by Mary Karr
“They was farts?” Cooter finally screams, more high-pitched than is masculine, and at that the men start to laugh. Daddy’s Adam’s apple googles up and down, and Ben slaps the table, and Shug has to wipe his eyes after a minute.
When everybody settles down, Daddy passes the bottle around again and jumps back to the story of his coming home without even a stab at a segue. “Ain’t nothing else to tell. I just walked up through the razor grass to Daddy’s old dirt yard. And there’s the old man, sitting on the porch. Just exactly like I left him the year before. And he looks up at me serious as polio and says, ‘You git the coffee?’”
To Mother, such stories showed that Daddy offered steadiness. He always returned to the logging camp at the end of whatever journey, and coming back was something she’d begun to need from a man, badly. He was a rock. Guys he worked with claimed you could set a watch by when he pulled into the parking lot or what time he clicked open his lunch box. When Mother described Daddy’s childhood to us, she would sometimes fake horror at how savage it all sounded—boiling the bristles off a live hog and so forth. But really she admired this world, as she admired the scratchy misery of the blues she listened to on her Bessie Smith records.
Mother was also desperate to get pregnant when she met Daddy. She was thirty, and back then that was late. And Daddy was a fool for kids. During World War II, he wrote in hilarious detail to his sister’s kids, Bob Earl and Patty Ann, whom he nicknamed Booger Red and Shadow, respectively. The letters were infrequent, but he made boot camp—and later the war—sound like giant camping trips. “Well Booger you ought to have heard the 50 cal. machine gun I fired at a plane today. Of corse it was radio operated thats a wonderful thing to send a plane up and no one in it. Tell my shadow to eat plenny of pinto beans so she can grow big enuff for the air force and stay out of the stinking army. Ha Ha.” About the same time, he wrote his sister about wanting some kids. “I’m too old to start a famly now I gess but I had my day. I got a 48 hour pass to London and shore like them English girls.” A card later postmarked Paris is more cryptic: “I way 176 pounds and am mean as hell.”
The war letters were passed on to me by my aunt Iris, Daddy’s sister, during one of my rare forays down south from grad school. I kept them in a cigar box I’d spray-painted gold for Father’s Day once, and which he’d stuffed with old pay stubs from Gulf Oil and then rat-holed in the army footlocker we didn’t open till after his memorial service.
I can still smell the odor that came out of the trunk when we’d crowbarred the padlock off and opened it. The smell had seeped into the letters and endures there—damp paper, and gun oil, and chalk from the edges of a puzzling cedar box, which we eventually figured out was a turkey call. (Its lid, held in place by a wooden peg at one end, gives a jagged gobble when you slide it back and forth across the chalked edges of the box.) He kept his Colt pistol wrapped in a flesh-colored chamois cloth. Though he’d preached to me about the dangers of loaded weapons when I first learned to shoot, I found a single bullet in the firing chamber, which to this day I don’t believe he’d left there by accident. He was too careful for that. He put the bullet in there deliberately, for a reason I would today give a lot to know. Whose face was floating in your mind, Daddy, yours or some other’s, when you snapped the chamber into place and after some thought, perhaps, put the safety on? Even if I’d had the wherewithal to ask this question before his death, he would have probably answered with a shrug, staring into a cloud of Camel smoke. Maybe he would have started a story about his first squirrel gun, or a lecture about how much to lead a mallard with a shotgun before you picked it off. Like most people, he lied best by omission, and what he didn’t want you to know there was no point asking about.
The envelopes are smudged with gun oil that’s turned the army-issue paper a transparent gray in spots. After the Normandy invasion, the envelopes are of uniform size, dated weekly with few exceptions. The story had it that my father’s mother had written his commanding officer complaining that she hadn’t heard from Daddy since he’d been shipped overseas. So Captain Pearse, a blueeyed West Point grad who would eventually arrange to have my father offered a battlefield commission, ordered him to write her every Sunday. On the seal you can see the young man’s mark, “Capt. P.,” his matter-of-fact block print the opposite of Daddy’s wobbly scrawl. Daddy’s hands always shook, so maybe he was himself some form of Nervous and just hid it better than most.
