by Bobi Conn
James didn’t have a job but could probably come up with something, and I could finish my senior year living in town, closer to school. I thought it was a pretty reasonable idea with clear benefits that my mother would appreciate—less driving, saving gas money, and . . . probably some other things, too. But as soon as I started talking, she blew up and yelled that I wasn’t going to embarrass her by living with a boyfriend when I wasn’t married. I didn’t understand her old-fashioned morals in the context of our history—they didn’t fit.
She yelled herself into a frenzy, though James and I were sitting there quietly, and I was fully unprepared for her to respond with anger. Finally, she said, You want to live with him? You marry him. I’ll sign the papers today if you want to marry him. If you really want to live with him so bad, you do that! James and I left a short time later and sat in his mother’s car. What do you think? I asked. He paused, then said, I think we should do it.
Do what?
Get married.
And so we did. We went back inside and told my mother, who immediately started crying and asking me whether I was sure I wanted to. My stepfather just said that now she had to let me, since she had offered to sign the papers. I didn’t know what to say except yes, I was sure, we were sure.
I don’t know that she wanted me to get married. Historically, it is an easy way to be rid of a daughter, and I was probably giving her some gray hairs by that point, with my refusal to shave my legs or eat meat. Even though she didn’t go to church, my mother would occasionally refer to God as if that was something she believed in, so I thought she might have been concerned about me living in sin. Or maybe with what everyone else would think about me living in sin. At the time, I didn’t understand how she might have struggled to raise a girl. I couldn’t fathom the difficulty of mothering a girl, with so much unhealed trauma around the experience of being a woman.
Two days later, we managed to get a preacher we had never met to marry us in a church we had never attended. I could only think, This isn’t right. I briefly considered saying no, that I didn’t want to, that I had just turned seventeen and didn’t know the first damn thing about being somebody’s wife, and if I were the betting kind, I would bet I was going to have a hard time figuring it out. But like everything else I had ever identified as not right in my life, I decided that what I thought didn’t really matter. And anyway, wasn’t James the only man who would ever love me? I thought it was my one chance to get married. One of my only friends at school soon told me, You’ve clipped your wings, and it took me twenty years to figure out what he meant.
Just like that, I joined a demographic I knew nothing about. Technically, I was a child bride, though I would have told you it was my choice and I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t marrying my rapist. I wasn’t marrying a man decades older—James was just a couple of years older than I was. Compared to my mom, who had run off to Jellico, Tennessee, to marry my father when she was still seventeen, I was doing pretty good.
I didn’t know how difficult it would be to finish high school, to heat our house, to keep my sense of hope alive. I didn’t expect that I would lose all respect for my new husband, that our life together would never feel light or exciting or free. Having no preparation for adulthood, still reeling from all the nightmares of childhood and praying for the return of the indescribable magic I had found in nature, I took on the responsibility of caring for myself, thinking the work of raising me was already done. Many people could have told me—though none did—things were going to get worse before they could possibly get better. I wouldn’t have listened anyway. I wouldn’t have believed them.
CHAPTER 16
A Pretty Smile
We moved into the same house that James’s college friends had rented, and each day I walked into the same entryway where his friend had told me James was probably sleeping with one of the college girls who was always around. At first, James got a job with the sawmill where Dry Branch Road met the highway. The highway was KY 519, just a two-lane road. My old church sits right off the road—the church where I learned about Jesus and was molested, saved, baptized, and finally told to leave.
James didn’t work at that job for long but got another job at the sawmill a little farther down 519, closer to the road that would take you out to Amburgy Rocks, those five cliffs that sat partially on my granny’s land and just a bit on United States Forest Service property. I didn’t understand what happened to keep that job from lasting long, but next he got a job at a sawmill in Carter County, which took about forty-five minutes to get to each day.
I started my senior year in high school a couple of weeks after we got married, and everyone was surprised when I told them no, I wasn’t pregnant, which filled me with a certain pride, though I knew I hadn’t been careful enough in avoiding pregnancy to really be all that proud. We had one car, the 1986 Dodge Aries that Mom and Frank bought me for $600 after I turned sixteen. In their wisdom, they told me I could have a car or braces for my teeth, and in my wisdom, I chose the car.
Why was that the one time I was allowed to make a choice for myself? I didn’t have the experience or insight to understand the relative value of braces at that time. I had no idea that it would just get harder and more expensive to fix my teeth, that there would be times I would resolve to do it, and other, more important things would come up that I would have to spend the money on instead. I couldn’t predict the amount of shame I would endure as I looked in the mirror or how I would try to hide my teeth every time someone insisted I smile for the camera. The one time I was given control of my own body was the time I needed an adult to make the best decision for me.
James had to be at work at six in the morning, so I got up at four thirty to cook his breakfast and lunch, drive him to the sawmill, and then drive myself to school. Thankfully, the job didn’t last that long.
