by Lee Smith
“You got some business here, buddy?” The voice was flat and nasal, absolutely without intonation.
I whirled, almost dropping the camera.
The man hunkered silently, watching. He was so still he looked of a piece with the mountainside, rock cropped bare and left there weathering, his face seamed, the telltale black circles of coaldust ringing his pale colorless eyes so that he resembled, I thought, some giant ominous raccoon. Before I could stop myself, I was giggling wildly! Cold sweat prickled under my arms.
“What’s so goddamn funny?” The man stood up slowly, then advanced. “Nothing,” I said finally. “Nothing.” I stood poised by the automobile, my hand on the door.
The man looked at me. “You’ll be one of them government fellers, I reckon,” he said.
Christ, yes! “W.P.A. Administration.” I fell into it quickly. “From Charleston.”
The man came closer, squinting at me. “Then I’ll tell you some things,” he said. “I’ll tell you some things. We been eating wild greens at my house since January this year, greens that the goddamn pigs eat. The children needs milk and we can’t get none of it, you hear me mister? None of it.”
“But surely,” I protested, “at the company store . . .” I gestured toward Granny Younger’s holler.
“Store, my ass,” the man said. His voice was so flat that he might have been saying “It’s going to rain”: he might have been saying anything. “I owe that store so much I ain’t never going to pay it, I’ll die owing the company everthing I got. You got to buy your powder from the store, see, you can’t blast coal without no powder, and you can’t get it no-place but the store, and it keeps going up on you—then they pay you by the ton, see, and then they have went and gone up on the ton too.” The man fell silent, looking out at the coal camp.
“You can’t win for losing,” he said.
I confess I have never been able to hold my peace when I should.
“But the union,” I protested. “This new man, Lewis, don’t you think—”
“I don’t think shit,” the man said. “Ain’t nobody paying me to think.”
“I guess not,” I stammered. “I mean, I guess so.”
“Hell, they talk big,” the man said, “but they ain’t done nothing yet. The only thing they done so far is get Mr. Blossom all riled up so he’s got him some Gatling guns and a bunch of Pinkertons up here. Hit’s coming on fer a bad time,” he said, almost as if to himself, then suddenly grinned a wide feral grin, exposing his yellowed broken teeth. “You heard enough?” he asked. “You want to hear some more?”
“I have to be on my way,” I responded quickly. “Perhaps I could ask you, however, do you know the family of Luther Wade? I’m told they live up here someplace.”
“That second row of houses over there,” the man said, pointing. “The one on the end,” he said. “I reckon you come up here to hear him sing. You gonna write it down or what?”
“Something like that.”
“They was some other fellers up here already, doing that.”
I remained silent, vastly relieved.
“Didn’t none of them have a car like thisun, though.”
I got into the automobile and locked the door.
“Didn’t none of ’em have such a fancy car.”
The man pulled a gun (!) out from somewhere—shoulder holster?—and looked at it, turning it in his hands. The gun was black and seemed to absorb the sunlight. The man looked at it carefully, blew in the barrel.
“Look, you want money?” I said—I think I said. “Is that it? Here.” I struggled with my overcoat.
“I don’t want nothing you’ve got.”
Carelessly, grinning, the man lifted the gun and shot out the rearview mirror attached to the car on the driver’s side. Glass splintered against the car and down onto the packed red clay.
The sound of the gun ricocheted deafeningly from the mountain wall.
The man grinned.
I threw the car into gear and screeched off down the narrow road into the holler, not the way I had intended going, not at all, but the man stood behind me there in the middle of the road still grinning so I could not turn the car and I had simply no choice at all.
Children ran beside me as I drove past the company store; everybody stared. I drove on, ascending now, at last almost within shooting range of the house I knew to be hers, then braked and turned and put the automobile out of gear and leaned out for a couple of quick shots.
By this time, the light was nearly gone. This series of photographs has an indistinct, grainy surface, as if coal dust were blowing palpably through the air.
