Genesis Road

Susan O'Dell Underwood

Description

Glenna Daniels faces a midlife cul-de-sac. She bears a recent miscarriage and third divorce the way her Appalachian parents taught her to cope with tragedy—in stoic secrecy. She quits her social work position in Knoxville and runs away from home at the age of thirty-six, heading west with childhood friend, Carey, a gay professor in Atlanta. During their years in school, Glenna protected him from bullies. Now Carey is her savvy guide as she tries to heal her fractured life. Through the wilds of America Glenna grapples with the past and reconciles a way back home.

Sujets

• National Parks
• Literary
• LGBTQ+
• National park
• Fiction
• Tennessee

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 21 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692854
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 by Susan O’Dell Underwood
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Genesis Road is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
FIRST EDITION
Requests for permission to reprint or reuse material from this work should be sent to:
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Madville Publishing
PO Box 358
Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Cover Photo: David Underwood
Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis
Author Photo: David Underwood
ISBN: 978-1-948692-84-7 paper; 978-1-948692-85-4 ebook
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931999
for Gavin
T ABLE OF C ONTENTS
Gravity
Graceland
The Sun and the Moon and the Stars
Something Old, Something New
Up the River
Dream Baby
Out of Eden
Unbroken
War Stories
The Long Way Home
Bridges
Fire and Ice
Boundaries
Evolution
Crossroads
Convergence
Acknowledgements
About the Author
G RAVITY
My house was a grave for the baby I lost there. And when it burned to the ground a few weeks later, then it was Daddy’s grave too. Any remains of him the firemen didn’t find are tangled forever with the baby I will never have. My mind’s eye threatens to wander again and again to the dying my daddy suffered. It takes all the energy I have to focus on the not-seeing, so I punish myself with the other losses. The gore that won’t stop flickering. All the woodwork burned—even the oak banister and newel posts I refinished with a toothbrush. The beautiful gilt stencil work Kevin and I did together in the dining room. The tile I laid in the bathrooms, the chrome fixtures. The bed Kevin built for us, where I conceived and miscarried. Pictures of Mama holding me as a baby, the heirloom quilt handed down from Granny Pearl’s mother, my wedding rings—all three of them. Nothing but a heap of black on the 6 p.m. Knoxville news. Black tumbling walls giving up ghosts of smoke, and firefighters in their yellow suits dragging hoses through my tulips. Twenty seconds of my life in ruins.
I want to ask the viewing audience slurping down their supper: Did you ever beg somebody to stay? Would you beg to stay someplace you love?
I wonder if they’ve really ever thought about Adam and Eve. The most famous exile ever. Poison ivy and kudzu choking over the path behind them. And the whole of civilization knows them for millennia as the first real, true fucker-uppers. I’ve never met even the most forgiving Christian who feels one bit sorry for the ancient grandparents we all supposedly come from. Of course, maybe that’s because our family hardly ever went to church when Dunn and I were kids. Mama was too busy keeping us alive. Daddy was still too drunk every Sunday morning. And religion is not exactly rated PG in Newport. We’re talking Pentecostals in hollers out toward the mountains. Holy rollers in the aisles drinking strychnine. I dated two boys who grew up handling snakes in church. They believed they could heal by laying on hands, who did plenty of “laying on of hands” with me.
Granny Pearl used to talk Bible to me, but I told her way back then that I was right fond of Eve. What did she do so wrong to get thrown out of paradise? In psych class my first semester of college, I perked right up to hear that we always blame the mother. It’s exponential how much blame we heap on the mother of us all. We forget, without her sex and sin and agony, none of us would even be here. Never mind that any second we might be headed into exile ourselves—bare feet blistered and sooty, nothing but sky and stars for shelter, the past a sunken garden of regret.
Time of death. The blood that morning at 5:23 wasn’t the monthly failure I’d lived through for three years. By the time I woke up to the warm rush between my thighs, I was in the middle of my baby’s actual dying, as if I could hear the wound in my life being made.
Blood soaked into the mattress by the time my feet hit the floor at a run. The baby I’d dreamed of seeped into fabric before I could catch him in my hands. Or her. It must have been too early to know. I hadn’t even been to the doctor, a stupid sin to punish myself with for the rest of my days. All because I didn’t want to share with anyone. I hadn’t found a way even to tell Mama. I certainly hadn’t told Kevin.
