Original Sins (68 page)

He overheard Lem in the corner of the room asking Jed what work Raymond did. Jed said, “Oh, I reckon he's some kind of professional bum or something.” They laughed.

Raymond felt humiliated. Jed thought being married to Mr. Prince's daughter, being foreman at the mill, made him something special. He was too ignorant to realize that other people didn't necessarily share his values. But he preferred Jed's contempt to his pity, which he had bestowed upon Raymond in great quantities ever since the strike had flopped.

His grandma was saying, “Now, let's see, was that the year Lyle's baby died of the whooping cough?”

Aunt Verbena replied, “No, honey. Remember? It was right after Royal's boy rolled his Chevy offen Raven Ridge.”

His grandma began talking vaguely of moving down the cove to Aunt Verbena's. Verbena, her sister, was married to Corliss IV, who was actually Verbena's second cousin. Everyone called him Cor Four. Verbena was a family name introduced in the 1800's by Corliss Three, an herbal doctor. Cousin Royal's full name was Pennyroyal.

“But law, I don't know. I don't reckon I ought to leave this place empty.”

“I'll live here, Grandma,” Raymond announced. He realized that his relatives in Tatro Cove were the Saving Remnant. That it was up to him to guide them back to their original mission, which they'd fallen away from.

When he moved in, the ground was still squishy from winter rains. He holed up with a stack of seed catalogs and emerged when things had dried out to dig up the garden and spread rotted manure and plant crops. He ordered fruit trees, vines, and asparagus roots by mail. He brought his chickens and cow up from Newland, and bought a couple of hives of bees and two unshorn sheep. He planted feed corn in his kin-folks' deserted patches and taught himself to make cottage cheese, cream cheese, hard cheese, butter. He figured out how to shear his sheep, and put the wool in bags till next winter when he'd have time to figure out what to do with it. He felled trees for winter fuel.

He decided it was like being crippled and learning to walk upright again. He watched Cor Four and asked questions, feeling sheepish that he had so resolutely turned his back on his family when he left for New York. Because it had now become clear to him that they were the Chosen People who'd preserved the ancient skills and traditions. His assignment was to render those skills and traditions operative again, to make his kinfolk aware of the value of the way of life they were now taking for granted. Capitalism was in its last days. And as the industrial valley in which Newland sat fell into ruins, here in the mountains would reside a race of people who could point the way to a more just and humane post-imperialist world. Meanwhile, during the period of decline, those in the valley who understood what was happening faster than their brethren would find refuge and inspiration here in Tatro Cove.

Although his house was wired for electricity, Raymond didn't use it. He got water in a bucket from the creek and stored dairy products in the old springhouse. He cooked on a wood stove and crapped in a smelly old two-holer out back. The summer days were long, and he was usually ready to sleep when it got dark. For entertainment he discovered which woods to walk in to see trillium, which rocks were covered with wild columbine. He began recognizing and naming individual chickens and watching their complicated social life. He became aware of the play of sunlight on the hill across from his house over the course of each day. At night he sat on the porch in the dark, watching the fireflies, listening to the animals settle down for the night, and trying to teach himself to play his grandpa's banjo.

He took delight in each item he discovered he could do without, lining them up one by one on a table in the living room. He decided two blankets on his bed instead of three were plenty. If he shivered a little at night, the shivers were pleasurable because he knew he was reducing his reliance on products of the capitalist system. Then he realized that if he had a down-filled sleeping bag, he could give up blankets altogether, plus not have to stoke the stove at night, thus reducing his need for gasoline for his chain saw. So he ordered an arctic sleeping bag by mail from L. L. Bean, from whom Justin had always ordered his chamois shirts. At the last minute he added a chamois shirt, a down vest, and a wool lumberjack shirt to his order, knowing they would be among his last purchases from the consumer society. Warm clothes meant he needed less firewood and less food. He also realized that he could cut down on store purchases if he did some serious hunting and fishing, so he added several hundred dollars' worth of equipment to the order.

