by Ann Pancake
The Ohio boy took to coming out of his room more often. His dust washed away (dust from where exactly?), him passing me, and I found myself watching him, just a little and despite myself. Even if some of them were union, didn’t matter, “a scab for your new millennium,” Jimmy would say. Scab. A thing that makes you want to pick.
One of those afternoons, the Ohio boy told me his name was R.L. He didn’t bother to ask mine. Just tossed the name over his shoulder as he climbed the stairs to his room.
I’d taken to walking up the road behind the house when I got home in the evenings. Up to the new gate with a brand-new lock. After I got done with the supper dishes would be my first free time since I’d woke up, and I’d walk in the cool coming on, the hollow narrow there, long early twilight, and I’d stop at the gate. I’d stand there without touching it. The bugs starting to chant. I’d stay there for a while, staring past it towards the head of Yellowroot Hollow. Then I’d turn around and walk back home.
Those nights when I couldn’t help it, when I had to listen, I’d find Lace in the living room with just the one lamp lit. She’d have her shoes already off. She’d be drawn up on the couch with her knees bent, her back against an armrest, and she’d have a window open. Blowing cigarette smoke out the screen. Straining her neck a little, and when I’d walk in, she’d push out the smoke, a sucking sob, and “Hi, honey” was what she’d say.
I wouldn’t say much back. I wouldn’t sit. I’d lie on my back in the middle of the floor, far from her cigarette glow. She’d be running her little radio low, that hillbilly music, twangy and urgent. Carried high in the head. I’d spread my arms and legs to catch any air that might be moving down there, and when Lace started talking, I couldn’t help it. My stomach would draw up under my heart. She’d start with the easy things, funny stories, what happened at work, or people who’d got on her nerves, or who all’d come in that night, stuff I didn’t have time to hear. Then, after not too long, she’d start complaining about Jimmy Make. That was worst of all, me lying there, needing to hear what mattered, but scared to hear, desperate for her to get to it and over with, and she’d have to run through her Jimmy routine. Because, yeah, Jimmy Make irritated and disappointed and confused me, too, but still, once in a while, I’d go on and say it, I’d say, “Mom, that’s just how he is.” Wanting to add, “You’re the one married him, how could you not see how he is?”
Then the hillbilly music would turn Jesusy, although it stayed twangy, it stayed high in the head. And the talk of Jimmy Make, his lack of spine, would finally carry Lace to what I needed to know. The Dairy Queen was one of the few places in town where people could gather anymore, and while Lace was working, she was told an awful lot, and on top of that, she eavesdropped, she overheard. Lace’s brain worked fast (“My wife’s smarter’n me, I’m not ashamed to admit it,” Jimmy Make would snicker. “Smart enough to marry me, wasn’t she?”), and wound taut like it was with so little to catch on, sometimes it would skip cog teeth and spin, crazy and quick.
She’d tell me where the newest permits were going—“Lyon’s put in for another one there on the far side of Carney, so the water’ll be coming down on Burginville next”—and she’d tell me who was getting laid off and where. She’d been telling me this stuff for a year, but now I had to listen. She’d tell me about the latest blackwater, the latest fish kills—“Maureen said up there at Rock Branch she can’t even walk into her back bedroom, stink’s so bad”—tell me who was selling out now. At first, I’d roll towards her as she told me, I’d raise up a little so I could see her, while she told of overloaded coal truck wrecks—“they couldn’t even tell them three kids apart, mangled up bad as they were”—fly rock crashing into people’s houses, chemical leaks in sediment ponds. Drownings in flash floods, people breathing cancer-causing dust. But it was still hard to believe her, even if I had to listen, how hard it was to believe things could get that bad. The government or the companies or God or whoever was in charge, it seemed to me they just wouldn’t let it get like that. Seemed to me like they couldn’t.
