by Ann Pancake
Then I was hurtling over those bad rocks. Leaping from one surface to the next hardly slipping, something inside me knew how to go, and when I got right up on the blue, the dust settling, I saw it was Tommy, and I yelled his name, but he didn’t raise up. The back of his T-shirt was still heaving, and I reached down, jerked him up, pulled him to me. The beat of his heart I felt both in his ribcage and under his spine, he was completely full of it, heart, and he was coated with pea-sized pebbles and dirt and dust, and of course he was crying, and I said, “I should beat your butt for following me up here.” I meant it to sound mean, but it came out like a sob. He said something back through all the snot in his head, I couldn’t tell what, but then he turned to look at me, his face moving from scared to stubborn to insulted, and when I finally heard him sniffle, “Corey got to go,” I realized he was talking about the snake ditches.
Dane
DANE WAKES in the air between the bottom bunk and the floor, he comes to in that second he spends in the air, then he slams on the floor, still wearing the boots, and the boots are tangled in the sheet, so the sheet comes with him. And Lace is hollering, and then Dane thinks how much farther Tommy had to fall, and he reaches out and across the floor, patting for Tommy, but Tommy is not on the floor. So Dane gets on his feet and stretches up and reaches in the top bunk, pats again, Tommy not there, either, and Lace is in the room, her arms and legs stiffened, her hands open, her face yelling for Tommy, and Dane throws back all the covers, but Tommy’s not there. While Corey just lies on his couch, perched on one elbow, watching. He hasn’t even been knocked off the couch by the blast, even though he is smaller and lighter than Dane is. Then Lace wheels away so fast from the empty bunk and back to the hall that Dane gets knocked down one more time.
Corey vaults out of bed after Lace, smashing down on Dane’s arm as he goes, and the front screen slams twice. Dane wobbles to his feet, the logs high in his chest, heaving, and then he is climbing into the top bunk. He pulls himself into the top bunk, his hands mushy like they’ve lost their bones, and there he sits rigid on Tommy’s mattress, his legs crossed, the bottoms of his boots in his hands.
He’s sat there, not moving, for a long time, when he hears them again in the yard. Lace still yelling, although you can hear the loudest of it is over, and Tommy still bawling, Dane listens. He doesn’t hear Bant.
The logs lunge. “Move,” he tells his body. His body does not. He swallows, the logs right under his throat. “Move,” he says again, he makes it sound harsh, and this time his hands let loose his boots. His legs unfold, and Dane swings down low enough that he can peek out the window behind Corey’s couch.
Bant is stalking away from Lace, towards the Ricker Run, her shoulders hunched forward, her hair hiding her face. Dirt all over her clothes. Lace is hollering, “You hadn’t gone up there—you get back here!—he wouldn’t’ve followed—Bantella See, right now! Old as you are, you know better!” and Bant disappears around the back of the house.
Lace
EVEN BEFORE that visit from Bell Kerwin, we’d been hearing the heavy equipment. Muffled distant at first, but by October, exactly a year after Charlie told me about the permit, we were hearing it right up over our heads. Killing the trees, I knew that’s what they did first, and I knew it didn’t necessarily mean an impoundment was going in. But it for certain meant the death of Yellowroot. If I’d looked at it head-on, I don’t think I could have borne it. Because through all those hard, hard years, I understood now, as I’d lost my self, my dream, my dad, my mom—it was place crept in and filled the lack.
The other thing, though, I’d learned through that loss, is that anger is easier than grief.
