Authors: Bobbie Ann Mason
Under the heading “Whales,” the sole instruction is “Do not worry about whales.”
Mama spends days emptying the outbuildings. She salvages a scythe and an ox yoke; the metal washtubs she and Granny used for years; the old iron wash kettle itself; a calf weaner; the milk cans I washed every day when I was growing up. She finds the stovepipe cover, the metal plate used to cover the hole in the ceiling when the coal stove was moved out of the house for the summer. It has Jesus’ face painted on it.
She salvages a cast-off outdoor thermometer, a broken garden hose, cans of leftover glue and paint. She finds pieced quilt blocks bundled and tied with strips of selvedge. And tricks by the gross. In despair, I realize that all of this is making its way to her new home in town. She is afraid burglars might break into the outbuildings if she leaves anything here. I suggest putting out a welcome mat. I know that in trying to be lighthearted, I am unfairly dismissing the worth of her life. But the worth of her life is what I value most, and it bothers me that she’s worrying about these bits of flotsam.
“I need to have a sale,” she says.
She hires a man to haul off the trash. It all fits into one small trailer.
She’s thrown out only items that are truly ruined and useless—the mouse-stained, the moth-eaten, the sodden and rusted and rotted. There is a bucket of thawed catfish and vegetables discarded from the bottom of the freezer, food dating back to 1985.
On moving day, Mama wears hot-pink pants and a pretty short-sleeved sweater embroidered with flowers. These aren’t her everyday clothes. “I’ll have to look like a rich bitch if I’m moving into a Big Fine House,” she explains.
I realize how nervous she is, moving into a place where the houses are close together and where the neighbors might look down on her country clothes. Mama assumes that people in Big Fine Houses are in society, and she is afraid they will be unfriendly. She’s in a tizzy, her cigarette smoke swirling behind her as she moves.
This house we are leaving is my birthplace, the site of my first memories. It is still a good, sturdy house, more solidly constructed than the little house next door where I was raised. I always regretted that when the bathroom was finally added, it blocked the breezeway I loved so much. It has been years since I sat in the porch swing or read a book under a maple in the front yard.
I think about Granny sitting in her rocking chair, twisting her hands in her apron and staring at the floor. Could she have imagined that her home would be abandoned by the family, rented out to strangers? Did she grasp the certainty that the hectic, high-tech world growing around her like pondweed—the foreshadowing of urban sprawl—was going to mean the death of the family farm?
Doesn’t Mama want to get away from this oppressive place at last? This is the house Mama moved into the night of her marriage and endured thereafter. She should be glad to go. Yet this move is so radical. It is surely all wrong. I try to encourage Mama to be triumphant about her new house, but right now she is too tired to care. Her face is drawn, and she frequently touches her temple, as though a pain were shooting through.
“Is this whole thing a mistake?” I ask.
“I’ll be all right,” she says. “It’ll just take time.”
She hasn’t had any more stroke symptoms. She is trying to limit the cigarettes, but she keeps forgetting.
…
I go to the pond with Oscar. This is my last visit to the farm while any of the family is living here. I feed the fish from a bucket of fish chow. A small black cat, a stray, crouches on the bank. I remember so many stray cats on this farm: a black cat crushed under Daddy’s tire; another scrawny cat with starving kittens; Daddy’s series of white cats. Not until I had owned nine white cats as an adult did I realize our shared partiality.
It is spring. The green lace of the trees is delicate and misty, like the first light of day. A sheen of purple lights the field—a ground cover of monkey flower and henbit, common weeds. Here I am again, facing this hard, eroding land, with the chicken tower behind me.
I go over the terms of our violent uprooting, trying to get clear: for Mama, the burden of operating a farm will be alleviated, and yet the farm will still be hers, close by. She has a good place to live in her old age, but she can still go fishing here, at her own pond. These small goals are accomplished with the aid of lawyers, tax accountants, and real-estate agents, in an operation as arcane as a tax audit. Nothing is simple anymore. To move Mama a couple of miles takes all the magic of the modern world: estate planners, title searchers, termite inspectors, veterinarians, insurance agents, cablevision providers, road maintenance crews, automobile mechanics, courthouse clerks, copying machines, fax machines, answering machines, billing systems, property surveyors, supermarkets, moving vans, pizza parlors, Chinese carryout emporia, florists, U.P.S., Federal Express, the Coca-Cola company, Wal-Mart, Kmart, the airline industry, and the federal government.
