Into the Web by Thomas H. Cook Page B

was.”
    “Mama!” Lila blurted out. “You be quiet now.”
    The old woman’s voice hardened. “Jesse wouldn’t have took it.”
    “Mama, stop it,” Lila said sharply.
    But Mrs. Cutler didn’t stop. “Jesse would have done something about it.”
    “Let’s go back in the house, Mama,” Lila pleaded.
    Mrs. Cutler’s eyes remained level upon mine. “Even after what they done to him at the Waylord mine.”
    I stared at her helplessly. “The Waylord mine?”
    “Come on now, Mama,” Lila snapped, firmly turningthe old woman away from me, whispering, “Sorry, Roy, sorry,” as she ushered her toward the door.
    I waited in the yard, all but reeling from so disturbing a remark, the sound of it echoing through my brain. Through the window I could see Lila guide her mother hastily toward a wooden rocker, scolding her gently all the way.
    In response, the old woman muttered something I couldn’t understand.
    “Mama just says things, Roy,” Lila told me when she returned to me.
    “What was she talking about?” I pressed.
    “I don’t know,” Lila said. “She gets things confused. One memory floats into another one. Things whirl around.”
    She knew that I’d seen it, the lie in her eyes. “I better get back inside,” she said quietly. “Good-bye, Roy.”
    She backed away from me, her smile soft, almost fragrant, like a small pale flower on her lips. “I always knew you’d be a good man,” she said in words she clearly considered to be the last she would ever say to me. “Nothing could change that … nothing.”

Chapter Eleven
    O n the way back to the valley, I spotted the road that had once led to the Waylord mine and the coal-blackened company town that surrounded it. A wooden sign had been nailed to a tree at the entrance to the road, reminding everyone that although the mine itself had long been shut down, both the mine and the town remained the private property of the Waylord Mining Company.
    For all the times I’d swept up the road toward Lila’s house, I’d never once turned off it, but Betty Cutler’s words suddenly cut through me, Even after what they done to him at the Waylord mine , and fired a need in me to discover what had shaped my father, perhaps twisted him, but had, by some transforming means, made him the man she seemed to think I was but the shadow of.
    The road into the town was overgrown now, littlemore than parallel ruts through a snarl of weed, but still maneuverable. Peering down its twisted path, I wondered what it was in my father that Mrs. Cutler so admired, and what had buried it so deeply, I’d never had the slightest glimpse of it for all the years I’d lived within my father’s house.
    I reached Waylord a few minutes later, got out of my car. A crescent-shaped line of buildings curved around a broad street. The mine lay at the eastern tip of the crescent, a square maw dug out of the hillside. It had been abandoned long ago, of course, along with the company offices and stores.
    Just behind the unpainted wooden gate that now blocked the mouth of the mine, I could see the supporting timbers, thick and black, along with the steel roof bolts that held them in place. It was not hard for me to imagine the years during which the mine had been active, the clang of the bell calling the miners to and from the mine, the shuffle of their feet as they passed each other in long lines, clothed in denim coveralls, their heads decked out in plastic helmets and carbide lights.
    My father had worked in the Waylord mine from the day he was nine years old, scrambling into the rickety wooden elevator, no doubt peering upward, as miners often do on the descent, drinking in a last greedy gulp of sun before the night engulfed them.
    The august offices of the Waylord Mining Company sat on a slight incline, shoved up against the hillside, its wide deck lifted on high wooden stilts. From there, the owners had been able to survey their pinched domain, their mine, their stores, the gray masses