Furnace Mountain: or The Day President Roosevelt Came to Town Read online

  Nicholas, however, knew how to play this game– one he had been playing for several years. “We’ll meet early tomorrow morning and go down by the creek. He’ll be out then and won’t even know you’re gone, or maybe not care if you got your most important chores done before you left.” He gave her a teasing tug of her hair and she smiled. “You’ll just stay gone for a little while and then you’ll sneak back in by dinner. Dinner will be cooked and the laundry will be on the line before he even knows you left and returned.”

  Alice smiled, knowing she caved in every time. “Al right then, in the morning. But if I get in trouble, I’ll tan your hide, Nicholas!”

  Looking lighthearted and encouraged now, Nicholas swung his arm around Alice’s shoulders and whistled until they reached the end of the path. It was the happiest she’d been all day.

  ***

  The last train to stop in Furnace Mountain of an evening was the 20:57 train out of Beattyville. There was a platform for the passengers to disembark, but now there was only a single, uncovered light to illuminate their steps. It didn’t matter, of course, since few passengers arrived in Furnace Mountain anymore.

  On that night, the platform remained empty, save for a crumbled piece of paper that blew across it like a tumbleweed. Three minutes later, the train took off again, sending a billow of smoke into the evening sky. The low moan of the wheels on the tracks vibrated through the empty streets, company for no one.

  Doors were shut and lights were on in those homes in town that had electric. Lanterns and lamps were lit in those that didn’t. The handful of remaining stores, hanging on by a thread but still open, had closed hours earlier. Their owners had retired, discouraged but still optimistic.

  “It won’t last forever,” they’d mumble to themselves as they looked up of an evening. “Things change. They always do.”

  Broken glass, paint chips, and garbage littered the sidewalks. Hollow storefronts with their windows, dusty and stained with filth, sadly watched streets that echoed silence. The sounds inside the pool hall were muted. It was bad manners for anyone to hear you having fun anymore. If anyone walked by, they did it quickly, heads lowered with eyes resolutely unseeing, and with purpose.

  Nobody looked anymore. There was nothing to see.

  The mountains hugging the tiny town were black outlines against the purple sky. They were sentinels that had watched it all from a distance with remorse. They had seen it before and would see it again. There was little they could do but judge.

  Chapter Three

  MARIANNE WAS PLEASED to see her children bright–eyed and alert on Monday morning. She felt rested, as she had spent a quiet weekend grading papers on her front porch. The last of the spring chill was gone from the air and was steadily becoming replaced with the dull, throbbing humidity that would soon take the little mountain valley as prisoner. For now, however, it was pleasant in the evenings to sit outside, and Marianne’s small, whitewashed house overlooked a field. When she had taken the position, the house had been one of the provisions provided by the board.

  Marianne was truly grateful for her position. She would never admit how close to becoming destitute she was when the position had been offered to her.

  Three years earlier, Marianne had been living with her father and teaching in her native Cincinnati. Her life had been a simple one, and happy, when he’d suddenly passed away from a stroke. Marianne had been heartbroken and the grief crushing, but she’d had no reason to think she couldn’t continue living on in her home and teaching her classes until she found out that her father had been heavily in debt. The house in which she was living had not been his for years. Her meager salary at the small private school where she taught was not enough to cover even the smallest of rooms in town. The small sum of money he’d left her had barely covered his funeral expenses and arrears.

  It was to her good fortune that she’d kept communication with a girlfriend from her college years. When she had written to Marianne and informed her of an opening at the small school in her hometown of Furnace Mountain, Marianne had applied and accepted without ever having visited.

  After the Pledge of Allegiance, recited half–heartedly by the older ones and forcefully by the younger, Marianne called for the letters of presentation to be passed forward.

  Her classroom was suddenly a sea of activity. There were groans from those who had forgotten theirs, nervous shuffling from those worried souls afraid that theirs were not good enough, and confident smirks from the handful of students from the students who just assume theirs were the best.

  The lesson of the day was the same for all of her students: responsibility. Caught up in the tasks at hand, she turned her attention away from the pile of letters on her desk.

  School broke at lunchtime and Marianne watched as the town dwellers left the yard to return home for their meals while the country kids scattered around to open their baskets and boxes to see what their mothers had prepared. When the last child poky child had left, Marianne sat back down at her desk with relief for the momentary break, dug out her egg salad sandwich, and began sifting through the letters.

  Few were surprises. Permission was sought to write movie stars, sports heroes, and the mayor. A fascinating and witty one from Simon Long, seeking permission to contact his late grandfather–a general notable for fighting in the War Between the States–had her laughing out loud. Looking to score extra credit, she imagined, one brave soul even asked if they could write a letter to her.

  “Try again dear,” she muttered aloud. The request was denied, seeing as to how they’d already met.

  Marianne was satisfied for the most part; the children seemed to have a solid grasp on the assignment.

  At the bottom of the pile, however, on a dirty sheet of paper that appeared to have been crumpled up and then smoothed out again, she found the spidery handwriting of Sam Walters. Marianne began reading, paused, and then sighed. He had not followed the instructions. Rather than providing her with his presentation, he had written his letter as though permission had already been granted.

