My years of growing up in Tennessee seem to me now only part of a cycle, a circle that included me and had to go full swing. Weeks after Mama's death-after the initial shock and numbing blackness-the world came into focus again. My mind had been flooded with reviving memories which came back fragmented but brought me a knowledge of myself, helped me to understand the conflicting desires, unrest, the terrible creative energies within me that had somehow merged violence, the hot impulses of youth, and death. I had learned to love darkness and night, to find in them the excitement and fear that a child feels, to know my own incompletion, the primitive blindness that drives human life. I came to know, too, the strength of the people, this people, my people; this land, its dirt, the part of it that was in my blood and called me back to it. It was this call that would bring me again and again to stand by my mother's grave, to stand there with the night around me, the far-off call of a lone whippoorwill reminding me that it was my death, too.
Daddy had two mules, Tobe and John, which he used to plow the fields, a few acres of corn, a tobacco patch, a large garden and numerous small truck patches. What time he wasn't yelling, "Ha, ha, c'mon, git up now," he would be singing to them, and in the late evenings with dusk settling, he would lead them to drink from the water trough and stand there talking to them, "It's been a good day now; got most of th' field plowed." He'd take them to their stalls, pitch a fork full of hay in to them, and then turn to the task of milking Ol' Brindle, the Jersey cow.
The mules and cow played a part in keeping the family fed. Potatoes were a staple, especially through the winter months. They would be dug late then stored in an earthen dugout. A good crop would get the family all the way through winter. Summer provided food plentifully, bringing a mixture of green beans, tomatoes, okra, squash, and cabbage. The okra was usually fried, but occasionally, Mama would slip in a boiled variety that the kids would poke at. Anyone unlucky enough to get it into her mouth would find it slid down the throat of its own accord. Mama was a good cook, creating her own recipes. Squash, she would first boil, then drain, add salt, pepper, butter; then she would use the potato masher; the squash then went into the oven and was baked a golden brown. A meal was often topped off with a huge blackberry, peach, or rhubarb cobbler, the sugared topping crisp and thick; sometimes, there would be apple, cherry, or sweet potato pie. Because the men worked long hours in the field, the middle meal-dinner-was always the heaviest, and a pone of corn bread announced the theme of the table. It may have been these filled tables of summer that kept any of the children from knowing they were poor, or it could have been they lacked the opportunity to compare themselves to anyone other than other mountain people just like themselves. All of us were proud: we didn't take handouts; we were close to the earth, and the earth provided what we needed. Only someone lazy, someone who did not grow a garden and can and put up for the winter, would be without necessary food and warmth. Mama used to quote, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard" to us children when we grumbled about work.
Daddy and an uncle or other worker timed dinner by the sun; we kids would hear them coming up the road and rush in to help Mama finish putting dinner on the table. The work in the fields was hard and dirty; the men would come in with dirt ground into their knees and seats, carrying it caught up in their cuffed overalls. Mama always told them, "Yo're behinds give 'way what y'did all morning." They would stop in the back yard, scrubbing their arms and hands down outside, sometimes throwing water by dipperfuls over their heads, shrugging in delight as the coolness washed down their sweat-riveted backs. They couldn't do much about the heavy, stale sweat that swept like a cloud into the dining room with them.
Once at the table, the men would haunch down over their food, shoveling and chewing vigorously; they always inevitably ate too much and would get up from the table rubbing their stomachs. Moving to the porch, they dropped into the chairs and swing, mangy dogs lying beneath them panting, flies being brushed away with straw hats with sweat-darkened bands. At one o'clock, they refilled their water jugs and headed back into the fields. Mama and us girls usually didn't get the dishes done until about then and would still have the dirty dishwater to throw out. If it weren't too dirty, we would sometimes leave the rinse water to be heated again for dishes that night. By that time a greasy, cold scum usually floated on top.
