by Ann Pancake
“And they throw just anything in them ponds,” Mrs. Taylor goes on. “Broke-down equipment and logs and chemicals, just anything they’re too lazy to carry off the mountain, just push it in the ponds. So who knows what all’s in that water when it comes through here. Even when it’s not that deep, you know, it’s still poison.You want that in your garden?”
Lucy nods. “Lots of people just not putting in any garden this year.”
“And seeping in your well water, and kids walking in it barefoot—”
“Well, Mom, how come I been trying to get you up to Cleveland for the past three years?”
Mrs. Taylor says nothing back, but her bottom lip butts out a little. Lucy is looking down at the hand lumps in her shirt pockets. The only sound for a while is Dane’s knife ringing the chopping board and the labor of Mrs. Taylor’s lungs. Then Lucy says, “And there’s not a thing you can do about it. Not one thing. His mom,” she tips her head towards Dane, “has called every agency she can think of, and won’t a one of them do nothing. Won’t even come in here and look. Why, their house is nearly in the creek, how bad it tore through there, you know. It’s just pitiful.” Lucy shakes her head. Then she looks at Avery for the first time since she met him half an hour earlier. She looks towards him even if she doesn’t meet his eyes. “I tell you, Mr. Taylor, it’s gonna take another Buffalo Creek. Gonna take all of us warshed out of here and killed before the first thing’s done about it.”
Now they fall quiet for even longer, but a different silence it is. Dane can feel the ripple in it. He brings the knife down on the cutting board, shoves the potato chunks he’s finished off to the side. He pushes his stomach against the counter to calm the fish down. Finally, Avery speaks.
“Well, Buffalo Creek was a different situation than it sounds like this here is.”
“Big ole dam, wasn’t it?” Lucy asks.
“Well,” Avery says. “Dam was what they called it. But it wasn’t nothing but three big slag piles dozed up into walls. Dumped the wastewater from the coal-cleaning plant behind them.You could see they weren’t nothing but slag piles.”
Mrs.Taylor lets loose a sobby kind of sigh. “And that’s why I won’t never forgive myself. Won’t never.”
Avery grimaces. “Oh, Mom. You didn’t know. Come on now.”
“No, no, we all knew, it was just a matter of when.” She wags her head, stares down at her hands. “And there you were, wanting to spend the night up at Lorado, and I said yes, after three solid days of rain, and I won’t never forgive myself, not long as I live.”
“Mom, there was no more rain those three days than was usual, I know that for a fact. And they rumored that dam to bust every spring. If we listened every time that dam was supposed to break, we would of had to live in tents on the hill.”
“Still.” Mrs. Taylor is slumped over now, her back bowed. She’s taken off her glasses. “But Dooley had work in there . . .”
“Well, now, honey,” Lucy comforts her. “You didn’t know. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty.”
“Mom, you didn’t know. I haven’t blamed you for a second. Besides, here I am.” Avery opens wide his arms and grins, trying to make a joke. Mrs.Taylor doesn’t smile back. Dane pounds his cutting board with his dull paring knife, the chopping louder and louder.
“How old were you, Mr. Taylor, when it hit?” Lucy asks.
“Twelve years old,” Avery says. Dane’s knife slips, clips the finger holding the potato, but it’s not sharp enough to break skin.
“He don’t remember nothing about the water itself,” Mrs. Taylor says. “He don’t remember nothing until he woke up on the side of the hollow after the water passed. God took care of him that way.”
“Yes,” Lucy nods. “He sure did.”
“And the happiest moment of my life was when I finally saw Bucky—we called him Bucky then—Bucky trudging along that hillside in them big ole clothes and all covered black, but I knew it was Bucky by how he walked.”
“Mmm-mmm.” Lucy shakes her head, imagining.
