Listen Here (55 page)

from
Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley
(2000)

They came in a shiny new car. Don Fields was waiting for them under the maples, sitting on one of Mr. Forrester's old yard chairs. We supposed they had called Don from the town. We had seen the man before but not the woman, when the man decided to buy the old Forrester place. From the edges of the yard, we watched and waited.

We like Don. Don and his family live by the bridge. Don's granddaddy helped build the bridge. Don's daddy was killed in the Big War.

The new people were wrong for us. We could tell by their smell, a smell of flowers killed in moonshine. We could tell by their soft hands. They were tall and ruddy, matched like a pair of Irish setters.

The man had lightning with him. We could feel it.

Don knew it, too.

“What's that ye got there, a Geiger counter?” he asked.

“It's a laptop computer,” said the man.

“Oh, right. My daughter has one of them. She works for the state,” said Don.

“Really,” said the man, and smiled at the woman.

We do not like lightning.

Don showed them around. He showed them where Mr. Forrester fell in the garden. That was why the Forresters had to go live with their daughter far away. After they left, Charley Carruthers was looking after their farm, but he is not able anymore. He could not keep the renters from throwing their garbage off the back porch and using the henhouse for firewood.

We do not like fire.

Mr. Forrester came back to visit once. He died on Charley Carruthers's porch. Then the Forresters' daughter, Dreama, decided to sell the farm. Long years ago, Dreama liked to come with two buckets and a jug of water and pick all morning. She did not stamp the bushes down but slipped in between the vines. She sang to herself and ate berries until the juice ran down her chin. We miss Dreama still.

We like Charley and his wife. They live above the road. Charley is part Old People. When Charley digs up a ginseng plant to sell, he puts a seed down in the hole to grow a new plant. He shows respect.

Don showed the new people how the cistern collects water from the roof.

“Like I'm going to be drinking out of that,” said the woman.

Don said, “As you know, the house has running water, too. In the thirties Mr. Forrester and his boys dug a reservoir up on the hill and ran a pipe down to the kitchen.”

“Brilliant,” said the woman, turning her sharp hips this way and that like she was handling knives.

Don showed them where the Forresters buried their famous hound Katie, under the lilacs. He walked them over the hillside where Norton Forrester used to grow grapes. We tolerated the Forresters for forty years. They kept the brush cut so we could breathe. But we didn't tolerate the renters, and now we want it all back.

We do not like being tolerant.

Everywhere the new people stepped, there we were.

“These goddamned brambles,” said the woman, ripping her sleeve loose.

Don said, “They'll take over a place if you don't keep it cleared. That and the honeysuckle and the laurel. A place like this is a by-God backbreaker if you don't have help.”

“Oh,” said the man, “we'll have help.” He took a deep breath and patted his chest with both hands. “Mountain air. This is so authentic.”

That night they slept on the floor upstairs, in sleeping bags.

“Well, what do you think so far?” asked the man.

“Don't ask,” said the woman.

“No, this is great. You've got to feel it. The whole ambience is American Primitive. And besides, it's just for one year,” said the man. “One year for me to write my book about getting away from it all in a forgotten corner of Appalachia. I'm going to do for this place what Peter Mayle did for Provence. After we sell our little patch of heaven, we can live anywhere. Don Fields would be a fool not to sell, too. People are going to want to build up here. You know what the developer said.”

“God, where am I going to get arugula?” wailed the woman.

We bided our time. We watched him write with the lightning. We watched him visit the neighbors with his tape recorder, he called it. We watched the woman smoke and leave for town. She would stay away all day. Inch by inch, by root and tip, we walked toward the house.

One day Elsie Fields brought them a cherry pie. She asked the woman, “Did Don show you Sarah's roses?”

She and the woman went out in the sloping backyard. Elsie knelt down by a rosebush and touched the heavy cream-and-pink blossoms the way she used to stroke her children's hair when they were asleep.

“Even after Sarah Forrester lost her mind, she loved her roses,” said Elsie. “This is a Seven Sisters. That one is a Queen Anne. It looks like the briers are about to take them over, though. And do you know what that is, there?”

