In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  That moment never came, though I was so sure it would—I had faith that the father I loved would someday see himself as the good man I wanted him to be. I told myself it was only a matter of time, just around the corner. But those fairy tales don’t end when you turn eighteen. You become a woman looking for another man who just needs your love, your devotion, your endless forgiveness. You keep stubbornly trying, waiting for dictators to become benevolent kings.

  We didn’t have central air-conditioning in the house and only had a window air conditioner in the living room when I was older. We kept the doors open when it was warm, the screen doors almost keeping the bugs out. There was a door at the side of the house, in the corner of the kitchen. Sitting at the kitchen table, you could see out the door to the creek and our trash bin beside it, an open, rusted metal container where we put bags of garbage until they started to pile up, and then we would burn them, plastic and all. Junior and I usually got to burn the trash, and it was especially fun when there was a Styrofoam plate in there. We would twirl the melting Styrofoam around a stick and watch it drip, like a liquid that didn’t know what it was.

  One morning while we were eating breakfast, Junior and I heard screams from outside. We jumped up from the kitchen table and went to the back door, where we stared through the screen. Our father had our mother’s hair in one hand, and he was using it to pull her down the road toward Granny’s house—they were at least to the first post of Granny’s fence that marked the boundary and kept her cows in. We watched as he used his other fist to hit our mother over and over on her head, face, whatever he could get to. It was mostly her screams that we were hearing, though his were mixed in, too. For some reason, far away as they were, he suddenly noticed us, though he didn’t stop dragging her.

  Time stood still. The sound of his rage and her cries tore the leaves from the trees. His fist beat her head and her back and the sun beat down the gravel road and lit our faces and their bodies, and the water glittered in the creek just steps away from where we stood, motionless. My mother hit the gravel and the gravel hit back, both of them giving up something along the way. The sun shining hard, the air still, everything coming apart then—cells, neurons, shafts of light, all broken and breaking. Something was breaking inside of me, too, something I didn’t even know I needed yet.

  CHAPTER 3

  Leaving Now

  I was twenty-five when I asked my mom why she had stayed with my father for so long. For you kids. I asked whether maybe it would have been better for us if she hadn’t stayed with him so long. Yeah, I can see that now, she said.

  What is it that convinces so many women—and men as well—to endure destructive relationships for the sake of the children? My mother must have performed some painful mental calculations to measure the devil she knew against the one she did not. How could the fear and uncertainty of what might happen to her children compare to what was happening to her children? Of course, most parents don’t want to deprive their child of the other parent. But maybe the other parent is cruel every once in a while—how does that weigh against every kindness that came before it? Maybe there are certain things within a person that only come out when they are responsible for a baby or arguing with a teenager, they’re out of a job, or the burden of survival is just too much. Sometimes it feels impossible to weigh the potential loss of a parent against the pain that parent might inflict. And then there are the good times—those fleeting moments when you let yourself relax, when things suddenly seem to slide into place, when you finally think, Things are getting better. Maybe you do that for years.

  I think now that my mother believed she was staying for us kids, but where would she have gone if she had tried to leave? She didn’t have a full-time job for most of the eighties, and no safety net of friends or family who were ready to take her—us—in. My father habitually recorded phone conversations and rigged doors so he would know whether they had been opened. It didn’t seem like any secret was safe from him, and there would have been no mercy if he had caught her planning to leave. We weren’t living in the digital age—the only technology she had to work with was whatever dilapidated car she was driving at the time. And before she could overcome those challenges, she first had to escape the mental prison that he had built around her with every insult, every threat, every beating. Somehow, she had to convince herself that despite all evidence to the contrary, she was not powerless.

  But why was she there with him in the first place? Why did she endure so much, sacrifice so much? Maybe she didn’t know any better. Maybe she didn’t like herself enough to demand better. Maybe she told herself things were going to be okay and one day woke up to find they certainly were not but that she had nowhere to go. Does it matter?

  When I was around five, my uncle showed up at our house one day, and my dad accused my mom of flirting with him. I remember my uncle had a strange look on his face, and I didn’t know why he looked so calm when my dad seemed to be on the verge of wanting to fight him. Maybe it was because they were both up for a good fight. But all of a sudden, my dad rode off in my uncle’s truck with him, and Mom grabbed us kids and took us through the barbed-wire and electric fences into Granny’s cow field. We ran to the creek that cut through the field and got down in it to hide when my uncle’s truck drove back to our house and then left again. We waited until Mom said to run, and then we ran through the creek, trying to stay low and hidden, until we were close to Granny’s house.

  We got there and Papaw Conn loaded us into his pickup truck, where we all bent over as far as we could so nobody could see us through the windows. On the way out of the holler, we met my uncle and dad on their way back to the house. They hadn’t stayed gone long, so they must have gone about halfway up the holler, to a neighbor who sometimes grew weed with my dad. Papaw stopped to talk to them, as you always do on country roads, and we stayed crouched down and quiet. Granny sat on the far end of the truck cab, her face betraying nothing. I learned so much from watching her but never stopped to wonder where and why she had learned to show so little emotion. I was just trying to survive, and maybe she was, too.

