Strange as This Weather Has Been (6 page)

Since we’d got back from North Carolina, though, Mogey and Mary had changed, too. Although it scared me a little to say it, I had to admit that to tell the truth. While we were gone, a kettlebottom, one of those petrified tree trunks that sometimes drop out of mine roofs, fell and clipped Mogey’s shoulders and neck. After that, he couldn’t work anymore, and he was never the same in other ways, too. He started having real bad headaches, and this spring, they’d gotten worse than they’d ever been before. Also in just the past year, even Mogey and Mary’d started talking about the bad things, and it wasn’t headaches they meant. I’d come over a lot that winter, more than I usually did, things getting louder and tighter at our place, tighter and louder. And although it would always be better at Uncle Mogey’s house, sometimes we’d be leaning over the table, cupping our coffee mugs, me settled in, even close to happy, and then, when I least
expected it, one of them would mention another thing lost. Honey-bees. A ginseng patch. A type of tree.

When they’d do that, I’d pull in on myself, I’d drop my head. The pretty sandy spot on the river we used to call the Beach, they’d say. Crawdads. Helgrammites. I’d stop sipping my coffee, I couldn’t swallow anymore, because it was bad enough hearing it from Lace. But hearing from them was even scarier. They said it like somebody was dying and others had already died, quiet and prayerful and sad they spoke it. They didn’t rant. And if even Mogey and Mary were so mournful, who still remembered, well, it was hard to tell yourself things weren’t really getting as bad as Lace said.

But then, before they’d gone on very long at all, Mogey, like he’d just thought of something, would look at me and say, “Now Bant. You’re too young to be so worried.You’re too serious.You should be spending more time with kids your age, having more fun.” Then he’d reach up with his fist and fake-cuff my cheekbone, so gentle he would just barely brush it there. And no matter how many times Uncle Mogey did that, it never once made me think of the look of my face.

But I was different from other kids my age. Uncle Mogey knew that. I didn’t want to be different, but I was, either born or made that way or both. Take my friend Sharon, for instance. Sweet girl that she was, this place didn’t matter so much to her. If you asked her, she’d say it was pretty, but it didn’t reach her like it reached me, and near as I could tell, it was like that with most kids at school. Then Corey, he didn’t care about anything he couldn’t run a tire over. And Dane. Well. He couldn’t help it.

My grandma would always say, “Now you young people. It’s up to you.” She knew where things were getting to. But then she started saying how it seemed the young people just didn’t care anymore, “except for you, Bant,” she’d say. Looking at me, but not in my eyes. Looking beyond the way she would. “I know you are different.”

Finally I could see Mogey and Mary’s house below me, and I stopped to try and make the bad feeling go away, at least a tiny bit. The tight square sides, the slate-blue siding, it was a real house, not a modular home, that Mogey had built with his hands. Everything in their yard was neat, toolshed and tarped woodshed and the empty dog kennel, old Brownie long dead. I scrawled down the shale bank into the backyard, shiny with sweat now, my tennis shoes muddy, but I’d take the shoes off at the door, and beyond that, I knew Mogey and Mary wouldn’t care. I pushed my hair back out of my face. Their grass needed cutting some, thought I’d offer to do it for them, but a good thick it was, not like our yard, where nothing ever wanted to grow and now the flood trash doomed anything brave enough to try. I saw how they’d been working on their garden, saw how they’d put out tomato plants in the shade, probably planning to plant them this evening, tomatoes I knew they’d started in winter in Styrofoam cups from seed. But then I was standing at the foot of the porch steps, and the door opened before I knocked.

“Hi, honey. He’s sleeping,” Aunt Mary told me in a low voice. She shook her head. “So bad today he can’t get out of bed.”

“Oh,” I said. Something dropped out of the base of my throat. “I’m sorry.”

“Wait here on the porch,” Mary said. “I’ll bring out some ice tea and we can visit here.”

“Oh,” I waved no with my hand. “That’s okay. I should be getting home.” I took a step back. “They’ll be wondering what’s taking me so long getting back from school.” With just the two of us, I knew, it wouldn’t be the same. Even in the sadness, when it was the three of us, there was always a brightness, too. Uncle Mogey would always end us up there, in the brightness. Aunt Mary—like most people, I didn’t blame her—could not.

