Chapter One

I come from two disparate worlds, and one of them doesn't exist anymore. I live with steel rhythms now, but I carry the memory of a sonata rising soft and strong. Others like me have done what I did--left the past behind them and made themselves over for the brittle present, but they didn't have a power that shook them to their bones. They didn't have a power that knocked them to their knees begging, Who am I? Who are you? Is it the power or yourself that you discover?

Bringing my worlds together took more courage than I had, but I had the help of the Praying Woman. She believed I shared her power of prayer, even after death and that the power itself was an accident of birth. I discovered that wasn't true, but her story became mine--ungentle, passionate and wiser in the end than it was while it was lived.

What you are can never be hidden, even when you hide it from yourself, because it will rise in crisis past your internal stories. It will claim you in the dark and heal you, and you will stumble with your truth until you learn how to walk with it.

In my story, hard-armed cities and old hills rise together against the horizon, shaping a future born of the past. I begin with the hills, because they are almost gone.

They rise in shoulders across a countryside I hadn't seen in twenty-five years. From the air, curves shrugged off by the Appalachians rippled down to crisscrosses of highways leading in and out of Huntington, West Virginia. I was returning there for the first time since age ten, flying in for Jean Plymal's funeral. As the plane descended, I wondered if Aunt Mimi would recognize me. I had stayed with her and Uncle Joe on their farm outside Kenova more than two decades ago and because of who I had become, I hadn't looked back. Now I was rushing home for a funeral, secretly broken not by death but by a life I had created out of air.

As we landed the late May sky was clear, and the plane door opened to air softer than the unrelenting glare of the southwest. Central West Virginia escapes the heat and humidity of the deeper south by a degree or two--winters chill at forty degrees and summers ease by at eighty, and even rain comes to call politely, usually not overstaying its welcome. Perhaps the climate is nature's way of making up for the hills that tumble from the Appalachian range, full of stones that bend plough blades, and under them, fault lines whispering threats.

I thought that I was the only member of my immediate family invited to Miss Plymal's funeral because Uncle Joe had never forgiven my parents for taking me away from the hills. This family carried its secrets deep, our own fault lines promising future upheaval. Jean had been one of those secrets, known and never talked about, protected by a familiar circle that grew smaller with every generation.

During her life she was the Praying Woman in my Aunt and Uncle's small farming community, called upon in crisis to reach God for the rest of them because, they believed, He could hear her better. I knew her in the summer that changed my life.

As I walked through the airport gate, Aunt Mimi waited, a tinier, ashen version of the woman I remembered from age ten, but her eyes were clear blue-gray, un-aged.

"Welcome home, honey!" She held me at arms' length. A light shadow flitted across her cheek. "You're all grown up!"

She barely reached my shoulder as she hugged me tight. I was half-afraid to squeeze back.

"You look good too, Aunt Mimi!" I patted her bird shoulder.

She stroked my arm and let go. "No, I don't honey. I look old because I am. And you're thirty-five, Emma Jane! Goodness, you're lovely!"

Behind her Aunt Della, Aunt Mimi's younger sister, stood holding her purse against her chest, smiling dreamily.

"Now, Della, you remember Emma Jane?" Aunt Mimi pulled me forward, but Della didn't lower her purse.

She nodded. "I remember you when you were very little," speaking each word slowly.

At her age, most people thought Della had had a stroke, but she had always been like this, living her life a step slower than other adults and because of that, a little shy of them. But when I was a child, she had made me feel like I was the most fascinating person in the world. Everything I did threw her into wild applause, and it was like having a big girl friend who always made you the leader.

Aunt Mimi gingerly took Aunt Della's purse out of her hands, and nudged her closer, so I could wrap her in my arms and feel her old head snuggle my shoulder.

"Oh hooray!" she whispered.

I threw my suitcase in the trunk of Aunt Mimi's old, immaculate Buick and slid into the front seat between them--Aunt Mimi who could barely see above the dashboard, and Aunt Della who waved out the passenger window at strangers. We turned onto the main highway to Kenova and we were fine until we drove into town and hit the cross streets.

Every time Aunt Mimi came to an intersection, she and Aunt Della leaned forward at the same time, turning their heads in tandem, right to left.

"I can't see anything!" Aunt Della would say.

"Neither can I," Aunt Mimi would reply, and roar into a turn.

I squeezed flat against the seat, eyes shut, and rode through the streets of Kenova, swearing I felt the swoosh of near misses, until Aunt Della announced, "Here's my yard."

