by Ninie Hammon
And the rhythm in their feet. Within seconds young and old are clogging.
When the picking and strumming is done, Will is at Ricky Dan’s elbow.
“Teach me to play,” he begs, “please!”
“It ain’t fun as you think; them strings hurt your fingers.” Ricky Dan holds his pick between his teeth, the gold one sparkling, as he lifts his guitar strap over his head. He leans the instrument against the porch railing and threads the pick in between the strings on the neck. “Soon’s you’re a little older, we’ll see.”
“You said that last year. I’m 9 now.”
“Like I said, we’ll see.”
“Did you know your daddy taught me how to play the guitar?”
“No, but I knew he played; his guitar burned up when Jamey caught the house on fire, though. You play much?”
Will had not touched a guitar in the two decades he’d been away from Kentucky.
“Not much.”
“We borrowed Maude Tackett’s mandolin, and it took forever to get Granny to agree to play it. But she could flat make that thing sing! After dark, she sat right here on this bottom step and watched Jamey set off firecrackers for the littl’uns.”
JoJo shook her head. “Now, she can’t even step off the porch. I hate seein’ her boxed in like that where she can’t hardly do nothing.”
“I told her she shouldn’t let her grief keep her a prisoner like that.” Will picked up a rock off the ground and pitched it at a bug crawling across the shaft of porch light on the dirt. “And she fired right back that I was as much a prisoner as she was. Only difference was her grief had locked her in and mine had locked me out.”
“She don’t let you get by with much, does she?”
“Nope, and she doesn’t miss much either.” He turned and looked at JoJo.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning what’s going on with you hasn’t escaped her notice.”
JoJo started to get to her feet, but he put his hand gently on her knee.
“Granny’s been hammered by life harder than anybody I ever met. But she hangs in there.” He leaned closer. “You might want to watch how that’s done. Take notes, maybe. I’ll loan you a pen.”
Anger flashed in JoJo’s eyes. “What gives you the right to show up here outta nowhere, like some big bird crapped you on the roof, and jump right into telling me how to live my life? I hardly know you!”
“But I know you. Better than you know yourself.”
“How you figure that?”
“What I said the other day—it takes one to know one. What’s going on inside you, the same thing’s going on inside me.
“You don’t have no idea what’s—”
“You’re scared. I don’t know what you’re scared of, but scared’s scared.”
“What do I have to be afraid of?”
Will shrugged. “Beats me. But whatever it is has got you by the throat and it’s choking the life out of you. That’s the other thing we have in common, you and me—the choking-the-life-out-of-us part.”
She said nothing, just glared at him.
“From what I can see, you’re half a mile down the road past scared and choked, though. You’ve crossed the border, set up housekeeping in…different people give it different names; I called it the Pit.” He leaned toward her. “I know that’s where you are because I recognize the scenery—not exactly a tour bus destination. I spent most of the past 20 years there…built a house, white picket fence, planted tulips next to the porch—”
“The light on that porch of yours may be on…” she snapped, “… but ain’t nobody home!”
She got to her feet and started up the steps, but he grabbed her by the wrist and spit the words at her.
“Okay, Sweetheart, here it is without the hollandaise sauce. You’ve given up. You’re just waiting for somebody to bring the curtain down and turn on the houselights.” He pulled her toward him. “You’re ready to die, aren’t you?”
He’d only said it to get her attention, for shock value. But Will was the one who got his bell rung. The sudden, caught-with-her-hand-in-the-cookie-jar look on JoJo’s face stopped him cold.
Well, he had her attention.
“In fact, you’re not just ready to die, you’ve planned it, got your exit strategy all mapped out.”
She tried to wrench her arm out of his grasp, but he held firm.
“What’s it going to be? Slit your wrists? Put a gun in your mouth? Drug overdose?”
Her eyes got huge and Will realized he’d stumbled onto the truth. His pulse kicked into a gallop; his mouth was instantly drier than a dust bunny. “You plan to down a bottle of pills, go to sleep and never wake up—don’t you?”
