Authors: Bobbie Ann Mason
At the end of the summer, Daddy enrolled in an agriculture course from the farm extension service. The textbook was
Animal Sanitation and Disease Control
. By October, he and Granddaddy were buying more and more cows, replenishing the stock from its wartime low. They bought a black cow, a heifer, a Jersey, a Holstein. They traded for some more mules. And Daddy bought the goat he had always wanted.
Mama was still determined to improve our lives. When Daddy’s tobacco crop did poorly, bringing only fifty-two dollars and fifty cents, she immediately ordered a hundred baby chicks. She sold eggs to the local hatchery, and she took orders for fryers. She butchered and plucked and dressed her chickens and delivered them to people in
town. In the spring of the following year, when it was clear that Wilburn had permanently settled into farming, she started work once again at the Merit Clothing Company.
“Why do you want to go back to work there?” Granny said reprovingly. “Why don’t you stay home and take care of these little girls?”
“But I can give them more if I make a little money,” Mama argued. “I want to be able to
do
for them.”
To spare Granny from having to take care of us, Mama left my sister and me at the Clubhouse, a day-care center for Merit children. The factory was considered progressive and enlightened for having such a facility. I hated the Clubhouse. Janice loved it because there were other children to play with. I hated it because I didn’t want to be around other children.
I was seven, too old for afternoon naps. I lay crumpled on a straw mat in agonized wakefulness while a sausagelike woman with squinty eyes supervised our slumber. The only thing at the Clubhouse I liked were the ten-o’clock and three-o’clock Popsicles. The days were long, and there wasn’t much to do, except swing or slide in the hard-dirt playground. I tried sitting under a tree. I read a book but got teased. I wanted to stay home with Granny and help her make albums of poems and pictures. We liked to cut out cartoons from magazines. The watchbird cartoons were my favorites. The watchbird was a crazed, gangly, glum bird squatting on a branch and spouting homilies beneath the tag “This is a watchbird watching you.”
After a few weeks, Mama took pity on me and rescued me from the Clubhouse. Janice had to leave too. She bawled, but I celebrated, although I missed the Popsicles. We stayed with Granny and Granddaddy during the day while Mama worked. In the early mornings, Daddy was away on his milk route. Granddaddy hadn’t wanted to spend the money to upgrade the dairy for pasteurization, so Daddy now sold our milk in bulk to a company in town and then bought it back, pasteurized and bottled. He delivered it to his old customers on his prewar route.
When Daddy came home from his milk route at mid-morning, he always brought us a treat from the grocery, where he delivered milk and cream. He brought two carefully selected packages of candy for Janice and me. They might be banana kisses, cherry kisses, peanut butter kisses, cinnamon hots, or a rattling little box of Boston baked beans. They were always clever little packages with numerous individual
pieces, like my puzzles, except the pieces were all just alike, pleasures guaranteed to be repeated.
Granny was piecing a star quilt. It was for me someday when I married. I helped her, learning to piece diamonds together to make stars. Granny created a pattern from a diamond she had traced onto newspaper. She cut the diamonds from flour-sack dresses my sister and I had outgrown. From her stacks of diamonds, she selected complementary colors for each star.
In her breezy hallway on a hot day, we lolled on her wicker furniture. She read the paper after dinner, after she had washed the dishes and put away her apron. Janice played on the cool linoleum floor, and all afternoon (or “evening,” as we always said) I sewed quilt pieces with Granny until the factory whistle blew. The clock ticktocked loudly, and the hands jumped merrily along. I was very aware of time passing, and the whistle always blew before we were ready to quit. I tried to follow Granny’s patience and guidance, her sureness as she sewed her minuscule and perfectly even stitches, tiny like kitten teeth. I was entirely absorbed. But then the five-o’clock whistle blew, and Mama, who labored in a sweltering upper floor of the Merit, came rushing home to us, whizzing into the garden and then supper. I shifted mindsets and followed my mother into a different measurement of time.
Against the Masons’ ticktock backdrop of slow regularity and patient repetition, Mama roared along like a train. At night Daddy sat in his easy chair—Mama had bought him a large red leatherette cushioned rocker with her earnings from the Merit—and read paperbacks. Mama worked until midnight—canning vegetables, or sewing, hunched over her machine. She never seemed to sleep. In the morning she slapped together two pimiento-cheese sandwiches, wrapped lettuce separately in waxed paper, and flew off to work by the time the whistle blew at eight.
