by Sissy Spacek
It was a lovely summer evening, that magic hour right before dusk when the light covers everything like honey. Jack and I were driving along the highway leading out of town when we passed the scene of an accident. Just minutes before, an old man had been riding his bike along the edge of the road when he was hit by a car. The police and ambulance hadn’t arrived yet, although I could hear sirens in the distance. A few people were standing around the injured man, who lay sprawled on the ground. While I was looking out my window, the man died right in front of me. I watched as the life left his body. One moment he was pink and alive and the next he was gray and dead. It was the most incredible thing, because the life didn’t drain out from him, but rose up from his body like a bright shadow, then was gone.
I knew I had witnessed something profound and mystical, and also strangely intimate. I kept thinking that I had watched a man die, but no one in his family even knew he was dead. They were expecting him to walk through the door any minute after his pleasant evening bike ride.
The experience has stayed with me all these years, and I still haven’t fathomed its full meaning. Although it was a tragedy for the man and his family, for me it was an indelible reminder that life can be taken from us in an instant, without warning. It was like a mid-course adjustment, to remind me not to take anything or anyone for granted, to live without regrets and enjoy every minute of the time we have.
My father came to live with us on the farm when he was eighty-six years old. The house in Quitman had become too much for him to keep up, and he was already spending months at a time with us. We set him up in the front bedroom of the house, on the first floor, and turned the library across the hall into an office for him. There he would spend hours reading through a dozen or more newspapers, mostly the Wall Street Journal, and clipping articles that interested him. He saved all his papers, piling them in stacks on the floor. (That’s probably why I only read newspapers online—to offset all the trees sacrificed for him!)
Our girls called him “Poppy,” and I was happy that they got to know each other better during the years when he lived with us. Whenever we visited him in Texas, it took a while for them to settle down. They were out of their “normal” routine and sometimes ran wild around the house. “Sissy, I’m afraid these girls are gonna grow up to be criminals,” he would tell me, shaking his head. But once he was able to know Schuyler and Madison in their own environment, where they were much calmer and their personalities could shine through, their relationship blossomed.
Madison followed Poppy everywhere. He took her for rides in the golf cart, and helped her with her homework. Both of the girls would sit with him on the porch while he made them applesauce by scraping a fresh apple with a spoon. He told them it was the same thing his grandfather, who had come from Moravia, had done for him when he was a boy.
My dad loved the history of this place, and he was beside himself when he discovered that Robert E. Lee’s soldiers had camped in our front field during the Civil War. Even better, the large neighboring farm, of which we were once a part, had played a role in the Revolutionary War. In 1781, British troops stopped there on their way to capture Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. According to legend, the farm’s owner, Dr. Thomas Walker, ordered up a fine, leisurely breakfast for the soldiers to delay them long enough for a rider to warn Jefferson. The future president escaped with minutes to spare, and the rest, as they say, is history. My dad was thrilled by these kinds of stories, and he often said how fortunate we were to live in the cradle of democracy. It was all we could do to keep him from putting historical markers up all over the farm.
My dad always liked to hunt. When he came to live with us, one of our neighbors told him that she had a lot of Canadian geese on her place, and he was welcome to come over and hunt them. So he woke up early one day and got into all his hunting gear and set out on his hunt. Our neighbor’s farm manager drove him over to a pond where there were about 150 geese swimming peacefully.
“Okay, Mr. Spacek,” said the manager. “You say when, I’ll scare ’em up and you shoot ’em.”
My dad just started laughing and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Where’s the sport in that? That’s not hunting, that’s slaughter!”
We have loads of deer on our farm, and he was excited to learn that you can shoot deer on your own property without a license. He made himself a little blind in the woods, and he would drive up there in his golf cart, toting his rifle. He’d wait for hours for a deer to appear, but when he had one in his sights, he couldn’t shoot. He decided he just wanted to watch them. From then on, he left his gun at home and took his binoculars instead.
