by Sarah Smarsh
Mom was the only caretaker in our family who didn’t drink when I was little. I didn’t drink when I was a teenager and young adult, either. You would have had that going for you as a child—no small blessing. But even when Mom was sober, she seemed far away.
At our new brick house in the country, I tried to stay quiet and require nothing. I spent hours drawing with crayons, learning to fold towels, making myself useful. I was four and wanted Mom to hold me the way she had in an ear-piercing boutique at the mall in Wichita. I chose gold hearts and cried when the woman behind the counter shot holes into my ears like Dad’s nail gun shot holes into wood beams. Mom carried me out of the store in her arms. It’s the only time I remember her holding me.
During the long days alone, I wandered outside to find rocks and bugs in the dirt and prairie grass. Or I poked around Dad’s work garage, which had bits of lumber on the floor and big metal saws plugged into extension cords. One day I found a new litter of kittens under the pegboard tool wall.
Mom said not to touch them because the mama cat would smell my scent and stop caring for them. This was agonizing for me. I saw myself as the protector of every baby animal born on our land. The cat was their mother, but I had seen many cats die violent deaths—mangled by hungry coyotes, chopped up when they found warmth under a car hood and someone turned the engine, shot from the road by some boy with a BB gun. I felt the metal shot lodged under the fur and wept.
As for cows, pigs, and chickens, the men were in charge of killing them, and I gratefully ate them. But while they were alive I fed and loved them. I watched them come out of their mothers as pink globs on the March snow and knew their mothers could only do so much.
To reach the kittens, I entered the work garage, which smelled like oil and sawdust. Dad had constructed the outbuilding where our trailer used to sit. I stepped around big circular blades and sawhorses as tall as I was, and crouched in the fine peels of wood that Dad hadn’t yet swept with his push broom. I peered into the shadowy space under a shelf, boxed in by tools, where the mama cat kept her litter. They were tiny balls of squeaking fur coiled up like the roly polies in the soil near the house where Mom had planted tulip bulbs. I longed to pet them but remembered Mom’s warning.
During one of my visits, the mama cat was gone hunting. The kittens seemed to be sleeping. I agonized again over whether to touch them. I’d watched them open their eyes for the first time, take their first steps with tiny tails stuck straight out and trembling. I decided that the mama cat knew me well enough to keep on nursing her babies whether my scent was on them or not.
I reached out and patted a furry head. The head rolled away from the small body, leaving a track of blood on the concrete floor. I felt a wave of heat rush through me as I realized that none of the kittens was moving.
Dad sometimes brought home big bleeding deer, pheasant, or quail, and peeled their skins off the muscle on the cement slab next to our front door. I wasn’t scared of blood, but this blood was different: A baby bled out, and it hadn’t even been eaten. When I looked closer in the dark space, I saw that all the kittens had been gnawed through at the neck. I heard a cry and turned to see the mama cat pacing behind me, out of her mind with confusion and grief.
I reported the event to my parents.
“A possum or a fox got ’em,” Dad offered.
That was the hard truth of the wild place we lived: Parents left their children by necessity to hunt for food so they wouldn’t starve to death, but those moments without protection offered plenty other ways to die.
The world was at once wondrous and lethal. The thunderstorms and funnel clouds that menaced us each spring and summer came from the most mesmerizing, sweet-smelling sky. The rare gray wolf with whom I loved to lock eyes at the edge of our land would hunt and kill the pets I also loved.
Along with the freedom and the space, that is a blessing you would have received from the feral way that children among us lived: seeing blood every day on a kitten’s neck, a father’s hand, the ground beneath a slaughtered hog hanging from a hook. Knowing in your own bones how fragile and fleeting a body is.
Our stretch of southern Kansas could be mapped by the Catholic saints that dotted the flat farmland as the names of churches and towns. He’s from St. Joe, someone would say. Turn before you get to St. Louis. We’re taking the pies up to the funeral at St. Vincent.
