by Zakes Mda
The following Sunday the elders of Genesis’ church descend on Rachel’s double-wide. There are five of them in black suits, and there is Genesis in his regular red and white plaid shirt and dirty jeans. He is not one for dressing up even for church, from which they have all returned.
Rachel and Blue are in the bedroom when the visitors arrive, but she knows exactly who they are when she hears their voices.
“I was afeared that your granddaughter would stay away for the day if she knew we was coming,” says Genesis in response to Nana Moira’s complaint about the unannounced visit.
“Genesis just wants to see his grandson,” says one of the elders.
Nana Moira hollers that Rachel should bring the baby because Genesis wants to see him. Rachel does not hesitate. She comes out with the baby, but keeps him in her arms as she stands in front of the elders.
“What’s his name?” asks one of the elders.
“Blue,” says Rachel.
They all cry “Blue?” in unison.
“What kind of name is that?” asks an elder.
“He’ll need a proper name from the Bible,” says another elder.
“Revelation,” says Genesis.
“Revelation?” asks Nana Moira.
“From Genesis to Revelation,” says Genesis.
“But we gave that one to Jason,” says the elder.
“The baby can always be Revelation Junior.”
“Revelation Junior?” says an incredulous Nana Moira.
All this while Rachel’s amazed gaze moves from one speaker to the next. Nana Moira cannot contain herself. She breaks out cackling. The elders all look at her, and then at one another with questioning eyes. No wonder this girl is flighty, her grandmother is cuckoo. It’s a pity that Jason had to sow his wild oats in a family like this.
“We want these two families, the De Klerks and the Bouchers, to come together and reconcile for the sake of the baby,” says one of the elders.
“Let me hold him,” says Genesis.
Rachel hesitates.
“Come on, Rachel, this is his grampa. He ain’t gonna run away with Blue,” says Nana Moira.
Rachel hands the baby over to Genesis.
“You call him that too?” asks Genesis.
“That’s the name the mama calls her young-un,” says Nana Moira. “It ain’t no big deal; it ain’t permanent.”
“It is permanent,” says Rachel. “His name is Blue.”
“It doesn’t matter about the name for now,” says an elder. “Let’s talk business, in the interests of the child.”
The elder outlines their plan. Genesis wants to adopt the baby. Although the elder is a lawyer, his practice is in Michigan. But he has looked at Ohio laws pertaining to adoption of rape-conceived children. Immediately he says this Genesis and the other elders protest that Jason did not rape anyone.
Rachel is fuming inside. She indicates that she wants her baby back, but Genesis is engrossed with him, talking baby-talk, telling him how smart he looks and that his grandpa will shower him with lots of pretty things.
“We know that,” says the Michigan lawyer. “But the woman insists she was raped and that this is a rape-conceived child. What I am saying is the Ohio law facilitates adoption of rape-conceived children. This makes things easier for us. We can offer Rachel anything she wants, any amount of money.”
“Blue is not for sale,” she says softly.
The lawyer adopts an avuncular mien and laughs. “You misunderstand me, Rachel. I’m not talking of buying a child. That would be absurd. You’re still young. You still have a lot of life to live. We’re talking of adopting your baby so that you’re free to live your life. We’ll pay for anything else that you want … college, if that’s what you want … a career … a job. All that can be arranged. It will make you a better mother.”
“It’s not like you ain’t gonna see the baby again,” says Genesis. “It’s gonna be next door here in Rome Township. You can visit any time you want.”
“Give me back my baby,” says Rachel, reaching for the baby resting contentedly in Genesis’ arms.
“See how pretty he looks in the romper I bought him,” says Genesis, as he makes to hand the baby to Rachel.
“That you bought him?” asks Rachel.
“Oh no, oh no,” says Nana Moira.
“Didn’t Nana Moira tell you? I bought you lotsa baby stuff.”
Rachel snatches the baby and runs to her room. She lays the baby on the bed and takes out all the stuff Genesis bought. She is piling it on the floor when Nana Moira rushes in.
