IV
Sara
It rained and Sara heard the rain in her sleep. She dreamed that winter had come upon her. Deep in her cocoon of sweaters and jackets and blankets, she grew colder and colder. She realized her body was stiff and beginning to shudder. The wind had begun again blowing and snow, fine fine snow came through the cracks in the house, little flakes of snow, like the finest dust, were melting, not even melting, on her blanket. She remembered being told once that when people freeze to death they get warm before they die, warm and sleepy. First warmth, then sleep, sounded good to her. She thought of stories she’d heard of people frozen in their homes, the clapboard shacks that weathered and dried so that wide cracks opened between the boards and let in the wind like sieves and they just built the fires up higher and higher and often the shacks burned down: there were so many leaning brick chimneys in the valley. But she was free: she had a truck with an engine that worked and money for gas when she got to town. She could leave and she even had somewhere to go, if she could find it. She would leave now and come back in the summer, if summer ever came back to the valley. She could guess but didn’t want to know that the cold had hit the cities as hard as the forest…
She dreamed she was a child in her mother’s house and she wandered from room to room in her mother’s house, making a circle through the archways and swinging doors. She knew it was desperate to think that anything might change in any of the rooms but still she made her rounds, looking for something she knew but didn’t want to admit was there. She loved to dance to music on the phonograph but if she heard someone coming she would stop as if guilty, sit down and appear to be listening quietly to the music that her mother played incessantly on the phonograph, incessantly bombarding her with a painful beauty she wanted to be part of. She was an exile from the beginning.
She dreamed she played in a vacant lot and was still and again a child. Other children came to the lot where she played and she could see that they were rough and mocking and cruel and she was frightened. She ran through the lot filled with laundry on lines blowing in the wind like flags, pale and old, poor and torn. She ran into an eight-sided house of dream memory, where there were many doors and she had to race to each door to lock it against the rioting children and there were always more, always open, to her terror and amazement. She was frightened and tired. She could see them watching her and sometimes they were right outside or sometimes far away but sometimes they came all the way into the house and she had to force her dream to force them out and she was getting tired in her sleep. She couldn’t get out anymore but they could get in and one of them was coming to judge her and the others were telling outrageous lies about her. She saw the sheets on the lines again and knew that each one was a deception and nothing could protect her from the mocking, the cruel eyes hidden behind them. She began to feel sleepy but was afraid to sleep and sometimes she would start up suddenly, realizing she had dozed and then she would have to search the house to see if anyone had gotten in and was waiting to attack her, or if someone had come and gone, taking something of value from her. But the house was empty. She only imagined that she kept important things in the house. Only dreams were in it and her fears and thoughts…
Sara’s pile of notes grew. She’d interviewed Houston for an entire day: had trouble breaking away after dark. He talked about everyone in the county but himself or his own family. She found out more about Houston from the postmistress, who seemed to stick to the facts while Houston was a natural-born gossip. She found out about some guy named Cecil who lived in cities all winter and then came back to the holler in an old bread van with a jar full of cash money and hunted sang in the woods to sell in the cities. Cecil was the best source for what was going on in the cities because he paid attention and didn’t drink. Lots of folks made forays into the cities, to investigate careers in factory work, save up some money, maybe find a girlfriend after being rejected at home, but they all came back sooner or later, them that was really a part of the place anyway, wouldn’t exactly call it a community but OK that was a good enough word, Houston guessed, for what he was trying to get at: the people who left for good were never part of it anyway, kept to themselves, they noses in books more’n likely, dreaming all the time of leaving, never really here. Houston couldn’t tell her about the town folks, never went to town. The nearest “town” consisted of about 300 people, give or take a birth now, a death then.
Sara always began her day rushing up to the highest point of the road to watch the morning sun burn the mist from the mountainsides, working down to the valley where little houses and barns and plowed fields would emerge as if by magic, and then she would leave the road and follow the deer paths through the forest back to her camp, sometimes taking hours as she stopped to examine lichens growing on rocks and dead wood passing through various phases of sculptural beauty on its way back to the earth. She’d get back to camp when the sun was high in the sky, have some coffee, usually nothing to eat knowing she’d have to sample some food wherever she went in the afternoon or risk seeming rude. On drizzly days she was torn between a reluctance to leave the sweet-smelling misty forest and a desire to warm and dry herself at the fragrant wood fires she knew would be burning in the homes of the folks she had yet to visit and interview.
But the summer was drawing to an end and she couldn’t leave anyone out, except of course those that had made it clear to her they weren’t talking. Seems everywhere she went, someone gave her the names of someone else she should talk to and if she didn’t show up to talk to those folks they would track her down, offended she hadn’t been by to visit immediately. So she had her growing list of names and her schedule made up for her by the “informants” who were, for the most part thrilled and filled with self-importance to think that their gossip would end up in a bona fide book to be read at the University. This was their chance to get messages out to a world that generally paid them no mind. Everyone had some funny story and then some homespun-sounding wisdom that they figured would sound good on the outside. Sara finally figured out that much of what they told her was what they figured she expected and wanted to hear about the good ole country folks they were supposed to be.
Sara found herself thinking in the mountain dialect and cadences, more so than when she had lived with the city kids on the commune and not had much commerce with the local people. She found out about old Pat who clear-cut the timber on his land to sell and made everyone so angry at him that he had to move to North Carolina. She found out about some killings and noticed nobody was much shocked. Some woman pushed her husband down the stairs when he was drunk and he died there of a broken neck, but everyone said he just fell even though everyone knew she done it: he beat her, had it coming. Sara found out about who bought themselves some bottomland and a nice new trailer home with insurance money from the old shack burned down, these stories told with winks and laughter.
Sara observed that most of the folks she interviewed didn’t say much about themselves but were full of stories about their neighbors. She learned that John Adkins and Annie Smith had finally married after a thirty-year courtship when John’s old mommy died finally at age of ninety-nine because John’s mother hadn’t much liked Annie anyways, maybe because Annie was so damn independent, driving her rural postal delivery route and living practically inside the city limits of Covington, even bin to court there to speak on her own behalf once. And Sara learned that when old Ruby Adkins finally died just short of a century, seven of her eight children wanted to sell the family farm, all 600 acres of good timber and cropland and take their share of the money to places like Roanoke, Virginia or Baltimore, even as far as Rhode Island, leaving their eldest brother, Robbie, homeless, not even knowing what to do with his share of the cash. Past times he’d a used extra cash to purchase a breeding heifer at the livestock auction he attended every Saturday, which was his whole social life, but with no land, what would he do with another cow? So Robbie bought him a trailer home over in Greenbriar County near a town was familiar but, b
eing used to 600 acres, Robbie couldn’t take it and died of a broken spirit before the year was out. Sara shook her head in sadness with the rest of them and, out of respect for the dead, refrained from taking notes until she got back to camp. She had so many notes and she would wait to put them together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to find some explanation for the vast darkness of this place, when she got back to the University. Meantime she listened to the voices of the forest to give her ideas whose worth she couldn’t rightly know.
Three Novellas Page 14