Calling Home

by Janna McMahan

  One by one, students flowed across the stage to accept diplomas. Some made funny faces, one turned a cartwheel, a couple stumbled down the stairs in their high heels. Once the group had reassembled in full in their seats, the president of the school board pronounced them graduated and everyone raced to the fellowship hall to scarf down an enormous spread of food provided by Central Christian’s women’s group.

  Shannon stood with her parents, accepting congratulations and posing for pictures.

  “Excuse me.” It was the reporter.

  Shannon was hesitant, but she could see no camera in sight.

  “I just wanted to say,” the reporter said. “You did a fantastic job up there and you should really think about a career in journalism. If you can get up there and do that great when you’re just in high school, you’d make a swell newscaster.”

  “Thank you,” Shannon said. “That’s really something to consider.”

  The woman walked away and Roger gave her a hearty hug and said, “That was one hell of a speech there, young lady.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I got something I want to show you.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s outside.”

  She followed her parents to the crowded parking lot behind the church where students shrieked with joy. Cars were tearing out, on the way to the field party that Shannon wouldn’t attend this night, and she realized that she hadn’t thought about the party, nor did she care.

  “No peeking.” Her father had his hands over her eyes. “Okay, now you can look.”

  The old truck was painted a bright red with black stripes down the side. The body had been mended, and there were new tires and the dirty wheels had been scrubbed until they gleamed. Inside, the bench seat was covered with new material and the dash had been cleaned and shined.

  “Oh, Daddy!” Shannon said. “Momma!”

  “Don’t look at me,” Virginia said. “I had nothing to do with this.”

  Her father had a goofy grin. Shannon flung her arms around his neck.

  “Sorry it took me so long, but I painted it myself,” he said. “It had some pretty bad dents and the front bumper was torn off, but the engine wasn’t damaged. I got a tune-up for you and now she purrs like a kitten.”

  “This is the best graduation present ever!”

  “I got the old seat belt fixed, too. Promise me you’ll wear it.”

  “I promise.”

  “Climb on in,” he said.

  The door didn’t creak like it had but opened smoothly. Shannon slid up onto the seat and ran her hands over the clean interior.

  “It ain’t much,” Roger said. “But a college girl’s got to have some wheels. She’s Hilltopper red. Need me to give you a lesson on how to pump your brakes on snow and ice?”

  “Very funny,” Shannon said. “No, I think I can manage.”

  “Well.”

  “It’s absolutely perfect,” Shannon said. “You even got rid of the deer and fish decals. Thank you. Thank you both. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Say you’ll be careful,” her mother said.

  36

  William Daniel Lemmons was pushed and pulled into life on the last day of July. It was an easy delivery and Shannon spent only two days in the hospital. She stood for hours staring down at Daniel in the bassinet, his tiny fists jerking as if he were continually frightened. He had a pale cap of wispy hair the color of driftwood and the bluest blue eyes. Shannon had heard that all newborns had blue eyes, but Virginia said they were Lemmons eyes. Shannon tried to determine if she felt like a mother in any way, but she finally concluded that she felt nothing. She didn’t hate him, but she didn’t love him either. Mostly she just felt sorry for him because her mother was right, he was just another victim of life’s unpredictable turns. She wasn’t drawn to him as her mother obviously was. Virginia had gotten up with the baby every night because she didn’t want Shannon to get attached. If Daniel cried, her mother breezed into Will’s old room, now the baby’s room, and scooped him up before Shannon even recognized the sound. It made Shannon wonder if she would ever make a good mother.

  It was pleasant that summer—no heat wave, no mosquitoes, no bad storms—as if nature were trying to placate the town for the horrors it had inflicted earlier in the year. Virginia was outside potting sticky geraniums. She had spent the summer training climbing roses up a trellis at the side of the porch and hanging swinging baskets of droopy, multicolored petunias. Shannon realized that this was probably the first time in her mother’s life that she had been released from work so she could putter.

  The baby was in the bassinet on the porch, and every few minutes Virginia checked on him. Shannon stood inside the front screen door (her father had finally replaced the cracked storm door) and watched her. Virginia removed her gardening gloves and leaned down to lift Daniel. She sat in the swing and talked softly to her grandson. The little boy would probably grow up considering his grandmother his mother, not an unusual thing in this town. Shannon would be long gone before the boy’s memory kicked in, and she would seem only a vaguely interested older sister to him. Shannon dragged the big suitcase out onto the porch.

  “I’m going now, Momma.”

  “Come kiss me good-bye.”

  Shannon kissed her mother and then she bent to touch her lips to the baby’s head. She meant to whisper, “’Bye, Danny,” but caught herself. She knew her mother would never let him be called Danny.

  “Drive careful,” her mother said.

  The suitcase thumped down the steps and made a loud thud when it hit the truck bed. Down the road a ways, she pulled over on the shoulder behind her father’s Trans Am. She climbed a fence and walked the field, ignoring briars that picked at her legs. Her cotton shirt made her slightly sunburned shoulders tingle. She touched the rubber band that held her shorts together in front and wondered how much longer before her clothes would fit again.