But his two major indulgences from the industrial state were a chain saw and his Jeep. Both he would, of course, do without eventually, but first he had to learn to use an axe. He had a power take-off installed on the back of the Jeep, figuring he'd need it in the fields since he was going to be farming alone. Once refugees arrived from the valley, however, once he persuaded his kinsmen to leave their mines and their businesses in town, he'd have all the manpower he needed.

His cousin Ben, M.G.'s son, started coming up the cove to help with chores. The first time Raymond ever saw him, on a visit with his parents, Ben was a scrawny howling baby in his mother's arms. Raymond had gone up North, not seeing him again until their grandpa's funeral. Ben almost took his breath away that afternoon, standing there in the parlor looking awkward in a dark suit, with his dark blonde hair parted and plastered down. He was everything Raymond had been at sixteen—earnest, idealistic, confused. Plus everything Raymond hadn't been—good-looking, patient and polite, a basketball player, a good student. Behind a puppyish friendliness and playfulness was wariness: Once he took someone on, it was for life. In Tatro Cove there was no getting away from anyone.

He asked Raymond for advice. M.G. wanted him to go somewhere out of the mountains to college. He wasn't sure, had a girlfriend named Cheryl, thought maybe he was in love, would she wait, etc. Raymond was flattered. His real kid brother had never wanted Raymond's opinions on anything. Apparently Ben saw him as a man of the world. Raymond supposed he was, in a way. He saw other reasons why Ben should stay in the mountains, though: The kids bound for college never came back. But Tatro Cove needed them. Raymond needed them, to help him piece together their proud tradition, from the remnants that littered the area. Raymond had the knowledge, the experience, the vision. But he needed a mouthpiece, someone who'd grown up in Tatro Cove and spoke their language as Raymond never could.

“But sometimes I get to wondering what it's like out there,” Ben would murmur.

“Ain't nothing worth bothering about.”

“You know that because you been out there all your life. But maybe I got to find out for myself.”

“How come you can't just take my word for it?” Raymond asked. If Ben had to retrace Raymond's exact steps, what was the point of anything? Raymond would teach him everything he needed to know about the outside—and about the strengths of Tatro Cove, the role its denizens would be playing in the future of mankind.

One afternoon he and Ben took a beehive apart in search of queen cells to cut out. Raymond explained that if any were allowed to develop, the reigning queen would waste energy that should have gone into egg-laying on hunting down and stinging to death her rivals. As alarmed bees swirled around and dive-bombed their veils, Raymond explained how this behavior resembled management's at the mill, or in any capitalist enterprise. Queens, drones, workers who gathered nectar, workers who tended the hive. Families, churches, schools, sports teams, the army—a pyramid with some authority figure at the top. Things were set up this way on purpose, Raymond told Ben, to prepare young people like himself to move into the hierarchy of some factory at the bottom.

“What's hierarchy?” asked Ben.

“Uh, rank, sort of like. Generals and lieutenants. You know.”

“Like chickens?”

Raymond looked at him. He wasn't supposed to interrupt. “How do you mean?”

“You know how they peck at the red one until she don't have no tail feathers?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“And up to Cor Four's milking parlor. The cows line up the same way ever day.”

Raymond was supposed to be drawing these analogies. When Justin used to explain things to him, he never interrupted. “Now this is how things operate in nature,” he continued, making the best of the interruptions. You couldn't blame Ben, he was just a kid, didn't even know what a political analysis was. “But the difference between us and animals is that we got brains and can see other ways.”

“Like what?”

Raymond hadn't exactly worked this out yet. “When you're ready to hear it, I'll explain. You got to absorb things little by little or they don't take.”

At dusk Raymond strolled down the cove. The creek gurgled, and bullfrogs hurled themselves into it with small splashes. As he walked past Aunt Verbena's, his grandma called from the porch, “How's it going, Junior?”

“Just fine, Granny. When you going to come down and see?”

“Law, child, I can't hardly get down them porch steps, never mind the foot of this holler.”

