by Lisa Alther
“That’s why you and me’ll be good to each other, honey. I won’t intrude on you, and you won’t ask me to desert Jim.”
“God, I’m going to be so good to you, Thelma.” He gathered one of her large breasts in both hands and nibbled on the nipple as it stiffened.
By the grapevine he heard an ATW organizer was coming to town. Together they mapped out a strategy and persuaded a few of the more intelligent workers like Mrs. Pritchard and Hank and Betty Osborne to join an organizing committee. After winning the election and defeating Mackay’s challenge that the votes hadn’t been properly counted, they negotiated a pretty good contract. Even the workers who’d fought against the ATW seemed pretty pleased with the benefits package. Except his father and brother, of course, who’d go to their graves still tools for the bosses. Almost everywhere he went, Raymond was respected and admired. At union meetings when someone questioned something he said, someone else would say, “This boy’s been up North. Better listen to him. Knows what he’s talking about.”
Raymond would reply irritably, “Look, down here we know everything they know up there, and then some.” Sometimes he wondered if these people understood what he was telling them. He reminded himself to be patient, to remember that they’d been in thralldom for so long that they needed reeducation. Eventually he’d organize classes to teach them about their proud Southern working-class heritage—the strikes and union wars, Harlan and Evarts and Gastonia, Barney Graham and Mother Jones and John L. Lewis.
Then a new machine was brought into the card room, and Mackay announced he was hiring a new woman to run it, instead of giving it to Mrs. Pritchard, who’d been reinstated and had seniority. Raymond, as shop steward, went to Mackay, who said, “Mr. Tatro, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
Raymond squared his shoulders. Who did this Mackay think he was anyhow, trifling with Southern working people?
“Let me tell you this, Mr. Mackay: You put somebody new on that machine, and we’ll all walk right out of this place.”
He turned red. “Mr. Tatro, if you walk out, you’ll walk back in over my dead body.”
At the rally at the high school gym after the walkout the ATW district representative said he was impressed with the local’s solidarity, but that they’d broken their contract, and that they’d better get their asses back into that plant and follow the grievance procedures. Raymond leaped up and yelled that if they went back in with that new machine still there, they’d never get it out again. He urged people to stay out until the machine was removed. The room erupted in cheers and angry shouts of agreement.
“People!” Raymond yelled. “We got right on our side! The Lord will lead us through the wilderness, friends, and succor us with manna!” Adrenaline pumped through his body.
Sitting on his porch that night, he was exhausted. Fired up by his speech, the local had voted to stay out. But here in the dark he felt silly. Who’d he think he was—a goddam preacher? All that Promised Land shit. His feelings of foolishness faded, and fear engulfed him. They were looking to him now as Moses. During the meeting he’d felt up to this role, but now he was just tired and worried. What if the strike failed and they lost their jobs?
He stood up from his rocker, got in his Jeep and roared down to the highway. As she lay in his arms listening to his version of the meeting, Thelma murmured, “Raymond honey, I declare, I do believe you’re just about the smartest man I ever did see. And I know you’re the sexiest,” she added, caressing his cock until it stood straight up, and rolling on top of him and impaling herself on it with a shuddering gasp.
As Raymond drove back to his house, he felt brave, strong and ready for anything management might come up with.
The next morning Raymond stood with the other strikers and watched the cars roll through the gates. He knew the scabs inside were just regular working people like himself, misled by capitalists. But damn it, they were stealing their brothers’ jobs! Instead of salt of the earth, he saw thick-lipped black faces with slanty foreheads, fluffy blonde bouffants and bright red mouths, hillbillies full of hookworms. He wanted to murder the ignorant fuckers with his bare hands. Cunts, jigs, and trash, too dumb to see what the strikers were trying to accomplish. As the cars exited that afternoon, the strikers scattered tacks across the access road. They yelled insults, threw eggs and tomatoes, and waved signs saying “SCABS, DON’T COVER UP OUR WOUNDS!”
