Strange as this Weather Has Been

Corey thinks about how his dad’s truck has always been his “pride n joy” (60); Corey, just like his dad, loves machines. Corey is riding in his dad’s truck when he sees Rabbit driving his lawnmower on the road. Most people avoid Rabbit, a man who lives along the hollow:

 [He’s] a little crazy, and further, nobody can tell what color he is and he himself won’t let on. If he was white, nobody’d care, and if he was definitely black, most wouldn’t care, but you just couldn’t tell by looking at him, and you couldn’t tell by his name, either. He hadn’t come from around here (63).

Rabbit fascinates Corey because he’s able to turn metal trash into machines that work. The next day, Corey sneaks off to Rabbit’s house. Rabbit’s bent over a freezer working on something. Corey makes light conversation, and Rabbit answers. Corey looks around at all the junk in Rabbit’s yard—junk he most likely collected from the bloated creeks that are full of metal trash and flood debris. This makes Corey think about the flood, how it was “like driving a boat, it was, there towards the end” (66). He was at home, looking out the window, when “he realized the creek was coming up so quick you could watch it rise. […] It thrashed up and over its banks […] still carrying in it just the regular flood stuff, sticks and pop cans and leaf wads and such” (68).

Dane is cleaning the room inside Mrs. Taylor’s bathroom while she talks about how her son Avery wants her to move to Cleveland with him to get away from the flooding that’s been plaguing the area ever since the mining company took over the mountains near her home. She’s interrupted by Lucy Hill, one of her neighbors, who comes by to get fresh water because the mining runoff has poisoned her well.

Mrs. Taylor asks Dane to check her old bedroom for plaster—the room has been falling apart ever since the mining blasts started, and it’s Dane’s job to clean up the plaster that falls from the ceiling. However, Dane is terrified to go into the room because there’s an End Times pamphlet on the stereo, and it’s open to the page that reads “The New Millennium: What Does the Future Hold For You?” (73). Dane feels like this pamphlet is alive, and “he knows just by standing nearby, can, in its own pamphlet way, feel and think, and worse. Do to you” (72). He wants to destroy it, but instead he reads the open pages that describe the end of the world and give references to specific Bible verses.

Dane can’t help but obsess over the idea that despite his age, he’s “going to see the End of the World” (74). His fears are compounded by the doomsday stories that Mrs. Taylor always tells him about people dying in floods brought on by the irresponsible coal companies. He prays about his fears, but he never hears God answer him. 

Lace works late hours at the Dairy Queen, and she always wakes Bant up by slamming the car door when her ride drops her off. Bant finds it hard to sleep anyway, since she can never completely be free of the chemicals from her job at the motel:

Penned in my little room, like sleeping in a stall it was. A blast from the mine had messed up my window so it wouldn’t open right, and the gas smell built. Me floating always in a gasoline hover. Hobart was too cheap to buy turpentine, so it was gas I used to wash off the paint, a bad blue lodged in your eye after looking too long (78).

While painting, Bant always feels the miners’ eyes on her, and this makes her feel ashamed not only because she feels self-conscious, but also because she knows they’re scabs. While most of the men come and go in a faceless crowd, “one, a skinny boy, who drove a big Ford pickup with Ohio plates” (79) catches her attention. She notices that unlike typical coal miners who are always covered in black soot, these scab miners are covered in a pale dust. They are “[a] different kind of miner. Different kind of mine” (80).

Bant thinks about her best friend, Sharon, who’s been closed off towards Bant now that she has a boyfriend. Ever since noticing the Ohio boy, Bant has been using what little money she gets to keep from her paychecks to buy skincare products from the Dollar General. Eventually she finds out that R.L. is the boy’s name.

On some nights, after Lace gets home, Bant listens to her talk about the latest mining news, such as where the newest mining permits are, and what mountains are going to be blown up next: “[F]lyrock crashing into people’s houses, chemical leaks in sediment ponds. Drowning in flash floods, people breathing cancer-causing dust” (83). Bant questions how the powers that be would let stuff like this happen. This update always eventually makes Bant angry because she realizes she’s too young to hear all this devastation and doesn’t know how to process it.

