Undiscovered Country

by Kelly O'Connor McNees

  “I promised you, didn’t I? Never doubt my promises, Hick.”

  If she only knew how I lived solely for those promises these days. “But how did you get them to agree?”

  Nora paused. “I told them we would bring a gun in the glove box.”

  “A gun? Do you even know how to shoot a gun?”

  “I do,” she said, “but this one is just for show. I put the cartridges in the teapot in my sitting room.”

  She collected me in her gleaming Buick, and we drove Prinz out to a kennel on Long Island where he would have the run of the clover-pocked fields. Then we set out north, through the Adirondacks, with the top down. The scarves we wore tied over our hair whipped in the breeze and twisted their ends toward each other like fingers. We were giddy with the freedom of traveling alone and unnoticed, just two middle-aged biddies, anonymous in the way plain women are. But what we felt—the deep-down-in-the-bones gratitude at having found each other, the understanding that our long, lonely slogs had been leading us, step by step, to each other—was an aria in my mouth and I was not afraid to sing it.

  Reaching Burlington and Lake Champlain felt like yanking open a grimy window shade. It was just so lush and green—enormous trees, crystal clear water, hawks in the trees and herons soaring over the lake. It was a breezy July day, and Nora drove the whole way because I still didn’t know how, though she threatened to teach me. I rested the back of my head on the seat and squinted at the bright blue sky. From this position, it looked like the very same sky that hung over the barren prairie, and one could almost be fooled, except for the scents the breeze carried. In Bowdle, it was eau de cow pies, the tang of iron in the dirt; in Vermont, everything smelled fresh and clean, of sap and rain. I thought of the trout as big as my arms that were likely swimming in the lake.

  Nora glanced over at me, divining my train of thought. “Are you hungry?”

  I smiled. I was starting to feel something strange. The muscles in my face felt loose and my shoulders had descended by about an inch. My skin felt warm. I wondered for a moment if I was about to have a heart attack—I reached instinctively for my cigarettes, as if they could save me—but then I realized what it might be. The phenomenon people called relaxation.

  The gravel crunched beneath the tires as she pulled in to a roadside hamburger stand off Route 2. Its red-striped awning rippled in the breeze over two picnic tables. We ordered fish sandwiches and french fries and apple pie.

  When the food came up, we took our trays to one of the picnic tables and dug into the deep-fried bliss. In the weeks leading up to the trip, I had gone around and around in my head about what the future held and whether I had made a huge mistake in leaving my job. But somehow, out in the fresh air and far from New York, I was able to make some kind of pact with myself. I’d get back to the fretting soon enough. For the moment, I wanted just to be in my skin, next to Nora, with a view of the mountains. In the morning, we would continue north to Quebec City, Le Château Frontenac, where, Nora had promised, we would dip strawberries from the hotel garden into our glasses of champagne. We would lie on the coverlet in the middle of the day. Nora would light a cigarette in her own mouth and then hold it to my lips for me to take a drag.

  For now, there was a gull casually sidling toward us and our food. I laughed.

  “Shoo!” Nora yelled, and it screamed at her and took off.

  “Darling,” I said, giggling, “you’ve a bit of mayonnaise on your lip.” A few strands of hair danced around her face, golden in the sunshine.

  She licked the mayonnaise off. “Oh, Hick,” she said, taking my hand. “Why can’t it always be like this?”

  “Let’s pretend it is,” I said.

  Chapter Twelve

  August 1933

  To pretend that way was a refuge, but one that could not be sustained. After two weeks of bliss, we returned to Washington. Nora reclaimed her role as first lady of the land, and I traveled from Washington by train, then two hours by bus, on my way to Morgantown, West Virginia—the first stop of my new job.

