Fiction

Kingdom Come

Denton Loving

Ben waits for the green arrow to let him turn at the Pineville bridge, while his dad Richard reads the signs at the Exxon station out loud. Richard always refers to this as the new gas station because it is not the one that sat on the corner for the first half of his life. The new station has an Arby’s and a Little Caesar’s Pizza inside it.

“Five dollar pizzas, all day, every day,” Richard reads from a sign that lights up at night. “Ben, when I use to drive through here, I didn’t have five dollars to give ‘em for a pizza.” He says this every time they make the trip back to Kentucky.

Since Ben was a child, he loved being in the mountains. Each trip was another chance to memorize the twisting lines of rocks and trees against the sky. In those days, Richard drove on what seemed to Ben like such a long trip from their home in Knoxville to this place where Richard had grown up in Kentucky. It felt like a great voyage. One made more monumental by the fact that they crossed into a new state.

Now, it is Ben behind the wheel, and Richard complains he is driving too fast even when below the speed limit. “My nerves are bad,” his dad reminds him. “Don’t scare me today out on this old road. If I had known you were going to drive like a damn NASCAR driver, we would have stayed home.” Music of any kind also makes him jittery, so there is only their conversation to pass the time – and Richard reading every road sign along the way.

“Kingdom Come Parkway,” he reads after they cross the bridge. That is the official name of this road, although everyone still refers to it by its number – 119. It is this highway that takes them deep into what Richard likes to call the Dark Hills of Kentucky.

“City of Pineville Water Treatment,” he reads from the driver’s side door of a utility truck parked on the side of the road. “Wonder what they do to it?” he says in the form of a question even though he never expects an answer. “When I was young, you could find the cleanest drinking water at any little stream you crossed. It was the best tasting water ever was.”

Farther up 119, Richard tells again how he remembers when the first eight miles of this new road were built. That was 1958 – half a century ago – but to Richard it is still the new road, and after all these years and all the trips they’ve made back, Ben thinks of it as the new road too.

“I hadn’t ever seen a road so good as this was then,” Richard says. “I was going to Corbin to look for a job when they opened this road up. I wasn’t out of high school yet, and they had closed the mines. There weren’t any jobs. You couldn’t buy work back then.”

“Would you have gone in the mines?” Ben asks.

“I would have worked at anything if I could have stayed here. But there wasn’t anything. No jobs at all. I guess it was better for me anyway. Forced me out of these black mountains.”

They pass some pretty bottom land that lines the banks of the Cumberland River. These are the only flat pieces of ground for a long time. When Ben was a little boy, his dad would talk about how the first settlers had planted their corn here over two hundred years ago. He would talk with fascination about how the river flooded every spring like the Nile and made the dirt rich. Richard thought it must have been wonderful to turn that earth for the first time and plant that precious seed in hopes of a summer crop, and Ben did too.

Richard doesn’t mention this anymore though, now that he is older. It is always about this time in the trip that he is tired of sitting in the car for so long, and he wonders why they have made the journey anyway.

”Maybe we shouldn’t have run off up here today. I’m tired. I wish we had just stayed home. It’s an awful gray day.”

It really is an awful gray day, dry but with the promise of rain to come. It is late in October. The leaves have already passed their prime and now resemble a uniform blanket of rust. It’s not an ideal day, and Richard only sees the land through winter windows. His eyes focus only on the houses that are run down, the businesses that have closed, the scrawny puppy on the roadside.

“Look at this ground,” he says. “It’s so poor it won’t even grow a good weed.”

This is the road to Harlan County, and Patty Loveless’s voice about never leaving here alive always comes to Ben when he’s on it, but Ben can also see new homes on hillsides, gas stations and stores with plenty of activity, a lot of smiling kids everywhere. Ben knows the land is steep and rough and worn out, but he thinks there is still a lot of life in these hills, and certainly a rugged beauty he loves.

Ben was born in Knoxville. He has lived there all of his life. He is a Tennessean. Richard also thinks of himself as a Tennessean, but he is not. He was born a Kentuckian and has always remained one. Granted, he’s been a Kentuckian in exile for most of his life, but it is this basic fact of geography that has colored his perception of the world. The pinnacle of Black Mountain is always in the landscape of Richard’s mind like the 1982 World’s Fair Sun Sphere is always in Ben’s.

“For someone from Kentucky, you always have a lot of bad to say about it,” Ben says.

