Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

by Ann Pancake

  “I’ll tell you something else, too, Lace. Anita and me thought about it. Thought about selling out, even after me living my whole life here and Anita most of hers, not to mention all the family I got going who knows how far back on what used to be that mountain there.” He paused for a second, looking at the broad blunt mound. “Why not just clear out of this mess, I was better off than a lot of the people here, I had some savings, go buy a little place in Putnam County or somewhere like that where you can ignore all this if you want to. So they brought the papers to the house, we was that close. That’s when I found out you had to sign a form that said you’d never protest a mine again and would never move back within twenty-five miles of Tout.”

  I looked quick at his face then. I’d never heard nothing about that. He chuckled real low. “Now that’s illegal. I suspicioned it was, and I researched it, and I was right. But my neighbors and all, they didn’t know any better. They just went on and signed.” He shook his head. “What else could you do? If you didn’t, they’d just refuse to buy. But I refused to sign, not necessarily because I wanted to stay within twenty-five miles. Not even because, at that time, I wanted to protest a mine. But because a coal company wasn’t going to tell me where I could live and what I could say.”

  He sat quiet for a few more minutes. Pulled his gloves on and turned the ignition back over for the heat. Then he passed his hand, I could see those big knuckles knobbing up even through the glove, across the dusk-dimming houses. “Not too long after they bought the places, lo and behold, the houses started burning down. Wake up in the middle of the night, there goes another one. Couldn’t catch nobody doing it, but of course, nobody official tried too hard. The company said they knew nothing about it, claimed vandals must be the ones. But it seems awful coincidental to me, even though it also seems senseless as hell. Unless it’s to intimidate those of us left to get out.”

  He cocked his head, looking up past his visors towards the hump. Then he slumped down a ways in his seat to see better, and I did the same. The hump not much more than long broad shadow now, level along the edge, rolling a little way back. You couldn’t any longer see the thin grass.

  “There she is.Tout Mountain. ‘Reclaimed.’They knocked er down by at least half.” He brought his gloved hand to his mouth, bit down for a few seconds on his thumb. “And I’ll tell you something interesting, something I wouldn’t have thought.” His voice went gentler then, almost tender, like I had never heard it before. But instead of being a comfort, it raised the flesh on my arms. “The hardest thing of all about living through this, hasn’t been the blasting or the dust or the flooding or the fires or how they broke the community. It’s looking up there each morning, at a landscape you had around you every day of your life. And seeing your horizon gone.”

  I ended up spending that whole evening with Charlie and Anita. When he drove me back and dropped me off outside Mrs. Taylor’s so I could slip into our house, it was later than I’d expected to be, but not later than if I’d just pulled a shift. All the lights in the house were off but the porch, and I figured everybody was in bed. But soon as I opened the door, the porch light caught the white of Jimmy Make’s shirt on the couch in the dark.

  I stopped in the doorway to get my bearings. My eyes adjusted slowly, and I saw he was in his boxers, and a long-john shirt too small to hold his belly, a band of skin pushing out at the bottom, and, for some reason, his big work boots.There wasn’t enough light that I could read his face, but his body was crouched forward on the cushions. I could feel the coil in him.

  “I know where you were.”

  I pulled the door to behind me. I waited.

  “Kids n me stopped at the Dairy Queen. Connie said you’d gone to a rally in Charleston.” He’d had his head hunkered down between his shoulders a little, and now he raised it up so his face was pointed at mine, but still I couldn’t see his eyes. I said nothing. I wasn’t sure if it was worse to be at a protest in Charleston or at Tout with Charlie, but right after I thought that, I didn’t care. And then I felt a surge of hate for Connie, but then that went away, too. And all I felt was hate for Jimmy Make.

