History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  I was not abused in the usual sense of the word, the stuff that makes it to the nightly news. I neither experienced a single instance nor multiply repeated instances of things such as beatings, sexual assaults, and so on. I was, rather, systematically neglected over the course of my early life. This was traumatic, but in radically different ways—the difference between a mother’s constant abusive drunkenness and witnessing a murder. It was exceedingly common, the garden-variety trauma that happens to millions and millions of children every day.

  It is also typical for people who have a chronically difficult time remembering their childhood past. I know now that in addition to memory problems, externally the child may create various attempts to cope by trying to block off or retreat from the world, often at the very time they are experiencing something traumatic. Later in life they may have the tendency to reenact in their daily lives a past they don’t quite remember, let alone understand, but which still takes possession of the present. Experiences of what happened an hour ago, the embrace of a loved one, the color of flowers tended all spring, vanish. Their instinctual core dissolves, even the very will to stay alive surrounded by so many kindred ghosts.

  Children of broken families often bring upon themselves the burden of trying to stitch together what is irreparable, and the guilt for having failed at that. Sometimes they seek impossible relationships, as if they were recreating in adult life the heroic if unbearable work of childhood. Or they will not allow themselves to let go of life patterns that are destructive. It seems hardly possible for them to walk away, to be able to say they have the power to make their lives. The story of the self struggling and failing against an overwhelming past is just that, a story. It is true. But it is also not inevitable.

  An inordinately large number of my extended family have taken their lives or tried to: jumping off bridges, overdosing, pulling off a Louisiana side road and putting a .357 Magnum to their head. My siblings live in despair, with broken marriages, depression, abusive relationships, and substance abuse. Marie spent her entire adult life trying not to be like our mother only to become just like her, an addict, falling down steps stone drunk, crushed by the past. Kinta dreamed of a prince but instead she’s stuck in a four-decade-long abusive marriage. She’s packed her bags and driven away countless times, but somehow she always turns around and comes back home. Sabrina is married to an alcoholic and keeps herself in a near-permanent marijuana stupor. Susan has gone through multiple marriages and is beset by loneliness. My brother lives in dire poverty, his life a ruin, a girlfriend deported back to Central America following her arrest for stealing copper tubing from AC units.

  Who saved me—my grandmother, siblings, teachers? Did I save myself? Or was I just plain lucky? Did history’s contingencies somehow conspire to allow me to get through? Perhaps I have been saved by my amnesia, the absence of memory as some primitive defense? Forgetfulness entails casting memory into oblivion. No wonder amnesia shares a root with the word “amnesty,” the forgetting of sins, the letting go of too much painful history.

  It is impossible to disentangle all these questions. I was one of the pieces of a wrecked marriage, conceived as a mistake and brought into a world that was breaking apart from the titanic forces of alcoholism, mental disease, divorce, and poverty. Unlike my siblings, however, I did not face all the pressures of trying to put the pieces back together again. I got to escape, if only for a few precious years, into the stability of the middle class and especially into the attentions of a few wonderful teachers who by their instruction showed me a way out. I was not the one in the car pulling Mom from dingy bars, nor signing the papers for her release from the mental hospital. I was not the one who stitched together Christmas stockings from pieces of red and white felt, insisting that there was a holiday to be celebrated, no matter what, forcing Mom into the kitchen to cook her exquisite oyster dressing before she hit the bottle and passed out by early afternoon. I was not the one who had to break down the bathroom door. I was not the one who remembered.

  Neglect wreaked its damage. The terrors that have befallen others have called to me. I still occasionally tumble into my second-person self. I also perfected a guilt over not being able to fix everything that went wrong, particularly my mother’s poverty and despair. In other instances, however, neglect offered a vantage point, a kind of perspective. Perhaps I wondered about what was happening, the meaning of it all, without necessarily having to do anything beyond surviving, the solitude of living on oblivion’s edge.

