“Barbara, I found it!”
My brother Donald called out to me from across the lush, overgrown grass and mostly obscured grave markers of Fort Lincoln Cemetery.
For the past twenty minutes he and I had been on a hunt in this long-established resting place in Colmar Manor, Maryland, right outside the District of Columbia. Rush hour traffic sped by on the other side of the iron fence, mostly moving east into Maryland’s Prince George’s County suburbs or on to Anne Arundel or Calvert Counties.
I looked up from the marker where I stood, about 100 feet from my brother. I had been scraping cuttings of dried grass from its face, mostly with the tip of my New Balance shoe, trying to decipher the name. So far I had cleaned off dozens of markers, all of which were level with the ground. I had used my foot and sometimes by hands, quietly disappointed by each. A few swipes across each marker showed either letters that did not fit the name of my query or dates of birth and death that did not apply.
Satisfied and relieved to no longer struggle through high July grass and follow parallel rows of graves between dips in the soil, I found my way through the uneven ground and unkempt lawn to where he stood. Yes, it was the one.
Salem Graham
Nov 9 1922 April 22 1972
In Loving Memory
Our father, who died at forty-nine from a sudden, piercing ischemic heart attack on a Saturday morning in my junior year of high school.
We swept off the marker, pulling the weeds, swiping the dead grass and strawish vegetation. I took photos with my iPhone. The marker is green now, but in the photos it looks like the tarnished bronze that it is.
I have never seen this marker, or at least I have no memory of it. The last time I would have stood in that spot I was sixteen years old, numb, and confused. It was three or four days after our father’s death and we were putting him in the ground. Just as we had his father, Isaac Graham, only two weeks before in Deerfield, Virginia. Then, all the family—all the surviving eleven siblings—were there. Some had also come to our father’s funeral, three hours away.
My father had no middle name or initial. I have joked, tastelessly, that they were too poor to have middle names, but I do not know if his siblings did. They were born in the 1900s through the 1920s. Dad was one of the younger ones. His parents, poor farmers in the Shenandoah Valley outside Staunton, Virginia, apparently ran out of normal names. I guess my father was named after the Virginia town of Salem. I have personally encountered only one other Salem in my seven decades.
Dad left the farm at fourteen to find work in Washington, D.C. or its environs. His older brother Forest, whose name sounded like “Farst” to my young ears, was already living there. Later my father was, like millions of other young men, drafted into World War II service. He was shipped to England, where he drove a truck. At least, that’s what he told us. We have photos of him with buddies there, a photo of a past English girlfriend, and even some of Bob Hope entertaining the troops. My parents intentionally or unintentionally kept secret what they did not think were secrets. They just did not tell us about themselves until we asked them point blank, and even then they evaded. If we got past the dismissive hand wave or a “Aah, you don’t need to know that,” we might catch a nugget about past fiances, travels, achievements, or adventures. I spent most of my life convinced my parents lived the most boring lives possible, even though we watched movies about people just like them.
Eventually, my mother talked about how she was to start nursing school but the war ended; how she was engaged to a boy but called it off; and the most astonishing, that she worked in an armaments factory in D.C. during the summer during high school. This one is all the more amazing because it meant leaving her tiny Appalachian town near the Kentucky/Virginia border for the big city and rooming with friends. Yet I did not know about this until I was almost fifty. I guess I just didn’t ask the right questions, and our parents were not disposed to let us know what they kept locked in their memories. Theirs was not a revelatory generation.
After the war, around 1947, Salem met my mother, Tessie; as the story goes, they were both with friends who also “got together.” (Side note: The wife in the other couple is the aunt of novelist David Baldacci; the husband was my father’s cousin, which in a roundabout way makes me Baldacci’s cousin’s cousin.) My parents married, with my mother lying about her age—she was only eighteen at the time—and within a year they had a baby boy, Gary. They settled in the Hyattsville area of Prince George’s County at the time and eventually bought a home in a Levittown kind of community called Landover Hills, where Donald and I grew up. My father had a drinking problem and became a devotee of Alcoholics Anonymous. It worked for him. He went to multiple meetings a week to re-enforce his sobriety and for the company, I suppose, although at the time we did not realize the latter reason.
