Dreams
A recurring one during the first few years after they died took place at the old house in Frankville—the palmetto bushes had overgrown and the stoop to the kitchen had been knocked down. There was no door there anymore. I was outside and could hear Mama hollering, crying for help. I panicked as I tried to figure out how to get to her. I finally pulled myself up into the stoop-less doorway with no door and took a left, through the empty dining room then through the empty living room and into the front room or music room as we called it—it was where we kept the stereo and records and piano—the piano was still there. I found her on the floor. Both of her arms had been cut off at the elbows and blood was everywhere. She flailed her arms like she was trying to stop it with her phantom hands. I crouched down and wrapped myself around her with nothing to use for a tourniquet and cradled her while she bled out and died in my arms, her skin the color of a pale gray cloud.
I would wake up nearly howling, my face wet, when it invaded my sleep, but my bedroom at Jane and Jim’s house was in the basement so no one heard me. I stopped having the dream by the time I graduated high school, but I’ve never forgotten the images it burned into my mind.
I dreamt about Daddy once about a year after they were gone. That dream took place in Frankville too, but only outside of the house. I rode up the driveway on the maroon Western Flyer bicycle with the banana seat I got for Christmas in second grade and saw him sitting on the fence between the yard and the pasture where the barn was. He was barefoot. My cousin Meme was there, but only in my peripheral vision. She watched from the kitchen door, stoop intact. The yard looked as beautiful as I’d ever seen it, manicured and shrubs pruned. My foot slipped off the pedal as I rode up and saw him sitting there on the fence, and when it did I got off of my bicycle and pushed it the rest of the way. I leaned it against the fencepost nearest him. His hands were folded together. He looked at me with his icy blue eyes and told me he was sorry he hadn’t been a better provider, that his earning capacity had been greater but that he hadn’t lived up to his potential. I told him it was okay. He asked me how Meme was doing, nodding his head toward her as she watched from the kitchen stoop, and I said she was doing okay. I tried to take his hand but he wouldn’t let me, and instead swung his legs around and hopped off the fence on the other side. He turned to look at me, then turned away and started walking toward the woods where the two deer he shot from the same kitchen stoop stood that cold morning during Christmas of 1983. I didn’t try to stop him. I let him go, even though he wore no shoes.
How much does fear weigh
As much as the pocketknife Daddy carried or a pair of Mama’s high-heeled shoes? As much as the whistles that escaped Daddy’s lips as he walked through the haygrass? What about the big, black tears that slid down Mama’s cheeks that morning the first time I remember seeing her cry? Or the yellow roses that covered her old-lady dusty blue casket?
Does it weigh more than mercy? More than a wish? More than time? More than a .30-06 cartridge?
If it weren’t at least a little bit heavy it would slip away or float through the air and out the window, wouldn’t it? It doesn’t. It sits here beside me, its pointy chin on my shoulder, and whispers unspeakable words into my ear. Shame stands beside it and goads, “Keep going, she’s going to give in.” They are partners, fear and shame, entwined to make a black, jagged-edged mass of dreadfulness. I won’t look at them. But they won’t go away, and finally turn their voices soothing when I stop fighting back. They say, “There, there, dear girl, we knew you’d come around.” They mop my brow and smooth my hair as I lie down and curl into a ball.
NOSTALGIA. SENTIMENTALITY. SOMETIMES A SHADE OF both will slip in and fog the windowpane through which I look at the past. But I feel a responsibility now to keep it as clear as I can, to see it as it really was and as it still flows through me.
There is good to see, lessons learned and wisdom imparted that I’m thankful to have received.
I think about growing old. I think about never being young. I have been younger as an adult than I was ever allowed to be as a child, maybe because I finally caught up with the notion that lurked in my brain in those early years—the notion of having to have my own back—and became comfortable with it.
