Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  Bessie never asked me to talk about it. Other people did, from time to time. But Bessie did not. If I asked her questions, she would answer them, but that was all. She did not answer a question and then go on to another story, using my question as a way to get to something else. She answered it and then she waited for me to ask another one. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. A lot of times, I had just the one question.

  When I got to be maybe seven years old, I started asking Bessie about my mother. I had been wondering for a long time about what she was like, but I was afraid my questions would sound too shallow or trivial. I didn’t have those words to describe it, but that is what I meant. I wanted to know: Was she talkative or shy? Did she have a lot of friends? What was her favorite food? Did she laugh a lot? What kinds of things made her laugh? How did she and my father meet? Did she want to have more kids? The questions were like a hunger in me. But I held them back for a while, afraid that they’d sound dumb.

  I knew Bessie would have the answers. My mother was her niece, the daughter of Bessie’s sister Regina, and before Bessie moved over to Raythune County, she’d lived in Lundale, real close to my parents. Lundale was one of sixteen coal camps in that valley. They were small, these coal camps, and Bessie told me that if you were standing on your front porch and you had an itch, your neighbor could scratch it for you without even stretching very far. That’s how close the houses were, and the trailers, too. But it was nice, she said. Real nice. People helped each other out. If somebody was sick and couldn’t afford the medicine, the church would take up a special collection. When there were layoffs at the mine, the families of the men who were still working would do what they could for the families in need.

  Now, Bessie made it clear that these people weren’t saints. “Saints do not exist on this earth,” was how she’d put it to me. “Only us sinners, doing the best we can every day to rise above our sinful urges. The saints are all up in heaven. We are trying to get there ourselves by doing good works, but you should never believe that there are any saints here on earth, Royce.” The Buffalo Creek Valley was no paradise, she would say. The people were poor and they worked too hard. The men died early. Coal mining, she called “a dirty business, top to bottom, start to finish,” but then she would say that coal keeps the country going, and somebody must do it.

  Bessie moved away from the Buffalo Creek Valley before I was born. She and my mother wrote letters to each other, she told me, because long-distance phone calls in those days were real expensive. They stayed in real close touch, through letters.

  It had been raining for days. Not hard, but steady. My parents did not have a usable phone at the time. Their phone service had been cut off for nonpayment. “No shame in that,” Bessie said. “Your mama had to make decisions about how to spend the money and she always said that food on the table is more important than any phone.”

  Anyway, my mother walked down to the store and called Bessie that Thursday and she said the sky looked strange to her, and she was afraid. This was not the kind of thing my mother was likely to say, Bessie told me. She was not a person who exaggerated or made up stories. And she was never afraid.

  My mother had had a bad dream on Wednesday night, the night before she called. In her dream there was a roaring sound and the whole world was sliding away, just collapsing right out from under her, she told Bessie, like a stepladder folding up, and she was flung into nothingness. Now, I heard later that a lot of people claim they had dreams and visions before it happened. A lot of the survivors said they knew it was coming because it had been foretold to them in a dream. They dreamed that the skies would rip wide open and the water would come pouring down, and the dam would blow apart and the water would come slamming down the valley.

  Maybe that’s so. Maybe other people did have such a dream. Or maybe they just said they did, after it happened. But the thing is, I know my mother had the dream, because she told Bessie about it. And she didn’t have it Friday night, the night before the flood, but on Wednesday night. If you want to show off and say that you saw something coming, you say that you had the dream the night before. Not three nights before. So I believe her. I believe that, in some way, my mother knew, and that kind of tears me up inside, because there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing at all. Nobody would have listened to her, even if she’d picked up her skirt and run up and down the valley, hollering, Look out! Look out! The dam’s gonna bust open in two days—you gotta grab everything you cherish in this world and run right now! She saw it coming, and there was nothing she could do.

  * * *

  I remember the water. I do.

  People told me later that I am probably just remembering what I was told, that there is no way a two-year-old child would remember it the way I say I do, but to hell with them. I remember that water: Black as can be. It wasn’t regular water. It was thick as dirt, and it stuck to things, like tar does. And it smelled real bad.

  It was early in the morning. I was playing on the floor. I don’t remember what I was playing with, but Bessie told me later I had a toy truck that I’d gotten for Christmas that year. I loved it so much. I wouldn’t play with any of my other toys. So you can be pretty sure that I was playing with that truck. There was a big sound—I don’t know whether to call it a bang or a roar, all I remember is that it liked to swallow us up—and my mother started trembling all over. She had picked me up by this time, and I remember that she was shaking so hard that she had trouble holding on to me. But she did. She held on. I held on to my toy truck, and she held on to me, and we were moving through the house, moving so fast that I was bouncing up and down in her arms. She was yelling. I had never heard my mother yell before. She was not a yelling kind of person. Usually she talked slow and kind of quiet. I don’t remember what she said that day, but I remember being scared because she was yelling.

