Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  We presently moved on to the drugstore. The druggist, a small crippled man, hobbled toward us, grinning to see us, and he and my grandfather talked for quite some time. Finally my grandfather said, “Give the child a strawberry cone,” and so I had it, miraculous, and the world of which it was the center expanded about it with gracious, silent delight. It was a thing too wondrous actually to have eaten, and I do not remember eating it. It was only after we at last reached home and I entered the house, which smelled like my parents’ clothes and their things, that I knew what they would think of what we had done and I became filled with anxiety and other forebodings.

  Then the car was coming up the drive and they were alighting in a post-funeral manner, full of heavy feelings and reminiscence and inclined not to speak in an ordinary way. When my mother put dinner in order, we sat around the table not saying very much.

  “Did the fire hold out all right?” she asked my grandfather.

  “Oh, it was warm,” he said. “Didn’t need much.” He ate quietly and so did I.

  On Sunday afternoons we all sat around looking at the paper. My mother had doubts about this, but we all indulged the desire anyway. After the ordeal of dressing up, of Sunday school and the long service and dinner, it seemed almost a debauchery to be able to pitch into those large crackling sheets, especially the funny papers, which were garish with color and loud with exclamation points, question marks, shouting, and all sorts of misdeeds. My grandfather had got sleepy before the fire and retired to his room, while my mother and father had climbed out of their graveside feelings enough to talk a little and joke with one another.

  “What did you all do?” my mother asked me. “How did you spend the time while we were gone?”

  “We walked downtown,” I said, for I had been laughing at something they had said to each other and wanted to share the morning’s happiness with them without telling any more or letting any real trouble in. But my mother was on it, quicker than anything.

  “You didn’t go in the drugstore, did you?”

  And they both were looking. My face must have had astonishment on it as well as guilt. Not even I could have imagined them going this far. Why, on the day of a funeral, should they care if anybody bought an ice-cream cone?

  “Did you?” my father asked.

  The thing to know is that my parents really believed everything they said they believed. They believed that awful punishments were meted out to those who did not remember the Sabbath was holy. They believed about a million other things. They were terribly honest about it.

  Much later on, my mother went into my grandfather’s room. I was silently behind her, and I heard her speak to him.

  “She says you took her to town while we were gone and got an ice cream.”

  He had waked up and was reading by his lamp. At first he seemed not to hear; at last, he put his book face down in his lap and looked up. “I did,” he said lightly.

  A silence fell between them. Finally she turned and went away.

  This, so far as I know, was all.

  Because of the incident, that certain immunity of spirit my grandfather possessed was passed on to me. It came, I think, out of the precise way in which he put his book down on his lap to answer. There was a lifetime in the gesture, distilled, and I have been a good part of that long, growing up to all its meaning.

  After this, though all went on as before, there was nothing much my parents could finally do about the church and me. They could lock the barn door, but the bright horse of freedom was already loose in my world. Down the hill, across the creek, in the next pasture—where? Somewhere, certainly; that much was proved; and all was different for its being so.

  A Final Word

  I was fourteen when he died. I had gone to Teoc with my aunt and uncle to spend a weekend. When we got to the house the telephone was ringing. It was my mother, telling us to return at once.

  I was frightened as we drove the winding country road back to town. I remember huddling in the back seat, and thinking that though my mother had not said so, we must all know what had occurred. On the front seat they were silent. I think grief was not so strong with me as fear.

  I wondered later what I was afraid of. But in a way, I knew. He was the loving companion of days that would never be repeated. There have been many loves for me since then, but none quite like that. I could remember it, but not call it back. This fact, which confronted me that night, is as awesome, as fearful, as anything can get. It’s enough to scare anybody to death.

  From Teoc Gan once brought a pocketful of acorns from the live oaks near the house. He went around the yard in Carrollton planting all these. I was with him. I remember his bending to dig a sufficiently deep hole, dropping in the acorns, tamping the soil back over them with the tip of his cane.

  Those trees now stand tall and strong around the house. It was sold after my parents’ death, and though it is in the hands of good owners, I nevertheless dislike going there now that so many have passed away. But when I see those noble oaks, I am cheered. I remember the day, and that planting, and can see the yield which seems to honor it.

  5

  DOWN ON TEOC

  TAKE two anxious young parents living in a snobbish little Mississippi town during the hard times of the twenties and thirties, hoping to please the fine families they had always known, hoping to do the right thing in every way, hoping their children would excel in school, succeed socially, be praised for good looks, dress well, never say the wrong thing, never be criticized, be friendly to all. Furthermore, and most important, those children were rigidly expected to attend church and Sunday school and young people’s meetings and read the Bible every day and say their prayers every night and grow up to be good Presbyterians.

  Take two lively children with inquiring minds who were not overly anxious to please and who had scant concern about what anybody thought.

  Help!

  Something, obviously, had to come to the rescue.

  The something that did come for my brother and me was what an attentive guardian angel or, more likely, a wise and witty fairy godmother might have had made to order. He was not a something but a someone, and was there all the time: our uncle, our mother’s youngest brother.

