by Rory Feek
Late that evening we loaded everything we could fit into Mom’s ’74 Plymouth Duster and climbed in the backseat, with Aunt Mary navigating, as Mom, smiling as she smoked her Winston red, with the wing-window cracked, steered the car east for the latest new-and-better life that awaited in Kentucky. The rest of our belongings were sold to the auctioneer for three hundred dollars. And in time, it was a better life. It was always a better life.
The government apartment complex in Atchison, Kansas, was better than my uncle’s basement, where we lived in Brownsville, Nebraska. And the green trailer in someone’s backyard in Greenville, Kentucky, was better than the little house at Sugar Lake, Missouri, that we packed up and moved from that night in tenth grade. Though they weren’t always better places to live, they were part of a better life to live. I don’t think I knew that at the time, but I do now. It isn’t about the house; it’s about the home. And we were always trying to make one. Find one. My mom just wasn’t good at it, I think. She didn’t come from a good home, so it made it kinda tough for her to figure out how to provide one for her children.
Most of the time we didn’t mind moving. We were used to it. We got to meet new kids and see new parts of the country. Sometimes it was a family reunion, like when we moved back in with Uncle Rod and Aunt Mary and their kids from time to time. We were just glad to see each other.
There’s only one place that I wish we hadn’t left: a small town in Kansas called Highland. We got there when I was in the fourth grade and stayed until the middle of my seventh-grade year. It was like something out of a movie, at least in my memory it was. All of us kids feel the same way. We loved that time and wish we could’ve stayed and grown up there.
My class had only seventeen kids in it. I don’t remember a single name of the hundred kids I graduated with in high school in Kentucky. But I still remember everyone’s name from my classroom in Highland. I remember those details vividly. What the streets looked like that I skateboarded down. How a Marathon candy bar tasted as you stood on the sideline, freezing at a junior high football game. And how Tina Scott played guitar in our music class that day. She was only nine or ten, but when she played and sang, I was mesmerized. I remember the smell of the gum in the football card collections sold at Ukena’s Hardware Store and the feel of the tennis ball coming off my racket at the courts near Fifth Street. That court is gone now, as are most of the houses we lived in when we were there.
I’ve gone back to Highland many times. I still do. It somehow feels like home to me. I was there only about three years, but they were the best three years of my life. The truth is, I’ve spent my life trying to re-create one particular moment from when we were living there. We had rented an old farmhouse out in the country, which had a couple of old barns and a corncrib. Just down the lane was a creek where a bridge had collapsed, placing our house at the end of a dead-end road. I caught a million bullhead catfish and swam in a thousand swimming holes in that creek. Everything is bigger in those memories for me. Exaggerated. Probably because it was such a good time for our family. My mom and dad were back together, at least for a few months or so, and we were a family.
It was 1974, I think. Some of my memories of that time aren’t completely clear. They’re blurry and come and go, but they’re very strong. Like the image of the number “38” on the top of a birthday cake that Dad was blowing out. Mom cooking fried chicken in the kitchen. Dad playing guitar on the couch, me sitting beside him, and him teaching me to keep time by tapping on the front of the guitar as he sang Jim Reeves’s “Distant Drums.” I remember a ’55 or ’56 Chevy in the driveway and forts being built in cornfields, a dog named Nooper that could climb the tree in the front of the house, and hours of going through the Sears & Roebuck catalog, carefully picking out Christmas gifts that would never come. Like the Pittsburgh Steelers pajamas I had at the top of my list . . . at that house, at that time, anything was possible.
I remember the smell of Ben-Gay and the feel of the football pads in the locker room underneath the stage at the end of the gym. And lacing up my first pair of Converse All Star tennis shoes. They were blue and white. The Highland Blue Streaks’s colors. The color of my school. My town. I remember the sounds in the huddle as our quarterback John Paul Twombly called the play and told the receivers to get open. Then he looked at me, signaling that he was going to throw it to me, his best friend who played tight end. I was one of the best players on the basketball and football teams, and the prettiest girl liked me—or at least I thought maybe she did. I felt like I was somewhere that needed me.
But then we moved. First to town, then across town. Then finally far away. And I had to say good-bye to that place. To those people. I hated doing that. It’s strange to say, but I never had a harder time saying goodbye than then . . . until this past year, when I had to say good-bye to my wife. That town meant that much to me.
I don’t think my mom knew what it meant to me. To my brothers and sisters. Or she didn’t care or, more likely, didn’t feel that she could do anything to change it. By then Dad had left her again. Many more times, actually, in his usual creative way, with alibis and lipstick on his shirt or a brick through the front window of Mom’s car. I remember hunkering down in the house on Fifth Street one night as Dad and Mom yelled and screamed, and he grabbed his half-empty whiskey bottle and slammed the door and left us. It wasn’t enough for him to leave us; he had to maim us. Make it so that Mom was out of options. And pretty soon, she’d pull out some black trash bags and carefully fill them like fine suitcases with everything we owned. And we’d get picked up by an aunt or uncle and move on.
But part of us stayed behind. Especially in Highland. It was too late. Without realizing it, deep roots had grown into that soil, and though in the years to come, I might have been living in Avoca, Michigan, or stationed in El Toro, California, a part of me was still back there in that little town.