“You lied to me … again …” says Rachel, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I didn’t lie. I didn’t say nothing.”
The baby wants attention. It begins to cry. But Rachel takes no heed.
“You ain’t gonna be wussing out of this now,” says Nana Moira.
“I’m not wussing out. I was never in it in the first place.”
Rachel rushes out of the room with all the items in her arms. Nana Moira wants to go after her, but decides to pay attention to the baby. She takes the baby and hobbles out to the living room where the elders are in various degrees of shock. Rachel gets kerosene from the lamp that is normally used when there are power outages and pours it on the clothes a short distance from the deck. The elders and Nana Moira, with Blue in her arms, all stand on the deck and watch in horror as she sets the clothes alight. Even the baby oil and the baby powder go into the bonfire.
Rachel looks up at the elders and at Nana Moira and at Blue, and smiles. There is a beatific calmness about her. She can hear dark foreboding sounds in her head. Vague, like the games her father played with her.
Nana Moira will not open the Centre today. She is driving Rachel and Blue to the Tri-County Mental Health and Counselling Services because she asked to be taken there. She fears that she is deteriorating to what she was when she still carried the dead weight. Even nightmares have returned. She can’t afford to be in that state again. For Blue’s sake she has to be well.
At the facility she is assigned a counsellor.
It takes the professionals two further consultations before they are able to diagnose her: she has post-traumatic stress disorder. At first the counsellor thought it was acute, but after a few more consultations she comes to the conclusion that it is chronic since it has persisted in excess of three months. Rachel has also had relapses.
She is determined to fight this; for Blue’s sake she will allow nothing to haunt her ever again.
8
Rain comes to Athens. She is one of the featured artists at a concert titled “An Evening of Appalachian Storytelling and Music”. On the programme she is a supporting act to an older balladeer by the name of Granny Sue from Shadyville, West Virginia.
Rachel is in the audience with three-year-old Blue. Rain is the only reason she is here. The last three years she has avoided any event that would take her back to her old life as a musician. Curiosity brought her here tonight. She remembered once a man called Skye Riley from the Blue Ridge Mountains telling her about his balladeer sister called Rain.
The Arts West auditorium is filled with the lovers of Appalachian folklore. Rachel was fortunate to get the front pew, the same one she remembers occupying with Schuyler almost four years ago when she first saw Skye riling up members of Appalachia Active. It seems so distant now. Another world. And sitting here with Blue, but without Schuyler, makes the memory even more poignant.
Schuyler. Rachel wishes she were here. But she can’t be. She is doing time at a women’s penitentiary in another state.
Things got tough for her and the family when she lost her job with the lawyer Troy after missing many days of work. She really hated that job and just couldn’t get the hang of it. So she spent most of the day sitting on the porch with her brothers smoking blunts.
One day Schuyler asked Rachel out of the blue, “Have you ever thought of selling?”
Rachel wondered aloud where that question came from. Thi
ngs were hard for her and Blue, but she had never thought of selling. She was making ends meet by knitting scarves that Nana Moira sold on her behalf to visitors at the Centre – thanks to Nana Moira’s teachings when she was pregnant with Blue. The returns were meagre, but the thought of dealing in drugs had never entered her mind.
Rachel discovered that Schuyler had bought herself a small digi-scale and a large bag of pot. She peddled it to construction workers revamping Route 33, thanks to Obama’s stimulus. Schuyler assured Rachel there was nothing to worry about. She was only dealing in pot, nothing serious, no hard drugs.
Schuyler’s business did not boom; she was a middle-man and was not making much profit. Her pool of regulars was small, and only once in a while did she get wildcard customers. Also she and her brothers used some of the weed themselves.
