Thesisfinalformatted.Docx.Pdf (1.64

THE PULPIT LEANER

A thesis submitted

To Kent State University in partial

Fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Fine Arts

Dawn Christine Hackett

May, 2016

Except for previously published materials

Thesis written by

Dawn Christine Hackett

B.A., University of Richmond – English, 2010

B.A., University of Richmond – American Studies, 2010

M.F.A., Kent State University, 2016

Approved by

David Giffels , Advisor

Robert Trogdon , Chair, Department or English

James L. Blank , Dean, College of Arts and Science

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... ii

PRELUDE ...... 1

OPENING QUOTE BY JOHN OLIVER KILLENS ...... 7

PROLOGUE ...... 8

ERA:

1920 – 1959 ...... 17

CHAPTERS:

The Ground They Stood Upon ...... 18

Bun’s Clan ...... 26

Homecoming and a Sister Named Damnation ...... 34

The Milkman’s Child ...... 44

Ignorance is an Open Door ...... 50

Bun’s Indiana Hayloft – c. 1954 ...... 54

The Purple Child ...... 59

Eddie’s Book of Cautionary Tales ...... 66

The Dixie Highway ...... 79

ERA:

1960 – 1995 ...... 80

CHAPTERS:

A Good Year to Be Hitched ...... 81

When to Call a Lawman ...... 85

Cal Flies his First Plane ...... 105

A Brat and The Flying Wallendas ...... 115

The Lyrics of my Mother ...... 123

Seagulls, Blisters, and Farts ...... 131

Awkward Purple Gremlin Eater ...... 143

My Brother’s Bun ...... 158

Letting Go – Men on the Side ...... 172

Weed, Wonderful Weed ...... 188

The Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Five . . . . . 206

The Indiana Invasion ...... 233

AFTERWORD ...... 250

THESIS AND SECONDARY COPYRIGHT CONTACT ...... 262

iii

Prelude

Pieces of Bark in a Rick of Wood

My grandfather, Roy Luther Craig, was born in southern Indiana to Loda and

Ermel Craig in 1914. When Ermel was nearly thirty and Bun was eleven years old,

Indiana elected a Klansman named Edward L. Jackson as governor. Privately men ruled their homes according to whatever dogma they clung to. The Klan weighed heavily in

Indiana infrastructure in the 1920s and anyone who was Jewish, Catholic, or African-

American needed to get the hell out. It was easy to call it hard times when the Great

Depression hit, but with the Klan's prominence, outsiders did not stand a chance.

The KKK was in its second wave of power when Grand Dragon D. C.

Stephenson convinced seven states to break from the national KKK. He ran the Klan and recruited from twenty-two states before he lost power, but he made his home in

Indiana, a ways north of where the Craigs called home.

Stephenson was rich, had a private train car, and financed political officials. But in 1925, Stephenson kidnapped an Indiana educational worker named Madge

Obelholtzer, who - I must clarify - was a white card holding member of the KKK.

Madge had dated Stephenson and broke off her relationship, so he trapped her by calling her and threatening to destroy her reading circle unless she came to see him, to talk before a trip to Chicago. Stephenson's bodyguard Mr. Gentry picked her up and

drove to Stephenson's home. In his kitchen, Stephenson and Mr. Gentry were joined by two more men, Shorty and Clenck, who forced whiskey down her throat until she was unable to defend herself. Shorty drove Madge and Stephenson to his private train car, pretending he was going to Chicago, shoved her into his sleeper and raped her several times. He bit her face, arms, breasts, tongue, ankles, and legs, punched her while he raped her until she passed out. She came to, still intoxicated and unable to move on her own. She screamed at Stephenson.

"The law will get their hands on you."

Stephenson, apparently unfazed and ready for more, turned to look at her.

"I am the law in Indiana."

Soon she was in a hotel room in Hammond and when Stephenson finally went to sleep, she held his revolver to her head. Madge was going to kill herself instead of

Stephenson, but later recalled on her deathbed she could not do it. It would shame her mother if she committed suicide. Instead, she convinced Shorty to drive her to buy a black silk hat, begged him to take her to a pharmacy, then purchased a common treatment for syphilis at that time, a mixture of mercury and chlorine. Madge was so weak, she only managed six down her throat, enough to poison her kidneys over a period of days, but not enough to kill her. She vomited blood until Stephenson, who

refused to take her to the hospital, dumped Madge at her home. Madge's parents rushed her to the hospital where she was unable to name her attacker. So it looked like it always looked in southern Indiana - the man was going to walk away, scot-free.

Madge Oberholtzer came to, asked for the police on March 28th, and gave an official report. She lingered, staph infections in her bite wounds, sepsis, and her kidneys failing from the mercury, until April 14th. Stephenson was arrested, tried, and convicted of second-degree murder. His lawyer argued she died from poisoning and there was no way Stephenson could have foreseen her actions.

The jury didn't buy the crazy dame story, neither did the Republican Party or his good friend Governor Edward L. Jackson. The Governor refused to pardon him in 1927.

Seems the law abiding white folks who held a Klan card had their ideals shattered. The

Klan lost power quickly, Stephenson spilled the beans on everyone who was paid by the Klan to the Indianapolis Times, and Klan officials scattered to Kentucky and

Tennessee, or removed themselves from the roster altogether. Membership in Indiana went from more than 250,000 to 4,000 by February, 1928. One year later, the Great

Depression hit. No wonder Loda Craig told stories about goblins to keep her children in line.

I long suspected that the truth is, holding a membership card or being officially named on a roster was not the thing that caused filth. Not wanting to be associated with the KKK because of the behavior of one member always begged the question of whether tearing up the card and officially disassociating from the official roster meant the

member changed in their heart. What I do know is never, not in all my visits to my grandfather’s house when my family went to Indiana in the summer, did I see a person of color in Mitchell, Indiana. This I do know . . . all that nonsense with politicians and

government hardly invaded the part of Lawrence County where my grandfather was raised and my mother Donna after him. Government was a bad word, no one called the police, poaching was a survival must, and taxes were evil. This was a place where tradin’ (as in “I’m goin’ in tuh town tuh do some tradin’”) was how one man helped another man. They had what you needed, you gave something up they could use. It was like a tradition, the male version of a swap meet but usually done one on one.

Every man in Lawrence County knew a thing or two about haggling for a bargain.

During the same period as the Great Depression crept into the households of even the self-sustaining farming communities, southern Indiana began to feel the weight. Sustenance farmers began an outward migration. But my mother Donna’s family, my grandfather included, never budged. They were firmly rooted in the soil of

Lawrence County.

Ermel saw the wooded lands cleared and began farming like his father before him. Bun did the same as did Ermel’s other children. They banded together and, lower than poor, held on until Roosevelt stepped in. The times are beyond my imagination but Bun told my mother Donna many stories, the beginning of one generation’s folktales passed down to the next. And I, born in 1963, was my mother’s barrel where she secretly ladled stories, ones she had sworn to die with. And my Aunt Brenda let fly things she had held in her breast for decades. That makes me one of the luckiest of the grandchildren still alive.

And this storied soil above the glacial shifts of the Great Lakes in the Knobs of

Indiana began to be reforested during the New Deal, abandoned farms were covered,

too. Bun was paid for steady work for the first time in a long while, and for that, he worshipped President Roosevelt. But those times ended along with the Great

Depression and time lurched forward into a world at war. What held steady was the way of life between women and men, some better than others, and always centered around a festering gossip pool that’s watershed was the church.

THE PULPIT LEANER

A little boy had read numerous stories in his children’s books about various life and death struggles between a man and a lion. But no matter how ferociously the lion fought, each time the man emerged victorious. This puzzled the boy, so he asked his father, “Why is it, Daddy, that in all these stories the man always beats the lion, when everybody knows that the lion is the toughest cat in all the jungle?”

The father answered, “Son, those stories will always end that way until the lion learns how to write.”

John Oliver Killens - 1970

Prologue

eyond the river ports of the Ohio, up into the heart of southern Indiana – where

layers of till are calmed by kaolin and marl, and rains sweep down from the north B and fleck the soil with coal – the avens bear pressure from rushing springs that surface near a bald and drench the timothy and clover with remnants of decayed limestone.

There, if you walk the land in summer beside a field of tasseled-out corn, the wild spring onions taint the air tart and sweet. Green flies and sweat bees buzz down, attacking salty skin. Noise hovers close under a blanket of heat, too thick to allow sound to be heard from even a slight distance. This was heat, heat in a way people outside southern Indiana didn’t know, but the locals call the devil’s grin.

In the summer haze my family visited southern Indiana annually, the place where my mother Donna was born and earned her degree in how to leave. I tolerated the sixteen-hour drive to get there from Florida, and dreamed of the grease-patched cats that crouched intently, watching smaller critters drink from the edge of a swallow hole. I always tried to pet them, get closer and name them, but feral farm cats live off rats and field mice. They never needed a damn thing from some child driven in from Florida. If I managed to sneak up on one, the feral cat saw my movement and scattered down through the thicket with a mad hiss. But there were always

more, and kittens and puppies, goats, and sometimes a mule. Chickens pecked around in the dirt but eventually my maternal grandfather quit keeping them. It was cheaper to buy eggs by the dozen at the A & P.

I never thought to watch for copperheads, though my grandfather Roy “Bun” Craig greeted us one summer with a hoe tucked under one armpit. From the blade end in front of him swung a copperhead, minus the head I mean.

Bun had a large head. I might describe him as being thin haired but when I was a child, I saw a large set of ears on a big head without enough hair to cover it. The problem was the size of his head, not the lack of hair. But his arms and hands were flush. Ticks and sweat flies ended their days tangled in the briar patches on Bun’s exposed limbs. His large head was nothing compared to his body. He was not fat; he was thick, thick like a mattress. His offspring were obvious save one of his six children. They were easy to spot and all of them with the Craig thickness. No one knows about the other stillborn and miscarried children . . . whether they would have been thick had they lived. Of course, I did not know about the extra pregnancies until I was much older, like I am now.

Funny name, Bun. As a child I wondered why rural Indiana was the kind of place where nicknames were better known than first names. Apparently, his ears, huge by all accounts, stuck out. Somehow that, with his thin hair, equaled Bun. I didn’t get it then so I stopped trying, with my childish attention span being that of a shoofly. I was too young to keep a hold on it, but family folklore has its own lasting echo. Once there is no one left who knows, folklore dies.

Someone has to pick it up, carry it around for a spell, set it down when it gets too heavy, pass it on with furtive nighttime whispers and let it slip into the darkness.

Bun always smelled like he was freshly shaven, a dense shot to the senses but a familiar recognition that grew on me. I watched him without speaking as he shaved his face every morning with a straight edge blade, expertly sharpened on a thick leather strap. He swirled a worn shaving cream brush in a small porcelain canister and hummed as he applied the soap to his face. There was a type of dignity about him being clean-shaven. He didn’t mind me watching, but no words were spoken between us.

When he went to his church in Spice Valley, Bun’s hairless face and thick tall body demanded rectitude. He never stood at the door and greeted his congregation but sat at the end of the front pew with his bible in his lap. The bible was worn from years of rubbing the gilded cover; his hands were calloused from decades of leaning as he gripped the edges of his pulpit to sustain his passion. The only time he was without his bible was when his big head was under an old car hood, or his wide rear bumbled atop his primer-gray Allis-Chalmer. He seemed manly when he plowed and smoothed the earth, sweat forming pits and V’s on his t-shirt. When he preached, he just seemed mean. And the pews in Bun’s church were harder than the pews in our

Florida churches.

Bun always preached about something Donna, his second daughter, did in her Florida life. She was vain and so sayeth Bun, that was a sin. She primped, wore pants and never showed an ounce of humility about it. She put on make-up every day. She bought me knit short sets and sewed hot pants and hip huggers with bell bottoms.

Foot stomping gospel songs were sprinkled throughout his sermons. If he’d left them to the end, I think his congregation might have slept in. The cadence of his sermons – the ones I heard – were similar from one Sunday or Wednesday to the next. They sleuthed through the bottom of my feet, up around my knees, constricting like a small boa pulsating, my ass numb

from sitting, his followers a bleak conglomeration of impoverished whites who – I must warn you – all looked as though there was not enough money for shoes or shampoo, yet never missed a meal. Southern Indiana soil grew sturdy folk. The longer they stood on the kaolin rich dirt, the bigger their bloom grew with each passing season. But they rumbled when they sang, hands to the air almost belly dancing without showing any midriff of course. One of my favorites that when it was at its best, moved at three beats per second.

Just a few more weary days and then I’ll fly away, ooh glory I'll fly away I’ll fly away To a land where joy shall never end When I die hallelujah, by and by I'll fly away I’ll fly away1

I can see Bun leaning against his pulpit, a knowing but serious grin jutting his jawline forward, pitching into the sway of his words. The sermon would go on, like the snippets I remember from one particular service.

“Tight pants on a woman . . .” he began one Sunday in 1972, “are a sin against Jesus’ teachings. Women belong in God’s graces in the home, long flowin’ skirts past the knees keep

‘em humble . . . ”

Pause, head turning north to south to ensure everyone nods in agreement.

“ . . . well, you all know it’s lie-kiss . . .”

And the congregation says Yes Brother Craig – speak the words

1 1 I'll Fly Away was written in 1929 by Albert Brumley who stumbled upon the idea for the song singing to himself while picking cotton. He sang the following lyrics: 'If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly” when he had the naked-in-the-bathtub eureka that The Prison Song and additional line “Like a bird from prison bars has flown” was an analogy for life on earth. He must have known Bun. As it was to me, my life on a pew being damned to hell for wearing pants was surrounded by lyrics heard with kid fears of death and dying. I was assuaged by the idea my mother would be there to greet me in her purple halter top and white hot pants.

“ . . she’ll meet Satan in the hereafter . . . because tight pants reveal what’s sacred to the husband and between the man and his wife . . .”

She serves him yes she does

“And in sin she did fall in the Garden of Eden and for-werd now she is fallen . . .

Mothers?”

Yes, Reverend Craig the women cry

“Please your husband, and the Lord your God in Jesus’ name we pray . . .”

Amen Brother the men admonish, concur, hypocricize

“Women serve your children and show them the way to the Lord . . . teach them Jesus will return and raise those who folluh him proper. . .”

Jeee – sussss speaks to us

“ . . . Now motherin’ children is a hard job we all know . . .”

Emm hmmmm yes

In the back, a thin greasy haired man begins a low murmur of words not found in the

English language, rhythmic, nonsensical. The smell of body odor rises into the top layer of heat inside the grin of the church rafters. My overgrown hands grip the pew seat edge on either side of me and I lean forward with my head bowed. I allow myself only quick snatches of visual. My mom always taught me not to gawk. People might get the wrong idea or take it as an invitation. I did not want to be mistaken for someone who wanted to testify.

“Brothers and Sisters, let us open the good book to Isaiah 30:13. Let the women of the church read with us . . . This sin will become for you like a high wall – yes, this sin of womanhood of motherin’ the children . . . This sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked

and bulging . . . women’s walls they fall . . . a high wall that collapses suddenly, in an instance . .

.”

They will perish, Brother Craig, yes they will Lord keep us Jesus save us

“Let Jesus appear with us now . . . now he will appear.”

My eyes wandered the church, across faces waiting for the long brown haired Jesus in the picture to unveil himself. I wanted to see the magic trick, find its tell at which time I know my feet will come alive and right out the door I will run, screaming. Collective breaths were held, then gasps for air turned to acting, the entry of the spirit invaded the true believers. I wondered if they were lucky, or cursed in some benign way. Recompense for counterfeit salvation.

“Yes, Jesus is with us. Witness, Brothers and Sisters . . .”

And at this point my mind begged for another song and the fat man on the banjo and the fatter one on a steel guitar jangled as if on invisible cue and the straggly man clapped a wood block as a buxom woman drummed piano keys. And the smell, oh the smell of all that worship festered in my sinuses, salty taste at the back of my throat eyes burning I’d find the page of the hymnal and pretend I didn’t know the words. But my voice rose into the harsh grin above me, drowned out by the righteousness of faith, sung at ¾ per second.

My latest sun is sinking fast My race is nearly run My strongest trials now are past My triumph has begun

Oh, come angel band, come and around me stand Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home2

2 Angel Band was written by Jefferson Hascall in 1860, a verse written in common metre or common measure, a poetic metre consisting of four lines which alternate between iambic tetrameter (four metrical feet per line, with each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable) and iambic trimeter (three metrical feet per line, with each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), rhyming in the

“ . . . Mothers don’t fear your children climbing a tree . . . learnin’ to drive tractor . . . they are watched by our savior Jesus . . . and if they fall, they will go to live in his everlasting love when the judgment day comes . . . their souls will be lifted.”

When the singing stops, a cacophony of holy spirits surrounds me and I wait for the speaking of tongues to come to me. But my tongues were always spent on the singing. The congregation roared as I withdrew into the pain of sitting against the pew. I rested there until the preaching ended. And I knew there was to be food afterward and I’d eat until satiated.

The summers we visited, unlike the other kids who converged upon his Bun’s house after church, I wore shorts. I wore pants, too. According to Bun, I am going to burn in hell. And don’t get me started on the make-up issue. I left it all in the music, every miniscule fear and overwhelming darkness brought on by the goblins waiting for me to show my true colors.

Somehow I knew, even as a child, Reverend Bun was nuts, maybe because my mother stood her ground. She was the same in her youth. There’s a story my mother told me late in our life together about Bun sitting beside her while she worked at a meager table that barely held eight plates while she dethreaded the silks from a pile of corn cobs.

“You don’t know what yer doin’, and you peel potatoes like a rich man’s wife,” Bun said.

“One day maybe I’ll be a rich man’s wife and a long way from here,” my mother said.

Did I mention his large hands? One of them swung with the full force of a man sitting at the head of a table who reached for the young girl at the corner.

pattern a-b-a-b. The metre is denoted by the syllable count of each line. The foot stomping in Bun’s church was denoted by the clapping of sweaty palms, tongue speakers and the clomping of dilapidated shoes.

My mom went flying. Blackness in the kitchen and a corn cob still in one hand, stars floated around her vision. When I heard the story, Bun was dead and if he had not been in the ground already, I wanted to put him there. She told me all she thought about was not crying.

“I made myself get up. I couldn’t see a thing, but there was no way I was going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry,” she told me.

She found her footing and, left jaw and eye swelling and turning blue, got up and sat back in her chair. She proceeded to pull the silks off the cob in her hand. Bun did not say a word, just regarded her with his chin jutted forward. That is the posture he held while the congregation filed into his church . . . reading glasses propped on his nose, he would look over them and when he did so, the bottom of his jaw went forward. It was Indiana-hick for condescension.

***

Standing her ground cost my mother in ways I will never understand. The earth she stood on was hundreds of miles away in Florida. She left when she was fifteen and never looked back.

Our vacations were an appeasement of the guilt of independence, the breaking away. The other five left and returned, or never left at all. I like to think it’s the kaolin and limestone dust which, when flooded, becomes a sort of quicksand. The others were simply stuck in it.

But the anticipation began to build in me to return to the singing each summer visit, and I never missed an opportunity to ride along with anyone who was headed for my grandfather’s church. In spite of the repetitive warnings of hell, in the end it was the music. Everyone played piano by ear. Banjos were whipped out of dilapidated cases, an aunt muddled her way from her car with an accordion, and Bun played a lap harp. Impromptu jam sessions occurred frequently as there is no rock and roll without foot stomping gospel. I watched Bun strum his harp, cross handed. Those same hands that put my mother on the floor.

Bun’s hands were multi-talented. He hunted deer with a .22 rifle, a caliber better suited to squirrel, but he never failed. He leaned against his pulpit and held his bible, hit his children, spanked grandchildren, and could level and shoot a shotgun without bracing for the recoil. Bun’s oldest son Eddie, the thickest of all his children, had the same hands. The difference seemed to be Eddie’s hands were attached to the foulest temper in the state. There was his next son Charles, and the four girls Karen, my mother Donna, Brenda and Anita. That I didn’t know then to pay more attention to the soil I played upon, the food made from lard I anticipated at every meal – a child sees what fulfills the immediate need, and in some ways, I was no different. Some said I stared too long and watched quietly because I was spooked when I was in my mother’s womb.

Truth is, it is what binds me now to the pen and paper for a story or two I must tell.

Bun’s brutalities and the instilled learning in his sons and others in southern Indiana were twisted into cautionary tales for my generation and the ones to follow. They appear in the pages that follow. Many were buried in the ground for fear of the outside world. But that glacial shift, the pure black and brown of it, and the tons of blasted limestone stolen, is the fault at the center of my memories. It lies in wait, ready for the infinitesimal shift that will resound a truth come from that soil, one hidden from my view for many decades. For one does not simply learn this family’s folklore in one telling. Years have rolled over me, distancing Bun from his father, my mother Donna from Bun, and me from my parents, aunts, and uncles. From my mother I have ached with her heartaches, cried in secret for my aunts’ lives, their escapes, and at times, the piteous stain of their men. Now that I know secrets, I can weave this story like a penned loom.

1920 – 1959

Now taters never did taste good with chicken on a plate But I had to eat 'em just the same That is why I look so bad and have these puny ways Because I always had to take an old cold tater and wait

Little Jimmy Dickens "Take an Old Cold 'Tater (And Wait)" Raisin' the Dickens

Onc’t they was a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,-- So when he went to bed at night, away up stairs, His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl, An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wasn’t there at all! An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press, An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’wheres, I guess; But all they ever found was thist his pants an’ roundabout-- An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out! James Whitcomb Riley (“Hoosier Poet) Little Orphant Annie – 1887 Originally The Elf Child – 1885 told in Hoosier Dialect of late 19th Century

The Ground They Stood Upon

ong ago, twenty-eight years before I was born, my great-grandfather Ermel

Craig took his brood to a revival in a tent filled with splintery benches in LKoleen, Indiana. His wife Loda stayed home to tend to the younger children who weren’t ready for a three day stint in a hot gathering of worshippers. Ermel was known across Lawrence County for stern ideas and come-to-Jesus sermons. He had the power to cure, he’d say, tipping his white straw hat or thumbing his suspenders. And those who didn’t take the cure weren’t pure or right with Jesus.

Ermel wasn’t short until he stood next to Bun. He was a farmer but had so many children, the farming did itself and if it didn’t, he beat the breath right out of them. He was free to roam the impoverished southern Indiana communities and preach that poverty in itself was a blessing.

“A man with too much to spend is a man with not much to do,” Ermel would say. “Idle hands have nothing to do but help the devil.”

Ermel wasn’t educated, was known to refuse drink, smoke, and other temptations, was impeccably clean for a farmer, had soft hands that saw their share of

doling out equal parts prayer and pain, was fertile as a breeding bull and wicked in the way men who spoke the bible for their own purposes were in those days. But lack of schooling was a tolerative condition. Ermel’s righteousness told him all he needed to know anyway.

He lived in a place where new-fangled equipment passed families by and older ways held sway over farming practices. If a man can do the work with a mule and a sod plow, a man can feed his family. And so Ermel’s children took their beatings and kept their farm during times that saw many take to living in the woods. He looked upon those former farming folk as the menace of immigration the Klan wrote about, probably never thinking his ancestor William Craig was an immigrant after the Revolutionary

War. Though no one ever found a white hood in Ermel’s closet, he was alive as the southern Indiana countryside went from heavily wooded to cleared for large swaths of corn. But as city folk began making their way across the landscape in their devil wagons

- scaring livestock and mostly getting stuck in the rutted paths - he was the first in line for a used automobile. He was, like the rest of the Craigs, naturally suspicious of lawmen and taxes.

But what evangelical Ermel didn’t know was his son Roy Luther was no fan of prohibition and paid little attention to the Klan. Sitting in his father's revival tent, he was known to sneak a swallow from a flask. He’d creep from the back row to roll a smoke and squat low behind a row of cars, spit, and wash away the smell of tobacco

with fire water. When he made a buck, he bought Dubois Dew3 off his friend - no lead, no lye, no alibi. Dubois County firewater ran through Lawrence County in spurts and sputters. All the teenagers, denied the rite of their first drink by the government, sought ways around law from a faraway place that didn’t know hill about their lives.

But with work hard to come by, small carpentry jobs between tilling, school, and tent revivals were all there was. Roy took his beatings silently when Ermel saw a crooked row of corn, or smelled tobacco on his son’s clothes.

After one particularly severe beating when he was ten or eleven years old, a kid at his school saw his swollen face the next day.

“Roy, yer face looks soft like a bread bun, like a dinner bun.”

The name took, and eventually the whole school called him Bun thanks to

Ermel’s beating.

But Bun grew disproportionately to the rest of his siblings and soon enough,

Ermel left him alone about most things, except going to revival. And in 1935, while

Stephenson rotted in prison, Bun sat under a hot tent in Koleen. It was then Bun saw the face of Kathern Texas Shelton.

Kathern was dark. Her eyes were so brown they looked black when she was angry which wasn’t very often. Her skin tanned easily as her heritage, questionable to most but dreamlike to Bun, was Scotts-Cherokee. She was full bodied and four years his senior. Black hair to her bottom, she kept it braided and coiled on her head, showing off

3 pronounced do-boy-do

her round, full cheekbones. When she smiled her teeth were bright and her eyes showed kindness of the soul. Bun noticed her muscular arms and wide hips and approached her after Ermel took a breath so folks could eat. What was said is a mystery that they both took to their graves and is not repeated in any letters during World War

II. As far as anyone knows, the only thing left of it is the soil they stood upon when they first spoke. And in Indiana, the soil keeps its secrets benevolently, pulling them down beneath outer glacial till, below quaternary limestone and sifted by gray and pink aquifer crystals of dolomite.

What is known is for one year, Bun Craig rode his father’s mule from Springville to Koleen to court Kathern. Every week, Bun arrived on Saturday afternoon and ate with the Shelton family. If the weather was fine, he wrapped his banjo in canvas tied with rope and fitted into a makeshift sling. On those visits, Bun reveled in the Shelton's natural musical gifts. Everyone sang or played something, even if all they had was two spoons. I like to picture them there, a bird’s eye view at night, impoverished souls around a small yard fire singing and picking. Bun rode that mule 14 miles one way, a story that bore repeating until Kathern no longer drew breath. She must have loved him deeply because by all accounts, she kept her fears about his drinking cloaked until

World War II broke out and he was a long way from her.

They married under Ermel's tent, promised to obey God, and Kathern promised to obey Bun. The Shelton family was as big as the Craigs, and with both sides together they filled the chairs. The date was February 13, 1937, Lawrence County, Indiana, one year before a recession hit the country during the Great Depression. But one thing Bun

knew how to do was farm and grow his own food. He wasn't thrifty, he was stingy as a goat in a patch of thistle, and for a while they survived by this measure in a part of the world where things were slow to change by any standard.

Bun could run a bandsaw that stretched thirty feet and knew what to do with the wood afterwards. He took on any job, large or small. Bun could frame a barn or house, put his back into a posthole digger and plumb fencing, shingle roofs with a worn down hammer, slap up outhouses over holes he dug, plow a mule, and turn a car into a coupe utility vehicle - all with nothing but an Audels for reference. Bun could take a rust- bucket tractor engine apart and make her hum. He worked every day until his hands were all calluses and split skin. But with the hands of a sudden angel he strummed an auto-harp, picked a banjo, and plucked a mean mouth harp. He carried a tune, but was no rarified vocalist.

His wife Kathern was no slump, either. The only picture I've seen of her when she wasn't broken from rheumatoid arthritis was of her unloading long, heavy wood planks with Bun and his brother Lloyd. The couple lived with Lloyd and his wife after marriage, until times turned around and a few out-migrated farmers returned to the soil of southern Indiana. Personal memories were shattered when that lone picture surfaced. Her dark, braided hair was wound into a huge coil on top of her head, thick eyebrows arched above a smile full of long teeth. I had never seen her in a condition on the other side of tortured and knotted. I saw the world as if it had not existed in any other state than as it was, but then I grew up. I am filled with folk tales, and I learned early to distrust church gossip.

Kathern's younger hands played the guitar. She didn't just strum, she could pick a little, too. When she wasn't pushing good grub three times a day or beside Bun at the sawmill, Kathern played piano and when things were particularly fine outdoors, she played the mandolin on the porch. Her ear extended beyond music, to the tenderness of birdsong. Kathern knew the sound of a White-breasted Nuthatch from an Indigo

Bunting. She could spot a lime Kirtland Warbler against the green leaves of a white oak, a lesser singer on its way somewhere else every Spring. She talked to the Brown-headed

Cowbirds and on occasion, whistled at a Dark-eyed Junco. The Yellow-bellied

Sapsucker she let be she said, because he was too busy driving the bugs from the bark of a tree.

"Wouldn't want to interrupt him while 'e's earning a livin'," she'd say.

Kathern talked about birds to her daughters when the men were out. When she could no longer go to them, her youngest daughter bought a cage and a parakeet. They named it Corky, mostly green with a little blue, and his favorite place was at the nape of

Kathern's neck - the only live animal ever seen inside Bun's house.

Kathern was a woman of faith. She knew the wrong way around liquor lead men to other women and hayloft card games for money. Bun's favor toward spirits other than speaking in tongues was a mark of his manhood to him, but she knew where it went, and that place was a hospital if you were lucky. If you weren't, you'd be dead too soon when God might have had other plans. By all accounts, though, she left it alone and pressed softly on the issue. What Bun may not have known was that Kathern knew of Bun long before she met him in Ermel's tent. She did not need a telephone party line

to hear other people talking. As it turns out, my grandfather had a reputation long before his wife and children came along. But once they did, it took a World War to change his ways.

Bun’s Clan

Craig: Scottish derived from Gaelic creag meaning “crag” or “rocks” and originally belonging to a person who lived near a crag.

When immigrant Scotts and Irishmen took arms against England in 1775, the Craigs were there. In 1783, they poured across the Blue Ridge province like water through a funnel. The government needed farmers and the Craigs could make a field of stone grow flush with produce. The New Yorkers went to northern Indiana, Mid-Atlantic folk took central, but the southern Scotts stopped in the rolling south, just across the Ohio

River. They went North until the soil was harder but springs were plentiful. The Corn

Belt grew, and so did the Craigs, though Catholicism was traded for the Pentecost feast.

My ancestors were not only subsistence farmers for a hundred years, they were downright hostile toward commercial farms that sprung up north of where they settled.

They stuck together with the other families and farmed hogs and grew corn. Bun always said he'd rather go without than buy from a grocer. So he sent his daughters instead.

Bun and Kathern are said to have been happy early in their marriage. They were outdoors unless the weather was foul, they sang, played music and worked hard in a way I have probably never experienced. Eventually, Bun planted trees and reforested parts of Indiana when President Franklin Roosevelt unrolled the WPA. That meant steady wages, his own land, and a family to work it.

As things usually went in southern Indiana in the 1930s, the first of many pregnancies began. Kinship they called it, and Bun was determined to increase his.

They were blessed with two boys first. The oldest they named after Bun (Roy Luther).

Roy Edwin, otherwise known as Eddie, was born in 1938 in their small home. Charles

David was born in 1940. By 1943, their first daughter Karen Frances was born after the

Navy raised the allowable age and Bun, twenty-five, enlisted. She was the result of a passionate goodbye. During leave after a shakedown cruise aboard the U.S.S. Lynx,

Kathern became pregnant and that goodbye before he shipped off became my mother

Donna Kay in 1944.

***

World War II did more than interrupt the making of children. Bun saw the world when he was in port, and being in the Pacific Theatre, many of the horrors of war sailors see that no other branch of the service can detail. Your ship is your plot of acreage in the limitlessness of 63.8 million square miles. Difference is, you can’t fall back or move to another area when a tactical error occurs. You are stuck with a mega ton ship sluicing one comparatively small slick. Danger reigns above by air, below by submarine, at equal level by a once mightier fleet of Japanese ships, and within the ship

itself. The old fleet was full of new ships, prone to daily fires, explosions, loss of men who were suddenly strewn into the sea because cargo or a plane broke loose from its moorings. Leaving your post at General Quarters meant a mandatory Captain’s Mast where you went away with half pay or worse, a lower rank and even less pleasant duties. Abandoning ship was a sure death, just a longer, slower one than the others.

When 1945 broke, many ships were silenced, no mail out and rarely mail in. Piles of letters written by forlorn relatives sometimes arrived in a large bundle after the sailor made it home. If he was one of the lucky ones.

I have five letters from Kathern to Bun from the middle of 1945, five of what was once nearly a hundred between them. In these letters it is obvious Bun had not written in several months. As bad as life was aboard a Pacific ship, life at home in southern

Indiana was not the picturesque Life Magazine photo of a perfectly coiffed woman and clean children being true to their patriotic father. Kathern moved several times, four children in tow for reasons I am unsure of, but according to my mother and one of my aunts’ best guess, was avoidance of becoming a burden to another relative. The children were not yet old enough to farm, though letters say her sons tried. Kathern did the planting, the small harvests of cabbage, potatoes, corn, and tomatoes getting them by.

What they did for meat is a mystery. As many Craigs and Sheldons in the area helped out, Kathern’s small brood occasionally received a wild turkey, some venison or squirrel poached or otherwise perhaps. She knew the right mushrooms to pick, too.

Mushroom season in Lawrence County was as much a tradition as a way to stay alive in the woods if your home burned down or funds ran out.

The only place I’ve ever seen with wild persimmon trees is southern Indiana. I’m sure they grow elsewhere, just nowhere I’ve been. Having a few on your property was a godsend. Knowing my mother Donna was taught to make it by Kathern, I know that was one harvest that took nothing more than waiting for the first day a persimmon dropped to the ground. You had to beat the varmints to them, peel carefully, and push the pulp through a metal sieve. If you were a bit more flush, a manual food mill did the trick. I always thought of them in the same category as runny yolks, mincemeat, and pineapple-clove on a baked ham – a way to ruin a person’s stomach. Decades later a cousin made a batch of persimmon pudding and I thought this is what heaven is made of, persimmon pudding, along with fat, plump ribeyes, and buttered noodles.

With food rationing during the war, forty percent of women in the US began farming in small measure for sustenance. But the Craigs never did anything small, and

Kathern remained committed to large parcels of corn with smaller swatches of vegetables that needed less land and nuzzled close to the house where she lived.

I remember wondering if Kathern could afford sugar while Bun was at sea. The butter she churned herself if a relative’s cow had an udder that was unusually forthcoming. But rice, the cheapest food at the store, was eaten so often, my mother refused to eat it as an adult. I only remember rice in my childhood in Florida for breakfast with milk and sugar. Sometimes still warm.

I can’t go back and ask Kathern and that is the damnation I suffer for not paying more attention to her as a child. But Bun I knew a bit better. He was mobile and the music at his church kept me near him.

Those five letters. From what an aunt who said was shoe boxes full of letters from Kathern to Bun during the War, I have learned more about Kathern than I ever gleaned as a child being in her home. She rarely spoke directly to me and I, born an observer with shyness and an awkward social status, stayed clear of her so I didn’t get in the way of her walking sickness.

But in those letters I know her by her words – in love, at least moderately healthy, and breathless with anticipation for Bun’s return. Her sweet, prodding cursive that lulled words onto thin paper folded into a small booklet to fit the red white and blue bordered envelopes the Navy insisted upon using. VIA AIR MAIL under a six cent stamp, rose colored with a bomber’s wing span across it. The return address a simple reminder of the past:

Mrs. Kathern Craig Bedford, Ind. R.R.4

Then addressed to the most complicated possible route to her husband:

Roy Luther Craig, F 1/C U.S.N.R. U.S.S. Lynx A.K. 100 E. Div. C/O Fleet Post Office San Francisco, California

I know a bit about FPOs. My father was Navy. I can decipher which ocean Bun was in and the letters tell me what ship he was on. Pictures of the U.S.S. Lynx at Okinawa are

rare, but it was an accompanying cargo ship with one 50 cal and one 38 cal dual mount guns, two single 40mm AA gun mounts, and six single 20mm AA gun mounts in the

Pacific Theatre. To the land locked Spice Valley locals, seeing the ship might have caused a few chest pains and more than a few screaming children. Kathern never saw it.

But her letters, like this first page from a June 4, 1945 postmark in Bedford, Lawrence

County, say more about her fears and emotions for Bun than any conversation she and I might have had.

I read of a lovelorn, mostly healthy

woman I never knew. She gently

gives directions to where they now

live, making sure he comes straight

to her to paint the town red. At the

end of the letter she uses the word

still, as in I still love you with all my

heart. Does she feel forgotten,

mentioning no letters for some time

but quickly stating she understands

and will try to be patient? There are

dollops about the children, Eddie,

Charles, Karen, and Donna – the oldest six years, the youngest 11 months – those tender beings she paints as kitten loving, scampering or quiet, except for my mother, Donna, the rebel. She was busy

watching her brothers assemble small structures for a new kitten, only to have her knock them down with no punishment, only the enjoyment of watching things fall. I can almost hear her gurgle. I imagine a baby mother, one with that smartass smirk with a raised eyebrow only across a smooth, plump face.

I am struck by Kathern’s mention of moving her household alone, once again.

She is, underneath the blissful love, afraid. She asks if Bun has her new address. How lonely, her words plaiting the fabric of separation, the fear of a distant war swallowing her beloved. She was still healthy enough to plant a garden then, that much I found in her writing. My sweet sadness is broken occasionally by the idea that she was a sexual being before her body turned on her. I’ve heard stories about Kathern and Bun and the letter has Eddie pretending he was a lion with the kitten and saying “’Who wants to see the lion?’ ha What they can’t think of” (emphasis mine). I hear the rhythm of Indiana slow-speak, the intentional kind, as I read and know she is making a sexual pun. She does this again in another letter of the five. Saying she could not wait until he got home,

Bedford would not hold her, and she could not wait for them to squeeze again. She loved to squeeze with Bun, what my aunt called code for making love.

I see her in my mind in a picture found decades after I was born of a woman helping to unload planks of wood from the back of a railed truck with Bun on the other side, her body in a way I never witnessed – upright and both arms strong, working. A picture of her on Bun’s knee with a scarf around her hair, eyes shining in black and white clarity, plump and healthy. Bun is not looking at the camera in the booth because

Kathern has said something to him and he’s tickled and, for the only time I know of, laughing without self-consciousness.

I also have lots of snapshots that aren’t real in my head, only unreliable memories of a grandfather who carried a world of burden on his back, a man who preached the evils of women acting like menfolk and expected a jolt in his church whenever he asked for Jesus to show his congregation his presence. All that loving, all that sinning. And wondering who would know from what was good and what they felt in their hearts as right?

One thing Kathern’s daughters knew for sure – Kathern never took another man for comfort or any other reason. That must be what was good in her heart, following her love. But war changes people, or so all the writers have penned.

