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  Praise for Icy Sparks

  “Rubio tells an entertaining and absorbing story…vivid and unforgettable.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Heartbreaking and absurdly funny.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “It’s always a pleasure to discover a first-time novelist who writes with depth, wit and empathy. Gwyn Hyman Rubio is such a find. Icy Sparks is a triumph of heart and humor.”

  —St. Paul Pioneer Press

  “[Rubio’s] fictional materials are affliction and persecution and out of them she fashions a legacy of joy…a significant addition to the literature of Appalachia, and the world.”

  —Louisville Courier Journal

  “Impressive…poetic…universally appealing.”

  —The Denver Post

  “A triumph of hearth and humor…Gwyn Hyman Rubio writes with depth, wit, and sympathy.”

  —Lexington Herald Leader

  “[Rubio’s] first novel is remarkable.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Rubio’s big-hearted first novel features Icy Sparks…[who] wins the love and respect of the reader. For all collections where there are tender hearts.”

  —Library Journal

  “Icy Sparks is a very touching novel that brings forth feelings of love, laughter, and sadness.”

  —Kentucky Monthly

  “Rubio displays sensitivity and promise…her use of dialect gives the story a lively authentic feel.”

  —The Raleigh News and Observer

  “Intriguing…The characterizations are so well done a reader might feel [the characters] are personal friends.”

  —Macon Telegraph

  “What a grand person Icy Sparks is! What a wonderful book her story makes! The pages of this novel almost turn themselves as the narrative glides gracefully from sorrow to sorrow, from joy to joy. Gwyn Hyman Rubio is a marvelous writer. Too grateful to envy, I admire and applaud her triumph and hope that everyone will share it with me.”

  —Fred Chappell, author of Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You

  “Icy Sparks speaks to us in an entirely new voice, painfully wise and wonderfully peculiar. In her original first novel, Gwyn Rubio makes us see that the tics and noises her remarkable heroine can’t suppress are the pure expressions of a brave and lively spirit.”

  —Francine Prose, author of Hunters and Gatherers

  “Icy Sparks is a work of imagination, about being different in a world whose difference brings separation and pain. Icy, in 1950s Appalachia, finds community with others who also don’t fit in and acquires an outlook that is wise, serious, and yet comic.”

  —Loyal Jones, author of Reshaping the Image of Appalachia

  “A most original work of fiction. Icy Sparks is an important contribution to the literature that helps us know the emotional realities of wounded people. It is also one of the few novels of the Appalachian region that goes beyond the description of external reality and places the reader in direct touch with the interior lives of its characters. Brilliant.”

  —Gurney Norman, author of Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories

  “Gwyn Hyman Rubio twists together her dark and comic visions to create a world so marvelous and strange that it takes one’s breath away. Her subject is the entanglements of order and disorder in a rural Kentucky setting of the 1950s, and she turns them upside down in a way that challenges our own definitions of where and how we live. She is an extraordinary writer.”

  —Stephen Dobyns, author of The Church of the Dead Girls

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ICY SPARKS

  Gwyn Hyman Rubio is a fiction writer whose short stories have been anthologized and published in literary magazines around the country. She is a winner of the Cecil Hackney Award as well as a recent recipient of grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She lives in Berea, Kentucky.

  Icy Sparks

  GWYN HYMAN RUBIO

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1998

  Published in Penguin Books 1999

  Copyright © Gwyn Hyman Rubio, 1998

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works: “Tune Me For Life” from God the Supreme Musician by Sri Chinmoy. By permission of Aum Publications. “Which Side Are You On?” by Florence Reece. © Copyright 1946 by Stormking Music Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Rubio, Gwyn Hyman.

  Icy Sparks / Gwyn Hyman Rubio.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0018-6

  I. Title

  PS3568.U295I25 1998

  813'.54—dc21 98–2829

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Para mi compañero, Angel

  In memory of Rachel

  O Master—Musician

  Tune me for life again.

  The awakening of new music

  My heart wants to become.

  My life is now mingled

  In ecstasy’s height.

  —SRI CHINMOY

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part II

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part III

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to the Kentucky Arts Council, The Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Virginia Center for
the Creative Arts, and The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences for their support.

  I feel fortunate to have Susan Golomb as my agent. From the very beginning, she has believed in my work and stood by me. Her relentless faith in my writing has kept me going.