He shook her by the arm and fear turned his voice harsh. “Don’t you?”
“What if I do? What business is it of yours? You’re not my father.”
“No, I’m not. I’m the reason you don’t have one.”
“You’re what? Let go of me!” She yanked her arm free. “And butt out!” She turned and started up the steps.
“Why?” No anger, no confrontation. A simple question, asked softly. She stopped but didn’t turn back around. “Can you tell me that? A beautiful girl like you. Your whole life ahead of you. What could possibly be so bad that…?”
He watched all the air whoosh out of her. Her shoulders sagged, her head drooped. He said nothing else. She’d tell him or she wouldn’t.
When she turned slowly back around, the girl who faced him wasn’t the same one who’d yanked her arm out of his grasp. This was a scared, broken kid. Granny’d said she’d lost JoJo in the mist; Will had just found her.
“Okay. You want to know so bad, I’ll tell you. But you’re the only one. I ain’t told a living soul and I don’t intend to. You got to swear you won’t tell nobody, neither.”
Will had made a similar promise to her father a long time ago and he’d kept it all these years.
“I won’t tell anybody.”
Tears welled up in her eyes and slipped down her cheeks. “I guess somebody needs to understand, to explain it all…after.”
Will swallowed hard. She wanted to unburden herself so he could explain it to Granny and everyone else in her family when she was dead! It suddenly hit him—that’s why she’d given Jamey that necklace. JoJo wasn’t just contemplating suicide; the clock was ticking.
She sat back down on the step beside him, looked like she almost collapsed on it. She wasn’t wearing a sweater, but when she started to tremble, he didn’t think it had anything to do with the cold. He took off his windbreaker and draped it over her shoulders; she didn’t appear to notice.
“Do you know anything about Huntington’s Chorea?”
“I think I may have heard the name of it, a disease, right?
When she spoke again, her voice was flat, emotionless, like she’d been asked to read aloud the ingredients label on a can of Spam.
“It usually shows up when you’re about 40. It causes certain cells in your brain to waste away. They just…die.” She turned and looked at him. “First you walk funny—herky-jerky like. Then you start to shake and twitch all over, arms fly up, legs kick, and you can’t do nothin’ ’bout it. You scream, holler, make weird, awful noises. You lose your memory, your personality and in the end, you lose your mind, go completely insane—have to be looked after like you’s a baby.”
“Somebody you know, someone you care about has Huntington’s, don’t they, JoJo?”
She turned away from him and stared out into the darkness.
“Yeah, that’s right. Matter of fact, I know lotsa skinnys. I signed up to be part of this research project at UK—paid good, $300—and I met all kinda people with Huntington’s. The disease is hereditary, so of course they come to the University of Kentucky to study it—’cause everybody knows all us hillbillies up in the hollers is married to our cousins!”
The spark of anger flickered and died, left her voice flat and lifeless again. “I ain’t really surprised t
hey come here. Them blue people up Troublesome Creek, that’s no old wife’s tale, you know. They were real.”
The blue people of Troublesome Creek were descendents of Martin Fugate, who settled in Eastern Kentucky in the early 1800s and brought with him a genetic disorder that turned the skin blue. Isolation, a limited gene pool and time did the rest and the disorder spread through the mountains around Hazard. The people whose skin was blue—a dark shade, almost purple—kept to the hollows. Men, women, old people, and children hid there from the world; outsiders thought the stories about them were myths. Finally, in the 1960s, a hematologist from the University of Kentucky searched them out and discovered they suffered from an easily treatable enzyme deficiency.
“So UK is studying the spread of Huntington’s Chorea among mountain people and—?”
“They was gonna get around to that part.” She turned and faced him and cried fiercely. “But the study I was in, wasn’t lookin’ for nothin’. Not nothin’! They needed college kids to use as a control group so they could measure the effects of Huntington’s on hand-eye coordination.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not getting the connection between…”
Her voice grew soft. “They wasn’t looking…but they found it all the same. Huntington’s goes down through families and they know how. They know what gene carries it.”
