by Bobi Conn
Those adventures usually seemed safe enough, as even our dad must have decided it was best not to lose a kid off the hood of a car. Sometimes, though, when there was a dog around, the dog would somehow get in front of the car, and suddenly Dad would accelerate. The car would be right on top of the dog, who was by then running as fast as he could. Junior and I would scream and yell for our dad to slow down and be careful, and Dad would just laugh and gun it a little, bringing us even closer, I was certain, to the dog’s demise. We never ran over a dog, though, and we never fell off the car. On those days, it was a relief to reach our driveway and see the dog run safely into the yard, away from Dad’s laughter and our racing hearts.
Other than the beagle named Daisy that one of Dad’s friends gave us, dogs never lasted long enough at our house for me to remember their names, so I did not grow attached to them. Most of the time, strays showed up out of nowhere, and we fed them table scraps when we had them to spare. I’m certain we never bought a bag of dog food. They wandered up the gravel road or out of the woods like some unfortunate fairy-tale child who stumbles upon a suspicious gingerbread house.
I didn’t realize people took animals to vets until I was much older, and later in life, it was still difficult to understand why people bought lamb-and-rice dog food or spent money on medicine for dogs or booties for their paws. Those are the kinds of things you buy when you have so much money, you don’t have to worry anymore about how many times your children have eaten hot dogs this week, or how they’re behind on their shots, or whether their clothes are looking too small or too stained so maybe someone’s going to call social services on you.
Even after growing up and getting a job and being able to buy organic food and the name-brand clothes for my kids that I wore only as hand-me-downs from friends, I struggle to imagine how we could take care of a dog like a family member. It seems that my guilt and worry about all the dogs I saw mistreated come out in subtle cues to them now, as they sniff me and I tense up, suddenly filled with the same fear I had as a child, wondering what awful thing is going to happen next.
When I was about eight years old, we had a dog around for a while—whether it was one my dad chased down the road with us on the car, I couldn’t say. Looking back, I can tell you it was about the size of a Lab and completely black. I don’t think we gave it a name. Once, it followed me to Granny’s house when I walked there to get some onions and tomatoes for my dad on a sunny afternoon. Granny and Papaw Conn were not home, but the chickens were out, pecking away at the dirt and grass, minding their own business. The dog got excited about the chickens and lunged for them, and my shouts could not stop him from chasing them in earnest. He finally caught a baby chick and crushed it in his jaws, dropped it and sniffed, then walked away. I was devastated by the chick’s death and walked back to our house sobbing, tears rolling down my face.
My father was standing outside, and when he saw me approaching, he demanded to know what was wrong. He already seemed angry, and my sorrow gave way to another feeling, a caution. I tried to catch my breath and, through choked sobs, told him that the dog had killed one of Granny’s baby chickens. I thought I might get in trouble, and some little part of me wondered whether he might tell me everything was okay, but he just grew angrier, and it seemed he was impatient, or unhappy that I interrupted him, or some other undefinable emotion. He unbuckled his belt and slid it out of his belt loops.
I thought I was going to be whipped for not controlling the dog, but he grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and yanked it into the air—all fifty or so pounds. The dog yelped at being jerked off the ground, but when my father whipped it over and over with the belt, the dog’s cries shocked me into silence. I could not cry for myself anymore and just stood there watching, wishing I had known to protect it. When he dropped the dog, my father turned to me and told me to stop crying, or he’d give me something to cry about. But my tears had already stopped.
When I was older, I found that some of my friends would laughingly recall their mothers coming after them with a wooden spoon. They spoke of things like being spanked, which I didn’t quite understand—it didn’t seem to have any impact on them, and it was more like a joke shared between the children and parents, an act of authority and submission that was almost a charade.
My father’s leather belt, though, fell on us without mercy, without reason. I was a Girl Scout for some of my grade school years, and one late fall, as winter darkened toward us, we picked paper angels from a plastic tree somewhere in town. The angels bore the names of children whose parents declared themselves unable to buy a doll or underwear or shoes for their children that year. Each of us Girl Scouts picked an angel from the tree and vowed to buy a gift or two for the unlucky child. Mine wanted a doll, and one afternoon, while my mother worked, my uncle came to get me, my brother, and our father to go to the dollar store and buy the doll. I think that was around the time that Dad no longer managed the gas station, but Mom still went there to do the bookkeeping. Dad had a pretty steady flow of people in and out of the house, and he was always wheeling and dealing, as he put it. Selling pills or the weed he grew meant we didn’t have to put our own names on an angel tree.
As we started to pull out of the driveway, my father noticed that my brother had chocolate around the corners of his mouth. Dad told my uncle to stop the truck just as we were pulling away, and he sent us back inside. I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen until my dad started whipping Junior in the living room. After a few hits, he sent Junior to his room and turned toward me. I realized that he was about to make a mistake—his frustration had been with Junior, not with me, and I had done nothing to anger him. I thought he must have forgotten what upset him, and in a moment that stands out as the first and only time I tried to defend myself, I started to speak: Wait— But before I could explain, the belt hit my back, my ass, my legs, and my words were gone. What was I going to tell him? In that moment of clarity, I saw his unhinged rage and thought I could make him see it for what it was. For a moment, I knew I was innocent.