***
Visiting my father’s marker in Fort Lincoln has started my journey, as the cliché goes, to write my memoir, or memoirs, but the more I study the genre I learn the difficulty of it. For me, the research will be internal; I do not need to revisit Maryland and Virginia, Ohio and South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, the areas where so much of my life took place. I must revisit and dwell in those mental images and sounds of those days, weeks, and years that I have often buried. Why? Because the demands of my adult life have left me little time for this exploration of my private geography, and because when I start the trip, I run into pain more than joy. The personal truth of those two reasons, the words after “because” are not just blocks to writing the memoir, but the reason for it. I find I must understand why the content of those subordinate clauses exists. At this point, I have decided that a good deal of it might be rooted in my parents’ reticence, or perhaps refusal, to tell their own stories fully. I know there is more in my childhood than I can remember at a quick, superficial level, and to write I must first re-experience those times.
Two of them float to the surface most quickly. The first took place in my youth, when my father was still alive; the second in my middle age. In my childhood, we did not take vacations to resorts. We visited family, either my father’s or my mother’s. We loaded up the car, left early in the morning, ate the lunch Mom packed, either on the way or stopping at a roadside park, and made it to our destinations as soon as possible. This was the before the interstate system was completed, so we traveled mostly on US highways through mountains. Sometimes we did go to the Chesapeake Bay beaches, only 40 miles from our home, or even all the way to Ocean City, Maryland. But mostly we visited family in Virginia or South Carolina.
When I was between seventh and eighth grade, we were visiting our grandmother in deep Appalachian. This trip was unusual because her husband Swen was living with her then. They had been married since 1936, but we had never met him. By “we” I mean my brother Donald and I. My younger brother was already showing signs of developmental disability and was too young anyway to remember past trips; our older brother was in his twenties. Swen had been in prison for many years for killing a woman and injuring her child. The story, kept from us until I squeezed it out of my mother, was that the woman was his girlfriend, he was drunk, he was trying to get in her house, and he shot her and the little boy. When this happened and how long he spent in jail, I was not allowed to know, of course.
If my parents had concerns about us being around a convicted killer who had served his time, they did not show it. What I do remember is an incident reminiscent of a sequence in To Kill a Mockingbird. In that novel everyone knows, Jem is frustrated with his father because Atticus was older than the other fathers and he “wouldn’t play football for the Methodists.” Months later a rabid dog comes near their house and Atticus is forced to put it down with a rifle at long range. Jem’s disbelief that his old dad was a crack shot rings true to many of us; we don’t know what we don’t know about our parents. Jem’s estimation of Atticus changes when he is assured that Atticus could outshoot anyone.
Swen, whom I did not call my grandfather or step-grandfather, liked his dogs and loved his horses. He found a way to stable some horses after his release from prison. That was surprise enough; imagine my amazement when my father came trotting, then galloping down the mountain path from the stables astride one of the horses. He rode like a cowboy, not like a child who had to be led. I had never seen anyone off of a screen ride like that.
“Daddy, you look like John Wayne!” I said, calling on the name of the main cowboy of the 1960s.
“More like Gabby Hayes,” he said, turning the horse rather dramatically and heading off to the main road that brought us to Grandma’s house. For those who don’t know, Gabby Hayes was the comedic, somewhat toothless sidekick in many Westerns of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Like Jem, I now respected my dad who could ride a horse like a movie star.
My mother’s revelation came over thirty years later, in a different town and different life. One day in the 1990s, I took my mother out to lunch. By then, taking my elderly mother out to lunch was not that unusual. It did mean a great deal to her and she liked to go to Morrison’s Cafeteria at Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga.
Why was my mother living in Chattanooga, for one, when she had raised us in the D.C. suburbs of Maryland? Because she desired to place my youngest brother, David, in a group home facility for full-time care, and she moved to a new city in 1986. She was 58 when she started a new life in the city I lived in; she had been widowed for fourteen years by then. My father’s death in 1972 altered everything in our lives, even in ways I am still trying to figure out fifty-four years later.
