by Mary Karr
I don’t remember who we got farmed out to or for how long. I was later told that we’d stayed for a time with a childless couple who bred birds. Some memory endures of a screened-in breezeway with green slatted blinds all around. The light was lemon-colored and dusty, the air filled with blue-and-green parakeets, whose crazy orbits put me in mind of that Alfred Hitchcock movie where birds go nuts and start pecking out people’s eyeballs. But the faces of my hosts in that place—no matter how hard I squint—refuse to be conjured.
Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while. It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here. I don’t mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.
I did know from that night forward that things in my house were Not Right, this despite the fact that the events I have described so far had few outward results. No one ever mentioned the night again. I don’t remember any subsequent home visits from any kind of social worker or concerned neighbor. Dr. Boudreaux seemed sometimes to minister to my health with an uncharacteristic tenderness. And neighbors dragged my sister and me to catechism classes and Vacation Bible School and to various hunting camps, never mentioning the fact that our family never reciprocated. I frequently showed up on doorsteps at suppertime; foraging, Daddy called it. He said it reminded him of his railriding days during the Depression. But no one ever failed to hand me a plate, though everybody knew that I had plenty to eat at home, which wasn’t always true for the families I popped in on.
The night’s major consequences for me were internal. The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness. Whenever I stepped into the road at Leechfield’s one traffic light, I usually expected to get plowed down by a Red Ball truck flying out of nowhere (unlikely, given the lack of traffic). I became both a flincher and a fighter. I was quick to burst into tears in the middle of a sandlot baseball game and equally quick to whack someone in the head without much provocation. Neighborhood myth has it that I once coldcocked a five-year-old playmate with an army trench shovel, then calmly went back to digging. Some of this explosiveness just came from a naturally bad temperament, of course. But some stems from that night, when my mind simply erased everything up until Dr. Boudreaux began inviting me to show him marks that I now know weren’t even there.
The missing story really starts before I was born, when my mother and father met and, for reasons I still don’t get, quickly married.
My mother had just arrived in Leechfield. She’d driven down from New York with an Italian sea captain named Paolo. He was fifty to her thirty, and her fourth husband. My mother didn’t date, she married. At least that’s what we said when I finally found out about all her marriages before Daddy. She racked up seven weddings in all, two to my father. My mother tended to blame the early marriages on her own mother’s strict Methodist values, which didn’t allow for premarital fooling around, of which she was fond. She and Paolo had barely finished the honeymoon and set up housekeeping in Leechfield, where he was fixing to ship out, than they began fighting.
So it was on a wet winter evening in 1950 that she threw her dresses, books, and hatboxes in the back of an old Ford and laid rubber out of Leechfield, intending never to return. She was heading for her mother’s cotton farm about five hundred miles west. Just outside of Leechfield, where Highway 73 yields up its jagged refinery skyline to bayous and rice fields, she blew a tire. She was about twenty yards from the truck stop where Daddy happened to be working. He had a union job as an apprentice stillman at Gulf Oil, but he was filling in at the station that night for his friend Cooter, who’d called him in desperation from a crap game in Baton Rouge where he was allegedly on a roll.
All Mother’s marriages, once I uncovered them in my twenties, got presented to me as accidents. Her meeting Daddy was maybe the most unlikely. Had Cooter not gotten lucky with the dice in a Baton Rouge honky-tonk, and had Paolo not perturbed Mother in the process of unpacking crates, and had the tire on the Ford not been worn from a recent cross-country jaunt (Paolo’s mother lived in Seattle, and they’d traveled there from New York, then down to Texas, where divorce laws permitted Mother to quickly get rid of husband number three before signing up with number four).… All these events conspired to strand my mother quite literally at my father’s feet on Highway 73 that night.
He said there was a General Electric moon shining the first time he saw her, so bright it was like a spotlight on her. She refused his help jacking up the car and proceeded to cuss like a sailor when she couldn’t get the lug nuts loose. My mother claims that she had only recently learned to cuss, from Paolo. Daddy said her string of practiced invectives, which seemed unlikely given her fancy clothes (she had on a beige silk suit) and New York license plates, impressed him no end. He’d never heard a woman cuss like that before.
She changed the tire and must have made some note of his raw good looks. He was some part Indian—we never figured out which tribe—black-haired and sharp-featured. His jug-eared grin reminded her of Clark Gable’s. Since she fancied herself a sort of Bohemian Scarlett O’Hara, the attraction was deep and sudden. I should also note that Mother was prone to conversion experiences of various kinds, and had entered a fervent Marxist stage. She toted Das Kapital around in her purse for years. Daddy was active in the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. Whenever they renegotiated a contract—every two years—he was known as an able picket-line brawler. He was, in short, a Texas working man, with a smattering of Indian blood and with personality traits that she had begun to consider heroic.
