"I trust the Lord."
A sudden terrible thought came to me. "Are people ever sick on Christmas?"
"Yes, Baby." Rosa was making supper toast by the fire, turning it carefully with a long toast fork. Her voice was like torn paper when she said again, "My little son died on Christmas Day."
"Died! Sherman died!"
"You know it isn't Sherman," she said sternly. "Sherman comes to our winder every day and you know it." Sherman was a big boy and after school he would stand by our window and Rosa would open it from the bottom and talk with him a long time and sometimes give him a dime to go to the store. Sherman held his nose all the time he was at the window so that his voice twanged, like a ukulele string. "It was Sherman's little brother—a long time ago."
"Was he sick with scarlet fever?"
"No. He burned to death on Christmas morning. He was just a baby and Sherman put him down on the hearth to play with him. Then—childlike—Sherman forgot about him and left him alone on the hearth. The fire popped and a spark caught his little nightgown, and by the time I knew about it my baby was—that was how come I got this here wrinkled white scar on my neck."
"Was your baby like our new baby?"
"Near 'bout the same age."
I thought about it a long time before I said: 'Was Sherman glad?"
"Why, what shape of thoughts is in your head, Sister?"
"I don't like babies," I said.
"You will like the baby later on. Just like you love your brother now."
"Bonny smells bad," I said.
"Most every child don't like the new baby until they get used to it."
"Are every and ever the same?" I asked.
Those were the days when we were peeling. Every day Budge and I peeled strips and patches of skin and saved them in a pillbox.
"I wonder what we're going to do with all this skin we've saved?"
"Face that when the time comes, Sister. Enjoy it while you can."
"I wonder what we're going to do with this long chain we've made." I looked at the chain that was piled in the box between the beds of my brother and me. It covered all the other toys—the dolls, engines and all.
The quarantine ended and the joy of our release battled with a sudden, inexplicable grief: all our toys were going to be burned. Every toy, the chain, even the peeled skin, which seemed the most terrible loss of all.
"It's on account of the germs," Rosa said. "Everything burned and the beds and mattresses will go to the germ disinfectory man. And the room scoured with Lysol."
I stood on the threshold of the room after the germ man had gone. There were no echoes of toys—no beds, no furniture. The room was bitter cold, and the damp floor was sharp-smelling, the windows wet My heart shut with the closing door.
Mother had sewed me a red dress for the Christmas season. Budge and I were free to walk in all the rooms and go out of the yard. But I was not happy. The baby was always in my mother's lap. Mary, the cook, would say, "Goosa-goosa-ga," and Daddy would throw the baby in the air.
There was a terrible song that Christmas:
Hang up the baby's stocking;
Be sure you don't forget—
The dear little dimpled darling!
She ne'er saw Christmas yet...
I hated the whining tune and the words so much that I put my fingers in my ears and hummed Dixie until the talk changed to Santa's reindeer, the North Pole and the magic of Christmas.
Three days before Christmas the real and the magic collided so suddenly that my world of understanding was instantly scattered. For some reason I don't remember now, I opened the door of the scarletfever room and stopped on the threshold, spellbound and trembling. The room rioted before my unbelieving eyes. Nothing familiar was there and the space was filled with everything Budge and I had written on the Santa Claus list and sent up the chimney. All that and even more—so that the room was like a Santa Claus room in a department store. There were a tricycle, a doll, a train with tracks and a child's table and four chairs. I doubted the reality of what I saw and looked at the familiar tree outside the window and at a crack on the ceiling I knew well. Then I moved around with the light, secret way of a child who meddles. I touched the table, the toys with a careful forefinger. They were touchable, real. Then I saw a wonderful, unasked-for thing—a green monkey with an organ grinder. The monkey wore a scarlet coat and looked very real with his monkey-anxious face and worried eyes. I loved the monkey but did not dare touch him. I looked around the Santa Claus room a last time. There was a hush, a stasis in my heart that follows the shock of revelation. I closed the door and walked away slowly, weighed by too much wisdom.
Mother was knitting in the front room and the baby was there in her play pen.
I took a big breath and said in a demanding voice: "Why are the Santa Claus things in the back room?"
Mother had the stumbling look of someone who is telling a story. "Why, Sister, Santa Claus asked your father if he could store some things in the back room."
I didn't believe it and said: "I think that Santa Claus is only parents."
"Why, Sister, darling!"
"I wondered about chimneys. Butch doesn't even have a chimney but Santa Claus always comes to him."
"Sometimes he walks in the door."
For the first time I knew my mother was telling me stories and I was thinking. "Is Jesus real? Santa Claus and Jesus are close kin, I know."
Mamma put down her knitting. "Santa Claus is toys and stores and Jesus is church."
This mention of church brought to me thoughts of boredom, colored windows, organ music, restlessness. I hated church and Jesus if church was Jesus. I loved only Santa Claus and he was not real.
Mother tried again: "Jesus is as the holy infant—like Bonny. The Christ child."
