going faulkner
Just a little background:
My family has occupied the same vast tract of land in North Georgia for over 100 years. My grandfather's grandfather acquired it. It starts at the top of a "mountain" and rolls down into Wolffork valley. Back in the day, my grandfather's grandfather had a wife on one side of the valley and a mistress on the other, and neither was the wiser. The mistress ended up my grandfather's grandmother. I'm happy to know my family line was the product of adultery. My grandfather's father, son of the mistress, somehow ended up with the land. After my grandfather was born, his father built a huge barn (circa 1914) and started a dairy. The dairy operated until the late 60's when it became unprofitable and my grandfather decided to close it down. The barn, gorgeous and gigantic, still looms over the landscape but no longer do cows or any other livestock call it home. Just the owls and the mice they prey on.
My grandfather married my grandmother after she'd divorced her first husband, a drunk. She had one son already, my Uncle Bill. It was the '30s and I think it was pretty unusual for a woman with a kid to divorce her husband and even more unusual for a man to marry her afterwards. My dad tried to explain to me the stigma she carried after all that. He told me it accounted for why she always had to dress so nice and carry herself so deliberately. He also said it accounted for why my grandfather was never made a deacon in his church. Stigma. Hard to imagine today.
They lived in a house by the barn, across the street from where my grandmother lives now. They had four more kids, two more boys and two girls. Then, one morning, their house burnt down. Last year my grandmother and I took a walk around the ruins of the old house which had been recently revealed when my Uncle Bill bush-hogged away all the growth that had been covering everything for years. She explained how the fire started and what they all did while I knelt down and picked through tiny piles of melted glass and twisted metal looking for something small enough to take as a keepsake. She said my grandfather had gotten up before the sun, as usual, to milk the cows. When he got up, he stoked the fire in the kitchen woodstove. My dad, who was about nine and had been sick with the flu, was sleeping on a cot in the kitchen near the stove to stay warm. Awhile after my grandfather left the house, my dad smelled smoke and woke up to the find the kitchen on fire. He ran and woke everybody up and they all got out. Within a half hour the house had burnt to the ground and they hadn't salvaged anything. All they had were the clothes on their backs. Turns out, the stove pipe had somehow come loose and fallen in, allowing flames to leap out of the stove and into the air, catching the wall behind it on fire. At least that's what I think my grandmother said. There was no time to do anything but stand there and watch the house burn down.
After that, they built a house across the street, where my grandmother now lives. The new house is a squatty, three-bedroom ranch built entirely of concrete blocks with a stucco exterior. This is a house that will never burn down. Time passed. They shut the dairy down. Vietnam came and my dad enlisted in the Airforce so he wouldn't get drafted into the Army. He was shipped off to Alaska to control air traffic. While he was gone, his two older brothers, Bill and Grover, concocted a plan to buy all the land on the barn side of the road from my grandfather and to split it between them. That land, of all my grandfather's land, was clearly the best for farming. Long flat stretches of pasture with soft, rolling hills, bordered by the Little Tennessee River on one side. The rest of the land, all on the other side of the road, ran up onto the mountain. It was steep and forested and only a small strip was good for a garden. None of it was good for pasture. When my dad came home from Alaska on a break he felt betrayed. He wanted to be a farmer, he wanted some of that land, he'd been cut out of the deal. This was, as far as I can tell, the event that has shaped his whole destiny. It set him up for a life of disappointment.
So he went back to Alaska, then ended up in Florida where he met my mom. Knowing his future of farming in Georgia was severely stunted without that land, he married my mom and, when he was done with the Airforce, he moved with her to Missouri. That didn't last long. They had fun, the winter they spent there was full of snow and sledding and romping and laughing. Mom went to Bible college and got a job as a cashier in a grocery store at union wages. My dad had dreams of becoming a rancher but couldn't find work on a ranch. According to mom, he just sat around all day, bummed out because he couldn't get steady work. Then she got knocked up and my dad decided, against mom's better judgment, to move back to Georgia to live with my grandparents. That was the beginning of the end of their marriage.
