INWOOD
MATHY ELIZABETH
Wife of Edward
Leonie left the lamp in the parlor and went upstairs, frowning as she thought of the ordeal ahead. They would have to go and see the new marker. It would be a sort of pilgrimage, a private memorial service, for which she had little heart. Not that she didn’t miss Mathy; she did, and the farm was treacherous with memories of her. The new tombstone would only revive them most painfully. Oh dear, she thought, lighting the lamp on her dresser. Mama would cry and Dad would stand all white and terrible, and the children would stare at them, frightened. It was going to be hard on everybody.
She thought back to the day in June, the anniversary of Mathy’s death. She had had to be very clever to keep that day in hand. It could have been dreadful if it hadn’t been for her efforts. She had to be so cheerful all day, so resourceful—keeping Mama busy to keep her mind off her sorrow; running out to chat with Dad, so he wouldn’t feel lonesome; saying little things to make them smile. It was exhausting. But she had done it—they hardly cried at all—and she could do it again.
She blew out the lamp and lay down. “Ahhhh!” she said, feeling her muscles let go. It was like this every night, the sudden surprising revelation that she was tired to the bone. There was so much to do on the farm, day in and day out. Sometimes she was downright provoked. She didn’t want to come here in the first place.
She thought back to early spring, when she had begged them to stay in town for the summer. The farm held too many reminders of last year’s tragedy. (She could not forget those weeks after Mathy’s death, when Dad went about all grim and silent, and Mama almost lost her mind.) To go back this soon seemed only asking for trouble. But her father had his reasons. In times like these, he said, they belonged on the farm, where they could provide for themselves. It cost them nothing to get there, except a tankful of gas and the time it took to walk down with the cow. They no longer had to hire a truck and move the furniture. There was plenty of that in the farmhouse, odds and ends that had settled through the years like dust.
Of course she might have let them go on by themselves. She had so wanted to go to school that summer, preferably in New York City, and take pipe-organ lessons. But Mama looked sad when she talked about it and said how lonesome they would be. And they would be—just the two of them down there, with no one around but Mary Jo, who was too young to understand, and Mathy’s little boy. Leonie couldn’t bear the thought of it. And if she didn’t go with them, who would?
Not Jessica. Jessica had married again, two years ago. (There was no accounting for that girl. There she was, a successful teacher, engaged to a young county agent with a university degree, when all of a sudden and right out of the blue, she gave back the ring and married a backwoods farmer, a widower with four children aged ten to seventeen.)
Of course, Jessica had come home last summer, when Mathy died; she came home in emergencies. But it was Leonie who really stood by the folks, year after year, and looked after them. It was Leonie who made Mama get glasses and Dad buy a decent car and saw to it that the kids had their tonsils out and stopped eating fried pies. It was Leonie who had not run off and left them for the first man that whistled.
She could have been married that very spring, if she’d just said the word. Kenny, the basketball coach at her school, had asked her. He was handsome and ambitious and had a wonderful voice. He sang at school programs, and sometimes he and she sang duets. But he was just a little bit wild, not quite the sort that her father would approve of. Anyway, she wouldn’t have dreamed of getting married so soon after Mathy’s death. She had more feeling for the folks than that. And since nobody else would, she would go to the farm this summer. She would honor her father and mother. She would keep them cheerful. And they would have a good summer or she’d know the reason why.
Having taken the veil, she promptly began the office. What she would have to do, she knew, was get their minds off their grief. Goodness knows, if work would do it, there was plenty of that on the farm. But hard work was not enough. They needed recreation, new interests. Psychology taught that nothing diverts the mind like new interests. Her mother and father needed some hobbies. They ought to collect something. They needed to read. Why, Mama never read a whole book in her life, not even a magazine. She hadn’t had time or encouragement. Well, this summer she was going to have both. Leonie promptly ordered The Ladies’ Home Journal sent to the farm. Mama could read about decorating and new ideas for the home; she could try new recipes.
