Jeff Darren Muse

My First Memory of Hurt

Featured in Dear Park Ranger: Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope

“I Remember the Dogs” interrogates the aftermath of my earliest memory: when my brother and I wrecked a minibike into a barbed wire fence. Reflecting on our father’s alcoholism and regret, our parents’ divorce, and the profound hold Kentucky has on my life story, this essay examines character. An excerpt:

“It’s June 1975 in central Indiana. My skull is wrapped in a swirl of bandages, my hair unwashed, nearly blond. My sullen eyes look straight at the camera, toward whom I can’t recall. But I remember posing for that portrait beside a hazy, half-grown cornfield, where my parents had built a brick one-story next to Mom’s mother, Grandma, and her quiet second husband. Though he wasn’t in the photo with me, my brother, Alan, stood nearby, his blood-soaked dressings from a shoulder wound oozing beneath a T-shirt. Twelve years old with coke-bottle eyeglasses and already a muscular chest, he was ‘built like a Burkhart,’ Mom once said, referring to Buck, whom Grandma had married first. I was tiny—three and a half feet tall, forty-five pounds or so—but in bandages I looked like a war vet just home from Vietnam. Sixteen stitches laced my head, sealing a jagged five-inch gash. Two more on my nose. Six through my left eyebrow. The black threads dangled in my peripheral vision, stinging and swollen, and I dabbed at the ones in my crusty nostril as if I’d broken my face. I’d never felt hurt like that. It’s my first memory of hurt.”

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