Gehenna, West Virginia
1947
If that diamond ring turns brass,
Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass.
“Hush, Little Baby,” traditional American lullaby
The mountain moved. Just a little. Just enough to cause the miners inside it to stop picking and shoveling. They waited. Mouths and eyes open wide. Seconds passed, minutes, then it moved again, a little more this time. The bare bulbs strung along the support timbers flickered off.
Helmet lights began wildly painting the interior of the narrow shaft, the jagged walls and steel rails and crossties and carts full of coal. Dust filled the crisscrossing beams of light as they sliced through the darkness and came to rest on the canary. The tiny yellow bird had fallen from its perch and now lay motionless on the floor of its cage, eyes open, claws clenched, a wing bent beneath itself.
The mountain moved again.
One of the miners turned to another, his flickering lamplight highlighting the contours of the other miner’s face. His jaw square, his cheek bulging with a wad of tobacco leaves. Beady eyes set back in his head, tiny white dots.
“Hey, Jim.” The miner was younger than the other, his helmet tilted to the side. A size too big.
“Whatcha want, Jacob?”
“I got something to tell you.”
Jim looked over at Jacob. “Now?”
“Yes. Now. Reckon we ain’t got much time left by the looks of things. There’s something I think you should know.”
Jim turned to Jacob. Squared his shoulders. He was much bigger than Jacob, taller and thicker. “Okay, what is it?”
Jacob forced a swallow as he looked up at Jim. “I love Julia.” His rehearsed words came out thin and dry, constricted, nothing like he practiced.
Jim stepped closer to Jacob and leaned over him. Just a few inches between their faces. Jacob could smell Jim. Sour sweat and whiskey.
“What’d you say?”
“You heard me,” Jacob stuttered. “I love her.”
“You son-of-a-bitch. I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
Jim looked around. The other miners were paying no attention. They were just standing in the shaft with their chins down and their helmet lights pointed at the floor between their boots, their pickaxes and coal buckets lying about unattended. A couple of miners were on their knees mumbling something.
Jim edged a little closer to Jacob, his breath hot and rank.
“I will kill you.” Jim spoke slowly, calmly, each word separated by a half-second.
“No, you won’t. This mountain is about to beat you to it.”
Jim squeezed his hands into fists and ground his teeth, his jaw muscles flexing, tobacco juice seeping from the corners of his mouth.
The mountain moved again, this time followed by an ominous groan that came up through the shaft, a belch from deep within the belly of the mountain. Tiny rocks peppered the miners’ helmets. They stared down into the shaft, their lamp lights struggling to make it more than a couple of feet, and beyond the faint glow, black abyss.
The support timbers began to bend and splinter. One broke, and then another, and then another. The floor heaved, and the steel rails and the ties on which they rested split apart like a giant zipper opening. The ceiling came down.
Outside the mountain, pressurized smoke and debris vomited from the tiny hole and billowed into the sky, covering the moon and stars like a coffin quilt. A flock of birds lifted from the treetops, the undulating mass holding momentarily before swooping back down into the forest. The few miners who had managed to claw themselves out of the mountain drew together and took off their helmets and bowed their heads as the shadow from the plume drifted over them.
Jacob opened his eyes to pitch black. He was pretty sure he was still alive. Not sure how or why, but he was. He didn’t have to see to know what had happened. He’d lived his entire life, all twenty-two years of it, in a company town, and he knew, just as his father must’ve known before the mountain took him. Julia would know soon.
Wrestling against the stone and timber that entombed him, Jacob worked one of his arms free. His other arm was trapped. Excruciating pain pulsating through his body. He felt for his legs, but he couldn’t find them, only large pieces of granite with damp flesh filling and protruding from the spaces between them. One of his lungs had collapsed, and the other was quickly filling with blood and methane. He was suffocating.
The screaming whistle woke Julia. It brought her out of deep sleep to regrettable consciousness. Abruptly out of a dream, out of a nightmare, out of a pit of charcoal-sketched images of broken timber and fractured stone. Men screaming. Julia knew the whistle didn’t come from a passing train. She wished it had, but it didn’t.
Gehenna was a small town tucked deep within the folds of the Appalachian Mountains, the latest census recording its residents at just under one thousand. But it really wasn’t a town. It was a coal camp, a few rows of patch houses, a store, a one-room school, and a church all constructed in tiered notches hacked into the forested mountainside on the western bank of the Big Sandy River.
