Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

by Ann Pancake

  “And what about burning up them dummies in Logan?” Corey chipped in.

  “Shut up, Corey,” I said. If it had been my fight, I would have pointed out how nobody’d got killed yet. But Lace, like Jimmy, always went for the drama.

  “Well, I’d rather die showing some spine and get shot in my front than sit and watch them kill everything matters to me.”

  “You are crazy, woman.” Jimmy Make skidded his chair back from the table. “I’m getting the hell out of here.” He reeled through the kitchen and slammed out the front door.

  “You just do that,” Lace said, quiet.

  It was all in the wrist. I thought in time to my hand. How many flicks in eight hours can you do? But at least with the painting you could see what you’d covered, at least you’d see you were moving ahead. Sometimes, those long humid afternoons, after R.L.’d already come out twice and talked to me, when I knew I probably wouldn’t see him again until the next day, I’d try to push my thoughts past high school. Where my mind wouldn’t go. Graduation my mind could get to, two years from now. The gowns and picture-taking, the caps, I could see. But all I could think past that was a little unlit space smelling like a cave. And not a real cave, but the rockledge cave up on Cherryboy, where you could get your body in, but then you crawled about ten feet and hit where the wall closed down in a V. That kind of cave.

  Eventually, he told me. It turned out he was a big talker, he told me plenty after a while. He didn’t ask much back, but that was okay, around him I found it hard to put my words in a line. “Jesus, I hate those fuckers,” he’d say, “makin us work ten, twelve hours, hell, you never know when you’re gonna get off. And fifteen minutes to eat somethin, and breathin that dust.” Him leaning against a dry scraped wall I hadn’t reached yet, my brush moving towards it. “But I gotta have me a job, and it’s good money. It is that. But once I save up enough, I’m quittin. Goin home and open a gunsmith shop. Work for my own self.”

  Good money. Twenty-year-old R.L. with his badass truck, bigger’n Jimmy Make’s truck. Newer, too.

  “What mine is it you work at?” I finally asked. Bitex 4, he told me. And that was the one. What the industry called Yellowroot now.

  I’d pray against it, I would, I didn’t know where else to turn. I’d pray not to feel for him like I did. I’d start out praying to God, but somehow it always slipped into praying to Grandma, that’s how my prayers anymore tended to do, and I didn’t want Grandma even knowing about this here. But no matter who I prayed to, didn’t nobody help me. He put the pull on me. I could feel this pull from his skin, it made me need to touch it, and I had never felt such a pull before. And it wasn’t only that, it wasn’t only the skin pull. It was also like he made me small, or cut me up into only a few parts, so I was only parts of myself, but those parts controlled me. On my days off, I’d force myself not to think about him. Practice at it. But next day, there I’d be back at the motel. He started getting up earlier, sleeping less. He’d bring me stuff to eat and drink, he’d tease, tell me stories. He’d watch like I was something worth watching.

  They never have to grow up, Lace would say, stay babified. Never have to because the women always take care of them, first their mothers, then their wives, and then they die. The women always wait and die later, Lace blowing smoke through the screen. Everybody around here is raised to take it and take it, Lace would say, to put up with it and take it, that’s what makes us tough, but especially the girls, the women, are tougher than the men, because the men just take it from the industry and the government, and then they take that out on the women. So the women are tougher, because they take it from the industry, the government, and the men, which means the women are stronger and for sure older, because the men never have to grow up because . . .

  Didn’t keep you from wanting them anyway.You go on and do.

  Then it wasn’t just Sharon closed to me in places, but me closed to Sharon, too. I finally knew where Sharon’d gone. Each of us in our separate places now.Together in that separate sense, talking of it sideways, Sharon and Donnie way, way ahead of me, who hadn’t even touched R.L. yet. And Sharon not bright enough to know how much she was letting on. What do you think, Bant? Her face lowered, Sharon picking grass. If you love him, is it still a sin? I mean, I’m not going to, but what do you think? If the girl loves the guy, is it? I told her they said it was a sin if you weren’t married, the love didn’t matter. But it was not sin I worried about (this I didn’t tell her), it was the punishment you got for the sin. It was the baby. But on the other hand, I was starting to think, what did it matter? Stay here and lose myself like Lace had, like Sharon would. Leave out and lose myself a different way (and what do you remember of North Carolina?).