She pointed to the apple tree deep in our midst.

“A tree,” said the woman bitterly.

“That's a Pound Royal apple tree. You don't hardly ever hear of Pound Royals anymore. In fact, I don't know of another one anywhere. That one's might' near an antique. You ought to take care of it, cut them briers back so's you can pick the apples. They're mighty good eating. So are the berries, for that matter.”

After Elsie left, the woman went to find her husband. He was sitting on the breezeporch, plunking on a dulcimer that he ordered from New York. The dulcimer was bright and shiny like it had been dipped in honey.

The woman said, “Elsie Fields says we've got some kind of rare apple tree behind the house. But the yard is so grown up that it's impossible to get to it. I thought you were going to have this place cleaned up.”

“Listen to this,” said the man, picking out notes. They sounded like rain in a lard bucket.

“You need a shave,” said the woman.

“I've decided to grow a beard,” he said, plucking away.

“Where's the phone number of that yardman the realtor gave you?” she said.

I've been thinking that I'll clear the yard myself. As part of the whole experience,” he said.

Frankly, we were relieved to hear it.

The next day he went to town and bought a hedge trimmer, a hand scythe, and a plastic bucket. The woman went with him and bought a small air conditioner like Burl Corbett has for his son's asthma.

The man put the air conditioner in a window.

“I got the bucket so we could pick berries. You could make jelly in a big iron kettle. If we could find a kettle,” said the man.

The woman just looked at him. Then she went in the cool room and shut the door.

The hedge trimmer had a cord for the lightning. But when he plugged it in and brought it outside, the cord was too short to reach us.

He hung the bucket on his left arm. With the scythe in his right hand, he began to cut a path to the apple tree. When he had cleared a space, he would stop to fill the bucket. Slash and pick. Slash and pick. He whistled the tune he had been trying to play. Happy as a hog in clover, he was.

We closed in behind him. If he had looked back, he couldn't have seen the path he'd made. But he never looked back. He edged down the slope, where we grew tall over him. We treated him fairly: We plucked at his clothes. We tangled around his ankles and raked his hair. Thus we spoke a warning to him: go back while you still can.

But he was in a rhythm, like a man who will fish a stream to extinction for the pure joy of killing. He even forgot to pick. Slash slash slash he went, his eyes hot and bright. This was what he had come to the country for: to feel his blood pumping, to feel alive.

He woke up Old Mother. She was sleeping at the base of the apple tree. Raising her weaving head, she looked and listened.

He was working his way around the tree when her swift, dark uncoiling caught his eye. Backwards and forwards he thrashed, screaming, wreathing himself in vines, tearing his flesh on our teeth, which are as numberless as the stars. For a moment after his foot slipped off the rock ledge, we supported his weight as a bird's nest supports a clutch of eggs. Then he fell like a man falling from the sky.

The next day they found his body on the rocks along the creek. He was lying beside the bones of the last renter, a man who had loved Pound Royal apples.

We have reached the back steps now. We can look in the windows. We can see the field mice playing in the breakfast dishes on the table. We can see the camel crickets eating spiders in the corners and the moths flitting in and out of the clothes the woman left behind.

Hissing peacefully to herself, Old Mother lays her eggs in high grass, on a blanket of rose petals.

(July 19, 1952–)

Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia, the daughter of Martha Jane Thornhill Phillips, a teacher, and Russell R. Phillips, a contractor. Although she left the region after college, much of her work is set in Appalachia. “No one has labeled Phillips as a Southern writer or a woman writer,” wrote literary critic Dorothy Combs Hill. “Her relentless intelligence breaks those boundaries. And, although her fiction set in West Virginia is evocative of place, it feels universal.”

Phillips graduated, magna cum laude, with a B.A. from West Virginia University in 1974, then earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1978. Her first published work, a chapbook entitled
Sweethearts
, won the 1977 Pushcart Prize. Since then, she has won many major American literary awards, including O. Henry and Best American Short Stories awards for her short fiction. She has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.
Black Tickets
was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize, and
Shelter
, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Machine Dreams
received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and was a
New York Times
Best Book for 1984.
Motherkind
won the 2000 Massachusetts Book Award and was nominated for Britain's Orange Prize.