Dad should read more, too. He hadn’t read a best seller, she guessed, since Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and maybe not even that. He hadn’t even read all of Shakespeare—and neither, she reflected, had she. They could read it together, like the Bible, read aloud to each other and have discussions! She smiled with pleasure at the thought, seeing, as a passerby through a window, the professor’s family seated in their easy chairs in heated discussion of King Lear. They would have music, too—Dad would like that—and a really active absorbing cultural life, such as all families ought to have. In a state akin to exaltation, she packed up her new accordion and her Shakespeare and hurried home for the summer.
That it turned out rather well didn’t surprise her much. She worked hard at it. They had musicales, they went on picnics. Sometimes they outdid themselves and had a dinner party. On these occasions, Leonie surprised them with a new dish (the kitchen fluttered with recipes cut out of the Journal). The children made place cards from construction paper, and Leonie decorated the table with flower arrangements. They laid extra forks for the salad and stacked the plates at the head of the table and made Dad serve. Everybody cleaned up for the occasion and pretended it was a formal dinner, and all in a spirit of good fun they learned just how to behave.
“How did you find out how to do these things?” her mother once asked.
“Oh, you learn a lot when you get out teaching,” Leonie said, “especially in a bigger town. The people up there are so up-to-date. And our school has a lot of formal banquets. The domestic science teacher really knows how to do things. That’s Carol Pokorny, you know, my best friend.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“She had a tea for the faculty, the last week of school. It was the grandest thing you ever saw—darling little cakes and the teensiest little sandwiches and spiced tea! She asked me to pour, you know. And as I handed out the tea, she had me put a tea rose on every saucer! A tea rose—wasn’t that a clever idea?”
Her mother was so impressed by other people’s ways. Leonie had not realized before how old-fashioned she was. It was a pleasure to see her look around and pick up new ideas that summer. With a little encouragement, she took time every day to sit down with a magazine. Maybe she didn’t actually read a whole lot—except the recipes—but it was a good exposure, just the same.
Leonie’s chief regret was that they didn’t have much time for Shakespeare. Dad was terribly busy. But sometimes at night she insisted on doing the milking herself, so that he could read a little. That way, they managed to get through The Tempest.
All in all, it was a satisfying summer. Not very often did Leonie lose her cheer and high resolve, though occasionally this did happen. Once in a while, in the long hot days, the spirit, always brimming in the morning, tipped like a bucket on the ridge of noon and threatened to run dry. Then her emptiness would fill with a guilty longing to be elsewhere and otherwise. She was lonely, buried in the country. She missed the radio and weekend trips to Kansas City. She missed her friends. Days went by with no one to talk to except Mama and the kids and once in a great while Dad, when he wasn’t brooding about something.
The only regular visitor was Ed Inwood, who came every other weekend to see Peter. You’d have thought that, living in Kansas City, Ed would know all about the shows and other affairs up there. But after all, he was only a garage mechanic, so maybe it wasn’t any wonder he didn’t keep up with cultural events. He was lucky just to keep up with a job, considering he was lazy. And cri
ppled, to boot. Not that his bad leg seemed to bother him much; he got around about as well as anyone, and you got used to the way he walked and hardly noticed it. You’d hardly even notice the cane if he weren’t always swinging it like a golf club or poking you in the behind. Ed never would grow up, she guessed. Mathy’s death had sobered him a little, as well it might. But he was still just one jump removed from the smart aleck she had loathed in high school. It was hard to think of him as a member of the family.
Now and then a neighbor lady dropped in to visit. Leonie tried to get her mother to return the call, but she wouldn’t do it. Mama never cared much for anyone who wasn’t an old, old friend or a relative. Relatives were what she and Dad really enjoyed. One Sunday that summer, Cousin Ophelia, Cousin Ralph, and their boy Ralphie came up to visit. (Ralphie was eighteen and peculiar; he slobbered and took things apart, such as clocks and engines; but he didn’t talk much and was no bother.) Ralph and Ophelia were about the same age as her parents. Growing up, they had lived near each other. And such a lot of laughing and talking you never heard as when they got together. The whole day they were there, her mother kept saying, “Now you folks have just got to come back before the summer’s out!”
