The Well and the Mine (21 page)

“Mama, did you think it was fun goin’ with boys?”

“Depended on the boy,” she said.

“But you enjoyed it?”

“Not any fonder of the Olsen boy than you were of Henry Harken?”

I thought about that. “Yes’m, I guess I like him better than Henry. He’s real polite, and he doesn’t talk too much—but he does talk enough—and when I smile at him, he smiles back twice as big.”

“That’s something,” she said. “I take him for a nice boy.” Lunches packed and dishes washed, she pulled out the bread-making bowl, a deep wooden circle almost big enough for Tess to sit in. I watched Mama sift the flour, measure out the soda and the buttermilk. Her hands never sped up or paused in the kitchen—they danced from bowl to jar to spoon to basin to dish towel, pouring and stirring and wiping and measuring and testing. I loved to watch the patterns of her hands.

“It seems lots harder than talking to girls, though,” I said.

“How do you figure?” That was one thing about Mama—she was good at letting you talk, at poking and prodding you to where you had to find the truth behind what you were saying. She wasn’t going to waste much time talking herself, and she didn’t always care to tell you how to solve your problems, but she would listen all day long and keep you talking until you knew what you really meant to say.

“You don’t know what boys are thinkin’.”

“I never have known just what girls are thinkin’, neither.” She stirred and ground the yeast in a few spoonfuls of hot water. “Smashing the yeast,” she called it. If it wasn’t smashed good, the bread wouldn’t rise.

“Well, no, but…” I had to start over. “With boys you have to figure out why they’re talkin’ to you and then what they’re thinkin’ about you.”

“Thought you said you didn’t care for any of them in particular.”

“I don’t.”

“Then it don’t matter what they think, does it?”

I sucked up the sweet, heavy yeast smell. The kitchen was full of it. “But you have to figure out what you think of them.”

“Ah,” she said. “Now I see.”

“See what?”

“What’s worryin’ you.”

“That boys are hard to figure?”

She had her hands in the dough, squeezing and turning. “That you don’t know how to tell which ones are worth botherin’ with. Flour the counter for me?”

I’d stepped between her and the sack of flour, and she moved the bowl aside, giving me space to scatter a handful of flour on the tabletop. I evened it out with the flat of my hand, and she dropped the lump of dough in the middle of it, rubbing her hands against mine to coat them white again. She’d make four or five loaves at one time, enough to last for a week.

“How did you and Papa meet?” I asked as she pulled the dough apart.

“At a big bonfire. I went over with my papa, and Albert came up and introduced himself.”

“Why did he walk over to you? He liked you right away, before he even met you?”

“Well, I’d nearly set my hair on fire. Might’ve caught his attention.”

“What did you think of him?” The flour covered her wrists, and she’d gotten a smudge on her cheek. She caught the knob of a drawer with her pinky, pulling out the rolling pin without leaving a trace of flour behind.

“He was nice enough. Liked his eyes. My daddy liked him.”

“Did you think you’d marry him?”

“Land’s sakes, no.”

“When did you change your mind?”

She turned to the side, both hands still on the rolling pin, and leaned against the sink. “He asked me, and I said yes.”

That wasn’t at all what I was looking for. “But how did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That you wanted to marry him?”

She stopped rolling, holding her doughed and floured hands bent at the wrist. That moment of thinking only lasted long enough for her to wipe her forehead with her arm and let out a long breath.

“He was a good man. Good to me. I liked his company.”

My mother wasn’t ever a big talker. And she wasn’t what you would call the most romantic soul.

I wondered what kind of soul I was.

Albert
THE END OF THE AFTERNOON SHIFT WAS PAYDAY, AND,
like every other Friday, by the time we stepped out of the cage into the sunshine, there was already two lines—one Negro, one white—snaking up to the two windows of the office. It was a smiling bunch of men, laughing, scratching, and spitting. Clumps of us stood around chatting, puffing out streams of smoke, and enjoying the feeling of money in our pockets. You never wanted to rush home after payday. The money turned the day sharper and fresher and lifted the dust off you better than shower spray. Negro girls stood a ways off, shifting their hips side to side looking to catch a Negro fellow with money in his pocket. The white women for sale waited for the men to come to them in town. Galloway used paper scrip, but some of the other mines gave out scrip in their own kind of metal coins, dugaloo. You could go to a picture show for a dime, but it’d cost you fifteen cents in dugaloo. I wondered if the whores made that same kind of markup.

