Chapter 1 #2
Soon, we Blues pushed ourselves deeper into the hills to escape the ridicule.
Into the blackest part of the land. Pa liked that just fine, saying it was best, safer for me, the last of our kind, the last one.
But I’d read about those kinds in the magazines.
The eastern elk, the passenger pigeon. The extinctions.
Why, most of the critters had been hunted to extinction.
The thought of being hunted, becoming extinct, being the last Blue, the very last of my kind on earth, left me so terror-struck and winded that I would race to the looking glass, claw at my throat, and knock my chest to steal the breath back.
A lot of people were leery of our looks. Though with Pa working the coal, his mostly pale-blue skin didn’t bother folks much when all miners came out of the hole looking the same.
But I didn’t have coal to disguise me in black or white Kentucky.
Didn’t have myself an escape until I’d gotten the precious book route.
In those old dark-treed pockets, my young patrons would glimpse me riding my packhorse, toting a pannier full of books, and they’d light a smile and call out, “Yonder comes Book Woman… Book Woman’s here!
” And I’d forget all about my peculiarity, and why I had it, and what it meant for me.
Just recently, Eula Foster, the head librarian of the Pack Horse project, remarked about my smarts, saying the book job had given me an education as fine as any school could.
I was delighted to hear her words. Proud, I’d turned practically purple, despite the fact that she had said it to the other Pack Horse librarians in an air of astonishment: “If a Blue can get that much learning from our books, imagine what the program can do for our normal folk… A light in these dark times, for sure…”
And I’d basked in the warm light that had left me feeling like a book-read woman.
But when Pa heard about Agnes’s frightening journey, how her packhorse up and quit her in the snow last month, his resolve to get me hitched deepened.
And soon after, he’d shone a blinding light back on my color and offered up a generous five-dollar dowry plus ten acres of our woodland.
Men, both long in the tooth and schooling young, sought my courtship, ignoring I was one of them Blue people when the prospect of land ownership presented itself.
A few would boldly ask about my baby-making as if discussing a farm animal—seeking a surety that their Kentucky sons and daughters wouldn’t have the blueness too.
Why, for all Pa cared, it could be the beastly troll in “The Three Billy Goats Gruff ” who wanted my hand. Lately, he’d been setting the timekeeping candle uncomfortably long for whoever was keen on calling.
But I couldn’t risk it. The WPA regulations said females with an employable husband wouldn’t be eligible for a job because the husband is the logical head of the family.
Logical. I liked my sensibility just fine.
I liked my freedom a lot—loved the solitude these last seven months had given me—and I lived for the joy of bringing books and reading materials to the hillfolk who were desperate for my visits, the printed word that brought a hopeful world into their dreary lives and dark hollers. It was necessary.
And for the first time in my life, I felt necessary.
***
“Right there’ll do it.” Pa fussed one last time with the slide on the courting candle, then finally placed the timekeeper on the table in front of my rocker and the empty seat beside me.
He grabbed his carbide-lamp helmet off a peg and looked out to the dark woods across the creek that passed through our property.
The snow picked up, dropping fat flakes. “Reckon he’ll be showing up any minute, Daughter.”
Sometimes the suitor didn’t. I hoped this would be one of those times.
“I’ll be off.” He dropped a matchbook into the timekeeper’s drip tray, eyeing the candle one final time.
Frantic, I grabbed his sleeve and whispered, “Please, Pa, I don’t want to marry.”
“What’s wrong with you, Daughter? It ain’t natural to defy the Lord’s natural order.”
I took his palm in mine and pressed the silent plea into it.
Pa looked at my coloring hand and pulled his away. “I gave up my sleep to ride over to his holler and arrange this.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up a shushing hand.
“This harsh land ain’t for a woman to bear alone.
It’s cruel enough on a man.” Pa reached for his hand-carved bear poker with the razor-sharp arrowhead tip.
“I’ve been digging my grave since the first day I dug coal.
I’ll not dig two.” He tapped the poker against the boards.
“You will take a husband so you’ll have someone to care for you when I no longer can. ”
He buttoned his coat and grabbed his tin lunch bucket off the porch boards, ambling off to his night shift down at the coal mine.
Hearing a horse’s strangled whinny, I turned toward a rustling in the trees, straining to listen above the prattling song of creek waters. The courter would be here shortly.
I leaned over the wood railing and peered out.
When I could no longer see the flicker of Pa’s miner’s lamp and was sure he’d disappeared into the woods, I reached over, adjusted the wooden slide on the timekeeping candle, and lowered the taper to where the wax would touch the old spiral holder’s lip within a few minutes of being burnt—a signal to this latest suitor that a prompt and swift departure was in mind.
Raising my hands, I watched them quiet to a duck-egg blue.