by Ann Pancake
I really looked at it for the first time. “It’s nice,” Bant said softly, and I saw what she meant. The outside looked newer and nicer than anyplace we’d ever thought of living, but of course that was before we learned how shoddily it was built. “Yeah, it does look nice,” I told Jimmy Make, and he grinned.
Jimmy Make and me carried in the couch, the beds, the dressers, balancing each piece between us, and Jimmy took the harder backing-up way even though I could see the back pain in his face, and I tried to get him to trade or stop, but he’d just bite his lip and shake his head. Bant and Corey toted boxes and smaller things—I had Dane watching Tommy—and we spent hours moving in. And right there, I should have known, I should have seen how it was going to be. We’d gotten there mid-afternoon, and many people passed us, on foot, in their cars, and there had to be people all over those cramped-up buildings looking out. But most people didn’t even act like they saw us, much less volunteer to offer a hand. That never would have happened back home.
By the time we finally got everything inside, we were too tired to put the beds together, so we slept on mattresses on the floor. At first, me and Jimmy and the boys in the room that would be ours, Bant saying she’d stay by herself, but within five minutes she was there with us, too. Once everybody got settled, Jimmy Make rolled over to face me, grunting like he always did when he shifted his back. “Don’t worry, Lace,” he whispered. “We’re gonna make er here.” Then he rolled over on his other side, and within a minute, fell asleep.
I wasn’t even tired. I lay stiff on my back, not touching Jimmy Make, my eyes squeezed shut. I heard the kids quiet into sleep—they went almost as quick as Jimmy—and then, the silence they left behind—I listened as it filled full of noise. At first, just the constant interstate aaahhhhh I noticed, but then, my ear tuning, doors slamming in the parking lot, cars starting, an alarm, the gun and brake of vehicles on the access road, them layering into the room. Then, closer, the layers drawing in, to the left of me, a TV pressing, a wah wah of muffled conversation under that, I shut my eyes even tighter like that would keep it out, then a second TV, behind the wall on my right. I finally opened my eyes, try to figure out where everything was coming from, and that’s when I saw the outside lights surging in, staining that room nearly the color of day, and it wasn’t so much the noise or the light, I didn’t understand then, but I would later, it wasn’t the interruption of sleep. It was the foreign place pressing in on us. I flipped onto my side, pulling my pillow over my head, and as I did that, I noticed beside the mattress where Dane and Corey slept, the old chest of drawers. Daddy’s chest of drawers, that had been in his and Mom’s room until Mom moved out and gave it to me. And a loneliness came into me like a wind blowing through, and for two straight years, that wind never stopped.
Down there, I learned fast, you couldn’t ever really get outside. Couldn’t even get in trees, in brush, much less get into hills, you weren’t ever out of sight or sound of a road, a building, a parking lot, and sometimes I’d miss backhome woods so bad I’d feel land in my throat. The townhouses had around them skinny strips of grass, then a whole bunch of parking lot like a hard hot lake. There was no other place for the kids to get out and play, and the first summer, I’d drag out a kitchen chair in the morning before the heat got past bearing and watch Tommy and Corey ride their Big Wheels, until the apartment manager told me kids couldn’t do that. We’d been there two months by then, and as the manager walked away, I realized she was the first person in all that time who’d said more than three sentences to me, aside from people who worked in stores, where they were paid to be friendly. People there lay as flat as the land, no up and down to them, and it was like everybody walked around with a door in front of their faces, no, two doors, this thick screen door, and behind that, a heavy storm one. And occasionally they’d open the storm door and speak through the screen. But then they’d close the storm door behind them again.
“People around here won’t speak to me.” I finally brought it up with Jimmy Make one night.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “People around here don’t speak to nobody.”
“I thought the South was supposed to be friendly.”
He broke another piece of cornbread into his chili and shook his head. “This ain’t the South,” he said. “That’s what the guys at work from the real South say. ‘This ain’t the South.’”
