was like a celebration. M’ brother, Samuel, took off from school to go with us. And me? I was so scared I near threw up on the way to th’ pits. Twelve of us were on the elevator. I remember Mr. John Canaan and Bobby Aronski were thair, I remember ’cause both of them was killed later in the cave-in at number seven. And all the men were bent over, like they were eighty yairs old. It was worse ’n all m’ nightmares. I remember I begun to shake when that elevator started down. That light at the top of the shaft, it shrank smaller ’n’ smaller until you couldn’t see it ’tall and nobody turned their lights on. We just kept goin’ down and down and it was darker than ever I thought it could be, the air smellin’ like bad eggs, and my mouth so dry m’ tongue was stuck t’ m’ teeth, down ’n’ down … din’t know a hole could be that deep. Then suddenly we come on the shaft and the elevator stopped real hard and everybody piled out into that black tunnel, so black the hat lights … the lights din’t go anywhere, ’twas that black…like the darkness just swallered up the light. The tunnel was only ’bout four feet high, they had t’ stoop over t’ work. Ever once in a while somebody’d yell, ‘Fire in th’ hole,’ and there’d be this terrible blasting and great clouds of black dust ’d come swirlin’ through the tunnel at us. No nightmare I ever had was that bad. Seven hours. I truly thought I was gonna die that day. I could imagine that shaft fallin’, the earth fallin’ in on us, smashin’ us all down to nothin’. When we finally came up, I looked up, waitin’ for that hole at the top of the shaft to appear, and finally it did and it grew bigger and bigger and it were like … were like resurrection. Once’t we were up, the men all set to pattin’ me on the back, all those bent-over men, thair faces coal black ’cept for thair eyes and mouths, like a pack a demons. My paw took the strap t’ me many a time after that, but I nair went back down. Ever.”
“Did he beat you a lot?”
“Oh, once in a month, maybe.”
“Once a month!”
“Sometimes he’d come home from Bailey’s drunk and I’d know ’cause of th’ meanness in his eyes. ‘Take ’em down!’ he’d beller at me and I would take down m’ drawers and lean ’crost the chair and he’d pull off that fat belt o’ his and lay into me. Sometimes three licks. Maybe four or five. But it was worth ’t. Any beatin’d be better than the hole.”
“Do you still resent it?”
“I suppose. Not so much that m’ paw whacked me as that he ever took me down thair ’tall.”
“Do you hate your father for that?”
“For that one thing? I guess I do. Not for th’ lickin’s, that were the penance I paid for refusin’ m’ paw.”
“Penance?”
“Well, that’s what Bishop Richard called ’t. Y’know, payin’ for when y’do somethin’ wrong.”
“Do you believe in that? Paying penance, I mean?”
“Well… I guess I ha’n’t fully made up m’ mind yet. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.”
“What bothers you about it?”
“Maybe…”
“Yes?”
“Maybe it started with Reverend Shackles.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Well, when I was—like maybe seven ’r eight?—we had this preacher—Josiah Shackles. Big, tall man, skinny as a pole with this long, black beard down t’ his chest, and angry eyes—like the picture y’see in history books, y’know, of John Brown? When they had him cornered at Harpers Ferry? Have you seen that picture, his eyes just piercin’ through you? Reverend Shackles were like that. Fire in his eyes. He din’t believe in redemption. You did one thing wrong—one thing! you told one simple lie—and you were hellhound. He ’ud stare down at me. ‘Look at me, boy,’ he’d say, and his voice were like thunder, and I’d look up at him, was like lookin’ up at a mountain, and he ’ud slam his finger down hard toward th’ ground and say, ‘Yer goin’ t’ hell, boy!’”
“Did you believe that? That you were going to hell?”
“I believed it at the time, I sure did. Reverend Shackles put that fear in me. Thair was no redemption ’r forgiveness in Reverend Shackles’s Bible.”
“So there was no reason to pay penance, right?”
“Yes ma’am, that’s right. It were like penance without redemption, so why bother.”
“Do you still believe you’re going to hell?”
“I don’t know. Bishop Richard once told me hell is in your own mind.”
“What do you think he meant by that?”
“Not sure yet.”
“So you feared the hole and Reverend Shackles. Were you afraid of your father?”
“Just that he ’ud somehow force me down thair agin.”
“But you never went back?”
“N’um, and nair will.”
“Tell me more about your mother.”
