“Combination Man” by Laura M. Furlan
Photo Credit:: GeoJango Maps licensed through Unsplash
Combination Man
I know a little bit about a lot of things.
But I don’t know enough about you.
—The Mills Brothers
I had just accidentally found my birth father in the Social Security Death Index. I hadn’t spoken with him in a few years, I guess, but I didn’t know that he was dead. His phone number was often disconnected. It was nearly impossible to keep track of him.
I immediately searched for an obituary, which I found easily online. It lists three sons and six daughters, not including me.
I called the funeral home and convinced the woman on the phone—a Miss Trudy—that I am his kin. Her voice was kind but distant. She sounded like Arkansas. Miss Trudy eventually gave me the phone number of a trailer park where his widow was now living.
I called the trailer park number and asked for her. She came to the phone. Melinda, I’ll call her, his widow, is also his step-daughter. She drives a school bus. She uses aliases and seems to alternatively live in Arkansas and Mississippi. She told me that my father died of lung cancer and that he asked for me. No one thought to call me. She won’t give me her phone number. She’s afraid that I want something I don’t.
I also called Tracy, his youngest daughter and my half-sister, who would often ask to talk to me when my father was alive. She seemed to be the only other family member interested in me, his secret love-child and first-born (or so I thought). He once told me that Tracy looked like me, though I’ve never seen a picture of her. Now Tracy’s phone is also disconnected, and I have a hard time remembering any conversation I’ve had with her.
In the years following this discovery, I will find out many things about him (thanks to the internet and my increasingly fabulous sleuthing skills), but I will never really know him. I will spend hours online trying to fill in the gaps of what I do know, to make sense of these pieces of my family history. Being adopted makes me desperate for a sense of belonging, though I’m increasingly unsure that I belong to this family.
I order a copy of his death certificate from Arkansas (morbid, I know). It confirms what Melinda told me, that he died of lung cancer at age 60. It also tells me his place of birth: Taylorsville, Mississippi. I’ve never been to Mississippi. I’ve actually only been to Arkansas once, on a family trip to the Ozarks when I was a teenager. These places are so foreign to me. I grew up in Chicago and have lived many places, none of which are in the South.
My father was POW in Vietnam (which I only know from my research). He spent nearly a year in captivity. I found an AP story about him with a quote from his then-wife (which I did not know that he had). He’d just come back to the States when he met my mother. He had serious PTSD. He once told me that he was in Special Forces and couldn’t talk about it. He didn’t want to be buried in the veterans cemetery in North Little Rock.
I’ve often wondered how much of his trauma I inherited. You know, epigenetically. I also wonder what he smelled like, what it would feel like for him to put his hand on my shoulder. What it would have been like to have grown up knowing him.
***
I never met my father in person. After my birth mother contacted me when I was in college, she found his name in some paperwork (because she couldn’t remember it). She then hired a private investigator to find him. She made the initial call to him, and then I started talking to him on the phone, irregularly but often for an hour at a time. Hello, darlin’, he’d say. This is your daddy. I can still hear his voice in my head (for which I am thankful)—but I never called him that.
He told me stories, and I would write them down on scraps of paper. He told me he had a twin brother, whose first name was the same as his but spelled differently. He told me about the ghosts in his house, when his former wife was dying. He told me that he had buried family treasure in a cave near the Mississippi River. He told me that we were related to Elvis, that his mother and Elvis’s mother were sisters. He told me that his mother had inherited oil money and that she used two different social security numbers.
He was charming and funny, and I loved to talk to him on the phone. I also thought that he was full of shit. He was dodgy and unstable and unbelievable, though I tried so hard to believe him because I wanted to know my history. I needed him to fill in the holes in my identity, to recover what had been taken away from me.
He does look a little bit like Elvis in his picture, the only one he ever sent, but I don’t think that his mother was related to Gladys Love Smith, Elvis’s mother, though they are both from Mississippi. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find the family connection. I discover that his mother did have a sister named Gladys, an odd coincidence to say the least.
When I was a kid, I always thought my father must have looked like Johnny Gage from Emergency or Hawkeye from MASH. Dark, handsome, funny. Of course, he must have been famous.
He once told me that he played music at a honkytonk bar. For years he refused to play me a song—until one day he did. I wish that I could remember that song.
He once invited me to come and visit him at Thanksgiving. I didn’t go.
He claimed me as kin, though I have no proof that we are related.
He doesn’t haunt me. He has not visited me in a dream.
***
My oldest son has been asking what kind of Indian we are. Fair enough. The truth is, for most of my life I didn’t know. I tell him what my father told me, that we are Apache and Osage and Cherokee. And maybe Creek—though he might have said Greek, to be honest, so I’ve always left that part out. But his parents are from Pascagoula, and hell, they could be Creek. And Taylorsville is Choctaw territory. I tell my son that I never met my father and what it feels like to be disconnected. To feel untethered, to feel like I don’t belong. He tells me he’s sad that I never got to meet my father.
He’s seven and I have a hard time parsing out all of the complexities of our Native heritage for him. He’s seven and he wants to know more about Indians, and I want him to have that knowledge, so we read books, like I did. I buy him picture books and later chapter books by Indigenous authors. He tells me when he sees egregious representations of Native people in cartoons and in books. He’s seven and he’s blonde like my birth mother and he’s going to have to defend his Indianness like I did. Do.
Also, he’s a donor-conceived kid, and he is going to grow up to be curious about the other part of his DNA. I feel guilty as hell that I can’t even be definitive about the half he gets from me.
