Strange as This Weather Has Been (39 page)

Charlie always said if we’d have a vote on it, the majority of people would be against it. But around here, majority had never ruled. And the majority was scared to speak out. Sometimes I’d get almost as mad at them as I was at the companies, but several times, Loretta or Dunky sat me down, talked sense to me, and if I got myself calm, I heard. I already knew. How some were scared a family member would lose a job, and they were right, they were right. Those companies would blackball a person quicker than you could spit. Some were scared if they went against it, their neighbors would look down on them—a lot of people don’t want to cause a stir and stick out, all that raising we had against showing ourselves. I understood that, too, I knew I’d always been considered outlandish exactly because I didn’t mind sticking out.

They put in that new gate real early in the spring, but long before then, I’d walked up the hollow. I put a shell around me, armor on my
heart, that’s how I did it. Anger, not sad. I’d seen the sediment ponds, then I’d seen the trees coming down. I watched the fill grow. I’d seen the impossibility of climbing it to check what was behind. It scared me to death that the kids would get up in there, and I threatened them to keep them out. Corey and Bant were the ones least likely to mind, so I warned Corey I’d take away his bike for a year if I heard he’d gone up there, and I cautioned Bant about the guards, said she might get arrested. It seemed mean to tell her that, but I wasn’t lying. I imagine Corey snuck up anyway.

I wrote more letters, made more calls—for the first time in fifteen years, I didn’t have a little one at home to watch, that made a difference, too—and I marched in a couple rallies in Boone County while Jimmy Make thought I was at work. I spoke out at a permit hearing. Then at a second one. It turned out I was good at that. By the time I got to that big protest in Charleston, the one with the TV cameras, Loretta and them were nudging me to the front of things, coaching me to talk.

It was outside a Lyon stockholders meeting at the Marriott, and the rich men in their khakis and golf shirts passing in and out those glass doors didn’t lower themselves to look at us, waving our signs from across the street, but Lyon’d also brought in their workers. They did that all the time, paid their workers to counterprotest or to speak at the permit hearings against us, their guys wearing those bizarre orange stripes up and down their pants legs and sleeves, “Lyon stripes,” they called them, like they were in some kind of brainwashed zombie army. Some of them even marched in step. A couple started antagonizing us, calling us out-of-state agitators. One hollered, “You’re takin food outta my kids’ mouths,” and I just hollered right back, “You’re taking the life outta my kids’ bodies,” and by the time the WSAZ camera got to me and asked me what I was doing there, I was mad way past stage fright. I had my say.

Somehow Jimmy Make never learned about the TV thing. Yeah, we didn’t get WSAZ at the house, but you’d have thought he’d hear it from somebody else, but little as he went out anymore, I guess that saved me. He’d more or less took up living on the couch by then, had got down from Mountain Dew and Pepsi to Wal-Mart pop, dressing in nothing but boxers or sweats, the weight layering on him, the slack. The less paying work he got, the less unpaid he’d do at home. I couldn’t hardly get him to even keep an eye on Tommy anymore. And I remember how we slept together that year. I remember. He’d have already been in bed for an hour or more, separate on his own side, and I’d got practiced at undressing without a light. I’d climb in careful, keeping to my territory, I knew just how far to slide in, the halfway mark.The smell of Jimmy Make.The difference from how he used to smell. The old mattress with a bow in it and you had to balance yourself up on one side of that dip. I’d lay there for a while on my back, my whole body stiff, listening to the rhythm of his breathing, the quality of his breaths, trying to tell if he was sleeping. Usually he was not. But he said nothing, and I didn’t either. Each of our breaths moving against the other.

Some days he ignored me. Others he just wouldn’t lay off. Sneering about how I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, ordering me away from the treehuggers. But even Jimmy Make had sense enough to know that telling me what to do would just provoke the opposite. So he started pulling out his wild card. His big gun.

“What if somebody hears you’re in with the shit-stirrers and does something to one of the kids? Huh? Ever thought of that?”

“I’ll kill em,” I hissed back.

Jimmy Make choked a short sarcastic laugh. “You’ll kill em?You’ll kill em? Ha.You have no fucking idea.You wait.You just wait.”

“It’s the kids I’m fighting for,” I’d say. “Their future. So they’ll have something of their own to grow up for.”

