BACK IN BATTLE MOUNTAIN, we had stopped naming the Walls family cars, because they were all such heaps that Dad said they didn't deserve names. Mom said that when she was growing up on the ranch1, they never named the cattle, because they knew they would have to kill them. If we didn't name the car, we didn't feel as sad when we had to abandon it.
So the Piggy Bank Special was just the Oldsmobile, and we never said the name with any fondness or even pity. That Oldsmobile was a clunker from the moment we bought it. The first time it conked out, we were still an hour shy of the New Mexico border. Dad stuck his head under the hood2, tinkered with the engine, and got it going, but it broke down again a couple of hours later. Dad got it running. "More like limping," he said梑ut it never went any faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Also, the hood kept popping up, so we had to tie it down with a rope.
We steered3 clear of tollbooths by taking two-lane back roads, where we usually had a long line of drivers behind us, honking4 in exasperation5. When one of the Oldsmobile's windows stopped rolling up in Oklahoma, we taped garbage bags over it. We slept in the car every night, and after arriving late in Muskogee and parking on an empty downtown street, we woke up to find a bunch of people surrounding the car, little kids pressing their noses against the windows and grown-ups shaking their heads and grinning.
Mom waved at the crowd. "You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you," she said. With our garbage-bag-taped window, our roped-down hood, and the art supplies tied to the roof, we'd out-Okied the Okies. The thought gave her a fit of the giggles6.
I pulled a blanket over my head and refused to come out until we were beyond the Muskogee city limits. "Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy," Mom told me. "You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more."* * *It took us a month to cross the country. We might as well have been traveling in a Conestoga wagon8. Mom also kept insisting that we make scenic9 detours10 to broaden our horizons. We drove down to see the Alamo? "Davy Crockett and James Bowie got what was coming to them," Mom said. "for stealing this land from the Mexicans"梐nd over to Beaumont, where the oil rigs bobbed like giant birds. In Louisiana, Mom had us climb up on the roof of the car and pull down tufts of Spanish moss11 hanging from the tree branches.
After crossing the Mississippi, we swung north toward Kentucky, then east. Instead of the flat desert edged by craggy mountains, the land rolled and dipped like a sheet when you shook it clean. Finally, we entered hill country, climbing higher and deeper into the Appalachian Mountains, stopping from time to time to let the Oldsmobile catch its breath on the steep, twisting roads. It was November. The leaves had turned brown and were falling from the trees, and a cold mist shrouded12 the hillsides. There were streams and creeks13 everywhere, instead of the irrigation ditches you saw out west, and the air felt different. It was very still, heavier and thicker, and somehow darker. For some reason, it made us all grow quiet.
At dusk, we approached a bend where hand-painted signs advertising16 auto17 repairs and coal deliveries had been nailed to trees along the roadside. We rounded the bend and found ourselves in a deep valley. Wooden houses and small brick buildings lined the river and rose in uneven18 stacks on both hillsides.
"Welcome to Welch!" Mom declared.
We drove along dark, narrow streets, then stopped in front of a big, worn house. It was on the downhill side of the street, and we had to descend19 a set of stairs to get to it. As we clattered20 onto the porch, a woman opened the door. She was enormous, with pasty skin and about three chins. Bobby pins held back her lank7 gray hair, and a cigarette dangled21 from her mouth.
"Welcome home, son," she said and gave Dad a long hug. She turned to Mom. "Nice of you to let me see my grandchildren before I die," she said without a smile.
Without taking the cigarette out of her mouth, she gave us each a quick, stiff hug. Her cheek was tacky with sweat.
"Pleased to meet you, Grandma," I said.
"Don't call me Grandma," she snapped. "Name's Erma.""She don't like it none 'cause it makes her sound old," said a man who appeared beside her. He looked fragile, with short white hair that stood straight up. His voice was so mumbly I could hardly understand him. I didn't know if it was his accent or if maybe he wasn't wearing his dentures. "Name's Ted15, but you can call me Grandpa," he went on. "Don't bother me none being a grandpa."Behind Grandpa was a ruddy-faced man with a wild swirl22 of red hair pushing out from under his baseball cap, which had a Maytag logo. He wore a red-and-black-plaid coat but had no shirt on underneath23 it. He kept announcing over and over again that he was our uncle Stanley, and he wouldn't stop hugging and kissing me, as though I was someone he truly loved and hadn't seen in ages. You could smell the whiskey on his breath, and when he talked, you could see the pink ridges24 of his toothless gums.
I stared at Erma and Stanley and Grandpa, searching for some feature that reminded me of Dad, but I saw none. Maybe this was one of Dad's pranks26, I thought. Dad must have arranged for the weirdest28 people in town to pretend they were his family. In a few minutes he'd start laughing and tell us where his real parents lived, and we'd go there and a smiling woman with perfumed hair would welcome us and feed us steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat. I looked at Dad. He wasn't smiling, and he kept pulling at the skin of his neck as if he were itchy.
* * *We followed Erma and Stanley and Grandpa inside. It was cold in the house, and the air smelled of mold and cigarettes and unwashed laundry. We huddled29 around a potbellied cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the living room and held out our hands to warm them. Erma pulled a bottle of whiskey from the pocket of her housedress, and Dad looked happy for the first time since we'd left Phoenix30.
Erma ushered31 us into the kitchen, where she was fixing dinner. A bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting harsh light on the yellowed walls, which were coated with a thin film of grease. Erma stuck a curved steel handle into an iron disk on top of an old coal cooking stove, lifted it, and with her other hand grabbed a poker33 from the wall and jabbed at the hot orange coals inside. She stirred a potful of green beans stewing34 in fatback and poured in a big handful of salt. Then she set a tray of Pillsbury biscuits on the kitchen table and ladled out a plate of the beans for each of us kids.
The beans were so overcooked that they fell apart when I stuck my fork in them and so salty that I could barely force myself to swallow. I pinched my nose closed, which was the way Mom had taught us to get down things that had gone a little bit rotten. Erma saw me and slapped my hand away. "Beggars can't be choosers," she said.
There were three bedrooms upstairs, Erma said, but no one had been to the second floor in nigh on ten years, because the floorboards were rotted through. Uncle Stanley volunteered to give us his room in the basement and sleep on a cot in the foyer while we were there. "We'll only be staying a few days," Dad said. "until we find a place of our own."After dinner, Mom and us kids went down into the basement. It was a big dank room, with cinder-block walls and a green linoleum35 floor. There was another coal stove, a bed, a pullout couch where Mom and Dad could sleep, and a chest of drawers painted fire-engine red. It held hundreds of dog-eared comic books桳ittle Lulu, Richie Rich, Beetle36 Bailey, Archie and Jughead梩hat Uncle Stanley had collected over the years. Under the chest of drawers were jugs37 of genuine moonshine.
We kids climbed into Stanley's bed. To make it less crowded, Lori and I lay down with our heads at one end, and Brian and Maureen lay down with theirs at the other. Brian's feet were in my face, so I grabbed him by the ankles and started chewing on his toes. He laughed and kicked and started chewing on my toes in retaliation38, and that made me laugh. We heard a loud thunk thunk thunk from above.
"What's that?" Lori asked.
"Maybe the roaches here are bigger than in Phoenix," Brian said. We all laughed and heard the thunk thunk thunk again. Mom went upstairs to investigate, then came down and explained that Erma was hitting the floor with a broom handle to signal that we were making too much noise. "She asked that you kids don't laugh while you're in her house," Mom said. "It gets on her nerves.""I don't think Erma likes us very much," I said.
"She's just an old woman who's had a tough life," Mom said.
"They're all sort of weird27," Lori said.
"We'll adapt," Mom said.
Or move on, I thought.
THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday. When we got up, Uncle Stanley was leaning against the refrigerator and staring intently at the radio. It made strange noises, not static but a combination of shrieking39 and wailing41. "That there's tongues," he said. "Only the Lord can understand it."The preacher started talking in actual English, more or less. He spoke42 with a hillbilly accent so thick it was almost as hard to understand as the tongues. He asked all them good folk out there who'd been helped by this here channeling of the Lord's spirit to send contributions. Dad came into the kitchen and listened. "It's the sort of soul-curdling voodoo," he said, "that turned me into an atheist43."Later that day, we got into the Oldsmobile, and Mom and Dad took us for a tour of the town. Welch was surrounded on all sides by such steep mountains that you felt like you were looking up from the bottom of a bowl. Dad said the hills around Welch were too steep for cultivating much of anything. Couldn't raise a decent herd44 of sheep or cattle, couldn't even till crops except maybe to feed your family. So this part of the world was left pretty much alone until around the turn of the century, when robber barons45 from the North laid a track into the area and brought in cheap labor46 to dig out the huge fields of coal.
