If You Knew Then What I Know Now

by Ryan Van Meter

  We’re driving to meet my parents at my grandparents’ farm so we can bury my grandfather in two days. He died of a heart attack yesterday in his nursing home, though it seems as if he’s been gone a few years now because he’d already lost his mind to Alzheimer’s. He was my father’s father, a farmer for many decades, a mandolin player in a bluegrass band, a leader in his basement church and tiny town—a lonely spot in the otherwise blank northeastern corner of Missouri’s map—and the man with the largest hands I’ve ever seen.

  My brother and I have our parents’ dog with us. They rushed up to the farm as soon as they found out about my grandfather, to be with my grandmother and help plan the visitation and funeral. Now it’s our job to bring their carsick golden retriever. My parents got this dog after I moved out, so I don’t know her very well, and she’s as nervous about riding in this truck as I am. At twenty-two, my brother still lives at home, so he knows her but doesn’t really like her. Before we left, I forced some kind of Dramamine for dogs down her throat, but when Garrett takes some of these tight curves quickly, I can still hear her whine.

  One of his phones starts ringing, so he grabs it off the dash and looks at the little lit-up screen. “It’s Mom,” he says, shoving the phone in my face so I can see her name. Just before he answers it, he clamps the antenna between his teeth and pulls it out. She’s calling to ask how much longer it will be before we get there. “Hour,” he says. “We got to get gas before long.” My brother’s voice is octaves deeper than mine. He listens another few seconds, then says, “No. One hour. Just hold your damn horses.” When he hangs up the phone, he shakes his head at me, and sighs. “Fuck.”

  On down the highway, he pulls off at an exit where we have to drive a couple of empty miles before reaching the gas station. “Why did you pick this ghost town?” I ask, glancing across the road from our station to an ancient, derelict one, bristly weeds poking through the pavement in holes where gas pumps used to sit. He gives his reliable sneer at my reliable attitude problem and gets out to pump. This is February, so cold that in two days, on the morning we all huddle at the gravesite, a record will be set for low temperatures. My dad will tell me a story about a funeral he attended as a boy in the same cemetery on a similarly grey and freezing day when it was so cold that all the men parked their cars—these were the kind that had to be cranked by hand to start—but left their engines running through the ceremony.

  Garrett opens the truck door and leans in, letting in a lot of wind, and throws two twenty-dollar bills in my lap. “Go pay,” he says.

  I pick up the twenties and lay them on his seat. “You do it,” I say. “I don’t want to go in.” Over his shoulder, inside the squat gas-station store, the cashier sits on a stool and stares at us, smoking his cigarettes and wearing one of those hunter’s caps with the bright orange that means watch out.

  My brother pinches the twenties between his fingers, waves them from one corner, and drops them back in my lap. “Don’t you have to go piss?”

  “I can wait, thanks,” I say, rolling down my window and holding my hand out, letting his bills flap in the wind as if I’m about to toss them free.

  “All right, all right,” he says, grabbing my arm and pulling it back into the cab.

  Inside the station, he stands for a couple of minutes talking to the orange-hat man—about what, I can’t imagine. Shifting from one foot to the other, his big frame swaying in front of the cashier’s counter, he scratches his red beard, laughing. While he’s in there, I undo my seatbelt and lean into the back to check for his shoes.

  Once we arrive at my grandparents’ farm, Garrett wrangles the dog while I carry in our suits, zipped together in the same garment bag, and my container of cookies. When I see my dad’s only sister and my mother, they announce they have the perfect job for me. I’m handed a booklet provided by the funeral home, and as people come by and drop off food for us, it will be my task to log in who brings what, and to affix numbered stickers to any dishes we’ll need to return. I sink into a chair at the table they’re sharing with casseroles covered in foggy cling wrap. Across the house in the living room, my father and grandmother are fixed in a wordless standoff about whether the casket should be open during the visitation and funeral. “But I don’t know any of these people,” I say. “Am I supposed to ask their names at the door?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll tell you,” my aunt says, nudging the booklet another inch closer to my elbow.

