Listen Here (62 page)

Addie had married at fifteen into the Morris family, who were victims of a change that had been going on since 1812, when the salt wells were dug north of the river at Burning Springs, a few miles east of Charleston. Christopher Morris, her husband, like most of the men, had gone into the new mines. He was a drunkard, but then so many of them were. He did beat her, but in that world of coal mining, day long, night long, where petrified tree trunks called kettles could loosen and kill, where the white bones of ancient fish in the coal caught the light from the miners' head lamps, and the crystal skeletons of plants were known as flowers of darkness, where accidents waited for millennia when the earth was disturbed, the men were all edged with fear, like people in a perpetual war who go about their business as best they can.

There were too many shootings on Saturday nights. From the new language of machinery and the railroad they took the phrase “letting off steam.” In winter, when he had work, Chris Morris left home before dawn with his carbide lamp lit on his miner's hard hat to show him the way; he made the daily trip by mule-drawn tram into the mine, sometimes as far as two or three miles. When he returned, long after dark, with his lamp lit to show him the way home, Addie heated water on the kitchen range and tried to scrub off the black gold while he sat in the washtub.

You could tell a coal miner by his eyes, and it was still so when I was a child there. They were darkened around the rims with coal dust that never came off—Nefertiti eyes. Yes, he beat her. Yes, he drank. Men then lived hard, died early, carried guns, gambled, and, being so on the tether of some decision made someplace else by men who didn't know their names, they swaggered even more. Those with brains fought their way downriver, to college, but carried the scars of the coal business, and still do. The feudalism. The exploiting of earth and men. Owner and worker, each far from the other, were threatened by the same diseases of danger and indifference, recognized each other as brothers who don't claim kin.

We are all marked, who have lived and been blooded by the coal fields. We never get away because it is deep in us, whether our fathers have worked the coal face, or bought our clothes and our college educations with money that was as black as the rims of coal miners' eyes. We have all been formed long before human ancestry or our culture or kindness or hatred or lack of money has affected us. These are all personal. And they can twist and stunt, or lie fallow in us, or help us grow strong.

But the coal mines, the darkness, like the mark of Cain, are as deep within us as the eons that formed us both, slowly and inexorably, millions of years ago, where patient time has crushed and dried ancient seas, swamps, forests, animals into something mysterious that seduced the world we lived in, made us rich, made us poor, broke the health of some of us, made some of us refugees. Like people who have been deserted by a lover, we may hate it, but we never forget it.

…

Mother Jones had left the coal town of Cedar Grove until late in her conquest of Kelly's Creek. It was not completely a company town. The boat yard and the mill were working, and the railroad owned property. All through the growing town there were still areas owned by my grandfather, and he could still say that he had kept the house and the acres around it away from what were being called, by all West Virginians, the “outside interests.” “Outside interests” cornered the mines, “outside agitators” were trying to organize them. West Virginians, who had sold to whoever would buy, sat in the middle, innocently claiming that “outside” was ruining their land and starving the miners.

When Mother Jones tried to find a field to have a meeting in the town of Cedar Grove, there was little land that did not belong to the companies or to the local mine owners.

Behind the facade of the Big House, little seemed to have changed. Everybody still had their place at the supper table, and there were still silver napkin rings with their names on them that enclosed damask napkins. By 1902 there were two grown half sisters, Myrtle and Bertha, old enough to court, brother Pressy, two younger brothers, Roger and Bado, two Tompkins girls, my mother Rachel and little Helen, two long-staying cousins of Addie, and a tutor and nurse for the youngest. Mr. Tompkins sat at the head of the table and served the meat. Mrs. Tompkins sat at the foot of the table and served the vegetables. After the long prayer, said by Mrs. Tompkins, there was usually a babble of voices.

At the supper table one winter night in 1902, all the family discussed the terrible Mother Jones who looked like a little old lady and had a mouth like a section foreman. Mr. Tompkins said she had sent him a message that she wanted to use his land to have a meeting but he wouldn't let her, and besides, most of the subsurface had been leased out, so he didn't have the right.

For once, nobody at the table said a word. The only sounds were the scrape of forks, passing of hot potatoes, reaching out by Mr. Tompkins for plates to serve second helpings. The whole table had retreated into a silence where everybody seemed to be someplace else or waiting for someone else to say something. My mother, who was ten, said she had never been in the dining room when it was so quiet.

Finally Addie spoke.

“Mr. Tompkins,” she said, “do I own the bull field outright?” He had turned over some of the property to her when there was one of the boombust fears of bankruptcy.

“Yes my dear, you know that,” he told her, and then, according to my mother, there was another silence.

Then Addie announced, “Then Mother Jones can use my bull field for her speech.”

