In the hospital cafeteria later, I notice that my father has become thin but has almost no wrinkles. He looks up from his pork chop and says, “That woman in the waiting room, the older one whose son has that blood disease, she used to work at the seminary. She was a secretary there right many years. I told her I had known a few people over there. She knew exactly who I was talking about.”
I don’t say anything. He never mentions the seminary.
“They kept me from using my education,” he adds.
My God, he’s talking about the past. Long ago when I asked questions about his childhood, he told me to mind my own business, so I try to sound nonchalant. “Who did? The seminary?” I poke at the wilted lettuce of my salad, keep my voice flat. “What did they do?”
“They put me in the state hospital, that’s what they did.”
My fork clatters against my plate. Jesus H Christ. It’s taken him forty-seven years to mention it—do I dare ask anything?
The seminary put him in the state hospital?
Risk it. “How did that happen.” No inflection.
“They ruined my chance to use my academy education,” he says. He stares into space, seems to have forgotten I’m there. “They were training me to work with mental patients. They knew I wanted to be a missionary, but they had an outreach program at the state hospital, we used to pick up some of those people and take them to events, some were awful people from the back wards. Animals really. The seminary wanted me to understand what it was like for those patients, so they put me in there with them.”
I’m on a new planet. Green men must be everywhere.
“They made me go there,” he says. “That’s why I’m the only person to ever have only one electric shock.” He gazes at me dead-on. “I am the only person to ever have just one shock. They forced me to go there.”
I nod as though I understand. All around us others continue eating bad cafeteria food, unaware that the world is flying off its axis.
“Several people in charge—they had something to do with what happened to me, they had it in for me. I kept journals to prove it, I wrote about the war and everything that happened on Lincoln Street, maybe I’ll give you those notebooks someday.”
He wrote it all down? I want to beg for the journals, for what I might learn about my family, and about myself. “I’d love to see them.”
“I started writing a book about what they did,” he goes on, “but I’m gonna give them a chance to apologize to me first. I’m still the only person in the state hospital to have only one shock. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I got immersion therapy later.”
He stands up. “They kept me from doing what I wanted to do. Psychiatrists are dangerous. They can get inside your mind and control your behavior.”
Not always.
I stumble after him toward the door and ambush a meal cart, apologizing to the nurse behind it, muttering that I finally have proof that mental health care in South Carolina needs a little work.
My father heads for the elevator. Watching him disappear inside it, I sit down on a bench in the hallway. Is he completely delusional now?
The “truth” depends on the teller. “No razor,” she says. “Not sick,” he says.
I close my eyes, remembering a day I was taken to school too early, before the doors opened—
What happened that day?
I felt abandoned, didn’t I? Suddenly I’m like Little Annie who’s an orphan. My mother doesn’t even know she put my shirt on backward. I take my coat off and struggle to turn it around. Two birds are sitting on top of the tetherball pole, singing. No one comes to school this early—the other kids will call me weird. Nothing’s right now. I look at a book for a while. Then voices. Some third-graders head into the yard; they start hitting the tetherball and it goes around and around the pole. More people and cars, the cars are the teachers, they park behind the building, near the cafeteria. Teachers eat a lot. Noisy, lots of kids. I sit in the swing and listen, cries and whoops and yelling, only three days until school ends for Christmas. Johnny’s late, he’s always late. The bell rings. I go in the bathroom and make sure my shirt is right so the teacher won’t notice. Arithmetic and reading and learning songs. I want everything to go back like it was before. The teacher frowns at me—I missed four words on my spelling test, I don’t have a perfect average now.
Then what? What did I do?
Recess. I remember recess. Johnny comes over, he’s got on that shirt with Mickey Mouse on it, he wears it all the time.
“Hey Lyra, how come you came to school so early-like?”
“I wanted to.” I walk off in a huff. I stare at the schoolyard gate, start toward it.
Johnny calls, “Whar ya goin’?”
“Home.”
“You can’t go home, school ain’t over yet.”
I don’t look back at him. “I can to.”
“You’re gonna get it for playing hooky.”
“It’s not hooky, I been here lots longer than you.”
Johnny catches up as I go through the gate. I turn to him. “Where are you going?”
“I can cut school good as any girl in this whole damn town.”
I don’t bother to tell him that my mother says damn is a bad word.
We walk in silence for the next two blocks.
Down the street, near my house, there’s a gray car with a yellow bubble on top and a long white station wagon with writing on the door. Looks like the car dead people go to the cemetery in. A group of neighbors is standing across the street.
Johnny says, “Damn—there’s a policeman at your house.”
I stare at the white station wagon. On the door is a picture of the Bull Street hospital.
Johnny sees it too and stops dead in his tracks.
“Damn fire and hell. Somebody’s going to the loony bin.”
I run away from Johnny and creep in our back door, hesitating in the kitchen. In my parents’ bedroom my father is screaming, “No, no, no—I won’t—I know you’re—you’re not going to—I won’t go—I won’t—”
The doctor who gave me shots is leaning over him. A policeman is on the other side. My daddy is trying to get up, yelling, calling the men names I’m not supposed to say.