  And that is where it stops for me. My memory stops, and so time stops. Time stops right there, when my mother and I are moving through the house, and the house is moving right along with us. It was knocked off its foundation—I learned this later—by the force of that water, millions and millions of gallons of water, coming at us at seven feet per second. Giant walls of water. They just kept coming and coming and coming. The house was spinning around. Out of control. Everything at the mouth of the valley that had been knocked down first—other houses, trailers, school buses, telephone poles, cars, even people—came smashing into our house, just like, a few seconds later, our house was going to smash into the things that were further down the valley from us. That water kept coming for over three hours.

  My mother and I made it outside. She got us out through a window. Holding me in her right hand, she used her left hand to fight and reach and claw, wiggling through that open window, while the water beat at her, and churned and spun her around and liked to pound her to pieces. Bessie had talked to the witnesses and so she told me about it. “Your mama was a fighter,” she said. And of all the things I ever learned about my mother—people have told me she was sweet and a hard worker, and pretty, too, in ways that pictures don’t show—that is the word I love best: fighter. Ellie Dillard was a fighter.

  I do not know what happened to her. No one knows. I think it was this: I think she was hit in the head with something that came flying at us. A piece of something, like the sharp edge of a car door, or a rock, knocked her out. One minute she was holding me tight, and then she was not. Sometimes I think I can still feel her hands around my waist, holding me, and then I feel her hands letting go, her fingers pried open one by one by the rank terrible force, and then she whirls away from me. There is a shocked look on her face, a look of amazement and horror and sadness, her arms stretching out as far as they can go, her mouth a round O. I cannot stand that thought for very long, though, and so I have to think of something else real quick. The idea that my mama knew she was letting go of me, that she had to watch herself flying away from me and her helpless to stop it, is more than I can deal with sometimes, and I find myself pra
ying that she was indeed knocked out, that something hit her hard in the head and she was unconscious when it happened, that she never knew, and that somewhere, she is resting on a high hill, catching her breath again. She is peaceful and happy, and not being whirled about. And she knows the day is coming when she can put her arms around me once more, and this time, she thinks, this time she will not let go. She will hold on to me forever.

  There are people who tell the story about what happened next. My father grabbed me and he threw me up a hill, with the fading bit of strength he had, with the last breath being torn out of his body, and I was caught by some people who were up there on the ridge over Lundale. Then he was swept away, too.

  I was cut and I was bleeding, but I was okay. The next afternoon Bessie came for me, quick as she could get there. Later, when I was a grown man and able to bear it, when I asked her about it, she described to me the day that she looked for my parents’ bodies. She wanted to give them a proper burial. It was Monday, two days after the flood. She went to the morgue that had been set up in Man High School and she walked up and down those rows of bodies. Up and down, up and down. She bent over to check, again and again, looking for something that would tell her it was Ellie. “Or Mike,” I said, and she said, “Yes, of course. Or Mike.” They were black and swollen, those bodies. They were terrible to behold. But she had to look, she told me. She knew she would be sick later, with the smell sticking to her, and she would never, ever get the pictures out of her head: the twisted limbs and the broken necks and the crusty smear of black that slimed over everything, as if all those poor people had been burnt instead of drowned. There were all ages, Bessie said: old people and newborn babies, and every age in between, like a ladder of sadness, and no rungs got skipped. Every single step in life was there, up and down the ladder. Every age.

  She never found them. There were seven bodies never found at all, and among the seven were my parents. Ellie and Mike Dillard.

  * * *

  I met her in Lymon’s Market, where we both worked for a little while. Her name was Brenda Smith. She had read a story about me in the paper some years ago and so she knew a lot more about me than I knew about her. Well, she thought she knew about me. Let’s put it that way.

  I worked at Lymon’s after I graduated from Acker’s Gap High School. I unloaded boxes and kept the place swept up and mopped shiny—that kind of thing. I already had some money from the survivors’ settlement fund, the money paid by the coal company, but I wanted to keep it so I could buy land. I still lived with Bessie. I would’ve liked to get my own place, but Bessie wanted me to stay, and so I stayed.

  Brenda came up to me after work one day. I was waiting for my ride home. I used to pay Ray Carpenter a few dollars a week to take me up the road to Bessie’s house. I didn’t mind the walk in the morning—it was about two and a half miles—but at the end of the day, I was beat.

  Anyway, Brenda said, “Here’s that penny.” And I said, “What?” And she said, “For those thoughts you’re thinking. You look like you’re a million miles away.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I got a lot on my mind.”

  “Like what?”

  “All kinds of stuff.”

  “That don’t give me a lot to go on,” she said. She was smiling. “Good stuff or bad stuff?”

  She was a cashier, a few years older than me, with blond hair that sort of curled around her face, and breasts that pushed up against her blouse in a way that made you want to keep on looking for a long time. I’d seen her trying to catch my eye when I was unloading boxes in one of the aisles. I would cut the tape on top and pull back the flaps and get out the cans of fruit cocktail or pinto beans or tomato sauce, one by one, and I would stack them on the shelves, row after row, bending down and standing up, down and up, down and up. She was at the front of the store. When there were no customers around, she’d lean out across the little black conveyor belt that ferried people’s purchases past the cash register, her elbows holding her up, looking my way with her pretty little smile.

