Mama's death unleashed in me a storm of memories. It was almost as if a window had been opened, and from it I looked out over a great distance into my own past and farther still into the past of my mother. Returning home from the funeral, I experienced time standing still. I attended my infant daughters' needs, but I was estranged to them and to myself. Memories assailed my mind, following each other rapidly, each quickening a never before touched part of myself. Even though I tried to keep busy, the memories kept coming, and I committed to writing them down, realizing I was trying to avoid the long hours settling in upon me, the empty space pressing in upon my existence. I was, I knew, denying Mama's death. I also knew instinctively that Mama was gone and that no one would ever be able to fill the void; I was, though, surprised to find that the more I wrote, the more I found myself in Mama. Mama's experiences were my experiences; they were mine as intimately as if I had been there with Mama from the beginning.
The first memory seizing my mind was Mama's marriage, a story I had listened to her tell in bits and pieces over the years, most of it distorted, no doubt, by my grief and faulty memory. On that cold December evening, Mama had huddled into her sweater, the winds cutting into her tender, girlish flesh. Bare, rain-darkened trees loomed starkly into the bleak overcast sky. Standing in the barnyard, Mama almost wished she had not left the house with its fireplace radiating warmth from the hickory log she had earlier carried in from the woodpile. She wondered if her mama had missed her yet. Even if she had, she would think she would be busy about her chores-milking cows, slopping hogs-and would not begin to worry about her until much later. Mama had slopped the hogs early in the afternoon; the cows, she reasoned, would just have to wait tonight. She didn't feel good about this, knowing their udders would be swollen, the milk beginning to force itself from them, first beading and then growing into heavy drops; her daddy would miss the milk buckets not being gone even before he missed her at the supper table. She knew he would milk the cows before he began looking for her; it wasn't that he didn't care so much as it was that things had to get done in a certain order. Her mama would probably send one of the older girls out looking around the yard, the barn and crib for her. That's why Mama was worried still to be standing here.
After slopping the hogs, she had slipped stealthily back into a back room and changed into her newest dress, one her mother had made out of flour sacks and given her the previous Christmas. This year's Christmas tree stood in a shadowy corner of the front room, just adjacent to the dining room and the kitchen, the only room that stayed really warm; this was the room the family spent most of its time in, its heat coming from a wood-burning cook stove and its always filled reservoir of water. The reservoir kept radiating heat even after the fire had burned down. Earlier that day, Regina had packed her meager possessions into a valise and tucked it securely into a distant corner of the rail fence skirting the barn. Waiting now, she fidgeted from foot to foot, apprehensive. Finally, chilled to the bone, she trudged back toward the house.
Inside, she slipped quietly into the back room and changed. More comfortable now with a flannel shirt of her dad's tucked into her faded flour-print skirt, she joined her mother and the smaller children around the fire. Her mother, darning socks mechanically, looked up, smiled, "Git th' chores done?" Mama replied she'd gotten behind and still had to milk. Her mother nodded approvingly. Resignedly, Mama gathered the milk buckets, thinking how the chores in this house were never done. There was always work to be done up until bedtime. Mama had often fell asleep, her young body aching from tiredness, but even then, a restless, sick younger brother or sister would nudge her out of her slumbers; and to rest her mother, she would sit up, quietly rocking into the early hours, listening to far-off animal cries, a fox barking, the hoot of an owl, a whippoorwill.
The whippoorwill is an insatiably hungry bird, spending much of its waking time in quest of insects. During the day it nests on the ground among last year's dead leaves. Mama had never seen a whippoorwill, but she had lain awake on many nights listening to it. Its plaintive cry moved her deeply, awakening in her a yearning as well as a sadness bottomless as the years. The whippoorwill's cry had come to represent for her the inexpressibleness of her own heart. Mama's heart had always gone out to all the little creatures that she knew would be scurrying through the brush, seeking food, avoiding the sudden sweep of death.
