A Guitar and a Pen

by Robert Hicks

  Willie was different from the very start, if I was to believe my Aunt Mary-Charles (named after their father, my great-grandfather, Charles Philip Talmadge, “most recently of the Confederacy,” whatever that meant, seeing as the war had been over almost a hundred years).

  Willie never fit in. When her sisters were courting a houseful of boys who showed up in the last years of the nineteenth century, Willie was in her room, not really doing very much of anything as she waited for everyone to clear out. In fairness, Willie was not considered a beauty, as the rest of the Talmadge girls were renowned to be: She was painfully plain. While her sisters helped their mother and their grandmothers, took classes, played tennis and rode, Willie never did. She was not a reader or a cook or a helper. She seemed doomed to become that sister every family had: who never married, but stayed at home to care for her aging parents. But in Willie’s case, her aging parents and her sisters and the help took care of her.

  When her parents finally passed, her sister and brother-in-law—my grandmother and grandfather—provided her an apartment within their rambling Colonial Revival pile. My grandfather, though self-made and a product of the New South’s industrial rebirth, was quick to adopt the ways of the Old South. My grandmother, a Talmadge of Talmadgeville, Tennessee, was key. She was twenty-something years his junior and lovely, the product of generation after generation of good alliances and beautiful young wives. By all accounts, they were devoted to each other.

  This was their lives: gentle, gracious, uneventful; lives built around the Methodist-Episcopal Church–South, the Colonial Dames, the DAR, the UDC, bridge games, horses, dogs, garden clubs, the cotton crop, books, travel, antiquing, gossip, and my grandmother’s grandchildren.

  And into that world came Willis Phinnaeus Buford. He would prove to be a thirty-seven-year disruption of their carefully scripted way of life.

  Willie met him in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. That is all any of us were ever told. Within days, though he was near twenty years younger and far handsomer than she, they were married in a civil ceremony in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

  Even she had no idea about his past, his people, or his place. He cut off anyone who dared inquire—by saying he found such conversation shallow and meaningless. Meaningless? Who your people were was the bedrock of our civilization. Were we anything more than our past? My grandmother had leather-bound volumes, embossed in genuine gold, that told our story, taking the “Talmadge and Allied Families” back to 1066, and linking us to all the important events of history (even if we had to skip a generation or two, now and then, to get us there).

  Once Willie and Willis had settled into one of my grandfather’s many comfortable non-rented rental houses populated by my grandmother’s family, Willis seemed to find work as shallow and meaningless as any discussion of his past. Though he was, according to his wife, always “on the threshold of something very big,” Willis never seemed to make it through the door and into the temple of success.

  All his schemes and travel, like everything else, were financed by his wife, who was, if truth be known, financed by my grandfather; and when he passed, by my grandmother.

  That was all we knew. Willis seemed to have no hobbies, no friends, and few interests, including his wife.

  For thirty-seven years, Willis Phinnaeus Buford mooched off our family, stayed away for months at a time, and made my great-aunt seem even more pathetic while she longed for his returns and lived her life in his vacuum. By all reports, even when he was around, he wasn’t. He had found a meal ticket with few demands.

  And then one day in 1948, three years before I was born, the phone rang. Uncle Willis had passed. He had been found dead in a hotel room in Greenwood, Mississippi, by a lady who worked as a salesclerk at a local department store. His heart.

  I have few doubts that my grandmother rested far easier that evening knowing we were rid, once and for all, of ol’ Willis. Just as my aunt began to veil herself in mourning, as far as my grandmother was concerned, a far bigger veil had been lifted from our family and its good name. While I’m sure they took on their prescribed roles as comforters to their grieving sister, as far as the rest of the Talmadge “girls” were concerned, relief and justice had finally arrived for the righteous.

  My grandmother set about making the arrangements for his interment in one of the seventy-one remaining spaces in the Talmadge-Fort plot in the center of Rest Haven Cemetery on the highest spot in Madison County, just outside the edge of Talmadgeville.

