A Wrong Turn
They bring you up to do like your daddy done. ~Bruce Springsteen
I used to be afraid of my father, a shadow in our lives, always eluding our sight, the way his presence dogged our steps, remaining off and to the right, perhaps left of our substantial selves, how dark he was, obtuse, his figure ducking and bobbing, a sudden jab struck out of nowhere, a jagged lightning bolt or a dull thud from behind; we could not predict, just knew the blow would come, but glancing, it was always glancing, the way a shadow approaches, looms, then falls away.
This was the dream I had: I was with my father. We were going somewhere. My father seemed anxious, perturbed, looking for the right direction. This way, he said, making a sudden turn. And then we, both of us, were falling. Falling over the Grand Canyon, which spread out below and around us. I realized there was no way back and I was holding my father’s hand. In a little while, I let go, and as I did, I felt some buoyancy, felt the air lift me a little, as though I might fly.
In the dream, my father took a wrong turn. He didn’t mean to. But it didn’t matter what he meant to do or not do. Now we were falling and there was no going back. I lifted my arms like wings.
***
I used to be afraid of going to hell.
The water the dinosaurs drank millions of years ago is the same water that falls as rain today. Water is so much a part of me that I don’t recognize thirst. The ancestors are my veins. I swim their waterways, like so much flotsam, unwashed. And so the sins of the fathers as well as the legacy of all women came down upon me.
***
I had been taught that at age twelve I would be responsible for the state of my soul, that I must be about my Heavenly Father’s business by then. At the dime store after swimming at the public pool, it was easy to sneak a candy bar under the bathing cap I wore and saunter out the door. I knew it was wrong. Still, I compulsively stole. I was running out of time. Soon, I would be held accountable before God, should I steal any more candy after my twelfth birthday. I was pretty sure I was a lost cause.
***
Our father betrayed us. Betrayed himself. Like so many fathers. In between his regular church attendance and faithful provision, his blue work shirts and Sunday best, his role as husband and father, he lived another life, invisible and secret.
It spread through our family like the bloom of octopus ink in water. It was there like his absence was —a present thing.
Unknown.
That betrayal smudged us all.
Our Fathers who art in heaven, what happened to take you from us, from yourselves, from your daughters?
Once a week, he emptied the trash into the incinerator and burned it. In the basement, he hand-loaded bullets for hunting, cleaned his rifle. He took my brother target shooting. Never me. At least once a day, he played the piano, or moved his bow across a fiddle.
***
My great grandmother read tea leaves and when my father asked her to show him how, she said, “You’d have to sell your soul to the devil.”
“You were born without a soul,” he told me. “You’re just like your great grandmother.”
And so, a designated witch, even if I wanted to drown, I couldn’t.
***
My father taught me how to play chess. I caught on quickly, but I don’t remember ever winning a game. He took me and my siblings to the library weekly. We checked out stacks of books. He didn’t pay any attention to our choices. I felt rich. I felt blessed.
My father lay prone on our couch, reading his books. I stretched out nearby, reading mine. We ate popcorn in the dim light of my mother’s Early American lamps.
One year, when I was eleven, I got a tape recorder for Christmas, even though in our religion we didn’t celebrate Christmas, and this was the first year we had ever received gifts. I pretended to be a radio announcer:
I turned the tape recorder on, held up the microphone to interview my father.
“This is KIMN,” I announced.
He didn’t miss a beat, mimicked the soft lyric twang of my grandparents’ southern accent, though he was not born in Kentucky, as they had been. He pretended to be Hank Williams. So I requested some music.
“Your cheating heart,” he sang. “Will tell on you.”
My father played music. He could play the guitar, the violin, and the piano. He played by ear and he also sang. I loved the sound of his music. I thought he was handsome.
His music nurtured me, as neither he nor my mother had, its rhythms, the varied tones, spoke to me of love; they soothed me. I felt each note, the twang of a chord, the sound of his voice, deep inside my small hollowed chest.
I loved him in chess moves, library stacks, a borrowed voice. I was never closer to him than that.
He was there for all of it. He was never there.
He knew me though. My badness. Like a curse. His shadow would not let me go.
***
I used to be afraid of my father.
Now I am afraid of the dark. Yes, all forms of it. The literal cold dark of a January night. Long Alaskan winters. Down beneath the tides and surface of the ocean. A corner of my heart gone lightless. No fire burns the black to gold.
I am afraid of the absence of light more than anything.
Here, at the home I’ve made, nestled beside the pond and its koi fish, with autumn sunlight shimmering across the water, I forget the murky depths and the fear that darts beneath the rocks. Above me, aspens quiver and blaze gold.
Aspens are connected beneath the earth. At their roots they are one living thing. In their annual transformation, I feel the hope of the ancestors. I sense the light changing my very roots.
I take a road trip to the West Coast, drive through the American West and the desert. The road is supposed to free me, remind me of younger days, the wind in my hair.
Instead, the road becomes a racetrack without guardrails. Sky and canyon fill my vision and, again and again, as I crest one summit after another, the earth seems to fall away. Any one of these edges could crumble beneath the wheels, sending me and the car tumbling into air and nothingness.
In my mind’s eye, as in the dream, I fall with my father.
Again and again, I fall holding his hand.
Again and again, I let go.
Every essay published here exists because a small number of readers refused to assume someone else would step up. To paid readers: my gratitude.
On Repeat
Songs to compulsively listen to.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?
Or is it something else?
High Control Groups: Resources and Support for Survivors
I was born and raised in the 2x2s. This section is for people recovering from high control groups and finding their way to themselves.
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This is what inheritance feels like when it is not money but shadow: a hand you were taught to hold, even while it pulls you toward the edge. The miracle is not that the fall never happened. It did. Again and again. The miracle is learning that letting go is not betrayal. Sometimes it is the first honest prayer the body ever prays. Wings, apparently, begin as refusal.
So heart wrenching and beautiful, you intertwined perfectly.