  Hate for his ridiculous boots that he needed on him to make him a man, and for his empty know-it-all-ness, and his spinelessness, and most of all, his I-don’t-care, while there sat Charlie and Anita in the ghost ruin of Tout, having lost almost everything except their will to fight, and Loretta and her family battling for their hollow, every rainfall that passed through a death threat, and still they never left. And so many other people I’d met in the past year and a half who were standing up against it, too, and my hate for Jimmy Make at that moment was the purest it had ever been, not a thimbleful of love to dilute it. And all I wanted was to throw something at him, something heavy and throw it hard, not even so much to hurt him as to see it break against him, the relief that would come with that shatter, and then he said, “Sometimes I think you’re more married to that mountain than you are to me.” And the hate rushed out of me like a hole’d opened in my back.

  He had named it. The marriage, it had been understood without either of us saying, we never spoke about. We fought about everything around it, but I realized right then neither of us had ever dared to name the marriage, but now Jimmy Make had. And when he did, me still standing in the door, the cold on my back, I suddenly saw that what tied us together wasn’t any longer that clench of thick harsh rope. That wasn’t it at all. What held us together now was a sinewy tangled-together nerve. A long stretched nerve that had never been tied right, had just been clapped together and then ingrown tight. And that nerve had been fraying for a very long time, but now it was on the outer verge of snap.

  By that spring, 2000, the only reason Jimmy and I’d talk at all was to arrange practical stuff, mostly around the kids, and to argue. We weren’t ever touching, either. Us dodging through the narrow house all balled in on ourselves, and some days, we were polite, we treated each other like company. Other days, we shot silent hate at each other, off our bodies, out of our eyes. In the meantime, it’d been a year and a half since I’d started that other kind of fighting, and already, even though I wasn’t fighting nearly as hard as many, I understood why people were as tired and frustrated as they were. If I got an answer to a letter, it was a form, usually only barely related to what I’d written. If I got an answer to a phone call, and that almost never happened, they blamed another agency, another department, they told me call somebody else. No matter what evidence people brought to permit hearings, seemed ninety-nine percent of the permits went through. If the DEP did come out and find a violation, they just wrote a little citation, demanded some diddly-squat fee that it was easier for the company to pay, and pay, and pay, than it was to fix the problem. “If there’s a legislator in this state not owned by coal,” Loretta would say, “I ain’t never heard of him or her, and I know coal lives upstairs in the governor’s mansion because no matter who a man takes in with him, he ends up in bed with coal.” You could bring a lawsuit, and some did, but most people didn’t have the money for that, and even those good lawyers couldn’t always work for free. Besides, coal ran most judges, too.

  So people were just plain worn out. Most of the ones who had suffered enough to start fighting were already tired when they began, and after a year or so, they’d get dragout beatdown exhausted, if they weren’t outright sick from the stress. And many people were sick from the stress, and not just the people fighting it, many people just living in it were sick from it. And what the hell? I’d ask myself again. What the hell is it? Because even if everybody had money to leave, I knew most of us would stay. And if those who’d left had any choice, most of them would run right back. Then I started thinking, especially of a night, standing in the black yard after Rhondell’d dropped me off, the unseen land close around me—maybe it was something about the mountains’ layers. Something about everything layered in them dead. All that once-live stuff, strange animals and plants, giant ferns and ancient trees, trapped down there for 250 million
years, captured, crushed, and hard-squeezed into—power. That secret power underground, that sleepy force lying all around, contagious somehow, catching, setting off the power pulls on top, the trickery and thievery, the violence and the loss, the way power will fight for power. The power under here, I told myself, if it can cause all that, it must also put a hold on us. Not greed for coal, not that kind of hold, we’d never got the profits from that. No. But just the pull, the draw, of so much power in the ground, and the kind of hold that makes.

  When was it I first started seeing the assumption that me and Jimmy Make’d just always be together? Looking back, I know I’d got a glimpse of it during the first year back home. But the first time I saw it naked, bold-lit, was that night in February when Jimmy Make named the marriage. Then once you see the assumption, you can’t any longer not see it. And then it’s not an assumption anymore. It’s no longer that invisible brace under your marriage, and after that was gone, well, I realized not much else was left besides that sinewy nerve. And gradually I was able to imagine how to just cut it, suffer that sudden terrible sharp pain, might actually be better. Fast, quick, terrible. Because how could I endure both the slow loss of the place and on top of that the slow loss of him?

