Strange as This Weather Has Been (24 page)

Back at the very beginning, before Corey was born, Jimmy Make was working a swing shift, and if I wasn’t completely wrung out, I’d nap on the couch after Bant and Dane went down and wait for him to get home.Wake to the sclop of him dropping his dirty boots on the porch, then his sock feet passing the door, he’d swagger in all gruffy and rough—“That motherfucker Grady, if he . . .” or “Gonna work us dead into the ground this week”—boy wearing a tough man mask.
Him in his loose jeans, faded grease stains down the front, his big black-and-white-checked flannel, sweatshirt hood hanging out of that. They had showers at the mine, but black as they’d get and tired as they were, Jimmy’d always miss some places, and although he wouldn’t say anything, he’d want me to find them. He’d walk into the kitchen and strip to his shorts while I fetched from the bathroom a soft washcloth, then I’d pull up a chair to the kitchen sink, get the water running to just the right hot, and Jimmy Make’d settle cross-legged between my knees. I’d hunt the secret places still smeared black, the nape of his neck, the hollow between his shoulder blades, the jut where his jaw-bone met cheek. I’d pull the washrag across his chest, and once in a while, if I went slow enough, he’d let down and tell me where he hurt. “There in the small of my back,” he’d mumble. “See if you can rub it out.” “Around my kneecaps, just pull up and down.”

Usually I’d do the rubbing in bed, Jimmy Make asleep before I finished, and in the damped light off the bedstand lamp, in the gold-flecked mirror on the closet doors, his body still looked like it had at fifteen. I’d watch it there. Even though Jimmy could feel the work in his body, where it showed first was only in his face, and there, only around his eyes. I could get the black anyplace else, but not under and around those eyes.

But that was early on. By the time Corey was born, Jimmy Make had stopped touching me unless he wanted sex and stopped touching the kids unless I reminded him to. And it wasn’t only us he lost interest in. He stopped visiting his mom and dad, too, said he didn’t have time or energy to make the drive. Then his mom died of cancer, quick—Jimmy Make would never talk about that, like he wouldn’t talk about anything—and after the funeral, he seemed to go away from that family altogether and even farther away from us.

Interesting thing was, during those years, me and Jimmy Make hardly fought at all.Way less than we did before we got married.Yeah,
I was frustrated, I was disappointed, but mostly I was numb. I figured that’s just what marriage was. I saw Mom and Dad as the exception, because I’d seen it in other grown-ups all my life, and now I learned how you got there by watching the girls my age who’d gotten married even younger than me.Watched their early excitement erode into disappointment, the disappointment fester into anger, and then the anger rub, chafe, grind, until it finally broke them into numb. By then he is your kids’ father, you and him own a house together, you’ve slept in the same bed for thousands of nights, shared thousands of meals, and he is bringing home that union paycheck. I tell you, that is important, no matter how when you’re younger you swear it won’t never be. Kids change that quick. But even without romance, without touching, without even much talking, me and Jimmy Make kept getting tied together tighter and tighter, only it no longer had anything to do with that slim green vine. This was rope. Knotted rope, scratchy and binding, and if you didn’t feel it always, you sure did if you turned.

As the years went by, even Mom went into the woods less often, partly because her arthritis was slowing her down, but mostly because the companies were shutting us out from more and more land. “If they don’t got a gate across the road,” Mogey’d say, “they’ll hoove up dirt in it so you can’t get over, and I’ve seen where they’ve deliberately cut trees across the hollow to keep you out.” “Getting everything posted,” Mom told me, “so even if you’re on foot, you got to worry the whole time are they coming after you.” Maxie Maxwell from down the hollow came up for a cup of coffee and to check in, see if it was happening to us, too. “These are roads and paths into places I been going all my life. They was everybody’s places before.”

One day Mogey came back and told us he’d blown a tire up on Carney Mountain. “Got out of my truck to see what happened, and here it was a roof bolt they’d sharpened and laid bolt-end-up in the road. I found a few more scattered around.”Then where we still could
get in, it seemed everything was getting scarcer, harder to find, but the ginseng especially, then the government put more regulations on how much we could take. “Companies can destroy every blade of grass,” Mom said. “But us with our little trowels and hoes, we got to follow the regulations.” And Mom’d always been one who I thought stuck way too tight to rules.

