Stranded in Skin and Bones: Faith Within the Madness

Introduction

Life is suffering in skin and bones. There is no way out of this body. No holes of escape. No lagoons of nirvana where we can wash away the stain. No route for the blood but round and round. Sure, we can bleed. We can bleed until death. Then the soul will go somewhere. But who wants to bleed? Who knows where the soul really goes? We have our beliefs. Different philosophies abound about how we are rescued from this bag of skin and bones. Because there are two sides of the soul—the broken side and the redeemed one. We cannot separate them. Not here. Not in this place. So the choice comes to everyone—God or money? Darkness or light? Peace or madness? This is our dilemma. We are stranded in skin and bones. Here with the animals.

Leppy

Joseph A. Munk said: If a calf loses its mother while very young it is called a leppy. Such an orphan calf is, indeed, a forlorn and forsaken little creature. Having no one to care for it, it has a hard time to make a living. If it is smart enough to share that lacteal ration of some more fortunate calf it does very well, but if it cannot do so and has to depend entirely on grazing for a living its life becomes precarious and is apt to be sacrificed in the struggle for the survival of the fittest.

¹

1974

Carl, my father’s friend, knocked on the door three nights after my mother secretly moved out. I was watching television from a lawn chair that I’d retrieved from the backyard and placed in the living room.

My father said to Carl, Hang on. We’re just about ready. 

I nodded at Carl standing in the door.

He nodded back and rocked on the balls of his feet. He had a rawboned face with a cigarette hanging from his lip. His shoes were greasy. Most of my father’s friends wore greasy shoes. He had bushy eyebrows and kept the eye above the cigarette squinted to keep the smoke out as he leaned in the doorway and looked at me with the other eye.

My father reentered the room with my shoes and dropped them beside the chair. Put these on. We’re going somewhere.

I didn’t ask why or where we were going. It was that kind of day.

That morning I’d walked four blocks to my middle school and returned to find the furniture gone, my mother gone, my father on our mustard-colored wall phone with the cord stretched as far as it would go, begging my mother to come home. I gazed around at the empty walls and rooms. I had no idea she wanted to leave us. He glanced at me and I mouthed—What happened? But he turned away and said, repeatedly into the phone, I love you. Why don’t you come back home?

It was the first time I’d ever heard him say he loved her.

My mother came from poverty. Rural Tennessee and nine siblings. Three of my uncles died under suspicious circumstances. One died in a hunting accident. One in a single car accident. Another died from a shotgun blast to the stomach. They found him with his shoe off. Supposedly he used his toes to pull the trigger. Police declared it a suicide. My mother said he was murdered. But only God knows for sure. She knew pain and loss. Pregnant by the age of seventeen. She married my father and went to work in a factory where she fell in love with her supervisor. Somewhere in the process of manufacturing Christmas wrapping paper at the factory—surrounded by the daily spirit of Christmas—she flirted with upward mobility and won her supervisor’s affection. He had money and drove a Corvette. He lived in an upscale apartment complex across the street from the high school. My father couldn’t compete with the supervisor. He had what my father couldn’t afford—means to a larger house and a new car. Soon she became a suburban tennis wife.

Before Carl arrived, I’d helped my father design new living room furniture. We built tables out of boxes we retrieved from the corner store’s dumpster. We replaced the chairs covered with 1776 Revolutionary War fabric—drummer boys and soldiers holding rifles—with lawn chairs. As we placed a black and white television on top of a stack of boxes, my father said, Son, I did everything I could do. I’m sorry.

This was his opening argument.

Carl would deliver the closing remarks.

Outside in the driveway, Carl said, We gonna teach you a lesson about women. Carl swung open the door of his Pontiac GTO. It let out a metallic squeal. Get your skinny-self in there.

I slid across the seat, pitching a few beer cans in the floorboard, trying to make some room. Carl got behind the wheel and turned up the country music station out of Nashville. He tapped his fingers to the beat of the song on top of the steering wheel and backed out of the driveway.

Uncertainty was in the air along with bitterness. I didn’t say anything. I was content to ride. They drank whiskey, passing it back and forth like two teenage boys. My father cringed as he swallowed. His Adam’s apple jutted out against squalid skin. The old car labored under the weight of Carl’s foot on the gas. Nobody said a word. Just George Jones singing.

Their silence scared me. Carl was never silent. The man could talk your ears off about nothing. Rattle on about how many deer he killed last year, rattle on about what he’d do if he had money. But he was mute. No rattling. Just the tapping. He threw the cigarette out the window.

We cruised past Sonic, past Piggly-Wiggly, past Wendy’s on the left. Making our way to the outskirts of Franklin, Tennessee where the high school emerged. Carl made a left-hand turn into an apartment complex. George Jones gave way to Johnny Cash. His baritone growl forced its way into the tension, along with June Carter Cash’s sweet voice. Carl downshifted and crept over a speed bump. The car squeaked on its haunches, the tailpipe drug. Carl craned his pointed head to look at me. We gonna show you what women all about, boy.

I nodded and leaned up to get a better view. I had no idea. The clubhouse came into view on the left. The swimming pool motionless and winterized. I had friends that lived in that apartment complex. During the summer, we performed can-openers and cannonballs off the board, splashing the girls who sunbathed, as residents barbecued on their patios. The smoke rising to the top of the third story apartment complex, and then evaporating over the roofs. But that night all of this was out of season.

Carl backed into a space between two cars, facing an apartment with curtains slightly open in the middle of the plate glass windows. The DJ on the radio was talking about the party they were throwing at the Sheraton. Brush up on your two-step . . . Bring your partner. The DJ trailed his words off at the end. 

I asked, Why are we sitting here?

You’ll see, Carl said.

We sat motionless for five minutes. Nobody breathed a word. 

