The Coal Tattoo Read online

  Easter rolled over, put her fist into her pillow, and pulled the quilt up to her neck. She still couldn’t get comfortable. She sat up and put her feet over the side of the bed, listening. Apparently Anneth had cried herself to sleep. Easter couldn’t hear anything except the house. The old wood murmured as it settled into the night. Sometimes she thought the lumber of the house held ghosts. She imagined those creaks and moans were the whispers and sighs of the dead, even though she knew better. She was as still as she could be, even going so far as to hold her breath. She could hear the whip-poor-will out there in the backyard, perched up in the locust tree it loved so much. She listened to its lonesome song and tried to ignore the other sounds she heard. She didn’t listen to the ghosts if she could help it.

  The cold floorboards felt good as she put her feet down, and a shiver ran up her back, but it was a comforting feeling, this coldness. It reminded her that she was alive. She padded down the hallway and slid her feet into Anneth’s lined boots, standing by the door as if at attention. She hustled on her coat and latched all the buttons, then pulled a wool cap down over her ears. She needed the night air, even if it was freezing outside. Her thoughts were running too wild for her to sleep.

  She stepped out into the blackest night she had ever seen. She looked at the sky and saw no trace of silver. There was not one star or even so much as a slice of moon. She had never seen a sky so void and still, like bottomless water. As soon as she stepped out, the whip-poor-will stopped singing. Maybe it was a ghost, too; everyone knew that whip-poor-wills didn’t come out to sing in December. She wondered if anyone heard its song except for her and Anneth. Sometimes they went to sleep listening to it.

  “It’s not normal,” Easter often said. “A whip-poor-will hollering through cold weather. They’re supposed to leave for the winter.”

  “He’s magic, though,” Anneth would say. She looked for magic anywhere she could find it.

  There would be snow soon; Easter could smell it on the air. She walked close to the creek and listened to its music. If she concentrated, she could be completely lost in that sound. Across the creek stood the mountain, noticeable only because it was blacker than the black sky, huge and looming like a gigantic animal.

  There was no doubt about it: ghosts lived here. Nobody saw them but Easter—not even Anneth, who was on constant lookout for such things—and she tried to ignore them. Sometimes she was aware of them on all sides of her, crowding around and breathing down her neck. There were her grandfathers, loud and rambunctious, always in motion. Her grandmothers. Her father’s mother, Serena, reared back in laughter, her big hands clapping together. And her maternal grandmother, Vine, standing in the shadows of redbud trees, her eyes cast down, as if that strange mixture of sadness and joy she had carried with her in life had followed her into death as well. There were people Easter didn’t know, too. Tall men with black eyes stood amongst the blue-leafed corn in the garden. A man who played the banjo and whispered a song. A whole gang of squat women with bunned-up hair who scurried along the creek bank, peeking back at her nervously. She had no idea who they could be. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of a child running. The children were a comfort, although she was always unsettled to see their unnaturally pale features. There was one child in particular, a boy who made her stomach ache. He bothered her the most because she had the strange sense that he did not exist yet. She had to close her eyes and pray for him to go away. Sometimes it was unbearable. But it was inevitable that ghosts would live here, considering everything that had happened.

  THEIR FAMILY HAD been marked by death, as if they were cursed. Their family history was a convoluted affair. Had it been a solid, visible thing, it would have looked like many rivers converging, seen from high above. It was a water crowded by secrets and lies. Only Easter knew all of it. Serena had told her some. Sophie had told more. But most of this history Easter simply knew, the way she knew when a flood was going to come or when someone was going to die in a car wreck.

