Merricat, said Constance, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh, no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Constance, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep.
I made up my own nursery rhyme when I was a child, when I was five or six, much younger than I was when I first read Jackson’s novel. The “rhyme” was only one line long—“My Mother’s Grave Is Yellow”—and I recited it sometimes in bed, more often when I crawled beneath the coffee table in our living room. The table’s wooden underside had been branded with the letters MMGIY, and for a few years, for the two or three years after my mother’s death and before I was too big to hide under the table, I cast about for the hidden message in those initials, finally alighting on that one line: “My Mother’s Grave Is Yellow.” In fact I didn’t know what color my mother’s grave was. I’d never been allowed to see it, just as I’d never been allowed to see my mother when she was dying in the hospital, just as I’d never been allowed to see my father’s mother because they didn’t speak, or see my mother’s mother because she didn’t want to have anything to do with her children or their lives, or see dozens of my other relatives because they were dead or missing or simply too far away. There were more secrets in my family than revelations, but what was hidden was nevertheless known, the hatred or violence or simple fear that produced and informed my family’s silences could be felt if not named, and if it took me years to recognize this force as the operating principle of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I nevertheless sensed it: the novel spooked me so badly that I returned it to the library and resolved to never read it, or Shirley Jackson, again; with the exception of the inescapable “Lottery,” which I must have encountered at least a half dozen times in subsequent years, I kept that promise for fifteen years.
Jackson structures her novel so that its climax comes just after Merricat confesses her role in her family’s death. The juxtaposition of the two events is what drives home the novel’s true point: that the difference between ruler and ruled is one of means, not temperament (my father terrorized me because he was bigger than me, but if I’d been bigger than him … !). In some sense, “The Lottery” can be dismissed as a sophisticate’s paranoia about the proletariat—Jackson and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, were both intellectuals based in rural North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman taught at the college—but We Have Always Lived in the Castle presents a world view that is both more personal and more complex than that of “The Lottery.” Just as the villagers’ poverty is the justification, conscious or unconscious, for their ignorance, Merricat’s hoarded wealth allows her to build her own shell of ritualized unknowing. Not surprisingly, after the villagers have trashed the Blackwood house, life resumes its former pattern. Charles, stymied, leaves; the villagers, spent, abandon all overt contact with the Blackwoods, but each night a basket of food is deposited on their porch in atonement; Mary Katherine, clothed in an old tablecloth and drinking from the last unbroken cup, speaks the novel’s final words without a trace of irony: “‘Oh, Constance,’ I said, ‘we are so happy.’”
The link between this book and another subversive fairy tale, Orwell’s Animal Farm, might not be apparent, but in fact Orwell’s is simply a politicized treatment of the theme Jackson confronts on a social level: ignorance is bliss. But it’s rarely accidental. In an ironic gesture of fate that I’m sure she would appreciate if not exactly welcome, Jackson’s relegation to high schools and rural libraries has left the intellectual audience she wrote for ignorant of her words, whereas the rural clodhoppers she wrote about have access to her books but pass by them unknowingly. Only their children read them, and, I imagine, learn from Merricat’s example: if the life you see is ugly, shut your eyes and dream of a better one. My mother’s grave is yellow, would you like a cup of tea? The poison in this cup is the dark side of the imagination, the unconscious, but it’s also the bitter antidote to a more quotidian but no less certain death, of conservatism, or provinciality, or just plain old-fashioned boredom.
Frank Stanford
Of the Mulberry Family:
An Arkansas Epilogue
C. D. Wright
ONE DOES NOT APPROACH who one is by going back down there. One approaches who one is by going down. Down is not where. When what one needed, what one thought one most had to have was love. Wild and radiant. Only love. It did not matter where one was. There. Down was where it had to be gotten. At any cost. Not that anyone suspected it would cost more than one could afford. Not that anyone suspected it would cost more than what was offered. Not that it has ever been otherwise. Further down. There. Where: a tendency lingers among country people to say suspicioned instead of suspected.
It was not regional it was systemic. It was hell. There. Then. Down. No. It was sweet. It was nearly poetry, which in its pure state exudes a sweetness keener even than pain. If not Southern then gothic: grotesque, mysterious, desolate. Sepulchral, yes. It takes all. Then it takes off. Explanations don’t help. Excuses don’t count.
Mockingbird, you tell it differently every year:
She was never going to leave. There. Down. She had no intention of leaving. The hills. The crooked green rivers. The rutted brown roads. Smoke sleeving out of farmhouse chimneys. Collapsing barns. The mineral-streaked bluffs streaming with maidenhair. Railroad bridges in fog. Redbud, dogwood, wild plum and service-berry in spring. Pronounced sahrvussberry. Horse apple by itself in a field. Pond by itself in a pasture. Alive. To love. To be loveable. To be loved. The geotropic life. Lived. Perceived. For the venation of one’s own leaf.
If you take root you will grow. She had been told. He told her. The full-blown poet. The land surveyor. He had a calling. He had a living. Her roots had yet to outgrow a coffee can: student, poet-in-waiting, barmaid.
