I took a drive to Harrisonburg, Virginia, one day, where there was an Indonesian restaurant I liked. This necessitated crossing the West Virginia–Virginia border on two-lane back roads so I could see if there was a discernible difference.
There was. The surface of the road changed on the Virginia side—it was smoother there, fewer cracks, more shoulder. There was more brick, less clapboard; more sky, fewer trees. The houses were set farther back from the road. There were swaths of lawn and horses and other cars with foreign plates—North Carolina, Texas—and flags. All kinds of flags.
To look into what distinguishes West Virginia from its neighbor and parent Virginia is to see a state that prefers fewer laws circumscribing the behavior of its citizens—regardless of the content of those behaviors. In contrast, Virginia’s history is one of being highly involved in governing the intimate lives of its citizens and legislating the protection of the social status quo.
No law is the best law seems to be the unspoken slogan of West Virginia. It has been legal to have gay sex in West Virginia since 1976; the comparable figure for Virginia is 2003. In 2006, the state of Virginia ratified a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman and prohibiting the Commonwealth from creating or recognizing any legal status for relationships between people who weren’t married. A similar constitutional amendment was proposed in West Virginia in 2009 but was overwhelmingly voted down by the House of Delegates.
In 2018, a nonprofit called the Population Institute released a nationwide “report card” that evaluated each American state on its reproductive health services. West Virginia’s grade was a C, Virginia’s an F-. For years, Virginia law has required women to have a vaginal ultrasound before an abortion in which the provider “must offer the woman the opportunity to view the image.” Though 90 percent of women in West Virginia live in a county without an abortion provider, the state never passed any such law.
West Virginia’s state motto, montani semper liberi or “Mountaineers are always free”—which I had now seen tattooed in classic black ink on no less than eight hot young West Virginians—comes with a simple image. Two men in rounded brown cowboy hats carry an axe and a pickaxe and chill against a large boulder inscribed with 1863, the date of the state’s founding. There is also some corn and a swath of green lawn upon which sit two crossed rifles and a red cap that seems plucked from the head of a Smurf.
Contrast this with Virginia’s sic semper tyrannis or “thus always to tyrants,” which makes Virginia fundamentally a place of opposition—to the supposedly sinister force of tyranny. “Mountaineers are always free” takes another tack: this is who we are; this is the state we’re in—free.
That fall of 2009, I worked in a wooden lodge cut into the side of a mountain at a desk that had been decorated with my name. I attended meetings and wrote grants and wore out the words “social change” and “empowerment.” But mostly I was in charge of girls who came to our programs who lived in nearby Nicholas County. I was assigned a list of about fifteen girls I would call every Sunday night so they maintained a connection to our programs throughout the year and also so we could know if they would come to the dinner and tutoring sessions we held at the Mountain Views office every Tuesday night. I was also in charge of planning college trips; many of the Mountain Views girls wanted to go to college, and their parents wanted this for them too. Still, some would be the first in their families to go, and the idea of a trip to visit campuses, particularly campuses as far away as North Carolina or Pennsylvania, was unfamiliar or out of reach for some families.
I liked making these calls, which I would do from the landline at Sam’s house. Because Pocahontas County and its environs are in the federal Quiet Zone, practically all the numbers of the students I called were landlines, and most times I had to ask a parent or sibling if I could speak to the girl in question. More than a few times, these family members had to ask me to repeat myself—I spoke fast, and I spoke New York; my pacing was brusque and wrong. But I got better. I learned to say, Good evening and how are you? I learned to breathe more between words and to wait longer without getting impatient when a brother went rogue and forgot to tell his sister I was waiting on the other end of the line.
The conversations I had with the girls were sometimes short but always instructive. What are you doing? Writing a paper about turtles. About to go for a walk down to Fas-Chek. Can you come to tutoring on Tuesday? No, I have to help dad out with digging a ditch. No, I have to watch my sisters, statewide testing, my boyfriend’s soccer game, detention. What’d you do? Spoke up when I was being bullied, asked why the dress code wasn’t being enforced on the boys too, skipped ahead three chapters in the textbook because class was too easy.