He’d snuff. “Whatever. Future don’t matter when you’re dead.”

Of course, I’d never admit it to him, but what he said did scare me. I questioned the kids in private, had anybody said or done anything to them? The three youngest didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, and Bant would say only that it didn’t matter. But I still did worry, and although I kept fighting, I did not join the environmental group, no matter how hard Loretta and Charlie, and eventually, even Mogey, who wasn’t well enough to go himself, urged me to. Because regardless of what Jimmy Make believed, I did know the real reasons to be scared. Like how a year or two before, over in Logan, they hung effigies of environmentalists. How just that past summer, ’99, the Logan County Commission hired school bus drivers and other county employees to attack people reenacting the historic unionizing march on Blair, and they even beat up Secretary of State Ken Hechler, eighty-five years old, they bloodied him good. You’d hear about people like that Chapman woman over in Willette who brought a lawsuit against a mine, and somebody cut her brake lines, and the sheriff told her she better buy a handgun, carry it all the time. Guy in Kanawha County who spoke out against it on national television, they snuck in of a night and slashed the throats of his dogs. At first, I thought some of the stories about the intimidation were exaggeration or rumors. But then somebody threw a rock through Loretta’s car window when it was parked outside the environmental office over in Boone County. Then there was me, small-time as I was.

I never told anybody but Loretta about it.Thank God I was alone. I was heading back from Danville after getting groceries, we had to drive all the way over there now that the Prater IGA had shut down, and I’d stopped at the big convenience store in Riley to get gas and use the bathroom. The restrooms were off in the corner and down this short hallway, kind of hidden past the pop and beer coolers, and when I came out, a man was standing in that little passageway like he was waiting to
get in the men’s room. I noticed him right away because he looked out of place, dressed up like he had an office job, tie and all, suit coat. He was blocking my way out, and I figured he didn’t see me, so I gave him this kind of how you doing? half-smile and said, “Excuse me.”

He didn’t move. “I know you,” he said, and, stupid as I feel looking back now, I thought he was coming on to me. I half-smiled again, this time with a yeah, whatever, leave me alone look, and I tried to ease past. He had his hand in his pants pocket, big loose dress pants. I felt his hand move in the pocket and press against my leg, his hand still behind the cloth, and, lord help me if I didn’t think at first it was his dick, and I just pushed harder to bust past and get away. But then he blocked me with his whole leg and pulled out enough of the gun that I could tell what it was. Then he dropped his leg and let me go.

People don’t do stuff like that around here. I’d never had a gun pulled on me in my life, never seen a gun pulled on anybody else, even though in this state, there are guns all over the place. I got myself back in the truck, and by the time I did, my whole body had gone to shivering. Even my teeth were chattering, I bit down but couldn’t make them stop. I had to sit there and wait before I was even safe to drive, I don’t know how many minutes went by. And I was shaken for several more days, but after that, I tell you what—it just made me fight even harder.

One day in February 2000, Charlie all of a sudden asked me if I’d like to take an afternoon and ride out with him to Tout. I glanced across the table at Loretta sitting beside him, and she raised an eyebrow he couldn’t see, so I knew she was surprised, too. A week later I lied to Jimmy Make I had to work a day I didn’t, and Charlie picked me up in the Dairy Queen lot.

It was snowing but not laying, flurries spiraling into the wipers, and us closed up there in the tight space of the cab, it made me a little nervous. I tried to small talk for a while, but Charlie never had gone for that. So we sat quiet for maybe thirty minutes, listening to
the heater fan, the road tracing the narrows between creek and hill. Then, as we got farther from my side of the county and deeper into Charlie’s territory, he started.

“I was born and raised in Tout,” he told me. “My daddy moved off the mountain and down into the camp to work the mine when him and Mom first got married.That was 1922, and I was born a little after. So I seen the changes in Tout.” We hit a Y in the road, and Charlie took the left. Slant-falling snow, leafless black trees, no color anywhere. “During my boyhood, it was a company town. Company store, company doc, company preacher, ball team, scrip, whole nine yards. Me and Anita got married in 1945 soon as I got back from the war, and I worked Prince George Number 7 most of my young man’s life. Automation come in the ’50s, half the town left out, but I got lucky, they kept me on. Company sold off the houses, and I bought ours and fixed er up. But then Number 7 shut down completely, and I was out of work like everybody else.”We were pulling a steep rise then, and Charlie stopped talking as he shifted down. In three minutes, he’d told me more about himself than he’d let out in the past eighteen months. Then he began another sentence, stopped, and tried it a different way.

