Texts for Translation 2007:
  Rebecca Jan Lane

I Haul Things…..

By Rebecca Jan Lane

I haul things. Bodies, burdens of my heart, my mind, my shoulders, so far that I am sloping forward and I can’t go forth anymore. I am tired. My stars, I am tired. I spend my days wandering round with not a place to rest my head, until I stop and lean against the building, the stone gray mausoleum with all the folks that’s been sleeping there for hundreds of years or better. How I envy them! How I wish I could lay my head back, let my eyes close and never open them up again. But the grounds keeper’d poke me in the ribs with his rake handle and shove me off. I got bruised the last time, may’ve cracked a rib or what not. I’ve had this cough ever since. So I don’t stay around there too long any more.

My daddy was a coal miner – face black as tar until he washed it off. Then it’d be pink again, except for the little creases round his eyes and mouth. It was like someone painted them in with a fountain pen, like the ones I’ve seen in the Sears and Roebuck catalog before. He mined and mined, and loved his wife and children – I being the youngest and only one still living. He’d read us the Bible, Shakespeare and the Greek myths. All the books he had on our shelves at home. But they were well used. The other miners used to call him Socrates. Daddy didn’t much about him, but I imagine that was the only name from the Greeks and Romans most of the miners knew, and the name stuck. Each day, before dawn he’d trudge down into the Newkirk Mines, and then when his face was as dark as the sky, he’d trudge home, grateful he’d lived through another day in the darkness.

On summer nights when the wind was warm, Daddy would play his fiddle. It’d be some tune about a wailing woman, missing her man right awful. He said he knew her once, that wailing woman. He told me her name was Mary Elizabeth, and that she came across the sea from Wales looking for better life, but got stuck in the mining town when she got married. Her man, James Patterson, died in a mine cave in, not far from the mines my daddy worked in. He said there was a blast and suddenly the mine spewed out smoke, like it was exhaling a long held puff of cigarette smoke. All the men went running and started digging at the mine’s mouth with their bare hands. But by the time they got the mouth and the path open, it was pretty clear no one could have survived. The flags flew at half-mast, and even the hungriest men couldn’t stomach even a cup of coffee that day.

It was said that Mary didn’t cry at the funeral, which my daddy thought was weird, although we all deal with grief in our own ways. One night about a week after the dust was spread across the coffin, he heard her crying next to the mine’s gaping mouth, begging the earth to bring her man back. It kept on through the night and kept up every night after that. Mary Elizabeth out there trying to reason with a big hole in the ground that had swallowed up her love. Daddy said she even went walking into the dark, much like the Greek myth about the musician Orpheus who brings his wife Eurydice back from the underworld, leads her like some pretty pet, right past the River Styx and the boatman, almost into the shining light of the living. Until he looked back and she disappeared out of the corner of his eye, back to the Underworld, those doors closed to him until it was his turn to sleep there.

This lady Mary Elizabeth, she couldn’t find her man in the mine either. The ground wasn’t so kind to her as the myth was supposed to be. She lost herself in that shimmering blackness. Some say she misplaced her mind among the dark ore that reflected like dead eyes unblinking. Some men found her a few days later, deep towards the darkest part of the mine, curled up in a ball, her heart finally stilled.
Daddy wrote the song for her funeral, trying to keep their love in mind when he scratched it out in his head. As much as I loved to hear him play that song, some part of me shivered deep inside because I swear I could hear her moan every time he pulled his bow cross those strings of his.
When he was happy, he’d play a little Mozart. I would run up and down the street, trying to race the music, like in a foot race, trying to get back and forth to where my Daddy stood on the porch, his head leaned over like he was dreaming, and the fiddle was his pillow. As I ran down the sidewalk, I could almost see the flurry of notes leaping and jumping ahead of me, like someone skipping rocks across a lake. I’d get back to Daddy before the swirling jumpy bits ended. But the music was always too fast for me, a few steps ahead, like it was teasing me into another race. And there I’d be, panting and dancing in his music, wondering how someone could even think that fast.

