She was drunk again. She was in the front yard yelling at my sister over some forgotten transgression. My sister was in tears. I was across the street, in front of my friend’s house. I couldn’t take this anymore. I told my friend “I hate her so much. I wish she would die.” These were pretty strong feelings to have for another person, even if she was my mother.
I was a teenager, fifteen years old, and I was ashamed of my mother. Why did I have to go through this? Why did I have to suffer through having a friend ask me if my mom was pregnant, and having to tell him no, it was just a beer belly. Why couldn’t I be normal, have a normal family? My friends had perfectly normal parents, even if some of them seemed to yell at each other too much. But I’d take yelling over what I went through any day.
We had come to this. I had loved her once. I still loved her. Loved her and hated her at the same time. She was such a loving person. She seemed to relish life. Everybody who met her liked her at once. She was that kind of person. She could strike up a conversation with anyone. She had once been so beautiful, in the pictures I had seen of her in her youth. Now, it seemed life had squeezed all of that vitality out of her. Life and drink. How could someone let alcohol do what it did to her? What had happened to her to become the person she now was? There was a demon dwelling secretly within her, buried but slowly making its way to the surface. Was there a demon inside me? Sometimes I thought I could feel it stirring within me. You’d be fine one minute and then the demon would take hold and fill you with despair. I was not religious; I didn’t believe the devil could take possession of your soul. But I did believe that a person could have, deep within, some dark other soul that made you do things you didn’t like afterward. You struggled to keep it quiet, and most of the time it slept. But some people, like my mom, couldn’t suppress it.
Her name was Elizabeth, but to everyone she met she was Bucky. She had been Bucky since she was a child, growing up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina. I never heard the story of how she got the nickname. Among her seven brothers and sisters, she was the only one who had a nickname. I never knew her mother or father very well. Her mother, Mama Beulah, died in a car accident when I was a baby. Her father lived long enough for me to remember visiting a few times. But all I remember is that he, Granddaddy Claude, was a scary man. He could only walk with crutches, and he frequently spat some ugly brown juice in a can. He lived in a little one-room apartment in downtown New Bern. An ugly, smelly place. He didn’t act like a Granddaddy. He acted like a mean old man who didn’t like his daughter and didn’t like his grandkids.. He had a demon within him, I could tell that even at my early age. And that was what made him really scary.
Later, I learned that Granddaddy Claude was a real hard case. He was a fighter and a drinker when he was young. His son Everet C. was just like him, and Everet C. had gotten shot in the leg in a barroom fight and died before I was born. Yep, Granddaddy Claude was a mean bastard, and by the time I knew him, that meanness had turned into a bitter old man’s meanness. He was an alcoholic to the end, and he passed that miserable disease on to several of his children.
My mother hated her father, but most of her sisters loved him. At that time, I couldn’t understand how someone could hate their father. The family was otherwise full of love. The brothers and sisters loved each other, and my mom told my sister and I many a tender story about them. But there was some unspeakable sickness in the family as well. That demon again. It was in Everet C the night of that barroom fight. It was in Aunt Mayvelline the night she got drunk, fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand, and burned herself up.
I was born in North Carolina, along with my twin sister Jayne. My family moved to Virginia when I was two or three. But to my mother, North Carolina was always home. She would say, “We’re going home this summer”, and “When I die I want to be buried home next to my mother”. Every year, we would take our two-week vacation “home”. First stop would be Uncle Billy and Aunt Joyce, who lived in Vanceboro, a small farming town about 20 miles outside of New Bern. Billy and Joyce had two daughters, Gail and Joan Ellen. Billy was my mom’s brother, and like her seemed to love life and family. He had no demon in him that I could tell. Our visits were the occasion for him to go buy a watermelon and we would cut it up and eat it in the back yard. Other times Billy would get out his ice cream making machine, and crank us up a batch of home made peach ice cream. Joyce equally loved life, and to her nothing was better than making a huge southern supper, with chicken and dumplings, gravy, mashed potatoes, collards, and black eyed pees, with the sweetest tasting iced tea. Jayne, Gail, Joan Ellen and I would go down to the train tracks, and put pennies on the tracks and wait for a train to come by. We would then retrieve our penny, by now nothing but a flattened piece of copper.
I remember one time, years after I had grown up, that my dad told me about the nights at Uncle Billy’s after us kids had gone to bed. Uncle Billy would whip out a huge jug of moonshine, and the adults would talk, catching up on the families, while passing that jug around. It surprised me, because I don’t remember ever seeing Billy drunk. A sad fact about having an alcoholic for a parent is that you can recognize drunkenness fairly easily, being used to the slurred speech, the excessive and inappropriate emotion, the unsteadiness when standing up. But I never, ever saw that in my Uncle Billy.
