In the early hours of morning as the cricket cries falter, before the roosters used to crow back home, I find myself awakening, just as the East begins to quicken, and I think of all those who have died, the generations before me; I think of all the dead, not with regret but with love, for they are part of me, the only part I've ever really come to know. The seasons have merged through the years-spring into summer, summer into fall, and fall into winter. I am older now and, if not wiser, at least aware that the doors in front of me remain yet closed, my time not yet having come, for I have children of my own, and grandchildren, who must be prepared, who will need to be counseled gently through their own long night hours. They have yet to learn that the dead only escape farther death, living on, ineffable presences free of change. Only they cannot be taken, for they live on in the past, which is not denied-unaging, unfaltering, immortal as our memories of them.
Mama in her last days walked more feebly than ever, and she became quiet and withdrawn, almost as if she listened to an invisible, silent clock ticking inside her. She spent her afternoons on the couch, eyes locked into television dramas. She would be glad to have me home, and I would feel comfortable with her, silence wrapping around us, a familiar blanket. I would watch Mama, bent over her walker, make her way painfully into the bedroom at night. Daddy, performing exactly and routinely, would help her undress; afterwards, I would go in and kiss her goodnight. It was a child's kiss, and I later wished had cradled and pulled that tired, frail body fully to my breast, that I had warmed the cold moments gathering around her in a final darkness.
After Daddy tucked Mama into bed, he'd sit up with me, talking, watching television. My infant daughters were already asleep in the "little room," accessible only through the kitchen and dining room. A stairs led out of the dining room into upper-story bedrooms that had been finished only in the last years. The living room had been built of logs, the other rooms being added to it gradually, one at a time. For a long time, the upstairs had been a hole of darkness. As a kid, I would sometimes wander up, balancing precariously on the two-by-fours to which thin ceilings were nailed. Mama had warned us kids the ceilings would not support body weight, so when I was up there, I was careful, fearing I would crash through. Spiders and mice crawled around in the dusty shadows, and here and there boxes stored clothes we children had long outgrown. The mice would sometimes die between the walls, and unable to get to them, Mama and Dad would have to smell the sweet rot of their bodies for days. They closed off the rough, crude stairs, but the rats would get into the upper part of the house anyway. Their gnawing frequently kept me sleepless. I would lie awake listening to night sounds made familiar by the years. I remembered taking a flashlight once up the stairs, easing into the blackness, the light beam locking onto a rat scurrying between logs; he stopped, little beady red eyes burning out at this intruder. In the primitive heat of that animal stare, my heart raced wildly. I decided the gnawing didn't bother after all and I could put up with it. Two rooms were later sheet-rocked in up there, and after that it was quieter, but still the noises of night could cause me to awaken quickly, my heart thumping. I slept with the girls downstairs, avoiding the upper darkness.
I missed getting home for her Mama's birthday that last year, almost missing Mother's Day. I sent gifts and called. That seventy-third birthday was, no doubt, a lonely one for Mama; she sensed she had already lived beyond her children's real need of her, for we were growing up proud and independent, reflections of Mama. We had been taught not to forget our origins, and Mama reminded us, "Ya'll hav' a daddy up here on t' mountains even after I'm gone. He don't say much, but it hurts him when ya forgit his birthday or don't come."
My being home, overdue as it was, Mama welcomed. We made plans for Mama to visit our older sister in Nashville, so Angie and Reba could go home with me to visit. Mama didn't like being away from home, "I'd jest rather be here in my own home, my own couch, than anywhere." The way it turned out, I took only one sister home, and Mama got to stay on her couch.
Reba had been home with me only a couple of days when the telephone call came telling us, "Mama's fallen and hurt herself real' bad." Angie, who had stayed home, rushed up to the house after Daddy called. Mama was still lying on her bedroom floor at an angle from the chamber pot from which she had pitched headfirst while attempting to pull up her own pants. Daddy had taken her to the pot and asked her to stay put until he could get back. She didn't much like facing up to her limitations and most certainly not to Daddy's orders. Finding intense pain mirrored in Mama's eyes, Angie knew the fall must have broken something. Mama grimaced, pain shooting through both her hip and shoulder, when Angie and Daddy tried to lift her. She insisted she didn't want to go to the hospital. But after several calls and with the help of some kinfolks, Angie and Daddy got her loaded into the ambulance. I could tell by the high pitch of Mama's voice, when I talked to her, that she was in tremendous pain. "Mama, it's just going to get worse. You had better let them take you to the hospital. At least they can give you something for the pain. You're going to be stiff, and it will hurt more tomorrow. Mama, will you let them take you?"