I think about wanting to change my legacy. I can’t repair the broken days that set me up to be afraid of life, so afraid that I felt like I had to attack it back at every turn so that it wouldn’t just happen to me anymore, so that I might have some say. But maybe I can start to see it as something kinder than I was shown. That’s my task now, to unlearn, to let down the walls, to reject the fear so that I don’t pass it on. Dear God, please don’t let me pass it on.
The Third Cartridge
New evidence, a new thread to connect to the others. Does it even matter?
Of course it matters. I don’t, however, know how to shimmy it into the story. I have to let it stay where it is—on the ground and in the laboratory report. I only heard two shots that morning. Why there was a third cartridge found is beyond me. What good would it do to know what it means anyway?
I wrote to a forensic firearms specialist at a criminal college in Manhattan, and after giving some details through email, stopped receiving responses to my questions. I’ve asked investigative journalist friends—“Do you know anyone who might read these reports and conjecture?”—they seem to want to protect me from myself. I don’t know if I want to be protected or not—I’ve not exactly exhausted the possibilities—but I do keep hitting dead ends. So maybe I should pay attention to that, to what the signs say. They say to stop, I think. Maybe there’s nothing to know. Maybe there is something, but what would it help? It might help me understand Daddy’s state of mind—was it all deliberate or was it not, did he plan it all out or did he just snap?
I’m not going to hate him even if it was deliberate. It’s not going to hurt less if it wasn’t. I’m going to leave it alone, let it rest there on the ground, let it remain an unfamiliar detail in that laboratory report. It’s not as if the presence of a third cartridge is the only unknown in this story.
Marble statue of a wounded Amazon
On the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, there is a Roman statue, a copy of a Greek statue from somewhere between 450 and 425 bc. Her left breast is exposed. Her right one is partially covered and there is a wound just below it. Her left arm, cut off between the wrist and the elbow, rests on a column.
I look at the statue and think of Mama.
There is a large defect noted in the chest.
I remember my recurring dream, in which she dies from having her arms cut off.
Had Mama been an Amazon, would she have ended up dead in her front yard? She was only a warrior because she had to be, but if she’d lived in a different time and place she might’ve had a different life.
I don’t suppose there’s any reason to wish she’d had a different life, but I don’t always consider reason.
CAN I GIVE UP HOPE FOR A BETTER PAST? I ASK MYSELF IF that’s what I’m doing—if I really do want to change what happened to us. That’s an unanswerable question. I want my parents to not have died the way they did. I want them to have had longer, happier lives. I want less trauma and instability for my sister and myself so that it doesn’t carry over into our adult lives in such a debilitating way. But take even one small part of anything away and the whole thing changes. I can wish for this or that at any given moment, but I also have to find some sort of comfort in the idea that everything is as it is supposed to be. I look to my left as I write this, at the row of books on Buddhism—the ones that tell me nonattachment is the path to enlightenment, to freedom, to inner peace and happiness, that love is not love if it clings. I try to let go of my wishes. I can’t write this the way that I wish it had been.
I hear stories about people who have parents and listen to them like a child listens to a fairy tale they’re hearing for the first time, awed and full of wonder. I hear about scenarios such as
parents moving to the same town as their children so they can be closer to the grandkids, so they can help out and be involved. I watch my friends and H. with fascination as they talk about what their folks are up to, how they annoy them, how they love them. I try not to cry when H. speaks to his folks on the phone, and cover up my longing for just one conversation like he’s having. I am jealous and I am sad. I am lonely.
Last winter, H. and I went to New Orleans to celebrate his fortieth birthday. We were to follow that trip with one to a songwriters festival in Florida. We had a few days to kill in between the two, so we drove to Alabama, first heading to Baldwin County so he could meet Jane and Nanny and my cousins. They are nice and warm people, and he is a nice and warm person. We had a nice and warm evening. We went from Jane’s house to Alice Frederick’s. I worked for Alice when I was in college—she is a psychotherapist and is still practicing, now in her eighties—I even lived with her for a time. She taught me at least half of the good things that I know, and we have a familial sense of each other. She met Daddy a few times when he worked as a juvenile probation officer and she worked at a Mobile-area treatment center. She, like so many people, knew a different man than I did and in fact has called him brilliant. I ask her to remember every detail about him every time I see her. She plays the game with me.
