By Matthew Wilson
Contributing Writer
Momma always hated the hospitals. She hated taking my brother there through much of his early life, and she hated when I would call the men in the orange and white ambulance to come take her. She thought she’d die one day in one of them hospital rooms, and to her, that seemed a greater sin than murder.
I never much minded the hospitals, especially in childhood when it seemed it was about the safest place a person could be. It was only later in life when I realized how many people went there to die, when I looked at the tubes hooked through Momma’s wrists and listened to the arrhythmic beat of the heart monitor did those places chill me to the bone.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Where to begin? Do I begin now at the end or as close to the end as I can be sitting at my desk, fingers on my Macbook as the vinyl record plays the melodic beat of The Beatles as they break into “Here Comes The Sun?” Twenty-two seems the wrong age to be writing about this. Better make it sixty or seventy when I can look back like a grizzled traveler, puff out my chest, and call myself a survivor. Writing in the midst of your life seems wrong, but since sixty or seventy ain’t guaranteed any more than a day past today, I might as well type till my fingers give out. I hope you are not one of those types opposed to ain’t, y’all, and the such. I know it’s supposed to be aren’t and you all, but these words are my vocabulary. They’re in the building blocks of my world along with less savory words like god damn, gotta be fucking kidding me, and that son of a bitch.
My grandmother used two of which on any given day to describe my daddy. Again, I could be proper with the use of father, but proper is not going to tell this story. I want to tell you the story of lost towns and ghost people, of the place where dreams die and are born in a cataclysm of sparks, of Peter Pan and Wendy, and of the dreaded reign and eventual fall of the Whiskey Mother.
For much of my life, I’ve had two mothers. One was angelic and the other, not so much, and I spent much time and turmoil wondering whether I belonged to one or the other. Born and raised in Monroeville, Alabama, to George and Joyce Wilson, Momma was among the middle of two sisters and two brothers. But, it seemed to me that the count was wrong.
Whenever I went to thinking, I saw a shade, a shadow of blankness like amnesia where a third sister should have gone. And the more I thought, the more I guess that’s the place of the Whisky Mother.
Momma
Momma would always say, “You didn’t have to be crazy to live there, but it certainly helped.”
Momma always said lots of things, and in childhood, they seemed like sage wisdom, some holy teachings from a blind prophet on a mountain summit, but they came from the mouth of a sixteen year old girl. Rarely did anyone find sixteen year old girls wise, and as sixteen came and passed for myself, I certainly didn’t feel beyond my years. But at two or three years old, to me she was God. A problem solver and vanquisher of all fears, she could do no wrong.
Well, she could do lots of things wrong, and some of those things she did wrong led to me, “the best gift that she ever had.” Momma was a wild child, the sort that drove her mama to the cuffs of pulling her hair out. She was still a wild child (as much as sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen are considered a child) even after I was born, but she never let me see as much, and if she did, my feeble mind could not recognize it.
Momma was a redhead. “You don’t mess with a redhead,” she would say whenever someone got her riled up. There was a bit of feistiness to her, a bucket of spice dumped into her chemical makeup, that sent her cussing like a sailor. Running across the yard on a humid summer afternoon, she promised to beat a neighbor’s “ass” because nobody “talked shit” about her kids. It took my daddy to restrain her, and even he slipped and slid in the grass, holding her back as she struggled forward to fulfill that promise. Collapsing in the yard, she waved her fist, her face matching the color of her hair. I thought she had a touch of Irish or Scottish in her, though her ancestral makeup remained a mystery. Maybe, there was a touch of Genghis Khan somewhere in the mix, though nothing suggests anything but caucasian and hellfire.
Perhaps, that’s a bad image for an introduction. Introductions are so important after all, and that was not the introduction I got. That stuff came later when the saint gave way to the frail creature, perhaps frailer than I ever entertained to be, pretending to be strong. There’s a certain commendation in even pretending. Momma used to tell me this story every night before I went to bed, nestled between my parents because I was scared to sleep by myself in the dark. It was more of a prayer, an exaction in repetition, that brought inner peace like being cloaked by heaven. On my mother’s words, my mind would stretch all the way down to Mobile Bay and to the silver battleship that served in the Great War and found itself a relic for little children and their fathers to play on.