An interval of silence was broken only by Mama's pained breathing. "I reckon I'll hav' to."
"Mama, Mama&ldots;" feelings bunched inside me and had to be expressed, "I love you."
"I love you, too," she formed her syllables around excruciating pain
Reba, after we were called that night, wrung her hands, paced from room to room of my house, and finally announced, "I wish I'd stay'd home-where I belong."
I sympathized, feeling just as helpless as she, knowing the long trip home, through the winding Georgia hills and into the Tennessee mountains, was ahead of us.
That ambulance ride was the "rough'st I've ever had t' git through," Mama told me later at the hospital, not really comfortable even then in spite of heavy medication. At the hospital, they cut off the new gown Angie had protested Mama's being wrestled into the night before, Mama demanding she get her ready. In pain as she was, Mama cried out in a high-pitched rabbit scream when they put her on a bed that wouldn't roll up and then had to move her to another. X-rays revealed ragged, flesh-tearing fractures in both the hip and shoulder, but once again, Mama gritted her teeth, bearing the pain, not as successfully as in the past. The shoulder, they didn't attempt to do anything about, just shielding her arm's limpness in a sling when they had to move her.
Mama came out of the surgery hallucinating, so doped against pain her eyes darted around the shadowed room in total terror of black bugs clumping, crawling, and dropping on her.
"Does it help, Mama," I asked, trying desperately to still her fears, "to tell you that I don't see any bugs?"
Mama nodded her head unconvincingly, and I could tell her nightmares continued. She must have recognized a pattern in her suffering and in the worried looks with which we attended her bed. In the following days, she signaled goodbye through oxygen-misted eyes. She searched through her past, calling out to her grandparents, talking with relatives, some dead, some dying. They had not told her about Uncle Ganter, but she had locked onto their Aunt Aldony, and her eyes begged to know. Their Uncle Ganter had been sent home, dying of cancer only a few days before. Mama told them feverishly, "Ganter'll be back in a minute; he's jest went to get some IV's." I suspected Mama knew he was dead. She was, though, too close to dying herself to make sense. When I had first arrived at the hospital, before the operation, Mama had been able to introduce me proudly to the ICU staff, "This here'n's my least one."
Mama went downhill rapidly, becoming stranger to us all the while. Gradually, it became clear she was turning loose of us and moving into some shadowed edge of night. One of her last natural responses was with Daddy. Catching his eyes following some activity in the hospital room, she had scolded, "What're ya lookin' at them women f'r?"
Daddy smiled, standing there as he was, hat in hand, and I teased Mama back, "Don't tell me you're still jealous after all these years."
Mama smiled, before catching herself and retorted, "Why, no. I quit carin' 'bout that years ago."
Some weeks after Mama's death, I was surprised, returning home, to find so little of Mama, and so much of myself and the other children, as we looked through her albums and cherished memories. Here was a lifetime of other people. In one scrapbook we found thirty or forty dinner tray markers from the days when Mama worked at the nearby rest home-each feeble, suffering patient, Mama had personalized, making a record of the day of death. Other communications were even more poignant and in Mama's own voice. Turning around an old painting, I read, "Giv'n me by my own dear mama on my thirty-seventh birthday." I reflected that thirty-seven meant Mama had not had me yet. How could we be so afraid of not existing in the future if we didn't exist in the past? A poem clipped and pasted in Mama's Bible asked she be remembered for her dreams. In a large print Bible I had given Mama and Daddy one Christmas, a wavering scrawl, obviously penned after the debilitating strokes, read, "It is our wish Laura have this back after we pass on."
Over the years, even before Daddy died, the house emptied out. Each of the children tried to take what mementos they could of the past with them. I held out, thinking what was there should remain until after Daddy died. He lived on years after Mama, surrounded more and more by the emptiness closing about him. Mama's voice inside me told me, "Y'a can't keep it noway; it all goes away, except for what's inside you." I had managed to keep plenty of her inside me.
