Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (14 page)

Suddenly I see Ham, a gray clash in the white old-folks'-home sheets. I see Taffy looking on from a dresser top as a stranger changes Ham's socks. Ham's face intelligent, his smell out of tune, his toes hidden by the stranger's hands. A half-dozen albino cats mist through the weeds beyond the old-folks'-home yard, stalking baby's breaths to suck, and I hear Ham say to the sock-changer, “I used to work for a man down in Romney . . .”

A few weeks after Ham leaves, our father visits him. He comes home quiet, the curtain pulled over his face. “He's not going to last up there,” I hear him tell our mother. “He can't get outside and they won't let him drink anything at all.” I know better than to ask about Taffy.

I SMUGGLE THE
Ouija board to the goat shed, the outlier building farthest from the house, back behind the barn, where it teeters smother-webbed in honeysuckle vine. So furtive am I that not only no brothers or sisters follow me, but no dogs either, except Mickey, who God couldn't outsmart. I smuggle it to the goat shed even though to get there I must pass the rodent-tailed electric-furred tom spot. I smuggle it to the goat house even though to get in I must wiggle and rip through honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and two violent-thorned locust saplings that grow right in the open door.

Mickey's too wise to trail me in. I stow the Ouija board box facedown in the darkest corner, then stand in a sun stripe with a splinter-handled spade in one hand and look for the softest place in the dirt floor. When I think I have it, I set my spade, aim my foot, and hammer down on the blade. It sinks an inch. I move it and try again. Again the floor gives an inch. I move and try, move and try, pocking my way
across the floor, sweat-soaked already in the small of my back and under my arms from frustrated panic more than the June humidity, and the Ouija board gloats from its corner. I reach a wall and stop. I'm going to have to try another way, but apparently goats don't poop as much as some animals, or if they do, it doesn't last as long.

So then I'm shredding back through the thorns, praying past the tomcat spot, to the barn where, as Mickey looks on apologetically for not being able to help, I fill a burlap feed sack with horse and cow turds, marveling as I pick them up at how long the animals' poop has outlived them. Finally I'm back in the goat shed, frantic now, crumbling the manure with my fingers to make it fine like regular dirt, which I use to bury the Ouija board until not a spot of the box shows, and then I add a layer on top of that. Last, for good measure, I mound over everything whole patties and hard fist-shaped plops in a pyramid almost as high as my knees.

Then I plunge through the thorns and the vines and sprint to the house, sheltering my eyebrows with my hands.

THE OUIJA BOARD
got the name one letter wrong. It was Ham, not Sam, who died in 1976, three years after he moved into the old folks' home. Our father went to the funeral up in Terra Alta and reported that no one else showed except a woman who claimed to be Ham's sister, which my father was sure Ham never had.

We continued to sight an occasional white Ham cat, one degree above optical illusion, one degree below peripheral vision, usually when we were in the back of the station wagon coiling along some country road. The naked-tailed tom with the asylum eyes, we never did spy again.

By 1976, I was thirteen. Too old to call “Maaa-maawwww.” Too self-conscious to wear mouseskulls. Too cynical to depend on my Children's Living Word Bible, which I stopped reading the summer of
the Ouija board burial and had not a moment of retribution befall me. But I still slept with my head under the covers and still prayed to be flat. I still braced, heart chuttering, for that now double haunting: the ghost of Ham working for the ghost of my grandfather, both of them hovering through the house.

But although I didn't move out until 1981, I never saw a soul and, far as I know, a soul never saw me.

What I still see decades later is that nail—I see it more than hear it. Flipping end over end down the oil-stove pipe. I see Mrs. Dock, her head flushed up from the dishes in the sink, her mouth falling open and her wet hand flying to her throat. I see her on the back stoop, knees spread in her apron, a fist kneading one thigh. I see her eyes a-dart with what to do.

“AND WHY DO
you reckon he'd do that?” Ham says to me “Before he pulled the trigger, drop a nail down that pipe to warn Mrs. Dock?” He has a chicken leg in his fingers, Taffy balled up against his belt. Outside, it's April dusk, but the sky so vague it could be any season, any time of day. Inside, air glitters like lit ice.

