Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

I didn’t realize I was working alongside convicts when I was down in my father’s tunnels. He only told me later, after I’d left. There wasn’t any difference in our appearances, anyway, and I imagine it’s always been the same — just a host of men covered in coal dust, black and blacker. I know the mines. I know the life Wilson must have been living there.

I can see him, deep in the guts of the earth, his skin grown darker with the dust. Wilson is a farmer. He belongs aboveground, sprayed clean by the sun and air. He needs soil and growing things, seedlings just coming up in their furrows, the great blades of corn grass slipping out of their first sheaths. If either of us should’ve been assigned to the mines, it’s me with my mining history and my electrical experience. They could’ve made me a shooter, like those men who set off the Banner explosion, one of the few whites in the shaft, running the wires in, escaping back to fresh air before things blew. Though it hadn’t worked that way for the shooters in Banner. It might not have for me, either. But that fate seems fitting, too — blown to bits belowground, a death I was primed for.

Rash has stacks of newspapers and articles about the lease system — his own fascination, he’s explained, men’s twisted desire to own other men — and I sift through them as I shelve. Photos show the offices at one mine, the brick rising into a triangle of a point above the main doors. Some eight hundred men block out the rest of the building, lining up with their shovels and lamps. One shot captures the growing pile of tools, all those handles and scoops, a jumble of elbows. I look for Wilson in the crowds, but few faces are showing. Just backs, bent, dark backs. I’d like to think I’d know the pieces of him anywhere, but I don’t. The back of Wilson is the back of every man.

THEyard is overrun with newcomers, all these men to back up the papers in the library. They’re coming from mines all over the state — Banner and Flat Top, Warner and Sipsey and Pratt. Kilby needs to process them and reassign them, but for now, they’re stuck.

I seek out the miners by their black nails and skin, and I ask after Wilson. “Nah,” they all say. “Never heard of no Wilson Grice.”

Others ask me questions. “You know the secrets of this place?”

“Tell me what I’ve got to do to get put out on the fields.”

I tell them I have no secrets, but one man reminds me of myself when I first came — pointedly out of place — and I want to give him an answer. I may even want to see him run, to do the thing I’m too cowardly to do, escaping for us both.

When he asks me what he can do to get a job out of eyesight, I tell him to go to the chapel. We’re in the yard, enough inmates and guards around us to grant a sense of anonymity. “Get Chaplain on your side,” I say.

The man smiles, but it drops quick, his expression moving toward fear as Beau springs up between us, his weasel’s face slippery with excitement at what it’s about to do.

“Hell you say, boy? Sounds to me like you’re putting Chaplain in harm’s way.”

“Jesus, Beau,” I say, sick of him enough to let my Yes, sir slip away, regretting it immediately.

His face shifts. “You talking back to me, you little son of a bitch?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, trying to bring it back in balance, realizing too late it’s No I should’ve said. Beau’s club comes out and up and then down before I can correct myself. Something gives at my collarbone, and I am on my knees, sound roaring from my mouth. It is the bray of the dogs in their pens, needy and pitted.

The yard has quieted around us, and my hollering fills in the empty air. Then Beau joins in. “Shut your goddamned mouth,” he yells. He repeats himself again and again, one of his hands yanking at the elbow on my good side, trying to get me up. “Get the hell off your knees, and shut your goddamned mouth. I didn’t whack you but a bit. Get the hell up.”

I can’t speak, can’t even move my lips. They are stuck half-open, slack and dumb.

Beau pulls on my arm, another guard appearing from the cluster of inmates to take my other side. Together the two of them drag me to my feet. The second guard’s hands on my elbow make the pain bloom in my shoulder, a ripping apart, the limb leaving my body thread by thread.

I let out a sound of resistance, something drowned and gurgling.

They’re pulling me in opposite directions.

“Jesus,” Beau says. “This way.”

My thoughts are not clear, nor is my vision, but I recognize the direction Beau points me. We’re going toward the detention house, to Yellow Mama and the confinement cells.

Beau knocks on the exterior door, and another guard unlocks it from the inside. My thoughts are graying, quiet and slack as my lips. I can feel my feet shuffling, as though they’re shackled, and the throbbing in my shoulder burrows deeper, knocking against bones and muscles and veins. The pain is a rusted saw blade, its teeth varied in length, turning and cutting of their own accord. Beau is talking to another guard at a wooden desk and they’re laughing, and the desk guard says, “We’re not picky,” and they’re laughing more and the saw plumbs deeper and there is another door opening, another corridor, a little sun to my left, and dim quiet to my right that swallows me in its evening tone, then another door, heavy and metal and dark, and a great heaving shove that sends my fumbling feet into themselves, where they betray me and send me to the floor. The saw explodes in my shoulder, a hundred small beasts eating away.

Idon’t know how long I’ve been lying here. Years, I imagine, years I spend pulling down my trousers and shitting in a hole in the middle of the room that I locate by groping in the dark. For years I feel the floor dampen with the contents of that hole when the guards choose to flush it. I sit in sewage in the dark for years. Water and bread come through a small slit at the bottom of the door, and I hunger for that meager thread of light as much as I hunger for the food.

The dark is thick and palpable, pressing up against my face, my hands and arms. It’s moist and warm at times, cold at others, though it could be my body that’s changing temperature through its fevered sweating and shaking. After a time, I no longer need to use the hole, my systems slowing. I can feel all those workings hunkering down into hibernation, only my mind spinning at its regular speed, possibly even faster, frantic. My name is Roscoe T Martin. My wife is Marie, my son, Gerald. My friend is Wilson, and I’ve condemned him to my father’s coal mines. “Thanks for the extra hands,” my father says. “Came around to my side, after all, didn’t you, Son?” Catherine asks for a story: “Tell me the one about the cat and the fox.” Marie and I are walking the village streets, the dam so close, the water loud and rushing. Our village has a church, an infirmary, Marie’s one-room school with its double doors and windows, its clapboard painted a dirty red. The streets are dusty clay. Near the water, old claw-rooted cypress trees are draped with Spanish moss, cottonwoods tuft their seeds, boulders and shelved rock croppings offer seats. I am twenty. I am eighteen. I am an electrician. A laundress courts me and a nurse, but I only have eyes for the teacher.

“You’re the teacher,” I say, startling her in the dining hall.

“Yes.”

“Why do you do it?”

“Teach?”

I nod.

“When they disobey, I hit them on the hand with a yardstick.”

I laugh and tell her I’ll have lots of children. We will have so many, I know it. Sons and daughters.

Faraday speaks in my ear: “Chemical affinity depends entirely upon the energy with which particles of different kinds attract each other.”