In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  Since I can call myself a stranger, I understand why I see myself surrounded by strangers. I can write imaginary lives for this imaginary family. Define brother. Not by blood, or by cohabitation. By occupation: My brother has been homeless and jobless. His children have been in foster care because he has sold pills to buy pills. By shared history: He was my companion in those times. By his pleas: Don’t give up on me.

  Now there are thousands upon thousands of young men like my brother, and there’s me praying to an unseen god to spare him from what our father gave us. No easy redemption awaits him, no surprise happy ending, and no simple kindness can survive his world. This sounds cynical, and perhaps it is. But I am humbled by my mother’s own cynicism, as displayed immediately after the death of one of my cousins. His death was somehow woven with his addiction to prescription pills, though I never found out what was in the autopsy report. Perhaps he inadvertently committed suicide, but there were other people with him, and their stories never made sense when put together. After filling me in on what she knew, my mother sighed. Oh well. Your brother will be next.

  What could I say? That comment immediately and permanently revised my definition of cynical. I can’t hold a candle to that.

  Junior started dating a girl when he was fifteen years old, and by the time he was twenty, they were having a baby. They got married and lived in a trailer. He worked in a factory, making decent money for a while. Then he got in trouble for pills—he had grown up watching our father do them, but living with him during his teen years probably changed his trajectory forever. Junior went to the county jail but got out on work release during the day and was able to keep his job. Until he was searched one day, coming back into jail from his job, and they found the pills he had taped around his waist. I don’t know what he was thinking, but since he was high at work and high on his way back to jail, he probably did not think about the fact that he always got searched when reentering.

  He lost his work release and then his job. For trying to smuggle in the pills, he was also charged with promoting contraband. He got out of jail for a while, and his wife had another baby around that time. I visited them when the new baby was born, and in the older girl’s room, I found a pile of dog shit from the rottweiler they let run in and out of the house. Junior asked me about some of his baseball cards, which we both collected as children. I had taken his little book of Ken Griffey Jr. cards, as well as his yellow baby blanket, from our mother’s storage shed, along with some of my own things. He wanted to know when he could get his cards back, and I told him he could have them whenever he wanted—he just had to come and get them. I thought to myself that I would keep them for him, as he was surely selling and trading most anything with value for pills.

  Looking at their house, I could see the deterioration already setting in. The kids intent on the television, surrounded by filth. My brother had drug addicts and sellers coming around—it seemed like a perfect repetition of our childhood, with large, unattended dogs thrown in the mix. I worried for the children, but I figured that whatever happened to them, they would not be subjected to it for long. That kind of thinking is probably what kept most people from interfering with my father’s treatment of us, and it is really an attractive thought for people who don’t want to rock the boat. Just stay out of it, hope the best for those kids, and surely this insanity won’t continue for another year, or another ten years, or another eighteen. Surely the kids will have someone to teach them a better way than their parents are showing them. Surely this won’t all get worse.

  Then my brother went to jail again, leaving two children with no father to care for them. When he got out, they came to live with him. Junior seemed to be doing well for a while, receiving assistance to help him provide a clean home for his daughters. Granny started telling me that she was helping pay his car insurance and some of his other bills. Next my mother told me she was paying all his utility bills, and I realized that with two people paying the same bills, he was doing something with the extra money that he did not want anyone to know about. I went to visit him around Christmas and found his trailer full of trash, with cigarette butts everywhere and ashes falling onto the carpet out of garbage bags that sat all around the living room and kitchen. I had brought presents for the girls and for him, and I said I would help clean. He was indifferent while I hurriedly bagged up the trash and took it outside. Come on, Junior—you’re better than this. You don’t want to become our father, do you?

  Our younger cousin overdosed around that time. He was in Florida to visit a pain clinic and get oxycodone to bring back to Kentucky. Those trips are often financed by someone with a lot of money—someone who does not go to prison when they get caught, but who gets probation and maybe put under house arrest. They don’t mingle with the petty criminals that go to prison so quickly and are in the county jails so frequently. I don’t know how my cousin got involved in that world, but when he died, Granny was devastated.

  Junior suddenly came down to my house for a few days, dropped off by another cousin and his girlfriend as they drove to Tennessee. I talked to him right away about the pills and the people he was around. We talked about our dad, and Junior told me that Dad had started shooting up some kind of pill. He would heat it up in a spoon and, when it melted, draw up the liquid with a syringe and shoot it into his arm. Later, Papaw Conn told me they took Dad to the hospital for an infection in his arm, which Papaw knew was from shooting up.

  Dad wasn’t being very careful, Junior said. When my brother first watched our father shoot up, Dad used the needle that two other men used right before him. Then he offered it to Junior. I asked Junior whether he took it, and he swore he didn’t—I still pleaded with him not to.

