Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  As evening fell and the shadows of all the pecan trees grew longer, my father might show up from work with an enormous chilled watermelon in the back of his car. Between the house and the tennis court, under the trees, we had built a Ping-Pong table out of the casing for a new gin stand. On this table, when the older crowd took over the court, the younger ones, like me, would slap at the hollow white ball, hoping it wouldn’t hit a crack where the table was nailed together and bounce backward. Dismantled of Ping-Pong gear, the table was grand for watermelon cutting.

  The best melons, known to weigh around forty pounds and to be so green as to seem almost black, were stored for chilling in the downtown icehouse as no refrigerator could hold one. Thump one with a knuckle, and a hollow sound would say it was ripe and ready. The granddaddy of all our knives had been sent for from the kitchen. (“Hold that knife away from you when you run!”) Smaller knives were fetched as well, along with every last saltshaker.

  All gathered around, watching as the great dirigible shape was readied for cutting—the ritual turned sacred and a hush would fall. The knife went in. One shallow cut straight along the length, then another, deeper one.

  Jamie and I had long arguments. Is a watermelon red before you cut it? If a tree falls in the woods with nobody around for miles, does it make a sound? We were annoyed to learn there were no answers.

  Leaning over on tiptoe, like the audience for some star performance, we could all watch as the beautiful monster let out an all but human groan and split in half, could see the crepe-myrtle red of the chilled flesh, pushing close to the white rind, studded with black seeds (sign of a good one), and the oval of the seedless “heart,” large as a football. We all but burst into applause as the split occurred, then crowded in for the juicy cuts that instantly smeared faces, stained shirts, and dribbled on bare legs and feet.

  Dad was terribly proud to have given all this pleasure. My mother would have come out in the cool of the day, wearing one of her voile afternoon frocks, lace at the collar. She would also go to watch the tennis, still, amazingly, in progress. Edward would be out there, his shirt drenched with sweat, as one by one the town champions came to oppose him. My brother, a crack player himself, sometimes even won. Then, the last match over, they too would join us, warriors come in from victories in the field.

  Everybody in town came down our road on those long summer afternoons. At other times, the bunch of kids my age and Jamie’s would gather and hike through woods to a place called Shaw’s Pond, a good three or four miles from town. It was a cold, clear swimming pond, spring-fed, shaded by pines, so that the water was always black. There was a rough pier there and a diving board, and in those days anyone who wanted to walk or drive out there was free to come.

  Tiredness came with twilight. “Go take a bath before supper. Be sure and wash your feet.” The cook would have left dozens of biscuits in long pans ready for the oven, and there would be ham or a mountain of cold fried chicken, with potato salad, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, a wealth of peach preserves and blackberry jam, and tremendous appetites, much laughing and joking and good feelings, everybody cleaned up, the boys’ hair slicked down with water. This was as good as it got.

  Consider those four men—the Spencer fathers. If the McCains resembled Highland Scots, it would take Dickens to describe the Spencers. They had sharp noses and double chins, amiable faces but strong opinions. All but Uncle Louie, whose dark hair held its place, were bald, or getting there. When together, they would sit in a rough circle on interminable Sunday afternoons in the living room in McCarley or Carrollton, wherever they were. They would be in their brown business suits with vests, their good quality “low quarters,” different from high-top shoes.

  They would talk. But unlike the McCains, who thrived on exchange, not a one of them ever listened to the other. In fact, as Jamie and I have often recalled, they all talked at once. It was much like the chanting of some ritual in Latin, or a bunch of frogs on the edge of a pond. You never could hear what they were saying. Perhaps they were each on a different subject. They did not even look at one another. Some voices would rise above others for a moment, then fall back into the chorus. Only one thing you could be sure of: No one ever agreed with anyone else.

