The Coal Tattoo Read online

  “I don’t feel like singing this evening,” she said, and stood, looking out on the yard. “I’m going to go take a bath. It’s so hot I feel sticky.”

  Easter took her time. She never filled the tub all the way up, but tonight she did. She wanted to lie back and just not think about anything for a little while. The water felt like warm milk on her burned skin. She had gotten up early to hoe out her garden this morning but the sun had been fierce and had reddened the back of her neck and her arms. Her scalp even felt sunburned.

  She wished that she could drift away, be aware of nothing but the water, but she couldn’t. She kept thinking about El, the way he had turned out. El wasn’t mean—he was always happy, in fact—but he liked to drink more than she had ever thought he would. And he loved going into those honky-tonks, liked dancing and hollering. His favorite thing was to talk her into the backseat of the car, almost as if he was excited by the notion that someone might see them tangled up like that. She had thought that he would eventually break down and go to church with her, but she had given up on that. She would be like all those women she had seen when she was growing up, the ones who came in looking tired and defeated, who seemed to get no satisfaction out of life except for going to church. The ones who, at prayer request, always stood with their shoulders hunched and said, “I want everybody here to pray that my husband will see the light and decide to start coming to church.”

  And Anneth. She didn’t even want to think about that mess. Running off and leaving her husband in Nashville without even looking back, starting the divorce procedure. She was glad Anneth was back, and in her happiness Easter had tried to ignore that her sister was about to be divorced after living with her husband less than three months, but Easter knew what lay ahead. More nights of Anneth coming in wild drunk, running the roads with every man who had beautiful eyes or a certain body language or a good voice.

  She splashed water onto her face and sank into the water, letting it overtake her mind as well as her body. She let everything lift from her, rise up with the dampness that drifted off the water.

  She didn’t know how long she rested like that. In a way it felt like a very long time, but it was probably only a few minutes before she started at the sound of the kitchen radio being turned up as loud as it would go. Ray Charles was on, singing that song “What’d I Say.” Preachers all over the place were taking hammers to that particular record because they said it was about sex. She didn’t know how they went about listening to records so closely—she simply heard a fast beat. Still, this was enough to break her peace, and even though she started to run more warm water and try to relax again, she couldn’t. The spell had been broken now. She sighed and ran the cake of Ivory soap down her arms, trying to rid herself of the anger she could feel beneath her skin.

  Easter glided down the hall, pulling the belt on her housecoat tight and patting the towel that was wound about her wet hair. The music was so loud when she came into the kitchen that the sound was tinny and distorted. The little yellow radio sitting on the counter fairly vibrated with Ray Charles’s rough voice. Now she could hear what the preachers heard; it wasn’t so much that the words to the sound were dirty as it was the way he was singing. There was a suggestion in every syllable. She went to the screen door and looked out, but no one had turned on the porch light. All she saw were the empty chairs and past them there was the blackness of night. She pushed open the door and stepped out, and then she saw them there. She stood on the porch and watched them, unable to move for a moment.

  Anneth and El had gone out into the yard and they were dancing near the porch. They weren’t dancing together, really, but were caught up in their own separate magics. El’s eyes were closed and he held both arms over his head as he swayed in place with a strange little smile on his face. Anneth had her eyes closed, too, but she was twisting against the grain of the music, faster than the beat, her hips swaying and jutting. One hand was on her hip and the other was raking her hair back from her face. She threw her head back so that her curls tumbled down in her face again and she laughed, even though the sound of her glee was lost to the music. She moved close to El and turned her back to him, rubbing her whole body against him, her backside brushing his thighs. The dress hugged her hips tightly, the fabric revealing the gentle curves there. Easter wanted to step forward, to grab Anneth and shake some sense into her head, but she still couldn’t move. The sight of them drew out all of her strength.

  Anneth turned to face El and put her hands on the sides of his face, her fingers spread far apart so that her thumbs were nearly in his mouth. El didn’t flinch. He either didn’t realize or didn’t mind that she was touching him this way. Anneth continued to laugh that low, quiet purr that seemed to catch in the back of her throat as she ran her hands down El’s arms and then held on to his hips. She moved too close, the top of her head touching El’s chin, and buried her mouth against his chest as she forced his hips to move back and forth. Then she arched her head back, her neck a long, elegant whiteness. El turned around, still snapping his fingers, his face placid and flat, and Anneth sidled up behind him and slid her hands into his front pockets.

  Easter took two striding steps off the porch, as if stepping over a narrow creek from one mossy bank to another, and grabbed Anneth by the arm. Easter twisted her around. Anneth’s eyes opened; her smile widened, then faded when she saw Easter’s hand slicing through the air to strike her. She didn’t even try to dodge the slap that Easter delivered. The sound of the smack was deafening—so loud Easter could hear it over the music—and then Anneth was recoiling, her eyes wide with disbelief, her hands to her face, one atop the other to cover the redness that spread there.

  “I didn’t—”

  “I was looking right at you!” Easter screamed with so much fervor that the damp towel unraveled from her head and fell onto the sandy yard. The words tore from the back of her throat. “You leave here and never come around my house again. Never!”

