Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel Read online

  I dragged deep on my cigarette, wishing it was pot. I held it in my lungs and mouth as long as I could, still staring at the house, trying to shoot towards it the hate I had for Mom.

  But then it seemed I could see Mom and Sheila behind the walls, day in and day out, moving like humped animals. I saw the slowness, the heaviness, that had come on Sheila in the three years since she graduated high school, a heavy that had only a little to do with extra weight. I felt the dread of church tomorrow, two hours of boredom and too-simple-to-any-longer-believe, and the old ladies gossiping about me in their heads. Then I saw myself heading back to Morgantown after church, and sharp, the homesickness came again.

  And I asked myself, what is it about this place? What? I pressed my forehead against the oak. Because for a long time, I’d known the tightness of these hills, the way they penned. But now, I also felt their comfort, and worse, I’d learned the smallness of me in the away. I understood how when I left, I lost part of myself, but when I stayed, I couldn’t stretch myself full. I twisted the cigarette out on the trunk. I reached for the sweet peach-pink. College, I almost said it out loud, was just something you had to get used to. Then I flinched. Because it was Mom’s voice that had come in my head.

  Once I was back in Morgantown, Jimmy Make took on in his absence an even greater glory than he’d had in the flesh. I’d dream his padded jean jacket up against me, I swear, for two weeks that’s as far as I went. Lying on my back in my room when I should have been studying, I’d let down my chest and breathe the Jimmy memory in. Hunched over a library table, I’d read the same page three times straight because on top of the print would be a picture of me and Jimmy Make in damp October grass.

  The beauty, beauty of that boy. Like what you feel off animals, big cats.Wet horses. It was a beauty could carry you a ways. I needed that right then. Against the grimy foreignness of Morgantown, the stale stink of dorm rooms and apartments, how hard it was to really get outside, the rain that started in November and never did stop. But it wasn’t just his beauty, I wouldn’t understand until later. It was also how, compared to college, Jimmy Make was simple. Straight. Something you could understand exactly where, how, why, he was.

  I didn’t see him at Thanksgiving because he’d gone deer hunting with his family up in the Eastern Panhandle, but we made plans through letters about Christmas break. I had to go get him because he was still fifteen, and at first, Mom nor Dad neither one wanted to let me take a vehicle all the way to Watson. But when my grades came and I got 2 B’s and 4 A’s, they both gave in.The grades surprised even me. Made me bolder. Later I’d wonder if my grades had been a little worse, would I have taken the risks I did that break.

  Jimmy Make was waiting out on his porch when I pulled into his driveway. Boy moved down those porch steps like a bobcat, and like a bobcat, he had no idea how he moved, and that made me want him even worse. He wore the fleece-lined denim jacket. I could feel his blood running in him from clear across the seat.We hadn’t made plans to get pizza, go to Beckley to see a movie, we both understood this wasn’t what you’d call a date. Jimmy Make knew the Watson backroads as well as I knew the Prater ones, and he told me how to get there, he found a good spot. All these years later, I can still smell that good no-cologne scent of him. Soap and boy. His soft skin face, barely any bristle and only on his chin. The simple, the familiar, a beauty I could get my mind and arms around. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it before. I guessed that meant he had.

  I was home for three weeks. I’d never had it so bad. Daddy let me take the car one other time, and Mom didn’t fight it, but I could tell she was getting suspicious. It had always been like that, a one-way mirror between us, the way Mom could see straight through me, but I couldn’t see nothing back. What Mom did agree to, instead of me going to Watson a third time, was that Jimmy Make could spend an afternoon up Yellowroot, with us, and that didn’t make me happy, but it beat nothing at all. His mother brought him and dropped him off two days before I had to leave.

  You know Mom watched us close. Stayed polite long as Jimmy Make was there, but soon as he went home, asked, “How old is that boy?” When he first got to the house, Dad invited him into the living room to visit, Mom gave him a glass of ice tea, but Jimmy Make was too shy to talk much even to me. So eventually Dad stood up, turned on the TV, and said, “I guess I’ll leave you two to yourselves.”

