Blood

by Allison Moorer

  I won’t ever figure them or it out. I won’t ever figure out why they stayed together, I won’t ever figure out why or when Daddy went mad, I won’t ever figure out why Mama held out hope that she could save him and have a decent life. Each path I take leads to another. Every one of them is difficult to navigate.

  I can’t cling to an ethic. I can’t even find one. There isn’t an ethic that works for a mess like life and there certainly isn’t one for a thing as irrational as love. I’m not going to make sense of Mama and Daddy, their relationship, or our family. I only hope I’ll learn how to accept that I can’t make what is wild tame. The only thing to do is let it be wild. Let it all be unanswered. Let it be.

  PART III

  Blood

  Reverberation

  The OED defines reverberate as (of a loud noise) to be repeated as an echo.

  Yes. There’s that.

  One shot. 1—2—3—4. Next shot.

  Stay home and rot yo’ ass. Pig. Worm. How much you weigh now? 140?

  I promise it will never happen again.

  (of a place) to appear to vibrate because of a loud noise.

  Yes. There’s that.

  One shot. 1—2—3—4. Next shot.

  My blood vibrates in my veins when I wake with a jolt. I don’t always know what rouses me but I feel the stress and soreness in my face and remember the fractures the dentist showed me on the X-ray. I’m slowly breaking my teeth. I’m clenching my jaws too hard in my sleep to not be fighting something. Most of the time I’m not conscious of what haunts me. I am only aware that something does.

  Have continuous serious effects.

  Yes. There’s that.

  A burst, violent and hard, then the reverberation.

  How does it all play out? Was there always a course ahead of me—a predetermined trajectory—or could I have gone in any direction?

  Any direction is always possible. Even if there is a predetermination of the one that is best suited. There is no great hand to swoop in to save me from myself if my self is resolute to pay no heed. One can ignore the signs and go by what the will wants—then all the upstream swimming eventually adds up to oppose one’s best interest in one way or another. You wake up one morning, exhausted and sick of yourself and your struggling through the days. You rewind the film and catch the glitch, the misstep, the warped and disjointed thinking you were thinking when you chose the path you chose. There’s always free will to mess up.

  Regardless, wherever you end up, going anywhere weightlessly is impossible. We gather material, day by day, from the first day we’re on earth, maybe even before. We tote, drag, lift, heave, and place it in the middle of whatever room, relationship, conversation, or endeavor in which we land.

  Sometimes the material, the baggage, is only the memory of sounds. The reverberation—the echo, the vibration, the continuing serious effects. Pig, worm, stay home and rot yo’ ass, how much you weigh now?

  It, since it is what is dragged and then placed in the middle of everything, then acts as the nucleus around which the concentric circles of life form. Its importance reverses its position and so reverses its very definition. The reverberation is no longer the effect but the cause.

  Compassion

  It is normally not hard to come by at all. I’m one of the ones who corner crying women in airport restrooms to ask if I can help.

  But there is a cold spot inside of me that is reminiscent of those I’d come across in Dry Creek, where we swam as little girls—mysterious, dark, somehow thinner, cooler, and less lifelike than the surrounding water. Those pockets scared me. They felt as if they held a slippery sickness I might catch. Sometimes I thought maybe I’d discovered a snake or something else poisonous and hideous that would bite me, but I never looked down. I wouldn’t have been able to see what it was most likely anyway, as the water was rarely crystal clear. I could only stand still and wait for it to pass.

  The cold spot shows itself now and then when vulnerability is rude enough to do the same. It elbows its way forward and I become afraid, dark, thin and bloodless, even momentarily mysterious to myself as I turn against my own heart that so badly needs my understanding. I am unkind to myself when I perceive my own inner weakness.

  Why did you do that? How could you be so stupid? You aren’t perfect enough not to be perfect.

  The most awful, ugly thing about self-hatred is that it doesn’t stay contained. The harder I am on myself, the harder I am on others. The harder I am, full stop.