“Aw, I’d sure like to,” Ophelia said. “But it’s such a long trip in that old car of ours. And I hate to leave Ma too often.”
“You just bring Aunt Cass with you next time.”
“Well, I don’t know. She’s gettin’ so old. I don’t know how much longer we’ll have her with us.”
They sighed and drew long faces. Then they hollered and laughed some more, and everybody sat in the yard, burping and slapping flies, till almost sundown. Leonie thought they never would leave. They were company and all that, but they were just not the sort of people she longed for.
So there she was, eighty miles from nowhere, with no one to talk her kind of talk and no one to recognize her vision of life as it ought to be. Sometimes as she bobbed up and down on the pump handle or skinned her knuckles on the washboard, the vision rose to torment her. It was an image luminous and obscure—like the sun, too dazzling to be seen plain. It had something to do with country estates, formal gardens, lakes and swans. It had to do with passenger liners and sailing parties, beaches and tennis matches, and dancing in a striped pavilion—the pastimes of the very rich as she had glimpsed them in magazines and the rotogravure (and which she believed attainable by righteous effort).
Then in her impatience she would kick the pump, or fix with a pyromanic eye the smokehouse, which was filled with gunny sacks and castoff books and every old crock and tool and photograph that had ever been in the family. She hated the farmhouse and all its scratched, patched, propped-up furniture. All this makeshift made her sick. The superintendent of schools ought to live better than this. And Mama, for all her pride in town, down here seemed to have no shame. One day, in a pique, Leonie stomped into the kitchen and said as much to her mother.
“I don’t know why we have to live like this!”
“Like what?” said Callie.
“All this broken-down furniture! That old settee with the oilcloth patch!”
“It’s good enough for down here, ain’t it?”
“Oh, that’s what you always say.”
“Well, ain’t it? We just sort of camp out here in the summer. It’s not like this was a fine house in town.”
“Why don’t we have rustic furniture or something—a big stone fireplace? Why do we have to live like poor white trash?”
Callie looked at her with stricken eyes. “Is it that bad, honey?”
“Oh, not really.” Leonie could have bitten her tongue out. “It’s just that you and Dad—well, I know you can’t afford to fix it up, but if you just thought about it different—I mean, if you just wanted— Oh, I don’t know what I mean. I’m sorry I said anything, Mama.”
And filled with remorse she ran down the path to the toilet, where she could berate herself in private. Poor Mama and Dad had worked hard all their lives. They couldn’t help it if this was an old dirt farm and not a country estate. It wasn’t their fault they were born poor and brought up in the sticks. It’s a wonder they’d come along this far. And they wouldn’t have, either, if she hadn’t brought home new ideas all along. As the Bible said, the child is father to the man.
She went back to the house to finish dusting the parlor. But for just a moment she picked up her accordion and played her piece again. “When you’re smiling, When you’re smiling, The whole world smiles with you…” And she was comforted.
Such outbursts never lasted long. For the most part, she was too busy keeping the summer cheerful. And she had done it. They had come safely through Decoration Day and the anniversary of Mathy’s death. But there was one more river to cross. There was still the day of the tombstone.
Lying on her bed in the darkness, she stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, half-listening to the murmur of voices on the porch below. How she dreaded the day. But there must be something she could do. There was always something. A few minutes later she rose and closed her door. She lighted the lamp, took a box of stationery out of the drawer, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Balancing the box on her knees, she began quickly to write a letter.
2
Thank goodness, the weather was fine. Hot, which was all you could expect for July, but there was a good breeze. As they rode home from Renfro, where they had attended church, Leonie looked at the clear blue sky with satisfaction. She had prayed it wouldn’t rain that day and spoil her plans. They stopped in front of the house, and Matthew left the engine running.