Grandfather forbade the children to go to the meeting, and Addie agreed. “I don't want a single one of you children going out there with that bunch of miners. Those men are armed and dangerous,” she told them, laying down the law. “Now I mean it,” she added, not trusting them.

My mother was the only one who disobeyed. A few nights later, Mother Jones spoke in the bull field and my mother, thank God, provided me with an eyewitness. She crept down the back stairs and scuttled out through the dark up the creek to the field where the miners' lamps lit the black sky like fireflies mingling with the winter stars. Beyond the dark crowd of men, the famous Mother Jones stood in dirty clothes on a feed box raising hell, so far away that my mother, hiding by the fence so nobody would see her and tell Addie, could only see the shape of her, even though she was lit up with pitchpine torches. But she heard her.

“She was a little tiny woman. She hollered just like a Holy Roller preacher, and she gave the miners hell. She told them they were cowards and didn't have backbones and didn't stand up for each other. I thought she was mean to them,” she said, when I asked her years afterwards if she had ever seen Mother Jones. “My God, she used language I never would let pass my lips, and she had grown men crying. I wouldn't have missed it for a farm in Georgia.” Then she smiled and said, “I was the only one brave enough to disobey my mother.”

from Before the Revolution—1960

For the second time in my life I saw Jake Catlett—not that I knew it. It would take years for me to recall a sixteen-year-old boy, old Jake's least one, who looked, in his Sunday suit, like Ichabod Crane.

At the jail that late afternoon I only saw the back of the man who had murdered my brother, and I wanted, in a surge of hate, to kill him, stamp him out. He was leaning on the jail windowsill, watching downriver through the bars. When Jack opened the cell door he didn't look around or speak, even when Jack said, “Somebody to see you,” and then, “Catlett, you got a visitor.” I saw his back arch as Jack walked toward him.

“Let me talk to him by myself,” I whispered. When I heard his name I only connected it with the Catlett that my mother said brought her papa downriver on a shutter.

He turned around. The man who stood there, watching me, was tall and quiet. The grief in his black eyes under heavy brows was so deep it could have been mistaken for aloofness. His face was gaunt and made without fat, his black hair fell long on his neck, the sideburns made his cheeks hollow. He needed a shave. He was spare-boned, straight, skinny as a rake; his head jutted forward as he took me in slowly, then Jack, and said, low, like a man not used to speaking, “I don't want to talk to nobody.”

I was afraid Jack would say something to make the man retreat into the isolated mountain of himself.

“Can I stay for a minute, by myself?” I begged.

Jack knew when he was shut out. He made one last try. “Okay, Catlett, you're in enough trouble.”

“I ain't gonna bother no lady,” Jake Catlett told him.

We could hear the rattle of Jack's steps as he went across the iron floor and clanged the outside cell door, and sat down within hearing in case I raised my voice.

Like any other cage, the cell had bars; the sun drew them in great shadows across the sleeping face of a man in the next cell. The place smelled of urine and Lysol. We stood, watching each other. What had happened did not show with him. He was just waiting, shut away from the river; he kept on glancing at it, clenching and unclenching his long spare hands.

“You from the newspaper?” he finally asked.

“No.” I sank down on the end of the rack, becoming small, obliterating anything that might rouse his distrust, because he had to tell me what he didn't know himself. I was in an agony of guile.

“What did you come for, then?” His voice came on strong. He was rooted out, ground-hog cornered.

“Catlett, shut up.” The man in the next cell turned over and went to sleep again.

“Don't pay him no mind. He's full of sneaky pete.” Jake Catlett stared at the man's scrap-bag back.

“It was my brother,” I whispered.

He looked at me as he would look at a wounded or frightened animal. I, stone-cold, willed him to it harder, using everything I'd lady-learned.

“I never meant to,” he muttered. “I never even knowed him. I never knowed he was your brother.”

I watched him.

“Look, lady. I never meant it. Why, I'm thirty-eight years old. I never done nuthin' like takin' on to scrap like that since I was a boy. You…”

“Tell me!” I had to force him back to where it had to begin, the key, the point, the place.

Jake Catlett sank down on the rack beside me and put his gaunt head between strong hands that could work a coal face, hold a woman hard by the shoulders, or hit Johnny. The black hair on the sunburned back of his fist stood out. That hand was the source—one hand, clenched, one strike—from that one hand, all the questions, a life that would never be the same again, not for him, not for us. I couldn't stop watching it.

We sat so long that the outdoor sounds came in and surrounded us: the beep of a car horn, across the river the whistle of Number 6 as it drew into the station. We were getting used to the smell of each other. The time tightened into the insistence between two people dwelling in the same needs—he to tell, me to learn. I had a dim urge to take his hand.

I broke the tightening stillness. “I heard he said something.”

