Castle of Appalachia By Christopher Emery She rang up the last can of green beans and gave the woman

her total. The clock read 3:02 in the afternoon. Hamblins General Store was past closing. Take care, maam. Elizahs words came out like a weary whisper from a slow day alone at the store. The woman must not have noticed Elizahs murmur and left into the afternoon heat of the Kentucky mountains. Elizah closed the register. She was the only one working since Mr. Hamblin hadnt come in today. The stifling June humidity following the spring showers didnt agree with his stiff, old miners joints. It didnt agree with Elizahs joints either, but she liked being alone on these days. She needed some time just thinking between the narrow, half-stocked aisles of the store. Elizah locked up and left, beginning her walk along the winding curves of Morris Road. The skies were gray with enveloping clouds and the air with enough humidity that she could smell the dirt and rocks tilled that day on the mountaintops a dozen miles away, the same mountains Pa had mined in before they only did the tops. She wanted to smell the old smell Pas old jacket, which shed wear on cold mornings and in winter. It was caked with the dense mine air and sweat hed gathered year after year. Elizah could feel the pangs of her hour-and-five-minute walk home without lunch, wishing she had change in her purse for two-for-a-dollar peanuts and a cola. Elizahs house, three miles down from the store on Morris Road, wasnt a bad walk, but Elizah felt older than forty-six years with each day and each walk.

A herd of trucks groaned in the distance. The miners finished their day the same time as Elizah. They were now catching up to her and she moved closer to the roads edge, awaiting their passage. The slopes along the edge gave her little surface but she managed to make room. The groans turned to growls as the trucks moved up the slope, beds filled with fellow workers in need of the ride. She stopped her walk and looked at them. The soiled trucks were sprayed in mud from the rains the weeks before and the windshields clouded up with cigarette smoke and dust. The men were silent, somber and unmoved by the road or Elizah. Their rides sputtered loudly and the half-static radios cranked up high spoke for them. Pa, Elizah imagined, wouldnt speak on his rides home, just like these menweak from slinging against rock each day for a small, dark prize. Once he came home, though, hed save up enough energy each day to greet and carry young Elizah in his arms to the front door of their little box house with pink shutters. Elizah spent more time with her Pa than anyone and they never grew tired of each others company. Pa never drank, smoked or went out like other miners and instead devoted his free time to care for Elizah after her mother died. In the evenings he told her stories, taught her games and carved coal figurines from a few scraps hed find at work. Even with nearly nothing and Pas endless labor, they both had a life in their small home they called the Castle of Appalachia. The last of several trucks drove by. One passenger in its loaded bed, a boy in his midteens, stared back at Elizah as she picked up her walk again. He looked troubled and hurt, like he was left alone without a family to go home to, and he was too young to work with desperate men nearly double his age. She stared into his eyes and saw some familiarity in them. Both were tired and longing, maybe they werent for the same reasons, but still tired, still longing.

The truck and boy grumbled away with the rest of the brigade around the bends, away from Elizah, and she made her way down the incline of the road. She was over half the way home, where the mountains opened up to a green valley below, brightened by the recent rains. The creek running through charmed and refreshed her, even though it wasnt safe for people anymore from the run-off of the slopes. She used to play by that creek as a child on Sundays, watching butterflies wave to their fair lady and crickets make way for her dainty feet in the grass. Pa would come join her in the afternoon after chores and add to her fairytale. She was a small princess and he was the king in these mountains, making a peaceful kingdom in the valley from their humble fortressthe one-story house with painted pink shutters. Elizahs walk was relieved by a momentary wind, cooling the sweat on her brow and pointing her to the castle seen just below in the grassy valley. As she walked down further, the creek passed under a bridge following a high cliff. To the left was a small green space, no more than fifteen-feet deep and thirty-feet wide, pressed up against the tall precipice. Small grave stones, about twenty in all, were covered with fresh flowers for the start of another season, passing another year since the mine took its miners. Elizah looked at the one that seemed to stand more erect than the others, partly shaded from the cliff. It read Robert Greenlow. Her freshly picked wildflowers were laid at its base. Pa told her when she was fourteenthe year before he became the upright marker below the cliffthe simple words she can never forget: Well live our lives in this castle, my Liza Greenlow, and there wont be any worries. Youre my princess, and Ill be watching you from the tops of these very mountains when Im gone one day.

Elizah had been kneeling in the soft grass before the stone, finding some peace for her joints and sore feet. She needed some time just resting in the narrow field of remembrance below the cliff. Elizah squinted, withholding sweat from her blurry, reddened eyes, as she resumed her journey home and the dotted green patch along Morris Road remained behind her. As she passed the last bend, homeward bound, her stomach had stopped knotting from her day-long fast and she felt her aches lessen in the cooling evening air. She opened her front gate and looked up at the sun peeking through the cloudsa steadily glowing light among the turbulent gray massesand her castle with pink-shutters stood illuminated between the shadows of the mountains.