Burn Down the Ground Read online

  “Your daddy wouldn’t take no for an answer,” my mother sighed. “When I went to get my books, he jumped in front of my locker and asked me again. If I bent down for a sip from the water fountain, he stepped in between to ask me again. This went on for four months!”

  Even though I knew how the story ended, I found myself rooting for my father to win Mom’s heart. Dad was smart and played basketball and football, too, and he was much better-looking. Garland looked like a dork.

  Against the urging of virtually everyone, including three different teachers, Mom eventually relented. One date with my father was all it took, and Garland was kicked to the curb. But judging by my mother’s far-off gaze and wrinkled chin, it was a decision she sometimes lamented. Without knowing about all of my father’s infidelities, I couldn’t see why she was so disappointed. Her brooding silence confused me. I thought she was pretty lucky. She’d been the best-dressed, most popular girl on the pep squad. I was a grubby tomboy who liked to play tackle football rather than cheer from the sidelines, wore discount clothes with patched-up holes, and had stringy hair that could have used some chlorine from a pool.

  Our life on Boars Head was as adventuresome as her sales pitch had predicted. And Dad had built our piece of heaven from scratch. What was there not to love?

  I searched her face for clues as to what could have been so bad to cause her gloomy daze. Mom caught me staring, snapped herself out of her thoughts, and rationalized, “But if I had stayed with Garland, I wouldn’t have you and David. You two would never have been born, and I would have Garland’s babies instead.”

  She made us seem like we were her consolation prize, lovely parting gifts she got for losing out on a life with Garland.

  My father hadn’t even wanted kids. He hated not being able to hear and feared he’d pass his “damned deafness” to his children. The fact that 90 percent of deaf parents have hearing children and 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents didn’t ease his fears.

  Dad’s childhood had been fraught with hardship and frustration. He had been isolated on a farm with no prior knowledge of deafness or its culture. Mom’s family, however, with two generations of deaf people, was an anomaly. She had grown up immersed in ASL and in the care of deaf adults who were confident with their place in the world. In her insular community, the hearing were the minority. If her children had been born deaf, she would have considered that a blessing. She would be contributing to the preservation of ASL and survival of Deaf culture, a common, staunchly regarded feeling among many deaf people.

  Mom got pregnant right away and every night my father worried his baby would be born deaf. “I tossed and turned and had terrible dreams until your mama finally gave birth,” he told me.

  When my father held his son for the first time he got big butterflies in his belly before he screamed “DEHVIH!” David was startled awake and Dad let out a big sigh of relief to know his son could hear.

  Mom had pressured him to have another baby but he resisted. “I wanted a little girl, but your daddy said no.” My father didn’t want to tempt fate, but he finally gave in to Mom’s pleas. Again, Dad took his new baby in his arms and screamed in a high-pitched voice, “KIPREE!” I shook and he knew I could hear.

  Though my father’s technique wasn’t foolproof, in our case it was spot-on. David and I could hear perfectly.

  For days I pestered my mother for answers about her courtship with Dad and life in a dorm. She finally got fed up. “I only went to Deaf school a few years; your daddy lived there almost his whole life. Why don’t you ask him? He’s sitting right there.” She pointed to my father reading the Sunday sports section of the Houston Chronicle, oblivious to our conversation. Mom buried her nose back into Stephen King’s The Stand.

  I tapped Dad’s newspaper. He folded down a corner so he could see me. “Tell me about living at Deaf school.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I shrugged. “Just wondering,” I signed. “Mom told me you met there.”

  I had never really asked my father anything before except for money or permission to sleep over at a friend’s. I didn’t know what to expect, but he put down his paper and told me his story.

  He was one of ten children born to Theodore and Ruby Crews. Together they lived on a farm in the dust bowl of Bowlegs, Oklahoma. Like his older sister Norma, who was the sixth of my grandparents’ ten children, and the youngest sisters Cathy and Reba, my father was born deaf. But his twin brother, Buddy, was not.

