Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

by Ann Pancake

  At last we reached the final boost to the very lip of what was left of the mountaintop. A vertical loose-earth wall.Then we were fingernailing it, and Corey toenailing it, then I got my arms up over the lip, and I tried to drag my body after, but there was too much give. The bank caved in and scrawled out from under me, until finally I just swam at it with all fours, swallowing a little shale as I swam, and eventually the bank fell enough and I rose enough that we were the same level, and I had enough of my body lying flat on some kind of shelf that I could pivot the rest of me onto it. I looked back at Corey under me. He was still scrabbling, his face bunched hard with effort, the light dirt showing bright in his hair. I got up on my knees, reached down for Corey, and throwing everything I had left into my shoulders and arms, I clawed Corey up by the straps of his tank top.

  Corey

  COREY staggers to his feet, still a little off-balance from Bant’s grab. He shakes his arms and legs to shed the dirt, tosses back his bangs. And then he sees.

  As soon as he sees, he can’t see enough. His eyeballs aren’t big enough to hold what he can almost see, he wants to stretch his eyes wide like you can do your lips, for a big ole burger, for three-layer cake. Corey’s stomach hardens, his chest, his arms clench.

  It’s too far to walk to. It is across a long long way of dirt and rocks and raw roads and terraced earth and black mounds. But it is there, if I had me one . . . It is a great grand giant thing, here in this place of puny things, you can see big things on TV, but this place full of sorry-ass piddly things, only things around here big enough to stretch your eyes are the coal preparation plant at Deer Lick (to look on it, a glory it was, gasp in his chest, they passed it at night, lit all over like a carnival ride and roller-coaster-shaped, but a real roller-coaster, not a game one, the livening violence to it) and that one silo at Performance Coal. And now this here.

  Corey has seen this machine in Gazette pictures, but in real life, he’s seen it just once, and that was in the dark. Them driving up Slatybank, trying to take the shortcut because Dad had stayed too long at the man with the parts’ house, and Dad pointed out the giant on the ridge overhead. Corey looked back, and he saw it on the night horizon. They were mining twenty-four hours a day, so it was all lit up along its neck, and instead of seeing it in metal, Corey saw it in lights, a cluster of stars, Corey saw a swinging constellation come down. When Corey’d seen it in the paper, Dad had told him its real name was dragline, but its nickname was Big John. Like something out of Star Wars, Dad said, maybe the biggest piece of machinery ever built, twenty stories tall, for sure the biggest shovel in the world, and we have it right here in West Virginia. And they call us backwards, Dad said.

  Now Corey sees it in its metal, in daylight. It’s big enough to dry up the spit in your mouth when you look on it, Corey can tell how big by the D-9 dozers and haul trucks antcrawling under Big John. Big John’s neck looks like one of those huge power transmitters that straddle the mountains to carry off the electricity the coal makes, and the neck is planted in a pivoting base the size and even the shape of sixty army tanks welded together. Swinging off the neck, the shovel itself, roomy enough to hold twenty or so of those monster rock trucks and throw them over the ridge, the rock trucks themselves so big Dad’s truck, Dad said, would only come halfway up one tire.

  If I had me a four-wheeler, if I did, Seth, Seth has one, and he is only nine, Corey’s brain, soaked in the size of this thing, if I had . . . He could sneak up in here when they weren’t working. Sometimes they do stop working, you know by the surprised stillness in the hollow, and Corey could sneak up in here and ride across the site for an up-close look. Blare that four-wheeler through craters and traps, tear around and skid and wheelie, jump ditches, and when he hit one of the roads, he’d really cut loose, ride like hell to the very edge, brake, burn rubber, slam stop at the last minute before hurtling over the fill. And if there was a blast when he was at it . . . Whoa.

  Then, no, matter of fact, he wouldn’t just look at the machinery. He’d go on and climb right in. He’d start with those big rock trucks, monkey right up and swing into a cab, grip the big wheel, that plastic hard as steel in his hands. Try the D-9 dozers next, he’d take his time, saving the best for last, he’d handle the controls, pump the pedals, them big treads rumbling under him, they can go over anything on earth.

