The Coal Tattoo

by Silas House

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

Two sisters can't stand to live together, but can't bear to be apart. One worships the flashy world of Nashville, the other is a devout Pentecostal. One falls into the lap of any man, the other is afraid to even date. One gets pregnant in a flash, the other desperately wants to have a child. This is what's at the heart of Silas House's third novel, which tells the story of Easter and Anneth, tragically left parentless as children, who must raise themselves and each other in their small coal-mining town. Easter is deeply religious, keeps a good home, believes in tradition, and is intent on rearing her wild younger sister properly. Anneth is untamable, full of passion, determined to live hard and fast. It's only a matter of time before their predilections split their paths and nearly undo their bond. How these two women learn to overcome their past, sacrifice deeply for each other, and live together again in the only place that matters is the story of The Coal Tattoo.

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

ANNETH WAS DANCING in her tight red dress and everyone was watching her, the way she closed her eyes and felt the music running up and down the backs of her legs, the way the curls trembled down in her eyes as she threw her hair about, stomping her feet with one leg proudly thrust through the high slit that ran up one side of her dress, and it was like seeing joy made into a human form that could travel across the dance floor—it was like seeing the music itself. Every part of her was moving. Her hips met the beat of drums; her bare feet matched the riffs on the guitar. She had kicked off her shoes as soon as the first strains of “Maybellene” came on the jukebox. She didn’t wait for anyone to ask her to go out on the dance floor with them, and she didn’t stop to grab a man. She liked dancing to this song alone, although no one ever danced by themselves at the Hilltop. There was a scattering of couples along the edges of the floor, but she was in the middle and all eyes were upon her.

Anneth’s sister, Easter, stood within the shadows near the door. She wore a long wool coat, and the cold drifted off it in thin little wisps as she was enveloped by the body heat inside the club. Her mouth was gathered in a tight knot and she looked much older than her twenty-two years. She had watched as Anneth jumped up, leaving her shoes and purse behind. She had watched as Anneth ran out onto the dance floor, snapping her fingers, shaking her body.

Now people were clapping along with the song, and men were holding their fingers to their mouths to fashion wolf whistles. Those leaning against the back wall tapped their feet and twisted at the waist. The other dancers turned to look at her and clapped in rhythm. “Look at her go,” a man yelled, unwrapping a long finger from the neck of his beer bottle to point at her.

Easter watched her sister and all of the other people, too. She saw the way men were looking at Anneth, their eyes on her hips, on her long legs. She saw the women trying to get their men’s attention. One of them reached up and grabbed her husband’s chin, pulling his face around to her. He laughed and pushed her hand away, went back to watching Anneth. He leaned back and hollered, unaware that his wife was now walking away with the car keys in her clenched hand.

When the wild breakdown of guitar and drums started, Easter lurched across the honky-tonk and plucked Anneth’s purse up off the table. She snatched Anneth’s jacket from the back of a chair and then hooked two fingers into the red heels her sister had left behind. She didn’t know any of the people sitting at Anneth’s table and they didn’t even notice her; they were all drunk and laughing and caught up in the music. Easter marched out onto the dance floor and took hold of Anneth’s arm as it arched over her head. She jerked Anneth around hard and grabbed her by the crook of her elbow.

“Let’s go,” Easter said, but her words were lost to the loudness of the place. She pulled Anneth across the floor and hustled her out through the milling crowd. Easter hit the door with a flat palm and it swung open, just missing two men standing on the other side. Outside, it was cold, and all was covered in a starless night sky. The air smelled of an oncoming snow.

“Take your damn hands off me!” Anneth screamed. She pulled away from Easter and took three steps back. She didn’t seem to notice the cold gravel under her bare feet. She touched her elbow lightly with her fingertips, as if Easter had harmed her there. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Easter took a long time to collect herself. She was so mad that she was out of breath. She was too angry to speak right now, anyway; if she said anything too quickly, words would spew out that she wouldn’t be able to take back. She stood there looking Anneth in the eye, breathing hard, for a long moment before she spat out her words. “You are seventeen years old, Anneth.”

