Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  After we finished the possum, Willalee and Lottie Mae and I stayed at the table sopping cane syrup with biscuits. Will and Katie had gone out on the front porch to rest, and we were left alone with Auntie, who was already working over the table, taking plates to the tin tub where she would wash them, and putting whatever food had been left over into the screen-wire safe.

  Finally, she came to stand beside where I sat at the table. “Come on now, boy,” she said, “an ole Auntie’ll show you.”

  “Show me what?” I said.

  She was holding the little shallow saucer with the possum’s eyes in it. The eyes were clouded in a pink pool of diluted blood. They rolled on the saucer as I watched.

  “Nem mind,” she said. “Come on.”

  We followed her out the back door into the yard. We didn’t go but a step or two before she squatted down and dug a hole. The rear of the house was almost covered with stretched and nailed hides of squirrels and rabbits and coons and even a fox which Willalee’s daddy had trapped. I would find out later that Auntie had tanned the hides by rubbing the animals’ hides on the flesh side with their own brains. It caused the hair to fall out of the hide and left it soft and pliable.

  “You eat a possum, you bare its eyes,” she said, still squatting beside the little hole she had dug.

  I motioned toward Sam where he stood at my heels. “You gone bury it,” I said, “you better bury it deeper’n that. Don’t he’ll dig it up. You might as well go on and give it to’m now.”

  “Won’t dig up no possum’s eyes,” she said. “Sam’s got good sense.”

  Sam did not, either.

  “Know how come you got to barum?” she said.

  “How come?” I said.

  “Possums eat whatall’s dead,” she said. Her old, cracked voice had gone suddenly deep and husky. “You gone die too, boy.”

  “Yes,” I said, stunned.

  “You be dead an in the ground, but you eat this possum an he gone come lookin for you. He ain’t ever gone stop lookin for you.”

  I could not now speak. I watched as she carefully took the two little clouded eyes out of the dish and placed them in the hole, arranging them so they were looking straight up toward the cloudless summer sky. They seemed to watch me where I was.

  Auntie smiled, showing her snuff-colored gums. “You ain’t got to think on it, boy. See, we done put them eyes looking up. But you gone be down. Ain’t never gone git you. Possum be looking for you up, an you gone be six big feets under the ground. You gone allus be all right, you put the eyes lookin up.”

  Auntie made me believe we live in a discoverable world, but that most of what we discover is an unfathomable mystery that we can name—even defend against—but never understand.

  My fifth birthday had come and gone, and it was the middle of the summer, 1940, hot and dry and sticky, the air around the table thick with the droning of house flies. At supper that night neither my brother nor I had to ask where daddy was. There was always, when he had gone for whiskey, a tension in the house that you could breathe in with the air and feel on the surface of your skin, and more than that, there was that awful look on mama’s face. I suppose the same look was on our faces, too, worried as we all were, not knowing what the night would bring, not knowing if it would be this night or the next night, or the morning following the second night, when he would come home after a drunk, bloodied, his clothes stinking with whiskey sweat.

  We sat at the supper table, eating quietly, nobody saying a word, and when we finished, my brother and I went just as quietly into the fireroom and sat in ladder-back chairs, staring into the cold hearthstone where there had been no fire for two months. By the time mama came in to sit with us we had already brought in the foot tub full of water. The only thing we seemed to wash for long periods of time on the farm was our face and hands at the water shelf on the back porch and our feet in front of the hearthstone.

  That night as we sat silently together, everybody thinking of daddy, thinking of where he was and how he might come home, I—for reasons which I’ll never know—turned to mama and said: “I want to preach.”

  She immediately understood that I didn’t mean that I wanted to be a preacher or to become a preacher, but rather that I wanted to preach right then. She said: “Well, son, if you want to preach, just get up there and preach to us.”

  She was always open and direct with us, always kind and loving, even though she was always strict. She believed that if a child did something he knew was wrong, had been told was wrong, he had to be whipped. And she did throughout my childhood throw some pretty good whippings on my brother and me. But she never whipped us when we did not know that we deserved it and, more, when we did not expect it.

