Out of Peel Tree

Out of Peel Tree: Essie

37 Out of Peel Tree Essie The fact of being sixty years old amused Essie as she lay resting in her hotel room in Pearl Beach, Florida, far from her home in Peel Tree, West Virginia. She was an antique! Her hands were becoming translucent, and the blue veins glowed like miniature jeweled rivers. Her skin was as delicately dry as rice paper. Never before had she felt so fragile and light, she who had been tough since the age of six, when she hauled countless buckets of water to her father’s garden. Later she carried four children through birth and childhood, her legs and arms becoming as strong as trees. She bent over countless other women’s laundry and floors and baked them fresh bread in the bargain. Her children rose like reeds in the pond, and lithely they left her, long before her husband Merle did, coughing up his black lungs in the cold white hospital until the doctor said, You can take him home now, there’s nothing we can do. In their bedroom she watched the light drain from his gray eyes as he suffocated. She imagined the coal dust sifting even through his heart, which for years she had listened to as she fell asleep, drum and echo, drum and echo. Essie opened her eyes and gazed at the Florida sunlight spotting the wall. The spots seem to laugh as they came and went. It out of peel tree 38 was strange how memories kept flowing into her mind, now of all times. Last week she had left Peel Tree, West Virginia—crossing the state line for the first time in her life—and come to Florida on a tour with her friend Sara. Now as she looked out her hotel window at the dun beach, a flamingo paused and balanced on a stilted leg, a scatter of gulls rocked in the sky, and she heard her mother say, “Essie, go fetch the eggs, and don’t dawdle, you hear?” She ran out, the kitchen floor warm and rough on her small feet, then the stone steps cool as butter, the sun dazzling her sight. Sugarnose snorted and skittered off as Essie darted under the barb wire. “No, I’m not comin’ to ketch you, horsie.” To her surprise, Essie heard her own childish voice, flung like notes from a bird. And suddenly there came a tumult of voices. Her husband’s voice, gravelly with sleep, asked, “Eva still got a fever?” Darlene, her only baby to get jaundice, wailed. Ray, the neighbor’s boy, always here with a hungry stomach, piped, “Please, can I have a little piece of cornbread?” The windows rattled in a November wind. The wind grew wilder. “Essie! Are you going on the glass-bottom boat ride? The bus is leaving in ten minutes!” Sara was knocking loudly on her door. “I’m coming,” Essie called. She didn’t want to miss anything. That night, Essie wrote to her grandchildren on postcards that pictured alligators and flamingos. She pictured her prim daughter Eva crisply handing the cards to her kids Billie and Hector, maybe smiling to see Essie call them “Billie Bo” and “Hector-berry,” but maybe not. Her dreamy daughter, Darlene, would leave the cards on the kitchen table for Corina and Joshua to find, amid a clutter of jam jars and magazines. Essie pressed the stamps on, rubbing them good with her finger. Then she stretched out on the bed and wondered if the voices of her mother and husband would return. She heard only the hum of the air conditioning. out of peel tree 39 After a long while, she heard the midnight coal train blow its whistle. The deep, full sound paused, like a person catching a breath, then went on, and Essie understood the language now. Slowly and without grief, the train whistle called out, one by one, the names of the dead. The enormous night opened its mouth and let the train run along its teeth. Essie felt herself swallowed up in the black night and the sound of the train rushing toward her. She felt it come closer, heard the whistle roll and the wheels shriek. The vibrations of the passing train, loaded with coal from deep underneath the earth, coal blacker than the night, shook Essie’s bones. She woke up. Outside, a full moon lit the clouds and...