by Bobi Conn
On another night, I awoke to the sound of guns. I remember I was about six, and they were right outside my bedroom window, in our front yard. I looked out my window and saw my uncle firing a handgun toward our driveway, where my mother ran and jumped into our long yellow Buick, an atrocity with two doors and a brown roof. My father was in that direction, too, firing a gun back at my uncle—his brother. I could not see what kind he held in his hand, but he almost never showed me a handgun, so I assumed it was a rifle. I wondered what would happen to us all, and it occurred to me that something might kill me that night. My window was open because it was warm outside, and I got back in the bed, as close as I could to my headboard, and held myself tight, waiting for it to pass.
The next day, I saw several bullet holes in our car. Nobody had gotten shot, but apparently my father filed a charge against my uncle, because several days later, my parents took my brother and me with them to the courthouse, where we went to an office, and my father told them he wanted to drop the charges.
Drop the charges? For attempted murder? Are you sure? the woman asked.
Yes, I’m sure, my dad told her.
I heard the shotguns and rifles many other times, mostly used on the stray dogs that we would adopt for a short time but that inevitably wore out their welcome somehow. We never asked what happened, and I was never told there was something wrong with the dogs or given any notice they were about to be executed. I would be sitting in the house, reading or watching one of our home-recorded VHS tapes once again, and I would hear the blast. The sound would echo all around as it bounced between the hillsides, while I ran to the front or back door depending on where the sound came from. I would hope that I wouldn’t get shot and hope that my mother wasn’t dead in the yard and wonder whether my father killed someone or killed himself or was finally just going fucking nuts and was going to kill every goddamn one of us.
Despite everything, I think my brother and I were raised to be responsible with guns. Our father told us never to point a gun at someone, even if we thought it wasn’t loaded. Junior and I used BB guns and the .22 rifle to shoot pop cans lined up on the picnic table. We learned guns were fun, but first they were for survival.
I grew up thinking there was a difference between the way guns are used in cities and how people in the country think of them. My papaw Conn hunted squirrels, and there was always talk of hunting for deer. My dad sometimes shot copperheads in the front yard and, as they came out of the Daniel Boone, he fired bird shot toward hikers he suspected of hunting ginseng. But mostly, the guns were there to protect him from the nameless enemies he talked about when he was high and telling us seamless, endless stories of what he had seen and done. He never went hunting. Maybe he was more like the city folk than he thought.
After he started taking pills in earnest, my dad was pretty concerned about cleanliness and swept the porch constantly. Or maybe he was just wrestling with the demons that inevitably reawakened every time the pills wore off—he always told me that the Lortabs he snorted were the poor man’s cocaine. When he finished with the porch, he would sweep the ground in front of it, where the rain dripped into shallow puddles from the grooves in our tin roof. Junior and I sometimes collected the water for no apparent reason, and I would watch the rain drip from the roof in waterfall curtains, mesmerized by their sure and steady paths. When Dad swept the ground, though, Junior and I would take the rare opportunity to laugh at him quietly, mocking him when we were out of earshot.
His approach to cleaning was all his own—he never came close to crossing any gender boundaries. He never washed the dishes or laundry—in fact, when Mom bought her first book telling women how to leave their abusive husbands, she hid it in the laundry basket in the bathroom, just below a soiled shirt or two, knowing he would never find it there. I came across it and asked her about it, and she assured me he would never see it in such a hiding place.
While I imagine he never cleaned the toilet, and I know he gave my mother crabs from some woman he fucked in the back of the gas station he managed, he watched me carefully when I set the table, chastising me if my hair hung over his plate at all. When he sat in his recliner, he inevitably found crumbs in it and accused my brother and me of eating in his chair. But we hardly ate in his chair at all, knowing that if we spilled something, he would be furious and our punishment would be thorough.
I daydreamed, though, of rubbing grape jelly all over his recliner and tying him down in it. I thought that being sticky would be the worst experience for him, and though occasionally my mind wandered to the idea of what it would be like to hit him while he was tied down, something about that fantasy seemed wrong. I ultimately decided that just being restrained would be torture enough for my father.
My mom and dad and a lot of their friends smoked cigarettes, so sometimes Dad would make us go outside and pick up all the cigarette butts that were strewn around the yard but that were especially prevalent around the front porch. We picked them up dutifully, careful not to overlook a single butt from the porch to the driveway. It almost made me feel proud, knowing how careful I was.
Once, he told us to start picking them up while he was talking to his buddy in the front yard, both of them smoking. I thought that surely he would put the butt out and throw it in the coffee can we were dropping the butts into, but when he was done, he flicked it to the ground near me. I don’t remember who the friend was, and I don’t think it was someone I really cared about in the first place, but I was again surprised that our dad would treat us with such disregard—like dogs, I thought. I think the friend had a strange look on his face when his eyes met mine, and I wondered what he would do with his own cigarette butt. I’m nearly certain he didn’t throw it on the ground, since I don’t have a special disdain for him that would have lasted all these decades.
