Strange as This Weather Has Been (12 page)

I learned what it is to grieve your life lost while you’re still living, and I learned that there are few losses harsher than that. It was grief beyond anything I’d imagined. I can still feel sometimes that dry raw socket. The slash, then the body-burning pain. For so many years, I’d only seen myself at all, I realized then, because I could see myself as different, as more than ordinary. The sweet peach-pink. But now I saw that was a make-believe choice I’d only pretended I’d had.

Daddy got over his disappointment pretty fast, why cry? milk’s spilled. Mom reacted exactly like I knew she would. Because when you did something really bad, Mom never did get angry at you, that would have been too easy, would have given you too much credit, too much respect. Instead, she’d let you know, without saying much of anything, that you’d disappointed her so deep you didn’t even deserve her anger. Weren’t even worth the energy of that. Mom kept me fed,
tried to keep me clean, made me get out of bed and on top of it even if she couldn’t force me out of the room, all the while throwing off that disgusted disappointment. And I knew it was supposed to make me want to prove myself back into her favor, but all I felt, once I got to the point where I could feel anything at all, was fuck your disappointment. Fuck it.

Once in a while during those dark months, Jimmy Make would call. Sometimes I’d talk to him, sometimes I’d say I was too sick. Once I knew about the baby for sure, the Jimmy Make spell had cracked wide open and blown far away. Jimmy Make was a stranger to me again. When I did talk to him, he had even less to say than he’d had before. “How are you feelin?” was about as far as he could get. And at times, I’d feel a blunted anger at him, for what he’d done to me, and for his childishness. But I was in all kinds of other pain then, and truth was, Jimmy Make didn’t any longer matter enough to make me feel much.

By April, I still had spells of tiredness felt like stones packed in my bones, but my nausea was fading. And because of that, and I guess because I was simply getting used to the loss—what a person can get used to, if I’ve learned nothing else in my life, I’ve learned that—once in a while, and just for a little bit, I might take a peek out of that tunnel I’d dug for myself. But I was denned up good that April afternoon, pouring rain and cold, not much above forty, when the scrape of muddy boots on the porch steps brought me full awake. In the living room, Daddy cleared his throat and hollered, louder than he needed to, “Well, c’mon in there, Mogey!”

I curled up tighter on myself, my knees nearly to my chin. I’d woke up needing to go to the bathroom, but now I’d have to wait, I’d made sure not a soul had seen me aside from Mom, Dad, and Sheila since I’d come back from Morgantown, and I wasn’t walking through the living room now. “Does make it easier to draw breath, I’ll tell ya,”
Daddy was saying in his loud company voice, and the cheerful in it made me even madder. “Can’t complain.” Then I heard Mogey, quieter, only a rumble to his voice, couldn’t tell what he said, and Daddy, “Cold, ain’t it? Gonna get a late start on fishin this spring.”

I jammed my pillow over my head, and when that didn’t work, I punched my fingers in my ears. My drawn-up legs holding my bladder. I lay there like that for many minutes, willing Mogey the hell out of here and on home, until my ears finally hurt so bad, I had to pull my fingers out. When I did, I heard a tapping on my door.

I knew it wasn’t Mom. Mom would bang and yap “Lace!” at the same time, so I pretended I didn’t hear it. I rolled over and faced the wall. The tapping didn’t stop. He’d tap a while, then rest a while, I could feel him on the other side of the door, then he’d start again. Mogey was a hard one to give a no to, even a no you weren’t actually having to say, but I told myself, just hold out. Still, he kept on, and finally I slammed my fist in my pillow, jerked upright, and dropped my feet to the floor. I wasn’t wearing a bra, just a T-shirt and an old pair of sweats, and when I moved, the cloth of the shirt stung my nipples. I stepped over to the mirror above Sheila’s dresser, reached up to smooth my hair, and then, a hand on each side of my head, I stopped. Because what I saw there scared me. I’d been glancing in that mirror for months, but now I actually looked, and it scared me. I backed quick away, hit the end of the bed with the back of my legs so fast I half fell on it. Then I pushed myself up, crossed to the door, and set my hand on the knob. I opened it the width of my face.

“Hi, Lace,” Mogey said.

