Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

by Mayes, Frances

  Often at night, my friends and I walk through the Willcox’s woods to a wide stream with beautiful springs. David Willcox, more handsome than Montgomery Clift, lives a block from me and later becomes my real love who loves me back. I played kick the can with him for years. He is a natural in the woods and loves all waters, as I do. In daylight you can see through clear water to the boils, which bubble so blue and pure far below that it seems a goddess could be born there. Such pleasure, diving through sunlight in water. Deeper and colder I swim down, my eyes open. I press my face into the icy surge, my fist into the opening in the earth. At night, it’s different. We build a fire on the bank and step out of the circle of light to change into bathing suits among palmetto bushes. In the spooky light, which just reaches to the lower tips of swaying Spanish moss, one by one we push off with a running start, swing on a vine, up, out, up, then, at the highest point, drop into the spring, darker than black. When Lard goes, howling out the Tarzan cry, I hold my breath, afraid the vine will snap. We love the exhilaration of the fall into the night, our shouts scaring away every polecat and fox. Crocodiles, rattlesnakes, and snapping turtles lie concealed among the grasses—we know they won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.

  David had green eyes and was shy. His father was a doctor with a balky heart. The family went to their cabin in the woods so no one could find him on weekends. When I am invited along, David and I take a rowboat on the river, throw out an anchor, and slip in the water. I shimmy out of my suit and tie it around my ankle, and we float and swim downstream with the current for a mile or so. In places the river becomes so shallow that my bottom surfaces. David swims ahead of me as I pole myself along, hoping no fishermen are casting nearby. In a deep spot, I slide back into my suit, red with mud. Somewhere, we crawl out and walk back through the oaks. Once, as we are bumping the rowboat into the bank, a water moccasin the size of my leg thumps down into the boat. Even in the shadows the snakeskin looks greasy and I see the sliver of black fang slipping in and out of its mouth. Instinctively I jump into the water where all its relatives hide. The live panic that seizes me as I touch the water sends me straight up onto the bank. David stuns it with an oar, finally flinging it back into the river.

  We accumulate a collection of arrowheads, as my father did as a boy. We search for Yamacraw burial grounds or middens, and I watch for unusual contours along the ground. We fish under bridges, climb up the sides of an abandoned granary, complete with waterwheel, and cross the swamp on a railroad trestle, hoping we won’t have to jump into the water hyacinths and alligators below. We hunt in waders at dawn in cold duck blinds, taking warm birds out of the jaws of the dog. The cabin was my favorite place to be. Geneva, his mother, cans fruits. His father rests under the scuppernong arbor reading Robert Service’s murderous poems of the Yukon out loud. We fill milk bottles with blackberries growing out of graves in a cemetery and his mother bakes cobblers.

  One night, walking back to the cabin where Geneva is cooking ducks full of buckshot on the outdoor fireplace, we stop. The sand road, once on the bottom of the prehistoric sea, glows white as the surface of the moon. What stops us is the pure perfume of honeysuckle, rampant along the barbed wire fence. My father loves gardenias, roses, honeysuckle. When we drove to the mill, he’d always slow at a low dip in the road, where tangles of honeysuckle bloomed. He always said the same thing, “Smells better than a million dollars.” When he came home with roses, he put them on the kitchen counter and said, “See there, we don’t even have to go to heaven.” The soft road at night and the fragrance seem like heaven. David never thought of kissing before, even as an experiment. We kiss twice, lips closed, chaste and amazed. He breaks off a sprig and sticks it behind my ear, then we kiss again, closer this time, our lips slightly open, just long enough that I feel his breath enter my mouth.

