Chapter 6

　　Days later, when the blisters burst, the clear liquid inside ran down to her feet. For weeks, the fronts of her legs were open sores, so sensitive that she had trouble sleeping under blankets. But by then the temperature had fallen again, and if she kicked off the blankets, she froze.

　　* * *One day that winter, I went to a classmate's house to work on a school project. Carrie Mae Blankenship's father was an administrator at the McDowell County hospital, and her family lived in a solid brick house on McDowell Street. The living room was decorated in shades of orange and brown, and the plaid pattern of the curtains matched the couch upholstery. On the wall was a framed photo of Carrie Mae's older sister in her high school graduation gown. It was lit with its own tiny lamp, just like in a museum.

　　There was also a small plastic box on the wall near the living room door. A row of tiny numbers ran along the top, under a lever. Carrie Mae's father saw me studying the box while she was out of the room. "It's a thermostat," he told me. "You move the lever to make the house warmer or cooler."I thought he was pulling my leg, but he moved the lever, and I heard a muffled roar kick on in the basement.

　　"That's the furnace," he said.

　　He led me over to a vent in the floor and had me hold my hand above it and feel the warm air wafting upward. I didn't want to say anything to show how impressed I was, but for many nights afterward, I dreamed that we had a thermostat at 93 Little Hobart Street. I dreamed that all we had to do to fill our house with that warm, clean furnace heat was to move a lever.

　　ERMA DIED DURING the last hard snowfall at the end of our second winter in Welch. Dad said her liver simply gave out. Mom took the position that Erma drank herself to death. "It was suicide every bit as much as if she had stuck her head in the oven," Mom said. "only slower."Whatever the cause, Erma had made detailed preparations for the occasion of her death. For years she had read The Welch Daily News only for the obituaries and black-bordered memorial notices, clipping and saving her favorites. They provided inspiration for her own death announcement, which she'd worked and reworked. She had also written pages of instructions on how she wanted her funeral conducted. She had picked out all the hymns and prayers, chosen her favorite funeral home, ordered a lavender lace nightgown from JCPenney that she wanted to be buried in, and selected a two-toned lavender casket with shiny chrome handles from the mortician's catalog.

　　Erma's death brought out Mom's pious side. While we were waiting for the preacher, she took out her rosary and prayed for Erma's soul, which she feared was in jeopardy since, as she saw it, Erma had committed suicide. She also tried to make us kiss Erma's corpse. We flat out refused, but Mom went up in front of the mourners, genuflected with a grand sweep, and then kissed Erma's cheek so vigorously that you could hear the puckering sound throughout the chapel.

　　I was sitting next to Dad. It was the first time in my life I'd ever seen him wearing a necktie, which he always called a noose. His face was tight and closed, but I could tell he was distraught. More distraught than I'd ever seen him, which surprised me, because Erma had seemed to have some sort of an evil hold over Dad, and I thought he'd be relieved to be free of it.

　　As we walked home, Mom asked us kids if we had anything nice to say about Erma now that she had passed. We took a couple of steps in silence, then Lori said. "Ding-dong, the witch is dead."Brian and I started snickering. Dad wheeled around and gave Lori such a cold, angry look that I thought he might wallop her. "She was my mother, for God's sake," he said. He glared at us. "You kids. You make me ashamed. Do you hear me? Ashamed!"He turned down the street to Junior's bar. We all watched him go. "You're ashamed of us?" Lori called after him.

　　Dad just kept walking.

　　* * *Four days later, when Dad still hadn't come home, Mom sent me to go find him. "Why do I always have to get Dad?" I asked.

　　"Because he likes you the best," she said. "And he'll come home if you tell him to."The first step in tracking down Dad was going next door to the Freemans, who let us use their phone if we paid a dime, and calling Grandpa to ask if Dad was there. Grandpa said he had no idea where Dad was.

　　"When y'all gonna get your own telephone?" Mr. Freeman asked after I hung up.

　　"Mom disapproves of telephones," I said as I placed the dime on his coffee table. "She thinks they're an impersonal means of communication."My first stop, as always, was Junior's. It was the fanciest bar in Welch, with a picture window, a grill that served hamburgers and french fries, and a pinball machine.

