Strange as this Weather Has Been

This chapter is told from the perspective of Lace and Jimmy Make’s 15-year-old daughter, Bant. It begins with Bant and Jimmy breaking the padlock off a gate and sneaking on to coal company property. This moment is fraught in a complex way: Although the coal company now owns this portion of the mountain, making Bant and Jimmy trespassers, their ancestors had freely roamed this very land for many generations. The coal company may have legal rights here, but this land has been Lace’s backyard her entire life.

Bant and Jimmy are investigating the state of things behind the gate. Ever since the coal company Lyon Energy began mining, poisoned flood water has plagued the Makes’ yard and that of their neighbor. Once behind the gate, Jimmy and Bant realize that the sediment ponds that Lyon had built “to catch the runoff […] were jammed with stuff, and you could see pretty quickly how the sides of some were tore through by the flood” (16). Lyon isn’t tending to the sediment ponds, and the rundown ponds are contributing to the floods. Bant confirms “yes, this is where the floods come from. From the busted ponds and the confused new shape of the land. From how the land has forgot where the water should go, so the water is just running off every which way” (16).

Bant remembers the flood that devastated their yard. She wasn’t home at the time, being up in the woods instead, but she recalls that it was a hard, fast rain that brought on the flood:

Before I even got out of the woods, I saw the footbridge was gone, and how many years of cloudbursts like that one had the footbridge gone through and never washed out? my mind moving fast and blurry, but then I was out of the trees, into the open where I could see […] the creek was blasting through our yard, torrenting against the house underpinning, terrible light brown with white chops raging in it, and down its rapids torpedoed trash and metal and logs, logs, logs (17).

Bant and Jimmy are at the edge of the fill, and she realizes that he has no idea what he’s looking at. He should be able to tell if it’s a dam or an impoundment since he has coal mining experience, but he’s just as clueless as Bant. She decides that she will have to figure it out herself.

This chapter is about 10-year-old Corey’s perspective. However, unlike Lace and Bant’s chapters, which are narrated in the first person, Corey’s chapters feature limited third person narration. Corey is daydreaming about owning a four-wheeler like his neighbor Seth, who is near Corey’s age: “Corey has to make do with his bike. Dad says they can’t get an ATV because it’s too dangerous, but Corey knows it’s because it’s too expensive” (23). Corey is an exceptional bike rider, able to do more tricks than any other kid in Yellowroot.

Corey and his younger brother, Tommy, are playing under the house. Ever since the flood, “they can get up in there easier, and with the flood-ripped insulation dangling around, it’s like a spookhouse. The flood knocked loose the washer’s drainpipe, too, and Dad won’t fix it, says Lyon energy can” (23). Because of the flood, the creek is now in their backyard. Corey and Tommy like to rummage the creek for random debris treasures, like “[w]ater heaters and kerosene stoves and tires of all dimensions, lawn-mowers and roofing, bike frames and car axles” (25).

Corey and Tommy walk through the dirty creek water towards Seth’s house. Corey asks Seth if he has thought about his proposition, and Seth implies that he doesn’t want to do it. Later, the reader finds out that Corey wants to race Seth in the snake ditches on their bikes. Corey is annoyed with Seth’s answer, so he and Tommy keep walking in the creek.

Tommy keeps asking about a creepy dead animal that they have nicknamed “the monkey.” The monkey is a landmark in the creek because it’s been decaying in the same spot for a while now. The monkey strikes an unsettling fear in Corey and Tommy because it’s so rotted that it doesn’t look like an animal anymore. Rather, it’s “mostly just an open eye too big for the body, and then a kind of what must be a snout, but most of that turned away and buried in mud” (29). 

On the last day of school, Bant decides that she’s going to climb the steep slope near the fill all by herself. While in the woods, she thinks about the uniqueness of her name, Bantella, and how her mom had made it up “for the speak-taste of it” (33). She thinks about being named for her maternal grandparents, and about the fact that her ancestors have been on the same land for “more than two hundred years” (34). She passes her maternal grandma’s old land, and she thinks about how she used to help her grandma harvest edible plants from the land. Her grandma stressed to her the importance of taking care of the land because the land takes care of them.

She decides to visit her uncle Mogey, who’s not really her uncle but her grandma’s nephew. Mogey is “[g]entler than women. Gentler than dogs. The gentleness in him was the gentleness in trees” (36). On her way to Mogey’s, she thinks about one of the times her grandma whipped her. She had killed a snake, and her grandma was shocked and disappointed because she always taught Bant that “[y]ou don’t kill what can’t harm you. And you shouldn’t kill what can harm you unless it’s a threat to you right there” (39).

Bant has always felt different than other kids her age, like she’s an old soul. While other kids are busy playing, Bant has always felt connected to the woods on a deep, almost spiritual level. She feels a connection to Mogey because he is the same way. She finally gets to Mogey’s house, and his wife, Mary, answers the door. Mogey is sleeping because he has such a horrible migraine that he can’t get out of bed. Bant shares a glass of tea with Mary and leaves.

Like Corey’s chapters, 12-year-old Dane’s chapters are narrated in the limited third person. Dane works for Mrs. Taylor, an elderly woman who’s sick with emphysema. During the summer, he helps her cook and clean. Most of the time, Mrs. Taylor tells Dane the same stories over and over:

[H]e’s good at listening. It’s the only way he knows how to be liked. Sometimes when Mrs. Taylor’s friends visit, they’ll talk to Dane as though he’s not there, the privilege or the curse of those who talk very little, an assumption on the part of the talkers that the nontalkers can’t hear either, or at least only hear what you want them to (44).

Dane thinks back to the recent flood; he was carrying Mrs. Taylor’s chamber pot, “his most important job for Mrs. Taylor, the main reason her kids have hired somebody at all” (45). While Mrs. Taylor has indoor plumbing in the kitchen, she doesn’t have an indoor bathroom. Instead, she has a room with a toilet chair, and it’s Dane’s job to carry the waste pot to an outhouse each day. One day, while carrying the full pot on his way to the outhouse, a flash flood occurred; the water from the nearby creek rose and crashed through Mrs. Taylor’s yard:

[W]hat scares [Dane] most is not the water wall, although the wall scares him bad. It’s how he didn’t move. He just seized up halfway between back door and outhouse, prickled sharp in his scalp, the slop pot held away from him, both hands gripping the handle and his eyes swelling and bulging out his head (47).

Dane thinks about how he’s different from everyone else in his family. He’s short for his age and also the weakest, and he notices that “[h]is arms are shorter than the others, pudgy and stumped, puffing down along their bones to end in even puffier hands” (48).