After the Flag Has Been Folded (12 page)

Hugh Lee was born ten years after Daddy. They weren't very close as brothers, but Mama and Aunt Mary Sue repeatedly turned to Hugh Lee whenever they really needed help. He was never too busy to give a ride and never too broke to lend a dollar. And Uncle Joe was selfish and arrogant enough to demand both of him and anybody else who crossed his path.

But Uncle Joe could be charming when he wanted. Complete strangers would stop him on the street and tell him how much he looked like that movie star Robert Mitchum. He had a head full of hair that was black as soot, thick-lidded eyes that made him look as though he was only half awake, and a slow grin above his cleft chin. Mary Sue was seduced by Joe's looks. Unsure of herself and raised with a religious code that honored perseverance, she tolerated Joe's alcoholic and abusive ways for far too long.

After Melissa was born, Mama took us kids up to Atlanta where Mary Sue and Joe were living. Mama made the trip during the day when she figured Uncle Joe wouldn't be home. Mary Sue had called and told Mama that Uncle Joe had beat the holy shit out of her.

Driving that little white Corvair of hers, Mama found the rental house in Atlanta without much trouble. Mary Sue was standing at the gas stove stirring a pan of oatmeal when we arrived. Coffee was percolating in a tin pot on the back burner. Mary Sue turned the flames down, reached for a thick-glass cup, and poured Mama some coffee.

“You okay?” Mama asked, gingerly taking the steaming cup from Mary Sue.

“Yeah,” she replied.

Mama eyed the nasty bruise on the fleshy part of Mary Sue's arm. It was as big as a softball. “Ye Lawdy, Mary Sue,” Mama said.

“I know,” she replied. Baby Melissa stirred. I walked over to the bassinet sitting next to the doorway to the expansive kitchen and peered at her. Her skin was pearly white. Like a bride's gown, it
captured light and dazzled onlookers. A crop of fox hair, orange and fuzzy, covered her head. God had fashioned Melissa from heaven's raiments and Satan's flames.

“What time is he getting home?” Mama asked.

“I don't know,” Mary Sue replied. “He's working construction. He might show up for lunch.”

“Are you packed?”

“Won't take long,” Mary Sue said.

“Well, let's get going,” Mama said. She pushed aside her cup of coffee and stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer. That marked the first of many times that Mary Sue and Melissa would come to live with us over the next few years.

It's hard to remember who slept where once Mary Sue moved in. I think Mary Sue and Melissa took my bed, which was in the middle of the trailer's narrow hallway. I moved into Frank's room with Linda, She took the bottom bunk; I took the top one. Floyd and Mama had the back room, and Frank slept on the couch. It was always crowded and full of noise—a television blaring, a baby squalling, kids arguing, grown-ups yapping.

It wasn't long, maybe a week or two after Mary Sue and Melissa moved in, that Uncle Joe showed up at the house. It was after dark on a school night. Linda and I were already in bed, our bunk beds pushed up against the same quarter-inch plywood wall that the television was pushed up against in the adjoining living room. I could hear every word from the television and nearly every word that was spoken in the other room.

I heard Uncle Joe before I saw him. He showed up at the door, asking for Mary Sue. Nobody invited him in, but he stepped inside anyway. He'd been drinking. “I've come here to take you home,” Joe said to Mary Sue.

“I ain't going nowhere with you,” Mary Sue replied.

“Like hell you ain't!” he hollered.

Mama was standing next to Mary Sue, who was holding Baby Melissa.

“Gimme that baby! That's my baby!”

“Leave them alone and get the hell outta my house!” Mama yelled back.

Then I heard Mama scream. Uncle Joe kicked her in the gut, sending her flying across the kitchen floor.

Disturbed by all the commotion, I climbed out of bed and was standing at the edge of the hallway. Terrified, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to run for Mama, but Floyd and Frank were headed my way. I hustled back to bed, crying.

Floyd and Frank ran down the hallway toward Mama's room. I started screaming bloody murder as I heard them scrambling for the handgun Mama kept in her bedside dresser. Frank heard my cries and came to calm me down. Climbing on the rail of Linda's bed, he slapped me fiercely across the face. “Shut up!” he said.

I sat there weeping, one palm pressed over my hot cheek. Floyd ran down the hallway with the pistol in hand. Mary Sue grabbed Melissa and ran in the opposite direction. When Uncle Joe saw the pistol, he took off out the door, toward his car. Floyd took off after him, firing one shot, then another. Either mechanics at Fort Benning aren't taught how to shoot to kill, or Floyd wasn't really trying to hit Joe. One bullet struck Uncle Joe's car as he sped away, and the other must've landed in a pine tree somewhere.

