“Get out of here!” Ambrose shouted as he grabbed the brush from its jar. Still carrying the paint bucket, he chased him through the back yard to the front, the brush lifted before him as if he’d paint the dog when he caught him. Roary circled round the porch, squeezed under a gate, and returned to his favorite spot behind the barn.
Still furious with himself, with Josephine, and Milstead Dupey, still searching for distraction, Ambrose walked to a corner of the front lawn where he opened the paint bucket with his pocketknife and began painting the top rail of Edgar’s fence blue. When he had to sit on the ground to paint the lower rail, he watched the top one fade into a limitless blue sky. Finding this illusion of the lack of boundaries appealing, he continued painting rails and posts of the fence all along one side of the lawn. Once out of paint, he fell asleep in the shade of a burr oak where Edgar eventually found him when he returned from town.
Paint spattered, muddy, aching from the falls he’d taken, Ambrose grimaced as he looked up at his brother with Roary beside him.
“I got drunk.”
“You plan on finishing it?” Edgar asked. He leaned down to pat the dog’s head.
Ambrose pointed toward the empty bucket.
Edgar shook his head.
“Kate won’t like the color, will she?” Ambrose struggled to his feet and picked up the brush leaving a smear of blue on the fresh green grass.
His brother shrugged. “It’ll wear off,” he said. “You might let me know when you plan on drinking next. I could have some whitewash on hand.”
Together, the dog following, they walked back to the house.
“Women,” Ambrose muttered.
Edgar gave him a questioning look, which he ignored. A headache began in a far crevice of his skull. It would get worse. What else could he expect? He’d known whisky wasn’t his friend. Edgar and Kate would look after him if he’d let them, but he’d have to talk, have to tell his whole story, have to confess about Jeanie and the boy. Better to go away. Why be bound to Josephine, to Charleston? He could go anywhere.
Alone after supper, he stared out his upstairs bedroom window. Night fell over the widespread lawn so dark with trees he could glimpse only part of the drive, part of the newly painted fence.
Kate just laughed at the color.
Where would he go? Maybe back to New York, or he might take off toward Savannah. He could try to find Jeanie and his son. How many years had it been? Four? What was the boy’s name? How tall was he now? He might even persuade Jeanie to marry him at last. He might. He might not. She could have married someone else. If not she, too, could have made up her mind to despise him. Still he might win her. Why was he filled with such foolish hope? Having more choices was daunting but he could remember waiting for the spring rains to stop the year he was fifteen then hiking out of the mountains while gazing up at a clear blue sky.
THE GRANDS
The ground mist eddied around the mule’s legs. He walked slowly toward a farmhouse as if aware that the man on his back was asleep. Behind the hills the moon set, casting long shadows on rows of cotton already stripped. Leftover bits dotted the dark earth, fluttered from the bolls’ dry hulls, caught the eye of the mule’s rider as he woke. Rising slightly, he touched the fiddle tied to the back of his saddle. As he reached the front porch steps, he shook his head then shouted.
“Hal-loo! Hal-loo!”
The front door opened quickly, but he could not make out the figure holding the lamp.
“Can you tell me where Edgar Moore lives?”
“Edgar Moore?” a woman’s voice answered.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Moore, this is your own house, you fool. Get off that mule and come inside.”
He slid off the mule, untied his fiddle, pulled the girth free, and with the same hand wrestled the saddle and blanket to the porch. Tucking the fiddle under one arm, he moved to the mule’s head, already lowered, slid the bridle off, tossed it, reins dragging, on top of the saddle. For a moment he considered the steps. Five, or were there six? He took every other one in defiant leaps. As he fell over the doorsill, he held the fiddle up in his right hand, then gently both arm and fiddle sank to the carpet.
Kate Moore looked down at him. She had on a new nightdress, which she saw he would not notice. Her long, dark hair was covered with a paisley scarf to keep it unmussed till church time tomorrow. She turned away and put the lamp down on a table by the door. Gathering the white dress around her legs, she sat down on the third step of the stairs. For ten minutes she waited. The figure at her feet did not stir. She stood up, carefully curved his legs out of the way and pushed the door to. Moving deliberately, she picked up the lamp, then carrying it before her, she walked to their bedroom. A mule loose on the front lawn, her husband so drunk he couldn’t move out of the entry hall. Such depravity stopped at her threshold. She locked the door.
