The Visit

The Visit by Howard Hull 13 I went back home last week. It was time. I had waited over a year. She died in April, and it is now August. He has stayed there by himself all of that time. I didn't really want to go, but I wanted to see him, to see how he was. It's a miserable place much of the time, hot and humid in the summer, and frigid in the winter. The drive up the long stretch of Interstate between Knoxville and Bristol was routine. Since my CB radio was broken, I rode the back door of an "eighteen wheeler" with the words HAGERSTOWN FURNITURE printed on the sides. He never got below sixtyfive . I turned off at the Abingdon exit, and started up Highway 19 to Bluefield* It is typical foothills country with bald knobs speckled with a tree here and there. Most of the low hills except for a few grazing sheep, and a house or two look as if they had been swept clean with a giant broom. They are old hills but have a timeless look about them. I stopped in Lebanon and had lunch at the Carriage House Restaurant. It had changed since the last time I had eaten there. It's now cafeteria style, and the food is not as good. By two o'clock in the afternoon I had reached Bluefield, and begun the tedious trip down Route 52, the last leg of the journey. It is winding and narrow, too narrow, as if the state begrudged every inch of asphalt added to it three years ago in an effort to make it tolerate the large trucks hauling coal up and down the mountains. It is no more than thirty-five miles from Bluefield to the homeplace near Welch, but it never fails to require at least an hour of driving time to get there. It is almost maddening . Each time I return, I find myself being washed in a shower of fine black mist rising from the surface of the dusty road, or worse yet, driving behind a native wearing a baseball style cap two sizes too large, cocked to one side as he chews and spits tobacco juice. He has never driven over forty miles per hour in his entire life, and never will. Down through Elkhorn, Kyle, Maitland, Big Four, Keystone, Kimball, Superior, Welch, and Junior Poca. Each beginning where the other leaves off, all with posted speed limits of twenty-five miles per hour. When I was growing up I never thought anything about a place being call Junior Poca, but now, it strikes me as being a very odd name for a town. Even in summer, the drive through McDowell County is not a pleasant one anymore. Although the hills and valleys are green, they are covered with rows of neglected nondescript coal company houses with an occasional mobile home surrounded by assorted dead automobiles. The few streams that run through the valley towns are still sluggish with coal dust. Low hanging tree limbs serve as flagpoles for paper and rags washed up when the streams were swollen by spring rains. It is a depressing sight. By three o'clock in the afternoon, I was almost there. As I left the two-lane highway, to drive up the dirt road that I had walked so many years ago, I looked toward the house, almost hidden by trees. I wondered if he would be on the porch. He was, but the place where my mother used to stand was empty. As I stepped from the shiny new car, I felt out of place. It was tobacco road, moved to West Virginia. Growing up, I had not loved it or hated it or anything else. I had just lived there because I didn't live anywhere else. Now it was different, I had lived somewhere else for thirty years. I had come to realize that I had grown up materially poor, but not spiritually or morally, and I guess that is what is important after all. As I walked up the weatherbeaten steps he smiled and said, "Slipped up on me—got here...