  Nora hadn’t been exaggerating when she said she had a hundred ideas for what I should do now that I’d been, ahem, retired from reporting. The government was hiring, and my unpaid bills made the decision easy. I thought of the job as “itinerant paper pusher for Uncle Sam,” but “investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration” was my official title. It was a title trumped up by Nora, I knew, to make the task sound more journalistic and less like what it actually was—traveling the downtrodden swaths of this great land, shadowing local administrators at budget meetings and typing up dreary reports of their troubles. Politics, along with a healthy dose of old-fashioned bureaucratic incompetence, was keeping the people from getting the food, jobs, housing assistance, and other help the president had promised in his New Deal. Harry Hopkins, the head of the agency and my new boss, claimed he was depending on my reports to figure out how to get around the horseshit and actually help people.

  It was a far cry from a front-page byline, and I missed New York and my evenings at Dom’s. John, of course, still had not spoken to me since the day I’d left the newsroom. And I missed Nora. The worst part was that I’d had to sublet my Mitchell Place apartment—I’d be traveling constantly and it didn’t make sense to keep it—and had to send Prinz out to the Long Island kennel indefinitely. But things had changed. I had to accept it. If I didn’t die of boredom in the new gig, I thought I’d be all right.

  The half-full bus to Morgantown smelled of sweat and tobacco juice that made slick spatters on the aisle floor. I wrenched open the small window next to my seat, hoping to get a whiff of the clean mountain air my travel book promised. The faint breeze did little to remedy the aroma of the bus, but I liked the improved view. The vast forests rolled up one side of the mountain and down the other, like waves on the sea, and here and there streams and chalky gray crags broke through the mass of green. The scene would have made a pretty postcard if it hadn’t been framed by the grimy window.

  Beside me, a man in a stained undershirt picked his nose with a dirty finger and examined what he pulled out of it. I puffed my cheeks in disgust and turned back toward the window. The man then unwrapped a sandwich that seemed to consist of raw onions, pickles, and horseradish so strong it made my eyes water. I inched slowly closer to the far edge of my seat.

  “Say,” said the man as he licked his fingers, “how about a drink before we go our separate ways?”

  If ever I doubted that my preference for women proved I had both good sense and sound aesthetics, this man offered ample reassurance. “I’d love to,” I said in the coy whisper of a debutante, “but I’m wanted for murder. Can’t take the risk of being seen.”

  His eyes grew wide and he turned away just as we pulled, mercifully, into the Morgantown bus station. He stood, swung his bag over his shoulder, and began edging up the aisle, as far away from me as possible.

  In the parking lot, a lanky man leaned against a car, squinting into the sun and holding up a sign that read hickok. I made my way over to him, my overnight bag banging against my knee, its contents sloshing. The humidity had turned mere breathing into a chore, and I was longing for a bath, a meal, and three fingers of bourbon, though not necessarily in that order. Nora had tried to extract a promise from me that I would not drink while I was on the road, but I’d said only, “I’ll try,” and made sure to pack the good stuff so I wouldn’t be out combing the mountains for moonshine come evening.

  “Clarence Pickett,” he said, and put out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Miss Hickok.”

  I liked him instantly because of the unhurried way in which he spoke and his kind blue eyes. Clarence was the head of the Quaker relief services, volunteers from the Society of Friends who had spent decades serving the people of coal country in West Virginia. What seemed like the permanent poverty of this region had grown much worse when all the mines shut down a few years back. From my advance briefing, I had learned that Clarence and his cohort del
ivered food and first aid kits, blankets and towels and canning jars. But all of that was like a whisper in the gale.

  “How did you get roped into being my chauffeur?” I asked. The county must be pretty bad off, I thought, if an administrator couldn’t be bothered to pick me up himself.

  “Well, the government people will have plenty to tell you, I’m sure,” Clarence said as he folded the sign with my name on it and put it in his pocket. “But I wanted to get you out of town and into these camps so that you could see what we’re dealing with.”

  That sounds ominous, I couldn’t help but think. Clarence waited patiently while I sucked down a Pall Mall and then opened the passenger door for me. He crossed in front to the other side and took off his hat before settling behind the wheel. I smiled at the way he sat erect, with the top of his head gracing the car’s ceiling. His face had a scrubbed look, and though I was entirely wilted, he seemed as cool as a swimming trout, as if those who were right with God could travel in their own pleasant weather systems.

