by Bobi Conn
You think that’s funny? You want to walk around looking like a little slut? Don’t you ever laugh at me again.
The smile stole from my face as I began to learn that if I felt pretty or stylish, something was wrong. That if I wanted to look cute—like everyone else always seemed to look with their nice clothes and nice hair and nice smiles—shame would follow.
I walked down to my granny’s house—it was always down, since we were closer to the head of the holler—knowing that what I was about to do was wrong, maybe even a sin, though it was not specifically mentioned in the Bible, as far as I knew. I walked without seeing the blackberry brambles I searched through at other times, when I was on my way to ask Granny for some eggs, onions, or tomatoes. I didn’t see the creek I spent countless hours poring through, catching crawdads whose pincers I feared, watching always for copperheads that might be aroused by my presence, ready to strike.
When I walked through the kitchen door, she looked up and asked right away what was wrong. I burst into tears and told her that I was supposed to tell her she was a whore, knowing I was taking a risk by not actually calling her that name but hoping it was close enough. Granny wrapped her arms around me, telling me everything was going to be all right and not to worry. Through my hot tears, I told her I was so sorry, and she pulled me to her and shushed my cries. I was relieved that there was no anger on her face, grateful that she knew this wasn’t my idea.
I wonder now how she sorted through that heartache, the grieving for her broken granddaughter, for her broken son, for her own fractured dream of family and answered prayers. Maybe she saw God’s will at work, some infallible plan that played out while I wept. Did she have faith that this, too, had its divine purpose and that obedient children would inherit the earth some fine day? She had faith, to be sure. But that’s not what I saw on her face that day.
Before long, that same look would cross my own face more than once, as tragedies piled onto one another and I slowly came to realize I could not change that grim reality. I grew familiar with a feeling of dread that was nearly eclipsed by weariness. A heartache that could no longer cry out. But before I ever felt the same pain that Granny must have felt that day, I knew that she ached for me and for what was unfolding. I knew that this hurt her, too, and that we grieved together.
In that moment, perhaps like me, she wondered what else would be lost that day, what punishment would come for us all. Maybe she feared my father and what had come from her birthing bed. Maybe there was a story I didn’t know, a history of transgression that rested in her memory in which this day was just another turning page. Maybe she clung to the love we had, the desperate devotion I felt for her, the need that only she could fill.
Maybe she didn’t know what to think. How to feel. What she did know was that the child in front of her needed her, and that her own grief would have to wait.
She drove me home and responded to his insult while I stood there. You leave her alone, she said. Don’t you do that to my little girl again. I was scared for her and awed as she spoke without fear, not knowing what he might do. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone defy him. It was the first and last time I ever heard anyone tell him not to hurt me.
It made sense to me then that he needed someone to tell him that, because in fact even I didn’t understand that it wasn’t okay to hurt me, whether it was my heart or my mind or my body at stake. I would spend much of my childhood quietly enduring whatever there was to endure, keeping my face still so my rage and fear did not betray me, so whoever it was would not punish me further.
When a teenage boy took me to an empty classroom in the basement of our church, I sat quietly on his lap like he told me to. I said nothing as he pulled my shirt out from under the waistband of my skirt. I stayed silent while his hands moved around my five-year-old body. When he was done, I went into the bathroom just like he said and fixed my clothes without a word. I never told Granny or Papaw Conn what the boy had done in the basement at church. I never told my parents. I don’t know what he said to me to keep our little secret safe, but it didn’t matter—I already knew how important it was for girls to keep our mouths shut.
No one thought to tell me when I became an adult, It’s okay now, you’re allowed to say no. I went from being a child who did not speak up, to being an adult who did not. Before I knew how to protect myself, I had to watch best friends turn away in disdain when I answered yes, the bruise on my neck was probably from my boyfriend. I had to hear a lover say things like, How could you let those men do that, I don’t know any other women who would let that happen. I had to watch my friends become my ex-husband’s friends and feel their affection for me diminish. Since I hadn’t told stories about him, they believed all the stories he raced to tell.
I had to unlearn the most important lesson I had learned as a child, the most important rule of survival—to be quiet.
I asked my mom once whether she had ever told her father—kind, gentle Papaw Wright, who lived on the road we took to town—what my dad did to her. Lord no, your dad wouldn’t be able to drive past their house if I did. It made sense at the time—we don’t inconvenience a man who terrorizes his wife and children. We don’t bother a kind, protective father with the knowledge of what his son-in-law has done and maybe watch that good father reveal a violence of his own. We don’t want any trouble.
And besides, You knew he was like this when you married him.
CHAPTER 2
Gravel
It took a long time for me to understand that most people couldn’t relate to the things I took for granted as a child. Things like how we had a cup of copperhead venom in the refrigerator for several years, how I watched my father tease and taunt the caged snake until it struck the Saran Wrap he had stretched over a plastic cup, how that cup sat beside our hot dogs and mustard and lifeless iceberg lettuce. For a while, whenever I looked through the refrigerator for something to eat, I thought to myself, Better not drink the venom.
