Original Sins (73 page)

All day long as Raymond weeded his garden, he could hear the roar of bulldozers shoving landslides down the backside of the hill on which the graveyard sat. There was another round of blasting. He could feel each explosion coming. The ground trembled as though an earthquake were under way. Then a deafening concussion. A cloud of orange smoke billowing silently into the summer sky, while boulders sailed upyard, arched, then floated out of sight behind the hills. His living room wall cracked along one corner. Huge trucks, Lyle's Flying Goose among them, rolled past his house leaving a trail of gleaming black chunks down the cove.

As he walked along the blacktop back from McCray's, with trucks thundering past, he came upon Lyla sitting in her yard behind a card table that held a glass pitcher. Her sign read, “Kool Aid, 5 ¢ a glass.” She was taking a trucker's nickel and handing him a Dixie cup.

As he roared off in a cloud of exhaust, Raymond asked her what she thought she was doing.

“Earning me some money,” she said, gazing at him as though he were retarded.

“Does your mama know?”

“She hepped me.”

“I don't think it's right, Lyla. You ought to be wading in a creek or something. Go play with your bull roarer. It's dangerous with all these big trucks.”

“Mrs. Cindy, she says why don't I do it.”

Raymond climbed up to the graveyard. Looking down the backside of the hill, he saw it had been scalped of its vegetation and topsoil, which now lay in jumbled heaps farther down. He watched down below as an auger six feet in diameter forced its way into what was left of the vein. It spewed out behind itself, into waiting trucks, ejaculations of shiny black coal. Withdrawing slowly, it shifted down the seam, then plunged in again, ripping and tearing out a new hole.

Endurance, he reminded himself. Fortitude. Stoicism. Disasters came and went in Tatro Cove. Wild animals, Indian raids, guerrilla bushwhacking, feuds, revenuers, floods, union wars, coal busts, accidents, disease, starvation, and VISTA workers. But Tatros remained.

He felt like a man with his hands bound behind his back, watching his lover being ravished. He couldn't hurl himself against earthmoving equipment, two stories high. It wasn't a question of overpowering or outwitting, just outlasting. If he could keep from going crazy, the strippers would be gone soon.

By autumn they were, leaving behind a road so rutted that cars could barely get down it. Ben hadn't been around much ever since their talk at the graveyard. Probably banging his brains out in the woods. Raymond concluded that endurance was the only answer. Patience like Job's. Ben would get tired of fucking and fed up with Dred's arrogance. He'd recognized that Raymond had his true best interests at heart, and he'd come back. Raymond just had to keep his distance so that Ben wouldn't feel pressured, and then make it easy for him to return once he recognized his mistake.

One day as Royal and Raymond walked the hills cutting galax, Royal said, “Looks like I won't have to cut this stuff no more, without I want to.”

“You come into an inheritance, Royal?”

“Sort of like. Dred there, he hepped me to get onto the welfare.”

Raymond straightened up and looked at him.

“He's starting him up this group. Needs my hep,” he added proudly.

“To do what?”

“To go out and get folks onto the rolls.”

“But Royal, once you're living off welfare, the Yankee capitalists have got you right where they want you—dependent on them. Not likely to make a fuss.”

“I ain't never made no fuss nohow. Been too tired trying to keep food on the table.”

“But
Royal
…”

“Son, don't you Royal me. The day you got six hungry kids is the day I'll be innerested in what you got to say about how I keep them fed.”

“But Royal, you could keep them fed with a market garden. Sell the surplus for cash. I'll help you set it up.”

“Naw, I'm sick, son. I need me the welfare.”

“What's wrong with you?”

He clasped his chest and started wheezing. “My lungs. Done gone plumb punky on me. Some days I can't hardly breathe. Looky here, why don't you join our group, Raymond. You might could get on the welfare yourself. Then you wouldn't have to dig this shit no more.”

Raymond looked out across the hills and down into the cove. If he did, he'd have more time to pursue his mission…. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” he snarled.

“Huh?”

These capitalists were brilliant, Raymond reflected, maneuvering men into engineering their own impotence. But it wouldn't last. Just as you had to sit out the stripping of your family graveyard, so you had to sit out all the wrenching death throes of capitalism.

