Clear Springs (5 page)

Every night the adults played cards and whooped it up. Mary drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Her raucous laugh encouraged Mama’s own laughter. Mama giggled and let loose her best laugh—a trill of little ha-ha’s as gladsome as a rooster crowing at sunrise.

“I can’t stand the taste of beer,” Mama said, making a face when she tried a sip. She smoked a few cigarettes, though.

“Wilburn got me started smoking,” she explained. “I don’t really smoke.”

“I started before I got here,” Mary said. “When the war was on, all the women commenced to smoking, but I beat ’em to it!”

Mama shuffled the deck of cards. “When Wilburn come home from the Navy, he’d be a-laying on the bed, and his cigarettes would be across the room. And he’d say, ‘Light me one, hon.’ So I’d go get a cigarette and light it up for him and bring it to him. Once in a while I’d tell him I was going to have one too, if it was that good.”

From the living room, where I sat on the floor coloring in a coloring book, I could hear the adults at the kitchen table, slapping cards down in a boisterous game of catch-the-deuce. Mary’s raspy voice cut through the smoky air like the sound of Daddy’s truck cranking up. She had adopted a Northern brogue, talking sharply and to the point. She was a big-boned woman, and she wore wide-legged pants. Uncle Rudy wore a brace on his leg, which had been damaged by polio when he was a child.

“They didn’t call it that then,” he had told me.

“It was polio, all right,” Mary said. “We just didn’t know it till now.”

The great polio scare was on that summer, and Mama worried that I would come down with it. But Mary said it came from public swimming pools. I longed to know what living in Michigan would be like, in a place that had swimming pools, in a lovely house like this on a street with a sidewalk, so close to the magic towers of Detroit.

Wandering around the living room, I gazed at pictures of dead people: my great-grandparents and my grandfather Robert Lee. I remembered him, but I didn’t remember when I learned he was dead. He was Mary’s other brother. He was Mama’s daddy. His portrait was on a lamp table. He had a sly grin and a thick head of hair. He stared across the room as though he had something to say, but it would be a long time before I knew his story. I had noticed that Mama wouldn’t look at his picture. I thought she didn’t like him.

I remembered him, even though I was only four when I was around him. I remembered his red hair. I recalled a cold, bleak day at a cabin on a hillside out in Clear Springs. The ground was bare, and chickens roamed through the yard. He showed me a wonderful thing. He dug a hole in the side of the hill and built a fire in it. Then he placed a potato
in the hole and covered the entrance. Later, we came back and found a hot potato there—steaming, its skin charred. I had never had a potato cooked in the ground before. At home we always had boiled potatoes-in-the-jacket.

I stared at his photograph. Then I opened my Bobbsey book again, and the New York skyscrapers renewed my longing to see the tall buildings of a big city. In the kitchen, the adults were ending a hand, yelping and puling in their teasing. I heard Mama cry melodramatically, “You fixed
my
little red wagon!” After a while, I heard her mock boo-hoo’s when she lost a hand. I could imagine the pout on her face. And then later I heard her sing out, “Shoot the moon!” I could hear my mother’s laughter rising above them all, and I could feel her triumph as she gathered the pile of winning cards to her bosom, raking them across the table in glee. Upstairs later, in our cozy pine-paneled loft, she hugged me as though she were sharing a secret with me, something she desperately thought I needed to know.

My mother was an orphan. I was her first child. She says it was hard to wean me from her breasts. And she says that when I was little and company came, I would cling to her and look to her for what to say. Today, my awareness of her missing parents makes me cling to her still, because I have never been able to bear the thought of such a hole in my own life.

Her father, Robert Lee, abandoned the family just before she was born, and Mama lost her mother in childbirth when she was only four. She was left to grow up without affection or closeness or indulgence. Yet she wasn’t thrown into an orphanage or adopted or shuttled around to foster families. She lived at first with her grandmother, then in the teeming household of her aunt and uncle. Her kinfolks took her in, out of obligation. But they gave her little love. “You’re lucky to have a roof over your head,” they said as they put her to work. She says she felt like a lost kitten, crouching beneath the passing shadow of a hawk.

For me, the image that most illuminates her childhood is the Christmas orange. One Christmas, in the houseful of kinfolks she was raised with at Clear Springs, the older cousins got dolls, but all she got was an orange.

