Brenda drives a pickup truck the color of bleached corn husks, where it isn’t the color of the virulent rust that’s eaten through half the frame. She drives like the highway is another rutted dirt road in the middle of Indiana: no haste, no hurry, and yet somehow, no problems. The traffic melts away at our approach, leaving us with a clear bead on the horizon. The speed is enough of a surprise that I don’t object when she takes as many surface streets and back roads as the route allows, driving past family farms and through fields of things I can’t identify.
“It’s been a hard season,” she says, eyes on the road, trees rustling around us. We’re back on the main road for a while, making the transition between states. “Not enough rain, not enough water, not enough love to fold back into the soil. Some of these folks are on the verge of losing their farms. Some of them have already lost; they’re just hanging on and hoping the banks don’t notice for a couple years more. Everything’s a haunted house in today’s America. Everything’s in need of an exorcism.”
“The world’s changed,” I say, uncomfortable, not sure what she’s trying to tell me.
Brenda sighs. “I know. I guess I don’t always make sense to you, and I’m sorry for that. You’re a lot younger than I am.”
“Always will be, I guess, unless my dying day says I was supposed to be a great-grandmother when I went.”
“Age isn’t the same as getting older,” says Brenda. “You can be here for a thousand years, and you’ll still never be as old as I am. Be grateful for that. There’s a lot of mourning to be had when you’ve been alive as long as someone like me. I remember when this land was all about the farms, and the fields went on this side of forever. These days, everyone wants to eat, but no one wants to take the time and care needed to coax the land into giving up its glories. People don’t change. We’re always selfish, and we’re always hungry. We’ve just gotten better at looking at greed and saying ‘Oh, that’s self-interest, that’s all right.’ We’ve forgotten the way the word ‘enough’ feels on the tongue.”
“Oh.” There isn’t a place for me in this conversation: Brenda may leave pauses, but they’re just breaks in a wall she built years ago, maybe before I was even born. I don’t have the strength or the knowledge to get through to her, and so I do the only thing I can, and change the topic. “Have you ever been to Kentucky before?”
“Not in decades.”
“Same here.” But I can taste it on the back of my tongue, humidity like fine wine, the unique blend of coal and ash and soft green moss that saw me through my childhood, anchored and cushioned me through the blows of my living days. Kentucky is the sound of dogs baying outside the window, the buzz of crickets, and the sweet comfort of Patty’s lips against my forehead, kissing my nightmares away. Kentucky is water and soil and doing for ourselves, even when people say things are easier in the cities, that we could have leisure and peace and silence if we were willing to slice ourselves off at the roots and turn into American tumbleweeds, rolling across the plains, looking for a place to grow. Maybe those people are right. Maybe if we’d moved, Patty would have lived, and if Patty had lived, I would have lived too. We could have grown old together instead of rotting away in matching graves.
But those people, those people who lived . . . they wouldn’t have been us. We needed Kentucky. It was in our blood and in our bones. Patty had sadness in her bones too, and she needed more than we knew how to give. When the world got to be too much, she left, and I don’t see how a change of scene could have saved her. New York didn’t save her. We needed Mill Hollow like Mill Hollow needed us, and every member of my family is buried there, going back to the land that loved us.
“You know things will have changed since you left,” says Brenda. Her voice is soft, but when I glance her way, her eyes are fixed on the horizon, as cold and inhuman as the rippling corn that calls her. “It’s still your home, but it won’t be the same.”
“That’s all right,” I say. “I’m not the same either.” When I left I was Jenna who runs, Jenna who buried her sister in the dark Kentucky soil, Jenna who knew hunger and weariness and fear, but who had never known how bad those things could get, even as she saw the sadness growing in her sister’s heart. That sadness swallowed Patty like a snake swallows a mouse, and that Jenna fled Kentucky on incorporeal feet, looking for a place where she’d be safe. She never quite managed to find it, and I buried her in the streets of New York, where I learned to be someone new. Someone stronger. Someone who doesn’t need to run.