The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  They picked themselves up and stood blinking, looking at Humus with bewilderment as he shouted, “Ha, ha! I’m king on the mountain!”

  A few others made attempts to climb the pile.

  “I don’t know,” sighed Cindy upon her return. “They’re all bottled up. No intensity to anything they do. They’ve been so harshly disciplined in their families that their aggression has been stalled.”

  Raymond felt his aggression about to be unstalled. He snapped, “They got very little aggression to start with. Why should they? Their world is warm and placid and friendly and accepting and noncompetitive. They know who they are and what’s expected of them.”

  “Exactly! And with no conflict, they’re failing to develop personalities with elasticity, resilience, and complexity. Conflict shouldn’t be feared, but rather its absence, and the resulting inability to deal with it. I worry so for them.”

  “But if you don’t have conflict, you don’t need to deal with it.”

  “There’s conflict everywhere. The alternative is death,”

  “I disagree.”

  “So disagree!” They glared at each other. She was delighted. She felt right at home. He tried to avoid noticing that he did too.

  Half a dozen boys had just pushed Humus off the hill. He was howling, “No fair! You can’t gang up!” Once in possession of the hill, the boys held out their hands and helped up the little girls.

  “Cindy, Tatro Cove is different from Philadelphia. Not better, but no worse. People aren’t machine parts—we don’t have to be uniform and standardized. We can enrich each other’s lives with our differences.”

  Humus charged back up the hill and pushed children off. Several kids, their faces red with rage but otherwise impassive, began beating the shit out of him.

  “How’s that for unstalled aggression?” Raymond called as Cindy raced to rescue Humus.

  Ben’s team won the regional play-offs and went to Louisville for the state championship.

  “Wow, it was neat, Junior!” he reported upon his return. “Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts, Howard Johnsons’—all in a row, one right after another. Shopping malls. Everthing.”

  They were on their way up to the graveyard to mend fences. Ben said he had to do a project for Civics class and might do it on franchises, how you set them up and how they worked. “It might could be a way for me to stay in the Cove and still make a living. Dad might help me start up a Kentucky Fried Chicken place.”

  Raymond stared at him.

  “What do you think, Junior?”

  Raymond started pointing out the different headstones and talking about the men who lay beneath them: Purvis Tatro, a great-uncle who was shot during a union drive at his mine in the thirties. Arlen Tatro, mashed into eternity by a tree he cut for Remington to make rifle stocks with during World War II. Billy Jack Tatro, killed at Okinawa. Lucian Tatro, killed in Korea. Horten Tatro, killed at Dak To. Grandpa Tatro, minus his right arm, which lay smashed thin as a snakeskin under tons of slate in the middle of a nearby mountain.

  Raymond explained how they were all casualties of Yankee capitalism, which made wars inevitable through the pursuit of raw materials, and of markets to consume the overproduction of junk. How capitalist profits peaked during and immediately after wars. How wars were fought by hillbillies and blacks and Puerto Ricans, how most men he knew up North managed to sidestep the draft.

  “Don’t hardly seem fair,” mused Ben as he hammered.

  “It ain’t. Don’t let yourself be deceived, Ben. The Kentucky Colonel is a Yankee capitalist front man, and Kentucky Fried Chicken ain’t got nothing to do with Tatro Cove, Kentucky.”

  Raymond suggested he do a questionnaire for his project to send home with his classmates, to see if their grandparents could recall any of the old mountain ballads. Ben looked at Raymond skeptically. “She wants a paper. You know, double-spaced, with footnotes and all.”

  “You could write up your results.”

  “Well, Dred, he thought the franchise project was a good idea. Said Tatro Cove was the seam of the poverty pocket. Needed to bring in new jobs.”

  “Dred? What does Dred know about Tatro Cove? What does Dred know about what’s best for you?”

  “It’s just that sometimes he thinks I have good ideas.”

  Raymond didn’t know what to say.

  “I like you a lot, Raymond. I just wish you could like me how I am.”

  “But I do!”

