As a stepfather, Bill Fielden proved to be more like Pappy than Jimmy Meadow. He was devoted to Vicki and a source of strength and kindness to everyone in the Faulkner family. Vicki assumed the name Fielden with pride and kept it all her life, whereas I dropped Meadow when I was eighteen—becoming Dean Faulkner again as soon as I thought my mother had left Jimmy for good. (She had not, as it turned out.)
Over the years Vicki and I crossed paths often in Oxford. I would have come back from Clarksdale, Memphis, or Chicago, whereas Vicki would have been returning from Caracas, Manila, or boarding school in Switzerland. The first time that Pappy brought Vicki to Nannie’s to play with me, she had already traveled halfway around the world—twice. I had flown in a plane only once. (My uncle Jack had taken Wese and me up in his beautiful black and yellow Aeronca the day that the Dean Faulkner Airport was dedicated in 1938. We took off on the grass strip five miles south of Oxford in a flat field in the Yocona River bottom and flew over Oxford for about thirty minutes. I was two years old.) In 1941, four-year-old Vicki arrived at the Memphis airport, alone, with a note safety-pinned to her coat: “Please get me to William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi.” The Japanese were about to invade China. Soon, Bill Fielden and Cho Cho followed Vicki to the States.
Vicki and I were both in Oxford the year that she was in the seventh grade and I was in the eighth. She was living at Rowan Oak with Pappy and Aunt Estelle. Cho Cho and Bill Fielden were abroad, I think. During the week, I was living at T’s with Wese and Jimmy and spending every weekend with Vicki at Rowan Oak.
Wese and Jimmy did not have a car. By the late 1940s, Pappy had started calling himself our “school bus driver.” Monday through Friday he would leave Rowan Oak about 7:45 in his old beat-up wood-paneled Ford station wagon. It had a hole in the floorboard in the back big enough to drop a small book through. We would ride looking down at the pavement rushing under the car and feel cold air blowing through it.
I would stand in front of T’s house waiting for Pappy to arrive. My place was next to Vicki in the backseat. At 3 p.m. he would be parked in front of Oxford High School waiting to take us home. Oxford was so small then that grades seven through twelve were housed in the same building. Pappy must have been grateful for that.
I was a Pee Wee cheerleader that year, which added to Pappy’s bus-driving schedule. The Pee Wee football team played its home games on Thursdays. I thought I would surely die if I missed one. Vicki wanted to be at the games as well. On the given Thursdays, Pappy would pick us up at school and ferry us home. I’d change into my Pee Wee uniform, have a quick supper, and at 6:45 our “bus driver” would be waiting to take us to the game (which was played on the high school field). I knew where to look for Pappy and Vicki in the stands. They always sat in the same place on the fifty-yard line, halfway up the wood bleachers. They stood out among the other two dozen loyal Pee Wee football fans. Vicki sat next to Pappy, who always wore a hat.
At dinner one Friday night, Vicki looked particularly full of herself. We could read each other like open books. Secrets were impossible. As soon as we were excused from table we headed upstairs and I whispered, “What do you know that I don’t? Did Sonny [her prospective boyfriend] call you?”
“Better than that,” she said.
“Do I have to guess or are you going to tell me?”
No answer.
“Who knows besides you?”
No answer.
“Okay, Stick.” I knew how much she hated that nickname. Maybe if I threatened to call her that she’d give. Or maybe if I said … “Please?”
“Well,” she said, picking up a deck of cards and giving it a professional shuffle, sinking to her knees ready to do Spit battle until the wee hours. “Did you ever hear of a writer named Lewis?”
“Sure, Robert Louis … you know.”
“No, he’s been dead for ages. This man came to the door today. And he spells his name different.”
“What did he want?”
“To see Pappy. I heard him knock and when I opened the door, there he stood. He had red hair and his face had these pock marks. He told me his name and said he was a writer and asked if Pappy was at home. I told him to wait just a minute and went into the library where Pappy was working.
“ ‘Who’s there, Vicki?’ he said.
“ ‘A man named Lewis. He wants to see you.’
“Pappy didn’t even stop typing. He said, ‘Tell him I’m busy.’ ”
“And you did?”
“Yup, and he walked off.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“I don’t know. But he had a funny first name … Sinclair.”