“I had to believe he was alive all along or I would’ve lost my mind, Lucy. I would’ve lost my mind right there. Dooley I wasn’t worried about. I knew he would have been up above. Patty told me she knew Bucky was alive, too, we held hands and prayed on it. And a hard prayer would hold me for ten minutes or so, then it would start to fade, I’d start to break down again, you know, and then Patty’d grab hold my hand and we’d pray again. Some people come through and said it wasn’t over, said a second dam was gonna blow, and that’s the hardest I’ve prayed in my life. And that second dam didn’t break.”
“Wasn’t no second dam,” Avery mumbles.
“Lord, lord,” says Lucy. Mrs. Taylor has found a tissue in her sleeve, and she shreds at it, her glasses still off. “Mmm,” says Lucy. She continues to shake her head. No one speaks for a while. Then Avery clears his throat.
“Well, Mom,” he says. “You sit here and tell us that, but you won’t leave.”
Mrs.Taylor sighs thickly. “Well.You know.” She places the wadded tissue on the table beside her coffee. “Anymore, I wonder if maybe I ain’t just bound to die in a flood.” She pauses. Lowers her voice a little. “Didn’t get me the first time, so it’s coming for me now.”
“Oh, Mom. That’s ridiculous,” Avery says.
Mrs. Taylor shrugs, slow and weary. “Gotta die some way.”
“Mom, you’re not yet seventy. Most people live past seventy.”
“Not around here, they don’t,” Mrs. Taylor says. She looks back at Lucy. “They asked me later how come I didn’t send Ronald up to look for Bucky, or why didn’t I go myself even. But you see, I just couldn’t let the four of us break apart. Still, every person I saw heading back up that hollow after the waters passed, I told them, I said, ‘You look for my boy, Bucky.’”
“I don’t blame you a bit,” says Lucy. “For not wanting to separate apart.”
“Oh, Lucy.” Mrs. Taylor shakes her head. “After that flood. I can’t begin to tell you. There never was a time like it. The world just went inside-out. People climbing out of that black mud near naked, your friends and neighbors climbing naked out of mud. People just squatting and going to the bathroom right there in the open.Wasn’t nothing else they could do, you know. And you just stood there and watched like it happened every day.” Again, she lowers her voice. “Truth was, you didn’t have nothing left to feel with. It was kind of like the water washed out your insides.”
“Hard to imagine,” Lucy murmurs. “Hard to imagine.” Dane rinses his knife to get ready for the carrots, and there comes to him a sudden memory of one time in church when a man told an end-time dream he had. He turned on the spigot in his kitchen and the water came out in his glass as blood.
“And some people, when the water was going past, they got sick to their stomachs and threw up while they watched.” Mrs. Taylor places one hand on her own stomach. “And afterwards, they told how lots of people up the hollow above us heard other people, kids, too, screaming for help, and they couldn’t do nothing to help them.”
“Oh, lord,” Lucy murmurs.
“Now you know that would stay with you. For a long, long time. At least we didn’t have none of that. We saw people in it, but we didn’t hear no screams for help. At least we don’t have to carry that guilt, too.”
“Oh, lord,” Lucy repeats. “We’re all gonna get warshed out.” She huddles down into her shirt collar, like tucking in from a hard wind. “I just know it,” she says, and Dane, cutting carrots now, draws shallow breath, the fish pitching sharp in his gut.
“Cold,” Mrs. Taylor goes on. “You know it was. Us in our night-clothes. People drifting past, hollering, ‘You seen so-and-so? You seen my mother? You seen Tommy Hatfield?’ Like that. I was scared to let anybody go back in our house, even though it hadn’t moved. Now Ronald, he kept wanting to go see, but I wouldn’t let him. Something just told me not to. Then Chip Mullens come up there, said he’d just talked to Kenny Smith’s son, told how he went
back in his house—now his had moved a ways—and stepped right on a body in his kitchen door. Then come to find a car half in, half out his living room wall with two drownded people in it. They was all kind of stories like that, and ever one of them true. You don’t make up that kind of stuff.”
