My grandmother had begun her household with fine things she had tatted and embroidered and pieced as a girl and young woman. My mother had had nothing when she and Daddy eloped. I didn’t have much except books, records, a few Corning Ware dishes (minus a casserole dish), a stereo, my black radio, and a blue electric typewriter. Roger owned a hand-painted car, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a TV.
We rented an old New England farmhouse with a warren of small spare rooms upstairs that we painted all colors. We played Scrabble and listened to the Beatles and Dylan and the Doors. We accumulated cats. We sat reading in front of the stone fireplace, which had, improbably, a heart-shaped stone above the mantel. We had no expectations of china, silver, or kitchen gadgets. Mama sent us a double-wedding-ring quilt she had made, and I was pleased when Roger admired it. From a salvage shop, we bought beautiful etched champagne glasses for twenty-five cents apiece; we bought nineteenth-century photographs and daguerreotypes for pennies. Driving past a fraternity house, Roger found a discarded, blue-painted plywood STOP sign. He put legs on it and created an octagonal coffee table. He fashioned a desk—legs on a door; and he made a dining table—legs on plywood. I made curtains of dark corduroy, which the sun soon faded. We hung whimsical mobiles we constructed from art paper. We painted, and I sewed and crocheted.
“Well, you’re finally grown up,” Mama observed. “Now that you’ve taken an interest in sewing.” We decorated our clothes with Magic Markers.
“I heard Bobbie married a hippie,” Cousin Datha told Daddy.
Daddy bristled and told her off, although in truth he had no idea whether Datha was right, since he hadn’t yet met Roger. His greatest worry about hippies was that they wouldn’t work. But actually we were both full of energy. Through Roger, I discovered coffee. With the coffee and a new blitz of confidence, I finished my degree—the logical conclusion of my graduate days. I had made it to the arbitrary goal I had set for myself. A while later, my thesis was published.
All around us, young people were discovering land, gardens, organic methods. We read Walden and The Whole Earth Catalog. We were on the cusp of the back-to-nature movement, the natural look, the real thing. I was ready to hoe. Roger didn’t know a shelly bean from a marigold, but ambitiously we launched into growing a garden. We bought a radio to scare raccoons from the corn. In late summer, when the corn grew ears, a loud argument woke us up in the middle of the night. A man and woman were yelling at each other about Woodstock. It was the radio, a talk show blasting out in the wee hours.
By hand, we broke sod for our garden. When I plunged my hands into the black New England soil, I felt I was touching a rich nourishment that I hadn’t had since I was a small child. It had been years since I helped Mama in the garden. Yet the feel of dirt seemed so familiar. This was real. It was true. I wheeled around and faced home.
16
Toward the end of the sixties, LaNelle, unhappy over Mama’s servitude in Granny’s house, told Mama, “I’m taking Don and we’re moving back down to our house.” The house was empty, the most recent renters gone.
Startled by LaNelle’s determination, Mama agreed to move back with LaNelle and Don. She needed that push, and her own home, standing forlorn and unoccupied in the woods, must have beckoned to her. In deciding, Mama stood up to Daddy for once: she forced him to choose between her and his mother.
Of course, he agreed to the move. He fixed the roof, while Mama repapered the walls and repainted the woodwork. But I know Daddy was torn, because he had promised his father not to leave his mother alone at night. He had to honor that promise somehow. Consequently, throughout the seventies, while Granny lived alone, Daddy went to her house after supper. She went to bed at dark, while he stayed up and watched TV. He slept on a narrow bed in the dining room. Mama and LaNelle and Don slept in their own beds in the little white house.
The arrangement was anguish for both my parents. But they felt they had no choice. It was unthinkable to put Granny in a nursing home. It was unthinkable to fail to care for her. And it was unthinkable to flout the kinfolks. Tongues would wag if Mama and Daddy neglected Granny. But no one would say a thing if Mama were left virtually alone, her marriage divided. Duty to elders was primary; a wife’s wishes were secondary. And Mama would not have thought of divorce or separation or striking out on her own, starting some career. My parents were prisoners of an old order.
Although I was increasingly aware that Granny was a burden on Mama, my devotion to my grandmother persisted; I always loved her. Every time I came home, I banged at the screen door of her back porch until she came to unhook the door. In cold weather the metal hook rattled its familiar song against the plastic sheeting tacked to the doorframe. She was proud to see me, her gentle smile welcoming. We sat close to the stream of air flowing from the gas furnace through a large floor grate in the dining room. Visiting was always awkward, as we slipped around on a veneer of small talk, like the slim notations in her old diary. There wasn’t much to say. She was concerned about where Wilburn was at any given hour. “What’s Chris a-doing?” “Has the mail gone on?” She wanted to know what work was being done, what needed to be done now, what could wait.
When LaNelle announced that she was moving back home, Mama acquiesced in part because I was bringing home my Yankee husband, and there was no place for us to sleep in Granny’s house. Besides, she surely felt shame at the awkwardness of the family’s arrangement, especially because Roger was from New York. People in Kentucky had an inflated image of New York folks. If someone from New York was expected to visit, it might be necessary to wallpaper the living room, paint the house, or blacktop the driveway.
