For me, America’s forgotten tragedy dwells within a house that always reeked of cigarettes. It was an old mill house, almost haunted; window panes became violent in the wind and dust had gathered in the divots of the paint-chipped walls. Smoke seeped into the fabric of the carpet and furniture and wafted through the vents in the old, boxy, television that endlessly ran outdated programs. I would rest my wiry body on the beams of the doorway and watch; a woman stabbed to death forty-seven times with a ballpoint pen; a talk show arguing why you should be able to purchase a gun without a valid ID; a gory horror film. I would never be able to watch things like this at home.
Cubie, a soothing woman with hair as white as marble, would sit on her trademark chair that was caked with soot and imprinted with the shape of her back. She handed me candy that tasted like it came from a time when houses were still lit with oil lamps while she called me sugar and softly rubbed the dark hair on my head. She withered along with her white, plastic throne, which to my knowledge, outlasted her by a long, long time.
Dalton was a brutish, peculiar country boy who would shoot airsoft pellets at his cousins when he was bored. Sometimes he would take me upstairs to his room, which smelled half of must and half of warm, fragrant cedar. I would sift through his collection of rusty knives and various items he had unearthed in the woods while he played Call of Duty. He was always, and I mean always, snacking on a bag of Combos Pizza flavored crackers. Dalton was—albeit a bit mean—an important influence in my life. He would yell at his mom and cause trouble, but he would always bring freshly dried venison to my mom with a wide grin and outstretched arms. My childhood had a lot of contradictions like that. I liked Dalton, he taught me a lot of
important lessons like how to jump off a rope swing and how to properly open a switchblade. But, he probably shouldn’t have let a seven year old hold a real, loaded gun.
Like any impoverished country home, the overgrown grass in the backyard was surrounded by old tractors and wheels that had lost their vehicles who knows when. Blue, with his good ol’ beer and his beloved Lowe’s hat, would soliloquize about why his wife Jeanette shouldn’t smoke weed and should deal with her problems like a true, god-loving patriot, while I picked mulberries from the roof of his disintegrating shed. Jeanette, of course, always fired back.
“Well how about you get yer’ butt off that damn chair and teach your son some manners instead of complainin’ ’bout the one thing I got left,” she would rifle out. Sometimes she yelled right at Blue and other times she had clearly given up, simply muttering it to herself.
We all lived in a tiny town called Bynum. Bynum was an old mill town that had lost its soul nearly a century before, when the Industrial Revolution stopped and the consequences of destruction set in. What was left was either remnants or seedlings. New people would move in, renovate, and eventually decide they were sick of it. But for Blue and Jeanette, it was simply the place they were put, and they were just fine with that I suppose.
My mother told me once that she considered not letting me inside that house and only letting me wander the yard surrounding it. She told me she had mixed feelings about letting her child be exposed to heavy smoke, guns, and a reality that was so shockingly different from what I knew. But ultimately she never actually made that decision, she said that she realized what I would be losing if I wasn’t exposed to the Wrenns: understanding and perspective.
The contrast to my life was palpable, and I was too young to have the depth to be anything but confused. In time though, I began to understand. People like Blue and Jeanette have been wheeled in and spat out of the wringer. They are those who, despite their hardships, maintained the Southern sweetness that capitalism tried so desperately to extinguish. At that house, which was ruled by entropy and longing, I learned of the
forgotten American tragedy. To America, pride means power; to the Wrenns, pride meant humanity.
