Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [5]
“Nothing,” Jack tells her as she shuffles through her homemade flash cards.
“Daddy, the coal of Southwest Virginia is …”
“Bituminous.”
“That’s right!” Etta smiles. “I hope they don’t make me spell it.”
“If they do, you just stay calm and sound it out,” I tell her.
“And if you can’t, we love you anyway, darlin’,” her father tells her.
“I want to win.” Etta’s eyes narrow.
“Etta, do you know how much coal there is in our mountains?”
“How much, Daddy?”
“Enough to mine for the next seven hundred years.”
“That much?”
“That much.”
“If they ask me that, I’ll know,” Etta says proudly.
“I don’t think they’ll ask you that,” Jack tells her.
“You never know.” Etta hugs his neck and returns to her seat.
I look over at Jack, who keeps his eyes on the road. I wish I could fill up the silence between us with something, anything, a joke maybe. I used to know what to say to my husband; I used to be able to comfort him or cut to the center of a problem and dissect it. I could always make him feel better. But something is wrong. Something has shifted, and the change was so subtle and so quiet, we hardly noticed it. We pull against each other now.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Is there really seven hundred years of coal in our mountains?”
“At least,” he tells me without taking his eyes off the road.
The WCYB television station is a small, square, brown-brick building nestled in the hillside outside of Bristol, just off the highway.
“Is that it?” Etta asks as she wedges between us and looks through the windshield.
“That’s it?” Jane echoes.
The building does look lonesome sitting there on the side of the road. It’s hard to believe that it’s the center of communications for the Appalachian Mountains. The kids were expecting WCYB to be a comic-book skyscraper with mirrored windows and an oscillating satellite dish shooting menacing green waves into the sky.
“Now, see, that’s not so scary,” Jack Mac says to the team.
“That ain’t scary at all. It looks like a garage,” Billy adds, disappointed.
“It ain’t how big it is. It’s if they got cameras. All you need is a camera and some wires and some electricity. That’s what makes TV,” little Jane says definitively. (I hope Jane doesn’t get any questions about modern appliances. If she does, we’re in big trouble.) Mrs. White leads the kids into the studio.
Fleeta needs a smoke. Iva Lou is so tense from the trip, she bums a cigarette. The rain has stopped in Bristol, but it’s still damp, and the fresh smell of the surrounding woods makes the place feel like home.
“I don’t know how you people with kids do it.” Iva Lou lights up, folds an arm across her waist, and perches her other arm with the cigarette in midair. I’ve always liked how she leans in to smoke, sort of like the cigarette might be safe to smoke if it’s off in the distance a bit.
“It weren’t easy, let me tell ye. That’s how I started with these.” Fleeta holds up her cigarette like a number one. “My nerves was so bad from the day-in-day-out with my younguns, I turned to tobacky and it’s been my friend ever since. Thank you Jesus and keep the crop pure.”
“Our kids are well prepared for the show. Sounded like,” Iva Lou says hopefully.
“I want ’em to whoop the asses off Kingsport,” Fleeta says as she stomps her cigarette butt. “I been watching every week, scopin’ out the competition. I had Ten to Two Metcalf run some stats for me.” Fleeta exhales. (Ten to Two is a bookie out of Jonesville. He got his name because he has a permanent tilt to his head, forcing his neck to crick over his shoulder at the ten-till mark.) “I got twenty bucks ridin’ on our team. And I don’t like to lose.”
If the exterior of WCYB is a big fat disappointment, the interior doesn’t do much to impress the kids either. The check-in desk is an old wooden table with a backless stool on wheels. A fancy plastic NBC peacock sign spreads over the back wall. A wide electrical cord dangles down from it like a hanging noose (it must light up). I peek in the small rectangular window of a door marked STUDIO. The familiar Kiddie Kollege set, an old-fashioned schoolroom