Free Me and My Baby View the Eclipse by Lee Smith Page A

course it wasn’t truly the end, I know that, just like I know it must not have been longer than a half-hour after that when Aunt Adele came in from wherever she was, probably the grocery store, rustling her paper bags, and Uncle Earl came in from the Rexall puffing on his cigar, and the boys came back from wherever they were and started kidding Lucie about Elvis. Which they did for the next two years. I know Lucie didn’t sit there in the rocking dark forever, nobody does that, the same way I know I didn’t play the refrain of the “Trish-Trash Polka” over and over forever either, but still it seems like it.
    Lucie got her hair cut in a pixie, painted her fingernails purple, started smoking Winston cigarettes and cutting school, and ran off in our senior year with a disc jockey named Horace Bean. She broke Uncle Earl’s heart and gave Aunt Adele migraine headaches. I stayed home working part-time at the dime store and taking care of Mama, who got worse and worse. I was Miss Welch High School as I said. In the fall of my senior year I got engaged to Lonnie Russell, the quarterback.
    *   *   *
    W hole years went by after that when I didn’t see Lucie although I kept up with her through Aunt Adele and Uncle Earl. Horace Bean didn’t last long—Uncle Earl had him annulled right away. Then Lucie went to college, then she taught school in Richmond and led the life of a gay divorcée. I didn’t care much one way or the other. I was working two jobs to put Lonnie through school at the community college, trying to keep a decent house and take care of Mama who was living with us then. Twice while Lonnie was working for Grassy Creek Coal—this was his first job after college—they tried to send him off to other places. One time to Texas and one time to north Alabama. “Count me out!” I said. I didn’t want to try to move Mama and besides I think you ought to stay in a place where people know you, and know who you are. I just couldn’t see Texas, all that wind and sand, or north Alabama, or even Bluefield where Lonnie wanted to buy into a mine explosives company and would have made a lot of money I admit as it turned out, if he had. But I just couldn’t see it. We stayed in Welch, and eventually Lonnie started his own mine explosives company which has done so well and I always kept the books for him. We were renting Mrs. Bradshaw’s house in town and I was pregnant the summer Lucie came back and ran into Doug Young.
    Ran into is exactly right! But actually he ran into us. Lucie and I were sitting out in my front yard on the lawn chairs getting some sun and trying to talk which was hard to do, our lives were so different by then, when here came a VISTA jogging up the road, sweat pouring down all over him. This was during the Poverty Program, we had VISTAs all over the place then. And you knew it would have to be a foreigner, to run in the sun that way.
    He ran right up to the gate and stopped dead in his tracks, looking at Lucie. Lucie was twenty-two or twenty-three by then, I guess, and so was I, but I had been married for years. I was as big as a house, I still have these stretch marks I got from Richie. Lucie stood up and went over to the gate to say hello and that was it. You couldn’t have pried them apart with a crowbar the rest of that summer long. Aunt Adele and Uncle Earl were just beside themselves too—at last Lucie was going with somebody worth his salt, Uncle Earl said. Lonnie and I thought he was weird, though, which he was. In addition to the jogging, he used to climb the mountains
for fun,
which nobody around here has ever done. Or maybe he was just ahead of his time. Now we have all this ecology and physical fitness but nobody had it then. Lucie climbed with him. He used to spend hours testing children’s eyes away up in the hollers, things like that. That stuff was part of his job. Lucie helped him. In fact she never