Weedeater

by Robert Gipe

She put the red money bag in my hands.

  I said, “I’ll do my best.”

  And she said, “I don’t know how much is already gone.”

  I said, “Well.”

  She said, “It doesn’t matter to me. I brought it to you freely. But if you choose not to say where you got it, that wouldn’t bother me.”

  I said, “Well.”

  She smiled and said, “Thank you, Eugene,” which nobody but Granny called me.

  And I said, “Goodnight, ma’am.”

  And I reckon that was that.

  DAWN

  When Momma’s funeral was over, we went to the graveyard out Tallow Creek where Mamaw was buried. Didn’t hardly nobody go with us. Which was fine. But Gene went. When the burying was done, I went up to Gene, there with his brother about to leave, I said, “Gene, what are you doing here?”

  He said, “You reckon Hubert’s around?”

  I said, “I reckon he is.”

  Gene said he had the red money bag.

  I said, “You,” thinking Gene had got the money, but then I was like, aint no way. My thoughts that he had something to do with stealing that money, those thoughts were my own meanness.

  GENE

  Hubert walked up. I told him what I told Dawn, that I had the bag of money. He said give it to him. I told him I didn’t have it, which was true, I’d hid it before I come to Tallow Creek. Hubert asked when he could have it. I said I was working at That Woman’s the next morning. Said I’d have it then. Hubert said he’d like to get it tonight. I said I’d be at That Woman’s early as he liked.

  DAWN

  Next morning I lay on the bed at Mamaw’s and I thought of Nicolette. I thought how it was my job to put flowers on her table, my job to help her make a world she wanted to get up in the morning and run out into.

  I got up and went in the front room. Nicolette had made herself a tent between the sofa and the television, a pink blanket with a pink satin trim, a blanket I’d made a tent of when I was little. I got on my hands and knees and looked into the pink air of her tent. She set, her legs folded under her, giving a bunch of little plastic monsters a talking to.

  “Now you got to work the mule,” she said to a monster that turned into a spaceship when you took it apart, “and you,” she said to a purple monster with bottom jaw fangs sticking out, “you got to churn the butter.” She had a hundred tinfoil balls from Hershey Kisses lined up by color, red and green and silver foil.

  I said, “What are those?,” pointing at the foil balls.

  She said, “Hey, Mommy. Do you want to come in my tent?”

  I crawled in a little on my elbows.

  She said, putting her finger down along the rows of tinfoil balls, “These are the tomatoes and these are the cabbages and these are the onions.”

  Her face was flush as a peach.

  I said, “I thought onions grew under the ground,” said, “and I thought tomatoes grew on a vine, a whole bunch of tomatoes on every plant.”

  She looked at me, a monster in each hand, and said, “They’re monster onions, Mommy. Made of silver. And the cabbages are emeralds.”

  I said, “And the tomatoes rubies?”

  Nicolette said, “The tomatoes are just tomatoes, Mommy.”

  I said, “Who is that?,” pointing at a redheaded princess action figure.

  Nicolette said, “She’s the country music singer witch.”

  I said, “Country music singer witch?”

  Nicolette said, “She sings on the radio and it makes people be nice to each other.”

  I said, “She’s a pretty witch.”

  Nicolette said, “She don’t care about that, Mommy. She wishes she was ugly.”

  I said, “Does she?”

  Nicolette nodded. I said,

  She said, “With baloney on it.”

  I went and fixed her a baloney and tomato sandwich and she ate it in her tent, her lips smacking, me listening from a stool at the bar between the living room and the kitchen, and that’s how I got through that morning, got through till it was time to go to June’s and find out about the red bag of money.

  GENE

  Next morning I got to That Woman’s just as Dawn did. It was raining hard. A froggy strangler, Granny would’ve said. I sat in the car, thinking it might let up. Dawn jumped out of her mamaw’s Escort. The rain mashed Dawn’s hair flat. She looked like misery itself. I wanted to put Dawn and That Woman together somehow. That Woman’s mommy dead, Dawn’s mommy dead. They needed one another. But they was at odds. They didn’t need to be.