Why do you think I live in an old 1870s farmhouse now? Or drive a 1956 Chevy or play guitar and write songs and stories about small-town life? It’s all part of getting back there. Finding my way back to that place in my head when everything was good, everything was right. And if it’s true that we can’t ever really go back, we find a way to bring the past into our future. At least that’s what I did. It’s what I think I’m still doing. Not on purpose. It just happened without me even noticing it. I woke up one day and realized that I have subconsciously spent my entire adult life trying to get back to that one moment in my childhood that I loved most.
Five
MAMA BARE
She did the best she could.
That’s it. All the years of being upset and disappointed by my mother and the choices she made came down to one truth: my mom did the best she could with what she had. And that truth has set me free.
For many years I struggled with understanding her, and I wanted some answers with regard to the tough times we experienced in our childhood. But the answers never came. Mom couldn’t handle talking about the decisions she’d made in the past—about how they impacted us and how we still carry them around. I tried to get her to talk with me many times, but she would just shut down. She couldn’t bear the thought that she had disappointed us or let us down. So for the last number of years, she acted as if it never happened, and that would drive me crazy. But, in time, I realized that it was probably a self-preservation thing. She knew. She knew her mistakes and failures far better than we did. And she had to wake up and carry them with her every day of her life. The weight was already heavy enough on her, I think. Having to face trial for it was too much.
So I learned to let it go—to just enjoy her for who she was and who she was trying to be. And that made all the difference in the final years. I loved my mom. I always loved her because she was my mother, but I loved her differently in the end. I was proud of her when the cancer finally took her from us. Really proud of her. I think it’s hard to be proud of someone if you’re angry with them. The bad emotions have a way of canceling out the good ones. So
in the end, when I let the bad memories go, it made room for us to make beautiful new memories. That was hard for me to learn to do, but I did.
My mom, Rita Ruth Carnahan, was from a large Irish Catholic family in Michigan. Her father, Leo, was a hard man. He had been in the big war back in the early forties, and when he came home, he had a dozen children with his wife, Maddie. I never met my mother’s mother. She died from brain cancer before I was born, but I’m told that she was a saint. By everyone. I’ve never heard a bad word spoken about her, which is a big deal—especially coming from a family who has a gift for talking about the worst in people.
My grandmother Maddie was a writer. I’m told she had poems published in local papers and that her writings still fill shoeboxes in closets somewhere at my great-aunts’ houses. I once was given a story of hers that I still have. Typed beautifully. It’s about a family trip Mom, her siblings, and parents took from Michigan to California in 1956. Stopping in Chicago, then Kansas, and continuing clear across Route 66 until they reached and saw the blue water of the ocean for the first time. It was beautifully written and filled with wonderful details. Clearly written by a mother with a passion to capture the moments that mattered in her life and to save them for eternity. I can relate to that.
My mom was difficult, I think. She had her own mind and wasn’t afraid to use it. That was unacceptable to my grandfather. They butted heads early on and never stopped until he was gone. My guess is she had some unresolved questions for her father, just like I had for her.
By sixteen she was on her own, living with her newly married brother Rod and his wife, Mary—a routine that would repeat itself well into my teenage years. Mom had been married and divorced and remarried by the time I came along. Her first husband’s name was Joe, and he was tough on her. Tougher than my dad was, I think. Joe beat her and left her stranded in California with a son in diapers who bore his name and another one on the way that he wouldn’t meet until years later. Mom somehow found her way to Kansas and was waiting tables when she met my father, Robert. Tall and handsome, he played guitar and dreamed of singing at the Grand Ole Opry someday. He was a ladies’ man. Unfortunately, not a one-lady man. That would cause problems in the future, but, for a while, it was good. Mom was pregnant when they met and fell in love, and soon after my brother Blaine was born, she found herself pregnant again. This time with me.
I was skinny with some red in my blond hair and a face full of freckles. My dad loved me. I know he did. He made it clear. He let me sit on his lap. That may not seem like a big deal, and it wasn’t to me at the time. But it was to some of the other kids in the house. I didn’t realize until years later that my two older brothers weren’t allowed on his lap. My dad accepted them and provided for them, but he didn’t treat them the same way he treated me or my two sisters who came later. He let them and everyone around know which children were his and which weren’t. Which kids he loved most. How he didn’t know that would scar those boys for life, I have no idea. But it seems he didn’t. Or he didn’t care. My two older brothers are in their fifties now, and both have had very difficult lives. I’m very proud of them and the men they’ve become in spite of their struggles. We look alike in some ways. Blondish hair, fair skin. But there’s a hurt in their eyes that you won’t find in mine. There’s pain that is so deep in them, no amount of time or drugs or rehab ever touches it. Those things come and go, but the hurt remains.
