About the Author and Work
Jeanie C. Crain is Professor of English at Missouri Western State College.
Whippoorwill Calling Me is an imaginative creation. The narrative contains thirteen themed mini-narratives structured to be complete within themselves; as a whole, however, the narrative explores the life of a people. Characters and events within the narrative are generalized rather than historical, although all have their roots in the author's childhood and a life style she experienced.
Themes within the narrative include the transience of time, the critical and enduring pulsations of blood ties, the intimate connections between a people and their land, the on-going struggle to survive, and the suffering accompanying survival. Against this black backdrop, the characters live briefly propelled by primordial forces bigger than themselves and their world.
Hauntingly, like the elusive whippoorwill, characters within the narrative nestle within the invisible past, fly noiselessly for a short distance, then plunge to the ground and hide. Much of the life they live is a broken-winged act. The song of these people is always plaintive, drifts sharply in the air--it is a song about living, loving, and dying--and in the end, the song dies away in a farewell message, a death cry.
Whippoorwill is loosely plotted: it begins with the death of a mother and ends with her voice speaking through a letter pointlessly resurrected. Like symbolic portraits in a play, mothers live and fade only to reappear in daughters who are themselves "the mother all over again." The author creates a circle of life spinning itself out repetitively in the seasons of time. The backdrop of the narrative is always an enveloping darkness.
Life looked at closely can drive people insane; Whippoorwill Calling Me reveals the brute reality of a life lived close to the earth. It is not, however, without lyric. And after the song dies, its lament lingers poignantly in the evening and early morning hours, hauntingly blending with the going and coming of light.
Foreword
The call of the whippoorwill lingers in memory, particularly for its distinctive, loud, rhythmic "whip-poor-will" cry repeated over and over. I remember the bird, strictly nocturnal, for its late evening and early morning cries, and lying in bed listening to it, I've thought the bird captures symbolically all the longings of a human lifetime.
Its family is Caprimulgidae and its species Caprimulgus vociferous. Leaf-brown with a black throat, this elusive bird is found from Southern Canada to the southern United States and mountains in Mexico. It feeds on flying night insects and moths and prefers open woodlands near fields. It nests on the ground among dead leaves. Few individuals have observed it, knowing it mostly, as I do, from its distinctive night utterances.
Lying in bed as a youth, I listened to its plaintive voice tirelessly repeating a rolling "Whip-Poor-Will, Whip-Poor-Will." It whistles at sunset, appropriately associating itself with the end of day and beginning of night, end of light and beginning of darkness; early mornings, its cry seems to lament the return of light. Camouflaged during the day, the bird nestles in fallen leaves and twigs, invisible even a few feet from its hiding place. Flushed, the whippoorwill noiselessly flies for a short distance then plunges to the ground and hides. If its nest is intruded upon, it flies away in ghostly silence or goes into its broken-wing act.
The gray bird's melody, always lonesome as it drifts sharply in the air, is a farewell message; a message about living, loving, and dying; a message about family and family blood ties; it sings the brief life and troubled days of all that is mortal, lamenting necessarily all that has been lost in the darkness settling into and enveloping human lives. Its cry is a death cry;
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...
Chapter 1 Going Home
A month after Mama died, not fully understanding why, I loaded up the Monza wagon, my two infant daughters, and took off again for Tennessee. The past days had been difficult-full of unfamiliar stirrings and restlessness. A feeling of time had settled in thickly, and I found myself plodding through tedious moments. Trying to keep my mind busy, to prevent its meandering paths into the past, I was, nonetheless, drawn relentlessly into a rush of memories seeming to possess me; I heard the voice and saw the image of my mother demanding my attention, but I knew, too, I was demanding of myself that I submit. I ached with a bottomless hurt swelling and pulsing that knotted finally into a dead presence within my womb. Mind winning out, arguing relentlessly that I must go back home and spend time with Daddy, I found myself driving through the steamy, sultry Georgia hills, eager for the woods and mountains just beyond. Even the incessant whining of my six month old daughter and two year old from the back seat of the car could not take me fully out of my ruminations. Distantly aware of a pinched feeling in my feet, I kicked off my shoes, exploring the cool accelerator with my bare foot, remembering how often, in past summers, standing in a sun-blistered corn field, I had cooled toughened, bare feet by tunneling down into the damper, worm-squirming under soil.
Today's blue sky and scudding clouds contrasted with the blue-black of that moon-silhouetted night I had driven through to reach my mother before she died. Then, too, my mind wandered aimlessly into the past, picking up this fragment and that, toying with them before dropping them into an unsolved mire-past compressed into present and future-a time bearing in upon me from which I knew I could not escape. Caught up in a cycle that had to be completed, I tried to defy the impersonal forces directing me, but I felt powerless in their grip. More than once on that night, I looked at the full moon hanging tauntingly in the sky, bringing me to think of seasonal change and the blending of winter into spring, spring into summer, summer into fall-reducing me to smallness, making me feel lost and alone. With the loneliness seeping into the depths of my soul, like the darkness itself, I yearned with the familiar needs that had propelled me from childhood. Always introspective, thoughtful and quiet, even as a child, I had often became an outsider within my own family.