  Her father leaned back against a tree at the edge of the field.

  “Hey, Daddy. I came to say good-bye.”

  He put a finger to his lips and softly said, “Shhh, come here and sit with me a while. I just let my little birds go.”

  Shannon lowered herself onto a thick root next to him. One half of the callback cage held a dozen nearly grown quail. From the open half, another dozen birds made their way into the grass with short, tentative quail strides. They stepped, stopped to look around as if they would be eaten at any moment, then they stepped again, stopped again. Their tiny twitching heads were now showing the black and white stripes that distinguished males. The females were a honeyed brown, and both sexes had mottled black spots against white breasts.

  “Too bad you’ll miss hearing them get called back tonight,” he whispered. “That’s the sweetest sound in the world. Usually males call and females answer.”

  “That’s the way things go. The men make a little noise and the women come running.”

  He grunted and smiled. “That may be, but seems you’re bucking that trend.”

  “You bet.”

  “Maybe Kerry ain’t the one for you, but someday the right man’ll come along. Don’t be scared to love him. That’s always been your momma’s problem. She thinks she doesn’t deserve love, so she’s loath to give it.” Shannon knew people said that Roger came crawling back, had begged Virginia to let him come home, but her father had returned on his own terms and Shannon would never be sure exactly why.

  The birds faded into the tall grass. One moment they were there, the next, gone. The luckless ones left behind in the cage made a sad culling sound and then forgot about their friends and went to pecking in the grain feeder and walking through the water trough.

  “I really appreciate you and Momma taking Daniel.”

  “Don’t think a thing about it. Go study your ass off and become something. Nothing would tickle your momma more.”

  “I feel guilty about this. With Will and me gone, she could have started classes at the college. She always said she want
ed to.”

  “Your momma talks a big game, like all the things she’d do if everybody else didn’t prevent her, but when it comes down to it, she likes being needed. She’s big on family, even if she doesn’t show it all the time.”

  “Momma said I shouldn’t come back until Thanksgiving. That if I started coming home every weekend I wouldn’t stick with school.”

  “That’s wise. It’s like those little birds there. They go flying off, but when they hear the others calling them they realize they’re lonesome and they come back and walk on into the cage without a second thought. Voluntarily trap themselves all over again.”

  “Seems dumb.”

  “It does. But people do it all the time too. Lot of kids go off to college, but they don’t last. They get homesick. They start coming home all the time, pretty soon they don’t go back. So, don’t you be like those birds. Don’t you come home. Not till you’re good and ready.”

  Shannon leaned against the pecan tree. Nuts rattled down to a listless bounce on the ground. She and Will learned young how to crack nuts with a hammer, to tap just enough to split the shells but not crush the meat. She smiled, remembering dropping the hammer on her toe, her father drilling her nail to release blood throbbing under the surface. The rest of the summer she ran around barefooted with a black toenail.

  Shannon brushed leaves from her legs when she stood. She bent to kiss her father, letting her lips linger on his head for a moment longer than usual. “’Bye, Daddy.”

  Along the winding roads, blackberry brambles exploded from tar-painted fence rows. Hay was sheared away, leaving unbroken streaks as if a giant comb had raked the soft hills. Tobacco stood strong and needed topping. Shannon drove around to the back side of the Rucker farm and up the skinny gravel drive toward Kerry’s house. A solid crop of waist-high soybeans stood ready to be harvested in the far field. Kerry was out with his father and Dave. Shannon bounced on the wide bench seat as she crossed the field to where the men stood fitting a grain header on a combine. Kerry took off his gloves and walked toward the truck.

  “Hey,” he said as he leaned in the window.

  “Hey, yourself. How’s it going?”

  “Can’t complain. Looks like I might get thirty-five to forty bushels per acre. I’ll see when I take it to the grain elevator.”

  “What do they use soybeans for? Hippie food? Tofu?”

  “Not this kind. They make oil out of it and animal feed.”

  “I hope you make a killing. I just wanted to say good-bye. I’m leaving now.”

  “Well, I guess this is it then.”

  “I know.”

  “Funny. This isn’t how I pictured us turning out. Well, have a nice life.”

  She started the truck. “Silly. It’s not like I won’t be back.”

  “Yeah, but you’ll change. You’ll be a little more changed every time you come back.”

  “That’s the plan, I guess.”

  “I got a word for you and that little book you’re always scribbling in,” he said. “Senescence. Know what that means?”

  “Nope.”

  “It means maturity. The crop’s flowering and ready to mature for harvest. That what you’re doing? Going off to flower and mature?”

  She grinned. “’Bye, Kerry.”

  He thumped a hollow good-bye on the wheel well of the truck as she pulled away. In the side mirror she saw him raise his hand to her. She did the same.

  Instead of driving straight out of town, Shannon went by Miller Park. Families were cheering on their Little Leaguers. Gangly-legged girls straddled banana-seat bicycles in the parking lot. Along Lebanon Avenue, children bounced on trampolines in backyards while men rode lawn mowers in closing circles in front of their fancy homes. Buildings along Main were standing strong; only a few signs like the occasional pockmark of hail damage told of the storm that had twisted the guts from this place. Scars were healing. Before long it would be impossible to tell anything had been amiss.

