by Bobi Conn
I felt comfortable throughout the downstairs and ventured around as even my father hesitated to do. The rooms held dishes, newspapers, clothes, and furniture; it seemed as if Great-Grandma had simply stepped out of the house and walked into her new one at some point, leaving everything behind and accumulating a new houseful of things. I was an explorer, and I sometimes brought her things that she had long forgotten but was glad to have moved into her new house. Once, I found a collection of coins, all organized in books with labels. I immediately recognized their value, as my father’s coin collections had instilled in me a great awe for the uncommon currency.
She kept those coins, and I wonder now what happened to them when she died. Perhaps another relative asked for them before that point, and she gave them away. Maybe they went to another great-grandchild, someone not in my papaw’s line. Who went through her things, parceling out the riches I had longed for in childhood?
Another time, I thought to look behind the door that always stood open, the one between the dining room and the living room. Behind it, I found a vodka bottle that was about one-third full. When my dad came into the house to look for me and perhaps find something for himself, I showed him the bottle where it sat, hoping he would be impressed by my grown-up discovery.
Look, Dad, I found a bottle of vodka. He picked up the bottle and unscrewed the lid, then smelled the alcohol inside.
That’s not vodka, he said. That’s your great-grandfather’s moonshine. Don’t tell Great-Grandma you found this. He tucked the bottle inside the jacket he was wearing and managed to save it for several years, until one day shortly after my mother left him for the last time. I was spending the night at his house, and he was particularly happy and cheerful. He bought us a pizza and gave me and Junior permission to watch movies, then disappeared for hours. Later, he told me he had gone into the woods with that bottle and drank every bit of the twenty-year-old moonshine inside it, roving around the forest in the dark, missing my mother terribly.
I must have inherited some of my sentimentality from my father. Every chance I got, I took our family pictures from his house, telling myself that they would someday be lost and squandered like everything else. One of the pictures I rescued/stole is a reprint dated 1953, of a black-and-white picture that was probably taken in the early 1900s. My father once told me that the youngest boy in the picture, who is almost lying down in someone’s lap, is my great-grandfather. On the back of the picture are names I do not recognize, though, so I wonder now whether he was right. Either way, they are my ancestors—men with handlebar mustaches and sharp jawbones; women with their hair pulled back into buns, even the young ones looking haunted; the younger people almost indistinguishable from their parents; nobody smiling—the image of all I’ve inherited.
I’ve never known anything about my great-grandfather’s father, about his story and how he became an outlaw. He was the only real hero I ever heard of as a child, and his legacy still haunts us. I wonder whether any of our men were ever good, whether any of them ever loved their children or touched their wives with tenderness. I wonder whether the women were gentle, or whether their hollow expressions accurately reflect their despair, their loneliness, their sense of futility. I wonder what they passed down to me—my blurred vision, my thin frame, my long fingers, my penchant for superstition, my longing for green hills and cliff faces?
I want their stories, so I can write my backstory. I want their names, their loves, their longings, their addictions, and their brutalities. I want them to whisper to me their heroic moments, their indiscretions, their final regrets, and the recognitions that filled their eyes in the moments before death.
But the storyteller was always my father, the original unreliable narrator. Drunk, drugged, lost.
CHAPTER 33
The Brokenness of Everything
Granny called to tell me when the house burned down. You better come up here, she said. I was dating the same young man I had loved in high school, when I was dating James, and he came with me. We stopped at Granny’s, and she remarked, He’s pretty, in her usual fashion—men were never handsome or cute, always pretty. We drove up to what used to be my home, and sure enough, there were ashes and some pieces of cinder-block foundation, but all the house and every beautiful, sad detail about it was gone. So was the dog.
There were still two or three old cars sitting by the creek—when did he start letting people park junk cars there? I hated the way they looked, abandoned and worthless, such a cliché symbol of white trash. We had always had the beauty of the creek and hills, if nothing else, and the cars seemed to take something away from that. I found a tire iron and went about smashing every window of the cars, wondering for a moment whether anyone would mind but quickly deciding I didn’t care. I climbed onto the hoods of the cars, so I could smash the windshields properly, while my boyfriend stood there, learning more about me and my grief than probably anyone else ever had. Thick glass flew everywhere, and I picked little pieces off me and felt some twinge of regret that the glass was on the ground. It was too late to worry about it now, though.
The one thing that survived the fire was a millstone that had always leaned up against the side of the house, in a little flower bed. Junior and I would buy planting flowers for my mom at a sale at our elementary school every Mother’s Day. I took great care in picking out what I thought were the most beautiful flowers I could afford with my few dollars. I don’t know where the millstone came from, but I decided it was coming home with me, this last fixture of childhood that somehow hadn’t been plundered or destroyed by my father. Some of the tar paper from the house had melted onto it and it was covered in ash, so I tried to roll it, but it wouldn’t roll properly, and I picked it up. My boyfriend offered to carry it for me, but I told him no, I had to do it. I washed myself off in the creek for the last time and knew I wouldn’t be back.