“So what?”

“Seventeen-year-old girls don’t go in no bar. You’ve been sneaking off since you were fifteen and I’m tired of it,” Easter said. “You want to be the talk of the county?”

Anneth crossed her arms against the cold and ran her hands up the undersides of her bare arms. “Maybe I do,” she said.

Easter let out a sigh and tossed Anneth’s jacket toward her. Anneth caught it with one hand and shoved her arms into it furiously. Easter fumbled around with one of the two purse straps she had on her arm. “I got your purse, too,” she said, trying to pick the tangled straps apart. “Here,” she said. “And your shoes.” She let the heels fall onto the ground between them. They landed perfectly, side by side and upright.

Anneth slipped her feet into the shoes and jerked the purse from Easter’s hand and unlatched it. She bent over it like someone staring into a deep kettle and fished around inside, looking for a cigarette, then fired her Zippo and breathed a line of smoke. She put her purse strap on her arm, turned, and walked away.

“If you think you’ll get a man acting thisaway, you’re bad wrong,” Easter said.

Anneth twirled on one heel. “You think I care about getting a man?” she said, smirking. “I don’t want no man.”

“What else would you come to a bar for? We’ve all been worried to death, and I’ve been out all night looking for you.”

Anneth rolled her eyes and exhaled smoke like a movie star and crunched through the graveled parking lot, her heels grinding.

“Answer me,” Easter said, almost in a holler. “Why’d you come here?”

“To dance,” Anneth said. “That’s why.”

Anneth got into Easter’s car. She slammed the door hard and the glass rattled in the doorframe. The windshield had frosted over and Easter had to sit there a minute and let the glass warm up. The wipers scraped across in long, monotonous moans. The radio played low with the strains of a country song, a fiddle and a mournful cry. She sat there for a long moment without saying anything, concentrating on the groaning wipers. There were Christmas lights hanging from the eaves of the honky-tonk and they glowed big and smudged through the frost on the windshield.

Anneth sucked hard on her cigarette, and the tobacco cracked and popped. She pressed it into the ashtray and fished out her pack of Lucky Strikes and lit another one. The lighter lid snapped like a pistol being cocked.

The window was only half defrosted, but Easter put the car in reverse and backed out, anyway. She drove slowly down the mountain, hunched over so she could see out of the spreading clear spot on the window. When they got down to the main road, she sighed heavily once more. “I’ll tell you what, Anneth. You are going to get destroyed. Running off to bars and worrying us every one to death. Who took you up here, anyway? I looked for Gabe in there but never could find him.”

“Gabe’s off gambling somewhere.”

“How’d you get here, then?”

Anneth looked out her window, although it was still fogged up. “I was walking up the road when I seen Lonzo Morgan drive up. He brought me up here.”

Easter slapped the steering wheel. She wore a small silver ring that snapped against it loudly. “I’ll have me a talk with Lonzo tomorrow.”

Anneth turned quickly, her curls sticking to her eyelashes. “You won’t do it,” she said, the scent of whiskey traveling from her lips.

“And you’ve been drinking,” Easter said. “I ought to call the law on them for selling liquor to you.”

Anneth leaned her head back against the seat and laughed. “Some feller bought me a shot.”

“You’re just a little girl,” Easter said. She ran her palm over the windshield, blurring the road. “The mind of a little girl in a woman’s body.”

Anneth leaned forward and turned the radio up loud. Ray Price was singing and she pushed the buttons until she found another station. She was in the mood for some rock ’n’ roll. Since they were surrounded by the mountains, there was nothing but static. She found a station that was playing something fast and grinding, but before the song could make itself known, Easter snapped off the radio.

“Ain’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“I don’t intend to be like you,” Anneth said. “I’m not going to set in that house with you on a Saturday night. Not going to lay down early so I can get up and go to church. I want to live, Easter. Why don’t you?”

