Rachel's Blue

by Zakes Mda

  People have lots of questions after the engineer’s presentation. Rachel is most impressed by her age – she is definitely younger than Rachel and yet here she is on stage addressing all these people, talking with eloquence and authority, and teaching people far older than her, some of whom are respected professionals in the county, things they knew nothing about. Because of her education she is more of an asset to Appalachia Active than Rachel is.

  All of a sudden she now sees her role as only to increase the numbers at demonstrations and protest marches. She does not add much value to the organisation. Nana Moira was right, she concludes, she must go back to school. She may not be an engineer like the young lady, but she can be something that people look up to. She is even more impressed when the engineer answers the questions with confidence and humour, and how she tries to be fair and honest. When she has no information on the advantages and disadvantages of a specific fracking method she says so, and directs the questioner to other sources that are more knowledgeable than she is.

  The lawyer to be loved takes the stage with more panache. Perhaps he imagines he is addressing a jury. He talks of well blow-outs that release millions of gallons of polluted water into creeks, of how natural water streams are hit when fracking companies prepare the ground for fracking, and of numerous occasions when the valves of trucks are “accidentally” left open so that the brine can be spilled along the road. All the while he gives specific examples of towns, villages and townships where these things have happened, and what the response or lack of response of Ohio government agencies was.

  This angers the people; some yell that this must not be allowed to happen. Rachel steals a glance at Jason. She catches him still staring at her. She wonders if he is paying attention to the proceedings at all. She finds his gaze discomfiting. He waves furtively. She responds with a weak smile, and quickly redirects her eyes back to the stage.

  “Every well in Athens County is an old well that has been converted, most before we even had laws,” says the lawyer, before outlining what legal recourse the communities have. It becomes obvious to Rachel that his role is to teach Appalachia Active how to get around things, how to stay within the law in their protests, how to use the loopholes in the law to fight the fracking companies. He is arming the members with legal tools on how to beat the fracking industry at its own game. He has really studied the law as it pertains to extractive industry and has explored the many avenues that aggrieved communities can follow to take their cases to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, to city and county officials, to state representatives, to the state governor and to the courts.

  The chairperson seems to have a different view, at least that’s what her facial expression shows as the lawyer uses PowerPoint slides to sum up his argument. She does not directly challenge him, though. After he has answered a few questions from the assembly and taken his seat, she calls upon Skye Riley to make his presentation. When he stands up one can see how scrawny he is, yet he moves and gesticulates as though he has just been ejected from a dynamo. His is not a meticulously prepared PowerPoint presentation. He just speaks off the cuff.

  “We can’t play by their rules,” he says. “They are pillaging our land and poisoning our water. We need direct action.”

  The audience is immediately electrified, especially the front pew of young women. Rachel is all agog.

  “You can actually change the situation you live in without dealing with politicians,” Skye Riley continues. “You need no one’s permission to confront the industry that is killing our families. We can’t wait for two years dealing with the courts; we need direct action now.”

  There is prolonged applause. The lawyer is trying very hard to hide his wounded look behind a smile. But it is a very mechanical smile. He takes the young man’s utterances as a personal attack on him.

  “Direct action,” someone shouts from the floor, “what does it mean exactly?”

  All eyes turn on the heckler. It is Genesis de Klerk.

  “It means you chain yourselves to pieces of equipment,” says Skye.

  Everyone knows exactly what he is talking about. Some people are already resorting to that line of action. An Appalachia Active member is currently on trial for doing exactly that. The news has been on Power 105 FM and in the Athens News. It is what scared Nana Moira; the way things are going Rachel may suffer the same fate.

  “It means you sit in the governor’s office and refuse to leave. It takes endless energy and money to go into the community organising. Slow and patient work needs resources and time, which we don’t have. In West Virginia we decided direct action is the only solution. We can’t wait for state regulatory bodies to work.”

