Читать книгу Rachel's Blue - Zakes Mda - Страница 5

Members and supporters of Appalachia Active, and some curious citizens, have assembled in the Arts West theatre building. Rachel sits in the front pew – this used to be a church some years back before the community bought it as a multipurpose performance space; it still has rows of pews for theatre seats. She is among a group of young women from the city and outlying townships. She sits next to Schuyler, her best friend from Rome Township. Occasionally they throw a glance at the two men and two women at a table on the stage, but most of their attention is on the people who are trickling in, filling the pews.

“Hey, there’s Jason. You remember him, don’t you? We called him the stinky kid,” says Schuyler, glancing at the two men walking down the aisle and looking for space in the opposite pews. One of them is Jason and the other is Genesis de Klerk, his father.

“I didn’t. You and the other yapping yentas called him that,” says Rachel. “Is that him? Where has he been?”

“Yapping yentas” elicits screams of excitement from Schuyler, and the girls forget all about Jason as they reminisce about high school and the lisping teacher who gave Schuyler and her friends that label because indeed they were busybodies. They mimic the teacher and the other young women in the pew join the conversation with their own memories of the trouble they used to get into as a result of not minding their own business.

One of the women on the stage, the older one, uses her clenched fist as a gavel to call the meeting to order and the assembly falls silent. She welcomes everyone to the workshop, especially the visitors from West Virginia who have come to help the people of Athens organise against the fracking companies.

“I always have a flashback to the sixties when I’m with members of Appalachia Active,” she says, rubbing her hands together with glee.

She then introduces everyone on the stage: the young woman is from the university where she recently graduated with an engineering degree; and the man is a legal practitioner in Athens, “a lawyer to love” because he fought for the Wayne Forest. Everyone laughs at the characterisation of the handsome middle-aged man because lawyers are generally reputed to be unlovable. This is quite a good generational mix because the fourth facilitator on the stage is a young man, Skye Riley, perhaps in his early twenties, who is a coal miner from West Virginia.

The young engineer is the first to address the meeting. She is using Microsoft PowerPoint to illustrate what hydraulic fracturing is all about. She tells the assembly that fracking technology has been in existence for sixty years, but horizontal drilling is a new technology.

“You get oil and gas, but you also get a lot of waste water that no one knows what to do about,” she says.

She shows slides of the different classes of wells and explains in detail how water is injected into them, and the potential for pollution this presents. And then she talks about the abandoned and orphaned wells throughout southeast Ohio and the ground water contamination that they cause, besides the fact that they are great conduits of this poison to the surface.

Although this is called a workshop, it is really a lecture. All the technical stuff cannot hold Rachel’s attention for much longer and she begins to fidget. Her eyes wander and catch Jason de Klerk gazing at her. He smiles. She smiles back.

People have lots of questions after the engineer’s presentation. Rachel is most impressed by her age – she is definitely younger than Rachel and yet here she is on stage addressing all these people, talking with eloquence and authority, and teaching people far older than her, some of whom are respected professionals in the county, things they knew nothing about. Because of her education she is more of an asset to Appalachia Active than Rachel is.

All of a sudden she now sees her role as only to increase the numbers at demonstrations and protest marches. She does not add much value to the organisation. Nana Moira was right, she concludes, she must go back to school. She may not be an engineer like the young lady, but she can be something that people look up to. She is even more impressed when the engineer answers the questions with confidence and humour, and how she tries to be fair and honest. When she has no information on the advantages and disadvantages of a specific fracking method she says so, and directs the questioner to other sources that are more knowledgeable than she is.

The lawyer to be loved takes the stage with more panache. Perhaps he imagines he is addressing a jury. He talks of well blow-outs that release millions of gallons of polluted water into creeks, of how natural water streams are hit when fracking companies prepare the ground for fracking, and of numerous occasions when the valves of trucks are “accidentally” left open so that the brine can be spilled along the road. All the while he gives specific examples of towns, villages and townships where these things have happened, and what the response or lack of response of Ohio government agencies was.

