Harlan County Horrors (19 page)

“
Peter...”

“
Why did Mama tell us you shot yourself?”

His
hands stilled and he sighed.

“Why’d y’all lie to us? You have any idea what we all’ve gone
through thinking you come down here and done that? Especially
Sissy? Rumors went around you ate a shotgun down in #17 ‘cause you
found out she wasn’t yours. Then Mama tells me–just me–that you’re
still alive but I can’t see you or talk to you or tell anyone?
Don’t tell me ‘vampire,’ neither, ‘cause I won’t believe
it.”
I can’t believe it
, I said to myself.

“
It was near impossible to keep it up, Peter. I needed more
energy than your mama could give me. It was better for me to sleep
here, hibernate like, than to keep asking her to
provide—”

“
Wait,” I said, my legs shaking. “What do you mean, ‘energy?’
”

“
I
needed ying energy, Peter, to stay alive, so to speak. Female
energy, to balance mine. To feed my p’ai. Your mother gave me what
I needed as best she could, only way she knew how.”

I
pushed myself to my feet, using the pillars to guide myself to the
chute I’d threatened to throw Ching-Ching down, and vomited.
Pinpricks of light danced in the blackness before my eyes. The
trunk. What Mama had done. What she’d asked me to be complicit in
helping her do. It came together.

I
flattened my palms on the wall over the chute and let my words
tumble into the depths of the mine. “Chiang-shih. Not ching-ching.
You’re chiang-shih. A dead shell that houses a living minor soul.
My god. Chiang-shih.”

“Chiang-shih,” he confirmed in a whisper. I turned to see him.
He held Ching-Ching in his left hand, near his hip. “I don’t want
blood. I don’t need it. I don’t need food or water. All’s I need is
energy.
”

I
stood silently for a solid minute. “Did you kill Mama?”

“
No, Peter.”

I
clarified through clenched teeth. “Did you take her energy,
then?”

I
saw the flicker of a smile in his young, pale face and a shimmer in
his eyes. “She called for me her last night and I came. When I come
back from Xuan Loc, I seen her in new dimensions. Soft yellow-green
energy around her, flickering with her mood, turning clover green
every time she’d get pr—”

To
stop him and to bring him back into the present, I said, “Pop. Her
energy?”

“
When I went to see her last week, she couldn’t speak but I
could talk to her like I talked to that old Chinese voodoo man. She
asked me to help her. Said she couldn’t stand the pain. Couldn’t
stand Becca’s pain. If I could just bring her to the edge of death,
she would take that last step herself and then we’d be together
forever like I told her. I didn’t do more ‘n what she asked me to,
Peter. I drained her energy, the last bit of yellow light until she
burned bright white, and I became more alive than I’d ever
been.”

“
This is sick. This is a sick, horrible joke. I don’t know
where you learned about chiang-shih or what game you’ve been
playing these decades, if you got some other woman or you just
didn’t wanna work in the mines or if you thought it’d be easier, us
livin’ on handouts, government checks, and piss-poor insurance
payouts...”

“
Bring me the trunk,” he said, “so I can help your mama finish
our journey.”

“
What?”

The
pulse around us thickened, emanating from the rock, coursing
through my body.

“
Bring me the trunk and everything in it. You know why I need
that trunk, Peter. I need it to bring her back. I need to make her
like me.”

I
turned and ran back through the adit and into the growing dawn. I
needed a drink, more than a drink, and someone to talk sense to me
and to wash away the idea that my father wasn’t dead or alive but
some thing that existed between states, waiting to make my mother
like him. I headed for the liquor store in Cumberland and drank
cheap whiskey in the cab of the truck until the dawn turned
black.

On
Friday, I dropped Becca off at Wal-Mart while I went to check on
Mama’s grave. The engraver hadn’t yet added the death date to
Mama’s side of the stone, but the fresh-tilled circle in the ground
showed me where her urn had been buried beside my father’s empty
coffin. The idea of his plan, one he thought her body waited here
to help him complete, made me half sick again. I decided I’d get
something for my stomach at McDonald’s and wait for Becca in the
store parking lot. After half an hour, I went in after her,
stopping to buy a $100 gift card at the express lane.

