Strange as This Weather Has Been, page 19
Then he went back to work, too early, far as I was concerned, and after that, he ignored us even worse than before he got hurt. I asked him what was going on, if he was in pain all the time or what, but he just shook his head and shrugged. I tell you, I wanted to keep some kind of love fanned up in me, but I couldn’t sustain it with getting nothing back, and by that time, the cycle was moving in reverse. I’d love for just one week, then unlove for a month or more.
We went without sex for some time, his back not mended enough, me recovering from the baby. I won’t never forget that first time back. Me on my back, ears pitched for whether the kids could hear, Jimmy Make on his hands over top of me. His elbows bent, him lurching back and forth, and I felt nothing at all except an irritated patience until I felt the new fat of his belly slapping down against mine. I opened my eyes, and I saw his were closed, I saw him gritting his teeth. Those teeth that had drawn me moonwhite that first October night, darkening now to a walnut stain. I looked, and I not only saw no love in his face, I saw no pleasure, either. What I saw was urgency. Pressure. Strain.
By the end of that year, the extra weight had clobbed up into his cheeks, his skin, and changed the look of his face. It was like his body had been holding on as hard as it could those first eight years in the pulpwood and underground, but then that one big knock had triggered a chain reaction, and even the smell of him changed. What grieved me worst, though, was that live hot wet. That hot wetness in him, what had first pulled me to him, what had kept me coming back—not exactly for the sex, or at least not for the pleasure of the sex, but because of the life, the liveness in him—that hot wetness had been dripping away for some years, but with the injury, it drained clear gone. Jimmy Make was twenty-five years old.
I’d hate myself for feeling that way, I would. Who do you think you are, I’d ask, you’re getting old, too, who are you to look down on him like this? But the truth was, even after four babies, I’d done most of my aging those months carrying Bant, and after that quick-up, I kind of just stayed still. And while most of my age happened on the inside, Jimmy aged only on the outside of him, when it was inside I needed him to grow. Still, I felt guilty about it. Huge guilty, and guilty’s never been a place I often go. I’d get to feeling so guilty that I think I could have overlooked everything else if it hadn’t been for this one thing: I knew he wouldn’t ever see the all of me.
I was pulling in with a load of groceries that February of ’96, Tommy almost two years old in the car seat behind me and the other kids at school. It was early afternoon, we’d had a short high thaw, everything in mud. Jimmy Make was supposed to be on day shift, but with the leaves off the trees, I could see all the way from Mrs. Taylor’s house his truck parked in front of ours. My heart punched hard once against my ribs until I remembered he wouldn’t have driven himself home if he was hurt. And then there tingled from my every pore a colder kind of fear.
I got Tommy in one arm and two bags of groceries in my other, and in that short walk from car to porch, my body went to shivering. I couldn’t help it, it did. Jimmy Make sat on the couch in his work clothes, clean, him leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs, his head lowered, and an orange juice glass of whiskey on the coffee table. The TV was off. He raised his head so little he had to roll his eyes way up to look at me.
“They shut er down,” he said. “Laid ever last one of us off.” Then he dropped his face back down.
I didn’t go to him. I looked away. I walked the few steps to the kitchen, my knees locking on me strange. I didn’t even think to cry, I guess I knew it was too bad for that. But something must have leached over into Tommy because the second I set the groceries down, I felt his whole body stiffen and his chest hollow into wail.
If it had been up to me, I would have stayed in West Virginia at least the six months until the unemployment ran out, but two months into the layoff, Jimmy heard about the construction work in Raleigh, and he said it was smarter to grab that while we could than wait six months and most likely end up with nothing at all. I argued him back, but not really that hard. I knew what he said made sense. And like the back injury had, the layoff thrust us closer together again. At least for a while. Fear can work like that. Or so I thought then.
A week before we left, I carried up to Mom’s trailer a couple garbage bags of stuff she’d said she’d store. We weren’t selling the house, I’d put my foot down on that, Bill Bozer was going to rent from us, but to make room for him and his girlfriend, I had to clear out more than we could take with us south. As I came up on the trailer, I saw Mom out back stacking stovewood that Mogey’s boys had dropped off.
