On Friday when she and Tom Bateman sat at the dining room table, she told him everything she remembered. She talked about Oliver working in Wheeling, West Virginia. Before he joined the army, Dewey worked for a couple of newspapers, first in Charleston, then in Columbus, Ohio. She didn’t know the name of either newspaper but remembered he ran a printing press for a time. Nellie remained in West Virginia but might have left Coal Creek in 1915 or 1916 to live with a family in Huntington. Margaret couldn’t remember ever hearing their name.
As she unspooled the memories, Tom scratched page after page of notes. He wrote the names of towns and families. Bracketed to the side was an approximation of dates according to what Margaret remembered.
She knew very little about John Paul, only that he was a year older than her, loved the woods as if he were born there, and was deaf in his right ear. At first, she was going to say the deafness had come about because of a fall from a tree. Then she decided to tell the truth.
“It happened when we lived in Barrettsville,” she said. “Daddy cuffed John Paul on the side of the head, and he howled like he’d been murdered. He kept crying for the longest time, and finally Daddy said if he didn’t stop carrying on he was gonna whack him on the other ear. John Paul finally stopped crying, but after that you could stand next to him and scream into his right ear, and he wouldn’t hear you.”
“What about the other two?” Tom asked. “Virgil, and the youngest boy. Edward, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Edward. He was a number of years younger than the rest of us, so he remained at home with Mama and Louella for a while. I don’t know what happened to him after that.”
“And Virgil, you have any thoughts on him?”
“Virgil was always a puzzle. For me and for everybody. He was closed-mouthed and quiet. Skinny as a stick. He could be sitting at the dinner table, and unless you looked directly at him you wouldn’t know he was there. Daddy picked on Virgil all the time. No matter what that boy did, he never got a single word of praise for it. You didn’t have to be a genius to know that sooner or later something was going to happen. Not long after I went to live with Aunt Rose, he supposedly walked down off the mountain and that was the last anybody saw of him.”
“But he was still a kid, wasn’t he?”
Margaret nodded. “Yes, he might’ve been nine or ten. A few days after he disappeared, Aunt Rose said Mrs. Welty claimed she’d seen him down by the train station. I didn’t put much stock in anything Mrs. Welty said, because she was one of those women who likes to hear herself talk. Nobody really knew where Virgil went, and to the best of my knowledge he was never heard from again.”
“After your mother and Louella passed on, did you or anyone else ever go back to the house in Coal Creek?”
“I didn’t, and I don’t think anyone else did but I can’t be sure. Given the hard times we went through there, I imagine they felt as I did: it was a place better forgotten.”
Tom sat there fingering his chin for a minute or so as he wrote, House?
“This hollow you’ve been talking about, does it have a name?”
“Not a proper name. It was just called Coal Creek.”
When he asked for directions, Margaret stopped talking for a moment. As much as she wanted to find everybody, or even a single somebody, she didn’t want to revisit the misery of the past.
“It’s a fair distance outside of Charleston,” she said reluctantly. “Take Campbell’s Creek Road until you come to a sign that says Split Rock Mine. Then turn and follow that dirt road up the mountain. When the creek bends to the left, the road forks. Stay to the right, and about a mile up that road is where the house is. But I doubt anyone up there will remember us. You’re more than likely wasting your time.”
He wrote Campbell’s Creek Road in the notebook, circled it, then closed the book and slid it into his briefcase.
“We won’t know whether it’s a waste of time unless I check it out,” he said and grinned. “I’ll call when I have something.”