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13 Dec, 2023

- ’Tis the Season to Kill the Dead-Mom Holiday Movie Trope

Feature

’Tis the Season to Kill the Dead-Mom Holiday Movie Trope

Carolyn Wells   7:20AM, 13 Dec, 2023

Dead-Mom-Christmas-Image

Cat Modlin-Jackson | Longreads | December 13, 2023 | 12 minutes (3,364 words)

The first Christmas my sister-in-law was dead, I watched The Holiday. Early in the movie, Cameron Diaz freaks out when she thinks her love interest, Jude Law, is a cheater. She rushes to his house to demand an explanation, and while his two young daughters frolic in the background next to a Christmas tree, he mouths the word “widower.” She responds with a blend of sympathy and solace. In lightning fashion, her reply whips from essentially, Oh god, that’s horrible, to Anyway, moving on! What happens next?! His grief is her relief. Look, I get it: I’d also be relieved to find out my new bonk buddy wasn’t a philanderer. I’m not mad at Cameron; I’m mad that the dead wife-mom is a plot device in more Christmas movies than I can stuff in a stocking.

This dead wife-mom lurking in the background is rarely relevant to the plot. More often than not, her inclusion only serves as sympathy porn, a cheap move for even the most ostentatiously bad films. She uses our fascination with the morbid for entertainment. For many, a dead-too-soon character is intriguing in the same way as aliens or Santa—something beyond the realms of their reality. Sure, half the season is dedicated to the mysticism of transcendental things: joy, togetherness, and the other stuff that disappears when the Christmas trees go in the trash. But this trope goes a step further in a Christmas movie. It escalates tragic death into magic.

The subtext is that the holiday season is a great backdrop for closure—there’s something in the air and some fluke meeting or supernatural encounter will heal thy spirit. Like in The Knight Before Christmas, when a romance springs up and the love of Vanessa Hudgens’ chainmail bae motivates her to finally bust out her dead mom’s treasured decorations. After years of finding them too painful to look at, all it takes is a few hours with a knockoff King Arthur, and the grief spell is broken. Or again in The Holiday, when a widower can at last open his heart to someone who’s basically a stranger, and the whole family then lives happily ever after (because of course the kids will be equally psyched about New Mommy). Filmmakers use a character’s grief to evoke viewers’ sympathy and cravings for a quick fix. The Christmas widower trope exploits these very human tendencies, triggering sadness for the sake of sadness and making the cheap promise of a neat resolution tied up in a pretty bow.

My sister-in-law Rachel* died at 37. That first December without her, I watched Jude drop the widower bomb on Cameron and absolutely lost my shit. Rachel and I weren’t as close as we used to be by the time she died, but that didn’t make our relationship any less impactful. Nine years older, she babysat me as a kid and played Barbies, lent me jewelry and makeup for hot dates when I was in college, and later, when I decided to marry a guy my brother and mom low-key hated, played diplomat and big-sister advocate. Years more, she named me the godmother of her baby girl—just months before her first cancer diagnosis.

Sobbing on the couch as I watched The Holiday, I cried for my brother. For my nephews and niece. For her best friend of 30+ years. For me.

Rachel had withered over three years. Then on a muggy Tuesday in July, I watched her die. Worse than that, I watched her husband, her children, her parents, and her friends watch her die. She couldn’t speak because of all the tubes, so her only way to communicate was with a small dry-erase board. We “talked” briefly about my goddaughter, the baby girl she’d waited so long to have, and her eyes lit up. “Isn’t she fun?!” she scrawled with a marker while grinning from ear to ear, even though she knew her fun was about to end. That evening, I took my nephew to Burger King in an attempt to distract him from what we all knew would be The Bad Day. An elementary schooler at the time, he told me he could deal with her never again being conscious for the rest of her life, so long as she was still breathing. My heart broke all over again, this time just for him. Then there was the morning after, when my brother buckled on the stairs, choking out “Oh, god” as he went down. I’ll never unsee it. And that is why I shake my fist when Netflix whacks a woman we never see.

Grief is not linear. There is no expiration date. It’s a way of life; an existence marked by absence. For a lot of us, this absence is weightier during days of celebration that can’t be erased from the calendar. This time of year it’s omnipresent, touching all the senses. The bright Christmas lights my dead sister-in-law isn’t here to string up. The cheesy songs she’s not singing. The bacon and Bisquick pancakes she’s not eating with us. The gawdawful Christmas movies she’s not watching. All of it’s here. Except her.

For a lot of us, this absence is weightier during days of celebration that can’t be erased from the calendar. This time of year it’s omnipresent, touching all the senses.

Christmas and death have a weird bond. To act like the latter doesn’t exist amidst the former would be ridiculous. Between Charles Dickens’ merry band of ghosts and a month full of birthday parties for a guy who dies twice after a miraculous birth, Christmastime is one big existential crisis. And sure, a movie can portray loss and grief in a way that the left-behind can actually connect with, and maybe—just maybe—derive a little lightness from. But for that to work, the plot would have to focus on what already exists. To get really corny about it, the magic would have to come from within. That kind of magic is a slow burn; it’s moving forward rather than moving on, whether that’s a daughter who gets by with a little help from her friends or a widower who gets closer to his sister as they help the kids navigate the world without their mom. It’s learning how to live a new life that’s always going to be laced with death.

Magic is in many ways similar to a too-soon death. Profound, ineffable, inexplicable—even when a cause is clearly identified. Humans will never know what death is like. (Well, most of us, though a lot of Evangelicals seem to have a pretty good grip on who’s going to which afterlife party and when.)

When I was in sixth grade, I first met a kid whose mom had died young. The news whisper-circuited to me: that my classmate, Sam, no longer had a living mother. She’d died of cancer. My internal reaction was the same kind of confused sympathy that I—and many other adults—would still have today: Oh, god. That’s horrible.

I felt that way for Sam’s dad, too. Solo parenting isn’t easy. Just ask Jake Russell, the leading widower in Falling for Christmas. Not only did his wife die, but she managed to die on Christmas! Without the dead wife, he and his daughter, Avy, don’t know what to do with themselves. Fortunately for them, a concussed heiress named Sierra (Lindsay Lohan), reignites Jake’s loins. Sierra bonds with Avy over the fact that they had both survived their mothers’ deaths at a young age. All family wounds healed, the three go on to live happily ever after at a lodge in the boonies.

