The Smell Of Before

The world began with coffee.
Not the drinking of it; Sam was too small for that, and anyway, Mawmaw Lucy said coffee would put hair on her chest, which was a fate Sam considered worse than timeout. No, the world began with the smell of it, percolating through the dark house before the sun had any business being up, a deep, brown smell, bitter and warm, like the earth itself.
Sam woke to it the way she always woke: nose first, eyes second. She lay in the narrow bed pushed against the wall of Mawmaw Lucy’s back room, blankets pulled to her chin, and let the morning find her. The coffee meant Mawmaw was already up. The coffee meant the stove was on, and at least for a little while longer, that everything was exactly as it should be.
She kicked free of the blankets, pink flannel, soft from a hundred washes, and padded across the cold linoleum on bare feet. The house was dark except for the yellow light bleeding from under the kitchen door. Sam pushed it open, and there it was: the kingdom.
Mawmaw Lucy stood at the stove in her housecoat, the one with the blue roses that had faded at the cuffs. Her hair was still in her sleeping braid, a thick rope of iron and ash hanging down her back. She didn't turn around when the door opened. She never did, but she lifted one hand in a wave that meant I know you're there, baby, and there's room for you.
"Mornin', sugar," Mawmaw Lucy said. She had a voice like gravel wrapped in honey, rough and sweet all at once.
"Mornin'," Sam said as she climbed onto her chair. It had a split down the middle of the seat that pinched if you sat wrong, but Sam knew how to hold herself just so, tilting to the left where the wood was smooth.
The kitchen was small and close, the walls papered in a pattern of climbing vines that had yellowed with time. The window over the sink looked out onto nothing but dark; just the quiet before dawn in the East End of Williamson, West Virginia. But inside, the kitchen was a lantern. The overhead bulb with its pull-chain cast a warm, buttery light that made the chrome on the stove gleam and turned the grease-spattered backsplash into something almost golden.
And the smells.
The coffee was the foundation; the bedrock. But layered on top of it, weaving through it, was bacon.
Mawmaw Lucy had four strips going in the cast-iron skillet. They hissed and popped in a language Sam understood better than English. It was the sound of safety.
Mawmaw Lucy turned a strip of bacon with a fork that had been bent slightly from some long-ago argument with a jar lid. The fat side curled up, brown and glistening. The smell rose from the skillet and made Sam’s stomach pinch with want.
It was the smell of safety.
She didn’t know what day it was. Days didn’t matter much here. What mattered was the rhythm.
Coffee first.
Then bacon.
Then eggs, if they had them.
Then the washing up.
There were things in Sam’s world she could not count on. But she could count on mornings like this.
"You sleep good?" Mawmaw Lucy asked.
"Dreamed about frogs," Sam said.
"Frogs ain't bad. Frogs is just frogs."
"They was in the bathtub."
"Well, that's less ideal." Mawmaw Lucy smiled. She pulled the bacon from the skillet and laid it on a paper towel that was already spotted with yesterday's bacon grease, because Mawmaw Lucy didn't waste. Sam watched the grease spread.
Then there was the third smell. It cut through the coffee and the bacon with a sharp, clean insistence, and it came from the sink where a plastic bottle stood on the windowsill, half-full of blue liquid. Dawn. The dish soap. Mawmaw Lucy washed dishes the way she did everything: thoroughly, without hurry, as if the act itself were a kind of prayer.
The bottle was the economy size, the kind with the picture of a bird or a duck or something flying over waves. Sam had never looked close enough to be sure. But she knew that when Mawmaw Lucy squeezed it into the hot water, the kitchen filled with a clean, bright smell.
Those three smells, coffee, bacon, and Dawn, were the pillars that held up the ceiling. They kept the world outside at bay.
Mawmaw Lucy cracked an egg into the skillet, where it sizzled in the bacon leavings. The yolk was perfect and unbroken.
"Your mama's sleepin' in," Mawmaw Lucy said, not looking up from the stove. "Let her be."
Sam nodded. Her mama, Stacy, had come in late, or maybe not at all, and had collapsed on the couch in the front room. Sam had heard the door open and close, the soft curse as Stacy hit the arm of the couch, then silence. She was used to it. Stacy moved through the house like weather, sometimes warm, sometimes storming through, sometimes just a pressure change that made everyone's joints ache.
"She okay?" Sam asked.
"She's fine as rain," Mawmaw Lucy said, which was what she always said, and which Sam was learning meant she's not fine at all, but there's nothing to be done about it.
Mawmaw Lucy slid the egg onto a plate with two strips of bacon and set it in front of Sam, and she picked up her fork; small, with a plastic handle shaped like a bunny, and cut into the yolk. It broke, golden and running, and she dragged a strip of bacon through it just like Mawmaw Lucy had taught her.
