Erin Holbrook

I can hear my father’s voice, immediately cool and strong and soft. It sounds the same as his aftershave smells. A spiced, full smell, mixed with sweat and grass from the lawnmower. I wonder how he does it. Is it that the slow southern drawl can’t be pulled apart from his words even after being written down and edited, or is it just me? Does everyone else reading his book hear his voice so clearly? Or did they hear something else? Do they see flashes of a short, balding man who wore a perpetual grimace? A man who reacts to nothing: quiet, but only because he’s terrified of your judgement? Externally calm, internally scrambled, ransacked, his foundations shifting like the Appalachian he is – toppling over slowly as his feet are mined out from underneath him.

I can smell the aftershave, and I can hear the rustling of the wind, and I can see the deep overwhelming green of the kudzu vines that cover everything and anything alongside the road when you’re driving in Kentucky. It’s so green. I didn’t know it was called Kudzu until my friend wrote a poem about those vines. Now that word rolls through my mind every few months, sharp and out of place. It’s a name I should find familiar, but I don’t. Only the vines’ shape is known to me, probably because I fled the state as quickly as I could. The only Kentucky plants I know are bluegrass because I am allergic to it, bleeding hearts because my grandmother had a bush, and willows because my dad tried to plant one in our backyard. He dug it up and replanted it in different parts of the yard, convinced it would do better if he just moved it a bit, until it died. I don’t know why he kept moving it. Our land was wet, and he put it at the most flooded corner of the lawn to start, which would have been its favorite spot. 

I grew up watching the kudzu vines from the back of the car, marveling at how they feathered every tall tree and telephone line with a thick, rich curtain. My father would take the winding roads at speed, like they were a casual stroll and not a deadly maze. I feel the twists in my stomach and remember my body telling me that a sheer drop is ahead, though the roadsigns forget to mention it.  I remember the terror that I might have to drive those roads one day, too, coupled with the amazement that my father could calmly direct the nose of our car into a vertical drop of a driveway. I recall the wonder I felt every year when the icicles began to form – massive and imposing – along the cut side of the mountains that lined the road.

The first time I went home as an adult. I noticed, surprisingly, that the green was a comfort – only the green. Everything else I hated. My stomach lived in my feet for the entire week. I wanted to hate the nature too. I wanted to feel that it wasn’t mine, that this wasn’t my home, that I belonged elsewhere. But despite the horror of making small talk with my overly religious mother and her Trump-supporting neighbors, the green on the drive southeast was soft and warm like a blanket, thick and heavy as the humidity in the air, which I welcomed despite the heat, simply because it felt nostalgic on my skin.

When you live there, the mountains close around you like a venus fly trap. You either escape, or you let them consume you. My father’s stories speak to that – to the way the coal companies erode everything until your home and livelihood are gone, too. You live long enough to see your life become unlivable, if the black lung, or the emphysema, or the COPD didn’t get you first, drown you under the water these mountains hail from. 

Did you know you can find fossilized shells at the peaks of the Appalachian Mountains? That you can still find traces of seabed at the tops of these hills that have been pushed up and then ground back down over millions and millions of years?

Pushed up, ground down, and then sliced open and shaved flat for the sake of someone else’s dishonest living. But don’t worry about that, ’cause Coal Keeps the Lights On.

My father’s stories don’t see Kentucky as a trap. He sees Kentucky like a siren, something pulling you back, again and again, because you don’t want to live anywhere else. And then you try living there, and you just can’t. The land is falling apart around you. The air and the water are plump with poison. Your poverty forms the core of your pride and the core of your suffering. You’re poor because you’re working hard, working honest. You’re powerless because you choose community over profit. There’s a nobility in it, some higher power, some godliness. That’s why you get angry. That’s why you get high.

As I read my dad’s stories, I wonder about the man who wrote them. Wonder about his honesty and his dishonesty. Which parts of this are him? Which parts aren’t? He didn’t teach me to love Kentucky. He showed me a Kentucky where we had to move to the city so I could have a chance at education and a biracial brother. He showed me a Kentucky where I had no power, no joy, no future. A Kentucky where just being a girl made my voice meaningless in a way that now feels foreign. His stories are blunt, showing the harshness and the cruelty of the systems that rip his home apart. But underneath it, he always comes back to a sense of home. In his stories, he feels a sense of belonging, and community, and understanding, that he never seemed to feel in real life. In real life, he chose surliness, and avoidance, and solitude. In real life, he buried himself so deep underground that not even a canary could reach him.

How did he really feel? Was Kentucky home, or was he searching just as hard as the rest of us?