This angers the people; some yell that this must not be allowed to happen. Rachel steals a glance at Jason. She catches him still staring at her. She wonders if he is paying attention to the proceedings at all. She finds his gaze discomfiting. He waves furtively. She responds with a weak smile, and quickly redirects her eyes back to the stage.

“Every well in Athens County is an old well that has been converted, most before we even had laws,” says the lawyer, before outlining what legal recourse the communities have. It becomes obvious to Rachel that his role is to teach Appalachia Active how to get around things, how to stay within the law in their protests, how to use the loopholes in the law to fight the fracking companies. He is arming the members with legal tools on how to beat the fracking industry at its own game. He has really studied the law as it pertains to extractive industry and has explored the many avenues that aggrieved communities can follow to take their cases to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, to city and county officials, to state representatives, to the state governor and to the courts.

The chairperson seems to have a different view, at least that’s what her facial expression shows as the lawyer uses PowerPoint slides to sum up his argument. She does not directly challenge him, though. After he has answered a few questions from the assembly and taken his seat, she calls upon Skye Riley to make his presentation. When he stands up one can see how scrawny he is, yet he moves and gesticulates as though he has just been ejected from a dynamo. His is not a meticulously prepared PowerPoint presentation. He just speaks off the cuff.

“We can’t play by their rules,” he says. “They are pillaging our land and poisoning our water. We need direct action.”

The audience is immediately electrified, especially the front pew of young women. Rachel is all agog.

“You can actually change the situation you live in without dealing with politicians,” Skye Riley continues. “You need no one’s permission to confront the industry that is killing our families. We can’t wait for two years dealing with the courts; we need direct action now.”

There is prolonged applause. The lawyer is trying very hard to hide his wounded look behind a smile. But it is a very mechanical smile. He takes the young man’s utterances as a personal attack on him.

“Direct action,” someone shouts from the floor, “what does it mean exactly?”

All eyes turn on the heckler. It is Genesis de Klerk.

“It means you chain yourselves to pieces of equipment,” says Skye.

Everyone knows exactly what he is talking about. Some people are already resorting to that line of action. An Appalachia Active member is currently on trial for doing exactly that. The news has been on Power 105 FM and in the Athens News. It is what scared Nana Moira; the way things are going Rachel may suffer the same fate.

“It means you sit in the governor’s office and refuse to leave. It takes endless energy and money to go into the community organising. Slow and patient work needs resources and time, which we don’t have. In West Virginia we decided direct action is the only solution. We can’t wait for state regulatory bodies to work.”

The young women are screaming like Skye is some rock star. The young men are clapping and nodding their heads in agreement. Jason is unimpressed. His attention is on the women in the opposite front pew.

“He’s been staring at you all this time,” Schuyler whispers to Rachel.

“He’s not staring at anybody; he’s speechifying.”

“Come on, you know I’m talking of Jason.”

“How do you know he’s staring at me and not you?”

“You were his girlfriend, not me.”

Rachel elbows Schuyler in the ribcage, and they giggle away.

Skye Riley is looking directly at them; they fall silent and pay attention. He is explaining that extractive industries affect poor people everywhere. The people who are doing mountain top mining in West Virginia are the same people who are poisoning Ohio water through fracking. They are also the same people who drive poor folks of colour out of their houses in New Orleans.

“We need people who are willing to lock themselves to equipment. We need folks who are not afraid to go to jail,” he says before sitting down to even greater applause.

“Shut down the injection wells in Ohio now!” some people are chanting.

It is obvious that most people in the room agree with the direct action route and some may even personally commit themselves to it. Rachel finds the chants electrifying. Such gatherings are what make life so wonderful in Athens County.

