After it was all done, I saw them again. One night I dreamed we were all back at Grandma Ruby’s and we were all sitting around the table in a big circle. Grandma was in her recliner in the kitchen, talking and ordering people around just like always. Then the rest of the family sat around in a circle, except there wasn’t any table now. Then all of the sudden this man walked in. It was Nathan. At least it looked like Nathan. He was taller and he had a beard. And it was like he had never even suffered from cerebral palsy.
Everybody was like, “You’re walking. You’re walking.”
He walked around the circle, and he shook our hands. He shook my Uncle Terry’s hand. And then he shook my Uncle Stanley’s hand. And then he shook my hand. And that was the thing about it. He wasn’t like I remembered him at all. He was all different now.
He was fucking angry.
I found a video my Uncle Terry made of my Grandma Ruby’s last days. I’d been watching it for weeks now. On the side of it he wrote Ruby Irene Goddard 1917-1997. And so I pushed play and watched the video of my Grandma Ruby in her deathbed, all broken-looking and little. And my Uncle Terry was sitting beside her bed and she was dying.
I started hanging out with this girl Charity. She was over at Bill’s mom’s apartment one night and I asked her if she wanted to watch this video.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Oh it’s this video of my grandma dying.”
She shook her head. “Fuck no. That’s weird.” Then she asked me if this was my idea of being romantic.
So I went back. I took Bill’s car and I took Charity and I drove down to the old house. As I drove up the road I swore I was going to see the house again just like I always saw it. I swore I was going to see the house from far away with its lights on, glowing golden in the night. I swore I was going to see blankets covering the trees and leading up to the door. I wondered if it was going to be like this—if I was going to see the front door open and the screen door closed like in the summertime, and I wondered if I was going to be able to see everything inside the house—Nathan sitting at the head of the table and Ruby hobbling around on her old cane. I wondered if I would see myself from years earlier walking around as well. And that’s what I expected driving by Grandma Ruby’s house in Danese.
But as I drove closer to the house, I realized there wasn’t anything like that anymore.
THERE WEREN’T ANY BLANKETS.
There was just the house and it was all locked up and alone. And it was all boarded up too and there weren’t any lights on anymore. And so I looked to see Nathan sitting at the table but he wasn’t there. And then I looked to see Ruby hobbling around and cooking chicken and gravy on the stove, but she wasn’t there anymore either. I stopped imagining it all because Ruby was in the ground now.
I walked with Charity around the house and found an unlocked door, which I opened and went inside. I felt like a burglar. And it was strange.
It was so empty inside. It looked so empty and broken down. There was the smell of musty carpet in the air and grooves in the floor from where the furniture sat for years. I walked with Charity into where Nathan always leaned against the footrest when he watched Walker, Texas Ranger. And then I walked her back into what they called Terry’s room. I saw that the ceiling was falling and water stains were running down the walls and so I said that it was just an old thrown-together place that didn’t even have a foundation really. Now it was falling down. It wouldn’t take long before it would all be gone.
I went into the kitchen and there was an old box of tapes on the floor. It was full of Nathan’s old VHS tapes I used to always watch. There were Gaither Gospel tapes, a couple of workout tapes Nathan bought because there were women wearing bikinis on the cover, and there was an old Johnny Cash tape I always watched on Sundays after dinner. Then we walked through the house to the back. The roof was caving in near the bathroom. There was a hole in the floor in the back porch. We walked out into the backyard where the Johnny house was. I showed her the field where all of the children used to work. Then we heard this squealing.
“What the fuck is that,” Charity said and grabbed my arm. Then she pointed to this possum struggling to walk towards us. It struggled to walk by the tree, but then it fell over, and then it tried to get up again. It looked bloody and there was a sore or a hole in its side where it looked like it had been shot.
“Is it hurt? What’s wrong with it?” Charity asked.
I walked closer to it and looked at it. It wasn’t playing possum.
“Be careful, Scott,” Charity whined.
“It’s rabid,” I said. I circled around and it stared up at me with its tiny, little eyes. I told her it was the strangest thing, but they always come around people when they got to this point. I told her it probably smelled us out here and came running.
“Why would it do that? Why would they want to come around people?”
It flipped and flopped on the ground and tried to walk. There were blood streaks running through its white hair. Then it tried to walk through a hole in a rusty chain-linked fence and got caught. The jagged fence cut and sliced at its skin. It still tried to pull free, but the fence had it now. It was caught in the fence and it was dying.
Then I heard my Uncle Nathan giggling like a demon from somewhere in the dark.
SO I WENT AWAY
I went away from this place and I lived somewhere else. Years passed. When I came back, it was all the same. It had been years, but the place was the same. I started teaching at the school I went to as a boy. It was a substitute gig. The original teacher needed surgery and she would be out for three weeks. There was a little girl there in the 5th grade class and she was so shy she could barely speak. The other 5th grade teacher told me that the little girl’s mother was on drugs. She told me not to get close to the kids like that because they never made it through the school year. They always ended up moving or just disappearing. She told me that she had been to a funeral just a few weeks earlier for a student’s mother who had overdosed.
