The shock of Mama's death pressed in upon me with a boundless hollowness. In the pains of childbirth, I had recoiled from a force seeming to wrench my womb from within, but this pain encompassed the womb, heart, and mind until I felt I could not bear it. The funeral exhausted me; I returned home with my children knowing I was alone in grief and that I had to bear up under its horrible weight. The world no longer had anything to do with me; I'd been cut loose from it. I performed my duties perfunctorily, oblivious to all but what was happening inside me. When exhaustion brought phases of anesthesia, I began to recognize and understand that my old self had been an illusion. I had to concentrate now on the newness shaping itself inside me; something wonderful was happening, and I needed to get close to it and understand it, but I was afraid I'd come to pieces; I groaned deeply. A rush of memories fell again upon me; this time, I heard Daddy's voice, like Mama's, coming back fragmented but more poignant than when his words had first been uttered.
I remembered Daddy's telling me about a night when thunder had rumbled in the distance while lightning forked through the sky, outlining dark, billowing clouds. He and a brother and cousin lay across a bed in their childhood home talking, listening to the subdued tones echoing from the living room where the adults were gathered. The winds had picked up, and the rumble was getting closer.
"Sounds like we might git a storm," Daddy remarked to his cousin.
"Let 'er come," the cousin Ben had replied, "I ain't afraid of it."
Almost within minutes, the winds were lashing the house; lightning flashed, and thunders clapped in unison, rain now falling in torrents on the tin roof. Sound and shock waves split the electrically charged air.
Daddy'd told me he didn't remember what happened next. When he came to, he was in the hall, leaning against a wall, cradling his head in his arms. He recalled smelling an acrid burning, seeing fireballs rolling around the room, then he blacked out. Blacking out is physical; the system simply shuts off; the light goes as suddenly as if a switch has been pulled. I blacked out once myself, years after Mama died. I'd been alone in the house, walking from one room to another when something inside me clicked, and I'd felt the light shutting itself off, from the top of the brain first, the rest of my brain reacting defensively, telling me to get down before I fell, to protect myself from hitting my head. Another part of me observed what was happening, projecting a question into the darkness. Was this what it was like to die? Simply to shut off? Was that it-a final and total blackness? When Daddy regained consciousness, he was aware he was in the hall, his limbs numb, and stirring slowly. Chimney bricks littered the floor and bed in which he and his cousins had been lying. Ben was bleeding from an angry gash in his cheek, caused by a sliver of shattered mirror. Parents and kids stumbled around dazed but in one piece.
"It probably had nothing to do with it," Daddy'd told me, laughing, "but I always thought it might 'ave happened 'cause of what Ben said."
Religious awe has been from the beginning of time connected to nature, and the more violent the display of nature, the stronger grows the religious belief. I've wrestled with religious questions all my life, reading as widely and deeply as my mind will allow before it rebels. I follow mind, but I also know human beings are more than mind. They're complex and wonderful, elusive and heart-poundingly real, and they get sick. I know myself, in my natural state, to be a creature driven by desire and a need to reproduce herself; but I am also aware that the soul within me is as fundamental to me as my knowledge of the physical world and people within it. I am connected materially and spiritually to primordial time and space, and although I know intuitively that I will die, that my material body will disintegrate, I have never fully believed that my soul will die. I was taught as a child to respect nature, its violence and power over me--to fear death as its ultimate display, but I was also taught to pray that if I should die, then God would take my soul.
I remember Mama's telling me, "Thunder is the voice of God," when I and my sisters had cowered in the storms. "He's displeased with somebody. Got nothing to worry about if you ain't done nothing wrong." Another time, Mama told me, the rumbling of the storm is "God in his chariot out for a ride."