The two girls agree that Skye Riley is “awesome”, especially when he glowers at the mention of elected officials who have sold out to extractive industry. When he shapes his lips into a defiant smirk he is even more “cute”. They admit to each other that they fancy him, although it is all in jest and laughter. Rachel is happy that Schuyler is gradually coming out of her shell and is becoming herself again after the death of her lover and then a trial that left her broken-spirited and on probation. She is beginning to appreciate life and men again. But the fact that she has a permanent limp and will walk with the aid of a crutch for the rest of her life will be a constant reminder of a sad chapter in her life.

After the meeting Skye rushes out for a much needed smoke as the rest of the people mill about the aisle debating the merits of direct action versus legal channels. Genesis is obviously a rule of law guy. He says he believes in protest, orderly demonstrations and court actions rather than in this so-called direct action which to him is tantamount to violent revolution. An elderly woman says Genesis is living proof of how people change as they age. After all, he is no stranger to jail; back in the day he used to lead sit-ins and lie-ins and other kinds of defiance campaigns against every cause known to man ranging from the Vietnam War to the saving of seals and whales and all sorts of animals that don’t even exist in America. A fellow sixties hippy – an unreconstituted one – asks: “When did Genesis become so conservative?”

“Bullshit! You guys just want West Virginia folks to take over our fight,” says Genesis, looking around for Jason. “Let’s go, Jase.”

Jason bumps into Rachel.

“Excuse me,” says Rachel.

“You’re excused,” says Jason. “Although I should be the one to apologise.”

“Jason!” she says.

“Yep, the one and only. Good to see you’re as pretty as you ever was.”

She doesn’t say “thank you”. Compliments always embarrass her.

“Meet my pa.”

“You’re Nana Moira’s girl,” says Genesis.

He shakes her hand heartily. “How’s the grand ol’ lady?”

“She’s doin’ great, Genesis. I didn’t know you were Jason’s dad,” says Rachel. “I knew him way back at high school.”

Rachel only got to know Genesis de Klerk a few years ago when Jason was already playing a hippy in Yellow Springs. He never talks about a son when he visits the Jensen Community Centre to hang out with the other seniors and gossip about the good ol’ days or to donate fresh produce for Nana Moira’s Food Pantry. She and Nana Moira have been to Genesis’ house deep in the Wayne Forest to glean tomatoes from his vast garden. Nana Moira makes them into salsa. He is the most organic of all the old hippies of southeast Ohio. His home is self-sufficient in almost everything, including electricity, which he gets from solar panels that are on the roof and on the boulders in the wild-looking part of the garden. Behind the house is a dam where he catches his fish. There are a few beehives for honey, ducks and chickens for eggs and meat, a cow for milk, and three large heaps of compost.

What Rachel remembers most about the visit was that when she wanted to use the bathroom Genesis’ wife – Rachel now concludes she cannot be Jason’s mom, judging by her young age, but his stepmom – took her to a room with a wooden toilet seat and a portable bucket under it. The family does all its business in that room and in another one like it downstairs. The contents are emptied outside and become part of the compost heap. That’s what gets Genesis’ vegetables so gigantic and full of vigour.

Rachel cannot forget how she flipped out. She had not known that some people use crap to fertilise their gardens.

“Ain’t nothing more organic than human crap,” Nana Moira told her when they were driving home.

“I’m not gonna eat Genesis’ veggies. Otherwise I am gonna think of all that crap. I wonder why it didn’t even smell in the house, not even in the latrine.”

“Maybe they treat it with something that eats the smell,” said Nana Moira.

“You gonna eat those veggies even when you know they’ve been fertilised with Genesis’ crap?”

“Of course I am gonna eat them. We’ve been eating them all along and we’s healthy as a fiddle.”

“Not me, Nana Moira. Not any more.”

“You don’t know what manure they use for them veggies from Kroger or from the Food Bank.”

That flipped Rachel even more. To this day she hates vegetables.