  There were no other rooms to go to but my bedroom. We stood outside in the cold bright yard. We sat on the woodpile, Jimmy grinning and snapping sticks in his hands while I talked to him about himself, tried to let slip a few things about me, and I could see Mom through the window at the kitchen sink, and I gave her a look, but if Mom even noticed, she sure didn’t care. After a while, Jimmy Make reached out with a stick and traced down my leg. Once that happened, the other couldn’t be helped.

  I flicked my mind around, but everywhere was light, and I knew Mom wouldn’t just let us wander off in the woods, not as far as we’d need to go with all the leaves off the trees. Finally, it was almost time for his mother to come back, and I told Mom I was going to walk him back to the turnaround. I’d figured it out. On the way, I ducked him off into the old chickenhouse just out of sight of our place.

  My bare butt against raw splintery wall. His behind in my hands and the waistband of his jeans just below that. Stale bitter still stink of the long-gone chickens, and it was like gulping a meal without chewing, it was, big, hard, almost hurtful swallows. I can still remember the crunch of dry and very old shit under my shoes, the sun through one lost slat burning my shut eye. And always after, I hoped that wasn’t the time. But always after, I knew it had to have been.

  Bant

  SO HE TOOK a blowtorch to it. He hacksawed it, and he blowtorched it, and I made sure to stay clear of that flame. But every once in a while he’d step back and motion at me take the hammer to the lock, try to spring it that way. I did what he wanted, but I did it leery, listening for a guard after every knock. Until Jimmy Make cocked his head, lifted half his lip, and kind of growled at me, “C’mon now, girl. Hit her harder.”

  Then, earlier than I’d expected, that lock fell right off in my hand. Fell off bigger than my hand. It was the biggest padlock I’d ever held, and I dropped it in the road, like it was something live I held, something I’d thought dead that turned out live. Jimmy Make picked it up and pitched it as far as he could up the side of the hill, where it fell with a swish and a thump in the very green brush. That year had been a wet spring and early summer, and it seemed the plants had grown to a green you could taste. Green like the plants were trying to make up for the other.

  It was the May flood that finally made him go. Jimmy’d worked in the industry, he believed he’d be able to tell better than Lace what was going on, and for once, Lace thought so, too. Fuck their lock, he told her, I’m taking the truck. My father didn’t walk when he could ride. That was two mornings before school was out, and all day, I’d thought about it, that feeling I was getting used to. Wanting to know and not. Then while I was helping him get supper, the phone rang, Lace on her break. “I think you should go up with him, Bant,” she said. “I want you to see.”

  Jimmy Make hauled his tools back to his truck, leaving me to get the gate, and sometimes I’d wonder if that was why he hadn’t left yet—needed us kids to hand him tools and open gates. The gate was iron bars welded in a longways triangle painted red and orange, and they’d bolted a sign across the bars that said NO TRESPASSING in blue letters. There was a long reason under it I’d stopped reading when I hit the part about my safety. I’d stooped under that gate a couple times since the coal company’d put it in earlier that year, but not often, and I never went much past it. Too exposed it was up in there, too easy to be spotted. Now I walked it open, and as I did, it squealed louder than the lock had rung. Loud enough for a guard to hear easy, so I stopped and listened. But it was near sunset, and the mine wasn’t working twenty-four hours a day on weekends then, and Jimmy’d picked the time because it was
the lightest hour with the least chance of us getting caught. Once I got the gate to where the pickup could pass, Jimmy Make gunned it through and waited on me. I let the gate clash back together and climbed in the cab. When I did, Jimmy Make muttered, “I will drive up in here whenever I want.” He said the “will” with a weight to it.

  For a couple hundred yards, it was just the same hollow it had always been, except for the flood mess in the creek. It had dammed itself head-high in the elbows and narrows, thrown itself up along the sides. Towers of treetops and logs and brush, spiked all through with tires and metal, then the little stuff gobbed in that, pop bottles, sticks and plastic, hung up and quivering. The creek water itself still colored like creamed coffee left for weeks on a counter. Then Jimmy Make said, “flyrock,” and I realized the road was roughed up not just from flood damage, but from blast damage, too, and then I started seeing how big trees slid down the hollow side and water poured off the mountain in little runs where runs had never been before.