  And, finally, he’d scale Big John. That vast mountain-handling piece of gorgeous machinery. And as Corey climbs it, the smell of its fluids, the good grease he’d get on his clothes. And maybe he’d cut himself a little on something. Maybe he’d bleed a little there. He’d crawl in, settle in the seat, take a look at how it ran, push his legs to the pedals, grip sticks and handles.That giant, his body in that gigantic body, his body running that body, and the size, the power of that machine: inside Big John, Corey can change the shape of the world. Corey can.

  Bant

  WHAT I SAW punched my chest. Knocked me back on my heels. At first I saw it only as shades of dead and gray, but I pushed my eyes harder, I let come in the hurt, and then it focused into a cratered-out plain. Whole top of Yellowroot amputated by blast, and that dragline hacking into the flat part left. Monster shovel clawed the dirt and you felt it in your arm, your leg, your belly, and how lucky Grandma died, I thought. I thought that then. And past where Yellowroot had been, miles of mountain stumps, limping all the way over to what used to be horizon, and what would you call it now? The ass-end of the world. Moonscape, that’s what many said after they’d seen it, but I saw right away this was something different. Airiness emptying me. Because a moonscape was still something made by God and this was not, this was the moon upside down. A flake of the moon’s surface fallen to earth, and in that fall, it had kept its color, nickel and beige, kept its craters, its cracks. But then it landed not up, but moonside down.

  My tongue moved in my mouth. It had lost all water, tasting what I saw. Then I realized I had my knee and one hand in that weird brittle grass, and I jerked my hand to my stomach and got myself up quick. Deer won’t even eat that grass. Now you know if deer won’t eat it . . . We’d come out on this raised embankment at the very edge of the mine, and I got back my balance, but the wind across that dead flat stirred the gas in my hair. Then I noticed Corey standing a few feet below me like he’d been freezetagged, his fists on his hips Jimmy Make-style, that stupid rag fluttering. There you go, Corey. There you go. You kids won’t have nothing but to clean up their mess. I hardened my face again and scanned the killed ground until I got to where I thought the Yellowroot Creek valley fill should be. Thing was, you couldn’t tell anything about size or distance up here, because, I realized right then, this was nothing. And you cannot measure nothing. What I could tell, because Cherryboy was not nothing yet, was how close they were getting to it, creeping viselike around the head of Yellowroot Hollow.

  I tightened my chest and turned away. Walked down the spine of the bank a piece. A haul truck passed under us, machinery jarring in my teeth, and more blocks inside me, tumbling down. Tumbling. Now I had my back to Cherryboy. I was just staring at where Yellowroot wasn’t anymore. Then I was remembering what Yellowroot had been.Yellowroot, shaped like a rabbit with its ears laid back, Grandma showed me that. It took its name from goldenseal, she said, that was the real name of yellowroot. Yellowroot’s the country name, Grandma said. Now yellowroot’s what you use for a sore throat, gargle that, nothing better for it. Turn your mouth yellow, your throat yellow, too. Everything in these woods was put here for a reason. Then I was hearing something else. Corey. I’d nearly forgotten about him, but it was Corey making a noise. Making a motor noise in his mouth, soft, I don’t think he even knew he was doing it out loud. And then I knew Corey had learned nothing at all.

  My arms flooded with wanting to knock him down, fling him off the bank, and rub his face in dead dirt. I wanted to hear him yelp and cry. But truth was, deep down I’d known all along Corey couldn’t understand. I’d just had to try, but, no, that was a lie, too, why I’d really brou
ght him . . . The real reason I’d brought him was I was scared to see it first time by myself. And I knew I had to see it before I could decide. Of course Corey did not understand, and Dane understood only in a way before word, before memory, and what did Jimmy Make understand?

