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Thirteen
- West Virginia University Press
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72 Thirteen There should be more to tell about Kentucky, at least the time when I wintered there, but there isn’t. Mostly, it was like West Virginia , just a little flatter. The people I met there weren’t cannibals. They weren’t even pig fuckers, like we used to yell across the river back in Crum. Mostly, they were like the people back on Black Hawk Ridge, families wound tight at the stem, sweating out the long summer days on the farms and trying to survive the cold, heavy days that marched across the winter in silent, gray, suffocating procession. There just isn’t anything to tell. I did very little that winter, my first winter out of West Virginia, except the kind of work that fades in memory like old photographs left in the sun. Mostly, we did whatever work we could to get ready for spring, and the planting, and the plowing and the haymaking when grass stood thick in the rolling fields. And every chance I got, I walked the road past Luther’s house, or drove the tractor by, shoving on the hand accelerator to make the old John Deere buck and snort as I drove slowly past the kitchen window in the distance. Once when I drove by Ruth Ella was on the back porch. She stood silently, her arms crossed in front of her, watching me without turning her head. I rolled past, embarrassed to gun the engine, and I knew her eyes followed me. They followed me until I was gone, through some apple trees and off into a field on the far side. But she never turned her head. What I remember most was the way her arms were folded. They were under her breasts. I could swear she was pushing her breasts up and I never realized until then how big they were. And then I drove by the house three times in a row and didn’t 73 see Ruth Ella at all. The windows were blank spaces in the wall and the kitchen light wasn’t on and the porch was black under the tilting roof. Three times, and Ruth Ella nowhere in sight. The fourth time I drove by it was the same, the house dark and cold in the early steely light of a gray day. I pulled out the hand clutch on the John Deere and sat on the vibrating old tractor, just watching. And then Luther stepped out from the corner of the house. He had a long, double-barreled shotgun cradled in his left arm. He wasn’t looking at me, but he wasn’t exactly looking away, either. Like he was looking behind me, trying to shove me on, get me out of there, make me move. Whatever he was trying to do, I didn’t want to ask him about it. I shoved in the clutch and the tractor lurched forward, sputtering. My hands were sweating on the wheel and I could feel Luther’s eyes on my back and I couldn’t help but grab a quick look behind me, just to make sure he had stayed where he was. He hadn’t. He had moved out into the yard, both hands on the shotgun now, shuffling slowly in the general direction of the John Deere. I shoved in the throttle, trying to do it casually, trying not to seem panicked. The old tractor belched and picked up speed and just when I thought I could slide through the whole thing without having to look Luther in the eye, the shotgun went off. I was driving a tractor, an old tractor, a tractor with a muffler system standing on top of the engine just in front of me, rusted through and through and dropping tiny bits of red soft rotten metal each time the engine belched. The rhythmic pounding of the engine escaped easily through the useless muffler, a noise that drove into me each long day in the fields. And in spite of the noise of the tractor, the thunderclap of the shotgun moved me hard against the steering wheel . . . [44.221.83.121] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:20 GMT) 74 We used the old flat-bottomed boat as a diving platform, leaping over the side and plunging down to the bottom of the shallow river to find pieces of coal rubbed shiny and dustless by the water and the sand. The coal was pretty—you could...