Sad-Proofing

My brother doesn’t hear what I hear, the sound of a coal train going away from the hollow, leaving Neon to the south. TW is busy glad-handing Quiller Yontz, a stonecutter he wraps an arm around by a spray of chrysanthemums in the shape of a horseshoe, someone’s idea of humor since my father died by a stroke of bad luck. Thomas William Wolff, M.D., my older brother, is nodding at something Quiller says as if the world of limestone and sweat is always a work in progress. It’s his town, my brother, his river of light the rest of us are paying to go down, which makes the rest of us passengers if not cargo. I tell myself to picture something pleasing—like my boy Charlie who I took to see The Wizard of Oz last night. In movie light, Charlie had looked up at Dorothy Gale and Toto and the black-and-white-then-Technicolor-then-black-and-white-again world unfolding as he chomped away at his popcorn like any four-year-old.

There are bullies, usually men, who will stand in the parlor of a funeral home and speak in loud whispers that excuse everything. Adultery. Greed. Pettiness. Betrayal. Death. My brother TW Wolff is a bully who delivers babies; has for a decade now. He travels the hills, in all weather, and on horseback—he owns a car but says he gets places with a horse that cars can’t go. TW sees himself like that: a knight-errant hero hoisting himself into the saddle.

Heroes can be scary, too. When my brother looks in my direction, I lower my eyes from habit. He wears a vested suit, dark blue. The chain of his pocket watch and the fob fall against the blue as strands of gold not unlike the hair of Mother when she was young, and mine when I was a child. My brother’s hair is freshly cut. Bleached strings of cigarette smoke rise from the fingers of his hand. He looks back at Quiller. They lean in to what is being said by the circle of whisperers they’re part of by the gaudy horseshoe-spray of white flowers I suppose are mums.

Lipstick reds creep across the oriental rug in the parlor where I sit beside my older sister America. I call her Sissy or Sis. Our parents called her Merkie—America if she had faltered in some way. She’s broad-shouldered for a woman, my sister, and there is a tough patience to her even with her father in a coffin on a bier in the front of a room of flowers and standing men.

Merkie had been entrusted with my son after I was taken away to the sanitarium. Today, she has decided to leave him at the house with relatives from Whitesburg, saying that he’ll learn soon enough about death and dying. No one asked for my opinion, which is pretty normal.

The unreal man in the closed casket at the front of the room is my father too, but what I think and feel are beside the point since I’m on furlough from Eastern State for being crazy, or what TW gets to say is crazy. Three years is a long time to be gone from home, put away for something that might have gotten you thrown in jail for a year (if that) if you’d simply been born a man. A pissed-off woman scares people, it turns out. Scared people are dangerous people.

Our father burned to death in a field fire—I imagine he was cutting brush, working alone—but the details hadn’t been passed my way. I had never called Daddy anything but Daddy. I knew he doted on TW, what parent wouldn’t? But my brother called Daddy awful things behind his back. Mostly a sonofabitch—one quick word like a stake through the heart. He made no effort to meet Daddy even part of the way toward peace or to shoulder some portion of the guilt he asked our father to drag around after the death of our mother who insisted on carrying her last risky pregnancy to term when she had been told not to.

I don’t want to despair. And thoughts of my brother TW are little paths to despair.

I struggle again to retrieve the picture of my son Charlie at the Neon. It’s hard to do, but I’ve learned after hours of practice sitting alone. I may have always been suited to solitude to some degree, to flights of fancy and imagination, but what sparked my ability to conjure up the sounds of a creek or of a crow settling on a branch, was Daddy putting me in a closet and locking the door when he found out that I was pregnant by a married man.

The name of the game is: don’t look at anyone and try to decipher the meanings of words. Go for tone of voice and fill in your own meanings. I call it “sad-proofing.” Really, it’s an exercise in controlling the world’s ability to confuse or control. If the object of the exercise is to keep me from reacting to the cruelty around me, then I’m getting better. I’m “gaining skill,” as the doctor at Eastern State would call it. He would have two good-sized orderlies tie me to a chair, not tightly but secure, and then raise the chair over their heads and walk like litter bearers. He’d walk along to one side and rattle off questions like What are you thinking? What are you seeing? and ask that I close my eyes and picture a river in summertime and focus all my “reactive energy” on holding that scene in the mind.

At first the orderlies “floated” me like that for a few minutes, then for half an hour, and slowly I came to accept what was out my control. It frightened me at first. I begged them to stop. Once in a while they dropped me and I was bruised or forced to experience falling and not being able to catch yourself. But the doctor said that these exercises some might have termed torture would help, and they did. That’s the best thing I can say about my time at Eastern: I can mask wanting to react until I don’t even feel like I want to react anymore. The last sticking point seems to be if the picture in my mind is of my son Charlie and I can’t see him except as someone dissolving. It’s not hard not to react to that.

Of course the exercise is practiced differently in different settings. Say, in a closet. It turns out that if you don’t want to be present in the life you made for yourself or that others made for you, you can pass into a place of your own making. If you can’t, you hurt and strike out. Then of course they give you shock treatments and you forget everything for months at a time.

The exercise is like listening to the sound of a train passing when there is no train.

That’s what I’m doing as I sit staring at the oriental then at Daddy’s buffed-shiny coffin then at the smoke from the cigarettes in the hands of the men standing at the front of the room: getting control of a desire to get up and walk over to TW and hit him in the face and keep it up, ruining the flesh and the shadow of the man, until I draw blood or he falls lifeless on the floor.

Maybe Daddy knew how his son was and stayed out of his way. Maybe he knew about TW being a bully, and maybe he didn’t. Daddy hadn’t been all that loving himself.

My father had locked me in an upstairs closet with a slop jar of a thing to shit and piss in and only water (and not much of that) and then made me stay in there for three mostly-dark days, after which time I was let out and given a beating. I may have reminded Daddy of my mother to the extent that we had the same color hair and same mean temper, with or without provocation. I never knew what to make of either of them. My mother and father each lived off the fury of the other in a way that spoke to the world, and what it said wasn’t so much a set of words adding up to reasons for this or that but a feeling that, deep down, they nursed a grudge.

The men at the front of the parlor are taking seats like something is about to start.

TW is coming this way.

