In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  I faked what I hoped was humble confidence and said, I guess sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree. I think I was hoping to reassure him that I was nothing like my father, that I wasn’t going to steal from him or start a fight or kill any dogs while I camped on his property over the weekend.

  Looks like the apple rolled down a hill and into a creek and washed up on another bank, in this case. He kept staring, but reassured me that he could perceive, even in that small amount of time, that I was, indeed, not my father. I was shaken, though, and spent the next few weeks wondering what would have happened if my father hadn’t gotten such a competent lawyer. Who paid for the lawyer anyway? It was probably Granny, whose allegiance to her children always came first, right after God but before the Law. And then us grandchildren—we took a place ahead of our parents, who she often had to protect us from.

  I imagined what it would have been like if he had gone to prison, if my mother had raised us alone. Would she have stayed in that holler? Would she have worked, or would we have lived off welfare? Would she have divorced him sooner, or later, and would she have replaced him with someone else to dominate every facet of our lives? Or would we have found freedom, living in the midst of so much forest, and would there suddenly have been so much space in our lives to be loud, to be happy, to be children? Would the nightmares have ended sooner? Would we have visited him in prison? Would he have died there, knifed by someone he robbed or refused?

  But there is no use in daydreaming about such things. His prison was always internal, and we were always right there with him—captor and captives, king and slaves.

  Though I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on, our family didn’t tell regular fairy tales. Our stories were of real people, with real villains and casualties—never the happy or meaningful endings of fiction. When I was about twenty-three years old, my dad told me how he ended up in rehab. He told me that he and his second wife were convicted for prescription-pill fraud. His wife went to prison, but he was allowed to stay in the county jail because his father was a Freemason, his brother was a Freemason, and the judge was a Freemason. He was even made the trustee in the county jail and carried keys to get in and out of various rooms; he mopped the floors and was able to stay well supplied with his pills. After being in the county jail for a bit, he went to the Hope Center in Lexington.

  He had written me a letter or two while he was in the county jail—the only times he had ever written me, at that point. He would write me more letters from the same county jail years later, but they are all the same. His sprawling handwriting can’t be contained within the lines. I can tell he presses the pencil down hard, as if he is struggling to put the words on the paper. He always says he wants to see me, he loves me. And he’ll call me when he can—sometimes a collect call from jail and sometimes from a new cell phone number when he’s out—and wonder aloud why I won’t come see him, then tell me about the latest person to steal from him, or who he stole from last, or how he got a little money and wants to send me some, wants to send birthday money and Christmas money, but the cards never come, that money never arrives, and he doesn’t call back.

  But this was the first time he had gone to rehab, and I thought there was a chance that something was different this time. I wanted to see him and see what had changed, whether he had finally hit bottom, as many people have to, or whether he had been inspired to make a new life for himself. Maybe he just wanted to be a dad now—a real dad who could love us and see his grandkids, and we could meet for lunch on Saturdays like I saw other grown daughters doing. It had been fifteen years since I dreamt I had saved him, and I thought fifteen years wasn’t too long to wait to see my father finally be okay. I arrived at the Hope Center with my son and went inside to the front desk. He showed up a few minutes later, grumbling about something and talking a little to the men around us, who opened and closed their lockers and looked at us with blank faces.

  We went outside so he could smoke a cigarette, and I sat down next to him, ready to hear how he was getting his life straight and turning over a new leaf and that sort of thing. Instead, he told me another story. He told me about his buddy at the Hope Center and how he and his buddy went out one night, over to the edge of the field, and got the knife that another guy dropped there for him. Then he told me about the man who had tried to take his change when he bought something from the vending machine. But he and his buddy convinced that guy to walk to the train tracks with them a few days later, and that’s when my dad pulled out the knife, and his buddy knocked the guy out—a big ol’ boy, my dad said, with a laugh—and they put him in a train car and shut the door. It was June and hot. He’d wake up in Chicago or even farther, if he woke up at all, my dad mused, still laughing. I sat there quietly, grateful my son would not remember the conversation.

  After that, I wondered whether my dad had ever killed anyone. Maybe he killed the man he put on the train—where would he be now? There was another story I remember from when I was very young, but the details were always murky to me. It seemed that a man was bothering my dad at the gas station he managed, where he worked for several years. I heard him talk several times about breaking an Ale-8 bottle and threatening the guy with it, but he also mentioned his brother being there to help him, and I don’t know—maybe they cut the guy, maybe they didn’t.

  On one hand, my dad’s stories instilled in me a sense of vigilante justice, of people taking care of each other in families and communities, not waiting for police to arrive and not settling matters in court. I loved watching Bonnie and Clyde and westerns with Clint Eastwood, stories about Jesse James and even the cartoon version of Robin Hood, where Robin Hood and Maid Marian are foxes.