“I'll tell you why”—Ham nods—“same reason he waited to do it until your grandma was out of town for that church ladies' meeting. Same reason he picked that little back room instead of messing up the nice room where he slept.”

Ham lays down the bone. I've got my gaze fastened to the floor, but Ham stares at my head until I have to look his eyes right back.

His voice comes tender as baby skin and resolute as rock.

“He done it out of kindness,” he says. “He done it out of care.”

And for a minute, pinned in that hard, cold bright, I feel the truth of what he says. Then I open the icehouse door, step onto dull grass, and hear again the shot that follows the nail.

ARSONISTS

T
HE PHONE RINGS
just as he's zipping his suitcase shut, even though he hasn't seeped a word to anyone in town, but Dell is not surprised. Kenny always knows. Five years ago, Dell would have let it ring; ten, he would have cussed it, too. Now he cups the back of his head with one hand, shuts his eyes, and says hello.

The first call is Becky, gobbling desperate—“Dell, you got to get up here, get him to himself”—before the receiver is grabbed, Dell hears the scuffle, and the connection thumbed off. Within fifteen seconds, it rings again, Kenny this time—“You just stay where you're at, boy, I don't need nothing from you”—before that call goes dead, too. Dell waits until the glow of the number pad darkens in his hand, then calls them back.

“Listen, Becky.” He says his words like flat creek rocks laid. “I'm sorry. I am. But it's my little granddaughter's birthday. I'm just out the door to northern Virginia.”

“Oh, Dell, I'm sorry, too, I'm just as sorry as I can be, but I've been trying to talk sense to him for two hours. It's the them-coming-to-burn-us-out again, only now he's saying he's got a bomb strapped to his wheelchair and's gonna blow us all up when they get here, Dell, I don't know where else to turn.”

Dell tips the receiver away from his mouth. The birthday present lies beside him on the bed. “Can't you at least try?”

“He don't want me in that bathroom, you know that better'n I do,
please
, Dell.”

The wrapping is twisted sloppy, the white undersides of the birthday paper showing. It was Carol always took care of that. Dell shuts his eyes again, middle and first fingers forked below his brows. “All right,” he says. “I'll be up.”

“Oh, I thank ye, Dell,” the gobbling again, “I thank ye, if it weren't—”

“Put him on first.”

He waits. When enough time has passed for Kenny to lift the phone to his ear, Dell speaks to the silence. “They ain't yet burned one with people still in it, Kenny.”

The nothing on the other end lasts so long Dell wonders if Kenny hasn't hung up and he's just not heard. Then a mutter comes.

“Boy. You just don't get it.” The voice rasps to whisper. “This house is worth so much they don't got the money to put an offer on it.”

ALTHOUGH IT'LL TAKE
at least a half hour to crawl the busted-to-pieces road to Kenny's place, Dell does not rush. Kenny'll never touch Becky, and anything Kenny's ever owned that can shoot or blow up is locked in Jason's old room in the upstairs of Dell's house. He gets Carol's Geo Metro started, his truck sitting with a bad alternator, and goes to scraping the windshield with a spatula. He had called Jason as soon as Kenny hung up on him the second time.

“I don't suppose you could hold it a day, could you, son?” He winced at his selfishness soon as he spoke so it was mostly relief he felt when Jason said no.

“All her little friends are coming over. I'm sorry, Dad.”

“I understand,” Dell cut in quick. “Don't you worry, I understand.” And while Jason talked on, Dell felt, as he always does, the surprise and then the pride, his youngest son, at twenty-four, speaking into his own phone, sitting in his own condo, surrounded by things he's provided for his wife and two kids. Jason already that kind of man. He built houses in northern Virginia, went up there at first thinking the job was temporary and then found himself plunged happy over his head in the construction boom, earning overtime every week and sometimes even more than that.

“We'll do something, too, when you get here, Dad,” Jason was saying. “Manda'll like that. Make her birthday two days long.”