  Half an hour later, hills that muscled the sides of the road began to open up. When Shannon hit a rise she could see giant sinkholes in pastures, a sign that this region was riddled with caves. She thought about her last school trip to Mammoth Cave and the pale cave crawdads with their milky, useless eyes, like the chalky eyeballs of Will’s mounted fish on the seat next to her. The truck droned along and wind tugged her curls out the window. She found an old eight-track with a heat-wrinkled label and shoved it into the tape deck. “Free Bird” came on, distorted and wavy, but soon the vocals straightened out and guitars came on mellow and strong.

  Please turn the page for a very special

  interview with Janna McMahan!

  Do any situations or characters in Calling Home have basis in real life?

  I grew up in a town similar to Falling Rock, peopled with personalities reflected in my novel. I will take a fragment of someone’s speech or the way they act and use it to flesh out a fictional person. I’ve written about drug dealers, gay thespians, unwed mothers, nursing home residents, university presidents, prison inmates, people who cross picket lines, and a flurry of other characters. All are imagined, but they may have the mannerisms or job or hairstyle of someone I know.

  As far as situations go, I used experiences I had in my hometown for this novel. I actually ran a boat dock restaurant and store one summer during college. I was a high school speech champion. My parents did work in an underwear factory. Our town was devastated by a tornado in the early 1970s and it made a huge impression on me. I’m still hyperaware of tornado warnings.

  What about the concert scene in Lexington? Did you go to concerts in high school?

  I rocked out. I couldn’t name all the bands I’ve seen, but a road trip in high school was the ultimate fun. Do you remember when it was a huge deal to come to school the next day wearing your concert T-shirt? It still smelled like ink, but it made you feel like a rock star for a day. I went to college in Lexington when Rupp Arena opened. At the time, it was the largest indoor arena in the country and it seemed as if there was a concert every week. I listened to what we now consider classic rock, but I got caught up in punk and new wave when I hit college. I love the spectacle of live music. Music was one of the few things that linked me to the world outside of my town. I was even a disk jockey in high school. It was fun to revisit the music of the late 1970s for this story.

  In the beginning of Calling Home, Virginia seems like an unbearably angry person and Roger seems an insufferable lazy ne’er-do-well. By the end, we have a very different attitude toward these characters.

  It’s easy to dislike a man who runs out on his family. But it’s also true that the human heart can only take so much before it builds a wall, something hard to buffer the hurt. That’s what Roger was doing. He’d tried, in his own way, to be as loyal and comforting as he could, but it simply wasn’t enough for Virginia.

  On the other side of the equation we have Virginia, a controlling woman with expectations of constant disappointment, particularly when it comes to Roger. Did she ever give him a fair chance? No, I don’t think so. Will she change her ways toward Roger? Only time will tell. But at least by the end we understand her better, too. Her actions, although unpleasant, are not unwarranted. She’s human and she’s hurt. Her way of coping is by keeping real love at a distance, even though it’s what she needs most.

  Each chapter is from a different character’s point of view. Why did you write the story this way?

  I liken this writing approach to how life really is. You can hear the same story from four different people and each person will give you his or her take on things. Usually none of the stories agree perfectly, so that leaves it up to you to decide which version is most valid. I wanted readers to have insight into the motives of each character, to weigh different perspectives in order to understand why a character made a certain decision. People have reasons for every decision they make, even the bad ones.

  The story is about being human, about making mistakes. It’s also about
family and forgiveness.

  The Lemmons family may be a dysfunctional bunch, but they have a strong sense of what it means to be a family. They may lie or sneak around, maybe they hold grudges or lash out when things get tough, but ultimately they come together again. They know you can always go home. Families know all the ugliness and they still are places of refuge and comfort. I loved writing about the quail and how they call each other back to the covey at the end of the day. They huddle for comfort. They need each other so much that they voluntarily walk into the callback cage and entrap themselves again.

  This story is about sacrifice on a grand scale. Roger sacrifices happiness for love. Virginia gives up the possibility of love for control. Eventually, Virginia redeems herself by taking her daughter’s child as her own. That speaks volumes about who she truly is in her heart.

  That’s right. Virginia is not a bad person. She’s a wounded soul. And above all she’s a mother. A mother’s love is one of the strongest forces of nature.

  And yet Shannon doesn’t take to the idea of motherhood. She seems so driven by her own goals that it makes her somewhat unsympathetic at times.

  No person is sympathetic all the time. Shannon is still a child, and to children the world revolves around them. Men who read my story sometimes don’t like Shannon. I think they believe she should have an epiphany where she embraces motherhood, but women who read the book understand Shannon’s fear and desperation. Children dominate a mother’s life for decades, and still, women rarely walk away from the responsibility. Being a good parent is work and cannot be taken lightly. It is the most intense life experience on a variety of levels and not something that most teenagers are equipped to handle. Shannon runs away from her baby. That may not be pretty, but it is realistic.