Clear Springs (41 page)

I see two young women, perhaps in town on a Saturday afternoon getting their picture made at a booth in the five-and-dime store. They’ve made sure their hair is perfect; they’ve probably used a looking glass just before posing. Their hair is brushed to a rich shine and carefully wrapped around some huge rats (coils of hair or yarn) so that it sticks out at the sides like wings. Eunice, in a dark dress, has black hair. Hattie, in a white shirtwaist, is delicate and fair-haired. Eunice’s full breasts are lifted within a high-necked dress that has streams of tucks over the yoke. I imagine Mammy Hicks making that dress, her old fingers working those fine stitches like tiny moles tunneling. Eunice has an impish face. She’s biting her lower lip, and glee is in her eyes. She senses the irony and the fun of what they are up to—these country girls in town, shelling out a nickel to have their picture made. Their mother will scold them and take little interest.

Eunice seems outgoing and jovial. But Hattie appears frightened and shy. Mama favors Hattie more than she does her mother. And I resemble Hattie, too. I have her hairline, her lips, her nose, her eyes. But she seems slightly walleyed, as if she has to keep her eyes on two things at once, in case something might catch her.

Mama gets up, leaves the room, and returns in a moment with another
snapshot she has found—three figures sitting in a field near a tree. I see flowers, probably daisies and buttercups. The photo is small, and the three people are indistinct, but I can tell they are dressed up, so I know it is probably a Sunday.

“That’s my mama and daddy and Aunt Hattie,” Mama says.

This is amazing. Mama has produced another rabbit from her hat—another long-lost puzzle piece magically materializing from the chaos of the move.

Robert Lee is sitting in the grass, wearing a jacket and a cap, a touring cap like people wore in the early days of the automobile. In the blur of his face I discern a hint of combined self-satisfaction and prankishness—the arrogance of youth. Eunice and Hattie are white swans. Robert looks as though he has gotten away with something. I wonder if this is his wedding day.

The photo holds such promise, young people on the verge. But their lives soon shattered. Robert Lee hovered on the edges of my life, just as he had on the edges of Mama’s. I know that I saw him a few times in my early childhood. The memory of his red hair was once sharp and distinct, but by now it is only a faint blot. I stare at him and his sweetheart. I need to study Mama’s old pictures of him again.

“Where’s your album with those pictures of the Lees?” I ask Mama.

Her face is pasty. She’s still tired from the move. Yesterday she said, “I’m tired as old Miss Tired.”

“I’ll look for it when I can,” she says now. “I can’t think where I put it.”

Her new house has a place for everything. Janice and LaNelle, who are both artistic, have helped to decorate the place and arrange Mama’s antiques. On the walls they have displayed some of the quilts that used to be stuffed in the top of a closet. Thanks to them, this house—which might have felt prissy and false, like something out of a magazine—feels like a home. It is comfortable and uncluttered, as if our lives have settled into place. But Mama still acts like a visitor.

I drive to the courthouse. The county records are in an annex filled with heavy, dusty books the size of valises. Both Robert and Eunice were born before births were officially recorded in Kentucky, so I can’t find any indication of their origins. Instead, while poking around, I happen upon my own birth certificate. On it my mother’s name is
Christy Mason, and her maiden name is given as Arnett. Arnett? Mama’s maiden name was Lee. Arnett was Granny’s maiden name—Mama’s mother-in-law, the woman her life became so solidly bound to. I’m perplexed.

I remember the time Mama took her yellow-and-white cat, Abraham, to the vet after she had accidentally backed the car over his leg. When the receptionist asked for the cat’s name, Mama became embarrassed—“Abraham” was one of Daddy’s whimsical inspirations—and she blurted out “Yeller” instead. Is this what happened when she provided information for my birth certificate? Did she try to erase the shame of her blackguard father, Robert Lee? I’m not sure whether I should ask my mother about this. She has always said she despised him. Yet I know that within a couple of months of my birth she took me—her new baby—to Paducah to see him. For the first time, I wonder what was on her mind then. What emboldened her to show me off? Did she want to remind her father that he had abandoned her when she was a baby? To show him she had become a productive adult—without his help?