She remembers how, as the smallest child in the household, she was made to work in the garden, the fields, the tobacco patch. “I was just an extra mouth to feed,” Mama says bitterly. “But I was always a hard worker. I guess I got that from my mama. They said she was a hard worker. I don’t know what else I got from her.”

I believe she also got her black hair, a tendency toward plumpness, and her sense of humor from her mother. Maybe she got her enduring spirit from her, too. Mama has a few tiny memories of her mother, Eunice
Hicks Lee. And Mama remembers that everybody said Eunice was short and fat with a good disposition, and that she liked to laugh.

“I had hair when I was born,” Mama tells me. “They said my mama had heartburns all the time she was carrying me, so that’s why I had hair. They said I didn’t have any fingernails or eyelashers. I was real little and didn’t cry for two months, and when I did it liked to scared them to death.”

Although my mother has told me about it many times, I still can’t quite manage to grasp the facts of her losses, the darkness of her painful upbringing. My own childhood was sunny and privileged, thanks to her efforts, and so my own choices were wildly different from hers. By the time she was seventeen, my mother had quit school and eloped.

After her grandmother died, my mother, Christianna Lee, was raised by the Mason family in Clear Springs, on the original Mason homeplace. She was taken in by her aunt Rosie, who had married Roe Mason, my father’s uncle. My parents weren’t related, even though they shared a set of cousins, and they did not grow up together. Yet my mother was dominated by Masons all her life.

In May, 1936, she was not quite seventeen. My father, Wilburn Arnett Mason, was twenty. They had met the year before. When they decided to marry, Wilburn kept it from his parents. Christy told no one except Aunt Rosie, who was relieved that Christy would marry into a respectable family. “I was afraid you’d fall in with somebody no-’count like your mama done,” Rosie said. Christy crammed her meager belongings into a suitcase Rosie let her borrow. Then Christy and Wilburn drove across the state line, to Tennessee, where they were married by a justice of the peace named Squire McDade, a popular performer of spur-of-the-moment, no-frills marriages. Wilburn brought Christy home to his parents’ house that night, long after his parents were in bed. The mantel clock was ticking loudly in the living room, where Bob and Ethel slept in the summer because it was cooler there. Wilburn and Christy crept into the north bedroom and settled onto a narrow bed that folded out Murphy-style from an elaborate piece of cabinetry containing a carved headboard and drop-down legs. Wilburn was clumsy, and the racket he made rigging up the bed made Christy giggle. The night was black, and she could see only vague shapes in the room, like people crouching.

When he heard his parents stir at first light, Wilburn jabbed Christy awake and quickly they pulled on some clothes. He led her from the bedroom to the kitchen. Through the tall windows Christy could see a vast, unobstructed expanse of fresh pasture and newly plowed fields. The fields, a geometric design bordered by tree lines, receded in the distance. The dew glistened in the coming sunlight. Bob and Ethel were standing in the kitchen, already dressed. Bob was stropping his razor, and Ethel was drawing a bucket of water from the cistern. When they saw her, they seemed to freeze. Slowly, Ethel lifted the bucket onto the edge of the cistern. Christy had never seen anyone thunderstruck until this moment.

Ethel steadied the bucket, and Bob let loose his leather strop. It dangled from its hook on the kitchen wall. Ethel replaced the cistern lid. They seemed to be waiting for words to come to them.

Then they said, “Well!”

Ethel said, “I’ll say!” A little smile flickered. She dipped water from the bucket into the kettle and set the kettle on the stove. The wood fire was already going.

Wilburn said, “Got enough grub? She eats like a horse.”

Christy gave him a little slap on his arm. She didn’t know what to say. What had she gotten herself into?

