Sissy once emerged from Dry Creek with a bleeding head because he threw her in the wrong direction, right into the part that had a rock bottom. She probably needed a few stitches but she didn’t get any. Daddy just doctored her up with a liberal dousing of merthiolate. He thought merthiolate could heal just about anything so he’d always try it first before any other treatment. We spent our childhoods with pink streaks on our arms, legs, or any body part that could get bitten, scratched, or knocked open, and Lord, did it burn when he’d put it on us. He’d probably have made us drink it if it weren’t downright poisonous and loaded with mercury. It’s been banned by the FDA for nearly twenty years now.
Dry Creek separated two parts of the pasture, and if the water was low enough—and it usually was, hence its name—we’d cross it in the truck. Sometimes there’d be washed-out places we’d have to dodge, and sometimes we’d get stuck and Daddy would have to go get the tractor to pull us to the other side.
The tractor stayed at the barn, which was about a mile away from the spot where we crossed the creek. But Daddy would walk to it and drive it back to rescue his truck. If Mama wasn’t with us he’d put Sissy behind the wheel to steer as he towed us across with a chain he’d hook onto the front bumper, the other end hooked to the tractor. Then we’d follow him back to the barn so he could return the tractor to its proper place. He believed in putting things back like you found them. But only things.
One Saturday afternoon we were driving through the pasture, headed home after being out in the woods all day. When we drove by a little swamp that we’d passed probably a thousand times in my life alone, Daddy saw an alligator camped out on the edge of it, sunning itself. Daddy stopped the truck, grabbed his rifle, and shot the gator right in the head. When the bullet struck, the gator headed for the water. Daddy, never one to waste an ounce of meat or an inch of hide, ran to the swamp and jumped in on top of the reptile, wrenching its neck back, Tarzan style. He strangled the last breath out of the long, mossy-colored creature and dragged it to the truck. He beamed as he announced we’d be eating alligator tail for supper that night.
Always latch the gate
Summer night. Sissy and I played in the pasture. Tromping through the grass, finding the familiar trails that led to the barn, crib, and back to the little house. A livestock holding pen was attached to its left side if you faced it. Darkness didn’t fall until eight or so, but when it did, it was time to head in for supper. The sky gave up its light.
We went around the back of the little house and through the pen. I hurried to get inside to catch Dukes of Hazzard or something. I neglected to lock the gate behind me. The latching system was a length of chain that wrapped around the gate and hooked onto a nail on the other side of the fence. It wasn’t easy to fasten with little fingers. I made a feeble attempt but in my child’s haste didn’t do it right and ran to the house.
We ate supper and were getting ready for bed. The phone rang. Someone from down the hill was calling to let Daddy know some of his cows had gotten out and were on the road and in their yard. How folks can tell someone’s cows from another’s is beyond me, unless they’re acquainted with the numbers on the ear tags. Just because you’re country doesn’t mean you’re dim-witted.
Daddy hung up the phone in a hurry. He hooked the trailer up to his truck and drove down the road to round up his herd. I always wondered how cows know when a gate is open. They don’t seem that smart, but they always know. He got them back in the pasture. He then came inside, wanting to know who hadn’t locked the gate.
Sissy didn’t take the fall that time. I fearfully admitted that I was the offender. He marched me out to the gate in my pajamas and made me latch it correctly twenty-five times. He made me count each repetition as I struggled with the chain and the nail. He counted along with me.
“One, two, three, four…” he said in his low, resonant voice. He was surprisingly gentle through his anger. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. I never leave a gate, cabinet, drawer, or subject open to this day.
He’d probably say, “That’s my girl.”
WE LIVED SIMPLY, DESPITE THE MADNESS THAT SWIRLED around our family. Had it not been for that simplicity and our grandparents I’m not sure we would’ve had much grounding. That’s not to say that our parents didn’t teach us right from wrong or valuable lessons to carry into our adult lives—Sissy and I both ended up with a strong sense of decency in most things, but some of that was passed down through others.
