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39 Eight He said his name was Lard and that he could drive cars, trucks, tractors and any manner of other farm machinery that had ever been invented and the son-of-a-bitch pulled me out of the water on the Kentucky side of the river. I still had my knife; it was still stuck down inside the back of my pants. But that’s all I had. By the time Lard pulled me out of the water and I could talk and think straight again my suitcase was gone into the lower murks of the Tug River. The brittle old cardboard probably came apart before it got a hundred yards downstream. I didn’t really care about the suitcase and the few clothes that were in it, but somewhere down there in that craptainted water the best book I had read in my whole life was soaking apart in liquid shit. I wasn’t exactly a small guy, but that didn’t seem to matter to Lard. He reached down, pulled me up out of the sucking mud and stood me on my feet. His arms were as big as my legs and he slipped one of them around me, snaked the knife out of the back of my pants and shoved it into his back pocket. Then he half carried, half dragged my filthy, dripping ass up to the road where he had parked his truck. It was an early ’forties model Chevrolet with a stake bed and Lard said it belonged to Eli Rumson, a farmer who lived in Bean Camp, off west in Kentucky at the edge of the mountains. Said he’d delivered a load of Eli’s farm produce to Huntington, back in West Virginia. And Eli had a room to spare and needed a farm hand and did I want the job? Was the least he could do, Lard said, for brushing me off into the river. I was headed somewhere, anywhere, but I sure as hell didn’t want it to be Kentucky. But there I stood, dripping muddy water onto the side of the road, and the only things I owned in the world were the 40 old sheath knife and the few sodden dollars I still had in my pocket. Eli had a room, Lard said. And Eli would feed me. The big fat bastard. He never told me Eli’s spare room was in the barn and that I had to share it with a rat as big as a fullgrowed dog. And he never told me about Ruth Ella. I took off my clothes, hung them out the window of the truck, and we left the river behind, left West Virginia hulking darkly in the cracked glass of the rear window. I sat twisted in the seat, watching the far ridges pull away behind us, knowing that I was leaving West Virginia exactly as I had entered. Naked, and wet. There was a pulling sensation in my gut, or maybe in my mind. Hard to tell. Like some sort of wire attached to a place inside me that I hadn’t known about, a wire that kept growing longer as we drove away from the river, a wire that is with me yet. Always attached to West Virginia. As time went by messages would come over this wire, bits of images, fragments of sound. In the middle of a steaming night on a wooden sleeping platform at the edge of the jungle in Honduras I came staring-eyed awake, seeing the barn on Long Neck’s farm and hearing the grinding squeal of the rusted hinges as the doors moved in the breeze. Once, stuck on the side of a mountain in Canada, I heard clearly the rush of wind through hardwood trees in autumn, the brittle leaves rustling like the soft rattle of dried gourds. I was five hundred feet above tree line at the time. The wire. Over the years, I would try to cut this wire. It couldn’t be done. Instead, I grew to wonder when others would know that it was there, wonder when I would be found out, when it would be known to anyone who cared to look that I was for damn sure a West Virginian, that I was born to the mountains and the ridges and the hollers, that the world would simply swallow me if I tried to escape. [3.17.150.163] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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