He, however, wasn’t a man of half measures.
I sometimes discover that I am still looking for a sort of church, but the times I have darkened the door of one as an adult I can count on one hand. I know what Daddy meant now. What he meant is that I needed to think for myself, that I needed to accept no dogma as a compendium for how to live as he had been taught to do. I am thankful for him saying that to me at the end of the day, and that he showed me to think for myself then so that I can do it now. He might not have gone about it the right way, but he knew what he was doing that Saturday night, even as drunk as he was.
Cold
We followed behind him with saplings in a bucket. They were pines. He had a posthole digger that made a sucking sound every time he pulled it out of the ground after he made a hole. If you don’t make a deep wound in the dirt, the roots won’t get down far enough and they won’t take hold. Then it won’t grow.
Seems like I followed behind him no matter what we did.
You have to pack the soil back around the tree. Get the air pockets out. Air pockets can kill anything—a tooth, a tree, a plane full of people.
I didn’t know the word sphagnum until just a few weeks ago. Seems like I would have known it already since it means a kind of moss that grows in wet areas and we lived in a swampy part of the world. The rot. The rot.
Lord, what we get taught to do.
I am more ambitious than I should be when it comes to what I think I can accomplish and always forget that my to-do list has no space on it. Not these days, anyway. No indolence, no idleness, no inactivity, no interims, no intermissions, no rest. No rest, no, hardly any at all.
Seems like I followed behind him no matter what we did.
I like to read everything. How many thousands of words can two eyes take in on any given day before they start to rearrange themselves on the page? One of my greatest fears is that I will die not having read everything that I want to. No need to be afraid about something that will happen. I should just go on and get used to it right now. I need glasses so I wear them. I sometimes wear glasses over my contact lenses because my eyes get tired. Glasses hurt my nose if I wear them for too long. At certain times of the day I get weary. I’m happiest at six p.m., when I feel like I’ve done the best I could with that day and it’s almost done.
Seems like I followed behind him no matter what we did.
Glasses over my contact lenses. I have poor eyesight like she did. She needed glasses to find her glasses too.
The coffee is ready now. It is 5:49 a.m. I go to bed later and get up earlier than I ever have before.
Lord, what we get taught to do.
Her feet were heavy before she got the first sip down. My coffee tastes stronger than the Maxwell House she made. But sometimes I don’t mind getting a Styrofoam cup full of her kind, weak and see-through, at a gas station. I drink it black. Then my memory starts to fire up.
Seems like I followed behind him no matter what we did.
I am dancing with a million other angels on the head of a pin in my mind, and the head of the pin is the only object I see in the blackest space of infinite space and it gets farther and farther away from me in my imagination—is it really my imagination—until it seems it can get no farther without disappearing but it never does and there I go, dancing dancing with the other angels that got left out in the cold. We dance because we don’t know we can stop.
Lord, what we get taught to do.
Seems like I followed behind him no matter what we did.
Lord, what we get taught to do.
Hours
Steinbeck wrote that he would start the work as soon as he found a glass for his pencils. Here I sit starting the work over and over looking for a glass for my memories. When I get them in the right one they glow like the fireflies Sissy and I used to catch in jars out in the yard at dusk.
Here at my table. After breakfast.
“PLEASE GOD, DON’T LET DADDY HURT MAMA. Please God, don’t let Daddy hurt Mama. Please God, don’t let Daddy hurt Mama.”
I could type that sentence all the way down this page. I don’t know how many times I would repeat my prayer while I lay in bed, listening and hoping that everything would be all right by the time morning came. I often fell asleep with it going through my head. It was more mantra than prayer—the one sentence over and over—rhythmic, solid, and the only worthy offering I could come up with from my quadrant of our circle.
“Please God, don’t let Daddy hurt Mama.”
Seems a simple enough, straightforward request. A whole world existed within it. If God didn’t hear me, and Daddy did hurt her, what would that mean, and what would happen to us? I was always afraid I would wake up and she’d be gone. My mind never traveled further than that when I was so young—I couldn’t have been more than four or five when I started lulling myself to sleep with the plea that seemed to keep time with my heartbeat.
Mama always tucked us in at night when we were little girls. We would get under the covers and wait for her to walk softly down the hallway. Sometimes it was a while before she appeared if Daddy was home and had already started in on her, but she always did. I looked forward to saying my prayers with her. She’d sit down on the bed and talk us both through them one at a time, Sissy first, then me.
Now I lay me down to sleep.
Our God-bless lists were long. We included everyone in the family, immediate and extended, plus all the puppies and kittens and sometimes even a sick calf or goat. When we finished, we’d exchange I love yous. Then she’d turn off our light and leave the bedroom door cracked a little as she left us. I’d remind her to leave the bathroom light on because I was scared of the dark. She’d go back to him.
“Please God, don’t let Daddy hurt Mama.”
I hoped God understood the stakes. I thought he would if I could get my words right. Surely he thought we were important enough to save. I hadn’t yet been told I wasn’t supposed to ask for anything and instead only say thank you. I thought that if you asked for something that was obviously something that needed to exist, or was the obvious preferred dynamic in a situation, it would come to be, because God was all-knowing and benevolent and he cared.
