The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  As he walked across the damp lawn toward his house, Raymond decided he should date other girls. He liked Emily better than anyone else, but he didn’t love her, if loving her meant wanting to kiss her and all. Maybe he was a fairy. He looked up and saw his house—a squat white box that needed painting. Open porch across the front with a sloping roof and lounge chairs. He contrasted it to the house he had just come from, Emily’s three-storey yellow wood thing with pointy roofs and fancy woodwork. It came to him that her family was rich, and his was poor—not hungry or anything, but there were no extras. He and Jed had always worked for their clothes and spending money. Emily and Sally never had. But of course they were girls. Yet they lived in the same town, shared ancestors, their fathers worked at the same mill….

  He plopped down in his desk chair and sorted through a pile of stamps. He picked up one from Madagascar and studied it under the light. The background was scarlet, the lettering gold leaf. A smiling Negro woman in a headscarf carried a basket on her head. He ran his fingertips gently across the stamp and felt the thrill that a new stamp from an unfamiliar country gave him. He glanced at his map, located the island. Tomorrow he would look it up in the encyclopedia at school. Who lived there? What did they do? What was the weather like?

  Why do I care? he asked himself. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  As Jed drove out of the parking lot after the dance and headed for Sally’s house, she asked, “Are you taking me home now?”

  He gave her a look. “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “No,” she said in a small voice.

  “What do you want?”

  “You.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Can’t we go to the quarry and talk about it?”

  “I’m tired of talking about it.”

  He glanced at her cleavage, left exposed by her blouse, the tails of which were tied under her tits to form a halter. He wanted his hand in there.

  “Please, Jed.”

  The moon, a fat orange globe, had just cleared the quarry wall. Darkened cars were all around. “OK. Talk. I’m listening,” Jed said, a sulky expression on his shadowy face.

  “I’ve thought it over. I think we should compromise.”

  “What do you think I been doing?” “Well, so have I.” “Hasn’t looked that way to me.” Her turn to sulk. Her lower lip protruded. “OK. What?” Jed asked. “Never mind.”

  “OK.” He started the engine. She grabbed his hand and made his fingers turn it off. Then she ran her fingertips over his palm.

  “I think we should keep our hands above the waist,” she announced.

  He pushed her hand away irritably and sank back in the seat with a long-suffering sigh. “Some compromise. That’s the same thing you’ve been saying.”

  “Not exactly it isn’t,” she whispered. The moonlight shone on the tops of her white breasts. He felt himself getting hard.

  “But inside the clothes?” he asked, his voice quavering. She said nothing. “Well?”

  “Yes, all right.”

  He scooted over and put his arms around her. They kissed. Then he slid his hand down into her cleavage, until he clasped a breast. He lifted it out of the bra cup and took the nipple in his mouth. Sally looked down at his flat-top and giggled, embarrassed. Babies sucked their mothers’ nipples, but she hadn’t known grown boys did. “What?” he asked, looking up.

  “Nothing,” she murmured. She felt like his mother. She kept reminding herself to keep track of his other hand.

  Emily’s Girl Scout troop was training for a one-week trek along the Appalachian Trail that summer by going on day-hikes with thirty-five-pound packs. They wore jeans, hiking boots, and flannel shirts. The trees had a chartreuse tinge. The redbuds and pink and white dogwoods put the other trees to shame. The earthworms had barely begun their spring clean-up so that the cushion of dead leaves on the trail was still thick. Occasionally they sang as they marched in single file: “Valderee, valderah, valderee, valderah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…”

  Mostly they walked in silence, glancing around dazzled by the spring light, like movie patrons emerging into midday sun. Emily ran her hands under her pack straps where they cut into her shoulders. Leaves rustled as chipmunks, snakes, toads, and squirrels scooted out of their way. Emily loved the weight on her back and the power in her legs as she covered mile after mile in a steady stride. She wore an olive army cap, and the sun through the swelling branches danced on and under the visor. The sense of failure with which she had gone to bed the previous night fell away. She knew each bird song, could name each tree and wild flower. Some people were good at partying, others were good at other things. She made good grades without trying. Sports were easy. She was a Curved Bar Girl Scout. She had played flute in the All-State Band. Admittedly, these things weren’t important in Newland, but that wasn’t her fault.