  We finally drove on to Papaw and Grandma Wright’s house. We may have been there a night—it’s hard to keep all that leaving straight.

  I think that was the time when Mom finally told my dad he needed help and she wasn’t coming back until he got it. The next day, he went to the sixth floor of St. Claire Regional Medical Center—the psychiatric ward—and stayed there for two weeks. We visited him, and he introduced us to a woman with dark hair and wide eyes who would trade him cigarettes for pills. He showed us what he worked on while there, plaster-of-Paris fruits that he had painted with circus hues and cartoon smiles that didn’t stay in their neat lines. The orange was my favorite, with its soft peach color, but the banana was too yellow and the apple too red, their smiles too white. When he came home, he hung them up above the kitchen stove, where they stayed until the house burned down. Looking at them always unsettled me, a constant reminder of his time on the crazy floor, when people started using the phrase mildly schizophrenic, whatever that meant.

  It seems like we left a lot, but the worst time for me began at the IGA grocery store in town. We often brought Ale-8 bottles there to return for ten cents apiece, which added up to quite a bit when we hauled in cases at a time, all covered in the tiny ants that invaded our kitchen whenever it was warm, forming a marching line toward the trash can. We would store the Ale-8 bottles on the front porch, where the ants had all the access they could hope for to the sweet residue in the bottom of each bottle. I have pictures of me, three years old or so, holding a Pepsi bottle up to send the last of the pop into my mouth. I have a lot of pictures of myself from that age and onward to when my two front teeth visibly decayed. For the rest of my life, the sugar and the phosphoric acid from those pops changed the way I smiled.

  It was usually my mom and us kids who hauled the bottles to the window in the corner of the store, where some man would take them to the back and give
Mom the voucher for the cash. I watched, wondering whether the man minded all those ants and what happened to them once they were taken to the back of the store. Did they escape? Did they settle there, in the mysterious dark room in the back of the IGA, to live a comfortable life? Or did the man kill them, angry that we had brought them out of the holler?

  For a few years, Mom would drive Junior and me everywhere in our brown Chevette. It often wouldn’t start right away, and Mom would have us kids push it for a bit, and then she could pop the clutch to get it running. Junior and I would run to the car and hop in with it still moving. It was usually easy for us to push the car when we started at our driveway, since the road from our house to Granny’s traveled on a slight downward slope. It was a little tricky to open the doors and hop in with the car moving, but we learned. As an adult, I learned to pop a clutch myself, even pushing a pickup truck while alone and pregnant, with the driver-side door open, until I had enough momentum to jump in and roll downhill with the clutch down and to hit the gas at just the right moment. As a kid, though, it was not so easy when the county roads department laid fresh gravel, since the thick, loose rocks were difficult to run on and we slipped more often. Much of the time, the road was worn smooth where the car and truck tires rolled over it, and a narrow path of rough gravel marked the center of the road.

  One time in the IGA parking lot, a man noticed us, my brother and I still in grade school, trying to push the car fast enough for Mom to get it started. It was harder in the flat parking lot, without gravity on our side. The stranger came and helped, which struck me as odd at the time, and the look on his face told me he thought something was odd, too. As a kid, I couldn’t push as fast as he could, so when he told us to get in the car and let him push, I did, and we rolled away. I’m sure Papaw Wright could have fixed the car with no problem. He owned and ran a successful garage all my life, and most of my mother’s life, too. I imagine he would have wanted to fix it, knowing she was driving around with us children. I imagine it was my father who liked the car that way, always leaving my mother uncertain and with the threat of being stranded looming over her.

  But once, there was a glimmer of something else in her when we arrived at the IGA. We didn’t make it out of the car. Instead of opening her door, Mom stopped us with a strange look on her face. Do you all just want to leave?

  I didn’t know what she meant. I knew we were there for groceries, maybe some macaroni and cheese, and I didn’t quite like the idea of whatever she was saying. She added, I’ve saved up some money. We could just leave your dad. We don’t have to go back. I was the last to say okay. We went to the Super 8 Motel by the interstate, which was pretty nice because it had two beds and a color TV. Soon, we were on the phone with Dad, telling him we weren’t coming back. He talked to Mom first and then to my brother, neither of them showing any emotion. They handed the phone to me and Dad was crying, begging me to come home, he would be different, everything would be different. He claimed he needed us, and that’s all I needed to hear. I couldn’t believe how callous my mom and brother had been, knowing Dad was so sorry for everything. Mom asked what I thought we should do, and I told her we should go back, Dad promised things would be better, and how could we leave him like this? We went back that night.

  I had learned by then that his feelings were the most important in the family, that his moments of regret—authentic or not—were more important than whatever we felt at any time. I needed to forgive him like God forgave me for being such a sinner. None of us deserved forgiveness from our heavenly father, so who was I to withhold it from my earthly father? Who was allowed to be vengeful? Who was allowed to be angry?