She was a widow now; living in the house her carpenter husband had built when she was young, He had never minded that she was slow, because he said her 'damn sweetness' gave him more than a smarter woman could. He only got mad once in his life--when one of their two normal daughters called her mother a dummy. My mother said that Tim spanked that girl for the first and only time in her life, and after that both those spoiled rotten girls were very good to their mother. My mother always ended that story gazing sharply at me, as if I should learn from the parable and all I thought was that my mother certainly wasn't dumb or slow. What was she waiting for in my silence?

As we drove on to her and Uncle Joe's farm, Aunt Mimi didn't bring up my mother or father and I wondered if I should. Instead I watched the hills mirror the half moon on an empty highway. Five miles down a familiar dirt road she pulled into her driveway, next to a house that hadn't changed in more than twenty years--on the outside.

Aunt Mimi explained, "We paint the house every year. Of course Joe always insists on the same color!"

Uncle Joe was waiting on the porch, as tall as I remembered but stooped, with a new, gray thinness.

"Emma Jane!" He yelled, opening his arms, and I suddenly stopped in the yard, not sure who I was with him now that I was grown.

"Get up here, girl!" he called joyfully.

I took a deep breath and walked clumsily into his embrace, and he swayed back and forth holding me.

"You're a big girl," he boomed.

"Yes," I squeaked, as he laughed and kissed my hair.

"And you're home again." He led me inside like I was a child.

A quarter of a century ago in this house, I had arrived hating myself; met Jean Plymal and dreamed a life for her; discovered how to pray; left and forgot everything. Inside the front door, my memories were gone.

The small foyer that had once opened onto the stairs leading to my attic bedroom, where I had watched Jean Plymal's porch light at night, was nowhere. The parlor's double doors to the left of the stairs had disappeared. Now the entire front of the house was a wall-less, blond-wood room, with a freestanding staircase in front of paneled swing doors leading to the kitchen.

"Isn't it modern?" Aunt Mimi clasped her hands. "We saved for years to do this."

I stood betrayed and a traitor. I had been healed here--where every shadow and old step should have been waiting for my return--and I hadn't given this house a thought in years. Aunt Mimi studied my face, no expression on hers.

"If you hold on to the past, Emma Jane," she said slowly, "you die too soon."

I swallowed dry, reaching for her. "Of course it's beautiful! It's wonderful!"

She squeezed my hands. "Wait until you see it in the morning, with all the sunlight coming through!"

I had to ask, even as my voice faltered, "And the attic?"

Aunt Mimi winked, smiling again. "Joe wouldn't let me change that. He just repainted it."

She led me up the free-standing staircase to the second story, where the old ladder in the hallway had been replaced with another set of stairs rising into the attic's floor. I grabbed the delicate banister and climbed up first. I could see a new double bed where the old feather bed had been, by the little window still framing Jean Plymal's house.

People had called her the Praying Woman, but as a child I didn't care if she knew how to pray or not, because she acted like I belonged on her porch, and that the stone's throw from Aunt Mimi's door was just a hallway between us. I remembered nights in the attic, when I would lie at the end of the bed and watch her front porch light through the window, wondering if someone would show up to ask for prayer, or if her man, Preacher Sam, ever kissed her fingers like I had seen in the movies.

I looked out the window now, holding my breath. Jean's porch light glowed in the holler. Someone had turned it on this night before her funeral.

A pile of years of being someone I had made up dropped at my feet, rags not worth half as much as this light.

"I'm home," I whispered, as tears finally came. "I'm home."

Uncle Joe was silent on the top attic stair, holding my bags, hardly breathing himself. Slowly, he set the bags down, paced the narrow room in two long strides and wrapped his arms around my shoulders. I pressed against his big warmth and let him hug me as long as he wanted.

"Our girl's back," he bellowed down to the second story.

"Joe, stop it!" Aunt Mimi yelled back. "You'll scare her with your noise!"

We both laughed, me wiping away tears as Aunt Mimi continued from below, "Both of you come down, before my perfectly good meal is wasted!"

It's easy to take for granted a love that folds you back into itself, no matter what you've done or how long you've been gone. It's easy to miss kindness that strokes. We think we're hiding our wounds, but the body tells in the tightness of a cheek, the hesitation in a step. People who love us see the signs. Aunt Mimi and Uncle Joe only asked me simple questions that night--why I was a radio reporter instead of say, a teacher or an office manager ("Because I like people's stories"); why I hadn't married ("Haven't met the right one") and what I did with myself in a city like Dallas, Texas, which was where I had come from this time. As far as they knew, I was a radio reporter on leave from a sleek prairie city that had grown up hard and bright.

