I went on to read mysteries, in which girl detectives solved crimes and quaint puzzles about heirlooms with the aid of a magnifying glass. These sleuths drove cars, had boyfriends, nice clothes, indulgent parents. They had time and money. They did not have to pick blackberries. I began writing my own mystery stories. I sat in a corner on the porch or under a maple tree and wrote with a fountain pen in a blue Double Q notebook, which had two interlaced Q’s on the cover. I started at the beginning and followed each story, wondering what would happen next. I didn’t follow Granny’s advice. I couldn’t think ahead. The pleasure of writing was discovering what might pop out of my mind unbidden. There seemed to be a storehouse of words that I didn’t know I knew, yet they appeared at the right moment, like a girl joining a game of jump-rope.
My detectives were twins, Sue and Jean Carson, whose father was a famous detective. Jean was grimly mature, with a boyfriend. She wanted to be a nurse. Sue, the more ambitious twin, was more like me; she wanted to be an airline hostess. I had derived all the names and setups from the mystery series books I had read—nurse Cherry Ames, airline stewardess Vicki Barr, the Dana sisters. I stole the name Carson from Nancy Drew’s father, Carson Drew. I still have a fragment of The Carson Girls Go Abroad, a story about a stolen stamp collection, particularly a Romanian stamp with an odd portrait of a bespectacled man whose hairline was askew. The Carson girls pursued a ring of stamp counterfeiters. In one chapter, the pursuit took Sue and Jean to the county fair, where they rode the Ferris wheel and ate candy apples and cotton candy. Then, alone, Sue entered a sideshow, “The Thing.”
In the center of the pen a woman—she looked like the wild man of Borneo—sat. Her long hair made a circle around her head, hanging down into her eyes. All around her were many poisonous snakes. Their forked tongues were darting in and out, in and out.
Intrigued by the sight of the poisonous reptiles, Sue still watched. Suddenly to her horror the wild woman began playing with the snakes, picking them up and putting them in her mouth. To Sue this was horrible. She managed to stay there longer, just for the sake of being brave. Who was going to be afraid of a woman and snakes? Especially if they had had their fangs removed, which Sue hoped with all her might they did.
Suddenly, the snake woman picked up something from the bare earth, and with a mighty lunge she flung it in Sue’s direction!
The chapter ended there. I had to keep Sue hanging until I could turn the page and imagine what happened next.
CHAPTER IV
The Surprise Party
When Sue Carson spotted the woman throwing The Thing in her direction she dodged sharply. The Thing, whatever it was; Sue supposed it was a snake, hit her on the shoulder.
Sue tried to stifle a scream but a tiny one escaped her, anyway. She looked down at the ground at her feet. She just knew a snake would be there! But where was it? Sue looked and looked. Nothing was on the ground except a short piece of rope. Suddenly Sue sighed a sigh of relief. The snake woman had thrown the rope instead of a snake! What a joke on her! Sue looked down at the rope again. It appeared to be moving! Sue stepped back. The rope was still. She discovered that she had been using her foot to move it! Another joke on her. What else was going to happen?
Sue glanced at her wrist watch. It was eleven thirty, time to be eating lunch.
Answering an ad in the back of a magazine, I sent off for information about the Famous Writers’ School, thinking I’d get some rules and instructions on how to write a story. The school sent me an aptitude test, which I quickly filled out and returned. Then the Famous Writers’ School answered with the news that I qualified for correspondence lessons, which cost a great amount of money. After that, the Famous Writers’ School kept sending me letters, asking me if I had made up my mind about the course. The aptitude test said I had talent, the letters pointed out. I thought the school was writing to me personally, and there appeared to be some urgency, so after receiving several of these letters I wrote to the Famous Writers’ School, saying I didn’t have the money to become a famous writer—I was only eleven years old.
The Carson girls went to France with their father and their French maid, Mlle. Bleax (my notion of a French name). Jean’s boyfriend piloted them in his own private plane while Sue played air hostess. One chapter was titled “How to Fly an Airplane.” In France, they saw the famous Percheron horses Sue had read about in geography. As it turned out, the counterfeiting ring was operating right there in Provençe, France!