Our two families had many adventures together. We went to Niagara Falls one year, and to the New York World’s Fair another year. We would take the long drive in two cars, using walkie talkies to communicate with each other. The year we went to Niagara Falls, I had started into puberty. I was miserable. I had a boner every second of that trip, and was embarrassed as hell about it. Nobody noticed except me. To this day, however, I have to laugh when we go through the family photographs. I would be seen with my hands buried deep in my windbreaker jacket, trying to hide my crotch.
While at Billy and Joyce’s, we would visit Aunt Velma for a few hours at the family homestead, my mom’s birthplace and childhood home. Aunt Velma was the widow of Durwood, another of my mom’s brothers. I don’t remember much about Durwood, but in our family albums we have pictures of him giving Jayne and I rides on his tractor. Durwood’s son was named Evert C, after the brother who had died in the barroom scuffle.
I remember a story my Mom told us about that old farm. They had an old hand operated water pump over their water well. When you swung the handle, the pump would make a distinctive squeaking noise. Well, one night, when my mother was a young girl, something happened. It was the night that Everett C. got shot. The brothers and sisters were in the house, and had not heard the news yet. But, they heard that old pump start its squeaking. No wind was powerful enough to move that handle. As far as they could tell, looking out the window, there was no one down there in the yard. Yet, that pump kept on squeaking. Later that night, they heard the news about Everett C. They all figured that squeaking pump was an omen of the bad news coming about Everett C. My Mom told us that story on a dark night, and it scared the hell out of me, striking some chord in my soul and resonating deeply. I’ve never forgotten it.
After spending a few days at Billy and Joyce’s, our next stop would be New Bern. Ever the dutiful daughter, my Mom would take us kids to see Granddaddy Claude. Then we would usually stop and stay at Aunt Mary Ethel’s and Uncle Carl’s. Uncle Carl ran a car mechanic shop and filling station, situated in the median strip of the highway going outside of town. Aunt Mary Ethel was my mom’s sister, and to this day is one of my favorite aunts. I never knew Uncle Carl very well; he died when I was very young. Their brood of kids consisted of Marlene, Nancy, Carol Rose, and the baby, Carl Jr.
One year we went to their cabin at Minnesott, a river retreat in Eastern Carolina. I had been allowed to invite my buddy Pat to come along. Jayne and Nancy were buddies and hung out together. Pat and I hung out together. Carol Rose was a year or so younger than us, and was sweet and cute and seemingly interested in us. Pat and I competed against each other for her attentions. It was nothing really serious; we never did anything physical. It was just young teens testing their budding ability to attract the opposite sex. She knew how to play us, I’ll tell you. She had us eating out of her fingers. There was a lot of that among us cousins. We knew better than to get serious about it, but there was a lot of flirting going on. We referred to ourselves as “Kissing Cousins”.
Pat and I were just starting to smoke, and we would steal a few cigarettes from my mom’s pack and then sneak out and have a smoke. The only problem was that there was no other source of cigarettes, and my Mom starting noticing her missing cigarettes. I eventually got caught. As punishment, my mom made me smoke an entire pack of non-filtered Lucky Strikes as punishment. Pat, Jayne, and Nancy were snickering as I went through this. They had swiped their share of cigarettes; but I was the one who got caught and who bore the brunt of my Mom’s wrath, such as it was. But it was no big deal, I enjoyed smoking, and I hadn’t learned to inhale yet. So my punishment was ineffective.
We were a large crowd for that cabin, with my Mom, sister, Pat and I, and Mary Ethel, Nancy, and Carol Rose. My Dad had not made the trip that year. The girls slept inside, but Pat and I decided we wanted to sleep on the screened in porch. That was a mistake. In the middle of the night, the mosquitoes started attacking, getting in through holes in the screen. We tried hiding entirely beneath our blankets, but it didn’t help. I’d be slipping into slumber when I’d hear the buzz of a mosquito, then the stinging as it alighted and fed. We finally decided we’d had enough and we decided to go inside. Uh oh, a slight problem. Someone had locked the door of the cabin. We knocked, and we knocked and knocked, but for some reason no one heard us. The mosquitoes were murdering us by now. We knocked some more, and finally someone came and let us in. There were no beds available. We went to sleep sitting in easy chairs in the living room. I went to sleep with my head resting on my arm, like Rodin’s Thinker. When I awoke the next morning, my arm was asleep and stuck in that bent position. I couldn’t straighten it for a good hour. That was an eerie and most unpleasant sensation.
