Listen Here (6 page)

from
Windfall: New and Selected Poems
(2000)

This is going to cost you.
If you really want to hear a
country fiddle, you have to listen
hard, high up in its twang and needle.
You cant be running off like this,
all knotted up with yearning,
following some train whistle,
can't hang onto anything that way.
When you're looking for what's lost
everything's a sign,
but you have to stay right up next to
the drawl and pull of the thing
you thought you wanted, had to
have it, could not live without it.
Honey, you will lose your beauty
and your handsome sweetie, this whine,
this agitation, the one you sent for
with your leather boots and your guitar.
The lonesome snag of barbed wire you have
wrapped around your heart is cash money,
honey, you will have to pay.

Poet's note: “Ontological” adapts the phrase “…when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign” from Eudora Welty's story “The Wide Net.”

from
Windfall: New and Selected Poems
(2000)

To speak in a flat voice
Is all that I can do.

—James Wright, “Speak”

I need to tell you that I live in a small town
in West Virginia you would not know about.
It is one of the places I think of as home.
When I go for a walk, I take my basset hound
whose sad eyes and ungainliness always draw
a crowd of children. She tolerates anything
that seems to be affection, so she lets the kids
put scarves and ski caps on her head
until she starts to resemble the women who have to dress
from rummage sales in poverty's mismatched polyester.

The dog and I trail the creek bank with the kids,
past clapboard row houses with Christmas seals
pasted to the windows as a decoration.
Inside, television glows around the vinyl chairs
and curled linoleum, and we watch someone old
perambulating to the kitchen on a shiny walker.
Up the hill in town, two stores have been
boarded up beside the youth center and miners
with amputated limbs are loitering
outside the Heart and Hand. They wear Cat diesel caps
and spit into the street. The wind
carries on, whining through the alleys,
rustling down the sidewalks, agitating
leaves, and circling the courthouse steps
past the toothless Field sisters who lean
against the flagpole holding paper bags
of chestnuts they bring to town to sell.

History is one long story of what happened to us,
and its rhythms are local dialect and anecdote.
In West Virginia a good story takes awhile,
and if it has people in it, you have to swear
that it is true. I tell the kids the one about
my Uncle Craig who saw the mountain move
so quickly and so certainly it made the sun
stand in a different aspect to his little town
until it rearranged itself and settled down again.
This was his favorite story. When he got old,
he mixed it up with baseball games, his shift boss
pushing scabs through a picket line, the Masons
in white aprons at a funeral, but he remembered
everything that ever happened, and he knew how far
he lived from anywhere you would have heard of.

Anything that happens here has a lot of versions,
how to get from here to Logan twenty different ways.
The kids tell me convoluted country stories
full of snuff and bracken, about how long
they sat quiet in the deer blind with their fathers
waiting for the ten-point buck that got away.
They like to talk about the weather,
how the wind we're walking in means rain,
how the flood pushed cattle fifteen miles downriver.

These kids know mines like they know hound dogs
and how the sirens blow when something's wrong.
They know the blast, and the stories, how
the grown-ups drop whatever they are doing
to get out there. Story is shaped
by sound, and it structures what we know.
They told me this, and three of them
swore it was true, so I'll tell you
even though I know you do not know
this place, or how tight and dark the hills
pull in around the river and the railroad.

I'll say it as the children spoke it,
in the flat voice of my people:
down in Boone County, they sealed up
forty miners in a fire. The men who had come
to help tried and tried to get down to them,
but it was a big fire and there was danger,
so they had to turn around
and shovel them back in. All night long
they stood outside with useless picks and axes
in their hands, just staring at the drift mouth.
Here's the thing: what the sound must have been,
all those fire trucks and ambulances, the sirens,
and the women crying and screaming out
the names of their buried ones, who must have
called back up to them from deep inside
the burning mountain, right up to the end.

from
Windfall: New and Selected Poems
(2000)

My Aunt Nita's kitchen was immaculate and dark,
and she was always bending to the sink
below the window where the shadows off the bulk
of Laurel Mountain rose up to the brink
of all the sky she saw from there. She clattered
pots on countertops wiped clean of coal dust,
fixed three meals a day, fried meat, mixed batter
for buckwheat cakes, hauled water, in what seemed lust
for labor. One March evening, after cleaning,
she lay down to rest and died. I can see Uncle Ed,
his fingers twined at his plate for the blessing;
my Uncle Craig leaning back, silent in red
galluses. No one said a word to her. All that food
and cleanliness. No one ever told her it was good.

from
A Space Filled with Moving
(1992)

Sometimes my affection for this place wavers.
I am poised between a vague ambition
and loyalty to what I've always loved,
kedged along inside my slow boat
by warp and anchor drag. But if I imagine
seeing this for the last time,
this scruff of the borders of West Virginia,
Pennsylvania, and Ohio, shaped by hills
and rivers, by poverty and coal,
then I think I could not bear to go,
would grab any stump or tree limb
and hold on for dear life.

