Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

by Ann Pancake

  The buck was not there in body. But something else was.

  I stepped into that little room, I stopped and looked around me. And something layered down over my self. At first it seemed to wrap me. But then it was somehow in the center of me, starting there, and then it washed on out through all of my parts. It was the feel of a warm bath with current in it, a mild electric, it prickled my skin, every inch of my skin it touched. And the thing was, once it had currented all the way through me and reached my very ends, it kept on going.

  It melted my edges. It blended me, I don’t know how else to say it, right on out into the woods. It took me beyond myself and kept going, so I wasn’t no longer holed up in my body, hidden, I saw then how before I’d been hidden, how I’d believed myself smaller than I really was. It made me feel bigger in myself, and it made me feel more here even though you might have expected such a thing to make me feel gone. And with it came total sureness. And with the total sureness came peace.

  I had to leave out of here for a while. I got drafted, Robby did, too, they loved us hillbilly boys for how good we could shoot. All those fall days hunting deer and squirrel, it’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad. But it meant I left out of here and saw other mountains, and now I know people not from here probably don’t understand our feeling for these hills. Our love for land not spectacular. Our mountains are not like Western ones, those jagged awesome ones, your eyes always pulled to their tops. But that is the difference, I decided. In the West, the mountains are mostly horizon. We live in our mountains. It’s not just the tops, but the sides that hold us.

  I tried for a long time to pull the two together, what I knew from church and what I knew from mountains. Of course, it would only be right if I could keep the church part ruling the woods part. So when I’d first walk into the woods, I’d say to myself, “Look here what God’s give us.” But just about as fast as I could have that thought, this second one would come from deeper: “This is God.” And then, from under that thought, from deeper yet, another thought would come, saying, “I go here. This is where I go.” And last of all, the most certain thought, but also the most dangerous: “This is me. This, all this, is me.”

  I used to dream a good bit about that buck. It was mostly the same two dreams I had, but I’d have them fairly often. I’d dream we’d come up on the sunken place, me and Robby together, and the buck would be there, but the feeling would not. The buck has a broke back, but he’s still alive, trying hard to get up, him hoofing in the sloppy wet leaves for a grip. His big rack is dragging at him, pulling on his head, and there comes in me a tear in my chest, like cloth tearing, such pity do I feel. The rocks lie in a circle, making the room where the buck struggles, and Robby is afraid to shoot him for fear a bullet might ricochet off a rock and hit one of us. But I crouch down behind a big beech, I press my cheek to it, those trees that look like they’re wearing human skin, and Robby takes aim from behind another one. I hear the explosion and then the echo off the mountain across the creek. But when I peek around to see the body, there ain’t nothing there.

  Or I’d dream it different. I’d dream the buck was dead. Me and Robby come up on him not fresh dead, but a day or two dead, his body twisted unnatural and his coat matted with rain. His coat matted in a way it would never get live. He’s shrunk up, how much littler he looks dead, and collapsed around his ribs like somebody has gutted him already. I look at the rack. The rack looks huge. It looks aliver than him. And something has already ate on his eyes, even though you would have thought the cold rain would have kept them back in their holes. There comes again in my chest the pity-feel of cloth tearing. And then, after the pity feeling, once more he is just not there.

  Nights, I lay in bed in this house I built, Mary sleeping beside me. Since the little strokes, I don’t sleep so good. I usually go to bed early, have to, and fall asleep right off, but after a few hours I wake up with a headache, or with worry, or both, and can’t get back to sleep. So I lay here feeling around me this house I built with my own hands, falling apart. Blasting’s cracked my Sheetrock, cracked the walls in my bathroom, cracked the cinderblocks under my house. Just a few weeks ago, it split my concrete porch in two. In this valley now we are completely surrounded by the mining. Soon it’ll be directly over top the house. And it’s across Route 9, too, across the river, those mountains being taken not only by Lyon, but by Arch, then you go south—more Lyon, some Peabody—and you go north, it’s there, too.You work all your life to have you a home. And you want your home to be quiet and peaceable. I built this house, I know how well-made it is, and it’s the only thing I got to leave my boys. And here they can take it from me without even walking on my land.