Oak and hickory and pine stood tall on the inclined earth all around Gehenna, their entangled canopies concealing the abscessed holes. Emerging from those holes like unfurling tongues and slithering down through the forest to train cars overflowing with heaps of shiny black sediment were paths worn smooth by booted feet and shod hooves. At the bottom of the gorge, the mountains squeezed the river into white rapids, and hugging the river as it slithered through the gorge were parallel iron rails and strands of wire drawn taut between tar-covered poles.
Plank boardwalks spanned the length of the storefronts, from the company store to the barbershop and on down to the livery stables and the sheriff’s office and the train station. Unpainted and graying and warping in the weather. Between the boardwalks was a churning, muddy mess referred to as Main Street.
Sitting at the east end of Gehenna was a one-room church where the miners and their families gathered with their Bibles each Sunday. The trail that started at the back door of the church bent into the forest and twisted up through the trees to a small clearing enclosed by a rusty iron fence. Within the fence and growing out of the knee-high grass were thin rectangular stones, ten rows of thirty each, many with the same death date etched into them. Some smaller stones among them.
For Julia, Gehenna was a prison. Hell rising out of coal seams. She believed the devil hid somewhere beneath the coal.
Julia sat up and threw back the patch quilt and rotated her legs over the edge of the mattress and sat there rubbing her eyes waiting for another whistle blast. She prayed one wouldn’t come, but God didn’t answer her prayer, and another one came. Julia covered her ears until it died, then she lowered herself down onto the cold floor and hurried across it to the window, the boards squeaking beneath her bare feet. She didn’t bother with her gown or shoes. She quickly unfastened the latch and lifted the window, the glass heavy in its warped frame. In came cold air and the stench of rotten eggs that the miners called stinkdamp. Julia thought if death had a smell, it probably smelled like stinkdamp.
Julia loved Jacob. Loved him with all of her heart. He was the one good thing in her life. He was the one man in her life who hadn’t failed her. Would never fail her. Never hurt her. Her knight in shining armor. She was waiting patiently for him to climb out of that mountain and take her by the hand and pull her onto a locomotive heading out of town. Didn’t care where. Anywhere but Gehenna.
The house was cold. No wood in the stove. Just damp ash. The cool night air sneaked down the chimney and crept under the door and squeezed between the spaces in the plankboards.
Julia slammed the window shut and hurried back to her bed and crawled in under the quilt and pulled it over her head. It was still warm. As she lay there curled within the cavity created by her body, she imagined she was trapped in a collapsed mineshaft. She wished she were. She wished she were with Jacob now.
Julia wept.
A few minutes later. A woman’s voice. Older. A little raspy.
“Why are you crying, dear?”
Julia peeked out from the quilt and looked around the room. It was dark. She squinted. Across the room. On the other side of the dressing table. A woman.
“Is that you, Mrs. Stanton?”
“Yes, dear. It’s me.”
“What do you want?”
Julia wiped her tears away with the quilt.
“Come here, dear.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you.”
Julia shook her head. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Yes, you do. Now come.”
“Go away.”
“You know I can’t do that. Come here. Now.”
Julia slipped out of bed. She pulled her gown over her shivering body and shoved her bare feet into the leather shoes beneath the bed beside a pair of muddy boot prints. The wool was rough against her skin. The shoes were cold and stiff. A size too large.
She found a matchstick and struck it against the bedframe. A dry snap and a hiss and a thin flame rose from the bead of sulfur. Yellow at its core, blue on the edges, bright in the darkness. She removed the glass globe from the oil lamp on the nightstand beside her bed and applied the flame to the charred cotton wick and returned the globe and turned the knob. A larger flame grew tall and thin within the convex glass.
With the lamp held high, Julia began walking toward Mrs. Stanton, the flame inside trembling as she went. Mrs. Stanton was walking toward Julia. The grandfather clock in the living room downstairs chimed twice.
The lamplight threw Julia’s silhouette onto the wall like a bucket of black paint, the contorted human shape moving, stretching, bending awkwardly. Barely visible on the wall, a portrait of a man and a woman side-by-side in an oval frame, the man frowning, the woman forcing a smile in the shifting light. Their eyes following her.
In and out of the halo of light encircling Julia on the floor as she walked came a wooden table on its side. One of its legs missing. An empty bottle. Some company scrip scattered about. A cradle. Another empty bottle.
Mrs. Stanton was a woman Julia had known all of her life. She was a woman she’d hated all of her life. She was a woman Julia didn’t want to talk to, especially not now.
Julia stopped short of the table. She could see Mrs. Stanton’s face, the lamplight sharpening the points of her nose and chin, lifting her cheekbones, hollowing her eyes. A witch.
