No Heroes Read Free

care about teaching that much.”
    I followed her to brief meetings with various administrators. MSU has a lovely setting with high hills as a backdrop to the buildings. Spring’s pastel trees were patched dark where the sun hit. I remembered hours throwing Frisbees here. We wore shabby clothes, protested disco music, and mourned Lynyrd Skynyrd. My wallet contained rolling papers instead of money. We felt free. Now I felt like an impostor, the butt of a colossal group joke. Any minute someone would say: “Just kidding, Chris. We don’t hire locals or ex-curb painters. Now get the hell out of here.”
    Walking the length of campus took ten minutes, and I headed back along Main Street, looking at the hills silhouetted against the sky. These woods were the cradle of my personal civilization, my own promised land. I grew up walking the same dirt for sixteen years, then began driving it. Town was where the groceries were, the doctor and the drugstore. Town was special. Town was exciting. Town was a half hour’s drive on a narrow road that followed a creek. I recalled each incarnation of a restaurant now converted to apartments. Stores were gone, but their sites were forever known to locals as “where Allen’s used to be,” or “Parney’s old place.” Directions to newcomers were disastrous— “Drive up Main past the old post office and turn where Bishop’s was, I don’t know the name of the street, then head down to where they’ve got that new stuff going on. Park by the old Big Store.” Directions in the hills were just as confusing—“Go out sixty past the wide place, go left at the creek, go three hollers up and make a right. If you hit Sharkey, you’ve gone about twenty miles too far, but there’s no sign for it. You’ll just know.”
    A car slowed beside me. The smiling driver was a wild friend from college, now transformed into a straitlaced pillar of the community. She had not only quit her outlaw ways, but she now behaved as if her past belonged to someone else. She drove me ten miles out of town to see a house. I asked Vondelle about various mutual friends, some dead, some vanished, most reformed. A few still lived as we had, managing to maintain a dope and whiskey lifestyle while pursuing careers and having families, although the “plumb wald” times were relegated to weekend parties, where cops hid on old dirt lanes waiting to arrest people as they left. Knowing the backroads was still crucial to living here.
    â€œI spent all these years away dreaming of coming home,” I said.
    â€œI spent the same years thinking about leaving.”
    â€œIt’s easy to leave.”
    â€œNot for me,” Vondelle said. “This is where I went to. Nobody in my family finished high school. I came here for college.”
    She had married the most exotic man available, an artist from off, which meant beyond the county line. He had no people. No one knew his history. He dropped into the hills fully formed and self-contained, like trailers on a ridge. Without a past, he had no enemies, no fears, no obligations. Vondelle had been a hippie artist from a tough county, full of confidence and glee at living in Morehead, eastern Kentucky’s den of iniquity. She liked to laugh, and party hardy. She had been resplendent with the enthusiasm of youth, determined to leave her mark. These days Vondelle and her husband no longer made art.
    She turned onto a side road and began driving uphill, taking two turns past a large pond that shimmered in the sun. A duck skidded to a halt beside a cluster of cattails. Birds made a symphony in the trees. She drove slowly up a steep road to a large house. The property included two outbuildings and a section of a wooded hill. We walked along the front slope covered with butterweed and larkspur swaying below white oaks.
    I told her I wanted to be alone and she nodded. Redbud blossoms hazed the