You don't have to explain.
I got your blood running through my veins.
-- Allison Moorer, Blood
I wonder how many little girls lie in bed at night and worry about their fathers.
Probably most of them, given the state of many men and the ways the world confuses us. Bad things that have nothing to do with the state of our characters will sooner or later befall all of us. We worry when things aren't going well; some of us worry when things seem to be going too well.
While we are concerned about those we love, worry is not a species of love. We can love in spite of worry, but worry exacts its costs. It is a product of uncertainty and doubt. It can drive a little girl to pray: Please God, don't let Daddy hurt Mama.
Some people put their trust in the idea that the world is the way it is for reasons we are too puny to understand. Worry, they say, is a sin, a deficit of faith. They say that all prayers are answered, and that sometimes the answer is no, because sometimes what we perceive as bad things must happen so that some larger plan can proceed.
And so for reasons unfathomable, the little girl's daddy shoots her mama and then blows his own head off, right there in the front yard, in the summer dark before dawn. She hears the shots and knows them for what they are. She runs out a kitchen door and calls for her mother, but it's too dark for her to see the bodies lying in the yard.
Years later she thinks about that moment and says another kind of prayer: that her mother was already gone when she got to the door, that she never heard her daughter who she could no longer help call out for her in the dark.
I had heard the story before, told in the impersonal, professional way of journalists. I knew about how singer-songwriters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer were orphaned by murder-suicide when they were, respectively, 17 and 14 years old. I understood the event informed their work, and respected their right to not talk about it all the time or make it the fulcrum of their careers.
It was something that, as a listener, you could forget about or never know, at least until you ran into something like the secret track "Cold Cold Earth" buried after five seconds of silence on Moorer's 2000 album The Hardest Part.
Late last year, Moorer decided to address her family's tragedy directly with a memoir and an album, both called Blood, that work through and over the story in explicit detail.
While the album is by nature more elliptical and offers the option of not thinking too long and hard about the motives of the artist--melodies having their own logic and lure--I resisted the book at first. I have read and written about the violence we do to one another over the decades and don't think there is much poetry or mystery in it.
If you have ever been in a penitentiary waiting area, you know something about the ordinariness of crime. It's depressingly banal; there's nothing special about the people we lock up. We are animals subject to being unbalanced by, among other things, greed, lust and desperation. Sometimes it seems we lock each other up more or less at random.
None of us are innocent; we're all capable of stepping over the line if the circumstances break right. Every time I've had occasion to visit a jail I've felt a little nervous; it's not all that obvious that I don't belong there.
But I finally got around to reading Moorer's book, imagining I'd be able to safely put it down after a while. Writing can be good therapy, but that doesn't necessarily give us reason to read what others write. Everybody has a story, but not everyone ought to attempt a lyrical memoir about their ill-starred parents.
But Moorer's book is a minor revelation; restrained, darkly funny and heartbreaking as it describes a family like a lot of families I've known.
Her parents were just kids really, living lives less orderly than ideal--country bohemians, what we might call "creatives" today. Her father had gone to Auburn and taught English, but he wanted to be a songwriter. He was an alcoholic, an abusive father who beat his dog, and a frustrated artist.
Her mother, Laura, was a pretty thing, and likely the more talented one. She worked as a legal secretary and presented as feisty to the outside world, and though she left her husband a dozen or so times seemed unable to stand up to him. The little girls listening in their beds heard one-sided arguments. He was a bad habit she couldn't quite quit. And when she finally did, it killed her.
It's an ordinary story, told in an extraordinary way.
Moorer interrupts her main narrative with brief interstitial chapters, printed in a sans serif type, that serve as amplifying asides to the story. Some are set in the present as she picks through the surviving paraphernalia of her family before the event: her mother's name tag from the law firm where she worked, her father's lyric sheets from his briefcase, which she still keeps in her desk.
She concludes he was a pretty mediocre songwriter who had trouble singing in time. Her mother had more musical talent, but her daddy wanted it more.
And maybe that was his chief talent: wanting.
And maybe wanting without ever getting is harder for some people. Nothing excuses what some men do to women, but making them out to be monsters is just a way of letting ourselves off the hook. It's always more complicated than that. Maybe we can understand how hard it is to want something that's simply beyond your ken.
So Moorer's sister--Sissy in the book--took one of their daddy's lyrics and finished it off as a song. "I'm the One to Blame," is its title, and Moorer recorded it for the book's companion album.
"Jealousy and pride drove me to shame," the lyric goes, "And I'm so sorry, dear, but I'm the one to blame."
Things don't always happen for a reason. There's lots of random hurt and free-floating anxiety out there, and happy endings are rare enough. But a book like Blood adds to our understanding. It might increase our empathy--if not for the bad daddies, at least for the little girls they worry.
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 02/16/2020