  “I’ll have to mark him for that,” she mumbled, but her words trailed off as she took another look at the letter.

  It took her two tries to get through it without the tears blurring her vision.

  Dear Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

  My name is Sam Walters, and I am ten years old. I live in Furnace Mountain, Kentucky and my teacher Miss Casteel told us that we could write anyone in the world that we found admirable. I think that there is nobody in the world more admirable than you. I know you are commendable because my Daddy told me so before he died, back before he was sad all the time. He said that you were trying to save us and that, if anyone could, it was you.

  I know that you are awfully busy but I am writing to ask if maybe you could come and visit my school and me in Furnace Mountain. We have a very nice town and I think you would like it. We used to have bunches of stores and even a place that you could buy ice cream any time you wanted but most of them closed and now they have boards where the windows used to be. I would also like for you to meet my teacher Miss Casteel. She is a very good teacher. You would like her a lot.

  Lastly, I would like for you to meet my Mama. She would be very glad to see you. My Daddy died because he didn’t have any work to do and now my Mama has to take care of me by herself. I know this makes her very sad because she sleeps a lot and I have to be very quiet not to wake her up. My Mama says that you are a very busy man because this is Election Year, but we would all be very glad if you could stop and see us too.

  Yours truly,

  Sam Walters

  There was nothing more for Marianne to do but find an envelope and buy the postage. It was the one address she didn’t need to look up.

  And who knew? Stranger things had happened. Maybe Mr. Roosevelt really would come to Furnace Mountain.

  Chapter Four

  ALICE’S FATHER WAS NOT A LAZY MAN. Or, at least, he hadn’t always been. This is what she reminded herse
lf of on a daily basis.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sakes!” Alice cried, giving the mattress one more tug. This time, she pulled too hard and went flying backwards across the floor. Rubbing her head, Alice straightened and glared at the bed. She’d gotten it off, of course, but she’d have a good bruise on her noggin.

  As Alice dragged the featherbeds from the house and laid them out in the yard to air, she tried to remember a time when her father had not been quarrelsome, short–tempered, and impossible. A time when he had not been drinking.

  She knew it wasn’t that long ago, couldn’t have been, but it sure did feel like it.

  Alice was ten years old when her mother died, and that was the year after Wall Street fell. In Furnace Mountain, they didn’t know anything about Wall Street. At the time, Alice thought that an actual street from Heaven had crashed to the ground. She wanted to go see it, to see if her Granny had come down with it.

  “If the street crashed, maybe Granny was on it!” she’d cried to her mama. Her mother had been sick at the time, unable to get out of bed. Still, she’d patted the spot beside her and Alice had crawled up and snuggled into her mother’s arm. She had still smelled like Mama then; the sickness hadn’t taken that away yet, but it would.

  “Darling,” her mother had cooed. “It was a street up in New York. Not in Heaven.”

  “But how can a street fall! It’s under us!”

  “It wasn’t a real street,” her mother had laughed. “It’s a different kind. You’re too little to understand.”

  By that time, Alice didn’t care about the wall or the street–she was simply content to be lying in her mother’s arms.

  “We are safe here,” the mayor at the time had tried to convince everyone. “We take care of ourselves here in Furnace Mountain! What happens in New York and Washington doesn’t affect us. We’ve never needed them!”

  Panic about the bank had not even reached a high and people were still optimistic and hopeful. They had gardens, they had land, they had each other... They knew how to survive. Everything would be fine.

  It would be another two years before Furnace Mountain felt the effects of that fateful day. That was when the furnaces had closed, and the trains had started bypassing the town shortly thereafter.

  The bank had taken her father’s store. He continued building his furniture out of his barn for another year, but, without jobs, nobody could to buy. The customers from Lexington stopped coming.

  That’s when his drinking commenced.

  Sometimes Alice still wandered down that part of town and looked at his old storefront; the windows behind the boards were thick with dust and broken in some places. She could still see stacks of wood in a corner, an unfinished chair.

  Their house was beginning to look the same way. The front steps sagged, a few floorboards had come up in the kitchen, and two of the shutters on the front of the house were dangling. Another bad storm would blow them right off.

  Robert could have easily fixed any of these, as well as repaired the kitchen table and the made new slats for Alice’s bed frame so that she wasn’t constantly ending up in the floor. He had either lost his inclination or he simply hadn’t noticed.

  Alice snorted, thinking of the things he did notice.

  “This coffee table is dusty,” she mocked him as she gave the featherbed a shake. Loose feathers flew up and drifted through the sky like big, flat snowflakes. “Aren’t you going to put these dang–blasted dishes away! All I see is garbage!”

  His bursts of temper were confusing and inconsistent.

  “If you can’t come out, I’ll come see you,” Nicholas had pleaded with her on more than one occasion.

  The truth was, Alice was embarrassed to have Nicholas come to her house. As children, he had played in her home and had been like another member of the family. But although she tried to keep the rugs cleaned and the rubbish out of the yard there was simply too much for her to do on her own.

