Of nearly two hundred letters I received from my father, only one was unsigned—the one that accompanied the secret will. The absence of authorial attribution lent greater credence to the document. I believed that it came from the core of my father’s personality, not a role or persona.
I’ve never been certain why he granted control of his legacy to me. I suspect he wanted someone to know of his prodigious output, the wide-ranging velocity of his mind. At the time he wrote the secret will, we had been at odds for over a decade. It bothered both of us, and we didn’t know how to overcome the distance, blaming each other, ensuring hostility through the steady maintenance of old wounds. Attack and counterattack, intimidate and ignore. We raised the art of veiled criticism to its finest sophistication and talked against the other within the family.
Because my father made it abundantly clear that he might die at any moment, I kept the secret will for twenty-eight years, through many moves about the country. Each new location meant discarding clothes, books, and furniture, but I always knew where the secret will was stored. I wrapped it in plastic for protection. Dad never mentioned the will, and I didn’t bring up the subject. His trust lay between us, unspoken and vital. When he died, it was the first item I packed before heading to Kentucky. As it turned out, I didn’t need it—my siblings still weren’t interested. I’d kept it safe for nothing. Nobody but me ever read the pages. No one cared but Dad.
On the long drive to Kentucky after his death, I watched for the Pottsville Escarpment, a geologic formation that indicated the edge of the Appalachians. Earlier I’d passed through Lexington, site of my birth, and wondered how my life might be if we’d stayed there, near my mother’s family. What if I’d gone away to college instead of attending the closest one? What if I’d married one of my first four girlfriends? What if I’d stuck with my dream of being an actor? What if I hadn’t hurt my knee so severely at age nineteen that I was forced back home in a plaster cast after leaving the hills forever, a pattern of departure and return that repeated many times until I realized the landscape would always hold me tight, that I could never escape, that in fact what I loved and felt most loyal to were the wooded hills, and not my father.
Chapter Five
MY FATHER’S full name was Andrew Jefferson Offutt V. As a child, he saw his name on three tombstones in a cemetery, a chilling sight that instilled a lifelong fear of joining them. This resulted in his decision to be cremated. Before I got home, his body was hauled out of the county for official incineration. The cremators cut open his chest to remove his heart implant. They placed the body in a cardboard box and slid it into a crematory that generated a fire of fifteen hundred degrees. Two hours of searing heat vaporized all organic matter, leaving pulverized bone, salt, and stray minerals.
Dad was an avowed agnostic, repeatedly emphasizing that he was not an atheist. In his opinion, disbelief created a religion of its own. This made for a brief conference with the director of memorial services. My sister and I rejected most options, including an urn or wooden box for Dad’s ashes. We went home to choose appropriate music and an array of photographs that would slowly fade into one another on a TV during the service.
Three days after Dad died, the family convened at the house. The first action each of us took, unplanned and spontaneous, was to slam the back door and stomp around the house—activities forbidden to us, reserved only for Dad. Then we laughed like maniacs, four middle-aged adults at last allowed to behave like children in our own home. My siblings stayed twelve miles away at a motel by the interstate. This was traditional—none of us slept in the house when we visited. The extra expense was worth the emotional safety. Dad never made us feel welcome and didn’t care for the presence of grandchildren. He treated them the same way he’d treated us as kids—bullying and critical, angry at the breaking of his ever-changing rules about sound, laughter, and talking. An essential difference was that we knew the risks, but our children didn’t.