But it is not from the vegetables, honey, eggs and milk that Genesis’ family earns its livelihood. These are mostly for home consumption. Genesis buys a lot of cheddar from Wisconsin cheesemongers and adds value to it by ageing it before selling it at the farmers’ market. Rachel and Nana Moira were impressed when he took them to his cellar and showed them the shelves with chunks of cheese in half-open glass containers or just wrapped in wax paper. There were thermometers on the walls and a range of fans on the floor to create air circulation. Some of the cheese, he told them, had been there for two years, and would only be sold after another three to fetch a good price from connoisseurs. Rachel was struck by the smell that permeated the room, both mouldy and pungent, almost like pee – a smell that she has associated with Genesis and his wife ever since. Even as he stands here with his son and Schuyler she can detect the familiar whiff.

“You remember Schuyler?” says Rachel to Jason.

“Yeah. The queen of them yentas back in the day.”

The memory provokes a few giggles; Genesis is bemused.

“‘Back in the day’ being the operative words here,” says Schuyler.

“I’ll leave you with your friends, Jase,” says Genesis. “Some of us have work to do.”

Jason suggests they all go for coffee at Donkey provided they give him a ride home. He was persuaded to attend this meeting by his dad so he came with him in his car.

Rachel helps the limping Schuyler down the steps.

And there is Skye Riley sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette.

“You girls didn’t hear a darn thing I was saying. Talking all the time,” he says looking at Rachel and Schuyler. And then turning to Jason he adds, “I bet you can’t get a word in edgeways with these two, bro.”

“About chaining ourselves,” says Schuyler, “that’s what we were talking about.”

“In that case you’re forgiven,” says Skye.

He stands up to introduce himself, and they all laugh and tell him they already know who he is. After they have told him their names he says he hopes to see them at the Appalachia Active’s first ever Action Camp that will be held for the whole of next weekend at the old Stewart School. It will be a community weekend of workshops about injection wells, fracking, community organising and direct action, all aimed at helping activists from across southeastern Ohio to prepare themselves for the impending fight. He will come all the way from the Blue Ridge Mountains to facilitate some of the workshops. Jason and Schuyler say they will not be able to attend the camp, but Rachel will definitely be there. Skye is excited to hear this and promises that he will see her there.

Jason, Schuyler and Rachel walk to Rachel’s Ford Escort, which is parked on the street just in front of the building.

“Holy fuck, these guys take themselves so seriously,” says Jason when the three of them are seated at Donkey sipping coffee. “You ain’t gonna be chaining yourselves to no frackin’ shit, will ya?”

Rachel says she will because she believes in the cause. Schuyler, on the other hand, would not be able to even if she wanted to. She is on probation and is still doing community service for a crime that the county prosecutor called “aggravated stupidity”. For the past few years she had a passionate affair with a married man whose promises to leave his wife and be with Schuyler for ever and ever were never fulfilled. Instead he died in a motorcycle accident. Schuyler was on the pillion when this happened.

Schuyler was in O’Bleness Hospital when the man was cremated. After months of hospitalisation she is now in physiotherapy.

The man’s family barred her from visiting his remains, which were kept in an urn in a columbarium at the cemetery. This embittered her because, as she told Rachel, all she wanted was to say goodbye to her lover. So one night she took a cab to the cemetery – she didn’t want to involve Rachel in the crime she was planning – and broke the glass front of the niche with a rock. She grabbed the urn and fled. Out on the road she phoned another cab to pick her up.

The wife knew immediately that this was not an act of random vandalism. She told the police who she suspected, and indeed they found the man’s ashes in Schuyler’s bedroom, on the nightstand next to her bed. She told the officers that she stole the man’s ashes because he was hers and his wife had no business keeping them or barring her from the cemetery. She was adamant that the man loved her, not the wife, and the fact that when he died he was with Schuyler was proof enough. Therefore, she felt that she was more entitled to those ashes than the official widow. This was Schuyler’s defence at the Athens Court of Common Pleas where she was on trial for felony vandalism. She was convicted and sentenced to a two thousand, five hundred dollar fine and community service. She is still serving that sentence and if she were to be caught on the wrong side of the law again during her period of probation she would certainly go to prison. That’s why she is not prepared to take any risk chaining herself to fracking equipment even though, like her friend Rachel, she strongly believes in the cause.