  I lay awake, sometimes pressing my fingers to the hurting places in my skull, and I say to myself, What are they doing up over your head? What are they doing above you? Funny, seems to me, how they keep it hid not inside someplace, and not under someplace, like things are usually hid. Funny how they hide it up over your head. There’s some kind of meaning in that there, in how they hide it. But given how my mind fails me anymore, I cannot puzzle together what that meaning is.

  After that kettle bottom dropped on me, my deer dreams turned different. My brain worked different in a lot of ways, them dreams was one of the worst. I dreamed deer not quite deer, deer like something got in their blood and turned them in funny ways, and I’d have a terrible time leaving behind me the feel of the dreams after I’d wake. I dreamed I come up on the mouth of a cave, it surprised me, and there flushed out of it a whole herd of these deer-elk creatures with antlers longer than they was. Rising off their heads in pairs, then fusing to make a single knife blade running longer than their backs, and after they got out of the cave, the whole mountain collapsed behind them. Then it got to where I was dreaming deer coming after me with bared teeth like mad dogs. I’d be in a nice yard someplace, and there’d be all kinds of deer gone wrong, and some of them lying in the grass you couldn’t tell was they dead or alive. And the mean deer leaping over the lying-down ones, coming at me, swinging them wolf-teethed heads. It was like I done something to them. It was like both me and them known what it was.

  Me and Mary look for greens where we can still find them, and nuts and stuff.These days it’s more for the sake of getting out and looking, the pleasure of that, than what we actually find. They’ve tore up our ramp and ginseng patches, they’ve run off all the game. And you can’t fish. Even if you found you a live fish to catch, I’d be scared to eat it, you know. For a long time, it was the trees dying scared me worst. I don’t mean how they clear-cut the mountains before they blow them up, although of course that’s an awful thing. But that is a thing you can see and understand. What scared me was the trees that are slow-dying. You don’t really notice, that’s why it’s scariest, until one day it just dawns on you—how long’s it been since I seen a mulberry tree? A butternut? Ain’t there more logs down than there used to be, or am I just nervous?What happened to that sugar tree used to be at the head of Nell’s Hollow just five years ago? The scariest is when things are lost before you know you’re losing.

  Then one morning last fall I found something that spooked me worse. It was real early, just after dawn, I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. I was climbing up the road to Bleak Knob to look for a ginseng patch used to be up there. Bleak Knob is a good ten miles from here, I hadn’t been up there in some time. It’s been all mined out underneath, I knew that, but I didn’t know how far they’d got with the stripping. I decided to go up and see.

  I got over there, and of course they had a pipe gate across where you used to be able to drive up, so I parked my truck and started climbing the dirt road. Wasn’t too long before I heard some kind of vehicle coming down, which surprised me a little. Then here it come around the turn, and it’s a tanker truck of some sort, and I stood off to the side, half-expecting it to stop and say something to me about trespassing. But the two men in it didn’t so much as look at me. Then I realized the truck didn’t have a trace of
lettering on it, and I noticed, too, that they had a gun rack in the cab, some kind of rifle in it, I couldn’t tell what.They went on down the road, and last thing I seen was that truck didn’t have no license plates neither. Now that scared me.

  It got worse. I hadn’t gone but a hundred feet when I saw something on the ground shouldn’t have been there.You get used to seeing all kinds of weird stuff up these hollows below valley fills and mines, especially around sediment ponds, but this hollow, near as I could tell, was more or less untouched. And here in the road was this goopy gray junk. Like in clots, dribbled along the road.

  Right there a bad feeling socked in my gut. It hadn’t even got to my mind yet, but I knew to back away and not touch that stuff, not even with my boot.

