Strange as This Weather Has Been (27 page)

Lucy nods. “Same thing happened down at Oceana.This boy lived through a house fire, then a car wreck, and then right after that, the cancer got him.”

“Well,” Avery says, “I heard that Steve Clancy figured if he lived through the flood, he could live through anything. That’s how come he was driving like he was. Wasn’t something out to get him.”

“Well,” Mrs. Taylor says. “I never heard that.”

“I heard it at school,” says Avery.

“Well.”

“Does make sense,” Lucy says.

Avery studies the linoleum. “To tell the truth,” he says after a while, “I don’t believe that was the reason.”

Lucy shakes her head, takes to murmuring again. “It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen here.”

“That’s why I’ve been trying to convince her—”

“Avery!” Mrs. Taylor says it so sharply Dane jumps. “This is my
home!” She lifts the walker and punches it on the floor. “Every penny of my savings is in this house. Every last cent.” Dane has turned around now, he’s never heard Mrs. Taylor this mad at anybody besides Lyon, and he shrinks from her, but watches as she lifts her arm and points up the mountain. “You want me to let em take everything away from me? Everything? Just let em have it all?”

Avery doesn’t meet her eyes. He stares into his coffee cup, biting his lip. Mrs. Taylor’s breathing huffs heavy as machinery, her arm still raised, trembling. Lucy glances nervously into corners. Gradually, Mrs. Taylor drops her arm. Her breathing quiets, at least as much as Mrs. Taylor’s breath can. Then, gently, without turning to look at him, she asks, “Dane, honey? You through with them vegetables?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he winces at the weak in his voice.

“Well, get that tube of biscuits out of the refrigerator and put em on the cookie sheet.” Mrs. Taylor looks back at Lucy. Both of them pretend the outburst never happened. Mrs. Taylor smoothes her skirt. “Now one thing I won’t never forget,” she says, “was when Shirl Benson come up with that pot of soup. She lived on down the creek towards Man, maybe a mile from us, and here she comes with a pot of soup in hot mitts. She’d got it hot on her gas stove. Now she didn’t have bowls or nothing, but she had spoons, and we passed it. She’d made it the night before, had it in her refrigerator like she knew something was going to happen.Vegetable soup with a little stew meat in it, chunks of fat, you know. Oh, it was good. Bucky was with us by then, you remember, don’t you, Bucky?”

She’s trying to make up with Avery now. Avery nods.

“Well,” Mrs. Taylor says. “That was Shirl Benson for you.”

From behind her, for some minutes, Dane has been thumping the biscuit tube. No matter how hard he hits it, or what part of the label he strikes, the tube won’t bust. This surprises Dane so little he’s not even frustrated by it.

“Oh, lord,” Mrs. Taylor says. “I’ve got down to making store-bought refrigerator biscuits for my baby.”

“I can’t get it open,” Dane says.

“Wham it there on the edge of the counter like you see on TV.”

“What can I do to get her out of here?” Avery asks Lucy, loud enough for his mother to hear.

“Won’t bust,” says Dane.

“Wham it real good. There on the sharp edge,” Mrs. Taylor says back.

“I’d get out if I could,” Lucy says. “But we can’t get enough for our place to buy nothing else. Won’t nobody buy a house with a bad well under a mountaintop mine.”

“Can’t get it to split.” Dane again, his voice even weaker now.

“Oh, lord have mercy. I’ll help you after I use the restroom. Just hold on.” Mrs.Taylor hauls herself up onto her walker with great huffing, finds her balance, then lunges towards the door.

“Won’t listen to a word I say.” Avery shakes his head.

Mrs. Taylor halts. She lifts the walker, turns a quarter way around. Plants the walker there. Dane turns, too, braced for another outburst. But this time she just looks at Avery. Then she looks away. “Well, Bucky,” she says softly. “You know. I been thinking on it.” She turns back, and stumps out of the room.

Left together in the kitchen without Mrs. Taylor between them, Lucy and Avery sit for some minutes in an itchy silence. Finally, Lucy tries to make conversation again.

“So, you don’t remember nothing about the water itself?”

The fish flip and slice in Dane.

Avery sits there for a minute. Then he shakes his head. “Nope. Don’t remember a thing between the time I went to bed and when I came to on the hillside with that dog up against me.”