*
Some of you already know these books: The Singing Knives, Shade, Ladies from Hell, Field Talk, Arkansas Bench Stone, Constant Stranger, Crib Death, You, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away, The Light the Dead See. If not, do you believe me when I say you don’t know what you’re missing. If you’re not young and crazy it may be too late. Maybe you were never that young, that nuts. Believe me when I say you are better off. Better to stroke the best than to hit it/ and forfeit the eleven stars of your youth.
*
Kicked back: in the transitory heaven of Pharoah Sanders records and blue ribbon beer. Talking carnally at a trestle table under a locust tree. The honey locust shedding freely. Driving around. Driving around in the truck. Poking around in the woods.
The surveyor and his catspaw. The poet and his follower. Poking around in the woods with a transit. He shot the lines. She held the plumb bob. Squatted in a stand of cedar to pee. Watch yourself: copperhead country. The sweet sachet of cedar and urine.
Mockingbird calling attention to one’s vulnerable position.
On top of Markham Hill. Dug a little pit with the heel of his workboot and the prong of a church key. Church key, the ubiquitous ersatz for bottle opener. They were under the ample branches of the horse apple. Emptied his wool herringbone trousers of coins. Covered them up. There, he said. If you ever need money. This will get you in a double feature. Double feature, that’s history.
She loved how he smelled, osage orange. But when he had not washed, he conceded that the goat got him. It could give you an instant headache.
Twin desks made from unstained doors on sawhorses. She smoked unfiltered brown cigarettes. She had to drive to the mall to get the special cigarettes. He bought records. Books. She bought cigarettes. Books. He but lay his hand on the book and inhaled the contents. She underlined everything and retained next-to-nothing. She liked to go somewhere with a book, make herself small and smoke.
She and the dance teacher smoked, Sylvia of the Balanchine extensions and candy-only diet. Bone-cold-cancer reamed Sylvia. If smoke were not permitted, she and Sylvia didn’t bother going in. He to
lerated secondhand smoke. He didn’t give a scintilla for a crowd.
Madura pomifera: Occurs as a single tree in more or less open situations in mountainous regions …
*
He read the living and the dead. She read the dead. He read the French, the Italian, the Americans. She read the French, the Russians, the Americans. They were in the South, so to speak. The Upper South. When you think about it, his beautiful sepulchral language was her first living poetry: Because none of you know what you want follow me/ because I’m not going anywhere/ I’ll just bleed so the stars can have something dark to shine in … The poet wrote. Small wonder. First blasted, living, everloving poetry. Horses fuck inside me and a river makes a bend in my shoulder. No goddamned wonder.
*
Educated by the Benedictines of Paris (Arkansas) and the levee hands of Snow Lake (Arkansas). Earned no academic degrees, taught at no college. Nor did he give public readings. In the main, he avoided cities. Published with obscure presses. Started an obscure press, Lost Roads.
Save for placing fourth in 1958, in a contest sponsored by the Ninth District Tennessee Federation of Women’s Clubs, he went unhonored.
*
Frank Stanford. Photograph by Meredith Boswell. Estate of Frank Stanford. Courtesy C. D. Wright.
When the sun shone quote unquote regular again, he hung the herringbones up by their suspenders and donned light khaki; leathered up the same workboots year round. A big head of girly curls, a long torso and short legs. The intimation of a satyr.
She adopted war fatigues and unflattering flannel shirts. Public-health glasses. A lash of tawny, horsey hair. She was split-rail thin but for the breasts, cream beaten with wine. Nails chewed beyond repair. The intimation of a maenad.
Nobody cooked.
Foreign films screened in the student union. Every Sunday night. They feasted: Children of Paradise, Weekend, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Romantic Englishwoman, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Lucia, Brief Vacation, Rashomon, The Conformist, The Apu Trilogy, The Battle of Algiers, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Shame. It was heavy fare.
*
Fruit globular, two to five inches in diameter, greenish yellow or yellow, somewhat resembling a large, rough orange, fragrant …
She took classes: mime, saxophone, poetry, ballet. Doing pliés she was visited by the residual scent of their constant screwing.
Sap like that of rest of tree, milky and sticky …
She and her coruscating redheaded friend practiced the beautiful figure series in the old gymnasium. The studies Etienne Decroux created for Jean-Louis Barrault: Children of Paradise.
She waited tables. All the young women waited on the young men. Down. There. But she was perfectly sorry at it. Sullen. Slow. Forgetful. Untipped. Every other night she janitored in the student union while her co-worker talked to her inaudibly, without stopping, over the institutional vacuum cleaners.
He called it bodark, from bois d’arc, wood of the arches. When the trees rained arrows on the French searching for the Vermilion Sea.
Imagined running a bait shop. She liked to be on the river, and one could foresee reading there with few interruptions. In a bait shop. Lulled by riverwater. Maybe she would write something. By and by.
Imagined being caretaker for the Civil War cemetery. Crosses not tended by living kin, crosses whose numbers would not increase.
The Civil War cemetery was in the black neighborhood. It was different from the college, different from the mall and different from her hometown. Her white-on-white hometown. The jukebox was better in the black bar than the college bar, and she liked to sit in the highbacked wooden booths shamelessly looking at faces and listening in. The talk by itself inebriated. Maybe she could write something. By and by.
