The Coal Tattoo Read online

  “All that matters is right now,” he said, and she would have loved him for that if nothing else.

  She crawled up onto his lap as he leaned back in the rocking chair there on her porch. And then they were kissing and his lips felt just as good as—even better than—she had imagined. She unbuttoned his shirt slowly, admiring the thinness of each white button, and then pushed the separate sides of the shirt back to reveal his chest and the silver chain that encircled his neck. An oval medallion hung from the chain, and she held it on the tips of her fingers and leaned in close to look at it: a man carrying a child on his back. Around the oval were the words SAINT CHRISTOPHER PROTECT US.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “My sister gave it to me,” he said. He put his chin on his chest so he could see the medallion and then held it between his fingers. “It’s supposed to protect travelers.”

  “It’s Catholic, though.”

  “He’s a saint,” Bradley said. “But I guess he’d protect a Pentecostal boy just as easy as a Catholic.”

  He put his hands on the sides of her face and pulled her up to kiss him. When her lips were upon his, she felt drunk. Kissing him was like dancing, like moving to the music. She felt his hands behind her back, unlatching her bra and then moving around to cover her breasts. She took hold of his fingers and brought his hands up so she could kiss his palms. She relished the roughness of his calluses, every line and crease holding another story that he could share with her. His fingers smelled like the woods. When she held them to her face she could smell the musk of pines, the sweetness of hickories. She felt like crying out at nothing more than his touch, at the warmth that bloomed between them when she put her chest against his and laid her head on the nape of his neck.

  They lay there like that with the darkness watching. She could see the sky above them, a blackness like death with a smudged glow where the moon was supposed to be. The wind was cool against her back and as it ran over her it swam through the trees, too, causing the leaves to awake and stir. Here she lay, naked to the waist, completely fallen for a boy she had met only ten hours ago. She knew that he would stay the night here with her and then he would leave her and be gone for good, but even so, she wanted to be right here. There was something that had happened between them that she couldn’t explain. All she knew was that this was the first time she had ever felt completely safe. She didn’t care if it looked like another stupid notion of her open heart. She was filled simultaneously with such joy and such sadness that she didn’t know if the tears that went unshed in the corners of her eyes were from happiness or grief. She had finally found the man she wanted and she wouldn’t be able to have him. War didn’t stop for love or anything else. It bulldozed right through all of that without a second thought.

  So she simply held him and was so comfortable there within his arms that she fell asleep. She was only vaguely aware of his carrying her into the house and awoke just enough to open her eyes briefly and run her hand over his lips as he put her on the bed. He stood for a moment beside her, looking down as if he didn’t know what to do next.

  “Lay with me,” she heard herself say, extending her hand. He crawled into bed with her and pulled her as close to him as he could get, laying his head on her naked chest. She put her hands into his hair and was asleep again in no time, dreaming of absolutely nothing.

  EASTER HAD DREAMED of the end of the world, and the feeling of dread stuck with her all day. It had not been a dream of fire and brimstone. Instead she had spent the night wandering through an abandoned world, the last person on earth. Everyone else had been sucked up to heaven or sent down to hell. She alone had been left in the purgatory of a stilled earth. She had seen herself walking up the road, passing empty houses, cars stopped in the road, after people had floated up out of them into nothingness. In her dream she had walked into town and seen silent storefronts. A broom lying on the sidewalk after the sweeper had been whisked away into the end. The only sound that of a record player that had been left playing in one of the apartments over Shoes Galore. She had never heard the song before.

  She tried not to think of the dream as she drove into town and parked in front of the attorney’s office. The world had obviously not ended: cars sped by with their radios cranked up loud, women sashayed down the street with their purses hanging from the crooks of their arms as they went from the drugstore to the grocery to the post office. Easter was here to find out if she could save her land. The attorney had said on the phone that there was not much hope of doing so, but she had brought all the proper papers and intended to see if they could discover some loophole.

  She started to stop in at Anneth’s apartment to check on her. There was no phone at Anneth’s and when Easter called the café that morning they said she had called in to tell them that she wouldn’t be coming to work. Easter glanced at her wristwatch and figured it could wait. Anneth was probably just hungover.

  She went into the lawyer’s office and found an old woman sitting at a large desk. She was typing in such a practiced, fast rhythm that Easter felt the urge to tap her foot to the beat.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Patton,” Easter said.

  The receptionist barely glanced up. She never stopped typing as she nodded her chin toward the row of chairs against the wall. “Be a few minutes,” the woman said.