“You children stay in the car,” said Callie, “we won’t be but a minute.”
Her voice, cheerful enough all the way from town, had suddenly slipped into a minor key with intimations of doom. Even the children felt it. They shut up immediately and sat very solemn in the back seat. The grownups came back from the house, carrying fruit jars, geranium plants, and a bucket of flowers picked in the garden that morning—dahlias and zinnias, cosmos, larkspur, and long fronds of asparagus. When everyone was settled again, they drove on toward Grove Chapel.
Not for a long time had regular services been held at Grove. The membership had dwindled through the years, and they finally boarded up the church and locked the door. Mathy’s funeral was the last service held there. The cemetery down the slope was left to the care of neighbors, various ones who had people buried there. They came in now and then with scythes and mowing machines and kept the weeds from overrunning the graves. Years before they ever left the farm, Callie and Matthew had bought a plot at Grove, big enough for themselves and any number of children. They didn’t like to think of the family broken up, even in death.
Riding toward the chapel, Leonie thought of the lonely silence of the graveyard, the long grass sighing, the moaning of wind in the cedars. Why didn’t graveyards have white birches and sugar maples? Why did they have to have cedars and pines, the darkest, sorriest trees in the world! But that was the old-fashioned way; gloom it up, make death even worse than it was. She scanned the road ahead anxiously and crossed her fingers. As the car headed up the hill she breathed a sigh of relief. There at the church stood another car. A man and two women sat on the steps.
“Who’s that?” said Callie. “Reckon somebody thought they were still having church here?” The people on the steps began to wave. “Why, that looks like Ophelia—it is! It’s Ophelia and Ralph—there’s Aunt Cass!”
“Well, for mercy sakes!” said Matthew, stopping the car.
“Howdy, howdy!” Ralph came toward them, a little burnt crust of a man, waving a straw hat.
Leonie jumped out. Smiling big, she opened the door for her mother. “Aren’t you going to get out, Mama?”
“I can’t hardly believe it’s them! What are they doin’ here at Grove?”
“It’s a surprise! I wrote and asked ’em!”
“Howdy!” called Ophelia, struggling across the churchyard with Aunt Cass. “Bet you never expected to see us
!”
Callie climbed out and hugged them and everybody laughed and cried and talked at once. Matthew and Ralph pounded each other on the back. Aunt Cass lost control of her kidneys and let fly where she stood. Ralphie, who had appeared from nowhere, stood grinning through his hair. It was long and straw-colored and always hung down in his eyes.
“Why, I never was so surprised!” said Callie when the hubbub quieted a little.
“We’re surprised ourselves,” said Ophelia. “We never thought we’d make it up here again this year, but Leonie wrote and begged us to come, so here we are.”
Callie turned anxiously to Leonie. “Have we got anything for dinner?”
“You just relax, Mama. Everything’s planned.”
“Well, let’s get on back and start fixin’ it. I know you folks are hungry after your long trip, and I ’spect Aunt Cass is pretty well wore out.”
“Wasn’t you going to decorate the grave?” said Ophelia.
“Aw, we can do that some other time.”
“I thought you’s going to do it today? Leonie said—”
“Why, of course!” said Leonie. “We might as well do it, as long as we’re here.”
“It’ll make us so late startin’ dinner,” said Callie.
“We can wait,” said Ophelia. “We ain’t that hungry. Go ahead—we can help you. I’d like to see the grave, anyway. I haven’t seen it since the funeral.”
“Well…” Callie looked skeptically at the little old woman leaning on Ophelia’s arm. “What about your Ma?”
Aunt Cass, who didn’t hear too well, understood the look. “I thought we’s goin’ to the graveyard,” she said in a querulous old voice.
Ophelia put her mouth to her mother’s ear. “You’ll have to stay up here. It’s too far to walk.”
“I want to go with y’.”
“It’s an awful steep climb,” shouted Callie.
“I can make it.”
The Moonflower Vine Page 29