The Moonflower Vine

by Jetta Carleton

  The nineteenth century had not yet ended when my parents, Matthew and Callie Soames, first came to the farm. They arrived newlywedded, with a teakettle, a featherbed, and a span of mules. Later they went to live in a small town, where my father taught school. Sometimes they came back to the farm for the summer. After many years they came home to stay. They painted the house and propped up the old gray barn, bought a bull and a butane tank, and lived here the year around, as happy as if they were hale and twenty instead of a frail old pair who would not see seventy again.

  My sisters and I used to visit them on the farm. We came each summer—Jessica from deep in the Ozarks, Leonie from a little town in Kansas, and I from New York, where I worked in television, then a new industry, very mysterious to my family. To me, and somewhat to my sisters, these visits were like income tax, an annual inconvenience. There were always so many other ways we could have spent the time. But, old as we were, our parents were still the government. They levied the tribute and we paid it.

  Once we got there, we were happy enough. We lapsed easily into the old ways, cracked the old jokes, fished in the creek, ate country cream and grew fat and lazy. It was a time of placid unreality. The lives we lived outside were suspended, the affairs of the world forgotten and our common blood remembered. No matter that our values differed now, that we had gone our separate ways; when we met like this on familiar ground, we enjoyed one another.

  I remember particularly a summer in the early fifties. Jessica’s husband and Leonie’s had stayed behind that year; one was a farmer, the other a mechanic, and neither could get away at the time. Only Leonie’s boy had come with her. Soames was a tall, beautiful, disconsolate child who had just turned eighteen. In a few weeks he was leaving to join the Air Force, and Leonie could hardly bear it. Once he was gone, there was so much he would have left undone, so much unsaid, that neither of them would ever again have a chance to do or say. It was a sad time for them. For the rest of us, too, especially as the war was still going on in Korea. The war itself troubled us deeply, and it gave his leaving a special gravity. We could not think of one without the other. And yet, here in deep country, remote from the outside world, it was possible, for the moment, to think of neither. There was no daily paper. Nobody bothered with the radio. The little news that came our way seemed unreal and no concern of ours. Only the planes roaring over each day from an airbase on the north reminded us of danger, and soon even they lost their menace. Their shadows slipped across the pasture and yard like the shadows of clouds, hardly more sinister. The farm was a little island in a sea of summer. And a faraway war where young men were dying troubled us less than the shooting of one old man.

  This had happened close to home, a mile or two up the road. A recluse farmer named Corcoran had been shot by his only son, a poor creature recently discharged from the army. My parents found the old man the next morning, rolled under a bed like a rug in summer and left there to die. He was still, though barely, alive. They drove him twenty miles to a hospital, my mother sitting in the back seat with the old man’s head in her lap.

  All this had taken place just before our arrival. On our last day but one, we were still talking about it.

  “Poor old thing,” said my mother, “be a blessing if he could die.”

  “Yes, it would,” said my father. “Nobody to care for him at all.”

  “He was a grouchy old thing, but he doesn’t deserve to suffer.”

  “How old is he?” I said.

  “He must be seventy, at least,” said my mother. The way she talked, he could have been her grandfather.

  “Have they caught the boy?” said Soames.

  “Not yet.”

  “Wonder how come him to do that.”

  “I don’t know,” said my father. “Some say the old man was pretty hard on him.”

  “There were all kinds of tales!” my mother said. “About his daddy chainin’ him in the smokehouse and all that. I never believed ’em.”

  “Idle gossip,” said Dad. “The old man had a way of antagonizing people and they had to get back at him. He was rough and crude in his ways, but he wasn’t mean.”

  “No, he wasn’t. The boy was just odd, that’s all. He wasn’t quite right. I don’t know how he got into the army.”

  “It figures.” Soames grinned and got up.

  “Oh, you’re a sight!” Mama said, patting him on the seat of his jeans. “My goodness, we forgot to heat dishwater.”

  So ended the symposium on neighborhood violence. We pulled ourselves up from the table, all of us stupefied with food. We had dined on roast tenderloin, peas in pure cream, sliced green tomatoes browned in butter, and burnt-sugar cake for dessert. My mother set a country table, and dinner was at noon.

