Strange as This Weather Has Been (23 page)

 

Me and Mary look for greens where we can still find them, and nuts and stuff.These days it’s more for the sake of getting out and looking,
the pleasure of that, than what we actually find. They’ve tore up our ramp and ginseng patches, they’ve run off all the game. And you can’t fish. Even if you found you a live fish to catch, I’d be scared to eat it, you know. For a long time, it was the trees dying scared me worst. I don’t mean how they clear-cut the mountains before they blow them up, although of course that’s an awful thing. But that is a thing you can see and understand. What scared me was the trees that are slow-dying. You don’t really notice, that’s why it’s scariest, until one day it just dawns on you—how long’s it been since I seen a mulberry tree? A butternut? Ain’t there more logs down than there used to be, or am I just nervous?What happened to that sugar tree used to be at the head of Nell’s Hollow just five years ago? The scariest is when things are lost before you know you’re losing.

Then one morning last fall I found something that spooked me worse. It was real early, just after dawn, I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. I was climbing up the road to Bleak Knob to look for a ginseng patch used to be up there. Bleak Knob is a good ten miles from here, I hadn’t been up there in some time. It’s been all mined out underneath, I knew that, but I didn’t know how far they’d got with the stripping. I decided to go up and see.

I got over there, and of course they had a pipe gate across where you used to be able to drive up, so I parked my truck and started climbing the dirt road. Wasn’t too long before I heard some kind of vehicle coming down, which surprised me a little. Then here it come around the turn, and it’s a tanker truck of some sort, and I stood off to the side, half-expecting it to stop and say something to me about trespassing. But the two men in it didn’t so much as look at me. Then I realized the truck didn’t have a trace of lettering on it, and I noticed, too, that they had a gun rack in the cab, some kind of rifle in it, I couldn’t tell what.They went on down the road, and last thing I seen was that truck didn’t have no license plates neither. Now that scared me.

It got worse. I hadn’t gone but a hundred feet when I saw something on the ground shouldn’t have been there.You get used to seeing all kinds of weird stuff up these hollows below valley fills and mines, especially around sediment ponds, but this hollow, near as I could tell, was more or less untouched. And here in the road was this goopy gray junk. Like in clots, dribbled along the road.

Right there a bad feeling socked in my gut. It hadn’t even got to my mind yet, but I knew to back away and not touch that stuff, not even with my boot.

I watched it for a while, the feeling in my belly making me a little sick.Then I tried to track it. It didn’t go too far, kind of dribbled along in a line maybe twenty feet long, a fair-sized gap between each gray glob. Then it just petered out. I knew it had come out of the truck when they was driving up full, and when I seen them, they was no doubt driving out empty. So I followed the tire tracks. The tire tracks was heavy and easy to follow, and I got up top in under an hour to where I could see clear where the truck had turned around. But it was strange. I couldn’t find no more of the gray stuff, and I couldn’t see where they might have been dumping it. Nothing. It was like the truck just went up there to have a look, turned around and went on home.

I hadn’t yet heard any rumors about them dumping what they call hazardous waste, not yet. But I can’t say I was surprised. Once I got home, I called the Department of Environmental Protection about it. I’d called them quite a few times over the years, and they were always polite on the phone, then, near as I could tell, didn’t do a durned thing. But what else could I do? There ain’t nothing else but throw a lawsuit at them, and lord knows I don’t have the money for that.

 

My church has never spoke out against the destruction. Some churches have spoke against it, but mine has not. I still go every Sunday.

I can guarantee you I’ve never talked before about any of this out loud.The buck, the dreams, the feel in the woods. Before, I didn’t even want God to hear, I especially didn’t want God to hear, but, of course, they say he hears everything. I was ashamed at how I couldn’t match up what they teach at church and what I know from the woods. But as I get older and, it is true, sicker, I understand more and feel less guilt about it. I understand that church mostly touches just the part of me that knows right from wrong. The part that says, “You better not.” As I get bold enough to think it, I understand church don’t seep into me no deeper or fuller than that, and it is very sad, to feel no more than that from church. Still, I can’t know no different: any sacred I have ever got close to has come straight out of these hills.