Three months after Mama's death, I sat alone in my bedroom, my two girls sleeping peacefully in a nearby room. I picked up Mama's picture from the dresser, just now being able to gaze at it without fighting back hot tears, tears that would bring a gentle reprimand, tears that would obliterate the past. I wanted my memories to invade me, the past to absorb me, to bring it all back into the present, to deny that any of it could be irremediably lost. So as I had done in the weeks after Mama's death, I summoned up the past in a long, winding movie of images, endless, the seasons spinning themselves out in a circle that fell back upon itself, the people of long ago rising again to wander through the hills of my youth, rising from their thousand graves to come back to the hard lives they had left, reminding me that the blood flowing through my veins was their blood-that this land was theirs and mine, that we had given ourselves to it, owned it, that the dead belonged to it now more intimately than in life.
Sighing, I pushed up out of my rocker and placed Mama's picture carefully back upon the dresser, not looking at it this time. Though the hour was late, I knew I would be unable to sleep-not yet. Taking down a collection of stories from among the books lining the shelves on my bedroom wall, books in which I had lived and breathed, taking the lives there, the images as my own, living in a thousand identities, peopling my world and making it bigger than the one Jihad known in Tennessee, I was curious when a letter fluttered from between the covers, and reached down to pick it up; I recognized immediately my mother's impeccably neat handwriting in red ink. Almost reluctantly, dreading what words might tumble out, opening another rush of memories, I noted the postmark first, placing the letter as one I had received in what seemed now a long ago summer I'd spent at Columbia University in New York, feeling perhaps more displaced, more cut off from humble beginnings, than at any other time in my life:
Monday 7th
Dear Laura
Proud to hear from you and know you were okay and I guess you feel a little excited knowing you will soon be home if it is the good Lords will. I pray he want let anything happen to the plane that brings you... Hank's already here and Bill's supposed to get here today. Will be so proud when the trips are over-I am always on the uneasy side.
Guess Hank will meet you at the plane. They came Sat. eve. awhile and was here yesterday for dinner and stayed until supper.
Reba had her shower Sat. Eve. got quite a few nice things and is still getting things in.
Angie had about as well move in again she's here so much, was here last Wed. nite-then back Fri. nite and stayed until this morning. Ernest almost worse than her about staying here. He's a good little ole thing, tries to be so nice to me all the time. You cant help from thinking he's something special.
I don't quite have the dishes finished-know if I didn't write the mailman would beat me. He comes to early.
Laura be sure and let us know your plane schedule so will know just when to meet you, huh? Hank was asking if you'd sent it. I don't know how long Bill will stay yet. They haven't written much since we went to Florida.
We have actually had 2 1/2 pretty sunshiny days and already have had a sprinkle this morn. guess it will have to do a lot of raining while Bill is here and Hank so they can't enjoy themselves.
I dread the cooking I will have to do next two weeks.
Wish I could send you some money but I stay so broke lately-is taking so much more spending for food than it did. It will really go this next two weeks.
Think if I go to Bills I am going to rest up some.
Dad's working on the road and Clyde went to help him get in his day's work. Clyde's dads son-in-law alright. He likes Ernest but Clyde follows around after him helping if he can. Ernest thinks none of the boys like him like they do Clyde. Makes me feel sorry for him. Clyde's such a talker and Ernest kindly quiet so naturally he get more attention. He just can't wait for Bill to get here. asked me last nite if I knew why he spent the nite-said he wanted to be here when Bill come.
hurry & rush
a letter
By
I love you
Mama
Putting the letter away carefully in my own Bible, I listened to the echo of Mama's words, heard in them a familiar concern with her children and their husbands, her own work and money. My mind toyed with but didn't dare ask the question, "Why this letter of all the letters over the years?" Dropping back into the rocker, Bible in hand, I saw for a moment the faintly flushed, powdered cheeks on which the casket had opened. Dressed in a soft, pink gown, hands folded in rest, the body had appeared years younger than her mama's own frail, worn-out submission to death. Again, memories took me back into the spring and summer of Mama's life, but this time I was fully aware that these were my seasons, too, that this was summer-late summer-in my own life. I knew then that Mama's story was my story, that I had to tell it.
