Carry

by Toni Jensen

  If this world, this time, seems familiar, it’s because there are so many points of overlap with present-day America. In 2020, Rush Limbaugh, Harvey’s airwaves heir, is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, despite how his rhetoric espouses the opposite of freedom or honor for all. For rural American men then and now, for those who want to believe and belong, the rhetoric promises belonging. But at what cost? So often, then and now, these notions of freedom, of belonging have been linked also to gun ownership.

  For all the considerable rhetoric comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, there’s not enough substantive consideration of the more recent past. We’re not looking hard enough at how the recent past was made, how policy or the repealing of policy affected everyday Americans. We act as if it’s difficult to trace where Trump’s base comes from—it isn’t. The base is filled with those shifted in the Reagan era, who are older now, of course, and even more afraid their way of life is shifting yet again. The base also includes the sons and daughters of those men, who are shaped by the memories of their childhoods and by news headlines invoking fear about immigration, healthcare, flooding in farm country, and, of course, guns.

  I am not meaning here to make excuses for my father or those with beliefs like his—past or present. I mean only to explore and explain how they’re crafted, how they’re made. Their stories are as American as any of our stories. In our country, the myth of individualism pushes us to ignore structures that create tensions and pressures in individuals, yes, but also in families, in communities. But that’s not how people are made, in isolation, with only some notion of character or goodness to form them.

  I’m intending, then, not to be an excuse-maker or a victim, but rather to show the whole view of how a person like my father becomes who he is. This view includes the external pressures that were and are far outside the control of everyday Americans.

  How all these men, then and now, take up their guns in anger is not entirely individual—it is at least in part structural. The myth of individualism leaves each person alone to thrive or die, to be harmed or to do harm.

  III.

  Unlike the intricate, long-lasting legacies of the Reagan years, my father’s post-apology years are brief, their legacy perhaps less lasting.

  One year, when my daughter is around four years old, we’re back visiting in the summer, and she wants to see a pig—a baby pig, preferably, but really any up-close pig would do. My mother knows literally everyone in my hometown of around nine hundred people. She knows a good many of the people in the surrounding towns, too.

  On my daughter’s behalf, my mother consults friends, makes phone calls. The next-door neighbor’s brother, an oversized man in farmer’s striped overalls, can’t think of anyone either. All the pigs are locked up tight in their hog confinement facilities. None are farm pigs. All the pigs are corporate owned.

  My daughter overhears enough of these conversations to report to anyone who will listen that she had thought she might see a pig, but, “As it turns out, they’re all locked up.”

  “As it turns out” is reported with wide eyes—I’m sure she’s imagining prison pigs in prison stripes. She charms and amuses nearly everyone to whom she reports the news. But there’s another expression alongside their amusement—sadness, befuddlement. How is it possible, in a state with literally more pigs than people, that nobody can produce even one?

  It’s hot this summer though it’s not yet August. Webster’s reports that the phrase dog days, whose first known use occurs in 1538, originates from both the heat and the stars: “The dog here is actually the Dog Star, which is also called Sirius. The star has long been associated with sultry weather in the northern hemisphere because it rises simultaneously with the sun during the hottest days of summer.”

  That year, my daughter does not get to see a pig. That year, in a rare occurrence, we’re all at my mother’s, all sitting together in her yard. I come outside to claim my lawn chair, and my father is telling the story of the last time he put his hands on me and left a mark. I’m on the bottom stair of the back porch, and I grab the railing for support.

  Everyone sits in a semicircle on the lawn. I pause there, on the step. People had been smiling, but now no one seems to know where to look. Though my mother still is smiling, my brother is studying the tops of his shoes.

  My father’s face is doing something complex. He had, after all, started the story before I came outside. He’s caught now—between the audience, between finishing the story and how I’m watching him decide. He’s been drinking and so has my mother.

  “You were such a willful little shit,” my father says, and my mother nods her head, and I stand like that on the last step and watch the apology years come to a close.

  IV.

  When my daughter is eight, my father has a cancer scare and, after treatment, is declared in remission. We’re back visiting, sitting out on his deck, watching the birds who come and go from the feeder, and we’re petting their new dog, Sadie, a black Lab.

  We’re still visiting every year or almost every year, but not more than that. It’s difficult to explain to some—the why of the visits, given the history. In my culture, it’s considered shameful to abandon family members, to withhold from them whatever care or affection you have to give. I still have some to give. But I will admit it’s not a steady or regular supply. I can’t count on it like I can the love for my daughter. I can’t trust it.

  Sadie the dog bounces around, wanting attention and food, bumping her head into my arm repeatedly until I make her sit and begin petting her.

  “I had her so well trained,” my stepmother says, “until I got laid up.”

  During my father’s health crisis, she’d taken care of the dog, and then when she had a health scare of her own, my father began caring for the dog himself.

