“I been saving money for your schooling,” he whispered.

“C.J., I cant pay you back for all you done. But dont make me go. I’ll be so lonesome. This here is my home. Dont send me away.”

He was crying. I had never seen him cry.

“Oh, God, C.J. I aint meaning to hurt you. Werent it you taught me about the union, about the coal operators? Aint they made this place a burden to bear? I’m scairt if I go off, I wont never settle here again. Hit would be too easy to turn tail, like Uncle Dillon.”

He raised his head. “Dillon never turned tail. You heard that offn your buddy there. Dillon’s living the old way.”

“We aint got the old way no more. We got the new way. That’s what I got to live. Only I cant bear to think I disappointed you. Say you aint disappointed.”

“I aint never been disappointed in you. You do what you got to do.”

He took a long time to say this last, and his voice held no ring of conviction. I felt like Judas. C.J. went into the kitchen to sit with Violet.

“Hey, dont worry,” Isom said. “You’re growed up now, and he aint even your daddy. He aint got no say so over you.”

There was nothing I could have said to hurt C.J. Marcum any more than to tell him that he carried no influence with coal miners, that he was not one of them. If I hadn’t been drinking, I would never have said it. But it was true. It was ironic, for C.J. had been on Blackberry all his life, before the companies came in. But it made no difference. To the miners, he was an outsider because he didn’t share their life. He was a businessman; he had money.

I was more at home with the miners than C.J. was. To them, I was Clabe Lloyd’s boy, even if I did live at Annadel. Isom and I spent time with them in the beer joints and whorehouses. We first ventured into Everett Day’s when we were fifteen and lost our virginity to a pair of amused colored girls. We were regulars for a while until Ermel found out and called us into his office at the hotel.

“So you boys want the clap,” he said.

We smirked and studied our hands.

“I go to Lizzie Mae ever time,” Isom said. “She aint got the clap.”

“So she says. If she aint got it now, she will have. You boys want your peters to shrivel up and fall off, just keep on going to Everett’s.”