The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton
For Michael on his fourteenth birthday… and for Connor on his.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.
William Shakespeare
It was always coal.
Coal filled their pantry and put a sense of purpose in their Monday coffee. Coal was Christmas and the long weekend in Nashville when the Opry offered half-price tickets. Coal was new corduroy slacks and the washboard symphony they played to every step. Coal was a twice-a-month haircut. Coal was a store-bought dress and the excuse to wear it. Coal took them in as teenagers, proud, cocksure, and gave them back fully played out. Withered and silent.
Coal was the double-wide trailer at twenty and the new truck. Coal was the house with the front porch at twenty-eight and the satellite dish. Coal was the bass boat at thirty-five and the fishing cabin at forty.
And then, after they gave their years to the weak light and black sweat, coal killed them.
And began again.
Chapter 1
THE DIAMOND STATE
The Appalachian Mountains rise a darker blue on the washed horizon if you’re driving east from Indiana in the morning. The green hills of the piedmont brace the wooded peaks like sandbags against a rising tide. The first settlers were hunters, trappers, and then farmers when the game went west. In between the hills and mountains are long, narrow hollows where farmers and cattle scratch a living with equal frustration. And under them, from the Tug Fork to the Clinch Valley, a thick plate of the purest bituminous coal on the Eastern Seaboard.
June was midway to my fifteenth birthday and I remember the miles between Redhill, Indiana, and Medgar, Kentucky, rolling past the station wagon window on an interminable canvas of cornfields and cow pastures, petty towns and irrelevant truck stops. I remember watching my mother from the backseat as she stared at the telephone poles flishing past us, the reflection of the white highway line in the window strobing her haggard face. It had been two months since my brother, Joshua, was killed, and the invulnerability I had felt as a teenager was only a curl of memory. Mom had folded into herself on the way back from the hospital and had barely spoken since. My father emerged from silent disbelief and was diligently weaving his anger into a smothering blanket for everyone he touched, especially me. My life then was an inventory of eggshells and expectations unmet.
Pops, my maternal grandfather, suggested Mom and I spend the summer with him in the hope that memories of her own invulnerable childhood would help her heal. It was one of the few decisions on which my father and grandfather had ever agreed.
The town was positioned in a narrow valley between three sizable mountains and innumerable hills and shelves and finger hollows that ribboned out from the valley floor like veins.
We had not visited Pops since Josh was born three years before, and as we came over the last hill, down into Medgar on that Saturday, the citizens stared at us like they were watching color TV for the first time. A fat woman in red stretch pants dragging a screaming child stopped suddenly; the child jounced into her back. Two men in eager discussion over an open car hood turned in silence, hands on hips. Booth four at Biddle’s Gas and Grub immediately discontinued their debate about proper planting cycles and launched wild speculation about the origin and destination of the blue station wagon with suitcases and a bike bundled onto the luggage rack. People just didn’t move into eastern Kentucky back then.
Twenty-two Chisold Street sat straight and firm behind the faded white fence that aproned its quarter acre. The front porch was wide and friendly, with an old swing bench at one end, a green wicker sofa and chairs at the other. The house was a three-bedroom Southern Cape Cod with white pillars on the porch, double dormers jutting out of the roof like eyes. One broken blind closed in a perpetual wink. The yard was trim and perfect.
We drew up in the wagon, a thin smile on my mother’s face for the first time in months. My father touched her arm gently to tell her she was home.
Pops had been vigiling on the wicker sofa, chewing the end of the long, straight pipe he never lit. He slapped both knees, bellowing an abundant laugh as he raced down the porch steps before the car was even at a full stop. He reached in the window to unlock the door, opened it as the engine cut off, and pulled Mom out of the front seat into a bracing hug. “It’s good to have you back home, Annie.”
She nodded blankly and hugged back.
I exited the car with my backpack of essentials. “Kevin, I think you’ve grown six inches in two months,” he said, fingering a line from the top of his head to my chin. He bear-hugged me, then gave my shoulder a squeeze. The strength in his grip left me flushed. He spun to Audy Rae, his housekeeper of thirty-seven years, who had come out to the porch. “It’s about time we had some life in this old house. The conversation has been wearing thin lately.” He turned back to me and winked. She dismissed him with a wave, swept down the steps and over to the car.
Audy Rae Henderson was five feet four and fireplug solid, her face furrowed with wise creases and unmissing eyes that burned brightly from her dark features. She reached up and placed a hand on each of Mom’s shoulders and held her at arm’s length as if to verify authenticity.
My father came around to the passenger side and stood until Pops acknowledged him. “Edward, how are you?” Pops asked. They shook stiff hands.
The inside of Pops’ Chisold Street home was sparkling clean—Audy Rae saw to that—but to me it smelled old and empty. In the living room, two matching wing chairs with eagle-claw feet and brass buttons tacked down the front faced a worn light-blue sofa with doilied arms. Three of my mother’s paintings hung over it: a man canoeing on a river; wild horses splitting a canyon; the Chisold Street house sometime in the sixties. The room was alien and unused, but anything was better than the throttling silence of our house in Redhill.
Audy Rae led me up to the spare bedroom. “Bet you’re glad to be done with freshman year,” she said, helping the bag onto the bed. I grunted and slumped next to the suitcase.
“High school, my laws. I remember when you was no biggern my knee and now you’re taller than your Pops.”
I was silent, examining the way my interlocking fingers roofed my thumbs.
She came over and sat next to me. “Kevin, you and your mom been through a bad thing—bout as bad as life gets. I know it’s gonna take a while for her and you to heal.”
“He blames me, you know. Says it was all my fault.”
She let out a long, slow breath.
A tear dropped down and splashed my hand.
“What happened wasn’t your fault, child,” she said softly.
“But if I’d…” The sadness and choking anger of the last two months began to close out the thin light in the room.
She put her hand on my leg. I could feel her eyes peering into me. “It all may seem black and desperate now, but you gotta just trust that the Lord’s gonna take care of you and your mom.”
I pulled at a stray thread from the white cotton bedspread as more tears came. “If he was taking care of us, none of this would have happened in the first place.”
She pushed out another long breath, then let it fall away. “Kevin, I can’t say why the Lord took Josh and why he took him the way he did. I don’t think we’ll ever puzzle out the answer. But I’ll just keep praying that one day you’ll find a peace with it.” She stood and moved to the door. “I’ll leave you to be putting your own things away.”
I finally looked up. She smiled. “It’s real good to have you here, child.” Her face was filled with fifty-three years of stocked kindnesses. I smiled sadly back.
She held out her hands. “Come to me, honey.” I pushed off the bed and took three quick steps into the cradle of her arms. She wrapped them around me tightly and squeezed, as if to try to turn me into a diamond.