In the corner, I found the correct drain that led to the septic tank. I removed the cap of a black marker, its sharp scent momentarily overpowering the mold. In my life I’ve written over ten million words, but never before on a wall. If Dad found out, he wouldn’t like it, and I’d get in trouble. In large letters I wrote “Clean-Out Drain” with an arrow pointing down.
At the foot of the steps, I glanced around the muddy basement one more time. I’d spent a lot of time down here, especially during winter, when school was canceled from snow. Now it was full of old Tupperware, empty beer bottles, and rotting wood. A rusty metal shelf held canned food that had expanded, the paper labels chewed by mice. I remembered killing a snake in a corner, then setting mousetraps for months.
Sonny had done a good job. He’d emptied the basement with more efficiency than the doctors had drained fluid from my father. Briefly, I imagined Sonny as a doctor—his bedside manner was gentle, and he’d have a nurse to retrieve tools instead of me.
I went outside in the chilly darkness. The rain had quit. Water dripped from leaves. An owl moaned along the ridge. The storm had cleared the sky, revealing the same swath of stars I looked at as a child. I listened intently. It occurred to me that the silence I heard was the sound of dirt.
Chapter Four
THE DOCTOR diagnosed my father with alcohol-induced cirrhosis and gave him six months to live. I arranged for a man to build a wheelchair ramp next to the driveway. I was proud of myself. I couldn’t help my father, but I could make it easy for him to get in and out of the house. He came home and returned to his chair. I went back to Mississippi.
The past decade had been difficult for me, beginning with the blow of divorce. Instead of writing, I’d devoted myself to my sons: shopping, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and driving them around. A few years later I married Melissa Ginsburg, a poet from Texas, and soon faced a fresh dilemma: My teenage sons wanted to go to college, and I was broke and unemployed. To finance their education, I taught myself screenwriting and worked on three television shows, True Blood, Weeds, and Treme. Hollywood was a world into which I never fully fit, beginning with my fear of driving in Los Angeles. Still, I blundered along, doing my best, living in hotels and furnished apartments for a few months at a time. I stayed focused on my plan—get the money and get out. After my sons went to college, I took a permanent position at the University of Mississippi and rented an old house seven miles from town.
The first summer in Mississippi, before Dad got sick, I drove home to see my parents, the only time in my life I visited them alone. Prior to that, other family members had been present, or my wife and sons had accompanied me. I stayed in Morehead at a motel on the interstate because Dad made it clear that I was welcome only after four o’clock in the afternoon. He implied that it was related to his work, since he was still writing, but the timing turned out to revolve around his schedule for drinking. Dad told me he was the happiest man in the world. The only complaint he had was the weekends, because Mom was in the house. They got along fine, that wasn’t the problem. Her presence interfered with his solitude, as did my visit.
Six months later he was dying, and I called regularly. He had already survived a massive heart attack, two minor strokes, and numerous lesser ailments. A smoker for forty years, he was permanently tethered to an oxygen tank for COPD. Dad always believed he’d die young, as his own father had. He was surprised to make it to age forty-five, then fifty, sixty, seventy, and seventy-five. Now his body was running down. In the last month of his illness, Dad knew death was near. He fell asleep on the phone, woke up, repeated what he’d just said, and was angry for doing so. An escalation of the pattern rankled him.
“I think, son, it’s the beginning of the end.”
“Might be,” I said.
“Probably is.”
“Probably so.”
“Maybe not,” he said.
The conversation contained a familiar tinge of conflict, and I resolved to go along with anything he said. In the end, death reduced every dispute to a draw.
He talked of his childhood, of the farm his father fought to save in the Depression, and how the land went to Uncle Johnny.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“My father’s brother.”
“You never talked about him.”
“Why would I? He got the farm. He never worked it. Dad and I did, but Uncle Johnny got it. I never saw him again.”
“What was he like?”
“Why do you care about him? I’m dying, not him.”
He had a point, a good one. But it was astonishing to hear about a relative I’d never met. Uncle Johnny’s grandsons would be close to my age. I wondered if they knew about our family, about me.
“I’m not afraid of this,” Dad said. “I don’t want you to think I’m trying to put on a fake front. I’m really not. If the pain gets bad, I’ve got a half a bottle of Percocet hidden. I’ll take them with whiskey. If the pain gets bad.”
“I understand.”
“Your mother knows. I told her.”
“It’s a backup plan,” I said. “Doesn’t mean you’ll do it.”
There was a long gap in our conversation. He spoke again.
“It surprises me that I’m not afraid. I had a pretty good run. Now I’ll find out if there really is an afterlife. Or if it’s just a long rest that I won’t know about. It’s hard to think of the world without me being in it.”
There are times in people’s lives when a significant event occurs and they’re not aware of it—the last time you pick up a son before he’s too heavy, the final kiss of a marriage gone bad, the view of a beloved landscape you’ll never see again. Weeks later, I realized those were Dad’s last words to me.
The day he died, I drove home a final time. The highway unfurled before me as if the car were a time capsule bent on depositing me in the past. I didn’t like how I felt because I didn’t feel anything. I hadn’t cried. I was aware solely of the burden of responsibility—firstborn, eldest son, head of the family.
