Sunsets and Silencers

"Lexicography" An Excerpt

By: Bobi Conn

All It Takes

For you, Dad,
is to give up your
fists and your belt.
No more kicking
my mother as she screams
in front of the coal stove,
no ripping her shirt
open as your children
stare from their bedroom
doors, no dragging

her by her hair

down a gravel road
as the birds sing
their requiem,
as the sun beats
your fist that beats
her back, her face,
the sun that beats
your other fist that
tears her hair while
her voice tears
leaves from the trees
while we watch,
and we watch,

not knowing
if we should cry
or like you say,

just eat our
fucking waffles.

***
But as I grew older, I began to understand guilt, how it turns on the mind, taking a new life of its own. There are some things you should understand about this man, the man who fathered me:
1957

He looks like almost every other baby ever born: red-faced, hairless, eyes closed. His cries pierce the quiet country desolation and scatter among the last brittle oak leaves of winter. Spring is coming.

1968

Middle child syndrome. Somewhere among the cows and the chickens, the last of the hogs and two stray dogs. Not as pious as the eldest, a daughter, nor as charming as the youngest, another son. Poor eyesight and a buzz cut. Nothing special, really.

1973

Pulls a knife on the kid at school who had taunted him for his thick horn-rimmed glasses. Two weeks later, drops out of high school, having almost completed the tenth grade.

1977

Marries my mother. Soon, she is pregnant but miscarries. That (boy, girl?) would have been my older sibling, the one to lead the way through childhood. Sometimes I envy that early departure.

1979

On the longest day of the year, I am born. Like many other babies, I am colicky and sensitive to over-stimulation. Like many men of that time and place, he prefers a smoky bar to our cramped trailer.

1980

Four days after my birthday, my mother has another child, a son. He will grow to have a head of luxurious curls and a problem with prescription drugs. The Baby Syndrome: never accountable, never held accountable. Kind-hearted and loving, but there's little room for a man with those qualities in our home or our town. He follows the path laid before him and I will come to wonder whether he can give up the pills, or if he'll just give up.

1984

Running through my Granny's field, which is where my father spent his childhood, our mother and my brother and I slip down into the creek, which is where I spent a great deal of my childhood. We must not cry. She peeks up and when my father's truck passes, we clamber out and continue toward Granny's house, where we will be safe for about an hour. She and my grandfather drive us to the other grandparents' house, where my mother spent her childhood. We return the next day.

1986

Dad has lost his job and Mom works for the city. I'm in the gifted program at school, but I'm the only one from the poorest part of the county. I go to special classes on Thursdays, along with the kids from the better elementary schools. They mock my clothes, my glasses, my hair, my name. I learn Spanish and I come to quietly hate the other children. I dread going there as much as I dread going home, where my father will accuse my mother of dressing well for someone else at her new job. I pray on the bus that he will not be home, or he will be in the barn with a friend, taking whatever he takes that puts him in a tolerable mood.

1989

We visit my father on the sixth floor of the local hospital, where he goes for some help. That is the crazy ward and he spends his days painting plaster-of-paris fruits that have faces. He chooses soft pastels, except for the lips, which are always a hard red. The mouths look like those of insidious funhouse clowns. Diagnosed with mild schizophrenia, he is released after two weeks. We return home to him. There are roses for my mother. I wonder what mild schizophrenia means.

1991

Our mother finally leaves and takes us with her. Twelve years of abuse is, apparently, all she can take. For the next fifteen years, I have nightmares in which she returns.

1993

He comes to pick us up for every-other-weekend visitation. Asks to borrow a garden hose and my mother refuses. For the first time, I step between them as he raises his fist.

2006

Almost a year passes without us speaking. He calls on the longest day of the year but I do not answer. Everywhere I go, I see men who look like he may have in an alternate universe: serious, dark-haired, wearing glasses. Working class and more or less sober. Not terribly successful, but functioning. Driving drivable cars to livable homes. Having lunch with their daughters on occasion.

2007

Father's Day comes and goes. Nobody calls him because he doesn't have a phone.