When my father got out of jail, someone from the county court system—an attorney, I think—called me to come answer some questions about my father. My dad was there in the building, but I went into a room with the attorney, and he closed the door. He explained that there were marks all over the kids’ legs, and someone thought it might be child abuse, but my father and stepmother said it was from the dog wrapping its chain around their legs when they tried to play with it. They wanted to know what I thought.
I was scared that someone would tell my father what I said, but I decided I had to tell this man the truth anyway. I had the chance to do for my siblings what so many adults in my life should have done for me. Maybe it wasn’t too late to save them and their children and all those who would follow.
I told the attorney that I doubted my father had whipped the kids’ legs with a chain—if he wanted to hit them, he would have done it where no one would see the marks. He was always smart enough for that. I never saw a bruise on my mother’s face, and I don’t believe anyone outside our home ever saw a bruise on me. But those marks could have easily been from switchings—the same thorny black locust trees still grew in that yard. Or maybe my father had grown sloppy as he aged, and he didn’t think to hide things as well. No matter what had happened in that particular instance, I knew the kids needed to be protected.
He’s a terrible father, I said. He shouldn’t be allowed to have children. Please, do not give these kids back to him. The attorney wrote down everything I said, looking up at me with some strange expression on his face—surprise? Concern? Was he bored? All I know is that they gave the kids back, and I could not fathom why, other than maybe thinking it’s always better to keep kids with their parents even when the eldest tries to convince you that a dog chain is the least of these kids’ problems.
But several years later, my little sister would beg me to take them out of foster care, and I would tell them, No, I’m sorry, I can’t take you. I would anguish over that choice and wonder how I could possibly save them when I was still trying so hard to save myself and my children.
My son was about five years old when we went
to my father’s rental house for a birthday dinner—Granny had asked me to come, so I did. My brother didn’t show up; he was out with a girlfriend. We drove to my granny’s first, and found that she had cooked an excessive amount of fried chicken, baked beans, and coleslaw, along with a chocolate cake and sweet tea. I had assumed the party would be there, but I followed Granny out to the house in Elliott County.
The house my father occupied then—you couldn’t really call it living—looked like it would be a nice-enough place if it were completely emptied and sanitized. I pulled my car off the side of the road, into the yard where my dad directed me. At first, I tried to avoid running over garbage, but then I realized it was everywhere. The front porch was crowded with towers of useless and dirty appliances, clothes, toys, utensils, everything. A dead-looking car sat in the front yard. Flies swarmed everywhere. I said my hellos and good to see yous. Granny told me to come into the house, which looked like one of those commercials for a drug-free America, the ones that show a passed-out adult sitting in front of a blaring television while a baby screams in the background.
In this case, the television blared cartoons toward an empty twin bed in the living room. I walked through the house with my granny, wondering whether I should be outraged or just let myself cry. Who slept on that bed? They must have had an illegal cable connection, since they rarely paid the electric bill. My granny warned me, This is really bad. I wasn’t sure whether you should see it or not, but I wanted you to know what was going on.
Sure. Let me soak it in, see what there is to see.
The house was bathed in darkness, which hid some of the trash but also made it look more sinister. I walked toward the kitchen, stepping around two black garbage bags whose tops gaped at me, spilling cigarette butts and food onto the floor. Scrambled eggs from two or three (four? more?) days previous rested patiently in a crusted frying pan, which sat on the hot plate they apparently used for cooking, when they cooked. I felt steeled for whatever came next. Why not? I opened the freezer door, and a stench hit me in the face. As I swung the door shut, I realized that nothing in the freezer was edible, or else it was beyond recognition.
Come here. Look in the bedroom.
I followed her to the bedroom. There were stairs leading to another bedroom, and what looked like a bathroom beyond the bed in front of me. I was putting it together: mounds of clothes and stacks of papers—that’s my father’s pack-rat nature at its worst, where nothing is worth keeping, and there’s no real space for anything to claim, so everything sits out in the open. Ashtrays overflowed onto a bedside table and down to the carpet. I wondered whether they took their shoes off.
I searched my granny’s eyes for some way to make sense of it. There was only one, which was to acknowledge that most of my father was gone, disappearing more each time he leaned over the table with a rolled-up dollar bill.
You should look in the bathroom. Can you believe this?
We went to another bathroom, and I peered inside, knowing already that the floor would be haphazardly covered in dog shit, that the toilet would be dirty and unusable, that I would fear for my siblings’ mental health and mourn their existences.
We walked toward the door, realizing there was nothing to be said. My twelve-year-old brother came in and showed me his legs. Look, Sis, these are flea bites. Don’t stay in the living room too long, or you’ll get eat up. These are Sissy’s shoes—mine don’t fit anymore. I really need some shoes, Sis.
I put my hand on his shoulder and smiled at him. Of course, honey. Let’s go get you some shoes. The three of us stepped onto the porch and into the heat. The sun bounced off the greasy water puddles in the yard and illuminated the brokenness of everything around us. Let’s see—we need some cups, don’t we? And paper towels? I’ll take the kids to get everything. Where’s my dad?
His wife responded with a lie. He went with a man to check on a job.
