arlena lockard

Ashland MFA Alumna

all of our unknowing

“If you ever tell this story,” Lonnie said, “make sure to begin and end it with ‘Growin’ up, I didn’t get no bread with my beans for supper.’” 

His graying curls reached out from underneath the brim of his dirty cowboy hat and splayed toward the sunlight like ancient Aztecs worshiping a solar deity; his simpering smile kissed the rim of a blue bottle of Bud Light. We sat on the back stoop of the rented farmhouse he shares with his girlfriend Kim and her granddaughter Lyzie, just outside of Mitchell. It was creeping toward 95 degrees, and southern Indiana’s brand of humidity made the very act of sitting outside, surrounded by breeze-deterrent cornfields, seem like too much work for those of us accustomed to air conditioning.

When I called Lonnie to tell him I wanted to visit, I was pretty sure he was shocked. Lonnie and I didn’t share the sitcom version of a father-daughter relationship. There have been perhaps four or five times he’s made contact in the last 20 years, but something changed recently. A year ago, he called to say he wanted to come to Ohio for a visit. Lonnie rarely left Indiana. With the exception of my wedding in 2000, and the birth of my daughter (who was now 15 years old), he mostly texted the obligatory holiday greetings, always with his closing text signature of “Cowboy Tears.” So, the depth of his paternal bond thus far read, “Merry Christmas - Cowboy Tears” or “Happy Birthday - Cowboy Tears.” I found this so ridiculous that often times, I didn’t even reply. 

But last year, not only was he calling, he drove seven hours to see me and my family for the Fourth of July weekend. It was that weekend Lonnie opened up about his recovery from prostate cancer. It was that weekend he told me how a big part of his childhood was shaped by his time in the Soldiers and Sailors Childrens’ Home in Knightstown. It was that weekend I saw in him a deep regret for missing out on being my father, and the search for absolution in the way he now parented Lyzie. However, once he left, nothing changed. Lonnie didn’t come back to visit this year on the Fourth of July. He didn’t call or text to wish me happy birthday. It was as if that weekend happened in a bubble of time. Once it popped, it was gone.

I was still having a hard time reconciling the person I made him out to be—the absent, uncaring father of my adolescence—with the person he now appeared to be, a flawed human struggling to do the best with the life he was given. Regardless of the reasons, it didn’t excuse his absence in my life. But maybe it explained it? I understood better the responsibility he felt towards his family in Indiana and how he knew that if I left with Mom and moved to Ohio, we would end up alright. In the end, I decided I wanted to explore the possibility of having a relationship with Lonnie and to do so, this time I was going to be the one to drive seven hours away. 

I knew if given the choice, Lonnie would have rather stayed at his farmhouse in Mitchell all weekend, so when I told him I wanted to explore Bloomington on the first day, I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled. My life in Ohio was more frenetic. I’m used to keeping a manic schedule and then still committing to more events; it’s just how I run. Because I work in higher ed, I knew I wanted to spend some time walking around Indiana University’s campus. I find college towns fascinating. There’s a certain rhythm to the college town that you don’t feel anywhere else. The pulse is erratic. The streets are loud and filled with pedestrians and cyclists in feverish flourishes of adolescent hopefulness and impending regret. Perhaps that’s why I love working in student services so much. Or maybe a part of me is still trying to reclaim the collegiate experience I never had, as I traded the typical freshman experience for diapers and breastfeeding my daughter. 

The previous year, my husband and I took our kids to Boston. We toured Harvard and MIT. We learned that the famous John Harvard statue was not really of John Harvard at all but fashioned after Sherman Hoar, an 1882 graduate of Harvard College. We ate all the seitan we could at Clover Food Lab and went on a whale watching cruise in the Boston Harbor. This is how we chose to spend our vacation days, immersed in the culture of the place. Lonnie had different ideas of vacation. He enjoyed a slower pace in life. Yes, he worked hard, but he enjoyed quiet time in the country, spending the evening on the back stoop, a bottle of Bud Light in hand as he and Kim waited on the crickets to awaken.  

“Find us on 4th Street,” I told him over the phone. “There’s an art festival going on, with musicians and poets and painters!”

I could almost hear an audible sigh through the phone. I wanted Lonnie to get out of his comfort zone and experience more than his small part of the state. But more importantly, I wanted to share something with him that I enjoyed, exploring the city, being around artists and academics and creatives and like-minded people, but closer to where he lived. It was my attempt at bridging the invisible divide between calling each other family and being family.

Kim and Lyzie genuinely seemed to enjoy the arts festival. Kim works as a seamstress, so she took to the textiles immediately, combing through vintage pieces like one of those antique dealers discovering a hidden treasure on American Pickers. We worked our way through the tents of abstract artists selling expensive oil paintings of Albert Einstein flying a rocket in space, with a red David Bowie lightning bolt across his famous German face. Poor Lonnie toggled back and forth between each group, checking on our progress down the street and then leaving to find Kim, only to return a few minutes later with a status update, “Kim’s in the Cherry Canary shop now. Meet you at the Sample Gates.”