***

It didn't bother me too much, hearing his attack on the church, though I knew that it was retaliation for something my Granny had done or said, disapproving of his booze, his pills, his fighting-man ways. I was her favorite and she made no attempt to hide that fact from anyone. Two years later, she would give me her mother's jewelry box that still plays music, cradling the crown-shaped pin set with the birthstones of my great-grandmother's twelve children. My older cousin hated me for that. She was older and did not understand why she shouldn't be entrusted with the jewelry box. I'm not sure, either, but I think that it might be because Granny thought I might treasure it in some way no one else could.

When I became a young adult, Granny gave me her kitchen table. Again, it had belonged to her mother, and it also served as the place where the adults had eaten every Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and birthday dinner since I was born. It was the same table at which my father had eaten those meals, along with every other meal, from the time he was born. My Granny ate and prayed at that table every day of her life. My son eats there now. The gift of the table upset even more of the family, as my father informed me, since his adult siblings each had expected to receive it in my grandparents' will, if not before their deaths.

But at this particular moment, I do not own the table or the jewelry box. I am listening to my father as he tells me that I must walk the half-mile to Granny's and tell her that she is a whore. I say yes, I will do that. This task is not optional, just as most things are not. I understood that I did not own the word no.

What does that word mean? What do we accomplish when we speak it? Refusal: I do not accept this dubious gift. Self-protection: You may not.... Denial: I am not. Most children learn the word at a young age, as they test the boundaries their parents set for them, the boundaries the physical world imposes upon them. As frustrating as it is to accommodate the child's no, that word is essential. A man once asked a woman, Why did you let that happen? She considered the question carefully and finally responded, I never learned how to say no. No can be enough to prevent a rape, or at least to vindicate the woman who sits in the courtroom, asserting her right to the privacy of her body. No functions in a way that please don't never has, in a way that tears and cries never will.

***

Walking down that one-lane gravel road, I think I understand the word whore. I had heard it before, growing up in a home with few attempts to censor the vulgarities of the world. I had probably already heard it screamed at my mother, who never denied any curse, but seemed to think that her motherly arms would somehow protect her face, her self, from what rained down.

It was not my word, but it came to be mine before many others. It was roughly akin to little slut, which I learned at the age of nine. At the age of 13, I entered the tumult of puberty. Throughout that summer, my father and his girlfriend took us swimming at a lake in the poorest neighboring county. The unemployed men who fished there or drank there in the afternoons would say things that I did not hear. One told my father that he must be proud of me, with my fine little body. I did not know why we left so early that day, but I found out soon that I had done something wrong to solicit that attention -- I dove into the water repeatedly and gracefully, as I had learned to do by trial and error alone. That careful falling could serve no end other than to seduce the grandfather at the lake, so it had to stop. I stopped my lovely falling, I tried to hide myself better.

That fall, I spent one night with his girlfriend's niece who was a year younger than me but already had the body of a woman. Her stepfather demanded that I sit next to him and the niece, my friend, went to her room. I sat quietly, pulling my hand away from him again and again. As her mother drove me home the next day, she crowed over the man she had been with the night before, told us how they danced all night long and that she was leaving her husband.

Since she was leaving him, I thought I might as well let her know that her husband had a problem with young girls. My friend was angry; she didn't want me to say anything. A week later, I came home from school and found a state trooper waiting for me in the living room. He asked me careful questions as my mother and stepfather sat there, listening. After he left, my mother asked her own questions and I quickly learned some important things. I should have called someone to come get me. I should not have been wearing shorts. I should not have even been awake.

By the following summer, the situation had evolved dramatically. At first, all of the adults had insisted that I testify in court, that I prevent anything from happening to another girl at his hands. Then, like my mother's questions amplified, dissent crept in: Why was she awake? What was she wearing? She wanted the attention anyway.... Finally, my friend's mother decided she wasn't leaving her man and that he hadn't done anything wrong. My father's girlfriend didn't want to talk about any of it. Those who did spoke loudly.

As my father drove me to court on my fourteenth birthday, everything became clear. I learned that I had humiliated my father. That he was going to kill that man. He would kill that man and what the fuck was wrong with me anyway? Did I want to spend all my life acting like a goddamn whore in a goddamn trailer?

I had never kissed a boy, but I understood what I had done.

I sat in the full courtroom not far from the man. The prosecutor asked me if I was ready and I calmly told him: I have nothing to say. Within minutes, I sat in the judge's chambers, surrounded by men asking questions and making declarations: Has someone threatened you? You can't do this -- think of the other girls he might hurt. Everyone's waiting for you, you have to talk.