  We got to these big dirt piles right in the middle of the road, and “company,” Jimmy said, and I knew they’d dozed them up to keep out people like Jimmy Make and me. I slunk down in my seat, peered up high through the windowshield into what woods were left. Looking for guards. Now Jimmy Make wasn’t driving the road so much as he was playing it, and when we hit the first dirt roadblock, he just plowed right up on it, the loose tools in the bed rolling and crashing down at the tailgate, and he rammed over, pow. “Hwoo,” Jimmy said to himself.

  Then the sediment ponds. I’d seen these before in other hollows, clear back to when me and Grandma were running the woods. They were put in by the company to catch the runoff, but I saw that Lace was right, Lyon Energy wasn’t keeping them up. They were jammed with stuff, and you could see pretty quick how the sides of some were tore through by the flood. I knew Jimmy Make believed it was these busted ponds that had caused the flood, and I saw what he meant. He said the flood came because of the ponds and from the hollow sides being scraped, and I saw that, too. The sides of the hollow, as we got further in, more naked and scalped, more trees coming down, and up above, mostly just scraggly weeds, the ground deep-ribbed with erosion, and I told myself, yes, this is where the floods come from. From the busted ponds and the confused new shape of the land. From how the land has forgot where the water should go, so the water is just running off every which way. That’s all it is, I told myself, Lace is stretching things again. But after what I’d seen three weeks ago in May, I wondered if it wasn’t as bad as Lace thought.

  I hadn’t been home when the cloudburst hit. I’d been on the ridge above Left Fork, and I wasn’t far from a good rock overhang Grandma’d always called the Push-in Place, and I holed up there until it stopped. The rain didn’t last long, although the half hour it did, it came heavy, but pretty soon, I was skidding on down the mountain towards the Ricker Run, thinking nothing of it. The run was moving high and muddy, like it should be after a quick hard storm like that, but it hadn’t left its banks. It had nothing to do with what happened to Yellowroot Creek because, I understood later, the mountaintop removal mine wasn’t draining into the Ricker Run yet. But as I got closer to where the trees opened into the clearing before Yellowroot Creek and then our house, I started hearing something, and for a minute, I couldn’t figure what it was. Then I started running.

  Before I even got out of the woods, I saw the footbridge was gone, and how many years of cloudbursts like that one had the footbridge gone through and never washed out? my mind moving fast and blurry, but then I was out of the trees, into the open where I could see, and then I thought, Tommy. Corey. Dane. Mom. “Mom!” I shouted. By then the creek was blasting through our yard, torrenting against the house underpinning, terrible bright brown with white chops raging in it, and down its rapids torpedoed trash and metal and logs, logs, logs, them crashing into the upstream end of the house, careening off and spinning around, and as I watched, one tree batter-rammed the fiberglass skirting and just jammed itself stuck, the loose end whip-tailing in current. “Mom!” I screamed, and I was racing up and down my side of the bank like a penned dog, looking for a place to jump across, looking for her or my little brothers in the blank house windows, and how long would the house hold? until, at the downstream end, I slipped in the mud, slammed down on one knee, looked across the creek, and saw Lace.

  The water boiled right above her knees, her sopped work uniform clinging to her, and I yelled, but she couldn’t hear me, her plunging her arm under water to the shoulder, and I realized she was looking for something. Only later would I know it was the weedeater, she’d already got the lawnmower up on the porch before the current had gotten this bad, the weedeater and lawnmower were the only work Jimmy Make had now. And I saw a muddy log boring straight down on her, and I screamed, and she could not hear but ducked it anyway.

