I was actually proud of Jimmy for having the courage to stand by his convictions. I felt the same way when I read another story that he filed on a tornado that ripped through Jonesboro, Arkansas. His focus was the death of a sixteen-year-old girl. Told from a father’s point of view, it was a sensitive portrait of grief, so beautifully written that the Associated Press picked it up and ran it on the national wire with his byline.
And yet this was the same man who would not allow Wese and me to turn on the TV except when he was at home (unless we could get away with it), or use the telephone or drive the car. Once, when he was on a drunk, Wese sneaked me out to the Department of Motor Vehicles so I could pass my driving test. We had a tacit agreement. I knew not to ask for the car if Jimmy was sober.
I’m not sure when he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, but the people there sustained us many times over. After one particularly long bout, when he had hauled himself and his jug up the disappearing staircase to the attic—“holed up to die,” he bellowed over and over—Wese called her friends in AA. They came immediately and were talking to her in the kitchen when I walked in carrying Jimmy’s 12-gauge shotgun. “It’s not loaded,” I said, “but if you’ll show me where the shells are, I’ll take them to him.”
They quickly defused my bravado, and when the phone rang thirty minutes later, I grabbed it. One of my friends wanted to know if I’d go out with him. Taking advantage of the situation, I asked for and was given Wese’s permission to go out on a school night. I left home without a second thought.
I often think how different, yet how similar, Pappy and Jill’s relationship was to Jimmy’s and mine. Both men were periodic drunks: They could resist drinking for weeks, sometimes months on end, but when the craving struck, Jimmy would drink anything he could get his hands on—cheap bourbon to start with, then when his liquor and money were exhausted he resorted to anything with alcohol content: vanilla extract, cough medicine, mouthwash, paregoric. Pappy had the wherewithal to plan ahead, so that when his supply ran out he could dispatch Andrew Price or one of his drinking buddies to a bootlegger to replenish his stock. We knew the binge was over when we saw him on his knees digging up bitterweeds in the pasture. He used a hand spade and worked steadily to keep the demons at bay. If he was unable to recover on his own, there was always Wright’s Sanatorium in Byhalia, sixty miles north of Oxford, where the drying-out treatment sometimes involved tapering off, not going cold turkey. On one occasion he drank cognac until he collapsed on a plane from Paris to Rome. The pilot radioed ahead for an ambulance to carry him to a hospital. And yet Pappy in his later years could drink socially, whereas Jimmy (and Aunt Estelle) could not. One drink led to a bender.
Pappy led two lives quite openly, and yet we at home were the last to know. To us he was the retiring recluse, shy, distant, and difficult to know, stuck in the red clay hills with Aunt Estelle. Needless to say, we were shocked at a photograph of him getting off a plane, drunk and disheveled, in 1955, when he traveled to Japan as a cultural representative for the U.S. State Department. The photograph appeared in the “People” section of Time magazine.* (Nannie promptly canceled her subscription.)
In a way I was luckier than Jill. I had a built-in escape hatch in the four-letter word step. For me there was always somewhere else to go, another family to love me and take care of me, someone else to bear the shame. Jill had no such option. She had to stay in the only home she had ever known. Pappy was her flesh and blood. Whereas I had only to worry that my friends might find out, Jill had to worry about the rest of the world—newspaper stories, biographies rife with tales of his drinking and depression, rumors of shock treatments. If Pappy or Aunt Estelle or both went on a spree, it reflected on her, or at least she felt that way. Whenever I was packed off to Oxford, everybody sobered up and took care of me. I wonder what my life might have been like if Wese hadn’t married Jimmy. But then again, how different might Jimmy’s life have been had Wese not had me?
When Jimmy lost his job at the Gazette, he and Wese moved to Chicago’s Oak Park where they lived in a housing project that looked like a prison compound. Every building in the neighborhood looked just as bad. The first time I came to see them, I thought, “Is this where I live?” The inside of their apartment was worse. It had only one bedroom. By day, my bed lived in a broom closet. Perhaps Jimmy hoped that if there was no room at the inn, I wouldn’t stick it out for the whole summer.
The apartment building had a security buzzing system installed in the bare, dingy entryway. Each resident’s name and apartment number was listed next to the buzzers. When a visitor pushed the buzzer, the resident buzzed back and the door to the stairwell opened. I never figured out why anyone wanted to get past that door.