  They’d been hiking along an almost treeless ascending spine of rock. Scrubby blueberry bushes were all around them. At the end of the ridge they came to a bald—a mountaintop above the tree line covered with coarse grass. Dumping their packs, they lay in the sun in the tall grass and ate sandwiches, chatting lazily about the dance.

  After lunch they headed down the mountainside through a hardwood forest. Partway down, they entered a hollow formed by a rushing, boulder-strewn creek. Eventually the woods thinned to a clearing. Several dogs began howling. In the clearing sat a shack, covered with tarpaper and roofed with tin soft-drink signs and black and white Tennessee license plates. Perched on stilts against the hillside, it had an open porch across the front. Five blue-tick hounds threw themselves against their chains, which were attached to the stilts. It looked as though they might pull the shack down at any moment. The creek out front was littered with cans and bottles, an old refrigerator, three gutted auto carcasses. Wash hung on a network of lines strung among the trees and the stilts. Six or eight little children played in a scrambled heap near a pile of coal. When they saw the Girl Scouts marching down the hollow, they jumped up, froze and gazed through pale blue eyes. Matted blonde hair obscured smudged faces, soiled shorts hung just below dirty potbellies.

  As the others marched on, Emily took off her pack and pulled out some apples and brownies and held them toward the children. They seized each other’s hands and edged more closely together.

  Emily heard a door slam. Looking up to the porch, she

  saw a gaunt woman in a long dress, an apron, and high-topped work shoes.

  “I was just …”

  “Thanky just the same, ma’am, but we don’t want nothing from nobody,” the woman intoned as though it were a recorded message.

  “Oh. Sure. I’m sorry.” Emily grabbed her pack by the frame and dragged it after her down the path.

  When she told her family about the incident that night at supper, her father murmured, “Well, life is difficult, Emily.”

  Emily frowned. “How come?”

  Her father smiled grimly. “It’s not a very nice world.”

  “Now Robert…” Mrs. Prince began.

  “I think it’s a neat world!” insisted Sally.

  Mr. Prince shrugged.

  As Raymond drove the twisting road into the mountains, he recalled the trips with his family back to the cove his father had left to come to Newland. He and Jed always insisted on being let out of the car the minute they turned off the main road. They raced up the washed-out dirt road to find their cousins, with whom they took off into the woods, scarcely to be seen until it was time to go home. He and Jed basked in prestige because they could instruct their cousins on town ways—what went on in the factories, how to shop in supermarkets, what it was like to ride a bicycle on a sidewalk. Streetlights, movies, drugstores, escalators, boxes that X-rayed your feet for shoe size, pinball machines, carnivals, beauty pageants, bowling alleys.

  But of course their cousins knew where to hide to see which animal. They could look at the sky and sniff the air and tell what kind of weather it would be. They
knew which berries and leaves you could eat. They could carve anything from a piece of wood. They got to drink whiskey when they were sick. They could shoot knots off pine trees from a hundred yards. They never had to wear shoes, and they could miss school whenever they wanted. And they were all right there—dozens of cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. All Tatros, and all in one county.

  Raymond remembered thinking it was neat. He hadn’t been able to understand why his father had left. He was having the same difficulty today. It seemed like such an uncomplicated life. If his father had never left, Raymond wouldn’t be facing this decision about what to do when he graduated. He’d have married and gone to work in a mine a couple of years ago. As things were, he had no idea what to do. The guidance counselor had given up on him. His grades were too lousy for a scholarship to college, and his father couldn’t afford to send him. Besides, he couldn’t see spending four more years failing to do work he wasn’t interested in. His father kept offering him a tour of the mill. His mother was predicting that Jed would grow up to be vice president over there. What he’d grow up to be she’d never speculated on, which bothered him. As though his future wasn’t worth thinking about, and Raymond was a foundling or something who had never really belonged in her family. Of course there was the job in New York City. But that would involve leaving everything. Whenever he thought about it, he got furious with Emily. She’d go straight from high school into college. She had good grades and a father with dough. She’d spend four years doing whatever she wanted and would graduate to marry some guy who’d support her for the rest of her life. Girls had it easy. Of course his own mother had always worked, but Emily would never have to if she married some college guy.

