Home to Big Stone Gap (3 page)

“The mining business has changed quite a bit since Jack was in,” Tyler begins. “I’m here to try and convince him to join us in a new way of doing things.”

“Mountaintop removal,” Mousey chimes in.

“We know all about that,” I tell Tyler.

“We’re aware that folks aren’t too thrilled with it. But we’ve come up with ways to reclaim the mountainside after we’ve mined.”

“It’s hard to reclaim a mountain when it’s gone,” I say pleasantly. I’m sure my husband is only being polite by entertaining this gentleman in our home. We don’t believe in mountaintop removal—in fact, the stories out of eastern Kentucky are frightening. Instead of using traditional techniques where miners go into the earth to extract coal, now they mine from the outside in. The Blue Ridge Mountains are scarred, at the least, and at the worst, rerouting the terrain causes dangerous mudslides and pollution to streams and lakes. The floods caused by this style of butchering have destroyed communities. The plant life lost is unforgivable. There’s more involved in reclamation than throwing seeds around to create ground cover.

“We’re working on that. We care about the environment too. We’re trying to figure out ways to provide jobs and respect the land at the same time,” Tyler says.

“Okay.” I look at my husband.

“Mr. MacChesney…” Tyler rises and extends his hand. “I hope you’ll consider our offer to you.”

“I will.” Jack smiles and walks Tyler to the door. “Thank you for stopping by.”

The screen door is barely shut when I turn to Mousey. “Now they go door-to-door like the Mormons.”

“Honey, don’t start.” Jack gives me a look.

“The last thing these mountains need is some opportunist coal company coming in and ruining the land. Do they think we’re idiots? Reclamation? How? It’s a joke.”

“Well, y’all, I’m gonna shove off.” Mousey stands and puts on his baseball cap.

“See there, Ave, you’re scaring Mousey.”

“No, no, I ain’t skeered. I got one just like her at home.”

“Give Nancy my best.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Mousey nods at Jack and goes.

“You’re tough. You cleared the room,” my husband says as he goes to the kitchen.

I follow him. “I thought I was polite.”

“This fellow has some new ways of going about it that don’t sound so bad.” Jack lifts the lid off the pot of beef stew and stirs. “I think it’s important to consider all our options.”

“You don’t want to work with this guy, do you?”

“Tyler’s a graduate of Virginia Tech. He comes from a family of coal miners in Pennsylvania. I liked him.”

“Great. Play cards with him, but you don’t have to work with him.”

“Ave, don’t start.”

“Start what? Sometimes you’re gullible. I’m trying to protect you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

I set the table in silence. Jack hands me the salad to toss. “At my age, I have to think seriously when a young man comes to the door and offers me a job. It doesn’t happen every day.”

“You have a job. A nice construction outfit. A company that turns a profit.”

“We could do better.”

“You do fine. With my salary—”

“This is not about you, it’s about me,” Jack says firmly. “Maybe I want to contribute more.”

He unwraps the corn bread from Fleeta and puts it in a basket. I sit down at the table as he ladles the stew into bowls and brings it to the table.

There’s at least one ongoing argument in every marriage, and ours has always been about money. My husband believes in the system: put your years in, and at the end of the rainbow is a good pension and union protection. When I point out how the coal companies have reneged on their promises and the union has depleted the pension fund, he gets angry with me, as if I’m pointing out a personal defect in him. He’s proud of his tenure in the mines, and he should be. But he isn’t savvy enough to see how these companies have taken advantage of him. It’s a blind spot in Jack MacChesney.

“I’m not sold on mountaintop removal. But this guy seems to think there’s a way to do it that won’t ruin the terrain. Someone local needs to get involved, if only to protect what we’ve got here.”

“Oh, I see. Join ’em and infiltrate.”

Jack puts down his spoon. “Do you have to do this?”

“What?”

“Do you have to fight me?”

