Crapalachia: A Biography of Place (4 page)

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Oh I don’t know,” she said. “Just some guy I asked to pose by the pretty flowers.”

So I sat in the kitchen not really knowing what to think.

 

Grandma looked through all of her pictures of the dead and then she said: “Of course some people don’t think it’s right. They don’t think it’s right taking pictures of the dead.”

Then she flipped back through all of the other pictures and looked at the one of Elgie’s dead brother.

She closed her picture book and smiled her smile.

 

That evening we went to the Wallace and Wallace funeral home to pay our respects for a woman she knew. It was another woman who was coming home one day and the mountain collapsed on her. I especially didn’t want to be at the funeral when Ruby took out her camera later. I’d been going to wakes with her for years now, and I’d even been to wakes at people’s houses, something called sitting up with the dead. I thought about how I watched people picking the body up and holding it and petting the dead hair and crying. I thought about how they carried it around and cried. I knew something was up that night, sitting around in front of the casket, and I knew what it was when my grandma leaned over and said: “Why don’t you take a picture for Grandma?”

“WHAT?”

She pointed to the body and tried handing me a camera.

“Why don’t you take a picture for Grandma?”

Oh GOD no.

I sat nervous and shook my head. But she wouldn’t stop it.

She kept trying to hand me the camera and saying: “You go on.”

I took ahold of it and stood there even though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to take a picture of this dead body in front of everyone.

There were a couple of pretty girls in the corner and they had a look on their face like, “What’s he doing? Is he getting ready to take a picture of a dead body?”

There were a couple of people standing around the body. They were hugging and holding and hugging and holding each other and crying. So I stood looking at it all and couldn’t take the damn thing.

 

Grandma cussed “shit” beneath her breath and tried getting my cousin Tina to do it for her instead.

“You take that camera and take a picture for Grandma,” she said…

Then she pointed to the camera

…and then at the body

…and then at Tina.

Tina didn’t want to take the picture either, but finally she took the camera out of my hand and turned to the body.

“That’s right,” Ruby said. “Grandma’s just a poor, old woman who can’t get up. Go ahead and take it for your poor Grandma and make sure you don’t cut off the pretty flowers behind the head. Someone spent so much on that arrangement.”

So Tina held the camera and Ruby said: “That’s right.” Then Tina snapped the picture—SNAP—and everyone looked around at where the camera flash was coming from.

 

I figured this would be the end of it, but it wasn’t. The next morning I walked the film down to Rite Aid when Ruby was working on one of her quilts. She was still stitching one of her squares on when I came back from Rite Aid and put the film back down on the table. I told her they wouldn’t develop them. I told her what they said.

“What?” Ruby said after I told her what they said.

I repeated it: “They said they couldn’t develop pictures of dead bodies anymore. They said it’s the policy.”

Ruby just looked so confused: “You mean they won’t develop pictures of people you know anymore. Well how are you going to remember them? How’s an old woman gonna remember all of ’em?”

I said: “It’s probably because of privacy laws and stuff. I’m sure there are not too many people bringing in pictures of dead bodies anymore.”

So Grandma Ruby kept working on her quilt with this funny look on her face.

 

Grandma said: “Well that doesn’t make any sense. These aren’t strangers. They’re my blood.”

I shrugged my shoulders and I sat with Ruby as she stitched another stitch and said, “Don’t make any sense to me. I know I used to get them developed all the time.” And then she was quiet for a second and then she started telling me a story that didn’t have anything to do with anything…

…She told me about how she used to ride the horse down into Prince with her grandmother. “We used to go peddling,” she said.

And they didn’t have anything, and I guess they sold canned preserves or quilts.

Then she told me about how they were going down the side of the mountain towards Meadow Creek one time and they heard this sound of what sounded like a wild animal crying.

They rode and the sound grew closer. They realized it was a baby crying.

It was all bundled up and put beside the path so if somebody came by they’d find it.

 

So Ruby asked her own grandma if they could stop and take the baby home.

Her grandma just shook her head no because they could barely feed themselves, let alone another baby. They left the baby there and Ruby said the last thing she remembered was the sound of that baby crying from far away and the mule moving away so slow.

She started stitching another square.

She looked at the squares of her old scrap quilt.

She looked so sad thinking about how Rite Aid wouldn’t develop her pictures of the dead.

And even now, years later, I wish I had pictures of all the faces I once knew. I wish I had pictures of Ruby and quilts, Nathan and teddy bear sweatshirts, groans and moans and radio preachers.

 

 

So Ruby and Nathan, let us pretend that we will always be like this. Let us pretend that we will never die.

Let us meet at this address a thousand years from now. Let us meet in Danese alive and not dead, alive and not dead, alive and not dead.

I sure as hell felt dead when the phone rang and they told Ruby that I had been skipping school for the past two weeks. They told me if I didn’t come back the next day we would be in trouble. The next day I went to school and was at least happy to see my friend Little Bill. He was wearing a toboggan. I had been friends with Little Bill forever. It wasn’t that big of a deal except we had retard math together and the retard math teacher Mrs. Powell only had three rules. No hats. I was just sitting down with Frog who was telling me about his brother getting crabs. “My mom told him not to be messing with that girl.” Frog said it was really sad. He kept telling me how his brother came home one night and finally told his mom that he had crabs. She was drunk and told him to put Raid on it. He didn’t know she was joking. Then Frog laughed. “And that’s what he did too. Shit ate through the skin and he almost lost his testicle.”

