Clear Springs (32 page)

At the end of 1989, the
Mayfield Messenger
highlighted the major stories of the year. A picture of me taken at the movie premiere was juxtaposed with a picture of the new chicken-feed mill built by Seaboard Farms across from my family’s house.

In the spring of 1990, after years of living in the Northeast, I finally managed to move back to Kentucky, but I was still several hours’ journey from Mayfield, and I did not go home for Thanksgiving that year. I was out of the habit. Janice lived in Florida. LaNelle was in Australia. LaNelle and I spoke on the telephone that morning, and I talked to Mama and Daddy on the telephone at about two in the afternoon, after they had finished dinner.

“That old squash made me sick,” Daddy complained.

He never liked Mama’s squash—her yellow crookneck squash mashed with bacon grease.

“Are you ready for the earthquake?” I asked.

He laughed. “I’ve got too much else on my mind to get scared by a crackpot,” he said.

The earthquake hysteria had begun some weeks before, when a self-proclaimed climatologist predicted that the most devastating earthquake in U.S. history would hit the New Madrid fault, on the Mississippi River, not far from Mayfield. There had been a major earthquake along the fault in 1811, but few people lived in the region then. It was said that the force of that earthquake caused the Mississippi River to run backwards, and that it rattled dishes at the White House. The aftershocks lasted well into 1812. Since then, doomster prognosticators have been saying that the next earthquake will sink the whole region—from Memphis to St. Louis—into the Mississippi, and that the land with all the water reserves beneath it will turn into liquid clay.

Western Kentucky greeted the new prediction with fear and frolic. The stores were having earthquake sales. During the week prior to Thanksgiving, Daddy gleefully watched people on TV being interviewed in grocery stores as they stockpiled bottled water and toilet
paper. Now, on the telephone, he told me about all these “crazy fools.” He added, “If there ain’t nothing to eat they won’t need all that toilet paper.”

Later that afternoon, Daddy’s upset stomach suddenly grew worse. Then a huge headache slammed his brain and he collapsed.

“I’m dying,” he told Mama. But he often said this for melodramatic effect when he had heartburn or an earache.

“Do you want me to call the ambulance?” Mama asked.

“No.”

But then he lost consciousness, and she called the ambulance, half afraid he would be mad at her for doing so. She expected him to wake up and say, “Just take me behind the corncrib and shoot me.” But surely this was only a spell, she thought. She called my brother, Don.

Don beat the ambulance to the house. Then the medics arrived and whisked Daddy off to a hospital in Paducah. Don and Mama followed in Don’s car. They hardly recognized the familiar road.

Daddy was placed in intensive care. He had had a cerebral hemorrhage and was in a coma. There was nothing to do but wait. Mama called me and said, “Your daddy’s had a real bad stroke.” Roger and I arrived at the hospital at one o’clock in the morning, after a long drive in the rain, our car full of dogs, to find my mother numbed with disbelief, my father seemingly in a deep sleep.

Janice and her teenage son drove up from Florida, arriving by mid-morning. LaNelle was summoned from Australia. In the darkness of uncertainty, she flew the length of the Pacific Ocean to Los Angeles, then to Nashville, where Don picked her up, as the rest of us still waited. She arrived at the intensive-care lounge in Paducah bearing macadamia nuts and books on Australian aboriginal culture and many snapshots. She brought kangaroo and koala souvenirs for the children. But her forced cheerfulness quickly faded. Australia didn’t register on any of us.

I recall the intensity of intensive care. In the family lounge, all sensations were heightened—the ringing of the wall telephone, the slow sucking of strange machines, the pop-up appearances of the nurses who came to summon a family. Several families were camped out there, each stationed in a cluster of chairs and couches. Everyone jumped whenever the telephone rang. One family waited for word on a young woman whose lungs had been burned by a deadly mix of bathroom chemicals. The wife of a man with a brain tumor sat in a stupor. Mama settled among us in calm denial. We didn’t know what went
through her mind. She wouldn’t talk. Ever thrifty, we fetched the remains of the Thanksgiving dinner and heated it in the cafeteria microwave. We huddled, cracking jokes like hickory nuts for survival. We lived in that lounge, napping and housekeeping in our little corner, clutching the mundane, elevating it to the surreal, charged by every sensation. We alternated between stoicism and despair. We imagined the reactions Daddy would have if he could see himself lying there in the hospital bed.