  As I began to see all that, I started to shed a little of my Jimmy Make anger, some of my hate. I even started to feel, for the first time in years, a little tenderness, if not for Jimmy Make, and maybe it was, at least for us. For that third thing we’d been together. We still went at it vicious, same fight so many times we had it memorized, me screaming, stand up to them with me, have a spine, him bellowing, I worked in the goddamned industry, you cannot fight them.You’ll never win. But I was coming to see that what he considered fighting and winning was different from what I did. And the other difference was, he wasn’t raised on one little piece of ground like I was, and he’d never had to use that place to fill in for something he’d lost.

  Then we had the May flood, and that changed the fight between us, that raised the stakes, and then the July night flood, it forced my hand again in the most terrible way. I told Jimmy Make, I made my voice reasonable, “Let’s move back up in the Ricker Place, the water can’t get in there.”

  “We don’t got the money to fix up that place, and we won’t never have it long as we stay here because I won’t never find work.”

  So I said, “Then move the house to where Mom’s trailer was.”

  “And where would we get the money to do that? Besides, you know well as I do they’ll take Cherryboy next, and then what do you think might wash down in that cove there?”

  I had come to believe what Loretta and Charlie did, that people would have to die for the government to step in and do anything. “So how can you leave your kids live here?” Jimmy Make would say, and of course, that was it. That was it. Even though Jimmy Make didn’t honestly believe we’d ever get killed and just said that to get me to move. But I knew we would get washed out. I knew that in my heart.

  I can’t lose my kids. I can’t leave my place. One more time, the terrible choices. Sometimes it seems I’ve spent my whole life choosing between bad and bad—stay at college or leave, have the baby or die, marry Jimmy Make or not, stay in Raleigh with a decent job or come home with none, fight to keep the land or give in and keep Jimmy—only now the bad choices are three. Stay here without my kids. Leave the place with them. Or keep my kids here with me and risk losing them altogether.

  What I do know, after almost two years of not even getting anybody to listen, much less take action, is this: the best way to fight them is to refuse to leave. Stay in their way—that’s the only language they can hear. We are from here, it says. This is our place, it says. Listen here, it says. We exist.

  Bant

  “COULDN’T you say you were going over there for something? Sneak over and see?”

  “They don’t let us wander around wherever we want.” R.L. giggled then, at the foolishness of me, and me thinking, you know how they are, and here you go on anyway.

  “Or ask somebody.”

  “I done asked, I told you that. They said ain’t nothing over there to worry about.”

  “And you believe em?”

  He rolled over hard on the creek rocks to steel those eyes at me. “Listen, you-all wanna stay in here, you want your brothers to have jobs, your husband, you better just get used to this here. Or go on and move out. You don’t want that, do you?”

  The rocks chunky and mean in my back, sun showing too much, I could feel the places on my face shining out. And it wasn’t just what I knew of North Carolina, it was also the other people who moved and then came back, I’d heard them. Why, they don’t treat each other no bettern animals. Got to where I wouldn’t even open my mouth in public. I’d heard. And that Stanley boy, he just disappeared. Yeah, up there in Dayton.They never did find that boy.

  “Why don’t your daddy put in an application?” He was trying to make up a little now.

  “That ain’t the kind of mining he knows how to do.” I thought a second before adding what came next. “And he wouldn’t do it if he did know how.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t, would he? Rather be down in a hole all day?”

  Skinny-ass Ohio boy, his boots bigger than his legs, how can . . . how can you hate what you hunger so for?

  “You know all those deep mines are shutting down anyway. No future there. This is the future, what I’m doing.”