HE WAKES in the middle of the night in a dark cramped room, lowceilinged, burrow-like, and beyond the window screen, the shriek and chung of the plants crowding around. Avery hears the insects as plant voices, and the humidity, which cramps too, he feels as plant breath. Although it’s not “plant,” “plant” isn’t word enough for this, not dense enough, not slick enough, not heavy enough, not green enough, for this here, no.This is vegetation. He is always smaller in this place than he is outside, the close updraws of the hills, the hemming hollows, the vegetation, they diminish him, no matter how long and far he’s gone, the land here is always heavier than he is, than any person, and how late the sunrise, how quick the sunset, how small the sky—those wither him, too. And although where he wakes is not his childhood home, it could, at the same time, be any of those homes, the dark cramp of a humid July, interchangeable, and when he wakes, he does not feel the momentary confusion, the disorientation, the loss of place he many times feels when waking in his own bed, beside his own wife, in his own house in Cleveland. No, when he wakes here, even though he has never lived here, even though he has never actually slept in this
room because it’s only recently become the guest room, still, he knows exactly where he is: he is home. And when he fades back, into sleep, there is to it a comfort, a peace, it should not have. But does.

In the morning he decides to walk up to the head of the hollow and see for himself. He decides he’ll do this even though he hasn’t brought the shoes for it. He has only the leather-soled loafers he wears to work because he’d planned to spend just two nights, get back for work on Monday, but it is worse than he’d expected, and he’d been down here for a week as recently as December. Not that it surprises him. He’s seen it coming over the past few years—how the coal trucks got bigger as the towns got smaller, how you could glimpse from the highways huge raw patches of earth way back between ridgetops where it wasn’t easy to get. Eventually the dimwit governor condemned the Methodist Church for condemning the mining practice—that even made the Cleveland papers—and the article carried the first clear description Avery had read of what his mother had been calling “some new kind of crazy strip mining.” But none of it surprises him.

He came down this trip to find the hollow freshly wrecked, a wreck that begins with the plugged-up creek and the flood-trashed yards before you even get near the devastation on company land, and then there is the damage that you can’t see from outside: the ruined wells and dropped foundations and cracks in walls and ceilings falling. As he walks up the road, a retarded man who lists to the side like a tree about to topple staggers off his porch and trails Avery a while. He twists one fist in the palm of his other hand, a polishing motion, and Avery asks him, “How you doing, buddy?” but he does not talk back, and when Avery steps off the hardtop into the dirt road, the man stops altogether. He’d seen Bell Kerwin on her front porch, hanging out rugs, and he called to her, and she spoke back, but instead of coming on out to her fence, she vanished inside her door. The final house before the locked gate, where the boy, Dane, lives has been especially
flood-hit, the yard now neatly piled with junk they’ve gathered up, a big side-by-side refrigerator standing all by itself like a monument.The base of the modular home is a kind of plastic or fiberboard molded and painted to look like cartoon rocks, and on the upstream side, the current has battered and ripped the fake rocks clear away. As Avery passes, out of the hole jogs a homely wire-haired dog, barking like a maniac with its tail wagging, then a chicken-skinny kid in gym shorts, cowboy boots, and a pistolless holster. “Hi,” Avery says to him. The kid stares back.

Once Avery stoops under the gate—newish gate, he notices, padlock newer yet—and gets to where the trees have been slaughtered, the liquid July sun splashes down unstoppered from every direction, and it dizzies him. He hasn’t worn a hat, doesn’t usually wear a hat, despite growing up in a place where a man wears a hat almost as often as he does pants. He has a white handkerchief his mother insisted he bring to protect his lungs from dust in case of a blast, and he drapes it over his head and hopes nobody sees him. At first he thinks the loafers will be okay, but as soon as he begins pulling a little elevation, his heels start to blister, and after the road buckles up into flyrock and shale, he slips and twists an ankle. Bangs his shin.

