This language was one of apparent sweetness, humor, courtliness, and loving repetition—yes sir being the characteristic all-purpose note that signaled the small welcome surprise at the world’s fleeting manifold, as in, Yes sir, Daddy’s Packard, or, Yes sir, Gene Tierney—a way of briefly holding something up to the light. This was the gaiety of a big family on their home ground, tramping the Blue Ridge, telling stories. It partook of old rivers beneath limestone bluffs, Norfolk and Western coal trains riding the sides of the canyons, clear-running creeks up on the mountain, dances, revivals, “singing all day and supper on the ground,” Sunday dinners, sisters at a bird’s-eye maple dressing table brushing their hair like Breck girls, flush, triumphant, and nervous with beaus waiting downstairs, old gentlemen in black suits scented with cigar and bay rum, and in the kitchen eccentric country ladies who cooked, cleaned, and kept the family rich in upcountry anecdotes.
In this language, there was also an outer circle of lesser character actors, a county clerk maiden aunt, kissing cousins at dances and socials who did the black bottom to “Whispering” and “Avalon,” a distant-relative moonshiner named Cappy weeping by his pump organ as his wife played “Old Rugged Cross”—Yes sir—surrounded by snoring blue tick hounds, a cast of John Qualen’s, H. B. Warner’s, and Charlie Grapewin’s who populated the endless loop of Warner Brothers and Fox second features, which by and by became Father’s memory of home.
This was the language that contained us for quite a long time. Besides relatives who had also moved west during the war, many of Mother’s and Father’s friends in Southern California were from the South as well, so the soft, rhythmic talk of Louisville and Montgomery and Charleston was deep in the weave. This identity and history, I came to learn, was a mythology in which it was crucial to be deeply invested, hedging, as it did, the unsatisfactory thinness of Father’s postwar California life.
ALTHOUGH FATHER’S NOSTALGIA was seemingly beyond tarnish, eventually the thinness worsened. The Virginia Historical Society road marker with our family name on it—Yes sir—somehow lost its magic, began to look a little silly as snapshot after snapshot over the years drained it of its efficacy to patch the fraying present. One grandmother’s fine crow-stepped home became a golf course clubhouse, another’s, a historic inn and stage stop, was bulldozed to make room for a minimart and VEPCO office. In terms of actual profit, it seemed that the only going concern on the family land had been a limestone quarry, long since traded away to a sharp-dealing uncle who had read his brother’s, my grandfather’s, fatal predilection for nostalgia all too well. When it came time in the early 1940s to split the family land, one brother drew the map while the other got first pick. But the uncle had put all the sentimental hilltops and meadows of their childhood, the old crumbling homesteads and unplowable river views, into one half and the quarry into the other—and when the time came to choose, grandfather, who had also invested in Stanley Steamer stock, couldn’t give up the map of his past, and took the half that had so little future, an allegiance to the principle of nostalgia that has passed directly on to Father and to me, unable to let loose. “If we’d had that quarry,” Father said to me once, “we’d have been all right.” Otherwise, he filled the garage with fetishes of the past, shutters from one old Virginia home bundled and stacked for some indeterminate purpose, a blanket-wrapped horsehair sofa from another that for years held cartons of Snarol and Roundup. Later, as he retired from his retail job and the past began to contract even more tightly to the present, a mid-sixties Corvair once owned by his beloved older sister filled half the garage, strictly non-op on flattened tires but filled inside with a further hedge against chaos, Bonus Buys of toilet paper, Hi-C, and Brawny towels scoured from market shelves on Father’s compulsive late-night shopping sprees at Vons, Lucky’s, and Boys Markets.
Dad at 14, Giles County, Virginia
STILL, THE ESSENTIAL sweetness of this bedrock Virginia language persists; in fact, I have an early memory of standing awestruck and a little scared in the basement of Father’s boyhood home contemplating its uneven Appalachian floor lit by the coal chute, a ridged pure-rock base of soot-blackened limestone, the literal bedrock and skeleton of the New River Valley emerging under the house. Another memory of that time is of rain, the element whose immemorial cascades had helped lay the limestone down in the first place. I had been about three, standing on my grandfather’s front porch during a summer storm, awed at the sheer downpour, the gray volume of water pouring straight into the vast front yard, bouncing like sunlit nails off the road, a roaring of the storm in the cathedral bole of the upper reaches of the maples. And then to run through the house to the back porch where now the same rain was instantly soft, silent, full, hazing the parked cars, the great chromed Buicks in their aura of lost time, and silently falling into the lilacs, forsythia, dogwood, box hedge, and holly of the rear yard—and in between, the old house a honeycomb of rooms, dark wainscoting, closely figured wallpaper, an ecstasy of space and honeyed voices, all for me surrounded in rain.
THE MIDWESTERN LANGUAGE of Mother’s family is more direct, flatter, skeptical, less eccentric or romantic, embellished with schoolroom homilies, catch phrases of the Great War, angers and Bible verses. To come to this history and this talk is first to come to the house in which so much of it took place; in fact, I can hardly think of Mother’s half of the family without recalling the line in Frost’s “Directive,” “This was no playhouse, but a house in earnest.”
Earnest it was, even though this particular house is gone, turned to parking spaces for an ambitious neighborhood funeral home. My cousin Billie pointed out that growing up we all knew the address of our grandparents’ house, a vital statistic: 2626 P Street, Lincoln, Nebraska.
Even years after its demolition, this locale could exert great power. I learned this on a visit in the spring of 2000 having turned my rental car down Twenty-Fifth and P with my photography gear on the backseat. I’d driven from the Omaha airport, and went straight to the address. I hadn’t been to this place for twenty-eight years, but as the familiar look of the street, the trees, the church on the right, the roof lines of the old houses all began to gather in the dusk, I felt a wave of some buried grief come rocketing up out of nowhere. It was literally hard to breathe; I felt blindsided and panicky. Resolutions to go easy on this trip evaporated like dew, and in minutes I was in a cramped, neon-washed liquor store still struggling to get breath as I scanned the dusty and exceptionally overpriced selection of Scotch. Flames spilled across the bill of the clerk’s checkered NASCAR hat, and I was hoping for a similar Pentecostal effect as I headed straight to my room on the top floor of the Holiday Inn where I was soon pouring a triple Black Label into a plastic cup of ice and looking warily out at the capitol of the Cornhusker State in its crepuscular gloom.
Mother’s family had lived several other places, but Lincoln is where they came to, where the children went to high school and college and out into their lives, and where the grandparents lived out their years, saw their last healthy days, and passed away. So it’s the house those on the Midwest side of the family remember most vividly.
As I think back to this dwelling, a place I only knew as a child, a certain sense of loss and disenchantment haunts the effort to return. “Weep for what little things made them glad,” says Frost, surveying the toys of the lost children in the lost village of his poem, and this grief seems part of the problem: so much of childhood’s radiance seems from an adult vantage point a matter of simple ignorance. But in graduate school I’d also run across Robert Duncan’s poem “The Fire,” in which he asks, “Do you know the old language?” I’d found this a helpful phrase since the tongue of our Midwestern life still only comes to me in shards, bits, syllables, phrases—“little things.”
However, as I found in my rented subcompact rolling down P Street in a panic, these archaisms continued to radiate dread and power through