No sooner would Mama get back into bed and to sleep, though, than she would be shaken out of her childish dreams by her daddy, at five o'clock, "C'mon, Regina, time to milk." Mama never complained out loud, but she was tired of holding babies, corralling the younger ones and trying to keep them busy; she wanted something more out of life, but she wasn't sure it had anything to do with marriage. Ed had asked her, and she had said yes; they really hadn't been seeing all that much of each other. About the only time they could ever be alone was when they walked home from church. On those occasions the older boys and girls would hold back from the family, keeping them in hearing distance but putting some darkness between them.
At this summer's revival, it hadn't even been Ed Mama'd walked home with; it had been his brother. But Ed had told his younger brother he wanted to walk with Regina. He'd fallen for her long black hair, those round and gentle eyes; he was vaguely aware of being drawn to her because she was a woman, but the attraction was something much deeper; he'd felt a connection the first time they were together, the first time he had really looked deeply into her eyes. He saw there an expression of life bigger than either of them, and he'd felt as if drawn in by destiny.
Mama didn't hear from Daddy until three or four days later. He came calling about three in the afternoon, spoke briefly to her parents; Mama walked him to the door when he got ready to leave. He didn't apologize, just told her matter of factly he 'd had a boil rise red and angry on his bottom, that he couldn't even sit down much less get married. He also told her he'd had to lie in bed, to suffer the indignity of having his mother apply a poultice. Having already experienced reservations, Mama was even less sure now what it was she should do. Ed had told her again he loved her and that he still wanted to get married. Mama agreed.
After the preacher had pronounced them man and wife, Daddy took Mamma home to his parents. In a back bedroom in his parents' house, Daddy had shucked himself out of his pants and shirt, coming to Mama, who was chilled and trembling in a light nightgown. Mama noted Daddy's long johns were ragged, and she wondered why he had not at least seen to it that he'd had new pajamas for tonight. Over the years, Mama learned that Daddy cared little for finer things, that he was content to have practical needs met. With Daddy's arms engulfing her, Mama felt a man's flesh for the first time, felt its hardness and secret shapes; the secret of her own father drifted in front of her as she yielded to never before experienced fumblings and pressures. Later, she lay awake, listening to night sounds-the creaking and groaning of the house settling; the empty, wintry winds -and she felt an unexpected sadness for something left behind. She had wanted to escape the demanding, long hours of home, but she sensed now there would be longer hours ahead.
That next morning, while Daddy still slept, Mama had slipped quietly out of bed, dressing quickly in the icy chill, making her way into the kitchen. Daddy's mama sat at the kitchen table, coffee in hand. Mama felt there was a picture here of something she couldn't quite make out, something in Ed's mother that reminded her of her own mother. Maybe it was the kitchen table, the steam wafting out of the coffee cup, the yellow light of the kerosene lamp, or maybe it was just that no one else was in the room yet. As Mama entered, Daddy's mama glanced at her knowingly, and somewhat pityingly, "Want some?" she asked, lifting an almost empty cup towards her. Mama flushed, wondering just how much his mama might have heard coming from the back bedroom last night. She accepted the coffee, sat down at the table with her, joining an ancient ritual of morning. The day's chores would soon be upon them, and though the surroundings were strange, Mama knew the men would soon be stumbling into the kitchen, demanding eggs, gravy, and biscuits.
It was only after Mama died that I began to realize how very little I had really known about her as a person, though now, in death, our identities fused; I found myself thinking Mama had gotten inside me, that we had somehow become one person. I felt Mama's absence keenly and knew that something had been taken from me that would never be returned. The physical emptiness was awful, and I shuddered; inside, though, Mama's presence was growing and filling me, every part -my mind, heart, and my body. It was not at all like the experience of having a baby growing inside ; one felt a baby's flesh almost from the beginning, a kernel attaching itself to the womb, hard and demanding. All of a mother rounded out from the embryo, softening and cushioning the baby, the mama's own body growing all the while stranger to her. A baby's tugging at the umbilical cord is felt even before movement begins. The first spasmodic jerks turn later into arms and legs that kick the mother inside, moving in strange little bulges of hardness across her abdomen. I remembered how, newly married, my husband and I had lain in bed at night, his hand warm upon me, him eager to feel the baby's movement. I had felt the movement from within, but I shared with my husband from without. Once again, Lawrence-like, I felt sorry for my husband-and all men-that they would never feel physical life inside them, that all they could do was feel their seminal fluids rushing out of themselves and into another. How awful to be a man. My womb quickened, but this quickening faded in the presence of something other than flesh inside me; this presence I knew was Mama but a Mama I could never have known as fully as I was knowing her now. I remembered that "know" in Greek meant experience, and I knew I was experiencing Mama, but nothing in life had ever prepared me for this kind of fullness inside myself.
