The Secret Zadie Carried Past the Gate

We married the year after, in the little Methodist church on the county road, and I moved into a company house two streets over from the tipple that smelled permanently of coal smoke no matter how many times I scrubbed the curtains. Camp life in Novinger back then ran on a rhythm you either learned to love or learned to leave. The whistle blew at five thirty for the men going down, the wives traded garden vegetables over back fences, and every child in that camp knew the sound of every family’s particular wagon or bicycle before they ever saw a face. Bexley’s route took him all over that property, up to the super’s office, down to the powder house, out along the spur line where the coal cars waited, and he brought a piece of every corner of it home to me at supper, who was fighting with whom, whose baby had taken sick, which bicycle had thrown a chain that morning and why.

By the time I was carrying that sack of sand, the trucks had come. Two flatbeds and a company car that could do the messenger run in a tenth the time, and the super up at the office had no more use in the world for a fleet of iron bicycles that cost money to grease and store. Word came down in the spring that the whole lot of them, all twelve, were going out with the scrap hauler to be sold for whatever the metal would bring. Melted down, most likely, same as the old boiler plates and the broken cart wheels.

Bexley came home the day he heard that news and didn’t eat his supper. He sat at our table a long while with his hands flat in front of him, and finally he said, “Zadie, there’s boys in this camp walking four miles to the county school and back because their daddies can’t spare a dollar for a used bicycle, and the company’s fixing to melt down twelve good ones that just need new tires.”