*
There are poems in his published collections dating from 1957 when Frank was preposterously nine years old. The work is that continuous. See YOU: “The Wolves” and “The Burial Ship.”
*
Couldn’t be a surveyor. Like him. Couldn’t fathom the math. Couldn’t go where snakes slept, slithered and multiplied.
Shut up, mockingbird.
*
More commonly known as the Osage-orange or mock orange …
Blanching erect on young trees; vigorous branches bear a straight stout thorn about one inch long at each node …
Why it takes so Christly and beastly long to learn to walk upright. The hands, the distances, the tools, the eyes one wears out scrabbling through the archeology of one’s shifting layers before the book one wanted to read, the very book that would set one on one’s two flat feet pushes to the surface. Branching erect …
The book that could set one’s life in inexorable, joyful motion. Headed in the right direction. As Miss Toklas was wont to say of Miss Stein’s driving—she goes forward admirably, she does not go backward successfully—that seemed the way to go. Straight and stout …
Going down. Always entails going. Down. There. To the woeful telos of that love. The love for, face it, the already-spoken-for, the now seventeen-years-amouldering poet.
It was a long time ago. It would take a very long time to fell.
Wood heavy (forty-eight pounds per cubic foot), exceedingly hard, strong, tough …
Everyone who met him stirred to his vision.
I guess you couldn’t help but like him, her father’s taciturn ruling. How the entire mess must have pained them. The lenient, upright parents. Watching her be whelmed. For love only love. Radiant, wild and terminal. Knowing he was spoken for. Not interfering. Not expecting anything good to come of it. Not foreseeing the worst.
Imagined the poet astraddle a cane-bottom chair staring at the unvarnished planes of floor. An ensemble of women performing the shadow dance at his back.
The hide is clean with me, the poet’s guarantee. Huh?
The centrifugal field of lies ever-expanding. A veritable seiche of lies. In a few forevers they would all be gnawing the roots of dandelions, but in this one he alone would be dead, and there would be no actual cauldron to scour the hide.
Nor would this ever be actually over.
Nor would she ever be the only soul, afterwards, to experience frequent sightings of the now seventeen-years-amouldering.
To dream sightings. Arriving late, impossibly, to her nonexistent sixteenth birthday party, dressed for surveying. But not getting out of the cab of his truck, slumped instead over the wheel. Not stirring. Living. Loving. The radio in the cab moaning “Wild Horses.” Nor the sole survivor to fondle the few things the poet touched that she had kept. Who learned to part with them, the fondled things, as they wore out, by force of will.
Not the only one to remove the human figures whose forms disrupted the view. To make of her foes, ciphers. And of those ciphers, foes. Forcibly.
Nor to paper over the errors, the failures, the sins which no brace of doves, no blood of the lamb could ever remit. To all but wear the beloved’s foreskin as wedding ring. To let another existential being be her whole actual world. And so on and so forth. Her kind. Down. There. Then. We were expert at acts of self-delusion and distortion.
The mockingbird has a million licks. At least one poor yodeler doesn’t have to re-learn the same-old saw every sad-ass spring.
*
Yet he acquired a sizable, devoted readership in his lifetime. It would be unwarranted to think his reputation profited by his premature death. On the contrary, the work suffered and to some degree remains tainted on this account because death was his subject. He has rightly been called one of its great voices.
*
It was there. Then. Down. Where this very instant a domestic artifact of little consequence insists on poking out, on being lit up:
The bed belonged to her grandmother. It was funky. A crudely scrolled two-tone veneered headboard. A set of springs not even boxed. A bathetic mattress. How many times had she wet her grandmother’s cotton gown sleeping alongside her grandmother’s passi
ve body.
When sleeping with the grandmother, even in the most hateful of winters, the window was propped up with a yardstick. The hammer nested in its own cold light under the pillow. The grandmother would pray, Now honey, don’t make a lake. And she would peep, See you in the morning, grandma. To which the grandmother would pray, Lord willing and the crick don’t rise. And in the morning, the grandmother would ruefully bear witness to her soaking side, the risen crick.
Frank Stanford’s Ninth District Fourth Place Prize. Courtesy C. D. Wright.
How many times would she ladle her poet’s gorgeous body in the cavity of their hand-me-down bed.
The other grandmother called it rabbit hedge, had a small one in her yard but considered it a nuisance, too much trouble to fell, the wood so hard.
She herself knew it as horse apple. She often heard it called that. But she didn’t think horses ate them. But what did she know about horses. One by the name of Duke lived on Markham Hill.
*
The bed with the white candlewick spread … She remembered the candlewick bedspread. The one that would later be used to rake the leaves into, wrap around the borrowed mover, shroud the cat.
The last male cat, Bowtie, hit-and-run-down in her absence. When she returned she opened the top of the refrigerator to its cadaver. He explained that he thought she would want to see him before he buried him. Later he told her he took care of it. Next she discovered the thawing remains of Bowtie in the garbage can in a paper sack. She went back in the house for the bedspread. Thinking no further than death wanted a winding cloth.
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