by Jim Bradford
I listened as she shared the heartbreaking tale. She recollected pieces of the story from her own experience, while other snippets had been scooped up and fit together like a puzzle from tidbits that her son William had shared over time. Even now she admitted not knowing every detail of the events she did not personally experience, but that did not stop her from weaving the story in great detail.
Growing up as an only child and a “plain ole country girl,” Pearl knew the meaning of work, especially when her daddy needed farm help. She couldn’t wait to escape her mundane country life in Maury County, Tennessee, and move on to a brighter future in the big city of Nashville. Plenty smart in school, Pearl developed into a short, stocky young woman in perfect proportions for farmwork but not so much for attracting the opposite sex.
She shared a rambunctious gene that ran from root to stem in her family tree. Over her parents’ vehement objection, she eloped with the first man she ever dated and at age nineteen promptly started married life in Illinois. Even then she admitted her gullibility and the fact that she was easy pickings for any man to sweep her off her feet. Reflecting on her poor life choices, she offered a unique philosophical viewpoint: “I took out a loan in life at age nineteen that I’m still paying interest on.” You could call it “Pearl’s Pearl of Wisdom.”
Their marriage lasted two years and three days from start to finish, of which she and John might have spent six months together. He was an over-the-road trucker filled with wanderlust and a fiery temper. Despite scant time together as husband and wife, their union produced two boys born thirteen months apart. William, their firstborn, was a carbon copy of his no-account, irresponsible father. She was thankful that Jimmy, her baby, inherited more of his mama’s genes.
When the doomed marriage finally disintegrated, Pearl and her boys returned to Tennessee. She was dead set on erasing any remnants of her failed life with John, so she took the extraordinary step of petitioning a Tennessee court to permanently restore the Derryberry name to both her offspring. She landed an entry-level accounting job with the then Nashville Gas Company and settled alone in the city while her boys lived on their grandparents’ Maury County farm more than an hour away. Thanks to the ex-husband, who stole her car during a feeble reconciliation attempt with his sons, she had no choice but to hitch a Greyhound bus every weekend to see her boys. Twenty-five years would pass before they would see John again.
Jimmy adjusted to farm life under his grandparents’ roof and trudged through school seemingly unscathed by any remnant of his family history. But William’s reputation as a hellion, just as his daddy had been, remained securely intact.
William’s rebellious teenage years found him hanging with wise-cracking outsiders and ending up on the wrong side of the law. He acquired a craving for drugs and a thirst for alcohol early in life. Drinking gave him such pretentious swagger and superior arrogance that even he probably believed the outrageous tales he spun to his buddies. He had no interest in school, eventually dropping out before finishing tenth grade.
Ten years later, after a nineteen-month stint in the army, a failed marriage, and prison time, William Howard Derryberry ran across Mary Kay Moon Davidson and liked what he saw. Her background was no better than his. Mary’s hardworking parents labored long hours trucking cargo cross-country, away from home days at a time, leaving little time for parenting a precocious young girl like her. She had never experienced a nurturing, loving family or anything close to strong familial bonds.
Mary had always survived by masquerading as a woman in a child’s body. She developed physically much younger than other girls her age and had attracted men’s attention since grade school. Like most girls, Mary desperately yearned for her parents’ affection, attention, and affirmation, especially her father’s. Her dark hair, olive skin, and radiant smile made it easy to turn a man’s head—and she was good at it. Mary had few girlfriends and nothing in common with any of them, so she ended up a teenage outcast. Predictably, she dropped out of school before completing seventh grade without any objection from her absentee parents. She became pregnant at age fourteen and promptly gave up her first child for adoption.
Though separated by just a few country miles, Mary never set eyes on William until after her eighteenth birthday. Their brief courtship became just another stop along the twisted road to adulthood. They began living together, unmarried, where their affair ensnared them in the same dysfunctional life cycle that had its roots deep within each of their family trees. They set up house in a small, weather-beaten rental near the end of a narrow two-lane country road in a remote corner of rural Maury County.
Maury County, sprinkled with country towns named Fly, Santa Fe (pronounced “Santa Fee”), Culleoka, Sawdust, and Hampshire, has been home to generations of hardscrabble tobacco and cattle farmers who have worked the same rich dirt that witnessed death and destruction as Civil War battlefields just 125 years ago. Barely thirty minutes south of Nashville, Maury County has given the art of country music plenty of life to imitate. A visit to any of its back-water towns is enough to make one realize that every cliché lyric writ large in any real country song isn’t just some fiction set to music. It is reality, straight from hundreds of communities just like these.
Like her companion, Mary acquired a taste for alcohol early in life. Maybe it provided hope and eased her pain; maybe she self-medicated to escape her present reality and terrible childhood memories; maybe alcohol temporarily pacified her lust for happiness. Whatever the reason, at age nineteen, Mary found herself hopelessly spiraling out of control yet again. Just two months after meeting the twenty-six-year-old farmhand, the now-familiar Walmart pregnancy test disclosed what she already knew—another baby was on the way. With no long-term commitment from William, Mary’s future looked more hopeless than ever.
