Rodney Crowell

"When we arrived unscathed, my father's overly careful about lining up the tires on the concrete driveway strips, barely visible under a half foot of water, and this seems peculiar given what our expedition's been like so far. With a hurricane blowing full-tilt all around us, sliding to a sideways halt would seem a more fitting conclusion to this wild ride. But then I'm not the one driving.
My mother gets out of the car, wades into the house, picks up a broom, and starts sweeping floodwater out the back door. Then she pops the refrigerator door open with a screwdriver-my father's solution to its broken handle—and grabs a can of lukewarm Jax, drains half of it in one glug, wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist, burps loudly and, pointing the can at my father, says, “J. W. Crowell, next time you lay a hand on me, you better make sure you kill me, 'cause if you don't I'll kill you. I don't care if I have to wait till you fall asleep to do it. How quickly my mother switches from Pentecostal purist to beer-guzzling shrew is one of life's deepest mysteries."

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"My mother was born in June, the seventh of Solomon Taylor and Katie Lee Willoughby's eight children. Addie Cauzette arrived with the right side of her body partially paralyzed, the result-according to an old country doctor who didn't examine her until she was three of a stroke suffered in her mother's womb. So from before birth, a pattern was set by which polio, acute dyslexia, epilepsy, the sudden death of an infant son, and a subsequent case of whacked-out nerves would join the lengthy list of maladies assaulting young Cauzette well before her twentieth birth day. In the seventy-four years and nearly four months marking her time on what she called "this crooked old Earth," my mother rarely drew a healthy breath. Still, to say that life wasn't fair for this awkwardly glib yet deeply religious woman would fail to take into account her towering instinct for survival. Thanks to this primal urge to thrive, she would leave this world at peace with the knowledge that physical existence was something for which she was born ill equipped. And I honor my mother by saying that it wasn't for lack of effort that an accommodation between her sensitive soul and the poorly fitting body she wore was so very hard to come by."

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"The previous fall and winter, my mother had experienced two failed pregnancies.
"I couldn't seem to carry a baby no more than fifteen minutes," she told me. "And your daddy swore up and down I was losin' 'em on purpose." But she did finally manage to complete a full-term pregnancy, and Tex Edward was born on January 27, 1944. He died thirty-seven hours later.
Staring into some vacant yet familiar dreamscape, where the sharp pain of thirteen miscarriages is softened by visions of a heavenly playground for lost children, my mother, sifting through fractured images that documented her baby's all too brief passage through this world, introduced me to my brother time and again. "Oh, he was beautiful, Rodney. He had a full head of curly black hair and the bluest eyes you ever seen. While I only got to hold him for a minute or two, I can still feel him to this day. They had me knocked out most of the time, but I could hear him cryin' off in the next room. They said I almost died, too, and for a long time I wished I had. They never brought him back and nobody told me nothin'"

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Admiring our work, I remarked innocently to my mother, when she walked up to have a look, that I thought my row was prettier than Dabbo's.
"Is not," he said. Simultaneously, the hoe in his hand came down on the top of my head, splitting my scalp open.
All the sounds of a normal spring afternoon-chirpy chatter and the lazy traffic-silenced themselves, and Norvic Street suddenly seemed like a scene from that science-fiction movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.
My mother's eyes commanded me to remain upright and conscious until she got to me. I cast a glance in Dabbo's direction-an inquiry of sorts, to confirm if he'd actually just smashed me over the head with the sharp end of a garden hoe. And if so, why?
But his eyes were two television test patterns advertising the end of another broadcasting day; "The Star-Spangled Banner" had been played and the sign-off prayer delivered. No clues were forthcoming from my unpredictable little friend.
When my brain completed cross-referencing my reaction with Dabbo's and my mother's, it finally registered that the warm red sticky stuff on my left hand was my very own blood, and my scream could be heard in Beaumont. "He killed me with a brain concus sion! He killed me with a brain concussion! Dabbo killed me with a brain concussion!"

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"Donnie Schott, whom we affectionately nicknamed "Shotzie" or, depending on the situation, "Shotz-Mo-Dilly-Ack," suffered from a violent strain of cerebral palsy. In the parlance of the times, he was a total spastic, Flailing arms, spidery legs, misshapen speech-Shotzie didn't so much talk as bray loudly—and the grandfather of all protruding chests drew attention away from his soulful blue eyes. Together with these afflictions, his close resemblance to a blond Elvis Presley, circa 1954, seemed a cruel joke. Life wasn't remotely fair for this sensitive soul.
His parents, whom I saw but once, and then from a distance, constructed small living quarters in the back of their garage, where their son, it seemed to his gridiron-crazed cohorts, lived in exile. Cot, sink, commode, desk, chair, and transistor radio gave it the feel of a jail cell. But for his inclusion in our continuing run of fun and games, it seemed that Donnie Schott lived a life void of human interaction."

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"My parents were drained of their color for months. My mother lost twenty pounds she didn't have to spare, and my father went through cartons of Pall Malls like gumdrops. I could practically hear eggshells crunching whenever they walked into a room with me in it. The funny thing is, I felt calm inside, even oddly restored. Overdosing on barbiturates caused a shift in my perception. The pain of losing Annie was no less prevalent, but I knew it would pass. And, that it probably wouldn't be anytime soon, no longer seemed impossible to bear."




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