  Before long, we were outside Morgantown and sliding deeper into the hills on narrow roads that were dark in midday beneath the tunnel of trees. A pheasant wandered into the road, and Clarence braked gently to let it pass. On our right was a shack that was completely overgrown with honeysuckle, as if the mountain had reached out its arms to smother it to death.

  “Where to, Mr. Pickett?”

  “Osage, one of the towns that make up this region they call Scotts Run. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of deprivation in your line of work back in New York City, Miss Hickok, but I feel I have to tell you to prepare yourself.”

  I didn’t like the sound of Clarence’s warning at all. I was only here to document the dull work of bureaucrats in airless rooms—not to see any camps for myself, not to have to steel myself against some devastating sight.

  “Oh, and if anyone offers you a drink of water, don’t take it,” he said. “It all comes out of the same river as the diphtheria.”

  We pulled into a clearing, and Clarence parked the car in the bare dirt. A sloping lane ran along a stream, and shacks and tents dotted the side of the hill all the way down. After the smell—human waste mixed with something chemical I assumed had to do with the mines—the first thing I noticed was the black dust. I dragged my finger through it on the hood of the car.

  “That’s coal dust,” Clarence said, gesturing to the headlights with his long finger. “The mines open occasionally for work and it all gets stirred up again. You’ll find it in your teeth tonight, in the seams of your clothing. There’s no avoiding it.” We walked into the trees, many of them strangely bare, and over to the riverbank.

  “And here we have the ‘run’ this place is named for,” Clarence said. “More like a walk. A long, filthy one at that.” The stream moved slowly and paused in eddies tinged an unholy array of colors—green with some soap-fueled overgrowth of moss, a foaming chemical red-orange, a slimy yellowish brown from God only knew what.

  What in the hell have I gotten myself into? I thought.

  I recoiled but then tried to conceal my reaction, but Clarence shook his head. “You don’t have to try to be polite for their sakes,” he said, sounding angry for the first time. “This here is a wretched place, and people living this way while others eat prime rib in Manhattan is a sin as egregious as murder. These folks aren’t exactly proud of living here, so don’t try to flatter them or pretend you haven’t noticed the conditions. Let them see your outrage. It’s one of the few kindnesses we can give them.”

  We walked back to the lane and over to the first shack, a one-room hovel of nailed bare board and a cobbled-together tin roof. A curtain hung where the door should be, so, instead of knocking, Clarence called, “Hello?” A breeze stirred the fabric, and I saw what was behind it: a dirt floor, a table with a single chair. On the table was a bowl full of scraps most country people would feed their pigs: apple cores, potato peels. A pair of flies circled the food.

  A woman with a weathered face and greasy clump of hair emerged from behind the shack, a heavy pail full of sopping laundry propped on her hip. Several small children orbited her skirt, each of them stark naked and streaked with mud.

  We walked over to her. I drew in a breath at the sight of a girl about six years old, covered in sores all over her trunk. Some of them were scabbed, but the others were shiny with pus. She sat down in the dirt and whimpered.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Johnson,” Clarence said. “I have someone I’d like you to meet.”

  The woman set the pail down and wiped her hands on the front of her dress. Then she plucked up the smallest child, a little blond boy with a snub nose. He clung to the shoulder of her faded calico dress, which was threadbare at the hips and revealed her bare skin beneath. Even undergarments seemed to be a luxury these folks could not afford.

  “This is Miss Hickok,” Clarence said. “From Washington, DC.” I opened my mouth to remind him that I was a New Yorker, actually, but then remembered I no longer lived there.

  I held out my hand. As the woman stared at it, I got a whiff of her and the children, and it took everything in my person not to take a big step backward. I thought of the various pests that might be making a home in their hair and felt my skin begin to itch. There was something familiar about her—her posture, her wariness. It plucked at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

  Clarence continued to broker our meeting in his unhurried way. “Miss Hickok has come to talk with you all about how things are going for you here, what you think the government should do to help. She is here to advocate for you all.”