  All afternoon, my grandfather’s friends and cousins drive over the big hill on the narrow road that passes in front of the house and turn in to the white gravel driveway. The women bring food, and the men bring their loud voices. My dad has a list of six names from my grandmother, and he asks those men, one by one as they arrive throughout the day, if they would do us the favor of acting as pallbearers. They are all honored, and tell my father so. I watch all of this from my perch at the kitchen table, fussing with stickers and glass dishes, drinking cup after cup of thin, instant coffee, eavesdropping as the women talk in words almost whispered. My brother stands near the door in a clump of men from town.

  He doesn’t know them, but they all talk like they’re friends, as if my brother and not my dad was the boy who went to school and 4-H and steer shows with them, or their cousins or older brothers or fathers. They’re talking about duck hunting, which my brother has been practicing for the last couple of seasons. He would actually be hunting right now, if he weren’t with us for the funeral. He and his buddies go every weekend, standing in frigid flooded fields clutching their shotguns and drinking beer. From the kitchen, I watch my brother tell the men about his most recent outing. His long arms point to the ceiling, and he squints one eye like he’s aiming his gun. He tells about a beautiful flock of ducks that was headed his way; I imagine the huge dark V against a white sky. “But right before they’re in easy range, the wind picked up. Those birds locked their wings and in one second, they were fucking gone.” All of them shake their heads in silence; they sure know that story. Garrett thrusts his hands in his pockets, tilts back a little on his heels, and sighs. “So, no, we didn’t bag any.”

  It’s his phrase “locked their wings” that echoes over my roomful of women. Putting those words together is unfamiliar, but the image they conjure is exactly right—I’ve seen birds open out their wings straight and rigid and turn in the wind that way, like keys. This is the first time I’ve heard my brother make language do something surprising, and I smile because I know that he doesn’t realize his words are beautiful.

  On the morning of the funeral, I unzip the garment bag and lay our outfits side by side on a bed. Even just by our clothes, it’s easy to see he’s the larger one; the shoulders of his shirt spread wider than mine, and the cuffs of his pants nearly skim the wood floorboards. We change into our suits and stand in the kitchen. He’s already wearing his new coat even though we don’t have to leave for another hour. I blow on new coffee as he paces the tile floor. I can tell he’s listening to the tap of his shoes on the linoleum. He rarely wears shoes like these, which is why we had to go out before driving here and buy this pair, along with the coat. His usual shoes are work boots, and all his coats are camouflage.

  My mother joins us in the kitchen, picking off yellow threads of dog hair stuck to her. “You both look very nice,” she says. She looks a second time at my brother, handsome and serious, and tells him she loves his new coat. Instead of finishing his lap around the kitchen, he pauses and looks down at himself to admire it. That night at the men’s store, he first picked out a long, ill-fitting black one. “No, no, no,” I said, and pulled this coat, the one he loves now, off a crammed rack and told him to put it on. The deep grey was a better color for his bright orange hair and yearlong sunburnt face. “Three-quarter length is nicer,” I said, trading his choice for mine. “And long coats make you look like a mobster.” He ignored my words—he had no idea what I was talking about—but he tried on the coat and smiled. I had guessed his size, and he fit inside it perfectly
. He grinned and stared at himself in the mirror while I stood behind one of his big shoulders, only the top of my head visible, and fixed his collar.

  To Bear, To Carry: Notes on “Faggot”

  My dear friend Tom wears eye shadow. He also often pins brooches to his shirts, just a few inches to the left of his skinny antique neckties. Both of us are instructors at the same university. On the evening after our first day of classes of this semester, we drank some wine and he told me about his morning.

  “When I walked in the classroom,” he started, “And before I announced I was the teacher, one of my students called me a faggot.”