Jimmy Make did try a little harder down there. One of the things he did was find us a park, oh, he was proud when he came home with that news—“I found us some woods to get into!” We drove up there the first weekend we got, and he really had found woods, and yeah, they were flat and tameish, you couldn’t feel the land as easily around you, but at least you had real ground under your feet, real trees over your head, and if we could just get out here, I thought. If we could just get out here every other week.
But then the first airplane passed overhead, low to where it looked like it was moving no faster than a car in a parking lot and loud enough to make Tommy whimper. Within five minutes of that one, a second came, then a third, a fourth, Corey leaping up in the air with a stick pretending to hit it. Finally we gave up and went back to our car, where we saw on the map what we’d decided not to see before.This big pink square of airport right above the small green of park.
A lot of that first year was just a floating, it makes it hard for me to even tell about it, nothing to touch. Bant was nearly as unhappy as me, quietly surly about it she was, and Dane just lived in a daze. Jimmy Make was earning less working construction than he had with the union job back home, and in Raleigh, everything except food cost more. But it wasn’t just the lack of money that made us poorer in North Carolina. It was what you saw around you, what you had to compare yourself to, and I’d never understood about that before. And if that didn’t keep us in our place, then there was the way people looked at us, regardless of how much money they had. Somehow people knew we were different from them, even before we opened our mouths, although I couldn’t for the life of me see how we looked much different from anybody else. It took me back to Morgantown again, the way the out-of-state students saw us, the way some professors did. And I know now that if we hadn’t moved to Raleigh, me and Jimmy Make would have frayed loose even faster than we did, and it wasn’t really the roses on our anniversary, the extra time he spent at home, the way he looked for parks, that kept us together. It was that smallness North Carolina made me. I was nothing in North Carolina, nothing or nobody I knew counted for anything in North Carolina, while Jimmy Make, he could pass in and out of that North Carolina world. He didn’t love it, but he could move in it. Jimmy Make got a little bigger in North Carolina, while I got a whole lot littler.
When the lease was up on the townhouse, we had to leave for a cheaper place. Almost didn’t find one, and never did find one big enough, but Jimmy Make finally heard of something through a guy at work.This huddle of two-story brick buildings behind a shut-down textile mill, them squatty and dribbly-stained, the Cat Piss apartments I still call them to myself. I’d taken back up smoking by then, I’d quit clear back when I got pregnant the first time, but in North Carolina cigarettes were cheap, and god knows I needed something to put inside of me. And often, that second summer, late at night, the only time I had to myself, I’d sit out on the stoop of the building and have a cigarette. I’d sit there, and naturally I’d be thinking of home, of Mom, of mountain dark, and I’d try to keep my eyes down low, to the concrete, the ratty grass, because Raleigh had no sky at night. Over Raleigh at night, at best a fuzzy film, at worst, if it was cloudy, a strange orange dome. And sometimes the churchy part of me would whisper, is this punishment? Another part of me whispered, is this a joke? All those self-important teenage years, how I’d wanted nothing but to get out. And here I sat, my sweet peach-pink—an orange glare stinking of exhaust.
It was in those apartments, our second March away, that we got the call. I was on my knees under the dining room table, trying to rub peas out of the filthy carpet, and I
could hear Bant beating on Corey in the living room and I was yelling at her to quit, and then the phone rang. Jimmy Make answered it. To this day, I thank God for that.
“Lace?”There was a crack in his voice. My scrubbing hand stopped. He walked up behind me and swallowed so hard I could hear his throat. “That was Mogey.” I looked up. His face had gone white with red stripes through it. Right there I knew somebody’d died, and then I knew if it’d been Mogey on the phone, it was Mom who was gone. “Mom?”
Jimmy Make nodded like a sleepwalker.
A heart attack, and that was it. I hadn’t even known she’d had heart problems, and if she’d known it herself, she never let on.
