Clear Springs (10 page)

One night not long after that, I was in my room getting ready for bed when I thought I heard a screech out in the woods. It was a banshee
screaming its head off. I told myself it was only imagination, but I waited fearfully, not daring to tell what I had heard. Mama was in the kitchen working up tomatoes. Daddy was reading a Zane Grey Western. The radio was playing, a dance-band program.

I heard the banshee rush down the path through the dark. Then Granddaddy burst through the back door. He had to go through the two bedrooms to get to the main room. We had no hallway.

“Ettie’s fell,” he cried.

Daddy rushed out, and Mama followed, wiping her hands on the tail of her blouse. They called for me to stay behind with Janice. We stood in the kitchen. Two years before, our parents had added a few rooms, including a bathroom and a large kitchen. Now the house seemed large and empty, the radio playing disembodied voices. We waited uneasily.

Granny wasn’t physically hurt when she fell, but she cried piteously and rolled up into a ball, as if she had to contain some internal anguish. Mama and Granddaddy took her to the hospital then, leaving Daddy to see after Janice and me. He made us go to bed, but I didn’t sleep. Two hours later, Mama and Granddaddy came home, but Granny remained at the hospital. Nothing was explained to me, but later I realized that it was not clear to anyone what was wrong with her. For some time she had been nervous. She had retreated into silence, and her hands entwined each other and picked at her apron hem. I hadn’t really noticed. Now I understood only that she was dreadfully sick. The suddenness of her collapse weighed on me. Everything I counted on now seemed tenuous, as loose as a feather floating to earth.

“She’s worried about something and she won’t say what it is,” I overheard Mama say.

Granny was so sick she had to be transferred to a hospital in Memphis. There, she got shock treatments. An electric current shot through her head, skewering her mind. I was terrified that she would die in that far-off hospital. Mama and Daddy had ridden with her in the ambulance and then left her there among strangers while they rushed home to their work. It was July, and the garden was coming in. Janice and I went to the Merit Clubhouse again for a few weeks that summer, while Mama filled in for employees on vacation. This time, I discovered the Clubhouse library, a little white house thick with the enchanting smell of dusty old books that had been donated for the factory children. I could see this dust in the sunbeams that crossed the room. I discovered a row of old-fashioned books by Louisa May Alcott. I began reading
Little Women
, and I longed to share it with Granny. But Granny had vanished.

Granddaddy read aloud to me a letter he wrote her. I sat in their bedroom by the oak wardrobe where he kept his cache of candy and the horehound sticks for his throat. He doled out his treasure—a peppermint stick or a few candy corns—for special treats.

His letter told about the weather and the local news and the cows and the crops and her garden and what Janice and I were doing. He had dug the potatoes, and Christy had canned more green beans and picked five gallons of berries. There was a big rain. He went to the stock sale and looked at shoats. He and Wilburn were “laying by” the corn. Wilburn helped cut hay over at Mrs. Shelton’s. Roe and Mary and her girls came to pick berries. They had a little picnic with Bobbie and Janice.

Granddaddy wrote, “Now, Mama, don’t you fret, times are hard, but they will get better by and by. You are ever in our prayers, and the Lord will heal thy suffering.” His letter was soothing and lovely. His language was musical. It was biblical—phrases like “standing on the verge of a brighter day,” “when our cares are gone,” “the woes on earth vanished.” It was the language of the songs in church, not actual talking. For the first time I heard strong emotions expressed in writing—not just in a story, but here at home. Granddaddy’s voice was strong and eloquent. I didn’t understand how he had found the words, because he could not read some of the books I was reading. It was as if by reading less he left his mind clearer for expression. I loved his letter, but it chilled me too, for I could hear the undertone. Granny was going to die.

