Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  It all happened silently; they would come boiling out of nowhere, frothing at the mouth, going like two balls of fire, first around Miss Henrietta’s house, then up and down the calf lot between their house and ours, then all around our house, finally tearing out toward the field in front of the house, where, down among the cotton and the corn, they would wear it all out like the tail of a tornado. Eventually the foliage would stop shaking and after a long while they would come dragging themselves out again, heads down and tongues lolling, going back to where they belonged. They would crawl under the house and sleep for hours.

  We had got used to their acting this way, and though it was best, we agreed, to keep out of their way, they did not scare us. The Negro children used to watch them more closely than anybody else, saying “Hoo, boy, look a-yonder.” White people had sunstrokes or heat strokes or heat exhaustion—I did not ever learn quite what the difference in these conditions was, and don’t know yet. Dogs had running fits instead.

  The Airedales were named Pet and Beauty, and only Mr. Dave, who owned them, could tell them apart. He took their fits as being a sort of illness, and as he loved them, he worried about them. He gave them buttermilk out of dishes on the floor and got them to take cobalt-blue medicine out of a spoon, holding their jaws wide with his thumb, pouring in the medicine, then clamping the jaws shut right. It must have tasted awful, for the dogs always resisted swallowing and tried to fight free, their paws clawing the ground, heads lashing around to get away and eyes rolling white and terrible. They could jump straight up and fight like wild ponies, but he always brought them down, holding on like a vise and finally, just when it seemed they weren’t ever going to, they would give up and swallow. Then it was all over. I never knew if the medicine did them any good or not.

  They had one of their fits that very afternoon, the day before school started. We had a friend of my aunt’s from out in the country who had stopped by and been persuaded to stay for dinner, and she saw them out her window and woke everybody up out of their nap. “Those dogs!” she cried. “Look at those dogs!” “It’s all right!” my father hollered from down the hall. “They’ve got running fits, Miss Fannie,” my mother cried. “It’s not rabies,” she added. “At least they don’t bark,” said my grandfather, who was angry because she had waked him up. He didn’t care much for her anyway and said she had Indian blood.

  I don’t know what I thought school was going to be like. It was right up the road, and I had passed the building and campus all my life, since I could remember. My brother had gone there, and all my cousins, and still were recognizable when they returned home. But to me, in my imagination beforehand, it was a blur, in the atmosphere of which my mind faltered, went blank, and came to with no clear picture whatsoever.

  After I actually arrived it was all clear enough, but strange to the last degree. I might as well have been in another state or even among Yankees, whom I had heard about but never seen. I could see our house from the edge of the campus, but it seemed to me I was observing it from the moon. There were many children, playing on the seesaws, sliding down the sliding board, drinking at the water fountains, talking and running and lining up to file inside to the classrooms. All of them seemed to know one another. I myself did not recognize any of them except occasionally one of the older ones who went to our tiny Sunday school. They stopped and said, “Hey,” and I said, “Hey.” One said, “I didn’t know you were starting to school.” And I said, “Yes, I am.” I went up to a child in my grade and said that I lived down that street and pointed. “I know it,” she answered. She had whiteblond hair, pale blue eyes, and very fair skin, and did not look at me when she spoke. The way she said “I know it” gave me to understand that she probably knew just about everything. I have seen sophisticated people since, and at that time I did not, of course, know the word, but she was, and always remained in my mind, its definition. I did not want to go away and stand by myself again, so I said, “I live next door to Miss Henrietta Welch and Mr. Dave and Mr. Dick Welch.” “I know it,” she said again, still not looking at me. After a time she said, “They feed their old dogs out of Haviland china.” It was my turn to say “I know it,” because I certainly had seen it happen often enough. But I said nothing at all.

