Summer 2007

ESSAY
Altered Landscape
 

BY PAMELA STEELE
 

From the airplane window, southern West Virginia looks barren. The winter-stripped trees stand frozen, their ribcages exposed. I hardly recognize the landscape until final approach. The plane banks over Charleston, and from this angle, tilted against the sky, I can make out the familiar soft rise of the hills.

My mother and stepfather don't know I'm coming. In 20 minutes, I will be in a rental car, driving the last 60 miles of the 2,500 or so I will have traveled to see them. I won't tell Mom I've taken the West Virginia Turnpike. Because a high school classmate of hers was killed on the turnpike a few years before I was born, Mom still considers it West Virginia's bloodiest highway and warns everyone away, advising us to Take Route 60. But, Route 60 is a two-lane road that winds along the Gauley River, and today, there is something in the air that says black ice. I decide to take my chances with the turnpike.

I stop in Beckley for a Pepsi and to fill the gas tank. Yards away from the convenience store, a bulldozer sits on top of what looks like the bottom half of a chopped-off pyramid. Beneath the dozer is a level plain of dirt, its sculpted sides planted in neatly cropped grass. This used to be a mountain.

If the airplane had flown farther south and west on its approach to Charleston, I would have seen similar landforms standing among the remaining mountains, resembling backyard dirt piles that children play on. In those places, dust rises from the tires of bulky trucks that haul coal from open pits where 800 feet of rock has been blasted from the tops of mountains — this, so coal operators can strip the earth more efficiently. If the plane had swooped in closer to the pits, I would have seen bone-weary men walking on the face of the moon.

On my last visit home, Mom showed me her coal tattoo. She drew my fingers to a black spot no wider than a pencil lead that I'd never noticed just under the skin of her right temple, the point of impact where one of her brothers — she couldn't remember which — had chucked a lump of coal at her when they were kids. Then she told me how Grandma and her kids would walk the railroad tracks near their house, gathering coal that had fallen from passing trains so they could keep the stove going in the wintertime. Discovering that mark on her face was an odd moment. In my 46 years, I'd rarely touched my mother's body. My father, dead at 27, had been my touchstone, cuddling and packing me around, letting me poke his skinny arms and the lumpy shell of belly under which his liver hardened into a stone.

As far back as I know, my family has worked in coal. Four of my grandfathers, several uncles and kin for generations crawled or walked through tunnels gathering lumps of black earth into their sacks and grainy dust into their lungs.

After my father died, my brother, sister and I spent our summers with his parents and our cousin Mickey, just three months older than me, tucked away in a hollow, or "holler, in Mingo County, West Virginia—one of many such small communities with no name or ZIP code of its own, designated only by the numbers painted on the tipples where coal was brought up from underground and loaded onto rail cars. For 12 summers of my life, I lived at Number 27.

Now, most of those men are gone, and no one in the family works in coal except Mick. Every day, for 20-odd years, he has climbed onto a bulldozer and pushed around dirt, filling in and leveling the dynamite-gouged earth over what used to be open pit mines. Then, someone else comes to plant trees on those used-up mountains, if they don't become locations for shopping centers or golf courses.
 

~

I wake up on my parents' couch where I fell asleep shortly after I arrived. Mom and Dad were indeed surprised when I walked onto the back porch and into their kitchen. Now, in a lull between bursts of TV noise, I hear the mantle clock ticking. I have been asleep for a hundred years.

I open my eyes. Dad is in the kitchen making plate noises, and Mom is still in her blue recliner with her knotted ankles propped on the footrest. She is a bit thinner maybe, but otherwise looks better than I thought she would. The chemo hasn't yet taken her hair. It's still a thick tangle of white she fidgets with.

She has been waiting. "Do you want to see my scar?" she says. I don't know what to say. I have never seen my mother in any state of undress. I prop myself up on an elbow and swivel in her direction. "Uh, yeah," I say.

She hikes up her knit top and grins. "I don't wear a bra in the house anymore unless I have to," she says. I stare at the exposed left half of her torso. Two purple tracks run together to form a 'Y' and disappear into her armpit. Below the skin, her chest has been scooped out level with the sternum, wildly out of proportion with her right breast.

"It's not too bad, is it?" she asks. I'm uncomfortable with this sudden intimacy, and I say it looks great and ask about her prosthetic breast. She pushes out of her chair and scuffs into the bedroom, comes back holding a large Silly Putty-colored lump.

"I think I'm allergic to it. I get a rash," she gushes.

This is not the attitude I expected from my mother, who delights in telling stories of car crashes and suicides who come to hurl themselves off the nearby New River Gorge bridge. She seems almost relieved to have cancer, actually nearing elation. Later, I will realize that, in an odd way, this makes sense. This disease has visited her family before, taking with it her brother, two sisters, a niece and, finally, her mother. Mom has always expected this, and aside from the fact that the chemo is strictly a precaution, that she will likely recover, this is just one more time my mother was right.

"It gets real cold next to my skin." Mom, usually quiet, is still talking, and as she talks, she tosses the lump from one hand to the other.

Dad walks in, says, "Ruth, what are you doing?"

"Warming my boob," she says.

I don't know what to say.

~

Two days later, the airport again. The morning is foggy, dense, but the plane takes off anyway. Parking lots shine like diamonds through the vapor, then fade as we ascend. From up here, I can barely make out the traffic as it picks up along Route 60 and

I-64. School buses and four-wheel drive pickups emerge from side roads and hollows to join the molten river of headlights. A moment later, it all disappears, but I've done this enough to know that below me, the winter-dull Kanawha oozes past the DuPont plant and the radiant-domed capital building. Farther south, one or two fire towers poke through winter-ravished trees, higher than any steeple. Inside those trees, tissue gathers into buds, and in two months' time, redbud and dogwood blossoms will levitate among the leaves on the hillsides, drawing nourishment from the leaf-rich dirt they're rooted in. And below the dirt, rock that will be shoved into hills and mountains by time. Below that still, buried deep in the earth, a greater hardness forming.
 

Pamela Steele, of Pendleton, Ore., is a graduate of Spalding University’s MFA program. She recently received a Jentel Arts Fellowship, and her first book of poems, Paper Bird, is due for release in July (Ice River Press).