Sawmill Boys

Sawmill Boys Neva Hamilton "Who licked the red offof your candy?" my mother asked, knowing it would make me madder than I already was. Before I could respond, she stuck a pork chop in my mouth and offered me a smile as sweet as a tall glass of tea. Momma should have been a county cop: she knew exactly how far to go without crossing the line. I had just gotten off a long day at the newspaper, so I ignored my mother, chewed the chop and surveyed the sorry state of my life. I had a degree in teaching from Radford, but when I moved back home to far Southwest Virginia, there were no teachingjobs to be found. Unwilling to leave my mountains, I worked in the sewing factory in Coeburn until it shut down, then I worked in the furniture factory in St. Paul until I got laid off there. Now, with a resume crammed full of factoryjobs and no real teaching experience, I couldn't get any of the schools to consider me. So I got a job covering community events for the local rag. The job itself wasn't so bad. The paper came out Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, so, like my love life, there was a lot of empty space to fill. Reporting kept me busy, but it paid less than the factory jobs. Still, it looked better on a resume. Ihad tried to make thebest ofit, doing anything I could to maneuver myself into a promotion. I often hinted to the managing editor that I was ready to cover some hard news. There's only so much you can say about blood drives, beauty pageants and Eastern Star bake sales. But hard news is hard to come by in Appalachia's small towns. People here turn on the national news to hear the bad stuff. When it hits close to home, they would rather whisper about it in the parking lot of Food City or talk about it at supper, between bites of cornbread and soup beans. Tragedy and misery punctuate our dinnertime conversation, then disappear faster than a fart in the wind. Validating bad news in print gives it a foothold in reality, and one thing that doesn't set well in the coalfields is reality. "You want to talk about it?" Momma asked as she flipped a couple ofbiscuits onto my plate and drenched them in gravy. I forked another pork chop onto my plate and shrugged. "I finally got my first hard-hitting news assignment today," I said around a mouthful of biscuit. 47 "Well, that's what you've been anglin for all this time. So why do you look so sour?" "Josephine wants me to cover a public meeting tomorrow night about logging the Jefferson National Forest. Forest service officials, tree-huggers, loggers and who knows who else will be there. Josie figures there'll be some real fireworks." "Well, I can't think of any better news story for you to start with. What's the problem?" Rolling my eyes, I nibbled the ragged edges of the pork chop bone before I answered. "Momma, where there's loggers, there's bound to be sawmill boys." Sawmill boys. I liken them to trees because they possess two kinds of beauty. The first kind is in their natural freedom, the beauty of a tree standing tall with its brothers. But when the sawmill gets a hold on them, they develop a second kind of beauty, the kind that comes from being cut down, sawed up, and spit out. Rough cut, splintered, shaped for utility. A sawmill boy can take a 4X4 between the eyes that'll lay him out flat on his ass and then get backup to finish his workday. They all wear a strange cologne of diesel fuel, hydraulic fluid and cigarette smoke. Sawdust trails them like breadcrumbs for the lost. They're lean, with knotty arms and hard faces, but their eyes are dreamy. Wendell, my ex-husband, was a sawmill boy. I remember the first time I saw him, more than five years ago. He was coming out of the ABC store with a bottle of...