  We all grapple with our pasts, trying to fathom the story of our present—even with those parts of it that remain lost to us. Sometimes it’s the empty spaces that call most powerfully, the source of our despair and wonderment, the knife’s jagged edge but also the point where the work of healing begins. Like our brains, history is constantly changing, subject to the endless revisions that compose who we are—our pasts and our future.

  EPILOGUE

  I KEEP RETURNING TO NEW ORLEANS. THERE IS research to conduct, and there are professional conferences to attend. But most of my time seems to be taken up with the dead and the dying. It’s one of the peculiarities of middle age, watching our parents age and pass away, the obligations to care for them in their final years, and, beyond, their memorialization. There are family plots on both sides of the family: a nice Salvant vault in the St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 just off the Esplanade, and a more modest plot in the Masonic Cemetery for the Crais family.

  I began this pilgrimage of memorialization some two decades ago when I buried my father. While I’d seen him in the years following our argument over the Social Security check—a sister’s marriage, then a niece’s—we never really spoke to each other. In the spring of 1990 I was out in Los Angeles interviewing for a job. I had a free day. I thought about giving him a call, renting a car for the hour-long trip to the retirement community where he lived with Letha, but I decided not to. He died a few weeks later. Dad arrived in New Orleans a few months after that via UPS in a simple, nondescript square box with lots of tape, dutifully packed by his widow and third wife. Sabrina put Dad’s ashes on the mantle but didn’t make arrangements for his burial. Sabrina hadn’t called the cemetery, hadn’t filled in the forms, hadn’t told them that on this particular Saturday morning in the month of June we were going to lay to rest the remains of our father. Kinta flew in from Texas, my sister Marie and her family piled into the car and drove from Florida. My wife and I headed down from Ohio. New dresses were purchased at the mall, along with lipstick, perfume, pantyhose. I polished my shoes. We went to the ATM to withdraw cash, so that we could all feel responsible when it came to pay a restaurant bill. We were here, in New Orleans, ready for a funeral. Sabrina’s father-in-law was a minister and had agreed to say a few words. We steeled ourselves. We wept in private and now were ready to cry standing alongside one another—family.

  And Sabrina had spaced out. The authorities had not been notified. The caretaker hadn’t a clue. We couldn’t have a funeral, and we couldn’t bury Dad, at least legally. So Sabrina slipped the caretaker some money. He told her to arrive really early in the morning, before visitors began arriving to pay their respects. So we woke up and headed down the street to the cemetery. Kinta was holding the golden box of ashes. I had a shovel balanced across my back. Sabrina was talking. A few people saw us and, I suppose, innocently concluded that we were going to do some tidying up, weeding, cleaning, making sure the family plot was up to snuff.

  I had the shovel resting on my shoulder like a miner going to work. I would do the digging, they had decided. I thought about death and burials as we approached the cemetery. There are ten family members buried in a plot about the size of a couple of sheets of plywood, going back to 1939 when my grandfather died in his mid-fifties. This was my first visit. It’s a small cemetery, with most people housed in little marble temples. Since most of the city is below sea level, and the water table is just a few feet below ground, New Orleanians have long buried their dead in the fresh air. Families ha
d their own mausoleums, with shelves on the inside to support the coffins. My grandmother, a good Catholic to the very end, is in one alongside other family members. I liked to think of them as summer houses for the dead, places where the departed could go for an eternal vacation with other family members, until I start remembering just how fucked-up our family is—the divorces, affairs, alcoholism, abuse, madness, suicides—at which point the idea of being stuck in the dark began to seem disturbing, a kind of purgatorial family gathering.

  Sabrina wasn’t sure where in the cemetery to go. She hadn’t gotten a map from the caretaker, who was nowhere to be found and, I suspect, had burned through the money and was now sleeping off a generous hangover. Here we were, with a shovel and a box of ashes. And we were lost. The cemetery had a few winding lanes, but there were graves clustered behind, so we wandered about for a good half-hour before we located the right plot.

