Drawed In

Virgil Combs was born with cerebral palsy in a time and place that had no patience for weakness. Eastern Kentucky did not make allowances. The mountains did not bend. And yet Virgil did not bend either - not through two bankruptcies, not through sons who broke his heart one by one, not through a lifetime of working with a body that drew his right hand inward and made every task twice as hard as it was for any other man. He worked. He prayed. He mowed. He cleaned. He kept going.Drawed In follows the Combs family of eastern Kentucky across more than six decades - from the early years of Virgil and Wanda Faye’s marriage through the full arc of a life built from almost nothing and held together by stubbornness, faith, and a refusal to ask for what he had not earned. When they arrived in Hazard in February of 1964 with nothing but each other, Virgil took a janitor job and started a mowing business. He built it account by account, added a soap delivery route, put magnetic signs on both doors of his truck, and became a deacon in the church he cleaned.Five children came. The sons, one by one, ran into felonies, jail, child support failures, and probation violations. Wanda Faye bought them cigarettes and commissary money. Virgil wanted harder love. Wanda Faye overruled him every time. He said once, quietly: I never asked nobody fer nothin I didn’t earn. He did not need to say it again.A doctor told Virgil at forty-two that he had Parkinson’s disease. It was not Parkinson’s. It was cerebral palsy doing what cerebral palsy does as a body ages. He would not be correctly understood for nearly thirty more years, when his brother Lonnie finally spoke the right name out loud. What a man does with a truth he receives at seventy is not the same as what he does with it at thirty.Virgil mowed until he was eighty-five. Wanda Faye never left his side.Drawed In is a novel about home - about what it means to stay in a place when leaving would have been easier, about what we pass down to our children even when we do not mean to, and about the particular grace of a life that does not look like much from the outside and contains everything on the inside.