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  “Did you draw this thing?” she said, as if anyone else would have.

  I backed away from the door. I hadn’t felt the sting of my mother’s whipping in a long time and didn’t want to feel it again. Swiftly, I blurted the only thing I knew could protect me.

  “Mama, I tore it up. I was so ashamed, I asked Jesus to forgive me.”

  Then I did something surprising. I burst into tears. I had shredded that paper because I was afraid of my anger, not because I was ashamed of it. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I had grown up hiding my emotion, my frustration and brewing fury at what God had done to my brother, at my mother’s sadness, at the silences in my home, at the joy I envied in my friends’ homes. This boil of fury had unnerved me enough to be careless, to slash my feelings out on paper.

  My mother hesitated. I sensed she had seen something she hadn’t expected to see. Something in the drawing. She stood for several minutes in the doorway, finally handing me a Kleenex from her apron pocket. Then, she gathered up the shredded pieces, cupping them in her hands, and walked away.

  In her wake, my galloping breath and heart slowed. Mixed with my calming nerves was a sense of bewilderment. The time she had taken to put all of those pieces together, to slowly assemble each character, each bubble of damning words. I bent down over my trash can and peered into its empty bowl. A stray fleck of blank paper still clung to the rim, held there by static. Suddenly I saw her moving from room to room in the quiet of the house, emptying trash cans, coming into my room.

  “—ck you!” the shred of paper called out, enticing her to look closer, to lick her forefinger and tap it to the paper; and with the other hand, dig past the wads of Kleenex. Tipping the can, she dumped the contents onto the bed, a snowstorm of flakes fluttering across the quilt. At least an hour, maybe two, it would take to put it all of these pieces together, but there was time—an entire day to fill. Puzzles required only patience, an eye for pattern, and a willingness to stay with the task. She was good at puzzles and patterns. Spreading all the paper pieces across the bedspread, she flipped them up so the marks called out to each other, and then patiently—steeled by initial outrage, then disbelief, then despair—she assembled them, one by careful one. Slowly, our family emerged, so different from the dream she had imagined as an eighteen-year-old bride so long ago. In the center, there she was, wearing the crown I had drawn on her head, roaring and blistering and driving the vacuum, a broken queen.

  Chapter 15

  Guns in the Family

  Throughout my childhood a .22-caliber rifle rested in the coat closet of our home in Colorado, its barrel propped among the sleeves of my father’s raincoat and the pleats of my mother’s peacoat. Knowing what I know now, how far my parents were pushed to the edge and how close they came to a breaking point, I am struck by the fact that they—that all of us—are still alive.

  My father grew up shooting his own food. In the basement of his childhood home, like so many in Kentucky, a gun case held a .410 gauge shotgun, a .35 Remington, and three .22-caliber rifles: a pump, bolt action, and semiautomatic. As a child, my father brought home squirrels and rabbits, and later, as the only boy in the family, he regularly went out into the backyard pen, picked out a pig, and took its life.

  One summer, when I was thirteen, I stood on my grandparents’ porch in Hazard and aimed one of the .22s at a poplar tree up on the ridge. Barbara Ann stood beside me, having already hit the trunk dead on. Apparently she was a decent shot. Neither she nor I had ever fired a rifle before, and I couldn’t fathom killing anything, animal or human; it just intrigued me to hit something so far away on the exact spot I had picked out. It was like throwing darts.

  Pushing my cheek against the cold butt, I squinted. The slender barrel felt too thin to be lethal, but the way it shifted wildly as I tried to keep it still unnerved me; it had a life of its own. Recklessly, I fired and it bucked and rammed against my shoulder, knocking me backward.

  “Don’t yank on that trigger,” my father said. He sat in a porch chair in my peripheral vision, stuffing his pipe. “Squeeze it, like I told you to.”

