Loving My Outlaw Uncle, in Spite of His Alcoholism

I remember the day my family read about my uncle's heart attack and what a sigh of relief we heaved. Nobody likes to hear that a loved one has died of a heart attack, but my uncle's death had been mysterious until the results of his autopsy were released. He had been driving his truck on a county road when it had suddenly flipped off the road, and he was found dead inside. My uncle had often battled alcoholism during his life, and we all assumed that maybe he had fallen under the spell of bad habits once again.

My uncle was born with the name Virgil, which is hands-down the name of a sissy. My uncle was no sissy. He picked up the name Butch in elementary school, and it stuck. (His son would later be named Little Butch.) He was a well-behaved bad boy. He went to church every Sunday with his mother, father, & sisters. He even sang in front of congregations.

But somewhere along the line, he became something of a renegade cowboy in his spirit. The old cliche that Country songs are always about cowboys losing their truck, their woman, & crying in their beers seemed to apply to my uncle. As far as I recollect, he was divorced from my aunt before his sons were out of high school. He remarried, and his wife had a baby girl, but he was divorced once again in a few more years. This didn't mean that he didn't love anybody. No, it just meant that he didn't know how to express his love.

After his second divorce, his life seemed to sink into a quagmire. Shortly thereafter, he was later sent to prison. Why? We are not sure. The only thing we do know for sure is that before my grandfather died, his son (my uncle) may have had access to his estate. Somehow, this ended up so mismanaged that my grandfather's house was lost to the government after he passed. Perhaps my uncle was misusing my grandfather's funds, but it is certainly clear to me that my uncle loved his father.

Alcohol can make a person do strange things. Also, not everybody is born to manage real estate.

You could say that my uncle didn't live up to his early promise, but then again my uncle didn't really make many promises to the world. He was a quiet guy, with a deep voice & a drawl. He just liked to be left alone. He had his vices, but he also cared for the important people in his life.

My mother remembers of when she was a child, and my uncle was a young teen. He worked his first job, helping out at a scrap yard in the afternoons. After weeks of this work, he came home with a surprise. He had put together a bicycle with parts from the scrap yard, and he wanted to give it to my mother as a gift. On the day of his funeral several months ago, my mother remembered this story. After all of the heartache of years of communication lost to alcoholism, my uncle's act of goodwill had still survived.

My mother no longer has the bicycle my uncle gave her over 50 years ago, but she knows she had an older brother who cared.