  I watched it for a while, the feeling in my belly making me a little sick.Then I tried to track it. It didn’t go too far, kind of dribbled along in a line maybe twenty feet long, a fair-sized gap between each gray glob. Then it just petered out. I knew it had come out of the truck when they was driving up full, and when I seen them, they was no doubt driving out empty. So I followed the tire tracks. The tire tracks was heavy and easy to follow, and I got up top in under an hour to where I could see clear where the truck had turned around. But it was strange. I couldn’t find no more of the gray stuff, and I couldn’t see where they might have been dumping it. Nothing. It was like the truck just went up there to have a look, turned around and went on home.

  I hadn’t yet heard any rumors about them dumping what they call hazardous waste, not yet. But I can’t say I was surprised. Once I got home, I called the Department of Environmental Protection about it. I’d called them quite a few times over the years, and they were always polite on the phone, then, near as I could tell, didn’t do a durned thing. But what else could I do? There ain’t nothing else but throw a lawsuit at them, and lord knows I don’t have the money for that.

  My church has never spoke out against the destruction. Some churches have spoke against it, but mine has not. I still go every Sunday.

  I can guarantee you I’ve never talked before about any of this out loud.The buck, the dreams, the feel in the woods. Before, I didn’t even want God to hear, I especially didn’t want God to hear, but, of course, they say he hears everything. I was ashamed at how I couldn’t match up what they teach at church and what I know from the woods. But as I get older and, it is true, sicker, I understand more and feel less guilt about it. I understand that church mostly touches just the part of me that knows right from wrong. The part that says, “You better not.” As I get bold enough to think it, I understand church don’t seep into me no deeper or fuller than that, and it is very sad, to feel no more than that from church. Still, I can’t know no different: any sacred I have ever got close to has come straight out of these hills.

  My headaches have got worse instead of better. I kept telling myself they wasn’t, and I didn’t say nothing to Mary, but then this spring, they took a leap. Seems they’ve near doubled in what they was hurting before, and I thought what they was hurting before was just shy of unbearable.

  As the headaches get worse, the dreams do, too. Looking back now, I believe it started, these new ones, with me dreaming animals with metal for teeth. A couple times I dreamed just that, normal deer with metal pressed in their gums. Then I dreamed I shot a buck and went to gut him, and I found he had a plastic bag for a belly. After that, I dreamed I was out walking and found glass scat. I dreamed leaves falling as ash. Then those dreams passed, too, and I stopped dreaming animals, I stopped dreaming woods at all. Instead, I dream that the world tilts, and I see crowds of good people can’t keep their footing, and they all fall and slide into a corner. Or I dream I’m out in my yard, and everything just stops. It’s like a clock running down, one where you don’t notice the ticking until it stops, but then it does stop, and I feel the universe dead quiet in its halt. And now, finally, I’ve got to where I dream without pictures at all. It’s just a dream of sound. There is nothing to the dream but an alarm going off, a horn with a beat to it: Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa. I don’t need no Daniel to interpret that dream.

  There is what my reason tells me. There is what my church tells me. There is what my dreams tell me. There is what this land tells me. I’m coming to accept that I’ll never bring all those things together before I die. But on my strongest days, I can tell myself without guilt or fear, it is not paganism or idolatry or sacrilege or sin. It’s just what I know. And what they tell me, these things I finally let myself trust, is what we’re doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide.

  The day before Thanksgiving, 1958, was the first time I felt it. It wouldn’t be until a very long time afterwards I could put words to it, like I have now. For a good many years after it happened, when I talked to myself about it—because I sure didn’t talk to nobody else about it—I just named it by the buck me and Robby never did find. I needed to call the feeling by something solid, I didn’t know how to do it better, and looking back now, I think the way I called it was just fine. Even though the buck hadn’t really been there. Him being gone, seems to me, made calling it by him even righter.

  As I got older, like I said, I started feeling the hum off all live things, even dirt and rock. And I could make myself feel how I was part of the land just by letting down something inside me, I got practiced that way. A letting-down at will. But the warm current and the loss of me in order to become me huge, me all, only happened three times after that Thanksgiving, and only once as strong. And I’ve never been able to make the feeling come. Only a word comes that until now I’ve never felt safe using for it because I know that word as a Christian thing.

