Hillbilly Elegy

was sure, he explained, that she was
being raped by some pervert. Years
later, after Aunt Wee’s dog growled at
her infant baby, Papaw told her husband,
Dan, that unless he got rid of the dog,
Papaw would feed it a steak marinated
in antifreeze. He wasn’t joking: Three
decades earlier, he had made the same
promise to a neighbor after a dog nearly
bit my mom. A week later that dog was
dead. In that funeral home I thought about
these things, too.
Most of all I thought about Papaw
and me. I thought about the hours we
spent practicing increasingly complex
math problems. He taught me that lack of
knowledge and lack of intelligence were