He casts his eyes on first this one then the next, stopping to pat a shoulder or arm, before he takes a seat beside Molly, his wife, who is seated next to America. When he sits, the music commences like the funeral director is taking his cues from TW, the King of Eastern Kentucky, and the rest of us had better get with it and do likewise or be prepared to face the consequences.

People tell me all the time, You’re so lucky to have a brother like TW. I think: Luck has nothing to do with it. I never say this out loud. What good would that do? And lots of folks have siblings they’re proud of or who love them enough not to close the car door on their hands. All those folks, though, would never last a day in Eastern: if they actually felt themselves being wheeled down a hall on a gurney after some mysterious treatment had just befallen them, they could probably handle the initial shock of it. People handle a lot of strange things. But the thing is, they don’t handle the total loss of control something like that announces. They just don’t. Because to handle that, you have to want to handle it. You need a reason to keep going. One overriding idea you’ll want to have in easy reach when you emerge from the fog of treatment.

And you can never, ever let go of that. Not even when you wake up the next day and feel a tenderness between your legs—down there—and know that something has happened to you.

Sure, I want free. I remember the first time I knew I wasn’t free. I was sitting in church with my father and mother and my older brother. The front of the church was brick and limestone. What I knew that they don’t tell you in school or even as part of the Sunday services is that my people had quarried the stone for that church. The cross on the stone was someone else’s contribution, but the limestone it was anchored to was a gift of the Wolff family. We weren’t the symbols of faith and redemption, sin and resurrection after death. We were the stone of Letcher County brought forth by living hands that bled from the work—or the men of the Wolff family were that stone. The women were the earth they tore it out of with their bare hands.

Of course my father’s hard, calloused hands allowed my brother’s hands to be soft.

Daddy invested everything in TW’s education so that no son of his had to dig stone.

I can think these things because I don’t say them out loud. I’d rather not have to think at all, which would be like driving a car in the hills before first light: you feel the road and hear the engine and the wheel is in your hands and no amount of luck of thinking makes what happens, happen. You make it happen. The headlights are on or off because you turn them on or leave them off. And without thinking. You, for sure, don’t think: I’m a Wolff and Wolffs are the ones who bring up the limestone that builds towns in the middle of nowhere. You just drive. Pretty soon you’re at a house where they have in hand the folding money and coins they exchange for something perishable. Eggs. Butter. Milk. Cheese. You don’t think about delivering what folks need that day and the next, you just do it. And, sooner or later, it’s who you are.

I’m not free. But I don’t dwell on it. With any luck I might get free at some point.

I might borrow back my canary-in-a-coal-mine yellow Model A Ford and head out for some exotic place in one of the directions of the Cross of Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior.

Someone who loves my brother—his wife Molly Wolff—is patting his leg then leaving her hand on his thigh. Someone who knows TW for who and what he is. Someone who has interceded on my behalf recently so that I might take my son to see The Wizard of Oz.

I can’t hear what she is saying, but I’m sure it has something to do with how he should behave toward someone weaker and less fortunate. For years, Molly has been a buffer between TW and the rest of Neon. She seems sure of what she’s doing. But she may never know what it’s like to be the focus of his controlling nature to the point where one life is taken from you and another handed back. So far, she appears to have no agenda other than to see that kindness prevail once in a while. I understand her trying to make being married to a powerful man, to this powerful man, something she doesn’t have to make excuses for. The funny thing is that loving my brother Thomas might be seen as aiding and abetting the part of us that nurtures fear to get what it wants. Maybe Molly is asking TW who sent the horseshoe of chrysanthemums and if referencing luck in that way is someone “trying to rub it in” with regard to Daddy’s accident. Whatever the answer, if that is what she’s asking, TW has made no effort to have it removed.

And if he wanted it gone, it would be gone.

A swath of flowers is at the head of a freshly-dug grave in the cemetery above the Junction, almost as many flowers as I recall seeing around the casket. I say “almost” because the horseshoe isn’t there. What I haven’t told you about TW is that even after standing up to resistance or disrespect, he practices standing up to the appearance of resistance or disrespect.

Obedience Harlow is standing to my right during the final remarks graveside. Beady, as she likes to be called, keeps looking up at first one then another man. She’s a few years younger than I am, and it’s clear that she’s on the prowl. “Hunting a man,” they used to call it and may still if things haven’t altered more than they appear to in the years I’ve been in the sanitarium.

When the preacher stops talking, Beady says, I like your dress, Abigail. Gray is your color. Then, most likely because I don’t speak right up, she adds: I’m sorry about your daddy.

Beady and I went to school together as far as she went. She dropped out before graduation. Married a miner. Divorced or he died—I can’t remember just then which is the case.

Beady has never been part of the better circle. Maybe, like most women her age, she hasn’t given up hopes of joining those ranks. She is dressed in a off-white dress that doesn’t hide her best features. Has on the sort of shoes that require thought to walk in, especially on a hill.

That’s something you can never understand if you haven’t been a child of privilege: not caring what others think but dressing and acting as if you do care. TW is an expert in matters like these. A veteran liar, some would say. Whoever sent the horseshoe of mums might say that.

I take Beady’s arm and say Thank you. Then I ask, Are you going to the house?

I’m talking a woman of a certain age now. Rejection staggers us, but we get up and go on. She looks for a moment as if she’s about to say yes or of course but stops herself, and then she asks if I think it’s all right if she comes. Like I could give permission. I tell her I’ll ask my brother and let go of her arm and start to walk over to where TW and Molly are standing.

I know to wait for TW to stop looking down into the open grave.

He looks into my face, and then I see he has actually been crying.

What is it? he asks in a taut voice that says he wants not to get upset more than is necessary. I recognize trying to hold yourself together. I say, Beady asked to come to the get-together, and then I point to her standing where I left her. But just now she’s talking to a man and seems occupied. Quiet and stillness fragrance the fall air over and around Daddy’s grave—or it may be the various perfumes mixing under cedars and pines that shade the family cemetery.

My brother wipes his eye and looks in Beady’s direction. In the light of the hillside her red hair glows more than I had noticed. She has a nice figure—for her age, as they say.

TW assumes whatever it is men assume about women like Beady, like me, and then speaks. Let me help you down the hill, he says and takes my arm. Molly is beside him. My sister-in-law is wearing the sort of sensible shoes that don’t call for the careful steps Beady’s shoes require. Molly smiles in my direction like I know something she isn’t saying because she doesn’t have to, and then the three of us walk down the hill to where the cars have been left.