Sometimes, Lace and Jimmy fight all night. It’s always the same fight: Lace tells Jimmy about the environmental destruction caused by the coal companies, and Jimmy remarks to her that they should just move away from it all. Lace retorts that he is a coward, as she wants him to stand up to the coal companies. Bant recalls that they did leave, four years ago, after Jimmy was laid off and couldn’t get hired because of his union affiliation. They came back after Lace’s mom died. 

Lace recalls the moment she told 15-year-old Jimmy that she was pregnant. He asked if she wanted to marry him, and she said no: “The baby I had no choice about—you don’t around here, especially not back then—but the marriage, that I could decide. Since I couldn’t get rid of the baby, the only other choice it seemed I could make was get rid of myself” (87). While she doesn’t end her own life, she “learned what it is to grieve your life lost while you’re still living […] It was grief beyond anything I’d imagined. […] For so many years, I’d only seen myself at all, I realized then, because I could see myself different, as more than ordinary” (88).

However, after getting pregnant and dropping out of college, she realizes that she’s just like everyone else, doomed to never escape her home. Being pregnant with Bant and coming to accept her new fate were the hardest things she’s ever had to endure. However, it was then that she became close with her mom seemingly for the first time. She started going into the woods with her mom to hunt for things they could eat and sell. In the woods, she bonded with her mom, and it was also in the woods that “Bant made herself real for the first time” (96) after Lace felt the fetus kicking for the first time.

Jimmy only visits twice while she’s pregnant, and she resents him; she can only think about all that she’s suffered and lost, while Jimmy “far as [she] could see, had suffered nothing at all” (98). While Lace and her parents are near destitute during this time, they survive by scavenging the woods, gardening, and canning. Bant is born during the canning of the last of the season’s harvest. 

Bant doesn’t have to go to work because Hobart is out of paint. With clear skies and no threat of rain, she decides to climb the fill to see what’s going on. While sneaking into the woods behind Lyon’s company property lines, she thinks about the weather and how it’s unseasonably cool. Bant knows that the unseasonable temperature is part of the problem, or at least she knows that her mother thinks so: “Lace believed the weather was linked to the rest of this mess, but I wasn’t sure how” (101). Once near the fill, she feels heartsick from the devastation of the land:

I did feel the hurt myself. I understood. It was like they were knocking down whatever it is inside of you that holds you up. Kicking down the blocks that hold up your insides, kicking until what the blocks kept up falls and leaves you empty inside (103).

She feels thankful, in a way, that her grandma isn’t still around to see “this kind of violence on a piece of ground she loved” (102). She’s climbing up the fill when a guard yells at her. She slides down, afraid she’s going to be arrested, but instead the guard offers her some food from his lunch. He asks what she’s doing, and she says, “Looking to see if there’s a slurry impoundment behind that fill” (105). He laughs, mocking-like, and says that the company wouldn’t hurt anyone: “When we’re done, we’ll clean er up. Pile it back on and smooth and grass it up. It’ll look nicer than before we started” (106). She’s relieved he’s not going to arrest her.

Dane lies awake in bed feeling anxious and sick because the skies look like rain, and with rain, lately, come the floods. He’s also fearful because Tommy keeps talking about the creepy monkey that he and Corey always see in the creek. Instead of sleeping, Dane thinks about the fact that he has to go to bed early with Tommy, even though Corey, who is younger than Dane, doesn’t have to go to bed until later: “Jimmy Make explains that Dane is younger in his mind than Corey is, so Dane needs more rest” (109).