The first photograph shows the house itself with the clothes flapping on the line beside it, children out playing in the dirt of the yard, such as it is, beyond the fence, children taking a trip of their own in the rusted-out Dodge or part of a Dodge in the yard.
—Then two lovely girls, apparently twins, holding hands as they come down the steps, frail and angelic: they’ve got no business here in this darkening yard. The twins, their dresses, and the wringer washer on the porch all seem to glow in this photograph; the yard, the house, the other children blurry and dark.
Finally Dory herself appeared in the lighted rectangle of the door.
“You girls!” she called. “Sally! Lewis Ray! Billy! You all come on, now.”
I drew my breath in sharply, clicking away.
But these pictures did not turn out because the light had gone by then! because Dory, at the door, picked just that moment to turn her head. She was reduced to an indistinct, stooped shape, the posture of an older woman—they age so fast in those mountains any way—or perhaps it was simply the angle of her head and the way she stood at the door, her head a mere bright blur.
Even when I blew it up, there was nothing there.
I drove for most of the night, beyond Claypool Hill and Tazewell to a hotel outside Christiansburg, desperate to put as much distance as possible between myself and the mountains. When I awakened the next day, in the late morning after seven hours of deep black sleep, I felt exhausted, drugged. Driving on, I was suddenly struck by the way my splintered rearview mirror fractured the noonday sun and sent it out in a splatter of light: like a prism, in all truth. I stopped the car and stared into this phenomenon until I was nearly blinded, and when I looked back at the rolling landscape of Lynchburg around me, it appeared all different, all new, as if cleansed by a silvery wash. I felt as I had felt several years ago upon hearing the news that a ninth planet—Pluto—had been found revolving around the sun, a planet that of course had been there all along: oh God! I thought. Nothing is ever over, nothing is ever ended, and worlds open up within the world we know. I was anxious to rejoin my family. Yet I sat there for quite some time, just east of Lynchburg, looking out at the first faint springing green on the earth’s wide rolling field.
Part Four
SALLY
There’s two things I like to do better than anything else in this world, even at my age—and one of them is talk. You all can guess what the other one is.
A while back, Roy and me were in the bed—that’s my husband, Roy—and I said this out loud to him it is something I have thought to myself for a while.
“Roy,” I said, “when you get right down to it, honey, there’s not a lot worth doing, is there, outside of this and talking?” and Roy wrinkled up his eyes in that way he has, and thought for the longest time, and then he said, “Well, Sally, I guess there’s sports.” Sports! I laughed so loud.
But that’s Roy for you. He’d roll over and die if he missed a bowl game on TV. One time he didn’t get up from that recliner for seven hours solid and his knees went right out from under him when he stood up when the news come on.
Roy has a good time, that’s the thing I like about Roy. He’s a lineman for the Appalachian Power and he likes that job fine, no complaints, turned down a promotion because it meant he’d have to wear a tie and spend half time at the office.
“Count me o
ut,” was what Roy said.
Roy likes his sports and he likes my kids and he likes pepperoni pizza and he likes to have some beer of an evening—I do too—and he’ll grow him some tomatoes every year out there by the garage, he likes tomatoes, and he likes engines better than any man you ever saw. Any kind of engine. He made Davy the cutest little dune buggie, and got him a helmet to go with it. Roy likes cars and boats. And Roy can fuck your eyes out, Roy can, and talking all the time. “Talk to me,” he says. Well I like that.
My first husband came from a family up in Ohio that didn’t believe in talking to women and he never said one word, just roll over and go to sleep.
I didn’t run into Roy until I was over the hill—I had this other husband first, as I said—but by God I know a good thing when I see it.
I jumped right on it.
Because him and me we are two of a kind and sometimes when we’re there in the bed it’s like it all gets mixed up some way, like you kind of forget where your body stops and his starts or who did what to who and who came when and all that. I said we are two of a kind.
