Births and Beliefs

Dear Caelan,

On a perfect, late spring day in my tenth year, your aunt Heloise told me that she was going to have a baby. Certainly, I had never gotten any idea in that two-acre womb I’d grown up in that babies could be anything but good news to anyone. I didn’t know exactly why to be thrilled, but was conditioned by every interchange I’d ever observed in person or on television to be that way, and so I was. It was a brief announcement to me, and there was no reason why it should have been otherwise, and I ran excitedly out of my sister’s room, out the door, across my grandparents’ yard, up their stairs to the master bedroom where they spent their days but not their nights and slipped behind the bed in the corner to be a secret participant in the news-breaking they were about to be treated to. Heloise and my mother were a few minutes behind me coming across the yards and through the house, and so I waited in quivering expectation. My grandparents, used to family coming in and out, remained in their recliners, probably assumed that I had done just that and continued to browse their newspapers and tv. After what seemed like hours, the door opened and Helen told her parents that Heloise had something to tell them.

Heloise made her announcement and I, desirous of seeing the joy unfold on every face, stood up to peek out from over the thick leatherette headboard, only to be told by my mother to leave the room, so I missed whatever discussions took place next. It was extremely rare in my youth to be excluded from any event, and I was puzzled and deflated for days thereafter. It was a well-padded, gingerbread world in that time and place, and neither depression nor bewilderment lasted long. I recognized things around me that I didn’t understand, but the adults told me that I would figure everything out one day and I took their word for it. It did not sadden me to be in the dark on certain topics; I simply saw my benighted state as a natural sign of childhood, about which I had few complaints.

The search for excitement generated by my sister’s activities continued non-stop for me until my mother and I departed for our new home in Memphis at the end of the year. I clearly remember Heloise’s wedding at Uncle Jack Pou’s house, to which my mother wore black, and vaguely disturbing recollections of the priest my father found to conduct the service. I remember a small, garage apartment where my sister and Tommy began their married life together. They speak now of living in poverty for a long time, but Heloise always had fresh, homemade cookies around when I went to visit. It never occurred to me at the time that they were undergoing anything other than what was portrayed for young marrieds on the happy-go-lucky sitcoms of the day. It was years later, after a number of revelations from the family and lessons cruelly taught by Life that I really had my eyes open to what was going on. Little pieces of the story like my mother moving eight hours away from her pregnant sixteen-year old daughter a few weeks before the birth of a first grandchild somehow escaped me when the tense was present. Even for a child, I must have been naive. It wasn’t until my mother told me her version of my own birth that the tumblers clicked into place on some other stories. You see, my mother had gotten pregnant by my father in late 1954. Not ready to wed, she arranged an abortion, which in those days involved much shame, secrecy, and a trip to the back alleys of a Dallas slum for a dangerously crude, septic solution. Two and a half years later, in my earliest days, torturing everyone around me as infants will, I innocently convinced my mother that the soul she had tried to do away with had come back to Earth seeking vengeance against her. Though it is not now always in the forefront of her mind, I know that she still believes this today. Strange, the collections of myth we Southerners encumber ourselves with.

My mother, who gave me a wonderful childhood, seriously hampered her core maternality by festooning herself with hoodoo. I am no healthier in psyche, thinking each time my doorbell rings unexpectedly that my father has come to call, despite having personally signed the papers identifying his body and attended his funeral on my twenty-first birthday. This reminiscence is primal Southern life at its best. Marianne and I had been brought together by the roses and chocolates of our day, pot and booze. She was in my English, literature, creative writing and world lit. classes that junior year of high school, and she started stopping by my place on her way to the beach, where she was going to see a dope source and semi-boyfriend. I use the “semi” prefix because Ron was four years older than Marianne and I were, and while he might have enjoyed some light petting with her, as just about any twenty-year old man will enjoy intimate contact with just about any sixteen-year old girl, he wasn’t putting any particular effort into a relationship. I had met him a year earlier, when he’d been hanging around with Dirty Andy and his boys down around Virginius and Lemon Way. Why he’d wanted to spend time with boys several years his junior was a mystery I pondered with fleeting contempt, but he was a minor thorn in my side for a short time then.

