Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Victor J. Banis
“The Reckoning,” “Metamorphosis,” “The Thief” Copyright © 2008 by Bev Rees; “Rosie and Mac” Copyright © 2008 by Sally Brinkmann; “Dear Anne Landers: Excerpts from a Novel in Progress,” Copyright © 2008 by Craig Tucker; “AIDS Diaries—Francel,” “Day Lights, Night Lights,” “Hob Knobbin’” Copyright © 2008 by Eve Birch; “Pappy’s Angels,” “Big Easys,” “A Wildwood Flounder” Copyright © 2008 by Leigh Horne; “The Azalea Quartet: An Excerpt from a Novel in Progress” Copyright © 2008 by Trish Rudder; “The Child Bride of Lester Cooley,” “The Shiny Black Car,” “Love in a Lobster Pot” Copyright © 2008 by Calvert Estill; “Harai” Copyright © 2008 by Christine Kaye; “Precious Child: A Memoir of Healing” Copyright © 2008 by Wanda R. Riggle
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
INTRODUCTION
Shortly after moving to Martinsburg, West Virginia, in late 2004, I joined a local writers’ group. I soon discovered that many of these writers shared a common style—not a common voice, exactly, since it was quickly apparent that each of them had his or her own writing “voice”—but, they all had something that I only gradually came to recognize as a West Virginia voice too.
Just as the locals speak with their own version of a Southern accent, a drawl that is clearly not Northern, but is less pronounced than what one finds in the deeper South—a soft, almost a musical way of speaking—I found too that West Virginia writers “speak” in a manner that is very much their own.
Which is not to say, however, that they don’t have individual voices as well. Christine Kaye’s haunting Harai and Bev Rees’s frightening The Reckoning share a sense of the horror wrought by man’s arrogant interference with nature, but they are miles apart stylistically.
Craig Tucker’s Dear Ann Landers, Wanda Riggle’s Precious Child, and Trish Rudder’s Azalea Quartet all deal with the tribulations of childhood, and all are touching, but beyond those essential facts, they are not at all alike.
Love is the common denominator in Leigh Horne’s Pappy’s Angels and Eve Birch’s AIDS Diaries—Francel, the sort of love that transcends pain and loss, but the stories otherwise have almost nothing in common.
The wry humor Calvert Estill displays in The Child Bride of Lester Cooley is light years away from the take-no-prisoners hilarity of Sally Brinkman’s Rosie and Mac, but both are funny indeed, and—here is my point—funny in a distinctly West Virginia way. It is difficult to think of either being written anywhere else.
Really, as I said at the beginning, all of these stories are utterly different from one another and, at the same time, uniquely alike in the West Virginia sensibility that they share. And all of them, let me say, eminently readable.
After a time, it occurred to me that it would be a pleasure to see some of these voices assembled where they could be enjoyed both singly and jointly—thus was born this anthology.
It has been a great pleasure for me to work on this and to savor the writings of these talented individuals, and to know that in some small way I was preserving them for generations of readers to come. I am confident that they, too, will savor them.
—Victor J. Banis
Martinsburg, West Virginia
THE RECKONING, by Bev Rees
They had always gone to the island in August, long before the children were born. Hedy and Robert Brewer hadn’t married until their mid-thirties, and from the beginning everything had gone smoothly. There were holidays in Europe, a lovely old Victorian house, and the charming cottage on the island.
And now? Two children who tanned well. Alicia, age five, and Robbie. Ah, Robbie: Robert Casswell Brewer the third. A handsome and precocious four-year-old. They had planned for the children to be close in age; Hedy had been anxious to get it over with and get back to the gym and back to the figure she had sacrificed for motherhood. And back she got, snapped back like a rubber band, to the lithe young woman she intended to be for the rest of her life.
It was a shame about the cottage though. They only got to use it in August, and a few weekends in the spring and fall. As long as the ferry was still running. But that was just about the extent of their regrets.
The cottage was shipshape when they arrived, thanks to their faithful house cleaner, Zelda. She also doubled as a maid when they entertained, which had to be arranged around her schedule at the Rip Tide.
They settled right into hurricane lamp dinners on the terrace facing the ocean: steaks on the grill and a salad, for neither of them was into cooking; except that Robert, on occasion, enjoyed fixing rather elaborate breakfasts. This menu was varied by ferry rides to the mainland for seafood.
* * * *
The Brewers were good parents, and spent as much time with their children as their careers would allow. Every summer they made sandcastles for them, extravaganzas really, and the children decorated them with shells and bits of sea glass. And they always got raves from passing walkers. The beach was unguarded on this more sparsely settled area of the island; therefore, the children could play in the water only when the tide was out and gentle waves rolled in. Every evening after dinner they biked to a small island store and bought ice cream cones, which they ate as they sat in weathered rockers on a narrow porch.
So, though the daily news was full of trouble in the Middle East, threatening famines and civil wars in Africa, they left that all behind and felt perfectly secure as they stared out at the moonlit ocean.
* * * *
About two weeks into their vacation, something strange began to happen. At night an eerie glow quivered across the horizon.
“How weird, Robert,” Hedy said. “Did you ever see anything as weird as that?”
“I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, Unless, of course, we’ve been thrown back into a time warp, and the Vikings with their torches are on their way.”
“Maybe it’s extraterrestrials,” Robbie said cheerfully.
“You know we don’t believe in that sort of thing, Robbie. It’s probably just an easily explained phenomenon, like a swath of phosphorus floating out there on the ocean. Like the phosphorous we saw on the lake in Nova Scotia when we went canoeing after dark. Remember?”
“Could it be northern lights?” Hedy asked. “I remember seeing them on the South Orange Reservation when I was a little girl.”
“Not any that I’ve ever seen. But it’s probably some simple phenomenon such as that.”
Alicia said, “I’m tired, Mama.”
“Yes. Come on Robbie, time for beddy-bye.”
“Don’t want to,” Robbie said. “I want to lie on the sand and look up at the sky. I want to search for extraterrestrials.”
“Robbie!” his father said.
Robbie pouted and threatened to throw a fit, but he took his mother’s outstretched hand instead.
The next morning the sky was overcast and a heavy fog was rising from the ocean. Robert made a batch of blueberry pancakes, and they ate them on the porch. By eleven the sun was breaking through, and eventually it cleared up. The tide was going out. The afternoon ocean would be perfect for the children.
At three, Hedy roused herself, and went to get the children into their swimsuits. Alicia ran to the water first, Robbie’s swimsuit had gone missing.
Alicia came running back. “Mommy, Mommy, the water’s really warm and there’s seaweed all over the place, and it’s really icky.”
And sure enough, there was a deluge of seaweed, that bronzy colored seaweed with many branches, called rockweed by the more science-minded islanders, the kind with blisters that children like to squeeze and pop. This struck Hedy as unusual. Large amounts seldom washed up except during Northeasters, and even then, not in quantities such as this. She gazed at it churning in the gentle waves.
“I