Part 2: Daddy Falls and Rises Again [Draft 2]
Stories of failure are common, but Daddy’s story connects him to the larger affairs of the world in surprising ways, through parallel and contemporaneous events. Some of the people in his story were caught up in bigger stories involving more important and better-known people. All this becomes increasingly clear to me as I age and my father’s life recedes—the 47th anniversary of his death approaches. Thematically, his story touches on topics we still worry about, including the surveillance state and privacy; the culture of the FBI; the courage of whistleblowers; the use of violence and intimidation to silence witnesses; and the abuse of positions of responsibility and trust for private gain.
I don’t know much about Daddy’s time as manager of Southern Discount. The office was at first on US highway 11 / state highway 16 just before it intersects with East Main Street. Then the office moved to a new location a few blocks east on the same street across from the train station. I usually walked home from school--it was perhaps a two-mile walk and it went by Daddy's office. I often went in to talk with his secretary--her name was Betty, I believe--and, when I thought she wasn't looking, to steal sugar cubes from the file cabinet behind her chair.
Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley tells how, after his discharge from the army in March 1960, Elvis returned to Memphis by a whistle-stop train tour that came through Marion and stopped just across the street from the office. The Colonel wouldn’t let Elvis sing on the tour, but he appeared and waved to the crowds at each stop—or did he? It was reported that, at some stops, an army buddy who looked like Elvis stood in for him while the King was in his private car “rolling dice at $100 a throw.” That was the median US weekly income in 1960.
This incident is not part of family lore, however much I wish it were, and however much it ought to be, given Mom’s long-term crush on Elvis and my father’s jealousy:
That’s Alright, Mama, Just Anyway You Do
Mama said she just had to see Elvis
as he traveled back to Memphis by whistle-stop:
He’ll be something, she sighed, in his dress blues.
Daddy said, No, with a look in his eye,
so she didn’t. But he did, and brought back news:
Though Elvis never opened his mouth, the town
shouted and clapped and laughed and snapped their Brownies.
A reporter said we were cheering his army buddy
while Elvis was holed up in his private car
shooting craps. Now everyone, from the muddy
banks of the Holston to the Chilhowie Road,
for a moment longed to live bigger, even Daddy.
The men thought and tried to grow rich, took
Carnegie, won friends, invested as friends advised,
but lost their shirts and nerve. They tried to shuck
the littleness from the little, not knowing all
salvation comes of being kind and small.
The wives had cosmic Jesus and “Don’t be Cruel”
to play on their forty-fives and dance. They puffed
their Luckies and they kicked off their dime-store mules.
After Elvis left, Mama slept in. She dreamed
her thin voice soared over his aching growl.
As the stripes turned to feathers on his sleeve,
they flew above a steeple, singing duets--
like angels, Mama dreamed, and half-believed.
(Sunstone, Spring 2018)
Daddy got into financial trouble by joining with local businessmen in investments and business projects. One investment was a track for racing go-go carts. Aside from the paved track and the carts, there was a small seating area and booth for refreshments, plus the land where the track sat (leased probably, but I don’t know for certain). Daddy invested to make money; the others invested, apparently, to incur tax losses to offset income. To use current business jargon, their incentives were not aligned, to Daddy’s detriment.
In another venture, Daddy and a buddy spent their savings and borrowed money to purchase appliances of various sorts that they apparently hoped to resell. (I don’t actually know how they financed the venture, but the disastrous result suggests something like this.) I remember our yard full of white appliances, washing machines probably; I suppose the warehouse was either not ready or maybe wasn’t big enough to hold the entire inventory. Before that, I remember riding in the truck with Daddy to the port in Norfolk to pick up the appliances, and the return trip by Virginia backroads to avoid weigh stations. It was a sunny day, darkened by my anxiety over Daddy’s scofflaw behavior—which I knew about only because he told me, of course—and fear of being caught. But it was an amusing day, too, since it was on this trip I first noticed Burma Shave signs:
He tried to cross
As fast train neared--
Death didn't draft him--
He volunteered--
Burma-Shave
*****
Within this vale --
Of toil — And sin --
Your head grows bald --
But not your chin –
Use — Burma-Shave.
(https://www.routemagazine.us/stories/defining-the-american-dream-one-sign-at-a-time)
I don’t know Daddy’s business plan for the appliances—I don’t even know if they were new or used (I think they were used) or where they came from—but the operation appears to have been financed on a shoestring. He cut corners. He reduced shipping costs by overloading the truck, as we’ve seen. In a more consequential cost-saving measure, he did not insure the appliances stored in the warehouse, so when it was cleaned out (by Daddy’s business partner, as Mom told me much later), he was left with the bill for the appliances and no way to pay it.
