The following week, a storm hit. The temperature dropped, and a foot of snow fell on Welch. Erma wouldn't let us use any coalshe said we didn't know how to operate the stove and would burn the house downand it was so cold in the basement that Lori, Brian, Maureen, and I were glad we all shared one bed. As soon as we got home from school, we'd climb under the covers with our clothes on and do our homework there.
We were in bed the night Mom and Dad came back. We didn't hear the sound of the car pulling up. All we heard was the front door opening upstairs, then Mom and Dad's voices and Erma beginning the long narrative of her grievances against us. That was followed by the sound of Dad stomping down the stairs into the basement, furious at all of us, me for back-talking Erma and making wild accusations, and Lori even more for daring to strike her own grandmother, and Brian for being such a pussy and starting the whole thing. I thought Dad would come around to our side once he'd heard what had happened, and I tried to explain.
"I don't care what happened!" he yelled.
"But we were just protecting ourselves," I said.
"Brian's a man, he can take it," he said. "I don't want to hear another word of this. Do you hear me?" He was shaking his head, but wildly, almost as if he thought he could keep out the sound of my voice. He wouldn't even look at me.
After Dad had gone back upstairs to tie into Erma's hooch and we kids were all in bed, Brian bit my toe to try to make me laugh, but I kicked him away. We all lay there in the silent darkness.
"Dad was really weird," I said, because someone had to say it.
"You'd be weird, too, if Erma was your mom," Lori said.
"Do you think she ever did something to Dad like what she did to Brian?" I asked.
No one said a thing.
It was gross and creepy to think about, but it would explain a lot. Why Dad left home as soon as he could. Why he drank so much and why he got so angry. Why he never wanted to visit Welch when we were younger. Why he at first refused to come to West Virginia with us and only at the last possible moment overcame his reluctance and jumped into the car. Why he was shaking his head so hard, almost like he wanted to put his hands over his ears, when I tried to explain what Erma had been doing to Brian.
"Don't think about things like that," Lori told me. "It'll make you crazy."
And so I put it out of my mind.
MOM AND DAD TOLD us how they'd made it to Phoenix only to find that Mom's laundry-on-the-clothesline ploy hadn't kept out intruders. Our house on North Third Street had been looted. Pretty much everything was gone, including, of course, our bikes. Mom and Dad had rented a trailer to carry back what little was leftMom said those foolish thieves had overlooked some good stuff, such as a pair of Grandma Smith's riding breeches from the thirties that were of the highest qualitybut the Oldsmobile's engine had seized up in Nashville, and they'd had to abandon it along with the trailer and Grandma Smith's riding breeches and take the bus the rest of the way to Welch.
I thought that once Mom and Dad returned, they'd be able to make peace with Erma. But she said she could never forgive us kids and didn't want us in her house any longer, even if we stayed in the basement and kept as quiet as church mice. We were banished. That was the word Dad used. "You did wrong," he said, "and now we've all been banished."
"This isn't exactly the Garden of Eden," Lori said.
I was more upset about the bike than I was about Erma banishing us. "Why don't we just move back to Phoenix?" I asked Mom.
"We've already been there," she said. "And there are all sorts of opportunities here that we don't even know about."
She and Dad set out to find us a new place to live. The cheapest rental in Welch was an apartment over a diner on McDowell Street that cost seventy-five dollars a month, which was out of our price range. Also, Mom and Dad wanted outdoor space we could call our own, so they decided to buy. Since we had no money for a down payment and no steady income, our options were pretty limited, but within a couple of days, Mom and Dad told us they had found a house we could afford. "It's not exactly palatial, so there's going to be a lot of togetherness," Mom said. "And it's on the rustic side."
"How rustic?" Lori asked.
Mom paused. I could see her debating how to phrase her answer. "It doesn't have indoor plumbing," she said.
*
Dad was still looking for a car to replace the Oldsour budget was in the high two figuresso that weekend we all hiked over for our first look at the new place. We walked down the valley through the center of town and around a mountainside, past the small, tidy brick houses put up after the mines were unionized. We crossed a creek that fed into the Tug River and started up a barely paved one-lane road called Little Hobart Street. It climbed through several switchbacks and, for a stretch, rose at an angle so steep you had to walk on your toes; if you tried walking flatfooted, you stretched your calves till they hurt.
The houses up here were shabbier than the brick houses lower down in the valley. They were made of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging roofs, rusted-out gutters, and balding tar paper or asphalt shingles slowly but surely parting from the underwall. In almost every yard, a mutt or two was chained to a tree or to a clothesline post, and they barked furiously as we walked by. Like most houses in Welch, these were heated by coal. The more prosperous families had coal sheds; the poorer ones left their coal in a pile out front. The porches were every bit as furnished as the insides of most houses, with rust-stained refrigerators, folding card tables, hook rugs, couches or car seats for serious porch-sitting, and maybe a battered armoire with a hole cut in the side so the cat would have a cozy place to sleep.
We followed the road almost to the end, where Dad pointed up at our new house.
"Well, kids, welcome to Ninety-three Little Hobart Street!" Mom said. "Welcome to home sweet home."
We all stared. The house was a dinky thing perched high up off the road on a hillside so steep that only the back of the house rested on the ground. The front, including a drooping porch, jutted precariously into the air, supported by tall, spindly cinder-block pillars. It had been painted white a long time ago, but the paint, where it hadn't peeled off altogether, had turned a dismal gray.
"It's good we raised you young 'uns to be tough," Dad said. "Because this is not a house for the faint of heart."