  Understood that move-the-mountain draw, the power, the suck, the tempt. Understood anyway the wrongness of it all. Understood he could not stop it. Understood he had to go. Did he understand how Lace would choose? How I would? Would he understand why? That’s just how he is, I wanted to say to her. Why can’t you see that’s just how he is? Go on and love him anyway. And I remembered the sleepy smell. The ginger in how he held me little, him my father and just a little older than I was now. I remembered how he’d never left, not through all those years, not even when she wouldn’t marry him, not even afterwards when she did and things got worse. He never left.

  The memory picture of Yellowroot faded fast. And the feeling it left behind scared me worse than the mine site did. Because what I was feeling again was nothing. The distance between me and the land had set in, complete, but this time, I didn’t even have any want in me to cross it. Nothing. Just like you couldn’t measure the site because it was nothing, you couldn’t feel for it either, because there was nothing to feel for. Nothing stirs nothing. And it came to me for the first time: was it worse to lose the mountain or to lose the feeling that you had for it?

  I still stood with Cherryboy at my back. I couldn’t see Cherryboy, but I could feel it behind me the way you can feel an animal hiding close by in the woods. How Uncle Mogey always said that an animal throws off itself a hum felt not by your five senses, but by something else you carry around you. Cherryboy I could still feel like that.

  Mogey

  ALTHOUGH I have been a Christian all my life, I have never felt in church a feeling anyplace near where I get in the woods.This worried me for a very long time. Even when I prayed in a church, I couldn’t make much come, where woods, I had only to walk in them.To walk in woods was a prayer. But I knew it was wrong. Some kind of paganism or idolatry, I didn’t know what you’d call it, but I knew it must be sin. I used to feel so guilty about it I finally talked to the pastor one time. This was years back, me maybe in my late twenties. Pastor Dick, that one was, and I respected him. I respected all of them, I figured they had something I did not, why else would God have called them to be pastors? So I told Pastor Dick my concern, and he said, “Mogey, God gave man the earth and its natural resources for our own use. We are its caretakers, and we have dominion over it . . .” And he went on like that, saying stuff I’d heard since I was little.

  But part of me knew, even back then, that’s not what it is. I knew we wasn’t separate from it like that. I started to say something, to explain to him—I think I wanted to get him around to where he’d say what I knew was okay—but he looked at me like Mary’d look at our younger boy Kenny when he talked about his pretend friend. So I cut it off and shut up.

  The first time I felt it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 1958. I’m sure on the year because I know I was ten, and that’d make my cousin Robby thirteen. We was standing right under the ridge on the backside of a mountain in Pocahontas County, a place they called the Ribs.

  That buck come out after the last drive. I don’t mean he was driven to us. He was not, he come out on his own. Out to the side of Robby and me, and a little below us, and I felt him before I seen him. The way a big animal throws something off himself, something he carries around himself that you can feel without seeing. It’s like a higher hum than the still things, trees and ground and rock, although I only call it hum because I don’t got no other word for it. It’s not something caught by ear. As I got older, I’d catch it off small creatures, too, and after I got to be a man, I mean really a man, got past the early man and come to know myself and settled down, I could catch it, just quieter, even off trees and dirt and stone. But in the beginning, I only got it off big animals. That morning when I felt the buck and turned and saw, I thought at first he was a doe, his antlers blurred in the branches like they were. Then he moved ahead, stepping, and the antlers focused, come clear, and he was nodding a little, I remember. Like his rack was dragging his head a little with the weight.

  I pushed my elbow into Robby. The buck held himself still, like he should not have, an animal that old knows better, and I stared at him, wondering at that stillness.The color their coats get in the fall, grayish, a kind of grizzled to them that comes on after the tender red-brown they wear in summer, as though they age by seasons instead of years. I watched him. Robby lifted his gun.

