Reverend Parry stood at the head of the grave, bundled to his chin in a frock coat, his hat squashed under one arm. His baldpate steamed as he read aloud from his little book. He spoke to the infinite charity of the Lord’s embrace. At Parry’s side stood his protégé of the time. A seminary scholar of about seventeen, he had a peaked look like a revenant: dark hair and pale eyes and a face of angular, jittering features. He bowed his head, his two sinewy hands folded before him. After a moment Parry turned and passed his small book to the apprentice, whispered something near his ear, and drew back.
The apprentice stepped to the lip of the grave. He knelt and scooped up a handful of dirt and sprinkled the coffin. Then he smiled broadly. “Whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.”
After the funeral the mourners mingled a few minutes, then dispersed and started drifting over the ridge toward Nortonville. I stayed with father and some other men who had volunteered to fill the grave, wandering among the white headstones while they set to work. Mother walked back to town with a number of women.
The sun had not yet appeared. The sky was a slate of cloud above our hills. I went up to the ridge-top and looked down over Nortonville. Houses breathed in that darkness below, thin chimneys respiring smoke. A few silhouettes of persons moved in the streets. The works stood very still.
From the Somersville valley at my back, a freezing wind barreled past me down the hill. Then a dark figure moved through the headstones, opened and shut the cemetery gate, and I saw Reverend Parry’s apprentice coming up the road. He had both his hands driven deep in the pockets of his frock coat. His head was down, face obscured under his derbyshire hat, and he seemed to move cautiously, as if the blighting wind at his back threatened to pick him up and fling him forward over the ridge. Then he stood beside me.
“You’re young Witherow, aren’t you?” he said. “I’ve heard a great deal about your mother. She’s a woman of much prayer, they say. A good woman—as your father’s a good man.” He glanced back to the grave, where father stood shoveling dirt over Edward Leam, then turned again to our view of the village. A ribbon of white breath spilled from his nose. “Did you know young Leam?”
I nodded silently.
“Does his death trouble you?”
I shook my head.
“I didn’t think so. It didn’t seem to.” He withdrew his pasty hands from his coat and rubbed them briskly. “You’re a strong lad, aren’t you? What do you make of this ashes to ashes business?”
I kept silent, shrugged a little. He bore my reticence without any comment of his own, standing a long moment by my side, as though hesitant to leave me unattended on the ridge. We listened to the scrape and slap of the men’s shovels, the soft thump of thrown dirt. He laid his light hand on my shoulder and said: “Do you know why we bury our dead? Because they disappear from us that way. It’s in keeping with the Apostle’s teaching: We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” His pallid eyes coursed my face. Then he started down the hill. “Peace to you, young Witherow.”
I first learned the apprentice’s name that evening at supper, when father questioned me.
“What did Josiah Lyte have to say to you this morning, Asher?”
Mother paused from her coleslaw. “The apprentice? He spoke to you?”
“Yes,” said father, “they talked whilst I filled the grave.”
“He asked me if I knew Edward Leam,” I said.
Mother shot a glance at father, stared a minute at the fork in her hand as if remembering its use, then prodded the slaw about her plate. Father touched his beard.
“He said why we bury our dead,” I told them. “He said something the Apostle said.”
Mother’s fork fell still again. She and father seemed to take up a silent dispute. Father pushed his plate away. “There’s little to fear in a man of God, Abicca.”
“A boy of God, more like. He’s unordained yet, and talking with a lad of five about death and the grave.”
Father waved his hand. “I think he meant well. He just doesn’t know better. He’s just unsure—still an apprentice and all.”
“I don’t want unsure scripture spoken to our boy. That Josiah Lyte smiled this morning where he should not have done.”
“Yes,” said father. For a moment he worked his mouth glumly, as though mulling the image of that smile between his teeth, tasting it. “Well, who knows how God’s grace can fall on a man?”
“But to smile over the very grave? Who smiles over a grave, David?”
Father lifted his palms, the skin still splotched in places where the day’s filth would not come off. “I don’t know.”
“Mr. Lyte told me you’re a woman of prayer,” I said to mother, hoping to please her.
She gazed blankly at me, then cast another look at father as she rose. She cleared our plates in silence.
{2}
LATE EVERY AUTUMN THE RAINS CAME AND CAST A RICH BLUSH OF green over our dry hills. From then until early summer the whole earth softened and breathed as a body softens and breathes at a welcome touch. In these green days you could climb the steep Cumberland Rise to the plateau west of town and find the mountain restored to its truest appearance. Humped emerald against the sky, its hollows lay daubed in shadow, and at its foot the land flowed lush to the coast. The country spoke more vividly in these green months, like a voice cured of its long catarrh. The land seemed caught in fresh remembrance of how things had been in the beginning, in the age when mastodons plodded its swamps, long before the Spanish came with their yellow grass. The land bodied forth its remembrance.
In this season the earth felt more a home than ever the rest of the year. I plunged headlong into the autumn, sank to my ankles in mud, played in shoulder-high grasses. The country was already green when in December 1870, at barely seven years old, I went happily to work in the Black Diamond breaker.
That place was a hive of boys inside. We sat on slats astride chutes and hunched over a dark current of coal and slag, snatching at it with bleeding hands. Dust stirred thick up to the rafters and the rock in the machine’s teeth screamed calamitously, like a dozen trains smashing into each other at full bore. The clamor blurred our vision and made us brace our limbs stiff. Our ears numbed, but still that jelly of sound went on tensing each wire and plank in our bodies. We bound our mouths with kerchiefs to screen the palpable air. We crammed our cheeks with tobacco to keep the dust out of our throats.
Somehow the monstrous roar was worsened by the lack of light. The few high windows stood filmed with dust, and up there upon the thick beams that stabled the roof only a choked glimmer fell. We would watch that minuscule light sometimes, in the seconds between tumbling loads of rock, when the clouds thinned and began to part in the air. Then the squeal and crash of rock again and the rubble pouring down between our legs and the big cloud dimming everything.
I took to my work in the breaker. The haze in which I bent my head for hours, the black pollen of the earth which coated me so profusely that I stood every hour to slough off its weight: there was something in all of it to which I felt akin.
Within weeks I’d forged a strong camaraderie with most of the boys, but with one particular fellow the sincerity of friendship ran deeper from the beginning.
Not long before I started, the watchman Boggs had become breaker-foreman. Regularly—if