The Ash Family, page 6
I was turning to leave when he noticed me. “Sister,” he said. “So what’s it going to be? You need me to bring you back to Asheville?”
“I have to decide today?” I said, disingenuously, just to get his response.
“We’d miss you,” he said. “I, personally, would miss you.”
“I like being missed,” I said.
“Stay,” he said. He leaned onto me. I could feel the cool intake of his breath as he smelled the part of my hair. “You’ll stink like a real Asher in no time,” he said.
Isaac said that even a hypocrite could be an agent of change because that was what interested him—the lifestyle, the feeling of being different. But he also wanted all the normal things, buying things and earning things, a house and kids. We’d gone to marches and then what had we done? I’d never been to an action with water cannons and rubber bullets. But Dice had, and Bay had, and the family had. Dice had said they had another solution, a real solution. I’d always known there was something more.
And here was Bay, asking me to stay.
“All right,” I said. I was hoping for a kiss on the mouth, but he only kissed my forehead.
CHAPTER 6
A girl I’d seen the previous day, the girl with the tattoo, woke me before dawn the next morning, when the black trees were just a slight perturbation on the blue-black sky. She brought me a cup of cream, like sweet white grease. “They’re heading off,” she said, “so you’ve got to help me with the milking.” She said her name was Queen. I again examined that tattoo down the center of her throat and into her shirt collar, a thick dark line, finger width, so it looked like she was sliced in two. She was young. My age.
A school bus idled in the courtyard, and the family members hustled out to it through the clouds of exhaust, lit orange and red. Before I’d blinked the blear out of my eyes, they were gone: the bus, Dice’s truck, and Bay’s car. Now I could hear the cowbells and the sheep bells, the rooster.
Queen wouldn’t tell me how long they would be away. She had pink cheeks, a round face, lank hair grown-out pageboy length, perfectly round nostrils, and a slow, dazed way of talking. Queen roused the enormous, sleepy cows and showed me how to clean their rears with a stiff brush, how to wash their teats with a sponge and warm water. I asked her what the cows thought of us, and she said they could tell I was nervous. The sun came in, and the hay-clotted air became, abruptly, a gold mine. Queen showed me to a thirteen-year-old heifer, and instructed me to set down my stool and bucket in the straw, and to grip the bucket firmly between my legs so she wouldn’t ruin the milk by kicking it over. “Good,” Queen said as I pinched and squeezed the cow’s warty teats. But within a few minutes, pain wore out my tendons. Meanwhile Queen had milked a whole bucket.
She glanced over at me. “Not everyone can get the milk out,” she said. She seemed to be assessing what to say next. “You can just rest. We won’t be in any rush till they all get back.”
I knew I shouldn’t want to rest, remembering Sara saying earn our trust when she held out her clothes to me, but with Queen’s permission, I stopped. I rubbed my forearms in relief. The patient cow gave me a brown-eyed look. I asked Queen about her tattoo. “I was on drugs,” she said. I watched milk issue from her fists. “I came here to be free,” she said, “freedom in the mountains.” She flushed and patted the cow’s flank.
“And you found what you wanted?” I said.
For a long time all I heard was the hiss of milk into her bucket. “I’m more free than I was before,” she said, “but wherever I go, I find myself.” Unlike Dice, unlike Sara, Queen seemed to be still working things out. She smiled again. “Even though Dice says there’s no such thing as the definite self, did he tell you that?”
I nodded.
“You remind me of a girl I used to know,” Queen said. “Cassie. She was a watcher too.”
I moved my stool closer. She began talking to me about actions that create authenticity. For example, she said, once you get a tattoo, you’re the kind of person who would have a tattoo. For example, she’d never been sexy, never felt sexy, and then she had sex for the first time and though she felt just the same, she knew she was now sexy. The action made her so, incontrovertibly. I nodded along, though I didn’t completely understand.
“It’s just like the Ash Family,” Queen said, and she was smiling again, at something that seemed in the past or future: “If you try to be a part of it, you are,” she said. “You have to be open.”