  Joseph Pinkney McCain was charming and funny, full of jokes, songs, and teasing. But he listened with care to what people said, and people to him did include children. He was irreverent, tolerant of sins, and friendly with sinners, was happily married to a pretty woman who loved him completely, and by some inexplicable curse, which was for us like a final touch of miracle, he was childless.

  The outline is enough to let you see it all.

  But wait. There are wonderful things to tell.

  The house I went riding thirteen miles to find was not to be seen from a distance. In blistering July heat, the oaks spread a depth of cool shade; their giant shallow roots crawled and sprawled, breaking through the surface of the sandy soil between the cattle gap and the front gate, pushing up close to the broad front steps. In the still of night, an occasional oak ball banged on the tin roof like a fist. In winter, too, the oaks made an evergreen shelter in a swept landscape.

  Coming there in a car from town, as we so often did, navigating those crooked roads heavy with dust or sloppy with mud, we we would take the familiar turn at the plantation store, a plain brick building with gas pumps out front, and then for the last short drive, past a hill slope with a cemetery among the trees on the right and a long spread of infinite flat fields on the left. Then we would see the grove. Just over a small bridge, we would enter it.

  Uncle Joe would be waiting. He’d have seen the cloud of dust the car made from the time it passed the store, watched it advance, heard the rumble of the cattle gap, and come out to stand on the veranda, waiting, one foot on the porch railing, wearing seersucker trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves, ready.

  Squeezing past our parents, my brother and I were the first ones out; the way I remember it, we couldn’t wait. Cars stopped habitual
ly in the wide sandy space between the cattle gap and the front fence. In my memory we were through the gate before the motor died. What joy in that sand beneath our shoes, or maybe we were even barefoot, though Aunt Esther would not be too happy about it.

  “Come on in! Come on in!” my uncle would call. I always had bandages. “How’d you skin yourself this time? Lord have mercy. Can’t you learn to stand up?” And hair to pull straight over too large ears. “A little more and you could use ‘em to fly.” And new tennis shoes in an ever bigger size. “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord.” All this for me, with another store for my brother. Whatever he said, we were happy to hear it. Though it couldn’t be called complimentary, we would stand there anyway, grinning in mindless delight at his ragging and railing. He picked us over like a hound with puppies; he carried us in his teeth like cubs.

  Our parents would have come in, standing back and admiring us, glad to be there, my mother especially—her home, after all. Her brother, her children. I think, too, that, like us, what they felt was freedom. Away from it all. A long sigh.

  Aunt Esther was coming. Out through the shadowy hallway with its comfortable chairs and sofas and gleaming tables, or in from the screened-in half of the veranda with its rugs and ferns and rocking chairs, and the glider, so nice to nap on in the afternoon. The oak boughs lifted in the breeze.

  “That was quite a storm last night,” says my uncle. “I thought it struck one of the oaks.”

  “Which one?” asks my mother, proprietary.

  “Don’t think it did. Just sounded like it.”

  “I was scared,” my aunt says.

  “She was callin’ on the Lord to save her,” he says. He lifts one finger in a mock sermon. “The day of repentance was at hand.” We all laugh. It is nice to be friendly about the Lord.

  Maybe we were all there only for the day, but maybe one of us would be staying on. “I can’t let them both go at once,” my mother would say, so we had our separate lengthy visits. Perhaps it was better that way, we were so different.

  Joe Pink, he sometimes called himself, for Joseph Pinkney, his full name. He was of medium height, with rather broad shoulders, one held higher than the other, a family trait, and the lean limbs of all the McCains. The hands were large-knuckled: we attributed big joints to our Scottish ancestry; we had come from Scotland way back when. His hair was sandy brown, getting a little thinner and grayer with the years, though he never got bald; and his face was florid, burned scaly from exposure, and maybe from the occasional bouts of drinking Aunt Esther frowned on, holding him down. His expression was changeable, serious and inward to the point of somber meditation in repose, but more often broken into a dozen planes with foolishness and affection. He loved to rag people, observe them carefully for what he could draw out as material for his stories about them, lie in wait for their more embarrassing moments to occur (sometimes prearranged little traps they were bound to blunder into). Then he was off, relentless. Cries of protest. General aggravation. Yet no real anger. How did he do it? I don’t know. It was said that everybody loved Joe McCain.

  He did not like everybody. He liked attractive women, but he often disliked “ladies.” He disliked properness and put-on, pretense. There was a good bit of that sort of thing around, especially in Carrollton, and a number of my mother’s models of fine behavior bored him. He would sit in their company with his hat in his lap, saying the right things, but you knew the small boy in him was counting the minutes till they left. He hated hypocrisy, and these mincing ways smacked of it to him.

  He loved his friends in the Teoc community. Back then it had a rural delivery service; a church four or five miles distant from the McCain place; and a number of farming families, who came to the store to get gasoline and groceries and were in lively touch with one another.

