"Gustavus, bring him in here."

Gustavus ignored the voice and walked off the porch to the car and took the passenger's seat. He slid over, close to Sandy with his left arm behind her neck, while the car's nose stuck into the air in drive-in movie fashion. He made the moves that made him annoying to Sandy and extremely unpopular with the white boys in Eskdale.

A more determined "Gustavus" came from the darkness.

He's speaking to Sandy," I said into the dark room which was lit by splashes of light from a television set.

"Well, you just come in here and forget about him," Miss Jackie said.

I opened the door and walked into the pool of TV light. Miss Jackie's outline on the couch suggested a size beyond belief. It was only a guess that there actually was a couch there.

"Turn on that light overhead," she said and I started toward the door that I had entered through reaching to feel for a wall switch when I was stopped, "No, it's a string overhead."

The light revealed an absolutely gigantic colored lady completely covering the couch in a sprawled position, eating from a huge bowl of potatoes with a whole chicken sitting in the middle of it. she covered the couch so completely that there was a question in my mind were actually on a couch at all or, by some trick, suspended about a foot off the floor.

We exchanged the formalities and she asked, "Have you eaten yet?"

"Yes, thank you," I replied.

"Would you like some ice cream or soda pop? I've got creamsicles, fudgsicles, popsicles, and there's plenty of soda out there," all in a very slow, tired voice.

"No thank you, I ate a little while ago in Charleston."

"I told Sandy that I wasn't feeling as good as I'd like. I've been down in the Charleston Memorial Hospital for seventeen days and they didn't tell me nothing but that my blood pressure was up. My-oh-my! doesn't their food taste plain. I couldn't wait to get home and cook myself some chicken, beans and potatoes.

This thought made Miss Jackie run her tongue over her lips making them moist and shiny. She reached into the bowl of chicken and picked up a leg, holding her little finger away from the others the way ladies do at country club luncheons.

"I've got these new pills now and I'm telling you all I do is sleep. The doctor had been giving me some kind for my diet and I think that's what made my blood pressure go up. Did Gustavus come in here?"

"No, he's still out talking with Sandy."

"Would you please tell him to come in here."

Gustavus had Sandy pressed to the driver's door. She said, "Would you please tell Gustavus to give me the keys so I can get off this hill?"

"Gustavus, your mother wants you," I said. . .

"Do you have one of these government cars so we can go downtown and pick us up some pretty things like Sandy Sue?" he asked.

"No, Gustavus, I have a little Renault in Charleston that will have to stay there until I get West Virginia plates."

"You can drive on Cabin Creek with out-of-state license plates," he informed me.

"I know I can, but I was advised by the VISTA office to wait until I have West Virginia plates so I'm not so conspicuous."

"Conspicuous?"

"Yup "

"Dry branch and Dekota are two places that you don't want to go anyways. You stop there and they'll pick a fight for nothing at all," he says.

With one hand on my suitcase and the other on the door handle, I said goodnight to Sandy and hoped that Gustavus would follow, which he did.

I followed him through the front room where his mother was asleep on the couch and then into a tiny bedroom. There was a set of bunk beds, a metal clothes closet, a bureau, and a space heater that was throwing flames up above the grate into the room. He offered me the top bunk, explaining that he was known to roll out of bed at night.

I positioned myself in a bent-over fashion on the top bunk with my legs hanging over the side. It had to be a hundred degrees on the top bunk. Gustavus pulled a box from the top shelf of the metal clothes closet which had a color photograph of young people dancing around a tape player in a suburban home, Before I could answer if I liked the "Jackson Five," he handed me an earphone and headed through the window curtains that hung in the doorway. To someone who had been tor two weeks drawing mental pictures of life in an Appalachian coal camps having the "Jackson Five" plugged into my ear from an AM-FM cassette recorder, and now having a creamsicle placed in my hand by Custavus who was walking around the room with a whole one in his mouth with just the stick sticking out, my notion of playing checkers by a Ben Franklin stove and kerosene lamps was too simple. Appalachian portrayals didn't account for the progress that other people were enjoying.

