Clear Springs (45 page)

I think of something I want to tell Mama. Recently, I saw a hummingbird fly into my living-room window, its long beak stabbing the glass. Stunned, it fell to the ground and lay on its side, still breathing. It was a female. Her feathers were green and gold—iridescent, like a peacock’s. The minuscule feathers overlapped like fish scales. The bird lay there, her exquisitely designed clothing on show. When she began to stir, I set her upright in a hanging flowerpot. Eventually she gathered the strength to buzz away like an oversized bumblebee.

A country person’s social isolation can be stunting, but then again he may have a chance at clearer glimpses of the ultimate—like the hummingbird that slammed into my window. A city dweller has more faith in human possibility and can dream up a skyscraper, but a rural person knows life’s limits. It occurs to me that the sorrow of this knowledge is the basis of the large-scale forgetting of our past, the loss of memory that has perplexed me so much. In agriculture, the individual
is lost in repetition; the world recycles. Memory seizes only what is out of the ordinary.

My berry box is almost full. I head back across the field toward Mama.

Mama always knows where the moon is, and when to plant seed potatoes, and what potion to paint on a sick child’s chest. She knows how to read the sky. My father knew when to expect birds to arrive or cows to calve; he knew how to fix almost anything without spending a cent. He could tell time in his head. He claimed he could approach any dog without fear.

I can’t sew up a chicken’s injured craw. I can’t drive a tractor or cook worth beans. I can’t put in a zipper. I tat words and save hummingbirds and come home to pick berries. Then I get eager to leap outwards again. Maybe someday I’ll move to Vermont. I’m planning to take up piano, and I’m going trekking in Ireland, and then maybe I’ll study lepidoptery. Or why not math? It turns out that the ultimate mysteries may be there. There’s more than was dreamt of in Miss Florence’s philosophy. I’ll give chaos theory a whirl. Wonders are crashing into me, birds striking my window. I can’t catch my breath. A summer dawn hits me nowadays like a stun-gun.

Maybe I’ll just sit still and grow quiet and contemplate what is close to home. It would be a good time to let the colored-glass bits and floating feathers and song snatches in my head settle, so that some clear light can shine through. I recall Mama writing me that Granny, bedfast and obstinate, was driving her up the wall. What will I do if Mama requires such care? All I know is that I imagine I will do what needs to be done, even though I think I can’t.

At the garden, I see that Mama has filled her buckets with beans, and now she is scraping some weeds that are popping through the dirt around her okra. She can’t abide the weeds coming through. She doesn’t let them get over a tenth of an inch high—barely visible. She scrapes the crust of the soil and turns it to aerate it.

“How many berries did you get?” she asks, straightening up. I show her my box. “Well, that’ll do for a pie,” she says, as she scrutinizes my berries. She moves into the tomato row. “I’m not going to hoe anymore,” she says. “The wind’s in the north, and I’d better not.”

“Why?”

“Whenever Granny tried to hoe when the wind was in the north, the plants would die.”

“I can’t feel any wind.” I set down the berries. Mama can sense the
direction of the wind when it is so subtle that not a leaf is stirring, even when she is indoors.

Mama says, “I’ve seen the wind blow in all four directions in one day. It does that when it’s trying to get back to the north.”

I remember to tell Mama about the hummingbird.

Her face brightens. She says, “I never saw a hummingbird land in a tree till just a few years ago. It wasn’t no bigger than my thumb.”

Then I think of something else I know will interest her. I tell her about the cat who goes walking with Roger and me and our dogs. “Every time we go for a walk, our orange cat comes along with us. He thinks he’s a dog. We try to sneak off, but he comes trotting along. He gets slowed down if we go for a long walk, and he has to be carried. If we leave him somewhere along the way, he just sits and waits at that one spot till we come back and get him—the way a kitten does.”

Mama laughs while I’m talking. Her silver curls flow from beneath her baseball cap. She says, “I never knew a cat that would go for a walk. Which one of your cats is that?”

“Fergus.”

“Fergus?”

“The name’s from Ireland—the name of an ancient hero. Anyway, I thought it was the kind of name Daddy would have liked.”

She grins. “Yeah, he would have got a kick out of that. Fergus.” She leans on her hoe. “I tell you, he could come up with the oddballest names for his animals. Buford. Happy Jack. Hubert. Alphonse. Elvira. Irving.”

A fluff of memory floats in like a paper airplane. “Why did you call us ‘Pusservin’ when we were little?” I ask. “I always thought you meant ‘Preserving.’ Were you saying ‘Puss
Irving
’? Or what?”

“Law, I don’t know. Pusservin—it was just a name I called you younguns.” She leans over to gouge out a sprig of pigweed—pig presley—that has encroached upon her field-pea vines. I feel the strain in her back and share her small victory when the weed comes up roots and all.

It had been an unusually hot summer, and my mother had gotten out of the habit of stirring about, although she still drove to her garden at the farm each morning. When she lived at the farm, she had kept active all summer, but at the new house, she felt inhibited from going outside. There were so many houses around, with people to see her and make her feel self-conscious. She was stiffening up with arthritis, and her muscles were still weak from her stroke a year ago. The doctor told her she had severe osteoporosis, but he didn’t seem to think that was unusual for someone her age—seventy-seven. Her daughters nagged at her about exercise. They went on and went on about muscle tone and skeletal support. It made her tired to listen to them.

Now that it was autumn, the weather was a little cooler, and she longed to go fishing. Her daughters had given her a new rod-and-reel for her birthday over a year ago, but she had hardly made use of it. She knew the fish were growing big. When Wilburn restocked the pond, just before he died, he had included two five-pound catfish.