“Dice said I am open,” I said.
“Start by telling me about how your mother let you down.”
“What do you mean?” I said, so quickly I didn’t have time to consider it.
Queen tilted her head. “Yesterday, at breakfast, Dice said it.” Queen’s tone was determined. “She left you alone, right? She abandoned you?”
I remembered my mother’s reflection in the linoleum at the airport, such a big solid woman made small and uncertain by a trick of the light. It felt like someone was pressing two fingers into the base of my throat. “Yes,” I said. “She was horrible.” Maybe, in a certain light.
Queen patted my shoulder the way she’d patted the cow.
I said, “Why didn’t you want to go on the action?”
She smiled. “I didn’t want to fast,” she said. “I’m afraid of going hungry, so Dice didn’t make me.” She squeezed my arm. Like Dice’s, her grip was so strong it felt mechanical. “I know it’s a lot to take in at first,” she said, “but no one here will ever make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
I looked at the ground and nodded.
“Believe me,” she said. Her eyes were pink.
She let go of me. A cow bellowed, its voice breaking. Queen wiped at her face. I wondered how she got that name but I was afraid to ask. “Do you think they’ll manage to stop the mountaintop removal?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, tilting the udder. The cow licked its blue nose. “But Dice has performed many miracles.” She paused. “He got me off drugs, right when I thought I would die. I was at the end of the line.” She was distant, thoughtful. “He heals without fake-world medicine.”
This reminded me that I needed to go to a store. “Is there a car around? Can you take me?”
Queen said, “Why would you want to leave, when we have everything we need?”
“I’m going to get my period soon,” I said.
“We don’t have to leave for that.”
“I’d love to pick up a few other things,” I said. I craved so many foods, foods I planned to steal or eat right at the cash register: Peach Looza. Coconut water, the sugary, viscous kind filled with white cubes of pulp. Chocolate chip cookies, lined up in a plastic rib cage. I was going to put lotion all over my raw hands. “Come on,” I said. “Dice didn’t mention any rules about errands.”
“Most of the women here can’t get their periods anymore,” Queen said. I was surprised. Everyone on the farm seemed young.
Instead of a trip to town, she brought me to the storage house and pulled out a cookie tin. She showed me the little rubber cups for the most of it, and special store-bought soap to clean the cups, and then reusable pads with snaps on the wings, hand-sewn out of novelty fabrics, dogs flying airplanes, dancing skeletons, to hide stains. We could dump our blood in the humanure wooden toilet box and cover it with sawdust, like anything else, she told me. “Listen,” Queen said. “They’re not going to be straightforward with you about whether you can go to town. They’ll say, ‘Why would you want to leave, when what you’re looking for is right here?’ ”
I thought back—Dice had said that; Queen had, a minute ago.
“I’ve learned it’s better not to ask,” Queen said. “Sometimes you might go, accompanied,” she said. “They don’t like it when we leave. If you try to leave, they follow you. And then if they think you’ve closed off, they do this thing called a rebirth.”
I wondered if she was speaking from experience. “What’s a rebirth?” I said.
“It’s a ceremony,” she said. She shook her head as if to clear it. “Dice wants to keep the family together, that’s all. And if we’re open enough, we’ll be able to fix the world. It sounds crazy,” she said, “but we’ve all seen this light around him, he glows a little bit.”
Queen closed the tin, red with silver reindeer, which reminded me of my mother’s tin, and that necklace with its silver garlands, and the earrings, and how I was supposed to be in Virginia, learning expository writing and pushing my way into a future more auspicious than a knickknack store. Then she tucked the tin back among the gold bottles of peaches and tomatoes.
Queen looked me over. “Let’s cut your hair. Get that padding off the brain. And for the family resemblance, you know.”
“Cut it right now?” I said, lifting my hair, which felt like satin in the cold.
She watched me, smiling vaguely. “I promise, you’ll really feel like you belong.”
She used the sheep shears. The shears were two facing knives connected by a U of bendy metal—no hinge, like scissors, just a hooklike structure she squeezed with her hands. She held my skull with her fingertips, tilted it back and forth as the shears crunched into my long hair. With each clip my head lightened, bobbing up like a spring.
