Clear Springs (42 page)

My mother was rattled, meeting her father for the first time. But she had a way of being forward and blunt.

He was uneasy. He spoke hesitantly. They talked in non sequiturs.

“He just squirmed,” she says. “I think he was put out that we come. He was nervous. He didn’t know he was a grandpa—he was still a real young man.”

Here she was, out of the blue, reminding him of his shameful past. And she sprang a baby on him, the grandchild he didn’t know he had. I can imagine him standing there as if exposed—living in sin, wholly unprepared for his daughter’s arrival. Perhaps he wondered what demands she might make on him. Maybe the woman he was living with didn’t even know he had a grown daughter.

“The little girl was laying up on a bed in the next room with her shoes on, a-playing,” Mama says. “I thought that was awful. I’d never seen any child on a bed with shoes on. That stuck in my mind.”

They went outside presently and sat in the yard at the side of the
house. It was a main street, and there was some traffic. After a while, he sent the little girl after ice cream. He tried to make sense of the baby in my mother’s lap.

“He just looked at you and talked to you,” Mama says. “But he wouldn’t pick you up; he never held you. He didn’t know what to say to you or how to make over a baby.” My mother resented his lack of demonstrative affection, as if it made him inhuman.

“Go back,” I say. I have a hundred questions. “I’m trying to see this scene.”

As I pepper her with questions, I can tell she is thinking hard. “Yes, there was grass in the yard; it was mowed. It wasn’t growed up. I can’t remember seeing any trees. I don’t remember if he had a car. It was a big house, one of those two-story houses built close together, kind of narrow—a gun-barrel house, it was called. It was an old-timey house with a porch. No, I don’t know how long he had lived there. The place where he lived was on the first street past the train yard—behind a brickyard. It was all battered up, down in there. The house wasn’t painted. It was wood—gray and weathered.”

Each detail has been wrested from her with a question. She strains, probing the past, trying to visualize it. I know her memory must be vague, but some images loosen from the vapor and shine clear.

“What were they wearing?” I ask her.

“Not work clothes—they were cleaned up. They weren’t dirty or ragged. Pretty good clothes. Sunday clothes, I guess.”

“Do you remember what colors?”

She’s exasperated with me. Why do I want to know such trifles?

“O.K.,”she says, slapping the album down on the coffee table. “If that’s the kind of thing you want to know. He had on tan pants and a light tan shirt. The woman was a lot shorter than him and had dark hair and had on a dark dress with white specks or flowers. The little girl had on frilly things. They wore ruffles and pinafores back then.”

“Amazing!” I say. “Now I can see them. Like pictures.”

“Oh, you’re straining my little watery brain,” she says with a moan. “All this talk. You make so much out of the least little thing.” But she laughs then.

“Were you glad you went?” I ask.

She pauses. “There was something in me that told me I had to talk to him. I had to find him. And so I did. And I saw we had nothing in common. I knew he didn’t want me. When I was growing up, they wouldn’t let me have anything to do with him, but after I went out on
my own, they couldn’t stop me. It was just something I wanted to do, just see him and talk to him. Wilburn never said anything about us going down there to see him. I think I slipped off.”

When she sighs, I hope it is a sigh of release, not pain.

Even though it had been a clumsy meeting, the ice was broken, and an acquaintance of sorts began. Soon after that trip to Paducah, Mary brought Robert Lee out to our farm for a Sunday afternoon. Mama helped Granny fix dinner for them. I imagine Robert awkwardly, tentatively, trying to respond to the opening his daughter created that day in Paducah.

“The menfolks stood around and talked,” Mama tells me. “You know how men are—if they’ve got a big job they want to talk about it. They want to talk about money. He bragged about all the money he was making.”

She didn’t go out of her way to talk to him, and he hung back from her. I suspect he talked about money to impress her. He was showing her he had made his way out of poverty. For him, this would have been an enormous achievement—a boy with no prospects who had married too young, made mistakes, been driven away to pay for his mistakes, and then managed to do well despite it all. But I’m struck by his boorishness. He had robbed his wife—and by extension, his daughter. Any success he’d gained had come at their expense. The family’s grievance always focused on his thievery. Yet here he was, the granddaddy of deadbeat dads, dwelling on the topic of money.