  Now, Alice glanced down at the stains on the feather beds and wondered what her mother had used to get them out. She wished she had someone to talk to, to ask, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t dream of going to Miss Casteel about such things and Nicholas’s mother, Anita, had probably never cleaned such a thing. Still, she had tried her best, and a fresh airing would at least make them smell better.

  Alice went over to the well; the stones needed to be replaced here and there but it still worked and they still had water. Since it fed into a fresh spring, water was one of the few things she didn’t have to worry about. Alice washed her hands from the bucket and dried them on the skirt of her cotton dress. She searched the yard for Robert, sometimes he napped under the weeping willow tree, but he was nowhere to be found. Alice truthfully didn’t expect him to be home until evening.

  With a dark look back at her house, she set out for the dusty trail through the woods that would take her to the creek.

  ***

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” Nicholas called out from where he lay sprawled on the grass.

  His back was to her, and his feet dangled in the cool waters of the creek. Seeing his dark hair disheveled and his white starched shirt stained with grass made her sentimental. Sneaking up behind him, she put her hands over his eyes and giggled. In one swift move, he had her over his shoulders and in his lap.

  “I knew that was you a mile away, though,” he promised when she protested. “I can always tell your walk.”

  “How?” she asked as she squirmed out of his arms and made a spot for herself next to him on the grass.

  Nicholas laughed. “You rustle when you walk, and I’ve been listening to your feet all my life.”

  They sat in companionable silence; both were lost in thought as the creek moved slowly in front of them, muddy and swollen from the rain they had recently been getting.

  “Did you do the assignment for Miss Casteel?” Alice asked at last.

  “The letter?”

  Alice nodded. “I’m finished with mine. I think it’s pretty good.”

  She waited for him to ask her to whom she had written but he was staring at the water again. Rolling her eyes, she dropped back to the bank and stared up at the sky. The clouds were moving in a slow, lazy pattern. Since it wasn’t summer yet and the air wasn’t weighted down with heat, the sky was bright and crisp. She closed her eyes and let herself drift.

  “What are you going to do in the fall?” Nicholas asked suddenly. It was the first time he’d asked.

  Alice shrugged. “Same as usual I reckon. Just no school. Take care of Daddy. Take on more sewing. Maybe I’ll ask Miss Casteel if I can help her out with the little ones. Why?”

  “You could go to college if you wanted to.”

  Alice laughed. “Where? With what money? And what would I do?”

  “You could be a teacher.”

  Nicholas might have been the smartest boy in school, perhaps even in the entire county, but Alice was smart, too, although in a different way. She could never remember all the figures and dates and equations that he could rattle off at a moment’s notice. But she did like to read and she liked to think problems through, something Miss Casteel called her “critical thinking skills”, and she enjoyed learning about history. In her secret dreams, Alice thought that one day she might even like to be a teacher.

  “Maybe,” she replied at last. “I would like that, I think. But who would take care of Daddy?”

  She knew that it was on the tip of his tongue to say that Robert could take care of himself, as he often did say, but even Nicholas knew that wasn’t the way it worked. Robert Johnson would be lost without Alice, the same way that Nicholas was afraid that he would be.

  “Still,” he persisted. “You’re smart, as smart as any other girl I know and probably smarter than a lot. You should do something.”

  “I do something,” she giggled. “And who knows? Maybe I’ll marry Larry Sturgill.” She meant it as a joke, Logan Sturgill was older than her and smelled like horse manure, but Nicholas looked outra
ged.

  “What?!” Nicholas cried. “He’s twice your age and looks like a mountain man!”

  “Yes, but he has a beautiful house,” she added. At the look on his face, she gently pushed him with her foot. “I’m joking. Good grief.”

  She realized then that it had probably never occurred to him that she could marry someone else. She didn’t know why it bothered him because he had certainly never done anything to make her think he wanted to, but the conversation was certainly making him frustrated.

  “You shouldn’t joke like that, Alice. You could do a lot better with yourself.”

  Sighing, Alice closed her eyes and shut him out. She had been in love with Nicholas for more than half her life. She knew that she should give up on the idea of him ever figuring that out, or doing anything about it. If anyone should be frustrated, it was her. In four months he would be gone, maybe forever, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. She wanted to enjoy the rest of the time they had together and she, for one, was not going to do anything to cause any strife.

  Chapter Five

  HOMER DYER HAD BEEN THE MAYOR of Furnace Mountain for five years. He had lived there, however, for thirty years. He’d moved from Four Tree with his family when he’d been not much older than Sam Walters. He’d left only for college, returning later to work for the railroad.

  Homer had seen his town through many stages– both during his time in public office, as well as during the years when he had merely been a citizen growing up on Brushy Fork.

  He had never seen it as bleak as it was now.

  Like most, Homer remembered sunnier days. He recalled a time when the trains rolled through at regular intervals, the depot had been the prettiest one around, the shops had thrived, the Gingerroot Festival was the most important event of the year, and the biggest uproar was when the town had voted on whether or not a pool hall should be allowed on Water Street. (It did go in but most of the women still refused to walk past it.)