Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  He chopped at the purslane and began lecturing to Ben about the myth of progress: “Under capitalism Progress actually means profits for shareholders. Progress toward some infinitely desirable but never specified and always receding goal. The term is an anesthetic that keeps workers punching that time clock ever morning. But corn just grows, it doesn’t progress.” He liked the sound of that last phrase. Corn just grows, it doesn’t progress. He saw himself feeding this analysis into Ben, and Ben passing it on to Zeke and Wash, and its spreading throughout the area. He himself would be like a radio transmitter.

  “Uh huh,” murmured Ben, avoiding Raymond’s eyes.

  Back at the house they smeared some butter and honey on bread Raymond had baked the day before, and set off up the stream with Raymond’s L.L. Bean fishing equipment.

  “Did you ever think,” Raymond asked, “how many times Cor One must have waded up this creek with his fishing gear?”

  “Naw, never did.”

  “Just imagine: This whole area empty of people except a Cherokee hunting party or two. Fish jumping out of the creek at you. Everything you needed you could make or hunt. Those guys were really something.”

  “I reckon.”

  Failing to catch trout, they ate their bread for lunch. As they sat licking honey off their mouths, Ben said, “Junior, did you ever, you know”—he blushed—“do it to a girl?”

  “You mean make love?”

  Ben ducked his head, mortified.

  “Sure. Every now and then.”

  “Who with?”

  “A couple of different women.”

  “Do you have a girl now?”

  He thought about Thelma, whether she qualified. “Yes, I guess. She lives near Newland. I’ve been … involved with her for about a year. But we’re not getting along too good right now.” He’d been down to see her a few times to try to talk her into moving with Jim to Tatro Cove. He described the ever wider gap yawning between rich and poor, the fouling of the valley’s air and water with wastes from the factories, the poisoning of its inhabitants, the eventual collapse of Newland, the deserted mills and factories inhabited only by hoot owls and black widow spiders.

  “My goodness,” said Thelma.

  “This scene down here can’t last much longer, Thelma. You need to learn how to supply your essentials with your own hands.”

  “Yeah, Jim’d be real good at that.”

  “In a place like Tatro Cove you’d get some help with Jim. Everyone would pitch in.”

  “I bet.”

  “They would,” he insisted.

  “Honey, I’ve lived in these parts all my life. I know how people flee when times get hard.”

  The last time he’d gone down there, she’d given him a TV set. “I think you’re lonely up there in the woods all alone,” she explained.

  He tried to act pleased, but had to face up to the fact that she hadn’t understood a word he’d been saying.

  Ben grinned. “So that’s where you go when you roar off in your Jeep like you’re running shine!”

  “You been wondering?”

  “Shoot, we all been wondering. Sitting around discussing it for months. Most decided you was going to see your parents.”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  “You going to marry her?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  He looked shocked, so Raymond added, “She’s a nice girl, but she’s already married.” This made it worse. “Her husband’s in a wheelchair.” Ben gasped.

  “Don’t look at me like that, please, Ben. I mean, life is pretty complicated.”

  “Doesn’t it upset her husband?”

  “He doesn’t know.” Things were getting more sordid in Ben’s eyes. “Look, she needed sex, I needed sex, so we gave it to each other. He was hurt less than if she’d left him. Probably less than if she’d told him.”

  “But I mean, it’s the most beautiful thing a man and a woman can do together. How can you just do it and then drive away?”

  “Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it ain’t. It depends on the other person, your mood, the circumstances. Sometimes it’s awful.” He felt as though he were raping a virgin. He remembered his shock on that church rooftop when Maria let him in on the secret that it wasn’t necessarily always and forever just because you sated your hungers on each other a few times.

  “I would never do that,” Ben murmured.

  “Good. I hope you don’t.”

  “When I make love, it will be the real thing.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “Cheryl wants us to, but I’m not sure I want to marry her. Then I couldn’t go away to college. But I’m not sure I want to go away to college.”

  Raymond looked at him. “Does she want you to marry her?”