  Charity begins at home.

  Every outward action is a reflection of an inner one; most of us know that. The natural outward compassion I possess becomes watery and thin when I cast aside what little I have for myself. My hurt and damage presents itself as a churlish character trait. I hate myself even more then. My cold spot is poisonous and hideous and it bites—me first, then you.

  Lord, what we get taught to do.

  I’m learning to stand still and wait for it to pass—recognize it and keep my mouth shut. I’m also learning to bust myself.

  Sometimes I despise being honest. Sometimes I despise those who taught me how to let such a lack of ruth rattle around inside my ribs. How does one reverse learning?

  Children

  I needed to be sure I could do the job. So I waited. I had a career to attend to, other things I chose to do, hurdles in front of me that would be easier to jump without a little one in tow, adventures to attempt through which it would not have been fair to drag a child. I married the wrong guy, or at least the wrong guy to have a child with, when I was barely twenty-three. I had serious reservations about him and about myself. I had emotional maladies that I was rightfully afraid I’d pass along. So I waited, and when I finally thought I was ready, I prepared with my second husband. He, at least, appeared to like children and have some kindness in him. John Henry arrived in 2010.

  He is my first thought when I wake. He is my last thought before I go to sleep. He feels like a culmination of something or some things, and like he came to the world with a remarkable grace that helps him know everything about every bit of me and even the rest of us—Mama, Daddy, and Sissy. I feel sorry if that is true. I don’t want him to bear all that. But I also know from the look in his eyes and his sideways glances toward me that he isn’t worried about it at all. He appears to see it clearly, to understand the fragility of people, not just the fragility of Moorers, in a way that most of us cannot and to be able to forgive it instantly. The way that he seems to absorb the world tells me that he wants to say, “Mama, I’ve got this.” When he cries, he pats my shoulder as if to remind me, “Don’t worry. This will pass.” Just like the cold spots in the water of Dry Creek, it does. He appears to have no cold spot.

  When we walk out of our apartment building in the mornings he acts like a deer emerging from the woods. He pauses and looks up at the leaves on the trees, especially if there’s a breeze, and takes in the world before he allows his feet to touch the sidewalk. He is alert to nature and checks the signs, always taking a reading. I don’t know what he sees or hears, though I suspect it’s something I usually miss. He finally, reluctantly, steps down after he’s looked and listened and we walk to school. John Henry has autism. He was diagnosed when he was almost but not yet two. He doesn’t communicate with words now, and he may never. I watched him lose the words he had, about twenty-five of them, when he was about sixteen months old and agonizingly wondered, and even asked out loud, what I’d done to cause such a thing. I have not stopped.

  He told me after he’d turned two, not verbally but through some sort of invisible wirework that connects our minds, that when he runs around and plays by himself that he is sometimes playing with my mama. He looks almost exactly like her except in the ways that he looks like my daddy, and inherited her laugh and goofy sense of humor.

  I’m glad I waited and got him when I did. I don’t know how he will ultimately do on this earth, but here are a few things I’ve figured out about us so far.

  He is here to s
how me unconditional love. I am here to learn how to receive and give it back.

  He is here to teach me to listen. I am here to shepherd him while he does it.

  He is here as a blessing. I am here to recognize him as such.

  He is here as an angel. He is sometimes of the sort that tests my patience, fortitude, and endurance, sometimes of the sort that ruptures my heart, sometimes of the sort that makes me feel like every part of me that has any good in it will burst through my skin from the way he makes it increase in size. I am here to learn to allow him to redeem me.

  Home

  How important is it, I ask. What does it mean, I wonder. Is home other people? Is home a sense of belonging? Is home inside of us?