We stopped under a railroad bridge and got out of the car to admire the river that ran through the town. It moved sluggishly47, with barely a ripple48. The river's name, Dad said, was the Tug49. "Maybe in the summer we can go fishing and swimming," I said. Dad shook his head. The county had no sewer50 system, he explained, so when people flushed their johns, the discharge went straight into the Tug. Sometimes the river flooded and the water rose as high as the treetops. Dad pointed51 to the toilet paper up in the branches along the river's banks. The Tug, Dad said, had the highest level of fecal bacteria of any river in North America.
"What's fecal?" I asked.
Dad watched the river. "Shit," he said.
Dad led us along the main road through town. It was narrow, with old brick buildings crowding in close on both sides. The stores, the signs, the sidewalks, the cars were all covered with a film of black coal dust, giving the town an almost monochromatic52 look, like an old hand-tinted photograph. Welch was shabby and worn out, but you could tell it had once been a place on its way up. On a hill stood a grand limestone53 courthouse with a big clock tower. Across from it was a handsome bank with arched windows and a wrought-iron door.
You could also tell that the people of Welch were still trying to maintain some pride of place. A sign near the town's only stoplight announced that Welch was the county seat of McDowell County and that for years, more coal had been mined in McDowell County than any comparable spot in the world. Next to it, another sign boasted that Welch had the largest outdoor municipal parking lot in North America.
But the cheerful advertisements painted on the sides of buildings like the Tic Toc diner and the Pocahontas movie theater were faded and nearly illegible54. Dad said bad times had come in the fifties. They hit hard and stayed. President John F. Kennedy had come to Welch not long after he was elected and personally handed out the nation's first food stamps here on McDowell Street, to prove his point that梩hough ordinary Americans might find it hard to believe梥tarvation-level poverty existed right in their own country.
The road through Welch, Dad told us, led only farther up into the wet, forbidding mountains and on to other dying coal towns. Few strangers passed through Welch these days, and almost all who did came to inflict56 one form of misery57 or another梩o lay off workers, to shut down a mine, to foreclose on someone's house, to compete for the rare job opening. The townspeople didn't care much for outsiders.
The streets were mostly silent and deserted58 that morning, but every now and then we'd pass a woman wearing curlers or a group of men in T-shirts with motor-oil decals, loitering in a doorway59. I tried to catch their eyes, to give them a nod and a smile to let them know we had only good intentions, but they never nodded or spoke a word or even glanced our way. As soon as we passed, however, I could feel eyes following us up the street.
Dad had brought Mom to Welch for a brief visit fifteen years earlier, right after they were married. "Gosh, things have gone downhill a little bit since we were here last," she said.
Dad gave a short snort of a laugh. He looked at her like he was about to say What the hell did I tell you? Instead he just shook his head.
Suddenly, Mom grinned broadly. "I'll bet there aren't any other artists living in Welch," she said. "I won't have any competition. My career could really take off here."THE NEXT DAY MOM took Brian and me to Welch Elementary, near the outskirts60 of town. She marched confidently into the principal's office with us in tow and informed him that he would have the pleasure of enrolling61 two of the brightest, most creative children in America in his school.
The principal looked at Mom over his black-rimmed glasses but remained seated behind his desk. Mom explained that we'd left Phoenix in a teensy bit of a hurry, you know how that goes, and unfortunately, in all the commotion63, she forgot to pack stuff like school records and birth certificates.
"But you can take my word for it that Jeannette and Brian are exceptionally bright, even gifted." She smiled at him.
The principal looked at Brian and me, with our unwashed hair and our thin desert clothes. His face took on a sour, skeptical64 expression. He focused on me, pushed his glasses up his nose, and said something that sounded like. "Wuts et tahm sebm?""Excuse me?" I said.
"Et tahm sebm!" he said louder.
I was completely bewildered. I looked at Mom.
"She doesn't understand your accent," Mom told the principal. He frowned. Mom turned to me. "He's asking you what's eight times seven.""Oh!" I shouted. "Fifty-six! Eight times seven is fifty-six!" I started spouting65 out all sorts of mathematical equations.
The principal looked at me blankly.
"He can't make out what you're saying," Mom told me. "Try to talk slowly."The principal asked me a few more questions I couldn't understand. With Mom translating, I gave answers that he couldn't understand. Then he asked Brian some questions, and they couldn't understand each other, either.
The principal decided66 that Brian and I were both a bit slow and had speech impediments that made it difficult for others to understand us. He placed us both in special classes for students with learning disabilities.
* * *"You'll have to impress them with your intelligence," Mom said as Brian and I headed off to school the next day. "Don't be afraid to be smarter than they are."It had rained the night before our first day of school. When Brian and I stepped off the bus at Welch Elementary, our shoes got soaked in the water that filled the muddy tire ruts left by the school buses. I looked around for the playground equipment, figuring I could win some new friends with the fierce tetherball skills I'd picked up at Emerson, but I didn't see a single seesaw67 or jungle gym, not to mention any tetherball poles.
It had been cold ever since we arrived in Welch. The day before, Mom had unpacked68 the thrift69-shop coats she'd bought us in Phoenix. When I'd pointed out that all the buttons had been torn from mine, she said that minor71 flaw was more than offset72 by the fact that the coat was imported from France and made of 100-percent lamb's wool. As we waited for the opening bell, I stood with Brian at the edge of the playground, my arms crossed to keep my coat closed. The other kids stared at us, whispering among themselves, but they also kept their distance, as if they hadn't decided whether we were predators73 or prey74. I had thought West Virginia was all white hillbillies, so I was surprised by how many black kids there were. I saw one tall black girl with a strong jaw75 and almond eyes smiling at me. I nodded and smiled back, then I realized there was something malicious76 in her smile. I locked my arms tighter across my chest.
I was in the fifth grade, so my day was divided into periods, with different teachers and classrooms for each. For the first period, I had West Virginia history. History was one of my favorite subjects. I was coiled and ready to raise my hand as soon as the teacher asked a question I could answer, but he stood at the front of the room next to a map of West Virginia, with all fifty-five counties outlined, and spent the entire class pointing to counties and asking students to identify them. In my second period, we passed the hour watching a film of the football game that Welch High had played several days earlier. Neither of those teachers introduced me to the class; they seemed as uncertain as the kids about how to act around a stranger.
My next class was English for students with learning disabilities. Miss Caparossi started out by informing the class that it might surprise them to learn some people in this world thought they were better than other people. "They're convinced they're so special that they don't need to follow the rules other people have to follow," she said. "like presenting their school records when they enroll62 in a new school." She looked at me and raised her eyebrows77 meaningfully. "Who thinks that's not fair?" she asked the class.
All the kids except me raised their hands.
"I see our new student doesn't agree," she said. "Perhaps you'd like to explain yourself?"I was sitting in the second-to-last row. The students in front of me swiveled their heads around to stare. I decided to dazzle them with the answer from the Ergo Game.
"Insufficient78 information to draw a conclusion," I said.
"Oh, really?" Miss Caparossi asked. "Is that what they say in a big city like Phoenix?" She pronounced it. "Feeeeenix." Then she turned to the class and said in a high, mocking voice. "Insufficient information to draw a conclusion."The class laughed violently.
I felt something sharp and painful between my shoulder blades and turned around. The tall black girl with the almond eyes was sitting at the desk behind me. Holding up the sharp pencil she had jabbed into my back, she smiled the same malicious smile I'd seen in the playground.
* * *I looked for Brian in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but fourth-graders were on a different schedule, so I sat by myself and bit into the sandwich Erma had made for me that morning. It was tasteless and greasy79. I pulled apart the two slices of Wonder bread. Inside was a thin smear80 of lard. That was it. No meat, no cheese, not even a slice of pickle81. Even so, I chewed slowly, staring intently at my bite marks in the bread to delay as long as possible the moment I would have to leave the cafeteria and go out to the playground. When I was the last student left in the cafeteria, the janitor82, who was putting the chairs on the tabletops so the floor could be mopped, told me it was time to go.
