“Grandpa was a rascal. He taught me to chew tobacco when I was seven.”
“Didn’t you hate the taste of it?”
“Yes, but he convinced me it was something a man needed to know how to do. He taught me how to spit too. Put me up on a wagon seat with him, took me off to town to trade mules. On the way there and back he gave me cussing lessons. We had a wonderful time.”
“What did Aunt Lucy say about that?”
“Mama didn’t know until too late. There was a whole side to Grandpa he didn’t show to women.”
Fergus has Grandpa’s long nose and curly hair. He was working on the belly, said it came naturally since he had to stay up all night eating and drinking with his clients, country musicians who swept into Nashville to play at the Grand Old Opry or hoped to play there. Like so many bats out of a cave blinded by light, they weren’t really comfortable until dark, so Fergus kept his recording studio open till two or three in the morning. We were talking in his office, the single messiest place I’ve ever entered—this includes the slums of Naples and my children’s bedrooms. Over two desks a hanging basket of red plastic geraniums dangled from a set of longhorn steer horns partially hiding a five-foot print of a tiger serenely marching through his jungle. A round table pushed to one side held stacks of poker chips, cards, a cluster of dirty glasses and ashtrays. File boxes sat on all but one seat of a couch. Behind them plastic ferns caught dust in front of a window that was never opened.
In the next room was a well-stocked bar equally in shambles. People, most of them wearing blue jeans, wandered through the office to the bar to replenish drinks. Fergus nodded or waved as they came and went. Grandpa’s gold watch, suspended under a glass globe, shone amid the chaos of papers, calculators, hunting knives and one villainous looking carved coconut rolling around between the phones on his desks. The coconut had on an eye patch, a bit of blue bandanna and an earring, all attempts to transform it into a pirate’s head. I counted three broken guitars in two corners; a busted drum took up one chair. In order to sit down, I had to prop my feet on a large carton of toilet paper, not that I minded. Fergus has always been like this, a collector and a keeper. The office was his version of Grandpa’s barn, a jumble of everything that ever was a piece of farm equipment. Strictly his territory. No one disturbs Fergus’ clutter but him. He lives in it like a bandit chief surrounded by his spoils.
“You know, Marianne, the only woman who ever caught sight of Grandpa’s carrying on was Miss Kate, and she didn’t know the half of it.”
“How did they stay together all those years? Of course there were three children. But he was almost ten years older than she was—”
“People did then,” said Fergus. He’d been divorced once and seemed perpetually on the edge of marrying again though he could never quite make up his mind to it. Compared to Fergus, I’ve led a sedate life, married for twenty-five years to the same man, mother of three. My husband and I run a horse ranch, a place near Santa Fe where we breed and raise quarter horses.
“Of course,” Fergus reminded me, “Miss Kate was his perfect opposite. He honored her quirks—built her that house in Franklin, paid for all kinds of help—and she put up with his … his good times.”
And the bad times? Do we forget them too easily? “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Well, yes. We don’t like to think of our grandparents as pitiable. They were though. For all her bossiness, my grandmother loved men, yet for thirty years she was a widow. During her last years she was quite mad. In her senility she confused me with my mother. She wouldn’t fly. She had allergies, arthritis, her share of aches, fevers and anxiety attacks which she called “nerves.”
As for Grandpa? I do know a mean old sow bit him in the calf of his leg, and he had to use a cane for six months. He was aware that his only son George hated farming. He was not fond of either one of his sons-in-law. Hail flattened entire alfalfa crops. Drought destroyed the cotton. Every kind of pest invaded his fields. To the forces of nature he remained a stoic. “The earth survives all weather,” he said. To the forces within he was, I think, largely a stranger. He often drank too much when he wasn’t supposed to drink at all. Diabetes made him melancholy. Some days he sat alone on the steps to the hayloft and cursed. I never saw him there, still I’m sure he must have done it, slumped there in the dark barn, fanned his face with his hat and cursed repetitively, dully.
“Why didn’t I ever hear Grandpa play the fiddle?” Aunt Lucy is the only one I can ask.