  I had often lingered for long minutes before the glass-front china cabinet on its tiny carved bowed legs, the glass, not flat, but swelling smoothly forward like a sheet in the wind, and marveled to see all the odd-shaped matching dishes—“Syllabub cups,” Miss Henrietta said, when I asked her. “Bone dishes,” she said, “for when you eat fish.” There were tiny cups and large cups, sauce bowls and gravy boats, and even a set of salt holders, no bigger than a man’s thumb, each as carefully painted as a platter. It was known to me that this china, like the house itself and all the fine things in it, the rosewood my mother admired, the rose taffeta draperies and gilt mirrors, had belonged to the aunt of the three Welches, that certain Miss Baugh, dead before I was born, who had been highly educated and brilliant in conversation, and whose parrot could quote Shakespeare.

  I did not find the words to tell any of this to the girl who knew everything. The reason I did not was that, no more than I knew how to do what she had so easily accomplished in regard to the dogs’ being fed out of Haviland china—which had often been held up to the light for me and shown to be transparent as an eggshell—I did not know what value to give to what I knew, what my ears had heard, eyes had seen, hands had handled, nor was there anything I could say about it. I did not think the child was what my grandfather meant by “smart,” but I did know that she made me feel dumb.

  I retreated and was alone again, but a day is a long time when you are six and you cannot sit opening and closing your new pencil box forever. I went up to the other children, and things of the same sort continued to happen. In the classroom I did as I was told, and it was easy. I must have realized by the end of the week that I would never fail the second or any other grade. So everything would be all right.

  From then on, life changed in a certain way I could not define, and at home in the afternoons and on weekends I did not feel the same. I missed something but did not know what it was. I knew if I lived to be a thousand I would never do anything but accept it if an old man fed his dogs out of the best china or if a parrot could quote Shakespeare. At home when I looked up, I saw the same faces; even the dogs were the same, named the same, though they, as was usual, had stopped having fits once the nights got cooler. Everybody, every single person, was just the same. Yet I was losing them; they were fading before my eyes. You can go somewhere, anywhere you want—any day now you’ll be able to go to the moon—but you can’t ever quite come back. Having gone up a road and entered a building at an appointed hour, I could find no way to come back out of it and feel the same way about my grandfather, ginger cakes, or a new book satchel. This was the big surprise, and I had no power over it.

  Life is important right down to the last crevice and corner. The tumult of a tree limb against the stormy early-morning February sky will tell you forever about the poetry, the tough non-sad, non-guilty struggle, of nature. It is important the way ants go one behind the other, hurrying to get there, up and down the white-painted front-porch post. The nasty flash and crack of lightning, striking a tall young tree, is something you have got to see to know about. Nothing can change it; it is just itself.

  So nothing changed, nothing and nobody, and yet having once started to lose them a little, I couldn’t make the stream run backward, I lost them completely in the end. The little guilt, the little sadness I felt sometimes, was it because I hadn’t really wanted them enough, held on tightly enough, had not, in other words, loved them?

  They are, by now, nearly every one dead and buried—dogs, parrot, people, and all. The furniture was all either given away or inherited by cousins, the house bought by somebody and chopped up into apartments; none of this can really be dwelt on or thought of as grievous: that is an easy way out.

  For long before anybody died,
or any animal, I was walking in a separate world; our questions and answers, visits and exchanges, no more communicated what they had once than if we were already spirits and flesh and could walk right through each other without knowing it.

  Years later, when home for a visit, I was invited to play bridge with some friends and on the coffee table saw a box of blue milk glass, carved with a golden dragon across the lid, quite beautiful. “That came out of the old Baugh house,” my friend said. She had got it in a devious way, which she related, but had never been able to open it. I picked it up, not remembering it, and without my even thinking, my finger moved at once to the hidden catch, and the box flew open. It wasn’t chance; I must have once been shown how it worked, and something in me was keeping an instinctive faith with what it knew. Had they never been lost then at all? I wondered. A great hidden world shimmered for a moment, grew almost visible, just beyond the breaking point of knowledge. Had nothing perhaps ever been lost by that great silent guardian within?

