July 1967
Grandma Hettie and I settle in on the porch to break green beans. Neighbor women stop to visit, grab beans from the pan, and work alongside us. The rhythmic creak of the swing’s chains and the grind of the glider’s metal rungs create a cacophony to accompany the work. We swat sweat bees and dodge the dive bombs of dirt daubers. Dogs pant in the shade of the porch. Their thick tongues drip raindrops of slobber. Haunch-thin cats sway past them, tails raised, to rub against our sticky legs. Sweat glistens on the faces of the women and pools inside my shirt collar.
The mountains echo the ladies’ voices as I listen to familiar stories and the latest gossip. Sometimes, a racy joke sends them into peals of laughter, and I catch a glimpse of the young girls they once were. Girls who climbed mountains, rocked baby dolls and splashed in the creek, like me. I’ve seen them young in faded black-and-white photos but found it hard to reconcile the pictures with the women they have metamorphosed into. Their faces carry a more hallowed beauty in lines etched from years of hoeing corn in the sun, worried about their men working dangerous jobs in the mines or logging in the woods. When their faces bloom in glee, youth kindles old fires in their eyes. They are fierce, bent by hard times, but never broken. A shy, awkward girl, I yearn to be like them.
Grandma and I linger on the porch after night falls. I curl up in the glider. She sits in a chair so near I can touch her. Her white hair is twisted into a bun above the nape of her neck. The wildroot cream oil she rubs into it each morning perfumes the air when the wind rustles the leaves in the apple trees. My brown hair hangs like a curtain down my back. She’s 60, and I’ll soon be 12.
Raindrops plop onto the porch roof as Grandma weaves tapestries of her memories and wraps them around me, her first-born grandchild. She tells me of creeks she waded, babies she tended, her mother’s smile and Grandpa Obie’s grin. Her voice grows husky when she talks of the man with pools of brown in his eyes. She met him in 1927 in a boarding house, where she cooked meals for miners. A man of the deep earth and ancient mountains to whom coal dust often clung. I sense her mouth widen into a grin, eyes glaze with old desire, as she whispers, “Your grandpa sure was pretty.”
In a voice soft as snow, she speaks of burying their firstborn in a Caretta, West Virginia, coal camp cemetery, sorrow and longing for the baby trapped in her voice 40 years later. “He looked perfect, but he was blue and so cold,” she says. “I held him against me to try to warm him. He never drew a breath.” Her breath catches in her throat.
Grandma entrusted me to carry her stories into a future she’d never see. I know this now, but on those nights, I couldn’t imagine a world without her in it. She’s been gone since 1979, but I see us there, our hearts swollen in contentment. Generations of our people, conjured back to life by her remembrances, dance around us in the shadows.
By Sheree Stewart Combs | Paris