“I’ll tell you this, but I ain’t told Loretta, you keep it to yourself—after that, I worked several strip jobs. I did. Country needed the coal, I needed the work, I didn’t have any problem with that. And even when these big jobs first started coming in, yeah, the mountaintop mines, if I’d been younger, I probably would have tried to get on one of them. Didn’t know any better yet.”

Now we were passing the Tout sign, and Charlie went still again. I’d only been over here once, when I was a little kid, and at first, passing through, it looked to me like all the other gutted-out cast-behind mining towns I’d seen through my life. A big paintless boarded-up store still plastered with faded ads going clear back to the ’50s. The collapsing houses, some held standing only by kudzu vines, and
the concrete steps leading to concrete foundations with nothing on top.

Then Charlie reached the end of the town, turned around, and started driving back. It was then I noticed how Tout was different. Because in those sad thrown-away towns I was familiar with, yeah, you would often see a place or two burned to the ground. But in Tout, I was seeing house after house after house had been torched. And most of the burned houses, I realized now, didn’t look like they’d been too old. And the fires themselves, I saw that now, too, had happened recently. Melted and charred aluminum siding peeling off the houses that hadn’t burned all the way to the ground. Floors covered with blackened rubble that the weather hadn’t smoothed down yet. Charlie pulled into the little gravel lot of the closed-down post office and turned us so we faced out, and two dogs on a ramble jogged through a ditch, but otherwise, not a soul moved anywhere. And directly above this whole eerie scene loomed a broad level hump covered with long yellow grass.

Charlie turned off his truck. We sat in total silence now, snow still sifting, afternoon sinking quick towards dark. I looked at Charlie’s hands on the wheel, his big swolled-up knuckles, all out of proportion to the rest of his body.

“They started coming in here late in ’94 trying to buy people out. They’re doing the same thing now in Omar, Four Oaks, Medlay. But us here in Tout, we were the first I know of.They come into your community that they’ve already started destroying, then they start making little side deals with people. Brewing suspicion and pitting neighbors and friends and family members against each other, make it harder for people to stick together and fight, oh, they’re great dividers, the industry is, they mastered that way back during the union drives. And that makes people even less want to stay, which brings the property prices down even lower. Not that a home under a mountaintop mine is worth much anyway.

“I’ll tell you something else, too, Lace. Anita and me thought about it. Thought about selling out, even after me living my whole life here and Anita most of hers, not to mention all the family I got going who knows how far back on what used to be that mountain there.” He paused for a second, looking at the broad blunt mound. “Why not just clear out of this mess, I was better off than a lot of the people here, I had some savings, go buy a little place in Putnam County or somewhere like that where you can ignore all this if you want to. So they brought the papers to the house, we was that close. That’s when I found out you had to sign a form that said you’d never protest a mine again and would never move back within twenty-five miles of Tout.”

I looked quick at his face then. I’d never heard nothing about that. He chuckled real low. “Now that’s illegal. I suspicioned it was, and I researched it, and I was right. But my neighbors and all, they didn’t know any better. They just went on and signed.” He shook his head. “What else could you do? If you didn’t, they’d just refuse to buy. But I refused to sign, not necessarily because I wanted to stay within twenty-five miles. Not even because, at that time, I wanted to protest a mine. But because a coal company wasn’t going to tell me where I could live and what I could say.”

He sat quiet for a few more minutes. Pulled his gloves on and turned the ignition back over for the heat. Then he passed his hand, I could see those big knuckles knobbing up even through the glove, across the dusk-dimming houses. “Not too long after they bought the places, lo and behold, the houses started burning down. Wake up in the middle of the night, there goes another one. Couldn’t catch nobody doing it, but of course, nobody official tried too hard. The company said they knew nothing about it, claimed vandals must be the ones. But it seems awful coincidental to me, even though it also seems senseless as hell. Unless it’s to intimidate those of us left to get out.”