Strange as This Weather Has Been, page 18
Right there a bad feeling socked in my gut. It hadn’t even got to my mind yet, but I knew to back away and not touch that stuff, not even with my boot.
I watched it for a while, the feeling in my belly making me a little sick.Then I tried to track it. It didn’t go too far, kind of dribbled along in a line maybe twenty feet long, a fair-sized gap between each gray glob. Then it just petered out. I knew it had come out of the truck when they was driving up full, and when I seen them, they was no doubt driving out empty. So I followed the tire tracks. The tire tracks was heavy and easy to follow, and I got up top in under an hour to where I could see clear where the truck had turned around. But it was strange. I couldn’t find no more of the gray stuff, and I couldn’t see where they might have been dumping it. Nothing. It was like the truck just went up there to have a look, turned around and went on home.
I hadn’t yet heard any rumors about them dumping what they call hazardous waste, not yet. But I can’t say I was surprised. Once I got home, I called the Department of Environmental Protection about it. I’d called them quite a few times over the years, and they were always polite on the phone, then, near as I could tell, didn’t do a durned thing. But what else could I do? There ain’t nothing else but throw a lawsuit at them, and lord knows I don’t have the money for that.
My church has never spoke out against the destruction. Some churches have spoke against it, but mine has not. I still go every Sunday.
I can guarantee you I’ve never talked before about any of this out loud.The buck, the dreams, the feel in the woods. Before, I didn’t even want God to hear, I especially didn’t want God to hear, but, of course, they say he hears everything. I was ashamed at how I couldn’t match up what they teach at church and what I know from the woods. But as I get older and, it is true, sicker, I understand more and feel less guilt about it. I understand that church mostly touches just the part of me that knows right from wrong. The part that says, “You better not.” As I get bold enough to think it, I understand church don’t seep into me no deeper or fuller than that, and it is very sad, to feel no more than that from church. Still, I can’t know no different: any sacred I have ever got close to has come straight out of these hills.
My headaches have got worse instead of better. I kept telling myself they wasn’t, and I didn’t say nothing to Mary, but then this spring, they took a leap. Seems they’ve near doubled in what they was hurting before, and I thought what they was hurting before was just shy of unbearable.
As the headaches get worse, the dreams do, too. Looking back now, I believe it started, these new ones, with me dreaming animals with metal for teeth. A couple times I dreamed just that, normal deer with metal pressed in their gums. Then I dreamed I shot a buck and went to gut him, and I found he had a plastic bag for a belly. After that, I dreamed I was out walking and found glass scat. I dreamed leaves falling as ash. Then those dreams passed, too, and I stopped dreaming animals, I stopped dreaming woods at all. Instead, I dream that the world tilts, and I see crowds of good people can’t keep their footing, and they all fall and slide into a corner. Or I dream I’m out in my yard, and everything just stops. It’s like a clock running down, one where you don’t notice the ticking until it stops, but then it does stop, and I feel the universe dead quiet in its halt. And now, finally, I’ve got to where I dream without pictures at all. It’s just a dream of sound. There is nothing to the dream but an alarm going off, a horn with a beat to it: Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa. I don’t need no Daniel to interpret that dream.
There is what my reason tells me. There is what my church tells me. There is what my dreams tell me. There is what this land tells me. I’m coming to accept that I’ll never bring all those things together before I die. But on my strongest days, I can tell myself without guilt or fear, it is not paganism or idolatry or sacrilege or sin. It’s just what I know. And what they tell me, these things I finally let myself trust, is what we’re doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide.
The day before Thanksgiving, 1958, was the first time I felt it. It wouldn’t be until a very long time afterwards I could put words to it, like I have now. For a good many years after it happened, when I talked to myself about it—because I sure didn’t talk to nobody else about it—I just named it by the buck me and Robby never did find. I needed to call the feeling by something solid, I didn’t know how to do it better, and looking back now, I think the way I called it was just fine. Even though the buck hadn’t really been there. Him being gone, seems to me, made calling it by him even righter.