Homecoming and a Sister Named Damnation

Ole buttermilk sky Don'tcha fail me when I'm needin' you most Hang a moon above her hitchin' post Hitch me to the one I love

Kay Kaiser “Ole Buttermilk Sky”

Bun came home from the war to Kathern when the Pacific Fleet cargo ships were decommissioned for wartime use in late 1945. Bun’s ship was silenced because of the rumors about the bomb, because loose lips sink ships. So do torpedoes. Ask one of the few survivors of the U.S.S. Indianapolis who delivered the bomb but went down by

Japanese submarine.

Bun made a scrapbook of his time in the Navy, but his son Charles eventually took it for safekeeping. I know my way around a Naval discharge sheet, a DD214, but I never saw Bun’s. I did not know he served during World War II. When I discovered this, I assumed it was something he was trying not to think about. When I found out it

was the Navy, I laughed out loud. My tall, thick, thin-haired, tractor fixing grandfather from a landlocked patch of land in the open ocean was, well, like a hog on a raft. There was never any conversation during our visits to his house about the War. That was something I would have listened to other than his sermons if he had cared to share it.

And I am struck once again by what we don’t know about our parents and grandparents until they are gone because a child sees them as simply older. Their lives did not begin until I became aware of them.

One of the other letters I have of Kathern writing to Bun in August, 1945, there is an unusual line not in keeping with anything in the other letters. It is an echo of the early struggles she began to face when rheumatoid arthritis was setting in. She writes:

Bun, we’re OK I guess and getting along very well, considering

everything: but very lonely for our Daddy. The children are fine

all growing full of meanness, and able to eat hearty. That’s something

to be thankful for. I canned a bushel of green beans yesterday, and I’m

still tired. I must be getting old. ha I really was tired last night.

The playfulness she wrote with was gone in this letter. In July, 1945, she opened

My Dear Best Pal and referred to him as Bunzy. Except for expressing the loneliness, her updates were always upbeat. And this is the only letter that did not have a coded reference to sex. Nevertheless, by September when the weather is at its finest in southern Indiana, when the sorrel tree and scrub pine pique the nostrils, she was beside

herself with anxiety. It seems Bun had shore leave on the U.S. mainland and he did not tell her he was coming home as he usually did on leave. Her writing became inquiring but still hopeful that he was as in love with her as she was with him. Bun’s reputation from their younger years in Lawrence County weighed heavily on Kathern’s mind:

You’re on shore leave. I imagine you are getting caught up on your rest and sleep now that the weather is cooler. Or are you going out every night and cruising around? Sweetheart, there’s just one thing I hate about you being in port. I’ll let you guess what that is ?? ______. Darling I wish with all my heart that I could be out there with you . . . I wondered how come you never said anything about me coming to Frisco in your letters. . . I’m glad they did take censorship off your letters. Maybe that way I get to know a little more about you. ha . . . Sweetheart, I don’t want to be nosey or anything, but let me say this as one who loves you very very much, more than anyone in this world. Please be careful and watch about drinking so much. You know as well as I do it only does you harm and gets you into trouble. I think you understand why I’m saying this. Don’t you Sweetheart?

I do not know the exact date of Bun’s homecoming in 1945. August of 1945, there was a bulletin in the Bedford, Indiana paper that every Navy man with three or more kids was to be discharged immediately. In May of the same year, the Germans were defeated and victory was declared by the allies. However, the Japanese did not surrender to the U.S. until September 2, 1945, or to the Soviets until 1956. Bun’s Navy was facing a dissimilar enemy, but his ship was decommissioned on November 1, 1945

in Suinsu Bay, California, sending all her men home. He had made it home in time for

Thanksgiving, and just in time for winter corn harvest.

By June of 1946, Kathern was pregnant for the fifth time, but spending more time in bed than with her other pregnancies. She missed the flush of mushrooms and the talk about town of the record low of 33 degrees in August. She missed tending her garden planted over water draining limestone, and the smell of ripening Hoosier tomatoes and summer pop corn.

All that limestone in the unglaciated sections of Lawrence County produced an abundance of springs and caves and Spring Mill State Park, where Kathern liked to take the children. But the soil drains too fast unless the pressure from a heavy summer rain finds a sinkhole partition. Her birds were there, but from her room during the pregnancy, Karen and Donna had to put on a birdcall show for Kathern. Donna said it made her laugh because they were rotten bird callers but great singers. So they changed to singing to her on occasion. Kathern taught them to harmonize. At ages three and two,

Karen and Donna began singing together, and bringing Karen out of her shell a bit and calming Donna’s independent streak as much as any two year old can sit still for fifteen minutes.

But Kathern knew one way to get Donna to sit still. In return for the singing,

Donna wanted a goblin story. Kathern made them come close to the bed and told the story of a little boy who didn’t like saying prayers.

Onc’t they was a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers, --

So when he went to bed at nigh, a wayyy upstairs, His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl, An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wasn’t there at all! An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press, An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’wheres, I guess; But all they ever found was thist his pants an’ roundabout— An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you (hand grabs child) Ef you Don’t Watch Out!

Donna jumped every time on the git, as her mother’s hand grabbed her arm.

When she told the Little Orphant Annie poems to me when I was her age, I knew it was coming, but it sent needles into my feet every time. She memorized them and passed them to me and my brother. For decades I thought he made them up, but they belong to a turn of the 19th century Hoosier poet.

Bun was busy taking carpentry jobs and expanding the garden to sell corn. He took in a handful of chicks and a rooster, a goat, and tinkered constantly on tractors and no-run cars when he wasn’t fishing. Bun pulled parts and sold them to others who needed something cheaper than ordering from the Shell Station garage in Bedford. In the evenings, he left the house often, going out visitin’ like he used to do before the war.

He had lots of brothers and sisters, and Ermel, to catch up with. He was home for dinner every night, cooked by Karen and Donna who were little helpers of women from

church who came to prepare food. Births and deaths. The food came in from all directions.

This time Bun slept in another room while Kathern was pregnant. She was visited by her sisters, too. She had six – Ruby, Wilma Jean, Nellie, Janet, Pattie, and

Juanita. Ruby was also pregnant, but not as far along as Kathern. It was as if Kathern had traded places with Bun after the war, stuck in a cofferdam.

***

In Spice Valley, the rumor mill was a mean old mister, sparing no one save the angels – and at times it seemed the cherubs who came with food were the harbingers of the gossip from which Kathern always turned away. Now she was a captive audience.

One of the churchwomen let it slip that she’d heard from another someone that Sister

Mounce and Kathern’s husband were becoming a bit too friendly. Sister Mounce was seen with Bun somewhere but not exactly knowing for sure they didn’t want to point any fingers. They all had what Kathern called the runnin’-offs of the mouth, an expression usually reserved for those with diarrhea and on the trot for an outhouse.

Kathern had never had the gossip turned toward her. The news she kept from Bun, somehow, in her isolation, but was heard crying – a faint memory Donna and Karen had of that time.

What some didn’t know about Sister Mounce’s husband Greenie Mounce was any slight hint of misbehavior on the part of his wife was met with severe beatings. Her daughter Sharon told me she remembered her mother on the floor of the bedroom often, not able to move for days at a time. Greenie Mounce was also a man of white

fabric, seen in his closet by one of my cousins who’d seen pictures and recognized the shapes. The Mounces also had a relative who, like Bun, had a nickname that would not die, but for different reasons. They called him Chicken Feathers. Seems he was fonder of his chickens than most men in Lawrence County. But that was just a rumor. A rumor until someone claimed to see him in the act – so still a rumor. Did not take long for that nickname to stick. Greenie Mounce was not happy being related by blood to a heathen who liked chicken other than for frying, and his wife probably caught the brunt of it.

Donna thought for years it was only the gossip that hurt her mother. It was her sister Brenda who solidified the truth years later. She said the rumor tore Kathern up inside. Other women said there was nothing to it and that the other old bitties needed to mind their business and worry about their own husbands. Sister Mounce was no adulteress.

Kathern took that pain. She held it in her heart like an agoggled ghost rippling in watery rings for it was not Sister Mounce who was being friendly to her husband.

What finally came to light – do not ask me how – was that Bun was having an affair while Kathern was experiencing the difficult pregnancy. The affair, it seems, was not with a church Sister, but her blood sister Nellie, who was married with children of her own. It may be they were often thrown together when Nellie visited to check on

Kathern, but they are all three gone now, and gone, too, are the details of the discovery.

What Donna thought haunted Kathern for years was only a vicious rumor about

Bun having an affair while she was pregnant with her fifth child. She told me the story several times when we discussed her experiences in Spice Valley growing up. I was at

Bun’s church enough times to know how it worked. I saw it happen. Being shy to speak to adults I did not know, I was invisible to them. I often overheard vicious things being said about my cousins, and the Early family who had two boys with Muscular

Dystrophy. Like that Jesus must be punishing them for something.

My brother Cal remembers and puts it better than I understood. “That when

Jesus was called to show a sign that he was with the congregation but there was none, it was the congregation’s fault. Someone there was not truly pure and certainly not a believer. So if [Bubbie and Randy] weren’t cured, someone there was sleeping with the devil.”

Many times, secret lies turned to the Early family. Both boys attended Bun’s church regularly, and I felt the presence of evil when I heard the gossipers talk. Bubby and Randy were decimated by MD, but tolerated everything. Randy was a good chess player from what I am told, but Bubby I remember the most, a bit plump, and loved church. He had light brown hair that was always disheveled in the way someone who leans his head back a lot makes it stick to his crown. He was as sweet and lovable as they come but I never knew what to say to him. I regret that now. I think about what he never had in his life – a girlfriend, losing his virginity, a bath without help, a driver’s license. I saw his tombstone when I was in my early thirties at Connerly-Switch

Cemetery, an oval picture of him smiling under glass attached to granite. Bun often had him come up to the area in front of the pew to sing. His favorite was B – I – B – L – E.

One Sunday morning while I was there, he sang the same two verses for nearly fifteen minutes. No one moved, not a chirp was heard. No instruments joined him.

The B-I-B-L-E,

Yes that's the book for me,

I stand alone on the Word of God,

The B-I-B-L-E.

The B-I-B-L-E,

Yes that's the book for me,

I read and pray, trust and obey,

The B-I-B-L-E.

Bubbie was the sweet prince of my memories as a child, broken but cheerful and tolerant. The gossip was vicious and I hoped the parents never heard it. Nevertheless, as things went in Spice Valley at the time, they were likely scorned and disinvited to many gatherings but for Bun’s inclusion when he thought to do so. I imagine Kathern at the receiving end of this evil, part of which turned out to be true and I wonder about my own philosophy. Men I ‘ve known always said they did not want to know if their girlfriends or wives cheated, and the women who said of course they would rather know if their husbands strayed. I felt the same way. Maybe ignorance really is the bliss

I’ve heard tell about. It might have at least spared Kathern during a difficult pregnancy.

And the hell of this goes on. Kathern’s pregnancy was being complicated by the crippling process that had begun during World War II. With the discovery of Bun’s affair with her own sister, it was more than she could bear. She miscarried the baby.

Kathern’s pregnant sister Ruby carried her child to term, the baby lived, but

Ruby died of milk leg soon after the pregnancy. Kathern and Ruby had been close.

Their brother, Commodore, who raised them as if they were his own, took in Ruby’s four children. In the same year, Bun’s mother Loda Craig died. Ermel quickly remarried. Loda’s gravestone has her name and the dates and only one word to describe her . . . Mother. It is a word that tells me everything and nothing about her soul.

I think of Kathern now, pregnant, madly in love with Bun, ill and isolated, and betrayed by her sister Nellie and Bun, losing Ruby within a short span. She suffered another miscarriage in 1948. She stuck it out with Bun as there was no divorce in that area, but as her health grew worse, she began to rely more on her two daughters who were to grow up faster than most children. Her two sons, Eddie and Charles, stuck with their father after the War, learning to farm and tinker, as well as picking up musical instruments. In a way, Kathern lost them, too. The worse the rheumatoid arthritis got, the less she was able to go outdoors and another of her loves died. Gone was the Indigo

Bunting and the White-breasted Nuthatch. She no longer had the chance to spot a lime

Kirtland Warbler against the green leaves of a white oak, or talk to a Cowbird or ignore a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.

It is a span of years that has little known day-to-day history, from after the war until their next daughter was born.

The Milk Man’s Child

I feel like acting my age I'm past the stage of merely turtle doving I'm in no mood to resist And I insist the world owes me a loving

The Andrew Sisters “I Wanna Be Loved”

The same year of the Great Brinks Robbery, James Dean got his big break in a Pepsi commercial, the Korean Conflict began, Americans had eight million TV sets in households, and McCarthy began his persecution of suspected communists. A few years before, Bun quit smoking and drinking and began to attend his father’s church again. It was 1950 and Kathern carried her seventh pregnancy to term and gave birth to

Brenda Lorene in July. The birth was difficult as Kathern’s legs had started their twist into opposition to each other, her hands were noticeably knotted at the knuckles and

finger joints, and her back was no longer straight. Her new baby had red hair and green eyes, and with Bun and Kathern both being brown-eyed and dark haired, no one knows where the green eyes came from. Bun had red in his bristles and hints of it in his arm hair, but Brenda was dark strawberry blonde.

Karen and Donna had learned to harmonize, play the piano, cook, sew, and clean. They could catch a chicken, burn the feathers off, scald and remove the feather bristles, and batter and fry it, too. The bus did not come out as far as their house, so they had to walk a few miles to catch a ride to the Huron school, a one room building that taught grades one through twelve together. Their coats were threadbare, their shoes flopped open at the soles, and if not for a slight height difference, might have been twins. There was never money for clothes or shots or dentists, though Bun was working steadily as Mitchell and the county grew around the booming Carpenter Bus Company.

A cousin told me Bun often went to Louisville, Kentucky to preach before and after he built his own church. He was not ordained until 1951 and the areas in Louisville he liked to visit were places I was told “no white person goes there” but this from a cousin who as an adult liked the word nigger. “There’s blacks, and then there’s niggers,” he told me once. Nevertheless, Bun was welcome at the Pentecost churches in

Louisville. My cousin went along when his parents let him and were not running him down with chores and restrictions. And apparently, Bun had a couple of friends in

Louisville, too. But that is all I know, lest I become like the church Sisters who knew

Kathern before she was too ill to attend services.

Brenda's early memories of Kathern were that those musical hands were arthritic to the point that she no longer played the mandolin, guitar, or piano. It was too painful.

Her fingers were not where they used to be and mashed against each other until only the tips and the thumbs were used to braid her hair. When Brenda was born, Kathern had given birth or miscarried seven times. According to Karen and Donna, Brenda was their sweet babydoll, a child with a cackling disposition and a toothy smile who loved to sing.

Donna told me a story that involved a squeaky, steel-coiled bed in Kathern's room. She swore she heard Brenda being made when she was six and Karen, eight years old, heard what was supposed to be a quiet walk into Kathern's bedroom, silence, then a coda of coils beneath a great deal of weight. Bun was thicker by then, and Kathern was big from sitting still with a body used to hard work.

"Karen and I started giggling. We couldn't stop. Karen asked how in the world could they put their bodies together. The look on her face was priceless, and I knew they were doing like the farm animals did," and at this point she'd make a smurch sound and shake her head left to right slowly.

"I guess Mom liked it. Dad would never make her do anything, but I think I peed myself laughing, or trying not to laugh."

I asked her what it sounded like once, and she tried to imitate the sound of the bed. Laughter started, we both turned red. Hard to imagine grandparents having sex, goes way beyond the whole parents doing it thing.

“Next day, Karen and I started calling it blues-in-the-night, an old Rosemary

Clooney song. Dad didn’t mind us singing the older tunes . . . take my word or the mocking bird, will sing a sadder kind of song, then, a man’s a two faced a man’s something that leaves you singing the blues in the night.”

She told me the story now and then, usually when she was deep into thinking about a phone conversation with Karen decades later. Eventually, as with all things

Indiana, her memory flushed away her pink cheeks, and she went silent for a while.

Then she would tell me another story, usually one about Kathern.

“There was an old fashioned iron, one of those you set on your stove to get it hot enough to use. I was warned, but one day I fiddled around while Mom was ironing and

I hit the ironing board. The iron slid all the way down her arm. She forgave me, and I was never whipped for it, I guess because she didn’t tell Dad.”

I heard the story at least fifty times, but it expressed Donna’s guilt about her mother’s condition being so wretched, I listened as if it was a new tale each time. It was like the letter Kathern wrote Bun during World War II that had Donna knocking down all the kitten forts her two brother made. She liked to see things fall.

It was the curse of poverty in a thin walled, Bun-built house, to have children half grown while Bun and Kathern were still trying to make more. But the Craig clan needed numbers in spite of the lack of funds, or Bun was to be seen as no man at all. So the blues-in-the-night kept coming. So the child who looked like no one else in the family arrived. Within another 18 months, Kathern had another miscarriage, then a stillbirth in early 1955 not carried to full term. I’ve never asked how the others were

disposed of in a family that poor with a life taken before seeing daylight and baptism. I do not want to know. I will leave that one to the wind.

When Brenda was nearly six and ready for first grade, Karen – eight years her senior – made her dress from red fabric with a white dot pattern and did her hair.

Brenda said going to school was the best thing in her world and it stayed that way for some time, but Bun was prone to relocating to Florida on a day’s notice. Bun often ran out of work when chopping wood by the rick in the harsh Indiana winters, when the carpentry work outdoors became impossible. His younger brother Wilbur who was called Wid – do not ask me why – had a church and steady work in Pinellas Park and

Sarasota. Bun made the United Pentecostal Church his home when they went to Florida.

The church was never a source of income for Bun, and Kathern and their children rarely had more than two days’ notice.

For the kids still in school, usually Charles, Karen, Donna, and Brenda, school records were not transported and education always took a backseat to Bun’s need for work. But for a few years, Brenda had her two older sisters, her mother, and school where she learned that with a pencil in her hand, she drew compulsively, another in a long line of daunted feminine talents in the Craig clan.

By the mid-50s, the maturity of the first two daughters and the mixture of rock and roll, had Karen and Donna ready to turn on the thrusters and run from Bun’s house as fast as possible. Bun was, finally, getting older, in his mid-40s when rockabilly hit the radio. His first daughters were starting to see men differently, in a way that Bun was not familiar. And the rock and roll naysayers were right in a way. The music of Charles,

Karen, Donna, and Brenda helped them find a separate identity – more so the female children of Bun and Kathern. This is never stated. It is an observation by someone who benefited from Donna’s love of music, a child of radio with an ear for the world that existed along the airwaves. It is all part of my rock and roll fantasy; one I have lived my entire life. There were times when music was all I had to hold onto, the only thing that gave me any pleasure or hope during the painful process of taking whatever the world threw my way. And I believe now as I always have, that rock and roll’s roots were what saved my mother Donna and my father Johnny. It propelled them up and away from the darker alternatives that lay before them.

Ignorance is an Open Door

If your heartaches seem to hang around too long And your blues keep getting bluer with each song Remember sunshine can be found behind a cloudy sky So let your hair down and go on and cry

Johnny Ray “Cry”

When I was little, my parents’ marriage was the stuff of romantic legend. My father, Johnny, met my mother when she had just turned 15 and he was 17. It was during another of those times when Bun ran out of local jobs and loaded up the household and migrated to Florida for work. Bun had a brother who lived on the Gulf

Coast side. They usually landed in a flat roofed, concrete block home with a yard full of cockleburs and poison ivy. The summer my parents met they were in Pinellas Park, and

Johnny was working at Wiley’s Bait Shop near John’s Pass in St. Petersburg. Bun liked to fish so they ran into each other. First Johnny met Karen and they dated a few times, but they didn’t last. So my father asked Donna on a date. Johnny was Elvis with green eyes. He was 6’2” tall with jet-black hair, cool clothes, a convertible, loved rock and roll and could lean against a car and ooze swagger. I was always told by my mother that she was a virgin until she married my Dad at the age of 16, and that she was head-over- heels in love, the whole shebang, and sex is great if you love someone like she loved my dad. She wanted two children, a boy first then a girl. That is exactly what she got. My father kissed my mother in front of us every day when he got home from work, a long, slow open mouth kiss with no tongue. My mother told me she didn’t like for him to use his tongue unless they were about to make love.

Charles and Johnny were friends first. Everyone knew Eddie was the oldest, mean one and Charles was the second, good brother who treated everyone with kindness. It didn’t hurt that he was a tall lank with a slicked back head of brown hair and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his shirt sleeve. But theirs was a young love that would not be stopped. It was forever in the rocking late 50s. And it was in this fairytale that I began to learn what it meant to be with someone.

It is amazing how thick they were – my rose-colored glasses.

***

When Donna was twelve years old, she was at home in Indiana from school not feeling well or taking care of her mother, probably both. There was always laundry to do on a scrub board in a tin washtub, clothes to hang on a Bun-rigged clothesline,

clothes to put away, dishes to wash, floors to scour, and mending. She was putting a pile of clothes in her brother’s bedroom, folding them neatly onto the made bed. There was an art to how she folded, great care was necessary though the clothes were usually hand-me-downs.

She stood folding, facing the bed. In a flash someone was behind her and she was shoved onto the bed with her skirt up in her face and her underwear pulled off. One big hand held her hands without trouble while the other got her legs spread. A guy was on top of her, trying to shove an erection into her. He missed. He never actually penetrated because she wouldn’t keep her legs spread. The ejaculation was all over her inner thighs. She was left there, skirt still over her head, in shock. Donna had no idea what had happened and did not know what to do. She found a rag and wet it, cleaning herself. The inside of her thighs and wrists were bruised.

That is the folk tale my father Johnny told me while we were in a car together in

Orange Park, Florida in 2002 a few years before he died. My parents had been divorced since 1976.

“You said . . . who the hell was it, Dad?”

“Your mama said it was an innocent thing, Charles or someone didn’t know what he was doing. She said he didn’t go inside her or anything and it happened just that one time.”

“Wait. Charles? Do you mean Eddie? Or was it a cousin? Not Grandpa, oh god no.” My heart felt gripped and bile was in my mouth. It was a question I never asked

my mother. Eddie was born six years before her and married young. Charles was the good brother and everyone was crazy about him. And Bun? Not in a million years.

“Dad.”

. . . . .

“Dad.”

“No no, it was probably Eddie or a cousin. What does it matter?”

“Are you kidding me? Because one is dead and the other one I hug when I see him. I might be in the same room with a guy who tried to rape Ma?”

“It was Eddie or a cousin. I just don’t always speak right since I’ve been sick.”

“Oh my god. Poor Ma.”

“You can’t tell her I told you.”

“Yeah. Thanks for that.”

I already knew I could not be the one to bring that up to her. But part of me devoured information like that, slimy things that really happened that no one tells you because you are always too young to understand. I had known for decades life was not the pretty picture drawn for me as a child simply by virtue of my own experiences.

I remember taking some silent time in the car, hand under my chin or rubbing my forehead as I stared out over Governor’s Creek on the overpass. Like Black Creek, the water was dark in the white-hot sun, murky and prone to sudden small zone flooding. Mullet flew across the bow of your boat, or even better, into your boat in sudden sinewy flight. I remember beginning to wonder how I swam at Dr.’s Inlet in

water like that when I was a kid. I didn’t care about moccasins or gator gars. I just wanted to be in the water where everything felt lighter.

Bun’s Indiana Hayloft circa 1954

Oh, life could be a dream (Sh-boom) If I could take you up in paradise up above (Sh-boom) If you would tell me I'm the only one that you love Life could be a dream, sweetheart

Crew Cuts “Sh-Boom”

As Bun’s clan was getting older, they learned to take Bun’s beatings, his slaps, his punches, and his sermons. Brenda was rarely hit when she was little, but when the two oldest children, both boys, were going at it daily, it became clear the oldest, Eddie, was

not to be cured. Bun took his sons fishing at the quarry before some ignoramus dove off the high wall and died when he hit a jut of limestone beneath the black surface below.

Naturally filled with water when blasted out of the earth, it was a snake haven. Snakes lived in the clefts and under overhangs, sluiced through the water toward the rowboat so they spent as much time smacking the water with the tip of a pole as they did dropping a flat, oval sinker to the bottom for catfish. But Eddie had to be better than

Charles and he was mouthy. Eventually they took separate trips with Bun, sometimes fishing a creek or taking a long drive to a Wabash basin tributary. But Bun was the natural fisherman. He caught the most every time from what I’ve been told. Catfish were strung up and hooked to a latch on the outside of the boat, skewered but alive.

And he was always a Preacher, a fisher of men. Words were his test line, and the bible his bobber.

Karen and Donna had the fun part, the thick, slime stained board where the head had a nail hammered into it with one swing. Catfish skinned, gutted, and chunked, rolled in cracker and corn meal. Whatever vegetable was fresh or canned on the side, and a cast iron skillet full of skittering strips in hot lard.

Karen and Donna were responsible for taking care of Brenda, too, and meals, clean ups, laundry, school, helping the boys with the farming, chicken plucking, and goat milking. When Charles was old enough, he was allowed to drive the big tractor and take over the fields and learned to work a sawmill outfit. Charles learned how to handle the Alliss-Chalmer, gravel the driveway and smooth it with a cutting blade attachment. He grew muscular and tan, Eddie grew bigger and meaner. Eddie had

taken to the guitar like nobody’s business and other boys – cousins and friends – came over to play along or just listen after school. They’d sit in the barn, usually in the hayloft on an unbroken bale. He was a pick man with magic thumbs. Charles was a frustrated beginner. They fought constantly over Eddie’s bravado, forever letting Charles know he was never going to play as well. Between the guitar playing and the sawmill, Eddie was a constant source of torture.

When Karen or Donna scrubbed the kitchen, Eddie found the biggest, thickest mud puddle possible and walked across their clean floor. He was rotten. Bun never did anything save the shotgun incident during a full Eddie rage. No one believed he’d shoot

Eddie, but only Bun knows for sure. It is a secret he took to his grave. But there are one or two things that, if silence were not the code for women in Spice Valley, may have made Bun reload that shotgun and run mad through the Knobs of Indiana.

Families were friends if the parents were friends. But Bun’s family was a preacher’s family and he ran a church of his own, so he was everyone’s friend. And there were Bun’s brothers and sisters and Kathern’s siblings, their children, parents, and an interminable amount of cousins. Add the church brothers and sisters and nearly everyone in and around Spice Valley knew, or was related to, Bun and Kathern. Their children played with the cousins when families planned a get together, and they grew up forming strong but sometimes tenuous bonds of shared poverty. Boredom was commonplace in spite of all the busy work.

Donna was known to feel the wrenches of loneliness often.

“I love to walk and I was no different when I was growing up. I walked in the woods a lot. We lived so far away from the nearest kids my age, and when someone visited I had to cook and clean. It wasn’t fun . . . but I started naming the trees. I talked to them like they were human, I tell you what. If anyone heard me they would have sent me to Chattahoochee,” she said. I heard the story often as a child. Every state had its infamous insane asylum, and ours was Chattahoochee. Donna made the saddest story end with a chuckle. She was funny that way.

“That’s why I love to do yardwork. I miss the trees if I’m cooped up for very long. And whenever I could get away from Dad, I went. Karen was the same, but she stuck close to Mom a lot. So everyone thinks Karen was the only one to take care of

Mom. I never get any credit for it.”

Karen and Donna were both gardeners in their own right, but on a smaller scale.

Karen grew towering sunflowers, my mother kept a neat yard, a lemon bush, cucumbers, and watermelons. But Karen took refuge from the outdoors and stayed close to Kathern, a story I heard often and never understood. The Karen I knew had a green thumb and was always outdoors at reunions. Maybe the inside became her safety zone. But around 1954, Bun had a large barn with a loft and a lean-to on the side where

Bun’s tractor was parked. At times they had a cow, and rolled hay could be sold for extra money. The barn had a loft of loose hay, and Karen may have tended the cow or the goat and did what was considered by Bun as goof-off. But bringing the cow in from the field to the barn had to be done before dark.

It happened that Karen was in the barn with the lean-to while Kathern’s sister

Nellie – Damnation Nellie – sent her boy Ronnie to run with Eddie. Eddie and Ronnie were of the same age and got along fairly well. Karen was probably coaxing the cow into the barn when Eddie and Ronnie entered. So the three of them were there, goofing- off if only for a moment. The boys went up to the loft and Karen followed and it was there, in the sweet dead odor of hay, that Eddie and Ronnie were suddenly done playing nice. The two of them overpowered Karen and they pushed her down onto the stemmed animal fodder and raped her.

She never spoke of it for decades, and only to one of her sisters. How she recovered, the remnants of the violent incest borne in silence, is a story only she could have told but she is gone. Now it is a fragmented memory – a disturbing murmur – in a barn that fell back to the earth long ago.

Eddie and Ronnie were never faced with punishment, nor were they faced with

Bun and the righteous hands that grasped his pulpit. But she was not the first of the sisters to face a silent fear, one so deep it ended in a young girl’s idea of the shame of saying it out loud. But the first to experience the vile intrusion, unknown to Karen, was her younger sister who never spoke of it either but to her daughter after the rapist died.

I wrote it down. It lies – still – soundless on the page.

***

Johnny had the folktale wrong. Donna was held down on the bed while someone tried to force penetration. What he had been told, it was his wife Donna’s confession, a crooked tale sunk so far into shattered glass, it was at that moment, Donna’s truth.

She lied about her age to my father. She was not twelve that day in her brother’s bedroom, neatly folding clothes into sorted piles. She was eight years old. And it became systematic. When the rape ended, she was twelve years, six months, and had begun to menstruate.

The shared but unspoken fear between the sisters, the imminent monster, was finally spoken from Donna’s mouth. “If you don’t stop, I will tell.”

The goblins, it seems, have many faces.

The Purple Child

I would beg and steal Just to feel Your heart Beating close to mine.

Elvis Presley Love Me

If you see me coming, better step aside A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died One fist of iron, the other of steel If the right one don't a-get you then the left one will You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt

Tennessee Ernie Ford 16 Tons

As Brenda began first grade, Donna turned twelve and six months, and Kathern was close to having her last birth. From the time Brenda’s memories of her mother’s hands took root, Kathern had begun to lose abilities like standing to cook or iron, disciplining her children, walking up or down steps, and especially, going outdoors to use the outhouse or enjoy birdsong and a nightfire. The rheumatoid arthritis feasted on her body. Her hands became small, knotted outcroppings of jutting stone, her wrists unpliable. The twisting traveled down her back and into her hips and legs. Either she refused medical help due to Bun’s feelings about wasting money on doctors, or because she saw herself as a burden – though I’ve been told later there were pill bottles in her bedroom.

Without serious medical attention from the early stages, Kathern’s lack of ability led to plumpness, then obesity. This made the pressure on her bones and joints worse.

She had but small pleasures left, her bible and a pair of donated reading glasses, and long, difficult attempts at embroidering and crossword puzzles. Making clothes was a thing of the past. As her daughters Karen and Donna did the cooking and sewing,

Kathern was known to complain.

“Ohhh, you girls. If I could get up and do it myself it’d be done right.”

As Donna grew, she avoided the Craig thickness. She was like a weed, long and skinny, with a big toothy grin. I heard the story many times of her nickname when she was eight, one from her mother and another later in life.

“Donna, you’re so skinny, you look like Icabod Crane,” Kathern teased. And again, the name stuck. Just like Bun stuck for Roy twenty years before.

“Hey, Icabod. I can’t see ya, are ya behind a tree?” Charles taunted.

“Icabod, yer just the pith of one of those blow downs we cut at the mill,” and

“yer nothin’ but a butt off,” Eddie’d say. She told me she had no idea what a butt off was at the time, but mostly she did not ask for fear her father would whomp her with his fist for using the word butt. Bun forgave Eddie anything, but not his other children.

And the seed of jealousy and retaliation was rooted in his younger brother and his two younger sisters. By the time Brenda was six, Eddie wasn’t around as much, but what she did know of him, she didn’t like.

Brenda taught herself most of what she knows. She, as ample as she was, was a natural at two musical instruments; the piano, and the accordion, the second of which was a complete hoot when she played. She wrapped her big thick arms through the straps and sat, partially bracing the large instrument on her lap in between songs. She pumped the creases and folds in a wave, held keys with her left hand and pushed buttons with her right, and kept that monstrosity breathing while she sang. Her long strawberry hair was rarely put up, but when she played it was clipped off of her face.

As she got older, she didn't need to see the accordion at all, she simply felt her way

through it. When she found a pencil and held it in her hands, she could draw like she’d had lessons at an art school.

Bun didn’t complain when his children learned the piano, lap-harp, guitar, banjo, or vocal harmony, but it was never to be used for anything but music sent up to Jesus.

Brenda secretly adapted all kinds of songs to that living breathing instrument. As she got older she only got better, picking up the guitar as well.

But when Brenda was six, her years of being the youngest ended – not so much with a bang, but more like a forgetting. The year was 1956, and the radio in Bun’s house was on when he was gone, playing music not found amongst his old stack of Victrola records. What he didn’t know was Kathern had a feel for the new sounds coming out, liked Elvis because he sang gospel like Tennessee Ernie Ford, and let her son Charles and daughters Karen and Donna listen to an Indianapolis station that syndicated an early popular music show called Bandstand. Donna always said the lack of their music when Bun was home was, for the most part, something to snicker about. Bun listened to gospel stations, and was particular about which ones he felt sent the right message. But they knew what he didn’t know, that rock and roll and a boy named Elvis, along with two boys named Everly, set his daughters on fire. Charles started letting his hair grow until he formed a small ducktail, rolled up his sleeve with a pack of cigarettes against his tan, muscular arms, and tried to find better clothes for himself and his sisters. In the world outside the Craig house, Charles was likable.

People just gave him things, but he’d work, too. So his sisters’ skirts poofed out from his their small waists and rolled, cuffed white socks with loafers were worn

beneath the spread of the hems. Loafers that didn’t flap when they walked, hand me downs from another family weren’t as bad as hand me downs from a church, worn by an older sister, then outgrown and passed down to another sister again.

Donna had a crush on Phil Everly, Karen had one on Don. And Elvis, well, what more can be said other than my mother’s words.

“I’d never seen a man who moved like that, what a voice. I liked him so much, I married a guy who looked just like him.”

The world was, finally, coming to life through music, even if it was behind Bun’s back. Kathern wasn’t known for lying, as far as I know she didn’t offer up the information and Bun never asked.

By then, the first used television had made it into the house.

“It must have been 1955 because all my friends at school already had one for years,” Brenda said. “I know the Mickey Mouse show was on after school.”

By then, Bandstand had been a television show for three years. When they were lucky and Bun was gone when it aired, the older children were plastered to their seats in the living room. But Brenda absorbed it all from a slight distance, waiting for her own time to come and another wave of rock and roll. It was the last year she was the youngest child, and she ritually watched Mickey Mouse and the Mouseketeers.

I’ve never heard any stories about Eddie joining them. He was probably in the barn with a lantern practicing guitar and banjo. He had a natural talent for both and it became another source of competition between Bun’s two sons. But Charles didn’t pick up the guitar until he was married with three kids and two more to come. Everyone

said Eddie was the best picker in Lawrence County before he left home. That meant

Charles never heard the end of it, and in that way, music was fuel for a fire that never stopped burning between them.

But all of it was done under the impress of gospel. Karen and Donna both sang beautifully and learned to harmonize. Donna taught herself to play the piano, as was tradition on both Bun’s and Kathern’s side. When a service with Ermel was attended, there was always a woman at the ivories, a devout and somewhat homely picture of what a girl should want to be. Eddie’s natural abilities began to put him on the raised platform of Ermel’s church until Bun built his own. Charles wanted up there. He sang with a lush, bass voice and sometimes when Karen and Donna tried to harmonize,

Charles put the bottom in. They sang before and after dinner, too, but only songs from the hymnal Bun used. But the Pentacosts of Spice Valley were rollin’ long before Elvis.

The singing was joyous and usually double quick. There were very few contemporary arrangements, just foot jamming run around the pews hollering, hands in the air. It made the whole church vibrate with thunderous revelry. It was all good, the ground beneath the Spice Valley church in Lawrence County could hold a cement truck in full turn.

The same year that television came in the house, Kathern was pregnant with her last child, Anita Faye. It was to be the most dangerous and the end of her birthing years.

The baby was as twisted inside her womb as Kathern’s joints and legs were on the outside. She was bedridden for most of the pregnancy, and often her daughters took turns fanning their mother, trying to make her happy. They read bible verses to her as

she convalesced. Of Kathern’s birthings, only one was in the hospital in Bedford during

World War II. Donna was born under military pay, but the rest were home births.

The pregnancy began in the early days of December, 1955 and past due by

August 15th. That summer saw the top of 98 ̊ before summer was out. Deep into the devil’s grin of that summer, sweat bees buzzing and stinging, a lethargic mule and overheating radiators, Kathern finally went into labor in her bed. As the labor began,

Charles was sent to fetch what we would call a midwife. She was a woman who’d given birth and overseen births of children until everyone lost count of how many she tended, and no one remembers her name. She is a shadowy figure in a goblin story hunkered near Kathern’s twisted legs.

But the labor was long and Kathern suffered unimaginable pain. Getting her legs parted, her older daughters heard her holler through the first night. Brenda was sent to

Ermel’s house. By the second night, Kathern’s screams were more frequent and another woman fetched to help. By the time that baby was pulled out of her, the umbilical cord had wrapped itself around the baby’s neck several times. The infant’s face was purple and suffocation almost took her but the women got her out, cut the cord and unwrapped the baby from its grip. Slowly, the baby’s face went pink and finally, the house heard the wail of life from Kathern’s room. Anita Faye, born August 28, 1956 became the last remnant of the married life Roy knew, and the expectations and demands he placed on Kathern.

Anita quickly became known as Nita, and almost as quickly, the spoiled bookend to their first son Eddie.

She was rotten, fitful, uncooperative, and blessed by parents who were nearly done dispensing beatings. Nearly. There was so much life happening by the time Nita was pried out, only Brenda was left to endure her immaturity after Nita turned four.

When she was born, Eddie was already married to Norma, who quickly learned to endure the worst that a Lawrence County marriage had to offer.

Eddie’s Book of Cautionary Tales

And the wolves will be tame And the lion shall lay down by the lamb And the beasts from the wild Shall be lit by a child And I'll be changed, changed from this creature that I am

Elvis Presley – Christmas Album Version “Peace in the Valley”

When Eddie was still a juvenile and two of his sisters still at home but younger than he,

Eddie built a reputation that lasted throughout his life. Even later, when he found calling in Tennessee at a local church and tried to mend his ways, I remember Donna remarking on his change.

“Well, he was a rotten brother, but I tell myself at least at the end of his life he tried to help people,” she said with sincerity.

The irony is I did not know the half of it at that point, only the stories of his behavior growing up before he got married, and the few that saw daylight. And now I know, she did not know about Karen and Eddie, at least not according to the one person Karen unburdened her soul to.

