Strange as This Weather Has Been (26 page)

I did go back to Raleigh to pack, for Jimmy to work his two weeks’ notice, and for the kids to finish the last of school. Then we hauled everything back up here. I was driving the Cavalier with all four kids—that was the last trip that Cavalier made—and when we left the interstate for 52 just past the West Virginia line, it was mostly relief and even hope I felt, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel scared, too. Threading those little choked-to-death towns, so humid you could see the vapor in the air, and what is it? I asked myself again. Makes
us have to return? My parents were dead, my cousins and aunts and uncles besides Mogey had all left out to find work, so many neighbors and friends had, too, and me and Jimmy Make with no jobs and up to our eyes in debt, why do you have to come back?

But I’d already figured out it wasn’t just me. How could only me and my thirty-three years on that land make me feel for it what I did? No, I had to be drawing it down out of blood and from memories that belonged to more than me. I had to. It must have come from those that bore me, and from those that bore them. From those who looked on it, ate off it, gathered, hunted, dug, planted, loved, and bled on it, who finally died on it and are now buried in it. Somehow a body knows.

MRS. TAYLOR’S boy Avery looks like city, but he talks like home. In Avery’s shoes is where Dane sees city most. Shiny across the tops, thin in their depth and width, slick on the bottom. No laces. The kind of shoes walk on pavement and cement, tile floor and carpet. His broth-colored hair sheds back from his face, and the shape of his head Dane can’t help but see as a figure eight—how it’s dented over each ear—and when he wears his glasses, which he only does occasionally, they make a figure eight the other way. He has been to college, and he is not a smiler. He is not a talker, either, and Dane can feel off him how he doesn’t want to fool with anyone much. Avery looks like Cleveland, but he talks like home, at least until Dane heard him call his wife, who is not from here. On the phone, Avery talks like he’s away from here, too. Avery can talk both ways, and Dane has never met anyone who can do that. Around Avery, Dane keeps his distance.

It’s late afternoon, and all four of them are crowded in the kitchen while Dane cuts up potatoes and carrots for Mrs. Taylor’s stew. Avery slouches in a chair, his long legs spider-sprawled. His face laced tight. At the table head sits Mrs.Taylor, her back to Dane at the counter, her
walker by her side. Lucy Hill’s across from Avery, but she’s too shy to look at him directly. She hadn’t known him before, but yesterday, when she came for water again, Mrs. Taylor asked her to drop by tomorrow, meet her baby. Lucy sits with her tight-jeaned legs pulled close together, and except when she sips her coffee, she hides her hands in her Myrtle Beach long-sleeved T-shirt pockets. Her gray hair she has pulled back tight in a fresh-made ponytail, the skin at the edges of her face pulled back with it.

“Well, what exactly
is
up there?” Avery is asking.

“No telling what exactly it is, it’s up there so high, and they tell us one thing, but there’s no telling. And with these floods and all—” Mrs. Taylor tries to explain, but Avery interrupts her.

“What’s the company say it is?”

“Company says it’s just a valley fill,” says Lucy. Dane hears the shyness in her voice. “But we’re scared there’s a big ole slurry impoundment up behind that thing.”

“There ain’t no way to tell,” Mrs. Taylor says.

“Can you see a prep plant up there? Belts? A silo?”

“Not where you can see any of it,” says Lucy. “But they could be piping the slurry up from Deer Lick. They got that huge one up over the plant, but people are saying that one may be full.” She looks over at Mrs. Taylor, looks back down. “I don’t know. That’s the thing. Don’t nobody know.” She sips at her coffee. “And they got nosers and gates all over the place, so you can’t get up in there to see, and even if you got to the foot and tried to climb, it’s steep, buddy. And slick. Especially with all the rain we’ve been getting.” Shakes her head. “This crazy weather. And even if there ain’t one right above us, we’re still in the path of others. That one up behind Deer Lick, they say it’s nine hundred feet from bottom to top, that’s higher than the New River Gorge. Then there’s another one up at Mayton, and who knows where all else.”

“And they throw just anything in them ponds,” Mrs. Taylor goes on. “Broke-down equipment and logs and chemicals, just anything they’re too lazy to carry off the mountain, just push it in the ponds. So who knows what all’s in that water when it comes through here. Even when it’s not that deep, you know, it’s still poison.You want that in your garden?”

Lucy nods. “Lots of people just not putting in any garden this year.”

“And seeping in your well water, and kids walking in it barefoot—”

“Well, Mom, how come I been trying to get you up to Cleveland for the past three years?”