On this night, strong tides of blood pulsed within me, and I listened to the metronomic beating of my heart and moved instinctually in awareness of life. I was part of this night, just as the night was part of me, and in the night, my mother moved inside me, breathing in me and through me, and back out into the full light of the moon etching its visible spirit into the primordial landscape.
On this fated night, driving to see my mother, I had taken what I thought was a shortcut through the mountains; the tortuous road stretched into miles. And with those miles came a question: what was this land, these people? I knew instinctively, even as I asked, my heritage was a matter of blood; I would never be able to outrun it-it would always be there-hauntingly there, vast, brooding, and bigger than myself, a visible sign of all that was invisible me. Like the ancient crags that hung down over the valleys, like the fogs that came and went, like the ebbings of the human spirit-my background and blood and family were just there, signaling the ongoing of life.
Early that next morning, I stood by my mother's bed and listened to the heavings within her frail, ancient chest. She gasped, rattled, and signaled she couldn't breathe. I looked into eyes, opened briefly through intense struggle; a fog condensed there, veiling and obscuring whatever warmth remained. For a moment, those eyes looked directly to me, pleadingly; pain surged through me, a mysterious sweeping of heat that flushed my heart then branched into my womb. Mamma's arms were strapped to her chest, and from everywhere, tubes protruded-electro -cardiac equipment, intravenous machine, and catheter. Where the sheet had crawled down from her body, purple-blackened arms exposed themselves needle-pocked and slit to admit tubes. Standing by my mother's bedside, I reflected on the many times I'd heard my mother say that she never wanted to die in a hospital; if she had to die, she'd say, she would just as soon do it at home. I remembered, too, my mother's fear of dying; she had loved the mountain breezes, opening her bedroom windows early in the spring and keeping them open into the fall, even after the first hint of frost had chilled the air. She had told me once that she couldn't stand the thought of being closed up in a casket and buried, unable to breathe. Mama feared the hospital with its cold, impersonal staff, its antiseptic and pungent odors; even the droning of the air conditioner filled her with dread of pneumonia. Her sheets, I could see, were drenched with perspiration, as was her forehead; the sheets clung damply the parts of Mama's body they still touched.
My stomach squeezed tighter; this time, I realized, I was facing no emergency to be followed by my mother's recuperation, as had been the case so often in the past. Looking past the fogs and sounds, I saw that my mother was already locked into the endless corridors of death. And somehow, I felt guilty. I remembered D.H. Lawrence's description of death: I saw my mother lying there, felt apart from her, knew her inapproachable; and I realized I probably had never known my mother as she was in herself, a person. I had never recognized the living being that was my mother herself. The memory did not bring me consolation: my mother's remoteness now, her disconnectedness was fact; suffering was her lot but also that of humans everywhere.
Standing helplessly by my mother's bed, I knew a passion driving itself into the deepest descent of soul. From my mother, I sensed a communication emanating from a core of the self, a last feeble stirring of something within, a convulsive effort gathering life into breath and sending it forth. Almost as an ESP between the living and soon-to-die, I breathed even as living sucked the breath out of my mother's body; her struggles were with the eternal; her reckoning could not be escaped. Mom shuddered visibly, collapsing back into herself; still, the ordeal was not quite over, not yet; something yet remained to be done, a resolution yet not fully acknowledged remained to be made. Sensing this unexpected lull, seeing it in a relaxation of external effort, I kissed my mother's hand lightly, then abruptly turned from her, walking from the hospital room back into the clutter of family, carrying with me a denial of death, the same denial my mother had fought futilely; I embraced hope instead, clinging to it, unwilling to accept inevitable fates.
Just being there prolonged my mother's struggles. Although I had grown up here in the hills and had seen death, sometimes graphically, as country children must, I had never been this close to death, never had it reach for me until I felt myself succumbing; sure, I had seen animals die, had witnessed in them the final spasms of life. Death, however, had not affected me closely, and I had only glanced at it half-heartedly, knowing that I did not belong to it, that I belonged to life.
So began the last forty-hour ritual of hearing doctors' reporting, listening to meaningless chatter from the nurses' station; I clung to dropping tones that might signal some whispered discussion of my mother. To the hospital staff, my mother had become an object which they attended, indifferently, occupying themselves with pulse, heartbeat, pulmonary functions, secretions, and excretions. The family was reduced helplessly to peeping in for reassurance, indications of change. Checking in on my mother, I observed them suctioning her lungs. With her hands strapped to the bed, each push of the tubes through her nose and into her lungs caused Mama's body to arch convulsively. Mama had worked at a convalescent home; she had talked about the old people, how she hurt for them, how she would never want to have tubes connected to and pushed into her body. I haunted the door, waiting for them to finish the procedure, then I slipped into my mother; it was the child in me who cried, "Mama, they're hurting you, aren't they?" Mama struggled to nod her head no but lapsed comatose, no longer strong enough to respond to the call of flesh, not hers and not that of her daughter's. A chill swept my body, blocking my heart in ice, and the ice moved into my womb, shocking me as if I had been injected with formaldehyde.
