by Bobi Conn
When I became a teenager, I asked Papaw questions about the contradictions I found in the Bible—I had read plenty of it on my own and quite a bit in church. I never got to talk with anyone about the things that didn’t make sense to me, but Papaw seemed safe enough to ask my questions now and then. I never argued with him, though. I didn’t want to find out where his patience ended and his anger began. Papaw corrected me as to why Jesus turned water into wine—not because it’s okay to drink wine now but because the water wasn’t sanitary back then. And when I asked about Daniel, the most famous vegetarian in the Bible, he told me that story was about living excessively, not the harm of eating meat. I wanted to shake his conservative interpretations, but it was enough to have an adult talk to me like I could understand what they said.
No matter how conservative their views may have been, neither he nor Granny talked about going to Hell or who should marry and who should not. They didn’t talk about politicians or race or the sin of dancing. They fed us and worked. Papaw hunted squirrel and picked blackberries. Granny cooked and prayed and gave us money that we didn’t deserve.
And though later I couldn’t go to church or believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and it would take years to undo some of the harm done in the church—if it can ever be undone—I knew my granny and papaw to be the kind of Christians some politicians claim to be, the kind of people any of us could want to be. But there is no faking that kind of humility. You can’t pretend to love and give and forgive like my granny did. She didn’t go around telling people how much faith she had, or how good God was to her. I heard it in her quiet prayers. I tasted it in the food she grew, canned, killed, and cooked. I felt it in the softness of her skin, which grew loose and spotted with age, unprotected and unadorned. It filled her house and spilled into the creeks and waiting hillsides, it wrapped itself around me, and I held on to that when there was nothing else.
CHAPTER 25
The Canary in the Coal Mine
I’ve worried a lot about my father and how he became so cruel, so indifferent to those of us who loved him and looked for his love. I listened to him intently, always trying to learn what I could do to make everything right, and what I must not do so I could stay safe. No matter how many drugs he did, he told stories. He repeated many of them over the years, and it always seemed that he was a walking history book of our family, the holler, and all the triumphs and tragedies that covered four counties.
More than once, he told me about how he dropped out of school just a few days after turning sixteen. Some boys had been picking on him—they liked to pick on him because he was skinny and had glasses. He said they pushed him around until the day he brought a knife to school and threatened them all. He never went back.
Every time he told me that story, I felt sorry for him. I knew how it felt to be too small, to get picked on, to be vulnerable. Somehow, I thought feeling too small must have been harder for him and that he had hated it so much, he found a way to make himself scary to these guys. But maybe he didn’t. Maybe the knife wasn’t enough. Maybe he would have had to endure more, and maybe he knew that, and that’s why he didn’t go back. I never dared to ask. In his story, he won.
Dad would sometimes complain about how gentle Papaw was, and I asked him once whether Papaw was always that way. No, he told me. Your papaw used to be a tough man, but Granny henpecked him to death. She kept dragging him to church, and as soon as he got saved, he changed. He’s nothing like he used to be. I wondered who it was that my granny fell in love with when she was a long-legged blonde and he was a young man in the military, wearing glasses and raising one eyebrow for the camera, his arms around his buddies.
After I was grown, my father told me one story about Papaw that complicated the person I had always imagined him to be. When my father was still just a little boy, they lived in a house closer to town. Papaw delivered milk for the dairy, starting each day at four in the morning. Their neighbors were what we would have called no count—they didn’t have jobs and stayed up late, working on cars that never seemed to get fixed. They kept a dog tied up to their fence, and that unfortunate creature woke up my papaw with his relentless nighttime barking. One night, as he tried to fall asleep, Papaw lost his temper and went outside with his shotgun. He killed the dog and carried it from the fence to the neighbors’ front door, which he kicked open. He threw the dog into the living room and went home, where he was arrested soon after. His boss bailed him out of jail, and not long after that, Papaw and Granny moved their family out to the holler.
What did that mean about Papaw? Is that where my father learned to shoot or neglect every dog that found its way to us? My father liked the man that he thought Papaw was then—a hard man, afraid of nothing, not even the law. I don’t know what else I don’t know. And I don’t have any other history to help me understand who my grandparents were before they became the heroes of my childhood. I may never know what happened between them and my father, or between Granny and Papaw. But when he was a young man, when I was listening, my father created a story for that—Granny was the villain, the woman who weakened her husband like in one of those Bible stories. Papaw was the tragic hero who lost his power, all of it taken by Granny, sitting there in her pretty dress on a church pew. I guess it’s easy to think of women as the enemy—I grew up with many of the same stories that he did: Delilah, Jezebel, Eve. All guilty of vanity, of not listening, of ruining everything for the heroic men around them. These characters set me up with the understanding that girls come into the world a little different from boys and that the men who simultaneously desire and revile women are the real victims, the only ones who were born with original innocence. With that kind of belief system, what kind of treatment wouldn’t women deserve?