  My gratitude also goes to my editor, Jane von Mehren, whose talent, intelligence, enthusiasm, and, above all, calming presence have buoyed me during these past two years. She is a woman of class and kindness.

  Thanks to Gabriel Geltzer, Jane’s assistant, for being both efficient and pleasant. I am thankful to have received excellent help from Dave Cole, my copy editor, and to have benefited from the artistic vision of Maggie Payette, the designer of my book jacket.

  I am grateful for the support I received from the Kentucky Chapter of the Tourette Syndrome Association. Through their loving actions and concern, the members of the Kentucky Chapter demonstrated their belief in the unique essence of every human being. I am most appreciative of my friends Loyal Jones and Father John Rausch for their knowledge and sound advice about Appalachia. Thanks to Isaac and Anna H. Ison for their personal collection of Appalachian expressions, A Whole ’Nother Language. I want to thank Lisa Hiner for the hymnals and her lovely rendition of “Gathering Home.” To friends far away and to those nearby, I am thankful for their optimistic reassurance along the arduous pathway to publication.

  Thanks to the M.F.A. Program at Warren Wilson College for nurturing both my spirit and my mind. A special thanks to the following teachers: Mary Elsie Robertson, for teaching me about courage; Francine Prose, for stressing the importance of humor; Joan Silber, for showing me the value of revision; Stephen Dobyns, for emphasizing the beauty of the creative process; Michael Ryan, for insisting upon concentrated effort; Charles Baxter, for offering hope.

  Were it not for Dr. Michael Roy Lyles, for his guidance and concern so many years ago, this novel would not have been written. I will always value his friendship.

  My heartfelt thanks go to my brother, Thomas Holt Hyman, for his continuous phone calls of support, and to my aunts, Mitzi Hyman and Dinah Hyman Waterman, for listening to me and encouraging me.

  And, finally, I am especially indebted to my husband, Angel Rubio, for his friendship, patience, joyful devotion, and particularly for his thoughtful advice during the writing of this book. His delight in the publication of Icy Sparks has been as great as my own. He was the first person to believe totally in my writing; his confidence in my work has remained unwavering throughout the years. My work, my struggles, and my dreams are blessed because our paths are joined.

  Icy Sparks

  PROLOGUE

  Matanni, my grandmother, said it began deep inside my mama’s womb when she was pregnant with me. Mama ate those little green crab apples that grow beside the toolshed. She ate oodles of them, popped them into her mouth like rock candy, crunched, and swallowed one right after another until not one was left to ripen on the tree. “Green apples ain’t no baby’s nourishment,” she said, “but in the beginning they was all your mama could hold down.”

  No more than a seed myself deep inside her stomach, I had to eat crab apples bigger than I was. I had to take that sour skin into my wee little stomach, grind it down, digest it, and grow. In the darkness of my mother’s belly, I ate the tart fruit, so sour on my tongue that it made my lips curl upward, so full of kick that I burped liked a bubble popping. Then, growing into a baby, I burst upon the world. The midwife slapped my bottom, and I croaked so loud that she turned around to see if the legendary bullfrog from Sweetwater Lake had hopped through the doorway. “But it was only you,” Matanni said. “Your eyes were bulging from your head, two hard round marbles. Already the blue was tinted yellow. Your skin was as cold as fresh springwater, slippery and strangely soothing to touch. When the croak sprung from your mouth, your lips were opened wide, stretched not into a yowl but an oval. The croak boomed into the room and slapped against the midwife’s cheek. She quickly turned her head, but you croaked again, and she turned back. ‘Cold as the bottom of Icy Creek,’ she said, leaning over to place you on top of my daughter’s stomach. ‘Icy,’ your mama said, stroking your bald head, and pulling up the quilt with her free hand until only the tip of your head showed. And the name, Icy, stuck,” Matanni finished, dropping her head forward till her chin dotted her chest like a period.

