They stayed at a schoolhouse turned historic hotel in the heart of coal mining country. The brick façade glowed in a brown dinge of light behind laced curtains.
It rained in sheets in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Through a series of tall picture windows in a classroom turned spacious bedroom, they played cards and Scrabble made of real wooden blocks, aged and played with by schoolchildren over a matter of decades.
Joanne made a meal in a small alcove, Norman standing alongside her, helping, aware of the solid wood chairs, the rounded tables and bone china, the bite of a breadknife with a worn handle and the teeth of a saw, all of it of a vintage of great permanence.
Joanne had on a wedding ring. Norman noticed it, this unannounced union decided upon by her alone. It somehow did not involve Norman, or it involved him, but in a way that acknowledged how love was always one-sided and kept alive more so by one partner than the other. He felt the advantage and disadvantage of what she quietly offered.
He looked askance at her, her hair flat against her head in an unadorned plainness of domestic life. She was in a shirt with the sleeves rolled above her elbows. It was something that would be decided, her faithfulness, over days, weeks, months and years, this decision of hers, and better configured in looking back on what had been decided and not voiced.
*
They were in a valley cut from a river, encased in an earthen mass of dead foliage, the layers of past life dating back millennia, predating the rise of humans, the V of the valley blocking sunlight so the day was more shadows, greyness and fog.
It took the reach of the sun across the cosmos to find them, the void of distance, a faint light eventually finding them on occasional days of blue skies, so it was not such a great burden to go into the mines against the characteristic slate grey of a webbed fog. You limited the possibilities, cut yourself off from alternatives.
Beneath the earth it was simply all darkness. You came up to the possibility of rain or sleet or maybe sun. It was a veneer, this world of light, when the greater reality of the universe was darkness. He heard a church bell toll that might have been for him alone, if he believed in miracles.
It was the two of them, and Grace, the compact of a life and the reach of Florida in the offing, but for now they were arrested here in the quiet of a schoolhouse, this weigh station between the past and the present. He liked this about Joanne, how she had found the schoolhouse in some informational flyer and sought it out, because places like this argued for simple choices or no choices at all.
Choice, or how it was now envisioned and experienced, was a new phenomenon, and what people decried when it was denied them was, in fact, the opposite of the truer essence of life and how it had been lived for the greater part of human awakening.
He was mindful of this against the scroll of fog and the diaphanous leech of true color, so Joanne was a shadow beside him. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. She cracked a series of eggs in a deft one-handed way, so it was a magic trick, the sudden glob of yellow like a contained sun run into a ceramic bowl. This was a late afternoon lunch materializing before his eyes — scrambled eggs and bacon, a pot of coffee on the stove over the blue whisper of a crowned gas ring.
There were memories laid down, a series of acts that defined her presence, back at the apartment, her panties stained with a rusty blood, the discoloration of the water in the bathroom sink, the intimacies of the body’s workings. There were nylons, too, wrung and hung casually over the shower railing.
He liked all this. He would not have anticipated it, but, when it was presented, he thought, here was a life, and he was a part of it. He sensed her creating it for him in the simple act of making lunch, and that a life was not any one thing, but a series of concatenated actions that created a greater context when viewed in their totality.
Norman poured a cheap, screw-top wine into a tumbler. They were in for the afternoon, locked in shadows. In a small library on the second floor, Norman held the weight of books stamped and worn, a hardback cloth threadbare and shiny with the oil of thumbprints — a library containing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
He looked through a porthole window, saw a small church and, beyond, a hole in the ground where men had descended daily. In observing it, he understood better what an education must have offered in the past for those who could make a living above ground, what a powerful inducement it must have been to study here, and to witness Hell, to see a hole consume and disgorge human life and to know there was an alternative in books, to study and hear the concussive explosive blasts deep underground, the horror and ever-present danger always there and that took so many.
In the associated history of the area, there had been worker unrest and strikes. Norman paged through a book with accompanying black-and-white photographs of miners in an age when people made a living here on coal.
He went out eventually into the pouring rain in search of a statue and found it by an abandoned spine of rail track — a bronze statue of a miner wearing a hard hat with a miner’s lamp, a pick in his hand. Veins showed in a defining grip and strength that was little needed anymore, though, in standing alongside it, it put into perspective the life Norman’s father had inhabited, the reach of Mayor Daley and the Machine, and how protective a class of men had to be to ensure dignity and a living wage.
He checked the toll of death in the mine and the surrounding mines at a small museum dedicated to miners above a post office. The deaths were all accounted for in handwritten ledgers. The museum had been underwritten by Loretta Lynn, the famed Coal Miner’s Daughter, a woman of great beauty and voice, who, for a time had brought the plight of the miners into the American consciousness — what they had offered the nation, and, in return, how they had been treated, the insidious slow death of black lung and the sudden cave-ins — solidarity, the only foothold the working class had against management.
Norman felt it, a gathering sense of what was then needed, and needed again, the rallying defiance of a generation, of a class consciousness that had been eclipsed somewhere during the Reagan Presidency.
He found a computer with an Internet connection back at the small schoolhouse library, and, searching archives, he found footage of the old Mayor Daley of his father’s vintage, Daley, glad-handing, tipping his hat along a St Pat’s Day parade route, in a coronation of the ordinary, a river run green with Irish pride and the color of money.
A voiceover echoed Daley’s 1968 post-Democratic Convention statement, ‘Gentleman, get the thing straight once and for all — the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder,’ a gaff glossed over by a reporter who, in the spirit of the times, declared, ‘We reported what he meant, not what he said.’
There was accommodation of interests and sympathies then, words not parsed and put under scrutiny, when it was so damn hard to get said right, what needed to be said, when, for most of your life, you spoke around a feeling and never fully understood it.
For Norman Price, it accounted for honesty, when contradictions, missteps, were an essential divining rod of how life was lived, and that there was nothing inconsistent in holding any number of contrary opinions on any number of subjects. It was the human condition.
Norman looked up into the glare of light. He had witnessed it even in the new politics of a supposedly unfettered history that came after the corruption of Daley, how Obama, a would-be presidential hopeful a year earlier, had mysteriously not recollected his former church pastor’s alleged statements against white injustice and American Imperialism, suggesting either that Obama was a liar, or that there were Truths one told among one’s own kind, or to oneself, that fed only a part of the font of who one was, and that a person could hold two histories simultaneously, two contradictory histories, and still somehow be true to oneself.