Papaw had a beer belly and a chubby face but skinny arms and legs. He never apologized with words. While helping Aunt Wee move across the country, she admonished him for his earlier alcoholism and asked why they rarely had the chance to talk. “Well, talk now. We’ve got all fucking day in the car together.” But he did apologize with deeds: The rare times when he lost his temper with me were always followed with a new toy or a trip to the ice cream parlor.
Papaw was a terrifying hillbilly made for a different time and place. During that cross-country drive with Aunt Wee, they stopped at a highway rest stop in the early morning. Aunt Wee decided to comb her hair and brush her teeth and thus spent more time in the ladies’ room than Papaw thought reasonable. He kicked open the door holding a loaded revolver, like a character in a Liam Neeson movie. He was sure, he explained, that she was being raped by some pervert. Years later, after Aunt Wee’s dog growled at her infant baby, Papaw told her husband, Dan, that unless he got rid of the dog, Papaw would feed it a steak marinated in antifreeze. He wasn’t joking: Three decades earlier, he had made the same promise to a neighbor after a dog nearly bit my mom. A week later that dog was dead. In that funeral home I thought about these things, too.
Most of all I thought about Papaw and me. I thought about the hours we spent practicing increasingly complex math problems. He taught me that lack of knowledge and lack of intelligence were not the same. The former could be remedied with a little patience and a lot of hard work. And the latter? “Well, I guess you’re up shit creek without a paddle.”
I thought about how Papaw would get on the ground with me and Aunt Wee’s baby girls and play with us like a child. Despite his “bullshits” and his grouchiness, he never met a hug or a kiss that he didn’t welcome. He bought Lindsay a crappy car and fixed it up, and after she wrecked it, he bought her another one and fixed that one up, too, just so she didn’t feel like she “came from nothing.” I thought about losing my temper with Mom or Lindsay or Mamaw, and how those were among the few times Papaw ever showed a mean streak, because, as he once told me, “the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” His wisdom came from experience, from his own earlier failures with treating the women in his family well.
I stood up in that funeral home, resolved to tell everyone just how important he was. “I never had a dad,” I explained. “But Papaw was always there for me, and he taught me the things that men needed to know.” Then I spoke the sum of his influence on my life: “He was the best dad that anyone could ever ask for.”
After the funeral, a number of people told me that they appreciated my bravery and courage. Mom was not among them, which struck me as odd. When I located her in the crowd, she seemed trapped in some sort of trance: saying little, even to those who approached her; her movements slow and her body slouched.
Mamaw, too, seemed out of sorts. Kentucky was usually the one place where she was completely in her element. In Middletown, she could never truly be herself. At Perkins, our favorite breakfast spot, Mamaw’s mouth would sometimes earn a request from the manager that she keep her voice down or watch her language. “That fucker,” she’d mutter under her breath, chastened and uncomfortable. But at Bill’s Family Diner, the only restaurant in Jackson worth sitting down at for a meal, she’d scream at the kitchen staff to “hurry the hell up” and they’d laugh and say, “Okay, Bonnie.” Then she’d look at me and tell me, “You know I’m just fucking with them, right? They know I’m not a mean old bitch.”
In Jackson, among old friends and real hillbillies, she needed no filter. At her brother’s funeral a few years earlier, Mamaw and her niece Denise convinced themselves that one of the pallbearers was a pervert, so they broke into his funeral home office and searched through his belongings. They found an extensive magazine collection, including a few issues of Beaver Hunt (a periodical that I can assure you has nothing to do with aquatic mammals). Mamaw found it hilarious. “Fucking Beaver Hunt!” she’d roar. “Who comes up with this shit?” She and Denise hatched a plot to take the magazines home and mail them to the pallbearer’s wife. After a short deliberation, she changed her mind. “With my luck,” she told me, “we’ll get in a crash on the way back to Ohio and the police will find these damned things in my trunk. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go out with everyone thinking I was a lesbian—and a perverted one at that!” So they threw the magazines away to “teach that pervert a lesson” and never spoke of it again. This side of Mamaw rarely showed itself outside of Jackson.
Deaton’s funeral home in Jackson—where she’d stolen those Beaver Hunts—was organized like a church. In the center of the building was a main sanctuary flanked by larger rooms with couches and tables. On the other two sides were hallways with exits to a few smaller rooms—offices for staff, a tiny kitchen, and bathrooms. I’ve spent much of my life in that tiny funeral home, saying goodbye to aunts and uncles and cousins and great-grandparents. And whether she went to Deaton’s to bury an old friend, a brother, or her beloved mother, Mamaw greeted every guest, laughed loudly, and cursed proudly.
So it was a surprise to me when, during Papaw’s visitation, I went searching for comfort and found Mamaw alone in a corner of the funeral home, recharging batteries that I never knew could go empty. She stared blankly at the floor, her fire replaced with something unfamiliar. I knelt before her and laid my head in her lap and said nothing. At that moment, I realized that Mamaw was not invincible.
In hindsight, it’s clear that there was more than grief to both Mamaw’s and Mom’s behavior. Lindsay, Matt, and Mamaw did their best to hide it from me. Mamaw forbade me to stay at Mom’s, under the ruse that Mamaw needed me with her as she grieved. Perhaps they hoped to give me a little space to mourn Papaw. I don’t know.
I didn’t see at first that something had veered off course. Papaw was dead, and everyone processed it differently. Lindsay spent a lot of time with her friends and was always on the move. I stayed as close to Mamaw as possible and read the Bible a lot. Mom slept more than usual, and I figured this was her way of coping. At home, she lacked even a modicum of temper control. Lindsay failed to do the dishes properly, or forgot to take out the dog, and Mom’s anger poured out: “My dad was the only one who really understood me!” she’d scream. “I’ve lost him, and you’re not making this any easier!” Mom had always had a temper, though, so I dismissed even this.