  The horn blew on a coal train when the train crossed the bypass and cut through the floodwall and across the river. A hundred train cars full of coal rolling by, stopping everybody on the bypass. The coal was flying.

  Killing each other. All that anger present in the world all the time, about to pop out like frozen biscuits from a roll. You shudder to think about people who don’t have people to stop them doing crazy things.

  DAWN

  June met me at the door with a big thick bath towel. She dabbed it on my cheeks with both hands and put it up over my hair and kissed me next to my lips and pulled me in close to her. The wet on me made spots all over her.

  Mamaw always gave June a rough way to go. June did stuff like going to those protests in West Virginia because she thought that’s what Mamaw would have her do. I never could understand why Mamaw had so much fight in her, fight for something bigger. June was big fight too, but I thought maybe she did it so she’d look right. I don’t know. Maybe I was wrong. June just always seemed to care more about what she looked like than what she was doing. Seemed to always disgust Mamaw, seemed to me, caring what you looked like. Course Mamaw always cared a crap ton about what she looked like—not so much her clothes or hair, or what people said about her out in town, but more what she saw when she looked in the mirror, which you might think is better than caring what you look like to others. But it’s still caring what you look like.

  After June dried me off, she looked down the hill, saw Weedeater sitting there in his Sentra. June said, “What’s he doing?”

  I said, “Saying goodbye to that money, I reckon.”

  I went upstairs to see what Momma left. Which was next to nothing. She didn’t have a box under her bed full of stuff she wanted to pack out if the house caught on fire. She didn’t have rings or CDs or books. She didn’t have a pile of makeup bottles and lipstick tubes and little eyebrow brushes and all kinds of nail polish. No pictures on the wall or sitting on furniture, or stuck in the mirror frames. Momma died borrowing off everybody, wearing whoever’s clothes were in the place she fell. I sat on the mattress in her room, smelled her dirty clothes, breathed in her rancid-butter-smelling sweat soaked down in the cotton. I picked up the blood-pink Kleenexes scattered around the bed, threw them away, and listened to the air conditioner moan.

  Aunt June came in the room, said, “This was something your mother made.”

  Aunt June came back from Kingsport to save my mother, save her from herself. In the end, I don’t feel like she tried very hard. Saving my mother wasn’t nine to five enough for her. It was an on call all the time job. I didn’t blame her. But my aunt didn’t look beautiful to me anymore.

  June held a clay cup out in both hands like it was sacred. It was a heavy thing, glaze dripped on it by somebody didn’t really know what they were doing.

  Aunt June said, “That is real good for a first pot. Real good.”

  I smiled, acted like I was glad to see it, like the pot was going to be some treasure I was going to pass on to my daughter. When June handed it to me, I just let it fall, let it smash on the floor.

  June picked up the pieces and said, “We can fix it.”

  After all that, I truly wondered did she really believe we could fix it.

  She was standing there holding the pieces when Hubert’s voice come booming from downstairs. He was laughing.

  Me and June went downstairs. Nicolette, Weedeater, and Hubert sat at the kitchen tabl
e.

  Hubert said, “That’s exactly what we ought to do with it,” and laughed again.

  * * *

  TURNS OUT there was a hundred and fifty kids from Drop Creek Elementary School who were supposed to go to Dollywood as part of a summer program and they lost their state money. And somehow Weedeater heard about it, and he told Hubert. And Hubert said he would pay for all them kids to go to Dollywood out of the waterfall money. And then he said anybody who wanted to could go and he’d pay for them too, until the waterfall money ran out. And that’s how in the middle of the last week of July in 2004, over five hundred people from Canard County went to Dollywood on the same day. Me and Willett and Nicolette went. Albert and Evie. June and Kenny. Hubert. Houston. Gene and his brother. Hazel went. Decent Ferguson went. All the people in June’s class. Everyone in this story who was still alive went, except Sidney and Belinda Coates. And Calvin. They didn’t go.

  Everybody from Denny’s coal mine went, all their families. They were already going, before Hubert said he’d pay. And then after people heard Hubert was paying, there was a bunch more. Big gang from Goldie Kelly’s church. Bunch of women from where Hubert went to get his hair cut. I mean, seriously. It was like all of Canard County.