A remark Granny’d made began to flit around the outside of Will’s memory like a moth around a porch light.
“And they can spot that gene with a blood test.”
JoJo took a breath and in that moment a sudden horrible foreboding came over Will, a sense that something had been hurled at him, something he couldn’t duck because he couldn’t remember what it was.
“They did blood tests on all the people in the study. The control group, too—for comparison.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “And they found it. In my blood. That gene. I got it. I got Huntington’s.”
She turned to him, her face slathered with silent tears. “I’m gonna turn into a skinny.” There was disbelief in her voice. “Me, a skinny.” Then her voice hardened. “I’m gonna jerk ’n holler and slobber…and then I’m gonna go crazy and die!”
The fluttering moth of memory landed and Granny’s voice rang clear in Will’s mind: “You might ’member, Joanna’s mama went all crazy like, hollerin’ and carryin’ on, and they had to put her away. Well, Joanna’s granny done the same thing…”
“Oh, JoJo!” That was all he could say.
He reached out instinctively and pulled her to him and she let go and began to cry, great gulping, heaving sobs that went on and on. Will held her tight, patted her back, and gently rocked her. It took a long time for her to cry herself out. When she did, she was exhausted and shaky, but calm. Will reached into the pocket of the windbreaker draped around her shoulders, fished out the red bandanna he’d found in the bottom of the gym bag he’d borrowed from Deke, and handed it to her.
“Only I ain’t gonna do it,” she said as she wiped tears off her face. Her voice was quiet and rational. But when she looked out into the darkness, her hands trembled. “I ain’t gonna let that happen. I’d rather be dead.”
“But I thought you said…40, that symptoms appeared at about age 40. You’re not even 20 yet!”
“I said it’s usually about age 40. But…” She stopped and her voice went dead again, mouthed words off a teleprompter. “A defect on chromosome number four causes a part of the DNA to repeat too often. In normal people, it repeats 10 to 35 times. In people with Huntington’s, it repeats up to one hundred twenty times. The more times it repeats…well, big number, bad case! And the bigger the number, the younger you are when you get it.”
She stopped, looked at him, and almost whispered the rest. “You can only pass it on if you have it, and when it’s passed down in an unbroken line through the same family, each succeeding generation’s DNA repeats way more times than the last.”
Will’s mind spun. Joanna had died young, but she’d had it or JoJo wouldn’t. JoJo’s grandmother’d had it, too, and so had her great grandmother. Four generations—that he knew about—in one family, from her great grandmother to JoJo and…
“Jamey!” Will croaked the name, then looked a question at JoJo he couldn’t wrap words around.
JoJo nodded slowly, her face an expressionless mask.
“He was s’posed to get a physical ’fore he went to work in #7 but he never done it. I used that as an excuse, took him up Lexington.” She managed something that resembled a smile. “But his ain’t nowhere near as bad. His number ain’t even half as big as mine. Maybe all that time when his brain didn’t get no oxygen…maybe that was a good thing. ’Course, he didn’t understand where we was or what they’s doin’ to him. He don’t know nothin’.”
JoJo and Jamey! Will could barely process it.
“I didn’t ask to know neither,” she continued. “Didn’t want to know. But there ain’t no way to un-know the truth.” She turned to Will and her voice colored her next words with a dozen different shades of loathing. “And knowin’ what’s waitin’ for me in…a few years.” Then she gasped out, “Maybe just months…” She stopped, gathered herself. “How am I s’posed to live with the knowing of it hanging over my head? Get through every day and know what’s comin’?”
“You don’t have to get through every day. You only have to get through one. I couldn’t stop drinking every day for the rest of my life, but I can not drink today.”
She gave him a withering look. “Thanks so much for your words of wisdom, Mr. Rogers. But I don’t live in the neighborhood. I live in the real world. And I will not die like that.”
