by Ann Pancake
He came down this trip to find the hollow freshly wrecked, a wreck that begins with the plugged-up creek and the flood-trashed yards before you even get near the devastation on company land, and then there is the damage that you can’t see from outside: the ruined wells and dropped foundations and cracks in walls and ceilings falling. As he walks up the road, a retarded man who lists to the side like a tree about to topple staggers off his porch and trails Avery a while. He twists one fist in the palm of his other hand, a polishing motion, and Avery asks him, “How you doing, buddy?” but he does not talk back, and when Avery steps off the hardtop into the dirt road, the man stops altogether. He’d seen Bell Kerwin on her front porch, hanging out rugs, and he called to her, and she spoke back, but instead of coming on out to her fence, she vanished inside her door. The final house before the locked gate, where the boy, Dane, lives has been especially flood-hit, the yard now neatly piled with junk they’ve gathered up, a big side-by-side refrigerator standing all by itself like a monument.The base of the modular home is a kind of plastic or fiberboard molded and painted to look like cartoon rocks, and on the upstream side, the current has battered and ripped the fake rocks clear away. As Avery passes, out of the hole jogs a homely wire-haired dog, barking like a maniac with its tail wagging, then a chicken-skinny kid in gym shorts, cowboy boots, and a pistolless holster. “Hi,” Avery says to him. The kid stares back.
Once Avery stoops under the gate—newish gate, he notices, padlock newer yet—and gets to where the trees have been slaughtered, the liquid July sun splashes down unstoppered from every direction, and it dizzies him. He hasn’t worn a hat, doesn’t usually wear a hat, despite growing up in a place where a man wears a hat almost as often as he does pants. He has a white handkerchief his mother insisted he bring to protect his lungs from dust in case of a blast, and he drapes it over his head and hopes nobody sees him. At first he thinks the loafers will be okay, but as soon as he begins pulling a little elevation, his heels start to blister, and after the road buckles up into flyrock and shale, he slips and twists an ankle. Bangs his shin.
He senses his mother about to give in. It is mostly the stories makes him think it. Of course, for three or four years after Buffalo Creek, she told the stories because she had to tell them. He understands that now, how her stories put shape and control and a kind of finality on a thing that was obscenely shapeless and uncontrollable and forever unfinished. She found new audiences wherever they moved—she had lived through Buffalo Creek, and it gave her, gave the whole family, both a luster and a taint, so there were always plenty of people to listen. And she told the details like a ritual—the car horns, Patty’s prayers, people half-naked climbing out of mud, Shirl Benson’s soup—so when Dooley always left the room and Avery followed, Avery told himself it was out of boredom. Eventually, though, his mother either spent herself or cured herself, and she quieted. She did tell the stories on special occasions, like February 26, the anniversary, and she liked to tell them on the anniversary of Dooley’s death, too, but in general, for a long, long time, she quieted. Then a couple years ago, when they began the mountaintop removal, the Buffalo Creek stories started seeping back out of her. She’d need to tell them at least once whenever he came down, and now that he was grown up, he stayed, he listened. But after the floods this year, she began telling the stories even over the phone, and long distance in his mother’s world was only for reporting who’d died and who’d got born. When she began telling the stories long-distance where she had to pay to tell the stories, Avery knew he better come on down, and once he got here, he realized she was talking about almost nothing else. And although that scared him some, he sensed he might be about to win. That’s the main reason he decided to stay a little longer.