The doctor tells him, “We’re just going to get you a little help, you won’t be there long, do you understand me, William?”
Two men in white uniforms are in the living-room doorway. When my daddy sees them, he rears up and scrambles out of bed. The doctor catches him, jerks him back by his shirt and it rips; one man in white grabs him, the other man in white grabs him on the other side, and while he yells and cusses real loud, the men slip a white jacket onto him and tie it in the back—he doesn’t have any arms now. Like Mrs. Moazen, only worse.
My mama is there too, she’s wringing her hands like she does, and crying. My daddy’s crying too, he cries louder than anyone I’ve ever heard and it seems like that first night again, when the praying went on, and my mama is saying over and over again that she loves him, that “this is only for a little while so you can get better—”
My daddy cries—“Please please please.”
My mama’s face looks as strange as my daddy’s, they’re both sick, they both must be going somewhere, to that scary hospital maybe. Who will be left at home with me? I hope Fluffy will stay.
My daddy is crying harder, tears roll all down his face, I didn’t know a daddy could cry all the time, he still doesn’t have any arms, and the white-clothes men are pushing him down on a carry-bed and tying cords to it, he looks like pictures in my history book, how they carried soldiers off the battlefields. He’s yelling again—really loud—as they carry him into the living room, and my mother and the doctor follow and the doctor is telling the men in white that he’ll be at the hospital within the hour but I know th
at Bull Street isn’t really a hospital, it has a high brick wall to lock people up—
They don’t see me, no one knows I’m here, I’m a secret person, like a ghost.
Soon they’re in the living room, and I hear all this commotion as they go out onto the porch. Maybe I’ll be in trouble because I cut out of school, but I don’t think anyone will care today. I walk into the living room and watch from a window as the others go down the front steps. People across the street watch—Johnny’s there but not Rosa. Mr. Faherty. No Sweetes. The man from Aiken Street who sells hubcaps. Two or three others I don’t know. A teenage boy is pointing and laughing.
The men carry my daddy down the sidewalk. He’s quiet now, he’s stopped crying, maybe he’s gone to sleep. Or maybe he died—they’re putting him in that car that goes to funerals. Across the street Rosa is dragging Johnny inside their house, you can tell she’s fussing at him and I don’t mind this at all. My mama and the doctor stand on either side as my daddy goes into the car. He tries to get up but the armless coat stops him, and he screams bad words over and over, and my mama is crying again as the men close the door, and suddenly my daddy’s cries sound like when you try to talk underwater, a stretched-out sound, and the doctor pulls my mama back from the white station wagon and he talks to the policeman, and the policeman gets in his gray car and starts the engine and the bubble on top begins to go around and around with yellow light, and slowly the white station wagon and the police car pull away.
The people across the street begin to go home, though some keep staring at our house as they walk away.
The doctor has his arm around my mama. Mrs. Moazen is there too. My mama is crying like she wanted to go to the hospital. She says over and over, “Nothing will ever be the same again.”
I go out to the back porch and sit down on the steps. I don’t know what to do—my mama is crying real loud and my daddy is gone.
With my father’s version of his state hospital stay still in my head, I wander the rancher like a distracted burglar, staring at household objects I don’t really see. I stop pacing—has he invented this bizarre explanation because even now the truth is too painful? Does he really believe this? I feel unfamiliar empathy for him—his life has not been easy. Or is this simply what he wants me to believe? I wish I could remember more. I do recall that after he came home from the hospital my parents seemed faded, like wet laundry blanched of color by the sun. Later that year my mother went in the hospital too, the regular kind, and when she returned she didn’t smile for a long time and she didn’t whirl me around anymore. What had I done wrong? Soon an imaginary friend—Dandelion Rose—came to live with me and that helped. She looked like an eight-year-old Rosa Truesdale, only with lime-green Raggedy Ann hair.
I go in my mother’s room and decide to look through her business files, to see if she’s left requests for her funeral. Anything to keep busy. In the scratched metal file box I find her teaching certificate, old savings-account books, my grandfather’s will deeding her the Brantley house. I take several folders out and notice a white envelope taped to the bottom. The letter inside, on yellowed flimsy paper, is handwritten and wrinkled, as though it was once crumpled up. I gaze at it idly. One section catches my eye:
I don’t get this. I was driving, you were just riding along, and no one got hurt. I got insurance for the car. I won’t ever sue you like you think—you didn’t do nothing wrong. I’ve never laid eyes on this kind of money and taking it would be stealing. I may end up sorry, but if you don’t take it back I’m gonna give the fifty-thousand to my church.
I gaze across the room. He gave away fifty thousand dollars? While they took one vacation in forty years? Where did he get that much money?
Of course. The farm.
I’ve lost his letter to me about the sale. Maybe I threw it away. I was living in that roach-infested East Village studio with the bathtub in the kitchen, when he wrote that he was getting too old to take care of the place and there was no one else who could. I knew what he meant: no son. Swallowing my anger, realizing the money would give them a more secure old age, I asked him to save me ten acres that included the house ruins. He agreed, and I imagined building a small winter studio where I’d once played.
