Wish You Well, Page 21

  "Dynamite!" Oz said.

  Diamond nodded. "Coal deep in that rock. Pick can't git to it. Gotta blast it out."

  "Is it dangerous?" asked Lou.

  "Naw. He knowed what he doing. Done it myself."

  As they watched from a distance, Eugene pulled the dynamite out of his pocket and attached a long fuse to it. Then he lit his lantern and went inside the mine. Diamond sat back against a redbud, took out an apple, and cut it up. He flicked a piece to Jeb, who was messing around some underbrush. Diamond noted the worried looks on me faces of Lou and Oz.

  "That fuse slow-burning. Walk to the moon and back afore it go off."

  A while later Eugene came out of the mine and sat down on a rock near the entrance.

  "Shouldn't he get away from there?"

  "Naw. Don't use that much dynamite for a bucketful. After it blow and the dust settles, I show you round in there."

  "What's to see in some old mine?" asked Lou.

  Diamond suddenly hunched forward. "I tell you what. I seed some fellers down here late one night poking round. 'Member Miss Louisa told me to keep my eyes open? Well, I done that. They had lanterns and carrying boxes into the mine. We go in and see what they's up to."

  "But what if they're in the mine now?"

  "Naw. I come by just a bit ago, looked round, threw a rock inside. And they's fresh footprints in the dirt heading out. 'Sides, Eugene would'a seed 'em." He had a sudden idea. "Hey, mebbe they running shine, using the mine to store the still and corn and such."

  "More likely they're just hobos using the mine to keep dry at night," said Lou.

  "Ain't never heard tell of no hobos up here."

  "So why didn't you tell Louisa?" Lou challenged him.

  "She got enough to worry 'bout. Check it out first. What a man do."

  Jeb flushed out a squirrel and chased it around a tree while they all watched and waited for the explosion.

  Lou said, "Why don't you come live with us?"

  Diamond stared at her, clearly troubled by this question. He turned to his hound. "Cut it out, Jeb. That squirrel ain't doing nuthin' to you."

  Lou added, "I mean, we could use the help. Another strong man around. And Jeb too."

  "Naw. I a feller what needs his freedom."

  "Hey, Diamond," said Oz, "you could be my big brother. Then Lou wouldn't have to beat up everybody by herself."

  Lou and Diamond smiled at each other.

  "Maybe you should think about it," said Lou.

  "Mebbe I will." He looked at the mine. "Ain't be long now."

  They sat back and waited. Then the squirrel broke free from the woods and flashed right into the mine. Jeb plunged in after it.

  Diamond leapt to his feet. "Jeb! Jeb! Git back here!" The boy charged out of the woods. Eugene made a grab for him, but Diamond dodged him and ran into the mine.

  Lou screamed, "Diamond! Don't!"

  She ran for the mine entrance.

  Oz shouted, "Lou, no! Come back!"

  Before she could reach the entrance, Eugene grabbed her. "Wait here. I git him, Miss Lou."

  Eugene fast-limped into the mine, screaming, "Diamond! Diamond!"

  Lou and Oz looked at each other, terrified. Time ticked by. Lou paced in nervous circles near the entrance. "Please, please. Hurry." She went to the entrance, heard something coming. "Diamond! Eugene!"

  But it was Jeb that came racing out of the mine after the squirrel. Lou grabbed at the dog, and then the con-cussive force of the explosion knocked Lou off her feet. Dust and dirt poured out of the mine, and Lou coughed and gagged in this maelstrom. Oz raced to help her while Jeb barked and jumped.

  Lou got her bearings and her breath and stumbled to the entrance. "Eugene! Diamond!"

  Finally, she could hear footsteps coming. They drew closer and closer, and they seemed unsteady. Lou said a silent prayer. It seemed to take forever, but then Eugene appeared, dazed, covered with dirt, bleeding. He looked at them, tears on his face.

  "Damn, Miss Lou."

  Lou took one step back, then another, and then another. Then she turned and ran down the trail as fast as she could, her wails covering them all.

  Some men carried the covered body of Diamond to a wagon. They had had to wait for a while to let the smoke clear out, and to make certain that the mine would not collapse on them. Cotton watched the men take Diamond away, and then went over to Eugene, who sat on a large rock, holding a wet cloth to his bloodied head.

  "Eugene, sure you don't need anything else?"

  Eugene looked at the mine like he expected to see Diamond walk out with his stuck-up hair and silly smile. "All I need, Mr. Cotton, is this be a bad dream I wake myself up from."

  Cotton patted his big shoulder and then glanced at Lou sitting on a little hump of dirt, her back to the mine. He went to her and sat down.

  Lou's eyes were raw from crying, her cheeks stained with tears. She was hunched over in a little ball, like every part of her was in wrenching pain.

  "I'm sorry, Lou. Diamond was a fine boy."