I stopped at the end of the trailer where I could watch her, but she couldn’t very well see me. I set my garbage bags quiet on the ground. She wore a dress that used to be the bright small flower kind but had now drained to beiges and grays. It was part of her dress system, I knew, the way she ordered them by age and stains and tears, this must be one of the oldest, to use for wood-stacking work, and still, over top of it, she wore a sweatshirt, despite that the air was barely cool, and I knew it was to keep the old dress at least a little clean. She bent to the stovewood with a jerkiness, her arthritis, I couldn’t help but flinch, hooked chunks into her left elbow, straightened up, then wobbled the few steps to the neat stack against her back wall. The wood clapping into place, she was making ready, the way she always had, even though it was May and she wouldn’t be burning this until late September.
Then suddenly she stopped, one hand on the pile, the other on her hip, and she looked at me like she’d known all along I was there. I could hear her soft panting. I tried to read her face, but right then, she turned away. “Good for you-all to get a fresh start,” she’d said when we told her we’d decided to go. “Pretty soon won’t be nothing at all left for young people here.” But that’s not what I’d seen in her face before she turned it.
I walked over to the dumped wood and piled a load in my own arm. Hickory, red oak, good long hot-burning wood Mogey’d sent her.Then I started ricking with her.The bark raspy on my bare hands, scraping up my wrists, but I just piled heavier, moved faster, and I felt Mom alongside me, but I never lifted my eyes to see her straight on. We worked side by side for a full hour with no sound but the chunks falling and knocking. Worked until we had two pickup loads ricked, and then it started to rain.
That North Carolina, I tell you. Down there, you just can’t get any grip on the land. No traction. No hold. If the eight years between Dane being born and us moving to North Carolina were the fastest of my life, the two years we spent in North Carolina were the emptiest and the least real.
I won’t ever forget driving down there, maneuvering six lanes and more of traffic with a panic perched in my chest. Me in that old Cavalier with all four kids, the three not in car seats with their faces jammed against the windows, and Corey saying, “How come there’s so many cars, Mom? Is there a football game or something?” I was following Jimmy Make with his truck loaded scary high with our stuff, tarp flapping over top of it, I could see that flapping all the way around the U-Haul he was dragging. Then I lost sight of him, had to risk our lives in the fast lane to find him, and goddamn you, Jimmy Make, I said in my head because how like him that was. Then I saw the exit he’d written on a McDonald’s napkin for me, and his rig ahead, already down below us at a light, and right past that, there “Foxwood” was.
He’d gone down a couple weeks before and rented this tall skinny half-apartment, half-house crammed between a bunch of other houses looked exactly like ours. A “townhouse,” they called it, and I lived there a year and never did figure out why. When I pulled into a parking spot beside him and stepped out of the car, first thing I noticed was a nonstop aaahhhh like a broken refrigerator running hard into an amplifier, but not until that night did I realize it was the interstate and it wasn’t ever going away. Jimmy Make was already unbolting the U-Haul, the kids clustering anxious and close. “How do you-all like it?” he said.
I really looked at it for the first time. “It’s nice,” Bant said softly, and I saw what she meant. The outside looked newer and nicer than anyplace we’d ever thought of living, but of course that was before we learned how shoddily it was built. “Yeah, it does look nice,” I told Jimmy Make, and he grinned.
Jimmy Make and me carried in the couch, the beds, the dressers, balancing each piece between us, and Jimmy took the harder backing-up way even though I could see the back pain in his face, and I tried to get him to trade or stop, but he’d just bite his lip and shake his head. Bant and Corey toted boxes and smaller things—I had Dane watching Tommy—and we spent hours moving in. And right there, I should have known, I should have seen how it was going to be. We’d gotten there mid-afternoon, and many people passed us, on foot, in their cars, and there had to be people all over those cramped-up buildings looking out. But most people didn’t even act like they saw us, much less volunteer to offer a hand. That never would have happened back home.