She would lift up the covers over my head and point to the stitching where the light faded in through little beads. “See the stars, Matthew. That’s all the stars in all the world. There’s the Big Dipper. Where’s the moon?” she’d say, running her finger along the stitching. Space stretched overhead, the infinity of the cosmos somehow caught within my bedsheets. For a moment, I could reach out and touch the stars. She would open the cover a little to let the light pour in, and I could see the curtains of the room. How she pulled down the stars and galaxies and threaded them to cloth was magic.
Later, when I was nineteen and she was drunk, she would pull the cover over my head and run her fingers along the thread. “Do you see the stars, Matthew? There’s the stars,” she’d whisper, her voice hoarse and dry, but the stars were gone. There was only thread and cloth, the magic faded by time. “Yeah, I see them,” I would lie because I could not bare to destroy the illusion. Once she passed out, I would sit for awhile and listen to the shortness of her breaths, wiping tears from my eyes, and I would wonder if I ever saw the stars to begin with. Maybe, it had all just been a lie.
When was the Whiskey Mother born? At what moment did it first take control of her consciousness? The Whiskey Mother was the person I saw whenever Momma would go on a bender. She never drank whiskey, not like her papa, and she never hit me like he did her, but that wasn’t Momma in those eyes, those orbs staring out with some manic lunacy that I did not know.
I remember my momma. I know who she was, what kind of person she was, and that ain’t her, so it might as well be some demonic presence in disguise because that ain’t her.
Mawmaw had a collection of Polaroids in a red ice chest in her room. In one of the crinkly, yellow photos, Momma stood in front of the single wide trailer she grew up in, dark red hair bobbed short, dressed in a denim jacket, beside her brother, George, and sister, Linda. She was probably twelve or thirteen in the photo. Not even a year or two later, I would be born and would look up to her like she was an adult.
Momma was a bald baby, whose hair took forever to come in small tufts of orange. For the longest time, she hated the color of her hair and the freckles on her skin. The kids at school would call her “tomater” and ask if she would get a “forever tan.” In her teens, she bleached her hair so blonde that it was almost white and covered her skin in powder. People called her a “porcelain doll” instead because some people were assholes, and it did not matter what she did because they would always be assholes.
Even in high school, they would laugh and point at the girl who brought a mouse to school in her lunch box in third grade. It was always a point of embarrassment for Momma, the little church mouse that had somehow snuggled its way among her lunch. From that point on, she was unclean, one of the poor, and Momma didn’t take kindly to being called poor.
Monroeville was not a kind place for her as she would soon learn, and it would never be a kind place to her, but she still insisted on coming back years later, pointing to the spots visited by some younger self, and laughing like she was thinking back on good times before the laughter would catch and she’d fall silent staring at the spot like she couldn’t believe that grocery store was gone or that gas station had opened.
The single wide on Rose Street was no place for a child, no place for much of anybody really, and twenty years later, the surrounding trees would swallow it up completely in a flora forest of green elm, oak, and ivy, but back then, it was a brown and white trailer, small and cramped for six people, and hidden behind a barbed wire fence as if someone wanted what they had.
Momma ran around the neighborhood like it was her personal playground. She climbed trees, played in mud puddles until she covered herself brown, and adopted the stray cat, Blacky, that Mawmaw accidentally ran over with the car. Her chin bared the scar of her attempted flip on the playground swing. Maybe, she could escape gravity and just float far away. She was the kind to draw a picture to tell a person she’s sorry, and she was sorry more often than not because she was a wanderer, out to see the world for all it was worth, but the world only stretched as far as Monroeville and that street.
George was Momma’s papa, and 39 years later, he’ll always only ever be George to me. Built like a giant to her, with a wiry beard that covered much of his face in brown soon to turn gray, George was an angry man.
At least, he had anger in him because he always wondered why his daddy didn’t love him, and his daddy never showed him any care in the world. George turned to the whiskey and the liquor, and the whiskey and liquor turned to George, and George became angry, as angry as he ever could. He’d rage his fists and stomp his legs and beat Mawmaw black and blue, and beat Momma black and blue too whenever she got between them. And once, he got so angry and so crazy that he shot one of his double barrel shotguns through the trailer and right above Momma’s head.
