Don't You Ever

by Mary Carter Bishop

  “I feel so, so . . .”

  “So what, Mom?”

  “I feel so guilty.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  WE MOVED HER to a private corner room with two windows. One of her earlier roommates, a wise little woman with a lyrical tongue, had told us she knew just what to do for an old person: “They need a pillow for every bone.” I brought in colorful cushions and decorated the room with Mom’s cherished pictures, plants, and tchotchkes. A few years before he died, following a squabble with Daddy, she’d burned his love letters from their courting days. But now, to each of the four framed photos of him, she’d proclaim daily, “I love you.” When I set out her photo portrait taken shortly before their wedding, she stared at it awhile and remarked, “I think I look sad.”

  * * *

  AT THE END of her life, Mom still bemoaned the fact that she had sinned in having Ronnie. When she announced to me these three words, just three syllables—“I’m no good”—she seemed to be expressing the judgment of herself she’d borne throughout her adult life.

  Though she’d earlier rejected the idea of heaven, now, like the proverbial believer in the foxhole, she was hoping for it. “Do you think I’ll be with Daddy?” That’s how she referred to him when speaking to me. She was sure he’d been whisked straight through the pearly gates, no need for examination. Though I wasn’t much of a believer, I assured her that yes, she would be with Daddy. I told her she’d been a good woman.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  * * *

  ON A FRIDAY morning, she was going. Phlegm crackled in her chest. Soft wheezes with her every breath were seabird cries in the distance. I knelt by her bed and kissed her, held her hand, stroked her arms. As she was slipping away that afternoon, Dan and her church friends came to kiss her goodbye.

  Her minister, who’d watched so many people die, advised me to take note as her breathing slowed. This was once-in-a-lifetime business. All the troubles of her life will melt away, he told me, all her conflicts and worries. It will all boil down to her being barely there and then not there at all.

  As she fed Mom morphine, a nurse skated the chestpiece of her stethoscope over Mom’s heart. An aide kept an eye on the faint pulsing of a blood vessel on the left side of her neck. The three of us hovered head-to-head as Mom’s tongue lolled around near her bottom teeth. In her right ear I whispered, “I love you, Mom.” Then she was gone.

  Aides came to wash her body and wrap it in a white sheet. The staff closed patients’ doors along the hallway as two black-suited undertakers wheeled her away on a maroon-draped gurney.

  Thirty minutes after she died, I gathered up her pillows. The one that had been under her left hip to relieve pressure on a bedsore was still warm. I shuddered slightly at this ghostly, unexpected touch, then wished I could keep it forever. The lingering heat of my mother’s body was another farewell, though not her last.

  Part VII

  A Finer Sifting

  19

  I Draw Closer

  Mom took this photo as Ronnie approached his first birthday. It likely was taken at the Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in Lynchburg, Virginia.

  Those first years without Ronnie, Mom, and Daddy, I set about healing myself. I took a road trip to Minnesota. I moved to a new house. I formed a writers’ group called FUMA (Fire Under My Ass) to make myself start writing. I was desperate to understand my mother and Ronnie the only way I knew how, through reporting, through writing, through working out on the page the greatest mystery of my life.

  On visits with Hicks family elders, I learned the names of Grandpa Emmett’s workhorses, the circumstances of him sawing off his fingers, the jokes about his prayers flapping about in the church ceiling, and the layout of the cabin where Miss Belle had her privates peppered. Other people told me about Ronnie’s Romeo ways in his twenties, his accident with a motorcycle, his grumpiness with waitresses, his hobnobbing with rich golfers.

  I went back to the boxes and scrutinized everything he and Mom left behind, each time with a finer sieve, each time revealing yet another layer. I found Mom’s faded keepsake book where girlhood friends wrote sentimental rhymes about kisses, death, and husbands to come. Two years before she was pregnant with Ronnie, she penned there a list of her nine favorite songs. At the top was “Picture on the Wall,” recorded by country music pioneers the Carter Family, from farther down in the mountains of Southwest Virginia.