That night, after their father picked up the boys and the baby
for weekend visitation, I surprised Becca with the card. “It’s just
a little something to thank you for taking care of Mama. I know
you’ve not been taking care of yourself. I want you to go and have
some fun.”

She
squeezed the breath out of me and called one of her girlfriends as
she slipped on her shoes. They decided to meet in twenty minutes. I
told Becca I’d stay and pack for my drive home and finish my
reading for work, that she should go and treat herself and not
worry a lick about me. After she left, I opened the bottle I’d
picked up and headed for the attic, ignoring Ching-Ching’s grin
from where he’d appeared on my suitcase overnight, returned to me
from the mine.

The
trunk was easy enough to drag across the junk-littered floor. I
knew it had to fit down the stairs, since someone had gotten it up
there in the first place. I turned it on its side and got in front
of it, easing it over the steps. I stumbled near the bottom and out
into the hall. It shot past me and crashed into the linen closet. I
whispered a thanks that it hadn’t popped open and I got it down the
main stairs and into the back of my truck with a lot less
difficulty.

I
sat in the truck, engine off and guzzling booze for half an hour. I
considered my father’s story and reconciled it with what Mama had
told me when I was twelve, when she enlisted my help.

August 1975. He’d been home for a little while and Mama was
pregnant. Becca and JR didn’t know that. Sissy was too young. I
only knew because I’d overheard them talking about it in bed. Since
Pop had come back from the second tour, they’d been having sex just
about every night. I’d started to keep myself awake to hear them.
That night they weren’t but my Pavlovian response was to lay there
and listen through the wall. Pop said something about “I can only
use it if it’s a girl.”

I
took a long drink, long enough to wash that memory out of my
head.

There never was a baby. I kept waiting for the announcement
that Sissy wouldn’t be “Little Sissy” anymore and we could start
calling her by her name. It never came. Twice more before the
bicentennial, I heard the same conversation. No babies.

Mama was dying, I thought. Dark circles deepened around her
eyes and her fingers blossomed orangey nicotine stains. Her flesh
became ashy and she dropped enough weight that her clothes hung off
her like she was a wire hanger. The more of a ghost she became, the
more manic Pop was. He’d taken a job in the mine and it got to the
point where we were happy to see him go off to work each night, the
last time being in February 1977. Mama told us he’d had “an
accident.” The funeral was closed casket.

Then she was pregnant again.

She
came and got me out of school. The car ashtray overflowed with
Salem stubs. She babbled about Pop not really being gone, her voice
shaking and cracking to the point where I could barely understand
her words. “I need your help, Peter.” I thought she’d gone crazy
with grief.

We
pulled into the gravel drive and I followed her into their room. I
wanted to ask her whose baby it was, how she could do something
like that with Pop not even cold. As I sat at the foot of their
bed, she undressed and I saw the advantage of her wearing her old
draping housedresses. Her belly swollen but not quite full, she
told me she had “already started things” and that she absolutely
refused “to give him another one.” I couldn’t wrap my mind around
what she could mean. She stood in front of me, her hands on my
shoulders, and said, “I’ve done this before, Peter, but I can’t do
it again. It’ll kill me. You don’t want to be all alone, do
you?”

I
shook my head and looked her in the face to avoid looking at her
blue-veined breasts.

“
Then I need you to help me. I don’t care how you do it, but
once it’s done, you take it up and you put it in my old trunk in
the attic with the others, hear?”

I
shook my head and tried to refuse her but she tightened her
grip.

“
I
need you to do this, Peter. Please. It’s not a baby. It’s not.
It’s...a horrible thing. I’ve pushed three of them and I’ve seen
what they are. He made me have them and carry them just so far.
This one...something’s wrong. It’s not the same as the others, I
can feel it.” The light of her soul flickered in her eyes. “You
understand what I’m tellin’ you? No, you can’t understand, and I
can’t explain it right now. I don’t have time. We don’t have time,
Peter. It’s coming. Right now. I need you to help me. Please.
Please, baby.”

