VOICE LESSONS: An Excerpt

VOICE LESSONS by Karen Salyer McElmurray, published by https://irisbooks.com/

A memoir-in-essays, Voice Lessons is one woman from Appalachia’s remembrance of childhood and of education, both formal and personal. McElmurray enters the world of writing and teaching, all the while coming to understand her deeply troubled mother.

The essays are arranged in four major sections: early years and experiences of faith; the work of hands and the work of classrooms, paralleling her mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s; writing and academia and the mother, disappearing into a land of forgetting. Finally, a fourth section relays both her mother’s death and the author’s acceptance of her own voice.

EXCERPT

1. Sounding ground

Floating in the warm salt water bed inside her, I listen as she rocks herself still.  So far, so far.  The Pontiac is riding west all those miles toward the Kansas air force base town where I will be born, and a radio is playing a country song.  She is leaning against the window, crying like she does.  She has never wanted him, never wanted me, not as much as she wants to go back home.  I’m taking you there once and for all, he says as they quarrel down mile upon mile.   The engine hums into the palm she lays against her belly.  Tires sound on the wet highway at night and my mouth is open, ready to taste the sadness she will feed me like milk. 

2. Ladder of air

In Dwale, in Kentucky, my granny makes sugar syrup and turns biscuits with her strong hands.  Dough catches on the thin wedding ring, gold like the edges of a Bible’s pages.  She rises while it is still night and gives food to her household and portions thereof.  All day she will hoe and swing chickens around and around to break their necks and scrub my granddaddy’s clothes at the ringer washer.  But for now it’s early and he’s just gone to the mines. She sits awhile.  The sky is getting lighter and there is sun, all pale and clean.  Her teeth are in a glass in the kitchen cabinet and her one gold tooth shines.  I am a child and the hollow of her empty mouth makes me afraid. Come here, she says, and pats the soft middle of her lap.  Her long black hair.  I still dream sometimes the braid is a rope ladder she climbed up and out.  

3. Songs

Uncle Dave was the boy my Aunt Ruth fell for when she heard him on a Saturday night radio show on WEKY.   She tells about listening to him sing Elvis and the way you could hear his hips move just by the sound of his voice.  I am a teenager by then, and already I know what music is forbidden, what music is holy.  I am antsy to ride the roads and drink whiskey and do who knows what, but Sunday mornings I go with my granny to East Van Lear Baptist Church.  Mary Ruth leads the hymns with her brothers, her guitar strapped across her shoulders, while, beside me, my granny sings too.  Her voice is high and off kilter, a voice I will hear all my life.  

4. Ghost rider

He was riding shotgun as we rolled our windows down and took curves too fast on country roads and found abandoned houses where we played our music loud until dawn.  My son was riding shotgun inside my body those nights, but I will not hear his voice for years and years.

5. A hole in the heart

My father says we are Basque, from the mountains of Northern Spain.  He says my great great great something or other was the bearded lady at a carnival that traveled south and that’s how we got there, Johnson County, Kentucky.  He says once when he was a boy they were fishing and drinking bootleg and his 1932 Model A Ford pickup went out of gear and drifted down into the waters of Dewey Lake.  In Korea, bombs went off and the air smelled like burning.  And the women.  Goldie, Doris, Sally.  Pearlie Lee, my mother.  He tells his stories at Lynch East Main where he teaches, where all the pretty girls sit around him in a circle in the high school lunch room and listen, listen.  Years pass.   He writes me letters and letters from his kitchen table.  He tells me God is almighty and loves me so, but I do not believe.  At the supper table, he prays.  There are, we both know, stories too hard to tell.  Once he sent me a buckeye from a tree near a sidewalk where he saw a boy playing.   He knew, without saying, that the boy was the son I gave away at birth.  More years pass.  He writes me text messages on his brand new phone.  He tells about the fox in the yard.  He tells about his heart, the tiny hole and the sac of blood that exploded inside.  

6. Roads

The highway-voice of memory.  Tires whishing rain.   The low hang of electric wires over a road packed with snow and I am driving, driving, stoned and full of visions of home.   All the places I’ve been.  State to state to state.  Town upon town.  Far places.  In Nepal my sweetheart and I walked for six weeks. Sherpas passed us on the trails, one with a hot water heater strapped to his back.   We sat dangling our feet in a healing sulphur spring in a place called Tatopani.  That night I dreamed I was staring into a map of the world and home.   The creosoted bridge across the creek to my granny’s house.  

