The next day she stole ten cents from the cashbox and took her first ride on the Ferris wheel.
“Little Sister, you can’t,” Emineh said. “What if they caught you?”
That night Little Sister whispered and Emineh dreamt that her heart took the shape of the scimitar.
The next day Little Sister stole twenty cents from the cashbox and rode the Ferris wheel twice.
“I won’t be able to protect you,” Emineh said. “Do you want to go back to the orphanage?”
The next day Little Sister stole thirty cents from the cashbox and rode the Ferris wheel three times.
Once there was and once there wasn’t, in the time when genies were jinn and camels were couriers, in that time there was a thief who thought she could not be caught.
Mother Zeyno was the one to tell that story. Of course.
“I would like to tell a story,” Emineh said and everyone turned to her, surprised.
She tried to make the nightingale’s sound, but her voice came out as sharp as the cold on the top of the eastern mountains.
Once there was and once there wasn’t, in the time when genies were jinn and camels were couriers, during that time there was a baby bird who broke its wing and so could not make the winter migration to warmer air. And so the baby bird’s mother went first to the oak tree to ask if it would shelter her baby bird in winter, but the oak tree said no. And then she asked the walnut tree. And the olive tree. And every tree she could find, but they all said no. Until finally she asked the pine. And the pine made a nest among its needles for the baby bird, and all winter long, it kept the baby bird warm and safe by not dropping its needles. And ever since that winter, the pine tree has never shed its needles.
“It would have been kinder to let the bird die,” Mother Zeyno said. “It probably grew up weak and coddled and couldn’t take care of itself.”
“I think that’s very cruel,” Emineh said.
“Then you take care of the baby bird,” Mother Zeyno said, and the others all laughed.
The next day Little Sister put her hand in the cashbox but Emineh took it out. She pressed her wool-roughened fingertips against Little Sister’s soft palm. “For me,” Emineh said, “stop.”
Little Sister climbed instead to the top of the Manufactures Building and spent each day looking down.
“Where were you today?” Mother Zeyno would ask and someone else would answer: “I saw her at the swimming competition.” “I saw her on the Wooded Island.” “I saw her on the battleship.”
And so Emineh told another story, this one in a voice as sharp as the knife that scraped the sheep’s wool from their backs.
Once there was and once there wasn’t, in the time when genies were jinn and camels were couriers, during that time there was a girl who could appear in more than one place at one time.
“What’s the point?” Mother Zeyno said. “Who cares if you can be in two places at once if you aren’t any good in either?”
And the next night, in a voice as sharp as the edge of a soldier’s sword:
Once there was and once there wasn’t.
A girl who could float from the ground.
“At least she’d be out of the way,” Mother Zeyno said. “You could sweep under her feet.”
And the next, in a voice as sharp as the eagle’s claw dipped in the blood of its prey:
Once there was and once there wasn’t.
A girl who could tell a horse to run backward.
Too bad the horse didn’t run backward right over the girl who taught him such a useless trick.
And the next, in a voice as sharp as the petalless rose:
A girl who could travel to Mecca and back in the time it took a spilled vase to empty of water.
Too bad the Prophet didn’t keep her there.
Too bad too bad too bad.
Emineh told her last story lying in bed with all of the other women lined up in their beds next to her and Little Sister tight in her arms.
Once there was a girl who could make you dream.
Emineh’s voice glowed like the golden moon as Mother Zeyno had seen it once, fat and full, over the mountains of her parents’ village when she was no more than a girl.
She could turn your heart into a shifting cloud. She could give you the strength to love all that was inside of you, which was everything.
And when the story was over, Mother Zeyno said only, “I wish people would be quiet so an old woman could sleep.”
That night, Little Sister whispered and Emineh dreamt that her heart took the shape of the world, and in the center of that world, inside of it, was Little Sister, inside of her.