  But the caretaker hadn’t indicated where Dad was supposed to go. I expected a flag or some sort of marker: “Dig here.” There was nothing but a patch of grass.

  “Sabrina, where am I supposed to dig? You didn’t ask the guy where?”

  “Just dig a hole.” The issue didn’t seem to faze my sister.

  “Whatayamean? What if there is, well, like someone else already there,” I said, pointing indiscriminately. It was one thing burying Dad on our own, but something else entirely digging up someone else. I had this vision of the plot turning to little piles of dirt, of boxes upended, some corroded and spilling their ashes onto the soil, and my sister Kinta still holding the box of ashes, then being arrested for conducting an illegal burial or, worse, defiling a cemetery, grave robbing. I started pressing my shoe into the soil, hoping to find some vacancy, an empty space below. Soon all three of us were walking around the plot like those treasure hunters on the beach with metal detectors. But all we had was a spade, one sister already high as a kite, and another patiently holding Dad and wondering if we were going to end up returning to the house, defeated. We were going to end up faking the ceremony. It would be a little lie for the three of us to share, like children who had done something wrong and had sworn an oath not to tell their parents or older siblings. We could even send the box of ashes UPS to one another if one of us got tired of the ruse.

  “How ’bout here?” I said, somewhat exasperated and pointing randomly. I was becoming paranoid, worrying that the police might arrive and we’d be hauled off to jail. Dad would be impounded. Dad would become evidence of a crime. The funeral would be canceled. Everyone would be angry, really pissed off, that they had made the trip home to New Orleans only to have Dad confiscated by the men in blue and sitting on some shelf downtown along with contraband, rape kits, knives, and guns.

  “Yeah, that looks like a great place, yeah, perfect,” Sabrina said with absolute confidence as if she had some X-ray vision that had identified the exact open rectangle of space amidst a jungle of bodily remains.

  It was one of those spades with a straight edge so that, ideally at least, I could cut neat lines in the grass instead of a bunch of silly arcs. I didn’t want to make a mess. I wanted my hole neat and squared like I had seen on television soap operas when widows, lovers, and disjointed men watched a coffin descend neatly into a hole that seemed punched out of the earth.

  I did not know how deep to dig. Six inches, a foot, all the way to China? But I managed to scrape the grass from the soil, place the turf to one side, then continue digging. A small pile of black earth formed at the hole’s edge.

  “I think that’s ’bout right. Don’t you think so?”

  Kinta and Sabrina agreed.

  “Okay,” I said. Kinta kneeled down and placed the brass box into the hole.

  “Yeah. It looks just fine,” Sabrina said. “Hurry up. Somebody’s gonna see us. We’re gonna end up in jail for grave robbing.”

  I scraped some soil on top, then bent over and returned the grass, patted it down, so that the plot looked like it had been patched.

  “What are we going to do about the extra soil?” We couldn’t just leave it there, a small black mound like the leftovers of some construction project. I started spreading the soil around, which only made things worse, creating a dark smudge on the plot like a child’s finger painting. After a while I gave up, hoping that by the time of the service the dirt would somehow disappear back into the earth, or that it would rain, or something, but that people wouldn’t notice. I could just tell people that Dad was buried, and I could point. And they would nod solemnly, and we could all go on with our lives.

  We walked back. It was already a boiling hot New Orleans summer day. In the shower I watched the dirt spin away down the drain. I wept. I worried. Children develop that inexplicable responsibility to their parents, even if they barely know them or—perhaps even more so—if their parents have been dreadful. Despite everything, I love my parents. My father wasn’t bad. He never beat us, nor was he, like my mother, a drunkard. He never did much of anything. That was the problem. In the second half of his life when I knew him, my father wasn’t there. And even in those few years when I lived with him, he was absent—working, falling asleep in front of the television, trying to find another woman who might take him in. And when I was old enough to confront him it was too late. His brain had gone to mush. And even if I had railed against him he wouldn’t have said anything.