  The young women are screaming like Skye is some rock star. The young men are clapping and nodding their heads in agreement. Jason is unimpressed. His attention is on the women in the opposite front pew.

  “He’s been staring at you all this time,” Schuyler whispers to Rachel.

  “He’s not staring at anybody; he’s speechifying.”

  “Come on, you know I’m talking of Jason.”

  “How do you know he’s staring at me and not you?”

  “You were his girlfriend, not me.”

  Rachel elbows Schuyler in the ribcage, and they giggle away.

  Skye Riley is looking directly at them; they fall silent and pay attention. He is explaining that extractive industries affect poor people everywhere. The people who are doing mountain top mining in West Virginia are the same people who are poisoning Ohio water through fracking. They are also the same people who drive poor folks of colour out of their houses in New Orleans.

  “We need people who are willing to lock themselves to equipment. We need folks who are not afraid to go to jail,” he says before sitting down to even greater applause.

  “Shut down the injection wells in Ohio now!” some people are chanting.

  It is obvious that most people in the room agree with the direct action route and some may even personally commit themselves to it. Rachel finds the chants electrifying. Such gatherings are what make life so wonderful in Athens County.

  The two girls agree that Skye Riley is “awesome”, especially when he glowers at the mention of elected officials who have sold out to extractive industry. When he shapes his lips into a defiant smirk he is even more “cute”. They admit to each other that they fancy him, although it is all in jest and laughter. Rachel is happy that Schuyler is gradually coming out of her shell and is becoming herself again after the death of her lover and then a trial that left her broken-spirited and on probation. She is beginning to appreciate life and men again. But the fact that she has a permanent limp and will walk with the aid of a crutch for the rest of her life will be a constant reminder of a sad chapter in her life.

  After the meeting Skye rushes out for a much needed smoke as the rest of the people mill about the aisle debating the merits of direct action versus legal channels. Genesis is obviously a rule of law guy. He says he believes in protest, orderly demonstrations and court actions rather than in this so-called direct action which to him is tantamount to violent revolution. An elderly woman says Genesis is living proof of how people change as they age. After all, he is no stranger to jail; back in the day he used to lead sit-ins and lie-ins and other kinds of defiance campaigns against every cause known to man ranging from the Vietnam War to the saving of seals and whales and all sorts of animals that don’t even exist in America. A fellow sixties hippy – an unreconstituted one – asks: “When did Genesis become so conservative?”

  “Bullshit! You guys just want West Virginia folks to take over our fight,” says Genesis, looking around for Jason. “Let’s go, Jase.”

  Jason bumps into Rachel.

  “Excuse me,” says Rachel.

  “You’re excused,” says Jason. “Although I should be the one to apologise.”

  “Jason!” she says.

  “Yep, the one and only. Good to see you’re as pretty as you ever was.”

&n
bsp; She doesn’t say “thank you”. Compliments always embarrass her.

  “Meet my pa.”

  “You’re Nana Moira’s girl,” says Genesis.

  He shakes her hand heartily. “How’s the grand ol’ lady?”

  “She’s doin’ great, Genesis. I didn’t know you were Jason’s dad,” says Rachel. “I knew him way back at high school.”

  Rachel only got to know Genesis de Klerk a few years ago when Jason was already playing a hippy in Yellow Springs. He never talks about a son when he visits the Jensen Community Centre to hang out with the other seniors and gossip about the good ol’ days or to donate fresh produce for Nana Moira’s Food Pantry. She and Nana Moira have been to Genesis’ house deep in the Wayne Forest to glean tomatoes from his vast garden. Nana Moira makes them into salsa. He is the most organic of all the old hippies of southeast Ohio. His home is self-sufficient in almost everything, including electricity, which he gets from solar panels that are on the roof and on the boulders in the wild-looking part of the garden. Behind the house is a dam where he catches his fish. There are a few beehives for honey, ducks and chickens for eggs and meat, a cow for milk, and three large heaps of compost.