“But you was chanting ‘direct action, direct action’ major,” says Jason.

“Yeah, I can chant it ’cause I support it, but I can’t do it,” says Schuyler.

Both Rachel and Schuyler find Jason a pleasant guy, a gentleman in fact, despite his vocabulary which is peppered with cusswords and has regressed from the high-school-acquired register to that of the township folks who don’t have much schooling. He tells them about his carefree life in Yellow Springs, his sadness at the loss of Big Flake Thomas, and his return to old Athens County where he hopes to resuscitate the music career that was really coming along fine in Yellow Springs until the big man decided to join celestial buskers. In the meantime he is helping his father in his cheese-ageing business and he hates it. He has come to hate cheese in all its manifestations, and as soon as he finds a job he’s bailing on his father.

What bugs him most is that his father has lately rediscovered God after a life as an agnostic hippy. He has gone back to the religion of his Michigan-Dutch ancestors – the Reformed Church in America – and has the religious fervour of a new convert that tends to annoy everyone around him. For instance, on Thanksgiving his relatives from Michigan descended like the elders of Zion on Rome Township and turned his home into a revivalist retreat.

Rachel remembers that Genesis’ origins are traced back to Michigan. His father – Jason’s grandfather, that is – was a pipefitter and welder of Michigan-Dutch stock who came from Grand Rapids to work at the booming coal mines in Rome Township in the 1940s. In the beginning he had stood out as a foreigner because people here have close-knit families with bloodlines that are identifiable from their surnames. But he worked his way into the hearts of the community and soon his strange Michigan-Dutch surname was as native as the Appalachian soil.

“It can’t be that bad,” says Rachel. “You’re just set in your wild Yellow Springs ways.”

“Ain’t nothing wild about Yellow Springs. It’s a place of art and culture. Carefree ways, yes, not wild ways. Major carefree! But here I’m like a slave. I’m a grown-ass man but Pa treats me like I’m a kid still.”

He goes along with the treatment just to please his pa and make his step-ma, whom he adores, happy. As soon as he returned from Yellow Springs they took him to Grand Rapids to be baptised into the church of his ancestors. He went along with that too; it made them happy and saved him from any nagging that was sure to come from his pa.

He was christened Revelation, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

“Revelation as in the Book of Revelation?” asks Schuyler, laughing.

“From Genesis to Revelation,” says Rachel.

“I hate that name. I am Jason, and I don’t wanna be a cheesemonger. I wanna be a music monger.”

“Those, my friend, are the lyrics of a new song,” says Rachel.

“You can play together,” says Schuyler. “You’ll make a great team.”

“Holy fuck! You got it, Schuyler. Right there, you got it major. Please say yes, Rachel. I heard you play at the farmers’ market the other day. We can make something good.”

Rachel thinks this is just talk. She doesn’t evince any enthusiasm for the suggestion. In any event, she never had plans to team up with anyone. She is a solo artist. Like her dad. Like her granddad. Okay, her granddad was not solo all the time. He had a band. The Jensen Band. But even then it was Robbie and the Jensen Band.

“We can do it, Rachel. Me and my conga and my didj. You and your guitar. You don’t need to sing nothing. Just play the guitar. We’ll produce sounds that no one in these parts has ever heard. Think about it, man, think about it.”

“There’s nothing to think about,” says Schuyler. “You two were meant for each other. She’s going to do it, Jason. I know she will. She’s got too much sense not to do it.”

After an afternoon of banter and laughter Jason says he won’t need the ride home after all. He wants to go bar-hopping on Court Street. He’s going to celebrate the new partnership that he hopes will come to fruition as soon as Rachel gives a positive answer.

“You think I don’t see what you’re up to, pushing me at this guy?” says Rachel as she drives on Route 50 taking Schuyler home.

“For music, Rache. Only for music. Don’t you get any dirty ideas further than that.”

They agree that Jason has become a very charming and well turned-out man, a far cry from the stinky kid they knew in high school.

