Strange as This Weather Has Been (19 page)

Through those first few years, despite the constant hurt for money, despite how I sometimes still resented him, despite we weren’t even allowed to share the same bed—me and Jimmy Make got tied together tight. When I look back now, I see the tie as a light spring green. I see it as a new slim vine. It wasn’t just sex. That would have run down in no time. Of course, part of it was Bant, I couldn’t see a lot of him in her, but I saw enough it didn’t let you forget. And part of it was isolation, eventually I was separated not only from my high school friends, but with jobs getting tighter and tighter, many people I’d known my whole life were leaving the hollow desperate for work somewhere else. But I can tell myself it was lust, the baby, loneliness, that it was nothing else to look forward to, when, in truth, I know it went beyond all that. I loved him. I’d look back later and want to believe I had not, because that I did love him and couldn’t keep on loving him is harder to face than to think I just never did. What else, though, could you call how it felt? The singing in the air around us when things were good. The way I’d want to cover him when he was cold. And even more amazing, I understood later because I couldn’t afford to then, Jimmy Make loved me. Even if I hadn’t wanted Jimmy Make, not much of anybody’d fool with a girl with a baby and no
money. Jimmy Make, though, was seventeen, eighteen years old, and one good-looking boy. But he stayed. He loved. At least how Jimmy Make could.

Those years Jimmy Make was getting deeper in me, Daddy was going further away. We’d always known that someday the black lung would take him, but then we waited quietly so long for him to die that eventually he really would die started to seem less and less real. By a year after Bant was born, though, his coughing took a terrible turn. Mornings were the worst, when I’d be in my bedroom dressing Bant, and right on the other side of the wall, I’d hear his struggling gooey hacks, like his lungs were coming up, and coming up, pulling the rest of his guts right behind. His eyes got glassier, like they were letting in less light and reflecting more back, and his eyes moved less often. Mom kept him in constant clean rags, old bedsheets that she tore into neat squares, and I was so occupied with Bant that it took me a while to realize how quickly she was gathering up the dirty ones and washing them. One morning when she’d left for Prater and Daddy was dozing by the radio and I was doing breakfast dishes, Bant came toddling towards me offering one of those hanky rags crumpled in her fist. When I pulled it away, it dropped open, and I saw it wasn’t any longer yellow. I saw it was black.

By Bant’s second birthday, he was in a wheelchair, and then it wasn’t the smothering that tortured him most. It was how he was no longer able to get up into the woods. He was all the time wanting to be pushed up into the trees, even though he hadn’t seemed that interested in the woods those last few years while he could still walk. “When you have a little time,” he’d say now. Say it polite, and patient, and unselfish. “When you have a little time.”

So I’d muscle the chair over root and rock up into the trees at the foot of Cherryboy, then somehow I’d wrestle him even higher than that. Terrified the whole time I’d hurt him some way, knock him clear
out of the chair with a log hidden under leaves, or jiggle that tank loose and that’d be it. “How you doing, Daddy?” I’d ask as we went, and how strange it was, to be standing with your daddy’s blue-flanneled shoulders only at your waist, and Daddy saying, “Oh, I’m” breath “just fine” breath “honey.” Breath. “I thank ye so much.”

I’d finally get the chair to a flattish place, level it as best I could and block it with rocks. Then I’d drop down on the ground nearby and try not to listen. Concentrate on Bant wobbling around, squatting and picking up stuff, turning it over in her hands like she liked to do, then carrying it all somber to show Dad. I’d try not to listen, do numbers in my head, how much Pete was paying us, how much I needed, how much more I still owed. Watch Bant again, cross-legged in the leaves now, stacking twigs like Lincoln Logs, and when neither Bant nor numbers could keep me from listening, I’d move on to Jimmy Make, relive in my head the latest time, but often not even that could drown the listening, could drown the one breath. One breath. One breath more.

Jimmy Make graduated in May of’ 86. I went with him to his senior prom, me twenty-one years old, and Jimmy Make carries the picture still. His arms circling my waist, him behind me and even shorter than usual because of my heels so it looks like he’s trying to see over my shoulder, and a backdrop of electric blue drapes. That summer, the one Bant wasn’t quite two, he couldn’t find a job at all, and we spent it like we had the summer before, or even happier than the summer before, at least for me, because him finally being out of school made us more legitimate, made me less ashamed. He’s going to grow up now, I thought. Now he’s going to grow up.

