The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “You know that because you been out there all your life. But maybe I got to find out for myself.”

  “How come you can’t just take my word for it?” Raymond asked. If Ben had to retrace Raymond’s exact steps, what was the point of anything? Raymond would teach him everything he needed to know about the outside—and about the strengths of Tatro Cove, the role its denizens would be playing in the future of mankind.

  One afternoon he and Ben took a beehive apart in search of queen cells to cut out. Raymond explained that if any were allowed to develop, the reigning queen would waste energy that should have gone into egg-laying on hunting down and stinging to death her rivals. As alarmed bees swirled around and dive-bombed their veils, Raymond explained how this behavior resembled management’s at the mill, or in any capitalist enterprise. Queens, drones, workers who gathered nectar, workers who tended the hive. Families, churches, schools, sports teams, the army—a pyramid with some authority figure at the top. Things were set up this way on purpose, Raymond told Ben, to prepare young people like himself to move into the hierarchy of some factory at the bottom.

  “What’s hierarchy?” asked Ben.

  “Uh, rank, sort of like. Generals and lieutenants. You know.”

  “Like chickens?”

  Raymond looked at him. He wasn’t supposed to interrupt. “How do you mean?”

  “You know how they peck at the red one until she don’t have no tail feathers?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “And up to Cor Four’s milking parlor. The cows line up the same way ever day.”

  Raymond was supposed to be drawing these analogies. When Justin used to explain things to him, he never interrupted. “Now this is how things operate in nature,” he continued, making the best of the interruptions. You couldn’t blame Ben, he was just a kid, didn’t even know what a political analysis was. “But the difference between us and animals is that we got brains and can see other ways.”

  “Like what?”

  Raymond hadn’t exactly worked this out yet. “When you’re ready to hear it, I’ll explain. You got to absorb things little by little or they don’t take.”

  At dusk Raymond strolled down the cove. The creek gurgled, and bullfrogs hurled themselves into it with small splashes. As he walked past Aunt Verbena’s, his grandma called from the porch, “How’s it going, Junior?”

  “Just fine, Granny. When you going to come down and see?”

  “Law, child, I can’t hardly get down them porch steps, never mind the foot of this holler.”

  TVs rumbled as he passed Royal’s and Lyle’s. He was swept with irritation. Barn dancing, clogging, ballad singing, banjo strumming, dulcimer picking. Corn huskings, quilting bees, house raisings. But television, all day every day, and night after night? He climbed the steps and walked into Lyle’s living room. Lyle, still in his yellow hard hat and green work clothes, lay on the sofa. His two children sat on the floor. All three gazed at Big Bird, who was shrieking at Oscar in his garbage can while some children played hopscotch on the sidewalk. Numbers began flashing on the screen while a chorus shouted out their names: “ONE! TWO! …”

  Lyle glanced up. “Hey there, Raymond! How you doing, boy?”

  “All right. How you doing, Lyle?” Actually he was annoyed. What did all this urban freneticism on the TV have to do with the children of Tatro Cove?

  “Have a seat?”

  “No, thanks. Just popped in to say hi.” As he walked back to the door, he saw on the wall a framed picture of a baby cut from a magazine. He stopped and studied it. Under the glass in one corner was a lock of hair. A tiny bracelet from the hospital, with beads spelling “Tatro,” was attached to the frame by a ribbon.

  “Who’s this, Lyle?”

  “The wife done that For our baby that died of the whooping cough. Seen one like it in a magazine.”

  “Nice.” Never had he seen such a tacky item. The taste of his kin had been debased at some very elemental level. Women up here in their spare time used to make witch hazel brooms, coverlets, corn husk dolls. It was pathetic.

  He crossed the highway to M.G.’s ranch house, which had puny little columns holding up the front porch roof. “For the dog to pee against!” M.G. had explained, chortling, slapping Raymond’s back, and tapping the column with his white patent leather loafer.