A car turned into the section of the parking lot where we sat. My father looked up for the first time. Carl whispered, Hunker down. We slumped. Carl turned off the radio. I heard a car door slam in the distance. Carl said, Look, boy. Look up here. There’s your mama!

I peeked through buttery smears on the windshield. 

My mother crossed the parking lot in a skimpy blue skirt, I’d never seen her so confident. She knocked, and the door opened. A man’s face appeared. He stepped aside to let her in.

My father never spoke. He let Carl do his talking. And Carl said, Boy, you got to watch women. They’ll mess you up every time. Ain’t met a woman yet that won’t cheat on you.

The buttery smears on the windshield coalesced in my veins. 

What George Armatage said: It may here be remarked that on first leaving the cow-house, the calf should be confined in a safe place in the yard or elsewhere for a day or two, until it becomes accustomed to the bright light of day, as on its first introduction it appears almost blind, and would likely to run into danger.²

1 Munk, Arizona Sketches,

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2 Armatage, Cattle,

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J.B. Cook

Auto Parts

1975

Most towns are made up of moments. Little chunks of history chained together—decades aligned with years, and years combined with the present moment. Franklin, Tennessee has had its moments. Five tragic hours of a Civil War battle. Six dead Confederate generals. Franklin has a history, but today it’s a vibrant community south of Nashville. A Target store sits at the base of a battlefield. Above it on Breezy Hill General Hood sat on his horse with his field glasses overlooking the realization that he faced too many Yankees in the trenches below. But he sent the Army of Tennessee anyway, and they charged a town that will forever be known for that Civil War battle. Those five hours scar the town’s history, and the town fathers named six streets after each dead general.

Cleburne Street

Carter Street

Strahl Street

Adams Street

Granbury Street

Gist Street

Franklin is home to big money now. But in the 1970s and early 1980s it was at best a Cowtown, a sleepy little community, and my father owned an auto parts store downtown during this era. The square brick edifice with two large plate-glass windows across the front was where my father stood behind the counter in a blue uniform shirt that had J.B. Cook Auto Parts over one pocket and Billy over the other. A pegboard lined with screwdrivers and wrenches hung as a backdrop behind the counter. Most everything was behind the counter in those days. The clock on the wall clanked above a sign that read: If you don’t think the dead rise, then you should be around here at quitting time.

We believed in the American Dream and American cars were a part of that dream. Our heroes were circling the high banks of Talladega and Daytona. And the eagle flied on Friday at my father’s auto parts store. But it all changed when the foreign car influence made it harder for the shade-tree mechanic to work on them. Back then anyone with the God-given talent to fix things could turn a wrench and make a buck. All of that is gone now. Gone are the muscle cars, gone are the shade-tree mechanics, gone are the mom and pop auto parts stores. Emissions control systems and internet capabilities carry the day. But there was once a world where the auto parts store was the hub that kept cars and trucks moving around Franklin. My father spent ten hours a day behind the counter waiting on mechanics to walk in and hand him a greasy auto part in a blue shop rag along with the message, Got one of these? He’d peel the shop rag away from the old used part like a surgeon laying open flesh to reveal cancer. Take one look. Then walk back an aisle and retrieve the correct part. He knew the business.

My father employed a quirky bunch of employees at the auto parts store, who were nicknamed Time Bomb, Badfinger, Bunt, Nap, and Coma. Mostly high school dropouts with basic car knowledge. And the highlight of my day was when one of these tatted boys—before tattoos were cool—would pick me up after school in one of my father’s delivery trucks, and I’d spend my afternoons at the store, watching them so I could emulate them and dress like them—blue jeans and concert T-shirts.

It snowed early the year my mother left my father and me. It collected on the flat roof of the auto parts store and turned the streets into slippery slopes for Chryslers, Chevrolets and Fords, and the more it snowed, the more wiper blades stuck to frozen windshields. Then radiators cracked and thermostats failed, causing heaters to blow only cold air. Cars and trucks were in a crisis. The deep freeze had the phones ringing off the hook while salt trucks peppered the front windows of the store with each pass on their way to the main throughways. But business eventually ground to a halt due to the amount of snow accumulation and mechanics gathered at my father’s store. Back then, the local auto parts store was like the old country store where people just hung around to socialize. Sometimes they arm-wrestled on the counter. And that day they traversed the storm and found their way to my father’s store, where they stabbed the counter with their greasy elbows and locked hands for another ultimate arm-wrestling contest. Someone would yell go and all manners of sounds would emit from the wrestlers. Some groaned, while others yelled out obscenities. And money passed hands when men were defeated, as other men won. And that day, I could feel us breaking away from the icy streets that imprisoned us. Like an iceberg floating in a primordial soup, evolving with every cheer that erupted in a communal gladness we rarely experienced. A tectonic shift in the plates.

Then in walked a guy we all called the Swede. He was a giant—6’6," blonde hair, blue eyes. Arms like the Incredible Hulk. He ate raw hamburger meat for lunch and worked in a garage behind the auto parts store that specialized in repairing exotic-foreign cars, which back then consisted of Toyotas and Datsuns, with an occasional Volvo and BMW thrown in.

Before this day, the Swede had been matched with every mechanic and Harley Davidson rider in town. The Swede had beaten all of them—hands down. The brave ones only lasted eight seconds or less. He’d slam his opponents hand down on the counter with so much force their knuckles actually said the word, Pop!

But a new challenger had stepped forward to take on the Swede. He was a farm boy, a commoner, a boy with dirt beneath his nails and muck on his shoes. Just a simple lad, whose brother worked for my father at the auto parts store. The farm boy was raised working in cotton fields, hauling hay, and chopping tobacco.

The farm boy got on one side of the counter, the Swede