a while. Listen, I’ll drop you off at Mary's. I'm gonna stop for some gas before I go on home.”
FIVE
Picture Hodges waved as they pulled up to the pump. A tall, stooped man with a sunken chest and high, narrow forehead, he was Mary's second husband, her first husband having been killed in the mines. Picture's full name was Picture Perfect Hodges. Everyone had called him P.P., until the day his picture appeared on the front page of the Charleston Gazette. It was the day after he'd returned from what he said was a fishing trip up on Elk River.
The photo had been taken at a fiddling contest over at Spencer the day before. There he was, plain as everything, standing behind a group of musicians, his arm around a woman. After that, P.P. became Picture, a man who no longer went on unaccompanied fishing trips.
Dwayne jumped out as soon as the truck stopped. “See you later, Benny,” he said, waving to Picture as he walked up the steep hill leading to the house his family had lived in for more than 40 years.
Picture rose from the bench next to the door. When the weather was good, he spent most of his time on the bench, gossiping and watching the traffic. Mary ran the store. Picture had slept in his truck for more than two months after the newspaper incident. “Did'ja see Russell?” he asked Benny. “He was here lookin' for you.”
Benny finished pumping the gas and began cleaning his windshield.
“Russell must'a found you. He didn't stay up the hollow very long. Came through here a while back, drivin' like a bat out'a hell. Didn't even honk as he went by.”
“Yeah, he found me,” Benny said, turning to go inside. As he opened the door to the store he noticed some joker had marked out FOOD STAMPS and scrawled CASH on the “WE ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS” sign.
Probably Junior, he thought.
A plump, gray-haired woman was leaning on the counter, staring at a tiny black and white TV set atop the cash register. She glanced up, nodded and turned back to the TV.
Benny picked up a loaf of white bread and a package of spiced ham, then checked to make sure the beer cooler really was on the blink.
“Russell find you?” Mary asked as she rang up his stuff.
“Sure did.”
“Well, what'd you think about him getting married? Who would have thought it, after all these years?”
Benny stared at her for a moment. “He never mentioned anything about it to me.”
She shook her head. “Well, I'm right surprised. He said his wife used to work with Ruth at that mattress factory. She's from somewhere down South, near the Tennessee-Kentucky line, I believe he said.”
On the flickering TV screen a man and a woman stared solemnly at one another. The man was talking but the sound was down so low Benny couldn't hear what he was saying. Whatever it was, the woman didn't like it, because she suddenly put her hand over her mouth and began to cry.
“Marriage should be good for Russell,” Benny said, picking up his groceries. “I'd say it will be a real learning experience for him, having been a bachelor all these years.”
“What do you hear from Ruth and Billy?” Mary asked. But Benny was already out the door.
Picture looked up from the bench as he strode by. “Did'ja hear about the dam?”
Benny nodded vaguely and climbed into the truck. He drove off, leaving Picture standing beside the pump, mouth agape.
The news of Russell's marriage occupied Benny as he as he drove down the hollow, paying little attention to the road. He could have driven it blindfolded and had driven it blind drunk more than once. The creek was still to his left, but twice as wide now as further up toward the mine complex. He passed a row of houses, all that remained of the old Blue Sulfur coal camp. Among them was Ruth’s family’s house, a blue, one-story affair with a small front porch.
The houses had been built in 1915, during the early days of World War One, a time when coal was badly needed for industrial production. Then came the 1930s and The Great Depression, a time of great suffering and depression on the creek, a time when men were lucky if they worked two days a week. Later, in the early 1950s, Blue Sulfur had sold off the houses, a move that came shortly after it closed the company store. The store was no longer profitable now that the miners had cars and could shop at area supermarkets where the produce was fresher, the prices cheaper and the selection much greater than that offered at the store.
Blue Sulfur was one of the companies that had fought hardest against the union. The new governor’s grandfather was one of the founders. The grandson grew up on the family estate in New York and moved to West Virginia after college, using his grandfather's money to finance his political career.
At one time, the Blue Sulfur camp boasted a post office and a small movie theater in addition to the company store. Now, there was only a scarred foundation where the store had been. Some of the small, frame houses had changed hands several times since the company sold them off. Personal touches, an extra room or a bigger porch, had been added here and there. As a result, a stranger might not realize, at least not right away, that all the houses had once been identical.
Benny couldn't remember a time when he hadn't been on a first-name basis with everyone along the row. He had eaten dinner in most of those houses and had slept in a few, some more than once.
Small vegetable plots flanked most of the houses. He had plowed several of those gardens with his old Ford tractor. He usually worked for free, but sometimes could be talked into accepting a chicken dinner, complete with dumplings and gravy.
The gardens were lush now, approaching their mid-summer peak. Benny marked summer's passage by watching the gardens. In the early spring, when the seedlings were pale and thin, the garden plots were brown, muddy rectangles; by midsummer, the fragile seedlings had become thick, green tangles. He especially liked watching the old folks tend their gardens. They would lean on their hoes and wave hello as he drove past. He always pictured his grandmother in the garden, her back stiffly erect, her head bent beneath her bonnet as she chopped weeds with her long-handled hoe. A lot of the older women wore bonnets when he was little but his grandmother was one of the few who still did; she always wore a blue one with paisley patterns.
Ruth also liked paisley. She had lined Billy's crib with a paisley patch quilt a few days before he was born. Benny thought she probably would have dressed Billy in paisley dresses if he'd been a girl. As it was, Billy mostly wore jeans and t-shirts with superheroes imprinted on them. At least, Benny thought, that's what he’d usually worn when he lived on Cabin Creek.
Benny got depressed whenever he thought of Billy. He was down in the dumps for weeks after Billy left for Columbus, but the pain faded with time and now was just a low-level ache.
Even the “Daddy Loves You Billy” sign was now so faded it was barely visible. Benny had scrawled it in big, red letters on the overpass down at the mouth of the hollow that time Ruth had left him and moved in with her mother in the Blue Sulfur house. Billy was six at the time, and Ruth wouldn't let Benny see him for almost a week. He had painted the sign on the overpass so Billy would see it on his way to school.
They had gotten back together, but it didn't last. Ruth had packed up and moved to Columbus a few months later.
It was a lot of things, but mostly the mine closing that