One evening a red Mustang arrived in Raymond's front yard. Cheryl was sitting shotgun. Ben hopped out, grinning. “You like it, Junior?”

Raymond's heart leaped at the sight of his blonde head and open cheerful face. Ben was back! Just as Raymond had foreseen. “Like what?”

“My birthday present.” He gestured to the car. Raymond said nothing.

“Daddy got it as a trade-in on a El Dorado. Give it to me.”

Raymond stared at it.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Very nice.”

“Come go for a ride.”

“No, thanks.”

“Ah, come on, Junior. Let's go get us a hamburger at that new place in town.”

“What new place?”

“Ain't you been to Hillbilly Heaven yet?”

Raymond nodded no.

“Come on, buddy. Get up off your ass and let's go!”

Reluctantly, Raymond climbed in.

The specialty at Hillbilly Heaven was the Hillbilly Burger, “barbecued with our own special sauce, laced with just a hint of home-brewed white lightning.” The clientele were mostly film crews and journalists from the national networks doing specials on the destruction of the Southern mountains.

Dred sauntered in. Ben said, “We got a big surprise for you, Junior.”

Dred held out a cardboard box on which was printed “Uncle Corliss Tatro's Old Timey Gee Haw Flimmy Diddle.” There was a picture of Cor Four sitting whittling in his hat and baggy overalls. The copy read, “Tatros settled in Tatro Cove before the American Revolution, and they're still there, living much as their ancestors did. The Tatro children still play with handmade wooden toys such as this …”

Dred and Ben were setting up Old Timey Toys, Inc.—with a factory in Tatro Cove which Ben would run. Dred already had orders from a couple of stores on Fifth Avenue that carried other Appalachian products, as well as from craft shops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Woodstock, Vermont.

“Great, huh, Junior?” Ben demanded. “It's why you haven't been seeing much of me lately.”

Raymond couldn't speak.

“I realize now,” confessed Dred, stroking his red beard, “that I came to Tatro Cove thinking I had all the answers. Well, I know now these people have plenty to teach me. I want to help them preserve their culture and transmit its strengths to the American mainstream.”

“What's wrong, Junior?” Ben asked in a worried voice. “Don't worry about him.” Dred gave Raymond a look of contempt. “He's just jealous he didn't think of it first.”

That night the skies opened. Rain gushed down like fluid from a uterus at the onset of labor. Raymond sat on his porch and watched in the lightning as the topsoil from his garden washed into the creek. He felt nothing. Ben had betrayed him for a handful of silver. Well, he would just have to revise his plans. How, he had no idea. He'd just have to wait until new means were revealed to him.

The rains kept up for several days. When they stopped, the creek was choked with silt from the soil bank left by the strippers. Water rose over the creek bank and began flooding his yard. With a shovel he dug a new channel. The next rain brought down more silt and filled in the channel. Every few days Royal and Lem and Lyle and Cor Four and Raymond were all out in the creek in front of their houses with shovels.

Raymond climbed the hill to get some idea how much more silt would descend. He discovered the graveyard had sunk, the ground having collapsed into auger holes. Looking down the backside, he saw that a mud slide off the soil bank had dammed the valley through which the creek ran. Murky reddish water was building up behind it.

At Thanksgiving dinner, M.G. said, “Lord, we got so much to be thankful for here in Tatro Cove.” Raymond reflected that M.G. sure did. He'd branched out into helicopters, was selling dozens to strippers. “We known hard times, which makes our present good fortune that much sweeter to partake of.”

After everybody amened, while the women served, Raymond told about the mud slide, about his concern that the wall would break and flood the cove, about the need to get together and do something about it.

“If it breaks, it breaks,” said Lem, shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth.

“Son, you can't stop progress!” announced M.G., folding his hands over his stomach, which bulged out over the white patent leather belt that matched his loafers.

Royal said, “I figure it's worth the worry so them folks in the valley can run their factories.”

