Blood Page 14

  Some things I would say to him now if I had the chance

  I don’t know if you would recall it this way, but the only time I ever confronted you about anything was when you almost beat Whitney to death. You hated the habit of barking he developed when someone would come in the door of the trailer. You hated barking dogs in general, and would even holler at Jenny’s unfortunately not-so-smart one that would yip incessantly to be let in at night to “shut up, you barking son of a bitch!” The dog’s name was Dudley. I was always embarrassed that you weren’t embarrassed about doing that. I know you tried to talk to her about the problem and lost your patience, but it’s not neighborly to holler out the back door in the middle of the night at someone’s dog. I know it’s not neighborly to let your dog bark in the middle of the night either. So I guess that was a lose/lose. My point is that you had ridiculously specific ideas about how dogs should behave. And barking wasn’t tolerated unless there was something you deemed worthy of being communicated by one. Little dogs that barked when someone came in the house didn’t qualify. Maybe someone across the street at the school office pissed you off. Maybe Jenny broke the combine again. Maybe you didn’t have enough liquor in your system. I don’t know and I don’t care. What isn’t a maybe is that I will never forget you grabbing our puppy and knocking his head repeatedly against the table that sat beside your chair in front of the television until I finally hollered at you to stop that afternoon in the summer of 1985. I got your attention somehow and you did. You stopped. But you almost killed the dog. I don’t know how he survived and I shudder even now remembering it. He limped back, squalling and terrorized, to Sissy’s room after you let go of him while I sat there slack jawed and watched you leave out the back door just as you’d come in it. I hated you for making him so scared, for making him into one of us, for changing him from an innocent full of love and joy into another cowering thing in the house that always kept an ear out for your footsteps so he’d know when to run. Now I wish I’d hollered at you more. Maybe you would’ve stopped doing some other things.

  Thumping your daughters on the head because they were too loud in the backseat wasn’t appropriate. Nor was going after Sissy instead of me after I ran over a stump and through the fence when you let us go out in the school truck on a rainy Saturday afternoon as I was just learning how to drive. I’ll never forgive myself for just standing there. All you did was shake me by the shoulders but you balled your fist up in front of her face and used it on her. Why, dear God why, did you think it was okay to hit her? Who hit you and taught you that? I’d like to tell that person a thing or two. We both helped you pull the dent out of the fender the next day. Then we threw mud on it so no one could tell. I know you were afraid you’d lose your job. You still shouldn’t have hit her for something I did. You shouldn’t have hit her at all.

  Don’t hit people and animals. Period.

  When you’re playing chess with your child and you tell them “check” or “checkmate,” you might want to explain what that means instead of just making her feel stupid.

  When you take a family trip to California, sleeping in the car on the side of the highway every time you get tired isn’t safe. Saying “True Grit” every time you look at your eight-year-old daughter who has just been forced into a short haircut will scar her and skew her ideas of femininity. Additionally, only eating pork rinds and Vienna sausages from gas stations when on a road trip isn’t health conscious. Making your daughters run laps around rest areas thinking it will make them tired so they’ll make less noise in the car is counterproductive. Calling me spoiled when I cried after you wouldn’t let me buy roller skates with my own money at the swap meet was mean. I wanted roller skates more than anything in the world, except for you not to be a drunk asshole, at the time.

  When I smell sawdust or hear a chain saw I think of going out to the pasture with you to cut up all the uprooted trees after Hurricane Frederic blew through. I remember loading those pieces of soon-to-be firewood into the truck and not being slow about it because you didn’t appreciate folks being slow about anything unless it was your idea to be.

  I think about you talking about how important literature was and the importance of speaking well, clearly, and with good grammar but I also remember you never asking me a question about school or a book I read. I tried to impress you by always having my nose in one and by looking up words in the dictionary—even the word abortion one afternoon when I heard it on the news—you had just praised me for my curiosity and I was trying to prolong your paroxysm. You didn’t say anything or try to explain it and I was too young and didn’t understand what I had read. I guess you didn’t know how to handle that one. I don’t like that I will never talk to you about any of it and will never know what you thought about Dickens or whether or not you ever read Ulysses.