Gustavus pulled a pink suit from the metal closet. "I got this walking suit and the tape player for Christmas."

"Where do you wear the walking suit?' I wondered out loud.

"When I go to Charleston or something special around school. I wouldn't wear it here on Cabin Creek; it would get all messed up. There isn't much to do around here anymore. Eskdale used to be a real town with a show building and stores where you could buy clothes, restaurants, but there's nothing left to it now. When I graduate from East Bank High School, I want to go to college and get away from here. The coach on the football team says that if I take the right subjects and get good grades, I might be able to go to college, I don't want to work in no coal mine getting dirty and never seeing the daylight. Un-un-un. You went to college, didn't ya? Do you make the same amount as Sandy or more?"

"The same, I guess; I haven't received any pay yet."

"I wouldn't ever work for what VISTA pays if I went to college. I'd want a nice car and clothes and an apartment."

"I have to go to the bathroom, Gustavus." I followed Gustavus through the window-curtains and then through another set into the kitchen. Gustavus hooked the ceiling light string as though he were shooting basketball and reached above the sink that had a hose coming through a window and grabbed a flashlight and a roll of toilet paper. He walked to the door, opened it, and flashed the light onto an outhouse without saying a word.

When I returned, Gustavas had brought his mother a glass of soda to wash down her pill and was encouraging her to get into bed where she would be more comfortable.

From where I lay flat on my back on the top bunk, my fingers could easily reach the sloped ceiling. It was so hot that it immediately brought sweat to my forehead. I felt misplaced and weak. With apologies for Miss Jackie being so sick and having to live in these conditions, for counting her security in the form of a freezer full of ice cream and two cartons of RC Cola, and for Gustavus caring so much for a pink walking suit and a tape player when his ambitions for the future seemed so far away; but I knew that they didn't want to hear that from me and that was not why I was there.

I could hear the rain on the roof from my own top bunk at home in Massachusetts. It somehow seemed much louder there than it was tonight, but I was listening to my feelings. I thought about how people came upon advantages and I remembered my mother responding to my own criticism of individuals with, "All the People in the world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

I felt hot and sweaty; I knew that this was what these people went through every day of their entire lives and that somehow I was supposed to do something for them to make their lives more comfortable and enjoyable. Tears did not come to my eyes as easily as they did when I was-younger, but they came that night because there weren't enough advantages to go around to everyone who needed them.

Gustavus came through the curtains and asked if I was going to sleep. He offered his tape player and earphone which I turned down for the sounds of the rain. It put pillars on that coal camp house and provided background music for my dreams.

* * *

A rooster outside the window didn't allow me the confusion of wondering where I was in the morning. The blue-gray light that came through the window could have been the end of a rainy day. It was the way light rose into the hollow, bouncing light here and there before it made its way over the mountain sometime around nine o'clock... as if the matters of the people didn't require light because they were all in the mines, anyway, and would not come out again until the sun had climbed over the other mountain -- not to he seen for another day.

The smell of something frying drifted through the door curtains. Hanging over the side of the bunk I could see Gustavus still sleeping, so it had to be Miss Jackie. I climbed out of bed and dressed with excitement and anticipation: meeting Miss Jackie fresh after a good night's sleep and touring the town which was to be my home for the next year.

Miss Jackie offered me a fresh towel along with a cheerful "Good morning While she went on with her cooking, I adjusted the hose nozzle to a very fine spray and brushed my teeth. The water tasted fine except for the arrangements for delivery which gave it its garden hose flavor. commented on the good water to Miss Jackie understanding that it was at a premium on Cabin Creek because of strip mining.

Miss Jackie matter-of-factly stated, "Miss Bascomb lets us hook onto her well and she's got fine water."

"What about the other people here in Eskdale, what do they do for water?," I wondered out loud.

"Up this end of town, people use the hand pump down there at the foot of the hill for drinking water. You can take a bath or wash in most of the water, but it does awful things to beans - makes them like bullets - so most people use the water down there at the well for cooking. It's real good."