  There’s an old and faded picture on the wall

  That has been a-hanging there for many years

  It’s a picture of my mother

  For I know there is no other

  That can take the place of mother on the wall

  Listening online to the Depression-era recording, I could imagine Mom’s soprano catching on a line near the end: Since I lost that dear old mother years ago / There is none to which with troubles I can go.

  Months before she died, Mom told me this: “If my mama had lived, I wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. Wouldn’t have gotten into trouble.” She said it a third time, as if in a mourning chant. Wouldn’t have gotten into trouble.

  * * *

  I TRACKED DOWN old friends from Keswick, people of my parents’ generation. One of the women had arrived in the community shortly after they’d carted Ronnie off to Western State. She was shocked to learn about Mom’s hidden-away boy. “I just can’t believe that about your mother.” She sat back in her chair and stared at me awhile before saying it again, with emphasis this time on the “your mother,” as if to say “your mother, of all the women in the world.” I knew what she meant. Mom presented herself as starchy and beyond reproach. Her prudish exterior was a cover-up. “Yep,” Dan said when I told him what the woman said. “Your mom was a recovering fallen woman.”

  I found men who’d grown up in Keswick with Ronnie. One who lived at the manor house where Ronnie often stole food from the kitchen remembered his parents ordering him and his brothers to stay away from Ronnie. But they couldn’t resist him and his freedoms. He was easygoing and fun to be around. Plus, he was so obviously lonely. “This was a person,” his old pal recalled, “who wanted attention so much it was crazy.”

  * * *

  ONLY RECENTLY I took a careful look at the stack of get-well cards Ronnie received when he was in the hospital in 1990. A customer joked that Ronnie had better recover soon or all his clients would resemble sheepdogs. Another must not have known Ronnie’s last name because he addressed his card simply to “Mr. Slim.” “I seen your card in the Barber Shop Window that said you liked to get cards. Im one of your customers but you probably don’t know me. I always say clippers on the sides is OK with me Maybe that will ring a bell. I don’t know what happened but I hope you get well soon. I am sending a little money and I hope it wont make you mad or hurt your pride. I know it gets pretty rough when you are sick I just got out of the hospital in October 1988 I had a lung cancer operation and I still don’t breathe very good. Well hang in there and get well.”

  * * *

  OF ALL THE things Ronnie left behind, none was so revealing as the 1959–1960 diary of a teenaged girl. Its plastic back was decorated in a diamond argyle pattern in black and cream, with tiny fleur-de-lis symbols inside each diamond. The back metal clasp of its locking device had been ripped off. Why would Ronnie have this, and why would he keep it?

  As I examined the little book, I saw that it was the diary kept by his first love. Ronnie didn’t often admit to soft feelings for anyone, but this girl had stayed in his mind until he died. “I would have given both my legs and my soul for her,” Ronnie told me, with more conviction than I’d ever heard him speak of anything. She was seventeen and eighteen when she kept the journal.

  Maybe I could find her. Maybe I could learn how Ronnie handled close relationships. Watching him during barbershop visits and hearing his many suspicions about people, I had trouble picturing him being truly close to anyone. Was the remoteness I saw in him r
elated to his physical problems of more recent years? Or were its roots deeper, earlier?

  In the spring of 2010, I found two listings in the local phone book for people with the diary keeper’s unusual last name. One of them was her brother. He gave me her married name and her phone number. She was as eager as I to talk about Ronnie. Over many fruit plates at her favorite restaurant over the next few years, she shared such intimate details of their relationship that I won’t name her here. She looked like a Joyce to me, so that’s what I’ll call her.

  Joyce was seventeen and soon to graduate from high school the day she met Ronnie, March 26, 1959. She met him at Polly’s house after the funeral service for Roy. She thought Ronnie was charming, courteous, well dressed. He was twenty-three.

  A brown-haired girl still round with baby fat, Joyce had kissed boys she’d met through her ultraconservative church, but she was still a virgin. Ronnie was gentlemanly and tender with her. He took her shopping for a bracelet in downtown Roanoke, and when she couldn’t choose between the gold one and the silver, he bought her both. He loaned her a record player and bought her records by the 101 Strings, an orchestra that pumped out the romantic mood music they listened to when they made out.