He looked me straight on, then dropped his eyes down and to the side. I knew it was out of politeness, had nothing to do with shy. I wanted to be mad when I opened the door, tell him leave me alone, but both the sight in the mirror and the gentleness of Mogey stopped me. Gentleness of Mogey always had. He had his dark green khaki hat
folded in his hand, his thinning blond hair crushed uneven, like a kid who just got up from sleeping, and I could smell off him woodsmoke and coffee. He didn’t ask me how I was. I appreciated that.

“Mary’s got a real bad cold,” he was saying. “I was counting on her to help me dig ramps tomorrow. Don’t got another day off for a week and I promised the fire department I’d get some for their feed. You wanna go with me?”

I knew it wasn’t just because Mary’d caught a cold, and I figured Mom could go just as easy as me, Mom’d already been getting in the woods every day. I wondered had she put him up to it. I started feeling for words to say no, but then Mogey’s voice, the soft flannel, dropped to a whisper. “Your mom don’t know I’m asking you. It’s just you and me, Lace.”

I looked over my shoulder then, buying time more than anything else. I saw the wrinkle of my body on the bedspread. The mirror, now without me in it. I turned back to Mogey, although I didn’t look at him. I sighed. “Okay,” I said.

He picked me up in his truck the next morning between rains.The sky a fresh-washed watery blue and the clouds on the move, and as I stood out there under it, waiting for him, my insides felt like that sky. Thin clouds blowing through me. Once I was in the truck, Mogey talked light at me, to keep me comfortable, I understand now, because I was too sucked in on myself to recognize it then. He drove us down Route 9 a ways, then turned up the dirt road to Carney Mountain, and I realized I hadn’t been back in there since I was twelve or thirteen, although I’d probably gone every spring before that.

Higher we pulled the road, quieter Mogey got. I didn’t say anything either. I hadn’t been out in three months, and I tell you, it was like light in your eyes after a long darkness, only it was not just my eyes, but my self felt that way. A squint with my whole body, and I pulled my jacket closer. No leaves on the trees yet, no redbud or dogwood
either, but nubbly little coltsfoot nudging up out of the ditches, and you could see sarvis here and there. Like fairy’s breath, I remembered that’s how I’d thought about it when I was little, but I hadn’t thought about it at all in such a long time. Finally Mogey pulled over as far as he could get on the narrow road and shut off the engine. He pointed up the hill. “Should be up that little draw there.”

Then he was out and throwing his leg over a small stream, carrying his shovel and hoe, and I was following with a big empty white detergent bucket in each hand, the trowels rattling inside them. I had a hard time pulling just that short draw, a rise I would have leapt in no time just six months before, that worried me a little, and then I saw it.The wide patch of fresh new green spearing up out of the dead leaves.
First thing out of the ground you can eat,
it was Mom talking in my head, and Mogey was already loosening the dirt with his shovel while I just stood there. The body-long squint. Then Mogey said, “Get you a trowel.”

I got down on the dead damp leaves. Then my knees were pushing deeper into the black loam under that, and I could smell the ramps from where Mogey was already pulling them up. I shoved my trowel in the ground and starting working around the bulbs, easing them out, careful not to nick or chop.Then I was just digging, and after a while, I realized I’d dropped the trowel altogether and was working them out with my hands, my fingers mud-crusted, the black pushing up under my nails. I worked steady with my hands only, not thinking, dropping them into the buckets by their hair, first the clump sounds as they hit the plastic bottom, then no sound at all as the bucket filled up. And then, suddenly it seemed to me, Mogey surprised me with his laughing.

“That’s enough there, Lace.” I looked up. “No reason to dig em all. Other folks’ll be up here, too.”

We hauled the buckets back to the truck, and then we washed our hands clean as we could get them in the run. Afterwards, Mogey
swung back on his haunches and pulled out his knife to pry the last of the mud from under his nails. “You know,” he said. “I’m giving my half to the Fire Department, but they’re buying, too. What if I sell your half to em?”

I shook my head. “Half ain’t mine, Mogey. All of em’s yours.”

“Like heck they ain’t yours.” He snapped his knife shut. “Hard as you were going at it.” He pulled my bucket to him and looked down in. I’d dug as much as he had with his shovel. “They are yours, or I’ll throw em out on the ground right here.”

I lifted a hand to push my hair back out of my face, smelled in my fingers the dirt still ground in my skin. “Okay,” I said to him. “Okay.” I nodded. “Go on ahead.”