Outside, a thin mist hung in the still air. I pulled the sides of my lamb's wool coat together. Three black girls, led by the one with the almond eyes, started moving toward me as soon as they saw me. A half-dozen other girls followed. Within moments, I was surrounded.
"You think you better than us?" the tall girl asked.
"No," I said. "I think we're all equal.""You think you as good as me?" She punched at me. When, instead of raising my hands in defense83, I kept clutching my coat closed, she realized it had no buttons. "This girl ain't got no buttons on her coat!" she shouted. That seemed to give her the license84 she needed. She pushed me in the chest, and I fell backward. I tried to get up, but all three girls started kicking me. I rolled away into a puddle85, shouting for them to quit and hitting back at the feet coming at me from all sides. The other girls had closed in a circle around us and none of the teachers could see what was going on. There was no stopping those girls until they'd had their fill.
WHEN WE ALL GOT home that afternoon, Mom and Dad were eager to hear about our first day.
"It was good," I said. I didn't want to tell Mom the truth. I was in no mood to hear one of her lectures about the power of positive thinking.
"See?" she said. "I told you you'd fit right in."Brian shrugged86 off Mom and Dad's questions, and Lori didn't want to talk about her day at all.
"How were the other kids?" I asked her later.
"Okay," she said, but she turned away, and that was the end of the conversation.
* * *The bullying87 continued every day for weeks. The tall girl, whose name was Dinitia Hewitt, watched me with her smile while we all waited on the asphalt playground for classes to start. At lunch, I ate my lard sandwiches with paralytic88 slowness, but sooner or later, the janitor started putting the chairs up on the tables. I walked outside trying to hold my head high, and Dinitia and her gang surrounded me and it began.
As we fought, they called me poor and ugly and dirty, and it was hard to argue the point. I had three dresses to my name, all hand-me-downs or from a thrift store, which meant each week I had to wear two of them twice. They were so worn from countless89 washings that the threads were beginning to separate. We were also always dirty. Not dry-dirty like we'd been in the desert, but grimy-dirty and smudged with oily dust from the coal-burning stove. Erma allowed us only one bath a week in four inches of water that had been heated on the kitchen stove and that all of us kids had to share.
I thought of discussing the fighting with Dad, but I didn't want to sound like a whiner90. Also, he'd rarely been sober since we had arrived in Welch, and I was afraid that if I told him, he'd show up at school snockered and make things even worse.
I did try to talk to Mom. I couldn't bring myself to tell her about the beatings, fearing that if I did, she'd try to butt70 in and she'd also only make things worse. I did say that these three black girls were giving me a hard time because we were so poor. Mom told me I should tell them there was nothing wrong with being poor, that Abraham Lincoln, the greatest president this country had ever seen, came from a dirt-poor family. She also said I should tell them Martin Luther King, Jr., would be ashamed of their behavior. Even though I knew these high-minded arguments would get me nowhere, I tried them anyway桵artin Luther King would be ashamed!梐nd they made the three girls shriek40 with laughter as they pushed me to the ground.
Lying in Stanley's bed at night with Lori, Brian, and Maureen, I concocted91 revenge scenarios92. I imagined myself like Dad in his air force days, whupping the entire lot of them. After school, I'd go out to the woodpile next to the basement and practice karate93 chops and dropkicks on the kindling94 while laying down some pretty wicked curse words. But I also kept thinking about Dinitia, trying to make sense of her. I hoped for a while to befriend her. I'd seen Dinitia smile a few times with genuine warmth, and it transformed her face. With a smile like that, she had to have some good in her, but I couldn't figure out how to get her to shine it my way.
* * *About a month after I'd started school, I was walking up some steps to a park at the top of the hill when I heard a low, furious barking coming from the other side of the World War I memorial. I ran up the stairs and saw a big, lathered-up mongrel cornering a little black kid of about five or six against the monument. The kid kept giving kicks at the dog as it barked and lunged at him. The kid was looking over at the tree line on the far side of the park, and I could tell he was calculating the chances of making it over there.
"Don't run!" I shouted.
The boy looked up at me. So did the dog, and in that instant, the kid took off in a hopeless dash for the trees. The dog bounded after him, barking, then caught up with him and snapped at his legs.
Now, there are mad dogs and wild dogs and killer95 dogs, and any one of them would go for your throat and hold on until you or it was dead, but I could tell this dog was not truly bad. Instead of tearing into the kid, it was having fun terrifying him, growling96 and pulling on his pant leg but doing no real damage. It was just a mutt who had been kicked around too much and was happy to find a creature who was afraid of it.
I picked up a stick and raced toward them. "Go on, now!" I shouted at the dog. When I raised the stick, it whimpered and slunk off.
The dog's teeth had not broken the boy's skin, but his pant leg was torn, and he was trembling as if he had palsy. I offered to take him home, and I ended up carrying him piggyback. He was feather-light. I couldn't get a word out of him except the most minimal97 directions. "up there,". "that way"梚n a voice I could hardly hear.
The houses in the neighborhood were old but freshly painted, some in bright colors like lavender or kelly green. "This here," the boy whispered when we came to a house with blue shutters98. It had a neat yard but was so small that dwarves99 could have lived there. When I put the kid down, he dashed up the steps and through the door. I turned to go.
Dinitia Hewitt was standing100 on the porch across the street, looking at me curiously101.
* * *The next day when I went out to the playground after lunch, the gang of girls started toward me, but Dinitia hung back. Without their leader, the others lost their sense of purpose and stopped short of me. The following week, Dinitia asked me for help on an English assignment. She never said she was sorry for the bullying, or even mentioned it, but she thanked me for bringing her neighbor home that night, and I figured that her request for help was as close to an apology as I would get. Erma had made it clear how she felt about black people, so instead of inviting102 Dinitia to our house to work on her assignment, I suggested that on the upcoming Saturday, I'd go to hers.
That day I was leaving the house at the same time as Uncle Stanley. He never had the wherewithal to learn to drive, but someone from the appliance store where he worked was picking him up. He asked if I wanted a ride, too. When I told him where I was headed, he frowned. "That's Niggerville," he said. "What you going there for?"Stanley didn't want his friend to drive me there, so I walked. When I got back home later in the afternoon, the house was empty except for Erma, who never set foot outside. She stood in the kitchen, stirring a pot of green beans and taking swigs from the bottle of hooch in her pocket.
"So, how was Niggerville?" she asked.
Erma was always going on about. "the niggers." Her and Grandpa's house was on Court Street, on the edge of the black neighborhood. It galled103 her when they started moving into that section of town, and she always said it was their fault that Welch had gone downhill. When you were sitting in the living room, where Erma always kept the shades drawn104, you could hear groups of black people walking into town, talking and laughing. "Goddamn niggers," Erma always muttered. "The reason I have not gone out of this house in fifteen years is because I do not want to see or be seen by a nigger." Mom and Dad had always forbidden us to use that word. It was much worse than any curse word, they told us. But since Erma was my grandmother, I never said anything when she used it.
Erma kept stirring the beans. "Keep this up and people are going to think you're a nigger lover," she said.
She gave me a serious look, as if imparting a meaningful life lesson I should ponder and absorb. She unscrewed the cap from her bottle of hooch and took a long, contemplative swallow.
As I watched her drinking, I felt this pressure building in my chest and I had to let it out. "You're not supposed to use that word," I said.
Erma's face went slack with astonishment105.
"Mom says they're just like us," I continued. "except they have different complexions106."Erma glared at me. I thought she was going to backhand me, but instead she said, "You ungrateful little shit. I'll be damned if you're eating my food tonight. Get your worthless ass55 down to the basement."* * *Lori gave me a hug when she heard I'd told off Erma. Mom was upset, though. "We may not agree with all of Erma's views," she said, "but we have to remember that as long as we're her guests, we have to be polite."That didn't seem like Mom. She and Dad happily railed against anyone they disliked or disrespected: Standard Oil executives, J. Edgar Hoover, and especially snobs107 and racists. They'd always encouraged us to be outspoken108 about our opinions. Now we were supposed to bite our tongues. But she was right; Erma would boot us. Situations like these, I realized, were what turned people into hypocrites.
"I hate Erma," I told Mom.
"You have to show compassion109 for her," Mom said. Erma's parents had died when she was young, Mom explained, and she had been shipped off to one relative after another who had treated her like a servant. Scrubbing clothes on a washboard until her knuckles110 bled梩hat was the preeminent111 memory of Erma's childhood. The best thing Grandpa did for her when they got married was buy her an electric washing machine, but whatever joy it had once given her was long gone.
