Let Them Lie

Chapter 1: The Hollow

The rain came sideways into Carbon Hollow, as it always did in March, driven by a wind that funneled down the gap between Gauley Ridge and Backbone Mountain like breath through a pipe. It turned the coal-blackened roads into creeks and the creeks into rivers and the rivers into something that looked, from the tipple at the head of the hollow, like the whole valley was trying to wash itself clean and failing.

Elsa Reddin stood at the kitchen window of the house on Reddin Lane — the last house before the road gave up and became a path into the laurel thickets — and watched the water carry a dead chicken past the front step. It turned slowly in the current, feet up, like a small drowned woman in a feather coat.

"Elsa." Her mother's voice came from the back room where she kept her medicines. "Come hold this light."

Elsa dried her hands on her apron and went. The back room smelled of camphor and lye soap and something underneath both that she had learned, by the age of ten, was the particular sweetness of a body losing its argument with time. Her mother, Cora Reddin, stood over the pine table with a basin of warm water and a folded sheet. On the table lay old Mrs. Henshaw, ninety-one years old, dead since Tuesday, waiting for her burying dress.

Cora Reddin was the midwife and the layer-out of the dead. She brought them in and she saw them off. In Carbon Hollow, where the company doctor was a luxury and the undertaker was fifty miles away in Fayetteville, Cora's hands were the first thing a person touched and the last.

Elsa held the kerosene lamp while her mother worked. Mrs. Henshaw's face had settled into something that was not quite peace and not quite anything else — the blank patience of the very old, carried past death like a habit the body couldn't break.

"She looks good," Elsa said.

"She looks dead," Cora said. "Hand me the comb."

Elsa handed it over. Her mother drew it through the thin white hair with the same careful strokes she used on the living. That was the rule. You treated them the same. You spoke to them. You did not rush. The dead, Cora said, could feel carelessness the way the living could feel cold.

Elsa believed it. She believed more than she wanted to about what the dead could feel.

Outside, the rain hammered the tin roof like a congregation of fists. Somewhere up the hollow, a dog barked and was answered by another, and then the barking traveled up the ridge in a chain that ended in a sound that might have been a coyote or might have been the wind finding something hollow to blow through.

"Mama," Elsa said. "Mr. Lamm came by the store today."

Cora's hands did not stop. "And?"

"He put up a notice. They're opening Number Nine."

The comb paused. Just for a moment, barely long enough to see, but Elsa saw it.

"Your grandmother warned them about Number Nine," Cora said. She resumed combing. "They didn't listen then."

"They don't have a choice now. The company's broke."

"The company's always broke. The hollow's always broke. Broke is what we are."

Cora lifted Mrs. Henshaw's head and slid the burying pillow beneath it — a small cotton cushion stuffed with cedar shavings that Elsa had stitched that morning. The old woman's head settled into it like a stone into a creek bed, finding its shape.

"It was twenty-seven years ago, Mama."

"I know how long it was."

"They say there's a seam behind the old workings. Rich coal. Enough to keep the hollow going another ten years."

Cora pulled the sheet up to Mrs. Henshaw's chin and folded it precisely, the way she folded everything — hospital corners on a dead woman, as though death were a bed you could make properly if you tried hard enough.

"Let them dig," Cora said. "Let them dig until they hit the devil's front porch if they want. But if you hear anything, Elsa — anything at all — you come to me. Not the church. Not the store. Not any man in this hollow. You come to me."

Elsa set down the lamp. The flame guttered and steadied. In its light, Mrs. Henshaw's face seemed to shift, the shadows rearranging themselves into something that might have been a question.

"I haven't heard anything in four years, Mama."

"Good."

"Not since the Worley baby."

"I said good."

But Cora's hands, Elsa noticed, had gone still on the sheet, and she was looking not at Mrs. Henshaw but at the wall behind the table, at the place where the plaster had cracked and the lath showed through like ribs, as though she were listening for something that had not yet arrived but was on its way.

The notice on the company store wall was written in Superintendent Virgil Lamm's careful block letters, the handwriting of a man who had learned to write in a one-room schoolhouse and never let anyone forget he'd surpassed it:

NOTICE TO ALL EMPLOYEES OF ALLEGHENY COAL & COKE
CARBON HOLLOW OPERATION

BY ORDER OF THE SUPERINTENDENT, THE NUMBER NINE MINE WILL BE REOPENED FOR EXTRACTION EFFECTIVE MARCH 15, 1934. ALL QUALIFIED MEN REPORT TO THE TIPPLE AT 6:00 A.M. FOR ASSIGNMENT. WAGES STANDARD RATE. COMPANY CREDIT EXTENDED FOR DURATION OF OPERATION.

