Blood Read online

  LIFE CHANGED WHEN WE MOVED FROM FRANKVILLE down to Irvington. Daddy had gotten a job at the George H. Bryant Vocational School, where practical skills and trades were taught to high school students who wouldn’t be going to college. He didn’t really teach unless he needed to fill in for someone, but he oversaw the place in a way, plus was in charge of trying to make the school’s crops turn a profit.

  Sissy and I were all of a sudden in bigger schools than we’d been in before and had no family around except for Katharine, Gus, and their two daughters, Melanie and Sandra. They lived in Mobile, though. It was only twenty miles away but we didn’t see them that often.

  I wonder now how Daddy felt about the vocational students. I know, in some ways, that he had more in common with those hardscrabble boys—those boys that had no privilege or position in the world—than he did with his Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity brothers at Auburn. He wasn’t a snob about social hierarchies or echelons, only about the lack of curiosity and the presence of hebetude. He would like that I know what hebetude means. He was a stickler about vocabulary and grammar.

  “Don’t use double negatives in this house.”

  Journal

  I study his handwriting. It is strange and angular, pointy and loopy, incongruous, at odds with itself, singular. It is like him.

  I look for clues. I’ve found a few. I’ve read every word maybe hundreds of times—it’s a spiral-bound notebook and some pages have fallen out. I make sure they don’t get lost. It sits by the desk where I write. I wonder if he knew I would write? He probably never even thought about it. My name doesn’t appear in the journal even one time. Sissy’s does, twice.

  Thursday, May 29:

  Went to Shelby’s graduation breakfast at the Hilton—she sang solo—(only one to sing).

  The next day reveals: Shelby graduated—8pm Theodore—I harvested wheat all day.

  A few days earlier, on Monday, May 26:

  GD told me at 10AM that the board would be voting wed. on whether or not to cut my job position—Alton Harvey’s rec—I met with Harvey at 2:30 w/GD in Davis’ office. He said strictly budget and not my job performance.

  Wednesday, May 28:

  Went to Barton and addressed the school board not to abolish my job position.

  I never heard about this possible abolishing of his job position. Did he even tell Mama? If he did, she didn’t tell us. Interesting word choice, abolish. So dramatic. He could’ve said terminate, do away with, eliminate, cut… but abolish? As if they were trying to delete him. He kept on working.

  Monday, June 9:

  Non-renewal pending. Got parts for combine (ordered).

  Wednesday, June 11:

  4:30PM Board of Ed. Voted to cut 13 voc. ed. Jobs—mine and JC’s here—Bill Hanebutt said brd. agreed to put my job back on agenda for 25th and vote to rescind their action to cut.

  Thursday, June 12th:

  Rain—got notice from bd. that they were not going to renew contract.

  Last w/June:

  Didn’t keep daily record. Finished wheat crop harvest 14th of June. Made about $4,000 profit not counting fuel costs. During 1st half of July I took some time off and also worked on moving wheat straw bales from field.

  I HAD NO IDEA HE WAS PROBABLY GOING TO LOSE HIS JOB. He must’ve been so scared. I saw no signs of him looking for another one.

  He didn’t keep a daily record of the events that occurred between Sissy’s graduation and the end of July. When they got arrested in Georgetown, Texas, it set off the chain of events that would finally leave him and Mama dead. I guess that was the middle of the end, maybe the end of the middle of the end, if I were charting things out—it sort of surprises me that I haven’t resorted to that at some point just so the details and the path to their deaths are clear in my mind. The beginning of the end had begun long before it was in sight to anyone but maybe God. It began the minute they met. I guess that’s how those things work.

  When a course is set, it is set, and it has to be run, no matter the butterfly effect. He and Mama were more like buffalo. The combination of them turned wretched somewhere and left tracks like the feet of big, clumsy, cloven beasts, running amok all over everything. The buffalo effect, I call it.