One day during Roger’s first visit, Granny made a special dinner for us. She was still nursing her grief over Granddaddy’s death. She undoubtedly felt abandoned when the others moved out, but she may also have felt the relief of masterminding her own house again. She was still able to cook and keep house and work in her garden. She had a few chickens.
That particular day, she welcomed us warmly into her kitchen. From her dish cabinet, she brought out her good dishes, including her better bowls—the china floral ovals with scalloped rims. Carefully, she laid them on a muslin tablecloth with a tatted edging.
“I was always proud of this set of dishes,” she said, caressing a white, gold-bordered plate. “I always thought they were fine.”
She had fried a spring chicken and made biscuits with milk gravy. She gave us English peas with little new potatoes, and she also served white field peas, which I preferred to the brown varieties. She had Waldorf salad with apples, walnuts, celery, and minimarshmallows. She chopped the ingredients very fine; her salads were always as richly textured as her embroidered dresser scarves. Dessert was damson pie. I was aware that I still hadn’t really learned to cook and wouldn’t have the patience to chop anything into such tiny bits. But I was starting to see more value in her ways, I thought, as the kaleidoscope twisted another turn, bringing the past into a new configuration.
Daddy was outside mowing. He mowed and manicured the place incessantly, even though his lungs suffered from the pollens and molds the mower stirred up. “I don’t want anybody driving past to think trash lives here,” he always said. His enemies were precisely the shiftless, impoverished ne’er-do-wells that he feared Roger had expected. Daddy was fighting against anyone ever getting the impression that such low-lifes lived here. He collected the trash discarded from speeding automobiles, and he trimmed borders with his Weed Eater.
“Tell Roger what it was like when you were growing up,” I urged Granny.
“Tell us what kind of school you went to, Mrs. Mason,” Roger said encouragingly.
Granny was bashful with Roger. “He won’t find it that interesting,” she said, looking at me.
But at my insistence, she brought out her old speller, her Bible, and her arithmetic book. The pages smelled musty, like the old books at the Merit Clubhouse library. The bent-backed Cornell speller contained recitations. As I turned the pages
, which were falling loose from the binding, I realized that the old method of memorization was based on sensitivity to sound, groupings of similar-sounding words: blunderbuss, incubus, nucleus; ulcer, cancer; suffer, pilfer. And the sentences seemed like quaint poems:
The farmer hatchels flax; he sells corn by the bushel, and butter by the firkin.
The farmer fodders his cattle in winter.
I wondered about hatcheling and foddering with firkins.
Roger told Granny about our garden in Connecticut. “We have a radio to scare away the raccoons.”
Granny laughed at that. “Do tell! I never heard of anybody playing the radio for coons!”
“They like the late-night blues shows best,” Roger joked.
I told Granny I’d been reading nature books. “They got me to thinking how I missed the garden and the fields and the cows,” I said.
“We have neighbors who are organic gardeners,” Roger said. “They’ve helped us out some.”
Granny removed the bowls from the table. She set her enamel dishpan on the gas stove to heat water. Alternate ways were of no interest to her. There was only one way to hill up beans, to set a hen, to make damson pie.
Later that year, Mama came to Connecticut to visit us. For the first time, she traveled on an airplane, ate cheese fondue, drank some wine, and went fishing out of state. While Roger and I were busy teaching freshman English classes, she upholstered our old chairs and made me a corduroy military-style coat with epaulets. She wasn’t used to taking a vacation, and she claimed she didn’t sleep for the entire two weeks she was with us. The strain of the four years at Granny’s house had wrung her out. She couldn’t relax.
“But you’re living in your own house now,” I said. “You’ve got it fixed up again.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to make it,” she said.
She was only fifty years old, but she spoke wearily, with resignation. She said, “I don’t have but ten, or maybe twenty, years left.” She cried, and at first I thought she was crying because she believed her life was nearly over, which hardly seemed credible, but then I realized how troubled she was. She saw her life being extinguished, her identity faded out like the pale moon in the evening. She was in the prime of her life, but it was being taken from her. Her own husband left her at night to stay with his mother. I talked Mama into extending her visit another week, thinking more time away would do her good. I was happy, a newlywed, and I was optimistic. Mama had always been strong, and I could not imagine her any other way, despite the strain in her face. When a friend remarked to me that my mother was the same age as his mother but looked much older, I bridled. My mother had always been young and beautiful, and to me she still was.
After Mama had gone back home, I tried to put her tears out of mind. Her letters brought the comforting familiarity of home, with nothing really surprising—just a steady coping that seemed timeless. She wrote that she was making a George Washington suit for a little boy, and that there was a man-eating catfish at Kentucky Dam. But she also wrote, “Wilburn hasn’t been fishing in eight years. He thought one of us should stay around here with Granny.” She wrote that he might have to quit selling milk—the smaller milk companies were going out of business. She wrote that it was getting dangerous to stay in the house in the woods without Daddy there. And she sent me instructions for making blackberry pie.