For the first time, the three of us did things together.We took Bant to the Firemen’s Carnival in Watson. We even drove all the way to the New River Gorge one day, like a vacation, and I can still remember Jimmy Make picking her up out of her stroller, putting her on his
back, telling her, “I’m your motorcycle, girl,” as he jogged her to the lookout. The love settled down a little, but as it did, it vined into me deeper and wider. I felt the vine itself thicken.

Then the Sunday of Labor Day weekend he showed up all full of himself, and at first he wouldn’t tell me why, him leaning cocky against a porch post with his ankles crossed, his big beautiful teeth grinning across his face. Finally he said, “I got me a job working in the pulpwood,” then he swooped down and grabbed Bant up. “I’m takin you-all out to dinner tonight.”

The work his outfit got that year was two counties north and east of here, which meant he rode two hours each way every day to get there and back. Which meant I started going two or three weeks at a time without seeing him at all. He did start giving me a little check, and god knows that helped, but then when he did come over, he was too tired to stay long, and more than once he fell asleep on me with us sitting straight up. I’d have been more understanding if it had just been the work that kept him away, but he spent a lot of his free days and nights partying with his high school friends, just like he’d always done, only before, without work, he’d had time for them and us both. “Well, he’s only eighteen,” Mom said one afternoon when we were stacking wood, and I knew what she was getting at. “I wasn’t a parent yet when I was eighteen,” I hurled right back. “And single,” said Mom without missing a beat. That made me so mad I grabbed Bant and took off.

Since that sleety February night, marriage hadn’t come up once, at least not between me and him. Each of us had our reasons, I guess, and mine was that by staying single I could still hold onto a little bit of myself. I loved him, but I didn’t want to marry him, and I’d made sure we were much, much more careful after Bant. I loved Bant more dearly than I’d thought a person could love, but no way did I want a second one.

That year passed rough. Yeah, we had more money, but me and Mom still worked hard in the woods, Daddy just got worse, and I only saw Jimmy Make about every other week. I tried hard not to let it get to me, I reminded myself that of course he had to work, and a part of me knew Mom was right about the not getting married. But to get through the absences, through his distance even when he did come around, I had to pull back.

In July and August of that summer, he went over a month without even calling. The longest he had ever gone. Then one Saturday afternoon, right about the time I started resigning myself to being abandoned for good, he left a message with Mom that he’d be up at two o’clock.

He was late. I started waiting in the living room, then I moved on out to the porch. A full hour went by past the time he’d said. I was madder than I could remember being at him, but even so, I found myself clear out in the yard where I could spot him at a farther distance. And then I was mad not only at him, but at myself, and running under all that anger, a bruised vein of fear and hurt, making the anger even more desperate. Thirty minutes more and I couldn’t any longer hold still. I was raging down the Ricker Run towards the turnaround place, and I got to the bridge just as Jimmy Make was pulling in.

He unfolded himself out of that car he had then, runty little orange Ford Fiesta, and I swear, I could smell the beer on him clear from the bridge. I waited for what strategy he’d use on me, he only had two, act all cheerful like hadn’t nothing happened, or act all hangdog like he’d already beat himself up so no need for me to. He sauntered over towards me, rolling on his feet, hands sunk in his jeans pockets and head cocked to one side like he knew that was cute, and I saw it was cheerful he’d picked. He got within a couple feet, spread his arms out to catch a bridge cable on either side, and then I saw the tiredness pressing behind the cheerful, a kind of thinness to the skin under his
eyes, but I knew the tiredness could be a hangover as easy as it could be work. He swung forward from his waist to give me a kiss, his chest swelling out in his white muscle shirt, and I shotsurged so full of hate, and love, and hurt, and want, I felt tears loosen under my eyes. But I hardened them back, and ducked his mouth.

“What the hell are you doing, drinking early in the day and then coming up in here late?” I hissed. “When your daughter hasn’t seen you in over a month and asking for you every other day?”