　　"Hey!" one of the regulars called out when I walked in. "It's Rex's little girl. How ya doin', sweetheart?""I'm fine, thank you. Is my dad here?""Rex?" He turned to the man next to him. "Where's that old polecat Rex?""I seen him this morning at the Howdy House.""Honey, you look like you could use a rest," the bartender said. "Sit down and have a Coca-Cola on the house.""No, thank you. I've got kites to fly and fish to fry."I went to the Howdy House, which was a notch below Junior's. It was smaller and darker, and the only food it served was pickled eggs. The bartender told me Dad had gone to the Pub, which was a notch below the Howdy House梐lmost pitch black, with a sticky bar top and no food at all. There he was, in the midst of a few other regulars, telling one of his air force stories.

　　When Dad saw me, he stopped talking and looked at me the way he did every time I had to track him down in a bar. It was always an awkward moment for us both. I didn't want to be fetching him any more than he wanted his ragamuffin daughter summoning him home like a wayward schoolboy. He looked at me in this cold, strange way for just a moment, then broke into a hearty grin.

　　"Hey, Mountain Goat!" he shouted. "What the hell are you doing in this dive?""Mom says you have to come home," I said.

　　"She does, does she?" He ordered a Coca-Cola for me and another shot of whiskey for himself. I kept telling Dad it was time to go, but he kept putting me off and ordering more shots, as if he had to gulp a whole bunch of them down before he could face home. He staggered off to the bathroom, came back, ordered one for the road, slammed the shot glass down on the bar, and walked to the door. He lost his footing trying to open it and sprawled on the floor. I tried to help him up, but he kept falling over.

　　"Honey, you ain't getting him nowhere like that," a man behind me said. "Here, let me give you a lift home.""I'd appreciate that, sir," I said. "If it's not out of your way."Some of the other regulars helped the man and me load Dad into the bay of the man's pickup. We propped Dad up against a tool chest. It was late afternoon in early spring, the light was beginning to fade, and people on McDowell Street were locking up their shops and heading home. Dad started singing one of his favorite songs.

　　Swing low, sweet chariotComing for to carry me home.

　　Dad had a fine baritone, with strength and timbre and range, and despite being tanked, he sang that hymn like the roof-raiser it is.

　　I looked over Jordan, and what did I seeComing for to carry me home?

　　A band of angels coming after meComing for to carry me home.

　　I climbed in next to the driver. On the way home梬ith Dad still singing away in the back, extending the word. "low" so long he sounded like a mooing cow梩he man asked me about school. I told him I was studying hard because I wanted to become either a veterinarian or a geologist specializing in the Miocene period, when the mountains out west were formed. I was telling him how geodes were created from bubbles in lava when he interrupted me. "For the daughter of the town drunk, you sure got big plans," he said.

　　"Stop the truck," I said. "We can make it on our own from here.""Aw, now, I didn't mean nothing by that," he said. "And you know you ain't getting him home on your own."Still, he stopped. I opened the pickup's tailgate and tried to drag Dad out, but the man was right. I couldn't do it. So I climbed back in next to the driver, folded my arms across my chest, and stared straight ahead. When we reached 93 Little Hobart Street, he helped me pull Dad out.

　　"I know you took offense at what I said," the man told me. "Thing is, I meant it as a compliment."Maybe I should have thanked him, but I just waited until he drove off, and then I called Brian to help me get Dad up the hill and into the house.

　　* * *A couple of months after Erma died, Uncle Stanley fell asleep in the basement while reading comic books and smoking a cigarette. The big clapboard house burned to the ground, but Grandpa and Stanley got out alive, and they moved into a windowless two-room apartment in the basement of an old house around the hill. The drug dealers who'd lived there before had spray-painted curse words and psychedelic patterns on the walls and the ceiling pipes. The landlord didn't paint over them, and neither did Grandpa and Stanley.