We had a lot of fun at Mary Ethel’s, but I was waiting to see my favorite cousin, Kenny. After spending some time at Mary Ethel’s, my mom or dad would eventually take me to Kenny’s house by the banks of the Trent River. This was the high point of my vacation, going to see Kenny. He was a couple years older than I was, and I idolized him. He could swim all the way across the Trent River, and he was the starting second baseman on his team, and he knew everything, particularly about the forbidden subject of sex. One year I came, he whipped out this magazine, Sunaire Review, a nudist colony publication. Where he got it, I haven’t the faintest idea. But it was my first view of adult female nakedness. They actually had hair down there!
Kenny’s dad was Uncle Tommy, another of my mom’s brothers. Kenny’s mom was Aunt Evelyn, who practically became my second mother during those visits. I remember well having breakfast at Kenny’s, having my first taste of fried eggs, cooked over easy and then cut up on toast, the yellow yolk saturating the toast. I remember my first taste of grits, and how you had to put in a pat of butter, some salt, and then smother it in black pepper. Grits themselves were actually quite tasteless; it was the stuff you put over them that made them so good. I remember Aunt Evelyn jokingly complimenting me on my “Yankee” manners. It was a light hearted jab we heard from all of the family; we were Yankees because we lived up north in Virginia and had our Yankee manners and way of speaking.
Kenny’s family lived in a beautiful place; a house by the shores of the Trent River near New Bern. The house was nestled in the pines, with houses on either side but not too close. A couple of hundred feet of backyard would end in a bluff, falling maybe 30 feet to the beach below. There was at one time a wooden beach house, but it had fallen to ruin long ago. There was a small wooden dock on the river. This place was a perfect playing ground for Kenny and I. We would play hide and seek, and army, and climb trees.
I would stay at Kenny’s a few days, while my folks and sister would stay at Mary Ethel’s. Then it would be off to Wilson, to see Uncle Murray (another of my mother’s brothers) and Aunt Naomi, and their daughter Sheila Fae and son Scottie. We’d usually stay the night, and then finally head home.
I remember one year, when I was a teenager, 13 or so, we went home but Kenny was out of town for some reason or another. Uncle Billy asked me if I wanted to stay with him for a week or so, and help him at his job. Uncle Billy was a plumber, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to do that or not. But he talked me into it, and it was a memorable week. Uncle Billy would crawl down under a house, and ask me to cut him a 6-inch length of half-inch pipe. We would do that all morning, then go to the café in downtown Vanceboro for lunch. I had my first hamburger with all the fixings at that café. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. We would go back to work, and at the end of the day we would go to the filling station and get ourselves an ice cold Pepsi out of the icebox. Billy and I would sit down on the stoop of the filling station, drink our Pepsis, and watch the traffic go by. Nothing else, just sit there. Or maybe we would buy a National Enquirer and read about the three headed pigs for a while. Then we would go home for dinner.
In my house, I have a print of a pencil drawing by an artist from South Western Virginia. That drawing perfectly captures my memory of life in Vanceboro. A man sits on a bench outside the diner, drinking a Pepsi and watching the traffic go by. Just like Uncle Billy and I did those summer evenings. Sometimes the simplest things make for the most contentment, and contentment is what I remember from that short week.
We loved those trips, my sister and I. They taught us the value of family. That was so important to my Mom. There was so much love. There was so much hugging and kissing and squeezing of cheeks. But we learned more. We learned goodness. They were good people, they never spoke ill of anyone (at least not white folks). They were joyful people, always expressing that joy in the way they talked. Aunt Joyce always smiled when she talked. Her smile could light up the room. We learned about true southern hospitality. There really is such a thing.
But if we learned goodness, we also learned about racism. It was commonplace. It was the way they were raised; a black man was a nigger, a black child was a pickaninnie. It was so common it was almost a non-issue. There was no alternative to the word nigger for them. It was almost like one black man calling another nigger. Almost, but not quite. When the family used the word nigger, there was always an undercurrent of emotion, a hatred behind the word. Jayne and I, having been raised in the “north”, had not been exposed as much to such intense, explicit racism. We learned to tell the difference, to insulate ourselves from it when we went home. But our form of Yankee racism, up north, was much more subtle. You never used the “N” word, but you never associated with black folk either. We each kept our separate company.
I cannot remember when I first realized my mother was an alcoholic. In those days, it was a deep dark secret that you didn’t discuss with anyone. Though I mostly remember her as a loving and doting parent, there were times when I glimpsed that darker side. She hadn’t overcome her roots; black folks were always niggers to her. She could cuss up a storm in that southern accent of hers.
My earliest memories of my Mother’s demon were when my sister and I, barely six years old, would get our whippings. The smallest infraction, and she was on us. She would get a switch and call us into the house. She would make us take down our pants, and she would switch our legs. Boy she made us dance, like marionettes on a string. It got to the point where all she had to do was say “I’m going to get a switch” and we straightened up, damned straight. I know that came from her father, than she had been treated similarly, probably even worse.
