Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

by Mayes, Frances

  Was I always alone? Where did they all find to go in the long afternoons? I rubbed against every splinter of the house. A cat, pouncing, examining, equally curious and indifferent. Outside, I lift the iron door at the base of the chimney and let the ashes fall out into the azalea bed. I climb closet shelves to push open the attic door with my head. Nothing there but trapped light and enormous whirring blades of the attic fan exhaling like a hot beast. In the hall, I lift the heavy lid of the cedar chest and breathe in the dark resinous smell that is death to moths. My hand knows what to push aside to feel the satin lining of my mother’s lingerie holders. I know the touch of the cold mesh evening bag she carried in college, its fragile chain, and inside, the round little mirror she’d looked in so long ago, back in her belle-hood, when her father said she was born to break a thousand hearts. In the bottom left, my fingers find the velvet box, almost soft, like a just-dead mouse, that holds a cool locket and a blood ruby ring, surrounded by chip diamonds. Among the bolts of silk and cotton and flowered chintz, I feel for notes, secret wills and deeds, but find nothing: baby clothes, sheets too good to use, report cards, my birth certificate with the brown ink imprint of my foot before it ever touched the earth.

  I spy also. Move silently from pecan tree to privet hedge to outdoor fireplace to behind the barn, listening to my parents, who sit in the yard in the early evenings. My ear, against a jelly jar, presses to the wall when my mother has the bridge club. But she only says, “Lilanne was a terrible bride. What could she have been thinking of, carrying those calla lilies? She is far too short—and wide—to carry calla lilies.” Opening the door to a closet close to the dining room where they play bridge, I find mother’s friend Martha there before me, crouched down trembling. The summer thunderstorms scare her and every time she’s dummy she runs to the closet to hide. When the storms magnify and the ground shakes with thunder, she even bids three hearts from the closet floor. Adults are pitiful.

  I taste all the sharp pink medicines and liver pills in the bathroom and know the sour bush whiskey someone from out in the county brought my father. He calls it monkey rum and won’t touch it because it could make you blind. I even sample the cloudy cordials Great-Aunt Bessy sends over from Vidalia, syrupy concoctions steeped from elderberries and scuppernongs.

  I’m interested in steaming open letters over the coffeepot, but nothing arrives except bills from Rich’s and the Nifty Shop. My red diary with a small key I keep in code. Since the letter “e” occurs 131.5 times in every 1,000 letters, I try to use as few e’s as possible. My own privacy must be maintained. I want to break wax seals. When I walk on the beach, I keep my eyes open for bottles with messages curled inside: I have been on this island many years.

  I was reading under the covers late, late one night. Not that anyone cared how late I read, but I preferred the blue light my blanket made. This year, sixth grade, we studied the War Between the States. I kept a notebook of the battle plans of Gettysburg and Shiloh. Jeb Stuart was all action, my favorite man. I would love someone like that but no one else, except possibly Heathcliff. I was stirred by Jeb’s cavalry troops singing “Kathleen Mavourneen, the gray dawn is breaking …” as they rode off to battle, how he saved the day for Lee. I could relive the time, envision it so strongly that I broke into time. I didn’t see myself as a plantation belle burying the silver tea service in the back forty as the Yankees arrived. I loaded a gun and took slow aim, dressed wounds on gangrenous legs, stuck my hand in blown-open stomachs to probe for bullets. Since I often went bird hunting with my father, I knew how to shoot. He had given me a BB gun of my own. The war also held some secret—something happened that could not be undone, and I wanted to know. We were branded “Southern” because of the war, different—better, really—from every other part of the country. I had to find out everything. I knew Robert E. Lee’s birthday was January 19, and the name of his horse Traveller. My mother was a Davis and I looked at the Confederate president’s face for family resemblances. His wife, my mother said, was known to be notoriously unattractive.

  Breaking into my reverie, the voices of my parents in the kitchen made a low rumble. I was reading about Judah Benjamin, brain of the Confederacy, much more interesting than their late-night snarls of accusations, denials, ups and downs. What would they talk about into the night if they were not angry? As though under the anger a deep silence waited.

  “You’re walking on thin ice,” I heard my father say, “and you’d better be careful.”