When I was in sixth grade Lindsay Lohan wasn’t even a Mean Girl yet, so I had to rely on personal experience to draw my conclusions about what life was like for Sam and his dad. My mom was a single parent. While her divorce from my “sperm donor,” as we affectionately call him, was ultimately a blessing, her attempt to bring home the bacon and still have the energy to function as two parents drained her. Watching her power through exhaustion day after day, I figured life wasn’t easy for Sam and his dad. At the same time, I had absolutely zero idea what they were going through.

Whether in real life or on-screen, the more intangible someone else’s circumstances, the more compelled we are to understand the whys and hows of their life. People watch The Holiday or somehow manage to sit through Falling For Christmas because movies like these distill foreign circumstances into familiar narratives. For a lot of lucky people, and probably the majority of those watching these movies, the untimely demise of a parent—or partner, or sibling, or close friend—will always be someone else’s story. Fortunately for filmmakers, it’s an easy story to sell. Viewers for whom this experience is unknown are taken to a false low, only to be proffered a hollow high. Using one of the saddest circumstances imaginable, the dead-mom Christmas trope kicks the audience’s emotions into overdrive, leaving viewers desperate for a happy ending. But for anyone familiar with this particular brand of grief, we know that’s not how it works. Instead of rubbernecking, we’re reeling over the reminder that we’ll never celebrate with her again.

We hardly ever see the dead-mom or dead-wife or dead-mom-wife in these movies. Just the sullen expressions of people who describe her with whispers. Then cut to the next scene where the main characters are slinging snowballs and sipping cocoa like nothing ever happened.

When this woman is mentioned, she’s there as a mechanism to evoke cloying emotional monologues or swoony exchanges. She’s a ghost. An afterthought. Rarely do we even hear her name. We just know her as an absence, a tool to shore up sympathy for the main character. Once that transaction’s accomplished, the ghost is erased—resurrected only to inject superfluous pathos for the sake of an emotional garnish.

After several years of poring over trash Christmas movies, I can reliably say it’s almost always a woman who gets the ax, leaving behind a cisgender widower and at least one shiny half-orphaned child. The implication is that it’s sadder when a woman dies; there’s more emotional currency. A kid has it harder without a mom. And a man having to parent without a woman? Well, obviously, such a triumphant feat can only be achieved by DILFs like Jude Law in The Holiday.

DILFS aside, this is one way the dead-mom trope doesn’t completely miss the mark. Feminist strides and 21st century be damned, women still do the majority of the physical and emotional labor that goes into raising children, making a marriage work, and keeping everyone happy at Christmas. Filmmakers are simply capitalizing on that narrative to crank out a Best-of-[Insert Holiday Movie Theme Here]-List production.

So far I’ve found very few exceptions to the only-dead-women-in-the-movie rule, including The Christmas Chronicles. I stumbled upon the Netflix hit the second Christmas my sister-in-law was dead. Before you get on my chestnuts, let me reassure you that I started this movie well aware it would be garbage. (I was cross-stitching a gift and I wanted a seasonal background movie.) I came for Kurt Russell and stayed for Goldie Hawn, having no idea what the movie was about. It took all of two seconds to get the gist: Two kids, traumatized by the death of their father, are left home alone while their also-grieving mom, played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley, is working the night shift on Christmas Eve. Santa Kurt shows up, shenanigans ensue, and the teenage boy with an attitude problem has his love of Christmas and nice-boy behavior restored.

And a man having to parent without a woman? Well, obviously, such a triumphant feat can only be achieved by DILFs like Jude Law in The Holiday.

Unlike the widower-dads who get to be a hero simply for managing to do baseline parenting, Kimberly’s character is out here bustin’ it but her family is still falling apart. Even though the dad in Falling For Christmas is kind of a mess, he’s given grace and sympathy by everyone around him. In Chronicles, however, the teenager’s shitty attitude is cast as a byproduct of the loss of a big strong man who can raise him “the right way.” Kimberly sure can’t do it. She’s out there trying to make rent instead of trimming the tree with tinsel. Suddenly ol’ Kurt Russell shows up in a beard and a sleigh and bim-bam-boom, problem solved.

While men generally have the neat luxury of being able to compartmentalize love, child-rearing, and career, the modern mother is demanded to juggle it all, with or without support. Anything less is a failure on her part. In some ways, my dead sister-in-law was the embodiment of the merry homemaker that Hallmark and Netflix love to torment us with.

Rachel grew up in Martha Stewart’s House of Christmas. Like the dead moms of our favorite streaming platforms, she carried the weight of the holidays on her back, striving to execute picture-perfect performativity in a commercialist world. She spent time and money she didn’t have shopping for the latest and greatest crap, whatever garland and trimmings Better Homes & Gardens magazine deemed trendy that year. Because that’s what was expected of her.

She adored her children, so I can see why—given that she lived in a world where Hallmark Christmas movies demand nothing but excellence from women—she’d want to give them the inventories of every Target in our tri-state area. But for as much as her labor was one of love, that pull toward performance, toward posting about everything on Facebook and Instagram, toward making sure the tree was surrounded by show-stopping gifts she and the kids could flaunt to the Joneses—all piled up into an impossible to-do list. The toll it took on her was obvious to the women in her innermost circle.

My dead sister-in-law was a human being. She could not emulate a Hallmark movie mom. Nor can her humanity be flattened into a corny hologram smiling over the people who miss her. She isn’t some straightforward Saint Mary watching over all of us. Rachel was complicated and messy and so was her life and her relationships. She gave with her whole heart and, even as her body failed, strived to carry the crushing weight of trying to do it all. It’s exactly this nuance and pressure that dies with these wife-mom characters.