  “She says not. But once we’d done it, I’d have to, wouldn’t I?”

  Raymond frowned, trying to remember adolescent logic.

  “And what if she got pregnant?”

  “You know about rubbers, don’t you? You can buy them in the men’s room at that Mobile station in town.”

  “Yeah, but sometimes they don’t work. It happened to a guy at school last month.”

  “That’s true. But I guess that’s a chance you have to take if you want her bad enough.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  As Ben strained to sort out the ethics of premarital sex, Raymond recalled his initiation with Wayne over the stamp album. It’d been kind and uncomplicated. Especially compared to the thing with Maria. It would be useful if Ben could get this sex business out of the way, so that he could move on to really important matters concerning the perpetuation of Tatro Cove. Raymond realized he only had to turn to Ben, put his hand on the spot on Ben’s thigh where the sunlight now played …

  The last time he’d seen Thelma, he’d driven her to her trailer because her car was in the shop. Jim sat in his wheelchair watching “The Newlywed Game” on TV. He was a pleasant good-looking man with a flat top and sideburns. Raymond felt a little guilty about fucking his wife, though it had turned out that there’d been another man before him. He and Jim got to talking, and Raymond sat down and drank a beer with them. Jim told about his accident. Training in Louisiana for jungle combat, his sergeant had yelled, “If it moves, fuck it or kill it!”

  “I tried to fuck it when I should have killed it,” Jim explained with a grim laugh. A Vietnamese woman had lured him into a hut, and someone had bashed him with a shovel as he climbed on top of her.

  Raymond glanced at Ben, who talked on and on about this Cheryl creature, how far they’d gotten with necking and petting, and wondered if he had any idea how flirtatious he was being. Probably not. Ben was an innocent.

  He recalled Injun Al’s telling The Five a Cherokee recipe for predicting the sex of a white baby. Put the pregnant woman in the middle of a flock of wrens. The baby would be a boy if they flew away in terror, because white boys stalked and tortured and killed them. If it would be a girl, they’d cluster around singing, because girls ground grain and scattered some for the wrens. He thought about his father’s story, of Grandpa Tatro driving the cow down Tatro Cove at dusk, chattering away to the baby on his hip.

  He stood up. “Let’s go home.” Justin, Maria, and those people, it seemed to him, didn’t really enjoy the physical sensations of sex. They used sex as a means to power. If they could lure someone into submitting sexually, they had attained power over them. Raymond had no wish to be like this.

  Ben looked up, startled. “What’s wrong, Junior?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did I say something dumb?”

  “Naw. Come on.”

  On the way home he explained to Ben, “‘If it moves, fuck it or kill it.’ This is the trip an imperialist culture imposes on people. You must dominate every living thing. Creatures are of value only insofar as they are of use to you.”

  “So you think I shouldn’t do it with Cheryl, Junior?”

  “How the hell should I know? Go fuck some l
ittle halfwit backwoods fruitcake. Get it over with! You got more important things to be worrying about.”

  “Basketball season, you mean?”

  Raymond looked at him.

  “I’m sorry, Junior. What’d I do?”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  As it grew dark, Raymond sat on his porch listening to the frogs croak and felt more lonely than he could ever remember being. Thelma’s response to his vision had been a TV set. Ben was interested only in fucking and playing basketball. Lyla didn’t play with her bull roarer. M.G. insisted on giving guided tours of his new bathroom. Nobody understood what Raymond was talking about. The last days were upon them, and they all wanted life to go on as usual. As always, everyone around him was prepared to sell out in return for their creature comforts.

  He watched the moon come up over the hill across the creek, the headstones in the graveyard up top silhouettes on the yellow backdrop. How many Tatros had sat in this spot watching that same moon? Corlisses I, II, III, and IV, his grandfather and grandmother, his own father. Now Raymond himself. Most now lay under those headstones. As Raymond himself would in a few decades. But he was leaving no children to take his place here on this porch. He was leaving no one to remember him, nothing to be remembered by. The gnawing started in his stomach, as though he’d swallowed a live rat that was frantic to get out.

