Clear Springs (43 page)

We pass McKendree Church; the cemetery where my father lies; the little house where wandering Aunt Mattie lived; names on mailboxes that are the same as the names on the old map. We see one of the country stores, abandoned now. We pass the spot where Dr. Hurt’s magnificent house with its chandelier and music room burned years ago.

The gravel road leading to the Lees’ house is just above Dr. Hurt’s place. The Lees and the Masons lived barely two miles apart. What determination and care it required in that small community to keep Christy Lee from ever knowing her father! We turn and head uphill. On the corner, a distillery once flourished. Not far up the road, Mama locates the site of the Lees’ homestead, and I pull off the gravel into a vacant, overgrown clearing. My mother’s father was raised here.

“This is where it was,” she says. “But the road’s been built up, so the place is not up on a hill now.”

The gravel, the color of paper grocery sacks, is muddy. Mama points out where the old house in the photographs had stood. The clearing gives the distinct impression of having been something else once, before nature began to reclaim it. In my mind, I arrange the house, the barn, a shed, the blacksmith shop, the orchard in this landscape. I try to see the straight-chairs in the yard under old shade trees that are no longer there. I can picture the porch, the spotted bobtailed dog, the hickory walking stick leaning against the tree. I remember
Mama in the pictures—she’s casually gorgeous in high heels and a white piqué dress with eyelet ruffles.

We walk around, mentally imposing those old pictures onto the landscape. It occurs to me that there were no electric wires overhead in those scenes, even though Clear Springs had received rural electrification several years before. This place made a deep impression on me when I was a child, I realize now, for I have carried around a notion that my knowledge of country life extends back into the nineteenth century, back to the first settling of Clear Springs. That way of life is what I imagine here in the pioneer-cabin style of house—the handmade chairs, the roof with the hand-split hickory shingles, the pair of rickety old great-grandparents.

Mama says, “The first time I came over there, I remember how shocked I was that they didn’t have any screen doors. The chickens and dogs could come right in the kitchen where we were eating. I wasn’t used to that. The house wasn’t very clean, but my grandparents were getting old and couldn’t take care of themselves very well. Once, I was here and Grandma Lee went out in the yard and grabbed a chicken and killed it for dinner. I was so surprised at that. We always penned them up for a week and fattened them—that cleaned them out. I’d never seen anybody just kill one that was running loose.”

In my imagination, Mama’s grandparents are sitting side by side in straight-chairs in the yard. Grandma Lee’s dark hair is parted in the center and pulled back in a knot. She has on shapeless brogans. Her dress is plain, a solid color. Grandpa’s hair, lighter than hers, is graying. His fluffy mustache flows over his mouth. Wearing work clothes, he sits with one leg turned out at an angle.

Mama says she remembers when the place and her grandparents’ belongings were auctioned off. “I got a wire eggbeater at the sale,” she says. “Several people were bidding on it, but they saw I wanted it, and they stopped bidding so I could have something of my grandmother’s.”

There is a profusion of irises along the edge of the clearing. Grandma Lee’s flowers have survived. Using a windshield scraper from the car as a tool, Mama and I dig up some of the tubers and stash them in a newspaper.

“These are the old-fashioned kind,” Mama says. “The blooms will be little.”

“Will they be all right for a couple of days, till I get home?”

“You can’t kill iris.”

“Evidently.” These irises have been here for over fifty years. It pleases me that I can grow some of my great-grandmother’s flowers and keep them going in her honor, but I think it pleases me even more that I recognize them from the old pictures.

“My daddy’s funeral was here at the house,” Mama says, as we straighten up from digging irises. “Granddaddy carried me out here. I don’t remember if Granny come along with us. The funeral was in the house because my daddy’s mother—Grandma Lee—was in bed sick. The roads were so muddy they couldn’t get the hearse up the hill. They carried the casket up the muddy road and then packed it into the house.”

Mama uses the verbs “carry” and “pack” frequently—she carries a cat to the vet and packs him into the office—but now I notice how these words emphasize her burdens. I remember what she said about the visit to the funeral home. Did no one sit up all night with the body? I wonder.