I am afraid of my brother. I was afraid of my father, too. Each night I was in that closet, he would come to the door and listen. I would hear footsteps then breathing through the thin pine closet door. Daddy did what he could to keep me from knowing that he cared about whether I lived or died. With Daddy in the ground, the clock is ticking on my furlough.

I had feared him, my father, but heard him worrying certainty in those moments he stood listening. Cruel men rule over us, shaping a world we barely recognize. We take their hard or soft hands as Molly takes TW’s on the way down the hill.

We tell ourselves it’s to keep from falling and being seen as weak and less than beautiful.

Strength and beauty have nothing to do with it.

At Eastern there is an attendant named Butch. A colored man, Butch keeps to himself. An outsider among outsiders. Sometimes they send him to bring me to the day room or cart me here or there on the locked ward. And often enough that he seems to have gotten used to me or enough so that we speak. He doesn’t hold forth about the world, not like I’ve heard most men do, but he’ll report the time of day or where we are in the calendar year that I take for a small kindness. He may know that an outsider lives and dies on those kindnesses.

The last thing Butch said to me the day TW picked me up from the hospital stayed with me. Butch said, Watch yourself in the world, Miss Wolff,  like he knew better than I did what can be taken from you. And with little warning. Often by someone who didn’t need to act that way but did so because the opportunity presented itself. Butch is about as close to a protector as I have, but I won’t think too much about that today. I’ll just do what I’m told for now. Until I can see my way clear to get some distance. I know better than to think I’m Dorothy Gale and blessed with Hollywood good fortune, but I know a few things about men and their Emerald cities.

Read Roy Bentley’s short story “Blood Memory.”

Blood Memory

My farrier wants to bring his handcuffs. My sister Abby is on furlough from Eastern State Hospital and has to be taken back. And the likelihood is that she will fight going. If she weren’t so explosive or hadn’t shot at a man with a .45, running him up a telephone pole to escape her, we might not have to be talking handcuffs. I tell him I’ll let him know. I’m not sure yet about the timing of any attempt to return her to Lexington. Daddy has only been in the ground a few days, and I’m not sure when would be a good time. I do know that I’ll need help, however.

Joe Samuelson is the last of his family trained to do the work he does. Joe lives in a house I provide and takes care of my mare Irish Dancer. He has a talent for getting people to tell him things. His wife Tarfia is our maid. Joe also has a brother-in-law who has been keeping an eye on my sister Abigail at Eastern State. I pay Joe a stipend on top of his usual salary for work like this, and he’s worth every Lincoln-head cent. Joe is amazing, especially given that the guy only has one arm (which is too bad, but I did the amputation myself and so I know it could not have been helped). Abby may have seen mistreatment, judging by her condition since I brought her back on furlough for the funeral, but that mistreatment is likely only the usual unkindness common in asylums in the South. Staff are kept in check with Joe’s help. I don’t worry a great deal, though Abby has been in the care and keeping of Eastern State for several years. We’re in the stables. Joe’s red hair shines like firelight in the dim barn as I follow him to curry Dancer. The stables are shadowy. If I were a student at the University of Kentucky, as I was not all that long ago, a student who taught grade school and was bettering himself by taking literature courses, I might say the stables wear night robes. I might think it, but I’d never say it out loud.

Dancer is in the middle stall. Joe opens a red halved-door on black iron hinges and swings it wide. The air swills soft hinge sounds. My horse knows me. She comes over to have her head scratched and to nudge my right hand to see if I’ve brought her an apple, which I normally do. I scratch the smudge of a blaze in the center of her head as Joe begins his work.

Joe and I don’t say anything, which makes me think that our relationship is one based on a series of rituals and cues like those Dancer and I share. He doesn’t need me in here right now, Joe, and I should excuse myself and let him work, saying that I’ll be at the house and maybe he’d like to stop up, but I take some time before I pat Dancer’s stare and turn to leave.

Joe is as close to a friend as I have, but what passes between us is mostly of a business nature. A hundred years ago in Kentucky a quarter of the population owned men like Joe. Free blacks even owned slaves themselves. The Louisville Examiner would have brimmed with anti-slavery invective I’d most likely have agreed with whether I defended it or not. And eastern Kentucky was where John Gregg Fee established anti-slavery churches and schools before they ran him out of the state in 1859 after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.

Maybe it’s a kind of blood memory, the way I see things, but it’s in the history too. Kentucky has always been a house divided when it comes to Negroes. The one-drop rule is the custom but an intelligent man—especially a doctor in 1940—knows the lie. Blood is blood.

I’ve read Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, but I’ve also read Marcus Garvey who just died this past summer. I’ve gone to Louisville and seen the musical Show Boat where a husband pricks his finger and swallows a drop of his mixed-race wife’s blood to avoid a charge of miscegenation. I see hypocrisy and try to live with it without making myself sick.

Joe isn’t talking until he stops brushing my horse. His empty half-sleeve flutters.

So, bring the handcuffs? he asks.

I can report from ten years of brief conversations that Joe sees the bigger picture: how Dancer is essential to my being able to see patients in bad weather because the roads—where there are roads—are primitive. Rudimentary. Both of us believe in horses and don’t want to give up that connection to a past of animal and man working together on mornings when coal smoke floats in the valley like the first breath of a newborn in winter in a wood-heated cabin. Each of us is fond of a good road. We have had that conversation, agreeing there are things about mountain roads that don’t meet the requirements of a road: Creek beds. Rivulets. Paths through the underbrush. Joe knows what it takes these days: A serviceable horse. A good listener who can keep his mouth shut. A pair of handcuffs.

I say, Better to have them and not need them.

. . . . .

I’m a mountain doctor who was first a teacher. Grade school. Quentin Wolff was my daddy. And according to John Rocque’s Map of London, 1746, a 24-sheet folding map (John Rocque handled the surveying and John Pine engravings considered among the best examples of 18th century British cartography), my great-grandfather Benjamin Cann Wolff grew from infancy to boyhood to manhood in a flyblown bar-and-bordello by the Thames called The Paradise Hotel. Ben Cann first came into Kentucky with Daniel Boone around 1775 just after the Siege of Boonesborough and Boone’s court-martial and acquittal. Reynolds Wolff, Ben’s son, carried a copy of the John Rocque map of London on his person for years, unfolding it to point to the section of Georgian London where his father grew up.