  It’s hard to tell stories about hunting for things that never get found. I try not to be downcast. I try to keep hold of my heart. I have Mary, and I have my boys. Some of the woods are left, and I still have the strength in my legs to walk up into them. Even with the problems in my head, I can get back in the mountain, and many people, like Robby, sick now with diabetes and the cancer both, can’t even do that. And despite my recent terrible dreams, something different happened in my sleep, just a week ago.

  I went to bed real early, before it was dark, with a headache so bad it was upsetting my stomach. I fell asleep pretty quick, and then I dreamed I was in a little grassy clearing. It felt good to me in that clearing, how I do love being down in a place, the good safe feeling of land all around. Then, while I was standing there quiet and glad, an old doe walked up to me. She stepped right up to me, and I looked back into her brown eyes, and she said, “This is what it’s like inside my head.”

  Then she shelled her head open. It just fell open in easy halves. And as she did it, there spilled out of it and over me this light a color of green I’d never seen before.

  The light from her head carried in it the feeling I’d had in the little room where the buck wasn’t. That feeling I’d only had twice since. That feeling I had never been able to make come on my own. Only this time, when I blended beyond myself with the sureness, the peace, the sureness and peace kept growing. Bigger beyond anything I’d ever felt, it swelled and spread, I swelled and spread, until there was not anything else. No woods and no doe and no light and no me. Until there was all. It was all. Not nothing. Not something. Just all.

  I guess you’d call it the peace that passeth understanding. I guess you’d say it come by grace.

  Lace

  DANE CAME looking more like Jimmy Make than any baby I ever had. That was good. Make sure Jimmy Make knew. The next eight years passed blurrier than any other part of my life, my life became my kids then, and I have not one regret over that, but when I look back on the thirty-five years I have lived, those are the eight I remember least. After Dane was born, Mom gave us a piece of ground out by the turnaround and we put a modular home on it. Jimmy Make always was the type had to live on a hard road. Two years after Dane, here comes Corey, and around that time, Sheila finally got married to the Parker boy down at Labee, and she moved out. We got the us
ed trailer for Mom because that was easier, Jimmy Make argued at me, than keeping up the “old house,” even though what he called the “old house” was, of course, the homeplace to us. I fought him hard on that. We went three generations back in that one house, three more in an even older place now ruint down to foundation stones further up the cove. But Mom wouldn’t fight him along with me. I was up there on the porch one afternoon fetching Bant—Mom still kept Bant a good bit, and a huge help to me that was—outright begging Mom not to give up and go, and finally she said to me, in her case-closed voice, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” I see now what she did then and I would soon. Whoever’s bringing in the most money—that’s the way things finally tilt.

  After Jimmy got Mom set up in her trailer, he bought his first truck. He did take care of Mom first. He’d been starving for that truck all his life, and I didn’t begrudge him. How men are, him especially.With Jimmy Make pulling down more money than my family had ever had, and me with two, then three, eventually four kids to watch, I ran the woods with Mom less and less often. Most of the time I was so drowned in other work I didn’t even think about it, but Mom would take Bant, and, oh, then I’d remember. Then I’d remember. Bant coming in all quiet like she always was unless you asked her something, like a woods thing herself she was in her quiet. I could see and smell and feel the woods fresh in her, her cheeks a good red from out there, and her eyes shiny and still away. The scent of mast, of duff, of air soaked in trees, all through her jacket and deep in her hair. How damned jealous, that’s the word for it, I would get. Jealous of a six-year-old I loved more than my life. Then I would try to go again, as far as I could with the kids when I had any time, up the creek where they could wade, along the bottom of Cherryboy to pick up nuts, Yellowroot for berries. But I couldn’t just let myself be there in it, the way I could when I had only Bant and Mom was with us, too. It was always the kids, not the woods, I had to be with first.