There was a chill in the late-spring air the day of the funeral. There were no flowers or food. Robert Lee’s casket stood by his mother’s bed, where she could look at him. His parents were brokenhearted, Mama says. “His death was such a shock to them. Grandma Lee prayed and prayed for him. She told me she had prayed his way into heaven and that he was O.K.”

I remember seeing Grandma Lee, sick in bed, at this place. I was out in the yard, and she was in the front room, visible through the window. Her ancient, heavy bones, weighed down by her sagging skin, battled the bedclothes. She worried her head from side to side. She reached for me with gnarled, bird-claw hands. I remember the house and the small hillside of bare, hard dirt. And that was where I remember my grandfather Robert showing me something very important. He dug a cave in the side of the hill, a hole large enough to bury some hot coals from a fire, and he inserted a potato and closed up the hole. Some time later, he pulled the potato out with a stick. It was done and ready to eat. It was a sort of miracle, involving a little cave, on a dollhouse scale. The image of that potato cooked in the ground has stayed with me all these years, I think, because my grandfather came down to my level and revealed to me something filled with essential mystery—cave, fire, transformation.

Soon after Robert was buried, his sister Mary took their parents to live with her in Michigan. They were both in failing health and there was no one else to take care of them. “Mary rode with them in an ambulance
because Grandma Lee was bedridden,” Mama says. “The morning after they got to Mary’s house, Grandma told Mary that Jimmo had wanted to have sex with her as soon as they got there. She said, ‘As sick as I was, and he wanted that.’ ” Mama stifles a little laugh. “She didn’t live long after that, and Mary brought her back home here to bury her.”

“What if you had moved to Detroit instead of eloping with Daddy?”

She mulls over this. I can imagine it. The fun-loving, rebellious side of her would have had the upper hand then. In Detroit, Mama would have been cut loose from the Mason homeplace. She would have adopted a Northern brogue, gotten tough. Mary would have watched out for her.

“I might have gone up there,” Mama says finally.

“What if the Lees had claimed you instead of Uncle Roe and Rosie?” I ask her. “What would your life have been like?”

She has a flat, simple answer. “I would have had more love from my grandparents, but not from my daddy. He didn’t want me.” Frowning, she stares into the distance. After a moment, she goes on. “Grandma Lee was real sweet. I believe she told me she had a baby at the same time I was born, but her baby died. Or did I just imagine that?”

In my snooping in the library, I have already traced that baby. It lived only a day. The name was recorded as “Vilent” Lee—probably Violet. I tell Mama now. Violet would have been her aunt.

Mama absorbs this quietly as we return to the car.

“It wasn’t right that Uncle Roe and Aunt Rosie kept me away from those old people,” Mama says suddenly. She is placing the newspaper-wrapped irises into the back of the car.

“I haven’t had much of a life,” she says after a pause.

I have stirred up too much, too many imponderables. I don’t know what to say. We get in the car and turn out of the clearing. We head back down the Clear Springs road.

I’m coming to understand how memories are imposed on the past and also how they get lost. We reach a point where we do not know whether we remember an actual event or an imagined one; we cannot remember whether a significant event actually happened. In studying a photograph, which is documented proof of our presence at an event, we analyze the event as if we had been there, when for the purposes of memory we had not, for it has vanished from the mind. So I come near to inventing these old great-grandparents and this mysterious
grandfather, while being as scrupulous to known fact as my brain will allow.

I don’t know where Robert Lee worked or lived; I don’t know what women he loved; I don’t recall what his voice was like. A few people who vaguely remembered the Lees tried to tell me the Lees were good folks, that I shouldn’t be ashamed of them for being poor. But Eunice’s family and later my family held the shame of his poverty against Robert Lee. The Hickses and the Masons were upstanding people, thrifty and correct. They didn’t let their chickens run around in the kitchen.

In one of the group photographs in Mama’s album, my grandfather’s hand rests gently on my shoulder. This is an important detail, I think.

