Lisbeth had given all the graduating seniors solos. I wished she had given herself one. How long since I had heard her sing?
The high school looked the same. It had only been four years since I had walked the halls myself, head down, not wanting anyone to stop and ask me for anything. People still asked, of course. Could I get them something, did I have anything, would I bring it to this party? In four years, people might have gone to college, gone away. But that was what people in other places did, not here.
Appalachian Ohio, the heart of nothing at all.
It was illegal, so Mama shielded me. But she loved Lobo, or thought she did, so we’d moved out onto the property to be with him. We had our own place, a tiny shack in a field away from the main house where all the plants were: a safeguard in case the sheriff came. The sheriff never came. A small, narrow house, built on a trailer, it had a skinny kitchen with a gas-powered fridge and a propane stove, a woodstove for heat, a ladder that led to a loft. By the time I was fifteen, the shack was my place, and I slept alone there every night; Mama had moved into the farmhouse. She said it was because the tiny house was cramped for two people—but I knew the real reason: she had chosen him over me.
By the time I was eighteen, I was working alongside Mama and Lobo. They didn’t pay me, and I had small, fast hands.
When they left a year ago to make a go of it in California, the farm in Ohio became mine, mine alone—at least, mine alone to manage. I had talked about classes at community college, but who had the money, who had the time, there were chores. What would I do with a degree, except farm? There was a harvest to get in, there was trimming and weighing. There was work in the way of any plans. Money to be made.
At the high school, I parked in the senior lot out of habit. The football field looked dead, brown and tufted. The air cut my lungs, cold but with an undercurrent of wood smoke, as I joined the trudging crowd.
They were holding this thing outside.
Nobody had dressed up—only warmly. My Carhartts wouldn’t have looked out of place, though I had changed into clean jeans before leaving the farm, washed my hair under the faucet, scrubbing at the plant scent, heady and woodsy, that clung to my skin. The smell wouldn’t come off. I kept a vial of lavender oil on the windowsill to douse myself for days like this. I had dragged a comb through my hair, teeth snagging on stems, put on sneakers in place of my mud-gummed boots. Lisbeth didn’t like it if I looked too country; her folks didn’t like it.
But we all were country, even those of us living in duplexes and houses, like Lisbeth’s, with garages and green lawns. Black rat snakes still found the cracks in cinder-block foundations and slithered into kitchens, box elder bugs still hatched in the sills. In spring, even driveways in town could lose their ends in the rising, brown waters of floods. At least in the springs we used to have.
I felt lighter, less encumbered, without the heavy coveralls, but the chill found its way into my joints. My wet hair crackled around my ears. In the field beyond the high school, the graduates shivered in their thin robes.
Generation to generation, nothing really changed. I knew these kids. They fetched water from springs, were familiar with stalling the electric company. But how many of them had grown up with a handgun duct-taped beneath the dining room table and canisters of money buried in the yard? How many of them slept in the woods some nights? It was safer than being too near the farmhouse with the raving men: customers, friends of Lobo’s, who had brought pills or mushrooms; safer than my house with its thin, bum door. How many of these kids ate deer meat for months straight because that was how the hunters bartered for their weed?
I saw Lisbeth’s folks. “You couldn’t find a dress?” Lisbeth’s mama said. Her lips pressed together until they disappeared.
Her parents looked like two pillars in church clothes, clean and pale. They thought my mama was a drunk. I had heard them whispering about it, years ago. And that Lobo was a saint for taking us in. It was safer to let them think that than to know the truth: we were all growers.
My jeans were clean. I swept a hand around my hair and felt no leaves. I sat down next to Lisbeth’s folks. We faced the stage, a platform shrouded in mist.
“They always have this outside,” Lisbeth’s daddy was saying. “They did last year, even though...”
He didn’t finish. It had no name.
Last year had been a late spring, the slightest thaw, and the coldest summer. It had snowed in September. And kept on snowing. This year, more For Sale signs had appeared in the windows of shops in town. More of the windows of houses were dark or broken: dingy, one-or two-roomed shacks. Plastic sheeting ballooned out of doorways, porches sagged into rot. Every house still occupied had a fire going, smoke chugging from the chimney. There were no children playing in the yards. On my drive to the high school, I had passed another gas station that had wrapped its pumps in tarps, yet another farm with chains across its driveway and a house that looked cold and empty, a greenhouse with windows smashed. Farms were taking the cold the hardest.
Ushers from the student council had wiped the folding chairs with towels, so the seats weren’t damp, but a chill began to seep into my shoes from the ground. I wished I had worn my boots.
“Here, honey.” Lisbeth’s mama pulled two flat, foil-wrapped packages from her purse.
I slipped the hand warmers into my coat pockets, and my fingers closed around them, cracking them.
The choir had prepared for cold. They wore scarves and hats. Some of the girls had fur muffs, maybe from rabbits their daddies had shot. When the singers assembled on the front of the stage, they looked like something out of Charles Dickens, a band of winter ragamuffins. I was almost surprised when they didn’t sing a Christmas carol.
Lisbeth had a great voice: high and true. When Lisbeth sang, people would sit up. People would pay attention. Being part of The Church meant she had to wear shirts that covered her shoulders and arms. It meant that I had never gone over to her house on Saturday night—she had services early the next morning. It meant that we had to meet places in secret like Crossroads.
She never drove out to the farm; she couldn’t be caught around that stuff; she shouldn’t be caught around me. They prayed before meals at households in The Church. What Lisbeth believed herself didn’t seem to matter. Singing was the reason she stayed, she said. They taught her other things she couldn’t seem to unlearn: marriage was coming. Jesus was coming in a fireball that would divide the Earth into the good and the lost. She would have to decide. She would have to be ready to go with Him. She wore sensible shoes, kept her hair long. She was always waiting for men.
I didn’t know the song they performed at what would be the last graduation ceremony, the final graduating class; the last time the platform groaned under the risers; the last time the wind tried but could not unsettle the principal’s hair, buzzed short on his flat head. The school building behind us was already freezing, empty as a factory. I only listened to Lisbeth’s voice, clear and strong alongside the choir, guiding them, blending, but sometimes rising above them.