“You worked for Westmoreland for thirty years. They cut your benefits to nothing. Your union is in bad shape. All the promises those people made to you, they’ve broken them one by one. You can’t trust these guys. They’re not on your side.”

“And you are?”

“Always.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.” Jack puts down his napkin and pushes his chair away from the table. He stands. “I’ve lost my appetite.”

I hear the screen door snap shut as he goes outside. I eat a bite of stew and remember something my mother used to say: “When you argue while you eat, the food turns to poison in your body.” So I put down my napkin and follow Jack out the back door. I can’t find him, so I turn on the back porch light and wait. Then I see him walking through the woods beyond the field out back. He’s really angry, but so am I. No matter what I do or say, he’s too trusting. From time to time, he’s put his faith in people I don’t approve of. We almost split up when he befriended Karen Bell, who wanted to sell him more than lumber from her Coeburn store.

There was a time when I would have run across the field and made a joke to diffuse his anger. I’d apologize, and he’d be terse for a while, and then he’d come around and we’d be back on track. For some reason, I don’t move. I just watch him as he goes, pushing branches out of his way with a stick. I turn around and go back in the house. I’m not giving an inch on this one; he should have thrown that fresh-scrubbed Hokie out of our house.

I guess I’m getting more stubborn as the years go by. Sometimes I want to be right more than I want peace. I’ve earned that, haven’t I?

The Slemp Memorial Library is my favorite building in Big Stone Gap. It’s nestled in the rolling landscape of Poplar Hill beneath the museum. It’s a lovely brick building with a grand entrance, decorated (by Iva Lou) with sheafs of wheat and Indian corn. When it was built back in the late 1970s, it became an instant gathering place for kids to do their homework, and for adults to find the latest bestsellers. I mourned the loss of the Bookmobile, but when Iva Lou was made head librarian, she traded her wheels for her own branch. Iva Lou blossomed when she was put in charge. With a modern facility, she was able to make the library a viable part of the community. She started story time for the kids and invited local clubs, from the Lions to the Junior League, to have their monthly meetings there. It’s a bit of an unofficial community center, but you can’t beat it when you want a quiet place to browse. Iva Lou took a corner of the main room and turned it into a living room with sofas, coffee tables, and racks of national newspapers on large wooden spindles. Where else in Wise County can a girl read
The Washington Post
?

I pull in to the parking lot and climb out with a thermos of hot coffee and a few of Fleeta’s sticky buns. Iva Lou has called a breakfast meeting in her office to plan for Fleeta’s wedding. Fall leaves dance in the gutter, and the pungent smell of pine fills the air. Iva Lou and Nancy Kilgore-Hall are chatting when I join them.

“Nancy told me you called her straightaway when I assigned you the decorations,” Iva Lou says to me.

“Yes, ma’am.” I’m no fool. The first thing I did when I heard I was in charge of the decorations for Fleeta’s wedding was call Nancy to enlist the expertise of the Intermont Garden Club. They’ve got the creativity to come up with a solid theme, and the rank and file to do the actual work. You can ask Nancy to do just about anything when it comes to making something pretty. She cannot resist an event in need of style and flair.

The Methodist Church Fellowship Hall is a challenge—it’s a basement, after all, with large pillars sectioning off the space, low ceilings, and very little light. The Garden Club has decorated the space over the years with great success. They’ve transported guests from downtown Big Stone to exotic ports of call using paint, chicken wire, crepe paper, fresh flowers, and a lot of elbow grease. It’s always a treat to see them work their magic on those pesky pillars. They’ve done it all; in a rondelet of historical time periods, the pillars became Roman columns or tropical palm trees and, once, a garden of giant sunflowers. Fleeta is more low-key when it comes to themes, so this time the Garden Club will keep it simple: Autumn in the Mountains Means Love Is in the Air. It’ll look good on the napkins.