It was 1906. My grandmother Moore told me this incident—part of it—long after Grandpa was dead, long after I’d left Tennessee, had married and gone. Part of it she may have imagined. Mine is a family of taletellers, anecdote swappers, believers in the word, for we have used the word to know each other’s lives. But the word often fails. There are lapses, year-long pauses, lies perhaps. And who’s to set matters straight? Whoever is left. There are not many of us.
Leaning back in her chair fifty-four years later, grandmother drifted away for a moment as old people do when telling a story they know well, yet she seemed to be musing over some fragment she did not choose to reveal.
“And the fiddle wasn’t broken?” I asked.
“No. Would have served him right if it had been. Would have served him right if I’d never opened the front door. He’d been at a country dance right after harvest. Big, noisy gatherings. I seldom went. Mr. Moore always wanted to go, so he rode off to play the fiddle for them. In those days they paid the fiddler with liquor, moonshine most likely. That’s why Mr. Moore came home, rather the mule brought him home, in that disgraceful condition.”
“Miss Kate,” Grandpa called her, twenty-two in l906, seventy-six when she decided to tell me the tale, remained a formidably respectable woman. A churchgoer, organizer of Sunday schools, a house cleaner and a collector of cut-glass and porcelains which stood on what-not shelves, a piece of furniture all children were forbidden to approach, she was described by everyone in the family with one word—particular. Reputedly the best cake baker in the county, she detested cooking. Her ideas about what ladies did and did not do led her away from the farm to her house in town as often as possible. She knew how to make lye soap and wring a chicken’s neck but she preferred, as she grew older, to forget such skills. She continued, however, to call Grandpa, dead thirty years before her, “Mr. Moore” all her long life.
Did the formality mark the distance between them? He was ten years older. Or was it merely the custom at that time for women to refer to their husbands as “Mr.” in public while reserving first names for private conversations? Both of these I suspect. And there was yet another reason—inverse snobbery. By continual use of this title and by other means—she insisted he should wear a suit rather than overalls to town—Grandmother tried to reconstruct Grandpa. He would, she was determined, become a gentleman, an act of will bound to fail. Grandpa’s friends called him “Sog,” a name given to him as a child after he fell into a half-empty barrel of sorghum molasses. When told that his station in life demanded a suit he said, “Miss Kate, I will cover myself with a suit for weddings, funerals, going to the bank for a loan and other great occasions but I will not ruin my business by wearing one. Mule traders wear overall like mule buyers do.”
It was a spurious argument since he had many other occupations; however, it served his purpose. She gave up on the suit but not the “Mr.” Though she never said so, it was apparent Grandmother felt she had married beneath her. She was an Allen from Virginia, a designation involving, as far as we could tell, contriving to act as if one’s breeding and social position were more important than mo
ney, especially when the family fortune had fallen to the poverty level.
Some of “the other Moores,” alas, included an older brother who had served time in a distant penitentiary. Grandmother never uttered his name, nor did anyone else in her presence. In fact I did not know of his existence till I was thirty-two, and Uncle Phillip, an in-law, told me Miss Kate had pruned the family tree, lopsidedly as it turned out. She continued to visit her own brother who, besides working as a circus roustabout and running the Silver Slipper Saloon somewhere in Oklahoma, later opened a liquor store in the Texas Panhandle. He was excused because it was a legitimate business located a safe distance from Allen territory. Texas, to her mind, was the Wild West, a suitable place for a wild brother.
Grandpa also still went to see his brother, privately we supposed. Except for lineages of mules, horses, and bird-dogs, Mr. Moore did not care about breeding. Somewhere during their marriage, early I’d venture, Grandpa gave up discussing asses, mares, stallions, and bitches when Grandmother dropped the Allens of Virginia. By the time I was old enough to notice such omissions, she seemed to have lost interest in ancestry altogether.
