FROM OUR HOUSE
By Lee Martin
Dutton, 192 pages, $22.95
First you notice the photograph: a shot from around the late 1950s, father and young son, standing in their yard, an old oak tree behind them. The two, squinting into the summer sun, are in front of a farm gate, their two-story house in the background. All seems well in this bucolic scene until you look at the photo more closely. The father and son stand apart from each other. Their body language is stiff. What’s significant is what’s missing: the absence of any physical show of affection–the son leaning into his father’s leg, the father’s arms draped around his son’s shoulders.
What’s significant in Lee Martin’s finely wrought memoir, “From Our House,” are the absences in his story. At first glance, the photograph facing the title page suggests the typical tale. Ah, yes, you think. It’s the abusive father versus the wounded, coming-of-age son. Yet, when you examine the scene even more thoroughly, you realize that you’ve almost missed the point. While the son’s eyes are downcast, his posture shy and withdrawn, the father stares straight on into the camera, arms sticking out from the sides of his torso, hooks rather than hands glinting in the light.
Martin’s book begins with his father’s accident–the loss of his hands to a corn picker. In an all-too-familiar rural scenario, we watch a man–Roy Martin–attempt to regroup and forge ahead after assimilating the blow of a farm injury. Roy spends time at a rehabilitation hospital, learning to strap on his hooks and work them well enough to scrawl a letter home to his wife and son: “Well my courage is picking up that I might get to come home some day.”
Eventually Roy does go home to his farm in southern Illinois, taking the bus alone. Of course, now his happy life has changed forever. Husband, wife and son–this tight little nuclear family–must adjust to the physical, emotional spiritual constellation of problems surrounding a disability. Roy develops diabetes. He reacts with rage toward his situation and vents his anger on Lee, lashing out at him with frequent verbal and physical attacks, nearly killing his son with his hook. The family is torn apart by the events, a grandmother even jumping in at one point to save Lee from a beating.
Martin is a smart enough author to know that no human portrait can be painted in all black or white. When Roy isn’t beating up his son, Martin depicts him as a man capable of displaying great courage and great charm. Roy uses his stare-at-the-camera-straight-on attitude to face his physical challenges and find ways to adapt. He drives a car and totes a bale of hay. He befriends the down-and-out and is an affable presence around town.
And ironically, Roy’s disability also pulls the family together in an odd way. Physically, the three find a new intimacy, with wife Beulah and son Lee taking on caretaker roles. They groom Roy, helping him in the shower and bathroom. They help him into his harness and hooks every morning, assist him with the few farm jobs he can’t accomplish during the day. They reverse roles, the son nurturing the father, the wife for many years assuming the position of primary breadwinner.
In a different time and place, this family would have gone to counseling, gone through a divorce and enrolled their son in the Big Brothers program. Grandma Martin would have been placed in an assisted-living residence. Beulah would have declared her powerlessness in the face of her co-dependency at a 12-step meeting for adult children of alcoholics.
Instead, the Martins muddle through, looking to their religious faith for strength and eventual redemption. They cope with the reality of financial and emotional difficulties as best they can. They become academic migrant workers, living in Oak Forest, Ill., during the school year, where Beulah teaches 3rd grade, then returning to their farm for the summer.
The absence of his father’s hands, of his father’s love, of any real, stable home, leaves a hole in Lee’s heart too large to be filled by his mother’s compassion. Lee acts out, becomes a rebellious teenager, displays his own bursts of anger. Yet, as an adult looking back, the author captures his plight with insight. This is not a simple look-what-happened-to-me book, but rather a thoughtful, reflective rendering of one young man’s struggle for identity.
Within his sometimes-rambling prose, Martin zeros in on suspenseful scenes and lines of dialogue that stun and stay with you for days. When Martin’s parents found out that his mother, then 45, was pregnant with him, the first thing his father asked the doctor was, ” `Can you get rid of it?’ ” Roy remarks much later, ” `When I die, everyone will come (to the wake) just to see if they bury me with these hooks.’ “
Martin’s lyrical descriptions of rural and urban life make his memoir come alive. The unfolding of the cauliflower leaves in the garden, the chirp of the katydids, the sound of the peepers trilling in the night in the pond are all here. As are the sounds of Larry Lujack, counting down the Silver Dollar Survey on WLS radio, the smell of the neighbor’s food wafting through the duplex wall, the clanging of pots and pans.
“How easily our bodies become us, our souls bound to the material, to the joy or grief or pain we feel through our skin,” Martin writes at the close of the book. “From Our House” brings us all of the above–the joy, grief and pain of slipping inside someone else’s skin.