  Anneth’s face seemed to flatten, her eyes hard. For just a moment Easter thought Anneth was going to say something else, but then Anneth turned and simply ran away; a few steps, and the purple flowers on her dress disappeared into darkness, into thin air. Into nothing.

  Eleven

  Life under Her Hands

  EASTER WAS AWAKENED by the smell of river water. She recognized the scent even before she opened her eyes. It was the aroma of sandy banks and long willow leaves and small stones. She felt an overwhelming bloom of joy rise up in her chest. It was so sudden and real that she sat straight up in bed and clutched her stomach. Then she realized that she was carrying a child. It was there, just behind her hands, stirring, a gathering of veins and blood and water and all things that would eventually make it real and solid.

  Her first thought was of El. He had been gone six days because she had ended up telling him to leave, too. He had defended Anneth, raved and thrown the chair off the porch, followed Easter as she walked to the creek.

  “She’s just young and drunk. She didn’t mean a thing by the way she was dancing,” he said, his hands out to her like someone asking for penance, although his voice was hard and sharp, a blade that was prepared to cut deeply.

  “I seen the way you were dancing together,” Easter said. “You’ve turned me against the church, started drinking, and now you want to dance vulgar with my own sister and want me to overlook that?” She crossed her arms. “I won’t do it.”

  He turned his back on her and walked away. This made her so furious that she ran to catch up with him, her naked legs escaping the folds of her housecoat. “If you’re going to take up for her, you pack your bags and get out of my house, too.”

  He stopped in his tracks, turned his head very slowly. He was completely sober now, she saw. Apparently he could snap his fingers and forget that he had ever drunk a drop.

  “Your house,” he said, and something in his face changed. “If that’s the way you want it, by God, all right then.”

  Now she was sitting
in her bed alone, realizing that she was carrying a baby, even though she hadn’t seen her husband in nearly a week, since that evening when he grabbed a few of his clothes and left. He had been on the road since then, but usually he called her and checked in, told her of the things he saw along the highways of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Tennessee. She had never felt so alone in her life, not even when her grandmothers or her parents died.

  She was desperate to call Anneth, to tell her to come to her, but she couldn’t do that. She hadn’t seen Anneth, either, since that night. And she still wasn’t ready to see her, although nothing had changed in her heart. She knew that what El had said was true, that Anneth was just wild and young and stupid in her own way, but still, she had disrespected Easter. Nobody got so drunk that they didn’t know what they were doing. She had often heard Serena say that there was truth in wine. “A person only does what they truly desire when they’re drunk,” Serena told her once. “Instead of being out of your mind when you’re drunk, you’re even more in your mind.”

  Easter picked up the phone and called the Depot Café, anyway. Sophie had told her that Anneth had moved into the apartment that was tacked onto the back of the restaurant, perched on stilts over the river. Sophie had told Anneth to stay with her and Paul, but Anneth was determined to have a place of her own. Easter thought about how she had said “my house” to Anneth. It was Anneth’s house, too, and always would be. She had told her that the day she and El were married, and she had meant it.

  “Can I help you or not?” she heard a voice say. It took her a minute to remember she had called the café.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Easter said into the phone. “Never mind.”

  She hung the phone on the hook, giving up, since she didn’t know what to say to Anneth. There was still too much distance between them. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Anneth dancing out there in the yard, the way the purple-flowered dress had clung to her hips, her head leaned back as she slid her hands into El’s pockets. It was too much to think about right now. She was going to have a baby and hadn’t even taken the time to be happy about it.

  She had wanted this for such a long time. On her wedding night, when El first moved on top of her, she had closed her eyes, and while she had concentrated on the newness of a man and the feelings it stirred up inside her, she had also prayed for a baby. She had hoped to get pregnant that very night but hadn’t. Now she counted back the weeks and tried to pinpoint when this child had been conceived. Impossible, since she and El had been doing it all the time lately. It pained her to realize that it had probably been one of those nights after they had been at the honky-tonk. El was always especially affectionate on those nights. He’d whisper into her ear: “Seeing you up onstage like that turns me on.” She couldn’t help but laugh. She never told him that it made her feel the same way.

  She knew why she had wanted to get pregnant so badly: she wanted to see what it was like, being there for the beginning of life. She had spent so much time with death, known too many who had died. People talked about life; they talked about it without even realizing. Yet no one ever discussed death beyond the basics. At church, death was as simplified as it could possibly be. Your soul left, your body was buried, and your soul went either to heaven or to hell. In both places there was eternal life; one was miserable and one was joyous. But no one ever really talked about death at all. She supposed people were afraid of exploring their mortality, fearing what they might discover if they thought about it too much.

  But with a baby it was different. For nine months she would have life right there in her belly, right under her hands. She would feel the baby moving and kicking, growing. She didn’t know how her body would contain all of this. The idea of that joy alone was so big that she felt she might burst wide open, an explosion of white light.

  She called El’s supervisor at Appalachian Freight. He said he could radio El and get a message to him with no problem. “What is it you wanted me to tell him?” the boss asked.