What do I remember of the trip home? That my mind let very little in. I remember standing in that leafless dead-grass cemetery on the far side of Prater and seeing how every one of my kids had outgrown their Sunday clothes, and I hadn’t known it because since North Carolina, we’d stopped going to church. I remember at the reception afterwards spying on the table a jar of blackberry jam that I knew was one of Mom’s, and you’d think it would have made me cry, but instead I nearly threw up. I remember on the way back to Raleigh rolling down my car window in the last little town before the interstate because I all of a sudden wanted woodsmoke smell. I remember Jimmy Make saying roll it up, the kids are cold. I don’t remember much else.
It took me ten days back in Raleigh to thaw. And then there I was in North Carolina with Mom dead and nobody to talk to but the kids. I mean nobody even to speak to, and it wasn’t like when Daddy died, when I’d had all kinds of time to get used to it, and then afterwards, I still had Mom at home. I crawled into bed, turned off the lights, and I drew my knees to my chest. I couldn’t help it. I fell in the tunnel again.
Usually it was the black ball I’d carry. Black ball, like all the grief and guilt were gobbed together, the grief huge, dark, and round, the guilt moving in the grief with sharp points, and the whole ball of it would grow heavy black big enough that finally it was outside instead of in, and right there I’d know I couldn’t any longer bear it. But right after I’d know that, it would ease off just enough to let me rest and get strong enough to hurt again. Not gonna kill you. That was Mom, too. Most of the time, I slept, the seduction of that—although the horror of coming awake—and if Tommy hadn’t still been at home, it’s hard to tell. It’s hard to tell. I thought on it again.
But Tommy was at home. I’d make him play on the floor beside my bed, and I know now I must have scared him bad, as well as he behaved those weeks. Him whispering and hissing as his superheroes schemed and fought, let Mommy sleep, I’d told him. Now Mommy has to sleep. Then one afternoon, I woke up suddenly, not even remembering having fallen asleep, and as soon as I did, I felt the empty of the room. I rolled to the edge of the bed, saw the Power Rangers scattered on the carpet, and Tommy, he was gone.
“Tommy?” I called out, and I heard the groggy in my voice, I must have slept longer and deeper than I’d thought. I swung up to sitting, pushing my hair back out of my eyes. “Tommy?”
I got up and started checking from room to room, “Tommy?” my voice rising now, the “Tommys” coming faster and higher, “Tommy?” The boys’ bedroom empty, the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, and “Tommy!” now I screamed. Then I was pouring into the parking lot in my bare feet, whipping my head around, “Tommy!” and the few people there looking at me, but not a one asking what was wrong, when here comes Tommy around the end of the apartment building, a woman older than me leading him by the hand.
“Is this who you’re looking for?”
I dropped to my knees and grabbed him to me, I felt him stiffen away, and I looked up at the woman, and “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
Then I saw the look she was giving back. Self-righteous. Smug. Redneck woman with so many kids she can’t even keep track of them all. And there crashed back onto me, straight through my grief, through the Tommy terror and the relief, the nothingness that North Carolina made me. Not Morgantown, not getting pregnant, not having to get married, not losing forever that sweet peach-pink, none of those had made me feel the nothingness the way North Carolina did. Because people outside of back home always thought they knew exactly who I was, when they had not the slightest idea.When they’d never see me because they didn’t know how to look, knew only to look for what they already thought they knew, so they always saw somebody else.
Memorial Day weekend we went back to help Sheila do the final cleanup on Mom’s trailer. Mogey’d found a buyer who would haul it off, and it seemed too early for me, but we needed the money to pay the funeral home. We were staying in our house, with Bill Bozer and his girlfriend, and when we woke up Monday morning, the day we were supposed to drive back to Raleigh, I told Jimmy Make I wouldn’t leave. I told him I could not. You might call that a decision, I’m sure Jimmy saw it as one, but in a way, it was not a decision at all. I didn’t any longer have a choice. And yeah, he was mad, but that wasn’t all he was. Always afterwards, Jimmy would blame the moving back entirely on me, but the truth was, Jimmy Make, too, had been upended by the loss of Mom. He, too, felt how much harder it was to be away without knowing Mom was holding you down back here.
