Liza woke up. “What’s going on?”
“Mickey thought you might like to critique our handiwork. He’s not going to school tomorrow.”
She smiled as she tried to sit up.
With reality-glazed eyes, I saw how my denial had prevented me seeing the progression of the leukemia. How could I have not seen the ravages of the cancer on her body? Even now in the past twenty-four hours of my enlightenment, more and more of my Liza was slipping. “Can I get you anything?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’d like a piece of Alice Huntington’s coconut cake.”
As I mixed the coconut into the batter, the whir of the sewing machine told me that Mickey was sewing the first two strips of the quilt.
The sweet smell of coconut cake permeated the house. I cut more pieces of cloth from the kid’s clothes. Memories flooded my mind of when Liza and I had taken trips up to the mountains with no kids. Then suddenly I had an idea.
I wanted to add something to the quilt, something that symbolized our marriage, something that represented our love among the patches of memories. I ran upstairs.
Once I reached my bedroom closet, I touched the soft cotton of my “red lumberjack of the woods” shirt, as she called it. I smiled. It always turned her on in the winter when I wore it to bring in the first load of firewood. I had looked forward to our trip to the Grand Canyon; I had intended to pack lots of flannel shirts including that one and pay the kids to go for long walks.
Downstairs, I cut three patches from my “red lumberjack of the wood” shirt for the quilt. If I couldn’t have my Liza snuggled beside me in years to come, then at least I could touch the red flannel square on cold winter nights.
I heard a car in the driveway as I finished icing the cake and began to drop coconut onto the top.
“Dad. Mom,” Anna called as she ran in the doorway.
She hugged me.
“Mom’s in the living room.”
Dropping her purse on the kitchen floor, she ran down the hall. A young man with shaggy brown hair, a small gold hoop in his earlobe, blue flannel shirt, clean jeans and hiking boots walked into the kitchen with Anna’s luggage.
He stood there holding her bags and looking confused. At least he didn’t have a pierced nose.
“Just put those on the floor. I’ll take them upstairs.” I held out my hand to shake his.
Normally, I liked to scare the boys that Anna brought home. This boy’s handshake felt different. He had a strong, firm grip. I wanted to put him at ease. I think Anna had a ‘keeper.’ “Hi. I’m Disney Halbeck.”
“Nice to meet you, sir. Tim Huntington.”
“You from up North?”
“Yes, sir. Boston.”
I looked at the coconut cake and back at him. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to Alice Huntington from Nantucket? “
His eyes looked widened. “No sir, not as far as I know.”
I smiled. “Son, have you ever made coconut cake?”
“Yes, sir. My mother taught me how to cook.”
“Sounds like your mama is a smart woman.”
Tim and I served coconut cake to everyone in the den. “Good cake, Dad,” said Mickey.
“I’m proud of you, honey. You can do it, you know,” said Liza as she looked at me, her dark green eyes bright.
“Do what, Mom?” asked Anna.
Lisa’s gaze held mine. “Your father can bake a coconut cake, he can make a quilt, and he can do a lot of things he thought he couldn’t.”
Later that afternoon, everyone cut patches from the clothes. We sewed strips of patches together, and soon the patches and strips became quilt tops. We laughed at old memories, entertaining Tim with stories from our lives. We would hold up a shirt and ask, “Do you remember?”
We left the last patch empty on the first quilt. I stared at the blue dolphin material not wanting to use it. When we added the pieces of Kelly’s clothes to the quilt strips, Anna and Mickey were quiet. They were remembering a sibling that once was and what might have been.
Would I do that when I wore a flannel shirt? Would I remember what was and what might have been in the years to come?
We worked late into the night and ate coconut cake during breaks. Working on the quilts bound our family together, more tightly. Each piece of material became a part of us, a part of our family story, and each quilt would be Liza’s legacy of love to her children, to her future grandchildren, and to me.