I made my way down Indiana Avenue and found everyone waiting for me outside of Starbucks. Lonnie was sitting on one of the iron patio chairs outside and already looked beat. I felt responsible; I couldn’t help it. Lonnie wasn’t accustomed to my need to be in the middle of the action and appeared overwhelmed by the crowd instead of energized. A selfish guilt crept into my previous urban-induced high. 

“How you doing, dad?” I asked.

“I’m okay,” he replied. “Kim’s already inside getting me something to drink.” 

While the thought of Lonnie drinking anything ordered in Starbucks was hilarious, I was thankful Kim was taking care of him. Where I was concerned with pushing him to his comfort limits, she knew his health—only two years post-cancer recovery—required the slower footing.  

“Good,” I said. “I’d still like to see the Sample Gates if you’re up for it.” 

“You go ahead,” he said. “I think we’re going to sit here a bit.”

As I walked down the Indiana Ave, a part of me felt like I was letting him down. 

Back in Mitchell, we perched atop the wooden deck, under the shade of a massive ash tree encroaching on Lonnie’s roof. Because of the tree’s proximity, it threatened the stability of the old farmhouse’s roof, but Lonnie didn’t have the heart to tear it down. 

An hour before we planted our sweaty asses into the well-worn deck chairs on the stoop, we drove into town to check the status of the house that Lonnie was building. The house would replace the smaller one demolished earlier this year when a red pickup popped the corner of Curry Street and drove straight into the front of the home. Though Lonnie owns the property, it had been some years since he lived there. At the time, he was renting the house out to his older brother Clifford, who after some health issues had fallen on hard times. Clifford had suffered another hip injury and was rehabbing at Mitchell Manor when the accident occurred. Lonnie said the truck drove clean through the living room and took out Clifford’s medical bed. He was certain, had Clifford been there, he would have been killed. When I asked if they ever caught the driver, Lonnie said, “No. Can you believe it? Not a speck of busted headlight or fender was found in the wreckage. They combed through it, looking for evidence, but nothing. Probably someone all strung out and didn’t even stop to see if he’d killed anybody. Just left.” 

Kim called and asked us to pick up mac-n-cheese and beer at the Ruler for a cookout later. The Ruler is basically Kroger’s version of a discount supermarket and now the only place for Mitchellites to buy food after their JayC Food Store closed. It was either the Ruler or the small sampling of shelf staples at the Dollar General, neither of which had a deli or bakery or much in the way of fresh produce. One look at the food options in Mitchell and it wasn’t hard to believe the research linking higher spikes in childhood obesity to poverty-stricken neighborhoods with lack of resources. 

On the whole, when the news reports on the death of Midwest small towns, Mitchell should be squarely included. Once a prime railroad junction—due to its location for east-west running lines from New York to Chicago—Mitchell became a booming industry city in 1907. The early 1900s attracted many manufacturers here, most notably the Carpenter Body Company which housed its school bus production in Mitchell until the company sold to Wayne Corporations and relocated in 1995. 

Seeing Mitchell now is trying to recreate my childhood through the distance of twenty-five years. Though I only lived there for a couple of years, moving with my mother to Ohio when I was five years old, I returned to Mitchell each summer to visit my dad until I was fourteen. So much of the town seemed familiar and yet so different, but I imagined that would happen to even the best of towns in the span of my maturity. A town mural depicting a school bus, a railroad track and the Gus Grissom Monument bleaches on the brick exterior of the now-deserted Three Hearts and Flowers Gift Shop. Peeled paint and faded resin where vivid red, white, and blue once stood patriotic and prideful against the cerise brick backdrop. The decay of the mural seemed to echo the decay of its inspiration. 

“Welcome to the Meth Capital of America,” Lonnie said as we drove down the road toward 7th Street. 

After our trip into town, Lonnie brought out old photo albums. I flipped through the old sepia and landed on a series of photos that looked to be taken at a picnic. Most of the children in the picture were wearing coats, which to me signified it must have been colder than the average picnic weather. Little Lonnie wore a blue cardigan, a white collared shirt and a blue bowtie. Leroy donned a red puffy jacket and Clifford an identical one in blue. 

In one of the photos, they stand together in front of a large brick building. Another, they are by a picnic table, a large watermelon placed center stage, reminiscent of a Thanksgiving turkey.  Lonnie and the kids are gathered around Granny. There is a lake in the background. One photo in the series shows Lonnie, Leroy, and Clifford running by the lake. This is the only picture that Lonnie isn’t looking at the camera. The camera only glimpsed the side of this profile as he faced toward his brothers running away. It was this picture that remained with me. In other photos of Lonnie, he is smiling, making goofy faces, throwing up peace signs, basically hamming it up for the camera. But in this one, when he isn’t aware of the peering lens, Lonnie simply stares behind him at his brothers, as if to say, “I’m watching out for you.” Leroy doesn’t smile in any of the pictures. His little 6-year-old body doesn’t even have the strength to pretend that this brief moment with his family somehow makes up for the fact that the rest of his childhood was spent being physically and sexually abused by the other boys at the children’s home. 