“Well, like I said, she nair had much t’ say. Din’t care ’bout education. I think she felt … she felt like it were a waste a time.”
“Did she ever read to you, tell you stories?”
“No ma’am, m’ maw couldn’t read. The only stories she ever told were Bible stories and she’d start but never finish, like she ’ud forgot how they ended.”
“Did you read the Bible?”
“ ’Twas the first book I e’er read. ’Twas the only book in our house.”
“How old were you then?”
“Dunno. Six, maybe. Seven.”
“And you read the whole Bible at that age?”
“Yes’m.”
“And what did it mean to you?”
“Y’know how it is with the Bible. Ev’ry
time you read it, it takes on a different message.”
“And how about Miss Rebecca?”
“She were my teacher, from when I was nine till I finished up in high school. Well, in high school I had lotsa teachers, but until I went to Lordsville, Miss Rebecca were my only teacher.”
“So all the children went to the same schoolroom?”
“Yes’m. One room. ’Twere divided up—some sat over thair, some sat over thair, some sat hair. Rebecca … Miss Rebecca … she ’ud move around the room, teachin’ first one buncha us, then t’other.”
“And she was a good teacher?”
“Smartest person I ever met.”
“Smarter than the bishop?”
“Smarter than anybody.”
“How about your friends?”
“Din’t have a lot of friends. Y’see, most of the boys I grew up with, they knew they would go to th’ mines when the time come. They din’t truck much with me.”
“Did they shun you?”
“I guess it were more like I shunned them.”
“The girls, too?”
“Until high school. They were all of a same mind. You grow up, go t’ school ’cause you have to. The boys quit, go to the hole, and the girls quit and marry ’em.”
“And that was unacceptable to you?”
“Kind of hopeless, w’n’t y’say?”
“Yes, I’d have to agree with that. So you were alone a lot growing up?”
Molly watched him as he considered the question. His face clouded over. She saw consternation in his look, as if he did not know the answer or, perhaps more accurately, had never even considered the question before.
Finally he said, “I din’t feel bad about it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did you feel that you were different from the others?”
“I was. They all thought alike. They din’t have dreams, they din’t ask questions, they just took everything th’ way ’twas put to ’em. Yes ma’am, I was diff’rent than all of ’em and thankfully so.”
“Can we talk about sex for a minute?” she asked, watching his expression.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Are you a virgin, Aaron?”
He smiled. “No ma’am. Lost that when I were sixteen. First yair in high school.”
“Was it a pleasant experience?”
“Well, yes ma’am.”
“How old was the girl?”
“Same age ’s me. ’Twere a girl I knew since we were kids. From Morgan’s Crik.”
“Did you feel it was wrong?”
“I s’pose if I was talking to, say, Reverend Shackles, it might’ve made me think badly on ’t. But I din’t grieve over ’t, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did the girl have any problems with it?”
“She never said, if she did.”
“Have you ever had a homosexual experience?”
He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Never really thought much about that.”
When he appeared to tire, Molly ended the interview. It was an interesting first meeting, but she only had flirted with the peripheries of Aaron’s life, the fringes of its structure. What she had solicited was elementary; that he feared the dark, hated authority, distrusted his elders, dismissed his peers, and that the hole might very well be the symbol for all in life that he dreaded. Phobia, disassociation, alienation, religious disorientation, all were present, yet these were not necessarily the symptoms of disorder. Who but a fool would not fear the hole, with its connate disasters, foul air and foreboding darkness? Or the evangelical madness of a Reverend Shackles? Rather they were testimony to that dark, forbidden locale in his mind where lurked the real “crawling critters and demons” of his disobedient dreams. So they had walked the rim of the escarpment together, but they had yet to look into the chasm.
SIXTEEN
Goodman went across the street to Early Simpson’s liquor store and found, covered with dust on a back shelf, a fairly decent bottle of red wine that probably had been there since KC&M was a one-shaft operation. He bought it and drove up the road, following Rebecca’s instructions. Her cabin was on the other side of the roaring stream, embraced by a thicket of pine trees. Darkness approached early in the deep valley, particularly here, where the trees blotted out the last of the sunlight. The house was incompatible with the rest of the village, a small A-frame structure with a large window overlooking Morgan’s Creek, its porch protruding to the edge of the rivulet. A one-lane wooden bridge carried him over the torrent. He parked beside her three-year-old Chevrolet and climbed the stairs to the porch. Her boots were beside the mat. He was removing his wet shoes when she opened the door for him.