“What do you want?”
“Come. Sit, dear.”
Julia moved closer, slowly, reluctantly, the boards squeaking. Mrs. Stanton moved closer. The two women continued until they met at the table, only inches between them.Julia put the lamp down on the corner of the table and picked up a porcelain pitcher. She poured some water into a bowl and put it back down and looked at Mrs. Stanton again before dipping her cupped hands into the water and splashing her face. Scattered about on the table were a hairbrush, scissors, a tin of cold cream, a powder box, a few bent hairpins, and a small bottle of perfume. Also on the table was a newspaper. The headline above the fold read, HOPE FOR RECOVERING THE FINAL TWO MINERS FROM GEHENNA NO. 5 AFTER THURSDAY EVENING’S CAVE-IN DWINDLES AS DAY THREE OF THE SEARCH BEGINS. THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE. OCTOBER 22, 1947.
Julia sat at the table. Mrs. Stanton sat across from her. The women stared at each other for a long time.
“What do you want?” Julia asked again.
“I think you know.”
“No. I don’t.”
Mrs. Stanton’s hair was long and straight and silky, falling over her shoulders and covering her breasts. One of her eyes was black and nearly swollen shut. Her upper lip puffy. Some scratches on her neck.
“You know, they’re going to find him,” Mrs. Stanton told Julia.
“Who?”
“My husband. They’re going to dig him out of there, and when they do, I’ll change. I’ll be the best wife in Gehenna. I’ll cook his meals. I’ll clean his clothes. I’ll bear him all the children he wants. No more back talk. I promise.”
“They’ll find my lover,” Julia said. Mrs. Stanton looked straight at her. Julia dropped her gaze but went on. “And when they do, we’ll run away, and won’t ever come back.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can,” Julia said. “I can, and I will.”
Julia was a tiny woman, frail and thin. Her gown hung over her shoulders like a funeral shroud. Her arms and legs long and thin like rope, her elbows and knees like knots. Her fingers so thin she had to clench her hand into a fist to keep her wedding ring from sliding off.
The mountain moved again. The house shook. Mrs. Stanton and Julia jerked and shuddered.
Mrs. Stanton pulled open one of the table drawers, the dry wood screaming out a squeak. She removed a Bible, big and thick, the leather cover worn across the spine, some of the pages dog-eared. She closed the drawer and bowed her head over her clenched hands for a moment and whispered something. When she opened her eyes and looked up, Julia was staring at her.
“What’s that you’re doing?” Julia asked.
“Praying.”
“Praying?”
“Yes.”
“To God?”
Mrs. Stanton nodded. “Yes. To God.”
“So, where is he?”
“Who? God?”
Julia nodded.
“He’s here.”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t seen Him. I’ve seen the devil, but not God.”
“Have you been looking for him?”
“Who? The devil?”
“No. God.”
Julia pulled open a table drawer and took out a small glass bottle with Hadacol on the label. She popped the cork, took a sip, swallowed, and grimaced. Then she looked at Mrs. Stanton and said, “Want some? Better than prayer.”
Julia held the bottle out to her. Mrs. Stanton stared at it and frowned. Shook her head.
Julia shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She recorked the bottle and returned it to the drawer and looked back at Mrs. Stanton.
“I love him?” Julia said.
“Who?”
“Jacob. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.”
Mrs. Stanton frowned and shook her head.
“Well, I love my husband.” Mrs. Stanton worked the brush through her hair, slow and steady, the bristles moving smoothly through the auburn strands, the lamplight catching the tiny diamond in her wedding ring. “It’s my duty.”
Julia felt alone, even with Mrs. Stanton seated across from her. She’d always felt alone. That was until she met Jacob.
“You know, sometimes folks reap what they sow,” Julia said, her voice rising. Hardening a little.
“I don’t approve of you,” Mrs. Stanton said.
“I really don’t care.”
Mrs. Stanton laid her hand on the Bible and leveled a finger at Julia, the tip only inches from Julia’s face. “You’re a sinner.”
“I’m a sinner?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Stanton nodded. “You’re a sinner, and you’ll soon pay for your sins.”
Julia jutted her chin at the Bible. “That book can’t judge me.”
“It already has.”
Julia took the Bible and threw it across the room, against the wall. It landed on the floor next to one of the empty bottles, face down, some pages folded beneath itself. The spine broken. The mountain moved again.
“You make me sick. You sit there crying about how much you miss that dirty old man.” Julia’s voice slowly grew louder. “You wait for him to come out of that mountain, and when he does, he scarfs down your food like an animal without so much as a thank you. Then he drinks until he passes out. You’re not a wife. You’re a servant. A slave.”