During the week that I help Mama move and get settled, I make many trips in my car—between the farm and the new house, and to the shopping center. On each short run, my tape of U2’s
The Joshua Tree
blares out the exact raw notes of my emotions. The sound is a long drawn-out wail, a plea for freedom. For a few minutes, at full blast, I’m running down the road, free.
As I drive, I contemplate movement. My forebears left southern England, the borderlands of England and Scotland, and Ireland, and they headed for America. Whole families picked up and left, crossing the ocean, then traveling in wagon trains down the Shenandoah Valley on the Great Wagon Road. From North Carolina, they headed for the Cumberland Gap into the wilderness of Middle Tennessee. These were bold, arduous journeys, over a couple of generations. But when the Masons and the Arnetts got to Clear Springs, they planted their
corn and stayed. A long settling began. A century later Robert Lee Mason and Ethel Arnett moved away, but not far, and they didn’t loosen their Clear Springs ties. Daddy was rooted on this farm for seventy years, and Mama was here for fifty-nine.
With such a long settling after the initial spurt of adventure, even the smallest moves are wrenching. My grandparents moving here from Clear Springs. The Roe Mason family moving to the County House. My mother going to work at the factory in town. My grandmother being sent to Memphis and Hopkinsville to repair her mind. And now my mother moving to a house in town.
Late one spring afternoon, a couple of weeks later, I return to the farm to check on things. The two houses, emptied out, stand near the chicken tower like compliant whores. My grandparents’ house looks shabby now that it is unoccupied, and the grass has shot up during recent rain. The irises and the wisteria have blown over. The renters have not arrived.
The other house has been empty for a long time. I go inside tentatively, imagining my young self still there, poring over my school lessons or sitting in the giant easy chair reading Nancy Drew books. The wallpaper is peeling. The old leak in the roof that periodically sprinkled my bed has caused the plasterboard ceiling to buckle. I remember many times sleeping with a pan, a washrag lining its bottom to deaden the sound of the dripping water. The floors, once shining hardwood, are smothered in moldy shag carpeting. The interior seems bedraggled and spent, as if the spirits that inhabited this space were glad to escape. Over my head, in the attic, remnants of a photograph of Eunice, my missing grandmother, may be trapped under generations of mouse beds. I have little hope of resurrecting her lost image, but I long to see such a picture. The story of my mother’s childhood is fresh, since Mama and I have reviewed it, and I’m haunted by the two crucial family members who vanished so early—her parents. I always felt their absence from my mother’s life, but I didn’t feel their absence from my own. Now my mind is drawn to them—a mystery that I feel compelled to explore. The hole created in my mother’s life yawns so wide and deep, I am washed with a grief decades old. But more than that now, I feel the hole in my own life. The loss of Eunice and Robert Lee is a void in our family history. If I could see a picture of Eunice, I might recognize something of myself; I would fall into place, a piece in the puzzle.
The attic is accessible through a hole in the ceiling of the little passageway between the main bedroom and the bathroom. The Sheetrock square that once plugged up the opening is missing, and the black hole gapes. An intense, musty odor of moisture and decay pours down from the attic like a heavy miasma. The hole is so small I realize why Mama used to send me up the ladder whenever she wanted to retrieve something she had stored up there. She would hold the stepladder steady for me to climb, but the ladder would sway, its hinge broken. I’d jerk the string on the attic lightbulb. There was no flooring up there, just a sheet of plywood laid across some of the joists. I would paw my way over the plywood, grab the box of Christmas decorations or whatever I had been sent for, and lower it carefully to Mama.