Hours later Liza coughed, and I held her as Mickey sewed the last strip onto the last quilt. Anna cut the last three patches from the dolphin material. We now had three quilt tops in our living room: one for Anna, one for Mickey, one for Kelly. I took Kelly’s quilt and wrapped my beloved wife in it. She coughed, once more, then opened her eyes, and gave me a slight smile. “Love you,” she whispered to me for the last time.
Liza Halbeck died in my arms surrounded by her children just before the first rays of the morning sun kissed the sky.
Water slapped against the boat. Dolphins played around the bow. Mickey cried as he gently let the wind carry his mother’s ashes into the ocean. Anna watched hers float into the water. In the distance, a mother dolphin and her baby leaped high into the air, splashed down, and dove under the water. I tipped my portion into the water and thought of the bronze statue and the sylphlike girl who used to be my wife. “Love you. Take care of our little Kelly.”
Anna, Mickey and I dipped our dolphin printed patchwork squares in the salt water. When we got back to the beach, we laid each square on the sand to soak up the sun. I watched the waves ebb and flow. I noticed the crabs running in and out of their holes.
At the campsite, I hooked up the sewing machine inside the Winnebago, and with the brass statue beside me, I sewed a dolphin patch onto each quilt top. Liza would’ve wanted me to end it this way.
The next morning, as I sat on the beach and watched a distant pod of dolphins frolicking in the waves, Mickey and Anna sat down beside me with their keeper quilts draped around their shoulders to keep away the chilly air. I opened my copy of The Fool’s Guide to Sewing a Patchwork Quilt to the end, and to my surprise my map of the United States fell out. Liza.
I held it up. “Hey kids, want to go to the Grand Canyon?”
When The Drugstore Was A Community Gathering Place
Across from the depot in our small town was my father’s pharmacy. There were high tinned-tiled ceilings and old oiled wood floors, a long marbled-topped soda fountain that served the best of Biltmore Dairy’s local ice cream.
In the high-backed oak booths boys played hooky, reading comic books and drinking fresh squeezed limeades, ducking out of sight if a parent appeared. My dad believes as many boys learned the fundamentals of reading from those secret sessions with the Green Hornet as they did their reading primers from the grammar school a few miles away.
Tucked in the back of the store behind shelves of categorically organized pharmaceuticals was a nook with a chair in it where a local minister’s wife could enjoy a relaxing cigarette away from all prying eyes and still hear all the conversations from the tables at the back. On any given day, the surveyors from a highway project that is now Interstate 40 or a world famous evangelist might sit and enjoy a milkshake. Town politics were always part of the subject matter as were all the day-to-day happenings that are the heartbeats of every small town.
No one who ever needed medicine was refused, even if the payment came in the form of fresh rainbow trout, a bag of apples or tomatoes, or corn on the cob. Sometimes it was understood that a payment might never be a possibility.
The cough syrup compounded in the back rivaled the potency of the finest brandy, was always cherry flavored and worked better than any remedy still ever marketed. There were bottles with skulls and crossbones on them, but to my knowledge no one ever combined the chemicals in a way that woul
d merit such a warning. I do know that the smelly fish emulsion fertilizer one of the chemical salesmen sold my parents made the perennial beds around our house rival anything in Southern Living . . . and it smelled to the heavens when it rained that summer.
Best of all are the memories of a wizened little old man, let’s call him Mr. Jones, who used to sit on the bench at the entrance of the store, happily giving tourists bad directions if they didn’t stop for respite in the town. I can still hear him saying, “You can’t even get there from here. Matter of fact you can’t give somethin’ to someone you ain’t got . . . and you can’t come back from someplace you ain’t never been. And that’s all the advice I can give you, visitor.”
—Susan Alvis, The Tie That Binds
Air Raid, Southern Style
by Mike Roberts
“Yes, sir. I’m a real Southern boy. I got a red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer.”