A major theme running through Phillips's work is the human failure to communicate, a failure that is most tragic when it occurs among family members. Phillips's characters are often anguished, isolated, and frequently misunderstood. “I'm interested in what home now consists of,” Phillips has said. “Because we move around so much, families are forced to be immediate; they must stand on their relationships, rather than on stereotypes of a common history.”

In 1985, Phillips married physician Mark Brian Stockman. The couple and their children make their home in the Boston area where Phillips is Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

In his review of Phillips' novel
Machine Dreams
, Jonathan Yardley notes, “Ordinary people can be extraordinary, she is saying, and what happens to them is terribly important. She is right, and the best parts of
Machine Dreams
do honor to them.” In the following scene from
Machine Dreams
, readers enter the thoughts of Danner, a young girl growing up in West Virginia during the 1950s. Through her, we also hear the voices of her parents: her father, Mitch, and mother, Jean.

In the scene from
Motherkind
, Kate, a new mother who is caring for her own mother who is dying, enjoys a serene moment with her infant son.

Fiction:
Motherkind
(2000),
Shelter
(1994),
Fast Lanes
(1984),
Machine Dreams
(1984),
The Secret Country: Randolph County
(1982),
How Mickey Made It
(1981),
Hometown
(1980),
Black Tickets
(1979),
Counting
(1978),
Sweethearts
(1976).
Autobiographical essays:
“Why She Writes,”in
Why I Write
(1999), ed. Will Blythe. “Premature Burial,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 210–17. “Callie,” in
Family: American Writers Remember Their Own
(1996), ed. Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer.

Adam Begley, “Tales out of Camp,”
Mirabella
(August 1994), 56, 59. Joyce Dyer, “Jayne Anne Phillips,” in
Bloodroot
, 209. David EdeIstein, “The Short Story of Jayne Anne Phillips,”
Esquire
(December 1985), 108–12.
Great Women Writers
(1994), 401–3. Dorothy Combs Hill, “Jayne Anne Phillips,”
Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South
(1993), 348–59. Jonathan Yardley, “Jayne Anne Phillips: West Virginia Breakdown”
Washington Post Book World
(24 June 1984), 3.