That’s where Paradise is, he said—or so my father Quentin reported.

The story goes, Ben Cann worked ships that sailed between the Colonies and England.

He signed on as a stevedore in the port of Charleston. Why my great-grandfather then journeyed from Charleston to North Carolina where he met Boone is anyone’s guess, but the decision resulted in his being in attendance at Boone’s forced departure from Boonesborough. The two were together, thereafter, in Kah-ten-tah-the—Wyandot for the area between the Ohio and Licking rivers. And Ben Cann Wolff was not a young man when he fought off the Shawnee. Stories depict Ben Wolff as lanky but a man of surprising ardor. His lethality was not his chief grace, however. Ben Cann was someone with a full purse and a talent for enlisting aid who oversaw the clearing of land that became the Junction and much of the original construction in that part of Letcher County. He built the town of Neon or caused it to be built, the stone to be quarried and virgin timber felled. (The girth of many of the trees brought down was said to measure a dozen standing men’s outstretched arms and hands touching in a circle around the base.) The work was done by the men Boone left him or, more accurately, who elected to follow anyone but the infamous alcoholic frontiersman when he moved on to Missouri. As a result, Boone’s men became his men. My great-grandfather’s eldest, my grandfather Reynolds Wolff, took it from there and finished Neon, handing off to my father Quentin who handed off to me. You could say the Wolffs know how to make something of what is handed them. You could say that some Wolffs take care of things that no one credits them for having taken care of.

. . . . .

What do I see if I step out from my office and look up and down the main street in the town my grandfather built and my father kept running? I see a town open at both ends, telephone poles nailed against the gray of future. Across the street from my office in Wolff’s Drugstore display window I see stair-stepped copies of Life and the Louisville Examiner—not my idea, but it may be a splendid notion for all I know—and a poster promising “Miss Neon Contest, First Prize One Ton of Coal from the Elkhorn Coal Company.” Farther up the street I can make out the white door to the offices of my lawyer French Hawk, Esq., who worked out a loan for me (and Molly) to build the new house, a loan paid out from my sister’s portion of “disbursements for rents, money received from sale or royalties collected from coal mined,” a loan arranged by the Letcher County Court after they declared Abby an Incompetent. The loan was for the entire cost of our house: $10,000. Mine #2 alone brought in that much a year. Having someone declared an Incompetent has its benefits, though the doing of it is another thing entirely.

Most nights on evening hillsides above Main Street, I see generations of miners and other workingmen in coveralls strip and wash up for dinner. Inside the row houses I know that biscuits steam and gravy from hog meat scents the cramped rooms. I’m welcome in most of the houses.

In town, someone may drop a nickel in a red Coca-Cola machine and slide his purchase out and up and dislodge its cap with a fizz-pop. Railroad men in from the west of the state might be walking the wood sidewalks to the Wolff House where they bed down with whatever lonely woman they can. Maybe I’d have been better served to be a railroad man, looking at the time in the dim and whispering sweet lies about Lexington and the land beyond the hills of Letcher County, but I was born a Wolff and as such there is a great deal more expected of me. I’m the miracle man for my people, an FDR with working legs and a horse named for the country they wish their forefathers had never left and what they do on Saturday nights to forget that life is hard and brief. I don’t say I’m a good man. I’ve done some good.

My sister Abigail is my cross to bear for the simple reason no one else can.

Abby has a history of violence. As her older brother I learned not to turn my back on her nascent rage. Her first marriage ended in divorce after she held a knife to the throat of her then-husband M.O. and took one good swipe at ending his life. M.O. Strong was just what his name said he was—a strapping six-footer with oversize forearms and a threatening manner—but M.O. failed to keep his attention focused on his wife after a quarrel about the temperature of some scrambled eggs she had served. He had gotten up from the table and stormed out of the kitchen. She’d followed—the story was told by their daughter Rose who had gone for help after her father fell back bleeding. According to Rose, M.O. must not have seen Abby approach because the much shorter woman somehow got the drop on the larger man on a set of stairs. Whatever the case, she sliced his throat with a kitchen knife. What saved her was that M.O. was brought to me. I stitched up a laceration that had missed any significant blood vessels and hadn’t penetrated the trachea. After 17 silk sutures I told M.O. that if he wouldn’t press charges I’d make sure that my family allowed him a divorce and threw in the cost of the materials and labor for a new house.

I recall that he sat listening, shamed by his failure to mount anything like a response or afraid the story might be attached to him like a bad haircut or a rumor judged to be more or less true and as hard to fend off as a riotous, much younger wife. M.O. got up from the examination table. Dressed in his bloody clothes. Leaving my office, he said, Sounds about right.

That was not the first (nor was it the last) time Abby answered an injury.

Nor was there one in particular that alerted our family to the possibility she might do harm beyond what even a family with considerable resources can quiet. The next year when she ran Dan Wright up a phone pole and emptied a magazine of forty-five-caliber ammunition in his direction, there was little to be done but commit her. Either that or jail since she was reloading when a bystander struck her with a handy river stone and knocked her unconscious.

Not long after Abby had been committed to Eastern I was alone in my office following the particularly tough delivery of a miner’s first child. I was thinking of our mother and how she read to us from the Bible. I can see how afraid we were—America, our other sister, Abby and me—and I could feel myself stiffen at the description of the End Times, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and some last battle on the plains of the Holy Land our mother said would involve so much bloodshed that the blood would be to the level of the bridles of the horses.

. . . . .

The day that I tell Abby to think about getting her things together, to head back to Eastern, begins with her coming down to breakfast with her housecoat open and nothing on under it. And the flash of her reminds me of a time when, like most women, she had a hopeful womb and ambitions to marry.

Molly is serving breakfast and motions for Abby to close her robe. Abby closes the robe and sits, saying, I am ready like she is going to rise and go to the movies with me and Molly and catch a new show at the Neon. Because I want to fill my head with something other than my sister this morning I try and recall the movie I saw them lettering on the marquee this morning. It stars Henry Fonda—I remember that much—and that the Henry Fonda movie replaces The Wizard of Oz, which I’m told sold out several nights last week. I can’t think of the most recent movie’s title, but it will come to me.

After we eat, Abby heads upstairs. Peacefully. No hoopla. No ruckus. I’m not buying it. I tell Molly what I’m planning. I say, I’ll drive her over to Lexington, drop her, and drive back this evening. And Molly nods. Says, Whatever you want to do.

