The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Verbena almost collapsed when they asked her to teach them to knit. She’d forgotten how, but Grandma Tatro showed them. They also set up an old loom from Verbena’s barn and began weaving a coverlet.

  Raymond explained to Ben how their forebears had sold them out for an illusion of security. Now, in the mill and the mines, they didn’t own the huge machines, the cloth or coal. All they owned was their labor, which they’d sold to management for cash with which to buy food and shelter. Management had purchased them, the way plantation owners used to purchase slaves. Ben and he, though, were resuscitating the family craft. They owned their equipment, their labor, and the end product, which they could either use or sell. They’d destroyed the worker-capitalist relationship at its source.

  Ben blushed to the roots of his blonde hair. “Are you some kind of Communist or something, Junior?”

  Raymond smiled. “Capitalism, Communism. Both concerned with the production and distribution of junk. Cor One got along with as little junk as possible—what could be produced by his own hands.”

  “What are you then—a Democrat or something?”

  “I’m a Tatro, Ben. Of Tatro Cove. And so are you.”

  He frowned. “What does that mean?”

  Raymond felt he was answering this question through illustration, not through abstract theoretical discussion, which was as foreign to Tatro Cove as Big Bird and M.G.’s white patent leather loafers.

  Late one night he sat by the stove knitting and watching Johnny Carson, picturing himself being interviewed by Johnny. You’d want to simplify your terminology, intersperse it with little jokes, appear on this show rather than one some news analysis program on public broadcasting, so that you could really bring your message to the people….

  There was a knock on the door. Raymond started, poking himself with one of his needles. People hardly ever came down to the end of the cove, never that late, and not through that sea of mud called a road. He jumped up, turned off the TV, and slid it under the bed.

  He opened the door on a tall, well-built man with a full red beard and thinning hair, who he figured was the guy from Philadelphia Ben had been telling him about. Ben was always enthusiastic about new people. But Raymond had really not been looking forward to this. Dred Allen, he said his name was. Raymond recognized it immediately. He’d done political work with Justin and Morris and those guys. Raymond decided not to mention mutual acquaintances. That was all behind him now. He was ashamed of his days as a missionary for Yankee imperialism.

  “Just thought I’d stop by, introduce myself.”

  “Come in.”

  “Am I interrupting?”

  Raymond laughed. “Hell, no. What’s there to interrupt?”

  “Yeah, this place is a drag, all right.” He sat down and pulled out some cigarette papers. “You mind if I, like, smoke?”

  “Not if you don’t mind if I knit.”

  “Your cousin Ben said we should check each other out. That we, like, have a lot in common.”

  “Do we?”

  “Well, he said you, like, lived in New York?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing down here, man?”

  “My family came from here. I grew up in the valley and decided to come back.”

  “Why?”

  “I like it. It’s quiet.” This was probably the last person he’d describe his mission to. He’d learned you had to be sly around unbelievers.

  “Jesus, you can say that again.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “My old lady and me, we were organizing in Philly. She got offered this job to, like, set up this pre-school thing for the county Human Resources Agency.”

  “How bout you?”

  “Me? Oh, I’m playing free-lance provocateur.”

  This was the fanciest name Raymond had heard yet for unemployment. “Where you living at?”

  “We rented a house two hollows down.”

  “So how’s it going?” Raymond had dropped a stitch and had to unravel a couple of rows.

  Dred drew deeply on his joint. “Shit, man, I can’t communicate with these cats, know what I mean?”

  Raymond looked at him. He knew what it was like to be new kid on the block. Besides, Hospitality was part of the Tatro code. “Well, they’re pretty stand-offish until they get to know you.”

  “Stand-offish? Man, I’d be glad if they were! I’m just afraid I’m going to get punched out, know what I mean?”

  “Oh well, if you’re at that point, you’re fine. What you got to watch out for is silence, when they won’t even bother to disagree with you.”

  “I was jogging up my road one day past this shack with a bunch of wrecked cars in the yard. This old guy was sitting on his porch. I ran up and introduced myself. Then I said maybe I could get someone to come haul away the cars. He said, ‘What’s wrong with them where they is?’” He laughed. “But I guess you got to figure that anybody with any get-up-and-go has already got up and gone!” He laughed. Raymond gazed at him, unamused.

  Dred left behind an invitation for Ben and Raymond for supper the next week. “He’s an outasight kid, your cousin. Can you help me persuade him to get the hell out of Tatro Cove?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I mean, like, hell, man, this is one bright kid. And what’s there for him in this disaster area. Know what I mean?”

  “What’s there for him out there?”

  Their eyes met.

  Raymond was just finishing kneading some dough the next night when Ben arrived, his hair slicked down from his shower after ball practice, and mud from the road almost to his knees. He dropped into a chair by the stove.

  “Dred says he came by.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Isn’t he neat, Junior?”

  “Yes.” He’d decided the best way to handle Ben’s enthusiasm was to humor it. Dred was so awful that even Ben couldn’t fail to perceive it in time. Patience. Like the patience required to knead dough, let it rise. He shaped the dough into loaves and slipped them into buttered pans.