We had no idea what books Pappy was writing then. Perhaps by 1948 he was already working on A Fable, which would win a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Two years before I became a Pee Wee cheerleader all of his books were out of print, but we didn’t know that, or that his reputation as one of this country’s leading novelists was in jeopardy until Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner came out in 1946. Cowley was the first to describe in layman’s language what Pappy once called “a cosmos of my own,” the Yoknapatawpha saga and its class struggle—the aristocratic Compsons, the resourceful and formidable McCaslins, and white-trash Snopeses, and presiding over all, the African American earth-mother, Dilsey. The effect of The Portable Faulkner was immediate and far-reaching. New editions of his novels would soon follow. In 1948, Harvard professor Carvel Collins created the first college seminar exclusively devoted to the works of William Faulkner. I had no idea of all this while I was on the ball field doing cheers and cartwheels. All I knew was that Pappy was in the stands watching me and would take me home after the game.
Pappy shielded us from worries. He never discussed money or the lack of it. I knew nothing about his financial straits until I read Joseph Blotner’s William Faulkner: A Biography in 1974. So it came as a surprise when I learned that he was supporting Nannie, Estelle, and Jill; several of Mammy Callie’s kin who lived in the cabin behind Rowan Oak; my mother (until she remarried) and me, the on-again-off-again waif; and sometimes Vicki and Uncle John and his family, who lived rent-free on Pappy’s farm and accepted an occasional allowance from Nannie, whose income consisted of ten dollars a week that Pappy deposited in her account, allowing her to pretend that it came from bank dividends. He was, as he later wrote, “the sole, principal and partial support—food, shelter, heat, clothes, medicine, kotex, school fees, toilet paper and picture shows, of my mother, an inept brother and his wife and two sons, another brother’s widow and child, a wife of my own and two stepchildren, [and] my own child.”
Saturdays were allowance days at Rowan Oak when Vicki and I would be given a quarter apiece. We spent them at the ten o’clock movie at the Ritz—admission for children was a dime, plus popcorn and a small bottle of malted milk tablets from Gathright-Reed’s Drugstore to eat on the way home. I think these tablets were marketed as “vitamin supplements,” but for Vicki and me they were better than candy. We speculated that they might make us “fill out” sooner. On special Saturdays we got fifty cents, which paid for the movie, popcorn, and a hamburger and Grapette at Mrs. Cook’s diner around the corner from the Ritz. Vicki and I roamed the town on weekends, walking anywhere we wanted to go. Our only rule was to be home by dark.
Our favorite playground was Bailey’s Woods, the thickly forested area around Rowan Oak where trails wandered over hills and crossed “stink creek,” a rain gulley that contained stagnant, festering pools. Behind Pappy’s barn were the “sand hills,” where erosion had eaten into a slope and exposed colored layers of clay—blue, gray, orange—with a patina of sand that glittered like fool’s gold. Here, the neighborhood kids gathered to build forts, or play war or kick the can or capture the flag.
Sometimes Pappy took us on hikes. We knew the paths with our eyes closed, but he taught us to walk in silence, heel to toe, the Indian way, and how to read animal signs or mark a trail for someone to follow.
Early one Saturday at sunup he led Ji
ll, Vicki, and me out of the kitchen, finger to his lips, behind the barn, down through the sandhills, past stink creek—deeper and deeper into the woods. He sat us on a fallen log and spoke in a whisper about the first people who walked the land, the Chickasaws. They walked in silence, he told us. No footfall could be heard, not a sound of a broken twig, no crunch of leaves underfoot. If we respected the silence of the forest, only then could we experience the wilderness.
With the dark forest surrounding us, he knelt and, as we crouched beside him, picked up a handful of dirt and leaves, and said, “Hold this. Smell it. It belongs to no one. This is the way the land should be treated, with respect. The earth is ours to protect as the people who came before us did.” We were young then, but I don’t think any of us ever forgot what he said that day.
Pappy spent a great deal of time with us. On cold, blustery February days, nobody else in the family would want to go sailing at Sardis Lake on The Ring Dove, Pappy’s sailboat. He’d say, “Let’s go, girls!” And Vicki and I went. When nobody else wanted to walk uptown with him to catch the late movie—Charlie Chan movies were his favorites—Vicki and I went. At that age we’d go anywhere, anytime, with anybody.
