Strange as This Weather Has Been (13 page)

For the most part, though, I stubborned on. I still carried that river-rock weight in my bones, I was tired every day, but I’d just harden my head to a numb, and if nothing else, the grief would hang off to the
side, like it had that first day digging ramps. Most of the time, I felt like some dumb scolded little kid, Mom the know-it-all boss, but occasionally, just occasionally, after the first few weeks, Mom would shift. And we’d be grownups together for a while. Then, once in a while, I could again see the beauty of the place. I’d see the beauty quick and sharp, and as we moved into summer, despite the haze, the heat, I started seeing it more often.

It was also in the woods where the baby first moved. May, and I’ll always remember the spot, I’ve shown it many times to Bant since. Mom and me were hauling ourselves up a steep hollowside way back in the Upper Cove, the leaves a mucky slipperiness, we had to walk careful using the sides of our feet to keep ourselves from falling. We’d both stopped near the top to catch breath, me braced against the hoe and Mom leaning on a pignut tree, when I felt something like a gas pain, sudden and sharp. I heard myself make a whimper. Mom looked back at me, saw my hand on my belly, and right away she knew. She smiled at me. And if I didn’t feel myself smile back. There Bant made herself for the first time real.

By then it was garden time, we laid rows and rows. Got Mack Kile with his tractor to plow and disk, then we furrowed by push plow, sowed and weeded by hoe and by hand. We worked her close. When I look back on that summer, I see first the pie plates for spooking the crows, rattling and flashing in breeze and in sun. I smell the tang of tomato vine, the scent of corn tassel, of where the green bean snaps loose. I remember Daddy in a lawn chair, his tank alongside him, shucking ears into a bucket, doing what he could. I feel the wet heat, the damp dammed down between the ridges, and everything with a weight to it, even the blank of the sky. Mom and me sweated over the rows, weeding, then picking, and with Bant moving inside, it seemed like she already struggled right along with us. By that August, the grief was no longer a constant slash. It didn’t lose its fierceness, and it never
left me altogether, but it tore at me less often. But I also know, when I look back now, that already that summer, the peach-pink was gone.

Jimmy Make came over exactly twice. He’d finally turned sixteen and got his license in May. Both times we sat out on the porch, me in the swing, pushing off a little with one foot, him hunkered over in a lawn chair, elbows on his legs, his cap half-hiding his eyes, and his jaw jutted out. He was shorter than ever on things to say, and I didn’t have the energy or the desire to hold up the conversation for us both, so we just sat there with the swing creaking. Neither of us made a move towards touching, much less sex, god knows that was the last thing I wanted then, and Jimmy Make, I figured out later, was afraid he’d hurt the baby. Without the want of him, I realized I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know what else was left. I looked at him, picking at where the knee of his jeans was wearing out, and although my mind knew he’d fathered this baby, it still wasn’t real for me in any way but bare mental. Through those terrible hard months since January, it seemed to me now, me and the baby’d got bound inside this tight tough circle: the woods work, the garden work, Mom, Dad, Sheila, house, mountain, hollow. Jimmy Make was a thousand miles outside all that.

The second time was August, and I really wished he hadn’t come. I was already embarrassed about how big I’d got, and then I caught the surprise on Jimmy’s face when he saw my belly after six weeks away. That made me outright mad. We sat there on the porch for a while, saying nothing after a few sentences at the start, me thinking how much work I had to do, why wouldn’t he just go on and leave, when he said, “Can I touch it?”

I was so surprised he’d spoke up without me asking a question first that I didn’t know what he meant. “Touch what?”

“Your stomach.”

I looked down at it. I wanted to say no, then I thought how that
might not be fair, so I shrugged. Jimmy Make waited a few seconds, then he rose out of his chair, but not all the way. In this bent-over crouch, not a stand, but not a real squat—as though if necessary, he could make a quick getaway—he crept over to me on the swing with his hand sticking out.

Once he got close enough, he waited again, several seconds. My body drew away. I could feel the heat off him, he was that close. I could smell his breath. Then he laughed, ducked back, and shook his head. But in the seconds he was close, I sensed for the first time the excitement he had for this child.

