Years would come and go before I got to the bottom of all the heart-blessing, and it was not entirely about snakes. One of Mom’s bad choices, which she learned to call them in rehab, and trust me there were many, was a guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice. He wore it long and shiny as a penny, said my mother, who clearly had a bad case. A snake tattoo coiled around his right arm where he’d been bit twice: first in church, as a kid trying for manhood among his family’s snake-handling men. Second time, later on, far from the sight of God. Mom said he didn’t need the tattoo for a reminder, that arm aggravated him to the end. He died the summer before I was born. My messed-up birthday surprised enough people to get the ambulance called and then the monster-truck mud rally of child services. But I doubt anybody was surprised to see me grow up with these eyes, this hair. I might as well have been born with the ink.
Mom had her own version of the day I was born, which I never believed, considering she was passed out for the event. Not that I’m any witness, being a newborn infant plus inside a bag. But I knew Mrs. Peggot’s story. And if you’d spent even a day in the company of her and my mom, you would know which of those two lotto tickets was going to pay out.
Mom’s was this. The day I was born, her baby daddy’s mother turned up out of the blue. She was nobody Mom had ever met nor wanted to, given what she’d heard about that family. Snake-handling Baptist was not the half of it. These were said to be individuals that beat the tar out of each other, husbands belting wives, mothers beating kids with whatever object fell to hand, the Holy Bible itself not out of the question. I took Mom’s word on that because you hear of such things, folks so godly as to pass around snakes, also passing around black eyes. If this is a new one on you, maybe you also think a dry county is a place where there’s no liquor to be found. Southwest Virginia, we’re one damn thing after another.
Supposedly by the time this lady showed up, Mom was pretty far gone with the pains. The labor thing coming at her out of nowhere that day. Thinking to dull the worst of it, she hit the Seagram’s before noon, with enough white crosses to stay awake for more drinking, and some Vicodin after it’s all a bit too much. Looks up to see a stranger’s face pressed so hard against the bathroom window her mouth looks like a butt crack. (Mom’s words, take or leave the visual.) The lady marches around through the front door and tears into Mom with the hell and the brimstone. What is she doing to this innocent lamb that Almighty God has put in her womb? She’s come to take her dead son’s only child from this den of vice and raise her up decent.
Mom always swore that was the train I barely missed: getting whisked off to join some savage Holy Roller brood in Open Ass, Tennessee. Place name, my own touch. Mom refused to discuss my father’s family at all, or even what killed him. Only that it was a bad accident at a place I was never to go called Devil’s Bathtub. Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them, and these grew in my tiny head into grislier deaths than any I was supposed to be seeing on TV at that age. To the extent of me being terrified of bathtubs, which luckily we didn’t have. The Peggots did, and I steered clear. But Mom stuck to her guns. All she would ever say about Mother Copperhead was that she was a gray-headed old hag, Betsy by name. I was disappointed, wishing for a Black Widow head of kick-ass red hair, at the least. This being the only kin of my father’s we were likely to see. When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.
But Mom saw enough. She lived in fear of losing custody, and gave her all in rehab. I came out, Mom went in, and gave it a hundred percent. Gave and gave again over the years, getting to be an expert at rehab, like they say. Having done it so many times.
You can see how Mom’s story just stirred up the mud. Some lady shows up (or doesn’t), offers me a better home (or not), then leaves, after being called a string of juicy cusswords (knowing Mom) that would have left the lady’s ears ringing. Did Mom make up her version to jerk me around? Was it true, in her scrambled brain? Either way, she was clear about the lady coming to rescue a little girl. Not me. If this was Mom’s fairy tale: Why a girl? Was that what she really wanted, some pink package that would make her get her act together? Like I wasn’t breakable?
The other part, a small thing, is that in this story Mom never spoke my father’s name. The woman is “the Woodall witch,” that being my dad’s last name, with no mention of the man that got her into the baby fix. She found plenty to say about him at other times, whenever love and all that was her last stop on the second six-pack. The adventures of him and her. But in this tale as regards my existence, he is only the bad choice.
2
My thinking here is to put everything in the order of how it happened, give or take certain intervals of a young man skunked out of his skull box, some dots duly connected. But damn. A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you’ve ended up someplace you’re proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.
I remember I always liked looking at things more than talking about them. I did have questions. My problem was people. Thinking kids are not enough full-fledge humans to give them straight answers. For instance. The Peggots next door in their yard had a birdhouse on a pole that was a big mess of dangling gourds, with holes drilled for the bird doors. It was the bird version of these trailer pileups you’ll see, where some couple got a family going and nobody, not kids nor grandkids, ever moved out. They’re just going to keep shacking up and hauling in another mobile home to set on blocks, keeping it one big family with their junkass porches and raggedy flag over the original unit. One Nation Under Employed. The Peggot birdhouse was that, a bird-trailer clusterfuck. But no birds lived in it, ever. There were bird nests galore in the trees behind the house, or they’d build one in some random place like under the hood of Mr. Peggot’s truck. Why not move into a house already built, free of charge? Mr. Peggot said birds were like anybody, they like living their own way. He said he’d known government housing that didn’t cost much more than a birdhouse to move into, just as unpopular.
Fine, but why keep the thing up there, growing mold? Maggot told me Humvee had made it in Shop. Humvee being one of Maggot’s uncles, last seen near a schoolhouse around the time of the Bee Gees or Elvis. By now it’s the nineties. The Peggots kept this reject birdhouse up its pole all those years for what, to remember their son Humvee by? I didn’t buy it. The Peggots had seven kids altogether, living as far away as Ocala Florida or as close as a mile away. Cousins without number roamed through that house like packs of half-broke animals with meal privileges. Every family member got talked to or talked about on a daily basis, except two: (1) Maggot’s mom, (2) Humvee. One doing time in Goochland, one dead, for undiscussed reasons.
Besides the birdless birdhouse, they had a dog pen with no dog. Mr. Peggot used to run hounds before he got too tired for it like all the old men we knew, back whenever they still had the lungs for it, and dogs had foxes or bears to chase up a tree. In fall time he’d take us to the woods to hunt ginseng or dig sassafras because those can’t outrun you. But mainly just to be out there. He knew bird tunes the way people know who’s on the radio. After we got old enough to handle a rifle, nine or ten, he showed us how to take a buck, and how to heft up the carcass on the tree branch over the driveway to dress it out, letting loops of guts fall out steaming on the gravel. Mrs. Peggot cooked venison roast in the crockpot. You’ve not eaten till you’ve had that.