Listen Here (32 page)

Chapter 4

It wasn't often that he and Jones could sit down together without Jones having to test him or think up a game to see if he could win it. He knew Jones only wanted to have him strong and to have him win. But he wished his father wouldn't always have to teach him.

Just have him listen to me, M.C. thought. Have him hear.

Maybe now he and Jones were sitting without a war between them. Maybe he could speak about what was on his mind.

“Daddy?” he said, “you taken a look up there, at the spoil heap behind us?”

“Way behind us,” Jones said, easily and without a pause. He was looking off at the hills he loved and at the river holding light at the end of the day. He was thinking about his wife, his Banina, who would not have had time yet to concern herself with coming home. But in another hour or so, she would think about it. She would say to herself,
It's time!
No clock was needed to show her. From where she was across-river, she could look away to these hills. She might even be able to see M.C.'s needle of a pole. No, not likely. But maybe a sparkle, maybe a piercing flash in the corner of her eye. She would have to smile and come on home.

Jones sighed contentedly.

“Daddy,” M.C. said, “it can cause a landslide. It can just cover this house and ground.”

“That's what's bothering you?” Jones asked. “That's why you were standing tranced in the cave. You thought I didn't know but I did. You worry about everything you don't need to worry from.”

A shudder passed over M.C. like a heavy chill. Jones studied M.C.'s face. M.C. was so skilled at living free in the woods, at reading animal signs, at knowing when the weather would change even slightly. Jones could convince himself at odd moments that the boy had second sight. And now, half afraid to ask but worried for his children on their way to Harenton, his Banina, he said, “What is it you see?”

M.C.'s eyes reflected light bouncing green and brown from one hill to another. Deep within the light was something as thick as forest shadow.

“Just some rain coming from behind us,” M.C. said. “You listen and you can maybe hear it come up Sarah's other side.” There was more. It was a feeling M.C. hadn't known before. He kept it to himself.

Jones stepped off the porch and turned around in order to see behind him. Beyond the rim of the outcropping, he saw Sarah's final slope with shade slanting halfway across it, and trees, made more dense with late-day shadow. As the trees appeared heavier this time of day, Sarah's seemed to pierce the sky.

Jones gazed at the spoil and beyond it to the bare summit where he had spent so much time with M.C. when the boy was small. Looking, he remembered how he had taught M.C. all he knew about hunting bare-handed. He recalled Sarah's cut, trees falling.

Now he listened. He saw the sky grow heavy with mist as he watched. It turned gray and, finally, dark. He heard sound coming. Rain, like hundreds of mice running through corn. He watched it come over the mountain and down the slope in a straight line.

M.C. hadn't bothered to move from the step. He had already felt the rain, seen it without seeing.

Wind hit Jones first. It ran before the rain. Jones didn't want his clothes soaked, so he stepped onto the porch while rain came full of mist, but hard all the same.

They watched it. The rain marched down Sarah's and on across, turning hill after hill the same shade of silver mist clear to the river. Then it was gone from the mountain. As it had come, clawing through cornstalk, it vanished with the same familiar sound.

“Huh,” Jones grunted. “That will cool it off maybe a minute. Wish it would rain hard enough to fill up that gully. Then I could take me a swim without sweating a mile to do it.”

M.C. had his mind on the spoil heap. He couldn't see it but he could feel it, the way he felt Sarah's above him pressing in on him when he lay in his cave room.

“It holds the water,” he told his daddy, “just hanging on up there. It'll rain again and it'll grow just like it's alive.”

“Now why did you have to catch hold of that all of a sudden?” Jones asked him. “You get something in your head, I swear, you don't let it go. Glad when school gets going. Catch hold of your math work like that one time. Don't talk to me no more,” he added and sat down again on the step.

The step was wet. So was M.C., who seemed not to notice. The rain was just dripping now. The mist had grown intense with light.

“It already cover all the trees they root up,” M.C. forced himself on. “It'll tear loose, maybe just a piece. But without a warning. Maybe a roar, and sliding into the yard and trying to climb my pole.”

“Quit it,” Jones said. “Just…don't talk to me.”