CHAPTER 6
Quittin’ Time
The thermometer was doing its best to shove the mercury above 100 degrees on the afternoon of Saturday, July 7, 1990. In middle Tennessee, July is a month of scorching, humid days and hot, steamy nights; a month when lush green lawns die without water and don’t recover until the next spring; a month when churchgoing farmers pray more fervently than usual over their wilting crops; a month when city dogs stay cool indoors and country dogs stay cool under the house.
William and his farm crew had baled hay since early morning. It was almost quitting time. For William and the younger hands who never fretted a minute over finances, the day’s pay would be their admission to a raucous evening of drinks and shooting eight-ball at the local beer joint. Two twenties and a ten elevated these workers to the top of the income bracket compared to other watering-hole regulars. On most Saturday nights the bar tab emptied wallets long before the next payday—or sometimes before the evening ended. Nevertheless, for William and his buddies, this was an acceptable way of life: week to week, payday to payday. You could call it his daddy’s legacy.
The pregnancy had made Mary tired, so she had spent most of that Saturday morning in bed. But eventually she got up and dragged herself into the shower. She would dutifully have the car there by the field, waiting for William at quitting time, but what she desperately wanted was a night out on the town with her man. She walked through the kitchen, where at least a dozen Mountain Dew and Budweiser cans littered the counter as they did much of the rest of the cluttered rental house. On her way out the door, she picked up their Coleman cooler. She opened the car trunk and tossed aside an assorted collection of empty and smashed cans just to make room for the cooler. Mary smiled, knowing a quick detour for beer and ice would be the greatest gift she could give William that day.
The beat-up Hyundai had seen better days, but at least it was transportation. Just four weeks earlier Mary had totaled William’s newer model in a two-car wreck that left her with bruises, minor scratches, and a mild concussion. Fortunately, her unborn child escaped unharmed. She faintly remembered hearing the emergency room doctor comment that her failure to wear a seat belt had probably sav
ed the baby’s life. She had not buckled up since that accident.
Heading down the dusty gravel drive, Mary turned left onto the main paved road. The speedometer eventually reached sixty-five as she drove into the sun on Carter’s Creek Pike. The air conditioner didn’t work, so all four windows were down. The front tires were practically bald and slightly out of balance, causing a gentle shimmy in the steering wheel. But at this point Mary didn’t care. Her main objective was getting to a good time and a night out on the town.
Normally the trip took thirty minutes, but today she made it in twenty. Parking beneath two large sycamores, she opened the driver’s door and waited. A slight breeze rustled through the trees as she cranked up Merle Haggard on the radio and planned their exciting night ahead. William arrived dog-tired, his Wrangler jeans and long-sleeved work shirt dirty and sweat stained from lifting sixty-five-pound hay bales since early morning. He had toiled hard for ten solid hours, loading wagon after wagon with the rectangular bales, stacking them in a stifling-hot, dusty barn loft, so just seeing Mary and her growing baby bump made his day. The ice-cold cargo waiting in the car trunk had its desired effect. He was one happy camper.
His lunch that day had consisted of a single slice of bologna on two pieces of white bread, two Hostess Twinkies, and a Mountain Dew. Five hours later he was exhausted, dehydrated, and hungry. As he had proven time and again, beer was an acceptable food substitute, one that satisfied his hunger a single cold can at a time.
Soon there were few unopened beers remaining in the cooler, but neither William nor Mary cared. Each swish and foam eased William’s aches and made the sweltering workday seem like a faint memory. Mary had little trouble persuading him to enjoy a big night out with dinner and drinks, but first he needed to clean up and change clothes. Settling in for the drive home, she snuggled close to him as he drove, resting her hand on his right thigh. Her seat belt lay untouched.
The posted speed limit on this stretch of county road was fifty miles per hour, but with no traffic or law in sight, William inched the accelerator steadily downward until the speedometer topped out at seventy-five. His preoccupation with Mary’s hand, idle thoughts of their evening ahead, and reflexes dulled by alcohol left him unprepared for the upcoming curvy stretch of Carter’s Creek Pike.
CHAPTER 7
Life-Giving Decision
Right on cue, Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion kicked in and the speeding car failed to maneuver the second curve. Skidding out of control, the Hyundai violently spun as the rear of the car slammed full force into an ancient white oak tree. Instantly, the faded trunk and rusty fenders folded together like the flattened cans Mary had pitched from the trunk earlier that day. Glass shattered into thousands of small pieces the size of diamonds. Doors buckled and flew open, ejecting Mary’s unharnessed body like a hurtled stone. The mighty oak stood oblivious as somewhere inside the mangled metal mess, hissing sounds faded into silence.
The nearest help would come from an approaching motorist who, at that moment, was out of sight and over a mile away. When the shocked rescuer arrived at the horrendous scene, he found Mary’s motionless body lying on the ground, her head resting in a spreading pool of blood. William remained securely harnessed behind the wheel, dazed but not seriously hurt. Blood trickled down his chin, his lip cut from the steering wheel.