As I got older, like I said, I started feeling the hum off all live things, even dirt and rock. And I could make myself feel how I was part of the land just by letting down something inside me, I got practiced that way. A letting-down at will. But the warm current and the loss of me in order to become me huge, me all, only happened three times after that Thanksgiving, and only once as strong. And I’ve never been able to make the feeling come. Only a word comes that until now I’ve never felt safe using for it because I know that word as a Christian thing.
It’s hard to tell stories about hunting for things that never get found. I try not to be downcast. I try to keep hold of my heart. I have Mary, and I have my boys. Some of the woods are left, and I still have the strength in my legs to walk up into them. Even with the problems in my head, I can get back in the mountain, and many people, like Robby, sick now with diabetes and the cancer both, can’t even do that. And despite my recent terrible dreams, something different happened in my sleep, just a week ago.
I went to bed real early, before it was dark, with a headache so bad it was upsetting my stomach. I fell asleep pretty quick, and then I dreamed I was in a little grassy clearing. It felt good to me in that clearing, how I do love being down in a place, the good safe feeling of land all around. Then, while I was standing there quiet and glad, an old doe walked up to me. She stepped right up to me, and I looked back into her brown eyes, and she said, “This is what it’s like inside my head.”
Then she shelled her head open. It just fell open in easy halves. And as she did it, there spilled out of it and over me this light a color of green I’d never seen before.
The light from her head carried in it the feeling I’d had in the little room where the buck wasn’t. That feeling I’d only had twice since. That feeling I had never been able to make come on my own. Only this time, when I blended beyond myself with the sureness, the peace, the sureness and peace kept growing. Bigger beyond anything I’d ever felt, it swelled and spread, I swelled and spread, until there was not anything else. No woods and no doe and no light and no me. Until there was all. It was all. Not nothing. Not something. Just all.
I guess you’d call it the peace that passeth understanding. I guess you’d say it come by grace.
Lace
DANE CAME looking more like Jimmy Make than any baby I ever had. That was good. Make sure Jimmy Make knew. The next eight years passed blurrier than any other part of my life, my life became my kids then, and I have not one regret over that, but when I look back on the thirty-five years I have lived, those are the eight I remember least. After Dane was born, Mom gave us a piece of ground out by the turnaround and we put a modular home on it. Jimmy Make always was the type had to live on a hard road. Two years after Dane, here comes Corey, and around that time, Sheila finally got married to the Parker boy down at Labee, and she moved out. We got the used trailer for Mom because that was easier, Jimmy Make argued at me, than keeping up the “old house,” even though what he called the “old house” was, of course, the homeplace to us. I fought him hard on that. We went three generations back in that one house, three more in an even older place now ruint down to foundation stones further up the cove. But Mom wouldn’t fight him along with me. I was up there on the porch one afternoon fetching Bant—Mom still kept Bant a good bit, and a huge help to me that was—outright begging Mom not to give up and go, and finally she said to me, in her case-closed voice, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” I see now what she did then and I would soon. Whoever’s bringing in the most money—that’s the way things finally tilt.
After Jimmy got Mom set up in her trailer, he bought his first truck. He did take care of Mom first. He’d been starving for that truck all his life, and I didn’t begrudge him. How men are, him especially.With Jimmy Make pulling down more money than my family had ever had, and me with two, then three, eventually four kids to watch, I ran the woods with Mom less and less often. Most of the time I was so drowned in other work I didn’t even think about it, but Mom would take Bant, and, oh, then I’d remember. Then I’d remember. Bant coming in all quiet like she always was unless you asked her something, like a woods thing herself she was in her quiet. I could see and smell and feel the woods fresh in her, her cheeks a good red from out there, and her eyes shiny and still away. The scent of mast, of duff, of air soaked in trees, all through her jacket and deep in her hair. How damned jealous, that’s the word for it, I would get. Jealous of a six-year-old I loved more than my life. Then I would try to go again, as far as I could with the kids when I had any time, up the creek where they could wade, along the bottom of Cherryboy to pick up nuts, Yellowroot for berries. But I couldn’t just let myself be there in it, the way I could when I had only Bant and Mom was with us, too. It was always the kids, not the woods, I had to be with first.
