One Christmas Dad sent me a hundred-dollar bill. It was the second time he’d ever given me cash, the first being forty bucks when I left home. A hundred dollars was a pleasant surprise. Previous Christmas gifts had included his discarded undershirts with stains in the armpits.
Reluctantly, I made the holiday phone call. Dad answered. By this time his phone had caller ID. He answered gruffly, without preamble or greeting. “Why’d you call, Chris?” he said.
“Uh, because it’s Christmas.”
“I know what day it is. I mean why did you call me?”
“To say ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”
A long silence. I had no idea how to proceed.
“Are you there?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have anything to say to me?”
“Sure, Dad. Merry Christmas. Hope it’s a good one.”
“You’re not letting me say what I want to say.”
Another long silence, which I broke. “I don’t know what you want to say, Dad. But I’m listening.”
“No, you’re talking. Saying you’re listening is talking.”
“Well, that’s why I called, just to talk.”
The conversation descended into a tense silence. Dad finally told me that he’d planned his response to my thanking him for the money he’d sent. But I must have known that, since I was deliberately thwarting him.
“Thanks for the money,” I said.
“What money?”
I didn’t speak, unsure what my side of the pre-scripted conversation was supposed to be.
He spoke into the silence. “I said, ‘What money?,’ Chris.”
“The hundred dollars. I appreciate it.”
“What hundred dollars? Did I send you money?” He started laughing.
“Dad, is that what you wanted to say?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said. “I have to go now.”
Later, Mom called to talk with my sons, then put Dad on the phone. James was in middle school. During the conversation he lowered his voice and began giving me quick furtive glances. Afterward he told me that his grandfather had talked to him about Internet pornography, saying that porn fueled all technology and that James was lucky it was available to him online. I told James that scientific research fueled technology, not porn.
For the memorial service, Mom chose Friday afternoon at a local funeral home. Since the family hadn’t paid for a fancy container, a table held an empty wooden box that represented his ashes. The box contained nothing, a fitting metaphor for a man who didn’t allow himself to be known. No one from his family attended the service.
Dad had little tact and no sense of diplomacy but could engage anyone in conversation. Everyone in the county had Andy Offutt anecdotes. One often-repeated story concerned a man who’d lost an arm in an accident and kept his folded sleeve pinned in place. The precise circumstances changed with each telling, but the gist was that at a social gathering, in a voice loud enough for all to hear, my father threatened to “come over there and tear your other arm off,” then laughed uproariously.
The sympathetic comments of the memorial attendees reflected brief encounters from decades back.
“You didn’t meet a man like him every day.”
“He was a character.”
“God broke the mold when He made Andy.”
“Put four kids through college and never left the house.”
“He was a character.”
“Your dad would say the most outrageous things.”
“He was nice to me once.”
“Andy didn’t get along with many people, but I always liked him.”
“He was a character.”
“He was a character.”
“He was a character.”
The visitors drifted away. True to her Irish heritage, my mother pored over the guest book to learn who hadn’t come, prepared to feel slighted. After everyone left, the ashes were presented to Mom, who gave them to me. The plastic container had the style of a large recipe box with a flip-top lid. Inside was a plastic bag filled with surprisingly heavy powder, tied off with a wire. Because I was driving, I tasked my son with transport. He snugged the box against his stomach, strapped safely beneath the seat belt. With my mother in the passenger seat, I drove slowly to avoid a wreck. One slip of the hand could drench us in the physical residue of Dad.
My father’s only direct instructions regarding his death had been to open a bottle of hundred-proof bourbon with his name emblazoned on the label, and drink a toast. The quart of whiskey had sat on a high shelf for many years, a Christmas gift from my mother. I’d always considered it odd that Dad would place the bottle in full view of his chair, where a quick glance would remind him of his mortality. As I drove up the hill, it occurred to me that maybe I had it backward—maybe the bourbon watched over my father.