I don’t know if my nephews and niece have ever seen these movies, but I imagine it would hurt to watch someone gush about how their mom’s not there to decorate the tree. Perhaps worse, a flick like The Christmas Chronicles could give the younger ones the impression that grief can be resolved during the holidays, setting the kids up for disappointment when an angel fails to cross the threshold. I’m not sure how my brother would take it, either. After watching him quiet-cry during a 2020 Super Bowl commercial with an old man telling a Google device about how much he misses his dead wife, my guess is my widower brother probably wouldn’t feel a warm and fuzzy connection with the widowed dad in the Christmas Prince series.

For years now, I’ve wondered if the people who resurrect these zombie wife-moms consider how their creation lands for people like my niece, nephews, and brother . . . not to mention my sister-in-law’s parents and ginormous circle of close friends. What story do writers and producers tell themselves so they can plow forward with the knowledge they could be robbing people of Christmas joy to feed a bunch of unscathed, fascinated folks with the on-screen equivalent of toxin-addled Pillsbury Rudolph cookies?

Maybe these filmmakers reason it doesn’t matter because we’re all dead inside anyway. Maybe they think that going out of their way to make viewers sad is fine. Or maybe these people genuinely believe they’re doing my sister-in-law’s family a favor by giving us the chance to escape into a world where an angelic woman will appear and melt all our pain away.

After watching him quiet-cry during a 2020 Super Bowl commercial with an old man telling a Google device about how much he misses his dead wife, my guess is my widower brother probably wouldn’t feel a warm and fuzzy connection with the widowed dad in the Christmas Prince series.

Sure, there’s a lot of value to on-screen personalities you can relate to—when those characters are actually relatable. Personally, I appreciate a character who’s estranged from their shitty father and, instead of having some neat and tidy reunion with their deadbeat sperm donor, the character goes on living their life without him—and maybe even develops new coping mechanisms along the way. Snuggly redemption arcs, like the dad and kid reconnecting or making peace (often at the instigation of another character), are not helpful. I know the audience is supposed to go, Oh, god! That’s wonderful! But I’m sitting there thinking Dear, god. Make it stop. For a lot of folks with deep family trauma, teddy-bear endings are nothing more than lies that promise to erase the facts of our circumstances.

Relationships, whether with a living or dead person, are complicated. It’s hard to stuff that mess into a 90-minute movie. We shouldn’t expect oodles of nuance from a blatantly superficial romcom, but there is a case to be made for uplifting flicks that show how people positively cope with the way things are. That honesty, that realistically achievable hope, is what makes it feel good. And that’s exactly what there could be more of in a movie or show that insists on deploying the dead wife-mom.

An almost good example of this is the development of a stepfather-stepson relationship after the loss of their respective wife and mother in Love Actually. I say almost because there are plenty of places where the plotline and the film overall venture into grit-teeth-and-cringe territory. (In fact, one writer at The Atlantic has apparently made it his life’s work to slam Love Actually.) What does work, however, and makes this left-behind storyline different, is that her death is pretty much the only catalyst that would make sense for launching the story arc between her child and husband. In this case, the widower doesn’t know his stepson well, he’s flummoxed when the kid brings up a problem that only the dead mom would know how to fix, the two figure it out anyway, and they become besties in the process. Their story is about how survivors rely on each other to keep moving forward . . . and that beacon of true hope—hope for a life where pain and possibility can exist concurrently—is the kind of holiday magic that could make those who’ve been left behind feel a teeny bit better.

Trash Christmas movies are popular for a reason. For those of us who indulge, they’re part of a season that can soften the blow of winter’s darkness. For a few precious weeks, SAD (aka seasonal affective disorder) gives way to GLAD (aka happiness) in the form of bright lights, window displays, tacky houses, catchy tunes, and hot cuppas. It’s a unique, sensory-filling (or overloading, depending on how you look at it) kind of joy in a bleak time in an oft-bleak world.

This time of year, the mundane feels exciting. I stop to revel in silly things we’ve collectively decided are special. I love the thrill of getting a glittery garland from Dollar Tree and I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for having a safe home to decorate, for the Christmas cards from old friends who remind me I’m not alone, and for the husband whose permanent childlike joy makes even Will Ferrell’s Elf bearable. (Except that shower scene. Gross.) Just ask the Grinch: It’s not about packages, boxes, or bags. It’s about what we already have. What is still here.

Yet, as Steve Martin’s character says in Mixed Nuts, a cheesy holiday movie in which no mothers were sacrificed, “Christmas is a time when you look at your life through a magnifying glass, and whatever you don’t have feels overwhelming.” That includes everything from family estrangement to financial pressure, to the absence of the ones who are gone. This will be my fifth Christmas without Rachel. Half a decade gone and I still catch myself wanting to pull out my phone to text her when I bake her favorite cookies, and I still get a punch to the gut when it hits me I can’t.

So I can come home to my apartment, littered with kitsch decor, cuddle up with my husband and a garbage holiday movie, and feel the happiness of this time of year . . . until someone mouths the word “widower.”

A forever storyteller and former journalist, Cat Modlin-Jackson spends her days working as a communications specialist and her nights writing essays about gender, culture, and chronic illness.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

6 Dec, 2023

- Christmas on the Moon

Feature

Christmas on the Moon

Carolyn Wells   6:00AM, 6 Dec, 2023

Illuminated christmas tree on the snow at night

Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | December 6, 2023 | 17 minutes (4,850 words)

I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 worth of explosives on the surface of the moon tops the list. The year was 1996. I was 21 years old and, in a way, quite homeless. Home is one of the enduring themes of Christmas, the joy of being in its midst and the thundering melancholy of longing for it, wondering if you can ever really get that feeling of belonging back—if you ever had it in the first place.

At the time, I was a college student in Jackson, Mississippi, and rarely went home. I would only fight with Pop about why I stopped going to church or entertain questions from Mom about my sudden hair loss and what this did or did not mean about radon poisoning. I did love my family, or at least the idea of them, and took great pride in our being rednecks who lived far off in the Piney Woods, a lawless land where nobody would deliver a pizza. So many of my college friends came from civilized places with public parks and museums. When somebody asked where I was from, I would pull out the atlas to poke my finger at the unmarked point on a map of Mississippi, between Brandon and a subatomic little village called Puckett. “Traveling circuses wintered there,” I’d say, a detail I learned from the Rankin County News as a boy.