As Eddie began to move onto his own life, he looked like he’d dent the front of a

Freightliner. He ate more than the rest. The trick was to get to the table before he demolished everything in a household that rarely did better than a few scraps of ham in the beans. Eddie and Charles moved to serious fistfights. One particularly hot summer day, Eddie had been at Charles for hours. They worked together at a sawmill with Bun, and Eddie had a habit of pointing out every mule track or crooked cut Charles made.

The jawing continued in the car on the way home, until a shotgun lay leveled in Bun’s hands. Bun pointed the barrels at his oldest son.

“Either yer goin’ down by your own speed, or yer layin’ down by this gun. You choose, Eddie,” Bun said.

Eddie, seething, red faced registered the barrels mentally and went white physically. It was the only time anyone had seen fear register on his ruddy face. He stopped, stared at Bun and never said another word.

Eddie eventually courted a local woman named Norma. In 1956 while Kathern was pregnant with Nita, Bun presided over Eddie and Norma’s wedding. Eddie and

Norma lived for a time in a tiny trailer on Bun’s property, but it mysteriously caught fire and burned down. Later Bun and Eddie built a small cabin on the rise of Bun’s land.

The cabin is a spooky memory of someone else’s memory – a place I have never visited and no longer exists. Like most things in Southern Indiana, it was eventually abandoned, along with assorted tractor attachments, cars without engines, an old Coca-

Cola machine, and various lengths of warped and sickly planks of wood. The cabin rotted and eventually fell back to the earth where the wood and thick paper wrapping used for insulation crumbled and mildewed into the soil. The blood from the floors and walls went into the soil as well.

My mother and her older sister Karen took supplies to Eddie and his wife

Norma. They usually took baking supplies and meat if there was any to spare, dry goods and the occasional luxury item – toilet paper – for the outhouse. Norma often felt ill and there was no running water but there was a constant but tamed spring on the property. A cement well was placed in the ground to pool up a supply from the spring, and makeshift hosing put into place for filling buckets and bottles. Donna hiked to the cabin whenever her chores allowed or she was not lost in a cornfield with her brother

Charles – a source of endless irritation for Bun.

Norma was pregnant with their first child and during one of Donna’s visits.

Norma was doing her best to put a dinner together for Eddie. He came home while

Donna was still there and a normal person might hide frustration or at least turn down the simmer burner in his head, but Eddie was a powder keg and that day. Norma was the unwitting matchstick. He was not happy with the result of Norma’s cooking, or maybe he was mad because his hair was so thick. The details are sketchy but Donna was there to see Eddie raise his blood pressure and explode on his pregnant wife.

Eddie threw Norma onto the floor. With no shotgun leveled at him, there was no way to get his attention. He railed. Norma bent and slouched with her back to him, as if she knew what was coming. Eddie began kicking, his stocky thick leg as powerful as

John Henry’s sledgehammer against the steam drill. Norma cried out, shrieking for

Eddie to stop.

Eddie gave Norma another hard kick in the lower back. Donna tried to get between her and Eddie’s wrath, but I did not think to ask her how. When he had his fill, he left Norma there on the floor in their cabin kitchen. The beating cost them a child.

But those unspoken rules, the ones that cause silence and lack of action toward those who deserve punishment, were at these moments handed down through the generations. Eddie’s list of tortures became Norma’s constant excuses of not feeling well enough to leave the house. I saw her in Bun’s church a few times but at family get- togethers, she did not have much to say. I remember her not coming around to see us but seeing instead her son Duane, the receiver of my unrequited childhood crush, and

their daughters Susie and Cindy. One of them would tell me Norma wasn’t feeling well and was at home in bed. Nevertheless, there are more stories to tell.

We learned not to get our hand or fingers in the way of a closing car door because Norma had broken all her fingers once not paying attention to what she was doing.

“Oh, he held her hand in place and shut the door on her hand just for meanness,”

Brenda told me. The lesson was repeated and though I’d heard it a hundred times, my fingers were in the wrong place once or twice and I remember screaming, but no broken bones. Then the message was echoed by Donna when I was little.

“Ah-oh. Just like Norma. You OK?”

Brenda said Eddie knocked her off the front porch of their house when she was around three years old. Charles saw it happen and went after Eddie. Brenda watched them fistfight in the yard.

“But Eddie would never act like that when Dad was around. He knew Dad would beat his ass. Eddie was mean,” Brenda said.

And when crossing a railroad track, be sure your doors are locked and your seatbelt is on because Norma fell out of the car when she and Eddie were going over the tracks on the way to Grandpa’s. Instead of letting go of the door, she held on and got all scraped up before Eddie realized what had happened.

Brenda knew the real story, the one that became a folktale used as a warning.

The road going over the tracks had not been paved and it was all hard surface and gravel with a huge dip before and after the track. There were no functioning arms

or lights to stop cars, just an old RR Crossing sign that leaned westward. Eddie and

Norma were on their way to Bun’s house because they were staying there for a brief time. Eddie heard a train coming and stopped the car near the sign.

Eddie told Norma to open her door. There was shouting involved, Norma heard the train, too. Eddie watched it coming while she opened the door. In what must have been sheer terror, Norma watched the train get closer as Eddie kept his foot on the brake and shoved Norma out of the car just as the train was dangerously close, then hit the gas pedal, spewing gravel, just in time to get the car away out of the way.

Norma knew to refuse Eddie was worse than doing what he asked. Instead of making a run for it, her fear kept her hand on the inside door handle. She was dragged down the dip with the tires screeching, on her back and rolling sideways. Eddie did not stop the car. If the train didn’t kill her, Bun’s house being any farther away would have.

It was a left and a couple hundred yards to his driveway down old Highway 60.

Eddie got out of his car, Norma hanging from the passenger side, clothes shredded. Her arms, legs, back, and face were bleeding. Karen and Donna got her into the house and with Kathern, they got her into bed and tried to dab the gravel from the wounds. Eddie wouldn’t pay for a doctor, and Norma wouldn’t ask for one.

“Eddie shoved her out the door onto the RR track so she’d die and it could be blamed on her. Like she just fell out when he was in a hurry,” Brenda told me. “I remember it, but I was little.”

Later in 1956 while Kathern was seven months pregnant with Nita, Eddie and

Norma were at Bun’s house. Brenda saw Eddie punch Norma so hard she landed several feet away. She lay in a fetal position on the hard floor and cried for hours.

“I was six years old and I just kept wondering – Why isn’t anyone helping her?

Why is everyone acting like it didn’t happen? Karen, Donna, Mom, and Charles, they were all there and no one helped her!”

Knowing what we knew as I wrote down her words, neither Brenda nor I had an answer. I can only guess that what a husband did to his wife was not something to interfere with, and that the females present were afraid of Eddie. None of it provides comfort from the picture of the scene in my head. There is no escaping the knowing, those haunting truths living in my imagination.

Karen, Donna, and Brenda witnessed this event. By then Karen and Donna knew the dangers that lurked everywhere in Spice Valley. There was no respite at home, nor at their one room school house.

There’s a story that is humorous in the retelling but worrying in its timing. When

Karen was just beginning to develop – and all the Craig girls got started early – she and

Donna were at that one room schoolhouse in Huron and the boys noticed everything.

There was a family in Spice Valley called the Blakes, George and Deanna (Early).

They had a son close to Karen’s age named James Blake but everyone called him

Skeeter.

One day at school, Skeeter was sitting to Karen’s left as she was taking lesson notes. He leaned toward her and pointed to his pants zipper, which was holding back an erection, and spoke to Karen.

“Wanna climb Skeeter’s mountain?”

No word on whether Karen ran screaming out of the room or if perhaps, she politely said no thank you.

Close to the same time as Skeeter’s inquiry, Bun let his children have a puppy.

The puppy wandered off one day and Karen and Donna went walking down an old road looking for the pup. They walked by Bob Terrell, a somewhat tall, dark haired fellow who eventually married one of Greenie’s daughters. Donna spoke to him.

“You seen our pup?”

Apparently, Mr. Terrell heard “You wanna fuck?” because he began unzipping his pants.

And so it went. Boys, men, brothers, preachers, fathers, cousins, and neighbors.

In their world, all of them were either violent, perverted, skewed, or dangerous, lurking strangers.

But there is one beam of light that found Karen and Donna around the same time. The Everly Brothers with their Kentucky accents and rockabilly smoothness. They become more important because Kathern had taught her daughters to harmonize and their infatuation with the two young Everlys and a song they sang early in their career gave the two young women a crumb of self-awareness and satisfaction.

In Bedford, due north of Mitchell but still in Lawrence County, there was a talent show and the first place prize was $25. Whenever Bun was not home, Karen and Donna began practicing harmony to “Bye-Bye Love.” As the story goes, they won and split the money. I have no details from Donna’s repetition of the story, I can not say whether

Bun knew or how they got to Bedford, but I would give a piece of my soul to have seen them perform. I wish I had asked what she did with her share. The sad part of it is, they needed so many things, they probably had to use it to buy a blouse and skirt, a pair of shoes without holes, or maybe feminine needs.

“When we menstruated, we were lucky to find an old rag!” I was told once. I shuddered. I hadn’t thought to wonder how being that poor and being female was managed in those moments.

But after I shuddered, I realized I had just learned how lucky I had been.

The Dixie Highway

Well you can talk about your Julie and your Peggy Sue You can keep your Miss Molly and your Mary Lou When it comes to the chicken or to doin' the bop I got a girl they call the queen of the hop

Bobby Darin “Queen of the Hop”

When 1956 moved into Fall, the work dried up and Bun headed back to Florida with the family in tow. But Charles sat this one out. He begged to stay and finish high school in

Indiana. A family that knew him offered to take him in and Bun relented. As far as I know, he was the first in the family to finish high school, though the background on

Kathern’s education is sketchy. Donna used to say he stayed partly because Eddie did not finish and got married when he turned 17, and it was one thing Charles had on him

. . . smarts.

Charles graduated in spring, 1957. The family returned to Indiana. Donna reconnected with a friend from school named Sharon Mounce and another named

Chelsea Moore. Sharon and Charles were sweet on each other.

Chelsea had a glass eye. Her parents dropped her off on the weekend to spend the night with Donna occasionally and their friendship became close.

“We laughed a lot. We’d get tickled and sometimes Dad would yell ‘You Girls quit that cacklin’ now’. But we were out in the barn one night just after dark and we got so tickled over I don’t know what, we were about to pee. We were bent over, holding

our sides and trying to breathe. Chelsea laughed so hard, I heard her gasp,” Donna said. “I thought she’d stepped on a nail or something but she kept laughing and trying to talk.”

“Don . . . Donna . . . oh, no . . . Donna”

“What?”

“I . . . I laughed so hard, my eye popped out. Help me find it.”

That was it. Donna peed on the barn floor in the corner, then still laughing, got down on her knees to help find her eye, goading Chelsea.

“Cain’t your eye see where you are?”

“Stop making me laugh.” Chelsea could not stop either.

“It ain’t like yer any more blind than you were. I hope I didn’t pee on it.”

They found the eye, covered with bits of dirt and hay, a story repeated to me by request from the time I was six years old. This one I remember. This one I relish.

“She wasn’t like the school girls in Florida. One girlfriend I had quit talking to me because I said something about testifying in church. She said I was one of those footwashing people and didn’t speak to me again.”

***

They left again in 1959. This trip they landed in a flat roofed, concrete house in

Pinellas Park. They were a short drive from St. Petersburgh and a place where Tampa

Bay spilled into the Gulf of Mexico called John’s Pass. Bun, Kathern, Charles, Karen,

Donna, Brenda, and Nita inhabited the small three-bedroom house. Charles had his

own car and that meant a bit of freedom he shared with his two oldest sisters. Charles was drawing the attention of every female friend Karen and Donna made.

“Does he have a girl?”

“He has a car?”

“What kind of music does he like?”

Charles and Bun still liked to fish though Bun complained Charles wasn’t working hard enough. They eventually found their way to Wylie’s Bait Shop near

John’s Pass. Cal Wylie had taken a young boy under his wing whose father had died in

New York in 1956 and relocated with his mother to St. Petersburgh. He was a tall, black haired guy with a short ducktail and a penchant for Elvis songs named Johnny. He and

Charles hit it off right away.

That is how Johnny came to meet Bun and Charles’ sisters. Which leads to another story worth telling. Johnny asked Karen out on a date, but knew enough from

Charles to ask Bun if it was OK. They were allowed to go out during the day, but Karen had to be home before dark. But everything changed that December.

On the second of December, 1959, Bun was standing on a saw horse but lost his balance. The fall broke his leg and he was in a cast that went from the top of his foot to the inside of his upper thigh, leaving him dangling room, then reached around his lower abdomen and half of his torso. Karen and Donna recounted that it was the most miserable they’d ever seen Bun, and he was sure to spread his misery to anyone within earshot.

Brenda recalls “I know he was waited on hand and foot. I tried not to get around him too much. He wasn’t working but he still managed to walk to church every

Sunday.”

I’ve heard this story from two of Bun’s daughters. Donna said it wasn’t as hot in

December but with a full cast on, all he did was complain. Mom couldn’t help him so

Karen and I had to do it. This was also when Karen and Donna learned a secret about

Bun.

“Well, we always had to do his wash, but he couldn’t empty his pockets very well,” Donna told me. “He left his wallet in his pants once. There were four one hundred dollar bills in it and here we were with old, holey shoes, hand me down clothes that didn’t fit. All I could think about was when I was thirteen in Indiana and had a tooth so rotten I couldn’t stand the pain. I mean it hurt. Finally his sister Lois came and got me and paid for a dentist. It was infected. I remember she turned around when she got me in the car and yelled at Dad.”

“TURKEY.”

“That was the first time I ever saw a woman stand up to Dad. I loved her for it.”

Not to say that Bun’s 1959 broken leg was an omen of any sort. To Bun that is sacrilege. But it doesn’t change the impact February 3, 1959 had on my mother.

“I remember it so well,” Donna told me. “I cried for days. When Buddy Holly died, and Richie Valens who sang that song “Oh, Donna” and the Big Bopper. I learned the Jitterbug to Big Bopper’s ‘Chantilly Lace’ and Richie’s ‘Come on Let’s Go.’ It was like the world went gray.”

This was an event I experienced with her years later thanks to Don McLean.

Between Bun’s broken leg and early rock and roll’s saddest day, that last year of the 1950s, the Craig household began a shift that spilled into 1960 – that magical year of

John F. Kennedy and new hope for the impoverished. But the reach of that war never settled into Lawrence County, Indiana. It remained a place that Bun’s daughters wanted to escape.

1960 – 1995

A Good Year to Be Hitched

He has gone away to live in that bright city He’s preparing me a mansionthere I know

Elvis Presley “In My Father’s House”

I found a thrill to press my cheek to A thrill that I have never known

Etta James “At Last”

As Bun recovered from his broken leg in Florida, they stayed put longer than usual. The winter ended and the first summer without southern Indiana brought hardship for

Kathern. The heat without air conditioning, the humidity barely broken by bay breezes, she had a clingy four year old with a moody disposition. Nita remained that way until she was in her mid-teens, and Brenda, ten in 1960, was the closest in age. Donna and

Karen were in Florida, too, and though Charles had stayed behind to finish high school and began courting a Mounce girl, he was not married yet and was in Florida with them. Eddie was in his own house in Lawrence County.

Miserable from the partial body cast that also enveloped his leg, Bun began to heal slowly. Karen dropped out of school in early 1960 to help pay the bills while Bun was out of work. She dated a young man named Johnny who she’d met through

Charles. It didn’t take. With Charles at Wiley’s Bait shop in St. Petersburgh several

times, Donna the tag-along eventually met Johnny began, too. With Bun’s permission,

Donna and Johnny started dating. Johnny and Karen remained friends.

I know few details of how the change took place and I often wonder who decided it wasn’t working between Johnny and Karen. I knew them both and can’t imagine them dating, but stranger things have happened in our family. There is a photograph of Donna standing in Wylie’s in a pair of dungarees cuffed below the knee and a short sleeve collared shirt. She was a knockout, one with a bit of a crush on

Johnny. I remember asking my dad how he dated Karen first then ended up dating

Donna.

“What was I supposed to do? Karen and I liked each other but we weren’t in love. She eventually met someone else. Your mom kept looking at me with those big brown eyes.”

That is as close to an answer as I will ever get.

It was not until thirty-five years later that I saw a connection between Johnny and Karen, something unspoken, but there all the same. Once Johnny and Donna started dating, Donna was a goner. Johnny wooed her with his Elvis good looks, his rock and roll swagger. But Kathern’s next heartache nearly wrecked their future, but gave Karen another chance in the end.

In June, 1960, Grandma Shelton died. Kathern’s mother had been dear to her and stayed with Bun and Kathern for a time. The only picture I’ve seen of her was a black and white, of a very old woman in a wheelchair with a car the size of a small tank

behind her. Donna often spoke of her with kind words, but that is the extent of my knowledge of Kathern’s mother.

According to Brenda, whose memory is a thing to marvel over – a crystal bell that needs only a brief question to ring – everyone piled into Bun’s car and returned to

Indiana for the funeral service. They all stayed with a couple from the church. She was ten years old, Donna was fifteen, Karen was seventeen. They were all used poodle skirts and loafers, tidy collared shirts with darts at the breasts, anxious and full of vinegar.

And Donna was in love but waved goodbye to Johnny.

***

Johnny had plans for his future. His father and his uncles were all Navy and served during World War II. Johnny’s maternal grandfather was a Merchant Marine who served in World War I and II, ending his years by having a stroke aboard his last merchant vessel. Donna called Johnny to tell him where they were staying and Johnny dropped the bomb on Donna.

“My father wanted me to join the Navy. I enlisted and I want to marry you before I go to basic training in California. Will you marry me?”

Donna said yes and within a few days my father drove to Indiana. The age of consent during that time was 16 years old. My mother was three weeks before her sixteenth birthday. According to my Aunt Brenda, this is how it happened.

“Your dad squatted down so he could look me in the eyes. I was only ten years old. He told me he and Donna were driving to Illinois to get married and he wanted me to come with them. I had never felt so special, and he was kind to me all the time. He

was good lookin’ like Elvis. I was scared cuz Bun didn’t know. I was afraid what he’d do to them when they told him. So I went with them and was their witness. My ten- year-old signature is on their marriage license.”

The date was June 20, 1960.

But Bun didn’t do anything the next day. Donna was a married woman three weeks before her sixteenth birthday, and Bun liked my dad. He called him Johnny, just like my paternal grandmother. They were the only two who did that. There was no scene, no beatings, and no recriminations.

My mom’s ache from leaving her mother overwhelmed her the first year of their marriage. Brenda was a sturdy girl who already knew her way around a kitchen, and

Karen was still there, so Brenda tried to learn how to help Kathern who, by then, was sitting most of the time. She was crippled by untreated rheumatoid arthritis. It bowed her back, knotted her hands and twisted her left leg until her foot pointed backwards.

Brenda was now tasked with helping her. To Bun, that was all women’s work and I can imagine him saying that was what daughters were for.

On July 11, 1960, Charles married Sharon Mounce. Bun officiated. He was the minister at both of his son’s weddings. But his first daughter to marry, Donna, eloped.

She stayed with Bun and Kathern and returned to Florida after Charles married.

***

Life in Indiana had not prepared the women of the family for many types of work outside the house. Back in Sarasota before the summer ended, Karen took a server job at Lido Beach Restaurant and Resort where she worked with a chef named Frank

DeGrasse. He was older than Karen, but she was fond of him. After a few months, they started dating. Karen knew Bun well enough to know his approval was not to be had.

Karen and Frank were falling in love, but they fell in secret, Karen sneaking out to date

Frank.

They married in December, 1960. It was what happened between the sneaking and the hitching during a year that saw three of Bun’s children find spouses and marry that became a folk tale Donna told me several times, usually when the bad-Bun stories were relived. I never heard Karen speak a word about it, but we were not in her company often when I was a child. So it is a thing that hangs there, a violent whisper from the past.

When to Call a Lawman

Come on baby, let me take you by the hand Come on sugar, let me take you by the hand Go for me, let me be All your own candy, your candy Candy man

Roy Orbison “Candy Man”

During my elementary school years, across the street from our Collins Road home a tepid brown, sandy dirt road snuck off the pavement marked only by an old-fashioned road sign. An iron post with a jutting, rolled coil arm was buried in quickcrete deep into the ground, its arm pointing across the ditch toward Collins. On either side of the black metal sign, drivers careened past having nailed a blind curve from either direction, and barely noticed the metal lanyards dangling from the iron. I imagine if they did, many wondered what the hell a Pondue was exactly. Whatever it was, it had an insignificant dirt lane named after it.

On the corners lied an old couple’s house, posh by Pondue standards, and another more stately home owned by two adults who owned horses. I never got a good look at the adults, but their daughter Julie was one of our babysitters. Cal liked her, but

I sat quietly, bored as a stump whenever she was chosen. I preferred Weird Susan from the far side of the northern blind curve. She had long red hair and a wide-open

disposition. Susan let us watch movies like The Scream and I remember her sitting behind my brother, pulling the sleeve of his white t-shirt and yelling at the television.

“Stupid. Is she going crazy or is there really someone screaming? This is making me nuts,” she said playfully. She curled into a ball, feet tucked beneath her butt, knees up and my brother sat in front of her on the couch. She made the dumbest movie a hysterical night of popcorn and pickles, and our only source of what my dad saw as gadfly noise. Her hair was below her shoulders, thick and red. Her face was lightly freckled beneath her green eyes.

Then my parents came home and Weird Susan disappeared. She made the nighttime a trip into a secret haven, but it always ended.

My father drove Susan home one warm fall night when I was still young enough to need a babysitter. When he got home, we were all sitting in the living room watching the end of a football game. Back then that meant Monday night. Three channels rotated our television dial with hard clicks, but the fourth, PBS, meant a second dial on the UHF channel.

The Miami Dolphins were punching some NFC team around. My mom sat on the couch, knee up, clipping her toenails and placing them neatly in an ashtray. Bob

Griese took the hike, fell back three yards and snapped the football past his ear silently.

I sat wondering how anyone would catch the ball downfield when there hadn’t been enough time to run that far but it was a trick play and Mercury Morris burst through the defensive line behind decoy Larry Cszonka, the guy with the bushy stache. But I was distracted by the too high rev of an engine coming off the north blind curve. I

heard rubber lay its claim to the pavement, a familiar sound. Then a loud crunch followed, a fence devoured by a heavy front end and the burst off the ditch across from our yard. Then silence, floating forever within a whir of white noise, before a four door

Dodge landed upside down at the foot of our driveway. I remember it like a film playing in my head, every piece of that night a solid memory.

“What in the world?” my mom said, eyes alert and neck strained.

My father was out of his recliner and opening the front door. I didn’t see him get up.

“Johnny?” she asked.

“Some idiot . . . be right back,” he said, voice suddenly magnified.

Idiot was his favorite driving word. I knew it was a car before I saw the smoking twisted wreck upside down. It was a word I heard while he drove and whenever Nixon appeared on TV.

“Stay here,” Donna snapped. She ran to the door, stopped, turned toward the kitchen and grabbed the phone. But someone had beat her to it and help was on the way.

When the red lights and siren came around the opposite curve, my father returned for blankets. Mom grabbed two Navy issues, scratchy wool things with one bar of blue across the top seam. I watched the lights with Cal at the window.

“Is he OK?” she asked nervously. I wondered how she knew it was a he, but then, most men who had a woman in the car were behind the wheel and a woman driving alone was a rare sight.

“Yeah. Idiot took that curve too fast. Out of state plates, Georgia I think.”

He ran back outside to the upside down idiot who must not have been that stupid because he was strapped into the car by his seatbelt. I watched the cops gather, three more cars, an ambulance. I felt static in my feet and a twist in my stomach. I had to pee. The flashing lights were foreign, some Saturday matinee sci-fi flick with aluminum saucers and Christmas lights.

We were glued to that window. There were so many lights, I saw the Pondue

Lane sign, bowed forward as if reaching for Collins Road. The upside down car brazed it on the way to Julie’s fence, but the sign was hitched and slanted, a jagged dent in the middle.

When the word bedtime hovered above us, we didn’t move. When Dad came back to our trailer, Cal scattered to his room and I ran for the bathroom, barely making it.

I went to bed, tried to sleep, but all I saw was the lights. All I felt was the seriousness and gloom of arriving police cars. It wasn’t like Adam 12. Not really. I wondered how people on television got to jail and what they did that was so bad all that seriousness came down on them. No one in the family ever talked to the police, no laws were broken, no one stole anything from our yard. Some Indiana traditions followed Donna. Our parents never yelled, so nosey neighbors never sent a cop to check on us. I never saw another one in action until ten years after that night. My family stayed clear of lawmen, preachers who made home visits, and any association with uninvited salesmen. They were all my father’s idiots.

But back in Lawrence county where my mother was raised, their small town had four squad cars, large heavy leftovers from the late 1950s. We never saw a cop in the summers when we visited Bun’s house. Spice Valley had an unspoken code – if you didn’t work it out at home, there was nothing to do about it. Shut up and eat it, stuff it down and let the bruises fade. Rub some dirt on it, or stick it in the cold spring.

The law was like the government in southern Indiana. Money grubbing, take what is not yours to take snakes, always with a hand held open for more. Land taxes were a heavy burden, and people found ways around the rules if they were hungry.

Poaching was common, and silencers unavailable, but no one ever made a call when a rifle shot cracked the air across the woods and down the valley. Some poor family was going hungry and no government man knew a damn thing about what that meant. To call the police was a sin against God, an invasion of a privacy held so dear, many suffered the unmentionable, but that was better than sending your own kin to jail.

Grudges dug deep into the soil and never died. Drinking was never done or was done at home, not in a bar where Johnny Law can haul you down to the drunk tank.

Bun ruled his children with a preacher’s toolbox. It was embarrassing enough to have a wife who never went to church. But he forgave her twisted limbs and prayed for

Jesus to right her arthritis every day. But people talked and gossip knows no walls. Bun had a home phone, a party line shared by four other families, as he was always looking for the next good carpentry job, or taking orders for his short lived sawmill.

My mother and Karen were close enough in age, a little less than two years, that people mistook them for twins. But as they grew older, they matured into their next

selves, easily identified as Bun’s daughters, but not mistaken for one another any longer. And as families went, my mother Donna’s body rebelled against the thickness, remaining true to the Icabod Crane nickname her mother gave her.

Bun’s father Ermel was around often during that time. One night when Karen was going out on a date in Indiana, Ermel gave her warning.

“Be careful. Us Craigs are hot blooded,” Ermel teased. He wasn’t lying. Simply count the number of pregnancies and affairs, but whether he was making fun of the

Craig men or putting her down is unclear.

When they migrated back to Florida after Grandma Shelton died to live near

Bun’s preacher brother, they went back to the Pinellas Park house where Donna had met Johnny. Because Donna was still with them after marrying Johnny, she and Karen shared clothes. Brenda and Donna both knew about Karen’s dates. They went to bed in their shared room one night and waited for Bun to turn in.

I have bits and pieces of the story, some with Charles there, some with Charles back in Indiana with his new wife. It is as clear as it will ever get with no one left to ask.

My mother’s version is what I cling to the tightest.

Karen was out their bedroom and on the ground, disappearing into the darkness.

Donna kept the window open until she heard a car door open and shut. Karen made it to Frank’s car.

Donna undressed and tried to sleep. She dozed but with one ear turned toward the window.

At four in the morning, Karen was trying to lift the bedroom window, but from outside there was no way to get leverage. She went to the end of the house and went in through the living room door. Bun never locked it. Bun never fell for it.

“Where you been?” Bun said from the dark corner of the dining room.

Karen quit creeping across the floor.

“Oh, Dad, I was on a date with a nice . . .”

Bun was up from his wooden chair, hand cocked back in seconds. He swung.

“You seein’ that 35 year old man?” he demanded.

Karen left her feet. He’d landed on her left jaw, sending her onto the dining room table.

“No Dad,” she sobbed, stinging and reeling, “His name is Frank ‘n he’s a nice man. I didn’t want to bother you.”

Karen stood against the table now, waiting for the blackness to gain light.

“No nice man sneaks a girl your age out at night without asking her folks.”

Bun lurched at Karen, grabbed her arm and had a belt in his hand. He swung it.

Karen hit the floor, not moving.

“Get up and take your medicine,” Bun demanded. He stood over Karen waiting.

She lifted her head, chipmunk pouches forming under raw red marks across her face.

“Dad?” a male voice from behind Bun.

“Get outta my way, Charles.”

Charles stepped back, watching Karen climb a chair to get to her feet.

“Dad, he wants me to stay in Florida. Asked me to marry him.”

“Yer not marryin’ no man who sneaks young girls out at night,” Bun ordered, and drew his belt back into an arch. He brought it down across her back. Karen’s eye were closing beneath the swelling of the first slaps, but now had turned her back to him for protection.

“Lay off a her, Dad,” Donna said, voice steady and low.

“Yeah, Dad. I met him, he’s alright just a bit older is all. He’s a cheft at . . .”

Karen took another swipe against her shoulders. Then another as she fell back to the floor, against her shin. Bun lashed her repeatedly, legs, rear, back, side – a thick, man twice Karen’s size. Then Bun went silent. His language flowed from his swinging arms and landed with loud pops. The popping noise went on, becoming a distant train running the old tracks, for a long time. Every single child of Bun Craig had taken beatings, some worse than others, but this night was different. This beating had too much momentum and there was no sign of it ending.

Donna moved toward Bun, but Charles grabbed her arm. Whether it was to keep her from Bun’s ire didn’t matter. Donna bit his arm and kicked his legs, free arm wailing around his head. Charles grabbed her with both hands and spun her around.

They were both facing Bun and Karen.

Painfully, Kathern made her way down the hall. Charles pulled Donna back to let her through. Brenda, ten years old, watched behind her. Her face was red from crying but she never stopped watching her mother’s twisted feet.

“Bun. Let go of that girl,” Kathern pleaded.

Karen was being pulled up from the floor by one of Bun’s hands. The other was behind his head, ready to strike. The wrath landed on Karen’s body, getting limper by the minute, as her neck gave way to the pressure of holding her head upward. She went forward.

“Dad, come on. Enough already,” Charles said, voice pitched from his usual bass to a tenor of simmering anger.

“Charles was some kind of mad,” Donna told me.

“Mom. Make him stop,” Donna screamed.

Kathern nodded to Charles, eyes glancing toward the phone.

Charles stood there, unable to believe the message. Donna made a stomp and landed on Charles’ foot. His grasp on Donna loosened. She ran to her mother, shielding her from Bun.

Bun heard nothing. He was all in.

“Charles,” Donna hollered.

He came unglued from his shock, picked up the phone and with a clear line, told the operator to get the police to their Pinellas Park address.

Little Nita Faye hollered for her mother from behind Brenda. The log jam at the end of the hallway grew thicker.

Twenty minutes passed, filled with pleading and harsh words toward Bun.

Kathern moved closer, telling Donna to step aside. Kathern leaned against the table and grimaced. She swung her cane up and poked Bun in the back of the leg.

The touch must have been a familiar warning. He turned to his wife, saw her streaked face and the draw of pain across her mouth. He saw Charles and Donna there, two married children he no longer had rights over. He stopped then, walking his wife to her spot on the sofa and taking his chair. He sat down, opened his reading glasses and peered from above them at the scene of his children gathered at the end of the hallway. Donna and Charles went to Karen. Nita shoved Brenda forward and ran to

Kathern, crying.

Brenda ran to Donna and helped find a rag. It was the only noise, a prattle in the kitchen, the dip of a rag in a bucket of water. Karen was unconscious when the lawman arrived.

“Mr. Craig, what’s this business of you hurting someone?” the officer asked.

“My daughter, my business,” Bun said steadily.

The lawman walked to where Karen lay. “She awake?”

“Yes sir. She’s comin’ around,” Charles said. He had a foot on the lawman as he stood up to face him.

“She pressin’ charges? You her boyfriend?” He flipped open a small pad of paper, feigning interest in the truth.

“Brother. And I don’t know. She can’t talk, can’t see either. He’s been beatin’ on her for an hour,” Charles said.

“That true, Mr. Craig?” the lawman asked.

Bun turned his head and regarded the man from above his glasses.

“Reverend Craig, and if your 17 year old daughter snuck out to see a 35 year old man, what’d you do?” Bun asked.

The lawman looked at Charles, then Karen and Donna. He turned back to Bun.

“Well . . . I guess I would do the same thing.” He flipped his small notebook closed and tucked it into his jacket. “Ma’am.” He nodded at Kathern and left the way he came in.

A few days passed. Karen gained enough strength to stand and eat, and confess.

“Brenda. That’s it. I’ve had all I can stand. Frank gave me this.”

Karen pulled a small, packed suitcase from under her bed. Donna had used the one they had and moved in with Johnny’s mother Kay in St. Petersburgh.

“Tomorrow when you go to church, Frank is picking me up. I will say I’m running late. You go without me. I’ve taken all I’m going to take.”

Brenda said she hardly slept that night and when the morning came, she did exactly what Karen asked her to do. Bun became impatient and told Brenda to go back to the house and get Karen. The church was walking distance from their house.

“I remember feeling so scared that I had to walk back to church and tell Dad

Karen was gone. I felt alone, I was the only one left and with Nita only four years old and Mom not well.”

Bun didn’t hit Brenda or run back to their house. He was in his place at the church and unless the building was on fire, he wouldn’t be put off a sermon.

They stayed for a few more months, packed up, and returned to Indiana – no

Donna, no Karen. They were Florida girls now. Frank and Karen married in December,

1960.

“I think he saw Florida differently after that. Think he saw it as possessed by the devil, but he went back years later. After you and your brother were little,” Donna told me.

Florida became the place where his daughters met boys, kissed boys, and left his ways behind forever. His two sons, Eddie first then Charles, met and married women from Indiana. Eddie was gone by the time Karen’s epic tale was retold.

The Craigs were now related to the Hacketts and the Mounces in a way not seen before, but not the first time in the darkness of Spice Valley. Charles and Sharon started having children right away, a girl, one boy, and three more girls. My cousins. I have so many, there is hardly enough pen and ink to list them all from first to second generations of children born of Bun’s six children.

Karen and Donna were both pregnant in 1961 and playing cards as Donna told me once, Donna would feel my brother Cal kick.

“Ouch, this baby is really kicking,” Donna said.

“Mine feels like its blowing bubbles,” Karen said.

On June 12, 1961, my mother gave birth to a boy.

Sometime in 1961, Karen gave birth to a stillborn baby.

But Karen and Frank had a girl one year later, then two boys. The girl, Denise, was in between my brother’s age and mine. Frank became a chef at his own restaurant.

A confession after Charles passed away many decades later told me Charles did not spare Sharon any more than Eddie spared Norma. Early in their marriage, Sharon was not the best cook in the Valley, but she could hold her own. But once she wasted food by ruining a meal. Charles, I was told, stood up in front of Sharon and hit her closed fisted so hard, she flew from the living room into the kitchen, knocking over table chairs like bowling pins. She flew backwards from the force. She came to lying on her back, facing the bottom of the table. No doctors were visited, no bones were wrapped and casted. To her shame and embarrassment, she didn’t talk about it, but prayed it would not happen again. But prayer falls on deaf ears at times as I have come to learn as an adult. Deaf and dumb. They were both dedicated to the church and Bun approved of Charles’ choice for a wife, but Spice Valley women in and out of the direct family Bun fathered were not spared from keeping secrets - that they felt they rained hurt down upon themselves and lest they die from small town shame, rarely told a soul.

But in 1963, my parents were in Lompoc Valley, California with my father stationed at Vadenburgh Air Force Base. It was the early days of missile testing and small rocket launches. One of my father’s earliest jobs was on the team that photographed and mapped the fallen pieces of missile debris, the precursor to NASA and the development of the space program.

Donna and Johnny with their son Cal lived on the base in a 10’ x 40’ trailer. The

Valley was full of poppies, fields in chunks of one color. Red poppies bordered by yellow bordered by blue. I’ve never been back, but I’m told those fields, for the most part, are gone. My only memory is watching the 8mm silent films on movie nights at

home. They were a breathtaking sight. Donna told me whenever Cal was outside, he had to wear a warmer cap with ear flaps because he always caught a cold. As for me, I was told two goblins got me in California, one in my crib, the other lurking under our small trailer.

The small Navy issue trailers were in bunches so there was little privacy. My mother hand washed our clothes and hung them on a swing clothesline. She would sit

Cal and me down on a blanket in the yard not far from the clothesline. One day Cal had a friend over, a little boy his age that lived a few trailers over and one of the few black families on the base.

Donna stepped outside with me asleep in my crib and the two boys playing in the living room. She was removing dry clothes from the line when she heard me begin to scream.

“I ran so fast, I don’t remember running. It was like I was at your crib in a second. And I saw . . . something horrible. I saw that neighbor kid in your crib. I saw him biting you on the forehead.”

When I heard the story, I became breathless, spooked even, and to this day it causes my stomach to flip because it happened to me, yet I was not a witness to the child in my crib.

“I ran that child out of our house. You were covered with bite marks, your arms, legs, your forehead. I wrapped you up and took you to that child’s mother. I screamed at her, ‘Look what your little boy did to my baby. I see that little boy again and you’ll regret it, I’ll have him in a home.’”

He was my first goblin, but I was a teenager before I heard about him. The second one was invisible. One day on that same blanket outside while Donna hung wet clothes on the line, I began crawling away. I didn’t go far, about six feet from the blanket to the edge of the dark space beneath the trailer. I’d seen something interesting, something resembling my bottle. There was a wooden crate of empty, old-fashioned

Coke bottles, the small ones like those in Bun’s porch machine. I managed to grab one and tip it upward. It had a little liquid in it and I swallowed. Then I screamed.

“Of all the bottles in that crate, you picked the one I had used to mix Drano and pour it down the drain in the kitchen. The plumbing was always clogged in that little trailer. I panicked, then I saw the bottle. I found a neighbor with a car quick and took you to the hospital. They pumped your stomach. They said you’d never swallow right again. They said you’d have scar tissue that would make it difficult to swallow for your entire life.”

I drank Drano, my first drug of choice. But there was never any scar tissue, no problems swallowing, just a slight narrowing of the esophagus. That I lived through it with my stomach intact is astounding.

“I thought I was going to the bad mother farm for sure after that,” Donna told me. I remember that became a saying between us. “Oh, guess I’m going to the bad mother’s farm now.” It was either there or Chattahoochee with the rest of the crazies.

When I was a teenager, I made up the bad daughter’s farm but Donna said she’d already been there and it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

100

My brother’s constant colds got better after we left California. When I was 23 months old, my father was restationed to Jacksonville, Florida where I spent the next thirty years of my life. A place my brother still calls home.

The drive from California was a folktale of its own. We were in a white Dodge station wagon with no air conditioning, driving I-10 through deserts and parts of Texas.