  I believe all of them had revered their mother. I never saw her, but her picture shows her with long brown hair, upright, in high-cut dark silk, smiling with a firmly controlled friendliness. She gave birth to nine children, and in the nineteen years between their father’s death and her own, she must have had her hard times bringing up the five who lived. Because times, beyond any gainsaying, were desperately hard.

  The McCains also, along with so many other Southern families in those times, had very little money. (In fact, if any family was known to “have money,” the immediate question, spoken or not, was, How did they make it? Where did it come from? The Snopses had yet to be invented to supply an answer.) The McCain plantation at Teoc was still mortgaged following the war, and so would remain until my father and my uncle combined to put it on a paying basis in the late 1940s. But the large property itself, the numerous black tenants, plus the prestige of relatives in distant places, gave my mother’s family a higher social level than my father’s, felt but never mentioned.

  But family talk continued on both sides with prideful reference, and beyond a doubt the boys, my father especially, had adored their mother. The main quality he admired in women was sweetness, and he always said she was the sweetest woman he had ever known. When she developed tuberculosis, it was thought that another climate would help her improve. The older boys made up a sum and rented a whole bedroom compartment on a train out to Texas. My father, as youngest, was sent along as her companion.

  They went to San Antonio and stayed there some months before she died. He never forgot the trip. At age eighty-eight, a lone widower, mentally crippled by a series of strokes, he used to recount to me for the thousandth time how he had brushed her long hair for her, holding it over his arm until every tangle was gone, and then helped her pin it up. “Do you remember her?” he would say, forgetting both when I was born and when she died.

  I once in the early fifties drove my parents across the Southwest to spend Christmas with my brother and his family in San Diego. When we reached San Antonio, my father raced about seeing places he remembered from those long-ago times—the Alamo, Buckhorn Saloon, the river walk.

  The Spencers had revered their father as well. Gettysburg and his amputated arm must have lived eternally in his memory, but I heard no stories he had passed down. Uncle Louie related that Grandfather had been present when Stonewall Jackson died, accidentally shot by his own men, but my uncle was so old when he told this, I had some reason to wonder if it could be true.

  Our grandfather had invented a device for opening gates without alighting from a buggy. This, he figured, would save rural mail carriers many hours along the route. He had sent off for a patent, but automobiles were closing out buggies and the product was never manufactured.

  They called him Papa. Though they all remembered the day of his funeral (it was raining), they felt it a pity that no one could remember where his grave was.

  When I used to come home to Carrollton to do whatever was needed for my father in his last years, we regularly took the car and went searching all over Carroll County for “Papa’s grave.” We must have explored every tiny out-of-the-way cemetery in those hills, the big Buick easing in and out of unlikely places, but I think we never knew if this or that broken and mildewed fragment of marble was really his or not.

  In one cemetery there was the grave of a tiny boy, Elijah Lee Spencer, born in 1891, four years after my father, who had scarcely made it to six months old. “My baby brother,” Dad would say, for he remembered him. But there had been others: Julian, who had died at birth, Lou Ella, who lived only to age three, and Clarence Wilson, who lived scarcely a year.

  Then there was Willie. As noted before, William Henry Spencer, the firstborn (1869), had simply left. Nobody ever
knew where he went. He would have been a young man then. There were various sightings, usually somewhere out West, but no one ever heard from him and all leads proved false.

  It was said of my grandmother that she would walk to the edge of the front yard each afternoon when the train pulled into the McCarley station, hoping that Willie would be on it. He never was.

  Jamie says the true story is that Willie went out West and changed his name to Howard Hughes. Proof of this theory is to this date lacking. Another cousin proposed an elaborate explanation involving a severe sunstroke, which had produced amnesia.

  My own theory is that such a disappearance comes of living near a railroad. The whistle sounds, the engine is heard from far away. Approaching, growing awesomely ever nearer and larger, it seems to bring knowledge of marvels it cannot speak to tell. Departing, it draws a young man’s yearning to follow after it, as long as it can be heard.

