by Lee Smith
I write, for instance: “Mrs. Alma Goodnight is enjoying a pleasant recuperation period in the lovely, modern Walker Mountain Community Hospital while she is sorely missed by her loved ones at home. Get well soon, Alma!” I do not write that Alma Goodnight is in the hospital because her husband hit her up the side with a rake and left a straight line of bloody little holes going from her waist to her armpit after she yelled at him, which Lord knows she did all the time, once too often. I don’t write how Eben Goodnight is all torn up now about what he did, missing work and worrying, or how Alma likes it so much in the hospital that nobody knows if they’ll ever get her to go home or not. Because that is a mystery, and I am no detective by a long shot. I am what I am, I know what I know, and I know you’ve got to give folks something to hang on to, something to keep them going. That is what I have in mind when I say uplift, and that is what God had in mind when He gave us Jesus Christ.
My column would not be but a paragraph if the news was all I told. But it isn’t. What I tell is what’s important, like the bulbs coming up, the way the redbud comes out first on the hills in the spring and how pretty it looks, the way the cattails shoot up by the creek, how the mist winds down low on the ridge in the mornings, how my wash all hung out on the line of a Tuesday looks like a regular square dance with those pants legs just flapping and flapping in the wind! I tell how all the things you ever dreamed of, all changed and ghostly, will come crowding into your head on a winter night when you sit up late in front of your fire. I even made up these little characters to talk for me, Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal and Princess Pussycat, and often I have them voice my thoughts. Each week I give a little chapter in their lives. Or I might tell what was the message brought in church, or relate an inspirational word from a magazine, book, or TV. I look on the bright side of life.
I’ve had God’s gift of writing from the time I was a child. That’s what the B. stands for in Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse — Barker, my maiden name. My father was a patient strong God-fearing man despite his problems and it is in his honor that I maintain the B. There was a lot of us children around all the time — it was right up the road here where I grew up — and it would take me a day to tell you what all we got into! But after I learned how to write, that was that. My fingers just naturally curved to a pencil and I sat down to writing like a ball of fire. They skipped me up one, two grades in school. When I was not but eight, I wrote a poem named “God’s Garden,” which was published in the church bulletin of the little Methodist church we went to then on Hunter’s Ridge. Oh, Daddy was so proud! He gave me a quarter that Sunday, and then I turned around and gave it straight to God. Put it in the collection plate. Daddy almost cried he was so proud. I wrote another poem in school the next year, telling how life is like a maple tree, and it won a statewide prize.
That’s me — I grew up smart as a whip, lively, and naturally good. Jesus came as easy as breathing did to me. Don’t think I’m putting on airs, through: I’m not. I know what I know. I’ve done my share of sinning too, of which more later.
Anyway, I was smart. It’s no telling but what I might have gone on to school like my own children have and who knows what all else if Mama hadn’t run off with a man. I don’t remember Mama very well, to tell the truth. She was a weak woman, always lying in the bed having a headache. One day we all came home from school and she was gone, didn’t even bother to make up the bed. Well, that was the end of Mama! None of us ever saw her again, but Daddy told us right before he died that one time he had gotten a postcard from her from Tampa, Florida, years and years after that. He showed it to us, all wrinkled and soft from him holding it.
Being the oldest, I took over and raised those little ones, three of them, and then I taught school and then I married Glenn and we had our own children, four of them, and I have raised them too and still have Marshall, of course, poor thing. He is the cross I have to bear and he’ll be just like he is now for the rest of his natural life.
I was writing my column for the week of March 17, 1976, when the following events occurred. It was a real coincidence because I had just finished doing the cutest little story named “A Red-Letter Day for Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal” when the phone rang. It rings all the time, of course. Everybody around here knows my number by heart. It was Mrs. Irene Chalmers. She was all torn up. She said that Mr. Biggers was over at Greenville at the hospital, very bad off this time, and that he was asking for me and would I please try to get over there today as the doctors were not giving him but a 20 percent chance to make it through the night. Mr. Biggers has always been a fan of mine, and he especially liked Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal. “Well!” I said. “Of course I will! I’ll get Glenn on the phone right this minute. And you calm down, Mrs. Chalmers. You go fix yourself a Coke.” Mrs. Chalmers said she would and hung up. I knew what was bothering her, of course. It was that given the natural run of things, she would be the next to go. The next one to be over there dying. Without even putting down the receiver, I dialed the beverage store. Bert answered.