I grew up with Mama's and Daddy's superstitions about storms, and they influence my own awe of the violence played out in nature. Mama could not have known about Zeus, the most glorious, most great God of the storm cloud, he that dwelled in the heavens. I grew up with a simple, unquestioning trust in the eternal. Over the years, I would subject that childhood trust to rigorous testing, but in the end I was content to know the existence of the gods or a god could not ultimately be proven by any arguments of universality, design, logical arguments of intelligent power, the future foretold, or tradition. I learned that the problems of belief would remain those of evil, omniscience, and evidence. Over the years, my enthusiasm for argument has waned, and I have found myself embracing the mystery of life in myself and in those whose lives have touched my own however briefly.
Mama had not been immune to the angry displays of nature, and she had done some worrying herself. My brother Bill fell in love with cars in late adolescence, and he would spend hours tuning up an engine or waxing a body into a glossy sheen. Having nothing better to do, he would sometimes stretch out in the car and fall asleep listening to the radio. He was still in the car one summer afternoon when a growing, low rumbling billowed suddenly into a crashing, electrical display of splendor and violence. In rapid succession, lightning sliced into trees, laying limbs to the ground, splitting trunks neatly in half. A high-pitched shriek, almost human, plaintively split the air and brought Mama running to the front screen door. She was sure Bill had been struck. Bill had obviously been shaken but was otherwise unharmed.
Other storms startled the country quiet of my childhood and were remembered because they broke the slumbering, heat-dulled summers. None equaled what I imagined of the one storm Mama and Daddy, newly married, had experienced while still living in a house in the valley, long before they had moved to the more serene mountains. A storm had come up and steadily picked up in winds and thunder just as they were sitting down to eat dinner. Daddy's philosophy had always been "if a thing's to be, it's gonna be; and it won't do no good to go around worrying 'bout it." This time, though, worrying or not, he was going to have to deal with the storm that sent a tree crashing through the roof over the dinner table. He told of still another storm, tornado-like, that had cut a swath through the mountains, neatly laying a ribbon of trees out of its path.
The storm of my childhood which I recall most vividly is the one that began in an eerie, yellow light that gradually yielded to steel-gray shadows and finally purpled into a blackness uncharacteristic of six o'clock on a July evening. Winds tore at the roof, loosening here and there a corner sheet of tin. Hail pounded into the tin, creating a deafening roar. The night flickered in a constant shimmer of light, electricity causing the very hair on my arms to stand up. My scalp prickled uneasily. Mama'd always told us kids to lie down flat when the scalp prickled because that was a sure sign lightning was about to strike. I had covered my head with my arms instead. With the worst blown over, we kids cautiously edged out into the blue blackness silhouetting huge, uprooted oaks, dirt clinging in great dripping clumps about their roots. Eventually, the trees were cut into firewood, but for the next few days, my sisters and I played house in the concealing, leafy branches.
Played out in nature, I find a deepening realization of human need and have learned to respect the ways in which people deal with the mystery of their existence. I have never believed simply that nature is god. Rather, I sense a life force driving itself through my body; it is connected with the passions, and yet it is more than the throbbing of human loins. I know it at times more intimately in the beating of my heart; I am alive and vibrant-part of the mind and purpose of a living universe, never fully comprehensible to me but no longer terrifying either. I've come to appreciate the metaphor that human life is an interlude played out in the electrical display of God the Father. It is this appreciation of the mystery of nature which Mama's experiences have built within me. I recall Mama's having told me about a full eclipse of the sun, a story enhanced by the child's sense of the vastness of the universe, painting the darkness blacker and the event more awesome than it probably was.
The afternoon had become shadowy, and the family had grown hushed and expectant; farm animals stopped lowing and rolled their eyes toward heaven. The chickens roosted early, and the dogs slunk into shadows. Gramma had asked Gramps what was happening, and he'd replied, "I don't know; it's gitting black as night out there." Seeing the sun blotted out like that, an orange aura circumscribing a more startling center of blackness, aroused terror in Mama's childish heart. Always before, the parents had been firmly in control, their fledglings securely nested. The children sensed awe, wonder, and perhaps even fear now. Even after the sun had returned, Mama had said a deathly quiet lingered hauntingly.
