“Honey! It came on time! You’re gonna get to be Beetlejuice for Halloween!”

I can’t help but smile as the three-year-old meets his mama with a grin big enough for a grown man. You can’t buy moments like that. Well, I suppose you can for however much that Beetlejuice costume cost. He races across the yard barefoot, dodging all the rocks and debris that Roaring Fork had knocked up the month before.

She picks him up and waves his hand for him. “Say thank you, Mr. Mailman!” No one on this route knows my name that didn’t know me before. I don’t go around advertising it, either. Don’t really have the time and I wasn’t well known before all this mess. I picked this route up right after the hurricane hit and haven’t had time to think about pleasantries, let alone anything else. I carry on with my rounds.

I ain’t spoke to a soul outside of work in three days. I grunt my way through the Dollar Mart every morning. That hardly counts. They’ve got my order down by heart now, so words aren’t even necessary. Mom and Dad try to reach out, but they know me. They know just to leave me be when I get like this. I am doing what I am doing out of love. It’s getting hard to talk to anyone again, and flames of resentment and anger and hate and hurt are all that spew out of my mouth each time I do. So I stay silent.

Ain’t had a day off since Helene came through. Didn’t have many days off before that. It’s just like Mike to retire right before this shit and leave me hanging. He’s probably laughing at me. I hope he’s laughing. I haven’t heard much out of Virginia, and I know Wilson Creek runs right by his house. It’ll run bad after just a couple of inches of rain. Knowing him, he’d survive armageddon. Knowing most folks in these hills, that’s par for the course. Can’t imagine armageddon looking much worse than this, anyway.

If anyone’s laughing at me, it’s Mamaw Helen. She’s been gone for two years, and I’ve felt her most days with me, living in her old house and all. She was the last one left out of her brood of eleven, despite being the middle child. Her words echo. Reckon I’m just too mean to die. Mean? Not at all. Rotten to her core, maybe, but never mean. Driving a school bus for thirty years and spending another decade or so in the classroom will give you some character. Though from what I’ve heard over the years, she was a character before all that.It doesn’t matter if I live here ‘til I’m eighty; this place will always be hers and Papaw Joe’s. Joe usually let her do all the talking. Wittiest man I ever knew. He’d never ruin a good joke by laughing at it, just like all the other old-timers I grew up around. He worked more in the twenty-odd years I knew him than most folks ever will in a lifetime. He could raise up about anything he set his mind to raising. Tobacco, beans, feeder steers, a big healthy garden, and a big happy family. His mantra rings in my ears. You got to take it like a cat eating a hammer, a little at a time.

They built their ranch style up as high as they could back in the eighties. The water still got up in the basement about a foot. Hard to believe since it’s eighty yards from the bank and at least thirty feet up. The old farmhouse would’ve washed away. 

I watched the North Fork of the New turn into the French Broad that day. Can’t even begin to imagine what the French Broad became. Branches turned to creeks, creeks turned to rivers, and rivers turned into something unholy.

I do catch glimpses of Helen, but it’s not the overbearing presence I’d grown accustomed to. Joe was always around, but he kept to himself. She would get right up in your face. It felt like getting smacked upside the head by a ghost, the way things would fly off the counters. The way things were always just the slightest bit out of place from where you’d left them. The way pennies seemed to rain down from heaven and get lodged in the strangest of places. 

She used to hang around through every season, changing form and playing hide and seek with me. It was a game with a beauty I couldn’t put into words, that I tried desperately to share with those I’ve loved. As time passed, I knew in my heart all too well that no one would ever see this valley through my eyes. Now my own struggled to recognize it.

I heard her in the birdsong as the sparrows and bluejays made their way out of the trees after the storm, when I knew it was over. I saw her in the crawdads wading through the mud along the newly made beach right in front of the driveway. I saw her in the sunrise the following day, when the clouds parted and I remembered her presence was bigger than anything Mother Nature could conjure up. Most people who experience loss and sit with it long enough know this. They don’t really go anywhere. They’re still here. Where else could they go? It can’t be reasoned with words or preached through sermons. It’s just something you know. Something you feel.

I couldn’t see her for most of that day. I was too busy watching the world rush through the valley, getting carried away by the torrent of mud and gulf water. I suppose it was her as much as anything else. The onslaught of a hundred hay bales, ancient logs, hissing propane tanks, and cattle trailers. Toolboxes, tires, and guardrails bent and wound up like barbed wire. They all floated by, lighter than feathers. I caught my first fish on that bank a quarter century ago, when I was knee-high, unbound, and knew nothing of this kind of hurt. Too young to grasp the full memory, but this place has a way of weaving into your mind and setting root. Helen and Joe planted the seeds way back in ‘62. 

The shallow bed where the river meets the mouth of Copeland is a six-foot drop now. All the weak bank got ripped up like fresh tilled soil. The willow trees and sycamores are the only life that held. Everything else is gone. The banks are barren. My mind is barren.