Mama clung to her last moments-refusing to die until one by one, each child had been drawn into her silent, watery communication of death. None of the children, though, could admit their mother was dying, this shadow of themselves-so they had eaten and slept in the hospital corridors. An aunt brought in fried chicken or a casserole nightly, faithful out of a sense of duty but also love. It was, after all, her sister dying, a sister who had early assumed responsibility as the oldest in a large family; a sister who had rocked the babies to sleep so that her own mama could rest. I knew my aunt loved Mama; I also knew that her being there was a compulsion because she knew she, too, was dying, not immediately, but dying, nonetheless in part with her sister. Death had already come to her visibly, visiting her husband in a cancer, which had wasted slowly every cell of life until he had laid upon his bed at home an emaciated skeleton, his flesh collapsing in upon breath itself. All my aunt now wanted was to get closer, to understand this thing that had happened to her, this strangeness that had settled into her own house, her bedroom, this thing that was now twisting the life out of her sister's body. I had to bear my aunt's being there, though tolerance even of myself came hard.
I accepted-as the family accepted-the doctor's explanation that nothing else could be done locally, that he was transferring my mother to Vanderbilt, that he would have already done so but had to wait for a bed. When finally my mother's heart stopped, Mama was alone-except for one child sentry in the hospital hall. Most of the myriad relatives and children had gone home wearily to rest, prematurely lured by the calm whereby death so often announces that a covenant has been resolved. I, too, had fled to comfort my own daughters, who had been corralled with my brother's wife. Not having eaten in two days, I stopped at a Dairy Queen and ordered a hamburger; I wolfed the food down. Once at my brother's, I finished off the food and drink and disposed of bag, cup, and sandwich wrappings on my way into the house. Both girls were in the same crib, and I hugged them, then dropped into bed; before I could sleep, the telephone rang jarringly. "That was Hank," my sister-in-law, pushing open the bedroom door, reported; "he says they've called Code Blue and that you need to get back there, fast."
I pulled wearily out of bed, looked in a mirror, ran a comb quickly through hair that hung limply, straightened my clothes, trying to brush out of them the telltale wrinkles that seemed to have settled in permanently. My every move was urgent. The drive to the hospital though stretched interminably; my senses were heightened: I felt, tasted, and saw everything as if time and space had suspended themselves. I thought to myself it must be some kind of joke that any of the receding things existed, only vaguely aware that I myself was moving; I remained, however, strangely connected to it all. The blue of the sky startled my eyes, jerking me into the reality that I was riding the bumper of the fellow in front of me. Normally, a conservative driver, I had cut out in front of this driver, rushing to beat the crest of a hill. Breath escaped gritted teeth and I vaguely heard myself murmuring, "Get out of the way; don't you realize my mother is dying? Get out of the way!" The blacktop snaked in front of me, undulating and rushing me into some necessary outcome.
By the time I reached the hospital, the hall outside my mother's room was already filled with commotion, frantic activity. Relatives were already gathering, circling in upon the smell of death. Everyone wanted to get close, to glimpse death before it had been treated cosmetically to resemble sleep. Their purposes were noble: my mother was family, and family came when its members died. We were all of us part of each other. We also felt death removed from us as we observed it in another. Whatever death was, I knew it was not sleep; it was not a state from which one would return. A change in matter was being wrought, a change of form, and philosophy now had nothing to say; religion, too, left the soul empty. Logic thundered in my head, then fled; an energy and force now centered on me, demanding an accounting. A sensation of strangeness welled up within me, and I no longer knew if I controlled or was being controlled; I felt as if I had been removed from the light, that I was now somehow a shadow playing upon a darkened, interior wall upon which other shadows moved.
I arrived too late; Mama had died, and I had not been there, just as I had not been there when they wheeled her to surgery to reset her broken hip, just as I had not been there on Mother's Day; An old inadequacy gnawed at me from within. Someone pressed in upon me from the right demanding, "What's going on? Do you know what's happening?" Estranged to myself as well as this piece of flesh by me, without patience, I pushed on through the shifting shapes, and speaking neither to myself nor the voice which had addressed me, I answered, "I think my mother just died." Catching my brother's Hank's eyes, I saw confirmed what I feared; he shook his head: "She's gone, Laura."
