Dad had no hobbies, no distractive activities. He didn’t do household chores, wash the car, mow the grass, go shopping, or fix anything. He never changed a lightbulb. I never saw him hold a screwdriver, stand on a ladder, or consult a repair manual. His idea of cleaning was to spit on a tissue and wipe the object. He didn’t sleep much. He drank. He rarely left the house. Dad was an old-school pulp writer, a machine who never stopped. In his home office hung a handmade sign that said: “Writing Factory: Beware of Flying Participles.”
The winter of 1968 was known in the hills as “the year of the big snows,” which closed my grade school for two weeks and trapped the family on our home hill in eastern Kentucky. For the first time in my father’s life, he could do what he always wanted—write fourteen hours a day. He ran out of cigarettes and Mom sent me to the general store a couple of miles away. I followed a path through the woods, each leafless tree limb lined with a layer of white. Frozen deer saliva glistened at the ends of chewed branches.
I made good time by walking the iced-over creek, sliding my feet along the bright surface. Smoke from the store’s wood stove rose to the top of the ridge, then flattened and began to dissipate in a long, low ribbon. Inside I sat by the fire until my wet pants legs were steaming and my feet had warmed. The proprietor, a kind man named George, gave me a piece of chocolate. He’d been in operation since the forties, the only business to survive the closing of the mines. He sold me cigarettes and I went home.
The following week I walked to the bootlegger for Dad. I left our dirt road for a game path through the woods, staying high enough on the hill to evade dogs. After a mile I dropped down the hill and crossed the blacktop to the bootlegger’s small shack. It was a one-room building with a sliding plywood panel serving as a window. No one ever robbed it, a testament to local respect and fear. I stood on layers of snow packed hard from tire tracks and the tread of many boots. The man inside was red-faced, with wild hair.
“Whose boy are you?” he said in a gruff voice.
“Andy Offutt’s first boy,” I said. “Chris.”
“Offutt,” he said. “Uh-huh. What’s he wanting?”
“Bourbon.”
“Bourbon,” he said. “Yep. Reckon you’re his boy, then.”
I placed ten dollars on the rough wood shelf. He exchanged the money for two pints of whiskey. I reached for them, but he grabbed my wrist with a grip stronger than I’d ever felt, as if the bones were rasping inside my arm. It was a test of sorts, and I tried not to show pain.
“Don’t you ever fuck with me,” he said.
I shook my head obediently. He released me and I entered the woods. Concealed from view, I dropped to my knees and rubbed snow on my wrist until both hands were numb. I could feel tears frozen below my eyes and was embarrassed, even alone in the ivory silence.
One summer a few years later, my two best friends and I decided we’d try drinking. We met at night in the woods and walked to the bootlegger. A different man was there, legendary for the length of his tongue, a .357 Magnum he occasionally flashed, and a certain rough charm with women. I told him I was Andy Offutt’s first boy and he’d sent me for whiskey. My buddies each bought what their fathers drank, and we left with bourbon, a half case of beer, and a large bottle of cheap red wine. Undoubtedly the bootlegger knew we were lying, but the hills were lawless in the 1960s.
We resorted to walking the blacktop, which would take less time than traversing the woods. The road curved three hundred yards to the top of a hill, then a long slow drop to the creek. We lightened our load by drinking a beer. I hated the taste and switched to whiskey. We headed down the hill. By the time we reached the bottom, I’d finished one half-pint and opened another, then fell in the creek and took a rest. I woke up in a car and went back to sleep. Next I awakened sick to my stomach on the front porch of a nearby house. I made it home and went to bed. It was a disgraceful beginning to the pleasures of alcohol, a clear warning to stay away from whiskey. Instead, I visited the bootlegger dozens of times before leaving Kentucky. Drinking bourbon changed the terrible way I consistently felt about myself. I suppose it was the same for Dad, who eventually died of liver failure.
And the boys I got drunk with that first time forty years ago? One shot himself to death and the other will be released from prison at age seventy-five.
Chapter Three
BY 2012 Dad had been occupying a large chair for several years, eating, sleeping, drinking, and writing there. Three days before Christmas my mother called my house in Mississippi, a rarity in itself. She spoke rapidly, her voice fraught with anxiety, an element of despair coursing beneath her words. I’d never heard this tone from her. She informed me that my father had fallen. Too small to help him up, Mom had called an ambulance service. The EMTs took Dad to the hospital, where the doctors decided to keep him. Mom wasn’t sure why.