Fragments of past conversations with Mama continued to tease themselves into my thought. I felt driven now to piece them together, for she knew it was my own life as well as the life of Mama I was piecing together; I knew, too, there was a story here and it would have to be written. I remembered now Mama's having told me about taking her first steps. It was as if I stood by Mama now, felt her toddler's chubby hands brace her from falling, saw through her eyes the strong image of her daddy as he swept past the house, following the straight furrow of his plow. Forgetting the lure of the milk splashing the floor, the first giggles of watching her mother at the churn, Mama had turned loose the churn and run awkwardly the three or four steps to the screen door, fallen into it, calling "Daddy... Horsy," her heart gladdened by the gay reply, "Regina, you walked." Her father resumed his plodding gait behind the mule. Rousing out of the memory for a moment, I felt my own past grow more distant; a grayness obscured early days that seemed somehow now only a shadowy enlivening of pictures pasted in a yellowing album.
Another story flitted through my mind. This one captured something of Grandma on Mama's side. Mama as a kid had watched her grandma teasing a black racer snake, which had turned on her and chased her into the house. Grandma had squealed, as Mama remembered it. The snake had ended up getting its head caught in the screen door, Grandma wetting her cotton panties in the excitement. I smiled, remembering how Mama had told the story. The story, no doubt, had been embroidered a little bit, but I'd encountered enough snakes to know that they could move rapidly on their bellies, undulating in a rippling motion that retained something of what must have been the snake's beauty before it had been cursed as a thing of evil. Snakes were common in Tennessee, and I, like my own mama, had been warned countless times to stay out of the weeds. But Mama, like all kids, had to test the wisdom of denial; she had on another occasion become intrigued with a copperhead, and after some time, she had run into her mother, "Mama, Mama, come see the pretty lizard." She told me she'd been almost hypnotized by the snake's eyes. I found myself thinking about Genesis and why it was that God had warned Adam and Eve not to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Why did God put the tree there in the first place? I remembered asking this question in Sunday school when I was still a kid; they had just told me God wanted obedience. What was so wrong with becoming knowledgeable selves that God would forbid it? And then, after letting Adam and Eve become this much like a god, why were they denied immortality? Why should mortals be cursed to die? I knew I didn't know the answer; I knew death only as an ultimate darkness, beyond knowledge.
I have borne two children, and I remember, in particular, how much I'd cried out in pain. I'd even told Fred afterwards that if he wanted another, he'd have to have it. But the old desire had returned, and we had another. It's the nature of life to beget life. I confessed I didn't understand the stream of life; I only knew that it had flowed through my mama and myself, that it had emptied itself out of us into our children. I knew, too, that my Mama's death was somehow tied up with my own, that it was happening to me now. I can feel death inside as real as my own breath, my mama inside me, and I know it is master of us both, that it will claim me, my husband, our children, too.
Mama's early risings had followed her into marriage; she resented Daddy's reluctance about getting up first and kindling the fires. He would grumble when she tried verbally to shake him out of his slumbers. Usually, she'd end up pulling out from under the quilts, her bare feet shocked by the cold of the vinyl floors. She adjusted over the years, and by the time I was old enough to remember, Mama would always have the living room warm, the kitchen smelling of strong coffee and sizzling bacon, when it could be afforded. Daddy just wasn't a morning person, but he'd get up, too, pulling his jeans over his underwear and taking lots of time while he got into and laced up his work shoes.