I was teething and according to Donna, I didn’t sleep the entire trip because it is hard to sleep when you are crying from teething. I can only imagine how miserable it was.

Since the Navy was generous with relocation leave, my father swung up to Indiana before we reached Florida. My mother had two children to show off, and missed her mother and younger sister Brenda.

Brenda and I have a joke about how long grudges last in Indiana. Hurt someone’s feelings and you’re never forgiven. During a long conversation about this book of family folklore, one of her sons told me he did not want to see me because back in 1983 I had given him a look that hurt his feelings so bad he cried. Apparently we were on a school bus during a summer walk from Nita’s house to the school in Huron, which by that time was much bigger and had classes for all the elementary school grades. He said something and I looked at him wrong. Thing is, I never made a walk from Nita’s house to the Huron School. Brenda said it was miles and miles away from where Nita lived. I quickly let it go. I knew the order of things in southern Indiana if you were related to a Craig.

Brenda teased me after I found out how her son felt about me.

101

“Oh. I don’t want to see you cuz back in ’69 you looked at me funny and it hurt my feelins, ahh.”

“Yeah, and back in 1902 you looked at my boyfriend too sweet and you’re a hussie,” I said.

But Brenda remembered something important after that.

“You know? When your parents drove all the way from California and swung up to Indiana to see us, I held out my hands to take you and hold you because I’d never seen you before. You were so beautiful. But you just turned away and held onto your mother’s neck. You didn’t want anyone but your mommy and that hurt my feelings.

You hurt my feelings when you were two years old and I cain’t forgive you for it.”

We howled with laughter. It was funny while it was also the truth of Mitchell,

Indiana. The difference was Brenda and I didn’t go telling twenty other people some twisted story that got it wrong so other people would hate the person we hated, too.

“1963 was a very important year for me,” Brenda said. “You were born and I was walking to the mailbox with my little transistor radio and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles came on the radio. It was the first time I heard them. It was magic.”

We sang then. “And when I touch you, I feel happy inside. It's such a feeling that my love I can't hide, I can't hide, I can't hide (badly held high note at end).”

I was flattered. My being born was a great as hearing your first Beatle’s song.

Now that is saying something.

“I can do without a lot of shit, but music is not something I can do without. It has saved my life many times, it was all I had sometimes,” I told her.

102

“Me, too. I wonder . . . what would life be like if I couldn’t listen to Stephen Stills or the Beatles, especially George.”

I glanced over at her dresser, a drawing she did of George Harrison when she was 14 years old taped to the wall beside the mirror. I remembered the times she drew me, getting my eyes just so every time, darkening my missing teeth as the adult teeth were coming in. And I tried to remember, how did it happen that she and I were so close and had so much in common? So many times I saw her in Indiana, Sarasota, at our trailer in Jacksonville when she was allowed to come visit us. And I feel, in this moment, so fortunate to have had her in my life. And simultaneously I feel dreadful over the pain she has suffered, and all her sisters, and Kathern. I suddenly recall the times in Indiana and Sarasota when I would fidget waiting for Brenda to have some time to sit with me, not to play, but to be goofy and go for walks. I brushed her hair, she brushed mine. She drew me prettier than I really was I thought, but I brought her pencils and paper and sometimes an eraser to see her magic hand move the led into something I recognized. It is a talent I do not possess, but one I marvel over to this day.

In the same year I was born, Bun moved Brenda, Kathern, and Nita to Sarasota,

3803 Locust Street, for a few months. Ermel came to stay with them this time. He got what would have been Brenda’s room, and she slept on a cot in the living room. This being the only eye witness story about Ermel later in his life, I was surprised to find out from Brenda that Ermel was very kind to her. He sent her to the store at age twelve to buy Doan’s pills for his bad back and payed her a quarter for her trouble. She bought

L&M cigarettes for 25¢ and when Bun wasn’t home, smoked them in the front room

103

and blew the smoke out the window. She was sure Nita, age six at the time, would snitch, but Nita stuck close to Kathern most of the time. She played in the yard occasionally, but mostly she clung to her mother. Nita slept in Kathern and Bun’s room until she was ten years old.

Brenda’s tenth year was a painful loneliness heaped with a new world of responsibilities. Karen was the last of the older generation of Bun and Kathern’s children to leave, which meant Brenda at ten years old became responsible. She described it to me.

“It was awful after the four older ones left because all the household responsibility was thrust on me - cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping etc. I was only ten so I didn't have much of a normal child hood. A 10 year old child should not have to shoulder that much responsibility. I know I was big for my age and looked more grown up body wise than 10, but I was still a kid mentally. My clothes were hand me downs, second hand given to me by whoever, mom sewed them. Hardly ever got anything new. Nita was a spoiled brat. She'd go outside and play, but we weren't very close then. She was only four when I was 10.”

When I asked her how it was Bun allowed her to come visit us, she put it simply.

“He probably let me go stay with you in Jacksonville because Donna was a married woman and he trusted her. Nita did not pick up the slack.”

“What do you think was wrong with Nita, why the severe mood swings?”

“Nita prayed to die young. When I told Dad [Bun] that, I don't think he believed me. She was very unhappy with her life. I was daddy's girl when I was little. Karen &

104

Donna told me I would hate him when I got older. They were right. It was because he treated me like dirt and never allowed me to do anything or go anywhere except spend the night with Charles & Sharon (when they lived in Florida), stay with you guys, and

Karen. No movies, no school dances, nothing like that. But the TV was on Sundays by then because Mom couldn’t go to church any more. So I guess he changed the rule on what the bible said on that one.”

105

Cal Flies his First Plane

Superman or Green Lantern ain't got a-nothin' on me I can make like a turtle and dive for your pearls in the sea, yep A-you you can just sit there while thinking on your velvet throne

Donovan “Sunshine Superman”

How can you tell me, how much you miss me? When the last time I saw you, you wouldn't even kiss me

Johnny Rivers “Poor Side of Town”

Around 1965 when Cal was four years old, the colds came back. Trips to the beach in

Jacksonville, Florida caused him to come close to catching pneumonia, with a trip to the

NAS Jacksonville hospital always following. It was finally determined that Cal had a heart that wasn’t functioning right, but the Navy hospitals weren’t equipped to take on the Circus of the Stars type surgery he needed. Johnny and Donna were told Cal had an extra set of valves on his heart and he needed major surgery. At the age of four, this was not common. Most juvenile heart matters were the tiny holes that wouldn’t close, or were completely hopeless. But we were lucky, Cal was ordered to go to Washington DC where they were equipped to complete the necessary surgery.

106

I have one strong visual memory of that time that involves a trip to visit Cal before his surgery. He was not in his bed, but flying down the shiny floors with his arms forming wings like an airplane, running. He didn’t seem sick, like most four year olds, he just wanted to be a kid. I remember being confused, but I felt the tension coming from Donna and Johnny and somehow knew it was a big deal.

The doctors cut Cal from the middle of his chest on his left side, all the way back to between his chicken bones. They cracked him open like an egg, went in and closed the valves, then sewed him up with over fifty stitches. The scar is a visage of antiquated practice that usually ended in increased infections, but not for Cal. He recovered and the only time I thought about him being that sick was whenever his scar appeared, at the beach or the inlet where we swam.

But life for my mother with two kids and Navy doctors to rely on was not an easy one. We had to arrive at 6:00 am to wait in a lobby when I had strep or some other malady. Once the lobby phones were open, people rushed to them to make an appointment that was usually hours away. We’d wait, bored, fidgeting, sick, for hours when I would test positive for strep and get a prescription that took another two hours to fill at the hospital pharmacy. The Cēpacol spray in my throat gagged me and when I gagged; my throat lurched making the strep awaken while I cried. I suffered from hives, for no apparent reason but that my skin didn’t like the heat. But the beach was my favorite place and every year on my birthday, I was allowed to pick where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do. I vacillated between the Harlem Globetrotters – Meadowlark

Lemon era – and the old west theme park named Six Gun Territory in Ocala, and every

107

year my first response was that I wanted to go to the beach. That never happened; early

March in northern Florida was a bit early. The water was still too cold.

What I am the most grateful for, though, is my mother’s openness about subjects never broached in her home when she was growing up. I could ask about what the dogs in the yard were doing, why the dogs from all over the neighborhood mobbed our

Beagle Tippy and why their ears were doing what my other grandmother called

Monkeyshine. I got a straight answer every time. I spent hours in the woods beside our house, or riding my bike. I was alone most of the time, but I always heard Donna yell for me when it was time to eat. Her Indiana cooking was amazing. My father’s New

York deli experience before he moved to Florida created a hodgepodge of goodies that were not expensive, but covered everything from lard based Indiana frying to tamales and Chungking. She gathered recipes, always trying something new, made a no bake cheesecake before it was popular to make them at home. My father loved cheesecake.

The potato salad was a mix of Indiana and New York, my father teaching my mother about adding vinegar to the sauce, and whether to boil the potatoes with the peels on or off. The boiled egg parts disappeared. For years Donna made our lunches, and fixed three meals a day on a Navy pay budget. She made her own clothes, and mine, kept my father’s uniforms dyed or pressed, depending on what rank he had attained. We were, in many ways, like the Brady Bunch, but without Alice and only two children.

What my mother left with Bun, all that forced religion, was never forced on us.

She introduced us to church when we were very young, then allowed us to decide if we wanted to go, and to which church we wanted to go. I liked vacation Bible school, and

108

one year at NAS Jacksonville she volunteered to teach it. I learned to play Duck-Duck-

Goose and Red Rover, Red Rover. It seemed like the entire world was moving to an unseen rhythmist.

Yet Donna never bargained for the other side of the coin. With Johnny, a man who avoided confrontation because his own father was abusive, there was a priapic silence, like foreplay for when they were alone in their bedroom. My parents never argued in front of us, we did not talk much at the small round kitchen table, and he often scolded me for being too loud when I got excited. It was actually more like irritation and a role of his eyes. He was never satisfied and showed his affection by teasing someone. It was his way. Donna missed the company of her sisters, but not enough to return to the hell she had escaped. Long distance phone calls were charged by the minute in those days, there was no such thing as unlimited long distance. Calls home for Donna were not as often as she wanted.

“I think the happiest time in my entire life was when you and Cal were little. I was a young mother so I could keep up with you, and you guys were such smart, good kids.”

I remember hearing that when I was in my forties and feeling sad. If that was the best time, then it was all downhill from there. But I remember being chased by her in our bathing suits, too. We could not afford a water hose, so she got a bottle that had a cap with a point and snipped off the end. She filled it with water and chased us around our small backyard. She taught me games with string with the ends tied into a knot.

Cat’s Cradle and Teacup. We took cheap tape and put prices on her kitchen stuff and

109

we swapped between being the shopper and the shop owner. And I broke things. Tops of cookie jars, entire pots of cooked food sprawled across a freshly mopped and waxed kitchen floor. I ran into things that gave me splinters, cuts, claw marks and cat bites, scraped my knees skidding out on my bike and came home bleeding from my elbows and knees. She never got upset or punished me. I always tried to glue things back together.

As a child, I ran wild when I wasn’t suffering from some random virus, especially strep throat which I seemed to get at least twice a year, the precursor to

Scarlet Fever.

“Every time there was a vaccination for you kids, we went. You had the shot to the upper left arm, the liquid version, the pill versions – you name it, you had it. That was one good thing about the Navy hospital, vaccinations were plentiful and free.

There was no way I was letting you two go through what I did.”

That explains the twice a year visits to the dentist. My mother’s rotten tooth, the pain, Aunt Lois calling Bun a turkey and taking Donna to get a rotten tooth pulled. My teeth came in as wild as I was, under my tongue, above my top row of teeth. I had

Donna’s big toothiness with my father’s small Elvis mouth. Cal’s teeth came in straight and he never had cavities, I had six during one visit and I thought the drilling was never going to stop. But on the way out was a huge trunk full of toys, small plastic things, fake tattoos, little cars. That was the payoff. And Donna took us for ice cream or made brownies for desert on the evenings we had to go to the dentist. Cal passed out once, he said from the smell of the place, after getting his teeth cleaned.

110

“Your dentist hit on me for years,” Donna told me once. I remember my gag reflex, the short hairy-fingered dentist balding on top and a foot shorter than my mother.

The not in my home, anti-Indiana kept coming for years. We never wore shoes with flapping soles, our clothes were always clean, we always ate enough good food, there were teacher conferences that always had Donna in them, and our house was immaculate. My favorite day to come home from school when I was in first grade was polish day – Donna used Old English. The second best was laundry day when I knew crawling into bed after my bath meant clean sheets that smelled like fresh air from the clothesline. When I walked into the house on laundry day, I knew the evening would have me watching Donna fold towels into the most exact, measured stacks possible. I knew where everything was, and when I opened my drawer to find a pair of shorts, there was always at least one pair if not a stack, of clean shorts with a matching top. We were poor at first, then lower middle class, but somehow she managed the household budget and saved money on the side. In the sixties, wigs were everywhere and when they opened the first K-Mart within driving distance from our trailer, they had a wig shop. My mother pinched pennies for months to allow herself a small stylable hairpiece, a plastic bun lift, a shag cut wig. She was always thin, dressed nicely, and smelled good.

Just thinking about the energy she put into her family causes melancholy.

Then Johnny came along and showed up with a trade-in car when he got tired of the one before it. The savings was gone, and Donna, fuming, went silent for days at a time. Since Johnny refused to argue, she had to keep her feelings inside where they

111

festered. It was a different kind of hell for her. She was social, loved to talk, and was married to a man who loved silence. For children to be absolutely quiet is impossible unless they are asleep. So Cal and I learned to shift into a different gear once Johnny came home. The radio went off, the TV came on, we had dinner, then watched Walter

Cronkite, and went to bed soon after.

During these younger years with Donna, Brenda and then Nita started to get breaks by coming to stay with us. We made trips to the Gulf Coast whenever Bun was there in the winter, but mostly we drove 16 hours to Indiana every summer.

There is a story Brenda told me of her first and second trips to stay with us in

Jacksonville. The first was 1967. Brenda was 17 years old, Donna 23 years old. She left

Nita, 11 years old, with Bun and Kathern.

“I remember Cal was always asking questions, showing how smart he was. He woke your mother up one night while I was there to ask how much a hippo weighs. I think we had gone to the zoo that day.”

I remember being in constant competition for his toys, the cool toys like electric football and building blocks, Lincoln Logs and little green soldiers, slot cars and

Matchbox loops. The bazooka guy on one knee was my favorite. Cal’s grades edged mine out every time a report card came home.

“I couldn’t fly back to Indiana because of all the plane hi-jacking that was going on. So your parents bought me a bus ticket. And then Calvin said, ‘Can’t buses by hi- jacked, too?’ and we all laughed but it kind of scared me, too. He was right, why not a bus?”

112

When I was five years old in 1968, Brenda sat at our small table in the kitchen. I came in and pulled a chair over to stand on. I was reaching for the peanut butter and the syrup.

Brenda asked, “What ya doin’?”

“Making a peanut butter and syrup sandwich.”

“Mmm. That sounds good.”

“You know what? When I get big and my mom gets little, I’m gonna make her all the peanut butter and syrup sandwiches she wants.”

Brenda laughed for some time over that, but I don’t remember thinking as I got bigger, Donna would get smaller. In a way, though, it turns out it happens that way sometimes.

Later in 1968, on June 5th, Brenda’s hero was assassinated. When Robert Kennedy was shot, Brenda cried for days.

When I was eight months old and bouncing on my mother’s knee with the TV on, it was 1963 and President John Kennedy died. Even though I was less than a year old, I, too, know where I was when JFK was shot. It was not a huge topic in our house when I was older, but I became less shocked every time I heard about this thing called assassination. After JFK, it was his brother Robert. Evers, King, the Manson family, attempts on President Ford by Squeaky Fromme after Watergate. Rebellious songs on the airwaves, politics was bullshit, and I was surrounded by visions of women burning their bras and Helen Reddy telling me “I am Woman” – hear me roar, her nipples poking through the soft fabric of her dress, her hair in a bob. Violence had moved out of

113

our home and onto the television and radio, across the country. Nevertheless, southern

Indiana stayed the same.

***

In 1969, my mother taught Brenda how to drive.

“Donna was insistent we wear our seatbelts before every car even had them. She would not let the car move until we buckled up,” Brenda said. “She was ahead of her time. Your dad put an air conditioner in the Dodge she was letting me drive and it spit ice at us the whole time. It was great.”

“She was like that with us, too,’ I said. “I think it was because of what happened to Norma. Same with getting your fingers crushed in the door when it shut.”

Same year, my mother further corrupted Brenda with Bun-sins by taking her to a movie theatre to see Guess Whose Coming to Dinner? with Sidney Portier. Then to the drive-in to see The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman. Donna let Brenda smoke without saying anything to Bun, too. And then came live music. Donna never stopped enjoying concerts as long as I knew her and it was the same with Brenda. During the day while

Johnny was at work, albums played and were switched and singing was a constant.

But in the end, Brenda had to return to Bun.

And Bun, that potentate self-made by violence and irascibility – the lingering remnants of his own father Elmer – a brutal self-assured Evangelist spouting the

Pentecost. Bun quilted rebellion and as the years rolled on, became full of face-saving spiritual motives.

114

But in 1967, Brenda went back to Kathern and Bun a changed young woman.

Nita was misbehaving and Brenda swatted her on the rear. Nita ran to Bun.

“I’ll be the one to punish her if she needs it,” Bun said to Brenda. He pulled back his arm and cocked his fist. But Brenda was hot and she drew quickly and put her weight behind her and grabbed his arm. Bun spun around and she lunged the other way.

“He never tried to strike me again.” That is how Brenda told the tale.

When asked what happened at home when she visited us in Florida, Brenda responded that nothing was ever done. Somehow Kathern managed doing dishes sitting down, but everything was dirty, no laundry was done, Nita needed a bath, and

Bun just sat there making some remark about Brenda being gone too long.

“When Nita was little,” Brenda said, “I couldn’t stand her. But she got older and we became buddies. Then we were inseparable.”

They were like the female bookends to Karen and Donna. Two generations of women in the same family. Both subjected to the same father, both tortured by the same patriarchal structure of southern Indiana.

115

A Brat and The Flying Wallendas

Really want to see you Lord But it takes so long, my Lord

George Harrison “My Sweet Lord”

Seventy-three men sailed up From the San Francisco Bay, Got off their ship And here's what they had to say. "We're callin' everyone to ride along

The Blues Image “Ride, Captain, Ride”

There is a hand drawn map made with the back of a white placemat that shows the intersection of Locust and Myrtle in Sarasota, Florida. Brenda drew a strange arrangement of low rent houses on the dirt road Locust leading to the paved Myrtle has arrows that point to the four houses on Locust that Bun moved the family to during winters he chose to go to Sarasota. When Karen left, it was 3710 Locust. When Ermel stayed with Bun, they were at 3803 Locust. For a brief time, after Ermel built his own house on Locust, they were at 3803 1/3 Locust. In Sarasota in the late 1960s and early

1970s, Locust was not a bad place to live, though the houses were nothing to brag about. I remember visiting 3803 Locust in my Easter dress one Sunday, Johnny driving us there early morning to spend a few hours with Donna’s family on Easter. Right out of the car, I was climbing a tree in the front yard. Then I saw a dobber nest and a few

116

loose dobbers. I panicked, got the bottom of my dress caught on a broken branch nub, and scraped my knee on the way down. I was afraid to go inside, so I didn’t. I found things to do in the yard. I wanted to see Brenda, but I hoped she would come outside to find me and not one of my parents. In the meantime, I had to pee. I finally squatted under a bush in the backyard and prayed I wasn’t going to get caught. If I saw Johnny, there’d be more than pee coming out.

When Brenda came looking for me, I was relieved. She saw my knee and took a tissue out of her dress pocket and wiped the blood off. It stung, but I was glad to have her as a shield. We went inside and I didn’t have to say hi to anyone and my parents didn’t notice my knee right away. In the front of the house was the small room that was actually an enclosed porch shared by Nita and Brenda. I sat on Nita’s bed and Brenda started putting laundry away in their shared dresser. The radio was on but the sound was low and I was beginning to feel OK again when Nita walked in, bored.

Nita sat in a rocking chair that was the only place to sit other than one of the small beds. In her hand was a glass bottle of Coca-Cola.

“Want some of my soda, Brenda?”

“No, Nita.”

“OK. Here you go,” Nita said in a nice-nasty voice. She tipped the bottle of soda until it poured onto their bedroom floor, a puddle the size of a 50-cent piece.

I immediately froze and looking at Brenda, felt like someone was going to get hit.

“You’re welcome,” Nita said.

Brenda closed the dresser drawer. She went into the kitchen to get a rag.

117

I sat on the bed and watched Nita smear the puddle with her big toe until it was the size of a plate. Then she left and went outside.

When Brenda came back, I said, “Look. She smeared it with her toe.”

“Yeah. She does that kinda thing.”

I was amazed at the non-reaction. I didn’t understand why Nita did something mean, or why Brenda cleaned it up and not Nita. It was like a silent understanding that

Nita acted out and no one touched her for it. It was like that for years, until Nita reached her teen years. I felt awful for Brenda.

“Where’d she go?” Brenda asked me.

“Outside.”

“Better go find her before she does something else she’s not supposed to.”

I glanced around the room, mad at Nita for taking Brenda away from the drawings on her side of the room – Peter Tork and George Harrison. I wanted her to draw for me, I wanted to watch. But I followed her outside, keeping my distance when I saw Nita. Both of her legs, the shins that showed below her skirt hem, and her arms were covered with small scabs.

“Nita, want to go for a walk?”

“Oh. You just wanna see your boyfriend.”

“Let’s go, Nita.”

I walked with them in the hot dirt road in my Easter dress and white buckle shoes already scuffed at the toes and ankles. When we got closer to Myrtle, there was a

118

huge open area. I was looking around and not paying as much attention to what was in front of us, feeling the summer setting in.

“Look, Dawn,” Brenda said. “Look up.”

I did. What I saw was unreal. Two poles that shot into the sky, about 100 yards apart and a long wire that stretched between them near the top. On each pole, there was a ladder and a landing near the top. On the right side was a man holding a long wobbly pole at its center. In his bare feet, he began to walk across the wire, balancing the pole as his feet formed into suction cups that gripped the thin wire.

“Who are they? From the circus?” I asked Brenda, breathless.

“The Flying Wallendas. They winter here when Barnum and Bailey’s is shut down.”

Nita chimed in. “The one in the chair is Brenda’s boyfriend. I’m telling Dad.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, Nita.” But Brenda watched the young man in the wheelchair who was watching the older man on the wire. I watched the man up high, mesmerized, excited, and suddenly needing to pee. Didn’t matter. There was no way my stinging feet were going to move from the hot asphalt burning the soles of my shoes. Nita continued to act disinterested, looking down the street and twiddling, scratching her sores.

“Stop pickin’ at those or they’ll never go away,” Brenda admonished.

“Shut up, or I’ll tell Dad about your boyfriend.”

“Go ahead. He can’t even walk poor guy.”

119

I saw others standing at the edge of the pavement half a block away on Myrtle, watching the same man defying the laws of physics. When he got near the other end, he suddenly dropped from the wire. My heart jumped out of my chest. But he bounced up, high enough above the fence line to see he was still holding the balance pole. An unnoticed net bounced him upward as he just as suddenly stopped bouncing and put the pole on the ground. He grabbed the edge of the net and flipped himself onto his feet to the safety of the hot earth. For several trips when Bun lived somewhere on Locust, it was the first thing I wanted to do. Sometimes we got lucky and the Wallendas were practicing, but sometimes the early spring rain kept them hidden.

“I did have a crush on the boy in the wheelchair,” Brenda admitted, “but I never even spoke to him. I was too shy with boys.”

It was true. Brenda expressed herself with a pencil, drawing whatever was near her heart. She drew the young man in the wheelchair, too, and put it on her wall below

George Harrison and Peter Tork. Her other outlet was the radio – the Beatles mostly – and the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

In the car on the way back to Jacksonville, I asked my mother about the sores.

“Why does Nita have sores all over?”

“It’s called in – fant – tie – go. It’s contagious, too. Let me know if you get any little sores on you,” Donna said.

I learned a scary word. Infantigo. At the time, I thought it meant Nita never took baths or it happened to mean kids. Infant meant she was the brat I saw.

120

Strange thing is I do not remember meeting Ermel Craig at any point in my younger years. It is possible Donna kept me shielded, or we just did not run in the same circles. If Johnny was in a room where Ermel or Bun began to talk the gospel, he left quietly. Ermel lived until 1972 in spite of having had a log truck’s ropes break close to him, the whole, heavy timber rolling across his legs. It may explain why our trips to

Sarasota were day trips with no overnight stays. Johnny’s mother and two sisters lived north of Sarasota in the St. Petersburg and Largo areas of the Gulf Coast, including

Indian Rocks. Combination trips were common and I remember ending a trip to see

Bun by staying with a paternal aunt and leaving the next morning. In those days, St.

Petersburgh was a short three and a half to four hour drive from Jacksonville. Even with The Flying Wallendas a short walk down Locust, I preferred our Indiana visits in the summer. The concrete blockhouses in Sarasota were small with cramped yards and no goat or mule. It was not a vacation to go from the Atlantic side of Florida to the Gulf side. That was just Johnny in the mood to go for a drive.

***

My favorite moment to be outside during summer visits to Indiana was in the gloaming. A friendly sky emitted a purplish glow across the sloping, suicide line of trees spanning Bun’s back acres. I sat on a tree stump, or the top of a picnic table, or climbed Bun’s Chalmer to feel the hard spring kick-back against my legs. I watched the dark hues imbibe naturally the land’s equilibrium. With little beauty – a land free of landscaped driveways filled with meticulously planned flower beds – the purple fused

121

with blue and orange is one of the few moments of subdural mysticism I still carry along my spine and into my brain. But as a child I wanted to jump into the fading light.

Eventually I saw it for what it was – the struggle during birth, the coming darkness – the place where the goblins escaped the other side. When the colors faded, I instinctively took cover in something akin to four walls, sometimes there in a lean-to against Bun’s large shed. I’d listen to a table full of adults having coffee and ice cream after a big meal. But my elders emitted ethereal light and as my eyesight adjusted and I made out the trees again. The mighty black oak with a set of stairs leading nowhere but served to hoist the climber to the grand trunk’s split of branches that were three times wider than my body. I listened to the shifts in conversation, the ones that occurred when one woman excused herself to use the restroom. The slowly popping bubbles as

Bun arrived with his own heaping, nightly bowl of ice cream to join them. Yet Bun never became part of the intimacy. He sat in a wooden, fan back chair off to the side. I watched him often, feeling a child’s unidentified discomfort.

The feelings combined into warring opposites – pity for his isolation and loneliness, and an intrepid awe of his blind faith and preaching. Underlying it all was suspicion. I asked a child’s questions. Where did it say in the Bible that I was going to hell because my parents took me to the drive-in movies? What about TV on Sundays.

There was no electricity before Jesus or after so how was watching football with Johnny in the scripture? Was I doomed to a fiery eternity? My eyes turned to my mother often, being my other mother in Indiana. Her posture, the excessive smile, and the disappearance of her tendency to sing snippets of 1960s and 1970s rock songs. My

122

mother the radio was silent and in this way, I became a disconnected soul. This was my family yet I did not click into the place where my piece of the puzzle fit. I was a corner piece, left bottom and out of focus. Donna was gone, replaced by an excessively self- conscious, vain woman connected to people who remained both strange and strangers until I aged another twenty years. And later, the knowing turned out to be worse than the exclusion.

But in those moments as the purple dissipated, I was everlasting. I neither aged nor regressed, was not wiser, nor was I more ignorant.

123

The Lyrics of my Mother

I went down to the sacred store Where I'd heard the music years before But the man there said the music wouldn't play

Don McLean “American Pie”

Donna may have left Indiana far behind, in part to escape Bun and the impoverished life of marrying a local boy who would fight the same lifelong battle with jobs, but parts of Indiana never left her. The music that caught her soul on fire, first in the rowdy praise of Bun’s church, then during the rock years when she came of age and fell in love, were as big a part of her as her warm brown eyes and toothy smile.

From my earliest memories, music is the backdrop. When we had a small radio, it was always on when Johnny was at work, and 8-Tracks and albums played on the weekend. Johnny favored Elvis, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, and the soundtrack from

“The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” With Donna, there were the old standards she sang when the words hit her, from where I do not know, and the AM radio station

WAPE on Highway 17 in Orange Park, Florida. She heard the older rock tunes mixed with newer sounds as they emerged. If she was listening, I was as well.

124

The goblin stories she retold had their own rhythm as well. She metered them out like precious stones. When she got to the ‘gitcha’ the tension was so enthralling, it was more fun than scary. But those damn goblins, I saw them everywhere. I equated them in my childish mind to all bad things that happened. I had a recurring nightmare that had my mother and me on a motorcycle, my brother and father zooming past us in a used boat of a car. Our motorcycle was taking us to a place on Blanding Boulevard in

Jacksonville and we could not stop it. Our motorcycle was taken when we got there, and I was seated with a bunch of other kids. Donna was across a large dirt patch sitting with other adults. Eventually, it came time to open the big pit in the dirt that had no bottom and each time I dreamt this nightmare, I watched my mother being pushed into the pit while I cried and screamed, wondering why my father never came for us. Those bad people pushing adults into the pits were goblins. They were part of life.

Every day Donna broke into spontaneous melodies, singing the words in a beautifully wavering voice. At the kitchen sink washing lunch dishes while I sat at the little table,

What child is this Who lay to rest On Mary's lap is sleeping Whom angels greet with anthems sweet While Shepard's watch our keeping This, this is Christ the King Whom Shepard's guard and angels sing . . .

125

The dramatic sweep into while shepard’s watch our keeping gave me chills, her ability to suddenly sing bass comforting. Cooking at the stove while I played in the living room,

Down in the meadow in an itty bitty pool Swam three little fishies and a mama fishie too "Swim," said the mama fishie, "Swim if you can." And they swam and they swam all over the dam

Boop boop diten datem autem choo Boop boop diten datem whatem choo Boop boop diten datem whatem choo And they swam and they swam all over the dam

Come said the mama fishie ‘for you get lost The three little fishies didn’t wanna be bossed

Itty bitty was Donna’s version. The actual lyrics were little bitty and she did a Bun face scrunch on every choo in a high-pitched voice.

The mysteries of puddin’ tain, suddenly playful, telling us to ask her name.

“What’s your name?”

“Puddin’tain. Ask me again, I’ll tell ya the same.”

“What’s your name?”

“Puddin’tain. Ask me again, I’ll tell ya the same.”

Puddin’tain went on until we quit laughing, or until she felt like moving to something else. It was the constancy of her communication whether lyrical or just talking that drew us to her so closely, differently than with Johnny.

When we were with her in the car, or sitting together in the living room,

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly

126

I don’t know why she swallowed a fly Perhaps she’ll die. There was an old woman who swallowed a spider That riggled and jiggled and tickled inside her … She swallowed the spider to catch the fly I don’t know why she swallowed a fly Perhaps she’ll die. There was an old woman who swallowed a bird How absurd to swallow a bird. She swallowed the bird to catch the spider That riggled and jiggled and tickled inside her . . . She swallowed the spider to catch the fly I don’t know why she swallowed the fly Perhaps she’ll die. There was an old lady who swallowed a cat Imagine that, to swallow a cat She swallowed the cat to catch the bird She swallowed the bird to catch the spider

And it went on, dragging out the fly after the I don’t know why, quickening the pace when moving backwards on what was swallowed and why and trying to keep up was the fun part. Then a dog, a goat, a cow, and a horse. When she swallowed the horse, she’s dead of course, and the song ended. “Do it again. Do it again.”

At bedtime, Donna took requests. I asked for a goblin story often, but there were others. The three little fishies lost its popularity as I got older and I moved onto other requests, but sometimes I missed the fishies and wondered whether they ever made it back to their bossy mama fishie.

If I were hungry, I’d ask what was for dinner and get a limerick response.

Peach porridge hot Peach porridge cold Peach porridge in the pot Nine days old.

127

It was decades before I knew the origin of this bastardized southern Indiana version.

No one can trace the exact origin, but it comes from pease porridge from the Middle

English. It was a pottage made with peas. The Craigs probably brought it with them from Scotland, but did not grow or buy peas, so it changed to peach, to me a more appetizing substitute unless you are eating the nine-day-old version.

Or a more southern Indiana answer for the ever popular, cheap potato,

Pie, pie, tater pie P – I – E – E – I – P Pie eeper iper, peeper piper How I love my tater pie.

One specific game song I remember my brother actually singing, something I’ve not heard him do often.

There’s a hole, a hole, a hole in the bottom of the sea. There’s a log on a hole in the bottom of the sea, There’s a log on a hole in the bottom of the sea, There’s a log, a log, a log in the bottom of the sea. There’s a frog on a log on a hole in the bottom of the sea . . .

This continued until the frog had a wart and the wart had a hair, upon which sat a flea and then dust. Then there was no hole, no hole, no hole in the bottom of the sea.

As I outgrew the fishies, the animal fair and the bears replaced them. At bedtime, these became my favorites. I slowly gathered the gumption to sing aloud as I got older.

128

Went to the Animal Fair The birds and bees were there The big baboon by the light of the moon Was combing his auburn hair. You should have seen the monk, Who jumped on the elephant’s trunk. The elephant sneezed and fell on his knees And that was the end of the monk, the monk, the monk, the monk. We went to the animal fair . . .

And it all began again. The visual of a baboon with long auburn hair, comb in hand, was fascinating. But scary were the bears,

Don’t go out in the woods today Or you’re sure of a big surprise. If you go out in the woods today You better go in disguise. For every bear that ever there was Will gather there for certain because Today’s the day the bears will have their picnic.

Donna always sang about the bears in a low, dramatic voice. I was in the woods by our house a lot, ran into banana spider webs and flying palmetto bugs, and ran from a bee or two, but I never saw the bears. I had to trust that Donna would tell me if the day ever came. The worst I saw was a snake that was more afraid of me, and I came home once with 102 chigger bites earned while fishing a local pond. All I needed was a cane pole and a wadded piece of bread. Cal caught grasshoppers so he caught the bigger fish. I unhooked brim until Donna told us to release them because our freezer was full.

129

Near our radio sat a small pad of paper and a pen, Navy issue, from the dozens my father brought home clipped to his Chief Petty Officer uniform pocket. The pens were black with a silver clip and ballpoint end. If a song caught Donna’s attention, she’d write down the lyrics while the song played as fast as possible, then waited until the next time the song played to catch the rest. But there was one song that took two weeks to finish. She had to keep the radio on past dinner time, an unusual occurrence in our house since the joke was there was no laughing allowed after 7:00 o’clock. It was a barb from Donna to Johnny, but in fairness, it was usually true. I lived in one world with Donna, and another with Johnny and Donna. No one had to tell me it was that way, or why, it was simply the way it was and as an anxious child, it didn’t bode well for my sense of self-consciousness. It was heavy enough to knock down a brick wall, but I carried it thinking I was the problem. The song was “American Pie” by Don

Maclean. The DJ who played it the first time Donna heard it, announced that it was a new song about the day Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens died in a plane crash in 1959. From that first listen, the pad of paper and pen never left the table and the unspoken rules about the radio and laughing went out the window.

After the two weeks went by and all the lyrics were recognized and written down, then rewritten in verse format, Donna began singing the song to memorize it.

The weight of the song can not be explained by me. I was not born when the crash happened. Watching my mother and learning about her loss, the music world’s loss, I began to see how important it was to Donna. The sometimes cryptic lyrics remained a

130

mystery to me until I was old enough to understand all of the references. It was, and is still, one of my favorite tunes.

It is odd to recall the lack of immediate gratification of those days. DJs were not allowed to state when your requested song was going to play so you could place your tape recorder next to your radio. But Don Maclean played no less than eight times a day. Even so, finding lyrics without having to pay money for an album, money we did not have, was impossible. You had to listen for the song and learn its depths. Donna was not to be dissuaded. A few weeks after she had the lyrics down, she sang it from beginning to end often. It overtook the regular tunes she sang so spontaneously, and when she wasn’t singing the words, she was humming the melody. Now that I am much older, I can relate well. There have been many times when one song, or one album has saved me from myself, from thinking of things too dark to mention to a parent or a brother. It was that way for Donna. Somehow, that song marked the beginning of the end of her own childhood, her late maturation into a woman with two growing kids who needed her less each day and a husband whose silence was beginning to act as a prison in its own right.

131

Seagulls, Blisters, and Farts

Chestnut brown canary Ruby throated sparrow Sing a song, don't be long Thrill me to the marrow.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”

The last time I remember Brenda visiting us before she married in 1970, it was during an especially hot summer. I remember my parents put together a set of bunk beds for my small bedroom in Florida. These were to accommodate my brother and me while

Brenda, given permission by Bun, came to stay with us. My Aunt Karen was married with her own children, so we rarely saw them. But escaping to our home meant, for

Brenda, a learning experience she might not have found otherwise.

When Brenda was at home with Donna, I rarely left the house. The woods could wait. And that was cool. But the bunk beds provided her with her own room where my brother Cal usually slept, and that was an adventure in and of itself.

132

I slept on the top bunk at first. I loved to climb trees, sheds, carports, and Morris

Minors. One morning I woke up on the floor half in the doorway of the bedroom. I was on the bottom bunk from then on. After we went to bed, Cal always got the farts. They were the biggest, booming farts I had ever heard. He called them by name.

"And this is my super semi-tractor trailer truck," and he'd let one go that sounded like a tin can being stomped into the ground.

I got the giggles so many times; we were admonished, but never anything severe.

So as soon as things quieted down again, we were in our secret world of gaseous explosions with odors that seeped down to my bottom bunk through his mattress. I remember laying there staring up at the springs beneath his part of the upper bunk and praying they held up against his rips. They always did. Those few times that one of my aunts stayed with us were always good times between my brother and me. We had the secret knowledge of our mother, the stuff kids know they may not have words for, like how different my mother was in our home when one of Bun's other daughters was spared the harsh Bun Rules to stay with us in Florida. Meals took on conversation in a household where any type of confrontation at the dining table, including bland topics like school, was frowned upon by my non-confrontational dad. But not when Brenda was there.

Brenda laughed. Then my mom laughed. If I was there, I was laughing, too. It was a cacophony of goofiness and singing. The Indiana in my mother came out to say hello every day and I had the attention of an aunt who had to split her time when we visited her in Indiana. It was, in a child's view, musical heaven.

133

Her hair was long, when she smiled or laughed you saw gaps where there used to be teeth in the front and back. Her fair skin was better suited to Norway or Iceland, and it freckled, even in the Florida winter. I was in shorts at all times, except when the occasional freeze hit and lasted for approximately 14 hours. Then the shorts came out again, those knit outfits that K-Mart sold all year round in green, purple, blue, and orange.

