by Robert Gipe
June said, “How does that make you feel when people talk good about you and Cora slowing down the coal companies?”
“Because you’re scared?” June said.
“No, not because I’m scared,” I said. “It makes me want to run so I can think about it. Hear my thoughts.”
June let the sound of the river come back. She raised up off my shoulder. “Do you need me to leave you alone?”
“You’re all right,” I said. And she was. I didn’t mind her being there. Except I didn’t want her to be cold.
“So have you figured it out?” June said.
“What I think about Blue Bear?”
“Unh-hunh,” June said.
I slipped my arm out of my coat sleeve and pulled June inside my coat. “I figure it don’t make much difference. Half of everything electric comes from coal. Half them Christmas lights on that barn yonder, half the juice for the lights in the offices of all the hippie enviro fighters, half of all of it. One mountain saved don’t mean much. They can give us one just to shut us up, so we can think we done something. But they can’t let us think we can get one whenever we want, or we’re liable to think we can have all of them.” I pulled June tight. “Seems to me it’s taking too much energy in the asking. I can see it wearing down Mamaw.”
“Can you?” June said.
“I can. There aint enough on our side. Aint enough people to fight all the time. So as long as it’s a big fight, Mamaw and her kind will have to pick their spots, and them people over there at that party—they’ll treat Mamaw and them like heroes—which they are—but they aint won.”
I stopped talking, and the black river kept on and on. The hooping and hollering at the barn kept on and the laughing at the fire down the bank—it kept on too.
“Sounds like you’ve found somewhere to think,” June said.
“I’ll tell you another thing,” I said. “It makes sense that yall at this party would need your get-togethers like this, away from things, where everybody has the same bumper stickers. But I wonder—what would happen if yall won? I’m not sure they could handle it.”
June laughed. “Always be something to be stirred up about, I guess.”
One more time we let the water music play through our heads, and then I said, “Aunt June, I believe I’m going to have to go back.”
“To Kingsport?” she said.
“To Kentucky,” I said.
“Well,” June said, “OK.”
I jumped down off the tree trunk and wiped my wet rear end. I helped June down.
“How does fifteen act?” I said. “Older than me or younger?”
“Kind of both,” June said.
“Probably why I don’t know if I’m coming or going.”
I crossed the meadow and found Decent Ferguson in the punch-bowl-and-beer-keg area, talking and poking a grinning young boy in the chest. I said, “Decent, where you spending the night?”
She said, “I don’t know. Where do you want to spend the night?”
I said, “I’d like to spend it at my mamaw Cora’s house.”
“Well, baby doll,” Decent said, “that is right on my way. When do you want to leave?”
“Don’t matter,” I said.
“Give me twenty minutes,” Decent said, “to get this Tennessee trash here lined out, and we’ll go.”
I nodded and turned away. The night air and the peach stuff Decent gave me to drink softened my opinion about the dancing, which had only gotten to be more of what it was earlier. When a guy asked me to dance, I let myself be pulled onto the floor. I couldn’t hardly hear what he was saying, but his name was Bill and he was also from Kentucky and he had heard of me. When the song was over he said, “I heard you were younger than you look.”
“I’m fifteen,” I said.
He said his family had a newspaper and I should tell my grandmother he would like to talk to her sometime, and I said, “Why don’t you want to talk to me?”
He laughed and said, “They don’t raise em scared in Canard County, do they?”
“That’s right, youngblood,” Bill said. “Give em hell.” Then he said he’d be glad to talk with me and my grandmother both, whenever it suited us. He slipped back into the crowd as Decent said in my ear, “You ready to go?”
The hippies swirled and shimmied, lost their balance and hugged together in a big gob, and I told Decent Ferguson I was ready to go.
***
June’s kiss goodbye was still wet on my cheek when Decent’s Bronco started tear-assing out of that hole. I prayed there weren’t any more hippie angels on that hill, cause Decent sure would have knocked them flying.
“Did you have a good time with my hairball friends?” Decent said, whipping the Bronco wheel back to the left as we come sailing over the rise down to the gate.
