Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “There won’t be no use trying to get it out now,” she says. “There won’t be nothing left.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We had another picture like it, and it crumbled to nothing years ago. I’m sure it’s all crumbled to dust by now,” she says, busying herself with a mob of worn dishrags.

  I wish I could see that picture. Maybe the special conditions in the nest of insulation protected it. Maybe it survived. Maybe there would still be a ghostly impression of my grandmother Eunice’s face—the grandmother I never knew.

  A while later, Mama hands me a box of loose pictures. “I think there may be a picture of my mama in there. I don’t know if you ever saw these.”

  It is a candy box. I remember how Daddy always assaulted a box of chocolates, punching down the centers to find the ones with nuts in them.

  The large photograph on top is a school picture, in which parents are posing with their small children in front of a large two-room plank building with a dogtrot breezeway.

  “That’s Mammy Hicks holding my mother,” Mama says, touching two small figures in the second row.

  Mammy Hicks—my great-grandmother—appears thin and old, with fair hair pulled back tight. Her daughter Eunice is in her lap. She’s a chubby little girl with long, dark curls. She is about six.

  “That’s your mother!”

  “They said I had her black hair. She had a Burnett face, round and fat. They said she was the prettiest thing and she loved to laugh and she had little fat hands.”

  Mama shows me a thumbnail photo, the kind made in a booth at the dime store.

  “That’s my mother on the right and my Aunt Hattie on the left,” she says, sitting down on the couch beside me.

  I can barely make out two tiny, round faces with pompadoured hair. I need a magnifying glass—or perhaps a floodlight. I remember the searchlight at the county fair when I was growing up, how it would play across the sky like a giant windshield wiper. Looking for enlightenment here in these bits of the past is like playing that light across the night heavens. It blanks out the stars, but it seems to be looking for something significant to alight on. Of course, the searchlight at the fair was merely waving its big arm of light in order to be seen from afar. But I really am looking for anything that will illuminate the pathways from the past to my own psyche. I know how one set of grandparents helped form me, but the other set was always missing.

  “Tell me more about your parents, Mama,” I say. “What were they like? Could they sing or play the fiddle? What was your life like when you were growing up?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember.” She laughs. “I declare, my mind’s not two inches long.” She jumps up and starts packing some pillows into a toilet-paper carton from the grocery.

  Of course, all my life I’ve known the bare outline of her story. It was like a tree that had lost its leaves. Hanging from its bare branches was the lone orange that she received for Christmas one year. My mother always gave us more than we deserved, slathering love on us in compensation for her own deprived childhood. The night before Easter, she labored at her sewing machine long after supper, finishing our Easter outfits for church. Christmas was an extravagant production, with scads of presents—toys and books and clothes, usually including an outfit she had sewn for each of us. And she stuffed treats into our Christmas knee-socks hanging from the door facing—apples, Brazil nuts, chocolate creams, peppermint sticks. That Christmas orange was on her mind.

  Drawing on the theory of chaos, I imagine how the Christmas orange comes down to me. In chaos theory, the smallest incident has far-reaching consequences. The ripple effect of the exhaust fan of an air conditioner in Paducah, say, may eventually affect a storm in Padua. I like to imagine how generations of the attitudes and behaviors of country people—a legacy of paucity and small shadings of pride and resistance and shame—intertwined and radiated down through time in increasingly complicated shapes. There is much more to my mother’s story than the orange. I want to know the details. I want to color in the outline.

  Later in the day, after I keep pestering her, Mama sinks down onto the couch again. “Where do you want me to start?” she asks.

  21

  At twenty-one, Eunice Hicks was afraid she was going to be an old maid. One of her sisters, Hattie, was already an old maid; nobody would marry her because she had fits. Another sister, Rosie, did not marry until she was thirty. Having children so late in life was risky; Eunice and her sisters knew of women who had died from bearing children too late.

  Eunice was aware of the wild, red-headed youth up the Clear Springs Road, the rough, flirty boy who acted older than his years—Robert E. Lee. She liked the way he laughed and joked around. They had attended different schools, but she had seen him working in the fields, or hanging around the general store at Clear Springs. She had seen him driving down the road from the store to the river bottom in a mule-drawn wagon with his father. The sight of Robert Lee whipped her up inside like someone beating egg whites.