That disbelief turned out to be a big part of the problem in growing up with an abuser. There were constantly things I just couldn’t believe because they made no sense—so many illogical experiences that defied reason and basic decency. By the time I became a young adult, I had grown suspicious of my intuition, my judgment, even my own feelings. I became the perfect target for the kind of people who like to undermine, ridicule, or control another person—except then, they were usually the same people I slept next to at night.
When I was about eight, after Dad started building a two-story addition onto our house, my mom loaded us kids into the car in a rush to get away from him. I heard him from the open window of the second-floor bedroom that was going to be mine, and he stuck his rifle out the window. For a moment, I thought he might shoot us, but he started screaming at my mother that if she left and took us, he would kill himself. I didn’t know what to do or which would be worse, but we ran to the car anyway. I asked her as she backed out, What if he shoots himself? She answered, I hope he does. There was nothing else to say.
The door to our new addition faced the creek behind our house and was solid wood, about six inches thick. It didn’t have a doorknob or lock but instead had three makeshift bolts that we had to slide deep into the door to close it. I never understood why it was so very thick, but it seemed meant to protect us. It was a beautiful door, clearly made by hand, and I can only assume he acquired it by trading pills or something he’d stolen. Outside that door, only a few feet of yard lay between the doorway and the bank of the creek, which edged closer to us each year. The creek ate away at the bank closest to the back corner of the house until the corner had only a couple of inches of dirt left. When I noticed these things, it would fill me with a concern that I never shared with my parents. My fears about the house falling into the creek never did come to fruition, though—instead, it met a fiery end before the creek had enough time to eat its way to the house.
CHAPTER 9
Holy Vows
I’ve often wondered what happened that made my mother so easy to abuse, so helpless in the presence of my father. I grew up knowing that I had to be ready to leave a man—my husband, a lover, the father
of my children—and that I had to mean it. I grew up knowing how my children would someday look at me, how their contempt and disgust would spread toward me despite the undying love we might share, if I let them hear and see me being belittled one too many times.
Of course, being a single mother was a different undertaking in the 1980s, when my mother first should have left. When I did my leaving decades later, I’d had ample opportunities for education, I’d had easy employment solutions, I’d had scores of women before me who left men and became single mothers and redefined that concept, who paved the way for single mothers to be allowed to be sexy and free and independent. But it still takes a good twenty years to pull yourself out of poverty, as I came to find out. And that’s if you’re lucky—no medical crisis, no new traumas that make mental health seem like some silly fairy tale, the realm of princesses and parents who somehow manage to give just the right amount of support to their children.
If you can survive the weight of bills you can’t pay and the emotional demand of children who you know deserve to be loved better than you know how to love, and if you can endure the loneliness and the panic that takes your breath away when you imagine what would happen to your children if you died or someone took them from you, then you just might make it, eventually. So I hear.
I have also learned a thing or two about loving the wrong kind of men, about staying too long. I listened to the things that broke inside when boyfriends and husbands named me worthless and weak. And when they spoke with their hands, I excused the marks they left as a one-time thing—a different kind of thing, something we didn’t even talk about. I’ve stood staring at the door like so many women do when they think about leaving, counting the large and small things I would have to account for: money, shelter, the ire of an entire community, a ride out of town, a safe place to land. After making my way out, I counted the things I left behind: a home in an idyllic forest, a bed frame, the baby’s favorite stuffed giraffe.
I rented grungy apartments that permanently smelled of the sad meal someone cooked there before we arrived. I put my mattress on the floor for the next ten years. I tried to make it all better.
I’ve come to believe that one of the defining moments of adulthood is the moment at which we recognize our parents as the overgrown children we all are, running around and reacting to each other as we learned to from our parents. Enacting our oldest child or baby of the family roles, our good girl and troubled child titles. Proving over and over that we are either the pieces of shit our parents resented and could not raise or the angels they adored who could do no wrong.
I thought something must have changed my father, that he had to have been different at some earlier point. I wondered whether he was kind in his younger days, or charming, just trying to decipher exactly what would have led my mother to marry him. No, she says, he was not. He would storm away from her house if she could not come with him, threatening to find other girls. He would drive another girl by her house for her to see. He had been cruel and hateful always.
Had either of my husbands been kind to me before I vowed myself to them? I never thought to ask myself.
My mother has had false teeth for many years. When I was little, I was fascinated by her jaw popping when she yawned and her teeth that looked so pretty until she pulled them out, leaving her smile half-empty. She told me she was in a motorcycle accident when she was seventeen, and her teeth were knocked out and her jaw broken. For days, she lay in the hospital with her mouth wired shut, and no, it does not hurt now, but her jaw has popped ever since.
Years later, it struck me that my mother had been on a motorcycle with someone other than my father—who was he? Did she like him? Did he like her? Did the accident bring their perfect love to an untimely end? Could he have been my father if she had stayed with him?