“Nancy, honey, I’m gonna need your recipe for the wedding mints. I’m thinking of making orange wedding bells and red fall leaves, and I’ll place ’em on gold-leaf doilies. I love me an autumnal theme.” Iva Lou leans so far back in her office chair, she has to use her tippy toes for balance. “Your mints are a classic, and that’s what we’re going for with this here wedding.”

“‘Classic’ is a fancy word for old,” I tell them.

“When the bride’s over sixty and the groom’s over seventy, what the hell else you gonna call it?”

“A miracle.” Nancy’s brown eyes squeeze into half-moons as she smiles. A decorating guru as well as a local maven of fashion, Nancy always has her light brown hair cut and highlighted in the current style. Lately, she’s been sporting a chin-length bob, straightened via blowout, with blond tips and a thick fringe of bangs. She’s a girl’s girl, but she has also developed a hard shell from working in insurance. Everybody knows that adjusters have the toughest hides in the county. From a corporate viewpoint, the last thing you want in an insurance rep is Mother Teresa. Somebody once said Nancy Kilgore-Hall had permanent lockjaw from saying no. They say it’s harder to get her to cut a check than it is for Fleeta to pay a compliment. “You need my molds, don’t you?” she asks Iva Lou.

“The only molds I got are for Christmas,” Iva Lou tells her. “I checked.”

“No problem, I’ll loan you mine. You need leaves and bells.” Nancy jots down the candy recipe and hands it to Iva Lou.

NANCY KILGORE-HALL’S WEDDING MINTS

Makes 120 mints if molds are used, less if you hand-cut them from the log.

COURTESY OF MARGIE MABE

2 boxes plus 2 cups powdered sugar
¾ cup butter or margarine
4–5 tablespoons cold water
2 capfuls peppermint oil

Blend ingredients with a mixer until doughy consistency forms.* Roll out on wax paper coated with powdered sugar.

Cut with small cookie cutters or use molds. To use molds, break the mixture into small balls, coat in finely granulated sugar, and press into molds. Let sit for two days, then pop out.

Can be frozen.

*You can add food coloring of choice.

“All right, girls, I gotta scoot,” says Nancy.

“What are you adjusting?” Iva Lou asks as she tucks the recipe into her date book.

“There was a wreck in Appalachia by the train trestle.”

“People think Appy Strait is a speedway.”

“They do indeed.” Nancy snaps her purse shut. “That curve right under the Roaring Branch always gets them.”

“It’s from people leaning to see the waterfall. You know, lookie-loos and rubberneckers.” Iva Lou shrugs.

“I guess so. Y’all call me if you need anything else.” Nancy takes her assignment and goes.

Iva Lou checks off her list. “I’m making the orange sherbet punch, one bowl with vodka and one without. Wedding cake is gonna be carrot. Janine wants to make it for her mama. The Tuckett twins said they’d make the Chex mix. So that leaves me with the salted pea-nits and the candy mints.”

“You got off easy.”

“What about you? Farming your job out to that overachiever Nancy Kilgore-Hall.”

“Guilty.”

“I don’t blame you—them Garden Clubbers are semiprofessionals, as it were. Let ’em do what they do, ’cause they do it better than anybody else.”

“Mrs. MacChesney?” The library aide Emma Morrissey, a delicate blonde with blue eyes, appears in the doorway. I can never tell her apart from her sister, Charlotte, who is her dead ringer.

Iva Lou smiles. “That there is Emma, in case you were wondering.”

“There’s a call for you on line one,” Emma says to me.

Iva Lou shoves the phone toward me. “Something the matter?” She glances at Emma, who looks concerned.

I pick up the phone and say hello.

“Ave? It’s Mousey. We need you to come over to Holston Valley right away.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s Jack Mac, ma’am. He’s in intensive care.”

“What happened?” I feel faint.

“He passed out on us, and we brought him here. The doctor says it’s serious. You need to hurry.”