  Easter sat in the leather chairs of the attorney’s waiting room and studied the mahogany paneling. She ran her hands through the stack of magazines on the end table near her. Life, Look, and Coal magazine. She paused at this and picked up the magazine, flipping through the pages to find that it was an industry magazine. Articles about augering and draglines and coal-washing techniques. Looking around, she saw a polished wall behind her that bore a large print showing a coal tipple at night. Snow glowed on the mountainside beneath a full moon. A Mack truck seemed to idle beneath the coal tipple as a load was dropped into it, a sign that the tipple never closed, not even for the night or winter or anything else. She stood and looked at it more closely before she realized that the words ALTAMONT MINING COMPANY were printed on the truck’s door in small, neat lettering. She threw the magazine down on the seat and walked out of the attorney’s office and back out into the daylight of the white street.

  WHEN ANNETH AWOKE the next morning, he was still asleep. She studied his face, tracing his eyes and eyebrows and his nose and his mouth with her finger. They had both slept in their pants, their legs tangled up like grapevines. She ran her hand down his smooth chest, starting with her thumb on the silver medallion and working down until her fingers dug into the waistband of his pants. She stopped there and went into the kitchen.

  Anneth made coffee, then fried bacon and boiled water for oats, whistling a song she couldn’t remember the name of. She thought she might have made up the tune out of thin air. She scrambled eggs and slid pieces of bread into the toaster, briefly wishing that she had listened when Easter tried to teach her how to make biscuits. She put plates on the small table beside the window and realized that she had never set the table before. She never had people over to her apartment and usually ate on the porch or in front of the television. She rolled silverware in a napkin, just as she did at work, and crowded the center of the table with jars of jelly and honey and a bowl of butter. She wished that she had a flower to put into a glass of water, but she didn’t want to go outside. There was a clump of wildflowers that grew down on the bank of the river behind the row of stores on Main Street, but she didn’t want to leave this cocoon they had made for themselves.

  He padded onto the linoleum of the kitchen in his Levi’s and stood stretching in front of her, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

  “That’s the best night of sleep I’ve had since getting my draft notice,” he said.

  “Set down and eat,” she said, and raked eggs from the skillet onto his plate.

  She sat down at the table and held both hands around her cup of coffee. She had no appetite. “You must think I’m crazy,” she said, “to
just take off riding with a boy I don’t even know and then let him stay all night at my house.”

  He blew onto a spoonful of oatmeal, leaning over his plate. “I’d say you were in love,” he said, and she thought he might laugh or at least show her his toothy smile, but he simply put the spoon into his mouth. She wasn’t used to men saying what they felt, being so honest and bare. Bradley meant every single thing he said. Maybe being sent off to war freed a person to be completely real.

  “I’d say I’ve gone crazy over you in only one day and night,” she said. “It seems foolish.”

  “Why should it?” he said. “Just because that’s not the normal way people do things? It doesn’t matter.”

  “You have to be in Ashland tomorrow, don’t you? If you’re not, they’ll court-martial you or something?”

  He nodded, swallowing his coffee. “If I don’t report, I’ll be a deserter,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “I could drive you,” she said. “The only train tomorrow is the evening one, at six.”

  “That’d make it that much harder to leave you.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and put his elbows on the table. “Let’s just have these two whole days together. And I’ll leave on the train. I’ll write you every day, and when I get back I’ll come for you.”

  She looked down at her coffee. “I want you to.”

  The rest of the day they sat together and talked and kissed, and when darkness came they didn’t turn on a lamp. Anneth put a stack of 45s on the record player, but one of them—“Love Me Two Times” by the Doors—got stuck on there and kept playing for more than an hour before they got off the couch and walked toward the bedroom. Anneth turned the phonograph off. They undressed in the gray shadows of night and did not speak.

  Twenty-seven

  Proof of Life

  SHE FEIGNED SLEEP as he moved around the room in the shadows of early evening. When it had been nearly time for him to leave, they had lain down to sleep together one more time. There was nothing more comforting or intimate than sleeping with him. Sex hadn’t brought them so close as sleeping together had.

  He packed his clothes and took a quick bath and put his uniform back on. She could see him buttoning his shirt and straightening his tie in the floor-length mirror that was fastened to her wall, even though she lay with her back to him. She didn’t want to get up and tell him good-bye. If she did, it would be finalized. She knew she would have to at some point, but for now she just lay there and tried to keep him with her as long as she could.

  He carried his bags out to the front door and took his time coming back into her bedroom, as if he was memorizing the apartment. When he came into her bedroom he stretched out beside her in his meticulously ironed uniform. He kissed her on the forehead.

  “I love you,” he said. For a moment she thought these might be the simple words of a soldier who needed to utter such a phrase so that he could hold on to this moment for later, when he smelled death, but she knew that he meant it. She could see the truth in his eyes. And a man had never said it to her this way, either, emphasizing each word—because each one was equally important, really. People always made a big deal about the word love, but it was really the other two words in that sentence that mattered.

  She had never cried over a man in her life, but after she kissed him and he walked out, she buried her face in the pillow and wept, trying to block out the sound of the train when it approached. And then she heard it leaving, each turn of the great metal wheels on the metal track a sign that he was getting farther and farther away. Each scratching grind of the train taking him closer to the war. When she couldn’t hear the train anymore she sat up in the bed with a start.

