He cut up through the forest and headed up the mountainside in the direction of where the mining site would be. It would be a long walk. He would have to go all the way around, bypassing the Heritage gates, and head up the backside of the mountain. He was not in good shape and the cigarettes did not help. He stopped often to catch his breath. Sweat clung to his back, but he did not take off the scarf. He wished he’d brought water. His granddaddy used to walk the mountains and hills like a mountain goat; he would not have tired out like this, not even in his old age.
The forest was threaded with cracks and slips, water pouring out from gashes. Other places were bone-dry. What used to be Little Blue Stream was buried. Everything around here had been named. Dove Creek and all of its offshoots, dozens of fishing holes and hollows and knobs and hills. Sugar Holler, Big Lick, Bony Knob, Red Bird Hill, Garden Hole. All of these names that were a part of him like the scripture itself and now all of it disappearing. He climbed over caves of brush and piles of rocks, the places where snakes liked to hide. His granddaddy used to come up here in the summer to hunt them. Cole did not go with him then, too scared. But now he was not afraid. There were worse things to fear. Last night’s swirling ambulance lights. Lifting Arie Webb out of the sludge. He did not want to see, but he kept walking.
He came to a sign that said “No Trespassing, Property of Heritage Energy” and went around it. He had been in these woods a thousand times. He used to come here to kneel in the forest with his hands pressed to the dirt. He used to walk with his granddaddy; he used to walk with Terry Rose. He used to dig for ginseng. He knew the plants and trees and birds. But in the last few years, he’d stopped. Too busy, he’d told himself. But that was not it, it was something else. He was afraid that he’d no longer belonged to this place, no longer deserved it. Now he tried to remember what it used to look like. Light shining through the tops of trees; green moss on stumps; blooming foxglove and little pink azaleas, like teardrops.
It was not the same woods anymore. Not the place where he’d gone ’senging with his grandfather, where he’d camped with Terry Rose. The mudslides, broken trees, all of it confused him, and after a while he wasn’t sure where he was. The machine noises grew louder, beeping, shoveling, whining. He thought of Blue, lying down in front of a dozer.
He stopped by an old sycamore and put his hands on its mottled bark. Saplings stood around his waist and ankles, and the mother trees grew around them, gleaming with new leaves. It was spring; everything returned in the spring. His grandfather had believed in the power of the wilderness. The wilderness called to the old prophets. John the Baptist and Moses and Elijah and Jacob and even Jesus himself. His granddaddy, in times of sorrow or pain, would come up to these woods. He’d pray and fast, and give himself over. He was a believer. He was a good man, but he was not God, he was no angel.
Now he knew where he was. He was getting close to the ridgetop, and if he went up to that dip between the sweetgum and the yellow birch, he would come to the small clearing where he used to watch the sun rise. He had watched it with his granddaddy, who took him up here and told him he’d better listen hard because God had a soft voice. And he watched it with Terry Rose. They camped here and woke up together and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee and watched the sun rise, leaning against each other, quiet, so quiet that Cole thought that maybe that was as close to God as he ever got. Now he went forward, clambering up the slope, leaves and twigs sliding under his feet.
He stopped.
He stopped because the mountain stopped.
The world stopped.
“Jesus,” he said, dizzy, faint.
He held on to the limb of the sweetgum and looked out onto the mining site. It was all below him, around him. He’d read the statistics and seen pictures and caught glimpses of the sites from the road, but never had imagined how immense. And he was seeing only a part of it. The land simply dropped off a few hundred feet, and below and across from him, all over, was the mining site, which looked like something from outer space, like an asteroid had hit here, or some kind of government testing site. The raging blood raced up to his head, and he felt like he was going to be sick. What had been forest and mountain was no longer here. Just gray rock and scars, bulldozed earth, and glistening seams of coal. The site was so big that the gigantic bulldozers and the 240-ton dump trucks looked like toys. They moved like bloated insects across the site, over the roads they’d carved out and around the blasting holes, the noise of them drowning out birdsong or any other natural noise. On a remaining hillside, newly felled trees lay like bodies, thousands of them. His granddaddy had taken him to the mountaintop and said God is all things good. Cole wrapped his arms around his chest. He thought of Terry Rose, crumpled in the parking lot of a run-down beer joint, dying in a pool of his own blood. The dead hung up in the trees. Buried in sludge. The bodies laid out on the hillside and all those who cried over them.
He looked at everything so that he would not forget. All of this was up here behind him, and he’d never looked. Too scared, too stubborn. No wonder he could not sleep. His granddaddy always said that bad sleep indicated a guilty conscience. He’d been down there, just a mile down there, counting his money and selling pills and stealing and screwing and making promises, and all the time this was right here, looming over them. Where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. He was at the gates of hell. He tried to recall the original contour of the land but could not remember. He closed his eyes and tried hard to see it, but nothing. This was his granddaddy’s granddaddy’s land, and in a few months, what he now stood upon would be gone.
He opened his eyes. The leaves on the trees around him were coated with ash from the blasting below. He looked out again at the missing mountain and felt dizzy. He slowly got down on the ground. It was too much, the feelings inside him. He lay down on his stomach and pressed his hands into the cool dirt. He’d never felt so alone or small. Dirt on his hands. Blood pumping through him. He tried to think of Bible verses, but there were none. But he heard the words of his grandfather: I had to lose everything, I had to forget all of it.
He did not know how a person was born again, how there could be more than one beginning, how a person could walk away from the past. The old people, with all of their stories and memories, they never forgot. What connected the land and the mountains and the living and the dead he did not know. But he lay there in the brokenness and began to say the names of the old people. He said all of their names. He said the names of those in his family. He said the names of those who had held him. He said the names of the dead. He said the names of places. Every creek and mountain and hilltop and family cemetery. He said the names of trees and flowers and creatures. He spoke clearly, talking into the dirt. He named everything; the words came easily.