I went hard against it. Up to the moments he’d bent there in front of my body, up to where I could feel his heat, his breath, I’d thought of that baby as mine alone. And why shouldn’t I? What I’d gone through, what I’d lost to have it.While Jimmy Make, far as I could see, had suffered nothing at all. I pushed back on the swing, stood up, and told Jimmy Make I’d suddenly got sick. I told him he better go home.

That night was so hot I couldn’t even get cooled on the porch, so I left it and walked to the back of the house, to where the dark yard blotted into woods. I stood at the edge, but then I felt the trees drawing me on up, and even though I knew it’d be a hard risky climb, big as I was, I pulled the steep anyway, one hand cupping my belly like that would cushion it from harm. I reached the big white oak, and I leaned my side against it, and when my breath started coming normal, I looked up at Cherryboy. And although I could see only the very bottom of it before it ran out of light, I could feel it rising solid above me.

It had been almost exactly a year since I’d left for Morgantown. I realized it was that, too, had been tearing at me all day. I turned my forehead against the trunk, and I ground it in until it hurt. I needed that little pain there. But then I remembered how up in Morgantown nothing had touched me. That great swallowing lonesomeness I’d felt for known place.

I recalled that late afternoon last October when I’d climbed up here, in a rage at Mom and, yes, at myself. And I recalled the question I’d tried to ask myself then but couldn’t get to, all racing like I was in my head. Now I had words for that question.
What is it? What makes us feel for our hills like we do?
I waited. The chunging of cicadas around me, the under-burr of the other insects. Something small twisting through the always dead leaves. And although I didn’t get an answer, I did know you’d have to come up in these hills to understand what I meant. Grow up shouldered in them, them forever around your ribs, your hips, how they hold you, sit astraddle, giving you always, for good or for bad, the sense of being held. It had something to do with that hold.

That year, we canned tomatoes, green beans, pickles, peppers, corn, blackberries. We’d always canned before, but never like that. Daddy snapped beans, sliced cucumbers, he’d help until he got tired, and even Mogey and Mary pitched in for a few days when I knew they had theirs to do, too.Their youngest boy Kenneth sat cross-legged on the floor, moving his plastic horses around. To watch him brought a tenderness in me, then a panic strong enough to gut my breath. With those jars boiling, window panes streaming down, the kitchen felt like the inside of a blister, a body heat and body wet like that. It was during one of those last canning days that Bant decided to come.

I WOKE UP and saw the sky clear as a shout. No haze, deep blue, kind of sky we didn’t often get around here in July, and the temperature unseasonable cool.Yesterday I’d run out of paint, and Hobart hadn’t yet got into Beckley to get more. He’d been mad because I hadn’t told him earlier that I was getting to the end of the bucket, but he couldn’t do much but tell me not to come in today. And it was like this day knew about me—no threat of rain, fewer gnats, less sweat, and maybe the slope would be drier, simpler to handle. Climbing weather.

I laid low until the boys and Chancey went off somewhere, then I snuck up the road and stopped at the gate. Took a quick look for guards and slipped on under. Then I just stood there in the unruined part of the hollow, the way I had with Jimmy Make that evening, smelling that green around me. So many flavors of plant. Sometimes I’d wonder. I had a pretty good idea how Corey and Dane felt about it, but sometimes I’d wonder on Tommy, if Corey had already spoiled it for him. Because when I was real little, moving over this land, I never saw myself, never felt myself, as separate from it. I didn’t even know to think about it at that age. It wasn’t until I got older that something
started rising up between it and me, and I started feeling a distance, almost a distance more in time than in space, like the land is in a different time from you, a stiller one, and you’re always just past it. And every year since I was about nine it had gotten harder and harder to get back to how I was in it as a little kid, but this year was worse by far. For a while I’d wondered if growing up would mean I just couldn’t open to it anymore. Now I was thinking something else was going on. As it was being taken, seemed I was drawing away.

