THE HOUSE INSIDE ME

by Camelia Wheatley

  I reached under my bed and pulled out the mirror bin, an heirloom, an amulet. This was the very mirror bin handmade by Simon Ainsley, made for his seventh-born daughter, my great-great-grandmother Joseymae, number seven. Maw Sue said the blood of every Ainsley sister is absorbed inside the wood and is what binds us to them, the life of each person to the next. As the bins are passed on—so is the tradition. I opened the mirror bin and took out my pen and notebook. I jotted down some details of today. Maw Sue said it was good for those who are gifted to journal our thoughts in an effort to remember them because over time, life tends to render us mindless without memories. It was a trick of the enemy, the horrible interceptors she called “memory muzzling.” It took our hope and without hope, we die. It sounded awful, so I was meticulous about writing the stories she told me down on paper so I wouldn’t forget. Just in case. I glanced up at the window where the lone crackle sat on the ledge, catching moonlight glints, and I began writing.

  I commemorate this day, the crackle and my vow. The dreadful curse of adulthood is coming, and when I’m left to wander like a desert lizard with all the other idiots, I hope this will serve as a reminder of what’s important. Me. I’m important. I’m a Seeker behind the pine curtain anointed with a locust crown with purpose. A girl with gifts and secrets. A girl with a house of sevens and shadows. Grit and grace. Little ‘ole Me. Cassidy Cleo Collard. The Moon Wanderer. Queen of the Pine Curtain. Southern Sap. The simple, barefoot girl who plays in the mud, collects crackles, dances in the rain, builds pine straw houses, climbs trees and consumes words and stories. A girl who wants to grow up and make lovely her losses.

  Signed, Cassidy Cleo Collard

  15

  Go Out Knowing

  To live is the rarest thing in the world.

  Most people just exist.

  ~ Oscar Wilde

  The scent of pine is the locust queen’s perfume. My scent, my belonging. The plush haven of pine trees is my kingdom come. My sacred place, my heritage. This land has been in my family for generations. Big Pops (Jefferson James Collard) came here in the nineteenth century and raised his family. His son, William Jefferson Collard (Papa C) married May Dell Adams (Mama C) and they raised four boys, the oldest being my father, Gavin Beck Collard. During Dad’s childhood, May Dell’s mother, Susannah Josephine Worrell, otherwise known as Maw Sue, moved onto the property. Years later, my own father followed tradition. He got married and built a house right next door.

  Growing up with family on all sides gave me plenty of time to explore our barbaric ancestral tree. I was curious to know where we came from. I tried to acquire Meg’s help, but she scorned my request as if she originated from a line of nobility found in a jeweled oak tree, some scandalous fifteen-minute affair in the back room of the White House, JFK meets Maid Mary drama. Her efforts at obtaining royal status began at a young age when Maw Sue told her she was a Seeker, a special kind with sparkle and shine. Meg snubbed off everyone except old money, family included. From our roots, there was no old money in our family tree. We came from slave owners and cotton farmers. Our prestige was borne off men’s bruised backs. I see no nobility there.

  Meg learned to smell greenbacks like a bloodhound. She believed she was only temporarily punished to live in squalor. Her belief was a royal knight was going to drive up in a Mercedes while a squat chauffeur driver in a stuffy white suit jumped out holding a satin pillow. In the center was a sparkling rhinestone baby rattler with Meg’s name inscribed. Below it was official paperwork and documentation to prove her theory of a royal bloodline. It was her ticket. She’d hightail it out of here, leaving us redneck Southern saps to our pig sticking.

  I’m a whole ’nother different than Meg. I bleed the South—thick pine sap flowing from the wounded tree bark. Even Dad asked me, “Who are you, Cass?” and I’d say, “Well, I’m Southern sap, of course.” But Meg? She straddled fences from the get-go, which I consider a travesty of the worst kind. I mean, just pick a side—for or against—it’s not hard. She pretended to be content, but we all knew she wasn’t. After hanging out with old money, she’d bring her snobbery home with her. One day I just snapped.

  “Make a choice, Meg,” I told her. “You can’t have it both ways.” Being a girl of few words, she left two distinct rows of teeth marks on my arm. I took this as a clear sign. Papa C said bite marks were characteristically Republican in nature. He knew this because he was a working-class, hard-core Democrat with a few teeth marks of his own. Meg was content to give us hell.