The machines down below rumbled and groaned, but he listened beyond that noise. He heard a rustling and thought it was the wings of some bird. He rolled over on his back and put his hands on his chest and looked at the star-shaped leaves of the sweetgum and heard his heart pumping blood. His grandfather used to say that God was laying on his heart. From far away he heard the clear high notes of a wood thrush melting away into sadness. He looked up through the last of the treetops and saw a jagged piece of blue sky, it was blue and it was good. And he began to weep, he wept for a long time, wept until he felt too big for his own body. Not heavy but big. Filled. Feeling the ground under him, feeling his own muscle and bone and skin. All around him the wilderness sang, the old people sang and God sang. The memory of the place was deep inside of him. He did not need to look again. He stood up and walked back the way that he had come. Dirt clung to him. He left it on him and got in his truck and rolled down the window, squinting at the bright sun. As he drove down the mountain, the scarf that those old bony woman hands had knitted for him blew wildly in the wind, straggly pieces of yarn dancing like pearls of light around his face.
Acknowledgments
I’m indebted to many people for helping me get here. Thanks t
o everyone who made this book possible.
First, a heartfelt thank-you to those friends who encouraged me to write and stuck by me in countless ways, big and small, including: Jenny Abramson, Allison Amend, James Cañón, Sara Greenslit, Michelle Hailey, Paul “Prof” Hendrickson, Rebecca Layton, Elizabeth May, Daisy Rhau, Emily Wallace, and Stephen Wiseman (for driving me around the mountains and hollers, and so much more). I’m grateful to all my friends and family in New York and North Carolina (you know who you are), with a special thanks to my folk crew in Carrboro. Thank you to Yukiko Yamagata, who believed before I did. To my family and parents, with much gratitude to my mother who instilled in me a love of reading. And thank you to José Miguel Cruz, who teaches me about grace and forgiveness everyday, and whose steadfast love and support make me a better person.
Much thanks to my careful readers who saw earlier drafts or chapters: Gregory Brooker, Rosanna Bruno, Michelle Hoover, Emily Jack, and especially Urban Waite. Thank you to Lora Smith, for helping me with crucial details about mining and religion. To J. Pasila for the maps and photographs. Thank you to Terry Lee and DoubleTake/Points of Entry. To Matt Bialer for your enthusiasm and unwavering support. An immense thank you to Susan and Jim Lapis, for graciously letting me use their beautiful cabin, where a good portion of this book was written. To my teachers who saw something in my earliest writing and told me to keep going: William J. Cobb, Charlotte Holmes, Alyce Miller, and my first creative writing teacher, Eve Shelnutt. To Sewanee Writers’ Conference, especially Randall Kenan, John Casey, and my peers in the workshop—you were the first readers. Thank you to Bread Loaf, and to my brilliant teacher Stacey D’Erasmo and the awesome wait staff.
Immense gratitude to the people of West Virginia, who fight the onslaught of mountaintop removal on a daily basis in order to save their homes and communities. A special thank you to those who shared their personal stories with me and taught me something about courage: Larry Gibson, Maria Gunnoe, Ed Wiley, and especially Bo Webb, who drove me around the mountains, offered me beer and a place to stay, and always had knowledge and a story to share. And in memory of the brave and inspiring Judy Bonds, whose fight for the mountains lit the way and opened so many eyes. Although this book is very much a work of fiction, a variety of films, articles, and books helped me along the way. Those that helped considerably include Everything in Its Path by Kai T. Erikson, a vivid picture of the 1972 Buffalo Creek Disaster; the Foxfire series edited by Paul F. Gillespie and Eliot Wigginton; Lost Mountain by Erik Reece, for powerfully detailing the effects of mountaintop removal; Our Appalachia edited by Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg; The Serpent Handlers by Fred W. Brown and Jeanne McDonald; and Serpent-Handling Believers by Thomas G. Burton. Thanks to the amazing films and radio programs at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, with special recognition to filmmaker Robert Salyer.
For giving me space and uninterrupted time to work on this novel, thank you to Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Fundación Valparaíso, the MacDowell Colony, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Thanks also to the residencies that showed support in the early days: Jentel Artist Residency Program, which inspired me to quit my full-time office job and never look back; the New York Mills Regional Cultural Arts Center; the Hall Farm Center for Arts and Education; and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.
Thank you to my editor Anton Mueller, champion of this book, for all of his insights and support, and to everyone at Bloomsbury, for their generous efforts in taking such good care of The Evening Hour. And, finally, my deepest gratitude to my agent, PJ Mark, whose suggestions, guidance, and faith made this a better book. Thank you for sticking by me and for caring.
In loving memory of my grandparents.
A Note on the Author
Carter Sickels, a graduate of the M.F.A. program at Pennsylvania State University, was awarded scholarships and residencies to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, the Djerassi Residency, and Fundación Valparaíso. After spending nearly a decade in New York, Carter left the city to earn a master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is now living in the Pacific Northwest.
Copyright © 2012 by Carter Sickels
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Electronic edition published in January 2012
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sickels, Carter.
The evening hour : a novel / Carter Sickels.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-60819-598-5
1. Mountain people—West Virginia—Fiction. 2. Working poor—Fiction. 3. Mountain life—Fiction. 4. Mountaintop removal mining—Fiction. 5. Choice (Psychology)—Fiction. 6. Appalachian Region—Fiction. 7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.I27E94 2011
813'.6—dc22
2010053034
The Evening Hour Page 30