An Appalachian Felix Culpa

The noise began as I was driving to the bank.

In fact, I was driving to the bank to withdraw the money for the very last payment on my car. And my car was the thing that was making the noise. It started with a loud, rough, squealing sound whenever I hit the accelerator. It wasn’t until I opened the door to let Michael out to get the money, that I realized the engine was also knocking.

I told myself this could not possibly be happening. Sacre Bleu was the best car we’d ever had, really a miracle. I’d made payments on time for ten months, and tomorrow I was going to get the title. No more worry when the twelfth of the month came up. The car was mine– a little rusty, a little older than my teenager, but mine.

I lied to myself that it must just need an oil change, and drove it home.

The next day, I had Jimmy the Mechanic come and diagnose the cause of the knock. He listened. He turned it off and ran to get the extra good oil. He put the oil in, waited for a time, and turned it on. It was no use. The knock may as well have been a death rattle.  He’d changed the oil in this car just a week ago, and a few weeks before that, and a month before that, and every time the oil had come out black. He thought it was because the previous owner hadn’t taken good care of the motor, but it was obvious that something was slowly breaking, and now it was broken. In Jimmy’s opinion, the dealer must have known this was going to happen, selling us a car that would drive until just about the time we had it paid off. We’d need a new motor now.

I think he said more, but I couldn’t hear him. I sat abruptly on the dry grass, feeling as if the whole world was dipping and whirling like a carnival ride.

Jimmy’s boy always follows his father on neighborhood mechanic work. He’d wandered around to my garden to check on it for me, as he does at least once a day. Just as I fell over, he came around the front, smiling. “I have good news!”

“What is it?” I groaned, holding my head.

“You have another butternut.”

By “butternut” he meant “acorn squash,” which I’m growing for the first time this year. Jimmy’s boy was excited when we harvested the first one. Now we had another fattening up, on the vine that ran out into the strawberry patch.

I tried to smile at him.

Jimmy was explaining that Ohio doesn’t exactly have a lemon law for used cars, but he was convinced that the dealer owed me at least some of my money back, or a free repair. He cautioned us not to pay that last payment yet. He also wanted us to bring him with us when we went to talk to the dealer. This took over a week to accomplish, because the dealer was never in. He lurked in his own house and watched the dealership on security cameras while his assistant did all the work, only showing up occasionally to check up on things. Michael kept on calling the dealership and only getting the assistant, who kept saying he couldn’t do anything by himself, only the dealer could, and the dealer should be in the next day. I began to refer to the dealer as “The Wizard of Oz.”

Finally, we gave up entirely and decided to walk into the dealership instead of calling, to see what would happen. Jimmy took us down there in that rickety Dodge he practically built out of junkyard parts. First he tried to talk sense into the assistant. Then the mechanic came in, and the mechanic happened to be Jimmy’s older cousin. Everyone in this town is Jimmy’s friend or a friend of his wife’s, or an uncle or a nephew or a cousin. Jimmy started acting out the knocking the car was making, by tapping on the threshold of the dealership with one finger, while the cousin watched critically. The Wizard of Oz watched the commotion on his security camera, and called his assistant, who held the phone to Michael’s ear. Nobody tried to talk to me even though I was the car’s owner, because I was a woman and they were Appalachian used car dealers. We ended up getting the car towed back to the dealership, where the mechanic said it needed a motor and “we can’t do that kind of work here.” They’d scrap the car and give me a hundred dollars if I wanted.

That last offer made Jimmy so angry that he stormed out of the dealership, so he wouldn’t start shouting.

Back in the Dodge, we conferred together. Jimmy was sure he could fix Sacre Bleu, for a very small fee for his labor, if we could get a junkyard motor, and that would be much more economical than somehow buying yet another car. He had the cherry picker and everything to get the old motor out. We ended up making that last payment and having the car towed back to my house. When he gave us the title, the dealer handed Michael a little over a hundred dollars cash by way of apology, which we gave Jimmy. The tow truck dropped my car in front of the haunted house, where it stayed. Now all we need to do is buy a motor. Jimmy’s been calling junkyards. I’ve been trying to figure out what bill we can possibly put off paying to put the money towards a motor, and so far the answer is none. There’s not a penny to spare.