By then, I wasn’t any longer just listening at the Dairy Queen. I was talking. I spread the word whenever I could, lots of people didn’t really understand what was happening, just like I hadn’t, because of how the industry kept it hidden up over our heads. And my manager, ole Connie Peters, didn’t like it one bit, but Connie didn’t like to confront anybody but kids, so mostly she just gave dirty looks. I’d tell people the truth, too, say I wasn’t against coal mines, “my dad and granddad and husband were all miners. I just believe they can do it a better way, a way that would actually give us more jobs and not ruin everything we have.” Some people would laugh at me, and some would wave me away with their hand, and a few would get mad. But the more people I talked to, the more I came to understand that most people, they thought just like me. True, there were some who’d admit it wasn’t pretty, but then say we had no choice, coal is all this place has ever had and ever will. But that bunch, I figured out, was one way or another making a living off it. Then there were a few who actually called it a good thing, said knocking off the mountaintops provided flat land and cheap coal. “Cheap coal!” Loretta would say. “Look what we’re paying for their cheap coal—for somebody in Ohio, Virginia, New York, Michigan, Iowa, Europe, even, to have their lights, we’re losing everything we got.” And I knew the ones who said that about the cheap coal were the few at the very top, the ones sick and crazy from greed.
Charlie always said if we’d have a vote on it, the majority of people would be against it. But around here, majority had never ruled. And the majority was scared to speak out. Sometimes I’d get almost as mad at them as I was at the companies, but several times, Loretta or Dunky sat me down, talked sense to me, and if I got myself calm, I heard. I already knew. How some were scared a family member would lose a job, and they were right, they were right. Those companies would blackball a person quicker than you could spit. Some were scared if they went against it, their neighbors would look down on them—a lot of people don’t want to cause a stir and stick out, all that raising we had against showing ourselves. I understood that, too, I knew I’d always been considered outlandish exactly because I didn’t mind sticking out.
They put in that new gate real early in the spring, but long before then, I’d walked up the hollow. I put a shell around me, armor on my heart, that’s how I did it. Anger, not sad. I’d seen the sediment ponds, then I’d seen the trees coming down. I watched the fill grow. I’d seen the impossibility of climbing it to check what was behind. It scared me to death that the kids would get up in there, and I threatened them to keep them out. Corey and Bant were the ones least likely to mind, so I warned Corey I’d take away his bike for a year if I heard he’d gone up there, and I cautioned Bant about the guards, said she might get arrested. It seemed mean to tell her that, but I wasn’t lying. I imagine Corey snuck up anyway.
I wrote more letters, made more calls—for the first time in fifteen years, I didn’t have a little one at home to watch, that made a difference, too—and I marched in a couple rallies in Boone County while Jimmy Make thought I was at work. I spoke out at a permit hearing. Then at a second one. It turned out I was good at that. By the time I got to that big protest in Charleston, the one with the TV cameras, Loretta and them were nudging me to the front of things, coaching me to talk.
It was outside a Lyon stockholders meeting at the Marriott, and the rich men in their khakis and golf shirts passing in and out those glass doors didn’t lower themselves to look at us, waving our signs from across the street, but Lyon’d also brought in their workers. They did that all the time, paid their workers to counterprotest or to speak at the permit hearings against us, their guys wearing those bizarre orange stripes up and down their pants legs and sleeves, “Lyon stripes,” they called them, like they were in some kind of brainwashed zombie army. Some of them even marched in step. A couple started antagonizing us, calling us out-of-state agitators. One hollered, “You’re takin food outta my kids’ mouths,” and I just hollered right back, “You’re taking the life outta my kids’ bodies,” and by the time the WSAZ camera got to me and asked me what I was doing there, I was mad way past stage fright. I had my say.
Somehow Jimmy Make never learned about the TV thing. Yeah, we didn’t get WSAZ at the house, but you’d have thought he’d hear it from somebody else, but little as he went ou
t anymore, I guess that saved me. He’d more or less took up living on the couch by then, had got down from Mountain Dew and Pepsi to Wal-Mart pop, dressing in nothing but boxers or sweats, the weight layering on him, the slack. The less paying work he got, the less unpaid he’d do at home. I couldn’t hardly get him to even keep an eye on Tommy anymore. And I remember how we slept together that year. I remember. He’d have already been in bed for an hour or more, separate on his own side, and I’d got practiced at undressing without a light. I’d climb in careful, keeping to my territory, I knew just how far to slide in, the halfway mark.The smell of Jimmy Make.The difference from how he used to smell. The old mattress with a bow in it and you had to balance yourself up on one side of that dip. I’d lay there for a while on my back, my whole body stiff, listening to the rhythm of his breathing, the quality of his breaths, trying to tell if he was sleeping. Usually he was not. But he said nothing, and I didn’t either. Each of our breaths moving against the other.
