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Dedication

To Ann, Liz, and Linden

May our families continue to make a way together

And to the land

PART I

STINGING NETTLE

1

HELEN

One winter, Rudy got an infection in his testicles while he lay out drunk on coal company land in a one-room shack that didn’t belong to him. When the corruption began to smell, he washed his balls with creek water and put some plantain on the infected place. He wrapped it up in duct tape, and kept the whiskey bottle by the bed. He lay on his bunk until his dick turned black and started bleeding out pus, at which time he found he could no longer walk. He couldn’t even get up to light the fire. When he started hallucinating, he knew he would die if he didn’t get up, so he forced his feet to find the floor, and he forced his body upright. He made it to the road, where he began, somehow, to walk. He knew his only hope was a ride. But it was the middle of the night, and it was February, and he was miles from town, and no one came by. Rudy would count out fifty paces and then collapse. Each time he passed out, he tried to do it in the middle of the road so that any car that came would have to stop for him. He kept himself moving like that most of the night. Finally a truck passed, some poachers coming back from a run. They pulled him up into the cab despite his odor, and they drove him the hour into town, speeding the whole way. He stank like he’d dug himself out of his own grave, shit and piss, the high smell of white worms and the paste of decay, and the hunters hauled him into the emergency room and left him there, and he fainted away on the floor.

“What happened then?” I asked my boyfriend, the night before he left me.

“They put Rudy in a hospital bed,” he said. “He was dead to the world for three whole days.”

“And then?” I asked.

“And then? Well, I guess then he woke up,” my boyfriend said.

“But what happened after he woke up?” I asked. We were lying in our narrow camper bed, not touching, but maybe about to.

“Come on, Helen,” he said. “That’s not the point of the story.”

“What’s the point of the story?” I asked.