  On the other hand, it became clear over the years that Dad’s black-market dealings, his law-of-the-land justice, his defiance of the system, none of that really translated into loyalty to family or protection of his children—to love. He even managed to sever his relationships with the men he traded guns and knives and old coins with, grew weed with, and sold pills to or snorted them with in the barn. Sooner or later, it seemed like everyone who knew him held a grudge against him. The last time he went to jail, I realized that he had a growing group of enemies, and people told my brother there was a price on Dad’s head. I wondered how, in his state, he could manage to survive being in jail any longer, and particularly how he could still get the drugs he needed to survive at that point. That line of thinking quickly goes where I am not ready to go, so I leave it, not yet at the end point—not ready to lose that which has caused me so much harm.

  While he and his wife were both in jail during one of those times, their kids in foster care, I visited his house. There was a dog there, worse off than any of the ones we watched come and go when I was little. This one, like all the dogs my father and his wife somehow ended up with, was tethered to a ramshackle doghouse by the creek, fed for a while, and then forgotten. The dog whined and strained at its chain, its cry broken for lack of water. I wanted to ignore its ribs and the parasites that must have feasted on it in the dusty, shadeless circle it inhabited, no more than thirty feet in diameter. I was scared to get close to it, but I felt implicated in its torment, as if eventually some day of reckoning might come, and I might be required to define compassion: How much do you wish for? How much did you show?

  There was no dog food, of course, so I looked through the kitchen cabinets for acceptable substitutes. The refrigerator held nothing edible. Finally, I opened a can of baked beans. Looking at it, I tried to guess how long the dog had gone without food. Granny had little sympathy for the animals at this house, but she claimed she had fed it once or twice. I pulled another can of beans out of the cabinet and paused. Would my youngest brother and my sister return to this house? Would the beans be replaced? Was I taking food that might feed them, and if so, would there be other food for them? Was this a choice?

  I opened the second can and muttered, Fuck. The dog went into hysterics as I approached, and I saw that he had an em
pty stainless steel bowl. I poured the beans onto the ground in as neat a pile as I could, and he lapped them up as if they were filet mignon, as if they were anything designed for his body. I laid the cans out of reach and quickly grabbed his bowl. The creek looked like it always had, but smaller. I dipped a bowlful of the clear water and watched a crawdad zip underneath a rock. I took the water up to the dog, and he rushed for it, lapping furiously until it was gone.

  Okay, okay. I picked up the bowl, avoiding his paws, and refilled it while he returned to the spot where the beans had been, licking hopefully at the dirt. Standing by the creek for a moment, I wondered at the countless hours I had spent there. I had seen copperheads and a rabid fox; I had played in the barn where rats prowled the abandoned corncrib; I had crossed the swollen creek once during a flood, walking over a rotten log that hung suspended above it, holding on to the rusty barbed wire that formed the rest of the strange fence. Would anyone ever again love that place as I did?

  I carried the bowl to the dog and set it before him. I turned away as quickly as I could, grabbed the cans, and took them to the garbage pile by the creek, a mound of trash bags and refuse that only the desperate seem to be able to produce. As I drove away, I realized that I could have freed the dog, and wondered what it was that kept me from doing so.

  CHAPTER 32

  Silver Dollars

  Around that time, Dad finally lost the house I grew up in. He couldn’t hustle for the payments while he was in jail, so the bank finally got what it had hovered over for twenty years. As he promised all my life, though, the house burned down before anybody else could live in it. Granny and I had gone in there not long beforehand. Someone had moved nearly everything somewhere else, most of it never to be seen again. I found a paper grocery bag full of weed under his bed and shoved it back under when Granny noticed it. We both pretended we didn’t know what it was.

  I got a few things that day—my dad’s knife and coin collections and an antique railroad lantern—that were the fixtures of my childhood. I would often ask him to show me his knives and coins, fascinated by the history they represented. The railroad lantern came from my great-grandfather who sold moonshine in Chicago during the Depression. He was a drunk and a murderer and mostly in prison, but there are fascinating stories about him, some of which make my father look like an upright citizen. That lantern was my night-light when I was very young; it hung in my bedroom and cast a strange blue-green light from two of the glass lenses, a harsh red light from the other two. It was never a comforting, soft kind of night-light, but it was the light I had, so I treasured it. Why didn’t the person who took everything else also take those things? They were set carefully in what used to be my father’s closet, not forgotten or overlooked. Maybe someone knew I would want them, somehow knew I would come.

  My father was my first storyteller, and though his stories never reflected what might be called “traditional values,” they still comforted me, and I could sense the magic with which they were infused, like all other icons of childhood. There wasn’t a lot that I could thank my father for, but there was a tenderness in his desire to tell me stories, which were so much more like the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales than the happily ever afters I could have heard. I didn’t grow up believing he loved me, but he did think I was worth giving these histories to, and I cherished them.

  He kept boxes full of newspapers and newspaper clippings, preserving the news of an arrest, a death, or a scandal. He showed me one clipping of my great-grandfather, for whom my papaw and brother were named, standing in a prison next to Al Capone. The men stood in their boxer shorts, arms slung over one another’s shoulders. My great-grandfather, Dad said, became friends with Capone while running moonshine to Chicago. Because the prison warden was one of his customers, my great-grandfather spent most of his time doing as he pleased, enjoying the fruits of corruption while paying the price for his lawlessness.

