Rachel's Blue. Zakes Mda

forgiven,” says Skye.

      He stands up to introduce himself, and they all laugh and tell him they already know who he is. After they have told him their names he says he hopes to see them at the Appalachia Active’s first ever Action Camp that will be held for the whole of next weekend at the old Stewart School. It will be a community weekend of workshops about injection wells, fracking, community organising and direct action, all aimed at helping activists from across southeastern Ohio to prepare themselves for the impending fight. He will come all the way from the Blue Ridge Mountains to facilitate some of the workshops. Jason and Schuyler say they will not be able to attend the camp, but Rachel will definitely be there. Skye is excited to hear this and promises that he will see her there.

      Jason, Schuyler and Rachel walk to Rachel’s Ford Escort, which is parked on the street just in front of the building.

      “Holy fuck, these guys take themselves so seriously,” says Jason when the three of them are seated at Donkey sipping coffee. “You ain’t gonna be chaining yourselves to no frackin’ shit, will ya?”

      Rachel says she will because she believes in the cause. Schuyler, on the other hand, would not be able to even if she wanted to. She is on probation and is still doing community service for a crime that the county prosecutor called “aggravated stupidity”. For the past few years she had a passionate affair with a married man whose promises to leave his wife and be with Schuyler for ever and ever were never fulfilled. Instead he died in a motorcycle accident. Schuyler was on the pillion when this happened.

      Schuyler was in O’Bleness Hospital when the man was cremated. After months of hospitalisation she is now in physiotherapy.

      The man’s family barred her from visiting his remains, which were kept in an urn in a columbarium at the cemetery. This embittered her because, as she told Rachel, all she wanted was to say goodbye to her lover. So one night she took a cab to the cemetery – she didn’t want to involve Rachel in the crime she was planning – and broke the glass front of the niche with a rock. She grabbed the urn and fled. Out on the road she phoned another cab to pick her up.

      The wife knew immediately that this was not an act of random vandalism. She told the police who she suspected, and indeed they found the man’s ashes in Schuyler’s bedroom, on the nightstand next to her bed. She told the officers that she stole the man’s ashes because he was hers and his wife had no business keeping them or barring her from the cemetery. She was adamant that the man loved her, not the wife, and the fact that when he died he was with Schuyler was proof enough. Therefore, she felt that she was more entitled to those ashes than the official widow. This was Schuyler’s defence at the Athens Court of Common Pleas where she was on trial for felony vandalism. She was convicted and sentenced to a two thousand, five hundred dollar fine and community service. She is still serving that sentence and if she were to be caught on the wrong side of the law again during her period of probation she would certainly go to prison. That’s why she is not prepared to take any risk chaining herself to fracking equipment even though, like her friend Rachel, she strongly believes in the cause.

      “But you was chanting ‘direct action, direct action’ major,” says Jason.

      “Yeah, I can chant it ’cause I support it, but I can’t do it,” says Schuyler.

      Both Rachel and Schuyler find Jason a pleasant guy, a gentleman in fact, despite his vocabulary which is peppered with cusswords and has regressed from the high-school-acquired register to that of the township folks who don’t have much schooling. He tells them about his carefree life in Yellow Springs, his sadness at the loss of Big Flake Thomas, and his return to old Athens County where he hopes to resuscitate the music career that was really coming along fine in Yellow Springs until the big man decided to join celestial buskers. In the meantime he is helping his father in his cheese-ageing business and he hates it. He has come to hate cheese in all its manifestations, and as soon as he finds a job he’s bailing on his father.

      What bugs him most is that his father has lately rediscovered God after a life as an agnostic hippy. He has gone back to the religion of his Michigan-Dutch ancestors – the Reformed Church in America – and has the religious fervour of a new convert that tends to annoy everyone around him. For instance, on Thanksgiving his relatives from Michigan descended like the elders of Zion on Rome Township and turned his home into a revivalist retreat.

      Rachel remembers that Genesis’ origins are traced back to Michigan. His father – Jason’s grandfather, that is – was a pipefitter and welder of Michigan-Dutch stock who came from Grand Rapids to work at the booming coal mines in Rome Township in the 1940s. In the beginning he had stood out as a foreigner because people here have close-knit families with bloodlines that are identifiable from their surnames. But he worked his way into the hearts of the community and soon his strange Michigan-Dutch surname was as native as the Appalachian soil.

      “It can’t be that bad,” says Rachel. “You’re just set in your wild Yellow Springs ways.”

      “Ain’t nothing wild about Yellow Springs. It’s a place of art and culture. Carefree ways, yes, not wild ways. Major carefree! But here I’m like a slave. I’m a grown-ass man but Pa treats me like I’m a kid still.”

      He goes along with the treatment just to please his pa and make his step-ma, whom he adores, happy. As soon as he returned from Yellow Springs they took him to Grand Rapids to be baptised into the church of his ancestors. He went along with that too; it made them happy and saved him from any nagging that was sure to come from his pa.

      He was christened Revelation, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

      “Revelation as in the Book of Revelation?” asks Schuyler, laughing.

      “From Genesis to Revelation,” says Rachel.

      “I hate that name. I am Jason, and I don’t wanna be a cheesemonger. I wanna be a music monger.”

      “Those, my friend, are the lyrics of a new song,” says Rachel.

      “You can play together,” says Schuyler. “You’ll make a great team.”

      “Holy fuck! You got it, Schuyler. Right there, you got it major. Please say yes, Rachel. I heard you play at the farmers’ market the other day. We can make something good.”

      Rachel thinks this is just talk. She doesn’t evince any enthusiasm for the suggestion. In any event, she never had plans to team up with anyone. She is a solo artist. Like her dad. Like her granddad. Okay, her granddad was not solo all the time. He had a band. The Jensen Band. But even then it was Robbie and the Jensen Band.

      “We can do it, Rachel. Me and my conga and my didj. You and your guitar. You don’t need to sing nothing. Just play the guitar. We’ll produce sounds that no one in these parts has ever heard. Think about it, man, think about it.”

      “There’s nothing to think about,” says Schuyler. “You two were meant for each other. She’s going to do it, Jason. I know she will. She’s got too much sense not to do it.”

      After an afternoon of banter and laughter Jason says he won’t need the ride home after all. He wants to go bar-hopping on Court Street. He’s going to celebrate the new partnership that he hopes will come to fruition as soon as Rachel gives a positive answer.

      “You think I don’t see what you’re up to, pushing me at this guy?” says Rachel as she drives on Route 50 taking Schuyler home.

      “For music, Rache. Only for music. Don’t you get any dirty ideas further than that.”

      They agree that Jason has become a very charming and well turned-out man, a far cry from the stinky kid they knew in high school.

      Nana Moira agrees to let Jason work at the Centre as a volunteer. This means he is not earning any wages, but will occasionally get a few dollars as gas money. It took Rachel weeks of cajoling for Nana Moira to finally go along with this arrangement. She did not want to get on the wrong side of Genesis, a man who has donated a lot to the Food Pantry, helping it not to depend solely on the supplies from the food bank in Logan.

      Jason