I used to get a black mark under my right thumbnail from shelling so many peas at Mammy and Dandy’s. We’d sit at Mammy’s feet in the den in the deepest part of summertime, air conditioner humming when it got above eighty-five degrees. Mammy would only turn it on when the weather got too hot and humid to bear—she said she hated the sound. Ceramic washtubs would be set on the floor for the shelled peas, and five-gallon buckets full of the ones Dandy would’ve brought in from the pasture garden that morning held the work to be done. The purple hulls were my favorites. I’d run my hands through the shelled ones, taken by their waxy surfaces—green with what looked like little bruised places for eyes—and the way they sounded when I’d pick up a handful and slowly let them fall back into the washtub—like a hard, faraway rain.
I long for that way of life, so distant from the one I now have. The idea of growing a garden and eating what would come out of it appeals to me now more and more as I grow older. Everyone we knew when we were growing up had a garden. We did too, right by the fence that separated the side yard from the pasture where the pond was. I’m not pleased when I think of all of that artful and practical knowledge dying with my parents. I’ve grown a tomato plant or two in a bucket and Sissy has done the same, but we don’t need to feed anything with the bounty but our spirits. We don’t really ever plant ourselves when it gets right down to it, not exactly preferring peripatetic lives but finding no reason not to live them. I wonder where we’ll eventually land, if we’ll ever make any place permanent.
Home is not a place, is it? I’ve read that sentence over and over in book after book.
Frankville was home to us, and it was for a long time. It isn’t now. The few times I’ve been back since I left Alabama for good have felt like being in a dream where that so-specific, so-utterly-warped atmosphere takes over my body. What causes that feeling? Is it only my memories that make that place feel like I see snakes in my peripheral vision? Is it my questions about what happened there? Is it just trauma? Our story is made up of memories just like the story of every family. Some are good, some are bad. Some make me break out in a sweat and my head spin even today, even though they have all of these years on them.
I believe it was a Saturday afternoon. I was four. Sissy, who would’ve been seven or eight, was leading me around on Betsy, our horse. She led me under the gooseneck of the livestock trailer that sat just outside the fence that separated the barnyard from the yard of the house, not thinking about the electrical wire that hung down just a little bit below it. It caught me under my chin and jerked me out of the saddle. I hit the ground with a thud. Mama and Daddy both came running when I fell. Mama tended to me and Daddy tended to Sissy. I think that was the first time he hit her in the face. She was so little. She couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds.
Writing that down makes me feel like someone has placed an anvil on my chest. There is nothing that can make me feel better or less guilty or shamed as I see the words about him hitting her staring back at me. The first time he hit her in the face. There were other times. I can’t find a pleasantry or platitude to say to myself that doesn’t make me want to claw my own face off. I just hurt, on the inside and even out. There’s something metallic and cold underneath my skin.
It happened forty years ago. It hurts me in some ways more now than it did then, now that I know what a thing like that can mean to a life beyond what it does when it’s happening. Now that I know what a thing like that has meant to my sissy.
The question of inheritance.
Did he expect adult sagacity from children? Why am I asking that question? Of course he did. I know it and she knows it. Why do I use such an expensive word as sagacity? I do it because I think it would’ve impressed him. Because I think it would’ve distracted him. Because I think it might have kept him from hitting her. Damnit, I’m still trying to make it right. I try to earn his approval even now and he’s been dead for thirty years. That sort of blows my mind. It makes exactly no sense and perfect sense all at the same time.
I read somewhere that one of the best things a person can do is to “give up hope for a better past.” Here I sit, trying to work it all out, not giving up that hope at all, trying to find proof that we weren’t and aren’t ruined by it all. The only proof I have of that is who we ended up being. We are okay, but we are not unbroken. The verdict, however, is still out.