When Pappy drove us to Sardis Lake to go sailing—long, slow drives on a gravel road twelve miles to Hurricane Landing—he had to listen to two preteen girls singing at the top of their lungs “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” all the way down to one bottle, then all the way back up to ninety-nine.
Poor Pappy. We were a noise machine—and this was a man who refused to own a radio. I’m sure he tuned us out.
There was plenty to do at Rowan Oak when we were not sailing. Pappy set up a Ping-Pong table under the porte cochere. His croquet court stayed in place on the front lawn from early spring to early frost. Our croquet matches were complicated by having dogs constantly underfoot. Pappy had terriers and a Dalmatian, Vicki had a mutt (Cutie), and Andrew and Chrissie Price had a pack of mutts and terriers that patrolled the Rowan Oak grounds at all hours.
Said terriers were immortalized in an Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph (now a popular postcard) of Pappy standing in the east garden with the dogs surrounding him. I think one of them is Kudzu, an offspring of my beloved terrier Little Bit. They all looked alike. After the photograph was published, an interviewer asked Pappy, “What kind of dogs are they, Mr. Faulkner?”
“Cartier-Bressons,” said Pappy, and so they were from then on.
The dogs made playing croquet almost impossible. We had to shoo them away before lining up our shots. I remember one mortal croquet game during a thunderstorm when Pappy was playing with Jill, Vicki, and me. We played with silent concentration. Jill was about to knock my ball to kingdom come when there was an ear-splitting clap of thunder. We all jumped and looked at one another in terror. Pappy kept playing like nothing was happening. Lightning was striking all around, so close we could smell it. Everything got dark. We could barely see the balls. Only the dogs had the sense to run for cover. Finally, when the rain came down, Pappy relented. The game was over. The very next morning, he registered Vicki and me at Camp Lake Stephens, a Methodist summer camp not far from Oxford. Everybody needed a breather, Pappy most of all. No Vicki or Dean for fourteen blessed days! It would have been worth any amount of money.
THERE WERE NO Halloweens like those at Rowan Oak, nights of magic terror. We grew up believing in our own family ghost, Judith Sheegog, the beautiful girl who had committed suicide by jumping from the second-floor balcony, breaking her neck on the front steps below, all for the love of a Yankee soldier who had abandoned her. Her grave, according to Pappy, was under the huge old magnolia tree at the end of the front walk, and her ghost walked the grounds of Rowan Oak “when the moon was right and foxfire danced in the woods.”
Pappy and Aunt Estelle staged elaborate Halloween parties for Jill with Cho Cho dressed as Judith, dead gardenias in her hair and holding real skeletons’ hands. Aunt Dot was the hunchbacked grave digger dragging chains behind her. With us children gathered on the front steps, Pappy would tell scary stories and at the supernatural climax we’d hear chains clanking. He would pause so that as we glanced over our shoulders we might see a ghostly white shape flitting in and out of the trees. Sometimes he would invite us to “visit Judith’s grave” under the magnolia tree. As twilight gave way to night, the time Pappy called “le temps entre chien et loup” (the time between dog and wolf), he would light a candle and give it to us, saying “If the candle goes out, that means Judith blew it out.” Of course, as we took our trembling steps in the pitch dark, heading for the magnolia tree, the candle inevitably went out. At that moment we’d turn in happy terror hoping Pappy would save us, but he’d be gone.
One Halloween he took us trick-or-treating. Vicki and I were determined to “get” an old lady who lived on a street that dead-ended into Bailey’s Woods. Rumor had it that this woman was a dog poisoner who hated Halloween and would not come to her door no matter what. She was leaving herself wide open. Vicki and I went armed with bars of soap, unwrapped and ready for use on her car windows. Pappy knew nothing of this. Staying several front yards ahead of him, we skipped up to her door and began knocking and ringing the doorbell before he caught up. When her porch light finally came on, we shouted “Trick or treat!” and tore around the corner of her house into her garage where the vulnerable car was parked. By that time Pappy had reached her house and was looking for us. We did not see her come out but heard the garden hose being turned on full force. The heavy spray of water missed us but soaked Pappy. The three of us were out of there in nothing flat.