  When we got a phone call telling us that our cousin had died and that it had happened in a motel room with one of Junior’s friends, I convinced Junior to stay with me and to let me tell everyone that I took him to a rehab facility in Lexington. His biggest concern at that time was our uncle, who had been estranged from his son and had not been allowed within a certain distance of him because of a restraining order, but who was now ready to kill someone over his son’s death. This is the same uncle who had the gunfight with our father in our front yard and who helped our father beat various men throughout our lives. We knew he meant it. Junior’s name had been mentioned one too many times, so we believed he was safest with me, far away from home.

  I got him some herbs on the advice of my herbalist—stuff that would help ease the withdrawal symptoms. I got him Epsom salts so he could take hot baths and soothe his aching muscles. I made miso soup and sushi, which he hated, and fed him granola that he loved. I made him take out the trash, but other than that, the only thing I asked of him was that he not call anyone and not tell anyone where he was—I didn’t trust any of his friends, and I especially did not want our dad to know where he was.

  A few days into it, he seemed to be doing well. We watched movies together, and I tried to show him what my life was like—a life without people robbing each other and taking every chance they had to get fucked up. A life where you could enjoy simple pleasures and didn’t have to be on guard constantly. A life focused on working for what you wanted to have in your life, and looking forward to the next achievement.

  Then he called his best buddy, a man in his forties with no job and no teeth. I had heard him talk about Ben several times, and each time I told Junior that I didn’t like the sound of him. Our mother talked about him as if he were Junior’s guardian angel, helping him get on the straight and narrow path. But Junior had told me they did some pills together, yes, but Ben has it under control and isn’t strung out—You just don’t understand, Sis. I suspected that this man’s interest in my brother was not at all altruistic and that he was calling Junior so much, asking where he was, for some other sort of reason. Junior answered his phone call one day when we were driving back from town. He told Ben he was staying with me, and as soon as he lost his cell phone signal on the winding country road to my h
ouse, I told him that he couldn’t stay with me anymore, that he had broken the most important promise he made to me.

  Aw, come on, Sis—it’s Ben! He’s my buddy, he’s got my back. There’s nothing to worry about—I trust him.

  When his girlfriend called a few days later and wanted to pick him up, I took him to town and told him that he didn’t have to do it, that he could go to rehab instead. He was in a bad mood and carrying everything he owned in a garbage bag, and he said he wanted to go home and figure things out. He didn’t like it, he said, that he couldn’t smoke inside my house or watch television in the living room as late as he wanted. It did not seem to occur to him that he was homeless and would not be going home to a television or a couch, but to someone else’s house, where he would stay until things got too uncomfortable or too dangerous. He had me leave him in a Wendy’s parking lot, and a girl picked him up a couple of hours later.

  Shortly afterward, we all went to my cousin’s funeral, and my brother was a pallbearer. There were young men at the funeral who looked like my brother looked in those days—vacant eyes, confused expression, and a general lack of presence about them. Junior talked to them, and I was pissed that they dared to show up at our family’s funeral, but why wouldn’t they? They probably thought they were all friends, in some sense. Showing their respect.

  After the funeral, we had a dinner at the fellowship hall of the church I had gone to throughout childhood. Our father would hardly give us a minute to talk alone, but I managed to pull my brother away, saying we were going to look at our maternal great-grandmother’s grave in the cemetery behind the church. When we got to the cemetery on the top of a little hill, I said to Junior, You know that if you don’t stop what you’re doing, you’re going to end up in the same place as our cousin, don’t you?

  He didn’t want to hear it and tried to tell me not to be so dramatic. I told him that he shouldn’t think he could keep cheating death or prison as our father had done for so long—most people don’t get to do that many drugs and be that destructive without worse consequences arriving much sooner. Junior talked about how he had been beaten up after getting out of the county jail recently, because he ran into someone our dad had ratted out.

  I told Junior he had to leave, and leave fast. It was painfully clear that our dad would not stop calling him, or coming to wherever he lived, or doing something to pull Junior closer toward him and his own terrible life. Junior said that after he left my house, every drug addict he knew gave him free pills, knowing he had been deprived of them for a few days. Dad suddenly wanted him to buy pills, to drive to other states and buy pills—anything related to pills, while Junior said he wanted to try to keep from using them so heavily again. At the same time, Dad told Junior that if he didn’t help get other people busted, Junior himself would have to go down. I never asked my father whether it was true, but I believed Junior. And all the while that our father was working with the law to stay out of prison, getting other people sent to jail for selling pills, he was still buying and selling them himself.

  I promised Junior a plane ticket and a place to live on the other side of the country. I promised him that I had friends who would help him, who would get him a job and help him get on his feet, and that I would find help to get him through withdrawal. All he had to do was leave.

  I’ll think about it, he said. And we walked back down to the fellowship hall, which was almost empty by then. Standing in front of it, he reached into his pocket and showed me the drugs he had on him.

  I told him he should throw them away, maybe keep the weed, but the other stuff kills people every day, and it was likely to kill him someday.

  He left, unconvinced but still telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, that he would think about it. I told him that I wasn’t making an indefinite offer, that I had money set aside and could make it happen soon, but if he waited until things got worse, it might be too late.

