Because he never learned to drive, Mother at thirteen began to drive him around the county for his law practice. She took great pride in that role and was grateful for the time they spent together. He worked to send all four of his daughters to college and lived to see them all become teachers. He died from a heart attack the year before Mother’s marriage.
Mother had suffered another loss, but a loss she acknowledged aloud only after Daddy’s death. While her father was serving as state treasurer, she became involved with the son of an ambassador from Brazil. She said that her father had given the relationship his blessing, but shortly after her father’s death, the young man was killed in an automobile accident.
Other than the fact that she was glad Daddy’s family had money, Mother said little about her feelings toward him before they married. It was Daddy who told me how he dressed mornings in suit, tie, and spats and sat at the window watching until he saw Mother walking past his house on her way to teach Latin classes in the high school across town. He would rush out the front door and offer to drive her to school. This daily ritual continued for some time before he dared to ask her out on a date.
Daddy played the piano by ear. Although he couldn’t read a note of music, he composed a love song to Mother and had a musician write the notes down for him. When she went to New Orleans to summer school at Tulane, he arranged with her host and hostess to take her to a nightclub where the band played the song dedicated to her. Her father and boyfriend dead, Mother finally accepted Daddy’s romantic overtures.
They were married on New Year’s Day, 1935. And though they fought often and bitterly as I was growing up, Mother and Daddy ended many of their days walking hand in hand through the flower gardens. And they spent most Sunday mornings of my childhood in bed rubbing each other’s feet.
II
I remember the house when it was white and the steps held you up when you stood on them. The porch columns were white, solid, and straight. The kitchen cabinets glistened buttery yellow, and the linoleum glowed with wax. The furniture was dusted and polished, the paper on the walls new. But the floors in every room were slanted like a ship tossed at sea, and cracks crisscrossed the ceilings and traveled from wall to wall like roads on maps of places I’d never been.
Mother, Daddy, and I lived with Granddaddy in the The Old Home Place, where Daddy, his two brothers, and his three sisters were born and grew up. It was there, sixty-eight years later, that Daddy died. By that time, his sister Bama had inherited the house. She did little to take care of the place. After several renters defaced the house before moving on, she let it stand vacant for years. Kudzu vines took over what had been Mother’s flower beds and covered the abandoned heart-shaped fish pool she had dug from the hard earth.
After Uncle Earnest died, Aunt Bama and their son, Earnest Junior—who must have been in his forties by then—stayed in the house with their parakeet when they came down from Columbia, North Carolina, several times a year. The usual pretense for their visits had something to do with house repairs, but Bama’s real reason was to visit Daddy and check up on, and criticize, Mother. Though Aunt Bama was the only family member left with wealth, instead of staying in a hotel she, Earnest Junior, and the bird always stayed in the living room of The Old Home Place, where they’d set up army cots for sleeping and hang sheets over the windows for privacy.
It must have been on one of those cots that Daddy died. Mother told me he’d been complaining of being cold all that evening and that he’d said he wished his sister hadn’t come that weekend. Mother said that he fed the birds before briefly visiting my brother Wyman and his wife, Anne. Then he went to see Aunt Bama and Earnest Junior in The Old Home Place.
Within the hour Earnest Junior was banging on Mother’s locked door yelling, “Uncle Wyman’s dead, Aunt Louisa! Uncle Wyman’s dead!”
Earnest Junior had been reading the book of Revelations aloud, he told Mother, when Daddy just fell back dead. At breakfast on the day of the funeral, I was about to ask Earnest Junior what verses he’d been reading and why, when he leaned over me and began stroking the satin binding of my robe with his fingers. Then he gave me that creepy look that had always made me feel uncomfortable. I got up and moved across the room. I’ve said nothing to him since. The last news I heard about him was that he was in federal prison someplace in the South.