  But as their courtship progressed, Joyce told me, Ronnie began to pressure her sexually, sometimes seeming as though he was on the edge of violence. Eventually, she relented, but she always felt that the more ambivalent she was, the more he pressured her, as though he feared she might leave him and he had to seize what he could. Even though she felt somewhat coerced, there was still sweetness in their relationship.

  In the fall of 1959, Joyce left home for her freshman year at a small Midwestern college run by her Pentecostal denomination. In January, when he drove her to the train for her return to school after the Christmas holidays, they had sex in his car at the railroad station. Once again, it was get it while you can. Despite Ronnie’s aggression, Joyce continued to see him.

  He sent her two dollars a month at school for movies and school incidentals. He visited her mother on weekends while Joyce was gone. Ronnie liked to enter Joyce’s house through the back door, near her bedroom, and hang out back there. Joyce’s mother often shooed him away. She found him intrusive, pushy, disrespectful of boundaries. Joyce’s mother warned her that he was overbearing. He had come to their fundamentalist church a few times and rudely interrupted Bible lessons to argue with members’ views on the gospel. That embarrassed Joyce.

  He never mentioned his biological mother. Joyce didn’t even know he had a half sister. Ronnie did offer one clue to his origins. While she was at college and going to many movies, he suggested she see the just-released Home from the Hill. “Ronnie said it was practically the story of his life. . . . He said, ‘You’ll understand a lot if you’ll just go see that movie.’” So she did, and later, I ordered it from Netflix.

  The lead character, played by George Peppard, is the illegitimate son of a wealthy Texas cotton planter. The story revolves around contention between that son and the landowner’s spoiled legitimate one. In a dramatic encounter between the two, the bastard son contrasts his measly life with the opulence surrounding the other man’s:

  You know, I was hanging around the day they named you in church, hanging around the ice cream and birthday cake parties they gave you every year of your life, hanging around on the Fourth of July when they set off firecrackers for you, when they gave you ponies and an electric train, when they drove you up and down the main street of town in an open touring car so everybody could see the son and heir. Somewhere along the way . . . I got a notion I had some of that coming to me.

  Ronnie heard echoes of his own life. I was the one who was dressed up and shown off to the neighbors. Buddy was given any toy he desired. At first, when Ronnie was with Polly and Roy, he had a pony and an electric train too, but eventually he was left in the shadows, just like the man in the movie.

  * * *

  RONNIE’S ROUGH WAYS continued to baffle Joyce. “I love him,” she wrote in her diary in March 1960, “but he makes it so hard for me.” Ronnie was talking seriously about marrying her. Her diary indicates she was considering it, though she was getting other proposals too. That April, slightly more than a year after she met Ronnie, a young man Joyce’s mother preferred over Ronnie took Joyce out for a Coke. Joyce said it wasn’t a real date, but Ronnie’s Chevy was parked in the driveway when the man drove Joyce home.

  When he saw Joyce with the stranger, Ronnie flew into a rage. Red-faced, he stormed into her bedroom. He grabbed her record player and records and threw them into the trunk of his car. He must have taken her diary that day too because her entries suddenly ceased that month. Ronnie stormed off. Joyce never saw him again. She told me that if Ronnie had returned and talked it over with her—and if he’d sincerely declared his love—she might very well have married him. Joyce’s father reported the theft of the diary to the police, but because it was of no monetary value, they convinced him to drop the charge.

  According to the diary, Ronnie told Joyce he wanted no children until they’d been married for at least five years. At one point, Joyce’s period was three months late. She spent days at college terrified she was pregnant. He wrote her not to worry about it, perhaps because he hoped to marry her anyway.

  Years later, however, Ronnie told me he had never wanted children. He tucked condoms in his car and even in the holes of trees in the woods where he had sex with his girlfriends. His explanation made my heart hurt: “I didn’t want to create any more bastards like me.” I believe he realized that he wasn’t emotionally able to commit to marriage, and he didn’t want to saddle anyone with fatherless children like him.