TVs rumbled as he passed Royal's and Lyle's. He was swept with irritation. Barn dancing, clogging, ballad singing, banjo strumming, dulcimer picking. Corn huskings, quilting bees, house raisings. But
television
, all day every day, and night after night? He climbed the steps and walked into Lyle's living room. Lyle, still in his yellow hard hat and green work clothes, lay on the sofa. His two children sat on the floor. All three gazed at Big Bird, who was shrieking at Oscar in his garbage can while some children played hopscotch on the sidewalk. Numbers began flashing on the screen while a chorus shouted out their names: “
ONE! TWO
! …”

Lyle glanced up. “Hey there, Raymond! How you doing, boy?”

“All right. How you doing, Lyle?” Actually he was annoyed. What did all this urban freneticism on the TV have to do with the children of Tatro Cove?

“Have a seat?”

“No, thanks. Just popped in to say hi.” As he walked back to the door, he saw on the wall a framed picture of a baby cut from a magazine. He stopped and studied it. Under the glass in one corner was a lock of hair. A tiny bracelet from the hospital, with beads spelling “Tatro,” was attached to the frame by a ribbon.

“Who's this, Lyle?”

“The wife done that For our baby that died of the whooping cough. Seen one like it in a magazine.”

“Nice.” Never had he seen such a tacky item. The taste of his kin had been debased at some very elemental level. Women up here in their spare time used to make witch hazel brooms, coverlets, corn husk dolls. It was pathetic.

He crossed the highway to M.G.'s ranch house, which had puny little columns holding up the front porch roof. “For the dog to pee against!” M.G. had explained, chortling, slapping Raymond's back, and tapping the column with his white patent leather loafer.

Ben's face lit up when he saw Raymond. They walked down the highway to McCray's Grocery, which was roofed and sided with brown asphalt shingles. A couple of men lay on the porch. Raymond and Ben joined them, propping up their heads and necks against the wall. They were discussing who the ugliest man in the county was.

“Now you think about that nose on Lester. All mashed in like that. They say his mama dropped him when he was a baby.”

“Naw, Lester can't hold a candle to you, Wash, in the Ugly Department. What you think, Ben? Don't you b'lieve Wash is just about the homeliest creature you ever did see, with them close-set eyes of hisn? You know, he can't hardly see off to one side. If Noah was to be standing over there on that hillside filling up the Ark, Wash'd walk right past him.”

Ben had been doing this his whole life. As he launched into a teasing discussion of his neighbors and kin, Raymond took mental notes. He'd learned during voter registration, during union organizing, that you had to speak to people in their own language. And to do this, you had to study how they operated. Ben spoke this language instinctively, but it was up to Raymond to make him conscious of the strong tradition for which he would be the spokesman. The men on the porch floor always discussed who had the worst problems, the most boring job. A parody of hierarchy, Raymond decided, a negative ranking system. A peaceful ritual for draining off aggression …

They lay on the porch like snakes in the sun. Raymond realized that he lay like a board—rigid, poised to leap into activity. And his brain—the wheels wouldn't stop spinning. He tried to relax, tried to imagine himself as a dead groundhog hung on a fence post He shrugged his shoulders to loosen them up, rolled his head on his neck.

“Yall right, Raymond?” Ben inquired. Raymond realized the conversation had stopped.

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

“You itching to get back home?”

“No. Yall carry on.” He knew that his presence made them uneasy. Conversations often ceased in midsentence when he appeared. He wondered if he gave off an aura of urgency. They'd rather push away the cup he held out to them without drinking from it But throughout history this had been the case. People didn't like being asked to disrupt their orderly little lives for the sake of the greater good. Prophets were always despised in their own countries. Raymond was getting used to it.

“Now Zeke there … You talk about ugly. That man's so ugly his own mama can't hardly look him in the face….”

A large Mercury pulled up. They sat up. The driver pushed a button, and the window rolled down. The man asked in a New Jersey accent, “Can you tell me where I can find some typical hillbillies?”

They looked at each other. Finally Raymond replied, “Yeah. Go down this road across from us. Take your first right. Go one mile and take a right down Branch Holler Road. When you hit a hardtop road, turn right and go one mile.”