  He sat down and handed Ben a dulcimer they’d found while ransacking Verbena’s barn. Raymond picked up Grandpa Tatro’s banjo. They strummed and plucked for a while, trying to figure out how to play the damn things together.

  “Let’s face it,” Ben suggested. “We’re awful.”

  “At least we’re not sitting staring at TV.”

  “What you got against TV? I bet you’d like The Waltons,’ Junior.”

  Raymond realized he hadn’t explained the difference between popular culture and mass culture. He’d reviewed his methods carefully and had decided that verbal explanation had to accompany, and provide a framework for, practical illustration: “The ballads Tatros used to sing until the arrival of the radio—they came from Scotland and England. Something would happen—a murder or something. Someone would write a song about it. Other people would forget the words or tune and add new ones. It’d be passed on from generation to generation, getting polished like a stone in a creek. It expressed the common experience of the entire community.”

  “How do you know what used to go on up here, Junior?”

  Raymond paused with his mouth open, trying to decide if this question was intended to be as impertinent as it sounded. Ben sometimes just didn’t seem to grasp his role as disciple. Raymond decided it was a genuine question, but that it deserved to be ignored, so Ben would learn to absorb things at the pace at which Raymond fed them to him. “You take television. Its messages are passed down from a few capitalists in glass office buildings in New York City. The ads make viewers want to buy a lot of useless junk. And the way different groups are presented or not presented in programs reinforces the pecking order that keeps those fuckers on top.”

  “What about ‘Hawaii Five-O’? That’s a real good show.”

  Raymond sighed, then reminded himself about rising dough.

  “You think I shouldn’t watch TV anymore, Junior?”

  “Shit, how the hell sho
uld I know?”

  Sitting in silence as rain splattered against the windows, Raymond felt discouraged. It was a shock to realize how little Ben understood. Did the kid have to go out and get as fucked over as Raymond had been? What was the point of missing “The Price Is Right” if Raymond wasn’t getting his point across?

  “There’s something I been wanting to tell you.” Ben blushed.

  Raymond looked up.

  “We finally done it, Cheryl and me. We loved it. Been doing it all the time.”

  “I thought you hadn’t been around much lately.” Raymond felt a pang of jealousy. It wasn’t a sensation he approved of, implying ownership of another person. But maybe it was inevitable in a society that treated people like things that could be bought and sold. The feeling began to fade as he performed his political analysis on it. All these reflexes from your upbringing lingered on. You had to examine them, then dismiss them.

  “I want to bring her down to meet you, Junior. Is that OK?”

  “Sure. Bring her by.” He wanted to meet this chick almost as much as he wanted to meet Little Lulu.

  Raymond had thought Dred looked like the type who’d serve whole wheat spaghetti, and he did. During supper Dred talked endlessly about starting a food co-op. “We could get staples a lot cheaper. Also items you can’t find around here—mung beans and natural peanut butter and stuff. We could like borrow a truck and make runs to Lexington or Knoxville.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find much demand here for mung beans,” Raymond said.

  “Hostess cupcakes and Nehis maybe.” Ben grinned.

  “Shit, man, I can’t get anyone interested in anything around this hell-hole.”

  Dred’s son Humus specialized in spontaneity. At that moment he stood up on his chair and lisped “Solidarity Forever,” thrusting his clenched fist into the air.

  Ben, having known only mealtimes at which women stood behind the men, and children gazed at their plates and said nothing unless questioned, looked stunned. Dred and his old lady Cindy and Raymond, however, listened and smiled at Humus and applauded when he finished.

  Dred resumed, “I tried to get the JayCees to buy that baseball field from Cletus Jones. Everyone said, ‘Aw shucks, Cletus, he lets us use it when we want to.’”

  “He does,” Ben confirmed.

  “But it’s under water all winter.”

  “But nobody plays softball in winter,” Raymond explained.

  “Fuck it, man. I mean, like, I never saw such a lazy, backward, uncooperative bunch of people in my life. Know what I mean?”

  Raymond glanced at Ben. But he appeared to accept every word the bastard uttered. “Maybe we like things the way they are,” Raymond suggested. “When you call someone lazy, you might just be defining yourself as puritanically hyperactive.” Cindy and Dred did strike him as frenetic, constantly jumping up to fetch food, tend the fire, or pace the floor for emphasis. He remembered these people liked nothing better than a good argument, and realized he was about to be lured into their stockade.

  “No, man, it’s not contentment. It’s resignation. You can read it in the faces.”

  “That’s really true,” insisted Cindy. “I can find only four mothers who’re willing to give their children a preschool experience.”

  “Maybe they like having them around.”

  “Yes, but think of the poor child. Plopped in first grade with no preparation.”

  “What about the poor child who gets plopped in a preschool experience with no preparation?”

  “I want to talk now!” announced Humus.

  “Shut up,” Dred growled.

  Humus picked up a broccoli spear and began beating Dred on his balding head, calling him a “fucking fascist bastard.” Mock hollandaise sauce flew around the room. Ben’s eyes got wider.

  Ben took it upon himself to persuade his cousins to enroll their children in Cindy’s preschool experience.

