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  “How’s that beau of yours?” she asked, mercifully releasing me and going back to her digging. We were working her garden, bringing in late-fall potatoes. She pitchforked, and I followed on my hands and knees, rooting through the earth and digging them up. The potatoes were enormous. Bigger than my fists. Even bigger than Sadie’s fists.

  There was a certain magical quality about potato harvesting. It was like treasure hunting, only better. You can’t eat gold.

  “Kevin?” I said. “He’s great. More than great.”

  Sadie stopped digging, leaned on her pitchfork, and stared at me. Try as I might, I had never quite gotten comfortable with her lazy eye. It just sort of floated there, not really looking but wanting to, while the other eye bored right into me. After all these years it still creeped me out.

  “Are you keeping him in line?” she asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know damn well what I’m talking about!” Both eyes managed to focus in on me for that comment.

  I blushed.

  “Yeah,” I replied, reaching down and fiddling with my belly button. “I’m keeping him in line.”

  “Let me tell you something,” she said. “A pretty little girl like you has got to watch it.”

  My hand wrapped around a monster of a potato and I resisted the urge to hurl it at her. Put to rest that lazy little eye forever.

  “Sadie!” I said, trying to keep my voice in check. “No offense, but if anyone tells me again how pretty little girls like me have to watch it, then I’m going to take these potatoes, or, better yet, that pitchfork, and do some serious damage!”

  Sadie took the tool and held it in front of her like a multipronged sword. “Bring it on, baby,” she laughed. “Give me what you got!”

  I lobbed a potato up in the air and, miraculously, she stuck it! Caught it right at the end of the pitchfork!

  “Oh yeah!” she cried. “Am I good or what?”

  “Or what,” I replied.

  “Look darling, I’m just trying to watch out for you. I promised your mother that I would, and I’m damn well going to do it.”

  “I’m fifteen years old, Sadie. I can watch out for myself.”

  Sadie laughed in a grimacing kind of way.

  “Don’t go biting my head off for worrying about you. That’s part of my job. To worry. About you and boys. About you and all your shenanigans with the coal company. There’s a big ol’ world out there to worry about.”

  “Well, don’t,” I said. “I’m on it.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of!” Sadie said.

  I blushed again.

  “The boy thing I get,” Sadie continued. “Whew! You should have seen me in high school.”

  “Please,” I said. “Spare me the details.”

  “There was this one time when I was about your age, at a party, and there were these two guys and I . . .” Sadie’s lazy eye started twirling in fast motion.

  I took two potatoes and stuck one in each ear. “La la la la la la la! I can’t hear you!”

  “All right, Mrs. Potato Head. Anyway, boys are one thing. But do you have to go after the coal company as well? Can’t you just drop that one? You know, like a hot potato. Just let it be. What happens will happen.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “It’s the coal company, honey. This is not a game.”

  “Never underestimate what us pretty little girls can do,” I said.

  Sadie sighed. “Lordy,” she said. “Why can’t you just be like all the other girls?”

  I took a potato, cocked my arm back to throw, but thought better and let it drop harmlessly in front of me.

  “Like Ashley?” I asked.

  “No. Not like Ashley. Like the normal other girls.”

  “Oh, yeah. The normal girls. Now I get it. So, what exactly should I be doing, Sadie? Getting pregnant? Dropping out of high school? Making sure my hair is big and my brain is tiny? Is that what you want?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s just that . . .” Sadie leaned on the fork and looked a little lost. I felt kind of bad for her, but a proud kind of bad. I was pretty pleased with the not-so-normal label.

  “You know who you remind me of?” she asked.

  “Who?’

  “A younger version of Widow Combs.”

  “Widow what?”

  “Widow Combs. You’ve never heard of her?”

  “Never.”

  Sadie plopped herself down in the dirt and opened up a bag of Cheetos, emptied most of the bag into her lap, and tossed the rest over to me.

  “Widow Combs,” she said. “Now that was one feisty old lady.”