I returned to Mama's grave-not as often as I should have. Somehow, I knew that whatever Mama's grave contained, it wasn't Mama. It was important, though, to honor her, to be there, to take flowers. My younger daughter, going with me, stood by my side on one of these trips. She stayed by the car as I busied myself pulling a weed from Mama's grave, straightening artificial flowers blown over by the wind, reading the footstone I'd put at Mama grave: Mother lives on in God and in the minds and hearts of her children. My daughter broke into my reveries: "Mama, who's that woman?"
"What woman," I asked. "Where?"
"She was over there," my daughter pointed, "leaning on that tombstone."
Not seeing anything, I asked, "What'd she look like?"
"I don't know&ldots; just an old woman with white hair&ldots; she had on a flowered print dress&ldots;"
From this general description, my mind resurrected Mama, and I saw her as clearly as if she stood in front of me. "I think you just saw Mama's ghost," I told Katy only half jesting. Something of the superstition of the hills lingered about us.
Years later, still trying to finish up something of my Mama's life being worked out in me, I drove home by myself to visit Daddy. I slept in the backroom, in the bed where Mama slept. My sisters that night had spent time talking about strange things they hadn't been able to explain. Angie remembered the lights she and I had seen on that night before Gramma died. Reba told about seeing lights between Daddy's house and her's, and she laughed, confirming our doubts, "And I seen 'em, too; they were real, and they had little tails&ldots;" I thought of my dead brother and the lights he'd seen. After Mama died, both Angie and Reba said they'd felt her come back to them. Angie said she had a hard time sleeping, and she heard Mama's footsteps come into her room; Reba said Mama came in and sat down on her bed: "I know it, it happened&ldots; something came in and sat down on the bed beside me&ldots; I felt the bed sag down&ldots;"
I joked, "You all cut it out; I have to sleep here tonight."
I spent two nights. The first night, I read into late hours to make myself sleepy. The "something" Reba talked about visited. Behind my back, the presence was lifeless and solid. I tried to push it out of bed and couldn't; it lay against me. I don't know how long this took or even if I was awake or asleep. I know that when I thought about it the next day, I felt a little silly. Mama wasn't a "something," and even if it had been her and she had come back, she wouldn't want be anything to be afraid of&ldots; She would want me to enjoy being there; she would want me to rest.
The second night I was there, Daddy stayed up longer talking to me. Angie got him into bed, and I went on in to the backroom to sleep. I again picked up a book and read for a while. The words I read on the page were interspersed with thoughts of Mama and what remained of her there in this room, in this house. When I put the book down, I slept restfully, comfortable in being home, in being in a bed where I had slept with Mama on those nights long ago&ldots; when I had reached out a foot to touch her when her even breathing slowed.
I visited Mama's grave again--often when death in my family would take me home. Standing there, the light pooling and darkening about me, Mama's blood chorusing through me, I would find myself again under a full moon of memories. I would relive the hard life, trivial moments, see again the dirt and the sometimes violent past-and find it softened, the persistent, enduring, ongoing struggles gentled. From somewhere deep in the woods, I would hear a whippoorwill burst full-throated upon the night. I have learned over the years that the whippoorwill's song is my own-plaintive, yet strong and enduring as the hills themselves, its cries of love and mourning reaching into dream, that place where sleep and waking blend, dark into light, and summers into winters spin. And herein is Mama's story.. and this my song:
Whippoorwill, whippoorwill,
I can hear you, whippoorwill,
calling me, calling me;
from the hills and moonlit woods,
comes your call beckoning.
I hear your call,
whippoorwill, I know it well,
it speaks to me;
to my home a forgotten shell,
take my mind, O whippoorwill.
A mother's love,
a father's arms, I hear them cry,
O whippoorwill;
burned-out fires, forgotten times,
a graveyard call, whippoorwill.
Take me back, if you will,
take me home, whippoorwill;
your cry calls wait,
it keeps me quiet, your lonely sounds
pervade tonight.
Before you go, O whippoorwill,
tell me quick, while all is still-
what does it mean
to live and die, whippoorwill,
a reason why?
Whippoorwill, the night is long,
I must hear your finished song;
the windless woods, whippoorwill,
are calling me, calling me,
whippoorwill, whippoorwill...