Mrs. Taylor says nothing back, but her bottom lip butts out a little. Lucy is looking down at the hand lumps in her shirt pockets. The only sound for a while is Dane’s knife ringing the chopping board and the labor of Mrs. Taylor’s lungs. Then Lucy says, “And there’s not a thing you can do about it. Not one thing. His mom,” she tips her head towards Dane, “has called every agency she can think of, and won’t a one of them do nothing. Won’t even come in here and look. Why, their house is nearly in the creek, how bad it tore through there, you know. It’s just pitiful.” Lucy shakes her head. Then she looks at Avery for the first time since she met him half an hour earlier. She looks towards him even if she doesn’t meet his eyes. “I tell you, Mr. Taylor, it’s gonna take another Buffalo Creek. Gonna take all of us warshed out of here and killed before the first thing’s done about it.”

Now they fall quiet for even longer, but a different silence it is. Dane can feel the ripple in it. He brings the knife down on the cutting board, shoves the potato chunks he’s finished off to the side. He pushes his stomach against the counter to calm the fish down. Finally, Avery speaks.

“Well, Buffalo Creek was a different situation than it sounds like this here is.”

“Big ole dam, wasn’t it?” Lucy asks.

“Well,” Avery says. “Dam was what they called it. But it wasn’t nothing but three big slag piles dozed up into walls. Dumped the wastewater from the coal-cleaning plant behind them.You could see they weren’t nothing but slag piles.”

Mrs.Taylor lets loose a sobby kind of sigh. “And that’s why I won’t never forgive myself. Won’t never.”

Avery grimaces. “Oh, Mom. You didn’t know. Come on now.”

“No, no, we all knew, it was just a matter of when.” She wags her head, stares down at her hands. “And there you were, wanting to spend the night up at Lorado, and I said yes, after three solid days of rain, and I won’t never forgive myself, not long as I live.”

“Mom, there was no more rain those three days than was usual, I know that for a fact. And they rumored that dam to bust every spring. If we listened every time that dam was supposed to break, we would of had to live in tents on the hill.”

“Still.” Mrs. Taylor is slumped over now, her back bowed. She’s taken off her glasses. “But Dooley had work in there . . .”

“Well, now, honey,” Lucy comforts her. “You didn’t know. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty.”

“Mom, you didn’t know. I haven’t blamed you for a second. Besides, here I am.” Avery opens wide his arms and grins, trying to make a joke. Mrs.Taylor doesn’t smile back. Dane pounds his cutting board with his dull paring knife, the chopping louder and louder.

“How old were you, Mr. Taylor, when it hit?” Lucy asks.

“Twelve years old,” Avery says. Dane’s knife slips, clips the finger holding the potato, but it’s not sharp enough to break skin.

“He don’t remember nothing about the water itself,” Mrs. Taylor says. “He don’t remember nothing until he woke up on the side of
the hollow after the water passed. God took care of him that way.”

“Yes,” Lucy nods. “He sure did.”

“And the happiest moment of my life was when I finally saw Bucky—we called him Bucky then—Bucky trudging along that hillside in them big ole clothes and all covered black, but I knew it was Bucky by how he walked.”

“Mmm-mmm.” Lucy shakes her head, imagining.

“I had to believe he was alive all along or I would’ve lost my mind, Lucy. I would’ve lost my mind right there. Dooley I wasn’t worried about. I knew he would have been up above. Patty told me she knew Bucky was alive, too, we held hands and prayed on it. And a hard prayer would hold me for ten minutes or so, then it would start to fade, I’d start to break down again, you know, and then Patty’d grab hold my hand and we’d pray again. Some people come through and said it wasn’t over, said a second dam was gonna blow, and that’s the hardest I’ve prayed in my life. And that second dam didn’t break.”

“Wasn’t no second dam,” Avery mumbles.

“Lord, lord,” says Lucy. Mrs. Taylor has found a tissue in her sleeve, and she shreds at it, her glasses still off. “Mmm,” says Lucy. She continues to shake her head. No one speaks for a while. Then Avery clears his throat.

“Well, Mom,” he says. “You sit here and tell us that, but you won’t leave.”

Mrs.Taylor sighs thickly. “Well.You know.” She places the wadded tissue on the table beside her coffee. “Anymore, I wonder if maybe I ain’t just bound to die in a flood.” She pauses. Lowers her voice a little. “Didn’t get me the first time, so it’s coming for me now.”