In spite of this, Chicago became one of my favorite places. I loved riding the Panama Limited from Batesville to Chicago, having lunch in the club car, looking over fences into backyards, seeing the lighted kitchens and screened porches, clotheslines, and doghouses, hearing the porter sing out “Cairo, Illinois,” knowing that soon we would pull into Union Station on Canal Street at midnight. Going to Old Comiskey to watch my beloved White Sox was wonderful: Nellie Fox on second; Luis Apparicio at short; Sherm Lollar behind the plate; and Larry Doby in the field. Jimmy’s cousin Boo Ferriss had pitched for the Boston Red Sox in the 1940s and was their pitching coach a decade later. When he came to town, he gave us tickets behind the Red Sox dugout, almost close enough to touch Ted Williams or Jimmy Piersall. After the game sometimes we got to join the team for dinner. Many times over, Boo was a godsend in my life. I loved the Loop, the L, the Palmer House, the jazz clubs. I loved all of it. Still do.
Jimmy Meadow died on skid row in Chicago. In June 1963, the Chicago police phoned Wese in Oxford, having found her name, address, and phone number in Jimmy’s otherwise empty wallet. He was discovered dead on the sidewalk and buried in a pauper’s grave. He weighed sixty-eight pounds. Wese did not return to claim the body.
*Before Jimmy and T, I had been a hymn-singing Baptist with Mama and Papa. My predestination phase lasted through high school until I discovered and fell in love with the words of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (“erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep … not fit to pick up the crumbs”). For the next thirty years I was a genuflecting Episcopalian. When the church saw fit to adopt a new prayer book, the music of the language and the profound feeling it generated was lost on me. The services no longer rang true. Language matters too much to some of us. At the same time, the mistakes of a lifetime began to haunt me. I decided my best bet was reincarnation. I’ll be starting all over as a black-eyed Susan.
*I think Pappy drank on airplanes because he was afraid to fly. He told me in the late 1950s that he had come to dread long commercial flights. This surprised me, because he’d been the first Faulkner to embrace flying and encouraged my father in his career as a pilot. I didn’t fully understand it until the same thing happened to me. After years of fearless flights, of looking forward to takeoffs and landings, I became terrified almost overnight. Now I fly only when necessary, and only on “Air Vodka” or “Air Ativan,” or both.
PAPPY’S DAUGHTER, JILL, AND I WERE CLOSE IN AGE BUT WE could not have been further apart in temperament. Few photographs exist of us together: Jill’s third birthday at Rowan Oak, my fifth at Nannie’s. There is only one of Jill and me by ourselves. We are standing in Nannie’s front yard. It is cold. Jill’s coat is too small. Mine is too big. If we’d traded coats we would have looked better. She is holding a small bouquet of leaves. We look like sad war orphans, possibly hungry.
Though we were brought up by the same people, spent time in the same households and with each other, Jill and I were never close. The distance between us widened as we grew up, perhaps because it was impossible to be best pals with someone I was afraid might be perfect. Even as a little girl Jill had donned her invisible armor, her protection from the pressures she would endure for a lifetime: too much to live up to, too much to live down, and no means of escape. We neve
r shared a secret.
When we were growing up, Rowan Oak was a quiet house with only one radio, in Jill’s room, and no TV. Pappy worked at home, of course. We didn’t really understand what he did all day long. He never told us to be quiet—or, at most, “Don’t thunder through the house!” He was so deep in his own world that often we ceased to exist for him. We could have ridden horses through the library and he would not have noticed. One day at the beginning of the school term, Jill’s second grade teacher had the students write down their fathers’ occupations. She told us later that, having no idea what Pappy did for a living, she left that part blank.
She was a brilliant horsewoman with a seat that rivaled our grandmother Nannie’s who was said to have the best in the county. She and Pappy would ride out on Old Taylor Road, a dirt road in those days and a fine track for a fast horse. Pappy would send Jill ahead to a predetermined spot, then at his shout she would spur her horse and fly down the road, kicking up clumps of earth, racing against the stopwatch Pappy held. For days afterward he would tell people, “Missy rode a two-minute mile Saturday morning out on Old Taylor.” My role was to cheer and clap as Jill flew past.