A job. That answer was supposed to protect Granny from the truth, but maybe at that point he thought I would believe it, too. I knew where they were, although I don’t know whose house they were at, or how much money was being exchanged. I knew he would return either happier or more distant, depending on what he was able to buy and how quickly it would work through his bloodstream.
My young siblings, my son, and I walked to the dollar store that was visible from the house. I asked the kids what they wanted. My son wanted a Power Rangers toy. My brother wanted some shoes. My sister wanted nothing. I looked at my brother’s clothes more closely and noticed his T-shirt was a man’s large, and it used to be white. It had a small hole in the front. He was wearing some shapeless, baggy shorts that looked like they once belonged to a high school basketball player. I asked him whether he had clothes to wear to school; the school was always giving the kids clothes. I do, but I can’t find them. They’re all dirty. That’s the economy of the household: get something, use it once, watch it rot as it sinks into the torpor around you.
So we got him a nice pair of jean shorts, some sandals, and a shirt. He picked the shirt that said Parents for sale: Buy one, get one free. I convinced my sister to pick out a nice shirt for herself, and I told them, I love you, you must do well in school, don’t forget I love you.
We went back to the house and ate on the front porch, swatting flies and sitting in old restaurant booths that at least seemed safer than the table inside the house. I wondered how my father had come down this road, how everything had gotten so much worse once he left the holler. Maybe it had been worse for a long time, and I had just not seen it. Maybe it was the shifting variety of drugs available to him as the pharmaceutical companies changed up formulas. Maybe it was just the way things were always going to go.
Later, as I’m driving away with my son, I worry that he won’t understand what we’ve just seen. I realize he has no context for the decay in which my family is living, so I ask him what he thinks about it. He says everything was gross, but he liked the pocketknife my father gave him in lieu of the birthday card that was supposed to arrive in the mail four months ago. I see a teachable moment, a way to explain the dangers of drug abuse and discourage him from ever seeing pills as a form of recreation. I choke on my words, though, and sob as I drive. In the end, I plead with him, Please, please don’t ever take that chance. My father’s mind is gone, it’s somewhere else, and I could not live if I saw that happen to you. From the back seat, as he looks up from his new Power Ranger, he assures me, Don’t worry, Mom. I will never do pills. I will never be like your dad.
How can I create a different world for my children, one that does not lead to broke-down cars and crippling addiction and felonies? How can I even be a mother? How do I translate the language of my childhood into a language of adoration, of devotion, of caretaking? I constantly tried out new words and, like magic, drew phrases like I love you and You’re so good from nowhere. Like a miracle.
Jacob had remarried a few years after we divorced. When he was still little, my son would tell me he wished we could all live together—his father and stepmother and me—and I said, I know, I’m sorry we can’t. He asked me whether I loved his father, and I said, Yes, of course, we’re family. He asks me what a family is, and I say, Family is all of us who love you. He seems to think that’s good enough.
There are other words, too, that I’ve had to define in conversations with my son. When he didn’t want to sleep and I comforted him in his bed, I told him he was safe. In one sense, I mean that the bad guys will not come into our home; no robbers will plunder our meager belongings. It means that the stove is not on, and I will get to him through any fire that could ever burn away those meager belongings. But as I tell him that I will protect him, I also think of how he isn’t awakened to me begging a husband not to hit me again. How he won’t learn the word rape from what his father does to his mother as she cries for him to stop.
I have no word for that.
A day or two after the birthday dinner, as I tuck him into bed for the night, he hugs me tightly and tells me
, We love each other so much. I’ll always fix your heart, even when your dad breaks it.
CHAPTER 34
Strangers
In many cultures and religions, naming a child constitutes a kind of defining, a way of determining the child’s personality or destiny. For years, I looked for my own name in books and on little cards that are sold in souvenir shops. All I found was a reference to Robert, which means bright fame. I hated the maleness of that name, as well as the idea of fame—it didn’t match my perception of myself. As an adult, I found more precise resources that identified my name as a diminutive of Barbara, from barbaros, the Greek word for a stranger, a traveler from a foreign land. A barbarian, it turns out, is someone new and different.
And finally, it made sense, this name that always felt right, but whose meaning never did. I am the stranger in my family, the one who left, who does not belong. It explains my difference, my not belonging. I would have thought I was adopted, if poor white people in hollers adopted babies they couldn’t feed and didn’t like just for the sake of having them. My name, this particular definition of me, gives me a location to fix my longing for another place, a home I’ve felt since childhood. It’s what I found each time I ran to the woods, whether I was running from my father’s rage, or exploring, or checking on the flowers and blackberries. It’s the silent welcome I felt there, where I was free and wild.
I was named after my papaw Wright, whose name was spelled Bobbie, which is often the female spelling. I puzzled over that and once asked my mother about his side of the family. She explained that he had been adopted when he was very young, and then those parents died, so he was adopted again. His birth family was probably lost to us forever, and that troubled me. Who named him? Why did they spell it that way? Was someone out there wondering where he had gone, searching for their lost grandson or nephew or brother?