When my mother came home that evening, she went into the bathroom with me as I showed her the bruises on my body—somehow asking her, perhaps because of something I had heard at school, whether this was abuse. She murmured a dismissal, and I asked her whether he had told her what happened. She said yes, he told her we refused to clean our rooms, so we were punished. And that was all.
It was especially ironic that he told her we wouldn’t clean our rooms. I cleaned constantly, always thinking that with a little more effort, everything would be perfect, and Dad would have nothing to be angry about. By the time I was seven, if we children were left alone for a few hours, I often set out to get the laundry folded, the floors vacuumed, the coal stove cleaned, and the coal buckets filled. I washed dishes, I organized my books alphabetically, I made my bed. I swept the coal-dust-covered cobwebs from the corners of our living room. Nothing worked, but I kept trying. I brought home report cards filled with As and teachers’ praises, but Dad always pointed out with a laugh that while it was good, any A should have been an A+.
Looking back now, I can see that anxiety fueled my feeble attempts to fix the broken world around me, and that anxiety didn’t go any damn where as I grew older and grew up. I would have to have children of my own and see their messy bedrooms and the toothpaste on the bathroom sink and some crumbs forgotten on the kitchen table. I would have to find myself back at the edge of panic and fear, not knowing what was happening inside me but knowing something bad would happen because of the mess, finding myself angry that someone else was sending me back to my childhood hell. I would have to see the hurt or anger in my children’s eyes to slowly understand that no one was going to punish me anymore. To understand that if I didn’t fix myself, I would pass my brokenness on to them—the burden of my anxiety and fear and heartache would somehow become theirs, no matter how hard I wished and prayed otherwise.
My brother didn’t respond to all that fear and anxiety like I did. I
nstead, he would shove everything under his bed when he was supposed to clean his room. I told Mom once, thinking they were fooled, and she explained that he was younger and not as good at cleaning as I was. Junior made terrible grades, so when he brought home Cs and the occasional B, he was rewarded. One time, I mentioned how unfair it was that I got rewarded for only the highest grades, and Mom said since I was capable of making the higher grades, that was what I should do. I was disappointed that I couldn’t seem to win my parents’ love that way, but making good grades was easy for me, and getting positive feedback from teachers was enough to keep me motivated to do well in school. That turned out to be very lucky for me, since it’s a lot easier to claw your way out of poverty with scholarships and a college degree.
But I kept searching for ways to convince my dad to love me, and I finally thought I had figured something out—I could make him laugh. I began imitating one of the radio DJs we heard on the station our radio was always tuned to, the only station that reached us so deep into the holler. I tried to learn jokes so I could come home and tell them to him, and I thought for a short time that I had made myself good enough, that he finally loved me. It wasn’t long, though, until he no longer laughed at my jokes. The happiness I felt lasted for such a brief time, and I was desperate to earn it again, to deserve his affection once more.
I began seeing my ugliness in the mirror. The more I looked at it, the more repulsive I found the face looking back at me, until it felt like torture to be in my own body. I already knew how to punish myself for everything that was wrong with me—I learned it from the adults—and so my self-loathing ate at me. I was certain my father didn’t love me because I was unlovable, undeserving, unworthy. I could feel it in my body, which longed for safety.
But no matter what he did, I kept wanting life to be better for my father. I felt his rage and pain as if they were my own, and sometimes it seemed like I alone could fix it all. I never thought it was his fault that he was cruel or unloving—I thought it was the rest of the world, I thought it was the pills he had to take for his back, his back that got hurt at work, and he tried to get workers’ compensation for it, but they screwed him over, and he was left with a bad back and nothing to show for all his hard work. And there he was, with a taste for painkillers and all that pain, and disks in his back that always needed surgeries he didn’t get and some of those disks having just disappeared altogether. It was this sad mess, this chain of events that led him down the path of self-destruction, and it was the doctors and the lawyers and the banks, and it was not being able to make a living and support his family—that’s what drove him to the point of no return.
I spent most of my life believing that, until I was twenty-seven. That’s when I asked my mother what had happened to his back while managing the gas station, what injury had caused the pain that spread from him through our family and into the world, and she said it was something minor, something inconsequential. That he didn’t get screwed by the workers’ compensation office—he just didn’t turn the paperwork in on time. That he came home with his minor hurt and tried to make it worse by bench-pressing their bed. So he could go to the doctor and get some good pills.
I knew then that I would never get him back, that maybe he was never there to lose in the first place. I had been dreaming of the man I knew he could be, that I just knew he wanted to be and surely would choose to be someday. For the first time, I was struck with the understanding that as hard as I had tried to make sense of the whole mess, it was time to give that up.
