Rachel's Blue. Zakes Mda
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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 Rachel is withdrawn in the kitchen as they bake the bread.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.
No one suspects that whatever happened at that camp has to do with a scrawny coal miner called Skye Riley. But no one has the time to dwell on Rachel’s change of mood. Nana Moira is preoccupied with the new project that Jason is introducing to the Centre.
After noticing the amount of waste that in his home would have been used for compost, Jason suggests that instead of dumping potato peels, onion skins, outer lettuce leaves, left-over food and even scraps of non-recyclable paper in the garbage to end up in a landfill somewhere, they should build a compost heap.
“And do what with it? We don’t keep no garden here,” says Nana Moira.
“Maybe we should,” says Jason.
“I ain’t gonna keep no garden, Jason. Am too old for that.”
“You ain’t gonna work on it yourself, Nana Moira.”
Volunteers like him will look after the garden. After all, there are all these people who come to the Centre to eat for free. Or just to sit on the porch and gossip about things that are none of their business. They could water the garden. Instead of depending solely on cabbages and Swiss chard from the Food Bank in Logan, Nana Moira could cook some real fresh vegetables for her guests.
“And you can even join the Compost Exchange too,” says Jason. “Pa can tell you all about it ’cause he’s one of the founders.”
Nana Moira learns that she doesn’t even need to have her own compost in the yard at the Centre if she thinks that would be too much for her. All she needs is to join the Compost Exchange. They give you five-gallon buckets that you fill with the waste and then seal them off. You either take them to their booth at the farmers’ market or they collect them from your premises if you are a business that produces a lot of waste, such as a restaurant. Each time you bring your bucket they give you a clean empty one. There is so much waste at the Centre that Jason is certain the Compost Exchange folks would come and collect it. Every six months members receive a five gallon bucket of healthy compost for their own gardens.
“That way you get to be green major, Nana Moira,” says Jason. “Pa says all this global warming stuff is because of them landfills. They pollute groundwater too. You become green, Nana Moira, if you don’t dump stuff but compost it.”
Nana Moira is sold on the idea. The backyard is big enough; the Centre will have its own garden. It need not be large at first while everyone is learning. It will grow as they get more confident.
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