Grandpa Moore died in 1938 when he was sixty-three and I was three, too young to ask him the truth of those surmises or any others that were passed on to me. Only a few of the immediate family are left. Age, accident and illness carried off Grandmother, my mother, the only son George. Aunt Lucy, her husband Phillip, and their son Fergus remain in Tennessee. I married and moved first to Texas, then to New Mexico, but I fly back to visit my relatives, compelled, I imagine, by the almost atavistic instinct of kinship that knits some families together. Air hours are short; movement through time is long. The moment I leave New Mexico I know I’m flying into a sepia-toned world peopled with beloved though elusive ghosts. Certain characteristics remain distinct while others are exaggerated, softened, forgotten or changed entirely depending on who’s telling the story. What is it we are after? No one seems to desire the whole truth, whatever that may be.
We have never ceased speculating about Grandpa’s death, which was admittedly strange. He was run over by the Interurban, an electric trolley that ran from Nashville to Franklin, a nearby county seat. Part of the tracks bordered his farm, so he often rode home from the fields. What was he doing on those well-known tracks? Could he possibly have gotten stuck? He was diabetic. Did he fall into a coma right there? Did he get drunk and fall asleep on the tracks? Uncle Phillip brought this up, but nobody else agreed with his theory. Was Grandpa suicidal? Why would he have been? None of these questions have ever been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. In 1938 autopsies were seldom performed to settle family curiosity. The suggestion of one would have, no doubt, shocked my grandmother. The Interurban had run over Grandpa. That was enough.
He is so much alive in everyone else’s imagination that I cannot imagine his death. During childhood summers at the farm I’d seen the trolley swerving along making clicking noises on the tracks. Since then I’ve seen those abandoned tracks. I’ve seen the place Grandpa Moore laid across them. Where was the mustachioed villain? The peril was evident. Oh, it was absurd! Like drowning in two feet of water, or choking to death on a fish bone, or dying from a concussion after slipping in a bathtub. Nevertheless, the Interurban ran over Grandpa Moore.
His farmhouse was two-story, faded red brick. The sloping roof of the long front porch divided the front of the house in half. Inside, underneath the stairs, was a closet with a fake floor and space enough between it and the cellar ceiling for a man to hide, a secret place never revealed to children of the family for fear something might happen to one of us if we used it. When Grandmother finally told me, I was twenty-eight and had children of my own to protect, yet I felt cheated.
“What a grand place for hide-and-seek it would have been.”
“You might have gotten stuck. The hinges were rusty. Anyway you most certainly would have been afraid in that small dark space. You would have been hysterical. Screaming and crying.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“Some other child would’ve.”
“I wonder who built it?”
“We never knew. Perhaps it was added. The farmhouse was old. I forget when it was built exactly, sometime before the Civil War though.”
“Perhaps Confederate soldiers were hidden there.”
“Aren’t you the romantic!”
“Or it was part of the underground railway.”
“More than likely it was meant to hide valuables, silver and jewelry, and such.”
Wasn’t it just as likely that Grandpa hid his whisky there, and she knew it though she wasn’t supposed to? I stared at her. She had dark eyes, a small staunch figure. No matter what the season she wore a full corset. Her composure, her certainty about all matters of opinion, was broken only by laughter. I cannot remember seeing her cry until she was in her eighties and had had a cerebral hemorrhage. Yet I was not there to witness every moment of her life.
There were many secrets in the family, things not told for years. Grandmother never told anyone where she met Mr. Moore, not even her own children. My cousin Fergus said he bet they met on a train. Fergus is “a little wild” his mother says, but he’s my only first cousin. He drove our grandmother down to Austin to my oldest child’s christening, so naturally I like him. And I like his idea. Everybody rode trains then.
“How do you do, Miss…? My name is Edgar Moore. I farm down around Franklin, Tennessee.” Mr. Moore sat in the seat across from her.
“I don’t know a thing about agriculture. I could hardly tell you if that was corn or cotton growing out there.” She folded her white-gloved hands on her lap and looked out the window.