  Then she gave up looking and started fighting current towards the front door, crouched over, her arms spread for balance, the debris barreling at her, tires, Styrofoam pieces, a pallet, I saw her twisting and swerving like in a dodgeball game. But she was hardly gaining ground, so she gave up on that, too, turned downstream now, looking over her shoulder always for what was coming behind, the flood force pushing her ahead of herself until she fell down, caught herself, stumbled back up, a clot of plastic jugs glancing off her back, then she dropped into water on purpose this time, I could tell she meant it, and started half-swimming, half-crawling, towards the stand of sumac and other little trees that marked the end of our yard. She fell forward into the thicket, pulled herself upright with each hand around a small trunk, and the trees stood close enough together to make like a cage around her, and although the water could breach the cage, the big pieces of debris and logs could not.

  The water dropped quick after that. The roar sunk to where she could hear me hollering. She struggled out of the sumac, limping a little, her uniform muddy and torn. She waved at me.Then she pushed down on the air with that hand, like telling a kid to quiet, and I could read her lips: “It’s okay. It’s okay.” But I knew better than that.

  Another dike was looming ahead, and this time Jimmy went around it, jerked the truck onto the grassy outside bank of the pond, and made a road that way. Then we were riding smoother, but it felt like we were going to tip, and I locked the door with my elbow. I thought again of the guards, how they must leave a few nosing around even when the mine wasn’t working, and surely they would hear the truck. The ponds stairstepped all the way up the hollow, and as the hollow rose, narrowed, those top ponds no longer even pretended at grass, nothing but flood trash and rock. And then it got to where not even Jimmy Make could drive a truck any farther.

  He idled it there a second, no doubt considering just crashing on through, but then he switched off the ignition, stomped the brake, and swung out. I followed him. Hit ground, my bones still humming off the jar of the ride, and soon as I left the inside of the truck—sudden silence, clawed-up earth, sky shifting towards rain—even though I was fifteen years old, how small I felt. Like anything could get me. I craned my neck a little around the bend, and I saw for the first time the mine rim, just a piece of it was all I could see from that angle. A prickle moved under my hair. I recognized it from the others I’d seen from highways, sudden dead spots in what should be green, but then, in the car, you’d swing on by and not see it anymore. Jimmy Make didn’t even notice. He was just swaggering on up towards the turn, and I knew why. Still preening in what he’d just done, the fuck-the-company pride of it. But when we got around that bend, even Jimmy Make’s cockiness drained away.

  The edge of the mine top towered several hundred feet right over our heads, a straight gray line that started at the east flank of Cherryboy, then ran as far to the right as my head could swivel. Lace had said they hadn’t got Cherryboy yet, and she was right, but not even all those late-night listenings had got me ready for how the top of Yellowroot was just plain gone.Where ridgetop used to be, nothing but sky. Under that sky, what looked from this distance l
ike raw colorless gravel but must have been piled-up rock. And beyond that, nothing at all.

  Jimmy’d stopped too when we first caught sight of that full edge, but we had to walk a little farther around the turn to check what Lace had sent us for.When Jimmy started off again, I followed right behind, my head down, me closer to him than I’d been in some time. He wore a black T-shirt faded to a plum color, and I watched his back, not ready to see the fill, and telling myself, it couldn’t be as high, as bad, as it already looked like it was going to be. But then Jimmy stopped, and I stopped, too, and there the fill was. And I couldn’t pretend anymore.

  The closest thing I’d ever seen to it was the Summersville Dam, but this was bigger, darker, and looser. I hauled back my head and looked up its whole height, and it seemed to me it must be as tall as the highest buildings in Charleston, but who knew for sure. There was just no way to gauge how tall the thing was because there was nothing natural about it, nothing you could compare it to, and then it dawned on me exactly what I was standing under—Yellowroot Mountain, dead. I knew from Lace and Uncle Mogey that after they blasted the top off the mountain to get the coal, they had no place to put the mountain’s body except dump it in the head of the hollow. So there it loomed. Pure mountain guts. Hundreds of feet high, hundreds of feet wide. Yellowroot Mountain blasted into bits, turned inside out, then dumped into Yellowroot Creek.