Earnest Junior was always peculiar, and his parents’ behavior toward him was equally so. One family story went that when he was a little boy in public school, Aunt Bama would go each day at recess to stand and peer at him through the schoolyard fence until the bell called the children back into the building. Even as an adult, Earnest Junior wasn’t allowed out of his parents’ sight. A trip out to their car to retrieve a sweater or suitcase required an entire family expedition. And once, when I was very young, I heard that he’d escaped their surveillance for a matter of minutes and ended up in South America.
Around the time he was twelve or thirteen, Earnest Junior did something so terrible that it drove the family to move from Spartanburg to Columbia. Mother said that once Uncle Earnest was about to tell her what doctors at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore had said after examining Earnest Junior, but Aunt Bama burst into the kitchen at that moment and screamed that he was to never say anything to anyone about Earnest Junior again. I suspect Daddy knew the whole story but wasn’t about to reveal to me any more about Earnest Junior than he would reveal about his and Aunt Bama’s other sisters, Bessie and Kate.
My cousin Peyton, Uncle Frank’s younger son, claimed that his father and mine used to wash their hands after reading letters from Bessie and Kate, both of whom had been in the insane asylum in Milledgeville. One had died there; the other got out and married. When I asked Daddy for more information about these women who were my close blood kin, he would just shift his eyes from mine and refuse to answer. Daddy and Uncle Frank had basically disowned those two sisters.
But Earnest Junior couldn’t be dismissed with a quick shift of Daddy’s eyes. He was too physically and persistently present. For some years after we moved from The Old Home Place to the new house up the street, Aunt Bama, Uncle Earnest, and Earnest Junior would come to visit and stay in the large room that had been built for Granddaddy, who was dead by then. In time, our family grew larger and took over the guest room, making it necessary for Aunt Bama’s family to rent a room at a motel at the edge of town when they visited.
It was a great relief to Mother to have my aunt out of the house for good as an overnight guest. Still, Aunt Bama and her family continued to have some Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners with us, as well as other dinners on their all-too-frequent trips to Georgia. Aunt Bama continued to fuss about Daddy’s mishandling of money, incessant smoking, and constant complaining about being at death’s door while refusing to go to a doctor.
“Someday, Wyman, you’re going to drop dead!” she’d scream shrilly again and again. And he did, of course, still smoking cigarettes, and with a heart so enlarged that you could sometimes hear it pumping if you were quiet enough.
Aunt Bama was also full of complaints about Mother’s cooking. “This Jell-O has a peculiar taste to it,” she would say, poking tentatively with a fork prong at a quivering lime-green blob. Or she would push her almost empty plate away, announcing: “I can’t eat any more of this food, Louisa. Something’s just not right about it.” Livid, Mother would do everything she could do to pretend that my aunt wasn’t there in her dining room at all, that the irritation was nothing more than a gnat that had slipped in through a snag in a window screen.
Daddy tried to ignore both women, dumping so much catsup on his food that his plate looked like a miniature replica of one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War. With Aunt Bama present, Daddy knew that Mother wouldn’t let her manners go and scream at him with her usual “You ruin everything I cook by pouring catsup on it, Wyman! Absolutely everything!”
Earnest Junior loved Mother’s cooking and ate helping after helping. Well satiated after one dinner of bake
d ham, sweet potato soufflé, and green peas in white sauce, he pushed his chair back from the table and announced with a rare sparkle in his eyes: “When Mama and Daddy die I’m going to be as rich as a king.”
“When your Daddy and I die all our money is going to foreign missions. That’s stated in our wills,” Aunt Bama said severely, glaring across the table at her son. “The Lord will take care of you, Earnest Junior.”
“The Lord, my foot,” Mother snorted when the two of us rehashed the dinnertime conversation privately later. “She means the law.”
Then once again she expressed her frustration with Aunt Bama for not telling her more about Earnest Junior’s condition. Mother felt it unfair, since she, by far the youngest of the whole bunch, would probably be left to deal with him. In a way, that’s exactly what happened. In her old age, when Earnest Junior called Mother collect from a prison, or some other place when he was an escapee on the run, she always accepted his calls. She said it made her feel safer to know where he was. She grimly referred to him as “my inheritance from your father.”