My headaches have got worse instead of better. I kept telling myself they wasn’t, and I didn’t say nothing to Mary, but then this spring, they took a leap. Seems they’ve near doubled in what they was hurting before, and I thought what they was hurting before was just shy of unbearable.

As the headaches get worse, the dreams do, too. Looking back now, I believe it started, these new ones, with me dreaming animals with metal for teeth. A couple times I dreamed just that, normal deer with metal pressed in their gums. Then I dreamed I shot a buck and went to gut him, and I found he had a plastic bag for a belly. After that, I dreamed I was out walking and found glass scat. I dreamed leaves falling as ash. Then those dreams passed, too, and I stopped dreaming animals, I stopped dreaming woods at all. Instead, I dream that the world tilts, and I see crowds of good people can’t keep their footing, and they all fall and slide into a corner. Or I dream I’m out in my yard, and everything just stops. It’s like a clock running down, one where you don’t notice the ticking until it stops, but then it does stop, and I feel the universe dead quiet in its halt. And now, finally, I’ve got to where I dream without pictures at all. It’s just a dream of
sound. There is nothing to the dream but an alarm going off, a horn with a beat to it:
Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa.
I don’t need no Daniel to interpret that dream.

There is what my reason tells me. There is what my church tells me. There is what my dreams tell me. There is what this land tells me. I’m coming to accept that I’ll never bring all those things together before I die. But on my strongest days, I can tell myself without guilt or fear, it is not paganism or idolatry or sacrilege or sin. It’s just what I know. And what they tell me, these things I finally let myself trust, is what we’re doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide.

 

The day before Thanksgiving, 1958, was the first time I felt it. It wouldn’t be until a very long time afterwards I could put words to it, like I have now. For a good many years after it happened, when I talked to myself about it—because I sure didn’t talk to nobody else about it—I just named it by the buck me and Robby never did find. I needed to call the feeling by something solid, I didn’t know how to do it better, and looking back now, I think the way I called it was just fine. Even though the buck hadn’t really been there. Him being gone, seems to me, made calling it by him even righter.

As I got older, like I said, I started feeling the hum off all live things, even dirt and rock. And I could make myself feel how I was part of the land just by letting down something inside me, I got practiced that way. A letting-down at will. But the warm current and the loss of me in order to become me huge, me all, only happened three times after that Thanksgiving, and only once as strong. And I’ve never been able to make the feeling come. Only a word comes that until now I’ve never felt safe using for it because I know that word as a Christian thing.

It’s hard to tell stories about hunting for things that never get found. I try not to be downcast. I try to keep hold of my heart. I have Mary, and I have my boys. Some of the woods are left, and I still have the
strength in my legs to walk up into them. Even with the problems in my head, I can get back in the mountain, and many people, like Robby, sick now with diabetes and the cancer both, can’t even do that. And despite my recent terrible dreams, something different happened in my sleep, just a week ago.

I went to bed real early, before it was dark, with a headache so bad it was upsetting my stomach. I fell asleep pretty quick, and then I dreamed I was in a little grassy clearing. It felt good to me in that clearing, how I do love being down in a place, the good safe feeling of land all around. Then, while I was standing there quiet and glad, an old doe walked up to me. She stepped right up to me, and I looked back into her brown eyes, and she said, “This is what it’s like inside my head.”

Then she shelled her head open. It just fell open in easy halves. And as she did it, there spilled out of it and over me this light a color of green I’d never seen before.

The light from her head carried in it the feeling I’d had in the little room where the buck wasn’t. That feeling I’d only had twice since. That feeling I had never been able to make come on my own. Only this time, when I blended beyond myself with the sureness, the peace, the sureness and peace kept growing. Bigger beyond anything I’d ever felt, it swelled and spread, I swelled and spread, until there was not anything else. No woods and no doe and no light and no me. Until there was all. It was all. Not nothing. Not something. Just all.

