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CHAPTER 1
Ozarks
AUX ARC REDS
I guess you could say I had Ozark Commie parents, at least that's the way my dad tells the story.
"I returned to Potosi, Missouri, in 1957, on leave from the Merchant Marine. I was just hanging out with nothing to do when someone suggested I should meet a new teacher at the high school who was causing a stir by standing up for communism, so I asked a friend to introduce me to this communist sympathizer, and we hooked up after that." Of course neither of my parents were really communists; this was the McCarthy era after all. Extolling any virtue of communism couldn't go unnoticed, especially out in the hills of Washington County, Missouri.
The political beliefs of my father could probably best be described as Libertarian ... where the far right meets the left and the far left meets the right. It was a murky political landscape around my father, whereas my mother — with a four-year college degree and a teaching job — fell more in line with the collegiate worldview of the times. These two alternately copacetic and conflicting ideologies played out in interesting ways.
"We were married about six years when we realized we had fundamentally differing views and allegiances when it came to discussing the Civil War," said my mother. "We almost divorced over it." So the residual dichotomy of the American Civil War conflict manifested in my childhood family dynamic. In retrospect, I see it all clearly now.
One of my earliest childhood memories of my mom is of walking into her bedroom and seeing her standing on her head. She was into yoga and the good earth, and her guru was a guy named Euell Gibbons who wrote a book on horticulture. Once as punishment for taking a hatchet to a tree, my brothers and I had to read the chapters of Euell's book that explained how to concoct natural salves and medicines and apply them to the tree wound — which we did.
Contrast that with memories of one of my father's hobbies — basically stabbing at moles with a Spanish American War — era cavalry sword. Since "Stabbing the Mole" involved smoking tobacco and drinking coffee, my father would do it for hours on end, sitting silently on a stool with sword in hand, waiting for the mole to make a subterranean move. He was contemplative — yet ready to kill. Occasionally he got the mole. Ultimately though, the payoff was simple. Quiet time with old friends: coffee and cigarettes.
VELMA
Velma smoked a lot and lived in a trailer. Velma also disliked kids. This predilection and aversion presented a problem for me when I was kid and Velma was my paternal grandmother. Velma's three sons (my father and uncles) would stop by to visit Velma for half-day coffee-and-cigarette sessions, so my brothers and I would often go along to see grandma.
"Seeing" grandma meant venturing into the trailer where she sat in an easy chair while a thick smoky haze blanketed all available breathable airspace except for one foot of clear air at floor level. This untenable circumstance would last until we boys would start coughing and laughing at the absurdity of all the smoke. Velma would thereby tell us to "get out" — to her way of thinking, cigarettes were sacrosanct and laughing at smoke was not.
Getting yelled at by grandma was good for brotherly camaraderie, but we were forever thereafter on the bad side of Velma. We didn't know of the hardship Velma had faced as a fifteen-year-old mother who eventually raised six boys and a girl during the Depression in a remote hollow of the southern Ozarks that she dubbed "Lost Vegas."
Velma's funeral was held in the Ozarks, and after her casket was in the ground, those folks who had come to pay their respects piled into cars and formed a caravan with destination unknown. (My immediate family and I were the "city folks," and we didn't know where we were going or what was about to happen.) The post-funeral procession drove for a few miles and then pulled into an empty field. Before the engines were off and the dust had settled, the banjos and guitars were out and the post-funeral bluegrass celebration was full on ...
DESICCANT
"Jim! Jim! What are you doing?" screamed Chun Ae. "Very good, delicious Jim ... no!"
"Well now honey, you're not supposed to eat it — these packets keep the candy dry," replied my father, as he threw the packets in the trash bin.
The year was 1952, and James Farrar had been drafted at the age of twenty-two into the U. S. Army and was stationed at Inchon, South Korea, for the duration of the conflict. My father kept a black-and-white photo of his girlfriend Chun Ae in his wallet — he said he almost married her but instead returned from the conflict to his hometown of Potosi, Missouri, and married the local high school English teacher (my mother).
Before meeting my mother in 1957, however, my father signed up for a two-year expedition to the South Pole. Many of my childhood years were spent as a captive audience to 8 mm movies of the South Pole expedition, wherein narrative stories of penguins, seals, and the finding of Ernest Shackleton's outpost on the mainland were the order of the day. He brought back souvenirs from Shackleton's hut, like hinges and doorknobs. This stuff didn't resonate till years later when I read about Shackleton's adventures and learned of the resilient perseverance and quixotic hardships Shackleton engaged in and endured.