Death was on my mind a lot, partly because I had had pneumonia, but mainly because of Beth’s death in
Little Women
. Maybe Granny’s mind was diseased, I thought, from reading. I had heard her niece say Granny had read too much when she was younger. “Aunt Ethel’s mind was always too active,” the niece said. People tended to think that you could disease the mind by what you allowed into it. They were afraid of studying. Any smart, bookish person who died young of a brain tumor or apoplexy was suspected of studying too much. Granny herself may have thought that her reading was dangerous. She had read
Gone with the Wind
. Earlier in the summer, I had been fooling around with that large red-covered book myself. Granny may have been worried that it would corrupt me. But I didn’t understand the story at all. The proximity of possum hounds and crinoline-understoried ball gowns was surreal. In my imagination I transposed Tara to our farm, my frame of
reference, and the opening scene with the possum hounds took place in the driveway of my grandparents’ house. It didn’t make any sense. I turned to Nancy Drew, who could be relied on to make sense of everything, and to Jo March, the heroine of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. I would be Jo, the writer. Not Beth, the shy little sister who died.

Granny was so homesick she begged the doctors to let her out of the hospital. She could not bear to be so far away from everything she knew. I imagine she may have dwelled on her Aunt Ella, stranded at her son’s in Detroit a few years before while her husband’s body was sent home to Kentucky for burial. Refusing to have any more shock treatments, Granny returned to us, and she stayed in bed until fall. Mama spent many hours up there, seeing after her and keeping house for Granddaddy. Twice a day Mama gave her shots with a large steel needle that she boiled in a stewer. I glimpsed Granny’s exposed buttocks, large and white.

Granny had changed. She was quiet, and she cried easily. She couldn’t remember the stories we had read together in my schoolbooks. She didn’t want to play with our albums. She went to the hospital again for a short period, but not in Memphis. She refused to have any more of those lightning bolts in her head. The lightning would clear out her brain’s passageways, they said, so she could think more clearly, so her brain wouldn’t swirl—but today I think that maybe she secretly wanted her brain to swirl, while she lay there with her eyes closed, watching a turning kaleidoscope that followed the cycle of the seasons. Her nerves were tangled up like a pile of baling twine. Her fingers would work busily in her lap, rubbing and twisting the edge of her apron.

What happened that night when the scream came hurtling through the dark? Was it merely that she fell out of bed? No one explained. She had to have some treatments. She needed rest. But that was all. Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil. It was a mystery, something she kept from my parents and something they kept from Janice and me. Apparently there was much that wasn’t meant to be said.

The Mason household was, I realize now, filled with silences and euphemisms. My sister and I weren’t allowed near when the cow had her calf. Sometimes Mama told me, a thrill in her voice, “Guess what? The sow found her little pigs last night! She’d been looking and looking for them, and she found ten little pigs.” The bull’s dalliances with the cows were not general news at our place. His courtships were hidden. The he-cow, as the bull was called, was so Victorian in his practices that Janice
and I never knew he was up to anything. I saw Mama Cat having her kittens once, chasing her tail as the kittens popped out. She growled and pounced, as if the birth were an unexpected attack from the rear. She chased her tail like the tigers in the Little Black Sambo tale I had read in the first grade. The tigers turned to butter; the colors in Mama Cat’s calico dress blended together as she spun after her tail.

Mama says now that Granny would never explain what was bothering her. Depression wasn’t acknowledged then, especially in a community where strong survival instincts made depression seem like a deliberate, luxurious choice. What unspeakable horrors tormented her? Was she still upset because we had moved out of her house? Had Daddy’s long absence during the war gradually worn her nerves raw? Was her own mind a horror for her? Had any of her people—parents, cousins—ever lost their minds? Was there a secret locked in her mind, chained there like an idiot child hidden in the attic?

Granddaddy and my parents talked about sending her to Hopkinsville. This perfectly respectable little western Kentucky city was identified in everyone’s mind with its insane asylum. If you said you had been to Hopkinsville, people would say “How long were you in for?” or “How did you get out?” The asylum was a vast brick fortress of a place, confused in my mind with the state penitentiary, which had an electric chair.

That fall, when Granny was still recovering from her sojourn in Memphis—surely the dislocation to Memphis was more disturbing than anything else that had happened to her—Granddaddy’s younger brother, genial Uncle Bee, died. Whenever he had come to visit, he always gave me a nickel, on condition that I could work it out of the knotted end of his handkerchief. At his funeral, the rows of the church pews were like furrows in the ground. I sat in the second row, very near the open casket, where he lay browned like a peach by the embalming. He was gruesome and still, motionless like the gray cat that Daddy had backed over with the truck. Everyone was crying. The preacher talked, and the more he talked the more they cried. I steeled myself, refusing to cry. I was bursting with emotion—fear and remorse and sorrow and grief. But I would not cry. It would be embarrassing. I did not want anybody to know my feelings. Like Granny, I wouldn’t tell what I was feeling. I did not want to admit my vulnerability. I would defy death. I had already lived to be ten. I had received my ten-year cake. I was too special to die, I thought.