“I reckon,” I said. “It aint gonna be the last fun I ever have, is it?”
“You’re fine,” Decent said. “I been down here a hundred times.”
The gate boy flew into action soon as he saw Decent, his eyes big as a slaughterhouse cow’s, and we passed him a millisecond after the gate gapped wide enough for us to pass. I turned to see him wiping his brow as he got back in his stickered-up Subaru.
“Did you see him pulling his britches up?” Decent said. “He had his little woman in the back of his vehicle. Getting him some.” Decent accelerated into a sort of straightaway. I couldn’t believe there weren’t any cops, but we never saw the first one, and before I knew it we were almost to Pennington Gap.
Decent got into her music and spent most of the trip singing in a voice that was good-hearted and strong, but not easy to listen to, which was just as well, cause I needed to think, and when I did, I realized there were more things I should have said to June in our talk beside the river. Things like this:
Blue Bear wasn’t just about winning a fight. Everything I could see from Mamaw’s porch, every place I had run through on a four-wheeler, every birdsong and spring flower, every ferny frond that come up beside a yellow muddy trail—all that kept me alive sure as if it was air I was breathing. The trees and the roll of the earth held me up like the ridge holds the cloud from passing so it can pour down rain. The vines and the rabbits and the squirrels and the orange lizards out on the rocks after a storm—all those things I’d forget when people dragged me down—I needed them close and always, where I could get to them quick when Albert was crazy on some new dope, when Momma was out of her head, when Mamaw pulled back into her groundhog hole of nothing for me, when Hubert made me want to blow his head clean off—there was only the mountains could talk sense to me. Winter, summer, spring, and fall. Didn’t matter I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was like if my best true friend were from Africa or Russia or something, and they didn’t speak English, but they had a look in their eye or a sound in their voice made me calm down, made me look up, look out, instead of just letting my eyes go burning blank with panic and mad at the world.
When this reason for fighting came into my mind that night riding home with Decent Ferguson, the faces of my cousin Denny and his daddy rose up before me. Those coal miners who had been so good to me, who had loved me through my tree-hugging ways, needed mountains and woods more than any of us. They loved it here, and they had to tear it up to stay. The full hard hardness of their lot came down on me that winter night, and I knew maybe not them but other coal-mining people would be mad at me, would hate me, but after that night, I never was mad at them, not the ones who lived here with me, not the ones taking their own sorrow and joy from what was left of these trees, these rocks, these rustling waters.
12: Mudhole
The wind sent garbage cans sailing down Long Ridge, and iron clanged against iron back towards the highway. Tree limbs clacked in the air. Mamaw wasn’t breathing. I screamed into her face: “Please, Mamaw. Tell me.” Last thing she said was: “Girl, you ought not to be scared of nothing like that.”
“Like what?” I hollered. “Please. Tell me what.” My spit
spattered her face. I shook her by her shoulders, and her chin bumped against her breastbone.
I held her up by her hair, and her eyes rolled back in her head. I heaved her up over my shoulder and backed out the kitchen door. The wind threw the storm door against the base of her skull. I put my hand over the crown of her head, too late for the storm door, too late for her coming bump bump bump down the stairs as I came in from June’s hippie Christmas party. I don’t know what she was doing upstairs. Probably snooping after Momma.
“Hold on, Mamaw,” I said. “Hold onto me.” I got her out to the Escort and set her on the backseat. I wished I’d put her up front with me, where I could shake her and try and keep her awake.
What I hated most about living on Long Ridge was Daddy’s people out everwhere—but where were they that night? You’d of thought with a howling snowstorm coming, a person could find them, but it didn’t work out that way. Just as well. I could hear my uncles’ stupid women in my head—“I wouldn’t have carpet on my steps” and “She don’t need to be living there by herself.” I hated my uncles’ women—acting all smart when they put Dr. Pepper in their babies’ bottles and couldn’t make change for a dollar if you put a thirty-aught-six to their heads. But I needed somebody. “Daddy,” I said, like I do sometimes when I’m pulled out thin.
