Bant
IT WOULDN’T be an easy climb, scaling that slope beside the fill. But the fill, I knew from seeing it with Jimmy Make, I couldn’t climb at all. I was going to climb the skinned-out slope on the side of it, and steep as that slope was, I figured I’d have to do most of it on my belly, like a snake. “Skin you alive.” I had a grade school teacher used to threaten us that way. “I’m gonna skin you alive,” she’d say, and every time the teacher did, I’d see a skinless kid, snagged on a barbed wire fence. Now when I thought of the slope, the teacher’s voice would come to me again.
The last day of school was a half day, and I’d started sweating on the bus, and I was sweating heavier now. I tried to stick to shade, heaved my bookbag higher on my shoulder, my hair falling safe over my face. Now I turned up Yellowroot Road, and I could hear the machine noise overhead. I wondered if Uncle Mogey and Aunt Mary were home. I thought again of the busted-lock gate.Tomorrow I would talk to Hobart about the job, and after that, I was going to have a whole lot less time. But then I saw myself stoop under those bars, and the cold prickle came again in my scalp. I looked back up at Cherryboy. Mogey and Mary probably were.
When I got to where the blacktop broke down into dirt, to the
thicket of sumac and other little trees that stood between our house and the rest of the houses in the hollow, I thought I heard Lace’s voice. I stopped, pulled in on myself, listened. But I didn’t hear anything more. I headed on, past all the trees, into full view of the house, and then I heard they were at it for sure. It wasn’t constant loud, they were trying to keep it down, but every minute or so, something would break loose. I walked slower, squeezed tighter to the strap of my bag. Still standing in the yard was the side-by-side refrigerator that had washed down in the flood, and the ground still glittered, with glass, with coal, although we’d worked so hard to clean it up, and at the end of the yard, before the sumac trees, a big stack of logs and branches, waiting for Jimmy Make to borrow a chainsaw. Another voice, Jimmy’s this time, came sailing out a window and cut the calm.
I stopped in the road at the edge of the patchy grass. I snuck real quick to the porch, dropped my bookbag on it, and shoved it across to the wall. For a second, I thought again of the gate. But then I took off around the side of the house, towards Cherryboy, and my shortcut to Mogey and Mary’s.
“It’s what’s on the inside counts,” my grandma used to say, and I didn’t believe that about everything. But I did about my name. Bantella Ricker See. Bantella was a name Lace made up for me before I was born, and although she never told me, I figured she made it up for the speak-taste of it. For how when you said it—Bantella—it pressed every part of your tongue, and that they called me just Bant suited me fine. I liked the longer name a secret kept. Jimmy Make’s real name was James Makepeace Turrell, but him and Lace didn’t get married until I was almost four years old, and when they did, Lace still wouldn’t change my name. She couldn’t keep her own name after she got married, so she kept mine, Ricker See. My grandma had been a Ricker, my pap was a See, but now I was the only one in the family
who carried either name. That was the other part of the secret, something else I held inside. And while See was better than Turrell, I also knew it was the Ricker meant the most because Rickers had been on this piece of ground at the foot of Cherryboy, west of Yellowroot, for more than two hundred years.
The flood had busted the footbridge all to pieces, so I jumped the creek and crawled up the other bank, the new loose dirt of it scaling down. Then I was on the old Ricker Run road and already I was reaching for the good I usually got in the woods, make the other go away. But I couldn’t yet bring it to me, and I started worrying even though part of me knew it was too early for that. The road was soft for walking, the ruts nearly grassed over, and the sun was falling heavy and thick the way it does after passing through all those green leaves. Before long I was passing where Grandma’s trailer had sat, and then I was moving on up the draw towards the Ricker Place where I’d lived the first four years of my life and Grandma’d lived all of hers until those last few years in the trailer. A couple hundred feet short of the old house, I reached the turnoff to the trail that would take me over the ridge to Uncle Mogey’s house, so I cut through a patch of mayapple and angled up the first part of it.
