MY FATHER KILLED A MAN ONCE. It was an accident.
He was driving a train between Tennessee and Alabama and saw a young man stand on the tracks and freeze in place—he wanted to commit suicide, it seemed.
My father said he screamed and screamed, but it takes a full two miles to stop a train. He saw the boy explode on impact, torso torn from limbs. He also said that he saw the boy’s eyes before the train hit him—that was the part he could never forget, the part he still saw even when he closed his own eyes.
I was having a similar feeling of internal combustion, albeit a less violent one; I was hungover and riding in a car along the Tennessee and Alabama state line and saw a train speeding alongside for a stretch and again thought about my father, who was now gone himself. He had died unexpectedly months before and I was still in mourning—sometimes the pain would dry up suddenly, and sometimes it would fall down all around me like rain. I was currently in a dry period.
I was riding down to my grandmother’s house to rescue a peculiar inheritance: some guns of my father’s, and some of his winter coats.
Driving the car was the man I loved. He decided to go with me—he wanted to be there for no other reason than to be a shoulder to lean on. He said he knew there would be tears.
I had forgotten about the Appalachian foothills, the rolling blankets of trees and hills that covered the landscape with green, gold, auburn, or white, depending on the season. I’d been in California too long and forgotten about seasons, these dramatic stages—oppressive humid summers, sudden blizzards in the winter, flash floods or tornadoes. I had no internal sense of season anymore and had as of late been ignoring my own personal seasons. My life in the California sunshine was coming to an end—I felt it. I sat quietly, often, and waited for instinct to guide me to the next thing, whatever it was.
I forgot how the mountains here bled water. Whole jutting waterfalls just shooting out of the rocks like a shower hose. I was having my own eruption of emotion.
My lover was driving. The night before, I held him close in bed and was beside him and beside myself. Why did this feel so good? My sex life was absurd. Typically I crawled through bathhouses and felt swept aside; the sex with him wasn’t lustful or “manly” or full of unspoken rage. It was this thing that I hadn’t had in a long time. It was closer to comfort. Like, I really was right there next to him—I was THERE. Is this what love felt like?
Back to our mission. My father had a bunker on my grandma’s land in southern Alabama. A collection of mod-era vintage winter coats and a collection of antique rifles, one with the name “Jody” engraved on it. The name of my great-great-grandfather. We were going to go to my grandma’s land, pick up the coats and rifles, go down to New Orleans for two days, and come back up to lover boy’s house in Tennessee. I would fly back to California from there. I figured if we were smuggling guns across that many state lines I should let a white boy drive—they’re good like that.
I remembered my father—he was an OG. His coat collection was one of his prized achievements; even I as his only son could not outrank it. I asked once when I was a boy, “Die-dee”—as I pronounced his name—“can I have your coat?” He was wearing this tan-and-green houndstooth number with wooden buttons and a large collar on it; it was long, almost to his knees. His older brother had been a mod and played in soul bands in the seventies—he had stolen his style from him.
“You can’t fit in Dad’s coat yet, son. You can have it when I die.” I couldn’t have been more than eight when he said it. He said it in a way where I knew he never intended to die. I thought about this memory as we pulled into a rest stop off the highway, and I almost cried but caught myself.
“Hey, baby—can we stop at Popeyes?”
“Yes, sir,” said my handsome driver.
I had done this drive to my grandma’s all through my youth. My father would drive four hours north to get me for Christmas and summer break, and I would sit and follow the roadway markers with my eyes and just feel content. Lover boy and I stopped in Birmingham, where we found a Popeyes, and, another hour and a half south, we found ourselves close.
The way to my grandma’s was the same as I remembered. It was all Gulf Coastal Plain Spanish moss, two-lane highways, dirt roads, and Reconstruction-era decay. Everything—even the sparse houses that were obviously lived-in—all seemed eerily vacant. I was vacant.
My grandmother was from Gee’s Bend; at some point in history a bunch of super scared white people burned a ferry so Black people couldn’t travel to vote there. This is as much as I remembered of what my family had told me. My boyfriend was white as fuck, and he was probably (besides insurance salesmen) one of only a dozen or so white men who had set foot in this stretch of land in twenty years.
There were so many abandoned churches. We parked and explored one a mile before my grandma’s house. It was dilapidated. I remembered my father driving me to my grandma’s house on the dirt roads of Wilcox County, where there were always cars parked on Sundays. We went in. The pews were stripped bare, there was mold everywhere, holes in the floor, wood planks strewn about the floor, and holes in the ceiling. How had it disintegrated so fast? It had been nine years since I saw it last. It seemed like that was too fast for something like that to just … all but disappear.
My mother had explained to me that buildings needed human breath in them to keep them moist and held together. Abandoned buildings are like abandoned people—they die sooner.
We explored it. Lover boy had a vintage camera from the sixties and there was just enough light in the abandoned church to take photos. I was staring at him and was a bit stuck. His camera was pointed directly at me.
What’s his name again? I thought. I sat silent for a full twenty seconds. Trevor, TREVOR, Trevor, his name is Trevor … phew!
He told me to stand in front of a stained-glass window that had a hole busted in the top of it. He liked the shattered rainbow light it was casting—it would not matter ultimately because the photo would be in black and white. But I obliged because I understood he wanted to get the feeling right.
He took the picture and I got fearful because the floor was weak in places, so I asked him if we could leave.
We made it to my grandmother’s house and got out of the car and walked past the backyard about some half mile through the deep woods. We stopped at a clearing my father had made to hunt deer, and under the watchtower he had built in this tree was a bunker unit that was locked up. My aunt had mailed me the key to it some weeks before. We opened it and stepped in. The bunker wasn’t bigger than a toolshed but it was neatly organized.
There was no electricity but there was enough sun to make out everything. His rifles were hung at the back of the shed on holders he had nailed to the wall. There were five in all, including the one from the twenties with my great-great-granddad’s name engraved on the wood. I ran my hands across it. “Jody”—it looked shabbier than I remembered as a kid, and, perhaps a little too overcome with emotion, I kissed it.
I saw under a table to my right the old army chest my dad had in his military days in his late teens. I knew the coats were there. I just knew.
I opened it and I saw, sitting on top of the stack, the tan-and-green houndstooth coat. He put it in last, as if he knew I was the one who was going to find it. It was still in excellent condition—he had taken great care with it. This time, before I could get overly emotional, I heard Trevor calling from the door.
“Baby, let’s come back here on our way from New Orleans. We should hit the road because it’s getting dark soon and I want to get off these two-lane highways,” he said matter-of-factly. I began to move. I grabbed an old hunting backpack my father had and put three coats in it. We carried four rifles and vowed to get the other stuff on the trip back.
We cut across the bridge leading to the main highway and I decided I missed California and that I would never come back to this place again. Another thirty minutes down the road Trevor asked to marry me. I said yes.