"Erma can't let go of her misery," Mom said. "It's all she knows." She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. "Everyone has something good about them," she said. "You have to find the redeeming112 quality and love the person for that.""Oh yeah?" I said. "How about Hitler? What was his redeeming quality?""Hitler loved dogs," Mom said without hesitation113.
IN LATE WINTER, Mom and Dad decided to drive the Oldsmobile back to Phoenix. They said they were going to fetch our bikes and all the other stuff we'd had to leave behind, pick up copies of our school records, and see if they could rescue Mom's fruitwood archery set from the irrigation ditch alongside the road to the Grand Canyon114. We kids were to remain in Welch. Since Lori was the oldest, Mom and Dad said she was in charge. Of course, we were all answerable to Erma.
They left one morning during a thaw115. I could tell by the high color in Mom's cheeks that she was excited about the prospect116 of an adventure. Dad was also clearly itching117 to get out of Welch. He had not found a job, and we were dependent on Erma for everything. Lori had suggested that Dad go to work in the mines, but he said the mines were controlled by the unions, and the unions were controlled by the mob, and the mob had blackballed him for investigating corruption118 in the electricians' union back in Phoenix. Another reason for him to return to Phoenix was to gather his research on corruption, because the only way he could get a job in the mines was by helping119 reform the United Mine Workers of America.
I wished we were all going together. I wanted to be back in Phoenix, sitting under the orange trees behind our adobe120 house, riding my bike to the library, eating free bananas in a school where the teachers thought I was smart. I wanted to feel the desert sun on my face and breathe in the dry desert air and climb the steep rock mountains while Dad led us on one of the long hikes that he called geological survey expeditions.
I asked if we could all go, but Dad said he and Mom were making a quick trip, strictly121 business, and we kids would only get in the way. Besides, he couldn't go taking us out of school in the middle of the year. I pointed out that it had never bothered him before. Welch wasn't like those other places we had lived, he said. There were rules that had to be followed, and people didn't take it kindly122 when you flouted123 them.
"Do you think they'll come back?" Brian asked as Mom and Dad drove off.
"Of course," I said, though I had been wondering the same thing. These days we seemed more of an inconvenience than we used to be. Lori was already a teenager, and in a couple of years, Brian and I would be, too. They couldn't toss us into the back of a U-Haul or put us in cardboard boxes at night.
Brian and I started running after the Oldsmobile. Mom turned once and waved, and Dad stuck his hand out the window. We followed them all the way down Court Street, where they picked up speed and then turned the corner. I had to believe they'd come back, I told myself. If I didn't believe, then they might not return. They might leave us forever.
* * *After Mom and Dad left, Erma became even more cantankerous124. If she didn't like the look on our faces, she would hit us on the head with a serving spoon. Once she pulled out a framed photograph of her father and told us he was the only person who had ever loved her. She talked on and on about how much she'd suffered as an orphan125 at the hands of her aunts and uncles who hadn't treated her half as kindly as she was treating us.
About a week after Mom and Dad left, we kids were all sitting in Erma's living room watching TV. Stanley was sleeping in the foyer. Erma, who'd been drinking since before breakfast, told Brian that his britches needed mending. He started to take them off, but Erma said she didn't want him running around the house in his skivvies or with a towel wrapped around him looking like he was wearing a goddamn dress. It would be easier for her to mend the britches while he was still wearing them. She ordered him to follow her into Grandpa's bedroom, where she kept her sewing kit32.
They'd been gone for a minute or two when I heard Brian weakly protesting. I went into Grandpa's bedroom and saw Erma kneeling on the floor in front of Brian, grabbing at the crotch of his pants, squeezing and kneading while mumbling126 to herself and telling Brian to hold still, goddammit. Brian, his cheeks wet with tears, was holding his hands protectively between his legs.
"Erma, you leave him alone!" I shouted.
Erma, still on her knees, twisted around and glared at me. "Why, you little bitch!" she said.
Lori heard the commotion and came running. I told Lori that Erma was touching127 Brian in a way she ought not to be. Erma said she was merely mending Brian's inseam and that she shouldn't have to defend herself against some lying little whore's accusations128.
"I know what I saw," I said. "She's a pervert129!"Erma reached over to slap me, but Lori caught her hand. "Let's all calm down," Lori said in the same voice she used when Mom and Dad got carried away, arguing. "Everybody. Calm down."Erma jerked her hand out of Lori's grasp and slapped her so hard that Lori's glasses went flying across the room. Lori, who had turned thirteen, slapped her back. Erma hit Lori again, and this time Lori struck Erma a blow in the jaw. Then they flew at each other, tussling and flailing130 and pulling hair, locked together, with Brian and me cheering on Lori until we woke up Uncle Stanley, who staggered into the room and pushed them apart.
Erma relegated131 us to the basement after that. A door in the basement led directly outside, so we never went upstairs. We weren't even allowed to use Erma's bathroom, which meant we either had to wait for school or go outside after dark. Uncle Stanley sometimes sneaked132 down beans he'd boiled for us, but he was afraid if he stayed talking, Erma would think he'd taken our side and get mad at him, too.
The following week, a storm hit. The temperature dropped, and a foot of snow fell on Welch. Erma wouldn't let us use any coal梥he said we didn't know how to operate the stove and would burn the house down梐nd it was so cold in the basement that Lori, Brian, Maureen, and I were glad we all shared one bed. As soon as we got home from school, we'd climb under the covers with our clothes on and do our homework there.
We were in bed the night Mom and Dad came back. We didn't hear the sound of the car pulling up. All we heard was the front door opening upstairs, then Mom and Dad's voices and Erma beginning the long narrative133 of her grievances134 against us. That was followed by the sound of Dad stomping135 down the stairs into the basement, furious at all of us, me for back-talking Erma and making wild accusations, and Lori even more for daring to strike her own grandmother, and Brian for being such a pussy136 and starting the whole thing. I thought Dad would come around to our side once he'd heard what had happened, and I tried to explain.
"I don't care what happened!" he yelled.
"But we were just protecting ourselves," I said.
"Brian's a man, he can take it," he said. "I don't want to hear another word of this. Do you hear me?" He was shaking his head, but wildly, almost as if he thought he could keep out the sound of my voice. He wouldn't even look at me.
After Dad had gone back upstairs to tie into Erma's hooch and we kids were all in bed, Brian bit my toe to try to make me laugh, but I kicked him away. We all lay there in the silent darkness.
"Dad was really weird," I said, because someone had to say it.
"You'd be weird, too, if Erma was your mom," Lori said.
"Do you think she ever did something to Dad like what she did to Brian?" I asked.
No one said a thing.
It was gross and creepy to think about, but it would explain a lot. Why Dad left home as soon as he could. Why he drank so much and why he got so angry. Why he never wanted to visit Welch when we were younger. Why he at first refused to come to West Virginia with us and only at the last possible moment overcame his reluctance137 and jumped into the car. Why he was shaking his head so hard, almost like he wanted to put his hands over his ears, when I tried to explain what Erma had been doing to Brian.
"Don't think about things like that," Lori told me. "It'll make you crazy."And so I put it out of my mind.
MOM AND DAD TOLD us how they'd made it to Phoenix only to find that Mom's laundry-on-the-clothesline ploy138 hadn't kept out intruders. Our house on North Third Street had been looted. Pretty much everything was gone, including, of course, our bikes. Mom and Dad had rented a trailer to carry back what little was left桵om said those foolish thieves had overlooked some good stuff, such as a pair of Grandma Smith's riding breeches from the thirties that were of the highest quality梑ut the Oldsmobile's engine had seized up in Nashville, and they'd had to abandon it along with the trailer and Grandma Smith's riding breeches and take the bus the rest of the way to Welch.
I thought that once Mom and Dad returned, they'd be able to make peace with Erma. But she said she could never forgive us kids and didn't want us in her house any longer, even if we stayed in the basement and kept as quiet as church mice. We were banished139. That was the word Dad used. "You did wrong," he said, "and now we've all been banished.""This isn't exactly the Garden of Eden," Lori said.
I was more upset about the bike than I was about Erma banishing140 us. "Why don't we just move back to Phoenix?" I asked Mom.