　　Grandpa and Uncle Stanley did have a working bathroom, so every weekend some of us went over to take a bath. One time I was sitting next to Uncle Stanley on the couch in his room, watching Hee Haw and waiting for my turn in the tub. Grandpa was off at the Moose Lodge, where he spent the better part of every day; Lori was taking her bath; and Mom was at the table in Grandpa's room working on a crossword puzzle. I felt Stanley's hand creeping onto my thigh. I looked at him, but he was staring at the Hee Haw Honeys so intently that I couldn't be sure he was doing it on purpose, so I knocked his hand away without saying anything. A few minutes later, the hand came creeping back. I looked down and saw that Uncle Stanley's pants were unzipped and he was playing with himself. I felt like hitting him, but I was afraid I'd get in trouble the way Lori had after punching Erma, so I hurried out to Mom.

　　"Mom, Uncle Stanley is behaving inappropriately," I said.

　　"Oh, you're probably imagining it," she said.

　　"He groped me! And he's wanking off!"Mom cocked her head and looked concerned. "Poor Stanley," she said. "He's so lonely.""But it was gross!"Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. "Well, there you go," she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. "If you don't think you're hurt, then you aren't," she said. "So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you're stronger than that." She went back to her crossword puzzle.

　　After that, I refused to go back to Grandpa's. Being strong was fine, but the last thing I needed was Uncle Stanley thinking I was coming back for more of his fooling around. I did whatever it took to wash myself at Little Hobart Street. In the kitchen, we had an aluminum tub you could fit into if you pulled your legs up against your chest. By then the weather was warm enough to fill the tub with water from the tap under the house and bathe in the kitchen. After the bath, I crouched by the side of the tub and dipped my head in the water and washed my hair. But lugging all those buckets of water up to the house was hard work, and I would put off bathing until I was feeling pretty gamy.

　　* * *In the spring, the rains came, drenching the valley for days in sheets of falling water. The water ran down the hillside gullies, pulling rocks and small trees with it, and spilled across the roads, tearing off chunks of asphalt. It gushed into the creeks, which swelled up and turned a foaming light brown, like a chocolate milk shake. The creeks emptied into the Tug, which overflowed its banks and flooded the houses and stores along McDowell Street. Mud was four feet deep in some houses, and folks' pickups and mobile homes were swept away. Over in Buffalo Creek Hollow, a mine impoundment gave way, and a wave of black water thirty feet high killed 126 people. Mom said that this was how nature took her revenge on men who raped and pillaged the land, ruining nature's own drainage system by clear-cutting forests and strip-mining mountains.

　　Little Hobart Street was too high up in the hollow to get any flooding, but the rain washed parts of the road into the yards of the people who lived below us. The water also ate away some of the soil from around the pillars holding up our house, making it even more precarious. The hole in the kitchen ceiling widened, and then the ceiling on Brian and Maureen's side of the bedroom started leaking. Brian had the top bunk, and when it rained, he'd spread a tarp over himself to keep the dripping water off.

　　Everything in the house was damp. A fine green mold spread over the books and papers and paintings that were stacked so high and piled so deep you could hardly cross the room. Tiny mushrooms sprouted up in corners. The moisture ate away at the wooden stairs leading up to the house, and climbing them became a daily hazard. Mom fell through a rotted step and went tumbling down the hillside. She had bruises on her legs and arms for weeks. "My husband doesn't beat me," she'd say when anyone stared at them. "He just won't fix the stairs."The porch had also started to rot. Most of the banisters and railing had given way, and the floorboards had turned spongy and slick with mold and algae. It became a real problem when you had to go down under the house to use the toilet at night, and each of us had slipped and fallen off the porch at least once. It was a good ten feet to the ground.

　　"We have to do something about the porch situation," I told Mom. "It's getting downright dangerous to go to the bathroom at night." Besides, the toilet under the house was now totally unusable. It had overflowed, and you were better off digging yourself a hole in the hillside somewhere.

　　"You're right," Mom said. "Something has to be done."She bought a bucket. It was made of yellow plastic, and we kept it on the floor in the kitchen, and that was what we used whenever we had to go to the bathroom. When it filled up, some brave soul would carry it outside, dig a hole, and empty it.