  Sadie rearranged her bulk, stretched her arms, and settled into storytelling mode. She closed one eye (the lazy one, thank goodness), so as not to let it distract from the story.

  Ever since I could remember I loved to listen to Sadie tell her stories. She could take a classic fairy tale like Cinderella and put a West Virginia coal-country spin on it. Cinderella living in the holler and working in the coal mine, the prince the son of the mine owner. Cinderella losing her miner’s helmet rather than her glass slipper.

  Sadie would talk with her hands, pulling words out of the air and flicking them over to me. During the scary parts of a story she’d open both eyes, the lazy one flopping around until your goose bumps were liable to burst.

  She was a great storyteller.

  “In 1965,” she began “way, way back in the day, there was a woman who lived in a holler across the border in Kentucky named Ollie Combs. Her husband had gone and died, and, from that day on, everyone just called her Widow. Widow Combs. I met her once before she died. I heard her speak. She was quite the woman.

  “Anyway, the coal company come to strip-mine her land. Back then, if you had sold away the mineral rights, you didn’t have no more say ’bout how they could come and get that coal off your land than a goat had wings. They could strip-mine your own land till it was as naked as the day you was born. You couldn’t do jack about it. No way, no how, no nothing.”

  When Sadie got into the storytelling zone she’d let her language slip into mountain talk, and her West Virginia accent would drift even farther south, back to the hills of Georgia where my grandfather’s grandfather had been born. I lay in the cool grass next to the potato patch and listened.

  “So ol’ Widow Combs was not so pleased with how this strip-mining thing was going down. Got her knickers all in a kink, it did. When them coal boys come with their big ol’ bulldozers and their coal company trucks, she was more pissed than a sober drunk. ‘We live hard,’ she said. ‘I don’t bother nobody, but you have invaded my home. I don’t want my home destroyed, its all I got left.’ She was a frail little thing, Widow Combs was. Didn’t weigh no more than the beard on a billy. And she was over sixty years old as I recall. Old and frail but fearless.”

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “Well, the dozers come and Widow Combs sits on a boulder right in front of them and refuses to move. ‘I have never been in trouble,’ she said. ‘I just want to live my life in my holler and be left alone.’ That old woman was something else.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, you can imagine that didn’t go down so well with them bulldoze boys. They had a job to do and they were damn well going to do it. Widow or not. So the police come and they dragged that woman right off her boulder and arrested her. Sent her on down to the county jail, where she spent Thanksgiving Day 1965 eating chicken dumplings. She and her two boys. One was twenty, the other seventeen.”

  “Seventeen?”

  “Seventeen. Just like that beau of yours.”

  “Wow,” I said, hanging on to every word.

  “Wow is not the half of it.”

  “Did it work? Did she stop them?”

  “Well, here’s the amazing thing. There was a photographer from the local newspaper who had come to see what all of the hul
labaloo was about, and he snapped a picture of the widow getting carried down the mountainside by the Kentucky State Police. She had refused to walk so they just dragged her sorry ass. Dragged her down the mountain. Wouldn’t you know it but that picture went . . . how do you call it?

  “Viral?” I said.

  “That’s it. Viral. And this was before the Internet. Widow Combs was all over the news, not just in Kentucky and West Virginia but everywhere. Folks was so used to the coal company getting what the coal company wanted. No questions asked. And then along comes this tired old widow who just says no. It shook things up it did. And damn if something actually didn’t happen.”

  “What?” I asked. I was totally stoked by the story. “What happened?”

  “The very next year the Kentucky politicians, the very same ones the coal company bosses thought they had in their pockets, went out and rewrote the strip-mining laws. Made them much more strict. Ten years later, the big boys in Washington gone and done the same thing. Heck, I do believe she was even invited to the White House.”

  “Awesome,” I said. “Totally awesome.”

  Sadie looked at me sternly. “Don’t go getting any grand ideas into that pretty little head of yours, young lady. She was over sixty. You’re fifteen.”

