WheretheHeathen Rage

Sky the color of a deep purple bruise hung draped over the holler. It was the same sky that for days had shrouded the mountain in a pall. Belching out thunderous roars and crackling with dry lightning streaking across it in white-hot veins threatening a hard rain. Now it was just dark and devoid of stars and the moon concealed by clouds yet it had still not rained. Still not afforded him the excuse to stay inside. So he rose in the porchlight that seeped through the slit in the drapes and jaundiced the stock-still room. The woman lay entangled in a quilt. Mouth agape. She stirred and rolled onto her side while he dressed there in the dark but she did not wake. When the room went still again, her breathing slow and rhythmic, he picked up his boots from the side of the bed and shuffled down the hall in his sock feet toward the kitchen. He knew every creaky floorboard in the hallway by heart and he knew what a light sleeper she was and he navigated the ancient planks on tip toes past the frozen faces of long-departed kin, yellowed behind their glassed frames, watching him until he stepped onto the linoleum in the kitchen.

The house was dark in the predawn hour. Still and musty with the earthy smell of age and the humid hint of rain. Hollis stood at the stove and switched on the hood light. He waited a moment in the stillness and listened for the train whistle to wail but it did not wail and inside the house there was no sound save for the faint ticking of an ancestral mantle clock. He turned the dial on the stove and watched the front burner redden and come alive and he took a percolator and loaded it with water and coffee grounds and sat it atop the fevered coils. A formica table sat against the wall with two matching chairs. Anna had wanted a bigger table with more chairs and he had promised to buy her one should they ever have children. She wanted a child. He didn’t. Far as he was concerned this world that he’d been brought into and not been able to escape was no place for a child. He felt pretty sure that by now even the idea of children was much a thing of the past and besides that, he liked the table with its two chairs. Liked what it represented. Just him and her against the world. Nobody else.

The coffee began to perk and he took down a cup from the cupboard and filled it, then sat down at the table in the yellow haze of stove-light and listened to the caw of a nightbird somewhere out in the distant dark while he stared hypnotized into the blackness in his cup.

He sat there in the dark for how long he didn’t know until he felt the presence of her, as if the house had inhaled and then exhaled in a giant sigh and when he stirred from his trance Anna was standing in the kitchen doorway watching him. She wore nothing but a thin nightgown that clung to every curve of her naked body beneath it.

“You hear them Jesus freaks hollerin’ again last night?” Anna asked as she stepped in and flipped on the wall switch.

Hollis’ eyes squinched shut and then blinked in spastic jerks against the light that exploded into the kitchen like a burst of burning phosphorous. Once his eyes took to the light he watched her curvy figure move beneath the gown as she crossed the linoleum on her bare feet toward the percolator.

“Impossible not to hear ‘em.” Hollis said.

Anna took down her own cup and poured her own coffee. Loaded it with enough cream and sugar to make the spoon stand straight up then sat across from him at the table. She crossed her legs and let the hem of her nightgown crawl halfway up her thigh.

“Kinda startin’ to piss me off. And that band. Christ almighty. That band sucks,” she said.

The quip was not lost on Hollis but he was already deep in the throes of worry and he couldn’t seem to find a smile for her this morning. It had been nearing eight months since he had heard the hiss of the big Norfolk Southern engines and the grinding and squealing as they backed under the flood loader at Bonny Blue tipple. The slipping of metal on metal as the wheels grabbed the iron rails and pulled the empty coal cars to rest beneath while they were loaded with the mountain’s black marrow. To some it was just noise. Something that kept you up nights. To Hollis it was a lullaby. He couldn’t sleep with a train not running.

He sipped his coffee and let his eyes move all over her. Innocence and hope still adrift there in her sleepy face. Tousled hair the color of dirty straw lying soft against the bare skin of her shoulders. He wanted to burrow his face in it and forget that there was a world that existed anywhere but right here. He wanted to creep back down the hall and crawl back in bed and lie on his side with his face toward the window and feel the soft warmth of her breasts pressed against his back. The sweetness of her breath warm on his neck. Howling sounds of a train running all through the night. He wanted to wrap himself in it all and pull it up around his shoulders like an heirloom quilt and drift back off to sleep in its comforts. He wanted to disappear.

