The Land Of Cotton
My son was dead.
It had only taken four months. The doctors told us he wouldn't
live more than a year. Babies born with trisomy-13, an extremely
rare genetic birth defect caused by the thirteenth pair of chromosomes
not dividing properly in a developing embryo and characterized
by severe deformation of the brain and body, never live more than
a year at the most. Our son had been born a freak, a monster,
just like the babies preserved in jars at the Mutter Museum of
medical curiosities in Philadelphia. My wife and I had tried to
care for him at home. He had to be fed through a tube every few
hours due to his mouth being so malformed that he was unable to
nurse properly. He spent ninety percent of his waking time crying
since his brain, so the doctors told us, was in an almost constant
state of seizure. It was an exhausting and emotionally draining
undertaking. Add to this the fact that I was only twenty and my
wife only eighteen, and that we had a two-year-old daughter to
care for as well, and it's not surprising that after a week of
round-the clock tube-feeding we both came down with a violent
stomach virus and had to take care of the children in shifts,
one of us doing the feeding and rocking and wiping while the other
one puked and laid on the bed curled up in a fetal position, clutching
their stomach and groaning and trying not to pass out. Nobody
came to help us. No one in either family could cope with the fact
of our freak baby. And so, realizing that we couldn't handle him
on our own, we put our son in a hospital ward to be cared for
until his inevitable death.
My wife went to visit
him every day; I stayed away as much as I could. She was determined
to love him as if he were a normal child. I found this almost
impossible, and this difference, fairly normal actually, since
mothers are automatically bonded to their children from having
carried them in their bodies and fathers take longer, exaggerated
by the extremely unusual and difficult circumstances, created
a lot of tension between us, a serious rift. Now, after four months,
he was dead, I was emotionally numb, and Terri was starting to
unravel.
Terri's father offered
to pay for everything: the casket, the funeral, and anything else
the death of a child required, if we would agree to allow our
son to be buried next to Terri's mother in the little town in
Alabama where she was born, and we agreed. Everything that happened
from that point until the day we arrived in Alabama swam by in
a disconnected hazy stream, like the transitions between scenes
in dreams where you can't quite remember how you got from, say,
your high school gym class to the middle of the Amazon jungle;
bits of it are dimly glimpsed but mostly you just find yourself
somewhere else without really questioning how you got there.
We find ourselves in
a funeral parlor, looking at the corpse of our son in a tiny casket.
The twisted misshapenness of his body against the plush dark velvet
puts me in mind of a Victorian exhibition of biological anomalies.
We look at him dispassionately, the way I imagine those Victorian
ladies and gentlemen must have done, the terrible tragedy of his
condition nullified by placing it in the scientifically neutral
context of a museum display. We feel no grief, no sadness, only
a strange calm, bordering on exaltation. This is an empty shell
lying before us. An empty shell which has cracked open to release
the immensity of the soul, and this immensity whispers to us,
winds around our faces like incense, tickling our ears and inviting
us to sneak a peek through the gates of heaven.
There is a fast-forward
shuffle and we find ourselves in a hotel room somewhere between
Philadelphia and Alabama. Terri's father is there and so is her
sister. The relationship between father and daughters is strained,
has been for years, and the relationship between Terri and myself
is about to snap like an old rubber band. Little imps and gremlins
perch on our shoulders, their arms filled with our harsh unspoken
words. The words accumulate mass; they fill up the room until
it becomes hard to breathe. Terri and I shift scenes, our heads
joining the moon's reflection in the hotel swimming pool. We say
things to each other about the death, about our feelings, or what
our feelings ought to be. We say these things because it seems
to be what's expected. We're following a script, and the dialogue
comes from a made-for-tv movie about the death of a child and
how the parents cope with the aftermath. What we're really thinking
and feeling is so inexpressible that we're forced to resort to
this wooden reading of cliched lines.
The moon dissolves in
ripples and we cut away to a restaurant somewhere in the deep
south. We've stopped at an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. I've
never seen such gargantuan people in my entire life. They must
weigh four or five hundred pounds and there's lots of them, piling
their plates with mountains of scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon,
ham, scrapple, hash browns, and pancakes drowning in butter and
syrup, and then going back for seconds and thirds. Then a brief
flash--a driving sequence. We're driving the length of Alabama,
north to south. I see nothing but mobile homes and trailer parks
everywhere. Doesn't anyone in Alabama live in a house?
And then the squealing
of brakes, the squawking of an alarm clock, and a harsh bitch-slap
back into wakefulness, but I don't feel like I'm awake. Surely,
this is a lucid dream, some kind of absurdist theatre. I half
expect a clown to leap out from behind a tree or a mailbox and
hit me in the face with a pie, and then everybody will laugh and
clap their hands and tell me it was all a joke and say, boy, you
should have seen the look on your face.