  Aunt Esther was social in the fashion of the times. She was by general consensus very pretty, with chestnut hair drawn into a chignon, large brown eyes to match, and delicate features. She loved pretty things and often drove to Greenwood, a Delta town about ten miles away, to shop for materials, sewing supplies, spices, gloves, and many other items on her list. She often left time to go to the picture show. She worked hard. She crocheted spreads and afghans, embroidered linens, briar-stitched throws in velvet and satin. She canned and pickled and preserved in late summer, and raised abundant flowers in beds outlined in native rock, reached by winding sandy paths. Here in this garden beside the house she gave evening parties with Japanese lanterns hung from the oak branches. The ladies wore their fragile dresses; their husbands or bachelor friends, dressed in shirts and ties and summer-weight coats, standing around, eating and talking; a fine evening. At her bridge parties, she set tables out in the open hallway. Organized, and a bit sharp-tongued, with so much to do, she bossed us around. “She thinks my children belong to her,” my mother used to say, but without resentment at first—a little, maybe, later on.

  As for Uncle Joe, there was no debate. He knew in what ways we belonged to him, knew it all along, knew what a difference he could make and was making. Occupied with business, my father spent a lot of time worrying.

  A part of my uncle’s love for my brother and me was rooted deep in his clannish family feeling. He could and did get mad at you for hypocrisy, or churlishness, or what he called “welshing,” failing to do what you’d promised. You had to measure up. But he never rejected you. Thirteen miles away, along twisted roads almost but never quite impassable, he was always there, through the years, foot on the porch railing, looking out, waiting.

  He rode the place in those days. The big reason to bring my horse was to ride with him. Those were pre-jeep times, and no car could maneuver the plantation roads. They were swampy in places, broken by drainage ditches, or heavy with dried mud from the winter.

  Uncle Joe would get up before day, while I was still asleep. My mother, complimenting my aunt, often said of her, “She gets up and dresses at four in the morning to eat with Joe. She’ll never let him eat alone.” Harvey Hoskins, the overseer at the barns, would bring up my uncle’s mare in the dim light, and he was off to the fields. Later, when I woke and ate, I would walk down to the barns for my horse. I would ask along the way, riding out through the huge wooden gates of barns and lots, out onto the land, “Where’s he got to? Where is he by now?” and whoever I passed would tell me, or guess at it. I would find him not long after. A little at a time, out in the dazzle of full sun, we covered the immense fields, stopping for a while where a tractor might be broken down, or to pass the time of day with the cotton choppers, who would come close and talk about the crop stand, or to look in on a cabin where somebody might be sick. Sometimes we got off to pick blackberries from bushes along a drainage ditch, or to drink water that gushed from the iron pipe at one of the artesian wells scattered over the place. We watered the horses from the concrete trough, and drank right from the pipe, letting the water run over face and neck to wash the sweat away. The water tasted of iron and was clear and swift and so iron-cold it hurt your teeth to drink it. The Negroes came to these wells, usually in the evening after work, riding a mule-drawn slide with a barrel on it to fill for daily water at home.

  In the late morning we would wind up at the store. The mail, a Coke or Nehi if not too near dinnertime. I might get to watch a quick hand of cards with Sam or Rosewell Long, or Dr. Maybry, or Arnie Meeks (the men sitting on the smooth bare oak counter, dealing from a deck worn to rags). The loser paid for the drinks. Then back to the house, maybe hearing the great bang and bong of the dinner bell along the way.

  I’ve tried to think back, tried earnestly to remember if there were evidences of bad feeling between my uncle and the many black people, descendants of the original slaves, for the most part, who worked on his land, lived on it year-round, and were furnished out of the store. As best I can recall, they were exceptionally good-humored around him in a way that seemed to make their dependency a reassurance to them rather than a burden. I can’t to this day believe I would not ha
ve noticed any deep-seated animosity.

  It was slightly different with my aunt. I knew the house Negroes often felt themselves ordered around, and I knew that some of them resented her. She railed at them for laziness, for forgetting, for doing what she wanted less than perfectly.

  Her story is interesting in itself. She was married quite young, at eighteen, and at that a year older than my uncle. She had come from being a small-town teacher (French and elocution), and found herself, a “town girl,” cast up in the midst of a plantation with an entirely black population for miles around to see to daily and call on for everything she couldn’t do herself. In addition, she had the running of what amounted to not just a house, a home, but a whole system of providing year-round food and civilized living, from the raw material of sheep shearing and hog slaughtering, milking, separating butter and cream, cutting and hauling wood for fires, to keeping well, or nursing the illnesses of, all and sundry around her.

  As if that were not enough, she also, in the first days, felt it her duty to “educate” the blacks, and so called them into classes and gave them, among other subjects, “moral instruction.” Her pupils agreed with every word she said but went straight about living as they pleased. Very soon she gave it up. There were episodes, later to be laughed at, of her running in from the garden in tears, apron flung over her head, of stormy vexation and despair. But she turned her corner. “She had grit,” my uncle often said, adoring her, though there had been a lot of quarrels too, and still were, for they were two spirited fighters. And lovers, too: we never doubted that.