  Eunice, who lived with her mother and raised tobacco and calves, had good things to start out married life with. She possessed a smart buggy and a healthy, fine-looking horse—a sign of status and prosperity. She owned a Hoosier pantry—a staple kitchen item of the time, a wooden unit of cupboards with a built-in flour dispenser funnel and a porcelain countertop. As a young woman of means, she was in a position to attract a respectable husband who owned some land. But instead, Eunice married the good-looking neighbor with the sexy swagger and not a penny to his name. The marriage was an immediate disaster, lasting less than a year. Robert Lee abandoned Eunice before their baby was born. He fled the county, driving off in Eunice’s horse and buggy. Possibly they were legally his property, through marriage, but no one in Eunice’s family saw it that way. He was a thief. And they never forgave him.

  “You go straight to the courthouse,” her mother told her when she straggled home in a neighbor’s wagon, cradling her big belly. Divorce was uncommon in the 1920s, but Eunice, humiliated and angry, immediately filed the papers. Her mother and sisters all said she had married beneath her, and she realized it was true. Robert Lee hadn’t even given her a real home, just a corner in his parents’ house. He didn’t own a farm. All he could do was hire out as a laborer. Everybody in the neighborhood let her know what a big mistake she had made. “You grabbed the first trifling tramp to come sashaying down the road,” they said. “You’re lucky your mama let you come back home after he run off.”

  Eunice gave birth to her baby and resumed life with her mother and her sister Hattie. Before long, Luther Moore, an older man with grown children, noticed her at a church supper. Luther had recently lost his wife. He was the opposite of Robert Lee—a respectable landowner. When her divorce was final, Eunice married him. With her baby, Christy, Eunice moved to Luther’s pleasant cabin-style house, down the Panther Creek Road. Finally, she felt settled and provided for.

  Christy’s earliest memories are of living there with her mother and Luther Moore. She can recall the layout of the house, the long porch facing the road, the cistern at the back door. She remembers creeping into the bedroom and seeing her mother and Luther Moore in bed together. When she tried to crawl into bed with them, they pushed her away. Eunice said, “Now go to your room, go on,” in a shushing tone, her hand shooing. And Christy retains another glimpse of the past: her stepfather went outside behind the shed, and Eunice told her child, “Don’t go out there.” Hushed warnings and secret loss were at the heart of Christy’s closeness to her mother.

  When Christy was four, Eunice grew big and Charley was born. Christy remembers the little baby and how afterwards her mother was wild with fever. Neighbors and kinfolks fluttered in and out as Eunice lay in bed suffering. She had convulsions. Christy was stowed in Luther’s wagon on a pile of tow sacks and driven up Panther Creek Road to her grandmother’s house. She didn’t see her mother alive again. Later, everybody said, “Your mama oughtn’t to have died. She wasn’t tended to right.” One n
eighbor told her years later, “I was there, and that doctor pummeled on her stomach. I saw him. He got up on the bed on his knees and worked his fists on her. That’s what killed her.”

  Eunice’s death unhinged the whole Hicks family and neighborhood. They couldn’t stop talking about it, searching to cast blame. Rumors floated around, stories compounded out of fear and grief. A conspiracy theory evolved. A lame man in the neighborhood was reported missing—murder was suspected—and somehow he got worked into the speculations about Eunice’s death. Maybe she was murdered because she knew something about the lame man’s disappearance. Maybe Robert Lee was in on it. Eunice had been wronged once by Robert Lee, and there was talk that she had been betrayed again. People whispered and buzzed. It was a hot summer, good for porch gossip. Rumors were built on a purloined tarpaulin and a truck leaving out in the night. Someone heard the ghostly footsteps of the missing man—his hobbled leg thumping. Someone else saw a woman carrying a bushel of leaves to a cistern in the moonlight. All of these stray tidbits grew into a garbled suspicion of adultery and murder and a body dumped in that cistern. Who did what to whom isn’t clear. There was likely little to any of this, just talk and superstition. But over the years, the suspicions spread like fungus creeping outward from the basic wrongs done to Eunice—abandonment, betrayal, death.

