by Ann Pancake
I looked over my shoulder then, buying time more than anything else. I saw the wrinkle of my body on the bedspread. The mirror, now without me in it. I turned back to Mogey, although I didn’t look at him. I sighed. “Okay,” I said.
He picked me up in his truck the next morning between rains.The sky a fresh-washed watery blue and the clouds on the move, and as I stood out there under it, waiting for him, my insides felt like that sky. Thin clouds blowing through me. Once I was in the truck, Mogey talked light at me, to keep me comfortable, I understand now, because I was too sucked in on myself to recognize it then. He drove us down Route 9 a ways, then turned up the dirt road to Carney Mountain, and I realized I hadn’t been back in there since I was twelve or thirteen, although I’d probably gone every spring before that.
Higher we pulled the road, quieter Mogey got. I didn’t say anything either. I hadn’t been out in three months, and I tell you, it was like light in your eyes after a long darkness, only it was not just my eyes, but my self felt that way. A squint with my whole body, and I pulled my jacket closer. No leaves on the trees yet, no redbud or dogwood either, but nubbly little coltsfoot nudging up out of the ditches, and you could see sarvis here and there. Like fairy’s breath, I remembered that’s how I’d thought about it when I was little, but I hadn’t thought about it at all in such a long time. Finally Mogey pulled over as far as he could get on the narrow road and shut off the engine. He pointed up the hill. “Should be up that little draw there.”
Then he was out and throwing his leg over a small stream, carrying his shovel and hoe, and I was following with a big empty white detergent bucket in each hand, the trowels rattling inside them. I had a hard time pulling just that short draw, a rise I would have leapt in no time just six months before, that worried me a little, and then I saw it.The wide patch of fresh new green spearing up out of the dead leaves. First thing out of the ground you can eat, it was Mom talking in my head, and Mogey was already loosening the dirt with his shovel while I just stood there. The body-long squint. Then Mogey said, “Get you a trowel.”
I got down on the dead damp leaves. Then my knees were pushing deeper into the black loam under that, and I could smell the ramps from where Mogey was already pulling them up. I shoved my trowel in the ground and starting working around the bulbs, easing them out, careful not to nick or chop.Then I was just digging, and after a while, I realized I’d dropped the trowel altogether and was working them out with my hands, my fingers mud-crusted, the black pushing up under my nails. I worked steady with my hands only, not thinking, dropping them into the buckets by their hair, first the clump sounds as they hit the plastic bottom, then no sound at all as the bucket filled up. And then, suddenly it seemed to me, Mogey surprised me with his laughing.
“That’s enough there, Lace.” I looked up. “No reason to dig em all. Other folks’ll be up here, too.”
We hauled the buckets back to the truck, and then we washed our hands clean as we could get them in the run. Afterwards, Mogey swung back on his haunches and pulled out his knife to pry the last of the mud from under his nails. “You know,” he said. “I’m giving my half to the Fire Department, but they’re buying, too. What if I sell your half to em?”
I shook my head. “Half ain’t mine, Mogey. All of em’s yours.”
“Like heck they ain’t yours.” He snapped his knife shut. “Hard as you were going at it.” He pulled my bucket to him and looked down in. I’d dug as much as he had with his shovel. “They are yours, or I’ll throw em out on the ground right here.”
I lifted a hand to push my hair back out of my face, smelled in my fingers the dirt still ground in my skin. “Okay,” I said to him. “Okay.” I nodded. “Go on ahead.”
The next morning, while Sheila dressed, ate, and left for the turnaround to catch her ride to work, I stayed in bed like I always did. “Lace, get up out of there and make that bed,” Mom called in at me, and then I listened until the house door shut behind her and the shed door slapped open. I peeked out my window to see which way she’d go so I could go the opposite, and after she disappeared up the Ricker Run, I got some jeans on and slunk into the kitchen. Daddy sat in the living room listening to the nine AM obits and sucking after breath. He didn’t hear me slip a few paper bags under my arm. Mom hadn’t left anything in the shed to dig with besides this heavy old thing closer to a mattock than a shovel, but I took that. Then I headed straight up on Cherryboy.