“You don’t have t’ do that,” she said. “I just like to wear plain old wool socks around the house.”
He was stunned by her appearance. She had taken off the denim jacket and skirt and replaced them with a gray sweatshirt and pants cuffed tightly at the ankles. She had on bright red wool socks and had unbound her flaming red hair, which cascaded down around her shoulders like hot lava. She seemed smaller without the boots, more vulnerable, less in control, perhaps because here she felt safe and comfortable. The room was lit with candles that haloed her hair and softened her features.
She had started a fire and the cabin was a warm and personal relief from the austerity of the rest of the village. A sleeping loft covered the kitchen in the rear of the peaked great room. Books were jammed and stacked into shelves that lined one wall. There were stacks of magazines on both sides of the window and a table in the comer was covered with photographs. Some were framed. Others, snapshots, leaned helter-skelter against the frames. There were several stacks of records, some of them old 78s, beside the cheap stereo against the other wall. The place was clean but not necessarily tidy, almost as if things had been left exactly where she had used them last. He did not see a telephone.
“Hope you don’t mind candles,” she said. “I only use the electric lights when I read or sew. Hate to waste things.”
“It’s very pleasant,” Goodman said. “I like the way they smell.”
“I make them myself,” she said. “Aaron loved candles. His favorite poem was from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Perhaps you know it.” She recited it almost wistfully:
My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!
“I remember it from college,” he said. “Sort of.”
“It’s a cliché, I know,” she said. “One of the charming things about Aaron was that he didn’t recognize stereotypes. Everything was new to him.” She waved toward the corner. “Put on a record—they’re over there. I’ve got to tend to dinner. I hope you like stew.”
“I love stew.”
“Good. It should be good and tasty by now, been brewing since yesterday.”
He flipped through the stacks of records—Crosby, Stills and Nash; Buffalo Springfield; the Stones; Jefferson Airplane; it was like a musical trip through the sixties and seventies—and finally chose Cheap Thrills by Janis Joplin and Big Brother. He strolled over to the bookshelf and stared down the rows of books. There were strips of paper protruding up from the pages, like the tabs on file folders. He was surprised at how many pages had been marked. He slid one volume out, a slender tome called Quotations for Living, and flipped it open. A phrase had been underlined lightly in pencil. “Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues. William Butler Yeats.” He flicked to another, a Chinese proverb: “There are two perfect men—one dead, the other unborn.”
“Those are Aaron’s bookmarks,” she said from across the room. “He marked things he liked in pencil and then when he had them memorized he’d erase them. He was still working on those when he left.”
“Must have quite a memory,” he said, snapping the book shut and replacing it on the shelf.
“Remarkable.” She dipped a ladle into the stew
, sucking some noisily off and then smacking, her lips with satisfaction. He popped the cork on the wine as she brought the stew pot over and ladled generous helpings on both their plates. He held her chair for her and she smiled grandly as she sat down.
“Déjà vu,” she said, almost to herself.
“Beg pardon?” Goodman asked.
“Just reminiscing,” she said, reaching out and tilting the wine bottle so she could read the label. “Did you find this here?” she asked with surprise.
“It was hidden behind the bottles of Thunderbird and Hurricane.”
She laughed. “I haven’t had wine for a while,” she said. “The schoolmarm in Crikside doesn’t drop by the liquor store and pick up a jug when she gets thirsty.”
The stew was a thick, succulent mixture of potatoes, okra, tomatoes, cabbage and a tough but tasty meat, which he learned later was rabbit. There was cornbread to sop up the stew juices with and they ate and drank wine and talked more about Stampler; about his father’s obsession that his sons should follow him into the coal mines; about his mother, who was afraid to disagree with old man Stampler, who talked to the spirits and who blamed Rebecca for her son’s contrariness; and how the elder Stampler meted out punishment with his belt—the number of lashes contingent on the seriousness of the offense.
“Sometimes when he came over, he’d be laced so bad … his backside would be strapped raw …”
He looked up at her quizzically. She looked away quickly and hurried on, switching the subject to Aaron’s insatiable appetite for knowledge.
“Tell me more about his mother. Did she have mental problems?”
“Never went out that last year. She would have starved to death except for her neighbors. Maybe the loneliness finally got to her. As badly as she treated Aaron—when he left she didn’t know what to do. She depended on men all her life and when they were gone, she couldn’t handle it.”