Ours was St. Rose, a parish located in Mount Vernon, which was homesteaded by Germans in 1870. By 1911, the place had a church with a steeple and a tiny Catholic schoolhouse. The priest’s house during my childhood was where nuns lived in the early days. Three members of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother staffed the school, which my dad and all his siblings attended.
The church was the main community pillar for miles. When a June thunderstorm destroyed it with a bolt of lightning in 1921, the country Catholics rallied to rebuild and dedicated the new structure by the end of the summer. Like Saint Rose, a Peruvian woman who built a grotto with her own hands to pray in, our churches were things we literally built. When I was a teenager, my dad would help pour the concrete for the new baptismal pool at Wichita’s grand Gothic downtown cathedral.
That is where his mother had gone to high school during the Dust Bowl. Teresa was raised on a vegetable farm south of Wichita, but as a teenager she moved in with a well-off family in town—cleaning their house, watching their kids, in exchange for room and board—so that she could attend high school. After graduation, she went to what they called secretary school. But she soon met a farmer with black hair named Nick, whom everyone called Chic. They married at nearby St. Anthony’s. That was the end of her professional plans.
Chic was the sort of man who threw parties and made people laugh. During Prohibition, he made runs to the hidden stills of the Missouri Ozarks as a bootlegger, according to family—a story I’m inclined to believe because I didn’t hear it until he’d been dead for thirty years. His parents gave him his nickname when as a little boy he tried to say a word for their ancestry: “Czech.”
Chic and Teresa’s wedding dance was in the country at Mount Vernon, where Chic’s people were farmers and where Teresa would spend the rest of her life. All six of their children were baptized and had their first confession and communion at St. Rose, the Kansas wind whipping their skirts and ties after church. Three of them, including my dad, got married there.
In 1949, Grandpa Chic was commissioned to lead renovation of the St. Rose school. Church records say that parishioners did all the labor except furnace installation, keeping the cost down to $15,000. There was, from my observation in that community, a deeper bond through labor than through vaguely understood dogma. The Catholics I grew up with went to Mass every Sunday but were more concerned with saving money than with saving anyone’s soul.
In fact, they were wild partiers. In Chic and Teresa’s day, when the community still held the annual Labor Day picnic in the field across the road from St. Rose, they put beer in a big metal stock tank that usually watered cattle. They got drunk and ate homemade sausage, freshly ground outside Chic and Teresa’s farmhouse. Grandma Teresa was always in charge of the pies since she bested the other women with her meticulous baking skills, but come party time the women showed up and hit the hooch, too. Some years, Grandpa Chic hammered together a wooden platform on the pasture to use as a dance floor. I don’t know where the music came from—a Ford with the door hanging open and the radio turned up, maybe, or a real band—but they swing-danced right there on the prairie under the stars.
Since my dad was born on Labor Day, Chic and Teresa must have missed the picnic fun that year, 1955. Around that time, Chic and his brothers worked on the church again, this time rebuilding the steeple. Nick thus grew up praying to a heavenly father in a church whose steeple had been constructed by his actual dad. His big sister Jeanette was the religion teacher.
In 1966, though, when the state dug the reservoir that I grew up next to, t
he new water supply cut off access to St. Rose for farm kids to the north. Without them keeping enrollment up, the school closed. Dad finished grade school in Cheney about ten miles south, where I’d attend kindergarten through third grade. But Mount Vernon and its church called St. Rose remained our community touchstones, imparting a sense that we were connected in body, land, and soul.
The year I was born, Grandpa Chic carved a new communion rail from a walnut tree on his and Grandma Teresa’s property and installed it at the edge of the church altar before my baptism. As a child, I knelt at it many times with the same fervent prayer I carried everywhere: that my family would be okay.
The inside of the church was decorated with images of blood, reflecting what life had taught us about our bodies. While we knelt in our pews, the Stations of the Cross encircled us—images of Jesus dragging his own torture device like a plow above the stained-glass windows my carpenter grandpa had replaced. Behind the altar hung the crucified Jesus, whose skin had been whitened to match ours. Near one of the rear pews, a small Pietà replica, perhaps ordered from some church-supply catalog in the 1920s, represented a mother’s sorrow.