We have arrived in Birmingham,
of which the only thing I know for sure is that, according to
Lynyrd Skynyrd, they love the governor. Terri's father has dropped
myself, Terri, and our daughter Diana off at a relative's house
and gone to stay in a hotel. Apparently there is still bad blood
in the family. The southern baptists had never gotten over one
of their own moving up north to yankee-land and marrying, of all
things, a catholic. We're met at the door by Terri's uncle Jeb.
He greets Terri and Diana with warm southern hospitality while
pointedly ignoring me. Terri attempts to break the ice.
"Uncle Jeb, David
here is an artist," says Terri.
Uncle Jeb turns and
looks me square in the eye and says "Can you draw a nigger?"
Ah, how lovely, how
refreshing. Pure, unadulterated racism. I've travelled hundreds
of miles to bury my dead infant son and I end up the house-guest
of a living stereotype: the hateful southern redneck white trash
bigot. I have never before or since heard the word "nigger"
used with such frequency by a single human being in the short
span of time I stayed in this man's house.
"Come over here
and hug mah neck," says Uncle Jeb to Diana. Diana scampers
over to the sofa. Uncle Jeb makes a peep-hole in the venetian
blinds with his fingers and points at the people walking about
outside. "Look, Diana--look at all them niggers. See? Them's
niggers..."
"Umm, we don't
use that kind of language where we come from, and we don't want
Diana learning words like that," I say.
"Why? They's niggers,
ain't they?" says Uncle Jeb, sounding genuinely incredulous.
I may as well have been objecting to the yellowness of the sun.
I'm sketching Terri's
female cousin who is really hot and is being kind of flirtatious
with me which I'm kind of enjoying since Terri and I haven't been
sexual or even affectionate in I don't know how long. I'm adding
some shadow to the side of her face, then a light gray for the
middle tone. Uncle Jeb looks over my shoulder at the drawing.
"You're makin'
her look like a nigger. Why're you makin' her look like a nigger?"
Was this man really this ignorant and stupid or was he just trying
to get my goat?
Terri's blood relatives,
her mother's brothers and sisters, seem to be sensitive and enlightened
people, but a lot of the others, the ones married in like Uncle
Jeb, strike me as real backwoods Deliverance types--they scare
me. Some of them are drug addicts and some of them are in jail.
I'll find out later on that the two cousins in jail had raped
a family member when they were all adolescents. And if they don't
like blacks, I'm sure they're not crazy about Jews either. I tell
myself that if I was there for a social visit, rather than the
funeral of my child, they'd probably tar and feather me.
The situation is not
helped by the fact that one of the girl cousins had married a
Jew who was apparently not a shining example of Jewish virtue,
not the cream of the Hebrew crop. I get an eyeful of this guy
at the family gathering. He looks like Ichabod Crane if Washington
Irving had been a Jew and had written him into Fiddler on the
Roof. He's tall and bony and gangly with a huge hook nose, beady
eyes, and kinky, wiry hair. He moves like a stick insect on stilts
crawling up a tree. He's sitting in the middle of a room full
of talking, socializing relatives, silent and scowling with his
head buried in a newspaper and his knees around his ears. Great.
Here is probably the only Jew these people have ever known in
their entire lives and it has to be this sour-faced, cretinous
scarecrow.
Terri and I drive around
the hills outside of Birmingham and get lost. We're on a real
mountain road, the kind where you can actually fall off the mountain
if you veer too close to the edge. We drive down a long dirt road
looking for someone to give us directions. The road ends at what
looks like a backdrop from a Li'l Abner comic strip. Maybe they're
shooting the movie version of Li'l Abner here. There's a shack
with a tin stovepipe sticking out of the roof. There's a chicken
coop, chickens and chicken shit everywhere. There's a cow with
it's udders dragging on the ground. There's an outhouse with a
crescent moon carved into the door. We're looking around. Hello?
Anybody home? A man comes into view off in the distance. He's
walking towards us and he's enormous. He looks like a giant, obese
gorilla that's been shaved and stuffed into a pair of overalls,
and he doesn't seem too happy to see us. I'm desperately craning
my neck to see if he's carrying a shotgun and/or a jug of moonshine
with an x on it. I'm joking about how he's going to kill us and
chop us up and put us in the chicken feed like in some splatter
flick about psychotic hillbillies, and Terri is laughing and so
am I but we're really shitting ourselves also. Now the man's face
is right outside the car window. He's looking at us like we're
government agents come to foreclose on his farm. We say fuck it
and roll down the window. His face breaks into a smile. "Howdy,"
he says, "Y'all lost?"
We're back at the house
and it's dinnertime.
"Bring me my food,
woman," says Uncle Jeb.
"Get your own damn
food," says his wife.
"He's just showing
off," says Terri's cousin.
After dinner, they watch
tv. Eventually, they will go to bed. I have a strong suspicion
that this is what they do every single evening--eat, watch tv,
go to bed, day in and day out. Terri's male cousin is sitting
on the sofa with his boots up on the coffee table. His eyes are
at half-mast; he's got chinese eyes. He's stoned out of his nut
and he's munching on a bag of fried pork rinds.