  “No, you don’t, Raymond. Not really. You want me to be somebody else.”

  Raymond thought this over as they walked down the hill. Maybe it was true. But only in the sense that Raymond could see in Ben undeveloped capacities, foresaw what was going to happen down in the valley, and understood the role Ben could play after the collapse. It was lonely seeing more than those around you saw. You were doomed to misunderstanding and isolation. People were constantly betraying you and betraying their potential, without even knowing it. He felt the familiar gnawing in his stomach. But then he thought about the long line of Tatro quare turns—Cor One alone in the Kentucky wilderness, Cor Three with only his herbs to communicate with. Looked at from a temporal point of view, yes, Raymond was alone. But when he returned into inner solitude, he knew he was in good company. In the best company, the most recent in a race of giants. And Ben could join him if only he’d let in what Raymond had to teach him.

  The county came to blacktop the road up the cove. Tatros had been trying to get this done for fifteen years.

  “I feel like they’re overdoing it, don’t you, Granny?” Raymond asked one afternoon as he strolled past Verbena’s porch. “All we asked for was some rock and gravel.”

  “Ain’t you heard, Junior? They fixing to strip the backside of yonder hill.”

  Raymond stared at her. “They can’t do that.”

  “How come not?”

  “Belongs to us.”

  “What’s up top does. But Cor Three sold off what’s underneath back in ’05.”

  “To who?”

  She shrugged.

  “We got to stop it.”

  She smiled and rocked. “Can’t.”

  Large trucks loaded with logs moved down the cove to the highway for several weeks. Then flatbed trucks hauling yellow bulldozers and loaders rolled slowly up the road in the other direction.

  “They got the right to earn them a living. Same as everbody else,” said Lem as he sat on his porch, his face still black from work. “Same as most everbody else,” he added, looking at Raymond.

  “I’m earning me a living, Lem,” Raymond said, hurt. Hell, it was a more permanent living than the mines could provide, not that Lem had the brains to understand why.

  “Yeah. I reckon.”

  “I’m keeping food on my table and clothes on my back. I don’t have a new Olds from M.G. like you do because I don’t want one.”

  “All right, Junior. Don’t get all touchy. You do what you want. But let other people do what they want.”

  “Even if it means wrecking what I’m doing?”

  “They ain’t hurting you none.”

  “Like fuck they ain’t. The whole house shakes when they go by. My seedlings is coated with the dust they throw up.”

  “Just relax, Junior. You be all right.”

  Raymond decided Lem was right. He had things to reveal to Tatro Cove, but every now and then there were a few things they could teach him. He was upset now because factors beyond his control were entering his life. The whole point was to accept your lack of control and go with the flow, as Tatro Cove had always done. He had to be alert, scour from his character the scum deposited by all those years spent on the outside.

  The blasting started. A rock the size of a basketball landed in his garden, leaving a crater several feet deep among the cauliflower.

  “That could’ve been Lyla’s head that thing landed on!” Raymond yelled at Lyle, who leaned out the window of the Flying Goose.

  “But it weren’
t,” he pointed out, chewing a piece of grass.

  “Next time it might be. We got to stop this.”

  “Look around you, Junior. Half the men in this county got a missing leg, or a smashed back, or the black lung. Any miner’ll tell you hit’s safer stripping than crawling into the middle of a mountain.”

  Raymond clamped his mouth shut and made no reply. Lyle thought he was impractical. What could be more practical than learning to supply all your material needs from your own land with your own hands? Maybe Lyle couldn’t see this now, but he would in time, once the system that was keeping him fed and clothed collapsed. Then he’d be looking at Raymond with respect rather than tolerant scorn. It was just lucky for this world that here and there were a few quare turns who didn’t allow themselves to be deceived into believing that how things were wasn’t necessarily how they’d always be. Probably Karl Marx himself was a quare turn.

