Dirt Read online

  “Mary’s story is one that will live deep in the corners of your heart forever, reminding you, through her own experiences and beautiful storytelling, that the good stuff of life is often found in the hardest circumstances. Dirt is the inspiring story of a girl who knew something better was on the other side of fear and challenge. Mary’s words are so poignant and touched my heart in so many ways. This is a story you will keep with you long after you turn the final page. I’m so excited to share this truly extraordinary memoir with everyone I know, and I’m eager for Mary to put pen to paper again.”

  Emily Ley, bestselling author of When Less Becomes More: Making Space for Slow, Simple, and Good

  “Mary Marantz is a born storyteller! She is an exceptional writer who has that unique ability to transform even the hardest of scenes into profound fine art. Her writing just has a way of taking you by the hand and walking you back to truth, to a place called home. If you’re tired of running from your story and ready to lean into the strength it gives you, this book is for you. Dirt is truly a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps American anthem. All I could think was how our two stories are so different, and yet Mary’s story is also my own. It’s all of our stories. This deeply moving debut book is a triumph in every way!”

  Jessica Honegger, founder of Noonday Collection and author of Imperfect Courage

  “In Philippians, the apostle Paul talks about the great stuff he’s done, the horrible stuff he’s been through, and how it’s all forgettable in light of God. Those verses come to mind when I hear or read Mary’s words. Her story matters because all of our stories matter—but it’s not her accolades or her acknowledgments of pain that you’ll remember most. Her words reek of God’s grace, glory, and goodness, and of our ability to cling to them. Whether you come to this book with the most successful or the most stinky past, you’ll be blessed and loved well by Mary’s leading. She’s a good friend, and this is a good book.”

  Jess Connolly, author of You Are the Girl for the Job and Take It Too Far

  “In this captivating, compelling book, Mary Marantz draws you into a moving story with plenty of space to breathe and say, ‘I’ve felt that too.’ Marantz writes from right here on the ground, meeting you where you are. She tells the unique story of her life in a beautifully relatable way, where you will comb through every page and be reminded: through it all, there is grace.”

  Morgan Harper Nichols, author of All Along You Were Blooming: Thoughts for Boundless Living

  “It’s easy to want to discard your roots and turn away from the mess that made you, but Mary Marantz does just the opposite in this beautiful work. Filled with the kind of writing that drops you directly into the gritty details of the story, Mary sifts through her own ‘dirt’ to reveal pure treasures and glimpses of God to hold on to for the long haul. This book is gorgeously written, and every last word is so intentionally placed. The words are stunning. The pictures she paints are so real, I could not put it down! Get ready to have your heart shaken up and made better through the pages of this book.”

  Hannah Brencher, author of Come Matter Here and Fighting Forward (2021)

  “How is it possible to find myself within a story that is so different from my own? Through gorgeous writing and brave truth telling, Mary guides us to lean into our own stories and find transformation and redemption we never thought possible. Dirt is an anthem of love over circumstances and faith over fear. I dare you to start this book and not read it in one sitting. I know it will leave you inspired, challenged, and changed.”

  Nicole Zasowski, marriage and family therapist and author of From Lost to Found

  “Dirt is a beautifully written memoir that I could barely put down. Mary’s words are equal parts poetry and pain, sadness and soaring redemption. For every one of us who has ever wished for an easier story, Dirt is the fight song we have been waiting for. An invitation to trade shame, striving, perfectionism, and unforgiveness for grace, rest, freedom, and reconciliation. I found myself repeatedly nodding my head, seeing myself in her story, even though our pasts could not be more different. I can’t think of a more important, desperately needed message right now. This book is a wakeup call, a resounding reminder to stop running and to dig deep into the mud that made us.”

  Tonya Dalton, bestselling author of The Joy of Missing Out

  “One word: riveting. If you’re looking for your next page-turner that will make you believe anything is possible for yourself, Dirt is what you need to read.”

  Jess Ekstrom, author of Chasing the Bright Side

  © 2020 by Mary Marantz

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-2670-6

  Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016

  Photo on page 55 courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-fsa-8a39820.

  Published in association with Illuminate Literary Agency, www.Illuminateliterary.com.

  Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Interior design by William Overbeeke.

  For Dad, Mom, and Goldie,

  who loved the Girl In the Trailer.

  For Justin,

  who loved the Girl After the Trailer.

  I have been born a new thing.

  This time, one with both roots and wings.

  For the people of West Virginia,

  who are unshakable proof of the indomitable spirit

  that grows wild in the mountains there.

  This story belongs to all of us.