I didn’t give up on that notion until she died. Fuck that Footprints poem. I was never more utterly alone than on the day Daddy finally killed her just as I was always afraid he would. God wasn’t anywhere around that day that I could tell, and he certainly wasn’t carrying me.
I’m not sure where I am with God these days. I pray now if for no other reason than just in case. Though I’ve taken it up again, I’d be lying if I said my faith had completely regenerated after taking so many blows. I do hope it’s just taking its time. I look at it from the corners of my eyes. I want to believe, I just don’t know if I should. So I try to make my own grace and notice it in other earthly forms. Can I be angry and simultaneously admit the miracle of my every breath?
The words I heard come from my daddy’s mouth while I lay in bed terrified me. They bounced down the hallway like ricocheting bullets and landed in the bedroom Sissy and I shared. He called Mama a pig, a worm. My ears burned and my heart hurt. I don’t know how she stood it. I don’t know how he did either. It’s hard work to be that mean. She didn’t fight back very often, if at all; I don’t think she knew how.
Sometimes he’d take a breather and go out and pee in the yard. I could hear the kitchen door open with a jerk and close with a slam—it was the most violent way of opening a door that I can imagine besides kicking through it or tearing it down. He did most things violently. He was not a soft touch. Or he’d go to the old pie safe that Mama had refinished and made into a liquor cabinet—she’d accidently gotten lye in her eyes and was almost blinded while she was doing it. He’d refresh the drink that he kept in the avocado-green insulated tumbler with the white rim. Then he’d start in again, spewing his vitriol until he grew bored or passed out and let her get some rest. It was all a regular thing, a way of life. What a thing to grow accustomed
to.
Out of everything I remember about my childhood, my mama is what I want to hang on to most. I want to keep her fresh and right in front. I want to remember how she smelled, how she talked, how she walked, how she laughed, how she dressed, the shoes she wore, her hands, her jawline, her skin, the way her arms felt around me, and how she tilted her head in little, almost imperceptible backward nods, and blinked a lot when she got insecure or anxious. I think of those things most every day, even now. I struggle to keep her close with those small details and things like rings, photographs, and the songs we used to sing and that she loved.
I can tell you most everything about who she was on the outside and about the little things she did that made up daily life with her, but I know almost nothing about her big hopes or her hurts. I don’t know how she ended up living the way she did—what decisions led her to a life with Daddy. She never said anything about any of that. He got between us when I was a girl, and he gets between us now, taking up all the space and spreading over my memories of her like coffee spilled on a white tablecloth. I sift through them to catch a glimpse of her, but he is always in them. He inflicted more pain, so of course I’m going to remember him through episodes that are impossible to forget. He etched them into me. He sits on top of everything and weighs it down like the heavy Southern air does, demanding all of the attention, even in death. She is my foundation and much harder to see. Trying to describe her place in my life is like trying to talk about a book I’ve read while not being able to quote a single sentence from its pages. Its essence winds around my spine and will always be there.
Nothing is remembered the way it happened. We remember this thing and not that one for reasons unknown. We recall random events down to their minute details but something that would be deemed by most as more relevant is forgotten. I’m afraid I’m going to get it all wrong, that I won’t remember correctly. So many years have dirtied up my rearview mirror. I don’t think I’ve lied to myself about what I saw, but even with all Sissy and I were privy to, I know it wasn’t everything. You can’t know everything about everything, even your own mother, sometimes especially your own mother. You can’t always trust your mind. I let that sink in. My heart rate goes up a little. I can hear it pounding in my ears. I take a deep breath.
I touch her ring. I feel the part of it that’s broken, the part that sometimes pinches the flesh just outside of the knuckle that connects my finger to my hand. I conjure her. I can hear her, I can smell her, I can see her, and I can feel her.
MOST MORNINGS, I GET OUT OF BED WHILE IT’S STILL DARK OUTSIDE.
The apartment I share with my son is a safe nest for us, for now. It is as soft a place as I can create to guard us from some of the hard edges of life, to guard him from them anyway. Still some get in. Sleeplessness hangs over me some nights like a quiet, dark blue demon that breathes my air. I drag myself out of the warmth early by anyone’s standards, even though I won’t have had the rest I need. This is more important. I need quiet to remember. I need space to remember. I need time to remember. I need clarity to remember. I need to be alone with only the silence so the memories can come in.
When I open my eyes, my mind weaves around and fires up even before I peel back the covers. I usually wake feeling rattled, as if I’ve been poked with a cattle prod. The smell of adrenaline-infused sweat lingers on my skin. Whatever fever dream I had leaves me shivering when I wake. Flickers and bursts and scenes start to come alive. I wonder what got me there—how I took my emotional time machine to the kitchen of the house in Frankville or to the kerosene heater just a room away where we’d sometimes get dressed for school because the house was so cold on winter mornings. Was it a dream or subconscious thought, or a memory hidden somewhere that jarred me? Sometimes it takes longer to start turning over details.