Mama was on the floor, trying to catch her breath. Her slight frame—120 pounds, five feet five inches—was doubled over in pain. Holding my palm over my red-hot cheek and crying ever so softly, I crawled out of the bed again and was hiding in the shadows of the hallway, watching as the drama continued to unfold.

“Mama, Mama, are you all right?” Frank asked. He searched for signs of blood.

With one arm grasping at her lower abdomen and the other
reaching for the corner of the kitchen table, Mama rose to her knees. Then she pulled herself up. “Aw, shit!” she groaned.

Floyd placed the pistol on the kitchen counter and rushed over to help her.

“I'm all right,” Mama said as Floyd gently led her to the couch. Then, eyeing me in the shadows, she said, “Get to bed, Karen.”

I crawled over Linda to the top bunk and pulled the ribbed-cotton covers up over my head.

“What's going on?” Linda asked.

“Uncle Joe kicked Mama,” I replied. “Floyd shot him.”

Linda didn't ask me anything else.

I fell asleep crying and praying: “Please, God, send Daddy back home.”

It wasn't long after that that Floyd left us, too.

M
Y SIXTH–GRADE YEAR WAS MARRED NOT ONLY BY MY VIOLENT UNCLE AND THE ON-AGAIN, OFF-AGAIN
relationship between Floyd and Mama but by a virulent outbreak of pus-filled boils on my arms and legs. I cleaned them every night with Phisoderm lotion per Mama's instructions, but the sores wouldn't go away.

I had one especially bad boil on my left shin, about the size of a nickel. The sores might have healed sooner if I'd been willing to forgo hosiery. But in 1968 fishnet stockings were all the rage, and it was the first year Mama gave me permission to shave my legs or wear stockings. So even though the threading of the fishnet hose made an
X
directly across the top of the nastiest boil, I refused to go barelegged to school. Since girls weren't allowed to wear anything other than a dress or skirt, I wore fishnets almost every day. After lunch, I would sit in my homeroom class and gently pull threads away from the boil's bloody crust. An hour later, I'd do it again.

“What is wrong with your leg?” one boy asked after observing my afternoon ritual.

“Infantigo,” I replied.

“What's that?” he asked.

“Beats me,” I responded.

A typically quiet girl, sitting nearby, piped up. “It's im-pe-ti-go, not infantigo,” she said snootily. “Dirty kids get it. My mama says.”

I was not a dirty kid. Different, yes. Dirty, no.

But I wasn't the only different person at school. Our science and reading teacher had Raggedy Ann legs. They hung limp from her hips, unable to support her, even though she didn't appear to weigh much more than any of us students. She told us it was the result of the polio that struck her as a child. Mostly she stayed put behind a desk. But whenever she needed to tend to something, she grabbed hold of the walker beside her chair. She'd lift its rubber-tipped corners one at a time, in a heel-toe, heel-toe rhythm, her feet dragging beneath her. I would hold my breath and pray she wouldn't fall. Sometimes she'd stumble awkwardly. She'd pause, flash us a smile. Then, grasping the walker tighter, she'd move on.

Smile and move on. Even as a child I recognized that it takes a certain amount of humility and a generous amount of grace to be able to do that. I lacked both. I was keenly aware that not having a father around was a handicap. While not as obvious a deformity as my science teacher's, sometimes it was just as debilitating.

A classmate who came home with me for an afternoon inquired about my parents.

“Mama's a nurse. And I don't have a daddy,” I replied.

After my friend went home, Mama called me aside. “Why did you tell that girl that you don't have a daddy?” Mama asked.

“I dunno,” I said, suddenly aware that Mama didn't approve of my answer. “I don't have a daddy, you know.”

“Yes, you do,” she said. “You have a daddy, Karen.”

“Well, he ain't here. What am I supposed to tell my friends?”

“You tell them that your daddy's deceased,” Mama answered.

“Deceased? What does that mean?”

“It means he's dead,” Mama said.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

I despised Mama for trying to sterilize Daddy's rotting flesh. Her
word—
deceased
—couldn't dismiss the anguish I felt. I hated Daddy for dying and leaving us all alone. And I hated the all-powerful, all-knowing God who could've saved Daddy from the grave but chose not to. Being the daughter of a dead man made me feel dirty on the inside, as if I had done something so wrong, so nasty, so unforgivable that God's only recourse was to take my daddy away.

That intense hatred seared a hole in my heart so big nothing eased the pain. Not that anyone was necessarily trying. Mama certainly never tried to talk me through my confusion. She was too busy trying to salve her own hurts. Linda, Frank, and I never ever talked about Daddy or how much we missed him.