There wasn’t a mirror around to check what I looked like. In the compost toilet room there was a burned cookie sheet nailed where the mirror would have been. I kept seeking my face in it.
“I bet I look like a mental patient,” I said.
“You are one!” Queen said, and kissed me on the head.
I could feel the cold breeze blowing on my skull.
* * *
Only five of us were present at lunch. I didn’t recognize the other three. They ate quietly, standing with their plates by the sink, their heads bent.
In the afternoon, I followed the sheep higher up the mountains. I was learning. A few headstrong ewes led the flock, and so it really wasn’t sixty sheep I had to control, but four. When a sheep turned the wrong way, I’d run to stand in front of her, and sometimes that was enough. She’d shift direction without even acknowledging me, like a cat. When that didn’t work, I’d stand in front and yell a little, “Ay ay ay.” When that didn’t work I’d stand, yell, and shake a branch, making myself look bigger. If I had to escalate, I’d try jumping, throwing sticks, yelling, running right at the sheep, and pushing on their heads and shoulders. I had an innate advantage, because sheep already fear anything with eyes at the front of the head, instead of at the sides. Front eyes are for predators.
That afternoon, the sheep tromped over a stream, frozen on top, moving underneath. My knees and hands cracked the ice as I splashed into the water. I looked up and I saw a heron, the blue slashes along its narrow head, the long white curved throat, the massive tucked body, dipping its foot in the stream.
I was in the mood to believe. The family had made me receptive to new possibilities—yes, they’d done their work. It was getting lost in Pisgah, it was Dice’s spell, it was everyone telling me, over and over, that I had to be open, and that they could tell if I wasn’t. I lost track of myself; I felt I was becoming the heron. What a relief it was to move from looking to being. So this is what it’s like to be a bird, gravity so light on my hollow bones, my long curled neck readying for a strike.
The heron startled and took off, a rigid white kite. I could hear someone rushing through the woods behind me, a girl’s voice cursing, then a shuddering crack, and the heron jerked in the air and followed its own neck to the ground. Queen emerged from the woods, carrying a rifle. She walked through the stream and approached the heron, which beat its wings helplessly against the stream bank. “Hey, Harmony,” she said, and laughed at my aghast face. “I’ve got dinner.”
“You can’t eat a heron,” I said.
“Yeah, you can,” she said. “They taste like frogs’ legs.” Some dark blood trickled into the stream, which pulled it quickly away, toward Tennessee. She slung the immense corpse into her arms. One wing spilled whitely to the ground. “We eat otters, beavers, raccoons.” I searched her face for remorse and found none. “You’re all right. Go on,” she said. “Go on and bring the sheep back.”
* * *
That night, the compost bucket under the sink was filled with blue feathers. Queen had dredged the bird’s long breast in flour and fried it with mushrooms. I ate the heron, dead blue angel, because I was here to understand how it all worked—the processes of stars, trees, and animals, the way to wring out a living from dirt. I’d eaten deer; this was the same. I had this idea that if I found everything agreeable and easy and comprehensible, then my redemption wouldn’t be real. It had to be hard, to hurt, like my hand. So I would be okay with not leaving. I would be okay with no modern medicine. I would be okay with no couples. In the fake world, people competed to live with perfect ease and that was why the Earth was dying.
And I could look in any direction and see goodness. The following morning, I woke to find every needle of pine jacketed by a low frozen cloud, sparkling with rime. The extended laugh of the yellow-shafted flickers echoed upward, with their endless tapping. I reached the kitchen before anyone else, and while I made pancakes for the five of us who were left behind, the clouds drew back raggedly from the lavender-blue sky, and all the mountains shone.
It was not restful, but it was ascetic, which could be mistaken for restfulness.
Soon Queen came to work beside me. I admired how quickly she lit the woodstove. She cored apples, filled them with butter, and baked them till they collapsed, red skins turned leathery gold. I liked her again.