I discovered a few days into teaching that the little girl couldn’t read. I stayed after school and tried to teach her. I told myself I was helping her, but who knows. Then I went home in the evenings and waited for the next day to come.
I tried looking for Bill, but I couldn’t find him. I asked around but nobody seemed to know. I drove by Ruby’s a time or two, but the house was falling in now and it usually just made me sad.
Then one morning I opened up the local paper and read about a robbery and a murder in the Rupert area of an old woman and her husband. There were two pictures of the suspects they had recently arrested. They were kids I knew from long ago. One was Naked Joe who I last saw a year after high school sitting on top of the monkey bars and shooting a pellet gun at some little kids playing nearby. And then there was this other guy who looked different. He had long red hair over his shoulders and a tattoo on his neck. His hair was long and flowing like a lion’s mane almost. It was so long and curling and flowing you could barely see his face behind the thick red beard. The beard covered his entire face. He looked like somebody from another world. At first I didn’t recognize him but then I saw the name beneath the photo. It was Bill. “Holy shit,” I said looking at his long long hair.
He was the little boy who had lice. He was the little boy who collected troll dolls. He was the little boy who decided to fall in love. He was the little boy who dreamed of crossing oceans and the elevations of mountaintops.
I found out what happened just a couple of days later. One Thursday I had stayed after school to help the little girl with her reading, and then afterwards I stopped at a gas station to fill up the car. I was just about finished pumping the gas when I looked at the pump across from me and I saw him. It was Lee Brown. He was still a giant, except he was wearing a shirt and a tie. We both laughed and finished pumping our gas. Then we shook hands. He told me his father was sick and he had come down to see him. He said his father was dying. Lee was a surgeon now (two years out of
his residency) and he worked in the emergency room at a hospital in Charleston. He lived two hours away.
The first thing he asked me after we finished catching up was if I heard what happened to Bill. I told him I had but I didn’t really know any details. And so he told me. He told me Bill and Joe were into some bad stuff. He told me about how they broke into this house to steal some shit. Bill did the breaking in and Joe did the lookout from the road. They were looking for pills. So Bill was going through the house looking for the bathroom. And then the old lady woke up and she heard him. Lee said her husband was sick and blind and on his deathbed. They broke into their house because they knew he was dying and had painkillers. And so she came out crying: “My husband’s sick. My husband’s sick. Please don’t take his medicine. Please don’t take anything.” Then Lee said Bill stole some cheap jewelry, some pills, and some chewing gum.
I said: “What?”
Lee said: “Oh yeah, Lil Bill had four packages of chewing gum that he admitted to stealing when they caught him. He wouldn’t admit to the pills or the jewelry though.” I just shook my head and listened to the rest of it. I listened to how Bill freaked out and picked up a block of wood sitting next to the stove and then he hit the old woman with it.
And then he hit her again.
And then he hit her again.
Then Lee told me that that wasn’t the end of it. He told me that the dying husband came out all blind as shit with a shotgun. He was blind but he was firing the shotgun all over the place. Then Bill and Joe finally took off. Then Lee said that when the ambulance showed up the old man ended up having a heart attack and dying right there—so Bill and Joe were stuck with two murders instead of just one. Lee told me it was called the felony murder rule.
I asked Lee who the old lady was. Lee told me it was the old junior high math teacher Mrs. Powell. Lee said it was just a coincidence.
I tried forgetting about it. A few weeks later I was after school helping the little girl who couldn’t read. Some days it felt like we were making progress, but then the next day we were right back to where we started. I only had a few more days left of substituting before their original teacher came back. I was going to be out of a job soon, and I didn’t know what to do.
I was sitting beside the little girl and listening to her read out loud. Every time she came to a difficult word, I asked her to take her time and think about how it would sound, and then say it. She read one word and then she came to a word she didn’t know. I noticed every time she came to a difficult word, she would reach into her jacket pocket and pull out a little golden locket on a little golden chain. Then she would speak the word. So she read and she read. She came to a difficult word and she touched the locket. She read the difficult word. She read and she read. She came to a difficult word and she touched the locket. After we were finished, and I was picking up my things, she came to my desk and thanked me for helping her. Then her eyes became teary and she said she had something to tell me.
She said: “I think you know my mother’s boyfriend. He did a really bad thing. He’s in jail. My mother said the two of you used to live together. She said the two of you were friends a long time ago.”
The little girl who didn’t know how to read was quiet for a second and she said that she wanted to tell me something else. She said that her mother’s boyfriend gave her something the morning of his arrest.
She told me she thought it was beautiful, but she didn’t need it if it belonged to the woman who was killed. She said she was sorry for the little old woman and the little old man who died.