  “He’s gonna move back to North Carolina, get work down there, if he can’t get on at this place over Mingo.”

  “Well, you-all won’t be able to get much for that house.”

  Like we didn’t know.

  “You-all could go down there, save up your money, come back here, and open you up a small business. Like I’m gonna do in Ohio.”

  Blown all over with rock dust when he comes off each shift. Ashes, not coal, looks gone to ghost, he does. Dust ashes ghost.

  “I still think you could get up in there and find out for me.”

  “You’re talking a lot today, ain’t ya?” He rolled to his back, laced his fingers under his head. Fox-grinned. “Well, you do me a favor, I’ll do you one. Maybe.”

  A cold spot made in the base of my throat. I pulled myself farther from him, although I didn’t move my body, didn’t let him see.

  “You hear me?”

  I said nothing.

  “Ain’t talking now, are you?” He pushed his face closer. “You do me, I’ll do you.”

  “You said they’d never let you up there.”

  “Oh, I’d find a way if I wanted it bad enough.”

  The end of something. It just always was. And what was it to grow up in this ending place, butting always against that, what? All those little half-ghosts, hovering. Glaze out the thinking part of your mind and you can see them all over the hills.

  “I’m only fifteen.”

  “Yeah, and I’m twenty and running out of patience.”

  Corey

  B-BO AND David swear Seth and them have gone to Myrtle Beach for two weeks. They say Seth was bragging about it, which he would. That part sounds right. Bragging about what all they’d get to do down there in Myrtle Beach, not counting the beach—and even the beach is something Corey has not ever seen—but also about how they’d play miniature golf and do bumper cars. And, David says, Seth told about this speedtrack down there.You pay a couple dollars and race around the loop in this low-to-the-ground racecar. Corey feels his face harden up when David tells him this. David swears he saw Seth and them leave out of here two days ago with their Suburban loaded with so much stuff they had to carry this white box on top, and B-bo swears he saw the same thing.

  But Corey doesn’t trust them—he doesn’t think they’re deliberately lying, just isn’t sure they’re bright enough to really know—so he checks on the house for two days from the creek before he decides David is right. At least about them being gone. Who knows about the two weeks part, which means Corey and Tommy need to act fast. Although it’s not like they’re doing
something wrong or bad. It’s just Corey picking up his prize.

  Because this is where things have got to: Corey’s bike is totaled, he’s tried for hours to fix that wheel, but all he’s done is make it worse. And Bant says he can have hers, but Bant’s is a girl’s. Rabbit in jail for who knows how long, could be years, and Dad more cranky and hateful-acting than ever, him and Mom fighting day and night, and Corey’s not exactly on his good side either, after getting a DUI with Rabbit while under Dad’s watch. Mom didn’t like that at all. Not a snowball’s chance in hell Dad will help Corey now, and there in the old house the parts sit, oh, all that time and muscle and brain Corey put into gathering them together. Because of all that, Corey is being watched close these days, it won’t be easy to pick up his prize, even with Tommy’s help. He was whupped on good, both for going with Rabbit and for tying Tommy up, but ha, don’t care. Just pretended like it hurt. The real punishment is how close he’s watched.

  So on the third day, when Corey leaves the creek and sneaks through the yard to the shed, it’s after Bill Bozer showed up to see Jimmy and Mom’s long gone at work. Because of the high redwood-colored walls, no one can see him from the road. The shed is one of those portable aluminum things you buy someplace like Lowe’s in a couple pieces, then haul home in your truck and put back together. It doesn’t have a floor. It just sits on these wooden struts and the floor is ground. The double doors in the front of the shed that swing open to let out the four-wheeler are locked, but not with a padlock, although there is a part of Corey that would have liked a padlock, because then him and Tommy could have busted it off with a blowtorch and hacksaw like Dad and Bant did up the hollow. The double doors are locked with a deadbolt you can open from the outside with a key or from the inside with a lever. Corey has a plan.