It was a nonplace, really. The boonies. The sort of place you only went if you were searching for an escaped convict or a coonskin cap. It did not feel like home. Nowhere did. Mom was from the Delta, Pop from the Hill Country up near Coldwater. “Mama and thems,” he called it, in a county where all the cemeteries had tombstones full of Scotts and Keys, which are two of my names. It felt nice to be in a place where so many of my family members had been embalmed.

As a young man, my father declined an offer to take over the family farm and split for Memphis to seek his fortune like a character in an old country song, though he never found it there. Memphis is where I was born. Was that my home? When I was nine, Pop’s work brought us down to the Piney Woods near Puckett, some three hours south, where we had no kin. In a place like Mississippi, where kin matters, we might as well have moved to Tierre del Fuego. But I had my first kiss here, and hit my first homerun. Maybe this was home.

It was, I suppose, until a week before Thanksgiving in my senior year of college. I’d come back to do a little laundry when Pop strode into the kitchen and gravely informed me that they were selling the house and moving again, due to a land dispute with a choleric farmer up the road who hated everyone but his cows.

“Where are you moving?” I asked.

“Up to town,” Pop said.

He meant the Ross Barnett Reservoir, an artificial lake with weedy marinas surrounded by forgettable subdivisions, which would allow my father to carry on his illicit affair with the largemouth bass. It was hardly 30 minutes away, but the people up there were all new.

“You coming up to mama and thems to hunt?” Pop asked as I folded laundry.

I didn’t want to spend Christmas with my family at a farm that never would feel like home, staring backward into a past that only made you sad. I wanted to stare forward. I wanted something new. I needed money, for one. My parents sure didn’t have any. “You have to come,” Mom said. “It’s Christmas.”

“Maybe,” I said, walking out of my last childhood home for the last time. I would never come back to this place. We had no people here. Why would I come back? Where would I stay?

I hadn’t been to church in years but still read my Bible often, with all those horrid battles and beasts and skin diseases that reminded me so much of my Mississippi childhood. The elusiveness of home is one of the Bible’s great themes. God himself was mostly homeless. “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests,” he says, “but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says, a little passive-aggressively.

God doesn’t seem to care too much about where you’re from, and when you’re from a place, he likes making you go somewhere else, usually worse. The whole book is a fever dream of exile and real estate development, beginning in a garden and ending 1,200 chapters later in something even better than New York in autumn, a hermit’s grand hallucination of a city almost impossible in its beauty and cleanliness and tax revenue.

I hadn’t been to church in years but still read my Bible often, with all those horrid battles and beasts and skin diseases that reminded me so much of my Mississippi childhood.

I remembered my Bible, and all those hymns, too, so many songs about looking for a home you can’t quite put your hands on. In “We’re Marching to Zion,” we sang about the “beautiful city” that awaited us, reached via “The Gloryland Way,” a spiritual highway leading into a metaphorical Canaan’s Land where there exists a habitation on a hilltop for peoples of every nation with no war or passport requirements. Until then, we slouched through arid and inhospitable lands, filled with stumps and snakes. The message was clear: you could find a home—you just have to die first.

I drove through woods and up into town toward Jackson, wondering if God had a home for me out there, somewhere. He’d led the Israelites to theirs with a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, but driving back to campus in the dark, I saw no burning signs pointing the way. All I saw was a great big billboard off the interstate, bathed in spotlight. In a blaze of fluorescent fire, the sign shouted with holy ghost power: FIREWORKS!

And I got to thinking.

There are places that matter, sites of consecration and meaning, both natural and human, that possess, through the alchemy of time and memory, a holiness: very old churches, ancient baseball stadiums, certain groves of trees on certain campuses. The Romans called it genius loci, the spirit that inhabits the earth and air of a place.

There are places and there are also nonplaces, forgotten or ignored or transformed by human progress into blind spots of experience where nobody wants to be, like the landscaping in front of a Burger King. The expansive lot with the FIREWORKS billboard off the interstate was a nonplace, which is perhaps why I felt so irresistibly drawn to it.

The billboard stood high on a pole, just off I-55, alongside US Highway 80. Once known as the Dixie Overland Highway, it stretched from the briny waters of the Atlantic near Savannah, Georgia, to the raging tempests of the Pacific near San Diego, California, and through a now-forgettable piece of Jackson over the brown sad water of the Pearl River. As I drove by this nonplace, I beheld a magnificent wasteland below the billboard, once a truckstop, now a field of gravel featuring the sort of tattered sheet metal structures where they chain hostages to the floor.

The fireworks sign stayed up all year, because every June and December, a capacious candy-striped circus tent filled with all manner of fiery delights materialized in this post-industrial apocalypse as if by some strange wood-elf magic. It seemed like the perfect place for a boy from nowhere to spend the upcoming holiday. I don’t know what prompted me to call the telephone company and find the phone number of the company that operated this fireworks tent, but that’s exactly what I did.

“Absolutely not,” Mom said, when I explained over the phone that I’d found holiday employment with Boom City, LLC, a subsidiary of The Hunan Group, Inc., managing Central Mississippi’s largest fireworks tent on a dark patch of highway just over the river from the Murder Capital of the New South. Death was rampant in the area: stabbings, execution-style shootings at the river or the strip clubs just over the hill.

“You’ll be robbed,” Mom said. “What kind of company hires a child to sell explosives?”

Something possessed me, a hunger to escape, to hurry up and exile myself and get it over with. Missing Christmas would be a hard stop, a clean death for the past.

A few days later, during finals week, my father made a rare appearance on campus. Most of the students were gone already.

“I brought you some things,” Pop said, opening the trunk of the car to reveal gun cases, ammo, and a machete wrapped in an army blanket.

“Your momma’s worried, son. The machete will make her feel better. I sharpened it,” he said, thumbing the blade.

Pop had brought along my old 12-gauge pump, my .30-.06 rifle, and three preloaded clips with 220-grain shot, in case the fireworks tent was attacked by a team of bison.