Many times I’ve tried to imagine this scene—the shock of the new, the embarrassment of the unspeakable, my parents as young kids daring the future with a radical act. My grandparents knew Wilburn had been courting Christy—or sparking, as they called it. They had watched her growing up over the years when they went to the gatherings at the Mason homeplace in Clear Springs. It wasn’t as though Wilburn had brought some stray home. They were pleased, actually, and probably relieved that the union had been accomplished with so little fuss and discussion. I can fairly well imagine the quiet astonishment of my grandparents—the little toss of Granny’s head as she tried to accommodate the surprise, the tickled exuberance beneath Granddaddy’s placid grin. I try to envision my parents emerging from the bedroom. He guides her by the shoulders, like a calf he’s bought at the stockyard. Her eyes are wide, as she enters her new life with a paradoxical mix of meekness and audacity. But I have trouble truly comprehending my parents’ courage in conducting this surprise incursion into the Mason household, knowing it would come to such an awkward scene. If they had the daring to spring this on my grandparents, why didn’t they have the nerve to announce their intentions openly?
They can’t have been afraid the Masons would say no. Their boldness was really more like cowardice, their inhibition creating a scene that perversely fulfilled their fears of embarrassment. What could have been more embarrassing than straggling out of the bedroom together that fine morning?

I’ve gone over the scene in my mind many times. Maybe their secret act was simply a way of avoiding debate. Marriage requires a jump of faith into the unknown, but their elopement literally came down to slipping in through the back door. Of course I believe they were in love, but what that odd morning scene tells me is that people can dive into marriage for no better reason than a desire for adventure. Or perhaps, even, a sense of fate—the willing leap over the edge. An alluring, dark feeling of wonderment—what would happen if we took the plunge? Maybe it would be like flying; we wouldn’t fall. But today when she tells me about the early days of her marriage, my mother always says, “I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.”

After breakfast, the men went to milk, and Ethel showed Christy how she washed her dishes. Aunt Rosie worked in a variety of creative ways, but Ethel seemed very precise, Christy observed. She was particular about her meat-grease can and the leavings that went into her step-pedal slop-bucket for the hogs. She washed her dishes in hot water in a pan on the woodstove and scalded them in the “rinch water” in another pan, using water and soap very sparingly. She had made her soap from hog fat and ashes and lye in a kettle over a fire outside. Christy was surprised that the soap was perfumed. Aunt Rosie didn’t perfume hers.

As soon as the men returned from milking, Christy went down to the milk house and helped them bottle the milk so they could deliver it to customers in town. She watched Bob handle the cream separator; he was careful and slow, like Ethel. Wilburn slapdashed through his work with a grin—to aggravate his parents, Christy realized.

She followed Ethel through her routines that morning, remembering herself as a little girl following her grandmother around. She helped Ethel with the hoeing, the washing, the sweeping. Her natural high spirits surged forth; she chattered about her cousins and the others at Aunt Rosie’s. With minimal small talk, Ethel concentrated on hilling up her beans, pulling the dirt close to the stalks with her hoe.

“I’m a hard worker,” Christy said. “I can turn out work. Lead me to it. I ain’t lazy. I’m work-brittle!”

In the afternoon, after dinner, Ethel sat down on the porch to rest.
She told her new daughter-in-law, “After your grandmother died, we thought about adopting you. But now we have you anyway!” She smiled, but she offered no embrace or other gesture of affection. She said, “Rosie thought you’d be better off out there at Clear Springs with some of your own people.”

Christy pondered what it would have been like growing up with Bob and Ethel and Wilburn. That was a strange idea, she once told me. She said she was glad they hadn’t adopted her; Wilburn would have been sort of a brother, then, not someone to marry. I find this a chilling thought. If they had adopted her, our family—my parents and grandparents—would have been in place. But I would never arrive.

It was common for newlyweds to live with the man’s parents. Since Wilburn was an only child, it was expected that he would stay with his parents. Besides, my mother knew that a son could not readily establish his own farm, especially during the Depression, so she did not expect to have a house of their own. She settled into her new life. Bob and Ethel were thrifty and purposeful, giving her the impression of a pair of secure, steady old workhorses. Their lives followed a firm cycle of work. But their routine was so quiet. Christy missed being around a crowd of people. She was normally sassy and full of fire. Instead of taunting her, the way her cousins had done, her in-laws were reserved and watchful. Wilburn teased her plenty, though. She fought him, and the more she fought the more he teased. He laughed at her and provoked her and got her to chase him. He behaved like a collie dog nipping at the cows’ ankles. But he was excessively shy around groups, and he would not go to church, just as he had not gone out to Clear Springs with his parents to the Mason family get-togethers. On those occasions he stayed home and explored the fields and creeks with the neighbor boys. He cared more about the natural world than he did about human events, Christy realized. He was always pointing out a bird nest or a strange bug.