Then she’d go too far. Even though I’d come out to the living room all on my own, even though I had to hear—there’d come a point where I couldn’t take no more, where I’d suddenly think: I’m just a kid. I’d look at her ranting from the couch over top of me, and then I’d slide far away from her, without really moving at all. There she’d be, across a wide river from me, waving a cigarette and ranting away, and I’d think, Why do you tell me everything? This is not how moms do on TV, not how my friends’ moms do, not even what you do with the boys. Go on. Keep away that flame. “And Nathan Brill said he’s heard too Deer Lick was piping slurry up above Yellowroot.” And there it’d be. Because no matter what else she told, she always got back to piping slurry up on Yellowroot. The rumor she’d been hearing that the coal processing plant at Deer Lick had filled the old impoundments where it stored its liquid waste and was now pumping slurry into a new impoundment behind the Yellowroot valley fill.
Then even the Jesus music would sign off, the station would go static until the obits at five AM, and Lace would drag off to her and Jimmy’s bed and sleep. But I would not. Burrowed back in my little room, I’d breathe through the sheet to strain out the gas, but then I’d feel about to smother. All summer, that double pressure. Something about to give, to bust. Flood or flame.
When they’d first get started, they’d fight in code. No privacy in that house, so while they were still to themselves, they’d fight on the slant, until they got to where they didn’t care, and then they’d fight wide open. Lace would be too tired to fight when she got home at night and Jimmy Make’d be in bed, so mostly they’d fight in the late mornings and early afternoons. Baron, the little dog, he loved it when they fought. It got his little dander up and set him into a prance. Dane would be at Mrs. Taylor’s, that was good. It upset him most, even though he said nothing. Corey, of course, took Jimmy Make’s side, such as he could, Jimmy Make not wanting any help, and Tommy trying to interrupt with stupid questions, like why’s cheese yellow when milk’s white? And the fight going—
If you’re so goddamned certain that fill’s coming down, then why the hell don’t you let us leave out of here?
Because a coal company’s not going to run me out of my house and off my land. If you had any spine, you’d fight em with me.
It ain’t a matter of spine, it’s a matter of common sense. I’ve worked for em. I know you can’t fight em.You won’t never win.
At least I’ll die trying.
Yeah, you and the kids, too, not to mention me.
Thought you believed we wouldn’t ever get washed out?
I’m talking about starving to death. I’m talking about how there ain’t no work around here and you know it.
Oh, you could get a job around here.You’re just too good for em.
Well, I will starve to death before I make pizzas. Not when there’s jobs going begging in North Carolina.
You’re just like the rest of em. Too chickenshit to fight anything but their wives.
And what the hell are you doing to fight? Making phone calls nobody answers? Running your mouth down at the Dairy Queen?Why don’t you go on up there and lie down in front of one of them dozers, you’re so keen?
Then it would unravel into name-calling—lazy, crazy, chickenshit, dumb—and then it would drill back into the past, old bad things jerked from the closets of their minds, and occasionally it would bank down, you’d think they were finished. Yet about the time you let out your breath, here it would flare back up, house-fire high. But the bottom line never changed: Lace wanted to stay, even though she was convinced we’d be washed out. Jimmy Make wanted to leave, even though he didn’t think it would ever get as bad as Lace thought.
Of course, we’d left before. Four years ago, when Jimmy Make got laid off at Witcher Run, we went to North Carolina, left Grandma behind. We lasted almost two years, and by the time we came back, the company had reopened Witcher Run under a different name and
made sure not to rehire any former union men. And Grandma was gone.
Lace
I TOLD Jimmy Make two weeks after I saw the doctor, us parked again in my dad’s car under a shutdown coal silo about six miles from Jimmy’s house. February, just above freezing, and a rain coming down with a hardness to it, crackling a little when it hit the windshield and roof. I’d thought it’d be Mom who’d be hardest to tell, but now I sat with a balloon in my chest, and every time I started to say, the balloon’d press up and shut my throat down. We’d been there long enough for the car to get cold, I was sitting on top of my hands, and I glanced sideways at Jimmy Make, but he was just sipping, content, from his can. By this time, we should have been all over each other, surely Jimmy Make must sense something was wrong, and why wouldn’t he say something, help me out? I swallowed, hard, opened my mouth. Swallowed again. And, at last, Jimmy Make asked me why I wasn’t drinking the beer I’d bought him. Apparently the waste of beer was most on his mind.