Those are the whiskey memories, the memories of a man so out of control that he couldn’t even control himself. His family owned so much property on Rose Street, it was pretty much theirs, and many of them never took too kindly to that McKinley woman or her brood.
George was a collector. He collected VHS tapes and VCRs, collected knives, cassette tapes, televisions, and guns. Whatever he didn’t spend on the bottle, he spent on his collection. He’d buy red meat, sausages, steaks, pork chops, and the like, and he’d go over to his mama’s house and she’d cook it up for him. Momma lived off of black-eyed peas and cornbread and simple things. She lived off whatever Mawmaw could find to cook or whatever she could buy with the leftover stamps after George went shopping.
The trailer had no hot water, so they took their baths in water heated on the stove. Momma didn’t get Christmas or Easter, and for birthdays, they’d rewrap what they already had and give it to each other as gifts. But, Momma grew. She grew to the sound of crickets through the thin paper walls of her threadbare shack. She grew from a wide-eyed little girl to a rebellious teenager who skipped school, snuck out, and stayed out far too late for her own good. She snuck out of the skating rink that her mama dropped her off at, and with her sister, Linda, in tow, she would party because what else was there to do.
All she had ever known was Monroeville and its borders, and if that was all there was, then there wasn’t much. It seemed at times that the whole town gathered down at the local gas station just to hang out. Monroeville would bury her, she might have thought sipping on a beer in the middle of a summer night.
She didn’t do good in school. She couldn’t see the board, and the teacher wouldn’t let her sit at the front of the room. Squinting gave her headaches, and she didn’t have glasses. At lunch, Momma would spend her time in the bathroom or wandering the halls or outside. She wandered alone because all anyone wanted to talk about anyways was that “damn mouse.”
And for a time, perhaps a long time, that’s all she thought her life was ever going to be. The world never seemed to go pass Monroeville except for Franklin.
At fifteen, she spent her Friday nights at football games because what else was there to do. She didn’t know what was coming, that she’d soon leave Monroeville in the dust, that she’d been cursed by her daddy and cursed by her lineage. She didn’t know of The Whiskey Mother.
The Ghost People
Mawmaw never talked much about the ghosts. She never talked much about her childhood, and it seemed to me that Mawmaw had been plucked into existence, old and tired. I stumbled across a picture of her from her high school days: a young woman smiling on the evening of the prom dance. It is hard to imagine that she had ever been that young. A few years later, she would be married. Years after that, she would be married again. She didn’t “luck out” when it came to men, she would say.
Sometimes, I would ask her about her youth. “Where were you when JFK was assassinated? What about the moon landing? The Civil Rights Movement? The Berlin Wall?” But, she always shrugged her shoulders like she didn’t have the faintest idea. “We didn’t have a tv when I was growing up,” she’d say, and for a moment, all she could see were the rows of cotton. She’d pick it in the warm months, a stash slung over her neck, as she sat hunched over. She picked turnips and squash and any other plants her family grew, but it always seemed to be the cotton that haunted her. Her childhood was among the rows, the weight of the cotton pulling at her back that would hurt almost sixty years later.
In Franklin, Alabama, she might as well been on another planet. Her family worked and tilled on land rented out from someone else. It was only years later that I brought to her attention that she had been a sharecropper. To her, she had been a farmer. And when she wasn’t a farmer, she was busy acting like a mother. She’d help take care of her two brothers, Ricky and Eddie. She’d carry their diapers down to the stream to clean them. They didn’t have running water. They got that from a well. When she got hungry, she’d pick figs from a nearby tree.
There had been ghosts in her childhood home. Whenever she went to sleep at night, she could hear the soft bouncing of a ball against the walls. Part of her believed the ghosts followed her. Her uncles wouldn’t leave her alone.
She never said how many there had been or their names, but they had all died horribly. It was the drink. It was the moonshine and the liquor that sent them to an early grave. They had journeyed the back hills of Franklin and Monroeville and partied to the break of dawn. They had chased women and thought themselves kings. They had sung songs drunkenly and drank until they could no longer see or walk straight. And, they had died as not quite boys and not quite men.