They came down the mountain and then they were in town. Easter stopped at a red light and looked around. There were no cars out on the streets, and all the stores were closed. Dim lights burned in the plate glass windows. Easter leaned her arms on the steering wheel and looked at Anneth while she waited for the light to change. She couldn’t stay mad at her, even when she tried. She wanted to conjure more hateful words, but she didn’t know if she could muster them.

“That ain’t no kind of life,” Easter said at last. “Drinking and carrying on. Smoking. What makes you want to act such a way?”

Anneth looked at her lap, unable to meet Easter’s eyes. “I don’t know,” she whispered, and Easter believed her. “Sometimes I feel so full up of something that I think I’ll bust wide open. Don’t you know how that feels, to want more? I just want to have a big time.”

The light turned green and Easter tapped the gas. “You’ll have a big time for the next few months because you won’t be going anywhere.”

“I don’t have no boss,” Anneth said, shaking her head. “You think you’ll tell me what to do? I’ll leave and never will come back.”

Easter laughed out loud without meaning to. She couldn’t help it. “I don’t know where you intend to go.”

Anneth didn’t say anything. Now they were out of town, and the mountains pressed big and black on either side, misshapen without their leaves. It was late but some people still had their Christmas lights burning; they lined the porches of houses that seemed to hang from the mountainside. Trees blinked in the windows.

Anneth slipped her shoes off and put her feet on the seat. She pulled her knees up to her chin, and her dress rode up, exposing her white panties. They glowed in the dim green light from the dashboard.

“Don’t you want to have fun?” Anneth said. “Didn’t you ever want to get out and dance and go on? You’re twenty-two years old and never done a thing I can remember except go to church. We’re young.”

Easter held tightly to the steering wheel. She hated these conversations with Anneth. They never led to anything. There was no name she could put to the difference that stood between them. She regretted that she and Anneth weren’t more alike. One night, about a year before their grandmother Serena died, Anneth had left her pew in the middle of church. Serena found Anneth at the creek, running her hand through a man’s wavy hair and kissing him on the mouth as they sprawled out on a big rock. Serena had taken her back to the house, Anneth’s face too beard burned to go back into the church.

Easter didn’t want a gulf to open up between them, for she loved Anneth more than she loved anyone else in this world. But it seemed that was going to happen. There was a wild blood in her sister. Sometimes Easter fancied that she could see it pulsing right in Anneth’s veins.

“Say?” Anneth said. “Did you hear me?”

“We’re different, and that’s all there is to it. Not all sisters are just alike.”

And all at once Anneth was crying. She scooted over on the seat until she was sitting right beside Easter. She laid her head on Easter’s shoulder. Easter didn’t flinch and kept her eyes firmly upon the road. It was curvy here, with the creek on one side and sharp cliffs on the other. She could feel her jaw clenching.

“I never meant to worry you,” Anneth said. “I just wanted to dance.”

Easter wanted to bring her hand up to Anneth’s face and hold it there, but she didn’t. Anneth always did this—she always did wrong and was forgiven. She knew just how to get Easter in the gut. And the worst part was that Anneth really meant what she had said. But Easter didn’t say a word. She relished the feel of Anneth’s face on her shoulder and drove on, watching the yellow slants of the headlights as they guided her toward Free Creek.

EASTER LAY IN her bed, listening to Anneth cry. She started to get up several times but knew it would be best if she didn’t.

Anneth had wanted to talk it all out, but Easter had simply taken down her hair, put on her gown, and said, “Good night,” in a practiced, empty voice, Anneth standing in the hall with her hands on her hips as Easter shut the door in her face. It was the first time in years that she hadn’t kissed Anneth on the forehead before lying down. Easter was more worried than angry. Still, she knew how Anneth’s mind worked. The only real way to get to that girl was through her heart. Anneth had a good heart that was easily startled, and Easter could have shamed her by crying and exaggerating how worried she had been. But Easter wasn’t about to act like the feeble one, crushed because her wild sister had sneaked off. That would be too easy. She wanted Anneth to think she was angry with her, when in fact Easter could not find it in her heart ever to be very mad at her sister.