I’m not prepared for my next discovery. From their marriage license, I find that when they married in 1918, Eunice was twenty-one years old and Robert was
sixteen
. She was a grown woman, and he was only a boy. What does this mean? I try to imagine what kind of courtship they had. On the license, his occupation is given as farming. Robert’s father, J. F. Lee, signed the license. And Robert signed it. Their handwriting is poor. After getting married, Robert certainly would not have finished school. I realize that Eunice died five years later, when Robert would have been only twenty-one. She died in childbirth, married to another man. What did Robert feel when he learned of her death? I’m shocked by the disparity in their ages. When she was sixteen, he was eleven. Now what am I to make of the mischief on her face in the dime-store portrait?

As I ponder this new information, my mind has done the easy arithmetic, the seven months between the marriage date and my mother’s birth.

Later, while trying to locate the record of Eunice and Robert’s divorce, I’m startled to find a document about the fabled horse-and-buggy incident. I hurry home with a copy to show Mama. The document is a “Petition in Equity,” and in it Eunice Lee brings charges against Robert Lee. It is badly typed, full of errors. I read it to Mama, paraphrasing the legalese.

“Eunice claims that they lived together since their marriage, but then on May twenty-sixth—that was a month before you were born—he ‘cruelly abandoned’ her and she doesn’t know where he went, but he took her horse. It was a bay horse about fifteen hands high with a white spot on its forehead, about eight years old. And he took ‘one top buggy and harness.’ She says that was all worth two hundred dollars. And she says he sold them to some guys, but she claims the price wasn’t high enough and that he was in cahoots with them for the purpose of cheating her out of her property.”

My mother is listening with a frown, as if a movie has begun—one she has already seen.

“Eunice filed this the very next day after he left her—and she’s suing for alimony,” I say. “She made up her mind real quick.”

“It could have been building up to this for some time,” Mama says. “He probably never treated her right.”

“And listen to this, he took her money too. She says she had a bank account of her own money, about three hundred dollars, and that he took it all out and was planning to leave the state.”

“That was a fortune!” Mama says. “She worked hard to earn that. They always said he robbed her.”

This discovery confirms Robert Lee’s knavish character. It’s not news to Mama. I’m saddened, yet I’m pleased to find details that bring Eunice alive to my mind. She was proud, quick-tempered, saving. She owned a “top buggy.” The description of the horse is vivid. The money in the bank reveals a thrifty, cautious nature. But she wound up in this plight. She is pregnant with my mother. And Robert has run off with all her resources, leaving her alone.

“It goes on,” I say. “She says she is ‘a very poor person unable to earn a support for herself and that he is a strong able-bodied man, capable of earning a living.’ She’s suing him ‘for twenty dollars a month for the next ten years or the sum of twenty-four hundred dollars to support her in the station in life to which she is accustomed.’ She’s calling for his arrest. She says he ‘so attempts to conceal himself that summons cannot be served upon him.’ I guess that means he’s in hiding, and she knows it.” I read on. “And she’s asking for a ‘general attachment’ against his property, and she’s also suing those two guys who bought the horse and buggy from him. She’s suing them for two hundred dollars.”

“I bet she never got it.”

“There’s no record. I don’t know.”

“He never was a daddy to me,” she says.

“Her handwriting was a lot like yours,” I say, studying Eunice’s signature. The capital letters are finely drawn, with a bit more flourish than my mother’s writing, but the roundness of the letters looks familiar. “She had nice handwriting.”

“Aunt Hatt had a beautiful hand,” says Mama, as she examines her mother’s signature. “But those fits caused it to deteriorate.”

I show Mama a copy of her parents’ marriage license and see her face fall when she realizes the date of her parents’ wedding. “That can’t be,” she protests. “Oh, no.”

I realize I shouldn’t have shown her that. Quickly I go to another document I copied at the courthouse. This one is a sworn statement from the two men who bought the horse and buggy from Robert Lee. They deny all knowledge of the charges, they say they knew nothing of Robert’s notions of defrauding Eunice, and they claim the horse wasn’t worth more than forty-five dollars or the buggy worth more than fifteen.

“That’s probably as far as it went,” Mama says bitterly. “She probably didn’t get nothing out of them or him, either one. He probably got across the state line.”

Embarrassed for him and for myself, I offer excuses. “He was only a teenager,” I say. “Maybe he was just a scared kid. He wasn’t ready for a wife and child.”