That’s two business failures I know of, and there may have been more.
We had moved a good deal in and around Marion, including a year or two in an antebellum house about 10 miles out of town, but by now we were living in a fine old house near Main Street that Dad had bought. Triggered by the failed businesses, his underlying instability (which I did not really come to grips with till after his death), and no doubt other events I have forgotten or never knew, he had a nervous breakdown (I heard the adults using that term) and ran away from home. His companion for at least a while was Smokey, a short, slender man with a gorgeous T-bird. I don't know much about his days on the road except that, sometime in 1962, he came to himself in Denver, Colorado, and didn't know how he'd gotten there. I believe he ended up in Alaska.
Daddy used to say, "It doesn't matter where you are or what time it is." I took this as being cynical; an extreme case might be, "it doesn't matter whose bed you wake up in." When he came to in Denver, Colorado, and didn't remember how he got there, place mattered. Meanwhile, his wife and four young children back in Virginia were wondering where he was--the unknown place mattered greatly. On the other hand, if he meant, whatever time it is, and wherever you are, you have obligations and responsibilities to fulfill, and love to honor, then I understand him.
The poems inspired by his temporary abandonment of the family are a mix of memory and invention:
The Runaway
1. Virginia
The town was full of young men on the make
pitching pennies at the Lion’s, city slickers
moving so fast all Daddy saw was wingtips
vanishing around corners. He wanted to move
like them, voom-voom, blowing the foam off
his beer, twirling Cubans in his fingers.
So he sold the house and bought cheap
appliances to sell to folks back in the hollers.
It might have worked, only he saved money
by going without the warehouse insurance,
and then his partner went and swiped the lot.
Bankruptcy’s not so bad, said his buddies,
it’s only one ball cut off. From a pool hall
he plucked Smokey, his voice rough
from Camels and rye. In a four-in-the-floor
T-bird, three fifths behind the seat,
a roll of twenties Smokey won
hustling the tables, they left with the top down,
trailing a slow diesel, breathing its fumes
mingled with roadside honeysuckle.
(ePoetry, Fall 2013)
I understand that his oldest brother, Harold, tracked Daddy down in Alaska and brought him back, though only after he was admitted for a time to a mental hospital in Radford, Virginia:
2. Alaska
He had been there interwar,
an Air Corps sergeant keeping
inventory—jerry cans,
smokes, compressors, sheer nylons,
lipsticks—lovesick for his Fern.
But back in those days he could
bob and bounce with his troubles
like a red and white plastic
floater. Later, tired of the hooch,
the white-eyed nights with the sun
circling like a stickle-back,
he struggled to recall our
smiles and voices. Still, he sent
postcards to his buddies, Friend,
up here my head is getting
clear, this is a man’s country,
and cried home collect, Can you
ever forgive me, honey?
His brother found him drinking
Scotch straight up in Anchorage,
brought him south to sleep and weave
rugs and spin out half-tall tales.
The bald psychiatrist tapped
his clipboard, questioned and poked
and tried to diagnose. When
Daddy finally wrote us--I’ve
learned to play Scrabble and hearts.
I draw. Take care of Mama.
I’ll be home soon, Your Daddy--
the letters were round and tall.
He came home at dusk, sat still
in the dark. When we walked in
he was slumped down in the chair.
I’d gone down the street shouting,
My daddy’s coming! but now
wondered who the small man was.
(Bay Leaves, 2011)
Daddy’s absence seemed long; I don’t know if it was a matter of weeks or a matter of months. I was in the fifth grade. When cold weather came, Mom couldn’t afford winter coats, so I wore a hand-me-down, source forgotten, whose pockets had worn out and opened into the lining. I was rather proud of this unusual feature—I could clasp my hands behind my back between the coat’s inner and outer layers—until an older neighborhood kid began making fun of me. “If your parents love you, why do they make you wear that old coat.” I didn’t think they had failed me, but perhaps I felt it: his words pained and shamed me.
I don’t know much about Daddy’s time as manager of Southern Discount. The office was at first on US highway 11 / state highway 16 just before it intersects with East Main Street. Then the office moved to a new location a few blocks east on the same street across from the train station. I usually walked home from school--it was perhaps a two-mile walk and it went by Daddy's office. I often went in to talk with his secretary--her name was Betty, I believe--and, when I thought she wasn't looking, to steal sugar cubes from the file cabinet behind her chair.
Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley tells how, after his discharge from the army in March 1960, Elvis returned to Memphis by a whistle-stop train tour that came through Marion and stopped just across the street from the office. The Colonel wouldn’t let Elvis sing on the tour, but he appeared and waved to the crowds at each stop—or did he? It was reported that, at some stops, an army buddy who looked like Elvis stood in for him while the King was in his private car “rolling dice at $100 a throw.” That was the median US weekly income in 1960.
This incident is not part of family lore, however much I wish it were, and however much it ought to be, given Mom’s long-term crush on Elvis and my father’s jealousy:
That’s Alright, Mama, Just Anyway You Do
Mama said she just had to see Elvis
as he traveled back to Memphis by whistle-stop:
He’ll be something, she sighed, in his dress blues.
Daddy said, No, with a look in his eye,
so she didn’t. But he did, and brought back news:
Though Elvis never opened his mouth, the town
shouted and clapped and laughed and snapped their Brownies.
A reporter said we were cheering his army buddy
while Elvis was holed up in his private car
shooting craps. Now everyone, from the muddy
banks of the Holston to the Chilhowie Road,
for a moment longed to live bigger, even Daddy.
The men thought and tried to grow rich, took
Carnegie, won friends, invested as friends advised,
but lost their shirts and nerve. They tried to shuck
the littleness from the little, not knowing all
salvation comes of being kind and small.
The wives had cosmic Jesus and “Don’t be Cruel”
to play on their forty-fives and dance. They puffed
their Luckies and they kicked off their dime-store mules.
After Elvis left, Mama slept in. She dreamed
her thin voice soared over his aching growl.
As the stripes turned to feathers on his sleeve,
they flew above a steeple, singing duets--
like angels, Mama dreamed, and half-believed.
(Sunstone, Spring 2018)
Daddy got into financial trouble by joining with local businessmen in investments and business projects. One investment was a track for racing go-go carts. Aside from the paved track and the carts, there was a small seating area and booth for refreshments, plus the land where the track sat (leased probably, but I don’t know for certain). Daddy invested to make money; the others invested, apparently, to incur tax losses to offset income. To use current business jargon, their incentives were not aligned, to Daddy’s detriment.
In another venture, Daddy and a buddy spent their savings and borrowed money to purchase appliances of various sorts that they apparently hoped to resell. (I don’t actually know how they financed the venture, but the disastrous result suggests something like this.) I remember our yard full of white appliances, washing machines probably; I suppose the warehouse was either not ready or maybe wasn’t big enough to hold the entire inventory. Before that, I remember riding in the truck with Daddy to the port in Norfolk to pick up the appliances, and the return trip by Virginia backroads to avoid weigh stations. It was a sunny day, darkened by my anxiety over Daddy’s scofflaw behavior—which I knew about only because he told me, of course—and fear of being caught. But it was an amusing day, too, since it was on this trip I first noticed Burma Shave signs:
He tried to cross
As fast train neared--
Death didn't draft him--
He volunteered--
Burma-Shave
*****
Within this vale --
Of toil — And sin --
Your head grows bald --
But not your chin –
Use — Burma-Shave.
(https://www.routemagazine.us/stories/defining-the-american-dream-one-sign-at-a-time)
I don’t know Daddy’s business plan for the appliances—I don’t even know if they were new or used (I think they were used) or where they came from—but the operation appears to have been financed on a shoestring. He cut corners. He reduced shipping costs by overloading the truck, as we’ve seen. In a more consequential cost-saving measure, he did not insure the appliances stored in the warehouse, so when it was cleaned out (by Daddy’s business partner, as Mom told me much later), he was left with the bill for the appliances and no way to pay it.
That’s two business failures I know of, and there may have been more.
We had moved a good deal in and around Marion, including a year or two in an antebellum house about 10 miles out of town, but by now we were living in a fine old house near Main Street that Dad had bought. Triggered by the failed businesses, his underlying instability (which I did not really come to grips with till after his death), and no doubt other events I have forgotten or never knew, he had a nervous breakdown (I heard the adults using that term) and ran away from home. His companion for at least a while was Smokey, a short, slender man with a gorgeous T-bird. I don't know much about his days on the road except that, sometime in 1962, he came to himself in Denver, Colorado, and didn't know how he'd gotten there. I believe he ended up in Alaska.