  Serena and Vine had been two forces of nature. Serena was a large, loud woman whose presence filled up the entire room and overtook it; everyone in the county knew her and liked her, despite or perhaps because of her habit of telling everyone exactly what she thought of them. Serena worked all the time, even when it wasn’t needed, and had a boisterous laugh that people recognized. Vine was a full-blooded Cherokee with hidden stories tucked in her eyes. Easter’s most vivid memory of Vine was walking behind her as she moved like a ghost through the woods, examining the leaves of every tree. Serena and Vine had been best friends for years when their children—Serena’s Luke and Vine’s Birdie—joined their two families, making them all kin.

  Birdie had been a bashful, withdrawn girl, scarred by growing up alongside her first cousin, Matracia, who was so beautiful she moved old men to lust in such a manner that they ended up cutting themselves in shame. And then Matracia had run off to East Tennessee to find her mother, which caused Birdie to withdraw even further. She had loved Matracia like her own sister—they had been closer than even two sisters can be—but Luke brought her back from this grief. Once Luke set his eye on Birdie and began to court her, everyone was shocked to see that they were unnaturally alike. They really did seem like they were two halves of one person.

  Luke urged Birdie’s true spirit forth and she opened like a window being eased up. A whole new girl emerged. She had a fiery temper that matched his. Her beauty was made plain once joy showed on her face. She was a twig of a girl, in sharp contrast to her big-boned parents. She loved to dance and laugh and sing at the top of her lungs, although she had done none of these things before Luke started getting her out of the house. He was like that, though—the kind of boy who couldn’t be refused. He was always laughing and cutting up and having a big time. He was the joy not just of Serena’s life, but of everyone who knew him.

  Still, when they announced their engagement, their mothers begged them not to marry. Luke was eighteen and Birdie only sixteen and both the women knew that she wasn’t old enough. Neither of them had married so young. But there was not much choice in the matter once Birdie came into the kitchen and told Vine that she had not bled in three months. Luke took a job in the Altamont mines and moved Birdie to Free Creek, where they built a house above Serena’s on the mountainside.

  Anneth and Easter’s father was beautiful. Easter was six years old when he died, but strangely she could not recall ever having seen him. She knew his face only through the pictures that Serena kept on her walls. He had wavy red hair and a square jaw, and thick lips that were full of color. She knew all of this even though the picture was in black and white. When Anneth was small, Serena had always told her that she had her father’s eyes—green as redbud leaves, so bright they nearly glowed in the darkness. He was a tall man with corded forearms and a cleft in his chin. Anneth studied this picture all the time, as if trying to recall his face, but there was no way she could remember him. She was only one year old when he died. When Easter saw her carrying around the picture, she knew what Anneth was thinking: I wish I had known him. His eyes have fire in them, like mine. Maybe he could tell me something about myself.

  When Luke died, it nearly killed every one of them. The Altamont mine caved in, and it took the crews three days to dig the men out. That whole time, families stayed at the mine entrance, praying and crying, drinking coffee and smoking, standing near the fire that was built in a rusted rain barrel. The state brought in a long yellow school bus for them to rest in, but nobody slept. For three days they waited, mostly women standing in the February wind. Often there was complete silence. Easter was there, but she was not sure if she could really remember it. Sometimes she believed she could simply remember her grandmother’s retelling of that day, and when she thought of it all, she saw it not only through her own eyes but also through Serena’s.

  It was just becoming dawn and the sky was the color of copper when the crew finally got to the chamber of dead miners. By the time they packed the bodies out, peach li
ght was splitting the sky, and thin tufts of snow were falling. When they brought out Luke’s body, Serena did not cry or holler out in pain. She simply fell to her knees and stared off into the distance, at the snow-covered mountains, at the horizon, at nothing. But Birdie started screaming and didn’t stop. She tore at her hair and moaned. A pack of women tried to hold her still, but she pushed them away. Serena couldn’t move to do anything.

  Birdie stumbled around the hardened mud, the bobby pins falling from her hair, curls making their way into the corners of her mouth and eyes. And then she hushed long enough to lean over and begin to search for pieces of coal. She walked along, hunched over, the way Easter imagined someone on the beach, looking for seashells washed up in the tide. She found five squares of coal, then threw her head back and let them each slip into her mouth like pills. Easter knew that her mother had lost her mind. The madness had been instant, like a candle being lit.

