Listen Here (49 page)

from June 21, 1973

I'm sixteen and I'm on my way to the maternity ward of King's Daughter's Hospital in Frankfort, Kentucky, with a boy I'll call Joe. He's my husband, and we're riding the elevator, which we once skipped school to do all afternoon, for that rush of up and back down and up. Now a nurse with crimson nails is guiding my wheelchair and some woman is holding the hand of a little girl with lace-edged socks and a deep cut on her forehead, stitched at a slant.

Nothing but a baby, says the woman, and she means me. She has cat-eye glasses, and her voice is slurred as whiskey.

Or that's me. I'm buoyant already, with contractions and momentum. The labor isn't much, yet. Physically, there's a pushing down between my legs, a shove at my lower back, an ache, none of it worse than menstrual cramps. It's my image I want to keep intact. I'm with it. I'm moving forward, steady as we go. I'm tough, ready to give birth as if it were an everyday affair, casual as buttered toast or sex.

Nothing but a baby her own self, the woman says, looking at me with a rat-toothed smile.

And she's right. I'm a teenaged girl and I'm married to a teenaged boy and we've decided to give our son away at birth. I'm sixteen and I'm waiting for the future to happen, but it already has, in ways I'll discover for the rest of my life.

These are the facts. My son, relinquished to adoption on the day he was born, was named Brian Keith McElmurray by the Kentucky Department of Social Services in June of1973. Other than his name, which they later sent to me in a form letter, I know very little about this boy who long ago became a man. I know that he was born very early in the morning, after a hard two days of labor. I know he weighed six pounds and something when he slid from my womb, the only time I ever heard him cry. I know that I was allowed, by law, to refuse to relinquish my son to my father who, two days after the birth, told me how he'd stood looking through the hospital nursery window and wondered that such a new being could so resemble his own father, a Standard Oil service station man who died when I was nine. I know that this is the only second-hand glimpse I have ever had of my son's face.

I know, or I have been told according to what is admissible by Kentucky Adoption Law, that my son was adopted one year after I relinquished him. Twenty-five years after his birth I will finally receive a letter from the Kentucky Department of Social Services, my first irrefutable proof that my son has a life beyond my own imperfect memory. The letter, dated January 15, 1998, states:

Dear Ms. McElmurray:

In response to your request to place information in the adoption/case record of Brian Keith, this is to let you know that your letter/request has been placed in his adoption record. To date, our agency has had no contact with him or the adoptive family since he was adopted by a Kentucky family in 1974. If he should ever contact our agency in the future seeking information about his birth family, we will advise him of your letter/request.

Under Kentucky's current adoption law, KRS 199.570, we can share the following non-identifying information about the adoptive parents.

The adoptive father was born in 1936 and had his Ph.D. in math. He was a professor at a large university. The adoptive mother was born in 1938 and also had advanced degrees in math. She taught part-time at the college level. Both enjoyed good health and had more than adequate resources to provide for a child or children. Brian Keith had adjusted quite well to the adoptive parents and they to him. The adoptive mother enjoyed being a mother and housewife. Our agency has no current information on the adoptive family.

I hope this information is helpful to you. For your information, Brian's birth date as given in our record is June 21, 1973.

Sincerely,
Virginia Nester
Program Specialist

 

These are the facts I currently possess, accrued like stray traces of dust. A paper trail that might lead, if I knew how to follow it, to irrefutable truths about what it meant to bear a son and give him away on that long-ago day, June 21st, 1973.

On this day of the birth, I woke in a room shadowed by floodlights Joes father kept on in the dog lot, for his coon hounds. Damian, the Siamese cat, slipped out from the bend of my knees. We both often got out of bed at that time, the cat for a midnight kitchen raid and myself to stand at the window. White and liver-spotted dog coats, night moisture on glass, all of it gleaming and cool. Pain in my lower back woke me this night, a tightness starting in my back and moving down, pulling between my legs. Not for sure yet this was labor, I raised my hand to the window. A thin hand, and in the flood light I saw blue. Pale blue skin, blue bones, right down to the blue, chilled insides of me.

Joe, I said. Wake up. I think it might be time.

Time, he said.

His chubby cheeks were bluish, a two day beard, and his boy eyes were pale blue with bits of sleep in the corners. He rubbed his fists against them hard, and I thought of the times I'd seen those eyes, wide and black, the pupils expanded and electric with acid or speed or whatever else we could drum up from the streets and medicine cabinets of our town. I wished both of us could fall into those pupils, some bottomless and safe place, and never come back again. Instead, I saw blue sparks ignite in the close bedroom air. We were both so small in that light. Blue sparks of fear, his and mine, ignited the scents of socks and sleep. What I didn't imagine yet was the stretching, the slow opening of me.

Oh my god, Joe said.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, full lips beneath his mustache twitching. He had a habit of drawing his long mustache hairs into his mouth, sucking, especially when he was frightened or angry. I went to him, tucked his head next to my stomach, where he could hear movement. If this child could talk, I wondered, what would be the words?
I'm late, I'm late
, like the rabbit in Alice and Wonderland. I want to stay here, the baby might say, in this soft place of blood.

Joe and I had a plan of sorts down pat. We'd prearranged with his parents, Rose and Joseph, with whom we lived, to use their station wagon for the hospital run—no fooling around in the middle of the night with hot wiring the Duster, which was now our car. We envisioned a back road shortcut to the hospital, a screeching halt at the emergency room, a wheelchair or two and then, in the most undefined part of our plan, a fast-forward version of that thing called
labor
, a painless, tidy version that involved no excretions or wounds, nothing so flesh-like as afterbirth. The real exodus was chaos.

