Strange as This Weather Has Been (18 page)

After the picnic, it was the silent treatment until we hit home, and then it was the fight. The worst one yet, unless it just seemed that way to me because of the sweetness earlier. Or maybe all that sweetness had made the vicious build up in them. It got so bad I left the house, took my pillow, and locked myself in the truck. I couldn’t really sleep there, lying in the dark with my eyes open, breathing that gasoline in my hair, wondering how close to a flame you’d need to be for it to catch. Hard to tell. After an hour or so, I rolled down the window, and I couldn’t hear anything else from inside. I figured they’d gone to bed. So I slipped back into the living room, quiet, and there they sat on the couch. Limp. Like they’d finally popped each other, taken all of each other’s air. Lace was doubled over so you couldn’t see her face, her arms in her lap and her head in her arms. Jimmy Make had one elbow on a knee, he held his forehead in that hand. And I thought I
heard somebody sniffing. I don’t know which one it was, didn’t neither of them ever cry, no matter what, they didn’t. So maybe I imagined it altogether. What I noticed for sure was that even though they were sitting side by side, their legs weren’t touching.

 

We could hear it getting closer. I knew they were going to take Cherryboy next, I didn’t need to learn that from Dairy Queen gossip. And I wondered, my roller gliding, how could I feel so mixed up about it? Know that what my parents had together wasn’t good for anyone, yet still feel such terror watching it finish?

And what did I remember of North Carolina? Get my body killed here, kill my insides if I left. I knew you never take all of you with you. I knew, it came to me with the brush moving, how if you left out, your ghost stayed behind. What I called the live ghost, the ghost you carry in you before you die. It stayed behind and hovered the hills, waiting on you. And what did I remember? (How the pavement would bloodbeat the wet stinking heat and how nobody came to visit. How the land opened wide to where anything could get you. How you walk only the skin of the world, nothing in you reaching any deeper. So that you know how you’re blowing away, feel always the airy empty insides of you.) That’s what I remembered of North Carolina.

R.L., clomping across the porch, carrying a can of Pringles to share. With every less inch of space between him and me, the hum heightening in my skin. I felt him. And how could I. What he did for the money just to buy the chips.
You know bettern that.

He squatted down beside me. His boot tops had little give, and he was perched awkward, balanced on his toes. He dragged a finger through the wet blue paint on my arm. He lifted the finger and painted a line on my face, the spoiled cheek. He touched that cheek anyway.

I want to stay, I want to have, I want to be, without leaving. All the little ghosts, hovering.

SO THERE were the five months in Morgantown, the nine pregnant, and then Bant. I did almost all my growing up right then. All that growing up pressed together so that each month held several years, and you can see it in my face, and in my body, too, if you look at pictures of me before and after. All along I told everybody I had no idea what I’d name the baby, but truth was, I’d chosen the girl name not two weeks after I felt Bant move. I made up Bant’s name not just for the pretty in it, but because it made her more singular mine. And I called her Ricker See because it made her more of this place.

When Jimmy Make got to the clinic and found out her name was on her birth certificate and it wasn’t Turrell, he left without seeing me or the baby and told Sheila he’d never be back. Sheila looked scared when she told me, and I have to admit, at first it scared me a little myself. Hurt a little more than that, despite that I’d thought I was beyond hurt from him. Then I asked myself—what had Jimmy Make done for this baby so far? Not a thing, I answered. Not one thing beyond come in a cold chickenhouse.

Three weeks later I was finishing up nursing Bant when Daddy said
from where he was getting a glass of water at the kitchen sink, “Well. Lookee here who’s a-coming.” I knew right away who he meant. I pulled my shirt back down, laid Bant against my shoulder, and I stooped so I could see out the window and on out past the porch. Jimmy Make pouting under his camouflage hat and carrying a package, I saw when he walked up the steps, wrapped in “Happy Birthday” paper.

Daddy was inviting him in before I had time to decide what to do or how to act. Jimmy Make was trying to be all polite and friendly to Mom and Dad while at the same time cold-shouldering me, not an easy balancing act for anyone, least of all for some kid hardly knew how to talk.When I took the package from him and said “thank you,” he looked away from my face and bit his bottom lip. But I saw him sneaking a peek at Bant. I reached up and turned her face gentle into my neck. But then Mom had to take her from me so I could open the present—a new dress could of fit a four-year-old—and before I could grab her back, Mom was handing my baby towards Jimmy Make.