  Patanni, my grandfather, told me different. “The dynamite in the coal mines done it,” he said. “All his life, your daddy was nervous, hearing them veins of coal popping open. Sometimes they exploded; sometimes they just croaked; but the noise always rattled in his brain. The hour you was born, his Chevy was curving along Black Knob Mountain when the coal truck in front of him backfired, blasting rocks down the mountainside. Startled, your daddy jerked the steering wheel to the right and swerved into a covey of quail feeding in the grass. The car slammed to a stop. Wings whooshed through the air, beating plumage and blood against the windshield. Powder-down feathers, like coal dust, flew through the open window; your daddy waved his broad hands in front of his face and closed his eyes; feathers swam around him; they fell upon his hands and seeped into his skin. He leaned back against the seat, breathing heavily, listening to the rocks settle, hearing the far-off rumble of tires crunching stones. He blinked his eyes several times, closed them, then opened them slowly. A dead quail, with squashed beak and smashed wings, stared at him. Your daddy was afraid and tried to open the Chevy’s door and jump out, but his eyes were transfixed on the bird’s glare, and his limbs were locked like death. Trapped, his eyes tried to escape. They pushed against their sockets, desperate to leap out and run; but try as they might, surging and popping like buoys upon the water, they stayed in place; and your daddy was forced to stay put and behold his future—a dark emptiness foreshadowed in the bird’s dead eyes. When he caught sight of his fate, his arms began to shake violently and a bellow tore through his lips. At that very same moment, while your daddy’s howl devoured the dusk and his eyes pounded away at the darkness, you—flying from your mama’s womb—croaked loudly. In that departing light, your eyes also popped with the truth of what your daddy saw—beaked lips screeching into nothing.”

  I, Icy Sparks, can’t recollect when I was born, but I still remember my daddy—how all his life his eyes bulged forward when he talked, like a dam holding back a flood of words, corking everything inside, so afraid he was of the vacancy left behind should all his thoughts be spoken. I remember how he’d squat in front of the country store, resting on his haunches, talking so quiet that friends would lean over to hear him. The closer they came, the softer his voice grew until suddenly his eyes would protrude like two round stop signs, signaling to friends that they were too near, that he needed to be alone. He had to silence the rumble of dynamite and the thump of dead birds. He needed time to rearrange his insides and summon some quiet. Muffling a scream, he’d simply swallow and create a new thought. Then, another shy sentence would leak through his lips.

  My legacy was come to rightly. The good Lord charters a path for each child, and no use comes from fighting against it. My mama died from kidney poison two weeks after she birthed me. From those little green crab apples, she created Icy, the frog child from Icy Creek, and an indigestion so troubled that it gnawed away her system and turned her water as yellow as my eyes. Matanni told me that before she died her urine was the color of acorn squash. “Child, them eyes of yours is her gift to you,” Matanni said. “Your mama saw the golden light and sent it back to you. The minute your sweet mama passed into heaven, your eyes turned yellow.”

  With his eyes popped wide, my daddy died; but, unlike Mama, he didn’t see the golden light, just the final scream descending. Patanni found him near Icy Creek. The tin bucket was overturned, its handle clutched in his left hand, the blackberries scattered the length of his leg, his skin puffed up from the stings. The bees so consumed with rage had plunged through his leather boots and bitten the tops of his feet, or so the coroner said. Even so, I remember only his eyes—iced surprise
and anticipated horror, saying more to a four-year-old than those thousand pinpricks that covered his body.

  I was born a frog child from Icy Creek. From my father, I inherited the fear that resided in his coal-black eyes, and from this fear I’ve gained wisdom. Fear placed books in my hands and led me to search for the answers. From my mama, I received lush hair, the color of goldenrod, and yellow ocher eyes. My mama gifted me with memory. Ask me to read the Book of Job. Afterward, I’ll recite it back to you word for word. From my mama, I grew to see the world through hope-filled eyes. Though hope did not come easy.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  On June tenth, I turned ten. The Saturday after my birthday, the eye blinking and popping began. We were eating breakfast. Matanni was sitting across from me; Patanni was at the head of the table. To this day, I can remember my first urge—so intense it was, like an itch needing to be scratched. I could feel little invisible rubber bands fastened to my eyelids, pulled tight through my brain, and attached to the back of my head. Every few seconds, a crank behind my skull turned slowly. With each turn, the rubber bands yanked harder, and the space inside my head grew smaller. My grandmother was studying me, making sure my face had been washed, my hair combed and fastened on each side with the blue barrettes she had bought me for my birthday. While Matanni studied me, I stared straight ahead and glued my eyes, growing tighter with each second, on the brown fuzz above her lip.