On the raised hospital bed, Mama lay still, her head rolled to the right. Her tongue curled brutally to the right, the result no doubt of having tubes and machinery forced into her. She already looked rigid, something apart from herself. Priding myself with self-control and maintaining an image of invulnerability, I knew better than anyone how vulnerable I really was-to myself, to others-how inside, I always curled into a fetal protectiveness. Standing by my mother now, I fought for reserve, the magnetism still strong between me, the child irresistibly drawn to her mother's breast and clinging for a moment helplessly, and the mother now only faintly warm. Ordered not to leave me alone in the room with Mama, Hank now gently pulled me up and away from my mother's body. My heart within wrenched, as if it were being pulled from my chest, ragged arteries protesting and spurting my lifeblood from me. Mama's warmth lingered upon my cheek, growing hotter and yet lighter, going, and I didn't know where.
Glancing backwards, I saw that my mother's body had every appearance of being worn out, of having finished a terrible wrestling with machinery and professional hands. Nurses' aids were hastily drawing the bed's curtains shut in order to ward off death from other ICU patients who had not yet resolved themselves to the fact that they, too, were dying. From that moment, I accepted the death inside me, knowing I would have to reckon with it; still, I had never been touched this intimately; my soul within winced.
Death and life are, I know, bound together, complimentary and mutual to each other, and out of their union comes yet more life and death, a primordial and eternal thrusting out of which continual unrest seeks rest. This was the cycle of life I had already seen played out in nature, the eternal coming and going of spring, summer, fall, and winter, but it was death, too, with a finality and ending that was permanent and to which all living beings succumbed.
Coming back home a second time, this time after my mother's death, was a necessary thing. The details and rush of her funeral had permitted little time for good-byes. There was too much shock-and too many people. Funerals I knew were supposed to help people grieve, to help them adjust to sudden absence of spirit; but I had felt only resentment. My grief was private, and it was bigger than myself. Something had been taken from inside me, and I felt violated, known, and vulnerable.
Relatives flocked into the funeral parlor, curious to look upon this new victim, confirming somehow thereby their own immortality. From there, they would drift out into the halls, compare notes, and renew acquaintances, comfortable in the drone of their own voices. This went on until the casket was closed. Even then, the press of people had followed in the traditional funeral procession leading over miles of twisting country road and ending finally at the gaping hole that would swallow the gray steel casket--vaulted and earthed-in at last from gaping eyes.
Only after the first spadeful of earth had cascaded in hollow thumps upon the casket were people content to leave-and only then could I find a quiet moment alone at the damp, mounding earth. The earthen thump upon the casket had pounded upon my heart, and an inaudible scream tore from my very being; for the first time, my reserve was broken, and I cried quietly, a single escaping tear signaling anguish. The pungent earth assailed my nose as I stood by my mother's grave, betrayed. Out of the earth had come flowers and food; I had learned the cycle, but I rebelled that it should be my mother who was now being taken into that most fecund of wombs. "Dust thou art, to dust returnest," echoed in my heart; "'twas not spoken of the soul." I knew, though, the oldest mythologies had told the story: God in Eden had breathed life into mortals, telling them it would be there until He took it again. It was an ancient story; philosophy and religion had not been able to improve upon this account of origins and science had missed its essence completely. What I wanted right now was reassurance, but I was barred by flaming swords.
After the funeral, family members reassembled back at the old home place. Afraid, I submitted, understanding a reckoning was being demanded of me. The minute I walked through the front screen door, I sensed this was my father's house; only he belonged here now. Yet, Mama lingered everywhere, shadowy but robust, comforting, and arguing no non-sense about lamenting what we had lost. Life was meant to be lived, and we were the living. I could almost see my mom walking out of the shadowed corners of the living room; only my mind denied it could be so.
For each child there, coming home after the funeral had been a necessary ritual disguised by concern for the father. We all cast side-long glances into the closets of the past, afraid of skeletons we had grown accustomed to finding there; we each knew Mama's presence, lingering , was benevolent and caring, a continuing nurturing of life. In coming back, each of us tried to conquer fear and to believe that coming back a next and then next time would not be so hard. I quickened, the cord that connected me to Mama, and indeed, to anything, severed. Something in me had been lost irretrievably, and an unspeakable sadness invaded, ravishing and leaving only a shell of what I had been formerly.
Coming back this second time, I watched my daughters enjoying Pa's house, playing until weariness embraced them. I had forgotten how quickly the dirt here claimed everything, and I spent my time washing faces, hands, changing clothes-fighting the losing battle against dirt, as I now understood my mother before me had. I tried to ignore the ragged, tick-eaten dogs that insisted on sleeping under the porch chairs, the black flies that clung and left black mess over everything.
In the hours that followed, as I found time, I helped my sisters empty out closets and dressers, trying not to linger with the rush of memories pouring out to us. Everywhere, we found messages and insights into a personality we now knew we had barely known. Our mother had been a person completely separate from us-and we had denied her this. The notes, letters, and cards mounted in yellowing albums disturbed us all strangely. The more obscure the memory forming and intensifying, the stranger we felt to ourselves. We could not tear ourselves away before being flooded by a vast, dead past that our mother had forgotten to bury. Or had she? Mama's voice called strongly to me from a distance, "Do this in memory of me."