Again and again, throughout the seventies, as Granny grew feeble and inactive, I tried to get her to tell me about her early life. She had so much hidden knowledge. I wanted to know where we came from, who we were, and why. I wanted to penetrate her mind. Why had she had those breakdowns? Wasn’t my mind a lot like hers? I pleaded with her to tell me about her youth. Could she have ever been young and sexual? I wondered. I didn’t always know the right questions to ask her. I probed and teased, assaulting her with my queries.
“There’s not much to tell,” she would say. She seemed to have no belief in the uniqueness or worthiness of what she harbored. Her mind was balled up like yarn. Her silences were extraordinary, as she sat in her rocking chair with her head down, brooding. I had no gift for drawing her out, but I plunged ahead insistently. What was Clear Springs like when you were little? What were your parents like? What games did you play?
She told me that she and her sister, Maud, made little houses in the woods, out of sticks, with roofs of bark and moss. “We’d use acorns for cups and leaves for tablecloths,” she said. “We’d lay moss all around. And feathers.”
I was enchanted. Later, I heard someone call such playhouses “fairy shelters.” I begged her to show me her family photographs—an album and some loose pictures in a box.
“Can I write their names on the back?” I asked as she began identifying the people for me.
“But I know who they are.”
She didn’t notice me jotting their names with a pencil.
“That’s Floyd Arnett,” she said, of one handsome young man.
“Who was he? What was he like?”
She thought for a minute. “He was a farmer.” Her knobby fingers fumbled with the pictures. “Here’s one of me when I’m about thirteen,” she said.
In the photograph, she looks older than that. She seems ladylike, in a white blouse with simple frills, with her hair piled up. She looks innocent, hopeful, unaware of her attractiveness. She has an eager countenance, but also a dignified reserve. Her ears stick out a little.
One of her photographs shows Granddaddy sitting behind a pair of horses in a buggy, with his younger brother, Bee. Bob Mason is a handsome youth with dark hair and sharp, well-defined features. I’d say he is about to trot right into a rip-roaring Saturday night. He’s holding the reins confidently. He and Bee are parked in front of a white house with an awning. In a later generation, he might have been a young stud at the wheel of a Mustang convertible.
But Granny would not divulge her feelings about this hunk with the buggy who courted her for thirteen years before she finally married him. I suspect that in her mind her sixty-three years with Bob—years when he changed from youthful suitor to aged invalid—were a complex swirl, with no separable phases. She and Bob still were those young people in the pictures.
She told me her mother was named Laura Rhodes, and she married an Arnett.
“Where did they come from?”
“North Carolina, I believe. Or Virginia, or somewhere over yonder.” She pondered. My questions demanded a grasp of distant fog. “There were three Arnett brothers who came here—way back,” she said, waving her hand at the past. “But one of them went on to Texas and wasn’t heard of again.”
“One of the brothers was my grandfather,” she said. “My father was Zollicoffer Quigley Arnett.” She pronounced the name with a smile. It was a mouthful. “He was named Zollicoffer for a general and Quigley after a lawyer. They called him ‘Z.Q.’ or ‘Coff.’ ”
After more of my probing, she told me, “My grandfather was in the Confederate army. And his brother was in the Union army. But they got together at home and there was no hard feelings. The ladies in Paducah made quilts for the Union soldiers. And pies. And they brought all the quilts and pies in a wagon to where the boys were camped.”
She chuckled softly, but these revelations exhausted her. She heaved a sigh, directing it back across time. How could I know what these people were like, with such slim clues? They sounded impossibly far away, but I liked the names. I said them over and over to myself. “Arnett.” Pronounced Arn-it, the same way Southerners said “iron it.” For weeks afterwards, during waking moments, the name “Zollicoffer Quigley Arnett” would spring out of my head like a jack-in-the-box.
My mother spent the prime years of her life in the service of her mother-in-law. From 1965 to 1981, as her health declined, Granny depended on Christy and Wilburn to take care of her. We children broke the rules. Recklessly and hopefully we grabbed at change as if it were a white sale at Penney’s. We didn’t stay around to help. Our flight was especially hard on my parents because the
family was so small. My parents had no brothers and sisters, so I had no aunts and uncles, no first cousins (“own cousins”). Granny’s kin, the few who were left, were out in Clear Springs.
I had wanted to return to Kentucky after graduate school, but Roger and I couldn’t find teaching jobs there, so we settled in northern Pennsylvania, where he accepted a job teaching English at a small college. We bought an old farm and planted a garden and some fruit trees. I was in the snow belt again, near Binghamton, where spring refused to come. I began writing a novel, and I grew to love snow. I still went home to Kentucky twice a year, and I traveled other places too, but my mother, with the responsibility of caring for Granny as she grew more feeble, was tied to the family farm as surely as Daddy had always been by his cows. She didn’t even go to church much. Toward the end of the seventies, after both Don and LaNelle married and left home, our parents once again abandoned their home and moved in with Granny. She had gotten too unsteady to stay alone. For some time Mama had been carrying her meals to her, after discovering she wasn’t eating anything but cereal and fried toast. They moved in, halfheartedly, and once again they rented out their own house.
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