The next morning Emineh was gone. Next to Little Sister in bed was the completed wool carpet rolled tight. When Little Sister unrolled the carpet and lay down on top of it and stretched out her fingertips to toy with the little tassels Emineh had knotted all along the carpet’s edge, and then ran her finger over the pink hyacinth, the purple hyacinth, and the white, Little Sister felt her heart take the shape of Emineh’s heart.
What happened to Emineh nobody would ever know. Probably she struggled, probably she was sorry. Probably she died.
“Sleep with me, child,” Mother Zeyno said the next night, and Little Sister did, though they each could have, should they have wanted, had a bed entirely to themselves.
MYSTERIES OF THE MOUNTAIN SOUTH
“I like to talk about it,” Edie’s grandmother said.
“Death?” Edie said.
“Yeah,” her grandmother said. “It makes me feel better.”
IN MAY, EDIE HAD a job offer and a plan to follow the mass migration of her fellow coders west after their college graduation. She and her friends—absent Edie’s unexpectedly-ex-boyfriend—would live in packs, turn large Victorians into something like their college co-op, ride company shuttles to work, and earn obscene amounts for obscene hours, doing work they didn’t so much love as crave.
But then Edie’s father said her grandmother would have to move into assisted living because: what else could she do? Edie’s father lived in a studio apartment. His two brothers were cash-rich but time-poor. Edie’s younger sister was only thirteen. And you couldn’t ask the wife you’d divorced to take in your mother, could you? Maybe, but probably you shouldn’t.
So in June, Edie drove south with some suitcases in her trunk, a company-sponsored drone in the backseat, and her newly rescued seven-year-old dog, Trixie Belden, in the seat beside her. Trixie was Edie’s graduation present to herself because Edie had
always
always
always
wanted a dog.
Their drive to the hills of southwestern Virginia had taken only a long morning but had crossed, in what Edie couldn’t help but think of as a time-traveler way, deeply into rural life. As if plain living were a thing of the past! As if excess belonged only to the present.
Mrs. Coxe’s house was one story but spread wide, with a porch on three sides, potted plants all around, a weedy lawn in the front, and an overgrown vegetable patch on the porchless side. Edie stumbled out of the car, her legs stiff with driving, and Trixie followed. At first, the dog shuffled around gingerly, dysplasia starting in one hip, but soon her ears perked and her nose quivered, and she sniffed in a widening circle. Edie stepped onto her grandmother’s porch, knocked, then turned to call Trixie, only to find she had disappeared.
Trixie Belden: a dog with a past. A bicolored border collie with a rough double coat. A dog always looking for the thing that was lost, the thing she could recall only with her senses, a shape here, a smell there, a taste of cherry lip gloss from a kiss on the lips: her former owner, a once-fourteen-year-old named Madeline who loved nothing more in the world than Trixie (née Emily Dickinson), the dog who’d disappeared from her backyard one afternoon in a forever cold case—gate still closed, doors still locked.
IT WAS MORE THAN an hour after Edie’s initial arrival that she and her grandmother finally hugged hello. Their first greet
ing had been a strange, rushed thing in which Edie stammered out, “I have to go after my dog,” then dashed off the porch without even looking her grandmother in the face, not even making entirely sure that the woman who’d opened the door was her grandmother. Anyway, the second time, they held each other tight, their first acknowledgment of Mrs. Coxe’s terrible circumstances.
“I’m sorry, Grandma,” Edie said, into Mrs. Coxe’s ear.
“Fuck you and your pity,” Mrs. Coxe whispered back, but she didn’t let go.
THREE HUNDRED MILLION years ago the Appalachian Mountains were twenty thousand feet higher. Enormous ferns and tiny salamanders dominated. More recently, there were wild turkeys, panthers, bears, wolves, woodland bison, a hundred ravens and vultures and eagles watching over a single kill. Sometimes there were wolf traps and sometimes children torn to pieces. But by 2015, there were mostly squirrels and woodpeckers, a farm here and there, a golf course on one reclaimed mountaintop, a prison on another, gated communities in the valleys, stills turned to museums in the hollows, the occasional marijuana field or worse, but also amphitheaters, craft shows, music festivals, and a steady stream of hikers with heavy packs.