“Oh, Mom. That’s ridiculous,” Avery says.

Mrs. Taylor shrugs, slow and weary. “Gotta die some way.”

“Mom, you’re not yet seventy. Most people live past seventy.”

“Not around here, they don’t,” Mrs. Taylor says. She looks back
at Lucy. “They asked me later how come I didn’t send Ronald up to look for Bucky, or why didn’t I go myself even. But you see, I just couldn’t let the four of us break apart. Still, every person I saw heading back up that hollow after the waters passed, I told them, I said, ‘You look for my boy, Bucky.’”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” says Lucy. “For not wanting to separate apart.”

“Oh, Lucy.” Mrs. Taylor shakes her head. “After that flood. I can’t begin to tell you. There never was a time like it. The world just went inside-out. People climbing out of that black mud near naked, your friends and neighbors climbing naked out of mud. People just squatting and going to the bathroom right there in the open.Wasn’t nothing else they could do, you know. And you just stood there and watched like it happened every day.” Again, she lowers her voice. “Truth was, you didn’t have nothing left to feel with. It was kind of like the water washed out your insides.”

“Hard to imagine,” Lucy murmurs. “Hard to imagine.” Dane rinses his knife to get ready for the carrots, and there comes to him a sudden memory of one time in church when a man told an end-time dream he had. He turned on the spigot in his kitchen and the water came out in his glass as blood.

“And some people, when the water was going past, they got sick to their stomachs and threw up while they watched.” Mrs. Taylor places one hand on her own stomach. “And afterwards, they told how lots of people up the hollow above us heard other people, kids, too, screaming for help, and they couldn’t do nothing to help them.”

“Oh, lord,” Lucy murmurs.

“Now you know that would stay with you. For a long, long time. At least we didn’t have none of that. We saw people in it, but we didn’t hear no screams for help. At least we don’t have to carry that guilt, too.”

“Oh, lord,” Lucy repeats. “We’re all gonna get warshed out.” She huddles down into her shirt collar, like tucking in from a hard wind. “I just know it,” she says, and Dane, cutting carrots now, draws shallow breath, the fish pitching sharp in his gut.

“Cold,” Mrs. Taylor goes on. “You know it was. Us in our night-clothes. People drifting past, hollering, ‘You seen so-and-so? You seen my mother? You seen Tommy Hatfield?’ Like that. I was scared to let anybody go back in our house, even though it hadn’t moved. Now Ronald, he kept wanting to go see, but I wouldn’t let him. Something just told me not to. Then Chip Mullens come up there, said he’d just talked to Kenny Smith’s son, told how he went back in his house—now his had moved a ways—and stepped right on a body in his kitchen door. Then come to find a car half in, half out his living room wall with two drownded people in it. They was all kind of stories like that, and ever one of them true. You don’t make up that kind of stuff.”

“We’re all gonna get warshed out.” Now Lucy can’t stop wagging her head. “That’s what’s gonna happen here. We are, too. That’s what it’ll take. Another disaster.”

“When I did get back in the house, Lucy, we had two foot of that greazy black mud in there. I mean, it got everywhere. It was in your bedclothes, it was in your refrigerator, your stove, it was in every dish you owned.Why, I had stuff wrapped in plastic, fabric I’d got to make Patty and Kelly dresses, and that mud got right through that plastic. We scrubbed, and we sprayed, and we wiped, and we mopped, and for as long as we stayed in that house, you could still smell that ole coal dirt in the walls.” Mrs. Taylor wrinkles her nose. “But here I am, complaining about mud, when we didn’t lose nothing.” She nods, mechanical, slow. “We didn’t lose nothing at all, not compared to what other people lost.”

She pauses there. Lowers her voice. “Buffalo Creek was never the
same afterwards. I don’t just mean how it looked, but how people acted. I was glad when Dooley found something else and we moved. That was about eight months after. And we were fortunate we hadn’t lived up there longer than we did. We’d only been there about four years. Now the ones who’d lived there their whole lives, that flood kilt em, in a way. Even the ones not kilt in their bodies.”

Avery shifts in his seat. “That’s right,” he says, softly. “You’re right there.”

“Remember that Clancy boy?” Mrs. Taylor asks him.

“Sure. Steve,” says Avery.

“Rode out the whole thing in a bathtub—can you imagine?—lived through that, then went and got himself killed in a car wreck a year later. Crazy stuff like that.” She looks away from both Avery and Lucy, towards the window. “That’s what I mean by it’s like something’s trying to get you.”