“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I told a poet. “It must be something bad.”
He was younger, wore a ponytail, and made my spirit dance. We did not belong together, were not meant to be in the way that a man and woman try to fit together. Instead, we walked a lot and talked even more. We watched muskrats play in the shallows of a lake; stood over the city at night half-amazed that the only place either of us had ever lived could be so beautiful and so ugly at the same time; shot pool according to rules we’d invent on the fly; wrote each other. It was more than grace; it was a distraction from what I’d lost over the last couple years.
Even though I sure didn’t need my uterus anymore—after birthing my three kids it was about worn out anyway—and I hadn’t wanted to be married anymore, either, I did get lonesome. Fifteen years of marriage is nothing if not a habit of being. Plus, I’d never been alone. Because my ex-husband and I had agreed to share custody, I was only alone part-time. But that was one part too many. It weighed down on me with a quiet I almost couldn’t bear.
On one such Sunday morning, the poet called. “I got somewhere I wanna show you,” he said. His sixth sense wasn’t intuition, it was sense of place. I climbed into his Toyota pickup not caring where he was taking me. I’d have gone to the ends of the earth if it meant escaping the silence of my empty house. We chatted and argued over the same things as if we were broken records: whether pop culture could count as culture, if fishing was a religion, and if it was possible to be a little bit elitist. I said sure in the same way someone could be a little bit pregnant.
“We’re heading toward the steel mills,” I said when I took a breath from debating and looked around. We were near the place that had stained my daddy’s collar permanently blue. My poet’s father hadn’t been an iron and steel laborer but had worn a blue collar his whole life, too. Which had ended prematurely, back a few years. Time wasn’t keeping up its part of the healing bargain. If anything it kept sharpening the poet’s loss.
We were driving mostly west, a little north, a direction I’d never gone.
“So where we heading?” I said.
“I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you,” he said.
And he could. He’d quit hunting years ago after a doe would not die, despite the bullets. She had to be finished off by hand. He hadn’t given up the guns and knives, though.
“Promises,” I said.
He knew about my breakdown and all the other evidence showing something was bad wrong with me. “I don’t know why you say that,” he said in a tone suggesting that I was still cute even though I was wrong and dumb for thinking something so lame.
“It’s like no other place on earth,” he said, his eyes on the road.
“This place has all the ingredients for making iron, but within a two-mile radius,” he said, “closer together than anywhere else on the planet.” He raised his hand and let it sweep through the air then fall onto the leather steering wheel. He scratched his beard with his thumb and smiled. He was both imaginative and real, an educated redneck, a working-class poet with a notion that a certain piece of land was enchanting.
He was taking me to his land, I realized. Although he didn’t live on the thirty acres, it was part of his father’s legacy, something in his mind that was larger than life.
We wound down dirt roads in an area called Beat Ten, the one that even police wouldn’t patrol. Violence wasn’t the only legacy of the mining villages. Outdated equipment and hidden shafts scarred the area and the insular air felt ruthless, desperate.
A poet might say about Beat Ten: boys don’t fight there, they beat one another to death. Meanness is a virtue passed down like a pedigree. The work is physical, unrewarding, but pays for sixes of Bud. Undeveloped is an understatement. Geology rolled the dice and shanty towns with elevators came up. Inside a mine, day and night look the same and when it’s hard to tell light from darkness, nothing is easy. It takes more than water to quench thirst. And water isn’t what warms and helps numb you to sleep.
A way of life evolved there that looked black to those whose eyes weren’t rimmed with coal dust.
It’s tempting to believe places like Beat Ten aren’t real. That they’re hyped up by TV and exaggerated by anti-Southerners. That leftover bits of experience were scattered around by carpetbaggers like some sort of stunted seeds that died out. It’s even tempting to make it sound romantic, like the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral. But Beat Ten is real, very much alive, and just west of Birmingham, Alabama.
The poet’s truck came to a stop because the road did. The poet shut off the engine and pulled up the emergency brake. “My great-grandfather built it,” he said, pointing to the remains of a log cabin. “He brought his wife here for their honeymoon in 1911. They didn’t even have a bed.”
Because of his bad back, the poet slept on the floor more often than in a bed.
When we closed the truck doors, a very faint echo rose in the distance. Maybe it was the crisp air. I wished I’d brought a jacket. Beat Ten’s woods, I told myself, sounded no different than the woods I was used to: crows, fall leaves crackling in the wind, a motor in the distance.