Iva Lou puts down the extension that she picked up when I asked what was wrong. “Let’s go,” she says. “I’ll drive.”

Kingsport

I
va Lou doesn’t say a word as we drive to Holston Valley Hospital in Kingsport. I’m numb as my thoughts tumble over one another; my feelings come and go in waves of panic. Iva Lou pumps the gas pedal, lifting it off to take each curve with precision. She barrels out of town and into Wildcat Holler at a clip. The stone walls, where they blasted through the mountain to put in the highway, are charcoal blurs on either side as we go. It seems that time has stopped entirely, and yet we’re speeding through it. Soon we’re outside Hiltons and the Carter Family Fold. When the road straightens into Gate City, Iva Lou deftly passes cars two at a time to get me there. To Jack.

I feel sick. Jack and I went to bed angry at each other last night, even though my inner voice told me to apologize. This morning I didn’t even bring him his coffee. I just hollered up the stairs that I’d be home at six, and left for work early, without waiting for his reply. This is what makes me the saddest, that I didn’t wait to hear his answer. I beg God to let him live just so I can hear his voice again.

Iva Lou pulls in to the parking lot outside the hospital. “He’ll be in Building A,” she says quietly. She knows this hospital well—it’s where she had her surgery—so there’s no confusion about where to go or what to do. We jump out of the car and run into the hospital. Mousey is waiting for us inside.

“What happened?” I ask.

“We were hanging Sheetrock, nothin’ strenuous, and we was talking, and then he passed out. He didn’t say nothing. He just hit the floor.”

My stomach turns at the thought of my husband falling to the ground.

“Me and Rick tried to revive him, then we called the Rescue Squad. And since we was over in Blackwater workin’, we was closer to here than home, so we brought him here.”

“You did the right thing. Thank you.” I give Mousey a hug, and he seems relieved.

Iva Lou has been talking to a nurse and motions for me to join her. “Come on.”

I follow Iva Lou and the nurse through the doors to intensive care, a large ward filled with patients in their beds. I look around the beds, searching for my husband. When I see him, tubes coming out of his nose and mouth, I almost collapse. Iva Lou whispers, “Buck up,” and sashays to my husband’s bedside, motioning for me to join her.

“You look good, Jack,” she says to him. “I like you in hospital green.”

I look at Jack’s face and force a smile. I try to act as though nothing is wrong. “Okay, okay, you win. I was wrong and you were right,” I whisper into his ear, apologizing for our argument the night before. I take his hands and squeeze them. “I’m sorry.”

He rolls his eyes.

“He can’t talk right now.” The nurse makes a motion to the tube. “If you’ll come with me, the doctor would like to talk to you.”

I don’t want to let go of my husband’s hands. Ever. I kiss him ten times too many before leaving his side. Again he rolls his eyes. As I step away, he closes them.

The nurse shows Iva Lou and me to a small, bare office outside the intensive-care unit. Dr. Smiddy, who is lanky and droll, motions for me to sit. I feel small next to him, like a kid, and in a situation like this, that’s a good thing. I want the doctor to be an all-knowing father, an expert. I want to believe Dr. Smiddy can fix anything.

“What’s wrong with my husband?” I ask.

“He’s a very lucky man. He hasn’t had a heart attack. But he does have a blockage in his carotid artery.” Dr. Smiddy shows me a drawing of the head and neck. He points to the neck on the left side. “I’m afraid of the blockage splintering off and causing further problems. We need to operate immediately.”

“When?”

“Right away.”

“Today?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why so soon?”

“I explained everything to your husband.”

I feel such anger. My husband passed out and fell; explaining anything to him is a ridiculous concept. Jack’s in no condition to say yes or no to any of this medical menu. They’re rushing me, us, and I need time to think. I start to speak, but the doctor stops me.

“Let me finish,” he continues. “We’re going to go in and clean out the artery and put in a stent to keep the blood flowing.”

Keep the blood flowing? What is he talking about? It sounds like Jack is dying. Is he dying?

