Listen Here (40 page)

from Chapter 1

The trail ended abruptly at the overlook. It never failed to take her breath away: a cliff face where the forest simply opened and the mountain dropped away at your feet, down hundreds of feet of limestone wall that would be a tough scramble even for a squirrel. The first time she'd come this way she was running, not just her usual fast walk but
jogging
along—what on earth was she thinking? And had nearly gone right over. Moving too fast was how she'd spent her first months in this job, it seemed, as if she and her long, unfeminine stride really
were
trying to leave the scene of a crime. That was two summers ago, and since that day her mind had returned a thousand times to the awful instant when she'd had to pull up hard, skinning her leg and face in the fall and yanking a sapling sourwood nearly out of the ground. So easily her life could have ended right here, without a blink or a witness. She replayed it too often, terrified by the frailty of that link like a weak trailer hitch connecting the front end of her life to all the rest. To
this.
Here was one more day she almost hadn't gotten, the feel of this blessed sun on her face and another look at this view of God's green earth laid out below them like a long green rumpled rug, the stitched-together fields and pastures of Zebulon Valley.

“That your hometown?” he asked.

She nodded, surprised he'd guessed it. They hadn't spoken for an hour or more as they'd climbed through the lacewinged afternoon toward this place, this view she now studied. There was the silver thread of Egg Creek; and there, where it came together like a thumb and four fingers with Bitter, Goose, Walker, and Black, was the town of Egg Fork, a loose arrangement of tiny squares that looked from this distance like a box of mints tossed on the ground. Her heart contained other perspectives on it, though: Oda Black's store, where Eskimo Pies lay under brittle blankets of frost in the cooler box; Little Brothers' Hardware with its jar of free lollipops on the dusty counter—a whole childhood in the palm of one valley. Right now she could see a livestock truck crawling slowly up Highway 6, halfway between Nannie Rawley's orchard and the farm that used to be hers and her dad's. The house wasn't visible from here, in any light, however she squinted.

“It's not
your
hometown, that's for sure,” she said.

“How do you know?”

She laughed. “The way you talk, for one. And for two, there's not any Bondos in Zebulon County.”

“You know every single soul in the county?”

“Every soul,” she replied, “and his dog.”

A red-tailed hawk rose high on an air current, calling out shrill, sequential rasps of raptor joy. She scanned the sky for another one. Usually when they spoke like that, they were mating. Once she'd seen a pair of them coupling on the wing, grappling and clutching each other and tumbling curvewinged through the air in hundred-foot death dives that made her gasp, though always they uncoupled and sailed outward and up again just before they were bashed to death in senseless passion.

“What's the name of that place?”

She shrugged. “Just the valley. Zebulon Valley, after this mountain.” He would laugh at Egg Fork if she declared its name, so she didn't.

“You never felt like leaving?” he asked.

“Do you see me down there?”

He put a hand above his eyes like a storybook Indian and pretended to search the valley. “No.”

“Well, then.”

“I mean leaving this country. These mountains.”

“I did leave. And came back. Not all that long ago.”

“Like the mag-no-lia warblers.”

“Like them.”

He nodded. “Boy, I can see why.”

Why she'd left, or why she'd come back—which could he see? She wondered how this place would seem to his outsider's eye. She knew what it
sounded
like; she'd learned in the presence of city people never to name her hometown out loud. But how did it look, was it possible that it wasn't beautiful? At the bottom of things, it was only a long row of little farms squeezed between this mountain range and the next one over, old Clinch Peak with his forests rumpled up darkly along his long, crooked spine. Between that ridge top and this one, nothing but a wall of thin blue air and a single hawk.

(September 6, 1953–)

One of three children of Anne Vannoy Jones, a teacher and homemaker, and Eldred Jones, a welder, Lisa Koger grew up in Gilmer County, West Virginia. She married Jerry L. Koger, an engineer, in 1974, the same year that she graduated with honors from West Virginia University with a bachelor's degree in social work. She studied journalism at the University of Tennessee, earning a master's degree in 1979, and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1989.

She has received awards for her writing from James Michener and the Copernicus Society of America (1989), the Kentucky Arts Council (1999, 1996, 1995), the Kentucky Foundation for Women (1987), and the Appalachian Writing Association (1988, 1987). Her first collection of short stories,
Farlanburg Stories
, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection in 1990.