  Mama and my brother sat there in front of the cold fireplace while I got up and turned my ladder-back chair over and got the crocheted doily off the pedal-driven Singer sewing machine to cover the chair with. The chair covered with the doily made a fine altar from which to preach. I took hold of it with both hands, looked out at them, and started my sermon.

  I said: “We all of us made out of dirt. God took Him up some dirt and put it in his hands and rolled it around and then he spit in the dirt and roll it some more and out of that dirt and God spit, he made you and me, all of us.”

  That is the way my preaching began. I don’t remember how it ended, but I know it went on for a long time and it was made pretty much out of what I had heard in church, what I had heard the preacher say about hell and God and heaven and damnation and the sorry state of the human condition. Hell was at the center of any sermon I had ever heard in Bacon County. In all the churches, you smelled the brimstone and the sulfur and you felt the fire and you were made to know that because of what you had done in your life, you were doomed forever. Unless somehow, somewhere, you were touched by the action of mercy and the Grace of God. But you could not, you must not, count on the Grace of God. It probably would not come to you because you were too sorry.

  I was exhausted by the time it was over, and I was asleep the moment my head touched the pillow. But I heard the pickup truck when it came in. And I heard daddy come through the front gate, the plow points banging and his own drunk-heavy feet on the steps and the front door slamming, and then I heard, as I already knew I would, querulous voices as mama and daddy confronted each other there beyond the thin wall. Finally, their voices raised to shouts and even screams, but since there was nothing breaking, no pots hitting the wall, no glass splattering on the floor, no furniture turning over, I could stand lying in my bed if I concentrated on hell and damnation. This was nothing compared to the eternal fires of hell that God might someday demand that I endure. With my whole self firmly immersed in hell, I could usually go back to sleep.

  I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. An enormous and brilliant moon shone over the cotton field where I was standing, still in my gown. It was not a dream and I knew immediately that it was not a dream. I was where I thought I was, and I had come here by walking in my sleep. I came awake that night the way I always have when I’ve gotten up in my sleep and walked. Terrified. Terrified almost beyond terror because it had no name and was sourceless. My heart was pounding, and my gown was soaked with sweat and sticking to my freezing skin. My mouth was full of the taste of blood where I’d chewed my lips.

  The cotton bolls were open all about me. As far as I could see, all the way to the dark wall of trees surrounding the field, was a white sheet of cotton, brilliant and undulating under the heavy moon. I stood there for a long time, unable to move. Off there to the left was the enormous oak tree that I had slept under that morning, it, too, brilliant in the moon, and behind the tree was the house, dark in its own shadow. I did not know what to do. I did not cry and I did not scream. I did not think that I could go back there to the dark house where my family slept. I somehow knew they would not receive me. I knew that I was guilty of something neither man nor God could forgive. But it would always be so when I walked in my sleep.

  I sto
od utterly still and waited because I knew if I waited long enough, the terror would find a source and a name. Once it had a name, no matter how awful, I would be able to live with it. I could go back home.

  Gradually, the terror shapes itself into a school bus. I can see it plainly. It is full of children. Stopped by the side of a road. I am in the ditch by the side of the road. They do not see me. It is broad daylight and many of the children are looking right at me. But they don’t—they can’t—see me. I have something in my hand. I do not know what it is. I cannot tell what it is. I come slowly out of the ditch and touch the school bus with the thing in my hand. The moment contact is made, the whole bus disintegrates in my eyes. There is no explosion, no sound at all. The disintegration is silent as sleep. When I can see again, the bus is on its back, broken children hang from open windows, and some—the ones toward the back—are drenched in gas from the ruptured tank and they are frying, noiselessly frying. I can smell them frying. And I am terrified at the probable consequences that will follow what I have done, but I am glad I have done it.

  Now I can go home, and I start off in a dead run between the rows of cotton toward the dark house beyond the oak tree.