Using his advanced age and income, car and ability to buy beer, he gained some authority over that wing of my gang, and I had to get it back by amusing the boys at his expense. One day, he invited us all over to his house for bong hits, beer and burgers. Noticing a box of pre-formed, mystery meat Bunker Hill brand burger patties in his freezer, I let Andy in on my plan, then slipped a round, gray dish sponge from the sink into the box. It looked just like the patties, but behaved quite differently on the grill, much to our delight and our host’s dismay. A week later, I had an insult contest with Ron, and I wouldn’t be telling the story if I hadn’t won. He disappeared shortly thereafter, surfacing with a look of less than perfect joy at seeing me again when he responded to Marianne’s knock eighteen months later. She got to the beach, twelve miles from her house and seven miles from mine, by hitchhiking. It was relatively safe then, but she had a couple of scares, and that’s why she started gathering me up to accompany her for the longest part of the trek. The benefit of enhanced safety was the only benefit accrued by any of us via this cycle of events. I never cared much for hitchhiking and was just right of indifferent about Ron; he was barely able to keep his stylish cool about having me back in his sight, much less in his house, much, much less in the increasingly friendly company of a feminine blossom on the verge of opening. That bud could have been his for the picking but for me.

One ugly night, even dope-hound Marianne decided that it wasn’t worth it to thumb rides all the way to the beach in search of a couple of joints. Besides, I always had an ounce or two handy, acquired as commission from acquaintances who cleaned, weighed and bagged pound-level purchases at my apartment on schoolday afternoons before my mother came home. We stayed at my house, and I did something I’d never done before and only a few times since -- I drank from a liquor bottle left in my hands for supposed safe keeping by a friend. We stayed in my room that evening, listening to the Rolling Stones, Ten Years After and Black Sabbath on the eight-track tape player. Fortified by Jules Stearn’s Kentucky Gentleman bourbon, Marianne kissed me. I kissed back.

Two years later, we moved in together, announcing our intention of doing so to her parents two days after I had asked her father’s permission to give her an engagement ring. Lousy timing. Two years later, we wed. We wed mainly to please Marianne’s mother, who was undergoing cancer treatment at the time and who believed to the depths of her own Catholic soul that she would go to Hell for our sins. In those days, people looked upon cohabitation as marriage on a trial basis, to be formalized if it worked. Marianne and I did not work in cohabitation, but married anyway. Two days later, I wrote to my father to tell him the news. In idealistic fervor, I went on in the letter to invite him to come and live with us if he wanted to start his life over again, since he’d screwed everything up up to that point.

Angered by his son’s assumption that help could be and needed to be rendered and by his son’s having married without asking his permission first, he called me. I was in the shower, twenty days married, twenty years old, when Marianne knocked on the bathroom door and told me that my father was on the phone. Now, he was an impressive man, six feet three inches tall, around two hundred twenty pounds, with a voice so deep that the silverware rattled when he said grace at the table, a phenomenon that convinced me of the existence of God in my early years. He held two Ph.Ds and three M.A.s, and he could hold a loaf of bread between his hands and ask you to guess what he was holding. Marianne sounded pretty shaken up after speaking to him briefly at twelve hundred miles distance.

He could always shake me up, too. There was a night when I was four that he came to 108 Adger and told my mother that he would kill himself if she didn’t remarry him. She gathered me and Heloise up and walked away from him toward my grandparents’ house while he took a pistol from his pocket. When we were almost to the back door of 1030 East Kings’ Highway, a shot rang out. My grandfather, legally a senior citizen and technically infirm from injuries sustained a decade earlier in a three-floor fall down an elevator shaft, walked quickly past us with his cane on his arm and a leather-wrapped blackjack swinging from his wrist. He walked straight up to my father, who was standing in the 108 Adger carport with plaster falling around him from the shot he’d just fired through the ceiling, loaded the lead shot-filled end of the blackjack into his fist, and knocked the larger, healthier, younger man out with one solid punch to the chin.

Three years later, when my mother had just started dating again, my father made another unpleasant visit to our home. He had seen her out on a date while out drinking himself. Late that night, he came to the door, impossibly belligerent, threatening and sordid. I heard the argument from my room at the back of the house and hid beneath the sheets, feeling that I should do something but not being able to think of anything that would be both productive and within my powers. I kept my head covered, stuck in a waking nightmare. Well, my maternal grandmother loved nothing better than spying on her daughters next door and across the street. Once, hearing splashing from Johnette’s swimming pool in the wee hours of the morning, she padded across the street to the short fence next to Uncle Pete’s greenhouse, shouted, fired a pistol in the air and shone a flashlight on ... her daughter and son-in-law making wholly legitimate love in an inner tube in what they had foolishly thought was the privacy of their own yard.