  "He was a man. A fine man"

  "I suppose you're right. He was a man."

  Lou eyed Jeb, who sat mournfully at the mine entrance.

  "Diamond didn't have to go in that mine after Jeb."

  "Well, that dog was all Diamond had. When you love something, you can't just sit by and not do anything."

  Lou picked up some pine needles and then let a few trickle out between her fingers. Minutes passed before she spoke again. "Why do things like this happen, Cotton?"

  He sighed deeply. "I suppose it may be God's way of telling us to love people while they're here, because tomorrow they may be gone. I guess that's a pretty sorry answer, but I'm afraid it's the only one I've got."

  They were silent for a bit longer.

  "I'd like to read to my mom," said Lou.

  Cotton said, "That's the finest idea I've ever heard."

  "Why is it a fine idea?" she demanded. "I really need to know."

  "Well, if someone she knew, someone she... loved would read to her, it might make all the difference."

  "Do you really think she knows?"

  "When I carried your mother outside that day, I was holding a living person fighting like the devil to get out. I could feel it. And she will one day. I believe it with all my heart, Lou."

  She shook her head. "It's hard, Cotton. To let yourself love something you know you may never have."

  Cotton nodded slowly. "You're wise beyond your years. And what you say makes perfect sense. But I think when it comes to matters of the heart, perfect sense may be the last thing you want to listen to."

  Lou let the rest of the needles fall and wiped her hands clean. "You're a good man too, Cotton."

  He put his arm around her and they sat there together, neither one of them willing to look at the blackened, swollen cavity of the coal mine that had taken their friend from them forever.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THERE WAS ENOUGH STEADY RAIN, AND SOME THUN-derstorms added to the plenty, such that virtually all the crops came in healthy and in abundance. One fierce hailstorm damaged some of the corn, but not to any great extent. A stretch of powerful rain did wash a gully out of a hill, like a scoop of ice cream, but no person, animal, or crop was hurt by it.

  Harvesting time was full upon them, and Louisa, Eugene, Lou, and Oz worked hard and long, which was good, because it gave them little time to think about Diamond not being with them anymore. Occasionally they would hear the mine siren, and then a bit later the slow rumbling of the explosion would come. And each time Louisa would lead them all in a song to take their minds off Diamond's having been killed by such an awful thing. Louisa did not speak much of Diamond's passing. Yet Lou noted that she read her Bible a lot more often by the firelight, and her eyes swelled with tears whenever his name was mentioned, or when she looked at Jeb. It was hard for all of them, yet all they could do was keep going, and there was much to do.

  They harvested the pinto be
ans, cast them in Chop bags, stomped them to get the husks off, and had them for dinner every night with gravy and biscuits. They picked the pole beans, which had grown up around the cornstalks, careful, as Louisa schooled them, to avoid the green stinger worms that lived under the leaves. They scythed the cornfield and bundled the cornstalks into shocks, which they stood in the field, and which would later be used for livestock feed. They shucked the corn, hauled it by sled to the corncrib, and filled it to almost overflowing. From a distance the tumble of cobs looked like yel-lowjackets at frenzied play.

  The potatoes came in thick and fat, and with churned butter were a meal by themselves. The tomatoes came in too, plump and blood red, eaten whole or sliced, and also cut up and canned in jars in a great iron kettle on the stove, along with beans and peppers and many other vegetables. They stacked the jars in the foodsafe and under the stairs. They filled lard buckets with wild strawberries and gooseberries, and apples by the bushel, made jams and pies, and canned the rest. They ground down the cane stalks and made molasses, and shelled some of the corn and made cornmeal and fried crackling bread.

  It seemed to Lou that nothing was wasted; it was an efficient process and she admired it, even as she and Oz worked themselves to near death from before sunup to long after sundown. Everywhere they turned with tool or hand, food was flying at them. This made Lou think of Billy Davis and his family having nothing to eat. She thought about it so much she talked to Louisa about it.

  "You stay up tomorrow night, Lou, and you'll find that you and me thinking on the same line."

  All of them were waiting by the barn late that night when they heard a wagon coming down the road. Eugene held up a lantern and the light fell upon Billy Davis as he pulled the mules to a halt and nervously stared at Lou and Oz.

  Louisa approached the wagon. "Billy, I thought we might need some help. I want'a make sure you get a good load. Land been real fine to us this year."

  Billy looked embarrassed for a moment, but then Lou said, "Hey, Billy, come on, I'm going to need your muscle to lift this bucket."

  Thus encouraged, Billy jumped down to help. They all spent a solid hour loading bags of cornmeal, canning jars full of beans and tomatoes, and buckets of rutabagas, col-lards, cucumbers, potatoes, apples, plump cabbages, pears, sweet potatoes, onions, and even some cuts of salted hog meat on that wagon.