Easter was twenty-two years old and she was raising her seventeen-year-old sister and that was all there was to it. Sometimes it amazed her when she thought about her situation, but here she was. Their uncle and aunt, Paul and Sophie, lived just up the road and had offered to have Anneth and Easter move in with them two years before, when Serena died. Easter had refused.

“I don’t want to leave the house where we’ve lived all our lives,” Easter had told them. “I don’t believe Anneth could stand it.”

Nobody disputed her. The family saw no reason why the girls couldn’t keep right on living there. After all, Easter had always been responsible and was plenty old enough. Nobody said aloud that most girls her age were married with children. They knew she would take care of Anneth. Even as a child, Easter had worked alongside her grandmothers in the garden or canning the beans. She had insisted on Paul’s teaching her how to quilt, had gone to church with Sophie every Sunday. She had once planned on going away to the college in Berea, but when Serena fell sick with cancer, that was all forgotten, like a long-ago dream that she couldn’t remember correctly. Nobody in their family had ever been to college, but Easter’s grades had been good enough to get the attention of the scholarship committee made up of old coal barons’ widows who made themselves feel better by sending poor girls off to school. But it wasn’t meant to be. It was like a tune in her head that she could stop humming: It wasn’t meant to be, wasn’t.

After the cancer had grown too large for Serena to bear its weight anymore, Easter took a job in the high school cafeteria. It wasn’t so bad except for the heat in the kitchen and the awful plastic aprons that they had to wear. She had wanted to go to college and become a teacher, but her job in the cafeteria allowed her to be one, anyway. She studied the faces of pale, hollow-eyed girls and knew which one needed someone to talk to, which one needed some money shoved into her hand. She could see trouble brewing behind the eyes of disheveled boys. The kids all knew her by name and came to her whenever they felt their lives were falling apart. She always knew what to say.

Everyone agreed that she had done right by Anneth. Their brother, Gabe, sure hadn’t done anything. He was wild, always running the roads, drinking or gambling, a different woman on his arm every time she saw him. Mostly Easter felt as if she didn’t even have a brother. He had always been so separate from her and Anneth. Different, too, in all ways. Gabe’s eyes held nothing but secrets. Maybe it was because he had stayed with Paul as much as possible rather than be raised by all those women. He had been working in the mines since he was seventeen, and she hardly ever saw him since he had moved over to Pushback Gap. He tried to give her money every time they got together, but Easter always refused it. She would take care of her little sister without anyone’s help, and she didn’t care if that seemed prideful or not. She made sure that Anneth went to school every morning and that she didn’t go too awfully wild, except for the occasional lapse, like tonight.

Easter rolled over, put her fist into her pillow, and pulled the quilt up to her neck. She still couldn’t get comfortable. She sat up and put her feet over the side of the bed, listening. Apparently Anneth had cried herself to sleep. Easter couldn’t hear anything except the house. The old wood murmured as it settled into the night. Sometimes she thought the lumber of the house held ghosts. She imagined those creaks and moans were the whispers and sighs of the dead, even though she knew better. She was as still as she could be, even going so far as to hold her breath. She could hear the whip-poor-will out there in the backyard, perched up in the locust tree it loved so much. She listened to its lonesome song and tried to ignore the other sounds she heard. She didn’t listen to the ghosts if she could help it.

The cold floorboards felt good as she put her feet down, and a shiver ran up her back, but it was a comforting feeling, this coldness. It reminded her that she was alive. She padded down the hallway and slid her feet into Anneth’s lined boots, standing by the door as if at attention. She hustled on her coat and latched all the buttons, then pulled a wool cap down over her ears. She needed the night air, even if it was freezing outside. Her thoughts were running too wild for her to sleep.

She stepped out into the blackest night she had ever seen. She looked at the sky and saw no trace of silver. There was not one star or even so much as a slice of moon. She had never seen a sky so void and still, like bottomless water. As soon as she stepped out, the whip-poor-will stopped singing. Maybe it was a ghost, too; everyone knew that whip-poor-wills didn’t come out to sing in December. She wondered if anyone heard its song except for her and Anneth. Sometimes they went to sleep listening to it.