  The last summer of my father’s life, my sister Nancy married. I had a case of poison ivy that looked like leprosy and everyone was mad because I was supposed to wear pink tulle in the wedding, to be a lady, even though I’d only recently come down out of the trees. Heavy creamy invitations went out to a thousand people, and all Mother’s friends went into a frenzy of luncheons, showers, teas for the bride. My father made his last trip out of his room to see her wedding presents on sheet-covered tiers in the dining room. He braced himself on the back of a chair and surveyed the rows of glittering silver flatware, pitchers, and trays. “God Almighty,” he said, then turned back into the hall, slowly making his way back to bed, totally exhausted. For weeks, the wedding took over everything, and he had to lie there dying on the edge of the celebrations. We all got new dresses prettier than Princess Elizabeth’s, who was going to become queen as my sister married. Flowered drifts of voile, peach linen with panels of pleated silk, aqua cotton, pale as the Gulf. My sister’s wedding dress fanned out into an immense train. Her fiancé came with droves of people from Atlanta, probably amused to be down in the sticks for a country wedding. I was just learning to flirt, the art southern girls are destined to practice throughout their lives. That I already wanted all the boys to love me did not produce any sense in me that I could return the feeling. The object was romance, something like David felt about hunting. Jeb Stuart. Tristan. The Snow Prince. My friends and I knew our bodies were semidivine, never to be bestowed except in an Irish castle, on the moors, or at least in Atlanta, on the wedding night in a glamorous hotel, with the trousseau overflowing from a trunk, flowers filling the room with a secret sweetness, a white peignoir that floated as one walked toward the bed, like the robes of an angel lighting on earth. Yes, we were short on realism.

  Meanwhile, kissing would do. I wasn’t exactly sure why anyone would want to do those other contorted things, so awkward and comical.

  The adorable blond groomsman, just out of college, flirts back, though I am in the eighth grade. He wants to play golf and I hear myself telling him I play often and will take him to the club. He ties a sweater with a crimson insignia around his shoulders and wears monogrammed shirts and baggy Bermudas. Possibly Sonny’s tight black T-shirts aren’t so great. Forest Ripley Harley III has been to Paris, France, and the real Vienna, not the Georgia one pronounced Vie-anna. He’s never seen sand greens before; I don’t know any other kind exist. I hardly know my way around the course, having played only twice with my mother. The last time, I’d swung back with a driving iron, my eye on the fairway rather than the ball, and thwunked my mother in the forehead, knocking her cuckoo. Forest must be already used to women acting incompetent at sports; he doesn’t seem to notice how often my balls pop fly toward the rough, or disappear into the pond. On the seventh hole, by pure fluke, I hit a hole in one. Forgetting to be cool, I’m thrilled and jump up and down, waving the club.

  “Too bad you’re so young,” he says driving home. “You’re just so sweet.” Sweet. I don’t want to hear that. Dangerous, mysterious, fascinating. I pout my lips: sweet. “Looks are deceiving,” I answer, trying to make my eyelashes brush my cheek as I lower my eyes. I’ve practiced how to look down, then very slowly up with wide eyes.

  I hang my arm out the window for the air. My long sleeves in the hundred-degree days keep anyone from seeing the seeping crust of poison ivy, remnant of a day in the woods with David. Surges of an itch beyond itch flood my entire body, at times so intense I stop breathing. The poison ivy courses in my bloodstream. It’s on my thighs, too, hard welts, horribly alive. My father’s cancer—no one utters the forbidden word out loud—might feel like this, but worse. I look at my arm, thinking How can this be my arm? I want to unscrew it at the shoulder and replace it with a well one. If the surges were constant, I could see how you’d fall unconscious or fall into a fit. At night I run hot water over my skin and the sensation of pleasure, just at the crux of pain, is unbearable. The blood-stimulating heat and the water might spread the poison ivy like a gas fire over my body but I let it run anyway, smiling and biting my lip. How could he be so silent in his room? I easily could scream. Odd, my arm has a memory: Anytime I�
�m under major stress, I get a faint rash along the tender inside of my elbow, a slight itch I don’t touch, lest it take hold of me.

  A bee flies under my sister’s veil at the wedding and she gasps and jerks, lifts the lace, fanning wildly until it buzzes off. A woman from Atlanta loses her half-slip in the church vestibule, daintily steps over the clump of satin, and walks on. My father lies at home, watched over for the evening by Drew and the sheriff, whose gun on the dining room table guards the hoard of sterling and crystal.