My father always liked the man that my great-grandfather was, though—the man who hardly raised his children because he was in and out of prison. The man who shot other men over petty arguments and to keep himself out of jail. My dad spent enough time around my great-grandfather to learn how to make moonshine and to hear his stories about selling it to Al Capone, prison wardens, and a president’s father. My father still praises my great-grandfather and has endless stories about their conversations and adventures during my dad’s teens and early twenties. I imagine my father learned a lot about what it meant to be a man from his grandfather, who died not long before I was born. My dad revered him and never seemed to think it mattered that Papaw was raised by his grandparents and not the man my father worshipped. Granny told me once not to ask Papaw questions about that, and the only clue I have about the people who raised my papaw is a black-and-white picture of them. I look at it sometimes and try to imagine their lives, their stories, and the history behind that simple photo.
But now that Papaw is gone, my dad seems to have respect for his father, too. Maybe Dad had to go through his own loss, see his children flee from him, before he could understand the value of the father that Papaw became. He certainly knows that Papaw worked tirelessly to give them everything they needed, and then some. I still ask for more stories, trying to uncover them all before it is too late.
Not long before she died, I asked Granny whether she still loved my papaw, hoping for some advice that would prepare me to work next to someone, suffer loss with them, endure great joy together.
No, she said. I would have divorced him a long time ago if I had known then what I know now.
We were driving the short distance to her house from my childhood home, which my father’s friend would soon burn down. In my shock, I had little time to ask anything else. I couldn’t believe she felt that way, with her faith in God and, I presumed, a sense of duty to stay married forever because of things the Bible said. It still makes me wonder what she experienced that left her so discontented in her seventies, as she grew soft with age in the only place I know to be heaven on earth. I still wish I had asked.
She never told me any stories about her life, and neither did my papaw. I absorbed my father’s stories, gra
teful to hear those histories and characters with all their complexities. Along with the seemingly endless narratives he knew about everyone, my father also talked about the bank, about rich bankers and prosecuting attorneys, workers’ comp attorneys—all these rich men who were out to get him. They were the enemy. I knew which kids at school had rich parents—my dad didn’t like them, either. He was constantly trying to scam the system and talking about how rigged it is, how crooked the players are.
Looking back on Granny and Papaw and their life in the holler, it seems they almost lived in a different world than my parents did or than my siblings and I experienced. I have a lot of the old black-and-white photographs from Granny’s house, and when my father grew up there, it looked almost exactly the same as when I was growing up. They took such good care of the house, it’s still standing now, though a little worse for wear after Papaw passed away. Granny kept the house clean, and it always felt cool and peaceful there, like that feeling in the forest.
Why have I spent so much time trying to understand my father? Maybe it’s a daughter’s need. I know I always wished I could be daddy’s little girl. It’s hard to believe he turned out like he did after being raised by my grandparents. It’s not that they were showy with love and affection—their goodness was just so evident to me through their actions, which stood in stark contrast to my father’s. Still, parents can’t help but be associated with their children’s trauma; after all, the parents are there—or noticeably not there—the whole time.
Maybe he turned out as he did because of the guys who picked on him—maybe my father was like today’s children, who also respond to bullying in often desperate, sometimes defensive ways. I could have easily been like that.
Or maybe my father was just a man of his time—the FBI’s statistics on crime identify the 1980s and 1990s to have been some of the most violent decades in America, including the rate of domestic abuse. He could have been a victim of some environmental ill, of a society that encouraged violence in men, or maybe of both.
And then epigenetic research theorizes that some of our DNA is encoded from our ancestors’ experiences and that our grandparents’ lives have as much of an impact on us as those of our own parents. My father idolized his grandfather, the moonshining and lawless man who wasn’t there for his kids very much. I idolized my granny, who made her kitchen the epicenter of her home and whose strength of will was more commanding than any law or social rule I know of. Perhaps we all, to some extent, carry these infinitesimal burdens with us always, lifetimes upon lifetimes of history and pain and triumph embedded into invisible and weightless, incomprehensible miracles of creation or chance that drive us, blindly, into passion.
Maybe my father is a sociopath or psychopath. I don’t know what he is. For someone from his time and place, getting a mental-health diagnosis was rare, and mental-health treatment even rarer. After his hospitalization, nothing changed for him or us—there were no prescriptions or counseling, only a strange new word floating around our home that dad would bring up with a laugh, just as he laughed anytime someone tried to assess him. I like to play games with them, he would say. Good luck trying to figure me out. Like so many people from all socioeconomic backgrounds, he simply kept on self-medicating, pushing away thoughts or fear or a darkness that had taken on a life of its own.
Maybe he’s just a bad person. I can imagine saying cruel things to my children, and I wonder sometimes whether I’m a bad person for that. But I can’t imagine doing some of the things he did to us, or to our mother, or to others around him. And yet, how do we know where the difference lies between realizing we could do bad things and choosing to do them? Where is that line? Surely most of us possess some capacity for cruelty, but then some people don’t seem bad at all. Others clearly are. Who gets to decide?