  Because there had not been a history of deafness in his family, some might call it a fluke. Dad considered it a big “up yours” from the Man in Charge. He arrived a few minutes earlier than his twin, earning him the right to his father’s name. But he would have gladly traded the “junior” status for a pair of ears that worked.

  Unlike my mother’s family, Dad’s parents and siblings didn’t know ASL, and so made up homemade signs to get across the basics. When Dad saw them talking to each other with their mouths he joined in by moving his lips and tongue with great exaggeration. No sounds came out of his mouth; it was like a puppet missing his ventriloquist.

  Grandpa Crews was a cigar-smoking oil rigger who never made it past the fourth grade due to a protracted childhood illness that kept him home from school. I never knew him to be without his dog-eared King James Bible, but according to my father his God-fearing days had arrived later in life. “My daddy’s mean,” Dad warned before every visit to their farm. “When I was small, my father lashed me with a razor strap. Sometimes my parents made me cut a switch from a cherry tree and used it to whip me.”

  I shuddered at the thought. I had only received one spanking by Dad, a quick swat on my butt for an epic bout of pouting. The spanking hurt my ego more than my hide.

  When my father’s sister Norma, the eldest of the family’s deaf children, reached school age, she was sent to live at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf, or “OSD” for short. The residential school was about a two-hour drive from the family farm, much too far for her to come home on weekends. Founded in 1908, OSD was located in Sulphur, just off Interstate 35 between Oklahoma City and Dallas. While some Deaf schools were still segregated, OSD housed deaf children of every age, race, and religion living in the state of Oklahoma.

  My father was an infant the year that Norma left home for school, disappearing for months at a time. He never fully understood where she went, even when his family tried to explain to him using the small amount of ASL Norma had taught them.

  When my father turned five, he was given a brand-new suitcase packed with uniforms. His mother had hand-stitched his name inside each one. Just as I was obsessed with my sleeping bag as we got ready for our move to Boars Head, Dad opened and closed his suitcase and packed and unpacked his clothes until the first day of school finally came.

  I was distressed by how emotional my father became as he recounted his first day at OSD. His father had taken care of checking in his sister Norma before taking him to the boys’ dorm. There he saw that all the boys had brightly colored toys, some that ran on batteries. Back on the farm, Dad had one cast-iron toy car.

  “My jaw hit the floor,” he remembered about the first time he watched television. “I watched with the boys for a few minutes, then they looked at the clock on the wall and turned the channel. This time there were real people inside the TV.” In disbelief, he ran to show his father but couldn’t find him. He had left without saying goodbye.

  Grandpa Crews was tormented. Leaving his little boy at the school filled him with guilt and sadness and he opted to slip out before Dad could see him crying.

  In truth, hearing parents commonly dropped off their deaf children with little or no explanation. This wasn’t because of a lack of love, but because they didn’t know ASL. They were simply unable to communicate. Many children suffered from the sudden and unexplainable abandonment. They didn’t know what was happening. Some didn’t even know their own names.

  My father gulped some air, wrinkled his ch
in, and pinched his lips tight as he explained how he thought he was being left at an orphanage. He covered his mouth and massaged his lips to fight back the tears. I had never seen my father even close to crying, but this experience had traumatized him. Seeing him so vulnerable made me upset, too. To this day, he can’t get through the story without choking up.

  One reason he was certain he was being abandoned was that it had happened before.

  “I was maybe three or four years old. I was misbehaving a few times one day and my parents got fed up. My father drove me to the railroad tracks where all the poor black people lived in a shantytown. He made me get out of the truck and drove away. The sun started going down and it got cold, but I stood in that spot all day. I had never seen so many black people before and when they walked by they stared at me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but they were moving their mouths so I knew they were talking to me. Some kids threw sticks and laughed. When it was almost dark, my daddy finally came back. He said if I didn’t behave, he would leave me there to live with the ‘niggers’ forever.”