  “That sure tasted good,” said Jessica. “I wish I had three stomachs, like a cow.”

  “Me, too,” Leonie said. She ate the last fried tomato off the platter.

  “On top of cake?” I said.

  “I always have to finish off on something salty.”

  “You’ll get as fat as pig,” said my father, patting her shoulder.

  “Where are you going now?” said Mama.

  “Just out on the porch,” said Dad.

  “Well, don’t forget, you have to go in town this afternoon to get ice—you or Soames one.”

  “I’ll go, Grandma!” Soames never missed a chance to drive my little car.

  “Why, honey,” said Leonie, “you don’t want to go running off to town, do you? Why don’t you stay home like a good boy and work on the barn roof? Mother would be so proud if you’d just finish your job.”

  “I’ll finish it.”

  “Well, never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. You know tomorrow we’re going to cut the bee tree.”

  “I know it.”

  “And there’s a whole bundle of shingles you haven’t touched yet.”

  “I know that, too, Mother. I’ll get around to them.”

  “Not if you go running off to town.”

  “Aw, let him go,” said my father. “It gets hot up there on that roof, doesn’t it, boy? We’ll both drive in after a while.”

  “Don’t wait too late,” Mama said. “We want to get our cream made before the moonflowers bloom.”

  “We’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  “Well, be sure.” She turned back to us. “We ought to have two dozen blooms tonight! I counted the pods this morning. I never see so many! Well now, girls, what are we going to take on our picnic tomorrow? Let’s decide.”

  We discussed it as we washed dishes. Down in the woods my father had found a hollow tree where the bees had hived. Tomorrow we were going to smoke them out, chop the tree, and take the wild honey. In the course of it, we would also fish and swim and cook our dinner by the shady creek. Our father and mother planned it as an all-day excursion, a jolly windup of our two weeks at home. As we debated the respective merits of French fries and potato salad, the telephone on the dining-room wall rang two shorts and a long.

  “That’s our ring,” said Mama.

  “I’ll get it,” Dad called. A minute later he came to the kitchen door. “Mama, it’s Jake Latham. He and Fanny and the Barrows and some of them are going over to Corcoran’s place tomorrow. Jake says his timothy is dead ripe and ought to be shocked. He thinks the peaches need picking, too.”

  “Oh, he does, does he?” Mama’s smile was mildly ironic. “It’s about time they did a little something for him. This’ll be the first time.”

  “Well, better late than never. Absit invidia.”

  “I reckon they wanted us to come and help.”

  “That’s what they want.”

  “I guess you told ’em we couldn’t.”

  “I said I’d see.”

  Mama looked at him as if he’d gone soft in the head. “But we’re going to cut the bee tree tomorrow!”

  “I know, but—”

  “Didn’t you tell him that?”

  “No—”

  �
�Why not?”

  “Well,” Dad said, squirming, “I don’t know that Jake would think a bee tree much of an excuse.”

  “Oh foot, who cares what Jake thinks!”

  “We don’t want to appear uncooperative,” Dad said primly.

  “Appears to me it’s them that’s uncooperative. They never done anything for him before. Well, anyway, it’s nice they’re doin’ it now. I wouldn’t mind helpin’, but can’t they wait till Monday?”

  “I asked Jake. He said that didn’t suit him.”

  “Well, tomorrow doesn’t suit us. We’ve got our plans all made.”

  “I know,” Dad said, looking worried. “I hate to go tomorrow, but I don’t see how I can refuse. You folks go ahead with your picnic, and I’ll go on over to Corcoran’s and help.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair,” said Jessica. “Why don’t we just all go. Your big girls can help.”

  “No sir!” said Mama. “Ain’t any of us goin’. Ain’t any use in lettin’ them spoil our day. There’s plenty of them to do the work, without us, and for once they can just do it.”

  “They’ll think we’re mighty selfish,” Dad warned.

  “Then they’ll just have to think it. That’s the price we’ll have to pay.”

  “All right. If that’s how you feel, I’ll say no more.” Dad put on his hat and went out with an air of noble resignation. He was vastly relieved.

  We finished the dishes, and Mama went upstairs for a nap. Soames had gone back to work. Leonie went out to tell him what a good boy he was.