Daddy used to say, "It doesn't matter where you are or what time it is." I took this as being cynical; an extreme case might be, "it doesn't matter whose bed you wake up in." When he came to in Denver, Colorado, and didn't remember how he got there, place mattered. Meanwhile, his wife and four young children back in Virginia were wondering where he was--the unknown place mattered greatly. On the other hand, if he meant, whatever time it is, and wherever you are, you have obligations and responsibilities to fulfill, and love to honor, then I understand him.
The poems inspired by his temporary abandonment of the family are a mix of memory and invention:
The Runaway
1. Virginia
The town was full of young men on the make
pitching pennies at the Lion’s, city slickers
moving so fast all Daddy saw was wingtips
vanishing around corners. He wanted to move
like them, voom-voom, blowing the foam off
his beer, twirling Cubans in his fingers.
So he sold the house and bought cheap
appliances to sell to folks back in the hollers.
It might have worked, only he saved money
by going without the warehouse insurance,
and then his partner went and swiped the lot.
Bankruptcy’s not so bad, said his buddies,
it’s only one ball cut off. From a pool hall
he plucked Smokey, his voice rough
from Camels and rye. In a four-in-the-floor
T-bird, three fifths behind the seat,
a roll of twenties Smokey won
hustling the tables, they left with the top down,
trailing a slow diesel, breathing its fumes
mingled with roadside honeysuckle.
(ePoetry, Fall 2013)
I understand that his oldest brother, Harold, tracked Daddy down in Alaska and brought him back, though only after he was admitted for a time to a mental hospital in Radford, Virginia:
2. Alaska
He had been there interwar,
an Air Corps sergeant keeping
inventory—jerry cans,
smokes, compressors, sheer nylons,
lipsticks—lovesick for his Fern.
But back in those days he could
bob and bounce with his troubles
like a red and white plastic
floater. Later, tired of the hooch,
the white-eyed nights with the sun
circling like a stickle-back,
he struggled to recall our
smiles and voices. Still, he sent
postcards to his buddies, Friend,
up here my head is getting
clear, this is a man’s country,
and cried home collect, Can you
ever forgive me, honey?
His brother found him drinking
Scotch straight up in Anchorage,
brought him south to sleep and weave
rugs and spin out half-tall tales.
The bald psychiatrist tapped
his clipboard, questioned and poked
and tried to diagnose. When
Daddy finally wrote us--I’ve
learned to play Scrabble and hearts.
I draw. Take care of Mama.
I’ll be home soon, Your Daddy--
the letters were round and tall.
He came home at dusk, sat still
in the dark. When we walked in
he was slumped down in the chair.
I’d gone down the street shouting,
My daddy’s coming! but now
wondered who the small man was.
(Bay Leaves, 2011)
Daddy’s absence seemed long; I don’t know if it was a matter of weeks or a matter of months. I was in the fifth grade. When cold weather came, Mom couldn’t afford winter coats, so I wore a hand-me-down, source forgotten, whose pockets had worn out and opened into the lining. I was rather proud of this unusual feature—I could clasp my hands behind my back between the coat’s inner and outer layers—until an older neighborhood kid began making fun of me. “If your parents love you, why do they make you wear that old coat.” I didn’t think they had failed me, but perhaps I felt it: his words pained and shamed me.
|
One way I thought about this incident, then and later, was to make it an event in a larger family history. Daddy’s mother had been a patient in the same hospital several times. The first and most traumatic incident was after the birth of a younger brother in 1934, when Daddy was 7. Sallie seems to have been sick when Max was born. She probably had post-partum depression. Whatever she had, it was exacerbated by a severe case of measles and pneumonia. She was bullied and verbally abused by her husband and, I suspect, by her mother-in-law. It was a toxic situation. Elbert feared for the safety of the baby and had Sallie sent to the state mental hospital, and left Daddy and the other children
|
to be looked after by his own mother, Emma. Daddy wrote:
"I was 12 years old in October after my mother got sick in May. [Actually, he turned 8 that October.] She had a bad case of measles [and] pneumonia, and gave birth to my brother Max all at one time. [Since Max was born in July, Daddy is either implying that Sallie was already sick before Max was born or he is confused about the dates.] It was too much and she lost her mind. The neighbors stayed there all the time taking turns for more than a month. It was all wasted work as momma's condition grew more acute and we had to take her to the state hospital for the insane. She stayed there for two years and I was a lonely little boy, little enough to cry and too old to let anyone see me cry.