My water had not yet broken, but the pain was shifting lower, and had developed an urgent, burning edge. Joe threw on cutoffs and a rose-colored polyester shirt and, still barefoot, opened the door, flipped on the hall switch and flooded the room with light. Somewhere, in the piles of blue jeans, Marvel Comics and the circuit breakers and boards that were his hobby, lay a spare set of keys to the station wagon, ready for an emergency. I stood in the middle of this emergency, cradling my belly, which was lower than it had been and needed hands to hold it up….

(July 12, 1941–)

Poet and children's author Llewellyn McKernan is a native of Arkansas who has set down roots in West Virginia. She is married to poet John McKernan, and the couple has one daughter. McKernan earned her B.A. in English from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, in 1963, followed by an M.A. in English from the University of Arkansas in 1966. In 1976 she completed an M.A. in creative writing from Brown University. Her thesis was a collection of poetry,
The Blue Ball, and Other Poems.

Says McKernan, “I have lived longer in Appalachia than anywhere else on earth. It is home to me. Its hills and valleys map my mind. Its creeks and rivers flow through my lines.”

She is the author of four books for children and three volumes of poetry, including
Short and Simple Annals: Poems about Appalachia
, and
Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia.
McKernan is currently an adjunct professor of English at Marshall University.

Poetry:
Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia (1994), Short and Simple Annals: Poems about Appalachia
(1983),
The Blue Ball, and Other Poems
(1976).
Books for Children:
This is the Day
(1994),
This is the Night
(1994),
Bird Alphabet
(1988),
More Songs of Gladness
(1987).
Autobiographical essay:
“Letter from a Poet in West Virginia,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 188–91.

James Byer, “The Woman's Place Is in the House,”
The Poetics of Appalachian Space
(1991), ed. Parks Lanier Jr., 178–82. Joyce Dyer, “Llewellyn McKernan,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), 187. Marianne Worthington, “Nothing Must Be Lost: Regional Identity and Dialogue in the Works of Edwina Pendarvis and Llewellyn McKernan,”
Appalachian Heritage
30:2 (spring 2002), 7–19.

from
Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia
(1994)

Nothing in my house
but pale blue foliage
furniture dry as chalk and
dusty, and
tiny paths that lead
to bathroom, bedroom, kitchen,
jammed on both sides
with books opened
by the wind
and mulched by good intentions.

I do not trust
the light that comes through the windows
nor the pantry
where canned goods
are stacked from floor to ceiling nor the one
recipe with “darling
darling” written all over it. I only trust the rain,
how it vanishes

then reappears
the same yet different. Once this spring
after a storm
the basement flooded,
a natural disaster that left in its wake
strange plants
hooded like cobras
and during a cloudburst this summer hail
big as jawbreakers
tumbled down
the chimney (inside them were seeds:
sunflower, alfalfa,
mung bean).

And now that it's fall and I'm a Jill-in-the-Box
whizzing from love letter
to laundry, ironing board
to ironing out the flaws in a real estate contract,
scattering here a toe
there a nipple—
O! Out of a ragtag bobtail sky a hissing and
a murmuring

builds
in the long yellow funnel of a cloud that
swells, pregnant
with strife, and a dark streamlined cry
spreads its wings,
getting louder and louder,
wheeling like a plot,
chockful of the quotidien, getting wild-eyed
and in heat

when it reaches
my level: thundering through trees, crashing
into windows,
spinning rooms
around on their stone foundation. The roof
pops like corks
out of champagne bottles as the rain shouts
down the house with its jiggers
and I rise, drenched to the bone,
luminous, whole,
bringing out from under the lumber
all the family silver.

from
Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia
(1994)

In busy hands lie the greatest stillness, in
mountains quilted with rain, where crickets cry

midnight and noon, I walk, you walk on bane-
laden slopes bathed in green, stroked long ago by

the steps of the circuit court rider.
We step over his satchel, where tobacco and

script, paled to the vein of a flower,
lie curled among the vines

that crush them. (Beside them toadstools push
up their shadows.)

We step over his saddle, whose cinch broke the
night when attacked by the headless horseman, he

spurred his fine gray stallion to a stumble.

 

And perhaps no night goes by but he doesn't rise
from the bones that float their silver from one

mountainside to another.
The dead laugh knowingly, but can they peel this

fruit? How the worm removes even the wildest
rose to another country.

In West Virginia, no one walks on water. A wind
rises as we start to cross the border, and on a road

 

that plunges straight down to the flatlands,
narrowing as it goes (like a fountain), farmers

wade to church on Sunday morning.

from
Short and Simple Annals: Poems about Appalachia
(1983)

Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday paper, she thinks
of her grandmother and how she wore her hair:

All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back
of her head.

She thinks of Al Capp's wit. He spreads it across
the page in screaming reds and yellows, but it ends

up silent: all coiled, white and gleaming, tucked
at the back of her head.

Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday paper, she thinks
of her sister, who's dumb but sweet; whose vital

statistics like Daisy Mae's are 36-24-36; whose
husband is some General Motors VIP.

All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back
of her head are yesterday's dreams, today's poverty,

tomorrow's chores. She bites her fingernails down to
the quick, and then some more.

Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday papers, she thinks
of her husband: his shoulders are narrow. He's smart.

He's an Irish Catholic who shadowboxes with the wall
and reeks of Scotch.

All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back
of her head is a vision of her father dead in a

cemetery in West Virginia, is a vision of her mother
still in bed, sleeping late on Sunday morning.

Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday papers, she thinks
of her childhood, lost forever in a hollow overhung

by towering Appalachian beeches. Her tears lie all coiled
white and gleaming, tucked at the back of her head.