“We’re all gonna get warshed out.” Now Lucy can’t stop wagging her head. “That’s what’s gonna happen here. We are, too. That’s what it’ll take. Another disaster.”
“When I did get back in the house, Lucy, we had two foot of that greazy black mud in there. I mean, it got everywhere. It was in your bedclothes, it was in your refrigerator, your stove, it was in every dish you owned.Why, I had stuff wrapped in plastic, fabric I’d got to make Patty and Kelly dresses, and that mud got right through that plastic. We scrubbed, and we sprayed, and we wiped, and we mopped, and for as long as we stayed in that house, you could still smell that ole coal dirt in the walls.” Mrs. Taylor wrinkles her nose. “But here I am, complaining about mud, when we didn’t lose nothing.” She nods, mechanical, slow. “We didn’t lose nothing at all, not compared to what other people lost.”
She pauses there. Lowers her voice. “Buffalo Creek was never the same afterwards. I don’t just mean how it looked, but how people acted. I was glad when Dooley found something else and we moved. That was about eight months after. And we were fortunate we hadn’t lived up there longer than we did. We’d only been there about four years. Now the ones who’d lived there their whole lives, that flood kilt em, in a way. Even the ones not kilt in their bodies.”
Avery shifts in his seat. “That’s right,” he says, softly. “You’re right there.”
“Remember that Clancy boy?” Mrs. Taylor asks him.
“Sure. Steve,” says Avery.
“Rode out the whole thing in a bathtub—can you imagine?—lived through that, then went and got himself killed in a car wreck a year later. Crazy stuff like that.” She looks away from both Avery and Lucy, towards the window. “That’s what I mean by it’s like something’s trying to get you.”
Lucy nods. “Same thing happened down at Oceana.This boy lived through a house fire, then a car wreck, and then right after that, the cancer got him.”
“Well,” Avery says, “I heard that Steve Clancy figured if he lived through the flood, he could live through anything. That’s how come he was driving like he was. Wasn’t something out to get him.”
“Well,” Mrs. Taylor says. “I never heard that.”
“I heard it at school,” says Avery.
“Well.”
“Does make sense,” Lucy says.
Avery studies the linoleum. “To tell the truth,” he says after a while, “I don’t believe that was the reason.”
Lucy shakes her head, takes to murmuring again. “It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen here.”
“That’s why I’ve been trying to convince her—”
“Avery!” Mrs. Taylor says it so sharply Dane jumps. “This is my home!” She lifts the walker and punches it on the floor. “Every penny of my savings is in this house. Every last cent.” Dane has turned around now, he’s never heard Mrs. Taylor this mad at anybody besides Lyon, and he shrinks from her, but watches as she lifts her arm and points up the mountain. “You want me to let em take everything away from me? Everything? Just let em have it all?”
Avery doesn’t meet her eyes. He stares into his coffee cup, biting his lip. Mrs. Taylor’s breathing huffs heavy as machinery, her arm still raised, trembling. Lucy glances nervously into corners. Gradually, Mrs. Taylor drops her arm. Her breathing quiets, at least as much as Mrs. Taylor’s breath can. Then, gently, without turning to look at him, she asks, “Dane, honey? You through with them vegetables?”
“Yeah,” he says, and he winces at the weak in his voice.
“Well, get that tube of biscuits out of the refrigerator and put em on the cookie sheet.” Mrs. Taylor looks back at Lucy. Both of them pretend the outburst never happened. Mrs. Taylor smoothes her skirt. “Now one thing I won’t never forget,” she says, “was when Shirl Benson come up with that pot of soup. She lived on down the creek towards Man, maybe a mile from us, and here she comes with a pot of soup in hot mitts. She’d got it hot on her gas stove. Now she didn’t have bowls or nothing, but she had spoons, and we passed it. She’d made it the night before, had it in her refrigerator like she knew something was going to happen.Vegetable soup with a little stew meat in it, chunks of fat, you know. Oh, it was good. Bucky was with us by then, you remember, don’t you, Bucky?”