  Sneaking backstage at the coliseum in Mobile and getting a very young Reba McEntire’s autograph on two Styrofoam coffee cups for us was a cool thing for you to do. I kept my cup pinned to my bulletin board for a long time.

  You getting Mama to make two canvas bags for fishing—one for you and one for Sissy—was also cool. Sissy loved to follow you in the creek into holes so deep she could barely keep her head above water. It was a good parenting lesson for me that you trusted her to make it through and to never drop the rod and reel you’d gotten her for her birthday that year. I thought it was amazing that y’all filled those canvas bags up with bass and bream. I’m sorry I wasn’t more of the get-up-to-my-chin-in-the-creek type. I got better about things like that but am still the girlier one of the two of us. You still shouldn’t have ever said, and especially let us hear you say, that you wanted a son instead of us.

  When you’d keep Mama up late at night when you stayed home, screaming and hollering and calling her names, I never knew why and it scared me to death. I think you liked it. Or maybe you didn’t like it but you didn’t dislike it enough to try to change it or even apologize. Your unexplained, misdirected rage sticks to me like sap. Seeing the meatloaf stains on the wall one morning when I was barely old enough to remember a thing—but I remember that thing, and that thing was that you’d thrown your plate against the wall the night before—sticks too.

  I wish you’d written better songs but I don’t guess you devoted enough time to it. The one you pulled out in 1985 called “Traveling Fever” was pretty good. I found a handwritten lyric to it in your briefcase years later. Now I know you wrote the original in 1967, years before I was born. Taking us to Nashville, to make a custom record of it at Gene Breeden’s studio that summer showed us the way into that world somehow. When we made the homemade cassette before you decided to ask Mammy and Dandy for the money to go to Nashville, I had to look up the word vanguard, since that was the title you put on it. I think that was a good title. I used to pass by the hotel we stayed in during that trip when I first lived in Nashville. I would think about the four of us staying in that room together and remember you sneaking out in the middle of the night.

  I despised the way you never took care of Mama. Your disregard for her wound so tightly around me that it makes me scared and ashamed to ever ask for help even when I need it desperately. If I don’t ask, I won’t be disappointed, right? I remember you saying to Mama, “You don’t count.” I don’t expect you knew that would make me believe that idea applied to us too. How could we count if Mama didn’t?

  Custom Records

  We got to Nashville on a Sunday after driving through the night from Biloxi, Mississippi. We’d been in Biloxi because Mama and Sissy had a Sweet Adelines performance there on the Saturday night. Sissy did a solo number during the intermission. I was so proud of her that I ran around telling people, “That was my sister up there” after the show. On the Monday, we got up early and went to Gene Breeden’s studio to record the two songs we’d picked out, “Traveling Fever,” a song Daddy wrote, and “I Couldn’t Stay Away from You,” which we had learned from Mama, who had learned it from a record when she was a girl.

  Dad
dy met Gene Breeden through Bill Stafford, who lived in Gulfport, Mississippi, and owned a music store. Bill played steel guitar and dobro. We made what I would later understand was a custom record—we paid to make it and they sent us a box of 45s a few months later. Sissy sold them at school but I brushed it off as nothing special. It didn’t faze me at all—I didn’t consider it out of the ordinary for a family to make a record together.

  Sissy, Mama, and I all sang together in the vocal booth—Sissy took the lead, I was on the high harmony, and Mama on the low. The whole thing only took three hours. I would later learn that’s how long one session is according to the musician’s union. It was all done by lunchtime. We spent the rest of the week knocking around Nashville. Daddy showed us Music Row. I didn’t dream then that I’d end up living at the corner of 18th Avenue ten years later or that Sissy and I would both sign record deals on those streets he’d walked before either of us were born, trying to land one of his own. He was so excited to show us all of it. I wonder if he had any idea what was to come. I wonder if he knew he had to get out of the way, even subconsciously.