—Billy Carter
If Southerners are obsessed with the Civil War and its relics, perhaps it’s because we can’t escape them. We are marked from birth as unique natives of the only region to have fought to leave the union. We are reared on the lore of a struggle made more glorious by comparison to the hardships of the peace that followed. We read the countless battlefield markers that point the way back a century and a half. All this nurtures within us a stubborn, poignant pride about what was, what is and who we are. It’s a wild violet in our culture: a flower to some, a weed to others, with runners that burrow deep in our psyche and surface to bloom without warning.
I first learned about the war and wild violets from my great-grandfather, Marse Pop. He was a tall, thin man with fine white hair and a presence that made him seem distinguished whether he was in his Sunday-go-to-meeting suit or his gardening overalls.
“Marse Pop” was, of course, a nickname. The family borrowed it from the two young sons of the woman who began keeping house for him after his first wife died in childbirth, fifty years ago. The boys couldn’t pronounce “Mister Perkerson” but they could say “Marse Pop.”
Now, “marse” isn’t a form of “mister,” but of “master,” and was once used by Southern whites and blacks alike. During the war and for years afterward, many Southerners referred to Gen. Robert E. Lee as “Marse Robert” or just “Marse.” I imagine that Marse Pop was flattered to have something in common with the general. I hoped the general, looking down from his cloud in heaven, was equally flattered to have something in common with a man like Marse Pop.
Either out of love or out of pity that Daddy died when I was two, Marse Pop always treated me like I hung the moon. When I arrived for my summer vacation in what Mamma called “L.A.” (Lower Alabama), Marse Pop always seemed as glad to see me as I was to see him.
He spoiled me all right, but not with the toys and things he called “gewgaws” the way a teetotaler would refer to demon drink. Rather, he showered me with something better—his attention. He made me feel ten feet tall just by talking to me. When I helped him with his gardening, he’d tell me the different plants’ names and explain what each plant needed to grow well.
Part of his gardening ritual was pulling out some flowers with purple petals.
“How come you’re doing that, Marse Pop?”
“Because these are wild violets, and if I don’t pull them up from where I don’t want them, they’ll flat take over. I don’t want them to grow anywhere but inside those tin borders I put over yonder.”
“So why not get rid of all of them?”
“I like their color, and they grow real well without me having to do much to them. They have their place in my garden, and other flowers have their place. Everything in its place—that’s the way the world’s meant to be.”
What I liked best, though, were his stories. After he finished in the garden, he’d sit on Grandma and Grandpa’s porch swing with me and spin the tales he’d learned from his grandfather, who’d fought in Gen. Longstreet’s corps against the bully Yankees. With Marse Pop’s words in my head, I daydreamed of being a Confederate soldier charging forward at Chickamauga or holding off Yankee assaults in the trenches at Petersburg.
By the time I was six, I was quite the little Rebel. I had a store-bought Confederate cap and a plastic cavalry saber with scabbard. A Confederate uniform wasn’t to be had, however, so Grandma bought a pair of pants and a shirt my size and dyed them gray. Confederate footwear was less of a bother. Once I found out that many Southern soldiers had to go barefoot, I did, too, summer or winter, only donning shoes when forced to by church, school or frost. And because the north had the gall to win the war, I scrawled, “I hate the North” in a Civil War history book Grandma bought me. I didn’t care about or understand the politics of the war, I cared about the drama.
The height of my personal Confederacy came one August afternoon when the air lay so hot and humid that just breathing was sweaty work. Grandma came on the front porch fanning her bodice to move air through her dress, and decreed we had to make ice cream even though we’d just made it two days before. Once the fixings were ready, Grandpa, Grandma, Marse Pop, two cousins who lived down the road and I circled on the porch to crank the handle on the ice-cream freezer. My knees bounced with anticipation, but not just because I wanted to eat. I had a surprise for everybody.
When it came my turn to crank, Marse Pop slid the freezer to me. I wrapped my legs around its rough wooden tub, shivered as melt water from the freezer’s drain hole sluiced over my feet and called, “Hey, y’all. Listen to this!” I took a deep breath and let out my interpretation of a Rebel Yell.