I said it looking straight into the dark hillside out the window.There was no way I could have said it while looking at him. After I did, he asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did the store-bought test. Then I went to the doctor, too.”
Then I did turn towards him, just the corner of my right eye, because I had to know what he thought. He’d put his beer can between his legs and was staring at it. Rubbing his thumb around its rim.
“Does this—,” he started. He stopped and rubbed another circle around the can. “Does it mean you want to marry me?”
“No,” I said, and then I looked out the side window away from him, into the icy rain, and I wondered how bad the roads would be getting home. I remember plain thinking no more than relief that at last he knew, and wanting to get away from him and home.
He nodded. Picked up his can and swallowed the rest. When I dropped him off at his house, he kissed me good-bye, but I didn’t meet his tongue. Not until the next day, replaying it all in my head, did I notice how the “are you sure” hadn’t been followed by “it’s mine.” I’d had enough pregnant friends to know how often that got asked. Then I realized Jimmy Make hadn’t asked it because he wasn’t unsimple enough even to wonder. And then I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I was the first Ricker, the first See, to go to college, and now I disappointed my family three ways: first, by getting pregnant; second, by dropping out; and third, by refusing to marry Jimmy Make. It was the third one hurt them the most because that one they understood least. But I could not marry Jimmy Make. The marriage would fall too short too soon of the life I’d always seen for myself. It was just as simple as that. The baby I had no choice about—you don’t around here, especially not back then—but the marriage, that I could decide. Since I couldn’t get rid of the baby, the only other choice it seemed I could make was get rid of myself.
I thought about that second choice for nearly two months. Late February, all of March, into April, rain and darkness and everything used-up looking. I burrowed back into my room, turned off the lights, and pulled my knees to my chest.
It’s funny, how I remember that time and don’t. A forgetting with vivid holes. I remember in bright spots, everything else dim or gone. The little knobs on my bedspread fielding out eye-level. The cracks and stains on the ceiling and walls, pools of blood, I’d see them, ghosts, animals deformed. Hurling my radio against the wall because it would bring in nothing but country except at night, and how I didn’t know it when my birthday came, and Mom left an untouched piece of cake on my dresser for four solid days. I remember being doubled over on the linoleum at the foot of the commode, if only I could throw it up, I didn’t think of it as a baby inside, but as a deadly illness I had to cure. And I remember Daddy’s breathing in the living room when both Mom and Sheila left and we were alone.The doctor’d finally put him on oxygen, tubes through his nose, and now every rasp breath came a shick. Shick. Shick. A spider in his web, I couldn’t help but hear him, trapping one breath. One breath. One breath more.
I learned what it is to grieve your life lost while you’re still living, and I learned that there are few losses harsher than that. It was grief beyond anything I’d imagined. I can still feel sometimes that dry raw socket. The slash, then the body-burning pain. For so many years, I’d only seen myself at all, I realized then, because I could see myself as different, as more than ordinary. The sweet peach-pink. But now I saw that was a make-believe choice I’d only pretended I’d had.
Daddy got over his disappointment pretty fast, why cry? milk’s spilled. Mom reacted exactly like I knew she would. Because when you did something really bad, Mom never did get angry at you, that would have been too easy, would have given you too much credit, too much respect. Instead, she’d let you know, without saying much of anything, that you’d disappointed her so deep you didn’t even deserve her anger. Weren’t even worth the energy of that. Mom kept me fed, tried to keep me clean, made me get out of bed and on top of it even if she couldn’t force me out of the room, all the while throwing off that disgusted disappointment. And I knew it was supposed to make me want to prove myself back into her favor, but all I felt, once I got to the point where I could feel anything at all, was fuck your disappointment. Fuck it.