For the first time in my life, I refused. I told them: I have nothing to say. And then, I said nothing.

***

When I was sent to my Granny's, I was too young to refuse anything. I hated my father for sending me to her with that word, and I hated myself for knowing I would speak it to her. The alternative, though, was unbearable.

***

Switches

Black locust branches bite
and it's so easy to tear
the skin of a child.

***

Black locust trees produce really strong wood that's great for posts, but the branches are covered with hard thorns. My brother and I had to pick up the branches that fell from the three black locust trees before my mother mowed the yard. There was really no way to pick one up without pricking yourself. One of my adopted stray cats climbed the largest black locust tree once and mewed herself silly. I didn't understand some of the finer points about cats at that point, so I climbed the tree to where she was, between ten and fifteen feet off the ground, and carried her down. Between her claws and the thorns, I was battered by the time I reached the yard again. As soon as I put her down, the cat climbed back up into the tree and mewed loudly. As an adult, I haven't been much of a cat person.

I use the word poor as if it were a simple word, as if you should understand. Being poor, though, will always be married in my mind to the other, intangible sorts of poverty that infused my childhood. The large black locust tree became a site for my knowledge of poverty when my mother, my brother and I crushed aluminum cans beneath it. I started to stomp them onto one of the cinder blocks that formed our back steps, since it was easier than doing it on the wet ground. My mother corrected me, saying we needed to get some of the mud into the cans so they would weigh more when we took them in. I didn't know what exactly that meant about us, but I remember feeling ashamed when the large, dirty-looking man weighed our bags of cans. Surely he knew that part of the weight was from something other than aluminum. I avoided looking at my mother's face, hoping she wouldn't also have to feel the shame if she didn't see it in me. After all, we needed the money to buy milk.

The black locust tree stood outside our kitchen window. Sometimes I would stare at it as I ate, thinking how uninviting it was. Not the weeping willows of my fantasies, where I imagined that one day I would live with the tree-spirits, despite never having been told a story about tree-spirits or, at that point, having seen an actual weeping willow. We ate like poor people in that kitchen. Lots of baloney sandwiches, lots of Kool-aid. Sometimes, when Dad wasn't home and we had very little, the three of us would share a can of beans for dinner. When Dad was there, we ate cautiously, hoping not to arouse his ire. That took some finesse, though, since there really was no predicting his anger.
The one and only time I ever heard my brother defy him was during dinner, when he was six years old. We were eating, but suddenly, my brother was crying. I'm sure my father had either ridiculed him or harassed him for some little thing, but he demanded to know why he was crying. I was proud and horrified when my brother responded, Sometimes I just get so sick of you. We all sat in perfect silence for a moment, which my father ended with a sweep of his arm, sending his plateful of food and glassful of milk into a kitchen cabinet and onto the floor. My brother wailed and my father thundered out of the kitchen, ordering our mother to clean up the mess.

Poverty was the cheap meat we ate with boxed macaroni and cheese, but it was also the food on the floor. It was the picture I found of my father's handiwork, a picture he took after he tore the kitchen faucet loose and hurled it through the kitchen window. It was the coal stove spewing fine black soot onto our clothes, into our hair and our noses; it was the fire dying in the coal stove; it was my mother slammed into the coal stove; it was me spilling the ashes from the coal stove as my father screamed at me because I could not hear what he said the first time. It was the ear infections that kept me from hearing every first insult, every first command. It was the electric going out during every storm, but it was my father turning the meter upside-down so it would run backward, so we could pay the bill. It was the creekwater we couldn't drink, the water we mixed into Kool-aid. It was watching my dad kill a dog by the creek. Watching him whip a dog with his belt. Watching him dump a dog's body in the woods. It was riding in his truck to another man's house, where he left me sitting as he took his rifle to the man's front door. It was the truck getting repossessed and the bank's men loading the truck with trash at gunpoint before they could drive it away.

It was complicated. It refuses to be defined.

Bobi Conn lives in Kentucky with her two children and does part-time teaching and editing. She enjoys writing in several genres, including adaptations to stage/screen, literary analysis, and creative nonfiction. She is currently working on creative nonfiction in an invented form, with content inspired by both her academic and creative passions.