  The aloneness found its place in me, and I started to absorb stories not found in books from an early age. I became an eavesdropper, observed things, surroundings, people, conversations, mannerisms, and expressions. Once I started elementary school, I had a lot to talk about. Teachers became annoyed with my chatty tales. They’d take me out in the hall and point their chubby fingers in my face. “Cass,” they’d say, “don’t repeat everything you hear. We don’t need to know about Mrs. Sparkman’s gallbladder surgery and her husband’s illicit affair.”

  Why not? It was art. Storytelling art. I grew up on the porch listening to stories. Words stuck to my skin like leeches sucking the blood from my Southern core. I had to talk and tell, as if it was embedded in me; letters formed a shape to my reality and gave my altered vision a perception of place. My ears absorbed an assortment of fishing stories, epics of war, dramatic narratives, biblical analogies, poems, fibs, death plots, love sagas, autobiographies, memoirs, cautionary tales, racecar stories, outlaws, hogwash and a lot of cock and bull. I later discovered this is a rite of Southern passage. Stories flowed from porches to kitchen tables, to the liquor stores, beauty salons, tinker shops and house to house, neighbor to neighbor, church office to pulpit, and by the time it reached Mrs. Edna Rollins’ front porch, it was legend because she was the town blabbermouth and journalist. No one was safe from Edna.

  If one took time to decipher the stories word-for-word, or more so, with numbers, one might find an inner message. Except for the cock and bull—Maw Sue said that was the liquor talking. I loved her storytelling ritual the most. Some days, if the weather was nice, we’d sit on the front porch swing and hear a story or two. We’d munch on cartons of malted milk balls, one of Maw Sue’s favorite snacks. I enjoyed it most when Meg wasn’t there, because on some level, Maw Sue and I connected. I know she’s my sister, but still. When it was just us two, our gifts would engage. Sounds went crisp in our hearing ears. Creak, creak went the swing. Crunch, crunch went our teeth. Swish, swish went the wind blowing between the swing slats. Eek, eek went the rusty chain. This cherished moment belonged to us. No one else. Maw Sue said a porch is to be useful for two things, and two things only. Storytelling or silence. No arguing, no lies, no crying, no gossip. Just storytelling or silence.

  She told many a story on the old porch. Stories of side-spitting, gun-toting, bullet-brazen renegades always one step ahead of the law, finger on the trigger and sleeping with one eye open. Gunfights, bootleggers, murder, womanizing, cheating, knife-slicing, fist-fighting, poker-playing, dice-throwing hucksters hung off every branch of the family tree. After storytelling we’d sit in silence and listen to the sounds. Creak, creak. Crunch, crunch. Swish, swish. Eek, eek. A car would drive by and honk. We’d lift our hands and wave like parade float queens. This time was ours and ours alone. Cherished moments built me on the porch. Storytelling or silence.

  Meg and I roamed freely along the side streets kicking balls, digging up crawdads, catching tadpoles, swimming in the creeks, skipping rope and trailing through the big pine thicket making forts out of pine straw or picking blackberries. Summer slowed everyone to a ghost town. The humid Texas heat flogged us with three-digit temps. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Pine Log for entertainment. We had one Dairy Queen, a Tasty Freeze ice cream shop, a miniature Putt-Putt, a movie theater and a skating rink. Or one might venture to the Green Stamp store, if you were my mother. What Pine Log lacked in activities; the S&H Green Stamp store made up for in mass merchandise.
The appeal of collecting stamps for the latest gadget sent women into buying frenzies. Everyone set high hopes on collecting enough of those books to obtain the latest extraordinary kitchen invention, including my mother, who had a green tongue and more kitchen utensils than sense.

  I weaved between my mother and father as if I was trying to find my place, my core identity. I could see parts of myself in my dad, the long-winded know-it-all part which was the vivacious, wordy, no-holds barred half of me, and yet the more mysterious half of me was my mother, the one who eludes me at every turn, unknown, sometimes brooding and hidden, closed off, withdrawn, a blank disconnect. This was my dilemma.

  Dad had peculiar sayings. They were foreign, a masculine he-man code females weren’t supposed to understand because of missing molecules. I think it was just his way of saying something without actually having to talk. I tried to tell him stories of what Maw Sue had shared with me to see his reaction and whether it would be like Mother’s, but Dad was indifferent on the subject, as if he’d heard the stories before, maybe a long time ago, when he was a kid, but they meant nothing now. So, I stopped just to be safe. One parent against me was enough.

  One of his peculiar sayings, however, held my attention. It seemed magical. Three significant words. I can’t remember when I heard it first, it was just always there and came up in conversation a lot.