I guess you’d call it the peace that passeth understanding. I guess you’d say it come by grace.

DANE CAME looking more like Jimmy Make than any baby I ever had. That was good. Make sure Jimmy Make knew. The next eight years passed blurrier than any other part of my life, my life became my kids then, and I have not one regret over that, but when I look back on the thirty-five years I have lived, those are the eight I remember least. After Dane was born, Mom gave us a piece of ground out by the turnaround and we put a modular home on it. Jimmy Make always was the type had to live on a hard road. Two years after Dane, here comes Corey, and around that time, Sheila finally got married to the Parker boy down at Labee, and she moved out. We got the used trailer for Mom because that was easier, Jimmy Make argued at me, than keeping up the “old house,” even though what he called the “old house” was, of course, the homeplace to us. I fought him hard on that. We went three generations back in that one house, three more in an even older place now ruint down to foundation stones further up the cove. But Mom wouldn’t fight him along with me. I was up there on the porch one afternoon fetching Bant—Mom still kept Bant a good bit, and a huge help to me that was—outright begging Mom not to
give up and go, and finally she said to me, in her case-closed voice, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” I see now what she did then and I would soon. Whoever’s bringing in the most money—that’s the way things finally tilt.

After Jimmy got Mom set up in her trailer, he bought his first truck. He did take care of Mom first. He’d been starving for that truck all his life, and I didn’t begrudge him. How men are, him especially.With Jimmy Make pulling down more money than my family had ever had, and me with two, then three, eventually four kids to watch, I ran the woods with Mom less and less often. Most of the time I was so drowned in other work I didn’t even think about it, but Mom would take Bant, and, oh, then I’d remember. Then I’d remember. Bant coming in all quiet like she always was unless you asked her something, like a woods thing herself she was in her quiet. I could see and smell and feel the woods fresh in her, her cheeks a good red from out there, and her eyes shiny and still away. The scent of mast, of duff, of air soaked in trees, all through her jacket and deep in her hair. How damned jealous, that’s the word for it, I would get. Jealous of a six-year-old I loved more than my life. Then I would try to go again, as far as I could with the kids when I had any time, up the creek where they could wade, along the bottom of Cherryboy to pick up nuts, Yellowroot for berries. But I couldn’t just let myself be there in it, the way I could when I had only Bant and Mom was with us, too. It was always the kids, not the woods, I had to be with first.

Things between me and Jimmy Make were different, too, and while the fact of that didn’t surprise me one bit, the ways it was different did. After the wedding, it was hard to want him anymore. I learned that for me it was either have sex or have a home; sex in houses, in beds, meant something else and not enough. But sex was the least of what changed. In less than a year of us living together, things that I’d kind of half-known about him before but had got muffled, now those
things came clear. Like how simple he was, no distance or depth in how he could see. While in the confusion of Morgantown, I’d craved that simpleness, now it irked me deep. Like how inside the bobcat walk crouched a confused little kid, and him not even unsimple enough to see that when I did. Like how he started spending all his free time either watching or working on things that ran, because, I couldn’t help but think, that engine noise blotted out anything else might turn up in his head.

“At least he’s not a drinker,” Mom would say when I’d complain. “You got lucky like me that way.” And she was right. The older he got, the less he drank, and I knew I was lucky, I knew where the kind of work he did could push you. Liquor, painkillers, illegal drugs. Take the edge off. A little of the uncertainty. Some of the hurt. But I’d never thought that was the kind of lucky I’d need, and I could tell from the way Mom said it, she’d expected more for me, too. I have to give her that. And I thanked her in my head for not saying what some others did—“and at least he don’t beat on you or the kids.” I still couldn’t be grateful for a bar low as that.

During those early years, though, sometimes I did truly love him, my mind still remembers that, even if my heart cannot. It was like the love and the unlove moved in cycles: I’d unlove for a week or so, then love for a month. Unlove two weeks, love for three. And part of me hated him for going away from us without leaving. But another part could see he wasn’t going so much as being taken away.