The passenger seat was cavernous to my little self, like a sky’s expanse to a single star. My family took this hour-long pilgrimage in the car each Saturday for nearly a year. We did it for my mamaw. On our first journey, it was 1970, and I was six. We piled into our new, tan Oldsmobile sedan for the fifty-mile trip to Louisville, all of us dressed in church clothes. We drove slowly away from our red-brick ranch house perched upon the highest spot on our farm, the house that my grandparents deeded to my parents shortly after I was born in 1964 and built a new house in town. Our farm sat upon a complex of caves and underground streams, underlain by hundreds of feet of limestone. My father once told me that the limestone formed in warm, shallow seas that covered our land millions of years ago. As we drove down the hill, I looked out over fields that stretched to the edges of our farm’s boundaries and imagined a smooth, blue ocean all the way to the horizon.
We headed down the long, gravel lane, turned left onto the state road, and took the next highway for a few miles before it cut between the Christian and Methodist churches, delivering us into the small town of Glendale. Driving down Main Street, we passed the bank, the post office, Hardee’s grocery, and Sego’s hardware store until the road rose over the L&N Railroad tracks. We turned right at the next road and within a half mile, we arrived at my grandparent’s house.
When we continued on our journey, our car was full. Sitting three across in front were my father, my nine-year old brother, Jeff, and my Papaw Cave. I sat atop the white-vinyl bench seat between Mamaw Cave and my mother; I could barely see my brother’s shoulders, clad in a brown-and-black plaid shirt. We continued our trek toward Interstate 65. A left sent us northbound.
In the back seat, I silently played counting games with my mother’s soft fingers like I would on one of our regular Sunday drives, during which the men up front would survey other farmers’ crops. On such a drive my father might ask Papaw, “Wonder how the Crane’s corn crop is growing in that valley this year?” and then make a sharp left toward the lowland for his answer.
Passing another field, Papaw would usually say something like, “John’s using that new spray on his tobacco, and the leaves look burnt.” It would be his way of lobbying my father to stick with old ways of farming.
But on that first weekend pilgrimage, we drove to the city. Things weren’t normal. Mamaw fidgeted beside me. The patty-cake game I played with Mom smacked too loudly, so we stopped. Up until then, my mamaw had sat wordless. She leaned up toward the front seat. “Earl,” she asked my papaw, “How many of these treatments did the doctor say I would need?”
My papaw didn’t turn around. “Ora, I already told you that the doctor doesn’t know,” he snapped. My papaw was a man who castrated bulls with a bare hand and a scalpel.
My father remained quiet as he drove. His head was angled a little left of the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the broken, white lines at the highway’s center. An only son after the deaths of his two brothers, my father’s life had become one of duty and obligation. He had stayed only two years at Western Kentucky University before returning to the farm at my grandparents’ urging. My mamaw was too worried about the temptations of parties with alcohol. My papaw needed his help.
I wanted to shake the car so that it had to stop. I wanted to scream, “What’s wrong with Mamaw? Why is she like this? How did it happen? Will she be okay?”
But I didn’t.
By then, I’d learned that my questions made others feel uncomfortable, like the time when I was five and asked, “What’s that?” and pointed to my father’s penis. He had stepped out of the shower, a young man—just thirty that winter—sharing a small bathroom with a family of four. I was sitting on a wooden chair where my mother had placed me with instructions to stay quiet while she dressed for church. I was already ready to go, in a drop-waist dress with white satin at the top and black velvet at the bottom. I sat as instructed until I saw this thing dangling slightly below the center of my father’s body, cushioned by a mass of curly, brownish-red hair, scrunched up like an accordion.
“You’ll need to take your chair out now,” my father responded to my two-word question. He pointed to the door as he wrapped a towel around his waist.
Back in the car on the way to Our Lady of Peace, my belly felt sick as I smothered what I wanted to know.
I sensed my mamaw’s nervousness. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, put her hands in her lap, placed her left elbow on the arm rest. Stillness was foreign to her. Every day she was up early and in her kitchen. She cooked three meals, beginning with a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and biscuits for my father and my papaw. The men ate early and left for the fields. Right after she put away breakfast dishes, Mamaw began mixing flour and lard to make pie crusts, adding the right amount of water, and cutting it all with a fork again and again. When the flour and lard had formed pea-shaped lumps, she moved the dough to the flour-dusted countertop, folding and stretching it repeatedly, and shaped it into an oval. She flattened it out with the rolling pen, its ends twirling through her hands. A couple of times a week after breakfast, she’d grab a chicken from the coop by the neck with one hand, swing it like a lasso above her head, and flop its body over the stump at the corner of the driveway. Then she wielded an ax high above her head and slammed it down. Whack! She let the headless chicken run itself to its death and then dipped it in boiling water to scald off its feathers. At 63, my mamaw worked as hard a woman twenty years younger.
