Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

by Mayes, Frances

  When he finishes talking, Rev. Dickinson comes over and hugs me and says he feels close to all the Mayes family even though we don’t attend church as regularly as he’d like. I swallow so hard my ears hurt. Then Mother Mayes’s friend Mrs. McCarthy pulls me close to her bosom. Her eyes are funny, gray with a brown rim, eyes like a wild animal’s might be. Her thin red hair looks almost pink. She even smells soft, like vetiver cologne and sweet peas. “Your Mother Mayes was a grand old gal, Frances. You got a lucky name from her.” I rest my head and let myself be patted. I don’t mind having Mother Mayes’s name, but I would fight anyone who ever called me “Fanny,” as they did her. Mother Mayes and her cook had the same name and it was embarrassing—fanny was a rear end. Many of Mother Mayes’s friends called her “Fan,” not so bad but almost. “She would have just loved these flowers, just be thrilled to death, oh my, thrilled to pieces.” She leans down to look at a bunch of fragrant narcissi Fanny brought in a mayonnaise jar sitting among the florist wreathes. “Fan loved the wild narcissus.” She straightens up slowly, a little unsteady. Her red nails dig into my shoulder for balance. “It’s a beautiful world, darling; that’s why we’re so sad when one of us has to leave it.”

  As she walks to the car, I start to cry, a flash of fast tears and the hot awful rock in my throat. I don’t know if I am crying for Mother Mayes or for Mrs. McCarthy, who can’t see well and thinks of Mother Mayes whenever she sees the wild narcissus that springs up unasked in Fanny’s yard every spring. Mother Mayes was a grand old gal, she had said. I kick up the silver tufts of leftover winter grass under the new. My parents and uncles and everyone shake hands with the same people they see every day while the man from Paulk’s smokes behind the clay mound. My sisters walk off with three of their friends toward a white convertible.

  For a long time, I wait in the black Cadillac. When I look out the window at the grave, I see my own reflection in the window. If I stare into my own eyes, the grave disappears. If I look at the grave, my eyes disappear. I stare at myself. I wonder if I will be beautiful, I thought. I jump onto the backseat and cross my legs slowly, lifting my dress just above my knee the way Hazel did. “To the opera, James,” I say to the empty driver’s seat. They don’t come and don’t come. “Why are they always so slow?” I shout aloud. I roll down the window and spit as far as I can. I pull the scab off my left knee and put it in the ashtray because it wouldn’t be nice to drop it on the floor of the fancy car. I would like to drive this, I thought. I see Daddy helping Mrs. McCarthy to her old two-toned, humpbacked Chevrolet. He was once balled up inside Mother Mayes’s stomach. How could he breathe? Now she is trapped under dirt. Children sometimes suffocated, shut in refrigerators. I kick the seat with my heels, then sigh, jerking my shoulders up and down. When I’m grown, I’ll wear only red silk. Aunt Emmy and Mother are walking toward me, their arms around each other’s waists. I don’t know what I want to happen next. I trace my finger around my lips that are cool and thin, just like Mother Mayes’s.

  Other than Mother Mayes dying, late grade school anchors in memory because my friendships expanded. Sammy Dixon passed me notes, and valentines—You must send one to everyone—now included secret messages: I like you. Looking at the sixth-grade class photo, where I stand on the front row with my hands in my pockets, each child retains an intimacy. Everyone remains vivid, the clothes they wear, the fabric and color, the texture of their hair, their nails, the smells of chalk and oatmeal, pencil lead, and oranges. Their faces hold the voices I still can hear. Be on my team; red rover, red rover send Judy right over; marshmallow roast at Kay’s, sign my slam book.

  What a radical concept, that we would leave the confines of the long brick schoolhouse and travel to something educational.