  But I wasn’t going to touch him. All I needed was the sight of him, or, no, it was even less than that. All I needed, all I was taking, was just knowing that he was and that he saw me. My brush blending. Skinny-strong boy, his boots bigger than his legs, the sweet lift of his butt in his Levi’s. Freckles under the dust-blown, and his hair colored like white corn, and the eyes dark brown where you didn’t expect such dark to be. Arms like snakes. Them big snakes in Africa, in India. Skin calling me to touch it.

  We celebrated the Fourth of July that year on the fifth because Lace had to work on the holiday. Hobart went on and gave me the fifth off, too, maybe because he liked seeing me work on the Fourth. And it was another of those coolish blue-domed days we had that summer, strange weather, beautiful skies, and for some reason, from the time we got up, Jimmy Make and Lace were working with each other instead of against.

  We put picnic stuff in the truck and drove all the way to Holly Creek Park, which was empty, just a bunch of overloaded trash cans. Corey found some fireworks, fountains and Roman candles and even black snakes, that somebody had overlooked when they were leaving the night before in the dark, and we set them off, Tommy so excited he ran around in circles making motorcycle sounds until he dizzied himself and fell down. Me and Corey built a fire and all of us cooked hot dogs on coat hangers, and Jimmy Make was sipping a beer, then I saw him sharing a can with Lace, they never did that anymore, and I saw that Dane was smiling. There was Dane smiling. Tommy was running in circles again, hollering, “I’m drunk! I’m drunk!” and Jimmy Make and Lace were laughing and teasing at each other, Lace pretending like she was going to squirt mustard on him, and Jimmy grabbed her from behind and held her around the waist. He was shorter than she was, he kind of rocked her there. Then Tommy nudged up under Jimmy’s arm to get in on it, and Jimmy Make’s face went even softer, and he said something into Lace’s ear.

  I couldn’t hear it, but when Lace ripped away and wheeled on him, I knew it was about North Carolina. I knew it was soft because of the hurt in his face. Maybe “C’mon, baby, please. Let’s just try it down there one more time.” Then, quick, he hardened that face and stagger-stomped off to his truck where he stood with his back to us, hands clutching the bed and elbows cocked out. Shoulders heaved up and his head hung, his toes kicking at a tire. Tommy made more motorcycle noises, louder now, and he ran around Dane in little circles, pinching Dane’s fat when he went, Dane trying to push him off, but Tommy dodgy as a fly, and I said, “You quit that,Tommy, or I’ll pinch you so hard you’ll have places for two weeks.”

  After the picnic, it was the silent treatment until we hit home, and then it was the fight. The worst one yet, unless it just seemed that way to me because of the sweetness earlier. Or maybe all that sweetness had made the vicious build up in them. It got so bad I left the house, took my pillow, and locked myself in the truck. I couldn’t really sleep there, lying in the dark with my eyes open, breathing that gasoline in my hair, wondering how close to a flame you’d need to be for it to catch. Hard to tell. After an hour or so, I rolled down the window, and I couldn’t hear anything else from inside. I figured they’d gone to bed. So I slipped back into the living room, quiet, and there they sat on the couch. Limp. Like they’d finally popped each other, taken all of each other
’s air. Lace was doubled over so you couldn’t see her face, her arms in her lap and her head in her arms. Jimmy Make had one elbow on a knee, he held his forehead in that hand. And I thought I heard somebody sniffing. I don’t know which one it was, didn’t neither of them ever cry, no matter what, they didn’t. So maybe I imagined it altogether. What I noticed for sure was that even though they were sitting side by side, their legs weren’t touching.