Why my mom didn’t set him straight, I don’t know either. It was a different time, the late sixties and early seventies. Women were supposed to know their place, I guess, and so were stepkids. As a grown man, I can’t bear to see people get hurt who don’t deserve it—especially children. If I could go back to that time, when I was four or five years old, I’d climb off my dad’s lap and push one of my brothers up there, and I wouldn’t ask him if it was okay. I’d just stand there and dare him to say something. I’d like to think I’m that kind of man now, but as I child, I didn’t even realize it was happening. I never saw it. I didn’t want to, I guess. My father’s rejection of my brothers didn’t show itself like that. It showed itself through their failed marriages, prison sentences, and stints in halfway houses. And painkillers. Always painkillers. Even today, the doctors keep writing prescriptions for my two older brothers, but they can’t touch their kind of pain. Medicine can’t fix being rejected by a father. Only a time machine can unlock that door. Or an apology. And my father selfishly took that key with him to his grave. My mom tried to right the wrong over the years, but something tells me she needed an apology from her own father before she could see clearly to help her sons.
I’d like to tell you that things got easier for my mom, but they didn’t. Trouble and hard times seemed to have found their way into our black-trash-bag luggage, and we carried them with us to all the new places we lived. She always struggled to make a living. To find love. To be happy. But there were good times too. She was proud of her children and believed that we were all destined for great things.
It wasn’t unusual for me and Joey to be at Mom’s house the day after we had received an accolade at an award show or event, and Mom would spend the whole time telling us how good my brother was doing, selling his homeless newspapers on the corner, or how my other brother was filing a lawsuit against his employers and would hopefully be getting a settlement soon. It’s not that she wanted to hold me down. My mom just wanted to lift them up. She loved all her children the same, and she went out of her way to let me and everyone around her know. Funny, that was just the opposite of what my father did.
Most of my memories of growing up have to do with the tough times Mom went through, that we went through with her. Like the time when we were starving, living in a run-down government apartment complex in Kansas, and she had to break down and call my dad for help—asking him to pay just one month of the years of child support that he had managed never to pay. That call was hard for her to make. She didn’t want to beg, but in this case it meant the difference between her kids going hungry or not. Next thing I knew, we were loaded in her car and headed to Kansas City to meet up with my dad.
When we pulled into the big, empty parking lot at the Kansas City International Airport that evening, Dad’s car was already there. My brothers and sisters and I were excited to see him. Rolling down our windows and waving. Big smiles on our faces as Mom’s car pulled in next to his. He just sat there in his long burgundy Buick, smoking a Winston. I don’t think he even turned his head to look, pissed I’m sure that Mom had put him on the spot. He took another drag and kept staring into the distance, ignoring the excited voices and little arms dangling from our car window.
Finally Mom opened her door and walked around to the driver’s side of his car. And then my father managed to take a woman who was at her lowest and drop-kick her to the curb. He rolled down his window a few inches, tossed a hundred or so dollars in small bills into the wind, and with that cigarette still hanging from his lips, slipped the Buick into drive and left my mother, with her babies watching, scrambling across the parking lot to pick up the cash. Anything that remained of her dignity was left there on that sunbaked pavement.
And it wasn’t just my father. Most men in general were not good to my mother. When I was in high school and we were living in Kentucky, Mom had a job cleaning a rich oil guy’s house. She cleaned his toilets, washed his dishes, and did his laundry while God-knows-what his wealthy wife was doing with her time. Sometimes in the evenings, Mom had to cook dinner and serve the couple and their uppity friends. She never enjoyed that, but again, if that is how she could make a paycheck, she did what she had to do.
But one evening in particular, I remember pulling in at their big fancy house to pick up Mom. She had been there late for another swanky dinner party they were throwing. Normally she came out tired and ready for her own beer and a cigarette. But on this night, she came out with tears streaming down her face. Sobbing. As we drove home, I asked her what was wrong, but she just sat there, staring out the passenger d
oor window. She sat there for a long time, thinking. Finally she told me she had been fired. She said at the end of the party, she had gone to use the bathroom in the next room, and the rich man was listening from his seat at the table. He said he didn’t hear the water running before my mom came back in the room, so he called her out in front of his friends. Said he couldn’t have someone serve them who didn’t have the manners to wash her hands after urinating. So he told her what a piece of crap she was and then fired her.
I’m sure that wasn’t the first time Mom had been fired from a job, but even she knew there was no reason to belittle her in front of other people and make her feel so small. Sometimes I think it’s the folks with higher education who are the most ignorant. I should’ve gone inside and stood up for her. Told that man to apologize to her. But I was still only about fifteen and my father’s son. I had yet to come across any role models to show me what good men do. So I just drove, listened, and kept my eyes on the road.
Mom drowned her sorrows in Folgers coffee and Budweiser beer—every day, pretty much, for as long as I knew her—not together, of course. The coffee would take its shift from about six a.m. until six p.m. each day; then the beer would take over and get her through ’til sleep would come, and the process would start again. One would help her find courage to face another day, and the other would numb the nerves that were shot and the heart that was broken. Mom was probably what you’d call a functioning alcoholic. She would be disappointed to hear me say that, but I don’t mean that in an AA sort of way. I mean it more in a descriptive sense. She just liked beer, and the alcohol seemed to help when nothing else would. I never once saw her stumbling drunk, but I saw a strange smile on her face some late evenings that you’d have a hard time finding during the day. It looked like happiness. Contentment. Or some form of it.