  Ben’s face lit up when he saw Raymond. They walked down the highway to McCray’s Grocery, which was roofed and sided with brown asphalt shingles. A couple of men lay on the porch. Raymond and Ben joined them, propping up their heads and necks against the wall. They were discussing who the ugliest man in the county was.

  “Now you think about that nose on Lester. All mashed in like that. They say his mama dropped him when he was a baby.”

  “Naw, Lester can’t hold a candle to you, Wash, in the Ugly Department. What you think, Ben? Don’t you b’lieve Wash is just about the homeliest creature you ever did see, with them close-set eyes of hisn? You know, he can’t hardly see off to one side. If Noah was to be standing over there on that hillside filling up the Ark, Wash’d walk right past him.”

  Ben had been doing this his whole life. As he launched into a teasing discussion of his neighbors and kin, Raymond took mental notes. He’d learned during voter registration, during union organizing, that you had to speak to people in their own language. And to do this, you had to study how they operated. Ben spoke this language instinctively, but it was up to Raymond to make him conscious of the strong tradition for which he would be the spokesman. The men on the porch floor always discussed who had the worst problems, the most boring job. A parody of hierarchy, Raymond decided, a negative ranking system. A peaceful ritual for draining off aggression …

  They lay on the porch like snakes in the sun. Raymond realized that he lay like a board—rigid, poised to leap into activity. And his brain—the wheels wouldn’t stop spinning. He tried to relax, tried to imagine himself as a dead groundhog hung on a fence post He shrugged his shoulders to loosen them up, rolled his head on his neck.

  “Yall right, Raymond?” Ben inquired. Raymond realized the conversation had stopped.

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

  “You itching to get back home?”

  “No. Yall carry on.” He knew that his presence made them uneasy. Conversations often ceased in midsentence when he appeared. He wondered if he gave off an aura of urgency. They’d rather push away the cup he held out to them without drinking from it But throughout history this had been the case. People didn’t like being asked to disrupt their orderly little lives for the sake of the greater good. Prophets were always despised in their own countries. Raymond was getting used to it.

  “Now Zeke there … You talk about ugly. That man’s so ugly his own mama can’t hardly look him in the face….”

  A large Mercury pulled up. They sat up. The driver pushed a button, and the window rolled down. The man asked in a New Jersey accent, “Can you tell me where I can find some typical hillbillies?”

  They looked at each other. Finally Raymond replied, “Yeah. Go down this road across from us. Take your first right. Go one mile and take a right down Branch Holler Road. When you hit a hardtop road, turn right and go one mile.”

  “Thank you so much,” he said, handing Raymond a quarter.

  They lay on the porch and waited. Ten minutes later the man in the Mercury ended up where he’d started from, looking at them. The window rolled down, and the man laughed. “That was a pretty good joke, boys.”

  They faked laughs.

  “How long have your people been in these parts,” he asked Raymond.

  “Going on two hunnert years.”

  “How did they get here?”

  “They walked.”

  After he drove away, they all chuckled, and Raymond was pleased with himself. It was probably just a question of time until they accepted him without hesitation. If he could get Zeke and Wash up off this porch floor and back to tilling their fields and fishing their streams, they’d be among h
is staunchest lieutenants.

  “You know, really I admire the way yall are together,” he told them.

  “Huh?” said Zeke.

  “You don’t realize how lucky you are up here. Under capitalism people don’t have friendships, they have functions or possessions or skills that other people need.”

  The three turned their heads to look at him.

  “But here in Tatro Cove it’s just Wash or Ben—complicated individuals you can’t categorize like that, because there’s nothing of material nature you need each other for. You can just sit back and watch each other’s characters open, one petal at a time, like a sunflower in the sun.”

  He looked at them, awaiting agreement. They smiled uncertainly.

  “Uh, what’s capitalism?” asked Wash.

  “Those are good men,” Raymond said as he and Ben walked back down the highway.

  “Well, I think they like you, too. But you use some pretty fancy words sometimes, Raymond.”

  “That’s where I need you to help me, Ben.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, I need you to tell me which words are too fancy. They’re all the same to me. Can I count on you for that?”