They were the ghost people. They existed as grainy black and white photographs scattered among dusty attics and crawlspaces. They existed as visages of cotton fields that stretch from dawn to dusk. They existed as youthful reckless abandonment. They existed as half formed memories of long forgotten times.
One drowned himself in the river. He waded out into the water thinking he could swim down to The Gulf. Maybe, he thought he’d reach the sea and live the rest of his days sailing among the Bermuda. Instead, the water took hold and filled his nose and mouth, and he drowned with the smell of whiskey on his breath, his life strangled out by the shine of the moon.
Another uncle lit himself on fire.
“He lit himself on fire?” I asked her.
“He lit himself on fire,” she said.
For as long as I live, I’d always think of a great uncle burning bright like the sun. Maybe, he was envious of the great burning ball of gas. Maybe, he had a cold, a chill that swept through his skin and into his bones. Maybe, he thought he’d never be warm again as his blood turned to frost and his brain to ice. Maybe, he thought he’d make the flames his mistress, or barring that then death would do. He went up like a candle wick. Whatever madness he found in the bottle burned him asunder.
There’s a phrase written by Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, in the classic text Te Tao Ching. “The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” That’s how I always envisioned the lives of the uncles. They were gone before they even arrived. Mawmaw would awaken from nightmares of figures standing in the dark of her room, their voices garbled by the sloshing of liquor. They seemed to beckon her to leave the safety of her bed and join them in the shadows of the gloom. They seemed to curse her life or at least her memories.
She made a solemn promise to herself that she’d never let the bottle rule her life. She’d never drink a drop of that hell water if she could help it, and for a while, she thought she could escape their curse. But, there they stood in the corners of her eyes, just out of view, the spectators of death.
They seemed to laugh at her promise.
Peter Pan And Wendy
They told Momma that he would die. They told her that sooner or later he’d be gone, and Momma should just accept it. At nineteen years old, she was confused and angry and determined to find answers. She was a mother now. The remnants of the wild child flaring up whenever she’d chase down doctors. She had two baby boys that depended on her, and she didn’t understand why the youngest, her little Zachary, wasn’t walking or talking like he was supposed to.
Zachary was born a sickly child, the color of the blue blankets he had been wrapped in. For much of his early life, he was in and out of the hospitals. He couldn’t seem to keep down a bottle without throwing up. Momma had been excited about having another baby. She had went to the rent-a-center, spending money she didn’t have to put down on a set of red bunk beds for the two of us, and I promised I’d fight my brother tooth and nail for the top bunk when it came to it.
We never did share those bunkbeds. For almost a decade, I slept on the bottom bunk, the top vacant except for a pillow and a couple forgotten stuffed animals. Momma and Daddy would leave me with Mawmaw while they went off on hospital trips in Mobile. “When are you coming home?” I wondered on the phone, late at night to Momma calling to tell me goodnight.
“Soon,” she would promise, “As soon as Zach’s better.”
And, she’d bring me a magic marker coloring book of Disney characters as if they had went on vacation and not a neurologist. One day, Momma came home from one of the trips crying. She sat at the dining table across from Mawmaw, wiping her eyes with a piece of paper towel.
“He said it might be Leigh’s Disease,” Momma said, lighting a cigarette. Her eyes were two puffy orbs, almost as red as the burning cherry. “Mama, he said Zachary probably wouldn’t live to see five? Who’s says that to someone?”
“He say anything else?” Mawmaw asked, her forehead creasing like it always did when she was processing bad news. “Don’t listen to him, Susan. Zachary’s going to be fine.”
“Bunch of quacks, the whole group of them. I’m going to get a referral to Sacred Heart over in Pensacola,” Momma said because they hadn’t settled on a diagnosis she was satisfied with yet.
When they finally diagnosed Zachary with Angelman and later, my sister, Kayla, I think the weariness had settled in, and she was just ready to be done with doctors. At four and five, chromosome and deletion entered my lexicon. Before I could barely count to a hundred, I had a very rough delineation of what genetic code was. When my brother and sister were born, there was a deletion on their 15th chromosome. Affecting one out of 15,000 people worldwide, Angelman Syndrome caused both physical and developmental delays. Mentally, they’d never age much past an 18 month old. Physical problems with the disorder included epilepsy and muscle atrophy.
