Black Sunshine: A Novel, page 20
He shook her by the arm and fear turned his voice harsh. “Don’t you?”
“What if I do? What business is it of yours? You’re not my father.”
“No, I’m not. I’m the reason you don’t have one.”
“You’re what? Let go of me!” She yanked her arm free. “And butt out!” She turned and started up the steps.
“Why?” No anger, no confrontation. A simple question, asked softly. She stopped but didn’t turn back around. “Can you tell me that? A beautiful girl like you. Your whole life ahead of you. What could possibly be so bad that…?”
He watched all the air whoosh out of her. Her shoulders sagged, her head drooped. He said nothing else. She’d tell him or she wouldn’t.
When she turned slowly back around, the girl who faced him wasn’t the same one who’d yanked her arm out of his grasp. This was a scared, broken kid. Granny’d said she’d lost JoJo in the mist; Will had just found her.
“Okay. You want to know so bad, I’ll tell you. But you’re the only one. I ain’t told a living soul and I don’t intend to. You got to swear you won’t tell nobody, neither.”
Will had made a similar promise to her father a long time ago and he’d kept it all these years.
“I won’t tell anybody.”
Tears welled up in her eyes and slipped down her cheeks. “I guess somebody needs to understand, to explain it all…after.”
Will swallowed hard. She wanted to unburden herself so he could explain it to Granny and everyone else in her family when she was dead! It suddenly hit him—that’s why she’d given Jamey that necklace. JoJo wasn’t just contemplating suicide; the clock was ticking.
She sat back down on the step beside him, looked like she almost collapsed on it. She wasn’t wearing a sweater, but when she started to tremble, he didn’t think it had anything to do with the cold. He took off his windbreaker and draped it over her shoulders; she didn’t appear to notice.
“Do you know anything about Huntington’s Chorea?”
“I think I may have heard the name of it, a disease, right?
When she spoke again, her voice was flat, emotionless, like she’d been asked to read aloud the ingredients label on a can of Spam.
“It usually shows up when you’re about 40. It causes certain cells in your brain to waste away. They just…die.” She turned and looked at him. “First you walk funny—herky-jerky like. Then you start to shake and twitch all over, arms fly up, legs kick, and you can’t do nothin’ ’bout it. You scream, holler, make weird, awful noises. You lose your memory, your personality and in the end, you lose your mind, go completely insane—have to be looked after like you’s a baby.”
“Somebody you know, someone you care about has Huntington’s, don’t they, JoJo?”
She turned away from him and stared out into the darkness.
“Yeah, that’s right. Matter of fact, I know lotsa skinnys. I signed up to be part of this research project at UK—paid good, $300—and I met all kinda people with Huntington’s. The disease is hereditary, so of course they come to the University of Kentucky to study it—’cause everybody knows all us hillbillies up in the hollers is married to our cousins!”
The spark of anger flickered and died, left her voice flat and lifeless again. “I ain’t really surprised they come here. Them blue people up Troublesome Creek, that’s no old wife’s tale, you know. They were real.”
The blue people of Troublesome Creek were descendents of Martin Fugate, who settled in Eastern Kentucky in the early 1800s and brought with him a genetic disorder that turned the skin blue. Isolation, a limited gene pool and time did the rest and the disorder spread through the mountains around Hazard. The people whose skin was blue—a dark shade, almost purple—kept to the hollows. Men, women, old people, and children hid there from the world; outsiders thought the stories about them were myths. Finally, in the 1960s, a hematologist from the University of Kentucky searched them out and discovered they suffered from an easily treatable enzyme deficiency.
“So UK is studying the spread of Huntington’s Chorea among mountain people and—?”
“They was gonna get around to that part.” She turned and faced him and cried fiercely. “But the study I was in, wasn’t lookin’ for nothin’. Not nothin’! They needed college kids to use as a control group so they could measure the effects of Huntington’s on hand-eye coordination.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not getting the connection between…”
Her voice grew soft. “They wasn’t looking…but they found it all the same. Huntington’s goes down through families and they know how. They know what gene carries it.”
