A Misty Mourning (18 page)

“Wow,” I said. “Don't hit any really big bumps.”

 

 

Before we could even get out of the Scout, two very large and well-fed German shepherds came to greet us. Large and absolutely beautiful, the two barked at us as if they'd never bark again but did not bare their teeth. They were interested, and maybe slightly alarmed, but not ready to attack.

“Nice doggy,” I said as I stepped out of the truck. I made no sudden moves and kept my hands palm down and to my sides. They sniffed and sniffed and I really wished that their owner would come and call them off. “Nice big doggy.”

The house was an amazing piece of modem architecture with more points and angles to it than I thought possible in a building. I swear there had to be rooms that had five or more walls instead of your standard four. It was a white sandstone with what I assumed were large solar panels along the roof. The yard was immaculate, and every pane of glass seemed to be a veritable commercial for Windex.

“Can I help you?” I heard a deep voice ask from behind. I jumped as if I had been shot and was comforted by the fact that Elliott actually shrieked.

I turned to find a
large
black man in overalls and a navy blue thermal underwear shirt. His boots were clean and his face freshly shaven. I looked to Elliott, hoping he would speak up, because I had no clue as to who we were there to visit.

“I. . . I. . . jeez, you scared the vinegar out of me,” Elliott said, still trying to catch his breath. The dogs had calmed down and were seated on their haunches. “I'm looking for Robert Miller.”

“What's your business with him?” the man asked in that voice that seemed to grow from his chest.

“Uh. . . we're wanting some help with some local history,” he said.

The man looked at Elliott's vehicle and spied his West Virginia license plates. “You're local.”

“Yes,” I interrupted. “But I'm not and I've just inherited the Panther Run Boardinghouse.”

The man eyed me, I swear, all the way from the top of my head down to my toes, which were sticking out of my sandals. “I'm Bobby Miller. What do you want to know?”

“You're Robert Miller?” Elliott asked.

“What's the matter? You weren't expecting a black man in this big mansion on the hill?” he asked.

“Well, actually,” Elliott began. “I. . . I don't know what I was expecting. I was told Robert Miller had been a miner, and I've never seen many miners end up in houses like that one.”

Bobby Miller was at least six feet three, with forearms the size of my thighs. Okay, my normal thighs, not my pregnant ones. He was maybe fifty years old, which was only alluded to by the grey at his temples. Otherwise, there were no wrinkles, except around his eyes, and he was as fit and firm as any thirty-year-old.

“Come on in,” he said and walked up to his house with the dogs
quickly on his heels. “Been trying to keep the panther off my property at night. I'm not having any luck.”

“How are you attempting that?” Elliott asked.

“I put up an electronic fence two acres out. She doesn't seem to care,” Mr. Miller said. “She's a mean one.”

He led us into his house and showed us to the family room where he told us to sit while his wife brought us iced tea. I didn't ask if it had caffeine or not. I drank it, hoping that it would have caffeine and I would be innocent of any wrongdoing.

“What is it exactly that you're wanting to know?” he asked as he sat down in a large tan recliner. The living room had floor-to-ceiling windows, which was really cool in the daytime because you could see forever and see all the wildlife. The flip side meant that at night anything and everything could see right into your living room. Surely there must have been some sort of miniblind system that I just couldn't see.

Bookcases were built into the walls, with a fireplace made out of a cream-colored marble taking up the only space not covered in books or windows. The floor was an expensive tongue-and-groove. Being the practical person that I am, or else the pessimistic negative wonder that I sometimes can be, I could only think of what a pain in the butt it must be to keep clean. There were pluses to being lower middle class, in a small house with yucky brown carpet. Only having to vacuum twice a week was one of them.

“Mr. Miller, my name is Torie O'Shea, by the way,” I said. “Is this house really run on solar power?” I don't know where that came from. I was all prepared to ask him about the boardinghouse and the mines, and instead that question just sort of tumbled out of my mouth.

“Call me Bobby,” he said, and smiled. “And, yes. It is.”

“Oh, that is just too cool,” I said and looked up at the ceiling.

“You didn't come here to ask me about my house,” he said.

“No, you're absolutely correct,” I said. “Forgive me.”

“It's all right. My house has been in quite a few magazines. It is one of a kind.”

“You were a miner?” I asked.

“When I was a child,” he said. “I was eight years old the first time I stepped foot in the mines. My father took me in.”

“How long ago was that?” Elliott asked.

“Nineteen forty-eight,” he answered.

He was older than I thought, but still not quite old enough to actually remember the era that I was most interested in.

“Thought I'd the of claustrophobia,” he said. I looked at his house with all of its bright open spaces and twenty-foot ceilings. Windows that went all the way to the sky. His confession was no surprise to me. “I swore I was not going to end up like my father or his father or his father.”

“What happened?” I asked. “How did you break the cycle?”

“Clarissa Hart,” he said. “She married a man who was educated and was on his way to being somebody. They had money. One day she was down at the mines—”

“Why?” I asked. “Why would she be down at the mines by that point in her life?”