He climbs past the first series of terraced ponds, the water as opaque as mustard and colored like the inside of a sick baby’s diaper. The only growing thing left up here in the head of the hollow is the grass covering the pond banks, no doubt the same stuff they’ve genetically engineered for reclamation. Grass that can grow on asphalt. Besides the grass, everything is dead, the hollow an amphitheater of kill, and the grass itself isn’t even green. His mother grew up here in Yellowroot. She ran right back the second Dooley was forced to retire and she could, and Avery has thought on it, how that promise of return is yet another reason people from here put up with what they do. If you work hard enough, you can retire back home, not unlike the promise of heaven, Avery thinks, yeah, “Almost Heaven,” and he snorts to himself. But Yellowroot was never really Avery’s home. It was the place where his mamaw lived. Dooley had kept them moving from the time Avery was born until he left for college, and after that, his parents kept right on going, Dooley laid-off here, mad at a foreman there, mine worked out in this place. But despite all the moving, they not only never left the state, they never even moved farther north than Nicholas County. They’d just circle and wander their range, like nomads or bears, so that Avery’s home, finally, is not a particular hollow, town, farm, coal camp, not even a particular county, but the whole foot-shaped swath of ground that holds the southern West Virginia coalfields. Until he turned eighteen, and left out, and learned.
He has an eye open for guards, not because their authority worries him—boys playing cops and trespassers—but because of the stupid hanky on his head. As the hollow narrows and draws in on itself, the ponds seem to widen, taking up more of the hollow floor, and all the debris in the rock channels is stained the same flat gray so he can’t tell what is live and what is garbage. The dull gray is not a real color, not a color water around here would ever run. It is a fake color, everything up here is fake—fake color, fake grass, fake ponds, fake stream. Avery ducks his head so he won’t have to look around him, and he smells his sweat, fruity.
Back when they’d visit his mamaw up here, he wasn’t Avery. They called him “Bucky” then. Bucky, their baby, everybody was proud of him, it was not only Mom who doted on him, but Patsy and even Kelly, too, and his parents decided Bucky had promise and would go to college, the first in the family and all that. And Bucky, too, believed he had “promise.” Until a lot later, when he learned, among other things, that it had more to do with the times than any promise he held. He graduated from high school later than Patty, Ronald, and Kelly, in 1978, when more kids were directed towards college. And it had more to do with the high school where Dooley’s workrovings landed Avery his junior and senior years, a high school with more middle-class kids than many schools in their territory. No, not promise. Happenstance, timing, and luck.
As he climbs, he grows mildly nauseated, his thoughts floating in his head like waves off hot pavement. For some time, he has felt the meat of his feet grinding up in his shoes, and finally he stops, takes off his glasses and sags over, his hands on his knees, and he pants. After his breath quiets, he hears no bugs, no birds, and the water in the ponds, that is silent, too, stagnant—no sound but the machinery overhead. A guttural amping up and down, it is not even white noise, doesn’t even provide the false peace of that, no, it is gun and grind and brake and back-up beepers in the distance. He sits himself on one of the rocks freshly blasted from the hill, and its sharp edges cut into his behind. He pulls off his loafers and his socks and wobbles a blister with his finger, tempted to bust it. Then, for some reason, he pulls back and really stares at his feet, and he is washed in a hot wave of shame. Shame at their pinkness, their baby look. At the thin lines impressed by the dress socks. Quickly, he squeezes the loafers back on, and he limps off his raw-edged rock and pushes up the hollow.
Although he pretends that he doesn’t, Avery understands what you lose to leave. What his mother learned she’d lose was different from what Avery learned he’d lost, but both of them learned it firsthand. She and his siblings closed up in the swelter of Baltimore for the two years Dooley tried to get out of the mines. Avery not yet born, and his mother trying to keep all five of them clean in the rundown row-house, Avery imagining, the gritty stoop and no yard, trash sweeping up
and down the street, catching in their railing, and the stink of rotting things. But that wasn’t it. In Baltimore or Detroit or Cincinnati or Cleveland or whatever city, it’s not just a matter of keeping down the dirt, Avery knows his mother knows. It is a matter of you yourself being perceived as dirt.To leave home is not just to leave a piece of land and family and friends, it is to leave your reputation, the respect you’ve earned from others, your dignity, your place. That’s the dilemma of his mother, how much more you lose than you’d ever imagine unless you’d already left and lost it before. Avery knows.