  Picturing my father as a deaf toddler dumped off at the shantytown sent a similar jolt of fear through me. I remembered my own terror when I was six and had flown home alone to Houston after visiting Mom’s parents in Oklahoma. I disembarked the plane but my parents weren’t at the gate waiting for me. Panic set in. A man who saw me wandering offered to have them paged over the intercom. I explained they were deaf and wouldn’t hear the announcement. Taken aback and not knowing how to help, the stranger walked away apprehensively.

  Just then I heard my father’s high-pitched voice. “KIPREE!” His head bobbed up and down as he jumped to see over the crowd. He swept me up in his arms, hugging and kissing me all over.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry, Kipree.”

  I changed from being scared to livid. I didn’t speak the entire ride home or the remainder of the night. I even refused to join them for dinner, so Mom left a plate of food outside my bedroom door.

  Remembering that day in the airport made me feel sad and confused. I couldn’t believe my grandfather would leave his deaf son alone like that. Believing he was left at an orphanage, my father described how he grew hysterical and bolted for the door. The housemother caught him and held him down on his bed till he stopped thrashing. Dad cried himself to sleep, but later in the evening the housemother woke him up by toggling the lights on and off. He and the other boys walked to the dining hall, where he saw his sister Norma. She smiled and waved like everything was fine.

  “My heart felt a little relief to know I wasn’t alone, but I couldn’t stand staying in the dorms all the time. It was like a prison to me.”

  Being incarcerated has not been kind to my father’s looks. He was handsome before, but now he is covered in tattoos—the crude type inmates give each other. “This one I got in jail in Mexico,” he explains, pointing to the spider on his left forearm.

  “Wait,” I stop him. “Mexican prison?”

  “Oh, yes, bad story. Your mama doesn’t even know about it. I’ll tell you later.” He continues showing off his new body art. “This one my girlfriend wanted me to get. Ha! Silly! And this one”—he points to a Tasmanian devil with both hands in the air waving the ASL signs for “I love you” and its tongue sticking out—“this one a black boy gave me for my birthday.”

  Dad explains that the “black boy” is a fellow inmate who works in the Huntsville Prison’s textile mill. He had disassembled a machine part to get the needles for his tattooing.

  Dad’s once lush Elvis pompadour is thinner, receding, and slicked back. His formerly beautiful smile featured white, straight teeth but they have been yellowed from his two-packs-a-day smoking habit. A few back teeth have been pulled out. “Hurt so I yanked it,” Dad signs. Many others have been knocked out during fights with other inmates. The missing teeth cause his cheeks to sink in, making him look even skinnier than he already is. Like Keith Richards in prison whites.

  But his prison whites aren’t really white. Every other prisoner’s uniform looks clean and new and bright. Dad’s is a dull ecru. His thermal shirt is dingy and the sleeves are too short to cover his long arms. It is haphazardly stitched in some places, but still full of holes.

  He’s better than this, isn’t he? We are better than this.

  Dad sees me staring pensively at his tattered sleeves and signs, “Old! Need new ones for winter but too expensive.”

  He has to buy his own thermals?

  I had no idea inmates weren’t supplied with everything they needed. Growing up in Texas, I often heard that prisoners had it made, with free healthcare and education and days filled with recreational sports and unlimited cable television. Now I know that jails have a commissary where prisoners can purchase everything from candy to toiletries with money from a “trust fund” subsidized by family and friends, if they’re lucky enough to have their support. Dad doesn’t receive counseling, take classes, or have a television. And even in the blistering Texas summer, there is no air-conditioning.

  His glasses haven’t escaped injury, either. The nose pads are missing and the frames are taped together in various spots. Every time he adjusts them, I notice how perfectly the metal frame fits into the fleshy, scarred divot on the bridge of his nose.

  Who did this to you? I’m angry Dad hasn’t been protected.

