Hardcastle (12 page)

When Gay stopped talking, Worth Enloe sniffed, twitched his bad eye, and looked straight before him without speaking. Oddly Gay seemed to catch his mood and didn’t talk any more either.

Music rolled himself another cigarette in the hopes the two of them would start up again. “I don’t mind tellin you it scares the hell out of me to think about crawlin back in a mountain tryin to cut hunks of it out to carry off. Seems like it would always be waitin to come down on your head.”

They did not reply, and Music began to realize that, somehow, they had talked each other into a change of mood. They seemed to have slipped into a puzzled and benumbed indignation at how little, after all, the proper knowledge of mining and the price of their wounds and infirmities had bought them. He could see it in their faces, the set of their shoulders, the way they stared before them. The very atmosphere around them seemed to be changing, and in it Music felt a growing resentment toward him he hadn’t noticed before. It seemed to harden into shape even as he became aware of it, as though, because he was an ignorant stranger, they had thought to instruct him, only to realize, somehow, in some manner, they had been playing the fool.

At last Worth Enloe rose, primed, and put the spark to the carbide lamp on his cap. “Gay, goddammit,” he said, “hit ain’t no clacker a-laying around out here.”

Gay Dickerson, looking confused and ashamed, got up and lit his lamp as well; and quick as that, the two of them began to duck walk back into the low drift.

“Well, goddam,” Music said to himself, looking after them.

The light from their lamps bobbled deeper into the mountain, and the cool breath of the coal mine seemed to wash out of the drift mouth in their wake, the odor of the bowels of the earth tainted with man piss and mule dung. Late season crickets grated slowly, haltingly in the cool night air. And a little at a time it came to him that, though they might have started out treating him with native forbearance and courtesy because he was a stranger, they had somehow realized as they talked that he wasn’t a stranger at all, but an old enemy, hired to keep them in line and paid for by their labor. They had not listed him in their litany of complaints, but there he was, wearing a badge and gun; and if they had forgot that for a moment, they had remembered it soon enough. It was only that the other miners, not so well off as Worth and Gay, never forgot, not even for a second.

But hellkatoot, Music thought, if it weren’t me rigged out with a damned pistol and a badge, it would only be somebody else. Only a fool would turn down three dollars a day in such times. He had never made so much money. Even when he worked as a lineman out in Chicago, he had made only fifteen cents an hour, and that for working twenty-three hundred volts, hot, and with shitty equipment. At Hardcastle, he worked only every other day and still made an average of ten and a half dollars a week; that was forty-two dollars a month. If he worked only a few months, he wouldn’t have to go home like a bum, a whipped dog. He could buy himself an automobile if he desired it. A single month’s pay would buy a sound used one.

He could see himself turning off the county road onto the washed-out wagon road up to his house, the motor of a dark blue, four-door Chevrolet chortling pleasantly under the hood. His father, out by the barn, would watch the car approach, quiet, suspicious, his instincts alerted to deal with some stranger, possibly a drummer, possibly the agent of some unknown trouble about to assail him from the larger world. His mother, looking through the kitchen window, as yet only curious and surprised, would utter a scarcely audible “Now who in the world?” His brothers, never even thinking to be curious or mistrustful, would merely be delighted at the sight of an automobile which was about to come to rest, if only for a moment, upon the stones, mud, sawdust, and chicken shit of their own, personal barnyard.

Yes, he thought, that’s the way it would be.

And later, after all the greetings and talk, during which his brothers could not help being more interested in the car than in him, he’d take his brothers for a ride, and there would be joking and laughter and high, good spirits. And later still, he would take his father and his mother to church, say, and his father would be silent and grave, perhaps puzzling over whether or not he approved of an automobile in the family, having already acknowledged, without quite knowing it, that there were things in the world, like riding in cars and airplanes and lodging in fine hotels, that were not appropriate to his station in life. So he would sit puzzled and dignified and not altogether happy. His mother, dressed in her finest, would be scarcely less confused, but flustered and giddy as well; for, whatever else the automobile might mean or signify, it would be a sign to her that her son had gone off into the great world and not only survived it and come home, but had somehow wrested from it an expensive marvel he had mastered and tamed to his purpose, which, at the moment, seemed to be nothing more profound than conveying her to church like a grand lady.