  And then they read his will. Willis Phinnaeus Buford did not want to wait out the long sleep before Judgment Day with our clan. He was to be cremated, and his ashes spread from a boat in the dead center of the Mississippi, between Tennessee and Arkansas. He was very clear that a bridge would not do. He wanted to be launched from a boat.

  No one in our family had ever been cremated. Cremation was a dark ritual of the Pagans in some far-off woods. The only time you could possibly allow a Methodist to be cremated was if he had died in a terrible fire and you were simply finishing the job. When Willis died, our people still held to the belief that an open coffin provided comfort for loved ones. For some unknown reason, the living found comfort in seeing that the dead were really dead. The same photographer who photographed our weddings would drive from Memphis out to Talmadgeville to photograph our dead: in case an “out-of-towner” had to miss the funeral, all the good food, and the chance to see a loved one dead, face to face, one last time. Folks would “talk” if you didn’t have a proper, open coffin or there wasn’t any cold fried chicken afterward.

  If it had been any real member of our family or any other in-law, my grandmother would have ignored the cremation request. She would have reminded, gently, those who mourned that such a request was made by someone not in his or her right mind.“What if he had asked to be stuffed and mounted? Would we follow his wishes and drive on over to the taxidermist?” Her arguments would have been clear and overwhelming. We buried our dead.

  But Uncle Willis was not a real member of our family, nor was he any other in-law. Willis was a worthless leech and a black mark and didn’t deserve one of our seventy-one remaining spaces. My grandmother was just being gracious to her pitiful sister even to have offered. He would have to fend for himself on Judgment Day when the quick and the dead rose up at the sound of the last trumpet and all the rest of us were together.

  So Willis Buford was cremated as he had wished, and life went on filled with church and bridge, travels and grandchildren.

  Except for one small hiccup.

  When they gave Aunt Willie the small green box with reinforced metal corners that contained Willis, she never seemed able to get around to renting the boat and following the second half of his wishes.

  No matter how much coercion—ever so gentle at first, then not so gentle at all—the family placed on her, Willie seemed finally to have what she never had in his life: Willis, one hundred percent of him.

  Whether she always carried him around in her purse or if that only came in time, I don’t know. But by the time my brothers and cousins and I came along, all of us knew that Uncle Willis stayed in Aunt Willie’s handbag.

  For several years after his death, he remained in the green box. Eventually the box, having been designed as a temporary home, began to leak at the seams, so Willie, still resisting her sisters’ well-founded logic, transferred Willis to a glass quart canning jar with an orange rubber ring-seal. And then he went back in her purse.

  Though none of our generation ever really knew Willis Buford, all of us knew that purse and all the other purses that followed over the years. None of us ever entered a room and weren’t immediately aware of the location of Uncle Willis.

  As much as Uncle Willis was a very real part of my childhood and our family visits back to Talmadgeville and my grandmother’s farm, there is something not right, even in our family, about a woman who carried her dead husband around with her in a Mason jar.

  No one else I knew had any of their relativ
es in jars. Why our family? And while it seemed to fit, with all the rest . . . my family living in the atomic age of the 1950s but still making references to the Civil War’s effects on us, it just didn’t seem right.

  And so that November day, just a few days before Thanksgiving 1959, I finally saw Uncle Willis, his jar leaning back on a pillow on my grandmother’s sofa, taken out of his dark leather tomb by my great-aunt for some reason I will never know. My brothers didn’t believe me when I said I had finally seen him. Their adamant disbelief seemed to confirm my belief that I was, indeed, the first of us to see him.

  We had all come home, as we had every year, a family joined together—not that we ever were too long away, no matter where we lived. All of my grandmother’s sisters were still well and thriving, and, as they had all their lives, were still preparing the dinner.