"We've already been there," she said. "And there are all sorts of opportunities here that we don't even know about."She and Dad set out to find us a new place to live. The cheapest rental141 in Welch was an apartment over a diner on McDowell Street that cost seventy-five dollars a month, which was out of our price range. Also, Mom and Dad wanted outdoor space we could call our own, so they decided to buy. Since we had no money for a down payment and no steady income, our options were pretty limited, but within a couple of days, Mom and Dad told us they had found a house we could afford. "It's not exactly palatial142, so there's going to be a lot of togetherness," Mom said. "And it's on the rustic143 side.""How rustic?" Lori asked.
Mom paused. I could see her debating how to phrase her answer. "It doesn't have indoor plumbing," she said.
* * *Dad was still looking for a car to replace the Olds梠ur budget was in the high two figures梥o that weekend we all hiked over for our first look at the new place. We walked down the valley through the center of town and around a mountainside, past the small, tidy brick houses put up after the mines were unionized. We crossed a creek14 that fed into the Tug River and started up a barely paved one-lane road called Little Hobart Street. It climbed through several switchbacks and, for a stretch, rose at an angle so steep you had to walk on your toes; if you tried walking flatfooted, you stretched your calves144 till they hurt.
The houses up here were shabbier than the brick houses lower down in the valley. They were made of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging145 roofs, rusted-out gutters146, and balding tar25 paper or asphalt shingles147 slowly but surely parting from the underwall. In almost every yard, a mutt or two was chained to a tree or to a clothesline post, and they barked furiously as we walked by. Like most houses in Welch, these were heated by coal. The more prosperous families had coal sheds; the poorer ones left their coal in a pile out front. The porches were every bit as furnished as the insides of most houses, with rust-stained refrigerators, folding card tables, hook rugs, couches or car seats for serious porch-sitting, and maybe a battered148 armoire with a hole cut in the side so the cat would have a cozy149 place to sleep.
We followed the road almost to the end, where Dad pointed up at our new house.
"Well, kids, welcome to Ninety-three Little Hobart Street!" Mom said. "Welcome to home sweet home."We all stared. The house was a dinky thing perched high up off the road on a hillside so steep that only the back of the house rested on the ground. The front, including a drooping150 porch, jutted151 precariously152 into the air, supported by tall, spindly cinder-block pillars. It had been painted white a long time ago, but the paint, where it hadn't peeled off altogether, had turned a dismal153 gray.
"It's good we raised you young 'uns to be tough," Dad said. "Because this is not a house for the faint of heart."Dad led us up the lower steps, which were made of rocks slapped together with cement. Because of settling and erosion and downright slipshod construction, they tilted154 dangerously toward the street. Where the stone steps ended, a rickety set of stairs made from two-by-fours梞ore like a ladder than a staircase梩ook you up to the front porch.
Inside were three rooms, each about ten feet by ten feet, facing onto the front porch. The house had no bathroom, but underneath it, behind one of the cinder-block pillars, was a closet-sized room with a toilet on a cement floor. The toilet wasn't hooked up to any sewer or septic system. It just sat atop a hole about six feet deep. There was no running water indoors. A water spigot rose a few inches above the ground near the toilet, so you could get a bucket and tote water upstairs. While the house was wired for electricity, Dad confessed that we could not at the moment afford to have it turned on.
On the upside, Dad said, the house had cost only a thousand dollars, and the owner had waived155 the down payment. We were supposed to pay him fifty dollars a month. If we could make the payments on time, we'd own the place outright157 in under two years.
"Hard to believe that one day this will all be ours," said Lori. She was developing what Mom called a bit of a sarcastic158 streak159.
"Count your blessings," Mom said. "There are people in Ethiopia who would kill for a place like this." She pointed out that the house did have some attractive features. For example, in the living room was a cast-iron potbellied coal stove for heating and cooking. It was big and handsome, with heavy bear-claw feet, and she was certain it was valuable, if you took it to a place where people appreciated antiques. But since the house had no chimney, the stovepipe vented160 out a back window. Someone had replaced the glass in the upper part of the window with plywood, and wrapped tinfoil161 around the opening to keep the coal smoke from leaking into the room. The tinfoil had not done its job too well, and the ceiling was black with soot162. Someone梡robably the same someone梙ad also made the mistake of trying to clean the ceiling in a few spots, but had ended up only smudging and smearing163 the soot, creating whitish patches that made you realize how black the rest of the ceiling was.
"The house itself isn't much," Dad apologized. "but we won't be living in it long." The important thing, the reason he and Mom had decided to acquire this particular piece of property, was that it came with plenty of land to build our new house. He planned to get to work on it right away. He intended to follow the blueprints164 for the Glass Castle, but he had to do some serious reconfiguring and increase the size of the solar cells to take into account that since we were on the north face of the mountain, and enclosed by hills on both sides, we'd hardly ever get any sun.
* * *We moved in that afternoon. Not that there was much to move. Dad borrowed a pickup165 from the appliance store where Uncle Stanley worked, and brought back a sofa bed that a friend of Grandpa's was throwing out. Dad also scavenged a couple of tables and chairs, and he built some makeshift closets梬hich were actually kind of nifty梑y hanging lengths of pipe from the ceiling with wires.
Mom and Dad took over the room with the stove, and it became a combined living room, master bedroom, art studio, and writer's study. We put the sofa bed there, though once we opened it, it never went back to being a sofa. Dad built shelves all along the upper walls to store Mom's art supplies. She set up her easel under the stovepipe, right next to the back window, because she said it got natural sunlight梬hich it did, relatively166 speaking. She put her typewriters under another window, with shelves for her manuscripts and works in progress, and she immediately started thumbtacking index cards with story ideas to the walls.
We kids all slept in the middle room. At first we shared one big bed that had been left by the previous owner, but Dad decided we were getting a tad old for that. We were also too big to sleep in cardboard boxes, and there wasn't enough room on the floor for them, anyway, so we helped Dad build two sets of bunk167 beds. We made the frames with two-by-fours; then we drilled holes in the sides and threaded ropes through. For mattresses169, we laid cardboard over the ropes. When we finished, our bunk beds looked sort of plain, so we spray-painted the sides with ornate red and black curlicues. Dad came home with a discarded four-drawer dresser, one drawer for each of us. He also built each of us a wooden box with sliding doors for personal stuff. We nailed them on the wall above our beds, and that was where I kept my geode.
The third room at 93 Little Hobart Street, the kitchen, was in a category all its own. It had an electric stove, but the wiring was not exactly up to code, with faulty connectors, exposed lines, and buzzing switches. "Helen Keller must have wired this damn house," Dad declared. He decided it was too convoluted170 to bother fixing.
We called the kitchen the loose-juice room, because on the rare occasions that we had paid the electricity bill and had power, we'd get a wicked electric shock if we touched any damp or metallic171 surface in the room. The first time I got zapped, it knocked my breath out and left me twitching172 on the floor. We quickly learned that whenever we ventured into the kitchen, we needed to wrap our hands in the driest socks or rags we could find. If we got a shock, we'd announce it to everyone else, sort of like giving a weather report. "Big jolt173 from touching the stove today," we'd say. "Wear extra rags."One corner of the kitchen ceiling leaked like a sieve174. Every time it rained, the plasterboard ceiling would get all swollen175 and heavy, with water streaming steadily176 from the center of the bulge177. During one particularly fierce rainstorm that spring, the ceiling grew so fat it burst, and water and plasterboard came crashing down onto the floor. Dad never repaired it. We kids tried patching the roof on our own with tar paper, tinfoil, wood, and Elmer's glue, but no matter what we did, the water found its way through. Eventually we gave up. So every time it rained outside, it rained in the kitchen, too.
* * *At first Mom tried to make living at 93 Little Hobart Street seem like an adventure. The woman who had lived there before us left behind an old-fashioned sewing machine that you operated with a foot treadle. Mom said it would come in handy because we could make our own clothes even when the electricity was turned off. She also claimed you didn't need patterns to sew, you could get creative and wing it. Shortly after we moved in, Mom, Lori, and I measured one another and tried to make our own dresses.
It took forever, and they came out baggy178 and lopsided, with sleeves that were different lengths and armholes in the middle of our backs. I couldn't get mine over my head until Mom snipped179 out a few stitches. "It's stunning180!" she said. But I told her I looked like I was wearing a big pillowcase with elephant trunks sticking out of the sides. Lori refused to wear hers outdoors, or even indoors, and Mom had to agree that sewing wasn't the best use of our creative energy梠r our money. The cheapest cloth we could find cost seventy-nine cents a yard, and you needed more than two yards for a dress. It made more sense to buy thrift-store clothes, and they had the armholes in the right places.