In summers, twilight drops a softening purple hue over my birthplace. Shadows gradually blend into a total darkness in which scurrying nightlife turns into terror. As children, my brothers, sisters, and I had been glad for the home's dim squares of light holding the night at bay. When the darkness didn't work, we were corralled into obedience by threats of bogeymen who lived in unlighted rooms, waiting to snatch young culprits. Still, despite fears, I would sometimes accept a brother's challenge to run out into the night and through a mile of darkness to an old, deserted house skirted by woods. Breathless upon returning, I sometimes brought with me panting, crouching memories back into the house. My brother Bill would grudgingly dole out the quarter he'd promised me.
A pole braced the chicken house door at night, keeping chickens in, foxes and coons out. Mother hen and baby chickens would be shooed into a coup and fastened for the night, the door usually blocked with a large rock. Still, sleep would often shatter into a death squall. Sometimes, Mama would succeed in rousing Daddy, and he would take a rifle from its rack, load it, and move cautiously into the hen house. A habit of awakening sharply to the slightest sound would follow me all of my life. I knew that part of the reason was that the hen house episodes had awakened in me early the sense of death as a hungry intruder. I had joined this trauma to other traumas of childhood so that I slept insecurely, always listening even in my sleep, springing quickly to defend myself. The quick crack of a rifle followed later by Daddy's muffled report that he had gotten a fox signaled my heart could quit pounding, that I could go back to sleep. The danger, though, was never far-just outside a window or door in the darkness blanketing the house. Once, it was a wildcat, crouched and lowering against the back of the hen house, tell-tale feathers in its whiskers Daddy had shot.
Many nights, when Mama could not get Daddy to stir, I would hear her feet padding softly through the house and out into the night. As I got older, I would follow her, my heart pounding. Once, we had unbarred the chicken coop to find a snake wrapped around the hen, its mouth stretched and contracting around a half-swallowed chick, the snake's body revealing the fate of three or four other baby chicks. I had watched Mama take a hoe and beat the snake's head into a bloody pulp. I've watched myself do the same thing to snakes unfortunate enough to cross my path. The reaction is instinctual. The next morning, I watched Daddy lift the snake, full length hanging, and carry it off. I've always been afraid of snakes; they are connected, I know, to death, but they are also part of my dreams at night. I've been tormented in dreams where snakes lure me to the barn; I've often awakened still feeling compulsively drawn into a snake's coils, a sinister hissing still calling to me of danger. Early in childhood, guilt awakened in me, and I associated it with growing up, but also with something wrong within myself. The guilt at times has been oppressive and associated with womanhood. I don't pretend to understand it fully, even now.
The night after Mama died, a full moon hung over the tree tops. The blue-black sky spanned in majesty of space and time. I felt myself utterly alone in the universe, and yet out of the darkness, I found myself communing with the disembodied voice of my mother. The voice was at once a comforting and familiar voice, a voice I knew could not exist physically, and yet I heard it clearly. It is a voice I have carried inside me all my life, one I will hear for the rest of my life. It promises never to leave nor forsake; Mama will be there whenever I call.
Only once have I cried out my fear of being forsaken. Sometime during that first week after Mama's death, I had fallen asleep, sleeping fitfully; in my dreams I was once again in my mama's house. The phone rang, and I answered it; a voice sounded through the static of all eternity, my mother's voice calling over a distance, uttering my name, "L-l-laura." I awakened to silence and knew Mama had been taken from me and felt the horribleness of the distance between us.
The day Mama was buried, I stood by her unfilled grave, looking down into the damp earth with a child's apprehension and racing heart. For a moment, all the sights and sounds of childhood blended--I heard a rumble of life, saw square rooms of light, heard a chicken's squall, cowered from crouching shadows in the night-as Mama's vaulted casket rolled softly out of my sun-eclipsed day. Following Mama's death, I knew I would never again look into the fullness of any new moon without finding something of myself and Mama's shadow there.