  When Gene got that red money bag back, we didn’t know what to do with it. Cause Hubert never wanted it. He only took it out of the waterfall to try to get Momma out of trouble. Then Sidney wouldn’t have it, and then Momma was gone anyway. So Hubert said why not, tell them all we’ll go to Dollywood. Hubert told people to show up that morning at the store he run across the mountain and told them to get them a tank of gas. They were lined up back up the hill almost to the gravel quarry.

  People were happy too, telling Dollywood stories about kids that got lost and kids that got found and music they’d seen. They laughed about throwing up on too much kettle corn and they talked about how good that frozen lemonade was going to be. It was nice after all that dying, all them funerals, to see everyone glad to be up in the morning, glad to be going someplace.

  We convoyed to Dollywood, the cars and trucks and minivans with their Canard County tags strung down 11E like it was a high school football road game. Hazel said she was scared the Astrovan wouldn’t make the trip, so she rode with me and Willett. She sat in the backseat with Nicolette. Me and Willett sat up front. We were outside Morristown when Hazel leaned up and said, “Listen. Evie told me about the money for this trip.”

  I said, “Did she?”

  Hazel said, “I know where that money come from.” She said, “I’ll tell you if you want to know.”

  I said, “All right.”

  She said, “Before yall was born, back when most everybody here worked in the mines was union, they had elections in the union. Back when I’m talking about, the big man for the union was named Tony Boyle and he didn’t like the man running against him, man named Yablonski. Boyle didn’t like that man saying he was a crook. Which he was. So Boyle paid these boys in Cleveland to kill Yablonski, paid with union money.”

  Willett said, “How’d they do it?”

  “How they done it was they put a bunch of money out in Canard to pay retired miners to campaign for the union candidate for judge-executive. But those boys never campaigned for nobody. They cashed their checks and give the cash back to the union for them to pay the killers. A hundred men, three hundred dollars each.”

  I said, “I never heard nothing like that.”

  Hazel said, “Cause none of them dudes ever said a word. Them old coal miners, ones that fought for the union in the thirties, knew how to keep their mouths shut. And didn’t care to do anything the union said do.”

  I said, “Why you telling us this?”

  Hazel said, “Cause your great-grandpa Scratch was the union dude collected all the money. He’s the one had it.”

  I said, “So?”

  She said, “That’s the money behind the waterfall.”

  I said, “How do you know?”

  She said, “I know.”

  I said, “So how is the money still here? I thought you said it went to the killers.”

  Hazel looked at Nicolette, who was looking out the window counting cows, acting like she wasn’t listening. Hazel said, “Never made it. Them guys in Cleveland was such screwups the law caught them before they got paid. And after they got caught every FBI agent east of the Mississippi showed up in Canard, up in the business of every union miner, every official, everybody could spell UMWA.”

  “Wow,” Willett said.

  I said, “That many law and they never found the money.”

  Hazel said, “That’s right.”

  Nicolette started humming to the music on the car stereo. I didn’t say nothing. My questions were for Hubert. Why hadn’t he spent the money before? Why did he want to give it away?

  Nicolette’s nose smeared against the glass as she sang low, “Love is like a butterfly, a rare and gentle thing.”

  Willett said, “I read about this.”

  “Yeah,” Hazel said, “but this is true.”

  I said, “So the man didn’t get killed?”

  Hazel said, “Oh no. They killed him. Him and his wife and his daughter too. Middle of the night on New Year’s Eve. They just never got paid.”

  I said, “And where were they from?”

  Hazel said, “Who?”

  I said, “The killers.”

  Hazel said, “Cleveland, Ohio. But their people were from Tennessee. Around LaFollette.”

  I said, “Are they still alive?”

  Hazel said, “That I don’t know.”

  We drove a hundred miles in silence, me trying to think of something rare or gentle in my life.