  What Rachel remembers most about the visit was that when she wanted to use the bathroom Genesis’ wife – Rachel now concludes she cannot be Jason’s mom, judging by her young age, but his stepmom – took her to a room with a wooden toilet seat and a portable bucket under it. The family does all its business in that room and in another one like it downstairs. The contents are emptied outside and become part of the compost heap. That’s what gets Genesis’ vegetables so gigantic and full of vigour.

  Rachel cannot forget how she flipped out. She had not known that some people use crap to fertilise their gardens.

  “Ain’t nothing more organic than human crap,” Nana Moira told her when they were driving home.

  “I’m not gonna eat Genesis’ veggies. Otherwise I am gonna think of all that crap. I wonder why it didn’t even smell in the house, not even in the latrine.”

  “Maybe they treat it with something that eats the smell,” said Nana Moira.

  “You gonna eat those veggies even when you know they’ve been fertilised with Genesis’ crap?”

  “Of course I am gonna eat them. We’ve been eating them all along and we’s healthy as a fiddle.”

  “Not me, Nana Moira. Not any more.”

  “You don’t know what manure they use for them veggies from Kroger or from the Food Bank.”

  That flipped Rachel even more. To this day she hates vegetables.

  But it is not from the vegetables, honey, eggs and milk that Genesis’ family earns its livelihood. These are mostly for home consumption. Genesis buys a lot of cheddar from Wisconsin cheesemongers and adds value to it by ageing it before selling it at the farmers’ market. Rachel and Nana Moira were impressed when he took them to his cellar and showed them the shelves with chunks of cheese in half-open glass containers or just wrapped in wax paper. There were thermometers on the walls and a range of fans on the floor to create air circulation. Some of the cheese, he told them, had been there for two years, and would only be sold after another three to fetch a good price from connoisseurs. Rachel was struck by the smell that permeated the room, both mouldy and pungent, almost like pee – a smell that she has associated with Genesis and his wife ever since. Even as he stands here with his son and Schuyler she can detect the familiar whiff.

  “You remember Schuyler?” says Rachel to Jason.

  “Yeah. The queen of them yentas back in the day.”

  The memory provokes a few giggles; Genesis is bemused.

  “‘Back in the day’ being the operative words here,” says Schuyler.

  “I’ll leave you with your friends, Jase,” says Genesis. “Some of us have work to do.”

  Jason suggests they all go for coffee at Donkey provided they give him a ride home. He was persuaded to attend this meeting by his dad so he came with him in his car.

  Rachel helps the limping Schuyler down the steps.

  And there is Skye Riley sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette.

  “You girls didn’t hear a darn thing I was saying. Talking all the time,” he says looking at Rachel and Schuyler. And then turning to Jason he adds, “I bet you can’t get a word in edgeways with these two, bro.”

  “About chaining ourselves,” says Schuyler, “that’s what we were talking about.”

  “In that case you’re forgiven,” says Skye.

  He stands up to introduce himself, and they all laugh and tell him they already know who he is. After they have told him their names he says he hopes to see them at the Appalachia Active’s first ever Action Camp that will be held for the whole of next weekend at the old Stewart School. It will be a community weekend of workshops about injection wells, fracking, community organising and direct action, all aimed at helping activists from across southeastern Ohio to prepare themselves for the impending fight. He will come all the way from the Blue Ridge Mountains to facilitate some of the workshops. Jason and Schuyler say they will not be able to attend the camp, but Rachel will definitely be there. Skye is excited to hear this and promises that he will see her there.

  Jason, Schuyler and Rachel walk to Rachel’s Ford Escort, which is parked on the street just in front of the building.

  “Holy fuck, these guys take themselves so seriously,” says Jason when the three of them are seated at Donkey sipping coffee. “You ain’t gonna be chaining yourselves to no frackin’ shit, will ya?”