I picked Mom up and we drove to the mall. I am not sure why she liked Morrison’s; we could have eaten anywhere, but the cafeteria format—do they still exist?—appealed to her. Maybe because you could see the food before you chose it. Maybe it was nostalgia. We went through the line, eyeing the salads—gelatin, tossed, slaws, three-bean—then the deserts—placed before the serious entrees to tempt us—then the steak, fish, fried chicken, pork chops—then the hot vegetables. Finally the breads—dinner rolls, cornbread squares, biscuits, and sliced Italian—butter, and beverages.
It is hard in a cafeteria line not to let “your eyes get bigger than your stomach,” as the old saying goes (do people still say that?). Of course we picked out too much food, much more than we would normally eat, and my mother, like me, liked to eat well-cooked food. The server helped us to our table and we began to enjoy what we didn’t have to cook ourselves. My mother had four kids and we lived solely on my father’s working class pay. Going out to eat was rare in our home. She still saw eating out as a treat, not just a normal way to get a meal.
In the course of the meal, my mother said something surprising, even shocking, and to this day I do not know what triggered it. That is a bad choice of words because what she said was about, of all things, weapons. Military ones. Perhaps we were talking about the past, or one of my son’s toys, or an old movie.
“You know, when I was in high school, us girls would go up in the summer to Washington, D.C. and work in the armaments factory.”
“Mom! You never told us that!” To this day I still feel the shock of her statement. Shock that she had kept such interesting information to herself for over fifty years. Shock that she chose to tell me at lunch at Morrison’s. In retrospect, I don’t think she planned to tell me. It just came out. Shock that my mother, five foot one, always chubby, from the most isolated of Appalachian Virginia coal towns, “just a housewife with four kids,” had been her own version of Rosie the Riveter.
“Well, that’s what we did. It was a good way to make money when we were out of school. There were four of us. We stayed in a boarding house and worked on the line.”
That was it, the totality of the memory. No specifics. She probably had a menial job sorting bullets or screwing parts onto torpedoes. There was a naval yard on the Potomac River in Washington in those days. She was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women and girls to perform this work in that plant. That I’m sure of; I am not sure why she didn’t want to say much more; perhaps she had forgotten most of it or the work was so mundane there was little to remember. Living in the big city probably dominated her memory more than making bombs.
I knew so little of my parents’ lives before we kids came along. My father died when I was sixteen—he was forty-nine—before I had the good adult sense to ask him. Mom lived much longer but found ways to evade questions. Even so, over the years bits and pieces revealed themselves. I use this grammar because Mom never set out to tell us her story, only to add some flavor here and there. Perhaps she did so more for herself, to remind herself she had lived, been young, and had fun before all the hard times, rather than to give us a coherent record. It is up to me as a writer to craft that coherence.
***
My brother and I stood and stared at the marker. Why had I not seen this before? Oh, that’s is a long tale, one of attempted escape, tries at re-invention, and tricks of memory. April 22, 1974. Try as I might have at one time, I can’t forget the snapshots and sounds of that morning that changed everything about our family and my existence, my soul. No, I never tried to forget that day, only its connection to who I was and am.
I looked at Donald. “What do you remember about that morning?”
My brother is dry, untalkative, but often surprisingly astute in what he does say. He has lived in “PG” and Anne Arundel Counties his entire sixty-eight years. He is twenty-two months younger than I, and as children were often mistaken for twins. We were blond, blue-eyed, unlike the rest of the family.
“I heard something, and I went in the kitchen where he was lying.” Donald was fourteen, and his father was dead already on the floor. “I remember it seemed like the ambulance took forever to get there, but it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Mom said she heard a gurgling sound that woke her up,” I recalled, “and she found him.” For myself, I didn’t remember anything but my mother crying in the living room. I did not go in the kitchen. Our older brother Gary, who still lived with us because of his own struggles, was doing something, and the ambulance workers came, and then some neighbors. It is all disconnected and disjointed now.
My father had woken up early that morning, as he did all Saturday mornings, because we ran a paper route for the Washington Post. If the weather was bad, as is was that very rainy morning, he put the bundles of 80-100 papers delivered from the Post’s plant downtown in an old Ford Falcon. He drove us around to place those on stoops in the neighborhood. If the weather was dry, we carried them in a Radio Flyer wagon. But delivering a morning paper, especially one of the Post’s size and reputation, meant we had to start early, at 5:00. A truck brought them to our house and dropped them off on our walkway by the front yard fence. In rain and snow we stuffed them into little plastic bags and set up about to distribute them. The task took about an hour between the three of us. Afterward, we went to school during the week, and back to bed on the weekends.