Marse Pop didn’t seem to mind that I more screeched than yelled. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, “That’s my boy.” If my britches hadn’t been loose already, I’d have split them as I swelled with pride. I was on top of the world.
Too soon, I fell off it. Marse Pop died when I was seven, followed by Grandpa. Our family’s land in “L.A.” was sold, Grandma moved to Atlanta to live with us, and Mamma remarried. Marse Pop’s ice-cream freezer rotted and rusted away. Mamma replaced it with a modern freezer with a plastic tub instead of a wooden one and an electric motor instead of a handle. No group had to gather to take turns cranking it, but what the new freezer made was more ice soup than ice cream.
Time brought other changes. My new father’s dog chewed up my Confederate cap, my plastic saber broke and the book I’d scrawled in gathered dust on my shelf. I no longer played Rebel soldier, either. Inspired by my new uncle, an Air Force pilot, I built and flew model airplanes. Yankee kids moved into our neighborhood and teased me about my bare feet and my Alabama childhood. To save face, I wore smothering shoes even in summer, as they did, and confined L.A. to a locked closet in my memory.
By age nineteen, I was smart and sophisticated the way all teenagers think they are. And after years of northern propaganda from TV, movies and school that alleged how stupid the South was, I was ashamed of my Southern roots. Then I met Cale “Buddy” Adams, a tugboat of a man used to pushing people around to his way of thinking or out of his way altogether. Though he knew nothing and cared less about gardening, he still managed to teach me something else about blooming.
We met because of a major obsession in my life, Jo Beth. She was Buddy’s youngest daughter and the most interesting girl at the Big Bargain discount store where I worked the summer before my sophomore year in college. She was cute, smart, patient, well-mannered and cheerful. Being around her was like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold night.
Being around her daddy, however, was like getting a root canal without anesthesia. I learned that when I came to his house to take Jo Beth out for our first date. She wasn’t ready yet, so he invited me to sit in the living room to wait and talk.
Within five minutes, it was plain he and I were from different species. After so many years in and around Atlanta, I considered myself a city kid. He had grown up on a farm in South
Georgia and hated anything to do with a city, especially Atlanta. I was scrawny. He had a torso like a barrel and arms as big around as my thighs. I’d made fun of the kids who played soldier in the junior ROTC unit at my old high school. He’d been a master sergeant in the army, overseeing the maintenance of attack helicopters. He drove a new Chevy pickup with an American flag on the antenna, a Rebel battle flag in the rear window, and bumper stickers that proclaimed him a “Civil War Re-enactor” and “Southern and Proud of it.” I drove a fourth-hand Toyota hatchback with a previous owner’s Dead Head sticker holding together part of a rusted fender.
But if I’d already underwhelmed him, I earned his stamp of rejection when he asked me what I was doing with my life.
“I’m about to start my second year in college,” I replied.
“Really.” His fingers clenched the armrests of his rocking chair.
“Yeah, and I’m looking forward to it. My freshman year was so fantastic.”
“I’ll bet.” He rocked faster.
“I mean, college is helping me understand the world better, a lot better than most people do.”
“Better than most people, huh?” Veins bulged in his forehead.
“It’s sad, but most people are just dumb, I hate to say it. In college, I get to be around so many brilliant people.”
He ejected from his rocking chair, thumped to the foot of the hallway stairs and shouted, “Get the lead out, Jo Beth! You’re keeping college boy waiting.”
In seconds, I heard soft, rapid footfalls. I reached the hallway in time to see Jo Beth hustle down the stairs, a hair brush in one hand, loafers in the other. She gave him a wide berth, grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the front door.
“’Bye, Daddy,” she called over her shoulder, prodded me through the doorway and shut the door behind her without breaking stride. Still barefoot, she led me along the decorative-gravel walkway to my car, gestured me into it and climbed in the passenger side. Once we were out of the driveway and on the road, she puffed out a breath and sagged in the seat. “What happened in there with you and Daddy?” She swiped at her hair with her brush.
On Grandma's Porch Page 17