"Has anyone thought about getting a water system here so that everyone could have good water in their houses?" She brought eggs and sausage to the table covered with dish cloths which, I came to learn, was a custom especially useful in fly season. I was unsure if it was something she brought with her from Alabama or if she learned it on Cabin Creek. A number of meals would come under the checkered and f floral dish towels. She wasn't preparing her answer; she was preoccupied with getting breakfast on.

"No, I don't think that people around here believe that we'd ever get any better water." She moved slowly through the curtain, satisfied that she had answered my question, called Gustavus, and then reentered the kitchen to find me shaving with cold water.

"Why, there's hot water in the kettle here on the stove." I had to laugh at myself for looking for the hardships and not considering that water could be heated.

Gustavus wasn't a morning person; only the barest greeting, a fast fried egg and sausage, out the front door, down the hill and across the creek to meet the school bus.

Having breakfast cooked and Gustavus off, Miss Jackie sat on a dinette-type chair with her giant legs spread for additional support on the floor while she leaned on the table. She had opened her home to a strange Yankee and was asking for a tete-a-tete. Her first concern was for her son: that an opportunity for a college education become a reality. She briefly outlined her own experiences from the cotton fields of Alabama to a series of coal camps on Cabin Creek. She wanted something better for Gustavus than what she and a man named Qubee had. Qubee spent the better portion of his life in Charleston following his own interests. Miss Jackie was a sensible woman who had diapered coal barons' babies and scrubbed floors before her health gave out. She wasn't fifty, but she spoke as though she was putting in her last order for hope.

Eager to see Eskdale in the light and without rain I started off the hill hopping over the washouts that the GSA car had straddled and fallen into the night before. I passed the hand pump which provided the cooking water for that end of town. Turning around to see where I had come from, the mountain side looked like a bowl cut in half. Its residents called it "The Cove." Two dozen or so unpainted coal camp houses were randomly spaced to about a quarter of the way up the mountain. With the exception of an occasional car or pickup truck parked along side these houses, everything was gray, including the trees which filled the mountain bowl beyond the farthest house and joined the sky in still another shade of gray. There was nothing to keep one from believing that this place was deserted years ago, that is, nothing except the cars.

At the bottom of the hill bordering Cabin Creek was another row of houses in various stages of disrepair. Two black boys, old enough to play hookey were perched on top of the roof of a demolished '57 Chevy which was parked in front of the most desperate-looking home. They were throwing empty beer cans into the creek, watching them float past the house, down, and away.

I remembered a time when I was fascinated by a popsicle stick or a twig in running water, I usually named my minuscule craft after the fastest boat on the lake. My imagination put me at the tiller of the craft as my short legs raced along the brook that separated the fifth and seventh fairways at the Nabnassett Lake Country Club. I'd talk to the twig the way city boys talked to pinball machines... "Don't get stuck, come on, get around there, you can make it"' But these boys weren't urging their beer cans on; they were more preoccupied with the stranger who had intruded on their pastime.

"Do you race one another with your beer cans?" I asked.

"No, we just throw them."

"I used to race twigs and popsicle sticks.''

Just then a teenage girl stuck her head out of the door and yelled, "Hey, Snowball"' The bigger of the two boys hopped off the car roof and ran over to the house. He listened to the girl and then yelled from the porch, "My sister wants to meet you."

"Sure," I yelled back not knowing that the introduction would be to a well-built, barefoot girl dressed in a tight T-shirt and shorts as though she were hoping for the first day of Spring.

"Do you know Rickie?" she asked, "He lived over there," pointing to a shack across the road.

I seemed to have remembered Sandy telling me something of a guy named Rickie who was in VISTA, who filled his spare room with trash, and who sent his mother a goat at her Park Avenue apartment.