  Contents

  Cover 1

  Endorsements 2

  Half Title Page 3

  Title Page 5

  Copyright Page 6

  Dedication 7

  Prologue 11

  Part I: The Girl in the Trailer 17

  1. It Always Started with Dirt 19

  2. You Have to Dig Down to Get to the Good Part 29

  3. A Tiny Shift in Words That Changes Everything 39

  4. Marked for Hard Things 51

  5. It Was Always in Our Blood 61

  6. Something Not Always Seen but Felt 73

  7. These Scars We Bear 85

  8. Leaving Is a Suitcase 97

  9. None of It Ever Made Her Feel More Real 109

  10. The Scars That Stitch Us Back Together Again 119

  Interlude 133

  Part II: The Girl After the Trailer 135

  11. A Ship Sailing toward a Distant Shore 137

  12. Stories Change Stories 151

  13. Belonging Is a Gray J. Crew Sweater 163

  14. A Constellation of Complicated 177

  15. Substance over Surface 191

  16. The Heavy Chains We Never Asked to Bear 201

  17. Not Even Real Dirt 209

  18. It’s Safe Now for You to Rest 219

  19. Grace Is a Root Word 229

  20. The Broken Was Part of the Plan All Along 239

  21. At Last Freedom Takes Root and Comes Home 251

  Epilogue 259

  Author Note 261

  Acknowledgmen
ts 263

  About the Author 269

  Back Ads 271

  Cover Flaps 274

  Back Cover 275

  Prologue

  HIS HANDS LOOKED even dirtier than I’d remembered, resting against the crisp, white, sterile sheets of a bed tucked away in the far-flung outer reaches of the hospital corner.

  I was standing in the same hospital I’d been born in some thirty-six years earlier in the spring of 1980, when Mom was already a wife of three years just two months shy of her twenty-first birthday, and he had yet to find his way to wanting to be a father. But from the first time he held me, I had been my father’s child, and that had been both our unraveling and the common thread that stitched us back together again.

  Once, we had known what it was to roar at one another—to shout and spit and fight and rail against one another with all the similarities in us that drove us to our differences. With all the stubbornness and set-in-our-ways that made us both so very much the same. We once knew what it was to fight with one another—and for one another. To hold on with a white-knuckle grip when everything and everyone around us was letting go. And now the blip-blip-blip of the machines casting their pale green light on everything standing between us—my leaving, my running, my staying gone—was the loudest noise in the room.

  It had been five years since I had been back home. Not since we laid Goldie in the cold September ground, when Dad and I sat under a cheap tent awning covering her newly open wound of a grave long after everyone else had gone. We held on to each other and cried stinging, biting tears as the rain picked up all around us and thrummed out a holy, haunting rhythm turned hymn on the vinyl above.

  A few hours before the tent, I had stood in a small, red-velvet-clad funeral home and delivered the eulogy for my beloved grandmother to a room only half full of people, a few of which might have preferred it if I’d just stayed gone. I hadn’t been bothered to be there when she died, so why should I be the one to get the final word? A day later, Dad moved from our old brown single-wide trailer into Goldie’s little red, suddenly empty house next door—the same house where he had both grown up and grown up way too fast—while my mom went back to her motel.

  A year later, he was vomiting up blood every day. It would come upon him with such a suddenness and violence that it didn’t so much spill out of him as erupt from his lips. He rarely made it to the bathroom in time, and as such, Goldie’s pristine green carpeting—the same she had chosen fifteen years prior because it perfectly matched her pretty pink-and-green flowered couch—was now streaked in deep shades of dark, dried crimson. Battle stripes that perfectly matched the starry dots of the same kind splattered on the ceiling above. Had she not already been dead, the sight of it surely would have killed her.

  I could just picture her now, up there on the top of Holcomb Holler, where our family cemetery rested in a small field surrounded by a sentinel of overgrown weeds. Where I like to imagine that the ghosts of our ancestors herald you up the twisting, turning knots of dirt road, rushing and whispering beside a motorcade of black cars as they make their unhurried, mournful crawl up the mountainside, ushering the next body on to its resting place with a refrain as low and lonesome as the slow pull of rosin on strings. Kindred souls just walking each other home. There, in my mind, Goldie would be doing exactly what she always said she’d do if any of us ever did something to disappoint her: spinning in her grave and cussing like a sailor under her dissipated breath, despite the good church lady she’d always been.

  Being my father, a man known far and wide for such bumper-sticker faith as “I’m tough, I can take it” and “Ohhh, it’ll be alright,” it had taken him far too long to go to the doctor. Now his insides were eaten up with the cancer, three tumors that had grown into one. He had lost sixty pounds through the ordeal. And it had mined and hollowed out his face in such a way—aged him twenty years seemingly overnight—that I could hardly recognize him now. My breath caught in my throat when I walked into the dim light of that hospital room and saw him, a man much older than I had left him. I had to look away so he wouldn’t see the horror in my eyes. And I was left staring at his dirty hands leaving marks on the crisp, white sheets.

  They were the only thing left about him that I recognized.