“Good morning,” I said. I like to maintain a certain distance with the hired help although Glenn does not. He will talk to anybody, and anytime you go in there, you can find half the old men in the county just sitting around that stove in the winter or outside on those wooden drink boxes in the summer, smoking and drinking drinks which I am sure they are getting for free out of the cooler although Glenn swears it on the Bible they are not. Anyway, I said good morning.
“Can I speak to Glenn?” I said.
“Well now, Mrs. Newhouse,” Bert said in his naturally insolent voice — he is just out of high school and too big for his britches — “he’s not here right now. He had to go out for a while.”
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t rightly know,” Bert said. “He said he’d be back after lunch.”
“Thank you very much, there will not be a message,” I said sweetly, and hung up. I knew where Glenn was. Glenn was over on Caney Creek where his adopted half sister Margie Kettles lived, having carnal knowledge of her in the trailer. They had been at it for thirty years and anybody would have thought they’d have worn it out by that time. Oh, I knew all about it.
The way it happened in the beginning was that Glenn’s father had died of his lungs when Glenn was not but about ten years old, and his mother grieved so hard that she went off her head and began taking up with anybody who would go with her. One of the fellows she took up with was a foreign man out of a carnival, the James H. Drew Exposition, a man named Emilio something. He had this curly-headed dark-skinned little daughter. So Emilio stayed around longer than anybody would have expected, but finally it was clear to all that he never would find any work around here to suit him. The work around here is hard work, all of it, and they said he played a musical instrument. Anyway, in due course this Emilio just up and vanished, leaving that foreign child. Now that was Margie, of course, but her name wasn’t Margie then. It was a long foreign name, which ended up as Margie, and that’s how Margie ended up here, in these mountains, where she has been up to no good ever since. Glenn’s mother did not last too long after Emilio left, and those children grew up wild. Most of them went to foster homes, and to this day Glenn does not know where two of his brothers are! The military was what finally saved Glenn. He stayed with the military for nine years, and when he came back to this area he found me over here teaching school and with something of a nest egg in hand, enabling him to start the beverage store. Glenn says he owes everything to me.
This is true. But I can tell you something else: Glenn is a good man, and he has been a good provider all these years. He has not ever spoken to me above a regular tone of voice nor raised his hand in anger. He has not been tight with the money. He used to hold the girls in his lap of an evening. Since I got him started, he has been a regular member of the church, and he has not fallen down on it yet. Glenn furthermore has that kind of disposition where he never knows a stranger. So I can count my blessings too.
Of course I knew
about Margie! Glenn’s sister Lou-Ann told me about it before she died, that is how I found out about it originally. She thought I should know, she said. She said it went on for years and she just wanted me to know before she died. Well! I had had the first two girls by then, and I thought I was so happy. I took to my bed and just cried and cried. I cried for four days and then by gum I got up and started my column, and I have been writing on it ever since. So I was not unprepared when Margie showed up again some years after that, all gap toothed and wild looking, but then before you knew it she was gone, off again to Knoxville, then back working as a waitress at that truck stop at the county line, then off again, like that. She led an irregular life. And as for Glenn, I will have to hand it to him, he never darkened her door again until after the birth of Marshall.
Now let me add that I would not have gone on and had Marshall if it were left up to me. I would have practiced more birth control. Because I was old by that time, thirty-seven, and that was too old for more children I felt, even though I had started late of course. I had told Glenn many times, I said three normal girls is enough for anybody. But no, Glenn was like a lot of men, and I don’t blame him for it — he just had to try one more time for a boy. So we went on with it, and I must say I had a feeling all along.