  “Poor ol’ Leonie,” said Jessica, “looks like she’s going to force him to finish that roof.”

  “Not if she encourages him to death,” I said. “If she doesn’t shut up, he’ll get mad and quit, like he always does.”

  “Yes,” said Jessica, “and then he’ll feel guilty, poor young’un.”

  “And have to be mad at her.”

  “And she’ll think he doesn’t love her or he’d have done what she wanted him to. Oh dear.”

  “Just like the voice lessons,” I said. Leonie had pleaded, nagged, encouraged and commanded, tried every stratagem known to mothers to turn Soames into a singer. She was right, of course, for Soames had a fine voice. He might have been really good if he’d worked. But he wasn’t interested in singing or in anything much, except flying.

  “Poor kids,” said Jessica. “I feel so sorry for both of them I can’t hardly stand it.”

  “Well, let’s get her back in the house if we can and make her leave him alone. I’ll play the piano. That ought to do it.”

  We went into the front room to the old battered piano and dug out some very back issues of Étude Magazine. I attempted a composition called “Cupid’s Appeal,” a great favorite of mine in my youth. It took me a while to arrange my fingers, and the melody tended to get lost between chords.

  Leonie came in with her hands over her ears. “Ow-wow!” she said, like Amos and Andy. “Move over!”

  She polished off “Cupid’s Appeal” in a competent manner and played some other pieces in the back, including the songs—all of them full of Hark! and Ah! and sorrow at eventide—which Jessica and I rendered in appropriate mood. We thought we were pretty funny. In the midst of it, a stray beagle who had hung around the yard all week began to howl.

  I went out to comfort him. “Poor thing, I wish you knew where you lived.”

  “He’s a sad crittur,” said Jessica.

  “He’s a nice little dog. I like him.”

  “He’s got fleas.”

  “He can’t help it.”

  “Whatever happened to the one with the beard?” said Jessica.

  “A dog with a beard?”

  “Well, he was kind of a dog. I mean that funny-lookin’ boy you brought here last summer.”

  “Oh, him! I didn’t bring him—he just came. He was on a walking tour.”

  “Talking tour, I’d call it.”

  “I remember him,” Leonie chimed in. “He wore tennis shoes.”

  “And no socks,” Jessica added.

  “And he smelled funny.”

  “One of those dirties she takes up with!”

  They beamed at me in devilish glee, off on a tear again about the company I kept. They never could understand the wild-haired anarchic types that seemed to gravitate to me, and I didn’t always appreciate them myself.

  “Remember him and the sorghum?” Jessica said. “He kept spilling it in his beard.”

  “And getting his beard in his plate!”

  “There was always a swarm of flies after him.”

  “Now stop it!” I yelled. “He was very intellectual.”

  “Intellectual!” Leonie reared back indignantly. “He sneered at Shakespeare!”

  “Sh! You’ll wake Mama!” Everybody broke out giggling again for no special reason.

  “I’m so hot,” said Jessica, “I’m foamin’ between the legs. Let’s go down to the bathtub.”

  The only bathtub on the farm was a wide place in the branch. Taking some towels and a cake of Ivory, we strolled down through the east pasture to where the little stream nibbled its way through a deep ravine. At one spot, my father had hollowed a spring out of the bank and kept a cup hanging on a birch limb. He believed in the therapeutic value of spring water, wild honey, and sunshine. We slid down and squatted on our heels in the sand. It was cool and sweet-smelling down there.

  “Have some branch water,” said Jessica, handing me a cupful. “Good for the kidneys.”

  She and I had a contest to see who could hold the most. Neither of us had ever heard of internal drowning. Leonie finally made us stop. “You’ll be peeing in the bathtub,” she said. We waded on down to where the stream widened into a pool. The water was deeper here, so clear you could see leaf shadows on the smooth sandstone bottom. We hung our clothes on the buckbrush, and Jessica waded in, screeching as the icy water came up around her middle. Leonie stepped in delicately, splashing water on her wrists and the backs of her knees. My foot slipped and I fell in. After a bit we got used to the cold. We soaped and dunked and splashed, cavorting like three little boys instead of grown-up women. Jessica was almost fifty and Leonie not far behind. I was close to thirty. But none of us acted our age or felt it. We mostly behaved like retarded children, because our parents liked us that way.