A freelance writer since 1980, Koger is best known for her short fiction. Having worked as a newspaper journalist and as a teacher of creative writing in workshops across the country, she is currently at work on a novel. She lives with her husband and two children in Somerset, Kentucky.

When her first published story appeared in
Seventeen
magazine in June, 1985, she remembers, “a familiar voice inside my head told me that the only reason they'd accepted my story was that their regular writers had gone on vacation or had died.” Though she had worked on it for three years, she was dissatisfied with it, as she reports she always is when she reads her published work.

She explains the importance of her home in her work, set in the rural southern Appalachian Mountains: “I suspect that trying to separate a writer's work from his background is a little like trying to separate a turtle from its shell…. Remove home and its influence from my back, and I will have lost not just shelter but an essential part of me. I grew up in a community where people had meat on their bones, physically and spiritually. As a reader I like fiction with heft and heart rather than fiction that is fashionably thin. I like ‘necessary' fiction, stories that feel as if they were born because they had to be born, to give life to a character who had begun to kick and thrash about because he knew his incubation period was up.”

Stories from
Farlanburg Stories
appeared originally in
Seventeen, Kennesaw Review, American Voice
, and
Ploughshares.
The ten-story collection won acclaim from Anne Rivers Siddons, Lee Smith, Mark Childress, and Madison Smartt Bell, among others, who praised her storytelling skill, wit, humor, and compassion for her characters.

In these scenes from “Extended Learning,” Della Sayer relishes spending time with her grandson, T. Barry, and his parents who have come for a summer visit.

Short stories:
Farlanburg Stories
(1990).
Autobiographical essay:
“Writing in the Smoke-House” in
The Confidence Woman: 26 Women Writers
(1991), ed. Eve Shelnutt, 353–66; rpt. in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 154–66.

Atlanta Journal and Constitution
(15 July 1990).
Charleston Gazette
(26 August 1990).
Chattanooga Times
(16 July 1990).
Chicago Tribune
(29 July 1990). Mark Childress, review of
Farlanburg Stories, New York Times Book Review
(August 19, 1990), 16.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
(19 August 1990).
Contemporary Authors
(1991), Vol. 133, 216–17. Joyce Dyer, “Lisa Koger,” in
Bloodroot
, 153.
Newsday
(12 August 1990).
Philadelphia Inquirer
(22 July 1990).

from Extended Learning

At eleven o'clock the next morning, Frank and Marjorie were still asleep. The sun had completed half its arc across the sky, and Della's dogs, two male mongrels, had already lumbered off to find shade. Silvervine, the cat, just returned from hunting, sat licking her paws and sunning herself on the walk.

Della had been up since five. When she was younger, she used to crave sleep. She dreamed of going to bed before dark and nesting there until noon the next day, but now that she had the opportunity, she had lost the inclination, which was just as well, she supposed, considering she had a grandson to attend to and a turn of light bread to make.

T. Barry sat beside her on the back porch steps, hands on his knees, a wrinkled bag full of hickory nuts in his lap. Della had gathered the nuts last fall from the big shagbarks that lined the road below her house and had stored them in a box on the top shelf of her cupboard until the insides were sweet and chewy, the shells the color of clean sand. She had saved them for this occasion, and at the end of the week, she planned to send what was left home with T. Barry with the hope that each time he cracked one, he'd remember the fun they'd had. She scooped a handful from the bag, tapped one with her hammer, then dropped the kernel into her grandson's open mouth. “So,” she said. “Tell me again what the T. stands for. It's Timothy or Terrence or Tutwyler. My memory's not as good as it used to be, you understand.”

The boy chewed steadily and looked at Della out of clear, deep-set gray eyes. He was a quiet kid with thick, blond hair cut so his head appeared pea-nut-shaped and difficult to balance. His arms and legs were remarkably unscarred and new looking, as though he hadn't figured out what to do with himself from the neck down. “It stands for Thurman,” he said, shyly. “You know that.”

Della nodded and cracked another nut, this time for herself. “Maybe,” she said, “and maybe I just wanted to see if
you
did. I knew a man once, a pitiful fellow, who got kicked in the head by a horse and couldn't remember his own name. He went crazy trying to remember it, so they locked him in a corncrib and kept him there till he died.”