CHAPTER 8
Spare the Rod
We barely got television reception through the huge antenna that stood next to our house, reaching beyond the roof. On Saturday mornings, my brother and I would take turns twisting it around in the ground, moving it slightly so its futuristic rods pointed this way and that. Eventually, we would settle for the least fuzzy version of the cartoons we could manage and tried to watch them with the distortion intermittently blurring the picture completely. Sometimes the picture was tolerable but there was no sound. The one channel that came in clearly almost all the time was Kentucky Educational Television on the Public Broadcasting Service. There were no cartoons, but we loved Sesame Street, and at some point, I got to see enough of The Electric Company to fall in love with it.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood came on right after Sesame Street, and we watched it to make fun of Mister Rogers, with his dull sweaters and unfamiliar calm demeanor. He gave out unsolicited advice, and even compliments, all while going through the same routine of changing from one nice pair of shoes to another, from a sport coat to a cardigan and back. I didn’t understand why he felt the need to change his shoes when he walked into the house, and who on earth has an inside sweater. I had never seen someone wear a cardigan or sport coat or be so optimistic for no reason. Everything about him grated on my nerves, though I felt a twinge of guilt for mocking him in our little house filled with cigarette smoke and heartache.
I suffered through the educational bits and cheerful assurances so I could watch his model train go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where I was enthralled. Daniel Stripèd Tiger was my favorite puppet, and my mother and I would sometimes rub our noses together like he and Lady Aberlin, saying, Hugga wugga, which is what I thought they said on the show. In that land of make-believe, everyone was basically good, and stories felt important. I tried to understand their world, and while watching the puppets, I felt a comfort that disappeared each time the red-and-yellow trolley headed back to Mister Rogers’s tidy house.
I also loved Reading Rainbow—I read all the time, and though I didn’t go find the books LeVar Burton talked about on the show, it was a world I could understand. I threw myself into books as much as possible. I would walk down to Granny’s house while reading a book, reasonably sure I wouldn’t get hit by a car. Sometimes I tried to ride my bike down there while reading, which was a little trickier. Sometimes, when I couldn’t run to the forest while my dad was shouting, I would close the door to my room and open a book, forcing myself to read the words, pulling my mind away from the sounds in the next room over and over, willing myself to go into someone else’s world, where fathers weren’t nightmares.
To watch just about anything, my brother and I would sit together in our dad’s recliner, which was placed close to the television at an angle, near the front door. For most of my young life, my dad kept a gun loaded and leaning against the wall by the front door. I learned to shoot a .22 rifle early on, but I knew this one was more dangerous—maybe a more powerful rifle, or a shotgun. I also knew I was never to touch it, and as I grew older and heard stories about other kids getting their fathers’ guns and accidentally shooting someone, I marveled that they were so daring as to touch the guns. I don’t remember ever being told not to touch it, but I never did, and the possibility never crossed my mind. I had a vague sense that if I touched a gun, I might die, but I was certain that if I touched it without permission, I would get a whipping that would make all the other whippings seem like a joke.
I saw my dad use his guns several times. He owned quite a few and would sometimes show them to me, saying things like SKS and AK-47 and names of foreign countries I had never heard of. I fired a shotgun once and never forgot how it kicked, bruising my bony shoulder, but the only one I could identify by sight was the sawed-off shotgun.
My father once pointed a rifle at his father, my quiet, church-going papaw, in our driveway. I hardly ever heard an angry word from Papaw, and his prayer before meals always began, Dear Heavenly Father, and almost always ended, Thank you, Lord and Granny, for the food. Papaw stood there, his face perfectly expressionless, while his son shook with rage. I couldn’t hear what my father said as I watched from the porch, but I saw the words twist his mouth and a darkness cross his face. Finally, Papaw got to leave, and the gun came inside.
Before I could tell the difference between abuse and discipline, I asked Granny why my father turned out like he did. We let him get away with too much, she sa
id. I thought I understood that—spare the rod and spoil the child. But I wondered where he learned to use the belt he turned on us with cruelty.
I woke up one night to hear loud voices in our driveway. I looked out my window, and from a hard angle, I could see my father standing in the driveway with a man from down the road. The man was leveling a rifle at my father, who seemed oddly calm standing there, as though violence was his resting point. The man yelled for a while, and my mother was out there, and I could hear her plead with him. This man had the nicest house on our road, and we would sometimes go there to pick cherries from his cherry tree. He finally left, and the next morning, I asked my mom why he had done that. She told me he was drunk and angry that one of my dad’s friends had driven past his house too fast.
Later, my father told me that the neighbor never knew Papaw was lying in the field next to our driveway, looking through his own rifle scope and aiming at our neighbor’s head.
I would have thought that the neighbor’s reaction was excessive if my father had not already outdone that himself. The neighbors at the head of our holler—the last family on the road—had a boy who was probably eight years older than me. One day when I was about five, he drove by our house too fast to suit my father, who said he was concerned that one of us kids would get hit by a car. By that time, we had a page-wire fence that ran the length of the yard, but still—I suppose Dad wanted to err on the side of caution. So, my father told me, he took two five-gallon buckets of oil from the gas station and brought them home, then spread the oil over the road that ran along our fence. For good measure, he scattered screws and nails over the oil. That will slow him down, he said. Years later, he told me about another young boy—sixteen or so—who drove past the house too fast. On the boy’s way back down the road, my dad stopped him and used a baseball bat to bash in his windshield, headlights, and side-view mirrors.