“Are you sure, honey?” she said. “You just walked all the way
over.” Her face folded in tired on itself, the darkness a full circle around her eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “I just wanted to see how you all were doing. Starting day after tomorrow I’m probably going to be busy at work.”

Mary shook her head again. “Well, drink some tea at least.”

I drank it there on the porch, and I thanked her and told her the garden looked good. She talked a while about the tomato plants, what they were putting in next, but I had a hard time paying attention. One last time she tried to make me stay longer, and I told her I was sorry but I couldn’t. Then I started back out the yard.

“Skin you alive,” that teacher’d say, and sometimes it wasn’t the kid on the barbed wire fence I’d see. Sometimes it was me. Sometimes it was my own arms and legs, skun naked, the blood beating through thick blue and red cords. And I knew—Lace having forgotten, Jimmy Make never having known, Mogey hurt bad as he was and never going to get better—my grandma would expect from me certain things.

The thing was, in the past year or so, I was starting to wonder if I was really that different from everybody else after all.

MRS. TAYLOR is the lady Dane takes care of. She watches TV with the sound turned down. Instead, they listen to Mrs. Taylor’s voice, not nonstop, not rambly. Just now and again outing with what’s on her mind. A TV screen glints in each of Mrs. Taylor’s glass lenses so that Dane sees Mrs. Taylor’s eyes as two little TVs, talking. And those two little TVs and the one big TV are the only places light comes into the room.

It is a dark place Dane enters every morning. Its two crouched windows, one blocked by a broken exhaust fan, and its dark plaid couch, the dark recliner, the dark paneled walls hung with dark pictures, daisies and praying children and pert terriers cut from magazines and somehow varnished onto dark slabs of wood. The other pictures, the dozen family photos under glass in plastic frames, Mrs. Taylor has already had Dane pack safely away after the blasts started knocking them down. The dark slabs of wood the blasts cannot shatter.

Mrs. Taylor doesn’t expect Dane to answer her. She seems to like it better when he just listens. Most people prefer it this way, Dane has learned, and he’s good at listening. It’s the only way he knows
how to be liked. Sometimes when Mrs. Taylor’s friends visit, they’ll talk about Dane as though he’s not there, the privilege or curse of those who talk very little, an assumption on the part of the talkers that the nontalkers can’t hear either, or at least only hear what you want them to. Which means Dane hears a lot. Mrs. Taylor’s friends find it unusual that Mrs. Taylor has a boy instead of a girl to help take care of her, and once in a while, they’ll mention this out loud. They’ll ask, “How’s the boy working out?” Then Mrs. Taylor will say, “Oh, he’s just a pleasure to have around,” and Dane will feel a warm goodness, “and more thorough than any girl I’ve ever had,” then a hotter shame. Dane even more girl than girl.

As Dane sits there listening in the dark room, he feels his own self get darker and darker. Dane fading, receding, without even glasses to light his face with reflection, Dane a dark barrel for the voices to fill. All those months before May, while he and Mrs.Taylor sat in the living room between chores, Mrs. Taylor talked of any number of things. But since the May flood, she speaks of only three: her kids’ wanting her to move to Cleveland.What happened at Buffalo Creek. And, less often, more hushed, the upcoming End of the World.

Mrs.Taylor begins to rock her body up out of her recliner and onto her walker, and Dane moves to help her. She wears a garment, part smock part dress, that falls straight down off the shelf of her breasts so that Mrs. Taylor looks like a wide piece of culvert pipe standing on its end. The smock dress is not white anymore, even though it is clean. The garment has darkened somehow in the dark close house, the house like a den, like a clean hole where a very clean animal might hide, darkening all that comes in it. Mrs. Taylor begins walkering towards the kitchen, and although the distance between recliner and kitchen table is maybe twelve feet, about halfway there she rests on her walker to catch her breath. The emphysema, and Dane listens to her lungs working, the lung sponges squeezing, he can hear them as
clearly as if she’s inside out. Then she recovers, and she takes a fresh breath. But she doesn’t move after it, so Dane knows she’s going to speak.

He tightens inside. If it’s the disaster at Buffalo Creek, he knows she’ll start in one of two ways. “Should’ve known better, but Dooley had work over there . . . But, we should’ve known better.” Or “Here I’ve moved right back into it. That was Pittston, this is Lyon, but one company or another’s bound to drown me before I die a natural death.” Dane waits, and in those four or five seconds, Dane prays. And to his surprise, he is answered.