The second night after I had returned home, still awake, I listened to a car turn up the mountain road, labor heavily, slow, and then turn into Daddy's driveway. I asked myself, "Who could that be at this hour?" Mama and Daddy had compassionately told me of Elbert, remarking how he was drinking himself to death; how he drunkenly staggered onto country porches at all hours. I decided not to stir, hoping Elbert would leave. His car horn honked twice. Silence. Gathering quiet. Then, a few minutes later, the quiet was broken.
"Ed, Ed, " a thick, liquor-slurred male voice called
"W-wh-who's there?' I heard Daddy responded slowly, sleepily.
I recognized from Daddy's halting, blurred echo, he was only just now aware of Elbert's presence. For a moment, I reflected on his helplessness here in this house surrounded by darkness. This was a house that creaked in the night, a house where small animals scurried in the loft. It was a house where I had cowered in bed listening to the muffled sounds of traffic in the valley, not understanding the disconnected vibrations wafted aloft on mountain breezes. This was a house where being alone had frightened me as a child. I remembered lying awake on the many long and repeated nights when Daddy left at eleven o'clock to pick up Mama from her work at the nursing home. He would drive through the night-dampened darkness, the old Chevrolet's headlights pointing out the twists and turns in the gravel road leading off the mountain and into the valley. I would lie awake gripped by fear, listening to the car's departing drone, sometimes afraid even to breathe loudly. My sisters nearby slept fretfully. Eventually, I would hear the car churning its way back into the driveway, the doors slamming, the screen door's opening, the tired, soft voice of my mother sharing last words with Daddy before they both slipped into the creaking bed to sleep. This was a time when I, too, could safely sleep, occasionally awakened jarringly by a chicken's death squawk, or more likely, by Mama's and Daddy's moving about the next morning, getting out of bed, lighting a lamp, pouring water into a tea kettle for coffee.
Daddy, too, had been reduced by Mama; age now claimed and made him fragile; he no longer appeared to me the same hard, defiant, and sometimes cruel male he had sometimes seemed to me as a child. His helplessness now in this house brought back memories to me of the nights when Mama had worked those long hours and climbed into bed only late at night.
I had assumed some responsibility for my siblings, and they often came to me with the questions they were too embarrassed to ask Mama or Daddy. They looked up to me as having answers, but any wisdom I had acquired was that experience inflicted, and it was not what I would have chosen for myself. Before I was twelve, I felt older, having taken life's hurt inside myself; not knowing what else to do with it, I had cultivated an imaginary game in which I projected myself outside my own body, observed whatever it was at the moment tormenting me. It wasn't always anything specific, just the hardness of life, the small animals hunted for meat, the chickens' heads axed off for Sunday's dinner. I became a survivor, never letting anything or anyone get too close. Inside, I stayed a child, reaching out for affection, and eager to please. And it was the child's fear I remembered tonight even as I reflected upon Daddy's helplessness.
"Ed, I wanna talk w'you."
"It's the middle o'night," Elbert. "Don't you think people ever hav' t' sleep?"
"Aw, people don't care, 'bout me anyway," the voice whined. "They don't wanna talk t' me. Yo're th' onliest friend I've got. You take me in."
I heard Daddy respond. "Ain't no wonder people don't wanna talk t' you. They're tard of being 'wakened jest 'cause you had t' much t' drink. They ain't gonna stand f'r it, and I ain't either. Go to sleep on the porch; we'll talk tomorrow."
Next morning, Daddy dismissed Elbert's drunkenness, laughingly telling me how one night when Elbert had threatened suicide, a neighbor had replied, "If I wuz livin' th' way you are, Elbert, I shore wouldn't be in no hurry t'die. You'll jest git t' hell faster."
The rest of that night, I listened to the quiet about me, a quiet interlaced with occasional thick mutterings coming from the porch where Elbert slept in the chairs, a whippoorwill mourning in the distance. The girls tossed an arm back and forth or cried out in dream. In the walls, rats or flying squirrels moved about. I thought about spiders-how they hung out in all the corners here and under the beds and boxes that held long worn-out, out-grown clothes. I remembered how in the hospital Mama, given Codeine, had hallucinated about big black bugs crawling out of corners, old boxes, when they had first medicated her. I knew her Mama's fears went back to her own childhood and a life starker than my own. I had tried to talk Mama out of the hallucinations-"Mom, it's only the medicine that's causing you to see bugs." She had replied , "I wish I could git one and put it on you. You'd see, they're real."
Toward morning, Elbert got up, stumbled off the porch, and drove off. His death-loneliness and despair became my own, as I felt the waste of life draining from each lost moment. This despair I was to feel intimately all my life, triggered by things that had happened, events traumatic enough that I buried them too deeply to be retrieved easily. Only as I approached mid-life would I discover stakes so high that I would have to confront what I had buried. This would be the beginning of the culmination of a reckoning that Mama's death had awakened in me.