“And some pistols,” he said, handing me a bag of pistols.

“Thanks, Pop,” I said, transferring the arsenal to my trunk, a few parking spaces over.

Sometimes, when I think about my life, I think about the quiet moments that may have shaped me more than I could’ve known, like the time my father handed me a sack of guns in a dormitory parking lot because he didn’t want me to die.

I reported for duty on Wednesday, December 18, 1996. I brought long johns, a hunting coat, bedroll, cookstove, radio, books, and the weapons; along with sufficient foodstuffs for the long dark winter: boxes of ramen, several gallons of Dinty Moore Beef Stew—enough survival gear to stage a delicious, hearty coup.

The lot was hemmed in on two sides by interstate overpasses and a vast junkyard to the rear. In between the tent and the interstate sat a midcentury motor lodge for travelers using this highway, back when travelers used this highway. The place was still open, rot be damned. A sign announced: TELEPHONE IN EVERY ROOM. Presumably, so you could call and say goodbye to your loved ones as you bled out on the floor.

The enormous circus tent had gone up overnight. A tractor-trailer the color of dry mustard backed up to one corner, but otherwise, the site was empty—a moonscape. Here I was to meet a man called Donny, who’d show me where the execution-style murders would take place.

Donny was maybe 30 years old with a .44 Magnum on his hip and ran all the Boom City tents in this part of the state. Orientation began in the tent proper, big enough for a church revival, strings of naked bulbs draped across the expanse of it. He opened the trailer, the merchandise stacked to the ceiling.

“It’s a hundred grand worth of fireworks,” he said. “I hope you got a gun.”

“I have enough guns to start a new government,” I said.

Behind the trailer, tucked away in the back, were my sleeping quarters, a tiny trailer the color and shape of a Grade B egg.

“There’s a hot plate in there,” he said. “But don’t use it.”

“Got it.”

“You get caught leaving, you’ll be fired,” he said.

“Got it.”

He looked around the empty tent and went to a dark place inside himself.

“People will want to steal everything,” he said. “But don’t go calling the cops just because. Don’t be jumpy like the last dude.”

“What happened to the last dude?” I said.

“He got jumpy.”

“What if I need to shower?”

“Use the motel,” he said, of the sex workers’ encampment across the lot. “They’ll give you a shower for five dollars.”

“Have you ever been inside it?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said.

Donny had me sign papers that relieved Boom City of any liability in the event of my dismemberment and said he’d see me in a week to empty the cash box and bury my remains.

Alone now on the surface of this godless asteroid, I tossed my bag and bedding into the egg. I’d brought a single sheet and a pair of heavy, careworn quilts made by my great-grandmother, Mama Bessie—my mother’s mother’s mother—tough as old boot leather and the size of an emaciated gnome. Mama Bessie raised six children alone and came from a time when men were men and women were also men, due to all the men dying. She made her home near Possumneck, another nonplace, east of West and west of Ethel. I could not shake the strangeness of life—how one day, you’re a boy, hoping Santa Claus answers your letters, and the next, you’re living inside a fiberglass egg with a loaded rifle and a pair of heirloom quilts from a village that Santa will never again visit, for it no longer exists.

I worked myself ragged that first day, through the early sunset and into the blue-black chill of night. My overnight security would be arriving sometime before midnight. Donny had let me hire my own night watchman, and I’d selected my big brother, Bird, the only human I knew— besides my father—who seemed capable of manslaughter. He was in town for a few days and sleeping at the new house over at the reservoir, the one I hadn’t even been to yet.

When Bird finally showed up, my body was already covered in a fine layer of gunpowder.

“What’s the new house like?” I said.

“It’s a house,” he said.

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

“What do you want me to do all night?” he said, surveying the ridiculous tent.

“Keep us both alive.” I handed him one of the pistols.

“I brought my own.”

“If something bad happens, wake me up,” I said.

“Just come out if you hear shooting,” Bird said.

That first morning, my big brother woke me with a vigorous rap on the door of the egg. I unfolded myself, thanked him, and he drove away, to return 16 hours later, as he would every night that holiday. Even when it turned steely cold, I found the solitary work hypnotic and absorbing, a way to vanquish the dread regime of time. For 18 hours, I unboxed and priced Roman candles, M-60s, Black Cats, Saturn missiles, my body covered in combustible dirt. At sunset, I walked the lot with a price gun in one hand and a pistol in the other. I warmed a bowl of Dinty Moore on the forbidden hot plate and watched holiday programming on a small TV on the counter.

Even when it turned steely cold, I found the solitary work hypnotic and absorbing, a way to vanquish the dread regime of time.

When the weather turned cold and unexpected flurries began, I donned a woolen poncho and took my smoke breaks mere steps from the explosives, using the tractor-trailer as a windbreak. I must have looked a sight to the customers and dealers who came and went with some frequency from the Sex Lodge. Sometimes I read Shakespeare. I had a Complete Works the shape and size of a Bible, tiny print on cigarette paper. I had given some thought to becoming an actor, traveling the countryside with a troupe. Who needs a home when you’ve got a stage?

A hundred yards behind the tent, out in the scrubby desert of disemboweled cars, sat a cinderblock shed where a man with a wispy white mullet lived, sexton of the junkyard. I saw him only once a day when he tootled around the lot on a small dune buggy. One day after lunch, I walked across the gravel to introduce myself. Nobody answered and I walked away. Then a voice rang out.

“Ho, there!”

I turned and there he was, in overalls and T-shirt, waving me back.

“I’m Otto,” he said.

“I’m working the tent,” I said.

“I do like a sparkler from time to time,” he said, his mind wandering to a happier youth.

“I’ve seen you out here on your dune buggy,” I said.

“That ain’t me,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, though it was obviously him.

“That’s the other Otto.”

I wanted to ask him what it was like to live with dissociative identity disorder and which Otto would be slitting my throat later. But this Otto seemed pleasant.

Customers were scarce—a few truck drivers, attorneys who drove over the bridge from downtown. One afternoon, a local TV reporter stopped by and asked to interview me for a segment on fireworks safety and I made up some important facts about fireworks safety. I must have looked like something dragged out of a bog, the scruffy character in the holiday movie who teaches life lessons.