But it was Earnest Junior who ended up inheriting The Old Home Place.
I have few memories of Daddy during the first four years of my life. While we lived there he was either at the warehouse supervising the workers or traveling in the northern states drumming up trade for his and Uncle Frank’s lucrative produce business. I do remember his striking image when, like Uncle Frank, he dressed up in his white linen suit on special occasions, pausing at the garden during rose season to snap off a red rosebud for his coat lapel.
Granddaddy is a giant in my first memory of him. I am sitting on the floor, looking up and up into his teasing face under his straight dark hair. The whole house was filled with his presence, his voice, and his smell, a mixture of talcum powder and cologne, both of which he used liberally because he never bathed. He just splashed a little water on himself like Daddy did and depended on the toiletries to do the rest. But Granddaddy never smelled bad, unless you didn’t like the aroma of Prince Albert pipe tobacco that clung to everything he wore and permeated his skin. I loved its smell because his pipe, and the smell of it, were part of him, and he was as much a welcome part of my world as the sun, the pecan orchard, and the flower garden in the backyard with its row after row of blossoms.
I think of Granddaddy in a dark, pin-striped gabardine suit. Even at breakfast he wore a suit. After breakfast he’d sit on the front porch in one of the high-backed rocking chairs, cross his legs, and smoke his pipe. After a while Daddy would come out of the house and ask, “Are you ready to go to work, Daddy?” Granddaddy would get up and go with him, though he hadn’t worked in years.
Mostly I remember Granddaddy, still dressed in his pajamas, on mornings when I went to his room to play with him. I always gave him the baby doll whose glass eyes shut with a clanking sound and whose wooden head was covered with brown, carved curls. I pretended to give him the baby doll because she was best, but the real reason was that I loved my brown bear more.
Our play together was a daily ritual. Mother told me that Granddaddy was “a nice old man, but senile.” Lucille Williams, the African American woman who worked for my family from the time I was three months old, called him a “friendly old fellow.” “His mind had been out of order for so long,” she told me several years ago, “that they treated him like a little child.” Whatever the condition of Granddaddy’s mind, his heart and mine were of one accord in the early morning when the baby doll and the brown bear played together among the rumpled bedclothes.
Then one morning, when I was three years and nine months old, Granddaddy wasn’t in his room waiting for me. His bed had been stripped down to the mattress, and the smell of him was hardly there at all. Baby doll and brown bear dangled useless from my hands.
Later Mother held me in her arms in the living room as she stood over Granddaddy’s casket. Granddaddy looked odd and artificial, with his lips painted, rouge on his cheeks, and his mouth stitched into an expression I’d never seen before. Daddy had been mostly absent from my early childhood, and Mother had been distracted and distant. Only Granddaddy had been warm and welcoming, and he’d died and hadn’t taken me with him. More than half of my world was gone.
“You shouldn’t show him to her,” Daddy wailed to Mother. Daddy sat in a straight chair by the secretary, pressing his bald head hard against its dark wood, sobbing. When Mother put me down on the floor, I ran out of the living room and out the back door. Just across the fence, my friend June was playing in her yard. “June!” I called. “June! I have a dead Granddaddy in the living room!”
Lucille came and stood at the back-door screen. She’d mistaken my announcement to June as bragging, not the hysteria it was.
“Shame on you, Margaret Richter!” she yelled. “Shame on you!”
I fastened my eyes on the pecan grove, while I felt my heart heavy in my chest and mockingbirds called from the trees.
Chapter Two
I
1939
NOW WE WERE LEAVING THE OLD HOME PLACE. FOR MONTHS ON Sundays Daddy had taken us two blocks up the street to the new house to see the progress the builders had made that week. “Finest oak flooring money can buy,” he’d boom proudly as we walked through the rooms that weren’t rooms at all but spaces divided by beams. I always walked in a daze trying to imagine that place, with its sawdust and nails, as home. But I couldn’t. It didn’t matter. With Granddaddy gone, home itself wasn’t home anymore.