We’d lived with the stripping since the ’50s, but we’d always hated it. I remember vivid how hurt and mad Mom and Dad were over what the company did to the one side of Yellowroot back in the ’70s. But now we heard rumors that the operations were getting bigger than anyone’d imagined, and although I never saw those mines myself, by the last few years before we left for North Carolina, I knew it was true because I saw the coal, running hard and fast and high right out of here. I saw it heaped in endless cars while I waited for ten minutes at railroad crossings with cranky kids, heard it at my back, the rails whining and clicking and groaning, while I loaded groceries in the car at the IGA. I felt it every time I got stuck behind an overloaded coal truck going up a mountain, every time I nearly got creamed by one coming down. But the telling thing was, as those tons and tons of coal went out of here, laid-off miners and their families went right along with them. I look back on it now and feel the fool for not putting two and two together, but with the nose-wiping, bump-kissing, diaper-changing, toddler-chasing, breast-feeding exhaustion, even though I heard the rumors and saw the coal, it didn’t yet mean that much to me.

Six years into the marriage, me pregnant with Tommy, Jimmy Make hurt his back at work. They operated on it, and I still partly blame that. “Whatever you do, don’t ever let em cut on you,” Daddy always said, but Jimmy Make was the kind of person trusted doctors more than himself. He was a good patient, hardly a word of complaint those three months he laid abed at home. Tommy was born in the
middle of it all, and Mom, thank god, moved right in for a time. We set up the hospital bed in the living room where he could watch TV, and while Mom would look after the oldest three, I’d nurse Tommy and hold Jimmy’s hand while I did.

I hadn’t held that hand in years, and I realized it by the way the hand had changed. Hardened on both sides now, calluses underneath, chapped skin and jutty bones on top.When the doctor said he’d probably never lose the limp, it cut right through me, I swear it felt like I’d crippled a leg of my own. But Jimmy Make wouldn’t talk about it, and if you tried yourself, he’d turn it into one of his boring borrowed jokes. “Mean as I am, don’t even need two legs.”

Then he went back to work, too early, far as I was concerned, and after that, he ignored us even worse than before he got hurt. I asked him what was going on, if he was in pain all the time or what, but he just shook his head and shrugged. I tell you, I wanted to keep some kind of love fanned up in me, but I couldn’t sustain it with getting nothing back, and by that time, the cycle was moving in reverse. I’d love for just one week, then unlove for a month or more.

We went without sex for some time, his back not mended enough, me recovering from the baby. I won’t never forget that first time back. Me on my back, ears pitched for whether the kids could hear, Jimmy Make on his hands over top of me. His elbows bent, him lurching back and forth, and I felt nothing at all except an irritated patience until I felt the new fat of his belly slapping down against mine. I opened my eyes, and I saw his were closed, I saw him gritting his teeth. Those teeth that had drawn me moonwhite that first October night, darkening now to a walnut stain. I looked, and I not only saw no love in his face, I saw no pleasure, either. What I saw was urgency. Pressure. Strain.

By the end of that year, the extra weight had clobbed up into his cheeks, his skin, and changed the look of his face. It was like his body had been holding on as hard as it could those first eight years
in the pulpwood and underground, but then that one big knock had triggered a chain reaction, and even the smell of him changed. What grieved me worst, though, was that live hot wet. That hot wetness in him, what had first pulled me to him, what had kept me coming back—not exactly for the sex, or at least not for the pleasure of the sex, but because of the life, the liveness in him—that hot wetness had been dripping away for some years, but with the injury, it drained clear gone. Jimmy Make was twenty-five years old.

I’d hate myself for feeling that way, I would.
Who do you think you are,
I’d ask,
you’re getting old, too, who are you to look down on him like this?
But the truth was, even after four babies, I’d done most of my aging those months carrying Bant, and after that quick-up, I kind of just stayed still. And while most of my age happened on the inside, Jimmy aged only on the outside of him, when it was inside I needed him to grow. Still, I felt guilty about it. Huge guilty, and guilty’s never been a place I often go. I’d get to feeling so guilty that I think I could have overlooked everything else if it hadn’t been for this one thing: I knew he wouldn’t ever see the all of me.