The following day we drove north to Frankville. Highway 65 led to four-lane roads, then to the two-lane roads that snake through Washington County, a place that looks like time and everything else left it behind. It is grown over, even more than it was when I was a little girl. We passed all the spots that used to serve as landmarks in each day’s drive to either Jackson or Chatom—the fork in the road at Leroy High School, St. Stephens, Rattlesnake Fork, the four-way stop at Bigbee where you take a right toward Frankville. Mack Schultz’s store on the left, the bridge where Daddy’s cousin Worthy ran us off the road, the school where Daddy went to elementary and where we sang in the fiddlers’ conventions on the right, Earl Johnson’s store on the left almost directly across from it. Frankville Baptist Church is just down from there in the bend in the road after you pass Mr. Earl and Sue Bell’s and Leon and Billie Nell’s houses on the left. Everything whooshes by in my mind as I remember the road now. It stops when I think of pulling over to look at the graves at the cemetery beside the church. Dandy, Mammy, Daddy, Mama Fannie, Mama Cora, the three babies Mama Cora lost, Kervin, Napoleon, all of them still there.
H. wanted to see where I grew up. I’m not sure I’d have ever gone to Frankville again without being nudged by someone who can nudge me. He wants to know me better, to understand me better, and I know that I can be hard to know and explain. Sometimes it’s easier to show than tell.
After we looked at the graves at the church, we got back in the car and headed toward the old place. I pointed out each house on the way and talked about who had lived in it and how they were related to me or not. My heart rate rose. I had feigned indifference about driving up there but H. knows as well as I do that indifferent is the last thing I am about Frankville, Alabama. He seems to know things about me that I’m not sure I even know about myself. He sees brutal and stubborn parts of me that I prefer to turn away from but he somehow—and I don’t quite understand this—leaves some space for me to reveal them, then gently acknowledges what I’ve done when I crack myself open. He doesn’t act surprised to see what I show him. Is it grace in motion when a person takes hardness in their hands and turns it soft? I can’t think of a better word for it. Sometimes I am taken aback by it, but most of all I am humbled to have it extended to me. I look at him and think, “I love you. Don’t die. Don’t let me get scared and run away from you.”
We stopped in Mammy and Dandy’s driveway so I could show him their house. I hadn’t told anyone we were driving to Frankville and I have no keys to anything since I let go of the property that I inherited from Dandy and Daddy. It was too painful to keep it. I felt heavy as we sat there and looked at the front porch of the white wooden cottage where Mammy used to water her ferns, as I noticed the clothesline where she used to hang the laundry and the rockpile Dandy would throw buckets of scraps, corn husks, and pea hulls over. I miss them.
After a minute we drove up to our old house. I stopped at the bottom of the driveway and parked the car, not knowing if it was too washed out at the top to make it up or not. We got out and walked up the hill and stepped over the fence with the No Trespassing sign on it. I couldn’t quite look at the house yet so I headed to the right, to the barn, after my eyes first settled on the spot where the livestock trailer used to stay parked, the spot where Sissy led me on Betsy and the electrical wire caught me under the chin, the spot where Daddy first hit Sissy in the face.
The gate to the barn is gone. I stopped and looked into the crib through the spaces between the rough-hewn logs. It’s full of old furniture and castoffs, our old yellow high chair included, which for some reason sent a shiver through me when it caught my eye. I spotted Daddy’s shoeshine box sitting on a table. He made it with a slanted handle for putting his foot on and stained it dark brown with a hefty coat or two of varnish. I wanted to grab it, to clean it up and take it back with me to New York City, but I didn’t. H. said he’d go in and get it for me but I decided it was best to leave it and let it continue to be covered with more dirt, dust, and years. What do I need a shoeshine box for?
