Gray Mountain: A Novel(50)

Finally, she suspected it had something to do with Donovan.





15


Samantha awoke to the pleasant sounds of distant church bells. There seemed to be several melodies in the air, some closer, or louder, others farther away, but all busy rousing the town folk with not so gentle reminders that the Sabbath had arrived and the doors were open. It was two minutes past nine, according to her digital clock, and she once again marveled at her ability to sleep. She thought about rolling over and going for more, but after ten hours enough was enough. The coffee was ready, the aroma drifting from the other room. She poured a cup and sat on the sofa and thought about her day. With little to do, her first goal was to avoid Annette and the kids.

She called her mother and gabbed for thirty minutes about this and that. Karen, typically, was absorbed in the latest crisis at Justice and rattled on about it. Her boss was having urgent, preliminary meetings to organize plans to investigate big banks and purveyors of sub-prime mortgages and all manner of Wall Street crooks, and this would begin as soon as the dust settled and they figured out exactly who was responsible for the mess. Such talk bored Samantha, but she gamely held on, sipping coffee in her pajamas and listening to the nonstop church bells. Karen mentioned driving down to Brady in the near future for her first real look at life in the mountains, but Samantha knew it was all talk. Her mother rarely left D.C.; her work was too important. She finally asked about the internship and the legal clinic. How long will you stay? she asked. Samantha said she had no plans to leave anytime soon.

When the bells stopped, she put on jeans and left her apartment. Annette’s car was still parked in front of the house, an indication that she and the kids were skipping church on this beautiful Sunday. From a rack near Donovan’s office on Main Street, Samantha bought a copy of the Roanoke Times and read it in an empty café while she ate a waffle with bacon. After breakfast, she walked the streets of Brady for a while; it didn’t take long to see all of it. She passed a dozen churches, which all seemed to be packed, judging by the crowded parking lots, and tried to remember the last time she had seen the inside of one. Her father was a lapsed Catholic, her mother an indifferent Protestant, and Samantha had not been raised in any faith.

She found the schools, all as old as the courthouse, all with rusting air conditioners sagging from the windows. She said hello to a porch full of ancient people rocking their time away at the nursing home, evidently too old even for church. She walked past the tiny hospital and vowed to never get sick in Brady. She walked along Main Street and wondered how in the world the small merchants stayed in business. When the tour was over she got in her car and left.

On the map, Highway 119 wiggled through the coal country of far eastern Kentucky and into West Virginia. The day before, she had seen Appalachia from the air; now she would try it from the road. With Charleston a vague destination, she took off with nothing but a road map and a bottle of water. Soon she was in Kentucky, though the state line made little difference. Appalachia was Appalachia, regardless of boundaries someone had set an eternity ago. A land of breathtaking beauty, of steep hills and rolling mountains covered in dense hardwood forests, of rushing streams and rapids cutting through deep valleys, of depressing poverty, of tidy little towns with redbrick buildings and whitewashed houses, of church after church. Most of them seemed to be of the Baptist variety, though the brands were hopelessly confusing. Southern Baptist; General Baptist; Primitive Baptist; Missionary Baptist. Regardless, they were all bustling with activity. She stopped in Pikeville, Kentucky, population seven thousand, found the center of town, and treated herself to coffee amongst the locals in a stuffy café. She got some looks but everyone was friendly. She listened hard to the chatter, at times uncertain if it was the same language, and even chuckled at the banter. Near the West Virginia line, she couldn’t resist stopping at a country store that advertised “World Famous Beef Jerky, Homemade.” She bought a package, took one bite, tossed the rest in a trash can, and sipped water for fifteen miles to get rid of the taste.

She was determined not to think about coal; she was tired of the subject. But it was everywhere: in the haul trucks that owned the roads, in the fading billboards urging union strength, in the occasional glimpse of a strip mine and a mountaintop being removed, in the battle of bumper stickers, with “Like Electricity? Love Coal” on one side and “Save the Mountains” on the other, and in the tiny museums honoring the heritage of mining. She stopped at a historical marker and read the account of the Bark Valley Disaster, a deep mine explosion that killed thirty men in 1961. Friends of Coal had an aggressive campaign under way, and she drove past many of their billboards declaring “Coal Equals Jobs.” Coal was the fabric of life in these parts, but the strip-mining had divided the people. According to her Internet research, its opponents argued that it destroyed jobs, and they had the numbers to support them. Eighty thousand miners now, almost all non-union and half working in surface mines. Decades earlier, long before they began blasting tops off mountains, there were almost a million miners.

She eventually made it to Charleston, the capital. She still wasn’t comfortable in traffic and found more than she expected. She had no idea where she was going and was suddenly afraid of getting lost. It was almost 2:00 p.m., past lunch and time to turn around. The first leg of her trip ended when she randomly pulled in to a strip mall surrounded by fast-food restaurants. She was craving a burger and fries.