Gracie nodded to the pianist, who struck the introductory bars. Then Gracie’s pure, strong alto rang out, followed by the three younger sopranos. I wanted to shut my eyes and ride that sweetness, to rest mindlessly on the resonance of their voices. But I had told them to look at me if they got shy. They did not need that crutch. They sang full and steady without hesitation.
“Open my eyes, illumine me, Spirit Divine.” Each time they hit the chorus, I thought I heard a fifth singer as their voices converged on those final notes. For a few moments, my heart ceased its hammering and the nausea left me. I squeezed Adam’s hand as the girls finished and returned to us.
Reverend Paul led another Scripture reading. Then it was time to view her body. Adam closed his eyes briefly as Lil scrambled past his knees. “Go on,” he whispered to Sarah, who held his hand and tried to pull him to his feet.
Seeing the dead helps the body understand what the mind does not want to grasp and the heart longs to deny. But I hated the ritual of the funeral at that moment. I wanted to send my girls running down the aisle out into the sun, out beyond this sorrow, past Clarion.
But we filed up to the coffin, Gracie and Rosie stately in their new poise. Lil looked once at her grandmother and then quickly away as she hugged my hip. Sarah just stared, her eyes glued to Momma’s face, as Gracie, who had been holding her up to see over the side of the coffin, lowered her back to the floor. I resisted the urge to keep looking back at Adam still seated behind us. I braced myself, but there were only the normal sounds of people moving in a quiet church.
Adam met us at the end of the pew and we walked out behind Daddy, who leaned on Rita’s arm. As we passed, everyone backed up or turned suddenly to speak to a neighbor. A little girl pivoted away from us to bury her head in her mother’s skirt.
We were naked. My skin was on fire.
The congregation came with us to the graveside service. I noticed a few sideways glances. Then we all gathered at Momma’s for the covered-dish supper. The house swelled with people, their perfumes and sweat mingling with the odor of coffee and fried chicken. The men had their whiskey and cigarettes on the back porch. They parted to let us through, but no one spoke. Bile rose in my throat and I swallowed painfully.
Uncle Otis, already drunk, hugged everyone and told them how much he loved his big sister. I did not see Daddy. I handed Sarah to Adam. With a child in his arms, maybe someone would find him approachable.
I found Daddy in the bedroom, lifting the lid off Momma’s little jewelry box and then setting it back in place. Then he rearranged her comb and brush and lifted the lid of the jewelry box again. His shoulders, suddenly frail, slumped forward. I peeled his fingers off the box lid and laid it down. I held his face, forcing him to look at me. His head felt fragile between my hands. He was not my father, but he was the man who raised me. “Daddy, we’re going to go into the kitchen and you will eat your supper. You have to eat now.”
His watery, bloodshot eyes focused, but he didn’t see me.
He let me take his arm and lead him into the kitchen. I sat him at the head of the table, the bowls of neighbors’ offerings crowded in front of him. Rita made him a plate.
“Thanks.” Joe tried to smile at me. “None of us could get him to come out of the bedroom. Not even Bertie.”
After Daddy began to eat, I joined Adam. Mavis Montgomery had cornered him and chatted excitedly, praising the girls’ singing. She had been in the hospital during Jennie’s funeral. Even in the crowded house, a small space remained around them.
I stayed by Adam’s side until I thought I glimpsed Frank’s face through the packed living room. All I could see was that familiar brow turning away from me, but I was certain it was him. The shock of seeing him lurched to the surface of my skin. “Let’s go. Now,” I whispered to Adam. In a glance, I saw that Adam had not spotted Frank yet. Quickly, I gathered up the girls and we left.
The next morning, Adam departed for his mountain trip. He returned two days later, not jovial and refreshed as he normally was after his retreats, but home and safe.
T
he days ached. The sky bruised my eyes. Every minor detail of daily life—the crumpled, folded brown bags the girls carried their apples and snacks to school in; the small scar on one of the horse’s flanks; Adam’s muddy chaps drying on the back porch—all seemed a knot of meaning, dense and indecipherable and simultaneously devoid of meaning. I hated the sorrow that seemed to be slowly unhinging my world.
