Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (3 page)

Grandpa Jay had a routine everyone in town set their clocks by. Ham steak and eggs for breakfast, then a drive out to the gas station in his black El Camino, with a red firebird brazenly painted on the hood. He owned the station and his son Jay Jay helped him run it. Then home for
lunch, that El Camino crawling at 45 miles an hour back to the house. Lunch. Nap. Drive out to the Spit (a large tongue of land that juts into the water, a famed attraction of Homer), the horses under the hood never given a chance to let loose. He was such a famously slow driver that folks in town could be heard saying, “Well, it’s two o’clock, better get on the road before we get stuck behind Jay.”

Jay died of a perforated ulcer. He collapsed in the bathroom at home, blood spilling everywhere. At the hospital, after they announced he’d passed, the nurse came out with a ziplock bag that held a neat roll of two thousand dollars cash. She handed it to my grandmother, saying they had found it in his hollow leg.

For years after Grandpa died, I could not keep my mind from wandering morbidly when I went into that bathroom. I would stare down at the linoleum flooring and imagine my poor grandmother, dutifully cleaning all that blood from the very spot.

My grandmother Arva was the quintessential doting grandma. In a world where nothing was stable or kind or sweet, she was its counterpoint. She was affectionate and warm. She gave me Twinkies and doted on me and I knew she loved me. I stayed with her often, and had a small room that was sort of mine. I watched her, ever the subservient housewife and slave in the kitchen, serve Grandpa. But with me, she was funny, and opinionated even, though always in her kind way. She took me to church with her and always made sure I had a nice little dress to wear.

I got the feeling she had lived her life for everyone else and she was just waiting for the chance to be free. Once, when I was a teenager, she said to me, “I sure hope your granddad dies soon so I can go live a little.” This floored me, as she never said a cross word otherwise, much less such a shocking confession. We were in the car, and I remember the soft, round outline of her cheek, her smooth nose in profile, as she paused a bit too long, as if contemplating the one stop sign in town.

After Grandpa died she got a new hip and an RV and hit the road, visiting relations all over the Lower 48 (what we Alaskans call the continental U.S.). I was happy for her.

•   •   •

M
Y PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS
were Ruth and Yule Farnorth Kilcher, a middle name my grandfather invented for himself. They had come to Alaska from Switzerland. Well, actually they were living in Germany at the time, just before World War II. My grandfather told me that they were part of a group of young idealists from various disciplines—painters, singers, filmmakers, philosophers—determined to leave Europe before the war. They had heard that the Territory of Alaska was giving away homesteads, free land to anyone willing to settle the wild country. They sent a scout, Yule, a dashing and charismatic philosopher, musician, chess player, and linguist, to go ahead and secure the place. Reportedly, he stowed away on a ship and was discovered by the crew. When he was brought before the Italian captain, he recognized the officer’s dialect and guessed the town in Italy where he was from. Yule guessed correctly, and followed up the trick by singing folk songs particular to that region. The captain was suitably impressed, and I like to imagine my grandfather and that captain, drunk from wine, singing songs as they sailed through the dark night. Yule eventually made his way to the New World. He hiked over the Harding Icefield with a ladder on his back, and when he came to a crevasse in the ice, he would lay the ladder over it, walk across it, return the ladder to his back, and keep going. It took him two years, but he finally arrived in Homer and secured a homestead free of charge, a gift from the government. He sent word to his comrades, telling them to come on over: he had found a beautiful place, and they could create their Utopia. But everyone had moved on with their lives. Everyone but Ruth. Ruth was an aspiring opera singer, and she decided to leave her dreams
of singing, her loved ones, and everything she knew, to marry a man she hardly knew, because she felt that if she was ever going to have children, they must be raised in a free country. With the war imminent, she left a modern Europe for a new and unsettled land to become a pioneer woman. No electricity, no water, no market. Just mountains and a fertile but unforgiving land. They built a cabin from trees they felled. They took a horse and wagon to town on the beach at low tide. She learned to hunt, can, and cut hay by hand.

Ruth had eight children, six girls and two boys—Mairiis (who we called Mossy), Wurtila Dora, Linda Fay, Attila Kuno, Sunrise Diana Irene, Edwin Otto, Stellavera Septima, Catkin Melody—and taught them all how to sing. The family sang folk music from the old country instead of saying prayers before each meal, and music was passed down to generations in our family like antiques or heirlooms are in others. Songs are my history—the story of us. Where there was pain in our family there was also song not far behind, and healing.

My dad is Attila Kuno Kilcher. We call him Atz. He was the fourth child and eldest son, born in Switzerland while his parents were there visiting relatives. Atz’s childhood was a mix of tremendously hard work and also creativity and freedom that his parents fostered in living generally by the principles of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner.

When I was young, I would hitchhike to town, and once my rides found out I was a Kilcher, they would say, “My, how lucky you are!” But they did not live with my grandfather. I would quip in the glib tone of a teenager that “Yule was a man loved dearly by all but those who knew him well.” A cynical thing for a teenager to say, but I was trying to get at a point that was hard to speak about—the gap that often lies between a person’s higher self and their struggles with the darker self. Yule was enigmatic and brilliant, but like many early settlers of the West, he had a hell of a hard streak. You had to, I imagine, to tame wild land. To build
rafts of raw timber and sail across uncharted Alaskan waters. He also had an abusive streak, physically and psychologically, and Ruth and many of his children suffered dearly when his moods turned dark.