T. Barry frowned and studied Della's crib. The rock supports at the two front corners had crumbled during the years, allowing the north side of the building to sit down, but the south side was still stable and several feet off the ground. Della liked her corncrib, though she had to admit it was hazardous. It reminded her of the hotrods the young boys drove through town.

“I don't believe that,” said T. Barry. “It's against the law to lock someone in a corncrib.”

“They abolished that law,” said Della. “I guess you're not familiar with the Corncrib Act.”

Behind them, inside the kitchen, Snapper whined and dug at the screen. Della had walked him earlier and would have let him out to run in the yard, but Marjorie had forbidden it. “Not as long as your dogs are home,” she'd said. “Fleas.”

T. Barry bit down hard on an unshelled nut. “What's ‘abolish'?”

“It means to do away with, to get rid of. Don't worry about it though. I still think you're plenty smart.”

“I'm in the E.L.P.”

“Sorry,” said Della. “I didn't know.” She tilted her head and looked at her grandson through her bifocals. “What's the E.L.P.?”

“Extended Learning Program. It's a thing for smart kids at my school.”

“Oh,” said Della. “Are you smart?”

T. Barry shrugged. “They say I am.”

“They say a lot of things,” said Della.

“I'm smart enough not to believe everything you tell me. Mama and Daddy say you have a bad habit of making things up.”

Della laughed. “I don't know why grown-ups do that.”

“Do what?”

“Try to keep things from kids.” Della shook her head. “Fifty cents says they'll tell you there's no such thing as the Corncrib Act.”

“I'll ask them,” said T. Barry, rising.

“Go ahead. I guess I'd better hurry inside and fix their breakfast. But I must say I was having fun sitting out here cracking nuts and talking to you.”

T. Barry rolled a nut with the toe of his shoe, then sat down again. “Is it true about that crazy man? I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Of course it is,” said Della.

“Tell me his name, then.”

“Can't do that.”

“Why not?”

“If he didn't know it, how do you expect me to?”

The day turned out to be a scorcher. By three o'clock that afternoon, the temperature had reached the mid-nineties, and the cows had wandered off the hills and stood under the apple trees below the house, chewing cuds and flicking matted tails at the flies.

Della's house had no air-conditioning, but she kept fans in most of the windows. On humid days, the only really cool spot on the place was the cellar because it was partially under the hill, and occasionally, Della would pull a chair in there and relax or take a flashlight and admire the variety of colors in her canned fruits and vegetables. Earlier, she had mentioned the cellar to Frank and Marjorie, but neither of them took her up on it, so she assumed they weren't too uncomfortable with the heat. She had also suggested they all get in her car and go for a drive to enjoy the countryside, maybe get an ice cream cone, her treat, but no one had seemed especially wild about that idea.

“Don't think you have to entertain us,” said Frank. “You just go on and do your thing, and so will we, and that way we can all relax.”

“I
am
relaxed,” said Della. “I just thought you might enjoy getting out and seeing the sights.”

“I grew up around here, Mom. Remember?”

“Things change,” said Della. “You've been gone a long time.”

Della stood in her kitchen, rolling and cutting egg noodles. She had the radio on to help pass the time. Frank was asleep, Marjorie was reading, and T. Barry lay stretched out on the living room floor doing his homework. It was their first full day of vacation, and Della wanted it to be memorable and exciting.

“Homework?” she had said when Marjorie told T. Barry it was time to get his books. “It's summer.”

“He takes a test in three weeks when school starts. He has to have a high score if he wants to stay in the E.L.P. That's a program for gifted kids at his school.”

Della looked at her daughter-in-law over the top of her glasses.

“He enjoys it,” said Marjorie. “At home, he'd much rather be inside reading or fooling with his computer than outside with the other kids playing in the street.”

“You think that's normal?”

“What's normal?” said Marjorie.

“Homework,” Della said to herself as she picked up a big knife and sliced off sections from the roll of noodle dough. Frank had never done homework during the summer, and as far as school went, he had certainly done all right.

At the moment, he was snoring in the front porch swing. He had eaten his breakfast a little after noon and had gone upstairs and prowled through some boxes of old books. He was asleep again when Della went to check on him at two. The noodles were for him; Della hoped they might enliven him. When he was a boy, his favorite dish had been a concoction of homemade egg noodles and beans. In those days, he liked to fish and hunt, and he spent hours walking the creek banks or just wandering over the hills. Back then, he'd come home with burrs in his socks and a craving for noodles, and Della had wound up fixing them once or twice a week. Now, he insisted they weren't worth the trouble it took to make them. Della loved her son dearly and was proud of his accomplishments, but there were moments when she was struck by the unmotherly thought that, at some point, he had turned into one of the most boring people she knew.