I saw Jonah over there in his line, and our eyes met for a second. There wasn’t much talkin’ between the lines. Belowground, sure, but once you stepped off the elevator, there were clear enough paths in opposite directions. We nodded, a tip of the head so small it wasn’t much different than letting out a deep breath. I wanted to ask him about coming over to the house, and the two lines seemed stupid and inconvenient. But I figured I’d ask him later.

The line moved fast, and soon enough I was scribbling my name on a line in the pay book, signing off on twelve dollars and forty cents for the two weeks. I turned around, hearing the coins jangle, stepping in time so they’d play a song. Walking toward me was a fellow I knew well enough, not so’s we’d chat, but he was coming straight at me, nearly running. Feeling friendly because of payday, I thought, flush with satisfaction myself. I smiled and nodded at him, ready to call his name, when I realized he was shaking his head. Shaking his head like I was doing something wrong. So until his boots were a couple of inches from mine, I stood there hitching my pockets and listening to my coins, wondering for those few seconds why he looked so unhappy when he had full pockets.

He said, “Your boy’s been hit by a truck.”

And then I didn’t hear nothing. No more coins making music, no more words coming out of his mouth, even though his lips kept moving. I couldn’t think to take the smile off my face, only stood there deaf and grinning.

8 The Well Woman

Jack
YEARS LATER, ALL I COULD EVER CONJURE WAS THE
sirens whirring and the taste of dirt. I couldn’t for the life of me remember that truck hitting me. I’d been walking to the ball game, and I heard the sounds of tires skidding on dirt behind me, which was different than tires skidding on pavement. I remember thinking the fellows would be so jealous I got to ride in the ambulance.

It was a decade later before I asked Pop why he didn’t sue that brick company. People then weren’t as litigious as they are now, but even then the common gossip was that he would have gotten a fat settlement just for shutting up. Maybe enough to send his kids to college. Maybe enough even to stop mining.

He wouldn’t consider it. Mama wanted him to, but she didn’t push. She never pushed. Aunt Celia wanted him to, and she pushed plenty.

What Pop said was, “Ain’t no reason to be demandin’ somethin’ of people. Don’t know their story. Best to take care of your own.” He didn’t mention that the driver never even slowed down after he hit me, and that maybe that was all of his story that we needed to know. But I suspect the world of legality and contracts and lawyers in seersucker suits seemed unreachable to him, undesirable. I wonder if that world seemed any less foreign after I received my law degree.

But at the time, of course, I didn’t question him at all. To hear Pop declare something was so was like hearing the voice of God. He and Mama were always a little more than human to us.

When Mama was ninety, she had a bad stroke that left her in the hospital for two months. She could hardly move her left side, just wiggle her fingers, and the doctors in Jasper said she’d never be able to eat on her own again. She choked every time she tried to swallow. Tess was back living with her then, and Virgie came up from Montgomery for a few weeks to help. I came down from Atlanta, and all us kids were back at home for a couple of weeks. We took her home from the hospital with a feeding tube, but she wouldn’t let the nurse hook it up. Instead she had us bring her meals to her bedroom and close the door behind us. She said, garbled but firm, to leave her be. I drove down twice a week, and for a few months, she’d hardly make a dent in a plateful of food. Then one day she came out before lunchtime and sat herself down at the table. She ate every bite on her plate.

The only time I ever say Mama cry was when I was lying there in the hospital with the dirt from the road still on me. She didn’t know I was awake. And I saw Pop’s face lined and old and afraid. I got to see the people that were under my pop and mama, and even though it was just a glimmer, it scared me.

That truck knocked more than my teeth loose when it hit me.

Leta
THERE WERE STILL BRICKS ON THE GROUND, AND I
couldn’t help but look and see if there was blood on them. It was a brick truck from Tupelo, Mississippi, was what they told me. Whether the driver was drunk or asleep or just plain worthless, he’d veered off and knocked Jack into a ditch, swerved back onto the road, and left nothing but those bricks behind him. Somewhere down the road somebody flagged him down, and he finally stopped, but he wouldn’t even get out of the truck. Just gave the company name, said he was sorry, and that he hadn’t seen Jack at all. Thought he’d hit a dog.

He should’ve stopped for a dog.

It was the farthest trip I ever took in the car, with Albert coming by the house from work to pick me up. The neighbors had gotten to me a little before the men at the mines got word to Albert, so I was dressed and ready when he pulled up the drive. Nobody knew much other than that Jack had been hit and that he wasn’t moving or talking when they loaded him into the ambulance. And it looked bad enough that they took him on to Birmingham.