"Slow," Mawmaw Lucy said. "Ain't nobody takin' it from you."
Sam slowed and she chewed as the kitchen settled around her, the refrigerator humming its one-note song, the clock above the stove ticking insistently.
Sam was six years old, and she knew exactly what love was. It was this. It was bacon and coffee and Dawn dish soap. It was a woman in a faded housecoat who never turned around but always lifted her hand.

She ate the last of her egg and asked for more bacon. Mawmaw Lucy gave her one strip, because rules were rules, and Sam ate it in tiny bites, making it last, while the sky outside the window slowly brightened towards the morning.
That was when the tires came.
They didn't sound like Stacy's car, which had a muffler that roared like a wounded animal. They didn't sound like the mail truck, which came at noon and always rattled too loud. They sounded like too many wheels, heavy and deliberate, grinding up the dirt drive that led from the hard road to the porch.
Mawmaw Lucy's hands stopped moving in the dishwater.
Sam watched the suds drip from her grandmother's fingers, watched the way Mawmaw Lucy's shoulders drew up. The sound of the vehicles grew louder, not one, not two, but a chorus of engines, diesels maybe, or trucks with heavy loads. Then the slamming of doors, a sudden sound like gunshots in the still morning.
"Mawmaw?" Sam said.
Mawmaw Lucy turned off the water. "Get down, baby," her voice had changed. The honey was gone. Only the gravel remained.
Sam didn't move. She didn't understand. The chair pinched her thigh, and she shifted, but she didn't get down.
The knock came. Not a knock, a pounding. A fist against wood that made the whole house shake. Then another fist, and another door. They were at the front door and the side door both, and Sam heard voices, male voices, shouting things that didn't make sense: Federal agents! Search warrant! Open the door!
Mawmaw Lucy moved faster than Sam had ever seen her move, crossing the kitchen in two strides, grabbing Sam under the arms, lifting her off the chair. Sam's fork clattered to the floor. The bunny handle broke off.
"Under the table," Mawmaw Lucy hissed, and she pushed Sam toward the nook where they ate breakfast, where the table was covered in a vinyl cloth printed with cherries. "Now. Don't you make a sound. Not one sound, Sam. You hear me?"
Sam heard. She didn't understand, but she heard. She crawled under the table, pulling her knees to her chest, and made herself small. The vinyl cloth hung down on all sides, and through the gap underneath, she could see Mawmaw Lucy's feet in their worn slippers, moving toward the front room.
The front door gave way with a sound like a tree falling, a splintering, screaming crack, and the house filled with boots; heavy boots that tromped through the living room where Stacy was sleeping. Sam heard her mother's voice, sharp and frightened, a sound Sam had never heard before: "What the hell? What the hell is this?"
A man's voice, loud and official: "Search warrant. Stay where you are."
Sam pressed her face against her knees. She could smell the bacon on her own fingers. She could still taste the yolk of the eggs. The kitchen was being overwritten by something new, something that came in on the boots: leather and gun oil and a synthetic sweetness she didn't have a name for. Aftershave, maybe. Or fear.
The agents came into the kitchen.
Sam saw them through the gap in the tablecloth: black boots, polished, with trousers tucked into them. Above the boots, she could see the bottom of a windbreaker, navy blue with yellow letters that she couldn't read but knew were important. The man wearing them stood in Mawmaw Lucy's kitchen, in the temple of coffee and bacon and Dawn, and he filled it up. He filled it until there was no room left for anything else.
"Clear!" he shouted, and the word went out into the house, echoing back from other rooms. Clear! Clear! Clear! Like they were looking for something. Like they were looking for someone.
"She's six years old," Mawmaw Lucy said, and her voice was steady now, steady and unwavering. "There ain't nothin' here for you to find, and you're scarin' my grandbaby."
"Ma'am, step back," the agent said.
"I'll step back when you tell me what you done with my daughter."
"Your daughter is in the front room with Agent Halloway. Now step back."
Sam heard Mawmaw Lucy move, heard the soft shuffle of her slippers on the kitchen floor. The boots turned, slow and surveying. They walked to the stove. They walked to the sink. Sam saw a hand reach down and pick up her plate. The hand turned it over, as if some secret might be written on the bottom. Then the hand set it down. The boots moved on.
They went into the back room where Sam had been sleeping. She heard the closet door open, heard hangers scraping the rod. She heard the mattress being lifted, the box spring creaking. They were looking in her bed, in her blankets, in the pink flannel that had kept her warm. The thought made her want to cry, but Mawmaw Lucy had said not one sound, so Sam swallowed it where it quietly sat in her stomach.