I keep trying to say what I notice here
that's beautiful. There's the evening star
riding the purple selvage of the ridges,
and the flat shine of the Ohio where men
in folding chairs cast their lines out
toward the backwash of the barges.
There are the river names: the Allegheny,
the Monongahela, and the names of the tributaries,
Fish Creek, Little Beaver; the towns named
for function, Bridgeport, Martins Ferry,
or for what the early settlers must have
dreamed of, Prosperity and Amity.

Why can't we hold this landscape in our arms?
The nettle-tangled orchards given up on,
the broken fence posts with their tags
of wire, burdock taking over uncut fields,
the rusted tipples and the mills.
Sometimes I think it's possible
to wash the slag dust from the leaves
of sycamores and make them green, the way
as a child, after lesson and punishment,
I used to begin my life again.
I'd say a little “start” to myself
like the referees at races, then
on the same old scratchy car seat,
with the same parents on the same road,
I could live beyond damage and reproach,
in a place with such promise,
like any of the small farms among the wooded hills,
like any of the small towns starting up along the rivers.

(September 20, 1872–March 17, 1958)

Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Anne Wetzell Armstrong was the daughter of Lorinda Snyder Wetzell and Henry B. Wetzell. She moved with her family to Knoxville, Tennessee, when she was a girl. Having spent part of her youth as her father's hiking partner in the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky, she returned to these mountains throughout her life, finally retiring to Sullivan County, in upper East Tennessee where she wrote her best-known novel,
This Day and Time.

Educated at Mt. Holyoke College and the University of Chicago, Armstrong spent part of her life blazing trails as a businesswoman. After holding management positions with the National City Company on Wall Street (1918–1919) and Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester (1919–1923), she became the first woman to lecture before the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and at the Harvard School of Business Administration. She wrote of her business experiences in a number of articles for
Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Monthly, Forbes, New Republic
, and published other works in
Saturday Review of Literature
and
Yale Review.

She knew fiction writers Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson and began her own writing career with a novel,
The Seas of God
, in which she used Knoxville as a setting. An unpublished manuscript titled “Of Time and Knoxville, Fragment of an Autobiography” focuses on her memories of growing up in Knoxville from 1885 to 1902. This manuscript of more than 350 pages is located in the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University.

Though she received little recognition as a novelist,
This Day and Time
, set in upper East Tennessee in the 1920s, preserves the mountain culture that has virtually disappeared with the industrialization of the region. Her central character, Ivy Ingoldsby, a single mother, ultimately rejects dehu-manizing factory work and returns to the family farm in an effort to find a better life for herself and her son, Enoch.

This excerpt from chapter 3 recounts Ivy's courtship and marriage, along with her struggles to make a living in town.

Novels:
This Day and Time
(1930),
The Seas of God
(1915).
Essays:
“As I Saw Thomas Wolfe,”
Arizona Quarterly
2:1 (spring 1946), 5–15. “The Southern Mountaineers,”
Yale Review
24 (March 1938), 539–54. “Have Women Changed Business,”
Harper's Monthly
158 (December 1928), 10–16. “Are BusinessWomen Getting a Square Deal?”
Atlantic Monthly
140:1 (July 1927), 28–36. “Fear In Business Life,”
Harper's Monthly
154 (April 1927), 607–14. “Seven Deadly Sins Of Woman In Business”
Harper's Monthly
153 (August 1926), 295–303. “A Woman In Wall Street By One,”
Atlantic Monthly
136:2 (August 1925), 145–58.
Autobiographical essay:
“The Banner House,”
Yale Review
27 (March 1938), 587–600.

David McClellan, “A Note on the Life and Works of Anne W. Armstrong” and “A Personal Reminiscence,” in
This Day and Time
(reprint, 1970), ix–xvii. Danny L. Miller, “Mountain Gloom in the Works of Edith Summers Kelley and Anne W. Armstrong,” in
Wingless Flights: Appalachian Women in Fiction
(1996), 53–68.

from Chapter Three

As she lay beside Enoch [Ivy's son] on the pallet, huddled close to him for warmth, Ivy tried to stop thinking, but the old question was again hammering in her brain: “Why did Jim leave me? Oh, Lord God, why did he do me that-a-way?”