There are other memories; swatches of memories, really, but enough to paint a portrait. I remember an incident when Jayne and I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. We were waiting for our mom to make us dinner. We knew she was drunk. We were getting hungrier and hungrier, but no dinner was coming. TV dinners, they were in the oven. But she was so drunk she didn’t realize she hadn’t turned the oven on. This went on and on, we begged her to feed us. Eventually we got fed, but it took forever.
I remember she would take me up to the barbershop at Hilltop, a little 4-store strip mall at the edge of town. While I was getting my haircut, she would slip into the Green Dolphin, a bar in the same strip mall. She was always slipping away like that. One year there was a carnival, and my sister and I got on the Tilt-a-Whirl, our favorite ride. When the ride ended, we started to get off, but the ride attendant told us to get back on, our mother had arranged it with him. We were ecstatic. Every time the ride ended, he’d wave us back on, to our great joy. Our mother was nowhere to be seen. Jayne and I starting getting a little sick, and were almost at the point of throwing up when we were finally let off the ride. It didn’t take a genius to realize where our mother had gone through all of this, a quick trip to the bar to grab a nip while the kids were enjoying the ride.
The American Legion was perhaps her favorite place. The American Legion in Fairfax City was the social center of town. It had a huge hall for weddings and gatherings, and a small bar downstairs. Next door was a Little League baseball field, the centerpiece of Little League in Fairfax, although none of the teams I was ever on were allowed to play on it. Every July Fourth they would have fireworks. They would launch them from the ball field. Everyone would gather in the American Legion parking lot or in the yard. My mother would disappear into the bar while we were waiting for the fireworks to start. She would reappear in time for the show. We would cuddle up together, sitting in the grass, and enjoy the spectacle.
I’ve always wondered what could drive a person to slowly destroy themselves with alcohol. Maybe it was pain that drove her to drinking. My mom grew up in the rural south, and never received very good dental care. By the time she was in her thirties, her teeth were a mess. She eventually had to have them all removed and get dentures. I remember the day she came home after having her teeth pulled. I’ve never seen anyone’s face so contorted with pain as hers was. She got her dentures, and she didn’t seem to have much more pain from her teeth. But there were other problems. She had to have her gall bladder removed. She had to have neck surgery to remove some growths, and in those days this was no out-patient surgery, in and out the same day. But she always seemed to bounce back from these painful episodes.
I remember when I met my eventual best friend, Paul. He and his parents had just moved in across the street. He was in sixth grade, and I was in fifth. They came over one night, and our parents talked while Paul and I hung out in the basement downstairs getting to know each other. I remember Paul standing on the foot of my bed, his hands on the ceiling, when he fell over and landed on my Robot Commando, a toy from long ago. He was sore but not hurt seriously. We both had a good laugh over it. That was the start of a long friendship. But then we heard a loud thump upstairs, as if someone had fallen. Paul said “uh oh, see you later”. I didn’t understand what he meant, but a few seconds later his mom called down stairs, time for him to go. “See what I mean?” he said. They left, and I came upstairs to find that my mom was drunk and her and dad were really pissed and yelling at each other. I never found out what the thump was, and I never found out how Paul knew what was going on seconds before his mom called down to him.
Don’t get me wrong. My life was not a complete disaster, wrecked by alcoholism. There were good times. There were more good times than bad times. I remember a mostly happy childhood just occasionally marred by bad incidents.
As I said, she was a beautiful woman. She had curly blond hair, “dirty” blond as she called it. She wore it short in later years, but my earliest memories of her include shoulder length hair. She was medium height, and given to plumpness. She had a deep North Carolina accent. I remember to this day her favorite song; a country and western song by Patti Page that went “Oh let me go, let me go, let me go, lover”. She always used to sing it. Until the Internet age, I’d thought that song was gone and lost forever. Now I know where to find it. I remember that she had a flower vase in the form of a small purple ceramic cow. That cow is forever associated with her in my mind.
She had a friend who lived down the street, Pinkie Curry. Pinkie and Bucky, what a pair. They were made for each other. Pinkie was, I think, southern Virginian. I remember them dragging us kids to the rodeo, and we saw Arthur Godfrey ride his horse. I remember Pinky could play a fair guitar, and I remember a cookout where we sang country and bluegrass tunes all night beside a campfire. I learned the song “Granny’s in the Cellar” from Pinkie, and played it for my children years later:
Granny’s in the Cellar, Lordy can’t you smell her,
bakin’ biscuits on her durned old dirty stove.
In her eyes there is a matter that keeps drippin’ in the batter,
as she whistles while the <sniff> runs down her nose.
Down her nose (down her nose), down her nose,
as she whistles while the <sniff> runs down her nose.
In her eyes there is a matter that keeps drippin’ in the batter,
as she whistles while the <sniff> runs down her nose.