Daddy’s white seabag stayed in our junkhouse for years. In the kitchen, we used two sets of forks—silver and stainless steel—he had filched from the mess hall. The handles were engraved with U.S.N. Daddy wore his summer whites out in the fields, plowing and harvesting. And he wore the uniforms he had rescued from the streets of San Francisco when the war ended. In my teen years, I wore one of the sailor hats, the circular brim turned down, for a beach hat. The pea jacket I inherited has the name “William Miller” in it.
In May, 1950, I reached my tenth birthday, the milestone of a child’s survival. Granny made me a ten-year cake, the traditional way of celebrating victory over childhood dangers and sicknesses. It was a small round three-layer cake about six inches in diameter—a white cake, with boiled white icing and a maraschino cherry on the top. It was all mine. Granddaddy would admonish Janice or me when we were selfish about something. “You ought to divide,” he would tell us. But I didn’t have to share this cake with anybody.
I had been in the hospital with pneumonia that winter. I was alive because of penicillin. In my parents’ and grandparents’ time, children died of bloody flux and typhoid. They were swept away overnight by fevers. They had worms and boils and scrofula. They turned yellow and puked bile. Early, ugly death was so commonplace that parents often gave children the same names as the previous ones who had died.
I was tiny and thin. When I lay flat, my hipbones rose like the knees of cypress trees. I didn’t imagine that I could die, though. None of my classmates had died—we got typhoid shots at school each autumn. I didn’t feel very sick during my stay in the hospital, and in fact I soon recovered.
But I was afraid my grandmother would die. Although Granny was sturdy and tall, she had an almost dainty way about her. And she seemed so old. Mama never used delicate little handkerchiefs, the kind Granny carried to church. Out in the garden, Mama blew her nose with her fingers. Mama swore she would never dress like the older women. Granny dressed like the archetypal granny—in a bonnet, apron, and long dress over several items of cotton underwear. She wore heavy dark shoes and cotton stockings rolled on garters. This working costume was generations old. Women donned stiff-brimmed,
long-tailed bonnets at a certain age of maturity, when they ran their own households and stopped letting their hair hang loose. They pulled it to the top of their heads with long hairpins. Yet within those old-fashioned conventions, Granny had her own style. She wouldn’t wear a brown dress. She liked delicate “figured-y” prints and costume jewelry and hats. She always dressed elegantly when she went to town on Saturdays and church on Sundays. She wore gloves, and she draped netting or veiling on her hats. It was gracefully swirled over the brim and drooped above her eyes. It might be fastened by a gay troop of red cherries or papier-mâché peach blossoms.
Granny knew quality. She had a lovely set of blue pottery: a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, a cream pitcher, and a grease jar. Her dishes—Depression-era premiums included in detergent boxes—were white, with gold filigree patterns. She had various chipped everyday dishes with faded scenes painted on them, but she saved her good things for special occasions. She brought out her fine tablecloths at Christmas and birthdays. She never used gifts, because they were too nice.
I loved her Chinese wind chimes, hand-painted glass panels that tinkled in the slightest breeze. On certain winter mornings, Jack Frost decorated her kitchen windowpanes with fancy designs like those on the wind chimes. She called windowpanes “window lights.” She had an orange-juice jug with a set of little glasses, painted with oranges and green leaves. Sometimes she made lemonade, and she made juice from the grapes gathered from her arbor next to the little pool Daddy had constructed for her goldfish.
A grape arbor, a fish pool, Chinese wind chimes: Mama didn’t care a thing for such frippery. She didn’t own many superfluous objects, except the millefiori paperweight we all marveled over, wondering if the little flowers inside the clear glass were made of candy. Eventually, frustrated with not knowing, Daddy tried to bust it with a hammer to find out for us. But he only dented it—it wouldn’t shatter.
Granny had an Oriental three-monkeys statue: Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil. It truly reflected her character. She didn’t reveal or explain. Plain facts sufficed. She reserved her imagination and her sense of the world’s complexity for her creations—her embroidery, her delicate cooking, her quilts. She sewed a fine seam, working with great care on her modest undertakings. She made a yoyo quilt out of satin ribbons she collected from the floral arrangements left at the cemetery on her homeplace. She tatted lace trim for aprons, collars, dresser scarves. Mama didn’t tat. But she could produce winter
coats (made of gabardine and worsted remnants she got at the Merit), school costumes, entire school wardrobes, Sunday frocks, Easter outfits, choir robes. She whipped out circle skirts, dresses with dropped yokes, ruffled pinafores.