By the time we finally got everything inside, we were too tired to put the beds together, so we slept on mattresses on the floor. At first, me and Jimmy and the boys in the room that would be ours, Bant saying she’d stay by herself, but within five minutes she was there with us, too. Once everybody got settled, Jimmy Make rolled over to face me, grunting like he always did when he shifted his back. “Don’t worry, Lace,” he whispered. “We’re gonna make er here.” Then he rolled over on his other side, and within a minute, fell asleep.
I wasn’t even tired. I lay stiff on my back, not touching Jimmy Make, my eyes squeezed shut. I heard the kids quiet into sleep—they went almost as quick as Jimmy—and then, the silence they left behind—I listened as it filled full of noise. At first, just the constant interstate aaahhhhh I noticed, but then, my ear tuning, doors slamming in the parking lot, cars starting, an alarm, the gun and brake of vehicles on the access road, them layering into the room. Then, closer, the layers drawing in, to the left of me, a TV pressing, a wah wah of muffled conversation under that, I shut my eyes even tighter like that would keep it out, then a second TV, behind the wall on my right. I finally opened my eyes, try to figure out where everything was coming from, and that’s when I saw the outside lights surging in, staining that room nearly the color of day, and it wasn’t so much the noise or the light, I didn’t understand then, but I would later, it wasn’t the interruption of sleep. It was the foreign place pressing in on us. I flipped onto my side, pulling my pillow over my head, and as I did that, I noticed beside the mattress where Dane and Corey slept, the old chest of drawers. Daddy’s chest of drawers, that had been in his and Mom’s room until Mom moved out and gave it to me. And a loneliness came into me like a wind blowing through, and for two straight years, that wind never stopped.
Down there, I learned fast, you couldn’t ever really get outside. Couldn’t even get in trees, in brush, much less get into hills, you weren’t ever out of sight or sound of a road, a building, a parking lot, and sometimes I’d miss backhome woods so bad I’d feel land in my throat. The townhouses had around them skinny strips of grass, then a whole bunch of parking lot like a hard hot lake. There was no other place for the kids to get out and play, and the first summer, I’d drag out a kitchen chair in the morning before the heat got past bearing and watch Tommy and Corey ride their Big Wheels, until the apartment manager told me kids couldn’t do that. We’d been there two months by then, and as the manager walked away, I realized she was the first person in all that time who’d said more than three sentences to me, aside from people who worked in stores, where they were paid to be friendly. People there lay as flat as the land, no up and down to them, and it was like everybody walked around with a door in front of their faces, no, two doors, this thick screen door, and behind that, a heavy storm one. And occasionally they’d open the storm door and speak through the screen. But then they’d close the storm door behind them again.
“People around here won’t speak to me.” I finally brought it up with Jimmy Make one night.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “People around here don’t speak to nobody.”
“I thought the South was supposed to be friendly.”
He broke another piece of cornbread into his chili and shook his head. “This ain’t the South,” he said. “That’s what the guys at work from the real South say. ‘This ain’t the South.’”
Jimmy Make did try a little harder down there. One of the things he did was find us a park, oh, he was proud when he came home with that news—“I found us some woods to get into!” We drove up there the first weekend we got, and he really had found woods, and yeah, they were flat and tameish, you couldn’t feel the land as easily around you, but at least you had real ground under your feet, real trees over your head, and if we could just get out here, I thought. If we could just get out here every other week.
But then the first airplane passed overhead, low to where it looked like it was moving no faster than a car in a parking lot and loud enough to make Tommy whimper. Within five minutes of that one, a second came, then a third, a fourth, Corey leaping up in the air with a stick pretending to hit it. Finally we gave up and went back to our car, where we saw on the map what we’d decided not to see before.This big pink square of airport right above the small green of park.