I was not strong enough yet to face myself, and more importantly, I had found I could play expected roles and, thus, evade at least any intense questioning from outside myself. The activity and energy demanded of me permitted me to bury what it was in me that was already dead in life-or at least I had thought it was dead. I had not yet learned that death is always resurrected in order that life itself continue.
At some point on that second visit, the work ended. There were no more drawers to sort through. What could be done had been. Daddy and I had visited kin-an hour here or there. We had enjoyed the drives through the country and the peculiar character of individual conversations. For me, it was a time of coming to some beginning terms of what my childhood had meant; I could see how far now I had moved away from it. This was no longer my life, but it was still very much a part of the blood thundering inside me, and I knew now I could never escape it.
Already, I'd returned in sleep to people and events past, and they peopled my head and heart more strongly sometimes than the people who pressed in upon me daily. I would return to the home place again and again in my dreams; and always, there would be the urgency of something there yet unfound and demanding my attention; I would awaken haunted and sure only of the driving force within me that kept me going. It was a strong force, a life force, form shaping matter; I knew I was not aware of it it consciously, and yet consciousness was a result of the life force's being there. In me, it directed itself outward into my husband and children, and still it was not satisfied; I felt it insatiably directing me into something yet to be.
One night, Daddy and I had set late at one of her relative's house. Sitting on the front porch swinging, we were restoring what we could of each other to ourselves, yet each of us felt a separation like the hand of death dropping a chill into the body. From the squatting cracker box crawl of houses lining the streets of this urban neighborhood, the never-ending noise of human voices drifted in.
Daddy and I came back home from our visits aware that responsibilities had been resumed, and with this awareness came a sense of dissolution. It was this Daddy and I took to the porch each night after the girls had fallen asleep. We filled the evening with easy conversation, content when the words slid away and left us with only the katydids' chirping, wind rustling the leaves, a whining mosquito.
I had already decided that tomorrow I would head back, The girls needed a good bath-not another wash pan filled with water from the buckets and heated, a fast once-over with a washcloth. I was tired of the sweat and dirt clinging to me. But before I left, I knew I would have to go back to Mama's grave-just as I'd done when I first came-and standing there, I would tell Mama, "I'm going, Mama. I don't know just when I'll get back. But I will be back; I have to be back; just as you've told me, I have family here. But you know, Mama, it's more than that; it's something inside me, pounding, something wanting to get out, wanting to be a part of everything that's here. You're here, too, Mama, aren't you? I can feel you inside me; it's almost as if I am you. I'm not afraid as much as I was. It's almost like when you prayed with me, 'Now, I lay me down to sleep; I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord, my soul to take.'"
That final night home with Daddy, I didn't sleep-but settled down into the old mattress and sagging springs, where Mama had spent her last nights before going to the hospital, resting until the roosters started crowing at daybreak. Then I pushed out of bed, made a cup of instant coffee, walked outside, and breathed in morning air. Daddy, awakened, stood with me a while; we neither of us said anything, just stood together and felt the morning seeping into our souls. Eventually, I roused the girls out of still heavy sleep, dressed them while they complained, told them they could sleep again on the way home.
I kissed Daddy good-bye; we both knew there would be other mornings and other places, other beginnings and endings, other seasons that would have to be lived through. We were content to know this was the place of birth, a place we shared, a place we would both come back to. The call of the land was an old call, a blood call, the call of our ancestors-a call we both knew we would never forsake; it bound us to each other and to the land, and to the mother and wife it had taken back into its womb, into which we, too, would eventually succumb. From the woods, the last call of the whippoorwill lingered as I backed my car out of the gravel driveway. Daddy waved and moved back into the darkness of the house.
Chapter 2 December Marriage
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 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 other girls out looking around the yard, the barn and crib for her. That's why Mama was worried to still 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 flours 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. 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 I 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. She knew, too, that her 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 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 speak to me most poignantly with Mama's voice
Chapter 3 Black is Night
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 it influences 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 year's, my enthusiasm for argument 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 eats 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 good. 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 in them 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 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.
Chapter 4 The Rifle Repeats
A certain amount of bewilderment and incomprehension is expected when a child confronts death. As the years bring death closer and make it familiar, the shock is supposed to lessen with each appearance, and one is to learn to endure, denying death, grateful that it has come to another. The shock of Mama's death ripped painfully into my soul, paralyzing and numbing it with a vast and timeless stillness. I had never before been touched this violently, this intimately, and I was afraid I would be destroyed. I groaned in agony and brute terror, blinded by suffering... not a general suffering but a suffering that was real and intimate, and centered within me.
