The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  ‘Who’s accusing you of misdiagnosis?’

  ‘Well, you’re accusing me of something, Miss Babcock, the way you keep coming down here and glaring at me all the time.’

  ‘You’re paranoid, Dr. Vogel.’ But as she thought about it, she realized that she was accusing him of something — of failing to live up to the myth that modern medicine was invincible. He couldn’t help it if his advance men had been overzealous in their claims.

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘As far as I can see,’ Ginny explained to Maxine and Clem as she sat in their cluttered kitchen that afternoon, ‘the doctors have tried everything they can think of. What she needs now is a miracle.’ She immediately regretted her choice of words. Since her evening in the springhouse, she had resolutely avoided the topic of religion with Clem and Maxine. The few times they’d met, they had studied her face eagerly, waiting for her to tell them that she was prepared to join them in the springhouse again. Each time she had deftly sidestepped the issue of her spiritual malaise. She wasn’t in any condition to decide anything and was struggling not to succumb, for once in her life, to the nearest sympathetic shoulder.

  Clem’s eyes gleamed with fanaticism as he pleaded, ‘Give the Lord a chance, Ginny. He healed my leg. He can heal your mother’s blood.’

  ‘What would it involve?’ Clem’s regenerated leg was difficult to dispute. After all, didn’t the Lord traditionally work in mysterious ways?

  ‘Could you bring her to the Temple?’

  Ginny pondered the topic. ‘I don’t see any way I could get her out undetected. Besides, it would be very difficult for her to climb that hill.’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll come to her. After a service. When I feel the power upon me.’

  ‘That would be great, Clem,’ Ginny said, trying to decide how to present this to her mother. What harm could there be in giving Clem a chance? Wasn’t it worth a try? It wasn’t as though they had to convert on the spot.

  Back at the cabin, she took her one remaining bird outside for his flying lesson. She perched it on her finger. They stared at each other, her blue eyes studying its tiny beady black ones. The bird flung open its beak and craned its gaping pink throat upward and screeched: Feed me, Mother! Irritably, Ginny turned her hand around and tilted it, hoping to jar the bird into unexpected flight. It flapped its wings desperately to maintain its balance. It wasn’t remotely interested in flying. It was interested in being fed. All day long if possible.

  Ginny tossed it mercilessly into the air. It would fly, damn it! For a couple of seconds, the bird held its wings tight against its sides and lost altitude like a kamikaze plane. Finally, hurtling toward the ground, it spread them and flapped halfheartedly, soared for several yards and landed gracefully. One day before long, the bird would finally catch on and would swoop away, higher and higher into the sky. Two things worried her, though: If it landed, it probably wouldn’t know how to take off again. The other problem was that the bird couldn’t eat or drink on its own. She had tried putting a dish of breadcrumbs and another of water in its basket. She had held its head in her fingers and had pecked its beak in the crumbs and had helped it scoop water. Then she had stopped feeding it, to see if it would figure things out. It hadn’t. It had merely screeched louder and longer, until she’d finally had to feed it to maintain her borderline sanity. What would happen to this pathetic specimen of birdlife if it did simply take off one day? Would it watch the other swifts and learn how to sweep down over the pond and scoop up a beakful of water? Or be ostracized for smelling like humans? Would it starve? Or return in defeat, requiring her to feed it for the rest of its life as her penalty for getting involved in the first place?

  That night Ginny found her mother lying staring at the ceiling. She didn’t acknowledge Ginny’s greeting.

  Ginny decided to come right to the point. ‘Mother, do you remember I told you about Clem Cloyd’s leg’s being healed? Well, Clem wants to try healing you. What do you think?’