  After we got the records back from Nashville he’d look for gigs and got a regular one at a place called Palmer’s West for a while—the three of them would go play and leave me at the trailer—though he noted in his work journal that it dried up—“no crowd, no money.” Then he set one up at the Holiday Inn at Tillman’s Corner, which was awfully close to where he and Mama would soon die. Sissy and Mama used to talk about how he’d get angry when people wanted Sissy to sing instead of him. I suspect he was just jealous as always and that makes me pity him. I understand, though. Just because someone gets to be a forty-four-year-old person doesn’t mean he will have reached any sort of reconciliation with his own ego by that time. The bottom of the thing is sadness, though, I think. There is misery when no happiness can be found for another person’s success. Jealousy is very much like shame—it eats you from the inside.

  FALL 1985—SISSY WAS A SENIOR IN HIGH SCHOOL AND I’D started ninth grade. We went to Theodore High in Theodore, which is in between Irvington and Tillman’s Corner. Sissy was beyond ready to get out of school. She sold the “Traveling Fever” records for a dollar apiece and sang wherever she could, even putting together a band with some boys from the bayou to play at the Greater Gulf State Fair that September. I think Daddy lined up the gig. Ava, one of Daddy’s colleagues at the vocational school, called someone at the Mobile Press-Register about her and they came out to the trailer and did an interview with Sissy. We figured out exactly the right spot for the photograph—she sat with her guitar in the nicest chair we had with a big houseplant next to it. One could’ve almost mistaken our trailer for a house that wasn’t on wheels.

  I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep my grades up and figure out my social world. School had always been a safe place for me, ever since I’d started first grade. I loved the smells, the cleanliness, the order, and the predictability. I knew what would happen while I was there. I had always made pretty good grades without trying too hard, but when I reached eighth grade, something changed. Algebra was beyond me, and science wouldn’t sink into my brain. I would bring home A’s in English, Social Studies, and History, but the other end of the spectrum was nearing dire. I was embarrassed but didn’t know what to do about it and neither Mama nor Daddy offered any help. Mama only told me I could do better when she’d give a cursory glance over my report card before signing it. I don’t recall Daddy looking at it by then at all.

  The bedroom on the end of the trailer

  I get nervous when I think about the headaches I started getting in eighth grade. I still get nervous when I have the same shooting pains in my head now. They hit me the first time one morning when I was twelve. I became nauseated when I stepped out of the shower. I was standing in a towel in my bedroom by the time I called for Mama. She told me to stay home that day and I did, and for the next two days too. All I could do was lie in bed. All I could eat were tangerines.

  The doctor she took me to on the third day diagnosed me with neuritis. Neuritis is an inflammation of the nerves.

  Mama bought a big bottle of ibuprofen on the way home and made sure I took some every day. I didn’t hear her ask the doctor what would cause a twelve-year-old girl to have inflammation of the nerves. I don’t know if she even believed him. I don’t know if he even believed himself.

  THOUGH I’D STARTED TO THINK ABOUT HOW TO GET TO college and how I’d make it on my own once I left Mama and Daddy’s house, all of that still seemed far away. I was stuck down in the days that I didn’t know were dwindling. Sissy was dating a boy named Kenneth whom she’d end up marrying in 1987. Mama didn’t like him—he seemed worldly and hung out with people who were much older than he was—but Mama wasn’t the type to take a liking to boyfriends of any kind. She always looked at most of them out of the corner of her eye. I guess she knew Sissy was going to be on her own soon, though I’m not sure she knew how she’d do it. I think Mama was scared of her marrying the wrong person just for a way out of town.

  Daddy would disappear during the weekend days by then—we often didn’t know where he was, and we mostly didn’t care. He and Mama continued trying to hold things together for some reason, though they certainly both must’ve seen how they were failing—they weren’t happy together, but I don’t guess they knew how to be happy apart.

  As the Christmas holidays approached that year there was tension as always—Mama always visibly felt there wasn’t enough money to go around to buy us the things we wanted and it worried her. Her enthusiasm and patience for the state of our lives wore thinner. After we got out of school for the break that December the four of us went on a rare trip to the mall together on a Saturday. Daddy quickly installed himself at the bar at Ruby Tuesday’s while Mama, Sissy, and I roamed the mall and looked at things we couldn’t afford to buy. Mama became upset and angry. We walked around a department store full of pretty sweaters and scarves, leather bags and gloves, and she hastily stuffed a store credit card application into her purse, saying, “Maybe I’ll just get one of these and go into debt like everyone else.”