  “Almost sixteen,” I said.

  “Like I said, fifteen.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said, tilting her head back, her lazy eye doing its thing. “Your mama.”

  “My mama? What about my mama?”

  “When your mama was younger she was all about saving these mountains from the strip-miners. If it wasn’t for your mama they might have mined that old mountain of yours a long time ago. She brought Widow Combs out here sometime, oh, I don’t know, must have been the late 1980s, to do a talk to the group your mama was involved in. Come to think of it, you remind me a lot of your mama, too.”

  “What?” My jaw dropped. So this was what Potter had been referring to. “My mother? My mother was an environmentalist? Like me? Doing this kind of stuff? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “You never asked,” Sadie said, looking a little uncomfortable.

  “What did she do?”

  “What didn’t she do is more like it. Same kinds of things as you. Marches and petitions and harassing the politicians. You name it, she did it. Anything to stop the strip-mining.”

  “Oh my God, Sadie. I’m out here putting myself on the line and you never told me this? Dad never told me? Why?”

  Sadie let out a long sigh.

  “It was hard on your mama. People don’t always like those who rock the boat. Too many waves. Your mama took a boatload of crap. People were pretty mean to her. As I recall, really mean. She lost a lot of her friends. Couldn’t get a job in town or nothing. It was hard on your daddy, too.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We didn’t want it to happen to you. Me and your dad. Like I said, I told your mama before she died that I would watch out for you. And that’s what I’m doing!”

  “By lying to me?” I was practically screaming.

  “I never lied to you, sugar.”

  “You never told me the truth!”

  “Not telling is different from lying.”

  “It’s still wrong.”

  “You never asked. I never told.”

  “How am I supposed to ask if I don’t know the questions?” I was furious.

  “Calm down, sweetheart.”

  “Calm down? Calm down so they can do their dirty work without anyone raising a stink? Calm down so it can be business as usual? Calm down so they can blow up my mountain, our mountain, poison our land, and pollute our water? Calm down so they can fry the effin planet? These are the same damn issues that Widow Combs and my mama were active with. It doesn’t seem like my mama was calm at all, Sadie! ‘Calm down,’ my ass. I’m ramping it up!”

  I leapt up, kicked over the basket of potatoes, and stormed home.

  •

  “Dad!” I yelled. “We need to talk! Now!”

  Dad was hunched over the pot in the kitchen, making—surprise, surprise—macaroni and cheese for dinner. I burst into the room like a billy goat to a nanny in heat.

  “I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me about Mom!”

  Dad turned down the burner on the stove and sat at the table.

  “Tell you what about your mother?” he asked. His shoulders were slumped. He looked tired. For the first time I noticed shades of gray in his hair.

  “You know what!” I spat. I was pissed. “Sadie told me about how when Mom was younger she went at it with the strip-miners. Why didn’t you tell me? How dare you not tell me!”

  I could see Dad tense up. His shoulders rose and his brow furrowed and he drummed on the table with the stirring spoon.

  His voice was soft. “I was planning on telling you. I was. It’s just that . . .”

  “It’s just that what, Dad? What? I don’t get it, I really don’t.”

  “I didn’t want what your mother did to influence you. I know how much you, I don’t know, worship her. If I told you about all of the activities she was involved in against strip-mining then, I thought that you might . . .”

  “Do the same? Oh my God, Dad! Mom was doing the right thing and you didn’t tell me because you didn’t want me doing it? That makes about as much sense as nothing!”

  “I was worried about you. I didn’t want you to go through the same heartache and pain and trouble that your mother did. It was very difficult for her, Cyndie. Going up against coal when Coal Is King is not easy. You know that. People can be very, very ugly, and do very mean things. Particularly if you’re a girl. It’s hard enough being a girl around here. And a girl who’s an activist? I did not want those ugly things happening to you.”

  “I am fifteen years old, Dad. You’re treating me like I’m Britt’s age.” Dad put the spoon down and rubbed hard at the space between his eyes.