  Home is not a place. How many times can we say it? Home, for me, is now some kind of peace. I had to work on changing that definition. Home comes from a present mind reminding me to be thankful for the roof over my head, wherever I am. But presence is hard to find. Look backward and become depressed. Focus forward and feel anxiety and worry. Sit still and be okay. Home, when it’s inside of us, allows us to sit still. Home allows us to just be, because it accepts us as we are.

  Maybe I’m lucky that I feel hardly any physical pull toward the place I spent my childhood. I don’t need to go there to feel like I belong somewhere. I’ve been making my own homes for well over half of my life, feathering my own nests from things I’ve sometimes had to fish out of the clearance bins, discovering comfort and security through deep breaths, cups of coffee, or scratch biscuits like Mama and Nanny made. However I learned to make myself a home, whether through placing a stack of books on a hotel room nightstand or stopping in the hallway to listen to my son’s sleepy laughter, I am happy to feel it when I can.

  The esperance simmering on the stove. I carry it with me.

  Artistry (and Melancolia I)

  It is a wonder to be able to see the possibilities in something. A melody, a word, a canvas, a room, an empty table, a piece of wood or marble, the beginning of a conversation, or a day. Magic churns around everywhere and it can be harnessed with the right tools. Some folks are born with them, and some have to earn them. Some are born with just enough access to them to be dangerous and then make it their mission to take that just-enough and polish it into a kind of living, breathing, breathtaking thing, tall and bright and sturdy, with still a bit of wildness remaining. Bluets into sunflowers.

  To see an artist in her full glory renders the world bearable.

  The opposite of full glory is Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancolia I. Volumes attempting to parse out the work have been written, but an artist doesn’t need an explanation of the complications that she knows arise with her tasks.

  One good thing my first husband did for me was introduce me to Dürer. He liked the engraving because it was a mirror. We want what we know.

  Mama and Daddy were artists. I never saw them as such when I was a girl and they never made money that way, but they lived their lives as creative people. They showed Sissy and me how to do the same. Inheriting that sensibility, that possibility, saved us somehow. It’s also a double-edged sword that made us even more exposed to hurt and rejection, but that makes some sort of skewed sense. It’s a risk to turn what’s inside of you into something for the outside world to access. For people like us, it becomes an extension of our childhoods on a huge scale, though we didn’t know that when we started to offer it. We were raised making music, continued to do so, and both made it our life’s work. It’s what we were taught, among other things, to do.

  Putting a creation into the world is asking to be understood and loved. The answer is not always yes.

  “PLEASE WELCOME BACK TO THE STAGE SISTERS Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne.”

  Our friend and fellow artist Rodney Crowell had been asked by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to curate a tribute to the Everly Brothers. He asked Sissy and me to come sing a few songs together. We both said yes without question.

  Cleveland, Ohio, October 2014.

  We strode out onstage together in our dresses and high heels, and after Sissy stuck a piece of gum she’d been chewing on top of Albert Lee’s amp (for safekeeping I guess), she took the lead part and I sang the high harmony as we’d done so many times before. We’d heard the song a thousand times. We’d sung it together at least a hundred.

  After the first line of “Maybe Tomorrow” the crowd applauded. The sound of our voices blending as only those that belong to siblings can buzzed through them just as it did us. Our voices are like two halves of a whole, and when we sing together we make one thing. It was electric. My chest and ribs vibrated in that perfect way that notes coming from my toes can make them do. Sometimes I think I live for that feeling.

  “I have to say that Sissy and I grew up on the Everly Brothers, we cut our teeth on ’em. We wouldn’t be standing here without the Everly Brothers, either one of us, so we’re very, very grateful to be here tonight. Thank y’all very much.”

  Sissy was right. Music saved us both. We’ve always got a song in us somewhere, even when it seems like there’s absolutely nothing else.

  The thing is, a song is often all I’m left with. Relationships are easy for me to enter, hard for me to be in, and by the time I get done grieving their end—which is something I seem to have to do while still technically in them—ultimately easy for me to leave. I’ve always had an escape route. There’s always been an exit plan brewing. Escaping and exiting has been my mother tongue, unspoken, but always batted around in the back of my mind in honest dialogue with myself—to escape or exit has always been the only safe option.

