around a curve. The train in its beautiful passing past, leaving.
Leaving behind the brush-took-over stores and the overgrown drift holes into worked-out mines and the trembly wooden churches with their hand-painted signs, warning, and the floors with nothing over them and the concrete pillars with nothing around and Slatybank’s steadfast hangers-on in their houses, which had looked just fine, just like houses, until the train. Diminished them to their shabby desperate left-behind selves against that marvelous train.
Now Corey and Tommy can see McWain’s backyard. Four or five kids climb a set of stairs lodged in the middle of the creek. From the stoop, they jump off into a hole where the water’s to their waists. As Corey and Tommy draw closer, Corey sees for sure the stairs are the ones they bought from a mobile home dealer in Beckley two years ago. And Corey starts to yell, “Hey, get off our property.” But then he notices Tommy is already right there at the foot of the steps, ready to jump with them. So Corey sighs, and then he goes on and does it with them, too. Corey knows he can do it better than them.
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