I did go back to Raleigh to pack, for Jimmy to work his two weeks’ notice, and for the kids to finish the last of school. Then we hauled everything back up here. I was driving the Cavalier with all four kids—that was the last trip that Cavalier made—and when we left the interstate for 52 just past the West Virginia line, it was mostly relief and even hope I felt, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel scared, too. Threading those little choked-to-death towns, so humid you could see the vapor in the air, and what is it? I asked myself again. Makes us have to return? My parents were dead, my cousins and aunts and uncles besides Mogey had all left out to find work, so many neighbors and friends had, too, and me and Jimmy Make with no jobs and up to our eyes in debt, why do you have to come back?
But I’d already figured out it wasn’t just me. How could only me and my thirty-three years on that land make me feel for it what I did? No, I had to be drawing it down out of blood and from memories that belonged to more than me. I had to. It must have come from those that bore me, and from those that bore them. From those who looked on it, ate off it, gathered, hunted, dug, planted, loved, and bled on it, who finally died on it and are now buried in it. Somehow a body knows.
Dane
MRS. TAYLOR’S boy Avery looks like city, but he talks like home. In Avery’s shoes is where Dane sees city most. Shiny across the tops, thin in their depth and width, slick on the bottom. No laces. The kind of shoes walk on pavement and cement, tile floor and carpet. His broth-colored hair sheds back from his face, and the shape of his head Dane can’t help but see as a figure eight—how it’s dented over each ear—and when he wears his glasses, which he only does occasionally, they make a figure eight the other way. He has been to college, and he is not a smiler. He is not a talker, either, and Dane can feel off him how he doesn’t want to fool with anyone much. Avery looks like Cleveland, but he talks like home, at least until Dane heard him call his wife, who is not from here. On the phone, Avery talks like he’s away from here, too. Avery can talk both ways, and Dane has never met anyone who can do that. Around Avery, Dane keeps his distance.
It’s late afternoon, and all four of them are crowded in the kitchen while Dane cuts up potatoes and carrots for Mrs. Taylor’s stew. Avery slouches in a chair, his long legs spider-sprawled. His face laced tight. At the table head sits Mrs.Taylor, her back to Dane at the counter, her walker by her side. Lucy Hill’s across from Avery, but she’s too shy to look at him directly. She hadn’t known him before, but yesterday, when she came for water again, Mrs. Taylor asked her to drop by tomorrow, meet her baby. Lucy sits with her tight-jeaned legs pulled close together, and except when she sips her coffee, she hides her hands in her Myrtle Beach long-sleeved T-shirt pockets. Her gray hair she has pulled back tight in a fresh-made ponytail, the skin at the e
dges of her face pulled back with it.
“Well, what exactly is up there?” Avery is asking.
“No telling what exactly it is, it’s up there so high, and they tell us one thing, but there’s no telling. And with these floods and all—” Mrs. Taylor tries to explain, but Avery interrupts her.
“What’s the company say it is?”
“Company says it’s just a valley fill,” says Lucy. Dane hears the shyness in her voice. “But we’re scared there’s a big ole slurry impoundment up behind that thing.”
“There ain’t no way to tell,” Mrs. Taylor says.
“Can you see a prep plant up there? Belts? A silo?”
“Not where you can see any of it,” says Lucy. “But they could be piping the slurry up from Deer Lick. They got that huge one up over the plant, but people are saying that one may be full.” She looks over at Mrs. Taylor, looks back down. “I don’t know. That’s the thing. Don’t nobody know.” She sips at her coffee. “And they got nosers and gates all over the place, so you can’t get up in there to see, and even if you got to the foot and tried to climb, it’s steep, buddy. And slick. Especially with all the rain we’ve been getting.” Shakes her head. “This crazy weather. And even if there ain’t one right above us, we’re still in the path of others. That one up behind Deer Lick, they say it’s nine hundred feet from bottom to top, that’s higher than the New River Gorge. Then there’s another one up at Mayton, and who knows where all else.”