  All day long as Raymond weeded his garden, he could hear the roar of bulldozers shoving landslides down the backside of the hill on which the graveyard sat. There was another round of blasting. He could feel each explosion coming. The ground trembled as though an earthquake were under way. Then a deafening concussion. A cloud of orange smoke billowing silently into the summer sky, while boulders sailed upyard, arched, then floated out of sight behind the hills. His living room wall cracked along one corner. Huge trucks, Lyle’s Flying Goose among them, rolled past his house leaving a trail of gleaming black chunks down the cove.

  As he walked along the blacktop back from McCray’s, with trucks thundering past, he came upon Lyla sitting in her yard behind a card table that held a glass pitcher. Her sign read, “Kool Aid, 5 ¢ a glass.” She was taking a trucker’s nickel and handing him a Dixie cup.

  As he roared off in a cloud of exhaust, Raymond asked her what she thought she was doing.

  “Earning me some money,” she said, gazing at him as though he were retarded.

  “Does your mama know?”

  “She hepped me.”

  “I don’t think it’s right, Lyla. You ought to be wading in a creek or something. Go play with your bull roarer. It’s dangerous with all these big trucks.”

  “Mrs. Cindy, she says why don’t I do it.”

  Raymond climbed up to the graveyard. Looking down the backside of the hill, he saw it had been scalped of its vegetation and topsoil, which now lay in jumbled heaps farther down. He watched down below as an auger six feet in diameter forced its way into what was left of the vein. It spewed out behind itself, into waiting trucks, ejaculations of shiny black coal. Withdrawing slowly, it shifted down the seam, then plunged in again, ripping and tearing out a new hole.

  Endurance, he reminded himself. Fortitude. Stoicism. Disasters came and went in Tatro Cove. Wild animals, Indian raids, guerrilla bushwhacking, feuds, revenuers, floods, union wars, coal busts, accidents, disease, starvation, and VISTA workers. But Tatros remained.

  He felt like a man with his hands bound behind his back, watching his lover being ravished. He couldn’t hurl himself against earthmoving equipment, two stories high. It wasn’t a question of overpowering or outwitting, just outlasting. If he could keep from going crazy, the strippers would be gone soon.

  By autumn they were, leaving behind a road so rutted that cars could barely get down it. Ben hadn’t been around much ever since their talk at the graveyard. Probably banging his brains out in the woods. Raymond concluded that endurance was the only answer. Patience like Job’s. Ben would get tired of fucking and fed up with Dred’s arrogance. He’d recognized that Raymond had his true best interests at heart, and he’d come back. Raymond just had to keep his distance so that Ben wouldn’t feel pressured, and then make it easy for him to return once he recognized his mistake.

  One day as Royal and Raymond walked the hills cutting galax, Royal said, “Looks like I won’t have to cut this stuff no more, without I want to.”

  “You come into an inheritance, Royal?”

  “Sort of like. Dred there, he hepped me to get onto the welfare.”

  Raymond straightened up and looked at him.

  “He’s starting him up this group. Needs my hep,” he added proudly.

  “To do what?”

  “To go out and get folks onto the rolls.”

  “But Royal, once you’re living off welfare, the Yankee capitalists have got you right where they want you—dependent on them. Not likely to make a fuss.”

  “I ain’t never made no fuss nohow. Been too tired trying to keep food on the table.”

  “But Royal …”

  “Son, don’t you Royal me. The day you got six hungry kids is the day I’ll be innerested in what you got to say about how I keep them fed.”

  “But Royal, you could keep them fed with a market garden. Sell the surplus for cash. I’ll help you set it up.”

  “Naw, I’m sick, son. I need me the welfare.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  He clasped his chest and started wheezing. “My lungs. Done gone plumb punky on me. Some days I can’t hardly breathe. Looky here, why don’t you join our group, Raymond. You might could get on the welfare yourself. Then you wouldn’t have to dig this shit no more.”

  Raymond looked out across the hills and down into the cove. If he did, he’d have more time to pursue his mission…. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” he snarled.

  “Huh?”

  These capitalists were brilliant, Raymond reflected, maneuvering men into engineering their own impotence. But it wouldn’t last. Just as you had to sit out the stripping of your family graveyard, so you had to sit out all the wrenching death throes of capitalism.