The next morning, while Sheila dressed, ate, and left for the turnaround to catch her ride to work, I stayed in bed like I always did. “Lace, get up out of there and make that bed,” Mom called in at me, and then I listened until the house door shut behind her and the shed door slapped open. I peeked out my window to see which way she’d go so I could go the opposite, and after she disappeared up the Ricker Run, I got some jeans on and slunk into the kitchen. Daddy sat in the living room listening to the nine AM obits and sucking after breath. He didn’t hear me slip a few paper bags under my arm. Mom hadn’t left anything in the shed to dig with besides this heavy old thing closer to a mattock than a shovel, but I took that. Then I headed straight up on Cherryboy.

That was the mid-’80s, people leaving the coalfields in droves, unemployment in the double digits across most of the state and over twenty around here. We had Dad’s check, miner’s pension, we didn’t have much else. After those first couple months when it became clear me and the baby were going to be around for a long time, I had money to worry about on top of everything else, and my guilt about it was almost bigger than my worry. Jimmy Make was only a sophomore in high school, not even old enough to drop out and work. Sheila’d got
on at a little sewing factory down at Labee making one dollar over minimum, but they had a long waiting list for a few spots, they’d never take me. Far as I could figure out, there wasn’t a place within fifty miles might give me work, and although I had no choice but to get a medical card, I knew Mom would throw a fit over food stamps or welfare. But now, whether he’d meant to or not, Mogey had shown me a way I should have seen from the beginning. Hadn’t because of how stuck I still was pretending I was different.

Truth was, I’d had plenty of practice. Mom had always kept those old-time ways, she’d step them up or ease them down depending on how tight things got. A tight we’d got in then.
You can live off these hills,
she loved to say,
everything was put in them for a reason,
but I’d stopped listening by the time I hit age twelve. Old people talking. Before I got hazed over with the peach-pink, though, I’d helped—the gathering, the digging, the gardening, the canning—and as I climbed Cherryboy that April morning, for the first time since December I felt my spirit stand up inside of me and push.

I tried for a week. By the third morning, Mom and Dad both realized what I was up to, but Mom said nothing and Daddy just said good luck. But what I knew by the second day was how much I’d forgotten, or maybe just never really known. I knew ramps and molly moochers must be in season, but I wasn’t sure where to look for either one.The few morels I did find I just stumbled onto, and there weren’t enough of them to try to sell. I wondered how much I must have just followed along as a kid and done what I was told. I wondered how much might have been washed out of me by those years of looking hard away. I kept at it. I was frustrated, but I was hardheaded, I spent all day every day out there, tired, tired, I tried. I got angry at myself, I even broke down and cried that last day when I didn’t find a single thing. But I couldn’t give up.

After a week, I saw something had to change. That morning when
Mom headed out to the shed, I followed. I didn’t say a word. She didn’t, either. Once we were standing in the dank dim, my face hot with embarrassment and anger, she just handed me a hoe and sack. She picked up her own stuff and turned to go, but halfway out the door, she stopped and looked down at my hands. “Anybody works with me,” she said, “has to wear gloves.” She leaned her things against the wall and rooted in a crate. After a minute or two, she pulled out a pair, cobwebby, but nearly new, and she slapped them against her thigh to shed the spider dirt.

I wore those gloves for the next four years. I wore them until they were more hole than glove.

Mom had married and raised her children late, she was in her fifties those years we ran the woods together. A round muscly woman who never wore pants, glasses she hadn’t changed since I was born, lord, how they used to embarrass me, and brown hair with steel rimming through it that she set each night with curlers, her only vanity, I guess, if it was that. When we walked the hills, she wore a zip-up sweatshirt over her dress, those see-through plastic boots over top her oxfords, and I never saw her slip. That first desperate year we hunted anything we had the least chance of selling, stuff I hadn’t even known you could use, could eat. Yeah, ramps and molly moochers, but also Shawnee lettuce and woolly britches and poke.Yellowroot before the sap.

If I close my eyes and look back on that spring, the first thing I see is Mom moving ahead of me, her burr-shaped body there. Me dragging behind, hauling sack, bucket, trowel, clippers, whatever we’d need that day. I see everything as heavy and on a steep slant, I see it in grays and browns, no green, and once in a while, I remember, I’d slip all the way back into the tunnel again.