At twelve Jill seemed more like the lady of the house than her mother was. I thought she knew everything. She had a vocabulary an adult would envy, got straight As seemingly effortlessly, could draw, write, and play the piano. She could pronounce Jean-Pierre Aumont’s name with a French accent and whip up exotic chutneys. She and her best friend, Mil’Murray* Douglas, ate watercress sandwiches with the crusts cut off, while I was stuck with peanut butter. She was editor of the Optic, Oxford High School’s newspaper, and she and Mil’Murray starred in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay their junior year. Her taste in clothes, thanks to Aunt Estelle, was incredibly chic. I relished getting her hand-me-downs, the last of which was her wedding gown, along with a hand-me-down father to give me away. She even had Rh-negative blood.
One morning I was in the dining room at Rowan Oak helping Jill set the table for lunch. She had taken out all kinds of flatware, several forks and knives for each place setting. This was not for “company” but only for the four of us—Pappy, Aunt Estelle, Jill, and me. After several attempts at placing silver in some kind of order beside the plates, I banged a handful onto the table, scattering some on the floor. “I’ll never learn what goes where! I’ll never be a lady!” I said. Jill glanced at me and said, “You were born one. Now pick that up.”
Pappy and Aunt Estelle organized pleasant social schedules for Jill. Vicki and I were always included when we were in Oxford. It was fun, if sometimes rather intimidating, to be with the “older crowd.” There were hayrides in a mule-drawn wagon in the late summer and fall. Pappy sat up front as Andrew drove the team down Old Taylor Road to a friendly pasture. He’d pull off to the side and we all went looking for firewood before the sun set.
With the fire blazing, full of hot dogs we had roasted on sticks, we stretched out on the cool grass and listened as Pappy pointed out the constellations. “See the Dipper, the big one just overhead, and Orion and his wondrous belt?” Sometimes we’d see a shooting star, and always there was my favorite, Venus, “the morning and the evening star.” After Pappy told a chilling ghost story or two, we’d put out the fire and pile back into the hay-filled wagon. Vicki and I sat close to Pappy. Nobody was interested in holding hands with either of us.
Pappy could be a prince charming when he chose. He once saved me from an awkward moment during a tea dance held at the home of Estelle’s parents, the Oldhams. There I was, eleven years old, all dressed up in a Jill hand-me-down that I adored—an ankle-length, black watch plaid taffeta skirt with a black velvet top piped in watch plaid, white kid gloves (Jill’s), and black patent-leather Mary Janes (not hand-me-downs, since my feet were bigger than hers). The tea dance started at four o’clock. I was horrified to see that each girl had been given a dance card as she came in, a folded paper square with a gold twine loop to fit over her wrist, and numbered dances with a blank beside each dance (waltz or polka) to be filled in by a dance partner (a boy).
The wait was long but finally at Pappy’s urging I managed to get four or five blanks filled in. About midway through the party, after the Virginia reel—my favorite dance, no partner necessary—Pappy announced that tea was being poured in the dining room. Miss Mary Jenkins, a nurse-friend-companion of the Oldhams, was seated at the head of their long dining room table behind an elaborate silver service. Pappy and I were the last two people in line. Miss Mary smiled at me as she picked up a China cup and saucer so fine that the candlelight shone through them. “Will you take milk or lemon, Dean?” My experience with tea was limited to the drink that came in a tall glass with ice, already sweetened, with a lemon wedge. “Both,” I said after a long pause. “Thank you, ma’am.” She poured milk, then squeezed lemon. I watched it curdle. Something was terribly wrong. Over my shoulder I heard her say, “Bill, will you take milk or lemon?” And Pappy say, “Thank you, ma’am, Mary. I’ll take both.”
Pappy’s gallantry extended to any lady in distress. Once, at a dinner party with close friends, Pappy was seating his dinner partner, the wife of a friend, who had had one too many cocktails. She missed the chair completely and sat down hard on the floor. Pappy immediately sat beside her and offered her a drink from his glass, saying something like “You know, I’ve always wondered what it was like to have dinner on the floor.”