“Oh, you were too young. No, let me think. He quit playing for the family sometime in the thirties. He’d go to his room to play or sit out under a tree in the yard. I don’t know what made him do it, some argument he and Mother had. I guess … something to do with fiddling and drinking. They seemed to go together. But he used to play for us all on Saturday nights—when we’d stay home to listen. He was the only one in the family who knew how to play a musical instrument. Mother had a player piano. Remember?”
I did. It stood in a corner of the living room out at the farm and was forbidden to children. Field mice had invaded it, eaten all the felt off the hammers, chewed through rolls of paper. My grandmother’s mute cultural pretension; it might as well have been a broken hay mower.
“Your mother and father—before they married—Uncle Phillip and I used to dance on the front porch in the summers. No rugs were ever rolled up for dancing in Mother’s houses. George joined in when he was courting a girl. He was always the caller. It wasn’t the kind of music we wanted in the twenties. Papa only knew square dance tunes, things like Cotton-Eyed-Joe, The Virginia Reel, Shoofly. We wanted saxophones, drums, trumpets … jazz.”
It was easy to see them. Grandpa in a vest and shirtsleeves, tapping his foot just outside the front screen door, light from the entryway falling on his fiddle under his chin, moths fluttering toward the light. Three young men, three young women dancing.
“Promenade all,” George called, and they pranced all the way to the swing, heels clattering on the wooden porch floor. An owl hooted. The moon rose. At a distance the lawn’s familiar elms, maples, magnolias were outlined in black, and the tops of the cars shone in the driveway. Grandpa played while his children square danced before him wearing flapper clothes. That was the only kind of dancing Miss Kate allowed. The Charleston, the shimmy, the black bottom, even the foxtrot were as religiously banned as the hip flask.
“Your father generally had some whisky with him. Or if he didn’t, your Uncle Phillip did. I suspect George did too only he couldn’t very well offer his papa a drink. When we were finished the men would go out to the cars and—”
“Where was Grandmother?”
“In the kitchen unpacking ice-cream. She had Minnie to make it and George to crank it. She made the cake … chocolate with a fudge icing or lemon with bits of shredded peel in a white seven minute icing.” She smiled. “Makes me hungry to think about them. Your father and Phillip and Papa sat on the porch steps chewing mints till she called them in.”
Aunt Lucy is white-headed and slight. Fluttery as a small nervous bird. Uncle Phillip is short, pink-cheeked, white-headed also. He likes the nostalgic tales but he insists, sensibly as usual, “You’re forgetting the bad years.”
“Yes,” Aunt Lucy sighed. “There were those. Papa would plant, we’d have a drought, and there would be nothing to reap. Mother hated those times. She’d have to rent the town house and she couldn’t go to Saratoga. Lord, she loved going to Saratoga Springs! So we’d just be stuck there on the farm gathering eggs and waiting for the weather to change. That’s when Papa took off. I never knew where he went exactly.” She drifted back to the kitchen to bring us some coffee.
“Hunting,” Fergus winked at me and his father. “He went off hunting I expect.”
We were sitting in another room full of Grandmother’s dark Victorian furniture Aunt Lucy had inherited. Carved leaves, nuts, fruit protruded from the backs and arms; unyielding upholstery held us upright. The cut-glass shone on the sideboard and
nearby shelves were full of fussy porcelain figurines; a milkmaid, a shepherd, a harlequin, and men and women covered with lace who appeared to be engaged in a court dance sometime in the 1700s somewhere in Europe. There wasn’t a single chicken, dog, pig, horse or mule, no figure from my grandparents’ daily lives. Naturally Grandmother wouldn’t have wanted a figurine of the hired man or the cook, and the idea of a porcelain pig or mule in her parlor would have offended her. Propriety and beauty were Made In Dresden. Meanwhile Grandpa slopped hogs, traded mules, tilled the soil, bought property in town, and every once in a while, broke loose.