Yes, he thought, yes, that’s the way it would be.

Far back inside the mountain the Jeffry Short-Wall machine began to eat noisily at the coal face in some room or other, and Music came back to himself as though he had actually, even physically, been somewhere else. He withdrew Regus’s pocket watch and checked the time. It was eight-thirty and Regus was no doubt asleep upon the iron cot in the powerhouse, where, at ten, he would enter to wake him, give him back his watch, and take his place upon the cot. In the meantime he was, he realized, supposed to be roaming. Since he had hired on, Kenton Hardcastle wanted two guards on his property at all times and wanted at least one of them on the move.

He started down the mountain beside the conveyor, descending at once through a thin gauze of smoke which hung suspended no more than a hundred and fifty feet above the valley. It was as though he had slipped below the still surface of a lake, and beneath it he became aware of a double sound: what seemed to be the distant cadence of preaching overlaid now and then with sometimes grave, sometimes joyous, cries. Now and again the preacher’s voice, if that’s what it was, submerged completely beneath the hubbub from the congregation. He paused for a moment and listened, and at first he thought he had fooled himself and what he heard was only the distant belling of hounds somewhere down the valley, but then he heard voices say quite clearly, although in perfect miniature, “Praise Jesus. Hallelujah.”

There was a church meeting going on somewhere. Down toward Mink Slide, he suspected.

At the foot of the mountain he passed beneath the black, hulking structure of the tipple and went on down the railroad siding. But curious as he was, he could hear nothing but the noise of his own footsteps, the liquid murmur of the river, and, from the powerhouse, the hum of the steam turbine and the windy whir of wheel and belt. He crossed the bridge and came up by the commissary, where an outside floodlight lit the gallery and a night-light glowed from within. Still, there was nothing but the confabulation from the coal company shacks directly across the street: somewhere among them, bits of talk; somewhere, the grinding pop of a rocking chair; somewhere, the incessant, soft crying of a child. But then, far off to the south, he heard a single voice, high and nasal and without the least vibrato, begin to sing, joined by the end of the first melodic phrase by other voices, which sang over and over again:

I am the man, Thomas, I am the man.

I am the man, Thomas, I am the man

I am the man, Thomas, I am the man

Look at the nail prints in my hand.

He went down the street past the boarded-up movie house where, Cecil told him, everyone in Elkin had once spent part of Saturday night since, each week, tickets for every member of a miner’s family were stuck in his pay envelope and the price was automatically deducted from his wages. It was a practice that had ended three years back, when someone tried to burn the movie house down one Friday night while Kenton Hardcastle, his wife, children, and housekeeper were watching
Rio Rita
by themselves. A tattered and faded poster beside the double doors still advertised
Rio Rita
, but only the Hardcastle family and the colored housekeeper had ever gotten to see it, although every miner in Elkin had had the price of admission deducted from his wages. The building still sagged toward the right rear, where the fire had burned through some of the supports. Giving the scorched rear section of it a passing glance, Music fancied he could still smell the sweet, creosoty stench of the long-dead fire.

The singing had stopped by the time he got to the depot, but he had isolated a shack at the end of the second row of company houses where a ragged, hoarse voice was reciting: “‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?’”

“No, oh no,” a woman’s voice said, and a jumbled chorus of voices added, “Amen.”

Sure, Music thought, seeing in the moony dark the simple rough cross fixed to the porch roof. He had noticed it the week before when he and Regus took the new yellow-dog contracts around to be signed.
Church
was printed upon the arms of the cross and
holiness
down the shaft in such a manner that the first
h
in
church
began the word
holiness
. The small, quiet man who lived in the house—Music even remembered his name: Bydee Flann it was—had read the contract over carefully and appeared to be angry; but he had only covered his face with his hands for a moment before he signed the paper and handed it back. Music remembered it all very clearly because he’d felt a deep need to apologize to the man, although he had not done so. Full of curiosity, he crossed the broken pavement of the road and climbed the bank toward the three rows of company houses.