  A Note of Caution

  The above was a story, a sort of “given,” like “A Christian Education.” When I wrote it, I believed it all happened, though I had changed Welch to Thomas and Miss Henrietta to Miss Charlene, her second brother to Mr. Ed. Miss Baugh became Miss Bedford. But now I think of it, I wonder if all these little events—the lady coming for dinner, staying to take a nap afterward, the dogs having fits—really did actually occur on that same day. It seems now a mixed bag of memories has all gathered here for me, like marbles in Chinese checkers when you tilt the board, rolling up against the time barrier, the preschool timelessness about to let go into time.

  Take it as you will: it was all there and real at one time or another. I’m no good in this particular instance at saying exactly when.

  Anyhow, the bell has rung. It’s time for school…

  PART TWO

  School

  13

  MISS JENNIE AND

  MISS WILLIE

  IN a small town that’s been there for ages, some people look out and some look in. I now can see that the in-lookers far outnumbered the out-lookers. As for myself, I mainly just looked around me.

  Photographs of those days powerfully back up my memories. From my birthday in late July onward, the sun became so dominant there was no way even to think about it. Grass parched, people squinted at the camera, everybody under twenty, it seems, went barefoot. This was before air-conditioning. Houses could offer wide hallways with doorways front and back, and some had breezeways, others screened porches, good for keeping out bugs (if not all mosquitoes), nice for naps, and a necessity for sleeping at night.

  As children, we played incessantly—in trees, in the creek, on the tennis court. We sometimes must have talked about what those late summer days were moving toward, sure and steady as the sluggish drift of the creek.

  The schoolhouse was a two-story redbrick building with cement steps up the front, set on a wide campus with swings and sliding boards to one side, basketball courts to the other. It was right up the street from our house, scarcely a five-minute walk.

  Once there, you had Miss Jennie. She was Mrs. McBride, really, a widow, but was always called Miss Jennie. As everybody, young and old, had always had her as their first teacher through grade three, she drew a large part of the tremulous awe out of entering the new state of being. She was gentle, firm, and quick, with eyes that twinkled at you from behind round glasses with black wire rims. Her hair, black and gray, was drawn back in a knot. Happy to be with children, she was often smiling. She wrote in a large, clear hand, dealt with ruled tablets and crayons of different colors and blackboards. Penmanship, numbers, the alphabet, with letters large and small. Next, reading aloud, memorizing, multiplying. Three grades in one room. How did she manage? She and God would know the answer, certainly not I. We sang. Everything was all right in our Father’s house (pointing upward), and it was joy, joy, joy (circling hands) over there.

  We came into the room (quietly, if you please) while she stood at the open door. We marched out in files, following a small flag. Mounting upstairs to chapel once a week, we would go in rows carefully stair-stepped by height, and all the older grades laughed as we paraded to our seats. Down in our classroom we also marched in and out for recess, and raised hands for “being excused.”

  Discipline? Stand in the corner with your face to the wall; write “I am sorry” ten times on the blackboard; stay in after school; or, coming up to the front, have your hand bent back, palm up, and get five slaps with a ruler. That last is the only one I remember catching; it didn’t hurt the hand the way it hurt the pride. I sat through arithmetic trying not to cry.

  Miss Jennie taught us the alphabet by Bible verses: “A good name is rather to be chosen …”; “Be ye kind one to another …”; “Create in me a clean heart…” Asked for Bible verses in other groups, some of the smart boys used regularly to quote “Jesus wept.” Miss Jennie was ready for that one. Not even when we got to “J” did we get to say “Jesus wept.” Her verse began with “Jesus,” all right, but was longer.

  Everybody’s parents approved of Miss Jennie; every child respected Miss Jennie; Miss Jennie was beloved. Faced with her greatest test, a woman who wanted a crazy, obstreperous child to learn with the rest, she let the child in, gave her a seat, and tied her to it. I used to see her writhing out of the corner of my eye. She once ran berserk and pushed me down on a brick walkway, cutting my lip. Miss Jennie sent upstairs for my brother to take me home, bleeding and bawling. I still have the scar.

