"Once," he admitted, blushing, as if he didn't know I knew about that, "but only because she's something like you are, not silly and giggly."
I didn't know what to say then. Sometimes I wished to be like the other girls, full of silly laughter about nothing at all, and not always so burdened down with responsibilities that made me feel older than my years.
Later that same night I gave Fanny a good scolding about her behavior and the consequences. She didn't have to explain again. Already she'd confessed to me, on a rare occasion when we were like sisters needing each other, that she hated school and the time it took from having fun with the other girls her age. Even at the tender age of not quite twelve, she wanted to make out with much older boys who might have ignored her but for her insistence. She liked the boys to undress her, to slip their hands into her panties and start those exciting sensations only they could give her. It had distressed me to hear her say that, and distressed me even more to witness how she acted in the cloakroom with boys.
"Won't do it no more, really I won't let them," promised Fanny, who was sleepy and agreeable to any suggestion, even an order from me to stop.
The very next day, despite Fanny's vow, it happened all over again when I went to Fanny's class to pick her up and head her back home. I forced my way into the cloakroom and tore Fanny away from a pimply-faced valley boy.
"Yer sister ain't stuck-up and prissy like ya!" the boy hissed.
And all the time I could hear Fanny giggling.
"Ya leave me alone!" Fanny screamed as I dragged her away. "Pa treats ya like yer invisible, so naturally ya kin't know how good it feels t'like boys and men, and if ya keep on pesterin me not t'do this an not t'do that, I'm gonna let em do anythin they want-- an I won't give a damn if ya tell Pa. He loves me an hates ya anyway!"
That stung, and if Fanny hadn't come running to throw her slender arms about my neck, crying and pleading for my forgiveness, I might have forever turned my back on such a hateful, insensitive sister. "I'm sorry, Heaven, really sorry. I love ya, I do, I do. I just like what they do. Kin't help it, Heaven. Don't want t'help it. Ain't it natural, Heaven, ain't it?"
"Yer sister Fanny is gonna be a whore," said Sarah later, her voice dull and without hope as she pulled bed pallets from boxes for us to put on the floor. "Ya kin't do nothin bout Fanny, Heaven. Ya jus look out fer yerself."
.
Pa came home only three or four times a week, as if timing how long our food would last, and he'd come in bringing as much as he could afford to buy at one time. Just last week I'd heard Granny telling Sarah that Grandpa had taken Pa out of school when he was only eleven in order to put him to work in the coal mines--and Pa had hated that so much he'd run away and hadn't come back until Grandpa found him hiding out in a cave. "And Toby swore to Luke he'd neva have t'go down inta them mines agin, but he sure would make more money iffen he did once in a while . . ."
"Don't want him down there," Sarah said dully. "Ain't right t'make a man do somethin he hates. Even iffen t'Feds catch him soona or lata peddlin
moonshine, he'd die fore he'd let em lock
him up. Ratha see him dead than shut up like his brothas . . ."
It made me look at the coal miners differently than I had before.
Many of them lived beyond Winnerrow, scattered a bit higher on the hills, but not really in the mountains like we were. Often at night when the wind was still, I'd lie awake and think I could hear the pickaxes of those dead miners who'd been trapped underground, all trying to dig their way out of the very mountain that was topped by our own cabin.
"Can you hear them, Tom?" I asked the night when Sarah went to bed crying because Pa hadn't been home in five days. "Chop, chop, chop . . . don't you hear em?"
Tom sat up and looked around. "Don't hear nothin."
But I did. Faint and far away, chop chop chop. Even fainter, help help help! I got up and went out to the porch, and the sound was louder. I shivered, then called to Tom. Together we drifted to where the sound came from--and there was Pa in the moonlight, shirtless and sweaty, swinging an ax to fell another tree so we could have firewood, come this winter.
For the first time in my life I looked at him with a kind of wondering pity. Help help help echoed in my brain--had it been him crying out, had it been? What kind of man was he anyway, that he would come in the night to chop wood without even stopping in the cabin to say hello to his wife and children?
"Pa," called out Tom, "I kin help ya do that."
Pa didn't pause in his swing that sent wood chips flying, just yelled: "Go back and get your rest, boy. Tell your ma I've got a new job that keeps me busy all day, and the only spare time I have is at night, and that's why I'm chopping down trees for you to split into logs later on." He didn't say a word to indicate he saw me beside Tom.
"What kind of job have ya got now, Pa?"
"Workin on a railroad, boy. Learnin how t'drive one of them big engines. Pulling coal on the C and 0. . . come down t'the tracks tomorrow about seven and you'll see me pull out . . ."
"Ma sure would like t'see ya, Pa."
I thought he paused then, the ax hesitating before it slammed again into the pine. "She'll see me . . . when she sees me." And that was all he said before I turned and ran back to the cabin.
On my coarse pillow stuffed with chicken feathers I cried. Didn't know why I cried, except all of a sudden I was sorry for Pa--and even sorrier for Sarah.
Four SARAH
. ANOTHER CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT WITHOUT REAL gifts to make it