  We could hear it getting closer. I knew they were going to take Cherryboy next, I didn’t need to learn that from Dairy Queen gossip. And I wondered, my roller gliding, how could I feel so mixed up about it? Know that what my parents had together wasn’t good for anyone, yet still feel such terror watching it finish?

  And what did I remember of North Carolina? Get my body killed here, kill my insides if I left. I knew you never take all of you with you. I knew, it came to me with the brush moving, how if you left out, your ghost stayed behind. What I called the live ghost, the ghost you carry in you before you die. It stayed behind and hovered the hills, waiting on you. And what did I remember? (How the pavement would bloodbeat the wet stinking heat and how nobody came to visit. How the land opened wide to where anything could get you. How you walk only the skin of the world, nothing in you reaching any deeper. So that you know how you’re blowing away, feel always the airy empty insides of you.) That’s what I remembered of North Carolina.

  R.L., clomping across the porch, carrying a can of Pringles to share. With every less inch of space between him and me, the hum heightening in my skin. I felt him. And how could I. What he did for the money just to buy the chips. You know bettern that.

  He squatted down beside me. His boot tops had little give, and he was perched awkward, balanced on his toes. He dragged a finger through the wet blue paint on my arm. He lifted the finger and painted a line on my face, the spoiled cheek. He touched that cheek anyway.

  I want to stay, I want to have, I want to be, without leaving. All the little ghosts, hovering.

  Lace

  SO THERE were the five months in Morgantown, the nine pregnant, and then Bant. I did almost all my growing up right then. All that growing up pressed together so that each month held several years, and you can see it in my face, and in my body, too, if you look at pictures of me before and after. All along I told everybody I had no idea what I’d name the baby, but truth was, I’d chosen the girl name not two weeks after I felt Bant move. I made up Bant’s name not just for the pretty in it, but because it made her more singular mine. And I called her Ricker See because it made her more of this place.

  When Jimmy Make got to the clinic and found out her name was on her birth certificate and it wasn’t Turrell, he left without seeing me or the baby and told Sheila he’d never be back. Sheila looked scared when she told me, and I have to admit, at first it scared me a little myself. Hurt a little more than that, despite that I’d thought I was beyond hurt from him. Then I asked myself—what had Jimmy Make done for this baby so far? Not a thing, I answered. Not one thing beyond come in a cold chickenhouse.

  Three weeks later I was finishing up nursing Bant when Daddy said from where he was getting a glass of water at the kitchen sink, “Well. Lookee here who’s a-coming.” I knew right away who he meant. I pulled my shirt back down, laid Bant against my shoulder, and I stooped so I could see out the window and on out past the porch. Jimmy Make pouting under his camouflage hat and carrying a package, I saw when he walked up the steps, wrapped in “Happy Birthday” paper.

  Daddy was inviting him in before I had time to decide what to do or how to act. Jimmy Make was trying to be all polite and friendly to Mom and Dad while at the same time cold-shouldering me, not an easy balancing act for anyone, least of all for some kid hardly knew how to talk.When I took the package from him and said “thank you,” he looked away from my face and bit his bottom lip. But I saw him sneaking a peek at Bant. I reached up and turned her face gentle into my neck. But then Mom had to take her from me so I could open the present—a new dress could of fit a four-year-old—and before I could grab her back, Mom was handing my baby towards Jimmy Make.

  “Ummm . . . ummm.” Jimmy Make backed away, his hands thrown up and facing out like it was something hot that Mom had. “Oh, no.”

  Mom laughed. “Ain’t no snake, buddy. This here’s your daughter.”

  Now he’d backed his way into the couch, his hands still thrown out, and his giggle had genuine panic in it. “Oh, no. Oh, no. I don’t know how to hold no babies.”

  Mom took his arm with her free hand and drew him sit down on the couch, him plunging down hard and surprised. I stood stiff across the room, torn between not wanting to watch and not wanting to leave my baby alone with this boy. Now Mom was getting him set up like an older toddler brother, pillow in the crook of his arm, arm propped on the end of the couch, and now she was settling Bant there. Jimmy Make sat paralyzed, his knees drawn together like a girl in a short skirt, his hat bill tipped over his face so you couldn’t see how he was looking. He sat there for a long time, not moving anything more than his eyes, if he even moved those. Then he stretched out one knuckle-chapped finger and pulled it along her pink arm.