Sometimes classmates at school would ask me about my father. The only comments I remember any of them making were hurtful things. Like the time one of my friends said, “It really bothers me that you don't have a daddy. I don't like being around you because of that.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, although I really thought she was the sorry one for saying such a horrible thing to me. I learned at a pretty early age that the death of soldiers in Vietnam didn't invoke much concern from others. Truth was, nobody really seemed to care that Frank, Linda, and I were growing up without a father. Except Mama, and it hurt her so badly, she could barely stand to think about it, much less talk about it. So we bore our sorrows in silence, to keep from offending anyone unnecessarily.

Like the multitude of Vietnam veterans who were returning home to empty airports, our family had no one around to embrace us or tell us that they appreciated our sacrifice. Daddy's death made me so angry I just wanted to go out and kick somebody's ass. Anybody's ass. I wanted to spit in God's face and tell Him what a pathetic mess He'd made of things. I didn't realize then that most of the mess was manmade.

 

W
ILD DOGWOODS WERE IN
bloom when Mama's Aunt Cil died in spring 1968, and it nearly broke Mama's heart. Aunt Cil was her
last physical connection to her mama, Granny Ruth, and with those two matriarchs gone, Mama's world just crumbled around her.

Frank, Linda, and I had spent a good bit of time at Aunt Cil's after Daddy died. Mama would drop us off at her farmhouse whenever she had errands to run. Cil (short for Lucille) was a squatty woman, with thick arms, thick legs, and broad shoulders. She had hair as white and fine as powdered sugar. It hung clean to her waist, but she wore it in braids, twisted up into a hair net. She looked like a Native American because she was, partly. Granny Ruth and Aunt Cil's mother, Louisa, was an Englishwoman, but their father was reportedly a Cherokee. Mama says she never met him and can't remember his name, but the grave marker for Louisa at the Tennessee cemetery identifies her as Louisa Matilda Hobbs, wife of Bill Sopshire. Mama's birth certificate spells the name Shropshire.

There were five kids in all—Ruth, Lucille, Pearlie, Ann, and Pet. Pet was the only boy in the bunch; Mama said her uncle was a traveling man who never settled down anywhere. Grandma Louisa lived with Aunt Cil at Christian Bend; Aunt Ann lived at Big Stone Gap; Aunt Pearlie married and moved to Toppenish, Washington; and Granny Ruth settled in Rogersville.

Aunt Cil married a man named Doc Christian. She told me once he wasn't really a doctor. “That's just what everybody called him,” she said. Doc already had a son, Lon, from a previous marriage. Lon was the first deaf-mute I ever met. A tall, lanky fella, he was about as old as Cil. Lon wore denim coveralls and tended to the hogs. He filled the water pail from the well every afternoon after dinner and again after supper. Lon seemed to know that his inability to talk made us kids nervous, so he smiled at us a lot and nodded hellos and good-byes.

“People think because he don't speak that Lon's retarded,” Cil said one day as we sat on the front porch, rocking and waiting for our dinner of green beans, ham, and biscuits to settle. “He's not retarded. Lon's smart. He just can't talk, that's all.”

After that I wasn't afraid of Lon so much. Sometimes Frank and I would climb the rail fence and watch as Lon slopped the hogs. Or we would follow him through the rows of cornstalks out back and watch as he inspected the cobs. Sometimes he would reach up to the apple tree's tallest branches and pluck us the choicest fruit. When Linda and I would tickle each other to tears, Lon would laugh right along with us. Only we couldn't hear his laughter. And he couldn't hear ours.

The other children raised in Christian Bend weren't the least bit afraid of Lon. Patsy Patterson Miller, who grew up in the house down the road from Cil's, remembers the day Lon loaded her up in a wheelbarrow and carried her out of the holler.

“We had a bulldog pup that had crawled up under the house,” Patsy recalled. “It was a rainy day. He was whimpering, so I crawled under there to fetch him. I was barefoot and cut my foot on a broken fruit jar.”

She was thirteen then and too big to be carried out of the holler by her daddy. Cars couldn't get back in the holler in those days, so Patsy needed to be carted out to the road that leads into Church Hill. Somebody ran down to Aunt Cil's and asked Lon to come help. Patsy said her daddy could communicate with Lon even though he was a mute. “Lon loaded me up in that wooden wheelbarrow of his and carried me out of the holler,” she said. “All of us kids thought the world of Lon. Whenever there was any sort of sickness or mess to clean up, folks in the holler sent for Lon.”

Aunt Cil was revered for her cooking. “She was a really good cook,” Patsy said. “I ate there several times. Lon would pick blackberries for her, and she'd make pies and jellies with 'em.”

Patsy loved growing up at Christian Bend, next to Aunt Cil and Lon. “I was a tomboy and we lived way back in the holler,” she said. “It was great.”