Late one summer, I think I was six or seven which made it 1969 or 1970, we went to Little Talbot Island, a trip that is infamous now in the retelling, but to me was another extension of the delirious happiness within which I lived.

Typical for Florida in the summer, there was only a slight chill in the wee hours, which meant you were sensitive to the low 80s, then sweltering humidity and rising temperatures as the dawn broke. One particular day was overcast, and we were making a trip to Little Talbot Island. Brenda did not realize what the sun was doing to her doe like skin when she was next to the ocean. We body surfed, ate lunch - my mother never failed to have food for us wherever we went - walked for miles and swam in the large tidal pools near the mouth of the St. Johns as it meets the Atlantic Ocean. Rip tides kept us from going too deep, but a sandbar full of gulls and brave young swimmers was plainly visible from the main shore. Problem was the rip tide stood between us and that bar. We didn't dare risk it. My mother always asked the same question.

"What will you do when you get to the sandbar?" she'd ask, relaxed, one shoulder dropped with sunglasses on. The edges of her mouth held a smirk.

134

"I don't know," I would say, and within five minutes, I forgot the sandbar existed. There were too many things to do other than drown. And you were never permitted to drive onto Little Talbot Island beach as it was a State Park. And there was no such thing as a jet ski riding the surf, making the beach combers puke from the fumes.

Brenda and my mother talked for hours, about what I don't know other than the snippets about their parents. They broke into song on the beach as easily as at our home. I always wanted to sing along, I had the voice for it, but debilitating shyness sometimes crippled my throat. I went off to the tidal pools to wake the sand with my hand and watch minnow sized fish snap at the uplifted grains. I poked dead crabs, stepped on a few live ones, and got stung by a jellyfish that was already dead. Then my mother broke out the sacks of cheap white bread and we went to the waterline and waited for the gulls to spot us.

Brenda was turning pink and my mother said we needed to go. But Brenda was having such a great time, she had never seen the Atlantic Ocean, and she had fallen in love with the salty air and the constant, mesmerizing drone of waves breaking then pulling themselves back into the surge of the surf. She was big chested and my mother had fashioned one of Brenda's bras with a piece of material to make it look like a bathing suit top with an extended stomach skirt over her mid-section. They pulled it off, too. There was a piece of early seventies cotton with bulbous, overdone flower buds in my mother's sewing supplies. My mother saved her scrap fabric, she was thrifty that way. But the cleavage of Brenda's Sheldon Mountains was showing, and her shoulders

135

and legs. I had never seen anyone wear a skirt to the beach, but Brenda was Bun's underage daughter and wear a skirt she did, a yellow one, though my mother cut the polyester hem shorter to make it more comfortable. My mother corrupted both of her younger sisters that way.

By the time the gulls arrived, little blisters appeared on Brenda's shoulders. She ignored the stinging. There was a bully gull swooping in to grab bread from the smaller gulls. One small, mostly white gull was missing a claw. I began herding it gently until I threw small pieces within two inches of its mouth. And the cawing! Insane amounts of screeching and squawking that gave me ear fatigue as fast as any rock concert I have been to. The other gulls caught on quickly to my favoring the lame gull, and the small gull and I had to begin again several times. But at least another hour went by, three females, different generations being swarmed on the shore of the Atlantic by voracious scavengers.

"Watch this," my mother demanded. She held her hand high with a full piece of white bread to the blue sky. A dive-bombing gull drove down until it nearly landed on her hand, but pulled up in a flush of wings to grab her bread with its claws.

"Wow, Donna," Brenda said, and proceeded to stand there and mimic her.

I continued to flush the outskirts for the weaker birds. It’s a habit I have never broken. But I saw a large blister on Brenda's back.

"Ma, look at Brenda's back."

My mother was all seriousness in a flash, and snuck around behind Brenda.

136

"Oh, no. Brenda, we need to get ya out of the sun, hon," she said, Indiana slipping easily into her tongue again.

"Ahhh, Donna. Party pooper. I don't wanna go," Brenda whined, but only in the way sisters do with each other. She headed back toward our towels.

"We can always come back, Bren."

I felt shame. I had pointed something out that made Brenda have to go and she was happy. I was guilty of being the kid who ruined everything, something my brother was fond of pointing out. As we took the long hike back to the oven-baked car, we stopped to admire the sea oats and the pure whiteness of the sand. It was all crystals and sparkles until the plant life crept in, where stinging thorns and army ants waited for a misstep, and sand fleas hid from the salty ocean. I remember thinking there are never ticks here like there are in the woods. And no ticks was always a plus. I hated being ticked. Somehow my hair always came out shorter at the hands of my mother's scissors.

The beach has a way of sapping a person, but usually not until after a shower at home. On the way, I held a towel in place against the window of Brenda's shotgun seat.

The sun coming through the glass was making her want to vomit. She showered when we were at home, and went to bed early. The bra she wore after her shower was lined with cotton balls. The pressure on the skin of her shoulders from the strap made her scream. Noxema was applied every 20 minutes. But the blisters grew.

I was asleep in the bottom bunk, at a time when all children are supposed to be asleep but often are not. I was awakened by an extremely harsh thud from the end of

137

the trailer. My training automatically went to hurricane drills and I managed my socks and shoes. They didn't match my pajamas, a pink tank top and green cotton shorts. My brother was out the door before me, no shoes and no socks. He headed toward the kitchen opposite of where I was going.

I ran into my parents' bedroom but no one was there. I ran into the kitchen and saw a light on in Brenda's room. Fear shot through me. Feeding the gulls had killed her.

I started to cry, and move slowly, very slowly, toward her room. My brother and parents were there beside her. Brenda was on the floor.

"How are we going to get her in the car?" my father asked my mother. He was down on one knee, shoving his black hair back and out of his eyes.

"Brenda . . . can you sit up?" my mother asked.

"Is she OK?" I wondered.

"Yes, go back to bed. She has sun poisoning," my father said in a surprisingly soothing voice.

At that moment, Brenda had telepathy. She said as clear as the nose on my face that I didn't need to worry.

"I'm fine, don't worry. Just fell when I got out the bed's all."

Sun poisoning. Sounded like it came with the Blob on the Friday night Creature

Double Feature. Did she bring it with her from Indiana? Did they have a poison sun, or is our sun poison and my mother will get sick, then me? Poison. It was a jagged word.

All I thought of was getting her a glass of cold water, which I managed with a chair to reach our freezer. The tray was steel with a lever in the middle, not an easy

138

thing to crack the ice without losing a finger. I got her one of my father's special gold glasses with the circular dips across the whole thing. It was huge to me, like a Big Gulp glass only much heavier. I forgot about the water and gave her a glass of my father's iced tea. I held it carefully, walking in a trance back to her bedroom.

"Here, I got Brenda this," I said.

My brother rolled his eyes. I heard his unspoken words – god you’re stupid. My mother's attention never left Brenda, and my father took the glass from me and asked

Brenda to take a sip.

"Thanks so much. Don't mean to be any trouble. I'm so sorry J. C. Sorry Donna,"

Brenda said. She sipped the tea while my father held the glass. I didn’t have a clue tea was harder on the stomach than water. Dad drank it by the gallon every evening and weekend.

Thirty seconds later, Brenda practiced projectile vomiting onto my father's white t-shirt.

"Yikes. That's one way to wake her up." He hummed in his nervous way and turned around to clean himself off, running the front of his pointer finger knuckle down my nose. "Isn't that right?"

I felt the tension run out of my body. If he made a joke, all was well. But it was, after all, to my aunt . . . a female. That made me feel more normal.

The rest of that night, my mother slept with Brenda in Cal’s bedroom, changing her cool cloths out and laying them on her shoulders, forehead, arms and legs. Then she covered Brenda with a light sheet. When Brenda got too hot, my mother fanned her

139

with the sheet, like she did for me on hot nights. I didn't sleep, but wandered from the living room to the bedroom door where Brenda was suffering, then back to the bottom bunk. My father, always on his way to work, had to get a few hours’ sleep.

It took two days for Brenda to stop glowing in the dark. I never saw that kind of red before. And the cotton balls under her bra never worked. She took to going without one, a sin in Bun's world. A practicality in ours. It looked like a huge shelf with broken hinges. Brenda kept cool rags, one under each breast, and didn't help cook because cooking in Florida isn't possible when the sun has poisoned your body. She was indoors and I believe at that time, I finally began to believe some things my mother told me were true. Coming in out of the sun, always leaving the beach before I was ready (I was never ready). I thought it was her job to be a pain in my ass, when in reality, she knew what she was doing. Donna was dear; she lost more sleep over others than anyone I’ve ever known.

I felt that dazed confusion a kid gets when they have had some innocent part in a bad thing happening. I was removed from making it better, but maybe I saved her by spoiling our good time at the beach. I began staring into space often, not being as playful with my aunt Brenda. She knew. She constantly showed me kindnesses though she was puking a lot and each time her skin touched fabric of any kind, she hollered. If only we had SPF 30 in 1969.

Now that I am older, I know what none of us really knew then . . . that Brenda might have died. My mother's horse sense, added to her ability to go three days without sleep and still function at full steam, saved my aunt from an expensive hospital trip. No

140

one had insurance on that side of the family. I don't think any of us knew how to spell the word. It was all military waiting rooms. No one called an ambulance unless there was a dead person waiting. But I didn't know about having insurance on cars and trailers back then. We always went to the naval base for doctors and strep throat. If you weren't sick when you went in, you were when you left. It was an all-day affair.

I was happy when Brenda put her bra back on and got in the car for a trip to the store with me and my mother. The radio was on again, and all manner of silly songs were sung.

Billy, don't be a hero. Don't be a fool with your life Billy, don't be a hero. Come back and make me your wife And as he started to go, she said Billy keep your head low.

And I sang out loud without my brother in the car, just us three women even though I was the flat chested one who didn't have a clue why Billy's girlfriend threw away the letter saying Billy had died a hero. I only thought she must have been one great big butthole. I knew everyone related to Bun acted differently when they weren't around

Bun, my mother and aunt included, and sometimes I felt sorry for him. What with his never going to the beach or not believing in drive-in movies, never letting his women relatives wear make-up, or turn on the TV on Sundays. All that missed football. All that missed laughter and goofiness. How did he stand it?

That same visit, my mother took Brenda back to the forbidden zone of cars and a big screen, a flush of evil. The Blanding Drive-In must have been the devil’s playground and he was busy, there were always many cars there when I was a kid. I was left at

141

home for this trip because of the movie rating. A secretly in-love Beatles fan, Brenda relished the trips to the drive-in with Donna. She could draw like a photographer, but never had any schooling for it. She drew Peter Tork and George Harrison with heavy pencils and put them on the wall of her bedroom. That was a place Bun never went. She was a new woman thanks to my corrupting mother. Watching my mom take her sisters to drive-ins and concerts over the years, I must have gotten my knowing sense of Bun from her. If she didn’t take it seriously, that meant Bun had no real power over our small family of four. That is how I stood his sermons, but learned from the music.

Damn that drive-in and its sinful ways. I mean, what with the playground under the screen and people getting out of their cars, the lousy popcorn and shriveled hot dogs in the secret safety of your car, I can see where it was the devil's work.

I secretly believed my mother Donna would be taken to task if Bun ever found out, but if there was one thing Bun's daughters knew how to do, it was to hold such truths quietly to their ample breasts. There was a joke about it . . . "It's gonna be bad . . .

Don't tell Bun" or something like "I'm tellin' Bun on your sinning ass. Drop to your knees and pray". I heard that said, then I thought of my grandfather and began, around the age of eight, to feel real pity for him. I still went to his church in the summers when we were in Indiana, but it was more to enjoy the farcical nature of crazy people with little money and few steady jobs catching the spirit and talking funny languages. And of course, the music.

But old home movies that survived on silent 8mm confirm the thing I saw but as a child could not put a name to. When he wasn’t at the pulpit, Bun could chuckle a bit,

142

smile with his chin jutted forward, fix a tractor or car, farm, beat his children or grandchildren. Yes, he could do all those things. But nothing ever took away that look of sadness that stained brown eyes below his heavy brow.

143

Awkward Purple Gremlin Eater

I feel fine. I'm talking about peace of mind.

Tommy James and the Shondells “Draggin’ the Line”

Well she knows what I'm about, She can take what I dish out, and that's not easy.

Tom Jones “She’s a Lady”

In 1971 when I was eight years old, Cal and I were stuffed into the backseat of a two- door, purple AMC Gremlin with a white vinyl interior. We were headed toward that last family gathering in Indiana where all eight of the original Craigs were together at

Bun’s. That made sleeping quarters limited. So behind our four-cylinder Gremlin with an ooga horn Johnny installed, was a temporary hitch and a Navy issue camper.

The terrain from Jacksonville to an hour north of Atlanta was flat. But as with every summer drive in this direction, the Georgia foothills and Tennessee and Kentucky roller coasters took us down to forty miles per hour and for one twenty minute span, to

144

thirty miles per hour. I was petrified, waiting to see our camper swing around in front of the Gremlin as we hit 6% grade declines. The camper pushed the car. Other drivers honked constantly. Johnny said his favorite word while driving a hundred times.

“Idiot.”

My fear kept me awake though Johnny insisted on our same late night departure.

So I watched the dark speed by, first Georgia, then Tennessee, and finally the best part – looking for grass turned blue in Kentucky. I had heard about it, but a deep frosted lush green was all I saw as the dawn came each year, waking colors as it rose. With

Tennessee and Kentucky came road abuse. Especially in our Gremlin, the up and down of the mountains put a grind on the engine. The camper pitched and wavered behind us. The air conditioning was turned off because the pull on the engine was too much to bear. There were no retractable windows in the back of that two-door car and my brother and I moved our faces, craning necks to situate ourselves where the air moved the most. My mother was not amused. She spent the second half of the drive giving my father silent looks, ones that if enunciated sounded a lot like You asshole.

When we finally got to Mitchell, Bun walked around the outside of the Gremlin and studied how the hitch held the camper in tow. He and my father found a level spot in Bun's backyard under the shade and Bun directed my father into place. The metal pull down steps were missing. Bun studied the situation, one fist on his hip, thumb toward the back of his body. I watched from his picnic table, another homemade artifact of my youth and one of my favorite places to be after the sunset.

145

After a short trip to the lean-to that housed his serious tractor - not the small riding grass cutter but the all metal open air driving monster in need of his constant attention - Bun returned to my father. They disappeared into the lean-to but resurfaced with concrete blocks in a wheelbarrow. They placed them in front of the camper door and voila, stairs. If ever there was a need to rig something, Bun found an answer in his lean-to. Another hulking shed sat beside it, but I never saw anyone go inside save Bun.

He tinkered constantly, softly biting his tongue as he worked. The safety of his world far surpassed any I felt in our Florida existence. Bun always fixed things. My father traded things in, or placed broken lawnmowers in our small aluminum shed, one shameful to our relatives in Indiana. They all had outbuildings, some bigger than the houses where they lived.

With the stairs in front of the smelly camper, I realized we were sleeping in stench and heat each night. Never sleeping well in other people's beds, I suddenly missed my pillows. I was rescued every night, my mother finding a way for me to sleep inside, out of the heat, a small act of kindness bereft of gratitude on my part. I always see these things in hindsight. A child's mind knew not when to register and process actions by adults unless there was pain or fear involved.

My father always took a short nap after we arrived, having refused to let Donna drive any of the sixteen hours. Then he disappeared. I rarely saw him during our

Indiana vacations except smoking a non-filtered Camel standing on Bun’s porch.

Behind him stood Bun’s Coke machine – the kind with a narrow door that exposed the capped necks of small, cold Coca-Cola bottles. Put the change in and the latches lifted

146

long enough for the buyer to yank out one bottle. He stood on that porch and gazed off into the rise of Bun's land, across small cornfields and a mystery of trees. I wondered where he went in those moments and believed he was most peaceful when he was off to the side, out of the constant din of meal preparation and church activities. My father never attended Bun's church. Bun never asked him why but accepted his mysteries and at times, joined my father on the porch.

Bun’s last self-built house was on Old Highway 50. Quarrymen escaping the back way knew Bun welcomed them onto his porch for a cold soda. Johnny often put one hand on the soffit board of the porch roof at night. His face lit by a strong inhale was blank as he stared toward the rise of the hill behind Bun’s house, across the cornfield and toward the captured spring where water syphoned through a makeshift,

Bun-rigged spigot fed Bun’s house. Johnny showed up for dinner and occasionally sought out Bun when he was alone. I’d give both arms to know what my atheist father and my preacher grandfather discussed. But I saw a mutual respect, though on

Johnny’s part, an uninformed one.

For the first time during a trip to see Bun, I missed the radio. At a time before cable, or satellite broadcasts, making even a simple phone call meant putting your finger in exactly the right number-hole as the dialer waited for the rotary dial to return.

Phone numbers were stored in an address book by pen. When someone moved around, there was a permanent history of a person’s life – their income or lack thereof, suspicious State border crossing moves insinuating distance from the law. Johnny and

Donna rarely moved, but Bun’s back and forth from Indiana to Florida for work meant

147

a few pages of entries. Donna put a single line through old addresses, wrote down dates of validity, and tracked her entire family. I was always fascinated with her address book, looking at the ones who never moved and wondering how they tolerated immobility. I was raised in mobile homes. Moving meant hitching your home to a big truck and some leveling work. It was not until I was much older that I began to realize what a strain all the changes were on Kathern.

“She never complained. Not once,” Donna told me. “We never had air conditioning and I know she had to be in pain. But . . . that was Dad. He wanted to move, we went the next day.”

And Brenda remembers, “She was miserable but Dad never stopped unless it was absolutely necessary – or in other words, unless he needed to.”

That Gremlin summer with the camper was too crowded to catch Nita or Brenda listening to the radio upstairs. The sounds of 1971 crowded my head. In spite of the

Beatles’ death, Ringo, George, and Paul had top hits on the charts. Every Sunday I listened to Casey Cassum and wrote down the top forty songs. Even the gospel failed me that summer. There was no filling the gap with the exception of gal time upstairs.

Everyone was there, married or not. Brenda, Karen, Donna, Nita, Kathern, and an endless parade of skirted cousins. But at night after everyone left and went back to their own homes, Brenda, Nita, Donna, and I were the ones upstairs. Sometimes Donna was with Kathern, mending hems and hearts. I did not miss her. She was my other mother in Indiana, the one whose posture changed and physical gestures like hand waving and

148

eye batting went full tilt, ratcheting up the self-consciousness. She was at a full boil with a lid on top when Bun entered the picture.

But I could sing out loud with her because in Bun’s house that summer, the singing was joined by one or two other voices. In 1971, her favorite song was shared by her two younger sisters and one would sing the first line with gusto, and the others knew the words.

“Jeremiah was a bullfrog . . .”

Goose bumps traveled down my legs every time.

“. . . was a good friend of mine. I never understood a single word he said but I helped him a drink his wine . . . Yes he always had some mighty fine wine.”

Then the chorus with Nita and Brenda, me shying away but singing in the background.

“Singing Joy to the World. All the boys and girls now. Joy to the fishies in the deep blue see. Joy to you and me.”

I never understood the song, but it was an undeniable melody and it just felt goooood. I’d leave the room with them, my mind a mad mixture of popular songs coming through in snippets.

“Country roads, take me home . . . and knock three times on the ceiling if you want me, twice on the pipes . . . I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky tum- bull-en down . . . cuz signs, signs, everywhere the signs, fuckin’ up the scenery – and the sign says “Long haired freaky people, need not apply, so I tucked my hair up under my hat and went in to ask him why.”

149

I had to keep the fuckin’ to myself. I heard things that way, and if I learned it wrong, I sang it wrong for years. Tell me have you seen her was tell me I’m a senior.

When Papa preached a little gospel, I sang Papa would do whatever he could, bleach a little gossip pool, sell a couple bottles of doctor’s food. And when I was two years old, everyone was starving because The Band said in the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely alive, and You’re out raisin’ cane right up with both your feet for You can’t raise a Cain back up when he’s in defeat. But better than all of that, Bill Withers and the

Jackson Five thumped in the back of my throat constantly. I was becoming a walking piece of percussion, split between gospel, Motown, and Richard Starkey. If I was heard singing the wrong words, I was teased relentlessly by my parents and brother. Teasing was the only form of emotional expression Johnny felt comfortable showing, which meant at times I began to take my rhythm underground. In those moments with my

Indiana mother and father, I was taught the darker side of self-consciousness led to painful awareness.

It was the same with Bun and the camper. I shut down whenever Bun was around. I was following the lead of others while feeling like I was inappropriate, never in the right place, always speaking at the wrong time.

***

During our long ride back to Florida, Donna was usually quiet, so Johnny kept the 8-track player moving. We were all in the car waiting for her to finish saying goodbye to Kathern, giving her privacy. I remember she was crying, fighting to keep control of a heavy sob and before we backed out of Bun’s driveway, Johnny pushed in

150

the first 8-track, one he found in town while we were in Indiana but didn’t tell Donna.

Her head was bowed and I watched from the backseat nervous and sad when the first song played.

Big girls don’t cry, big girls don’t cry. Big girls, don’t cry aye aye. They don’t cry. Big girls, do-on’t cry. I wonder why.

Donna smiled through her tears and I saw in that moment that it was Johnny’s way of making her feel better, a tender gesture generally kept out of his children’s sight. They chuckled together, and the ride home was a bit lighter.

*** When I was twelve and we made our summer journey to Indiana in 1975, Bun had traded for a camper but it lived at Charles’ house. By then Eddie’s son Duane was godlike to me. He sprouted upward and his muscles pressed against the fabric of his clothes, no doubt made to work with Eddie and drop out of school. The next generation struggled nearly as hard to get through High School, though the one room schoolhouse had become an elementary school. The money curse, however, was relentless. Hearing a stray gunshot at night in the summer was frightening to me, but Duane and my other cousins took it in stride.

“Folks gotta eat,” one of my cousins would say after a bracing crack in the dark.

When I was eleven, though, we were visiting Charles’ family in Lawrenceville where Bun kept his camper. There was a long cushioned bench, a set of bunkbeds, and a corner chair built into the frame with a bright orange seat. The whole thing smelled

151

like the old-fashioned seat floaters left wet in a boat for two years. Charles’ house was hulking, but dilapidated. They had running water to the kitchen and one bathroom between five kids, Charles, and his wife. They were bible strict, and many moments spent visiting, I spent not speaking.

My cousin Ricky, born the same year I was, was their only son. His moon face was broken up by his cut jaw line and mischievous brown eyes. I was lanky and gangly and longing for the ocean, he was solid and woven into the soil, but his dreams drew him outward and away from everyone else. Somehow, he was not like my other cousins. He wanted out from the moment he formed a complete thought. Sometimes we rode bikes until I no longer knew where I was, challenged by the rolling line of the back roads. Ricky led me to our summer home, wherever that was at the moment, and I was always safe. He was Bun's favorite so my friendship put me in his good graces simply by my tomboyish charm and my natural way of wanting to do all things “male.”

When I wanted to drive the small tractor, it was Ricky who set things up for me.

Bun denied him nothing, as long as it didn't involve borrowing money. I have a picture of me driving the small tractor. Problem was, it didn't move fast enough for me to escape my father's watchful eyes. And that is how he was during all our visits to

Indiana, a whisper of attendance at family gatherings, always on the periphery and never tethered to anything.

Since the old state road was still traveled from the quarry by men who pounded and blasted rock all day, sometimes they stopped to pull a bottle from behind the door of the coke machine. They were usually young, dirty, and strong from working quarry.

152

Limestone was no easy life for the earth didn't offer it up easily. These men worked with pools of standing water filled with snakes, machinery that killed and maimed a man whose attention was lifted for mere seconds, and drove fast, beaten up trucks with no air conditioning. I fell in love with each one of them, especially the one who tweaked my nose with his swollen finger. He didn't scare me. The sense of Bun's safe haven extended automatically to anyone entering the property. I did not have this luxury in

Florida, where everything was temporal and every day felt like the one before; Mom stayed home with me and my brother; Dad went off to work for the Navy; school was a constant source of anxiety and awkwardness. But in Indiana something ethereal came with the heat and I was free for two weeks every summer.

Believing Ricky was the key to the mysteries of being our age, I was easily influenced by the way he watched me. Smirking beneath his eyes, all kinds of trouble was to be had. Our bike rides lasted well past dark, we often sat together at Bun's church when Ricky was not elected official babysitter of children too young to participate, and we fished. When the flood arrived the summer of 1975, an entire cornfield sank into a flooded earth, ruining the small crop for the season. Winter corn was feed for farm animals, as important as the ears of corn that graced Bun's table late spring and throughout the summer. But something below the surface had pulled the field downward, one long, level football field on the lower tier of earth. I imagined

Bun’s Satan down there, wielding dangerous tricks.

It was a rain that lasted four days, a relentless deluge of hail and water. The rooftops popped like cooked corn, windows were shut trapping the heat inside Bun's

153

house. Cooking was an experiment in heat displacement, handed over to can openers and cooled cucumbers with bread and cheese. Mustard was the only condiment and no one drove to town. Cars were rushed under aluminum roofs or parked beside sprawling black oaks for protection. Feral animals disappeared, hunkered down somewhere out of sight. Chickens were left to their own devices, mules tied to posts beneath a lean to awning, braying non-stop and bucking wildly. Abandoned cars and tractor plows long forgotten sank beneath the weight of their bulk into flooded soil.

When the storm stopped and life resurfaced, Bun's corn field had been relocated, six feet lower and feeding the hungry beneath the soil. A sink hole engulfed the stalks, an old Volkswagen Beetle roof, filled with Aunt Brenda's belongings, peeked out from beneath the new pond swamping the corn.

Never one to miss an opportunity to earn money, my cousin Duane appropriated

Bun's rowboat, plugged a hail hole or two and found oars in Bun's shed. For a penny,

Duane rowed the smaller children across the field, on the water above the stalks. For five cents he tied the boat to a branch that was once too high to touch and watched for snakes while his passengers took a swim. I paid five from my allowance - 50 cents a week - and paid for my Aunt's two young boys to go for a row. Duane made a nice sum for the time and talked incessantly about what he might buy. Once the topic was exhausted, he returned to his usual silent place of living, a mysterious and protected veil he wore that kept him safe from his father, Eddie.

One night it happened that Eddie’s family and ours were at Charles’ house with

Bun’s camper. Duane was there, Ricky, me, Cal, Charles’ oldest daughter, and Ricky’s

154

younger sister. Duane hung with my brother and being the pesky little sister, was not invited on their long walks down the old state road, deep into the thickets and chigger flowers as the old loose stones gave way to strangulation by overgrowth. I watched the two of them, sometimes followed behind distantly, but they went places near the quarry I was not allowed to go without an adult. Dangerous place, this quarry. I doubted its existence many times but I had not yet picked up the habit of smoking, which meant sneaking, or weed of another variety, which meant certain hell and damnation. My foray into that world did not begin until 1976, another year later. The outcome of all those mixed up crushes, my need to gain attention from my male cousins, was a night in the camper at Charles' house.

One night after the storm, my parents hooked up the camper and drove it to

Lawrenceville. Once in place in the only shade in the yard, dinner was prepared and singing began. Ricky's older sister Diane and younger sister Debbie, my brother and I, and Duane, ran free on the property well after dark. The camper loomed there, an invitation to all sorts of sinful games, and on that night, we ended up sitting in the grass with an old coke bottle when my brother had a brilliant idea - one born of his own crush on Diane.

"We should play spin-the-bottle," he said enthusiastically.

My stomach lurched in the way a child's mind tells the gut that's gonna get me whooped.

Duane said nothing but stared at me. I lurched the other way. The thought of his mouth on mine caused fear and exhaustion beyond anything I felt before. No David

155

Cassidy or Danny Bonaduche touched the realness of the moment, the awkward longing that flushed through my legs.

"Good idear," Ricky said quickly.

"I don't know. Mom and Dad might kill us if they catch us," Diane said with great concern. She was the oldest by one year, but that meant everything when I was twelve.

I felt a flash of childish hatred. Ricky's face drew down, disappointment pulling the corners of his mouth.

"I don't know," she said again. But she faltered, she looked at my brother and it seems, she had a crush on the foreign boy from Florida.

My brother, always the thinker in the group, said "We can go in the camper.

There's enough room for all of us."

"I wanna play, too," Debbie said. She was ten, skinny and doe eyed.

"No, you're too young," Ricky said.

"Am not, am not . . . I'll tell if you don't lemme play," Debbie said, and humphed her hand onto her hip. I knew she wouldn't tell, but her need to beat big sister for my brother's affections and Duane's acceptance became her catalyst.

"Please," she pleaded.

"OK, Deb. Just keep your mouth shut," Diane said with a tinge of kindness. Deb was a whipper snapper, bright and cute.

So the game proceeded, at first short kisses on hardened mouths. But by the end of our game, Duane and I were tasting each other’s mouths from the inside. I don’t

156

remember much about kissing Ricky, but Duane was the first real kiss I ever had. And in my mind I can hear all the jokes about going to family reunions to meet my next husband. Whatever. It was all dark and mysterious, in another world until the door burst open.

“Time to go,” Johnny snarked.

“What are you doin’ in there?” Ricky’s mom I think.

Ricky was the first to speak as the light from the porch made a small path into the camper. We were fully clothed but the glass bottle on the floor spoke for us.

“We’re just tellin’ scary stories,” he said.

Charles was furious and at that moment, not knowing the name for the feeling, I sank into the simple relief of having the same parents that I had the day before. In the car for the short drive to Bun’s house, the silence was thick. I sat behind my mother

Donna who, when she turned her face toward my father Johnny, had a slight smirk on her chin.

“Dawn. What were you two doing in there?” Johnny demanded. He was using his pissed off dad voice that made my bladder contract. I think I might have peed a few drops when he asked me instead of my brother.

“I’m scared to say.”

“Calvin?”

“Playing spin-the-bottle.”

157

There was a lengthy silence, what felt like six months. My parents finally looked at each other but said nothing. We never spoke of it again. Donna turned the dial and found a rock station and I remember what song was playing.

Well, I built me a raft and she's ready for floatin' Ol' Mississippi, she's callin' my name Catfish are jumpin', that paddle wheel thumpin' Black water keep rollin' on past just the same

The music removed the thoughts of Bun’s reaction, wondering whether my parents felt the need to label our game as a Bun-sin and turn snitch. All I wanted was a get out of jail free card, a pass from swats from my father in front of other adults. When it happened, it meant humiliation, a stinging disgust toward Johnny who was usually quiet, teasing, or angry. I wonder, on that day, which man I was most afraid of disappointing – Dad or Bun.

That night in the camper was the last time I saw Duane. Before the next summer creeped around and I turned thirteen, my parents divorced and Donna remarried.

Johnny pulled sea duty for six months and the divorce was final while he was at sea. He returned to an empty home. The Bicentennial was like 1960 to the rest of the country when a new leader tried to step in and take us in a new direction. In 1976, my life changed forever and regular visits to Indiana and Sarasota were a thing made of dust.

158

My Brother’s Bun

Some brimstone baritone anti-cyclone rolling stone preacher from the east, Says Dethrone the Dictaphone hit it in his funny bone and that's where they expect it least

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – Roaring Silence “Blinded by the Light”4

Exploring my memories of all things Craig – perched at the edge of an abyss that once entered, will never be retrieved – I’ve had many conversations with Cal. The ones that circled the deceased relatives I try to paint back to life again were small awakenings.

Epiphanies of sorts. We had the same parents. We did not always live in the same orbit.

I have a few memories of where Cal was during what I remember, yet he has different notions about my perspective. And here it gets tricky.

Being faithful to family folklore as a writer who holds the pen has been difficult and, at times, tedious. I wonder who will be offended – what do the other children of

4 In Jacksonville, Florida, Bruce Springsteen’s original version got little to no airtime on the one rock station available.

159

the other sisters know and how will they feel? It is no easy task to stay true to the purpose, to the only aspect that matters. The truth is in me, and those alive when I began and at the end of this writing are the ones filling in events, timelines, confessions, heartbreaks, and joys. But my brother saw things I never saw.

Arguing with myself for a few years about handing over the aven pressure, I have come to understand no one picture of Bun is enough to truly draw his being.

Where our mother Donna is concerned, I’d swear we had different mothers. But Bun is another ghost altogether. I asked Cal if he remembered any specific sermons given while we were at his church.

“Just one about kids being allowed to go outside, get dirty. He was telling the women [in the congregation] to let their children drive tractors and not coddle them too much. If they died, they would go to Jesus so they shouldn’t worry.”

I fold that into pieces of what I remember. Between us, we reconstruct one long, hot summer Sunday through fragments over several years. I went to Bun’s church more often, but Cal was there. I don’t remember seeing him. Cal took some of the pictures I have of me driving Bun’s yard tractor. It was small and unimposing, but probably twenty years older than I was at ten when I drove it. I never thought to wonder who took the picture. Johnny was the shutterbug – a fascinated voyeur with an 8mm camera and an aperture with three floodlights that could burn a witch’s iris.

Cal spent more time on Old State Road 60, walking long distances unafraid. I rarely got past the rise of Bun’s rear acreage by myself. Unless a cousin or an aunt or two were going for a girl’s chat, I stayed near the well, the barn, lean-to, a fiery garbage

160

barrel, or the large black oak with steps that led to nothing. Cal saw the quarry. He was there alone and with Duane who was one year his senior. I think one year meant everything in a tough southern Indiana homestead because Duane was quiet and withdrawn, though not sullen. Cal said he talked a lot when his father Eddie or Bun were not around. That I did not know, but once heard, it made perfect sense.

Cal saw more than one copperhead in its natural habitat. I never saw one alive.

“Indiana was where all the cool stuff was. We got to be around chickens and tractors. We drove old trucks and worked on engines.”

Cal’s impressions of Bun match mine in some ways. When Bun was at our house, everyone was quiet and sat properly. Females all wore skirts or dresses except for me.

After Bun left, everyone was recognizable again. I hated that kind of company – sitting still and quiet was not my thing. I was an anxious kid with a sensitive streak that bumped up against a profane sense of silliness. But still, Cal had very few two-way conversations with Bun. I had none. I observed. Cal studied.

Feral cats being my favorite past-time during visits to Bun’s house, we share a memory about a litter of kittens birthed by a brave mother under Bun’s porch. Same porch where the Coke machine sat waiting for thirsty quarrymen going the back way, or the rare lineman barreling down Old Highway 60. Gravel under their rubber made a fitful sound and a cloud of dirt skittered then flew behind. It was like a bell on a Mom and Pop store door. It was how a person knew company had arrived, or that Bun was back from wherever. I forgot how quiet it was at Bun’s house. Quiet in the sense that the constant drum of an expressway was absent. It was why you could learn which bird

161

was talking, or whether a wending youngster left out the cow in the field after dark told to lead her into the barn.

Five feral kittens eventually ventured out from underneath the porch. Two were peach striped and the other three were gray. One afternoon one of the rare linemen saw the Coke machine and stopped, pushed his dime into the slot and opened the heavy door to yank out the glass bottle of his choice. When he let the door close, he heard a gawk, and looking down to see what was in the way of the door, he saw one of the gray kittens half in, half out. The door caught its neck. The man was beside himself, picked up the kitten and ran to the back of Bun’s house where he had seen people wondering around and found Donna and Nita. I was watching the man, but I was not sure why he ran. Donna and Nita took the kitten and flew into the house and up the stairs. Nita grabbed a towel.

I came into the large room at the top of the steps to see my mother gently rubbing the back of a gray kitten. I saw it trying to squirm, but the head was the only thing moving. The kitten’s neck was broken. A turd was half way out of its rear. Donna just hovered there, waiting for it to die, petting its back and talking to it. I can’t remember to this day what she was saying, only the sight of that kitten taking its last breath and going still, turd stuck for eternity, unlodged.

“It’s OK, Dawn.”

“Why is there a turd?” I asked through tears.

162

“It was curious about the Coke machine and the man said it got caught while the door was closing. You know what they say, curiosity killed the cat. When its neck broke it lost control of its body. So it just started pooping.”

Cal remembers this too, but I can not see him there.

I remember the silence that followed and my mother and Nita burying the kitten.

I didn’t go with them. I ran outside to find another of the five kittens. It was how I dealt with mourning a dead kitten. It was all too unfair.

One thing that broke those silent blankets was Bun’s phone. It rarely rang, but when it did, it was akin to hearing an ambulance where we lived. The rotary telephone bells clanked cacophonously, and Bun ran from the barn or cornfield to answer it. He never let a call go unanswered. I remember my fascination with telephones as a child.

Bun’s was no different.

I picked up Bun’s phone when he and my parents were not around. There was no dial tone. What I heard was four people having two conversations – two women speaking to each other, two men holding a separate conversation. Today they call that a conference call. During my early years at Bun’s, it was called a party-line. If Bun wanted to make a call, he had to ask everyone to hang up. Since everyone knew who used the party-line, it was an open invite to another person’s business. Bun always preferred face to face, at church or doing some trading for an engine part. Maybe that was why. No one in Spice Valley could leave their driveway without notice in spite of the distance between houses. Headlights were brighter in the southern Indiana darkness, the sound of a car with the choke pulled out as it fired traveled at night. And you could set your

163

watch by the trains through Mitchell. The tracks were less than a thousand yards from

Bun’s house. If a train was late, everyone knew there must have been an accident near the tracks along the line. Maybe some freight worker was slacking off.

When Nita was old enough to drive, her sounds were distinct. People knew it was Nita without looking, regarding the clock to check the time instead. She drove a big, heavy tank of a car like a bat out of hell. Nita slung more gravel down Old State

Road 60 than anyone did in Mitchell. In those days, there were only two other families on the quarry end, and as the crow flies, it was still a bit of a hike to get to someone else on that road. These things my brother and I remember alike.

When Cal and I came back from Massachusetts October of 1976, we went back to where my parents had last lived as man and wife, back to our father Johnny. Cal lived through his own personal hell when my parents split, and Donna remarried before the ink dried.

The whole, shitty situation hit him with immediacy and he nearly drowned on his anger. Johnny got custody, not bothering to ask either of us how we felt, and was clueless. He had no idea what he was inheriting. Cal was hell-bent on destruction.

Johnny never parented either of us. That was always Donna’s job.

When Johnny ran out of ideas on how to deal with his son, he decided what Cal needed was a dose of southern Indiana. He arranged to have Cal stay with Eddie and

Norma and sent $50 a week to help pay for food. As soon as Cal arrived at Eddie’s, he asked, “Can I go see my grandpa?”

164

Eddie drove Cal to Bun’s house. Cal never went back to Eddie and Norma. But

Eddie kept cashing those checks.

At fifteen years old, Cal’s eyes weren’t filled with wonder. They were wide open.

When I asked him what kind of conversations he had with Bun, it was a short answer.

“None. Unless he was telling me to get the cow from the field, he didn’t speak directly to me.”

I was disappointed, but not surprised.