  After they buried Luke, Birdie left the little house he had built for her on the mountainside and moved in with Serena. Birdie couldn’t stand the thought of being in that house without him, and for this Serena and Vine were glad. Serena didn’t like the idea of the girls’ being left alone with Birdie up there, because she didn’t know what to expect of Birdie. In those first days after the funeral, Vine moved in with Serena, too, since they were both widows now. They had used each other’s houses over the years, anyway. By that time Vine was already sick herself and not able to help much, but each night she was present to comb out the girls’ hair, to stand in the doorway while Serena sung them to sleep, to sit by Birdie’s side when she wouldn’t allow anyone else to console her.

  Birdie had stayed in her room most of the time, talking to herself, shuffling and reshuffling the stack of postcards that had been Matracia’s prized possessions, singing, dusting her dresser, and remaking her bed dozens of times before she would come out and eat. She cried all the time. “I didn’t know it was possible for a person to have so many tears,” Serena said. Birdie got so bad that one day Easter found her standing in the middle of Free Creek completely naked. Easter was seven and didn’t know what else to do but run and get her grandmother. Easter crossed her arms over her chest—each hand holding on to the opposite shoulder—and sat on the creek bank while Serena went to Birdie.

  “Here, now,” Serena said, and took off her own shawl to wrap around Birdie’s nakedness. The shawl was too short and didn’t cover anything except Birdie’s breasts. She walked up out of the creek with her head leaning on Serena’s shoulder, and Easter watched as they made their way up the road and into the house. Birdie’s rump and legs were marked by a dozen small blue marks, as if she had pinched herself over and over.

  Easter hated to remember what had happened shortly thereafter. Her beautiful mother, dead and cold in the ground. She realized now that she’d never get over it. There were so many times when she wanted just to go to her mother and tell her all of her troubles, to crawl up on her lap and lay her head on her mother’s shoulder, to smell the lavender oil Birdie dotted behind her ears, to hold her mother’s hand in her own.

  As a child, Easter sometimes walked out into the garden so silently that Serena wasn’t even aware of her until Easter stood just behind her grandmother. She had always possessed an abnormal talent for moving without making a sound. Serena would start but never let out so much as a yelp, and then Easter would realize that the old woman was crying. Easter would squat down in the garden beside her and take her hand. “There’s just too much death in our family. It’s too much,” Serena would say.

  Vine and Serena had told the girls much of this old history. They were always telling about Birdie and Luke’s wedding day, always going into one of the old tales when they were cutting corn off the cob or peeling potatoes in the kitchen or were holed up in the house during a bad snowstorm. But her grandmothers left so many things out that Easter had to fill in with her unexplainable knowledge. Serena had a whole other life that she never talked about, too. Easter knew, though. She knew about Serena’s scandalous divorce and the way she used to drink with the men and curse like a sailor. But Easter also knew what a good friend Serena had been to Vine and how they had helped each other to survive all their troubles. And she knew about Serena’s midwifing half the people in the county, too.

  Serena rarely talked about her midwifing days, and Easter couldn’t understand why. Every time they went to town, someone came up to Serena and said that she had delivered them from the womb, and she grew more and more distraught that she couldn’t remember all of them. This bothered her greatly, especially in the weeks before she became so sick that she was bedfast.

