Clear Springs (36 page)

Half of her was doted on and the other half was a secret shame. Chris tottered between the two views of herself. She loved her aunt and her grandmother, and they loved the part of her that came from Eunice. Often lonely, Chris explored the creeks and fencerows. But sometimes they went fishing. Mammy Hicks’s people, the Burnetts, would rather fish than eat cake. The Burnetts would be chopping out tobacco, and all of a sudden one of them would say, “I believe the fish might be biting.” Their hoes would drop, and before they could think it through, they would find themselves lounging on the creek bank with fishing poles. Chris went fishing in Panther Creek with her grandmother and aunt and listened to them whoop and gossip. She liked the slippery feel of the fish. She learned to thread a hook with a squirming worm and drop it into the water. When storm clouds came, Mammy herded her and Hattie home like a mother duck. Mammy feared lightning the same as snakes. Lightning had burned her house down. Lightning was like snakes jumping in the heavens, she said, all lit up and jerky. “Snake fits,” she said.

Mammy Hicks suffered from dropsy—heart trouble. Her ankles swelled. She was seized with spells of weakness and couldn’t do her work. As her health deteriorated, one of her sons or daughters would come to stay with her most nights. Chris waited on the porch each evening, gazing longingly down the narrow dirt road, hoping someone would come to stay the night with her grandmother. Mammy was only in her sixties, but to Chris she seemed ancient, with her wrinkled, broken body and her puffy feet bursting from her shoes.

One afternoon, Mammy Hicks was sitting up in her four-poster bed eating watermelon when all at once she lurched and fell back on the pillow.

With a shriek, Hattie leaped to her mother’s side. “Chris, reach in her mouth and get that piece of watermelon out,” Hattie said. “Maybe she’s choked on it. Go on, reach in there. Your hand’s little.”

Chris did as she was told. Her grandmother’s head was limp, and Chris had to force her fingers past rotten teeth. The odor was like a putrefying
dead animal. She pulled out the slippery piece of watermelon. But Mammy Hicks was dead.

It was the year of the stock-market crash, but the Depression had come early to the Clear Springs area. Throughout the twenties, the farmers of Clear Springs were in difficulty. They could grow enough food for their own use, but no one had much money to buy goods, even though there were two general stores. On Saturdays, to earn some cash, the farmers carried produce and chickens and eggs to Mayfield in their wagons. Although some families owned cars, the rural way of life had changed little since the settlement of Clear Springs a century before. Mammy Hicks’s Montgomery Ward organ was as newfangled as anything around. Nobody owned a radio. Nobody had a bicycle.

My mother was ten years old. Hattie’s sister Rosie decided that Chris could not be left alone with Hattie because of her fits. So Rosie brought both of them to live with her and her husband, Roe Mason, on their nearby farm. The Mason farm was well kept, with the borders scythed, the rail fences laid true. Chris had often visited the place, but now that she was coming there to live, she felt uprooted once again, and her life seemed insignificant. From a small ménage of women, Chris entered a huge household of cousins, hired hands, and boarders. Uncle Roe—Thomas Monroe Mason—had one son by his first wife and three children by Rosie, his second.

Chris and Hattie brought a wagonload of Mammy Hicks’s possessions with them—her dishes, some furniture, her organ, her ice-cream churn. They also brought Eunice’s fine things: her preserve stands and cakestands, her Hoosier pantry, and her bed with the high headboard and footboard—the bed she died in. At Aunt Rosie’s house, Chris and Hattie slept in that bed in the dining room, near the kitchen fireplace.

The house was full of children, but none of Chris’s own age to play with. She was outgoing, yet she was often lonely and bewildered. She hid in the attic and wrote little stories on a tablet. Or she explored the fields and the creeks. Along the fencerows, she found a kind of weed with a translucent lining in its seedpod that she could chew. It was like plastic. Years later, when plastic was developed, she claimed she had invented it. She discovered a banana tree growing in the woods. She picked a banana and ate it. She was sure it was a banana. She didn’t often have bananas, but this truly tasted like one. She tried to follow hummingbirds. She played with cats. Cats went by colors—Blackie,
Whitey, Calico, Yeller. She dressed them in doll clothes. “She’s always packing a cat around,” Hattie explained to Rosie. Chris wore cotton dresses that Aunt Rosie made for her. Chris always wanted something tied around her waist. If she didn’t have a belt, she used a string.

