Where the Road Gives Out

Chapter 1: The Silence

The child was two years old and her name was Pearl.

Essie Slone learned about it the way everyone in Dismal Creek learned about anything—somebody walked to somebody else's porch and said the words out loud. In this case, it was Virgie Watts who came up the path at dusk, her boots caked with creek mud, her face the color of old ash. She didn't knock. She just stood at the bottom of Essie's steps and said, "Pearl Sizemore's gone."

Essie set down the shirt she'd been mending. The needle stayed where it was, pinned through cotton like a tiny silver bone. "Gone how?"

"Fever. Started yesterday morning. Ruby tried cold cloths, tried willow bark tea, tried everything Ida told her to try last winter for the croup. But this wasn't croup." Virgie's voice had the flat quality of someone who had already cried and was now on the other side of it. "By the time Boyd walked out to the Colson store to use the telephone, and by the time the doctor drove up from Hazard, Pearl was already cold."

"How long?"

"Six hours from the time Boyd left the house to the time the doctor's car got stuck at the ford. Another forty minutes on foot from there. Pearl was gone before Boyd even reached the telephone."

Essie stood up. She walked to the edge of the porch and looked out at the hollow. The last of the October light was caught in the tops of the tulip poplars, and below that everything was already shadow. The mountains rose on both sides like cupped hands, and the road—if you could call it a road—followed Dismal Creek for about three miles before it gave out entirely at the Sizemore place. Beyond that, there was nothing but timber trails and footpaths worn into the hillside by generations of people who had never owned a car and never would.

Two hours to the nearest telephone. Six hours for help to arrive. And a two-year-old girl dead of a fever that any doctor in the country could have treated with penicillin.

"Ruby's not eating," Virgie said. "Boyd won't come out of the barn."

Essie nodded. She went inside and wrapped two jars of soup beans in a flour sack, added a pone of cornbread, and came back out. "I'll walk down with you."

They went together in the failing light, following the creek. The water was low for October, running clear over the rocks, and the sound of it was the only sound there was. No cars. No telephones ringing. No radios playing from kitchen windows, because most families in Dismal Creek didn't have electricity and the ones who did couldn't pick up a signal this deep in the mountains. The silence was so complete it had its own weight, like something you carried on your shoulders.

The Sizemore cabin was dark except for a kerosene lamp in the front window. Ruby was sitting in a straight-backed chair with her hands in her lap, staring at nothing. She was twenty-three years old and looked forty. Boyd was nowhere to be seen. The other children—there were four of them, ranging from eight down to three—were huddled on the bed in the back room, quiet as rabbits.

Essie set the food on the table. She didn't say she was sorry, because sorry was a word that had been used up in these hollows a long time ago. Instead she said, "What do you need?"

Ruby looked at her. Her eyes were dry and red-rimmed. "I need it not to have happened."

"I know."

"I need a telephone. I need a road. I need a doctor who lives closer than an hour and a half away. I need somebody to tell me why we live like this, Essie. Why we live like it's still 1862."

Essie didn't have an answer. She stayed until Ruby finally ate a few bites of cornbread, and then she walked home alone in the dark, feeling her way along the creek path by memory and by the sound of the water.

That night she couldn't sleep. She lay in bed and listened to the silence and thought about Pearl Sizemore's face, which she had seen many times—a round, brown-eyed face, always sticky with something, always grinning. She thought about the distance between Dismal Creek and the rest of the world. She thought about the two-hour walk to the Colson store, where there was a single telephone on the wall behind the counter, and how that telephone was the thinnest possible thread connecting six hundred people scattered across a dozen hollows to anything resembling modern life.

She thought about her own children—Tom, who was twelve, and Della, who was nine—and how either one of them could spike a fever in the night and be beyond help before morning.

And she thought about the radio.

Not a radio for listening. A radio for talking.

---

Essie Slone was thirty-four years old and had lived in Dismal Creek her entire life, except for two years in Lexington when she was eighteen and nineteen, working at a tobacco warehouse and taking night classes at the community college. She had come home when her father got sick, and she had stayed when he died, and she had married Harve Slone, who worked the mines until his back gave out, and now she grew most of what they ate and took in mending and sold eggs when she had extra.

She was not the kind of woman who made speeches or organized committees. She was the kind of woman who noticed things and then couldn't stop noticing them. She noticed that the coal company—Elk Ridge Coal, which employed most of the men in the surrounding hollows—kept the roads just bad enough that the state wouldn't pave them but just good enough that the coal trucks could get through. She noticed that the company store at the mine charged twice what the stores in Hazard charged, and that most families were so deep in company debt that they couldn't save enough to leave. She noticed that the children in Dismal Creek were, on average, smaller and sicker than the children she'd seen in Lexington, and that the women aged faster, and that the men coughed more.

She noticed the silence most of all. Not the natural silence of the mountains, which she loved—the sound of wind in the hemlocks, the creek running, the whippoorwills at dusk. But the other silence. The enforced silence. The silence of people who had no way to talk to each other across the ridgelines, no way to call for help, no way to know what was happening in the next hollow over, let alone in Frankfort or Washington.

Information was currency, and the people of Dismal Creek were broke.