I remember when we got our first hi-fi record player, and we went to the store to decide what would be our first record album. Not the Beatles, not Elvis, my mom convinced Jayne and I to get “Hootenanny at the Limelight”, a bluegrass album. I loved that album, and played it constantly. At least until I discovered the Beatles and Elvis.
My father, a remarkable man whose story deserves its own separate treatment, loved boats. He had one, a boat he had built himself. Virtually every summer weekend our family would head off to Chesapeake Beach, towing the boat on its trailer. There we would spend the day boating and fishing. Afterwards, Jayne and I would swim at the beach while the folks went to the Rod N’ Reel Club for their adult diversions. We would get all sunburned and stung by the jellyfish, although that wouldn’t stop us from doing it again the next weekend.
We would then join our parents at the Rod N’ Reel club. The Rod N’ Reel club was a noisy adult playground. They had a restaurant, a bar, and about a zillion slot machines. This was in Maryland, and at that time and place slot machines were legal. Those slot machines were busy night and day, people feeding quarters and pulling that handle as fast as they could. It was loud; that many machines with that many handles being pulled generated a lot of noise. I would occasionally help my Mom feed those machines. My mom would put the quarter in and I would pull the handle. I would then watch entranced as those crazy wheels turned round and round, finally exposing a heart, a pineapple, and maybe a lucky seven. There would be the occasional payoff, just enough to entice us to keep feeding those machines.
I remember one time as my dad stood there with a bunch of quarters in his hand, silently trying to decide what to do next. My demon got a hold of me, and I thought it would be funny to slap his hand up and watch those quarters go flying. Well, I did so, and those quarters went flying all over the busy floor, under people’s feet and under slot machines. But my dad didn’t think it was very funny at all. He was pissed and let me know in no uncertain terms. I had to pay for those quarters out of my allowance.
In later years, we stopped going to Chesapeake, it was just too far away. Instead, we would haul the boat out to Occoquan, put in there on the Occoquan River, and ride out to the Potomac River. The best part about those trips was the ride out there. At the time, you got to Occoquan from Fairfax by taking route 123, a winding country road that seemed to go on forever, even though it was only fifteen miles or so. Nowadays, that road is packed with middle and upper class suburbs with a stoplight every ten feet, but back then it was non-stop country road all the way. On the way, we would pass the Dew Drop Inn. Yes, there actually was a Dew Drop Inn in Fairfax County. It was not just something in a song; it was real. That was one of the first landmarks on our trip.
After a while we would pass an old, beaten down house trailer. An old black man would be sitting on his porch, waving to every car that passed. He was an institution in those parts; they eventually wrote newspaper articles about him. Jayne and I would eagerly anticipate the chance to wave to that man, to see his smile, to see the simple pleasure he seemed to derive from complete strangers. This was the next landmark on the trip.
Then, we’d pass Lorton prison, which always intrigued us. We never saw any inmates, just fences with barbed wire and guard towers. Lorton was the last landmark before we hit a wavy stretch of 123 as it wound its way down a hill to the Occoquan River. This was our favorite part of the ride. The road had several switchbacks as it waved its way down the hill. It was like a roller coaster in your car. At several points there would be a break in the trees and we could see the town of Occoquan and the river. It was not a wide river, at points it seemed merely a creek.
Finally we came to the high point of the trip; the one lane bridge across the river and into the town of Occoquan. The nearby city of Woodbridge was named for this bridge. At this point, the Occoquan River was no more than a couple of hundred feet across. We would come up to the bridge, and wait for oncoming traffic to get across. When it was clear, we would advance onto the bridge. It was a bumpy ride, as the surface was little more than wooden beams across the span of the bridge. We always wondered if the bridge would survive our crossing. One could look to the right and see the dam, which formed the Occoquan Reservoir, a key water source for our region. One could look to the left and see the river stretching out in the distance and the town of Occoquan nestled beside it. In later years, they built a brand new bridge across the river, rerouted traffic away from the winding stretch of 123, and demolished that old one lane bridge. Such a shame.
We would let in at a small marina in the town. Then we would slowly cruise down the river to the Potomac. While the Occoquan was puny, hardly living up to the name of river, the mighty Potomac was a real river. It was wide enough to be scary, and as we turned south and headed downriver, it got wider until you could just barely see the other side. Our folk’s substitute for the Rod N’ Reel Club was Marshall Island. This was a small place on the shore with a crab house, boat docks and let-in, and a swimming area. Once again, Jayne and I would endure the sun and the jellyfish for the chance to swim and enjoy ourselves while our folks went to the crab house. Afterwards, we would join our folks in the crab house, although neither of us liked seafood and would usually end up having a hamburger or hotdog.
