fiction

by Sarah Landenwich

To the Center of the Earth

Poplar County, Kentucky, 1906

The stranger at Winnie London’s table had a scar on his left cheekbone. Thin and hooked, almost elegant in its curve, it began above his eyebrow and cupped the eye, drawing to a small, white close like an embroidery stitch at the top of the bone. Decades after he first knocked on the farmhouse door, after the farm had burned and the dusty coal camp along the creek had grown into a boomtown and dwindled back to nothing again, Winnie’s great-grandchildren would know about the scar. Sometimes it was described like a woman’s lacework, sometimes like a scythe, sometimes like the fish pole of the devil who had dragged this man from the black swamp of hell and hauled him up to earth. But that day, he was just a stranger who had wandered to her door. He was well dressed, with a silk vest the color of a blue jay and a silver watch so large Winnie could hear it ticking from his pocket. She studied the scar because it was easier than looking in his eyes. In the dim light of the kitchen, his pupils had grown to fill the pale irises. They stared at her, black and unblinking. His eyes, he explained to Winnie, were sensitive to the sun. A doctor in Chicago had told him to stay out of harsh light or else he’d go blind.

“That’s why I decided to make my business in coal.” He smiled, his teeth white as the inside of an onion.

He was a young man still, not more than thirty, and there was a time a smile like that might have quickened Winnie’s heart. But she was thirty-two and a nine-month widow, with two fresh streaks of white in her hair for each of the children who had died that year. She did not smile back.

“All I want is the mineral rights,” he said. “I don’t want your farm, I don’t want your crops. I just want the coal. It’s all outlined right here.” He tapped the contract on the table, where his name was already signed next to a blank line where he wanted her life to intersect with his. Charles Belmont. It sounded to Winnie like the name of an English king. A conqueror. 

“You can go on farming like you do now, only with more money in your pocket,” he said. “If we ever decide to dig, we’ll work around you.”

At the end of the table, her son George, twelve years old, the only one aside from Winnie and baby Adelaide who had survived the scarlet fever, raised his sunburned face. Talk of money always made him look up. It was one of the many ways the illness had poisoned them both.

Belmont saw the look. “I understand you’re a schoolteacher,” he said, leaning

forward. “I plan to build a school as soon as I build my town. Perhaps you could help me

run it.”

“I’m already running one.” Winnie nodded down the mountain, where the schoolhouse stood at the edge of the cornfield. She and Jacob had built it the year they married. Strong, beautiful Jacob, who had dreamed a whole life with her from the day they met. The schoolhouse, like the farm, was too much without him. It had been a year of her heart falling out of her every day, snagging in her ribs like a thread of yarn caught on the doorframe. But she was never going to sell one speck of dust to this man or any other. Her great-great-grandfather had come here from Virginia in 1797 to farm the land and raise hogs in the hills. Her ancestors drank from the springs and bathed in the creek and built the house Winnie lived in from the pine on the very same mountain. It was all she’d ever had that was hers.

“I’m willing to offer a thousand dollars,” Belmont said. “That’s a whole new life for you and your children. The land will still be yours.”

“The coal comes with the land,” Winnie said. “Whatever your paper there may say, they’re one and the same.”

Belmont smiled the white smile, but the silk had flowed out of his voice. “I’ll buy the land too, if you want. But I don’t need it. I just want the coal.” He rose and picked his hat off the table. “I’m staying in Marvel at the hotel. You can find me there.”

When he ducked out into the hot summer light, his pupils shrank to specks of black. Two glacial irises stared down at her, pale and unreadable as a January sky. “I hope you’ll change your mind, Mrs. London,” he said. “I think you’ll be glad you did.”

George was waiting at the door when she came inside. “The Mitchells sold their minerals,” he said. “They’re going to build a new house.”

Winnie watched Belmont trot down the road on his horse, his head high and easy

as if the whole mountain were already his.

“And what happens when he wants to dig a hole through their sitting room?” she

asked. “How can one person own what’s above the ground and someone else own what’s beneath? Will the roots belong to him and the stalks to the Mitchells?"

