“I seen one at the top of the stairs.”

“Go turn it on. They’s guns here. Shells too, and another machine gun. Go git some more of the girls to help carry them.”

I groped my way back and found what I thought was the door to the stairway. When I yanked it open, I heard a sharp intake of breath. Then a woman’s voice pleaded querulously, “Go on and leave us be. Please leave us be.” Someone else sobbed softly in the dark.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and closed the door gently.

I found the right entrance and rushed upstairs, tripping on my skirt and hitting my knee painfully. I turned on the light, but I couldn’t bring myself to follow the ones who went down after the guns. I went out onto the porch. Women ran back and forth on Felco’s lone paved street, the street of big houses where the doctors and bookkeepers lived, dragging pillowcases filled with food. Cecil Nunally’s widow emerged from the doctor’s house with a chocolate layer cake.

I heard the whine of motorcars approaching from down the creek. I ran to the machine gun and sat down behind it, careful to place my food on the ground close beside me. Three state police cars churned up the road through Colored Bottom. I swung the machine gun back and forth, surprised at how easily it moved. The metal trigger froze my finger clear to the bone.

The cars drew up below the store. Black sludge clung like icing halfway up their sides. The doors swung open and policemen jumped out. I squeezed the trigger, spun the gun wildly back and forth, kicked up globs of black mud at their feet. The first men out whirled around, tackled those behind them, piled back into the cars. They backed up and sped away, the rear ends of the cars waggling as they slid back down the road.

I sat still. My body buzzed from the racketing of the gun. I smelled burnt oil. Straight ahead, across the railroad tracks, I could see the row of houses where I had lived. Hundreds of women gathered there, too, so far away they appeared to walk on water. Scab miners came from the drift mouth to see what was happening. The women met them, beat them about the head with their sticks and frying pans, swiped at them with axes, and the men fled behind a row of empty black coal cars.

I gathered up my food. The bacon had been sliced and wrapped in slick butcher’s paper, perhaps waiting to be picked up by the paymaster’s wife. Even now she might be cowering in the basement.

Pricie and Gladys struggled out the door, carrying a machine gun between them.

“I hear shooting?” Gladys asked anxiously.

“Mmmmm,” I answered. I was counting the bacon strips. Twenty-four slices. Enough for ten days if I could keep it frozen.