Home to Big Stone Gap

  “I knew it was miles and miles.”

  “It’s never been surveyed properly, though.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve had to spend a good bit of time making maps. There weren’t any.”

  “If you grew up around here…”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t. I came into this cold.”

  “Have you had lunch?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why don’t you come to the house and I’ll fix you some? I’m expecting Jack later. I’d like you to tell him some of the things you’ve learned about this forest.” I have an agenda, obviously.

  “I’d like to, ma’am. But I have a lot of work to do yet.”

  “Everybody needs to eat lunch.”

  He smiles. “I guess that’s true.”

  “I just have to take the lights off my husband’s footbridge over the creek.”

  “I saw that. Did he make it himself?”

  “Yep. Anything my husband makes has to last a minimum of a hundred years. That’s his motto and his goal.”

  “Ain’t many around like him anymore.”

  “Not many,” I agree.

  Randy follows me to the bridge. I don’t feel wary with him: after years of trusting my gut and relying on the Ancient Art of Chinese Face-Reading, I can see that Randy is a thoughtful person and a kind one (the curve of his lips tells me that). It’s selfish, I know, but having him with me, it’s as though Joe is here; if Joe had lived, he’d be this age. I’m desperate to know, or just to have a window into, what that might have been like.

  I gently pull the lights off the railing of the bridge, rolling them around my hand and under my elbow, as Jack taught me (I learned how to wrap cable that way when I helped him with the Kiwanis Christmas-tree sale one year). On our way back to the house, Randy stops to record some moss he finds at the base of the old Scotch broom trees near the fence line. He takes out his notebook, jots down a few descriptions, then photographs the moss. His notebook is almost full. He closes it.

  “How did you end up at Berea College?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “It’s free.”

  “For everybody who attends, right? Not just scholarship students?”

  “Yep. My dad didn’t want to pay for college, and I didn’t want to go ROTC. Most of my friends did that. But I’m not the military type—I’m not real good at following orders.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Shoo the Cat meets us at the screen door on the sunporch. He eyes Randy up and down and then decides he’s okay. Old Shoo rubs up against his calf, and Randy picks him up. “I didn’t know you had a cat.”

  “He hides on holidays. He’s not a fan of crowds.”

  “He’s an old one.” Randy pets him gently.

  “Twenty-two. I can’t believe it.”

  “I heard of a cat living until twenty-eight once.”

  “No way!”

  “Yes, ma’am. If they’re happy, they last almost forever.”

  “Like people.”

  Randy laughs. “I guess some.”

  I pull a tray of lasagna out of the refrigerator and put it in the oven. I set the table for three, and I offer Randy a drink, which he accepts. I pour glasses of iced tea for both of us.

  “Tell me about your family,” I say.

  “My mom died when I was five years old.”

  “Oh, no. That’s terrible.”

  “My dad remarried—a nice woman. Her name is Cynthia, and she had three kids of her own.”

  “Do you get along with them?”

  Randy shrugs. “I’m so much older than they are. Really, it’s not about me liking them, it’s about staying out of their way.”

  “I understand.” I take a sip of tea. “How did your mom die?”

  “She died in a car accident. I was in the car at the time.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “Sometimes I think I do. But I’m not sure. There was a picture of the car in the newspaper; it was crumpled like a beer can. The headline said, ‘Boy Survives.’ I always resented that. It should have said, ‘Mother Dies.’”

  “How old was your mom?”

  “She was born in 1944.”

  “Like me!”

  “Wow. She’d be your age now, then.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “My son would have been eighteen on his next birthday.”

  We look away from each other, almost afraid of the similarities.

  “What happened to him? Your son?” he asks.

  “He died of cancer. Leukemia.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Only four years old.”

  “Wow, that’s so sad.”

  “Last September,” I tell him, “when I saw you in the woods, I thought you might be him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s because on some level, I like to pretend it was all a mistake. I can imagine that somehow, somewhere, my son survived and he’s finding his way back home.”

