by Robert Gipe
Everyone that could, in cell after cell, looked up to see what was passing. A door opened in front of me. My brother Albert stepped out into the hall. He lived with my uncle Hubert, and I never saw him, especially not at school. He was a senior and only came to school to sell pot. He had a hall pass anybody who looked would see was fake.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I go to school here, douchebag,” I said.
Albert grabbed hold of my shirtsleeve. “Momma wants you to come stay with us.”
“Don’t talk to me about Momma, Albert.”
Albert grabbed hold of me again. Tighter. A year before I could whip him. Wasn’t so sure I still could that day.
“You need somebody,” he said, “to talk some sense into you.”
“Who? You?”
Albert’s rat eyes burrowed into me. I was the target of his arrowhead nose. He said,
I jerked away from Albert. I could see people in classes gathering up their stuff. The bell was about to ring.
Albert reached his left hand out to touch my cheek. I busted him in the face just as hard as I could. I meant to knock his eye clean out of his head. He staggered but didn’t fall. Faces gathered at the narrow slits of glass in the classroom doors. Albert put his hand over his hit eye and stared at me with the other.
“You think Daddy would want you talking at them meetings?” Albert said. “He’s spinning in his grave.”
The bell rang and I stuck the crown of my head right in Albert’s mouth with everything I had. He went down, flat on his back. I started stomping him. He grabbed my foot and I fell, but I landed on my knees right on his chest.
I beat him in the face with the spine of my French book, wishing it was hardback. He caught me by the hair, pulling hard, when two teachers got me under the arms and pulled him off of me.
The school suspended me. Momma took Albert to the hospital and Mamaw took me home. That night I lay in bed, grinding my teeth, swearing at the ceiling. I couldn’t get my breath.
Mamaw got up real early Thanksgiving morning. There were three pie crusts in tin pans lined up on the counter by the time I got up. We were going to her brother Fred’s house for Thanksgiving dinner on Drop Creek, and she was making chess pies. Mamaw moved like she was mad, everything short, sharp, and hard. Only thing she said was, “Store lard caint touch what we got ourselves.”
We were supposed to be at Uncle Fred’s at twelve, but Mamaw took her time and it was almost twelve before we left the house. Mamaw’s sister Verna and her buckeye husband were in the car in front of us as we headed up Drop Creek. It was gray and dreary when we got out of the car at Fred’s house. Verna hit her husband on back of the arm and asked did he bring the playing cards. He said he did.
We walked up the broad steps onto Fred’s deep dark front porch. My cousin Kevin’s little boys were shooting paintball at a target at the side of the house. The targets were stuck on Uncle Fred’s woodpile, the biggest woodpile I ever seen.
When we walked in the front room of the house, all four of Mamaw’s nephews were standing there in front of the television.
They looked at us like they’d been waiting, but they didn’t say anything. Two were Fred’s sons. The other two were Verna’s. Verna lived in Cincinnati, but the boys stayed in Canard County. Mamaw’s nephews all worked on strip jobs around Blue Bear or wherever they could get work. Uncle Fred’s younger son Denny worked on the strip job Mamaw’s petition was about.
We carried pies in the kitchen. Uncle Fred’s wife Genevieve took them from us. Genevieve was round and nice, but whenever we went over there she said at least once what a pretty girl I could be if I wouldn’t wear Halloween makeup all over my face.
“Dawn, you been sick?” Genevieve said as she took my pie.
One of my eighth grade cousins, a boy with a football jersey on, ran through. “She got suspended.”
“Is that right?”
“Don’t matter. We’re on break anyway,” I said.
Fred laughed at that.
Genevieve sat us down to eat at a round table off the kitchen. The dishes were white with flowers on them. Fred passed me a pan of rolls. Aunt Verna was filling a water pitcher at the sink when a hose came loose under the sink and water started flooding out all over the kitchen floor. Fred moved quickly, quietly, and turned it off. He was soaked. He smiled.