He's forgotten to turn on the defrost, and the coffee he stowed on the dash has steamed the windows good. Dell smears holes where he needs them. Then he is stuttering past the padlocked beige trailer that was the Tout post office, past the old gas station/grocery store, with its window shattered into webs, and here and there—rotten teeth among the sound ones—the burned-down homes. Dell sips his coffee careful, his eyes narrowed on the road. Some of the houses are just scorched, their windows like blackened eyes. Others went full-blaze, gaping open now, their charred rooms exposed—a pitiful vulgar to it, Dell can't help but feel. Others are nothing but steps climbing to rubble-cluttered concrete slabs. The kudzu already covering. Overhead, the flattened hills roll in dead slumps, like men's bodies cold-cocked, Dell sees them when he brings himself to look, like men knocked out. The humps of their twisted shoulders, their arms and legs drunk-flung. Them sprouting their sharp foreign grass.

The company is finished with Tout, West Virginia, now.

SOMEBODY STARTED BURNING
houses within a year after they blew up the first mountain. More than a decade ago, Jason still a boy, Carol still with
them. In the worst of the blasting, dust stormed the hollow so thick Dell couldn't see Sam Sears's house across the road, and everybody'd had to burn their headlights, their houselights, right through the middle of the day. A few people'd even videotaped it—Lorenzo Mast had, and Sibyl Miller—back when some believed bearing witness could make a difference. That year, there was no summer green, no autumn red. Everything evergray and velvet.

Sam got him and his wife gas masks from an army surplus store, but Dell made do with a scarf. Standing on his front porch, a winter muffler wound round his face, watching the horizon dissolve in linked eruptions like the firecracker strings him and Kenny'd a couple times got hold of as kids. Blasts thunderclapped the wishbone of his chest, and the rock dust taste familiar in his mouth. Dell looked on at first in disbelief and even awe—it was nothing fancy they used, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, exactly how Tim McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City at about the same time—but quick that turned to outrage and frustration and, finally, helplessness and grief. Which was at last, Dell understood now, a different kind of awe. Brimstone. The word would come to Dell, he couldn't help it. It came on its own in the taste of the rocks. And through it all, the hole opening in him. The hole small at its mouth, but boring deeper, deeper. Craving always to be filled.

Six months into that gray blizzard, the company started offering the buyouts. By then, a lot of the properties were good and blast-busted, with walls cracked, ceilings dropping, foundations split. Wells knocked dry. By the time the offers came, the homeowners had been told by the Department of Environmental Protection that they couldn't prove the damage hadn't been there before the blasting started, and no one had the lawyer money to argue with them, so many people sold, even at the pathetic prices offered them. If their houses weren't shot, their nerves were, and those who could start over, did.

Dell and Carol talked about it, too. Discussed it, argued it, full-on fought. Lying in bed of a night in the silver glitter of the lights on the mine, Carol crumpling Dell's hand under her chin. Pressing her lips there. Shouting at each other once while they were power-washing the dirt crust off their house—that comes back to Dell too often now, the splatty roar of the spray, the expense of the rental and still the dust sticking like paint. How hard it was when you got nowhere else to put it not to take it out on who you loved. Sometimes Dell'd take the leave side and Carol'd take the stay, then by next time, they'd have traded places on it. Bottom line was, Dell was pushing sixty, had taken early retirement, and where were their life savings? Right there in the house. Like a big pile of money blowing away littler and littler with every explosion, every dust cloud, every coal truck crashing through town.

They reached the final decision one afternoon while they were reframing family photos and Carol's needlepoint, fixing them sturdier to the walls. They simply couldn't begin again on what the house would fetch now. Dell remembers how they weren't even sitting when they decided it, they were standing in the living room, finished with rehanging the last picture. He remembers the gray cast to Carol's face, the afternoon having just reached that moment when it's time to turn on the lights. The minute they made it definite, there came in Dell a peculiar painful rightness that he recalled from when he was a kid, back when he used to bang his head against his bed frame, against walls, usually out of anger, occasionally to salve a shame. And for a day or two, the little hole hushed its yearning.