Chris Offutt: My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

He went back in the house. The rain slackened momentarily. I bent forward and cupped my ears toward the earth. I heard cars on the blacktop at the foot of the hill and the gentle sound of thousands of raindrops striking thousands of leaves. I heard my own ragged breathing.

After a few minutes, Sonny yelled for me to come back to the house. The bushes were too intertwined for me to stand upright, and I had to scuttle backward. Limbs scratched my skin. Water ran into my pants. I emerged into a small clearing and tugged my clothes in place, shivering from the cold and sweating from exertion. I took two steps, slipped, and fell. Mud spattered my glasses. My cell phone rang and I ignored it. I fell twice more, scraping my hands. A branch tore along my cheek. I was breathing hard. It occurred to me that if I had a heart attack, Sonny would drag me up the hill and drive me to the hospital. Maybe I’d share a room with Dad.

I regained the safety of the yard. Sonny had packed up his snake machine and said he’d come back later and look for another drain. I was wet and muddy, irritated at the world and myself. Only a damn fool plunges down a steep hill, out of shape at age fifty-four, and attempts to hear the sound of dirt. I listened to the voicemail on my phone. The doctor thought my father might need a transfusion and my blood type matched his. I told Sonny, who looked away, then spoke quietly: “You need you a ride to the hospital?”

I shrugged and he said to get in. The sun was going down. We talked of our varied marriages, old buddies, and grade school teachers. Sonny dropped me at the hospital, but the medical emergency turned out be premature. Dad’s condition had stabilized. The catheter had begun draining.

Late that evening, the water was gone from the basement. I called Sonny, who said he’d found a better clean-out drain against the wall closest to the hill. He suggested I write its location on the wall in case someone else came next time. Sonny’s idea was practical and smart, but it shocked me. The notion of writing on the wall, even a dim basement corner, was unthinkable. It violated Dad’s rules. You wrote on pieces of paper, organized them into a manuscript, and produced a book. You didn’t write on a wall any more than you would spit on the floor. But Dad was sick and I was Sonny’s assistant. I had my instructions.

In the corner, I found the correct drain that led to the septic tank. I removed the cap of a black marker, its sharp scent momentarily overpowering the mold. In my life I’ve written over ten million words, but never before on a wall. If Dad found out, he wouldn’t like it, and I’d get in trouble. In large letters I wrote “Clean-Out Drain” with an arrow pointing down.

At the foot of the steps, I glanced around the muddy basement one more time. I’d spent a lot of time down here, especially during winter, when school was canceled from snow. Now it was full of old Tupperware, empty beer bottles, and rotting wood. A rusty metal shelf held canned food that had expanded, the paper labels chewed by mice. I remembered killing a snake in a corner, then setting mousetraps for months.

Sonny had done a good job. He’d emptied the basement with more efficiency than the doctors had drained fluid from my father. Briefly, I imagined Sonny as a doctor — his bedside manner was gentle, and he’d have a nurse to retrieve tools instead of me.

I went outside in the chilly darkness. The rain had quit. Water dripped from leaves. An owl moaned along the ridge. The storm had cleared the sky, revealing the same swath of stars I looked at as a child. I listened intently. It occurred to me that the silence I heard was the sound of dirt.

THE DOCTOR diagnosed my father with alcohol-induced cirrhosis and gave him six months to live. I arranged for a man to build a wheelchair ramp next to the driveway. I was proud of myself. I couldn’t help my father, but I could make it easy for him to get in and out of the house. He came home and returned to his chair. I went back to Mississippi.

The past decade had been difficult for me, beginning with the blow of divorce. Instead of writing, I’d devoted myself to my sons: shopping, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and driving them around. A few years later I married Melissa Ginsburg, a poet from Texas, and soon faced a fresh dilemma: My teenage sons wanted to go to college, and I was broke and unemployed. To finance their education, I taught myself screenwriting and worked on three television shows, True Blood, Weeds, and Treme . Hollywood was a world into which I never fully fit, beginning with my fear of driving in Los Angeles. Still, I blundered along, doing my best, living in hotels and furnished apartments for a few months at a time. I stayed focused on my plan — get the money and get out. After my sons went to college, I took a permanent position at the University of Mississippi and rented an old house seven miles from town.

The first summer in Mississippi, before Dad got sick, I drove home to see my parents, the only time in my life I visited them alone. Prior to that, other family members had been present, or my wife and sons had accompanied me. I stayed in Morehead at a motel on the interstate because Dad made it clear that I was welcome only after four o’clock in the afternoon. He implied that it was related to his work, since he was still writing, but the timing turned out to revolve around his schedule for drinking. Dad told me he was the happiest man in the world. The only complaint he had was the weekends, because Mom was in the house. They got along fine, that wasn’t the problem. Her presence interfered with his solitude, as did my visit.

Six months later he was dying, and I called regularly. He had already survived a massive heart attack, two minor strokes, and numerous lesser ailments. A smoker for forty years, he was permanently tethered to an oxygen tank for COPD. Dad always believed he’d die young, as his own father had. He was surprised to make it to age forty-five, then fifty, sixty, seventy, and seventy-five. Now his body was running down. In the last month of his illness, Dad knew death was near. He fell asleep on the phone, woke up, repeated what he’d just said, and was angry for doing so. An escalation of the pattern rankled him.

“I think, son, it’s the beginning of the end.”

“Might be,” I said.

“Probably is.”

“Probably so.”

“Maybe not,” he said.

The conversation contained a familiar tinge of conflict, and I resolved to go along with anything he said. In the end, death reduced every dispute to a draw.

He talked of his childhood, of the farm his father fought to save in the Depression, and how the land went to Uncle Johnny.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“My father’s brother.”

“You never talked about him.”

“Why would I? He got the farm. He never worked it. Dad and I did, but Uncle Johnny got it. I never saw him again.”

“What was he like?”

“Why do you care about him? I’m dying, not him.”

He had a point, a good one. But it was astonishing to hear about a relative I’d never met. Uncle Johnny’s grandsons would be close to my age. I wondered if they knew about our family, about me.

“I’m not afraid of this,” Dad said. “I don’t want you to think I’m trying to put on a fake front. I’m really not. If the pain gets bad, I’ve got a half a bottle of Percocet hidden. I’ll take them with whiskey. If the pain gets bad.”

“I understand.”

“Your mother knows. I told her.”

“It’s a backup plan,” I said. “Doesn’t mean you’ll do it.”

There was a long gap in our conversation. He spoke again.

“It surprises me that I’m not afraid. I had a pretty good run. Now I’ll find out if there really is an afterlife. Or if it’s just a long rest that I won’t know about. It’s hard to think of the world without me being in it.”