  We must have gone to Texas to get Sissy on Friday, June 13th. And if that’s right, then they got thrown in jail on the following Tuesday, June 17th. Father’s Day would’ve been the Sunday before but I don’t remember it.

  I know he didn’t mean for all that to happen. But I also know that he had to know he was responsible for it. That if he hadn’t gotten drunk in Austin, that if he hadn’t made Sissy start the drive back to Killeen to Brenda’s, that if he hadn’t pulled her hair and her head back while she was driving north on Interstate 35, the events that followed would not have been the same.

  Mama was left trying to figure out what to do with such a mess. We had to leave Sissy in Texas. Mama gave permission for her to be released into Brenda’s custody and had to come up with more money—I don’t remember how—to pay for an attorney who could maybe get the charges against her dropped. Daddy might’ve tried to help if she had let him, maybe, but it’s understandable why she wouldn’t allow him anywhere near us then. He didn’t have any money anyway.

  I don’t know if Daddy knew how scared the three of us were. I know he must’ve been scared too, from his own corner of the catastrophe. Mama wouldn’t talk to him. Sissy wouldn’t talk to him. I wouldn’t talk to him. Brenda told him we were in a shelter. We weren’t.

  It must’ve been hell to be turned on like that, even if it was deserved. When you screw up, no matter how badly, all you want is to be forgiven and to be told by someone, anyone, that you aren’t an unforgivable, unredeemable person. Daddy went back to Alabama by himself. He looked for reassurance from Katharine, who said he stopped to call her every hour or so because he was out of his mind with grief and worry. That makes me sorry.

  I’ve got a handful of notes from Jane that she kept from it all. Daddy called her a lot, and she wrote down some of the things he said, probably so she could report to Mama.

  Tell Lynn not to file for divorce. Call a counselor. Will do everything in his power to prevent divorce—will go to AA—counseling every night… will let kids stay with Brenda. Will give up anything he must. Without them there is no life. Tell Lynn to call psychologist.

  He finally got himself back to Alabama on the Thursday. Will let the kids stay with Brenda? In Texas? He wanted me to go to Texas too? So he could have Mama to himself. That was always part of the problem—we got in his way of her, we took her attention and were her allies.

  Mama got the details in Texas sorted while we stayed at Brenda’s house for another week or so—an attorney was retained, and Sissy began to look for jobs though she was unsuccessful at keeping one. My sister is an artist through and through and punching a clock or the keys on a cash register is something she just can’t quite wrap her mind around. She sang for money here and there that summer and laid low the rest of the time, waiting to see if she’d be cleared of the charges against her, and to see what would happen next.

  Mama and I went back to Alabama. We weren’t sure Sissy would go back at all.

  Jane paid for us to fly from Killeen to Mobile. Mama needed to get back home so she could try to keep her job. She knew she had to try to build a new life for us, one without Daddy in it anymore, and keeping her job was the first step to that. It was my first time on an airplane. We dressed in the nicest clothes we had with us for the trip. Jane picked us up in Mobile on a steamy afternoon late in the month of June. I had turned fourteen some days before, on the 21st, but I don’t remember it, just like I don’t remember Father’s Day. When Jane picked us up, she dropped Mama off at work and took me home to Monroeville with her. Jane tried to talk Mama into going to Monroeville too, into getting a job there and starting a new life away from Daddy, but Mama wouldn’t do it. She said she couldn’t and wouldn’t run.

  I spent a few weeks shuffling around with various
relatives. First Jane and Jim, then I spent a little while with Mammy and Dandy. A few weeks after we got back from Texas, Mama and I moved into the house she’d found on Barden Avenue. We took a few things from the trailer but most of the furniture we got was picked from what we’d left in the house in Frankville. Daddy helped us move in.

  I don’t know how they got there after all that had happened, I guess in the way that they always got to every understanding or forgiveness if those two things ever really existed between them. My feeling is that neither one could really let go of the other. They must’ve been addicted to the push and pull, the roller coaster of their relationship, so they had no choice but to take each other however they could, however the other demanded (it was mostly about what she demanded at that point as far as I could tell, which was a turning around of things), but Mama knew that she had to move Sissy and me away from Daddy.