  On still nights in our country town, I used to hear trains on that very track, passing through driving rain, or darkness thick with summer heat, or frosty starlight. The feelings evoked were many, not necessarily the same as Willie may have had, but never failing to awaken. There is a little bit of Willie in us all.

  Willie’s departure left the four brothers—country boys who moved from that little railroad community out into the world of business and affairs. They had all planted, chopped, and picked cotton, had known farmwork, milking and feeding, plowing mules, and driving wagons, slaughtering and butchering, firsthand. They had worked in country stores and knew the value of products shipped in by train, bills and invoices from distant centers passing through their hands.

  Uncle Ed wound up in Birmingham, a leading executive for Southern Railroad. Uncle Louie, while content to be with country friends around McCarley, built a new house, the finest for miles around, bought land in the Delta, and ended life better than well-to-do, a respected man of business.

  Uncle Tom, aspiring to no great prominence, was a friendly “traveling man” for speciality advertising products. Our own house abounded in fancy shoehorns, leather-backed clothes brushes, calendars, and diaries, all stamped with our family name, as they might have been with names of businesses and companies if sold on his route.

  His marriage to Mary Beard, on the other hand, was a great success. Perennially smiling at all who came their way, he and Aunt Mary took sly account of each other; to be around them was to feel shined on. They were never well-off, and their four children may have caused various anxieties. They were the only part of the family who lived in half of a house. It was over in Winona, a hill town to the east of us, located on the main-line Illinois Central and the highway to Memphis. The house had once been a church, now deconsecrated and turned into two spacious apartments.

  I loved going there. When Uncle Tom was away on his selling travels, and the children, older than I, were away at school or work, Aunt Mary would sometimes invite me over to spend the night with her—“just the two of us,” she would say. We would talk a blue streak—visiting, she called it—and eat suppers of chicken salad, hot rolls, iced tea, and one of her fancy gelatine desserts. Then we would walk up to the picture show. She had a slight, charming stutter, and my father criticized her fluttery ways, but to me she was fun to be with, fond of prettiness in life, the pleasure of living.

  Uncle Tom had a weakness for miracle cures. Medicines said to cure everything from arthritis through constipation and asthma were always about to be produced from among the samples in his car. He once brought us something called Crazy Water Crystals, packaged from one of the many natural phenomena over in Arkansas. The crystals were supposed to cure any number of complaints when drunk dissolved in water, but the main thing they did was cause gas. My brother delighted in drinking large quantities and pestering everyone with the resulting explosions, which smelled. He thought this was terribly funny; I suppose we all did, except my mother, who thought it was coarse.

  Stopping by for a visit one morning when passing through Carrollton, Uncle Tom asked my mother where I was. My mother laughed. “She’s writing a book,” she said, as indeed I must have been, up in the main living room, where it was quiet.

  “I read a book once,” said Uncle Tom. “I’ve forgotten what it was about. Something about some chickens …” He tried hard to recall but could not. His daughter May became a brilliant student and eventually a lecturer in history. He applauded all her work, and spoke of it with the greatest pride.

  May loved him. After Aunt Mary’s death he spent his time largely with her. Knowing he was probably in his last illness, she asked the minister to call. She had never once heard her father use a single word of profanity, but when the minister left, she bent down to hear what he was saying.

  “Looks like the son of a bitch could have said a prayer.”

  8

  RELIGION

  OH, my God!

  The entire family on both sides of our house were brought up as strict Protestants, believers in God, Christ, the Bible, the devil, heaven, and hell. All retained their early beliefs, except for Uncle Sidney, who was said to be an atheist, though no one exactly called him that. “He just says he doesn’t believe in anything,” my mother would explain, adding, “He says that but I don’t believe it.” She could not conceive of a world or a day or a minute in which her religion was not only totally there but also functioning on all cylinders. It was woven into all she thought, said, and did.