At least, her babies weren’t dying, and even if they never would be normal, that was enough for her in the moment. Momma was all about proving the doctors wrong anyways. They told her that Zachary would never walk, and she’d spend almost everyday pushing his legs against the floor, willing them to move, until one day they did. That was always a point of pride for her, an adage that determination could overcome the impossible.
“I got him to walk,” she said. “I got him to walk.”
When I was little, I used to think of Zachary and Kayla as Peter Pan and Wendy. No matter how many years went by and the world changed and I changed, they always seemed to stay the same. There was that same naive laughter caught up in their eyes and a mischievous quality that said they would get into trouble, the moment someone turned their back.
It was a little easier pretending they might fly up to Neverland on a whim. Growing up, I found games for us to play. I’d cover us in a blanket and pretend that we were three astronauts exploring an exotic, alien landscape. The carpet would be thick red clay. Stuffed teddy bears would act as friendly Martians while Mawmaw stood in as the evil alien queen. I’d roll a blue kickball to them and try to get them to roll it back in a game of ground toss.
It was easier when I was younger. I had more of an imagination for the unseen, which dulled as I got older. Zachary grew less mobile too. Whereas he could move around freely as a boy, his back hunched, and it became a task for him to walk without assistance.
My brother would put his legs behind his head like he was a gymnast. Momma always wondered how he could be so flexible. He would chunk toys across the floor or bang on the wall with a sly grin as if he was testing my mother’s patience.
“Stop being a little asshole, Zachary,” Momma would tell him, and he’d laugh, the grin consuming his face as he momentarily paused before another toy went flying.
My sister would constantly sign for either the bathroom, food, or drink because she either knew it’d drive my parents mad or the compulsion was driving her mad. Over the years, she developed an affinity for both volleyball and jumping jacks and refused to exercise alone, grabbing you by the hands and moving them up and down. She was wilder and more mobile than our brother, inheriting a bit of Momma’s mischievous gene.
The greatest shame Momma ever felt was when she had to send Kayla away. Neverland had claimed her and was pulling her from reality, and Momma couldn’t hold onto her anymore. Years later when she was drunk and alone in the hours of the morning, Momma would ponder the decisions that defined her life, and her mind would always catch on her daughter that she sent away from home. Momma had a failure for a brain that seemed content to always worry and always place the blame on her own shoulders. Momma hated her failure of a brain, and that failure of a brain hated Momma.
The genesis of The Whiskey Mother was one part bad childhood and one part failures, and the greatest failure Momma would ever feel for the longest time, the thing that kept her up at night, was learning about that damn learning tree.
There are trees older than me, trees that stretch back thousands of years before Jesus Christ was crucified. The Redwood trees stand tall and wide like giants slumbering upright in the earth. There were no Redwoods in Alabama. Instead, we had elm, oak, willow, and pine. We had birch, and magnolia, and dogwood. We had beech, and chestnut, and ash. We had cypress, and black cherry, black gum, and walnut. We had trees that seemed to stretch forever, but really only stretched between highways. And, we had trees that little children climbed in the summer months. We had trees like skeletal fingers stretching toward winter skies for any traces of warmth. But, in all my years, I had never heard of a learning tree before.
I liked to think of Kayla as Wendy from Neverland, but she was more like Tinkerbell. She was like a gust of wind moving through the trailer. She didn’t have it in her to stay still. She wanted to venture and plunder. She wanted to test the brillo pad and wash it down with dish soap. She wanted to bang her hands through the air, against the wall, and against others. She would chunk toys hoping to break through the walls or the ceilings. Kayla would wail at times for no reason at all. She’d stay up late at night and plot, and Momma would check on her half a dozen times because she could never leave Kayla alone.
But, Kayla had problems that went beyond all those things. She’d dig in her diapers. She’d tear them into little white strips across the floor. She’d chew on them. The harsh realities of growing up with disabled siblings were they had no concept of what going to the bathroom was. Kayla was the worst of the two in this manner. On one particular morning, Momma awoke to find Kayla smeared in the contents of her diaper, rubbing it along the wall of her bed as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Retching, Momma called for Mawmaw to bring her a rolls’ worth of wet paper towel and garbage bags. Cussing like a mad woman and attempting to keep her coffee down, she began the slow process of cleaning up the mess.
