THEN
My parents weren’t exactly the poster children for a happy marriage. They were two people who never should have been together. Like fire and water: my mother hot and destructive, my father quiet and still. And I was the product of that meeting: a kid who was never loved, never wanted and never good enough.
We lived, back then, on two sections of ranchland northeast of Paducah, Texas, with about two hundred head of Hereford cattle, which brought in just enough money to keep my parents from quitting ranching but not enough to live without a lot of belt-tightening during certain years. My mother, Helen, was as loud as she was mean and as thin as an oat stalk from the diet pills she should have stopped taking but refused to quit. My father, Jim, was a sturdy and quiet man—a hard worker with a streak of something hurt and brooding beneath his silence.
I’m not sure why my mother was the way she was. She never talked about her family. All I knew was that she had been born in the hills of Missouri and raised by a single mom who had five kids, took in laundry and cared for her own mother, who, it was once said, could have taken off a squirrel’s head with a single rifle shot at fifty feet.
As for my father, his quietness apparently came out of a hundred-twenty-five-acre wheat farm outside Great Falls, Montana.
From what I understood, my paternal grandfather, William, was like my dad, strong as an ox and a hard worker. His wife, Maureen, was dark haired, green eyed and known both as a fastidious housekeeper and an excellent pie baker. Like me, my dad was an only child, but, unlike my parents, my grandparents had longed for a whole brood of kids. The sadness over the offspring that never materialized was said to have hung over their house like a cloud.
By the age of ten, my father was already working the farm. He fed the chickens and mucked out the henhouse. He milked the Holstein, Betsy, hoed the vegetable garden and helped his father with the cut. In school he was a so-so student, never attaining a grade higher than a C but never causing problems with his teachers either. By the time he was in high school, he was a strapping kid who’d grown strong from moving irrigation pipe and digging ditches. The football coach kept trying to recruit him but my father apparently couldn’t see any sense in the hitting and tackling and fighting that went on just to get a leather ball over an arbitrary line, and he refused.
Instead, whenever he had a free day, he would grab his fishing rod and a canvas pack and head for the distant hills. The land undulated low and wide around him, spreading as far as he could see, and there was a nice trout stream about five miles away. He would hike there and catch brookies and then use an old cast-iron skillet he’d hidden under a log to fry the fish over a campfire, with salt and a little oil he carried in a small jar in his pocket. Afterward, he would set his back against the log and roll himself a cigarette as he thought about everything and nothing.
It was a simple life but one that suited my father. One day, however, a neighbor called. He’d broken his arm thanks to a stubborn horse that had kicked him when he wasn’t looking. The neighbor asked my dad’s father if he could help with the threshing, just until the neighbor could hire someone from town.
Somehow, on that sun-filled day, my father’s dad got tangled up with the thresher, and even though the neighbor’s wife rushed him to town in her truck, he died of his injuries that night. The funeral was small.
My father, who was nineteen, tried to keep the farm running but eventually lost it to the bank. By then his mother was showing signs of dementia, which would take three long decades to claim her. She went to live with her sister in Billings and my father made his way to Colorado, where he got a job as a hand on a big cattle ranch and sent checks back to his mother. He met my mom on a trip to town. She was already two months pregnant from a boy who, whether from patriotism or fear of marriage, had left to join the Navy.
My father never had a chance.
My mother suggested a picnic by a creek and baked a pie like his mom did. She wore low-cut blouses and curled her hair. She took him to a dance at the Grange. A month later they were married.
When my mother lost the baby a few weeks after their wedding and my father’s boss offered him a job in Texas with a pay raise, they went south. Then a settlement check arrived from the threshing company and they put a down payment on their own ranch, which was where I was born.
My mother named me Olivia with the lofty expectations of the talented beauty I would become—Olivia de Havilland, Olivia Hussey, Olivia Newton-John. However, I was a hardheaded and fussy child and I was quickly demoted to Liv. And my father found himself hog-tied to a ranch and to a mean and bitter wife.
At least that was how my paternal grandmother put it when I went to visit her and my great-aunt the summer I was twelve. My mother said it was dementia that made my grandmother tell those lies but it seemed to me like she told the story during one of those moments when she was as lucid and clear as anybody. My great-aunt, who would die two years later, said the story was “about right.”
The older I got, the quieter my father seemed to become and the more bitterness filled my mother. I watched him silently shovel his supper into his mouth while my mother sat there with a cigarette between her fingers trailing smoke and asked him about his visit to the feedstore that day or whether he thought they should get a new truck or if he knew the Howells down the road had gone to Galveston for a week at the beach. He would mumble one-word answers until she got so angry she’d accuse him of cheating on her with the clerk at Murphy’s Feed and Supply or selling our stock for too low a price or being too much of a “hayseed” to go anywhere besides town.
He absorbed every insult and accusation she threw at him, sometimes saying, “I’m not cheatin’, Helen,” and other times going off to finish some chore or head into the pasture for a smoke. A few times, he slammed the door behind him or curled his fists into hard balls but he never hit her or yelled. He just retreated into a quiet that seemed to grow darker as the years went by. Once, I saw him kick at a barn cat after my mother called him “dumb as a post” but the cat was too fast and my father’s foot missed and I heard him curse under his breath. When I asked him once why he put up with her, he said he’d made a vow and he wasn’t a man to go back on his word.
I promised myself right then that my marriage would never be like theirs, and yet look how mine turned out.