I get whiplash driving back and forth from town. Things are halfway normal there. They didn’t even lose power during the flood. I went without it for nearly two weeks, nor a lick of cell service. Those were the nights I sat in the courthouse parking lot, where I had some signal. Rambling away on the phone to anyone who would listen and putting off the drive home until the last possible second. At least I didn’t have to see that damned river in the dark. 

I saw West Jefferson lit up on a satellite map the night of the storm like a big beacon. Nearly everywhere else in the mountains lost power. People here are lucky to have a place to go, and that’s more than a lot of North Carolina can say right now. I fear it will divide us and the townspeople even further, though. They will never understand. They didn’t understand before.

I pass the Big Laurel intersection. I recall the day after the flood, when we were all walking along the banks like zombies. Whether or not we had a way out, we were all stuck. I wound my way up to the Flatwoods to check on Jimmy. We’d been working together for now on six years and I figured no one from our job was getting to him for a while. The road up the Laurel was a warzone; power lines dangled in front of my face, and it looked like missile strikes had been taken out all along the creek bottom. Takes a body twenty minutes to get from my place to his when the roads ain’t washed away. Dodging the telephone poles and out-of-state work crews, it took me about an hour.

I found him and his whole family putting a culvert back in place that washed a quarter mile downstream the day before. They lined up their tractors and used the buckets to hold it as Cut Laurel Creek roared like a river trying to claim it. It’s barely a trickle when nature’s wrath isn’t raining down upon us. 

They seemed unfazed. I swear they’re built different back in Pond Mountain. I stopped and talked for a minute before the rain came again. We burned a few butts, and I made some jokes about coming to drag his ass back to work, that the mail was piling up. His driveway was washed out for ten days before he managed to make it in.

My neighbors worked nonstop on the day of the flood, pushing mud with their buckets and knocking fallen trees to the side to clear us a path to the highway. We were still stuck for a day and a half. I waded through a foot of mud and climbed the ridgeline that night. The wind blew soft and warm across my face, and I thought I felt her for a split second. I tried to call everyone I love at least a dozen times. No bars. It was pitch black on that hillside, and if it weren’t for bawling cattle and the grunts of a solitary doe I would’ve been all alone. I still felt alone. Helen had abandoned me and added an E to the end of her name. I still talked to her up there for an hour or so, since I couldn’t get through to anybody else.

Mom and Dad got to me the morning after. I was pacing up and down the road since dawn like it might put everything back in place. They told me yesterday they were climbing ridges, too. Wonder where I get the urge from. They spotted me across the way, so they managed to sleep through the night. Mom favors Joe but she acts like Helen more and more with each passing year. She takes that as a compliment now. We knew better than to say anything like that when Helen was alive.

Dad had never looked so happy to see me in his life. It wasn’t a few hours later we were both griping again. I told him I would rather jump in that river than go back to work. He said folks needed me. I barked back and told him that yeah, people really needed their Amazon packages at a time like this. But he was right. Medicine, bills, bank statements; people need those now more than ever. The world wasn’t gonna stop spinning for a little old cataclysm, and no one else would’ve been able to run this route right now if they tried. I knew the people. I knew the roads. Or what was left of them, anyway.

Most people are in good spirits. Driving around like I do, you see things through a wider lens. You’re invisible. No one over the age of seven or under the age of sixty gives the mailman a second thought under normal circumstances. But these days I’m a celebrity. People get a kick out of seeing me amble through all this destruction like it’s just another day. I hope it gives people hope. Or at least a sense of normalcy in something after racking my brain for any other word, I can only describe as hell. I should manage better than that, writing like I do. Guess the thesaurus got washed away with everything else.

I meet a man cracking jokes as he and his neighbors build a makeshift bridge out of two-by-fours, claiming “we got my dump truck across. It’ll hold you.” I meet a couple on Pond Mountain who hadn’t seen anyone in four days and didn’t know there was even a way out. I meet a woman up on Big Springs trying to get a call through to her son, who married a flatlander and thus got to sit out this whole ordeal. I meet folks with nothing left but the clothes on their backs and the smiles on their faces. I meet a man walking his dog every day with fierce abandon, trying to tune out the memory of his wife washing a mile downstream. 

I see hell and heaven intertwined, manifest in the stubbornness of my people who know hardship in their bones. Who knew it long before some silly little flood that they will get through with compassion and grace, because that is their way. They will know it again down the line and face it just the same, when the news dies down and we fade from the world’s eye once more. I am convinced we’ll be holed up in these hills until the end of time, for better or worse.

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We’re going through another cold spell. Wind’s cutting through my clothes now and it’s always blowing the way you don’t want it to. It’s barely November and I’m picturing two months ahead in my mind; half this roadwork will give out and folks will be in the same bind they were before. Can’t imagine how many times I’ll get stuck or nearly slide off the side of a ridge. I can see it now: stranded on top of Big Spring Mountain with only my mind for company. It’s bad enough each year without a five-hundred-year flood for the backdrop.