  He jumped up and raced into the house and lit a lantern. Taking out the charts on the corporate executives he’d drawn up in New York, he studied them. Plundering the world. Dirty capitalist fuckers. But once they’d done their worst, Tatro Cove would remain. The gnawing in his stomach subsided. Raymond’s people would have preserved all the skills and traditions necessary to fashion a new world from the capitalist wreckage.

  He’d lost the faith out there on the porch. Thelma, Ben, the others, they required patience. Tomatoes didn’t ripen overnight. Bread took three hours to rise. Soup stock had to simmer all day long. What was “time” anyway? Capitalists tried to save it, as though it were money in the bank. It was place that was sacred in Tatro Cove. The passage of less than a decade was scarcely noticed. He’d come away from voter registration and union organizing thinking people were something to be manipulated. Well, they weren’t. You had to let them evolve at their own tedious pace. The disconnected pieces of his life fell into place: Through non-example, it had all been preparing him for his mission here in Tatro Cove. He’d seen how the rest of the world was run, had rejected it, and could not get on with formulating a positive alternative.

  He put the charts away and turned on the TV. He’d watch just one program. In order to see what kind of crap his kinsmen’s heads were being filled with. You had to know what you were up against.

  Toward the end of summer all Raymond’s vegetables began ripening at once. He read up on food preservation and dried some things over the stove. There was a root cellar under the house for the squash and pumpkins. The potatoes and carrots and beets he left in the ground to dig up as needed. Ben and he picked gallons of wild blackberries and raspberries up the hillsides where former pastureland was returning to scrub. They went to Verbena’s and asked their grandmother to teach them to can.

  She looked up from her rocking chair on the porch. “Law, honey, canning is women’s work!”

  “But we ain’t got us no women,” Raymond replied. “So I reckon we got to do it ourselves.”

  She taught them reluctantly, and the whole family stopped by to watch. As Raymond boiled and stirred, he tried to look content. But the truth was, it bored the hell out of him. He didn’t exactly see what all these hours over a hot stove had to do with the post-industrial society. If Ben hadn’t been there, he’d have dumped the whole mess on the compost pile. As it was, he kept stirring, steam condensing on his glasses.

  In the fall Ben and he went to an abandoned orchard on the hillside and picked bushels of wormy apples, which they cored and sliced and strung up over the stove. If Ben hadn’t been there, he’d have watched “Bonanza” on the TV while he sliced, as research into contemporary culture.

  Raymond’s money nearly ran out, which meant he couldn’t buy gas to go see Thelma. He noticed that after a couple of weeks away from her large welcoming body, he became tense and irritable. She was a soothing, softening influence, which he needed to offset the rigors of his demanding life. He had to get him some gas money.

  He went out one afternoon with Royal, who showed him how to dig “sang” and cut galax, which Mr. McCray would buy and resell to brokers from New York, who shipped the ginseng to the Orient and sold the galax to florists.

  “How come you ain’t never married?” Royal asked, glancing out from under his battered felt hat

  “Guess I never met me the right woman.”

  “Pray the Lord you never do,” he muttered.

  “I’d like to,” Raymond lied. “Sometimes it gets pretty lonely.”

  “Better lonely than nagged to death.”

  “Aw, Annie, she don’t nag you much. You got you a good wife, Royal, and a nice bunch of kids.” The family unit, eroded by capitalism, was the backbone of Tatro Cove. It had to be encouraged and preserved.

  “Yeah, but you hate it when it’s all you can do to keep food on the table.”

  “You do all right.”

  “I do all right, but I can’t never buy them all that stuff they see on the TV.” He hitched up his overalls, which were so old they were almost white.

  “They don’t need it”

  “Tell them that. Most everybody else around here gets pretty much what they wants. I just can’t figure out how they do it. Guess you might say I ain’t never found myself.”

  “Or lost yourself, one.”

