THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

A Death in the Mountains - 2002

312 2002 A Death in the Mountains It was only a matter of time. We all knew that. We walk down the wide, worn wooden stairs. No one speaks. There is no sound except the strange drum-like noise of our feet on the hollow steps. His wife grips the old man’s hand and he can feel the tremor of her body through her fingers. The lawyer walks in front of us, not looking back. He has done this before and he knows what to do, what not to say. We go outside and stand in the bright sunlight. Such light has always charged the old man with energy, as though his body were some sort of solar collector that gathers the charge of the light and pumps it into his heart. But not today. He wishes for dark, so others cannot see him. His only want is to hide, to step aside from the systems that trapped him. But he cannot. He is in the sunlight with his humiliation and there is nothing he can do about it. They have taken everything. The Pale Light of Sunset 313 I see his wife’s fingers tighten on his hand. Tears run slowly down her face and she turns away from me, not wanting me to see. But I have already seen. She is hurt deeply. More than that, she is lost. For two hours on that bright morning he sat in a high-ceilinged room in the courthouse, watching and listening as he was told who his friends were, and were not. That his land was gone. That his pride was gone. The judge stared at him, wondering, perhaps, how such an old man came to be here. But the judge knew. We all knew. And then it was over. The lawyer shakes our hands and we thank him. I have already paid him; the old man has nothing with which to pay. I have heard others say they were broke. What they really meant was, they didn’t have any cash. For the moment. But they had houses, cars, stocks, other things they could turn into something, if need be. Not the old man. He has nothing. They stand there after the lawyer is gone, holding hands in the sunlight , the wife crying softly. He wishes to be taken from the Earth. But there is no one to take him. Not yet. Hard winter comes. The sun rises on the first day of a new year. It rises as on any other day. There is nothing special about it. The old man awakens terrified in a bed that is not his, in a cabin that is not his. He watches the light grow outside the window and he longs Lee Maynard 314 for the dark. He is less afraid in the dark. In the dark, no one can find him, can see him. He is old, and he is closer to the day he was born than he has ever been—naked in thin light, weak, and not in control of anything. He has no job. He is too old for a job. He has nothing. The coal company has it all. Strange, he often thinks. He has never been in a mine. And yet the mine has always been in him. His wife still sleeps beside him. He hears the small noises she makes deep within her throat and he knows that she is dreaming bad things. She trusts him to care for her and he no longer knows where to hold that trust. He only knows what it weighs. He cannot lift it. If she falls ill, he cannot pay for her care. If she is hungry, he cannot give her food. He can give her only of his heart and mind and these are not things to keep her alive. God, God, he thinks, it isn’t supposed to be like this. Colder. And still. He watches as his wife moves silently about the cabin, looking for something to do, something that is right. She is wrapped in a thin housecoat, her gray hair hanging limply around her face, her arms wrapped around her waist. But there is nothing for her to do. The temperature is one degree below freezing. His wife cries silently, trying to hide her face from him. But he knows. It is only a matter of time. We all...