What did he even want it for? There was probably a plan to use it against someone, or maybe he wanted to have it on hand just in case. I don’t remember my parents ever warning us not to touch it. But we knew—we knew well that to get ourselves hurt by doing something stupid would only lead to a whipping.
We were tucked so far away in our holler, our own small, unbothered wilderness that the outside world could hardly reach, for better or for worse. My brother and I occupied ourselves in the ways that children of our sort did. We ran through the woods, we waded through creeks and climbed around on barbed-wire fences, we picked up empty corncobs that had been gnawed clean by the rats who lived in the corncrib long after my dad gave up on raising hogs. We knocked wasp nests down and picked up odd mushrooms we found growing. We used hammers and nails and climbed into the loft of the barn by scaling the uneven boards that jutted out along the corner, scraps of wood and dusty wood planers waiting to break our fall. In some ways, we were so very free.
But we were not free to speak our minds—our voices did not belong to us. There was no room to say, I don’t deserve this, or You are hurting me, or Please, no more. Only one person had the power of language in our home, and words were just as potent as his other acts of violence.
Worse than being cussed at or belittled, though, was how he forced us to say cruel things and laughed at the spectacle: Tell your mother to lay down and let her pups suck. It made my stomach quiver to say it, though I did not know what it meant. He would tell me to say that to her, and I was too scared to say no, though I could sense it was wrong and somehow dirty. It was his way to shut her up, putting his words in our mouths, where they tasted like sawdust and liquor and muddy water. I didn’t even wonder how my own words would feel when they rose up from within my quivering belly and came charging out.
Our father played strange games with us, all of us. He would grab my mother’s hand and pull one of her fingers back, forcing it into an unnatural bend while she would cry out, Please stop, no, you’re hurting me, come on this isn
’t funny, and he would grin and look at us kids, standing there with confusion and alarm on our faces, and then he would chuckle. He might let go long enough for her to sigh with relief, and I would think everything was okay until he bent her fingers in the wrong direction again. Sometimes he would do that until she buckled to the floor, begging on her knees for him to stop, almost crying, with my brother and me not knowing what was happening—could it really hurt when our father was smiling and laughing? Those two things did not make sense together, and I thought everything had to make sense, somehow.
At some point, I stopped trusting myself to know the difference between what made sense and what did not. I learned that when things looked wrong, felt wrong, there had to be something I didn’t understand. I learned I should trust the man telling me to trust him, to accept whatever he was doing, no matter what my own good sense had to say. I learned to ignore my own judgment, and for a good long time, I had no idea that I could trust myself.
We used to go out to this man’s house, an old man out in the country—Earl. Earl did not have indoor plumbing or electricity, but he did have a lot of empty metal Prince Albert Tobacco cans. Sometimes he would give one to my brother, and I wished he would give me one because they seemed precious and rare. Earl’s skin was brown and wrinkled, and one of his eyes was smaller than the other. It looked like his face had been injured long ago, maybe in a war. The man raised hogs with my dad. We used to have hogs in our yard, and at one point, they stayed across the creek at the corncrib, but now the hogs were at Earl’s place, where the hills were too steep to play on, and there were no woods in sight.
During one of our visits, my father called for me to come to him while I was walking around the fields, looking at the cows and trying to find a way to have fun. I went to him, and standing beside Earl, my father held out a long, thin red pepper to me.
Eat this, he said.
I told him I didn’t like hot peppers.
The red ones aren’t hot, he said. And though he was smiling, I knew I did not have a choice in the matter. I wanted to believe him and thought maybe this was a different kind of pepper than what I had tried before. I bit off the end, and instantly, my mouth was on fire. My father laughed at the joke as I rubbed my shirt on my tongue over and over, desperate to cool it down. I was embarrassed that he had made a joke of me in front of Earl, who I don’t believe laughed, but I was in too much pain to care about much else. It was still burning when we left, and on the ride home, sitting in the back of the pickup truck, I wondered how long some pain could last.
I couldn’t accept that my father would hurt me for fun, humiliate me for his pleasure and maybe the amusement of another grown man. All the things that I heard and saw and felt fell onto and into one another, clanging in a relentless, deafening echo that demanded my constant vigilance.
He talked about the bank and how they were going to take the house. He told our mother he would burn it down with all of us in it before the goddamn bankers got their hands on it. He talked about the Social Security office, the settlement that he deserved, the paperwork that needed to be done, and the appointments he had to go to. I heard the state attorney’s name over and over, and I heard about the crooked doctors who wouldn’t refill his prescriptions. I knew in my child’s heart that when those people finally left him alone, his back injury would get better, and we could keep our house, and the settlement money would make up for him not working.
It was the lawyers, the bankers, the system—they were working against him, against us, and keeping me from having a dad who loved me and who could go fishing and grow a garden and put corn out for the wild turkeys in the hills behind our house, a dad who could just be happy to have us and our beautiful holler and the Daniel Boone National Forest all around us, bathing us in beauty each day, all day long, instead of a dad who sometimes turned to rage for no reason at all and left bruises on us or called us little piece of shit or woke us at night while he did awful things to our mother.