I kept coming back to that side profile picture of Lonnie and the way he looked back at his brothers. How many smiles were manufactured to make his family feel better? How much of his gregarious appearance and goofy demeanor was for show? How did he survive the same time spent in a place that would break his other two brothers, and not come out completely damaged? How much of his childhood at the orphanage does he still carry around, even in adulthood, even now?

“Was this one taken at the children’s home?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “See, our heads are shaved. They shaved them once we got to there.”

“They shaved your heads?” I felt stupid repeating this simple statement, but images of small children lined up to get their heads shaved by orphanage personal began to flicker in my periphery. 

“Yeah,” he answered. “Probably easier that way to keep us clean.” Lonnie stood up quickly and walked into the house. He returned a minute later with his iPad. 

“Look.” Lonnie conjured a picture of the children’s home on its screen. “This is the old administration building here.” 

He pointed to a large beige building with rust red arches around the lean windows and above the front entry. It looks like something out of Gone with the Wind. 

“And here is the lake.” His calloused hands—rough from a life of construction and farm work, from trimming trees and mowing lawns, and any other means to make a living by the sweat of one’s own brow—grabbed ahold of another Bud Light and then handed me the iPad. The photo on the screen showed the same lake of previous picnic pictures. 

“When did you go back?” I asked. A part of me wished I had been there with him, that he would have wanted me there to share in these experiences, that we knew each other enough to be there for one another as we try to reconcile our own childhoods of loneliness—his without his mother, and mine with him. 

“I took Lyzie and Kim out there last year,” he said. “All of the main buildings are still there, the administration building, the church, the school, but the old dorms, the ones I stayed in were torn down.” 

I spotted another photo of Granny, Lonnie’s mother, sitting on a porch step, holding a baby and surrounded by six other young children. 

“Is that you?” I asked. I pointed to a boy with a head full of curly dark hair right next to Granny. His mouth was wide open expressing a mischievous smile that had me wondering if he was doing something the camera didn’t catch, like pulling a strand of brown hair of the girl (my Aunt Deb) in front of him, or pinching the arm of the slightly older boy (my Uncle Clifford) sitting on his other side. 

“Sure is,” Lonnie said. “This must have been right before we went to the children’s home, ‘cause our hair’s long.” He leaned down toward the photo album as if carefully excavating a long-forgotten relic. 

“So, when do you think this photo was taken?” I tossed my gaze between the small curly-haired boy in the photo and the older, living color version of him right next to me, trying hard to hide both my curiosity and concern. 

“I had to be right around nine here, so probably ‘67? This must have been the summer right before we were sent to the home.” The way he said the word “home” trailed off into the open Indiana sky. It seemed to travel out across the cornfields that surrounded Lonnie’s farmhouse, and up highway 37, north past Bloomington, and east on highway 70 until it reaches Rush County, where the remains of the Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s Home still stand.

Before Lonnie and his brothers Clifford and Leroy were shipped off to the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Children’s Home in Knightstown, their mother tried one last desperate attempt to evade social services by housing them in separate homes with different members of her family. Clifford was defiant and Leroy too small for excessive manual labor, so it was Lonnie who was sent to stay with his maternal grandparents on the Maddox farm. Like 60-year-old Lonnie, a man building an entire house by himself in the heat of the Indiana summer, 9-year-old Lonnie was a hard worker. He chopped and stacked firewood by the front door each morning, helped out with the chores, and basically catered to the whim of Grandma Maddox, a woman with a steely disposition and merciless affinity to teach the hard lessons of life. As a part of the arrangement, his mother was to send 20 dollars a month to her parents to cover the cost of Lonnie’s food. One month the money never came. 

Besides Grandma and Grandpa Maddox, the farm housed three of their children, the youngest of which, Uncle Jimmy, was only 5 years older than Lonnie. That night, when the six of them sat down for dinner, Grandma Maddox announced that Lonnie’s mother neglected to pay for his food that month, so he would not be allowed to eat any food until everyone in the house was finished. All of them, probably too afraid to speak up against Grandma Maddox, ate their food in silence as 9-year-old Lonnie, no doubt hungry from a long day’s work on the farm, looked on. Once everyone was done eating, Lonnie grabbed a spoon and scooped out the leftover beans into a small plate. 

“Grandma,” he asked. “Can I have a piece of bread with my beans?”

“No,” she replied. “I done already put the bread up.”

Bits of paint flaked off the deck-chair's arms in rust-colored confetti. Kim placed an old box fan on a trunk by the side of the house in a desperate attempt to feel less humid. There was a break in the conversation as we both sipped our beer, as if our mutual silence was a reverent reminder of all of our unknowing. 

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ARLENA LOCKARD LIVES IN NORTHEAST OHIO, SPLITTING HER TIME BETWEEN A CAREER AS AN ACADEMIC ADVISOR AT A SMALL COMMUNITY COLLEGE AND EVENINGS SPENT WRITING NARRATIVES ON FEMALE-VOICED HUMOR AND MENTAL ILLNESS. SHE EARNED AN MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING FROM ASHLAND UNIVERSITY IN 2019. HER WORKS HAVE APPEARED IN THE NORTH COAST REVIEW.