  Thanksgiving was the one day in the year when Minnie, my grandmother’s beloved cook and best friend, was pushed aside and became simply a lackey in the kitchen where she proudly ruled.

  Every year, the old place came back to life—it was a glimpse of how it must have been when my dad was growing up. As each of the sisters prepared her “dish,” the doors to the back hall and to the dining room swung back and forth as old servants were sent on missions to get this and do that. There was a commotion that was rarely found in a house now populated with old folks.

  Willie didn’t really have a dish. She got in folks’ way. No one really needed her help, but part of everyone’s job was to try to find small jobs she could do, here and there.

  And then everything began to go wrong. As best as we could later piece together, Willie pulled Willis out of her purse and set him on the mantel. With everyone working and talking and ordering folks around, no one noticed that Willis had been placed right there in the midst of it all.

  Great-aunt Tump, the godliest of all, was making her mother’s mother’s signature cornbread dressing—as she had since her mother had given over the reins forty years before. This was no ordinary cornbread dressing from a package. This was holy, sacred dressing, far more important and more at the center of our meal than any turkey would ever claim. This was the dressing whose recipe all our mothers had asked for, in preparation for the day Tump left us.

  Tump was looking for black pepper. There had never been the need for her to bother others. She could find it herself. Why interrupt a good story just to ask for the pepper?

  She found, up on the mantel, a quart jar of black pepper.

  Before she began to spoon and stir Uncle Willis into the dressing, she tasted him. Tump would go to her grave with her cherished faith that he was black pepper—that the crematorium must have given him a good Christian burial and then dumped a large can of black pepper into Willis’s green box. After all, the crematorium people knew as well as anyone that they shouldn’t be burning folks up. Aunt Tump would remain alone with this belief.

  Aunt Willie must have noticed the opening of a too-familiar jar: she collapsed, swooning, onto the linoleum. Everything stopped. She was out cold, but seemed still to be with us.

  My grandmother’s equally elderly physician, Dr. Crook, came from his farm next door, arriving after Willie had been taken to her bed. As she came to, she mumbled things that made no sense: but then, again, when had she ever made much sense?

  Somehow her sisters pieced it all together. Tump was mortified. Her actions had, all at the same time, hurt her fragile sister and ruined the dressing. My grandmother, meanwhile, was not going to throw away a very large pan of cornbread dressing just because of a small mistake. After all, she had lived through the Great Depression, when folks would have killed for a very large pan of cornbread dressing—and such cornbread dressing as this!

  On the other hand, no one seemed too concerned about Willis. After some quiet discussion, Grandmother decided to get Willis out of the dressing and back in his jar. Of course it was understood that, even when she’d finished, there was bound to be some dressing in the jar and Willis in the dressing. Nothing was perfect in this life, but we could try our best. That’s all He had ever asked of us.

  The kitchen oath was the key to making it through the day. My grandmother made each of her sisters, including a sniveling Aunt Tump and all the servants, swear they would never tell another soul what had happened. Willie had simply taken to her bed, as she more than anyone else would do. Success rested on their silence. What had happened was no one’s business. It was over, done.

  By the time we gathered in the dining room that afternoon, the big table a bit bigger and the four “children’s” tables filled in each corner, everyone knew. I’d heard it from my cousin Pat.

  It was a rather quiet Thanksgiving. None of the grandchildren needed to be reminded that we were inside a house, or at dinner. There were no outbursts as we all kept our eyes glued on what seemed to be an unusually large serving of dressing on each of our plates. It looked, in fact, like most everything on our plates was dressing, the rest of the meal a mere garnish. Each of us had the same goal, and that was to make it through the meal and try not to eat anything that had touched the dressing.

  My grandmother tried to normalize the unusually quiet meal with small talk. She demanded verbal interaction. Yet silence seemed to prevail, broken only by the periodic quiet sniveling of Aunt Tump.