  “Just say ‘Call home,’” she said, and thanked him before hanging up the phone. She sat there for the next thirty minutes with her hand on top of the receiver, and although she was lost in reverie she didn’t even startle when the phone rang, its piercing bell so loud it could be heard all the way out to the garden.

  “El, when will you be home?” she asked.

  “You mean to your house?” he said. He was on a pay phone at a truck stop somewhere—she could hear cars and trucks speeding by. She could picture him leaning against the phone booth, his black hair slicked back, his big fingers tapping impatiently.

  “I’m sorry about all that,” she said. “I was wrong. It doesn’t matter now—none of it.”

  There was nothing but the sound of a car horn on the other end of the line. He must have been standing beside the busiest highway in the country. It sounded like a train was going by.

  “El, I’m carrying our child,” she said, and heard the sounds of traffic. Then, in a jagged little breath, he told her that he loved her more than anything in this world.

  THAT DAY, ANNETH worked at the café without really hearing anybody say a word. It had happened a lot lately. She saw people’s mouths move, somehow knew what they were saying. She nodded, but she was somewhere else, not there in the café waiting tables. At the end of her shift she stepped out into the light of October and breathed in the smell of autumn, and this scent seemed to awaken her, but not much. She was all at once aware of the sounds of the town: a few cars speeding by, going far too fast for Main Street, the scratch of a broom sweeping the sidewalk in front of the record store across the way, a car door slamming and then a woman hollering to her little boy to wait for her. At five o’clock the excitement died, as the trains came in less frequently, and Black Banks seemed an altogether different place than it had that noonday.

  Anneth felt as if there were weights attached to her jaw, pulling her face down. Why had the customers joked and talked to her at all today, anyway? Couldn’t they see that her eyes were dead?

  It wasn’t just because of her fight with Easter—the biggest fight they had ever had. The blues came in and she had no control over them; they just swooped in whenever they took a notion. All she wanted to do was lie in her bed with the shades pulled down and her quilt pulled up. She felt a stirring in her gut, something like disgust, for no reason at all. Maybe she was disgusted with herself. It was all too much to take, and the only thing that would help would be sleep. Sleep was the closest thing to death, the only way to escape. Lately she had been having short, unexpected pangs of missing Matthew, too. She missed listening to him sing as he piddled around their apartment by the Cumberland. She missed looking into his eyes, studying the round veins in his big hands.

  She had a few good friends, and Paul and Sophie, but deep down Easter was really all that mattered. She knew that Easter could have gone off to teachers college if it hadn’t been for raising her. Easter had given it all up to take care of Anneth. It made her think of that Ray Charles song “Ain’t That Love,” and she found herself singing it under her breath as she leaned against the wide window of the café: “When you cry, I want to cry some, too.”

  That was love, that desire to do for another person what wasn’t any real help to oneself. She couldn’t really think of anyone else besides Easter who had gone that far for her. Then she remembered that it was Ray Charles who had been singing when Easter got mad at her. She hated that she would never, ever be able to listen to him again without remembering that evening; she loved Ray Charles so much that it felt like losing a good friend.

  She stood on the sidewalk with everyone walking by and cried. She was glad they could all see her. Lots of people were out, because town was closing down and people were going home for the day. Lolie threw the door of Shoes Galore open and came down the sidewalk, swinging her yellow purse, then started to holler out something before she realized that Anneth was in tears.

  “Oh, baby,” Lolie said, and took Anne
th in her arms. Anneth leaned her chin on Lolie’s shoulder but didn’t embrace her, just stood there with her arms limp at her sides. “It’s over Easter, ain’t it?”

  “It’s everything.”

  “Work?”

  Anneth shook her head. “No.”

  “Matthew?”

  “Hell, no.” She didn’t know if she was lying or not.

  Lolie hooked her arm in Anneth’s and walked her up the street. “I tell you what. You come home with me. I’m going to cook you a big supper. Beans and salmon patties and fried potatoes. You can make the corn bread—you’re the best hand at making it, anyway. And then we’ll get all fixed up. And then me and you and Israel will go honky-tonking.”

  Lolie let go Anneth’s arm and did a little rump shake. A carload of boys went by in a red Chevy. They leaned out the window and wolf-whistled. “Oh, baby!” one of them called. “Hell, yeah,” yelled another.

  “In your dreams!” Lolie hollered after them, but she was smiling and waving to the boys. “Come on, Anneth Gail,” she said, and took hold of Anneth’s hand. “We’ll have a big time. God knows I could use a night out. I hate working for Sissy Goins. That bitch was on my case all day.”

  Anneth wanted to at least give Lolie a smile out of kindness, but she couldn’t. “Not tonight,” she said, and started walking away. “I just want to go home and be by myself.”

  Lolie caught hold of her arm. “You want me to stay with you?”

  Anneth had never noticed how much older Lolie looked than her, even though they were the same age. Lolie’s eyes were so kind, like an old woman’s. “I’ll be all right,” she said, and gave Lolie a hug. She patted her on the arm and let go her hand. “Go on, now.”

  Anneth walked back up the sidewalk but paused at the door to the café, looking back down the street. Lolie stuck her arm out her car window, waving as she pulled away with her radio turned up so loud that Anneth could hear it.