That golf cart was great for Daddy. He’d take it up to the end of the long driveway and pick up the mail and the paper. Then he’d stop by Gerri’s house for a cup of coffee. My dad made big breakfasts for himself and the girls—which they loved, since Jack and I weren’t enthusiastic cooks. We were more into free-range grazing from a stocked refrigerator. But Daddy was a great cook, and he loved to make eggs and sausages. He would appear every morning fully dressed in pressed trousers and a button-down shirt. As I watched him carefully slip the eggs onto plates laid out on the kitchen island, the morning sun slanting through the blinds, I thought of that picture of him as a young agricultural agent, wearing his white linen pants and two-toned shoes, standing out in a cotton field. Whatever my dad did, he did it with style.
When he was feeling well, Daddy would take long walks along the farm road. I would always find little piles of sticks that he had gathered along the way. Just like in Quitman, where he couldn’t seem to walk in the front door without pulling weeds from the lawn, my dad kept our pathways free of branches, just to be helpful. Even when he started using a walker to get around, we never ran out of kindling on the farm.
Daddy always loved making fires, but we never had a fireplace in Texas. To save money on construction, he had put in a fake gas hearth. He spent years with a pent-up desire for crackling flames. When we bought a small lake house with a fireplace outside of Quitman, Daddy spent all his time out there, building fires. When he moved in with us in Virginia, he kept the fireplace in his bedroom going day and night, three seasons of the year.
One night we came home from an evening out and looked down the long, dim hallway to see his walker tipped over in front of his room and a dark, still shape next to it. Jack and I raced down the hall, calling, “Poppy, are you all right?” He poked his head out of the doorway and said, “Well, I was collecting firewood and …” The dark heap was a load of logs that didn’t quite make it through the door.
As the years went by, my dad’s health started to fade. We replaced the four-poster bed in his room with a hospital bed that was lower to the ground and could help him sit up. But after a few days he wanted his regular bed back. The new one just reminded him that he was sick. So Jack hauled the disassembled four-poster back into the bedroom and started setting it up. Daddy could see he was having a terrible time trying to hold it and screw it together, so he asked, “Jack, can I help you?”
“I tell you what, Poppy,” said Jack, struggling to keep the posts upright. “Can you get Sissy so she can help me set this up?”
Daddy turned his walker around and shuffled down the hallway. It took a long, long time and Jack could hear every turn of the wheel. I was in the family room, building a fire. When I heard him come in, I called out, “Hey, Poppy!”
“Hey, Sissy!” Jack heard him say from down the hall.
There was a long pause. And then my dad said, “Where’s Jack?”
Jack’s mother and my father died within months of each other. When Gerri was in hospice care at home, Madison made herself a pallet of blankets on the floor next to Gerri’s bed and read aloud to her from Harry Potter. Gerri was buried in Ipava, Illinois, where a plot was waiting for her next to Jack’s father, the pilot who had died when they were all so young.
About three months later, in late December 2000, my dad went into the hospital and never made it home.
He was clear as a bell most of the time. We could tell he was reliving his past because he kept calling me Mother’s pet name. “Sugarbunk!” he said. “I need my britches and a fresh shirt.” Then he pointed to the clock on the wall. “I’ve got to go onstage in fifteen minutes, Sugarbunk…” He was back in college, performing with his band. Another time he looked around the room and said, “This is a nice cabin. Whose is it, anyway?”
I knew the end was coming, but when my father died that night, I was still shocked.
He was so young! I thought. And then I remembered: He was ninety years old.
It was hard to believe that our daughters were growing up and ready to start their own lives. It seemed like we’d never get them past that first three months. And when were they ever going to sleep through the night? Then suddenly they were walking and talking and starting school and driving and dating. And if you haven’t taught them everything you want them to know by the time they’re twelve, you can just forget about it. By then it’s all over; they’ve stopped listening. Then you send them out into the world, and suddenly you think of all the things you’ve forgotten to tell them: Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t park in a loading zone. You lie awake at night thinking, “I’ve got to get ’em that Mace!” Actually, that was my gift to Madison when she went away to college. Jack got her a dog.
