Strange as this Weather Has Been

Dane wakes up worried because he knows that Jimmy left in the middle of the night. He remembers the terror of last night, when he heard Jimmy and Lace fighting and saw the monkey at the end of the hall. Even though he’s never seen the monkey in real life, he knows what it looks like from Tommy and Corey’s descriptions. He had to pee, but he felt compelled to look down the hall, like it was beckoning to him. It was “[l]imp on the carpet, twisted funny unlike any live thing would lie, and its dirty fur swished a little, Dane saw it move, the way it swishes when water passes over it” (337).

That morning, he is eating cereal on the porch when he sees Corey driving Seth’s four-wheeler with Tommy sitting behind him. When they drive by, Dane decides to follow them to the snake ditches. Dane hides out of sight and watches as Corey tells Tommy to get off. Corey, alone on the four-wheeler, drives up and then goes sharply down. The turn is too hairpin, and the “machine flips over backwards with Corey under it and crashes into the catchment pond. A blurb and sucking in the water” (343). Tommy screams, and Jimmy Make suddenly appears. However, Corey dies in the accident.

That fall, Bant turns 16. However, the only “thing [she] had to celebrate that year was not missing [her] period in late August, and that was relief, not happiness” (344). Mrs. Taylor has moved to Cleveland with Avery, and Jimmy Make has left. Bant is scared for Dane:

 [He] never cried over Corey. Tommy did, and I did, and Lace did, and Jimmy Make did, too. Dane just righter shut. Since Corey’s funeral, Lace had gone to the cemetery on the edge of town a couple times a week, and usually she took me and Tommy with her (345).

After Corey’s death and with Jimmy gone, Lace becomes even more involved in environmental activism. She also goes back to church.

One day, Jimmy shows up at the house out of nowhere. He’s traded his truck for a van, and he says that he has room for anyone who wants to go back with him Raleigh, where he has a good job. Dane doesn’t say a word, grabs a small box of belongings, and gets into the van. Tommy is bawling, but Lace encourages him to go with his dad. However, Bant says she’s staying. After Jimmy pulls out of the driveway, Bant walks past the company gate. She climbs to the top of the fill and sees a hole between that and another fill:

[A] kind of bowl, big enough to hold three houses the size of Uncle Mogey’s. But even big as that bowl was, I was almost sure it was too small for a slurry impoundment. I couldn’t tell for sure, though, because I couldn’t see its bottom. All I could see were the trees. That bowl was jumbled solid with dead trees (352).

She decides the only way to know for certain what’s there is to climb down. Underneath all the trees are “four good-sized sediment ponds” (353). She pokes a stick to see where the bottom is but can’t feel it. She realizes that with enough rain, this bowl would fill to the top and unleash all the gunk and dead trees, and that her house, the closest, would be the first to be consumed. She climbs out and goes to her grandma’s old land. There, she finds a freshly dug grave of sorts decorated with “little rocks, sparkling with quartz, careful chosen and neat” (356). She uncovers the dirt to find Lace’s old lunchbox full of Dane’s special belongings. She realizes right away that Dane did this, and she reburies it before turning home to her mother with news of the discovery.