  After that, he was back up every other week. He didn’t let on I might be alive, but he came to see Bant. He did his talking with Mom, while I’d sit sentry across the room, and he’d hold Bant like glass and whisper. This father who wasn’t yet shaving.

  Then it was full fall, the season you could make the most money, and I was following Mom again, only now with Bant on my back and even deeper debts than last spring. Cohosh, seng, sassafras, black walnuts, hickory nuts, butternuts, pawpaw. It was the ginseng you’d make the real money on, two to three hundred dollars a pound, but the dealer would take other roots, too, sometimes nuts, and the rest we’d sell to neighbors or out along the road. Eat what was left. Fall meant wild meat as well, and Daddy tried to hunt some squirrel, even got a few, and Mogey and his older boy brought over more than that, turkey, and later deer, and that was the only time in my life I ate groundhog.

  When I first got started, it was just plants I’d expected Mom to reteach me, things I could sell, but she knew she couldn’t teach that without the other, and when I look back now, I see how much else I relearned. The names of all the little streams off Cherryboy. How the game paths went. Where you could find you a safe drink of water, where you could duck under overhangs to shelter out of storms. It was shortcuts across ridges from hollow to hollow, it was how easiest—footholds, handholds—to scale a particular draw. And although before that year I’d never been the type of person listens any closer than to what comes out of a mouth, all those quiet hours in the woods, I couldn’t help paying other kinds of attention. I started listening in other ways.

  Every few hours I’d have to stop and find a good log to get my back against so I could feed Bant. Unbutton whatever old shirt I was wearing, the fall cool tightening the skin on my breast, pull the blanket up around Bant to protect her warm. Mom would look away, that deep modesty of hers, while I couldn’t do anything but look at Bant. Bant’s sweet face working for the milk, that concentration, pull and let go, and I’d love out of a part of my heart I hadn’t known I’d had. Like Bant herself had made that part while she was inside me, her tiny hands reaching up into my chest, secretly shaping, then left the new part behind to wake up when she was born. But then, sometimes, I’d get worried. Her face worried me clear back to then. She was a silent, solemn, watchful child, even as a little baby you could see all that in her. It was like, I feared, she was born with the age in her. It was like all the grief and disappointment and growing up I’d done while I was carrying her had seeped into her before she was born. I worried a lot about that.

  We kept following the seasons. Walking the ridges. Working the hills. Sometimes Mary and Mogey’d come with us, sometimes Sheila when she was off, but it was mostly just the three of us. First Bant on my back, and then Bant waddling, stumbling, picking herself up, and finally Bant working with us. Bant buckle-legged,
chubby-armed, all serious to help, squatted over hickory nuts, pulling berries off canes, by three she knew how to keep clear of the briar. By four, how to climb a leaf-thick hollowside using the edges of her feet. And although I kept worrying about what she carried in her—my age, my grief—I also realized the ways I was changing for the better—what had trickled into me to fill that loss—I realized Bant got some of that, too.

  Strange thing was, those turned out to be the best years for me and Jimmy Make, too, although I’d never have believed you if you’d told me that back then. Because of course Jimmy Make was still in high school, still living at home. Still his mom’s baby, while I was busy with a baby of my own, and the fact that things went best that way, well, it tells you something. By the Christmas after Bant was born in September, he’d gotten over the naming enough to talk to me again. At first I hardly answered back, told myself I didn’t need him or care, but I mostly just wanted to punish him a while. Only wants sex anyway, I justified it to myself, even though deep down I knew he could get sex in easier places. But by February, when he’d call to say he was on his way over, I found myself, despite myself, watching out the window for him to come bobcatting around that bend. And by two weeks after that, we ended up in the backseat of Jimmy’s daddy’s Blazer.