  And still, however distant we were, however much I felt abandoned (and I now knew he had abandoned us in one way or another), I felt I owed him a decent burial. I realized I was still searching for his love a long time after he was gone.

  That afternoon we returned to the cemetery for the service. Although they had been divorced for nearly thirty years, my mother arrived with a dozen red roses. She stood at the back, behind me and my sisters and a motley arrangement of nieces and nephews. Reverend Madden said a few words, none of which I remember, because I was still fretting over that scratch in the grass and looking overhead to the thunderheads starting to come in from the Gulf. I knew it was going to rain, and that the rain would wash the soil away and that the grass would slowly suture itself, and I would forget where exactly I had buried Dad.

  Reverend Madden asked each of my siblings to come up and place a flower on the plot and, if they wanted, say a few words. I thought of Sabrina’s loquaciousness, which my other sisters shared, though none as serious as Sabrina’s. Each of them walked to the grave, flower in hand. Once they said a few things the words just started flowing, but as I had experienced inside my head earlier that day, they were all directed not to the living, but to a square metal box near their feet. There was no eulogizing, no disquisition to those of us standing about, about our father’s life, as a man, a husband, Dad. They were talking like they always had wanted to. It was as if they had told him to sit in a chair and listen to what they had wanted to say all these years when our father was everywhere except where he was needed.

  I guess this is why when it was my turn I just placed a flower on the plot, looked at my work, and turned away. I think I had said everything already. The grass looked pretty good. Everything was going to be okay.

  While I was completing this book Susan, my oldest sister, my other mother, died following a decade-long battle with metastatic lung cancer. I called her once or twice a week, and visited whenever I could, especially in the final days. Against the assault of chemicals and the disease’s relentless spread, I tried offering what comfort I could. She lay in bed curled into a ball, a mere seventy pounds, the pain stealing the little energy she had left. I would tell her stories about the good times in Tunisia, the smell of rosemary in the garden, the Mediterranean as blue as lapis lazuli, our trip to the Sahara with Pablo, until the morphine carried her away.

  I listened to her fears and regrets and to her wish to be buried with our father.

  “Yes, of course,” I tell her. “Yes, I can do that. I’ll bring you home.” Home being New Orleans.

  Susan tells me exactly how she wants her name spelled. I email family members
, make the necessary phone calls. The engraver kindly visits the plot to make sure there is enough room on the granite slab for my sister’s name. Sabrina thinks we should sneak into the cemetery, perform a kind of guerrilla burial like we did with Dad. Susan would appreciate the transgression, Sabrina thinks. I am not so sure.

  Even Mom has returned. In February 2011 she sustained a terrible accident. Mom and Kinta had gone to Stein Mart for the big clearance sale. Across Florida one store after another had closed down during the Great Recession. Property values collapsed. People walked away from their homes. Unemployment spiraled upward. FOR LEASE and COMMERCIAL SPACE AVAILABLE signs stood in vacant lots. Employees received notice, spent their last days at work taking stores apart. Everything goes, even the bathroom sign.

  An employee pointed Mom in the direction of the bathroom. At one end of the store were two identical entrances separated by twenty paces: one for the bathroom, the other a changing room. The store had a problem with theft, particularly in the changing room, so an employee placed a heavy display wall halfway across the entrance, leaning it precariously. From a distance, and in a rush, it looked like a louvered door. With the slightest pull the display wall came tumbling down on her slight frame, breaking a hip, cracking one femur all the way to the knee, and crushing a right arm.

  An ambulance brought her to the nearest hospital, where she endured multiple surgeries followed by bleeding in the stomach, heart problems, severe edema, and an opportunistic infection that required expensive antibiotics. One wound would not heal, exposing a piece of titanium holding a limb together. On the bulletin board in her room nurses had posted a DO NOT RESUSCITATE order.