Momma tried everything. She tried overalls. She tried a snugger pair of diapers, but nothing ever seemed to work. Kayla was a crafty sort, and she’d find her way into anything if that anything was possible. Momma would sit on the couch, puffing on a cigarette, as if she was trying to conjure some amount of strength to go on. In her twenties, sixteen seemed almost a lifetime ago, and in those moments, she felt too old to only be in her twenties, and she felt the pain of a lost youth. How was she going to raise two disabled kids? Such an idea a tougher and tougher dilemma to consider.
It was in moments like this, the popping of silver cans would echo throughout the trailer. I didn’t understand it then, that she was there too. That dreaded Whiskey Mother hid behind the smile and reassurances of my mother. I was still too young to see those wild, uncaring eyes, and maybe, The Whiskey Mother was still too feeble. Maybe, she wasn’t quite set in the skin, hadn’t quite become more than a shade. Maybe, she was like the cigarette smoke evaporating against the popcorn ceiling.
The doctors told Momma that it had been her fault Zachary and Kayla had been born like they did. Well, not her fault. Fault elicits blame, and as the old Southern saying I just made up goes, there are no faults when it comes to acts of God. If anyone was to blame, it was the long line of ancestors stretching back from now till the first and their genetic markers and mutations. Momma had been the conduit for the disorder though, passed down from mother to children. It could lie dormant for generations before rearing itself again.
The problems continued, and Momma dealt with them the best way she knew how to. And the years, just ticked by and ticked by. The doctors’ only solution was an increase dose in medication that wasn’t working, and if it did work, would lobotomize Kayla into a drooling zombie. A wild and troublesome girl was better than a drooling zombie on any day. How do you handle the hitting and biting? How do you handle the moments when you have to sleep or have to work or you take your eyes off of them for a second? How do you have enough eyes to follow two of them when your corneas are already strained from trying to watch one?
“Can’t we get a straight jacket?” My daddy asked the doctor during one of Zachary’s checkups. Zachary had a black eye because he got a upset stomach from eating crawfish and decided to settle the matter by beating the hell out of his face. Anything spicy was off the menu after that.
The doctor laughed, clicking his pen.
“But seriously?”
At seventeen, long after The Learning Tree, I’d drive my brother to school, and I’d watch him through the rearview mirror. It was a race to make it to the parking lot before he became upset and started banging his head against the glass. “Stop it, Zachy-man!” I’d yell, swerving through traffic and speeding through red lights. On a handful of occasions, I’d stop the car along the side of the road, in utter exhaustion, and turn around because Zachary had busted his lip and stained his white polo in globs of red spit.
The schools were no help when it came to Zachary and Kayla. They were less of no help in that they did more harm than good. Momma had a lifelong distaste for them almost as much as she did the doctors and the hospital. Over the years, teachers had let Zachary swallow a penny. They were trying to teach him to count. “He can’t even talk!” Momma yelled with exasperation. At another time, an aid fell on his leg and broke it. I had to hold his leg out of the tub while my daddy tried to wash him. They’d tell Momma that Zachary and Kayla had no problems at school, that they were perfect saints, and that obviously the disabilities were grossly exaggerated. To hear them say it, maybe Zachary and Kayla were really faking it all. Those little tricksters were pulling a fast one on everybody. One note read, that Zachary and Kayla used “the potty” in school. Why did they need diapers again?
“Then, why did they come home with soiled shorts in their book bags?” Momma said angrily over the phone.
It wasn’t the first incident nor would it be the last before the battle over the school was through. The special education building was separate from the rest of the school. A little brick building, the curtains were drawn, the door locked, and if someone needed access, they’d better have a pretty strong knock.
“Why are you locking the door to the classroom?” Momma wondered on one day after checking out my siblings for a doctor’s appointment.
“Precautions,” the teacher’s aid said, her eyes adjusting to the light as if she was part bat. That didn’t sit right with Momma. Nothing those teachers did sat right with Momma. Once, she came to pick Zachary and Kayla up, and he was in nothing but a diaper. Apparently, he had threw up on his clothes, and the teacher had removed them.
