Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  That morning he had found a lesser horned owl dead alongside the road. He had set it down on the concrete floor of the milk house.

  “I know a taxidermist who might want to do something with that,” Daddy said when he showed me the owl. “That owl is something. It sure is beautiful. Wonder what happened to him.”

  The owl had feathered horns and a catlike face. It had been lying beside the road without a mark on it, as if it had had a heart attack and simply fallen from the air, making a soft but fatal landing.

  Later in the afternoon, we all strolled to the pond, and while Mama fished we admired Daddy’s ducks. Peggy admired Oscar. “He looks just like my little dog, Becky.”

  “Have you ever seen such an ugly dog?” Mama said.

  “Why, Oscar’s not ugly!” Daddy protested.

  “Well, Becky and Oscar would probably hit it off,” Peggy said. “But she’s having a high old time living at her friends’ house back in California.”

  Daddy liked Peggy because she had a sense of humor, but he wasn’t impressed by the shenanigans in town. The parade of trailers and sound trucks was disrupting traffic; the cast and crew were throwing money around like chicken feed.

  I wondered what Granny would have thought about the extravagance. It was only in the last decade or so of her life that she ever bought meat at the grocery, and then she saved the molded foam trays the meat was packaged in. She saved the twist-ties from bread bags; they lay mangled in a jar like the fishing-worms I collected as a child. She saved all the Christmas wrapping paper. I remember how Granny would never turn on her single kitchen lightbulb in the evening until it was completely dark. One of the lights on the movie set was enough to illuminate a church parking lot. Warner Brothers spent about twenty-three million dollars making In Country, pumping about five million into the local economy. Much of the movie budget was spent trying to conjure up an illusion of old-fashioned authenticity—quaint old things like those from Granny’s time. Instead of filming at McDonald’s, the crew chose a cozy diner with a giant rooster on the roof. For the filming, they replicated the diner, rooster and all, in a vacant lot across from what had been the Merit, where my mother had sewed labels.

  In the late summer, the light on the dark-leaf tobacco that is special to the region was a soft glow. The film crew marveled at the way the light hit the dilapidated old corncribs and tobacco barns in the landscape. They adored quilts. Bruce and Demi were spotted emerging from an antique store with armloads of quilts. The crew—in their trendy industrial safety shoes with colossal toes—favored a certain late-night dance place in Paducah where white people didn’t normally go. They descended on it and danced through the night. They hated the alcohol ban in Mayfield. Mayfield had been dry for time out of mind. Yet some of the men said the Mayfield women who went out with them drank more than anybody they’d ever seen, as if they were desperate for excitement.

  Toward the end of the production, I was invited to watch a scene being filmed, and I drove out to the set—a snaky swamp, with cypress trees growing from the water. Trucks lined the lanes leading into the swamp. Apparently a jumbo wardrobe trailer was required to dress two actors in jeans and flannel shirts.

  When I arrived, the filming was in progress. Near the end of the novel Sam runs angrily to the swamp to face her questions about what happened to her father, who died in a Vietnamese jungle. She has found his diary, and its revelations are horrifying. She spends the night in the swamp. The next morning her uncle Emmett finds her there. Emmett scolds Sam for thinking she can learn what Vietnam was like by camping out in this comparatively tame wilderness. But as he scolds her, his own emotions about the war erupt and the two reach out to each other.

  The cameras were rolling. But it wasn’t Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis I saw. It was Sam and Emmett, my characters, standing there before me, their backs to me. Their flannel shirts looked slept in. Sam’s camping gear was there, her sleeping bag, her snacks, her radio. I crept along the margins of the scene until I could view it from the front.

  Emmett was leaning against a tree, gazing into the distance.

  Referring to her father’s diary, Sam said, “The way he talked about gooks and killing—I hated it.”

  Words I had written rose in the air as my heart rose in my throat. Sam, my creation, the closest I had come to having a daughter, materialized before me for this brief time in this swamp, a place I had visited with my father, where we’d spotted cottonmouths and great blue herons. I came close to crying.