When he was first born, I became determined to learn the Cherokee language and enrolled in online classes through Cherokee Nation. I learned how to introduce myself and how to say some animal words, like awi for deer, wadaduga for dragonfly, gili for dog. I adored the instructor, and I continued to email him for years after, but I didn’t have the stamina to stick with it. It is hard to learn a new language as an adult. I am thrilled that language revitalization is happening and that it’s working. I tell myself I will get back to it some day.
I’ve taught my son how to be curious and kind and how to stand up for what is right. He has taught me to recognize my fierce motherlove.
I’ve given him my father’s surname for a middle name. I write in his baby journal how important that name is to me and how I, if I really had the guts, would change my name.
I show him that photo that I have of my father, which he had sent only after many years of my asking. The photo has a hole at the top from a pushpin, and I imagine that he must have liked this photograph enough to hang it up somewhere. He’s wearing a white undershirt and bluejeans, and he’s standing in front of a dresser or something in the yard. He told me that he liked to fix up old furniture that he found discarded on the curb.
We see the cleft in my father’s chin, which my son and I have both inherited. I read more about chin clefts, how rare they are (especially in women), how it’s really a jaw that’s not been fused all the way.
After my father died, I looked up his address on Google street view, and for the first time saw the house that he had lived in, at least during the last few years of his life. The house is white, with a big front porch. This must be where the photo was taken. I tried to imagine him in the yard, on the porch. The house sat next to a church parking lot, and I imagine that on Sundays he could hear the singing from that church.
He had a series of careers after he returned from Vietnam. He called himself a combination man, which I took to mean that he was good at a lot of things. In Pascagoula, he worked in the shipyard until he injured his back in a fall. He told me he was a sheriff in a small Arkansas town (though I’m not sure that I believe this one). In Little Rock, he fixed dressers and took in wayward children.
In an alternate timeline, I get to meet my father. I listen to his voice, his laugh, watch how he moves through the world. He meets my sons. I meet all of my siblings and hear family stories. I am welcomed home.
***
He had been working as a carpet layer in Chicago when he met my mother. He was five years older than her (who was 16). They knew each other for six months. He never knew her last name. I don’t know exactly how or where they met, but he tells me that he was teaching her how to drive in a ’58 Fleetwood Cadillac that someone gave him as payment for roofing a house. I was conceived in that backseat. Somewhere in Addison. This all has been confirmed by my birth mother. How’s that for an origin story?
I look up pictures of ’58 Fleetwoods and try to imagine what it must have been like to drive one of those around the streets of Chicago in 1969. It’s a big fancy car with gigantic tailfins. They must have felt like they were somebody important.
One day he tells me that his mother hid the letters that my birth mother had sent him. He found them after his mother died. My birth mother remembers seeing his mother only once, on some Chicago street, yelling at her for being pregnant.
He skipped town, though he told me that he later came back to look for me, convinced for some reason that my name was Lisa Marie (more Elvis weirdness?)—though oddly enough those are my initials. I can’t imagine that if there was a newspaper notice about my impending adoption he would have seen it.
When Illinois finally changed its open records law a few years ago, I sent in a request for my original birth certificate. I had dreamed of having access to it since I was a kid. Because I already knew my birth mother’s name by then, nothing about it was shocking. My name is officially Baby Girl—my mother never named me. My father is not listed.
And so, I am left with more questions. How did she find his name after she first contacted me? What are those records? Are there papers that she signed when she gave me away? Did she name him then? Why did she choose to not name him on my birth certificate? I’ve never asked her.
And then there’s this other thing. I have an information sheet from Catholic Charities, though I was not adopted through them. It is dated 1976, which is the year that my parents adopted my brother through Catholic Charities. This paper lists the only information I’d ever known about my birth parents—their age, race, religion. Father: American Indian. Veteran. Scraps, really. Not the whole story.
***
There are things that I don’t know about my father and things that aren’t true. Like the twin brother business, a sketchy story at best. I request a copy of my father’s birth certificate, which confirms that he was a single birth. And then I find two different marriage certificates online on which he has used this alternate spelling of his name. It’s not a twin—it’s an alias. The whole family uses aliases—why, I don’t know—and I have to say that it’s frustrating at best to research family history with all of these names. I can only imagine that one uses an alias on a marriage certificate if one is already married to someone else at the time, but by this point, this fact doesn’t surprise me. By my count, he was married five or six times.
I feel like I’ve debunked the Elvis story, but I’m still caught up on the Gladys thing. And the why. Why did he believe that he was related to Elvis? Was it a story that his mother told him? One that he made up? Why would he tell me, his secret daughter, about it? What am I supposed to learn from all of this? What if I want to believe it, even though it seems to be untrue? What would it mean to be related to Elvis?
I don’t know what to do with the buried treasure story, though he told me where it was if I ever wanted to go there. Made sure I wrote down the directions. I have yet to find any clear connections to this oil story or who his Oklahoma relatives are or were. I have names.
Of course the true stories are also unbelievable. The Cadillac? The ghosts in his house, who turn out to be his wife’s ghosts and not his? Marrying his step-daughter? His mother and her two social security numbers (and many aliases)?
No wonder adoptees are so good at dissociating. We have to be.
I want to share my family history with my sons, but my ancestors are in databases and in the memories of people I’ve never met. I construct my story from fragments, these partial truths, anything I can find. I try to gather them in my mind, hold them together, try to make a whole.
Laura M. Furlan teaches Native American literature at the University of Massachusetts. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in Sentence, Jubilat, Yellow Medicine Review, and in the collection Sovereign Erotics. She is currently working on a memoir about motherhood and adoption. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her wife and two sons.