Then Pappy turned the tables. One night we were awakened by the sound of the piano. Someone was playing a Chopin waltz that Vicki had played in a recital. She and I recognized it at once. We sat up in our beds and said “Judith!” While the piano continued playing, we crept out of the bedroom in our nightgowns holding on to each other. Pappy came out of his bedroom with a flashlight and led us downstairs. As we reached the bottom steps, the music stopped. Pappy switched on the lights in the hallway and front parlor. We searched every room. No one was there. To this day I don’t know how he managed it.
On rainy weekends at Rowan Oak, Vicki and I spent hours playing cards—Spit, Casino, Concentration—sitting cross-legged on the soft gray rug in the front parlor, totally absorbed. We held spend-the-night parties, with six or eight girlfriends crowded into our upstairs bedroom, giggling through the night, raiding the refrigerator, talking about boys, telling ghost stories, playing the Ouija board, and trying on Aunt Estelle’s makeup in her black-and-white-tiled bathroom with ceiling-high windows.
Sometimes Jill would recount tales from scary movies such as Gaslight and The Spiral Staircase. We had seen them more than once, which only stoked our fears. Only I had seen Black Narcissus, yet every time I tried to tell the story I would get so scared I couldn’t finish. It is a terrifying tale of a nun who goes mad in a convent high in the Himalayas. Each evening one sister must ring the bell summoning everyone to chapel for vespers. The bell stood at the edge of a precipice. In order to make the huge bell ring, the sister had to swing out over the sheer cliff clinging desperately to the rope, then struggle to regain her footing. The night came when an insane nun waited in the shadows … which was as far as I could get.
One night, Jill and Vicki were worn out with me. Pappy (supposedly asleep in the next room) came in and finished telling the story. “One of the Godden sisters wrote it,” he noted. “You’ll find reading it is scarier than the movie.” He told us to look at Nannie’s latest painting: a nun’s face and habit done in pastels. The nun’s tortured face reminded me of Wese’s after a god-awful row with Jimmy.
I hold dear the memories of my childhood with Vicki, the good and the not so good. Sometimes we got into hair-pulling, shin-kicking, name-calling fights. The worst, and I do not remember what it was about, ended with Vicki throwing my clothes and the watch that Pappy had given me for Christmas off the “Judith balcony” onto the steps below. �
�If you broke it, you’re dead!” I shouted as I tore down the stairs. Pappy was sitting on the steps outside, my Swiss wristwatch in his hand. “It’s not broken, Dean,” he said. “Don’t you risk breaking something with Vicki that can’t be fixed. You are better than that. And I expect it of you.”
Those words had a lasting effect on me. For the rest of my life, every time I gave in to my feelings and behaved badly (and there were many) I would find myself saying, “You’re better than that.” His words rarely altered my behavior until it was too late, but they guaranteed that I would own up to the error of my ways.
When we were older, our sailing excursions continued. Pappy would bring along a bottle of stout, a magnum of champagne, and a silver goblet. When he dropped anchor after thirty or forty minutes’ sail time, he would have someone hold the goblet steady while he filled it half and half with stout and champagne (a Black Velvet, which I think he discovered in 1918 in the RAF). In order to drink from Pappy’s “grail,” we had to play his game. He would recite a line from a poem. The lucky sailor who knew the next line was given a sip. He would start with easy ones: “Red sky at night …” Or, “Malt does more than Milton can …” Or, “Tiger, tiger burning bright …” Working up to some real doozies like “Deer walk upon our mountains …” and “April is the cruelest month.…” We never tired of playing. Winning made the Black Velvet taste better—plus the winner sometimes got to select the next line of poetry.
Vicki went on to become an accomplished sailor and had her own sailboat in Manila. When Pappy went on a State Department tour and visited the Philippines, she took him sailing in Manila Bay. I like to think of them heading out to sea, Vicki at the tiller, Pappy relaxed and happy, purple sails billowing in the wind.
IN LATE SUMMER OF 1950, PAPPY WROTE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR of the Oxford Eagle to be published on August 31. In it, he took on the conservatives opposed to the legal sale of beer in Lafayette County. To a man the town’s religious leaders were opposed to beer and some weeks before had taken an ad in the Eagle proclaiming the evils of drinking. The town had voted down the sale of beer in all previous elections. Oxford had always been dry.
Every Day by the Sun Page 14