The envelopes have no stamps, just the black cancellation mark of the army postal service, and the ones dated after 1944 have “Passed by the Base Censors” in one corner. The censors have razored out some words, leaving oblong slots in the pages where Daddy had tried dropping hints of his whereabouts to folks back home. The tone of the letters progresses from the early farm-boy bragging to a soldier’s gravity: “I gess you will faint when I tell you I saw [blank] a few days ago and today I ran into some of his outfit and they said he’d [blank]. I sure hated to hear it. Plese tell his Daddy that I cut his name on a piss elum tree right where it happened near the [blank] River. Tell him it was sure a pretty place. I’ll talk to him about it when I get home.”
The trunk held sepia photos wrapped in cheesecloth from his childhood during the early part of this century. My favorite shows Aunt Iris with the four boys—Uncle A.D., Daddy (who also received no name, only initials—J.P.), Uncle Pug, and Uncle Tim. The boys range from just under six feet (Pug) to six four (A.D.). They are shirtless under their bib overalls; their matching close-cropped haircuts, which Daddy claimed you could rub the river water out of with three strokes of a flat palm, are dark and sleek as seals. With odd solemnity, they hold a single boat oar like a totem. And strung from the giant pecan tree behind them are half a dozen dead alligators, which they hunted for the hides. I remember Daddy’s description of swamp gas circling their flat-bottomed boat. Baby Tim usually sat at the prow with a bull’s-eye lantern that turned a gator’s eyes an eerie reflecting red. In another picture, his mother—her face partly obscured by the huge bonnet—holds the halter of a mule my grandfather allegedly beat to death one day for its stubbornness in the field. My grandfather’s picture resembles a younger, stouter version of what I had watched him calcify into before he finally died at eighty-six—a hard brown man in a Stetson, planted in a cane-bottomed rocker on a porch with three equally taciturn-looking bird dogs.
We found a clipping from Life on Normandy. Daddy had taken a pen to the spread, writing names underneath many of the men walking away from boats in the surf and holding their rifles up out of the spray. Others posed on tanks. Daddy had scribbled names under certain faces—Rogers, Kinney, Brown, Gustitus, and some faces he had inked out with a simple X.
The trunk also held just about every receipt from every bill he ever paid. He didn’t trust banks and believed checking accounts and credit cards were big-company traps to make a man spend money he didn’t have without even knowing it. If a Southwestern Gas representative ever had the gall to knock on our door to claim that Daddy owed three dollars for a 1947 gas bill, he would have met with one of the elastic-bound bundles of receipts from that year, then a rectangular piece of faded onionskin stamped PAID. It was a feat Daddy never got to perform, but on nights when he spread the receipts out chronologically, he made it clear to my sister and me that every day some suit-wearing, Republican sonofabitch (his term) weaseled a working man out of an extra three dollars for lack of a receipt. He would not be caught short.
These notorious Republicans were the bogeymen of my childhood. When I asked him to define one (I think it was during the Kennedy-Nixon debate), Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry, which I took to be gospel for longer than I care to admit. Maybe the only thing worse than being a Republican was being a scab.
Scabs were the cornerstones of one of Daddy’s favorite lectures. For some reason, I remember him delivering it one particular morning when I was just old enough to drive and had picked him up from the night shi
ft in his truck. I slid over so he could take the wheel. He brought into the cab the odors of stale coffee and of the cleaning solvent he used to get the oil off his hands. “Now you take me,” he said. “Any kind of ciphering I could always do. Math or anything. I could have had that shift foreman’s job right over there.” He tilted his hard hat toward the white oil-storage tanks and the flaming towers by the roadside. “Twelve thousand dollars a year, straight salary. Mr. Briggs called me in. His secretary got me coffee like I like. And he had a desk near as wide as this highway, solid mahogany. ‘Pete,’ he tells me, ‘if you’ll stop worrying about crossing a picket line you’ll do a helluva lot better by your family.’ Well I thanked him just the same. Shook his hand. And a few days later I hear they give it to old Booger.” Who old Booger was I had no idea, but this lecture had its own velocity, so there was no point in interrupting. “Pretty soon old Booger gets to feeling poorly. He’s got the headache and the sore back. Pretty soon his belly’s swelled out over the top of his britches. He’s got the mulligrubs.” Maybe Daddy thumped his cigarette butt out the triangular side window at this point to buy a minute of thought. “See, Pokey, there was more job there than there was man. And you don’t believe me, his wife’s a widow today.