I kiss my wife on the head and smell the ashes from the morning’s cook-fire in her hair.

I wonder if the clothed me will ever get accustomed to the naked me Molly has always exposed. Outside, I head to fetch Joe who sees me coming and waves with his good arm and waits, wiping that hand on a rag that hangs from the belt at his waist. It’s early, a chill in the air and coal smoke drifting across the valley. My friend the farrier will have been working for hours already. When he isn’t doing work for me, he forges knives and shovels for other people in town.

I see Joe headed out to meet me. Wiping his hand, he has guessed at most of what’s to come and takes up a position at the end of the walkway by the Model-A Ford, Abby’s old car.

I hear the mewing of kittens somewhere nearby. In the vicinity of the stables.

The sound is as light as a wasp’s nest.

Out of nowhere I remember the title of the movie: The Grapes of Wrath.

At the end of the walk Joe holds open the car door for Abby who is now walking like she is walking to the gallows: head down, her gray Samsonite suitcase in both hands and bouncing against her legs as she steps. I’m a step or two behind. The soles of her shoes click on the paving stones on the walk. Let me take that, I say and she releases the suitcase handle.

I say, You remember Joe, don’t you? He’s going to drive us today.

Abby stops and looks back at me. Her look asks what is happening to her.

Joe steps up and snaps one handcuff on her wrist and then steps back—my cue to step up and pull Abby’s arm back so he can snap the other cuff into place.

I drop the suitcase. Move toward Abby. I put my hands on her shoulders.

My sister is stunned but not so stunned she doesn’t react. She spins around and kicks me. I feel my strength leaving: she’s landed a blow to my groin. Out of the edge of my vision I see Joe take hold of Abby’s pale arm and turn her and bring the arm up and snap the other handcuff into place. The skin of his hand is the color of tea and he has hold of Abby’s white-white arm as he deposits her on the seat. Joe is this fellow with one arm who is performing the equivalent of a circus trick: putting the custom-made iron handcuffs on Abby while I try and get to my feet, making sure Abby doesn’t even bump her head, then stepping back as if to announce the completion of his miracle as he closes the door on her side with confident authority.

I manage to get up and put Abby’s bag in back under the rumble seat.

I go around to the driver’s side where Joe is holding the car door.

I slide in. I say, Actually, I’ll be driving. Joe isn’t going.

Abby is moving in the seat. You’re both black bastards, she says.

I take note of what she’s doing and start the car and begin to drive away.

Abby has her stockinged legs up and is kicking the windshield. With her hard-soled shoes—the kicks are having an effect. I hear a crack as the windshield spiders and then lets go and we are sitting in (and covered by) glass. The seats are covered in shards. I pull over.

Joe is there, opening the door to raise Abby from the mess. He scoops her up.

Standing handcuffed by the car, Abby doesn’t so much look at me as stare through me. Her dress is raised. She’s a mess. Stockings and garters are visible. I move to her.

This time, as she tries to knee me, I catch her leg and squeeze. Hard.

You sonofabitch, she says. And then she spits at me.

I feel the wet.

Thoughts of doing her harm tambourine in my head. I say, Joe, you take Miss Neon here to the stables. I’ll see what I can do about rustling up an automobile. And if she gives you any trouble, tie her legs. Abby has cut her thigh on a piece of windshield. Blood is flowing down the front of her right leg. I don’t think about blood memory or slavery or Kentucky’s role in the War of Northern Aggression, then I do. Joe is walking Abby to the stables. She’s going with him, twisting every so often as she goes. I’m trying to think what to say when I get to the house and on the phone to Caudill’s Ford as I wipe the spit from my face.

Read and hear Roy Bentley’s short story “The War of Northern Aggression.”

It had rained. The hillside was a black enormity both sides of the road as if the world had lost its color or dissolving objects had become apparitions and blurred into one another.

We had never been close, my brother and me, standing apart even in family photographs, but he rescued me from prison at the last possible moment by having me committed. What had I done? The misdemeanor offense of aiming and firing at a man. All right, I ran a man who shall remain nameless up a telephone pole with a .45 that I carried in my pocketbook—there were black bears in that part of the state and randy bootleggers loose in the night. I might have felt kindly toward TW, but I was thinking of Daddy and his locking me in a closet for three days.

It was one of those damp days in fall, everything a shade of gray. I was on leave from Eastern State Hospital, known as Kentucky Asylum for the Insane before 1913. My brother TW thought I should be at the funeral of our father, Quentin Wolff, who had burned to death in a field fire. TW had signed me out on furlough and was driving me to Neon from Lexington in a 1930 Model A Ford I recognized as one Daddy gave me to use for my eggs and butter route.

Shock treatments my brother signed off on at Eastern left me seething. And “seething” is putting it mildly. If I had tried to kill someone who got me in the family way and then wouldn’t leave his wife and children—if I had emptied an entire clip of store-bought ammunition at Nameless as he scurried up a phone pole, what might TW and the rest of eastern Kentucky imagine I would want to do next? TW seemed wary. He kept looking over in my direction. He acted like he had something he wanted to say. He looked changed from the last time I’d seen him: a fletching of gray at the temples, lace-like lines around the eyes. He always wore a kind of uniform: white shirt, suspenders, wingtip shoes, a suit jacket. His feelings for Daddy were what I’d call a grieving love. 1940 could have been a tough year for him already for all I knew.

My brother said, You look nice in that dress. Gray suits you.
I don’t want to talk, I said. I’m not mad. I just don’t want to talk.
TW looked over at me then back down the road. His expression hadn’t changed.
That’s all right, he said. Save me having to talk about the weather.

When I was growing up, my folks would talk about the hostilities that tore Kentucky apart in the Civil War. My granny taught me the phrase The War of Northern Aggression. I’ve heard the North wasn’t the aggressor and that the South was defending its right to own and trade slaves. This was like that, a white lie. TW saying I looked nice. What you hear in place of something it was understood you had spared the hearer. I’d been cooped up for three years in an institution whose saving grace was that it wasn’t Kentucky State Women’s Prison.