“I can’t take him out there like that,” Momma complained something fierce. There was the loud stomping of students moving by outside. “Why didn’t you call me? You should have left his clothes on. Soiled clothes are better than no clothes.”
Momma complained to the principal, and the principal decided that there wasn’t a damn thing in his power that he could do. His hands were so figuratively tied, he might as well been in one of those straightjackets my daddy could never get.
Momma decided to become an investigator. Lord knows she watched enough detective, murder mysteries. Momma had the OCD, and she could always tell when something was amidst. She’d catch me sneaking a late night snack because the paper towel had been moved a few centimeters to the left of where she had it.
She showed up to school one day unannounced and knocked on the door of the classroom. One of the teacher’s aids opened the door a crack, sticking her face out as if to suck air. “Yes, how can I help you?” she said.
“I’m here to pick up my kids,” Momma replied.
Pushing her way inside, Momma was met with darkness. The room was dark except for a light near the teacher’s desk and Veggie Tales flashing on the little portable television set. The teacher looked like she was about to have a coronary when she saw Momma standing in the door. Kayla sat at the table, building blocks the color of taffy thrown aside, her shorts soiled. Zachary was gone. It was as if the darkness had swallowed him, and he had vanished without a trace. Momma’s eyes scanned the room, her brain whirling.
“Where’s Zachary?” she demanded.
No one answered her.
“Where is Zachary?”
A laughing moan broke the air, a noise that was so Zachary it was as much a part of him as his soul. Two eyes reflected in the dim light, shining from the darkness of the toy shelf. Zachary sat stuff among discarded toys, his leg sticking from behind a desk that was blocking his exit. Momma pulled the desk out from in front of him, and he crawled out, leaving one of his sneakers behind.
There’s a certain rage that can split a person’s soul. It can tear right through them if they hold it in, or it’d tear right through someone else if ever released. Momma’s daddy had been the rage, more feeling than man. And on some terrible nights, nights where I’d feel myself burning to ash and wonder about the choices I’ve made in my life, I would have it. In that moment, Momma had it too, and it both burned and ripped her and the room in a blearing heat.
If Momma had been a different woman, someone far less moral, and if she could have gotten away with it, she would have killed a person. Instead, she took them out of school completely. She got herself a lawyer because they broke a cardinal rule: no one messed with her children. She didn’t want money. It wasn’t about that. It was about what was right.
As a result of the court case, it was decided Zachary would be transferred to another school system, and Kayla was offered a referral to The Learning Tree program in Mobile. She’d live in a group home where they’d offer her around the clock care and help her with her behavioral problems. She’d have a better life there, better than what Momma could give her. Momma debated, and she cried, and she agreed that was best for Kayla because there wasn’t anything else she could do, and she cursed it all for being put in that situation at all.
The Whiskey Mother
The depression hit her hard. She seemed fine one day, and then she wasn’t. It was as if a cloud had came over her. By this point, Kayla had been in The Learning Tree for years. It had been decades since she escaped Monroeville. It had been at least ten years since she even touched a drink.
It wasn’t something she could explain. Maybe, there had been many things. She tried going to mental health, but she didn’t like the group therapy meetings. She didn’t like the stories people told her, and she could only schedule an appointment with a therapist every few months. She didn’t want to take their medication, to be a zombie.
Momma looked into natural remedies, herb pills that were supposed to make her feel herself, but nothing seemed to work. She started drinking recreationally, and it increased from recreationally to weekly, to daily. It went from a six pack a day to a twelve pack to an eighteen pack. It got to the point where she’d sleep most of the day, and she’d stay up most of the night, and she’d choke and wretch a can down before the effects of the last can even wore off.
I didn’t understand, and I still don’t, how the person who got onto me when I got a B on a math test in school, could sit there with a silver can in her hand and laugh like she didn’t even know who I was or cuss me like I was nothing.
“Get the fuck away from me,” she’d yell when I tried to snatch the can away, and in that moment, I decided on the Whiskey Mother because she ain’t my mother, and my mother might as well be dead for the amount of good it did me.
And I used to pray at night, wondering if God could bring my Momma back for good, or at least make her go away for good, cause I couldn’t handle having her one moment and gone in the next and never knowing which Momma I was going to get.