Dane has the day off tomorrow because it’s Sunday and Mrs. Taylor “doesn’t believe in working on Sundays, like his grandma didn’t, so Dane doesn’t work” (109). Dane used to go to church with his grandma, and while he didn’t always understand what was said, he absorbed “the atmosphere like a tight mesh net, the reward and punish, the protect and threat” (110). He tries to pray, but he doesn’t feel like God speaks to him anymore. Dane constantly worries about his self-image:

His mind is not growing right, and Dane knows this by looking at his body. In the last nine months or so, Dane has grown strangely shaped. Hips, waist, thighs, swelling to a bigness without any length and his body not bothering to grow at all above his waist […] Leaving Dane. Strangely woman-shaped (111).

He hears Corey get in the shower, and he imagines hitting him and knocking him down. He’s jealous of Corey, but also resents him because Corey constantly teases and belittles him.

Dane remembers that after he cleaned and read the pamphlet, he went to his favorite spot, a clearing of ground where his grandma’s trailer used to sit. Hidden within an old TV, Dane keeps Lace’s old lunchbox, filled with secrets he calls his “pieces of God”: an acorn he had taken from a tree near a church, “the broken-off leg of a plastic horse,” and a magazine picture titled “Face of God in clouds” (116). Dane was hoping to conjure feelings of God by visiting these items, but “Dane had known for over a month that God wasn’t working around here anymore. God had been leaving ahead of time to get safe from this mess. Save Himself” (117).

On two occasions, Bant had to paint over graffiti at the motel. The graffiti, which read “Scab Resort” and “Local Jobs for Local Miners,” made her feel conflicted. It’s her job to paint, yet she wants to leave the words because they reflect the way she feels.

That night, Lace tells Jimmy that she heard his old friend Bill Bozer is scabbing. Normally, Jimmy hates scabs, but he defends Bill, saying, “What the hell was he gonna do? He’s gotta wife with a kidney problem. He’s gotta have the hospital card” (121). 

Corey notices that Seth’s family is different from others in the town: “Seth and them are inside people. They stay in their house with their air-conditioning on. Most people along Yellowroot don’t lock up. Seth and them do” (123). Corey and Tommy pass Seth’s house on their way to look at the monkey. When he notices that Seth’s house is “a scab-colored brick, and the house perches on a little dozed-up mound” (125), it’s clear to the reader that Seth’s family has money, with the implication that it’s because of scabbing.

Corey and Tommy pass the monkey, and Corey is surprised that nothing has eaten the eyeball yet. They start walking back home. When Corey sneaks a look in Seth’s window, he sees Seth playing videogames and an abundance of toys scattered in his room. With Seth busy in his room, Corey sneaks into his shed to sit on his four-wheeler. 

For some time, Lace has been serving fried bologna sandwiches for dinner, a sign of their poverty. Jimmy can’t find mining work because of his union affiliation. At dinner, Lace and Jimmy argue: She brings up environmental groups that are fighting against the mining companies, but Jimmy retorts, “I’ve told you a hundred times. You stay clear of the shit-stirrers. You get too close to the shit-stirrers and we really will get killed” (131). Jimmy then gives specific examples of people who tried to stand up for the mountains but were hurt by those defending the miners.

Eventually, Bant and R.L. talk. He tells her that he works the Yellowroot mine, and she feels horrible for having feelings for him because that’s the mountain she and her family grew up on:

I’d pray against it, I would, I didn’t know where else to turn. I’d pray not to feel for him like I did. I’d start out praying to God, but somehow it always slipped into praying for Grandma, that’s how my prayers anymore tended to do, and I didn’t want Grandma even knowing about this here (132).

Bant becomes increasingly attracted to R.L. Even though she hasn’t had sex with him, she isn’t worried that sex is a sin. Rather, she’s concerned with pregnancy:

[It’s] the punishment you got for the sin. It was the baby. But on the other hand, I was starting to think, what did it matter? Stay here and lose myself like Lace had, like Sharon would. Leave out and lose myself in a different way (and what do you remember of North Carolina?) (134).

Bant and her family celebrate Independence Day a day late because Lace has to work on the Fourth of July. They have a picnic, and for once Lace and Jimmy seem happy together. By the end of the day, they once again start arguing about their circumstances—Jimmy wants Lace to move with him to North Carolina, and Lace says no.