I wanted to believe the shock treatments were necessary. If I closed my eyes I could see attendants standing over me before the air turned gold then blue-black and I went unconscious and woke to see the matron in charge—Hazel Lynch—with her black hair pulled back tight. I’d see her giving orders with the carriage of one used to taking charge of others. I’d see an orderly wiping up something. Riding in a car that had been mine, I had to tamp down my rage. Nothing about what had happened was fair, but where in the black and white world was there a house where what happened was fair? I was helpless in the face of the consequences of my one very-visible act of aggression against the world of men. I was never demure, never girly, but I was learning what it takes not to call attention to oneself. I held my hands folded in my lap.

If you were to look at old photographs of my brother Thomas William Wolff at medical school in Lexington: Errol Flynn. All movie stars look crazy, but especially Flynn. Others whispered TW had the world by the tail, but I saw the fear. His pencil-thin moustache was part of a mask. I knew he was terrified he might crack up or become a man who buries money in a Maxwell House coffee can in the backyard then forgets where he buried it—like Daddy.

Before my commitment I prided myself on dressing in store-bought clothing and a few fine accessories that won me notice if not compliments. I had been the captain of my own ship—a canary-in-the-coal-mine Model A—and I had seen what dressing well could lead to. I had money and a smile on my face. I was someone others said hello to. I wasn’t someone about to crack up and need to be put away. That is, until ol’ Nameless Married Someone noticed me.

I delivered eggs and milk and butter then. His neighbor Joe Samuelson was on my route. The first time our eyes met—on the stoop at the Samuelson place—Nameless looked at me like he couldn’t face a day without me in it. I was important to someone. Which was what I’d heard I was on the earth for. I’d been married. I knew. That didn’t mean he didn’t take advantage of me. He did. Three times he caught me alone and tried to force me, three times I said no. The fourth time he cornered me. It was night. We were outside. Stars wheeled overhead, the spaces between stars a sullen web. What was happening—it was like the color was being drained from the world.

A few months after, Daddy locked me in a closet. He had gone into Neon and someone had asked him if I had taken up with a married man and “gotten in trouble.” It was the first Daddy had heard of me and Nameless. Maybe the first time he had thought of me as having sex and being someone men might want to have sex with. I’d been married, had two children, but this was something else. I was under his roof. He was responsible for me.

The closet might have been all right, bearable, but after I went to the toilet in the slop jar he had allowed me, I started vomiting. That made it, that confined space, take on a woozy stench.

I didn’t eat for three lost days. When he finally threw open the door, Daddy didn’t say anything. Didn’t apologize. I went and drew water. Boiled it. I bathed. Dressed in other clothes. I had found flour to make biscuits and was in the middle of rolling the biscuits when Daddy came in. I had looked down at dough I was rolling and so didn’t see him raise his hand.

He hit me with his fist. I know I lost consciousness because, when I woke, I was lying on a bed of feed sacks on the porch where I’d been dragged and left.

I made up my mind that someone was going to pay. If not Daddy, someone.

When I fired the pistol at Nameless, I was smelling that foul closet and seeing the last pieces of the light become an inverted delta and disappear in that space as the door closed.

TW didn’t smoke or chew, didn’t swear unless it was something he did out of everyone’s hearing, so he would have been designated a moderate man. A man who other men knew could be trusted with their secrets or their money. But I knew TW had a couple of women up in the hollows. You wouldn’t have known it to look at him, but he was something of a ladies man.

As he drove, and the black-tree-miles passed by on either side of the Model A, I thought of one mountain woman named Beth Stallard. Beth was a quilter renowned in the mountains for her skill. The rose pattern in the quilt on floor of the front seat was likely hers. The fact that it rested where it did wasn’t an indication of anything, but I thought it signaled some fondness. The quilt—like Beth—referenced the mysteries of a man who stood apart from others in and around this part of Letcher County. There was a flame juggler prancing on the roof of a house. A Stars & Bars and a crucified Jesus. I reached to the floor for the quilt.

You cold? TW asked.

He looked back at the road as I unfolded the keepsake quilt. It presented as a rising sun on a field of patchwork clouds. It had a star-strewn, black square in the foreground that reminded me of Hazel Lynch’s hair and of the trees at the side of the road. Black was, I thought, an odd color to plant front and center like that. Morbid, to some eyes. Tacked to the sky in another square was a rainbow above a Christ-on-the-cross. Ravens crossed the respective squares, streaming into the assumed air like black water. I smoothed the quilt across my lap then sat and rubbed the place between my thumb and forefinger on my left hand and rocked.

Sometimes I think too much, I said.
I don’t think enough, he said. I know.
I’m glad you’re here.

He started to say something else. Thought better of it. Sighed.We drove on. I counted the embroidered ravens on the quilt as I rubbed my hand.

It was the third year of my hospitalization. I had been married and divorced. My three children had been taken from me. I was a stranger to them now. If I wasn’t a conversational companion, I thought I’d earned some understanding. I knew my anger was a cloud between us.

And the way TW strained to see landmarks ahead, it had nothing to do with landmarks.

He opened the ashtray. Took out a pack of Camels. Tapped one into his mouth and lit it. In a moment he cranked his window down.

I can stop at a diner I know up ahead, he said. If you want.

I knew he wouldn’t offer me a cigarette since he likely recalled I didn’t smoke. Smoking was not among my vices, not yet, but I liked the smell. I liked that it reminded me that the air around some men is poisonous. There were few other cars traveling the road my brother and I had been on now for a little while. It might be nice to have a slice of pie. Apple. Maybe a dollop of vanilla ice cream. I told him to stop. Which seemed to please him. He flipped the lit cigarette out the window, blew the smoke out the opening, then cranked the window back up. I had the quilt across my lap, but I said what I said not caring whether I might be thought odd or crazy.

TW had my future in his hands. A furlough was what he called this leave from treatment.

He would decide how long I had on the outside of Eastern’s red colonial walls.

Leave the window down, I said. I might like some air.

After the diner, we drove. The air brightened. The trees changed colors. Black became forest green. Shadows flew. Maybe I did need a slice of Bluegrass State apple pie a la mode.