The sparse, damaged fibers still holding me together were worn thinner by Momma’s revelation. In my sleep, I met her in the white space of dreams, where I asked my questions and she answered. She spoke reluctantly. Her lips moved, but there was no sound. I woke in a hot, futile rage.
My biological father’s ignorance seemed unjust, unnatural. Men have an alien, physical capacity for innocence: their bodies can bring forth life that they know nothing of. Only in complete insanity or a coma could a woman do such a thing.
A week after Momma’s funeral, I told Adam I was going grocery shopping, and while Daddy worked his shift at the mill, I went through Momma’s things, spending hours investigating every corner of her house. I pulled out drawers and turned them upside down. Sweeping her dresses aside, I searched the closet corners. I held each book by its spine and shook it. Nothing. Thirty-nine years had wiped out any trace there might have been of him. Every trace but me.
The Sunday after my private search, Bertie, Rita, Mary, and I met at Momma’s to go through her clothes and jewelry. I lingered after they left, straightening the kitchen, then followed Daddy’s pipe smoke through the house to the front porch. I found him in his usual spot, sitting in his rocker, puffing on his pipe. A large oak tree spread its branches over the yard and the land sloped so that the mill was a hundred feet from the porch. All my life he had sat in that same spot on the porch, facing the mill.
Now he was my only source of information. His gaze, locked on the mill, held the vague softness of a man looking out to sea, expecting nothing. He had regained his color since the funeral, but none of the weight he had lost during the last months of Momma’s life. He was suddenly an old man.
My determination to confront him wavered, and my direct, rehearsed questions vanished. “You and Momma took care of all of us kids the same. I never felt I was treated worse. But you two always let me wander off on my own. I had more freedom. Why was that, Daddy?”
His rocking continued uninterrupted for so long, I thought he might ignore my question. Then he stopped and took his pipe out of his mouth. “You didn’t need any more than what you were given. You kept to yourself and took care of yourself. Even when you were a bitty little thing and kept wandering off. We didn’t let you go. You went. And you found your way around. Never snake-bit. Never hurt. The others—especially Rita—needed more watching, needed more discipline. You just didn’t need it—Would’a been a waste on you.” He put his pipe back in his mouth and began rocking again.
“Why do you think I was different?” My heart banged in my chest.
“That’s just how it was. I’m sure your girls are the same, some needing more than others. That’s all there is to it.”
I was not prepared for him to draw parallels between his situation and mine, but I pressed on. “That’s all there is to it?”
“Yep, that’s it.” He returned his pipe to his lips, took a long drag. His rocking chair squeaked dismissively as he squinted at the mill.
That old longing swelled in my throat. I’d always wanted more from him. More affection, more discipline, more stories, more touch. But, lately, I also felt the press of gratitude. He’d kept Momma from the wrath of her stern father and the scorn of a whole town. He was still protecting her.
I didn’t want to cry in front of him. I patted the arm of his rocker. “Well, I thank you for all of it” was the best I could do. I did not have the will or energy to goad my father for more. And what good would it have done? Long ago, he had chosen his path. I let the sleeping dog of my mother’s secret lie.
I was, in my own way, a perverse echo of her.
B
efore the deaths, Adam had remained, in some essential way, innocent. He had, as far as I knew, never been a child. He hadn’t been bent, while very young and still supple, by the knowledge of mortality that the death of a pet or a distant relative brings.
An uncharacteristic quietness enveloped him. He’d always been capable of a kind of absorbed, open calm, especially when working with a damaged horse or trying to quiet the girls, but now his stillness seemed vacant, no longer a sign of will and effort, but an absence of both. When the girls went to him or the horses turned to Adam, he opened his hands, blind hands brushing lightly over the world, his body operating on rote memory. The only time he seemed at peace and fully present was when he listened to his daughters singing.
When Jennie died, the girls mourned, but the ostracism of their father, followed by their grandmother’s death, propelled them into another level of isolation. We’d always been somewhat removed from life in Clarion and the mill-village, but now the four of them were far less interested in going into town or visiting cousins. With Momma’s death, they seemed to retract into a greater reliance on each other while simultaneously surrendering to their individual passions and quirks. At some point, most evenings, they would gather at the kitchen table with their homework. On the evenings they had no homework, they would linger there after dinner.
