Rachel's Blue. Zakes Mda

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СКАЧАТЬ laughter. Special occasions are not only limited to Thanksgiving or Fourth of July or Valentine’s Day. Nana Moira has a knack of coming up with a special occasion off the top of her head and starts cooking. Sometimes it is something that people can recognise, such as Saint Patrick’s Day or Mother’s Day, but at other times it is an obscure anniversary – the first time she set her eyes on Robbie Boucher, for instance.

      It bothers Jason that Rachel is usually somewhere else instead of enjoying his company at the Jensen Community Centre. But he is biding his time. She will learn to appreciate him. And together they will create beautiful sounds that will haunt her soul and make her dream of him in the middle of the night as she sleeps in her room.

      Fridays are his blissful moments because that’s when she bakes bread to sell at the farmers’ market the following day. She spends the whole day in the kitchen at the Centre, and he helps her knead the dough, or he runs some errands to town in case she needs some more hickory nuts or flour or whatever else she uses in her recipes. They talk about the old days and laugh a lot. And they promise each other that soon they will start rehearsing and playing together. They giggle and guffaw and tease each other and chase each other around the tables and use the kitchen stools and lids of pots as shields when they blast each other with flour. Then they clean up the mess quickly before Nana Moira discovers it.

      Nana Moira always keeps out of the kitchen on those days. She has indeed taken a shine to Jason, and she tells her granddaughter so. “I hope sweet Jesus will open your eyes one day and you’ll see that this is a good man He has delivered right to your doorstep.”

      But Rachel has many other interests and, according to Nana Moira, takes Jason for granted. If she is not out there doing Appalachia Active stuff such as demonstrating at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources offices on East State Street to stop a well on the land of Mrs Mayle, an eighty-four-year-old in Rome Township who does not want it on her property, she is visiting with Schuyler – that crippled Schuyler, according to Nana Moira – and driving her to physiotherapy or to her community service work at an old age home in the city.

      On Fridays when the baking resumes Rachel does seem to reciprocate Jason’s romantic – some may say amorous – attention. At least that’s what he thinks. That’s what Nana Moira thinks too, and she is ecstatic about it while it lasts. That’s what the gossiping women of the Jensen Township Quilting Circle think as well, and they ask themselves behind Nana Moira’s back why good things always fall in the laps of those who do not deserve them, those who fail to appreciate them.

      One weekend Rachel goes to the Action Camp where she meets Skye Riley and things happen.

      The camp is held in Stewart in an old building that used to be a school but is now used for various community purposes. Different workshop sessions are going on at the same time in the classrooms, and Skye takes the initiative to look for Rachel until he finds her at the “Fracking 101 Workshop” where participants are learning how gas is extracted using horizontal hydraulic drilling technology. The content is at a much greater depth than at the Arts West meeting. From then on he is with her that whole day, accompanying her even to sessions he would not otherwise have attended; he has heard it all and seen it all.

      Rachel is grateful for his company. She would have been quite lonely here without Schuyler; most of the participants are much older people. Skye is with her when she attends the session on “Injection Wells” where they explore what happens to all the toxic frack waste, the dangers of injection wells and how Ohio has become a dumping ground for the waste. Just to be with her, he even attends those sessions that deal with topics he detests, such as one on “Exhausting Administrative Remedies” where Rachel and the other participants learn what bases to cover before resorting to direct action. Skye tells Rachel during the lunch break that it was a session of appeasement, just like the one titled “Strategic Legal Defence”, which explored ways to use court cases to further campaign goals.

      “We are tired of playing by the rules of the establishment,” says Skye, using a term that was fashionable in the heyday of demonstrations and sit-ins in those giddy years that baby boomers like to boast about.

      Skye is in his element when he facilitates his own workshop on “Strategic Direct Action”. He makes the session great fun by letting participants play games and role-play scenarios based on his own experiences in West Virginia. “The cops can be a real drag,” he says, and teaches the workshop what to expect from law enforcement and how to de-escalate dangerous situations. All the while his emphasis is on defiant action.

      “They can’t arrest us all,” he says. “They can’t kill all of us.”

      At first Rachel is a bit shy about making a fool of herself playing some of the games in front of Skye Riley. But soon she gets into the spirit of things, especially when Skye himself is leading the activities with abandon, becoming the life of the party in the process. Soon the workshop is raucous; even senior citizens are laughing themselves silly.

      “When you’re faced with real law enforcement you’ll remember this moment and you’ll know what to do,” he says after all the horsing around.

      After a dinner of pizza delivered to the camp venue by a local restaurant, a movie is screened in the old school hall. But Rachel and Skye decide to skip that one. Instead they repair to Skye’s motel room on the outskirts of Athens, and there she sits on his bed and strums the guitar and sings The Cuckoo, a favourite song that she once heard Jean Ritchie, the legendary balladeer from the hills of Kentucky, play so beautifully on her dulcimer.

      He likes the guitar, and he says so.

      “Only the guitar? I just sang you a song and you like only the guitar?” asks a wounded Rachel.

      Skye Riley comes from the Blue Ridge Mountains where women sing of coal mine accidents in gravelly voices and where songs have been liberated from the tyranny of metre but are laden with ornaments. He cannot pretend he loves what he heard even if that becomes a deal breaker. He searches for kinder words in his head but they don’t exist.

      “There’s no voice that you can’t do nothing about,” he says. “Somebody can train you how to use yours to full effect. Back on the Blue Ridge Mountains I know some old singers who can shape it for you. You can be that whiny kind of singer that people love none the less.”

      She feels insulted. No one has ever told her she sucks.

      “Did I hear you right? Did you just call me whiny?”

      “In a good way,” says Skye. “Almost yodelly. It can be a charming style of singing. All you need is to try to be nothing other than a whiny singer. You should appreciate the whine and use it to your advantage.”

      His honesty is so disarming that she breaks out laughing.

      That night Rachel does not go home. And the following nights too, even though the Action Camp is over and the rest of the activists are back with their families.

      When Jason sees her a week later he knows immediately that something happened at that camp. Rachel is withdrawn in the kitchen as they bake the bread. No fooling around. She is more intense than ever before. More focused. But when she is with Nana Moira and the quilting women she is relaxed and even bubbly. She is nicer to her grandma and stops complaining about her candy. One afternoon she even brings Hershey’s Kisses and places the box in her grandma’s lap.

      “There, but don’t overdo it,” she says.

      She is chirpy in a way that makes those who know her uncomfortable.

      “She needs to see a doctor,” Nana Moira declares.

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