Strange as This Weather Has Been (35 page)

At first I didn’t believe everything they said—how nearly a thousand miles of streams had been filled with the rock and dirt that used to be mountaintops, and how the fill had killed everything there. How what soil was left on the flattened tops was compacted so hard that if anything ever came back besides the grasses and shrubs the company sprayed on, it wouldn’t be for at least several hundred more years. How over fifty percent of the electricity in the United States came from coal. But Loretta would bring in newspaper articles to back up what she said, and materials she’d picked up from the environmental group just starting over in her county, and she had a computer, too, she’d print stuff off the Internet. Charlie would sit there and quote statistics without a shadow of emotion crossing his face, and I knew Charlie was too practical to exaggerate.

I couldn’t help but come home talking about it, and there at the beginning Jimmy Make didn’t say much when I did. The little bit of
trying Jimmy Make’d done with me in North Carolina had vanished the day we moved home, and after only a week or two, my smallness faded. I was my whole self again. Now we were back to how it’d been before. I can’t say, though, that I gave it a whole lot of attention. Things’d been neutral or worse for so long I didn’t expect any better, and besides, I was so busy with working and learning and looking after the kids, Jimmy Make was more an annoyance than anything else. Something in your family you just have to put up with, like a surly teenage kid who gets on your nerves but doesn’t do real harm. The phone had hardly rung all summer for his “business,” and now that we were getting into fall, it was going to ring even less. But instead of looking for a regular job, Jimmy Make started talking about buying a snowplow for his truck. Although he half tried to hide it from me, he wasn’t doing much of anything but watching TV, not only in the evenings, but in the daytime, too, even though with the old satellite dish scrambled, we picked up only that one channel we’d gotten when I was a kid. I’d walk in in the middle of the afternoon, from work or from the store, and there Jimmy Make’d be flopped out on that sagging sofa with his shoes off and his sock bottoms black, putting away Dr Peppers and Mountain Dews. I’d go so far as to open my mouth, but then I’d make myself shut it. I was the one made us come home. I still didn’t feel I could say anything yet.

Charlie took a lot longer than Loretta to warm up to me, and those first couple of weeks, he’d often just go quiet after I came around. Eventually, though, he opened a crack. Loretta, she knew the facts, but she’d also talk about exactly what was going on behind her house and how that made her feel. Charlie would mostly talk information. Talking to Loretta was like reading a story, while Charlie was a newspaper article. I gathered that he lived over in Tout, a little town at the other end of the county I’d only visited once in my life, and somehow his home had been badly damaged, too, but I couldn’t yet tell how. The
first time Charlie talked to me by himself was an evening in October, and it wasn’t his own troubles he was worried about.

I clocked out about nine and stepped outside for a cigarette while I waited for Connie to let Rhondell off, too. Rhondell was my ride home. It was just starting to get honestly cold, and I hadn’t brought a heavy enough coat, so I sheltered between the Dumpsters, turning to the wall to keep the lighter lit. Then I heard the door open, and I looked and saw Charlie bowlegging out. But instead of heading for his car, he surprised me by coming my way.

“Hi, Charlie,” I said, kind of soft so not to scare him. He mumbled back. He had this full shock of white hair like a bowl upside down on his head, and that head only came to about my shoulder. His ears, his nose, his eyes, them small, too, like a shrunken Santa Claus with no beard and no joy. He eased in between the Dumpsters and stood there looking out on the dark hill behind us, not facing me.

“I finally got into some records, Lace,” he said. Then he stopped.

“Yeah?” Right away, a badness coiled up in my stomach.

“Couldn’t figure out what’s killing your fish, but I found out something else.” He went still again.

“What?” I said.

“They’ve got the permit for Yellowroot Mountain.”

A boot heel in my chest. “You’re sure?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I saw the permit myself.”

I took a deep drag on my cigarette, and that’s when I felt how my hands were trembling. Filter jogging against my lip. “Who is it?” I said, steadying my voice.

“Lyon. An extension of Bitex 4. Started all the way over at Slatybank a couple years ago.” He shook his head. “They must have already blasted to bits every ridge between there and you-all.” He took one hand out of his pocket. And although I’d never seen Charlie touch a soul, right then he touched my arm. “I’m real sorry, Lace.You-all be careful.”