“Hopefully, this is the only blockage. Then we’ll do a PET scan—”

“What’s that?”

“A head-to-toe scan. We’ll do it as soon as Jack recovers.”

Recovers? How did we go from “hopefully” to “blockage” to “recovers” so quickly? Maybe Jack is fine; maybe they’ll operate and see that it’s not a big deal. Or maybe they’ll take a scan and see that the problem is worse.

The doctor explains the options, but I barely hear him. I’m in a daze of disbelief. How did this happen? Why didn’t we catch it sooner? I wasn’t persistent enough with Jack; I’d let doctor appointments slide because I was tired of begging him to go. Somehow I feel that even this is my fault. I wasn’t diligent enough, so now my husband has to pay.

The nurse leads me back to Jack, who is about to be transported to the operating room. I tell him that I love him, and he smiles. I tell him that everything is going to be all right, and try not to cry, but I can’t help it. I cry. I’m afraid of the feelings I have, the depth of them in this moment. I really love my husband, though I don’t always show it. I wish there was something I could say that would express to him the deep meaning he has brought to my life. So I lean down and say, “Thank you.”

The orderlies wheel him away, and I watch until he is through the doors at the end of the long hallway. I think of the hundreds of times in nineteen years that I’ve watched Jack go, when he’d back down the hill onto Cracker’s Neck Road in his truck, or drive away after dropping me at the airport, or how I’d wait until he disappeared from sight after taking me to Iva Lou’s trailer for girls’ poker night. Jack says that I’m hooked on good-byes. I savor them. I count them. I get lost in them. Does he know how much I treasure him? I wonder. Is that enough to sustain him now?

There’s something in the way the sheer pale blue curtains surrounding his bed are draped that remind me of the day Jack’s mother died in the hospital. I always loved Mrs. Mac; she had good old-fashioned common sense. She was a direct person—some would say brutally honest—but was never hurtful. She was a mountain girl who lived by a naturalist code: she grew her own vegetables, made her own fires, and quilted her own blankets. She could make do in any situation. I remember how Jack held her when she was dying. He didn’t let go for a long time. I stood back and watched him through the blue curtain. Finally, the nurse gently touched his shoulder, and he knew that he had to leave her. I was waiting on the other side of the curtain.

I think about dying and all those I loved who are now gone. I feel as though I am falling in line behind them, my mother, my father, Fred, my beloved Spec, and Joe. I had my mother to talk to when Fred died, and when she died, I had Iva Lou to help me. When Spec died, it seemed I had the whole county to mourn with me, so I never felt alone. When our son died, it was the worst thing that could happen to us, but it was happening to our family, and there was much consolation in Etta’s love, and a lot to learn from a little girl as she grieved. Somehow, to share the very worst of life with Jack made it bearable. He showed me how to live with pain, live through it to get beyond it. I wouldn’t have known how to do it without him.

But I can’t talk to Jack about his illness, and it’s terrifying.

I smooth the sheets on his bed. Then I decide to make the bed. Maybe, if I tuck the corners neatly and fluff the pillow, the surgeons will take the same care with my husband. If I’m very quiet and very neat, maybe the doctors will go that extra mile, and he’ll be all right.

There’s a linen pocket on the side of the mattress for personal effects, since there are no side tables in the ICU. I reach inside and collect Jack’s watch, his chain and medal of the Blessed Lady that I bought for him in Florence, and his wallet. A small notepad with a tiny golf pencil is attached to his wallet with a rubber band.

Jack always carries this small pad and pencil. I special-order them from the same stationer in Richmond who provides me with the blue airmail envelopes and paper for letters to Italy. Jack and I always joke about the tiny notepads. What would he do if they ever stopped making them? The scraps of paper from these pads have been a bone of contention with me for years. All around the house, I find tiny pieces of paper with numbers jotted on them, the measurements and numbers meaningless to everyone but Jack. He keeps these scraps in his pants pockets, on windowsills, and in his truck. He leaves them anywhere and everywhere, and it drives me nuts. I flip the notepad open and see a list.