Place in the South has often stood in for human contact. The truth was—I wanted something that seemed like normal family tradition.
Six months later he wrote to say that the buyer hadn’t wanted to divide the property. That since I didn’t live in South Carolina, why did I need property there?
I called him and screamed, “You promised me.” I’d believed that on this one thing—the farm for Christsake—he wouldn’t let me down.
“I don’t know what you’re so upset about,” he fired back. “You don’t understand these things. That place is from my family and I’m the last of my line. I’ll give you several thousand dollars, provided you send me a detailed statement about how you will use it. That ought to make us even.”
I threw the phone across the room.
That Christmas when I went home, which I did only to see my mother, I wanted to visit the farm one last time, but I’d forgotten the directions and my father refused to tell me how to get there. I looked it up on a plat map at the county courthouse, disregarded the new “No Trespassing” sign, and walked around the ruins anyway. On that Christmas Day, my beaming father presented me with a clear plastic box bearing a metal nameplate extolling the history of his family and the land once called China Grove. Imprisoned inside was my handful of sandy South Carolina soil.
The worse my mother gets, the more haunted I feel, like I’m clawing at the door of some house I’ll never enter. Avoiding my father the next day—I’m furious about the farm all over again—I tell the hospital I’ll be away for a while and, without thinking, I start driving south as it begins to rain. In a half hour I leave the interstate and meander down soggy back roads. I spend an hour on dead-end two-lanes, pass through nearly abandoned small towns whose Main Street stores are boarded up. Several times I get lost and slow down, watch water beat against the open fields. I pause beside an old house that’s falling down: the roof is caved in and a magnolia tree and eight-foot-tall weeds rear skyward from the interior. Nature always recovers, always reasserts itself. Always survives. I try another road. Kudzu everywhere, that vicious voracious vine turning trees into formless leafy humps. This road leads to one that feels vaguely familiar. Finally I spot the expanse I think was China Grove. I park and walk along a barbed-wire fence, camera over my shoulder. The horizon is green and brown, flat, still, damp, fecund. And minus its historic drama. The ruins were plowed under years ago. Human history doesn’t exist here anymore.
I stare at the fields of soybeans where loblolly pines once held up the sky. No burnt shards left to gather and no vase to glue them onto. I take no pictures.
It’s against the law to destroy a family cemetery, so I get back in the car and try to find it. Have they built new roads? I ride down one where several mobile homes nest together. Down another. Nothing but more farm fields. I’m near where the ruins were, so the cemetery should be a half mile away. Where the hell is it? I admit defeat—even if I could find it, I’d have to trespass to pay my respects to my ancestors. I stop the car and walk through the warm mist anyway, staring across the terrain I remember. My mother and I skipping through the woods, my father digging up his talismans. I’m back on that dangerously jagged wall—all the blackened boards, fallen chimneys, the spooky mist perpetually hovering. Our landscape of loss and defeat shooting through my veins. This place was our story.
But I’m not the first descendent who didn’t inherit it—it’s odd that the only family stories my father’s ever told me have to do with this place. My great-grandfather’s will inexplicably denied one son any land, and later the furious disinherited son smashed his parents’ gravestones with a crowbar. I still remember the tombstones that looked vandalized. His sister, whose
first child had died while a toddler, feared her deranged brother would desecrate her child’s grave too, so she exhumed the child’s body and moved it to a town cemetery. After that, the cemetery at China Grove ceased to be the family burial ground.
A legacy that fits far too well.
I look out across the fields. It’s just acreage in the middle of nowhere. Not worth anything. A place where a man went crazy and a mother protected her child. Where another man and his child looked for things that can never be found, exchanging dirt that came to naught. After a while I acted like I didn’t care that he didn’t save me those acres. Didn’t care that he never had a kind word for me. But staring at the damp fields, leaning against barbed wire, the soft fabric of my heart rips open all over again.
When I get back in my car, my cell phone is blinking. The message from a nurse says my mother’s condition has become “grave.” Frantically I head back to the interstate, my pulse racing, and speed toward Columbia. When I arrive at the hospital an hour later, I run up the stairs and push through the ICU doors into my mother’s cubicle. Her breathing is shallow.
My father, poised beside the machines, cries out, “She’s going.” He puts a hand on her pillow, six inches from her face.
My favorite cousin and another cousin from Brantley stand on either side of the bed. We watch my mother’s breathing; the ventilator pumps like mad but no air seems to reach her. I take her hand, keep my eyes on her face; I want to witness her departure from the world. I whisper about the good times—the Thanksgivings in Brantley, all her brothers and their families, the table laden with ten vegetables, ham and roast and turkey, more food than any family could eat, and everyone brought a pie and there was laughter around the table and old stories were flying about.
My father takes something out of his pocket. “She left this.” He hands me an opened envelope. “You should read it now. I already did.”
Robotically I unfold the single typed sheet and begin to read aloud. The words don’t penetrate. I stop reading because I want to focus on my mother’s labored breathing. I tell her that I love her and look at the piece of paper again and read her requests for her funeral—the tone is disturbing. I stop in mid-sentence, look at the envelope: “To Be Opened After My Death.”
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