Rachel does not know how her friend got into meth. Schuyler’s neighbours reported a strong chemical smell, almost like pee, coming from her house. Add to that the high volume of traffic; folks who came for a few minutes only and then drove away. The law came calling one night, found meth lab paraphernalia, and arrested every member of the family, including the parents. Although Schuyler took all the blame for the meth lab the rest of the family was charged: in Ohio it is a felony to fail to report a crime. The catch is that you must know it’s a crime you’re witnessing. The prosecution could not prove that the family knew what Schuyler was up to in her room, and the case against them was withdrawn.
Rachel remembers leaving Blue with Nana Moira and driving to Columbus to attend Schuyler’s trial at the District Court. She was determined to stand by her friend who had always been there for her when things were bad. Schuyler had a very good public defender who got her off with the minimum Federal sentence of five years, despite her prior conviction (remember the stolen ashes?). Since then Rachel has not seen her because she is serving her sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut.
If Schuyler were here they would be laughing together at Thos Burnett’s jokes and making silly remarks about his large Croc shoes and his broad tie on a blue denim shirt, with blocks of red, green, yellow and blue, each block with a picture of Scooby-Doo in different poses. Thos is a famous storyteller in these parts, performing at fairs, zoos, festivals and schools throughout Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia. Rachel recalls that when she was a little girl her pops took her to a reindeer farm in northern Ohio, where she saw Thos telling stories for the first time. He was the resident storyteller at the farm.
Now here he is, much bigger and greyer, making Blue laugh his tummy sore with a story about Old Zach’s dog that was cut into two by a blade of grass. Old Zach tried to sew it together. He only discovered when he was done that he had slapped it together in opposite directions – half of the head joined to half of the dog’s ass. The dog could see from both ends and wag its tail likewise. The story got lost on Rachel as she marvelled at Blue’s relentless laughter. He was obviously following the adventures of Old Zach’s dog in all their silly detail. Rachel remembers her pops, like Thos Burnett an itinerant teller of tall tales. Once she had a dream to follow in his footsteps. She wondered why she abandoned a dream that would have filled folks with so much happiness.
The thought of her pops brings about a fleeting feeling of dread – an apprehension she does not understand. But she is also filled with a lot of joy that bubbles over to Blue. She finds herself embracing him tightly. He tries to free himself because she is breaking his concentration on the story.
It is Rachel’s turn to be engrossed when Wormz and the Decomposers take the stage. The trio sings and plays variously the ukulele, the banjo, the guitar and the mandolin. Rachel loves them most when they sing what they call “a dirty little song about water”. Her fingers begin to itch as they pluck and strum invisible strings. A single tear runs down her face.
“Why you crying, Mama?” Blue gives her a very concerned look.
“Because I’m happy, baby,” she says. “Very happy.”
Finally the act she came here for takes the stage. Rain is introduced by the MC, Thos Burnett, as Granny Sue’s protégée. Rachel is struck by her calmness, her blonde hair that cascades down her shoulders and her petite stature. She sings a capella of the hills that bleed acid water from abandoned mines. Though Rachel is not much enamoured with this style of ballad she can identify with the words. Rain is singing of the same acid water that Rachel’s Jensen community knows so well from their own bleeding hills.
After this Rain plunges into a ballad about “the man I loved more than anybody I ever knew”, and then introduces Granny Sue.
It is obvious to Rachel that Granny Sue is well loved in these parts. Even as she walks on to the stage there is applause, whistles and cheers. Rachel notices that she looks very much like an older and stouter version of Rain. The hair that cascades down her shoulders is white rather than blonde. Rachel has seen Rain smile Granny Sue’s naughty smile and make her deliberate gestures. Clearly Rain sees herself as the heir to this great storyteller and balladeer.
“Now it’s time for some storytelling and song making,” says Granny Sue. “If you know anything about ballads they tend to sound like six o’clock news. All families tell stories. We all have those ‘remember when’ kinda stories. Like ‘remember when Grandpa fell down the stairs?’ Calamity and mayhem make us laugh.”