That same imagery existed in the richest Roman Catholic parish, of course. But what we found on the crucifix was not a metaphorical suffering represented by the body. We found the body itself. Dad knelt and prayed next to me, his cologne mixing with the priest’s incense, his folded hands scabbed where real nails had pierced the skin when his hammer slipped.
All the genuflecting was hard on old farmers’ knees, but they did it without complaint. People were not enjoying themselves, that was plain to see.
Our severe, old-fashioned priest didn’t like that my mom let me wear pants and a tie to Sunday school. At Mass, his liturgy focused on sin.
But I loved going to church. As in hospitals, everyone was quiet and talking to God. It was a similar feeling to when I talked with you. I felt like you were the force that makes something alive, and even when I prayed Catholic prayers I was sensing you on the other end of them.
In a different Christian church, some Protestants were concerned with the idea of being born again. But my church rarely talked about such a joyful notion. Our fixation was on the sacrifice, the death, the martyrdom. Before communion, the priest spoke Jesus’s words: “This is my body, which will be given up for you.” It was an idea we understood.
My first memory of dancing is to Mom’s 45 rpm single of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” spinning in the family room, the beat constant and fast like an engine’s pistons. The song is full of metaphors about longing, but I recognized the lyrics as literal things: the dull knife, big and shining, that tore the hide off a buck or a bumper sticker off a car bought used. The sweaty sheets of summer nights without air-conditioning, without sleep. The freight trains that moved through Kansas, unable to stop in time if something got stuck on the tracks. The intentional fire, controlled on the prairie, that glowed around us through the night and put ash in the air when farmers burned off stubble to wipe the slate of their cropland clean.
There is a notion of safety about childhood I’ve noted in my friends, the comfort they feel when they “go home” to sleep in a childhood bedroom under the same roof as their parents, which some children never know. It’s what I would have wanted for you, but it’s so hard for poor parents to give it—because they don’t have safety themselves.
Every moment of my childhood required vigilance. I felt true rest only when I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer and collapsed into deep sleep. As the child passenger in cars, I always felt like I was the one in charge of keeping the car on the road. Living in the country meant a lot of time on highways between here and there; I’d watch out the car window in a state of constant prayer and commune with the country sky. I wanted to lie down across the backseat and go to sleep, but I had to focus, to assert some control on the situation through my awareness. If I didn’t, I thought, Dad would fall asleep at the wheel due to exhaustion from the long workweek, or Mom would drop her cigarette and bend to pick it up as we swerved into a ditch at top speed, or a drunk aunt would fail to stop at an intersection.
It was not an irrational concern. I couldn’t list the number of wrecks I was in as a kid. Over beers, my family could map a rough timeline of their existence by car crashes and who was in them: “No, that’s the time it was on the bridge over the crick.” “You got that right, but it was a Buick, not a Lincoln.” “Yes, Candy was a baby.” “Was that the one where Jeannie was reading in a horse trailer and the hitch broke and it flipped into the ditch, or the one when the old woman come flying through the intersection by the mall?”
Getting to and from school amounted to the same trouble because of our rural location. I was in three school bus wrecks by the time I finished high school; each time the bus tipped over into a muddy or snowy ditch on account of bad rural roads and hard Kansas weather. So I prayed and stayed vigilant on school buses, too.
One September afternoon at the start of second grade, at the end of the long school bus ride from the small town into the country, I saw a huge flame near my house. The bus driver was dropping me off at Grandma Teresa’s a half mile to the south, as she often did since my parents worked. I saw the fire through the bus window. I ran down the rubber aisle, down the big steps with my bag, down the dirt road as fast as I could. I ran toward the fire as though I alone was going to put it out and save everyone in it. I got halfway down our driveway, which stretched a quarter mile from the dirt road, and saw with relief that it was our pole barn, not our house, that was burning.