  His tone irked me. It implied I hadn’t been listening and, what’s more, I shot like a girl. As a budding teenager, I picked up on his condescension without being able to call it such. Don’t throw, don’t run, don’t bat, don’t fish, don’t pull that trigger like a girl. And yet, I was a girl. Over the last year, as I had put on my first bra and wriggled into a pair of hosiery, his manner toward me had turned more and more stilted and condescending. This was the Sixties, when condescending to women was an accepted practice, and my father was masterful. I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but I knew I was supposed to endure his subtle undercutting, along with sanitary napkins, budding breasts, and wobbly high heels. It was all a part of becoming a woman. I had learned this from my mother, who wilted and shrank beneath his remarks, her only protest a pained expression that she wore through dinner and sometimes for days. My impulse, on the other hand, was to bite back. I didn’t know the words “chauvinism” and “sexism” at the time—the women’s movement was only stirring—but part of me wanted to shoot the gun just to one-up his attitude, to prove I could master anything he handed me.

  Red-faced, I recovered my balance and wiped each hand on the seat of my shorts.

  “There’s the rag,” my father said, nodding his head to where an old washrag hung from a nail.

  The screen door whined and my grandfather joined us, settling on the porch rocker and taking out his chewing tobacco.

  “Cain’t shoot with slippy fingers,” Grandpa observed, good-naturedly.

  It was 1965, and Americans could still order a rifle by mail from a magazine, though not for much longer. The killing of President Kennedy two years before had opened a raw wound in the nation’s side. He’d been shot and killed with a rifle mail-ordered from an ad in National Rifle Association magazine. Two more assassinations loomed ahead, Martin Luther King’s and Robert Kennedy’s, and exactly one year from then, a sniper would climb into the clock tower at Texas University and end the lives of sixteen people in the first mass shooting of its kind. All of these slaughters would have to happen before the Gun Control Act passed in 1968. Only then would mail-order sales of rifles and shotguns finally be illegal, and most felons, drug users, and people found mentally incompetent would be prohibited from buying guns. This new law would infuriate my father.

  Aiming again, I steadied the barrel until my eye turned watery, and then, with a firm but easing pressure, I pulled the trigger. Blam! A bit of bark spit from the trunk.

  “Yap, she nicked her,” my father said, approvingly.

  “Well, Ray, does she really need to be doing that?” My mother’s shadow stood behind the screen door. A tinkling came from the ice cubes in her glass.

  My mother rarely challenged my father, and certainly not in front of me or my sister. But she couldn’t abide guns or alcohol. Both had lacerated her childhood. At eleven years old, not long after she had risen from her sickbed and had begun to believe she might live after all, a banging came to her family’s front door. My mother’s parents, Marguerite and Benjamin, lifted their eyes from the supper table and looked at one another. Benjamin wiped his mouth on his napkin, rose from the table, and went to the door. An urgency of muttering drifted back to the table and when Benjamin returned moments later, his mouth was thin and set.

  “Get your coats on,” he said to my mother and her two brothers. “You’re going to Aunt Jeanette’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask questions.”

  The reason would come to my mother in bits and pieces over the ensuing months, hushed whispers overheard, and gaps filled in randomly by her brothers. The story of that afternoon in 1940 had begun better than most: my mother’s grandfather, Carl Knox, actually managed to make it home, stumbling back up the mountain from the bar in town. He banged through the screen door of his mostly empty house. The only one home was his wife, my mother’s grandmother, Ber
tha Mae.

  Though soft at heart, Bertha Mae was a gritty woman. Married at fourteen, she birthed thirteen children, losing only one to meningitis. She sold apples and slopped hogs, sewed exquisite and sweetly designed quilts, and left her husband several times. That very morning, Bertha Mae had gathered all of the jars full of grain alcohol from Carl’s hiding places, hauled them to the creek, and dumped their clear, acrid liquid into its watery mouth.

  Still, her resolve must have shuddered as her husband ravaged through the house. As with all alcoholics, he wanted more, and his fury mounted from room to room as he rooted and banged about. Her fingers fumbled with the slippery cups and plates swimming around in the sudsy sink, and when he clattered down into the cellar she felt her spine jitter all the way to her tailbone. He came roaring back up the stairs like a bellowed fire and the plate in her hands dropped, splintering in the sink as she spun away. Flinging her arms up to the rack over the kitchen door, she grabbed the family rifle and ran out into the yard.