  The scene was supposed to end with an egret taking wing as Sam and Emmett walk arm in arm out of the swamp. The bird hired for the scene was not a common egret, but a snowy egret, a member of a dwindling species, wheedled away from Disney World (and probably FedExed to Paducah). At the appropriate time, it was released from its cage. Sam and Emmett walked away from the campsite. But the fluffy-plumed bird strolled about slowly, getting its bearings. The prop master slammed a clapper together, but the bird would not take flight. It pecked around nonchalantly, like a chicken scouting for bugs. The prop master fired a stage pistol. The egret ignored the sound. It refused to follow the script. It would not wing its symbolic arc gracefully through the scene. Apparently, no one had realized that in hurricanes egrets are the last birds to leave before the storm hits. The more the commotion, the steadier their nerves.

  The next day, to their surprise, the camera crew discovered an enormous flock of egrets in the next cove. The birds may have been there all along. This was the kind of irony that amused Daddy. When I told him about it, he said, “If they’d asked you about it, they wouldn’t have had to go all the way to Florida for that bird.”

  “But I didn’t know there were egrets at the swamp,” I said.

  “You could have asked me. I’ve seen them over there time and again. Big flocks of them.” He laughed, enjoying his bit of superior knowledge. “Sending all the way to Florida for a bird!”

  Near the end of their three-month stay in the area, the film company returned the family photographs they had borrowed from my mother. I was present when a young man on the prop crew came to the house with the box of photos. Mama went through them, discovering that three of the most special ones were missing: a portrait of Daddy in his Navy uniform, a picture of herself when she was young, and a family photo of Granddaddy with his brothers and sisters.

  “We can pay you for them,” the young man said. “I’m sure I got all the pictures we had. I don’t know what might have happened.”

  Mama said, “I don’t want money. I want the pictures.”

  “I’m afraid there aren’t any more. I brought all the pictures on hand.”

  In his van, he had the hanging baskets of ferns and airplane plants the company had borrowed. The plants were leggy and brown. He hung the plants up for Mama on the porch, and then he gave her some extra plants he had.

  “I’m sorry about the pictures,” he said. “I’ll look again, but I’m sure I brought all I could find.”

  Mama was upset, but she wouldn’t say so. She examined the plants, trying to remember all those she had loaned to the crew. Her abashed silence reminded me of my casserole dish sailing off a balcony years before.

  “Anybody could have taken the pictures,” LaNelle told her later. “There were so many people around. A lot of people are dying to have antique pictures.”

  Mama asked LaNelle again to inquire about the six dollars the company owed her for the bucket of damsons she had picked for the pie. “I wish they had those damsons stuck you know where,” Mama said.

  LaNelle investigated, and a few days later she reported, “When you see how much money they’re giving you for borrowing the plants and the pictures, you’ll shut up about those damsons.”

  Mama was flabbergasted when she received a check for eleven hundred dollars. “Well,” she said after a moment. “But it won’t take the place of those pictures.”

  In Country premiered at the mall in Paducah a year later. My family and I dressed up and went. A limousine
was reserved for us, but I declined it, knowing it would make my parents uncomfortable. Daddy would snort and mock if he saw anyone riding around the courthouse square in a limousine, so he would have been humiliated to be seen in one himself.

  I was acutely aware that some attention had come to me that we could not quite accommodate. I was afraid Daddy was disappointed, fearful that I had somehow moved into some other realm, rejecting his world. I thought he knew I wasn’t likely to move to Hollywood and start throwing wild parties, or whatever depravity Granny had warned me against when I was in New York. But it wasn’t corruption Daddy feared so much as falseness. Yet there we were at the premiere, all duded up.

  The movie began. One of the first scenes was set in a Paducah park. Loud whoops of recognition erupted. It seemed that the audience couldn’t concentrate on the plot because they were so excited about seeing familiar places on the screen. The movie was dotted with Mayfield landmarks—the courthouse, the Dairy Queen, a cemetery. Our town was on celluloid now, and we were authenticated.