  As I said earlier, weakness was never considered a virtue in our family. When significant looks didn’t work, Grandmother spoke up and asked Tump why she was sniffing and dabbing at her eyes. She knew perfectly well why, of course; what she was really saying, in her own special way, was to stop.

  Tump, by now so eaten up with grief and guilt, didn’t take the hint.“You perfectly well know why!”

  Grandmother again tried to take control.“No. I don’t understand why.”

  This was Tump’s cue to silence, but somehow she didn’t get it.“I’m sniveling because Willis is in the dressing and Willie’s in her bed! That’s why I’m sniveling! It’s all wrong and you know it!”

  It was out. What we all already knew was now public knowledge. Willis was in the dressing. Willie really did have a reason this time to have taken to her bed. Despite Tump’s weeping, our silence grew louder.

  And then it happened. All of us are witness to what was said and happened next. Our grandmother cut that silence with a slight smile and melodious words.“No, I don’t understand why you’re sniveling. Here we are, an unbroken chain of family under one roof. The Lord has preserved our health and made us to prosper. We are united as sisters in this family, with my children and my children’s children. Our land and our people thrive and are well. We are safe here from harm’s way.

  “It was bad enough that Willis Buford ever came into our lives. He humiliated our vulnerable sister with his slothfulness and infidelity. It was bad enough that he died as he did, compromising what was left of her dignity. It was bad enough that he demanded to be cremated as heathens do and thrown into the Mississippi—for what purpose I will never understand. Yet even then she could not depart from him and has humiliated each of us by carrying him around in a jar for near fifteen years.

  “I’m not sure that Willis Buford didn’t finally do something constructive for this family that he only took from in life.”

  “Whatever could you mean?” Tump asked.

  And then we saw her do it. For the first time that anyone could recall, my grandmother, Mattie Louise Talmadge Fort, with her impeccable table manners, took a bite of food and spoke with her mouth full. “If I’m not mistaken,” she said as she shifted the food on her palate, “I believe that Willis has added a bit of body to the dressing.”

  And with that, all the taboos had disappeared, the veil had lifted. At first with reluctance, and then with some kind of empowerment years before any of us had ever heard the word, each of us, in our own time and in our own way, ate Uncle Willis.

  Within the next two years my grandmother and the rest of the Talmadge “girls” went on to their reward. All who gathered with them around the big tab
le that day are now gone, too. There are far fewer spaces left in the Talmadge-Fort lot at Rest Haven these days.

  Yet, for those of us who remain, Willis Buford forever lives on in our hearts every year, as we gather together, wherever we might be.

  Robert Hicks

  Robert Hicks has lived and worked in Nashville for over thirty years. As a music publisher, he has run his own company, launching the careers of some of Nashville’s best-loved singer-songwriters. He has worked as an independent publisher and has also been in partnerships with both PolyGram Music and MCA/Universal Music.

  His regular “guitar pulls” out at his cabin in the hills south of Nashville have attracted everyone from Mary Chapin Carpenter and the late Harlan Howard to John Hiatt and Tom T. Hall; from Jules Shear and Larry Carlton to Ray Wylie Hubbard and Steppenwolf’s John Kay. Keith Richards once remarked, “You just don’t stumble upon the guitar pull, you have to persevere in your heart to get there.”

  As a writer, his essays on regional history, Southern material culture, furniture, and music have appeared in numerous publications over the years. His first book, a collaboration with French-American photographer Michel Arnaud, came out in 2000: Nashville: The Pilgrims of Guitar Town (Stewart, Tabori & Chang).

  His debut novel, The Widow of the South (Warner Books, New York, 2005), was born out of his many years of work at Historic Carnton Plantation in Franklin, Tennessee, and his passion for the preservation of the remaining fragments of the battlefield. The Widow of the South was launched to overwhelming critical success and became a New York Times Best Seller. In December 2005, Hicks was named Tennessean of the Year by the Nashville Tennessean for the impact The Widow of the South has had on Tennessee. He is currently at work on his next novel.