It was a place of haves and have-nots in every way you could imagine. Dogs chained too tight; dogs running free; children too skinny; children too fat; swimming-pool houses up on the hills that sank suddenly into the ground and shacks that had hung nearly perpendicular off hills, without fail, for two hundred years. Everything seemed too much or too little, until you looked closely and realized in the shadows of those extremes, just like in every other place, there were a hundred people living lives in between, making do with just more than enough. One of those people was Edie’s grandmother.
Mrs. Coxe: eighty-four years young. Still prone to sulks and temper tantrums, as if she’d never learned her mood was something she could control.
She also had a tumor. A knockout punch in slow motion. Three months probably.
EDIE ROSE THE NEXT MORNING to find Mrs. Coxe drinking coffee at the living room window, looking out on the yard, where wisps of fog drifted over the overgrown grass. A morning ritual of sixty-some years? No. There was a black bear outside the window because Edie had put a heap of dog food on the porch in an attempt to lure Trixie home.
“What a treat,” Mrs. Coxe said as she took Edie by the hand.
A bear! the size of a bear! It rambled off the porch, rubbed up against Edie’s car, snuffed around for more food, then glanced back at the house. Edie retreated to the room’s far wall.
Mrs. Coxe laughed. “It can’t see this far,” she said, then pressed her nose up against the window glass. “I don’t think, anyway.”
Edie crept back toward her grandmother. The bear had moved to the far side of Edie’s car and was doing who knows what. Probably leaving a bread-crumb trail for other bears to follow.
“My grandfather once traded ten pounds of flour for a black bear cub,” Mrs. Coxe said, putting her arm around Edie and drawing her back to the window. How thin her grandmother’s arm, how evident the bone! “Then he traded the bear cub for a rifle. Then he traded the rifle plus a broken plow for a wheelbarrow, a sack of sugar, and a kiss.”
How folksy! How charming! How chatty the woman who has had her coffee! Could any of this be true?
“I’m sure it’ll go away on its own,” Mrs. Coxe said. “Just like your dog will come back on its own.”
“Her name is Trixie,” Edie said indignantly. “She’s not an it—” Edie had hit a roadblock: cry or stop talking. She stopped talking; but then she cried anyway.
Mrs. Coxe walked out of the room, and Edie stopped crying. Apparently she’d needed an audience. How embarrassing. When Mrs. Coxe came back a moment later, she held a pile of photographs, which she extended toward Edie.
“Those are your great-great-grandparents,” Mrs. Coxe said. “Our family has been in these parts more than a hundred years. So you can’t be such a baby. Not about a bear and not about a dog. Not even about a human being.”
Edie looked at the photos. Each small black-and-white picture showed a crowd of kids bookended by a man and woman who probably weren’t as old as they looked. The woman was white and the man, definitely, clearly, positively—black.
Edie looked at her great-great grandfather, looked at his kids—little bit dark, little bit curly-haired, little bit Italian-seeming, really—and then she looked at her great-great-grandfather again. “I didn’t know he was black,” Edie said, trying to sound nonchalant, utterly and absolutely unsurprised, nothing that could make her sound insensitive or racist. Because she wasn’t!
“Melungeon,” Mrs. Coxe said. And then she added, “Elvis was Melungeon,” as if that explained anything.
Edie nodded. Life was surprising. It could give you a bear rubbing up on your car one moment and the next give you news that made such a bear seem small.
She was black?
Not that she minded. But?
Was this a so-what situation or monumental? She was already in favor of equality for all, poverty for none, peace on the planet, act globally and locally, seven generations forethought, and all that jazz. She had, after all, just come out of a very solid liberal arts education and held both the idealism and the energy of youth.
But your history? Your people? That should be a point of pride. Ancestors in the struggle! Or was that appropriation at its heart? Oh God, Edie didn’t know, she really didn’t.
“Tom Hanks is a Melungeon,” Mrs. Coxe said.
“But what’s a Melungeon?” Edie cried.