  After Vine died, Serena never was the same. It was as if a little part of her had been sucked away with Vine. That was when the real trouble had started with Anneth. Anneth was only eleven, but she’d taken to Vine in the same way that Easter took to Serena. When Vine died, Easter had seen the flicker of epiphany on Anneth’s face. Anneth had been too little to really understand either of their parents’ dying, but she had watched Vine be eaten up by the cancer. Vine’s last words were a gurgle in the back of her throat: “I am paying for my sins.” Easter had seen Anneth’s mind working, trying to figure out Vine’s past, wondering what she had done to deserve such a horrible death. Serena had laid her head on Vine’s chest and cried great heaving sobs. But Easter had watched Anneth: the color draining from her face, the understanding of death clear in her eyes. It was almost as if Easter could read Anneth’s thoughts: I have to live all that I can. Look at this, how fast life goes. Everybody dies one day. Anneth already had wild blood, and here was a seed that had been planted that day.

  But it was worse when they lost Serena. Easter remembered that night when she had sat up with Serena, listening to her die in that cold hospital. Anneth had been just a child, but couldn’t she have been there with Easter and Sophie and the other women cousins? Couldn’t she have been there instead of back home, helping Paul with a quilt? She didn’t even like to quilt.

  If Easter thought too much about it, she became furious. Because Anneth had not been there to see the realization in Easter’s face, to see how Easter suddenly knew that she had to spend every day of the rest of her life trying to do the good that Serena always hoped to do. The day Vine died, Anneth had decided to be as wild as possible; when Serena died, Easter had decided to walk through life like a whisper.

  That night, Serena had held her hand so tightly that she thought her fingers would break. And then, when the life began to seep out of Serena, Easter could feel it being sucked away through her fingers, too. She had held on to Serena’s hand so long that Sophie had to pry their intertwined fingers apart.

  Easter had had enough of death. Standing on the porch in the cold, she realized that her face and hands were completely numb. The night was so silent that even the creek was nothing more than a low rumbling that sounded very far away, like the sound of blood in one’s ears. This must be what death sounds like, Easter thought. Above the mountain stood a gray line of light, like smoke. Daylight was approaching from the other side of the world.

  Three

  Everyday Magic

  ANNETH COULD NOT believe she was seeing a redbird at night. She had been given this gift only once before, as a child, and had thought that sort of magic was reserved for the innocent. Redbirds did not stir after dark, yet there it was, sitting right in a square of moonlight in the middle of the path, as if someone had posed it there.

  Anneth took careful steps toward it, not moving anything but her feet. She thought it was most likely hurt. Perhaps it had been asleep and had fallen from its nest in the middle of the night. That was the only thing Anneth could figure. She squatted down as she got nearer the bird, bending her knees and pulling in her body so that her chin rested on her chest. She could see the moonlight in its feathers. Its tiny head moved around nervously, like the head of a blind person trying to figure out who is nearby.

  When she was five years old, Anneth had been awakened in the
middle of the night by Vine. Vine had whispered, “Get up. I want you to see something,” and had positioned Anneth on her hip and carried her outside. Unlike tonight, that night had been very warm—so warm that the earth seemed to hiss and steam against the darkness, the air filled with the faint scent of baking soil. She put her face in the heat of Vine’s hair, which smelled like clothes that had been hung out to dry. She wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but then Vine patted her back and said, “Look here.”

  There was a long moment before she understood that they were standing in the middle of the yard in front of Vine’s house, where Anneth was spending the night. And then she saw: the ground was covered by redbirds, dozens of them. They were perched in the smaller trees in the yard—young redbuds and dogwoods—but mostly they sat on the ground, looking up at the mountain as if something stirred there. They were so silent, so still, yet a low hum arose amongst them, the way it does at a church meeting when everyone’s head is bowed in prayer.

  “This must be magic,” Vine said.

  After a while Vine sat Anneth down on the ground and moved near the birds, holding out her hand as if she held a fistful of seed. Vine ran her finger down the back of one of the birds, but it did not move. Then she stood quickly, withdrawing her hand as if this touch was almost too much to bear. She came back and squatted down with her arm around Anneth’s waist.

  And then, one by one, the redbirds rose from the steaming ground and sailed away on quiet wings. When they were gone, the valley seemed impossibly silent, a silence only rocks knew.