On Woodward

Alma May Combs lay on her back near the edge of the mountain ridge, her open sketchbook at her side. The wild fescue grass was rough on her bare arms, but she didn’t care: The air was fresh and clean and sweet smelling here. Facing in this easterly direction, she could almost forget that she was part of the community down in the valley below and behind her. She could gaze up at the yellow-green leaves of the huge maple fluttering in the autumn breeze and almost forget about the grimy buildings of the Independent Coal Mining Co., that she and her family lived in one of the row-after-row of company owned shacks.

She could almost forget, too, that just two weeks ago the whistle had blown, signaling disaster. Three miners had been killed, but her father had escaped again. “Reckon I’m too cussed ornery to die,” he’d quipped with a grim half-smile when his partners pulled him out from the rubble of timber and coal.

She stretched her long overall-clad legs. To her right, she saw the reddening leaves of the sumac; to her left, the crimson seed cones of the ear-leafed wild magnolia. The sun soothed and warmed her face and body. She was almost, as her father would say, as “happy as a ‘possum up a ‘simmon tree with a dog a mile off.”

Alma May shifted her body now and thought about the mine explosion. As much as she tried, she could not push it completely from her mind. If anything ever happened to Pa, she knew she’d die, too.

This place belonged to her. She’d told no one but her father about it. Sometimes on Sundays, his day off, they’d sneak away for a little while and climb up here. She’d sketch the surrounding Kentucky foothills and the tree-crowned crest of Big Black Mountain, several miles south. Chet Combs would never fail to peer over her shoulder as she worked, and say in his best art critic’s voice: “Some day, Miss Alma May Combs, you’re going to be a famous artist.”

If he got the urge, he’d bring along his worn guitar. He’d pick up the instrument and sit with his back resting against the trunk of the tree. Alma May would watch his long-fingered, graceful hands play as he sang in a clear tenor voice. Maybe he’d sing one of the old Elizabethan favorites of the region, “Lovin’ Nancy” or “Hangman’s Song.”

Then they’d lie on their backs and make believe that the clouds above them were really The Farm.

“See that big cloud to the right and back a ways?” her father would ask. “That’s the barn. And that medium-size cloud in front a it? That’s the house.”

“What’s that little bit a cloud to the left, Pa?”

“Why, can’t you tell, Alma May? That’s the tractor, a course.”

After they’d worked out in minute detail such things as where the trees would be, and how many chickens and hogs they’d buy the first year, the conversation would end with Alma May asking, “Pa, are we really going to have a farm someday?”

“Sure as a skunk stinks we are, Alma May. Don’t we already have a hundred and fifty-thee dollars saved for it?” After a moment, he’d add, “A course, we’d have to find a place near the mountains. Ain’t never going to live no wheres for very long without we see mountains.”

Now Alma May raised her head a little and nestled her hands behind it. The outline of her developing breasts under the bib of her cotton overalls repeated the outline of two foothills in the distance. She smiled at the comparison. There were so many things happening with her body that she didn’t yet know the reason for. It was all so confusing. Who could she ask? There were some things she couldn’t talk to Pa about. Like the way Uncle Darcas had been looking at her lately, with that funny smile twisting his lips—it made her skin crawl and her stomach creepy-feeling. She ought to be able to talk to Ma about these things. Several times Alma May had tried, but her mother had looked down and cleared her throat, then quickly changed the subject. One time she’d opened the Woman’s Home Companion to a page advertising Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. She took it to her mother and asked, “Ma, what they mean by ‘female weaknesses’ an’ ‘irregular an’ painful menstruation, inflammation an’ ulceration a the womb’?”

Her mother had tucked her head further down over the washboard where she was scrubbing the overalls of Alma May’s eight-year-old brother, Jimmie Lee. Her face blushed as red as Pa’s red-and-white polka dotted handkerchief hanging on the line behind her. “I’ll tell you when your time comes, Alma May.”

Well, Alma May’s time had come, more than four months ago, and her Ma still hadn’t told her any--

The whistle blasted now in the valley below. Alma May jumped to her feet. Forgetting about the sketchbook, forgetting about everything but her father, she ran as fast as she could—down, down toward the valley. The whistle blowing during working hours meant only one thing: someone’s Pa was dead. The brutal sound shouted its cruel message: “Your Pa-a- a-a! Your Pa-a-a-a!”