That incident was unfortunate, but the night I quaked beneath the sheets and my grandmother decided that my father’s car had been in the 108 Adger driveway overlong, her observations were welcome. Once again, my maternal grandfather measured my father’s height on the floor. When I was eleven, living in Virginia Beach with my mother, Arthur Sr. remarried, which did not bring out the best in my father. He, like my sister’s father, had moved back in with his parents after divorcing my mother, which says something I’ve never quite figured out about her, and had been happily ensconced at 902 Prospect ever since. Ousted from teaching by having flunked a senator’s son during the McCarthy era for answering that Karl Marx was a communist, drummed out of the insurance business for pocketing premiums, a failure as a restaurateur after giving his patrons advice such as, “You don’t need to eat that; you’re too damn fat as it is,” he had drifted into frequent fishing and a pretense of overseeing maintenance projects for Shuey Properties, Sr.’s residential rental holdings.

I like to think that he came close to making up for the rent money he stole from tenants via high quality repairs. I liked believing in Santa Claus, too. In any event, Sr.’s 1968 marriage to Mildred Whitman, who had been Mary Willis’s best friend, came as an unpleasant surprise to my father. His mother’s favorite child, he thought and said that another woman’s presence in the house would defame his mother’s memory, questioned the source of moneys that had paid for the house in the first place, was rude to Mildred whenever he saw her, and finally drove his father to make the following proposition. “Son,” said Sr., turning with a creak the old, green leather office chair at the apothecary’s desk in the living room, “I’ll pay to move you anywhere in the world you want to go. I’ll give you $700 a month for six months, $350 a month for the next six months, $150 for six months after that, then $75 a month for another six, and by that time you should be firmly on your feet.” My father could have chosen Hong Kong, from which most of his clothes came, or New Orleans, where floods had not yet at that time destroyed the small art museum where he had paintings on display. Sr. had said, “anywhere in the world,” and $700 was a tidy sum in 1968 dollars, roughly equivalent to what I bring home today. Of the entire globe, my father chose to move to Virginia Beach.

I don’t think I had much to do with his decision. We were never in frequent contact. When he dropped me off at the end of each overnight or weekend visit, or wireclipping adventure into Barksdale Air Force Base to unearth a WWII-vintage Thompson submachine gun and a couple of drum clips with which to participate in the annual Caddo Lake Water Moccasin Round Up, or after any other typical father/son activity though, I remember him proposing to my mother. Also, she told me several times that he sought my company only as a means to hers. No, I don’t believe that I had much to do with his decision to move to Virginia Beach. My mother was clearly not happy with his arrival. I could tell, because she said “Goddamit,” and “Hell” quite a bit. Oh yes, we saw him over the next year, and he took us out a few times and cooked a couple of dinners in the beachfront apartment he’d rented, and my mother reciprocated with dinners at our apartment. Being who she was, she would have been unable to stop herself from social reciprocity, no matter what. The “matter what” in this case, however, was my father, from whom more harm than good came.

As had happened years earlier, he saw her on a date while he was out drinking, and he knocked on the door later, and she let him in for some reason, and things became unpleasant, but this time, Granddaddy was 1200 miles away. I was eleven years old, and I heard my mother fall to the floor. I did not and do not know if my father intended rape or just plain violence. I did and do know what my maternal grandfather would have wanted me to do, and I did it. I went to the door of my room and called down the hallway to the living room, “You are drunk, and you are out of control, and I would appreciate it if you would have the decency to leave.” After a moment of silence, the parquet floor groaned nearer and nearer as my father approached me. I stood my ground, but slid the bb gun I was holding under the quilt so as to avoid inciting him. I backed carefully away from him and sat on the edge of the bed as he entered my room, which was too small to hold his shadow on the wall behind him. I heard my mother slip into the bathroom across the hall as that slurred, cavernous voice began a litany of undying love for the woman he had just laid unwelcome hands on. I wondered if she’d locked the bathroom door and waited for him to pause for breath. When he did, I told him that under no circumstances was his behavior appropriate and asked him once more to leave. With little more attempt at explanation, he did so. A combination of his own sense of iniquity at behaving other than he was raised to behave and the conditioning he had received at Granddaddy’s hands on other occasions worked strongly on my behalf, and so I won. My mother and I spoke briefly that night, and I passed out from exhaustion a few minutes after my father’s departure.