This was the worst of all. I squatted on the floor and bawled in the baby's face, "Santa Claus is only parents! Jesus is—"
The baby began to cry and Mother picked her up and cuddled her in her lap. "Now you behave yourself, young lady; you're making Bonny cry."
"I hate that old ugly Bonny," I wailed and went to the hall to cry.
Christmas Day was like a twice-done happening. I played with the monkey under the tree and helped Budge lay the tracks for the train. The baby had blocks and a rubber doll and she cried and didn't play. Budge and I ate a whole layer of our box of Treasure Island chocolates and by afternoon we were jaded by play and candy.
Later I was sitting on the floor alone in the Christmasy room except for the baby in her play pen. The bright tree glowed in the winter light. Suddenly I thought of Rosa Henderson and the baby who was burned on Christmas Day. I looked at Bonny and glanced around the room. Mother and Daddy had gone to visit my Uncle Will, and Mary was in the kitchen. I was alone. Carefully I lifted the baby and put her on the hearth. In the unclear conscious of five years old I did not feel that I was doing wrong. I wondered if the fire would pop and went to the back room with my brother, sad and troubled.
It was our family custom to have fireworks on Christmas night. Daddy would light a bonfire after dark and we would shoot Roman candles and skyrockets. I remembered. The box of fireworks was on the mantlepiece of the back room and I opened it and selected two Roman candles. I asked Budge, "Do you want to do something fun?" I knew clearly this was wrong. But, angry and sad, I wanted to do wrong. I held the Roman candles to the fire and gave one to Budge. "Watch here."
I thought I remembered the fireworks, but I had never seen anything like this. After a hiss and sputter the Roman candles, violent and alive, shot in streams of yellow and red. We stood on opposite sides of the room and the blazing fireworks ricocheted from wall to wall in an arch of splendor and terror. It lasted a long time and we stood transfixed in the radiant, fearful room. When finally it was finished, my hostile feelings had disappeared. I was quiet in the very silent room.
I thought I heard the baby cry, but when I ran to the living room I knew she was not crying nor had she been burned and gone up th
e chimney. She had turned over and was crawling toward the Christmas tree. Her little-fingered hands were on the floor, her nightgown was hiked over her diapers. I had never seen Bonny crawl before and I watched her with the first feelings of love and pride, the old hostility gone forever.
I played with Bonny with a heart cleansed of jealousy and joyful for the first time in many months. I was reconciled that Santa Claus was only family but with this new tranquility, I felt maybe my family and Jesus were somehow kin. Soon afterward, when we moved to a new house in the suburbs, I taught Bonny how to walk and even let her hold the monkey while I played the organ grinder.
[Mademoiselle, December 1953]
A HOSPITAL CHRISTMAS EVE
I MET CAROL a few days before the Christmas when we were both patients in the hospital for physical therapy. Carol was a very busy girl; she painted in watercolors, drew with crayons, and most of all she planned for her future. At that time, she was planning for a Christmas Eve party, for it was to be the first time in her life that she was going to walk with her new prosthetic legs to a party.
Carol was an amputee. She had been born with legs so twisted that when she was nineteen years old, she had them amputated.
On this Christmas Eve, there were loads of visitors in the ward, families and friends of the patients' and parties organized by the hospital. But for Carol it was a catastrophe. The party she had yearned to go to was denied her because one of the legs was being repaired. It was going to ruin her Christmas Eve, and when I looked at her, I saw that silently, bitterly, she was weeping.
I asked her to come over to see me. She was very adept at her wheelchair and came over, still crying.
"Of all the times in the year this leg had to be fixed—just when I was so looking forward to walking to the party and showing my friends my new legs."
We talked for a while, and I read to her the most living piece of literature, except for the Bible, that I know. James Joyce's "The Dead."
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
I read it as much to comfort myself as to comfort her, and the beauty of the language brought peace and loveliness to both of us on that Christmas Eve in that hospital ward.
She was a girl of magnificent courage, accepting the infirmities of her life with grace and equanimity. Still, I knew that she was troubled about the party, because she repeated, "Tonight of all nights, when I was going to walk in and show my friends."
The doctors also were troubled, and suddenly, like a rising wind, there was a small commotion in the corridor. News was being passed around that Carol's leg was going to be fixed in time and she could go to her party, after all. There was general rejoicing in the nine-bed ward, and Carol wept again, with excitement.
When it was time for the party to begin, Carol was dressed immaculately and wearing her finest clothes. Her legs were brought to her, and she used the skills for walking that she had been taught so very recently. A doctor looked in the doorway to see how she was getting on, and the therapist said, "Good girl, Carol."
She checked the straps on her prosthetic legs, and then she struggled to get into a standing position, and with her head held high, she walked proudly down the corridor of the ward to where her friends were waiting for her.
I knew that the long months of suffering, heroism, hard work and courage had paid off and that Carol would really be all right.
The last time I heard from her, she was attending college, joining in all the student activities, and was planning to teach physiotherapy after graduation.