Mom also tried to make the house cheerful. She decorated the living room walls with her oil paintings, and soon every square inch was covered, except for the space above her typewriter reserved for index cards. We had vivid desert sunsets, stampeding horses, sleeping cats, snow-covered mountains, bowls of fruit, blooming flowers, and portraits of us kids.
Since Mom had more paintings than we had wall space, Dad nailed long shelf brackets to the wall, and she hung one picture in front of another until they were three or four deep. Then she'd rotate the paintings. "Just a little redecorating to perk181 the place up," she'd say. But I believed she thought of her paintings as children and wanted them to feel that they were all being treated equally.
Mom also built rows of shelves in the windows and arranged brightly colored bottles to catch the light. "Now it looks like we have stained glass," she announced. It did, sort of, but the house was still cold and dank. Every night for the first few weeks, lying on my cardboard mattress168 and listening to the sound of rainwater dripping in the kitchen, I dreamed of the desert and the sun and the big house in Phoenix with the palm tree in the front and the orange trees and oleanders in the back. We had owned that house outright. Still owned it, I kept thinking. It was ours, the one true home we'd ever had.
"Are we ever going home?" I asked Dad one day.
"Home?""Phoenix.""This is home now."SEEING AS HOW WELCH was our new home, Brian and I figured we'd make the best of it. Dad had shown us the spot near the house where we were going to put the foundation and basement for the Glass Castle. He'd measured it off and marked it with stakes and string. Since Dad was hardly ever home梙e was out making contacts and investigating the UMW, he told us梐nd never got around to breaking ground, Brian and I decided to help. We found a shovel182 and pickax at an abandoned farm and spent just about every free minute digging a hole. We knew we had to dig it big and deep. "No point in building a good house unless you put down the right foundation," Dad always said.
It was hard work, but after a month we'd dug a hole deep enough for us to disappear in. Even though we hadn't squared the edges or smoothed the floor, we were still pretty darn proud of ourselves. Once Dad had poured the foundation, we could help him on the frame.
But since we couldn't afford to pay the town's trash-collection fee, our garbage was really piling up. One day Dad told us to dump it in the hole.
"But that's for the Glass Castle," I said.
"It's a temporary measure," Dad told me. He explained that he was going to hire a truck to cart the garbage to the dump all at once. But he never got around to that, either, and as Brian and I watched, the hole for the Glass Castle's foundation slowly filled with garbage.
Around that time, probably because of all the garbage, a big, nasty-looking river rat took up residence at 93 Little Hobart Street. I first saw him in the sugar bowl. This rat was too big to fit into an ordinary sugar bowl, but since Mom had a powerful sweet tooth, putting at least eight teaspoons183 in a cup of tea, we kept our sugar in a punch bowl on the kitchen table.
This rat was not just eating the sugar. He was bathing in it, wallowing in it, positively184 luxuriating in it, his flickering185 tail hanging over the side of the bowl, flinging sugar across the table. When I saw him, I froze, then backed out of the kitchen. I told Brian, and we opened the kitchen door cautiously. The rat had climbed out of the sugar bowl and leaped up onto the stove. We could see his teeth marks on the pile of potatoes, our dinner, on a plate on the stove. Brian threw the cast-iron skillet at the rat. It hit him and clanged on the floor, but instead of fleeing, the rat hissed186 at us, as if we were the intruders. We ran out of the kitchen, slammed the door, and stuffed rags in the gap beneath it.
That night Maureen, who was five, was too terrified to sleep. She kept on saying that the rat was coming to get her. She could hear it creeping nearer and nearer. I told her to stop being such a wuss.
"I really do hear the rat," she said. "I think he's close to me."I told her she was letting fear get the best of her, and since this was one of those times that we had electricity, I turned on the light to prove it. There, crouched187 on Maureen's lavender blanket, a few inches away from her face, was the rat. She screamed and pushed off her covers, and the rat jumped to the floor. I got a broom and tried to hit the rat with the handle, but it dodged188 me. Brian grabbed a baseball bat, and we maneuvered189 it, hissing190 and snapping, into a corner.
Our dog, Tinkle191, the part朖ack Russell terrier who had followed Brian home one day, caught the rat in his jaws192 and banged it on the floor until it was dead. When Mom ran into the room, Tinkle was strutting193 around, all pumped up like the proud beast-slayer that he was. Mom said she felt a little sorry for the rat. "Rats need to eat, too," she pointed out. Even though it was dead, it deserved a name, she went on, so she christened it Rufus. Brian, who had read that primitive194 warriors195 placed the body parts of their victims on stakes to scare off their enemies, hung Rufus by the tail from a poplar tree in front of our house the next morning. That afternoon we heard the sound of gunshots. Mr. Freeman, who lived next door, had seen the rat hanging upside down. Rufus was so big, Mr. Freeman thought he was a possum, went and got his hunting rifle, and blew him clean away. There was nothing left of Rufus but a mangled196 piece of tail.
* * *After the Rufus incident, I slept with a baseball bat in my bed. Brian slept with a machete in his. Maureen could barely sleep at all. She kept dreaming that she was being eaten by rats, and she used every excuse she could to spend the night at friends' houses. Mom and Dad shrugged off the Rufus incident. They told us that we had done battle with fiercer adversaries197 in the past, and we would again someday.
"What are we going to do about the garbage pit?" I asked. "It's almost filled up.""Enlarge it," Mom said.
"We can't keep dumping garbage out there," I said. "What are people going to think?""Life's too short to worry about what other people think," Mom said. "Anyway, they should accept us for who we are."I was convinced that people might be more accepting of us if we made an effort to improve the way 93 Little Hobart Street looked. There were plenty of things we could do, I felt, that would cost almost nothing. Some people around Welch cut tires into two semicircles, painted them white, and used them as edging for their gardens. Maybe we couldn't afford to build the Glass Castle quite yet, but certainly we could put painted tires around our front yard to spruce it up. "It would make us fit in a little bit," I pleaded with Mom.
"It sure would," Mom said. But when it came to Welch, she had no interest in fitting in. "I'd rather have a yard filled with genuine garbage than with trashy lawn ornaments198."I kept looking for other ways to make improvements. One day Dad brought home a five-gallon can of house paint left over from some job he'd worked on. The next morning I pried199 the can open. It was nearly full of bright yellow paint. Dad had brought some paintbrushes home, too. A layer of yellow paint, I realized, would completely transform our dingy200 gray house. It would look, at least from the outside, almost like the houses other people lived in.
I was so excited by the prospect of living in a perky yellow home that I could barely sleep that night. I got up early the next day and tied my hair back, ready to begin the housepainting. "If we all work together, we can get it done in a day or two," I told everyone.
But Dad said 93 Little Hobart Street was such a dump that we shouldn't waste time or energy on it that we could be devoting to the Glass Castle. Mom said she thought bright yellow houses were tacky. Brian and Lori said we didn't have the ladders and scaffolding we needed.
Dad was making no visible progress on the Glass Castle, and I knew that the can of yellow paint would sit on the porch unless I undertook the job myself. I'd borrow a ladder or make one, I decided. I was certain that once everyone saw the amazing transformation201 of the house begin, they'd all join in.
Out on the porch, I opened the can and stirred the paint with a stick, blending in the oil that had risen to the surface until the paint, which was the color of buttercups, had turned creamy. I dipped in a fat brush and spread the paint along the old clapboard siding in long, smooth strokes. It went on bright and glossy203 and looked even better than I had hoped. I started on the far side of the porch, around the door that went into the kitchen. In a few hours, I had covered everything that could be reached from the porch. Parts of the front were still unpainted, and so were the sides, but I had used less than a quarter of the paint. If everyone else helped, we could paint all the areas I couldn't reach, and in no time we would have a cheerful yellow house.