  “Were you with him when he died?”

  I nod.

  “Then you know he really did die.”

  “Yes. My little fantasy doesn’t make any sense. But to tell you the truth, none of it has ever made any sense to me. I still wake up and can’t believe he’s gone. So I guess I imagine things to cope. I even thought you might be an angel, coming to take someone away again.”

  “That’s wild.”

  “Pretty crazy, right?”

  Randy taps his pencil on the table. “So you don’t get over it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Like my mom. I always wonder if I ever will.”

  We sit in silence awhile. I check the clock; Jack should be home by now. In a way, I’m glad he’s late. It gives me a chance to ask Randy more questions. It’s not often I talk with kids my Joe’s age. When I see his old classmates in the Pharmacy or around town, it’s always a little awkward—I guess they can see the sadness in me.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” I ask Randy.

  He smiles. “Her name is Tawny.”

  “She must be pretty.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Tawny’s a pretty girl’s name.”

  “You’re right about that. She’s got black hair and brown eyes. A lot of people say we look alike, but I don’t see it. As soon as I graduate, we’ll get murried. I really want to get murried.”

  “Why?”

  “I love her.”

  “Besides loving her, why would you get married so young?”

  “Well, the way I see it, you never know how much time you got. You might think you got a lot, but I don’t believe you can count on that. I think you sort of have to do things that you want to do, because maybe the chance won’t come around again. You don’t think I ought to get murried, though?”

  “It seems to me that you like what you’re studying. Maybe you can think about getting an advanced degree. The kids who stay in these parts after they’ve gotten an education really matter. They give back. That’s important.”

  “I guess so. But I can do that and get murried. Do you have any other children?” he asks.

  It’s funny. I’d removed all the silly pictures of Etta from the refrigerator door when I was trying not to dwell so much on her absence. I surely meant to put them back, but I haven’t yet. There are formal pictures in the living room, in polished silver frames, but none in the kitchen, the true center of our home. I’ll have to work on that, I think. I jump up. “Yes, I have a daughter, Etta. She just got married in Italy a few months ago.” I go to the living room, fetch a wedding picture with all of us in it, and return to the kitchen. “Here she is.” I hand him the picture.

  “She sure is pretty. She don’t look very old.”

  “Nineteen, almost twenty.”

  “Is that why you’re against young marriage?”

  “Partly.” I smile. “I just think it’s a good idea to wait. You can be more certain of your fe
elings if you grow up a little more and have a few more life experiences. Then again, I’m starting to realize that this may be the right thing for her and that I need to trust her judgment.”

  “Ave? I’m home,” Jack hollers from the front of the house.

  “Back here, honey.”

  “I hope you don’t mind, I brought company…” Jack walks into the kitchen, Tyler right behind him.

  “Of course not. I have company too.”

  Jack smiles. “Randy, you back to cause more trouble?”

  “Yes, sir, I hope so.”

  Randy stands and extends his hand to Tyler. “Hi, I’m Randy Galloway.”

  “Randy goes to Berea. Studies horticulture,” I explain.

  “That’s interesting. You gonna be a botanist?” Tyler wants to know.

  “I hope so. That is, if there’s any woods left by the time I graduate.”

  I intervene, saying, “Randy, you have to be careful what you say. Tyler is one of the owners of the Bituminous Reserves, Inc. They mine coal using mountaintop removal.”

  “Wow,” Randy responds. “I never met management before. You guys are the enemy we fight every morning when we go out into the forest to document the herbs.”

  Tyler laughs awkwardly. “I don’t like to be called the enemy.”

  “Why do you do it?” Randy asks earnestly.

  “I’m a businessman.”

  “There has to be a better answer than that,” Randy says.

  “Now, Randy,” I say.

  Tyler puts up his hand. “That’s okay, Ave Maria. Randy, tell me, what would you do if you were me?”