That was the mid-’80s, people leaving the coalfields in droves, unemployment in the double digits across most of the state and over twenty around here. We had Dad’s check, miner’s pension, we didn’t have much else. After those first couple months when it became clear me and the baby were going to be around for a long time, I had money to worry about on top of everything else, and my guilt about it was almost bigger than my worry. Jimmy Make was only a sophomore in high school, not even old enough to drop out and work. Sheila’d got on at a little sewing factory down at Labee making one dollar over minimum, but they had a long waiting list for a few spots, they’d never take me. Far as I could figure out, there wasn’t a place within fifty miles might give me work, and although I had no choice but to get a medical card, I knew Mom would throw a fit over food stamps or welfare. But now, whether he’d meant to or not, Mogey had shown me a way I should have seen from the beginning. Hadn’t because of how stuck I still was pretending I was different.
Truth was, I’d had plenty of practice. Mom had always kept those old-time ways, she’d step them up or ease them down depending on how tight things got. A tight we’d got in then. You can live off these hills, she loved to say, everything was put in them for a reason, but I’d stopped listening by the time I hit age twelve. Old people talking. Before I got hazed over with the peach-pink, though, I’d helped—the gathering, the digging, the gardening, the canning—and as I climbed Cherryboy that April morning, for the first time since December I felt my spirit stand up inside of me and push.
I tried for a week. By the third morning, Mom and Dad both realized what I was up to, but Mom said nothing and Daddy just said good luck. But what I knew by the second day was how much I’d forgotten, or maybe just never really known. I knew ramps and molly moochers must be in season, but I wasn’t sure where to look for either one.The few morels I did find I just stumbled onto, and there weren’t enough of them to try to sell. I wondered how much I must have just followed along as a kid and done what I was told. I wondered how much might have been washed out of me by those years of looking hard away. I kept at it. I was frustrated, but I was hardheaded, I spent all day every day out there, tired, tired, I tried. I got angry at myself, I even broke down and cried that last day when I didn’t find a single thing. But I couldn’t give up.
After a week, I saw something had to change. That morning when Mom headed out to the shed, I followed. I didn’t say a word. She didn’t, either. Once we were standing in the dank dim, my face hot with embarrassment and anger, she just handed me a hoe and sack. She picked up her own stuff and turned to go, but halfway out the door, she stopped and looked down at my hands. “Anybody works with me,” she said, “has to wear gloves.” She leaned her things against the wall and rooted in a crate. After a minute or two, she pulled out a pair, cobwebby, but nearly new, and she slapped them against her thigh to shed the spider dirt.
I wore those gloves for the next four years. I wore them until they were more hole than glove.
Mom had married and raised her children late, she was in her fifties those years we ran the woods together. A round muscly woman who never wore pants, glasses she hadn’t changed since I was born, lord, how they used to embarrass me, and brown hair with steel rimming through it that she set each night with curlers, her only vanity, I guess, if it was that. When we walked the hills, she wore a zip-up sweatshirt over her dress, those see-through plastic boots over top her oxfords, and I never saw her slip. That first desperate year we hunted anything we had the least chance of selling, stuff I hadn’t even known you could use
, could eat. Yeah, ramps and molly moochers, but also Shawnee lettuce and woolly britches and poke.Yellowroot before the sap.
If I close my eyes and look back on that spring, the first thing I see is Mom moving ahead of me, her burr-shaped body there. Me dragging behind, hauling sack, bucket, trowel, clippers, whatever we’d need that day. I see everything as heavy and on a steep slant, I see it in grays and browns, no green, and once in a while, I remember, I’d slip all the way back into the tunnel again.