Mrs. Stanton stood. Julia stood. The chair fell over.
“You don’t know the first thing about keepin’ a vow,” Mrs. Stanton shouted. “You have no sense of duty. You don’t know nothin’, and you’re selfish. You’ll never leave these mountains.”
“You’re wrong. I’ll leave. You wait and see. I’ll leave.”
“The mountains have already claimed you.”
“You don’t know what love is,” Julia told Mrs. Stanton.
“Oh, dear. You’ve confused love with lust,” Mrs. Stanton said.
“And you traded your dignity for obedience.”
Julia stood and turned her back to Mrs. Stanton. Julia took the lamp and walked over to the wooden cradle in the opposite corner of the room. She slowed as she approached it. Stopped just short of it. Her hand trembling. She took in a breath and held it as she continued until the flickering light reached the crib. She slowly raised the lamp and peered over the railing. Empty, just a small patch quilt with red stains on it and a wooden rattle. Two of the railing rungs were broken, one missing. Julia scrunched her eyes shut as she struggled to breathe. Like someone was choking her. She was suffocating.
She put the lamp down on the floor and reached into the crib and picked up the quilt and sat down in the rocking chair beside the crib and buried her face in the blanket and sobbed. She began signing as she rocked. “Hush, little baby. Don’t say a word.” The floorboards methodically screeched under the bowed rockers. Back and forth. Creak…crick…creak. “Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.” Creak…crick…creak. “And if that mockingbird won’t sing, mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.” Creak…crick…creak. “And if that diamond ring turns brass, mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass.”
After a couple of hours, Julia dried her eyes and returned the blanket to the crib and made her way back over to the table and sat. Mrs. Stanton sat. They looked at each other.
“You know what that whistle blast means, don’t you?” Mrs. Stanton asked.
“Yes. I know. The searchers blow it when they find a miner.”
“And you know they’re finding dead miners, right?”
Julia didn’t say anything.
“And you know it’ll sound again, don’t you?”
Julia ignored Mrs. Stanton. “You should leave this place. Leave that animal. Pack up your things a jump on a train.”
Mrs. Stanton shook her head slowly. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Until death do us part. Remember?”
“Well, it’ll probably be death.”
“Then so be it.”
“You’re a damn fool. You’re holdin’ on to a man ain’t never loved you.”
“Shut up.” Mrs. Stanton shouted. “Shut up.”
Julia ignored her.
“When they pull his broken body out of that mine, you’ll climb back up the mountain and dig another hole, and you’ll put him back into the earth where he belongs.”
Mrs. Stanton covered her ears with her palms, but she couldn’t block out Julia’s shouting. “Your mother and father believed you would grow to love each other over time. That’s why they arranged you to be married.” Julia paused a moment. “Or was it the baby?”
“Shut up.” Mrs. Stanton shouted. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
Another whistle blast. The women just sat there staring at each other. Rat claws scratching somewhere behind the walls.
Mrs. Stanton stood. Julia stood. Mrs. Stanton walked over to the window and looked out through the wavy glass. Beyond the blurred rows of rooftops was the church steeple rising into the smoke. A cross on top. She stared at it a long time and then whispered, “Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.”
Mrs. Stanton walked back to the table and sat in front of Julia and continued brushing her hair.
“You know, dear,” Mrs. Stanton said. “There was a time when he was human. A time before the drink. Before the war. Before he went into that damn mountain.”
She drew the brush through her hair. Slow. Steady. Stroke after stroke after stroke.
“I know what you’ve done.”
Julia tilted her head. “Pardon me?”
“I also know what you’re hiding.” A sinister smile appeared on Mrs. Stanton’s face, the lamp light accenting her stretched features.
Julia rested her trembling hand on her stomach.
“Do you know, they whisper behind your back,” Mrs. Stanton said. “In the company store. During church service. In the mines. Everywhere.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Oh, yes they do. Folks say you’ve lost your mind.”
“Shut up.”
“But I guess they shouldn’t be surprised. Caskets can make you crazy, especially small ones.”
“Shut up.”
“I know how hard it is to listen to the kids playing in the street outside.”
“Shut up.”
“You know Jacob isn’t going to make it out, don’t you?” Mrs. Stanton was still smiling, the corners of her mouth wider, her lips thinner. All of her teeth showing.
“Yes, he will.”
“No, dear. He’s not. There’s only one whistle blast left, and they will blow it for him.”