The leaving out, the education, how he paid. His mind forever after speaking to itself in two Englishes, there were many ways he split, but for him, they were all embodied by that double language. The hard sharp language spoken by the educated, clever language, language you pull out of your head . . . all the time shouting down his first language, an English smooth and wet, soft and loamy. Language you can wrap around, language that will work for you, play for you, easy in your mouth, welling up from a deep-knowing place under your tongue. His first language never bound him, it didn’t pen him in, while the other language’s words—“standard,” “proper,” “correct”—you must use like coins, shiny and rigid. The value of each one already fixed before you get hold of it, you can use each word in only one way. Although eventually, it wasn’t a split at all, couldn’t really call it a split, because a split would have meant he became both, and he didn’t. He fell in between both. He became neither.
He got the business degree at Marshall although it was the history classes that spellbound him, because even at nineteen, he knew he would eventually need job security a history major wouldn’t give him. Neither of his parents had enough schooling to know to warn him off the humanities, Avery somehow already knew that, so he worked on his business degree while taking as many history, philosophy, and sociology classes as he could, staying on a ninth semester because of it. Mom still liked to believe Bucky went to college because he was smart, but Avery learned why it was people went to college. And just how much or how little it had to do with brains.
Now he is rounding the final crook in the hollow, and then Avery finds himself face-to-face with the inside-out mountain. The perversion towers directly over his head. A wall of dead world the height of a small skyscraper, it is the biggest valley fill he’s ever seen, as sterile as a recently erupted volcano. Behind the top of the fill, there are some kind of heaps, might be a second wall, but it’s hard to tell, and behind those, the edge of the nearly level butt of the used-to-be mountain. But although he’s never seen anything quite like this, and although he is already dizzy from the climb, the sight does not make Avery stumble or gasp. It doesn’t surprise him. To the contrary. Avery feels calm. He stands with his neck craned, sweat weeping down his temples, dribbling the small of his back, and he knows this is the best view of the hollow head he’s ever going to get. He cannot tell, of course. It could be just a valley fill, but it could also be a dam, could have a sediment pond behind it or even a slurry impoundment. But he cannot tell, and you never know what they might be up to now, what new system or “technology.” That’s part of the reason what he sees doesn’t surprise him, even though he’s never seen land destroyed in quite this way, on this scale—and quite a few man-made disasters Avery has seen.
He drops his head, casts his eyes over the plain of bleak rocks filling what used to be a creek where he and his cousins fished, caught crawdads, built their own little dams. He can see between the rocks in some places, even from this far away, glossy colors of deep turquoise and brass orange. No, it not only doesn’t surprise him, it also, if Avery is honest, doesn’t horrify him either. And if he is more honest, the way he responds to it is even more revolting than feeling no horror and no surprise, because what Avery feels deepest—tell the truth, go on and say it—is a kind of satisfaction. Yes, the sight satisfies him in the way it confirms all he knows and all he suspects, and it brings with it too a perverse relief. Because if the entire truth be told, the slaughter also fulfills a secret unspoken urge Avery carries always. This itchy voice, this desperate chant, that begs: Okay. Let’s just get it over with. Let’s go on and get it over with, and at least then we won’t have to worry about what’s going to happen next. If we just go on and get it all over with.
Because there was one thing his mother was right about: nobody who went through Buffalo Creek was ever the same. Even though in the years immediately following it—the years his mother told her stories—Avery didn’t give it much thought, at least not when he was awake. Then, during a sociology class his sophomore year at Marshall, everything changed.