  After Eunice died, her children were separated. The new baby, Charley, was raised by Luther Moore and his mother, and Christy stayed with her grandmother, Susan Hicks, known as “Mammy Hicks,” the woman who would ruin her good knife skinning a mole. Mammy Hicks and her daughter Hattie, who still lived at home, looked for signs of Eunice in the little girl. They shortened her name, Bernice Christianna, to Chris. In her hair and her cheekbones, Chris favored Eunice, but now and then they glimpsed sinister traces of Robert Lee in her.

  In her new home, Chris traipsed off to explore the fields and the outbuildings, until someone ran to catch her. The new place, with its vast fields and choked fencerows, seemed to swallow her up. Mammy Hicks owned sixty-two acres, with a good barn and a stable, an orchard, a smokehouse, and a henhouse. She even had a telephone, and she had once had an elegant two-story house, but it burned, destroying most of her fine furniture. A widow, she managed well with the help of her brother and her grown sons, who rebuilt the house and did the heavier farm work. The farm was a lonely place, though, for the only child, a spirited four-year-old.

  She played alone, with the meager playthings that had been scrounged up for her. Her aunt Rosie gave her a little duck, and she treated it like a doll. She talked to it and carried it around.

  “Chris wooled her duck to death,” Mammy told her daughter Rosie later. “It liked to broke her heart when that little duck died.”

  “That’ll learn her,” Rosie said.

  Chris played with the pig. Mammy always kept a pig named Pet—a new one each year. Pet was never penned up, and he would hang around the yard, waiting for scraps. Chris would scratch him on the belly and he’d fall over and raise his leg in ecstasy. But one hard-cold day in the late fall, the men would help Mammy string him up, slit his throat, bleed him, and butcher him. She smoked the hams and sides and shoulders in her smokehouse. She made sausage with her meat grinder and packed it into homemade sacks that were like sleeves.

  Mammy Hicks was a practical-minded farm woman in a long dress and apron and a bonnet with a brim as deep as an awning, but she also aspired to refinement. She was literate when most women of her generation and place were not. She made sure her six children went to school, and she purchased a mail-order organ so they could be musical, like the Hurt family. Dr. Hurt boarded a piano teacher at his fine house for his six daughters. Mammy Hicks felt she was just as good as the Hurts, with their wraparound verandah and crystal chandeliers. So the affront to her dignity when no-good Robert Lee abandoned her daughter was immeasurable.

  Mammy and Aunt Hatt decided that Chris was too little to send to school the first year. Even after she started to school, they wouldn’t let her walk there by herself. And whenever there was something catching going around, they kept her at home. Chris’s grandmother and aunt watched over her, but they were not affectionate with her. She longed for them to hug her or pet her, as her mother had done. Chris remembered wallowing in her mother’s lap, daring to slide off until she was caught by the legs. Perhaps she reminded Mammy and Hattie too much of Eunice’s shame? Did they see too much of Robert Lee in her? She had an independent spirit and was scampish. In a second-grade photograph, her head is cocked shyly, but there is an internal mischief bubbling, and a sly sense of privacy in her eyes.

  As she grew older, Chris overheard the talk about her father, and she wondered about him. She wondered if he thought about her at all. He was worthless, a rascally snake-in-the-grass, everyone said. He was double-dealing and black-hearted and violent. He was rumored to have joined the Army. Once, Chris saw a group of uniformed soldiers trudging along the road. “They’re just getting home from the war,” Hattie said. “It takes a long time for them to make their way home.” Chris heard people talking about the Blue and the Gray. The Civil War and the Great War ran together in her mind. She formed a picture of her father in a uniform, off in a war. She heard he had married again. She heard he was working on the river as a deckhand on a towboat. She knew he came to Clear Springs now and then. He hadn’t disappeared entirely. His family was here, and he returned occasionally from the river, or some war, to visit them. But whenever Chris asked about him, Mammy Hicks would say “Hush!” and find a chore for her to do.