Prince and Mackay and several supervisors whisked across the line every morning in Mackay’s big Buick, Mackay staring straight ahead. But Prince and the others who’d been there a long time looked upset. To Raymond they had become simply the Bosses, fattening themselves on his people’s labor. He’d spit when Mr. Prince caught his eye. Jed and his father arrived every morning in Jed’s Chevy. Jed would rev his engine and fly through the pickets with disdain for their safety. This infuriated Raymond, who gave Jed the finger. Once he shouted at them that they were traitors to the working class. His father rolled down the window and yelled, “Where was you when I was on Guam, you damned Commie?” Raymond didn’t see his father’s point, but it did wound him. His own father didn’t understand what he was doing or why.
The union refused the strikers benefits, so they had to use their savings. Raymond knew it wasn’t so bad for him because he didn’t have a family. Plus which he had a big garden and some animals. But some of the others were really hurting. A few tried to find other work, but nobody would hire “Commie agitators.” Some were starting to look worried. Raymond assured them management couldn’t hold out much longer. He devoted himself to keeping morale up, getting the pickets to singing, “Oh when them scabs/ Go marching in …” Townspeople stopped by with casseroles. Sometimes they donated money and told the pickets they were one hundred percent behind them, which cheered things up.
But then the Confederate statue was blown up and blamed on the strikers. Management got a restraining order so only two could picket each gate. Townspeople stopped coming by. If they did, they shouted that they wished they could be on vacation all year round too.
“You blew that thing up, didn’t you?” he asked Jed at Sunday dinner.
Jed grinned. “Why would I do something like that?”
“So it’d get blamed on me. You done things like that all your life.”
“Ah, you’re crazy, Raymond.”
But Raymond had to hand it to his kid brother: He was a lot smarter than he looked.
Strikers started drifting back in. Raymond ordered them, begged them, to stay out. But they looked at him sourly and explained that, unlike him, they had families, mortgages, and car payments. They’d sold off their belongings and gone into debt following his vision. Downtown they crossed to the other side of the street if they saw him coming. Some had to move away from Newland. The following year employees voted the ATW out. Pretty soon after, Arnold got a contract from the Defense Department to make zipper material for body bags for Vietnam. At the end of the year they declared a five percent stock dividend.
Raymond sat around the house. In a matter of months he’d gone from nobody to hero and back to nobody again. Worse than nobody, the whole town despised him. They’d be bound to, since they’d all sold out and he hadn’t. He was ahead of his time, was all. In a hundred years what he was trying to do would be appreciated. Hell, in twenty years maybe. But what good did that do him now?
“What you wanna go being a hero for anyhow?” Thelma asked. “Look at poor old Jim in his wheelchair. There’s a hero for you. You a hero to me, honey. Ain’t that enough?”
He tried to convince himself that it was enough. He pumped diesel fuel at the truck stop, ate Thelma’s dinners in the evening, went home and did chores and slept. It was an honest, hard-working life, full of integrity. It was how working people all over the world lived. Why then did he stalk the hills around his house missing FORWARD meetings, missing strike rallies? His analysis had been right. Where had things gone wrong? Some nights he’d listen to Thelma agreeing with every word he said and telling him ho
w wonderful he was, and would miss Maria fiercely. If only Thelma would argue with him, put him down sometimes, challenge him. As long as he fucked her, everything was fine with her. But Maria had cared about his political analysis, spoke his language. Thelma didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
One night he gave her a copy of Das Kapital saying, “Thelma, there’s more to life than slinging hash and having orgasms.”
“Yeah, they’s Saturday night TV and emptying your husband’s bags.”
“There’s growing and changing. I try to help you, Thelma. If you’d just open your mind, you might learn something.”
“Honey, if you’d just shut your mouth, you might learn something.”
“What?”
“Look, Raymond, I’m nobody special. Just a regular waitress at a dinky old truck stop, with a paralyzed husband.”
“But that’s the whole point. That’s not ordinary. Jim isn’t in that wheelchair by accident.”
“Honey, once you in a wheelchair, why don’t matter.”
“But it should. Why aren’t you and Jim angry? Why aren’t you planning an action around it?”
“Raymond honey, I don’t know who it is you want me to be, but I ain’t her. Now if you want me like I am, you come on back here as often as you like. If you don’t, just keep your distance. Cause I like myself and I don’t need you dumping on me.”