At the time, he was also still a drinker, and Dad liked to give me beer starting from a young age. I think I was around five when I stumbled into the corner of the refrigerator, off balance, and I heard him laughing. Much later, rummaging through the thousands of pictures my parents took—why did they take so many pictures?—I found one of myself in nothing but a diaper, sitting on a yellow lounge chair in front of our trailer that we lived in before they built the house, grasping a cold Stroh’s with both hands. A can of lighter fluid completes that composition, the picture of white trash.
Mom told me later that the picture was staged, but she also told me in complete seriousness that they used to put beer in my bottle to make me sleep. Either way, I drank beer whenever they let me and liked it until I was nine years old and my Sunday school teacher said alcohol was bad for the liver. The next time my father offered me a drink of his beer, I told him, I don’t want any, even though I was scared to death I would get into trouble for saying no. It turns out that the only thing I feared more than my father was going to Hell, because the God I learned about didn’t take sin lightly.
It is a wonder we had so many pictures lying around, just like it is a wonder we were able to afford a Nintendo at some point. Just that one system—nothing fancier—and I don’t remember us getting any games besides the first Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. But why would such poor people spend their money like that? The time would inevitably come when we really needed that money for food, for the electric bill. They could have taken us to the dentist or saved up for the next disaster they surely knew was coming. But we lived the poverty boom-and-bust lifestyle. In a landscape littered with disappointment, immediate gratification seems to make sense. In a region defined by broken promises, you might as well take the safe bet, the pleasure of a moment that might never return. There is no promise of tomorrow, and there’s a damn good chance tomorrow will be worse than today. Most of these crises can’t be fixed with $300 anyway. Let’s have some fun while we can.
Considering how little love there was to go around in our house, and how keenly I felt the shortage, I blamed my little brother in some way for the pain that set in at an early age. I took out all of my hostility and aggression on him, and if I had not been able to do that, I probably would have turned it all inward even more fervently than I did. We were Irish twins—he was born one year and four days later than I was. I was named after our mom’s father, and my brother was named after our paternal grandfather. Junior was my playmate, my victim, and my witness, someone who shared my fear and my anger, at least until he found a way out of all that feeling.
The one and only time I ever heard my brother defy our father was during dinner, when he was about six years old. We were eating, and suddenly, my brother was crying. My father had either ridiculed him or harassed him for some little thing, but, still, he demanded to know why Junior was crying. I was proud and horrified when my brother responded, Sometimes I just get so sick of you. We all sat in perfect silence for a moment, which my father ended with a sweep of his arm, sending his plate full of food and glass full of milk into a kitchen cabinet and onto the floor. My brother sobbed over his plate, and my father thundered out of the kitchen, ordering our mother to clean up the mess.
Part of me was thrilled that Junior felt brave and confident enough to say those words—words I would have never said. As much as I resented him for seeming to be so much more lovable than I was, I felt a deep need to protect him as well. The other part of me wanted him to keep his mouth shut and not make our father angry, because Dad’s anger never stayed contained. I just sat there, fear knotting itself inside me as I waited for Dad to come back into the kitchen, and watched Mom clean up the mess on her hands and knees.
Those were the kinds of scenes that could happen in the solitude of our holler. The slow realization that we were poor and sure did look it became entwined with stories about the needy I sometimes read or heard at school. I began to understand that things were different at our house, but I was smart enough not to tell
my teachers or the police officer who came to school to teach us the names of all the drugs and how bad they are. I always knew we didn’t have money, but it wasn’t a lack of money that made me feel poor, worthless, dirty. I didn’t know the word poverty yet, but there was a poverty that made our home feel so different from our granny’s.
Poverty was the cheap meat we ate with boxed macaroni and cheese, but it was also the food my dad flung to the floor. It was the picture I found of my father’s handiwork, a picture he took after he tore the kitchen faucet loose and hurled it through the kitchen window. It was the dentist appointments we never had, the coal stove spewing fine black soot onto our clothes, into our hair and our noses; it was the fire dying in the coal stove; it was my mother slammed into the coal stove. It was the ear infections that kept me from hearing every first insult, every first command. It was the electric going out during every storm, but it was also my father turning the meter upside down so it would run backward and we could pay the bill. It was the creek water we weren’t supposed to drink, the same water we mixed into Kool-Aid. It was watching my dad shoot his gun at a dog by the creek. Watching him whip a dog with his belt. Watching him dump a dog’s body in the woods. It was riding in his truck to another man’s house, where he left me sitting as he took his rifle to the man’s front door. It was the truck getting repossessed and the bank’s men loading the truck with our trash at gunpoint before they could drive it away.
It was complicated. It refuses to be defined.
In my childhood fairy-tale world, my father was misunderstood. Not even he understood himself like I did. I hurt for him—his pain, the oppression of living poor and being a man who felt too small. I grew up in fear of this man I loved, ready to forget his transgressions in an instant. There were so many, it seems he killed the part of himself that might have claimed redemption.
I waited for the moment when we would wake up and realize that it was all a bad dream, that my father loved us and was there to protect us, that my mom was strong and worthy of his adoration. We would share a laugh at the odd dream that seemed so real and then go about being our true selves—selves that smiled because we weren’t afraid, and our teeth weren’t rotting, and no one would whip you because they thought maybe you were mocking them.