“‘As it is written,’” the weary voice said, “‘for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’”

“Yes, brother. Amen,” said the congregation.

“Yea, but I tell ye, we cannot be torn-nah from his grasp-pah!” the preacher’s voice said with sudden raw volume just as Music came abreast of the lighted window of Bydee’s house and looked in upon the crowded room.

“Amen,” someone said.

“Hallelujah.”

“Lord, we know only a little,” Bydee Flann said in a voice so ruined it sounded like a wood rasp. “In our ignorance we don’t know what to hope for, ner what to pray for.”

“Amen.”

“Amen.”

He was not, Music saw, somehow quite the man he had seen before. It wasn’t just a matter of the rough, ragged work shirt having been changed for one of those old-fashioned white dress shirts with the replaceable celluloid collars—although Bydee’s had no collar at all—and his patched work pants having become a pair of black dress pants worn slick and green as the body of an old housefly; it was a matter of strength and dignity and authority. Sweat glistened on his cheeks, and not a member of the congregation so much as coughed or moved while he traced his finger along the page of the open Bible before him and, in his soft, hoarse voice, read: “‘For we know not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.’” Bydee Flann, become preacher, nodded his head with profound understanding and stood back a step from the rough, homemade little lectern before him. “Thank God,” he whispered, “thank God.” He pointed his finger at an old woman who sat with four children on one of the makeshift pews, nothing more than a plank supported between two chairs. “Thank God for yer suffering, sister,” he said.

“Thank you, Jesus,” the woman said.

“You,” the preacher said, pointing to a man who sat looking at the floor, his huge hands hanging between his knees. The man responded, “Thank you, Lord,” somehow knowing at once where the preacher was pointing.

“You and you and you,” the preacher said pointing to other members of the congregation, and there was a chorus of answers; the women seeming to thank Jesus; the men, to thank the Lord.

The preacher went back to the open Bible upon the lectern and read again in his hoarse, ruined voice: “‘The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God. And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.’”

The preacher stepped back and raised his hands and closed his eyes. Sweat soaked his shirt through under his arms, made a dark streak down his back. “Praise God,” he said. “Hallelujah.”

“Hallelujah.”

“Amen.”

“Children of God,” the preacher said. “Heirs of God! Do you want more than that? Do you need more than that? You better love your suffering!” he shouted. “You better thank God for it! He keeps strict account! Didn’t He allow his only son to be cursed-dah and spat upon and nailed-dah to the cross?” Raising his right hand over his head, his forefinger protruding like the barrel of a gun, the preacher walked among his congregation. “Child of God-dah, ye’ll sit on His right hand-dah!” he shouted, pointing his finger at a small blond girl Music had seen standing beside the ball field that first night he had come through town. “Heir of God-dah,” the preacher shouted, pointing to a woman whose narrow, wrinkled face looked close to both ecstasy and weeping, “ye’ll dwell in Glory!” He paced back and forth, singling out members of his congregation. “For though the body be dead-dah because of sin-nah; the Spirit is life-fah because of righteousness! Rejoice!” he cried. “Rejoice!” He pointed his finger at a rawboned, lantern-jawed man who sat toward the rear of the small, crowded room, a man who was half a head taller than anyone else. “You are called-dah! Justified-dah! Glorified-dah!”

The man loomed up. His eyes, which had been feverishly upon the small, grey-haired preacher, rolled back into his head as though he were going to faint, and he began to tremble and shake, head to foot. Outside the window, Music took an involuntary step backward as the tall man’s jaw seemed to unhinge itself and wag, and a rhythmic and unintelligible succession of syllables issued from his mouth while only the whites of his eyes showed and his body continued to shake and jerk. Across the room another man rose. He was bent nearly double, and his mouth, without the superstructure of teeth, collapsed upon itself again and again as he spoke a low and singsongy bass. A woman rose too and added her voice.