I got off the next day around three, I remember. The older kids weren’t quite home from school, and Jimmy Make was watching Tommy. I walked up on Yellowroot that time. Right up the creek behind the house, facing it head-on after a summer of fooling myself. Past the places where me and Daddy used to fish, past the pools where you used to could drink, and I felt nothing but numb as I passed them. Almost as high as the Hemlock Hole I went, but before I reached that, I veered away from the creek to the high steep bank, going all the way down on my hands and knees to climb it. And then, maybe how low to the ground I got, maybe the hurt of the rocks under my bare hands, the numb dropped away. It cracked off, and my mind and my heart were working hard as my body, and this is why, mind was thinking, heart was knowing, this is why we feel for it like we do—the long, long loss of it. This is why. Its gradual being taken away for the past hundred years, by timber, by coal, and now, outright killed, and the little you have left, mind thinking, heart knowing, a constant reminder of what you’ve lost and are about to lose. So you never get a chance to heal. Then I heaved myself on up to the bench, and I dropped down onto a log, and
Mom,
I heard myself say in my head. “Mom.” I said it out loud. I looked up, towards Yellowroot’s top, through limb and falling leaf and, past those, crisscrossed sky. I didn’t hear nothing back.

Not a month later, I was in Dunky’s husband Nathan’s old Blazer, bumping up the road back to their place. “Wanna see what you-all got to look forward to, huh?” Nathan had said when he picked me and Dunky up. We pulled a slow mile, following the creek, crossing it twice on low-water bridges, wiggling along between close wooded hills, when the road finally breathed out into a big open clearing.

Many times Loretta told me how beautiful it had been, and I saw now that it used to be. Three houses tucked quiet in a broad cleared hollow, the pastured hills mounding behind them, and I could imagine it in May, when the ground would be a soft bright almost glowy green,
and from a distance, all you’d want to do was to lay your cheek against it. Up against one hill was the white frame house that Loretta’d told me had started as a log cabin, and her husband’s family had lived in that place for a hundred and fifty years. Against the opposite hill set the modular home where I knew Loretta’s older son,Tike, and his wife Janie and son lived, then a little below it, Nathan and Dunky’s trailer, all of the places prettily kept with shrubs around them.

But now it was a beautiful painting that had been ripped in two. Between the white house and the others slashed a clawed-out gulch choked with big rocks, that gulch about as deep as Dunky was tall and wide across as a riverbed, the rocks thrown out all around it even farther, eating up the yard, and at the upper end of the slash, you could see a barn caving down into it. “And I’d always thought they couldn’t steal the land right out from under you,” Loretta’d said the first time she told me about it. “But turns out they can rob you that way, too.” You couldn’t any longer pull a car all the way to the white house because of the gash in the ground, so Nathan parked at his trailer, and when I got out and looked towards the house, Loretta was leaning over the railing. “Hey, buddy!” she called. “Welcome to our mess!”

“Yeah, we felt the blasting, of course, but we didn’t understand exactly what was going on—couldn’t get up there, you know, the guards and gates and all—until that ’96 summer flood.”That was Tike talking, him and Loretta leading me up the rim of the gash to where I could get a good view of the fill. “Dad’s family’s been right here since the mid-1800s, and there ain’t never, ever, been water through here like came that day.” We had to pick our way careful over the rocks and logs, and now that we were getting closer to the barn, I saw how the flood had just plowed the ground out from under half of it. “And now we’ve got it three times since.”

“So after the water went down that first time,” Loretta said, “me and Tike took his four-wheeler back in there, snuck past the guards
to see it.” She took my elbow and guided me around the safe side of the sucked-down barn, and then we were standing behind it where we could see how the gulch ran clear up the hollow. “But that was two years ago, and you don’t have to go far now.”

There it was. This monster gray plateau, not a landscape ever had or ever would belong in our mountains, it was like it had been dropped out of the sky from some other place on earth, and running down off it, these lord-god-huge gullies cut vertically all across the face of it, and I understood, the force of the water to have carved such canyons in it. We all three stood quiet then, even Loretta stopped talking, and a November wind was stinging down that gorge. I pulled my coat tighter to me. My ears were ringing, but the ringing had nothing to do with the wind. I recalled what I’d said to Loretta when she’d told me about it back at the Dairy Queen, how naive I’d been just a month before. I’d said, “What’d the DEP say when you complained about the damage?”

