Watermelon Summer by Anna Hess Read Free Book Online

comforting when I was a child,
like snuggling down into a mess of puppies.
     
    "But try as I might, turned out I wasn't a puppy.  I didn't quite know what I was—maybe a skunk or a 'coon—but I soon saw that the puppy
pile wasn't for me.  First thing I noticed was—I didn't want to
be a coal miner like my daddy.  Sure, he made right good money,
but Daddy came home worn down and used up.  I didn't know then that
the mines were poisoning our streams and tearing apart our families, but
I did know that Uncle Tom was on a breathing machine from too much coal
dust, and Uncle Eddie died in a cave-in before he hit thirty. 
Even the lucky ones were all bent over like old men long before their
time."
     
    I shivered but sat in silence, not wanting to
interrupt, even to spur Arvil on.  Although his childhood was
completely different from mine, I could relate to his feeling of not
fitting into the world he was born to.  I'd always felt like an
ugly duckling, too, not able to feign enough enthusiasm in makeup and TV
shows to float along in the stream of modern American youth
culture.  But my trials and tribulations paled in comparison to
Arvil's.
     
    "Mammy tried to keep the peace," Arvil was saying,
"But 'fore long, I couldn't keep her happy either.  All my poor
sainted mother ever asked of me was that I dress up in my Sunday
going-to-meeting clothes once a week and come along to church, but soon
religion started feeling like part of the problem.  We were raised
to submit to the will of God, but I wasn't feeling particularly
submissive.  It seemed to me that the the preacher taught us to
listen to the man in charge, and that's why no one talked back to the
coal-mine boss-man."
     
    I could hear the Appalachian mannerisms drop away as
Arvil went on to tell me that he'd worked hard in school, gotten a
scholarship, and left the mountains to go to college.  Even though
he came back, there was no real home to return to.  "My boy cousins
were already working in the mines," Arvil said, "Or at McDonald's if
they were less lucky, and each of my girl cousins seemed to have at
least two babies on her hip.  I was trying to decide whether to cut
my losses and leave the mountains, this time for good, when I met your
father...and Greensun.
     
    "Greensun seemed to be the answer to my
prayers.  Here was a group of people who believed what I believed,
and who were making their own puppy pile.  I was the only one from
around here, but the Greensun folks only laughed at my accent in the way
you tease cousins to make them know they belong.  I hadn't
realized that if you left your family, you weren't leaving the puppy
pile forever, and I was ecstatic."
     
    I was pretty happy myself.  This is
what I'd been dreaming about; it was why I'd thrown away my European
adventure to spend the summer at Greensun.  I couldn't resist
nodding along as Arvil told me about the community in its prime.
     
    "I spent a couple of years so in love with the idea
of Greensun that I was 100% happy to never go beyond that mailbox,"
Arvil told me.  "We dug potatoes together in the fall, ate them all
winter, and planted more in the spring.  You've never met him, so
you don't know how magnetic your father's personality is, how he can
pull a dozen people into his dream so we're all drifting right along
with him.  But he can, and we were.
     
    "Eventually, I fell into a part as an extra in a
movie that was being filmed locally.  That seemed like just as much
fun as digging potatoes, so I got an agent and started going to
auditions in Atlanta.  Then I landed a couple of bigger roles where I
spent a week or two on set, and after a while, it seemed like I was
spending half my time away from Appalachia."
     
    You know how the music starts to change in a movie,
and you're sure something bad is going to happen?  Arvil was such a
good storyteller that I could