  He stopped at Tatro Cove. His grandparents lived in a simple, well-tended white frame house at the end of the cove. It was two-storey but only one room wide, with stone fireplaces on either end and porches with railings top and bottom. His grandparents sat on the downstairs porch rocking and looking across the creek to the steep ridge on the other side. Raymond remembered that when their family would arrive here, his father would be tense and would stand on the porch shifting from leg to leg, talking gruffly. By the time they had to leave, he’d be lying barefooted on the porch with his feet propped on the railing, chatting languidly or dreaming in silence. And on the trip home, they would watch the tension start seeping back into his body, as though starch were being injected into his bloodstream.

  “Well, sir, who do we have here?” exclaimed his grandfather, standing slowly with the aid of a cane. His other arm was missing below the elbow. The sleeve of his green work-shirt was folded up and pinned to the shoulder. “I reckon it’s young Junior, Mother.”

  “Well, I declare,” she said, accepting his peck on her weathered cheek.

  Raymond sat on the step, wishing he hadn’t stopped because now he couldn’t think of anything to say. “I’m going over near Clayton to take me some pictures and just thought I’d stop and say hi.”

  “Law, what you want pictures of Clayton for?” his grandfather asked.

  “Well, sometimes newspapers and magazines call me up and want pictures of coal mines and stuff.”

  “That a fact? Shoot, if I’d a known that, I’d a bought me a camera and made my fortune!”

  “What’s new?” Raymond asked, amused, since nothing was new over here, which was the whole appeal.

  “Oh, nothing much. Lyle and his wife had them a new baby last week. A girl, was it, Mother?” She smiled and nodded and rocked.

  “Is that his second?” Lyle, Raymond’s cousin, was only two years older. All the cousins with whom he had roamed the surrounding hills were married now with small children. Raymond felt like a kid.

  “The creek started in to rising a couple of days ago, but I don’t think it’s gonna amount to much. Do you, Mother?” She smiled, shook her head no, and rocked.

  “Killed me a big old copperhead in the garden patch yesterday. Musta been two feet long. Don’t you guess, Mother?” She smiled, nodded, and rocked.

  “Lem’s blue-tick was lost for a week last month. He come in all tore up. Looked like he’d been wrassling with a bar, didn’t he, Mother?” She smiled, nodded, and rocked.

  The hot sun and his grandfather’s drone and the rumble of rockers on wood were putting Raymond to sleep. Birds called back and forth, the creek bubbled, the new foliage was blinding bright green. He breathed deeply.

  “What your folks up to?” his grandfather asked.

  “Oh, nothing much. Same as usual. Dad’s busy at the mill.”

  “He works too hard, don’t he?”

  “Well, I guess he likes to.”

  “That’s what happens to these fellers who go off to the city. They get all caught up in it. Now they’s some that like that pace, but hit didn’t never appeal to me.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “But your daddy, he always was an itchy one. ‘Now just set down and relax, son,’ I used to tell him. But did you ever try telling a tornado to relax?” They chuckled. “Couldn’t find him no work. Sometimes he’d cut down a tree or two for a furniture factory. The mines was always shutting down and laying people off. All you could count on was hunting, and your garden patch. And if the creek flooded, or a frost came late, even your garden failed you. Hit was a turrible time.” The sun flickered across Raymond’s face as a breeze swayed the tree branches.

  “Well, what about that good-looking brother of yours?”

  Raymond winced. He knew Jed was handsome and that he himself was pretty ordinary, but why did everyone have to emphasize it? “He’s just fine. As gorgeous as ever. He lifts weights every day and is bulging with muscles. He spends a lot of time with Sally Prince. Her father runs Dad’s mill.”

