CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
B y the time they reached Memphis, Tennessee, Mad realized that they were still essentially strangers. And they were going to add more people to this caravan? Mad wanted to keep moving, to find their dad, but Rube was more content to wander.
It was Rube who asked if they could visit Graceland, and it was Mad who tried so hard to think of a polite way to say no. “Do you even like Elvis?” she asked.
“I mean, he’s an icon, right?” Rube replied. “He’s a crucial part of American pop culture.”
“What’s your favorite Elvis song?” she asked him.
“Oh, boy!” he exclaimed, surprised at the question, “Hmm. ‘In the Ghetto,’ maybe?” And as Mad laughed at the absurdity of that song being his favorite, he changed his mind. “Wait! No, why did I say that? Shit, um, maybe ‘Hound Dog’? That’s pretty good, you have to admit. Anyway, it’s not about the music, exactly. It’s just the symbolism of him.”
Mad tried to think of her own choice for favorite song by Elvis but all she could hear in her head was Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis.” Then she could only think of Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” Did she not know a single Elvis song? He was before her time, but not so far away that he was cool again to people like her. He was just a famous guy who ruined himself through excess and ended up on velvet paintings that hung in the living room of your weird aunt and uncle.
“I’ve heard the tickets are pretty expensive,” Mad offered, trying to keep them on the road, heading west, but then she realized that, if they didn’t stop, if they made good time, they would be standing in front of their half sister outside her dorm at the University of Oklahoma, trying to convince her that they were related and that they were looking for their dad, who had also once been her dad. Mad remembered the strange sensation of Rube driving up to the farm, and he had only been one person. If Mad had wanted no part of his plan, it would have been a one-on-one fight, and she could have kicked his ass, shoved him in the PT Cruiser, and sent him on his way. But she thought of this college girl, feeling crowded by these two people who might as well have been old people to her, begging her to get in the car and head west. Why had she agreed to this?
“We can eat,” Mad offered, and it was a testament to their growing relationship that Rube seemed to sense that Mad would not set foot in Graceland and so he agreed.
“What should we eat?” he asked.
“Barbecue,” she replied.
“Which one?”
“It will not matter,” she told him. “They will all be better than anything you’ve had in Boston.”
RUBE HAD STAYED WITH THEM AT THE FARM FOR TWO DAYS, FOLLOWING Mad’s mom around and helping with the work while Mad got her affairs in order, which consisted mostly of sorting through her clothes, looking for outfits that suggested that she had her life together and wasn’t a scam artist and that this absolutely wasn’t about money or a cult. She did not have a lot of outfits that sug gested this state of being, because she pretty much only wore blue jeans and then flannel shirts over T-shirts. She decided the best she could manage was to be clean, unrumpled, and so she ironed her shirts and washed her jeans in the hopes that when she walked into the living quarters of a person who was family, they would not be afraid of her. Or, at the very least, they would be less afraid than the circumstances allowed.
They were going to Oklahoma, where they were hoping to meet their half sister, Pepper Hill, who was a senior at the University of Oklahoma. Rube had shown her the folder compiled by the detective, and it was much thicker than the one on Mad, because Pepper was a basketball star. It still wasn’t that thick because she was a women’s basketball star, but nevertheless. There was a lot of information on her, even if some of it was purely statistical, even though she was eleven years younger than Mad. She was feeling embarrassed that, of the three siblings, she had the least amount of national press. Rube had his books and Pepper had basketball. Mad had the farm, had been featured in magazines, but farms weren’t as sexy as sports and literature. There was no category in Trivial Pursuit for Farming. But, she considered, for a dad who left very little trace of himself as he moved through these families, he had produced exemplary children. Or, no, Mad reminded herself, their mothers had produced exemplary children.