Mary clung to life while the unheralded motorist frantically dialed 911 on his portable Motorola phone. Within fifteen minutes a Maury County EMS unit from nearby Columbia arrived and immediately observed that Mary had suffered severe head trauma and desperately needed critical medical treatment. William was transported to Maury Regional Hospital, where he was treated and released with only minor injuries. Mary was airlifted to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where a world-class medical facility and highly trained specialists awaited her arrival. The skilled helicopter trauma crew stabilized her for the twenty-three-minute flight to the hospital’s medical tower landing pad.
Family members were contacted, and both mothers, along with William, rushed to Vanderbilt’s medical complex in midtown Nashville. Doctors gave Mary’s family scant hope that she would survive the night. A compassionate medical specialist counseled the distraught family, preparing them for the worst. Brain activity was nonexistent, and without the vast array of medical equipment surrounding her, pushing and pulling life into her lifeless body, she would already have died. Because Mary’s insurmountable head injuries left virtually no hope for her survival, the doctor gently led the family to concentrate their attention on her unborn, yet still viable, fetus.
Speaking in simple terms, the doctor explained that even without trauma, a baby born three months early entered the world with odds unfairly stacked against him or her. Syndromes associated with Mary’s alcohol use, coupled with a lack of prenatal care, created even greater odds against a healthy baby. A second doctor joined the conversation, and together they chronicled many potential ailments this baby would likely encounter. The lengthy list included underdeveloped lungs and heart, stroke, blindness, and brain damage, each problem likely requiring a lifetime of special care, assuming survival. They also mentioned that the baby’s odds of living longer than a few days were extremely low. Given all these options, Mary’s dazed mother looked hopelessly into the doctors’ eyes and instructed them to do what they could to save the baby.
The specialized neonatal intensive care team kicked into high gear and feverishly prepared the delivery room for an emergency birth. At 6:01 on Sunday morning, July 8, 1990, a baby boy was born via cesarean section to William Derryberry and Mary Davidson. Two hours and twenty-nine minutes later, the life-sustaining apparatus connecting Mary’s bruised and swollen body to her remaining semblance of life was disconnected. Her head trauma and other internal injuries proved too severe for any hope of recovery. William caressed her soft, swollen hand for the last time and sobbed uncontrollably as Mary drew her final breath.
Her unnamed son clung to his own frail life just down the hall from his mother. Outside the hospital on this sultry July Sunday morning, bell tower chimes from Belmont United Methodist Church filled the air with solemn yet joyous sounds, mourning death and celebrating birth.
The baby boy, delivered thirteen weeks early and weighing in at barely two pounds, arrived fighting from his first breath. He could have been appropriately named Rocky because of his stubborn struggle for life, but after three days he was given his father’s first name, William. His middle name was a combination of the first initial of both parents’ middle names. Though legally recorded as “William HK Derryberry” in the county clerk’s office, he would simply be known as HK.
CHAPTER 8
Miracle Baby
As Pearl spoke, I found myself sitting on the edge of my chair, both spellbound and appalled at learning of the unfolding tragedy surrounding HK’s ill-fated entrance into the world. But that was just the beginning. There would be more to his story than heredity and birth.
Our Saturday sessions lasted several weekends as Pearl unloaded her storehouse of memories, and I learned how this miraculous little blind boy came to be sitting at that dining room table the day I entered the restaurant.
From the outset, the premature infant’s survival was a daily struggle, touch-and-go at best. Pearl knew that William would never be fit for fatherhood, especially for a child who would require constant care and attention. His life consisted of a continual bounce between short-term menial employment and the county jail. So Pearl, at age forty-five, defaulted as her grandson’s guardian.
Raising a special-needs grandchild as a single mother, while struggling to make ends meet, was hardly the life Pearl Derryberry envisioned. But she accepted the task, doggedly determined to be a better parent for her tiny, fragile grandson than she had been for her own two boys. She felt the accident had handed her a do-over, and she intended to take full advantage of it.
Wisely, Pearl had purchased a small two-bedroom, white frame house just east of downtown Nashville in 1986, aft
er an unexpected promotion at the gas company. Her house was exactly seven miles from Vanderbilt Medical Center’s neonatal intensive care unit, where HK spent the first three months of his life. Hospital protocol required on-duty personnel to log the name, date, and time of arrival and departure of every visitor entering the NICU. Pearl Derryberry’s name is recorded there each of the ninety-six days her grandson struggled for life.
Some days she stopped by the hospital on her way to or from work. On days that HK’s condition worsened and she had no time off, she used an extended lunch break to check on him. When those restless, lonely nights came and she found herself staring at the walls instead of sleeping, a short trip to the hospital provided solace and quieted the ever-present anxiety hovering just beyond her reach.
Pearl knew only a handful of people in Nashville, all gas company coworkers. Her aging mother, fighting her own health battles, occasionally ventured up from the farm to help keep the hospital vigil. William sporadically faded in and out of the picture but mostly out. Since the accident, he had tangled with his own unfathomable demons. Truth be told, Pearl climbed that insurmountable mountain alone. Isolated, without a support system, devoid of family and friends, she managed one hour, one day, one step at a time.