  “What’d they say?” Raymond asked. This infatuation of Ben’s was bound to burn itself out. And when it did, Raymond would be waiting patiently to continue Ben’s instruction.

  “Muriel said she’d have to give Clem up soon enough as it was, and she wanted him with her as long as she could keep him. And Annie said little children belonged at home with their mothers. And Bertha said Cindy and Dred wasn’t nothing but Communists, trying to break up the American family.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told them they was being backward and old fashioned.”

  “But Ben, they have a point. It’s one way of looking at it.”

  “But Dred, he said …”

  “Fuck Dred!”

  Ben looked at him, alarmed.

  Ben brought Cheryl down one afternoon. Raymond could tell at a glance that she was a silly little twit, but he realized she might be useful for chores like canning and knitting, which were boring Raymond to death. She fluttered in, with Ben beaming behind. She started chattering about what a pleasure it was to meet Raymond, how much she’d heard about him, modeling herself on Scarlet O’Hara. Ben acted like a turd, feeding her questions that were supposed to display her at her best. If this was her best, Raymond shuddered to contemplate her worst.

  She looked around Raymond’s kitchen. “No electric range?”

  “I got me a wood stove.”

  “Why, I don’t believe I could manage without a range. You’re just a wonder, Junior. And no refrigerator?”

  Who was this? Betty Furness? “I use a springhouse.”

  “Ben honey, I know how much you admire Junior. But when we get married, honey, I just got to have me my Gold Medallion kitchen.”

  Raymond decided Ben ought to fuck her in the mouth. At least it might shut her up.

  “But you like to can, don’t you, Cheryl?” Ben urged.

  “Not if I can help it.” She laughed. “How long you been here?” she asked Raymond.

  “Close to a year.”

  “How long you staying?”

  “My whole life, I hope.”

  “Really? Gosh, I can’t wait to get away.”

  “How come?”

  She laughed. “Whenever my sisters come home from Atlanta, they say Tatro Cove looks like a hurricane’s been through.”

  “I think it’s right pretty myself.” Raymond’s heart was breaking.

  “Down here it’s not so bad. But out on the main road it’s a mess from all the stripping.”

  Raymond watched them walk back down the hollow. Ben put his arm around her. She snuggled up against him. They cut up through the woods. Probably they’d fuck on the leaves at the top of the cliff. Raymond went outside and began digging in his garden.

  The next day he ran into Lyla as he walked past her house. “How you liking your new school, Lyla?”

  She giggled, looked around, then whispered, “She crazy, that Mrs. Cindy lady.”

  “How come?”

  Lyla put on an adult voice: “‘Lyla, no juice and cracker until you call me Cindy.’”

  Raymond decided to go to the parish hall and see what was being done to his little cousins by this emissary of Yankee capitalism. The children sat coloring. Occasionally they sneaked glances at each other and giggled. Whenever Cindy spoke, they were polite, calling her Mrs. Cindy. Except for Humus, who called her Mom, and sometimes “stupid bitch woman.” She wore a long dress and combat boots.

  “How’s it going?” Raymond asked, determined to be pleasant.

  “Awful,” she sighed. “All they do is sit there and obey me. I wish one would kick me or throw a tantrum.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, they’re just so repressed. From their authoritarian home lives. It shows in everything they do. Look at these pictures.” She pointed to the wall at drawings of their houses. “So stark. No decoration or anything.”

  “But that’s how their houses are. People don’t have many extras around here.”

  “Material poverty I can handle. It’s the emotional paucity, the paucity of the imagination I’
m talking about, Raymond. For instance, this morning I tried to get them to imitate bacon frying. I even got down on the floor and demonstrated. They looked at me as though I were nuts or something.”

  Raymond suppressed a guffaw.

  “The kids in the Philly Free School loved it,” she said in a hurt voice. “They’d lose themselves in it, until you thought they really were bacon frying.”

  Raymond suggested this was a pretty sophisticated assignment for mountain children, but that she should try again, letting him explain. After his explanation and another demonstration, some appeared to understand. They flung themselves down and began writhing, cooperative strips of bacon. But Raymond couldn’t figure out the babbling noises coming from their mouths. Sound effects? The snapping and crackling of fat? Eventually one little boy jumped up, went over to a girl who was just watching, put his hands on her head with a firm downward pressure, and barked in a gruff little voice, “Heal, sister! In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, throw off your illness and be whole!”

  Cindy’s face assumed an expression of horror. She called a halt to the home revival and sent them out to play.

  Raymond couldn’t stop smiling as he and Cindy stood in the yard watching Humus. “You be the capitalist pig, and I’ll be the revolutionary worker!” he ordered Clem. Clem looked at him, frowned, and joined the others under a tulip poplar. They sat watching the shifting pattern of leafy shadows on the grass.

  “See what I mean?” Cindy demanded. “So sluggish. Sometimes I wonder if the poor little things aren’t full of worms.”

  She marched over and said something. They got up and followed her to a dirt pile. She explained and gestured. Humus scrambled up the pile and stood on top with his hands on his hips. A couple of boys followed, and he pushed them down the pile.