In the living room, Mom opened the special bottle and poured shots. We stood in a ragged circle, looking at one another. No one knew what to say, and I realized everyone was waiting for me. I lifted my glass. “To Andrew Offutt, father, husband, writer.”
I placed the ashes on a shelf that held Dad’s books published under his own name. In the next few days, we each added items to make a small shrine—photos, knives, a mug, a plaque, a Kentucky Derby hat. Everyone knew Dad wanted to be cremated, and we all assumed that someone else had information regarding the disposal of the ashes. As it turned out, he hadn’t specified his intentions with anyone. Never a sentimental man, my father had no special spot in the woods, favorite view of the land, or relationship with a body of water. We didn’t have an urn for a columbarium. Various options arose, but none took hold: saving the ashes to bury with Mom, dividing them among the survivors, or placing them in a rocket bound for outer space. After a while the subject trickled away and was abandoned. We were all putting off the decision, perhaps an effort to avoid a mistake that would have made Dad mad.
My siblings returned to their respective homes. My wife and I stayed the next three months in Kentucky to help with legal issues and Mom’s future plans. As a child, I never knew what my mother thought or felt. She didn’t talk much. My primary memory consisted of her moving quietly about the house carrying objects from room to room. She carried out tasks with focused intent and followed strict routines: shopping one day, cleaning another, laundry on a third. The rest of the time she typed.
Mom was a cipher to me then and, to some extent, still is. Her standard response to any inquiry was a variation of “I’m fine” or “Everything’s great” or “I have no regrets.” If asked her preference about anything—an outing, a meal, a drink—she invariably reversed the question to “What do you want?” Her opinions were reflective of Dad’s, a kind of psychic mirror. She avoided conflict by keeping her feelings to herself, and the result was marital accord.
A week after the memorial service, I took Mom to a greenhouse built of plastic sheeting. Mom selected a plant with white flowers, then smiled, shook her head, and chose red flowers instead.
“Your father was color-blind,” she said. “I only bought white flowers so he could see them.”
She took the red ones home. After fifty years Mom planted flowers she liked in her own backyard.
Chapter Six
THE LOSS of a parent takes away a kind of umbrella against the inclement weather of life. Regardless of condition—tattered fabric and broken spokes—it had always been at hand, offering the potential of protection and safety. Dad’s death made me the nominal head of the family, maker of decisions, next in line to die. Now I had to provide my own umbrella—for myself, my siblings, and my mother.
Mom decided to sell the house and move to Mississippi. My wife and I began clearing her house, filled with the accumulation of five decades. Furniture stood against the wall of every room, often piled with objects—pillows, books, magazines. Each closet was stuffed floor-to-ceiling. Depression-raised, my parents threw nothing away—the basement contained junk culled from the rest,
the discards of the discards.
I began with Dad’s clothes—forty pairs of fleece sweatpants and pullovers, and sixty silk shirts, all bought by mail. One pair of pants had a large lump in a pocket. I checked for cash but found an unused tissue, which meant the pants hadn’t been washed since he wore them. The last hand inside the pocket had been his. I underwent a deep sorrow but quickly locked my feelings away, exactly as my father always had. Emotions would interfere with the tasks at hand, slow my progress, render me weak and vulnerable.
I worked twelve hours a day. We made daily trips to town: donating books to the library; clothes and household items to Christian Social Services; furniture to the university theater department. On the way home, we stopped at the liquor store to get more boxes. The strongest ones were designed to hold bourbon, the poison that had killed Dad.
For several years my father lived in a large La-Z-Boy chair, upholstered in leather, the right arm burnished smooth from moving the TV remote control. The seat was lodged in a permanent tilt to accommodate the favor he gave his bad leg, subject of a mysterious malady never diagnosed: nerves, arthritis, bone, something. Doctors could not discover the ailment. It bothered Dad for many years, leaving him unable to fly in an airplane, his reason for not visiting his adult children. He told me it was a “ghost wound,” scar tissue below the surface where he’d been stabbed while serving Genghis Khan. He regarded the pain as evidence of reincarnation. He stressed that Khan’s army was cavalry-based and he’d been a lowly foot soldier, nothing fancy. Dad reveled in the essential humility of this role.