  “Oh, my Lord,” she said, feeling the warmth there, the spirit that stirred within. “I’m pregnant.”

  Twenty-eight

  Mysterious Ways

  ANNETH DECIDED THAT this baby would be her secret. She told only Easter, Lolie, and Jewell the story of her two and a half days with Bradley. No one else needed to know. She wasn’t ashamed, but she wanted to keep the story to herself. It was no one’s business, and telling it seemed to lessen the meaning of what she and Bradley had found in each other. In the months since he had gone, she had come to accept that she would never see him again. She hadn’t received one letter from him and carried disappointment in her womb along with the child each time she went to the post office. For the past few weeks she had been going to check her post office box two or three times, as if the postmaster passed out letters on an hourly basis instead of filling the boxes a single time in the mornings. She slid her key into the small gold door, and each time her disappointment loomed bigger when she discovered nothing more than catalogs or bills.

  She didn’t have a second sight like Easter, had no dreams or visions. But she did have a feeling in her gut and she knew that Bradley was never coming back from Vietnam. This was as plain to her as the memory of his face, which she saw swim before her every morning when she awoke.

  She bought a newspaper every morning, checked the state casualty lists, then threw the paper away without glancing at the other headlines. She was only looking for proof of what she already knew. If she saw his name there, spelled out in black letters, at least she might be able to go to sleep at night. She became obsessed with the war news on television. She rushed home from work and ate at her coffee table, never looking at her food. She memorized the cadences in Walter Cronkite’s voice, could anticipate the calm quiet that came over him when he studied a piece of paper he had been handed. She sat on the floor, close to the television screen, hoping for a glimpse of Bradley when the news crews traveled with platoons. She sucked in her breath upon seeing a soldier that resembled him; then the camera would focus in on the boy, who always turned out not to look like Bradley at all, and she let her breath out. She didn’t know why she looked for him amongst the living. She would be more apt to find him in one of the battle scenes when the reporter had to speak loudly over the gunfire in the background. She imagined that he had been shot in the heart as soon as he stepped off the helicopter and into the lush jungle. She saw his arms flying out in the rush to accept death, the way his body crumpled, his helmet staying on when his head hit the ground. Or he might be propped up against a tree as if resting, the only sign of death the slouch of his shoulders, the way his chin rested on his chest.

  She had once quietly opposed the war—quiet in her opposition only because she wasn’t sure what was right—but now she snapped the television off when it showed the protesters. She joined the others at the café when they condemned the hippies and the cowards. She refused to fashion two fingers into the peace sign, something that had once filled her with a sense of pride and great power. She bought a marker and a pack of construction paper at the drugstore and squatted down on her kitchen floor to let the marker squeak out “We Support the Troops” in her careful handwriting. She taped this sign not only in the window of her own apartment, but also in Easter’s living room window and on the front door of the café.

  Beside her bed she kept a notebook in which she wrote a letter to Bradley every night. If she was completely wrong and he was still alive and she happened to find a letter from him in her post office box, she would post a large manila envelope with all her letters inside to his return address, and he would receive all of her love and desperation by way of the postal service. Some of the letters went on and on even though she knew her words were in vain. They were all letters to a dead man.

  When she couldn’t stand being the only one to harbor this knowledge anymore, she went to Easter. After work she asked Easter to go for a walk with her up on the mountain to see the wildflowers before the autumn frosts. Already the scent of fall was in the evening air.

  They sat in the middle of the field and the sun was warm on the tops of their heads. This had always been their place of secrets, where they revealed the mechanics of their hearts to each other. Both of them knew that their grandmothers’ ghosts loitered here. Now Easter sat quiet
ly, waiting, and Anneth knew that Easter was no fool. Easter knew that Anneth had brought her for a reason. Anneth let it all out at once, like a gallon of paint that is tipped over on a new rug.

  “Easter, I can’t raise this baby by myself,” she said. She put her hand atop her belly, where the baby had lived for three months now. She knew that it was impossible, but already she felt movement there. The gathering of blood and bone, an energy that glowed within. “I’m not ready.”

  “You will be,” Easter said. “When you have a baby, something in you changes. Like a light switch. When my baby was born, a change washed out over me and I felt like I could do anything. It was only a second before I realized that he was stillborn, that I wouldn’t get to put this change to use, but I felt it all the same, Anneth. When you have a child, you become more powerful than you ever were before.”

  “No,” Anneth said, and then stopped. She couldn’t say more, although her mouth was full of words. She looked at the sky as if the clouds might give her a way to say what she needed to put into a sentence. She hoped that Easter would be able to interpret the shape of her face and know what she was asking of her. She steeled herself, as if about to face a cold wind, and then looked her sister in the eye. “I want you to raise this child.”