I follow the road along the Mississippi, refueled and oiled (burning a quart every fifty miles now, I don’t care for that), and enter at once the industrial wonderland of the St. Louis megalopolis—heavy-duty freight train, smokestack and warehouse territory. Barges of steel a block long move upriver loaded with coal and scrap iron, dragged through the filthy water by tugboats with three-story superstructures. Oil refineries appear, catalytic cracking plants, a thicket of pipes and stacks with flare-off fires brighter than the sunlight. Nostril-prickling smells float on the air, sly and sinister. Factory buildings of rusty red sheet metal, their windows broken, stand next to foundries and blast furnaces with brick chimneys sixty eighty a hundred feet high. Near each clanging workshop is a settling pond, a tailings dump, a slime pit filled with oily sludge, toxic solvents, pathogenic chemicals, black tars and industrial vomit roiled together in a marbled arabesque of brilliant, unforeseeable colors.
We roll along in the sewer of traffic, walled in by giant freight trucks, Fruehauf mudguards in front and Mack radiator grilles with bulldog figurehead looming over my rear. I recall the inscription on the wall back in the pissoir of that Grafton café: “There’s two things awful over-rated: teenage pussy and Mack trucks.” True, true—and suppose this mad environment went on forever?
I leave the highway and the industrial madhouse, turn off for rest in a state park on the shore of the river. Sollie and I get out, piss on the leaves, read the words on the base of a monument by the parking lot:
Near this site, at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark spent the winter of 1803-1804, preparing for their journey to the Pacific Coast. President Jefferson had commissioned them to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory. They called their winter quarters Camp Dubois and their party of 44 men the Corps of Discovery. On May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery left Camp Dubois, ascended the Missouri River to its source, and crossed the Great Divide, reaching the Pacific on November 7, 1805. They returned to Illinois on September 23, 1806, having concluded one of the most dramatic and significant episodes in American history.
When Clark and Lewis came for the first time in sight of the western sea, Clark wrote in his journal, “Ocian [sic] in view. O, the joy!” A poor speller but a man of heart.
Me and the dog munch on some lunch, peanuts and beer for me, Purina’s crunchy granola and E. St. Louis tap water for her. Around us extends this park of mud, weeds, garbage. A few sickly trees gather the soot and acids from the sky. From beyond that meager screen of life comes the unrelenting clamor of the highway, the city, the modern industrial state. Except for one old black man casting a line into the river, the dog and I are the only visitors at Camp Dubois at this landfill in time. What would Lewis say? what would Clark feel? if they could revisit their old campground now. What would they think, for example, of those wistful puffs of steam that rise from behind that black slagheap of burned muck and blistered metal looming above the trees in the southeast quadrant?
Ocian in view O joy?
Onward into the industrial jungles. Weaving through a tangle of intersecting freeways, I steer by blind luck onto the correct ramp and find myself rolling southeastward minutes later into the sylvan monotony of agrarian Illinois. Nothing in my foreground but cement and cute little green trees, while coming and going, rumbling toward me and howling past, roars the continuous caravan of tractor-trailers, the world of Mack and Kenilworth and White and Peterbilt.
Should not be cluttering up this here Interstate. Asking for trouble. But I am weary of this flat land, this ironed-out countryside, and long to see the fuzzy conical hills of east Kentucky, the long blue smoky ridges of West Virginia, the hills of home. Therefore I take the fast road, the quicker to get through.
Besides I don’t feel good. Don’t feel right at all. If I weren’t intent on making two more hundred miles today I’d pop a Demerol tab right now. Or Dilaudid. But that can wait. Must wait.
What about Will? There’s the question. Will he be glad to see me? Coming down on old Will one more time, bringing along my train of troubles to unload on his back, why should he care about Elaine? How can he grieve for Claire, whom he never even met? Whose fault but mine that my daughter Ellie’s in Rhode Island? Or maybe East Virginia? Where can he find the tears to mourn the loss of Myra Mishkin, nonobjective abstractionist? He’s certainly not going to sympathize with the loss of my job at the Tucson Welfare Department or my permanently foundered career opportunities with the United States Federal Fucking Government. Can’t hardly burden him with something new, can I? Him and Marian they got troubles enough of their own, what with Pittsburgh and Morgantown and Wheeling moving down from the north and the tentacles of Charleston and Huntington creeping in from the west. Beleaguered, besieged, beset, they’re lucky they’ve survived as long as they have.
And here comes I.
With my little secret.
22
1975:
Fort Lightcap, West Virginia
They walked the entire boundary line one Sunday afternoon in November. Indian summer, with maple leaves crackling underfoot and the harvest moon due to rise at sundown. Will showed Henry his six-rail worm fence, newly erected. Couldn’t afford barbwire, he explained, and anyhow these split blackjack pines was cheaper. In fact Will earned a part of his income now splitting rails and building ornamental fences for the suburbanites’ new homes outside of Shawnee. He was, he boasted, the last rail-splitter in Appalachia.
