No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Christmas Break

Winter arrives in a slow blur of muffling snow. Each blade of grass leans into its tiny drift. Snowlight glows all day. Squirrel tracks are delicate runes in the whitened earth. I enter the woods, where there is no time, only the slow revolution of season. Winter is the land’s long rest, the ashes in which the Phoenix sleeps.

I have gotten through the first semester at MSU. My student evaluations are strong. I didn’t forge strong bonds with colleagues but made no enemies either. Teaching four classes a week has left me weary and ready for rest. The house holds a menorah and a Christmas tree. Sam and James are excited that celebrating Hanukkah includes eight days of gifts.

Deep within me lurks a permanent winter, a dark solstice of the soul. Blue shadows spread over the snow like pools of water in white sand. The sky is granite between the hills. I sit in a bare swatch of snow and lie on my back. I want to leave the cuneiform of my body imprinted on the glistening land.

Eugene, my best writer, has dropped out of school. The admissions office has no listing of a phone for him in Martin County. His address is a rural route number. The culture of the hills has reclaimed Eugene as one of its own. I quit MSU twice and I wonder if any of my teachers felt as responsible for me as I do for Eugene. Perhaps I failed him in some way.

It is wrong to play favorites, but every teacher does. I am now left with Sandra, a less talented writer, but more ambitious. The biggest favor I can do is help her transfer to a better school. No one suggested that to me, and for years I wondered why. Now I understand that good students are so rare that a professor wants to keep them for himself.

A sudden gust whirls the air with beads of white like the seed of a dandelion. Landscape is easily understood in winter when the sightlines are open. Without foliage you can see the folds of earth where the ridges dip into a hollow. The initial period following a light snow is ideal for learning the woods because it is impossible to get lost. All you have to do is follow your footprints home.

I have done that but there is no longer any home here, only what home was. Nevertheless, I am not a fool for coming back. Students seek my counsel when they have difficulty in other classes. One young man drives one hundred thirty miles a day to study fiction writing with me. Junior faculty members have approached me with the idea of beginning inter-disciplinary coursework in Appalachian Studies. There has even been covert talk of an MFA program in Creative Writing, which is nonexistent in Kentucky.

I rise and step into the deeper woods, transformed to a gleaming chandelier of white. Rabbit tracks cross a quilt of snow to a redbud, known in Kentucky as the Judas Tree. During ancient times it bloomed huge and lovely in the woods — white blossoms bigger than magnolias, a sweeter scent than honeysuckle, its trunk more stalwart than stone. The redbud ruled the oldest of the old growth forest. In his moment of desperation and sorrow, Judas hanged himself from the boughs of a redbud. Its limbs became withered and weak overnight. The redbud would never again bear the weight of a man.

I hope that I can forgive myself for Eugene’s decision the way the forest forgave the Judas Tree. I am reminded of the old story about the axe that entered the woods. Upon seeing it, the trees said, look, the handle is one of us.