My feet hit the floor. I take a few steps toward the back of my bedroom door and find a sweater to wrap around my shoulders. I tiptoe into the hallway that is lined with black-and-white photographs. My family seems to join me these days because I’ve hung their faces here and it’s a relief. There have been times I could barely remember them, but not so these days. I feel them on my short journey toward the kitchen, where I make my coffee and think about a way to keep going with it.
I write these things down to simultaneously put us to rest and keep us alive.
I won’t solve anything by doing this job I’ve assigned myself. I can’t reverse time even if I count backward from four to the tempo of “Thirteen” by Big Star.
Next shot.
4—3—2—1.
One shot.
Nope.
The Photographs
Nanny and PawPaw when they were still teenagers. How could anyone have helped but fall in love with a woman that pretty? PawPaw never quit courting her. They were married for fifty-eight years and fifteen minutes. She is sad that he died on their anniversary. I think it’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever known.
Mammy and Dandy. Regal and refined.
Sissy and me sitting on Nanny and PawPaw’s hearth when we were probably seven and three.
Me on my tricycle at the Bicentennial parade in Jackson when I was four. Someone helped me wrap tinfoil around the back fender and in the spokes to decorate it. There’s an American flag stuck in the front basket. That’s the day we sang with the group Nanny had with Mama, Clyde, Margaret, and Gayle. They wore gingham dresses with tiny pearl buttons all the way up the back that they sewed themselves. We changed from our play clothes into dresses so we could sing too.
Sissy in that boggin’ cap that made her look so tough when she was about two I think, and looking exactly like my son did when he was that age.
Daddy feeding two goats from an oilcan. There’s another one of him from that day. He’s leaning against the fence between the yard and the pasture and wearing an engineer cap. My teeth are an exact mixture of his and Mama’s. The autopsies said they both had good teeth so that’s a relief. Makes me think I might hold on to mine until old age if I make it into a thing like old age. You don’t realize how important teeth are until you start having trouble with them.
Mama, soaking wet, laughing and acting a fool in the creek. Happiness.
Sissy and me on Betsy with Daddy—he’s in the middle of her saddle, Sissy’s behind him, I’m in front. He’s holding the reins. I’m holding the saddle horn and looking down. She’s leaning back with her hand on Betsy’s croup, looking suspicious of the camera and worried.
Daddy as a baby.
Mama in the backseat of someone’s convertible when she was pregnant with Sissy, a kerchief on her head and smiling that wide smile of hers that my son smiles too.
I hung these photographs here so my son could see these faces and maybe recognize the lines of his in them one day too. I want him to see his family. I want him to know where he came from. It doesn’t hurt to remind myself either, as I pass his bedroom on the right, stopping for a few seconds to listen for his sweet, sleepy breaths.
THIS MORNING I THINK THERE IS NOTHING TO SOLVE BUT I keep on despite my weariness. I work my way through a few dilatory activities but eventually make it to my desk. I look at my notes. I don’t have Mama’s pretty handwriting. Hers was a perfected, loopy cursive while mine is an amalgamation of mostly connected print and rushed circles. My handwriting just looks like I’m in a hurry. She used to get on to me for making my lowercase a’s and o’s with an extra go-round in them and marvel at the way I held my pencil so that it lay right on top of the ring finger of my right hand and made a permanent knot there. Even then I had to figure out my own way of doing things, despite her direction. I suspect I inherited that from either her or Daddy, though I can’t tell you which. I don’t know how Mama found time to do things like work with me on my handwriting, but she did.
I pick up my stack of index cards and pieces of paper and look through the first few. I get exasperated with myself almost immediately and put them down on the left side of my desk. Who am I trying to kid? Self-doubt creeps in like
the scum I used to see on the pond on those mornings when Sissy and Bullet and I would go down to the pasture to fish and then call Dandy from across the fence. It starts to cover me up.
I have to remind myself that I knew her, that there must be some way to show you who she was as I remember her. I feel her absence, then and now.
I pick the stack back up.
IT’S AN UNDERSTATEMENT TO SAY THAT MAMA WAS A CONFIDENT driver—I suppose when you drive the same roads day in and day out it becomes second nature to you. She used to fly down the road at top speed whether it was in the old Impala, the Monte Carlo, or the brown Ford LTD we got when I was in fourth grade. I don’t remember which one we were in the morning she fixed the hem of her skirt as she drove. How anyone could keep one eye on the road and one hand on the wheel, and one eye and one hand on a needle and thread, I don’t know. There was quite likely a coffee cup balanced on the dashboard as well.
A day late and a dollar short, she used to say. But we got there on someone’s prayers, probably hers, and a song. Always a song. If we weren’t singing, which was seldom the case, she’d always reach over and turn up the radio when she heard a song she liked and maybe do a little shifty dance in the driver’s seat and sing along. Mama was never one of those people who say they don’t like this kind of music or that out of hand. She liked what she liked no matter where it came from if the singing was good and it caught her ear somehow.
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