  One evening a red Mustang arrived in Raymond’s front yard. Cheryl was sitting shotgun. Ben hopped out, grinning. “You like it, Junior?”

  Raymond’s heart leaped at the sight of his blonde head and open cheerful face. Ben was back! Just as Raymond had foreseen. “Like what?”

  “My birthday present.” He gestured to the car. Raymond said nothing.

  “Daddy got it as a trade-in on a El Dorado. Give it to me.”

  Raymond stared at it.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Very nice.”

  “Come go for a ride.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Ah, come on, Junior. Let’s go get us a hamburger at that new place in town.”

  “What new place?”

  “Ain’t you been to Hillbilly Heaven yet?”

  Raymond nodded no.

  “Come on, buddy. Get up off your ass and let’s go!”

  Reluctantly, Raymond climbed in.

  The specialty at Hillbilly Heaven was the Hillbilly Burger, “barbecued with our own special sauce, laced with just a hint of home-brewed white lightning.” The clientele were mostly film crews and journalists from the national networks doing specials on the destruction of the Southern mountains.

  Dred sauntered in. Ben said, “We got a big surprise for you, Junior.”

  Dred held out a cardboard box on which was printed “Uncle Corliss Tatro’s Old Timey Gee Haw Flimmy Diddle.” There was a picture of Cor Four sitting whittling in his hat and baggy overalls. The copy read, “Tatros settled in Tatro Cove before the American Revolution, and they’re still there, living much as their ancestors did. The Tatro children still play with handmade wooden toys such as this …”

  Dred and Ben were setting up Old Timey Toys, Inc.—with a factory in Tatro Cove which Ben would run. Dred already had orders from a couple of stores on Fifth Avenue that carried other Appalachian products, as well as from craft shops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Woodstock, Vermont.

  “Great, huh, Junior?” Ben demanded. “It’s why you haven’t been seeing much of me lately.”

  Raymond couldn’t speak.

  “I realize now,” confessed Dred, stroking his red beard, “that I came to Tatro Cove thinking I had all the answers. Well, I know now these people have plenty to teach me. I want to help them preserve their culture and transmit its strengths to t
he American mainstream.”

  “What’s wrong, Junior?” Ben asked in a worried voice. “Don’t worry about him.” Dred gave Raymond a look of contempt. “He’s just jealous he didn’t think of it first.”

  That night the skies opened. Rain gushed down like fluid from a uterus at the onset of labor. Raymond sat on his porch and watched in the lightning as the topsoil from his garden washed into the creek. He felt nothing. Ben had betrayed him for a handful of silver. Well, he would just have to revise his plans. How, he had no idea. He’d just have to wait until new means were revealed to him.

  The rains kept up for several days. When they stopped, the creek was choked with silt from the soil bank left by the strippers. Water rose over the creek bank and began flooding his yard. With a shovel he dug a new channel. The next rain brought down more silt and filled in the channel. Every few days Royal and Lem and Lyle and Cor Four and Raymond were all out in the creek in front of their houses with shovels.

  Raymond climbed the hill to get some idea how much more silt would descend. He discovered the graveyard had sunk, the ground having collapsed into auger holes. Looking down the backside, he saw that a mud slide off the soil bank had dammed the valley through which the creek ran. Murky reddish water was building up behind it.

  At Thanksgiving dinner, M.G. said, “Lord, we got so much to be thankful for here in Tatro Cove.” Raymond reflected that M.G. sure did. He’d branched out into helicopters, was selling dozens to strippers. “We known hard times, which makes our present good fortune that much sweeter to partake of.”

  After everybody amened, while the women served, Raymond told about the mud slide, about his concern that the wall would break and flood the cove, about the need to get together and do something about it.

  “If it breaks, it breaks,” said Lem, shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth.

  “Son, you can’t stop progress!” announced M.G., folding his hands over his stomach, which bulged out over the white patent leather belt that matched his loafers.