The House At Night

D
ANNER
, 1956

In the humid nights her mother let her sleep under one thin sheet, an old one worn soft from many washings, and in the dark of her child's bedroom she turned and sweated until the sheet wrapped her small body like a sour cocoon. Night sounds in the house were shot with lambent silence: rotary blades of the stilled electric fans gathered a fine dust behind the ribs of their metal cages.
Once you're asleep you won't know how hot it is, go to sleep, fans cost money to run;
crickets sounded in the close dark, their throbbing continuous as the running of a high-pitched musical engine. No breeze stirred to break their sounds; Danner drifted, almost sleeping; each shrill vanished faster than the last. She heard faintly her brother breathe and whimper; in these summer days the artificial disruption of school was forgotten and the fifteen months of age separating them disappeared; they existed between their parents as one shadow,
the kids
, and they fought and conspired with no recognition of separation. Doors opened now onto the same unlit hallway; near Billy's room the hallway turned, lengthened past the bathroom and emptied into their parents' bedroom. There the high Grandmother Danner bed floated like an island above its starched white skirt; the row of closet doors slid on their runners, a confusing line of illusions; and the two big bureaus shone. The bank of windows was so high no one could see anything but the branches of the lilacs, branches that now in the August night looked furred with black and didn't stir. By day the leaves were a deep and waxen green.
Jean, come and get these kids, don't either one of you ever stand near the driveway when you see I'm backing the car out, goddamn it, I'll shake the living daylights out of you
: what it meant was the State Road construction and the jackhammer, shaking a grown man's body as he held the handle and white fire flew from the teeth of the machine. Endless repair of the dusty two-lanes progressed every summer, but the roads were never finished; they kept men working who had no other work and Danner liked to watch; at night she saw those men in the dark corners of her room, tall shadows with no faces.
Even if there aren't prisoners anymore the workmen are nearly the same thing
, and they did look different, dangerous, though they wore the same familiar khaki work clothes her father wore to work at the plant.
Your father and Clayton own the concrete company—they don't work for a wage, do you understand what I'm saying?
The workmen were from Skully or Dogtown and their families got assistance, a shameful thing; in those shabby rows of houses on mud roads they kept their babies in cardboard boxes. But that was just a story, Mitch said; they were trying to get along like anyone.
You'd say that about any man who worked on a road, wouldn't matter if he was a lunatic
, and Jean turned back to the stove, always; she stood by the stove, the kitchen cabinets, the sink, the whole house moored to earth by her solid stance, just as the world outside went with Mitch in the car. He carried the world in and out in the deep khaki pockets of his workman's pants. When Danner and Billy were with him and the road crews were out, Mitch waited with no complaint for the flagman's signal and kept the windows rolled down. Yellow dust filled the car and caked everything with a chalky powder. Big machines, earth-movers and cranes, turned on their pedestals with a thunderous grinding as two or three shirtless men pulled thick pipes across the asphalt with chains. Mitch held both children on his lap behind the steering wheel, the three of them crushed together in a paradise of noise. Jackhammers and drills were louder than the heat, louder than sweat and the shattered ground and the overwhelmed voices of the men. Mitch smoked and talked to the foreman, yelling each sentence twice while the children coughed from the dust and excitement. Jean made them stay in the back seat if they had to stop near the construction; she nodded politely to the flagman, kept the car windows rolled up in the stifling closeness
just another minute
, and locked all the doors. At home they weren't allowed to lock doors:
children are safe at home, you should never be doing anything you don't want Mama to see
, but Danner and Billy closed themselves secretly into adjacent closets and stayed there until the dark scared them, tapping messages with their fists on the plyboard between them. Pressed back against clothes and stacked shoe boxes, Billy wore a billed khaki cap like his father's and Danner kept a navy blue clutch purse her mother no longer used; it smelled of a pressed powder pure as corn, and the satin lining was discolored. Danner unzipped it and put her face in the folds; she held her breath just another minute and that made everything lighten: the fields surrounding the house were full of light, scrub grass grew tall, and the milkweed stalks were thick as wrists. Wild wheat was in the fields and the crows fed, wheeling in circular formations. Milk syrup in the weeds was sticky and white; the pods were tight and wouldn't burst for weeks. Where did the crows go at night? They were dirty birds waiting for things to die, Danner was not to go near them; when the black night came she was in her bed to wake in the dark and pretend she saw the birds, rising at night as they did at noon, their wingspan larger, terrifying, a faint black arching of lines against the darker black; even the grasses, the tangled brushy weeds, were black. Danner heard the house settle, a nearly inaudible creaking, ghostly clicking of the empty furnace pipes; her mother, her father, walking the hall in slippers. They walked differently and turned on no lights if it was late. Danner lay listening, waiting, fighting her own heavy consciousness to hear and see them as they really were. Who were they? The sound of her father was a wary lumbering sound, nearly fragile, his heaviness changed by the slippers, the dark, his legs naked and white in his short robe, the sound of his walking at once shy and violent. Danner heard him ask one word and the word was full of darkness:
Jean?
At night her mother was larger, long robe dragging the floor, slide of fabric over wooden parquet a secretive hush. Danner heard her mother up at night. Doors shut in the dark. The bathroom door, click of a lock. Hem of the long robe gliding, a rummaging in cabinets too high for the kids to reach. Jean finds the hidden equipment and pulls out the white enamel pitcher; the metal is deathly cold, the thin red hose coiled inside is the same one she uses, sterilized before and after, to give the children enemas. “Younger than Springtime” is the song she sings when she rocks Danner to sleep, the child at seven nearly too big to be held like a baby, earaches and sore throats Billy will catch next, and the two of them awake till midnight. She rocks them both at once and reads a thick college text for the classes she takes one at a time. She memorizes everything as though she were a blank slate; next year when Billy's in school she'll do practice teaching and get the certificate, there's never enough money and they meet the bills because she plots and plans, and the smell of her throat and neck as the cane-bottomed rocker creaks is a crushed fragrance like shredded flowers. Danner is the one who won't sleep; she smells her mother and the scent is like windblown seeding weeds, the way the side of the road smells when the State Road mowing machines have finished and the narrow secondary route is littered with a damp verdant hay that dries and yellows. Cars and trucks grind the hay to a powder that makes more dust, swirling dust
softer than starlight;
Danner hears Jean's voice as one continuous sound weaving through days and nights.
Pretty is as pretty does, seen and not heard, my only darling, don't ever talk back to your mother, come and read
Black Beauty,
a little girl with a crooked part looks like no one loves her
, and she cuts Danner's flyaway brown hair to hang straight from the center with bangs, a pageboy instead of braids; that way it takes less time. The chair creaks and Danner is awake until Jean lies in bed with her and pretends she'll stay all night. She calls Danner Princess, Mitch calls her Miss, Billy is called My Man;
who's my best man
? Danner watches Jean pick him up; he's still the smaller one, hair so blond it's white. He stiffens laughing when his mother burrows her big face in his stomach, and he drinks so much water in the summer that he sloshes when he jumps up and down. Runs in and out of the house all day to ask for more and drinks from the big jug.
How can he have such a thirst? Lifting that heavy jug by himself, looks like a little starving Asian with that round belly;
at five he shimmies to the top of the swing-set poles, a special concrete swing-set their father has brought from the plant and built in the acre of backyard down by the fence and the fields. The poles are steel pipes twenty feet high, sunk into the earth and cemented in place; the swings are broad black rubber hanging by thick tire chains. Billy climbs the tall center pole and the angled triad of pipe that supports the set at either end, but Danner prefers the swings, a long high ride if she pumps hard enough, chains so long the swings fly far out; she throws her head back, mesmerized, holding still as the swing traces a pendulum trajectory. Locusts in the field wheedle their red clamor under her; locusts are everywhere in summer, in daylight; she and Billy find their discarded shells in the garden, a big square of overgrown weeds in a corner of the lot. In the tumbledown plot they dig out roads for Billy's trucks, and the locust shells turn up in the earth: they are hard, delicate, empty. Transparent as fingernails, imprinted with the shape of the insect, they are slit up the middle where something has changed and crawled free. Danner throws the shells over the fence. Billy smells of mud and milk, kneels in dirt and sings motor sounds as he inches the dump trucks along. They make more roads by filling the beds of the bigger plastic trucks, pushing them on their moving wheels to the pile of dirt in the center; when they've tunneled out a crisscross pattern of roads, they simply move the dirt from place to place, crawling in heat that seems cooler when they're close to the soil, making sounds, slapping the sweat bees that crawl under their clothes and between their fingers. The stings, burning pinpricks, swell, stay hot, burn in bed at night. Danner sucks her hands in her sleep, and the lights are out, the calls of the night birds are faint, and the dream hovers, waiting at the border of the fields; the dark in the house is black. The bathroom light makes a triangular glow on the hallway floor; the glow hangs in space, a senseless, luminous shape, and disappears. The bedroom door is shut, a lock clicks. Danner lies drifting, hears the furtive sound of the moving bed, the brief mechanical squeak of springs, and no other sound at all but her father's breath, harsh, held back. All sounds stop then in the black funnel of sleep; Danner hears her mother, her father, lie silent in an emptiness so endless they could all hurtle through it like stones. Jean sighs and then she speaks:
Oh, it's hot
, she says to no one. Danner sinks deep, completely, finally, into a dream she will know all her life; the loneliness of her mother's voice,
Oh, it's hot
, rises in the dream like vapor. In the cloudy air, winged animals struggle and stand up; they are limbed and long-necked, their flanks and backs powerful; their equine eyes are lucent and their hooves cut the air, slicing the mist to pieces. The horses are dark like blood and gleam with a black sheen; the animals swim hard in the air to get higher and Danner aches to stay with them. She touches herself because that is where the pain is; she holds on, rigid, not breathing, and in the dream it is the horse pressed against her, the rhythmic pumping of the forelegs as the animal climbs, the lather and the smell; the smell that comes in waves and pounds inside her like a pulse.