  “Don’t come near me!” she hollered, breathless, her voice rattling through her teeth.

  Carl, halfway through the screen door before he spotted the gun in her hands, halted, surprised.

  “Aw, come on, you won’t shoot that.”

  “I will. I swear I will!”

  He whooped, launching off the porch. As yet, Carl had never laid a hand on Bertha Mae, but the whiskey turned him into someone she didn’t know and couldn’t trust. The fury that had so strengthened her earlier in the day dissolved now in the face of what she had done. She had defied him and, more dangerously, had deprived him.

  She took off down the lane, lurching as the gun butt banged against her ribs, her footing erratic and wild as she fought the binding hem of her dress.

  “Don’t, Carl! Don’t come any closer!” she cried.

  He wasn’t listening. He laughed again and she heard his footfalls gaining on her. Panic rose like bile in her throat and suddenly she stopped, twisted around, aimed for his ankles, and fired.

  The gun bucked hard against her shoulder and the barrel moved. She saw her husband skid and falter, then drop like a piece of sawed lumber to the dirt. He wasn’t ten feet away, and she could see a black stain pooling like oil through the cloth of his pants, not down at the cuff, but higher, at the pocket of his hip bone.

  She screamed, calling out to anyone who might hear, and ran toward him. The neighbors, Jim and Ethyl Everett, hurried out and across the field, but when they saw the gun, they stopped and hurriedly backed away.

  “No, please stay here,” she said, her voice shaking. “Help him. I didn’t mean to shoot.”

  “Don’t blame her,” Carl sputtered from the ground. “I drove her to it.”

  By the time word arrived at my grandparents’ door, pounding so hard the knife rattled against my mother’s supper plate, Carl Knox had bled to death in the road.

  Bertha Mae cried for days. She lost control of her bladder. Though no charges were ever brought, a heavy pall of shame lowered over the family, deepening through the funeral, darkening for weeks in the newspaper and around supper tables across town. Bertha Mae closed up the house and no one in the family stayed or settled on that part of the mountain again.

  Now, years later, as I wrestled with a rifle and felt its danger in my hands, I knew this story of my great-grandparents from family members, but had no way of comprehending how close I had come to a gun death in my own generation. I did not know that sometime in the early days of my childhood, when I was five or six years old, my mother had hunched on the edge of her marital bed, her eyes raw and red-rimmed with fatigue, her nose running, her hands wringing a handkerchief. Across the room, my father had leaned against the bureau, tightly wrapped, his arms folded across his chest.

  “I’m going to kill myself and take Roddy with me,” she had cried through a blur of mucus and tears. She uttered this despite the trauma of her childhood, despite her ferocious belief that killing oneself was a mortal sin against God, a flagrant flouting of His right to give and take life. For her to have even thought about ending her life, and then to have uttered it out loud in the same breath as threatening to murder my brother, could only have meant she was utterly distraught. She must have believed with all of her heart that she couldn’t save my brother and couldn’t bear to look at a life without that hope. All of her strength and dreams rested on her Christian faith, on her trust in Jesus, and God, and the Holy Spirit, and the whole lot of it was letting her down.

  My father, stilled and silent, made no move to comfort her. In the way he had been raised to weather harsh times, he flattened his heart.

  “You can go wherever you want,” he said, finally, his voice hard and lifeless. Unrelenting. “But he stays.”

  Standing on the porch at thirteen, gun in hand, I didn’t know my mother had ever threatened suicide. I wouldn’t know this until I was fifty, but I sensed it then. If she had walked out on the porch in that moment and announced she couldn’t do this anymore, she wanted to end her life, I wouldn’t have had to ask why. I knew the story, even if it was rent with holes.

  I lowered the gun. The tree, pocked and shredded, looked as if it might limp away.

  “Plenty more shots left,” my father said, thinking me discouraged. Smoke billowed from his pipe, its sweet aroma wafting up my nose.