  When he fired on him, that buck didn’t show in any way he moved that he’d been hit by a gun. The shot knocked him off the ledge more like a punch than a bullet. And after he fell, he didn’t just crash and come to rest on the next outcrop like he was supposed to. No. He went to rolling. It was the third strange thing he done that day, after showing himself to boys with a gun and then standing still, practically posing for the shot. I’ve seen nothing like it since, big buck hooping down that mountain end over end, antlers over backside, whiteside, the antlers, then the white rump, coming up over and over again. Me and Robby leaned out, each of us hanging off a tree, and we watched him roll what had to have been well over five hundred feet, and that buck never hung up on a thing. Not a bush, not a ledge, not a rock. He just never hung up, like he should have. After a while, he disappeared out of our sight, although we could still hear the thumping and even the rattle of dirt and rock, and then, after a little bit, we lost the sound of him, too.

  I’d never been to the very bottom of the Ribs.There was a fair-sized creek down in there, and running pretty full like it was, it took up most of what flat lay between the mountains, and there wasn’t much flat to begin with.We’d tried to come straight down as best we could so we’d end up about where the buck should have, but we didn’t see no sign of him. Not only no body, but no blood, and no tore-up leaves or brush, and no knocked-loose rocks. I looked at Robby, waiting for what we should do. Robby squinted and shook his head. He said, “You walk up the creek and I’ll walk down. Holler when you find him.”

  I nodded and took off quick up the bank. I’ve always loved looking for stuff in the woods. That feel you get when you sudden-spy, as you’re moving, the deep green leaf of a ramp. The crinkle of a morel. Presents the woods give you just for paying attention, that’s how I saw it. And here I was, a little boy hunting a big buck, maybe a ten-pointer, wasn’t much you could look for more exciting than that. I slogged along through them rain-blacked trees, it was steep down there even at the very bottom, most of the time I had to kind of stagger along with one leg higher than the other, and many a time I near slid in the creek. But I didn’t feel the cold or the wet, didn’t feel the mud soaking through the seat of my pants. It was sweet in that gorge, I’ll tell you. Rhododendron and fern, lichen and moss, big rocks, pretty even in such weather. I had my eyes sharped good. I’d been hunting game with my dad since I started school, hunting greens and stuff with Mom even before that. But, hard as I looked, I still couldn’t find no sign of the buck. Not even tracks or some mark of struggle in the brush. My excitement started running down on me some, and eventually I got to a point where I knew the buck could not have come off this far from where he was shot even if we had got way off course during our slide down. I figured he must have come off in Robby’s direction, even if Robby hadn’t hollered yet. I started heading back.

  I run into Robby about where we’d parted ways. He had dropped down on a soaked rotty log, his hands between his legs for the warmth there. “Well,” he said to me. “He didn’t come off that way.”

  “Didn’t come off my way neither,” I said back.

  He cocked his head up at me. “Had to’ve,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Ain’t no sign of him up through there. I looked real close.”

  Robby blew his breath out, loud, to show how ticked off he was, then pushed up off the log. “Guess I’ll have to go look myself.” He
picked up his gun and left.

  I watched him go. Just stood there for a while, my nose running hot and heavy and fast, me wiping it over and over again with the cuff of my coat until that cuff was about glistening. Then I started shivering myself, and I couldn’t just stand there freezing to death in the rain. So I decided to double-check Robby’s direction, too.

  Now this next little part I don’t remember as good. This time the hunt for the buck didn’t have the look-forward-to it had had before—I trusted Robby, I figured the buck wasn’t up his way. I really just needed to move. I was starting to feel hungry under the cold, and also some worry over whether Dad would whip me when I got back for not telling him where I was going. I was feeling bad for the buck, too. I knew he had to be wounded, and it is a very bad thing for a hunter to clip a deer and never find him again. Him dying a slow death someplace, or being killed brutal by some other animal. To cripple a deer was a terrible thing. I was blundering along, thinking this, when I come up on it.

  It was a spot where the shelf between the Ribs and the creek broadened a little. Turned out, although I couldn’t see that yet, that it made enough space for a little sunk-down place like a room, and it seemed even more like a room because there was rocks all around it. Somehow a rock fall had come and made like this room. And I come up on the rock border and the widened place, and, sudden, I knew that beyond it, the buck would be there. Somehow I knew that, I remember exactly how it felt in me. Then I climbed up the little rise and dropped down.