Call and Response: Roger May and Mike Murphy

Roger May. January 25, 2014. Coal-laden railcars roll through the upper Kanawha Valley along the icy Kanawha River, just west of the confluence of the New and Gauley Rivers at Glen Ferris, Fayette County, West Virginia. (First published in The Guard… — Roger May. January 25, 2014. Coal-laden railcars roll through the upper Kanawha Valley along the icy Kanawha River, just west of the confluence of the New and Gauley Rivers at Glen Ferris, Fayette County, West Virginia. (First published in The Guardian on January 30, 2014.)

When I was a little brat I used to talk to God all the time. I’d invite him to our trailer to watch cartoons or to eat fish sticks and applesauce with me. He never showed up.

Pop came home drunk one night. He yelled, damn car knocked like hell all the way home from Lulabelle’s! The next morning, I saw a gas pump handle and six feet of hose hanging from the gas tank. Lulabelle’s is twenty miles away.

The second-grade teacher gave me the role of Jesus in our class’s Passion Play. I remember it was Easter and the grass was a neon green and the crocuses were poking up through. I was excited to play Jesus, the Son of God. Mom forgot to make a costume for me so I had to wear her cotton bathrobe over my Superman Underoos and carry a flimsy cardboard cross. The other kids fake-yelled mean things at me on the road to Golgotha through the school cafeteria. Mom’s robe kept coming open. I was humiliated and embarrassed. I figured that must be what Jesus felt like.

I’ve been with a few girls in this town. It was usually some kind of awkward-yet-exciting groping in back seats or out by the backwaters of the lake, the feel of warm flesh and rumpled fabric, random nights filled with yeses and noes and maybes. Once a girl named Missi let me feel her boob under her shirt, made me promise not to tell. I met Bant at the end of last summer. She was one of those girls you never noticed for years and then one day you see her and suddenly she’s beautiful, like a swan or a sunset. One night we lay down under the spruce trees and looked up at the mountains all around and the stars breathing down on us. Everything felt perfect.

I was sitting in the last pew in the back of the church. I watched one of the solid men of the congregation go into Preacher Dodd’s office. He was talking too loud. I could hear every word he said. I could hear him saying I hate my wife, Reverend. I hate my wife. I heard him start sobbing and blubbering. I got the hell out of there. There was something beautiful about his pain.

A kid in my class named Tommy ditched school and was jumping stones across the river when the Allegheny Power Company opened up the turbines on the dam. He tried to make it across but the rocks were slippery and the water came up fast and Tommy couldn’t swim. They dragged the river for a while but didn’t find his body until the river finally thawed in the Spring. One of the volunteer firemen who pulled Tommy out said he was caught up real snug in the roots of a willow tree and he looked just like he was sleeping. The power company paid Billy’s family five-thousand dollars. I figured that must be what a body is worth.

Mom and Pop give me a Timex watch for graduation. We all go to Shoney’s for dinner. Bant says she’s thinking of going to college in the fall if she can save up some money. I don’t say a word. Lonnie and me have been talking about signing up for the Army Reserve. I can hear the watch ticking away on my wrist like a heartbeat ...tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,

tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,

tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, ... and it all feels somehow like we’ve just been born.

Mike Murphy. Baltimore, Maryland.

Call and Response is a photo-literary exploration devoted to the relationship between photographs and words. Using photographs from the Looking at Appalachia project, writers are encouraged to respond narratively to a single image in 1,000 words or less. We hope to use this platform to expand our community and encourage collaboration between photographers and writers. Learn more about how to submit here.

Call and Response: Nathan Armes and Noah Davis

Nathan Armes. March 15, 2014. Kingston, Roane County, Tennessee. My grandfather's truck sits under I-40 where the highway crosses the Clinch River in Roane County. The smokestacks of the Kingston Fossil Plant, managed by the Tennessee Valley Authori… — Nathan Armes. March 15, 2014. Kingston, Roane County, Tennessee. My grandfather's truck sits under I-40 where the highway crosses the Clinch River in Roane County. The smokestacks of the Kingston Fossil Plant, managed by the Tennessee Valley Authority in Kingston, have dominated the small town's skyline since the 1950s. The plant burns about 14,000 tons of coal a day.