A crab feast at Marshall Island was a sight to see. My folks, maybe joined by friends who had come along for the ride, would convene at a long table with a huge sheet of brown paper stretched over it serving as a tablecloth. Each place at the table had various mallets and tools for crab smashing. Serving after serving of crabs would arrive, and each diner would slowly build up a huge pile of discarded crab parts. They would grab a crab, crack its shell open, and pull out the good parts. They would rip off the legs and suck the meat out of them. Of course, a key part of the process was the imbibing of copious amounts of alcohol. The feast would go on for hours. The piles of refuse would grow and grow.
My sister and I would observe these growing piles with disgust. As far as I was concerned, crabs were disgusting creatures to begin with, with their pincers, and their eyestalks, and their incomprehensible mouth parts. They were not much more than aquatic insects to my eyes, and who would want to eat insects. I never understood how someone could eat a crustacean. But eat them they did. I remember my mom saying that there was a different way of eating crabs in North Carolina, as compared to Virginia. North Carolinians seemed to think that Virginians were poisoning themselves, eating parts of a crab that they shouldn’t. Of course, Virginians felt the same way in reverse. That just convinced me, there was no right way to eat a crab. To this day, the smell of crabmeat makes me nauseous. I’ve never been a seafood fan.
It was then time for the boat ride home. At the juncture of the Occoquan and Potomac rivers, there was a small island, heavily wooded and uninhabited by humans. Jayne and I came to think of it as “our” island. I’m not sure why, except maybe that we each had our fantasies of living on this island, far separated from the human humdrum and enjoying the wilderness. We passed that island many times, and each time we would beg our dad to stop at the island. My dad always refused, but one day he relented and approached the island.
I remember that my mom was flushed with beer from the recent crab feast. We had my parent’s friends with us, Denny and Iris I think it was. We approached that island and Jayne and I were trembling with excitement. We were finally going to visit our island, to walk on it, to visit the creatures who lived there, creatures who had maybe never encountered humans before. As we got closer, the water got shallower and shallower, and finally my dad said we couldn’t get any closer. It was at that point that the boat motor stalled. He tried and tried to get it started, but it wouldn’t. We were there adrift for maybe an hour or so, my dad working furiously trying to get the motor running again. My mom was full of beer and had to pee, but there was nothing she could do. The boat didn’t have a head. She couldn’t hang it over the edge of the boat and go, not with everybody around and in broad daylight. She just had to suffer. And complain, oh lord, how she went on. As I recall, several people were suffering before it was all over. My dad eventually got the motor started and off we sailed back home. Neither Jayne nor I ever mentioned our island again.
Eventually my dad sold his boat. It was getting old, and maybe so was he. He sold it to a friend who fixed it up and took us out in it one time. But my dad couldn’t be without a boat for very long. We eventually bought a little cottage at Colonial Beach on the Potomac. He bought himself a boat, a fishing boat with an inboard Chevy engine, powerful and fast. Almost every summer weekend we would pack up the car and take the 90-minute drive down to the beach. That was how it was with our family.
Oh, the good times we had at that cottage at Colonial Beach. All the cottages there had names, and my folks decided ours would be “Miner’s Manor”. I wasn’t too thrilled about that name, but couldn’t do anything about it. There were two bedrooms; my folks slept in one, Jayne slept in the other, and I slept on the screened in porch. Yes, I hadn’t learned my lesson from Minnesott. But the screens held and the mosquitoes left me alone. My bed was a cot underneath a window leading into the living room of the cottage. There was a big fan in that window, and I used to go to sleep listening to the soothing drone of the fan.
In those days, gambling was strictly illegal in Virginia, but as I’ve said some forms of gambling were legal in Maryland. Now it just so happened that at Colonial Beach, as long as you were on shore you were in Virginia, but as soon as your feet hit the water you were in Maryland. So some smart people built a place on stilts just off the shore, so technically they were in Maryland and could have slot machines. They named this place Reno, and it was immensely popular. We went there often. Thirty years later, I had occasion to re-visit Colonial Beach and Reno was still there. The slot machines were no longer legal, but had been replaced by off-track race betting. Reno will probably still be there long after I’m gone.
Jayne and I were in our teen years by now, and my coming of age will always be associated with Colonial Beach. We hooked up with some of the townies there and hung out together. Every weekend, the first thing we would do after arriving and unpacking the car would be to walk the half-mile or so down to the boardwalk. Now, the “boardwalk” was actually a wide concrete sidewalk, stretching a few hundred yards down the beach, fronting the beach stores, game parlors, and ice cream and hot dog shops. But, everybody called it the “boardwalk”. We would hang out with our friends on the beach. At one end of the boardwalk was the dance hall, called the “Black Cat”, across from Reno The Black Cat was our night spot, with its black lights on the dance floor. We would go to the Black Cat, dance a while, then go out on the Boardwalk or ride around with friends who had started driving.