7. Heart song

The heart, says Deborah McCauley in a book called Appalachian Mountain Religion, is “one of the most significant and telling recurrent themes in mountain preaching.”  It is the heart, “broken…tender…a heart not hardened to the Spirit” that is important in mountain faiths.  McCauley says that, for mountain faiths, “rational belief alone…what makes sense to the head, is woefully inadequate.”  As I read, there I was again.  Back in Lick Fork, at church.  Back in other church houses I’d been to in the mountains.  All those voices, so tender.  Soft as the laying on of hands.  

8. The uterus

Its outmost layer, the perimetrium, has nestled inside it a muscular layer called the myometrium, and inside that, an inner lining called the endometrium.  Way inside that moist cave, do we already hear voices?  Mother.  Father.  All our blood kin.  Is our voice already ours inside the womb?  What stories did my son know before he opened his eyes that first morning I surrendered him into other arms?  His voice is like my voice, I tell myself when I am forty and meet him for the first time.  

9. Radio

I left my faith behind a hundred million years ago.  Dropped what I had left in the offering plate and never thought twice.  Stood at the church house door with my back turned and braced myself so the Holy Ghost couldn’t follow me on the road out.  I recorded all my prayers and listened to them backwards just like Revolution Number Nine but never heard the hidden message once.  I held my hands out, palms up, and waited and waited for the rain to fill them.  I looked up into the tallness of trees and listened, again and again.  I hold the names of god, the names of hunger, the names of longing in my mouth and they melt, a sweetness that always leaves me wanting more.  Driving home to Eastern Kentucky there is a preacher’s voice on the radio and I turn the volume up as loud as it will go.

10. Air waves

Once when I was little, my father held a head set up next to my ear and I heard whistling, then voices speaking a language that reminded me of the sound of birds.   These days, my son lives in Korea, where he says the language is tonal.   We speak now and then via computer, the screen blank and blue, and I remind myself to breathe between the pauses.   The word Skype sounds like sky, like air and the ocean.  

11. Immersion

That morning in Eastern Kentucky there are three miners in the Brookshire Inn breakfast room.  I take photos, wanting to remember the coal stains on their faces, the way their hands hold a coffee cup.  The day hasn’t started yet, and I’m exhausted with driving, with being back in a home that isn’t one, with how my mother has forgotten just about everything these days. The taste of the fudge stripe cookies she used to love before the Alzheimer’s.  My name, most days.  At the nursing home, I am surprised by the empty dining room and the music coming from the hallway.  The patient bathroom is crowded and there is a boogie box playing gospel.  Power, power.  Wondering working power.  There’s singing and hand-clapping and arms waving in praise of the Lord and a preacher is holding a Bible next to his heart.  My mother is sitting next to a sink in her wheelchair, looking confused as all the voices rise and fall and as the preacher lays his hand on the head of a big woman with a flowery housedress, also in a wheelchair.   There is power, power, wonder working power. I kneel, touch my mother’s dry, cool fingers.  She smiles her vacant smile as the big woman is lifted, wheelchair and all, then lowered into a huge, therapeutic bathtub.   I wonder if my mother is remembering a creek by a house at night, voices traveling from the banks of a long river.  I wonder if she knows that word anymore.  Baptism. 

12. Well water

Writer Margaret Atwood says that the written voice is like the singing voice in music.  It travels not across the page, but through time.  I remember the well at the back of my mother’s mother’s house, the sulfur water that left our palms the color of rust.  How I’d fold up little squares of paper with wishes and throw them in.  The house and the well are long gone, but I remember watching my granny singing a hymn as she drew water.  Is the water of memory what washes us clean?  Again and again, I give that time a name and I sing it, a song full of sorrow and joy.   

—

Praise for Voice Lessons

Tug your voice up from the water, a friend told Karen Salyer McElmurray. Let it swell to bursting, a wicked and beautiful bloom. Here, the writer heeds that friend’s advice. In luminous prose, McElmurray’s voice rises up and carries with it the echoes and textures of the people and places she’s known—the murmurs of odd-turned women, the creak of old floorboards, the ringing of temple bells. More than anything, these lyrical essays bear witness to the necessity and transcendence of language itself—its extraordinary resplendence, balm, and light.

—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread

Voice Lessons is about translating experience into awareness, and that awareness into words. McElmurray transcends both the Southern rootedness of her upbringing, and the genre of writing about writing, without leaving either behind. During most of her young life, McElmurray sustains herself through manual labor. What we come to understand, in this powerful book, is that writing itself is manual labor. It is blood sport. Taking aim. Knowing when to wait, when to hold your breath, when to let go, and when to pull the trigger.

—Sue William Silverman, author, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

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Category: On Writing