A pity, she thought, looking out into the green stillness of yard and sunlight and berry canes. A thousand pities, that people couldn’t live in this magical beauty untroubled; that you had to weigh the sweetness of the morning and the rumpled velvet grandeur of the mountains towering over the town against the need to feed your family, the need to make a living, to make something of your life.
A thousand pities that this beauty was the only thing you had to trade. And so many traded it for a life in the cities.
She shook her head, her heart hurting for those sunny-hearted sixteen-year-olds who wouldn’t be in her classroom when school convened again in the fall. At times she had a sense of standing on a stream bank, watching the flashing water leap past her: a glimpse and it’s gone.
She had made a choice long ago, and, in spite of the meager pay that she augmented with weaving and quilting, she told herself she was content. Nieces and nephews, students and cats. Sitting on the bank of the stream of time. She smiled at the morning, wondering what the day would bring.
“Fred!” Bob Wishart reached out from the bed where he lay as his brother came into the room. “Fred, you came!”
“I’m sorry.” Fred touched him, looked down into his face-round, fair-skinned and soft, a familiar, comforting mirror of his own-and then around at the big first-floor bedroom of their mother’s house. It was the only room large enough to contain the softly beeping battery of respirators, filters, monitors. The blue-flowered curtains were open, showing the fence cloaked in honeysuckle whose smell almost drowned the faint whiffs of antiseptic; the light dimmed the green watching eyes of the surge suppressors and backup batteries that clustered around the feet of the life-support equipment. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t come before, when this happened.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Bob’s smile, his joy, was like standing happily naked in summer sun. Bob had always been the twin to take life as it came. “You wrote the checks, anyway. God, what would Mom and I have done if you hadn’t come through? And you’re here now.”
“I’m here now.” Fred settled himself by the bed in the old purple plush chair that had always graced the living room. Someone must have carried it in here for Mom to sit in.
It was good to be back. Good to be home. Funny-when he’d left this place, fled to Stanford and the promise of more than the University of West Virginia could teach, it had felt like escaping prison. Even his love for Bob hadn’t outweighed the sense of suffocation, of being trapped in this small town and this dusty house; held prisoner by their mother’s nameless fears. He wished he could embrace his brother, but Bob lay tangled in the ghastly sterile spiderweb of tubes and monitors and stanchions bearing IV bags, as he had lain for ten weeks now since the accident. Thank God indeed for the money the Source Project paid, the money that had been ready when word reached him, to provide the care Bob needed without requiring their mother to stay at the hospital in Lexington to look after him.
She wasn’t strong. She had relied on their father to deal with the world, and when he’d died, abandoning her as Fred had later abandoned her, she’d relied on her boys. Going away among strangers would have terrified her, killed her, maybe. Yet Fred knew she wouldn’t have abandoned her son.
It was enough-almost-to embrace Bob in his mind, his thought. And Bob, looking up smiling from the pillow, returned the hug with his eyes and his heart.
After the nightmare of the past few years, what had been stiflingly provincial now showed its true nature: safe and familiar, the heart of his self. In the peaceful sunlight of the bedroom the guilt he’d felt-the sense that he, Fred, should have been the one in the car when that truck roared around the corner in the dark-dissolved, like dirty grease in those time-lapse dish soap commercials they’d seen as children.
He was the one who could help. Who’d save them both.
Fred reached out with his mind, his heart, his thoughts, as if to draw the whole old house around him like a comforting blanket. The sounds and scents and the way the boards of the upstairs hall creaked, the cracked glass of the sun-porch window, the huge old Populux stove in the kitchen, everything. . Every memory of their childhood. The taste of every cookie they’d eaten in the cluttered kitchen and the smell of the attic dust.
He could give it back to Bob. Come back to it himself.
It was good to be home.
Hank Culver put his head through the dispatcher’s office door. “Anything I need to know before we go down, Candy?”
She checked the line of Post-it Notes stuck to the edges of her monitor-not that she needed to. Plump and curly-haired Candace Leary had been dispatcher at Applby Mining Corporation since long before they’d computerized, before there’d even been phones down into the mine. I’d have to stand at the top of the hole and shout, he’d once heard her telling Mr. Mullein’s secretary-Norman Mullein was son-in-law of the original old bastard whose name was on the mine. I thought it was heaven when they got us a couple tin cans on a string.
The secretary had half-believed her. There wasn’t a tram that left the downcast or a malfunctioning sprinkler pipe she didn’t know about. “You’re still developing the main panels in Twelve?”
He had been all week. “It’s still looking good. The seam’s about four feet thick and pretty level-maybe a little dip. Floor and ceiling look good.”
“Good deal. The geology boys’ll be glad to hear it.” She checked the status board. “Everything clear. Hillocher’s crew is starting to retreat out of Area Ten.”
“Good. Thanks.” As he clumped down the porch steps of the little office and crossed the dust-blackened gravel and mud that lay between it and the pithead, Hank checked his helmet light and his radio and touched the lumbar pack where he stowed the spare batteries-including an extra nick-cad for the radio, which weighed a ton. He’d paid for the extra battery himself, not trusting the one the company provided. In spite of all the union’s griping, the company tended to go cheap on equipment and keep it longer than they should. Back in the mid-sixties, when he’d started working at the old Green Mountain shaft on the other side of town, he’d gotten into the habit of buying as many spare parts as he could afford and carrying them in his lunchbox.
Twice, in those days, he’d been caught in cave-ins, once seen his brother Gil half-crushed when the face collapsed. It had taken the company hours to even locate them and nearly two days to dig them out.
Though Gil had survived-he’d been back at work in six months and had worked for Applby until emphysema got him in ’88-it was not something Hank planned to ever let happen again if he could help it.
Men were coming out of the locker room to crowd around the pithead elevator, gray coveralls still damp from yesterday, clumsy-footed in boots and kneepads. Sonny Grimes stubbed his Marlboro on the elevator doorjamb and with the other hand fished a pack of smokeless from his coverall pocket, chewing even as he tucked the half-smoked butt behind his ear. “The fuck you lookin’ at?” he demanded, when Hank put distance between himself and the inevitable spit to come.
“My mama was frightened by a cow in the pasture,” said Hank. “Gave me a complex.”
“Fuck you.”
A few feet away Ryan Hanson was twisting his body into a corkscrew in an effort to demonstrate Hideo Nomo’s pitching style to Gordy Flue: “Kicked the Braves’ ass that one year.”
“Bunch of Japs,” opined Grimes and spit tobacco on the cement floor. “Damn dumb game anyway. Give me football.”
“You like those guys in the spandex britches, Sonny?” asked Gordy, getting a general laugh and another “Fuck you” from Grimes.