Back in the car heading toward Our Lady of Peace, Mamaw mumbled that she wished God would take her sadness away, that He would stop testing her faith. No one said anything. That’s why were in the car—her sadness.
On normal days, Mamaw would work in the kitchen while the television blared from the small, wood-paneled, sitting room, broadcasting Pat Robertson, Rex Humbard, Billy Graham, and Oral Roberts—the Christian televangelists she worshiped. Mamaw often dialed in and pledged money for the Graham Crusades. She stopped in the middle of the kitchen, kneeled down on both knees, and prayed aloud for those being born again on live television.
When I was in the kitchen with her, Mamaw talked to me about her deep sadness for all the world’s lost souls, for all the starving children in Africa, for all the sinners and everyone else who had forsaken God. These were heavy burdens she chose to carry. God punished those who leave him, she told me, and saved those who professed their faith. Her own father’s alcoholic rages had vanished after he had been born again. My mamaw celebrated his conversion (“Praise the Lord,” she’d say). I heard her ramble on about how he’d turned away from worldly sins. “Forgive him,” she asked on behalf of her father, a plea to absolve the fierce beatings he used to give her when he was drunk.
God had taken two of her sons; that’s how my mamaw saw it. The first, a baby, Earl Jr., surely had not sinned. The second son, James, died from tuberculosis when my father, the third son, was eight. I only knew Uncle James from the high school yearbook page dedicated to him. When I opened the yearbook on the table, it fell naturally to his picture, the spine grooved from overuse. I stared at his pink cheeks that stood out in the sepia-toned photograph, hand-colored for this special remembrance. My mamaw lamented over my shoulder that God took a good boy at sixteen, and then knelt down in prayer, begging forgiveness for her sins. If I had prayed, I would have asked for the weight of the world to be lifted from her bony shoulders.
Substituting sadness for depression was only one way my family played with words. At Our Lady of Peace, my family—all six of us—sat in the waiting area before a stoic doctor walked out, greeted my father and my papaw, and ushered my mamaw through double doors that flung open in unison. Mamaw would be given a treatment, my mother said, word play for electroshock therapy.
We waited. My mother occupied my brother and me in a game of “Riddle-me, Riddle-me-ree. I see something you don't see,” and described the light, green specks on the white floor tiles. My brother and I made wild guesses to find what couldn’t readily be seen.
I saw other things while we played this game, like how my father sat, legs crossed, bouncing his foot nervously up and down and turning the pages of The Record, the weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville. I saw my papaw, teary eyed, holding one of the white, cambric handkerchiefs that my mamaw starched for him on ironing day, when the sweet fragrance of freshly-washed linen filled the air. I saw the tall, white marble statue of the graceful Mary standing in the corner, her arms extended as to beckon me into her loving embrace, like a promise of help for those who ask.
When the doctor reappeared, he collected my father and my papaw, and they followed him eagerly through the double doors. My mother cued my brother and me to put our shoes back on. In a few minutes, my father and papaw escorted my mamaw out to us. Her feet moved in short steps as if her knees were bound together. Her forehead blazed with red splotches that she rubbed them like she was reading braille. I wanted to run toward her like I always did and wrap my arms around her legs, but her eyes stopped me. They were blank, like everything behind them was empty. The men steadied her on either side, and we shuffled to the car, an entourage of the suffering.
In the back seat, I put my head on my mamaw’s lap to comfort her. She turned away from me and stared out the side window. The pilgrims were all silent. The car glided home to the farm, providing steady passage. This pilgrimage was complete.
In a few days, I was back in my mamaw’s kitchen, helping her. Her wooziness was mostly gone; she worked steadily. I mixed the eggs into cornmeal as we listened to the TV. Mamaw pressed me urgently to tell her when I would accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. I answered by shrugging my shoulders and saying, “I don’t know.” I did not know if I accepted Jesus, would I have sadness, too?
My family took pilgrimages with my mamaw every month for most of the next year. Her sadness did vanish, but so did her memory. Sitting in her kitchen, she often asked where she was and why she was there. She stopped questioning me about Jesus, too, like the noisy soundtrack had been pushed out by the vast emptiness of her mind.