Summary
One night after Vance turned thirteen, he received an alarming call from Mamaw, telling Vance that no one had heard from Papaw despite his predictable schedule. Rushing to his house, Vance, his mother, and Mamaw found their beloved Papaw dead. Thus began the emotional process of alerting family of Papaw’s death and mourning him. Mamaw assigned Vance the task of telling Lindsay the bad news, and when she finally arrived home from a night out, she and Vance collapsed onto the floor in tears.
Lindsay regretted “taking advantage” of Papaw by asking for his help with her car. “To this day, being able to ‘take advantage’ of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent,” Vance writes. While the Vance children lived in fear of exhausting the safety valve of goodwill they might need to survive, Papaw made it clear that the reservoir was endless.
Papaw was given a visitation in both Middletown and Jackson. “Even in death, Papaw had one foot in Ohio and another in the holler,” Vance writes.” Like all hillbilly funerals, Vance said, this one included the preacher inviting mourners to say a few words about the departed. For Vance, the task was overwhelming, as a small lifetime of memories flashed through his brain. He remembered how Papaw taught him how to shoot a gun using, Vance later learned, military-grade tactics; he recalled Papaw panicking when he wasn’t able to find a sleeping Vance during a funeral service years earlier and searching cars with a loaded .44 Magnum until he realized Vance was still in the church. Most of all, he remembered Papaw telling him, “‘the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.’” And so, Vance stood up at Papaw’s funeral and said, “He was the best dad that anyone could ever ask for.”
Mamaw and Vance’s mother were uncharacteristically out of sorts at the funeral. Vance found Mamaw, for example, hiding in a corner of the funeral home, staring blankly at the floor. In the days after the funeral, Vance realized that “something had veered off course.” His mother’s temper worsened, and she expressed resentment for everyone who has mourning Papaw, claiming that she had the most special bond with him. One morning, Vance found his mother in a bath towel on her porch, yelling at her boyfriend, her friend Tammy, and Lindsay. She had cut her wrists and was taken away by a police cruiser.
This marked Vance’s first realization that his mother had taken to prescription narcotics. Making things worse, Papaw’s death had “turned a semi-functioning addict into a woman unable to follow the basic norms of adult behavior.” With Bev in rehab at the Cincinnati Center for Addiction Treatment, Mamaw was helping raise both Vance and Lindsay now. Family members strategized, many suggesting that Vance be permanently sent to California to live with his Uncle Jimmy. Vance remembers Lindsay and him becoming almost totally independent during this time, preparing food and managing crises as they came.
On weekly visits to their mom’s rehab center, which they referred to as the “CAT house,” Vance Lindsay, and their mother were encouraged to speak earnestly, which almost always provoked fights. Their mother admitted she used drugs as a way to escape the pressure of paying bills and to get over her father’s death. Lindsay said she resented her mother for neglecting them in the wake of Papaw’s death, thereby depriving her of the right to grieve. For the first time, Lindsay had spoken up to their mother, and Vance now saw Lindsay as a real adult.
A few months later, their mother moved back home and began reciting the prayers she had learned to deal with her addiction in rehab. She told Vance that her addiction was a disease, which he resented and denounced as false. He notes that research suggests that genetics do play a role in addiction, but that those who view their addiction as a disease are less likely to fight it.
Vance also began attending his mother’s regular narcotics anonymous meetings. He remembers one man who attended a meeting simply because he was on the streets and the meeting room looked warm. He admitted he had little intention of giving up his drugs and said he was from Owsley County, in Kentucky. Vance marvels at his own realization years later that this man grew up no more than 20 miles away from his grandparents’ childhood home.
Analysis
This chapter begins with an event that will change the Vances' lives forever: the death of Vance’s grandfather, or Papaw. Until this point in the book, so many of Vance’s stories have centered on the relationship between—and often antics of—Mamaw and Papaw. Even when trying to kill each other or living in separate houses, Mamaw and Papaw stood as a unit, a pillar in Vance’s otherwise unstable life. Papaw’s death, therefore, feels like an enormous shift in our story’s world and is accompanied by a sharp shift in tone, from plucky and determined to devastated.
Vance also deviates from his typical structure in this chapter following Papaw’s death, dwelling for pages on memories of Papaw, both firsthand and inherited from family members. As such, these pages function as the extended eulogy that Vance couldn’t give at the funeral, and together, these stories complete our picture of Papaw, a complicated man who ultimately served as Vance’s best father figure. We learn, for example, that Papaw once burst into a highway rest stop pointing a loaded revolver because he believed his daughter was being raped—when, in reality, she was just brushing her teeth. He also taught Vance everything he knew about shooting guns, fixed Lindsay’s wrecked car so she didn’t feel like she “‘came from nothing,’” and taught Vance that a man’s character is judged by how he treats women. “Papaw was a terrifying hillbilly made for a different time and place,” Vance admits, but “‘he was the best dad that anyone could ever ask for.’”
As a result of Vance’s departure from the present tense, we as readers experience Papaw’s life in flashback through striking images. Perhaps the most striking is the image of Vance falling asleep during a Kentucky funeral as a child (again, an image that Vance has inherited through oral storytelling, rather than remembering it himself). The image of Mamaw and Papaw searching the cars outside the church with loaded pistols while Vance sleeps under a pew inside is an important image of Mamaw and Papaw as a kooky, hillbilly team, and it makes Papaw’s death all the more heartbreaking for the reader. This image announces the tragic departure of one half of a duo we’ve come to love.
Of course, this chapter also tragically introduces Bev’s addiction to prescription narcotics. Particularly owing to its reveal that Vance’s mother has likely been high for many of the episodes about which we’ve learned in previous chapters, this information shocks the reader, much like it does Vance, and complicates his mother’s character. Indeed, Vance’s mother verges on transforming into an antagonist here, if she hadn’t already by nearly killing Vance earlier in the book. Making matters worse, his mother begins to resent his grandmother and sister for taking over the caretaking duties that she neglects. “‘I’m your mother, not [Mamaw],’ she told us,” Vance writes. As his mother begins to see Mamaw as her enemy, she positions herself almost as her mother’s foil, neglectful in ways that Mamaw is attentive, reckless in ways that Mamaw is cool and collected.
However, even Mamaw changes in the wake of Papaw’s death, transforming before Vance’s eyes from the pillar of stability to a shell-shocked woman. Vance writes about finding his grandmother uncharacteristically quiet and reflective in one corner of the funeral home, “recharging batteries that I never knew could go empty.” This metaphor, comparing his grandmother’s spitfire spirit to an inexhaustible battery pack, speaks to Mama’s characteristic energy. It is only because we know how spirited Mamaw is normally that we understand the gravity of her sitting quietly in the corner of her own husband’s funeral. For the first time, Mamaw appears frail in Vance’s eyes: “At that moment, I realized that Mamaw was not invincible.” By highlighting this image, Vance also foreshadows Mamaw’s eventual death, the event that will throw his world out of orbit.
