Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Lace

  Bant

  Corey

  Bant

  Dane

  Bant

  Corey

  Dane

  Bant

  Lace

  Bant

  Dane

  Bant

  Corey

  Bant

  Lace

  Bant

  Corey

  Bant

  Mogey

  Lace

  Dane

  Avery

  Dane

  Bant

  Lace

  Corey

  Bant

  Dane

  Lace

  Bant

  Corey

  Bant

  Lace

  Dane

  Bant

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  For the people in the central Appalachian coalfields

  who struggle against catastrophe daily. Nowhere have

  I seen courage and integrity like theirs.

  Lace

  WHEN I WAS eleven, I got it in my head I was going to a high school basketball game in Charleston. Mom told me I was not. Said I had no business going to some high school basketball game in Charleston, I wasn’t even in junior high, but I had friends older than me and that’s all they’d been talking about—the first time we’ve made it to regionals since 1962, everybody’s going to be there, we’re making banners, and Paula’s mom’s driving and taking us to Shoney’s beforehand. My mom said she didn’t care who was driving.

  The game was on a Saturday night. The week leading up to that Saturday I made sure not to mention it again. Soon as I finished the supper dishes, I slipped on back into me and Sheila’s room—Sheila and Dad busy watching TV, Buck and Roy and Grampa Jones, even at eleven I wouldn’t be caught dead watching Hee-Haw—and I put on my clothes I thought made me look oldest. I ripped my jeans a little climbing out the window, but I told myself just don’t take off your coat, and then I was running light and quiet and very, very fast down the Ricker Run in the March early dark. I stopped on the footbridge, stitch ripping in my side. I could hear Yellowroot Creek under the hoarse of my breath.The hardest part was next, trotting the whole mile down Yellowroot Road without anybody seeing me. Everybody knew everybody back then, and everybody knew I had no business running down the road on a Saturday night in the dark. But then three miracles happened, two for me and one for Mom. First, I made it to Route 9 and had my thumb out before a single neighbor saw me. Second, a man in a Lantz truck picked me right up and drove me all seventy-five miles to the Civic Center without a word about my age, my parents, or why I was hitching. And third, and least surprising, given the time and place, the Lantz truck man didn’t do me any harm.

  I didn’t get to the game until the last quarter, but I was there. After we lost, Paula’s mom took me home with everybody else, called Mom before we left once she figured out I hadn’t ridden in with them. I was the last one they dropped off, and it wasn’t until we were all the way down to just me and Paula in the van that I started thinking about what was going to happen once I got home. But I wasn’t scared. And I sure didn’t feel guilty. Just mad at Mom, it was her fault. If she’d let me go the regular way, I wouldn’t have had to hitchhike. Right there I decided I wouldn’t let her get me.

  I trudged back up the Ricker Run in a dark so pure I could hardly see my feet at the end of my legs. Then I saw the porch light. Mom waiting there with her long wooden spoon. I stopped out in the yard, just beyond where the light fell. “Get your rear end up here. Now,” Mom said, and there wasn’t nothing else I could do.

  When she went at it, though, something was different. Once I had that don’t-get-me in my head, I dodged that whipping like a boxer who fought from his behind. I danced, swinging out on Mom’s grip on my arm, I arched my back and fast-footed, I spun and I leapt, to where every lick either missed me or barely grazed. Mom wore out faster than me. Then we both stood there, her panting, me feeling the wind through the spreading rip in my jeans.

  She ended up making me stay in my room except for chores and church every Saturday and Sunday for three months. I still do say it was worth it. I still do say I won.