“So you’re going to kill yourself because you don’t like the way you’re going to die? Does that make sense to you?”
She stood up, a little unsteadily, her knees weak from the outpouring of emotion. “I didn’t tell you this so’s you could try to talk me out of it. This ain’t no debate. I’ve made up my mind and you can’t stop me!”
Will stood slowly, too. “You got that right. I can’t stop you. You said it yourself. Nobody can hold up a falling tree. Or a falling life.”
That unsettled her. “Well…good then.” She slipped his windbreaker off her shoulders and handed it and the bandanna back to him. “Now you understand why you can’t say nothin’, not even after…’cause if they know about me, they’ll figure out about Jamey. But once Jamey starts to…” She couldn’t say it. “Once it’s clear he’s got Huntington’s, then you can explain what I done so—”
“No.”
“What do you mean no?”
“How many things can no mean?”
“The only reason I told you was—”
“I don’t care why you told me. I can’t help you. I can’t make somebody else understand what I don’t understand myself.”
She gaped at him.
He managed a shrug. “It takes one to know one—I told you. I threw away years of my life; you’re about to do the same thing. See, we’re just a—”
“No, we’re not!” She was instantly so furious all she could do was sputter. “How dare you stand there so smug, so... so…” Then she chanted in a squeaky voice, “Oh, JoJo, I know just how you feel!” She made a humph sound in her throat. “You don’t have no idea what it feels like to—”
“Want to die? I was dying! I was lying on a gurney while my life drained out of me and I was glad!”
His intensity drew out for a breathless moment before he continued, softer. “Then Bill Cosby in a Mr. Clean suit showed up, got right in my face, pointed out that I was chucking a life 27 miners in Harlan #7 wished they’d had. And that…ding, ding, ding…was my wake-up call.” He shook his head. “But you, Darlin’, don’t even have an alarm set.”
He could tell she had no idea what to make of him. And that was good. His only hope was to throw her off her game. He reached out to take her hand in both of his…and she was gone again. Vanished. Lost in the fog. The hand he held was cold and limp, felt like a dead fish on a s
tick.
He held on and kept talking anyway. “One of those miners was your daddy. You never knew him, JoJo, but I did. He was my hero. He was…” Out of nowhere a wave of emotion choked him. He gritted his teeth and cleared his throat, but all he could manage was a ragged whisper. “…the best of all of us.”
He paused, got his voice under control. “And I guarantee you, young lady, that your daddy wouldn’t have given up even one hour of living because he was scared of how he was going to die.”
She pulled her hand out of his. “I’m sorry—”
“Honey, you don’t have anything to be sorry—”
“I’m sorry I told you!” she snapped. “I should have known better. I should have kept my mouth shut.” She turned and hurried up the steps and into the house.
CHAPTER 26
IT HAD GROWN late, but Jamey didn’t notice. It had grown cold, too, and Jamey didn’t notice that, either. He was in that place he went when he worked on his arts. He’d told JoJo once the place was “more in my head than in my shed”—and that rhymed! Jamey was so proud! He liked rhymes, but he almost never made up his own.
In fact, Jamey didn’t seem to have as many words in his head as other people and he didn’t see that as a bad thing at all. Surely, it must be a lot of trouble to carry all them words around with you all the time, like a bucket full of rocks. The more rocks in the bucket, the heavier it’d be. He didn’t think his bucket was nearly as heavy as the bucket most folks carried and he thanked God for that. Granny said all good gifts come from God so Jamey was all the time thanking God for one thing or another because his life was so full up with good things—most times he couldn’t even enjoy one before another one come along.
Only tonight wasn’t all full up with good things. It was sad and scary, and Jamey asked ValVleen again and again to sing so he couldn’t hear the fearful thoughts in his head. And he reached down and scratched Bucket’s head over and over because with the old dog there at his feet, he didn’t feel so alone.