One sunny day in early October, after her dinner at noon, she impulsively went fishing. Leaving the dirty dishes on the table and the pots and pans on the counter, she stowed her tackle box and her rod-and-reel in the car and drove to the farm. She parked the car in the
shade by the stable, near her garden, and headed across the soybean field toward the pond. She knew the fish would be biting. She was quicker in her step than she had been lately, but she picked her way carefully through the stubbly field. The soybeans had been recently harvested, but she did not know if the men who leased the land had gathered the popcorn they had planted in the back fields. It had been several years since she had been across the creeks to the back acreage.

She was walking through the field behind Granny’s house. Only one car was in the driveway, and she did not see any of the renters. The trampoline in the yard reminded her of a misshapen hospital cot. The black dog chained to the wash-house regarded her skeptically, pawed at the ground, and sat down lazily. With his chain, he had worn away her grapevine and turned the grass into a crescent of dirt. The old place had so much time and heart invested in it, too much to comprehend. Now it seemed derelict and unloved.

She was out of breath when she reached the pond, but she recovered quickly in the warm air. The leaves on the trees along the creek were beginning to turn yellow and brown. The pond was full and still. The pondweed had diminished somewhat this year because Don had released two grass-eating carp into the water. They were supposed to eat their weight in pondweed daily. She had told Don to make sure they were the same sex. She didn’t want the pond overrun with carp, which could be a worse calamity than pondweed.

She felt good, eager to fish. She baited her hook with a piece of a chicken gizzard she had bought the week before. It was ripe, a piece of stink bait to lure a catfish. After wiping her hands on the grass, she cast out and reeled in slowly. It was pleasant to stand on the bank and watch the arc of her line fly out. She was standing at the deep bend of the pond, near the old lane. The water was exceptionally high, nearly reaching the rim of the pond. The wind was blowing from the east, and her floater drifted to the left. She reeled it toward her.

Lately she had been reviewing her life, reflecting on the hardships she had endured. She bridled at the way the women always had to serve the men. The men always sat down in the evening, but the women kept going. Why had the women agreed to that arrangement? How had they stood it? What if she had had an opportunity for something different? Wilburn, amazed by her paintings, once said, “Why, if you’d had a chance, there’s no telling what you could have accomplished.” She didn’t know. The thought weighed her down, taunting her with something lost she could never retrieve, like a stillborn child.

After a while, she got a bite. Her cork plunged down and then took off. A fish was carrying the bait across the pond, against the wind, rippling the water, flying across. She reeled in and felt the fish pull steady. It was a big one, but she didn’t allow her hopes to rise yet. It seemed heavy, though. She worked it back and forth, feeling the deep pleasure of hooking a fish. It grew lively then. It was a fighter. As it resisted, she gradually realized its strength. She was afraid her line wasn’t strong enough to bring it in. She would have to play it delicately.

She had never felt such a huge fish pulling at her. With growing anticipation, she worked the fish for an hour or more. But time seemed to drift like a cloud. She thought of LaNelle’s Lark at the bottom of the pond. Wilburn had sunk the dilapidated car at the high end of the pond to reinforce the levee. Its hulk would be like a cow’s skeleton, she thought. She did not allow the fish to take her line near that area.

She thought she knew exactly which fish she had hooked. She had had her eye on it for years. It was the prize fish of the whole pond. She had seen this great fish now and then, a monster that would occasionally surface and roll. It would wallow around like a whale. Since the first time she’d seen it, she had been out to get the “old big one.” Her quest had become legendary in the family. “Mama’s going to get that old big fish,” they’d say. But she hadn’t imagined this would be the day. It was as though the fish had been waiting for her, growing formidably, until this day. It had caught
her
by surprise.

Slowly, the fish lost its strength. She could see its mouth as she drew it nearer, as it relaxed and let her float it in. The fish was gigantic, more immense than any fish she had ever caught. From the feel of it and now the glimpse of it in the murky water, she thought it might weigh thirty pounds. If only she could see Wilburn’s face when she brought this fish in.

She had never landed a fish larger than eleven pounds. She had caught a ten-pound catfish at a pay-pond once, and she had hooked the eleven-pounder in this pond. She knew that landing this one would be a challenge. She would have to drag it out, instead of raising it and flipping it out of the water.

Finally, the fish was at the bank, its mouth shut on the line like a clamp-top canning jar, its whiskers working like knitting needles. It was enormous. She was astonished. It touched the bank, but without the smooth glide of the water to support it the fish was dead weight. She couldn’t pull it all the way up the bank. She couldn’t lift it with her rod, nor could she drag it through the weeds of the bank. She was more worn
out than the fish was, she thought. She held the line taut, so that the fish couldn’t slip back in the water, and she tugged, but it didn’t give. The mud was sucking it, holding it fast. Its head was out of the water, and with those whiskers and its wide wraparound mouth, it seemed to be smiling at her. She stepped carefully through scrubby dried weeds and clumps of grass, making her way down the shallow bank toward the fish. Knots of pondweed bordered the water. Gingerly, she placed her left foot on a patch of dried vegetation and reached toward the fish.

The patch appeared solid. For a fraction of a second, the surprise of its give was like the strangeness of the taste of Coca-Cola when the tongue had expected iced tea. The ground gave way under her foot and she slid straight into the pond. It wasn’t a hard fall, for her weight slid right into the water, almost gracefully. On the way, she grabbed at a willow bush but missed it. She still had hold of the line, even though her rod-and-reel slipped into the water. She clutched at dried weeds as she slid, and the brittle leaves crumpled in her hands. Then the fish was slipping back into the water, dragging the rod. She snatched the rod and felt the fish still weighting the end of the line. Quickly, she heaved the rod to the bank. She caught hold of the fish and held it tight, her fingernails studding its skin.