“Shut up,” Julia pleaded. “He’s alive. He’s alive. I know he is. He’s going to make it out.” She was shouting.
Mrs. Stanton just shook her head as she brushed her hair, still smiling.
“He’ll come out of the blackness and the dust and the rock and take me away, far away from this dreadful place. Far from all the lies. Far from the pain and suffering and death.” More tears. She wiped them away with the quilt.
Leaving the lamp at the table, Julia stood and walked back to the window, and stood there hugging the quilt, looking out. In the distance, from somewhere behind the mountains, in the forest and the obscurity that was night in the gorge, came the repetitive pumping of locomotive pistons and steam chuffs, faint at first, then growing louder and heavier until a train finally appeared from the folds. A long string of cars rattling through the sleepy town. Smoke spewed from the stacks, and the rolling clouds of black accumulated in tight knots that uncoiled as they drifted back over the cars and dissipated into the night. Its whistle blasted, paused like someone taking in a breath between screams, then blasted again.
There was a knock at the front door. Three solid thumps. Julia looked down at the front porch. The sheriff and the pastor were standing on the steps. The pastor in his Sunday suit, starched white shirt, black tie, vest with gold chain looped through a buttonhole, leather shoes buffed to a high shine. In one hand, his hat. His Bible in the other. The sheriff was wearing a brown jacket over a khaki shirt tucked into wool pants held up with suspenders, the white pearl handle of his 38 protruding from his jacket. His knees stained red. Dirt beneath his fingernails. His face was as black as the night. He held his helmet under his arm, the lamplight on, and pointed at the floor. The windchime dangling from the porch rafters jingled in the breeze, a mournful melody.
Julia whispered, “Oh, no,” her breath fogging the glass.
“I can’t let you leave,” Mrs. Stanton said.
Julia turned and looked across the room at Mrs. Stanton. “Pardon me?”
“I said, I can’t let you leave.”
Julia hurried back over to the table and sat and looked at Mrs. Stanton.
“You can’t stop me.”
“Oh, yes I can.” Mrs. Stanton picked up the scissors, its blades long and sharp, glistening in the lamplight as she opened them. Still smiling.
“What are you doing?”
Mrs. Stanton grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled it taut between the blades. “I can’t let you leave.”
Julia screamed. “No.”
Mrs. Stanton closed the scissors, and a chunk of her long auburn hair fell and slid over her shoulders and down between the cleavage of her breasts. More thumps from the front door. Another whistle blast. Mrs. Stanton opened the scissors, grabbed more hair, pulled it between the blades, and closed them again. More hair fell. Still smiling.
Julia squeezed her hand into a fist and swung it at Mrs. Stanton. It collided with the mirror. The glass fractured into long, sharp slivers that fell from the frame onto the floor. Mrs. Stanton was gone.
More pounding on the front door. Then a bang. Boots on the steps, rapid and heavy. More pounding on the bedroom door.
“Mrs. Stanton,” the sheriff shouted. “Open the door. Please, Julia. Open the door.”
Julia picked up a piece of the broken mirror and studied it, blood oozing from her knuckles. There was Mrs. Stanton looking back in the reflection. “You can’t leave,” Mrs. Stanton said.
“Well, if I can’t leave, then you’re not staying.”
Julia brought the sliver to her neck. Mrs. Stanton screamed.
The bedroom door burst open, and in came the sheriff. The pastor remained in the door frame, hugging his Bible. The sheriff followed his lamp light to a single clump on the floor, the slivers of mirror reflecting the light as he went. Blood and hair everywhere.
When the sheriff’s light found Julia, he shouted, “Oh, no.”
The sheriff put down the lamp and dropped to his knees beside Julia and picked up her head and sat and held it in his lap. “Oh, daughter. What have you done?” He rocked and cried as he squeezed Julia. Blood and hair all over him.
The pastor crossed himself.
A miner came quickly through the open front door, up the steps, and down the hall to the bedroom. He appeared behind the pastor, his helmet still on. His face black. Breathing hard. The pastor looked at him. He looked at the pastor, then over at the sheriff, and then back at the pastor.
“What is it?” the pastor whispered.
The miner spoke into the pastor’s ear. “We found him.”
“Who?”
“Jacob.”
“Are you sure?”
The miner nodded.
“Alive?”
“Yes. Alive.”
The pastor and the miner looked at the sheriff again.
“Is that Julia Stanton?”
“It is.” The pastor nodded. “Now, go tell the undertaker to dig another hole.”
“Next to her baby?” the miner asked.
“Yes,” the pastor said. “Next to her baby.”
