Last year, amid what passes for bustle in the\u00a0slow South, I stepped into a coffee shop in Charleston, SC. Before I could get the words \u201clarge coffee\u201d off my tongue, the barista looked me up and down and said, \u201cOh, my friend would love you.\u201d<\/p>\n
I hesitated, not sure if I should feel flattered or worried. I\u2019m not ugly enough to make babies cry but not good looking enough to turn any heads, so I tried to fit a casual smile to my face: \u201cOh yeah?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah. She loves chest hair.\u201d She nodded toward my shirt, the top two buttons undone to contend with the lowland heat. A scraggle sneaking out.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe should visit Greece,\u201d I joked, but the barista didn\u2019t get it and I took my coffee to go.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true. I\u2019m hairy. But it\u2019s not surprising: The Scots-Irish and Welsh people who fill my family tree settled in the southern Appalachian mountains in the 18th century, and we haven\u2019t left. Those Maxwells and Joneses and Prestwoods and Harrells passed along genes helping each next begotten son better survive falling snow and rising elevation.<\/p>\n
Those first men\u2014most of them settling the land I was raised on just after the Cherokee were forced out by treaty upon treaty\u2014were rough. They chose to stake their lives in a place that was then labeled only as \u201cThe Wilderness\u201d on many maps.<\/p>\n
The first of them, Abraham, pushed into the Blue Ridge Mountains at the age of 75. His wife died, he\u00a0re-married a 30-something named Bathsheba (you can\u2019t make this stuff up), and they lit out. In the midst of thick, lawless forest, with roaming bands of bushwhackers and renegade Indians ghosting through the woods, he pulled down trees and raised up new life.<\/p>\n
In the hair sprouting on my chest, I have stories of my ancestor, Hiram, fighting off the men who\u2019d come to take his sons away to fight for the Confederacy; Jim chasing down a car thief around switchbacks in the Smoky Mountains; Ray somehow missing the mountain lion that leapt after his horse. Men\u2019s men\u2014shooting guns, taming land, growing big families.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the body hair they\u2019ve given me is not in style. Had I been born 30 years earlier, coming into adulthood as Burt Reynolds spread his chest hair across the pages of\u00a0Cosmopolitan,\u00a0<\/em>then flaunt it I would. But this is the age of hairless, six-packed (nay, eight!) Ryan Goslings and Channing Tatums. Today, men ought to be bulky boys, smooth-skinned like dolphins, as if they\u2019ve been bred not to shed on the carpet.<\/p>\n Still, I\u2019ve never been tempted to shave or laser or wax or meditate away my manmade sweater. This is mostly because I\u2019m lazy. But it\u2019s also because I like my hair.\u00a0I know I\u2019ve inherited it; something in its absolute attachment to me also attaches me to the men who\u2019ve come before me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When my son was born,<\/strong> my wife and I were schooled by the nurses about the benefits of \u201cskin to skin,\u201d letting our newborn lie upon our naked chests. It seemed magical. Upon contact, he\u2019d calm, nuzzle in, close his eyes. He would also grab. Like an angry crab, he\u2019d latch onto tufts of my chest hair with no sign of ever letting loose. This was the primitive grasping reflex, the nurse later explained: the evolutionary echo of an ape infant clinging to his mother\u2019s fur as she charged through the jungle. In his first hours, it was this chest hair that my son first knew of me, our first (painful) connection. I couldn\u2019t provide him with milk, but I could give him this\u2014something to hold onto.<\/p>\n I then began to wonder what else I would or could give him. Questions of inheritance become immediate and daunting when one becomes a father. As soon as my son came crying into this world, I supposedly shifted into a model of manhood. I knew he would watch the way I approach women and food and the lawn and language. I worried about what I\u2019d pass on.<\/p>\n Yet no matter what else he received from me, I reckoned the odds pretty good that he\u2019d eventually wear the chest hair of the men before us. Surveying those men, no matter the far-off stories of fighting and rowdiness, I find hardy but gentle men. Men I\u2019d happily push in front of my boy to say,\u00a0look here.