“Drownded,” was all he said.
Genevieve left the kitchen and returned carrying a folded shirt, plaid and soft, a clean white V-neck T-shirt. Fred patted me on the shoulder as he passed behind on the way to the back of the house to change his clothes. Genevieve had the water on the floor mopped up before the bread got cold. Fred came back. He had a tan canvas coat on. He nodded at his wife and left.
“He’s going to check on the mine,” she said. “They have a new boy working the guard shack.” We finished eating and cleared the dishes and pans from the table. Genevieve set a pound cake, a stack cake, a plate of cookies, and one of Mamaw’s chess pies out on the table.
“Should we wait for him to get back?” Mamaw said.
“He’ll be a while,” Genevieve said. “Untelling.” She stacked plates, piled silverware. I looked at Mamaw. She nodded at me. I rose to help.
“I’m fine, Dawn,” Genevieve said. “Why don’t you go out there and see what Denny’s doing.”
My cousin Denny sat in the living room slouched down in an armchair. A deer head hung above his head. He wasn’t paying attention to the football game on the TV. He smiled at me and got up and went in the kitchen.
Denny brought me a Mountain Dew and sat back down in his daddy’s chair. His mother passed through, got a big piece of Tupperware out of a closet. She went back in the kitchen and brought me a paper napkin. I had a headache. My skull felt like it was about to split in half.
“Denny,” his mother said, “you get in some wood. Start a fire.”
Denny lifted up out of the chair.
“Come on,” he said. I didn’t move. He tapped me on the side of the knee. “Come on.”
We went out to the big woodpile. I stood waiting for Denny to pile my arms full of wood. He turned around and took a pint bottle of whiskey out of his jacket pocket.
“Where’s your pop?” he said.
“In there.”
He poured some of the whiskey in his red plastic cup. He handed it to me. I took a sip and was glad for it. One sip and the world widened out in my head.
I shook my head. It was enough. He took a sip.
Denny filled my arms with split oak. He waved me in the house and even though the woodpile was big as a trailer, he split more, long arching strokes with the ax. We went in the side door. There was a mud room, where their boots and work clothes stayed. I seen broken glass sitting on a Styrofoam tray like meat comes on at the grocery store.
“He making you pack that wood?” Fred was behind me. His eyes looked tired too. He took the wood from me and stacked it by the stove.
Everybody was sitting in the TV room when we went back in the house. One of the grandkids was in Fred’s chair. The grandkid got up and Fred sat down. Mamaw and the other women came in and stood around behind the chairs and sofas.
Fred looked up at Mamaw. “How you getting along with the tree huggers, Cora?”
“Doing all right,” Mamaw said.
“Well, I’m worried about you.”
“Who’s winning the football game?” Genevieve said.
“And I have to wonder what you’re thinking getting that youngun mixed up in it.” Fred said.
Nobody said anything. All those big men made me smother. I went out in the yard. There were six four-wheelers parked on the gravel. I took off on one.
The tires crunched against the frosted ground. The bark of the motor ran through the skeleton trees. I wound straight uphill, dipped across a dry creek bed and then up again. I came to the edge of the woods, to the mine the meeting on Tuesday night had been about. I
turned the four-wheeler engine off. The strip job was quiet. A hawk circled far out above the grass on the reclaimed section. A security man came out of the guard shack into the sun. He sat down on a block of wood. He ate out of a plastic container, sopped Genevieve’s yellow gravy with a dinner roll. The sun made long blue tree-trunk shadows, turning the stones at the edge of the highwall gold and orange. The light anyway was beautiful.
I walked away from the four-wheeler.
You walk on and on, thinking you’re going deeper into the woods, deeper into the past, farther away from the bullshit of the world, and then you trip over the cable running from somebody’s satellite dish, and then you see the trailer and hear the creak of the trampoline springs, and then it’s oh well, welcome back. I wished I was warm, by the stove at Mamaw’s, cutting pictures out of magazines, looking at winter through her dripping windows.