For the most part, though, I stubborned on. I still carried that river-rock weight in my bones, I was tired every day, but I’d just harden my head to a numb, and if nothing else, the grief would hang off to the side, like it had that first day digging ramps. Most of the time, I felt like some dumb scolded little kid, Mom the know-it-all boss, but occasionally, just occasionally, after the first few weeks, Mom would shift. And we’d be grownups together for a while. Then, once in a while, I could again see the beauty of the place. I’d see the beauty quick and sharp, and as we moved into summer, despite the haze, the heat, I started seeing it more often.
It was also in the woods where the baby first moved. May, and I’ll always remember the spot, I’ve shown it many times to Bant since. Mom and me were hauling ourselves up a steep hollowside way back in the Upper Cove, the leaves a mucky slipperiness, we had to walk careful using the sides of our feet to keep ourselves from falling. We’d both stopped near the top to catch breath, me braced against the hoe and Mom leaning on a pignut tree, when I felt something like a gas pain, sudden and sharp. I heard myself make a whimper. Mom looked back at me, saw my hand on my belly, and right away she knew. She smiled at me. And if I didn’t feel myself smile back. There Bant made herself for the first time real.
By then it was garden time, we laid rows and rows. Got Mack Kile with his tractor to plow and disk, then we furrowed by push plow, sowed and weeded by hoe and by hand. We worked her close. When I look back on that summer, I see first the pie plates for spooking the crows, rattling and flashing in breeze and in sun. I smell the tang of tomato vine, the scent of corn tassel, of where the green bean snaps loose. I remember Daddy in a lawn chair, his tank alongside him, shucking ears into a bucket, doing what he could. I feel the wet heat, the damp dammed down between the ridges, and everything with a weight to it, even the blank of the sky. Mom and me sweated over the rows, weeding, then picking, and with Bant moving inside, it seemed like she already struggled right along with us. By that August, the grief was no longer a constant slash. It didn’t lose its fierceness, and it never left me altogether, but it tore at me less often. But I also know, when I look back now, that already that summer, the peach-pink was gone.
Jimmy Make came over exactly twice. He’d finally turned sixteen and got his license in May. Both times we sat out on the porch, me in the swing, pushing off a little with one foot, him hunkered over in a lawn chair, elbows on his legs, his cap half-hiding his eyes, and his jaw jutted out. He was shorter than ever on things to say, and I didn’t have the energy or the desire to hold up the conversation for us both, so we just sat there with the swing creaking. Neither of us made a move towards touching, much less sex, god knows that was the last thing I wanted then, and Jimmy Make, I figured out later, was afraid he’d hurt the baby. Without the want of him, I realized I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know what else was left. I looked at him, picking at where the knee of his jeans was wearing out, and although my mind knew he’d fathered this baby, it still wasn’t real for me in any way but bare mental. Through those terrible hard months since January, it seemed to me now, me and the baby’d got bound inside this tight tough circle: the woods work, the garden work, Mom, Dad, Sheila, house, mountain, hollow. Jimmy Make was a thousand miles outside all that.
The second time was August, and I really wished he hadn’t come. I was already embarrassed about how big I’d got, and then I caught the surprise on Jimmy’s face when he saw my belly after six weeks away. That made me outright mad. We sat there on the porch for a while, saying nothing after a few sentences at the start, me thinking how much work I had to do, why wouldn’t he just go on and leave, when he said, “Can I touch it?”
I was so surprised he’d spoke up without me asking a question first that I didn’t know what he meant. “Touch what?”
“Your stomach.”
I looked down at it. I wanted to say no, then I thought how that might not be fair, so I shrugged. Jimmy Make waited a few seconds, then he rose out of his chair, but not all the way. In this bent-over crouch, not a stand, but not a real squat—as though if necessary, he could make a quick getaway—he crept over to me on the swing with his hand sticking out.
Once he got close enough, he waited again, several seconds. My body drew away. I could feel the heat off him, he was that close. I could smell his breath. Then he laughed, ducked back, and shook his head. But in the seconds he was close, I sensed for the first time the excitement he had for this child.