"Mother came home to stay, and I can see her now. Her hair is close cut and wearing a shapeless hospital dress. I wanted to hug her and tell her how much I loved her but a true mountaineer never allowed any outward sign of emotion. I climbed the hill to my crying tree and there in my little boy's mountain language, I gave thanks to god for bringing my mother home.
"She was home. I loved her very much, but she would never be completely well again. Some way or another her mind was damaged and it was never home again like it was before mother went away."
My poem inspired by the sad story changes the chronology and alludes to her husband's unfaithfulness, though I don't know when it began:
Safety
The white oak on the ridge above the house
hangs on to its leaves all winter, till spring’s
new buds push out the old, and Mama
is crawling along in the garden, sifting the dirt
to make a bed for radishes and later for dill.
It’s summer and she hums to herself all morning.
She’s not right, Granny says, pointing to her temple.
She holds on to hurt the way a white oak
clings to its leaves. I throw a rock at Granny,
not a big one, but it whizzes past her forehead
and she whips me hard. Mama don’t say
nothing. I hide behind the oak and sulk.
There’s no house big enough for two women,
so says Daddy, and he ought to know:
Mama can’t do nothing to suit his mama,
and Granny don’t care what my mama thinks.
Mama’s belly gets big, and when Brother is born,
she catches the measles and pneumonia
and then stops talking. Daddy’s scared she might
hurt the baby, so he has some men in white
haul her off in a car, and Granny takes over.
I shut my eyes, but the world won’t change
for all my crying. I open them, and there the world
still is, the radishes bitter and gone to flower,
the dill eaten up by caterpillars. Granny’s
happy for once, but the baby is colicky,
and I keep hiding from her, and Daddy spends
his nights somewheres else. After frost has floured
the corn sheaves in the river bottom, Mama
comes home in a shower of early snow,
the flakes as fat and lacy as laurel blossoms.
Daddy hands her the baby, and she begins
humming to herself, and little brother hums back.
In our family lore, Sallie’s instability came from her family, the Grubbs, reputedly subject to melancholy and depression. These family stories framed my understanding of myself and my unhappy potential. But I did not consider how Daddy’s breakdown might reflect an underlying condition. I was only 11 or thereabouts, so I suppose my failure, if it was a failure, is understandable.
After Daddy’s return, he declared bankruptcy, a very public admission of failure. We lost the house and moved from Southwest Virginia to Ashe County, back in North Carolina, where Daddy had been born. We lived in a ramshackle brick house at the foot of Mount Jefferson—a wonderful place to live, set amid cow pastures, with an old, neglected orchard nearby, more useful for climbing trees than providing apples, and a faded red barn that had a dark loft and was ruled by an impressively long black snake. A farmer rented the pastures to run his cattle and he (or his hands) often worked them on horseback. It was probably these men who found the blacksnake in the barn and killed it, a loss I still mourn in a small way.
We were a short walk from the woods that flowed down the long slope from the crest of the mountain. We had the freedom of the woods and fields. We knew where the puffball mushrooms grew, one day accidentally discovering that stepping on them sent up clouds of "smoke." We did not know that the smoke was spores, or that the spores could be toxic if inhaled, an ignorance without consequence in our case. For heat, the house had a large propane stove in the living room, the kitchen stove, and space heater in the bathroom. Our winters there were cold, and on occasion the children slept in the living room in front of the stove. On those cold nights the windows of the unheated rooms would frost over, leaving only a small gap in the center. Once, after a heavy snow the cold lingered for many days. The snow on the roof gradually melted in the sunlight and dripped off the gutterless rear roof where it refroze into a line of thick icicles that stretched from the roof to the ground. When the sun rose, the icicles shone a deep blue and gold set in silver.
The roof was metal; we called it a "tin roof," but I'm sure what was made of. The pattering or pounding of night rain were soothing as, dry and warm in bed I fell asleep. In his memoirs about his childhood, Daddy wrote "the rain talked on the old tin roof.... There will never be sweeter music."
Daddy went to work for a local car dealership. Late one summer the new models overflowed into the pasture behind our house.
Driven
Daddy sells Dodges and Plymouths on commission.
On an August morning, when dew picks out
cobwebs in the grass, the new models appear
in two neat lines in the field behind our house--
Belvederes sky blue and chalk white, Furies
sleek as sunshine and waxed to gleam
like rhododendron leaves. When little brother
expects a whipping, he sneaks under a cream
two-door Savoy. None of us children dare
climb onto a car seat to take the wheel,
but in a shed we make the grindstone spin,
faster and faster, till it flies off the axle.
