I never sneak up on Gladys cause her ears don’t work good no more. When I walk in her front door, I call out, “Yoo-hoo, it’s Marris,” so she don’t get spooked. I saw her jump a time or two when a sound come too quick and she won’t ready. Old hearts like hers and mine don’t need testing.
Today she says, “You sound awful spry for the sun just up and frost on the ground.”
“Got reason to,” I say back and get her attention. She plays like she don’t care, but I see sorting behind her eyes, and she wonders what my reason is. I pour me some coffee and sit cross from her and grin.
“You look ugly when you grin like that,” she says to stretch out her asking.
I hold on to my news and sip coffee.
“When you grin like that, your wrinkles puff up and your eyes turn to sinkholes,” she says to get under my skin.
I stay easy.
“For Lord’s sake, spit it out,” she finally says. “You know you want to.”
I scoot to the edge of my seat and put both hands round my coffee cup. “Skeeter’s gonna come with his new bride for a visit on the first Saturday in October,” I say, so happy I can pop. “They coming at noon all the way from Asheville. How I know is Skeeter called Mooney, and Mooney told Preacher Perkins, and the preacher come by here on his rounds last Monday, and that’s how come I know.”
My hands shake when I try to drink from my coffee cup cause I’m so discombobulated.
“Last two times Skeeter say he was coming, he don’t,” Gladys reminds me, and that’s true. He got car trouble one time and had to work last minute the other, as I recall. Been two years since the last visit that don’t happen. Three years before that when he don’t come, but I don’t count when it comes to Skeeter.
“What’d he do with his old wife? She dead or throwed out?”
“Don’t rightly know. Preacher Perkins don’t give particulars and I don’t ask. I’ll know on Saturday. I feel good bout this time.
“His new bride, Gladys! That’s the best excitement. Getting to start again. Don’t know her name yet. She gotta be special if Skeeter picked her. Saturday will be here before you know it and I’ll get answers. I gotta cook chicken and dumplings for him or he won’t feel like he’s been home.”
“Don’t go killing no chicken yet on account of that boy, Marris.”
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Skeeter’s coming soon to the only mountains he’s ever called home, but when I was born, my folks don’t live in Baines Creek in the highlands of North Carolina like now. Baines Creek don’t have coal to dig in its heart that breaks a man in two. When I come along, we live over Rock Bottom way in West Virginia, on the airish side of the mountain where coal dust sifted through slits round the windows, and spindly houses can’t be scrubbed clean. Where we lived looked the same inside as it did outside. Gray.
It was in the year 1898 I come to be, and everybody in the world knowed the name Mother Jones. Some got to see that lady hero for real. Mama and Daddy saw her once when she come through on the train in the rain. She stood at the back of the iron caboose and looked down on a passel of coal mine families washed in the rain that don’t stop, but the coal dust stuck to their skin.
Mama remembered everything Mother Jones wore right down to the line of buttons on her shoes. It got told so many times I thought I’d seen her myself. The long, black wool dress with a high bustle on her backside. A velvet fringed shawl worn bare in spots. A black straw bonnet tied with satin streamers. A thin leather purse hanging by a chain.
How she looked won’t the story though. It was what she did and how she talked. That little woman could fire up weary souls, call burly men cowards for taking scraps, pull em down to their knees, then raise em up in hope with just her words. Mama and Daddy knew that for fact, not recollect.
Mother Jones don’t like that coal miners put a pile of gold coins in rich men’s pockets and nary a penny in their own. If daddies got hurt, boys got sent into the mines. When bills won’t paid, then families got put out on the road—their stuff crammed in a paper poke. If a man was to say out loud That ain’t right, he’d be gone without a trace. When Mother Jones says That ain’t right, folks listen. For a pint-size woman, she got a gallon-size voice.
My daddy, Leland Earnest Jones, took extra pride cause we got the same last name as the bona fide champion of the workingman. “She’s something, that Mother Jones,” Daddy would say and shake his head and grin, his crooked teeth light in his dark face. “It won’t take a flea fart to snuff her out, but she won’t afeard of nothing. It’s like Mother Jones got angels all round her so she can sleep at night and fight all day long for working souls.”
Her Christian married name was Mary Harris Jones, and that’s where I come in.
That name got put on me in a fit of birthing pride when Mama had herself a girl after three boys and a long stretch of in-between. Mother Jones’s words—a woman’s words, no less—was the rage in all the papers, and on flyers folded over and passed on the sly from hand to hand. She come from Irish roots like my folks. When she outright called herself a hell-raiser, all the men cheered and the women don’t mind. Said she abides where there is a fight against wrong, and for sure that was living dark in the mines. She was a gift from the merciful Lord is what she was.
Everybody was poor in Rock Bottom, and no amount of work changed it. Even when my three brothers went in the mines with Daddy, we can’t get ahead of the bills for medicine and sundries. They was grown men starting to court when Daddy was home with Mama and me cause of a broke arm. The mine blew up, and my brothers died, and so did all the men underground. Everything broke inside Daddy that day. He turned old and never found his strong self again.
Rock Bottom cut the heart outta folks and let em walk round thinking they was alive when they won’t. We left there with my brothers still in the belly of the earth. We left the only home I ever knowed, and the hard rains came and followed us on that journey away. The dirt road we trudged along turned to mud, slippery then sucking mud. With the heavens opened wide, mountain gullies spouted water that gushed swift cross the road we walked. We plodded with our heads down, thin clothes soaked clean through, downtrodden as anybody there ever was. The creek we walked by grew wide as a river and carried branches and rocks and danger.
Dark come early and we took cover in a dry pocket under a boulder. We shivered and held tight to one another, me in the middle. After all the losses we suffered those sad days, I pick that night to cry.
Mama felt me shake from more than cold and wet. With little sting in her voice she said, “What you crying for, Marris? You made of tougher stuff than this.”
I felt little in this storm that beat and battered my world gone strange. I whispered, “Are we gonna die?”