  “If I were on thin ice,” she answered, “I’d skate as fast and with as much style as I could. If you’re slow,” she said pointedly, “you will fall through.” Her logic was maddening but I often agreed with it. I knew neither of them ever had seen any ice. But I could imagine her skimming fast across a frozen lake in a red skirt, the cracking ice always just behind her. I heard the bench of the kitchen table scrape back. “Besides, you knew that was the song and you didn’t come to me.” She flings supper dishes into the sink.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “On the radio. They were playing ‘When Day Is Done.’ ”

  She sings in an awful tremolo “When day is done and grass is wet … I think of you.” She is close to tears.

  But then the tone of my father’s voice changes. Instead of rising and rising again, as usually it did in their long night sieges, it falls. “All you can think about is some idiotic song.” He slams down his glass on the table. “I am dying, God damn it. Dying.” There is silence then. I throw off the blanket and sit up. I shine the flashlight out the window into the backyard. A gold panel of light from the open back door falls across the lawn. Beyond that, only the spring night. Nothing moves.

  The panther came into my dreams when I was twelve and never left. In my dream, I am sleeping. I wake up and find the panther along my body, its black back to me, my arms around it, my hand curled around a big paw. The claws are retracted but I feel their possibility. I lie totally still, thrilled, terrified, hardly breathing. The ropy, oily suppleness of the body of the sleeping animal, my face against the back of its head. When light starts to slant into the room, I slowly tie a blindfold around the panther’s eyes and slip out of bed.

  My father was a nuisance with his illness. All his operations were performed at a Catholic hospital in Atlanta. He’d linger for weeks, with my mother staying in the Henry Grady Hotel. I had to live with Daddy Jack, friends, or my aunt and uncle. Finally he needed treatments for so long that my sister came home from college to take care of me. We thought they were going to cut off a leg in one operation. Whatever he had was spreading. When I visited him in the hospital right after that, he said it felt good to wake up and reach down and feel his leg. Nuns fluttered around him and he flattered them and flirted even then. I had never seen a nun, and found their wimples and starched white robes apparitional.

  My sister was the sweetheart of Phi Delta Theta at Georgia, and taking care of me was not what she imagined. Even though she hadn’t yet graduated and was only nineteen, she got a job teaching fifth grade ten miles away in Ocilla. Since I was in sixth, I was able to grade her papers for her. One of her pupils said Lax was the capital of Georgia and another said the Flint was the largest river in the world. Willie Bell took care of us. This suited me fine but finally Daddy came home and never worked again. I saw his stomach when my mother changed the bandages. He looked as though he’d been torn at by a wild animal. His big suppurating wound would not heal.

  Daddy was a bleeder. My own blood goes scarlet and viscous, thickens even as I’m cut. Nothing, I’m nothing like him. “Blue blood,” he always said when he nicked his face, the sink swirling with pale blood and water. “Blood like the English royalty, all of them hemophiliacs.” His dull nails were almost square, beautiful really, with fine long fingers. Soft hands that never did a lick of work. When we went on a trip, Drew loaded the car. My father did not even lift a suitcase. My thumbs are square like his but the rest of my nails are oval with clear moons. I don’t have his f
lat bottom, his flat feet, his eyes the color of crude oil. Is he really my father?

  Whoever he was, I was not. A point of definition. But we all came out of the landscape. In the Carter years, the Yankee journalists were dumbfounded by Plains, just down the road from Fitzgerald. They tried every whichaway to condescend but the place, so completely itself, confounded them. One columnist finally said the stars were so bright they could drive a person mad. I knew he was on to something but he dropped it right there.

  Up close, like the trees on the edge of the riverbank, our roots are too exposed to thrive. A vast shallow sea used to cover this land; it left us swaths of silky white sand, with chinks of ancient shells. Prehistoric looking garfish meditate on whatever fish meditate on in the brackish sloughs. Leaning oaks and pines trailing their moss in the water are romantic from a distance; up close the branches twist out like arms and legs. The far distance was in our eyes, all of us. A high school photograph of me shows a pure uninterrupted face, but my eyes look like the eyes of someone blind from birth. Cypresses grow in standing black water. We are like that, trees growing out of their own reflections.