  When I got to the door, I opened it quietly and went down the hall to the little room where I knew daddy was sleeping on a pallet. It was where he often had to sleep when he came in drunk and out of control and mama would not let him into their room. He lay, still dressed, curled on the quilt spread across the floor under an open window through which bright moonlight fell. I sat down beside him and touched his face, traced the thick scar of perfect teeth on his flat high cheekbone. The air in the room was heavy with the sweet smell of bourbon whiskey. Sweat stood on his forehead and darkly stained his shirt.

  “Daddy,” I said. He made a small noise deep in his chest, and his eyes opened. “Daddy, I’m scared.”

  He pushed himself onto one elbow and put an arm around me and drew me against him. I could feel the bristle of his beard on my neck. I trembled and tried not to cry.

  “Sho now,” he whispered against my ear. “Everybody’s scared now and then.”

  “I was in the cotton field,” I said. “Out there.”

  He turned his head, and we both looked through the window at the flat white field of cotton shining under the moon.

  “You was dreaming, boy,” he said. “But you all right now.”

  “I woke up out there.” Now I was crying, not making any noise, but unable to keep the tears from streaming down my face. I pushed my bare feet into the moonlight. “Look,” I said. My feet and the hem of my gown were gray with the dust of the field.

  He drew back and looked into my eyes, smiling. “You walked in your sleep. It ain’t nothing to worry about. You probably got it from me. I’as bad to walk in my sleep when I was a boy.”

  The tears eased back. “You was?” I said.

  “Done it a lot,” he said. “Don’t mean nothing.”

  I don’t know if he was telling the truth. But hearing him say it was something that he had done and that I might have got it from him took my fear away.

  “You lie down here on the pallet with your ole daddy and go to sleep. Me an you is all right. We both all right.”

  I lay down with my head on his thick arm, wrapped in the warm, sweet smell of whiskey and sweat, and was immediately asleep.

  ELEANOR MUNRO (1928-)

  Eleanor Munro has written several volumes of nonfiction, including On Glory Roads: A Pilgrim’s Book About Pilgrimage (1987), Originals: American Women Artists (1979), and Through the Vermilion Gates (1971).

  A graduate of Smith College, Munro completed graduate studies at Columbia University and the Sorbonne.

  Her fascinating Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter (1988) largely concerns her father, Thomas Munro, a curator of the Cleveland Museum of Art, who wrote Scientific Method in Aesthetics, and her first husband, Alfred Frankfurter, who edited Art News.

  This section describes her paternal grandfather, the son of Scottish immigrants, who grew up farming in Nebraska. He married a New England woman, Mary Spaulding, and later retired with her to a “little homestead” in the Catskills.

  from MEMOIR OF A MODERNIST’S DAUGHTER

  There it was that our grandfather, by then a knobby, sour-faced Scot with the deferential manners of some country people, would take me and my brother on his knee when we begged him to tell us a story.

  “Bappa, tell us about Rip van Winkle!”

  “What? That one again?” He would settle into his rocker covered with old scarves and a crocheted afghan. He would raise his head, lean back against the chair and close his eyes while he called up the lines. I looked up into the long deep pleats of his throat. I jabbed my brother as we settled ourselves in his lap. My brother jabbed me.

  “Soo, soo,” our grandfather would say, stroking our arms and our hair. “Settle down and listen. There was a man a long time ago…”

  (Our eyes were closing, my brown head leaning on my brother’s curly gold one.)

  “…and he lifted his hand to his face and felt a long beard. ‘Oh, what is this?’ he cried. ‘What has happened? I just lay down for an hour, and now I am changed…and where is my home, and my wife and my son?…’

  “Then came a lady…

  “‘I remember a Rip, a long time ago,’ said she, ‘but he went away into the woods and his family is gone to the ends of the world. But come into my house, old man, and I’ll care for you till you die.’”

  Thus did our grandfather weave for us the first intimation we had of the exile’s lament, the pain of separation and the impossibility of finding one’s way back to the place of beginning. So much had been lost out of his own life by then, a whole clan vanished on the winds, his sisters Flora and Ferny, his mother and dad, and behind them in memory, the patriarch, Big Alexander of the Prayers, an evangelical preacher-teacher born on Skye after the catastrophe of Culloden.