“Fooooooo,” I said, started the car and rolled down the hill, turned right toward the highway, but soon as I turned, I slammed the brakes, skidded in the gravel, Mamaw going thump against the back of the front seat. A vehicle turned sideways blocked the road, white door smashed, trim down the side hanging loose and rusty. Chains and men’s voices rattled across the pavement.
“Mamaw,” I said. “Mamaw, Mamaw, Mamaw.” She had fallen into the space between front and back seats. I put the car in park, reached over the top of the seat to try and pull her up. I climbed into the back, crying, breath lost, squealing like a train wheel. Panic poured down over top of me like coal into a gon. My knees pressed into the backseat and I got up under Mamaw’s armpits—like when Hubert pulled dead Keith out of his truck. “Mamaw, please,” I said, and when I give her one more big jerk, “Unnnnh,” she went, sucking air. Her eyes rolled back down, all glazed like Chinese food by the car door lights, and I could hear her breathing light as feathers, and I knew she was losing stuff out of her mind every second. I set her against the door and climbed back up front, got the car turned back to the left, went the longer way off the ridge, into the no-light-at-all fire-scarred woods, road wrapping back on itself like a snake Mamaw’d chopped in half with a hoe, trail of blood, twisting forwards and backwards all at once, trying to escape the fall of the blade.
“Breathe, Mamaw, breathe.” Curves come quick, and I couldn’t look back at her. Do and I’m off the road, gone over the edge into some homemade dump, tangled up in busted garbage bags, soggy mattresses, God knows what. “Pay attention pay attention pay attention,” I said.
I come blind around a curve and felt mud against the doors, against the bottom of the car, grinding against the metal beneath my feet, and then sizzling around the Escort’s spinning wheels. The Mudhole. The Mudhole took the whole left-hand side of the road for sixty yards on the crest of the mountain. The Mudhole was deep enough to baptize in. Nobody could figure out why it never dried up, but it never did. I was mired in it up to my hubs.
The car tipped, the driver side headlight submerged in the mud. I slid up and out the passenger side. The other headlight shone in the faces of two men and a woman walking towards us. I didn’t know them, but I knew who they were. They were Keith Kelly’s kinfolks. Come all the way from Drop Creek with their fists balled up around the end of four-foot roof bolts.
“We know you killed Keith,” the woman out front said. “You and that dry heave Hubert.”
I rubbed my eyes. The chickens had come home to roost. I could feel their talons clinching down on my eyeballs. Mamaw was laid out on her face across the backseat. If I’d had a gun I would have shot all them Kellys right on the spot. I swear I would have. “I aint got time for this,” I said. “My grandmother aint breathing.”
“Neither is Keith, you cocked-up little witch.”
My first thought was to grab the woman by the throat and drown her in the Mudhole. She was big, but she was soft—blonde and thick. My second thought was to drown myself—just fall down and start swallowing Mudhole water, start swallowing and trust one of these Kellys to hold my head down and make sure I died. The men fell in line behind the woman. Their hands hung at their sides, roof bolts dragging in the gravel. The men’s lips were parted, and the wind blew their hair, which was long and clung together in syrupy ribbons. They did not look at all like Keith Kelly, prettier face-down dead on the Drop Creek road than these two were with their blood all up and vengeful.
“It wasn’t enough, was it?” the woman said. “It wasn’t enough that you and your busybody kin was gonna cost him his job, get his mine shut down. Wasn’t enough that your skanky mother come sniffing around. You and your crook uncle had to run him off the road and kill him on top of all that. You couldn’t be satisfied. And why? What had he ever done to you? I tell you what he done. He hadn’t done nothing.”
“My grandmother is going to die,” I said. I didn’t say it to the blonde woman. I said it to the ground. But I said this to the blonde woman: “She didn’t kill your brother. She is a good person.”
“Like hell she is,” the woman said. “We know your crook uncle fixed it with the law. So we come on our own.”
“We like to never find you,” one of the men said.
“Shut up, Arthur,” the woman said.