  “Well, I sure wouldn’t wreck the terrain of a mountain range that is thousands of years old, just for a few years of coal. I’d capitalize on nature’s riches in a way that would sustain it. I’d come up with a business plan to do what I’m doing on a larger scale. Why shouldn’t the herbs needed to make medicine come from our forests? Most pharmaceutical companies go down to the rain forest in the Southern Hemisphere, but we got a lot of herbs right here.”

  “Some folks have tried that. It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Tyler tells him in a tone so reassuring, I see why Jack has been won over. Tyler Hutchinson is soothing and in control at the same time. A good salesman.

  Randy’s not buying, though. “It seems to me, if you don’t value the land and what it produces, it just lays the world open to be destroyed.”

  “Coal is made in the earth,” Tyler says.

  “Yes, and we need the coal. I’m not saying that we don’t. But why would we ruin nature for short-term energy? It doesn’t make any sense. We need these forests too—they’re a treasure, really. Even if they exist just to make oxygen. That’s a huge thing. We’ve got to trust nature to know something that maybe humanity doesn’t.”

  “I appreciate your point of view, Randy,” says Tyler, gracious on the surface.

  I look at Jack, hoping he caught how dismissive Tyler has been with Randy, but Jack is busy cutting squares into the pan of lasagna he pulled from the oven. Sometimes I’d like to hit Jack over the head with a brick to wake him up.

  “Jack, can you handle lunch from here? I have to get to work,” I say. “Randy, it was nice to get to know you a bit better. Do you think you can find your way back when you’re done with lunch?”

  “Oh, easy, ma’am. I parked at the high school. I’ll just hike down.”

  “Or Jack can take you.”

  Randy stands and shakes my hand. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

  “You’re entirely welcome.”

  As Jack and Tyler resume their conversation, I motion with a jab to Randy to stick it to Tyler. He smiles and gives me the thumbs-up.

  I begin my e-mail exchange with Rosalind Stoneman of Aberdeen as though I am communicating with someone who speaks a foreign language instead of just being from a foreign country. We quickly adapt to each other’s use of the English language. Her sense of humor comes through her idioms (my favorite so far: she and her husband are like “chalk and cheese”—in other words, total opposites), and I hope she gets mine (saying “bless your heart” can mean “drop dead” in these parts).

  We have lots of questions for each other, but somehow, on top of both of our lists is what kind of clothes to bring for our husbands. I pictured an erudite, dashing playwright in Donald, but his wife assured me that he is more the farmer type. Her only sartorial advice for me was to bring wellies and lots of warm sweaters. She and Donald love their drafty old house, but we might not be used to it. (Wait till she has her first night in Cracker’s Neck. I’ll remind Jack to leave lots of firewood!)

  I have always loved being a pharmacist, and yet it’s never been hard for me to take time away from my job. While it’s interesting to study medicine and to keep current with all the latest pharmaceuticals, that part of my profession is the least compelling to me. I love serving the customers, hearing their stories, and hopefully, making them feel a little better. I still enjoy going into customers’ homes when I make deliveries because I’m fascinated by how people choose to live.

  For example, when I deliver out in the Valley to Susan Gibson, I notice that her furniture and knickknacks have not varied in forty years. The house is always as neat as a pin, but not one detail has changed. She has a pale green ceramic frog that sits on the windowsill, and it has sat there, in the same spot, since I was a girl. I used to go on delivery runs with Fred Mulligan—I guess he liked the company, though he never said much to me. I’d spend a lot of time reading in the car, unless he invited me to go inside. I knew that when we delivered to Miss Gibson, we were near the end of the route. Sometimes Fred would have me run the delivery to the door without him. I had favorite customers, and they made me feel special. Whenever I delivered to Mrs. Little on West Second Street, she’d have two Nilla wafers and a glass of milk waiting for me.