Daddy, in time, also yielded to the relentless and impersonal forces of life. In his last years with Mama, after she'd started having the strokes, as they made her more and more dependent, Daddy was the one to spend his days at home, keeping Mama always within calling distance and seeing to it that her needs were met before he went to scatter corn for the few ragged hens still roosting in the falling-apart hen house. Even then, though, his mind would be on the rivers and woods.
Mama never took to being waited on, and most of what Daddy did brought protest and complaint. As a kid, I'd never understood the complex relationship between Mama and Daddy; only after Mama's death, did I begin to realize that the daily give and take between my parents had been an established love communication, one with complex rules. The desires between them had been strong, and out of those desires had come the children. With eight children demanding attention, little time was left over for each other. The passion between them then had lessened over the years so that as a child I could sometimes wonder whether they really loved each other, why it was they sometimes spoke to each other sharply, impatiently, why their words were sometimes loud and angry. But there were tender moments, too, a kind of tender bantering and affection that went on day in and day out. And in the first days of spring, Daddy would come strolling up from the barn with a bouquet of honeysuckles. There were also the familiar conversations, Daddy slapping Mama on her butt, her protesting, and him telling her he knew every part of her body. There were even times when he'd grab her a little roughly, pulling her to himself, and she would protest, but fall into him a little bit, too. My child's eyes just missed a great deal of what was going on in front of me, or saw it and didn't understand it. I've watched my own children look at me with the same kind of missed meaning.
Money had always been scarce when I was a child. What little income was generated usually came from Daddy's tobacco patch or from Mama's work at a factory or rest home. As kids, we'd always had plenty of food, but pennies were pinched for clothes, and luxuries were almost unknown. As I grew older, I learned to regret some of the childhood comparisons I brought home to Mama and Daddy from school. Kid-like, we children had always seen ourselves as needing something, and occasionally, Mama would relent, digging deeply into an old cracked vase where she had carefully hidden some small change and a few dollar bills. We'd usually get the camera or "just have to have" we'd whined for . After Mama's death, the one letter I'd found from her stated just this hardship, "Seems like now I stay broke all th' time." I found this letter carelessly tucked into a book I had been reading. It was neatly penned in red, the handwriting jarring loose memories of another time, another place, a Mama taken from me.
Money may have been the reason that Daddy never bought Mama an engagement ring. As a kid, I'd heard Mama grieve this omission. For Mama, the ring symbolized commitment, and maybe sacrifice. I knew Daddy never did feel Mama's need-and maybe not even her yearning. Later, the children had bought the ring for Mama, a simple, inexpensive one. Mama couldn't have been more proud, although I was sure she'd rather Daddy had been the one to buy it. Along with that ring, Mama had worn another -a multi-colored mother's ring given to her by another child, set with a stone for the birth of each child. At the children's request, the rings had been placed back on their mother's fingers after she died. Swelling, though, prevented the diamond's being placed on the proper finger. When asked what should be removed before the casket was closed, I had impulsively thought, "Nothing." On reflection, though, I knew the rings should be returned to the living. That didn't prevent me from crying when they wheeled Mama's casket from the chapel; I couldn't help remembering how she'd proudly worn the rings and knew they would have to be pried now from her rigor -mortised fingers. A corsage, too, was removed from the soft pink of the gown, to prevent, I was told, mildew and rot. Mama had been allowed to retain her glasses, these placed by her side.
Days after Mama died, I ran across another older pair of glasses still lying on the mantle and gathering dust. Picking them up, as I was later to do with Mama's pictures, I toyed with them, seeing them as part of a lost identity. Before me, Mama's face formed transiently; nothingness cut across my being, and a chill climbed my spine. Who exactly had Mama been, where had she gone, what could it mean that she had been taken -vanished. The mystery of human life swept over me in waves; I ached with the bottomless years filling me with nausea and yearning. The same dull ache came to me again and again in the years that followed Mama's death-it never faded completely, hurting most in the evenings, in the first enveloping darkness, in the early hours of morning, in the in-between times, the merging times, the times when I seem to be neither here nor there, neither myself nor fully what my mother was. And always, it is the late evening's or early morning's crying of the whippoorwill that speaks to me most poignantly with Mama's voice