“Well,” Mrs. Taylor says. “I got company coming in three weeks. Avery called last night. We got to Lysol that bathroom good.”

Dane has never met Avery, Mrs. Taylor’s youngest son, but it’s from Avery his check comes. Mrs. Taylor keeps detailed records of Dane’s time on a chart magneted to her refrigerator, then she sends the chart to Avery, and Avery does the math. Avery is also “a history buff. Oh, he loves to read.” And a “vagabond.” “He’s just been all over the place. Itchy feet. I’m so glad he finally settled down.” Now Mrs. Taylor shuffles forward. Her feet foreshortened bread loaves stabbed into slippers, blue terrycloth folded over the instep. The toe-nails, flakes of brown mica. She fumbles with a kitchen chair—she won’t often ask for help, Dane has to see it and step in—and Dane does, pulls out the chair and guides her down. “Let’s do them dishes first,” she says. “I always say do the kitchen first before you get bathroom all over your hands.”

When the May flood hit, Dane’d been finishing his most important job for Mrs. Taylor, the main reason her kids have hired somebody at all: her toilet arrangement. Because Mrs. Taylor has running water in the kitchen and a bathtub that works, but she doesn’t have a flush commode. Instead she has a metal chair fitted with a plastic toilet seat, and under the seat is fastened a big metal pot like the black kettles with
white flecks Grandma used for sterilizing canning jars. Mrs. Taylor’s kids can afford to install an indoor toilet. Mrs. Taylor has told Dane they have not as another way to get her to Cleveland.The special chair with the pot has its own room, a sizable room with its window propped open with a brick even in winter, the room empty of everything else but a dish towel wall-hanging of white kittens. Dane feels sorry for the kittens. Every day but Sunday, no matter what else Mrs. Taylor might ask him to do—wash dishes, vacuum falling plaster, help check her sugar, dust, follow her directions on cooking supper—Dane has to carry the slop pot to the outhouse and empty it there.

That Saturday in May, the sky cracked open right about the time Dane was ready to carry out the pot. “Coming down that hard, won’t last long,” Mrs. Taylor told him. “You just wait a while, honey.” And he did, the two of them watching the silent TV while rain clamored the house roof, until Mrs. Taylor started fretting about leaks in the bedroom, but Dane checked, and there weren’t any.Then finally they heard the roof ring a lighter pitch, and Mrs.Taylor said, “Okay, darlin, why don’t you take it on out. I don’t think it’s coming down hard enough to splash any up on you.” And Dane let himself out the back door and headed for the outhouse in the far corner of the yard.

He had his head ducked, his face turned down from the rain still falling, so he heard it first. And when he recalls it now, he also hears it before he sees it. An unfamiliar alto “
aaaaaahhhhh
.” Not a rumble, no, there was no bass to it. All he could think was a new kind of machine must be coming, and he turned to look into the rain up the hollow to see. Mrs. Taylor’s house wasn’t on the creek side of the hollow, between Yellowroot Creek and her backyard stood the row of houses across the road, and those house’s yards and fences, and the road itself. Which is why when Dane picked up his head and saw the creek coming at him, he couldn’t make sense of it. A thigh-high water wall the color of chocolate milk driving ahead of itself logs and tires and other stuff
Dane didn’t have time to tell what they were, more things surging and bouncing behind the wall’s foaming face. And the wall itself not solid across but split, the water having found every place the hollow lay a little lower and then hurtled through the low places in channels, and because the road rose a few inches above the house, one of those channels bore down directly on Mrs. Taylor’s house and yard.

When Dane thinks back now, what scares him most is not the water wall, although the wall scares him bad. It’s how he didn’t move. He just seized up halfway between back door and outhouse, prickled sharp in his scalp, the slop pot held away from him, both hands gripping the handle and his eyes swelling and bulging out his head. Like if only those eyes could get closer to the water, they might understand, Dane trying to make sense—creek on the wrong side of the road, water on its end—while Mrs. Taylor screamed at him from the back door, “Move, boy! Move!” But he did not. Dane frozen, rapt with his slop pot, while the water wall came crashing through the backyard above Mrs. Taylor’s, sucking into itself lawn ornaments, a doghouse, a blue plastic wading pool, spinning, until all of a sudden, the thought struck Dane that the water would have hit his own house first.