The cockerels are freer. On hoods that hide
the slant-sixes, those ornaments stretch and crow
and the pale sun obeys, rising like smoke,
then catching fire on the green cusp of the sky.
(Big River Poetry Review, 2012)
So far as I know, the chickens never actually roosted on the cars. Two breeds were running wild on the place when we moved in—bantams, or banties as we called them, and game chickens. The banties were small, the roosters extraordinarily beautiful. The other chickens were bigger and, so far as I remember, black as crows but long-legged and gaunt, quite unlike the banties' compact little bodies. As a kid, I understood Daddy to call them “gaines chickens,” which I assumed was the name of the breed. But I think I misunderstood—the idea of fighting chickens was not part of my experience. When our pet rabbit was inadvertently let out of its cage, one of the black roosters jumped on him and broke his back. So “games chickens” it probably was.
While we were still in Jefferson, Daddy then went to work as a truck driver for a furniture company. He took me on one trip north, to warehouses in Elmira and Rochester. This trip was a big deal to me, a step outside my ordinary life that was never diluted in memory by being repeated. For one thing, I missed several days of school without guilt or sickness.
In Rochester, Daddy spent a good while trying to figure out how to navigate a labyrinth of one-way streets to get to the warehouse, then he backed the rig down a narrow alley to the loading dock. I remember having dinner after dark in a bar somewhere in New York (probably Rochester), with the neon lights in the windows and over the bar. I remember having a conversation with Daddy about the place, so strange to me—about drinking, I think, but I don’t remember what we said.
At one point we stopped in the middle of the night at a little motel. I was already asleep in the cab, and the world for me consisted of overwhelming sleepiness and a small section of motel wall splashed with the light of the truck’s headlamps. The motel door opens. We walk inside—or, more likely, Daddy carries me from the cab into the room. And I’m already back to sleep. On the return trip, I recall vividly the moment on a highway across the river from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The city lights streaked the water, their beauty magnified by the river’s name—the Susquehanna, Daddy told me. Later, he put me down in the bed of the truck, on a comfortable, but strange smelling and slightly stiff, palette of furniture pads, with furniture pads for blankets. I knew no more till he woke me, at first light, at a gas station (possibly a Sunoco) in Roanoke, Virginia, with mist rolling off the land.
I don’t have warmer memories of Daddy than those from this trip, when he put me to bed so gently and taught me a beautiful word.
Not long after this, Daddy was hired by Northwestern Bank, and we moved to North Wilkesboro, in Wilkes County, North Carolina, where the home office was located. I was in the seventh grade. I knew a little about Wilkes. I had no memory of it, but we’d lived there for a short period around the time of my birth, while Daddy was working with the Department of Transportation. It was a county noted for Junior Johnson, a moonshiner who became an early NASCAR legend, and for chicken houses and for unusually short inhabitants, especially the older country folks--Daddy blamed it on the poor clay soil.
Wilkes was a Republican island in a Democratic sea, and for that reason (folks said) the legislature punished it by leaving unpaved a high percentage of roads. It was built as a development at the terminus of a railroad, and for a long time this made it a center of trading and business. One of my maternal aunts lived there with her family. When we’d lived near Jefferson, we sometimes attended the branch of the church in Wilkes, though more often we drove back to Marion, Virginia, where my mother had joined. We were about forty miles from each town, so Mom drove us to attend where she felt most comfortable and had friends. I had no reason to expect we would stay in Wilkes long, but my Mom is still there, almost sixty years later.
Posted and updated, 6 February 2024, updated and expanded 4, 11-12 April 2024. Second draft: 11 May 2024. Send comments, questions, and corrections to [email protected].
"I was 12 years old in October after my mother got sick in May. [Actually, he turned 8 that October.] She had a bad case of measles [and] pneumonia, and gave birth to my brother Max all at one time. [Since Max was born in July, Daddy is either implying that Sallie was already sick before Max was born or he is confused about the dates.] It was too much and she lost her mind. The neighbors stayed there all the time taking turns for more than a month. It was all wasted work as momma's condition grew more acute and we had to take her to the state hospital for the insane. She stayed there for two years and I was a lonely little boy, little enough to cry and too old to let anyone see me cry.