  “Hey Dad, Meg and I are going to the creek swimming, okay?”

  “All right, Cass,” he’d say from underneath the truck hood, “go out knowing.”

  Or, “Daaddddd! We’re bored.”

  “Well…shitfire, then be like Columbus,” he’d say, tinkering on a motor, “Go discover something. Go out knowing.”

  “Whaaat? I’m ten,” I’d answer. “And besides—Columbus had a boat.”

  “Well, go out knowing you’ll find a boat. Ahoy!”

  Oh, haha. Dad’s a comedian. Go out knowing was his give-all answer to everything. One day, after the thousandth time of hearing it, I asked him what it meant. I got man grunts and strange tinker-shop talk about a man’s brain, how it works, metal hitting metal, rubber meeting asphalt, wood and nails, the way a motor purrs, the sounds of gears shifting. Basically, the three words were intended to inspire exploration, imagination, learn and go out knowing stuff. He called it James Dean wisdom, rules for the rebel road. I had no idea how important these words would become on my journey from teen to adult. And Dad had no idea how much trouble those words would give his firstborn daughter.

  Prone to doing everything in excess, I would indeed go out knowing waaaay more than I should have—and those rules? Rules didn’t apply to my rebel road. For Cass Collard, daughter of Gavin Beck “Mad Hatter” Collard—and Gabby “Lash” Lancaster Collard—it was black or white, feast or famine, in or out, all or nothing.

  One thing guaranteed my time with Dad. A river run. In Pine Log, a river run had nothing to do with water or fishing but everything to do with spirits. Dad was out of beer and Pine Log was dry as a Baptist pulpit on Monday. If one was to acquire spirits, they had to drive clean across the Flats River Bridge, fifteen miles one way.

  Not to mention, Dad had so many speeding tickets we lost count. It sent Gabby Collard into hissy cat fits and punishing silence. I was there when he got number ten. My feet were propped up on the case of beer he’d just purchased at Clark’s liquor store. Lying next to it was a paper sack with Mother’s favorite wine.

  “What does MD 20/20 stand for?” I said, curious about the name.

  “Whoooweee!” the Mad Hatter said, flying past trees, cars, big eighteen-wheelers, houses, signs, cows. “MD means mad dog. A glass or two is fine,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “But if you drink too much, you lose your mind like those mad dogs, you know, like the ones your Uncle Daryl fed gunpowder and made them crazy as all get-out.” Dad sped up and I held on. “And when you lose your mind, you lose your 20/20 vision, and when that happens…” He hesitated. “Well…let’s just say it’s pretty powerful stuff.”

  A gravitational pull of the earth pressed my shoulders against the door while Dad turned the corner on two wheels. I feared the door would fly open and I’d fall out and no one would ever miss me. Dad gunned it on the straightway and forced my head to pop against the seat. I up righted myself. I half believed what he’d said. He was a natural bullshitter. A blare of sirens went off in my head.

  “Son of aahhhhh!” Dad yelled and hit the steering wheel with his fist. His face twisted. He gave the mirror a condemned look. I turned around to see who he was sending to Hell. It looked like the disco lights at the skating rink. Turns out, those sirens weren’t in my head after all. They were after Dad. The Mad Hatter got mad, and madder still. He spouted off a few split infinitives involving God, Jesus, the mother Mary, piles and more piles. When Gabby found out, she was going to be PTA. PTA is the level of nostril-flaring, Old-Testament, Moses with a stick, Jesus with a whip, Southern hellfire and brimstone shit storm. It starts out as a normal discussion about something pointless, which suddenly reverts to something else pointless, which makes people argue, then fight over nothing, which ends in slamming doors, burnt cornbread, police cars and neighbors coming to porches. It ends abruptly with pissed-off women reverting to silence and men who drink whiskey and stay out all night. PTA has various stages. P is pissed off, which is a typical Southern hissy fit. T is ticked off, which is pretty bad but mostly broken dishes and flying saucers. A is ass-kicking, which means you’re done. Kaput! History! Our family hit all three simultaneously, which is the crème de la crème Southern shit-kicking Texas anthem. In this moment, Dad’s three infamous words didn’t fit at all. He didn’t want Gabby to go out knowing nothing about nothing. But we all knew—he’d hear about it, sure enough.

  * * *

  Boredom had set in. Meg was revolving around me like an irritating planet. The Texas heat was threading down two degrees away from triple digits and we were miserable. Dad was in the tinker shop. Mother and Aunt Marlene were at the Green Stamp store.