He rubbed one of the logs with his thick, flat-nailed fingers. “Most of the land around here has only pine growing on it, but not my acres. They’re covered with hardwoods—oak, hickory, cottonwood. That’s why the deer come here.”
Crunching leaves, we crossed the threshold and stepped into what was left of the cabin. Giving me a tour, he navigated by proximity to the fireplace. Vines threaded through the decay of boards and rocks, a bit of life weaving its way through what was left. A cat-sized rat jumped from a plank overhead onto the log beside me and scurried down. When I stepped back onto one of the logs, I caught my tee shirt on a large splinter. I expected to hear myself scream but failing that, I tried to look casual.
Pointing to a heap of material and pine needles, he said, “Rat’s nest. Big one.”
“Did that come with the honeymoon package? Or was it extra?” I had one honeymoon and spent it away from rats, soaking in a heart-shaped private pool, one of the ones advertised in the back of bride magazines. The poet’s girlfriend of seven years was loyal and loving and he was very satisfied with her. But as yet, he’d not proposed.
Taking my shoulder like he might take his newest bass rod, he pointed me to the back corner of the cabin where a tree had taken down a wall. “That was an accident,” he said. The tree had taken down most of the roof, too. “Nature doing her thing. But the other cabin, well, it wasn’t an accident.” Nearby was a second cabin that burned. He looked somewhere I couldn’t see. “Beat Ten people don’t like outsiders.”
I listened for banjos. “But wasn’t your granddad an insider since he owned the land?”
“Belonging isn’t about ownership here. It’s more a matter of blood.
I spent some time walking around inside the burned cabin. The old stove was a four-legged enameled piece that had once been white. Now two prosthetic log-legs propped it up. In the front was an opening for wood. How much wood had its hungry mouth been fed over the last century? And what day called forth its last fire? On the top, three circles were black—stove eyes. Rust had eaten up much of the relic, but some sort of stubbornness—chemical, maybe—had refused complete disintegration.
In the left corner of the cabin, beams were covered with planks fashioning the upstairs. Up there was another rat’s nest. It was easy to spot if I looked closely.
The air was brisk. Not cold, but challenging enough for a single-layer tee shirt. Sudden chill bumps webbed out to cover my body. I had never been here before and yet I knew this place. I felt at home in these remains of a cabin for reasons I didn’t understand.
I walked around back and touched each log of the thirteen-high log wall. The homemade clay chinking had held for almost a hundred years. “They scraped it off the roads, hauled it back, wet it with water from the river,” he said as I dug out a loose chunk. It was almost pastel, Easter pink from the red ore that tints the earth in this area. My once-pink nipples showed through my shirt; time had darkened them to the color of mud.
I wanted to kiss the poet now, this very moment. Instead, I stumbled after him down the hill, spraying leaves in our wake.
“Here,” he pointed, “look at this. It’s a deer’s.” The bed was a small area of dented earth where leaves and twigs had been packed from the animal’s weight. We searched for bits of fur, proof of what we were sure of but couldn’t really see. We came up empty.
“Will the deer come back if they know we’ve been here?”
“Probably not.” He and I stood by the deer bed in silence. I wondered where the deer would sleep, if they slept alone, if they would miss this place, but I did not break the silence. I’m good at keeping quiet.
We walked to the river and startled some birds. Wings beat the air and squawks syncopated in an uneven pitch. The birds abandoned their cover and fled.
“What are those?” But they escaped too fast for the poet to identify, so they flew off unnamed.
Our next walk was in the city. We met by a lake for what would be our last walk for a while. I was having surgery the next morning.
“Take one last look,” I said when I was about to leave. “Next time you see me, you may not recognize me with boobs.”
“Go on and get that operation,” Mother had said over the phone. “Your daddy said to write you a check.” Weeks before an operation had removed his stomach but not all the cancer.
I argued for a few days but my vanity won out.
“Not a lotta girls can say their dad’s given ’em titties,” the poet said.
“Not funny,” I said. But he was right.
With our final-for-a-while walk over, he hugged me and wished me luck. “I may not be able to get my arms around you next time.”
The next time we drove to his land, my soreness from the operation was a memory. So was my dad.
This time it was night. We built a fire and laid down a quilt my grandmother had made. We held hands, talked about our childhoods, missed our dads out loud, and wished upon the stars for different things. We wept for a while before we left. I haven’t been back since.