  “I reckon I’m just a quare turn or something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A quare turn?” From Royal’s lengthy explanation Raymond decided a quare turn was someone who wasn’t content just to live life, but who insisted on trying to understand it too. A stance that incapacitated you in the ordinary world of getting and spending. Every now and then the Tatro family produced one. “Cor Three, now there was a quare turn,” Royal mused. “Always wandering through the woods, stooping down and touching plants. Not picking them or nothing, just touching them like he was talking to them or something.”

  Raymond felt as though he’d been handed the template to his personality. All along everyone had thought he was a weirdo. In Newland people avoided him because of his rayon shirts and reindeer sweater vests. In New York, where everyone had prefaced remarks with “My therapist says …,” there was some agreed-upon state known as Normality toward which everyone worked, as though on cars with engine knock. They “managed” their relationships as though dealing with a herd of cows. They advised him on what clothes to wear, what books to read in order to fit in. But actually he was a quare turn. He never fit in because it wasn’t his nature to fit in! It was his nature to see what others couldn’t, to blaze a trail for them into the post-industrial wilderness, just as Cor One had prepared a way into Tatro Cove for the more timid and “normal” settlers from the valley.

  As Raymond wandered the hills searching for ginseng and galax, he squatted and touched plants. Sometimes he collected their seeds or leaves. These hikes were practically the only time he’d left the cove in six months, apart from his trips to Thelma. Late one afternoon under a threatening grey sky, he raised his head from his digging on a high hilltop and looked out over the entire area. The cove and its houses, the highway and McCray’s store. Farther up the highway was the little town with its main shopping street, a couple of churches and a red brick courthouse. A few roads, trucks loaded with coal barreling down them. Railroad tracks with freight cars mounded high, like shiny black caskets. A couple of tipples, alighted like mosquitoes, sucking coal from the mountainsides.

  In all directions as far as Raymond could see stretched forested ridges, valleys, creeks flashing silver under the glowering sky. And writhing across many ridges were contorted dark yellow scars. Seve
ral small mountains had had their tops shaved to form flat mesas, like in cowboy movies. Dirt and boulders and tree trunks cascaded down these mountainsides.

  He picked up his sack and shovel and walked across the field and down through the woods back to the cove, where he forgot about what he’d seen as quickly as he could.

  One weekend his parents drove up from the valley. Raymond cooked them supper Saturday night—fruits and vegetables he’d canned, dried, and stored, some ham Cor Four had given him for helping with haying.

  They sat around the stove afterward. “What do you do for fun without no TV?” his father asked uneasily. Raymond had hidden his under the bed.

  “Walk up the cove and visit somebody. Go lay on the porch floor at McCray’s.”

  “Shoot, that’s what I done all them years ago. Can you play that thing?” He pointed to Raymond’s grandfather’s banjo. “You oughta of heard Pa make that thang ring. Before he lost his arm. Used to play for barn dances, hour after hour.”

  “I’m teaching myself. But it’s hard with no one to learn from. They don’t have dances no more. All this stuff. It’s like having to rediscover it from scratch.”

  “Now, what you looking at me like that for, boy?”

  Raymond sighed. “You saw to it that I learned to read and write. But you didn’t never teach me how to take care of myself. How to garden, and chop wood, and all like that.”

  “Well sir, I didn’t hardly expect a son of mine to come back to Tatro Cove, to tell you the truth. I thought reading and writing was what was important. Still do.”

  “You sold us all out for a bowl of potage, Pa. Like what’s-his-name in the Bible.”

  “Cain,” his mother murmured.

  “That’s easy enough for someone to say who ain’t never been cold nor hungry.”

  “So now you’re warm and fed, and dependent on those fuckers at the mill. And so is Jed. But me, I ain’t dependent on nobody.”

  His mother was having a heart attack at his language.

  “You let a flood come, like the spring of ’28, and wash all your crops out, and then you’ll see who you’re dependent on. Or you lose an arm like your grandpa. You can live like this cause you got you a dozen relatives you could call on for cash if you was ever in bad trouble.”