Chris Offutt: My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Faron and his wife arrived to help us pack. Faron had been a logger, a telephone lineman, and a carpenter. He broke horses and rode a motorcycle. He now worked as a car detailer. His hair was cut in a “Kentucky Waterfall,” a long mullet that reached midchest when combed forward. I asked him what he called his hairstyle, and after hesitating, he looked me in the eye and said: “Outdated.” We laughed as we always had, our dead fathers momentarily forgotten. Faron and I carried Dad’s chair to his truck. He was laughing as he accelerated up the grade and around the curve, his hair streaming from the window.

I gathered Dad’s guns and went through them. A revolver was broken, the crane snapped off the cylinder, not worth repairing. Two were rusted to ruin. I took a shotgun and a rifle to visit Faron’s brother, a master gunsmith who won awards for marksmanship with muzzle-loading rifles he built by hand. Randy sat in his garage surrounded by tools, gun parts, a motorcycle, and chunks of gorgeous wood. He greeted me as if he’d seen me last week instead of a decade back. We could have been kin — bearded and bespectacled, with sandy-gray hair and potbellies.

Randy cleaned Dad’s guns while we talked. The Remington single-shot was made in 1936, the stock a rich tiger walnut, the action smooth, the sights still true. My grandfather used it to hunt small game during the Depression, then gave it to Dad. We walked to Randy’s gun range and ran several rounds through the rifle. He was impressed by my ability to hit a beer can at twenty-five yards. I shrugged it off, secretly pleased, and gave credit to the rifle. “Good gun,” Randy said. “Come see me.” I nodded and drove away, grateful to know him, to know all the Hendersons.

For a long time I believed I’d had two childhoods — one in the house, and another outside — running parallel, drastically different. Years later I realized I’d had four distinct childhoods, indoors and out, plus a division of “before Dad worked at home” and the abrupt transition to his constant presence in the house.

My brother and I shared a bedroom on the second floor. Inside a clothes closet was another door that opened to a narrow staircase leading to the dark attic. I was absolutely convinced that ghosts lived up there. The exterior wall of the house held a set of closed, decorative shutters. They were fastened to the brick on the other side of the wall at the foot of the steps. I believed that after I went to sleep, ghosts descended the steps from the attic and used the shutters to leave the house and kill people, returning before I woke up. Eventually they would enter the house through the mysterious closet and kill the family. It was my job to protect my brother and sisters.

Before going to sleep, I arranged rocks beneath my blanket in specific patterns designed to keep the ghosts at bay. I developed the habit of sleepwalking, leaving the room to awaken elsewhere, occasionally outside. A few times I came to consciousness sitting in the bathroom, my mother pressing a damp cloth to my forehead, urging me to wake up. She later told me the whole thing perplexed her, but since I always awakened, she didn’t worry about it. I never told her about the ghosts and she never asked about the rocks in my bed.

Dad needed a home office, and my sisters’ bedroom was the best option. They would take my bedroom, with a new wall added for privacy. The attic would be renovated for my brother and me. Before the carpenters arrived, I decided to explore the attic during the day. I opened the closet door and stood at the bottom of the stairs, staring into the darkness above. I put one foot on the bottom step and immediately pulled it back. The next day I was able to keep my foot in place longer, and the day after that I momentarily stood on the bottom step. In this fashion, over a period of days, I crept up the steps until I was crouching at the top. As fast as possible, I jumped into the attic and pulled the string to a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The attic consisted of exposed beams, studs, and rafters. Without insulation or ventilation, the room was extremely hot. Wasps droned overhead.

Sitting on the floor was a cardboard box containing paperbacks with plain yellow covers. I plucked one at random and opened it. I knew right away that I shouldn’t be reading it, but I didn’t want to stop because it gave me a warm tingling inside my body. My stomach tightened and my lips became dry. I crouched over the box for an hour. There were about twenty of these books. I quickly learned to skim for the good parts, which were either graphic sex using language I’d never seen, or detailed accounts of spanking women with big backsides.

My brother called me for supper and I arranged the books in the order I’d found them and went downstairs. After years of being scared of the attic, I now wanted to rush back upstairs. For a week I secretly read hard-core pornography until my mother cleared the area for the carpenters. I was eleven years old.

That same summer a dentist pulled four of my permanent molars to create sufficient space to move the rest of my teeth around my mouth. I wore a full set of braces for two years — upper and lower — the only ones in the county. Every morning I replaced four rubber bands that crisscrossed between my jaws. At night I slept wearing a metal bit that locked into my teeth and buckled behind my head. My mouth ached most of the time. I’d always been a rough-and-tumble kid, and the inside of my lips bled from ragged wounds sustained by rural life. I learned to ignore throbbing gums, cut lips, and the spitting of blood. Pain relegated itself to a distant nagging, similar to the itch of an insect bite.

The carpenters worked all summer, and in August my brother and I moved to our new room in the attic. Each night we stepped into the dim closet at the foot of the steps. Our room above was completely dark, and the light switch was at the top of the stairs. I inhaled deeply and held my breath. I placed my hands on the doorjamb and catapulted myself up the steps, knowing just where to place my feet to avoid each creak. At the top of the stairs, my open palm hit the light switch, and I jerked my head to check for ghosts. They were always gone, having managed to flee moments before my sudden arrival. It was then safe enough for my brother to climb the steps.

Decades later he told me he’d been grateful that I went upstairs first. Every time he ascended the steps as an adult, something cold always passed through his body. Later, I asked my younger sister if there was any part of the house she was afraid of. She was silent for a moment, then shook her head and said, “I was afraid of the whole house.”

Over the past thirty-five years, our attic bedroom had shifted in the traditional way of an abandoned nest — first to a sewing room, then a study when my mother attended college, and now a storage chamber for junk. Narrow paths flanked tall stacks of goods that included Christmas decorations from the fifties, clothes from the sixties, and high school yearbooks from the seventies. The roof leaked. There was a vague smell of mildew, rot, and squirrel urine. My bed was an odd-sized piece of foam rubber that was crumbling and gnawed by mice. Beneath it lay remnants from childhood: a few paperback books, an empty wallet, a pile of seventh-grade love letters, a cigar box filled with wheat pennies, three diaries, and a dead bat.

I found a framed charcoal sketch of my brother that someone drew when we were kids. I stared at the drawing for a long time. It looked more like my brother now than it did then, as if the artist understood that a portrait is future memory made tangible. I wandered among the maze of piled objects, touching this and that. It was like being at a yard sale, going through the remains of another person’s life. No one occupied this space anymore, living or dead. I had become my own ghost, haunting my past.