The Lottery

The trailer sits on cinder blocks by the river. An air conditioning unit coughs in the bedroom where a little girl naps and dreams of huckleberries. The red truck outside is brown with rust, and where water flows from a pipe at the mill, fish swim sideways, tumors on their stomachs and zinc coating their gills. The man sitting in a pick-up eats the silver fish from the river, and a dollar bill in his pocket listens to the ball growing in his stomach, white and ridged against red insides. After driving the gravel road to the convenience store, he asks the woman behind the register for a pack of Pall Malls, turns and pushes a dollar into the lottery machine. Inside the electric box, the bill falls next to fives, tens, even twenties, crinkled and torn. Some smell of alcohol, or perfume, while his is blotched with the blood of a deer he shot in a farmer’s field at night. He remembers the animal green eyes transfixed by the truck’s high beams, brown velvet of its body unable to move as the bolt slid the bullet into the chamber, flash of gunpowder sparking, orange and yellow and black.

Noah Davis. Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Call and Response: George Etheredge and David Joy

George Etheredge. December 4, 2015. Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina.

When dinner is served, she sees venison tenderloin seared rare in cast iron and sliced into thin medallions. She sees morels cut lengthwise from cap to stem, the mushrooms hollow as caves, cooked tender in butter brought just to the point of smoking. She sees mashed potatoes whipped with heavy cream, asparagus broiled crisp at their crowns with a thin drizzle of olive oil.

When dinner is served, she sees deer cubesteak dipped in egg wash, rolled in yellow corn meal, and fried golden in hot oil. She sees green beans cooked low on the stove all day with onions and streaked meat sharing the pot. She sees the tomato that hung on the vine by the driveway that morning when she left for work, the fruit now picked and cut, sprinkled with salt and pepper. She sees a cake of cornbread wrapped in a checkered dishcloth to keep it just warm enough that it will still melt butter when she cuts her triangle and makes her plate.

When it’s early spring and the hill behind the house is covered with ramps, she sees meatloaf. In summer, she sees street tacos made simple like the Honduran woman who owns the food truck just down the road makes them—corn tortillas filled with meat, white onion, cilantro, and a spritz of fresh lime. I make ours with meat that I cut from the bone and canned in mason jars and we eat them on the porch in our rocking chairs with Coronas, Modelos, Estrella Jaliscos, the bottles sweating in our hands as the lightning bugs start to blink on the wood line.

Sometimes the leaves have the mountains afire and sometimes there is snow on the ridgeline and sometimes she walks into the house and is overcome by the smell of what has been simmering since the night before and she pulls the lid off the pot and sees a stew that started with bone stock and mirepoix—carrots, celery, and onion—finished with canned venison and kale, so hearty that it could float a car.

What she will not see is what came before. She will not see what I cannot stop seeing, what I remember when I take a bite and close my eyes:

Fifteen feet up a hickory, I watch a tree line at the edge of a clear cut. I hear heavy footsteps and ease around the right side of the tree for a look and there he stands. The buck walks to my left and I slip behind the trunk, shoulder the rifle, and balance the fore end on a tree step I’ve augured into the opposite side for a rest.

The deer is broadside when I slide the crosshairs onto his shoulder. The clear cut is too rough to track and drag, strewn with downed timber and studded with sawn stubs, so that I do not want to risk a shot for heart and lungs and have the deer run a hundred yards. I want to drop him where he stands. Pin his shoulders together and buckle him.

Just before the deer strolls behind a cedar sapling I touch the trigger and the .308 shatters the morning. A hundred and fifty grains of copper jacketed lead hit just behind the shoulder and bloodshot the backside to pudding.

The buck stoops forward and sprints, back legs driving him over tangled ground. He makes it forty yards before he crashes. From my stand, I can just make out the white of his stomach through the brush. I watch his ribs rise with each breath, that breathing slowing, slowing, then gone.

There is a sadness that only the hunter knows, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration. Life is sustained by death, and though going to the field is an act of taking responsibility for that fact, even though this deer will feed us for the year, the killing is not easy nor should it be.

As we eat, I remember the killing and I remember the not killing. I remember the first deer that I ever saw in the woods, how I was set up directly on a game trail and how that young doe walked so close that I could’ve reached my hand out and touched her, how I was absolutely amazed that if I was still enough, I could disappear.

I remember the days when I saw nothing but squirrels and the days that I saw nothing and wished I’d seen squirrels and the days that I saw everything but squirrels—one time a cooper’s hawk that came out of nowhere and snatched a cardinal from a limb, the hawk flying away with a fistful of red as if it carried a poinsettia in its talons.

I remember the man who first handed me a knife and told me where to cut. I remember every bit of this moment, every last detail, from running the blade around the bottom joint of the deer’s hindlegs to the way the air smelled of pine needles and viscera to the way the sunlight filtered through the trees in bars. I taste this on my tongue as I chew that first bite and swallow.

My dinner plate is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever witnessed. I see it as a miracle. It is as if I have uttered the words of a prayer and those words have been answered. This is what I wish I could show her.

David Joy. Jackson County, North Carolina.