AS THE WEATHER warmed, a sort of rough beauty overtook the steep hillsides around Little Hobart Street. Jack-in-the-pulpits and bleeding hearts sprouted wild. White Queen Anne's lace and purple phlox and big orange daylilies blossomed along the road. During the winter you could see abandoned cars and refrigerators and the shells of deserted houses in the woods, but in the spring the vines and weeds and moss grew over them, and in no time they disappeared altogether.
One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by. Mom really piled up on books. She came home from the Welch public library every week or two with a pillowcase full of novels, biographies, and histories. She snuggled into bed with them, looking up from time to time, saying she was sorry, she knew she should be doing something more productive, but like Dad, she had her addictions, and one of them was reading.
We all read, but I never had the feeling of togetherness I'd had in Battle Mountain when we all sat around in the depot with our books. In Welch, people drifted off to different corners of the house. Once night came, we kids all lay in our rope-and-cardboard beds, reading by flashlight or a candle we'd set on our wooden boxes, each of us creating our own little pool of dim light.
Lori was the most obsessive reader. Fantasy and science fiction dazzled her, especially The Lord of the Rings. When she wasn't reading, she was drawing orcs or hobbits. She tried to get everyone in the family to read the books. "They transport you to a different world," she'd say.
I didn't want to be transported to another world. My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships. I loved The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, and especially A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I thought Francie Nolan and I were practically identical, except that she had lived fifty years earlier in Brooklyn and her mother always kept the house clean. Francie Nolan's father sure reminded me of Dad. If Francie saw the good in her father, even though most people considered him a shiftless drunk, maybe I wasn't a complete fool for believing in mine. Or trying to believe in him. It was getting harder.
*
One night that summer, when I was lying in bed and everyone else was asleep, I heard the front door open and the sound of someone muttering and stumbling around in the darkness. Dad had come home. I went into the living room, where he was sitting at the drafting table. I could see by the moonlight coming through the window that his face and hair were matted with blood. I asked him what had happened.
"I got in a fight with a mountain," he said. "and the mountain won."
I looked at Mom asleep on the sofa bed, her head buried under a pillow. She was a deep sleeper and hadn't stirred. When I lit the kerosene lamp, I saw that Dad also had a big gash in his right forearm and a cut on his head so deep that I could see the white of his skull. I got a toothpick and tweezers and picked the rocky grit out of the gash. Dad didn't wince when I poured rubbing alcohol on the wound. Because of all his hair, I had no way to put on a bandage, and I told Dad I should shave the area around the cut. "Hell, honey, that would ruin my image," he said. "A fellow in my position's got to look presentable."
Dad studied the gash on his forearm. He tightened a tourniquet around his upper arm and told me to fetch Mom's sewing box. He fumbled around in it for silk thread but, unable to find any, decided that cotton would be fine. He threaded a needle with black thread, handed it to me, and pointed at the gash. "Sew it up," he said.
"Dad! I can't do that."
"Oh, go ahead, honey," he said. "I'd do it myself, except I can't do diddly with my left hand." He smiled. "Don't worry about me. I'm so thoroughly pickled, I won't feel a thing." Dad lit a cigarette and placed his arm on the table. "Go ahead," he said.
I pressed the needle up against Dad's skin and shuddered.
"Go ahead," he said again.
I pushed the needle and felt a slight tug when it pierced the skin. I wanted to close my eyes, but I needed to see. I pushed a little harder and felt the resistance of Dad's flesh. It was like sewing meat. It was sewing meat.
"I can't, Dad, I'm sorry, I just can't do it," I said.
"We'll do it together," Dad said.
Using his left hand, he guided my fingers as they pushed the needle all the way in through his skin and out the other side. A few droplets of blood appeared. I pulled the needle out and then gave the thread a gentle jerk to tighten it. I tied the two ends of the thread together, like Dad told me to, and then, to put in a second stitch, did it again. The gash was pretty big and could have used a few more stitches, but I couldn't bring myself to stick that needle in Dad's arm one more time.
We both looked at the two dark, slightly sloppy stitches.
"That's some fine handiwork," Dad said. "I'm mighty proud of you, Mountain Goat."
When I left the house the next morning, Dad was still asleep. When I came home in the evening, he was gone.
DAD HAD TAKEN TO disappearing for days at a time. When I asked him where he'd been, his explanations were either so vague or so improbable that I stopped asking. Whenever he did come home, he usually brought a bag of groceries in each arm. We'd gobble deviled-ham sandwiches with thick slices of onion while he told us about the progress of his investigation into the UMW and his latest moneymaking schemes. People were always offering him jobs, he'd explain, but he wasn't interested in work for hire, in saluting and sucking up and brownnosing and taking orders. "You'll never make a fortune working for the boss man," he said. He was focused on striking it rich. There might not be gold in West Virginia, but there were plenty of other ways to make your pile. For instance, he was working on a technology to burn coal more efficiently, so that even the lowest-grade coal could be mined and sold. There was a big market for that, he said, and it was going to make us rich beyond our dreams.