THE COAL TATTOO

Third in a multigenerational saga (A Parchment of Leaves, 2002, etc.) of a Kentucky mountain family with tragedy to burn.

Easter and her younger sister Anneth are orphaned when their father dies in a cave-in at the Altamont Mine and their mother hangs herself shortly thereafter.The two and their brother Gabe are raised by their grandmothers: Serena, whose family settled in the shadow of the mountain at Free Creek; and Vine, a Cherokee whose land was on the other side of the mountain in an area that’s now a mine. Easter is a churchgoing Pentecostal who finds love with El, but grief when her only child is stillborn and she can’t have another. (The child has a blue birthmark similar to a “coal tattoo” that marks men who have survived cave-ins.) Anneth is a beauty whose wild streak draws her into drinking, barroom flirtations, and impulsive marriages to a Nashville-bound singer/guitarist, a wealthy mine foreman, and ultimately a dangerously controlling man. The relationship between the sisters is frayed by Anneth’s recklessness, but ultimately family ties endure when the Altamont mining company turns to strip mining, using coerced “broad form deeds,” and tries to bulldoze their mountain (“ . . . loving the land was a given, not something one could choose. . .”). When the sisters and their aunt stand in front of the bulldozers, the media plays up the incident, and the land is saved for now. Anneth falls in love with a draftee headed to Vietnam, discovers she’s pregnant, and promises to give the baby to Easter and El to raise. Both sisters are natural singers, and a motif about the coming of rock ’n’ roll in the 1960s adds an intriguing period dimension.

Sometimes marred by a monotony in its characterizations, but, overall, a gentle tale with appealingly flawed people and an exquisite sense of the quotidian.