M.C. couldn't tell if there was any worry in his father's face. He could see only an intensity of anger at being bothered.

Suddenly the sun came out. M.C. bowed his head until the light leveled off, softened and shaped by the green of hills.

Doesn't even hear me, M.C. thought. Fool, Daddy. All at once, he wanted to be back up on his pole.

Dude'll have to tell him. He'll have to listen.

Bright sunlight began to dry up the truth seen so easily in the rain.

“These old mountains,” Jones said. He looked out over the side of Sarah's and beyond. “They are really something.”

M.C. stayed quiet. Sullen.

“It's a
feeling,”
Jones said. “Like, to think a solid piece of something big belongs to you. To your father, and his, too.” Jones rubbed and twisted his hands, as if they ached him. “And you to it, for a long kind of time.” He laughed softly. To M.C., it sounded full of sadness.

(August 29, 1959–)

Poet Pauletta Hansel is one of three children of Lamie Lewis Hansel and Charles Hansel of Somerset, Kentucky. Born and raised in eastern Kentucky, she began writing when she was a child and became a published poet (in
Mountain Review
) when she was a teenager. At age sixteen, while still in high school, she was recruited to enroll at Antioch College. She attended Antioch's Appalachian campus in Beckley, West Virginia, and graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in human services. Her master's degree, with a concentration in Montessori education, is from Xavier University (1980).

In 1976, Hansel's work was featured in
Ms.
magazine in an article on Appalachian women poets. At age fifteen, she told the
Ms.
reporter that both her grandfathers were miners, but “home” for her “meant one mountain community college town after the other, wherever her father happened to be teaching philosophy. ‘The outside,' she says, ‘never did seep in all that much.'”

She was instrumental in organizing early networks of Appalachian writers, including the Soupbean Poets, a politically active writers group she co-founded at Antioch; Street Talk, a theater collective that wrote, produced, and performed plays locally and nationally from 1980 to 1984; and the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC), which is still active today.

Since 1980, Hansel has worked in Cincinnati, first as a teacher at a Montessori school, then as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society of Cincinnati, then as an administrator for the Urban Appalachian Council, where her main responsibilities focused on community arts programs and community development. She is currently a teacher and administrator at Women Writing for (a) Change, a feminist creative writing center.

She gave up writing from 1984 to 1994, in part, she says, because “in my early years I tried too hard to be an ‘Appalachian writer,' and lost the sound of my own voice in trying to blend with others. My work now is definitely influenced by my Appalachian roots…but the stories and language reflect not just my past but my present as an urban dweller for more than half my life.” Her poetry has appeared in
Appalachian Journal, Adena, Twigs, Wind, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel
, and in anthologies including
New Ground, A Gathering at the Forks
, and
Old Wounds, New Words.

Poetry:
Divining
(2001).
We're Alright but We Ain't Special
(1976), with Gail V. Amburgey, Mary Joan Coleman.
What's a Nice Hillbilly Like You
…? (1976).
Some Poems by Some Women
(1975).

Jacqueline Bernard, “Mountain Voices: Appalachian Poets,”
Ms.
5:2 (August 1976), 34–38. Jackie Demaline, “The Arts Life: Desk doesn't bind this poet,”
Cincinnati Enquirer
, 30 July 2000.

from
Divining
(2001)

I look for the way
things will turn
out

—Poetics,
A.R. Ammons

I am trying to find the shape of things,
to find where words might go
without the prodding of my pen,
left to their own devices:
startled
sliding up
as if unnoticed,
nestling in the curve
of
century's
end;
places I have never seen—
Niagara Falls, Lookout Mountain—
sliding down
between the floorboards
of my mother's kitchen, 1962.

I am trying to find the shape of things,
to let them unfold
without my restless hands forever
moving, pressing up or down
into the patterns
so familiar they are all I ever
dare to sew;
to let this life unfold:
a bolt of cloth spilling
from a tall shelf,
haphazard by its own design;
a liar's yarn spinning out
incredulously true.

from
Divining
(2001)

That spring
she let herself go,
uncoiled the cord
and slipped out through
the crack in the window.

