The cold came on so fast this year. We’d had a couple of cold snaps in northern Appalachia this fall; it even snowed a little on November first. But the real wintry cold came in with a wind storm this weekend. It went from t-shirt weather to near freezing in six hours, and this time the cold is here to stay.

I wore a coat for the first time this weekend as I went for a walk in my neighborhood, LaBelle, which the locals pronounce “LAY-bell” and call “The Hilltop” even though it’s more of a cliff’s edge overlooking downtown Steubenville. Mansions overlook downtown, with expensive houses for a couple blocks, and then the neighborhood I live in.

I saw roses that were vibrant the day before, scrunched and faded like cabbages. Neglected gardens still had a few late tomatoes red on the vine, as their leaves shriveled and perished in the frost. The icy mid-November wind ripped papery leaves from the sycamores and shingles from the hundred-year-old foursquare houses.

I worry about The Boy. He’s small for his age, pale, a cream-colored face under a shock of blond hair, and then it’s just skin and bones and secondhand jeans. He doesn’t sleep well at night or pay attention during the day. He’d been living with his other grandfather, whom he calls “Pappy,” before he moved in with Grandmother.

LaBelle has a lot of sycamores. It also has a lot of foursquares, boxy, two story houses with four rooms on a floor, the kind of house that used to be respectable middle-class housing. Now they’re rundown rentals in need of mold abatement and new paint. I live in one, and so do the Baker Street Irregulars, and so do most of my neighbors.

When I got back, my nine-year-old daughter, Rosie, was outside, playing with The Boy.

The Boy is the only male child of the family that lives on the corner; they are the ones I call the Baker Street Irregulars. The matriarch of the family is a cheerful grandmother who’s missing her front teeth. Grandma, step-Grandpa, five half-siblings, and sometimes the mother of all of those half-siblings with her new boyfriend and baby, are all crammed into a four-bedroom house. The house is like a planet surrounded by satellites. Every day, besides the five or six children, there are cousins and friends of cousins, grouchy aunts and slurring drunk uncles, who wander by the house to visit and sit outside. The children tumble around the yard until dark.

Grandma is a devout Christian; she starts every morning playing hymns on the radio. Before COVID-19 she used to herd the whole family to a Protestant church on the other side of LaBelle twice a week. The Boy calls it “Ballet Church,” because he mixes up the syllables in LAY-bell.

When the state of Ohio closed the churches before Easter, she was sad. “I just want to go to church,” she said. “I don’t care which one. I wanna be with Jesus.”

She kept the children indoors and away from their uncles and aunts and cousins during the lockdown in March and April. Now, when they walk to the corner market with her, she makes them wear masks.

The Boy’s face is so skinny, those blue disposable rectangles stick out far past the sides of his head.

I worry about The Boy. He’s small for his age, pale, a cream-colored face under a shock of blond hair, and then it’s just skin and bones and secondhand jeans. He doesn’t sleep well at night or pay attention during the day. He’d been living with his other grandfather, whom he calls “Pappy,” before he moved in with Grandmother.

I heard the story of how Pappy died from The Boy’s younger sister. “Pappy drank too much alcohol. He hit his head on the counter. We shut the door because we didn’t wanna go in there. They didn’t want to tell us Pappy was dead.”

The Boy’s younger sister calls COVID-19 the corona-VAH-rus. Some of the other neighbors call it “That COVID-19,” as in “Walking around without your jacket, that’s how you catch that COVID-19.”

The Baker Street Irregulars are enjoying school this year, because of that COVID-19. The schools don’t give any homework, so that textbooks don’t have to travel back and forth, possibly bringing germs with them.

Rosie often tumbles around the yard with the Baker Street Irregulars. But she didn’t like to play with The Boy for several months, because he wouldn’t stop teasing her. Grandma heard about it and gave him a stern lecture. “You know you gotta be nice to people. You don’t wanna be a bully. Remember that video about the girl who killed herself?”

The Boy behaved after that — at least, most of the time.

In my yard, Rosie and The Boy were bent over a big concrete square that must have been the floor of a shed long before I moved in. The shed is gone now, but we use the foundation for a patio. It’s a convenient way to social distance; children can stand on either side of it and be exactly six feet apart. Rosie and The Boy were using the patio as an arena for shoving Matchbox cars at one another. They dragged over an old piece of particle board so the cars would slide down it like a ramp, when they got to the end of the concrete.

When the state of Ohio closed the churches before Easter, Grandma was sad. “I just want to go to church,” she said. “I don’t care which one. I wanna be with Jesus.”

What The Boy needs more than anything in the world is normality: a stable, quiet, routine to overcome his trauma and feel safe. He needs to go to school every weekday and go to Ballet Church on Sundays. But he’s not going to get it.

That COVID-19 came to the Ohio Valley in March, when it came everywhere else. But our case numbers stayed very low. We only lost six people. Some obeyed the rules and some defied them on purpose, but few were really afraid. They laughed at the notion that six deaths from that COVID-19 and a handful of hospitalizations counted as a pandemic. Sure, there was a pandemic in faraway New York where they have skyscrapers and subway trains and tourists from foreign countries. Naturally New York had a pandemic. New York might as well be the other side of the moon from here. This is Appalachia.

Now, suddenly, it’s a real threat.

Six deaths turned into ten over the weekend. A handful of hospitalizations turned into twenty-one at once, which is an enormous number when there’s only one hospital in the county. Total active cases are growing fast, and exponential line on the graph that goes up and up and up to doomsday just like it did in New York.

People are hoarding groceries again. The governor has ordered a curfew, though nobody knows what that’s supposed to help. I’m sure they’ll close the schools before long and The Boy will have to stay at home. Some of the satellites orbiting his household will likely die. Everyone in LaBelle is going to lose someone they know.

Everything is going downhill so impossibly fast, just as it seemed to do in March. But this time it’s happening here. It’s not like months ago, when we watched people die by the hundreds in places that seemed alien. It’s going from bad to worse in LaBelle, in Steubenville, on the eastern edge of Ohio in the foothills of Appalachia.

We’ve known it would happen eventually. We’ve been watching it happen for eight months. And here it all happened, to us, so fast.

The wind whipped the leaves off the sycamore trees, and the virus came to Northern Appalachia.

Now it’s here to stay.

 

Mary Pezzulo writes the Steel Magnificat weblog for Patheos. 

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