“More money, my rosy red ass. That ignorant scab sonofabitch.” When he said the word scab his knuckles would get white where he gripped the wheel. “Pokey, anybody cross a picket line—and not just here. I mean any picket line. I don’t care if it’s the drugstore or the carpenters or whoever…” What followed would be a grisly portrayal of people prying open children’s mouths to steal the bread from them.
In the trunk’s very bottom, under the stack of plastic-wrapped dress shirts we bought from Sears or Penney’s each Christmas and never saw him even unwrap, we found a sock with a roll of bills adding up to some three thousand dollars—gambling money, I guess, his version of security.
CHAPTER 2
If Daddy’s past was more intricate to me than my own present, Mother’s was as blank as the West Texas desert she came from. She was born into the Dust Bowl, a vast flat landscape peppered with windmills and occasional cotton ranches. Instead of a kitty for a pet, she had a horny toad. She didn’t see rain fall, she said, for the first decade of her life. The sky stayed rock-white and far away.
About all she later found to worship in Leechfield was the thunderstorms, which were frequent and heavy. The whole town sat at a semitropical latitude just spitting distance from the Gulf. It sat in a swamp, three feet below sea level at its highest point, and was crawled through by two rivers. Any hole you dug, no matter how shallow, magically filled up with brackish water. Even the wide ditches that ran in front of the houses, where I later learned that sidewalks ought to be, were not enough to keep the marsh from burbling up. Digging a basement in that part of the country was out of the question. So when a tornado warning was announced on the radio, everybody but Mother herded into doorways and bathrooms for fear of a touchdown. She tended to throw open the doors and windows. I can still hear the hard rain splatter on the broad banana leaves and the cape jasmine bush off the back porch, like a cow pissing on a flat rock, we liked to say.
Once, we saw a black funnel drop out of the low-bulging sky over the football field across the street. It tore the yellow goalpost up and wrenched it like a paper clip. We were forty yards away, watching through the screen. I leaned my head into Mother’s denim hipbone and kept my ears stoppered with my fingers. But I could still hear the concrete posts torn out of the ground like some giant buttons getting popped off. Mother worshiped that kind of wild storm like nothing else.
I own just one picture from her childhood. She’s alone on what looks like a wide whitewashed porch, wearing a stiff little wool coat and staring dead level at you from under Dutch-boy bangs that are blond and military-cut across her forehead. Her parents named her Charlie—not Charlotte or Charlene, but Charlie like a boy, a name that’s required no end of explanation over the decades. It even got her a draft notice during World War II. At the time of the picture, she was two and had come down with pneumonia when a cold norther blew down. The doctor spent some hours trying to get her fever to fall with cold sponge baths and spoon-fed whiskey toddies, but he finally rolled his cuffs down and announced to my grandparents that the case was hopeless. If the child lived through the afternoon, he said, she would surely be gone by midnight. There was much hand-wringing on the part of my grandmother Moore. She had injured her female parts somehow during Mother’s birth and couldn’t bear any other children.
Nevertheless, about suppertime, Grandma got cheered by an idea. Like my mother after her, Grandma drew some parcel of relief from busy-ness. She recovered enough enthusiasm about the future to wash Mother’s hair and hard-comb it dry, after which she summoned the town photographer. If Charlie Marie was going to die, she said, then they’d better hurry up and get a picture of her for a keepsake. My grandfather threatened to leave if my grandmother took that sick child outside just to get enough light for a photograph, but Grandma had her jaw set.