They offered me small things about themselves--how Uncle Joe wanted to travel if he could ever find someone who could keep his eye on the hog enough to watch the farm, where Aunt Mimi bought remnants on sale to sew napkins for the Baptist church--and none of us brought up my parents. When I asked what Jean Plymal had died of, they exchanged a look and then averted their eyes.

"Something to do with her heart, I hear." Uncle Joe studied the decorative plates hanging above Aunt Mimi's cupboards.

"Is it a mystery?" I asked, baffled.

"Not her death, no." Aunt Mimi closed the silverware drawer. "Tonight's for catching up," she announced, gathering up our dishes to scrape them in the sink. "Tomorrow has its own place."

There were rules among these hill people, unspoken lines that only outsiders crossed, and they were not invited back. To Aunt Mimi and Uncle Joe, I was one of them who had returned and certainly I still recognized the end of the conversation, even after years in the ungentle outside.

The next morning, Uncle Joe and I sipped coffee in the kitchen as Aunt Mimi ironed our dress blacks in the main room.

"You have your mother's hands," he said, too casually.

I tapped a hidden fault line. "Why isn't she here?"

His face turned dark. "You don't let yourself remember much, do you, Emma Jane?" He was stone still, and then, "I wasn't as strong for you as I should have been."

I touched his big hand on the table. "I remember what I need to, Uncle Joe, and you were wonderful to me."

He covered my hand, ready to speak again when Aunt Mimi brushed into the kitchen and glanced at him sharply.

"Joe."

They gazed at each other in a long moment, each knowing what the other wasn't saying, because they had been married a long time.

Uncle Joe shrugged and leaned back with a grin. "Lord, Mimi, are we ready for another funeral with this family?"

She handed him his suit and me my silk sheath. "Well, I am," she said.

Uncle Joe circled her waist with one long arm. "A funeral don't bring out the best in this family and it don't bring out the worst. It just brings out who they are, and that's the shame!" He chuckled, with Aunt Mimi shooing him out of the kitchen from behind.

A funeral, like baptism, holds a sense of wonder and helplessness before a miracle of passage. At birth, hands reach to pull us from the dark and at death, they try to hold us back as we move into darkness again.

The Baptist church, where Jean Plymal's funeral would be, was two miles down the road from the farm, a white wood frame house with a steeple, stained glass windows, and double doors opening to one large room of pews. Behind the pulpit, a dark cherry wood cross twice the height of a man gleamed in prisms of colored light.

Uncle Joe, Aunt Mimi and I sat in the third pew with Aunt Della and her two daughters behind us, while other people whom I didn't know, but who looked like the rest of us, crowded the other pews. Some had flown in from other cities like me, and others had just walked down the road. Aunt Mimi was stroking Uncle Joe's shoulders in small circles.

"You're getting tense," she whispered.

He cracked his neck.

"Did Bill bring his mother?" he asked.

"He promised he wouldn't do that," Aunt Mimi responded.

"Did Della bring her camera?" he asked.

"She promised she wouldn't do that," Aunt Mimi replied.

"Oh, God," Uncle Joe moaned.

I remembered that Bill was my mother's older cousin who still lived with his mother, Mamaw Suzy, and dated a retired nurse in Huntington. Every time Bill spent the night in Huntington, his mother would call the relatives and explain he had slept on the couch. Whether or not God cared if Bill was having sex at age sixty, Mamaw Suzy was convinced her kin would damn him. In a show of familial love or a shared mean streak, they never told Mamaw Suzy that none of them cared. Mamaw Suzy, age ninety, was also rumored to have turned a little nasty with old age, a point of debate among those who had known her since she was young.

A withered voice cut through the organ music. "She looks pretty, even if she is dead."

A tall, dark man in the aisle stooped over a purplish hairdo. "Now, Mother."

Mamaw Suzy raised her voice. "Well, she does look pretty."

Bill was trying to guide Mamaw Suzy by the elbow toward the back pews, when she came to a halt in front of one of Aunt Della's daughters, hissing in her mother's ear. Mamaw Suzy turned an old bird's eye on my cousin.

"If you're saying something hateful to your mother, I'm going to slap you silly!"

When Bill desperately pushed her elbow, Mamaw Suzy jabbed him hard in the ribs and baby-stepped her way to the back, leaving him coughing for breath. I turned around to Aunt Della, who was looking for something in her purse. Her daughter now stared straight ahead, a white circle of tension around her mouth.