We had roommates, God bless them—another couple. Now that I was no longer under my mother’s roof, I saw no reason not to smoke all the weed I could, though I found that it was no longer an adventure but that I felt confined and anxious getting stoned in our house. There was always a party there, whether the living room was crowded or there were just two of us up all night, fully immersed in a chess game with a level of concentration made possible by the potent acid I generally had on hand. Since James couldn’t hold a job and my paycheck from Long John Silver’s didn’t go far, we started buying sheets of acid to resell.
I don’t know how the bills got paid, if they got paid. I may have met our landlord once. He was the father of a girl I went to school with, a girl who seemed poor and somehow more sexually advanced than the rest of us by middle school. She had a cute boyfriend from middle school onward, and last I heard, she married him and they moved into that house next to her father’s several years after our heyday had ended.
The people at our house were almost always smoking weed or tripping on psychedelics. For the longest time, it seemed like a continuation of the scene that had unfolded when James’s college friend and his roommates lived there. Back then, the house had felt light and comforting, airy and peaceful. I don’t know whether it happened slowly or quickly, but somehow the feeling inside the house changed, and everything began feeling dark and dirty. Strange people eventually started coming around, and things were stolen off our porch when we left them overnight for a yard sale. Things were stolen from inside the house, too, and I couldn’t begin to guess whether it was someone we counted as a friend who had done that.
Since I always had it on hand, I began taking LSD pretty regularly, though I found it had no effect the day after I had just taken it. For a while, I took it every other day, which gave my system just enough time to reestablish sensitivity to it. I loved nothing more than to play chess with a couple of different people while I was high on LSD, and we watched the Woodstock movie over and over that year. Since staying up all night and tripping had become habitual, I often missed entire days of school, showing up as soon as I could drive myself there safely. Now, I c
ould laugh—or cry—thinking about my ability to judge what was safe back then. The truancy officer finally called me in and asked for directions to my house. I asked her what she needed that for, and when she told me, I understood I had to have a doctor’s note to miss any more school. From then on, I went to the health department constantly, getting an excuse for whatever malady seemed to sound best at the time.
When I did make it to school, I was a sight to behold, with my unwashed and tangled hair, bathing once a week or so, pupils as big as dimes. We had a couple of pot plants growing in a closet, and James insisted we couldn’t turn on the closet light to look at them—it would mess with their growing cycle or something like that. I didn’t understand much of what he said about what we should and shouldn’t do. It made me feel like a child again, struggling to comprehend what my father’s rules were and what I had to do to keep him happy. I tried to just memorize everything and obey.
One afternoon, I lit a candle to carry into the closet with me—candlelight not being strong enough to disrupt our delicate plants and their growth hormones—and looked at the plants to see whether I saw anything of interest. I peered over the candle with my long, unwashed hair hanging above it, and soon my hair was on fire. I ran out of the closet to James, not knowing what to say, but he quickly grabbed a pillow or blanket and smothered the fire. My hair was singed all over on one side, but when I brushed it, the burnt pieces fell out, and I had no gaping bald spots, praise the Lord. The next day, when I walked into the school atrium, a girl greeted me by telling me that my hair looked good.
She brushed it, another girl pointed out, rolling her eyes. She was right—otherwise, I couldn’t tell you how many times I brushed my hair that year. But you could get the number by counting on one hand.
My senior year, I had an English teacher who had us read The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies. While a lot of our rooms in the school were too cold during the warm months, hers was always mercifully comfortable because she stuffed the air-conditioning vent with paper towels to block the air. I sat right below the vent, and one day, I noticed I was terribly cold and someone had removed the paper towels. Several days later, I asked her after class why she had done that, and she hardly tried to suppress her laughter as she explained that other students were complaining of a particular student’s body odor, so she removed the paper towels to combat the unpleasant smell. I found something about her explanation discomforting, and it took me a while to fully realize that the student with the offensive odor was most assuredly me.
Still, one day this teacher handed back a paper we had written, a personal narrative, which I had turned in but then requested that she let me revise, even though I had gotten an A, just to get it right. On my final draft she wrote, “Very beautiful. Your revision turned this into a jewel.” She took me into the hallway to tell me that I shouldn’t be hanging out with the people I was associating with, that they were bad news and would drag me down. She said that I was able to do something my peers could not do, that my writing was not at all average but beyond that. Do you understand that? she demanded to know.
Did I understand? I understood writing was the only thing that felt natural to me, the only time I felt I could make sense of the world around me. I understood I couldn’t play the guitar or be confident like James, and I wasn’t pretty enough to be a contender for the prom queen, and I apparently stank to high heaven. I understood that the only way I could stop hating myself and my life and everyone around me was to be a different person—not the girl who lived in the holler and who was afraid of the world, but maybe this girl who smoked a lot of weed and wore tie-dyes and had older friends anyway, so I didn’t need the kids around me to like me. That I could have a husband—one person in the world who liked me as I was, or at least thought I was good enough for now. All I really understood was that I needed to survive, but I had no idea how to. I didn’t understand that this wasn’t what life should look like.