Grandpa Chic had insisted they burn off some of the tall grass between the barn and the pond. Chic was an old man by then but still as cocky as when he was a young bootlegger. He was so cavalier about setting blazes to burn off fields or trash piles that Dad liked to joke he was a pyromaniac. That day, the wind wasn’t on their side.
When the fire got ahold of a small bit of the barn close to the ground, Chic took an axe to the metal wall. That just gave the fire oxygen, and the flame roared all the way up the side of the barn.
When I got there, out of breath with ash in my hair, Dad and Grandpa Chic stood next to the fire with unimpressed faces as crisp pieces of the barn rained out of the sky.
The fire itself didn’t scare them. They put their bodies on the line every day at work dangling from roof joists, operating giant electric saws, wearing plastic hard hats while bricks rained down from demolition projects. A shed blazing right next to our house was nothing to get excited about in terms of personal safety.
The pole barn on fire, though, was one of Dad’s proudest feats of construction. He had framed the barn with wood he salvaged from the 1910 high school that Kingman had torn down to build a new one. He had spent $400 on new tin for its sides and roof. It was a lovely thing to him, a symbol of his hard work and skills. And inside it rested his Massey Harris combine, a farmer’s biggest equipment investment. The Massey was a beautiful machine from the 1940s that he had bought at an auction in Pretty Prairie for $300. It worked better than his dad’s combine or his older brother’s down the road.
“It ran like a sewing machine,” Dad recalled with a sad look, many years later.
He ran inside the burning barn and started the combine. Its tires were on fire as he backed it out onto the gravel between our house and the barn. He couldn’t stop the flames from taking the whole machine, though.
Dad’s shed and farming equipment weren’t insured. He wasn’t alone in railing against the insurance industry, whether agriculture or home or auto or health or life.
“Insurance is criminal,” he would say. “One hundred percent rip-off.” Everyone would nod.
We got a lucky break with the pole barn, though. The insurance agent said it was covered by the homeowner’s policy in Mom’s name. On the claim form, Dad listed what had been lost and added a few things that weren’t in the fire for good measure.
But
that was the beginning of a string of much worse fortune. Since Dad no longer had equipment to work what we called “the hill,” a stretch of red jaw east of the lake that needed torn up with a plow, Grandpa Chic paid one of my uncles to do it instead. Meanwhile, home-loan interest rates had skyrocketed to almost 20 percent.
“That meant no one was calling Chicky or Nicky to build a house,” Dad told me.
So Dad had to find some other way to make money. He did roof work with his oldest brother for a while; a hailstorm had hit Hutchinson that summer, and a lot of shingles needed torn off. Uncle Gary would pick him up in his Toyota Land Cruiser with a trailer behind it. But that work was temporary.
Meanwhile, Grandpa Chic was getting old. All his sons had inherited carpentry, but he had always been in charge. It was unsure whether the brothers would stick together after he died.
“Holy shit,” Dad remembered thinking. “Smarsh Brothers Construction is going tits up.” Between the loss of his farming equipment and the slowed demand for carpenters, he needed to find employment outside the family business for the first time in his life.
In the fall of 1987, at age thirty-two, he applied for a job managing the tear-off of factory roofs at Boeing in Wichita. They asked how much he wanted per hour. He said $18.
“That’s pretty high,” the Boeing guy said.
“And I’m pretty good,” Dad replied. He lied and said he’d been in charge of twenty-five men before, that he had driven a semi, that he knew all the lingo the man was using.
It was a night job, so as not to interfere with the factory’s daily functions. Each sawtooth roof was a forty-yard length of ridges, one side a steep pitch of glass letting light in for the airplane factory workers. Alone, Dad designed and built a rail track across the enormous jagged roofs to move the torn-off pieces. Once his crew showed up, they climbed a forty-foot ladder with no backstop in the darkness, stepping carefully across frost. When the crew left at 8 a.m., Dad still had to drive a semi full of tear-off to the dump. He often fell asleep while driving.