By Michele Moseley

I didn’t know we were poor until 1979. When we left our house in the sticks, we just kept on driving until we didn’t recognize a damn thing. Mama said what’s done is done and don’t talk about it. I pressed my face to the car window and watched everything I knew snake backwards in the August heat. We all carried the weight of my father’s anger differently, and the burden was uneven. As the youngest, my reckoning of things was crooked. Porous. My sister’s recollection was much clearer. And spiked. A delicate razor wire hanging about her like the lace trim of a dress. Broken cups and splintered door frames were the only souvenirs early on. But then a hard slap at supper broke the dam one night, and we hushed ourselves down into the shadows of the house and did not say out loud what was true. We were caught in the current. Flotsam. When Mama announced without warning we were leaving, it was like chewing off a foot to release a trap. Sacrificial.

The divorce worked its way through us like a fever at first. Stripping the grain from the chaff with raw force, we were left cagey and stunted. No going back after we moved into the box apartment in the big town with a real Kmart and no walking anywhere. Just take the Dodge with the blue vinyl that burns the back of your thighs. No Japanese beetles, glossy and emerald, to line up on the sill. No yard at all. Just shag carpet the color of mustard and low voices coming through the walls from next door. I missed what we left behind. Even with my father’s fury over all the things he felt he gave up to simply be with us, I felt the loss of something precious. But sometimes what you love is just the ghost that still rises. Doesn’t make it real.

What I really remember is patchworked. Fragmented like a kaleidoscope. I want to make it whole, but it gets harder. The house we left was built in 1882 and probably haunted even though the porch ceiling was swiped with blue paint to keep the spirits away. Creaking old rooms with plastic stapled over the windows to keep out the cold, which smeared any sunlight into a gray haze. When there was money, the oil truck pulled up, and the furnace rumbled. Other times there were chunks of coal for a fire with a black powder that settled into the room and dulled the plaster. No one around us had it any better, and for all we knew, no one did, anywhere.  

When the well ran dry in July, red clay surged up through the pipes and made Mama cry. The smell flooded the house. Metallic. Like you could taste it. Nowhere to go but outside. My sister and I stretched long-legged in the weedy backwoods in the clothes our grandmother made us and waited for the sound of my father’s car on the gravel. Sometimes he was in a good mood, and we met him at the car. We could read his face even in the half light of sundown and knew when to disappear. We lingered in the pines often that summer. Like we were a part of something there that couldn’t be broken. 

Only the car radio offered flashes of a larger world, but we didn’t pay attention. We played tag in the old Presbyterian graveyard like wild heathens. Perching atop the headstones as kings. Calling out the family names as we ran crazy over the dead below us. Seemingly touching the edge of something unknown and beautiful. Something we had no words for. By the time we landed in the apartment, we were half animal with the right callouses and the wrong sneakers. Just skinned up from the inside out. Starting school in town would be a hurt we had never known. A way to learn to tread water. 

My mother cut her hair and played her vinyl records. She positioned each thing in the apartment and then rearranged it all again. The new color television set was a space-age marvel and one of the only things we owned. When Mama got a job teaching at the middle school and started taking classes at night, we hardly recognized her. We were in foreign territory, and there was no going back. By the time we got to Thanksgiving that first year, it was like we had never lived anywhere else. Even my father seemed hazy. Something conjured. A Navy coat hung with moth balls. A half-used bottle of English Leather. I recalled his dark eyes and towering height. What we love and fear can be the same sometimes. There were a few phone calls in the beginning and then nothing ever again. Not even a Christmas card. We were unmoored and drifting. And I couldn’t reconcile it all in my mind. 

I have become a mental cartographer these days. Mapping out the spaces to remind myself of what was. The memories saturate and blur like slush, but I try to keep the edges sharp. What is fleeting still exists. It is no less valuable. 

When I see Mama now, she talks about that old house. She tells the stories over and over until they are more about the telling than anything else. 

She says you can only hold what you remember.