In the Here and Now

Again and again, I try to write the way Northern Appalachia feels, here and now.

I’ve got to find a way to crystalize the here and now.

I am obsessed with making a memorial to the here and now.

I want to be a primary source for future historians: not for battles or bombings or the doings of important men, but of traumatized people in a traumatized neighborhood at the junction where the Rust Belt collides with Northern Appalachia. Here, now, before it’s too late. Before America here and now collapses and becomes what happens next. And I feel that it’s hopeless.

History will have a lot to say about this time. But I’m afraid they won’t remember that we were human beings.

Historians will record what’s happening in Washington, and in Europe. But history will not remember that once a week I volunteered with the children at the after school outreach. Last week I taught them about the Civil War. I played a video of a chorus singing the Battle Cry of Freedom, and a little girl in a plaid dress jumped out of her seat and seized both my hands to dance with me. We whirled round and round the room, singing “The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah! Down with the traitors! Up with the stars!” and I felt so happy I forgot to be afraid for  the next hour. But that night, I was so panicked I couldn’t sleep.

Some historian might write down that we had a terrible strain of influenza this winter, and the hospitals all over the valley were so crowded that they couldn’t take any more patients. But they will not write down that my friend Miss B had to go to the hospital at one o’clock in the morning because she couldn’t breathe. She was sent home after a few hours and an IV. I ran to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for her the next day while the eldest daughter watched the baby, but the prescription wouldn’t be ready for over an hour, so I went for a walk in Union Cemetery just behind the shopping center.

In the here and now, it was the last day of February, but the thaw had begun in earnest and it was as sunny and muddy as springtime. I didn’t even need a coat. The cemetery rolled on for acres and acres, dotted with the graves of Americans from three different centuries.

No historian will mention that I walked around the graves of the veterans of the World Wars first, up beyond the ravine where the sun is so bright. And then I walked on the other side, where the hills are steeper and the graves are much older. I saw the grave of a girl who lived twelve years, seven months, and three days. I stopped at the headstone of a child who died when he was much younger, and touched the carved limestone lamb on the top as if it was a living thing. I found the grave of Johann Fischer, who was born in Germany but defended us in America in the Revolutionary War. You’ll find some mention of Johann Fischer in historical texts. I don’t think anyone wrote anything about the dead children.

I found myself standing in a squadron of identical little semicircles, each decorated with a metal ornament painted to look like a flag. I couldn’t read the worn inscriptions on the stones, but I read the plaque declaring that these were the Union soldiers who had fallen in the Civil War.

I wanted to tell the Union soldiers about the little girl who’d danced with me to “Battle Cry of Freedom.”

I thought they might like to hear it.

The wind whipped up so cold and noisy that it felt as if I was surrounded by ghosts. And then the sun came out, and a blue jay hopped out of a tree and landed for a moment on top of a nearby obelisk, and that was like a haunting as well, but a peaceful one.

In the here and now, I saw robins hopping on the grass between the graves as I went back, and realized that the winter was nearly over. I wondered what the country would look like when winter came again.

I wondered what, exactly, America was, besides a piece of land with hospitals and shopping centers and graves on top of it. I decided that America is people: many terrible people and many, many wonderful people, and history will remember only a few of us. But we were here.

I wasn’t afraid again until long after I dropped off Ms. B’s prescription.

I wasn’t afraid until night.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.