Fire Baton: Poems

Fancy Gap

Fancy Gap If you don’t make the grade, you don’t make Fancy. USE CAUTION in your approach to these curves! She’s fooled a lot of guys into thinking it’s easy. But with Fancy there’s a price to pay. Nine people paid it last year. If you have any doubts, ask a driver who knows Fancy: Fancy Gap Mountain descent, Route 52. —Carroll County Highway Commission and your Highway Safety Division of Virginia 1. The poster was a fixture where we weren’t welcome, as girls: tree forts, pool rooms, full-serve gas stations’ grease pits, paneled dens with burnt wood plaques. A guy would show he was no perv by having Fancy up, but what I learned from glimpsing it I wouldn’t have the nerve or words to say till more than one decade had passed, and the bare flesh between her frayed cut-offs and gingham halter wasn’t rare. Her shorts weren’t that low-rise. She wore tan hose. She had more on than fashion victims wear, 56 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 56 goosebumped, today. But her hillvampy pose on prop split-rails, rope-belted, veil of hair a gallows hood, a warning not to doze on 52, still managed to invoke something chthonic, older than their joke about the grade, the curves, and Fancy’s price. Childhood was health. To ripen meant to die, to drive on routes of bloody sacrifice each day of a dull life, or to untie the noose in my belt loops (against advice) and give my body up to some doomed guy just like the guys in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. The local pantheon’s selection was small, though, limited to a hard-shell, cracked, one-gendered Binity composed of sentimental Sonny goo and mad Dad bumper stickers; sports TV; Hank Williams, who had died while passing through; and, for the women, baby pageantry. Since those were all the icons of my youth no wonder that I felt I found more truth in the black canvas her photographer hung for the void Fancy arched against. And so I built the way I worshipped her. Remember my location: stymied, fenced, pre-Internet. Our Methodist pastor, hammily ignorant, had me convinced 57 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 57 I hadn’t read somewhere but had made up that story like a nerve-induced hiccup where Jesus, playing on the Sabbath, molds birds out of mud. Some neighbor snitch reports his breaking two commandments, mocks and scolds till pre-teen Jesus turns on him and snorts and Snitch just withers up. His body folds, completely moistureless. Around his corpse the mud-birds spring to life and fly away. If Pastor X had let my mind have play among the locked bookcases like the rest played spin-the-bottle, confirmation class might have been a mere hoop. I might now vest in long robes, an ordained or tenured ass who bore her elders’ code on every test. Instead I went and broke in, smashed the glass case doors that guarded the Apocryphal (ascribed to Thomas) Infancy Gospel. 2. Well, that’s a metaphor. I quit the church and lurked for fifteen years, until I heard a poet who had done the right research and guested on The Simpsons quote the birdand -withered-boy story. But the lurch X left me in? I’d filled it. Each potsherd of shiny glass and plastic that I stacked for Fancy’s altar subbed for what I lacked 58 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 58 in orthodox theology. Before I stood in Robert Pinsky’s audience, his take on Thomas serving to restore my hunger to learn Greek and confidence in my own mind, the impulse to adore hard-wired in me made random incidents seem Fancy’s work. A drummer I liked lost his arm, carwrecked. The jackleg preachers tossed that up as an example of how God resented hard rock. I though otherwise: it wasn’t personal, not Sweeney Todd, not hatred, but White Ladies, Lorelais, or Phantom Hitchhikers. As Ichabod Crane’s dread of one dark stretch of road implies, some places have toll-spirits. Fancy Gap had mine. She owned a torn wedge of the map of Appalachia: east to Charlottesville (where Jefferson took over), everything south of John Henry, north of Chapel Hill (a basketball Parnassus...