"Mother came home to stay, and I can see her now. Her hair is close cut and wearing a shapeless hospital dress. I wanted to hug her and tell her how much I loved her but a true mountaineer never allowed any outward sign of emotion. I climbed the hill to my crying tree and there in my little boy's mountain language, I gave thanks to god for bringing my mother home.
"She was home. I loved her very much, but she would never be completely well again. Some way or another her mind was damaged and it was never home again like it was before mother went away."
My poem inspired by the sad story changes the chronology and alludes to her husband's unfaithfulness, though I don't know when it began:
Safety
The white oak on the ridge above the house
hangs on to its leaves all winter, till spring’s
new buds push out the old, and Mama
is crawling along in the garden, sifting the dirt
to make a bed for radishes and later for dill.
It’s summer and she hums to herself all morning.
She’s not right, Granny says, pointing to her temple.
She holds on to hurt the way a white oak
clings to its leaves. I throw a rock at Granny,
not a big one, but it whizzes past her forehead
and she whips me hard. Mama don’t say
nothing. I hide behind the oak and sulk.
There’s no house big enough for two women,
so says Daddy, and he ought to know:
Mama can’t do nothing to suit his mama,
and Granny don’t care what my mama thinks.
Mama’s belly gets big, and when Brother is born,
she catches the measles and pneumonia
and then stops talking. Daddy’s scared she might
hurt the baby, so he has some men in white
haul her off in a car, and Granny takes over.
I shut my eyes, but the world won’t change
for all my crying. I open them, and there the world
still is, the radishes bitter and gone to flower,
the dill eaten up by caterpillars. Granny’s
happy for once, but the baby is colicky,
and I keep hiding from her, and Daddy spends
his nights somewheres else. After frost has floured
the corn sheaves in the river bottom, Mama
comes home in a shower of early snow,
the flakes as fat and lacy as laurel blossoms.
Daddy hands her the baby, and she begins
humming to herself, and little brother hums back.
In our family lore, Sallie’s instability came from her family, the Grubbs, reputedly subject to melancholy and depression. These family stories framed my understanding of myself and my unhappy potential. But I did not consider how Daddy’s breakdown might reflect an underlying condition. I was only 11 or thereabouts, so I suppose my failure, if it was a failure, is understandable.
After Daddy’s return, he declared bankruptcy, a very public admission of failure. We lost the house and moved from Southwest Virginia to Ashe County, back in North Carolina, where Daddy had been born. We lived in a ramshackle brick house at the foot of Mount Jefferson—a wonderful place to live, set amid cow pastures, with an old, neglected orchard nearby, more useful for climbing trees than providing apples, and a faded red barn that had a dark loft and was ruled by an impressively long black snake. A farmer rented the pastures to run his cattle and he (or his hands) often worked them on horseback. It was probably these men who found the blacksnake in the barn and killed it, a loss I still mourn in a small way.
We were a short walk from the woods that flowed down the long slope from the crest of the mountain. We had the freedom of the woods and fields. We knew where the puffball mushrooms grew, one day accidentally discovering that stepping on them sent up clouds of "smoke." We did not know that the smoke was spores, or that the spores could be toxic if inhaled, an ignorance without consequence in our case. For heat, the house had a large propane stove in the living room, the kitchen stove, and space heater in the bathroom. Our winters there were cold, and on occasion the children slept in the living room in front of the stove. On those cold nights the windows of the unheated rooms would frost over, leaving only a small gap in the center. Once, after a heavy snow the cold lingered for many days. The snow on the roof gradually melted in the sunlight and dripped off the gutterless rear roof where it refroze into a line of thick icicles that stretched from the roof to the ground. When the sun rose, the icicles shone a deep blue and gold set in silver.
The roof was metal; we called it a "tin roof," but I'm sure what was made of. The pattering or pounding of night rain were soothing as, dry and warm in bed I fell asleep. In his memoirs about his childhood, Daddy wrote "the rain talked on the old tin roof.... There will never be sweeter music."
Daddy went to work for a local car dealership. Late one summer the new models overflowed into the pasture behind our house.
Driven
Daddy sells Dodges and Plymouths on commission.
On an August morning, when dew picks out
cobwebs in the grass, the new models appear
in two neat lines in the field behind our house--
Belvederes sky blue and chalk white, Furies
sleek as sunshine and waxed to gleam
like rhododendron leaves. When little brother
expects a whipping, he sneaks under a cream
two-door Savoy. None of us children dare
climb onto a car seat to take the wheel,
but in a shed we make the grindstone spin,
faster and faster, till it flies off the axle.