  I wonder if she would’ve gone back to him if she hadn’t been worried about what everyone would say to her about it. Or that she would lose her older daughter forever? That she would lose both of us—I certainly wasn’t giving her a pass on this one. But I was again dragged along for the ride.

  Daddy was still around a lot, even though we’d moved out. He had the audacity to put some Budweiser in our refrigerator one afternoon and after he left, I poured it all down the drain, can by can. The smell nauseated me. He asked me what happened to it a few days later when he showed up again. I surprised myself by telling him what I’d done without compunction.

  Mama had finally asked him for a divorce.

  Daddy signed the papers she served him. I went to Ruby Tuesday’s with them one Friday afternoon when Daddy gave them back to her. Mama just stuck them in her purse without looking at them.

  I CAN MAKE A LOT OUT OF THOSE THREE PAGES. What shows on them that isn’t written down is his worry and desperation. I can picture him in the trailer in Irvington, sitting in the chair that he’d rescued from the dump, trying to get this person or that on the phone, trying to get anything out of anyone that would give him some kind of hope that he hadn’t let everything good slip through his fingers. Standing up, sitting down, dialing someone, standing up, going to the refrigerator, sitting down, dialing someone, repeat.

  Slip. That’s a funny word for me to use. It didn’t slip. It was thrown. Thrown away like so many empty bottles of Jim Beam.

  Daddy’s grandmother Mama Fannie died that summer. It was the end of July. Mama and I rode up to Frankville from the house on Barden Avenue with him for her wake. He came by after Mama got home from work and we took her car. We mingled around at the funeral home where Mama Fannie’s body was on display, doing that wake thing that everyone does. It’s different when an old person dies. There isn’t the shock running through the air, the idea that it was too early for them to go. Folks are sad, of course, but it’s not a confused or a mad sad.

  On the way back down south that night I sat in the backseat while Mama and Daddy sat up front. We talked about death, corpses, funerals, and caskets. Mama said she didn’t want an open casket when she died. She said she didn’t want everyone gawking at her dead body. Daddy just drawled out, “Yeah, everybody’ll say, ‘He looks real natural. Except for that hole in his head.’”

  The following day he went back up to Frankville for the funeral. The family had gathered at Mammy and Dandy’s house before the service, and when it was time to go to the church he slid into the backseat of a car next to his first cousin Elizabeth. She told me years later that when he sat beside her that day, he took her hand and stared straight into her eyes as his brimmed with tears. He didn’t say a word; he just stared at her, then turned his face away and looked out the window. She told me she has often wondered if he knew then what he would soon do.

  I never went back to the house on Barden Avenue after I left on the morning of August 12, 1986. I was a child and didn’t have to. My uncles, aunts, and even my sister weren’t so lucky. They had to go deal with my parents’ lives, their things, and face their goneness.

  They had to face the pain in the ass that is death. All of the dead person’s things and affairs have to be dealt with. Houses have to be emptied, belongings and property have to be distributed, bank accounts have to be accessed and closed, debts have to be analyzed and with any hope paid, life insurance policies have to be located, wills have to be read, social security benefits for minor children have to be applied for. The list goes on ad infinitum.

  And all of it has to be done by family members who are consumed with sorrow and disbelief. There should be a waiting period, a grace period. There should be time for breathing, for somehow trying to take in the new normal, as abnormal as it is. On the other hand, maybe it’s a blessing that there isn’t time. Maybe it’s better to have lists of things to do so that one’s emotional knees don’t buckle under the weight of why. And if you have time to think about why, you probably will. Better to keep your head down in details.

  Goneness. It sounds like a condition because it is. It’s not a blank space waiting to be filled, but a deep hole that will forever be a hole—a cruel, carved-out crater or violently dug indentation, a chasm left by something that has been removed.