Out in Lubbock, Grandma was rolling a cobbler crust for Mother’s homecoming dinner when the call came that she had been detained in Leechfield. Grandma had prayed for her to make up with Paolo. She’d started auctioning Mother off to various husbands when she was only fifteen. Like some prize cow, Mother liked to say, fattened for the highest bidder. With a paid-for Ford and a ship waiting for him in the Gulf, Paolo had what Grandma thought of as the Ability to Provide. Plus he had dragged Mother out of New York, where God knew what-all went on, and relocated her in Texas. Grandma subsequently viewed my father as some slick-talking hick who had buffaloed her only child into settling for a two-bedroom tract house when she deserved a big ranch. In fact, Paolo was the only husband of Mother’s whose existence Grandma would acknowledge—other than Daddy, of course, and him she couldn’t very well ignore. She felt that Paolo’s story would teach me a lesson, the punch line of which was something like divorcing a salary man for somebody who punches a clock was bad manners. At least Grandma told me a few stories about Paolo. Pressing Mother for details of her past always led to eye-rolling and aspirin-taking and long afternoon naps.
To Paolo’s credit, he didn’t give Mother up as easily as the others had. He chased her—so the saying goes—like a duck would a june bug. He sent yellow roses to her hotel room every week, and Daddy finally took to setting the boxes of chocolatecovered cherries that kept arriving for her in the common parlor of his boarding house, where his roommates ate them by the fistful. Paolo finally got up enough courage or desperation to appear there for a final showdown. For some reason, I picture Daddy stretched out on a narrow bed in a string T-shirt and boxer shorts, his eyes narrowing like a snake’s when Paolo, whom I imagine in the seersucker suit he wore for his wedding snapshot, ducked into the room with slanty ceilings. Mother was there to watch all this. At some point the ta
lk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo’s ass. It was the first time Mother saw Daddy fight. (In fact, there wasn’t ever much fighting to it, at least that I ever saw. Daddy hit people, and then they fell down. End of fight.) After that, I picture Paolo more or less crawling down the stairs. He shipped out to Saudi Arabia, never to be seen again until his picture cropped up in a box some decades later and I asked Mom who the hell that was.
At my parents’ wedding in the Leechfield Town Hall, Daddy concluded the ceremony by toasting Mother with the silver flask she’d bought him for a present. “Thank you for marrying poor old me,” he said. He was used to carhops and cowgirls, and said Mother represented a new and higher order of creature altogether.
The truth seems to be that Mother married Daddy at least in part because she’d gotten scared. As much as she liked to brag about being an art student in Greenwich Village during the war—and believe me, in Leechfield she stood out—she had racked up a frightening number of husbands, so frightening that she did her best to keep them secret. And her economic decline had been steady: over fifteen years she’d gone from a country house in Connecticut to a trailer park in Leechfield. Somehow all her wildness just didn’t wash in the anesthetized fifties. She’d lost some things along the way, and losing things scared her. Daddy was handsome enough and the proper blend of outlaw and citizen. And he didn’t bow much to the mannerisms she’d picked up to impress her coldblooded Yankee husbands. The only Marx he knew was Groucho, the only dance the Cajun two-step. The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to see what he was getting into.
Their early time sounded happy. With the G.I. Bill, they bought a small house in a line of identical small houses. It was more than Daddy had ever dreamed of owning. He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo that he built bookshelves for her art books, hung her paintings all over the house, and promised someday to construct a studio so she wouldn’t have to keep her easel propped in the dining room.
My daddy had grown up with three loud brothers and a sister in a logging camp in the piney section of East Texas called The Big Thicket. His family lived mostly without hard currency, buying coffee and sugar with credit vouchers at the Kirby Lumber Company Store. Other than that and such luxuries as calico for dresses, they grew and shot and caught what they needed.
That world was long gone before my birth, but I remember it. In fact, my father told me so many stories about his childhood that it seems in most ways more vivid to me than my own. His stories got told and retold before an audience of drinking men he played dominoes with on days off. They met at the American Legion or in the back room of Fisher’s Bait Shop at times when their wives thought they were paying bills or down at the union hall. Somebody’s pissed-off wife eventually christened them the Liars’ Club, and it stuck. Certainly not much of the truth in any technical sense got told there.
Except for Christmas Eve morning, when they met in the Legion parking lot at dawn to exchange identical gift bottles of Jack Daniel’s from the windows of their pickups, the men had no official meeting time and place. I never saw evidence of any planning. They never called each other on the phone. No one’s wife or kids ever carried a message to meet at thus-and-such a place. They all just seemed to meander together, seemingly by instinct, to a given place and hour that had magically planted itself in their collective noggins. No women ever came along. I was the only child allowed, a fact frequently held up as proof that I was hopelessly spoiled. I would ask Daddy for money for a Coke or shuffleboard or to unlock the pool table, and it was only a matter of time before somebody piped over at us that he was spoiling me and that if he kept it up, I wasn’t going to be worth a shit. Comments like that always rang a little too true to me. Sometimes I’d even fake starting to give the coin back or shying away from the pool table. But Daddy would just wag his head at whoever spoke. “Leave her alone. She can do anything she’s big enough to do, cain’t you, Pokey?” And then I would say I guessed I could.