“She would come down and visit every now and then. Just so happens I'd come down with the flu or something that day and my father sent me out ahead of him, early. Said for me to go on home. Clarissa saw me coming out of the mine and she stopped me. She asked me a few questions, like if I could read and write, which I could. My mother had made sure of that. Clarissa said that no boy who could read and write should be wasted in the mines . . .”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Most of the children who worked in the mines couldn't read or write,” he explained. “She said that there were plenty of things that I could be doing. She made me promise her that if she got me out of that mine that I wouldn't waste my life on things like whiskey and gambling. That I would go to school and go to college and be somebody. I said I would.”

“So, what happened?”

“She paid my father whatever I would be bringing in mining, plus an extra ten dollars a week. In exchange I was to go to school, but as soon as school was out, I had to come to the boardinghouse and do whatever odd jobs there were, plus read to her every day. That was all she wanted me to do. I did that for nine years,” he said with a smile on his face. “I told her once when I was leaving for college that she'd saved me. She shook her head and told me that my mother had saved me by seeing to it I knew how to read and that I'd saved myself by being willing to work and learn. She refused to take any credit for it at all.”

“So do you come from a long line of miners, then?” I asked.

“My father was a miner for fifty-two of his sixty-three years. He came down with black lung. They started making his coffin before he was even dead,” he said.

“W-why would they do that?” I asked.

“There was no hope. As soon as they diagnosed him. . . everybody knew,” he said. “His father worked the mines and his father before him, and my great-grandfather was a slave over in Shenandoah. The miners weren't much better off than the slaves, but at least the miners could vote, were free to go where they wanted, and didn't have to worry about their children being sold out from under them. I'm not exaggerating when I say the life of a miner back then was close to slavery. We've been told it was a free country, but at the time . . . to people who worked for the company . . . it wasn't. Nothing free about it.”

What do you say to something like that? “Did your father ever talk about the old days? Or your grandfather? I'm looking for the scoop on the Panther Run Boardinghouse and the coal company. I know that the superintendent was lynched there.”

“Why?” he asked, and I noticed a slightly distrustful tone.

“I've inherited the boardinghouse and I'm curious as to its history. Once I started getting a little bit of information I just couldn't get enough,” I said. And it was true.

“That place was at the center of bloodshed for many years. My grandfather told me about the lynching once,” he said. One of his dogs had laid his head in his lap, and Mr. Miller absently stroked the fur on its head. “Gainsborough wasn't always the superintendent.”

“No?” I asked.

“No. He was sent in to take over because the first superintendent was missing for two weeks and then found floating in the river. They brought Gainsborough in, and at first he was just an official guest of the company. He'd been a superintendent at several other mines, and from what I understand had whipped them into shape in nothing flat. He had a reputation coming in. After a while, he decided to take the position of superintendent,” Mr. Miller said. “It was his fatal decision.”

Mr. Miller looked as though he was growing tired of the conversation, and I felt a little peculiar sitting in this man's house asking him all sorts of personal questions. But not peculiar enough to refrain from asking one more.

“Do you remember what was hanging in the great room of the boardinghouse when you were a child? Right above the fireplace?” I asked.

He smiled at me and stopped petting his dog for a minute. “Yes,” he said. “The photograph of Gainsborough's funeral.”

“You ever ask her why it was hanging there?” Elliott asked.

“Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I did,” Mr. Miller said.

There was a pregnant pause, and not just because I was in the room. “Well? What was her answer?”

“She said ‘Forgiveness comes when you forget.' “

“What the heck does that mean?” I asked. I hadn't meant to say that out loud.

“I don't know exactly,” Mr. Miller said. “But I never asked again.”

“Well, we've taken up enough of your time. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your taking a moment to answer the questions of
a complete stranger,” I said and stood up. I smiled at him and he smiled back.

“I figured if Clarissa left you the boardinghouse, you must be okay,” he said. “She had a keen sense.”

“Oh, thank you,” I said.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said as he got up to show us to the door.

“Sure.”

“Why'd she leave it you?”

“She said it was a debt repaid,” I answered as Elliott and I reached the foyer. Mr. Miller opened the door and the brilliant yellow sunlight spilled in across my face. “My great-grandmother Bridie MacClanahan had owned it originally and left it to Clarissa.”

“Bridie Mac,” he said. “You don't look much like her.”

“How would you know what she looked like?” I asked, aware of the fact that she'd been dead fourteen or so years before he was even born.

“Oh, I've seen pictures. At Panther Run. We've all seen pictures,” he said.

You would think that at a moment like that I would be able to think of something to say. Instead I thanked him again and stepped out into the brilliant light with Elliott, just as confused as I, by my side.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“
R
udy?”

“Yeah, Torie?” he asked. I knew that he was several states away, but if I closed my eyes and pressed the phone up to my ear as close as I could get it, I could almost imagine we were in the same room.

“What's going on?” I asked as casually as I could. “How was fishing with my dad?”

“Miserable.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he caught about twenty fish, and the only thing I caught was a case of malaria from all of the blasted mosquitoes,” he said.

“Take more vitamin B-twelve,” I said. “You know, Elmer can tell you every vitamin you need to take for every ailment. He claims vitamin E will do the same thing that Viagra does.”

“I don't need any help in that department,” Rudy said. “Or do I?”

“Considering my present state, I think not.”

“You miss me?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said. “How's Mom?”

“Fine. She's finally come to the decision that you will look just as good in peach chiffon as you would in seafoam-green . . . satin or whatever it was that you were supposed to wear,” he said. “I think Colin's getting a little nervous.”