“If he woke up after laying flat on his back that long, don’t you know he would be all stove up?”

“He’d bellyache for a month. I can hear him now.”

It took about two minutes of family counsel to decide against heroic measures for prolonging life. We knew he would hate the idea of being hooked to machines. We discussed it briefly. And then in characteristic Mason fashion, we hung around in the hall for half an hour trying to decide what to do about supper. No one would take the initiative. Finally we sent for a pizza.

The days passed. Our friend Dottie brought us a station-wagon load of Chinese carryout food, with a tablecloth, cloth napkins, china plates, candles, chopsticks, and a bottle of wine with wine glasses. She arranged the dinner on the circular coffee table in the lounge. We lived in illusions, in shining glimpses of possibility. Daddy would miraculously wake up and we would all drive home.

Alternately, we told ourselves that slipping away in a coma was the best way to die. We thought he was lucky he didn’t know his plight, lucky to exit this way, without suffering. Of course we wanted him to wake up, and we hammered at the neurologists. We demanded information, answers, assurances—which they could not give. We wanted him to live, to recover. But we knew he could not tolerate being an invalid. We didn’t want him to spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair, helpless.

He had never trusted doctors. He wouldn’t go to them except when he suffered severely. For years, he’d had a chronic earache, with a permanent ringing in his ears. When he had his ears tested once, he was pleased that the doctor could hear the ringing too. But his distrust of doctors made him skeptical of their methods—their horse liniment, their snake oil, their magic cures with cobalt and rotgut chemical potions. He knew people who had died from going to the doctor. He knew people who carried piss-bags plugged into their sides. Why would doctors do that to a person? He knew their character. He knew
when they were putting one over on him. He saw how they acted superior, wielding their high-blown vocabulary to shame him. He hated hospitals so much he wouldn’t even take his dog Oscar to the vet to be tested for heartworm, even though a neighbor’s dog had died of heartworm. “Oscar don’t want to go to the hospital,” he said.

His cousin Mose had diabetes and wasn’t supposed to eat much bread. “What that doctor don’t know won’t hurt him,” Mose said. Daddy and Mose and all their kind continued to have eggs and fried toast and bacon or sausage for breakfast every day of their lives. Cholesterol was just another booger-man story they didn’t have time for.

Daddy died on December 1, his mother’s birthday. He didn’t get to learn how the earthquake prediction turned out.

His death came much too soon, before crucial things had been said. Unanswered questions flew around like moths drifting toward a pilot light. We needed to understand his perversity, his stubbornness, his passivity. We needed clarification. He had been so silent. What had he made of us? We needed to show our love, heap upon him a backlog of long-intended expressions of sentiment. What do I do now? Mama wanted to know.

Instead of answers, we had food. Before the funeral, neighbors and kinfolks began bringing food to the house. They brought chicken buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, deli meat-and-cheese trays, loaves of white bread and pimiento-cheese spread, pies and cakes. A few made casseroles or cakes, but most brought prepared dishes from the supermarket. Store-bought costs more, so it has higher status.

The brick, faux-plantation-style funeral home in Mayfield is positioned between Wal-Mart and Kmart. It’s an old funerary establishment, in one family for several generations. The place is dismal with its miserable purpose. We forced ourselves through its doors, dreading the private family preview of the enhanced body before the visitors arrived. We dreaded our own grief, the awkwardness of our sorrow. As we entered, our misery exploded through wads of Kleenex. The tears came like a poison we had to eject.

But the man lying there in the three-piece suit was not Wilburn Mason, only a garish look-alike, some store-window mannequin. Mama was unable to look at this grotesque version of her husband. Later, when the guests arrived, she could not stand beside the casket and greet people as was customary. She sat far down the front row of chairs, where the casket was out of her line of sight. The visitors came to her. “He looks real nice,” they said. The rest of us mingled.