  Half of her was doted on and the other half was a secret shame. Chris tottered between the two views of herself. She loved her aunt and her grandmother, and they loved the part of her that came from Eunice. Often lonely, Chris explored the creeks and fencerows. But sometimes they went fishing. Mammy Hicks’s people, the Burnetts, would rather fish than eat cake. The Burnetts would be chopping out tobacco, and all of a sudden one of them would say, “I believe the fish might be biting.” Their hoes would drop, and before they could think it through, they would find themselves lounging on the creek bank with fishing poles. Chris went fishing in Panther Creek with her grandmother and aunt and listened to them whoop and gossip. She liked the slippery feel of the fish. She learned to thread a hook with a squirming worm and drop it into the water. When storm clouds came, Mammy herded her and Hattie home like a mother duck. Mammy feared lightning the same as snakes. Lightning had burned her house down. Lightning was like snakes jumping in the heavens, she said, all lit up and jerky. “Snake fits,” she said.

  Mammy Hicks suffered from dropsy—heart trouble. Her ankles swelled. She was seized with spells of weakness and couldn’t do her work. As her health deteriorated, one of her sons or daughters would come to stay with her most nights. Chris waited on the porch each evening, gazing longingly down the narrow dirt road, hoping someone would come to stay the night with her grandmother. Mammy was only in her sixties, but to Chris she seemed ancient, with her wrinkled, broken body and her puffy feet bursting from her shoes.

  One afternoon, Mammy Hicks was sitting up in her four-poster bed eating watermelon when all at once she lurched and fell back on the pillow.

  With a shriek, Hattie leaped to her mother’s side. “Chris, reach in her mouth and get that piece of watermelon out,” Hattie said. “Maybe she’s choked on it. Go on, reach in there. Your hand’s little.”

  Chris did as she was told. Her grandmother’s head was limp, and Chris had to force her fingers past rotten teeth. The odor was like a putrefying dead animal. She pulled out the slippery piece of watermelon. But Mammy Hicks was dead.

  It was the year of the stock-market crash, but the Depression had come early to the Clear Springs area. Throughout the twenties, the farmers of Clear Springs were in difficulty. They could grow enough food for their own use, but no one had much money to buy goods, even though there were two general stores. On Saturdays, to earn some cash, the farmers carried produce and chickens and eggs to Mayfield in their wagons. Althou
gh some families owned cars, the rural way of life had changed little since the settlement of Clear Springs a century before. Mammy Hicks’s Montgomery Ward organ was as newfangled as anything around. Nobody owned a radio. Nobody had a bicycle.

  My mother was ten years old. Hattie’s sister Rosie decided that Chris could not be left alone with Hattie because of her fits. So Rosie brought both of them to live with her and her husband, Roe Mason, on their nearby farm. The Mason farm was well kept, with the borders scythed, the rail fences laid true. Chris had often visited the place, but now that she was coming there to live, she felt uprooted once again, and her life seemed insignificant. From a small ménage of women, Chris entered a huge household of cousins, hired hands, and boarders. Uncle Roe—Thomas Monroe Mason—had one son by his first wife and three children by Rosie, his second.

  Chris and Hattie brought a wagonload of Mammy Hicks’s possessions with them—her dishes, some furniture, her organ, her ice-cream churn. They also brought Eunice’s fine things: her preserve stands and cakestands, her Hoosier pantry, and her bed with the high headboard and footboard—the bed she died in. At Aunt Rosie’s house, Chris and Hattie slept in that bed in the dining room, near the kitchen fireplace.

  The house was full of children, but none of Chris’s own age to play with. She was outgoing, yet she was often lonely and bewildered. She hid in the attic and wrote little stories on a tablet. Or she explored the fields and the creeks. Along the fencerows, she found a kind of weed with a translucent lining in its seedpod that she could chew. It was like plastic. Years later, when plastic was developed, she claimed she had invented it. She discovered a banana tree growing in the woods. She picked a banana and ate it. She was sure it was a banana. She didn’t often have bananas, but this truly tasted like one. She tried to follow hummingbirds. She played with cats. Cats went by colors—Blackie, Whitey, Calico, Yeller. She dressed them in doll clothes. “She’s always packing a cat around,” Hattie explained to Rosie. Chris wore cotton dresses that Aunt Rosie made for her. Chris always wanted something tied around her waist. If she didn’t have a belt, she used a string.