  Mrs. Babcock said nothing for a long time. She had grown up in the rural South surrounded by every form of religious perversion. She had been raised in the Southern Baptist church, deserting it for the Episcopal church largely at the insistence of Wesley, who wouldn’t hear of subjecting his children to baptism by immersion or to weekly diatribes about hell-fire and eternal damnation. Although she admired the dignified language of the Anglican prayer book, found solace in the antiquity of the rituals, she still nurtured in her heart a fondness for the fervid fundamentalist sects of her homeland — the faith healers and snake handlers, those who saw visions and rolled in aisles and spoke in tongues. She had read repeatedly, when she had woken in the middle of the night and been unable to sleep, from her worn Book of Common Prayer — The Order for the Visitation of the Sick, The Communion of the Sick, The Order for the Burial of the Dead — searching that melodic and dignified language for some clues as to what was happening to her, how to cope with it. She found few. And here she remained in this bed, deteriorating. But she suspected she lacked the one element essential to faith healing — faith in that form of healing. However, if God should choose to use Clem Cloyd as His instrument, she was more than prepared to return to the faith of her fathers.

  ‘Why not? We’ve tried everything else.’

  Clem walked in the door the next night dressed in green work pants and a fresh white shirt. He held his hands up, palms inward, like a surgeon in sterile gloves. Or as though his fingers were the prongs of a horseshoe and the good luck would flow out if they pointed groundward. He was glowing with faith and confidence.

  After greeting them, he invited them to pray. It was a simple littl prayer, which asked that God’s will be done, but that that will include healing Mrs. Babcock. Then, his eyes tightly shut like a child making a birthday wish, he placed his supercharged hands on Mrs. Babcock at different spots her head, her heart, her incision.

  He promised to return after the next service, when he would be recharged with the power and the glory. After his departure, they alternated between feeling silly and feeling superstitiously hopeful.

  The next day Mrs. Babcock’s right retina hemorrhaged.

  As she lay in the dark with platelets transfusing into her arm, Mrs. Babcock watched a thunderstorm out her window with her functioning eye. High winds lashed the branches of the elm. Presumably the chattering squirrel family was snug inside a hollow somewhere along the trunk. Patterns of lightning kept imprinting themselves on the black sky. Try as she would to compare these fluorescent patterns to cracks in dinner plates, or earthquake fault lines, she kept seeing them as luminous circulatory systems.

  That afternoon Ginny, lying on the spare bed, had read to her from the last volume of the encyclopedia. The electric chimes at the church circle were playing ‘Make the World Go Away, Take It All Off My Shoulders.’

  ‘“Yantra,” — Ginny read.’ “Any physical form which can convey a charge of symbolism. Used in several types of yoga as an object for “worship,” i.e., an object serving to focus the attention and emotions of the devotee, and to identify for him stages in his progress toward spiritual enlightenment…” — Ginny’s voice was quavering.

  Mrs. Babcock looked at her questioningly.

  ‘I did some Yoga in Vermont. With a friend named Will Hawk. It was quite an experience.’ She inhaled deeply in what looked like an attempt to quell warring emotions.

  ‘And did you gain enlightenment?’

  ‘About some things,’ Ginny replied, with evident pain. ‘But not about what I was supposed to be, I suspect.’

  ‘My conclusion from nine years of encyclopedia reading,’ Mrs. Babcock offered, ‘is that all the great world religions have been training systems to instruct adherents in how to die.’

  ‘Oh, come on. There has to be more to life than death!’

  ‘Why does there?’

  As she watched the lightning, Mrs. Babcock formally ackn
owledged that she was dying. This last month in the hospital was merely the graduation ceremony. The process itself had been underway for years. A leaf, she knew from the encyclopedia, began dying in mid-summer, when the days were long and hot. The vivid green leaves on the elm outside, for instance, had already begun dying. In midsummer, in response to genes and hormones and environmental influences, the delicate balance in a leaf — between growth and decay, between order and chaos, between elaboration and disintegration — tipped in favor of decay. The amount and kinds of proteins being synthesized altered gradually over the weeks and months, carrying the leaf inexorably toward that final moment when a light breeze would suffice to dislodge it and swirl it away.

  However, it was one thing to acknowledge intellectually that she wasn’t going to leave this hospital alive. It was, as she knew, another thing entirely to accept that fact emotionally. She had no idea how far along that route she might have progressed, if at all. The leaf, before it was allowed to drop off the branch in autumn, was first required to export to the tree proper a goodly portion of the nitrogen and minerals supplied by the tree throughout the summer. In addition, the dying leaf paid its rent for branch space by returning to its woody host an acid formed during the leaf’s death throes that granted the tree winter hardiness. Without this acid the tree as a whole would perish in an early freeze. And the tree wouldn’t loose its hold on the leaf until it had secured this acid.