  By then I’d decided I was newer than all this here. Here was fine for Mom, Dad, and Sheila—you could take one look at them and see how they fit—but only outside of here would I, Lace See, live real life. Ages one to eighteen were just a waiting for that. Nothing on TV, nothing in books, nothing in magazines looked much like our place or much like us, and it’s interesting, how you can believe what’s on TV is realer than what you feel under your feet. Growing up here, you get the message very early on that your place is more backwards than anywhere in America and anybody worth much will get out soon as they can, and that doesn’t come only from outside. Still, despite all those shows and pictures and stories and voices, I never was able to see what lay ahead for me as something solid. I saw it instead as a color, a sweet peach-pink. A color I could walk into, with its own temperature, own smell, and by the time I was a teenager, that color, temperature, and smell had put such a spell on me I didn’t see much else.

  So when I was in eleventh grade, and they brought in a guidance counselor from away from here, and I ended up doing work-study for her second period, it proved what I’d known all along about my own specialness and how southern West Virginia was just a holding pen for me. Mrs. Claylock always seemed nervous, and she only lasted two years, but in that time, she figured out not only was I smart, but really good at tests. Us cooped up in that supplies closet they gave Mrs. Claylock for an office, cloudy with her strange perfume. I never smelled that perfume again until a department store in North Carolina, and when I did, Mrs. Claylock came so clear I could see the acne scars on her chin. Mrs. Claylock told me how to apply for college, then she went even further and fixed me up with scholarships and grants, and the day I graduated high school, May 1983, I told myself once I got to WVU, I’d never look back.

  Truth was, though, after a month away, I was feeling a kind of lonesomeness I’d never known there was. I’d start drinking in my dorm room most evenings, stretched out on my window ledge on the eighth floor of Tower Two, a rum and coke between my legs, or a bottle of Mad Dog 20-20, and if anybody asked, I’d say I was just warming up for that night’s party, but really I’d be watching the ridges in the distance. It was like I was all the time feeling like I wasn’t touching nothing, and wasn’t nothing touching me back, and yeah, they had hills in Morgantown, but not backhome hills, and not the same feel backhome hills wrap you in. I’d never understood that before, had never even known the feel was there. Until I left out and knew it by its absence.

  October made it worse. The sky never clearer any time of the year, keen mornings and warmish afternoons, sharp color in the hills, and the threat of winter making everything more precious. I’d be sitting in a lecture hall, in the library, trying to take notes, trying to study, and there’d come to me October things I’d thought I’d left behind when I left being a kid. The rich wild fur smell of squirrels in my daddy’s canvas jacket pockets. The rough of a burlap sack for picking up hickory nuts. Persimmon taste. Searching for the prettiest of the pretty leaves for Mom to help me iron between wax paper. By the third week of the month, I couldn’t hold off any longer. Just for a weekend, I told myself. There’s no failure in that.

  I left on a Thursday, and because I didn’t have another way, I hitchhiked, but I’d gotten so turned around by those two months in Morgantown I headed east instead of south and was halfway to Cumberland, Maryland, before I realized some
thing was wrong. Spent the night at a truck stop on Keyser’s Ridge, head in my arms, and woke up with ketchup in my hair. I was in the restroom washing it out when the counter lady came in and asked me, “Where you trying to get to, honey?” The lady knew a lot of drivers coming through and found one heading my way.

  Daddy was out in the garden twisting off pumpkins. He almost lost his balance when he recognized it was me. He took off stiff towards me, his legs loosening as he walked, then he clapped his arms around me and slapped on my back. Hollered for Mom, and even Mom looked happy to see me. People around here don’t really want their kids leaving, doesn’t matter for what. They don’t have a lot else. With his arm around my shoulder, Daddy guided me on into a kitchen chair, Mom carrying my suitcase behind, and “Get us out a plate of them peanut butter cookies,” she called to Sheila. Then we all four sat around the table, and they listened to the parts of college I knew they’d want to hear, Daddy saying, “Well now! Well now!” once in a while, slapping the table in surprise.

  That evening Mom made fried chicken and good thick lumpy gravy, my favorite, and rice and green beans, birthday food, and mine wasn’t until March. Afterwards, we sat in the living room while Dad and Sheila watched the one channel we picked up and Mom worked on one of her projects. It was breadbag rugs that year, her twisting the plastic into little ropes that she would weave together later. And for a while, I watched TV, too.