“The sun ain’t even up yet. Why don’t you see if you can’t sleep a bit more,” Hollis said.

She held up her coffee cup.

“I’m already drinkin’ coffee. ‘Sides I ain’t sleepy.”

She slid her foot into his lap and wiggled her toes into his crotch.

“We could both just go on back to bed. Make you glad you did,” she said and winked and bit down on her bottom lip.

“Baby don’t do that. You know I gotta get goin’.”

“Whatever.”

She didn’t move her foot.

“Ya know, you don’t have to keep digging around up on that mountain. We’re gettin’ by on my check.”

Hollis just sipped his coffee and gazed off at something Anna couldn’t see.

“I’m gonna bring in what I can ‘til the strike’s over. I ain’t gonna just sit around and watch TV all day.”

“Gonna get yourself shot for poachin’ if you ain’t careful. That’s what you’re gonna do.”

“I’m always careful.”

Anna knew full well that he wasn’t always careful. Crawling over barbed wire fences and no trespassing signs like he never saw them at all. Traipsing around on anybody’s property he damn well pleased like he owned it.

“Whatever,” she said.

Hollis finished his coffee and got up from the table and rinsed his cup and placed it upside down on a towel next to the sink, then took an empty potato sack from a drawer and stuffed it into his back pocket where it hung down like the frayed tail of a squirrel.

“You see Rawlings tell him to stop hollering into that damned megaphone so early in the morning. He’s almost as obnoxious as those Pentecostals with that thing,” Anna said.

Hollis smiled and walked back over and kissed her then stepped to the door.

“Hey,” she said.

He turned back and she was watching him.

“I love you,” she said.

“I know. Rain check on that whole bed deal you were peddlin’?”

“Maybe. We’ll see about it.”

She grinned and he grinned back and then he turned the doorknob and stepped out.

A metal table decorated in a rusty patina stood on the porch right outside the door. Atop the table lay an assortment of ginseng roots that could easily pass for gnarled fingers chopped off the hand of a tiny witch. Hollis scraped them into the sack and twisted the top closed and stepped out into the yard.

The house sat no more than twenty yards off the train track. Close enough that had a passing train managed to jump the track and fall on to its side it would have toppled the back porch and at least part of the kitchen. The sun had come leaking into the night; the world coming to life. Beads of dew twinkling in the grass. A Brown Creeper called in a high warbling song that silenced for a moment but only for a moment when Hollis first stepped off the porch. He stood and patted the pocket of his shirt inside his jacket and heard the rustle of the cellophane wrapper around the Pall Malls. The lilting melody of the little Creeper started up again and in the coming dawn Hollis made his way across the yard and up onto the railroad track. The track ran overgrown with carpetweed as far as he could see cutting a seam through a decaying landscape conflicted between dwelling and desolation. He walked past rotting trailers and sinking lopsided houses. Garments hung from clotheslines swaying in the morning breeze - odd like chorus-lines of invisible dancers dressed in work shirts and khakis. A mangy dog lay in a yard tethered to the end of a chain anchored to an engine block. When he saw Hollis his ears perked and he charged full speed up the slope. A hard yelp sounded like a gunshot as the chain yanked the dog back just shy of reaching the top. Hollis stopped and took the Pall Malls from his pocket and shook one up from the pack and grabbed it with his teeth and cupped his hands around it against the breeze and lit it. He let the smoke seep out of his nostrils, calm as if he never even noticed the dog. It seemed to further enrage the poor animal who carried on lunging against the chain and barking and baring its slobbering fangs.

Hollis looked out up ahead. Then he looked back behind. He stood a moment and thought to himself that if he hadn’t been positive that he had indeed just turned his head on its pivot he might have been able to convince himself that he were looking in the same direction both ways. He took another long drag, leaned forward just out of reach of the snarling fangs and spit on the dog’s forehead.

“Dumbass. That chain’s gonna do the same damn thing ev’ry mornin’ ya know,” he said to the dog, then he turned and started on down the track and walked until he disappeared in the low morning fog silent as an apparition.