  “That a fact? Well, how about you, son? Your tennis shoes wearing thin running from all the girls?”

  Raymond blushed. “I’ve got a girl. It’s nothing too serious, though.”

  “Now, I’ll tell you one thing, son. You’d better pick real careful like. That’s what I told all my boys. The love of a good woman is the most important possession a man can own. Ain’t that so, Mother?” He slapped her thigh. She smiled and rocked.

  “We’ve had us a real good life together, Grandpa and I,” she confirmed.

  “We can all see that you have.” Raymond was relaxed to the point of immobility. He looked out to the garden and remembered his father telling how after each baby was born, Grandpa had carried it outside. “He’d hold it up, Junior, so it could see the ridges all around, and he’d say, ‘We ain’t got much here, but ever speck of land you can see belongs to Tatros, and we real proud and happy to share it with you.’ Then he’d lay the baby in a patch of sun in the garden, and he’d say, ‘The Lord give us this soil, and you got to learn how to take care of it, so’s it can take care of you.’”

  Raymond had missed out on this ritual, and felt cut off. “Well, guess I’d better move on,” he announced, trying to stand up.

  “Won’t you stay and eat some dinner with us, Junior honey?” his grandmother inquired.

  “I’d love to, Granny. But I got to go take my pictures.” The truth was that he thought his feet would take root in the front steps if he stayed longer. How his father escaped—and why—he would never understand. The peace, the calm acceptance. So different from the noisy factory, the bustling town. An owl hooted on the ridge.

  “You’d better stop off and say hidy to Lyle and them.”

  “I can’t this trip, Grandpa. I’m in a rush. But tell them I say hi.”

  “Come back when you can stay awhile,” his grandfather called as Raymond walked toward the car.

  Raymond could hear his father’s voice telling (as he had time after tedious time) about leaving Tatro Cove: “Somebody was going to drive me to the bus. As I walked down to the car toting my stuff in a paper sack, I saw Pa coming down the holler driving the cow. It was dusk, and lightning bugs was blinking all around him. On his hip sat my sister Inez, who was a little one-yea
r-old baby then. She was dressed in one of them white knit gowns. She was smiling up at him and cooing, and he was just chattering away to her. The tears in my eyes was so thick I couldn’t hardly see to get in that car.”

  Maybe Raymond could reverse the process? Build a cabin, work in a mine?

  He parked near a tipple with Consolidated Coal painted on it. He photographed it, and the train cars being filled one by one with gleaming black chunks, and the huge trucks with names painted on their cabs that brought in loads from the small mines for cleaning and sorting. The men, in hard hats and work clothes, slapped each other on the back and yelled jokes over the din. It was hard work, honest work. Raymond found it appealing. His uncles and cousins were coal miners. His father and grandfather had been. He’d return to the family profession. This is where he would work! He would go down into the belly of the whale, and he would emerge changed. He would emerge a man!

  As he ran out of pictures to snap up above, he began to confront the fact that he would be spending the afternoon in the middle of a mountain. The previous year he had photographed some weeping widows after an explosion and cave-in in Southwest Virginia. He hoped no one would have to weep for him this afternoon.

  You get used to this, he assured himself as the electric car descended into the tunnel. But until you did, it sure did feel claustrophobic. This was probably how a baby felt being propelled through its mother’s birth canal: Until this moment, he hadn’t realized how good he’d had it where he’d been before. He became conscious of each limb, of how much he liked and used each hand and foot and arm and leg. What if a roof bolt came loose, and several tons of slate crashed down? His grandfather had lost his arm that way.

  He pulled himself together and asked the man driving the car to stop while he lit flares and snapped shots of the passageway and the tracks. On they went, deeper and deeper into the mountain, with only the long narrow tunnel connecting them to daylight

  He snapped—men running the huge continuous miner machines, loading and riding the conveyor belts, mending pumps in water to their knees, eating lunch as water dripped from the ceiling onto their sandwiches, placing roof supports. They ate away at the innards of this mountain like ravenous termites. And like a lacy termite-riddled log, was it possible the remains could collapse into powder?