Melungeons. Once thought to be the lowest of the low, but by 2015, like the newly trendy handmade items pouring out of the mountains and onto the Internet, they had become desirable, romantic even, with annual meetings and books of genealogy and more members than detractors. Melungeons were mountain people historically, shunned for looking different—darker than whites, lighter than blacks—unwanted by either. Some folks believed, insistently, that Melungeons were descendants of Turkish or Portuguese sailors abandoned along the Atlantic seaboard in the sixteenth century. That was what the Melungeon Unions—meetings of anyone who cared to be included—sometimes reinforced and sought to prove with their DNA tests and genealogical studies and visiting Turkish dignitaries. But most people believed the simplest truth: the Melungeons were the product of black and white and Indian intermixing.
“What I want,” Mrs. Coxe said, tugging the stack of photographs back out of Edie’s grip, “is a green burial and a home funeral. I don’t want mold to grow on my body. Let it rot like it’s supposed to. Tell your father.”
That was how Edie met Michael. Mrs. Coxe called the Mountain Home Funeral Home, and he came right over.
MOUNTAIN HOME FUNERAL HOME, one of the longest-running black-owned businesses in the county, started by Michael Hendrix, Sr., in 1934. Now run by his great-grandson Michael Hendrix IV: only twenty-seven and the proprietor of his own mortuary business, specializing in environmentally sustainable practices and death midwifery—but also the regular stuff, if you want it.
He came to the house to explain what would happen. Mrs. Coxe sat strangely silent throughout (Who is this woman? Edie thought. How can a person change so much from second to second?), and perhaps as a result, Michael kept glancing at Edie, talking more and more to her, while Edie studied him, until Mrs. Coxe finally snapped her fingers in front of Michael’s face and said, “Talk to me, you bastard.”
“It’s the tumor,” Edie said immediately, though God only knew if that was true.
But Michael just laughed, smiled at Mrs. Coxe, and directed his attention toward her until he said, “So that’s it,” then turned to Edie as if she were the punctuation at the end of his sentence.
“IS THERE SOMETHING TO SIGN?” Edie asked.
“There is,” Michael said.
After Mrs. Coxe had signed her paperwork and paid up front, Michael asked to say a word to Edie, and so she walked him to his car.
“She understands,” he said, “that I’l
l be the one to prepare her?”
“Prepare her how?”
“Her body,” he said.
“I’m sure she understands. That’s why we called you. What are you saying?”
“It’s just sometimes . . . people think they aren’t prejudiced, and they think they can handle”—he paused again—“a black man washing their body, but then suddenly they can’t.”
“Well, she’ll be dead anyway, right?” Edie said, her voice rising in pitch. God, how she hated that.
“Right,” he said and looked at her.
“So you mean me? Do I understand?”
“You and your family.”
“We’re not racist,” Edie said. “My grandmother’s black. Melungeon. Whatever.” How convenient to have this information to wield! She was not a racist! How could she be! She kept going: “My father’s grandfather was black. No, my grandmother’s grandfather was black. My great-great-grandfather, or something, was black. Melungeon.”
Michael laughed.
“What?”
“So you’re black?”
“What do you mean, preparing the body?” Edie asked suddenly. She nearly stumbled right into him, as if her words were spewing her rather than the other way round.
Michael had a measured way, calm; he’d brought it home from Afghanistan, as good as any medal.
Edie felt the urge to touch his arm.
“I’ll wash the deceased,” he said, “and keep the deceased cool with dry ice and take care of the deceased, so that your family can spend time with the deceased. In her home.”
Still Edie didn’t absorb it; didn’t picture what the future held. All she could think was how he kept saying “deceased.” Was it polite or was it weird?
“That’s what she wants, isn’t it?” Michael asked. “To be at home?”
They were interrupted by a racket from the trees: nature’s squabbles. They both swiveled their heads. When they turned back to each other, Edie nodded her head yes.
“You know Melungeon isn’t the same as black,” Michael said.
The Trojan War Museum Page 6