Another way we are, Roy and me, is down to earth. I’ve always been like that basically and so has Roy, even before we took up with each other. Sometimes we play a little poker with Lois and Ozell Banks and sometimes we go to Myrtle Beach. We don’t want the moon.
Not like Almarine, who is all the time trying to get us to go into the AmWay business with him and Debra. The more people they get, see, the closer him and Debra get to being a diamond distributor, or a ruby or a emerald distributor, or whatever the hell it is he wants so bad.
“I’ll buy your soap,” I said, “and I’ll buy your oven cleaner,” I said, “but by God that’s it and you might as well take all those cosmetics right out of this house.”
I am not about to go fooling around with any soap cosmetics.
I told Almarine that, too, right to his face.
“I don’t buy a thing but Mary Kay,” I said. “Now get that straight.” Roy was laughing and laughing. Lord, I love the way that man can laugh. And Almarine leaning forward, just so serious, he was sitting right there on that couch.
“Tell me your dreams,” he said. Almarine learned that at the AmWay convention, they tell you to say that and write them down.
“I dreamed I went to a demolition derby in my Maidenform bra.” Roger said that—that’s my grandson, Roger, with the smart mouth. We were all in here in the family room looking at Almarine sitting on the couch with all that soap and air fresheners and nail polish and God knows what-all spread out around him like he was a regular store. And putting on weight, too, I noticed—Almarine used to be a tackle in high school and now he’s got this real big neck.
“No, I’m serious.” He held his pencil up in his hand like he was back in tenth grade, taking a spelling test. “Tell me your dreams,” he said.
“Shit, Almarine,” Roy said. “Come on.”
So finally Almarine got up and went home. If he had any sense he would of known he’d never get anyplace with me and Roy who are the only people on our street who haven’t ever planted any grass in our yard so we won’t have to mow it. That’s how we are.
But Almarine is always telling people that if they go in the AmWay business their life and their marriage will improve.
“It’s a couples business,” Almarine says.
Shows you how much he knows.
But my whole family is like that. People say they’re haunted and they are—every one of them all eat up with wanting something they haven’t got. If it’s not being a double ruby it’s something else. Roy says that watching my family carry on is better than TV. They’ve always been like that—not Ora Mae, of course, but she’s another case altogether, and not Pappy, that’s Luther—any more since he’s gotten so old and crazy he’s forgotten what it was that he wanted so bad although all the rest of us remembers it real well as you might imagine. But the rest of them, Lord!
When Roy fell off of the truck about a month ago and got his knee smashed up so bad, I told him the whole story, I never had told it before, Roy sitting home in a leg cast so he couldn’t do anything else but talk.
“Listen,” I said, and I got him a beer, “I’ll start at the beginning,” I said, which I did, and although I told it the best I could, I’m still not sure I got it straight. It took me a day to tell the whole thing.
I’ve always said this: either a person loves their mama or they don’t. And either a family will work or it won’t, that may not be the way it is everywhere, and especially not now with women’s lib, but that’s the way it was here, when I was growing up.
You’ve been in those houses too, the ones that don’t work, and you know what that’s like, the kind of house that makes your blood pressure go up just to put one foot inside the door, everybody yelling and snapping off each other’s heads, breaking stuff, running off in all directions, and once the kids are gone they never come back, oh they might send a Christmas card or something but that’s it, couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Dodge, and who’s to blame them? or else it’s the kind of house you go in there and it’s so quiet and you can hear a pin drop all the time. Everything happens the same way every day, same time, you know you almost die you get so bored. Nobody has got anything to say to anybody else.
This is the kind of house my friend Lois Crowe grew up in, you couldn’t even open the Frigidaire Lois said between meals and you had to sit on plastic on the chairs. The end of that story is the way her mama, who was such a housekeeper, got at the last, how she took to washing her hands about twenty or thirty times every day, but then every time she got them clean, she’d just stand in front of the sink and holler for Lois or Ozell or one of the kids to turn off the water because she couldn’t stand to touch the faucets, see, she had gotten her hands so clean.