Now it is hard to think of standing on a wobbly ladder and wriggling through that tiny hole. Everything here always seemed to be dangerous to get to. For all our restraint—and our unwillingness to take chances or to move beyond the carefully configured boundaries of the farm—we were daredevils, living routinely with risk. My family operated on the edge. We lived with fire, electric storms, twisters. We drove on icy roads in cars with bald tires, low brake fluid, and cracked steering. We occupied a world without snowplows and seat belts and smoke alarms and lightning rods. (Daddy claimed lightning rods drew lightning.) We heated water in the bathtub with an immersible electric heater. Could you touch the water to find out if it was warm? We weren’t sure. An electric space heater with a frayed cord sat beside the tub. LaNelle picked it up once from within the tub but for some reason did not get electrocuted. We ran barefooted over thorns, broken glass, and rusty cans. We nicked our legs on rusty barbed wire. The woodstoves had faulty flues, the porch steps had broken boards. Spiders grabbed our faces in the night; they inched under the sheets and prowled along our legs. We risked ticks, snapping turtles, diphtheria, measles, blood poisoning, “hydrophobie” (rabies).
The dangers at home must have paled in Granny’s imagination, compared to the unspeakable evil in the outside world.
We never got food poisoning, even though dressed eggs and mayonnaise went on every picnic. We weren’t concerned about botulism. Mama would scrape the brown part off the top of the food in the jar so as not to waste the rest.
And then there was the arsenic. Daddy bought a pound of arsenic for a taxidermy course he took by correspondence when he was a youth. He stuffed a mouse, a procedure requiring arsenic. I always
heard about the arsenic stored in the junkhouse. He didn’t know how to dispose of it, so he just stuck it away somewhere.
“I think it got sealed up in the attic of the smokehouse,” Mama said recently when we were packing to move.
“Why are people always sealing up attics?” I wanted to know. The attic of Granny’s house was shut up, too.
On the telephone, Janice said, “Don’t you think he got rid of the arsenic? He wouldn’t have wanted it around when we were growing up.”
“Where would he get rid of it?” I asked. “In the creek?”
Don told me he had seen it. “Daddy kept it up above his gun shop. The cardboard box was dissolving.”
“That’s where my quilt frames are,” Mama said. “They’re worth something.”
The arsenic weighed on my mind. Would it have lost its potency by now? Where could we dispose of it? What if it got into the pond? What if a tornado shot the little building into smithereens, dispersing the arsenic over the Jackson Purchase? I wondered if I was just being a worrywart, like Granny. Why didn’t she worry about the arsenic instead of fornication on Fifth Avenue and whatever else she expected I would find in New York?
Of course, when I was growing up, country people were so fatalistic they didn’t give a second thought to most of the daily dangers. The only one they would really address was vermin. It occurs to me now that people sealed off attics to prevent the spread of wildlife. In the winter, we could hear squirrels bowling overhead.
I stare at the hole above me, imagining the specter of Eunice Lee entombed there like some Edgar Allan Poe character. Eu-la-lee.
Nancy Drew would have no difficulty with this. For one thing, she would have her flashlight with her. And for another, somehow, a dependable ladder would be at hand. And in her adventure, the photograph, unscathed, would be neatly nesting in the insulation like an Easter egg. But here, in this scene, the frame of the hole above is collapsing, and water stains cover the rotting ceiling. No doubt my mother is right—there is nothing salvageable up there. The mice would have shredded Eunice’s portrait into a pathetic confetti.
I leave the house and drive to town to run some errands. Later, I go to the drugstore to pick up the enlargement I’ve ordered of that tiny snapshot of Eunice and her sister that Mama gave me. Then I return to my mother in her shiny new house. The driveway and the brick path
are clean. There is no mud, no weeds. I can sense how out of place she must feel in this pristine neighborhood.
She doesn’t hear me come in. She is watching
Wheel of Fortune
, her favorite show. Her ginger cat, Chester, in her lap, gives me a haughty glance.
I examine the picture under a table lamp. The faded thumbnail snapshot has been blown up to five by seven inches. The results are astonishing. The faces are so clear, the dresses and hair full of rich detail. At last, I do have a genuine picture of my grandmother.
I show this blow-up to Mama—Eunice and her sister Hattie, smiling at us across time. After locating her glasses, Mama examines it skeptically.
“Why, that’s not them,” she says. “They didn’t look like that.”
“It has to be them!” I cry. “You said it was. And this is exactly how you described them.”
Hammer that piece in place!
I definitely remember that she identified them. They fit her description: Eunice was short and fat and had a happy disposition, and Hattie was thin and troubled-looking. Mama studies the picture and still seems dubious, but she tentatively comes around.