But neither Mom nor Dad nor Brian nor Lori nor Maureen was impressed. "So part of the front of the house is yellow now," Lori said. "That's really going to turn things around for us."I was going to have to finish the job myself. I tried to make a ladder from bits of scrap204 wood, but it kept collapsing205 whenever I put my weight on it. I was still trying to build a sturdy ladder when, during a cold snap a few days later, my can of paint froze solid. When it got warm enough for the paint to thaw, I opened the can. During the freeze, the chemicals had separated and the once-smooth liquid was as lumpy and runny as curdled206 milk. I stirred it as hard as I could and kept stirring even after I knew the paint was ruined, because I also knew that we'd never get more, and instead of a freshly painted yellow house, or even a dingy gray one, we now had a weird-looking half-finished patch job梠ne that announced to the world that the people inside the house wanted to fix it up but lacked the gumption207 to get the work done.
LITTLE HOBART STREET led up into one of those hollows so deep and narrow that people joked you had to pipe in the sunlight. The neighborhood did have lots of kids桵aureen had real friends for the first time梐nd we all tended to hang out at the National Guard armory208 at the foot of the hill. The boys played tackle football on the training field. Most of the girls my age spent their afternoons sitting on the brick wall surrounding the armory, combing their hair and touching up their lip gloss202 and pretending to get all indignant but secretly loving it if a crew-cut reservist wolf-whistled at them. One of the girls, Cindy Thompson, made a special effort to befriend me, but it turned out that what she really wanted was to recruit me for the junior Ku Klux Klan. Neither putting on makeup209 nor wearing a sheet had much appeal for me, so I played football with the boys, who would waive156 their guys-only rule and let me join a team if they were short a player.
The better-off folk of Welch had not exactly flocked to our part of town. A few miners lived along the street, but most of the grown-ups didn't work at all. Some of the moms had no husbands, and some of the dads had black lung. The rest were either too distracted by their troubles or just plain unmotivated, so pretty much everyone grudgingly210 accepted some form of public aid. Although we were the poorest family on Little Hobart Street, Mom and Dad never applied for welfare or food stamps, and t
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ranch
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| n.大牧场，大农场 | |
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hood
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| n.头巾，兜帽，覆盖；v.罩上，以头巾覆盖 | |
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steered
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| v.驾驶( steer的过去式和过去分词 )；操纵；控制；引导 | |
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honking
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| v.（使）发出雁叫似的声音，鸣（喇叭），按（喇叭）( honk的现在分词 ) | |
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exasperation
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| n.愤慨 | |
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giggles
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| n.咯咯的笑( giggle的名词复数 )；傻笑；玩笑；the giggles 止不住的格格笑v.咯咯地笑( giggle的第三人称单数 ) | |
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lank
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| adj.瘦削的；稀疏的 | |
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wagon
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| n.四轮马车，手推车，面包车；无盖运货列车 | |
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scenic
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| adj.自然景色的，景色优美的 | |
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detours
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| 绕行的路( detour的名词复数 )； 绕道，兜圈子 | |
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moss
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| n.苔，藓，地衣 | |
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shrouded
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| v.隐瞒( shroud的过去式和过去分词 )；保密 | |
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creeks
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| n.小湾( creek的名词复数 )；小港；小河；小溪 | |
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creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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ted
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| vt.翻晒，撒，撒开 | |
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advertising
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| n.广告业；广告活动 a.广告的；广告业务的 | |
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auto
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| n.(=automobile)(口语)汽车 | |
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18
uneven
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| adj.不平坦的，不规则的，不均匀的 | |
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19
descend
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| vt./vi.传下来，下来，下降 | |
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20
clattered
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| 发出咔哒声（clatter的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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21
dangled
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| 悬吊着( dangle的过去式和过去分词 )； 摆动不定； 用某事物诱惑…； 吊胃口 | |
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22
swirl
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| v.(使)打漩，(使)涡卷；n.漩涡，螺旋形 | |
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23
underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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24
ridges
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| n.脊( ridge的名词复数 )；山脊；脊状突起；大气层的)高压脊 | |
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25
tar
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| n.柏油，焦油；vt.涂或浇柏油/焦油于 | |
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26
pranks
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| n.玩笑，恶作剧( prank的名词复数 ) | |
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27
weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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28
weirdest
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| 怪诞的( weird的最高级 )； 神秘而可怕的； 超然的； 古怪的 | |
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29
huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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30
phoenix
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| n.凤凰，长生(不死)鸟；引申为重生 | |
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31
ushered
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| v.引，领，陪同( usher的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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32
kit
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| n.用具包，成套工具；随身携带物 | |
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33
poker
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| n.扑克；vt.烙制 | |
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34
stewing
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| 炖 | |
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35
linoleum
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| n.油布，油毯 | |
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36
beetle
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| n.甲虫，近视眼的人 | |
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37
jugs
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| （有柄及小口的）水壶( jug的名词复数 ) | |
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38
retaliation
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| n.报复，反击 | |
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39
shrieking
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| v.尖叫( shriek的现在分词 ) | |
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40
shriek
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| v./n.尖叫，叫喊 | |
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41
wailing
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| v.哭叫，哀号( wail的现在分词 )；沱 | |
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42
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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43
atheist
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| n.无神论者 | |
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44
herd
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| n.兽群，牧群；vt.使集中，把…赶在一起 | |
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45
barons
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| 男爵( baron的名词复数 )； 巨头； 大王； 大亨 | |
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46
labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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47
sluggishly
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| adv.懒惰地；缓慢地 | |
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48
ripple
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| n.涟波，涟漪，波纹，粗钢梳；vt.使...起涟漪，使起波纹； vi.呈波浪状，起伏前进 | |
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49
tug
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| v.用力拖(或拉)；苦干；n.拖；苦干；拖船 | |
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50
sewer
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| n.排水沟，下水道 | |
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51
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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52
monochromatic
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| adj.单色的，一色的 | |
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53
limestone
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| n.石灰石 | |
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54
illegible
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| adj.难以辨认的，字迹模糊的 | |
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55
ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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56
inflict
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| vt.(on)把…强加给，使遭受，使承担 | |
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57
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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58
deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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59
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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60
outskirts
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| n.郊外，郊区 | |
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61
enrolling
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| v.招收( enrol的现在分词 )；吸收；入学；加入；[亦作enrol]( enroll的现在分词 )；登记，招收，使入伍（或入会、入学等），参加，成为成员；记入名册；卷起，包起 | |
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62
enroll
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| v.招收；登记；入学；参军；成为会员（英)enrol | |
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63
commotion
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| n.骚动，动乱 | |
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64
skeptical
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| adj.怀疑的，多疑的 | |
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65
spouting
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| n.水落管系统v.（指液体）喷出( spout的现在分词 )；滔滔不绝地讲；喋喋不休地说；喷水 | |
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66
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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67
seesaw
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| n.跷跷板 | |
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68
unpacked
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| v.从（包裹等）中取出（所装的东西），打开行李取出( unpack的过去式和过去分词 )；拆包；解除…的负担；吐露（心事等） | |
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69
thrift
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| adj.节约，节俭；n.节俭，节约 | |
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70
butt
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| n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶 | |
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71
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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72
offset
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| n.分支，补偿；v.抵消，补偿 | |
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73
predators
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| n.食肉动物( predator的名词复数 )；奴役他人者（尤指在财务或性关系方面） | |
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74
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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75
jaw
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| n.颚，颌，说教，流言蜚语；v.喋喋不休，教训 | |
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76
malicious
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| adj.有恶意的，心怀恶意的 | |
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77
eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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78
insufficient
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| adj.(for，of)不足的，不够的 | |
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79
greasy
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| adj. 多脂的，油脂的 | |
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80
smear
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| v.涂抹；诽谤，玷污；n.污点；诽谤，污蔑 | |
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81
pickle
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| n.腌汁，泡菜；v.腌，泡 | |
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82
janitor
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| n.看门人，管门人 | |
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83
defense
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| n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩 | |
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84
license
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| n.执照，许可证，特许；v.许可，特许 | |
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85
puddle
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| n.(雨)水坑，泥潭 | |
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86
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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87
bullying
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| v.恐吓，威逼( bully的现在分词 )；豪；跋扈 | |
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88
paralytic
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| adj. 瘫痪的 n. 瘫痪病人 | |
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89
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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90
whiner
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| n.哀鸣者，啜泣者，悲嗥者，哀诉者 | |
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91
concocted
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| v.将（尤指通常不相配合的）成分混合成某物( concoct的过去式和过去分词 )；调制；编造；捏造 | |
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92
scenarios
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| n.[意]情节；剧本；事态；脚本 | |
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93
karate
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| n.空手道(日本的一种徒手武术) | |
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94
kindling
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| n. 点火, 可燃物 动词kindle的现在分词形式 | |
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95
killer
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| n.杀人者，杀人犯，杀手，屠杀者 | |
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96
growling
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| n.吠声, 咆哮声 v.怒吠, 咆哮, 吼 | |
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97
minimal
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| adj.尽可能少的，最小的 | |