Don’t think about winter. Don’t think about winter.

I meet people from all corners of the country with food and supplies. The cynic in me thinks they mistyped “Asheville” on their GPS and ended up in Ashe County. I learn that some of them actually did. They feed me and I reluctantly take it. I keep hearing that I deserve it as much as anybody else. I’m thanked for my service like I just got back from the war or something. Most of the time I don’t really see the value in what I’m doing. I’m just reminding people of what comes after this. Junk mail from politicians that couldn’t give a damn about little places like Creston and Lansing and Warrensville. Bills that won’t stop no matter which party wins the next election.

Mainly I don’t feel anything. I’ve been in a daze trying to figure out new lines of travel as roads get fixed, crumble away, and get fixed again. I dodge flaggers and sit for hours waiting behind gravel trucks. My mind wanders, ends up in oblivion, and runs back screaming. It all just builds and builds and builds until I get to where I can’t speak. People try to talk to me and I’m nowhere to be found. I feel those I love drifting away and I’m pushing back against the ones who are sticking around.

I hold multitudes within me. I’m crying out for help in back of my mind trying to get out. I’m barely there. And to think I used to enjoy the solitude. At this point it’s broken me. Words escape me and all that’s left is hurt. Most people probably think I’m just ill. It’s the kind of tired that sleep won’t fix.

In my heart I know I’m quitting soon. I’ll stick it out through Christmas but it’s just too much to bear. I sit alone after work, consumed by the racing of my mind. The doubts and fears seeping through what good might have come out of this. It’s a disease. At work I go through the same thing, the only difference being I have some distraction. But either way there’s no escape. I really don’t think I’ve had a moment to breathe in years and this whole mess has done nothing but put that on full display.

Helen would know exactly what to say to me. I don’t know what that is, but I know she’d have the words. We made a good pair. She loved to talk, and I loved to listen. I could visit with her for hours and not get a single sentence out, and there wouldn’t be a moment of silence. I’d hear the stories of her life I’d heard a hundred times and greet them with the same enthusiasm as I did on the first. I’d listen to tall tales of how she hitchhiked all the way to Maryland with her cousin. How she and her sister stuffed a chicken’s butt full of rocks to take to market so the scale would go up another pound. How she got beaten, hard, for all that and everything else in her youth, and the only thing it did was make her all the more rotten.

I heard how she met Joe in the fields carrying wads of money to pay the bean pickers. How she thought he was well-to-do and a life with him wouldn’t be as hard as the one she had growing up. That was probably the best joke he ever pulled on her. They did have a great life together; a hard but good way of living. All but dead and gone now, but it enriched the soul like nothing else. That little stretch of bottom land where Copeland Creek trickles into the New cradled and nurtured them through the years. It gave back what they put into it, despite bad yields one year or losing a dozen cattle the next. It always seemed to level out.

It was in those moments I remembered. It’s what I’m missing now. The weight of the world makes me forget what she always got across so clearly without even trying. Folks can go through hell and back and it won’t wither away at their soul one bit if they stay grounded in what matters. Family. Community. Place. She never said that outright, but I doubt I would’ve listened if she had. It’s not so much the words as it is the feeling behind them. 

It hasn’t been the same here since her and Joe died. Nothing feels like home anymore, and the little that did got blown down by the winds or washed away in the flood. The house that once sang with spirits is now just full of ghosts. My family is the only tie that’s keeping me here now. A part of me thinks they’re all that ever was.

Maybe this is all selfish. I just see all these people banding together across the rest of the state, and it makes me take a hard look at what’s going on here. We didn’t really lose all that much in the grand scheme of it all. Farm equipment can be replaced. Lives are another story. Still, the hurt runs deeper than that. I don’t think anybody that didn’t watch it with their own eyes will ever understand. Even with all the devastation I’ve witnessed in the months after, the river running that day is all I see. As fast as I saw people coming together it seems like they’re liable to forget just as quickly. They’re getting at each other’s throats again. My mind can’t take it, and my heart can’t bear it.

Helen would’ve seen the good in it, no doubt. I would have told her about that mom and her little boy dressing up for Halloween, and she would have run with it. Wrung every drop of joy out of it she could muster. That was her way. She and Joe wore their joints and fingers and spirits down to dust, but they didn’t work a day in their lives. It was never heavy. That kind of burden you put on yourself.

I have moments where the grief comes over me like a tidal wave. Nights where the floodwaters crash into my dreams. I was grieving well enough before this damn hurricane ever came through and I will continue to do so. Someone’s got to do it. Most of my people are too stubborn to give old Helene an inch on their resolve. Helen surely wouldn’t have. That’s the way of mountain folks. Nothing wrong with it, either. I envy it. I wish my heart were that calloused, if only for a moment. With enough loss it could be one day.