V. LAMM, SUPERINTENDENT

The men gathered around it the way they gathered around everything in Carbon Hollow — in a loose half-circle, hats in hands, shoulders hunched against a rain that wasn't falling inside the store but might as well have been. They read it once, twice, three times, as though the words might change if they looked long enough.

"Number Nine," said Burl Combs, who was fifty-three and had been mining since he was twelve. He said it the way you'd say the name of a dog that had bitten you.

"They sealed that hole in ought-seven," said Deak Hurley. "Sealed it and said never again."

"Never again lasts until the money runs out," said Luther Reddin, Elsa's brother, who was twenty-four and had a wife and two children and a cough that woke him at three in the morning and a debt at the company store that grew like kudzu regardless of what he did. He stood at the back of the group with his hands in his pockets and his cap pulled low, reading the notice with the expression of a man calculating the distance between a rock and a hard place and finding it shorter than he'd hoped.

"There's twelve men down there," Burl said.

"There's twelve dead men down there," Luther said. "And there's living men up here who need to eat."

No one argued with that. You couldn't argue with hunger. It was the only thing in Carbon Hollow more stubborn than the coal.

The company store was a long wooden building with a tin roof and a porch that sagged in the middle like a swayback horse. Inside, it smelled of lard and tobacco and the particular dusty sweetness of goods that had been on shelves too long. The shelves were half-empty now. The credit ledger behind the counter was thick as a Bible and twice as heavy with sin.

Pearl Hurley, Deak's wife, stood by the dry goods with a bolt of cotton in her hands, turning it over as though she could will it into something she could afford. She put it back.

"My daddy was on the rescue committee," she said to no one in particular. "He said they could hear them tapping. After the fire. Tapping on the rock."

"That's just stories," Deak said.

"My daddy wasn't a story."

The store went quiet. Outside, the rain continued its work on the hollow, patient and indifferent, wearing the mountains down one grain at a time.

Elsa walked home through the mud with a pound of flour and a tin of condensed milk, both on credit, both adding to a number she tried not to think about. The road — they called it a road; it was two ruts with ambition — wound along the creek past the row houses the company had built in 1903, identical boxes of unpainted clapboard set on stone piers, each one leaning a little more than the last, like dominoes frozen mid-fall.

Children played in the yards despite the rain. They were the color of the hollow itself — mud-brown, coal-dusted, pale beneath the grime like something that had been underground too long and was trying to remember what sunlight was for.

Elsa passed the church — Free Will Baptist, white paint peeling to gray — and the schoolhouse where she'd finished eighth grade three years ago and now helped Miss Tackett with the younger children when there were enough children well enough to come. She passed the doctor's office, which was a converted tool shed behind the company office, with a hand-lettered sign that said DR. P. KEENE — COMPANY PHYSICIAN and beneath it, in smaller letters, HOURS BY APPOINTMENT, which was a joke because no one in Carbon Hollow made appointments. You went when you were hurt. You went when you were sick enough to stop working, which meant you were very sick indeed. And when you were dying, you sent for Cora Reddin.

She was passing the doctor's office when the door opened and a man stepped out onto the narrow porch, shaking rain from his hat.

Dr. Peter Keene was twenty-nine years old, which made him the youngest professional man in Carbon Hollow by two decades. He was thin in the way of men who forgot to eat, with dark hair that needed cutting and wire-rimmed spectacles that sat slightly crooked on his nose. He had been in Carbon Hollow for eight months. In that time, he had treated black lung, silicosis, broken bones, burns, a stabbing, two births, and an outbreak of typhoid that had killed four children. He had not cured any of these things. He had managed them, the way you manage a river — not by stopping it but by trying to keep it in its banks.

"Miss Reddin," he said.

"Doctor."

He looked at the flour and the milk. "Your mother well?"

"Well enough."

"And you?"

"Well enough."

He nodded. He had the look of a man who wanted to say something else but couldn't find the door into the sentence. Elsa had seen that look before, on men who came to her mother's back room not because they were sick but because they were frightened and couldn't say of what.

"They're opening Number Nine," she said.

"I know. I signed the inspection."

She looked at him. He looked at his hat.

"The state requires a physician's certification that the air quality and structural integrity meet minimum standards for reopening a sealed mine," he said, as though reciting from a textbook. "I performed the assessment last week."

"And does it? Meet the standards?"

He put his hat on. It sat crooked, like his spectacles. "Good evening, Miss Reddin."

He went back inside and closed the door.

Elsa stood in the rain for a moment, looking at the closed door, and then she walked on. The flour was getting damp. The condensed milk was heavy in her hand. And somewhere in the back of her mind, in the place where the knocking lived when it wasn't knocking, something stirred.