  “What?” I said. “What is it?”

  “You know Britt’s little friend Taylor?”

  “You mean her so-called boyfriend? Yeah, what about him?”

  “He broke up with her.”

  “Dad. They weren’t even dating. What’s the big deal? And don’t change the subject.”

  “It is a big deal, Cyndie. It’s a big deal to Britt. She’s really hurt. And I’m telling you this because it has everything to do with what we were just talking about!”

  “How? How does it have anything to do with it?”

  “She may not act like it, Cyndie, but Britt is so proud of you. She idolizes you. She really does. She was talking it up at school about how her big sister is going to stop mountaintop removal. About how her big sister is going to save Mount Tom. Well, I guess Taylor’s parents work for American, so he doesn’t quite see things the same way you and Britt do.”

  “And that’s why he dumped her?” I quietly asked.

  “That’s why he dumped her. And not in a very nice way, either.”

  “The macaroni’s boiling over,” I said.

  Dad got up and took the pot off the stove.

  “Where’s Britt now?” I asked.

  “Upstairs. In her room. Crying her eyes out.”

  •

  “Hey, Britt,” I called, knocking on her door. “Can I come in?”

  “No!” she said. I could hear her sobs. “Go away!”

  I opened the door and went on in.

  Britt was lying on her bed, a pillow over her head, clutching tightly to Mister Wiggins, her bunny. I sat down on the edge of her bed.

  “I said go away!” Britt’s voice was muffled by the pillow.

  I put my hand on her back.

  “Dad told me about Taylor. That really sucks. I am so sorry. I really am.”

  Britt sobbed even louder.

  I remembered how, when I was little and I was sad, my mama would rub my back. She didn’t tell me not to be sad. She didn’t tell me everything would be all
right. She would just sit on the side of my bed and rub my back and listen.

  So that’s what I did. I sat on the edge of Britt’s bed and I rubbed her back.

  “What happened?” I finally asked.

  Britt took the pillow off of her head.

  “He is such a jerk! He dumped me because I want to save Mount Tom. Can you believe that? That’s what happened. He’s an idiot and a jerk and I hate him. He called me a slut! A slut! For wanting to save Mount Tom!”

  I thought about all that Dad and Sadie had said, and I closed my eyes and let out a long sigh.

  “Asshole!” I said tenderly.

  “Whatever. I can’t believe I was ever even going out with him!”

  I had to turn my head to hide my smile. Britt’s definition of “going out” had been sitting with Taylor at the lunch table.

  “He is such a loser,” she went on. “And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “He chews with his mouth open!”

  “Gross!” I said. “Who wants a boyfriend who does that!”

  “Yeah,” Britt said. “I was going to break up with him anyway. He’s like a total poser. Anyway, I want a boyfriend just like Kevin.”

  “Better watch it, Sister!” I smiled, continuing to rub her back. “You steal him away from me and that old Mister Wiggins of yours is history!”

  Britt sat up, made the peace sign, pointed the two fingers at her eyes and then pointed them at me.

  “I’ll be watching you,” she said. “One false move and that boy is mine!”

  We both laughed.

  “Want to know something really awesome?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “I guess Mom was really active in saving mountains, too,” I told her.

  “Really?” Britt sat up.

  “Really.” I told her everything that Sadie and Dad had told me. Everything.

  “Wow!” Britt said. “That is so cool. Not the stuff about people being mean to her and all, but the other stuff. And the Widow Combs thing. That’s totally awesome! Maybe we can do that.”

  “I hope we don’t have to,” I said.

  I looked at Britt. Really looked at her. At how young and innocent and fragile she was. And how pretty. Not just cute pretty but beautiful pretty.

  I was finding out that pretty had its downside. That pretty was definitely a double-edged sword. I wanted to be pretty. I wanted Britt to be pretty. But I definitely didn’t want all of the bullshit that seemed to come with it.