  From the hallway, I could hear the nurses at their station—their accents sounded both foreign and familiar at the same time, like the two different versions of myself that I now held inside me couldn’t agree on which one it was. There was the me who was the Girl In the Trailer . . . and then there was the me who came after. And they had both come to stand by my father’s bedside, knowing full well they should have come much sooner.

  It had been five years since I had been home to Nicholas County, West Virginia, but I hadn’t lived there in eighteen. And at that moment I was, in every way, both a girl and a woman divided: eighteen years at home and eighteen years since I’d left. I had just crossed some unspoken threshold of a finish line where I’d now spent as much of my life outside of that trailer as I had in it. And thinking back on it right then, it felt much less like a memory and more like another lifetime.

  In the flickering, green, beeping darkness, Dad’s eyes rolled forward—slow, wincing, as if that effort alone might finish him—blinked, and then opened.

  “Hey, Kid. How we doing?”

  It had been years since he’d called me Kid. Not since I left for law school at Yale and he finally, for the first time in my life, started calling me Mary. He’d visited me exactly twice in New Haven in the three years I was in school there—once to help me find an apartment and once to move me in. Neither visit was to come back and watch me walk across the stage when I graduated. A lifetime of work to help get me to that place, and he wasn’t even there to witness it. But I had at least graduated to my given name, and that felt like something. So to hear him call me Kid now, in the small, still darkness of this unfamiliar room, it felt like he wasn’t so much in another place as another time.

  My first thought was that they must have him on some powerful pain medicine, and that through an IV-induced fog he was just pretty out of it. I traced the tube coming out of his arm to a clear bag of liquid hanging from a metal stand and churning out its drip, drip, drip rhythm till all the drips and blips in the room seemed to be keeping time with one another, and I felt like I might lose my mind at the repetition and replaying of it all. It was like scenes from a projector reel were casting mere shadows of our life—both he and I together, and he and I apart—on the sanitized, whitewashed walls all around us. They blurred and bled into one another in a way that began to rewind time, my past, present, and future all melting into one. And I couldn’t bring myself to look at anything but the hands that helped build me.

  “Kid, Kid, Kidster. I was praying that you’d come.”

  Now I was certain. The time to be worried was here.

  The only church on Sunday where JR Bess had ever worshiped was at the altar of the woods. His congregation was a canopy of trees ripe for the cutting. His preacher was a busted-up, run-down John Deere 550 dozer always pushing him, driving him on toward his higher power. To me, he was not a man who ever seemed to be on real good terms with God. And to take one look at the struggle that was his life, it would be easy to assume that God had been more than fine with that arrangement. As far as I knew, Dad hadn’t prayed for anything or anyone a day in his life.

  And I had no idea why he’d be starting now.

  1

  It Always Started with Dirt

  FROM THE EDGE of a dirt path off of Airport Road, where the road forks and snakes just a little taller to form the highest point on Fenwick Mountain, you can stand and watch a storm roll in from any and all directions.

  We would do that often when I was little. We’d stand out under the wooden overhang of a hand-built lean-to turned front porch—where the boards were all mismatched scraps of whatever you could find and the nails, half-hammered and crooked, sat rusted from the punishment of a blistering summer sun—and watch as
streaks of lightning lit up the heat of a July night sky. While thunder rumbled hard and shook the mountains.

  Dad stood next to me in his muddy jeans and a long-since-yellowed white undershirt, his bare, battered feet on the dirt floor of the porch. His dark hair wild, as if standing on end at the electricity of it all.

  “Sure is pretty, ain’t it, Kid? Y’know, if you listen close and count, you can tell how far away it is.”

  The next lightning flashed, and we started counting together. We only got to two-Mississippi before we heard that low rumble of thunder rising up again. This storm wasn’t coming. It was already on top of us.

  When the rain came, it washed over us in sheets and waves, hammering out a Johnny Cash train-track get-a-rhythm on the tin-can roof of our single-wide trailer that paired nicely with the lonesome whistle-will of the wind through the chimes Mom had hung just outside my window. A true West Virginia lullaby if ever I heard one.

  That night, as we stood and stared into the face of the storm—the kind of earth-shaking furor that makes you feel like the hand of God itself is hovering just a few feet above the ground with a finger pointed directly at you—we froze as lightning met ground just two houses down, and their transformer lit up and started sparking like a Roman candle. The house was spared, but the garage burned down and with it the family dog. Well, technically he died when the fire department answering the call had to shoot him to put him out of his misery, but he was lost nonetheless.

  The mountain I come from was never easy on animals.

  I WAS NOT a beautiful child.

  Gap-toothed, with a mess of wild, curly brown hair—the chemically altered kind so synonymous with the eighties and that decade’s particular love of cheap home perms, big hairspray bangs, and the chance to change whatever lot in life you’d naturally been given. I had eyes that were set too close together, lips that were far too thin, and—to add insult to injury—my father’s nose set right in the middle to remind all the other features that they were playing far too small.