  But by 9:30, how Sheila talked over top the show was starting to irritate me. So was the rustle of Mom’s bread bags. I was feeling again the smallness of the room, how piled up we always were, and then I began to hear Daddy’s breathing. It couldn’t have gotten so bad so fast, had I just been used to it before? His three-fingered hand lay spread on his knee. He’d lost the other two in a mine before I was born, and when I was in junior high, how that gap’d embarrassed me. About ten o’clock, I stood up and told them I was going to bed, even though I wasn’t tired.Then I lay there in the bed I’d slept in since I left my crib, my eyes wide open, and I should have been exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep, and at first I thought it was because my mind was confused. Then I realized it was the tangles in my heart. Sweet and hurt.

  The next morning I pretended to take my time drinking a cup of coffee with Mom and Dad, but all I was really thinking about was calling some friends. Most weren’t home, and I tried four numbers before Missy McDaniel was. She said she was going to the away football game down in Watson that night. Did I want to come?

  We got there a little late, and instead of heading for the bleachers, we took a circle around the field. I knew Missy was looking for Roger Cant. We found him pretty quick, cool-sagged up against the chain-link fence in his track letter jacket. Missy slipped behind him and knocked the back of his knee with the front of her own, and when Roger turned to grin at her, I looked past his shoulder and realized he wasn’t alone.

  I’d seen the other boy before. I knew who he was. James Makepeace Turrell. They called him Jimmy Make even back then, a name you didn’t easily forget, and we kept track of those boys in neighboring counties, them with a luster the ones you’ve seen every day since first grade don’t have, and as far as we were concerned, wasn’t much to look at in our county anyway. So I knew who he was, but I hadn’t known how fast he’d grown up over the summer. Jimmy Make was three years younger than me, but he’d grown into a hard rolling beauty made those three years go away.

  He wore a fleece-lined denim jacket tight against his body, his bare hands shoved in the pockets of his close-riding jeans, and you could tell the new muscles making under there. Make you want to run your hands across. His hair thrust thick out of his cap, a bright duskiness to it, and I saw on his strong neck, his face, the brown of his skin despite summer being two months gone. Now Missy was facing Roger, their heads close, teasing at each other, while Jimmy and me hung back on either side of them. I made like I was watching the game, but really I was stealing looks at those earth-colored eyes. The thick of his mouth. Slipping my glance down his lean thighs there. And Jimmy Make would seem to notice, then would look away, and I wondered, was it lack of interest or was it shy? And that made me have to know more.

  “I’ve got some weed out in the car,” Roger was saying.Then Roger and Missy were ambling away, and me and Jimmy Make were following, him closer to my shoulder than he should be, and later I’d swear—I felt it off him for the first time right then. The hot wet. I learned it right there before I ever touched him. Us drifting towards the part of the field they used as overflow parking, star-pricked sky with a crackle to it, so dry and cold, new cold, and us drifting through those other October night dramas. Mothers beating cowbells in the stands, and little boys playing their own games of tackle in the shadows. The twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls huddled outside the bathrooms, whispering, and the older girls walking in twos and threes round and round the field, while the boys leaned on the chain-link fence where they could watch both the game and the girls. In the parking lot, the smell of pot. Low-laughing voices. By the time we reached the car, Roger’d forgotten about getting high. Him and Missy climbed straight in the backseat, and then it was me and Jimmy Make by ourselves in the dark.

  I climbed up on the hood, braced my feet on the bumper. Jimmy Make did, too. I leaned back with my hands splayed behind me, and then Jimmy did like me, and we were side by side, not touching, and not facing each other, either. Then I could feel not only the hot wet, but also the nervous off him. I felt, too, his soberness, felt him there in a way all the drunk flirting and groping and messing around in Morgantown hadn’t been there at all. And I felt also, although I only named it later, the familiar of him. Again, after all that Morgantown, how so simple and familiar Jimmy Make felt even though I’d never been near him before.