  There was the story about the sheriff of Carter County, who tried to find my great-grandfather and his moonshine still one too many times and ended up shot and dead at the end of my great-grandfather’s gun. My dad laughed at the end of all his stories, including the one about my great-grandmother’s father, whom my great-grandfather shot during dinner, after they argued over who made better moonshine. I didn’t find that one as amusing, and I wondered afterward how my great-grandmother must have felt, having her father killed by her husband while sitting down for a dinner she must have cooked.

  She favored her youngest son, my father said, who was conceived while her husband was in prison. In the end, he got everything she left to her children, and my father said that youngest son swindled Papaw Conn out of his inheritance. My papaw would hardly talk about it when I asked, but expressed his conviction that the money and the property were not worth bearing a grudge.

  Papaw was particularly good at not holding a grudge. He had worked for a dairy for about twenty-five years and was ready to retire when they suddenly let him go. He used to take us in his milk truck sometimes, riding around in those dark, early mornings, and we would get a little chocolate milk if we could stay awake long enough to drink it. I asked why they had let him go, and someone told me it was so they didn’t have to pay his retirement. An enormous clock from the dairy hung above the bureau in Granny and Papaw’s dining room, and Granny took it down after that happened. I asked Papaw about it one day, expecting his righteous indignation—like my father so often expressed. Instead, he looked away. There’s no use in dwelling on these things. But I grieved for how unfair they had been to him. Instead of resenting it himself, Papaw just worked at the county roads department for another fifteen or twenty years, tirelessly.

  My great-grandfather died the year before I was born. I wonder whether he ever imagined that he would become the hero of my father’s stories and the legend of my childhood. I wonder whether he realized at some point that my father idolized him, and whether he ever recognized the influence he had in shaping my father. I wonder whether he loved his wife, or regretted his absence from his children’s lives, or regretted killing his father-in-law, or the sheriff, or whether he thought much at all about such things.

  My great-grandmother outlived him by many years, and we would go visit her in Bath County. She lived in a light-yellow house that some of her sons built for her and that sat immediately next to the house where she had raised those sons—the two doorways were about twenty feet apart from one another, facing each other diagonally. She had short white-gray hair and was very large in my memory, always sitting in her chair and watching the small television that sat high on a shelf in the living room. The living room was filled with stacks of newspapers and other strange collections. She had dolls everywhere, and several of the largest ones stood as sentries next to her chair, their lifeless eyes staring always, their hair perfectly colored and cut, their clothes nicer than anything I owned.

  Her house had a funny smell, and it wasn’t until I bought mothballs some twenty years later that I recognized the familiar scent. It filled each room—the cramped and cluttered kitchen, the spare bedroom that housed most of the dolls, the strange bathroom with a soft toilet seat. When we visited, I would go directly to hug Great-Grandma in her chair and stand around for a few minutes, waiting to see whether she would give me a two-dollar bill, a half dollar, or, rarest of all, a silver dollar from her collection.

  Outside her house was an exotic array of plants that grew around the perimeter. There were grapevines in a corner, touch-me-nots that I touched over and over, watching the little seed pods explode, and lush islands of color scattered around. My brother and I explored the vines and the gardens through overgrown grass, stepping away from snakes whenever we found them curling and sliding through their paradise.

  My favorite place at her home—and perhaps anywhere else—was the abandoned house of her childbearing years. It sat two stories high and was a slate-gray color, weathered and worn. It smelled even older than the house she lived in, and must have been home to many creatures
by that time, but it was filled to the brim with the objects from her past and from her children’s pasts. My father and grandparents would sit inside the yellow house with my great-grandmother, visiting for hours, while I moved through the old house, searching for treasures.

  At the end of each visit, I would go to Great-Grandma with whatever I had found, asking her whether I could keep the items. She let me take the 1905 Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalogue that was about three inches thick. I was seven or eight years old when I acquired the catalog, and I would sit on my bed, turning through the pages carefully so as to preserve them. The catalog reminded me of the books I read by John D. Fitzgerald, the Great Brain series. I longed for things like Radio Flyer wagons and Tinkertoys, though I did not know what they were. I thought about how it would feel to get an apple and an orange in my Christmas stocking, and somehow, that seemed much better than the toys I received. I imagined simple holidays with a rare Christmas bird—perhaps even a goose, like in the stories—and savoring treats like roasted nuts. I didn’t know why, but I was fully enamored with my conception of the past and longed to experience it. Maybe, like so many people, I thought all the terrible things I had seen and felt and heard only existed due to inventions—in our case, pharmaceuticals. Maybe guns, every now and then. As if no one was beating or raping women before that. As if every adult had behaved before gunpowder came along.

  The floorboards in the old house were rotten or broken in places, and I would climb the stairs with some fear, knowing I had been warned not to go up them. Upstairs would have been a room for a child—or two or three children—and it seemed that the objects there had been abandoned for even longer. I picked up fewer things, afraid I would find a snake or worse in the hot darkness. I felt the presence of the children who had grown up there, though—their games, their arguments, their hiding beneath hand-sewn quilts. I felt like they were still there, all around me—not the adult siblings of my papaw, and not quite ghosts—and it was vital to leave their things undisturbed, so they could return someday and find everything where it belonged, waiting for them in an endless childhood.