Daddy's death tore up Aunt Cil. She and Frank got into a row one afternoon because he wanted to watch a World War II movie and she forbade it.

“I won't have no war movies in my home!” she declared, ordering Frank to flip the television's station. He protested, but Aunt Cil wouldn't budge. Finally, he turned to a western.

“But Aunt Cil,” I said, intervening on Frank's behalf, “they got guns in westerns, too.”

“It ain't the same,” she said. “I can't tolerate no talk of war since Dave died.”

I didn't argue with her. And Frank never did ask again to watch a war movie in Cil's house.

Aunt Cil had a simple house. It had no foundation and was held up off the ground by stiltlike posts. “That's so snakes don't get in the house,” Cil explained.

She didn't have any indoor plumbing, so water had to be pumped from a well in the front yard. And for many years there wasn't any electricity. Even when we were kids, the light in the house came from single electric bulbs hanging from the center of each room. I'd have to climb on a stool, hold the lightbulb, and jerk on a chain to turn the light on. Cil cooked everything in her woodstove. She heated the house the same way. Cil kept a porcelain pot under her bed for night. During the day, there was a two-seater outhouse back by the apple grove. Linda and I would never go in there alone, so we always made the other one tag along. Discarded magazines served as wipes. Once, while Linda was doing her business, curiosity got the better of me. “Wonder how far this thing goes down,” I said, plunging my head momentarily into the black hole.

I jerked it right back out.

“Whad'ya see?” Linda asked.

I didn't have enough breath to answer her. Pushing the door open, I fell out into the ground, gasping.

“SHUT THAT DOOR!” Linda screamed. “You're letting the flies in!”

Cil performed the same bedtime ritual every night. She'd put on a cotton gown, take out her hair net, and unwrap her braids. Then
she'd take a silver-handled brush and run it through her hair for a hundred strokes. “If you brush your hair one hundred times each night, it'll keep healthy,” she explained. Linda and I would sit on the edge of Cil's bed and count the strokes with her…seventy-nine, eighty, eighty-one. Then we'd borrow her brush and do the same to our hair.

When we finished, Cil would pull out her black Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red and read us a story. Usually it was a tale from the Old Testament—the story of a flood, a plague, a king, or a whale. Cil shied away from the battle stories. Then she'd drop to her knees by her bed, and Linda and I would follow suit. We'd fold our hands and listen quietly as Cil asked for God's blessing on us, on Lon, on Frank, on Mama and Grandpa Harve and all her mountain neighbors. Then Linda would crawl into bed with Cil and I would sleep on a cot next to her bed.

Cil died in that bed. She died the same way she lived—gracefully and peacefully. When Mama got word, she loaded us into the 1967 Chevy Malibu that she'd traded her Corvair for and drove through the night with her friend Dave Gibbons at her side. As we drove over the bridge that spans Tennessee's Holston River, toward Christian Bend, Dave turned and chided us kids for cutting up in the back. “Listen, you kids need to calm down. Can't you see how upset your mother is?”

I stopped tickling Linda long enough to study Mama's face. Her forehead was bunched up, her dark eyes troubled, her lips drawn taut. She was chewing on the inside of her cheek, her habitual worry gristle. She hadn't said much of anything since we left Columbus some eight or nine hours earlier. She hadn't even told us kids to knock off our messing around like she usually did. It was as if she was in another place, another time, with other people. And I suppose that's exactly where she was—in a place of remembrance. Thinking about all the times she and her mama used to board the ferry for the trip across the Holston River. When Mama was a little girl, there wasn't a
bridge across the shiny silver waters. So she and Granny Ruth would have to hop a ferry, then walk the five or six miles to Cil's.

The road, which is paved now, was a dusty shoelace pathway in those days. It wrapped around the muddy banks of the Holston, and sometimes, especially during spring runoff, water would spill out over the road until there was no sign of it. On those trips, mud would cake Mama's legs like dark stockings. She didn't always like the journey, but Mama loved the time she spent with Aunt Cil. Cil had what country folks called the joy of the Lord. She could always find something to laugh about. Her joy was infectious. With Cil nearby, a person just couldn't have a bad day.

Later as I peered into her casket at the altar of the Freewill Baptist Church at Christian Bend, I thought how lovely Cil looked. I hadn't thought a dead person could be so pretty, but Cil looked beautiful. She wore a pale pink cotton gown. Her white hair was parted down the middle, and two long white braids hung to her waist. The hands that had kneaded flour into biscuits, sliced and mashed apples into sauce, brushed and twisted hair, and embraced family and friends in prayers and love lay folded against her heart. A white Bible was tucked beneath them.