  This had always been a fear of mine, a scenario I could imagine, and one I was actually surprised hadn’t already happened. I’ve dealt with faggot for more than twenty years; I vividly remember about ten different instances of the word being used on me—and know there are more I can’t as easily recall—and I doubt a similar count for any other word is possible. I’ve imagined Tom’s classroom scenario, that is, only up to the moment when I would have to react. Tom didn’t know what to do either, so he just stared at the kid—the burly, cocky guy you’d imagine, sitting in the back corner of the room of course, tilted in his chair, his arms across his chest. Tom stared and then just introduced himself to the class, wrote his name on the blackboard, and handed out copies of his syllabus.

  “I can’t believe that’s something we really have to deal with,” I said, shaking my head, and my dear friend agreed.

  Then I asked him, “What were you wearing?”

  “This,” he said, tugging the shoulder of his cardigan, wiggling his butterfly brooch.

  “I mean, not that it matters.”

  “Right,” he said.

  Later, I was bothered by my question. What were you wearing? Because it implied that the student might have had a good reason for saying “faggot.” If Tom was dressed like one, then he was asking for it—or, if not asking, then at least his brooches and his cosmetics made the student’s word understandable, explained why. And certainly it bothered me that I was trying to justify the kid’s behavior. But what I most hated was this: even though I had asked my question in the unguarded comfort of close friends, the word had still tricked me. If only for a second, I was guilty of looking at my friend the same way I hated being looked at.

  My earliest memory of the word comes from fourth grade, when a book titled A Bundle of Sticks circulated among a group of snickering classmates. Drawn in colored pencil on the cover was a sheepish boy wearing a karate uniform, his hands clasped tightly together. I didn’t read the book back then, but I knew, because it was often talked about on the playground when no teachers were around that, somewhere in its pages, the boy in the uniform was called “faggot.”

  And actually, he was called “faggot” a couple of times; I’ve since tracked down the novel by Pat Mauser McCord, originally published in 1982. Ben Tyler, the main character, had a reputation as the boy who hated fighting—a fact that made him a good target for Boyd, the school bully. After the bully taunts him, forces him to eat mud at the bus stop and kicks the Tyler family dog, Ben uses his karate self-defense classes to stand up to Boyd. But all that comes after this early scene:The class rocked with laughter. Dennis Mathews leaned back too far and tipped his chair over. Everyone went wild, and Miss Fletcher stood up, banging on her desk with a ruler.

  Boyd pointed at Ben. “Benjamin’s a faggot. That’s why he won’t fight.”

  Ben felt heat rise into his face. He wanted to cover his ears and scream.

  Everyone in the class pointed at him and laughed, even John who had spent a weekend with the Tylers last summer and Cindy who had his name on her love list.

  Miss Fletcher then comes to Ben’s rescue by demanding that Boyd tell the room the meaning of “faggot.” When his definition (“It’s a guy who . . . you know . . . kisses other guys and stuff”) doesn’t satisfy her, the teacher sends Boyd to the class dictionary. And “faggot,” it turns out, surprising Boyd, Ben, and the rest of the class, means “a bundle of sticks.” The author doesn’t describe Miss Fletcher’s face in this pivotal moment, but I’ve imagined her smug smile, and her high-heeled shoe tapping triumphantly. As she orders Boyd back to his chair, she tells the class that any definition besides the one printed in the dictionary is slang, and therefore not appropriate.

  I don’t doubt that the author intended for that scene to educate her readers and disarm “faggot.” Probably the bigger lesson was Ben could and should karate chop straight through his metaphorical bundle and splinter the sting of name-calling into pieces. But in my fourth-grade classroom, instead of becoming a word without power, “faggot” became a word anybody could say any time without fear of retribution. Girls were called “faggot,” boys were called “faggot.” If a classmate cut in the lunch line, if one boy splashed another with water from the bathroom sink, if one kid threw out another in the daily kickball game at recess, all of them were faggots. And if our teacher or some other school adult overheard, the defense always pulled from back pockets was something like, “What’s the big deal? All I called him was a bundle of sticks?” Instead of making the word obsolete, the definition gave it cover. Objections became groundless. Because it’s so simple that even a room full of nine-year-olds could figure it out: there’s a difference between how a word is defined and what it really means.