  He dies for three years while I rise, making my escape from childhood. He gets pains at the table, and I don’t know whether to stop until the waves passing over his face subside or to keep chewing. Before he takes to his bed permanently, he rests in the afternoons. Sometimes he calls me but I play Elvis over and over in my room, ignoring him. He could call Willie Bell with the little button by his bed that buzzes the kitchen. I can hear her: the good sound of pots and pans clattering. Separated from him by a hall, I lie on my bed reading and eating peanut butter cookies. The afternoon perfectly quiet. One window open and the curtain lifts, falls, billows, ripples. “Frances … Bud, do you hear me?” he calls. Sunny light. I adjust my three pillows, hug my book to me: This is my secret and pleasure. I have a new stack from the library: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Frances Parkinson Keyes’s Joy Street, Emily Brontë. I have a fine-tip pen with purple ink. There’s a blot of it on the pink linen bedspread. In my black speckled notebook, I copy “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / I have forgotten, and what arms have lain / Under my head till morning; but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight.” Willie Bell comes in with a stack of laundry. The hairs on her arms are little black curled wires. My skin, white as a lightbulb, my leg jutting out, faintly blue, my shoulder with light freckles like beach sand. She flashes her gold when she speaks. “Don’t you hear your daddy calling you? Him lying in there and you won’t answer. Shame.”

  Everyone but me seems to forget his terrorist past, holding a match under the kitchen curtain, saying the house would explode like fatwood; clicking his change in his pocket after you’d asked him to stop; ripping in half the new too-expensive blouse. I never could have friends stay over because of the unpredictable night escapades. His violence never turned toward me and I know he adored me, but I do not, will not, forgive him. Somewhere Chekhov says that it would be strange not to forgive. But was there no one in Russia like my father? He’s losing his life, losing us, leaving us. Visceral fear of his wasting body assaults me when I go near his room. My love for him is something I must hide, like notes from Calhoun Bruner, in an outgrown coat pocket. If only a wild bolt of lightning would strike him in the head. What if he lifts from the bed, a wafting spirit who never leaves the house? This illness is endless. And isn’t it just like him?

  How brave he is. How very young. Everyone says so, over and over. My mother becomes a tireless Florence. For months, streams of visitors faithfully bring his favorite coconut cakes, lemon pies, and flowers. Soon he will be under the ground. Maggots in the candy bar. Worms in the decayed possum. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle upon your snout. This can’t be. I reject death. Death mocks every live breath. The house is somber and sober and smells of cleansers, rotted stems, sun-dried sheets, bandages. He will just wake up one morning, well.

  I stay in my room. I stand naked on the wicker dressing table stool so I can stare at my body in the mirror. My hips are smooth as an empty bowl, and I think my new breasts are astonishing. Some girls got big brown nipples; I hope I never will. I make sarong dresses from scarves my sisters left in the chest of drawers, practice casual, indifferent poses so that when I see Sonny Stone again, I can look sophisticated for an eighth grader. My mother’s sister Mary raises her right eyebrow when she is skeptical. When I practice this, I look bewildered rather than sexy. Sonny is a junior and lives two blocks down Lemon, above a grocery store. His father has one arm, a war injury. I watch Sonny on rainy days at school when all the students whose classes are at the same hour can just dance in socks on the basketball floor because there’s no room inside for all the activities. He can really dance, and he wears only black T-shirts and fitted jeans. No one else dresses that way. I can see that the way he holds his partner makes it easy to dance with him, unlike the bobbing boys who’d been in my class since kindergarten. “Stranger in Paradise” and “Unchained Melody,” my favorites, seemed written for him—his tight mouth, skinny, muscled torso, blond hair with a hint of red.

  I’d had boyfriends since fifth grade. We all gathered on Saturday night and sat on steps talking endlessly. Still children, really, we chased each other through dark neighborhoods and peered in windows. We threw triangular folded notes in class, talked on the telephone about who liked whom. But on the arm of six-foot, 110-pound Clifton MacDuffie, box-stepping to “Ebb Tide” in the humid sock-smelling gym, my thick pink angora sweater feeling more like a live rabbit every minute, I lock eyes with Sonny Stone, as he rolls by with Pamela Puny Paleface Poor Posture Peterson in his arms. I look down, then slowly back at him. His sharp elbow jabs Clifton. He doesn’t say “Excuse me” or anything, just throws his head back and winks. Then he starts talking to Pamela, who wears makeup because her mother owns a beauty shop and fixes her hair and face all the time. She has wavy hair and looks up at Sonny with a loose red smile that shows her sixth-year molars.