I hated the household chores, but Mama would remind me the work had to get done. We all had a part to play. What the men did in the fields was important for all of us. The cows and mules had to have hay and corn in the winter, as did the chickens; the tobacco crop would give us Christmas money. What was raised in the garden would be canned to get us through winter. Understanding the necessity of the work didn't make me like it any more, and I resented having to stay in the house and do it. At least the men got to work outside.
Afternoons were usually free for the kids, unless it was washday. We all hated washdays. On these days, Daddy would fill up a large kettle with water, the water carried by bucketfuls, then he'd kindle a fire under it. This kettle in the backyard was the same one used at hog killing time. By the time breakfast had been finished, the water had boiled and was ready to be carried to the old washing machine on the porch. Very early in my life, we had used scrub boards, and the clothes would have to be squeezed by pushing and pulling them through manually operated rollers. This older model was replaced eventually by an electric version, but we still had to carry the water. Daddy eventually had a well dug in the backyard; we no longer had to carry water from the spring where we tormented crawdads for entertainment.
We kids would fuss and grumble and be chided by Mama all through the washing. Dark clothes had to be sorted from light clothes: the men's overall pockets had to be turned out to rid them of dirt, tobacco crumbles, broken match sticks, sometimes pennies, and even nails. The clothes, rinsed and squeezed, went into a dishpan, which, when filled, one of the girls would carry to the clothesline and hang up. We were taught by Mama to hang shirts by the tails, a clothespin at each seam; pants were hung from the legs, towels from the corners, and sheets or bedspreads would be lifted over the line and pulled into a neat half. The washing and hanging would usually last into the early afternoon; then the washing machine, with a half-inch to inch of pure dirt at its bottom, would have to be emptied and cleaned.
By the time the machine was cleaned, the clothes would be dry enough to begin taking off the line and folding. Inside the house, boxes were designated for bedclothes, work clothes, towels, and so forth. After Gramma died, Mama inherited her buffet and some other furniture; this allowed Mama to get rid of some of the boxes, but pushed under the beds with their bare coil springs would be boxes of outgrown clothes, Mama refusing to throw away anything that a later occasion might put to use. Worn-out clothes ended up in the pieced tops of quilts. Heavy quilts were welcome in the cold winters when we children slept in unheated backrooms of the house. In one of these backrooms one spring, Mama'd grabbed a broom and carried out a black snake looped about its handle; this snake had somehow gotten into the house and one of the boxes of clothes. I found Mama later going through that box carefully and sorting clothes that could be gotten rid of by giving them away to cousins.
Winter made washing an even more dismal affair-drudgery for us kids. The only change was that the machine was pulled from the front porch into the kitchen. Large heaps of dirty clothes lay everywhere, and water puddled around the machine. A dirty trail stretched from the machine to the back door, marking the comings and goings of the ones hanging clothes. Winter washings would be finished off by mopping the kitchen floor. The linoleum would be dirty again by nightfall.
Supper consisted of dinner's leftovers taken from the oven and returned to the table. Usually, there would always be some beans or potatoes left over, or if the men had eaten particularly heartily that noon, we might have some bread and milk. In the winters, when we used canned vegetables that Mama tried to stretch into May, we would sometimes have cornmeal mush, a gravy made by browning the cornmeal in grease, then adding milk and cooking until it thickened; it smelled like popcorn when it was first being browned, and we kids learned it was filling. Other times, we would have scrambled eggs and hoecake. Daddy always ate after he milked; Mama strained the milk just before or after supper. She would cover one empty bucket with a cloth, lift the full one and pour its contents carefully into the other; if she poured too hastily, the cloth would slip, dumping all the dregs and cow hairs back into the bucket. My youngest sister got yellow jaundice and almost died; we suspected the raw cows' milk had been the source.
