A/N: For Day 13 (Peppermint) of the 25 Days of Fic Challenge, I became fascinated with the Greek myth about Minthe, the naiad whom Persephone changed into a leafy groundcover for the crime of attracting Hades' eye. With Persephone's history, I'd have thought she'd have known better than to put all the blame on the "other woman." This in turn reminded me that I'd been jonesing to use Carrie Underwood's "Two Black Cadillacs" as a story prompt, which somehow resulted in setting this revamping of the myth in 1930s Harlan County, Kentucky. Hades, as god of the underworld, was also associated with precious metals and therefore, logically, with mines.
1
The black veil gives a women decent privacy with her thoughts.
Corrie Worth, newly widowed, brushed crimson on her lips with a practiced hand, adjusted her hat over graying curls, and lowered the veil. Black gloves, bought at Woolworth's, weren't of the quality usually demanded by the wife of the third-richest mine owner in Harlan County; but sometimes keeping up appearances meant letting down standards.
She stepped into the waiting black Cadillac with the assurance of a woman who'd been driven all her life.
2
Her very first Cadillac had appeared when she was walking to school, barefoot to save her shoes, on a road more stones than dirt.
Looking back at herself with grown-up eyes, she saw an underfed girl who at sixteen looked no more than a city girl's twelve, still in braids, with her calico dress a little too short but no money to replace it. Her mother did miracles, farming the rocky soil and the steep mountainsides, but weather's a fickle friend.
The back door of the Cadillac opened, and Dixon Worth offered her a bag of peppermint candy to get in. She was too stupid with hunger to say no.
3
For Dixon Worth's funeral, the preacher took as his text 2 Corinthians 4:8-9. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.
The slip of a girl on the other side of the church wept with the concentration of a person who's biting the inside of her cheek and thinking about when her dog died.
Corrie would have lent her a veil if they could have admitted to knowing each other.
4
Sheriff J.H. Blair was one of the first to shake the preacher's hand after the service. Corrie suspected she could have danced naked on Dixon's coffin without shaking Blair from his certainty that he'd caught the right men when he jailed those striking miners as murderers.
What will they stoop to next? had become the center of dinner-party conversation among the mine-owning families. A new widow wasn't invited, of course, but word got back to her. This time, they attacked one of us on in the dark. Next, they'll be murdering us in our beds.
A more horrifying idea followed, one that had to be couched in a whisper. Next, they'll be raping our daughters.
Remembering how she'd wed Dixon—trembling and shamed, fearing that she'd made a baby, fearing that she'd incited him somehow—Corrie could almost laugh at fearing the miners.
A black veil hides a widow's unseemly swings of emotion.
5
The girl waited until Corrie had laid her rose on the coffin before she stepped forward with a straggling handful of daisies.
She had the fine features and sinuous movements of a naiad somehow stranded in these coal-rich hills, forced to guard a stream where the mines spewed waste. She might have meant to marry a coal-miner or go to Lexington for factory work or even chase the Hollywood men from the recording companies to get a contract singing songs older than the hills.
For less than a flicker of rain, Corrie's green eyes met the girl's clear blue gaze. The girl mouthed thank you.
6
Corrie had guessed when she found the pink lipstick on Dixon's silk handkerchief, but she hadn't cared until word got back through the servants that little Araminta Sizemore had tried slicing her wrists.
She'd sent a pair of cream-colored gloves—the good ones, from the shop in Lexington—with a message written small and folded into one finger.
7
Her own nightmares about miners involved hanged men, ropes still around their necks, accusing her. Once Dixon's safely in the ground, she'll turn to Sheriff J.H. Blair for comfort, and he'll mysteriously lose the keys to the jail, just long enough for the miners to escape. Their lives won't be worth much in Harlan County, but that's nothing new.
The thought of Blair sweating and grunting atop her nauseated Corrie, but it wasn't not right that any more people suffer for Dixon's sins.
8
Peppermint tea, so refreshing was the murmur among guests at the house after the funeral. Talking about Dixon's murder wasn't proper, not in front of his widow.
9
Raising the pick over her head had taken all Corrie's strength, but the wet, crushing noise when it entered Dixon's head had made the effort worth it.