Mama doesn’t remember talking to him that day, or ever talking with him to any extent, even though she was around him on a number of occasions during the next four years. “I didn’t want much to do with him,” she tells me now. “But the day I took you to Paducah—I knew I just
had
to meet him. He was so flabbergasted, he was speechless. But I decided I didn’t need anything more from him. And I was satisfied with that.”

From what I can find out, Robert Lee worked on the river when he was young, in the 1920s. He worked on a towboat as a laborer—anything from cook to deckhand. I imagine that after stealing Eunice’s property he may have made his way across the river to Missouri or Arkansas. Working on the river, then, might have followed naturally. I picture
him as a rowdy and randy young squirt, ready to engage the world. He strutted and bragged; he was sexually attractive; he knew the ways of the world, knowledge he gained on his visits to Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo—all the river towns where he might have docked and gone on sprees. He wouldn’t have retired to his room and read a book. From what I have heard, he was loud, rude, impetuous, adventurous, abusive to women. I imagine him exploding with obscenities, going into drunken rages. He would be in a whorehouse; he would be in bars, maybe in fights. He would always be looking for a chance—to test his skills, to pick up some change, to see what there was to see. He roamed and explored and caroused. A big hotheaded, hard-living son of a bitch. My grandfather.

After Eunice died, or maybe after she remarried, he would have made his way home to see his family. Visiting his parents at Clear Springs, Robert hung out at the store with his brother, worked with horses, did farm labor. He helped his father split shingles. He could work with his hands like an artist. The river was far away and foreign to this little community, so being a boatman probably seemed romantic. One of the neighbors gave Robert a nickname. He called Robert “Record,” from the song “Steamboat Bill.”

In the song, Steamboat Bill, pilot of the
Whippoorwill
, tries to out-race the redoubtable
Robert E. Lee
, the fastest steamboat on the Mississippi. But Steamboat Bill’s boiler explodes from the fury of the race and now he’s “a pilot on the ferry in the Promised Land.”

I’m attracted to the idea of Robert Lee as a riverman. A rambler, a gambling man, a wanderer. No one else in my family that I know of ever strayed far from farm life, unless Daddy’s Navy voyage counts. For generations, all the forebears I can name were farmers. But here was a principal figure in my immediate family cruising down the river. I try to picture Robert Lee on a towboat, steering barges of coal through the great confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at Cairo, Illinois, the place where Huckleberry Finn’s raft misses the turn toward freedom for the slave Jim. Robert Lee might have traveled all the way to Pittsburgh or St. Louis or New Orleans. I study the map. Could he have gone on the Missouri River to Omaha—“way yander to Newbraskie”?

My imagination is steaming down the river. I could hop onto Huckleberry Finn’s raft, or Robert Lee’s towboat—whatever’s going.

Robert Lee died not many months after the Sunday afternoon in 1944 when we all had our picture taken together. My parents received a telegram asking them to meet the body at the depot. Our address had been found on a scrap of paper in his pocket. Daddy had given him the address some time before and Robert was still carrying it with him.

Mama is not sure where her father died, but she thinks it may have been in Mississippi, where he had gone on a job—maybe on a road crew. She said the workers were sheltered in tents, in cold, rainy weather. He didn’t come out of his tent for two days, and when someone eventually checked on him, he was delirious with fever. He was carried to a hospital, but he soon died.

“He took double pneumony,” Mama says. “I don’t believe there was any penicillin then.”

I wonder about all the pneumonia I had as a child—some of it without benefit of penicillin. How my mother must have worried over me, fearing I would die from the same disease that killed her father.

“The funeral was out at his mama and daddy’s house,” Mama says. “But before that, he was laid out for the public at a funeral home in Mayfield. Thelma, my half-sister, and me was the only ones there,” Mama says. “Nobody knew about it, I guess. And that woman he lived with couldn’t have come there because they weren’t married. Thelma and me just set there. We didn’t cry. He wasn’t a daddy to either one of us. I didn’t have any feelings. He made big money, but he never spent a penny on me. I got him a floral spray for seven-fifty. Back then you could get a big standing spray for seven-fifty. But it was still a lot of money.”

On a sunny summer day much like the one in those 1944 photographs at the Lee homeplace, Mama and I are on a Sunday afternoon drive to Clear Springs. I’m still looking for Robert and Eunice. Mama wants to show me those old settings I’ve had on my mind, and I want to see my mother in the places of her youth. I remember her as a young mother—her bouncy black curls pulled back on top, her long, thin legs, her waist only barely beginning to thicken from childbearing. I remember her head thrown back in laughter.