  Retired from teaching, Miss Jennie lived quietly in her house up near the Presbyterian church, where she regularly taught the little children in Sunday school, right on to the end. She let out rooms, I understand, to difficult old ladies, who must have been worse than any first- or second- or third-grader, but could not be enjoined to stand in a corner, much less smacked with a ruler. A new primary school building was named, of course, for her; there was never any way for Carrollton, Mississippi, ever to let her go. There was no way to think of Carrollton without her. Even to let go of her at the end of the third grade was bad enough. I got scared all over during July and August. The only cold spot in the world was at the pit of my stomach. No longer to know precisely one’s place in line, to get “Well done” for saying the memorized verse, to write correctly the names of Columbus’s three ships, to march behind the little flag.

  Who would teach us next? It was a real question because the Depression had struck and the school (I remember many worried conversations when my father returned from meetings of the school board) had hardly the money to operate.

  During my last year in Miss Jennie’s room, two new students entered late in the year. They had been living somewhere else. They were sisters named Meade Marian and Frances Keenan. Meade was always laughing, while Frances, quieter, had a good many thoughts of her own. They wore their dresses much shorter than we were allowed to do, rather like paper-doll children, skirts flaring up to the lace on their panties. In winter, when my mother would sometimes walk up to meet me after school, she would see them and say, “I don’t see why those children’s legs aren’t freezing.” Maybe they were. Their air said that style was more important than discomfort. They knew what they were doing. The Keenan girls.

  Late in August of that year we heard that the school had employed their mother, Mrs. Keenan, to teach grades four and five. “Lucky to get her” was my mother’s judgment. “All that family is smart and Willie especially.” She had come back from somewhere else to live there; her husband, a man no one seemed to know much about, was employed elsewhere.

  She was a member of a leading Carrollton family; her grandfather, or so I recall, had been a U.S. senator, and other relatives of a decidedly alert disposition could be met among us or heard about from elsewhere. One of her cousins, Mr. John M—, drove cows back and forth to pasture for his wife, Miss Annie, but if you stopped to speak to him, it was politics, current affairs, or history he’d read you a lesson on. All that sort of thing was going
on in his mind (though not neglecting the cattle). He let his hair grow long and never went to church.

  I first saw my new teacher on a street uptown, walking on one of those sidewalks that, owing to erosion and road-scraping, had got much higher through the years than the roadbed. I was riding in the family car. It was August—hot, blazing. She had on a bright blue dress with a flounce, almost to her ankles, and her long hair was caught up in a careless “bird’s nest” way, puffed out over the brow. All this looked interesting. She walked with her head down, rapidly, the flounce swinging. “There goes Willie Keenan,” my mother said. “I bet she’s burning up in that dress.”

  In early September we got our new books from the druggist who always kept them. On the appointed day we entered our new room with caution, took seats, and waited. She had arranged her desk. No playthings, cutouts, colored stars, or maps. Books. And a few flowers. The hair was the same as I’d seen. The voice was nothing we were used to. It came from other places. For one thing, speaking to any one girl, it said “darling.” We never used that word. Full of endearments—“honey,” “sweetheart,” “precious,” “baby,” “sugar,” even “sugarfoot”— we had read “darling,” maybe heard it in the picture show, but didn’t say it. Mrs. Keenan did.

  She was wearing glasses: horn-rimmed, they slid down to the tip of her nose and stayed there. Her hair, rich brown laced with gray, frothed over her brow. I think now she must have been pretty in a taken-for-granted way. She tapped the books, our texts. We would use them when we could, she said, but she had no use for much that was in them. (Astounding rejection.) “Take literature, for instance,” she went on. She paused. I must have heard that word before, but didn’t remember where. We had lots of books at home. We were always reading or being read to. But I don’t remember hearing it called “literature” before. She said she had ordered another book for us. It would come.