My father was up making himself something to eat quite early and would have been waking us up soon had his heart not stopped without warning. Perhaps not “without warning.” He was on a special diet for his heart, was recovering from the alcohol problem, worked too hard, was trying unsuccessfully to stop smoking, and had been overweight much of his life. His nickname was “Pork Chop.”
In answer to my query, Donald did not say much that hot afternoon in late July standing over our father’s grave. He did not have to. Everything changed that day in 1972, especially our relationships with our mother, our older brother Gary, and David. All six of us, now five, lived in the tiny bungalow home. Everything shifted.
I graduated from high school and moved away to college eighteen months later and relocated permanently. At fourteen, Donald had to find his way in the world, as his own father had. My mother was left to raise a severely intellectually disabled child. We had no idea at the time how deep and abiding his disability would be, but it eventually led her to move six hundred miles away to find good care for him. And my older brother Gary suffered from physical (Crohns’ disease) and mental (OCD) maladies that were not understood at the time and were just beginning to manifest. His resulting ill health and difficult behavior would plague him, Mom, and the rest of us for decades.
I escaped to a different state, taking years and perhaps more to figure out my place in the world without a father to control, cajole, or counsel me. Donald escaped to his own identity and found an early and successful marriage and two accomplished children.
How would my life be if Salem Graham had not died that morning in 1972? Who would I be? I can only conjecture. I probably would not have moved far from Maryland. Perhaps I would not have gone beyond a four-year degree, if that. I might have found another career and retired earlier. Would I have married? All other things considered, probably I would have, eventually, but would there have been children, or divorce? Would I have met the interesting people I have? Obtained the same education? Lived in a place where I never felt truly at home but learned to accept?
My son never met his grandfather, but my son would not even exist as who he is if our father had not died that day. My granddaughter, the lovely dark-eyed sprite who runs our lives, who asks for “mas” (more) when a firetruck roars by, mi nieta, would not exist. My education, careers, friendship, religion, health—every aspect of who I am except my DNA and my immediate family of origin--would be different.
Yes, I remember that morning. I know my dear brother does, too, even if we cannot articulate it all. It was gray, cold, wet, chaotic. The guy who dropped off the Washington Post delivered them for us a few days. Neighbors came by, without the right words to say, which my mother criticized. She became a widow, disappointed in and by life, that day. People brought food. We had a funeral. Since I was the only “church person” in the family, my pastor conducted it, even though he did not know my father. My father’s religion was AA, which is better than none at all and probably better than some others. Its steps are based on a realistic appraisal of oneself, on humility, and awareness of our influence on others.
Who would I be without April 22, 1974? In contemplating a memoir with the pretentious title of A Life Like No Other—because every life is unique and like no other—I sought for a starting place to serve as a foundation for all the quilt pieces that represent my years. Ah, a horrible mixed metaphor! Yet sometimes our lives feel like disparate sets of categories that do not align or correspond.
I do know that on April 23, I ceased to be under any kind of protection. I was on my own. Not long afterward, my mom, her hands full with widowhood, living on Social Security, a chronically ill son, and one with severe disabilities, my mom told Donald and me she couldn’t worry about us any more and we would have to take care of ourselves. She could not really support me financially or emotionally, nor could she stop me from decisions I made. At sixteen I made my own decisions, got a part-time job (Donald took over the paper route), looked into colleges far from home, decided on one, spent lots of time with church friends, graduated with strong grades. I was bookish, nerdy, awkward, afflicted with an odd disease of my own. No need to worry about me doing drugs or getting pregnant. I would rather hang at the Baptist church.
At seventeen I went to college four states away. That and the other quilt pieces of my life—infertility, a difficult marriage, teaching, working full time and living on tiny stipends to get through college and graduate school, traveling, meeting amazing people—happened because my father died in 1972.
Facing the lack of a parent as a teenager shatters one’s youth, one’s options, one’s hopes, one’s boundaries. We spend a long time finding those shards and gluing them back together in patterns that do not resemble the original. Finding my father’s gravesite with my brother may have been the end, the placing of the last piece, that allowed me to start this memoir.
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