So it was that my mother’s fevered two-year-old self was stuffed in a bright red coat and propped out on the open front porch on a freezing January afternoon. Mother said that she saw the whole sky through a gray curtain. She remembered the wind blowing full tilt at her from the west like a wide white hand of hard air slapping toward her face. There were no breaks or hills to interrupt the wind from its long slide off the northern Rockies. It hit her from across a thousand miles of flat-assed nothing. In the foreground you can see a spotted cat appear to rub its hind parts on Mother’s shins. This gives the whole picture an aspect of haste. Mother doesn’t smile. She said that she didn’t feel like she was fixing to die or anything, only that a wooziness made her want to lie down but people kept standing her up.
What made this story endure in our family is that it ends in a miracle. When the preacher arrived the next morning, dressed in his freshly brushed black coat and ready to give comfort, Mother was sitting upright in bed rolling up rag dolls from old quilt scraps and still sucking whiskey off the rock candy her daddy had gone into town to buy her at the crack of dawn. Grandma liked to say later that it was the fresh air that healed her.
Our only visit to my grandmother’s house in Lubbock is seared into memory for me by Mother’s first serious threat to divorce Daddy. I don’t remember what they fought about that morning, only that at some point she chucked a pot of oatmeal against the yellow kitchen tiles, grabbed her straw purse, and pulled us out to the car without even bothering to change us out of our pajamas. I do remember that before Lecia would agree to go into Stuckey’s for breakfast, Mother had to buy us new dresses. (Even then, my sister had a sense of propriety I lacked: if I wet my underpants playing, back then, I just stepped out of them and kept running.)
Somewhere past Dallas that afternoon, we stopped again for a paper bag full of fifteen-cent burgers. Lecia and I had been playing Jewelry Store in the backseat, which involved my giving her real money for fake jewels. She kept a red fruitcake tin stuffed with buttons of every conceivable shape and material, including rhinestone and brass love knots. I had started the trip with a stack of dimes I’d collected in a glass cigar tube from Daddy, and a click-open plastic Barbie purse full of pennies. By Fort Worth, Lecia had taken nearly all the dimes by arguing that since they were littler, they were worth less. That was the kind of transaction that marked all our games. (Lecia went on to make an adult fortune selling whole-life insurance in Houston.)
Anyway, I was down to pennies, and she was down to trying to pawn off plain white plastic buttons as pearl when the afternoon sky first went dark.
Out in West Texas, the sky is bigger than other places. There are no hills or trees. The only building is an occasional filling station, and those are scarce. How the westward settlers decided to keep moving in the face of all that nothing, I can’t imagine. The scenery is blank, and the sky total. Even today you can drive for hours with nothing but the hypnotic rise and slope of t
elephone lines to remind you that you’re moving. So the sky getting dark was a major event, as if somebody had dropped a giant tarp over all that impossibly bright wideness. You could still see the water mirage lying in the middle of the blacktop road a ways ahead, but the sky it reflected had somehow gone all dirty brown. We looked up. Lecia pointed out a dark cloud racing toward us. It was strange. We’d seen tornadoes, but this was different. Instead of blue-black, this cloud was the color of an old penny, and it was wider, slower, not at all cone-shaped. It still seemed far off when handfuls of locusts began to spatter against the windshield like hail. You could hear the hum of wings as the cloud got closer. Then the world outside the car went black so fast it seemed the sun had been blown out. It didn’t start slowly and build the way normal storms do. By the time Mother got us pulled over, I was crying, and the cloud had more or less enveloped the whole car in a deep crust, a sheet of locusts. They made an eerie roachlike clacking noise that multiplied about a million times in my head. Mother scrambled to close off the side vents, but some of them got inside anyway. That set her saying Oh my God oh my God and me screaming as I hunkered down in the black well of the backseat in the duck-and-cover posture we’d learned for the atom bomb. Lecia was quicker to the take than we were. She started smacking locusts with her flip-flop, calling each one a name: “Take that, you sonofabitch,” she’d say. Weird, but after that she was terrified of cockroaches like nobody else. Just the sight of one—and you had to shake them out of your shoes in the morning, down there—would send her climbing up the bookshelf and wailing. She could gut a coon or skin a snake without a wince, but flying roaches drove her nuts, which is odd because she seemed fearless that day, going after the locusts.