I called Mom from the landline that ran into the tent from a nearby pole, to give her the number and offer proof of life.

“Could you come to the farm Christmas day, at least?” she said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“I left you a turkey breast, if you get a chance to go to the house,” she said.

“I can’t, I’m not allowed to leave.”

“I just hate this,” she said. “It’s Christmas.”

Isolation works a number on you. I almost wanted criminals to stop by. In the long stretch of dark between sundown and the arrival of my brother, I took to dragging a chair out in the middle of the lot, beyond the glow of the tent, under the great black ceiling of stars, staring up into the cold. I felt like Abraham when God told him to leave home and go find another one and that his family would grow as many as the stars above. I felt like Jacob, his grandson, who sleeps on the ground at night and demands a blessing and God puts him in a scissor hold and gives him a hip injury that lasts all his days. It always seemed odd to me that God would appear to Jacob and all Jacob wanted to do was wrestle. But after a week out on the moonscape, I understood. If God had shown up, I’d have wanted to wrestle, too.

The night of Christmas Eve, I sat out in front of the tent looking at the stars, the faint wash of interstate traffic a distant waterfall. Where were all the people going? Back home or madly away? My school friends were spread across the country. Other friends were over beyond the gelid swamp rot at Martin’s, a seedy downtown lounge always lively in the homecoming days before Christmas, filled with a neon haze of cigarette smoke and the beautiful stench of whisky and ash. The thought of all that happiness made me sad. I didn’t want to be sad but you can’t help what you think about. All those people, at least the ones I knew, had homes to go back to, right there in town, warm childhood beds in leafy neighborhoods where they’d grown up and could probably keep coming back to for the rest of their lives, if they wanted.

The idea of having a place to go back to—a house, a village, where you would know people and they would know you—seemed a priceless luxury beyond imagination. Pop had a place like that, at the Coldwater farm. He was there now, asleep next to Mom in a bed in his parents’ house, on the land he called home and always would. I had an egg on wheels.

When Bird showed up that night to let me sleep, I’d made up my mind.

“I’m going to the new house,” I said.

“Thought you wasn’t supposed to leave,” he said.

“If Donny shows up, tell him I’m over at the motel.”

The idea of having a place to go back to—a house, a village, where you would know people and they would know you—seemed a priceless luxury beyond imagination.

I careened through better parts of town, everything closed for Christmas Eve but shop windows gleaming yet with light. I wanted a shower. It would be a gift to myself, a small luxury, a humanizing act, a blessing to wrest from the grip of God. I pulled into the neighborhood, tucked away on a forgettable street among a series of forgettable subdivisions, each with its own forgettable boat ramp. The design of the homes was derivative at best, another subdivision without history, all those Frankenstein facades, a Victorian gable here, a Tudor chimney there, shallow porches, hollow columns. The new house was dark, just another brick ranch with shutters that wouldn’t close.

As soon as I saw it, I laughed aloud: I’d once gone out with a girl who lived here, two or three years before. Uncanny. The girl, Libby, was so pretty, so kind, so tall, so blond—like a captain for the Finnish national volleyball team—and I remember feeling envy that she lived here, in a house, in a place where you could get pizza delivered right to your door. Life is weird.

Pop’s boat was backed into the open carport. Through the window, I caught the unmistakable glow of our lighted Christmas tree, though the house was empty. I found the key Pop had handed me a month before and tried the side door, but it didn’t work, and neither did any other key, and neither would the windows budge nor the locks be jimmied with a credit card. I kicked the shrubberies. I cursed the name of God. I whispered fuck very loudly.

I climbed up into the bass boat, into the only good seat available, and smoked.

Libby! Where had her family gone? The brass knocker on the front door still had her family’s surname on it. She’d lived here all her life, she said. Why’d they leave? Divorce? Promotion? A sudden turn of ill fortune? Where did she sleep now and was she sad about that?

I guess it was in that moment that I must have first begun to see, through a glass, darkly, that all of us lose home eventually. Otto hadn’t been born in that cinderblock shed. Mom had no family farm. She had nothing but us, her children. No wonder she called the fireworks tent every night. When I took this ridiculous job and then hired her firstborn to risk his life so that I might sleep a little, I’d done more than cancel my own Christmas. I’d canceled everybody else’s, too.

I threw my head back and exhaled a cloud of breath and smoke and overhead saw a perfect square cut into the carport ceiling. Maybe Christmas didn’t have to be annulled. Maybe I could climb through the ceiling and sit by the tree and just enjoy it, for an hour or two.

I found a ladder in the garage and climbed into the attic, crawling on hands and knees across ceiling joists with a lighter to show me the way. I would take a shower and make a delicious turkey sandwich. It would make Mom so happy to know she’d fed me. Maybe I would make a fire, sit by the tree, and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, remembering happier Christmases. Maybe even pray for a few more, down the road. I would make Bird a sandwich, too.

When I took this ridiculous job and then hired her firstborn to risk his life so that I might sleep a little, I’d done more than cancel my own Christmas. I’d canceled everybody else’s, too.

Up in the rafters now, above what I reasoned was the kitchen, I kicked at every hole in the ceiling that looked like it might be an attic door, but nothing would give. I kicked and cursed like a failed St. Nick, with no gifts and no magic and no way into a house that would never be a home. No room in this inn. Not tonight.

I climbed out and drove back to the emptiness on US 80, where I half-expected to find Bird dead, all the money and fireworks gone, but he sat there, perfectly unharmed, a rifle across his lap, watching a snowy feed on the television.

Later, Bird and I sat there together in the dark beyond the light of the tent and smoked. From the interstate, the warm red light of the striped canvas must have looked inviting in the blackness. The Bible says Jesus is just like that, a tent you can crawl inside. “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God,” writes John in the Book of Revelation.

“Merry Fucking Christmas, little brother,” Bird said.

“So merry,” I said, fingering the safety of my rifle.