Before Mama had gotten her first kerosene refrigerator, she kept milk in a hole dug in the ground out back of the house. That's how she kept the formula when the babies were infants. Mama had triplets when she was forty, and I was the last one born. Since Mama couldn't breast-feed three babies at once, she was grateful when Carnation Milk donated a first year's supply of milk; hundreds of rusty tin cans in the outer woods' edges still attest to the abundance of formula. In winter, the milk could just be covered and left on the dining room table; its surface would usually be frozen by the next morning. The cream would be dipped off, saved, allowed to turn; Mama knew just the right stage of clabbering for butter making. Churning required a perfect rhythm if the floor was not to end up overly milk specked. Golden butter bits would first begin to fleck the surface, then gather and cluster, finally forming huge, soft clumps. After it was dipped from the churn, it was then molded, the rest of the milk forced out. The buttermilk we drank or used to make cornbread. Sometimes just after Mama finished churning, we kids would spread the butter on a piece of hot cornbread and devour it. These were good days, golden days; we were kept busy and full, time marking itself with repeated chores and simple meals.
Usually by the time Mama finished getting the milk taken care of, it would be bedtime. Bedtime always came early, and getting up came even earlier. In early evenings, Mama would come into the living room, wiping her hands on her apron, and fuss at Daddy, who would be, by this time, unlacing his heavy shoes, turning them upside down, and dumping the field dirt on the floor. Either mama with a spirit of resignation, or one of us girls, would have to get a broom and clean up after him. Mama always scolded him soundly, "Why don't y'take yore shoes off on t' porch?" He never did, and summer's dirt would be replaced by mud in the winter.
Daddy has always laughed at me about the time my boy friend Howard came to see me on a winter night. I had met Howard after I got shot with a 22 rifle and was hospitalized. My sister Angie had taken down the gun from its rack and said she was going to kill a hawk diving after some of our baby chickens. Mama had gone to Illinois to visit with our brother. Mama needed the rest; she didn't often have a chance to get away. She had never seen the ocean until after I went away to college; I took her in a green Mercury convertible that looked more like a sinking ship than a car. I can still envision how the glaring brightness of the sand rendered Mama's frame small, fragile. Her trip away from home this time terminated in her rush to get back home to find out if I was OK. At the time, I selfishly thought Mama was more worried about money than she was about me; I learned much later that this little shooting episode caused Mama to start working at a nearby rest home, that her first two years' wages went to paying off that hospital bill.
Angie had started to the porch when the gun went off; the safety wasn't on, and the slamming of the screen door had tripped it. I remember being hit by the bullet, spinning around, and ending up on the porch floor. Then the screaming for Daddy started. Daddy, who typically never drove over thirty, drive seventy miles an hour getting me to the hospital. Lying in the back seat of the car, not knowing if I was going to die or not, I promised God that if he'd get me out of this one, I would do anything He asked of me. This was not the last time I promised God something to remember it for a short while but then to end up not acting on the promise fully. Religion, somehow, had more to do with getting up and going to bed and living than it did with church. Mama did take us children to church once in a while, but most of what we learned about God, we learned as simple acts: we were instructed not to "tell stories," and not to steal. We were to obey our parents and respect our elders. I converted at a summer Bible camp, but my introspective, questing nature always made me ask questions that pitted me against conservative stances. Religion simply was just a connection with the universe and the mystery of life as a whole. I had learned early that the thrust of life was brutal and demanding, even as the submission to it was inevitable. My beliefs have evolved, changing over the years. But always, religion has remained connected with the struggle to live and the necessary end of dying.
I survived Daddy's driving me to the hospital. My oldest brother had not been so lucky; a year before we triplets were born, Chester had taken a shortcut over an old building, hung his pants leg on a roof shingle, and pitched headfirst onto a corn stalk that ruptured his stomach. Daddy carried him off the mountain in a wagon; he died of an infection. Mama told me sketches of her grieving process. She'd said that something inside her broke. Days after his death, Chester had returned to Mama in a dream; he stood at the foot of his mother's bed and told her, "Don't ya worry 'bout me, Mama. I've gone t'be with God just like y' told me I would if I died. Don't y' worry; it's beautiful here, and I'm happy." After that dream, Mama'd said, told "I never worried 'bout Chester no more. O, I missed him, and there was a hole left in my heart, but I stopped crying."