“I’m not a native. I can say it.” Richard says this fast, maybe so Ben won’t argue. Richard is an intelligent man. He knows what the word native means, but he’ll use any trick to get one over on his son.

“You are too a native. You were born in a potato patch in a coal camp in Harlan County.” It’s a story Ben has heard too many times to ever forget.

“I wasn’t born in a potato patch!” Richard is in a huff at the thought he was born out in the dirt, as if his family were too poor or stupid to have children in a proper way. Ben knows all of this, but he likes to make a point sometimes too. “They were digging potatoes the day I was born,” Richard says, “but I wasn’t born out there. Besides, my people just came here to mine coal.”

“Your people followed Boone through the Cumberland Gap. They became coal miners a lot later.”

“Well, my mother was born in Virginia,” Richard says, as if he judges the argument won.

He changes the subject by pointing out an eastern hemlock tree along the road. He knows all trees, some by their bark, some by their leaf. This is a gift Ben wishes he had, but he seems to have not inherited that gene. Ben thinks he might have also had to grow up on Cumberland Mountain to keep the names of trees so close to his heart.

“Community of Black Star,” Richard reads from a wooden sign painted in bold letters of black against red. They follow the sign’s direction and follow the smaller road until eventually trading pavement for gravel. Ben is not exactly sure where the line is, but he knows they have crossed into Harlan County. They come to the cemetery where Richard’s parents are buried. Not only are his parents here, but so are most of the people he knew in childhood.

Richard does not have one bad memory from growing up on this mountain. Even the stories that sound wild and terrible are retold in a reverence for the past or with the excitement of a thriller. He loved this place as it was in his youth. He worshipped the people he knew. They are never far from his thoughts no matter how far away Knoxville might feel to him or how far he might wish it to be. It is this place he retreats to in his dreams.

As they move over the cemetery’s car path, both men are quiet. Ben parks the car above his grandparents’ graves. Richard stopped getting out of the car a long time ago, but Ben asks him if he wants to get out anyway. Ben always asks him. Now though, it is all Richard can manage to ride here, to realize he has already lived decades longer than either his mother or father, to pause for a moment and accept the fact that the past can not be relived. Ben will walk to the graves and read the familiar dates carved into their stones. He will walk there and stand there for both of them.

Today though, the air reeks of wood fire. The smoke is so diluted Ben squints his eyes to distinguish it in the wind. His nose recognizes the smoke though. Ashes land on his clothes like snow, and he looks around to see where the fire is. A massive heap of timber burns on a nearby mountainside. A bulldozer pushes more logs and brush into the flaming pile. A great section of trees have been torn off that piece of the mountain, and heavy equipment is working overtime to demolish more. Ben has stopped still before making it halfway to his grandparents’ graves. He stares at this new view until he suddenly sees the trees are not all that is gone. Across the narrow valley, the entire top of a mountain has been removed, chopped off like the head of a convicted criminal.

“Lord, Lord!” Richard says behind him. He stands outside of the car, holds onto the door for support. His look of panicked amazement echoes how Ben feels. Both men feel the same endless drop in their chests.

“If you’d have told me fifty years ago they’d just tear the tops off those mountains, I’d have never believed it,” Richard says. “I thought if anything at all stood on the Day of Judgment it would be the face of that mountain. It might have been the one thing able to look God in the eye without shame. Not even it now.”

A huge flock of starlings blacken the sky like a scourge. They fly overhead and land on a row of sycamore trees that line a ditch below the cemetery. The trees’ white wood, smooth and parched like bones forgotten in the sun, stands sharp against the birds’ black feathers.

Richard thinks every trip he makes back to Harlan will be the last. He says this every time he visits the ground where his parents lie, but he always comes again. Ben realizes today though, it may truthfully be too painful for Richard to come back to this place, with the curving line of the mountain’s highest summit now made straight.

The men are always more quiet on the way home, but words are a complete failure to them now. The weight of the missing mountain sits too heavily upon them.

Denton Loving lives on a farm near the historic Cumberland Gap, where Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia come together. He works at Lincoln Memorial University, where he co-directs the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. He is also an editorial staff member of the online journal Smokelong Quarterly. His work has appeared in Birmingham Arts Journal, Appalachian Journal, Somnambulist Quarterly, Heartland Review and in numerous anthologies including the forthcoming We All Live Downstream: Writings about Mountaintop Removal (Motes Books, Louisville, Kentucky, 2009).