Well, there is houses and houses, I guess.
Sometimes I’ll be driving along over to Black Rock or up to Richlands or something, and I’ll pass by a bunch of company houses—the kind we used to live in, at the Blackey camp—and I’ll get to looking real close, and wondering what kind of families live in each one and what-all they do, what makes them tick, you might say, or not tick as the case might be and often is, I guess—all those houses just alike, and all the families inside them different, but those houses still exactly the way ours was then, that porch on stilts and the cool dark place beneath it where we played, wringer washer on the front porch, the front room where the sofa was and the lamp from Ohio with tassels, and Mama and Pappy’s bed, and the back room where all the rest of us stayed except for Lewis Ray, the baby.
Pappy made him a little bed in a box by the kitchen stove when he was born, and even when he got bigger, he slept in there. Once Lewis Ray set his mind on something, he just had to have his way. Our house was like the rest. And we were like the rest, too, I guess, us children, snot-nosed and sniveling, and hungry half the time, playing games we made up straight out of our heads.
I remember us all getting in that old Dodge out in the yard and taking a trip to the West. “Where the cowboys are,” I’d say. And Billy used to tell us over and over how much Tom Mix had been hurt: blown up once, shot twelve times, hurt forty-seven times in the movies alone which didn’t even count stuff, Billy said, like knife cuts. “Turn left,” I’d say, “for the Grand Canyon.” “I don’t wanna go in the Grand Canyon,” Lewis Ray’d start hollering. He was so stingy and contrary we never let him play if we could help it. “I wanna go out West,” he yelled, “where the cowboys are.” “The Grand Canyon is West,” I had to tell him, so he’d shut up, and Pearl and Maggie sat on the back seat folding their hands like ladies and giggling.
I remember those times we’d go with Pappy over to the fiddlers’ convention at Matewan and sit under the big old shade trees along the banks of the Tug, and Pappy’d walk off with all the prizes.
And sing! He sang to us by the hour in those days. Songs he made up or the old songs, songs he just naturally knew. Such as for instance “Barbary A
llen,” or “Fair and Tender Ladies,” or—this was my favorite—“Down in the Valley.”
I can still see it all so plain, us of an evening, sitting out on the porch, and Pappy on the steps with his guitar or his dulcimore across his knees, and all of us sitting around out there on the porch in the dark or out in the cool dark yard.
“Down in the valley, valley so low, hang your head over, hear the wind blow,” Pappy would sing, his voice so pure and true at that time it was like it never came out of him at all, it was like it was something he called up out of the dark green summer air and out of the mountains themselves—“hang your head over, hear the wind blow.” The neighbors used to come over too, you could see the end of Horace Stiles’s cigarette shining red by the corner of the house where he stood, and the women’s dresses light in the shadows of the porch.
It’s a funny thing but I don’t know now whatever happened to Horace or any of all those Stileses.
Way up on the side of Hurricane, where the slag heap from the coal camp was, you could see the red glow of the burning slag, which never went out, and when the wind was right you could smell it, a sweet-awful smell that doesn’t smell like anything else in the world but it’s got a little sulfur in it somehow, enough sulfur anyway so that every time I peel a boiled egg nowadays it takes me right back there in a flash, just like I never left, like we are all still sitting around there listening to Pappy sing. “Send me a letter, send it by mail, send it in care of the Birmingham jail.” He had the prettiest voice, he could go up high if he wanted just like a woman, or down real low, he could almost whisper and still be singing. I’ve heard it said a million times that Pappy could of made a mint if he’d of wanted to, if he had ever written down those songs he made up or if he had gone to Nashville and got on the radio. I believe this is true. But Pappy didn’t want any more than he had, I think—or I’ll say it this way—he already had everything he wanted.