Some days he ignored me. Others he just wouldn’t lay off. Sneering about how I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, ordering me away from the treehuggers. But even Jimmy Make had sense enough to know that telling me what to do would just provoke the opposite. So he started pulling out his wild card. His big gun.
“What if somebody hears you’re in with the shit-stirrers and does something to one of the kids? Huh? Ever thought of that?”
“I’ll kill em,” I hissed back.
Jimmy Make choked a short sarcastic laugh. “You’ll kill em?You’ll kill em? Ha.You have no fucking idea.You wait.You just wait.”
“It’s the kids I’m fighting for,” I’d say. “Their future. So they’ll have something of their own to grow up for.”
He’d snuff. “Whatever. Future don’t matter when you’re dead.”
Of course, I’d never admit it to him, but what he said did scare me. I questioned the kids in private, had anybody said or done anything to them? The three youngest didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, and Bant would say only that it didn’t matter. But I still did worry, and although I kept fighting, I did not join the environmental group, no matter how hard Loretta and Charlie, and eventually, even Mogey, who wasn’t well enough to go himself, urged me to. Because regardless of what Jimmy Make believed, I did know the real reasons to be scared. Like how a year or two before, over in Logan, they hung effigies of environmentalists. How just that past summer, ’99, the Logan County Commission hired school bus drivers and other county employees to attack people reenacting the historic unionizing march on Blair, and they even beat up Secretary of State Ken Hechler, eighty-five years old, they bloodied him good. You’d hear about people like that Chapman woman over in Willette who brought a lawsuit against a mine, and somebody cut her brake lines, and the sheriff told her she better buy a handgun, carry it all the time. Guy in Kanawha County who spoke out against it on national television, they snuck in of a night and slashed the throats of his dogs. At first, I thought some of the stories about the intimidation were exaggeration or rumors. But then somebody threw a rock through Loretta’s car window when it was parked outside the environmental office over in Boone County. Then there was me, small-time as I was.
I never told anybody but Loretta about it.Thank God I was alone. I was heading back from Danville after getting groceries, we had to drive all the way over there now that the Prater IGA had shut down, and I’d stopped at the big convenience store in Riley to get gas and use the bathroom. The restrooms were off in the corner and down this short hallway, kind of hidden past the pop and beer coolers, and when I came out, a man was standing in that little passageway like he was waiting to get in the men’s room. I noticed him right away because he looked out of place, dressed up like he had an office job, tie and all, suit coat. He was blocking my way out, and I figured he didn’t see me, so I gave him this kind of how you doing? half-smile and said, “Excuse me.”
He didn’t move. “I know you,” he said, and, stupid as I feel looking back now, I thought he was coming on to me. I half-smiled again, this time with a yeah, whatever, leave me alone look, and I tried to ease past. He had his hand in his pants pocket, big loose dress pants. I felt his hand move in the pocket and press against my leg, his hand still behind the cloth, and, lord help me if I didn’t think at first it was his dick, and I just pushed harder to bust past and get away. But then he blocked me with his whole leg and pulled out enough of the gun that I could tell what it was. Then he dropped his leg and let me go.
People don’t do stuff like that around here. I’d never had a gun pulled on me in my life, never seen a gun pulled on anybody else, even though in this state, there are guns all over the place. I got myself back in the truck, and by the time I did, my whole body had gone to shivering. Even my teeth were chattering, I bit down but couldn’t make them stop. I had to sit there and wait before I was even safe to drive, I don’t know how many minutes went by. And I was shaken for several more days, but after that, I tell you what—it just made me fight even harder.