Mama’s view of Granny as a domineering fussbudget was so different from mine. I didn’t realize how my mother suffered at the hands of her in-laws, because she had learned how to hold her tongue around them. Eventually she learned an almost superhuman forbearance under the Mason regime. Granny tried to make Mama do everything the way she did it; she enforced her particular and peculiar methods for every task, from shelling beans to making cakes to killing chickens. Granny even bossed Granddaddy, manipulating him into doing her wishes. He always consulted her on matters about the farm, except on bulls and vehicles.
From Granny, I got the notion that I could have things just the way I wanted them, according to my own rules. From Mama, I got the notion that I could do everything. Granny was patient and forceful and certain. Mama was hurried, harried, rushed along by the stream of time and necessity. She slung out meals, gardens, crops, babies. She could cook supper and work all the buttonholes on a coat in the time it took Granny to boil out her stove burners.
One hot night in July of my tenth year, some men came to go frog-gigging with Daddy. Beneath a large oak by the road, I sat gazing across the field in front of the barn at swallows wheeling and dipping in the twilight. The train went by, the lights already shining in the passenger cars. Now and then a vehicle passed on the road, a neighbor on the way home from town. As the darkness grew, I had one of those feelings of eerie dislocation, when things are out of the ordinary, a routine broken. Everything was thrown into a new perspective. The men out frog-gigging struck me as deeply strange, mysterious. I could see their silhouettes moving around the pond, their flashlights briefly beaming, and hear the occasional mumbling rush of their voices. Mama was in the kitchen. She had turned the light on. She was working up green beans—breaking them and canning them in jars in her pressure canner. Tomorrow night she would fry a mess of frog legs for supper. Tonight Janice and I were going to sleep outdoors under a tent Daddy rigged up by roping his Navy blanket to three trees. It wasn’t much of a shelter, but he said it would keep owl mess from slapping us in the face as we slept.
Everything was irregular. Staying up late. Sleeping outdoors in the
front yard under the trees. Listening to owls and frogs and the choir of cicadas. I was seeing from a new angle, a sidling glance that charged everything with new meaning. I sought and cherished such moments.
Actually, I was afraid of the dark. The grown-ups had always told us ghost stories, to humble us and make us mind. The stories left me helpless in the night, fearful of something unseen that might get close to me and smother me, suck my breath the way a cat was supposed to suck a baby’s breath. Banshees were messengers of doom. They turned all the air into sound. They shrieked—
eeeeeeeeee!
—a sound like their name. The sound would draw your breath from the roots of your lungs.
The summer light lasted until nearly eight o’clock, but in winter it was dark when I washed the milking equipment (the “milk things”) for Daddy, one of my regular chores. I was afraid to walk to the milk house and back in the dark. We rarely kept a workable flashlight. I followed a path through the woods, climbed a stile (two stumps) over a fence, then made a straight run up the creek-gravel driveway to Granny and Granddaddy’s. Returning home, I outran the booger-man.
The men came in now, carrying their frog gigs—poles with sharp metal points they used to stab frogs in the back—and I saw them from our makeshift tent. When Daddy peered under the blanket to check on us, Janice had already gone to sleep. He showed me the bucket of frogs, pulsating and bloody. He carried them to the house for Mama to dress. While Daddy and the men stood under the trees and smoked, I saw her in the back-porch light dressing the frogs—chopping off their long fat white legs and skinning them and dropping them into a bowl. I imagined the partial frogs twitching in the bucket. She took the frog legs inside, and later she reappeared and poured a pan of wash-water out the back door onto the rose bush.
The men left, and after a while Mama turned out the kitchen light. It was completely dark. Janice and I slept on old feather bolsters, with only a little sheet over us. I could hear frogs at the pond starting to croak again, triumphant yet diminished. I lay there feeling fear and celebration at the same time. I was so thrilled to be alive that I couldn’t go to sleep. The night was full of howls and hoots and wails. Mosquito sirens pierced my ears.