Nana Moira agrees to let Jason work at the Centre as a volunteer. This means he is not earning any wages, but will occasionally get a few dollars as gas money. It took Rachel weeks of cajoling for Nana Moira to finally go along with this arrangement. She did not want to get on the wrong side of Genesis, a man who has donated a lot to the Food Pantry, helping it not to depend solely on the supplies from the food bank in Logan.

Jason takes to his tasks with gusto. He can be seen with a bucket and a mop cleaning the linoleum floors without anyone asking him to do so. He even dusts the furniture, a thing that no one ever did at the Centre. When Nana Moira needs some ingredients for her culinary masterpieces he volunteers to drive to Wal-Mart in the city in his Pontiac, a distance of more than twenty miles. And he always returns promptly with the right stuff. Soon Nana Moira becomes dependent on him, and misses him on the days he doesn’t come.

He has no obligation to be at the Centre at all, but he is there on most days of the week. Sometimes there is no work for him, so he just sits at the long tables and gossips with the quilting women. Once in a while Rachel is there and joins in the gossip. Thanks to Jason, the new quilting women are beginning to open up to her, to realise that she is not such a snooty person after all. She, on the other hand, betrays a tinge of jealousy when they hover over Jason and hold on to every word he utters.

People notice that whenever Genesis stops over at the Centre Jason does not show up. There is some estrangement between the two, and Genesis no longer visits as much as he did because he feels betrayed by Nana Moira. Exactly what she feared. But there is nothing she can do about it because Jason is a grown man who is entitled to make his own decisions. Also, he is a positive presence at the Centre.

In any event, Nana Moira feels Genesis should not be so pissed off with everyone because the boy still minds the cheese stall at the farmers’ market for him on Saturdays, and even on some Wednesdays. But Genesis expects more than just minding a stall from his son. He wants him to learn the trade and be part of the family business. He thought Jason – whom he insists on calling Revelation – had returned from Yellow Springs precisely because the world had given him a few hard lessons about life, and that now he would be more serious and be an upright citizen; he would not be afraid to face his responsibilities like a man. Especially now that he has been baptised into the church of his ancestors, who are known in history as hard workers who helped to build America into what it is today.

“But all he does is sit here yap-yapping with the women,” says Genesis on one of his visits to the Centre.

“He don’t only yap-yap,” says Nana Moira. “He helps a lot here. And he’s learning plenty of stuff.”

“What can anyone learn yap-yapping with women?”

“What can anyone learn from women? You talk like you didn’t come from a vagina.”

This disarms Genesis and he breaks out laughing.

“I didn’t,” he says. “Caesarean.”

“Same difference. You lived in some woman’s innards.”

The quilting women are scandalised. People in these parts don’t call things like that by their names. Plus Genesis is too young to be talking such stuff with Nana Moira. He could easily be the age of Rachel’s late pops. But he is enjoying the exchange with Nana Moira and even forgets that he is angry with his son.

The original reason Jason took up the volunteer offer was that he was going to be closer to Rachel. He hoped this would give them the opportunity to rehearse and busk together. But now he genuinely loves working here and enjoys the company, not only of the regular quilters, but of a variety of people from Jensen Township and from neighbouring townships such as Rome, Ames, Dover and Canaan. Sometimes storytellers descend from the hills and come out of the Wayne Forest to enjoy Nana Moira’s “special occasion” dinners and tell their tall tales to the joy of everyone, and to Nana Moira’s cackling laughter. Special occasions are not only limited to Thanksgiving or Fourth of July or Valentine’s Day. Nana Moira has a knack of coming up with a special occasion off the top of her head and starts cooking. Sometimes it is something that people can recognise, such as Saint Patrick’s Day or Mother’s Day, but at other times it is an obscure anniversary – the first time she set her eyes on Robbie Boucher, for instance.

It bothers Jason that Rachel is usually somewhere else instead of enjoying his company at the Jensen Community Centre. But he is biding his time. She will learn to appreciate him. And together they will create beautiful sounds that will haunt her soul and make her dream of him in the middle of the night as she sleeps in her room.