He was a boy I liked, she said, but your dad was jealous that I went out with him sometimes. Someone loosened the lug nuts on one of the motorcycle wheels, and as we gained speed going down US 60, the wheel came off and we crashed. I’m pretty sure it was your dad who loosened the wheel. I never dated the other boy again. I married your father soon after.
As she told me this story, the history of my parents fell into place in a new way. I knew how it felt to want his love—a love that was always so impossibly close. I understood how she must have pushed all her words down when he threatened to find someone else, just as I swallowed my anger with each insult, afraid to lose him forever. My mother had lost her words, her ability to define herself to herself or anyone else, for so long. Like many in abusive relationships, she had paired with the person who was happiest to exploit her vulnerability. And with each cruelty, with each torturous moment, her voice was quieted. Whatever weakness first made her tolerant of his abuse had been replaced by her need to survive and, soon, to protect her babies—as well as she could.
In an alternate universe, I see her closing the door the first time my father threatened to storm off and find another girl. She shakes her head over it, whispering with her sisters that night as they daydream about the colleges they will go to. They aren’t marrying poor, bad-tempered boys in hollers. They aren’t trying to feed babies on a man’s gas station job. They aren’t having babies in trailers and crushing aluminum cans in the mud for milk money. They aren’t smoking cigarettes in the kitchen while their husbands snort pills with their buddies in the barn, hoping their husbands will pass out as soon as they come in, hoping their moods do not darken as they walk toward the house.
In this alternate universe, those daughters of the sixties are listening to their Tom Jones and Smokey Robinson records—still making their own clothes from Simplicity patterns, sure, but after high school, they attend the local university or work in a shop in town. They marry young men and live in real houses and probably still get divorced, but there are no broken jaws. Almost everyone remains intact, more or less.
In real life, Dad never seemed to mind us knowing how reckless he could be, how casual his regard was for others—for us. He loved telling stories, and I was an avid listener, at once horrified and mesmerized as I tried to stitch a coherent narrative from the pieces I collected. When he was about nineteen, he worked for the hospital in town, delivering oxygen to bedridden patients at their homes. Dad was always a master in the black market, always trading something for something else, always procuring weapons and tools and drugs with his skills in negotiating, or perhaps in coercion.
He told me a story that while he was an oxygen deliveryman, he convinced a janitor at the hospital to steal a tank of nitrous oxide for him, since the janitor had the key to the room where the tanks were stored and locked away from people like my father. As soon as he got the tank, Dad took it with him to the delivery truck and hooked it up to a mask that he strapped to his face. He said that he turned the nitrous on full throttle—not mixing it with oxygen, as your local dentist would do to prevent a massive loss of brain cells—and drove down the road with his usual supply of oxygen tanks in the back.
Then, my father told me, as he drove down the road and crossed into the other lane, he hit a woman, and they had a terrible crash that left the woman paralyzed for the rest of her life. I don’t know why my father did not go to prison but somehow got out of the charges with perhaps a misdemeanor, perhaps some community service, maybe probation? No punishment or injury worth including in the story he told.
I think about her sometimes, that woman, and wonder whether she is still alive. I wonder what she was doing before she was paralyzed, whether she had a job or children or was a student at the university in town. I wonder where she was driving to before the crash, and did a sense of foreboding puzzle her while she listened to the radio in her car? I wonder whether she somehow found strength and inspiration to redefine herself after the accident, perhaps to become an Olympic swimmer or to reach out to children in wheelchairs so they would have a role model who showed them anything is possible. I wonder, if she didn’t have children, whether she could have and who they would have
been, whether she would have loved them and raised them to be gentle people or would have someday despaired that her children had gone astray.
I wonder whether she ever had an orgasm after that, or thought about my father and hated him, or found Jesus and thought it was a divine intervention. I wonder whether she lived in our town the whole time, whether I ever saw her in a store or on a sidewalk, and whether she knew who I was. I wonder whether she saw him in me, hated me for what he had done, resented him surviving and going on to make babies who could be like him. I wonder whether she was happy to be alive after that, or not.
I wonder how on earth he has survived for so long, and why.
While I was learning to survive being me and interrogated my mother about her young life and how it felt to be her, she told me another reason why it took her so long to leave my father. She had eloped with my father at the age of seventeen, crossing the Tennessee border, where they could get married without any parental interference. I still have the picture of them on their wedding night—my mother in a pink dress, my father wearing the same smile I have always feared.
After she came back and moved into the holler with him, she eventually complained to her own mother about how he treated her. Grandma responded with the old adage, You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.
I imagine I know how Grandma Wright felt when she said that. Angry at a daughter who didn’t listen, who snuck off with the bad boy. Not ready to rescue a grown woman, not sure whether that woman is ready to rescue herself. Not knowing what has happened to her daughter’s children, what is happening, what comes next.