Henry carried a shotgun, Will an old single-shot .22. Watching for cottontails. Never too late for fence-row chicken. No dogs with them; Will’s son Joe had taken the beagles away for the day, off on a hunting trip of his own down along Crooked Creek. He’d also taken Will’s twelve-gauge double-barreled LC Smith. Not that Will minded. He could get as many rabbits with a .22 and without dogs as the boy could with shotgun and with dogs.
And he proved it quickly. Holding up one hand, he stopped Henry and pointed with the rifle at something concealed in the brown bunchgrass at the base of the fence. Henry looked, looked hard, could not see it.
One little bright brown eye, Will said. See him?
Henry stared, concentrated, shook his head. Will raised his boy’s rifle, aimed, cracked off a shot. The rabbit took one hop forward—already dead—and collapsed, neatly perforated through the brain. Will gutted the little beast and tucked him away inside the game pocket of an old canvas hunting coat that looked familiar to Henry. It was the same coat their father had worn through the forties and fifties. The hunting license inside the celluloid case on the back was dated 1952.
They walked on, up the hill toward the woods. They jumped a second rabbit; Henry flung the shotgun to his shoulder, fired and missed.
Thought you was supposed to be some kind of game warden, Will said. You shoot like one of them sportsmen types from Pittsburgh.
Well shit, says Henry. Well fuck. Well christ out west we don’t waste ammo on rabbits. We hunt big game out there. I mean elk. Mule deer. Moose. Antelope. Black bear. Bison. Slow elk.
Slow what?
Beef cow.
Will smiled. They entered the woods, following Will’s new fence. Henry noticed the red and white PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT NO HUNTING signs tacked up on fence and trees. Yeah, Will explained, had to do that now. Too many strangers around these days. Kids with rifles. Grown men in little jeeps. People he didn’t know, had never even seen before, coming around, climbing fences, blasting away at anything that moved, in season and out. Didn’t know where the hell they all came from but there seemed to be more of them every year.
Country’s growing, Will. You’re out of date.
It can’t last.
Don’t be too sure. When we were kids the teachers taught us that the population of America was 120 million. Remember? As if that figure was meant to be permanent, absolute, like the mileage from Stump Crick to California.
Well ain’t it?
Now it’s 230 million. In other words, Will o
ld fart, the population of our country has nearly doubled in only forty years. And it’s growing faster. We’re in trouble.
I noticed things was getting kind of crowded. Like the rabbits is worse some years than others. Had a plague of grasshoppers last year. But it don’t last—they come and they go.
That’s so. But it takes time.
The brothers walked through the golden shade of the trees—red oak, white oak, poplar, beech, sassafras, Osage orange, red maple, black walnut, butternut, shagbark hickory. All hardwoods, all young, a third-or fourth-growth Appalachian forest. The best crop this country could grow, said Will, was trees. Trees and game. That’s what this hill country was meant for: hardwood trees, deer, bear, turkey, honeybees and wild hogs. And maybe just enough corn to feed some pigs. Someday these trees of ours will be worth a million dollars, Henry.
Ours?
That’s right. Ours. Lightcaps’. When we get these 120 acres all growing hardwoods we’ll be the richest family in Shawnee County. You wait and see.
How long do we have to wait?
Will smiled again. About a hundred years. Little Joe’s grandkids will get the benefit.
They followed the old wagon road up through the woods. They paused at the graves of their grandmother and great-grandfather, Cornflower and Doctor Jim. Will had cleared away the running blackberry vines and poison ivy, restored the ancient monuments and rerouted the lettering.
We should’ve buried the old man here too, Will.
Naw, I don’t think so.
Why not?
This is still Shawnee territory. Us Lightcaps ain’t been around long enough to lay claim to it.
Henry stared at his older brother. Four inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, two years older, black-bearded and baldheaded, Will seemed like a different man, a new man, in his middle middle age. Not nearly so dumb and stupid as Henry remembered him. Heavier, thicker, slow, stiff, rednecked and wrinkled like jerky around the eyes but—different. Possibly wiser.
Will, sometimes you talk like a philosopher.
Brother Will shifted his chew from one cheek to the other, spat a stream of brown juice to the ground. He grinned at Henry. Kind of work I do, Henry, I got a lot of time to think. Not like you with all your technical intellectual type jobs.
Will the farmer had practically given up farming. He kept a pair of mules for his logging operations and raised enough hay to feed the team through the winter. Each year he raised two pigs for slaughter, butchered them himself, ground his own sausage, cured and hickory-smoked his own hams. His wife, Marian, kept a vegetable garden, a sweet-corn patch for roasting ears and a small flock of hens. They still tapped the sugar maples every March, distilling enough fancy-grade pancake syrup to trade in town for a year’s supply of medical care, dentistry, wholesale auto parts, kerosene, underwear, overalls, shoes or shoe repair, movies or books, whatever needed or available. The underground economy. Marian drove the local school bus and sometimes worked as a teacher’s aide—when they needed cash. We got more time than money, she’d explain. Will heated his house with coal, which he obtained himself, in the traditional Lightcap fashion, from the C&O Railroad, and with wood. He kept the telephone as a business necessity but had long ago stopped paying power-company bills. Just never found no need for that electric stuff, he explained. For toilet facilities they used the outhouse most of the time, a chamberpot down in the basement by the coal furnace in the bitterest days of winter. Saves time and trouble, Will pointed out: I’d have to work a whole year to get a regular bathroom installed in the house and then a month every year after that to pay the plumber. With my thundermug system I put in five minutes a day about ninety days a year—what’s that add up to?—and it don’t cost me a cent. We borrowed the pisspot from Charlie Holyoak’s attic twenty years ago. When the wife wants a bath I light up the butane under the water heater, let it burn for half an hour, shut it off and fill the tub by gravity flow. Marian enjoys lying around in a tub of hot water, so what the hell, might as well take advantage of this here modern high technology while it’s still cheap. It won’t last, you know.
