And I did. At least when she was listening.
Grandma was busy fashioning an apron to cover up the shiny bronze bosoms on the Venus de Milo lamp Mother had mailed home in a big box from New York where she worked making airplanes for the War.
“Is my father off fighting in the War?” I asked.
“No, your daddy was a coal miner, but he wasn’t lucky enough to get out of there alive.”
“What happened to him?”
Grandma looked up from the pink-flowered scrap in her hand and studied me before she answered. “I reckon if you have a curiosity about him, you’re old enough to know.” I reckoned so too—after all, I had just turned four years old.
Grandma folded her hands on the table to show I had her full attention.
“A loose coal car ran over him down in the mines and killed him,” she began. “You weren’t but five months old and don’t remember it, but make no mistake, you come from coal. Scratch any West Virginian a few layers down and you’re bound to find a vein of coal. Yours runs deep. You were born in a coal camp at Penman, West Virginia, on November 17, 1939. I helped you into this world. Good thing. By the time the doctor came you’d been looking around all big-eyed for more than an hour. He weighed the heft of you with both hands, judging you to be better than eight pounds.”
She turned to rifle through a drawer of old pictures, handing one to me.
“This is your daddy in his mining garb. His name was Hursey Lee Hall.”
In the picture she shows me, my father has platinum-blond hair and a hint of a smile. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place what it is. His belt buckle skews off to the side. He wears a carbide lantern helmet, carries a dinner bucket in his hand. Maybe somebody took that picture on the very day he died, but there’s no way for me to know.
Grandma said a big shot from the coal company came the morning of the funeral and gave my mother one thousand dollars for my father’s twenty-nine-year-old life.
Then he gave her two days to move out of the sorry little company house we rented.
On the third day another miner would move his family in and take over my father’s life, every morning riding a coal car over the soon-forgotten bits of him left splattered along rails down in the mines.
Mother used the money as a down payment on a house at 211 Fourth Avenue, East Beckley, West Virginia. Fourth Avenue was a red dog road. Red dog is burned out trash coal. If the coal had too much slate, it was piled in a slag heap and burned. The coal burned up, but the slate didn’t. The heat turned it every shade of red and orange and lavender you could imagine. When the red dog on our road got buried under rutted dirt or mud, dump trucks poured new loads of the sharp-edged rock. My best friend Sissy and I followed along after the truck, looking for fossils. We found ferns and shells and snails, and once I found a perfect imprint of a four-leaf clover.
“Don’t you be running on that red dog road,” Grandma hollered as I ran off to play.
“Yes ma’am,” I said over my shoulder.
And I’d mean it, but I could never slow my feet to a walk for very long. The scars on my knees are worn as permanent penance.
After the War ended, some of our streets were renamed in honor of men killed in battle, and Fourth was changed to Bibb. East Beckley was the divide between the doctor-lawyer-merchant-chiefs who lived in big houses in Beckley proper on streets like Woodlawn or North Kanawha, and the others who lived along the dirt road of the Gray Flats in scattered houses grimed by coal dust. From my house it was only down the road a few houses to Sissy’s, then across the field to the 19-21 Bypass, the paved road that separated East Beckley from the Flats, where the road wasn’t even covered with red dog.
There was a class system of sorts. We were somewhere in the middle.
Most everybody had a vegetable garden, called a Victory Garden during the War, and we did too. And we had a grape arbor and fruit trees. Like many of our neighbors, we had our cow Bossy for milk and butter, and a dozen or so chickens for eggs. The three pigs Grandpa fattened up and butchered every fall provided ham and bacon and pork chops. And we had pets too—a border collie named Queenie and an assortment of cats, my favorite a tomcat named Buttermilk. Sissy’s grandma had a goat and ducks, and Mr. Lilly had honeybees. But we weren’t out in the country. We were in a real neighborhood, with houses lined up on both sides of the road.
Built in the Craftsman style, our white two-story house had a blue roof and blue shutters, a front porch with a swing, and a scalloped, white picket fence all around. My grandma and grandpa moved to Beckley to live with us after my father got killed in the mines when I was five months old. They were left to take care of four-year-old me, my sister Vonnie, two years older, and Hursey, my eleven-year-old brother who was deaf, for a year and a half while my mother and Aunt Lila went off to build airplanes at a war plant in Buffalo, New York. I wondered how they got there. Maybe they rode the bus. Maybe they rode the train.
I couldn’t remember when they left.
Every night before I went to sleep I tried to remember, but I never could.
2
Washed in the Blood
Best put in a jug of coffee and a quilt or two,” Grandpa said. “Water’s likely to be right chilly.”
“There’s quilts in the car and coffee’s perking,”