Maybe there is also a sickness born of economic instability and pressure and helplessness that destroys lives all over the globe, and that sickness takes on a particular look and feel, depending on the landscape. Whatever happened to my father, and to so many other fathers I grew up around, seemed to spread to the mothers in my generation—now there’s often no strong woman to hold the family together in hills and hollers, bringing children and grandchildren to the table with the reminder that we belong to one another. Hollers seem more empty even as they fill up with trailers and television reception.
But I don’t think we are the only ones who have watched this generational carnage unfold. Such destruction occurs in regions throughout America and throughout the world, as the most vulnerable populations have suffered and continue to endure compounding losses, as their land or minds have been colonized. Sometimes financial poverty does not go hand in hand with a poverty of the mind and the spirit. A lack of things does not necessarily mean hopelessness and desperation. Being poor in the holler—or anywhere—does not require cruelty or decay or drug addiction.
However, that might be the logical end, after so much pain.
These are all theories, of course—the musings of a daughter who wants to make sense of why she wasn’t loved. For much of my life, that thought made me sad, but now I can see myself as another person born into this world, born to people unprepared and possibly unable to love me, to fully see me. Maybe if I can make sense of it, I can make it mine.
But the hero of the story is always the storyteller. The storyteller is the one with power.
CHAPTER 26
About Love
For my nineteenth birthday, my father came to visit me in my apartment, which I subleased from another girl for the summer. James was living in Lexington again, and I had my own place for the first time. I was once more working for the college that summer and was surprised to find I could pay my bills, and did so on time. My meth dealer, a chemistry major at the college, had moved away after dropping out of school again. My apartment was on the top floor of an old house, and I loved to climb out of the living room window onto the roof of the second story. I would sit there and smoke cigarettes—always natural or organic tobacco because I was still trying to be healthy. I watched the sunset from there and listened to the train. In some ways, I was at peace.
Soon after he arrived, my father crushed a Lortab and Ritalin and mixed them together and offered me a rolled-up dollar bill to snort a couple of the lines with. I wondered how I could accept such a gift. It was expensive, I knew—the pills cost more than anyone can truly afford. The pharmaceutical companies have not only made billions of dollars every year since they hit the Appalachian jackpot; they also have a growing list of families and children and souls in their profit column. I know that people who want to escape will find a way to get high, get drunk, or whatever else, and Eli Lilly didn’t pull my father from a path of righteousness. But you have to wonder how much was being done to guard against abuse when the only things at stake were these hicks and hillbillies, these rednecks and backwoods inbreeders. Balance that against the stock prices, the yachts and cruises, the Cuban cigars—and our history shows that time and time again, poor people just can’t compete.
I’ve watched my generation turn into people like my father—in and out of jail, their children being raised by grandparents, their babies going to foster care. As the taste for painkillers has spread from the poor to the middle class, a collective agony has been uncovered. The poor used to be hidden so well, and now it seems that everywhere I go in my small town, or in the larger town I commute to—and on the interstate in between—there is someone carrying everything they own in a garbage bag, wearing clothes that don’t fit.
I spent years wanting to escape my own body, to get some relief from the inner hell that would never just let me be. Now I look into my father’s vacant eyes, hear the slur in his voice, and I know he found a way out of whatever hell was keeping him company. I see it all around me in the sunken, wild eyes I avoid in the grocery store. I see it in the way many addicts walk, a certain looseness I’ve come to recognize in the lost. It’s so easy to escape the sinister harvest we now face after decades upo
n decades of exploitation and its attendant social ills: poor health, broken schools, broken homes. But the escape only lasts for a few hours at a time.
I took the rolled-up dollar bill from my father and snorted the burning powder, telling myself I could not reject what I thought was the only way he could show me love. It would be a long time before I felt like I deserved a love that didn’t hurt.
That word—love—how does one begin to define it? For the longest time, I relied on the power of definition through negation. I am not in love. I could never love a child as a mother should. Now I tell my son of my love for him, how it will outlast us both. He asks me about my family—don’t I love our family as much I love him? I tell him no, I love him above all else.
I used to define love in my romantic relationships with men, then finally realized I was just not yet equipped to do so. I loved men by waiting for them. The further they were from me, the stronger my devotion.
Almost always, I loved them by having sex with them when they wanted me, by not saying anything when I found their porn or figured out how drunk they had gotten, and I forgave them when they dismissed me, showed violence, cheated. It was all I knew to do, in the absence of tenderness and carefulness and devotion and all the other words that appear inside Hallmark cards—there, they are so often nouns, like objects that you can pick up or point to. As verbs they are much more elusive—where is the act of devotion? It seems to be not one act but a series of actions, and not just a series of actions but a manner in which one performs those actions. It’s the noun, the verb, the adjective, the adverb—it defies the sentence diagrams I loved in tenth grade, when language and words were so easy, when they fit into categories and branched off with lines and always went in the right order at the right time.