Every Tuesday night, all the girls who wanted our programs left their schools, separated by miles and mountains, and took school buses to the bottom of the dirt road that led to Mountain Views. Before big pots of spaghetti and sauce, we asked the girls to tell us again what they were grateful for. I’m grateful for my body because it helps me run and play soccer; I’m grateful for my family and for the fence posts they won’t buy because they’re sending me on the college trip to Virginia instead.
I studied the ACT so I could teach it those nights and lead small classes for three or four girls on the parts of a sentence, the American electoral college, how to write a poem. The student who’d sung “Rent” usually came, bringing love poems. Also the redheaded girl who had often sat with me at camp. Her mood was different by that fall. When I worked with her on math, she cracked jokes, then cracked pencils, then refused to answer my questions at all, preferring to sit on the seventies-patterned cushioned chair and stare at her hands in silence.
Word reached me that a horse trainer who worked with Mountain Views and lived on Lobelia Road was looking for a roommate for her farmhouse, and I leapt at the idea, remembering that hike with Trey and the mountain that looked like a pregnant woman. She had split with Trey’s friend Bill and was looking for someone to help with her mortgage. By October, I hauled my clear bins of books from Sam’s place in Hillsboro and moved into Anya’s two-story farmhouse, which looked out on a round pen where she trained horses. She and I took long hikes through the rambling woods and neighborhood, a close-knit hamlet of people who lent sugar, lent trucks and trailers. They threw me a welcome party of homemade elderberry wine and bread on a stick and venison canned the previous year, and, as ever, people took out instruments—a mash-up of the fiddles of the native West Virginians with the harmonicas and cellos of the aging hippies. On one of her trail rides, Anya was adopted by a fluffy, troublemaking orange kitten and, knowing my obsession with such creatures, brought him home for me.
Soon Trey was often at the farmhouse with me, frying an egg or cleaning a pan, petting the dog or brushing the cat, helping me feed the fire in the wood stove or the three very free-range pigs. The pigs had belonged to Bill, but Anya didn’t have the heart to make him get rid of them.
One Saturday the pigs escaped their pen; I came down the stairs and fumbled in the kitchen for the kettle, and my hand hit a pig. Later, I got a phone call from the woman in the closest house over the hill. Normally a bastion of calming energy, her voice was urgent: all three pigs were over at her house, digging underneath the foundation. Bill appeared a half hour later on the road in his red Subaru wagon. He banged his hand on the driver’s-side door and called, “Here piggy piggy piggies,” and in a matter of minutes all three pigs perked up their ears, ceased their digging, and trotted obediently after his wagon like a mother ship.
In high school, Trey and Bill and some ten other men I would come to know had called themselves the Droop Mountain Holler Boys, in homage to this valley where they had all, more or less, grown up. For short and in jest, they sometimes still called themselves the DMHB. The DMHB were in some ways an unlikely bunch, both the sons of Back to the Landers who’d stayed after the commune disbanded and the sons of Pocahontas County locals for generations. They tended to like differe
nt kinds of music from the other boys at school and preferred being outside and making up games together to partying every weekend. They were in their twenties and thirties now, working construction jobs around the county to pay for the little they needed. Pool night on Fridays was their tradition, and it was Bill who first brought me there.
I’d often walked this way down the road, past the small cemetery and the house where the dog barked at me, but I’d never kept going. Bill kept going, then eventually turned off and parked in a grassy field near a gray-blue weathered shed from which a station wagon stuck out. As we got closer, I saw that the engine of the wagon was hooked up to a generator, which was powering the light in the small shed.