"He stayed only a few weeks, but I liked Rickie." Lilly liked all the male VISTA workers who were sent up Cabin Creek. She was one of ten children who lived behind the door which she had pulled shut a moment too late to hide an older woman still sleeping on a couch and two children sleeping on the floor. "Are you staying with Miss Jackie and Gustavus she asked. I told her that I was and that I hoped to help the community with some of their water and air pollution problems -- a matter which didn't interest her as much as whether or not I could roller skate or if I had a girlfriend.

Enjoying the pleasure of new acquaintances, I started out again and crossed a rotted-out plant bridge that served to get the Cove residents' cars to their side of the creek when the water was too high to drive through. It was curious at first when I saw an entire family casually drive over the bank of the creek, through the water, and up the other side. The creek was a yellow ochre color, spotted with cans, tires, a refrigerator, and toilet paper hanging from the Springs high water mark in the trees that grew along the sides of the creek.

I walked along the railroad tracks which were bordered by what Cabin Creek people called "the hard road" on my right and the creek on my left. On the far side of the creek, a few outhouses sat on the bank causing me to wonder where all the waste went, a distasteful, but necessary concern, so I traced it with my mind: ten miles down the hollow to Cabin Creek Junction where the creek met the Kanawha River. Beyond the outhouses were some tightly-packed and unpainted houses that spoke of quick work and inadequate supplies of materials. I found out that this cramped little settlement was built after the 1916 flood that washed everything away in that area and left a new piece of land called Sandy Bottom.

As I got closer to the center of town, the tracks, the hard road, and the creek widened from one another to make room for a row of buildings which had seen much more than just normal deterioration. At one time, the town had been the home of nearly 10,000 coal miners and railroad men; but with the mechanization of the mines in the late 1940's and early '50s, the substitution of oil for coal, the population was trimmed to nearly 500 inhabitants. Aside from a few working miners and railroad men, the residents were, for the most part, the parents and grandparents of children in factory towns in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.

Harry Nehman's Cash Grocery was the only on-going business-in the row of buildings beyond the railroad tracks. His was a nostalgic looking store with two large bay windows on either side of the door that held samples of his inventory other than groceries. A bright red hand pump and a large picture of The Last Supper (which could be illuminated with a fluorescent light) were surrounded by Mrs. Nehman's Swedish Ivy and Christmas Cactus which seemed to do very well in that spot. In the other window, there were some plastic childrens toys, baby clothes, and some unidentifiable plastic flowers in pots. Despite having to put up with coal cars which completely blocked his storefront to the street, sending coal dust swirling everywhere, Harry was able to keep a neat-looking store and a clean front window.

In a partially demolished building next door, there were a half dozen men sitting on cement-blocks, playing cards, and drinking out of brown paper bags. Away from the immediate area where they were sitting, the empty building was filled with beer cans, liquor bottles, and empty cigarette packages. I had hoped to pass unnoticed when one of the card players yelled, "Hey buddy, come here!" Hesitantly, I walked over and said hello and was quickly panhandled for twenty-five cents One of the card players lifted his brown bag with the screw top bottleneck sticking out to make the deal more friendly. A very neatly dressed older man who didn't appear to be involved in the cards or drinking asked if I were the new VISTA worker and if I had one of those government cars as he needed a ride to the doctor in Charleston. I suggested that Sandy might be able to help him and he suggested that his wife might kill him. That possibility opened up a whole new area of concern as I stepped back out onto the dirt path that fronted what could have served as a western ghost town set were it not for the mountains in the background.

Directly across from this scene was the liquor store next to the Baptist Church which had a fresh coat of white paint that made it gleam in comparison with everything else. Speakers were mounted in its steeple with one directed toward the liquor store and the other toward the part of town I hadn't yet reached.

There were at least a half dozen churches in Eskdale. The more established people went to the Baptist or Methodist Churches. The not-so-well-off whites went to the "Jesus Only" Church. There was a Black Primitive Baptist Church up in the Cove. There were two maverick black preachers: the garbage man who preached his sermons in his garage over a set of guitar speakers that his wife had given him for Christmas; the other, Sister Hunter, who held services in the Community Center building in the Cove where singing was a specialty.