Of course to get to Birmingham we went straight down 78, right past where Jack was hit. Which I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for the bricks. No blood that I could see after I had Albert pull off the road even though he didn’t think I should be looking. But the bricks had dented the dirt. It made a high, long whine build up in my throat to think that what could leave gashes in the earth had left its mark on Jack. But I caught that strange, scared sound by clapping my hand over my mouth, and I swallowed it like cough medicine. Albert and I didn’t say a word all the way to the hospital.

Tess
PAPA WOULDN’T COMPLAIN TO THE BRICK COMPANY.
He said what’s done is done. (His eyes were red, which the mines brung about sometimes, but instead of making them look uglier, it made the blue seem brighter.) He squatted down next to me and told me Jack had been hurt real bad, and for a while all I could think was that his eyes were like sky and roses.

Virgie
MAMA AND PAPA WOULDN’T LET US GO WITH THEM
when they drove after the ambulance. They stopped by Mrs. Hudson’s and asked her to come over, so we sat around while she tried to make small talk. We couldn’t do anything but wait, but that seemed to take up most of our energy; it was exhausting to try to be polite and listen to her. It took a lot of convincing to get her to go back to her own family and let me take care of supper for Tess and me. Finally she did. I made cornbread with cracklin’, thinking to give Tess a treat and keep myself busy for a little while, but neither of us could eat much.

I give Mrs. Hudson credit for not telling us much about the talk around town. After she left, neighbors started coming by, asking if we’d heard anything even though they could see for themselves the car wasn’t back in the driveway. And they’d say they were praying for Jack and “hope to goodness there wasn’t no bleeding inside.” Or that “God willing he won’t be a cripple for life.” Pretty soon we turned out the lights and stopped answering the door.

Mama and Papa drove in sometime after dark, both walking stooped and slow. They managed to smile when we met them at the door. “Don’t worry,” said Mama. “He’ll be right as rain.”

No bleeding inside, at least the doctors were fairly sure of it. He broke two ribs, but they hadn’t torn his lungs. He broke an arm and a leg and cracked his skull enough to leave a lump and skint his face on the gravel. That list sounded bad enough, but the next day when Tess and I got to skip school to go see him, the words seemed empty next to staring at his face—eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks—all there but shifted around. Swollen and black and blue and purple, his face looked like it had been shaken and not quite fallen back into place. His smile at least was the same, only more gap-toothed.

I had to beg Mama to let me come sit with him for another day or two, and even though she only let me miss one more school day, I pretty much camped out at Norwood over the next two weekends. Mama was there all the time, sometimes overnight. Papa had to work, of course, so he’d drive Mama to Birmingham, drive back to the mine, then pick her up and take her home. And do it all over again the next day.

It was the first time I’d been to Birmingham, and I didn’t want to get out of the car at the hospital. I didn’t belong. And not only because of the strangeness of the place itself, the size and the noise of it. The people were different. As we drove through downtown, the people on the streets looked like they’d stepped out of a magazine. The girls had the prettiest dresses—the streets one big parade of chiffon and georgette crepe. Pinks and blues and lavenders, like dainty Easter eggs. The men all wore suits with shoes so shiny the sun reflected off them. They moved like they had someplace important to be.

“Different, ain’t it?” said Papa that first time I stepped down on Birmingham pavement.

The air was full of dust at home, but the air in Birmingham was different. My nose and throat stopped up as soon as I stepped outside. And even though there wasn’t a trace of red rock, my white gloves were dirty, covered in some sort of gray grime even when I didn’t touch a thing. It was an unreal thing, looking up at the thick cloud hanging over the city where you couldn’t hardly see any normal, white clouds, then looking around and seeing satin slippers stepping through those dingy streets. The streets in Birmingham made me think more than Carbon Hill streets did.

I felt like an explorer, walking past more Model As and Model Ts than I’d ever seen in one place. I was like Columbus discovering the Indians. Like I’d taken a wrong turn and stumbled on some other world with a different sky and different air, different land—all paved over, almost no grass to be seen—different buildings that stretched toward the smoke. Tall and thin like pencils, the downtown buildings looked sure to topple over. They blocked out bits of the sky, and I soon found out that at night they blocked out stars. Past the tall buildings, the smokestacks muscled into the city. A few blocks over on First Avenue, Sloss Furnaces spit sparks and flames, fireworks I could see from the street. Every way I looked, something was being made and its leftovers were pouring into the sky.

