And now, on a serious note: Skeletons
August 14, 2005 – 5:07 PM
Anecdotes from my mother's childhood often strike me as story fodder.
Clarence, her father, was an infamous drunk. He lives in a nursing home now, diabetic, his leg amputated. In his mind he can still drive and walk if they'd just let him out of the damn place. He's almost 90 years old.
What angers my mother is that when he tells her stories or reflects on anything, it's a story about him being drunk. Never “I built this,” or “I worked on that,” or “Mary and I…” He was quite a skilled and artistic bricklayer when he was sober and working, which unfortunately wasn't often. Some of the most beautiful brick designs on porches and walkways in my hometown were done by him. But that's not what anybody remembers. That's not even what he remembers.
What he remembers is drinking a bottle or bottles of Turkey, and waking up the next morning underneath a cow. He says to this day he can clearly see the sight of the cow chewing grass above him. Almost every story he tells can be ended with “he's lucky…” he's lucky the cow didn't step on him, kick him, etc.
My mother remembers being 3 years old and sitting in the emergency room with her mother and Clarence, and he had to hold his intestines in his belly by pushing them in with his hand. He and another drunk had gotten into a knife fight.
Another time he reportedly walked 2 miles home in the middle of the night, his throat cut from ear to ear. They missed the jugular vein. He never knew his throat had been cut until the next morning. Or whenever he woke up; he may have been passed out for days if he were that drunk. Who found him? Likely my grandmother. What in the world would that have been like? To find your husband stagger in the door obliviously drunk in the middle of the night, his throat slit, bloody, and completely unaware? To be afraid to assist him because he's violent when drunk?
Once he moved the family to Louisville in the early 1950s to supposedly take a job up there. He spent more time getting drunk and passing out, though, and punching out my grandmother. As a result my grandmother, mother, and aunts all went hungry. After one such episode, after he finally passed out, my grandmother took his wallet and took the $30 he had from it, spirited the children out of the apartment, and took them to the nearby amusement park. She let them ride the rides all day and eat ice cream, and that night, they took the bus back home to Hardin County. To this day Clarence whines, “You all robbed me blind and left me penniless and hungry up there!” Left him penniless! It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. He spent more time getting drunk than earning food for his family, and he cries that they left him penniless and hungry.
Once Clarence took my grandmother and the three girls to Pensacola, Florida, for a vacation. It took several days to drive there. The vehicle didn't have air conditioning, and he was drunk while driving, and my mother remembers it as one of the worst times of her life. They all traveled with two newlyweds, a boy and a girl who were probably 17 years old or thereabouts, unrelated to the family but it was cheapest to travel in groups. It was going to be the couple's honeymoon.
When they all arrived, the family they were going to be staying with did in fact have air conditioning, but it was broken. They spent two horrible days and nights there, in the middle of August. The newlywed boy kept crying because he was homesick, “I want my Pap. I want my Pap.” After two days of this the very miserable group packed back up and drove back to Kentucky.
Child marriages. Boys too young to even spend a night away from their parents without having a nervous breakdown. Girl brides expecting to be taken care of only to find out they're married to selfish and immature boys just as their mothers were. A drunk father who drives everywhere because the mother can't, and in the meantime his primary vocabulary is comprised of swear words. It's an ugly story and I hear it every time the topic of Florida comes up.
Clarence was homeless for several years prior to his final stay at the nursing home. Every once in a while he'd show up at the store my mother worked at, lice-infested, urine-streaked, unable to move his left arm. He had two strokes. His sole possession was a van that he drove everywhere. The man could barely walk or get his pants unzipped to urinate, but he'd drive to St. Louis, Cleveland, Georgia. He spent his life in that damn van drinking, driving, and surviving, and luckily never killing anybody unless perhaps you count my grandmother who died at age 68, of cancer, never having had enough money to afford a doctor to diagnose her. Except for one country doctor who told her she'd just bruised a kidney while leaning over a chair. It was stomach and colon cancer instead.