  After this is over, I’ll go.

  If he does that again it will be the last time.

  Let me store resentments like I’m canning vegetables for the winter so I’ll slowly develop a deep, smoldering hatred in return for my deep disappointment.

  None of it is fair, neither to my partners nor to me. It’s never been malicious, rather something I learned to do out of necessity. It has been my protection, the only acceptable response to my fear. I haven’t even known I was doing it, not until now.

  My sister seems to be much the same sort of creature as I.

  Inheritance. Reverberation.

  I took on the shame of being the daughter of a murderer. It made me shy. It made me reluctant, reticent, because I didn’t want to reveal it and I knew the subject of family always comes up when you’re getting to know someone. I was very careful about to whom I revealed my family’s details. I didn’t want to tell it. I was ashamed of what had happened to my family. I didn’t want to see that look spread across the face of a person hearing the story for the first time—the look of shock and then pity. That look told me they thought we must’ve been trash, because the sort of thing that happened to us only happened to people who were stupid, addicted, violent, and unworthy.

  I learned to hold my fists up to the world to try to protect myself from being seen, to also try to hide from the reality of it, to try to deny where I came from, to try to present a version of myself that no one could imagine having come from folks who couldn’t rise above the sorts of demons that hovered over them.

  I’m still trying not to be the daughter of a murderer. I’m still trying not to be the daughter of an abused and murdered woman.

  I’m still trying to redeem them. I dream their dreams, I speak their thoughts, and I sing their songs. I carry the structure of their bones around my insides and try to tell the world, “This is what they looked like. They looked like me. Can’t you see them? Can’t you see there was more to them than how they died? That isn’t all there is to it. They were more than that.” Sometimes I have to remind even myself of those things.

  It’s easy to see where it all came from. Because we grew up the way we did, we’ve never imagined anything could feel worse than how we did as children, so we can bear a situation that’s not right for us for years, determinedly trying to fix it, fix it, fix it, though we don’t have the tools, before we finally wake up
and notice that no matter what we try, it just doesn’t feel good. Before we wake up and notice that no matter what we try, we just don’t feel good. That we’re tired of trying so hard to do something that isn’t doable. That we aren’t living fully or the way we should. That we’re making someone else miserable right along with us while thinking we’re sacrificing and trying to make everyone happy. Then we accept that we have to move on and get out, stoically saying it’s the best thing. Yes, I’ve watched her do it too. I don’t want to do it anymore.

  It’s hard to love and be loved when you are afraid to be anything but closed. Accepting tenderness brings with it the necessity of openness, which breaks my shell and leaves me exposed and susceptible to hurt. There were many years when that just wasn’t an option, especially those hot, early ones when I was just starting to recover. It is sometimes a slog even now, this far down the line. It’s easier to hide and not ask anyone for anything, least of all for understanding and acceptance.

  I’m calling myself out now.

  A control freak is never happy, even when she thinks she’s in control. Alcoholic and abusive households inevitably produce edgy, directive people who constantly, I dare say insanely, try to pull the pieces of the past back together in the present so they can be figured out. The worst of us re-create our childhoods so we can try to change them, so we can finally gain control over what happened. We don’t trust anyone else to tell the truth or take care of anything. That sort of undermining just doesn’t ever work if you want to be with another person or other people. It has to be unlearned, stripped off of you like old paint from a porch. The real need isn’t for control when it gets down to it, but instead for sanctuary and love, neither of which I would’ve recognized even if they’d materialized at my front door. Most people want what is familiar and will take it over something new even if the new might feel better. I’m an expert at finding the familiar. But I’ve grown tired of repeating what I was shown. I’m trying to learn how to speak to sanctuary and love and even invite them in to stay.