One day in February 2000, Charlie all of a sudden asked me if I’d like to take an afternoon and ride out with him to Tout. I glanced across the table at Loretta sitting beside him, and she raised an eyebrow he couldn’t see, so I knew she was surprised, too. A week later I lied to Jimmy Make I had to work a day I didn’t, and Charlie picked me up in the Dairy Queen lot.
It was snowing but not laying, flurries spiraling into the wipers, and us closed up there in the tight space of the cab, it made me a little nervous. I tried to small talk for a while, but Charlie never had gone for that. So we sat quiet for maybe thirty minutes, listening to the heater fan, the road tracing the narrows between creek and hill. Then, as we got farther from my side of the county and deeper into Charlie’s territory, he started.
“I was born and raised in Tout,” he told me. “My daddy moved off the mountain and down into the camp to work the mine when him and Mom first got married.That was 1922, and I was born a little after. So I seen the changes in Tout.” We hit a Y in the road, and Charlie took the left. Slant-falling snow, leafless black trees, no color anywhere. “During my boyhood, it was a company town. Company store, company doc, company preacher, ball team, scrip, whole nine yards. Me and Anita got married in 1945 soon as I got back from the war, and I worked Prince George Number 7 most of my young man’s life. Automation come in the ’50s, half the town left out, but I got lucky, they kept me on. Company sold off the houses, and I bought ours and fixed er up. But then Number 7 shut down completely, and I was out of work like everybody else.”We were pulling a steep rise then, and Charlie stopped talking as he shifted down. In three minutes, he’d told me more about himself than he’d let out in the past eighteen months. Then he began another sentence, stopped, and tried it a different way.
“I’ll tell you this, but I ain’t told Loretta, you keep it to yourself—after that, I worked several strip jobs. I did. Country needed the coal, I needed the work, I didn’t have any problem with that. And even when these big jobs first started coming in, yeah, the mountaintop mines, if I’d been younger, I probably would have tried to get on one of them. Didn’t know any better yet.”
Now we were passing the Tout sign, and Charlie went still again. I’d only been over here once, when I was a little kid, and at first, passing through, it looked to me like all the other gutted-out cast-behind mining towns I’d seen through my life. A big paintless boarded-up store still plastered with faded ads going clear back to the ’50s. The collapsing houses, some held standing only by kudzu vines, and the concrete steps leading to concrete foundations with nothing on top.
Then Charlie reached the end of the town, turned around, and started driving back. It was then I noticed how Tout was different. Because in those sad thrown-away towns I was familiar with, yeah, you would often see a place or two burned to the ground. But in Tout, I was seeing house after house after house had been torched. And most of the burned houses, I realized now, didn’t look like they’d been too old. And th
e fires themselves, I saw that now, too, had happened recently. Melted and charred aluminum siding peeling off the houses that hadn’t burned all the way to the ground. Floors covered with blackened rubble that the weather hadn’t smoothed down yet. Charlie pulled into the little gravel lot of the closed-down post office and turned us so we faced out, and two dogs on a ramble jogged through a ditch, but otherwise, not a soul moved anywhere. And directly above this whole eerie scene loomed a broad level hump covered with long yellow grass.
Charlie turned off his truck. We sat in total silence now, snow still sifting, afternoon sinking quick towards dark. I looked at Charlie’s hands on the wheel, his big swolled-up knuckles, all out of proportion to the rest of his body.
“They started coming in here late in ’94 trying to buy people out. They’re doing the same thing now in Omar, Four Oaks, Medlay. But us here in Tout, we were the first I know of.They come into your community that they’ve already started destroying, then they start making little side deals with people. Brewing suspicion and pitting neighbors and friends and family members against each other, make it harder for people to stick together and fight, oh, they’re great dividers, the industry is, they mastered that way back during the union drives. And that makes people even less want to stay, which brings the property prices down even lower. Not that a home under a mountaintop mine is worth much anyway.