“It’s not normal,” Easter often said. “A whip-poor-will hollering through cold weather. They’re supposed to leave for the winter.”

“He’s magic, though,” Anneth would say. She looked for magic anywhere she could find it.

There would be snow soon; Easter could smell it on the air. She walked close to the creek and listened to its music. If she concentrated, she could be completely lost in that sound. Across the creek stood the mountain, noticeable only because it was blacker than the black sky, huge and looming like a gigantic animal.

There was no doubt about it: ghosts lived here. Nobody saw them but Easter—not even Anneth, who was on constant lookout for such things—and she tried to ignore them. Sometimes she was aware of them on all sides of her, crowding around and breathing down her neck. There were her grandfathers, loud and rambunctious, always in motion. Her grandmothers. Her father’s mother, Serena, reared back in laughter, her big hands clapping together. And her maternal grandmother, Vine, standing in the shadows of redbud trees, her eyes cast down, as if that strange mixture of sadness and joy she had carried with her in life had followed her into death as well. There were people Easter didn’t know, too. Tall men with black eyes stood amongst the blue-leafed corn in the garden. A man who played the banjo and whispered a song. A whole gang of squat women with bunned-up hair who scurried along the creek bank, peeking back at her nervously. She had no idea who they could be. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of a child running. The children were a comfort, although she was always unsettled to see their unnaturally pale features. There was one child in particular, a boy who made her stomach ache. He bothered her the most because she had the strange sense that he did not exist yet. She had to close her eyes and pray for him to go away. Sometimes it was unbearable. But it was inevitable that ghosts would live here, considering everything that had happened.

THEIR FAMILY HAD been marked by death, as if they were cursed. Their family history was a convoluted affair. Had it been a solid, visible thing, it would have looked like many rivers converging, seen from high above. It was a water crowded by secrets and lies. Only Easter knew all of it. Serena had told her some. Sophie had told more. But most of this history Easter simply knew, the way she knew when a flood was going to come or when someone was going to die in a car wreck.

Serena and Vine had been two forces of nature. Serena was a large, loud woman whose presence filled up the entire room and overtook it; everyone in the county knew her and liked her, despite or perhaps because of her habit of telling everyone exactly what she thought of them. Serena worked all the time, even when it wasn’t needed, and had a boisterous laugh that people recognized. Vine was a full-blooded Cherokee with hidden stories tucked in her eyes. Easter’s most vivid memory of Vine was walking behind her as she moved like a ghost through the woods, examining the leaves of every tree. Serena and Vine had been best friends for years when their children—Serena’s Luke and Vine’s Birdie—joined their two families, making them all kin.

Birdie had been a bashful, withdrawn girl, scarred by growing up alongside her first cousin, Matracia, who was so beautiful she moved old men to lust in such a manner that they ended up cutting themselves in shame. And then Matracia had run off to East Tennessee to find her mother, which caused Birdie to withdraw even further. She had loved Matracia like her own sister—they had been closer than even two sisters can be—but Luke brought her back from this grief. Once Luke set his eye on Birdie and began to court her, everyone was shocked to see that they were unnaturally alike. They really did seem like they were two halves of one person.

Luke urged Birdie’s true spirit forth and she opened like a window being eased up. A whole new girl emerged. She had a fiery temper that matched his. Her beauty was made plain once joy showed on her face. She was a twig of a girl, in sharp contrast to her big-boned parents. She loved to dance and laugh and sing at the top of her lungs, although she had done none of these things before Luke started getting her out of the house. He was like that, though—the kind of boy who couldn’t be refused. He was always laughing and cutting up and having a big time. He was the joy not just of Serena’s life, but of everyone who knew him.

Still, when they announced their engagement, their mothers begged them not to marry. Luke was eighteen and Birdie only sixteen and both the women knew that she wasn’t old enough. Neither of them had married so young. But there was not much choice in the matter once Birdie came into the kitchen and told Vine that she had not bled in three months. Luke took a job in the Altamont mines and moved Birdie to Free Creek, where they built a house above Serena’s on the mountainside.