  I was straddling myself, one foot still in the stirrup of boyhood, the other in womanhood, realizing there were parts I could not take with me. Others I did not want to carry. Having seen the bark pit and fly like a bit of flesh, I felt no affinity for this metal weapon. I didn’t need its weight or its violence, not for food, or pride, or principle. I sensed its shadow, how close it had come once, and could still come, to my mother, and how, in the hands of someone intent on killing, it might not miss.

  “No sir,” I said, hearing an inflection in my voice that I only used in Kentucky, “I think I’m done.”

  Shifting the gun carefully, the way my father had shown me, nozzle down, I released it into his hands. Until that point, I’d always tried to be the son that Roddy couldn’t be. A weight lifted, a part of childhood I would not take with me.

  Part II

  Flight

  Chapter 16

  Wings

  A human is not meant to fly. Powerful elements work against such a thing: the weight of muscle and bone, the wrench of gravity, a woeful lack of wing. But I had discovered a glorious way around these flaws. Bearing down, my feet pushed against the trampoline bed and, instantly, I propelled upward, rushing toward the ceiling, hanging there for a pinpoint of time. Far below me, Barbara Ann looked up, positioned at the end of the trampoline, ready to stop me if I yawed off course.

  This was as close to flying as I’d ever come, closer than my swings and the perch of high trees. I had found a way to leave the earth. The most thrilling moment was not on the way up, but falling back down, the luscious swoon in my belly and zing of blood up to my brain. Plummeting, as I was doing now, was a weightless, boneless rush.

  “Okay, be ready. On your next bounce!” called Mark, my trampoline teacher, as if he knew I was getting carried away and had forgotten what to do. He was standing on the metal frame, ready to spring in and catch me.

  This was the moment we had worked for. I was twelve years old, and for the first time, I was going to tip the capsule of my body backward, spin 360 degrees, and break out in time to save myself, all on my own: without the snug spotting belt around my middle or Mark’s hands catching and putting me on my feet.

  In a split second, I sank into the bed and flew up again. Breathless with fear, I flung my arms up and folded my knees into my chest. I saw nothing, felt nothing—not the trampoline, not my sister, only a black blur of sensation. My body wanted to live, to break from spinning and see the ground. A flash split through my brain to let go, to reach for something, but I clenched and crushed my knees into my ribs. The thick canvas bed pitched into view and, in another millisecond, my feet appeared, touching down as if they knew what to do
.

  “All yours!” shouted Mark.

  I burst into a smile. Mark grinned, hands in the air, dramatizing the moment. At the end of the trampoline, Barbara Ann clapped her hands once and clasped them to her chest. I had watched her learn the trick first and was determined to master it myself. Time and again, Mark had maneuvered me through the steps, forcing my body with his hands to lift high enough, spin fast enough, keep track of up and down. It was as much a victory for him as for me, this moment when the brain and body react together and do something marvelous. His ruddy features wore the heightened joy of a teacher when a slip of knowledge implants in a student, like a new gene.

  “Again,” he commanded. “Do not think. Just feel.”

  I couldn’t have been happier. I was in the bowels of an industrial park, inside an inauspicious building full of vague manufacturing. The front lobby had a towering ceiling and just enough floor space for a giant trampoline and one strip of tumbling mats. It was grimy and hot and I wanted to stay there forever. This was Mark’s world. He had been a circus performer until he’d caught one hand in some sort of machine that tore three fingers from his right hand. From all I could see, his absent fingers didn’t faze him. He could churn out six back handsprings in a row, starting from a dead standstill and revving into an effortless and fluid flipping machine all the way across the floor, ending with a full twisting back flip just short of the plywood wall.

  I longed to learn all that he knew: how to make my body morph into a gyrating machine, working in tandem with gravity and whirling through the air. I couldn’t get enough. I wanted to feel and re-feel the sensation of release. Before discovering the trampoline, the only time I had inched close to the same euphoria was riding in my father’s sail plane, feeling a swirl in my stomach each time the winch cord severed its hold and he and I were there alone, with only a pair of wings and the air’s breath.