"Boy, whatchoo
eatin' that crap for?" says Uncle Jeb.
It takes a minute or
two for the cousin to acknowledge that he's been spoken to. His
eyes move from the tv to the package of pork rinds to Uncle Jeb's
face with lizard slowness.
"Good fer ya,"
he says with finality, and returns to his munching.
Now it's time to visit
Terri's mother's home town, the place where our son will be buried.
The town is so small you can literally walk from one end to the
other in about fifteen minutes. the newest building seems to have
been erected during the Roosevelt administration.
"This place looks
like Mayberry 1945," I tell Terri as we stroll about. The
only modern things I see are the giant tv satellite dishes on
the front lawns next to the pickup trucks. Above the tree line
towers an enormous metallic Dr. Seuss contraption with crazy tubes
and pipes snaking every which way in convoluted arrangements.
It looms over the landscape like the set of a bad 50s sci-fi flick.
It's Ed Wood doing German expressionist cinema. It's actually
a cement plant, the largest one on the east coast at one time
apparently, and all the able-bodied men in the town work there.
Their lives revolve around it, like Welsh coal miners. It's incredibly
surreal. We take pictures, thinking that no one will believe us
without documentation.
Terri and I return to
the house where the relatives are gathered. There's maybe thirty
people there, eating, drinking and talking loudly. A red-faced,
silver-haired man, one of several preacher-uncles in the family,
all bluster and tooth polish with nothing to back it up, like
Billy Graham without Billy Graham's money, says to me in a booming
voice, "So, boy..."
Yes, he actually called
me "boy."
"So, boy... how
y'all like the south?!"
I'm at a loss for words.
Terri blurts out, "David
says it looks like Maybery 1945..."
She laughs stupidly,
a kind of whinnying hee haw. There is icy silence in the room.
Icicles are forming on the window sills. Good, Terri... brilliant.
That will really endear me to them. You're sharp. Good move.
Terri's sexy girl cousin
arrives with her boyfriend. The boyfriend is a photographer, an
artistic type. Uncle Jeb doesn't like him and doesn't try to hide
it. The cousin and the boyfriend imitate our northern accents.
They say "Yo. Hi you guys..." It's hilarious. They sound
about as convincing as we probably do trying to sound southern.
The tv is on and turned to the news. The anchorman speaks without
a shred of an accent.
"They go to school
to learn how to talk like that," says Terri's cousin.
The cousin and the boyfriend
want to get out of this hayseed duckburg and move to a real city,
someplace happening, like Atlanta. And they don't like country
music; they're rockers.
"What bands do
you like?" we ask.
"Van Halen!"
they shout in unison.
Now it's time for the
funeral. I request a non-denominational service or eulogy or sermon
or whatever. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a religious
Jew or even a practicing Jew, but I am uncomfortable with the
idea of a lot of Jesus talk. It's a bright, sunny day at the family
graveyard. Butt-loads of relatives are in attendance. I have no
idea why all these people are here. Any excuse for a party, I
guess. One of the preacher-uncles moves to the lectern to speak.
It's not the one who called me boy, thank goodness. The first
word out of his mouth is "Jesus."
"He's with Jesus
now! He's in heaven with Jesus! Jesus has come and taken him up
to heaven!"
Motherfucker. My wishes
were totally disrespected. I am the father of this child, am I
not? Oh well, fuck it. Nothing to be done about it now. I'm not
going to make a scene. I guess they just can't help themselves.
Opiate of the masses and all that.
Another uncle, one of
Terri's mother's actual siblings, finds me by myself in a quiet
corner of the graveyard where I've gone to cool down, and apologizes
for the Jesus stuff. He offers me true sympathy and compassion
for my loss and for what I've been through. He is the only one
to do so. It is kind and sweet and I am grateful. He shows me
the grave marker of the family matriarch, the first one to come
over from Ireland in the eighteenth century. It's a giant obelisk
like the Washington monument, but on a much smaller scale of course,
and it's rough-hewn and primitive, more like the standing stones
of ancient Britain than a modern carving. The uncle and I stand
in silence, soaking in the energy of the stone.
The stone says to me
"Be strong. You've got a lot more tzuris to endure. I myself
lived through a war, a famine and evil land-grabbers. I puked
my guts up every day crossing a fucking ocean in a rickety wooden
boat, and when I got here there were bears and snakes and hostile
indians and feuds and poverty, but I survived. I made it, and
so will you."
I'm feeling calm now
and ready to face whatever lunacy remains ahead. I tell myself
that at least I'll have some interesting stories about all this
someday. The sun is going down and the uncle and I turn and make
our way back to my son's grave site where the festive relatives
are already breaking out the beer and chips and potato salad.
David Aronson
Decmber 2006