I didn’t remember the trip to Lexington taking this long, but I’d been in handcuffs and in a different car, a sedan, and a state of mind that doesn’t allow for close observation of distances and time. Ravens like those on the quilt had been in the impossibly blue sky as I stared out the window of a sheriff’s car. I remembered wings. Blue-black wings. Snow either side of the road. The smell of men in the front seat smoking cigarettes. That day, I remembered looking down at myself at some point during the ride and noticing that my skirt had ridden up and no one had smoothed it down. This was a different day. The birds in the air weren’t circling or sending messages to one another in some language known only to birds. This was the day that the crazy woman in the yellow Model A had lost her father. Today I could watch and listen to the birds without worry that they were betraying secrets. I could smooth down my own skirt. I could ask for, and be handed, a wedge of warm pie with a mini-mountain of vanilla ice cream on top.

*       *       *
I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep. TW was smoking a cigarette. Driving. He looked in my direction then back out the windshield and down the road.

You been asleep about an hour, he said.
How much farther?
Not far.

I fell back asleep and dreamed of Eastern State. Its orchards and ornamental trees. The trees became attendants grabbing hold of me to drag me to a room for another session with the electric-shock machine. This time, in the dream, someone was saying According to E.A. Bennett 90% of cases of severe depression which are resistant to all treatments will disappear after three or four weeks of ECT. The words of the sentence remained now after the therapy had wiped away my memories, though they came rushing back first as dreams then as nightmares.

When I awoke again, the car was stopped and TW absent from the driver’s seat.

Judging by a winged-horse swinging sign on a post outside, we were at a gas station. I heard a laugh then TW was by the driver’s-side door and then the door opened.

I had to stop, he said. I was running on fumes.

The quilt had slid onto the floor. I picked it up and spread across me once more.

TW said, You like that, don’t you.

There were other cars on the road. One driver honked. Waved at a car driven by someone with flame-red hair. A woman, judging by the lipstick-red smile. The woman waved back.

TW pulled out onto the road again.

We should be there in an hour or so, if I don’t get behind another coal truck.
On Sunday?
TW looked at me. This is Thursday, he said.

I felt myself looking at my brother. I saw him now as something other than the boy-man who came back from medical school with a lightness to his step and a smile and a good word for everyone. His face seemed sadder. The lines had deepened. At the temples his wire-rimmed spectacles had worn a thin line of green in the gray, close-cropped hair. A patina. He had taken off his glasses in the diner and I had noticed it then, but now I could plainly see green against the gray. Like one of the doctors at Eastern named Gragg who coughed between endless cigarettes.

TW began speaking. He said, We can drive straight to the funeral home. Or we can just go the house—the new brick house. You haven’t seen my house, have you? Let’s do that.

I didn’t know how to answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be made to see Daddy. Especially since he’d died by fire. I imagined his body—seeing it—might cause me to get upset. It didn’t occur to me to consider that the casket might be closed.

I said, I would like to see my boy.
Is that what you want? I’m happy to do that. Molly is waiting to feed us—she may have it ready and on the table. You like ham, right?

The child in question was my bastard by Nameless. I had named him Charlie: Charles Leroy Wolff. TW had been “seeing after him”—his phrase those times he’d visited me in the years I’d been away. I wanted to try and add up the number of visits, but I couldn’t. Often when he had come, I’d been in restraints for an outburst or rule infraction and was so mad I forgot who was and wasn’t in the room. If I had to guess, I’d say he came to Eastern State Hospital twice a year: Christmas and Easter. Always with something for me to sign. And always after the holiday.

On one such visit TW asked me to sign over—deed—to him my portion and share of the bottomland-homestead forefathers had claimed when they came into the Big Sandy River Valley area with Daniel Boone before 1800. My arms had to be released from a strait jacket then massaged for me to be able to write. My brother waved to the attendants to make that happen.

He said he would bank my share. I would have what I needed out of the interest.

He’d manage the principal. Invest it.

I wasn’t sure TW had heard me. I was used to what I said being ignored or dismissed as the ravings of a mad woman. I said it again.

You can do that. And you will. But you have to behave.

We were turning onto the two-lane that I recognized as leading into Neon. There was the Ford dealership, a drugstore-soda fountain, the Bank of Neon, and The Neon, the town’s one theater. The marquee at The Neon advertised The Wizard of Oz. I had heard attendants talking about it. Someone said it was in color—of all things! They said it was a children’s movie.

I said, I’d like to take Charlie to The Neon. See that new movie.

His eyes turned from the road. We’ll see, he said.

The car was warm. I kicked off the quilt then thought better of that and scooped it up and folded it. I tucked the quilt into the place where I’d found it. The flame juggler stared out from the fold. The act of caring for the quilt seemed to meet with some approval on my brother’s part. He pulled the car up a brick drive to a level spot. Parked. I’ll get your suitcase, he said.

Should I bring the quilt inside, I asked, knowing who had made it.
No was all he said.

The house smelled of bread and something else. Maybe—pecan pie.

TW’s wife Molly greeted me with a hug and kind words. After my time in Eastern, I recognized kindness. If it had a color, I thought of kindness as blue. It was a Kentucky sky. Not the pewter skies above the snaking two-lanes. Not the salt-colored smoke TW blew out the window of a yellow Ford. Not the sentinel gray-then-black-then-gray confederacy of trees on the grounds of Eastern lining both sides of a winding path referred to as the Main Building.

I was glad for her presence. TW kissed her and glided past and up a set of stairs.

Molly ushered me into the parlor. A picture of my parents stared down from a wall like the eyes of Janus. My mother’s dour face and pulled-back-into-a-bun black hair answered the mystery of why I had seen Hazel Lynch as a familiar evil. Mother’s pearls rested against a dress the front of which was a blaze of roses retouched in by some photographer-artist. Daddy’s look was one of brokenheartedness that no amount of retouching could lessen or translate or soften.

Not a hint of blue anywhere in the photograph. Background golds raged the way flames will, the way deciduous trees do in fall. The coloration of the faces served up a belligerence I felt hovered over me, awake or sleeping. A wild in the blood that sooner or later consumes us.

I slept in an upstairs bedroom and so had to be called down to breakfast by a loud rapping at the door of the room. It was TW. He was dressed and telling me what sort of Friday I could expect before my feet touched the floor. His day involved arrangements at the funeral home for the burial on Sunday. He said that today I’d be free to visit with Molly.

Calling hours are tonight and tomorrow night, he said and I nodded from the bed.
Molly has your breakfast downstairs, TW concluded and closed the door.