“Sometimes I’d take [Kathern] what she needed or she’d ask me to do some piddly thing, but she didn’t say much either. But Nita was there, and Ernie. I talked to

Nita a lot.”

When I asked Cal what he did while he was there, I realized it was a question I might have asked long ago.

“I worked. Grandpa asked me if he gave me $50 would I put in a full day’s work.

He was short one man, I think Charles was going to miss work the next day. It was a four-man team – Grandpa, Eddie, Charles and one other guy. I said, ‘Sure’. The first day he had me working the baled hay he sold for extra money. Everyone thinks hay is nearly weightless. But when it’s green and wet, it weighs a ton. When it came out of the baler, I had to grab it by the twine, no gloves, no special clothes. The truck was about shoulder height, so I had to heft bales into the back of the truck. Someone else was in the truck making it fit. When it was stacked high, we got on top and laid down. We’d go to the next house and unload at their barn. And the stack in the back was really high.”

165

“How did that work?” I asked.

“We made stairs out of the bales. That way we could walk up the steps to make sure the stack against the barn wall was as high as possible. Then we went back and did it all again for the next order of hay.”

When Cal told me this story, my shoulders ached with sympathy.

“That was when Grandpa started to be nice to me. I mean, he didn’t talk to me any more than he did, but he was actually nice. My fingers – my hands were cut to the bone. Grandpa actually came and sat down beside me and cleaned my hands.”

Bun even made a sideways compliment.

“He can’t even work a Band-Aid.”

I laughed. My brother fell into the Indiana cadence instantly and nailed the trickle of Bun’s words. I asked if he worked in Bun’s sawmill, and whether Eddie and

Charles still feuded like they did when growing up. They were married men with children of their own, some older than Cal.

“I think Eddie acted like he was in charge at the sawmill. Charles just let him think he was. Charles was really nice to me. Eddie never spoke to me. I helped them get the logs to the sawmill, too. They used Grandpa’s big tractor. Bun ran the chainsaw and the felled trees were chained and dragged behind the tractor. My job was to unhook them then roll them into a neat line with a log rolling tool.”

“I’ve seen that on TV, like big tines. What do they call that tool?”

“A log rolling tool . . . I don’t know. You have to look that one up.”

166

I was immediately reminded of Donna’s smart-ass remarks. That is something

Cal and I have in common, too. We learned from the best, the girl who smarted off with a corncob in her hand and got punched for saying she might marry a rich man one day.

This was the same sawmill on Bun’s property that produced a mountain of sawdust. The smell was maddening but none of us, none of the cousins, could bare not to be king of that mountain. I won for a while then got knocked off by a bigger, older cousin – usually a male because the females all wore skirts and dresses. When I relinquished my reign, I went indoors to cool off while welts formed on my legs, face, and arms. I spent the rest of the evening reeking of freshly hewn pine, sap clotting my long hair. Then I was forced to wash it all away in the water harnessed from the spring at the top of the rise.

And Cal had an experience with Nita when she came to visit us in 1974. Nita was

15 years old, Cal 13 years old. The story I thought I had straight is that Nita seduced Cal and he went for it. But speaking with him now, it turned out to be a young man’s brag.

But Nita was well developed by then, a buxom curvy chick who, without any effort on her part, was the butt of many rumors. If a young man she liked came to Bun’s house to see her, she was taking a lover. When Brenda met and married a man named Gene in

1970, they lived in Indiana but moved often. That left Nita at home with Kathern and

Bun. It is hard to imagine the boredom she had to embrace. Nita had earned a reputation for ‘liking her men’ early, whether earned or simply the meanness of those who saw her at church.

167

What they did not know is at the age of twelve or thirteen, Nita was in Bun’s church on a Sunday morning but had to use the bathroom. In those days, it meant going out the door and behind the church to the outhouse marked for women. The one marked for men was down the same path, hidden in some trees. A few minutes after

Nita left the church, a boy close to her age named Donnie left the church to use the men’s outhouse.

Donnie waited for Nita to come out, grabbed her from behind, and raped her behind the outhouse. That is what Brenda remembers of Nita’s confession to her.

Brenda and I shook our heads when she told me. Rape is an abomination. Rape behind an outhouse is indescribable. Donnie died in a car accident, and outside of telling

Brenda many years later, Nita never said a word to anyone. In spite of the generations moving on, the game was being played by the same rules. Silence, fear, gossip.

The same stay with us when she was fifteen, Nita found work in Jacksonville.

She was a cashier at Pic N Save, a long ago defunct low end K-Mart. Johnny helped her buy a used, dark green Pinto and she began making and saving money. Things were going well for Nita.

At Pic N Slave as the workers called it, Nita met a man named Ernie Thompson. I will never have the exact circumstances of how their elopement happened, whether

Donna knew, but there was a small trailer park – one of the many, Navy base rip-off places where nothing worked and the trailers were so small you barely had room to change your mind – and I think Ernie lived in one of them. I remember driving to the trailer to see Nita and Ernie getting out of her car. Ernie was standing on the sidewalk

168

looking at us, holding a pillow against his chin and down to his stomach. His face was red and he was swaying from side to side, biting the edge of the pillow. I knew instantly, though I don’t understand how, that Ernie had gotten laid, probably for the first time in his life. Nita just kept unpacking the car. It turned out that going to Georgia to get married did not work and they came back still single, but Nita stayed with Ernie after that night. Soon they went to Indiana and lived with Bun and Kathern, probably because Nita was not meant to stay as long as she did and felt it was her responsibility to go back. Considering how they were living and the low pay and lack of benefits from

Pic N Save, they thought it was the best way to go. The next time I saw Ernie at Bun’s was our last summer visit as a family to Indiana. He was, by all accounts, a macho shithead.

As I shaved my legs at the sink in the kitchen – there was no bathtub – Ernie was sitting on Kathern’s couch and saw me.

“What are you doing?”

“Shaving my legs.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twelve.”

“Geez, a twelve year old shaving her legs,” Ernie sniped, ‘that’s just not right.

What is this world coming to when a twelve year old girl is shaving her legs.”

“None of your business,” I sniped back.

“What? Well, that is no way to talk to an adult. Twelve years old. Geez.”

169

I never had another conversation with him again. I saw him several more times after my parents divorced in 1976, but he was always talking down to Nita, broke, picking fights, and telling everyone how intelligent he was. I knew no one who liked him, including Nita who was constantly depressed when I saw her while she was still married to Ernie. But from what I’ve heard, Bun liked him quite a bit.

I missed her after that long stay with us. Nita was ruined by Donna as well, taken to see Three Dog Night. She spent two days with my mother’s double album which, when unfolded, had a center picture of the three singers. She gazed for hours at one, then moved to the next, then the third and began again from the first one. She mooned like that until it was time to eat or sleep. I sat beside her to see what she was looking at.

“You like them?” I asked.

“Oh they are sooo good looking,” Nita answered.

“Which one do you like best? I like the one on the left, no the middle one.”

“They’re all beautiful. I think Chuck is the best, though.”

“Which one is he?” I asked.

Nita pointed to the far right, touching the mouth of Chuck Negron, long straight hair and full mustache. She was ruined. But Nita had a taste for soul. Bun used to tease her and say, “Nita and her black men.” Sly and the Family Stone, Michael Jackson,

Smokey Robinson all made her list. When Sly was on The Mike Douglas Show, he started playing the piano, didn’t like the sound set up, stopped in the middle of the song and left the stage. Nita went nuts.

170

“Yeah, you tell ‘em Sly.”

Nita was as much a dancer as a music lover, but had not inherited the vocals of her sisters. Could be that umbilical cord cheated her from a strong larynx or bruised her voice box. Whenever she was there and Johnny wasn’t home, if a funk or soul song came on, we would sing and dance around the living room. We both loved Honey

Cone,

Stick-up, highway robbery Stole my love from me-it's a case of grand larceny Stick-up, highway robbery It's a felony-heartbreak in the first degree Boom-boom, shakalaka, boom-boom-boom-boom

I’d had a crush on Michael Jackson since I was six years old and shared her love of rhythm and blues, funk, Soul Train. As I got older and began buying my own albums, I found notes inside the jackets from a stay at Donna’s house years later. I found one inside “Off the Wall” by Michael Jackson: A copy of this would make my tweaker tweetter. Torn pieces of paper slipped inside my Motown album greatest hits collection:

I’ll mail you blank tapes if you make a copy of this I’ll dance – don’t stop till you get enough. But I could not afford blank tapes so I never made copies, a simple regret I still carry with me.

Cal remembers her and Ernie during his stay with Grandpa. “She was fun to talk to, and it was like she didn’t have anyone to talk to even though she was married to

Ernie. All he did was boss her around. So she and I talked in the evenings. She snuck cigarettes to me. But I could tell she was unhappy.”

171

When I heard Cal say this, I knew I was not as off about Nita as I thought. I had always seen her severe swings from frantically happy to completely silent as a warning

I did not quite understand, but would come to see clearly years later.

172

Letting Go - Men on the Side

Diamond girl, you sure do shine Glad I found you, glad you're mine Oh my love, you're like a precious stone

Seals and Crofts “Diamond Girl”

I can snatch a little purity My mama loves me, she loves me She get down on her knees and hug me

Paul Simon “Loves Me Like a Rock”

The first of Bun’s children to divorce was Brenda in 1973. She had met and had a son with a man named Gene who according to Brenda was a male prostitute who had no idea how to hold a normal job. I had to ask her.

“Whey did you marry Gene? Did you know what he was doing before you married him?”

173

“Yes. But I was pregnant with Jason by then and my girlfriend told me since we were living together I needed to marry him or I wouldn’t get my tax refund. I didn’t know any better. Gene said he’d stopped when we married. But he didn’t.”

Gene, the father of Brenda’s two sons, was someone I met once during a summer trip to Indiana. Gene and Brenda lived northeast of Mitchell in Columbus, Indiana so my father drove us to their government apartment. That was the first time I ever fell in love with someone else’s children. I ignored Gene who never spoke directly to me, but her sons Christian and Jason were two gurgling, red headed beauties with the sweetest faces I had ever seen. They both had their little white baby shoes on, though Christian was older and quickly sprouting past Jason’s baby frame. I adored them. What I remember about their place was how obvious it was they had no money. Gene had greasy hair to his shoulders but I do not recall his disposition being good or bad. They had nothing. It was heartbreaking.

The next time I saw Brenda was after her divorce. Gene disappeared for a few weeks and then came back to Brenda. He admitted he was staying with another woman, had sex with Brenda then said, “The woman I was living with has the clap.”

That was when Brenda called Nita. Nita asked Bun if Brenda could come home to stay with them. Bun agreed, sent Eddie in his truck to Bloomington where Brenda and Gene had moved to last. And for a time, Brenda and Nita were both at Bun’s house again. It was from 1973 that they became inseparable.

Brenda met Zeb Simmons and remarried. This is how she described what it was like when they were together,

174

“He was really attentive and I felt special. When we had sex, we did everything and it was great. Then we got married. On our honeymoon night, he got on top of me, came, then rolled over and went to sleep. That was how our sex life was for the rest of our marriage. He didn’t care about me after that, nothing on birthdays or Valentines.

Then he got jealous of Nita and started a rumor that we were lesbians.”

This one I had heard, and more than once. The rumor, as of early 2004, still lived.

I was told the same story I’d heard several times. One day someone went into the house on Old Highway 60 and when they heard the music on upstairs, went to find someone.

What he found was Nita and Brenda dancing to some music, wearing their underwear – bras and slips. This and Zeb’s repeated accusations kept the story alive for decades. The last time I was told the story, I’d had enough.

“You know, as bad as those two women had it, whatever they needed to do to survive is fine with me and no one’s business. And it probably didn’t happen and if it did, so what? They were dancing. It’s fun to dance.” What I got in return was a blank stare. When you don’t fly with the covey, they don’t know what to do with you, but you better believe you are next.

Since Christian and Jason no longer had a father in their lives while at Bun’s, he took it upon himself to discipline both of the boys. They all shared the large room at the top of the stairs, with Jason in a crib and Christian on a small cot. Nita and Brenda had twin size beds. By this time, there was a small bathroom upstairs as well.

One summer, probably 1974, I saw Bun spanking Christian for what was probably a small thing. He was still in pull-ups. Bun had him tightly by one arm, and

175

swatted him without mercy with his other hand. Christian’s feet were off the ground from the swatting. I felt ill, ran into the house and up the stairs and stayed in the small bathroom crying until someone else needed to use it.

I confessed this to Donna when I was much older. She had seen something, too.

“When Eddie still lived in Indiana and we were there during the summer, Dad

[Bun] and Eddie teased little Jason. He had a temper for being a little guy, but they teased him until he was crying and throwing a fit on the ground. And they laughed at him.”

It was the last piece of hate to fall into place in my heart for my grandfather.

Eddie was an asshole, but Bun acting that way with a small child was sickening.

“I couldn’t stand it,” Donna said. “I walked to where they were sitting and grabbed Jason in my arms. Looked at both of them and said ‘You ought to be ashamed, you’re grown men picking on a little boy wearing a diaper.’”

I can imagine the look on her face, defiant, permeating. Neither man said a word to her. We always returned to Florida, so whether it happened again is unknown. I asked Brenda if she knew Bun was hard on her kids.

“I think so. He thought he was doing right by them because they didn’t have a daddy around. I had to put up with it to have a place to stay. I had nowhere to go. Then

I met Zeb and got out of there.”

From the frying pan into the fire. One hopeless place to another.

At one point during Brenda’s marriage to Zeb, he adapted Christian and Jason and they took his last name. But as the boys got older, they weren’t very fond of Zeb or

176

the way he treated their mother. According to Brenda, he liked to make her feel worthless every chance he got, whether it was about her cooking, her weight, her teeth, it was his favorite pastime. The kicker came shortly after a Valentine’s Day during the time Nita and Brenda were together every day.

“I found a Valentine card Zeb gave Nita in our house,” Brenda said. “I confronted him about it and all he had to say was ‘You weren’t supposed to see that.’ I asked him why he gave her a Valentine and didn’t get me, his wife, anything. ‘Because she’s beautiful’ Zeb said. I asked if he thought I was pretty. ‘Well, you used to be.’ Nita swore they never slept together. And I don’t know if by then I cared. Wasn’t long after that when Zeb came home one evening and the boys were gone. He was unhappy about something and we were in the bedroom. He pulled his arm back and made a fist and punched me in the face. I fell back on the bed and he ripped my dress and raped me. I told him to stop over and over, to get off me. But he did it anyway. Wasn’t anything I could do about it, either. They said you can’t rape your own wife, and the church was behind him not me on that issue.”

“So all four of you were raped. Not one of you was spared,” I said with my head down. Then I looked her in the eye. “Why didn’t anyone talk to someone? Why did all four of you keep this shit to yourself?”

“I don’t know. I want to know the same thing. Nita and Karen didn’t tell me about what happened to them until a long, long time after it happened. And they both swore they’d die if I repeated it. Do you think they will know somehow?”

“What I think is I need to tell you a story about your other sister, Donna.”

177

***

Nita married Ernie while my parents were still together, but it was not long after her Pic N Save fiasco that Donna told Johnny she wanted a divorce. Immediately after, early in 1976, Johnny pulled sea-duty, something that was a thing of the past for years in his Navy career. Their divorce was final while he was out to sea, something for which

Cal never forgave Donna. He was angry, punched holes in his bedroom walls. I just stood along the periphery watching it all happen, unsure whether to cry or run away.

But like the other women in my family, I had nowhere to go. I was thirteen years old, the sexual revolution was upon us, and Donna had enough of being told she didn’t need to work outside the house. She wanted to make money, she wanted Johnny to settle their disagreements and not force her to be silent. Donna was coming alive in a way that Johnny did not understand. While he was at sea, she landed a job at Orange

Park Hospital running the main switchboard. Her job ten years before at Southern Bell, one my father badgered her into leaving, qualified her for the position. But she worked evenings, and that meant I was at home without anyone but Cal who was quickly going off the deep end, drowning with ire.

Then the real bomb exploded.

Donna met someone else right away. She was seeing him while Johnny was at sea on the Saratoga. As soon as my seventh grade school year ended, I met her new husband and a small U-Haul trailer was hitched to our car. Cal’s dog was sent to the

Jacksonville Humane Society – famously a kill center if not adopted within one week.

My cat went with us. I didn’t have time to say goodbye to anyone and Johnny came

178

home to our double-wide trailer in Ridgewood, Orange Park, Florida empty. No kids, no wife, no washer and dryer.

Donna’s second marriage was a nightmare. A charming sociopath to Donna, a wretched snake to Cal, our step-father Rick Montrose lied to Donna about their plans.

We were supposed to be in South Weymouth, Massachusetts until the end of summer, then return to Orange Park where he had a house before school started again. Once we got there, she became his three children’s mother and Cal and I were never home unless we had to be. We arrived the first week of June, 1976 and left on Halloween, 1976.

Donna had to call Johnny to ask for the money to get us back to Florida. My mother had nowhere to go.

“I thought about Indiana, but I think I was so close to suicide, that would’ve been the last straw. I was humiliated, had no money, no job, no place to stay, had to give my kids away to their father. So I called an old girlfriend and slept on a mattress on her floor.”

I remember the nightmare of Rick Montrose. Donna weighed one hundred and nothing when she finally made it back to Florida and at 5’10 ½” tall, her clothes hung off her like a sack. She got a job at a Pizza Inn for tips and just for fun, Johnny took us there to eat sometimes and left her two quarters as a tip. The games were endless.

Recriminations, custody battles, poverty, and no safety net for any of us – we lost our mother. There we were, back in the same doublewide living with Johnny. That is when

Cal was sent to live with Eddie in Indiana over the next summer, but ended up staying with Bun.

179

Within a year, Donna had two divorces under her belt. She’d lost everything. The way the laws were in the 1970s, the credit earned by Johnny when they were together did not count for Donna. She landed a job at White Trucks, a small firm that died during deregulation. She saved money and eventually moved into an apartment with another friend she met working at Orange Park Hospital named Chris. Donna went wild.

I saw my mother for a couple of hours on Wednesdays after school. On the weekends, I wanted to spend both days with her but she was busy. She started to like beer. She went out every Friday and Saturday after a long workweek. She did not get out of bed until one or two in the afternoon. I wasn’t old enough to drive yet so I had to beg someone to take me to see her, then hope she had enough gas in her car to take me back. To this day, I have never forgiven the idea that no one asked me where I wanted to live, and with whom I wanted to live. The world was upside down within a six- month period and when I returned to my old middle school, I was put in a different section, far away from the school friends I once knew.

I wondered where Bun was then. What he might say to Donna if he had the chance. The summer trips to Indiana ended when my parents divorced, making 1975 the last summer we made the trip. Donna’s humiliation at being divorced twice and losing her own kids is something I will never experience, nor will I pretend to know how she felt. I know what I saw in her, and I watched her go off the deep end partying every weekend, out all night dancing, having many different boyfriends. Some lived with her, one she lived with then left. She finally met someone and dated him steadily.

180

Thus began a sixteen-year relationship with a man named Jon Potter. They never married, they lived in Bun-sin. But about that, Donna never felt embarrassed.

I thought Indiana was a thing of the past. But before I get ahead of myself, Donna and I flew to Indiana October 1, 1977 on Johnny’s dime. Kathern had a heart attack and

I took time away from school to go with Donna.

When we were picked up at the airport, it was in Louisville, Kentucky. Karen and Brenda picked us up. They hugged for a long time, then they cried. Karen and

Frank had returned to Indiana to stay. Things were rough for them financially. Brenda was married to Zeb at the time, Nita to Ernie. We finally got our bag and made it to the car. I do not remember much of the drive to Bedford where Kathern was hospitalized, but I remember walking in the main doors into a large open waiting room. Bun was sitting to my right, reading his Bible, looking at us from above his glasses with his chin jutted forward. I think he stood up to hug Donna, but we were being pulled to critical care to see Kathern by Karen who knew the way.

“Better prepare yourself, Donna,” Karen told her.

Donna took a deep breath and straightened her posture. They let us in, pointed us toward her room, but there was someone in there so we stood near the nurses’ station. I looked to my right and a file was open on top of the counter. It was Craig,

Kathern T. and on the top sheet was the word Deceased 1:10 AM and a long line that led to the bottom of the page, but before I could read the rest, we were ushered in. I was completely spooked. Imagine my shock when we entered and Kathern’s eyes were open, her cheeks rosier than I’d ever seen them.

181

Donna cried immediately. She leaned in to hug her mother, careful not to remove any nodes or IV lines. She kissed her on the forehead. All she could manage was, “Oh,

Mom. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

I stood beside Donna, agog at the amount of color on Kathern’s face, the small smile on her soft mouth. I wondered where her wrinkles had gone. The room smelled like roses, but I saw none. She wasn’t speaking, though, and that was hard. Kathern’s brown eyes watered as she looked up at Donna with that soft grin and tried to pat

Donna’s hand. Her lips formed the words “It’s OK,” but no sound came out.

“Look, Mom. She looks so good. Look at how pink her cheeks are,” I gushed. I was ecstatic. I saw DECEASED written on her chart, but this woman looked better than

I ever remembered her looking. I must have read it wrong. I could not stop assuring

Donna how rosy and peaceful she looked.

Donna stood there, her hand over Kathern’s knotted knuckles. She sobbed, a soulful, broken sound I never heard before that day, and never heard again.

Then they ran us out. Kathern was only allowed five minute visits and they were back to run another EKG. I put my hand on my mother’s back and waited until she let go of Kathern’s hand. The nurse handed her a small pouch of tissues.

When we were back in the main hall, Karen, Brenda, and Nita were all there waiting for us. We were herded toward the women’s bathroom on the next floor down.

It was not until this moment that it really sank in that Donna and I were in Indiana.

“You OK? I know it’s hard,” Karen said to Donna, rubbing her shoulder.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

182

“To the lady’s room on the second floor. It’s the biggest one,” Brenda said.

We all peed, though I was not aware I needed to until we got there. Afterward, I stepped out of the stall and Karen and Brenda were lingering at the door of a stall smoking. My mother and I automatically lit up, Donna handing me a cig. She let me smoke in front of her, Johnny did not. Nita lit up, too.

“Where’s Ernie, Nita?” Donna asked.

“He’s working.”

There was a silence as we inhaled deeply and slowly exhaled. The tile was shiny, the stalls spotless, but the smell was antiseptic cleanser unlike the smell of roses in

Kathern’s room.

I finally broke the silence.

“Geez. We’re acting like a bunch of school girls smoking behind the teacher’s back.”

“Well, Dad doesn’t know we smoke,” Karen said.

“Oh that’s funny. Still hiding from Dad just like me.”

There was a nervous giggling that started and it grew into a puffing plume of cigarette smoke and hotboxing until ashes fell off without a flick into the toilet. It was

1977 and smoking was allowed almost everywhere except near oxygen and in patient rooms. I was fourteen and it was the first time I felt like one of them, but whether Bun saw me smoking – I didn’t give a hoot. I went along, though. Call it peer pressure in reverse.

183

“They won’t let us all back in to see her again until tomorrow. Are you ‘ins hungry?” Nita asked.

Donna wasn’t. I was. Either way, eating is what we did in Indiana during a minor or major catastrophe. We went back to the lobby where Bun was still sitting, reading his Bible.

“How was she?” Bun asked Donna.

“She had color in her cheeks,” I butted in.

“Fine I think. She didn’t say anything but she was awake. When are they letting her go home?” Donna asked.

“Don’t know, not for a while I reckon. They said they want to watch her.”

I found him a bit too cool considering his wife had a chart that said DECEASED.

I kept it to myself.

We went back to Mitchell, to Bun’s house where Brenda and Nita started cooking. It might have been Karen’s house. The whole thing is foggy once I left that smoky bathroom and we saw Bun again. What I remember is the goofiness that took over with the four sisters in the same place. I had developed since they had seen me, a bit of teasing ensued.

“Growing those Shelton Mountains I see,” Brenda said.

“Yeah, but hers aren’t big as ours yet,” Nita said.

“Well,” Brenda decided, “we’ll call her canoe. Donna, you’re tugboat. Karen’s a tugboat, too. Nita, you’re a freighter and I’m a battleship.”

184

Through all that grief and sudden change of scenery, the capitalized DECEASED still in my head, I began laughing. It turned into a snort. We were all laughing. There were only the five of us. No men around, talking about how our breasts compared to the size of boats and I was only a canoe. It was goddam hilarious and we were all holding our sides for a few minutes. Call it comic relief.

“Ok, tugboat. Want a salad or something?” Brenda asked.

“Yes, please, battleship.”

“How ‘bout you, canoe?”

“OK. By the way, how’s the war going with that bra, battleship?”

I’m not sure where we slept for the two nights we were there. When we left,

Donna went in to say goodbye to Kathern while I waited with Bun. We didn’t speak, though I made a point to sit in the seat between Bun and my cousin Ricky who was always around to help Kathern, to sit with her and hand her the brush. He learned to help put her braid into a curl on her head. He slept at the hospital a few nights with Bun in the waiting room.

We flew back on a Friday and Johnny picked us up from the airport. I sat in the back seat, feeling the thick awkwardness in the car. Johnny had paid for our tickets and

I felt he was expecting something in return, but neither of us had anything to say.

Donna had just left her mother – again – and did not want to talk except to update him on Kathern’s condition. My mother let me stay with her that night so when Johnny stopped in front of her shared apartment, we silently got our bags out of the back of the car and said goodnight. Miffed, Johnny walked stiffly back to his car, slammed his door

185

and screeched out of the parking lot. I stood there for a minute trying to figure out exactly what it was we were supposed to say or do. In that moment, it was all about him. I wondered if he had any idea what it was like to see Kathern that way, what his ex-wife was feeling, or whether he had hoped she’d run into his arms overwhelmed with grief at the airport. The games were thick and I remember thinking at that moment

I preferred the dance in Indiana to the one between my parents and my living with

Johnny.

A week later, I was home from school sitting on the couch in Ridgewood when

Johnny opened the door. I had heard a car drive up but didn’t think anything of it, thought it was Cal. In walked Donna, red faced. Johnny watched my reaction.

“I’ve got news. Your grandma died this morning,” Donna said, and began sobbing, putting her arms around me. It was October 10, 1977. Kathern was 63 years old.

I admit I did not want to cry, but it seemed like the thing I was expected to do. I hated having my parents in the same room back in our old home with me sitting there as a centerpiece, on display for Johnny who was afraid to be the one to break the news to me. Instead, Donna drove to our trailer grief stricken. It felt like everyone’s priorities were simply fucked.

“I’m flying back but your dad and I don’t want to take you out of school again.

You’ve already missed too many days,” Donna said.

“Oh, that’s not fair,” I whimpered.

186

Truth was I wanted to go to Indiana with Donna because it was Donna who was going. It was less about attending a funeral than it was missing out on the sisters Craig.

I admit that with no embarrassment. I was living with a brother and my father and spent most of my out of school time trying to find a way to spend time with my mother.

My father was still angry with my mother, my brother was still out of control and our father was clueless, I was the property of a man who didn’t ask me where I wanted to be. I was scared all the time, had lost my old friends, and my mother was drinking, dancing, and dating. The world was off its axis.

After Kathern’s funeral in 1977, Donna slowly began to make trips to Indiana again. The next time I went, I was nineteen, Brenda was divorced for the second time, but remarried to Joe. Karen and Frank relocated from Florida back to Indiana, and Nita was married to Ernie and had a son. They called him Little Ernie.

When Bun saw Little Ernie at the hospital he said to his youngest daughter Nita,

“Well, there must uh been a nigger in the woodpile somewhere along the line. He sure is dark.”

And that is the only time I’ve heard a story where Bun used a racial slur. I wonder how Nita took it. Considering Bun was preaching in Pentecostal churches in

African American churches in Louisville, Kentucky, I have never been able to make sense of it. That is my white ignorance showing. I had thought many negative things about Bun, but being a racist had never been one of them. According to Cal, Bun had a

World War II injury and a morphine addiction, too, though he managed to control it and appear normal. I remember a story one of my cousins told me about driving Bun to

187

the Chiropractor, Bun prone in the backseat unable to stand on his own. So there is evidence to support what Cal suspected – a long time severe back injury during a time when morphine was all the rage. I hope he shared it with Kathern.

188

Weed, Wonderful Weed

Come out Virginia, don’t make me wait You Catholic girls start much too late Oh, but sooner or later it comes down to fate I might as well be the one, You know only the good die young

Billy Joel “Only the Good Die Young”

When I graduated high school in 1981, my father had remarried and my step-monster made it clear to me she wanted me gone. I was free to move after I finished high school.

By then, Donna had gone through a government program for first time, low income home buyers and owned her own home. I packed my POS car and moved in with

Donna and Jon as soon as I had that diploma in my hand. I was accepted into Stetson,

University of South Florida, University of Florida, and Florida State University, but my parents had not saved a dime for my college fund. They broke the news to me and I decided to attend a local community college while living at Donna’s. By then, Indiana had started coming to her.

189

As soon as Kathern passed, Bun remarried within six months. He married a widow named Mary Canada, a distant cousin on the Shelton side.

Bun had purchased a small RV when he partitioned his 45.2 acres in Mitchell into a ten-acre parcel where he put a smaller trailer for himself, and a 35.0-acre parcel where the harnessed spring still ran. Charles bought the larger parcel and the old house on

Old Highway 60. Charles and his family were now neighbors with Bun and Mary. With the money he made selling the larger parcel, Bun bought the RV. He and Mary made many trips to Donna’s house, both when she first moved in with Jon Potter and when she bought her own house on Melvin Road, the one I moved into when I left high school.

The relationship between Bun and Donna started to morph into a surprisingly amiable openness. I always saw him when he was in town, but our conversations stayed sparse. He knew nothing about me, and I knew entirely too much about him. But

I liked Mary, who from what Donna told me, stood up to Bun, refusing to sell her own house when they married. She retreated to it often, especially when Bun was disagreeable. According to Donna, Mary had her own ideas about a woman’s place.

And what Bun said to my mother still floors me.

Donna and Bun were in conversation while Mary was in the backyard in the camper and Bun was inside, apparently beginning to admit he was not completely happy. He commented on his sex life.

“I’ll tell ya, she’s no slouch in bed,” Bun told Donna.

190

When it was repeated to me years later, I think I quit feeling my feet for a few days.

Finally, Bun gave in to the idea of Mary keeping her old house and, in his own way of trying to make sense of the situation; he built an indoor bathroom with a shower for Mary. Until that point, Mary was still using the outhouse in her backyard. Donna and Mary hit it off right away. While others back in Indiana were gossip struck by his hurry to remarry, sisters included, Donna took it in stride. She had done it herself once.

There was a running joke about Thanksgiving, Bun’s favorite time of year to visit

Donna in Florida. The feast prepared between Mary and Donna was massive. We had the turkey of course (not Bun this time), and Mary made chicken and dumplings from scratch, best I’ve ever eaten and have failed to duplicate. There were four different pies, and usually two kinds of potato dishes and yams. Add another three side dishes and you have an idea of the Thanksgiving dinner we had. I even tolerated praying before I ate, bowing my head, when Bun and Mary were there. That was something we never did when I was a child. When I moved in with Donna again, she no longer prayed before a meal either. But of course, Bun led a prayer before every meal. Normally I kept my head up and was silent, which in my world meant respect toward those who wanted to pray before a meal even when I did not participate. Bun had that kind of power.

“Well,” Bun said, “sure smells good. When you ladies think we’ll eat?”

“Dad, just be patient,” Donna teased.

“You know Bun,” Mary said, “can’t eat soon enough for him.”

191

It was true. Bun was an early riser who, every single day of his life, made himself eggs, bacon, and toast for breakfast. He used an old tin stove percolator to make coffee and to this day, no one has been able to best Bun’s coffee.

When the table was set, some of the dishes sat on the stovetop because of the lack of empty space. The rule was get to the side dishes then sit and pray, fill the rest of your plate and dig in. One year Jon made a joke at prayer time. Before Bun started speaking but after he had us bow our heads,

“Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub. Yeah, God,” Jon said and laughed.

I gulped back a hyena like laugh. Donna smirked and shook her head.

“That’s a pretty good one, Jon. Short and sweet. Let’s eat,” Bun said.

I was stunned. But he was always there for more than one day so there were other opportunities to say a Bun prayer.

We all ate until we were in pain. Bun laid down on the living room floor, a room surrounded by softly tufted furniture in earth tones, immaculately clean and untouched by food. The only time that room was wrecked was at Christmas with Cal’s growing family. Mary lounged on the loveseat, I took the chair, and Jon and Donna conked out on the couch. An hour later, we were all up and at the table again, eating our second meal. Funny, there was never a second prayer. My biggest and most unnecessary fear was that Jon might let slip one of his Christ responses, always meant to be funny, in front of Bun. He liked to respond to a story by saying “Christ on a post toastie” or

“Christ on a pogo stick” (a particular visually funny favorite).

“Let’s eat,” Donna would say, “then we’ll lay down and eat again.”

192

“Then we have P-I-E-E-I-P pie,” I said. Bun smiled, I saw it from the kitchen once. I was proud of myself, of that grin.

The pies were not store bought. It was like going back in time to when Donna and Johnny were married and Cal and I were young. My mom made the pies a day ahead with the exception of the meringue for the lemon pie. Holidays were always a tear for me. Which parent and grandparent do I see this year at Thanksgiving, and how do I split Christmas. With divorced parents, it never stops.

Somewhere along the line Donna decided if Bun was coming to visit, she was going to be herself. Her language got a little cleaner, but she was never much of a curser anyway. An occasional damnittohell or shit was her limit. She often replaced them with shuckey dern, or glory be to god da. Gone was her favorite expression when I was a child, “I swear to John Henry’s old mule named George!” which she substituted for every curse imaginable. As a child, that did not work and she got hit anyway because it was the same as cursing, this replacing other words for the hell words.

That meant when the first round of eating was over, Donna and I lit up and smoked our cigarettes in the kitchen before we found a place to lay down and suffer.

And Donna, who had grown exceptionally fond of her beer, drank one or two in front of him. Bun never said a word.

It was the conversations I didn’t hear when they happened that seem exceptional. Donna told me years after they happened, one or two that I remember.

“Dad said he knows I think he was too hard on us kids, but we had it a lot easier than he did with Papaw [Ermel]. He said ‘Donna, I’d hear my name yelled by that man

193

while I was plowing the field before school and I knew, I just knew, I was going to get beaten. And I never knew what for. I thought I was doing better by you kids than he did by me.’ And once I asked him, ‘Does Karen know that?’ and I felt bad the minute I said it but I wanted an answer. Dad just shook his head, never said a word.”

These were moments I struggled the most, the old Bun stories and the new Bun stories. Which ones were the true account of the man I could not answer, but I remember thinking to myself – so what, that makes it all OK now I guess.

Yet I could not deny their connection, the blossoming adult child who mirrored her father.

“Don’t tell the other kids this,” Bun told her, “but you were always my favorite because I saw myself in you. Mostly because you were the only one who ever stood up for yourself, stood up to me.” Then Donna would jut her chin forward and I’d see an echo of Bun in her posture.

If only I had written all these confessions down the moment I heard them, some twenty or more years ago now. But it doesn’t change my witness to their relationship becoming softer. Bun learned from Donna, and it was good. They talked on the phone, and Bun sent her tapes of him singing gospel songs from his old chair.

***

After my first year of college, Jon, Donna, and I drove from Jacksonville to

Indiana. I was nineteen years old and with me, tucked quietly away inside a towel in my small suitcase, was the sweetest bag of bud I could find. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, I didn’t know who smoked it and who didn’t. All I knew was when

194

I did smoke weed, I always had it. But I went off it for years at a time with no sorrow or struggle from the age of thirteen. Marijuana was washing up on the shores of Florida’s

Atlantic coast in bales. There were bale-watchers who did nothing but wait to reprocess the sea soaked plants and either sell it off or have a huge party. The Jacksonville

Colosseum never patted anyone down or made you walk through a metal detector for a live concert and joints were rolled and passed down the aisles freely, sometimes never returning to the original roller. That was fine, we just rolled another one.

I had rules about weed. I never went to class stoned. I never drove stoned. I never, well, never did much of anything stoned except watch MTV or put on my head hugging earphones, the kind with the ¼” jack, and listen to music for hours. Even those activities had rules. Never until all my homework was done. At night, I used it to help me fall asleep, that is until I began enjoying the high with the headphones so much I forgot I was supposed to fall asleep. I sat on the edge of my bed and air drummed, or stood in front of my dresser and just jammed. I would eventually crawl into bed and fall asleep, but I had to stop falling asleep with the headphones on. I never heard the alarm.

We drove straight to Bun’s smaller parcel. Brenda and her two boys were there,

Karen, Nita and Little Ernie, Charles and Sharon, too. We spent time with Bun, or I should say Donna and Jon spent time with Bun while I politely did my time then went outside to fart around with my cousins and have a cigarette.

195

Jason and Christian, who were still as much in love with me as I was them at the time, asked Brenda if I could stay with them. I loved the idea. Jon and Donna went to

Karen’s or Nita’s to stay. I went to Brenda’s.

Brenda was working at Toby’s Donuts. She got up before the roosters to make their donuts and came home early in the afternoon. Brenda was married to Joe at the time, a nice man who treated her well. Only problem was, Joe was prone to disappearing for periods of time to see his family. During this trip, Joe was on one of his outings. Christian and Jason were old enough to play outside without supervision, so I spent most of my time cleaning and making food. Christian and Jason showed me how to walk to the grocery store and since I was working a part-time job while I was a full- time student, I had money. I stocked their kitchen and cooked for the boys while Brenda was gone or sleeping.

At one point on the first night there, I was sitting in the kitchen at Brenda’s and

Nita had come over to visit with us. Ernie, Christian, and Jason were outside.

“So how is it living with your mom now and not your dad?” Brenda asked.

“Heaven,” I answered. “My step-mother is a horrible person; it was miserable living with them.”

“Your mom seems happy with Jon, and he seems really nice,” Nita said.

“Yeah, he is. But did you see her when they were taking the group picture at

Bun’s before we left? She gets here and always acts like ‘Oh, look at me. I’m the thinnest and prettiest of everyone.’”

Nita and Brenda burst out laughing, both saying “That’s so Donna, you’re right.”

196

“I know. Yikes.”

“Ah,” Brenda said, “she’s just being Donna.”

There was a minute or two where I almost backed down, but I knew from my years around these two women that what is said rarely gets repeated. So I dove in.

“Do either of you, you know – toking gesture made – smoke anything besides cigarettes?”

“Hah. Hell yes, but we never have any. Can’t afford it or can’t find it,” Brenda said.

“I can get one joint now and then, but that’s it,” Nita chimed in.

I nodded my head and looked out the kitchen window for a few moments. I went to the sink and got a glass of water while Brenda and Nita talked about the times they were high together.

