Crapalachia: A Biography of Place (16 page)

 

He was the little boy who had lice. He was the little boy who collected troll dolls. He was the little boy who decided to fall in love. He was the little boy who dreamed of crossing oceans and the elevations of mountaintops.

 

 

I found out what happened just a couple of days later. One Thursday I had stayed after school to help the little girl with her reading, and then afterwards I stopped at a gas station to fill up the car. I was just about finished pumping the gas when I looked at the pump across from me and I saw him. It was Lee Brown. He was still a giant, except he was wearing a shirt and a tie. We both laughed and finished pumping our gas. Then we shook hands. He told me his father was sick and he had come down to see him. He said his father was dying. Lee was a surgeon now (two years out of his residency) and he worked in the emergency room at a hospital in Charleston. He lived two hours away.

The first thing he asked me after we finished catching up was if I heard what happened to Bill. I told him I had but I didn’t really know any details. And so he told me. He told me Bill and Joe were into some bad stuff. He told me about how they broke into this house to steal some shit. Bill did the breaking in and Joe did the lookout from the road. They were looking for pills. So Bill was going through the house looking for the bathroom. And then the old lady woke up and she heard him. Lee said her husband was sick and blind and on his deathbed. They broke into their house because they knew he was dying and had painkillers. And so she came out crying: “My husband’s sick. My husband’s sick. Please don’t take his medicine. Please don’t take anything.” Then Lee said Bill stole some cheap jewelry, some pills, and some chewing gum.

I said: “What?”

 

Lee said: “Oh yeah, Lil Bill had four packages of chewing gum that he admitted to stealing when they caught him. He wouldn’t admit to the pills or the jewelry though.” I just shook my head and listened to the rest of it. I listened to how Bill freaked out and picked up a block of wood sitting next to the stove and then he hit the old woman with it.

And then he hit her again.

And then he hit her again.

Then Lee told me that that wasn’t the end of it. He told me that the dying husband came out all blind as shit with a shotgun. He was blind but he was firing the shotgun all over the place. Then Bill and Joe finally took off. Then Lee said that when the ambulance showed up the old man ended up having a heart attack and dying right there—so Bill and Joe were stuck with two murders instead of just one. Lee told me it was called the felony murder rule.

I asked Lee who the old lady was. Lee told me it was the old junior high math teacher Mrs. Powell. Lee said it was just a coincidence.

 

 

I tried forgetting about it. A few weeks later I was after school helping the little girl who couldn’t read. Some days it felt like we were making progress, but then the next day we were right back to where we started. I only had a few more days left of substituting before their original teacher came back. I was going to be out of a job soon, and I didn’t know what to do.

 

I was sitting beside the little girl and listening to her read out loud. Every time she came to a difficult word, I asked her to take her time and think about how it would sound, and then say it. She read one word and then she came to a word she didn’t know. I noticed every time she came to a difficult word, she would reach into her jacket pocket and pull out a little golden locket on a little golden chain. Then she would speak the word. So she read and she read. She came to a difficult word and she touched the locket. She read the difficult word. She read and she read. She came to a difficult word and she touched the locket. After we were finished, and I was picking up my things, she came to my desk and thanked me for helping her. Then her eyes became teary and she said she had something to tell me.

She said: “I think you know my mother’s boyfriend. He did a really bad thing. He’s in jail. My mother said the two of you used to live together. She said the two of you were friends a long time ago.”

 

The little girl who didn’t know how to read was quiet for a second and she said that she wanted to tell me something else. She said that her mother’s boyfriend gave her something the morning of his arrest.

She told me she thought it was beautiful, but she didn’t need it if it belonged to the woman who was killed. She said she was sorry for the little old woman and the little old man who died.

She told me that her mother’s boyfriend had given her a pack of chewing gum too, but she had already chewed it and now it was all gone.

 

So she took her little fifth-grader hand and reached into her pocket and then she pulled out the golden locket and the golden chain. Then she put it on my desk. I turned the trinket over and it had initials on it. They were Mrs. Powell’s initials. They were the initials that belonged to the murdered woman.

I looked at the little girl who looked at me with her green eyes. She was wondering if this was the locket of a dead woman. I thought for a while and touched the locket that belonged to the murder victim. I was about ready to say something when I stopped.

 

I looked at the locket again and then I told her: “No, this couldn’t have belonged to the woman. I know for sure. You just keep it.” Then I handed it back to the little girl. And the little girl went back to her desk and got ready to leave. She put the locket on because this wasn’t the possession of an old woman who had been murdered, but this was the thing that her mother’s boyfriend had given to her. This was the sweet thing that made her feel loved, and this was a chain that made her feel beautiful. This was a golden thing that made her feel like a movie star.

So I went home that night and I did something strange. I went through my old books and I picked one out from long ago. I opened it up and I read about Buffalo Creek.

 

It was February. It was morning. It was 1972. The Pittston Coal Company built a sludge dam on the side of a mountain above a mountain town. I read about how they built the dam to keep it full of toxic coal refuse. This refuse was like muddy black water, thick as oatmeal. One morning the dam broke and the water went rushing down into the valley.

 

I read about how the disaster killed 125 people. I read about how parents tried to save their children. One father was putting his children on top of their house. He was trying to put his wife up there too, but then the house broke apart like toothpicks. They were all hanging onto their father and being washed away in this giant muddy river. Then a car came barreling towards them in the flood water and knocked into their father. He lost his grip on their mother. The children were still hanging onto him. He was able to swim to safety and put the children on a bank. The last time they saw their mother she was floating down the river and screaming for help. They were their own mother now.