Dad’s mother died in 1984. He was fifty years old, had outlived both his parents. The sense of feeling orphaned led him to address his own mortality by composing a legal will, which he sent to my siblings and me. The terms were simple—everything went to Mom. If they died together, the rest of us split the estate equally four ways.
Included with the will was a long meandering letter that referred to silver and gold hidden in the house. For two pages he discussed his relationship with the first Macintosh computer on the market, delighted at his own skill at modifying fonts and learning to program it on his own. He closed with instructions that he’d appointed me to deal with the contents of his office.
On you Chris, I decided, this task and onus must fall—and I’m telling the others this without the reason. The examination of the office and disposal of its contents is totally up to Christopher J. Offutt, and this is oh-fficial.
In a separate envelope with a return address of General Douglas MacArthur, Dad sent me a secret will that furthered the details of the public version. He included instructions about his porn, where it was hidden and what to do with it. An accompanying letter expressed his reasons for not involving my siblings—he evaluated each in a petty manner and found them all lacking. I immediately wrote to my brother and sisters, offering a copy of the secret will to alleviate any concern that I might be receiving special favor. They demurred, already bored by porn and weary of his secrecy.
The secret will explained Dad’s long interest in pornography. The major difference between his own books and current writers was attitude:
They obviously dislike women, or worse, and I’ve always been crazy about ’em. I am not a sadist: I have sadistic tendencies. That difference is enormous.
He expressed his preference for porn from the Victorian era and his reverence for the Marquis de Sade, who wrote detailed sexual fantasies while in prison. Dad lamented recent changes in the marketplace while firmly affixing his own status:
I was The Class Operator in that field, Christopher J.,& there will be no successor.
The letter ends with a fierce exhortation that I not cross him up by getting killed. If so, he’d have to come barrelling up to my Boston apartment and try to find this very letter.
I’d become accustomed to unusual letters from Dad. Often they carried the signature of “John Cleve.” The name began as a pseudonym for porn but developed into a full persona when I was a child. Cleve’s signature differed greatly from the others. It was less formal, with joyously looping letters that ended in a circle with an arrow—the symbol for being male, the planet Mars, and the chemical element of iron. Letters from John Cleve were filled with provocative comments about women, ebullient use of punctuation, and humorous wordplay.
In later years, I received an occasional missive signed by Turk Winter, the persona who eventually replaced John Cleve. Turk’s signature was equally stylized, with a horizontal line that crossed both T’s and flared upward. There was an intensity to the smallness of the signature, the individual letters legible and terse.
Though I searched the letters for clues, I could never quite discern a reason for the differing signatures. It didn’t seem related to content. I concluded that it was the personality he was embodying, or perhaps that embodied him. After I left home, the varying signatures were the first indication I had that explained my father’s drastic and sudden shifts in mood when I was a child. Arbitrary rules changed abruptly, with swift consequences for breaking them. It’s possible that each persona viewed his domain with different expectations and decrees. None of us knew whom we were dealing with at any given moment.
Of nearly two hundred letters I received from my father, only one was unsigned—the one that accompanied the secret will. The absence of authorial attribution lent greater credence to the document. I believed that it came from the core of my father’s personality, not a role or persona.
I’ve never been certain why he granted control of his legacy to me. I suspect he wanted someone to know of his prodigious output, the wide-ranging velocity of his mind. At the time he wrote the secret will, we had been at odds for over a decade. It bothered both of us, and we didn’t know how to overcome the distance, blaming each other, ensuring hostility through the steady maintenance of old wounds. Attack and counterattack, intimidate and ignore. We raised the art of veiled criticism to its finest sophistication and talked against the other within the family.
Because my father made it abundantly clear that he might die at any moment, I kept the secret will for twenty-eight years, through many moves about the country. Each new location meant discarding clothes, books, and furniture, but I always knew where the secret will was stored. I wrapped it in plastic for protection. Dad never mentioned the will, and I didn’t bring up the subject. His trust lay between us, unspoken and vital. When he died, it was the first item I packed before heading to Kentucky. As it turned out, I didn’t need it—my siblings still weren’t interested. I’d kept it safe for nothing. Nobody but me ever read the pages. No one cared but Dad.
On the long drive to Kentucky after his death, I watched for the Pottsville Escarpment, a geologic formation that indicated the edge of the Appalachians. Earlier I’d passed through Lexington, site of my birth, and wondered how my life might be if we’d stayed there, near my mother’s family. What if I’d gone away to college instead of attending the closest one? What if I’d married one of my first four girlfriends? What if I’d stuck with my dream of being an actor? What if I hadn’t hurt my knee so severely at age nineteen that I was forced back home in a plaster cast after leaving the hills forever, a pattern of departure and return that repeated many times until I realized the landscape would always hold me tight, that I could never escape, that in fact what I loved and felt most loyal to were the wooded hills, and not my father.