Despite my grief, the day we moved up the street to the new house I was excited. Men came and went, hauling pieces of furniture and boxes out of the house. The front yard was filled with bureaus and dressers and chairs stacked one atop the other. Mirrors leaned against the palm trees. Boxes of dishes, pots and pans, clothes, books, photographs, canned food, bags of flour, cornmeal, and sugar stood among the shrubs.
Mother and Daddy’s bed, stripped of its linen, stood in the middle of the walkway. Wildly excited and nervous, I climbed up onto the bed and began to jump on the bare mattress. Granddaddy was dead and buried in the cemetery across the road from the pickle plant. A speeding car had smashed my dog Spot. And we were leaving the fig tree and my rope swing forever. But the higher I jumped, the more my sadness was replaced by the joy of pure motion. Higher and higher I jumped, giddy with a head full of blue sky and furniture. A bus pulled away from the station across the street. A dog barked. The town clock rang out the hour. Still I jumped.
Then Mother came racing out the door, screaming, “Stop! Stop that, Margaret! Stop!”
I stopped.
Even so, my feeling of freedom was so great that nothing could diminish its vivid memory. For those few minutes I spent jumping on Mother and Daddy’s bed I was utterly joyous.
II
I was filled with wonder when I looked into the shoe box of tiny pine trees that Mother held in her hands. They were a whole miniature forest.
The yard of the new house was broad and deep. To one side of the backyard were four pecan trees. An old oak stood near the back door. Thick wisteria vines hung from its branches, their blossoms lush and abundant. Except for the pecan trees and the oak, the yard spread its two acres flat and blank without another tree to catch the sunlight or create patches of welcome shade.
Sometime after I was four Mother planted other trees—the maple near the front porch, the mimosa with its pink puffs and tiny leaves that folded together at evening like praying hands, Japanese magnolias, dogwood along the sidewalk, and a crab apple and a pear tree out back. Though I watched her plant many of them, it was watching her plant the shoe-box forest of pines that most filled me with wonder.
Mother set the box down on the grass and beside it dug a hole with her spade, chopping and chopping until the dirt was loose and soft enough to receive the tender roots that she pushed into it. Then she patted the dirt around the little tree with her hands and watered the earth with drizzle from the hose that she dragged around from where it lay coiled under the faucet. The tree looked smal
l and vulnerable—not like a tree at all, just a small sprig of pine in the grass. “Are you sure this is going to grow into a real tree?” I asked.
“It will grow into a tree as tall as the house and taller,” Mother assured me. Then she carried the box to another spot, dug a hole, and planted another tree. She repeated the process all over the front and long side yard while I followed her, dragging the drizzling hose and its long extensions.
I couldn’t imagine the long-leafed pines they would grow into, tall and glorious, yielding enormous pinecones that were used to start the Christmas fires in the living room fireplace, or how many pine needles would be shed each year to be raked into the driveway to make it a carpet of golden brown. I don’t remember being aware of when the trees changed from looking like twigs and began to look like trees, or when I began to look up and not down at them. I don’t remember when I looked out at the yard and realized that we lived in a grove of pines. What I do remember is that walking around the yard with Mother, watching her plant the trees, taking them one by one from the shoe-box forest, was one of the happiest, most thrilling experiences of my childhood.
III
“Hold him up and look at me,” Mother said, backing me up against one side of the new house. She stood my brother Wyman—I’ve always called him Bubba—in front of me. I caught hold of his hands.
“Be still,” Mother said, bending her head over her Kodak box camera.
The sun hurt my eyes.
“Be still, I said!”
Bubba squirmed his determined sweaty hands free from my grip and toppled to the grass.
“I told you to hold him up!” Mother screamed.
“I didn’t mean to let him fall, Mama,” I pleaded. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I told you!”
“Mama!” I cried. But there was no way for me to reach my mother through her fury.
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