Of all the men in the Liars’ Club, Daddy told the best stories. When he started one, the guys invariably fell quiet, studying their laps or their cards or the inner rims of their beer mugs like men in prayer. No matter how many tangents he took or how far the tale flew from its starting point before he reeled it back, he had this gift: he knew how to be believed. He mastered it the way he mastered bluffing in poker, which probably happened long before my appearance. His tough half-breed face would move between solemn blankness and sudden caricature. He kept stock expressions for stock characters. When his jaw jutted and stiffened and his eyes squinted, I expected to hear the faint brogue of his uncle Husky. A wide-eyed expression was the black man Ugh, who taught him cards and dice. His sister pursed her lips in steady disapproval. His mother wore an enormous bonnet like a big blue halo, so he’d always introduce her by fanning his hands behind his head, saying Here comes Momma.
My father comes into focus for me on a Liars’ Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can’t but write it in the present tense.
I am dangling my legs off the bar at the Legion and shelling unroasted peanuts from a burlap bag while Daddy slides the domino tiles around the table. They make a clicking sound. I haven’t started going to school yet, so the day seems without beginning or end, stalled in the beer-smelling dark of the Legion.
Cooter has just asked Daddy if he had planned to run away from home. “They wasn’t no planning to it,” Daddy says, then lights a cigarette to stall, picking a few strands of tobacco off his tongue as if that gesture may take all the time in the world. “Poppa had give me a silver dollar and told me to get into town and buy some coffee. Had to cross the train tracks to get there. When that old train come around the turn, it had to slow up. Well, when it slowed up, I jumped, and that dollar come with me.
“Got a job threshing wheat up to Kansas. Slept at night with some other old boys in this fella’s barn. Man by the name of Hamlet. Sorriest sonofabitch ever to tread shoe leather. Wouldn’t bring you a drink from sunup to lunch. And married to the prettiest woman you ever seen. A butt like two bulldogs in a bag.” This last makes everybody laugh.
I ask him how he got home, and he slides the story back on track. While I’m waiting for his answer, I split open a fresh peanut with my fingernail. The unroasted shell is soft as skin, the meat of the nut chewy and almost tasteless without salt. Daddy finishes his drink and moves a domino. “About didn’t make it. Hopped the Double-E train from Kansas City to New Orleans. Cold?” He glares at each of us as if we might doubt the cold. “That wind come inching in those boxcar cracks like a straight razor. It’ll cut your gizzard out, don’t think it won’t. They finally loaded some cattle on somewhere in Arkansas, and I cozied up to this old heifer. I’d of froze to death without her. Many’s the time I think of that old cow. Tried milking her, but it come out froze solid. Like a Popsicle.”
“It’s getting high and deep in here,” Shug says. He’s the only black man I’ve ever seen in the Legion, and then only when the rest of the guys are there. He wears a forest-green porkpie hat with the joker from a deck of cards stuck on the side. He’s famously intolerant of Daddy’s horseshit, and so tends to up the credibility factor when around.
“I shit you not,” Daddy says and sprinkles some salt in the triangular hole in his beer can. “You hop one of those bastards some January and ride her. You’ll be pissing ice cubes. I guarangoddamntee you that.” They shake their heads, and I can see Daddy considering his next move by pretending to study his dominoes. They’re lined up like bricks in a wall, and after he chooses one, he makes a show of lining it up right on the tabletop, then marking down his score. “They unloaded one old boy stiff as a plank from down off the next car over. He was a old one. Didn’t have no business riding trains that old. And when we tipped him down
to haul him off—they was four or five of us lifting him—about a dozen of these round fuzzy things rolled out his pant leg. Big as your thumb, and white.” He measures off the right length on his thumb.
“Those were the crown pearls, no doubt,” Shug says.
Daddy stares seriously into the middle distance, as if the old man in question were standing there himself, waiting for his story to get told properly and witnessing the ignorance that Daddy had to suffer in the process. “Wasn’t no such thing. If you shut up, I can tell your thickheaded self what they was.”
“Let him tell it,” Cooter says, then lowers his head into a cloud of cigar smoke. Cooter is bothered by the fact that Shug is colored, and takes any chance to scold him, which the other guys tend to ignore. Shug gives me Fig Newtons out of his glove compartment, and I feel evil seeing him scolded for no reason and not saying anything. But I know the rules and so lay low.
“One old boy had a big black skillet in his gear. So we built a fire on the edge of the freight yard. It was a kind of hobo camp already there, some other guys set up all around. Nobody bothered us. This old fella’s stretched out behind us stiff as this bench I’m sitting on here.”
“The dead one?” I ask, and the men shift around in their chairs, a signal for me to shut up, so I do.
“That’s right. And you ain’t never gonna guess what happens when they thaw.” This is the turning point. Daddy cocks his head at everybody to savor it. The men don’t even fake indifference. The domino tiles stop their endless clicking. The cigar smoke might even seem to quit winding around on itself for a minute. Nobody so much as takes a drink. “They pop like firecrackers and let off the biggest stink you ever smelled.”