We started experimenting with drinking. By this time, our mom had moved from beer drinking to whiskey. Four Roses whiskey was her brand. I remember Jayne stealing a few ounces out of Mom’s fifth of Four Roses, replacing it with water, and going out to drink with her townie friends. I too experimented, although I never had the guts to steal my Mom’s whiskey. But my townie friends found ways to get a hold of a bottle of whisky or vodka. I remember my first drink of whiskey, sharing a bottle with a couple of friends, each desperately trying to show how we could hold our liquor. I would take a gulp, feel the burning as it went down, and feel the queasy funny feeling in my stomach afterward. That wasn’t bad. I took a bigger gulp, enduring the burn like a man. A third gulp, bigger than the last. I was waiting to start feeling it. Well, I felt it all right. I felt it all come right back up, along with the evening’s meal, all over the ground.
I found out as time went by that drinking was not for me. I couldn’t hold it. Just a few sips and I’d be plastered. I would get sick. I hated the loss of control. Others would get drunk and their speech would get slurred. Me, I’d completely lose the ability of speech altogether. I would suffer terribly from hangovers, with painful throbbing headaches. It was just not worth it. I was never completely satisfied with drinking, doing it only to fit in with my peers. I would later find other bad habits more suited to my tastes. But here was another of life’s mysteries to ponder. How could an alcoholic endure that side of drinking; the nausea, the hangovers, the loss of control? How could they do this to themselves? Questions I never found answers for. Not to this day.
Although alcohol was not my cup of tea, my sister was a different story. Even in those early years, when she was swiping whiskey from the old lady, I could see that Jayne had that demon. I worried about her, as did some of her friends. It was never as bad as our mom. But she did eventually join AA, evidence enough that she knew she had problems. I think, however, that my sister was born with my Dad’s inner strength, and our experiences enhanced that strength, enabling her to get past the obstacles that so troubled our mother.
Life went on, things continued to get worse. The shit hit the fan when I was in my early teens, just barely in high school. My mom was transporting my sister and some of her friends to school one day. She was drunk and got in a car accident. No one got hurt, but apparently it could easily have been much worse. My dad was shaken by this accident. My mom lost her license for a while over this accident. Her car was totaled, and my dad refused to replace it. Up until now, her drinking problem was little more than an embarrassment and an inconvenience. Now it was serious. Lives were threatened.
.
This seemed to mark a turning point. There was no more tenderness between my dad and her, no more trust. They were strangers living together in the same house, bound only by their children’s needs. For a while, my mom seemed to straighten herself out. She got a job, and earned the money to buy a car. She started paying Jayne and I a huge allowance (huge to us, anyway), which we had to work for, cleaning the house. But we could see the signs; she would go to work and come home drunk. It was almost continuous now, whereas before there were some days of respite between bouts of drunkenness. She was damn mean when she was drunk, although it never came to violence. But she was mean and nasty and we felt shame, shame for the spectacle she made of herself in front of our friends and neighbors. It was affecting all of us, my dad included. We hated her and we hated ourselves for hating her.
This was what it had come to, that day I let my feelings out to my friend and said I hated her and wished she would die. I wished afterwards that I could take those words back, as if voicing them somehow made them come true. I had always held those feelings inside. Now they were out, and I couldn’t stuff them back in. I later made a vow to myself that I would never let that happen again, never again would I let my true self show.
There came the day when my father was truly shaken, to the bone. He told us that our mom had spent the night with a knife under her pillow. It chilled us as it had him. He had come to a decision. She was a danger to herself and to us. She needed to be put away, to be committed for rehabilitation. I remember clearly that day we went before the judge at the Fairfax County Courthouse, my Dad, Jayne, and I. He asked us each how we felt about this. We answered with the truthfulness of fear. But, oh, how it hurt. We were betraying our mother! We were going behind her back. But we went ahead. The papers were signed, the stage was set, and the deed was done.
I don’t quite remember the sequence of events after that, only that the commitment never happened. Maybe my dad confronted my mom with the commitment papers, and she suggested an alternative. I’ll never know. I only know that she decided to go back home. We thought it was temporary, that she would somehow get well and come back to us. We had a tearful farewell at the airport gate. My mom hugged each one of us, hard, and told us how much she loved us. It seemed so final, as if she was saying goodbye forever. How could that be, she was coming back, wasn’t she? As she left through the gate we said our final goodbyes, and had our last look at our mother while she was alive.