When Jill was in her early teens, Pappy had a two-wheeled pony cart built as a Christmas present. He bought her a harness horse—which Jill and Mil’Murray named “Lady Patricia”—and taught her how to drive the cart. Two could sit on the seat and two in the rear, legs dangling. Jill went everywhere in her cart. She and Mil’Murray rode up front. Vicki and I rode in the back. Whenever we came to a steep hill, Vicki and I had to hop down and walk, then run fast to catch up.
One Saturday, Jill decided to take us to Taylor, a hamlet six miles south of Oxford. We did not tell anyone where we were going. We were on our own most weekends, and knew that as long as we were home before dark, everything would be fine. When we arrived at Taylor in midafternoon, Jill first watered “Pat” at the trough outside the grocery store, and we all drank from a gourd dipper. Realizing that we were awfully hungry, we searched our pockets. I had five pennies. Jill took my money and disappeared into the store, emerging with five pieces of rock candy. She took three pieces and gave Vicki and me one each. She was the driver, after all. Then we got in the cart and headed back to Oxford. It was past dark when we got home. Pappy, Aunt Estelle, Wese, the neighbors, and the sheriff, furious to a person, were waiting. I had planned to spend the night with Vicki but home I went with Wese and to bed without supper. Vicki and Jill didn’t get to eat, either.
Sometime later, when Jill was riding her pony on Old Taylor Road, her dog, Pete, trotted along beside her. Pete raced ahead to Rowan Oak and was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Pappy wrote a letter to the Oxford Eagle. Published on August 15, 1946, it read in part:
His name was Pete. He was just a dog, a fifteen-months-old pointer, still almost a puppy even though he had spent one hunting season learning to be the dog he would have been in another two or three years if he had lived that long.… He was standing on the road waiting for his little mistress on the horse to catch up, to squire her safely home. He shouldn’t have been in the road. He paid no road tax, held no driver’s license, didn’t vote.… To say he didn’t see the car because the car was between him and the late afternoon sun is a bad excuse because that brings the question of vision into it and certainly no one unable with the sun at his back to see a grown pointer dog on a curveless two-lane highway would think of permitting himself to drive a car at all, let alone one without either horn or brakes because next time Pete might be a human child and killing human children with motorcars is against the law.
No, the driver was in a hurry: that was the reason. Perhaps he had several miles to go yet and was already late for supper.… But Pete has forgiven him. In his year and a qu
arter of life he never had anything but kindness from human beings; he would gladly give the other six or eight or ten of it rather than make one late for supper.
It could have been Jill.
Jill’s birthday in June was often celebrated with costume parties and dances held on the back gallery when Aunt Estelle’s blue and lavender hydrangeas were in full bloom and the cedars along the driveway were aglow with fireflies. The boys sported coats and ties, and the girls wore full-skirted pastel-colored dotted Swiss and organdy dresses. Graceful in the moonlight we danced to music from Jill’s record player.
It was magic. But I never knew what happened after the party was over and I went home to Nannie’s or T’s. Sometimes when it got late I could feel the tension, a sharp edge in Pappy’s voice, a slight wobble in Aunt Estelle’s step, my mother and Cho Cho’s shrill laughter, the familiar smell of bourbon. I knew all the signs; I knew when to run: how to make myself very small and quiet, how to disappear into the night. I did not know if Jill had learned any of this yet. The enchanted scene could have been quickly distorted, the soft aura shattered by an argument between Pappy and Aunt Estelle that escalated into cutting remarks that once spoken could not be forgotten, that could not be taken back, secrets dark, strange, and painful. I never saw it happen but I feel sure that it did. I can only hope that Mil’Murray was with her.
With her silky blond hair, icy hazel eyes, military bearing, and clipped, near-British accent, Jill was a formidable first cousin. She was so formal and distant that when she smiled at something I said or did, I felt that she had given me a present. She and Pappy were very much alike, and she was his pride and joy. In the 1978 television documentary A Life on Paper, she told of a time when Pappy was on a binge and she attempted to get him to stop drinking. He turned on her and drunkenly blurted, “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s child.” Then she casually remarked to the interviewer, “Pappy didn’t care about anybody!” I screamed at the TV set, at her as she sat in her garden in Charlottesville, as cool and unruffled as the pale green sleeveless summer dress she wore.
Every Day by the Sun Page 12