When George died, Momma cried, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would cry over such a man. All I ever heard about were the stories, the stories of whiskey memories, of the time he almost blew Momma’s head off, or the time he punched Mawmaw in the gut, or the time he let his kids go hungry. And I wondered how a person, much less Momma, could ever cry over a good for nothing man like that.
“He bought me candy. He’d take us up to Repton, and buy us these bags of assorted candy,” Momma told me, sitting on the couch bleary-eyed. “And when I was pregnant with you, he walked down to the gas station and bought me a bag of ice because I was craving it.”
And that’s all Momma would remember for days, and she never had any other good memories of the man except for the two, and I wondered why she cried until I found myself crying too and wondering. Being an alcoholic ain’t like the movies. If it was, then I’d be fine with my hate, and I could have left home at the age of 18 for college, content with my hate.
No. It’s love. It’s a painful love, a love that feels like ripping your fingernails off or a knife plunged deep in your chest. It’s a foolish love that keeps you praying every night through tears, just praying that somehow tomorrow might be better. I don’t know how to describe The Whisky Mother except as the absence of love. She’s a broken woman, a spiteful woman, who’d say anything just to not be loved. She’s a suicidal force of nature, that slowly builds and builds like a fungal infection of black decay.
“Fuck you. I’m done. I’m fucking done!” I swore with a rage so great that it split me in half, and over the course of the three years, I kept splitting and splitting until I went nuclear and became nothing but atoms. “Please, Momma. Please don’t die. Please come back. Please just stop. Get help. Please get help. Please. Please. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t….”
And I wonder if that is the moment where all Whiskey Mothers and Whiskey Fathers are born? Are they born in that dark moment of despair that so utterly fills you that it becomes you? I wonder back to the red headed girl playing among the trees, who the school kids picked on because of her freckles, and I wonder how many nights she stayed up, praying that her papa could be the same one as the one who took her to the store to get candy. And I wonder at what point did that prayer become moot?
I’d sit in the darkness holding my hand to her chest to check for a heartbeat. I’d turn her to her side when she started to seize and hold her as her breath broke in ragged strands. I’d pick her up when she gagged and carry her to the toilet. I’d debate if I should call 911 or if she was dead. If the ambulance picked her up, she’d just leave as soon as she sobered. She wouldn’t go to rehab because it was too many days. Momma started coughing up blood, but she refused to go to the hospital. She refused to do anything but drink.
Momma would take care of my brother in a half slumber, singing softly to him as he laughed. She’d sing “Happy Together” as she swayed his arms from side to side, and I’d feel like crying. To him, she was still God. To him, she could do no wrong. He was ignorant to The Whiskey Mother, to the pain, and to the worry. Never had Neverland seemed so far away.
I did cry. I banged on walls. I cursed her. I pleaded. I did everything I could think of to reach Momma.
At nineteen, I decided there wasn’t anything else I could do. Sitting in my room, I put the edge of my pocket knife to my wrist and wondered if God was listening, if I’d go to hell, and if hell was worst than this. Nobody wants to die, some people just get mighty sick of living.
No to the darkness. No to the despair. That’s what I told myself when I swallowed the lump in my chest and picked myself up. I would not let myself become the shade, the shadow that flickers behind all of us, and I would not let my Momma become the Whiskey Mother again. And on a day as she lay near death from a ruptured ulcer and close to the way out, I drove her up to the hospital, and she got the help that she needed.
She’s now two and half years sober.
And, yet, I can’t shake this feeling within me. It’s hard to explain the emptiness that persists in silence when everyone is asleep and you’re alone to your thoughts. I think of Peter Pan and Wendy. I think of the ghost people, who died far too young. I think of George, my grandfather that never was, and I think to how he died alone in an empty house. I think of Momma lying plum white in bed, convulsing with shakes, and my head against her chest listening for the soft beat of her heart. I remember the moment when I thought she was dead, and the moment when she wasn’t.
And I’m so terribly afraid. I’m afraid of the past, of the present, and of especially the future. But, fear and dread are The Whiskey Mother’s domain, so I must make peace with it. I must not let it define my life and not let The Whiskey Mother define hers. As J.M. Barry once said, “I taught you to fight and to fly. What more could there be?”