We looked at the stars and told stories. I did not want to leave him alone and I think he did not want me to go to sleep. Whatever sadness I felt was as much my fault as anybody’s. I’d made my choices. Home was out there, somewhere. All the hymns said so. Maybe it would be a city or maybe it would be a church or a wife and children or a house on a beautiful street, or maybe it would just be peace in the invisible tabernacle that was Jesus. Who could know.

A few days later, the world descended upon the house of explosives and bought almost everything. Nobody died, I saw no drug deals gone wrong, nobody shot anybody, and Otto didn’t show himself again and neither did the other Otto. I hired a few friends to help out on New Year’s Eve, and it was nice to have company.

After midnight, when the crowd finally thinned and the traffic slowed, out beyond the glow of the tent, my friends fired off bottle rockets and multi-shot aerials, which burst in bright bouquets of color and light over the junkyard and far across the darkness of the river, and it was fun to see them having fun, but my mind was already down the road, toward some new future where I might never have to be alone again at the most wonderful time of the year. A family. A wife. A place to sleep without wheels. My last night on the lot, in the trailer shaped like an egg, I felt ready to hatch and fly toward some new home.

These days, I don’t know what to tell people when they ask where I’m from. I have lived in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wyoming, and I’ve lived in Savannah, Georgia, now for 17 years—longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. My mother lives here and my father is buried here, under soft green grass five minutes from my house. I have a wife, too, who moved as a child even more than I did. We have three girls. One will be off to college next fall and the other two after that. I like the idea of staying here so that our children can be from somewhere, even when they leave. It’s nice to know where you’re from.

When people ask where I’m from, I still say “Mississippi.”

And people say, “Whereabouts?”

Sometimes I say, “The Piney Woods.”

Sometimes, “Brandon,” where I had my first kiss.

Or “Star,” where I went to high school.

Or “Puckett,” where I hit that homerun.

Mostly I just say “You haven’t heard of it. I haven’t even heard of it.”

I still think about that big circus tent. Strangely enough, I now live mere blocks from the very origins of the old Dixie Overland Highway, US 80. They call it Victory Drive here in Savannah, Georgia, but it’s the very same road that runs right by the tent where I worked that December, some 600 miles to the east. I ride my bike across this road to go to work. Crossing that road is like fording a river of time that runs back through the weird history of my little life and all the places I’ve lived and left. Sometimes I think the only home any of us have is in the tabernacle of memory, though I do own a pretty brick house on a leafy street, which feels as close to paradise as I’ll ever get, at least on this side of the Gloryland Way.

The year after I worked the tent, I heard that my successor had been robbed of all his money in the middle of the night and stripped naked, gagged, and bound to a pole. Discovered hours later he was believed to be dead but was only asleep. They say he was fine. I still drive over that piece of interstate every few years when I come back to Mississippi, and I always look off toward the moonscape with fondness; that desolation where I spent the loneliest Christmas of my life. The motel is still there, and so is Otto’s cottage. I don’t know if the tent goes up anymore. In place of the large FIREWORKS sign is a great big banner promising ROMANTIC ADVENTURES. I have often considered stopping, to have a closer look and stand there amid the wasteland and feel the sweet pang of lost youth, but having no weapon, I drive on.

Harrison Scott Key is the author of three nonfiction books, including How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Congratulations Who Are You Again, and The World’s Largest Man. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

4 Dec, 2023

- ‘What Kind of Man Would Abandon His Family By Pretending To Be Dead?’

Feature

‘What Kind of Man Would Abandon His Family By Pretending To Be Dead?’

Longreads   6:00AM, 4 Dec, 2023

TruthIsOutThere_1

Katya Cengel | The Atavist Magazine |November 2023 | 1,709 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 145, “The Truth Is Out There.”

Bruce Champagne stood in a small clearing next to a stump. It was mid-November 2022, and snow was already visible on the nearby mountains. All around Bruce were stands of reeds known as phragmites, some so tall they reached well over his head. Just a short walk away, through a swampy area, was the western edge of Utah Lake.

Bruce, a retired cop in his sixties, had come to this no-man’s-land to research a mysterious sighting. A few years back, an elderly couple living in a house on a nearby bluff saw something they couldn’t explain. The couple refused to recount their experience over the phone, so Bruce visited them at their home in Saratoga Springs, about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City. They told him that they went into the backyard one day because their dog was barking. Not far away, near a stump in the field behind the house, they saw a figure. A creature.

It appeared to be six or seven feet tall. It was dark, hairy, and humanlike. The creature stood up, paused, then walked away, disappearing into the reeds. The whole thing lasted three or four seconds.

After he heard the couple’s account, Bruce measured the distance between the backyard and the stump. It was 60 yards, a range at which, Bruce knew, the couple would have been able to see the contrasting shades of clothing or skin. But they said that the creature was uniform in color. Bruce also noted that it was May when the sighting happened, which is when carp spawn in Utah Lake. Perhaps the animal, whatever it was, had been feeding.

Now Bruce was weighing whether it was worth placing game cameras in the area. He’d installed them at dozens of sites over the previous decade; a blue dot marked each location on a map on his computer. He told me that retrieving data from the cameras, usually after 30 days or so, felt like Christmas morning. Except in this metaphor, Bruce’s gifts always turned out to be socks and underwear. He spent a lot of time watching footage of deer and squirrels, because the cameras never caught what he was looking for: the relict hominoid Sasquatch, popularly known as Bigfoot.

Bruce considers himself a cryptozoologist, someone who searches for and studies animals whose very existence is disputed. Unlike some of the more eccentric types in the field, Bruce is organized and methodical. He has published papers every bit as dry as those in other areas of study—they just happen to be about relict hominoids, sea serpents, and lake monsters.

His specific obsession with Bigfoot began when he was a kid, more than 50 years ago. In fact, it was right around the time his father disappeared. Bruce is reluctant to allow that the two things might be connected, but it’s hard to see it any other way.

Bruce hasn’t looked for the truth about what happened with his father nearly as hard as he’s looked for Bigfoot. Still, the truth keeps finding him and his family. Over the past five decades, revelations about a man who left home one day and never came back have taken Bruce and the rest of the Champagnes by surprise—again and again and again.

1.