He senses his mother about to give in. It is mostly the stories makes him think it. Of course, for three or four years after Buffalo Creek, she told the stories because she had to tell them. He understands that now, how her stories put shape and control and a kind of finality on a thing that was obscenely shapeless and uncontrollable and forever unfinished. She found new audiences wherever they moved—she had lived through Buffalo Creek, and it gave her, gave the whole family, both a luster and a taint, so there were always plenty of people to listen. And she told the details like a ritual—the car horns, Patty’s prayers, people half-naked climbing out of mud, Shirl Benson’s soup—so when Dooley always left the room and Avery followed, Avery told himself
it was out of boredom. Eventually, though, his mother either spent herself or cured herself, and she quieted. She did tell the stories on special occasions, like February 26, the anniversary, and she liked to tell them on the anniversary of Dooley’s death, too, but in general, for a long, long time, she quieted. Then a couple years ago, when they began the mountaintop removal, the Buffalo Creek stories started seeping back out of her. She’d need to tell them at least once whenever he came down, and now that he was grown up, he stayed, he listened. But after the floods this year, she began telling the stories even over the phone, and long distance in his mother’s world was only for reporting who’d died and who’d got born. When she began telling the stories long-distance where she had to pay to tell the stories, Avery knew he better come on down, and once he got here, he realized she was talking about almost nothing else. And although that scared him some, he sensed he might be about to win. That’s the main reason he decided to stay a little longer.

He climbs past the first series of terraced ponds, the water as opaque as mustard and colored like the inside of a sick baby’s diaper. The only growing thing left up here in the head of the hollow is the grass covering the pond banks, no doubt the same stuff they’ve genetically engineered for reclamation. Grass that can grow on asphalt. Besides the grass, everything is dead, the hollow an amphitheater of kill, and the grass itself isn’t even green. His mother grew up here in Yellowroot. She ran right back the second Dooley was forced to retire and she could, and Avery has thought on it, how that promise of return is yet another reason people from here put up with what they do. If you work hard enough, you can retire back home, not unlike the promise of heaven, Avery thinks, yeah, “Almost Heaven,” and he snorts to himself. But Yellowroot was never really Avery’s home. It was the place where his mamaw lived. Dooley had kept them moving from the time Avery was born until he left for college, and after that, his parents kept right
on going, Dooley laid-off here, mad at a foreman there, mine worked out in this place. But despite all the moving, they not only never left the state, they never even moved farther north than Nicholas County. They’d just circle and wander their range, like nomads or bears, so that Avery’s home, finally, is not a particular hollow, town, farm, coal camp, not even a particular county, but the whole foot-shaped swath of ground that holds the southern West Virginia coalfields. Until he turned eighteen, and left out, and learned.

He has an eye open for guards, not because their authority worries him—boys playing cops and trespassers—but because of the stupid hanky on his head. As the hollow narrows and draws in on itself, the ponds seem to widen, taking up more of the hollow floor, and all the debris in the rock channels is stained the same flat gray so he can’t tell what is live and what is garbage. The dull gray is not a real color, not a color water around here would ever run. It is a fake color, everything up here is fake—fake color, fake grass, fake ponds, fake stream. Avery ducks his head so he won’t have to look around him, and he smells his sweat, fruity.

Back when they’d visit his mamaw up here, he wasn’t Avery. They called him “Bucky” then. Bucky, their baby, everybody was proud of him, it was not only Mom who doted on him, but Patsy and even Kelly, too, and his parents decided Bucky had promise and would go to college, the first in the family and all that. And Bucky, too, believed he had “promise.” Until a lot later, when he learned, among other things, that it had more to do with the times than any promise he held. He graduated from high school later than Patty, Ronald, and Kelly, in 1978, when more kids were directed towards college. And it had more to do with the high school where Dooley’s workrovings landed Avery his junior and senior years, a high school with more middle-class kids than many schools in their territory. No, not promise. Happenstance, timing, and luck.

As he climbs, he grows mildly nauseated, his thoughts floating in his head like waves off hot pavement. For some time, he has felt the meat of his feet grinding up in his shoes, and finally he stops, takes off his glasses and sags over, his hands on his knees, and he pants. After his breath quiets, he hears no bugs, no birds, and the water in the ponds, that is silent, too, stagnant—no sound but the machinery overhead. A guttural amping up and down, it is not even white noise, doesn’t even provide the false peace of that, no, it is gun and grind and brake and back-up beepers in the distance. He sits himself on one of the rocks freshly blasted from the hill, and its sharp edges cut into his behind. He pulls off his loafers and his socks and wobbles a blister with his finger, tempted to bust it. Then, for some reason, he pulls back and really stares at his feet, and he is washed in a hot wave of shame. Shame at their pinkness, their baby look. At the thin lines impressed by the dress socks. Quickly, he squeezes the loafers back on, and he limps off his raw-edged rock and pushes up the hollow.