  What interested me most about Joyce’s diary was that when Ronnie seized it, he read what he could of it and jotted comments on many pages in which Joyce mentioned him. I recognized his handwriting. His commentary was the dialogue he was never able to have face-to-face with Joyce. He yearns for a deep connection, it is clear, but he doesn’t know how to achieve it or how to keep it.

  When Joyce notes that she’s just written Ronnie a letter “telling him I wanted more respect,” Ronnie writes, “Love is respect.”

  When she laments that she “wished I had someone to love me truly,” Ronnie writes, “I do.”

  When she says she wrote to Ronnie to ask him not to come to see her anymore but then lacked the nerve to mail it, Ronnie writes, “she is using me.”

  When she says she asked a pastor for advice on how to get rid of Ronnie, Ronnie writes, “ask me not him.”

  When Joyce has a change of heart and decides she does want to see Ronnie, he writes, “that [sic] more like it.”

  When she’s having trouble with her studies and wishes Ronnie were there to “love me some,” Ronnie writes, “I love you honey.”

  When she writes that she doesn’t think Ronnie is interested in marriage any longer, Ronnie writes, “you are wrong about that.”

  And when she’s flunking a course and says, “I wish I were dead. Why I was ever born I’ll never know,” Ronnie writes, “to be my wife.”

  Instead, Joyce married the man who took her out for that Coke. Ronnie told me that years after he sped away from Joyce’s house, he saw her in a store with young children and obviously pregnant with another. She has no memory of that encounter, but by then, Ronnie’s appearance had changed so much because of the acromegaly that she wouldn’t have recognized him.

  * * *

  THERE WAS ONLY one other person in the world who knew my parents and Ronnie. This man met my mom seven years before I did. Before I was born, he was present at our tenant house the day that apprehensive eight-year-old Ronnie arrived from the orphanage.

  John Sharpless “Buddy” McIntyre Jr. was as moored in my family as in his own. He practically fell out of his mother’s womb and into my mother’s arms. If Mom couldn’t find a babysitter, little Buddy accompanied Mom and Daddy on their earliest dates. I went to Mississippi twice to see Buddy, a retired insurance broker. I�
�d known him all my life because he maintained such a close relationship with Mom and Daddy, writing them hundreds of letters, sending them checks that made them financially secure, and visiting them whenever he returned home to Virginia. But Buddy and I had never spoken about Ronnie. I wasn’t even sure if he knew Ronnie was Mom’s son.

  On my first visit, I saw in Buddy the subtle gestures and body language of my parents—the way he tilted his head, the way he laughed. I heard them in his voice, in his figures of speech, and in his tender heart. When I mentioned it to Buddy’s wife, Carolyn, on our walk back from their gardens, she said, “Well, of course. He spent more time with your folks than anybody.”

  He chokes with fondness when he speaks of Daddy and of “AID-drah,” as he pronounces Mom’s name. He saw the best of my folks. He was a grown man before his mother told him that Ronnie was Mom’s son, and he said he admired my father for “overlooking all that.”

  Still, even as a little boy, Buddy wondered why Early was so hard on Ronnie. “He cut him no slack. He was always on him. I never understood it, because Early was such a good man. It made no sense to me.” My parents raised a fine man. It just wasn’t Ronnie.

  * * *

  YEARS AFTER MOM died, I read her very last letters to Ronnie, which he’d hidden away. Six times over his last nine months, she begged him to have the surgery and to save himself. “Please let them try and help you. I’m sure they can.” By November, three months before his death, she was pleading. “Please,” she wrote, underlining the word, “see somebody who can take care of that tumor.” In a note card adorned with drawings of seashells and postmarked twenty-two days before he died, she offered to help him pay for the operation.

  That Christmas, she sent a card and a church directory picture of her and Daddy. She invited Ronnie to their house for Christmas Day. Now I know that back when she’d seemed so emotionally frozen, she was always quietly hurting for him. On a small sheet of writing paper inside the card, she wrote, “We are getting older and don’t have a lot of time left, so why not make peace and enjoy each other?” As far as I know, he never replied.