Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Copyright © 1999 by Bobbie Ann Mason

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this work were originally published in The New Yorker.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mason, Bobbie Ann.

  Clear Springs : a memoir / Bobbie Ann Mason.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83024-1

  1. Mason, Bobbie Ann—Childhood and youth. 2. Women novelists, American—20th century—Family relationships. 3. Kentucky—Social life and customs. 4. Mason, Bobbie Ann—Family. 5. Farm life—Kentucky. 6. Family—Kentucky. I. Title. PS3563.A7877Z77 1999 813′.54—dc21

  [B] 98-37173

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  Preface

  My grandmother baked cookies, but she didn’t believe in eating them fresh from the oven. She stored them in her cookie jar for a day or two before she would let me have any. “Wait till they come in order,” Granny would say. The crisp cookies softened in their ceramic cell—their snug humidor—acquiring more flavor, ripening both in texture and in my imagination.

  “Coming in order”—an apt phrase for writing a memoir. My life is coming in order, as memories waft out of that cookie jar. But what is the recipe for those cookies? Who knows? My grandmother is dead, and her knowledge and memories are lost.

  Like many Americans, I long to know the past. There’s a sense of loss in America today, a feeling of disconnectedness. We’re no longer quite sure who we are or how we got here. More and more of us are rummaging in the attic, trying to retrieve our history. We draw genealogical charts and hang old quilts on the wall. We seem to hope that if we can find out our family stories and trace our roots and save the old cookie jars and coal scuttles, we just might rescue ourselves and be made whole.

  I grew up on a small family farm, the kind of place people like to idealize these days. They think the old-fashioned rustic life provided what they are now seeking—independence, stability, authenticity. And we did have those on the farm—along with mind-numbing, back-breaking labor and crippling social isolation. Farm life wasn’t simple. I remember a way of life before I Love Lucy and credit cards and Watergate, a time when women churned butter and men plowed the fields with a team of mules and children explored the fields and creek beds. Sometimes I think I can remember the nineteenth century. When I was born in Kentucky, in 1940, farm ways had not changed much since pioneer times. No true cultural up heaval had hit Clear Springs, the rural community my family came from, since the Civil War. We seemed to live outside of time.

  But World War II hurled us into the twentieth century. After my father came home from the Navy, we got a radio the size of a jukebox, and we started going to drive-in movies. I began dreaming of a rootless way of life, one that would knock me loose from that rock-solid homestead and catapult me into the fluid, musical motions of faraway cities. All three generations of our extended family were challenged simultaneously by news from a fast-moving outside world. My elders had to carry on with their inevitable labors, but seductive promises seemed to whirl in front of my eyes like a fireworks pinwheel. I was mesmerized, churned up by popular songs and Hollywood images that filled me with longing.

  Suddenly it was possible for the newest generation of country people in our region to go to college, travel to Europe, and even choose a life off the farm. (I had a notion to work as a secretary for a record company.) My parents encouraged even my most ill-informed ambitions, for like most Depression-era parents, they wanted their children to have easier lives than they had had; and they wanted us to rise above the shame so many country people felt. The movies and the radio insisted that country people were inferior and backward. “Put your shoes on, Lucy, don’t you know you’re in the city?” There was a fatalism in my parents’ hopes for their children, a fear that we would move on up to some highfalutin place where, cocktails in hand and spouting our book learning, we would look down on them.

  I didn’t want to spend my life canning beans and plucking chickens, so trundling my innocence before me like a shopping cart, I headed for New York—where else?—and got a job on a movie magazine. But I wasn’t a glamour-puss, I hated cocktail parties, and writing celebrity gossip soon palled. I wanted to be a real writer, which I thought meant I had to become a Greenwich Village bohemian. I didn’t know that the postwar portrait of the Village artist was already turning into a caricature. Bob Dylan—Nick Carraway’s country cousin—had arrived in the Village some time before, not as a starry-eyed tourist like me but as a revolutionary messenger from the boondocks. But it was a long time before I understood how Dylan affirmed the very resources I had left behind.