George shrugged. “He said all he wanted was the coal.”

“Your father and sisters are buried in that ground,” Winnie said. “He can’t have them."

•

It took Belmont a year to ride up to the Londons’ farm again. By then, the Carsons and the Halls had sold their minerals, too. Only Winnie and the McClures had refused. Each Saturday, George came home from the market with stories of Belmont. How he had gone to Louisville to persuade the L & N to build a spur to Marvel. How his men were up in Ellis Island recruiting right off the ships. One Saturday, George returned with the news that Belmont had bought 19,000 acres along Sayer’s Creek to build his town.

“So he owns the water now, too?” Winnie said. “Is he going to patent the air next?”

Belmont arrived in a bleaching October sun as hot as July. This time he brought a

stick of peppermint for Adelaide and a set of encyclopedias for the schoolhouse. He dropped the books on the table the way Winnie had seen men dump a bad crop on a scale.

“This is my family’s land, Mr. Belmont,” she said. “From right here under your feet all the way to the center of the earth. You can’t have it.”

He smiled impatiently, the arc of the scar widening around his eye. “You’re making the wrong decision. I’m going to build this place into something. You’ll get left behind.”

“This place already is something,” Winnie said. “If you can’t see that, your eyes are worse off than you thought.”

He laughed then, as if this were a great joke between them, then got on his horse and rode away. After that, Winnie kept the shotgun behind the door.

At night she dreamed of coffins. Sometimes it was her children in them, disintegrating to bone up on the mountain. Sometimes it was her father stuffed in the pine box her Uncle Herbert had sawed too short. Once it was a little rabbit, still alive, shrunk into the corner. A jumble of old pencils, the doorknob of her house. One night she dreamed it was Charles Belmont in the ground, his eyes white as frozen lakes. His scar turned into a worm and slithered off his face.

•

Soon there was a cloud of dust down in the valley from the parade of mules and men and equipment Belmont had ordered up. Already a muddy coal camp throbbed along the creek. Railroad ties were laid from Marvel, and before long, men from Italy and Poland and Spain flooded into the valley, looking blanched and hungry in the hot sun. Wooden houses popped up along the new roads, with children on the steps and wives looking hopeful from open doorways. Then one afternoon, two young ladies arrived and walked into a one-story building on the edge of the camp. The next day a sign hung over the door: Sayer’s Creek School. Free to company children.

That winter was hard. By Christmas, only three pupils came to Winnie’s school, and in January she did not open the doors again. Adelaide got sick with a cough that held in its rattle the warning of another coffin. Then one morning, Winnie and George were tilling the field with their mare Artemis when they saw smoke in the distance, a thin wisp like a child’s pencil scrawl. By noon, Samuel McClure galloped up to the house to tell her the courthouse in Marvel had burned to the ground, along with every title and deed and bill of sale the whole history of Poplar County had ever known.

Samuel wiped his face with a handkerchief. “There’s no records anymore, Winnie. You need to find your deed and keep it safe. He’s going to try to take your farm. He’s going to try to take it all.”

Before Samuel was down the hill, Winnie had dragged the cedar trunk her father made her as a wedding gift from beneath her bed. George stood in the doorway and watched her rummage through the books and papers.

“What are you looking for?” he asked. He was seventeen now, with solemn eyes, brown and liquid, like Jacob’s. She had made him too serious, giving him the responsibilities of a man when he wasn’t one.

“The deed to the farm.” She folded the yellowed paper into a coffee tin. “So when he comes for it, we can prove it’s ours.”

She waited for the new moon, then crept up to the cemetery. Down in the valley, the glow of electric lights emanated from Belmont’s town as if a star had fallen from the sky and lay burning in the creek. But in the dark of the mountain, the winds talked to her in her babies’ murmurs, and she dug in the ground with the shovel she had brought and lay the coffee tin near the root of a poplar tree. By the time she turned to head down the mountain, an orange light was climbing up the hill. Winnie ran to the house. Jacob’s Winchester was in her arms by the time the men reached the porch.