  Time measured in hours, days, weeks, months, and years

  I shared 5,165 days with my parents on this planet. 14 years, 1 month, 22 days. 737 weeks, 6 days. 123,960 hours. Or something like that.

  I have, at this writing, now lived 16,307 days. So it works out that I have spent about 31 percent of my life with them. If I live to be 80, I will have lived 29,220 days. The percentage of days spent with my parents alive will have decreased to about 18.

  They will still be 2 of the most influential people in my life. They will still guide me. They will still be the measuring stick for most everything I experience.

  PART II

  Sissy

  Perpetual only in the way of a pendulum (for my sister)

  Dear Sissy,

  Do you wonder if anyone ever stops to think that happy can’t withstand all of the responsibility we try to put on it? Why don’t people understand that happy can get worn out? That it can is a lucky thing, I think. Happy knows what it is better than we do and it sticks to its guns, coming and going as it pleases, just like all of the other emotions. I think it knows it’s not more or less important than any of the rest of them and if it hangs around all the time then it won’t be noticed.

  People love happy, but no one loves sad. Sad makes people nervous. It takes the scales off of the eyes. It puts them on sometimes too.

  There are some who bear the burden of perpetual melancholy. They are made of blue and gray but you are not one of those. You are every color sometimes all at once. You are a hot, white light sometimes darkened by a cloud that rolls over you like a murder of crows would roll over the yard, which is pretty close to the ground because crows rarely fly higher than the trees. You are something to see.

  Just so you know, you were the first love of my life.

  Sissy

  Bow and Arrow

  Daddy carved it for Sissy by hand out of a young hickory. If I remember right, it was about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. He whittled it smooth, and then cut notches in each end for the nylon string with his pocket knife. She would stand in the pasture or in the yard between his workshop and the house in shorts and a T-shirt—her skinny, tanned legs looked like they went all the way up to her armpits—while she closed one eye tightly to improve her aim as she sent arrow after arrow into the sky or a homemade target. The arrows were fashioned from bamboo that they found growing by the Santa Bogue Creek and scrap metal, leather ties, plus glue Daddy had in his workshop.

  Hair in a ponytail. Bare feet. Tough, set jaw. Imagining she was a wild child, a native son like Daddy who wielded a swift machete to cut down things like little hickory trees and bamboo. Probably imagining she was many other things too, though I don’t think she has ever told me about most of them.

  What happens when you hit your daughter

  Firs
t, she will bond to you out of fear, mistakenly thinking she has done something wrong and if she can just manage to not do it again or somehow please you, you might not hit her or anyone else anymore. She will even think you will love her properly if she can earn your approval. She won’t realize this is impossible. Then, she will either do that with every man she comes within a hundred feet of for the rest of her life or until she learns not to (this will take much doing), or she will despise them with such vehemence that she can barely stomach one around. Sometimes she will do a combination of both of those things, working herself into a pattern of push and pull, I love you I hate you, I need you I don’t need anyone, that will drive her a little crazy. She won’t understand at first, if ever, why she only attracts other masochists.

  Whatever numbing agent she’s picked for herself—she will probably try drugs, drink too much alcohol, starve herself or binge and purge, maybe cut herself, act out sexually, in fact she may do all of those things—that continues to help kill her spirit and dulls her enough to keep her participating in living like a maniac will be consumed to varying degrees depending on need.

  She will be more likely to commit suicide than if you hadn’t abused her.

  She will give herself away and will mistake admiration and infatuation and sometimes even abuse for love.

  She will be far too capable sometimes and won’t allow anyone to help her and even when she does need help she won’t know how to ask. She will have stopped asking for help as a child when she didn’t receive it or even if she did receive it and it wasn’t given full-heartedly. She would rather not ask at all and get by on her own than risk being crushed by disappointment and be made to feel insignificant again. She will not know how to take care of her emotional self and won’t know that violence against her is wrong. She will trust the untrustworthy because you will have been untrustworthy and children have no choice but to put their trust in their parents. It’s fascinating yet makes so much sense when you can zoom out, yes?