  Confused, unsure of my direction or purpose, I left the city for an upstate New York graduate school. Then the sixties exploded. In one ear I heard the Beatles singing the magic of transcendence, and in the other I heard about my grandmother’s nervous breakdown, apparently caused by her worry over me—the innocent who had “gone off up North” to the evil big city. I teeter-tottered between two worlds. As I struggled to become sophisticated, my folks and their country culture were always present in the deepest part of my being. Yet I was estranged from them, just as I was a stranger there in the North. I was an exile in both places.

  This book is the story of a family trying to come to terms with profound change. It truly centers on my mother. If she’d had the chance, she might have busted out to the big city years before I dreamed of doing so. Many of the impulses I felt burned in her breast, too. But she remained caught in a household dominated by my cautious, worried, tight-stitched grandmother. To understand what happened to my mother and subsequently to me, I recently began to sort through the scraps of the past, looking for the patterns of our quilted-together lives.

  —BOBBIE ANN MASON, KENTUCKY, 1998

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Map of Clear Springs, 1880

  The Mason-Lee Family Tree

  Part One • The Family Farm, 1994

  Chapter 1

  Part Two • Country People

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Three • Clearing Out

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Four • Clearing

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Five • The Pond

  Chapter 27

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by the Author

  About the Author

  Clear Springs

  1880

  PANTHER CREEK PRECINCT

  POP.: 1,422

  MOST OF BOBBIE ANN MASON’S NINETEENTH-CENTURY

  FOREBEARS SETTLED IN CLEAR SPRINGS, A FARMING COMMUNITY

  IN GRAVES COUNTY,

  IN WESTERN KENTUCKY.

  The Masons

  THE MASON HOMEPLACE IS STILL LOCATED AT THE

  SITE OF J. P. MASON’
S RESIDENCE (22),* ON

  PANTHER CREEK, WHERE HUNGRY PIONEER

  PEYTON WASHAM ATE HIS SEED CORN.

  The Arnetts

  BOB MASON JOURNEYED WEEKLY FROM HIS PARENTS’

  HOME (T. M. MASON, 22) TO THE ARNETTS

  (W. P. ARNETT, 32). HIS HORSE-AND-BUGGY TRIPS

  WENT ON FOR THIRTEEN YEARS BEFORE

  ETHEL ARNETT AGREED TO MARRY HIM.

  The Hickses

  IN 1919, ROBERT E. LEE STOLE EUNICE’S HORSE

  AND BUGGY AT THE FARM (NOT SHOWN,

  CENTER OF BLOCK 22) WHERE MAMMY HICKS

  LIVED WITH HER PIG, PET.

  The Less

  THE LEE FAMILY ARRIVED IN THE AREA AFTER 1880, SETTLING

  NEAR DR. A. A. HURT (9–10). THE IRISES STILL

  BLOOM AT THE ABANDONED LEE HOMEPLACE.

  * THE NUMBERS DENOTE THE NUMBERED MAP SECTIONS.

  1

  It is late spring, and I am pulling pondweed. My mother likes to fish for bream and catfish, and the pondweed is her enemy. Her fishing line gets caught in it, and she says the fish feed on it, ignoring her bait. “That old pondweed will take the place,” Mama says. All my life I’ve heard her issue this dire warning. She says it of willow trees, spiderwort, snakes, and Bermuda grass. “That old Bermudy” won’t leave her flower beds alone.

  The pondweed is lovely. If it were up to me, I’d just admire it and let the fish have it. But then, I’m spoiled and lazy and have betrayed my heritage as a farmer’s daughter by leaving the land and going off to see the world. Mama said I always had my nose in a book. I didn’t want to have to labor the way my parents did. But here I am, on a visit, wrestling with pondweed.

