Except from a memoir audiobook
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
And had other sons and daughters as a kid, I liked to stand in the driveway and look at the barn through one eye. I blocked out its surroundings by cupping my hands around my face and pretended. I was looking at an old black and white photo, the coal black wood, white tin roof and ghostly horses rearing on each side of the front door, like peering into the past in a film slide carousel on the third floor amid images of mission trips and family photos. There was a negative of the barn when I held it to the light, I saw the barn and the spirit blue tones back when it was first built. If you reached past me and picked out another slide, you could see grandpa's father also named Raymond facing the camera and ill fitting jeans and eyes so sunken in, they looked like the barn. He was a cruel man who once threw a pitch fork at grandpa and laughed when it stuck in the hind end of a cow. Instead, he beat on grandpa's mom and harassed the local women so badly that when my mom got a job at the Sunshine cafe in town, a fellow waitress recognized her name and told her, you know, your grandpa once offered me a pack of beer to give him a ********. You could see all of this play out on the slides, flip through the slides fast enough and you can watch my grandfather grow from a frightened boy with a cow lick to a young man in army fatigues to a preacher. Watch the anger jump from his father to him like demons. You might be tempted to flip back and forth through the frames to pinpoint that single slide. When he went from someone who needed help to someone who terrorized his family as if it is in a sum of bad days and relaxing into coping mechanisms and excuses as if we don't wear paths in our brains that make it hard to walk anywhere new without constantly stumbling over the old divots. An old camera can only capture so much. You can't reach back and save him and you can't cast the anger onto a herd of pigs and send them into the sea to put down the slides and go out onto the third floor balcony from there. You can see all the way up the hill and all the way down the hill. You can see the birds that kept making nests under the lip of the roof. Even after grandpa installed mesh to keep them out, you can see the ashes on the window sill from where my mother wrote her poetry and chain smoked, sitting on a hard chair when it was too cold to go out in the puddle of cigarette butts on the chipped white painted slats beneath us. You can see the flourishing hackberry trees and the fruitless fruit trees and the crick and the dead cars. If you relax your eyes until your vision blurs, you can see the echoes of the not dead cars that my mother left in and me chasing them all the way down to the highway. Each time with my arms outstretched, screaming, take me, take me with you. Don't leave me here until the times I didn't chase them anymore. You can see into each neighbor's yard and down to the animal bodies on I end in 67. You might see the memory of a girl balanced on the banister getting ready to bending her knees to her body, letting her jump underneath your feet. There is a trap door. You can take the ladder down to the second floor, balcony, walk down the stairs and leave. I can't, I'm always here, but I'll follow you to the road and point to the spot where cousins finally got hit by a car and my grandfather gathered her body in a sheet and carried her to a special hole in the earth. And it was the hardest any of us ever saw him cry.