Strange as this Weather Has Been

Bant thinks about all the times R.L. has touched her. It started innocently, with him stroking her hair, but soon they were sneaking off during her lunch breaks to kiss. Recently, he has been trying to pressure her into having sex with him. She tells him that she’s only 15, but he says, “So? I was doing it at twelve” (263). She tries telling him that she doesn’t want a baby, but this is just an excuse that masks the real reason: “I’d had enough before anything between my legs. But also it was something beyond that that I needed to keep. That had nothing to do with my body” (263). 

Lace recalls that after moving back to West Virginia for good, she was forced to take the demeaning job at the Dairy Queen:

Jimmy Make wouldn’t take a job like that, and I knew it was my fault we’d come home, so I got on. Still, I believed if Jimmy Make would just lower himself to do something regular along with me, we’d get by okay, it was a whole lot easier to be poor up Yellowroot than in Raleigh, North Carolina (264).

Once back, Lace realized how bad things are getting. In the creek by their house, crawdads and the fish were dying. Rhondell, a friend at work, explained, “Poisons in the runoff got em” (266). Dunky, another friend, added that “[m]ercury […] [l]ead, arsenic, cadmium, copper, selenium, chromium, nickel” are all things that are littering the water (266). Lace wondered how Dunky could know all this, and Dunky said she learned it from her mother-in-law Loretta.

Loretta and a man named Charlie would often come to the Dairy Queen to talk about the environmental devastation happening around them, and one day Lace joined them. Lace realized that these two people “taught themselves chemistry, geology, hydrology, biology, politics, and law. It’s amazing what they’d taught themselves, Loretta with nothing but a high school diploma and Charlie without even that” (268). Lace didn’t believe them at first, but Loretta would always bring in newspapers or articles to support her claims.

After searching some records, Charlie discovered that the mining company, Lyon, received a permit to blast Yellowroot next. He warned, “They must have already blasted to bits every ridge between there and you-all […] I’m real sorry, Lace. You-all be careful” (270). Lace felt heartsick thinking about the irreparable damage done to land: 

Its gradual being taken away for the past hundred years, by timber, by coal, and now, outright killed, and the little you have left, mind thinking, heart knowing, a constant reminder of what you’ve lost and are about to lose. So you never get a chance to heal (271).

Dunky and Loretta took Lace to their place to show her firsthand how their home had been ravaged by the mining destruction. Since their family settled the area in the 1800s, there had never been a flood like the one that ruined their property recently. But when they complained to the DEP, they were denied any recompense with the excuse that the flood was “an act of God. Normal weather event. Mining didn’t contribute at all” (273). Loretta emphasized the complexity of it all, asking whether it’s fair that the mostly out-of-state miners “get $60,000 a year while the rest of us got nothing but dust and floods and stress and poison and never knowing when that water’s gonna take your house with it” (275).

After hearing all of this, Lace wrote a letter to her senator, made phone calls to government agencies, and even attended a permit hearing. Jimmy never supported her, having accepted defeat already:

‘Nothing to do but get used to it or move […] you won’t never beat coal. It’s who has the money, the rich people always win, that’s how it’s always been, especially in the state of West Virginia. That’s why the smart people get out’ (276).

Corey ties Tommy up so that he can sneak off to see Rabbit, the metal-collecting man shunned by the town. Rabbit has promised Corey that he has a special job for him if he can come by alone, without Tommy. Once at Rabbit’s, Corey knocks on the door. A clearly drunk Rabbit answers: “Rabbit’s yellow smell that he carries always, soaked-up liquor leaking out his skin, but today the smell is the purest Corey has ever smelled, and it pours straight from his mouth” (281).

Rabbit tells Corey to get in his car because they’re going to pick up a part that’s hard for just one person to reach. Soon, they are driving off the main streets, “turning off onto a paved road back up a hollow” (284). Rabbit drives right past a no-trespassing sign and onto an abandoned road that weaves though old tunnels and mines. When they stop, Rabbit informs Corey that he wants to tie a rope around him and lower him into a deep, black hole to retrieve an “ole panel off a breaker box” (286). Corey agrees, and Rabbit lowers him down.

