The passenger seat was cavernous to my small self, like a sky’s expanse to a single star. Each Saturday for nearly a year, we made this hour-long pilgrimage by car—for Mamaw. The first trip was in 1970. I was six.
We piled into our new tan Oldsmobile for the fifty-mile ride to Louisville, all of us dressed in church clothes. My father pulled away from our red-brick ranch house, the highest spot on the farm—land my grandparents had deeded to my parents after I was born in 1964, when they moved to town. Our farm sat on a bed of limestone, undercut by caves and underground streams. My father once told me that warm, shallow seas covered this land millions of years ago. As we drove down the hill, I looked out over the fields and imagined an ancient ocean stretching to the horizon, calm and blue.
The car crunched down our gravel lane, turned left onto the state road, and then followed the highway into the town of Glendale. We passed the bank, the post office, Hardee’s grocery, and Sego’s hardware before rising over the railroad tracks and turning at my grandparents’ street. We picked up Mamaw and Papaw at their small house, and then we were six.
My father drove with Papaw beside him and my nine-year-old brother in the middle. I sat up front on the white vinyl bench seat between my mother and Mamaw, barely able to see over my brother’s plaid shirt. We turned north onto Interstate 65, heading toward the city.
I played finger games quietly in my mother’s lap, like I did on Sunday drives when the men in front compared crop rows and livestock. My father might say, “Wonder how the Cranes’ corn is coming in that valley?” and veer left toward the fields to see for himself. Papaw would lean forward and say something like, “John’s using that new spray—burned the tobacco leaves.” A subtle nudge toward the old ways.
But this wasn’t a Sunday drive. Mamaw sat stiffly beside me, fidgeting. When our patty-cake clapped too loud, she flinched, so we stopped. She leaned forward.
“Earl,” she asked, “how many of these treatments did the doctor say I’ll need?”
Papaw didn’t turn. “Ora, I already told you—the doctor doesn’t know,” he said, sharp and low.
My father kept his eyes fixed on the broken white lines in the road. He didn’t speak. An only son after the loss of his two brothers, my father had returned home from college early to run the farm. Mamaw had worried about what college boys might get into. Papaw had needed help. My father’s life bent toward duty.
I wanted to make the car stop. I wanted to scream, “What’s wrong with Mamaw? Why is she like this? Will she be okay?”
But I didn’t. I had learned to swallow questions.
I remembered another time I asked something I wasn’t supposed to. I was five, sitting on a wooden chair in our cramped bathroom, dressed early for church in my black velvet drop-waist dress with a satin top. My mother had told me to stay quiet while she got ready. When my father stepped out of the shower, I pointed and asked, “What’s that?” His body was still damp, a young man of thirty. He wrapped a towel around himself and pointed to the door.
“You’ll need to take your chair out now,” he said.
Back in the Oldsmobile, my belly ached from all I wasn’t asking. Mamaw kept shifting. She crossed and uncrossed her arms. Her hands fluttered from lap to armrest and back again. Stillness didn’t suit her. Mamaw woke early every day to cook three meals, starting with eggs, bacon, and biscuits for my father and Papaw. As soon as breakfast was cleared, she mixed flour and lard for pie crusts, cutting the dough until it formed small, pea-sized lumps. Then she shaped and rolled it into perfect ovals, her hands practiced and quick. On some mornings, she marched to the chicken coop, grabbed a hen by the neck, swung it like a lasso, and brought it to the stump. Whack. She scalded the feathers off in boiling water and cleaned it herself. At sixty-three, Mamaw worked harder than most women half her age.
On that first trip to Our Lady of Peace, she murmured that she wished God would take her sadness away—that He would stop testing her faith. No one answered. That was why we were in the car.
On normal days, the TV blared from the wood-paneled sitting room, voices of Pat Robertson, Rex Humbard, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts. Mamaw prayed aloud with them. She knelt on the kitchen floor during Graham Crusades, tears streaming down her cheeks as strangers were born again on live television.
She talked to me while she cooked. She worried for all the world’s lost souls, for starving children in Africa, for people who turned away from God. These were her burdens. She told me that God saved those who believed and punished those who didn’t. Her own father had stopped drinking after he got saved—“Praise the Lord,” she said. I didn’t know him, but she had told me he used to beat her. She prayed for forgiveness on his behalf.
God had taken two of her sons. The first—Earl Jr.—died as a baby. The second, James, died of tuberculosis when my father was eight. I only knew James from the high school yearbook. When I opened it, it always fell to the page with his photo, the binding worn soft there. His pink cheeks had been hand-colored. Mamaw stood behind me once and whispered, “God took a good boy.” Then she dropped to her knees and prayed for her own sins. If I had prayed, I would have asked for the weight to be lifted from her shoulders.
In my family, we didn’t say “depression.” We said “sadness.” At the hospital, we all sat in the waiting room—my parents, brother, grandparents, and me. A doctor came through the double doors and spoke quietly with the men. Then Mamaw disappeared behind them.
My mother kept my brother and me busy with “Riddle-me, riddle-me-ree. I see something you don’t see…” We guessed colors in the flecks of the speckled tile.
But I saw other things. My father, bouncing his foot, flipping through The Record, the Catholic newspaper. My Papaw, holding a starched white handkerchief Mamaw had ironed for him days before. The tall statue of the Virgin Mary, arms open in quiet welcome, as if she saw everything I didn’t understand and promised help anyway.
When the doctor returned, he brought my father and Papaw through the swinging doors. My mother told us to put our shoes back on. Mamaw emerged between the two men. She walked in tiny steps, like her knees were bound. Her forehead was blotched red, and she rubbed at it gently, like she was trying to read it. I wanted to run to her and throw my arms around her legs. But her eyes stopped me. They were blank. Not angry, not tired—just gone.
We filed out in silence. Back in the car, I laid my head in her lap, trying to comfort her, but she turned to the window and said nothing. The car floated down the highway toward home. This pilgrimage was complete.
A few days later, I was back in Mamaw’s kitchen. She moved slower, but the wooziness had faded. We made cornbread, and I stirred the eggs into the cornmeal while the TV played in the other room. She turned to me suddenly, her voice urgent.
“When are you going to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t know. Would believing bring sadness too?
The pilgrimages continued every month for almost a year. Mamaw’s sadness did leave—but so did her memory. Sitting in the same kitchen, she often asked where she was and why she was there. She stopped asking me about Jesus. It was like the noisy broadcast of her faith had been silenced, crowded out by something even heavier—something too big for words.