 

I shook my head and laughed and watched Little Bill sit down in front of me with his toboggan.

I whispered to him, “What are you doing? You’re going to get killed wearing that hat.” Then Frog shushed me.

I finally realized what wearing a toboggan meant. Little Bill came from a big family who all had different last names. Some days they came to school wearing toboggans—even the girls. I looked up at the retard math rules: #1 No gum. #2 No talking. #3 No hats. And Little Bill just sat quiet. At first Mrs. Powell didn’t notice. She sat in front of the class doing paper work.

 

One of the girls, Bobbie Jo, raised her hand. There was something wrong with Bobbie Jo. She was always holding crayons and pretending she was smoking cigarettes. Then she would eat the crayons. She always went around saying, “I got Terry’s ring,” pretending that she was married to this poor guy in our class. It was either that or, “I’m going to sit on Terry’s face.” Terry never said anything. One time I watched this guy named Jody spit on her. She wore glasses and the loogie smacked against the lens of her glasses. It slipped down the lens. She cried and cried. After that whenever she got the chance she started telling on people.

So Bobbie Jo raised her hand and said, “Mrs. Powell, isn’t one of your rules that we can’t wear hats inside?”

Mrs. Powell wasn’t paying attention but then she finally said: “Yes—that’s right. No hats.”

Bobbie Jo kept going: “Well why is Lil Bill wearing a hat then?”

 

So it started.

 

Mrs. Powell looked up and Little Bill put his head down.

“Bill, take off your hat.”

Little Bill kept sitting there like he didn’t hear her. He kept his head down.

Mrs. Powell said it again. “Bill, take off your hat.”

Little Bill said, “I can’t.”

Mrs. Powell walked over to him. “What did you say?”

Bill said, “I can’t.”

We were all feeling for him now.

Mrs. Powell walked over to him and said, “What did you say?”

Bill said, “I can’t.”

“What?” she said again. “Take off your hat.”

“Please no,” Little Bill said.

“Take it off.”

“Please no.”

“Take it off.”

“Please no.”

TAKE IT OFF!

 

And so he did. He took off his toboggan real slooooooooooooooooowwwwwwww. That’s when we saw it. His skull was bald and shiny and bright and so pale that you could see the veins running all over beneath the white skin.

“He has lice,” Bobbie Jo said. “His mother makes him shave his head when he gets lice.”

One of the other kids said, “You’re bald, Lil Bill. Did your mother do that?”

Little Bill tried thinking something up quick. He knew we were in 9th grade now. He knew he was too old to have lice. The only thing he could come up with was the wrestler King Kong Bundy. King Kong Bundy was bald. Little Bill was bald. Little Bill said, “I’m trying to be like King Kong Bundy. I want to be a wrestler. I want to be like King Kong Bundy.”

 

Then he was walking around us showing us his wrestling moves, showing us his muscles. He wanted to be like King Kong Bundy. Goddamnit. He kept saying it like it was true, like he didn’t have lice, like the whole world was one big stupid lie that he believed in his heart.

 

I told him it was okay. I told him the same thing during history class the next period. I told him to keep his head down and just read his Crapalachia history book and it would be okay.

 

So we read about the accidents of history. We read about the James River and Kanawha Turnpike, which was a one-lane road that passed by our house. It was the way west. George Washington and the Virginians built it, but the New Yorkers built the Erie Canal. The Virginians found out that water travel is faster. The Virginians lost. Therefore, New York became New York. But imagine if we would have won. Imagine Crapalachia as the center of the world. Imagine skyscrapers rising from the mountains.

 

I read about how Governor Arch Moore kept 100,000 dollars in a refrigerator in his office because he loved cold, hard cash.

 

I read about how to stuff a ballot box. Have the party boss at the end of the road in a truck start with a blank sheet of paper that is the size of a paper ballot. Send the first guy in with the blank ballot stuffed in his pants. On the way out have him hide the real ballot in his pants and put the fake ballot inside the ballot box. Take the real ballot back to the party boss. The party boss fills it out and gives it to the next guy who goes in and slips the filled in ballot in the ballot box and brings out the blank ballot. This goes on all day. This goes on all day and then the men are paid in liquor. This is how you get them drunk and steal an election fair and square. This is democracy.

 

Then Frog raised his hand and told the teacher, “Do you know that Charles Manson grew up in West Virginia? His mother was a prostitute in Clarksburg.”

The teacher told him to be quiet.

Everybody laughed.

Frog told us again that it was true.

 

Then we read about how you build civilization. They built the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel by digging a big ass hole in the side of a mountain. They used a bunch of poor people to dig it. A poor person means either their skin was dark or their accents were thick. That’s the best way to do anything—get a bunch of poor people to do it. So they cut and cut into the mountain but there was a problem. They didn’t wet the dust from the cut limestone—so the men developed silicosis. The men started dying by the tens and then the twenties and then the hundreds and then—the thousands? Since they were poor the company just buried them. There was an investigation a few years later but no one cared. They were poor people. The official statistic was 476 but the truth is over 1,000 of the 3,000 men lost their lives in a few short days.

And then we read about the number of coal miners killed.

 

In 1931: 1,456

In 1932: 1,192

In 1933: 1,051

In 1934: 1,214

In 1935: 1,216

In 1936: 1,319