  My sister and Cleve, her new husband, stop by the house to say good-bye to Daddy. She’s stunning in her going-away suit, shining with happiness, and crying as she leaves because they are off to Nassau, then to French Morocco, same blistering latitude as Georgia but a world away. Cleve will be a navy lieutenant for two years and she knows they will be among foreigners when the telegram arrives with news that Daddy has died.

  Forest kisses my forehead and says, “Look me up in five years.” I smile and lift my shoulders; Daddy has said I have lovely shoulders. Someday maybe someone will drink champagne from the hollows my collarbones make when I pull my shoulders forward a little. I fold my inflamed arm around my bouquet so he can’t see the oozing pus.

  Mother cried all night. The next day we were left with packing up boxes and tiptoeing around the house again. Summer burned. I wished we were at Sea Island on the edge of the palmetto jungle. Daddy holds on, refusing all the ground has to offer. We hire nurses around the clock. There was little for them to do except tell me to be quiet. I walk by in the hot afternoon and see the nurse staring at the trickle of urine dripping into a jug on the floor, the only activity in the room except that sometimes a fly crawls over Daddy’s face and the nurse leaps up to fan it away. I have a telephone in my room, with my own number. I talk, till my ear goes numb, to Monroe and Jeff, and to Richard, who sets up bowling pins at Bowens Mill. I’ve met him when I’ve been swimming at the pool there, ten miles outside town. Son of the fish hatchery manager, he’s the one my parents would most violently oppose. His voice comes from another world; I can hear the miles between us. He’s darling. Often my phone rings once. When I pick it up, no one answers me.

  At home late on Friday nights, I look out the window from eleven on, waiting to see Sonny Stone walking home from Pamela’s house, right behind mine. After flirting with Forest and knowing David, I can see that Sonny won’t do, but the very thing I see that won’t do is what attracts me to him. He rolls up his sleeve and pokes in a cigarette. When Mother and I pass him in the car, I say, “Look, that’s Sonny Stone—he said he’d ask me for a date if I were older. He’s the cutest boy in the eleventh grade!” She glances at him. “Generations of ignorance,” she says, “and probably Vitamin D deficiency.” Still, I crouch in the dark dining room that faces Lemon Street. At eleven fifteen, or eleven thirty, or sometimes midnight, he walks by, obscure as a shadow in his black T-shirt. Sometimes he glances at my house, where I peer out from the edge of the draperies.

  Before I go to bed, I look in my father’s room. His covers are not disturbed. In the middle of the canopied bed, he looks like marble. He already could be dead. The light from the bathroom shines like a white plank over his sleeping form. He won’t die and won’t die. Frozen like this, he’s better than his former swaggering self. “No-fun bastard,” I whisper at his door. “What did you ever do for anyone? On whose arm will I come out at the Sub-Deb Dance? You would do this.”

  His reign ends two days before Christmas. His forty-eighth birthday passed four days ago. Relatives are all over the house. I sit in my uncle’s Cadillac all afternoon, listening to the radio, pushing the station bar over and over, unable to find anything except moronic gospels and chestnuts roasting on an open fire that I don’t want to hear. We have a tree but no one decorated it. When my uncle comes to the porch and motions at me, I pretend not to see him. He raps on the window. I am bloody cold and no one I know has even ridden by. “Sugar, you better go in and say good-bye to your daddy. They don’t think he’s going to make it,” my uncle said, as though this were news.

  My mother leans onto the foot of the bed and squeezes the daylights out of my hand. Daddy Jack stands at the door mopping his bald head with his handkerchief: his son, the one he’d worked with every day, the one who’d proved with blood his astounding bravery. The nurse says, “Mr. Mayes, here’s Frances, do you see her?” He’s been in a deep coma for days, his breath light as a newborn’s. The mill whistle blows. Suddenly he opens his eyes. Not jet-black now: faded like an old horse’s. He stares. I press my knees hard against the bed. “Yes,” he said clearly, “she’s beautiful.”

  Last words. He seems to frown and look out the window and he is gone from this world. The doctor comes in and my mother starts to yelp like a hit dog and says, “Oh, no, not after all this.” Who knows what she expected, but I understand what she meant.