  A few weeks later, he was arrested again. This time, he was facing trafficking charges for crack cocaine, unlawful possession of various pharmaceuticals, and who knows what else. The person who sent him there was his buddy Ben, who had been wearing a wire every time he asked Junior to score some pills for him. Junior had to listen to the conversations they had over their cell phones and in person, and then he went to the county jail for a while. Later, he went to trial and was offered a plea bargain—he could get a lighter sentence if he would rat on some other people, somehow portraying them as the real criminals that deserved to be in jail. Whether it was his sense of honor or a fear of retaliation, I’m not sure, but Junior chose to accept his fate, and he was sentenced to ten years in state prison.

  I visited him in prison most Sundays, often bringing Orion and my new baby with me. At first, Junior just wanted me to buy him Mountain Dews and honey buns from the vending machines we were allowed to get snacks from. In the summer, the prison staff and some inmates would sometimes grill hamburgers outside, and we could buy those for lunch. Sitting at one of the round tables in the gymnasium during one of our earliest visits, I asked him what kind of programs there were that he could do while in prison. He told me that he was just there to sleep and eat and that his goal was to get out of there without doing anything else but those two things.

  Frustrated, I told him, You’re going to get out of here in a few years if you get parole. No matter when it is, you can either leave this place the same way you came in, or you can leave with a certificate, some training, even just the respect of the people running programs. If you go back to your life the same way you came in, you probably won’t stay out for very long.

  He dismissed me, and I decided I couldn’t fix it. I also decided I wasn’t buying him honey buns every time I visited, especially because he seemed to think I owed him something and hardly thanked me. But over the next few visits, his tone changed. He started taking some classes and got to work in the prison garden. He was good at it—he was always good at whatever he did—and his supervisor encouraged him. When he moved into a halfway house a couple of years later, he had recommendations that made it possible for him to get a job in a vet’s office, and he was so good at that, they tried to convince him to go to veterinarian school.

  Had I saved my brother with my lecture? Later in life, I asked him, and he said he needed that tough love to snap out of it, to stop feeling sorry for himself. But he also told me how, in that moment, he was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. I had tried at other times to talk him into walking away from the world he was immersed in—I had asked him, Do you want to be like Dad? And of course he didn’t want to be like our father, but he had to hit the proverbial rock bottom before he could really look at himself and take account of what his life had become. My words may have helped inspire him, but only because there was nowhere else to run. Thankfully, he was able to find hope in that moment, and support from the prison workers soon afterward, as they gave him a chance to prove himself while he stumbled along a new path.

  Prison was probably the safest place for my brother to hit rock bottom. He wasn’t willing to do what it took to get more drugs in there—he told me about the guy with pills and what he wanted in return for one. But I think about all the people who find their lowest point and can’t pull themselves up, who have no way to muster enough self-worth to change. How many people find themselves facing the full weight of despair and disappointment in their lives and run from that grim reality? Why would anyone willingly choose to embrace self-awareness and the painful, difficult work of changing oneself from the inside, fully experiencing all the shame, guilt, and loneliness that one person can bear? When I lectured my brother, I hadn’t even faced my own self yet. Despite how ugly some of my past had been, I hadn’t found my own rock bottom.

  We didn’t stay in touch much after he left the halfway house. For a while, he wasn’t allowed to leave Rowan County, where he had to go back to live. I was determined not to go there except for the occasional holiday—each time I took that interstate exit, I felt like
I was driving into a dark cloud. Our father was always complaining to Junior that I never visited, never called.

  I couldn’t find the words to explain that I had fought so hard to build a new life, worked so hard for my college degrees and to just not be in a house where a man was beating me or humiliating me. I didn’t know how to do that and stay in touch with the people who still lived where I came from. Our littlest brother and sister grew into teenagers and then adults, and I hardly ever knew how old they were. I would hear occasionally that my sister loved wearing makeup and shopping for clothes, that my youngest brother wasn’t talking to Dad anymore. I worried about them from far away, wondering whether they could make it out of whatever desolate hell they had endured following what Junior and I had suffered.

  But Junior was the only other person who knew what it was like to grow up as I did: in a beautiful holler, Granny’s house so close and safe, our mother clinging to something she saw in our father or simply too afraid to leave. The nightmares that turned out to be real—pretending to be asleep so Dad wouldn’t kill our grandparents or Mom or us. The sweet, wild berries and the cool streams. The joy of throwing walnuts against the tree in Granny’s yard, next to the old well.

  I grew up loving my family but knowing they didn’t know me. We are all strangers. I can tell stories about them—they named me at birth, marked me, defined me. They determined my words and my meanings, bequeathed me their lexicon. But they also sent me running into the forest and into the pages of other worlds, where the chains of little slut and whore disappeared into a vast, infinitely variable realm of language.

  The stories keep happening, and I wonder whether I can ever write them all. My granny, with her forgiving, boundless heart, eventually says, I don’t think I can make it . . . My brother finally says, I can’t believe my own father would . . . And at last I say, Forgive us all, for we know not what we do.