Mammy Hicks’s organ occupied a place of honor in the parlor. It was a beautiful thing, with cutwork and fancy trim and colorful insets. It had a gorgeous stool, with a crimson velvet cushion and beaded embroidery. Chris loved to fool around on the organ, pounding the keys and pushing and pulling the stops. Although both Hattie and Rosie could play by ear—church tunes and folk songs—they wouldn’t teach Chris to play. They were too busy.

Sometimes Aunt Rosie sent Chris a mile down the road to the store to get some sugar or salt or matches. Once, there was a penny left over and Chris spent it on chewing gum. Aunt Rosie whipped her with a hickory switch, but Hattie intervened.

“If she needs correcting, I’m the one to correct her,” said Hattie, who jealously guarded her niece. “She’s my baby.”

“I’m not going to have her think she can just take what’s not hers,” Aunt Rosie said. “She got that from her daddy, I’ll allow.”

Hattie had the falling sickness. A lick on the head had triggered her seizures years before. The affliction made everyone a little afraid of her, as if it could leap out like a contagion. They assumed she was touched in the head. Little was understood about epilepsy—or “elipepsi,” as some called it. They said she “had fits,” like a dog in August. Her spells often came on at the time of her period, the women claimed. Sometimes when Hattie was hoeing tobacco she would suddenly keel over and begin jerking. She drooled, her tongue hung out, and her eyes rolled back. Chris was afraid for her aunt, and she tried to anticipate risky situations, since the seizures came on so suddenly. Hattie experienced both kinds—petit mal and grand mal. The petit mal seizures were only momentary lapses, and if Chris tried to intervene during them, Hattie lashed out at her furiously. Resisting Chris’s warnings, she would deliberately sit on the edge of the high end of the porch, shelling beans and humming.

“Move away from there,” Chris said. “You’ll pitch off the edge if you have one of them fits.”

“I’ll give
you
a fit if you don’t watch out,” Hattie said.

Hattie loved to pick blackberries. One July morning, Aunt Rosie sent Chris along with Hattie into the blackberry thicket, as she often did, to help in case Hattie had a fit. On this occasion, Hattie did have
one, and she fell headlong into the briar patch. Chris pulled and tugged on her, but Hattie was heavy. Chris ran back to the house for help, but when she returned with two of her cousins, Hattie was picking berries as if nothing had happened. That summer, she put up a hundred quarts of wild blackberries.

Hattie didn’t like to be reminded of her illness. The family didn’t want her to take chances, or do certain things—ride a horse, stay up late, eat kraut—that might bring on one of her spells. She probably was aware of the onset of a fit. Going into a grand mal seizure is said to be a strange, dreamy feeling; Hattie would feel as if she was about to throw up, or enter the gates of heaven—one or the other. It would be like escaping. It would be a sensation that something nebulous was passing over her. And then for what might have been forever … nothing. Afterwards, she would moan and cry, and as she became gradually aware of her surroundings again, it would be like climbing out of the cistern—dark and frightening. She would cry loudly during this phase. She would come to herself eventually, no doubt feeling as if she had entered through heaven’s gates but had had to exit from the gates of hell.

The residents of Uncle Roe’s big house tended to shoot each other down with hard looks and straightforward judgments, with incessant teasing and carrying on. They carried on to get attention or to get even. Carrying on could mean lamenting, complaining, harping, or teasing.

“She carried on and carried on about wanting that doll.”

“Mama, make Chris quit aggervatin’ me about that doll.”

“If y’all don’t shut up about that doll, I’m going to get me a switch.”

Chris got nothing but an orange the first Christmas at Uncle Roe’s, but the following Christmas she finally received a doll of her own. It was a large, beautiful doll with a porcelain head and hands and a soft, cuddly body. It wore pretty clothes and it could go to sleep. But one day the doll’s eyes mysteriously fell into the back of its head. Chris shook the doll, and its eyes rattled. They wouldn’t open again. She wrapped the doll up in rags so no one would see its face. She was afraid she would get a whipping. She hid the doll under a quilt, scared of what the others might say.

“You punched that doll’s eyes out, didn’t you?” Datha said when
the secret was discovered. Datha was one of the cousins, eight years older than Chris.

“No, I didn’t. They broke.”

“I believe you punched that doll’s eyes out. Mama, Chris punched her doll’s eyes out.”

Later, Datha’s brother Mose said, “I heared you punched your doll’s eyes out, Chris.”

“No, I didn’t. They fell out.” Chris started to cry.

“She’s gettin’ a sull on,” Mose said. “Like a old possum gettin’ a sull on.”

“She’s always all sulled up about something or t’other,” said Herman, Mose’s half-brother.

“How would she like
her
eyes punched the way she punched her doll’s eyes out?” said Uncle Roe, with a wheezy chuckle.