Violence and death had never been far from our family's front porch. Hunting was a rite of manhood; boys were trained early in the art of shooting to kill. I sometimes found myself thinking the men hunted not for food but for the sheer joy of blood; I saw my brothers and male cousins as something opposite myself, hard and imposing, brutal and insensitive to the life they took. They laughed at tender-heartedness, taunting it by holding up the dead squirrel, knowing the girls watched and squirmed as they gutted and skinned them. Mama told me not to mind the boys, but I did mind them; satisfied with their torture, they sometimes seemed to become insolent and half contemptuous. I sometimes resented them utterly, knowing they demanded acquiescence and submission of all that came under their touch. I resented my own mother's cajoling attention to them, knowing she, too, found them brutal, at times savage in their behavior. I know now this assessment was both fair and yet inaccurate; it missed everything of their own heart struggles.
I desperately wanted Mama to understand the dark mysteries of my heart, but I stumbled thickly when I tried to tell her about any of the hurt. Only after Mama' death would I find myself able to reach fully into the experiences of my past and to begin to understand there what had shaped my earliest sense of human loss, rounding itself out in Mama's death. But Mama's death, of course, was only a prelude, only the beginning of a symphony that played itself out in all of life.
My best friend in fifth grade had been Andy. We ate home-packed lunches together, usually egg sandwiches or peanut butter, an apple or cupcake. Eating, we would talk about the boys we liked or didn't like. In spite of school boundaries established within the open, mowed play yard, seventh and eighth graders would slip off into the woods at the back of the school grounds. There, they played boy and girl games while curious fifth graders whispered the goings-on to each other. Time and again, the older girls would be lured into the outskirts of the school yard, half out of curiosity of something they had not yet experienced, to find themselves being groped by one of the older boys, who would then come in after recess and whisper his conquests to the other boys. Fifth graders were usually excluded, but they saw the obscene hand gestures, heard the girls whispering, the boys giggling among themselves. These were the cruel experiments by which children everywhere grow up; society only hides the brute games with its social dress.
The games continued-in the cloakrooms and on the bus rides home in the afternoon. The younger ones would be ordered to sit up front and to keep their eyes on the road; already, one or two girls had gotten a reputation for letting the boys' wandering hands explore at will. They were always the sought-after ones, never lacking a seat partner, sometimes accommodating more than one. Adults were not always indifferent to the dirty little games being played out in the back of the bus. I remembered one bus driver who had urged the boys on, "Dig deeper, boys."
An unwritten rule had it, though, that no one was to talk about what happened at school or on the bus once she was home. Besides, you rode the bus with brothers and cousins. At home, the girls didn't talk about sex either; they found out about it on their own, usually finding themselves flooded with hot shame when a mother would take one of them aside and tell her to keep her dress down and not to let a boy touch her breasts or put his hand between her legs. Some of the girls learned even earlier than fifth grade about being touched intimately and sometimes violently. Andy and I were blood sisters and talked to each other freely, trusting the other to keep secrets.
Andy came from a large family-and from her, I learned about periods, pregnancy, and babies. Andy would tell how once a month she would see an older sister rinsing out bloodied rags by hand before bringing them to the washing machine. We were both put off, repulsed, by the notion that girls had to have periods, that we were going to be having our own any day. Washing day was always exclusively female, so we would see the stained rags being washed and hung on a back line away from the house. We were to learn when our own periods started that privacy was hard to keep-that accidents happened and that odors clung stubbornly even after washing.
I never really became comfortable with my body; I resented being female, that I had no choice. The boys always seemed boundless in their freedom while my sisters and I were confined to the house and an endless round of domestic drudgery. I rebelled by refusing many of the roles modeled to me by Mama. Instead of cleaning house, I would slip away with a book; I refused to wear dresses, clinging instead to my worn jeans. I would volunteer to work in the garden, to help with the chores at the barn. Mama would try to soften the anger and resentment she saw growing in me, but I would acquiesce only to resent her, too. I felt Mama had no life for herself; everything that she was, she was in relation to her children, Daddy, and the house. She lived in and through her children. Whatever I wanted, I knew it had to do with more than being a mother, a wife. I've learned over the years that what I want is to be myself, to be known as a self, the same thing Mama wanted, perhaps the same thing every human being everywhere wants, and is denied.
I had spent lots of nights at Andy's house, so I knew almost as well as Andy about what went on there. They lived in a sprawling white frame house with at least six bedrooms, and even then the kids doubled up. The kids, in fact, seemed to crawl out of the woodworks, and always, Andy's mother would be pregnant, another one on the way. They were outwardly a jolly family-in keeping with the red hair and freckles most of them sported. To me, Andy's family always seemed better off than my own; at least, they had meat during the week, a chicken stewing on the stove or a roast cooking in the oven. In my own home, we seldom had meat, and when we did, it often came from the men's hunting in the woods. We occasionally enjoyed fried chicken on Sunday -and not always then. When Andy and I would get off the bus in the afternoon, the first thing Andy would do would be to give me a large glass of onioned cow milk and usually a tea cake, heavy and spiced. After our snack, we would hide out in Andy's room.
