The Evening Hour by A. Carter Sickels

into the kingdom of God.” The men had offered to help him relocate, far away from the coalfields, and he’d just laughed: “Why would I want to live on land that my people never walked on?”
    Cole shook his head. “He’ll never last if he goes in the nursing home.”
    â€œHe’s not supposed to last forever.”
    They each lit a cigarette, then Kay rested her head on his shoulder. “Cole, you ever wonder where your mom is?”
    â€œNo, not anymore. Why?”
    â€œI don’t know, I just wondered.” She hesitated. “When I was little, I used to wish I had a mom like that. It seemed cool, her being out there, traveling.”
    â€œBetter to have one that sticks around.”
    Cole’s mother was sixteen when she got pregnant and ran off. She came back only once. He was ten years old and she blew into town for a week and showered him with junky gifts. Sea monkeys, candy cigarettes, baseball cards, Shrinky Dinks, and cheap T-shirts that were too small, as if she’d picked them out for a four-year-old. But Cole didn’t care. He stretched the shirts over his chest and arms, making them fit and wearing them until his grandfather threw them away.
    â€œYou ought to get out,” Kay said. “Like she did.”
    â€œWhat do you expect me to do out there?”
    â€œWhat you’ve been talking about.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œBe a nurse.”
    â€œShit.”
    â€œWhy not? Get away from all this. You could come up to college with me.”
    â€œDon’t you think I’m a little old?”
    â€œThis is something you want.”
    He stood up and brushed off the seat of his jeans. He thought of his grandmother accusing him of running around. Did she really think that the money he gave her came from working at a nursing home?
    â€œIt’s all talk,” he said. “I couldn’t never get in.”
    â€œYou don’t know.”
    â€œOh, yes I do know. I know.”
    Cole walked over to the land where his aunts and uncles had once lived. The air was still heavy with dust. It smelled of chemicals. He coughed, spat. The aunts’ houses used to be hidden from each other by towering oaks and hemlocks, but Heritage had burned the trees and demolished the houses, leaving behind a mess of upturned earth and monstrous bulldozer tracks with pools of black, brackish water collecting in the ruts. The gardens were torn out. The henhouse was gone too, so was the barn that had once housed the milk cow and goats. It was hard to remember the way the land used to look. A valley, a little stream. Gone, buried.
    Most of the mining land had already been swindled from the people more than a hundred years ago, but the coal companies always wanted more. After Heritage pressured the widow Shirley Scott, who lived at the head of the holler, into selling, then it was easy enough to get rid of everyone else, either by buying them out or making their lives hell. The first thing they did was clear-cut the forests. Bulldoze the trees, burn them. Oaks, hickories, everything. Then they drilled giant holes into the earth and filled them with explosives, and after they blasted, they dumped the rocks and rubble into the valleys. One day, not long after Heritage got its first permit, Cole was driving to town, and as he crested a hill he looked over and saw the felled trees covering the hillside like graves and he knew then that what was coming was too big to stop.
    He walked through the tall weeds over to the path that they’d always called Church Lane. A black slickness rose up in certain places where he stepped, and he went carefully as if the land was rigged with mines. Wasteland . The church was still standing, but barely. Last year a flash flood had rushed down from the barren hillside and smashed into it. Cole had helped his grandmother fill out FEMA forms, and they collected about half of what they needed, using the money for bills