LUCKY STAR ALMANAC

BY ALISON MOORE - Writer in Residence

RUSH HISTORICAL DISTRICT

Weather

There’s a duel between the sun and clouds these days. January may be over but winter isn’t ready to give up. After a hard rain I can hear the creek from my porch and when I walk down the hill to see it, water the color of chocolate milk roars over the rocks as if Clabber challenged Bluejohn to a race and got to the junction first. A few mornings later I wake to the snow that fell soundlessly while I slept, covering everything equally in a thin veneer of white. On my morning walk I make the first footprints on the path through the woods. Taking the same path back, I meet myself coming and going, a record of every step already melting, leaving no trace I was here.

Flora and Fauna

The frost flowers are gone now, but there’s a huge bouquet underground waiting: crocus, daffodils, and many I don’t know the names of. Yet. Each new landscape I live in asks me to open books and learn. Animals are easier, at least the ones I can see, both domesticated and wild. Three deer on Star Mountain cross the road. Pileated woodpeckers flash through the trees behind the shed. The two sheep, Thing 1 and Thing 2, respectively, are not long for this world. In a little more than a week they’ll be taken to a place that will turn them into the food they were raised for. Meanwhile, their breath is still visible in the cold. The goats whose faces are as sober as saints have a perpetual job of keeping the grass down, the stickers shorn for penance. I need to know their names. Across the gravel drive, the rooster’s harem lays a dozen or so offerings a day that are gathered and scrambled or fried or folded into batter. Don’t the hens wonder what happens to their eggs? All these creatures need feeding and tending so we can reap the harvest. Home grown has a literal meaning to me now. Seasons change. Nothing lasts; nothing ever ends, either.

Rush

is the place that haunts me. I read everything I can get my hands on about its history, how the population swelled to thousands, then dwindled down to four families at the end. Something about the three buildings holds me in thrall. Gray as a charcoal sketch they stand perfectly still, stripped and vulnerable without their doors, windows wide open to the wind. Time collapses on itself. There are lives within as layered as the sheets of newspaper once tacked to the walls for warmth. Now, the last news of the nineteenth century has been torn away leaving only the thumb tacks holding a few scraps of the Mountain Echo behind. 

I start hearing things. Footsteps at first, then a chair scraping the floor as it’s pulled across the room. Then I see a shimmer of a woman climbing onto the chair to hang this paper laundry inside her two-room house, pushing hard on a tack so the wall will take it. Can she read? She might have to teach herself to translate the hieroglyphics. I can see her lingering over the pictures: a portrait of a woman whose name doesn’t matter, an ad for a sewing machine, a man’s face inside a ladies lace-up boot. Henry Field’s seed catalog, a Silvertone guitar.

This woman, I’d like to call her Willa, might have a future husband working in one of the mines—the Lonnie Boy, the Morning Star, the Beulah or the Yellow Rose. They’ll have a family soon. Finished with her work for the day, she gets down from the chair, runs her hands across the pages as if she might have papered something over—a keepsake in a chink in the wall, maybe a bottle of Blue Waltz perfume she saves for dances. She hid it so well she can’t remember where. She stops in front of a headline. She turns. “What’s this mean?” she asks, pointing to the word “Ore,” three letters of mystery. I wish I could see her as clearly. I can read but I can’t explain the reasons, that from where I stand, her life is no longer concerned with crops that grow upon the land but what minerals lie beneath it. Hope for prosperity is why people give up their farms and come to this place, why they find it hard to leave, why their labor matters. Until it doesn’t any longer. 

Willa has probably heard of Chicago where all the zinc goes, but how could she know it’s the market, not the weather, that dictates her future in this remote valley in Arkansas. Right across the road, Rush Creek floods or disappears underground as the storms come and go, something she understands. But for the life of her she can’t make sense of a lot of things: the rise and fall of prices, the boom and bust of zinc carbonate, the war and peace in strange countries across the ocean. Things in the newspaper that don’t make sense. Things that have nothing to do with rain.

The shimmer of her shape coalesces into specific details. She is not young as I assumed. Her dress might have been yellow once and is now almost as white as her hair. Her face? She turns away before I can see the color of her eyes or their expression. Maybe I’ve seen too much. Or not nearly enough. She is like breath on a mirror: something that blooms and quickly fades. There is no chair. The wallpaper of news—long since torn away. Only the constellation of thumbtacks, dark as old pennies, remain as proof she was ever here.