She was unleashed.
Even her hair sprung
free of curl.
Her clothes
would not stay put.

She spoke too loudly.
Sentences ran on
ahead of her.
She followed
when she chose.

When people said
they didn't know her
anymore,
she did not
hear them.

from
Divining
(2001)

You really only need to breathe,
as long as you breathe
with everything,

the way your hand breathes in
the shape of a baby's head
as you cradle the soft

green scent of his neck,
and your ears breathe in the teeming
silence of the forest's edge,

and how your eyes breathe in the day
as it cracks wider open
all the way until you see

its fiery center
pushing out the night,
and how your very heart

breathes all you
cannot bear to know
with eyes or ears or skin alone.

Breathe in and hold until your
center burns and swells
but does not crack.

Breathe out.

from
Appalachian Journal
(1982)

At least that's what they say,
in state.
I say he's the one who's in a state, daddy
now can't use you like a cane.
He lies without you for a pillow,
eyes open and not able to believe
that you aren't standing in the door.

Lying in state.
What do they know
about the states you've lain in?
One had the mountain you were born on,
where you lay screaming in a midwife's arms,
on your mother's breast,
by the willow, up creek
and in his arms,
or the state you were in
when you left, screaming inside,
to come up north
to this state without mountains.
You lied then
that first night when he asked
if things would be all right there.
He lied too
when he believed you.

Lying in state.
What a state you both were in
when I lay inside you,
him without a job,
you without him, half the time,
or anything you knew back home.
Then I was there,
screaming in a doctor's arms,
who got paid by the state.
You worried then
the state would take me.
You would've hid, you said,
or run back home,
but stayed thinking times get better soon.
You told me this,
me with my daughter in me,
and so scared.
Times changed,
but not enough to keep me here.
Just like you,
I left,
like my girl will leave me,
coming back
only now to see you
lying in state.
You would be in a state
to see me here, too late
and with this girl, eyes black like coal,
like dirt,
like yours.
But they don't know that.

(May 17, 1869–February 7, 1935)

Corra Mae (or Mary) White Harris was born in Elbert County, Georgia. She married Lundy Howard Harris, a Methodist clergyman, in 1887 and began writing in an effort to eke out a living after her husband suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to resign his professorship at Emory College. She became a regular contributor to a New York journal, the
Independent
, tackling everything from book reviews to editorials.

Her novels Were extremely popular during the first half of the twentieth century. Her first novel,
The Jessica Letters
, was followed by her best-known work,
A Circuit Rider's Wife
, a novel set in rural Georgia which was serialized in the
Saturday Evening Post.
The book, based on her husband's experiences in the ministry, was a witty critique of the Methodist Church and its underpaid emissaries in rural mountain communities. A film version of the novel was released in 1951 under the title
I'd Climb the Highest Mountain.

Harris published a total of fourteen novels and spent the final years of her life writing a column for the
Atlanta Journal.
Her papers are at the University of Georgia.

In this scene from
A Circuit Rider's Wife
, a novel based on Harris's own experiences as a minister's wife, the female narrator ponders the fate of a “fallen” woman in a turn-of-the-century mountain community.

Novels:
The Happy Pilgrimage
(1927),
Flapper Anne
(1926),
As a Woman Thinks
(1925),
My Book and Heart
(1924),
A Daughter of Adam
(1923),
The House of Helen
(1923),
The Eyes of love
(1922),
My Son
(1921),
Happily Married
(1920),
From Sunup to Sundown (1919), Making Her His Wife (1918), A Circuit Rider's Widow
(1916),
The Co-Citizens
(1915),
Justice
(1915),
In Search of a Husband
(1913),
The Recording Angel
(1912),
Eve's Second Husband
(1911),
A Circuit Rider's Wife
(1910),
The Jessica Letters
(1904).

Grace Toney Edwards, “Foreword,”
A Circuit Rider's Wife
(1998).
National Cyclopedia of American Biography
(1937), Vol. 26, 380–81. L. Moody Simms Jr., “Corra Harris,”
Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary
(1979), 205–6. John E. Talmadge, “Harris, Corra May White,”
Notable American Women 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary
(1971), Vol. 2, 142–43.