  Time has helped mellow my memories of Fred Mulligan. I even call him Dad, occasionally, when I refer to him. For a long time, I called him Fred Mulligan, as detached as you can get. I’ve now known my own papa, Mario, for almost as long as I knew Fred. I wish I could have foretold, when I was a girl, how my story would play out. It would have given me great comfort to know that eventually, my heart would be filled by the love of a true father. I wasn’t able to have it with Fred. Maybe, had I been a boy, things would have been different. There is no harder work in the world than trying to get someone to like you, and this was my eternal mission with Fred. Though he knew I wanted him to like me, it was the one thing he withheld.

  It wasn’t all awful, but as with all childhood sadness carried forward, the past puts a veil over adulthood, a dull achy feeling of guilt, sometimes outright melancholy and sometimes shame for unnamed feelings. The combination of these emotions and juggling them always left me tired. They interfere with the now, which is why I stopped the habit of going back and blaming myself for things that can’t be changed. And while I don’t forget events altogether, the details have become murky, some disappearing altogether (hallelujah). That’s one of the comforts of getting older: the sharp edges wear away, and one is left with a practical view of things. Emotions are for the present; don’t squander them on past hurts that are a waste of time. I learned that from Mario, who showed me how to start over again.

  But without Fred Mulligan’s influence, I wouldn’t have survived small-town life. He’s the one who showed me by example that things are not always what they seem. He showed me on the old delivery route that even when a home and the family inside seemed perfect, you could always count on the fact that there was a lot going on behind closed doors—plenty of secrets, mysteries, and reinvented histories. “Every family is its own country,” he’d say. Fred Mulligan was right.

  I pull in to Glencoe Cemetery, past the fountain—dry in winter—and up to the hillside where my mother and dad are buried. I get out of the Jeep and climb the hill. There’s a small bouquet of posies on Mama’s grave that I did not leave. I remove the Christmas wreaths from the headstone
s. I pick up the posies and see that on one of the long, thin satin ribbons, M.B. is printed in ink. My papa left these for my mother.

  I can’t express how much I miss my mother. Time hasn’t helped one bit with this loss. I have tremendous guilt, though I know it’s not quite rational, that I couldn’t do more to save her life. Sometimes I replay her illness over in my mind and imagine whisking her off to a fancy hospital somewhere in a faraway city where they had the cure. In that fantasy, she is still with me. What a dream!

  I think of all the things we didn’t do, the trip we were to take to Italy but never did. Why didn’t I make her go? I backed down too easily. I let her go back into her cocoon for no good reason. I should have fought her on that—then, at least, she would have seen her sisters before she died. She would have been able to go home one more time. I understand, just a little, that I was her home, and as long as I stayed close, she was happy. But, like all daughters, I wanted more for her. Alas, I wasn’t able to deliver it.

  I make the sign of the cross and say a prayer.

  I take the two dried-out wreaths over to the garbage can by the fence. There’s a new grave, with large arrangements of pink, yellow, white, and red flowers thrown haphazardly over the freshly dug dirt. It looks like a big, beat-up birthday cake, with the bright ribbons and foil tribute letters whipping in the wind. I don’t remember Fleeta telling me of a recent death. The grave is in the Horton plot. Good family, the Hortons.

  I walk back to my mother and father’s grave, and as I go back down the hill, I stop at the Goins family plot. The Goins family had, as two of its members, the prettiest girls in town, Cathy and Gail, though they’ve since grown up and moved away. Recently, one of their relatives died, and everybody told me that I had to come up and see the headstone, because I wouldn’t believe it. I look down, and now I know what all the fuss is about. It says:

  Goins Goins Gone

  I laugh loud. Wait until Jack sees this—it’s his kind of humor. It takes a big person to laugh at death, and an even bigger one to laugh after death.

  Aberdeen

  “Now, look here,” Iva Lou says as she takes the curves of the road to Tri-Cities Airport with too much firepower to suit me. “I like a tartan plaid with navy blue, kelly green, yeller, and black. I got me a beret with a kelly-green grosgrain ribbon, and I want my kilt to pick up that hint.”