Then she begins to sing a ballad. Like Rain, she sings a capella. It is about a town that rises from the wilderness where there was nothing the previous day. Now in the night there are hotels and saloons and good time girls lining the streets ready to entertain weary travellers. At the crack of dawn the town disappears again, only to emerge at nightfall. All the while Rain is standing next to her smiling and showing the appropriate facial expressions that the story demands.
And then they sing a duet – Rain and Granny Sue. It is nothing like harmony or unison. One singer sings a stanza and then relays the story to the next. The ballad is about a mine disaster and a young man who died there. It describes how handsome he was, and then goes on to narrate how Number 8 was flooded and all the men were doomed. The two balladeers sing the chorus “going down the dark hole” in unison.
Rachel is moved, but she thinks it would have been even better if they had arranged the whole ballad in soprano and alto harmony. That’s how she would do it.
“If I had money these men would be checkers and whalers and not go down the black hole” the song continues to its end. After the applause Granny Sue explains that in fact they would continue to go down the black hole because coal mining is their life, from the days of their great-grandfathers. Coal runs in their blood and they do not want to be anything but coal miners.
“It’s been like that with my folks,” says Granny Sue. “It’s been like that with Rain’s folks. We live and eat and breathe coal.”
By the time the concert ends Rachel has decided she is going back to music. She will add storytelling and will travel like her father before her, and like Rain and Granny Sue, from place to place bringing laughter and joy. One thing that strikes her most is that these storytellers and balladeers are folksy and country like her or Nana Moira or anyone else from her world, yet they all went to college from what she sees on the programme. Thos Burnett has an MA from Bowling Green and is doing an MFA in storytelling at a university in Tennessee. Rain has an Associate of Arts degree from a community college in Kentucky. Even good old Granny Sue did a BS in education under the name Susanna Holstein at a West Virginia college.
What stops me from being like these folks? she asks herself as she pushes Blue in a stroller to the office at the back that is also used as a green room. She finds Rain and Granny Sue packing their stuff for the road back.
Rain’s first reaction is to coo over the baby even before she greets the mom.
“Ain’t she big for a stroller?” asks Rain.
“He’s only three,” says Rachel.
“Well, he’s a cutie then. Could have sworn he’s a girl,” says Rain.
“At three he should be running all over the place. He needs the exercise,” says Granny Sue.
“He gets plenty of it at home,” says Rachel. “He’s quite a handful running all over the place, like you say.”
Rachel introduces herself and asks Rain if she is the same Rain that Skye told her about. She is indeed the same Rain. To Rachel’s surprise Rain knows something about her. She says her brother Skye used to talk about her a lot. Rain was almost certain that for the first time he was getting serious about someone because he never talked about the many flings he had at his anti-fracking campaigns.
“Now, you done gone and married someone else,” says Rain.
“I didn’t marry anyone,” says Rachel.
She does not elaborate. Rain doesn’t think it would be good manners to pursue the matter further. So they talk about music. And about storytelling. And they exchange contacts and promise to keep in touch.
Once more Rain comes to Athens. But this time not to perform for the public. She is visiting Rachel and has brought her a gift: an Epiphone acoustic guitar. It is green in colour because a girl from the hills deserves a green guitar.
“I told Skye I met you,” says Rain. “He wants to come and visit.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” says Rachel. “And I hope this guitar is not from him ’cause I’m not gonna accept it.”
Rain says she’ll be very hurt if she doesn’t accept it because she bought it herself with her meagre savings after Rachel told her she used to sing and play but stopped more than three years ago when a man she used to play with did awful things to her. Rain thinks it has to do with lost love and warns Rachel never to let a man break her heart to the extent she gives up the one thing that matters in life – music. She bought her the guitar because Skye told her that Rachel’s fingers were quite nifty on the strings and it would be a shame if she gave that all up because of some silly man. “But you can rest assured,” she says, “this guitar ain’t from Skye. He knows nothing about it. It’s from me. I want to hear you play.”