The morning after Pearl Sizemore's death, Essie got up before dawn and walked to the barn. Harve was still asleep; his back was bad enough now that he slept late most mornings, easing into the day by degrees. The barn was half-empty—they'd sold the cow the previous spring—and the loft was full of things Essie had been collecting for years without entirely knowing why. Old radio parts from the mine's communication shed, which had been torn down and rebuilt in 1958. Vacuum tubes she'd bought for a quarter apiece from a junk dealer in Hazard. Copper wire. A car battery. A microphone from a public address system that the high school in Viper had thrown away.

She climbed up to the loft and looked at all of it, arranged on a plank table like the components of a puzzle she didn't know how to solve. She knew what a radio transmitter was. She knew, in theory, what it did. But she didn't know how to build one.

She did, however, know someone who might.

---

June Tackett lived three hollows over, in a place called Greasy Creek, which was exactly as picturesque as it sounded. She was Essie's first cousin on her mother's side, and she was the only woman Essie knew who had ever been anywhere or done anything that wasn't directly related to coal, children, or church.

June had joined the Women's Army Corps in 1943, when she was nineteen. She had trained as a radio operator at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia and spent the rest of the war at a communications station in England, sending and receiving coded messages. She came home in 1946 with a footlocker full of technical manuals, a habit of smoking Lucky Strikes, and a restlessness that never quite went away. She had married a man named Orvil Tackett, who died in a mine collapse in 1955, and since then she had lived alone in a two-room house with a dog named Sergeant and a workshop in her back shed where she fixed radios, rewired lamps, and generally kept the electrical infrastructure of Greasy Creek from falling apart entirely.

Essie walked to Greasy Creek that afternoon. It took an hour and a half over the ridge, following a trail that switchbacked through stands of hickory and oak. The leaves were turning, and the woods smelled like cold earth and tannin. By the time she reached June's house, her legs were burning and her mind was made up.

June was sitting on her porch, smoking and reading a paperback western. Sergeant, an aging beagle with one clouded eye, raised his head and thumped his tail.

"Pearl Sizemore died yesterday," Essie said, without preamble.

June set down her book. "Lord. What happened?"

Essie told her. June listened without interrupting, which was one of her best qualities. When Essie finished, June stubbed out her cigarette on the porch railing and said, "That's the third child in two years."

"I know."

"Tommy Caudill's boy, and the Hensley baby before that."

"I know, June."

June looked at her. June was thirty-eight, four years older than Essie, with short gray-streaked hair she cut herself and hands that were always nicked and calloused from her work. She had a long, bony face and eyes that missed nothing. "You've got that look," she said.

"What look?"

"The look you get when you're about to make my life considerably more complicated."

Essie sat down on the porch steps. "I want to build a radio transmitter. A small one. Low-power. Enough to cover the hollows—maybe a ten-mile radius. Something people can pick up on a regular AM radio."

June was quiet for a long time. She lit another cigarette and smoked half of it before she spoke. "You know that's illegal."

"I know."

"You can't just broadcast on whatever frequency you want. The FCC licenses that. You'd need permits, approvals, equipment inspections—"

"How long would that take?"

"Years. If they'd even consider it, which they wouldn't. We're talking about a hollow with no paved road and six hundred people who don't vote because they can't get to the county seat."

"Then we do it without a license."

June looked at her steadily. "Essie."

"What?"

"You're talking about a federal offense."

"I'm talking about a two-year-old girl who died because nobody could pick up a telephone. I'm talking about Ruby Sizemore sitting in a dark house right now with four children and no husband who'll look at her because he can't stand the guilt of not walking fast enough. I'm talking about every family in these hollows living like they're on the moon, and nobody outside this place even knows we exist."

June smoked. Sergeant sighed and put his head back down.

"Can you build it?" Essie asked.

"With what?"

"I've got parts. Vacuum tubes, copper wire, a car battery. Stuff from the old mine comm shed."

"That's junk."

"It's what we have."

June was quiet again. Then she stood up, dropped her cigarette, and ground it out with her boot. "Show me what you've got."

---

They walked back over the ridge together, and by the time they reached Essie's barn, the sun was going down. June climbed up to the loft and spent twenty minutes examining the parts, holding vacuum tubes up to the light, testing connections with a multimeter she'd brought in her coat pocket.

"Some of this is usable," she said finally. "The tubes are military surplus—they'll work. The copper wire is good. But I need a crystal oscillator, and I need a proper antenna, and I need about six things I don't see here."

"Can you get them?"

"Maybe. The junk yard in Whitesburg might have some of it. And I know a man in Pikeville who repairs radio equipment for the state police—he might have spare crystals."

"How much money?"

"For everything? Maybe thirty dollars."

Thirty dollars. That was two months of egg money. Essie thought about it for exactly three seconds. "I'll have it by Friday."

June sat down on an overturned bucket and looked at her cousin. In the dim light of the barn, her face was serious. "Essie, I need you to understand something. If we do this—if we build a transmitter and start broadcasting—we are breaking federal law. The fines are real. Prison time is possible. And if Elk Ridge Coal finds out, which they will, they won't just come after us. They'll come after our families. They'll fire every man connected to us."

"I understand."

"Do you? Because Harve can't work the mines anymore, so they can't fire him. But my neighbors' husbands? Georgia Blankenship's husband? These men have no other work, Essie. This is it. There's nothing else."

"I know what I'm asking."

June studied her for a long moment. Then she nodded. "All right. But if we're going to do this, we're going to do it right. We need more than a transmitter. We need someone who can talk. Someone who sounds like she belongs on the radio. Someone people will actually want to listen to."

Essie smiled for the first time in two days. "I know exactly who you mean."