Tell Me by Mary Robison

Tell Me by Mary Robison

Author:Mary Robison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-03-25T04:00:00+00:00


14

In Jewel

I COULD BE GETTING MARRIED soon. The fellow is no Adonis, but what do I care about that? I’d be leaving my job at the high school. I teach art. In fact, I’d be leaving Jewel if I got married.

I have six smart students, total, but only two with any talent, both at third period. One of them might make it out of here someday. I don’t know. Jewel is coal mining, and it’s infuriatingly true that all the kids end up in the mine.

One of my two talented students is a girl. She’s involved with the mine already—works after school driving a coal truck for them. I’ve had her in class since her freshman year. She’s got a ready mind that would have wowed them at the design school in Rhode Island where I took a degree ten or so years ago. “Dirty Thoughts,” she titles all her pieces, one after another. “Here’s D.T. 189,” she’ll say to me, holding up some contraption. She does very clever work with plaster and torn paper bags.

Jack’s the name of the man I might marry. He’s a sharp lawyer. He looks kind of like a poor relation, but juries feel cozy and relaxed with him. They go his way as if he were a cousin they’re trying to help along.

Jack’s a miner’s best friend. He has a case pending now about this mammoth rock that’s hanging near the top of a mountain out on the edge of town. And the mountain’s on fire inside. There’s a seam of coal in it that’s been burning for over a year, breaking the mountain’s back, and someday the rock’s going to come tumbling straight down and smush the Benjamin house, it looks like, and maybe tear out part of the neighborhood. The whole Benjamin family has seen this in their dreams. “Hit the Company now,” Jack says, “before the rock arrives.”

Jack first met me when a student was killed a couple of years ago and the boy’s parents hired Jack to file suit against the Company. As I understood it, there were these posts every few or so feet in the mine, and the Company had saved a buck skipping every third post. Well, Rick, the boy—he was a senior at school but he worked afternoon half-shifts in the mine—was down in the shaft one day, and some ceiling where there wasn’t a post caved in and he died on the spot. Rick was a kid who was never going to be a miner. His ceramics, done for me, weren’t bad, when they didn’t explode in the kiln.

Jack asked me out for coffee one of those days when court was in recess. We blew a couple hours at the Ballpark Lounge, playing a computer game called Space Invaders.

“You could win money at this,” Jack said. “You ought to have your own machine.” Don’t I wish. That’s how Jack thinks: big.

My gifted student who might get out of Jewel someday is Michael Fitch. “Maybe I’m nuts,” he said to me after homeroom had cleared out one morning.



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