I quietly opened my suitcase and found my towel, walking with it back to my seat in the kitchen.

“You didn’t need to bring your own towel. I have towels, I’m not that poor,”

Brenda said playfully.

“Nope. Wait.” I unrolled it, put my fingers around the top of the baggie and snapped it out. “Tah dah.”

“Oh my god, no way.”

“Ew,” Nita taunted, “I’m tellin’ your mommie on you little girl.”

“OK, none for you then,” I said smiling.

197

I don’t know who was happier of the three of us. My sense of immediate acceptance, Brenda’s love of smoking weed, or Nita’s love of finding weed to smoke.

“Your kids are outside. Should we?” I asked. “Do you have a bowl?”

“No. If I knew you were bringing it I’d a bought one,” Brenda said.

“OK, let me get mine.” I went to my suitcase and found my small corncob pipe, four inches long and one and half inches high at the bowl end.

“I’ll open the window. I don’t work tonight. Yippeee,” I heard Brenda sing.

“I have to go home, I better not with Ernie in the car, except maybe one hit. You guys will save some for me, right? Don’t smoke it all without me,” Nita begged.

Nita took her one hit and left to find her son and go home before her husband got mad at her. She still had supper to cook.

Brenda and I finished the bowl. I sat waiting for the blur, looking around at the dusty floors and the dishes in the sink. I got up and looked in Brenda’s fridge, certainly a low-income housing appliance if I ever saw one.

“I don’t have any beer if that is what you are looking for.”

I felt embarrassed for not asking permission to go to her fridge, then realized she was not mad, just wanting a beer.

“That’s OK. I’ll get some later. I don’t like to go out into the world stoned. I feel kind of freaky. What do you want to do?”

“Let me check on the boys. They ate at Dad’s so they’re good for the night. Then we can go hang out in my room upstairs. My radio is up there.”

198

We made our way up there, me lugging my suitcase, stashing it under her bed. I saw her accordion case.

“You still play that thing?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Can you play anything other than church music?”

“Yes, I can play anything as long as I know the song,” Brenda said, bending over to unsnap the case and settling on the foot end of the bed pumping it up, testing the keys. “What do you want to hear?”

“You like the Beatles, play something from the White Album. Please.”

“Hmm. OK.”

Her broad lap was engulfed by the accordion, and as she began to pump the center in an arch, I heard the beginnings of “Piggies.” I howled. Brenda sang.

Have you seen the little piggies crawling in the dirt And for all the little piggies life is getting worse Always having dirt to play around in

I added the snort-oinking after the first line and after she got to around in, she began a deep, satisfying laugh that only those of us who are pleasantly stoned and in a safe place having a blast understand. I began to hitch, my side hurting.

“I have to pee,” I cried.

“Go ahead oink oink oink.”

I had to stay bent over to make it to the toilet. While I was gone, Brenda broke into Billy Joel, then practiced a bit of “Rocky Raccoon.”

199

For the rest of my stay, that was our routine. The second night Brenda broke out the tape recorder. “We have to find two blank tapes so we can each have one of us singing.”

“I’ll buy them at the grocery store tomorrow. They sell them everywhere now.”

I woke Brenda when it was time for her to get ready for Toby’s Donuts, greeted her with a plate of bacon and eggs with toast and butter. I made dinner for Christian and Jason, cleaned, hung outside with her sons’ friends. But eventually we were reported MIA and Nita showed up early one evening after we had smoked two bowls.

She seemed depressed and uncomfortable. She wanted to know if we were having fun without her and whether we’d smoked it all. I brought her the small pipe with a small bud in it and handed her the lighter.

“We’re having dinner at Karen’s tonight, all of us. I came over to tell you since you don’t have a phone,” Nita told Brenda.

I panicked a bit, but settled down again when Brenda seemed to take it in stride.

I lit a cigarette. “Do you want me to bring you a joint?”

“No. Ernie finds it and I’m dead. Just leave me one over here. Dinner isn’t for another hour. I told them I’d pick you up,” Nita said sadly.

I had seen it before. It was Nita number two. Number one was a dancing, happy, goofball I spent time making up our own language, she left those notes in my albums. I loved her dearly. This Nita was the down, inconsolable woman whose life was never where it should be. She was the unhappiest person in those moments and I wanted nothing more than to make her feel better. But I realized we were older now, and there

200

wasn’t enough goofiness between us to get it all back to good. She was unhappily married, she didn’t need to tell me. I’d met her husband a long time ago. Her eyes went dark, her face more stoic than sullen. I knew there was a complicated mess in that head of hers because I had my own messy brain, but I had no idea what it was like to be her. I silently blamed the umbilical chokehold. Maybe it was a chemical imbalance. It was a troubling mechanism in her, a switch no one could reach. Not even Nita could reach it.

I changed my clothes, put on a sundress. Brenda changed into pants and a t-shirt that didn’t smell like weed. We brushed our hair which is where I got a little lost. I stood next to her in the small bathroom.

“I keep my hair long because I love the feel of it on my back when I’m stoned,” I told her.

“Me, too. Never cutting mine. Don’t like it too much. We have to go act normal.”

“I don’t know what the fuck that is.”

We laughed but managed to stop it from becoming stoned hysteria.

We made it to dinner, and Brenda was the coolest stoned person I’ve ever seen. I followed her lead. I sat in a chair away from the main table that was full anyway. When

I started to get nervous, I walked outside for a cigarette.

“Where you two been?” Karen scolded.

“I don’t have a phone. I don’t know what’s going on,” Brenda said. “Nita had to come tell us about dinner. I’ve been working. Dawn’s been making me breakfast and dinner. I think I’m spoiled now.”

201

She was smooth. All evening I thought about getting back to her bedroom and singing to her accordion playing. At my highest moments, I marveled over how she made that monstrous device sound like a rock and roll song. All those black and white buttons on one side, keyboard on the other, the constant push and pull of the air through the center. It was by far the best week of my life. I fell deeply in love with

Brenda, like the sister I never had. Indiana was a brave new world in some ways. Or maybe I was what was different. I hadn’t been there since 1977, five years and many marriages and births had passed.

But the poverty still lingered in the air. It hovered above their hearts and around every corner was the straw that would clean them out. Bun was no longer living in his old house, but still on the same street, still preaching at his church, married to a different woman. The house where Kathern and Bun lived until she passed belonged to

Charles now. Eddie moved to Tennessee and turned to the church. He’d been saved.

Before we left on that trip, Donna came to pick up me and Brenda and we visited

Kathern’s grave in Connerly-Switch Cemetery. Her headstone read Katherine, not

Kathern. There was a plot next to her for Bun. Two years later, Eddie had a massive heart attack and died in Tennessee, December 10, 1984. He was 46 years old. Donna flew to the funeral alone.

***

I visited Indiana again when I was twenty-three, but my life was a whirlwind and we all stayed at Karen’s house. I didn’t smoke weed any more, not for a few years. I spent a lot of time with Karen’s first son Steve who was full of questions about sex and

202

girls. Jon’s daughter Jenny went with us. I’d left behind me a trail of impending tragedy

– a crush on a married co-worker, a job I didn’t like, a recently defunct relationship that

I thought would end in marriage. I’d married and divorced between visits, too. There was no magical bag of weed and Donna was having female issues. I’d moved back in with her and Jon after my divorce, then again after my almost married relationship ended. We had hit that stage that most mothers and daughters hit. I was young and beautiful; she was a grandmother who had to have a hysterectomy and was on a hormonal roller coaster. Donna never lost her looks, but nature has a way of pitting a mother and daughter, even as close as we once were, against each other. I made snide remarks during the trip and she glared at me often. I felt stuck without my own car. I had to be wherever Jon and Donna were. It was 1986 and in less than a year after that visit, I entered drug rehab for alcoholism in May, 1987. But the drinking was only a symptom, and I had to admit to questions I was never given answers to. Johnny and

Donna were in the same room together for the first time in eight years the day they drove me to rehab. And that was only the beginning of self-awareness.

Nita divorced Ernie, who made it difficult for her to see her son. He eventually moved to another city and took Ernie with him. He said “I don’t want my son around those trashy people.” Bun was removed by the elders of the church, but continued to meet with other preachers at every convention within driving distance. There is a long, storied history I know little about concerning the ground beneath Bun’s church. Greenie

Mounce donated the land, Bun paid for and built the church, his church, that sat on it.

After decades of preaching from that particular pulpit, Bun was somehow pushed out

203

in favor of one of Greenie’s son-in-laws. The scuttlebutt was the new preacher stood accused of molesting a child. The horror of the situation is something I did not witness.

Bun and Mary were not happily married or at least Donna told me they had problems and Mary went to her house for weeks at a time. Bun called Donna often, who had Bun praying for my life when she began seeing signs of my self-destruction. Four months after I left rehab, Jon was offered a promotion and he and Donna moved to

Richmond, Virginia, an event I gave up to God knowing more than I did about what was best for me. Maybe not being so close to her was what I needed. Rehab definitely opened up a dialog between Johnny and me, beginning a very long journey of recovering some semblance of a relationship between us. Rock and roll was not saving anyone in the late 1980s.

After her divorce and the loss of her son, Nita began dabbling in heavier drugs, pills mostly from what I have been told, drinking. She held down a job but gained a massive amount of weight.

I was into my third year of sobriety and about to get married for the second time when Donna called me from Richmond. She was my Maid of Honor.

“Dawn, I . . .”

“What is it? What’s happened? Is it your Dad?”

“No. I have to fly to Indiana, then fly to Florida for your wedding. I’ll be a few days later than I expected.”

I could hear her cupping the phone, muffling a crying jag. I waited silently.

“Nita died. They found her in her bathroom on the floor.”

204

It was April 15, 1989, twelve days before my wedding. Nita was 32 years old.

Bun had lived to see two of his children die, the first-born son, and the last-born daughter. He’d had four daughters and though he officiated over both of his son’s weddings, he did not walk a single daughter down the aisle at her own wedding.

Brenda, devastated and beyond consolation, died a little on April 15, 1989, too.

She never visited Nita’s grave in Connerly-Switch Cemetery. The tombstones yielding the engraved names of Bun’s clan were growing in number.

Somehow, Donna held it together and made it to Florida. We talked about it, how young she was, how unfair. And I told my mother what I already knew was true.

“She suffered her entire life. I don’t think she was made for this world, and I know she’s in a better place. There’s no more pain.”

Donna spoke of letters she’d received from Nita, one nearly 30 pages of cursive writing back and front, that did not make much sense. I saw the letter and read most of it, but have lost track of it. It may be Donna did not want to be reminded that she did not do something. But I believe, there was nothing for her to do, and to this day think an umbilical cord turning a baby’s face purple before birth, that lack of oxygen during an important transition through the womb, gave Nita issues no one else will ever understand. The last time I saw her show any happiness was in 1983 while I was living with Donna for a short period. Nita, Ernie, and Little Ernie came to Donna’s house to visit. But the swings from insanely funny to brooding silence were severe. I blame Bun in part for not wanting to spend much money on doctors, but even I know getting

205

psychological help was an absolute satanic practice – one done by someone who did not accept Jesus Christ as their savior or the need would not exist.

206

The Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Five

Time was drifting, this rock it had to roll So, I hit the road and made my getaway Restless feeling, really got a hold I started searching for a better way

Climax Blues Band “Couldn’t Get it Right”

'Cause the love that you gave that we made Wasn't able to make it enough for you to be open wide, no

Alanis Morissett “You Oughta Know”

It was an ordinary day in Donna’s new transitional style house with a loft and baskets across the rafters. The wrap around porch was covered with a sparkling sheet of snow that would melt by noon. The upstairs had a full living room and at the far end, a huge bedroom with a wood stove made of iron. The edges of the white sheet peeked from beneath the soft, print patterned comforter. The edges emulated lace. Off the bedroom was a bathroom with a shower stall, under the bathroom window an antique wooden nightstand she found in the mountains treasure hunting. There was a set of

207

black and white ducks, sharp billed, on the lower shelf of the table. On top was a glass jar full of Q-tips and a neatly folded stack of hand towels that matched the shower curtain. From the open living room upstairs, she could look down into her first floor living room. It was full of the earth tone furniture from her Melvin Road house and fit like a glove. A small TV on a stand against the stair wall faced the matching living room chair, best seat in the room. The lower outer wall in the front was glass doors with solar panels at the bottom of two stationary ends.

The view of her porch was unobscured and the road blocked out by the natural landscape of pines and holly trees. The kitchen against the opposite wall was small but had a pass through into the living room where the couch was, a small nook at the end of the counter that led to the backdoor had a small maple table with four olive green, rubbed-finish mule ear chairs. An old pottery vase sat in the center with pussy willow stems jutting upward into a spread of green puffs. Beneath the upper bedroom was another bedroom and beside it, a bathroom with an extra-large entry door, a full bath, and a washer and dryer. The shelf above the laundry area was dark wood and decorated with old books – Moby Dick, Charles Dickens Collection, The Old Man and the

Sea, and Collected Works of Mark Twain. A decoy duck from a pottery shop in the foothills sat on one side of the books, an antique navigator’s tool at the other end.

This was Donna’s house. Her fingerprint was all over it.

Donna had left Jon Potter one year before. Jon spent the last five years of their sixteen years together out of town most of the time. Donna raised his daughter Jenny,

208

getting her through her tough, teenage years with Jon traveling all the time. Circuit City in Richmond, Virginia kept him busy. He became disconnected, a removed robotic image of himself. They owned a split-level house together that he was rarely in near the end, though Donna wore the engagement ring he gave her three years before. Donna said she’d stay at least until Jenny finished high school if they didn’t work things out.

Jenny won a partial art scholarship to an institute in the Carolinas, and had begun her first year. Donna and Jon were set to have a serious talk, sign a paper settling the equity payment on the house if Donna moved out. She waited for him to return home from a store opening in Boston. Instead, he called her.

‘I’m in town,” Jon said. “When will you be out of the house?”

“What? I’m not ready to move. You were supposed to be here by now so we can talk,” Donna complained.

“You need to get out. I’m married and we’re moving in.”

. . . . .

That same night, Donna called me in Florida. I remember the sound of her voice, and dropping the phone on the floor. The weeks that followed were a frenzied search for a house to buy, and coming home from work to her house with Jon finding windows jarred open and things missing from their house. Harassing phone calls began, Jon calling daily to find out when she’d be out, that he and his wife and her kids needed to live in the house. They were tired of the hotel situation.

Donna hired a lawyer to draw up papers about the house equity, which Jon signed at the lawyer’s office. After looking at houses for three weeks straight and

209

finding nothing, Donna was nearing a nervous breakdown. I called her every evening to see if she was safe and whether Jon had snuck in the house while she was gone. The whole thing was beyond creepy, a sick joke that had Donna on edge in her own home.

Then one day with her best friend Becky along, Donna walked into her new house. Both women tried not to show their excitement but they both knew this had her name on it already. The closing was in 30 days.

A week later, Donna called me. She was nervous, Jon had been in the house again and this time there was a checkbook missing, but she already called the bank and had her share transferred out.

“Ma?”

“Yes.”

“Get the hell out of that house.”

“I’m moving in a little over three weeks.”

“No. Get a storage unit, get Becky and Brian to help you and put your stuff in storage. Stay at one of those executive weekly rate places, but please dear god, get the hell out of that house. You are going to come home one day and that asshole and his wife and her kids are going to be sleeping in your bedrooms.”

There was a long silence, so I kept talking.

“I can’t stand it. You are not safe. If he’ll get married to someone, it means he was seeing her for what? A few years? Who knows. He’s a liar and you know he’s sneaking in the house every day. How do you know he isn’t bringing his wife with him,

210

sitting on your furniture, screwing on your bed . . . you are not safe. Get out of there, please.”

“You’re right, I know you’re right. Let me give Becky a call.”

“OK. I love you. Call me back tonight if you need to, but call me and let me know what’s going on.”

Two days later, on a Saturday morning, Becky and Brian from work helped

Donna pack, rent a U-Haul and find a storage unit. While they were loading the truck,

Jon pulled up in the driveway. Behind him was a Hanover police car.

Becky was first to lose it.

“You asshole. What are you doing here?”

“Ma’am. Mr. Potter has a right to his own property,” the cop said. “He asked me to supervise, to come with him so there was no trouble.”

“He asked you to come here because he is a coward,” Becky said.

“Becky, calm down. We can handle this,” Donna said. She turned to the officer.

“He and I both own this house and I have the right to stay as well. He married another woman and has been harassing me. I’m leaving three weeks early just to get away from him. I’d appreciate it if you would escort him away from here and do not let him come back until tomorrow morning.”

“Hah, yes,” Jon sniped. “That’s not going to happen. My wife and I need this house now.”

211

“Sir,” the officer said to Jon, “is there a reason you can not wait until tomorrow morning to allow her to remove her belongings in peace? You bring another woman over here and I don’t see this going well.”

“You can’t shove me out of my own house,” Donna said, becoming irate. “I raised your daughter, I . . .”

It was Becky’s turn to put a hand on Donna’s shoulder. Donna was shaking.

“Ma’am, are you planning on being completely out of the house by tomorrow morning?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have proof that this is your home, too?”

“Yes.”

The officer turned to Jon. “Are you saying this is not her house as well?”

“No. Her name is on the deed, too. But I need a place to live,” Jon said.

“Sir, if she has as much right to be here, then you can wait until tomorrow. I don’t need to be here. She is legally on this property and there is no crime being committed.”

“She’s going to take things that don’t belong to her,” Jon said.

“Son of a bitch,” Becky said.

The officer, who was growing impatient being on a non-call, ignored Becky’s comment and addressed Jon. “Sir, I’m going to ask you to leave until tomorrow morning. If you come back, I’m giving her my card and I’ll come back out here.

Understand?”

212

“Yes,” Jon said. He got back in his car and left. The officer handed Donna his card and drove away.

Brian came outside and they hit high gear. Donna went over the house three times, checking every drawer, windowsill, and under furniture for anything that belonged to her. She left Jon all the furniture his mother gave them, a dining room set, their bed, and all his electronics intact, though she told me she imagined taking a hammer to the Macintosh stereo system. This story I’ve heard at least fifty times, and luckily, I wrote it down not because I planned for it to appear in a book someday, but because I made her repeat every word while I wrote it down because no one at the house did. Jon signed the equity payment agreement and it was in the court system.

There was no reason for her to be there. As for Jon, I have little to say because one word really does say it all at times. Asshole.

And that is how Donna came to be in her perfect two bedroom house with a natural landscape, ducks, baskets on the rafters, and Mark Twain on a shelf on that ordinary day.

But a sorrow hung over Donna, my brother Cal, and me that same day. The night before I was on the phone with my mother doing something I rarely did. I was watching the local CBS news. Cal had called to tell me not to miss it that night,

Valentine’s Day, 1995. When it was time for the news, I called my mother so she could listen with me.

The broadcast began with a glamour shot photo of Cal’s ex-wife and mother of his three children, Lori.

213

“On January 31st, Lori McRae disappeared at approximately 2:30 AM from the

Cedar Hills Shopping Center. Today the police have finally made an arrest. Lori

McRae’s Bronco was spotted with a male driver, and the police pulled him over. The suspect was removed from the vehicle and cuffed while officers searched the vehicle.

On the back seat, they found torn, bloody clothing, and a hunting knife. The suspect, whose name is not being released, claims he stole the car when he found it abandoned.”

“Are you hearing it OK?”

“Oh god, oh god. Yes, this can’t be real.”

“It’s not. We’re trapped in a fucking nightmare. I haven’t been over to Cal’s house since she disappeared. I don’t want to sit there and stare at the kids and make them more nervous. They are trying to act like she just decided to go somewhere and get away from her new husband.”

“Oh god. Hearing them talk about her on the news . . . you never think it will be someone you know, someone you love. Your own family.”

“I know . . . it feels like I need to be somewhere but I don’t know where to go.

This happened 1/8 of a mile from my house. But I don’t know what to do. I feel so helpless. They found bloody clothes. Lori wouldn’t just go somewhere for two weeks and leave her kids. And she’s got a new baby.”

Neither of us wanted to say the words but they were hanging over all of us.

“She’s dead. She’s dead.”

214

After I hung up with Donna, I called Cal. He and I talked several times a day. I told him I had our mother on the phone during the broadcast. “Cal, they found the clothes. This isn’t good.”

“No. It’s not. J.C. was doing all right with it until this morning. He was eating cereal and he just broke down and started crying. Sam cries so much we had to take her out of school. Alex is lost, he hasn’t gone to school in two weeks.”

J.C. was seventeen, Cal’s oldest. Samantha was ten, Alex about to turn eight. We were trapped in this nightmare, but it was the worst for the kids. Lori and Donna had been close, Donna going out of her way not to be a nosey mother-in-law. Lori liked her so much she called her while she was still married to Cal just to talk, sometimes to get advice. They were together sixteen years. Both had remarried, Lori had a baby named

Amanda with her new husband. Lori was the Postal worker, Mother of four. MIA.

The next morning, the day after Valentine’s Day, Donna started her ordinary day. She had the flu two weeks before, but was feeling great.

I was at my new job for six months and the day after Valentine’s Day was as busy as they came. It was payroll week, it was a massive search for a new executive, a pool of temporary clerical workers whose duties I structured and assigned. I answered my twentieth call of the day and heard my brother’s voice.

“Hi,” I said with a little more enthusiasm than I meant to use.

“Are you sitting down?”

“Uhm . . . yes.”

“Do you have privacy? Can you find privacy and call me back?”

215

“OK,” I said robotically. His tone was serious and somewhat sarcastic.

I went into the office of my good friend Kathy in accounting. I asked her to stay in the room with me. I called my brother back.

“OK, I’m in a friend’s office and sitting down. What did they find out?”

“Ma’s had a heart attack.”

“What? What!”

“Ma’s had a heart attack. Becky called me. Ma couldn’t remember your work number. She’s OK, Becky said she’s OK but she did have a mild heart attack. She’s in

Cardiac Intensive Care at Chippenham Hospital.”

I was suddenly deaf. I did not understand English.

“I can’t go, you know why. But I’ll call and buy you a plane ticket. Can you leave today?”

“I have to find my boss . . . yes. I can, thanks for buying the ticket. Becky said she’s OK, right?”

“Yes. Sorry I can’t go with you.”

“No no. I get it. OK. I’ll call you from my house when I get there.”

“OK. Breathe.”

“I am, I think. Bye.” After I hung up, I stared at the wall in Kathy’s office.

“What happened?” Kathy asked. “Did they find Lori?”

“No. My mother had a heart attack.” And then I lost it. I left Kathy’s office and began wandering around, asking where Barbara, my boss, could be found. She was at a meeting, OK. At a meeting with her boss.

216

I walked outside, down three doors, then decided to walk to the back entrance so

I could breathe and try to pull it together.

I knocked on the CFO’s office door and heard a gruff “Yes?”

I pushed the door open slowly until I saw Barbara and asked her to step outside.

I know she saw the panic in my face, the drying tears because she looked alarmed and came right out without saying a word to the CFO.

We walked out the back entrance and I said the words.

“My mom had a heart attack this morning. I have to fly to Richmond today.”

Then came the breakdown, Barbara who had forty pounds on me but I was a foot taller, holding me up, arms around me saying “I’m so sorry. I thought it was about your sister-in-law. Go now if you need to. We’ll cover you.”

After another minute, I calmed down and went into crisis mode. It was what I was good at, one of the reasons I was hired. I delivered bad news, I confronted people over policy issues, met with the President to hear his concerns. I had to drive home and pack but first I had to walk back into my office and find my things. I did not want to answer any questions. I told Kathy I was leaving and I’d call her from Richmond, found my keys and my car and was on the expressway crossing the river without remembering the twenty minute drive it took to get to the bridge. My brother had a ticket ready, drove me to the airport. “Call me when you get there, or after you see our mother.”

“Shit. Call Becky and tell her what time my flight arrives,” I said. “I forgot.”

217

There was a mother with three young children on the plane. They sat in front of me. I was an emergency ticket so was stuck against the back wall. Someone got bumped. I didn’t give a damn.

But those kids, they kept looking at my face. I went in and out of my personal battle to hold it together. I’d lose it, then remember that Becky said she’s OK, but she did have a mild heart attack. But she’s OK.

The little girl asked me why I was crying.

“My mommy is sick,” I said with as much levity as I could muster.

“Oh, my mommy is right here. She’s not sick.” Off she went down the aisle. The mother sat up and turned around.

“Sorry. She’s a curious one.” She smiled and sat back into her seat facing forward.

I didn’t mind. Seeing the little girl and answering her question helped.

Becky met me, trying to look calm but I gave her a bit of shit.

“You look about as fresh as the morning dew.”

“Oh, it’s been a really long day,” she said smiling. The tears were welling up.

“I’ll drive you there first. She’s in ICU but they know you’re coming in from

Florida and said they’d let you see her right away.”

“Oh, god, thank you Becky. Are you OK?”

“I don’t know. Scared the hell out of me.”

It was a ride I do not remember. We got there and every step got heavier.

218

Becky tried to prepare me. “She didn’t want me to call you or Calvin. Said you guys had enough to deal with. So sorry about Lori. But I made her give me a phone number.”

“Yeah, I bet. Did you do that before or after the heart attack stopped?” A poor attempt at humor on my part.

“OK. We’re here. Ready?”

“Yes.”

The nurse drew back the curtain and I stepped inside. There she was. Donna.

Stunning. Hair still done, make up good for the most part, just a little smear of mascara.

“Oh, Dawn. I didn’t want you to come all the way here. I’m so sorry.”

“Ma. No way I wasn’t coming.”

There was just this one thing that was different. She couldn’t stop yakking green bile into the pink plastic puke catcher.

I touched her arm. “Ma, why are you throwing up?”

But she was too busy yakking so Becky answered.

“They said it’s from the blood thinners they gave her to stop the heart attack. A lot of people throw up when they get a lot of it all at once.”

I turned around, facing away from Donna, put my hands to my face.

“Oh man,” I said beginning to shake.

“I know. It’s hard to see her in a hospital. She doesn’t do hospitals.”

That made me laugh and I found the clutch again. I turned around.

“Can I stay at your house?” I asked Donna.

219

“Of course. Sleep in my bed upstairs.” Yak, spit.

We weren’t allowed to stay there long, ten minutes and they ran us out. When we got back to Becky’s car, I felt the adrenaline leaving my body. I’d seen her, she was

OK. Puking was normal. And she was so beautiful, but what the hell was she doing in that hospital. Heart attack. I had to repeat it to myself, rolled it over in my head until it sounded like pig latin or Billy Joel – heart attack yak yak yak yak yak.

I had Donna’s keys. House, car, shed, unidentified. I had a car.

“Do you think you can find the hospital tomorrow when you go back?”

“Uh, just get back onto Hull Street Road until I hit 150 and head north until I see the hospital exit.”

“You got it. Goodnight, hun.”

“Becky, thanks for everything. Thanks for being there with her.”

“You don’t need to thank me for that.”

She left, her scent lingering at the front door. Becky always smelled like a luxurious spa dipped in vanilla. She and my mother made an unlikely match – a tall thin corn-flower and a shorter, curvy petite rose.

I found the downstairs phone and called Cal. We talked long enough for me to tell him what I knew, but that I hadn’t talked to a doctor yet. That was tomorrow. There was nothing new on Lori. The suspect was still claiming he stole the vehicle from a parking lot.

I had been in Donna’s house once before, a trip I made to Virginia alone. It was perfect. I didn’t want food. I found an ashtray and smoked a cigarette. Upstairs I found

220

something to sleep in and my toothbrush. But I forgot to pack contact lens solution and a lens holder. I searched her kitchen for two small cups and put a little salt in hot water, knowing I needed to find my glasses. I forgot to pack those, too. I was too tired to care. I fell into her bed and cried myself to sleep.

I had the strangest dream. There were alarms going off outside a building I did not recognize. There was banging and a faint voice coming from far away. Something in my brain said,

“Wake up now.”

I opened my eyes, disoriented.

There it was again. The banging, the voice from a distance. The fog cleared a little.

“Dawn.” Screaming beneath the upstairs bedroom from the outside.

“Dawn get up. Let me in.”

My skin jumped off my body in one lurch, then settled back into place as I realized Becky was banging on the outside of the house, trying to wake me up.

Blurry eyed with no glasses, I made it down the stairs and opened the front door.

“The hospital has been trying to call you. They finally called me.”

“I’m not sure there’s a phone upstairs. Wait, what?”

“They said your mother’s condition has changed and you need to come to the hospital now. That’s all they said. Her condition has changed and they want you there.”

Overload. Shutdown. Numbness.

I got dressed, found my shoes, got in Becky’s car.

221

I asked again.

“All they said was you needed to come to the hospital because her condition has changed. That’s all they told me. I’m not a relative so they didn’t say anything else.”

“Oh, god. Maybe she was asking for me,” I said, lying to myself. The air in the car was too thick. It felt like hours before we got there. Everything I saw was blurry unless I squinted so hard it hurt. Becky was panicked, nervous. My mind went back into crisis mode.

We were back in Cardiac ICU, asking to see Donna Hackett. I heard myself say the words from the back of a long tunnel, like I was talking through a dur-dur.

“Wait here.”

The nurse went in search of the Cardiologist on duty. I was waved in but they asked Becky to stay. Family only.

“She’s her sister,” I said. Crisis mode meant thinking, speaking, not feeling.

We went into the same partially curtained door, but what was on that bed was not the woman on that bed six hours before. Donna’s eyes were closed, tubes ran upward into her nose, another larger tube into her mouth, taped into place. There was a new machine beside her that sounded like a blown accordion. The black and white keys were missing and there was no keyboard. Its center moved up and down, not in and out in a slight S. The room smelled different. It smelled as if goblins had been there. The clean mixed with Donna’s odor. It was death. I could smell it even if my eyes did not recognize that the accordion was life support. The tube down her throat was keeping

222

her alive. The three new IVs were anti-seizures and saline. I approached her bed, opposite the machine.

“Dawn, don’t ever let them put me on life support. I can’t stand the idea I’d be dead but kept alive by some machine. Promise me.”

“OK, Ma. But that will never happen to you.” I thought no way, she’ll go peacefully in her sleep, in her 80s. Here I was standing in a Richmond hospital, ICU,

Donna on life support. Donna, age 50 years. I leaned down close to her ear and spoke to her, “Ma? Ma.”

Becky stood in the corner of the room, stumped, mortified. I looked at her.

“What the hell happened? She was fine. You saw her.”

Becky shook her head and waved her arms while she cried quietly.

I remember a young doctor coming in, faceless, calm.

“Are you Dawn Hackett? Miss Hackett’s daughter?”

“Yes. What is going on here?”

“Sometime between 2:00 and 5:00 AM she became unresponsive. The left side of her face was slack, her left arm was also unresponsive to pin pricks. We called in a

Neuro-consult and he recommended a Neurosurgeon consult. The Neurosurgeon is on his way now.”

“So, what happened between 2:00 and 5:00 AM that no one noticed in a Critical

Care Unit?” He was being obtuse, waiting to say the words, trying to start with everything he knew. I was becoming enraged but the shock of Donna lying there not breathing on her own kept me from punching him squarely on the mouth.

223

“Miss Hackett has suffered a bleed in the right side of her brain. She had a stroke

– a massive bleed in her brain that caused fluid to build up and shut down her pulmonary system. She stopped breathing on her own.”

“You mean she died.”

“We administered life saving measures. When she continued to be unresponsive, we put her on life support, yes.”

“She died.”

. . . .

“She died and you put her on life support.” Becky came to my side at that moment stunned but a bit more aware of the posture the doctor held. I didn’t care. I wanted him to say it.

“She died sometime between 2:00 and 5:00 AM and you put her on life support.”

The doctor was a patient man. He had been there before.

“The bleed . . . the stroke caused a massive amount of fluid to build up in her brain. That put pressure on her ability to breathe normally. When that happens, either the heart stops or the lungs shut down. In her case, it was the lungs. When she stopped breathing, we administered CPR. We diagnosed it as a stroke. The left side of her face was slack, her left arm unresponsive to touch. The life support is a temporary measure.

The fluid on her brain is still building.”

A nurse spoke quietly to the Cardiologist, then left.

“The Neurosurgeon is here. We need to clear the room so he can examine her.”

224

I’m not going anywhere I thought. I’m not leaving her in the hands of people who can’t give me less than a three hour window. But Becky gently pulled me out of the room. A nurse led us to a bench outside the ICU. It was dark red cloth and big enough for two people, but the cushioning looked worn. I sat and felt the bottom of the bench on the back of my legs. I was wearing jeans and a light sweater over a tailored shirt. I saw Donna walking toward me, down the wing of the Jacksonville International

Airport. She wore straight slacks and a white blouse with a tailored jacket, a scarf around her neck. On her left shoulder was a purse strap. On her face was a big smile. It was Christmas, 1994. She had seen me waiting for her. I turned to my boyfriend at the time and said, “My god. She is not fifty. She looks great.” Boyfriend said something in return I can’t recall. “Look at how stylish she is,” I said, then hurried to her for an all embracing hug. I saw her at Cal’s for Christmas, Johnny had flown in from Japan. His mother Kay was there, my favorite grandparent, having recently gone off her meds and back into paranoid schizophrenia. Cal had driven to Largo and rescued her. She lived with him for a while. His Christmas tree was enormous. Cal used a ladder to string the lights, the top almost touching his vaulted living room ceiling. He put a set of carol playing lights on the tree. The soldiers and small drum ornaments from our childhood were there; along with another 200 bulbs he bought to cover the tree. I saw a small

Santa face with a cotton beard. We’d each had one, he kept his. It was midway up the tree on the side, but at the end of a branch, easy to spot. Johnny flew in from Japan where he was doing a three-year stint with the Civil Service. We were all there, the

225

Hacketts. I saw Donna walking toward me at the airport, her outfit, makeup, hair, and a confident and happy walk. That image was fresh, only seven weeks old.

“I’ve got to call Cal. Where’s a phone?”

Becky went to the nurses’ station and returned with long distance instructions for the phone at the end of the hall, the one in the surgery waiting area. There was a code for families who had a loved one in critical condition. I had a code.

“If the Neurosurgeon comes out get me back here, please,’ I said to Becky. Her face was red. A box of tissue sat on her lap.

Cal’s wife Robbie answered the phone. “Hi. How’s your mom?”

“I need to speak to Cal.”

“Everything alright?”

“I need to let Cal know what’s going on.” I heard him in the background “Is that

Dawn? Give me the phone.”

“Hey, how’s it going?” Cal asked

“Listen. Ma has had a stroke. She’s on life support.”

“Oh, god,” Cal said, his tone lowering.

“You need to get here. Fast.”

“I’ll drive. I think the van will make it.”

“Any news on the suspect?” I asked, but blankly with no feeling.

“No. Let me pack. I’ll be there in nine hours; I remember how to get to her house.”

226

For a family who had rejected Bun’s rules, those he drew from reading the Bible, everyone was saying the word god a lot. Even me. “Oh, god” was the first response.

I returned to Becky. I sat again, but it was only a few minutes before a tall, crazy haired genius in a white coat stood in front of us.

“Are you Dawn, Miss Hackett’s daughter?”

“Yes yes that’s me,” I stood thinking we were going to a consultation room.

“We can talk here. No time to find a room. I’m Dr. White. We need to get a brain scan on your mother. The fluid buildup is probably massive. I need your permission; you are next of kin on her chart.”

“Permission for what?”

“You have to decide whether we can go ahead with Neurosurgery to relieve the pressure on her brain. We have to remove the fluid before her heart stops beating, too. I understand she came in with a heart attack. Is that correct?”

“Yes. I’m lost. She came in with a heart attack but now she’s on life support for a stroke. What do I need to decide? A scan?”

“Well, yes and no. She was given a clot dissolver in the Emergency Room called tPA. That is what caused the hemorrhage in her brain. Unless I find an abnormality during surgery, I’m confident that is what happened. Some people have bleeds from their stomach lining. Miss Hackett had one in her brain.”

“Oh my god. A drug did this.”

“Yes, but I need to move quickly. You need to decide whether we can proceed with Neurosurgery. For that, we need a scan. I will not order the scan if there is no

227

surgery. You have to consider the amount of damage to her brain and her quality of life after the surgery. You need to choose whether to take her off life support or take the chance she’ll survive surgery. I have to say, with her heart weakened, the odds of her making it through a three hour surgery are very low.”

I tried to absorb it all. I was in a movie moment now, in a panned out shot. Then a close up right in my face, a Neurosurgeon who looked like the mad, genius professor kneeling in front of me. I needed a new flux capacitor.

“Quality of life. You mean whether she will function because of the stroke. Do you know what the odds are she’ll be able to talk or . . .”

“I don’t want to guess. It is possible with a bleed this massive she will remain in a vegetative state but breathing on her own, or breathing with a machine. Her capabilities will be severely diminished, that is definite. But how they will be diminished is unknown. You will not know until after the surgery, if she survives it.

There is also the chance that the surgery itself and removing the fluid will damage another part of her brain immediately surrounding the bleed.”

“My choices are to leave her on life support until the bleed makes her heart stop; take her off life support now – which she never wanted, ever; approve the surgery and she dies during, do the surgery and if she survives, her quality of life is screwed. Is that right? Do I have it all straight?”

“Yes,” he said. The corners of his mouth turned upward for one second, but he quickly went back into his calm, serious posture.

228

I squeezed Becky’s hand. I had a thirty-second facial strain, the one when you are in and out of shock from hearing horrible news. It was not quite a cry, though tears touched my cheeks. I glanced around the area, the sterile blank environment, then at

Becky. When the facial contraction stopped, it hit me that I knew nothing about this man in front of me. I was in a strange land talking to a native. So I asked.

“Are you any good?” I heard myself ask this from three miles behind my mouth.

He grinned a little again. “We are considered the best in this region. We do well I think.”

It is amazing how in those small moments, the ones that later you think went on for an hour but in reality lasted a few minutes, you can remember everything. The details of his hair, his craggy but friendly face, the paint on the walls beside us, how his brown pants crinkled at the knee as he squatted, Becky’s silence, the smell of the busy life around us mixed with death (a certainty in any hospital), the sound of the drug that killed my mother – tPA, tPA, tPA. Satan in the form of a tiny round pill. Or was it God, was it her time and God called her, and more importantly, who was I to interfere. Or was it human cruelty in the dose of better living through pharmaceuticals. Maybe it had nothing to do with God.

“How long do I have to decide?” I asked, face no longer contorted.

“Five minutes. We need to do the scan and I’ve got a room for the surgery on hold.”

Five freaking minutes. Donna’s life boiled down to five minutes and rested on my shoulders. What a horror show. “Don’t ever let them put me on life support,

229

Dawn.” But they did. Now I was the one to kill her or try to save her from what she didn’t want.

“OK. Where do I go when I decide?”

“Tell the nurses at the station. I’ll be in the ICU with your mother.”