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98
shutters
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| 百叶窗( shutter的名词复数 )； （照相机的）快门 | |
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99
dwarves
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| n.矮子( dwarf的名词复数 )；有魔法的小矮人 | |
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100
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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101
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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102
inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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103
galled
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| v.使…擦痛( gall的过去式和过去分词 )；擦伤；烦扰；侮辱 | |
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104
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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105
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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106
complexions
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| 肤色( complexion的名词复数 )； 面色； 局面； 性质 | |
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107
snobs
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| （谄上傲下的）势利小人( snob的名词复数 )； 自高自大者，自命不凡者 | |
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108
outspoken
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| adj.直言无讳的，坦率的，坦白无隐的 | |
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109
compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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110
knuckles
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| n.（指人）指关节( knuckle的名词复数 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝v.（指人）指关节( knuckle的第三人称单数 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝 | |
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111
preeminent
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的 | |
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112
redeeming
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| 补偿的，弥补的 | |
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113
hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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114
canyon
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| n.峡谷，溪谷 | |
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115
thaw
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| v.（使）融化，（使）变得友善；n.融化，缓和 | |
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116
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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117
itching
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| adj.贪得的，痒的，渴望的v.发痒( itch的现在分词 ) | |
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118
corruption
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| n.腐败，堕落，贪污 | |
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119
helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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120
adobe
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| n.泥砖，土坯，美国Adobe公司 | |
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121
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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122
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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123
flouted
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| v.藐视，轻视( flout的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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124
cantankerous
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| adj.爱争吵的，脾气不好的 | |
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125
orphan
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| n.孤儿；adj.无父母的 | |
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126
mumbling
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| 含糊地说某事，叽咕，咕哝( mumble的现在分词 ) | |
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127
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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128
accusations
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| n.指责( accusation的名词复数 )；指控；控告；（被告发、控告的）罪名 | |
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129
pervert
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| n.堕落者，反常者；vt.误用，滥用；使人堕落，使入邪路 | |
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130
flailing
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| v.鞭打( flail的现在分词 )；用连枷脱粒；（臂或腿）无法控制地乱动；扫雷坦克 | |
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131
relegated
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| v.使降级( relegate的过去式和过去分词 )；使降职；转移；把…归类 | |
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132
sneaked
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| v.潜行( sneak的过去式和过去分词 )；偷偷溜走；（儿童向成人）打小报告；告状 | |
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133
narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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134
grievances
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| n.委屈( grievance的名词复数 )；苦衷；不满；牢骚 | |
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135
stomping
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| v.跺脚，践踏，重踏( stomp的现在分词 ) | |
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136
pussy
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| n.(儿语)小猫，猫咪 | |
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137
reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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138
ploy
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| n.花招，手段 | |
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139
banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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140
banishing
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的现在分词 ) | |
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141
rental
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| n.租赁，出租，出租业 | |
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142
palatial
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| adj.宫殿般的，宏伟的 | |
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143
rustic
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| adj.乡村的，有乡村特色的；n.乡下人，乡巴佬 | |
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144
calves
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| n.(calf的复数)笨拙的男子，腓；腿肚子( calf的名词复数 )；牛犊；腓；小腿肚v.生小牛( calve的第三人称单数 )；（冰川）崩解；生（小牛等），产（犊）；使（冰川）崩解 | |
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145
sagging
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| 下垂[沉，陷]，松垂，垂度 | |
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146
gutters
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| （路边）排水沟( gutter的名词复数 )； 阴沟； （屋顶的）天沟； 贫贱的境地 | |
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147
shingles
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| n.带状疱疹；（布满海边的）小圆石( shingle的名词复数 )；屋顶板；木瓦（板）；墙面板 | |
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148
battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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149
cozy
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| adj.亲如手足的，密切的，暖和舒服的 | |
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150
drooping
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| adj. 下垂的，无力的 动词droop的现在分词 | |
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151
jutted
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| v.（使）突出( jut的过去式和过去分词 )；伸出；（从…）突出；高出 | |
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152
precariously
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| adv.不安全地；危险地；碰机会地；不稳定地 | |
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153
dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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154
tilted
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| v. 倾斜的 | |
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155
waived
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| v.宣布放弃( waive的过去式和过去分词 )；搁置；推迟；放弃（权利、要求等） | |
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156
waive
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| vt.放弃，不坚持(规定、要求、权力等) | |
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157
outright
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| adv.坦率地；彻底地；立即；adj.无疑的；彻底的 | |
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158
sarcastic
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| adj.讥讽的，讽刺的，嘲弄的 | |
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159
streak
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| n.条理，斑纹，倾向，少许，痕迹；v.加条纹，变成条纹，奔驰，快速移动 | |
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160
vented
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| 表达，发泄（感情，尤指愤怒）( vent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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161
tinfoil
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| n.锡纸，锡箔 | |
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162
soot
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| n.煤烟，烟尘；vt.熏以煤烟 | |
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163
smearing
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| 污点，拖尾效应 | |
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164
blueprints
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| n.蓝图，设计图( blueprint的名词复数 ) | |
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165
pickup
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| n.拾起，获得 | |
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166
relatively
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| adv.比较...地，相对地 | |
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167
bunk
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| n.(车、船等倚壁而设的)铺位；废话 | |
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168
mattress
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| n.床垫，床褥 | |
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169
mattresses
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| 褥垫，床垫( mattress的名词复数 ) | |
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170
convoluted
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| adj.旋绕的；复杂的 | |
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171
metallic
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| adj.金属的；金属制的；含金属的；产金属的；像金属的 | |
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172
twitching
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| n.颤搐 | |
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173
jolt
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| v.（使）摇动，（使）震动，（使）颠簸 | |
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174
sieve
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| n.筛，滤器，漏勺 | |
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175
swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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176
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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177
bulge
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| n.突出，膨胀，激增；vt.突出，膨胀 | |
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178
baggy
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| adj.膨胀如袋的，宽松下垂的 | |
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179
snipped
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| v.剪( snip的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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180
stunning
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| adj.极好的；使人晕倒的 | |
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181
perk
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| n.额外津贴；赏钱；小费； | |
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182
shovel
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| n.铁锨，铲子，一铲之量；v.铲，铲出 | |
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183
teaspoons
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| n.茶匙( teaspoon的名词复数 )；一茶匙的量 | |
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184
positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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185
flickering
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| adj.闪烁的，摇曳的，一闪一闪的 | |
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186
hissed
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| 发嘶嘶声( hiss的过去式和过去分词 )； 发嘘声表示反对 | |
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187
crouched
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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188
dodged
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| v.闪躲( dodge的过去式和过去分词 )；回避 | |
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189
maneuvered
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| v.移动，用策略( maneuver的过去式和过去分词 )；操纵 | |
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190
hissing
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| n. 发嘶嘶声, 蔑视 动词hiss的现在分词形式 | |
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191
tinkle
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| vi.叮当作响；n.叮当声 | |
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192
jaws
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| n.口部；嘴 | |
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193
strutting
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| 加固，支撑物 | |
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194
primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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195
warriors
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| 武士，勇士，战士( warrior的名词复数 ) | |
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196
mangled
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| vt.乱砍（mangle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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197
adversaries
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| n.对手，敌手( adversary的名词复数 ) | |
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198
ornaments
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| n.装饰( ornament的名词复数 )；点缀；装饰品；首饰v.装饰，点缀，美化( ornament的第三人称单数 ) | |
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199
pried
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| v.打听，刺探（他人的私事）( pry的过去式和过去分词 )；撬开 | |
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200
dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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201
transformation
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| n.变化；改造；转变 | |
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202
gloss
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| n.光泽，光滑；虚饰；注释；vt.加光泽于；掩饰 | |
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203
glossy
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| adj.平滑的；有光泽的 | |
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204
scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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205
collapsing
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| 压扁[平]，毁坏，断裂 | |
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206
curdled
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| v.（使）凝结( curdle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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207
gumption
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| n.才干 | |
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208
armory
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| n.纹章，兵工厂，军械库 | |
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209
makeup
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| n.组织；性格；化装品 | |
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210
grudgingly
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