Jack had gone through art school with Five, and he wanted to get a dog just like her for Madison. But we could never figure out her breed, or if she even was a breed. We checked out every shaggy dog that we could find, with no luck. After years of looking, Jack almost gave up. Then one day he opened up a new book we’d gotten about dog breeds, and found her. Five was a schapendoes, a Dutch sheepdog, a breed so rare in America that it’s still not registered with the American Kennel Club. When he showed me the picture, I nearly fell off the couch.
We had to jump through hoops to convince the Canadian breeder that we were worthy owners for such a special dog. Finally, we got her, a beautiful brown and white fur ball, the most adorable puppy imaginable. As soon as we saw her, it was instant love.
In the Fisk tradition of naming dogs after numerals, Madison called her Zero. Like Five had done for Jack, Zero took great care of Madison for nearly four years. But every time Madison brought her home, Zero followed Jack around like a long-lost relative. It was clear to Madison that Zero was Jack’s dog. She belonged with him. So on Madison’s twenty-second birthday, she officially handed Zero over to her dad.
Jack took Zero everywhere with him, but she had a tough act to follow because Five was such a remarkable dog. One time a guard at a studio tried to stop us from taking Five into a screening.
“No dogs allowed,” he said.
“Oh, really?” said Jack. “The invitation said ‘cast and crew.’”
The guard leaned forward and whispered, “Is that a trained dog?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Jack. “She’s a trained dog.”
“Well, then! You follow that yellow line, it goes around the corner, and it will lead you right to the screening room.”
With that, Five put her nose to the yellow line, followed it to the corner, made the turn, and disappeared. The guard was amazed. A few moments later, Five looked back around the corner, as if to say, “C’mon! What’s the hold-up?”
It didn’t take long to realize that Zero had the same talents. While he was designing Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, she came with him on location and even attended production meetings. We have a picture of her sitting in a chair at the table next to Jack. Once, when he was looking at a location, he and Zero had to walk a long way from the parking lot to the set. There were a lot of kids running around, and Zero was not used to small children, so Jack said, “Zero, get in the car.” The location scouts were amazed when she just turned around, ran all the way back to the car, jumped in, and waited patiently for him to return.
Zero was the latest in a revolving cast of animals who had lived with us at the farm. There were always dogs and cats and ponies; sheep, chickens, and a donkey named Elvira. We had a pet songbird for a while. It must have fallen out of its nest, because when one of our cats brought it to the door, it was a tiny naked bundle of bones, so young it didn’t even have feathers. Madison fed it mashed worms out of an eye dropper, and amazingly, it survived. The bird grew feathers and lived out on the second-floor sleeping porch. We named it Twerp 2. When it heard us laughing and talking outside, it would squeeze through a hole in the screen, then fly down and land on our heads.
We also adopted a stray dog we named Quitman. We found her shaking and soaked to the bones outside my father’s house one morning. There had been terrible thunder and pounding rains all night, and she had huddled under the eaves, trying not to drown. When Jack discovered her, he blessed her. “May you have a long and happy life,” he said. Then I came around the corner and said, “Look, a puppy! We have to take her back to Virginia.” For the rest of her life she would quiver and run for cover whenever it rained, which, in Virginia, is a lot. And here she’s been for almost fifteen years, with all her phobias intact.
Sometimes we’d have half a dozen or more dogs in our family. For many years, the leader of the pack was a miniature dachshund named Patch. Sometimes she reminded me of me: small but mighty. And bossy. Like many small dogs, Patch lived a long time, and she was a big presence in our lives. On the last day of her life, she walked outside to her favorite spot and sat down under a tree. I’ll never forget how she looked around the farm, just taking it all in. It reminded me of the day my mother left home to go to the hospital and paused to drink in the sight of the world she was leaving. That’s just what this little dog was doing.