I was born. I cried all the time. Mom found herself, 20 years old with a colicky baby living in a single-wide trailer on the top of a red dirt hill in Georgia with no car and no job and no way out. She was completely miserable. She'd grown up in a suburb of Miami, hating her mother and loving horses. She married my dad to get out of her mother's house and to get one step closer to horses, to the bucolic sort of life she'd fantasized about from her stuffy suburban neighborhood. The reality did not match the fantasy. She wished they'd stayed in Missouri. For some reason my dad agreed to move off that red dirt hill (the plot of land, next door to my grandparents new block-house, that had been assigned as his) and to a nearby town. Mom worked at McDonalds and daddy had a succession of jobs which laid him off. After a couple of years mom decided to divorce him. His response was to load a .22 caliber pistol with snake shot and shoot himself in the temple. A .22 caliber pistol is weak and snake shot (dozens of tiny metal pellets packed into a small bullet) is even weaker. Questions lingered: did he really mean to kill himself or was he just trying to make mom feel guilty and stay? I believe the latter. His story? The gun went off while he was cleaning it. There is no one in my family who believes that version. I guess, at this point, it goes without saying that it didn't kill him. Instead he was left with a few tiny metal pellets dispersed through part of his brain like grapes in a jello mold. The doctors told him he had an increased risk of seizures, but after 27 sum years there haven't been any seizures so I guess he's probably ok.
Losing custody of me was the next awful thing that happened to him, in the story about himself that he tells himself. It was the event that cemented the hard luck that was simply suggested by the underhanded deal between his brothers that locked him out of the good land. After that, for my dad, it has been all down hill. He married a colossal bitch and had twins with medical problems. Isaac was born with his heart backwards and was sick all 20 years of his short life. His childhood was spent in and out of Egelston Children's Hospital in Atlanta, multiple surgeries, pacemakers, check-ups, weekly health crises, special education, evolving dilemmas, a heart transplant, surprise lymphoma and, finally, death. Alex, the other twin, was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes when he was five. And, of course, there's me.
He wanted me to live with him so badly. He used every weapon of guilt in his arsenal to convince me to tell my mom that I wanted to live with him, not her. But I was stubborn. I resisted. I got further and further away. Now I live 3300 miles away from him and if he pushes me anymore I'm afraid I'll fall off the continent. I could live in Europe. I could live in Asia. I could get further, old man. I could get further. In a few years maybe I could move to the moon.
Now my dad lives in a house on his red dirt hill that he ended up building in 1983. He and my stepmother and my brother Alex have their little triumverate of something up there on that hill. They watch a lot of t.v. and bicker a lot. Alex is 25 now and just got a bachelor's in history. He's smart and needs to get the fuck out of that house, it's like a giant coffin they'll all be buried in one of these days. Dark and dreary and oppressive. I hate that house as much as (as an extension of) my stepmother. My grandmother asked the other day what I would do if/when I inherit that house. I told her I would burn it to the ground. And I would.
My family has occupied the same vast tract of land in North Georgia for over 100 years. My grandfather's grandfather acquired it. It starts at the top of a "mountain" and rolls down into Wolffork valley. Back in the day, my grandfather's grandfather had a wife on one side of the valley and a mistress on the other, and neither was the wiser. The mistress ended up my grandfather's grandmother. I'm happy to know my family line was the product of adultery. My grandfather's father, son of the mistress, somehow ended up with the land. After my grandfather was born, his father built a huge barn (circa 1914) and started a dairy. The dairy operated until the late 60's when it became unprofitable and my grandfather decided to close it down. The barn, gorgeous and gigantic, still looms over the landscape but no longer do cows or any other livestock call it home. Just the owls and the mice they prey on.
My grandfather married my grandmother after she'd divorced her first husband, a drunk. She had one son already, my Uncle Bill. It was the '30s and I think it was pretty unusual for a woman with a kid to divorce her husband and even more unusual for a man to marry her afterwards. My dad tried to explain to me the stigma she carried after all that. He told me it accounted for why she always had to dress so nice and carry herself so deliberately. He also said it accounted for why my grandfather was never made a deacon in his church. Stigma. Hard to imagine today.
They lived in a house by the barn, across the street from where my grandmother lives now. They had four more kids, two more boys and two girls. Then, one morning, their house burnt down. Last year my grandmother and I took a walk around the ruins of the old house which had been recently revealed when my Uncle Bill bush-hogged away all the growth that had been covering everything for years. She explained how the fire started and what they all did while I knelt down and picked through tiny piles of melted glass and twisted metal looking for something small enough to take as a keepsake. She said my grandfather had gotten up before the sun, as usual, to milk the cows. When he got up, he stoked the fire in the kitchen woodstove. My dad, who was about nine and had been sick with the flu, was sleeping on a cot in the kitchen near the stove to stay warm. Awhile after my grandfather left the house, my dad smelled smoke and woke up to the find the kitchen on fire. He ran and woke everybody up and they all got out. Within a half hour the house had burnt to the ground and they hadn't salvaged anything. All they had were the clothes on their backs. Turns out, the stove pipe had somehow come loose and fallen in, allowing flames to leap out of the stove and into the air, catching the wall behind it on fire. At least that's what I think my grandmother said. There was no time to do anything but stand there and watch the house burn down.