  In an interior scene, I glimpsed one of the photographs Mama had loaned to the company. It was a portrait of me as a sophomore in college, in my pixie haircut. The picture was standing on a piano. I was a shadow of Beth March.

  After the premiere, at a reception, my parents were too tongue-tied to speak when introduced to the director. Daddy would not congratulate him on his achievement. I was sorry for his embarrassment, and I felt guilty for causing it.

  Later, at home, my parents wouldn’t tell me what they thought of the movie. They seemed uncertain how to express what they felt. But they hadn’t said much about the novel either. I remember being at home shortly after the novel was published. Daddy had read all but the final scene. He opened the book (he always marked his place by dog-earing the corner of a page) and sat down beside me on the couch to finish reading it. He read the few pages quickly, closed the book, said nothing, and went outside to mow. I would have been hurt, but I understood his silence. A few years before, he had written me a letter. In it, he said he often got up at three or four A.M. (a habit from his milking days), made his bacon and eggs in the microwave, and then read my stories while the sun came up. He said he read them over and over because they meant so much to him. He wrote that he could express himself better in writing than he could in talking. He told me he was proud of me. I couldn’t stop crying when I read the letter. He had had the courage to express himself to me, more courage than I had. I could not reply. I never replied adequately to his letter.

  In Country did have a Hollywood ending, off screen. My sister LaNelle fell in love with one of the set designers she worked with. When the filming finished, she left with Craig Edgar for California, taking along her two cats. Daddy approved of Craig, who had good character. LaNelle and Craig returned to Mayfield several months later for their wedding. And then they went to Australia, where Craig was designing sets for a movie theme park.

  At the end of 1989, the Mayfield Messenger highlighted the major stories of the year. A picture of me taken at the movie premiere was juxtaposed with a picture of the new chicken-feed mill built by Seaboard Farms across from my family’s house.

  19

  In the spring of 1990, after years of living in the Northeast, I finally managed to move back to Kentucky, but I was still several hours’ journey from Mayfield, and I did not go home for Thanksgiving that year. I was out of the habit. Janice lived in Florida. LaNelle was in Australia. LaNelle and I spoke on the telephone that morning, and I talked to Mama and Daddy on the telephone at about two in the afternoon, after they had finished dinner.

  “That old squash made me sick,” Daddy complained.

  He never liked Mama’s squash—her yellow crookneck squash mashed with bacon grease.

  “Are you ready for the earthquake?” I asked.

  He laughed. “I’ve got too much else on my mind to get scared by a crackpot,” he said.

  The earthquake hysteria had begun some weeks before, when a self-proclaimed climatologist predicted that the most devastating earthquake in U.S. history would hit the New Madrid fault, on the Mississippi River, not far from Mayfield. There had been a major earthquake along the fault in 1811, but few people lived in the region then. It was said that the force of that earthquake caused the Mississippi River to run backwards, and that it rattled dishes at the White House. The aftershocks lasted well into 1812. Since then, doomster prognosticators have been saying that the next earthquake will sink the whole region—from Memphis to St. Louis—into the Mississippi, and that the land with all the water reserves beneath it will turn into liquid clay.

  Western Kentucky greeted the new prediction with fear and frolic. The stores were having earthquake sales. During the week prior to Thanksgiving, Daddy gleefully watched people on TV being interviewed in grocery stores as they stockpiled bottled water and toilet paper. Now, on the telephone, he told me about all these “crazy fools.” He added, “If there ain’t nothing to eat they won’t need all that toilet paper.”

  Later that afternoon, Daddy’s upset stomach suddenly grew worse. Then a huge headache slammed his brain and he collapsed.

  “I’m dying,” he told Mama. But he often said this for melodramatic effect when he had heartburn or an earache.

  “Do you want me to call the ambulance?” Mama asked.

  “No.”

  But then he lost consciousness, and she called the ambulance, half afraid he would be mad at her for doing so. She expected him to wake up and say, “Just take me behind the corncrib and shoot me.” But surely this was only a spell, she thought. She called my brother, Don.

