Chapter Text
1913
The bitterly cold, damp November morning engulfed Mrs. Rey Solo as she stumbled, half-dressed, from her home, nearly falling down the rickety wooden porch steps, and ran as fleet as a deer to the end of the road all lined with miner’s shanties made the same as hers. Mist swirled about her form, dressed in a nightgown, a shawl and nothing else: her long brown hair had come half-undone from its braid, and her face bore the wild, terrified look of a cornered animal. It was still dark, not yet sunrise, nor yet late enough for the miners to have risen from their beds and begun the long march into the underground labyrinths of bituminous coal, but she knew her way well enough that she needed no light. Her bare feet left prints in the pristine frost on the ground, where not a single mule or wheel had yet left a track.
She staggered up finer steps than those she had come down, and threw herself against an oak door with as much force as she could, crying out, “Dr. Dameron! Dr. Dameron!” and her voice was near to weeping, thick with fear and horror. “Open the door!” She beat on the door with her fists, casting terrified looks back over her shoulder. Inside, behind the lace curtain, a light went on, and then the door opened, revealing a stunned, handsome man with sleep-tousled dark hair and a finely formed Mediterranean face beneath. Mrs. Solo nearly fell into the man, who wore only his nightshirt and his trousers half-on, and carried a kerosene lamp. “Doctor,” she gasped, trembling all over.
“Mrs. Solo, what on earth is the matter?” he asked, raising her up with one hand. “You have been gone all night. Have you had some trouble? You are half-frozen. Come inside. What is it?”
As he guided her across the threshold and barred the door, she stood halfway, and covered her mouth with one hand, shaking her head sharply, as if afraid to speak. The lamp illuminated her face: younger than the doctor’s by fifteen years, perhaps, and pretty, but no less lined with exhaustion, and pale as ash. “You must tell me,” she whispered, clinging to his brown hand with sudden force. Her eyes bored into his. “Tell me, Doctor: you were the one to declare him dead, weren’t you?”
Dameron paused. The woman’s demeanor was concerning to him both personally and professionally, and he did not wish to distress her. “I was,” he said softly.
“My late husband, I mean,” she added, as if there was some doubt about which dead man she meant.
“Yes, Mrs. Solo. Your husband was dead beyond any doubt when they brought him here. What has that to do with the state you are in?”
She closed her eyes and opened them again, her lips trembling. “I am afraid I am going mad,” she said, voice breaking all to pieces. “Mad, I am mad, I must be mad, I thought— I thought—”
“What? What did you think?” Dameron asked gently, but no matter how he prodded, the young widow remained silent, shaking her head with silent tears streaming down her face.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
“Do you have your lunch pail?” called out Rey, wiping her flour-covered hands on the cleanest rag she could find as she turned her head towards the shanty’s door, where her husband was slipping on his jacket in the pre-dawn light.
“I have,” he answered, his low voice careful and deliberate, a smile playing in it. “And I saw the extra cornbread. Thank you kindly.”
“You need it, Ben. You’re twice the size of half those men,” she told him, stirring the pot over the stove before darting back to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Stew tonight. Potato. Don’t be late.”
“I may be anyway, catfish mouth,” he said, chucking her under the chin. “Keep it warm. Foreman wants to talk about that supervisor position.”
“For certain sure?” Rey was delighted: he had mentioned it last week, but she had thought it was a passing fancy. “And you didn’t tell me!” She flicked him with the towel. “Get to going, then, Mr. Supervisor Benjamin Solo.” He ducked out the door with a grin, and she lost herself in thoughts of being a supervisor’s wife.
How lovely: a nicer house, lace curtains, maybe even a second bedroom! And fresh meat every Sunday, instead of only when the company store decided to have salted pork on hand in exchange for scrip. She went back to making bread. It was a Monday, so bread must be done for the week today: then dinner would cook slow all day over the wood stove, and the clothes must be washed— coal dust had worked itself so deeply into most of Ben’s work clothes that not even lye could take it out, but his Sunday best needed washing, and he was particular about how he looked Sundays when his mother was in attendance, so she liked to take special care with both their clothes Monday mornings.
Rey finished kneading the bread dough and left it to rise, then walked out to start the wash-fire. Smoke stung her eyes in the spring morning as she stoked it up, waving hello to the other wives and children in the yards of the shanties close by to hers. The sun rose up, higher and higher, and she pounded and scrubbed her good cotton shirtwaist with its camisole and Ben’s Sunday shirt in the boiling cauldron until her shoulders ached, then levered them out with her pole and set them to cool before hand-washing on the board, where she sat on her stool and scrubbed over the corrugated steel.
She sometimes missed the days where all she had done every day was go to school. It did not seem as if it had been long ago at all, these days— and it hadn’t been, to be truthful. She was only nineteen, after all, and she had left school at sixteen, later than most girls did, but only because she had wanted to be a teacher like old Mrs. Solo, who was now her Mother Solo, the schoolmistress. Down the road, she knew, the schoolhouse still stood, where Mother Solo was inside at this moment, teaching small children their letters and ciphering and history.