It was narrow, not much more than a game path, hard to see if you weren’t used to taking it, especially now, with all the green stuff trying to cover, but I’d been running this path since before I was born. I’d started running this mountain when I was still inside Lace—
Oh, that was a hard year,
Grandma’d say
. Hard times then. And your pap just a-smothering to death all along, you know
—and they carried me back up just weeks after I came out. If I said it out loud, Lace would say I couldn’t remember, but I could, the ground moving below me, dead-leaf-colored, how many colors of brown. The smell of November rain on beginning to rot leaves. I helped my grandma from the time I could walk.
Good little helper, Bant. Such a good helper,
creasies,
Shawnee, poke, ramps, molly moochers in spring, blackberries in summer, mayapple and cohosh, then ginseng and nuts—hickory, black walnut, butternut, chinquapin, beech—in the fall.Yellowroot after the sap went down. Sumac and sassafras in November, come Christmas, holly and greenery. I knew these things before I could read.
You can live off these mountains,
Grandma’d say.
And in bad times,
she’d say, meaning layoffs, strikes, but also, I knew, the year I was born,
we did
.
Now that I’d got past the steepest part of the path to Uncle Mogey’s, I was moving fast, watching always for the copperheads. The humid riding me like a damp shirt. This was full woods now, and I reached out one hand, touched the tree trunks that I passed, lichens, bark, moss. Up in here, you couldn’t hear the machinery working.You couldn’t see any sign of the flood.
After we came back to West Virginia from North Carolina two years ago, it was all different. It was different. But I still spent a lot of time up here. I didn’t hunt stuff much anymore—some of it was gone, and even the plants that were left the dealers wouldn’t buy like they used to—so I mostly just sat in my places. Those places where if you sat quiet, the space dropped away between you and the land. Some of them were places I’d discovered on my own, but others were ones where me and Grandma used to stop. She’d make me sit quiet, I learned that young, too, and when it was time to go, she’d say,
Now this is just between you and me, Bant.You and me’s special place.
Like the heart of the rhododendron thicket, the limbs bendy and matty and strong, it was like being inside some kind of body there. It felt animal live. The rock overhangs in the winter, how icicles would make off them, great scary masses, the rocks making faces, angry and beautiful. I’d feel closest in spring, before the leaves came all the way out, when the mountains show their hope with little color patches, redbud and dogwood, dogwood and redbud, the roll of the words in your mouth. And if you look real close, how all the leaves are tightly
curled, bulging just a little beyond bud—leaf-wait, I’d call it. And inside them, right before they bust out, you see what looks like a feather.
But Grandma never said anything about how the places might make you feel. She wasn’t a talker, especially not about things like that. When she did talk, it was to tell you how to do something, or to tell you something that had happened before you were born, or to remind you how to act right. She had strict ideas about acting right. She wouldn’t touch you much either. What she liked to touch were woods things, things that came out of the ground. But even without the talking, she taught me to let into my insides the real of this place. From her I learned the deep of here.
Mogey knew, too. That was the main reason I went over there as much as I did. Since we’d got back from North Carolina it seemed to me Lace had forgotten everything but the bad, and, of course, Jimmy Make had never known. It seemed to me there was only one person left who knew, who remembered, and that was Uncle Mogey. He wasn’t really my uncle, he was Grandma’s nephew, a Ricker, too, and he was one of our few relatives who hadn’t yet left. He used to run the woods with us a lot, clear back to when I was very small, and I remember how he’d carry me on his shoulders when I got tired, make me tall as branches. Gentle, Mogey was. Gentler than women. Gentler than dogs. The gentleness in him was the gentleness in trees. And it seemed to me only Uncle Mogey and his wife Mary tried to remember, I mean
really
remember. Quite a few people talked about what they thought was being lost, but already people weren’t remembering.
Mogey and Mary always had a pot of coffee going, and they’d been giving me a cup since I was ten years old. They treated me like that. Usually there was a crockpot simmering, too, you’d smell it, venison with onions and garlic, or smothered round steak, or brown beans, and sweet tea, too. The inside of their house was always light, and that was so different from ours, dropped down in the narrow of the
hollow like ours was. It was hard to get our house light. And sitting with them at their kitchen table, Mary’s china cupboard that Mogey had made her gleaming and homey, poems about God they had hanging on their walls, I’d get a belonging feeling I didn’t often have with people. It was like going back to when I was little, before everything started to change. When people would visit more, and me and all the other kids who used to live up and down Yellowroot would just be in and out of people’s houses all day long. Like everybody’s house was ours, and everywhere you were welcome, and if you ate lunch at Kerwins’ house one day, they’d be up at the Ricker Place with Grandma feeding them the next. It still felt that way at Uncle Mogey’s.