  Don beat the ambulance to the house. Then the medics arrived and whisked Daddy off to a hospital in Paducah. Don and Mama followed in Don’s car. They hardly recognized the familiar road.

  Daddy was placed in intensive care. He had had a cerebral hemorrhage and was in a coma. There was nothing to do but wait. Mama called me and said, “Your daddy’s had a real bad stroke.” Roger and I arrived at the hospital at one o’clock in the morning, after a long drive in the rain, our car full of dogs, to find my mother numbed with disbelief, my father seemingly in a deep sleep.

  Janice and her teenage son drove up from Florida, arriving by mid-morning. LaNelle was summoned from Australia. In the darkness of uncertainty, she flew the length of the Pacific Ocean to Los Angeles, then to Nashville, where Don picked her up, as the rest of us still waited. She arrived at the intensive-care lounge in Paducah bearing macadamia nuts and books on Australian aboriginal culture and many snapshots. She brought kangaroo and koala souvenirs for the children. But her forced cheerfulness quickly faded. Australia didn’t register on any of us.

  I recall the intensity of intensive care. In the family lounge, all sensations were heightened—the ringing of the wall telephone, the slow sucking of strange machines, the pop-up appearances of the nurses who came to summon a family. Several families were camped out there, each stationed in a cluster of chairs and couches. Everyone jumped whenever the telephone rang. One family waited for word on a young woman whose lungs had been burned by a deadly mix of bathroom chemicals. The wife of a man with a brain tumor sat in a stupor. Mama settled among us in calm denial. We didn’t know what went through her mind. She wouldn’t talk. Ever thrifty, we fetched the remains of the Thanksgiving dinner and heated it in the cafeteria microwave. We huddled, cracking jokes like hickory nuts for survival. We lived in that lounge, napping and housekeeping in our little corner, clutching the mundane, elevating it to the surreal, charged by every sensation. We alternated between stoicism and despair. We imagined the reactions Daddy would have if he could see himself lying there in the hospital bed.

  “If he woke up after laying flat on his back that long, don’t you know he would be all stove up?”

  “He’d bellyache for a month. I can hear him now.”

  It took about two minutes of family counsel to decide against heroic measures for prolonging life. We knew he would hate the idea of being hooked to machines.
We discussed it briefly. And then in characteristic Mason fashion, we hung around in the hall for half an hour trying to decide what to do about supper. No one would take the initiative. Finally we sent for a pizza.

  The days passed. Our friend Dottie brought us a station-wagon load of Chinese carryout food, with a tablecloth, cloth napkins, china plates, candles, chopsticks, and a bottle of wine with wine glasses. She arranged the dinner on the circular coffee table in the lounge. We lived in illusions, in shining glimpses of possibility. Daddy would miraculously wake up and we would all drive home.

  Alternately, we told ourselves that slipping away in a coma was the best way to die. We thought he was lucky he didn’t know his plight, lucky to exit this way, without suffering. Of course we wanted him to wake up, and we hammered at the neurologists. We demanded information, answers, assurances—which they could not give. We wanted him to live, to recover. But we knew he could not tolerate being an invalid. We didn’t want him to spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair, helpless.

  He had never trusted doctors. He wouldn’t go to them except when he suffered severely. For years, he’d had a chronic earache, with a permanent ringing in his ears. When he had his ears tested once, he was pleased that the doctor could hear the ringing too. But his distrust of doctors made him skeptical of their methods—their horse liniment, their snake oil, their magic cures with cobalt and rotgut chemical potions. He knew people who had died from going to the doctor. He knew people who carried piss-bags plugged into their sides. Why would doctors do that to a person? He knew their character. He knew when they were putting one over on him. He saw how they acted superior, wielding their high-blown vocabulary to shame him. He hated hospitals so much he wouldn’t even take his dog Oscar to the vet to be tested for heartworm, even though a neighbor’s dog had died of heartworm. “Oscar don’t want to go to the hospital,” he said.