I was not a bit surprised at what we got, although after wrestling with it all for many hours in the dark night of the soul, as they say, I do not believe that. Marshall is a judgment on me for my sin. He is one of God’s special children, is how I look at it. Of course he looks funny, but he has already lived ten years longer than they said he would. And has a job! He goes to Greenville every day on the Trailways bus, rain or shine, and cleans up the Plaza Mall. He gets to ride on the bus, and he gets to see people. Along about six o’clock he’ll come back, walking up the holler and not looking to one side or the other, and then I give him his supper and then he’ll watch something on TV like The Brady Bunch or Family Affair, and then he’ll go to bed. He would not hurt a flea. But oh, Glenn took it hard when Marshall came! I remember that night so well and the way he just turned his back on the doctor. This is what sent him back to Margie, I am convinced of it, what made him take up right where he had left off all those years before.
So since Glenn was up to his old tricks I called up Lavonne, my daughter, to see if she could take me to the hospital to see Mr. Biggers. Why yes she could, it turned out. As a matter of fact she was going to Greenville herself. As a matter of fact she had something she wanted to talk to me about anyway. Now Lavonne is our youngest girl and the only one that stayed around here. Lavonne is somewhat pop eyed, and has a weak constitution. She is one of those people that never can make up their minds. That day on the phone, I heard a whine in her voice I didn’t like the sound of. Something is up, I thought.
First I powdered my face, so I would be ready to go when Lavonne got there. Then I sat back down to write some more of my column, this paragraph I had been framing in my mind for weeks about how sweet potatoes are not what they used to be. They taste gritty and dry now, compared to how they were. I don’t know the cause of it, whether it is man on the moon or pollution in the ecology or what, but it is true. They taste awful.
Then my door came bursting open in a way that Lavonne would never do it and I knew it was Sally Peck from next door. Sally is loud and excitable but she has a good heart. She would do anything for you. “Hold on to your hat, Joline!” she hollered. Sally is so loud because she’s deaf. Sally was just huffing and puffing — she is a heavy woman — and she had rollers still up in her hair and her old housecoat on with the buttons off.
“Why, Sally!” I exclaimed. “You are all wrought up!”
Sally sat down in my rocker and spread out her legs and started fanning herself with my Family Circle magazine. “If you think I’m wrought up,” she said finally, “it is nothing compared to what you are going to be. We have had us a suicide, right here in Salt Lick. Margie Kettles put her head inside her gas oven in the night.”
“Margie?” I said. My heart was just pumping.
“Yes, and a little neighbor girl was the one who found her, they say. She went over to borrow some baking soda for her mama’s biscuits at seven o’clock a.m.” Sally looked real hard at me. “Now wasn’t she related to you all?”
“Why,” I said just as easily, “why, yes, she was Glenn’s adopted half sister, of course, when they were nothing but a child. But we haven’t had anything to do with her for years as you can well imagine.”
“Well, they say Glenn is making the burial arrangements,” Sally spoke up. She was getting her own back that day, I’ll have to admit it. Usually I’m the one with all the news.
“I have to finish my column now and then Lavonne is taking me in to Greenville to see old Mr. Biggers who is breathing his last,” I said.
“Well,” Sally said, hauling herself up out of my chair, “I’ll be going along then. I just didn’t know if you knew it or not.” Now Sally Peck is not a spiteful woman in all truth. I have known her since we were little girls sitting out in the yard looking at a magazine together. It is hard to imagine being as old as I am now, or knowing Sally Peck — who was Sally Bland then — so long.
Of course I couldn’t get my mind back on sweet potatoes after she left. I just sat still and fiddled with the pigeonholes in my desk and the whole kitchen seemed like it was moving and rocking back and forth around me. Margie dead! Sooner or later I would have to write it up tastefully in my column. Well, I must say I had never thought of Margie dying. Before God, I never hoped for that in all my life. I didn’t know what it would do to me, in fact, to me and Glenn and Marshall and the way we live because you know how the habits and the ways of people can build up over the years. It was too much for me to take in at one time. I couldn’t see how anybody committing suicide could choose to stick their head in the oven anyway — you can imagine the position you would be found in.