[McCall's, December 1967, published posthumously]
WRITERS AND WRITING
HOW I BEGAN TO WRITE
IN OUR OLD GEORGIA HOME we used to have two sitting-rooms—a back one and a front one—with folding doors between. These were the family living-rooms and the theatre of my shows. The front sitting-room was the auditorium, the back sitting-room the stage. The sliding doors the curtain. In wintertime the firelight flickered dark and glowing on the walnut doors, and in the last strained moments before the curtain you noticed the ticking of the clock on the mantlepiece, the old tall clock with the glass front of painted swans. In summertime the rooms were stifling until the time for curtain, and the clock was silenced by sounds of yard-boy whistling and distant radios. In winter, frost flowers bloomed on the windowpanes (the winters in Georgia are very cold), and the rooms were drafty, quiet. The open summer lifted the curtains with each breeze, and there were the smells of sun-hot flowers and, toward twilight, watered grass. In winter we had cocoa after the show and in summer orange crush or lemonade. Winter and summer the cakes were always the same. They were made by Lucille, the cook we had in those days, and I have never tasted cakes as good as those cakes we used to have. The secret of their goodness lay, I believe, in the fact that they were always cakes that failed. They were chocolate raisin cupcakes that did not rise, so that there was no proper cupcake cap—the cakes were dank, flat and dense with raisins. The charm of those cakes was alogether accidental.
As the eldest child in our family I was the custodian, the counter of the cakes, the boss of all our shows. The repertory was eclectic, running from hashed-over movies to Shakespeare and shows I made up and sometimes wrote down in my nickel Big Chief notebooks. The cast was everlastingly the same—my younger brother, Baby Sister and myself. The cast was the most serious handicap. Baby Sister was in those days a stomachy ten-year old who was terrible in death scenes, fainting spells and such-like necessary parts. When Baby Sister swooned to a sudden death she would prudently look around beforehand and fall very carefully on sofa or chair. (Once, I remember, such a death fall broke both legs of one of Mama's favorite chairs.)
As director of the shows I could put up with terrible acting, but there was one thing I simply could not stand. Sometimes, after coaching and drilling half the afternoon, the actors would decide to abandon the whole project just before curtain time and wander out into the yard to play. "I struggle and work on a show all afternoon, and now you run out on me," I would yell, past endurance at these times. "You're nothing but children! Children! I've got a good mind to shoot you dead." But they only gulped the drinks and ran out with the cakes.
The props were impromptu, limited only by Mama's modest interdictions. The top drawer of the linen closet was out of bounds and we had to make do with second-best towels and tablecloths and sheets in the plays that called for nurses, nuns and ghosts.
The sitting-room shows ended when first I discovered Eugene O'Neill. It was the summer when I found his books down in the library and put his picture on the mantlepiece in the back sitting-room. By autumn I was writing a three-acter about revenge and incest—the curtain rose on a graveyard and, after scenes of assorted misery, fell on a catafalque. The cast consisted of a blind man, several idiots and a mean old woman of one hundred years. The play was impractical for performance under the old conditions in the sitting rooms. I gave what I called a "reading" to my patient parents and a visiting aunt.
Next, I believe, it was Nietzsche and a play called The Fire of Life. The play had two characters—Jesus Christ and Friedrich Nietzsche—and the point I prized about the play was that it was written in verses that rhymed. I gave a reading of this play, too, and afterward the chi
ldren came in from the yard, and we drank cocoa and ate the fallen, lovely raisin cakes in the back sitting-room by the fire. "Jesus?" my aunt asked when she was told. "Well, religion is a nice subject anyway."
***
By that winter the family rooms, the whole town, seemed to pinch and cramp my adolescent heart. I longed for wanderings. I longed especially for New York. The firelight on the walnut folding doors would sadden me, and the tedious sound of the old swan clock. I dreamed of the distant city of skyscrapers and snow, and New York was the happy mise en scene of that first novel I wrote when I was fifteen years old. The details of the book were queer: ticket collectors on the subway, New York front yards—but by that time it did not matter, for already I had begun another journey. That was the year of Dostoevski, Chekhov and Tolstoy—and there were the intimations of an unsuspected region equidistant from New York. Old Russia and our Georgia rooms, the marvelous solitary region of simple stories and the inward mind.
[Mademoiselle, September 1948]
THE RUSSIAN REALISTS AND SOUTHERN LITERATURE
IN THE SOUTH during the past fifteen years a genre of writing has come about that is sufficiently homogeneous to have led critics to label it "the Gothic School." This tag, however, is unfortunate. The effect of a Gothic tale may be similar to that of a Faulkner story in its evocation of horror, beauty, and emotional ambivalence—but this effect evolves from opposite sources; in the former the means used are romantic or supernatural, in the latter a peculiar and intense realism. Modern Southern writing seems rather to be most indebted to Russian literature, to be the progeny of the Russian realists. And this influence is not accidental. The circumstances under which Southern literature has been produced are strikingly like those under which the Russians functioned. In both old Russia and the South up to the present time a dominant characteristic was the cheapness of human life.
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