  “Well, sure, Raymond.” He seemed pleased at the notion that he might have something to offer Raymond. Raymond had to make him see that this very humility was a valuable part of the legacy of Tatro Cove.

  Back at Ben’s, M.G. insisted Raymond come see his new bathroom. “We just had it redid, Junior. I want you to be the first to see it!”

  Raymond walked into a brightly lit, tiled cubicle. Fluffy green carpet covered the floor and the squat toilet like creeping mildew. A square sunken bathtub ordered from Lexington. Double sinks in a fake-marble Formica counter. Mirrors all over the place. M.G. flushed the toilet “Listen, Junior! It don’t make a sound.”

  “Well, it’s really something, M.G.”

  “You’re not just whistling ‘Dixie,’ son! I reckon it’s the finest bathroom in these parts. What you think?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Why, I bet you ain’t even seen many bathrooms this grand up North!”

  “No sir, I sure ain’t.” Raymond’s lack of enthusiasm was driving M.G. in search of greater hyperbole.

  “I do believe this is just about the most luxurious room I ever did see!”

  “Oh Pa, come off it,” Ben muttered in the doorway.

  M.G. said in a huffy voice, “Why, I get the impression, Junior, you don’t much care for it, to tell you the truth.”

  Raymond sighed. “M.G., I ain’t got nothing against flush toilets. I just don’t necessarily believe that owning one makes you a better person than you was when you had an outhouse down the holler.”

  Early the next morning Raymond went to Cor Four’s barn to help him milk. Cor Four never said much, and when he did, it was in a self-conscious drawl. As he sponged udders and attached suction cups to nipples, he spoke not at all. Working alongside him, Raymond honored this silence. Probably Cor Four was communing with his cows, keeping them content and productive, like a queen bee with her workers.

  At one point Cor Four chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Hee hee, just thinking about old Cor Three.”

  “What about him?” This was wonderful stuff. Ancestors were living presences in Tatro Cove, formed part of the fabric of daily life.

  “Used to hunt squirrels all the time and bile them up. Give the broth to you, no matter what ailed you. Verbena was down with the ammonia one winter, and he turns up in her roam with a bowl of that stuff. She looks up at him and says, ‘Uncle Cor, if hit was to take squirrel broth to bring me back, I’d just as soon go on home.’” He chuckled. Raymond didn’t. He’d been reading up on it. There was lots to these folk remedies. Mockery of them was a tactic of the drug industry and the AMA.

  “There’s lots to be said for folk remedies.”

  “I reckon. But give me a shot of penicillin over squirrel broth any day, boy.”

  The problems here were graver than Raymond had recognized. Apparently even the older generation had fallen prey to the modern world. His work was cut out for him. But on behalf of the younger generation, he asked Cor Four what toys he’d played with as a kid.

  “Toys?”

  “Yeah, you know, wooden toys that your father and uncles probably carved for you from pieces of wood.”

  Cor Four took a bite of Red Man tobacco and sat chewing on a milk can outside the milking parlor. “Yeah, I recollect one or two. Something we called a gee haw flimmy diddle that you made out of laurel twigs. And this thing you whirled around your head on a rawhide cord. A bull roarer. This old Cherokee Indian who lived up the next holler used to make them for us.” He laughed.

  “Can you show me how to make them?” He studied Raymond. “What you wanting old-timey junk like that for anyhow?”

  “For Lyla and the other little kids in the cove.”

  “They got em the television now. Don’t need no bull roarers.”

  But that evening Raymond handed Lyla a bull roarer, a slice from a hickory limb with a cord attached. She shifted her eyes from Big Bird long enough to look at it.

  “Uncle Cor made it for you,” Raymond explained. “You twirl it around your head and it makes a sound like rushing wind. The Cherokee Indians used to think they’d bring on storm clouds in a drought.”

  Lyla shrugged and returned her eyes to Big Bird.

  “Mind your manners,” Lyle growled from the couch. “Say ‘Thank you, Cousin Raymond.’”

  “Thank you, Cousin Raymond.” She grinned, revealing several missing baby teeth, then looked back at the television.

