ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part One, Chapter 35: Ernie Begins his Memoir

Perhaps as a way to soothe himself after his mother’s death, perhaps as a way to bring his mother and father back to life — to live with them once again — Ernie begins a memoir, starting with his childhood.

“Mine was a happy childhood,” he tells me. “My older friend Blackie and I cut school and took alleys to the movie theaters downtown. We bought snow cones along the way. On Sundays I went to the movies with my neighborhood pal, Kenny, and afterward bought comics at the corner drugstore. In the summer, Kenny and I rode bikes together. I got into fights. I fell in love.”

I knew Ernie’s father was an alcoholic who didn’t stop drinking for good until Ernie was in high school. I knew an older boy almost suffocated Ernie in an after-school fight, putting a sheepskin-lined jacket over Ernie’s face. I knew Ernie almost drowned once, turning blue before someone pulled him out of the pool. I knew Ernie’s classmate and best friend, Perry, who lived at the Baptist Orphans Home, died of a heart ailment at age ten. And now, Ernie’s telling me his childhood was a happy one?

“You fell in love?”

“With Jo Anne. When I was twelve.”

“Can a twelve year old fall in love?”

Ernie looks at me as if I just dropped off the moon. “Of course they can. I’m proof.”

In the memoir, he writes of Jo Anne. Most of the year she lives with her grandmother and little sister in the mountains of Blackey, Kentucky, but in the summer the two sisters come to the city to live with their mother, a nurse who supports the family.

Until Ernie meets Jo Anne, he spends his summer in the usual way. Kenny and I raced our bikes. We explored the neighborhood alleys, and we tested our homemade parachutes from the highest garages we could find. We snuck into Old Man Gallagher’s back yard, where bright orange goldfish swam in a rock-lined pond, and fed them bits of bread.

Ernie doesn’t show me any of his memoir until it’s all in first draft. I have to wait to read about Jo Anne.