“
He come to you after… after he…died? He can’t have, Mama.”
Horror rushed through me at the idea that either she believed this
fantasy or that it could conceivably be true.

“
I’ll bring it out. If you can’t look at it, don’t. Just
finish it off and put it in the trunk and it’ll all be over. It’ll
be our secret and you’ll never have to do it again. I promise.
He’ll never come back. He won’t have the energy.”

I
twisted the key and started my truck. The engine purred in the
gathering dark.

I
didn’t open the bundle Mama handed me. There was no sound but there
was a pulse and warmth. Blood seeped through the towel, staining my
hands and my T-shirt. What could I do with it? Beat it with a
shovel? Shoot it? She’d left open the door to the attic, so I sat
on the steps with the pulsing mess bleeding onto my lap. I cried as
quietly as I could. Mama ran water in the tub and sang in her
trembling voice, “What a friend we have in Jesus...”

I
couldn’t bring myself to do anything to it, whatever it was, baby
or demon. I crept up the stairs and found the trunk. Mama kept the
attic neat as a pin. I walked among the snatches of our lives to
the trunk she said held the quilts her great-grandmothers had hung
on the line to point the way north. I placed the bundle at my knees
and flipped up the latches; she’d already unlocked it.

I
peeled back an old grey blanket, and underneath there were three
swaddled white bundles padded by newspaper. Blood rushed through me
like a flood. I didn’t want to open them. I didn’t want to know
more than I did. I knew too much. I lifted the one she’d entrusted
to me and placed it atop the others. I wanted to pray, but if what
she’d told me in the car was true, it was an unholy creature and
not worthy of my prayer.

I
spotted some old stationery in a box of papers and rooted through
the box until I found a pencil. I wrote two simple sentences that
said all I could articulate, folded the paper and placed it inside
the envelope. As I put the blanket back in the box, I whispered,
“Goodbye.” I put my note on top and latched the trunk closed. I
shoved it up against the wall and started to hide it behind as many
boxes as I could find. Satisfied that it no one could get to it or
out of it, I went down to the kitchen to wait for my mother. She
took our clothes to the burn barrel and as we watched the flames
consume them, she wrapped her arms around me and repeated the
Lord’s Prayer until the fire died.

It
took me a good ten minutes to get to Gertie. I drove as slowly as
possible, partly because I was nearly blind drunk but more because
I really didn’t want to get there.

I
dragged everything into the mine, and once I reached the point
where the moonlight faded, I whispered, “I have it.”

“
Good.” He seemed stronger than he had the night before. He
held Ching-Ching in one hand, and when I saw it, the pulse began
around and inside me. I knew I’d left it on my suitcase. So it
wouldn’t just follow me home; it would follow me anywhere. Anywhere
it needed to be, at least.

He
helped me carry it to the cage: the unsteady elevator that men took
to get into the recesses of the mine. He threw the lever and we
rattled slowly into the belly of the earth. We went for a few
minutes before stopping. There was a good six inches between the
edge of the elevator car and the solid ground of the shaft. He’d
lit a few lanterns along the walls that gave me just enough light
to see by. He handed Ching-Ching to me, stepped over the gap and,
alone, carried the trunk further into the shaft—#17.

I
stayed in the cage, still unsettled from the swaying. He called
over to me for the key. I set Ching-Ching on the floor of the
antique elevator so I could use both hands to uncoil the key from
my ring. Once it was free, I tossed it toward him. When it didn’t
clatter, I assumed he’d caught it. Through the gloom of the mine, I
heard him twist the lock and ease open the latches.

The pulsing entered my head, so strong it nearly knocked
me
over. I curled my fingers through the
wire of the cage as his voice b
egan to
seep through the incessant pounding.