One wore a felt hat with a notch in the brim. The other had a thick beard with no moustache, his chapped lips shining in the heat of his torch.

“You’re notified of Belmont Coal’s intent to mine this mountain,” he announced. “A crew will be here next month to start digging.”

Winnie raised the gun to her shoulder. “They will not. This is my land, and whatever is in this ground belongs to me.”

The man brandished a paper from within his coat. “This here says you signed your coal to Mr. Belmont. By law, he’s permitted to access that coal by whatever means he sees fit.”

It was the same page that had been on her table five years ago. Only now there was an X signed on the line above her name as if she could not read or write. As if she was no one in the world at all.

“I know how to sign my name,” Winnie retorted. “I have the deed to this land and everything beneath it, and I’ll take it to Washington to prove it’s mine if I need to. You get away from my house.” She racked the gun and put her finger on the trigger.

The man slid the contract back into his coat. “Lady, Mr. Belmont paid you fairly for the coal in this ground, and now he’s come to collect. You’re going to do what we say from here on.” He tossed a small bundle wrapped in newspaper at her feet, then turned his horse in a circle and left.

When the men had gone down the hill, she bent to the ground and opened the parcel. Ten one-hundred-dollar bills sat in the greasy newsprint. The bills smelled like smoke.

•

There are only so many nights a human being can stay awake with a shotgun, and eventually Winnie slept. Asleep next to Adelaide, she never heard the first black whoosh of the flames.

The sheriff said it must have been an ember from the stove that sparked the fire, though how a single ember caused a house and barn to burn in an hour, no one ever could explain.

“Must’ve been kindled by all the books,” the sheriff said, toeing the charred spine of one of the encyclopedias Belmont had brought years ago.

Winnie and Adelaide made it out with only burns on their hands and arms. George ran to the barn for the thousand dollars Winnie had hidden beneath Artemis’ trough. The horse charged when George opened the door. No one knew if he died from the blow of the horse or the beam that fell on top of him.

Winnie went to every lawyer in Marvel and told them about the men who came to her house with the forged deed. She told them she had the real deed hidden, though she knew better than to tell any of them where it was. She even made good on her promise to go to Washington. No one wanted to listen. She was a woman from the mountains of Kentucky. There wasn’t any evidence, they said. Farmhouses burned all the time. Besides, the country needed coal, didn’t she know that? The thirst for steel was unquenchable.

A team of men came to the farm while she was away, along with a geologist from West Virginia rumored to sniff out coal easy as water. After weeks of digging, he declared the coal beneath the farm too hard to get to and the rock too thick, and steered Belmont toward another mountain. Soon, a farm on the western part of the county was burned, and within a month a new mine was dug. A new courthouse was built, too, funded by Charles Belmont himself. Quietly, it filled up with new deeds.

For a time, Winnie and Adelaide lived in the schoolhouse. They replanted the corn and tried to start over. But after a while, even the charity of the McClures started to dry up. Belmont’s thousand dollars had burned the night of the fire along with everything else. There was nothing left to tap. When a pair of dentists came through looking to set up a business at the new hospital and offered to buy her farm, she signed her name on the line. She tried to explain how the coal belonged to her, too. She warned them that Belmont might come for it again, or another man like him, sometime down the road. The men listened politely, sensing a patient ear was what she needed in order to make the sale, and said thank you, they had read the geologist’s report. Belmont wouldn’t be wanting it anytime soon.

The night before she left, Winnie walked up the mountain to the cemetery. She kissed the headstones of George and Jacob and the twins. In the light of the moon, she dug with her hands for the coffee tin. All she found was a tiny bone, no bigger than the curve of her finger. It probably belonged to a bird or a squirrel, but it looked to Winnie like a child’s rib, and she put it back in the ground and dug no more.

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Sarah Landenwich is a writer based in Louisville, Kentucky. Her debut novel, The Fire Concerto, was released in 2025. This excerpt in Good River Review is from an early, unpublished novel, Like All Things from God.