On the drive, through some back roads, I’m mentally following the 1880 map of Clear Springs. Back then, the village of Clear Springs (pop. 1,422) had a post office and two doctors, a drugstore, a blacksmith shop, a general store, and several houses. The map shows all these, as well as the farms all around, with the names of the owners. Twenty-two of my great- and great-great- and triple-great-grandparents are represented on that map. All the families I come from were settled in the community by then, except for the Lees, who would arrive by the turn of the century.

The farmland is much the same today, with tobacco and soybeans and hay and corn. But there are no stores now. The houses are modest; there’s an occasional mobile home. Now and then we see a new brick house beside a dilapidated wood-frame house that has been allowed to weather and cure like an old ham. A very old tobacco barn appears gray and ghostly through a grove of oaks.

“That tobacco’s out so late this year, I don’t think it’ll make,” Mama observes as we pass a field with seedlings planted in a checkerboard pattern. She seems more interested in the crops of the moment than the reminders of the past. I can almost feel her quaver at some of the hard memories I’ve dredged up. Most of her generation of kinfolks
out here in Clear Springs are dead, and we haven’t kept up with the younger people.

We stop at Mammy Hicks’s house, where Mama was born. Some years ago, it was remodeled into a barn; now it shelters farm equipment. The planks have weathered, and vines and weeds have grown around the place. Behind the house, Mama points out the old brick cistern, which collected rainwater from the roof. It is shaped like a milk jug, with its mouth and shoulders rising from the ground.

“I got a whipping once for playing around that cistern,” she recalls.

We stand in the large doorway of the barn, and she gestures vaguely at the spaces inside. “Aunt Hatt’s bed was over there in the corner. And here is where Mammy Hicks died; she was eating watermelon when her heart give out. Over there is where I slept. Mammy Hicks had lace curtains—they always said the Irish had to have lace curtains.”

“They were Irish?” I ask.

“The old country. I guess they was Irish.” Mama pronounces it “Arsh.”

A wisp of ancestral memory floats across a couple of centuries to this spot. My mother was a child here.

Before that, Eunice had been a child here, the youngest of six children; their father died when she was a baby. Mammy Hicks looms in my mind as a no-nonsense woman who married a bit above her station. Her husband knew books. But his people had sided with the Union and might even have been bushwhackers. The fine organ that she was determined to have her daughters play was so much prized that when the house caught fire, Eunice and Hattie managed to rescue it from the second floor. I don’t know how that was possible. Could they have heaved it out the window?

I try to imagine my mother growing up here, an independent little creature running around the fields, playing with the pig. She would have had a secure, steady family for several years, until Mammy Hicks choked on that piece of watermelon. In her home-cut bob, Chris is a sly orphan with her head cocked and bent down slightly, glancing furtively upward. In her furtiveness is a gleam of independence. I see my mother’s life in outline, with the large, domineering Mason clan gathering around her, thwarting her wanderlust and collapsing her ambitions. Over the years, my mother, from a headstrong and spirited youngster, turned into a woman so bowed by circumstance and others’ authority that she thought she didn’t even deserve a house as nice as
her grandmother’s. Mama was at home with scraps and nubbins and hand-me-downs. The comfortable house she lives in now, I suspect, must make her feel that her life has been a most improbable journey.

As we drive farther into the country, I realize how isolated the Clear Springs community was in earlier times. Nowadays, of course, roads and wires connect it intimately to the larger world, but when my mother was a child, she rarely got to go as far as Mayfield. We pass a farm where, in 1880, Antnette Victoria “Bobbie” Mason had just married Mack Arnett. Antnette (a corruption of Antoinette, pronounced
Ant
-nit) would have eight children, and three would die as infants. She would die at age thirty-six, from blood poisoning, after giving birth to twins. I don’t know how she got her nickname, “Bobbie,” but I have a special feeling for her, this young Bobbie Mason who lived in that hard time when she would have been carrying water from the spring, scrubbing heavy britches on a washboard, drying peaches for winter, killing chickens, plucking geese. It was only a slight lurch in time that sent me down a different road, to life-saving penicillin and the radio and jet airplanes.