He stumbled back then, restuck his hands in his pockets, pretended he hadn’t been after a kiss at all. “Aw, Lace, now. I ain’t been drinking.” He was still grinning, but I could see he was sidling towards mad. “I just had me one beer on the way over,” and he threw his thumb towards the car like there were full cans on the floor would prove him honest.

A hundred comebacks flitted through my head, and my fist balled up to smack him, but all I did, quieter than I expected, was say, “When the hell are you gonna grow up? When the hell?”

Then the grin was gone and away, and he thrust his hand in his hip pocket and pulled out a check. “Here’s grown up for you.” I could feel him just this side of furious, I could feel him holding it back. “Calm down, now, baby, why you always gotta ruin what little time we got?”

“You spend more time with us and less getting drunk, and we’d have more than a little.You pathetic babified fuck.”

Then I pushed past him and into the turnaround and then I was charging up Yellowroot Creek. I could not resist it, I hated myself for it, but I had to go, and at the least, I didn’t want to be following him. I could hear him, feel him, scuffling along after me, we were both moving fast and not talking, our twin breaths, rushing, and the terrible rip in the middle of me, wanting to slap him, then wanting him, period. I fell once, he didn’t move forward to help me, I picked myself up and plunged on. And there we went, fighting each other without words
while at the same time searching for a place to have sex, yeah, that was that year in a nutshell. Of course the first swimming hole was just foaming with a whole slew of little kids, Mr.Williams’s grandchildren visiting, and him and Sam Kerwin and some other parents watching them, and I knew me and Jimmy Make passing would give them one more juicy thing to talk about, but I didn’t care. Then when we were still a good five minutes from the Hemlock Hole, I could already hear people hollering, and once the path passed out of the trees, there they were, kids about Jimmy’s age, and beer cans all around. Me and Jimmy Make didn’t even look at each other.We veered off and shortcutted the half mile through the woods to the above-the-hollow-road, me feeling the heat of him behind me all the way, his heat horse cat, sweat and brush and briars and sun, the anger and the hunger. The hate and the want. Finally we stumbled into the backup place we’d used a few times before, under the snake ditches, and then I did turn to face him. I saw the two red thorn scratches down his shoulder, how the sweat drenched his hairline, how his eyes seemed to be moving forward out of his face. I pushed him down behind this big honeysuckle thicket, then he was on top of me, the sharp stones and rotty branches in my back, he struggled with his pants, I shoved him back until he got himself ready, his fingers trembling, him cussing the foil.Then Jimmy Make driving hard and me coming right back up to meet him, then me turning him over and driving just as hard back, and then he rolled me, it was wrestling, I was under him again and I took a piece of his arm in my mouth. And then I felt it. Sudden spurt of warm wet that wasn’t me. I understood immediately. Rubber’d broke.

That time, when I missed my period, I knew right away. No. I knew before I missed. I said nothing to no one for several weeks. Partly out of embarrassment—fool me once, fool me twice—partly, I think, because I was once again trying to pretend I had some kind of choice to make.

It was fall again, right after Bant’s third birthday. Mom was going out that morning to scout for ginseng, and I’d planned to go, too, but anybody says you don’t get as sick the second time . . . I’d been over the commode off and on for two hours, trying to muffle what I was doing by flushing the toilet while I heaved. After about the third time, when I opened the door, Mom was standing right there in her sweatshirt and boots. Looking hard at me.

I wiped my mouth with my hand. “I’m too sick to go, Mom.”

She nodded. She didn’t turn away. She kept looking at me. I swung my eyes down, wishing she’d move so I could just go on, then I looked back in her face. And I saw she didn’t look mad. She didn’t look disappointed. She just looked sad. And that sadness scared me to death.

“All right,” she finally said. “I’ll take Bant with me.”

I went back to bed. Daddy, who I knew wouldn’t have any idea until I told him, sat in the living room with the radio. I was thankful for that. Twice more I had to lock myself in the bathroom, and Daddy’s gospel music covered everything up. Around eleven, I finally got some clothes on, and I was standing in the kitchen trying to eat crackers when Daddy called in, “You feelin better, honey?”