Not a sound. Not yet.

Just the memory of sound, like an echo running backward, looking for its source.

That night, Elsa lay in the narrow bed she'd slept in since she was four years old and listened to the house settle around her. The Reddin house was older than the company houses — it had been there before Allegheny Coal & Coke, before the tipple and the man-trip and the company store, back when Carbon Hollow was just a gap in the mountains where a few families scratched a living from the thin soil and the thinner hope.

The house remembered things. It creaked and popped and sighed in ways that other houses didn't, as though its joints were full of stories it was trying to tell. Elsa had learned, by long practice, to distinguish between the sounds the house made on its own and the other sounds — the ones that came from somewhere else, somewhere deeper, somewhere that had nothing to do with wood and nails and the settling of old foundations.

The knocking was different from the house sounds the way a voice is different from the wind. You couldn't explain the difference to someone who hadn't heard it. You just knew. The way you knew the difference between a living hand and a dead one, between a breath and a sigh, between a person sleeping and a person pretending to sleep.

Elsa's grandmother, Verna Reddin, had heard the knocking all her life. Three raps, always three, always exactly one day before a death. It came in walls, in floors, in bedframes, in windowsills, once in the handle of a butter churn. Verna had kept a ledger — the same ledger Cora kept now, in the locked drawer of the pine dresser — recording every knock and every death that followed.

The miners called it the tommyknockers' warning. The old Welsh and Cornish miners who had come to the Appalachian coalfields in the 1880s brought the name with them — tommyknockers, the spirits of dead miners who tapped on the walls of the mine to warn the living of danger. Some said they were helpful. Some said they were malicious. All agreed they were real.

The church — Pastor Virgil Samples, who had been preaching at Free Will Baptist for thirty years and showed no signs of stopping — called it nonsense. Or worse than nonsense. Witchcraft. Devilry. The kind of thing that happened to women who spent too much time with the dead and not enough time with the Lord.

Elsa called it a curse.

Not because she didn't believe it was real. She knew it was real. She'd heard it for the first time when she was eleven years old — three sharp raps on the headboard of her bed, clear as a fist on a door — and the next day, Mr. Sizemore had been killed in a roof fall at the Number Six mine. She'd heard it again at twelve, at thirteen, at fourteen, each time followed by a death, each time a little louder, a little closer, as though the thing that made the sound was learning her frequency.

The last time was four years ago. The Worley baby. Three raps on the kitchen table while Elsa was eating breakfast. She'd told her mother. Cora had gone pale and still and said, "Who?" and Elsa had said, "I don't know. I never know who." And the next morning, the Worley baby — three weeks old, born too early, lungs like wet paper — had stopped breathing in its crib.

After that, nothing. Four years of silence. Elsa had allowed herself to hope that the gift, the curse, the whatever-it-was, had passed. That it had been a phase, like growing pains, like the nightmares she'd had as a child about drowning in black water. Something she would outgrow.

She lay in the dark and listened to the rain on the roof and her mother's breathing in the next room and the house creaking and the wind finding the gaps in the clapboard, and she thought about Number Nine.

Twelve men. Sealed in. Twenty-seven years.

Her grandmother had warned them. The day before the fire, Verna Reddin had gone to the mine mouth and told the foreman that she'd heard the knocking — not three raps but a cascade, a drumroll, a sound like the mountain itself was trying to get someone's attention. The foreman had laughed. The men had gone down. The fire had started in the afternoon, in the deep workings, where a spark from a pick hit a pocket of methane and turned the air itself into a weapon.

The rescue committee — seven men, led by the mine superintendent of the time — had worked for nine hours. Nine hours. Then they'd made the decision to seal the mine. Brick and mortar across the entry, across the air shaft, across every opening that led to the deep workings. Seal it and let the fire burn itself out.

Nine hours was not enough time. Everyone knew it. Some of the twelve might still have been alive. But the fire was spreading, and the gas was building, and the rescue committee decided that the risk to the living outweighed the hope for the trapped.

So they sealed it.

And afterward, Carbon Hollow had done what Carbon Hollow always did with things it couldn't face. It turned them into stories. The tommyknockers. The curse of the Reddin women. The idea — never spoken directly, always implied, always hanging in the air like coal dust — that Verna Reddin had not predicted the disaster but caused it. That the knocking was not a warning but a summoning. That the Reddin women carried death the way other women carried children — inside them, waiting to be born.

Verna had died in 1921, alone in this house, with the ledger in the locked drawer and the silence of a town that crossed the street when she walked.

Elsa turned onto her side and pressed her ear to the pillow and closed her eyes.

Silence.

Good.

She slept.