  That day, Sadie displays clear confusion over who’s in charge and how to behave. She will sit and behave if spoken to in a calm voice. If anyone raises a voice in excitement or anger, she reacts by bounding or thrashing around. Still, she’s that thing we call “a good dog.” She’d been allowed in the house and then banished to the barn with the older dog. It’s understandable that she doesn’t know what’s happening.

  “She just howls,” my father reports. “Down at the barn—howls and howls and howls.”

  He wrestles his arms around her head and shoulders and neck, playing rough, and when she puts her mouth on his arm, he smacks her nose, lightly at first and then harder and then much too hard still to call it a smack. He hits the dog, who bucks and tries to get at him with her mouth. My daughter watches from over by the bird feeder.

  It is like a primer in how to make a dog mean. It is like a primer in how to make this visit a short one.

  Before the visit, I’ve had a months-long primer in how I’m supposed to act if I’m to be considered a good sister, a good daughter. The last few months have featured call after call from my sister—who seems to want to debate endlessly whether she should go help my father with his cancer treatment in person or whether she is able or whether there is another way to help. Her world is more complicated than mine in all ways, perhaps. Or perhaps it’s as simple as how I made this decision long ago or how my father’s behavior made it for me.

  He’s still in my life because I think that’s right, because our culture is clear about not throwing people away. Our culture is clear that you should do your best to stay connected. So I have. I am. But I’m not going to pretend I’m interested in or willing to show up for the physical labor of caring for my father. There’s no part of me that’s able to do it. In order to stay connected, I’ve had to set up boundaries and maintain them. It’s imperfect. It causes strain—in my mind, my body, my heart.

  We’re all there when he hits Sadie the dog, who is a good dog, as I am, in my own way, a good daughter. We are good enough, in any case, to deserve something else
.

  When we leave later that day, my daughter presses her face to the car window’s glass. “Can’t we go back?” she says. “We can’t leave her. We have to go back.”

  She begs and begs to go back for the dog, and if I thought anyone would let us take the dog, we could, we would. I tell her this. I tell her I’m sorry. Her father agrees. He’s driving and looks only at the road, and this makes me wish I were driving.

  I know my father well enough to know both that he won’t let us take the dog and also that he will treat the dog worse, that he will take out his anger and embarrassment on her, if he realizes we think he mistreats her. It’s delicate. It’s awful. We drive on.

  This past year, more and more governmental agencies are recognizing that people who abuse their pets also often then abuse their families. Animal control officers in select cities and states are being instructed to contact the police or sheriff’s departments in cases of animal abuse, so they can follow up with family members when the suspected abuser is not at home.

  I don’t know why I’m working so hard here toward gender-neutral language. Yes, women sometimes are abusers, absolutely. But the statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program are clear. They are definitive. The following statistics, pulled by researcher Jackson Katz from the FBI’s statistics, all are related to crimes committed by men:

  86 percent of armed robberies

  77 percent of aggravated assaults

  87 percent of stalkings

  86 percent of domestic violence incidents resulting in physical injury

  99 percent of rapes

  Almost 90 percent of murders

  Almost all mass shootings in the past thirty years

  There is little need, then, for striving toward language that leaves out an actor, that leaves out an actor’s gender. Men hit—their dogs and wives and children. Men rape and rob and stalk and use their guns against each other and against their families and against the masses. I’m not trying to place blame here where it doesn’t belong, but what good comes from our everyday obfuscation? Who is served by our everyday American procedure of rendering general and passive our language about violence?

  In addition to how some animal control agencies now report animal abuse to police for follow-up, on their website in 2018, the National Sheriffs’ Association has posted a FACT/MYTH sheet about animal cruelty and this violence we call domestic.

  They cite a 2017 study that shows 89 percent of women who have pets during an abusive relationship report their pets were “threatened, harmed, or killed by their abusive partner.”

  Their facts include the following:

  Domestic violence, child abuse, and animal abuse frequently occur simultaneously in a family.

  Women with pets may delay leaving a dangerous environment for fear of their pets’ safety.

  Individuals who commit pet abuse are more likely to become batterers.

  Animal abuse often is linked to the severity of IPV (Intimate Partner Violence).

  Safe havens for pets—offering assistance either with direct service or information to survivors of domestic violence about housing their pets safely—have grown nationally.

  Their myths include the following:

  Animal abusers represent a distinct type of offender.

  A safe haven for pets of domestic violence victims is always a place where the pets of domestic violence victims are sheltered in the same area as the family.

  Other studies, too, show animal or pet abuse as one of the early prime indicators of violence. In my family, I’m meant to believe in the ways others believe my father has changed. But I don’t. I believe in his past and present behaviors. I believe in the patterns. I would like to hold more hope toward change, but I’m not willing to risk anyone’s safety on myth when there are so many facts, when the pattern is so clear.