Chris cried and screamed. She wailed.

“Old squall-bag,” said Herman.

“She punched her doll’s eyes out, I believe,” said Datha. “I never heard of a child punching her doll’s eyes out. Have you, Mary?”

“I reckon not,” Datha’s sister, Mary, said. Mary was sweet, but she took her sister’s side.“Why would you want to punch your doll’s eyes out, Chris?”

“It’s
my
doll! I’ll punch her eyes out if I want to!” Chris was shrieking and stomping her feet. “But I didn’t do it.”

“She says she didn’t do it, but she acts like she did,” Mose said.

And so they carried on.

One Sunday afternoon they were playing ball. All the neighborhood children were there, lots of Burnetts and Hickses, some Tynes boys. Mose chased Chris through the field behind the house. He ran her halfway to the church, caught her, and quick as a jaybird pulled her dress up and pushed mustard down her pants. “I’ve been wanting to do that for the longest time,” he said.

“She was as mad as a old wet hen,” he reported gleefully to the others.

She was angry about that for years. Not long before Mose died, in his eighties, she asked him if he remembered the incident. She asked him, “
Why
did you do that to me?” He just laughed, as though remembering a moment of pure pleasure.

Chris was a fighter, with a quick temper. The boys liked to see her get mad, so they would keep on teasing her until she vibrated with fury. She was a spitfire, they said. When she fired off her temper, the
family would say, “That’s the Lee in her.” Chris learned how to fight everybody except Uncle Roe, the boss. Nobody messed with Roe—he used a tobacco stick for serious whippings. He assigned tasks and then stood back watching while others worked. In the mornings, he would get up first and wake up everybody, then go back to bed till breakfast was ready.

Chris did not have to help in the kitchen. Instead, they sent her outdoors. She tended her own little garden. She fed the chickens. She ran cattle. When a cow strayed from the herd or broke through a fence, Roe sent Chris after her. Roe farmed about eighty acres—mostly corn, wheat, and hay, with two or three acres of tobacco. Like most of the farmers around, he did things the old way—the hard way. Tobacco was worked entirely by hand. It was the most difficult work on the farm—tedious and grueling. Before and after school in the spring, Chris toiled in the tobacco patch. At first she was too small to set tobacco—transplant the seedlings—but she could pull the seedlings from the seedbed and drop them in place in the row. Someone else came along behind and pressed them in the ground with a sharp-pointed peg. Seedlings had to be transplanted early in the day, while the dew still drenched the plants. She went to school shivering, wet and cold all over. Later in the season, topping and suckering tobacco—cutting the flowers and new shoots from the plants to make them produce more leaves—were miserable chores. Chris wore a pair of men’s overalls to protect her skin from the gummy, smelly plants as she hoed the weeds out of the tobacco. When she chopped a tobacco plant down by mistake, she would bury it; but Uncle Roe caught her once and gave her a whipping.

In the fall, she helped harvest corn. They gathered the dried corn by hand, tossing it into a mule-drawn wagon. The harsh husks slit her hands. After the crop was stored in the crib, Uncle Roe sent her to the weed-choked river bottom to cut down the dried cornstalks with a sharp hoe. After all the stalks were down, he burned the field.

Robert Lee came and went, sidling around the edges of the community, visiting his parents. Aunt Rosie and Aunt Hattie were determined that Chris should not go near him. He had stolen their sister’s horse and buggy. He took advantage of poor Eunice and then left her. She wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t married him, they said. If he hadn’t taken off, she’d be living still. But no telling what he would have done
to Eunice if she’d lived. Poor Eunice—maybe she was better off dead. He would have carried her to Paducah and that would have led to no telling what kind of trouble. Chris grew to hate her father.

Then she saw him. She was at Crockett’s store, across from school. She saw a man standing by the potbellied stove with some farmers. He had his back to her. She thought he looked familiar. Someone whispered to her, “That’s your daddy.” She stared at his red-brown hair. It was an ugly color, she thought. She described it later as “piss-burnt.” He was tall and slender, yet muscular, and he had a worldly air—the way he stood by the stove jawboning with the men who lingered around the store. Hickory-smoked hams hung from the rafters, and a cat was curled up on the pickle barrel. Mr. Crockett was cutting slabs of cheese. It was a lazy wintertime scene, with dark coming on fast. Her father didn’t look at her. But she could hear his loud laugh, his rough talk, forbidden talk. She realized she had seen him before. A few times after school she had noticed this man standing at the edge of the playground. Now she wondered if he had been there trying to get a glimpse of her.