“Ladies needn’t know about farming. Where are you from?’
“Virginia. Most of my family lives in Richmond. I have an aunt in Tennessee.”
“Where?”
“Franklin.” She twisted her fingers together. She had never ridden on a train alone before, much less spoken to a man while riding on one, but it seemed uncivil not to speak when he was sitting just across from her. Of course she would not give him her name. Fortunately Mr. Moore recognized the aunt when he and Miss Kate arrived at the station. In time, allowing a few days for her to recover from her journey, he came calling.
If they were both on the train from Richmond to Nashville in 1904, it was as innocent as that, I believe. How easy it is to believe one’s own fictions. Perhaps they were not riding the train. Perhaps they met on some other occasion. He was an eligible bachelor, and she was a young woman in need of a husband. I’m certain they did not meet in church. Grandpa was a backslidden Methodist, one of those who attended Easter services if at all, while Grandmother was a Campbellite, a member of the Church of Christ, one of the fiercer fundamentalist groups. Drinking, smoking, dancing, gambling and card playing were forbidden. So were musical instruments in church. To tune the congregation for hymn singing, the minister blew on a pitch pipe. The only amusement during the service was reading the hymnal or lugubrious funeral parlor advertisements on one side of the cardboard fans.
Invariably the picture on the other side was of a longhaired, extremely gentile Christ dressed in a white robe vaguely reminiscent of garments worn by the choir in other churches. He was standing in a highly idealized garden of Gethsemane alone except for a number of rose bushes in the foreground and cypress trees in the background. I used to wonder about those heavy, red, symmetrical roses. They were like no others I’d seen. Finally I decided they were supposed to be heavenly flowers. The message beneath ran: Your Friend In Your Hour Of Need. Then there was the name and phone number of the funeral parlor. As a child with a wide experience in visiting family churches—all kinds of Protestants plus Catholics were represented—I found Grandmother’s the most dour. However, it suited her astringent needs which were most apparent in her sense of decorum. To her the simplest act—such as meeting a man—could be dangerous. One had to have a proper introduction by some family member or, lacking that, by a t
rusted friend. Over-trained in social conventions, she had no training at all in being a farmer’s wife. How did she adapt? I wish I’d asked her during her lifetime, still the question isn’t difficult. So much is already known it’s easy for me to intuit her answers.
“At the farm the front porch was a good deal of trouble because children wanted to play out there. I would be in the kitchen and Mr. Moore would come in carrying George. He was about two then.”
Both Grandpa’s and George’s faces were red, Grandpa’s from the sun, George’s from bawling.
“Miss Kate, he’s fallen off the porch again. Why can’t you watch this child?” he shouted.
She shouted back, “I can’t watch George and cook dinner at the same time. There are too many dangerous places around here. Watch him yourself.”
“I’m hiring you a cook.”
“High time!” Miss Kate turned her own reddened face back to the wood stove, a large black cast iron monster she despised every day all day every summer.
She was expecting my mother then. 1908. Pregnant, hot, often exhausted, she was in no humor to accommodate. George did not fall off the porch again. She sat on the porch swing, fanned herself, and watched him while Minnie took over the kitchen.
My grandmother and I never looked in the least alike. Our opinions seldom matched. Though I cry easily, perhaps our temperaments are somewhat the same. Children are easily influenced. I lived in the town house with her, Uncle George and my mother during part of World War II. I wished I’d had a cook.
In his photograph Grandpa, curly-headed and long-nosed, looks like a sober, industrious squire. In many ways he was. A gold watch-chain stretched across a large belly. He had three hundred acres of rich Middle Tennessee land where he raised cotton, corn, alfalfa, tobacco, and the usual barnyard produce, hogs and chickens. He also had mules to trade and property in town to tend. Until Miss Kate made him take it down, he had a sign on his front gate reading Trade in Your Old Mules for New. After he died my grandmother lived for almost thirty years on his investments and had some money left over to leave to their children. In part he was another sort of person which accounted for a barely suppressed smile and definite laughter in his eyes in that photograph. As a child I simply thought he looked jolly. Fergus, five years older, knew better.
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