She’s trying to make up with Avery now. Avery nods.
“Well,” Mrs. Taylor says. “That was Shirl Benson for you.”
From behind her, for some minutes, Dane has been thumping the biscuit tube. No matter how hard he hits it, or what part of the label he strikes, the tube won’t bust. This surprises Dane so little he’s not even frustrated by it.
“Oh, lord,” Mrs. Taylor says. “I’ve got down to making store-bought refrigerator biscuits for my baby.”
“I can’t get it open,” Dane says.
“Wham it there on the edge of the counter like you see on TV.”
“What can I do to get her out of here?” Avery asks Lucy, loud enough for his mother to hear.
“Won’t bust,” says Dane.
“Wham it real good. There on the sharp edge,” Mrs. Taylor says back.
“I’d get out if I could,” Lucy says. “But we can’t get enough for our place to buy nothing else. Won’t nobody buy a house with a bad well under a mountaintop mine.”
“Can’t get it to split.” Dane again, his voice even weaker now.
“Oh, lord have mercy. I’ll help you after I use the restroom. Just hold on.” Mrs.Taylor hauls herself up onto her walker with great huffing, finds her balance, then lunges towards the door.
“Won’t listen to a word I say.” Avery shakes his head.
Mrs. Taylor halts. She lifts the walker, turns a quarter way around. Plants the walker there. Dane turns, too, braced for another outburst. But this time she just looks at Avery. Then she looks away. “Well, Bucky,” she says softly. “You know. I been thinking on it.” She turns back, and stumps out of the room.
Left together in the kitchen without Mrs. Taylor between them, Lucy and Avery sit for some minutes in an itchy silence. Finally, Lucy tries to make conversation again.
“So, you don’t remember nothing about the water itself?”
The fish flip and slice in Dane.
Avery sits there for a minute. Then he shakes his head. “Nope. Don’t remember a thing between the time I went to bed and when I came to on the hillside with that dog up against me.”
Avery
HE WAKES in the middle of the night in a dark cramped room, lowceilinged, burrow-like, and beyond the window screen, the shriek and chung of the plants crowding around. Avery hears the insects as plant voices, and the humidity, which cramps too, he feels as plant breath. Although it’s not “plant,” “plant” isn’t word enough for this, not dense enough, not slick enough, not heavy enough, not green enough, for this here, no.This is vegetation. He is always smaller in this place than he is outside, the close updraws of the hills, the hemming hollows, the vegetation, they diminish him, no matter how long and far he’s gone, the land here is always heavier than he is, than any person, and how late the sunrise, how quick the sunset, how small the sky—those wither him, too. And although where he wakes is not his childhood home, it could, at the same time, be any of those homes, the dark cramp of a humid July, interchangeable, and when he wakes, he does not feel the momentary confusion, the disorientation, the loss of place he many times feels when waking in his own bed, beside his own wife, in his own house in Cleveland. No, when he wakes here, even though he has never lived here, even though he has never actually slept in this room because it’s only recently become the guest room, still, he knows exactly where he is: he is home. And when he fades back, into sleep, there is to it a comfort, a peace, it should not have. But does.
In
the morning he decides to walk up to the head of the hollow and see for himself. He decides he’ll do this even though he hasn’t brought the shoes for it. He has only the leather-soled loafers he wears to work because he’d planned to spend just two nights, get back for work on Monday, but it is worse than he’d expected, and he’d been down here for a week as recently as December. Not that it surprises him. He’s seen it coming over the past few years—how the coal trucks got bigger as the towns got smaller, how you could glimpse from the highways huge raw patches of earth way back between ridgetops where it wasn’t easy to get. Eventually the dimwit governor condemned the Methodist Church for condemning the mining practice—that even made the Cleveland papers—and the article carried the first clear description Avery had read of what his mother had been calling “some new kind of crazy strip mining.” But none of it surprises him.