On other night he’d play something soft and warm like, gentle like a hushing rushing stream. He never said who it was by, if it was Mozart, or some other fiddle player. Those nights seemed warmer somehow, and almost a little sad. Not like the wailing woman sad, or something played for a funeral. Maybe just thoughtful, whispery, like a momma praying over her family. And I’d sit there against the post of the porch, as the peeling green paint scratched the back of my neck, with my eyes half closed against the night. I’d lean there and not think of anything at all, but just let my mind wander. Sometimes I’d try to find the constellations my granny taught me about. But more often than not, my mind didn’t want to focus. So I’d sit there, looking up to the stars, feeling the little ants tickle and crawl across my legs on their nightly march back to their anthills, and I swear as sure as I’m born, those stars hung lower, as if they were leaning in to get a better listen.
When I was young, younger than my seventy-eight years I am now, I was a porter. One of the best round, as a matter of fact. My mule and I, we carted things all over this here county, into the next county and sometimes into the next state. We moved things like you’d never seen. Pianos, books, cannons. We even worked for an undertaker a spell, hauling bodies of the dead soldiers back their ma’s and pa’s, and the old folks back to their sleeping kin.

It was a quiet job, just me and my mule, traveling across the dirt roads. We got to know more about the areas we traveled than the folks who lived there themselves. It was a lot of time to think, and imagine. But mostly, I thought. I could tell a lot by what people had me haul. If someone was hauling a bed to their new house, I knew it was a big deal. An heirloom maybe, something that’d been in the family for generations. Beds weren’t as easy to come by as they are now-a-days. Especially with the wrought iron, and four posters. These were important. Whole families might stem from the bed I carted across the county line.

If someone had me haul boxes of books, I could guess they were either a teacher, or a preacher. Seems those were the only folks I knew who read that much. Of course we all picked up some learning on the way, but it was almost like the teachers or the preachers were frightened it was going to slip away from them, so they had to keep reminding themselves of what they thought they’d learned way back when.
Some days, I wondered what I would want hauled back and forth. What in the world would be worth all that trouble of me hitching up my Nan mule, of hiring someone to watch and deliver, defend from robbers on the road and protect from the rain. All that trouble always seemed a bit uncalled for in my eyes. I could never answer that question. Some days it’d be hauling my daddy’s fiddle. But then I couldn’t play it, and what good is it just for looking at.

I never owned a car. I couldn’t tell where the brain was. My daddy always said don’t trust something you can’t see where its brain sits. And with a car I can’t. There’s been many a night when I was tipped off with whisky that my old Nan mule drove me home, just as plain as if I was doing the steering. But with a car you can’t do that. I’d be off dying somewhere. But maybe then, that’d be better than what I’m doing now.
I just keep on hauling things. My mule is long gone, and the porter business slowed down with the advent of the Model T. But I still haul things with my shoulders slouched forward, and my head almost dragging the dust. I haul memories. Things my momma and daddy taught me, the voices of my brothers and sisters – I hauled them too, right up to the graveyard to lay them in the cold earth next to our grandparents. I carry all of that with me wherever I go. In my pockets are the beads my momma used to pray with, and wrapped around the end of it is a horse hair from my daddy’s fiddle bow. That’s the last thing I know of from that fiddle. I was hoping to clear out the house, and then the farm caught fire. I’m assuming that went with it, as I’ve never found any remnants otherwise. Heaven knows, I looked until my hands were blistered and black from the soot ashes and coal.

And now as I stand here on the brink of life or death, with the great underworld opening up before me, I think I have it figured what I would want to haul. I’d want to haul a thousand of those days with my daddy on the fiddle playing that soft sleepy music, with my momma in the kitchen making biscuits and gravy, and that ceiling of stars. I’d want to haul all of them on my cart, and spread them out before me like leaves around a tree in the autumn. I’d just sit surrounded by these memories, or bury myself in them, completely covered by our stories, with barely a place to blink my eyes. I’d want to be completely surrounded, covered, wrapped up in them.

These stories, of which I was a part, will no longer echo, as I’m the last living of all of our kin. Then when I am gone, they will become nothing more than a rumor, whistling through the trees, before being forgotten entirely. See, that’s what I’d want; I’d want some remnant of my life to go with me into the dark, where Mary Elizabeth went hunting for her man, where he met her and took her to the other side. Give me some memories to comfort me, and keep me sane until I can finally unburden my mind, greet my lost family and breathe out at long last, it is done.

But until then, until that day when I wake to the dark or the light, with some hand outstretched towards mine, I shall keep on hauling.

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