“I’m trying to help you, Thelma, not dump on you. Sometimes I think you misunderstand me on purpose. But being misunderstood is thing new to me.”
“Look to me, honey, like you got you a need to be misunderstood.”
“All I’ve ever wanted is to be in a setting where the people around me understand me and agree with me.”
“Tell me about it.”
As he roared back to his house, Raymond realized he was alone again. Thelma was deserting him right when he needed her most. That was just about what he’d come to expect from women.
Raymond went to Tatro Cove for his grandfather’s funeral. After a service at the house they all “walked that last mile” with Grandpa Tatro, weeping up the hill behind his house to the family burying plot. Eight grandsons, including Jed and Raymond, toted the coffin. Grandma Tatro led everyone in her husband’s favorite hymn in a wavering voice: “Oh ye young, ye gay, ye proud,/ You must die and wear the shroud./ Time will rob you of your bloom./ Death will drag you to your tomb.”
Those still living in the cove knew the hymn. Those who’d left could only join in on the chorus, which boomed out over the mountains: “Then you’ll cry, ‘I want to be / Happy in eternity!’”
As a kid, Raymond had been drilled like a Catholic learning the rosary on who lay beneath each headstone. The first Tatro of Tatro Cove was Corliss, a long hunter originally from the valley of Virginia, one of the over-mountain men who fought so fiercely at King’s Mountain. The story went that if someone admired one of his possessions, he’d insist they take it: “I don’t want nobody envying me on account of a lot of useless junk.” He also used to say, “Tatros work to live, they don’t live to work.”
As the grandsons took turns with the shovels, Raymond looked past the stand of grey headstones down through the poplars to the cove. His grandpa’s house sat on the site of Corliss’s original log cabin. And down the cove toward the highway were the houses now inhabited by his cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. Near each were barns, sheds, gardens, and pastures. Tatros had been breeding and loving and dying in this cove since 1760. Over 200 years, close to ten generations. A way of life had evolved here based on good manners, hospitality, self-reliance, leisure, and responsibility for neighbors and kin. Rather than production, consumption, competition, and confrontation. All his agitating at the mill was to get workers a few hundred more dollars a year, with which to buy a lot of “useless junk.” The company, the union—two halves of the same plague. Why, he’d been nothing but a pawn!
He handed his shovel to Jed and stepped back. His grandma, Uncle Corliss IV, and Aunt Verbena stood in the front row. Next came his father and mother, Sally and her children, and his uncle Phil, a schoolteacher in Cincinnati. Then M.G.’s family. M.G. owned the Cadillac-Olds dealership in town and had a new brick ranch house on the highway. Then Lem’s and Lyle’s families. Lem worked at Associated Coal’s #26 mine and was in the UMW. Lyle owned his own Mack truck with “The Flying Goose” painted on its cab and hauled coal to the tipples from small truck mines. In the last row was Royal’s family. Royal did some lumbering, some farmwork. Sometimes he worked for a day-labor pool in Cincinnati. He used to work in the mines, but had the beginnings of black lung and had refused to go back. During the War on Poverty he’d been a Happy Pappy, planting locust seedlings and learning how to fill in applications for nonexistent jobs.
They still honored age in his family, but otherwise it appeared to Raymond that they’d adopted the values of the capitalists, basing family status on accumulation of junk. This fall from grace, he realized in a moment of searing illumination that made the cove tremble before his eyes, occurred when the first Tatro sold his labor and used his earnings to buy necessities—rather than laboring directly to produce necessities. At that point he became dependent on outside forces. The solution, therefore, was to produce what you needed with your own hands from your own land, to decline the junk capitalists offered for sale, to pare your life down to essentials and see how much you could do without, rather than how much you could accumulate.
Back at the house, Raymond, still shaken by his hilltop vision, stood studying the color photo of his grandpa in his coffin. Next to it hung those of each family member who’d died since the invention of color photography. There was a sameness to Tatro corpses. Some year a photo of his own corpse would be hanging here. And what would he have accomplished? How would he be remembered? Would his descendants speak of him with respect, as the current Tatros did of old Corliss, the long hunter, the over-mountain man, the veteran of King’s Mountain? Would anyone name his sons after Raymond? The best gas pumper in East Tennessee …
He overheard Lem in the corner of the room asking Jed what work Raymond did. Jed said, “Oh, I reckon he’s some kind of professional bum or something.” They laughed.