Mom didn’t want to keep his chair but felt uncomfortable donating it to Social Services. I called my childhood friend Faron, at one time nicknamed “Hollywood” for his handsome looks. He’d known my father for fifty years. Faron was a Henderson, a name in good stead in the county, unsullied by scandal or sin. He had three brothers, including Sonny, who had drained the basement in winter. One brother joined the navy and left the hills for good. The rest remained. As each aged, he came to resemble his father more, and I wondered if it was the same for me.
Faron and his wife arrived to help us pack. Faron had been a logger, a telephone lineman, and a carpenter. He broke horses and rode a motorcycle. He now worked as a car detailer. His hair was cut in a “Kentucky Waterfall,” a long mullet that reached midchest when combed forward. I asked him what he called his hairstyle, and after hesitating, he looked me in the eye and said: “Outdated.” We laughed as we always had, our dead fathers momentarily forgotten. Faron and I carried Dad’s chair to his truck. He was laughing as he accelerated up the grade and around the curve, his hair streaming from the window.
I gathered Dad’s guns and went through them. A revolver was broken, the crane snapped off the cylinder, not worth repairing. Two were rusted to ruin. I took a shotgun and a rifle to visit Faron’s brother, a master gunsmith who won awards for marksmanship with muzzle-loading rifles he built by hand. Randy sat in his garage surrounded by tools, gun parts, a motorcycle, and chunks of gorgeous wood. He greeted me as if he’d seen me last week instead of a decade back. We could have been kin—bearded and bespectacled, with sandy-gray hair and potbellies.
Randy cleaned Dad’s guns while we talked. The Remington single-shot was made in 1936, the stock a rich tiger walnut, the action smooth, the sights still true. My grandfather used it to hunt small game during the Depression, then gave it to Dad. We walked to Randy’s gun range and ran several rounds through the rifle. He was impressed by my ability to hit a beer can at twenty-five yards. I shrugged it off, secretly pleased, and gave credit to the rifle. “Good gun,” Randy said. “Come see me.” I nodded and drove away, grateful to know him, to know all the Hendersons.
For a long time I believed I’d had two childhoods—one in the house, and another outside—running parallel, drastically different. Years later I realized I’d had four distinct childhoods, indoors and out, plus a division of “before Dad worked at home” and the abrupt transition to his constant presence in the house.
My brother and I shared a bedroom on the second floor. Inside a clothes closet was another door that opened to a narrow staircase leading to the dark attic. I was absolutely convinced that ghosts lived up there. The exterior wall of the house held a set of closed, decorative shutters. They were fastened to the brick on the other side of the wall at the foot of the steps. I believed that after I went to sleep, ghosts descended the steps from the attic and used the shutters to leave the house and kill people, returning before I woke up. Eventually they would enter the house through the mysterious closet and kill the family. It was my job to protect my brother and sisters.
Before going to sleep, I arranged rocks beneath my blanket in specific patterns designed to keep the ghosts at bay. I developed the habit of sleepwalking, leaving the room to awaken elsewhere, occasionally outside. A few times I came to consciousness sitting in the bathroom, my mother pressing a damp cloth to my forehead, urging me to wake up. She later told me the whole thing perplexed her, but since I always awakened, she didn’t worry about it. I never told her about the ghosts and she never asked about the rocks in my bed.
Dad needed a home office, and my sisters’ bedroom was the best option. They would take my bedroom, with a new wall added for privacy. The attic would be renovated for my brother and me. Before the carpenters arrived, I decided to explore the attic during the day. I opened the closet door and stood at the bottom of the stairs, staring into the darkness above. I put one foot on the bottom step and immediately pulled it back. The next day I was able to keep my foot in place longer, and the day after that I momentarily stood on the bottom step. In this fashion, over a period of days, I crept up the steps until I was crouching at the top. As fast as possible, I jumped into the attic and pulled the string to a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The attic consisted of exposed beams, studs, and rafters. Without insulation or ventilation, the room was extremely hot. Wasps droned overhead.
