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Fatama, Alabama, June 2044
Working on fence posts was my grandfather's work, my father's work for some time, until the winds and sand came in from the coast, and the sky opened up a wound over southern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, a blinding eye swirling, burning until everything in the Deep South became too dry. No crops would take, and then my father became a clay miner who told me, "Clay rocks are good for nothing but the money. And there's not much of that, Mathew, except for the government, what they're willing to give to keep us here." But money or no money, my father would have stayed and died just as he did.
When I think of him, I see him standing, the stance of an old dancer, his chubby hands positioned as if ready to go into step--one, two, swirl and swirl. My Uncle Wayne called him a graceful pig because my father was not so tall, though he learned the routines perfect. When I think of him, he spins me across a field he's talked about--green with a ceiling of blue and thick-shouldered clouds I've never known. All I've held is this desert Alabama wasteland. My father takes me round and round, lets me go, lets me fly.
Working on fence posts was my grandfather's work. He put up fences for anybody in Coffee County and counties around. "Ten dollars for every six feet of post," my father told me, some still hanging on, the barbed wire torn and twisted on itself, snapping in the wind like lion tamer whips that come howling. It was my father's work, my uncle's work for some time.
But then the earth turned crazy, and the ozone opened up like a wound, giving the sun permission to burn off every field, devour even the trees--oaks, swamp cypress, and pines that had survived for years with roots clear to the ocean, down to the red-hot core-the sun scorched out that preserved life, splintered branches and trunks into bone, "And it was finished," my father said. "Every town in a panic after years of drought and heat, the government saying to stay calm. The earth let go of itself. The wind pushed the black grit on top of us and pushed, and when it stopped, people fled to Birmingham, Atlanta, and further north--" The Saved World, we call it, too crowded even before we arrived, so the government sent in the national guard to keep us back. What followed--heavy rains in winter, parching droughts in summer. Nothing will germinate, will take root, all of our food brought in from the Saved World so we won't starve.
A string of checkpoints now stands north of the desert, just south of Birmingham and Atlanta, stretching to the Mississippi. This is a marshaled land, a separate land, disappearing as quick as my father's dance steps in the kitchen. But with enough money you can purchase a visa, emigrate, ask for asylum at least and hope the government will grant it. We just choose to stay, they tell us--our community of miners pocketed along the rivers, our existence a contradiction of mud and snakish water engulfed in all this blowing sand. I work the Tensaw and Alabama and Coosa like my father, my uncle. River people, river trash, clay miners, no one's people. We start in Mobile after the spring floods and chase the dwindling channels north, pumping water to the sites where we dig and dig for clay rocks, "For nothing," my father assured me.
There is other mining in the Deep South--mining for real things like limestone and kaolin, granite, coal--what the Saved World can't afford to lose. But us, we dig to keep ourselves here, to keep busy until death, living in a time warp of old things--trucks from the turn of the century; fire hoses bursting along the skin; scratched-up tools, clothes, and dishware that have already seen one...
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