Daddy was just over six feet tall. His legs were long and he walked fast. I remember trying desperately to keep up with him when he’d take us with him out to the pasture or somewhere. He always seemed to have something on his mind. I was always careful about what I said around him. I never wanted to bother him and risk him directing his anger at me. The repercussions for that felt like being sliced open by the edge of a saw palmetto leaf.
It is recommended to wear protection when around the saw palmetto. The indigenous name for the saw palmetto in Alabama is taalachoba. Daddy was one-eighth Choctaw. Dandy was one-fourth. Dandy’s mother, Mama Cora—Cora Meiden Moorer—was one-half. I’ve always been proud of my Native American blood, but I’ve come to understand that Mama Cora’s was something no one in the family liked to discuss. Even so, Katharine told me that Mama Cora always knew which root to dig up and make a tincture from should someone fall ill. I don’t like to think about anyone believing it’s better to deny any part of who you are so that you can pass more easily in the world if you do. I just don’t agree with that idea. But I suppose it was even less safe to offer a full disclosure then than it is now. But does our blood make us who we are?
I am one-half Vernon Franklin Moorer. I am one-half Laura Lynn Smith Moorer. They say that girls inherit an equal amount of genetic information from each parent because they get X chromosomes from both, while a boy gets only one X and the Y has less genetic information. Who really cares outside of the laboratory? I only know that I am them but I am not them. I am Allison Moorer. So what keeps me from being only the halves of them? What makes the whole? What is in the hole in between the two halves? Pure genetics can’t explain who we end up being. What we see through windows and how fast we have to walk to keep up is surely just as important as the X and the Y. And maybe more important. The part that holds the two halves together must be what determines whether we go one way or the other. What our work ethics are. How much we care about making the bed in the mornings. Whether we become artists or bankers. What kind of parents we are. Whether we turn the lights on in the house before dusk settles so we can—with any hope—keep the bel hevi that threatens to blossom in our stomachs at bay. Whether we can sustain a relationship or not and whether we can be faithful in one.
I see it as a crack between the two halves, but a crack that holds something. Something that sprouts an entirely unique being. It is not weightless. It holds mass that varies in heft depending on the day and what you need to apply it to. It must be ever-mysterious God. Some sort of familial Higgs boson. What else makes a person’s sense of self? The new part holding the other two parts together? The new part that is created by how we deal with what we see through windows and how fast we have to walk to keep up? The new part that saves me from feeling like the face looks in Edvard Munch’s The Night Wanderer all the time. If it weren’t for my new part, the part that is just me, how could I not have re-created exactly the misery that my parents lived in? It’s hard enough not to with just the parts of them I have in me. I have unwillingly done my version of what they did too many times now. I want to lean more on the new part, the part that is not them, and let their parts wither and die if I have to.
I admit we put too much responsibility on our parents for our ills. After all, we alone are accountable for who we end up being. Nevertheless, what sticks, sticks. And it can’t be unstuck. It can be jostled, talked to death, pried away, and maybe covered up for a while, but what sticks is always in us. Home is who you are. And someone has to show you where you lie on the map.
Easy in the Summertime
July 1981. Alabama summer sun. Sissy got her fishing pole. Went down to the honey hole. Greasy fire-y frying pan. Viola grabbed it with her hand. Burned so bad her skin it peeled. There I saw the truth revealed.
Watermelon tastes so good. Bare feet on the cool hardwood. Summer dresses Nanny made. Cut-off blue jeans torn and frayed. Swinging on the barnyard gate. It don’t get dark till after eight. Run inside a kiss and hug. Wrapped up in my mama’s love.
Firefly whispered in my ear. She said let’s get out of here. Fly down to the creek with me. There’s something you gotta see. The stars come out and glow so bright. That’s why I don’t mess with morning light. They’re the ones that soothe my soul. They make me want to rock and roll.
Easy in the summertime. Easy in the summertime.
Easy in the summertime.
