We cousins were an amazingly compatible group. Sherm and Del had married first, so they had a head start on child-bearing, and they maintained their lead. But, by happy accident, except for their firstborn, Shermy, each of the kids in our family had at least one counterpart of roughly the same age in the Park family.
Double first cousins can be more like siblings than siblings. The gulf of four years between my older brother and me was unbridgeable, whereas my cousin Mark, who was only a few months younger than me, was a great friend and more of a brother to me than my older sibling. And, like my brother, he had all the same grandparents as me, so we were genetically every bit as close as brothers.
But my older brother and I did not get along. He never liked me, and after enough years of nastiness, I had settled on avoidance as my best coping strategy. But my brother was not content with that. When he was hanging out with his age counterpart, my brother thought he should show off by bullying me, both with minor physical assaults and savage taunting and ridicule. I answered as best I could the verbal assaults, and in that area I think I held my own. But the physical prodding and pushing and shaking and knocking down found me defenseless.
Except for Shermy. Bigger than any of the cousins, he spend more time associating with the grown-ups and with my older sister, but from time to time he was outside where the younger kids were, and when my older brother picked on me in some visible way, Shermy didn’t hesitate. He was right there, putting a stop to the torment. At home, my older sister was the only one who ever protected me; but when the cousins were together, Shermy was a much more forbidding protector.
It’s not as if Shermy—eight years old than me—ever became my chum. But he watched out for me and all the other kids, to make sure that none of us was subjected to mistreatment. And since the only person trying to mistreat me was my older brother, that meant that several times Shermy intervened on my behalf.
The result was that, while I didn’t hang out with Shermy, I worshipped him. I wanted his approval. I wanted to be like him. All the stuff you’re supposed to want from your older brother, I wanted from him.
I was four years old, five years old.
Then we moved to Santa Clara, California, and not long after, we got word that in a tragic tractor accident, Shermy had been killed in the family’s orchard in Benton City, Washington.
We drove north to attend the funeral. It was devastating to me. Shermy couldn’t be dead. Yet there he was in the coffin. My father showed me the mark where he had been hit in the head and knocked unconscious, while the tractor continued backing up and he was crushed to death between the steering wheel and the tree. At my age I had no existential questions, no “why would God allow this” issues. I only knew that my idol and protector was gone. Yet because I wasn’t even his brother, just a cousin, I was kept at a remove from the real mourners. There was no one I could shed my tears with. No one knew how much this fourteen-year-old boy had meant in my life.
That’s the person I drew on in creating Ernie, the good, kind, understanding brother who dies, while a child is left behind with an unstanchable grief.
More than sixty years later, there is still a Shermy-sized hole in the families. He is rarely mentioned in my presence; more recent losses and deaths draw more conversation and attention. But nobody who knew him has ever forgotten Shermy or slackened in their regard for him. Even my own mother, when she wanted to give me an example of good choices, would call upon stories from Shermy’s life that she had learned from Aunt Delpha. So he remained an example of kindness, of power used for the benefit of the weak. And memories of him, my feelings toward him as a child, gave me Ernie.
* * * * *
None of the specifics in the lives of the Pullman family and their descendants are based on any real incidents, apart from Zanna’s and Emily’s drawings. My only autobiographical novel was Lost Boys, and after that wrenching experience I vowed never to attempt such a thing again.
But Zanna’s Gift is still thick with nostalgia for a childhood that can bring loss and pain—yet which still retained the possibility and reality of much happiness. Maybe if Shermy had lived to adulthood, I would have eventually come to see him without the filter of adoration that I had as a child. Maybe he would have been just another grown-up cousin, when I became something like a grown-up myself.
He didn’t live long enough for disillusionment, however, as Ernie also did not. That glow of nostalgia never faded. His goodness remained and remains pure in my memory. And that goodness was what flowed out of me onto the page. I hope you have come to love Ernie and Zanna and their family as I do.
Real families have powerful dynamics that change over time. Even though I knew my mother’s unhappiness with Nana Lu, I still adored her as much as I did Grandpa. I also loved my mom’s mother, Parkee, and chances are that despite all his failings, I would have loved Daniel Lester Park, if he had not died of a stroke when I was a baby. Since he’s the grandparent I most take after (including a stroke in my early sixties), it’s possible he might have become my favorite.
It’s possible to love people that cause you pain; it’s possible to love people who behave badly. Love is not incompatible with resentment, anger, fear, or envy. That attachment that is deeper than mere emotion is still there when the negative feelings pass; couples who never got along can find themselves devoted to each other in old age.
Even the nastiness between my mother and her mother-
in-law had an end. There came a day when Nana Lu initiated a conversation with my mom in which she admitted that she had been, not just unfair, but completely wrong about those strange Parks who married two of her children. She saw now that in the ways that mattered most, Sherman had been a good husband and father; Peggy had been a good wife and mother.
And, as my mother told me later, they ended the conversation with mutual respect—and a good deal of crying. This one conversation allowed her to see herself, her family, and her husband through Nana Lu’s eyes. Even though she knew Nana Lu had been wrong in judging her, she also understood that she had been wrong about Nana Lu, too. They had now established a good working relationship. They could speak to each other without causing wounds.
Families can contain offenses and reconciliations, wars and truces, loyalty and betrayal, belonging and exclusion. All of human society is acted out within families, and people are as often at their best in a family as they are at their worst. No snapshot of a family as they are today can possibly tell any meaningful story about who the members of the family really are. You have to know the history, each person’s version of it, several generations back; you have to know something about the family members who are now missing; you have to stick around and see what comes of the things they’re doing and feeling and planning today.
And even when we think we have all the important information, we never really know another person to the core. They are always capable of surprising us. We are never likely to understand fully what they mean by the things they say and do. All we can do is make our best guesses based on the information we have. There is always a deep gulf between who people really are and the image of them we create in our minds.
Since, in our hearts, everyone we know is mostly the person we imagine them to be, in some ways I feel that Zanna and her family are real people, whom I know and love. Thank you for giving them room in your imagination, at least for a time.
Greensboro, North Carolina,
March 2019
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Zanna's Gift Page 8