Yule was a state senator for one term, and upon hearing he’d lost the reelection, my dad offered his condolences while they were driving together somewhere. Yule was so angry and embarrassed by the defeat that he accused my dad of being happy about the loss. He screamed repeatedly, “You’re glad your old man has lost! I know what you’re thinking!” until my dad began to doubt what he had actually thought in the first place. It is the first memory my dad has of his own psychological suffering. Physically, Yule hit my dad often, backhanding him head over heels or striking him with a tool that Yule deemed had been fetched too slowly. When Yule found out my dad had been smoking, he made my dad strip down naked and then walked around him and whipped his whole body. Yule built many layers of shame and cruelty into his abuse and punishments, in both mind and body. My dad suffered a lot of trauma in his childhood, and then went off to Vietnam and sustained more.

My dad never heard the words “I love you” from his father until Yule was on his deathbed. In his final hours a miracle occurred. Yule softened and looked at my dad and said he was sorry, that he loved Atz and was proud of him. That moment changed my dad’s life. It gave him something he had needed so desperately. Many stories like my dad’s end without hearing those words. Many stories like mine end without a parent making amends, or achieving a loving, honest relationship. Mine did, because of my dad’s willingness, and my own, to do the hard work it takes to learn a new emotional language. He and I share a common goal: to be accountable, fulfilled human beings. I have a relationship now with my dad that I cherish.

As for Yule, I loved and feared him. He was one of the brightest men
I have ever known, and when he gave you his attention, you felt like the sun was shining on you alone. He spoke many languages and knew the root words that unified them. He was forever espousing philosophy. His temper was quick, though, and his sharp mind could turn on you, leaving you bare. He would walk into the barn where we lived, unannounced, and begin to read our mail. He had a thick Swiss accent and wore a beret over his thinning brown hair. He smelled of stout sourdough bread and garlic. He was not overly tall, but was lean and powerfully built, with chiseled features.

Ruth was the perfect counterpoint. Her Swiss accent was gentle, lilting, musical. She was every bit the poet and artist. She had high cheekbones and wore her long hair in a simple but elegant fashion. She wrote and won awards for her column in the Anchorage paper.

Yule helped draft the Alaska Constitution. After they’d signed it, the jade chandelier that was hanging overhead broke, and each man took several pieces. I remember my grandmother telling me the story, pressing a cool shard of that jade into my young hand.

As Yule became political and went on to be elected as a Democratic senator for one term, it was up to Ruth to run the homestead along with her children. As the years turned to decades, the abuse and long winters finally wore her down, and she took Catkin, her youngest, still a baby, gave up her stake in the homestead, and went to the Lower 48. She married a Marine and lived out the rest of her days in Knoxville, Tennessee. Years later I went to visit her there, and she gave me a self-published book of her poetry. It was called
Voice of the Initiate
. She told me of her youth in Switzerland, her dreams for the artistic colony in Alaska, how she gave up her dreams of singing to have kids in that beautiful wild country. How she taught singing to all her children. She had tears in her eyes as she pulled a file from a box near her bed. Inside it were press clippings of
mine. She said it had been worth giving up her dreams to see them come true for me.

I honor and respect the generations who have come before me, and I wrote them a song about this unpayable debt of gratitude. I was privileged to perform it as a duet with Dolly Parton on my newest album.

My Father’s Daughter

She stepped off of the boat to see flowers in his hand

The man she would marry was as hard as the mountains

She had his children in a log cabin

Soon I’d be another star in this family’s constellation

In the land of the midnight sun

Searching for gold

I am my father’s daughter

He has his mother’s eyes

I am the product of her sacrifice

I am the accumulation of the dreams of generations

And their stories live in me like holy water

I am my father’s daughter

My father raised me in an old log cabin

And he sang for me the songs his mother sang to him

In honkey-tonks and empty bars,

Just me and him and that old guitar

He passed on a legacy wrapped up in a melody

And I carry on

Searching for gold

I am my father’s daughter

I have his eyes

I am the product of his sacrifice

I am the accumulation of the dreams of generations

And their stories live in me like holy water

I am my father’s daughter

Every time I step onstage

And the music finds me

I don’t need gold to remind me

I am my father’s daughter

I have my Grandma’s eyes

I am the product of such sacrifice

I am the accumulation of the dreams of generations

And their stories live in me like holy water

I am my father’s daughter

Oh

I am my father’s daughter

two

broken harmonies

B
ut we did not always live on the homestead. We started out in Anchorage. We started out as a family, with a mom and everything.

My father was the first one of his family to carry music from a passion into a profession, and began writing his own songs when he was a teenager, eventually making a living at it. He took his guitar to Vietnam, where music helped him to assuage the trauma of his childhood and the effects of war. When he met my mother, he found a new family in her religion that felt safe to him. He converted and they were married in the Mormon Church. At first they lived in a remote cabin at the head of Kachemak Bay. They had their first child, my older brother Shane, in 1971. Their second son, Vance, was born in September of 1972. He died suddenly, before he was a year old.

My dad decided to pursue academics, and they moved to Utah, where he got his master’s degree in social work at Brigham Young University, becoming the first college graduate in his family. I was born there in 1974 while my dad was attending school. When he graduated, we moved back
to Anchorage, where he worked with troubled youth. We lived in an apartment until my dad had the money to build us a larger house. Only a few memories stand out for me. I remember feeling safer by making myself a pallet of blankets by the bedroom door, choosing to sleep there instead of in my bed. I remember a giant rotating Big Boy sign across the street. I remember a small kitchen window where sunlight streamed in. When we moved to a larger house shortly after, I got my own room and was allowed to pick my own carpet—pink shag. My younger brother, Atz Lee, was born in 1976.