The cockerels are freer. On hoods that hide
the slant-sixes, those ornaments stretch and crow
and the pale sun obeys, rising like smoke,
then catching fire on the green cusp of the sky.
(Big River Poetry Review, 2012)
So far as I know, the chickens never actually roosted on the cars. Two breeds were running wild on the place when we moved in—bantams, or banties as we called them, and game chickens. The banties were small, the roosters extraordinarily beautiful. The other chickens were bigger and, so far as I remember, black as crows but long-legged and gaunt, quite unlike the banties' compact little bodies. As a kid, I understood Daddy to call them “gaines chickens,” which I assumed was the name of the breed. But I think I misunderstood—the idea of fighting chickens was not part of my experience. When our pet rabbit was inadvertently let out of its cage, one of the black roosters jumped on him and broke his back. So “games chickens” it probably was.
While we were still in Jefferson, Daddy then went to work as a truck driver for a furniture company. He took me on one trip north, to warehouses in Elmira and Rochester. This trip was a big deal to me, a step outside my ordinary life that was never diluted in memory by being repeated. For one thing, I missed several days of school without guilt or sickness.
In Rochester, Daddy spent a good while trying to figure out how to navigate a labyrinth of one-way streets to get to the warehouse, then he backed the rig down a narrow alley to the loading dock. I remember having dinner after dark in a bar somewhere in New York (probably Rochester), with the neon lights in the windows and over the bar. I remember having a conversation with Daddy about the place, so strange to me—about drinking, I think, but I don’t remember what we said.
At one point we stopped in the middle of the night at a little motel. I was already asleep in the cab, and the world for me consisted of overwhelming sleepiness and a small section of motel wall splashed with the light of the truck’s headlamps. The motel door opens. We walk inside—or, more likely, Daddy carries me from the cab into the room. And I’m already back to sleep. On the return trip, I recall vividly the moment on a highway across the river from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The city lights streaked the water, their beauty magnified by the river’s name—the Susquehanna, Daddy told me. Later, he put me down in the bed of the truck, on a comfortable, but strange smelling and slightly stiff, palette of furniture pads, with furniture pads for blankets. I knew no more till he woke me, at first light, at a gas station (possibly a Sunoco) in Roanoke, Virginia, with mist rolling off the land.
I don’t have warmer memories of Daddy than those from this trip, when he put me to bed so gently and taught me a beautiful word.
Not long after this, Daddy was hired by Northwestern Bank, and we moved to North Wilkesboro, in Wilkes County, North Carolina, where the home office was located. I was in the seventh grade. I knew a little about Wilkes. I had no memory of it, but we’d lived there for a short period around the time of my birth, while Daddy was working with the Department of Transportation. It was a county noted for Junior Johnson, a moonshiner who became an early NASCAR legend, and for chicken houses and for unusually short inhabitants, especially the older country folks--Daddy blamed it on the poor clay soil.
Wilkes was a Republican island in a Democratic sea, and for that reason (folks said) the legislature punished it by leaving unpaved a high percentage of roads. It was built as a development at the terminus of a railroad, and for a long time this made it a center of trading and business. One of my maternal aunts lived there with her family. When we’d lived near Jefferson, we sometimes attended the branch of the church in Wilkes, though more often we drove back to Marion, Virginia, where my mother had joined. We were about forty miles from each town, so Mom drove us to attend where she felt most comfortable and had friends. I had no reason to expect we would stay in Wilkes long, but my Mom is still there, almost sixty years later.
Posted and updated, 6 February 2024, updated and expanded 4, 11-12 April 2024. Second draft: 11 May 2024. Send comments, questions, and corrections to [email protected].
This is the note Daddy wrote me in 1962 while he was in the mental hospital; I turned elevent later that year. The letters struck me as "round and tall," as I wrote in a poem above. At the time, I was overwhelmed by receiving the letter, too moved to understand much of what it said. The existence of the letter was more important than anything it said. The shape and size of the letters mattered, but I couldn't have said--I still can't say--why.
Only later, after hearing my sister's story of abuse, did I remark that she is not specifically mentioned in the letter. "I think about you boys, and we will have a good life together." Of course, perhaps he mentioned her in the letters to Mom written at the same time.
Only later, after hearing my sister's story of abuse, did I remark that she is not specifically mentioned in the letter. "I think about you boys, and we will have a good life together." Of course, perhaps he mentioned her in the letters to Mom written at the same time.