MAMA HIRED VIOLA DONALDSON TO LOOK AFTER US the summer between my second- and third-grade year of school. Viola lived down the road a piece but not far. She’d arrive every morning just before Mama left for work. She mostly spent the days in the living room watching her stories on television, but somehow kept a pretty keen eye on us.
Sissy went down to the pond one morning and caught a few fish. God, it was hot outside. She cleaned her catch in the sink at the back of Daddy’s workshop like he’d taught her to do—scaled them, cut off their heads, sliced them down their middles and gutted them, then rinsed them clean. She then came into the house with them and asked Viola if she could fry them for lunch. Viola told her she could. Mama had taught Sissy how to make the perfect mixture of cornmeal, flour, and salt and pepper for the batter. In the big iron skillet, she heated a dollop of Crisco from the can that sat beside the stove, but it got too hot and caught on fire. I was watching, and ran into the living room to tell Viola there was trouble in the kitchen. She pushed herself up off the sofa and did her version of running in to see what was happening.
To our horror, she grabbed the burning skillet with her bare hand, opened the kitchen door, and threw it into the yard, luckily not hitting a dog or cat. The house likely would’ve caught on fire if she hadn’t done what she did. There was a charred spot where the skillet landed in the yard.
Viola’s hand was badly burned. Sissy called Mama at work to tell her what happened and that she better come home. She did. Viola didn’t return to work for a couple of days but when she did she had a huge bandage on her burned hand. A few weeks later the bandage was removed and the skin on her hand had started to peel off. It was pink where the brown had sloughed away. Sissy and I hadn’t understood until then.
I didn’t understand a lot of things.
I was around seven years old when I decided to go talk to Daddy about something I didn’t understand that was weighing particularly heavy on my mind. It was rare for him to be home on a weekend night, and even though it was out of character for me to speak up about anything, I decided not to waste the opportunity of having him around. I wanted an answer. I screwed up my courage, walked out into the damp night, and crossed the yard between the house and his workshop. I can still hear the crickets and feel the damp grass underneath my bare feet.
There was no knob on the door to his shop, only a hole where one had once been, through which Daddy had put a heavy chain. I stuck my finger in the hole around the chain and pulled the door toward myself to open it. I stepped inside. Daddy was sitting at his homemade workbench. I quickly scanned the room and made note of the ever-present avocado-green insulated tumbler with the white rim that held his beloved mixture of Jim Beam and water sitting there next to him. I don’t remember what h
e was doing or working on. I may not have noticed then, for my mind was on other matters. He might’ve just been tinkering with something, or he might’ve been lost in his own thoughts as he was prone to be. I interrupted him. I was so nervous at the thought of speaking that I couldn’t quite look at his face, so my eyes settled on the drawings he’d had Sissy and me make on the particleboard wall I was standing in front of. I breathed in a good, deep breath and then spit out my question.
“Daddy, I counted, and it’s been seven Sundays since we went to church. Don’t you think we ought to go in the morning?”
He looked straight down at me from the stool where he was sitting, let quite a pause develop, then with an expression that was a mixture of surprise, contempt, and maybe a little admiration, answered me.
“Too much church is bad for you.”
“Okay.”
So I turned on my heel and walked out of the workshop, back across the wet grass of the side yard, and back through the kitchen door to the house, resigned that it didn’t look like we’d be going to church the next morning. I didn’t stop to look up at the starry sky.
I was troubled and worried, and not only about my own unredeemed soul. Wasn’t church a good thing? Mama said it was. Nanny and PawPaw and Mammy and Dandy said it was. Upon reporting the brief conversation I’d had with Daddy to Mama and Sissy, Mama suggested that the next morning we get dressed for church, get out our Bibles, and have our own service and Bible study right there in the living room. We did no such thing. I don’t know if she forgot by the next morning, was too depressed to actually do what she said we should, or what, but follow-through was not her strong suit. Especially when it came to dealing with Daddy.
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