How do you get the water into the kitchen?
Gravity flow. From the springhouse.
So why the hell not have a regular toilet?
Well because then the goddamn county building code would make me pay for a goddamn septic tank and leach field, that’s why, cost me another year’s work in the garage and muck up the garden besides. Don’t need it.
Therefore Will had abandoned farming. With the children grown up and gone there was no need for a milk cow. He’d have stopped bothering with hogs too except that you could not get decent bacon, sausage or properly cured hams at the supermarket or any place else. He no longer raised cash crops such as cereals, maize and cattle-feed because the midwestern agrofactories had long ago cornered that market. Will refused to specialize in any line of work full time at any trade. His auto-repair and welding shop, in the village of Stump Creek, was open for business only by appointment. Like our father he spent more time in the woods—where he was happiest—than in the shop or on the farm or in the house. Unlike Henry, he was only a moderate drinker, mainly with his poker-playing friends on Friday nights. He attended church every Sunday morning but more for the neighbors and the gossip than the Gospel.
Where does God live, Will Lightcap?
Him? Well I’ll tell you, brother. See that old tamarack snag on the north side of Noisy Mountain? That’s where.
How do you know that?
Well, that’s my guess. What’s yours?
Will and Henry walked through the woods, through the shadows, approaching the amber-golden evening light that shone across the meadow beyond. They came to the spring and cabin. They took the pint Mason jar from its stub on the maple tree, dipped it into the cold clear water and drank. They drank again. They stepped into the cabin that Will had built nearly thirty years before. All was intact, in good order, neat, clean, smelling of pine tars and woodsmoke. The windows were open, allowing the autumn air to move through the single room. The cot was made up with fresh sheets and a quilt, the floor swept, a load of kindling, pine cones, and split beech logs filled the woodbox by the stove, and the mousetrap under the cupboard held one fresh dead mouse. Will removed the mouse and reset the trap, baiting it with bacon grease.
Mother’s coming out? Henry said.
Oh sure, she’ll be out tonight. For supper. But Marian cleaned this place up for you.
How’s Mother doing, Will?
She’s fine. You’ll see. Getting a little older, all gray on the head, but not stooped over and just as busy as ever.
What’s she do?
She keeps busy. The church and going to college. Takes a bunch of courses. Like “women studies,” whatever the hell that is. And then there’s that Meals on Wheels volunteer job.
Meals on Wheels?
That’s what they call it. She drives around town, delivers hot meals to old bats and ancient farts too sick to cook for themselves anymore.
Old folks, eh? Henry smiled. But she’s over seventy herself.
That’s right.
They left the cabin, taking their guns, and walked up the hill, through the fringe of the trees and across the hayfield to the crest. From there they looked eastward across ridge after wooded ridge toward the soft blue haze of the Allegheny and Shenandoah mountains, the backbone of Appalachia.
A pall of smoke hung across the sky. Looks like the world’s on fire, Henry said.
There’s a good fire a-goin’ on Cheat Mountain.
Who set it?
Will smiled. Hard to tell. There’s a lot of boys around here need the work. It’ll do the woods good anyhow, burn out the underbrush and laurel, grow some feed for the deer. You read history, Henry. Didn’t the Indians always start a lot of fires?
What’s that mess down there? Henry pointed into the valley below, past the recontoured slope of the strip mine toward a vast cleared area beyond. The yellow bulldozers and earthmovers were at rest n
ow, for the weekend, but it was plain their work was not completed. What the hell are they up to? Isn’t that Ginter Hollow?
Will smiled again. You been away too long, Henry. The Ginters are in real-estate development these days. They live in town and spend their winters in Florida. What we’re a-lookin’ at down there is what they call Sylvan Dell Lake. Dam up the crick, make a little lake, clear off the woods, sell five-acre homesites. Might even be a golf course down there someday. God knows what they’re up to and I don’t want to know. Might make me sick in the stomach.
They walked along the ridgetop, following the boundary line. Will complained about the always rising property tax: since he lived by barter the government was coming at him in another way, rezoning the land—against his wishes—as potential development property. The fact that the farm was close to the boundary of a national forest made it, in the eyes of the land sharks, a valuable piece of real estate. Every urban dweller, it seemed, now hankered for a weekend home, a vacation home, a hideaway near a national forest or national park or national seashore. The new four-lane superhighways slashed through the hills made access to the farthest coves of Appalachia easy and quick.
You better sell out and come west, Henry said, before they run right over you.
From what I hear, says Will, it’s no better out there.