  “Come on, Meg,” I grabbed her by the shirttail. It was so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Maw Sue’s Ranchero was the only clear option to eliminate boredom. There was nothing transparent about it. It was the color of vomit, brown and beige. The Ford Ranchero was supposed to be the ambiguous statement auto of all automobiles. In vehicle anatomy, it was male and female. The advertisements read More than a car! More than a truck! I was like, “Well, good grief, Mr. Henry Ford. What the hell is it then?” And then it dawned on me. It was our ticket to travel.

  Dad had a notion every automobile should have a namesake. We had his ’60s Chevy truck, Brutus, and mother’s four-door Ford Galaxy named Miss. Just M-I-S-S. Dad said it had to have a dainty name like a girl fart, a soft poot, barely audible. Meg and I died laughing, but mother gave him the stink-eye. When Dad drove MISS, she morphed into a loud, gaseous fart. He said he was just breaking her in and blowing the soot out, which was mandatory for all knuckle busters, so sayeth Motor Madness Magazine. Dad’s lead foot and eccentric auto knowledge drove Gabby bonkers, which led to blame games, enraged screaming fits, beer-can crushing, MD 20/20, belching, burnt cornbread, door slams, rebel flags flying, God Save the Queen…the end. I took it to mean I’d better have my driving skills perfected or my life would be in the shitter.

  Meg and I practiced our driving skills under the carport and never left the driveway. We were traveling in Maw Sue’s Ford Ranchero. After forty miles in the wilderness, cutting corners and narrowly missing a sand lizard, we had a name for this half-truck, half-car automobile disaster. Flash Fannie. We were young. We had a ride. The world was our oyster. For the long pretend road trips, we’d carry a travel bag with essentials. We’d need spiffy clothing to meet dignitaries in Africa and England. The mere thought of natives or the queen seeing us dressed in patchwork was embarrassing. We wore them out of love for Mama C—but that love ended when we crossed the state line on our imaginative day-tripping adventures. We packed peanut butter sandwi
ches and two packages of Kool-Aid in case we got stranded in France or Iberia and couldn’t read the menus. Last but most important, our communication device, the paddle talk. It was a red plastic doohickey, similar to a Ping-Pong paddle with a flip notepad attached with words and phrases. It allowed us to talk inconspicuously and never open our mouths. Unfortunately, it had a limited vocabulary. Of course, one never knows when the phrases HOT TO TROT, WANNA PARTY or GET LOST might come in handy to the occupants of the car idling next to you at the red light. On vacations we’d sit in the backseat and write out messages, like hey shit head or ass wipe, and hold it up to strangers in the other lanes. Our parents were clueless to the shenanigans.

  “Road trip rebels!” Meg yelled.

  “Woohooo!” I screamed and fist pumped the air. I drove like my genes were fueled with gasoline. I learned the mechanics of stop, go, and start, look both ways, burn out, smoke tires, fishtail, curbing, revving, and popping the gears. I learned to drive eighty and properly spit out the window and flip off those cracker jack-asses the Mad Hatter says got their GD license in a Cracker Jack box. Everything was going great until we shifted gears and accelerated into the outskirts of hell.

  “Tree! Turn-turn, Cass!” Meg was screaming and acting like a drama queen. “You’re gonna hit a tree! TURN!” I reacted in fear. We were moving. Not play or pretend, but moving. The garage was getting further and further away. In panic mode, I floored it like Dad did. We kept rolling backwards. I had not mastered the art of driving backwards. That’s James Bond stuff or Dukes of Hazzard boys, not me. A multitude of events happened simultaneously. Our travel clock stopped. My stomach lurched into my throat. My vision slowed. I saw and heard each millisecond acted out. Meg’s scream. Our bodies sucked to the ceiling. Meg flip-flopped. Me all tangled up in the steering wheel. A loud foghorn blew. An atomic wind gust rushed inside the cab. Both of us floated like astronauts. Meg’s hair spiraled like spikes of weeds. The paddle talk swiveled between us, its red letters mocking our plight. A vortex of sounds, sucking and spitting. I hit the seat and snapped to reality. My legs locked stiff on the brakes. A loud screeching horn made my ears bleed. Flash Fannie rocked side to side. Out of the corner of my eye, the butt end of an eighteen-wheeler passed. I held no air. My lips locked tightly together. The Houdini car trick was over. In the silence, I heard the crazy branch of the Collard family tree, snap.