  Our bodies glowed with the sting of the water. “Aren’t we pretty?” I said.

  We stopped splashing and looked at each other. “Why, yes we are,” said Jessica. “We’re real nice.”

  Though she was overweight and I was skinny, all three of us were smooth and unblemished and the skin fit snug on our bones. Out here in the open, lacy with sunlight, we were beautiful, and it seemed the natural thing to say so. We climbed out and sat on a flat rock, rubbing ourselves warm with the big towels.

  “I wish Mama and Dad would put in some plumbing,” said Leonie. “Wouldn’t you think they’d want it?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Jessica. “They’ve been without it for seventy years, I guess they don’t miss it.”

  “They could get used to it.”

  “Why, what’s the matter with this?” said Jessica, imitating my father’s tone. “Why, this is good enough for anybody!”

  We laughed, and I thought of the town where I grew up, where only the banker and the grocer could afford a septic tank and the constant repairs of a pump in the basement. The rest of us got along the best way we could. I remember the kitchen on a winter morning—coal buckets underfoot, the bucket for slops near the door, water boiling on the big black range, my father shaving at the kitchen table, and I in my petticoat, washing myself in the gray enamel pan (my neck and under my arms), while my mother fried the bacon and grease burned on the stovelids. The kitchen was not a gracious room. It was bathroom, dining room, laundry and dairy, each in turn or all at once. Not that you thought very much about it. Not, that is, till you visited in the city. After each exposure to other folkways, it was harder to sit in the outhouse at ten be
low or tolerate that functional urn in the bedroom.

  This was in winter. In summer, life expanded with the sunshine. You could bathe upstairs, do the laundry outside in the shade of the peach tree. You could iron in the breeze on the back porch. The house grew taller, wider, prettier. Heating stoves went out to the smokehouse and flowers came in to the tables. There were still the water buckets to fill and the slops to empty. But no coal to carry in, no ashes to carry out. And there was no need for the chamber pot; one went out to the toilet before going to bed—a pleasant excursion on a summer night.

  “Well, anyway,” Leonie was saying, “I wish they’d modernize the place a little, if they’re going to stay here.”

  “They can’t stay here much longer,” said Jessica.

  “They think they can.”

  “I know, but they just can’t. Bless their hearts, they’re too old. Anyway, plumbing wouldn’t be half as much fun as this.”

  The sun trickled down through the oak leaves. Away off in the woods a cardinal told us what a handsome bird he was. “Pretty-bird, pretty-bird!” he said over and over. Jessica sat on a blue towel, hugging her knees. Her skin was still rosy from the water and her round cleft rump like a great peach. She looked like Boucher’s Diana or a bather by Renoir. But she would have laughed if I’d told her, and said Boo-shay didn’t know boo-cat, or something to that effect. Jessica was not about to pretend that she was anything but what showed up in clothes—a plain, middle-aged woman, rather dowdy and in need of a girdle.

  I looked at my other sister, sitting in the sunlight, brown and glossy as a warm brown egg. She was the one with enviable pigment, a dark-skinned blonde whom sunlight loved. As her skin tanned, her hair turned paler and paler. It streamed over her shoulders now, fine and silvery as young corn silks. No woman who looked like that, I thought, deserved the nature of Carry Nation. But Leonie’s was something like that. More than the rest of us, Leonie bore the vestigial burning passed down from our forebears, a hellfire breed who preached a trail through Indiana and Kentucky, hacking the wilderness with the Word of God. If in their zeal the apple sapling fell with the poison oak, that was right, for it was the Word of God that felled it. The Holy Book was the law and the light and the way, and it was not love. And nothing could sway those ember-eyed fanatics, chopping their way toward Missouri and the twentieth century—just as nothing swayed Leonie. She had this burning, this ax of God. But hers was a hard way, like theirs, and defeats were many. When the blight of doubt fell on her, it was pitiful to see. Two weeks ago when she came to the farm, her face sagged with worry and her eyes were hollow. But the gentle days and the cream and laughter had rounded and smoothed her and made her beautiful again. Sitting naked on the rock, combing her long blond hair, she looked like a Lorelei, and I told her so. She took the compliment with a shy smile, not believing but pleased that I gave it.