  Just because it is Christmas Eve and we are having the funeral, it rains. Hard. By the time the coffin is lowered, there are inches of water in the hole. I look down and the casket blanketed with red roses floats, a last refusal. Then he lurches and settles into the clay. I close my eyes and cross them hard beneath my lids to keep from thinking.

  The next day my mother and I drive home with my sister Barbara to Florida. The round lakes in the town are where the limestone substrata collapsed. The earth can do that, just sink, and then fill with water. One day we see the movie The Merry Widow with Lana Turner and my mother cheers up, then cries. My sister has three small children who seem to cry a lot also.

  I begin to feel the buoyant emptiness I was to feel for so many years. Even though Daddy wasted for three years, death surprises me, so insulting. It seems like such an unlikely thing to happen, especially that his great force could cool. I thought he was powerful, and to fall—or rise—from mean and adoring to pitiful and brave was too tangled.

  When we came home ten days later, Willie Bell had moved his bed to the other side of the room and put on a different bedspread. If only he hadn’t said that about me at the last moment. Beautiful. Me, with the pointed incisors that made Wivoni Harden say I looked like I should hiss instead of smile.

  The house feels blank and clean, no mysteries hidden anywhere. I recalled a day a long time ago when my sister learned to drive. We were all at Fernandina, and Nancy and I took Daddy’s new Oldsmobile into town. At a stoplight, she rammed into someone from behind. My fault—I had shouted “Look” at an antique hearse displayed in front of a mortuary. The entire front of the car caved in. Scared, fearing the brunt of his anger, we knocked on the hotel door, where my parents were taking an afternoon nap. Obviously annoyed, Daddy opened the door and we told him that his car was smashed. “Is anyone hurt?” he asked. We said no. “Well, why in hell did you wake me up?” He slammed the door. I really loved him then.

  Since my father read no books, played no records, collected no stamps or clocks or coins, nothing tied down his memory. Willie Bell had given his clothes away, thrown out the tree, baked a pound cake. I’d missed Rosemary’s party. I didn’t want to go to school ever again. I didn’t care about logarithms, passé composé, or the new Supreme Court announcement that segregation was over. Nothing could touch me. Once his clothes, hunting guns, and the white box containing an old watch, gold cuff links, and his tuxedo studs were hidden, he was entirely gone. How quick is oblivion. Over Christmas, all my friends learned how to fast dance. I could dance perfectly in my mind but with a real partner I couldn’t follow a lead and stepped on his feet. I thought, Now I’ll never learn.

  My mother was forty-seven when her husband was laid beside his mother under marble slabs at Evergreen Cemetery. She thought she was still young. At fourteen, I did not think she was young, but I was about to notice that, although she was full of high spirits and wants, she was—to my astonishment—utterly helpless. Not that she didn’t warn me. You think I’m made of iron. I am not made of iron, she repeated over and over. What was she made of?

  Without either the high drama of her
entanglement with my father in his swaggering days, or the day-and-night vigil over his decline into brave-and-sweet ghost of himself, she emerged like a spooky velvet-winged spectral moth that flaps toward porch lights.

  As for him, she didn’t know which to prefer—the hand pouring the Southern Comfort over ice, or the hand weak and bony on the bedspread, constantly reaching out to us as we walked by his bed. Arrogant (You low-down pissant) or pitiful (I’ll be dead and you’ll be fastening those pearls and he yanks off the pearls, sending them scurrying all over the kitchen floor). Raging big boss (I want it yesterday) or supplicant (Please, darlin’, some chipped ice). Wild (roaring into the driveway at dawn) or snagged (pus-stained bandages over wounds).

  In the first winter of our loss, Frankye found that we had no money. The mill check came, even while Daddy was sick, but when he died, nothing. Mayes Manufacturing had long since sold to New York owners and Daddy was their manager, while Daddy Jack sat on the money. There must have been health insurance then but we didn’t have it. My parents had neglected to pay the installments on the life insurance policy; they simply forgot. The life insurance would have made all the difference in our lives. When I asked why, she replied, You have no idea what I go through. Months in the Atlanta hospital, operations, nurses, medicines, doctors—the costs never were mentioned but must have been staggering. When all the medical bills were paid, the First National Bank statement said one thousand dollars.