Our divorce papers glowed their spite on the dining room table every night when I got home from work. I would sit there in our empty, ticking house with my palm on my belly, starting to pudge a little—or maybe that was my imagination. I calculated the weeks before I’d probably start showing and the days before Kevin would ask again why I hadn’t signed the deal I forced on him. I was so sure my baby would be a tourniquet to save us, a last-minute reprieve. I never even thought about miscarriage. I was arrogant. And vindictive.
If I could undo that sinning, would it make any difference? My baby, the dream I’d sacrificed for, through procedures and surgeries, hormonal juggernauts, injections, humiliation, insecurity. Every moment with that baby inside me was mine to feel. It wasn’t simple biology. I had earned the right. Too early to sense movement or even a flutter, maybe even a pulse. But I knew inside me another human closer than any human will ever be to me, living because I lived, breathing with my breath, needing me as much as I needed.
So, I bargained after every at-home test on the market came back positive. One more week , I promised, and I’d call Kevin. I’d share the baby. I’d go to my doctor. One more week . I’d take Kevin back, and this baby would solve his betrayal. All the awful months he had lived a second life parallel to ours. But every day, yet again, I couldn’t relinquish the thrill of my secret. Or my spite.
Kevin’s signature was already on the line, a horizon I couldn’t see past. Everything I’d ever asked him for came down to two final words: Kevin Hamilton . Should I sign Glenna Hamilton? Or rebel and stall for time to forgive? Should I sign Glenna Daniels? The lawyers would kick it back, but he’d get my message.
After I married Dawson and later Sam, I regretted not keeping my maiden name. But all my life I’d believed I could undergo a full makeover just by saying I do . Other women my age could be trendy and anti-traditional. Taking a husband’s name equaled freedom from Daddy. Dawson and Sam labeled me, though, expected me to be a maternal chef one minute and a doll the next—static and mute and satisfactory, obedient. Made in the image of their imaginary wives. Boys have lifelong dreams too, I learned.
When Kevin proposed, he said, “Now you’ll want your maiden name back.”
I shrugged. “Mainly my name shows that Glenn Daniels didn’t get the son he wanted on the first try. That’s his stamp. That single ‘a’ at the end never gave me a lot of elbow room.”
Kevin was the only person besides Carey I ever told about Daddy holding a gun to my head. I told him about the worst beating I ever took from Daddy, which I never told Dawson or Sam. There were no words except the most blunt and simple ones to explain the worst of all: that after all the abuse, I still loved my daddy, that he was one of the most charming men I knew, probably the most sensitive, vulnerable, boyish man I’d ever met. He was a magnet, and I’d been a little pile of iron filings my whole life.
“I want to be Glenna Hamilton.” How easy it looked, finally having Kevin, aiming one more time for fidelity and love like nobody in my family ever had.
Wanting his name also came from my rightest right feeling about Kevin. I wanted a baby with him. Only him. Ever. Sure, over the years an impulse to hold a baby and smell its head had blurred my common sense. But then I would think about making Dawson a dad. Sam. A dad. And I recounted all the boys, guys, men. Before Kevin, I was a slave to birth control for twenty years, at least. Through half of high school and all of college I tried every latex, sheepskin, spongy, spermicidal trick to stay sure-fire not pregnant. Sometimes I doubled up with a condom and a diaphragm. And then I worked up my nerve in college to go on the pill. I rarely had sex without some kind of protection, not even with Dawson or Sam.
But Kevin. Kevin lit up whole rooms inside my future I hadn’t imagined. When we were trying everything to conceive, gravity was my goddess, ally, doula. After we had sex, I would lie with my legs up in the air, hips crooked toward the ceiling. Nearly on my head, I worked my will and the forces of the moon and the earth’s magma core and the polar axis, whatever it took. In those dreamlike states, images came into my head of Kevin holding a boy, a bright boy in sunlight, and they were laughing. I couldn’t have known how much that dream would haunt me later.
Visualizing the baby I wanted was part of the hoohah a couple of women at work believed, along with talking to the baby before it’s born, singing to it. They said while I was trying to get pregnant, I should try to avoid any negative thoughts, especially about Kevin. That I should let my hormones do all the talking and the screwing and let every cell feel how right my body and our domestic situation were for welcoming a new soul. I should empty my mind of everything but a new space for a new life. And to envision as often as I could who that new life would be. I tried my best to picture the three of us, but what always came to me naturally was Kevin with a little boy who looked exactly like my daddy in pictures of him as a toddler. I never touched that beaming boy, blond and lingering. The two of them were always at a distance, a kind of stabbing blur, over-lit, like when the eye doctor dilates your pupils, and the sun threatens to burn your retinas.
That morning I miscarried, it was hours before I could get up off the bathroom floor. Daylight was high through the lead-glass window. When I