We walked through the barn. I felt ghosts everywhere. I talked about this sick calf that we nursed and that pet goat that died after she had babies and pointed out the loft that Sissy and I used to climb up to and then jump out of. I’d always flap my arms on the way down hoping I could fly.
I’d avoided the house when we walked up but headed toward it after we were finished at the barn. There isn’t a driveway anymore, just sandy gravel and grass where Mama used to park her car and where I first tried to drive. The patio is still there, the monkey grass she planted around it is still there, the palmettos are still there. Everything is wild. The kitchen stoop is gone.
I stood on the stump that Daddy put by the front door to use as a step and looked into the living room and to the left into the music room. Everything in there was mostly the same as it had always been. I stepped down from the stump, walked across the side yard, and looked into the hole in the door of Daddy’s workshop. It still has a chain through it to keep it closed, but there’s a padlock on it now. Daddy never locked it. Not a bit of daylight was streaming through it, as it has no windows. It was dark as pitch. I wondered if the drawings he’d had us make on the particleboard walls were still there or if they’d faded away.
I turned around and looked up at the kitchen window where the lamp went flying that night we went to choir practice. I stepped on the ground where Daddy kicked Mama in the leg that Saturday afternoon and where I’d practiced so many cheers, cartwheels, and jumps while Mama watched from the window. I walked over the spot where Daddy helped Sissy set up a target to practice shooting her bow and arrow. We walked around to the side of the house and looked at the porch where he used to sit, sipping his whiskey out of the avocado-green insulated tumbler with the white rim or his Budweiser from a can. I pictured him there and remembered him calling me to come look at the heat lightning with him. “Natural fireworks,” he’d say. H. and I then walked down through the pasture to the pond where Sissy and I caught so many delicious little bream. It’s surprisingly not dried up. I told H. about catching a fish on a peanut once and how we’d mostly use Roman Meal bread from the loaf Mama kept in the kitchen for bait. The pond was as still as it ever was. We turned around and made our way out of the pasture back toward the house. The sky was the color of my eyes, my sister’s eyes, my mama’s and daddy’s eyes. H. said it was a beautiful place. I agreed and added that it had also been the saddest, ghastliest, wickedest place on earth.
There are still some buttercups growing in the front yard. H. picked some and handed them to me. He told me it didn’t seem so bad. I again agreed and said, no, it wasn’t all bad and tried not to cry. I don’t kno
w why. We walked down the driveway, got in the rental car, and headed to Florida. The roads were worse than I remembered. I decided to call my sister and that’s when she said the thing about wishing she’d have a heart attack.
“You okay, Sissy? You sound a little heavy.”
I told her we’d been to Frankville.
“Yeah, well, that’ll do it. I moved twenty-six boxes of two-inch tape today and I’m exhausted. I’ve diagnosed myself with something called chronic trauma fatigue. Sometimes I just wish I’d die of a heart attack.”
I hated Daddy for putting that torment in her. But who said that children are entitled to an insulated and happy experience, that they are never supposed to know fear, worry, or even depression? We don’t like to think about such, but such is all around us and, in truth, exists much more plentifully than the opposite. To accept that most of us grow up without what we’re told we’re supposed to have would upset the balance of denial that keeps us trying and forgiving. To accept the idea that parents—the people whom we have no choice but to trust—will disappoint us, betray us, and leave us wanting is too much. To accept the certainty of fallibility removes the hope that someone, sometime, will parent perfectly. No one has ever nor will ever do it perfectly.
No, ours was not an easy upbringing. But I am also not unthankful for it, just the way it was. It’s complicated. I can unravel the sweater and say, “I’d like to take these valuable things and leave those things that made me crazier than hell,” but why? To do that discredits the experience as a whole. You can’t cherry-pick relationships. Plus, my crazy-as-hell might be someone else’s favorite thing.
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