I didn’t tell anyone at school about my writing. I was afraid they’d make fun of me. I was an earnest kid with a frown on my face. My diligence in school was absurd. I was always going overboard. Mrs. Isabella gave us word games on holidays. How many hidden words can you find in Halloween or Merry Christmas? My pencil would fly. I would find a hundred and fifty in the Christmas greeting: Cherry mist charms hammy chasm stammer retch stair mast star rat hat is it sit sir earth … Merry Christmas was nearly half the alphabet! I was free to whirl the kaleidoscope of letters almost endlessly, listening to the sounds in my mind. Mrs. Alene ordered a special school project through the mail from a school-supply house. It was a kit to be assembled—an entire Dutch village, made of hundreds of pieces of pasteboard, with little tabs to fit them all together. The village had shops and pretty row houses with mansard roofs. People wearing balloon pants and wooden shoes were sweeping the cobblestone streets. Skaters glided on the surface of the canal, their wee silver skates stuck in the ice with vertical tabs. The village was large, covering a table. To construct it, we worked in teams, by turns, but I commandeered the table, desperate to work on the Dutch village full time. It was the most splendid thing ever to appear at Cuba School.
Fortunately for my classmates and teachers, I was absent for long stretches of school, due to illness. In the winter, to keep from getting sick, Janice and I wore long pants beneath our cotton dresses, which had gathered skirts and long sleeves. We wore our dreadful brown leather high-topped plow shoes. We did not play out in the cold or snow because we were sure to catch cold. I always got sick anyway. I coughed and wheezed and spit and blazed with fever. I came down with pneumonia almost every winter.
In the first grade, I stayed out of school for two weeks, enclosed in a breathing tent—blankets draped over the bedposts to hold in the sweet fumes of boiled benzoin—while I happily colored and read and played. Mama called it an oxygen tent. I was out of school so long that Miss Christella took up a collection among her students to buy me presents. Unfortunately, I returned to school the day she planned to bring me the presents. So she returned them to the stores and I never got them. I can see her still, sitting on the bus with the shopping bag full of presents—I heard they included books and house shoes—she planned to drop off at my house. But there I was, hopping onto the bus that morning. The lost presents grew in my imagination. They made me acquisitive and desirous. Even though I always got plenty of gifts for Christmas and my birthday, there was always something else I wanted. Today it seems to me that Miss Christella’s gift of art and imagination was worth much more than the gaudy lost packages.
In the winter of my tenth year, I lay in the hospital, thin and bony, my lungs tight with congestion. But I paid no attention to Mama’s fretting over me. I wasn’t concerned. I loved being sick. I was allowed to have ice cream and milk shakes every day. During the fever, I felt a loose plank flapping in my head; it was my mind speeding up, getting ready to fly apart. I enjoyed the sensation; it seemed to be coming from the very heart of my being.
The following year, I had two more delightful hospital stays. The first one was caused by a middle-ear infection, near Christmas. For enduring a spectacular earache, I was entitled to special presents and candy in addition to my Christmas presents. Granddaddy brought a LifeSavers book to the hospital for me. It was a carton shaped like a book that opened out to form a bookcase with a dozen rolls of LifeSavers on the shelves inside. I savored all the flavors, one by one—Pep-o-mint, Wint-o-green, Spear-o-mint, Cryst-o-mint, the c
olorful fruits. For Christmas I received The Clue of the Black Keys (Nancy Drew) and The Spirit of Fog Island (Judy Bolton), a cowboy shirt, and a paint-by-numbers set. I was saturated with happiness.
Later that winter, I got sick again, and one afternoon I coughed so hard I suddenly gushed up blood. Mama threw Janice and me into the car and rushed us to the hospital. She didn’t even stop at the barn to tell Daddy, who was milking. I brought along a Quaker oats box to spit in. I kept coughing up blood. As we reached the waterworks on the approach to town, it occurred to me that I could die. Blood was an inch deep in the box. Even though I had passed the ten-year survival mark, maybe something had gone wrong. Mama’s face was white, as if she were the one losing blood. She told me recently that she was worried that I had tuberculosis. She had seen people die from this wasting illness, and she had seen their bloody spitboxes. “I thought you were having a T.B. hemorrhage,” she said.