Raymond felt the gnawing start up in his stomach. Here he was, telling them something essential for their immediate physical survival, and they wouldn't listen. How could he have expected them to grasp something as subtle as their mission? He'd been living among them for over a year, and they still hadn't recognized his function, still avoided, ignored, or patronized him. There was a limit to how long you could sustain patience in the face of unremitting ignorance. Just as everyone had always done, it appeared the people of Tatro Cove were bound to betray him. He looked around at the flushed smiling Tatro faces with their similar features. All these people were interested in was shoveling the maximum amount of poor-quality food into their babbling mouths.

After dinner M.G. ushered his relatives into the living room to inspect his new 23-inch Motorola color TV console. They all sat and watched “Hee Haw.” Two men in straw hats were dancing and playing banjos and making faces:

“This old hillbilly, he watched this nurse get into this elevator. The Doc, he comes up and says, ‘Clem, why, what's wrong with you, son?' ‘Doc,' he says, ‘that girl, she climbed in that there box. The doors shet. And when they opened again, she'd plumb vanished!'”

Canned laughter roared. So did the room full of Tatros. Raymond tried to calm his stomach, reminding himself of the brutalization his relatives had endured—their land, their culture, their very bodies exploited, maimed, and destroyed to produce profits. It wasn't his kinfolks' fault that they were incapable of accepting the message Raymond was offering. He noticed Ben across the room, staring at him, perplexed. The others could have another chance, but it was too late for Ben.

A commercial came on. An earnest engineer in a construction helmet and work clothes knelt with a pine seedling in his callused hand and explained with a sincere blue gaze about how the multi-national oil company he worked for was restoring the hillsides it had stripped until they were more attractive and more hospitable to wildlife than when God Himself first fashioned them.

Two men in overalls lay in the yard of a tarpaper shack, a coon dog sleeping beside them.

“You reckon we outta mend that roof one day, Pa?” one drawled, his eyes closed and his hand reaching for a brown jug.

“Why, son, I declare, I …”

Raymond's hand grabbed a heavy glass ashtray. He hurled it as hard as he could at the TV screen, which shattered, throwing glass around the room.

Everyone stared at him.

“Don't yall see what the capitalists are doing? Portraying us as stupid and lazy. Not human. Just like they do blacks. So they don't have to feel guilty about destroying our land and our people and our culture for their own goddam profit!” He was screaming.

M.G. said in a quiet voice, “Son, you just wrecked my brand-new Motorola 23-inch color TV. You some kind of Communist nut or something?”

Raymond knelt by his stove in front of Ben, who'd hurt his knee in ball practice that afternoon. Raymond had persuaded him to let him rub some homemade salve on it. Ben was sitting in his underwear, while Raymond rubbed the swollen knee.

“I reckon M.G. is pretty annoyed with me?” He felt grateful to Ben for coming to see him. Everyone else was avoiding him.

“To tell you the truth, Junior, he ain't real happy.”

“I reckon I ought to find some way to get his set fixed.”

“It might help.”

“I feel bad about it. I lost my head.”

They heard a car pull into the yard. Red lights flashed through the window. Two state troopers and M.G. rushed through the door. They sniffed around the room like dogs looking for a spot to pee in.

M.G. said, “It's just like I thought. All right now, I want to know, Junior, what you doing to my son. Teaching a seventeen-year-old boy to knit. It's downright un-American!”

Raymond sat back in his chair and rubbed the salve from his palms onto his jeans.

“It ain't normal for no man your age to live all alone like this. How come you ain't got you no wife?” Raymond looked at him.

“Come on, Ben. I'm taking you right now to Doc Dalton for a check-up.”

“What for, Pa?”

“You know what for, son.”

Ben looked at Raymond, who was starting to get sick to his stomach.

“You're wrong, M.G.,” Raymond said.

“What?” asked Ben.

“Come on, son. And don't think I ain't gon have you locked up, Junior. We may share a last name, but a Commie faggot like you ain't no kin of mine.”

“You're making a bad mistake, M.G.” Raymond was unable to move from his chair.

“We'll see what Doc Dalton has to say about that.”

“What, Pa?”

Lyla arrived on Raymond's doorstep the next afternoon and handed him a note.