Corey tries to turn on the flashlight that Rabbit gave him, but it doesn’t work; he’s forced to feel his way through the dark to find the part. Meanwhile, Rabbit gets lost in the dark: “He panics, flails, he grabs. He goes after Corey, he snatches at him, tries to bundle him back, but he finds himself swimming at air, and finally, on frantic instinct, he wheels and plunges towards where the light should be” (291). Corey manages to bump into the metal part and ties the rope around it. During the ride back, the sheriff pulls over Rabbit and arrests him for a DUI. 

Bant has decided to use the quiet early morning hours to investigate what the mining company is doing. She assumes that if she gets there before anyone else, she’ll be safe from prying eyes. She sneaks past the company gate and climbs along the familiar path. While she’s climbing, a blast goes off: “The ground started rolling, and then I heard a boom […] I was skidding on my side down the earth wall” (296). After the smoke from the blast clears, she looks back to see a crumpled-up Tommy, who followed her to tell her that Corey went to the snake ditches. 

Dane wakes up to hear Lace yelling at Bant in the front yard. She’s mad that Bant snuck away to climb up the mountain, which allowed Tommy to follow her. Despite her angry front, Lace is scared thinking about what could have happened to them during the blast.

Lace has become an activist, spreading “the word whenever [she] could, lots of people didn’t really understand what was happening, just like [she] hadn’t, because of how the industry kept it hidden up over [their] heads” (300). At the same time, she also tries to show her sympathy to the people who have fed their families on mine money, like her husband, father, and grandfather: “I just believe they can do it a better way, a way that would actually give us more jobs and not ruin everything we have” (301). She even made it on TV when she protested outside a Lyon stockholders meeting. Although most of these protests were uneventful, a man later recognized her in a grocery store parking lot and showed her his gun as a threat.

Charlie takes Lace to see his hometown, Tout. Tout used to be a “company town. Company store, company doc, company preacher, ball team, scrip, whole nine yards” (306), until most of the residents relocated in the 1950s due to automation. Now, Tout is a ghost town. Charlie won’t leave because he doesn’t want the company to win. Apparently, when people sold out, they had to sign a form that said they would “never protest a mine again and would never come back within twenty-five miles of Tout” (308).

After her visit with Charlie, Lace arrives home late, and Jimmy is mad. He mistakenly accuses her of being at a rally in Charleston. She suddenly feels a pure hatred for Jimmy because he is too weak to fight for the land that she loves: “By that spring, 2000, the only reason Jimmy and I’d talk at all was to arrange practical stuff, mostly around the kids, and to argue. We weren’t never touching, either” (311). However, her hatred eventually softens, and she suggests that they move to her mom’s old house to avoid the floods. Jimmy refuses, arguing that they don’t have the money to fix it up, and they never would, because he can’t find work. Lace realizes that she has to choose: She can fight “to keep the land or give in and keep Jimmy” (313). 

Bant wants R.L. to sneak around his job to find out what’s going on with the fill. He tries to barter this into sexual favors, proposing, “Well, you do me a favor, I’ll do you one […] You do me, I’ll do you” (316). He’s trying to bribe her, saying that if she has sex with him, then he’ll get the information she wants to know. 

It’s rumored that Seth and his family are on vacation, so Corey comes up with a plan to get their four-wheeler: He digs a hole under their shed, squeezes Tommy through the hole, and then Tommy unlocks the shed door. Once inside, Corey is excited to see that the keys left in the four-wheeler. He plans to ride it on Sunday, when everyone will be at church and won’t notice him. 

Bant gives in and has sex with R.L. in the hope that he will keep his word and show her the mountaintop. They have sex in his truck; she thinks she might be bleeding and worries that the blood will show on her white shorts. However, the moisture she felt was actually the result of having unprotected sex: “Once I got my shorts down, I saw most of the stickiness was not blood. I had to take toilet paper, ball it up, hope it stayed steady in my pants” (324).

Three days after they have sex, R.L. sneaks her onto the mountain at night. They stumble along the site, barely able to see in the dark, and after a long time they end up back at his truck. He smugly assumes that he’s done his part in the investigation, declaring, “I told you there wasn’t no impoundment up here” (328). Bant feels tricked and angrily snarls, “You have no fucking idea whether it’s up here or not. You had no fucking idea where you were going the whole goddamned time” (329). She rushes away to look again on her own, but he is mad that she might cause him to lose his job. He calls out that he loves her, but Bant suddenly blacks out. The next thing she remembers is waking up in his truck. Bant doesn’t know whether she fell or if he knocked her down.