Pepper was a former Gatorade High School Player of the Year in Oklahoma, the only woman to score more than three thousand points in her career, and a two-time state champion. She was Oklahoma’s starting shooting guard on the women’s team, which was ranked fourteenth in the nation. Mad learned from a profile from her senior year of high school in The Oklahoman that Pepper—who went by Pep (of course, this had to be their dad)—had transferred high schools during her sophomore year because the new principal had confiscated her gym key so she wouldn’t be able to practice in the mornings and nights. “It’s just, like, there’s a lot of hours in the day, you know? I spend most of them playing basketball,” Pepper said in response, “and my mom knew I’d keep going, just break in, and she didn’t want me to go to jail or get expelled, so she moved us to another district. She’s a good mom.” No mention of a dad, Mad noticed. She wondered if their father had anything to do with Pepper’s basketball talent, though she couldn’t imagine how he would have influenced her, since he had no experience or interest in it when she knew him. But she figured that Rube was pretty flabbergasted to learn that his insurance salesman father, who wrote crime novels on the side, would turn his next kid into a farmer.
There was a picture of Pepper, in her uniform, but the black-and-white photo was blurry from being reproduced. Still Mad instantly could see a resemblance, the square jaw, the straight blonde hair that Mad shared, and, good lord, the height. According to a scouting report from her freshman year at OU, Pepper was six foot one, an inch taller than Mad and only an inch shorter than Rube. She didn’t know what to expect, of course, didn’t know if she’d even want this athletic, hyper-driven girl in the car with her as they moved west, but she liked the safety of numbers, to imagine all of them, these tall, imposing children of their terrible father, moving toward him like they were Godzilla, bent on destruction.
AT THE COZY CORNER, THEY ATE RIBS AND BARBECUED BOLOGNA SAND wiches dripping with sauce and coleslaw. The A/C was broken in the restaurant, a tiny little box of a place, but the food was so good they didn’t care. There was no one else in the restaurant, and as they ate, Mad asked Rube a question that seemed too personal for the close confines of the PT Cruiser.
“You mentioned a boyfriend,” she started.
“An ex-boyfriend now, but yeah,” Rube allowed, still eating.
“Have you been in many relationships?” she asked. “You ever been married?”
He put down the sandwich and wiped his hands on a napkin. He took a sip of iced tea and then looked back at her, as if determining what he could tell her. “I’ve never been married, no.”
“Oh, yeah, okay, I guess I forgot,” Mad said, feeling like an idiot. She didn’t even fully know what the laws were, if it was allowed in Massachusetts. But all she wanted to know was if he’d been in love, been committed to someone.
“So what about you?” Rube asked her. “Are you … do you like guys? Or, maybe, girls? I can’t—I guess I don’t know.”
“Guys?” she replied, and it sounded like a question, though it was meant to be declarative. She had no interest in women. But, honestly, sometimes she wished there was a third option. Or just maybe that she lived somewhere that had more guys to choose from. She repeated herself, more confidently this time. “Guys.”
“Okay, cool. It’s just, you know, I couldn’t place you with the farming and the flannel and the boots and … well, it’s just good to know. Have you ever been married?”
“Me? No. Never married. Never even close to that. I haven’t seriously dated anyone since college. The farm just requires so much work. I can’t just go out on dates and see where it goes and all that, because there’s always something I need to be doing. I don’t have time to get to the serious part.”
“Are there any handsome farmers who have land that abuts your own farm? Seems like that would be a good fit,” Rube offered.
“There are no handsome farmers in our neck of the woods, no. And they wouldn’t be interested in our farm, because it’s not that big, and we’re organic, and we have weird ideas about farming, and they think we’re, like, witches who make things grow with black magic.”
She did think about a guy from Little Rock, Arkansas, who had come to Coalfield to write an article about the farm for a glossy southern magazine. He was a cute, slightly nerdy boy named Matthew. He had treated her seriously and asked good questions that revealed the limits of what he knew about farming but impressed her that he’d even known to ask. He stayed in town for three days, seriously longer than he probably needed to, and she took him to dinner one night and nothing really happened, but there had been a spark. And he would email afterward, even after the article had come and gone. It was nice to come home after work and relax on the sofa and correspond with him, talking about things that didn’t matter, which meant she could share things that didn’t matter. But time passed, and she got busy with work and didn’t respond as quickly, because it was hard to treat email as something real, and so he stopped writing as much. He’d invited her to visit him in Little Rock, but that had been almost eight months ago, and she’d not replied. It was sad, maybe, but that was the closest she’d been to a relationship in a good long while.