  On us, our grandfather shed the love those clansmen shed on their children and the lore he had learned by the sea and on the prairie. He taught us the Indian walk and how to lift birch bark with a penknife, bend it and seal it with candlewax for a toy canoe. He gave me my name, Hiawatha Painted-feather, and ordered me moccasins and a bow and arrow from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. One day when the rain was blowing in sheets, he strode out into the storm to cut me Indian grass for a basket.

  “Because he loves you,” said Mary, biting off a thread. I watched through the window as he leaned against the wind. He came back stamping, shaking rain all over the kitchen, his eyes grave behind spotted glasses, speaking in a brogue full of tenderness, “It rains on the housetops and all through the land…”

  When I dropped my doll, old and floppy, down the outhouse, he raked it up and washed it. “Because he loves you,” said Mary tightly, watching it blow on the line. It must have hurt her to see how such small acts touched us while her demanding labors left us unaware.

  He seemed very wise and knew all the tales, and even those he may not have known I attribute today to his telling, for they all come out of the same well. “Pison, Giheon, Hiddekel and Phrath,” he would begin, “four are the rivers that run toward the sea.” He would reach over to the enormous black teacher’s desk that stood by his chair, pull out from among his Testaments and Psalms, his Homer, his Tennyson and Longfellow, his Emerson, Darwin and Spencer, a yellow tin box of licorice. His hands would move like rusty farm machinery to work off the lid. With slow farmer’s hands, he would grope out two tiny black squares for us and go on playing on the strings of our imagination.

  The old names lay soft on his tongue—Gilgamesh and Abraham, Theseus and Odysseus, Mowgli and Ab, and the one who went into the pit and whose coat was dipped in blood.

  “Man was born in a cave and lived in a tree. Man sailed in a boat dug out with fire, curved like the moon. Man wrote on a stone in letters called runes.

  “What is man?” he would ask us children, looking away over our heads into the distance through his heavy
glasses. Then he would answer. “He struggles upward. He pushes on. He reaches his level. He will live on that spiritual height forever.”

  “You are so wise, Bappa,” I said more than once, standing by his knee, looking up into his face. And he would correct me gently, “Remember the man who walked by the sea and picked up a stone.

  “‘This stone,’ he said, ‘is what I know,’ and he threw it into the waves.

  “‘The ocean is what I do not know.’”

  There came a time, after Mary died, when he came down from the mountain to live with us in Ohio. I was then an adolescent, and he seemed to me pulled out from the roots, an aged melancholic in black clothes and ill-fitting false teeth. For a while, he wanted to chop wood for exercise, as he had once done for necessity. So my father ordered cords of it, and every afternoon he would take his stance in the backyard, fix the log with solemn gaze, lift the ax and let it fall. All afternoon, chop chop would echo down the backyards of our suburban block, chop chop like the sounds of country lands. So he would chop while the hours went by, and it came to me, young as I was, that he was holding time at bay.

  Then his mind began to go. “The Overflowing Fountain bathes us all,” he would intone. “The spirit lives on. We can communicate beyond the grave. I often feel the presence of my beloved Mary.” At parties in our house, he would lift a finger to a circle of guests. His impassioned brogue brought them to a halt. “What is man? A wind that passeth away and cometh not again….”

  Witness to such scenes, my brother and sisters and I stood helpless in pity and shame. “He is old, he is sad, he is mystical,” our father instructed us children, four in number by then. “He believes in things people no longer do. Don’t hurt him by arguing, but remember there’s no truth to them.” I saw our father had no way to approach his father or to alleviate his own pain. It was then our mother, usually so diffident and self-involved, who would reach out to the old man, quiet him and lead him off to his room at the back of the house. So that finally we children, busy in any case with our schoolwork, our sports, parties and friends, were uncertain how to behave and drew away, leaving our grandfather in his loneliness.