Gracie focused on academics, particularly history. Her grades had always been high but they rose to straight As. She became the family manager, spending more time with her younger sisters, helping me get them ready for school, checking on their homework, singing them to sleep at night when they needed it. Rosie continued riding as much as possible. Formerly the most volatile of her sisters, she became the most quiet and cooperative, a change I could not read as wholly positive. Lil read voraciously, mostly fantasies in which good wizards and witches prevailed over evil. If she had no chores and nothing to read, she cleaned and cleaned the house. Each afternoon after school, she swept the front and back porches, jabbing at the boards of the floor until she banished every speck of dirt. Sarah, of course, continued to draw. Orange-haired girls, increasingly more detailed and realistically proportioned, crowded her drawings, their dresses blood-red. Their eyes wide circles. Their mouths open in an O of terror or song.
I
still had not shared with Adam what Momma had told me. For the first time ever, I kept something from him. But Momma’s story of my father began to plague me. I grasped at it for some relief from the memories of Jennie on the ground, of Adam’s bloody hands on the steering wheel, and Momma’s gray face before she died. If I was imagining my biological father walking down a street, eating a sandwich, lying down next to his wife for an afternoon nap, or even buried on some faraway, strange hill, I was also less aware of Adam sleeping and unresponsive next to me.
My blood and bones, the tonality of my voice, the shape of my fingernails, my love of reading, even the roundness of my hips, might have been given to me by a man I’d never met. What else did I not know? The thought of my ignorance about my paternity made me shudder. I lived daily with the secret of having chosen a stranger to father my own children. How could I brush aside this news about my father? His blood ran in the veins of my daughters, mingling with Adam’s.
By 1965, the Piedmont Hotel, where my mother and Benjamin Mullins had been lovers, reeked of poverty and full ashtrays. An old, unshaven man slumped in an overstuffed chair in the lobby. The thin-necked clerk at the counter reluctantly put down his comic book to survey my plain dress and my lack of luggage.
“Is there still a stairway in the back?” I asked. “Can I see one of the second-floor rooms?”
He hesitated, then led me down a dank, uncarpeted hall and up a flight of narrow stairs, retracing my mother’s footsteps.
“Here, this one.” I stopped him at the first door.
He said nothing, just shrugged and unlocked the door.
The vertically striped wallpaper had faded to yellows and grays. A dark old bureau leaned in one corner, its missing leg replaced by a brick. Morning light, stark and unkind, shone through two dirty windows, illuminating a clot-colored bedspread. The curtains, a geometric patterned fabric from the fifties, were the one attempt at new décor.
Nothing of my young mother remained in the room. Nothing to explain how she could have let me grow up without such crucial knowledge.
“You want this room, lady?”
“No!” I ran from the room and out the back door.
I’d longed for some repercussion from Momma’s confession, some recognition from Daddy, some change in demeanor in Joe or my sisters. Anything that would convey that I was not alone in what I knew. But there was nothing, no difference.
What was an earthquake for me was undetectable in everyone around me. What I now knew estranged me, the very thing Momma in her secrecy had sought to protect me from. Leaning against the wall of the Piedmont Hotel, gulping the sharp, fresh air that seemed to splinter in my lungs, I saw again the anguish on her face as she’d admitted what she had kept from me. That shame, I suddenly realized, was the core of the matter for me, not the nature of the man who had fathered me, not any nuanced shifts in my relationships with my siblings.
My mother was ashamed of the circumstances of my conception. That was the stone I could not swallow or balance against all I knew of us, of what she had been to me.
And now she was gone. No longer accountable, she had surrendered me to my own resources.
T
hat night, I made Adam accept my touch as I had the night before Momma’s funeral. Forcing intimacy on my husband was a strange cruelty on my part. A kind of fear filled his face and eyes as he lay stretched out under me. But that was the only time grief loosed its grip on him. It was exorcism, and we needed it; otherwise, we would have been lost to each other. Those were the only nights that he slept the whole night without waking. I knew I was taking unfair advantage of how well I knew his body and its responses, knowledge that he had given in trust. But I wanted the contact. I needed it. Tears—his and mine—were preferable to distance and silence.