Raymond felt humiliated. Jed thought being married to Mr. Prince’s daughter, being foreman at the mill, made him something special. He was too ignorant to realize that other people didn’t necessarily share his values. But he preferred Jed’s contempt to his pity, which he had bestowed upon Raymond in great quantities ever since the strike had flopped.
His grandma was saying, “Now, let’s see, was that the year Lyle’s baby died of the whooping cough?”
Aunt Verbena replied, “No, honey. Remember? It was right after Royal’s boy rolled his Chevy offen Raven Ridge.”
His grandma began talking vaguely of moving down the cove to Aunt Verbena’s. Verbena, her sister, was married to Corliss IV, who was actually Verbena’s second cousin. Everyone called him Cor Four. Verbena was a family name introduced in the 1800’s by Corliss Three, an herbal doctor. Cousin Royal’s full name was Pennyroyal.
“But law, I don’t know. I don’t reckon I ought to leave this place empty.”
“I’ll live here, Grandma,” Raymond announced. He realized that his relatives in Tatro Cove were the Saving Remnant. That it was up to him to guide them back to their original mission, which they’d fallen away from.
When he moved in, the ground was still squishy from winter rains. He holed up with a stack of seed catalogs and emerged when things had dried out to dig up the garden and spread rotted manure and plant crops. He ordered fruit trees, vines, and asparagus roots by mail. He brought his chickens and cow up from Newland, and bought a couple of hives of bees and two unshorn sheep. He planted feed corn in his kinfolks’ deserted patches and taught himself to make cottage cheese, cream cheese, hard cheese, butter. He figured out how to shear his sheep, and put the wool in bags till next winter when he’d have time to figure out what to do with it. He felled trees
for winter fuel.
He decided it was like being crippled and learning to walk upright again. He watched Cor Four and asked questions, feeling sheepish that he had so resolutely turned his back on his family when he left for New York. Because it had now become clear to him that they were the Chosen People who’d preserved the ancient skills and traditions. His assignment was to render those skills and traditions operative again, to make his kinfolk aware of the value of the way of life they were now taking for granted. Capitalism was in its last days. And as the industrial valley in which Newland sat fell into ruins, here in the mountains would reside a race of people who could point the way to a more just and humane post-imperialist world. Meanwhile, during the period of decline, those in the valley who understood what was happening faster than their brethren would find refuge and inspiration here in Tatro Cove.
Although his house was wired for electricity, Raymond didn’t use it. He got water in a bucket from the creek and stored dairy products in the old springhouse. He cooked on a wood stove and crapped in a smelly old two-holer out back. The summer days were long, and he was usually ready to sleep when it got dark. For entertainment he discovered which woods to walk in to see trillium, which rocks were covered with wild columbine. He began recognizing and naming individual chickens and watching their complicated social life. He became aware of the play of sunlight on the hill across from his house over the course of each day. At night he sat on the porch in the dark, watching the fireflies, listening to the animals settle down for the night, and trying to teach himself to play his grandpa’s banjo.
He took delight in each item he discovered he could do without, lining them up one by one on a table in the living room. He decided two blankets on his bed instead of three were plenty. If he shivered a little at night, the shivers were pleasurable because he knew he was reducing his reliance on products of the capitalist system. Then he realized that if he had a down-filled sleeping bag, he could give up blankets altogether, plus not have to stoke the stove at night, thus reducing his need for gasoline for his chain saw. So he ordered an arctic sleeping bag by mail from L. L. Bean, from whom Justin had always ordered his chamois shirts. At the last minute he added a chamois shirt, a down vest, and a wool lumberjack shirt to his order, knowing they would be among his last purchases from the consumer society. Warm clothes meant he needed less firewood and less food. He also realized that he could cut down on store purchases if he did some serious hunting and fishing, so he added several hundred dollars’ worth of equipment to the order.