The doctor wasn’t alarmed. I merely had pneumonia again—bronchial pneumonia this time—and I had burst a bronchial blood vessel from coughing. The nurses gave me an enamel boomerang-shaped spittoon and placed me in an enclosed sunporch on the third floor of the hospital. The porch was private, enclosed by windows. With the nurses’ reassurances, I relaxed, telling myself it was impossible for me to die. But I could see my mother’s anxious face, hear her nervous voice. I could see her belly bulging out. I heard her say, “I’m afraid all this worry will make me lose this baby I’m carrying.”
She saw me staring at her stomach. “I swallered a punkin seed,” she said to me. From the way she grinned, I decided she would be all right. I was afraid another child meant more work for Mama, but I didn’t dwell on how my illness was affecting her or how much it was costing Daddy.
The sunporch was drafty, so after a few days I was moved into the ward, where it was warmer. A woman in the bed next to mine chattered. She had had a D-and-C, and she apologized for passing gas continually.
“They scraped my womb,” she said. “But I’ll still have my baby. They didn’t hurt it.” She emitted explosive noises.
Mama patted her own belly. “If I have this one, it will be a miracle, with all I’ve been through,” she said.
I preferred the sunporch, which was like having my own playhouse. But I stayed busy, even on the ward. Mama brought me books from the library, and she bought me Nancy Drews and Judy Boltons from the paint-and-wallpaper store, which had a small book section. The foot of the bed was piled with all my activities—the books, my stamp collection, a new paint-by-numbers set.
Each day I inhaled penicillin from some kind of breathing machine in the hospital basement. The acrid penicillin vapors loosened fascinating streaks of yellow and dark red in my chest. As the days went by, I coughed up large clots, hunks of brown blood like chicken livers. I studied them for clues to my being—like reading entrails or tea leaves. Twice a day, a nurse appeared at my bedside with penicillin shots, plunging the metal missiles with full force into my taut buttocks.
The kinfolks from Clear Springs showed up, although they kept the children away, in case of contagion. Mose, Herman, Mary, Datha—my parents’ cousins—were in and out, dressed up for town and joking and teasing me, while I held court. They brought ice cream and candy. They all said to Mama, “Well, Bobbie Ann’s got enough books to run a school.”
“All those books will break you, Chris,” they said.
“I paid a dollar apiece for them things,” Mama said. “She says she’s going to write her own books so we won’t have to buy any.” Mama laughed so loud she had to grab her big stomach to hold it still.
The doctors and nurses humored me along. Dr. Ellison praised my mystery novel and encouraged me to learn science. I was writing a new Carson Twins book called The Mystery at Pine Lodge. I had never seen mountains or a pine lodge, but I could visualize the small mountain village, the pine-scented lodge, the bushy-headed criminal, the pair of girl detectives who snooped in his room at the lodge. I had created a place I had never been, and it was tantalizingly real.
“I’m on pins and needles to find out what’s going to happen next in that book you’re writing,” Dr. Ellison said.
“Me too,” I said.
“You should study journalism when you get to college,” he said. “But don’t forget science.” He gave me a list of words to study: molecule, cell, atom. He said he was going to cure me of my annual pneumonia.
Molecule. I said it over and over to myself. It was a lovely word. Mole plus cule.
King George died while I was in the hospital. And Daddy accidentally killed our collie dog, Boots. He didn’t mince his words. “I backed the truck over Boots,” he began. I had been reading all of Albert Payson Terhune’s books—about Buff and Lad and Wolf and Bruce and Lochinvar, the whole Sunnybank cast of noble, heroic collies. I was sad about Boots; and my old dog Rags, dead on the highway, was still a vibrant memory; but the immediate reality of the hospital made events at home seem distant. And the sentimentality of the Terhune books surpassed any emotion about real, flesh-and-fur dogs.
I was getting well, and I no longer imagined that my own life was in danger. But I overheard Daddy say to Mama, “If she keeps this up, she won’t live to be fifteen.” But fifteen seemed so far away, years and years. I didn’t even wonder if there was a special cake for a fifteenth birthday. In retrospect, I see how oblivious to suffering I was, there in my little pleasure-dome. I was enacting a typical Mason trait—retreating into my playhouse, the way Granny retreated into her mind, and the way Daddy retreated to the farm after the war.