  The next morning she told us to pack our suitcases, that we were going up to Nanny’s for a few days. Nanny cooked and baked, and she assigned the gift-wrapping chores to us, which we loved. PawPaw’s presence was always reassuring. He was a soft-spoken man, but strong and dependable in a way I’ve not often come across in many other people the world over. Nanny and PawPaw were our solidity. They were our safety.

  A few days turned into the entirety of our Christmas holidays. We didn’t mind. There were more things to do and more people to see than down at the trailer, plus we didn’t have to navigate Daddy’s moods. Mama would call every day to check on us, and would sometimes drive up to Jackson after she got off work to spend the night. She’d get up in the wee hours to drive back to work in Mobile the next morning. Sometimes she stayed at the trailer with Daddy. I never knew what was going on between them, but while I knew it must be something, I was mostly relieved not to be witness to it for a little while. She brought the gifts that we’d wrapped ourselves (we picked out and wrapped our own presents to put under the tree by then) to us when it was obvious we wouldn’t be spending Christmas morning anywhere else but Nanny and PawPaw’s. She spent Christmas Eve down at the trailer with Daddy, but arrived by herself early on Christmas morning to spend the day with us. The three of us sat in the den at Nanny and PawPaw’s house as we unwrapped the packages that held no surprises. Melancholy hung over us as the sounds of Nanny’s cooking drifted into the den. After we’d finished opening the boxes, Mama revealed that she’d also gotten me a piano.

  She found it in the classifieds and bought it from an elderly woman for a hundred dollars. She then had it moved to a storage facility in downtown Mobile. I’m not sure what her plans for it were, but there was no room in the trailer for the big, antique upright. It was so heavy it might’ve gone right through the floor. I was thankful for it anyway.

&nbs
p; A few days after Christmas, Nanny and PawPaw and Sissy and I went down to Mobile to get the piano out of the storage facility and move it up to their house. There’d been talk of us just staying there and starting back to school in Jackson again. Mama had even planned it out enough to say that she would probably keep her job in Mobile but drive back and forth every day. I tried not to get my hopes up about it as there’d been talk of things like that happening before, but I couldn’t help imagining being back in my old school with my old friends and in a place I knew so well, in a place where I felt safe.

  It was a cold and gray day, and I could practically feel the worry radiate from Nanny. We arrived in Mobile and the piano was loaded into the back of PawPaw’s El Camino. PawPaw had to pay twenty dollars for a length of rope to secure it. The high price made him mad. I’d never even seen PawPaw mad before, and I don’t think his anger was really about the cost of the rope. I don’t remember us stopping for lunch like we normally would have, only making our way back up to Jackson by early afternoon. Nephews and cousins were dispatched to help unload the back of PawPaw’s “girl truck,” as he called it, and the piano Mama bought me for Christmas was set across the room from Nanny’s Kimball upright, which was easier to play and in pretty good tune. The new old piano needed repairing, and middle C stuck every time I used it. I felt sad for Mama when I looked at it.

  We stayed at Nanny and PawPaw’s house until the night before we were supposed to return to school. The talk of staying up there and re-enrolling in school in Jackson just stopped that day, and Mama told us we were going back to the trailer with no explanation. Sissy and I both protested, but ultimately loaded up the things we’d taken with us plus our accumulated Christmas gifts into her brown Ford LTD with the undependable headlights and headed south. What choice did we have? When we arrived, I unpacked, then decided to take a shower so I would have somewhere to cry. I hadn’t eaten since Mama’d confirmed we were going back to Daddy. When I finally got out of the shower after staying in it too long, I dried off my body—pink from the water I ran so hot it was almost scalding—with a towel. I held my hand over my stomach for a few seconds, concentrating on the visibility of my hip bones and taking an odd kind of comfort in the realization that everything but them had gone concave. Sucking my stomach in farther made the waves of anxiety rolling over the top of my constant bel hevi go away for a few seconds. It’s a trick I still practice.