Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake

Author:Ann Pancake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2010-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

If it had been up to me, I would have stayed in West Virginia at least the six months until the unemployment ran out, but two months into the layoff, Jimmy heard about the construction work in Raleigh, and he said it was smarter to grab that while we could than wait six months and most likely end up with nothing at all. I argued him back, but not really that hard. I knew what he said made sense. And like the back injury had, the layoff thrust us closer together again. At least for a while. Fear can work like that. Or so I thought then.

A week before we left, I carried up to Mom’s trailer a couple garbage bags of stuff she’d said she’d store. We weren’t selling the house, I’d put my foot down on that, Bill Bozer was going to rent from us, but to make room for him and his girlfriend, I had to clear out more than we could take with us south. As I came up on the trailer, I saw Mom out back stacking stovewood that Mogey’s boys had dropped off.

I stopped at the end of the trailer where I could watch her, but she couldn’t very well see me. I set my garbage bags quiet on the ground. She wore a dress that used to be the bright small flower kind but had now drained to beiges and grays. It was part of her dress system, I knew, the way she ordered them by age and stains and tears, this must be one of the oldest, to use for wood-stacking work, and still, over top of it, she wore a sweatshirt, despite that the air was barely cool, and I knew it was to keep the old dress at least a little clean. She bent to the stovewood with a jerkiness, her arthritis, I couldn’t help but flinch, hooked chunks into her left elbow, straightened up, then wobbled the few steps to the neat stack against her back wall. The wood clapping into place, she was making ready, the way she always had, even though it was May and she wouldn’t be burning this until late September.

Then suddenly she stopped, one hand on the pile, the other on her hip, and she looked at me like she’d known all along I was there. I could hear her soft panting. I tried to read her face, but right then, she turned away. “Good for you-all to get a fresh start,” she’d said when we told her we’d decided to go. “Pretty soon won’t be nothing at all left for young people here.” But that’s not what I’d seen in her face before she turned it.

I walked over to the dumped wood and piled a load in my own arm. Hickory, red oak, good long hot-burning wood Mogey’d sent her.Then I started ricking with her.The bark raspy on my bare hands, scraping up my wrists, but I just piled heavier, moved faster, and I felt Mom alongside me, but I never lifted my eyes to see her straight on.

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