When he did begin to speak his voice was gentle. He was thinking aloud. He seemed to have forgotten who I was. “I been settin' here figurin'—goin' over and over it. He was just standin' there, and that feller kept callin' on Jesus—I figured I had to shut him up, leave me time to think. Gawd knows, I needed it even if I had to get locked up. That old man kept on and on—
he's
just lookin' out through them bars. I seen his face and his clean white coat in the light from the toilet. That was over at the City before they moved me over to the County. This here is the County. I ain't never been to jail before…Gawd, when I think about Loretta and Maw and Paw…”

He stopped for a minute, then came back from his thinking. “I reckon I flew red. Couldn't nothin' be done to shut that old feller up.
He's
the only one I could see. I took and hit him one and he—you know, when you shoot, a bird seems to linger in the air for the longest time, only it ain't more than a second. I seen him standin' before he fell and he looked kind of surprised. Then he said, Thank you.' He said a real quiet thank you, and just sighed down on the floor and hit that iron rack. Jeez Christ, I hated him when he said that, that thank you, lording it over a goddamn drunk tank. I never hit him hard. Just blowed off the last of my steam. I figured he was makin' fun of the rest of us…”

“How long had you been standing there looking at Johnny before you hit him?” It was such a curious question, not what I had meant to ask him. I wasn't seeking the power in one Saturday-night pint, but the power behind that.

“Just about all my life.” He looked at me then.

I began to laugh. It insulted him. I managed to stop laughing.

“Y'ought to be ashamed of yourself. Settin' there laughin' with your brother not cold in his grave. I can sure see you two are brother and sister.”

“That's the trouble with all you damned people who strike out blind. Your fist is packed for an enemy, so you hit the first person who looks like him.” Disgust of the man beside me made me stand up to get away from him.

He looked up at me and studied me for a while as he must have studied Johnny. “You people make me sick. When you spit you hawk coal dust same as us.” He was taking the bandage of wariness and grief and surprise from his eyes, and they showed clear, clean hate—lit up with it—something honest to deal with.

“What got you into it, Jake? What put the chip on your shoulder?” I questioned fast, before he could retreat again.

That curious tenderness of quiet men, even with the hate there, made him get up and put his hand on my shoulder. His grip was viselike.

“Now look here, lady. I'm goin' to tell you. It's too late not to, ain't it?”

“Yeah, it's too late not to.” Our hands had the same shape. Behind us we could hear Number 6 pull out of the station, going west.

“I've about had enough. Here I end up with ten thousand dollars' bail and I ain't never had nuthin' since we sold the farm but a few acres of ridge land and Loretta's womb and Gawd knows ye cain't borry money on that. Looks like a man works hard all his damn life and things are goin' along all but Loretta's womb.”

He sat down and folded his hands in his lap and told himself the story, as he seemed to have told it forever, over and over. “Loretta come to Jesus and took to gettin' sick along about the same time. She had fifteen operations, that purty little gal; she come from up around Beulah—Slavish people. Come here in the mines. Ever time she'd get in the hospital she'd get purty as she ever was. Then she'd come home and get drug down again and takin' to goin' to bear witness on Wednesdays, gettin' up there in public tellin' how she had all them operations and come to Jesus and Maw fussin' and fumin' tell her that kind of carryin' on wasn't like no Jesus she ever knowed. They'd fight and argue about Jesus never shut up. Maw is Baptist, and that there womb of Loretta's must'a had a rock in it that couldn't nobody find start in to draggin' her down again, that thing must'a weighed a ton.” He paused long enough to fetch a deep sigh. “Then this July the union ruled you couldn't have no Number 8 for the hospital, unemployed over a year. I been out of work one year last Saturday, that damn Number 8 was all we had worth a red cent. I was a good coal-face man. I been makin' coal up and down this here valley since I was fifteen years old.” He remembered me and accused, “They ain't a damn thing, ain't even that dress on your back didn't come off the coal-face and don't forgit it. You people puttin' on to act high and mighty…”

From his own coal-face all the way down his life he was getting to Johnny. But his voice had dropped so low that what he had to say ran out toward the floor and I had to lean almost into his lap. He didn't even notice, for he was no longer talking to me.

“We're good people. Come from upriver, up around Lacey Creek. Sold out up there. We had to. Even Paw saw that. Automation come in and we read out to move. Ain't nary a thing left now. They done stripped it. We come down here and Paw bought a little piece of property. Old Carver place…I got me another job.”

I could see the hill farm at Beulah, the neglected fall field rippling, the lespedeza, the orchard covey wurtling in the air, before it was all thrown away, stripped down to bedrock like the Catlett place on Lacey Creek, or this man's face, this distant cousin stranger. “You're Mr. Jake Catlett's son,” I told him. “We're kin, a long way back.” He didn't even hear me.