I could tell I was almost to the top of the ridge, the light changing a little. I was in truly deep now, all mountain and no sight of people, of things people-made, and down below me, this soft loft of heavy-leafed branches, and above me, the underside of the same. Finally, I was feeling the distance shutting. I stopped there to make sure, tugging after my breath, the gnats wavering in, and it was, the distance was shutting. A feeling closer to the trees all around. I took off again, really running this time, the curve and dip of the ground echo-shaping the curve and dip of my body the way a flat road never did, and the more the distance shut, the faster the badness dropped away.
It was only in the woods that Grandma ever whipped me. Lace would spank me a good bit down at the house, and Jimmy Make wasn’t a spanker at all, you could tell it made him too nervous, he left that kind of thing for Lace to do. My grandma only whipped me a couple times, and all of them were on the mountain, and all of them were with switches she made me cut. She gave me her knife and made me pick one, and if I picked too little, she sent me back. Those are the whippings I remember. I can’t even recall much of why Lace was spanking me, and hers never had real sting. Grandma’s, hers hurt, they went deeper than skin, and after that, they stayed.
Once it was for throwing my trash. I’d carried some candy up with us, must have been Easter candy I was hoarding from my basket, we didn’t get candy except on special occasions and I know it was spring when I did this. I was wearing pants without pockets, I carried the candy in my hand. Because I didn’t want to carry the wrappers around after I ate, I threw them behind us and off in the weeds a ways, thinking Grandma wouldn’t notice. Grandma did. “You can live off these mountains, Bant,” she said. “You don’t dirty up where you eat. You know bettern that.”
Another time Uncle Mogey and Aunt Mary and their boy Kenneth were with us, and the four of them were digging ramps, and I felt left out, probably jealous of Kenneth. I liked being the only kid, getting all the attention that way. So I dug up my own patch of stuff where they weren’t looking. Not ramps, just a whole bunch of different kinds of plants I pulled out of the ground. I remember Uncle Moge and Aunt Mary being polite, not looking at the whipping, acting like it wasn’t happening. But I know Kenneth snuck a peek. Grandma didn’t just whip me that time. She also made me plant everything back.
Then there was the killing of the snake. The worst whipping she ever gave me. That was spring, too, the snake still sluggish from the cold nights, that’s the only reason I could kill him, him trying to sun on a rock, and I dropped another big rock on his head. I must have been about six, old enough to know how Grandma felt about snakes, but I knew how Jimmy Make felt, too. By that time, I’d been up to the snake ditches with him a good bit, I was acting out of the Jimmy Make part of me. It wasn’t even a blacksnake, much less a copperhead. Nothing but a garter. And that time was the worst not because of how long and hard she whipped, but because it was the first time I saw she was honestly surprised, a bad sad surprise, at something I had done.
I’d rolled the rock back off his head, feeling a scratchy satisfaction, watching the juice seep out of his head while the body still thrashed.
Then there was Grandma. So surprised at first she said only, “Oh, Bant. What is wrong with you, girl? What is wrong with you?” And the way she said it sounded like there really must be something wrong with me, it sounded so much like that it scared me, and not because I was about to get beat.
After the whipping, me sniffling, that snake body still moving, Grandma said, “You know way bettern that.You don’t kill what can’t harm you. And you shouldn’t kill what can harm you unless it’s a threat to you right there. Snakes eat up other things that give us problems, like mice and rats.” And even later, when we were heading home, the hurt gone from my behind but the shame still burning, she had to bring it up again. “Go around just killing stuff, it’ll eventually come back on you. It throws things out of whack.” She shook her head. “As much time as you’ve spent with me up on this mountain . . .” And there she stopped, like what I’d done was so bad she couldn’t even think what else to say. She shook her head again, not looking at me. “You know way bettern that.”