Below the Baptist Church, which anyone who had seen Eskdale would agree is just about in the center of town, there was another row of deserted buildings backed right up to the vertical mountain side as if to give the impression that the trees were growing out of the roofs of the buildings. The last building turned out to be occupied by another general store -- the one over which Sandy was living. The remains of a single gas pump and an eye-level "Cold Beer" sign shared a spot bordering the edge of the hard road. High overhead, there was a sign which read, "Mena Joseph's General Merchandise", for the convenience of drivers coming up the Creek. The store sat literally two steps from the surface of the hard road.

Inside -- clothing, shoes, hardware, and groceries -- explained to me what General Merchandise meant. The inventory and display were a secondary concern; the first, living arrangements. The bedroom was behind the shoe shelves; the kitchen behind the meat counter, equipped with fry pan, hot plate, and coffeepot; and the living room was between the candy counter and the pinball machines The seating consisted of folding lawn-type chairs that were facing an early morning soap opera on TV while their occupants hopped up with interest to see an antique pistol collection brought in by some middle-aged man.

The two women, almost identically dressed in sweat shirts, athletic sneakers, and jeans, came to me. I introduced myself and the older the two who was Mena immediately asked, "You're from New York, aren't you?"

"No. Massachusetts."

"That Jewish fellow, Rickie, he only stayed for two weeks He was from New York," she continued, "He came in here wanting to know all about Eskdale. He was going to start some kind of a recreation center for the kids. He left before one lick of work was done. I think he was afraid of this place. I told him about Eskdale and how you couldn't walk down this hard road on a Saturday night without seeing a fight or a shoot out. This was one wild-assed town, buddy, I'll tell you. Bodies just came flying out of the second floor of that old hotel building above where the shop used to be. This was one mean place and if you wanted to live here, you had to know how to protect yourself." She rubbed her arms the way a swimmer with a quirk might before A race. "Still yet, I keep a pistol under the counter and one next to my bed."

Her friend, who had taken one of the lawn chairs in front of the TV, had her arms folded in a way that implied power, "Most of the trouble makers are so drunk that you can just grab them by the collar and throw them out. "Mena continues, "The rest of the people in this town are pretty nice. A lot of Christian types that mind their own business and leave you alone.''

"But they mind your business, too," the lady in the lawn chair said without turning from "Love of Life".

"There are plenty of good people in Eskdale - you just have to watch who you get hooked up with. Some of the people have taken Sandy for a ride because she has that government car. Then they will turn around and steal from her, but I keep this pistol here most of the time so if I hear anything I can run upstairs and see what's going on. She wouldn't know what to do if some drunk came along and wanted to make trouble. Sandy has been good to people, but I don't think they all appreciate it.

"You know people don't move to Cabin Creek anymore; they move away from it," Mena continued. "What are you going to do for us here in Eskdale?"

"I've been assigned to survey the community for water, sewerage, and air pollution." As I responded, it came to me that this topic's popularity had grown way beyond my own interest in the subject. I was a victim of my own romantic instincts. Cabin Creek, West Virginia had a counter-culture ring to it that captured my imagination before I ever saw the place.

"When you leave, take a good look at that red water running from underneath this building Mena said. "There's an abandoned mine shaft filled with acid water on the mountain behind the store. Someday it will break loose and I'll be sitting over there on the other side of the Post Office."

There was a certainty with which she spoke. I suspected that Mena had her finger on the pulse of the community; now, she had her eyes on "Love of Life". I thanked her for the coffee and conversation and stepped outside the door.

The acid-red stream flowed from beneath the store to a point fifty or so feet away where it formed a miniature lake covering half the road. Across the hard road in another direction, an old woman was feeding pigeons. Houses were perched on the mountainside without agreement -- their arrangement spoke of independence and freedom; their condition spoke of decay and desertion. There was a sense of foreignness about this place, intriguingly haphazzard. There was nothing that I knew of as being typical 1970 America and that excited me.