  No coincidence then that fourth grade was also the year when I was first called “gay.” One evening after school, a classmate who lived on the next street over called me into the dark tent of trees behind our houses. Out of his slick jacket, he pulled a copy of a pornographic magazine he’d swiped from his dad’s bedroom. We crouched together in the shadows, huddling close to the edge of a creek bank, as crickets vibrated invisibly around us. On the pages he turned for the both of us, the women were naked and between their legs, quite unexpectedly, was hair. And I was so surprised by that strange secret of the female body that all I could say to my proud classmate’s grin was “Gross.” But in my one word, more meaning than I had intended was revealed. The next day at school, during a group photograph of the class, I sat in the front row with the other extremely short fourth-grade boy. As the teacher and the photographer directed us, telling us to sit or stand up straight, to scoot in closer, fix collars, and remove hands from pockets, this boy turned to me. “You’re gay, you know,” he said. “You’re gay because you think Playboy is gross.”

  I decide to go looking for “faggot” myself, to know what those voices are really saying when they snarl it, to uncover its violence inside. In the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Clarendon Press in 1989, nearly three pages are devoted to the word and its many derivatives. The word isn’t as simply defined as it was in Miss Fletcher’s fictional classroom. I scribble down some of the definitions of the noun and verb forms—surprised there’s a verb form at all.

  noun:1. A bundle of sticks, twigs, or small branches of trees bound together: a. for use as fuel.

  2.a. With special reference to the practice of burning heretics alive, esp. in phrase fire and faggot; to fry a faggot, to be burnt alive; also, to bear, carry a faggot, as those did who renounced heresy. Hence fig. the punishment itself.

  b. The embroidered figure of a faggot, which heretics who had recanted were obliged to wear on their sleeve, as an emblem of what they had merited.

  6.a. A term of abuse or contempt applied to a woman.

  b. A (male) homosexual. slang (orig. and chiefly U.S.)

  verb:1. a. To make into a faggot or faggots; to bind up in or as in a faggot.

  c. To bind (persons) in couples; also, to bind hand and foot.

  2. To fasten together bars or rods of iron preparatory to reheating or welding.

  3. To set (a person) on the faggots preparatory to burning.

  4. b. To carry or wear a faggot in token of recantation; to recant.

  The tightly-packed black columns are almost dizzying. As I stand over the book, thick and worn and split-o
pen under my eyes, just one of several volumes of the OED, I think that more than any other, this word has probably been the biggest of my life. I’ve feared it; when I’ve heard it, it’s caused the most instantaneous effect on my body, and still does—the same heat rising to my face like the character in that fourth-grade book. And it can still trick me, as it did in that conversation with my friend.

  So given my history with the word, I can’t help but read phrases like “fry a faggot” or “to set (a person) on the faggots preparatory to burning” literally. This is what I want—the threat, for the word to be dangerous and not just feel that way. And certainly it’s melodramatic, but I suddenly can’t help but consider every time I’ve been called “faggot,” and think that person wanted me burned because of who I am. But at least in this dictionary, in these uses, burning a “faggot” doesn’t mean a gay man.

  Do I reach too far into the idea of burning when I wonder about the joking expression, familiar among gay people, “a flaming queen?”

  On the shelf beside the OED is a lineup of etymological dictionaries. In one, the Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories, published by Wellington House, 1999, I find this entry for “faggot”:Middle English—Faggot was first recorded in the sense “bundle of sticks for fuel.” It comes from French fagot, from Italian fagotto, based on Greek phakelos, “bundle.” Toward the end of the 16th century, the word came to be used from dialect as an abusive term for a woman; later in the 20th century, this was applied as offensive slang in US English to a male homosexual.