I don’t recall how many days we were in limbo, with our mom back home without us. But one day, I was at home, hanging out with my friend, Chuck. We got a phone call. My sister answered it, and after a while she ran away to her room. My dad told me to come to the phone. Funny, I didn’t realize even then that it was the bad news we had been dreading. I was truly puzzled. But then I came to the phone, and heard my uncle Tommy, his voice strong but hard and uncompromising. All I remember him saying was “Jimmy, your mama is dead, son, your mama is gone”. I hung up the phone and ran to my room. My poor friend Chuck didn’t know what was going on. He came to my room and asked me what was wrong. I told him “She’s dead, she’s dead”, burying my head into my pillow.
The next few days were a blur as we got ready for the funeral. It was to be held in North Carolina. True to her wishes, my mom was to be buried back home, next to her mama. It never occurred to me to ask questions. I had seen the shape she was in, it seemed to me inevitable that death was the next step. Jayne was the one with the questions. How did she die, why did she die? Her “friends” had raised doubts, that maybe she had killed herself. That to me was ridiculous. She would never have done that. She was not a suicidal person. The official cause on the death certificate was heart failure. But that only created more questions. I found it difficult to talk about with my dad. All he would say is that she died from drinking. I finally decided, in my own mind, that she knew she was dying even before she left to go back home. That some medical verdict had completely undone all of our commitment papers, our legal maneuverings, our pitiful attempts at betrayal. Some doctor had told her she would die within a month, and that changed everything. That was why the commitment never happened; that was why she wanted to go home; that was why that leave-taking had seemed so final, because she knew that she would never see her children again.
We made our way back home for the funeral. Back home one final time. It was to be my last trip there for twenty years. The funeral was held in New Bern. In her coffin, she looked so old, much older than she was. She was born in 1927, and died in 1969, making her 42 years old at her death. So young. So much to go through. I tried and tried not to cry at her funeral. I didn’t want the family to see me crying. I never cried. It seems like such a simple thing, to resist crying. But all resistance does is make it harder to endure. My face would screw up and my body would convulse in one great spasm. Tears would stream out of my eyes, and I would wipe them before anyone could notice, and then wait for the next convulsion. Of course, everyone saw, they saw my raw pain and my tears and my fruitless attempts to avoid the inevitable. Decades later, when my father died, I didn’t even bother trying to resist. I cried in great big sobs. I had learned my lesson. You cry to help ease the pain.
She was buried at the old family homestead, the tobacco farm where she was born and raised. There, we walked through a corn field, a half mile or so, it seemed. We came to a copse of trees, and there was the family graveyard. She was buried there, and lies there still, even though the fields were long ago sold. That copse of trees is still there, and so is Bucky.
After the funeral, we went back to our home, our fractured family trying to pick up the pieces. Jayne began showing some of the inner strength I referred to, cooking and keeping house for my Dad and I. In the process of healing, and of getting back to our lives, we stopped going “home”. At first, we were too busy. Jayne and I were in high school and busy healing and getting on with our lives. My dad remarried, and we had a whole new family to get acquainted with. Later, I don’t know why we didn’t go back. We just didn’t. We never mentioned going back. We didn’t talk among ourselves about mom very much at all. Maybe it was like our island; once reality intruded it was just too painful to go back. Maybe it was just plain embarrassment at having avoided contact with the family. Maybe it was just that we knew we could never go back to the way it was. Every few years we would get a phone call. Kenny came up one year with his new bride. But we lost touch.
As I said, I didn’t go back for twenty years. I went to college, got married and had kids, I would occasionally think about the family. I wanted to see them, to go back. But it was always just a remote possibility, a daydream. But then one day, Kenny called. He just decided he was going to break the ice, to find out what had happened to us. He told me Uncle Billy now had cancer, and would die soon. I needed to see him before his time was up.
So I packed my wife and kids into the car and off we drove to North Carolina. Along the way I told my children stories about Uncle Billy and Aunt Joyce, and about watermelon and homemade peach ice cream and tractor rides, and pennys on the train track and smoking Lucky Strikes. We had a great reunion and saw all the family. But too much time had passed. We were no longer close; we were never to have that connection we once had. They had lived an entire lifetime in those twenty years and so had I. Cousins had grown up and married, and had their own kids, and some became grandparents. Some were fighting their own demons. We no longer knew each other. And so the last, hardest consequence of it all came to pass; we lost our family. The one thing she tried so hard to teach us to value.
So, this story comes to its close. I’ve never told the full story. Even now, there’s so much left to be said about the family, about the rest of my own life. Maybe some day I’ll do so. Some day I’ll tell my Dad’s story. I wrote this story for my children, so they could understand a little of who I am and why I am the way I am. I wrote it for myself, to try and exorcise my own demon, still slumbering beneath the surface. I wrote it for Bucky, so that she won’t be forgotten and so my children would know their grandmother ever so slightly. It is a sad, tragic story, but it was happy and joyful as well. After all, that’s what life is all about.