Fridays are his blissful moments because that’s when she bakes bread to sell at the farmers’ market the following day. She spends the whole day in the kitchen at the Centre, and he helps her knead the dough, or he runs some errands to town in case she needs some more hickory nuts or flour or whatever else she uses in her recipes. They talk about the old days and laugh a lot. And they promise each other that soon they will start rehearsing and playing together. They giggle and guffaw and tease each other and chase each other around the tables and use the kitchen stools and lids of pots as shields when they blast each other with flour. Then they clean up the mess quickly before Nana Moira discovers it.

Nana Moira always keeps out of the kitchen on those days. She has indeed taken a shine to Jason, and she tells her granddaughter so. “I hope sweet Jesus will open your eyes one day and you’ll see that this is a good man He has delivered right to your doorstep.”

But Rachel has many other interests and, according to Nana Moira, takes Jason for granted. If she is not out there doing Appalachia Active stuff such as demonstrating at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources offices on East State Street to stop a well on the land of Mrs Mayle, an eighty-four-year-old in Rome Township who does not want it on her property, she is visiting with Schuyler – that crippled Schuyler, according to Nana Moira – and driving her to physiotherapy or to her community service work at an old age home in the city.

On Fridays when the baking resumes Rachel does seem to reciprocate Jason’s romantic – some may say amorous – attention. At least that’s what he thinks. That’s what Nana Moira thinks too, and she is ecstatic about it while it lasts. That’s what the gossiping women of the Jensen Township Quilting Circle think as well, and they ask themselves behind Nana Moira’s back why good things always fall in the laps of those who do not deserve them, those who fail to appreciate them.

One weekend Rachel goes to the Action Camp where she meets Skye Riley and things happen.

The camp is held in Stewart in an old building that used to be a school but is now used for various community purposes. Different workshop sessions are going on at the same time in the classrooms, and Skye takes the initiative to look for Rachel until he finds her at the “Fracking 101 Workshop” where participants are learning how gas is extracted using horizontal hydraulic drilling technology. The content is at a much greater depth than at the Arts West meeting. From then on he is with her that whole day, accompanying her even to sessions he would not otherwise have attended; he has heard it all and seen it all.

Rachel is grateful for his company. She would have been quite lonely here without Schuyler; most of the participants are much older people. Skye is with her when she attends the session on “Injection Wells” where they explore what happens to all the toxic frack waste, the dangers of injection wells and how Ohio has become a dumping ground for the waste. Just to be with her, he even attends those sessions that deal with topics he detests, such as one on “Exhausting Administrative Remedies” where Rachel and the other participants learn what bases to cover before resorting to direct action. Skye tells Rachel during the lunch break that it was a session of appeasement, just like the one titled “Strategic Legal Defence”, which explored ways to use court cases to further campaign goals.

“We are tired of playing by the rules of the establishment,” says Skye, using a term that was fashionable in the heyday of demonstrations and sit-ins in those giddy years that baby boomers like to boast about.

Skye is in his element when he facilitates his own workshop on “Strategic Direct Action”. He makes the session great fun by letting participants play games and role-play scenarios based on his own experiences in West Virginia. “The cops can be a real drag,” he says, and teaches the workshop what to expect from law enforcement and how to de-escalate dangerous situations. All the while his emphasis is on defiant action.

“They can’t arrest us all,” he says. “They can’t kill all of us.”

At first Rachel is a bit shy about making a fool of herself playing some of the games in front of Skye Riley. But soon she gets into the spirit of things, especially when Skye himself is leading the activities with abandon, becoming the life of the party in the process. Soon the workshop is raucous; even senior citizens are laughing themselves silly.

“When you’re faced with real law enforcement you’ll remember this moment and you’ll know what to do,” he says after all the horsing around.