  I recall a Hallmark greeting card Dad sent me for Christmas. He had just marked his first full year in prison; twelve months spent establishing his pecking order among the other inmates. Inside he wrote, “I had been solitary confinement four times since April for fighting with niggers cause me mad because stealings—all offenders are haters, thief, jealous, etc.”

  What made them do this to you? You provoked them, didn’t you? You accused them or called them names. Just keep to yourself, Daddy.

  “You’re early. I just woke up, had barely had enough time to brush my teeth and take a shit when they told me I had a visitor,” he signs, leaning back in the metal armchair.

  “Sorry, but I have to catch a flight home tonight.”

  “I wanted to smoke a joint before our visit.” Dad’s favorite pastimes used to be smoking marijuana, sipping a cold beer, betting on football, and conversing with friends. I guess a slightly stoned jailhouse visit with his daughter is as close to freedom as he can get.

  Rules don’t allow for tobacco, drugs, or alcohol, so my father has quit smoking and drinking. He doesn’t usually smoke weed, either, not because of the law, but because of the cost. Complaining that five dollars buys a “tiny joint as thin as spaghetti,” he doesn’t think it’s worth it. Although he hasn’t smoked this morning, his access to weed surprises me.

  “Joint? Where did you get that?”

  “Found it in the pages of a magazine at the library. Somebody must have missed it.” He shrugs and smiles. “Their loss is my gain. Did you bring a burger?”

  “I wanted to but Dairy Queen wasn’t open at nine-thirty.”

  Dad shakes his head, not concealing his annoyance. “See, you are too early.”

  I look over my shoulder at the guard to see if it is safe for me to pass my contraband. “I have gum in my waistband.”

  Dad wiggles his fingers impatiently as I dig the package out from its hiding spot. He rips open the silver foil in a flash of excitement and chomps a piece with his remaining front teeth. It takes only three or four chews for the burst of flavor to overwhelm him. He closes his eyes and leans back with his arms outstretched and palms facing outward like he is praising Jesus.

  “Long time,” Dad signs. After a few more chews a bewildered look washes over him. He inspects the package and finger-spells the words “Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit,” as if to ensure that, yes, this is the correct brand of gum. “Tastes different. Long time, I guess.”

  I watch him. He looks like a little boy seeing fireworks for the first time.

  Without warning, my father slips off one of his Chuck Taylors and slides sticks of gum between the cushion and sole of the shoe
before replacing it on his foot. He swiftly does the same with the other.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I can sell them for a dollar a stick,” Dad tells me as he reties his laces.

  I don’t think they are well hidden, but Dad isn’t worried. I glance around to see if anyone has noticed and spot a beefy Hispanic guy. His buzz cut reveals a dented skull. He has an eye missing with the lid sewn shut and his skin looks melted. His bottom lip droops, allowing saliva to escape, and he uses a handkerchief to wipe the drool.

  ASL has its advantages, including the ability to talk without being overheard by those around us. “What happened to him?” I sign, trying not to stare.

  “He killed his wife and kids then tried to kill himself. It didn’t work,” Dad replies matter-of-factly. “Good man. Quiet.”

  Quiet, says my deaf dad. And good? It’s all relative, I suppose. The disfigured murderer is a good man in my father’s eyes.

  What does that say about Dad?

  THE MAN OF STEEL

  Now that we were civilized and living in a trailer, my brother and I had three rules:

  1. Don’t leave the refrigerator door hanging wide open. We live paycheck to paycheck and money doesn’t grow on trees;

  2. Don’t drink straight out of the milk jug because it grosses Mom out; and

  3. Don’t tell anyone Mom and Dad smoke marijuana.

  From the minute she enrolled me in third grade at Montgomery Elementary School and David in sixth grade at Montgomery Junior High, my mother sounded like a broken record when it came to Rule #3. “You know not to tell anyone we smoke, right?”