I was pulling in with a load of groceries that February of ’96, Tommy almost two years old in the car seat behind me and the other kids at school. It was early afternoon, we’d had a short high thaw, everything in mud. Jimmy Make was supposed to be on day shift, but with the leaves off the trees, I could see all the way from Mrs. Taylor’s house his truck parked in front of ours. My heart punched hard once against my ribs until I remembered he wouldn’t have driven himself home if he was hurt. And then there tingled from my every pore a colder kind of fear.

I got Tommy in one arm and two bags of groceries in my other, and in that short walk from car to porch, my body went to shivering. I couldn’t help it, it did. Jimmy Make sat on the couch in his work clothes, clean, him leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs,
his head lowered, and an orange juice glass of whiskey on the coffee table. The TV was off. He raised his head so little he had to roll his eyes way up to look at me.

“They shut er down,” he said. “Laid ever last one of us off.” Then he dropped his face back down.

I didn’t go to him. I looked away. I walked the few steps to the kitchen, my knees locking on me strange. I didn’t even think to cry, I guess I knew it was too bad for that. But something must have leached over into Tommy because the second I set the groceries down, I felt his whole body stiffen and his chest hollow into wail.

 

If it had been up to me, I would have stayed in West Virginia at least the six months until the unemployment ran out, but two months into the layoff, Jimmy heard about the construction work in Raleigh, and he said it was smarter to grab that while we could than wait six months and most likely end up with nothing at all. I argued him back, but not really that hard. I knew what he said made sense. And like the back injury had, the layoff thrust us closer together again. At least for a while. Fear can work like that. Or so I thought then.

A week before we left, I carried up to Mom’s trailer a couple garbage bags of stuff she’d said she’d store. We weren’t selling the house, I’d put my foot down on that, Bill Bozer was going to rent from us, but to make room for him and his girlfriend, I had to clear out more than we could take with us south. As I came up on the trailer, I saw Mom out back stacking stovewood that Mogey’s boys had dropped off.

I stopped at the end of the trailer where I could watch her, but she couldn’t very well see me. I set my garbage bags quiet on the ground. She wore a dress that used to be the bright small flower kind but had now drained to beiges and grays. It was part of her dress system, I knew, the way she ordered them by age and stains and tears, this must be one of the oldest, to use for wood-stacking work, and still,
over top of it, she wore a sweatshirt, despite that the air was barely cool, and I knew it was to keep the old dress at least a little clean. She bent to the stovewood with a jerkiness, her arthritis, I couldn’t help but flinch, hooked chunks into her left elbow, straightened up, then wobbled the few steps to the neat stack against her back wall. The wood clapping into place, she was making ready, the way she always had, even though it was May and she wouldn’t be burning this until late September.

Then suddenly she stopped, one hand on the pile, the other on her hip, and she looked at me like she’d known all along I was there. I could hear her soft panting. I tried to read her face, but right then, she turned away. “Good for you-all to get a fresh start,” she’d said when we told her we’d decided to go. “Pretty soon won’t be nothing at all left for young people here.” But that’s not what I’d seen in her face before she turned it.

I walked over to the dumped wood and piled a load in my own arm. Hickory, red oak, good long hot-burning wood Mogey’d sent her.Then I started ricking with her.The bark raspy on my bare hands, scraping up my wrists, but I just piled heavier, moved faster, and I felt Mom alongside me, but I never lifted my eyes to see her straight on. We worked side by side for a full hour with no sound but the chunks falling and knocking. Worked until we had two pickup loads ricked, and then it started to rain.

 

That North Carolina, I tell you. Down there, you just can’t get any grip on the land. No traction. No hold. If the eight years between Dane being born and us moving to North Carolina were the fastest of my life, the two years we spent in North Carolina were the emptiest and the least real.

I won’t ever forget driving down there, maneuvering six lanes and more of traffic with a panic perched in my chest. Me in that old
Cavalier with all four kids, the three not in car seats with their faces jammed against the windows, and Corey saying, “How come there’s so many cars, Mom? Is there a football game or something?” I was following Jimmy Make with his truck loaded scary high with our stuff, tarp flapping over top of it, I could see that flapping all the way around the U-Haul he was dragging. Then I lost sight of him, had to risk our lives in the fast lane to find him, and
goddamn you, Jimmy Make,
I said in my head because how like him that was. Then I saw the exit he’d written on a McDonald’s napkin for me, and his rig ahead, already down below us at a light, and right past that, there “Foxwood” was.