Once in a while during those dark months, Jimmy Make would call. Sometimes I’d talk to him, sometimes I’d say I was too sick. Once I knew about the baby for sure, the Jimmy Make spell had cracked wide open and blown far away. Jimmy Make was a stranger to me again. When I did talk to him, he had even less to say than he’d had before. “How are you feelin?” was about as far as he could get. And at times, I’d feel a blunted anger at him, for what he’d done to me, and for his childishness. But I was in all kinds of other pain then, and truth was, Jimmy Make didn’t any longer matter enough to make me feel much.
By April, I still had spells of tiredness felt like stones packed in my bones, but my nausea was fading. And because of that, and I guess because I was simply getting used to the loss—what a person can get used to, if I’ve learned nothing else in my life, I’ve learned that—once in a while, and just for a little bit, I might take a peek out of that tunnel I’d dug for myself. But I was denned up good that April afternoon, pouring rain and cold, not much above forty, when the scrape of muddy boots on the porch steps brought me full awake. In the living room, Daddy cleared his throat and hollered, louder than he needed to, “Well, c’mon in there, Mogey!”
I curled up tighter on myself, my knees nearly to my chin. I’d woke up needing to go to the bathroom, but now I’d have to wait, I’d made sure not a soul had seen me aside from Mom, Dad, and Sheila since I’d come back from Morgantown, and I wasn’t walking through the living room now. “Does make it easier to draw breath, I’ll tell ya,” Daddy was saying in his loud company voice, and the cheerful in it made me even madder. “Can’t complain.” Then I heard Mogey, quieter, only a rumble to his voice, couldn’t tell what he said, and Daddy, “Cold, ain’t it? Gonna get a late start on fishin this spring.”
I jammed my pillow over my head, and when that didn’t work, I punched my fingers in my ears. My drawn-up legs holding my bladder. I lay there like that for many minutes, willing Mogey the hell out of here and on home, until my ears finally hurt so bad, I had to pull my fingers out. When I did, I heard a tapping on my door.
I knew it wasn’t Mom. Mom would bang and yap “Lace!” at the same time, so I pretended I didn’t hear it. I rolled over and faced the wall. The tapping didn’t stop. He’d tap a while, then rest a while, I could feel him on the other side of the door, then he’d start again. Mogey was a hard one to give a no to, even a no you weren’t actually having to say, but I told myself, just hold out. Still, he kept on, and finally I slammed my fist in my pillow, jerked upright, and dropped my feet to the floor. I wasn’t wearing a bra, just a T-shirt and an old pair of sweats, and when I moved, the cloth of the shirt stung my nipples. I stepped over to the mirror above Sheila’s dresser, reached up to smooth my hair, and th
en, a hand on each side of my head, I stopped. Because what I saw there scared me. I’d been glancing in that mirror for months, but now I actually looked, and it scared me. I backed quick away, hit the end of the bed with the back of my legs so fast I half fell on it. Then I pushed myself up, crossed to the door, and set my hand on the knob. I opened it the width of my face.
“Hi, Lace,” Mogey said.
He looked me straight on, then dropped his eyes down and to the side. I knew it was out of politeness, had nothing to do with shy. I wanted to be mad when I opened the door, tell him leave me alone, but both the sight in the mirror and the gentleness of Mogey stopped me. Gentleness of Mogey always had. He had his dark green khaki hat folded in his hand, his thinning blond hair crushed uneven, like a kid who just got up from sleeping, and I could smell off him woodsmoke and coffee. He didn’t ask me how I was. I appreciated that.
“Mary’s got a real bad cold,” he was saying. “I was counting on her to help me dig ramps tomorrow. Don’t got another day off for a week and I promised the fire department I’d get some for their feed. You wanna go with me?”
I knew it wasn’t just because Mary’d caught a cold, and I figured Mom could go just as easy as me, Mom’d already been getting in the woods every day. I wondered had she put him up to it. I started feeling for words to say no, but then Mogey’s voice, the soft flannel, dropped to a whisper. “Your mom don’t know I’m asking you. It’s just you and me, Lace.”