  In my father’s last year, thinned to a boy again, he is hard to imagine as the swaggering, powerful, big boss who could scare me so much that my teeth chattered. His eyes lose all jolt and spark; it’s like looking into old campfires. I still run hot and cold on his sickness. At last, the house is peaceful. No waving of guns, no bottles thrown across the kitchen, no keys jerked from my mother’s hand at three a.m. I had wished he’d just evaporate for as long as I could remember. Still, he reached for my hand with his old warmth. “Bud, we’re sweethearts and buddies. That’s why you’re my bud.” He’d always said that but now he sounds sad. I had to check to see if he always had a fresh glass of water. He listened for the noon whistle from the mill. “They’re going to dinner,” he said, and I knew he could see the mill workers walking out under the arch he built. A sign hung from it: THROUGH THESE GATES PASS THE BEST PEOPLE ON EARTH: OUR EMPLOYEES. When the five o’clock whistle blew, “They’re going home.”

  Every morning Mother and Willie Bell freshened his bandages and dressed him in a clean pair of pressed pajamas. They changed the sheets the way tablecloths are changed in dining cars of trains, rolling him to one side and making up the other, then rolling him onto the clean side. Sometimes I was forced to sit with him when my mother had to go out. Francis Ward, our doctor, came by frequently to shoot him up with morphine, so mostly he just lay there in a haze. Now and then, he’d rally and talk with frightful clarity about how beautiful the river was when he was a boy and how he picked up the tiny bird arrowheads, as I still did. Long-lost events seemed to be happening again, even to me as he described them. I could see him as a child, picking the shy Confederate violets for his mother. I saw him with white doves resting on his arms the year he spent in a wheelchair. The cages still rotted in back of Daddy Jack’s house. What caused his anger in high school when he pushed a teacher and was expelled? And there was a photo of him in a uniform at military school, looking oddly small.

  He smelled awful, like a raccoon run over on
the road, a smell I still feel in my nose years later. I have a horror of illness. When someone I love gets the flu, I say, “You’d feel better if you’d just get up and do something.” I say, “It’s not good to just lie there.” I’m mute at the bedsides of dangerously sick friends, can say no easy words, my heart racing at the hospital smells, the efficiency of the nurses. His skin peeled. I flicked big dry scales off the top of his hand when he was unconscious. Irresistible, but I really didn’t like to touch him, either, and would soap my hands when I left the room.

  In his illness he became sweet, not wanting to cause trouble. He became the boy his mother had doted on, the “Boofa” of the family, the courageous one who took the bullet for his father. And he was silent in pain, never moaning. Backbone made of iron, the doctor said. A saint, the preacher said. When he slept, I read The Secret Garden, imagining hunting speckled butterflies in a walled garden. I did not want him to die with me in the room and listened for the sinewy rhythm of his breathing. Would I be able to see his death, the transparent scarf, float out of him and out the window? Would it flutter over me as it left his body?

  What my mother does the nights of those long months, I have no idea. I stay with my best friend on Saturday nights. Her parents go out to the club for supper and as soon as they pull out of the driveway, all the boys in our group appear. We make popcorn, talk, talk, talk. Edna Lula and Virgil bang out four-handed “Heart and soul / I fell in love with you,” and suddenly I like Sammy Dixon but as I lean back against the piano, laughing, my first kiss happens with Jeff Hardy. They switch to the first chords of “Blue moon / You saw me standing alone” and he quickly kisses me hard with his thirteen-year-old lips and I let him while everyone shouts and stomps. Sometimes we end up at Angela Moore’s (her parents go to the same place as Edna Lula’s for supper). There, playing spin-the-bottle, I kiss nine boys. These cold, slippery tight-lipped kisses are dry runs for the real thing—Sonny Stone, for instance. I am sure he wraps Pamela in his arms and kisses her deeply, her back bent as in movies. I imagine kissing someone so powerfully, we both pass out. But when? I practice on my ancient musical teddy bear and on the folded washrag in the bathtub.