  The Spencers were brought up Methodist, and were, I think, churchgoers, except for Uncle Ed, who claimed to tune in sermons on the radio. Uncle Louie was the main support of the Methodist church at McCarley. His daughter Virginia sang in the choir or played the piano, or sometimes both, just as my mother, if the organist did not show up, could be found at the little Presbyterian church organ, valiantly pumping away, playing and singing for both Sunday school and church.

  Carrollton was crowded with churches. There was first and foremost to our way of thinking, since we had to go so often, the Presbyterian church, white and plain (they liked everything plain), with cedars in the front, a white steeple, and a bell, its rope hanging down in the vestibule. The old front walk was brick, with moss grown in the cracks.

  The hours on Sunday one had to spend in that church I scarcely would choose to consider to this day. Sunday school! Some good things could be said for it. We memorized Bible verses.

  I always liked the cadence of the Bible. The verses we were taught stay with me still, especially as Miss Jennie McBride, our Sunday school teacher, was giving us the same ones in primary school. I loved hearing that the Lord was my shepherd. I loved also seeing the cards with pictures that were handed around, in that case pictures of sheep and a man in a purple robe with a tall shepherd’s crook, carrying a little lamb. I collected cards like these. “Suffer little children to come unto me,” said one. They were sitting in His lap. That would be nice, I thought.

  Art was in short supply, one had to realize from going occasionally to the beautiful Episcopal church across the street, where there were images of a religious nature in the stained-glass windows and graceful carvings on pulpit and lectern. At the Presbyterian church the stained glass bore no images, and the light that came through the windows looked livid, as if bursting through storm clouds.

  The center of attention was the chancel, and central to that, the pulpit, where the enormous Bible sat upon a white cloth with a single lily embroidered in golden thread. From up there came the interminable sermons. Some went on for nearly an hour. The shortest could generally be clocked to run forty-five minutes.

  Once the church elders met and agreed that the minister, a lean, gray, long-faced man named Mr. Harris, preached too long. It was thought that someone had to give him the message. Dad was selected to do so. He called on the minister and let him know that his sermons were learned and contained fine thoughts but should be shortened. Mr. Harris then went the rounds and asked the other elders if they agreed with this. Everyone denied ever having considered such a thing. We were back to
square one.

  After services, what a joy to be back home! To squirm out of Sunday clothes, socks or stockings, tight shoes, scratchy petticoat, and, in later years, proper white gloves and the necessary hat. To leap into any old thing and grab up the funny papers. In summer to run around barefoot.

  At Teoc there was yet another Presbyterian church, serviced by the Carrollton minister on off Sundays. It was an unadorned white building on a low hill, standing lonely in all weathers during the week, but on Sunday a magnet, drawing its members from all directions for services.

  When our minister was at Teoc, we went to some other church, the first choice usually Episcopalian, though its pulpit was often empty as well, being served by the rector at Greenwood. Then we had to choose Methodist or Baptist, and usually took Methodist, since my father had once been one. The Baptist church, an imposing brick structure, stood along the main route from our house to our church. We had to maneuver through scores of cars parked there for services. My mother expressed weekly dismay: “The Baptists are taking the earth!” She felt a certain curious competition about other denominations, I guess because our congregation was always a small one. (Not so small as that of the Episcopalians, who were originally a handful, though they enjoyed some converts, suspected of trying to upgrade themselves socially.)

  Presbyterians were known to be fanatically strict, upright to a fault, their Scots origins showing through in such traits as emphasizing “stewardship” (meaning money) and clinging rigidly to beliefs in predestination and eternal punishment meted out for no particular reason other than having been born. The sermons we heard were often on texts from the Old Testament. God’s awesome judgment was always at the ready. Methodism seemed to me much kinder, but Dad took to Presbyterianism like a duck to water. It might have been invented with him in mind. He gave liberally to the church all his life, and the Carrollton church came to depend on his largesse so much that he could get his way about everything. There was nothing he liked better than that.