  While Lou was loading, she saw Louisa take Billy to a corner of the barn and look at his face with a lantern. Then she had him raise his shirt, and she did an examination there and came away apparently satisfied.

  When Billy turned the wagon around and left, the mules strained under the new weight, and the boy carried a big smile as he flicked the whip and disappeared into the night.

  "They can't hide all that food from George Davis," Lou said.

  "I been doing this many a year now. Man never once fretted about where the bounty come from."

  Lou looked angry. "That's not fair. He sells his crop and makes money, and we feed his family."

  "What's fair is a momma and her children eating good," answered Louisa.

  "What were you checking for under his shirt?" asked Lou.

  "George is smart. Most times hits where the clothing covers."

  "Why didn't you just ask Billy if he had hit him?" "Just like an empty lunch pail, children will lie when they shamed."

  With all their surplus, Louisa decided the four would drive the wagon laden with crops down to the lumber camp. On the day of the trip Cotton came over to look after Amanda. The lumber folks were expecting them, for quite a crowd had gathered by the time they arrived. The camp was large, with its own school, store, and post office. Because the camp was forced to move frequently when forests had been exhausted, the entire town was on rails, including the workers' homes, the school, and the store. They were laid out on various spurs like a neighborhood. When a move was called for, the locomotives hooked up to the cars and off the entire town went in short order.

  The lumber camp families paid for the crops either with cash money or with barter items, such as coffee, sugar, toilet paper, stamps, pencils and paper, some throw-off clothes and shoes, and old newspapers. Lou had ridden Sue down, and she and Oz took turns giving the camp children rides free of charge, but the patrons could "donate" peppermint sticks and other delicacies if they saw fit, and many did.

  Later, from atop the sharp spine of a ridge, they looked down where a shaft of the McCloud River flowed. A splashdam of stone and wood had been created downriver, artificially backing the water up and covering boulders and other obstructions that made log transport by river difficult. Here the water was filled bank to bank with trees, mostly mighty poplar, the bottoms of the trunks scored with the lumber company's brand. They looked like pencils from this great height, but then Oz and Lou noted that the small specks on each of them were actually full-grown men riding the logs. They would float down to the splashdam, where a vital wedge would be kicked out, and the thundering water would carry the trees downriver, where they would be tied off and Virginia logs would ride on to Kentucky markets.

  As Lou surveyed the land from this high perch, something seemed to be missing. It took her a moment to realize that what was absent was the trees. As far as she could see, there were just stumps. When they went back down to the camp, she also noted that some of the rail lines were empty.

  "Sucked just 'bout all the wood we can from here," one of the lumberjacks proudly explained. "Be heading out soon." He didn't seem bothered by this at all. Lou figured he was probably used to it. Conquer and move on, the only trace of their presence the butts of wood left behind.

  On the trip home they tied Sue to the wagon and Lou and Oz rode in the back with Eugene. It had been a good day for everyone, but Oz was the happiest of them all, for he had "won" an official baseball from one of the camp boys by throwing it farther than any of them. He told them it was his proudest possession behind the graveyard rabbit's foot Diamond Skinner had given him.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  IN READING TO HER MOTHER, LOU CHOSE NOT BOOKS, but rather Grit newspapers, and some copies of the Saturday Evening Post they had gotten from the lumber camp. Lou would stand against the wall of her mother's room, the paper or magazine held in front of her, and read of the economy, world catastrophes, Hitler's bludgeoning war across Europe, politics, the arts, movies, and the latest news of writing and writers, which made Lou realize how long it had been since she had actually read a book. School would start again very soon; even so, she had ridden Sue over to Big Spruce a few days before and borrowed some reading material for her and Oz from the "lending library," with Estelle McCoy's permission of course.

  Louisa had taught Eugene to read when he was a child, and so Lou brought a book for him too. He was concerned he would find no time to read it, and yet he did, late at night under lamplight, his moistened thumb slowly turning the pages as he concentrated. Other times Lou helped him with his words as they worked the fields in preparation for the coming winter, or when milking the cows by kerosene lamp. Lou would take him through the Grits and the Posts and Eugene particularly liked saying "Roooosevelt, President Roooosevelt," a name that appeared often in the Grit pages. The cows looked at him strangely whenever he said "Roooosevelt," as though they thought he was actually mooing at them in a peculiar way. And Lou couldn't help but gape when Eugene asked her why somebody would name their child President.

  "You ever think about living somewhere else?" Lou asked him one morning while they were milking.

  He said, "Mountain all I seed, but I knowed they a lot mo' to this world."

  "I could take you to the city one day. Buildings so tall you can't walk up them. You ride in an elevator." He looked at her curiously. "A little car that pulls you up and down," she explained.

  "Car? What, like'n the Hudson?"

  "No, more like a little room you stand in."

  Eugene thought that interesting, but said he'd probably just stick to farming on the mountain. "Want'a get hi
tched, have me a