She told me that her mother’s boyfriend had given her a pack of chewing gum too, but she had already chewed it and now it was all gone.
So she took her little fifth-grader hand and reached into her pocket and then she pulled out the golden locket and the golden chain. Then she put it on my desk. I turned the trinket over and it had initials on it. They were Mrs. Powell’s initials. They were the initials that belonged to the murdered woman.
I looked at the little girl who looked at me with her green eyes. She was wondering if this was the locket of a dead woman. I thought for a while and touched the locket that belonged to the murder victim. I was about ready to say something when I stopped.
I looked at the locket again and then I told her: “No, this couldn’t have belonged to the woman. I know for sure. You just keep it.” Then I handed it back to the little girl. And the little girl went back to her desk and got ready to leave. She put the locket on because this wasn’t the possession of an old woman who had been murdered, but this was the thing that her mother’s boyfriend had given to her. This was the sweet thing that made her feel loved, and this was a chain that made her feel beautiful. This was a golden thing that made her feel like a movie star.
A SHORT HISTORY OF CRAPALACHIA PT 3
So I went home that night and I did something strange. I went through my old books and I picked one out from long ago. I opened it up and I read about Buffalo Creek.
It was February. It was morning. It was 1972. The Pittston Coal Company built a sludge dam on the side of a mountain above a mountain town. I read about how they built the dam to keep it full of toxic coal refuse. This refuse was like muddy black water, thick as oatmeal. One morning the dam broke and the water went rushing down into the valley.
I read about how the disaster killed 125 people. I read about how parents tried to save their children. One father was putting his children on top of their house. He was trying to put his wife up there too, but then the house broke apart like toothpicks. They were all hanging onto their father and being washed away in this giant muddy river. Then a car came barreling towards them in the flood water and knocked into their father. He lost his grip on their mother. The children were still hanging onto him. He was able to swim to safety and put the children on a bank. The last time they saw their mother she was floating down the river and screaming for help. They were their own mother now.
I read about roadways being washed away. I read about people seeing train tracks bent and wrapped around oak trees, coal train cars lifted on top of trees.
I read about how the survivors described it as a giant thirty-foot wave of water.
I read about bodies in trees. I read about the body of a young boy in a tree thirty feet above the ground. He had his hands up in front of his face like he was trying to protect himself.
I read about another body of an old man. There was a dog beside him. The man was dead but the dog wasn’t. The dog was protecting the body of the old man. It growled and bit at any rescue worker who tried to get close. The dog did this for days.
I read about how they didn’t find people with injuries. They found only people who were dead or ones who were left without a scratch. One house was destroyed and the house beside it was still standing with the car left untouched in the gravel driveway.
I read about the rescue workers using a bulldozer to push through the mud. They found an artificial leg, but they didn’t find the person who the artificial leg belonged to. They came across all of these baby dolls with their little baby doll hands reaching out of the mud. The rescue worker pulled out one baby doll by its hand. They freed it. Then he pulled out another baby doll hand. They freed it. Then they saw another little baby doll hand and pulled at it. It wasn’t a baby doll hand. It was the hand of a five-year-old girl. She had already been dressed that morning. She wasn’t in her pajamas. She was wearing a pink dress. They cleaned her up and tried to comb her muddy hair and put her in a body bag.
Three days later they found the body of a woman sitting against a tree. I read about how the rescue workers couldn’t believe they had not found her earlier. They had walked past her body perhaps hundreds of times. How could that be? They even ate lunch beside that tree one day and still didn’t see her. She was sitting against the tree and looking out at the river and she was dead. There was some sand in her mouth, but her body was untouched. There were no bruises. There were no broken bones. There were no gashes on he
r head.
I read about how two days later the rescue workers were walking past a row of caskets in the morgue. They looked inside one casket and there was the little girl in the pink. And in the same coffin right beside the little girl was the woman they found sitting against a tree. They didn’t know that these bodies found days apart were more than just bodies. The woman sitting against the tree was a mother. The little girl in the pink dress was her daughter.
I read about how the Pittston Coal Company said it was an act of God.
Then I looked up from the book and put it away. I saw all of the people I had known and loved being washed away in that flood. I saw Ruby and Nathan. I saw Stanley and Mary. I saw my uncles and my aunts and all the McClanahans. I saw Bill and his family. I saw Lee and all the crazy fuckers. I saw Sarah. They were all being washed away and they were all doing something else. They were all screaming.
AND NOW…
My water keeps rising. My water keeps rolling.
SO I FAILED
My home was gone. So I decided to write this book. I tried to remember all of the people and phantoms I had ever known and loved. I tried to make them laugh and dance, move and dream, love and see. I put some of them together and twisted our time together. I tried to bring them back, but I couldn’t. I started digging on the mountain years ago. I pushed the shovel down deep into the rocky ground and I cut out clumps of dirt and stones hard as gall.
Crapalachia: A Biography of Place Page 12