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n My mother\u2019s father<\/strong> woke up dizzy and numb a couple of weeks ago. This came out of nowhere. He\u2019s 83 but as active as a 33-year-old (which is to say, more active than I am). A few days prior, I\u2019d driven by his house to see him on a ladder installing a new floodlight, my grandmother holding the instructions down below. The day before, waking up out of sorts, he\u2019d mown the grass.<\/p>\n It took a full day of inconclusive tests and head scratching before the doctors realized his aorta had torn, blood pooling instead of pumping. They rushed him to a bigger hospital to open him up in the middle of the night. Before the surgery, the nurses shaved his chest.<\/p>\n Upon hearing he\u2019d been whisked away for emergency surgery, I felt sure he was going to die. I\u2019d seen him pale and faded earlier in the day at the hospital. While my wife ushered our son, now two years old, up the stairs for his bath, I slipped into the bedroom and wept. Hunkered in the corner, I cried most out of the fear that my son, splashing and playing above me, wouldn\u2019t come to know this man as I did.<\/p>\n My son takes his middle name from my grandfather: Ray. And my son, Abraham Ray, is taken with him. Most days, he asks to go to Papaw\u2019s house (to my grandmother\u2019s bemusement, it is always Papaw\u2019s house, not Granny and Papaw\u2019s\u2014always Papaw\u2019s food, Papaw\u2019s couch). He gets a ride on the tractor or the chance to roll down the steep hill. What tugged most at my chest that night was the inevitable conversation when my son next asked to see Papaw.<\/p>\n I also felt I had to take an accounting of what he could learn from Papaw but might not learn from me. Ray grew up in the Cataloochee Valley, the youngest of two handfuls of kids, and was a reckless boy. He\u2019d wrecked 13 cars by the time he turned 18, including the teacher\u2019s car that he backed into with the stolen school bus. But after he returned from his deployment during the Korean War and settled down with Grace, he took a job at the plant and shaped a simple, comfortable life.<\/p>\n For the 33 years that I\u2019ve known him, he\u2019s been quiet, calm, and funny, his language steeped in these mountains\u2014full of\u00a0thars<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0yuns<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0aint\u2019s<\/em>\u2014and his manner always even. I\u2019d only seen hints of his revelrous youth\u2014his picking up a pool cue and running the table at an uncle\u2019s house. From every other angle I could see, he was a man who could fix anything broken, deliver a witty turn of phrase in the midst of small talk, and do whatever his family needed: working the night shift, driving long delivery routes, doing the dishes after every meal.<\/p>\n I worried I couldn\u2019t properly teach my son to use\u00a0a ratchet or to change his oil. I worried he\u2019d not know a man as wholly content to be still as my grandfather,\u00a0a man always at ease to sit and watch and listen. Sobbing on the floor in the dark, I could only hope I\u2019d inherited and embodied some of the man my grandfather had become. If not for my sake, for my son\u2019s.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Miraculously, my grandfather<\/strong> survived the surgery. Most miraculously, his body reacted like a young man\u2019s; the hospital staff couldn\u2019t help but release him merely six days after removing and replacing his heart. Grandma took him home, a long scar running the length of his now-shaven chest. I wondered how strange his chest felt to him, the smoothness of his skin like a boy\u2019s but with a fault line now bisecting him.\u00a0A reminder of life and death.<\/p>\n We couldn\u2019t hold our son off for long. A few days after Papaw returned home, we took Abe over. I wished I could know what he saw in the Papaw before him, leaning on a walker, slowed and tired.<\/p>\n \u201cHey, little feller,\u201d Papaw said.<\/p>\n In my arms, Abe absent-mindedly slid his hand into my shirt\u2014an occasional nervous habit\u2014brushing his small fingers along my hair. He smiled at Papaw, and I hoped that what he saw standing in that house was a man we both hoped we might become, a man like so many of the men who shape us: those tough, dogged, soft souls covered up in hair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I knew my son would watch the way I approach women and food and the lawn and language. 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