A remark Granny’d made began to flit around the outside of Will’s memory like a moth around a porch light.
“And they can spot that gene with a blood test.”
JoJo took a breath and in that moment a sudden horrible foreboding came over Will, a sense that something had been hurled at him, something he couldn’t duck because he couldn’t remember what it was.
“They did blood tests on all the people in the study. The control group, too—for comparison.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “And they found it. In my blood. That gene. I got it. I got Huntington’s.”
She turned to him, her face slathered with silent tears. “I’m gonna turn into a skinny.” There was disbelief in her voice. “Me, a skinny.” Then her voice hardened. “I’m gonna jerk ’n holler and slobber…and then I’m gonna go crazy and die!”
The fluttering moth of memory landed and Granny’s voice rang clear in Will’s mind: “You might ’member, Joanna’s mama went all crazy like, hollerin’ and carryin’ on, and they had to put her away. Well, Joanna’s granny done the same thing…”
“Oh, JoJo!” That was all he could say.
He reached out instinctively and pulled her to him and she let go and began to cry, great gulping, heaving sobs that went on and on. Will held her tight, patted her back, and gently rocked her. It took a long time for her to cry herself out. When she did, she was exhausted and shaky, but calm. Will reached into the pocket of the windbreaker draped around her shoulders, fished out the red bandanna he’d found in the bottom of the gym bag he’d borrowed from Deke, and handed it to her.
“Only I ain’t gonna do it,” she said as she wiped tears off her face. Her voice was quiet and rational. But when she looked out into the darkness, her hands trembled. “I ain’t gonna let that happen. I’d rather be dead.”
“But I thought you said…40, that symptoms appeared at about age 40. You’re not even 20 yet!”
“I said it’s usually about age 40. But…” She stopped and her voice went dead again, mouthed words off a teleprompter. “A defect on chromosome number four causes a part of the DNA to repeat too often. In normal people, it repeats 10 to 35 times. In people with Huntington’s, it repeats up to one hundred twenty times. The more times it repeats…well, big number, bad case! And the bigger the number, the younger you are when you get it.”
She stopped, looked at him, and almost whispered the rest. “You can only pass it on if you have it, and when it’s passed down in an unbroken line through the same family, each succeeding generation’s DNA repeats way more times than the last.”
Will’s mind spun. Joanna had died young, but she’d had it or JoJo wouldn’t. JoJo’s grandmother’d had it, too, and so had her great grandmother. Four generations—that he knew about—in one family, from her great grandmother to JoJo and…
“Jamey!” Will croaked the name, then looked a question at JoJo he couldn’t wrap words around.
JoJo nodded slowly, her face an expressionless mask.
“He was s’posed to get a physical ’fore he went to work in #7 but he never done it. I used that as an excuse, took him up Lexington.” She managed something that resembled a smile. “But his ain’t nowhere near as bad. His number ain’t even half as big as mine. Maybe all that time when his brain didn’t get no oxygen…maybe that was a good thing. ’Course, he didn’t understand where we was or what they’s doin’ to him. He don’t know nothin’.”
JoJo and Jamey! Will could barely process it.
“I didn’t ask to know neither,” she continued. “Didn’t want to know. But there ain’t no way to un-know the truth.” She turned to Will and her voice colored her next words with a dozen different shades of loathing. “And knowin’ what’s waitin’ for me in…a few years.” Then she gasped out, “Maybe just months…” She stopped, gathered herself. “How am I s’posed to live with the knowing of it hanging over my head? Get through every day and know what’s comin’?”
“You don’t have to get through every day. You only have to get through one. I couldn’t stop drinking every day for the rest of my life, but I can not drink today.”
She gave him a withering look. “Thanks so much for your words of wisdom, Mr. Rogers. But I don’t live in the neighborhood. I live in the real world. And I will not die like that.”