  “Where you live at?” I finally asked him, when I realized he wasn’t going to talk on his own.

  Jimmy reached up his hand and rubbed the back of his hair under his cap so the bill tipped forward over his forehead. “Oh, out there on the other side of Watson,” he said. Even from the side, I could see his teeth in the dark. I saw they were hard, straight, and white.

  “You got any brothers and sisters?”

  He did the thing with the back of his head again. “Two sisters and a brother way older than me,” he said. “I guess I’m the baby.” He laughed a little.

  I kept asking him stuff, and he answered back, all serious sounding, but then the little laughs. Our hands still there behind us on the car hood, just far enough apart. I thought I could feel the want off him, but I wasn’t sure, and him not trying to touch me was unfamiliar in a way that made me excited, and worried. And hungry like I hadn’t been in some time.

  Then the car started bouncing up and down, to where it bucked us right off onto the ground, and at first, both of us were embarrassed. Then Jimmy Make busted up laughing, and I did, too. And we took off running at the same time, through the cars and on out into the field, and then Jimmy Make fell and rolled over once, flopped out on the dew-damp grass like a dog. He grinned up at me with his white teeth. “Why don’t you come on down here?” he said, patting the ground. When I did, he still didn’t touch me, he never did touch me that night, but it didn’t matter. Because by that time I knew for sure what was coming off him, and it wasn’t lack of want.

  I woke up the next morning with a Jimmy Make blaze. Stunned golden inside with the dream and the crave and the new of that boy. Daddy asked me did I want to walk with him up Cherryboy a ways, and I did, but I didn’t see the mountain, didn’t see that October I’d come back for, didn’t hear Daddy talking and didn’t hear his breathing, either. Too busy with that Jimmy Make and me movie in my head. The second I got a little privacy, which wasn’t until early afternoon, I called Missy, and Missy said yeah. She’d already talked to Roger. Jimmy Make felt like me.

  I cloudwalked the rest of that afternoon. Mom asked me to peel apples for apple butter, oh, I had no problem with that. Sheila asked if she could take down my posters in our room, I said go righ
t ahead. Only worry I had in the world was when I’d see Jimmy Make next, and I held onto that golden until right before supper. When Mom started talking about church the next day.

  “Well,” I said, and I tried to make it sound as offhand as I could. “I’m not sure I’ll make it to church in the morning.”

  Mom stood at the stove with her back to me, moving potatoes in a skillet. “Well,” she said. “I reckon you will.”

  And then I felt things folding down to how they were before I left, and I drew a hard breath because I had to keep them braced. “Mom,” and I tried to sound reasonable. “I’m eighteen years old. I don’t even live here no more.”

  Mom didn’t bother to turn around, and that she wouldn’t fight me in a real way made me even madder. “Long as you’re part of this family and visiting, you’ll go with this family to church.” She hit her taters with a shake of salt.

  Then it fell, crashed down for real. I was fourteen again, the two months away hadn’t happened at all. I snatched up my jacket and slammed out the house, managed to knock my elbow into a porch post, but I kept going, crossed the edge of the yard, and climbed on up into the trees, yelling at myself in my head, why the hell did you work so hard to get back here? Haven’t you yet learned any better than that? Once I reached the big white oak where I could watch the house from high up but they couldn’t see me, I pulled out a cigarette I had hidden in my pocket, and I smoked it for spite. And glaring down at the house, I saw it again how I’d seen it before I left. Grubby, grim, gritty, covered with that asphalt shingle stuff with fake brick shapes pressed in it. The bubbled greasy place where the coal-stove pipe came out of the wall. The old outhouse still tilted in the corner of the yard, we hadn’t got an inside bathroom until I was two, and even now, Daddy sometimes used the outside one.