There are valuable lessons everywhere, if you are willing to receive them. It’s amazing when a small brown dog can teach us so much about how to live in this world, and then how to leave it.
After attending the University of Virginia, Schuyler moved to Los Angeles. She continues to act in films, but almost all of her energy for the past few years has gone into her music. She has already written countless songs and released two CDs, the latest, recorded in Virginia, in a little studio just a few miles down the road from our farm. I am in awe of her musical talent, which goes much deeper than my own. Every once in a while I’ll sing backup on a song, or she’ll bring me up onstage to put on a harmony while she’s performing. One of the best moments of my life was performing with Schuyler during a huge concert at Wolf Trap National Park in Virginia. But most often I am happy just to sit in the audience, watching her live out my old fantasies of being a rock star.
Schuyler lives in a cozy house near the ocean with her fiancé, Chapman Bullock, a motion-graphics artist, and their rambunctious yellow lab, Rigby. There always seems to be something delicious bubbling on her stove or baking in her oven, and a crowd of grateful friends at her table. (I don’t know how she learned to cook so well—it couldn’t have been from watching me!)
Madison studied painting and sculpture at California Institute of the Arts and Virginia Commonwealth University with a yearning to become an artist and filmmaker. She’s written and directed several short comedies; in one I have a funny cameo, playing myself as an out-of-work actor. Since then, she’s been busy paying her dues and is on her way to becoming an art director, which is what she wants to do. She’s moved to Texas, where there’s a booming independent film industry and where she’s surrounded by family and feels right at home.
The walls of her house are covered with her paintings: her adopted dachshund mix, Maude, who reminds me of Patch; a painting of me in a dress I wore in Badlands; and a study of her grandmother Gerri. I love her use of color and the way she captures the spirit of her subjects. Madison’s paintings are expressions of the world around her.
It looks like the whole family is destined to live the “art life.”
Like the first Spaceks who made that leap of faith and sailed across the ocean to settle in Texas, we depend on one another, and our lives are deeply intertwined. We like each other’s co
mpany. Madison lives a short drive away from my brother Ed, his wife Tannie (who often tutored Madison on location), and their computer-enthusiast teenage son, Austin. Ed’s eldest son, Stephen, is an artist’s manager who lives near Schuyler in Los Angeles, and Mark is a filmmaker who lives near Madison in Texas. All of Ed’s boys are like brothers to our girls.
Jack and I have also stayed close to his family. His sister, Mary, still lives nearby in Virginia. She runs our office, manages our business, and keeps things working smoothly on the farm. Although she and David Lynch have parted ways, they are still friends. Their son, Austin (did you notice we have a lot of Austins in the family?), grew up with our girls and is also like a brother to them. He’s an artist and filmmaker, like his father and uncle, and his wife, Nancy, is a sculptor. Nasif Iskander, the son of Jack’s older sister, Susie, is dean of faculty at a highly regarded school in San Francisco. Susie is remarried, to a rancher named Richard Francis, and lives in South Dakota. They tried moving to Virginia for a while, but they quickly returned to the western prairie. The East Coast didn’t sit well with Richard.
“Too many trees,” he said.
The part of Virginia where we live has grown over the years. We no longer have to rely on the combo platters at La Hacienda when we want to dine out. There is a bustling downtown open-air mall filled with fine restaurants, and theaters that attract some of the best musical artists in the world. Best of all, for me, a Whole Foods supermarket has opened. I still think it’s the best way to be well fed at home (without actually having to cook). I’ve been shopping there for years, and the clerks all know me well.
Not long ago, I was coming back from a trip to California, and I was bringing Schuyler’s chocolate lab, Cassidy, back to live on the farm. I had the dog and her huge shipping crate, so I asked the car company that always picks me up at the airport to bring a large SUV. We were going to need extra room. No problem, they said. And when my flight arrived, the driver was there with a Yukon, and he helped me get the dog into the seat next to me, and the crate into the back of the car. It was great!