A lot of that first year was just a floating, it makes it hard for me to even tell about it, nothing to touch. Bant was nearly as unhappy as me, quietly surly about it she was, and Dane just lived in a daze. Jimmy Make was earning less working construction than he had with the union job back home, and in Raleigh, everything except food cost more. But it wasn’t just the lack of money that made us poorer in North Carolina. It was what you saw around you, what you had to compare yourself to, and I’d never understood about that before. And if that didn’t keep us in our place, then there was the way people looked at us, regardless of how much money they had. Somehow people knew we were different from them, even before we opened our mouths, although I couldn’t for the life of me see how we looked much different from anybody else. It took me back to Morgantown again, the way the out-of-state students saw us, the way some professors did. And I know now that if we hadn’t moved to Raleigh, me and Jimmy Make would have frayed loose even faster than we did, and it wasn’t really the roses on our anniversary, the extra time he spent at home, the way he looked for parks, that kept us together. It was that smallness North Carolina made me. I was nothing in North Carolina, nothing or nobody I knew counted for anything in North Carolina, while Jimmy Make, he could pass in and out of that North Carolina world. He didn’t love it, but he could move in it. Jimmy Make got a little bigger in North Carolina, while I got a whole lot littler.
When the lease was up on the townhouse, we had to leave for a cheaper place. Almost didn’t find one, and never did find one big enough, but Jimmy Make finally heard of something through a guy at work.This huddle of two-story brick buildings behind a shut-down textile mill, them squatty and dribbly-stained, the Cat Piss apartments I still call them to myself. I’d taken back up smoking by then, I’d quit clear back when I got pregnant the first time, but in North Carolina cigarettes were cheap, and god knows I needed something to put inside of me. And often, that second summer, late at night, the only time I had to myself, I’d sit out on the stoop of the building and have a cigarette. I’d sit there, and naturally I’d be thinking of home, of Mom, of mountain dark, and I’d try to keep my eyes down low, to the concrete, the ratty grass, because Raleigh had no sky at night. Over Raleigh at night, at best a fuzzy film, at worst, if it was cloudy, a strange orange dome. And sometimes the churchy part of me would whisper, is this punishment? Another part of me whispered, is this a joke? All those self-important teenage years, how I’d wanted nothing but to get out. And here I sat, my sweet peach-pink—an orange glare stinking of exhaust.
It was in those apartments, our second March away, that we got the call. I was on my knees under the dining room table, trying to rub peas out of the filthy carpet, and I could hear Bant beating on Corey in the living room and I was yelling at her to quit, and then the phone rang. Jimmy Make answered it. To this day, I thank God for that.
“Lace?”There was a crack in his voice. My scrubbing hand stopped. He walked up behind me and swallowed so hard I could hear his throat. “That was Mogey.” I looked up. His face had gone white with red stripes through it. Right there I knew somebody’d died, and then I knew if it’d been Mogey on the phone, it was Mom who was gone. “Mom?”
Jimmy Make nodded like a sleepwalker.
A heart attack, and that was it. I hadn’t even known she’d had heart problems, and if she’d known it herself, she never let on.
What do I remember of the trip home? That my mind let very little in. I remember standing in that leafless dead-grass cemetery on the far side of Prater and seeing how every one of my kids had outgrown their Sunday clothes, and I hadn’t known it because since North Carolina, we’d stopped going to church. I remember at the reception afterwards spying on the table a jar of blackberry jam that I knew was one of Mom’s, and you’d think it would have made me cry, but instead I nearly threw up. I remember on the way back to Raleigh rolling down my car window in the last little town before the interstate because I all of a sudden wanted woodsmoke smell. I remember Jimmy Make saying roll it up, the kids are cold. I don’t remember much else.
It took me ten days back in Raleigh to thaw. And then there I was in North Carolina with Mom dead and nobody to talk to but the kids. I mean nobody even to speak to, and it wasn’t like when Daddy died, when I’d had all kinds of time to get used to it, and then afterwards, I still had Mom at home. I crawled into bed, turned off the lights, and I drew my knees to my chest. I couldn’t help it. I fell in the tunnel again.