Her own first day, she had been very small: five or six, sitting in the front, her braids stiff and tight, her feet not even touching the floor as they swung under the hem of her drab gray dress. Mrs. Solo had seemed perfectly huge, enormous, a lady with strict eyes and a firm hand on that ruler, and her son Ben had been thirteen, a big boy itching to go and be a real miner already, whose feet not only hit the floor in the desks in the back of the schoolroom but whose knees had to stick out on both sides because they simply did not fit.
Rey smiled to remember it. The second day, he had tugged on her braids, laughing at how tightly they had been done up, and she had snatched up Mrs. Solo’s ink-pot and dumped it over his head, sending the class into an uproar. She had been paralyzed with terror of a beating before the whole school for her awful crime, but Mrs. Solo had chastised her son instead, saying he ought not to have teased her, and then Ben had slunk, red-faced and ink-stained, from the room. The third day, he had brought her a penny as an apology, and she had bought all the candy it could buy from the company store with the greatest delight she had ever known. Yes, Mrs. Solo was a fair teacher, and from then on Rey had gotten along with her very well.
Both of her parents had died before then. She could not remember when, but she knew Papa had died in a mine collapse when she was two, and Mama had died of tuberculosis soon after that, but somehow Rey had straggled on: the town had not sent her off to an orphanage, and she had been looked after by Mrs. Solo and by a few other families who could afford to feed another mouth from time to time, and then at fourteen, about the time she had been helping Mrs. Solo to teach the eight year olds geography, she had looked at Ben across the table at Sunday dinner and thought why, he is twenty-one, a man grown now, and I am a woman, aren’t I? He had regarded her with only shy respect ever since the ink-pot incident, but since certain changes had begun to take root and shape her body into something strange and new, she found herself courting very strange new feelings and thoughts about all manner of things, and especially regarding Ben Solo.
It had not been a quick courtship, either: Mrs. Solo warned her to think long and hard about whether she truly wanted the life of a miner’s wife, and they had not wed until Rey was eighteen and Ben was twenty-five— practically an old bachelor by all accounts in Walker’s Hollow. He was a decent husband, though: not given to drink or any sort of vice, and always kind to her.
As Rey rinsed the clothes and wrung them, hanging them to dry in the soft spring air, she thought what a nice change being a supervisor’s wife would be. Over the past year they had been married, she had never complained of her lot in life, but Ben had promised a better life one day for them both. She knew his mother had once had dreams for him: dreams of something more than this mining town, with coal dirt ingrained into his skin. Perhaps, Rey thought, pinning the clothes tight and walking back up the rickety steps, this would be a step up, to lead to another step up and so on. Perhaps they might have children, living in a supervisor’s house.
True, there had been no hint of children yet, but that was hardly a mystery. Ben spent his time at home either eating or sleeping, and left before dawn every morning. Rey was not concerned overmuch in that regard. Most of the other wives she knew complained of their husbands’ unwanted advances, but Rey, truth be told, had the opposite of such a problem. There had been a wedding night, and after that not much else, save for a few chance encounters: sometimes she wished for him to be more forthcoming, but did not know how to ask frankly yet. That is all right: it has only been a year, that will all come later, she thought, checking the rising dough and the simmering stew. The dough was ready, so she shaped the loaves and put them into the oven to bake. Everyone said so, anyway: that love often came after marriage, and Rey was just fine with that.
As she beat out their rag rug, a distant rumble shook the ground, and she ignored it. Dynamite was the fastest way to get the coal wrenched out from its seams in the earth, and it seemed every day they had little earthquakes. A wonder that all the shanty houses were not shaken to their foundations every day! She continued going about her day, doing all the chores.
The sun was setting. The five o’clock whistle blew its shrill, sharp cry over the hills and trees of Walker’s Hollow, and Rey set the table for dinner. The front porch creaked as Ben came up the steps in the familiar thump, thump, thump-thump step of heavy boots and stamping off coal dust, black to the brows ( she could see him through the window) and washing his hands and face on the porch in the bucket she always left for him until the water was black and he looked like a human and not an overgrown tommyknocker. He came in through the door, ducking his head at her greeting, and sat at table, lines of coal dust he had not been able to get out marking out the creases by his eyes and mouth and the still-fresh scar from that pickaxe a few months back that ran from his brow to his jaw down the right side of his face. She put the stew on the table and ladled it onto his plate. “Eat before it gets cold,” Rey advised, stirring it. “And there’s fresh bread.” She noted he had not carried in his lunch pail, and sighed. “Have you left your pail at the mine again?” she asked, shaking her spoon at him in mock admonishment.
Ben half-smiled and opened his mouth, as if to speak, when a solemn, firm knock on the door made her look toward it, startled: who was calling so late? “Hold a moment,” she called, wiping her hands on her apron and looking up at Ben.
He was gone.
Nobody sat in the chair he had just been sitting in. Steam curled off the stew in the place she had set for him, but he was not there.
Rey’s blood ran cold as ice, and she knew: she
knew
who was at the door, and why. Blind with horror, she stumbled to the door and opened it, and there, yes: there was the foreman, his hat off, and behind him Dr. Dameron, that acquaintance of old Mrs. Solo’s, who also clutched his hat in his hands, looking pale and grim. “Mrs. Solo,” said the foreman, determination in his face, “it is with the greatest regret and grief I must say…”