Page One

I done twenty-four years of . . . time, that’s it, just only time. How? Hell, it ain’t all that hard really. Ma and Pa was good at being, what’d you call it? . . . role models. Yep, that’s where I learnt it. They’s just like me—or is it me’s just like them?—a feared of walking out the door. I know it sounds crazy after all them years of Pa downing breakfast grits and gravy, then fetching that old beat-up silver lunch pail what smelled of pig’s feet, pickled eggs, and coal dust—no matter how hard, nor how many times Ma scrubbed the damn thing. Then him, all used up like he was, to go get on the company bus, and ride fifteen miles just to slip into the mouth of mother earth and ride that elevator down seventeen, eighteen hundred feet into hell. How’s a man like that gonna be a feared of sitting in a little 'ol movie house to eat some popcorn and watch one of them movies with Robert Redford and Paul Newman and the Sundance Kid? It’s cuz he done used up all the luck the Good Lord’s give ‘im. Used it all up in that shithole filled with other folks’ money and nothing for him but a broke-ass back, lungs that’s black as pitch, and skin that hangs loose off his bones like a winter storm rolling over top of Spruce Knobe, all grey and cool to the touch.

So why’d I follow? Hell, if I knowed that, I wouldn’t a been following. I guess if you see anything long enough—more to-the-point, from the first minute you crawl from the crib—and that’s all you ever see, you followed ‘cuz that’s all you know they is. If you ever thought about leaving, even as little as askin' Ma what learnin’ you could do in them higher grades, she’d swell up like a bullfrog and start croaking like a small air horn on one of them eighteen wheelers.

Page Three

As bad as all that was, the total worst of it all was the smell of him dying. It’s been six months now and if you stand near the closet that sits between the toilet room and Ma’s bedroom, when it’s still outside, you hold your head just right, it’s there, the smell of death, still hanging, heavy like the bedding on a rope between the house and the White Ash. Only thing is now, least it ain’t like right before he passed. Then it was like a bad humid day. When the water’s so thick in the air you wonder how it ain’t raining, how you even gonna breath without gills. That’s how it was near the end. That smell filled the house like a fog or sometimes worse, when, I swear you could see bits of rot dangling like snowflakes only they’d float not fall. What was worst, when you’d try to get away from it, the smell, like when you’d leave for no reason but to walk away from it all, them dangling bits what smelled of death, would take that walk with you. And it weren’t like you could out run it either. 'Cuz I tried. Them bits would cling to your britches, your shirt, even your socks every time you’d try. After we put ‘im in the ground, I’d went to one of them wash-o-mats where for a couple of quarters you’d stick your clothes in a machine, dump in some soap powders, and after some bit of time, your stuff’d be clean—well, after four or five tries at it. Anyways that were the worst of it all.

Finally even St. Peter got tired of all the hacking, and spitting, tired of Ma’s tears, and too I guess, tired of my cussing and carrying on about his fighting and not just givin’ in. And not long after that, Ma was gone too. That’s why I’m a standing here I guess. I thought the mountains back home was pretty—I mean the ones they didn’t cut the tops off to get at the coal. Hell, they’s more like titties on a twelve-year old girl than real mountains. I seen a picture of this very spot in one of them magazines at the mortuary, so I got to wondering what it would feel like to step off this here ledge. I been plenty of times, in that elevator shaft dropping 175 floors into the belly of the earth, but that can’t be like the same thing as this—stepping I mean, off this here ledge. With God’s sun warming your face, all the while the wind chasing away coal dust and coal death and the smell of all of that, replacing it with the smell of pine trees and lake water to fill your nose and lungs instead.