So I told her that I loved to write, that I wanted to write, and in her characteristic exasperated way, she told me that I should, that I had to do something with it, and Don’t just screw around. But of course I did, until I didn’t.
I also had a sociology class that year, and the teacher was funny and comfortable with all the students, for whom I had utter contempt at that point. I missed class so much that, one day, he told me I would come out of there with a C. I argued with him: You know I have learned more than anyone else here. You know I understand more than anyone else here. You know that my work is A work, that when I have been here, I earned an A. And Yes, he said, all those things are true. But you weren’t here. So you get a C. After pleading my case for a few more minutes, he offered me a deal: if I read Night Comes to the Cumberlands and wrote him a paper on it, he would give me an A in the class.
I got the book immediately and started reading, wondering what it was about it that made him think it was worth me reading in exchange for the grade I wanted. Soon, it began to make sense as I read Harry Caudill’s account of the history of Appalachia. I read as little as it took to complete my assignment and wouldn’t learn until years later how and why that book was incomplete and, to many, an insulting perspective. But for me, reading it at the age of seventeen was a turning point, a moment of self-realization.
As the book unfolded, it seemed to illuminate the history of the region, the history of my people, in such a way as to account for the desperation that pervaded the water we drank, the air we polluted, the mountains we plundered, the love we longed for and withheld from one another. It made me see my father, for the first time, not just as my father, but as a descendant of sharecroppers, of thieves, of Irishmen, of desperate immigrants, of settlers who could not read or write and had never seen gold and so traded vast swaths of land for single, shiny gold dollars. The heartbreaking history my father told me through his stories, bits and pieces both recent and distant, now had a context—we suddenly fit into a narrative, and that brought us a little closer to making sense. For the first time, I saw myself as a great-granddaughter, a descendant—not just a self. But it made my self more complicated than I ever had conceived of it being.
How do we define a self? As the differentiator: I can’t understand you people. As the reference point: I didn’t see anything. The victim: Why did this happen to me? The perpetrator: I didn’t mean to . . . The self, of course, is the main character of each of our stories—the hero, the martyr, the one whose suffering really matters and whose goodness is remarkable, whose shortcomings are both comprehensible and forgivable. The Bible tells us that the body is a temple, a sanctuary for the soul, a home for the I of every thought.
In my house, there are many mansions.
CHAPTER 17
The Walking Wounded
Granny was terribly worried about my health from the moment I told her I was a vegetarian. She could not fathom that a person could be healthy without hamburgers, sausage, bacon, and Christmas hams. My entire life, she had fed me in a way only a hardworking country grandmother could do, making biscuits from scratch and gathering the eggs herself, growing and canning tomatoes and green beans all summer long, peeling potatoes with a paring knife that she stopped with her bare thumb as I watched, amazed she did not cut herself.
Granny’s religious views seemed to complicate her morals in response to my meat-free diet. On one hand, she told me it was the Lord’s will that we eat animals because the Bible said we had dominion over them. On the other hand, she had no qualms about slipping some ground beef into the vegetable soup she brought me in quart Mason jars, the soup she cooked up and canned for those cold winters. She promised there was no meat in the soup but seemed flustered at the question. Of course I could see the little clumps of fried hamburger, but even as an arguably book-smart teenager, I thought there had to be some kind of explanation beyond my comprehension—maybe it was a flavoring I knew nothing about, or a mystery vegetable.
I used to ask her to lie—pretend—that I hadn’t called or wasn’t visit
ing so my father wouldn’t know I was close by when I saw her, but she would never agree to that dishonesty. And yet, she felt justified in her ground-beef deception because she was convinced that feeding me meat was part of her maternal duty, directed by the will of God himself. I could not make sense of it when I was a teenager, and I didn’t want to make her feel bad, so we both ended up pretending that the ground beef in her soup was a vegetable.
She offered to give me her camper if I would eat meat, and another time, she offered me $300. With a sense of valiance, I declined both. I had stayed in that camper often as a child, “camping” in her backyard, next to the henhouse. My brother and our various cousins and I would listen to the country station whose signal somehow found its way into our holler. We would play cards and games for hours, laughing and enjoying the time that could be uncomplicated by the adults in our lives.
Though I refused Granny’s offer at the time, I soon ended up living in that camper. At some point, my husband and I decided we could no longer afford to pay half the rent for the house we were living in, and we gave our roommates unceremonious notice before moving out. We decided to live in Granny’s camper, which was then parked in her cow field, closer to my father’s house than hers. My father ran a simple wire to it so we had enough electricity for a light at night and perhaps a radio. There was no water to connect to, so I brought it from the creek in a bucket to wash dishes, and we went to my father’s to use the bathroom and shower.
It almost seemed like it would work for a while, though my dad often pressured us to come to his house. My husband was intimidated by him and, as my first boyfriend, had caught the full force of my father’s threatening, domineering attempt to be protective.