There was a pitcher and bowl on a washstand by the bed, but I knew it wouldn’t be necessary. TW’s house had indoor plumbing. The bathroom was just down the hall. I had discovered this the night before. It was furnished with a claw-foot tub and running water and a flush toilet. I ran a bath with hot water and slipped into it. In a little while, I pulled the plug and watched water spiral down the drain. Then I got out and dried off and wrapped a robe around me.

I went back to the bedroom and dressed in something from my gray suitcase.

My clothes were wrinkled but felt comforting. Familiar.

I made the bed and went downstairs.

Molly was busy in the kitchen. When she saw me, she stopped what she was doing and motioned for me to sit. The kitchenette was a four-person affair with brushed chrome and padded yellow chairs. It looked modern in a way that seemed appropriate for a house belonging to TW Wolff. In a short while we were together at the table, eating eggs and ham and biscuits.

Light from one of four long windows in the room fell on Molly’s hands. Those bright hands made me connect her movements to the idea that she might help me to see the boy.

I began by asking a question about what had happened to Daddy.

Molly said there had been nothing anyone could do. She began the story of the day they had heard the news: a telephone call from the Junction alerted them to the accident. They were calling the fire that, an accident, and it sounded right since the wind isn’t to be dictated to.

Some people have faces that stay with you, hall portrait or no hall portrait, and Molly’s face was one of those. Soft-featured, mature but not old, intelligent green eyes—like the doctor at Eastern who had leaned over me to describe the shock treatments and what I could expect.

The light wasn’t on Molly’s hands or face now. Not in the same way.

I asked my question: Do you think I could go to Merkie’s and see my boy?

I know what it’s like not to be listened to. This wasn’t that. She was listening.

When she spoke, I knew it wasn’t something she had thought would be asked of her.

Molly rose from the table. She began taking plates and glasses, forks and knives and spoons, to the sink by the long windows. I had no choice but to wait. Waiting was something I had learned to do at Eastern. I rubbed my hand and sat.

Why don’t you dry, Abby—I’ll wash. And we’ll talk about it.

I stopped rubbing my hand and got up from the table and began doing as she asked.

I had to guess where each item belonged in the cupboards, but Molly smiled and nodded, or pointed with a soapsuds-white hand, and we got through the task. Afterwards she made a phone call and talked to someone who seemed to make her repeat every other sentence.

I was standing in the hallway by the portrait of Mommy and Daddy and rubbing my hand, though I was standing. I felt my heart sink as she hung up the phone.

It was clear that she had been talking with TW.

I’m to drive you to see your boy Charlie. Your brother will call Merkie and arrange it. He said you’re not to upset him, Abby—your boy Charlie. He said you’d know what that means.

I thanked her. Not upsetting my son meant I’d continue to be Aunt Abigail.

Charlie had gotten so much bigger I almost didn’t recognize him. Merkie—America, my sister—brought him out onto the porch after she had laid down a warning I didn’t need to hear.

He favored our side of the family, the Wolffs, and was tall for four years old.

Merkie had dressed him in his Sunday clothes. He smelled freshly bathed. His brown hair was damp and I smelled soap as he settled himself into the glider between Molly and me.

Auntie, Mommy says I can’t feed the chickens. Can I feed the chicks, Aunt Abby?

Maybe the world is two things at once: a House of Pain and a House of Pleasure, but I figured it would be the odd woman who could hear a son call another woman Mommy and not feel like she’d been ushered into the House of Pain. I let that injured feeling slip from me.

I asked Charlie a question, ignoring the commandment against his feeding the chickens.

You’re dressed up—would you like to go see The Wizard of Oz with your Aunt Abby?

He perked up. Clearly, even at 4, he knew more about the movie than I did.

I had guessed right: Molly’s presence caused older-sister to check herself before she spoke. America looked to Molly. What do you say about that? she asked.

Molly looked at me. Then at Charlie on the glider. She smiled.

I’ll chaperone, she said.

I shouldn’t have been happy, but I was. Daddy was dead and soon to be buried in the Wolff cemetery overlooking the Pure Oil station and the A & P. I was headed back to that hellhole of a sanitarium in a matter of a few too-short days. But to stand in line with Charlie at the Neon and buy tickets—actually, Molly paid: I hadn’t been trusted with money—and then to go inside and buy popcorn and Dixie cups of Co-cola and sit with my son was answered prayer. A blessing. If I had believed in God, which I didn’t, how could I after Eastern, that God would have been a she and would have looked like Molly and spoken in a voice like my sister-in-law’s.

The movie started. Charlie’s eyes were frozen on the screen. I thought my son was awfully well behaved: not once did he ask for other treats or to go to the bathroom. He seemed terrified by the green-faced witch. He looked down and away then back up for reassurance.

Charlie moved his eyes, following the singing silver can that banged on its chest and intimated that all we need to survive is a heart and friends. A smidgen of kindness. Maybe the luck of the innocent. Certainly a lot more luck than Daddy had the day his ran out.

By the time Dorothy Gale got to see the Wizard the second time, with the charred broomstick of the Witch of the West as proof she had accomplished her mission, Charlie Wolff was hooked. A few more shock treatments and I might forget my whole life, but my hope was that he’d keep this somewhere. It might have been a lot to ask, but I didn’t think so just then.

Copyright © 2015 Roy Bentley. All rights reserved.

Hear “The War of Northern Aggression.”

Gloria Regalbuto Bentley narrates “The War of Northern Aggression,” a searing short story set in the Steinbeck-era South, where a female patient on funeral furlough from an Eastern Kentucky mental hospital encounters a brother with secrets, a town without pity, and an illegitimate son torn from her by a world of men-who-hurt-women. John Steinbeck found his female voice in the heroic women of The Grapes of Wrath, characters whose collective strength survives famine, flood, and separation. Roy Bentley’s unforgettable protagonist barely hangs on, exiled and powerless, in a house of pain without company, hope, or exit. Like Steinbeck’s novel, Bentley’s story starts with an act of self-defensive violence provoked by savage male aggressiveness. Unlike Tom Joad, who served his time and was welcomed home by family, this transgressor’s sentence becomes a permanent condition through a brother’s complicity—a tragic example of punishing the victim for which Steinbeck would have felt anguished empathy. So will Steinbeck readers like you. Click below to hear Gloria Regalbuto Bentley narrate a stunning new short story, “The War of Northern Aggression.”—Ed.

Copyright © 2015 Roy Bentley. All rights reserved.

Read “The War of Northern Aggression.”