for milk, and three large heaps of compost.
What Rachel remembers most about the visit was that when she wanted to use the bathroom Genesis’ wife – Rachel now concludes she cannot be Jason’s mom, judging by her young age, but his stepmom – took her to a room with a wooden toilet seat and a portable bucket under it. The family does all its business in that room and in another one like it downstairs. The contents are emptied outside and become part of the compost heap. That’s what gets Genesis’ vegetables so gigantic and full of vigour.
Rachel cannot forget how she flipped out. She had not known that some people use crap to fertilise their gardens.
“Ain’t nothing more organic than human crap,” Nana Moira told her when they were driving home.
“I’m not gonna eat Genesis’ veggies. Otherwise I am gonna think of all that crap. I wonder why it didn’t even smell in the house, not even in the latrine.”
“Maybe they treat it with something that eats the smell,” said Nana Moira.
“You gonna eat those veggies even when you know they’ve been fertilised with Genesis’ crap?”
“Of course I am gonna eat them. We’ve been eating them all along and we’s healthy as a fiddle.”
“Not me, Nana Moira. Not any more.”
“You don’t know what manure they use for them veggies from Kroger or from the Food Bank.”
That flipped Rachel even more. To this day she hates vegetables.
But it is not from the vegetables, honey, eggs and milk that Genesis’ family earns its livelihood. These are mostly for home consumption. Genesis buys a lot of cheddar from Wisconsin cheesemongers and adds value to it by ageing it before selling it at the farmers’ market. Rachel and Nana Moira were impressed when he took them to his cellar and showed them the shelves with chunks of cheese in half-open glass containers or just wrapped in wax paper. There were thermometers on the walls and a range of fans on the floor to create air circulation. Some of the cheese, he told them, had been there for two years, and would only be sold after another three to fetch a good price from connoisseurs. Rachel was struck by the smell that permeated the room, both mouldy and pungent, almost like pee – a smell that she has associated with Genesis and his wife ever since. Even as he stands here with his son and Schuyler she can detect the familiar whiff.
“You remember Schuyler?” says Rachel to Jason.
“Yeah. The queen of them yentas back in the day.”
The memory provokes a few giggles; Genesis is bemused.
“‘Back in the day’ being the operative words here,” says Schuyler.
“I’ll leave you with your friends, Jase,” says Genesis. “Some of us have work to do.”
Jason suggests they all go for coffee at Donkey provided they give him a ride home. He was persuaded to attend this meeting by his dad so he came with him in his car.
Rachel helps the limping Schuyler down the steps.
And there is Skye Riley sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette.
“You girls didn’t hear a darn thing I was saying. Talking all the time,” he says looking at Rachel and Schuyler. And then turning to Jason he adds, “I bet you can’t get a word in edgeways with these two, bro.”
“About chaining ourselves,” says Schuyler, “that’s what we were talking about.”
“In that case you’re forgiven,” says Skye.
He stands up to introduce himself, and they all laugh and tell him they already know who he is. After they have told him their names he says he hopes to see them at the Appalachia Active’s first ever Action Camp that will be held for the whole of next weekend at the old Stewart School. It will be a community weekend of workshops about injection wells, fracking, community organising and direct action, all aimed at helping activists from across southeastern Ohio to prepare themselves for the impending fight. He will come all the way from the Blue Ridge Mountains to facilitate some of the workshops. Jason and Schuyler say they will not be able to attend the camp, but Rachel will definitely be there. Skye is excited to hear this and promises that he will see her there.
Jason, Schuyler and Rachel walk to Rachel’s Ford Escort, which is parked on the street just in front of the building.
“Holy fuck, these guys take themselves so seriously,” says Jason when the three of them are seated at Donkey sipping coffee. “You ain’t gonna be chaining yourselves to no frackin’ shit, will ya?”
Rachel says she will because she believes in the cause. Schuyler, on the other hand, would not be able to even if she wanted to. She is on probation and is still doing community service for a crime that the county prosecutor called “aggravated stupidity”. For the past few years she had a passionate affair with a married man whose promises to leave his wife and be with Schuyler for ever and ever were never fulfilled. Instead he died in a motorcycle accident. Schuyler was on the pillion when this happened.
Schuyler was in O’Bleness Hospital when the man was cremated. After months of hospitalisation she is now in physiotherapy.
The man’s family barred her from visiting his remains, which were kept in an urn in a columbarium at the cemetery. This embittered her because, as she told Rachel, all she wanted was to say goodbye to her lover. So one night she took a cab to the cemetery – she didn’t want to involve Rachel in the crime she was planning – and broke the glass front of the niche with a rock. She grabbed the urn and fled. Out on the road she phoned another cab to pick her up.
The wife knew immediately that this was not an act of random vandalism. She told the police who she suspected, and indeed they found the man’s ashes in Schuyler’s bedroom, on the nightstand next to her bed. She told the officers that she stole the man’s ashes because he was hers and his wife had no business keeping them or barring her from the cemetery. She was adamant that the man loved her, not the wife, and the fact that when he died he was with Schuyler was proof enough. Therefore, she felt that she was more entitled to those ashes than the official widow. This was Schuyler’s defence at the Athens Court of Common Pleas where she was on trial for felony vandalism. She was convicted and sentenced to a two thousand, five hundred dollar fine and community service. She is still serving that sentence and if she were to be caught on the wrong side of the law again during her period of probation she would certainly go to prison. That’s why she is not prepared to take any risk chaining herself to fracking equipment even though, like her friend Rachel, she strongly believes in the cause.
“But you was chanting ‘direct action, direct action’ major,” says Jason.
“Yeah, I can chant it ’cause I support it, but I can’t do it,” says Schuyler.
Both Rachel and Schuyler find Jason a pleasant guy, a gentleman in fact, despite his vocabulary which is peppered with cusswords and has regressed from the high-school-acquired register to that of the township folks who don’t have much schooling. He tells them about his carefree life in Yellow Springs, his sadness at the loss of Big Flake Thomas, and his return to old Athens County where he hopes to resuscitate the music career that was really coming along fine in Yellow Springs until the big man decided to join celestial buskers. In the meantime he is helping his father in his cheese-ageing business and he hates it. He has come to hate cheese in all its manifestations, and as soon as he finds a job