  Rachel says she will because she believes in the cause. Schuyler, on the other hand, would not be able to even if she wanted to. She is on probation and is still doing community service for a crime that the county prosecutor called “aggravated stupidity”. For the past few years she had a passionate affair with a married man whose promises to leave his wife and be with Schuyler for ever and ever were never fulfilled. Instead he died in a motorcycle accident. Schuyler was on the pillion when this happened.

  Schuyler was in O’Bleness Hospital when the man was cremated. After months of hospitalisation she is now in physiotherapy.

  The man’s family barred her from visiting his remains, which were kept in an urn in a columbarium at the cemetery. This embittered her because, as she told Rachel, all she wanted was to say goodbye to her lover. So one night she took a cab to the cemetery – she didn’t want to involve Rachel in the crime she was planning – and broke the glass front of the niche with a rock. She grabbed the urn and fled. Out on the road she phoned another cab to pick her up.

  The wife knew immediately that this was not an act of random vandalism. She told the police who she suspected, and indeed they found the man’s ashes in Schuyler’s bedroom, on the nightstand next to her bed. She told the officers that she stole the man’s ashes because he was hers and his wife had no business keeping them or barring her from the cemetery. She was adamant that the man loved her, not the wife, and the fact that when he died he was with Schuyler was proof enough. Therefore, she felt that she was more entitled to those ashes than the official widow. This was Schuyler’s defence at the Athens Court of Common Pleas where she was on trial for felony vandalism. She was convicted and sentenced to a two thousand, five hundred dollar fine and community service. She is still serving that sentence and if she were to be caught on the wrong side of the law again during her period of probation she would certainly go to prison. That’s why she is not prepared to take any risk chaining herself to fracking equipment even though, like her friend Rachel, she strongly believes in the cause.

  “But you was chanting ‘direct action, direct action’ major,” says Jason.

  “Yeah, I can chant it ’cause I support it, but I can’t do it,” says Schuyler.

  Both Rachel and Schuyler find Jason a pleasant guy, a gentleman in fact, despite his vocabulary which is peppered with cusswords and has regressed from the high-school-acquired register to that of the township folks who don’t have much schooling. He tells them about
his carefree life in Yellow Springs, his sadness at the loss of Big Flake Thomas, and his return to old Athens County where he hopes to resuscitate the music career that was really coming along fine in Yellow Springs until the big man decided to join celestial buskers. In the meantime he is helping his father in his cheese-ageing business and he hates it. He has come to hate cheese in all its manifestations, and as soon as he finds a job he’s bailing on his father.

  What bugs him most is that his father has lately rediscovered God after a life as an agnostic hippy. He has gone back to the religion of his Michigan-Dutch ancestors – the Reformed Church in America – and has the religious fervour of a new convert that tends to annoy everyone around him. For instance, on Thanksgiving his relatives from Michigan descended like the elders of Zion on Rome Township and turned his home into a revivalist retreat.

  Rachel remembers that Genesis’ origins are traced back to Michigan. His father – Jason’s grandfather, that is – was a pipefitter and welder of Michigan-Dutch stock who came from Grand Rapids to work at the booming coal mines in Rome Township in the 1940s. In the beginning he had stood out as a foreigner because people here have close-knit families with bloodlines that are identifiable from their surnames. But he worked his way into the hearts of the community and soon his strange Michigan-Dutch surname was as native as the Appalachian soil.

  “It can’t be that bad,” says Rachel. “You’re just set in your wild Yellow Springs ways.”

  “Ain’t nothing wild about Yellow Springs. It’s a place of art and culture. Carefree ways, yes, not wild ways. Major carefree! But here I’m like a slave. I’m a grown-ass man but Pa treats me like I’m a kid still.”

  He goes along with the treatment just to please his pa and make his step-ma, whom he adores, happy. As soon as he returned from Yellow Springs they took him to Grand Rapids to be baptised into the church of his ancestors. He went along with that too; it made them happy and saved him from any nagging that was sure to come from his pa.