So, when they finally—thankfully—busted up, I got packed off and sent away, exiled to Burnt House, West Virginia, the town where they had grown up. Summers, Easters, Christmases were all in Burnt House. Some school years were spent with Dad, some with Mom, a couple were spent half one place and half another, and one year I went home to Burnt House for Christmas and just decided not to go back to school and nobody even noticed or cared. Everything away from Burnt House was always in flux, confusing and depressing and angry. Exile was far better. I always wanted to get back to Burnt House.
One time I was staying with my mom, who was going to graduate school at Ohio State—I was always riding the stupid bus going from Toledo, where my dad still lived, to Columbus and back again, and then sometimes on to West Virginia—and we were watching TV, watching an old movie version of Long Day’s Journey into Night, with Katherine Hepburn and Jason Robards. My mom was drinking vodka and getting more and more agitated and exasperated.
“This is ridiculous!” Mom said. “Whoever heard of a family like that?”
In case you’ve never seen Long Day’s Journey into Night, it’s the story of the messed-up Tyrone family, where mother is a drug addict, dad’s an alcoholic, older brother a crazy alcoholic, and the younger brother a sensitive artistic type and probably an alcoholic, too. There’s lots of drinking and arguing and soul-searching.
“Whoever heard of a family like that?” Mom asked again. “This is just—it’s yuck.”
“Mom,” I said. Thought. Where was I supposed to begin? Where? With her? With Dad? With Dad’s side of the family? Mom’s side? Both of them and everybody else too on both sides all had problems of one kind or another. Tragedies. Screw-ups. Cruelties. Crazy things. Stupid things. Bad, bad, sad things that nobody ever forgot, things people never talked about openly but only sometimes related in whispered hinting half-stories after dark.
“Us!” I finally said. “We’re a family like that!”
“Oh, we are not,” Mom said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Was she blind? Deaf? Drunk? Deliberately stupid?
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“You don’t know anything,” Mom said.
That’s what she thought.
I guess that’s what she wanted to think. That I knew nothing.
But I did know a few things, and I learned a few things more. A lot of things, really. I wasn’t much of a talker when I was a kid, I was a reader and a listener. A snoop, too, like my dad said. I wanted to know everybody’s business. I read old letters, I went through dusty boxes of photographs. I liked listening to the old timers tell their stories. I listened to all the gossip, and I believed some of it. In the end I knew my family better than any of them knew themselves. For a long time the world outside me was more important than the world inside me, and that was the time in my life when I got to know Burnt House. I learned all the stories in that town. Down Stalnaker Creek from the Stalnaker’s house, where I stayed most of the time, then on down Horn Creek to Route 47 and up through the little community, past the little string of houses, past Butchie’s store and the church and the schoolhouse, past the collapsed Langford house, past the Ellysons and the Talbots, past the post office and Page’s store, then up Hog Run where a few other families lived—past all those houses, all those lives—I knew that place and I knew the people who lived there and I knew their stories better than I’ve ever known anything else. So, yeah, I knew a lot of things.
But the biggest thing I knew—the biggest thing I knew right then—was not to tell about what I knew.
Telling had to wait.