“I need to see her,” I said, suddenly panicked. It felt like the last time, it was my final moment with Donna.

“OK. Come with me.”

Dr. White led me through the door by scanning his ID. Becky stayed on the bench. We did not speak; she was giving me my moment alone. The Dr. stood outside the room.

I recognized the slackness on her left side. All the IVs were on the right. I stayed on the left. The noise from the machine became rhythmic. My thoughts were nonsensical. My heart, though, was open. I held her limp hand, becoming angry at the breathing machine and those who put her on it. She was too young to have a DNR on file anywhere. But I knew. I knew the meaning of that machine and how Donna felt about it. Now she was on it and the decision was on me. If they’d never put her on it, there’d be no decision and I would be arranging a funeral. There was no way to contact my brother on the road. In my purse was a small book of phone numbers, one in Japan.

As far as reaching out, there were no other familiar people in my book. Not for this call.

“Ma. Forgive me whatever happens.”

I met the doctor outside the room and asked for a few minutes. Asked to make a call to my father.

230

I prayed the long distance code worked for international calls. It did. Johnny answered his work phone, about to leave for the day.

“Dad.”

“Hi there.”

“I don’t have much time. Ma has had a heart attack and then she had stroke.

She’s on life support. They’re asking me to decide what to do. If I do nothing her heart will stop, if they do surgery, she may be alive but a vegetable. What do you think?”

“Your mother?” He asked, needing to hear it again. There was a long pause.

“Dad?”

“I don’t know Dawn. Whatever you decide, I don’t know what to say. You are there and I’m not. You are the best one to make this decision.”

“I know that. I can’t call Cal because he is driving here now. I just needed to say it out loud. Can you come?”

“Well . . . I am not sure what the right thing to do here is. Do you want me to come?”

“Yes, Dad. I need at least one speaking parent here.”

“OK. What’s the number where you are staying?”

“I’m at Ma’s house. It’s . . .”

“I have it.”

“Oh. OK.” This was not the time to allow that little surprise to settle.

I found Becky again. The look on her face told me what she did not want to ask directly.

231

“Becky, I need to talk to the Neurosurgeon. Be right back.”

As I approached the ICU Nurse’s station, I noticed the sun was up and small particles of snitch floated by me. Snitch, a childhood word in my head at an odd moment.

“I need to see Dr. White immediately. He is with Miss Hackett waiting to hear from me.”

The nurse recognized the name and moved quickly to hit the buzzer and I was taking the long journey two curtains down on the right. The curtain was already pulled back, the room full of doctors. I saw only Dr. White’s hair, then he turned and the craggy face appeared.

“Do the scan. Unless you find an abnormality like you said, do the surgery. I need someone to tell me where to wait. I need to make phone calls to tell her father. I have to go home to do that. How long do I have before the scan results?”

“We are sending her down now. I will wait in the imagining room. If I see a solid edged space, that means there was no abnormality. We will go right to surgery from there. We will start at Noon at the latest.”

“Three hours you said?”

“Possibly longer, or if her heart is too weak, we’ll let you know right away.”

“I have to go home – to her house and find phone numbers.”

The nurse whose face is no part of my memory touched my arm and led me to the inner sanctum of the Nurse’s Station. “What is the home number where you’ll be?”

I drew a blank. Straining, the area code came to mind and the rest followed.

232

The nurse wrote it in red marker on the front of Donna’s file.

“Don’t worry, if something does not go as we expect, I will call you. Does she have call waiting?”

“Yes. Unfortunately. Don’t you hate call waiting?”

The nurse looked surprised but gave me a knowing grin and a light touch on the arm. “Go. We’ll take it from here.

233

The Indiana Invasion

She traveled this road as a child Wide eyed and grinning, she never tired But now she won't be coming back with the rest If these are life's lessons, she'll take this test

Dixie Chicks “Wide Open Spaces”

This is what I remember about the next twenty-four hours.

Becky drove me to Donna’s house with a quick stop to buy contact lens solution and a case on the way. There was a Food Lion on the corner of Hull Street Road and the turn off for her subdivision. Becky walked in with me, guiding me to the area I needed, and paid for my stuff. She bought us each a bottle of water and a banana.

I found my mother’s address book easily, or maybe it took thirty minutes. I do know I opened the water and drank it without breathing. I was parched. I shoved pieces of banana into my throat while I decided what order to call Donna’s surviving siblings and Bun. Knowing my mother, Karen was the first call. Her home number was in the book, but Karen was at work. How did I not know that. Becky nor I could

234

remember the name of the school Karen worked at. I was forced to call Brenda, who did not answer. My only option was to call Charles and risk Sharon answering. I needed to tell Karen then let her decide which direction the dominoes were to fall. Sharon answered. Charles was at work as well.

“Do you know the name of the school where Karen works? I need to talk to her.”

“Why? I everything OK?” Sharon nibbled.

“I just need to talk to her. Sorry to bother you, I don’t know her number at work.”

“Oh. She works at the Huron School. There’s only one in Huron,” Sharon answered. Her voice was in sing song mode which to me was slang for ‘I’m telling you this but I know you’re up to something and leaving me out.’

This was a moment I will never forget. There are rules in Indiana on who tells whom what, who they share it with, if they share it, and when they share it. If so and so hears about what’s her name’s thing before her best friend whozit, people get sore.

Feelings are mashed, friendships destroyed. Information was power. It was a form of entertainment. I had to tell Karen first and the process was agonizing, putting on a just calling to talk to her voice in the middle of my personal disbelief of the words I was about to say to Karen.

I called the school front office who put me on hold and paged Karen. It was only a few minutes before she picked up, or it might have been thirty. I don’t know how they let her know to pick up on a certain line, but there was a hesitant fear in her voice when she said, “Hello” which sounded more like a question than a salutation.

235

“Hi, Karen. It’s Dawn.”

“Hello . . .” Karen. Waiting.

“My mom’s had a heart attack, then she had a massive stroke.”

“Oh, no,” Karen replied with the heavy sadness of Indiana grief.

“She di . . . she’s on life support. You need to get here. Can you come?”

“Yes. But Dad. I have to tell Dad.”

“Do you want me to call him?”

“No. I’ll get Brenda and Charles to go with me to his house. Life support?”

“I told them to do a scan and then surgery. I had to decide. That is what I decided . . . they don’t think she’ll make it through a three hour surgery because she just had a heart attack yesterday morning. My understanding is she goes in on life support for her lungs, but her heart may stop.”

“We’ll leave early tomorrow morning, early early. I’ll call you and let you know.”

“You have her home number?” I asked and immediately admonished myself for asking a stupid question. Robotic forward motion.

“Yeah at home.”

“If I don’t answer, leave a message. I have to get back to the hospital. Cal’s on his way, so is my dad. By then the surgery will be over. I may not get back here until after he follows me to the hospital to see her, or not to see her . . . I mean, you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Karen said, sobbing now. “One of us will call you and let you know.”

236

“OK. Be careful.”

Her last sound was inaudible.

“How’d she take it?” Becky asked. I had forgotten she was in the house.

“Not well. I don’t know, I can’t say I know her well enough to answer that but she’s going to get everyone together and drive to grandpa’s house. I know Karen will come. That’s all I know.”

“Anyone else you need to call before we go back?”

“No, but what about work? Can you call them?”

“Oh, shit. Yeah I’ll do that now and we’ll go.”

I went upstairs to the loft bedroom with my bag of lens solution, cleaned my lenses and put them in my eyes. Clarity came back to my vision, but it did not help my brain. The ringing sound from the back of my ears was horrendous, trying to drown my thoughts. My thoughts were fighting back, and they were winning.

“OK. I have my purse this time and I can see. Two cars or one?”

“When will your brother get here?”

I tried to calculate. What time was it that I called him, was the sun up yet, how much time had passed. “Not until after the surgery for sure.”

“Two. That way you can come back here if you need to show him the way, or pick up your dad at the airport.”

“Oh, right. Damn it. I think that is a fourteen-hour flight, plus a last minute ticket. He’s supposed to call as soon as he leaves the plane.”

237

It was less of a conversation than it was a way to sound normal in the moment. It was a practice in futility. I felt for Becky, but I was so busy trying not to feel for myself, I offered little comfort. Only a twisted sense of humor was present. It was the only way I knew how to speak after Karen.

When we arrived at Chippenham Hospital, Joe was there. A longtime friend of

Donna’s with a heart of gold, he heard the news and left his desk. He was in the surgery waiting area looking for us. I went to the Nurse’s Station and asked if there was a private waiting area, got directions, and asked four times whether the surgeon would be able to find us there. We had made it back by Noon, there was no abnormality, only a large mass of fluid buildup. Only. And then there was that damn life support machine.

We sat in that room, fudging around with dog-eared magazines swarming with viruses waiting to cling to our fingers. No one read. Joe was filled in on the events since the news of the heart attack. He went wan around the eyes, bowing his head a lot.

Becky did her best to keep talking. I was up, then sitting, then outside the door looking.

After three and a half hours, I went to the bathroom. When I returned, Becky and Joe were outside the door.

“The surgeon just came to get you. Come on,” Becky said. We both sucked in air and held it, letting it out slowly but silently. Her chest moved like mine.

Dr. White was at the Nurse’s Station and we were corralled to, once again, the red bench for two. Joe stood back until I waved him closer.

238

“I was able to remove most of the fluid without further damage to the brain tissue. There was no abnormality, it was the tPA. Her heart rate slowed the last hour but not enough to cause concern.”

“Where is she?” I asked. “I need to see her.”

“Miss Hackett, your mother is in a coma. She’s still on life support.”

Not what I wanted to hear. Rejected and burned, tossed into a metal can on fire.

“What do you mean in a coma, like she was before?”

“No, she was not comatose before, but sedated to slow her blood pressure until we knew whether surgery . . .”

“So coma from the surgery?”

“The coma is from the excessive pressure on her brain, and yes, the strain of the surgery.”

“How long, is that normal?”

“I’ve only seen a bleed that large once before. There is no normal here that I am aware of.”

I tried with great strength to wrap his words around my fears, but every time they grabbed hold, my fears skittered in twenty directions. My heartrate was up, my breathing was shallow. Coma, like in the movies, the visuals played in my head in between panic and doom – every piece of film with a person in a coma.

“I don’t understand. I want to see her. She’s in a coma.” I looked at Becky who was way ahead of me with working tear ducts.

I could not cry, not for lack of trying, but for survival.

239

“As soon as she is in recovery. Fifth floor, other end of the wing. There’s a button you push and tell them your name, the patient’s name . . . they will come and get you as soon as you can see her. OK?”

“Thank you, Dr.,” Becky said.

“Yes, thanks,” words that left my mouth instead of a scream. Fuck you she’s in a coma. If she wasn’t in one before, what did I just do. Oh, god Oh, god Oh, god

We obeyed, found the area with the locked doors that have to be buzzed open after a phone call from the waiting room. The hours of visitation were insane. Fifteen minutes every four hours, closed from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM. Opens at 8:00 AM. Closes at

7:00 PM. No more than two visitors at a time.

I remember going in alone first, then I remember Becky with me. I remember the long, fetid walk to the desk after passing six curtained rooms that were all open at least enough for me to glance inside. No one there that I recognized.

“Donna Hackett. I’m her daughter,” I said to a faceless nurse. She pointed to the curtained area behind us, another twenty feet away. The smell was igneous and light at the same time. It took me twenty minutes to walk twenty feet, or maybe it took ten seconds. The reigning in of what I was looking at, of who it was in that bed, the new reality of existence in the world of the living and half-dead.

The right side of her head shaved, heavy staple-gun sized rivets in a horseshoe four inches high and three inches wide. An IV needle drained fluid from the top of her head. Beside it was her hairline on the left side, put into a Pebbles ponytail straight up and blossoming like fronds on top of a palm tree. The IV in her head drained a yellow-

240

brown fluid I thought I smelled as I looked at it – rotten and clinical. A larger needle protruded from her neck and from it, two tubes pushed liquid in. Both arms were above the blankets, four thin hospital blankets of light blue cotton. Her right arm strung like a

Christmas tree, every five inches an IV plus a permanent valve at the top of her shoulder for blood withdrawal. Both nostrils had tubes taped across the bottom of her nose, plus an oxygen insert with the standard double inserts taped in place on her cheeks. Left arm was bruised from the elbow down, the stroke arm where no blood was coming out after many apparent attempts, where the veins laid down and lifted their middle fingers in a salute to the phlebotomist. Settled for the left shoulder and neck instead. A large tube ran from beneath the covers to her right side and into a urine bag.

Bright orange mixed with blood, a massive UTI that fell a distant fifth place to other issues. Behind her head, a vaporizer spewed a small, constant cloud of moisture. From her left side another tube from under the blankets from an IV in her leg, covered by breathing leg covers to prevent clotting. The end of the bed had a hanging power drive that stuttered as it pumped and released air into the leg wraps. Except for a flat pillow, her body was nearly flat, a hint of rise in the head of the bed. Beside the left of her bed, the life support pumped air into her lungs through a long, thick tube that ran down her throat. Beside it were two smaller tubes – tickbirds on a rhino clinging to their master.

Blood dried at one corner of her mouth and the bottom of both nostrils. Nodes contacted her chest from under the blankets, her upper arms, the other side of her neck, the back of her skull. Fed information to another machine with a blaze of lights and crooked lines and numbers that jumped by five points at a time. Her face was flat but

241

for her nose and the tubes. Her eyelids pulled tightly across her irises, lashes matted shut by pieces of dry white specks. Pie eyed she used to call it, but that meant drunk.

Swelling made her face seem fluid in its flatness, tape resting itself on stretched skin.

My chest heaved, nose curled against the onslaught of pain behind my eyes. No.

Not yet.

I took a small space between appliances beside her head, smelled her new scent and took in a short breath, “Ma.”

I reached for her hand but there was an IV running into the top just short of her knuckles. I gently wrapped my fingers around hers. Mine were on fire, hers were melting beneath the heat. I squeezed slightly, “Ma,” a little louder. I told myself one eye moved below the lid. Coma, comatose. What a strange new language I had created, bitter on the tongue.

I was with her for part of the fifteen minutes and remembered Becky. Becky who needed to see her as I saw her at that moment. I told the nurse I was bringing in Miss

Hackett’s sister.

“Don’t try to talk to her. She’s unresponsive,” she suggested.

“That is all there is and unless you’ve died before, you can’t tell me that,” I refuted. I felt my ovaries get bigger. The shock was wearing off.

Becky was sitting pretending to watch a TV that droned about medical care.

When she saw me, she got up and I put my hand on her back.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked.

“Oh, no. How bad?”

242

“Well, let’s just say if she ever does wake up, I’ll call her Frankenmom.”

“Shit,” Becky said with a sad chuckle.

“I’ll wait behind you if you want.”

“No. We can stand there together.”

I can strain all I want to tell of Becky’s reaction, but to tell a lie defeats the purpose of writing about an event nearly indescribable. I know she and I were side by side amongst a mess of chords, tubes, and wires. I know Becky’s eyes searched the woman in the bed for signs of recognition as I did. I knew the moment she found it, too.

I felt it. There were tears and shivers. Neither of us had slept for more than two hours over the last thirty-two. Takes time for it to settle, that you can not have a conversation with the person you were just talking to a few hours before. How Becky kept her footing was a mystery.

I do not know how long we were there. We were kicked out and allowed back in but sooner than the four hours on the sign. When there was nothing left, no energy to sit up straight and almost nine hours since Cal left Florida, we went back to Donna’s house. We collapsed on Donna’s cushy living room furniture. Becky had a beer. I was four months shy of eight years sober. I made coffee.

“You should take a nap before your brother gets here,” Becky said.

After I snorted coffee out of my nose, we began a semi-hysterical laugh. We reached the land of beyond exhaustion when a body will not allow sleep but runs on fumes. After the laugh came tears and more phone calls. I checked messages. Karen left a message saying, “We are driving there in a few hours. We’ll be there tomorrow early

243

afternoon,” as I struggled to calculate what day was tomorrow. And I wondered who we was, too. Johnny was arriving just after midnight.

Cal arrived shaken, but with no idea how our mother was doing, it was something else entirely.

“I was almost to the North Carolina border and I tried to tune in the Jacksonville

AM news radio station. There is no way I should have heard this, not that far away, it’s impossible. But I heard it anyway . . . the guy who had Lori’s Bronco confessed and led the police to her body. He beat her, stabbed her, then suffocated her. He dumped her

[naked] at the end of a dirt road in the woods in George. I heard the guy say the Grand

Jury handed down an indictment for first degree murder. Then the station was lost.”

“Holy shit, Cal,” I cried. “He confessed when? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“No time. You called about the stroke and I had to wait. They convened the

Grand Jury in record time. Somebody downtown is in a hurry.”

I studied his burden, the thing weighing his shoulders down and making him breathe erratically.

“She survived the surgery. But she’s in a coma and still on life support,” I told him.

“A fucking coma. What are they saying?”

“Not much,” I said. “Either the swelling in her brain tissue goes down and she can breathe on her own again, or another heart attack and she won’t make it. I can’t believe this is happening. Do you think 1995 is going to get any worse?”

244

Cal laughed with me. We had shared the schizophrenic grandmother, the disappearance of his ex-wife now murdered, and a mother who was in a coma after a massive stroke. It is fair to say our sense of humor was wickedly warped. It was the family way, suffer on the inside, hold it together as long as possible. Seemed we learned volumes from the Craigs.

Becky, Cal, and I returned to the hospital in two cars. Becky went home from there, Cal and I stayed until they locked us out. We went to the airport and waited on

Johnny. We were anxious and needing to be somewhere else but not sure where. I knew

Cal was between two worlds of extreme pain and anger from Virginia to Florida. I had two cats, and someone agreed to feed them but I do not know whom.

Late morning the next day, Cal folded up the pull out couch; Johnny dressed after sleeping in the downstairs bedroom below me. I had slept off and on, but the push of blood pressure woke me up, startled and trapped. I was upstairs putting my toothbrush in the bathroom, losing track of what I was doing when two cars pulled into the driveway.

“Dawn,” Cal shouted, then a knock on the door.

I ran down the stairs and as the door opened. Karen came in first, then Brenda.

Behind her were Bun, Charles, and Sharon. Cal said hi then looked at me. Johnny walked toward Bun to shake his hand but stopped before he got there. All eyes were then on me and I noticed I held my breath, forcing myself to form words.

“She lived through the surgery.”

245

Karen and Brenda, who rode together in Karen’s car, bent over and began tearing up. Charles let out air, Sharon smiled a little. Bun bowed his head, “Praise Jesus.”

There we were. Johnny, Cal, Bun, who had not seen each other since the summer of 1977, and Cal since 1983. I urged everyone inside to sit and everyone said his or her helloes. Johnny and Charles shook hands rigorously. Bun shook Cal’s hand, then

Johnny’s. My new language failed me, for this scene in the horrid play had not been written.

Bun sat in the big chair facing the TV, solitary. Charles and Sharon shared the loveseat, Cal was on the couch with Johnny. I stood at the bottom of the stairs until everyone sat then moved to the small cove with the mule ear chairs. I stood between the table and the front door.

“They said her heart slowed during the surgery, but there was no defibrillation necessary. But she is in a coma now. She’s unresponsive and they are not sure which way this will go.” My words were surprisingly steady but considerate. “We can go see her right away, but I have to warn you, there’s a tube in every opening and she is on life support.” I looked at Bun, still steady and quiet.

“But she’s alive,” Bun said.

“Sort of, I mean yes, on life support. She is not breathing on her own, hasn’t been since before the surgery.” I did my best to go from the beginning. They were up and down, stretching legs and backs. Side conversations began. I ended up in the chair where Bun had sat.

246

“Becky said she felt severe chest pain, unlocked her door so the rescue team wouldn’t break it down, got her phone and laid on that couch.” I pointed to her big sofa where Brenda was sitting at the far end. “Then she dialed 911 and waited. It was a medication they gave her in the Emergency Room that caused the stroke, but that was after I got here and saw her.”

Bun came from the kitchen to sit at the sofa end nearest to my chair. His chin was jutted forward and he held a soda in one hand.

“So she laid right down there,” Bun said, “and dialed one eleven.”

I did not correct him but through the opening, I saw Johnny in the kitchen smile a little. He was giving Karen a big hug, a Johnny smile, and a tweak on the nose.

“Yes,” I said looking directly at Bun. “Having a heart attack but remembered to unlock her door. Remarkable when you think about it, isn’t it?”

Bun sat, and slowly shook his head, his chin coming to rest on his upper chest.

His eyes were open. I knew he prayed each time his head went down like that. But it was hard to read any sign of relief or expectation. I realized that little bit of conversation was the most ever to pass between us. The world grew constantly stranger.

I took Brenda and Karen upstairs to see Donna’s loft. Below, Bun and Cal spoke of the changing world

“The last things I heard Bun say to me,” Cal told me, “were that drugs needed to be legal . . . and that not all things of this earth are God’s work.”

As they talked for a few moments, Bun saw a framed picture in Donna’s living room from the Lost Tribe series. A man, woman, and child, bundled in the cold on

247

watercolor horses with an empty background, the horse not drawn to scale, caught his attention.

“That horse isn’t gonna make it,” he said to no one particular, “it’s neck isn’t long enough to reach the ground ta drink water. Can’t reach the grass.”

Everyone rested and ate, Johnny hovering wherever he found comfort. He had not seen Charles or Bun since the summer of 1977.

“Whenever you guys are ready,” I said, “we can go to the hospital and I can take you back one or two at a time.”

“I’m ready,” Brenda said.

“Let me call Becky so she can meet us there,” and I grabbed the phone from the kitchen.

Bun downed his soda and everyone grabbed purses and keys, including me, but

Cal stayed. He had phone calls to make to Florida. His kids were there without him.

Our small caravan with me in the lead, Karen and Brenda behind us, Charles,

Bun, and Sharon in the rear, made the trip to Chippenham. Quietly they followed me into the hospital, onto the elevator, into the waiting area. Johnny and Bun were coming back with me first. I overloaded us by one person, but acting as escort for two men who did not know where she was, one no longer related to her, I felt like their shield. If a nurse gave me shit, I was ready to pounce, Bun or no Bun.

Johnny got there first and stood on Donna’s left side, careful to avoid the machinery. I reached the foot of the bed, but Bun, walking slower than was his normal gait, got there last. I turned to see him behind us and stepped toward him, pointing to

248

Donna. Without a word, he moved to the head of the bed on Donna’s right. For a few seconds he studied the arrangement, careful not to knock anything over. But when he decided to let Donna know he was there, he took her right hand in both of his without heed to the IVs with Johnny and I watching.

“Donna,” Bun said.

Suddenly, her eyes opened, rolling, but focused enough to see her father’s face.

Her body lurched against the tubing. She began choking on the large tube down her throat, trying to speak, feeling shock at seeing her father there.

“Do you want me to pray with you?”

Softly, Donna shook her head yes and as Bun began to pray in Jesus’ name, her eyes closed and her body relaxed, accepting the breathing tube again. And as his words continued, I felt a presence between them and began to cry, startled that she heard a voice and opened her eyes. Johnny put a hand to his face and shifted his weight.

As Bun’s words wended toward his Amen, Donna quietly slipped back into her coma.

Three days later, Bun left with Charles and Sharon, back to the Knobs of southern Indiana. There were jobs at stake and little money to lose by being away.

Before he left, Bun saw Donna again, holding her hand and said to his comatose daughter:

“Fight the good fight, Donna. Fight the good fight.”

Whenever I heard this, a flourish of Triumph filled my head, me finishing the song silently – Every moment. Every minute, every day.

249

Two days after Bun left, the breathing machine was turned off and the main tube removed from Donna’s throat.

I guided Brenda and Karen back to her bedside, Brenda on Donna’s right, Karen on the left, me at the end of the bed, all standing silently, the sisters holding their breath. Donna’s eyes opened.

“Hi,” her voice gravelly but upbeat.

“Oh my God,” Brenda said and a long, moaning sigh that signaled the beginning of a joyful cry began.

“Donna?” Karen said.

With great effort, Donna shifted her head slightly, eyes looking at her older sister. “Hi, Kern,” she managed.

And in that moment of love and history, the three women who had said goodbye to Nita in 1989 took positions, Karen at Donna’s shoulder, Brenda at her legs, touching each other, sobbing, beginning to strengthen a bond that existed from a distance for several decades and stretched across the distance over Kentucky and West Virginia. The road travelled repeatedly, vows were spoken. Bun’s daughters were grounded in the knowledge that in their lives, they had found each other again. And again.

250

Afterword

And I’ll take everything As it comes my way Pushin’ your pain around my door And I cry for you yes I die for you Is this blood on my hands all for you?

Candlebox “You”

Donna Kay survived her massive stroke to face a second death, that of her former self.

She never sang the same again, a tremor planted in her weakened vocals, nor did she ever dance with the passion of her previous life. Friends swarmed then disappeared over the first year, leaving Donna and I to find our own way. The next years I spent as her caregiver were tumultuous, painful, loving, role changing – my life was never the same. I can not speak for how Donna felt each moment, but what I saw and felt as her caregiver changed me forever. We both died, leaving our former lives behind with no notice. The transition was a horror, an inexplicable journey and loss of faith. We were angry, though not at the same times. We grew, though always under the heavy weight of denial, the inability to accept the immeasurable tragedy we faced in our own private

251

hells, and a life we built together while she fought to make small steps toward milestones, the biggest being a joke between us – “All I want is to be able to take myself to the bathroom again.” The first step, though, was holding her head up straight.

We grieved for each other and I, being a different sort of angry, grieved over my relationship with God. The heaviest burdens were always Donna’s – seizures, broken bones, endless surgeries, four heart caths, fighting with her devastated body - but I admit easily now the moment in Chippenam with Dr. White while the fluid in Donna’s brain continued to gather, is the burden I carry now, still, long after I was forgiven by my mother and reassured of my decision. It is a beautiful and hateful netherworld I lived in during the caregiving years, and little has changed in the deepest recesses of my memories when I allow myself to go there. But sometimes it opens its doors and creates a vacuum, sweeping me into that lonely place without any effort from me. I will always carry it. Donna carried it, too.

Bun called often, wrote letters, and sent VHS tapes of him singing the gospel, the next best thing to being with Donna. He ended every conversation with the same words, “Fight the good fight.”

Two years and six months after Donna died the first time, Roy “Bun” Luther

Craig died in Lawrence County, Indiana August 10, 1997, and was buried in Connerly-

Switch Cemetery next to Kathern Texas Craig. This in spite of his second marriage, which after he experienced it for five years, claimed he was beginning to understand why people divorced. Donna and I travelled from Virginia to Indiana for the service, a difficult journey for my mother. She never recovered fully from the loss of Kathern or

252

Bun in spite of the difficult upbringing and her lifelong refusal to move back to southern Indiana.

We returned once more in 2001 for a mini-reunion that Donna planned. Donna,

Charles, Karen, and Brenda were there along with their children and their grandchildren. But nothing goes smoothly in Spice Valley. I spilled the beans that we were coming to Charles while asking for a phone number for one of my cousins. Of course, Donna caught hell from Karen for not telling her first. Sometime on that trip, as the last of the Bun clan gathered, ate, sang, and talked, I realized a sad fact about Bun.

He was a preacher who had four daughters, a man who, for all his biblical passion, never walked a single daughter down the aisle.

During that visit, I rented a hotel room while my mother stayed with Karen and let her take on her care. I rose and made coffee, turned on CNN and watched as one tower burned and saw the second plane hit the other tower. That night I drove from

Bedford to Huron as the sky darkened into a deep purple across the lower horizon. That was the last time Donna saw Indiana soil.

On October 2, 2005 – five minutes after midnight – Johnny succumbed to cancer in a Jacksonville hospice. He fought it for four years. He was alone when he let go, as they say in Hospice speak, “Some people need to die alone, some refuse to let go until a certain person is there. Everyone is different.” He was cremated and his ashes were taken into the Gulf of Mexico by ship through John’s Pass where his cremains were dropped.

Brenda became immobile in many ways and moved into assisted care in 2013.

253

I was six months into the MFA program where I learned how to craft this novel when I lost my mother. Donna Kay died in hospice at 8:20 pm on January 21, 2014 at the age of 69. I was there as she took her last breath, holding her hand. Nineteen years of life after her initial drug induced stroke, she died the third and final time from its latent effects. I have never seen a person suffer at the end of their life like Donna. Here I spare the details and only say that the relief we both expected when the drug caught up with her again never came.

“I’m dying aren’t I,” she asked me three weeks before she passed.

I looked down into her eyes and saw a frightened, confused soul. I held her hand tightly.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m here with you.”

After she passed, Donna Kay was cremated. I called from her hospice room first my brother Cal, then Karen.

“Hi, Karen,” I said.

“Oh hi,” Karen said while taking a deep breath.

“She passed at 8:20 PM.”

“Oh god. I hate this, I was supposed to be next.”

“No, when Nita died she said she’d go before anyone else and you know my mom, she was stubborn enough to pull it off.”

“Well, will there be a viewing here or in Virginia?” Karen asked.

254

“Uhm, neither,” I hesitated. I knew she had campaigned for Donna to buy a plot in Connerly-Switch Cemetery next to her own for years. I had assumed Donna told her,

I knew Brenda had been told. No service, no Indiana burial.

“What?” Karen said.

“She said if people didn’t see her while she was alive, she didn’t need for them to see her dead. And she is being created. She did not want a service at all.”

“Well. This is the first I’ve heard about it,” Karen said, her tone harder and more finite.

I said nothing. My mother had just died. I was hearing the same southern

Indiana I’d heard my whole life. Someone wasn’t in the loop when it mattered. Or someone was doing something they never did. What I knew was not something I shared with her in those brief seconds. I had asked five years before Donna died about

Karen’s wishes.

“Well,” Donna said, “I don’t know what I want. Being sick for so long has given me a different perspective. I called Brenda and she didn’t find anything in the bible that said getting cremated is a sin.”

“You know what, Ma? I have always wondered why in the hell you would want to be buried in the one place you spent your entire life staying away from – somewhere your own children probably won’t get to because it is too far away.”

“I know. I don’t want to be there, either. Karen will just have to be disappointed.

Won’t be the first time. I feel bad, but this is me, not someone else.”

255

At Donna’s request, her ashes were taken into the Gulf of Mexico through John’s

Pass and dropped at the same longitude and latitude as Johnny’s, thirty-eight years after their divorce.

One year and one month after I lost my mother Donna, Karen passed one day before her birthday in February, 2015. She had survived breast cancer and suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis for decades, but the cancer returned. Karen died in her sleep in her home in Huron, Indiana. She’d never spoken to me again in spite of my attempts to get her on the phone. I figure, she and Donna can fight it out in their heaven. I was a simple, faithful bystander. Both wanted to be with their true loves and that is a good thing. Maybe they are there now, laughing about how silly the whole thing was – to worry about where the soulless body goes.

Brenda, my aunt, musical soul sister, and dear friend is my early family historian. She filled in gaps, shared her secrets and I mine. Cal, my brother, still lives in

Florida and over the course of many phone conversations, I listened to his memories and perspective of Bun, Nita, Donna, Karen, and all things Indiana.

***

On Christmas Day, 2003, I sat at my computer, planning to cook dinner at

Donna’s house during a brief time when she lived on her own but still received help from me often. When my phone rang, I expected it to be my mother adding something to the dinner list.

“Hello,” I answered.

“Hi, Dawn.” Though it took several seconds, I recognized Brenda’s voice.

256

“Hi. Merry Christmas. What are you up to?”

“Well . . . I’m not doin’ very good right now.”

“What’s going on?”

“Charles died this morning,” Brenda said. “I’m glad I had your number. I thought you’d wanna tell Donna. His viewing is tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry, Brenda, so sorry. I was going to make dinner for us, but I’ll get dressed and head that way. Tomorrow? Really?”

“Yes,” she said with great emphasis and a bit of irritation. “I don’t know why, they know people have to travel to get here.”

“Ok, uhm, I’ll head over there now. I’ll call you from there.” I wondered why

Karen did not call, which was the usual order of things in Indiana, but I was comforted by it being Brenda. We were much closer.

I arrived after a fifteen-minute drive. I did not call first. As I let myself in

Donna’s front door, she was in her lift chair with a surprised look on her face.

“You’re kind of early aren’t you?” Donna said playfully.

“Yes. I’ve got some news. It’s bad.”

“Oh, no.”

I bent down beside her chair and put my hands on her right arm. “Charles died in his sleep last night.”

Donna repeated herself while she began to cry. “Oh, no, Oh no.”

“Do you think you’re up to going to Indiana for the funeral,” I asked. A question

I knew the answer to already. She had begun to need me to live with her again, a tumor

257

growing in the middle of her lower spine. At times, she screamed when she moved, but never when I was there. I had been at it for too long to miss the signs, but I was at the end of an extremely shattered marriage.

“I told Brenda we’d call her after I told you to find out what’s going on. The viewing is tomorrow. We need to leave early tomorrow.”

Donna and Brenda cried on the phone together, then Donna and Karen cried. I remained calm. I was an expert at crisis management. I let it out in private, usually months or years after the event.

I watched my mother’s body grow weaker from the strain.

“Can you make the trip?” I asked her.

“I don’t think so. I can’t believe I can’t even go to my own brother’s funeral, but

I’m having trouble walking and it hurts to sit in one place, too.”

“I know. Maybe I should go by myself. Do you want me to go?”

“One of us should be there.”

“I’m so sorry, Ma. Merry Christmas.”

Donna chuckled through her tears, shaking.

“Yes,” she said, “you should go without me.”

“OK. I’m sorry about dinner and Christmas. I’ll call Brenda and let her know I’m coming.”

When I returned from Indiana, I moved back in with Donna. She was in severe pain physically and emotionally. Three days after I moved in, I took her to get an MRI.

She had a massive tumor growing inside of her spinal cord, the reason for the new

258

breakthrough pain, the crippling of every move she made. One day, about two months after Charles died but before her surgery, I came home from buying groceries to find her in deep despair, sobbing as her body shook.

“What, Ma? What’s going on?” I ran to her side and touched her arm.

“Nothing new,” she sobbed and gasped, trying to talk while sobbing.

“OK. What are you thinking about? Charles?”

“Yes,” she said, “but it’s not because he died. I mean, that, too, but . . .”

“What is it, talk to me.”

“I’ve waited my whole life for an apology from him and never got it. Now he’s dead and I’ll never hear him say he’s sorry”

“I don’t understand. For what?”

. . .

“Ma?” I pushed.

Donna took deep breaths and worked to get herself under control. I pulled a chair next to her legs as they were in front of her on the lift chair, her black orthopedic shoes with special wedges turned severely inward.

“I’ll wait,” I said as I sat down. A few minutes passed and she began to tell me a story, one I’d never heard before.

“Charles, he . . . he raped me when I was young. I was eight.”

“What? What the fuck?”

“Don’t get mad at me,” she said, still crying.

259

“You? No, not you. At him. I thought he was the good brother, that piece of shit.”

“I know. That is part of why I never said anything. No one knows, not Karen, not

Dad before he died.”

“When you were eight? Goddamnit.” The fury was building. I saw flashes of his enormous casket being backhoed into place at Connerly-Switch Cemetery. Bile in my throat.

“I was putting clothes away in his bedroom and he came up from behind me and all of a sudden, my skirt was over my face and he raped me.”

It was a beginning. It was a twisted, deeply rooted secret Donna held since she was eight years old. I saw the sickly sweet remains of confession take her body.

“He did it the first time then,” she continued.

“First time? How long did this go on?”

“Until I started menstruating, when I was twelve and a half.”

Oh, God. I felt my breathing shallow as hers deepened, her face ablaze. She cried hard for half an hour before she spoke again.

“Ma, why didn’t you tell someone?” I asked softly. “How did he get away with it for so long?”

“Because, because . . . Dad would have shot him if he knew. I just knew he would. Then I’d be the reason Charles was dead and Dad in jail. I don’t know . . . I was ashamed and they’d have blamed me anyway. That’s how it went. But every time I heard Dad say “Charles? You and Donna take the tractor to the back field . . . or you

260

and Charles go over to so and so’s house and pick up such and such . . . I knew. I just knew it would happen again. It would’ve killed Mom if she knew. Everyone thought he was the good one, the good brother.”

For the first time I began to understand so many things about my mother. She was always outside where Bun could not see her and think to send her somewhere with

Charles because Karen was always inside near her mother. Karen had to stay with

Kathern. Donna was always made to go with Charles for heavy chores. Donna lost herself after meals and other chores to the woods, the fields, the barn, anywhere she could be but where Bun could see her. Why she was so irritated when Karen acted as if she was the only one who took care of Kathern. Why Donna and Karen were so different and each of them with reasons to be under the sky or under a roof.

“Charles never apologized. He’s never said a word about it whenever I’ve seen him. He acts like it never happened. Now he’s dead and I’ll never get an apology.”

“Apology?” I asserted. “He should have spent his life in prison. I can’t believe it, four and a half years . . . I have no words.”

We sat there together, crying, making bad jokes which was mostly me not knowing how to handle the information or the heartbreak. We were there for a few hours, until Donna had to pee. I helped her into the wheelchair we were using because of her tumor. I slid her into place and watched her do the three-rock I knew so well. On the third rock forward, she pushed with the right hand. Her stroke affected left already in place, curled around her walker. She plopped back into the wheelchair several times.

“Want some help?” I asked.

261

“I guess,” Donna said, “I’m too tired from crying.”

I went through the motions of transfer with her, holding her in place while she struggled to push her pull-on pants down with one hand, gripping the walker with the death twist of her stroke-affected left hand. It was our bargain. She had to do as much on her own as possible. She stayed in a snap front robe most days to avoid so much work. The circle was closing. Donna had gone to the bathroom by herself for twelve years, but those days were ending.

“I can’t get this side down,” she said out of breath.

“I’ll do it,” I said. I took the edge of her pull up and pants on the stroke side and pushed down, holding her steady with one free hand in a moment of helplessness. I see her there still, those moments when she had to turn over control of a part of her body to me.

“Careful,” she snapped.

“I am.”

Once they were down, my job was to make sure she hit the lift seat on her toilet, her butt-guide, then leave with the chair and shut the door. A picture of fading dignity,

I waited in the hall or near the door for her to yell for me.

As I grabbed those feeble moments when I was free from holding a hip or hand or cleaning a urine soaked bed pad, I tried to push it out of my mind. But what I heard was my father, Johnny. Johnny’s folktale, the one he had wrong, the one he thought he knew but Donna only told him a version of it she could bear. My father Johnny’s buddy

262

Charles the rapist, the incestuous monster of my mother’s childhood, the shame she carried everywhere.

And slowly, I felt the folktale of my father untwist into Donna’s truth. That is the thing about the truth – it never satisfies a wounded heart.

Embargoed Thesis, NEOMFA

Home School: Kent State University

Thesis Director-Secondary Copyright Contact: David Giffels, University of Akron

263