Things between me and Jimmy Make were different, too, and while the fact of that didn’t surprise me one bit, the ways it was different did. After the wedding, it was hard to want him anymore. I learned that for me it was either have sex or have a home; sex in houses, in beds, meant something else and not enough. But sex was the least of what changed. In less than a year of us living together, things that I’d kind of half-known about him before but had got muffled, now those things came clear. Like how simple he was, no distance or depth in how he could see. While in the confusion of Morgantown, I’d craved that simpleness, now it irked me deep. Like how inside the bobcat walk crouched a confused little kid, and him not even unsimple enough to see that when I did. Like how he started spending all his free time either watching or working on things that ran, because, I couldn’t help but think, that engine noise blotted out anything else might turn up in his head.
“At least he’s not a drinker,” Mom would say when I’d complain. “You got lucky like me that way.” And she was right. The older he got, the less he drank, and I knew I was lucky, I knew where the kind of work he did could push you. Liquor, painkillers, illegal drugs. Take the edge off. A little of the uncertainty. Some of the hurt. But I’d never thought that was the kind of lucky I’d need, and I could tell from the way Mom said it, she’d expected more for me, too. I have to give her that. And I thanked her in my head for not saying what some others did—“and at least he don’t beat on you or the kids.” I still couldn’t be grateful for a bar low as that.
During those early years, though, sometimes I did truly love him, my mind still remembers that, even if my heart cannot. It was like the love and the unlove moved in cycles: I’d unlove for a week or so, then love for a month. Unlove two weeks, love for three. And part of me hated him for going away from us without leaving. But another part could see he wasn’t going so much as being taken away.
Back at the very beginning, before Corey was born, Jimmy Make was working a swing shift, and if I wasn’t completely wrung out, I’d nap on the couch after Bant and Dane went down and wait for him to get home.Wake to the sclop of him dropping his dirty boots on the porch, then his sock feet passing the door, he’d swagger in all gruffy and rough—“That motherfucker Grady, if he . . .” or “Gonna work us dead into the ground this week”—boy wearing a tough man mask. Him in his loose jeans, faded grease stains down the front, his big black-and-white-checked flannel, sweatshirt hood hanging out of that. They had showers at the mine, but black as they’d get and tired as they were, Jimmy’d always miss some places, and although he wouldn’t say anything, he’d want me to find them. He’d walk into the kitchen and strip to his shorts while I fetched from the bathroom a soft washcloth, then I’d pull up a chair to the kitchen sink, get the water running to just the right hot, and Jimmy Make’d settle cross-legged between my knees. I’d hunt the secret places still smeared black, the nape of his neck, the hollow between his shoulder blades, the jut where his jaw-bone met cheek. I’d pull the washrag across his chest, and once in a while, if I went slow enough, he’d let down and tell me where he hurt. “There in the small of my back,” he’d mumble. “See if you can rub it out.” “Around my kneecaps, just pull up and down.”
Usually I’d do the rubbing in bed, Jimmy Make asleep before I finished, and in the damped light off the bedstand lamp, in the gold-flecked mirror on the closet doors, his body still looked like it had at fifteen. I’d watch it there. Even though Jimmy could feel the work in his body, where it showed first was only in his face, and there, only around his eyes. I could get the black anyplace else, but not under and around those eyes.
But that was early on. By the time Corey was born, Jimmy Make had stopped touching me unless he wanted sex and stopped touching the kids unless I reminded him to. And it wasn’t only us he lost interest in. He stopped visiting his mom and dad, too, said he didn’t have time or energy to make the drive. Then his mom died of cancer, quick—Jimmy Make would never talk about that, like he wouldn’t talk about anything—and after the funeral, he seemed to go away from that family altogether and even farther away from us.