Either Dr. Ellison or puberty cured me, and I’ve hardly been sick since. He gave me vitamin pills to build my strength. I liked to lick off the sugar coating and taste the mysterious flavor beneath. It was much like Fletcher’s Castoria, a staple patent medicine of my childhood.
That summer, when I was well and running barefooted over the farm, Mama invited Dr. Ellison to supper. Janice and I had a new little sister, named LaNelle, and Mama was healthy and busy, operating at her usual speed. She cooked ham and field peas and scalloped potatoes and double-chocolate dump cake for our guest.
Dr. Ellison wanted to go out and walk in the fields, which I thought was unusual. He was from Detroit and he said he was enchanted by the country, an attitude that mystified me. The country was so ordinary, I thought. We climbed a stile over a fence into a pasture. He threw out his arms to embrace the landscape. “This is a wonderful place,” he said. “It is beautiful, a treasure. You should always appreciate it.”
“This place?” I said. I couldn’t imagine he meant grass, blackberry briars, cow manure. I wanted to go to Detroit, where there were concrete sidewalks and tall buildings and traffic. Everything was so green here, and nothing important ever happened. Mama’s aunt Mary and uncle Rudy came to visit from Detroit each summer. Mama fried chicken for them, and they loved the chicken so much they picked the bones clean and then sucked on them. They couldn’t get good, tender chicken like that in Detroit, they said. They missed beans and cornbread and onions. But I thought they were ridiculous to come back. Detroit was an intriguing place, with Yankees, who spoke another language and ate different food—Detroit food. That’s what I wanted.
10
Food was the center of our lives. Everything we did and thought revolved around it. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it—endlessly, day after day, season after season. This was life on a farm—as it had been time out of mind.
The area around Clear Springs, on Panther Creek, was one of the first white settlements in the Jackson Purchase. In the spring of 1820, Peyton Washam, his fifteen-year-old son Peter, and a third man whose name has been forgotten came to Panther Creek from Virginia with a plan to build a cabin and plant some corn. Mrs. Washam and the seven other children, whom they had left in a settlement about a hundred miles away, would come along later. Before the men could begin building, they had to slash a clearing from the wilderness. It was tougher than they expected. They
had plenty of water, for the place abounded with springs, but they soon ran out of food and supplies. They sent for more, but before these arrived they were reduced to boiling and eating their small treasure (half a bushel) of seed corn—the dried corn that would have let them get out a crop. Then Peyton Washam came down with a fever. He sent for his wife to come quickly. She arrived late at night and got lost in the canebrake—a thicket of canes growing up to thirty feet high. Frightened in the noisy darkness, she waited, upright and sleepless, beneath an old tree till daylight, according to the accounts. She hurried on then, propelled by worry, but when she reached her husband’s camp, she was too late. He had died during the night. Afterwards, she lived out his dream, settling in the vicinity with her children. The area her husband had chosen eventually grew into the community where a dozen branches of my family took root.
This story vexes me. What a bold but pathetic beginning! What careless, untrained pioneers. How could Peyton Washam and his cohorts have run out of food so soon? If they arrived in the spring, they should have planted that seed corn before long (between mid-April and mid-May). Why, in a mild Kentucky spring, did they not get a garden out right away? How could they have run out of supplies before they got their corn in the ground? Of course they had to clear some canebrake, which wasn’t easy. But it wasn’t as hard as clearing trees. You can even eat cane like a vegetable. In May, there would have been a carpet of wild strawberries. If Peyton Washam was too sick to forage, why didn’t the kid and the other guy go pick something? What kind of pioneer eats his seed corn? Why didn’t they shoot a squirrel?
Mrs. Washam is the hero of the tale. She survived and her children joined her. She probably could handle a gun. I’m sure she knew how to get out a garden. I picture her coming alone with a basket of cornbread and fried pies, looking for her sick, hungry husband, trying to follow directions scribbled on a piece of paper. Turn left before the canebrake. Follow the creek to the large old tree. Or maybe Peyton Washam’s handwriting was bad—maybe he meant an oak tree.
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