It was an upper-division class, fairly small, maybe twenty students. Avery kind of got into it by accident. The professor, a youngish man, took an interest in them all, and through that interest, he somehow discovered Avery had lived through Buffalo Creek. As soon as he learned this, he asked Avery for his story—actually, he pleaded for it, pleaded even before he knew whether Avery would resist or not, which Avery didn’t. He didn’t think he cared. He told Dr. Livey he didn’t remember anything before he woke up on the hillside after the water passed, which was what he’d told everybody all along (which was, almost always, what he told himself ), but Dr. Livey wasn’t disappointed. He’d take anything he could get. He asked Avery to speak about it into a tape recorder, told him he’d pay him as a research subject. Avery hadn’t understood his enthusiasm, but it flattered him, and he didn’t speculate too much about the professor’s fascination with his story. He just considered, first, the money, which he needed badly, and, second, pulling hard against his desire for the money, nearly overriding it, his fear of being alone in a room with a man so different from anyone he’d ever met before coming to Marshall. That worried him. Dr. Livey was not a West Virginia name, and he definitely didn’t have a West Virginia voice. He didn’t look local, either, and not just his clothes, but the long nose with its rounded lobes, the coarse longish black hair, the dark droopy moustache, and dark droopy eyes. In the weeks before he recorded his story, Avery mostly worried about what he would say in the office with this Dr. Livey before the tape recorder started. Telling the story itself seemed no big deal.
So one afternoon late in the semester, he found himself perched stiff on an orange-cushioned metal chair at a little round table, clutching a Coke Dr. Livey had bought him and talking into the purr of the black recorder. After a year and a half in college, he was acutely conscious of his accent and how it would replay through the machine, but he hadn’t yet learned how to tame it. He went on anyway, speaking as close to how he imagined a research subject should sound, while Dr. Livey nodded and made silent encouraging yes, yes, and? expressions, mute so as not to mar Avery’s precious story. The office had a single tall window that took up most of the only wall not gorged from floor to ceiling with more books than Avery had ever seen in a room so small, and through the window, the tepid November sun fell mild and full over every surface: the flat of the table, the tape recorder, Avery’s arms. Avery, the Coke can sweating in his hand, told his story as straightforwardly as he could, beginning with waking up on the side of the hollow and continuing into a few weeks after, while Dr. Livey scooted in closer and closer, as though the sharing of the story created a familiarity between them, when Avery felt exactly the opposite. And he tried not to look at Dr. Livey, the watery lemon light exposing every blemish on his face, the black pores, the errant hairs, but he could smell him, a smell like clothes closed up for a long time in an airless closet. Avery concentrated so hard on his accent, on his story, on keeping as much distance as he could from Dr. Livey without drawing attention to it, that it wasn’t until the next day it dawned on him he’d never told the story straight through like that to anyone. And he didn’t think he’d told it even to himself in the light. It had always been for him a wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night story when, half asleep, he was too unprotected to stop it.
When he got done, he looked up at Dr. Livey, waiting for him to pay him
so he could get out. But Dr. Livey was in no hurry. First he praised Avery for how well he told the story, then he puffed up with righteous anger—this didn’t surprise Avery, he’d seen it in class before—and he paced around and lectured at Avery a little about how Avery and all the rest of them had been exploited and abused, the companies, capitalism, and Avery nodded obediently, the urgency of his need to escape crushing any attention he could give this speech. Then Dr. Livey selected for him a book from his shelves, told Avery something about it that Avery didn’t listen to and stuck the check between its pages, and finally Avery was hurtling out the door, down the stairwell, and into the day.
It was mid-afternoon the Tuesday of the week before Thanksgiving. The sun thin and steady without heat in it. Avery, the book still in his hand and his backpack over one shoulder, found himself seeking dark. He ended up in Boney’s Hole-in-the-Wall on Sixth Avenue, the bar completely windowless and the lighting inside so weak you could hardly see the bartender. That afternoon, he was the only customer. He tucked himself into a back booth and waited. No one came over to see what he wanted. He placed his hands palms down on the sticky table, steadying himself, and he tried to think, but all that came to him were odors: the sour beer soaked into the table, the faint urine and sharp disinfectant from the bathroom behind him, the smell of Dr. Livey’s sweater. He felt that something had happened that he needed to figure out, but he couldn’t think. It was like he’d left part of his mind behind in the office and it hadn’t caught up with him yet. Something brushed his leg, and he leaned down and squinted and saw a dog under the table. The dog collapsed on its side and closed its eyes. Avery waited a little longer, burrowed there in the cave of his booth, the booth, in turn, buried in the bar, the bar also a close dark cave, and finally, without buying anything, he stuffed the book in his backpack and left.