I walked the rutted mine road back towards the house. An owl swiveled its head high up in a poplar tree. Its doubloon eyes fixed on me. It flapped to another tree, deeper in the woods. I followed it. The owl moved to a third tree. I went after it, my eye fixed on the owl, and the ground beneath my feet broke in on itself, made a hole narrow and deep.
Once I was in, it felt like the ground closed up over me. It didn’t; I could still see the sky, but the hole was deeper than I was tall. I tried to stand, but my ankle gave out on me, and when I fell I peeled back the skin over my shinbone on a wedge of sandstone. My pants leg bloodied up, and I rolled over on my back at the bottom of the hole.
3: What Hurts
I lay at the bottom of the hole until the stars came out. Orion the hunter shot straight up into the moon. My dad first showed me Orion’s belt. He showed me how once you saw the belt, the rest of him fell into place. He told me he liked the way it looked like the hunter was running and shooting. Like Rambo or something. I got lightheaded and I saw Daddy in a tree stand above me, bow season. Daddy lifted out of the tree stand and began to run across the sky. I hollered but he couldn’t hear me.
The owl settled in a tree above me. I spit out little pieces of leaf.
My father built his own truck, put it together from the parts of other trucks—eight Ford Rangers lined up facing the road—eight Ford Rangers it took for him to get one to ride back and forth to work. Hubert gave people credit if they’d bring him a Ford Ranger, but they had to park them lined up straight the way Daddy liked them or it was no deal.
The owl hooted.
I would go out and sit in one of the Rangers the winter after Daddy died and Momma started grieving out of a Heaven Hill bottle. I thought about them trucks, and the night got colder and my leg hurt worse. I had to keep my wits about me. Of course you know I survive because I’m telling you the story right now. But you don’t know I don’t lose a finger, do you? Maybe I lose my foot. Maybe I lose my foot and grieve over it and become a drunk and then a drug addict like Momma. No. I wouldn’t be like her. Not the same mistake. A different mistake. I lose my foot and get depressed about it and eat and eat and get so enormous, like six hundred pounds, I can’t get out of bed, look like I melted into the sheets. See me, unwrapping a whole box of Little Debbie oatmeal creme pies, all twelve pies, so I can cram them in my mouth all at once to suffocate myself?
“Dawn?”
Momma stood before me, silver like the dull side of aluminum foil. Momma looked young and clean, her face smoothed out by the hunter’s moon. She crouched at the lip of the hole. She wobbled and then steadied herself. She lay her hand on my cheek. Her fingers against my face didn’t feel right.
A flashlight beam lit her from behind.
“Hubert,” Momma said over her shoulder.
Hubert put the light in my face, his voice deep behind the shine. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
Safer by myself than with you, I’d of like to said, but I didn’t say anything.
“Put your hands up,” Hubert said.
Hubert lifted me out of the hole and carried me up the hill. His hair was long and greasy. Stubble filled his cheeks outside his moustache and goatee. His miner’s jacket opened on a wifebeater and smelled of burning plastic and the salve he put on his arthritis. He carried me to the mine road, to a coffee-colored Delta 88 he left in the yard with the keys in it in case somebody needed to move it. Hubert lay me in the backseat. Hubert and Momma got in the front.
“Where’s Mamaw?” I said.
“She went the other way,” Momma said. “Hunting for you.”
Hubert and Momma headed up Blue Fork towards Virginia. They said they were taking me to the hospital there. Then they fell to talking about a man who pawned seven weedeaters for a friend. The weedeaters turned out to be stolen, and now the man who pawned them was facing a charge. They stopped at the man’s house and he came out, three hundred pounds easy, cheeks and forehead full of acne, all red-rimmed craters and white-topped peaks. Wet strings of black hair cut across his face like the lines on a globe. He came to Momma’s window.
“In the back, Cinderella,” she said.
Cinderella got in beside me. He rubbed his raisin eyes with the heels of his hands and breathed like he was snoring even though he was awake. He cried over a lost girl.