  The woman’s mouth twisted into a wry smile I could see she reserved for expressing disbelief in things she’d heard tell of but never seen— elevators, ice cream, talking pictures in movie houses with plush seats and electric fans. Never in her life, I could see, had someone from the government shown the slightest interest in her welfare. The boy on her hip buried his face in her hair.

  “Ruth Johnson,” she said, finally taking my hand with her free one. She looked back at Clarence. “What do you mean ‘how things are going’?”

  “I mean, is the relief helping you get what you need? Do you have enough food? Things like that.”

  I touched the pocket of my skirt where I kept my small notebook and pencil, but I decided against pulling them out at that moment. If Ruth clammed up, I wouldn’t be able to get what I needed to write my report.

  “Well,” she said hesitantly, surveying her house and the shacks and tents beyond, as if I were the stupidest person alive not to know the answers to Clarence’s questions, “I guess we’re doing all right for now. We’re supposed to get fifteen dollars a month from the county, but lately it has been just ten. And usually they run out of money that last week, so we have to make do. Last month, one of Mr. Pickett’s people here got her hands on a big sack of flour and passed it out. So we had that, but it weren’t much.”

  The discrepancy in the payments piqued my reporter’s interest and I nodded. “What do they say, the people from the county?” I asked. “How do they explain that they’ve run out of money?” I figured it could be corruption, dry coffers, or both.

  “I never asked,” Ruth said. Her bottom row of teeth looked like little brown pebbles, and I noticed a faint rash around her mouth and up the sides of her jaw. “All I know is, we got school starting in a month, and the older children need clothes. And shoes. They just reopened some of the mines, but it won’t last long. And, anyway, my husband, Norbert, is blacklisted for talking to the union, the fool. He ain’t worked in years.”

  Just then the little boy peed down the front of her dress.

  I sucked in my breath before I could stop myself, my aversion all too apparent, but Ruth just glanced down at the wet spot and shrugged. She looked like the most exhausted woman in the world, as if it were her job to carry the entire mine-scarred hillside on her shoulders, with a baby on her hip besides.

  “Is that all, then?” she asked. “I got to get that
laundry wrung out.”

  I made myself take her hand again. “Thank you for telling me all this, Mrs. Johnson,” I said, my voice too loud, too cheerful. I was facing a steep learning curve in this new endeavor, I realized. The job was nothing like what I’d imagined it would be. She stared at me, as if she were waiting for more. “I can promise you—Washington’s going to hear about it.”

  Ruth looked at me like I was speaking Greek backward. “Oh, you mean that Roosevelt fellow? I heard about him. But I don’t think Jesus Christ himself could make a lick of difference out here.”

  That makes two of us, I nearly said back.

  For the rest of the day, as Clarence took me from one family to the next, the despair of the place engulfed me. I’d covered tragedies in my time as a reporter, but they were mostly accidents—fires, car wrecks— or one-off crimes of passion and drunkenness. This suffering seemed different. Perpetual. The mines had brought people here during the boom twenty years back and then left them stranded on the hillside when the coal market collapsed, Clarence explained. And no one but the Quaker relief people seemed to care.

  “What’s wrong with the children’s skin?” I asked him, afraid to know the answer.

  “Those sores come from bathing in the river. It’s the pollution. And then there’s the diphtheria, like I said, and the typhoid, the rickets, the dysentery.” He counted them off on his fingers. “All of which could be resolved with proper sanitation, wells, and waste disposal. But we don’t have the funds to do it.”

  I thought with longing, and then chagrin, of the room Nora and I had shared at Le Château Frontenac, decorated all in white and pale green like an ice cream sundae with mint candies. It seemed to be on another planet. Clarence introduced me to one sad story after another: young men who were as gnarled as old codgers, leaking tents, women wearing nothing but their slips. There was no livestock anywhere nearby, so no milk or eggs, to say nothing of meat. Most families kept a little garden, and Clarence had tried to help them can their yield, but they never had enough jars and often got too hungry to wait for the vegetables to mature anyway. He had seen them dig up bitter green potatoes, he told me, small as knuckles, and eat them raw.