At breakfast the next day, she told me that she knew how strong the urge would be for me to tell the family, especially Granddaddy, what had happened and what I’d done, but that I must not do so, because she had promised her brother, Uncle Jack, that she would never speak to my father, and he would a) never speak to her and b) kill my father, should he learn that she had broken that vow. I did as she wished. Later, I had some very pleasant times with my father, and some curious times, too, but the damage done me that night never healed to any extent. I had done what I had done, and he had done what he had done, and I could no more forget it than I could forget that he was, indeed, my father. That’s some of what crackled through the long distance phone lines when I got on the phone with him on the night of April 16th, 1978. He cussed me for an utter lack of respect and said that since I felt that way and was all he had that he had nothing to live for and would end it all. I told him that I loved him and that he’d read the wrong messages into my letter and otherwise pleaded with him to not commit suicide, but he hung up on me after about fifteen minutes, apparently still intent on doing so.

I called Arthur Sr. and my father’s oldest brother, Uncle John, told them about his call, and asked that they please do something. They reminded me that my father had threatened suicide several times, usually around Xmas, and said that I need not take him seriously. Two mornings later, Heloise called to tell me that my father had been found dead in his apartment by a friend. The coroner’s report claimed death by natural causes. Diabetes and cirrhosis had flared in an extremely excited man, and his liver and brain had simultaneously exploded. One cause would have crippled him physically; the other, mentally. Together, they were terminal. I flew immediately to Shreveport and went on the afternoon of the 18th to his apartment.

His landlady, who had been my second grade Sunday School teacher, met me at her back door, gave me the key to the garage apartment where I had spent a summer with my father two years earlier, and babbled in what she probably thought were soothing tones about how fine my mind had been and how I had been among the first to win a King James Bible for memorizing verses. “Consider the lilies of the field, and how they grow. They do not sow, neither do they reap ...” My father didn’t sow much, either, if he could help it, yet he was reaping the very whirlwind behind the politeness I struggled to maintain before his landlady. As it turned out, I didn’t need the key at all, because Uncle John Shuey had already been there twice.

On the first visit, he had not been able to get past the door because of the smell. The nature of my father’s death had deteriorated his organs and tissues rapidly. The vomit on the ceiling was mere icing on the cake. On the second visit, Uncle John had held his breath long enough to turn a window unit air conditioner on full blast and open a window before staggering out to be sick in the yard. I got there two hours later and didn’t linger. I went to the nearest supermarket, bought two bottles of concentrated Lysol cleaner with enough disinfectant and odor masking power to make New York’s Bowery District smell like an animal hospital, came back, opened the bottles and just tossed them as far into the apartment as possible. An hour later, I came back and began to clean it and go through my father’s effects.

My godmother arrived early that evening, shortly after the fellows from Goodwill, who were carting hundreds of tattered paperback books and frayed, imported neckties out to their truck. I helped her take most of the refrigerator and pantry items to her car and called it a day. I had, after all, a funeral to attend the next day, April 19th, 1978, my 21st birthday.

Researchers have found that smell is the sense most closely associated with memory, that, for example, a father’s tee shirt left in a daughter’s stroller will help to bond her to him for life. At the end of my first visit with you, my daughter, your mother left the tee shirt I had brought sitting on a park bench. I remember the smell of bad, angry, unhealthy death as a legacy from my father. After experiencing it, I declined the actual sight of his remains when fulfilling my duty as surviving next of kin by signing the morgue papers identifying the deceased and authorizing cremation.

“To tell you the truth, I never thought you’d live to see this birthday,” observed my mother the next morning. “I guess I misinterpreted my psychic powers and that it was another Arthur Shuey who would be dead before now.” The already negative feelings for the occult which my mother had cultivated in me over the years heightened. Well attended though with the conspicuous absence of his brothers, nieces and nephews, my father’s memorial service was not too awful. The minister only fumbled when pretending to know him and his multitudinous virtues a couple of times. Heloise seemed tense the next day at 108 Adger. We were chatting in the master bedroom and she was doing something about some sewing project when her voice dropped in volume and pitch. She told me that she had gotten a phone call a couple of hours before the funeral and heard, in my father’s unmistakable voice, “I’m alive.” It had frightened her, and she’d hung up the phone immediately. Someone died in that apartment, but I looked at the body. My father had several friends like “Shadow” Myers who could have died from the same alcohol-induced ailments. Also, my father could have had or imagined good reason to disappear. He would be 74 today, and every time my doorbell rings unexpectedly, the thought flickers through my mind that it’s him.

Another thought that occasionally flickers through my mind is that my marriage, which tortured me and Marianne for no more than 20 months, was even more of a waste because it helped to take my father’s life.

These pages describe the delusions, fantasies & perspectives of one Arthur F. Shuey, III. The usual disclaimers about any resemblance between the characters named herein and real persons apply.