“I don’t care,” I said.
“She was everthing to me,” he went on. He began to moan, like you’d hope your mother would at your funeral.
“I don’t see why,” Momma said to Cinderella. “She told everybody you stole that church van. She parked it at your mother’s house.”
“I know,” Cinderella said.
“She still gonna be your ‘everthang,’” Momma mocked Cinderella, “when you go to jail over them weedeaters?”
Cinderella put his face in his hands and sobbed.
“Yes,” he said.
Momma said, “I should have drowned you when I had the chance.”
“When was that?” Hubert said.
“Seventh grade.”
God kept Momma from telling that story. Thank you God. Momma opened a beer and handed it to Cinderella. “Here.”
Cinderella nearly dropped the beer taking it from Momma when Hubert went too sharp through a curve.
“Goddam, Hubert,” Cinderella said. Then he turned to me. “What’s wrong with your leg?”
I didn’t say anything.
“This girl is in shock,” Cinderella said.
“She aint in shock,” Momma said, “She’s my daughter, dumbass.”
“I’m in shock at how retarded you are,” I said.
“Hey,” Cinderella said, “You aint got no call to talk to me like that.”
I said, “Momma, I’ll give you a hundred dollars to put the radio on something good and turn it up loud as it will go.”
“Loud don’t make it good,” Hubert said. “Good you don’t have to turn up loud.”
Hubert had been drinking too much. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have said that. He would have sat there still as a stone and not said anything, all John Wayne about it.
“Give me one of them beers,” I said.
“I aint,” Momma said.
“Give her one,” Hubert said, “might make her nicer.”
“Go to hell, Hubert,” I said.
I hadn’t been around Momma and Hubert for weeks. It made me sick how easy I fell into their way of talking. Momma handed me a beer. I drank half of it in one pull.
“Daggone, Hubert,” Cinderella said, “who is this girl?”
Cinderella looked at me. His mouth smelled like he’d thrown up a bale of hay.
Hubert laughed through his nose at that, and I wanted to break it for him, take that nose and twist it to where the falling rain would drown him.
“Dawn, you need to settle down,” Momma said. “Drink your beer. Take it easy. It’s a holiday.” Momma started to sing. “O come all ye faithful.” There were new gaps between her teeth.
“That’s a Christmas song,” Hubert said.
“No it aint,” Momma said. “It’s a Thanksgiving song.”
; “No it aint,” Hubert said.
“I think she’s right, Hubert,” Cinderella said. “I think she is.” Cinderella nodded at me.
“Hey, Cinderella,” I said. He looked at me out his raisin eyes. I said, “Give me your knife.”
“I aint got a knife,” he said. “What you want a knife for?”
“Cut my throat you’re so retarded.”
“Dawn,” Momma said.
“Then what’s the next line?” Hubert said.
“I don’t know,” Momma said. “Yall got me flustered.”
“Oh come ye, oh come ye,” I sang, and Hubert joined in on “to Bethlehem.”
“See,” Hubert said.
Momma shook her head.
The road wound past brokedown coal camp houses pressed against the blacktop, past the pipes and belts and rows of lights of the processing plant, past wide spots puddled in gray water, places that weren’t anything anymore, weren’t nature, weren’t human, just places left behind. We started up the mountain. A curve snuck up on Hubert while him and Momma were singing some country song, and I got thrown up against Cinderella. The pain in my leg jumped up in my waist, and I hollered out right as I landed against him. He put his arms around me. I put the heel of my hand in his greasy face and shoved.
“Get your hands off me,” I said.
He put his hands up in the air and I went back to my side of the car. Nobody said much the rest of the way to the dinky one-hall hospital across the Virginia line. When we got there, the doctor looked at me standing in the hall and said there wasn’t nothing broke and that I could go on. Momma said she was worried about how I was hurting, and couldn’t he give us something. The doctor sized Momma up and sent us on home.