  I knew later that it was my fault, that Mom and Junior were ready for it to end, but I had dragged us back. The next time he beat her or made us cower or threatened someone, I knew I had let that happen. I had fallen for it, foolishly, when Mom and Junior knew better. But I wanted him to love us, and so when he cried, I thought it was the moment I had been waiting for—the moment he finally wanted us and knew how important we were to him.

  I wanted to please, to avoid wrath. It was a devastating alchemy of abuse and religious fear, and I accepted my constant inner hell as punishment for how unworthy I was. Desperate to earn God’s love, my father’s love—anyone’s love—I forgave in an instant, full of hope for some imaginary future. Like so many women before me and since, I learned that you go back, you stick it out, you love the man until he is saved by your sacrifice. It’s the kind of thing you can always see going so badly in someone else’s life, but not in your own.

  Each time we went back, things were good for a few days, and sometimes for as long as a week. There were roses one time, and I told Mom, That was nice of him. She snorted a laugh and replied, Sure, I’m the one who will have to pay for them. My guess is that we all paid for them, in one way or another.

  I thought my mom would leave us all only once. I was about six. My brother and I were playing outside and ran into the house when we heard her screams. I thought Dad was killing her, it was so much louder than the normal screaming. Instead, I found them squared off on either side of the kitchen table, and she was armed with a heavy antique kitchen scale. She was raging. I had never seen her so angry. She usually only looked scared when they fought. When he noticed us, my dad took the opportunity to mock her. Look, kids—look at your mother. She’s crazy, she’s fucked up.

  His laughter was derisive and shook me. I didn’t know what to think, how to make sense of her rage, her impending violence. Then he said the most shocking thing of all: You’d better straighten up, or I’m going to take these kids and leave. He had never threatened to take us before, and I implicitly knew he didn’t want us. I was begging please no in my mind when she screamed, Take them! Take them and get out of here, just leave me alone! I don’t care anymore!

  I wondered in horror what would happen to us if he took us away. He might kill us, he might whip us, we might never see anyone we love again. I was more frightened then than ever, thinking she would sacrifice us for good, one last time, and we would be lost to the world. It didn’t happen, of course. My father sent us to the car and we waited there for about fifteen minutes, but it was my mother who came and told us to get out, that we weren’t leaving. I searched her face for some explanation, but it wasn’t there. I never asked her what had happened, how it was that she was ready to watch us leave. I don’t know who backed down first, but I imagine it was her. And I imagine that it was not my father’s love that made her change her mind but that he spelled out the consequences for her if she didn’t put that fucking scale down right now, and she started seeing things his way.

  There was another time when she talked back to him, and I watched him grow more agitated. I wasn’t even ten, but I asked her, Why don’t you just go along with what he says, make him happy? It wasn’t really a question—I was agitated, too. I knew that she knew what to do, how to survive—we all did. What was the point of fighting back? There would only be hell to pay. Some part of me knew that he was still in the wrong, of course, and that my mother had every right to stand up for herself. But I didn’t care. I didn’t have the emotional resources to always care about what was wrong or right or fair—I just wanted things to be bearable. I didn’t want to wonder again what he was going to do to her, to us, to anyone we loved.

  All that time, I was going to church every Sunday morning with Granny. Between church and God and all the uncensored reading I did, I developed my own superstitious faith in the unseen. Grandma Wright didn’t go to church but chain-smoked and gave me grocery bags full of her tabloids—usually Star, which I would read cover to cover, intrigued by the lovers and wives, the breakups, and the scandalous red-carpet outfits. One time, there was a Sun in a bag she gave me, and I read it thinking it would be like Star. I found out pretty quickly it was more like the National Enquirer that sometimes appeared at Grandma’s house but that I usually saw at the grocery checkout lines.

  But in that issue of Sun, there was a
set of instructions on how to make your deepest wish come true. In the lower right-hand corner of one of the pages, the tabloid gave directions to fold a new one-dollar bill in a particular order, place it in a new white handkerchief, put the handkerchief under one’s pillow, and imagine what it was one longed for the most. And then, the instructions claimed—abracadabra—the wish would be granted.

  It seemed so simple, but I wondered what exactly they meant by a new dollar bill. I could not find one in our house that was less than a few years old, but I thought I would give it a try anyway. My father had lots of handkerchiefs that he carried with him. None of them were in new condition, though. I went into my parents’ bedroom as nonchalantly as I could and picked one that looked the whitest, thinking it would have to do. Back in my bedroom, I followed the directions for folding the dollar bill and handkerchief exactly so and looked forward to lying down that night.

  I was not sure what I would wish for, but as I thought about it in the dark, I quickly started dreaming. I am sleeping in a large white bed, covered by a pristine white comforter. My bedroom has beautiful wooden walls. My father walks in and I sit up, propping myself with the thick, soft pillows behind me. He is wearing a white suit and looks strong, healthy. He sits on my bed and says, I just want to say thank you—thank you for showing me the light. And I am relieved, proud, knowing I have finally saved him.

  Many years later, a boyfriend would tell me that it was dark magic, that my father’s white suit marked him as a deceiver, that Lucifer was the light bearer, and that it was a spirit trying to trick me. For years, I just waited to see whether it would come true.