Interesting thing was, during those years, me and Jimmy Make hardly fought at all.Way less than we did before we got married.Yeah, I was frustrated, I was disappointed, but mostly I was numb. I figured that’s just what marriage was. I saw Mom and Dad as the exception, because I’d seen it in other grown-ups all my life, and now I learned how you got there by watching the girls my age who’d gotten married even younger than me.Watched their early excitement erode into disappointment, the disappointment fester into anger, and then the anger rub, chafe, grind, until it finally broke them into numb. By then he is your kids’ father, you and him own a house together, you’ve slept in the same bed for thousands of nights, shared thousands of meals, and he is bringing home that union paycheck. I tell you, that is important, no matter how when you’re younger you swear it won’t never be. Kids change that quick. But even without romance, without touching, without even much talking, me and Jimmy Make kept getting tied together tighter and tighter, only it no longer had anything to do with that slim green vine. This was rope. Knotted rope, scratchy and binding, and if you didn’t feel it always, you sure did if you turned.
As the years went by, even Mom went into the woods less often, partly because her arthritis was slowing her down, but mostly because the companies were shutting us out from more and more land. “If they don’t got a gate across the road,” Mogey’d say, “they’ll hoove up dirt in it so you can’t get over, and I’ve seen where they’ve deliberately cut trees across the hollow to keep you out.” “Getting everything posted,” Mom told me, “so even if you’re on foot, you got to worry the whole time are they coming after you.” Maxie Maxwell from down the hollow came up for a cup of coffee and to check in, see if it was happening to us, too. “These are roads and paths into places I been going all my life. They was everybody’s places before.”
One day Mogey came back and told us he’d blown a tire up on Carney Mountain. “Got out of my truck to see what happened, and here it was a roof bolt they’d sharpened and laid bolt-end-up in the road. I found a few more scattered around.”Then where we still could get in, it seemed everything was getting scarcer, harder to find, but the ginseng especially, then the government put more regulations on how much we could take. “Companies can destroy every blade of grass,” Mom said. “But us with our little trowels and hoes, we got to follow the regulations.” And Mom’d always been one who I thought stuck way too tight to rules.
We’d lived with the stripping since the ’50s, but we’d always hated it. I remember vivid how hurt and mad Mom and Dad were over what the company did to the one side of Yellowroot back in the ’70s. But now we heard rumors that the operations were getting bigger than anyone’d imagined, and although I never saw those mines myself, by the last few years before we left for North Carolina, I knew it was true because I saw the coal, running hard and fast and high right out of here. I saw it heaped in endless cars while I waited for ten minutes at railroad crossings with cranky kids, heard it at my back, the rails whining and clicking and groaning, while I loaded groceries in the car at the IGA. I felt it every time I got stuck behind an overloaded coal truck going up a mountain, every time I nearly got creamed by one coming down. But the telling thing was, as those tons and tons of coal went out of here, laid-off miners and their families went right along with them. I look back on it now and feel the fool for not putting two and two together, but with the nose-wiping, bump-kissing, diaper-changing, toddler-chasing, breast-feeding exhaustion, even though I heard the rumors and saw the coal, it didn’t yet mean that much to me.
Six years into the marriage, me pregnant with Tommy, Jimmy Make hurt his back at work. They operated on it, and I still partly blame that. “Whatever you do, don’t ever let em cut on you,” Daddy always said, but Jimmy Make was the kind of person trusted doctors more than himself. He was a good patient, hardly a word of complaint those three months he laid abed at home. Tommy was born in the middle of it all, and Mom, thank god, moved right in for a time. We set up the hospital bed in the living room where he could watch TV, and while Mom would look after the oldest three, I’d nurse Tommy and hold Jimmy’s hand while I did.
I hadn’t held that hand in years, and I realized it by the way the hand had changed. Hardened on both sides now, calluses underneath, chapped skin and jutty bones on top.When the doctor said he’d probably never lose the limp, it cut right through me, I swear it felt like I’d crippled a leg of my own. But Jimmy Make wouldn’t talk about it, and if you tried yourself, he’d turn it into one of his boring borrowed jokes. “Mean as I am, don’t even need two legs.”