Anneth and Easter’s father was beautiful. Easter was six years old when he died, but strangely she could not recall ever having seen him. She knew his face only through the pictures that Serena kept on her walls. He had wavy red hair and a square jaw, and thick lips that were full of color. She knew all of this even though the picture was in black and white. When Anneth was small, Serena had always told her that she had her father’s eyes—green as redbud leaves, so bright they nearly glowed in the darkness. He was a tall man with corded forearms and a cleft in his chin. Anneth studied this picture all the time, as if trying to recall his face, but there was no way she could remember him. She was only one year old when he died. When Easter saw her carrying around the picture, she knew what Anneth was thinking: I wish I had known him. His eyes have fire in them, like mine. Maybe he could tell me something about myself.

When Luke died, it nearly killed every one of them. The Altamont mine caved in, and it took the crews three days to dig the men out. That whole time, families stayed at the mine entrance, praying and crying, drinking coffee and smoking, standing near the fire that was built in a rusted rain barrel. The state brought in a long yellow school bus for them to rest in, but nobody slept. For three days they waited, mostly women standing in the February wind. Often there was complete silence. Easter was there, but she was not sure if she could really remember it. Sometimes she believed she could simply remember her grandmother’s retelling of that day, and when she thought of it all, she saw it not only through her own eyes but also through Serena’s.

It was just becoming dawn and the sky was the color of copper when the crew finally got to the chamber of dead miners. By the time they packed the bodies out, peach light was splitting the sky, and thin tufts of snow were falling. When they brought out Luke’s body, Serena did not cry or holler out in pain. She simply fell to her knees and stared off into the distance, at the snow-covered mountains, at the horizon, at nothing. But Birdie started screaming and didn’t stop. She tore at her hair and moaned. A pack of women tried to hold her still, but she pushed them away. Serena couldn’t move to do anything.

Birdie stumbled around the hardened mud, the bobby pins falling from her hair, curls making their way into the corners of her mouth and eyes. And then she hushed long enough to lean over and begin to search for pieces of coal. She walked along, hunched over, the way Easter imagined someone on the beach, looking for seashells washed up in the tide. She found five squares of coal, then threw her head back and let them each slip into her mouth like pills. Easter knew that her mother had lost her mind. The madness had been instant, like a candle being lit.

After they buried Luke, Birdie left the little house he had built for her on the mountainside and moved in with Serena. Birdie couldn’t stand the thought of being in that house without him, and for this Serena and Vine were glad. Serena didn’t like the idea of the girls’ being left alone with Birdie up there, because she didn’t know what to expect of Birdie. In those first days after the funeral, Vine moved in with Serena, too, since they were both widows now. They had used each other’s houses over the years, anyway. By that time Vine was already sick herself and not able to help much, but each night she was present to comb out the girls’ hair, to stand in the doorway while Serena sung them to sleep, to sit by Birdie’s side when she wouldn’t allow anyone else to console her.

Birdie had stayed in her room most of the time, talking to herself, shuffling and reshuffling the stack of postcards that had been Matracia’s prized possessions, singing, dusting her dresser, and remaking her bed dozens of times before she would come out and eat. She cried all the time. “I didn’t know it was possible for a person to have so many tears,” Serena said. Birdie got so bad that one day Easter found her standing in the middle of Free Creek completely naked. Easter was seven and didn’t know what else to do but run and get her grandmother. Easter crossed her arms over her chest—each hand holding on to the opposite shoulder—and sat on the creek bank while Serena went to Birdie.

“Here, now,” Serena said, and took off her own shawl to wrap around Birdie’s nakedness. The shawl was too short and didn’t cover anything except Birdie’s breasts. She walked up out of the creek with her head leaning on Serena’s shoulder, and Easter watched as they made their way up the road and into the house. Birdie’s rump and legs were marked by a dozen small blue marks, as if sh. . .