“Do you want to get married?” Rube asked.
“I guess I have to want it more than I want the life that I have right now. And it would be nice if something came along to make me wonder.”
“Well, you are very interesting and super capable and quite pretty, so I think you should get online and find somebody.”
“I will never go online and find somebody,” she replied. “I’d rather just be a farm witch. But I was talking about you.”
“Fair enough. Yeah, I’ve been in a few relationships. It’s complicated, I guess.” He seemed to consider picking the sandwich back up, but he hesitated.
He told her about how he hadn’t known he was gay, that it wasn’t something he’d understood about himself from adolescence. But then an older boy in high school had chosen him, had seen something in him that suggested that he was gay. And that meant a lot, in that time period, when things were even worse than they were now. To take a risk like that, you had to feel pretty certain that the other person wouldn’t destroy you. Rube just felt like maybe the boy knew him more clearly than he knew himself and he allowed it. They dated in secret, did everything in secret, but Rube liked it, understood how his attraction worked and what he desired, but then the boy went off to college and they never saw each other again.
A few years later, when he went off to Boston College, he dated some, but he couldn’t tell his mom because he thought it would break her heart. She had hoped for grandchildren, some way to make their family larger than it was, and then he got a job teaching at a pretty fancy private school. The school had these arcane morality clauses that scared the shit out of him, and so he’d kept that part of himself under wraps. If he did anything, it was always illicit, and it never felt right, like it shouldn’t have made him feel so guilty. So it was just better to be alone than to feel that way. He’d lived like that until he sold the novel and could leave that teaching job. And he’d met his boyfriend, who was an editor, and they had been happy, but he still couldn’t tell his mom. He’d never told her. And then she’d died. And even if he hadn’t cracked up after her death, he doubted his boyfriend would have stayed with him much longer. Rube had kept him at arm’s length from parts of his life for so long. Why would you stay with someone like that?
“I keep people at a distance, I know,” he said.
“I guess I do, too,” Mad offered, but it was easy to do that when you lived on so many acres that you could barely even see your neighbor. But she knew what he meant. If a person wanted her, it made her suspicious, not flattered. It was a part of herself that she hated, to think that she was so deficient that someone was scamming her if they said she was interesting.
“My therapist says that’s definitely because of Dad,” he offered.
“Oh,” Mad said, not sure what to say. She’d never been to a therapist in her life. The chickens demanded so much of her attention that she couldn’t even find someone suitable to have sex with every once in a while. No way was she using her free time driving to a city and talking about her freaking dad. No, thank you. But she’d glean what she could from Rube’s therapist. She seemed like a lady who might know some things.
“Yeah. She says that he left me and my mom, and so I’m afraid that I’m gonna do the same thing.”
“Or maybe you’re afraid someone will leave you again,” Mad offered.
“That, too!” Rube said. “Yes, one or the other.”
“And you think that’s all because of Dad?” she asked, genuinely curious. She didn’t feel the same. Her dad had done what he’d done, but she didn’t think he was the reason she couldn’t commit to a relationship with a dude who didn’t even exist. Maybe if she met someone online and they got deep enough into the relationship, she’d have a clearer sense of it.
“I think it’s at least half of it,” he said. “Half of it’s that Dad messed me up by leaving. And half of it is that my mom messed me up by staying but being so damn sad that I never forgot about it.”
Mad figured that most therapy consisted of focusing on how your parents messed you up, and then finding ways to keep that pain contained within your own body so you didn’t pass it on to anyone else or yell too much at the people responsible. But her mom was great. She wanted Mad to leave, to explore, to be happy. Although, if a therapist was present right now, and Mad was forced at gunpoint to say something about the whole situation, she’d admit that maybe having your mom constantly ask you to explore beyond the place that you, with all of your blood, sweat, and tears, helped make into an extremely successful agricultural landmark in the modern American South, you’d feel a little unappreciated, too.
