Chris Offutt: My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

We resorted to walking the blacktop, which would take less time than traversing the woods. The road curved three hundred yards to the top of a hill, then a long slow drop to the creek. We lightened our load by drinking a beer. I hated the taste and switched to whiskey. We headed down the hill. By the time we reached the bottom, I’d finished one half-pint and opened another, then fell in the creek and took a rest. I woke up in a car and went back to sleep. Next I awakened sick to my stomach on the front porch of a nearby house. I made it home and went to bed. It was a disgraceful beginning to the pleasures of alcohol, a clear warning to stay away from whiskey. Instead, I visited the bootlegger dozens of times before leaving Kentucky. Drinking bourbon changed the terrible way I consistently felt about myself. I suppose it was the same for Dad, who eventually died of liver failure.

And the boys I got drunk with that first time forty years ago? One shot himself to death and the other will be released from prison at age seventy-five.

BY 2012 Dad had been occupying a large chair for several years, eating, sleeping, drinking, and writing there. Three days before Christmas my mother called my house in Mississippi, a rarity in itself. She spoke rapidly, her voice fraught with anxiety, an element of despair coursing beneath her words. I’d never heard this tone from her. She informed me that my father had fallen. Too small to help him up, Mom had called an ambulance service. The EMTs took Dad to the hospital, where the doctors decided to keep him. Mom wasn’t sure why.

“Would you please come home?” she said.

The nature of our family is that no one appeals for help of any kind — not financial, emotional, or moral support. Since Mom was asking, I knew it was serious. Uncertain of the circumstances, I packed clothes appropriate to a funeral, drove all day, and arrived on the winter solstice, gray and rainy, a sense of melancholy draping the hills. I went straight to the hospital. Dad was too bloated for diagnosis. The first order of business was draining forty pounds of fluid, which wasn’t going well.

I accompanied Mom to the house in which I’d grown up, her home of fifty years. My mother loved Dad with a tenacious loyalty and devotion. She accepted his quirks and admired his brilliance. The strength of their marriage was due solely to her. She ran every errand, shopped, cooked, cleaned, and drove her children places. She typed every final manuscript Dad wrote.

Mom was five feet, two inches tall, with red hair, green eyes, and a good figure. She stayed out of the sun to avoid freckling. For a year after high school she attended Transylvania University, left for economic reasons, and began working in a bank. She’d always regretted not furthering her education, and in 1980 she enrolled at Morehead State University, where I was a senior. For the next twelve years she took a few classes per year as one of the first continuing education students at MSU, receiving a BA in philosophy and a master’s in English. She taught freshman composition for three years on campus, then began teaching at the newly opened state prison in West Liberty, Kentucky.

From ages sixty-five to seventy-eight, she worked full-time as a secretary in Morehead to supplement their combined Social Security income. Mom was adamant that they didn’t need the money, but I understood the truth — my parents’ sense of pride forbade her from admitting financial need. I also know that the job was crucial in that it provided my mother with escape five days a week. Her children had left home and moved far away, but Mom could get only as far as the nearest town for work. She had her own life there — walking to the bank every day, chatting with the mailman and a woman who worked at the liquor store.

The morning after I arrived home, Mom rose early and went to the hospital. I walked through the house and discovered that two weeks of heavy rain had flooded the basement, which was not draining. Dad had always called his neighbor Jimmy to deal with plumbing problems. Jimmy was dead, so I called his son, who showed up promptly. Sonny and I were glad to see each other but stood awkwardly in the drizzling rain, unsure what to do. Men in the hills didn’t touch except to punch each other or accidentally brush arms while engaged in a shared chore. We grinned and looked away, scratched ourselves, and grinned some more. I asked how he was, and he said, “Straight as a stick, son.”

The water in the basement was six inches deep, more than Sonny or I had ever seen there. I’d brought shoes suitable for the woods but not wading and remained on the basement steps with a flashlight. Sonny moved slowly through the water, seeking the drain, wearing large rubber boots. He said they’d belonged to his dad. At the top of the steps I found my father’s old zip galoshes. The rubber was ripped at the stress marks across the toe. I wrapped two plastic bags around my feet and slid them into Dad’s boots.

Sonny was crouching over the drain. He dipped his hand into the murky water, felt around briefly, and said: “Phillips.” I went upstairs and fetched a Phillips-head screwdriver. Sonny removed the drain cap and fed the metal snake into the pipe. I remembered being a child and watching Jimmy snake out the drain while Dad stood idly by, holding a flashlight. Now Sonny and I repeated their behavior, wearing our fathers’ boots.

The walls of the basement were moldy, the rafters covered in cobwebs. Dark water moved beneath our feet. The motor rattled as the steel wire coiled and uncoiled within the drum. I recalled playing in the basement with Sonny and his brothers. As the youngest boy on the hill, he trailed behind us and never spoke. I mentioned the past to Sonny, but he had no interest in nostalgia. He was occupying the moment, running the snake by feel, staring into the middle distance, frowning and muttering exactly as his father had. Sonny believed the snake was getting diverted into another pipe. He retracted it and tried again.

“Still writing tales?” he said.

I told him yes and he nodded once, returning his attention to the snake. Very few of the boys I grew up with had finished high school, but they accepted that I was a writer. I was merely doing what other men did — following in my father’s footsteps. Sonny was a plumber. The son of a local drunk was the town drunk in two towns. Sons of soldiers joined the army. That I had become a writer was perfectly normal.

The water level lapped against the walls from our movement. One of Dad’s boots began to leak. Sonny shut off the machine. He told me to go down the hill twenty-five feet to the old sewage trench, now replaced by a septic tank. As a kid I’d spent hundreds of hours over the hill, finding snakeskins and rabbit dens, old bottles and animal bones, feathers and lucky rocks. I knew the gap in the brush and the best route down. In the forty years since my last venture, bushes had spread and grown, and I was much less agile. My boot skidded and I went to one knee but remained upright. Rooted in earth rich with human waste, the forsythia tendrils were higher than my head, bigger than my thumb, tangled and knotted together. Rain fell in waves. I had no hat or gloves.

Facing a row of briars, I knew instinctively to rotate my body into them, letting the thorns scrape but not grab hold. Now I had to find the old sewage trench. The rain increased. I crawled beneath the heavy overhang, moving slowly, joints stiff, the weight of my body hurting my hands pressed to the ground. Sonny yelled from the top of the hill. I couldn’t see him, but I waved my arms and shook a bush. He wanted to know if I heard anything.

“What am I supposed to hear?” I said.

“Anything, son. Listen at the ground. It’s not supposed to make no noise, so anything you hear is good.”