It made me think of the smallness of Carbon Hill in a way that I hadn’t before. I couldn’t have imagined this place. Tess was the one good at playing pretend, but I didn’t think even she could have thought this up. It didn’t bother me much that I hadn’t been able to imagine it, but I couldn’t stand that I’d never even tried. Carbon Hill had wrapped me up warm and snug, and I never thought of leaving it. I didn’t particularly care for Birmingham, but I thought I should have known about it, at least wondered about it. I started running through the other places that were only words—the Grand Ole Opry came through the radio from a giant stage called Nashville, as exciting and unimaginable as Washington, D.C., or England or Montgomery. Those places didn’t have any people on the front porches or crickets chirping at night or kids playing in the front yards. All they had was a syllable or two, with nothing behind them. Like Amelia Earhart flying across the Atlantic. President Hoover and Governor Graves. Just ideas, all of them.

Same as nurses. Doctors I’d known, but I’d never met a nurse before, and at first they all blended together in their stiff pinafores and blue-and-white checked dresses, fluttering around Jack’s bed. Every inch of them was ironed and starched from their bibs and aprons to their caps, and I wondered how they kept them so white working around bleeding people. Those first couple of days they checked on Jack all the time, partly because something could still pop up unexpected, and partly, I figured, because he was cute. At some point I started noticing that a young, freckled one with thick hair twisted under her cap seemed to be there most of all.

“How do you get it all so straight?” I asked finally, surprising me and her. She didn’t answer me until I added, “Your uniforms. They’re so perfect. Even the collars.”

“Iron ’em while they’re wet on a good, hard board, and won’t be a wrinkle in them,” she said, then leaned toward me over Jack’s bed. “And the collars, they’d slit our throats they’re so sharp. You’ve got to put a little soap under the edge so they don’t rub your throat raw.”

Just like that, with talk about a bloody neck, she turned into a real person. She’d call me by name when she came to check on Jack’s bandages and take his temperature (which could mean he had an infection of some sort, she said), and I learned about her three younger sisters in Atlanta. Robin was the first nurse in her family, and she’d given her old uniforms from nursing school to her sisters so they could pretend and maybe get the itch to get trained themselves. “Can’t count on findin’ the man you want,” she said. “Might as well know you can make a livin’.”

By the time Jack went home, I’d found out that she was sweet on a law clerk who she met when she stitched up his foot after a nail went clean through it. If he asked her to marry him, she wouldn’t be a nurse much longer. She didn’t seem too upset about that—with hospital rules she’d either have to give up nursing or give up the boy, and she wasn’t about to let him go. The romance didn’t interest me much, though. I was taken with her spotless uniform and her little triangle of a cap that always stayed exactly in the middle of her head. I liked how sure she seemed of herself and her job, how she smiled at Jack and laid her hand on his forehead like he was kin, not some boy she happened to be paid to take care of. And I could be like her as easy as I could be a teacher, which had become more than just two syllables long before. A teacher was Miss Etheridge with her soft voice or a dozen other women I’d know by face and voice and mannerisms. And now a nurse was not just a woman in a starched pinafore—a nurse was Robin O’Reilly. In a day, Birmingham and nurses became touchable things and it put me in a mind to reconsider all those other paper-thin ideas that must have as much substance behind them. Somewhere Amelia Earhart, flying airplanes and wearing pants, had as clear a voice as Miss Etheridge or hands as fast as Mama’s. The thought was so heavy—too heavy—it made my head jerk.

I could only think of far-off people and places for so long before I’d glance down and see Jack looking up at me. My brother hurt and tucked in bed, that was something I knew. And that something won out over all my new thoughts with no battle at all. With outside the hospital more overwhelming than appealing, I was just fine in Jack’s ward. I’d sit on the edge of his bed, stroking his hair, which he always loved. We’d play tic-tac-toe for hours, and when his eyes were droopy but he was too stubborn to close them, I’d sing softly “You Are My Sunshine.” He didn’t care for the please-don’t-take-my-sunshine-away part, which made him think about me leaving, so instead I sang, “No one can take my sunshine away.”

Albert
I’D NEVER SEEN A SMALLER THING THAN MY BOY LYING
in that hospital bed. Looked like a breeze would carry him away. Eyes blackened, blood still in his hair, arm and leg fresh in casts. I was there with Leta and the girls that first morning he woke up in the hospital—the only daylight in a long, long stretch that I didn’t spend time belowground.

“I’m like you, Pop,” Jack said, all smiles, a hole where one tooth should have been. Cheerful eyes staring out of the bruises. “I can take whatever they throw at me. Trucks and all.”