“So you’re going to kill yourself because you don’t like the way you’re going to die? Does that make sense to you?”
She stood up, a little unsteadily, her knees weak from the outpouring of emotion. “I didn’t tell you this so’s you could try to talk me out of it. This ain’t no debate. I’ve made up my mind and you can’t stop me!”
Will stood slowly, too. “You got that right. I can’t stop you. You said it yourself. Nobody can hold up a falling tree. Or a falling life.”
That unsettled her. “Well…good then.” She slipped his windbreaker off her shoulders and handed it and the bandanna back to him. “Now you understand why you can’t say nothin’, not even after…’cause if they know about me, they’ll figure out about Jamey. But once Jamey starts to…” She couldn’t say it. “Once it’s clear he’s got Huntington’s, then you can explain what I done so—”
“No.”
“What do you mean no?”
“How many things can no mean?”
“The only reason I told you was—”
“I don’t care why you told me. I can’t help you. I can’t make somebody else understand what I don’t understand myself.”
She gaped at him.
He managed a shrug. “It takes one to know one—I told you. I threw away years of my life; you’re about to do the same thing. See, we’re just a—”
“No, we’re not!” She was instantly so furious all she could do was sputter. “How dare you stand there so smug, so... so…” Then she chanted in a squeaky voice, “Oh, JoJo, I know just how you feel!” She made a humph sound in her throat. “You don’t have no idea what it feels like to—”
“Want to die? I was dying! I was lying on a gurney while my life drained out of me and I was glad!”
His intensity drew out for a breathless moment before he continued, softer. “Then Bill Cosby in a Mr. Clean suit showed up, got right in my face, pointed out that I was chucking a life 27 miners in Harlan #7 wished they’d had. And that…ding, ding, ding…was my wake-up call.” He shook his head. “But you, Darlin’, don’t even have an alarm set.”
He could tell she had no idea what to make of him. And that was good. His only hope was to throw her off her game. He reached out to take her hand in both of his…and she was gone again. Vanished. Lost in the fog. The hand he held was cold and limp, felt like a dead fish on a stick.
He held on and kept talking anyway. “One of those miners was your daddy. You never knew him, JoJo, but I did. He was my hero. He was…” Out of nowhere a wave of emotion choked him. He gritted his teeth and cleared his throat, but all he could manage was a ragged whisper. “…the best of all of us.”
He paused, got his voice under control. “And I guarantee you, young lady, that your daddy wouldn’t have given up even one hour of living because he was scared of how he was going to die.”
She pulled her hand out of his. “I’m sorry—”
“Honey, you don’t have anything to be sorry—”
“I’m sorry I told you!” she snapped. “I should have known better. I should have kept my mouth shut.” She turned and hurried up the steps and into the house.
CHAPTER 26
IT HAD GROWN late, but Jamey didn’t notice. It had grown cold, too, and Jamey didn’t notice that, either. He was in that place he went when he worked on his arts. He’d told JoJo once the place was “more in my head than in my shed”—and that rhymed! Jamey was so proud! He liked rhymes, but he almost never made up his own.
In fact, Jamey didn’t seem to have as many words in his head as other people and he didn’t see that as a bad thing at all. Surely, it must be a lot of trouble to carry all them words around with you all the time, like a bucket full of rocks. The more rocks in the bucket, the heavier it’d be. He didn’t think his bucket was nearly as heavy as the bucket most folks carried and he thanked God for that. Granny said all good gifts come from God so Jamey was all the time thanking God for one thing or another because his life was so full up with good things—most times he couldn’t even enjoy one before another one come along.
Only tonight wasn’t all full up with good things. It was sad and scary, and Jamey asked ValVleen again and again to sing so he couldn’t hear the fearful thoughts in his head. And he reached down and scratched Bucket’s head over and over because with the old dog there at his feet, he didn’t feel so alone.