Well, in came Lavonne at that point, sort of hanging back and stuttering like she always does, and that child of hers, Sherry Lynn, hanging on to her skirt for dear life. I saw no reason at that time to tell Lavonne about the death of Margie Kettles. She would hear it sooner or later anyway. Instead, I gave her some plant food that I had ordered two for the price of one from Montgomery Ward some days before.
“Are you all ready, Mama?” Lavonne asked in that quavery way she has, and I said indeed I was, as soon as I got my hat, which I did, and we went out and got in Lavonne’s Buick Electra and set off on our trip. Sherry Lynn sat in the back, coloring in her coloring book. She is a real good child. “How’s Ron?” I said. Ron is Lavonne’s husband, an electrician, as up and coming a boy as you would want to see. Glenn and I are as proud as punch of Ron, and actually I never have gotten over the shock of Lavonne marrying him in the first place. All through high school she never showed any signs of marrying anybody, and you could have knocked me over with a feather the day she told us she was secretly engaged. I’ll tell you, our Lavonne was not the marrying sort! Or so I thought.
But that day in the car she told me, “Mama, I wanted to talk to you and tell you I am thinking of getting a d-i-v-o-r-c-e.”
I shot a quick look into the backseat, but Sherry Lynn wasn’t hearing a thing. She was coloring Wonder Woman in her book.
“Now, Lavonne,” I said. “What in the world is it? Why, I’ll bet you can work it out.” Part of me was listening to Lavonne, as you can imagine, but part of me was still stuck in that oven with crazy Margie. I was not myself.
I told her that. “Lavonne,” I said, “I am not myself today. But I’ll tell you one thing. You give this some careful thought. You don’t want to go off half cocked. What is the problem, anyway?”
“It’s a man where I work,” Lavonne said. She works in the Welfare Department, part time, typing. “He is just giving me a fit. I guess you can pray for me, Mama, because I don’t know what I’ll decide to do.”
“Can we get an Icee?” asked Sherry Lynn.
“Has anything happened
between you?” I asked. You have to get all the facts.
“Why, no!” Lavonne was shocked. “Why, I wouldn’t do anything like that! Mama, for goodness’ sakes! We just have coffee together so far.”
That’s Lavonne all over. She never has been very bright. “Honey,” I said, “I would think twice before I threw up a perfectly good marriage and a new brick home for the sake of a cup of coffee. If you don’t have enough to keep you busy, go take a course at the community college. Make yourself a new pantsuit. This is just a mood, believe me.”
“Well,” Lavonne said. Her voice was shaking and her eyes were swimming in tears that just stayed there and never rolled down her cheeks. “Well,” she said again.
As for me, I was lost in thought. It was when I was a young married woman like Lavonne that I committed my own great sin. I had the girls, and things were fine with Glenn and all, and there was simply not any reason to ascribe to it. It was just something I did out of loving pure and simple, did because I wanted to do it. I knew and have always known the consequences, yet God is full of grace, I pray and believe, and His mercy is everlasting.
To make a long story short, we had a visiting evangelist from Louisville, Kentucky, for a two-week revival that year. John Marcel Wilkes. If I say it myself, John Marcel Wilkes was a real humdinger! He had the yellowest hair you ever saw, curly, and the finest singing voice available. Oh, he was something, and that very first night he brought two souls into Christ. The next day I went over to the church with a pan of brownies just to tell him how much I personally had received from his message. I thought, of course, that there would be other people around — the Reverend Mr. Clark, or the youth director, or somebody cleaning. But to my surprise that church was totally empty except for John Marcel Wilkes himself reading the Bible in the fellowship hall and making notes on a pad of paper. The sun came in a window on his head. It was early June, I remember, and I had on a blue dress with little white cap sleeves and open-toed sandals. John Marcel Wilkes looked up at me and his face gave off light like the sun.