“I don’t see any reason to disturb Mother’s … um, view of the world. She’s happy with it. But I’ll tell you, Grandpa didn’t do much hunting. He had a shack out in the woods where he went to do his serious drinking. One time he took the sheriff with him.” Fergus laughed.
“Why?”
“Marianne,” said Uncle Philip, “You remind me of your mother, always wanting to know why this and why that. Until you came along she asked more questions than anybody in the family. No one knows why exactly. He thought the sheriff was working too hard maybe. Mr. Moore and some fellow were having an altercation on the square. The sheriff’s office was right there. He stepped out to ask them to quiet down. Mr. Moore talked him into getting in the buggy with him. You wouldn’t remember his horses. He had a fine pair of matched bays. Before the sheriff knew it, your grandpa had taken him out of the county. They spent three or four days in the woods eating country ham, biscuits, and redeye gravy and drinking whisky. Country ham creates a powerful thirst. Probably they did a little dove hunting too. Finally the sheriff mentioned he had to get back to town.”
I sat in that upright chair thinking for a few minutes about a three or four-day diet of country ham, redeye gravy, biscuits, and whisky. There is absolutely nothing anybody can do to vary the taste of Tennessee country ham. Smoke cured, with hickory usually, heavily salted, it’s first boiled for hours, baked, cooled, then cut into the thinnest possible slices which are eaten cold or fried in ham fat. After the first day maybe the whisky helped. Or maybe Grandpa and the sheriff stumbled to the nearest farm and bought some eggs. Oh, it’s not hard at all to search the country for groceries, not for me. I know that country, know what a hungry farmer and a sheriff might eat.
“Sog, I can’t eat eggs.”
“Can’t?”
“Never could look a fried egg in the eye.” “Scrambled?”
“Them neither. My mama used to cook them with brains. With or without they still look suspicious to me.”
The woman at the back door waited holding a bowl in her hands. Her hair was gray, her figure slack. She had on a loose brown shift. Miss Kate wouldn’t have given her the time of day if she’d seen her in the country or in town.
“What about turnip greens, Ma’am? You got any turnip greens you’ll sell us?”
“Out there in the garden if you’ll pick ’um. You won’t be wanting the eggs then?”
“Let’s cut that to a dozen ’stead of two.”
“How you going to carry ’um?”
It was a poor place, a tenant farmer’s shack with not a scrap of anything to waste, not a box, not a bit of paper.
He wrapped the eggs in some turnip greens and put them in his hat. The sheriff stuck the rest of the greens under the buggy’s seat.
“Ain’t we dandies, by God!” Sog roared as they took off.
“You’re going to think so when one of them eggs breaks in your hat,” said the sheriff.
“I wonder what Grandmother said when he got back?”
“I don’t think she said anything much. They understood each other. He’d toe her mark just so long then he’d rip off,” Uncle Phillip said. He must have wished sometimes that he’d ripped more himself. Most of his life he worked for an insurance company and when he retired he kept on looking after anyone who needed looking after, which amounted to nearly all the Moores—Grandmother, Uncle George, Aunt Lucy and elderly cousins that everyone else had forgotten. He was a man naturally inclined toward benevolence, but can’t such an inclination become a burden too?
“Miss Kate would leave when she pleased,” Fergus reminded me. “Don’t forget her hay fever.”
Grandmother’s hay fever dictated a trip every fall. She got on a train and left the state for some other where ragweed wasn’t pollinating. Her family had scattered by then. She visited her sister in Pennsylvania once, her brother in the Texas Panhandle more often. Frequently she went to a spa like Saratoga or Red Boiling Springs. And she traveled alone. A few years after Grandpa died she announced she’d cured herself of hay fever by eating the local honey.
Fergus’ comment was, “She would’ve of had to have eaten about fifty gallons of it. Miss Kate lost her reason for going. She didn’t have to get away from the farm anymore.
“But she usually spoke of Grandpa as if she adored him.”
“Sure she did. They admired each other. He did everything she wouldn’t have dared, and she … she was such a model of respectable behavior he couldn’t help but admire her.”