I remember being 14 years old, standing there by her bed, and her weakly saying to me, “The cancer-man's got me. I'm afraid to die.” I remember being 14 years old and feeling terribly helpless, unable to comfort her, unprepared, not knowing what to say. I'm ashamed of myself for that. I was only 14, and I'd never had anybody close to me die before. I didn't know what to say. I'd give anything if somebody else's wise and comforting words had found their way to my mouth at that moment. I'm sorry, Mamaw.
I have few anecdotes that are specifically about Mary, my grandmother. The most vivid one also happens to be one of my mother's first memories. She was three years old and it was storming outside. Mary was sitting in a chair underneath a hanging light bulb, peeling potatoes. The dog, Lady, was asleep under Mary's chair. My mother and sisters were sitting on the floor nearby playing with potatoes in a box. “Yes, we had to play with potatoes,” she says. “We didn't have any toys.”
Lightning struck. It came down through the light bulb, hit Mary in the top of her head, went through her body, and broke every bone in the dog Lady's body below her, killing the dog. “If it hadn't been for the dog, Mama would have been dead. Even so it left a black mark down her back. She couldn't stand thunder after that. She couldn't even be in the same room with a balloon for fear somebody would pop it. We all loved that dog, and we cried for weeks.”
Where was Clarence when this happened?
“Out drunk somewhere, no doubt.”
Mary spent her life struggling to keep her family together, to keep them safe from him, and struggling once they were grown to escape him. Her life was short. He's spent his life making the lives of others a living hell, and he lives on, and on, and on. Now he's trapped in a nursing home bed, an amputee, getting better personal and medical care than he's ever gotten in his life (considering the state of most nursing homes, this bleakness is still heaven compared to him sleeping on his mother's grave while homeless). And he's still angry at the world for trapping him, for not letting him out of bed so he can drive to St. Louis.
He is reportedly proud of his granddaughter. He referred to himself as my grandfather once, to me, on the phone. “This is your …. your grandfather,” he said, feebly, once. As though confused and startled to find himself related to anybody. I didn't even know he was my grandfather until I was 9 years old. I thought my grandmother's second husband, Allen, was my grandfather.
The first time Clarence ever showed up on my mother's porch I was nine and had no idea who he was. Sometimes, if he was sober and clean, she' d let him come in and sit for a few hours. She never fed him, I don't even remember her offering him something to drink although she probably did. These days, she claims that he brags to visitors about his granddaughter who traveled to New York. Clarence the wanderer, proud of me. Clarence who beat up my grandmother, who threatened to take away the children if she left him, who starved his family in favor of moonshine, who slept on his mother's grave out in the woods as an 85 year old man crying because he just wanted to be close to her. I'm not proud of this man. I don't like him. I dislike myself for pitying him for being old and feeble and pathetic enough to feel sorry for. And he's proud of me for merely leaving Kentucky.
The story would be Mary's, if she were alive to tell it. But she died when I was too young to even realize what a life she'd really led. And instead all I have are my mother's remembrances, brought to the surface by dealing weekly with the nursing-home-bound Clarence. Clarence's recollections are too hazy with liquor to be lengthy or reliable or objective. My mother was too young to imagine what my grandmother must have really gone through. And my grandmother is dead, so she can't speak. If she were alive, she would likely not want to speak of it and remember.
So I'm ashamed of myself for finding any of it story fodder, for wanting to write about it, for having written about it. Mamaw, I'm sorry, but I find the ugliness, of which there has been plenty and too much, interesting at the end. I think it's a story worth telling. It must be, or else it wouldn't be retold every time my mother calls me. I can't make you live on as a saint untouched by ugliness, getting her due reward in the end. I don't mean to romanticize it, and I don't mean to betray you by pitying that cowardly old pathetic man lying helpless in a hospital bed, reaping what he sowed. But I can expose what you lived through, and make others feel it. I can feel it, and try to understand.