I’d bought Sacre Bleu a day after turning forty, and the first ten months of my forties had been the easiest months of my whole life.  All I wanted was for things to continue as they had been, getting a bit easier. Now I was grounded for a bit. Michael had just been bumped up to full time at the restaurant, and now he had to walk back and forth to work every day.

My thoughts swirled, as they always do when things go terribly: No one will ever believe this is real life. Nobody could possibly get into a mess this often. Your mother will laugh if she finds out. Your bad-tempered alcoholic Irish Catholic aunts will think it’s hilarious. It’ll confirm for them everything they believe about you. You’re too ridiculous to take care of yourself. You ought to be in a home. You must be under a spell. Maybe you’re possessed. Maybe the Virgin Mary put a curse on you. In any case, God hates you and you’re a failure. 

I started ruminating, as I hadn’t for quite awhile, about that person I was supposed to be but never became.

I was supposed to be a successful professor of Catholic bioethics with a whole series of important books out and a teaching career. At the same time, I was supposed to be a thrifty housewife making enormous meals from scratch for the six to nine children I’d birthed naturally, in our spotless house, while Michael worked as a successful professor of theology and wrote his own books. No, no, I was supposed to be somebody so clever and savvy that I never got sucked into this vortex in the first place, had never heard of Steubenville, had never been in Mike Scanlan’s personality cult. Whatever the case, I was a failure. The setback with the car was proof of that.

Jimmy’s boy came over, to entertain me and get my mind off things. He started coming over every single day after supper, to see the garden and tell me how school was going and ask if the car was fixed yet. I was glad of the company. I promised him that soon as it was fixed, we’d go hiking at the Hellbender Preserve, over by the Lincoln Bridge, and see the railway tunnel where the trains used to go. I promised that when October came, we’d go to the pumpkin patch and take a hay ride together. Surely we’d have the car fixed by then.

He and I made up a game to pass the afternoons. Jimmy’s boy wanted to color a coloring book, but I didn’t have one. I had markers and marker paper, but no book, and no working car to run and pick one up. He asked if I could draw a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog for him to color in, and I carefully copied one from a Google search. He colored it carefully, looking at the colors on the screen to make sure he got it exactly right. Then he asked if I could draw SpongeBob and Patrick, and I did, and he colored them in in yellow and pink and stuck the picture on my fridge. We’re going to make a whole book of cartoon characters, with me doing the pencil and him doing the inks.

One day he walked with me to the corner market to get a can of cat food. We walked a block and a half, right past “Tink’s Wall,” the place where the homeless gentleman had been shot five years ago, when Jimmy’s boy was a baby.

“Uncle Tink!” said Jimmy’s boy, pointing to the wall where the makeshift shrine used to be.

“He was your uncle?”

“Of course he was,” the boy replied with confidence. “He’s my uncle. An uncle is a friend of your dad.”

“An uncle is a friend of your dad? Does that make me your aunt?”

“Yes. I call you that all the time.”

I had never been anybody’s aunt before. At least, I am biologically, but I’ve never met any of my nieces or nephews. I’m the family scapegoat and not supposed to know them.

“When are we going hiking by the place with the special lizards?”

“A hellbender isn’t a lizard! It’s a kind of amphibian, like a frog. We’ll go one afternoon when the weather is good, as soon as the car is running again”

When we got home, we checked on the acorn squash. It was nearly ready to harvest.

I went inside to Adrienne, who joked that I was playing favorites if I was going to go to the pumpkin patch with just Jimmy’s boy. I promised that all of us would go together, as a family.

It could be that I am not a failure, and God doesn’t hate me.

O felix culpa. O happy fault. O disastrous life that stranded me in Northern Appalachia, where I’ve found a home.

Just then, it felt good to be me.