  Though it is early spring, the heat in the Okefenokee Swamp is as persuasive as an electric cattle prod. We’re running wild on the visitors’ catwalks. I am wearing a white sailor shirt and navy denim pants with big buttons. I sketched them and had our seamstress, Mrs. Smith, make them especially for today. As soon as we’re out of sight of the teacher, Edna Lula and I dab lipstick on our lips. We’re with a group of our friends, all boys. The six of us climb to the top of a fire tower and look out over the swamp. As far as we see—standing black water, black tupelos, possum haw trees, and the ghostly moss-hung cypresses tapering to wisps far above their swollen trunks—the whole landscape appears to us in shades of gray. From the plank walkway, though, we see the tiny Confederate violets, sundews that can catch insects, yellow water lilies, pitcher plants where bugs drown, and the spooky Venus flytraps with jaws that snap shut. When a ranger takes us out in a flat-bottomed boat, logs suddenly rise and open their jaws. Sunning on hummocks, the alligators’ enormous mouths smile, as though in a pleasant dream of an earlier epoch. In the boggy water, we pass small islands with a single tree, palms like ones in cartoons of people on deserted islands. The ranger says they are “floating” and we look at him without comprehension. How can an island with a palm tree float? He invites me to step out on one, and I stand up in the boat and leap to the island. Immediately, I feel it dip, giving under my weight. My impulse is to grab the tree but then I remember we are on the same unreliable ground. I scream and scramble back to the boat while everyone laughs.

  So an island can travel, take a tree with it. The ranger says the islands are decayed leaves and sticks, forced loose by swamp gases, with the tree acting as kind of a sail. How alluring, this mysterious swamp. I see for the first time today, also, that Bill Daniel is alluring, that strange sights are alluring. The gray light’s secret loveliness fills me with the sudden elation I often feel—a powerful bath of euphoria in moments like this, or for no reason at all. One alligator has a baby alligator riding on its back. I’m not sure if Bill likes me better than Marideane Melton. Probably he likes her tan skin and green eyes.

  The cypress trees send up gnarly knees to breathe for them. In shops along the highway carvers sell cypress birds they’ve whittled, making the knobs and rings of the wood form the eyes and mouth of an owl or crane.

  I know about quicksand, in which a horse and rider can go down. At Saturday movies, I’ve watched them sink until there’s only an upraised hand seeping down, the oozy quicksand closing over the clutching fingers. The whole landscape, I see, is full of riddles and tricks. Just as I’ve tried to lure a rabbit to the trap with a little scent of vanilla on a cloth, the earth springs traps on us. The twister gathering into a spiral over the road will sweep through the town, lifting bathtubs and pet dogs and garages. Daddy will not let us bathe when there’s lightning.

  The marshy river of grass looks like land but sways in the tide. Creatures disregard their borders, too: Catfish emerge from boggy black water and walk; ibises stand all day on the backs of Brahman bulls, pecking insects out of their hides. Heron are reeds until they raise blue wings and fly. In fields where children run, old tops of wells give way and you find yourself screaming in a dry pit with spiders or scrambling up mossy walls and sliding down into the dank water. This is in the paper all the time.

  If we stayed till night, we would see swamp fire zapping and hear green tree frogs’ tinkling-bell chorale, but we won’t. We troop back to the parking lot at four to meet the room mothers for the seventy-five-mile ride home.

  Bill sits in the backseat next to Marideane, his arm resting on the window, and Jeff Hardy is on the other side of her. He’s cute, too. I’m in front with the map, guiding us back to Fitzgerald, a little farther than Willacoochee and Alapaha, on up the road from Glory, Mystic, Enigma, not as far as Sunsweet or Arabi.

  Equal and opposite, I experienced a different revelation in our other field trip. How did our gray-gabardine-suited teacher, who always maintained that “God’s children” were “kind,” “decent,” “God-fearing,” and “righteous,” this gentle woman made of kindness, dream of taking her precious charges on a trip to hell?

  I had heard the word “abattoir.” When we passed an odd smell like tires burning and something else on the
road to Ocilla, my mother sometimes said “abattoir.” Abattoir, from the French to fell, regardless of the lovely sound of a garden with a glass summerhouse and purple gloxinias. I never asked what it meant. The word made a splotch of clear flat lake in my eyes, a hidden water I would find if I turned off the highway and followed the clay path back beyond leaning houses smothered in kudzu, beyond the blue tobacco fields. Abattoir—a name for a nunnery of cream-colored stones, a vine with white flowers like ghost faces; abattoir, a lethal silver knife flashing.