I went hard against it. Up to the moments he’d bent there in front of my body, up to where I could feel his heat, his breath, I’d thought of that baby as mine alone. And why shouldn’t I? What I’d gone through, what I’d lost to have it.While Jimmy Make, far as I could see, had suffered nothing at all. I pushed back on the swing, stood up, and told Jimmy Make I’d suddenly got sick. I told him he better go home.
That night was so hot I couldn’t even get cooled on the porch, so I left it and walked to the back of the house, to where the dark yard blotted into woods. I stood at the edge, but then I felt the trees drawing me on up, and even though I knew it’d be a hard risky climb, big as I was, I pulled the steep anyway, one hand cupping my belly like that would cushion it from harm. I reached the big white oak, and I leaned my side against it, and when my breath started coming normal, I looked up at Cherryboy. And although I could see only the very bottom of it before it ran out of light, I could feel it rising solid above me.
It had been almost exactly a year since I’d left for Morgantown. I realized it was that, too, had been tearing at me all day. I turned my forehead against the trunk, and I ground it in until it hurt. I needed that little pain there. But then I remembered how up in Morgantown nothing had touched me. That great swallowing lonesomeness I’d felt for known place.
I recalled that late afternoon last October when I’d climbed up here, in a rage at Mom and, yes, at myself. And I recalled the question I’d tried to ask myself then but couldn’t get to, all racing like I was in my head. Now I had words for that question. What is it? What makes us feel for our hills like we do? I waited. The chunging of cicadas around me, the under-burr of the other insects. Something small twisting through the always dead leaves. And although I didn’t get an answer, I did know you’d have to come up in these hills to understand what I meant. Grow up shouldered in them, them forever around your ribs, your hips, how they hold you, sit astraddle, giving you always, for good or for bad, the sense of being held. It had something to do with that hold.
That year, we canned tomatoes, green beans, pickles, peppers, corn, blackberries. We’d always canned before, but never like that. Daddy snapped beans, sliced cucumbers, he’d help until he got tired, and even Mogey and Mary pitched in for a few days when I knew they had theirs to do, too.Their youngest boy Kenneth sat cross-legged on the floor, moving his plastic horses around. To watch him brought a tenderness in me, then a panic strong enough to gut my breath. With those jars boiling, window panes streaming down, the kitchen felt like the inside of a blister, a body heat and body wet like that. It was during one of those last canning days that Bant decided to come.
Bant
I WOKE UP and saw the sky clear as a shout. No haze, deep blue, kind of sky we didn’t often get around here in July, and the temperature unseasonable cool.Yesterday I’d run out of paint, and Hobart hadn’t yet got into Beckley to get more. He’d been mad because I hadn’t told him earlier that I was getting to the end of the bucket, but he couldn’t do much but tell me not to come in today. And it was like
this day knew about me—no threat of rain, fewer gnats, less sweat, and maybe the slope would be drier, simpler to handle. Climbing weather.
I laid low until the boys and Chancey went off somewhere, then I snuck up the road and stopped at the gate. Took a quick look for guards and slipped on under. Then I just stood there in the unruined part of the hollow, the way I had with Jimmy Make that evening, smelling that green around me. So many flavors of plant. Sometimes I’d wonder. I had a pretty good idea how Corey and Dane felt about it, but sometimes I’d wonder on Tommy, if Corey had already spoiled it for him. Because when I was real little, moving over this land, I never saw myself, never felt myself, as separate from it. I didn’t even know to think about it at that age. It wasn’t until I got older that something started rising up between it and me, and I started feeling a distance, almost a distance more in time than in space, like the land is in a different time from you, a stiller one, and you’re always just past it. And every year since I was about nine it had gotten harder and harder to get back to how I was in it as a little kid, but this year was worse by far. For a while I’d wondered if growing up would mean I just couldn’t open to it anymore. Now I was thinking something else was going on. As it was being taken, seemed I was drawing away.