There was a lively evasiveness among the guests. People said, “It’s nice to see you.” Some avoided the subject of our loss. The Clear Springs kinfolks swam into focus, and then the old buddies Daddy hung out with at the filling station, and guys he had played with as a boy. They told us stories, things we didn’t know, pranks Daddy pulled. The spirit grew lighter, more in keeping with Daddy’s personality. But the flowers were incongruous, not his style. Many accompanying cards listed several names of people who had “made up” (paid for) some flowers together. Some of the offerings were plastic or silk, made to endure in the elements.

The next day, after the funeral—which was conducted at the funeral home chapel—we rode to Clear Springs in a Lincoln Town Car behind the hearse. A policeman led the procession, followed by the preacher, then the hearse, then the family. Just east of town, a red pickup truck broke into the line. The policeman stopped the procession and got out of his patrol car. He motioned for the truck to leave the line. When it failed to cooperate, he gestured more vehemently. Finally, in seeming chagrin, the truck veered out of the line and turned left into the parking lot of a motel. It blundered along, looking as though it couldn’t figure out what had happened. And then the procession continued.

“Don’t you wish Daddy could have seen that?” we said.

“He would have gotten a kick out of that.”

We were seeing everything through his eyes. He loved anything that flouted convention.

All along the highway, the oncoming traffic saw us and slowed down. The drivers didn’t whiz past, bent on their missions to the video store or the Piggly Wiggly; they pulled over and stopped on the shoulder of the road. All of them. It is the custom of the South. Some of the drivers were young people, including a few sorry-looking guys with unruly hair and rear-jacked cars. Farther down this two-lane state road, we came upon some construction work, and the oil-pavement trucks rolled out of our way. One of the workmen doffed his blaze-orange hard hat and held it to his chest.

Our little procession probably seemed eerily appropriate to all those motorists and workmen, for death was on everybody’s mind. The earthquake was due that day. Schools were actually closed and grocery stocks were low.

Our Town Car was a sort of mortuary schooner. The trip to Clear Springs was a long, slow, peaceful ride through town and the countryside.
I could see the landscape more clearly than I had since I was a child. We passed the old Arnett property, Granny’s homeplace, and the family cemetery next to it. When we turned down the Clear Springs road, an old 1880 map of Clear Springs—a detailed guide to the past—came to mind. The map, which I had been studying recently, showed all the old houses and the names of the families who lived in them. It occurred to me that so little had changed since then; the nineteenth century was barely yesterday. The road was paved now, but it was still a country road, with the residences spread far apart. I noticed a ramshackle tobacco barn through the trees. Only a few brick houses were new. We floated past reminders of generations of Burnetts and Arnetts and Hickses, all relations of mine. The names on the mailboxes offered hints. I wanted to know the stories. Who were those people of my past? What had happened to them? What life would I have led if my family had never left Clear Springs? We passed the road where Mama had lived as a little girl with her grandmother, Mammy Hicks. We glided up Pulltight Hill, so called because mules had to pull tight when they trudged up its steep slope. McKendree Church was at the crest of the hill, and the cemetery was across the road. Both are still part of the old Mason homeplace; the Mason family supplied the land for the church. Literally, with scant preparation, I had been thrust back to my roots. Significance seemed embedded in the very ground. The cemetery was a miniature of the 1880 map of the community, I thought, gazing around at the stones that were engraved with familiar surnames.

Under a little blue tent, we sat on folding chairs beside the casket, which had an American flag spread over it. The preacher led a graveside service from a funeral manual—some words that didn’t much register. I thought about the earthquake. It might erupt any second. The churches had been well attended the day before, a Sunday. A lot of people had added earthquake insurance riders, made new wills, held yard sales.

Daddy would have loved it if the ground had opened up on that raw December day and toppled him down in. He hated trappings so much, it would have been fitting if something had happened to undercut it all, to bring us all down to earth, into the earth, to show that all was folly.

I realized that we were sitting on Granddaddy’s grave. Masons surrounded us. Herman and Bessie, Roe and Rosie, Robert and Ethel. We were on an artificial green carpet, like the astro-stuff Daddy had glued
onto the front porch. The carpet had been spread over the ground; it extended down into the grave and out over the mound of dirt, as if we could not bear the sight of it. The casket was poised above the lined grave, which held a metal vault. The lid of the vault was waiting nearby. The flowers were banked on top of the carpet that covered the pile of dirt. Later the florists’ stilts and plastic baskets would be arranged on the newly filled grave.