“He was grown,” she says firmly. “Clausie said he was
mature
for his age.”

I am trying to imagine a sixteen-year-old boy—not one of today’s sullen teenagers hiding in his room with his sound system, but a self-reliant country boy—handy with tools, familiar with mules, accustomed to working alongside men. What would be on his mind, his horizons? He had no money or land. Eunice had a lot he might lust after—her full, attractive figure; her bay horse; that fine buggy; cash in the bank. He could have hung around her, impressing her with his way with a horse. Before long, he found himself in wedlock—committed to an extent he was unprepared for. When the prospect of a baby loomed too large, he abandoned his wife, escaping with her property. I run through the familiar story. But the question of blame shifts in my mind, like a kaleidoscope rotating. Eunice may have taken advantage of him—a boy. Who seduced whom? By heaping all the blame on Robert, the Hickses may have been trying to protect Eunice’s own reputation. Still, it’s not easy to forgive him, even at this
late date. Back then, sixteen was a lot older than it is nowadays. But so was twenty-one.

Suddenly Mama stands up and throws out her arms triumphantly. She’s beaming. “I just remembered—I was born premature! They said I was so little they were surprised I made it! They said I didn’t cry for two months, and when I did—it liked to scared everybody to death! They said I didn’t have any fingernails or eyelashers!” She lifts her hands in a thankful hallelujah, celebrating her legitimacy. For her, believing otherwise, I see, would be unbearable.

Later, we look through the album that has the photographs of the Lees. There are several pictures of Robert Lee, taken long after he abandoned Eunice and my mother. Instead of a child groom, he is now a grown-up. He’s handsome in a flashy way, like an actor. He looks cocky, as though he has breezed in for the day from some glamorous place—Paducah, maybe—and wants to look sharp to impress the folks at home. His striped tie seems rather short, possibly because his large midriff is bulging above his belt buckle. He is about forty-two years old.

“He drank a lot,” Mama says, pausing over another one of the pictures. “He made big money—road construction, I think. Back then you could make good money on a road crew. Mary was always saying he made a lot of money but he blowed it.”

My mother and I and my baby sister, Janice, are in some of these pictures. Janice is a tiny baby, so it is 1944, probably August or September, doubtless on a Sunday afternoon, when families assembled for big dinners. The Lees, some sitting on wooden straight-chairs, are gathered under the trees in front of a small, plain, unpainted house with a porch. The roof is made of split-wood shingles, with a central chimney. Irises line a dirt driveway.

“There’s the Plymouth, one of our oddball cars,” Mama says, pointing to another picture. Several black cars and a truck with sideboards are parked under the trees. “I guess I drove it out there that day.”

“Tell me about the time we drove to Paducah to see him when I was a baby,” I urge her. She shuffles some of the loose pictures like playing cards.

Aunt Mary gave her Robert Lee’s address and urged her to find him. Mama considered this for some time. Her curiosity had been held in
check by her resentment, but now and then she had a notion that maybe he loved her, a little. Finally, she acted on impulse. Her cousin Shirley Hicks, from Clear Springs, drove out one Sunday afternoon in her new car and asked Mama to go riding. Mama put on her nice dress and combed her hair. She grabbed me and a blanket and some diapers, and we hit the road. I was two or three months old.

Paducah was a long, leisurely drive, and the weather was good. They played the radio. They honked at other Sunday afternoon joyriders. Mama liked being with Shirley, who had a spontaneous, warmhearted nature.

As they drew into the outskirts of the city, Mama grew nervous. What would she say to him? Maybe he wouldn’t be at home. She had an idea he might be living in a slum, down by the riverfront. They stopped at a filling station and asked directions. The house was not far into town, near the train yard. They drove past the Illinois Central train-repair shops, where black locomotives resembling giant grasshoppers squatted menacingly. She expected they would get lost, but Shirley found the street without difficulty. When they located the house, they stopped in front of it and sat there for a while, until it got too hot to stay in the car. They went to the front door. Immediately, he answered her tentative knock.

“We found him at home, with that woman he was living with,” Mama tells me. “She had a little girl with her.” She assumed the child wasn’t Robert Lee’s, because Mary had not mentioned her.