Original Sins (72 page)

“And what did you say?”

“I told them they was being backward and old fashioned.”

“But Ben, they have a point. It's one way of looking at it.”

“But Dred, he said …”

“Fuck Dred!”

Ben looked at him, alarmed.

Ben brought Cheryl down one afternoon. Raymond could tell at a glance that she was a silly little twit, but he realized she might be useful for chores like canning and knitting, which were boring Raymond to death. She fluttered in, with Ben beaming behind. She started chattering about what a pleasure it was to meet Raymond, how much she'd heard about him, modeling herself on Scarlet O'Hara. Ben acted like a turd, feeding her questions that were supposed to display her at her best. If this was her best, Raymond shuddered to contemplate her worst.

She looked around Raymond's kitchen. “No electric range?”

“I got me a wood stove.”

“Why, I don't believe I could manage without a range. You're just a wonder, Junior. And no refrigerator?”

Who was this? Betty Furness? “I use a springhouse.”

“Ben honey, I know how much you admire Junior. But when we get married, honey, I just got to have me my Gold Medallion kitchen.”

Raymond decided Ben ought to fuck her in the mouth. At least it might shut her up.

“But you like to can, don't you, Cheryl?” Ben urged.

“Not if I can help it.” She laughed. “How long you been here?” she asked Raymond.

“Close to a year.”

“How long you staying?”

“My whole life, I hope.”

“Really? Gosh, I can't wait to get away.”

“How come?”

She laughed. “Whenever my sisters come home from Atlanta, they say Tatro Cove looks like a hurricane's been through.”

“I think it's right pretty myself.” Raymond's heart was breaking.

“Down here it's not so bad. But out on the main road it's a mess from all the stripping.”

Raymond watched them walk back down the hollow. Ben put his arm around her. She snuggled up against him. They cut up through the woods. Probably they'd fuck on the leaves at the top of the cliff. Raymond went outside and began digging in his garden.

The next day he ran into Lyla as he walked past her house. “How you liking your new school, Lyla?”

She giggled, looked around, then whispered, “She crazy, that Mrs. Cindy lady.”

“How come?”

Lyla put on an adult voice: “‘Lyla, no juice and cracker until you call me Cindy.'”

Raymond decided to go to the parish hall and see what was being done to his little cousins by this emissary of Yankee capitalism. The children sat coloring. Occasionally they sneaked glances at each other and giggled. Whenever Cindy spoke, they were polite, calling her Mrs. Cindy. Except for Humus, who called her Mom, and sometimes “stupid bitch woman.” She wore a long dress and combat boots.

“How's it going?” Raymond asked, determined to be pleasant.

“Awful,” she sighed. “All they do is sit there and obey me. I wish one would kick me or throw a tantrum.”

“You do?”

“Well, they're just so repressed. From their authoritarian home lives. It shows in everything they do. Look at these pictures.” She pointed to the wall at drawings of their houses. “So stark. No decoration or anything.”

“But that's how their houses are. People don't have many extras around here.”

“Material poverty I can handle. It's the emotional paucity, the paucity of the imagination I'm talking about, Raymond. For instance, this morning I tried to get them to imitate bacon frying. I even got down on the floor and demonstrated. They looked at me as though I were nuts or something.”

Raymond suppressed a guffaw.

“The kids in the Philly Free School loved it,” she said in a hurt voice. “They'd lose themselves in it, until you thought they really
were
bacon frying.”

Raymond suggested this was a pretty sophisticated assignment for mountain children, but that she should try again, letting him explain. After his explanation and another demonstration, some appeared to understand. They flung themselves down and began writhing, cooperative strips of bacon. But Raymond couldn't figure out the babbling noises coming from their mouths. Sound effects? The snapping and crackling of fat? Eventually one little boy jumped up, went over to a girl who was just watching, put his hands on her head with a firm downward pressure, and barked in a gruff little voice, “Heal, sister! In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, throw off your illness and be whole!”

Cindy's face assumed an expression of horror. She called a halt to the home revival and sent them out to play.

Raymond couldn't stop smiling as he and Cindy stood in the yard watching Humus. “You be the capitalist pig, and I'll be the revolutionary worker!” he ordered Clem. Clem looked at him, frowned, and joined the others under a tulip poplar. They sat watching the shifting pattern of leafy shadows on the grass.

“See what I mean?” Cindy demanded. “So sluggish. Sometimes I wonder if the poor little things aren't full of worms.”

She marched over and said something. They got up and followed her to a dirt pile. She explained and gestured. Humus scrambled up the pile and stood on top with his hands on his hips. A couple of boys followed, and he pushed them down the pile.

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.