More shouting from the front room. Stacy's voice, high and angry, then cut off. A man's voice, lower, saying something about rights. About remaining silent. Sam knew what silence was. She was being silent right now. She was being so silent she could hear her own heart, a rabbit-thump in her ears.
The boots came back through the kitchen. They paused at the table.
Sam stopped breathing. She could see the boots from the knees down, perfectly still, perfectly patient. The man was looking at the table. At the cherries on the vinyl cloth. At the chair with the split seat. Sam felt, in that moment, that he could see her. That he knew she was there, small and six and smelling of bacon, and that he was deciding whether to reach under and pull her out.
Then Mawmaw Lucy was there, standing between the agent and the table, her slippers toe-to-toe with the polished black shoes.
"You got a warrant says you can terrify babies? Cause I'd like to see that part."
The boots hesitated. Then they moved on, out the side door, into the yard where the dawn was finally breaking, weak and pale over the mountains.
It went on for an hour, maybe two. Time stopped meaning anything. Sam stayed under the table, her legs cramping, her bladder full, but she didn't move. She listened to the house being taken apart. Drawers opened. Cushions overturned. The floorboards in the hall creaked as heavy feet walked back and forth. She heard them go down into the cellar, heard the scrape of the wooden door, the damp smell of earth rose up to mix with the leather and the gun oil.
And then, finally, the engines again. Starting up. The grind of tires on gravel. The house emptird out by degrees, boots tromped back the way they had come, voices faded, doors slammed. One engine. Two. Three.
Then silence.
Not the right quiet. Not the hush of early morning, of coffee percolating, of bacon waiting. This was a new quiet. A silence that had been let into the house and couldn't be shooed out.
Sam crawled out from under the table. Her knees ached. She stood in the kitchen and looked at the ruin.
The front room was worse. The couch cushions were on the floor. The little table where Mawmaw Lucy kept her ashtray and her Bible was overturned; the ashtray spilled, the Bible face down on the rug. Stacy sat on the edge of the couch with no cushions, her hair wild, her eyes red. She was smoking a cigarette with a hand that shook so badly the ash fell on her own knee.
She didn't brush it off.
Mawmaw Lucy stood at the front window, looking out at the drive, churned by all those tires. Her arms were crossed over her housecoat. Her braid hung down, and Sam saw, for the first time, that Mawmaw Lucy's hair was not iron and ash. It was just gray, and she was just an old woman, and the house was just wood and linoleum, and none of it was strong enough.
"Mawmaw?" Sam said.
Mawmaw Lucy didn't turn around.
Stacy looked up. Her eyes met Sam's, and in them, Sam saw something that scared her more than the boots, more than the shouting. She saw a wall. A door closing. Her mother looked at her and then looked away, toward the spilled ashtray, toward the space where the men had been.
"Go on back to the kitchen, baby," Stacy said. Her voice was empty. "Ain't nothin' for you to see."
"What'd they want?" Sam asked.
The quiet that followed was absolute. Stacy took a drag of her cigarette. Mawmaw Lucy kept looking out the window. The sun was up now, a hard pale disk above the mountain, but it didn't warm anything. The light fell on the overturned table, the spilled ash, the Bible with its pages crumpled, and it looked like evidence at a crime scene.
"Go on," Stacy said again.
Sam went back to the kitchen. Her plate was still on the table, the egg yolk dried to a yellow crust, the bacon grease gone cold and white. The fork with the broken bunny handle lay on the floor where it had fallen. She picked it up. She held it in her hand. The coffee pot was still on the stove, the burner still on. The coffee had boiled down to a thick, bitter sludge. The smell was scorched. It was ruined.
Sam climbed onto her chair. The split pinched her thigh, but she didn't tilt to the left. She sat straight and waited for someone to tell her what had happened. She waited for Mawmaw Lucy to turn around and lift her hand. She waited for Stacy to come in to fix her hair and call her sugar like she sometimes did.
The bacon grease on the paper towel hardened. The Dawn dish soap sat on the windowsill, blue and untouched. The water in the sink went cold, the suds dissolving until they were just a film on the surface.
Sam sat at the table, holding the broken fork, and she understood, without words, without explanation, that the world had changed. The three smells were gone. Coffee, bacon, and Dawn; they had been driven out by leather, gun oil, and cigarette smoke, and they would never come back the same way. From now on, they would be after smells. They would be reminders.
She looked at the closed door between the kitchen and the front room, then at the window where the sun was climbing. Her own small hands, still smelling of breakfast, still held the broken bunny.
And she did what they told her to do.
She stayed silent.
Outside, a bird started up, tentative, testing the morning. But inside, in the house on the dirt road in East End, there was no sound at all. The silence had begun. It filled every room, pressed against every window, and settled over Sam like a blanket that was too heavy, too hot, impossible to kick free.
She sat at the table and breathed it in.
The smell of before was gone.