My other grandparents, Mama’s parents, were long dead. I never knew my grandmother Eunice, and my grandfather Robert Lee died when I was about five. He was a drunkard, everyone said. Whiskey was evil and illegal, used only in secret. In the Mason household, Granddaddy hid his pint of “medicinal” whiskey, and occasionally he made blackberry brandy in the basement. Granny would surreptitiously take a toddy if she was sick, but she wouldn’t venture near a bunch of men gathered out behind the corncrib. They might be nipping.

Nearby towns like Paducah and Cairo, on the river, sold alcohol openly. Cairo, Illinois, had a reputation as a rough river town, and boys went there for lessons taught by whores. But our county, Graves, upheld a facade of temperance. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, alcohol had been voted in and out several times. Back then, blind tigers—houses where alcohol was sold clandestinely—kept a barrel out front as a signal. On Saturday night, a man might go to the poolroom in Mayfield, encounter some whiskey in the back room, and have to be dragged home. Or it could be worse.

The John Burnett in this difficulty was Mama’s great-grandfather. Such an incident could easily have occurred in the same place fifty years later. Mama was not allowed to go to the community dances
sponsored by her Uncle Zeb—even though he could fiddle like anything—because there might be a knife fight. There was once a murder at one of Zeb’s dances. People didn’t go out on Saturday night in Clear Springs merely to shake and stomp. They wanted to get drunk.

Sometimes Daddy got drunk. He drank only beer, but he couldn’t hold it. A few beers would knock him loopy. When my sister Janice was born, he arrived at the hospital staggering and laughing. Mama made him hide under the bed when she heard the nurse coming. He passed out and slept there all night. He didn’t drink regularly or openly, just on occasion when he would get in a mood and go off in the car suddenly. Sometimes he didn’t come home to milk the cows, so then Mama knew he was on a binge. She would start worrying, pacing the floor and looking out the window. After an hour or two, she and Granddaddy would go milk, for the cows would get mastitis if they weren’t milked on time. Nothing was said about why Daddy was absent. Mama spoke only of how he might have had a wreck.

The church tried to rescue tipplers before they toppled. We attended Calvary Methodist, a small church in town affiliated with the two Methodist churches in Clear Springs. But Daddy wouldn’t go; it was up to Mama to make sure her children’s souls were safe. She was secretly afraid Daddy would go to hell. At church, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union struggled to erase thoughts of alcohol from the minds of young people. When we reached adolescence, the W.C.T.U. made us sign a pledge never to touch a drink of alcohol in our lives. I was an obedient girl, and I signed the pledge. Anyway, I figured it wouldn’t be binding after high school. But one boy refused to sign. He had already been to Cairo, and he knew something.

When I was seven—before Granny got sick and while Mama was still at the Merit—Mama sent Janice and me to the Daily Vacation Bible School at a Baptist church for a week, so Granny wouldn’t have to tend us. Everyone called Daily Vacation Bible School by its full name, emphasizing the “Daily Vacation,” as if to stress the dreaded dailiness as well as the oxymoronic notion of school as a vacation.

The Baptists were not our religion, so I didn’t know what to expect, but the week that followed was one of delightful mornings of coloring books, stories, songs, and cutouts. I enjoyed coloring Joseph’s crazy-quilt coat and filling in angel wings with the essence of cake-icing white against the off-white of the coloring booklet’s pages. I liked Daniel in the lions’ den. The lions didn’t seem especially ferocious. Goliath was more frightening than any lion, and clean-cut David
seemed no match for the shaggy giant. We sang “This Little Light of Mine.” (“Hide it under a bushel—no!”) Daily Vacation Bible School was like regular school, except for all the praying. I didn’t know how to pray out loud and was afraid of being called on. Grown-ups prayed effortlessly, snatching prayerful phrasings out of thin air when the preacher called on them. Silently, I prayed for a bicycle to replace my velocipede.