After that, they built a house across the street, where my grandmother now lives. The new house is a squatty, three-bedroom ranch built entirely of concrete blocks with a stucco exterior. This is a house that will never burn down. Time passed. They shut the dairy down. Vietnam came and my dad enlisted in the Airforce so he wouldn't get drafted into the Army. He was shipped off to Alaska to control air traffic. While he was gone, his two older brothers, Bill and Grover, concocted a plan to buy all the land on the barn side of the road from my grandfather and to split it between them. That land, of all my grandfather's land, was clearly the best for farming. Long flat stretches of pasture with soft, rolling hills, bordered by the Little Tennessee River on one side. The rest of the land, all on the other side of the road, ran up onto the mountain. It was steep and forested and only a small strip was good for a garden. None of it was good for pasture. When my dad came home from Alaska on a break he felt betrayed. He wanted to be a farmer, he wanted some of that land, he'd been cut out of the deal. This was, as far as I can tell, the event that has shaped his whole destiny. It set him up for a life of disappointment.
So he went back to Alaska, then ended up in Florida where he met my mom. Knowing his future of farming in Georgia was severely stunted without that land, he married my mom and, when he was done with the Airforce, he moved with her to Missouri. That didn't last long. They had fun, the winter they spent there was full of snow and sledding and romping and laughing. Mom went to Bible college and got a job as a cashier in a grocery store at union wages. My dad had dreams of becoming a rancher but couldn't find work on a ranch. According to mom, he just sat around all day, bummed out because he couldn't get steady work. Then she got knocked up and my dad decided, against mom's better judgment, to move back to Georgia to live with my grandparents. That was the beginning of the end of their marriage.
I was born. I cried all the time. Mom found herself, 20 years old with a colicky baby living in a single-wide trailer on the top of a red dirt hill in Georgia with no car and no job and no way out. She was completely miserable. She'd grown up in a suburb of Miami, hating her mother and loving horses. She married my dad to get out of her mother's house and to get one step closer to horses, to the bucolic sort of life she'd fantasized about from her stuffy suburban neighborhood. The reality did not match the fantasy. She wished they'd stayed in Missouri. For some reason my dad agreed to move off that red dirt hill (the plot of land, next door to my grandparents new block-house, that had been assigned as his) and to a nearby town. Mom worked at McDonalds and daddy had a succession of jobs which laid him off. After a couple of years mom decided to divorce him. His response was to load a .22 caliber pistol with snake shot and shoot himself in the temple. A .22 caliber pistol is weak and snake shot (dozens of tiny metal pellets packed into a small bullet) is even weaker. Questions lingered: did he really mean to kill himself or was he just trying to make mom feel guilty and stay? I believe the latter. His story? The gun went off while he was cleaning it. There is no one in my family who believes that version. I guess, at this point, it goes without saying that it didn't kill him. Instead he was left with a few tiny metal pellets dispersed through part of his brain like grapes in a jello mold. The doctors told him he had an increased risk of seizures, but after 27 sum years there haven't been any seizures so I guess he's probably ok.
Losing custody of me was the next awful thing that happened to him, in the story about himself that he tells himself. It was the event that cemented the hard luck that was simply suggested by the underhanded deal between his brothers that locked him out of the good land. After that, for my dad, it has been all down hill. He married a colossal bitch and had twins with medical problems. Isaac was born with his heart backwards and was sick all 20 years of his short life. His childhood was spent in and out of Egelston Children's Hospital in Atlanta, multiple surgeries, pacemakers, check-ups, weekly health crises, special education, evolving dilemmas, a heart transplant, surprise lymphoma and, finally, death. Alex, the other twin, was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes when he was five. And, of course, there's me.
He wanted me to live with him so badly. He used every weapon of guilt in his arsenal to convince me to tell my mom that I wanted to live with him, not her. But I was stubborn. I resisted. I got further and further away. Now I live 3300 miles away from him and if he pushes me anymore I'm afraid I'll fall off the continent. I could live in Europe. I could live in Asia. I could get further, old man. I could get further. In a few years maybe I could move to the moon.
Now my dad lives in a house on his red dirt hill that he ended up building in 1983. He and my stepmother and my brother Alex have their little triumverate of something up there on that hill. They watch a lot of t.v. and bicker a lot. Alex is 25 now and just got a bachelor's in history. He's smart and needs to get the fuck out of that house, it's like a giant coffin they'll all be buried in one of these days. Dark and dreary and oppressive. I hate that house as much as (as an extension of) my stepmother. My grandmother asked the other day what I would do if/when I inherit that house. I told her I would burn it to the ground. And I would.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 11:40 AM
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