 

I read about roadways being washed away. I read about people seeing train tracks bent and wrapped around oak trees, coal train cars lifted on top of trees.

 

I read about how the survivors described it as a giant thirty-foot wave of water.

I read about bodies in trees. I read about the body of a young boy in a tree thirty feet above the ground. He had his hands up in front of his face like he was trying to protect himself.

 

I read about another body of an old man. There was a dog beside him. The man was dead but the dog wasn’t. The dog was protecting the body of the old man. It growled and bit at any rescue worker who tried to get close. The dog did this for days.

 

I read about how they didn’t find people with injuries. They found only people who were dead or ones who were left without a scratch. One house was destroyed and the house beside it was still standing with the car left untouched in the gravel driveway.

 

I read about the rescue workers using a bulldozer to push through the mud. They found an artificial leg, but they didn’t find the person who the artificial leg belonged to. They came across all of these baby dolls with their little baby doll hands reaching out of the mud. The rescue worker pulled out one baby doll by its hand. They freed it. Then he pulled out another baby doll hand. They freed it. Then they saw another little baby doll hand and pulled at it. It wasn’t a baby doll hand. It was the hand of a five-year-old girl. She had already been dressed that morning. She wasn’t in her pajamas. She was wearing a pink dress. They cleaned her up and tried to comb her muddy hair and put her in a body bag.

 

Three days later they found the body of a woman sitting against a tree. I read about how the rescue workers couldn’t believe they had not found her earlier. They had walked past her body perhaps hundreds of times. How could that be? They even ate lunch beside that tree one day and still didn’t see her. She was sitting against the tree and looking out at the river and she was dead. There was some sand in her mouth, but her body was untouched. There were no bruises. There were no broken bones. There were no gashes on her head.

 

I read about how two days later the rescue workers were walking past a row of caskets in the morgue. They looked inside one casket and there was the little girl in the pink. And in the same coffin right beside the little girl was the woman they found sitting against a tree. They didn’t know that these bodies found days apart were more than just bodies. The woman sitting against the tree was a mother. The little girl in the pink dress was her daughter.

 

I read about how the Pittston Coal Company said it was an act of God.

 

Then I looked up from the book and put it away. I saw all of the people I had known and loved being washed away in that flood. I saw Ruby and Nathan. I saw Stanley and Mary. I saw my uncles and my aunts and all the McClanahans. I saw Bill and his family. I saw Lee and all the crazy fuckers. I saw Sarah. They were all being washed away and they were all doing something else. They were all screaming.

AND NOW…

 

My water keeps rising. My water keeps rolling.

My home was gone. So I decided to write this book. I tried to remember all of the people and phantoms I had ever known and loved. I tried to make them laugh and dance, move and dream, love and see. I put some of them together and twisted our time together. I tried to bring them back, but I couldn’t. I started digging on the mountain years ago. I pushed the shovel down deep into the rocky ground and I cut out clumps of dirt and stones hard as gall.

My wife even asked me one morning, “What the hell are you doing.”

I didn’t say anything to her, but I took the dirt and stones and I put them in plastic bags. Then I traveled. I went to Pittsburgh, PA, and Chicago, IL, and Atlanta, GA. I went back to Pittsburgh, PA. I left my dirt there in the streets. I went back to Chicago, IL. I went to New York City. I went to Washington, DC. I went to Charlotte, NC. I went to Raleigh, NC. I went to Oxford, MS. I went to Ann Arbor, MI—the home of Iggy Pop and the ever beautiful Elizabeth Ellen. I went to Portland, OR. I dreamed of China. I dreamed of India, Berlin, Paris, London. I went to Seattle, WA. I went to New York City and I dropped my dirt. I went to New York City. I went to New York City for a third time. I went to New York City.

 

I gave my dirt away to the people I met. I called it magic dirt and they laughed. They put it in flower pots and the flowers grew. I dropped the stones on the sidewalks. I told them I was going to make the whole world Crapalachia, but they didn’t believe me. They thought I was only joking. I think of Sarah asking me why I was doing this.

I told her I was putting blankets in the trees for our children, so that no matter where they went—they would always be home. The whole world would become this place. It would take a million years and it would take a million trips, but I would rearrange the world.

She said, “That’s impossible, Scott, and it’s also crazy.”

I told her that’s why I needed to do it. I told her that was the only reason to do anything.

 

 

So now I put the dirt from my home in my pockets and I travel. I am making the world my mountain.

 

 

So we have to come to the end. Listen: Your heart is beating. Isn’t that amazing? Your heart believes in you. I believe in your heart too.

 

I wanted to write a book about all the people I knew and loved before I forgot them, but I see that my book is something else now. I see that I have been praying a selfish prayer for myself. I see that I have been praying this prayer…

 

We pass the torch of life for one another like runners in the night. I WILL forever be reaching for you. PLEASE keep reaching for me. Please.

I am going to start this appendix with an observation… How do you know England is an island? Have you ever walked around its borders? How do you know this appendix is true? Is it because I told you so?

 

Actually there were only 12 of them. I’ve always said there were 13 of them because I was told once that Ruby lost two babies rather than one. It always felt better when I said 13 anyway. So really there were only 11 of them because I know for sure Ruby had a baby who died before Stirley was born. My Aunt Annie got married when she was young and moved away. She was the oldest, so really it was like there were only 10 of them. Grover moved away as well. By the time my dad was born, it was like there were only 9 or 8 or 7 of them.