“Ummm . . . ummm.” Jimmy Make backed away, his hands thrown up and facing out like it was something hot that Mom had. “Oh, no.”

Mom laughed. “Ain’t no snake, buddy. This here’s your daughter.”

Now he’d backed his way into the couch, his hands still thrown out, and his giggle had genuine panic in it. “Oh, no. Oh, no. I don’t know how to hold no babies.”

Mom took his arm with her free hand and drew him sit down on the couch, him plunging down hard and surprised. I stood stiff across the room, torn between not wanting to watch and not wanting to leave my baby alone with this boy. Now Mom was getting him set up like an older toddler brother, pillow in the crook of his arm, arm propped on the end of the couch, and now she was settling Bant there. Jimmy Make sat paralyzed, his knees drawn together like a girl in a short skirt, his hat bill tipped over his face so you couldn’t see how he was
looking. He sat there for a long time, not moving anything more than his eyes, if he even moved those. Then he stretched out one knuckle-chapped finger and pulled it along her pink arm.

After that, he was back up every other week. He didn’t let on I might be alive, but he came to see Bant. He did his talking with Mom, while I’d sit sentry across the room, and he’d hold Bant like glass and whisper. This father who wasn’t yet shaving.

Then it was full fall, the season you could make the most money, and I was following Mom again, only now with Bant on my back and even deeper debts than last spring. Cohosh, seng, sassafras, black walnuts, hickory nuts, butternuts, pawpaw. It was the ginseng you’d make the real money on, two to three hundred dollars a pound, but the dealer would take other roots, too, sometimes nuts, and the rest we’d sell to neighbors or out along the road. Eat what was left. Fall meant wild meat as well, and Daddy tried to hunt some squirrel, even got a few, and Mogey and his older boy brought over more than that, turkey, and later deer, and that was the only time in my life I ate groundhog.

When I first got started, it was just plants I’d expected Mom to reteach me, things I could sell, but she knew she couldn’t teach that without the other, and when I look back now, I see how much else I relearned. The names of all the little streams off Cherryboy. How the game paths went. Where you could find you a safe drink of water, where you could duck under overhangs to shelter out of storms. It was shortcuts across ridges from hollow to hollow, it was how easiest—footholds, handholds—to scale a particular draw. And although before that year I’d never been the type of person listens any closer than to what comes out of a mouth, all those quiet hours in the woods, I couldn’t help paying other kinds of attention. I started listening in other ways.

Every few hours I’d have to stop and find a good log to get my back against so I could feed Bant. Unbutton whatever old shirt I was wearing, the fall cool tightening the skin on my breast, pull the
blanket up around Bant to protect her warm. Mom would look away, that deep modesty of hers, while I couldn’t do anything but look at Bant. Bant’s sweet face working for the milk, that concentration, pull and let go, and I’d love out of a part of my heart I hadn’t known I’d had. Like Bant herself had made that part while she was inside me, her tiny hands reaching up into my chest, secretly shaping, then left the new part behind to wake up when she was born. But then, sometimes, I’d get worried. Her face worried me clear back to then. She was a silent, solemn, watchful child, even as a little baby you could see all that in her. It was like, I feared, she was born with the age in her. It was like all the grief and disappointment and growing up I’d done while I was carrying her had seeped into her before she was born. I worried a lot about that.

We kept following the seasons. Walking the ridges. Working the hills. Sometimes Mary and Mogey’d come with us, sometimes Sheila when she was off, but it was mostly just the three of us. First Bant on my back, and then Bant waddling, stumbling, picking herself up, and finally Bant working with us. Bant buckle-legged, chubby-armed, all serious to help, squatted over hickory nuts, pulling berries off canes, by three she knew how to keep clear of the briar. By four, how to climb a leaf-thick hollowside using the edges of her feet. And although I kept worrying about what she carried in her—my age, my grief—I also realized the ways I was changing for the better—what had trickled into me to fill that loss—I realized Bant got some of that, too.