Tonight didn’t neither one of them do much good, though, because what his hands was making was scary. There was sad, hurtful images in that rock and the longer he worked on it the more he wondered if a rock could be bad. People could be bad. He hadn’t never knowed nobody who was bad, but Granny’d talked about bad people and the Bible had stories about bad people so there must be some somewhere. They must be the folks who lived out on the flat because wasn’t no bad hillbillies.
But if people could be bad, then maybe things could, too, and if things could be bad, maybe this piece of jet was one of them bad things.
“How would you know that a person was bad?” he asked ValVleen. The bird studied him as if she was considering the question and trying to come up with an answer. But Jamey figured out the answer first. “It’d be ’cause they looked bad, right, or acted bad? That’s how you’d know!”
So if looking bad meant a person was bad, then that must be the way you could tell that a thing was bad, too. And this piece of jet looked bad, least what he’d seen of what was hidden down inside it did.
Jamey stopped carving and sat stock-still. You don’t suppose he was committing a sin to turn the bad things in this rock loose. He wasn’t exactly sure what a sin was, but he did know he didn’t never want to do one. A sin was bad. If this rock was bad, maybe the rock was a sin.
He put down the chisel in his hand and fat tears leaked out of his green eyes.
“ValVleen, I think I’ve made a sin arts. But I didn’t really make nothing. I let’ out what was in there, so I guess I let a sin out of this bad rock.”
He scooted his stool back and looked at the shiny piece of jet. It glistened in a thousand points of light from the flickering flames of the lanterns.
Had to be a sin, because didn’t feel right, none of it did. Nothing about setting the images free in this rock had felt like it was supposed to. When Jamey come back from that place he went when he worked on his arts, the big miner in the front was all done, everything just right. But there was all those other miners outlined in the background to pull up out of the rock. And he couldn’t manage to get back to his place to do it. It felt a little like when he first started to carve and he tried to force the coal to be what he wanted it to be. Only, he hadn’t tried to force this piece of jet to be nothing. So why wouldn’t the images come on out of there like they was supposed to? Was it his job to drag them out?
He sighed. He didn’t have no choice; it was his job to finish it. Jamey wiped his tears and his nose on the sleeve of his shirt, picked up the chisel, and went back to work.
The moon was a white bone in the black sky before he put his mallet and chisel down on the workbench for the last time. He was done. He shouldn’t have been. Should have taken him a whole lot longer to finish it, seeing as how there was all them miners to set free. But the arts didn’t turn out like he figured it would.
He sat back and looked at the images in the shiny black rock and began to wonder if it was a sin after all, because now that it was finished, it sure was pretty. Scary and sad and ugly and pretty all at the same time in a tangled up way Jamey didn’t have enough words in his bucket to describe.
There was so much detail in the explosion frozen there in the piece of jet it was like Jamey was there and could see it. Rocks flew, helmets was knocked off, roof bolts and lunch pails in the air. You could make out the pockets on the miners’ shirts, the holes in their pants, the laces on their work boots. The big miner in front had lost his helmet; his hair went ever which way. The right sleeve of his shirt was torn beneath the string thing tied on his arm and all the buttons was missing so it flapped open. Two other men was tangled together and one didn’t have no shirt on at all and Jamey stared at it, wondered where it went. Could a explosion blow your clothes off?
The longer Jamey looked at the carving, the more grateful he was that there wasn’t no faces on none of them people.
He’d told Granny he didn’t think there was any faces in the rock but he’d been wrong. There was probably faces all over it. You just couldn’t see them. All them miners had they heads turned away, or there was somebody’s arm or leg blocking their face, or a helmet or piece of rock.
As he stared at the carving, he felt himself drawn into it, like it was a pool of shiny black water instead of shiny black rock. Then he seen what was in there, deep down in the bottom of it. And soon as he did, he laughed right out loud.
“Look at that, ValVleen.” He pointed into the depths of the rock and laughed again. “Ain’t never seen nothin’ like that ’fore in a rock.”
The bird didn’t chirp, didn’t make a sound. Jamey didn’t think nothing of it at the time, how she acted. But later he understood.