He had done well in high school and had earned a scholarship to the state university. Four years had turned into six, six into ten; more than half his life had been spent in school. He had knocked off all the rough edges, but in the process, something else had been knocked off, too. Though he could tell her there was a statistically significant correlation between canopy tree mortality and drought-induced stress, he could not tell her how to save her wild chestnut trees. And Della was surprised and, secretly, a little disappointed the first time she discovered that, unlike his father, he could not recognize a white oak suitable for veneer from one destined for crossties.

Neither she nor Royce had any education beyond high school, and Royce had always been proud that his son was smart and had done so well at books. “It's the way the world's goin',” he had said when Frank finished his Ph.D. “Gettin' an education is the ticket to a better life.” There was a slightly wistful tone to his voice that Della hadn't heard before.

“Oh, I don't know about that,” she said. “I don't have an education, and I'm happy with my life.” She laughed. “Why, I don't know as I could stand it if it got any better.”

Royce smiled, patted her shoulder, and said, “Some are just easier satisfied than others,” which caused Della to wonder for weeks whether he knew something about their life that she didn't.

Della lifted the noodle sections, combing with her fingers until the yellow strips unwound and lay like a pile of shorn curls. Through the kitchen window, she had a clear view of Marjorie, who was stretched out in a lawn chair in the backyard. She was a good visitor, really, no more trouble than the cows. She did not hang around the kitchen and get in the way by trying to be useful, nor did she rattle on about the food and interrupt Della's work by asking for recipes. All she wanted was to be left alone with her book, and occasionally, she would look up and inquire whether there was any iced tea.

She was Frank's wife, and Della wanted to like her, but Frank's wife or not, she wasn't very lively, and Della often wondered how she worked up enough energy to pull a tooth. Della recalled having a tooth pulled by a dentist, a Dr. Weeble, when she was a child, and what she remembered most about the experience was not the pain or the blood but the look on Dr. Weeble's face as he rolled up his sleeves, rubbed his hands together, and told her to say, “Aaahhh.” It was an eager, alive look, one that said, “I am
passionate
about teeth!” To be good at anything, you had to feel passionate about it, Della had always believed, the way she felt about the people she loved, the way Royce had felt about trees.

“If you had only ten minutes left on earth, how would you spend them?” she once asked Royce, and, without hesitation, he told her he'd go to the woods, lie on his back, and look at trees. At the time, she was hurt because he hadn't said he'd spend his last moments with her. Looking back on it, she thought she recognized a rare, uncalculating honesty and a genuine love of nature in his answer, and she wished he were around to instill a little of that love in their grandson.

When she had finished with the noodles, Della washed her hands and tip-toed into the living room. T. Barry lay on his stomach, studying. Seeing him like that took Della back almost thirty years. He looked so much like Frank from certain angles.

“Psstt,” she said.

He glanced up.

“You don't look like you're having much fun,” she said. “Are you having fun at Grandma Della's house?”

He wrinkled his nose. “You've got something awful in your carpet,” he said, pointing at a dark spot in the pile.

Della knelt and examined it. “That's not something awful,” she said. “It's a mashed raisin. Your better brand of carpets come that way.”

T. Barry looked skeptical.

“It's true,” said Della. “The manufacturers put little pieces of food in there so the people who buy the carpets will have something to fall back on in case of hard times.”

T. Barry put his face closer to the raisin and peered at it. “You're making that up,” he said. “I bet it doesn't say that in any carpet books.”

“Just because it's not written down somewhere doesn't mean it's not true. Grandma Della loves T. Barry. True or false?”

He shrugged. “True.”

“See,” said Della. “You believe that without reading it.” She untied her apron and took it off. “Are you finished with your homework?”

He shook his head.

“Too bad. I was looking for someone to take a walk with me.”

“I've got to do my math,” said T. Barry.

Della picked at the raisin. “What's nine plus nine?”

He rolled his eyes and looked insulted. “That's easy. Eighteen.” Della held up her hand. “Ding-a-ling-a-ling.”

“What's that?”

“A bell,” she said. “School's out. You already know more than me….