Bruce’s parents met in the Navy. Alan Champagne, the oldest of five from an East Coast family, joined up right out of high school. Lynn Marie Brown enlisted after a brief stint in college studying art. An eccentric young woman who loved science fiction, especially Ray Bradbury, Lynn was 19 when the couple married. After several more years in the Navy, including a posting in Japan, Alan and Lynn settled in Bakersfield, California, a sprawling city of oil wells and orchards populated by the descendants of dust bowl migrants. It was where Lynn had grown up.

Alan found work in the communications sector and then as a probation officer. He attended and graduated from college while working. Lynn took care of the children. There were four boys—Bruce, Brad, Brian, and Barry—and one girl, Deirdre, whom everyone called DeeDee. The boys all had the same middle name: Alan.

Bruce was the oldest. His dad took him shooting, and Bruce used his father’s Winchester 12-gauge. Once when they went fishing at a bass pond, Alan oared out in a rowboat to dislodge a fish his son had caught when it became tangled in some underwater weeds. He could have cut the line, but Alan wanted to make sure Bruce saw the fish he’d caught.

Alan also liked to fish in the ocean. Bruce didn’t go on longer fishing trips, like the one his father scheduled in the late winter of 1972. On Friday, March 10, Alan drove two and a half hours from Bakersfield to Morro Bay, a small community about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was meeting a group of friends who worked in law enforcement; they would be gone for the weekend.

Morro Bay got its name from the 576-foot volcanic plug sitting at the mouth of the narrow channel connecting the bay to the Pacific—morro means “snout” in Spanish. The harbor, completed in the 1940s, was a popular launch point for recreational fishing and boating. But there were times, especially in winter, when big swells made navigating the foggy channel treacherous.

According to the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol logbook, word that Alan’s fishing trip was in trouble reached shore at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday. Someone reported that they’d heard a voice calling out for help from a sandspit stretching like a spindly finger up the bay’s western edge. The voice belonged to 15-year-old Steven Stranathan. The boat he was on that morning had capsized.

Steve had been excited to embark on his first fishing trip with a group he called “the guys.” It included Steve’s stepdad, Jack Stranathan, 58, a deputy sheriff and veteran of the Navy and Coast Guard; Joseph Boydstone, 64, a doctor at a Bakersfield jail; and Harry Morlan, 58, and Irlan Warren, 39, both probation officers like Alan, who at 32 was the youngest of the adults aboard.

Steve would later remember kneeling next to Alan just before the accident happened. They were on the cabin deck of a boxy, 28-foot leisure craft made by a company called Land N’ Sea. It was part boat, part travel trailer. It belonged to Jack, who was down below steering. The vessel was more than a mile south of the entrance to Morro Bay and a few hundred yards from the sandspit. The seas were rough. As the boat battled the waves, Steve joked to Alan, “Well, if we go, at least we’ll go laughing.”

The next thing Steve knew it was dark. The boat had split in two and capsized, and he was in the water trying to swim. The cowboy boots his stepdad had mocked him for wearing on the boat were dragging him down. Steve kicked them off, then wriggled out of his Levi’s, flannel shirt, and parka—everything but his underwear. He swam toward the surface. The water got brighter, then brighter still. Steve wondered if he’d make it. Just as he felt sure his lungs would explode, his head burst out of the water.

Steve saw his stepfather floating lifeless nearby. He also saw Harry Morlan clinging to the engines at the stern of the overturned hull. Steve and Harry managed to swim to the sandspit, where another body had washed up: It was Joseph Boydstone. Steve dragged him from the surf.

Soon a Harbor Patrol boat arrived. By 9 a.m. the Coast Guard cutter Cape Hedge was conducting a shoreline search of a five-mile area. Rescue personnel found debris from the boat: two fenders, a canopy. Irlan Warren was also found, alive. Irlan said that after being flung into the water, he swam to the surface. Sometime later, he was able to grab the boat’s propeller shaft and wait for rescue.

The only man unaccounted for was Alan.

At 10:57, an Army helicopter was dispatched to the scene, followed by one from the Navy. By 11:05, a Coast Guard plane had arrived. The pilots made low passes along the ocean side of the sandspit but found nothing.

Meanwhile a dozen firefighters and harbor patrolmen headed toward the white and yellow hull, which by then had beached. Scattered among the driftwood and kelp on the sand were ripped sections of fiberglass, a yellow seat cushion, and a paper plate. Using axes, a crowbar, and a power saw, the men cut a hole in what Land N’ Sea claimed was a “virtually unsinkable” boat. Someone reached into the boat’s cabin and pulled out a leather sandal and a gray plastic box. The crew shone a flashlight inside but couldn’t get a clear view. A rescuer was lowered headfirst into an opening, but if Alan’s body was inside he couldn’t see it.

The Navy tried to flip the hull upright. A rope was slipped under the bow and the other end was attached to a chopper. Three times an attempt was made to lift the wreckage, without success. Shovels came out, and men loosened the sand around the hull. On the fourth try, the helicopter was able to lift the hull and then slam it back down, right side up.

It was now 12:40. The tide was coming in, the ocean lapping at the men’s ankles. From the hull they pulled a waterlogged suitcase, a pillow, and a dented teakettle. Scouring the beach once more, they found a sleeping bag and a tabletop. But there was no body.

There never would be. Which was strange.

“We do have probably a disproportionate amount of accidents out here just because the coast is rough,” said Eric Endersby, who recently retired as director of the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol. Endersby didn’t work the 1972 rescue, but he knows the history of the bay as well as anyone. He said that boating accidents resulting in death are rare. But what’s even more unusual is someone disappearing after a wreck. “If somebody’s lost in the surf, even if they sink, they eventually wash in just because all the wave energy pushes them,” Eric said.

“In my thirty years,” he continued, “we’ve never not recovered somebody.”

Read the full story at The Atavist

Table of Contents

Longreads Features: 13 Dec, 2023

13 Dec, 2023

’Tis the Season to Kill the Dead-Mom Holiday Movie Trope

6 Dec, 2023

Christmas on the Moon

4 Dec, 2023

‘What Kind of Man Would Abandon His Family By Pretending To Be Dead?’