Her childhood came back to her, the cabin, far from any others, in Rocky Hollow where she had been born, the seventh of twelve—born when laurel was in flower, so that her mother had named her for the rosy cloud of bloom she had looked out on through the little window beside her bed; for the “ivy” that came each May to lighten the deep shadows of Rocky Hollow—ivy, the first thing her mother's tired eyes had rested upon after the granny-woman had lifted her head from lower down the bed. “Hit's a gal, Mis' Buckles, another fine little gal!”

Ivy's thoughts dwelt softly on her mother, a kindly, dragged-out woman, often sick, but always struggling for a semblance of decency and order in the swarming cabin. Her mother would plant a few flower seeds every spring, zinnias or marigolds, touch-me-nots, and bleeding-hearts. “Seems like,” she could hear her mother saying, “flowers keeps a body from bein so lonesome.” Ivy could see her mother squatting beside the branch that tumbled down past the cabin, straightening her back from time to time, trying to get enough clean clothes together so that some of the children could go to Sunday-school two or three times at least in the course of the year.

Ivy remembered the daily squabbles; remembered a brother killed by a falling tree; a little sister burned to death, little Dee, left alone in the cabin and trying to start a fire as she had seen the older ones do, by pouring oil on the green wood. She could still hear the screams of little Dee, a sheet of flame, running frantically towards the field where the rest of them were dropping corn. She could see herself on one of the steep slopes that wedged in Rocky Hollow, grubbing sprouts on a piece of “new ground”; she could see a stranger passing up the hollow and all of them stopping, her father and mother too, resting on their hoes or mattocks, staring after the stranger to whom her father had called down a low half-hostile “Howdy.” Ivy could scarcely remember a time when she had not handled a hoe.

There were moments of delight Ivy remembered of her childhood; the time she had uncovered the pheasant's nest in the leaves; the little terrapin she had made a pet of; the Indian arrow-heads she had turned up with her hoe; times she had played house under a great sycamore that overspread the log spring-house, with acorn-cups for dishes, with tufts of moss, bits of broken crockery. Her childhood, when she thought of it, did not seem to her to have been an unhappy one. Her father, if high-tempered, had not been brutal, or only occasionally, when he was drunk and might beat her mother or kick one of the boys. There had been the fun of going up on the mountain every summer for huckleberries—the whole troop of them, and other families too—the fun of going down the river each spring to the sugar-orchard, sleeping in the sheds left there from year to year among the sugar-maples.

Then her mother had died, leaving her, the oldest girl at home, to mother the family till her father had married again, within the year. Then, in the spring that followed, back at the sugar-orchard, all of them helping make sugar and syrup again, and people coming to trade with her father for the thin sappy syrup, carrying it away in the buckets they had brought.

And then one day, as she had been carrying a bucket of sap to the fire, a young man standing in her path, teasingly, as if to block the way; a tall, straight, very clean young man, with very short hair, in soldier clothes, and the young man laughing: “Don't be scared! You've growed a right smart since the time I saw you last, at the burying-ground, when they put your Grandpap Buckles away. Well, you ain't gettin' any worse-lookin', I'll swear you ain't!” and then Jim laughing again—Jim was always laughing—”Ivy, I swore to Gawd, first time I ever laid eyes on you, I'd come and steal you some day!”

And then Jim and her “a-talkin,” while the sugaring went on, and Jim helping her as she trudged to and from the fire, or to and from the spring, some distance away. And then a dusk when Jim had caught her and kissed her.

She liked to dwell on the memory of Jim's going to town and bringing her back a pair of slippers, the first she had ever owned, town slippers to replace the clumsy outgrown shoes of her brothers which she had worn before, when she had worn any at all. She saw Jim and herself standing up before the preacher in the sugar-orchard, “of a Sabbath, the prettiest day hit were.” She could recall in sharp detail the look and feel of that day, bluets twinkling up from the turf under their feet—those wee “forget-me-nots” her mother had loved—the mountains blue-black, ragged fringes of snowy cloud half hiding their tops; and a red-bird, like a drop of blood, against the bare ghostly branches of a giant sycamore on the river-bank, the red-bird whistling its throat out from the topmost branch of the sycamore.