  * * *

  WHEN WE finally got to Dollywood, people were pouring across the parking lot, kids excited, old people on the shuttle buses smiling and pressing their teeth back in place. When we got to where you go through the gate, there were groups from other places, dumping out of their tour buses, all wearing the same-color T-shirts, listening to people tell them when and where they needed to be back.

  The Canard people all went tear-assing up to the gate where Hubert stood with a fistful of tickets thick as a brick, handing them out to everybody who stuck their hand out for one. Soon as we got in, Willett starting telling me stories on all the Dolly Parton songs playing over the loudspeakers. At the museum we saw the rag coat Dolly had when she was little, her coat of many colors, and we saw her report cards, and all that kind of went over Nicolette’s head, but she loved the birds, the big bald eagle sanctuary. While we were standing there looking at the eagles, Decent come up eating a turkey leg and told us how her sister got proposed to right on the spot we were standing. And then June told us about a girl she knew in school who got proposed to on the Ferris wheel in the carnival part of Dollywood.

  Hubert got one of Dollywood’s motorized wheelchairs and went around on that with two of them Drop Creek schoolkids riding on his wheelchair armrests. Albert got him a wheelchair too, told them he needed one cause he was in rehab trying to get off drugs. When he went to get on Blazing Fury, that ride where you’re rollercoastering through the town on fire, I took his wheelchair back to the wheelchair checkout place and told them he was healed and wouldn’t need a wheelchair no more. So then I had to stay away from him cause he would have made a ruckus cause him and Evie and Hubert were all putting liquor down in their frozen lemonade and they were getting good and drunk and I found out how good and drunk when I told Hubert I’d ride Blazing Fury with him and he started crying saying it reminded him of when he worked in the mines, all that darkness and fire, and when the ride was over he kept on crying and wouldn’t get off and told the dude that told him to get off because there was a ginormous line of people wanting to ride, Hubert wouldn’t do it. He told them he was a disabled coal miner and that every gray hair in his beard was a friend he’d lost or a rockfall he’d been in. He told them all that even though he hadn’t worked in the mines since I’d been born.

  Whe
n Hubert finally got tired of riding Blazing Fury, I pushed him out in his wheelchair. I wanted to ask him again about the money, cause now I could tell him I knew about the blood money, and he might tell me something.

  I said, “Hey Hubert,” and he said, “What?”

  Right then Evie and Decent walked up. Evie said, “That’s enough.”

  Evie and Decent had been talking, and Decent, who didn’t realize how drunk Evie was, said to Evie maybe she ought to take Hubert on home.

  Evie said, “Come on, Hubert. Dolly says you need to go home.”

  Hubert said, “She never did.”

  Evie should have never mentioned Dolly, cause Hubert got stirred up about it, wanted to see her, wouldn’t turn loose of his wheelchair, but they eventually got him out of there, and Evie and Hubert left, with Evie driving Hubert’s truck.

  * * *

  NEXT WE went to Splash Country, which is the water park at Dollywood. They had a little kid area with a wave pool and Echo and the Bunnymen and Simple Minds and all these people June liked were playing over the loudspeakers, so I left Willett and Nicolette there, shivering wet with a corndog in each hand, and I went and got in the line for the water ride where you rode on a mat down through a tube like in a science fiction movie.

  The line was awful, standing there in your bathing suit dripping with a ton of other people all wet holding those slimy mats. I was there by myself with nobody to talk to, and I heard these girls a couple turns ahead of me in the line, and I don’t know what they were talking about exactly, but I could tell they were talking about drugs and they were going to the outlet mall, and you could see they weren’t up to no good, and they were mean to each other and especially mean to this one girl and that girl kept saying fuck you, fuck you, her voice thick and slurry and loud, all messed up, and I realized it was Belinda Coates, there at Dollywood with a bunch of girls I hadn’t ever seen before.

  Good thighs. Strong calves. She had forearms like she chopped wood. But she was standing there in a bikini, looked like she hadn’t eat in a month. I stood behind a bunch of young tall guys all pimples and lies and wished I could hear what Belinda and them were talking about. They had gone from picking on each other to scheming on something. The line moved and all the girls Belinda was there with screamed like crazy when they went down through the tube.