As a kid what I found most curious and odd about my father was his method of working on old cars while resting on his haunches. My brothers and I all tried it and laughed when we fell backwards, as we were unable to do what our aging father did effortlessly. He had learned the stance from Korean mechanics during his stay at Inchon. A successful cultural exchange, I'd say, in the midst of all the bloodshed, in the form of a beautiful woman wearing a Kimono in a faded photograph and a man resting on his haunches, at peace with the world.
BREACH OF PROMISE
The first "breach of promise" lawsuit of the new world was brought about in 1622 by a Rev. Greville Pooley, who made the assertion that any consent of marriage between my ancestors, William Farrar and Cicely Jordan, should be considered invalid.
Cicely was born in England around the year 1600, presumably as an orphan, and immigrated to Jamestown, Virginia, on a ship called The Swan in 1610. The early arrival of Cicely to Virginia made her one of the first European women to reach the new world, and the resultant reality of supply and demand would factor prominently in later events that shaped her life.
William Farrar left out of London and arrived in Virginia in 1619 aboard a ship called Neptune. William was an investor in the third charter of the Virginia Company of London, which had established a colony in 1611 called "Citie of Henrico," which later came to be known as Farrar's Island.
The paths of Cicely Jordan and William Farrar would coalesce in 1622 as a result of a Native American attack on the English colonist settlements. William Farrar escaped the assault and took refuge at the better-fortified plantation of Cicely Jordan and her husband Samuel, which was known as "Jordan's Journey." Samuel Jordan died a year after the Native American attack in 1623. With the death of Samuel Jordan, Cicely was now twenty-three years of age, pregnant, and unmarried, in a settlement with a dearth of eligible females. The competition for her hand in marriage was immediate. Rev. Greville Pooley performed the funeral rites for her husband while subsequently proposing marriage within a span of hours.
Rev. Pooley attempted to marry Cicely without her consent by reciting the words of a marriage service — speaking the words for her as well as for himself.
Cicely, however, accepted her other suitor, William Farrar, instead. Consequently, Reverend Pooley took the matter to court, but the court referred the case to the Virginia Company of London, which punted the case back to the court. Eventually, after several years, Rev. Pooley withdrew the breach-of-promise suit, and the marriage of William Farrar and Cicely Jordan was formally allowed and accepted in Virginia. Three hundred and eighty-four years later, this was all news to me.
THE LAST BATTLE
The American Civil War was still going on in the twentieth century. The issue at hand that caused what was perhaps the last battle of the American Civil War was: what to name me on the day I was born. As a result of these hostilities over naming rights, I was at the hospital for the first day of my life without a name.
Negotiations between the North (my mother) and the South (my father) continued while I tried to make sense of the transition from the warmth of the womb to being nameless in the stark environs of a hospital. History has a way of repeating itself, and once again, the South lost the last battle. As it turned out, I was not named "Stonewall" (Stonewall Jackson) or "Jubal" (Jubal Early) or Jeb (J.E.B. Stuart) or "Forrest" (Nathan Bedford Forrest), as these Confederate general names were preferentially presented by the South — but summarily dismissed by the North.
Thanks, Ma ...
CHAPTER 2
Illinois
CHAIN SAW MORNING
It was a day etched in memory ... he seemed agitated and somewhat possessed, so we kept our distance. I was around ten years old and my three brothers were older. We stood bemused as our father took a chain saw to a freestanding upright old log. It was understood that he wouldn't hurt us, but we weren't sure he wouldn't manage to hurt himself.
The jarring sounds of the chainsaw continued for hours — the staccato growl gradually segued into the whine of an electric drill. The drill was for the detail work. When he finished later that day, we were astounded. A three-foot-high wooden sculpture of our father in a Civil War uniform was not what we had expected at all.
"How did you know it was going to look like you?" "I didn't." The sculpture became the family lawn ornament for the better part of ten years, till the termites had their say and took it down for good.
TAPS
Dead dogs, dead cats, dead rabbits, dead turtles ... it didn't matter that that none of them originated from a pet store. They were family pets — so when they died they were all given a military-style funeral and burial. My father had somehow procured an old cavalry bugle for these affairs. He would play "Taps" on the bugle while we kids gave our best ceremonial salutes ...
EAST ST. LOUIS
East St. Louis is where I lived until I was four years of age. I had no knowledge of the race riots that occurred in 1917, nor was I aware of the white exodus of the 1960s. I was there until 1970, and the music that filtered down from my three older brothers was real good — James Brown, Joe Tex, and The Jackson 5. The most lasting memory-related association that I still have with East St. Louis is of my dad and brothers and me taking pieces of cardboard and sliding down a steep ravine of frosty frozen mud (there was no snow) to a creek-bed bottom below. This East St. Louisan was laughing all the way down ...