“I can’t eat anymore,” Rube finally said. “Should we hit the road? Or perhaps there’s a cultural landmark that you’d like to check out?”
“We probably should keep driving. It’s, like, seven hours to Norman.”
“It’s already five o’clock. With stops, we won’t get there until pretty late.”
“We can stop in Arkansas,” Mad offered.
“A hotel room?” Rube asked.
“Yeah, Rube,” she replied. “Did you think we’d just live in the car? Or sleep under the stars? We’ll have to find lodging on this trip. We can’t stay in the dorm with this girl we’ve never met.”
“Yeah, of course. I know. But you want your own room, right?”
“I guess it depends on how much a room costs,” Mad replied. She did not want to go into debt tracking down her siblings and confronting her dad. She needed to be careful with her money. She had thus far not offered to pay for gas. She had not paid for the tickets to see Elvis’s kitchen. She had paid for her own meal here at the Cozy Corner. She bought her half brother’s book, those royalties going right into his bank account. She still had to get back home . Who knew what expenses might occur. If it meant sharing a hotel room with her half brother, well, stranger things would probably await them.
“Oh, great!” Rube offered. “We can watch a movie and order a pizza.”
“Let’s just see how tired we are. There is a long stretch of driving that you have to do. And I want to finish your book.”
“Yes, sure,” Rube answered, but she could see that he liked the idea of it, to be less alone.
And as they drove across the Mississippi, Mad realized this was the farthest west that she’d ever been in her life. Thirty-two years old, and she was only now in the western part of the United States because of a brother that she had never met before and a father who waited at the edge of the country. As they reached the other side of the bridge, Mad closed her eyes, centered herself, even as the car kept moving forward. She could feel the tug of the farm, knew where it was, could see it clearly in her mind. No matter how far she went, she’d not lose sight of it. She opened Rube’s novel, took a few seconds to remember what was going on within the pages, and kept reading, eager to see how it all turned out, knowing that, at the very least, when she reached the end, there would be a resolution.
1978, COALFIELD, TENNESSEE, 8MM
Close-up on a hen’s eye. The black pupil is surrounded by speckled orange, before the frame expands to reveal a young girl, wearing an Opryland Theme Park cap, smiling, two baby teeth missing, cradling the chicken in her arms.
She kisses the hen, who bristles, and she places it on the ground. She picks up a basket of eggs and walks over to a woman wearing a pair of overalls, who covers her face and shakes her head at the camera. The girl pulls on her mom’s arm and the woman relents, smiling. After a few seconds, she makes a goofy face and holds up an egg like she’s going to throw it at the camera, which pans over to the girl, who laughs. She takes an egg from the basket and makes the same gesture and the camera slowly retreats, as the woman and girl shake their fists.
The next shot shows the girl holding up the end of a trailer hitch as the mother backs up a John Deere tractor. The mother hops off and helps the girl connect the trailer. The girl then climbs onto the tractor and, after a few seconds, gets the tractor started and pulls out. The camera pans to show a somewhat rickety chicken coop on wheels, painted an electric orange with white trim, being pulled by the tractor to a new location with fresh grass. The girl waves, and the chicken coop jostles and bounces, and the camera pans over to the mother, who is smiling, looking at the girl.
Close-up on the girl’s face as smoke swirls around her. The camera pans out to show her reaching into an open smoker and plucking hard-boiled eggs from the grates. She takes one, shuffling it from hand to hand until it cools, and peels off the shell. She looks at the camera, makes a goofy face, similar to the one her mother made earlier, and shoves the entire egg into her mouth. She chews but then laughs, opening her mouth to show the yellow of the yolk stuck in her teeth. She finally swallows, nodding, and then reaches for another egg. She holds it out toward the camera and nothing happens, but then she frowns, gesturing toward the camera, and a hand reaches out and takes the offered egg. The hand quickly retreats from the shot, and the girl watches, waiting for some response. Instead, the camera turns toward the field where the chickens now scratch at the grass.