  More and more over the past several days, she had been swamped by her past. People and incidents that she hadn’t thought about in years kept popping into her mind and dragging her down the dim corridors of her memory. For instance, she had recalled vividly the first and only time she’d been back to Sow Gap since leaving for Hullsport with her parents when she was five. When she was ten, her father’s father had died, and she and her parents had gone to the funeral.

  The trip, a hundred and fifty miles of rugged foothills, had taken two days in the shiny new Ford. The deeply rutted road looked like a hog wallow. Every couple of hours they got bogged down, and her father had to pry the auto out of the mud with logs and boards. Twice he had to go in search of farmers with mules to drag the car out. There were rivers to ford, mountain gaps to cross. Parts snapped on the auto and had to be fabricated out of scrap iron in farmers’ junk heaps.

  Throughout the trip, her mother, in her flowered hat and white gloves and silk print dress, kept repeating, ‘Honey, you must never be ashamed of your origins. Your people are hardworking, God-fearing folks. Hardy pioneer stock. A little backward maybe, a little slow. But hard-working and God-fearing.’

  These sermonettes had first suggested to the little girl that there might be something wrong with her origins. All kinds of questions started assembling themselves in her brain: Apart from this mud-bound marathon of a trip, why had she and her parents never been back? Why had they left in the first place when all their relatives were there? Why hadn’t she seen her grandparents since she was five, her aunts and uncles and cousins?

  They had arrived just as her grandfather’s coffin was being lowered into the ground in a family plot on a hillside. Off into the distance rolled ridge after ridge of mountain, rising up abruptly from deep valleys. And directly below was Sow Gap — consisting of a handsome red brick courthouse on an unpaved street, surrounded by a couple of sandstone churches and several frame stores. There she had stood in a ruffled chiffon dress with ribbon ties, surrounded by cousins she had never met in neat dresses made of flour sacks. They, their clothes, and their town, in spite of evident tidiness, appeared ineradicably smudged from the omnipresent coal dust.

  The supper after the funeral was a boisterous affair, held in the sagging gray house of her father’s brother, Reuben. Fortified with a jug of clear corn liquor, Reuben asked the little girl and her father to go fishing afterwards. ‘Fishing’ consisted, of throwing sticks of dynamite into the creek behind his house and collecting the stunned fish that were thrown up on the bank.

  ‘Reuben, that’s illegal,’ her father complained after the first explosion. ‘That’s against the law!’

  ‘Zedediah, ah am the law,’ he replied, swigging from his jug.

  The next day Reuben drove them out to the mine where her father had worked before leaving for Hullsport, the mine where Reuben himself still worked. It was basically a dark hole in a hillside with metal tracks running into it. Some tarpaper sheds clustered around outside it. And all around that black hole were heaped great piles of smooth reddish stone. Her father wandered around nervously, peering and looking generally uncomfortable in his suit and starched collar. She sat on a slag heap with Uncle Reuben, who sorted through the chunks for fossil imprints of prehistoric plants, complete with every vein and stem, imprisoned for all eternity in the soft stone.

  ‘Nothing won’t never change them plants now,’ Reuben said gravely to his fascinated niece. ‘They done been here for thousands of years. Millions maybe.’ She picked out a couple of the choicest to take home.

  That night at supper, in a room packed with relations, Uncle Reuben demanded of Mr. Zed, ‘Why ain’t you never been back afore, Zed? It like to killed Pa, you runnin’ off like that without nary no reason.’

  In indirect answer, Mr Zed regaled the assembly with the incident that had preceded his removal to the area that eventually became Hullsport. His cousin Zeke Hull had been running for sheriff on the Democratic ticket. Mr. Zed had been a Republican and hadn’t liked Zeke anyway, and so had refused to work for his election. ‘If you can’t count on yer kin, who can you count on?’ Zeke had demanded. And he had come gunning for Mr. Zed, who had had to gallop off into the woods on his horse and hide in a streambed for a couple of days, with his electioneering cousin hunting him like an animal. Zeke had been elected anyway and had served as sheriff for many years, just recently being shot to death in a gun battle with a moonshiner.