  I’m working with a metal-toothed rake, with a yellow nylon rope tied to the handle to extend its reach. I stand on the pond bank, my Wal-Mart Wellingtons slopping and sucking mud. I fling the rake as far as I can, catch the pondweed, and then tug it loose. An island of it breaks off and comes floating toward me, snared by the rake. I haul it in and heave it onto the bank. The pondweed is a heavy mass of white, fat tendrils and a black tangle of wiry roots beneath the surface scattering of green leaves. Along with my rakeful of weed comes a treasure of snails, spiders, water striders, crawfish, worms, and insect larvae—a whole ecosystem, as in a tide pool. I haul out as much as I can lift—waterlogged, shiny leaves and masses of tendrils, some of them thick and white like skinned snakes. I rescue a crawfish. It wriggles back into its mud tunnel. As I work, the bank gets clogged with piles of weed. I am making progress. There is an unexpected satisfaction in the full range of athletic motion required for this job. I think about hard labor and wonder whether some of my fitness-minded friends with their rigid exercise routines could be talked into helping me out.

  I’ve seen water lotus covering a lake, smothering it with plate-sized pads. Water lotus are giant lilies—double-story affairs that make gigantic seedpods resembling showerheads. Water lotus are a disaster if what you want is fish. Even without any lotus, this pond has seen disasters before—three fish kills: a fuel spill from the highway, warm-water runoff from a tobacco-warehouse fire, and a flood that washed the fish out into the creek.

  In the early eighties, my father hired a backhoe to create the pond so that my mother could go fishing—her favorite pastime. He cut down a black-walnut tree so she could have a view of the pond across the field behind the house.

  There used to be blackberries at the site of this quarter-acre pond—banks of berry bushes so enormous that we tunneled through them and made a maze. The blackberries were what we called tame. Back in the forties, my parents planted a dozen bushes to keep the fields from washing into the creek. The blackberries spread along all the borders. The berries were large and luscious, not like the small, seedy wild ones, but we never ate them with cream and sugar—only in pies or jam. Every July we picked berries and Mama sold gallons of them to high-toned ladies in the big fine houses in town. They made jelly. We got twenty-five cents for a quart of berries, a dollar a gallon. It took an hour to pick a gallon, and I could pick up to four gallons in a morning, before the sun got too hot, before I got chiggers implanted in the skin under my waistband. My fingers were full of thorn pricks and stayed purple all summer. The blackberries haven’t disappeared, but they used to be more accessible, less weed-choked. They grew up and down all the creek banks, along the edges of all the fields, along the fencerows, along the lane. My father burned down masses of them before digging the pond.

  The pond feeds into Kess Creek, which cuts across this farm—the place where I grew up, and where my mother still lives. The farm is fifty-three acres, cut into six fields, with two houses along the frontage. We are within sight of the railroad, which parallels U.S. Highway 45. We’re on Sunnyside Road, a mile from downtown Mayfield, somewhere between Fancy Farm and Clear Springs, in Graves County. We are in far-western Kentucky, that toe tip of the state shaped by the curve of the great rivers—the Ohio meets the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, about thirty-five miles northwest of Mayfield. To the east, the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers (now swelled into TVA lakes) run parallel courses. Water forms this twenty-five-hundred-square-mile region into a peninsula. It’s attached to the continent along the border with Tennessee. Historically and temperamentally, it looks to the South.

  There aren’t any big cities around, unless you count Paducah (pop. 26,853), twenty-six miles to the north. The farm is typical of this agricultural region. A lane cuts through the middle, from front to back, and two creeks divide it crosswise. The ground is rich, but it washes down the creeks. The creeks are clogged with trash, dumped there to prevent hard rains—gully-washers—from carrying the place away. At one time this was a thriving dairy farm that sustained our growing family. It was home to my paternal grandparents, my parents, my two sisters, my brother, and me. There were at least eleven buildings along the front part of the farm, near the road: two houses, a barn, a stable, a corncrib, a smokehouse, two henhouses, a wash-house, a milk house, an outhouse. I even had a playhouse.