  We do not go back for Sadie the dog, and she lives at the barn with the other dog, and she is prone these years later to jumping up and knocking people down by way of a greeting. She is still a good dog. She’s also attention-starved. On one of our last visits, she knocks down my daughter, and when I ask if she’s okay, I ask in a quiet voice. “Mom,” she says, “I’m fine.” And physically, she is. But I can see in her face we’re both thinking back to the earlier day—we’re both still in the car, wanting to turn it around, wanting to go back.

  V.

  It’s Christmas Eve, 2018, and we are halfway through dinner when I learn that only moments before our arrival, my father has been hitting the dog. She’s a rescue dog, this girl, Ellie, a black Lab mix with a fondness for being scratched under her chin and left ear, with an even greater fondness for treats. She sits nicely for pets, rubs her head against your thigh. She’s of the type we so often label good—a good dog, a pleaser, a love.

  She’s the dog of my stepbrother and his long-time girlfriend. She’s well behaved, is easy to be around.

  This is only my second Christmas back here in the last thirteen or fourteen years. After my daughter’s father and I get divorced, she most often goes with him to Texas to his family’s for Christmas. So I’ve been heading to Iowa. I’ve been performing the act we call “making an effort.”

  My father’s diagnosis—Lewy body dementia—makes making an effort seem more urgent. The disease is named after Dr. Frederic Lewy, a German-born neurologist, who in 1912 discovered the existence of the protein deposits that cause the disease. According to the Lewy Body Dementia Association, “the protein deposits develop in nerve cells and cause neuron death in the brain. Lewy bodies interrupt normal messaging to the brain. The specific set of symptoms will depend on the area of protein deposit growth in the brain.” Lewy body dementia was Robin Williams’s diagnosis after he committed suicide.

  The disease thus far has left my father many times confused about who we are or unable to come up with our names. These periods so far are not lasting. His hands sometimes hold tremors. He sometimes forgets common words or phrases. It’s the most awful when he forgets something he’s known his whole life—how to bait a fishing hook, for example, or familiar place names. He most often can come up with the name of the nearest tribe to a place, and then it’s a guessing game from there—which direction? Are we working toward a city or town? Where is it, exactly, that we’re going?

  But this dog is part of the now. The look in the girlfriend’s eyes as she leans over and tells me during dinner is part of the now.

  When she smiles through the holiday meal, when she lowers her voice to tell me about the hitting, about the dog, she’s also working toward this ideal we call good.

  What does it mean to be a good daughter, a good mother, a good girlfriend or wife? Where in this ideal, this notion of good, is the room for honest emotion? Where in this ideal is room for struggle or for a graceful exit?

  I tell the girlfriend she’s done a good job with Ellie the dog, who seems like herself, who seems fine. She really does. I’m so angry, but I’m also so glad she seems unharmed or to have made a quick recovery.

  “It’s hard,” she whisper-says. “Because of where she came from, we are very careful to be gentle with her.”

  I nod. I say again, “You’re doing a very good job with her. She’s a wonderful dog.”

  We drink more wine, she and I. After, we clear the table. Even in the most evolved of company, women most often clear the table. Women most often cook the food that’s on the table. Women most often shop for or grow themselves the food that’s on the table. Women most often plan what food to put on the table, not to mention what the table itself looks like, where it is placed in the room, what plates are atop it, what napkins and forks and knives.

  In 2020, women often earn the money to buy the actual table, to buy the
attendant glasses and plates, the shining knives. If they don’t smile while planning and buying and setting and cooking and serving, they’re not as good a daughter, girlfriend, mother, wife. When we police a woman’s affect, when we privilege it or equate it with her actions, with what she actually does, we’re engaging in our most pervasive and yet our most quiet form of sexism, our most quiet form of everyday violence.

  If a man sets a table, he is praised for the doing, for the action. Imagine telling a man to smile while he sets the table. Imagine that at a holiday meal.

  In the near future, the girlfriend will break up with my stepbrother. Her social media posts indicate happiness—a bright face, new adventures, a moving on. I click and click and click until I see a picture with Ellie the dog, who looks happy and well.

  Back in the now, back in Christmas Eve, we have opened our presents, and my father is trying to tell a story. He’s trying to remember the name of the mountain outside the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, which is not far from where I lived when I lived in West Texas. He has been through there many times. He is trying to tell a story about a time when he visited me.

  “Where the Apache live?” he says—his voice rising, making a question.

  “Sierra Blanca,” I say. “I think that’s it.”

  And then together we say, “Mescalero Apache,” and we laugh a little.

  He still sees the world in the same way most of the time—through orientation by land and people—which is a good thing turned bad in the losing of it. It is all heartbreak, at least if you’ve given over your heart.