As we entered, two men were in the middle of shooting a game on a grand, oversized pool table. One of them was boisterous and dark-haired; the other, his brother I gathered, was quieter. One more man, in shorts and thick wool socks, sat in an old iron barber’s chair with his feet up drinking an Old Milwaukee beer. The shed smelled like the night and the wood smoke coming from a nearby house. A small boom box played Nine Inch Nails. Peter and Trey took turns swinging a length of string with a ring on the end of it toward a hook by the door.
Yes! Trey called out, having hooked the ring.
No way, no way, Peter said, you were over the line, you were cheating.
The boisterous brother turned to face me and wiggled his eyebrows like watch this, held the pool cue behind his back, and shot. He missed the ball so badly and so hard that he knocked the eight ball off the table. It rolled beneath the station wagon, and his brother and the man in the chair heckled and booed while he retrieved it. I was the only woman there that night, and many other nights after.
Bill rolled his eyes and tossed me a beer, which I was sure I’d drop, but didn’t.
Good catch, Trey said, hugging me. A small compliment but enough to relax me and push me out of my own mind and into the action.
Wanna play? Peter asked me, gesturing toward Trey and the ring game. But from some need for distance, or hard pride maybe, I didn’t want to spend time with Trey only, or let him know I’d come for him.
I think I want to play pool, I said, turning toward the table.
Uh oh, careful, Bill said. It’s not a standard table, so it plays weird.
He was right. The table’s size made the balls roll faster and farther, and every shot felt smoother and more languid than on tables I’d encountered before.
At a certain point that first night, after we’d had a few, not drunk but heading there, the song “Brown Eyed Girl” came on the boom box.
Oh oh oh oh, said the louder brother, and the man in shorts leapt up from the barber’s chair. It was a group joke of theirs—whenever this song came on, they’d replace the subject of the title with “squirrel.” Peter put his arm around me from one side, and Trey from the other. “Laughing and a-running,” they began to sing, and I was just there, not a woman necessarily, but a friend who could stay as long as I wished.
There were instincts I found I had about what makes a good life that were more applicable to life in Pocahontas County than they had ever been to life in New York City. How people sometimes slept on a stuffed cotton mattress in their cars overnight if they’d had too much to drink or just felt like it and then kept the party going in the morning, not with drink but with sleepy faces and coffee and eggs and bacon. People stayed and waited and carpooled and dropped off and dropped in. There weren’t many people at the parties, but there were old people and young people together, and there was a kind of determination in these parties, a drive that matched mine.
No one was in a hurry; no one was climbing the ladder; no one’s first question was “What do you do?” The DMHB worked only as much as was absolutely necessary and then spent their leisure time playing music, hiking, or relaxing with their families; people were more than the calculus of their profession or their ambition. If I wanted to hang out, there was only one place to go, and everyone I wanted to see would probably be there. I could relax. There was no question of where the night would take me. I’d keep drinking, or I’d go home.
Anya and Bill split again, and Anya moved out, and left Bill and me and the animals alone together in the farmhouse. I probably should have moved out, too, when she did, but I didn’t—stubbornness I guess, plus sheer dumb love for that house. Its back field was a plateau that covered the space between the house and the nearest mountain, and it attracted deer in the gloaming.
Even on Saturdays, Bill got up at four or five o’clock in the morning and played NPR at top volume while he made breakfast and fed the pigs. Then he’d go off to see about a fence or visit a friend, and he’d say something true and cutting to me on his way out, and I’d be diminished and scuttle away.
I didn’t know how to live right in a house like that. I was always building the fire wrong; or doing the dishes wrong, letting the water run or draining the sink too soon; keeping the heat in too long or letting it out too soon and killing the plants. Often I worked late at Mountain Views, and if Bill was gone on a job or hunting or delivering a horse in North Carolina, I’d come home to a cold house, and the chickens and the pigs had not been fed, and there was a woodshed full of wood but no kindling. I’d take the headlamp that hung from a nail by the front door and go out to the dark woodshed and do my best to cut kindling with the axe the way Trey and Bill had shown me.