  The gravel-and-mud county road ran in front. Sometimes the school bus couldn’t get through the mud. Before the road was paved and fast cars started killing our dogs and cats, we would sit on my grandparents’ porch and say “Who’s that?” whenever anybody passed. My grandparents’ house was a large, one-story building with a high gabled roof—a typical farmhouse. The other house, a small white wood-frame structure that my parents built when I was four, stood on a hill in the woods. When the road was paved, the roadbed was built up, so the house seemed to settle down to the level of the road. We still say the house is on a hill.

  The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U.S. route that unites Chicago with Mobile, Alabama. Highway 45 goes past Camp Beauregard, a Civil War encampment and cemetery, and leads toward Shiloh, a Civil War battlefield, and continues to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Presley was born. On this highway when I was about ten, my dog Rags was killed, smashed flat, and nobody bothered to remove his body. For a long time, it was still there when we went to town—a hank of hair and a piece of bone. It became a rag, then a wisp, then a spot. It’s hard to explain the indifference of the family in this matter, for my heart ached for Rags. It had something to do with the immutability of fate. To my parents’ way of thinking, there was nothing that could be done to bring Rags back to life, and besides they were behind on the spring planting or perhaps the fall corn-gathering. There was always something.

  When I was in junior high, a motel opened up on the highway. It was the first motel in Mayfield. I could see it from my house. Marlene lived at the motel. I envied her. The allure of rootlessness—strangers passing through, stopping there to sleep—is a cliché, but if you live within sight of trains and a highway, the cliché holds power. Marlene’s father built her a frozen-custard stand—to my mind the definition of bliss. It was a cozy playhouse on the side of the open road: a safe thrill. But Marlene wa
s popular at school and grew too busy for any sidelines. Her father put an ad in the paper: “FOR SALE: Marlene’s Frozen-Custard Stand. Marlene’s tired.”

  Long before this, back in 1896, across the field in front of our houses, an amazing thing happened. Mrs. Elizabeth Lyon gave birth to quintuplets. For a brief time they were world-famous, until curiosity-seekers handled the babies to death. The quintuplets’ house stood right beside the railroad track, and passengers from the train stopped to ogle. They were five boys—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. The names had come to Mrs. Lyon in a dream. President Grover Cleveland and Queen Victoria sent congratulations on the babies.

  I am a product of this ground. This region is called the Jackson Purchase. In 1818, Andrew Jackson signed a deal with Chinubby, king of the Chickasaw Nation, and soon white settlers swarmed in, snatching up sweeps of prairie. Most of them came from Middle Tennessee, where the Cumberland Settlements had led to the founding of Nashville. One of the Cumberland pioneers was my great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Mason. Several of his ten children headed for the Jackson Purchase, and four of them settled on Panther Creek, at Clear Springs, from whence all the relatives I have ever known sprang. In 1920, a century after my ancestors settled in Clear Springs, my grandparents boldly moved away from there, from the bosom of generations. The land had been divided up so many times that sons had to leave and find their own land. For Granddaddy, it was a long journey of eight miles. In 1920, he bought the fifty-three and one-tenth acres by the highway for five thousand dollars. The house, only six years old, was sturdy and attractive. The land was cleared and fertile, and it was only a mile from town, so trading at the town square or the feed mill would be an easy journey by buggy or wagon.

  At one time, much of the land of the Jackson Purchase was covered with tall grass. The Chickasaws had apparently burned it periodically to create grassland for buffalo. When my father plowed in the spring, he turned up arrowheads. The land is not delta-flat, but it’s not at all hilly either. It resembles rolling English farmland, both in the natural lay of the land and in the farming habits the farmers imposed upon it. It has small fields, and the fencerows are thick with weeds, vines, oaks, wild cherries, sumac, and cedars.