CAHOKIANS
As a kid I remember thinking it strange that there was a large Indian mound on one side of the street and a Grandpa Pidgeon's on the other. Grandpa Pidgeon's was like a precursor to Walmart, where one could get anything from guns to clothes to musical instruments. I spent a lot of time perusing the Harmony and Japanese guitars for sale in the instrument aisle. A short distance away was "Monks Mound," which is the largest in a group of mounds (one square mile in diameter) built by the Mississippian culture, which disappeared except for the mounds that have survived the elements and waves of "new world" settlers. Monks Mound sits adjacent to Interstate 70, and hulking even more impressively ominous on the other side of the interstate is a massive earth-covered mound replete with vertical pipes spouting flames (burning off methane gas) and the constant activity of bulldozers and scavenger birds. This mound was built by the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American culture, which is not yet extinct ...
ACROSS THE STREET
Daniel Ashbury and I used to wave at each other from our respective sides of the street. Sometimes Daniel wouldn't wave, so we would just look at each other for a while and then move on to something else. The street between us was recessed with up to twenty-foot embankments on both sides — ostensibly perfect for playing with the same-aged boy across the street, to my six-year-old way of thinking.
"Why can't I go play with Daniel?" "You can't. It's not safe."
At school I got to know Daniel enough to consider him a friend, but Daniel was rarely in class, and before the school year was over, Daniel was dead. Remembering the circumstances of Daniel's death is like peeling the scab off of a wound. Time heals, but there is a scar to mark the time and place.
Several months before Daniel was found dead, I was awakened by the commotion of voices and flashing lights. The police were at my house. It was around midnight in the early spring — when the weather is cold — when Daniel showed up at my house, half-naked and shivering with feces smeared in his eyes, his mouth, and around his wrists, asking for food and water. Daniel had told neighbors and teachers at school that he was kept in a cage-like cell at home and was abused by his stepmother. Already by the age of six, Daniel had multiple metal plates inserted in his skull from an unexplained bathtub incident that also left him with second-degree burns.
It was difficult for the mind of a six-year-old first grader to comprehend the cruelty and inhumanity that Daniel Ashbury suffered. Now, thirty-six years later, it's still starkly incomprehensible. They told me he had died after spending the night in a car with no water. The cause of death was from ingestion of anti-freeze that had been put into a Coca-Cola container and left in the car. Daniel was taken to a hospital, where it took him fourteen hours to die. Maybe he made a decision to drink the poison in a Coke bottle to be free from purgatory ... only Daniel knows hell and the reason.
THIRTEEN CARS
"Take out the trash when you get home from school." "Okay, Pop."
As a kid, taking out the trash meant hefting it several hundred yards to the rear of the family property and then burning the garbage in an old oil drum, the same way "Rocky" and his pals would gather round to sing doo-wop and keep their hands warm. No singing around the fire for me, though there was a cavalier interest in throwing objects into the barrel that might explode (batteries, light bulbs). A lot of acrid fumes from plastics and Styrofoam to ponder — I guess that was my shared experience with kids from third-world countries.
High school was the age when I began to realize that not everyone had a hillbilly father who harbored thirteen cars in various stages of assembly, five motorcycles, and one wooden self-depiction sculpture cut with a chainsaw. Pop was born in 1930, at the front end of the Great Depression, and the first ten years of his life were spent in that era. Poverty? I asked my mother once why Pop always slept on a couch and not a bed. She explained that he was never comfortable on a bed because he didn't have one as a kid. This observation bears truth because Pop exclusively slept on a couch ("devonette" as he called it) after my folks divorced.
The second great depression for my father was an unfortunate but inevitable convergence of circumstances that resulted in the destruction of two of his most valued cars (a 1956 MG convertible and a 1958 Sunbeam convertible), all of the motorcycles (a Sears BMW, a Cushman three-wheel, and a Cushman two-wheel), as well as my ride at the time (an early '60s Honda 50). High winds took burning embers from the ritualistic oil-drum garbage fire to nearby fallen tree leaves that had collected around the barn where the vintage cars and motorcycles were stored, resulting in fire and devastation. After the fire, Pop sunk into a general depressed state that lasted many years till, ironically, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The diagnosis spurred an epiphany, and Pop lived a renaissance of sorts through his remaining years.
As for me, I had a few years to go in high school with no motorbike, but the upside was that thereafter, for ten dollars a month, the Belleville Township Waste Disposal trucks picked up the garbage just a few steps away. In the end, despite a classic car and motorbike defeat, no more toxic smoke from the backyard incinerator seemed a clear environmental victory ...
MELTING POT
To this day I am perplexed as to why I can hum the melody and approximate the words to several Hebrew folk songs.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Jay Farrar.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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