After a dinner of pizza delivered to the camp venue by a local restaurant, a movie is screened in the old school hall. But Rachel and Skye decide to skip that one. Instead they repair to Skye’s motel room on the outskirts of Athens, and there she sits on his bed and strums the guitar and sings The Cuckoo, a favourite song that she once heard Jean Ritchie, the legendary balladeer from the hills of Kentucky, play so beautifully on her dulcimer.

He likes the guitar, and he says so.

“Only the guitar? I just sang you a song and you like only the guitar?” asks a wounded Rachel.

Skye Riley comes from the Blue Ridge Mountains where women sing of coal mine accidents in gravelly voices and where songs have been liberated from the tyranny of metre but are laden with ornaments. He cannot pretend he loves what he heard even if that becomes a deal breaker. He searches for kinder words in his head but they don’t exist.

“There’s no voice that you can’t do nothing about,” he says. “Somebody can train you how to use yours to full effect. Back on the Blue Ridge Mountains I know some old singers who can shape it for you. You can be that whiny kind of singer that people love none the less.”

She feels insulted. No one has ever told her she sucks.

“Did I hear you right? Did you just call me whiny?”

“In a good way,” says Skye. “Almost yodelly. It can be a charming style of singing. All you need is to try to be nothing other than a whiny singer. You should appreciate the whine and use it to your advantage.”

His honesty is so disarming that she breaks out laughing.

That night Rachel does not go home. And the following nights too, even though the Action Camp is over and the rest of the activists are back with their families.

When Jason sees her a week later he knows immediately that something happened at that camp. Rachel is withdrawn in the kitchen as they bake the bread. No fooling around. She is more intense than ever before. More focused. But when she is with Nana Moira and the quilting women she is relaxed and even bubbly. She is nicer to her grandma and stops complaining about her candy. One afternoon she even brings Hershey’s Kisses and places the box in her grandma’s lap.

“There, but don’t overdo it,” she says.

She is chirpy in a way that makes those who know her uncomfortable.

“She needs to see a doctor,” Nana Moira declares.

No one suspects that whatever happened at that camp has to do with a scrawny coal miner called Skye Riley. But no one has the time to dwell on Rachel’s change of mood. Nana Moira is preoccupied with the new project that Jason is introducing to the Centre.

After noticing the amount of waste that in his home would have been used for compost, Jason suggests that instead of dumping potato peels, onion skins, outer lettuce leaves, left-over food and even scraps of non-recyclable paper in the garbage to end up in a landfill somewhere, they should build a compost heap.

“And do what with it? We don’t keep no garden here,” says Nana Moira.

“Maybe we should,” says Jason.

“I ain’t gonna keep no garden, Jason. Am too old for that.”

“You ain’t gonna work on it yourself, Nana Moira.”

Volunteers like him will look after the garden. After all, there are all these people who come to the Centre to eat for free. Or just to sit on the porch and gossip about things that are none of their business. They could water the garden. Instead of depending solely on cabbages and Swiss chard from the Food Bank in Logan, Nana Moira could cook some real fresh vegetables for her guests.

“And you can even join the Compost Exchange too,” says Jason. “Pa can tell you all about it ’cause he’s one of the founders.”

Nana Moira learns that she doesn’t even need to have her own compost in the yard at the Centre if she thinks that would be too much for her. All she needs is to join the Compost Exchange. They give you five-gallon buckets that you fill with the waste and then seal them off. You either take them to their booth at the farmers’ market or they collect them from your premises if you are a business that produces a lot of waste, such as a restaurant. Each time you bring your bucket they give you a clean empty one. There is so much waste at the Centre that Jason is certain the Compost Exchange folks would come and collect it. Every six months members receive a five gallon bucket of healthy compost for their own gardens.

“That way you get to be green major, Nana Moira,” says Jason. “Pa says all this global warming stuff is because of them landfills. They pollute groundwater too. You become green, Nana Moira, if you don’t dump stuff but compost it.”

Nana Moira is sold on the idea. The backyard is big enough; the Centre will have its own garden. It need not be large at first while everyone is learning. It will grow as they get more confident.