Sitting on the floor was a cardboard box containing paperbacks with plain yellow covers. I plucked one at random and opened it. I knew right away that I shouldn’t be reading it, but I didn’t want to stop because it gave me a warm tingling inside my body. My stomach tightened and my lips became dry. I crouched over the box for an hour. There were about twenty of these books. I quickly learned to skim for the good parts, which were either graphic sex using language I’d never seen, or detailed accounts of spanking women with big backsides.
My brother called me for supper and I arranged the books in the order I’d found them and went downstairs. After years of being scared of the attic, I now wanted to rush back upstairs. For a week I secretly read hard-core pornography until my mother cleared the area for the carpenters. I was eleven years old.
That same summer a dentist pulled four of my permanent molars to create sufficient space to move the rest of my teeth around my mouth. I wore a full set of braces for two years—upper and lower—the only ones in the county. Every morning I replaced four rubber bands that crisscrossed between my jaws. At night I slept wearing a metal bit that locked into my teeth and buckled behind my head. My mouth ached most of the time. I’d always been a rough-and-tumble kid, and the inside of my lips bled from ragged wounds sustained by rural life. I learned to ignore throbbing gums, cut lips, and the spitting of blood. Pain relegated itself to a distant nagging, similar to the itch of an insect bite.
The carpenters worked all summer, and in August my brother and I moved to our new room in the attic. Each night we stepped into the dim closet at the foot of the steps. Our room above was completely dark, and the light switch was at the top of the stairs. I inhaled deeply and held my breath. I placed my hands on the doorjamb and catapulted myself up the steps, knowing just where to place my feet to avoid each creak. At the top of the stairs, my open palm hit the light switch, and I jerked my head to check for ghosts. They were always gone, having managed to flee moments before my sudden arrival. It was then safe enough for my brother to climb the steps.
D
ecades later he told me he’d been grateful that I went upstairs first. Every time he ascended the steps as an adult, something cold always passed through his body. Later, I asked my younger sister if there was any part of the house she was afraid of. She was silent for a moment, then shook her head and said, “I was afraid of the whole house.”
Over the past thirty-five years, our attic bedroom had shifted in the traditional way of an abandoned nest—first to a sewing room, then a study when my mother attended college, and now a storage chamber for junk. Narrow paths flanked tall stacks of goods that included Christmas decorations from the fifties, clothes from the sixties, and high school yearbooks from the seventies. The roof leaked. There was a vague smell of mildew, rot, and squirrel urine. My bed was an odd-sized piece of foam rubber that was crumbling and gnawed by mice. Beneath it lay remnants from childhood: a few paperback books, an empty wallet, a pile of seventh-grade love letters, a cigar box filled with wheat pennies, three diaries, and a dead bat.
I found a framed charcoal sketch of my brother that someone drew when we were kids. I stared at the drawing for a long time. It looked more like my brother now than it did then, as if the artist understood that a portrait is future memory made tangible. I wandered among the maze of piled objects, touching this and that. It was like being at a yard sale, going through the remains of another person’s life. No one occupied this space anymore, living or dead. I had become my own ghost, haunting my past.
I went outside and used a ladder to climb onto the narrow porch roof. The closed shutters were screwed permanently into the brick. No secret door existed. There was just a man standing alone on a roof, facing a wall.
Chapter Seven
FOR MOST people, childhood is a refuge of simpler times. The increasing responsibilities of adulthood imbue the past with innocence and joy—a seemingly endless summer, the vastness of a night sky, winter’s fade to the bouyancy of spring. Childhood improves as we age and get further away from it. Not so for my father. He rarely talked of his early years except in dark tones, with the occasional anecdote or an obliquely bitter reference. The story of his youth is vague, shrouded in pain and difficulty.
My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485) Page 3