“Changing weather,” Queen said, nodding at the sun on the sleet. “Sometimes here there’s a double rainbow, and there’s a third rainbow and a fourth rainbow, always in the same place if you know where to look, around the sun.”
“That can’t be true,” I said.
“I promise. I’ll show you,” she said. “Did you know Dice can change the weather with his mind?”
“Sure,” I said. Queen seemed naïve, but I couldn’t make sense of that: she’d tried out more lives than I had. “Later,” I said, “will you tell me more about your life before you got here?”
She looked surprised. She smiled at me, stroking her vertical tattoo. I wondered if it felt different from her other skin. “We’re not supposed to talk too much about the fake world,” she said.
“Does everyone always follow the rules?” I said.
She gave me a long, probing look. “Don’t mess with me, Harmony,” she said.
“I’m not!” I said. And she surprised me by bestowing upon me a glorious sunbeam of a smile. That moment set the pattern for what would become the center of our friendship: we recognized in each other the person who might lead us astray.
Breakfast was quiet. We knew our brothers and sisters were planning a hunger strike, sitting on the cold ashy mountaintop all chained together, in frost, in sleet. I turned at little sounds, like that wind arrow caught in the holler bluster. No, it was just the dogs on the porch; no, it was just the pine branch scraping at the window; no, it was just the wind.
Queen milked. I collected eggs. We fed the pigs. “Did you know these pigs are guarding something?” Queen said.
I shook my head.
“See that door behind them?” There was a door in the back wall of their stall—I hadn’t noticed it.
“There’s a room back there. That’s where Dice buries departed friends,” Queen said. “I mean, his faithful dogs, the good rams.”
“Oh,” I said. “For a moment, I almost thought you meant people.”
She laughed. “You don’t think dogs and sheep are as worthwhile as people?”
I shook my head uncertainly. “Have you been in there?”
“No,” Queen said. “It’s locked.” She snaked her arm around me. “Last year, when the room got full, we milled up some old bones and used them in the garden, for phosphorus. He’s thoughtful about everything,” she said. “I like thinking that nothing gets forgotten.”
* * *
The family returned that afternoon. The bus arrived, then the truck, then Bay’s car, and Queen made me help her fill up the largest cauldron with water to boil. The family came out, dirty, gaunt, and terribly quiet. They removed their clothes, standing on their toes on the dead grass. They wore underwear or undershirts or nothing at all under the subdued half-light of the afternoon. They were like a conquered army. Dice tested the water, then the family washed, with buckets and dippers, in water slippery with cow-fat soap.
Bay walked toward us. I looked at his scars, like countless shining splinters. My heart lurched remembering he’d kissed me.
“What happened?” I said.
“Wait for Dice to say,” he said.
* * *
We ate salami and bananas and grits for dinner. Dice ate nothing. Afterward we pulled the chairs in a circle in the meeting room. A circle of chairs meant a story; a square of chairs meant singing.
“I want to talk about failure,” Dice said. “You might think we failed, but I’m not so sure.” He spoke very quietly. “Once I saw a corpse in the desert and it was only dry bones but it lay atop a patch of flowers.” In school, we always avoided looking at the teacher. But here, our attention made Dice a radiating star.
“There aren’t many wild places left in these mountains,” Dice said. “Look for the clean trunks. To the missionaries who first scouted the Blue Ridge,” he said, “these trees were a hundred feet tall. Four hundred years ago North Carolina was wild grapes as far as the eye could see, sugaring a horse’s legs to the knee, and you could catch a passenger pigeon for dinner just by swinging a heavy pan through the air.” The family hummed and sighed together. “Remember what you’re struggling for,” Dice said. “We’ll find the ennobling conflicts that will convey us to a better world.”
Out of the thousands expected, Dice said, less than a hundred showed. The first day no media came either. So for the eighty or so present, there was extra pressure to fast and stay, and so many disappeared in hunger and frustration till it was only the twenty of the family left. The next night they unchained their arms because no one cared one way or the other. “But is this failure?” Dice said.