  “Now that Zeke’s dead, I figure it’s safe for me to visit,’ Mr. Zed explained to his assembled critics.

  Mrs. Hull told that night about teaching at the state reform school for girls in the next town, while Mr. Zed was working the mines. One afternoon as she was leaving, her students surrounded her buggy, intent on turning it over. She had fought them off like Cyrano de Bergerac, with a long hatpin.

  Her young daughter sat listening and staring in disbelief at her dignified parents — her father in a dark suit and starched collar, and her mother in her silk print dress and costume jewelry and well-coiffed hair, her mother who now had two maids and spent most of her time rushing off to meetings of church groups and civic clubs in a flowered hat and white gloves.

  Just before the Hulls were to leave, Uncle Reuben, swigging clear corn liquor and negotiating the hairpin mountain turns near his house like a race driver, ran Mr. Zed’s new Ford off a steep ridge. Reuben rolled out unharmed, limber as a rag doll from his home-brew, but the Ford bounced on its hard rubber tires down the cliff and crashed into a hundred pieces in the cove below.

  On the train home, in a passenger car squeezed between cars piled high with glistening black coal, the little girl demanded, ‘How come we moved away?’ She had loved the family dinners, crowded with her flamboyant aunts and uncles and cousins, in contrast to the lonely Hullsport dinners in the echoing formal dining room with just the three of them.

  Her parents laughed with embarrassment, as though the answer should have been self-evident. ‘For you, honey,’ Mr. Zed replied. ‘To give you opportunities we ain’t never had.’

  Opportunities to do what they never really said. Not in so many words. But they always let her know when she was going astray from the master plan — for instance, with the scene they had thrown when Ned Ketchum, her high school swain, a farmer’s son, had asked Mr. Zed for permission to marry her, in place of her going north to college. And so she had gone off to Bryn Mawr, her parents beaming approval as the train pulled out. Their daughter, with an ex-coal miner for a father, in the Ivy League!

  Mrs. Babcock had returned to Hullsport, had marrie
d a Harvard graduate, had begun a family. All according to the plan, improvements on the plan. Her delighted parents had moved the young family into the huge white house and had watched from the cabin the prospering of their apparently charmed line. Mr. Zed was the most important man in town, ably backed up by his debonair son-in-law. It had been a long hard crawl from Sow Gap to Hullsport, but Mr. Zed had made it, an Appalachian Horatio Alger. And Mrs. Hull had made it. She was an officer in half a dozen clubs and circles, spent every weekday at meetings and spent most of her time while home on the phone arranging those meetings.

  Mrs. Babcock had always felt that that was no way to run a home — with maids and your one lonely child doing all your housework. Which was why she had dedicated herself solely to her house and family, pledged all her energies to their care; she would be a living reprimand to her own mother. Which was why she had eventually ended up on the cabin couch one afternoon during the Tired Years, worn to a frazzle by her selfless devotion, wailing, ‘I’m just so tired, Mother. I can’t stand it anymore. What should I do?’

  And her mother, seeing this monument to human doggedness that she and Mr. Zed had constructed so patiently through the years about to crumble into divorce or mental collapse, said coldly, ‘You must do your duty.’ Meaning her duty to her parents, to her husband and children.

  But then Mrs. Hull had died. Wesley had converted the factory to munitions following Mr. Zed’s retirement. And Mr. Zed had gone sour on his life and works, and therefore on his daughter’s life and works as well. He began referring to Wesley as ‘that carpetbagger’ and ‘that Episcopalian’; and he began planting kudzu all around the town and factory in hopes that they would be swallowed up. The founding of a town, the establishing of the Hull line, became trivial to him in the face of his mate’s death, in the face of his own approaching death. And the life that Mrs. Babcock had lived, largely in obedience to her parents’ visions, had begun to seem trivial to her too, as her own children packed up and moved far away and put an end to Mr. Zed’s Hullsport saga.