I started on up, keeping my head low like that would hide me from the guards, then I realized how stupid that was. The sky so blue it had a hardness to it, like you might reach up and hit the underside of a blue-domed skull. Usually in July, this time of morning, the sky’d be taking on a haze, and by noon, the whole thing would be milky. Come August, the sky would whiten up by nine AM, sometimes with a tinge of poison yellow, but this year it seemed the seasons were running backwards. The summer strangely cool and wet following a warm snowless winter, that winter following the worst drought summer in sixty years. Anymore, seemed there was either too much water or too little, the temperature too high or too low. “Strange as this weather has been,” people would say, or, “With this crazy weather we’ve been having.” And I knew Lace believed the weather was linked to the rest of this mess, but I wasn’t sure how.

Then I was in the part where the trees were sliding down the hollow sides, I was passing those sediment ponds, simmering in themselves, so green with God-didn’t-even-know-what I couldn’t see a quarter inch under their surface. I had my ears pricked for guards even though I realized I had no idea how a coming guard might sound, we never saw Lyon’s nosers drive up in here, so they must have slunk around on foot, and what would you hear? Dirt hiss as they took the long slide off the rim? A crunkle of rocks? I heard nothing but the machines destructing overhead. It sounded different up in here, you
could hear it more clear, the noises separated out—revving motors and backup beepers and crashes and bangs. Scrape of that humongous shovel against rock.

I tried to squint through the tore-up trees to the used-to-be ridge, thinking of guards perched up there with binoculars, pistols. Most of the ponds were jammed with logs and junk, I could see it even better now on foot than I had in the truck, and that meant next time it flooded, the ponds would hold back even less water than they had last time.
Evil,
Lace called it.
All of it. Calculated evil.
Jimmy Make’d roll his eyes.
It’s not evil,
he’d say.
How can a woman bright as you are be so goddamned backwards? It’s just greed and they-don’t-give-a-damn. It’s money.

Greed and money and they-don’t-give-a-damn
are
evil,
Lace would say.

I was finally coming up on that last bend before you swung around and took it full in your face. I ducked my head, hair falling over my eyes. I watched the shattered rocks under my tennis shoes, breathed with my mouth to lighten the gas smell, but the destruction kept calling me to see it. Like the pictures in the Dairy Queen had, like the sex chapter in the ninth-grade science book we never read.

So I stopped and looked up.

The first hurt I felt wasn’t for myself. It was for Grandma. Many times I’d been in a car with her and seen a highwall from a strip mine, even a small one on a mountain we didn’t know, and how my grandma would flinch. I was scared to think what it would do to her to see this kind of violence on a piece of ground she loved. But after I felt for Grandma, it was like I no longer knew where I was. I all of a sudden got dizzy, so many times in my life I’d walked up this hollow, followed the creek, and back then, you couldn’t see the top of anything. You were just in it, in the hollow, in the mountains, in the woods, up above you trees and vines and rock overhangs, and higher than that, a change in the light that let you know where the top should be. But
then, finally, I did feel the hurt for myself. I understood. It was like they were knocking down whatever it is inside of you that holds you up. Kicking down the blocks that hold up your insides, kicking, until what the blocks kept up falls and leaves you empty inside.

I gazed away from the fill to a couple left-behind trees on the ridge, raggedy. I’d seen at church a picture of Calvary. Thorn trees set in a bleached earth and sky. Then I turned my head to the far left, to Cherryboy and beyond, still wooded, I tried to take comfort from that, and for a little while, the comfort came. But almost right away, the separateness set in.

I didn’t stop moving again until I hit that field of eerie boulders at the foot of the fill, sharp-angled and unweathered.
Shut up and grow up.
Jimmy’s voice. I looked around for guards, then I dropped on all fours and started bearwalking it again. I’d noticed last time a narrow strip of ground on one side of the fill, rusty-colored and bald, not a lot of rock on it. Solid. Then I was at the base, and I straightened up, checked over my shoulder. Scanned the mine rim, saw nothing live up there but those sorry left-behind trees. Once I got right against the bank, I smelled the ground odor in it, and that made me feel safer, and I started climbing again, this time more like a spider than a bear, and along the bottom there, it wasn’t as steep as I’d thought. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard after all.

I’d clawed up maybe two body-lengths when the voice came from so close it didn’t even yell.