  And so we went on the field trip. Pigs jam the stockyard we walk by. Another pen holds cows that moo and roll their eyes. A man with a prod urges the pigs one by one up a single-file ramp and into the building. Halting ones are jabbed and let out scary cries.

  I’ve heard those sounds before because our neighbor, Dr. Griner, is a veterinarian, and when farmers pull up their loaded trucks in the alley behind his house, each pig’s back legs are tied together, then it’s suddenly hoisted upside down. Suspended in the garage doorway, the pig starts to shriek as Dr. Griner raises a long knife. As he hacks, I learn the word “castrate.” The awful testicles accumulate in a bloody pile as the neighborhood children watch.

  My shoulders rise. In the first room did the pig really swing out grunting suspended by a hook in the roof of his mouth and a glistening man with a hatchet lean out of a pulpit and smack the pig’s throat? Yes, I do remember the squeal—was it educational?—and the big red spurt arching down onto the sloped floor with a drain. A coiled hose guzzled water onto the floor. Hot smell, a tin roof under broiling sun. My throat closing and freezing. I filed with the others through the high rooms where piles of tails and trotters and slabs are stacked on chunky tables and men in streaked aprons thwack and smile at us. Bucket of eyes, some open, some closed. Grinding of gristle, white knob ends of bones. My raw joints and sockets working me through the long room. As we reach the end of the assembly line, our teacher says, “If you enjoyed this, next year we can see where Jeff Davis was captured dressed up like a woman.”

  On the way out each of us is handed a hot dog, end of the process. Phew! Rufus Yeoman, Betty Zane, and other friends are eating theirs. I push out the door into the humidity that swallows me whole and throw mine in the bushes. That smell! Hair in an old hairbrush, rusty iron water from the faucet, it’s like nothing at all but itself, something under the smell, the word: abattoir.

  When I open the door to the kitchen that afternoon, my mother is making a big pan of brownies studded with pecans. I tell her about the field trip. “Pour yourself a co-cola with the brownies. And you do see what I mean?” She runs her fingers through my hair, smoothing back damp curls. She is always harping on the “cracker mentality.”

  Daddy comes in with the first armful of roses of the spring. He agrees with her that the field trip was a stupid idea and that the school principal has not got the sense God gave a billy goat. He pulls me to his chest, forgetting that the roses pierce through my blouse, and kisses the top of my head. “You’re my buddy,” he says. For a space, they’re the parents I want.

  The thousand Étoile de Hollande rosebushes he had planted along the mill fence are coming into bloom. Blood red, his favorite. Out come the brownies in a whoosh of steam from the oven. The dark chocolate scent and the light, spicy perfume of the roses blend with the western sunlight slanting into the kitchen. Daddy lays the roses on the drain board and hands me the scissors. I start to snip off all the thorns.

  Even now, the white heron can walk through swamp water across my dream. The pig can rise in the air with a fast jerk. I have baked a thousand pans of brownies in my life and planted hundreds of roses, none red. Out of the endless expanse of school days, from all the birthday parties, wiener roasts, movies, overnights, carnivals, tests, piano lessons, homework, what rises in memory? Swamp and abattoir. Thinking hard, writing about these specific days long gone, I think I’ll get to the bottom. Why are they remembered? But what one finds in the enterprise of writing is that there is no bottom. Only a contraction into the rhythmic, blood-pumping heart of the past and sometimes an expansion out of it.

  Something must be hidden. I pried up floorboards in the barn and found an old baby shoe and a bill for tires. I tossed all the navy caps and shirts from my uncle’s war trunk. “Stop that plundering.” My mother shoved the uniforms back inside and snapped down the lid. I riffled through the pages of Art in Everyday Life, a college textbook of my mother’s. “Don’t strew,” she said when she came upon me with a drawer pulled out, old photos scattered on the floor. “You strew faster than I can pick up.” “Plunder” and “strew,” ancient words: spoils of war, recklessness, booty, scattering, mindless ransacking. I was voracious to solve a mystery. Whatever was hidden, I would find.