Loretta snorted. “Act of God. Normal weather event. Mining didn’t contribute at all.”

I still stood hypnotized when Loretta was turning away,Tike behind, and they’d gone ahead several feet before I jerked my eyes loose and brought up the rear. Single-file we went along the rim, silent this time, and Loretta slipped once on a sharp-sided rock, caught herself before Tike got her arm. The wind was at my back now, pushing my coat ahead of me. Then I noticed what must have been the goat pen. Part of the fence still standing, part shredded in the rock. I knew Loretta hadn’t pointed it out coming up, Dunky had told me this months ago, because the goats were the single thing Loretta couldn’t bring herself to speak about. How when that first big flood hit, the nanny and her kids had been latched in their pen. And with the water crashing down so quick, no warning, by the time they knew what was happening, the current was too strong for anybody to rescue them, although Nathan tried, and nearly drowned himself doing it. As we passed the pen, I
couldn’t help touching one upright fence post. I rubbed my scarf across my eyes, then dropped it and jammed my hands back in my pockets, scolding myself, how much easier it is to cry for goats, why is it easier to cry for goats? And then I understood it was because a goat death was possible to imagine. It was possible to imagine a goat dying that way.

Then we were warming up in Loretta’s living room, pumpkin bread and coffee, Loretta’s husband, who they all called “Dad” and who looked fifteen years older than Loretta, laid up in a recliner wrapped in a blanket from the waist down.Tike and Janie’s four-year-old, Zeke, was bumping up against Tike’s knees—I already knew they were holding off on having another one and Dunky and Nathan were waiting on their first until they got a better grip on their future here—and Tike was showing me a spiral notebook where they’d recorded all their incidents since the first flood. The blasts, and the smaller floods, and the dead fish, and the fly rock, the number of times they’d had to pressure-wash the blasting dirt off their house, the outbuildings they’d lost, all of it written neat in marker, date and description of event, and Loretta was saying, “Did you know the explosives they use are exactly the same as the ones Tim McVeigh used in Oklahoma City? Only most of the blasts here are ten times stronger than what blew up that building.”

“Oh, yeah, we’ll get real large shakes,”Tike went on, “see how that ceiling’s cracked? I could show you all over the house. The walls are splitting off from the floors.”

And me, so full up by then it was like listening from under water, and over top it all, over top all they were telling me,
this can’t be, can’t be, can’t be, us.
Me sitting there on the edge of the couch, the coffee going cold in my hands, nodding at what they said and reading and rereading, reading and rereading, the needlepoint hanging on the opposite wall. “They’re out of their minds,” Nathan was saying. “You don’t shit where you get your water. Any animal knows that.” “Watch
your language,” said Dunky, nodding at Zeke, and that needlepoint, “In His hands are the deep places of the earth. The strength of the hills are His also. Psalm 95:4.” “And all of em scared they’ll lose their jobs, and I say, lose jobs? Lose jobs?” Loretta talking, “Why should a few people, most of em from out-of-state, get $60,000 a year while the rest of us got nothing but dust and floods and stress and poison and never knowing when that water’s gonna take your house with it?”

Then all of a sudden, although he hadn’t made a sound past his “good to meet you,” Dad cleared his throat. I heard the phlegm in it. When he did, everybody shut up quick and turned to the recliner in surprise. Dad sat forward a little bit, and when he spoke, it started in a croak but then it ran clear. “It’s like having a gun held on you with the hammer back.” He raised his hand, he pointed at his head. “And not knowing when the man’s gonna pull the trigger.”

 

I wrote my first letters shortly after that, to Jay Rockefeller and Senator Robert Byrd. I’d never had any use for politicians before, around here you learn very young where a West Virginia politician’s loyalties lay, but Loretta and Charlie and the others said we had to speak our piece. I listened even harder to the people who had already educated themselves, I stayed late at work, came early, to do it, and I learned fierce. It hurt to learn it, it did. It was easier to half-ignore it, pretend it wasn’t that bad anyway, or if it was, couldn’t do nothing about it so why get worked up, that’s how a lot of people lived. But I realized to at least know part of what was going on made you feel like you had a particle of control instead of none at all.