 

Strange thing was, those turned out to be the best years for me and Jimmy Make, too, although I’d never have believed you if you’d told me that back then. Because of course Jimmy Make was still in high school, still living at home. Still his mom’s baby, while I was busy with a baby of my own, and the fact that things went best that way, well, it tells you something. By the Christmas after Bant was born in
September, he’d gotten over the naming enough to talk to me again. At first I hardly answered back, told myself I didn’t need him or care, but I mostly just wanted to punish him a while. Only wants sex anyway, I justified it to myself, even though deep down I knew he could get sex in easier places. But by February, when he’d call to say he was on his way over, I found myself, despite myself, watching out the window for him to come bobcatting around that bend. And by two weeks after that, we ended up in the backseat of Jimmy’s daddy’s Blazer.

The summer before Bant turned one, between Jimmy Make’s junior and senior years, that summer was the best. Despite all the heaviness in me, that summer I also found a fragile happiness I’d never had before. It was partly the love that Bant had shaped in me; partly the relief, the contrast, between this summer and the spring and summer before. Partly though, I have to admit, it was what grew in me for Jimmy.

He was supposed to be working for his uncle remodeling houses, but not many people were having work done that year, Jimmy Make was free a lot. I’d wake up early, get as much of my work finished as I could in the cool, and then afternoons, a couple times a week, Jimmy Make’d come up.

Mom would take Bant for a few hours. Me and Jimmy Make were going swimming.We’d walk back out to his car in the turnaround, pull the old bedspread out of the hatch, and head up Yellowroot Creek. Back then, there were two swimming holes up Yellowroot, and the first one was everyone’s favorite because it was deep, and bottomed with the smooth little stones, and it had diving rocks. But if you pushed past that one, and we did, you eventually hit the Hemlock Hole, only chest-high, muckier than the first hole, but almost always, on weekdays, nobody around.

Usually he’d pull off his shirt as we climbed. The way his back browned, then went white where it slid into his pants, I tell you, it brought water to my mouth. Sometimes one of us would grab the
other soon as we got there, crash up into that flat place under the hemlocks where nobody could stumble on us and see. That holey stained bedspread, the little needles gluing onto your skin, where all you’d find those needles later, and the tiny cones crunching under you when you’d wiggle and roll.

Other times we’d tease ourselves with wait. Pretend all this interest in swimming first, Jimmy Make’s pale tight butt moving under and over water, the muscled leanness of his legs, those muscles still new enough that even Jimmy Make was surprised by them, pleased by them, we learned his new body together. We’d paddle away from each other, splashing from a distance, until maybe he’d go to floating on his back, eyes closed. I’d ripple up beside him, stand and hold him underneath with one hand, while my other’d find his nipples, finger their hardness, play the grooves of his ribs.

Or all of a sudden Jimmy Make might plummet down deep, snake between my legs, then heave up fast, water spraying, with me on his shoulders, him stumbling forward finding balance under my weight, and the inside of me beating against his neck.The liveness, I could feel it. My liveness, our liveness, his, liveness of the land around us, oh you felt it quicker when you were opened up like that. And the hemlock needles on my back, the low dense branches just past that.

Afterwards we always crawled back into the long afternoon light, and we stretched out on the flat rocks up where the creek took the plunge into the hole. Jimmy Make would drop straight asleep while I lay awake, watching. I watched the water dry off our bodies, you could see the sun take it, go.Watch the flesh sleep-jump under Jimmy’s tight skin.Watch his face move, like Bant’s, when he rubbed away an insect with the back of his sleeping fist, that like Bant, too. I could smell the sun in Jimmy Make’s skin, his back, his shoulders, cinnamon brown and freckles both. I’d lie on my side, I’d reach out my tongue. In Jimmy Make’s shoulder, I’d taste the sun.

Once in a while after those afternoons, he wouldn’t leave. He’d spend the night. On the living room couch, Mom wouldn’t let us share a bed unmarried despite that we had a baby and she had to have an awful good idea what we were up to those long afternoons. After everyone was good and asleep, though, he’d usually slip on in with me. Sheila not waking in her bed, Bant curled up in her crib, I’d feel him slide under my sheets, push me over on the narrow mattress, and then all of us in there together. The sound of Jimmy Make’s breath in the middle of the night. I remember the comfort of him there. Because somehow only in sleep, only in my childhood bed, did Jimmy Make ever feel older than me.