“You keep throwing the old opposites theory at me.”
Fergus took a long puff on his cigar. He often used it to underline his opinions in the same way that pipe smokers point the stems of their pipes or make people wait while they puff and consider an importunate question.
“Honey, I can’t come up with nothing no better.”
This was another of Fergus’ tricks, to switch to bad English when he wanted to make a point. In the country music business to be able to “talk country” was a necessity. It was also an effective way of disparaging someone else’s opinion. By playing the ignoramus, he could at the same time play the sage, plainspoken hick. At times like this I thought I saw Grandpa’s influence coming through again, or maybe it was just the cigar that made me think of him and tobacco.
Aunt Lucy floated back in just as I spoke of seeing tobacco in his field.
“Now, you have that wrong. Papa only raised tobacco once. He said it was too much worry.”
“It wasn’t just worry about the crop,” Uncle Phillip interrupted. “He said it was too hard on his barn. Curing the way he did it required a hardwood fire burning slow on the floor of the barn and lasted nearly three weeks. You never saw that done did you, Marianne?”
I hadn’t. I knew almost nothing about the real business of farming. Grandpa’s only son Uncle George didn’t like what he knew. He was far more interested in buying and selling land than he was in plowing and harvesting. First he took up auctioneering, then real estate. I wondered briefly what Grandpa would have thought about that.
“Well, he was a trader himself,” said Fergus.
“Papa wasn’t sentimental about farming. He liked the look of the land, the way certain fields lay, and he took pride in what he could raise, but he always planned for us to leave the place—all of us. He insisted on college educations, girls included. Papa was a great believer in education.” Aunt Lucy got up again and went to the dining room.
“I want to show you something. You haven’t seen it in years.” She held up a wax apple with teeth marks on it.
For an instant I was seven years old again tasting wax instead of the tart apple I’d expected, and Fergus was laughing just as he laughed then. Of course he was the one who had dared me to take the fruit from Grandmother’s cut-glass bowl on her dining table. Of course I chose the apple; I liked it best. It was a strong primary red, darker on one side than the other.
“Did you keep the rest of it, Aunt Lucy?” Once there was a bunch of grapes, a banana, a pear, two plums, two peaches, and an orange. All were wax, beautifully colored and shaded to ripe perfection, or so they appeared to me in those pre-plastic days. By some childish twist of logic I had not thought to wonder why the fruit never spoiled. Perhaps I unconsciously assumed everything in my grandmother’s house stayed quietly perfect in the way old people seem always the same age to children.
“That kind of thing went out of styl
e, and Mother put them in the attic. You remember, that storeroom she had upstairs. One hot summer they must have collapsed. Only the apple kept its shape. When we cleared out the house, I threw the rest away.”
The truth is sometimes a poor, sad thing—wax fruit melted in an attic, a lone mule wandering on the front lawn, a mute player piano—a few insubstantial fragments. All we could do was grab hold and make something more of them. I turned the apple in my hands.
“It’s a grief, clearing out a house after someone’s gone. But you can’t keep everything. You’d never believe that though, looking at Fergus’ office.”
“The ghost of Miss Kate flies through there on white angel wings around four every morning. Sometimes people hear her screaming.” Fergus grinned.
“And Grandpa’s ghost?”
“Oh, his is still riding though the Arcade on a mule.”
The Arcade is a sort of covered passageway through the middle of a block in downtown Nashville. Small stores used to face pedestrians on either side. I don’t know what’s there now or if it’s even still used.
“Why did he do that?”
“He’d been up to Nashville to see some friends,” Fergus said and looked at the ceiling as if he wished I hadn’t asked.
“You mean he’d been up all night drinking” Aunt Lucy intervened. “I know he did that kind of thing. I swear, the way he treats me, you’d think I was Mother. She’d hardly let anybody say ‘whisky’ in front of her.”
“Yes,” Fergus went on, “well … he rode through the Arcade and found a policeman waiting for him on the other side. And the policeman said, ‘I’m fining you five dollars for disorderly conduct.’
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