Mission

We remember what suits us, and there's almost no limit to what we can forget.

–David Shields

I'm trying to rescue Judy Stonemanfrom the deep black lake of my memory—her house perched on the side of a mountain,

the way it smelled like spring water, dogwood trees, that black dirt fragrance of the Blue Ridge forest, but another kind of smell, too, one that must have had to do with her people, the way they lived without running water or indoor plumbing, not unclean but the way clothes smell when they've been washed with homemade soap and hung on a line, the opposite of how fabric softener smells…

We're a story I can't understand—pieces of it are so lost they worry me.How did I get to know Judy Stoneman,

or even meet her in the first place and God knows where I found the courage to ask her out on a date, a wiry girl with a hard scowl to make you think she could whip you in a fair fight but then a smile, too, sunlight breaking through clouds in a thundershower, and mostly not much to say except if you asked a question about her family or what she thought of Wytheville or Galax or Fries, and then she'd speak her mind

and how did we say goodbye at the endof whatever it was we had betweenus? She seemed to belong to that mountain

that was on Route 94 between Ivanhoe and Fries, a road that must have been laid out by moonshiners who knew they could outdrive anybody on curves and switchbacks like that, twelve miles of keep-the-hell-out-of-here, though I remember Judy's mother as friendly enough, formal in that country-woman kind of way, looking me up and down while I waited in her kitchen for Judy to finish getting dressed.

I had the sense her father was waitingout of sight, had no use for boys like me.I felt brave, being out with Judy Stoneman,

but also wary like a stranger in a hostile town, except there was no town and the danger was invisible, and Judy treated me like she was willing to try to fall in love with me the way I was with her but she knew it wouldn't work and even if it did, how could she teach me what I'd need to know for her people to trust me, or even to respect me, and anyway she was joining the Air Force in a month or two, so what difference did it make?

One Saturday afternoon with spring rainfalling, we took a drive, watched a car careentoward us, swerve off the road, down the mountain

side out of sight—blink of an eye in which we might have died but now we were alive and maybe those men in that car were dead, but it was half funny it was so fast and crazy, and who were we to have lived through such a thing and we could have kept going, no one would have known the difference, but of course we didn't, I stopped, and we walked back to where they'd went down into the trees—

Climbing out the windows came four drunk menfrom a car braced on its side against a tree,but who I want to rescue is Judy Stonemanwhose house perched on the side of a mountain.