Chapter Five
MY FATHER’S full name was Andrew Jefferson Offutt V. As a child, he saw his name on three tombstones in a cemetery, a chilling sight that instilled a lifelong fear of joining them. This resulted in his decision to be cremated. Before I got home, his body was hauled out of the county for official incineration. The cremators cut open his chest to remove his heart implant. They placed the body in a cardboard box and slid it into a crematory that generated a fire of fifteen hundred degrees. Two hours of searing heat vaporized all organic matter, leaving pulverized bone, salt, and stray minerals.
Dad was an avowed agnostic, repeatedly emphasizing that he was not an atheist. In his opinion, disbelief created a religion of its own. This made for a brief conference with the director of memorial services. My sister and I rejected most options, including an urn or wooden box for Dad’s ashes. We went home to choose appropriate music and an array of photographs that would slowly fade into one another on a TV during the service.
Three days after Dad died, the family convened at the house. The first action each of us took, unplanned and spontaneous, was to slam the back door and stomp around the house—activities forbidden to us, reserved only for Dad. Then we laughed like maniacs, four middle-aged adults at last allowed to behave like children in our own home. My siblings stayed twelve miles away at a motel by the interstate. This was traditional—none of us slept in the house when we visited. The extra expense was worth the emotional safety. Dad never made us feel welcome and didn’t care for the presence of grandchildren. He treated them the same way he’d treated us as kids—bullying and critical, angry at the breaking of his ever-changing rules about sound, laughter, and talking. An essential difference was that we knew the risks, but our children didn’t.
The last time I took my young sons to Kentucky had ended badly. Dad began his standard browbeating of seven-year-old Sam, who’d left the bathroom door open. I was unable to respond, a failure that chafes me still. Instead of seeing my son as the target, I saw myself as a child—vulnerable and powerless—and it triggered such intense pain that I simply shut down. I lapsed into immobile silence as if frozen in place, my body separate from my mind, my emotions absent. I knew I should intervene on my son’s behalf, but the child part of me was still terrified of my father’s rage.
Rita, my wife at the time, had no such inner darkness. She came to me and said: “We have to go.” Within fifteen minutes we packed our suitcases, made our stiff farewells, and drove to town. We didn’t return to Kentucky for several years, a decision that was very painful for my mother. She’d saved all our toys for the grandchildren to play with on future visits—LEGOs, blocks, dollhouses, soldiers, and more than twenty board games. Three times she asked me to send my boys to her home by themselves. I refused without telling her the reason: I didn’t want them to endure their grandfather’s emotional abuse.
In my twenties and thirties, I called home often. Mom always answered and, after a brief conversation, put my father on the line. For a long time I thought she didn’t like speaking to me. Later I learned that if she talked too long, Dad would get mad. When they added an extension for the second floor, Dad eavesdropped until he voiced a disagreement. At times they began their own conversation. I would listen, imagining them in different rooms of the house, talking on the phone. Now I was eavesdropping. Twice I gently hung up the phone, wondering how long they’d continue until noticing I wasn’t there.
Over the years I came to dread three days per year that necessitated phone calls to my folks: Christmas, Dad’s birthday, and Father’s Day. A gnawing anxiety began two or three weeks before each holiday. I thought about the problem from various angles, foremost when to actually dial the number. As with everything in Dad’s life, there were staunch rules regarding the phone. No calls in the morning or afternoon or during meals. Calling between five o’clock and six o’clock was acceptable, except Dad usually hadn’t had a drink yet, which meant he’d be impatient, prone to anger. Six to seven was out
due to supper. Calling between seven and eight was optimal—unless the Reds were on TV. Later was no good, because after a few drinks Dad rattled on nonstop, his slurred speech veering into the maudlin, his mood volatile.
I latched on to the idea of calling promptly at seven o’clock on the three days per year when I felt obligated to communicate with my father. Unfortunately, the line was often busy because my siblings had deduced the same ideal time. Despite Dad’s claim of disliking the phone, he was a lonely man who enjoyed talking. If I said I needed to go, he’d simply launch into a new subject and orate for several minutes. We didn’t really converse; I listened. Dad often threw verbal bait into the water—usually an opinion he knew I didn’t share—seeking a disagreement, which for many years I snatched like a starving fish, eager for conversation even if it was a debate that ended in anger. Over time, I learned to recognize and ignore those traps. After a brief pause, he’d begin a monologue on a new subject. Never did he inquire about my wife, my sons, or me.
The only way I could get through these telephone calls was by having a drink first, then replenishing as Dad talked. Afterward, instead of merely feeling bad, I’d be drunk and feeling bad. I tried a new tactic—right after Dad answered, I informed him that I had to be somewhere in twenty minutes, but I wanted to call since it was Father’s Day. I successfully employed this strategy for fifteen years.
When my work started getting published, Dad told me how he dealt with editors, a group of people he loathed. He’d make a list of subjects he wanted to address, then anticipate an editor’s reactions and generate his own written responses. This way, no matter what an editor said on the phone, Dad was prepared and could not be taken by surprise. He applied the same pattern to family calls, building a scene in his head and behaving within his self-assigned role. The drawback came when family members lacked insight into his pre-scripted conversations. If someone didn’t respond the way he’d imagined, Dad’s frustration could easily escalate into anger.
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