When the organ music stopped, a young preacher stepped up to the pulpit behind Jean's open casket and looked across her body at us. He had grown up knowing her, Aunt Mimi and Uncle Joe had told me, but he had never talked about her praying powers. She had attended this church, his father's church, as a child and continued after it became his. Uncle Joe said they were good friends who used to sit together in the young preacher's office after services, but no one knew what they talked about.

"I was asked to begin this ceremony of passage with a song. However, I was asked that we not rely on any music other than our own voices."

The preacher looked down as we put away our hymnals, and then lifted his head.

"Please stand and repeat after me."

We glanced around at each other, confused. The organist folded her hands in her lap. Who wanted to hear our voices stumble in a cappella?

He began. "Rock of Ages cleft." And stopped.

We fell in behind him. "Rock of Ages cleft."

"For me, let me hide."

We murmured out of sync. "For me let me hide."

He continued. "Myself in Thee."

We followed his lead, faltering, and then understanding, settling with the words in straightened shoulders and lifted chins.

Rock of ages cleft.

For me, let me hide

Myself in Thee.

Then we waited until he spoke again.

"Amazing Grace how sweet!"

Now we knew that Jean Plymal wanted to hear our voices together without music and we responded as one.

Amazing Grace how sweet!

The sound that saved a wretch.

Like me, I once was lost

But now am found.

Amazing!

Grace saved me.

The familiar words spoken in a new way moved us to the river whose currents flow despite our choices, and we bowed our heads without being told to.

"Hear us now, oh Lord," the preacher announced. "We commend the spirit of Jean Plymal to Your care."

I peeked behind me and saw Mamaw Suzy nodding her head fiercely.

"That is all she wanted said." The preacher took off his glasses and stepped to the end of the casket to comfort us as we lined up to give Jean our final goodbyes.

Many, in the body of a family that I didn't know but recognized from old photographs, paused for a moment beside Jean's casket and moved on. Aunt Mimi stood longer, touched Jean's forehead and stepped back as Uncle Joe leaned down. I waited behind him, and gasped as he placed his lips on Jean's cheek for almost longer than I could bear. Aunt Mimi moved to his side, wrapped her arms around his waist and held him tight.

"It's over, Joe," Aunt Mimi said against his shirt collar, holding him until he rose, "She's gone."

I exhaled and stepped forward.

Jean Plymal was over age seventy when she died, and yet she looked like a little rich girl in white silk asleep on white satin, red-brown hair showing no gray. An emerald solitaire lay on her breast, and I sobbed at the surprise of it--that this lovely hill woman, whose bare feet had slapped the porch boards as she rocked, owned a precious gem. Who were you? I wondered. I kissed my fingertips and pressed them to her alabaster hand.

The hands of the dead reveal who they were more than their altered faces. Their hands hold the final glimpse of a life, with fingertips, lines and scars mapping a history. A month ago, I had seen another dead hand under a tarp in a Dallas parking lot, and the sight of it had sent me here.

One of Aunt Della's daughters was hissing again as I stepped past the casket. Next to her, Aunt Della was feeling around in her purse again and I heard, "You promised, Mother!"

Aunt Della smiled beatifically, slowly pulled out a Polaroid camera, and pointed the lens at Jean's face.

"This is really IT!" her daughter shrieked, trying to walk away with one foot and get closer to grab the camera with the other, creating the effect that she was hopping in front of the casket. Her mother focused for a wide shot on Jean's dead face.

Oh Lord! I had spent my formative years with these people, I thought hopelessly, and as a child I had thought that everyone was like them. Then I grew up and realized that wasn't true.

"No one will really understand you, except those people," my mother forecasted bitterly, "and those people don't understand much."

The flash strobed, Aunt Della lowered the camera, and announced to the cross above us, "Forever and ever. Amen."

As I dropped into the pew, Aunt Della headed down the aisle with a furious daughter on either side. When she reached our pew Uncle Joe jumped up and pulled her in against his dress jacket. She buried her face in his chest, holding the developing photo between thumb and finger as if she had grabbed it from a fast current.

We buried Jean Plymal in our family graveyard another mile from the church. One after another, we threw handfuls of dirt into the grave, some saying a final goodbye and others, like me, wondering whom we had lost. After the preacher scattered his dirt, he faced the rest of us. "Nothing stops the river."

His voice broke hoarsely, and we held him among us as we walked to our cars.

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