I started to pant like a dog hemmed up in a room too warm and close during a thunderstorm. The men moved towards me. The first one got within arm’s length, and I busted him right in the face. His nose flattened out,
He went staggering back, kind of whining, like a baby. The other one grabbed me before I could do anything else and pinned my arms back. I stomped one of his feet. He clamped down on me with one hand and raised up that roof bolt with the other and was fixing to club me with it when another hand flew out of the darkness and stayed the Kelly man’s hand. The Kelly man turned to see what stopped him busting my head, and when he did another man come out of the shadows and wrapped him up. The two other men had stripe work clothes and hats with patches on the front said the name of the coal company mining on Blue Bear.
“You need to settle down there, big boy,” the one who grabbed him first said. “Didn’t nobody come out here tonight to kill nobody, did they, Blondie?”
The man I punched turned to look at the thick blonde woman, Keith’s sister Blondie Kelly, to see what kind of fight she was wanting to put up. The wind come up the gap colder, and run over top of the mountain. Blondie said, “Johnny Ray, what you come up here for? What’d you set that truck in the road for?”
The man she called Johnny Ray had a big red moustache, no beard, and a stone rose face, but with eyes warm and blue as a pilot light, like my father’s. He turned to me in the light of the Escort. “We come up here to talk to your grandmother, Dawn, about what she’s costing us. We didn’t care to scare her, but . . .” A truck come up behind me, and then past me, slowing for Johnny Ray to take a set of chains out of the back, and Johnny Ray hooked the chain to the truck and then to the Escort’s frame, then the truck moved forward and the Kelly men and then Blondie Kelly had to back out of its way. When the Escort got closer to the edge of the Mudhole, fanning through that fudgy water, Johnny Ray sloshed out into it, opened the back door against the water’s weight, and said, “I’m going to pull you out now, Cora.” And then my grandmother was floating in Johnny Ray’s arms.
I didn’t know Johnny Ray, but I remembered him from the hearing. His wife yelled at Mamaw in front of the state people who had come to hear what people thought about whether or not the state should protect Blue Bear Mountain from strip mining. Johnny Ray’s wife had cussed Mamaw, said Mamaw was taking the food off her children’s plate, said her man h
ad never not worked a day in his life, said who did Mamaw think she was, said she said she was from here, but was she, really? I remember the people clapping and Mamaw just standing there in the dim blue-gray community center fluorescents.
“We’ll get her to the hospital, Dawn,” Johnny Ray said. “We won’t let her die.”
I watched Johnny Ray take my grandmother to the truck’s red lights, then the darkness, then the door, and I moved towards the truck and unhooked the tow chain from it, patted the tailgate, and the brake lights blinked twice, and the truck pulled away, blue smoke piling out, and the exhaust giving a hollow rattle. The truck skirted the Mudhole, picking up speed, and then was gone around the curve, leaving me holding a chain caught beneath the burning headlights of a banged-up Ford Escort, and the glare of a thick blonde woman.
Blondie Kelly said,
I said, “Fight, I reckon.”
“Well, come on,” she said.
“Why you so sure you can’t trust the law to fix us?” I said.
“Don’t know a thing about the law,” Blondie Kelly said. “All I know is Keith is dead and you and Hubert hated him and you and Hubert was right there when he died, right there on that road he drove every day for the last ten years.”
“How do you know it wasn’t him trying to kill us?” I said.
“Keith wasn’t going to kill anybody,” Blondie said.
“He sure was doing some weird shit,” I said.
“He had been acting kind of loco,” one of the guys said.
“Hush,” Blondie Kelly said.
I walked up close to Blondie Kelly, close enough for her to hit me if she wanted. Up close, all I could see was her hurt. Her eyes were the eyes of a mouse stuck on a glue trap.
“We didn’t want to kill your brother, Blondie. It was an accident.”
Blondie Kelly looked at me for a long time, I think to see if I was going to change the way I was acting. I don’t believe she thought I could stand there and act like a normal person who didn’t mean her harm. Finally she said, “The only thing makes sense is you and Hubert got it in for us.”