  “Well, see you,” said Raymond, heading for the door. He didn’t know how to act around kids. Hadn’t been around them much. Nobody in FORWARD had any. In Newland he saw Joey and Laura some. They were brats—interrupted and talked back, showed off and threw tantrums, confident their parents would be enthralled, which they generally appeared to be. Capitalism bred brats: Only the new was worthy of respect in a consumer society.

  “You got nice kids,” he said to Lyle, who was seeing him out.

  “You don’t have to live with them.” He laughed.

  “They seem to do what you tell them.”

  “When they don’t, I beat the shit out of them.”

  Raymond chuckled. He was sure Lyle was being modest, putting down his virtues as people so often did in Tatro Cove.

  The sun woke Raymond, shining on his bed as it cleared the hill across the creek. He went outside, took a leak, then picked up the bucket and went to the creek. He sniffed the air and looked at the sky, the way his cousins used to when they were kids. You tried to figure out what kind of day it was so you knew what jobs to plan. It was still such a kick planning his days, after years of having them planned for him by employers.

  He pulled on his overalls and chamois shirt and built a fire in the stove to scramble some eggs. The corn needed hoeing. The fence around the graveyard needed mending. When Ben arrived, he stripped some corn for the chickens and fought with the rooster over the eggs, while Raymond milked the cow and put the milk in the springhouse. As they chopped weeds in the corn patch, Raymond glanced at Ben from time to time. The sun shone off his blonde hair like a halo. Raymond thought about him all the time now—his guilelessness, his native intelligence, his integrity, his uncomplicated enthusiasm and curiosity. Ben touched him deeply. The responsibility frightened him every now and then. The opportunity to create the spokesman he needed was staring him in the face. But what if Raymond couldn’t do it right?

  He chopped at the purslane and began lecturing to Ben about the myth of progress: “Under capitalism Progress actually means profits for shareholders. Progress toward some infinitely desirable but never specified and always receding goal. The term is an anesthetic that keeps workers punching that time clock ever morning. But corn just grows, it doesn’t progress.” He liked the sound of that last phrase. Corn just grows, it doesn�
�t progress. He saw himself feeding this analysis into Ben, and Ben passing it on to Zeke and Wash, and its spreading throughout the area. He himself would be like a radio transmitter.

  “Uh huh,” murmured Ben, avoiding Raymond’s eyes.

  Back at the house they smeared some butter and honey on bread Raymond had baked the day before, and set off up the stream with Raymond’s L.L. Bean fishing equipment.

  “Did you ever think,” Raymond asked, “how many times Cor One must have waded up this creek with his fishing gear?”

  “Naw, never did.”

  “Just imagine: This whole area empty of people except a Cherokee hunting party or two. Fish jumping out of the creek at you. Everything you needed you could make or hunt. Those guys were really something.”

  “I reckon.”

  Failing to catch trout, they ate their bread for lunch. As they sat licking honey off their mouths, Ben said, “Junior, did you ever, you know”—he blushed—“do it to a girl?”

  “You mean make love?”

  Ben ducked his head, mortified.

  “Sure. Every now and then.”

  “Who with?”

  “A couple of different women.”

  “Do you have a girl now?”

  He thought about Thelma, whether she qualified. “Yes, I guess. She lives near Newland. I’ve been … involved with her for about a year. But we’re not getting along too good right now.” He’d been down to see her a few times to try to talk her into moving with Jim to Tatro Cove. He described the ever wider gap yawning between rich and poor, the fouling of the valley’s air and water with wastes from the factories, the poisoning of its inhabitants, the eventual collapse of Newland, the deserted mills and factories inhabited only by hoot owls and black widow spiders.

  “My goodness,” said Thelma.

  “This scene down here can’t last much longer, Thelma. You need to learn how to supply your essentials with your own hands.”

  “Yeah, Jim’d be real good at that.”

  “In a place like Tatro Cove you’d get some help with Jim. Everyone would pitch in.”

  “I bet.”

  “They would,” he insisted.