  When I lift the dust ruffle of my parents’ bed, I know at last I have found something. I pull out my father’s calfskin suitcase with the Boca Raton Club sticker and slide back the locks with my thumbs. Inside, a tarnished silver flask and a box. I pour the last few drops into the cap, smell it (I know the smell of bourbon), then rub the drops into the blue rug. No one will see, since it’s under the bed. The box is full to the brim with gold, but foil, like chocolate coins in my Christmas stocking toe. Pieces of eight, doubloons, as in peg-legged pirate stories. The edges unloosen easily, like pulling paper away from a cupcake.

  The foil is silver on the inside and I almost know what the rolled balloon is for. There’s a larger one in the box too, with a forked plastic stick shaped like branches that magic people way out in the country hold to find water. What is that? It has something to do with the rubber bag in the bathroom, with the box of powder that smells like peppermint. I’ve heard the word “douche.” I stuff my pocket and go to the porch, where I blow up one of the balloons, but it doesn’t feel like a balloon. More animal. The skin on the inside of my arm feels smoother than the skin of the balloon. I fit one over the front yard faucet and hold it tight while it fills, stretches to bursting. Mrs. Tuggle, the dentist’s wife, walks by and stares without speaking to me. I ball up the gold and rubber, bury them under the house in the doodlebug mounds, and then hunch there, peering out through the foundation vent at nothing passing down Lemon Street, nothing happening in the yard except my dog Tish rolling merrily, probably in Daddy’s bird dogs’ do-do. Nothing else moves, not even the light, faint blossoms at the top of the crape myrtle. This is something, this box of pirate gold, something, but not it.

  What are they hiding? Knowing them, they probably don’t know themselves. Two blocks away, at The House, I pillage every room. Three times a week I practice on the piano there. Daddy Jack and Fanny don’t care what I do as long as I stay out of the kitchen. She looms over the stove, madly coating everything she cooks with cayenne pepper and several shakes of Tabasco. Sometimes she cries because her husband tries to beat her. “I was running for my life last night,” she says. “Bud gets mean as a snake when he gets into the bottle.” I don’t like his name being the same as my nickname. “Fanny, why don’t you stay here? He’s mean. You could sleep in Hazel’s old room.” She shakes her head. “Oh, honey.” I stare at the cabinet lined with green and pink parfait dishes. I wish we could make ice cream right now. On the back burner, she keeps a pot of once green beans falling apart in salt pork.

  I find Hazel’s tattered sheets of music, still in the piano bench even though she’s been gone from Daddy Jack’s house for twenty years. They flake as I turn the pages. In my grandmother’s desk, untouched since she died, a dozen cubbyholes must hold one secret. One paper shows Mother Mayes’s maternal family tree. Her mother, Sarah America Gray, was born on January 30, 1848—before the War Between the States. Her father, George Alexander Gray, was born in 1802. I don’t know what happened in history in 1802. Then the drawing branches: His parents, Ransom Gray and Narcissa Alexander, married in 1800. Narcissa Alexander Gray! Married to Ransom. At last, something worth knowing. I’m sure they had a great romance. Too bad this was before the days of photographs. I want to see Narcissa and
Ransom. The last name, down in the taproot, says George Alexander, born in 1743, even before the Revolution. I copy the best names on the palm of my hand. Other than that: my uncles’ Georgia Tech diplomas, dull letters from Hazel in Miami complaining about how much she missed home. I’d heard Daddy Jack’s family in North Carolina had a French maid and a place in Nova Scotia for the summers. Some family war occurred and Daddy Jack spoke to no one in North Carolina anymore. No information at The House, only cabinets of painted china, scratchy afghans folded on the twin beds, dance cards in yearbooks, a buzzer to signal the kitchen under the dining room rug, and the key to the grandfather clock, whose Westminster chime every fifteen minutes reminded Daddy Jack of England, where he was born. Because of a song I learned in kindergarten, I believed firmly that it would stop short, never to go again, when the old man died.

  At home, jars of swollen pickles glint in the back corners of cabinets where the shelf paper runs out. I look in every chest for secret compartments in the backs of drawers, places to hide amethysts, love letters, and hand-drawn maps with Xs on them. I press the floor, hoping for a panel to spring open, revealing a staircase going down, down to a dirt room full of trunks, or an entrance to the underground railroad where slaves had escaped, although I know our house is not that old and that the town of Fitzgerald did not even exist during the War.