  “Bad stuff, mostly,” I said.

  That surprised her, I think. We were out in the alley behind the store, because Ray liked to pick me up out there. He didn’t like to come to the front. Ray was older. He had sideburns, plus a black mustache that he couldn’t keep his fingers off of. Never had a real job, but was always busy, you know? And he had a car. That was all I cared about.

  “What kind of bad stuff?” she said.

  This had gone too far. I wanted to stop the conversation, even though I knew it was just a joke, just a sort of flirty thing going on, and that she didn’t really want me to start listing all the bad things I was thinking about. The older I got, the more the pictures in my head had begun to show up. They had been black and white but now they were in color a lot of the time. Not just the things I remembered, but the things other people remembered and told me about. Including Bessie. She didn’t mean to, but sometimes she made things worse. Sometimes when I asked her a question about that day, about my mother or what she was wearing or what our house had been like, I wanted her to say, “I don’t know, Royce. I can’t remember.” But she always tried to answer me.

  I liked talking to Brenda, as long as she didn’t push me.

  This day, I just said, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She laughed and smacked my arm, as if I was being a bad boy. I looked down and stared at her hand—the one that had touched me—and that made her laugh again. She didn’t understand.

  Her ride came first and I watched her climb in the backseat of a two-door yellow Mustang. She had loads and loads of friends. There must’ve been seven or eight other people in that car, all smushed and squished up against each other, laughing and yelling. Brenda disappeared into that car like she’d been folded into something foamy in a mixing bowl and was just absorbed by it, losing the firm edges of herself.

  We talked a lot after that. Before and after work. On our breaks. I brought her home to meet Aunt Bessie. I knew Bessie would like her, too. Brenda had dreams—she wanted to get out of here, get away—and she had a way of talking about the world that made it seem like a wide-open place. A good place.

  After “Death Imprint” there are four other things. One by one, those things happened to me, just the way that lady had said they would, all those years ago, even though I was on the lookout for them and would’ve stopped them if I could. Number Four is “Impaired Human Relationships.” That is the only way I can explain what happened next. It was like I knew that my friendship with Brenda was going to end, anyway, and so I had to go ahead and end it. Just get it over with.

  One Sunday afternoon Brenda and I were sitting on the swing on the front porch, our bellies full of Bessie’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes. This was fall. A chill hung in the air, the kind of chill that bothers you, eats at you, like something important you’ve forgotten to do.

  And I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I don’t know why or how, but I knew I couldn’t stand being there on that porch with Brenda for one single second more. My skin started to go cold. I had to be by myself. I truly thought I was going to die, right then and there, unless I got away.

  I stood up from that swing and I went inside and I told Bessie I wasn’t feeling well. I asked her if she could tell Brenda good-bye for me. And I never called her again. I did not go back to my job at Lymon’s Market, either. I never had no job after that. Just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t stand being around people. Starting that day, I have tried to go easy with the little bit of money I have left but it is running low. Am I worried? I am. Mainly about my dogs. You can eat less yourself, but you can’t explain things to a hungry dog.

  Brenda called me a few times after that, and left messages, but I think her pride must’ve kicked in because her messages were not desperate or pleading, just sort of curious. I got the feeling she was relieved. Relieved that I was the one who’d taken the step that needed to be taken. I see her from time to time now. She’s not the same girl she was—she’s kin
d of lost her sparkle, is how I’d call it. Well, truth is, she’d have lost it a lot quicker if she’d stayed around me for very much longer.

  Everything started to change after that. Bessie got sick and she died, and I buried her, and I moved to my cabin. The dogs came down the road, one by one. They joined up with my life. They sort of made a wall between me and the world. Which is how I survived.

  For some reason I’d thought it would be gradual. Thought I’d be less and less able to put up with having people around me. Thought I’d pull away from them, inch by inch, piece by piece. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was sudden. It happened right there on the porch, on that chilly Sunday afternoon. I can remember the feel of Brenda’s hand, when she put it on my leg. It liked to burn me. Even though I was cold.

  I guess you could say it happened the way night comes in the mountains: swift, like the fall of something sharp and heavy. One minute you are still in day. The next minute the world is dark. But your eyes adjust to the darkness. You learn to live there. You make do.

  * * *

  I started reading about Buffalo Creek when I was thirty-one, thirty-two years old or thereabouts. Before that, when I was younger, Bessie did not like to see me reading about it. And so I did not. Bessie was the only family I had, and she was real good to me. So I never crossed her.

  But in 1999 she got the emphysema. I used some of the money I got from the survivors’ settlement to make sure she was comfortable. I bought two pieces of land with the rest of it. One is the little bit of land that I put my cabin on. The other is bigger. That’s the part I’m going to put a fence around for my dogs—no matter how much those bastards offer to pay me for it.