Light to the Hills: A Novel (15)
Sass shook her head just the same. The thought of sucking on the sweet mint now made bile rise in her throat.
“I’ll keep it for later,” Mama said. “For a happier day.” She took the crinkled paper and stuck it deep inside a jar she kept on the shelf above the stove, tightening the lid for extra measure.
Sass drifted out to the front porch, where she sank onto the top step, her legs suddenly weary. The unfamiliar bustle around the cabin—pots steaming with rags and the low murmur of voices laced with concern and worry—made her breathless, her heart beating furiously inside her chest. Immediately, Digger and Tuck sidled up to her, whining and thumping their tails. They pushed their noses under her hands, shameless bids for attention. Sass pulled them in close, comforted by their warmth, and laid her head on Tuck’s shoulder. As she sat listening to the tree frogs’ evening chorus, a memory floated into Sass’s head.
Once, in the woods, she’d followed a solitary bee lighting from flower to flower, in a path only it could see, until it led her to its hive in an old hollow gum tree. She’d told her pa about it, and he made her take him there the following day. After studying the tree for a bit, he’d lit the end of a gum stob and blew it out, leaving it to smolder. He’d wrapped both their hands in kerchiefs and had given Sass a wide cotton satchel to hold open near the tree.
Pa had pulled his pipe from the front pocket on his overalls, filled it with tobacco, and lit it between his lips, pulling deeply on the pipe stem until puffs of blue smoke had circled his head. Pipe in his teeth, he’d brandished the smoldering stob and stuck it inside the hollow gum, right up the gullet of the busy entrance where the bees buzzed in and out.
He’d told Sass to stand still and sing. “Sing?”
“Keeps you and me both calm,” Pa had explained. “Pick something cheery.”
So she’d sung. She got through “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Down in the Valley” while Pa puffed and cut chunks of comb out of the tree with his pocketknife. He’d shaken the bees from each piece and lowered them carefully into Sass’s sack, and her voice had never wavered, even when the tone of the bees’ buzz went up in pitch as they realized thieves lurked at their door. Only once or twice she’d heard her father curse when an angry stinger found its mark. The louder they buzzed, the more Pa had puffed, the sweet-smelling tobacco crackling as it burned.
He didn’t rob them dry. Better to leave them some to winter on so that they’d stay put for another visit. When he’d judged they’d taken enough, he’d snugged the mouth of the sack shut, rubbed the smoldering stob out in the dirt, and gave Sass the signal to back away slowly.
“I went down in the valley to pray,” she’d sung, “studying ’bout that good ol’ way. Oh, who shall wear the starry crown? Good Lord, show me the way.” Her small voice had mingled with the bees’ music like they’d made their own choir in the middle of a secret woodland church.
When she and Pa had gotten far enough away that the bees left off chasing, he’d knocked the tobacco out of his pipe bowl and, for several seconds, pressed a pinch of it against the angry red spots where he’d been stung. He laid his big hand on top of Sass’s head.
“I declare, Sassy, I think you done bewitched them bees with your singing. They prob’ly thought there was a’ angel come to visit their little tree house.”
The thought struck her now that Finn’s injury was much worse than an upset beehive, and they could all use a means to keep calm. She cleared her throat, trying to ease the lump that stuck there, and opened her mouth to sing for Finn.
Chapter 6
In the past week since the cave-in, Rai had taken to sitting in the rocker on the front porch after supper. The rhythmic to-and-fro motion calmed her nerves, and the sounds of the forest at dusk brought to mind happier times, when the children were younger and her biggest worry about Finn was getting him to wash behind his ears. Now, Rai smoothed the corner of her apron, damp from her hastily dried tears over thinking of her oldest boy being crippled from mine work. Since he’d been big enough to walk, Finn had loved the outside, even at nighttime. She’d made Harley put a lock on the cabin door way up high where the boy couldn’t reach, for fear he’d wake in the night and toddle into the woods alone. Somehow he’d known, even as a young’un, that outside dark was different than cave dark, something he wanted no part of.
Up in the thickets and caverns of the mountains, night falls as a thick wool blanket over everything. Mountain dark is sweet. Breezes blow with a clean smell, especially when there’s rain on the way. The forests release an organic smell of life, new sprouts of sassafras and privet, flowering laurel, and the damp layers of leaves and fallen logs, mushrooms sprinkled across their tops like freckles on a young girl’s nose. The trees sway above, their leaves rustling and dancing in the summer, pine needles and the evergreen cedars swishing when it’s cold.
Under those mountains, there’s another dark altogether. In the coal mines, chipped and hacked and blown apart until their passages reach down into the heart of the mountains, the darkness is a cruel, live thing. At first it sidles up like a sly cat, and no matter how sternly you cast it off, it brushes around your legs and shoulders. Past a certain depth, it starts to mean business. It closes around a person like climbing inside a grave hole. That kind of dark has no sweet smells, no breezes. The reliable sun never reaches its rays into the hidey-holes and corners under all that rock.