As we drive down the road, images of him float through my mind: the boy in the meadow with Eunice and Hattie, the boy vamoosing with Eunice’s horse and buggy and her money, fleeing to the river, running away from his crimes and responsibilities, rambling around. I’m haunted by the thought of him huddling feverishly in that tent, in the mud, coughing and dying.

What did he believe he was doing when he absconded with Eunice’s fortune? Did that memory come to his mind as he lay dying, guilt rushing up like vomit? Did he think of that day in Paducah when my mother and I showed up, smashing our way into his Sunday afternoon? Perhaps in his fever he was tormented by the bay horse he stole, its fleeting hooves hammering in his brain.

Inexplicably, Robert Lee is buried in the Hicks graveyard, just off the main road in Clear Springs. The graveyard is enclosed with a wrought-iron fence. We drive through the gates and onto the grass. The place is well kept—neatly mowed and trimmed. Robert Lee and his family lie just east of Eunice and her family. I wonder if their proximity signals some kind of reconciliation in the community. Eunice has a tall, elegant stone, but others in her family closest to her grave aren’t marked. Her sisters Hattie and Lillie are near her. Their sister Rosie is in McKendree Cemetery, with the Masons. Mammy Hicks is here. J. R. Hicks, who left the estate of books and beehives and tricks, is here too.

Mama points out what she thinks is Aunt Hattie’s spot. “I always wanted to get Hatt a stone,” she says, her voice low and mournful.

I take her hand as we walk several yards and stand before Robert’s parents:

Grandpa Lee lived three years after Grandma Lee died. Both of them died in Detroit, far from the lives they had known.

“I think my daddy’s right there,” Mama says, pointing to a space to the right of Mary Lue Lee.

He has no headstone. But a small hunk of concrete, like the corner of a foundation, is there. It has gravel embedded in it. It lies in a bed of periwinkle and some scattered leaves. Robert is catty-cornered across from Eunice, he without a monument, she with a monolith, like a beacon—is she warning him away or beckoning him back? Her stone is old-fashioned and lovely. It says:
COME YE BLESSED
and
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
. Her name is misspelled “Unice.” An image is carved above her name. It looks like a balcony between two portals, and a star is shining through a set of open gates. The gates of heaven are opening and a shining five-point star guides her in.

UNICE
Wife of
L. O. MOORE
Mar. 29, 1897–Aug. 29, 1923

I see that her childbed fever occurred at the height of the summer heat. Nearby, her second husband, Luther Moore, is buried beside his first wife. One reads relationships and discussions here. Robert Lee ends on a note of eternal entrapment.

“After he died, Mary said that the woman he lived with told her he always loved my mama,” Mama says. “She said he’d have nightmares and wake up calling out her name. She said he really loved my mother.”

“I bet he did. He still had your name in his pocket when he died. I’m sure he loved you, too.”

She laughs a little. “You make so much out of everything. But I reckon it’s true. He must have felt awful when he heard she was dead.”

I’m aware that we seem to be gossiping in his presence. This vacant spot hits both Mama and me hard, but we don’t know what to say.

I’m aware that Robert Lee was a rounder, but I admire his bold sense of adventure and his desire to learn what he couldn’t learn in the atmosphere of this community that held a curse over his head. I want to see his good side, and I want my mother to get out from under that old horse-and-buggy grudge.

I say, “I bet when he came back to Clear Springs he acted like he was really something on a stick. Remember how he combed his hair in those pictures? Not a
hair
out of place. But maybe he had a right to strut a little. He’d been somewhere and done things. He had gumption. I bet he didn’t turn out as bad as some of them said.”

Mama is listening, with her head down. After a while she says, “Well, just because he run off, I don’t think they should have kept me from having anything to do with him.” She touches her foot to the chunk of concrete that lies on his grave. It’s like a piece of rubble tossed aside, casual and meaningless.

We’re silent for a long while. Then Mama says, “I’ll take back what I said before. If I hadn’t had you children, I wouldn’t have had much of a life. But I
did
have you. I just never had a chance at anything.”

“That’s because you didn’t have parents to bring you up—but we did.”

She adjusts her weight, as if she has been standing too long. “If my mama and daddy could just see me now,” she says. “If they only knew how their youngun turned out.”