At first it doesn’t look like Jack’s handwriting at all. Then I see a familiar “E” shaped like a backward 3, which gives me pause. It
is
my husband’s handwriting, but the effects of the fall are apparent. The print is wobbly. He must’ve written it lying in this bed moments ago. The note says:

STILL TO DO

1. build a bridge

2. hold my first grandchild

3. see Scotland

4. Annie

I study the list. The thought of my husband dying without having held his grandchildren makes me cry again; worse, to think that he wouldn’t be around to be an influence on them. I don’t want to be a grandparent if he’s not here. I don’t want to be anything if he’s not here.

So many memories come rushing back, just moments, small pictures, jumbled, out of order. Jack and Etta when she was three, high on her papa’s shoulders, walking across the field out back. He looked like a giant, and she so small. Jack, when Joe was born; he held our son before I did. It just seemed natural; after all, it was the son he had dreamed of, and for so long. Jack at Joe’s grave when we buried him. He could not stop his tears. Jack on our wedding day in Italy, when he toasted my father and looked at him with such respect. Jack helping his mother down the steps at church so she wouldn’t fall on the ice. He treats all women like fine china.

Scotland: we always said we’d go, but we never found the time. How many hints did I need to know his true heart’s desire and
do
something about it? The signs were everywhere. He checked out books from the library on Scottish clan battles, even chose a shade of red paint for our living room from a book called
The Best of Highland Castles.
I didn’t take his dream seriously enough. I made vacation plans, and he went along with them. We were always going to Italy, it seemed, whenever we went anywhere. Maybe Jack was helping me to make up for all the years I didn’t know my father in Schilpario. Maybe he felt he had to put aside his dreams for mine. I should have insisted he go! Why didn’t I? After all, Britain is close to Italy—just an hour flight. I always joke that Italy is the Florida of the UK. We could have done it—we should have.

Build a bridge? Jack never mentioned a bridge to me. Not once, not ever. This one is a complete mystery to me.

Annie? I never heard him mention an Annie. For a second I feel betrayed—where am I on his list? I didn’t even make it. It doesn’t matter. I don’t deserve to be one of his last concerns—I haven’t earned that. He’s been the good one all these years. The righteous one. The one with the big heart. All the sweetness, all the light, all the gentle strength, all the things he is. It’s all ending. I can’t believe it. I would give everything I have for more time. Please give me more time. It’s all happening so fast, too fast. I want to slow everything down, buy time. If time stops, that means no harm will come to him.

I stay next to the bed for a long while, as long as the nurses will let me. I can still picture my husband lying there, and maybe they understand that this is as close as I can get to him for now. The idea of him has to do. After a while, I pick up my purse and Jack’s things and go out into the empty waiting area. Iva Lou is off somewhere, so I sit down and hold Jack’s watch. I trace the numbers with my finger, wishing I could stop the movement of the hands, turn them back to a week ago, when Jack was fine and his artery was clear. I put his watch on my wrist, remembering that it was ticking on his arm just a few minutes ago.

Iva Lou gives me a cup of coffee. “Here, drink this.”

“No, thanks.”

“Now, don’t do this. Don’t go to that place.” Iva Lou sits down next to me.

“I’m going to lose him, Iva Lou. I know it. I’m being punished. I wasn’t grateful enough. I wasn’t good enough to him. I made him work too hard to love me.”

“You’re being silly. You’re human. You’re not some perfect thing that does everything right all the time. None of us are. He’s gonna pull through this because he’s strong. And because he wants to.”

I look at Iva Lou, hoping that I will see on her face a validation of all she says. I would like to believe it. But I’m afraid she’s wrong. I hand her the list I found.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“It’s from Jack’s notepad.”