It was at a meeting of a writers’ group I joined that fall, hosted by Peter’s aunt, who wore her hair in pigtails and poured homemade elderberry wine into thick crystal goblets, that I learned about the two women who had died up on Briery Knob almost thirty years earlier. I had been to his aunt’s house many times before: she also hostessed a Sunday night music night that was full of tambourine and “I Shall Be Released.”
The other four members of the writers’ group took their seats on a red sofa, a leather wingback chair, and a knitted pouf. They were all in their fifties, all transplants to West Virginia who had come in the 1970s. We sat around a low table sipping our wine. We had all brought a piece of writing, which we cradled in journals or legal pads on our laps. One by one we read. A tan man with a white ponytail read a short story. Affirmations were murmured. Then it was Tim’s turn to share. He was Peter’s father and the doctor at the local jail ever since it had switched over from being a hospital.
My journal entry tells me that the light was thin that day and wind blew around the leaves that had already fallen on the grass outside. Tim wore a cloth baseball cap and tapped the toes of his boots against the carpet. He retrieved a square of folded-up paper from the back pocket of his jeans and began to read it in a quiet, steady voice. It was a poem, and it was a dream: he is walking through the woods, and then he finds two women’s bodies. After he finished reading the poem, he refolded the piece of paper and then began to cry, pressing his thumb and fingers to his eyes like a duck’s bill and shaking out the tears.
Asked about this day, Peter’s aunt said she believes that it was finding the bodies that led Tim to become a doctor but that Tim was a stoic man who she doesn’t believe would have shared his feelings about the murders so openly in a group setting.
In my memory, Tim’s wife brought his head to her shoulder. She looked down at the carpet, then back up at our hostess and the rest of us. She smiled and sighed in a kind way, and then her smile faded to a sadness that seemed to say, “Still?”
PART III:
THE RELEVANT NECESSARY PEOPLE
I have heard it said that Georgians are unable to drive in snow, and that Arizonans go bonkers behind the wheel in the rain, but no true-blooded West Virginia boy would ever do less than 120 mph on a straight stretch, because those runs are hard won in a land where road maps resemble a barrel of worms with Saint Vitus’ dance.
—Breece D’J Pancake
Jacob and Linda Beard, year unknown
1
BY THE MORNING AFTER THE murders, Thursday, June 26, 1980, the news covered the southern part of Pocahontas County like a
fog and then moved north toward Marlinton. Wives called their husbands at work. Children turned to face their classmates on the school bus and then told their parents over dinner what they’d learned. In the restaurant of the Marlinton Motor Inn, at Miss Kitty’s beer joint, at Dorie’s lunch counter, in the front yard of Oak Grove Presbyterian Church in Hillsboro, the story spread: two girls had been found on Briery Knob shot to death. Nineteen and twenty-six, so young, so young. A fear that gripped the throat and stomach—some parents wanted to keep their children home from school.
Outside the Marathon station in Hillsboro was an ice machine and a bench for shooting the shit, usually occupied by retirees and older men drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. By the gas pumps, a volunteer ambulance driver for the Hillsboro Fire Department was holding forth for a small crowd.
I had a hell of an ambulance call last night, he said. He had been the one to drive the dead women’s bodies from Briery Knob to the hospital in Marlinton. Someone asked if the women were local, and the ambulance driver said no, but the rumor was the people who did the killings were. Those gathered agreed—no one not from Pocahontas County would know how to get to Briery.
June 25 was a Wednesday and the Pocahontas Times went to press Wednesday nights, so the news of the young man’s discovery in the woods didn’t hit kitchen tables until a full week later. “Tragedy struck the County with the finding last Wednesday night of the bodies of two young women on the Briery Knob road,” the Times reported. In an effort to identify them, the paper ran two thumb-sized photos of the corpses.
The Third Rainbow Girl Page 8