She could still see Jim's father, Uncle Jake, hobbling down the steps to meet them, his unsmiling deep-plowed face, his faded and patched overalls hanging loosely on his once powerful figure—her and Jim coming through the gate at sundown, Jim laughing, his head high, her own cheeks burning. She had wanted to hide, to streak away like a rabbit when the dogs were after it…. She could still hear Uncle Jake's harsh grating voice: “Proud to know ye, Ivy. I know your pap. Me an' him was raised up together.” And then Aunt Jane, bleached and gentle, in her clean gray print, shyly, from the doorway: “I reckon you're plumb beat out, Ivy, honey. Hit's a right smart piece from the sugar grove.”

She could still see Uncle Jake's and Aunt Jane's cabin as it had first looked to her—the two beds, in opposite corners, the few straight splint-bottom chairs, the wide boards of the floor white as she had never seen before; white spreads on the beds; a clock. Not ten miles from Rocky Hollow, but a strange new world. Someone passing every day, up or down the road; people to shout to and who shouted down to them: “How air ye? How air you-all? Reckon hit'ull fair off?” Other cabins; Big Bill Byrd's down below, on the river; Doke Odum's on down the road; and up it, hardly more than half a mile in the opposite direction, the Philipses'.

Ivy liked to dwell on the memory of Jim's going to town and bringing her home a pink chambray dress and some pretty chemises. Jim was “free-hearted.” Jim had money saved from his three years in the army; he had bought a cow and two shotes. Days of plenty. Jim had made the crop by himself. “Pap, you ain't a-goin' to raw-hide these here knobs whilst I'm here. Ivy, do you guess I'm goin' to have
my
woman workin' in the sun? Well, you've got another guess.” Days of plenty—sweet milk every day, and butter on the table.

Then winter. Jim walking back and forth to town, twenty miles away, for something to do. Jim's money all spent. Jim sitting by the hearth day after day, smoking cigarettes, getting up to stretch himself now and then, yawning. Uneasy days. And then Jim going off to a logging camp, coming home every week or so with a sack of flour over his shoulder, shoes for Ivy and his mother. Jim laughing again, but talking, while at home, of the army, not such a bad life for a man. “A sight easier 'an loggin', or tryin' to grub a livin' off o' these here worn-out old knobs.” Not a bad life, pool, movies—something to do of an evening.

And then bluets twinkling up from the grass again, red-birds whistling from the sycamores. Jim restless again. He had “quit off loggin'.” He would look for a job in town. Maybe he would rent a house there, take them all into town to live; no more grubbing. And Ivy whispering to him at the gate: “Could you git me a few yards of nice domestic, Jim, ef your money holds out? An' some pretty soft flannel-cloth or like o' that? Reckon you know what I want 'em fer. I'll be down afore long.”

And then a package coming in the mail; some little dresses, a hood, and a white coat, embroidered, everything very fine. But no word. Days of looking and waiting, the days lengthening out to months, the months to years.

…

At last, after four years of this struggle, after months of thinking of little else, Ivy had decided on the move to town….

…

…Before, much of her work had been done outdoors and no two days had been alike. Now, all day long feeding a pair of overalls through a machine, with a dusty window beyond the machine, and through it, if she had looked off her work, a brick wall across an alley, and other dusty windows facing her.

If she had worked hard before, she had stopped to visit with anyone who passed. In the factory, at first, Ivy had stopped to talk to one girl after another along the row of machines where her own was, but they had been quick to warn: “Watch out, forelady's lookin'!” They had been anxious to resume their stitching of pockets and leg seams, and Martha had told her frankly: “You can't never in God's world make it at piece-work, Ivy, if you stop to talk,” adding: “Don't none of ‘em like to be stopped, Ivy. A body cools off like, when they stop, and it takes a right smart time,
you
know, till they can get up their speed again.” Later Martha had cautioned: “Law, Ivy, you got to do more dozens a day ‘an that, to live in town.”

Ivy herself had begun to long with the whole strength of her being to return to the place whence she had come. Her thoughts had gone back to a hawk that Doke Odum had caught once in a trap and, chained to a stick, brought to show her and Enoch. She remembered the look of fear and anxiety in the hawk's eyes, the hawk's thrusting its head suddenly forward, looking off towards the mountains with its wide-apart far-seeing eyes. Ivy imagined she was the hawk. Following a line of white stitching across blue denim hour after hour, day after day, the eyes of her mind had always been looking far off, to the mountains—those mountains to which, like the hawk, she belonged….