One night a waning gibbous moon drowned the river with light. A barred owl yelled for company and I stepped into the yard to mimic its eight high-pitched cries that ended in a gurgle. The owl hollered back, closer. We repeated ourselves twice more, until the owl recognized my foreign accent and cast a disdainful silence through the darkness. In the morning, I told Rita of my worry that our child would treat me in the same manner. She patted the bulge in her middle.
“You’ll speak the same language,” she said. “It’s a baby, not a bird.”
I nodded and left for the woods, pondering the wisdom of my wife. Fatherhood implies an automatic taming, the necessity of employment, a beginning of ownership. I’d expected glimmers of paternal anxiety but the onrush of fears was a box canyon ambush. I doubted my abilities to raise a child without ruining it. Although I trusted Rita implicitly, in my worst moments I worried that the baby might not be mine. At other times I was convinced that some long-buried Offutt gene would surface, producing a sideshow freak. Mainly, I was afraid that Rita’s love would shift away from me.
Most of our friends were single and none had children. Some envied the pregnancy, while others considered us brave, possibly stupid. We had no one to talk to, no models of how people dealt with kids. I mentioned this in a pokergame, and a guy derisively asked if I thought I was the first man to father a child. I said nothing because the answer was yes, that was exactly how I felt. I knew that drastic change was coming, but had no way to prepare for it.
My life’s progression had been a toxic voyage bringing me to the safety of the flatland, where I began each day by entering the woods along the river. I’ve become adept at tracking animals, finding the final footprint of skull and bone. Many people are afraid of the woods but that’s where I keep my fears. I visit them every day. The trees know me, the riverbank accepts my path. Alone in the woods, it is I who is gestating, preparing for life.
~ ~ ~
Where I’m from, the foothills of southern Appalachia are humped like a kicked rug, full of steep furrows. Families live scattered among the ridges and hollows in tiny communities containing no formal elements save a post office. My hometown is a zip code with a creek. We used to have a store but the man who ran it died. Long before my birth, a union invalidated the company scrip, shut the mines, and left a few men dead. Two hundred people live there now.
Our hills are the most isolated area of America, the subject of countless doctoral theses. It’s an odd sensation to read about yourself as counterpart to the aborigine or Eskimo. If VISTA wasn’t bothering us, some clown was running around the hills with a tape recorder. Strangers told us we spoke Elizabethan English, that we were contemporary ancestors to everyone else. They told us the correct way to pronounce “Appalachia,” as if we didn’t know where we’d been living for the past three hundred years.
One social scientist proclaimed us criminal Scotch-Irish clansmen deemed unfit to live in Britain — our hills as precursor to Australia’s penal colony. Another book called us the heirs to errant Phoenicians shipwrecked long before Columbus seduced Isabella for tub fare. My favorite legend made us Melungeons, a mysterious batch of folk possessing ungodly woodskills. We can spot fleas hopping from dog to dog at a hundred yards; we can track a week-old snake trail across bare rock. If you don’t believe it, just ask the sociologist, who spent a season like a fungus in the hills.
The popular view of Appalachia is a land where every man is willing, at the drop of a proverbial overall strap, to shoot, fight, or fuck anything on hind legs. We’re men who buy half-pints of boot-legged liquor and throw the lids away in order to finish the whiskey in one laughing, brawling night, not caring where we wake or how far from home. Men alleged to eat spiders off the floor to display our strength, a downright ornery bunch.
The dirt truth is a hair different. The men of my generation live in the remnants of a world that still maintains a frontier mentality. Women accept and endure, holding the families tight. Mountain culture expects its males to undergo various rites of manhood, but genuine tribulation under fire no longer exists. We’ve had to create our own.
Once a week, Mom drove fifteen miles to town for groceries, accompanied by her children. We visited the interstate, which was creeping closer in tiny increments, bisecting hills and property, rerouting creeks. We called it the four-laner. It slithered in our direction like a giant snake. Mom said 1-64 ran clear to California, a meaningless distance since none of us had ever crossed the county line. The completed road linked the world to the hills, but failed to connect us to the world.
I never intended to quit high school, but like many of my peers, I simply lost the habit. Education was for fools. Girls went to college seeking a husband; boys went to work. The pool hall’s grimy floor, stained block walls, and furtive tension suited me well. The only requirement was adherence to an unspoken code of ethics, a complex paradigm that I still carry today, A rack of balls cost a dime, cheeseburgers a quarter. I ran the table three times in a row one day, and afterwards could not find a willing player. Inadvertently I had alienated myself from the only society that had ever tolerated me, a pattern that would continue for years.
After a week of shooting pool alone, I was ripe for an army recruiter who culled the pool hall like a pimp at Port Authority. I was under age but my parents gleefully signed the induction papers. The recruiter ferried me a hundred miles to Lexington, where I failed the physical examination.
“Albumin in the urine,” the doctor said. “No branch will take you.”
I felt weak. Tears cut lines down my face. My own body had trapped me in the hills, spirit pinioned by the flesh. I didn’t know which was worse, the shame of physical betrayal or the humiliation of having cried in front of a hundred eager men-to-be. They moved away from me to hide their own embarrassment. I was subsequently denied admittance to the Peace Corps, park rangers, — the ranks of firemen and police. I’d never know camaraderie, or test myself in sanctioned ways against other men.
That summer I began to steal and smoke dope, and in the fall I had no choice but to attend college. The only school within the mountains had recently become a university. After two years, I quit and announced my plans to become an actor in New York. Jennipher, the one girl I’d had the courage to love, had married a quarterback and moved far away. My sisters considered me a hopeless redneck. My brother refused to live with me, and my father and I hadn’t spoken civilly in upwards of thirty-eight months.
Mom fixed me a sack lunch the morning I left. We sat quietly at the completed highway, staring at the fresh, clean blacktop. Mom was trying not to cry. I felt bad for being the first to erode the family, though I’d already been at it for a while. The road stretched to the horizon like a wide creek and I thought of Daniel Boone questing for space. The road in had become a way out.
Mom pressed a ten-dollar bill in my hand and dropped her head.
“Write when you get work,” she mumbled.
Birdsong spilled from the wooded hills. I began walking, the pack on my back angled like a cockeyed turtle shell. A pickup stopped and hauled me out of Kentucky. The hills relaxed their taut furls, billowing gently like sheets on a clothesline, I had a fresh haircut, two hundred dollars, and a grade school photograph of Jennipher. I was already homesick.