Mama also told me that the triplets had come because she wanted a girl. Chester's dying had left one girl and three boys; even though she was forty, she wanted another girl, even prayed for one. She'd been told to expect twins but not triplets. The moral of this story, Mama told me was "Be careful what y' pray for, 'cause y' jest might git it." How bittersweet, I've often thought, is what we want when we get it.
I was lucky in another way, too; the bullet barely missed main arteries, which, if severed, would have resulted in my hemorrhaging to death immediately. I had time in the hospital to remember lead-ups to the accident; I experienced nightmares for months afterwards in which I would see Angie and Reba playing with the rifle, would hear the cold, metallic snap of the firing pin, and would sit straight up in bed, my heart lurching, my body drenched with perspiration. I'd felt the same fear and apprehension when as a child I had been startled out of sleep by a chicken's squall; all my life, I've known that death is nearby; its drama blackly, bloodily catches up the unsuspecting as well as the ones who watch, their hearts panicked
I met Howard at the hospital, his daddy, suffering from a heart attack, in the room across the hall. Howard gravitated to my room immediately, coming in and sitting awkwardly at first at the foot of my bed. Frequent visits made us both more comfortable; we talked about our interests, ambitions, what we wanted out of life. I liked the attention he showed me, appreciated the magazines he brought in for me to read, the candy bars he'd buy out of the snack machines. The nurses started kidding me about my boy friend, causing me to blush deeply; it also made me start thinking about whether I wanted a boyfriend. I wasn't sure I wanted anything to do with the roles of girl friend, wife, or mother. Howard seemed different though from all the other boys I'd been around; he was shy and polite.
Howard's daddy had died in the night. I was awake when the nurses tiptoed in and closed my door. I heard, though, and understood the urgent whispers in the hall. I listened when they wheeled his body away. Howard came in to see me the next day, to tell me, but he could see I already knew. He lingered a while to visit. He told me he not been really close to his daddy, that his daddy drank, and when he drank, he was sometimes violent. Howard had been bruised by that violence, and though he said he regretted his daddy's death, he really wasn't unhappy. I understood intuitively; I'd seen enough drinking to understand its effect upon people. Most people get hooked: they start drinking because they like how it makes them feel, how it lets them feel bigger and less vulnerable, more in control; but they hate it, too; they hate it because it becomes a habit and they can't shake it. Daddy didn't drink a lot, but he did sleep in the backyard one night. Mama took an old quilt out and tossed it over him.
This night, it had snowed, and we weren't expecting anyone since the roads were bad. When the car pulled up, Daddy had gone out on the porch, yelling at the dogs, "Go on, Skip. Git off th' porch. G'on now." He gave another dog a soft kick while Howard stomped the snow off his boots. Coming on in the house, Howard sat down by me on the couch and stretched out lankily with his boots in front of him; I smelled whiskey. As the heat hit his boots, a slow puddle of muddy water pooled around them. I had just mopped the floor that afternoon. Daddy told me he could see me getting angrier by the moment, and he swore it was that puddle of water that kept me from marrying Howard.
I continued to see Howard for a while after I went to college. He ended up spending some time at a boys' farm, and about then, I decided Mama had probably been right, "He wouldn't likely to settle down into any kind-a' job. Probably wouldn't amount to nothin'." I finally lost touch with him, in the way that I've lost other people from my past, remembering their faces, seeing them, hearing their voices, fragmented conversations, the pieces forming what I am-so many people, lost, dead. In later years, I would think of Howard and think of winter nights, winter washdays, whiskey, boots, and muddy puddles. I think of my parents and a life lost, and remembering, I'm filled with a pervasive sadness for all the things that can not endure.