"Hey, look what I have," Andy grinned, reaching under her bed and pulling out a pile of magazines. I recognized True Story.
"You mean your mother lets you read these," I asked, reflecting on how Mama had snatched them away from me on an occasion or two. The magazine's being there meant my mama must have occasionally read them, but I denied this. Mama, after all, read the Bible to us kids, and she didn't really have time for a private life. It's always possible, too, someone else brought the magazines into the house.
"She doesn't know," Andy replied. "I got these from Barbara."
For the next few minutes, we busied ourselves flipping through the pages, looking at pictures, giggling over some description where a boy fondled a girl, placing his hands in her panties, or cupped her breast. We knew breasts started growing around the eighth grade, the lucky ones getting them prematurely. Andy and I had actually examined each other, looking to see if there was any swelling yet. Andy was disgusted with her flat, boy chest, and I secretly dreaded anything happening to me that would mark me any more outwardly as being a girl.
That school year churned on- Andy and I continued eating lunch together and sharing secrets. I already knew not everything was right in Andy's house. Andy had told me when not to come over. She had told me, too, that she had been touched; she didn't tell me by whom, where, or when; she came to school one day bleeding, and I had held her in the bathroom while she cried. I became even angrier at the betrayal of our bodies. I thought I was beginning to hate men. I had generalized my feelings, and while the adolescent emotions were strong, they were also unfair to both the facts and the opposite sex.
School continued to be school. Both rooms (first through fourth grade and fifth through eighth) were ushered out onto the playground one afternoon after the older boys had set a field of grass on fire. The smoke billowed out before the wind, the fire beaten back but leaping again to the dry grass. Finally, with the help of several men who ran over from the nearby store, the fire was out, the grass blackened and smoldering. Back in the classroom, we heard Marty telling the other boys he'd set the fire because he was bored.
Another afternoon, I learned Billy Sue had been taken out by a couple of boys who had pulled her panties down. They had looked at her, touched her, and even tried to put their penises inside her. A teacher, looking out from a window had seen what was going on, and she brought Billy Sue inside, took her to the girls' bathroom and talked to her. Later, that same afternoon, the two boys had been taken to the cloakroom, and the other kids heard the smack of the paddle on their bottoms. None of them told their parents.
In winter months all the kids played in the cloakroom. The young girls played doctor and nurse, using each other as patients. Once, the teacher's son had tried to break in; he'd been looking through the keyhole and knew what they were doing. He'd gotten his fingers smashed in between the door.
We were all learning the pains of growing up. Wre came from homes where we had already seen too much. What we hadn't seen in the houses, we had learned from working around the barn. We'd learned generation was a part of the nature of living; everything and everyone did it. We began practicing early.
One morning when I got to school, Andy wasn't there. I watched the clock, thinking she was just late, that she would come in before the noon hour. Andy didn't show that day and not the next. None of her brothers and sisters was in school either. Finally, I asked the teacher, "Where's Andy?"
Hearing the demand in my voice, the teacher with an unaccustomed firmness pulled me aside. "Something's come up; Andy won't be in school for a while."
All that day, I felt Andy's absence like a hunger inside me, and I couldn't shake it. Something was wrong; I just knew it. My mind went back over the afternoons I had spent at her house. What had happened? I thought maybe one of them had died. Death, while still new and a little scary to me, had happened closely enough that I knew people sometimes disappeared. The Laura grew nauseous, "What if it was Andy?
Getting off the bus that afternoon, I rushed in to Mama, "Mama, Mama, Andy wasn't in school today."
"I know," Mama had replied. I heard a soft tinge of regret in her tone.
"But why, Mama? What's happened?"
"Andy's daddy is dead, honey. They're all gonna be outta school awhile."
I was relieved. It wasn't Andy. She would be back. She hadn't lost her best friend.
That night, I heard Mama and Daddy talking in the hushed whispers they used when they didn't want the kids to hear. The door was ajar between the kids' room and theirs, so I slipped out of bed and over to it to listen. I knew instinctively they were talking about Andy's daddy.
Daddy said, "She shot him seventeen times."
"Seventeen," Mama echoed incredulously, "But why? Why would she do that?"
Daddy spoke in measured spaces: "They said he'd come home drunk and still drinking and well things just happened."
"O God," I heard Mama's voice trail off.
After that, it was quiet. I curled fetally inside herself, trying to make my thoughts be still
I couldn't sleep the rest of that night. My window was opened, and I listened to a whippoorwill. Every time it cried "whip poor Will," I thought of Andy. Was Andy hearing it, too? Was Andy thinking about me? What can I do to help Andy? My stomach knotted, and I pulled my knees farther up into myself; I felt violated and shocked. I knew there was no help for this kind of pain; Andy would never be the same, couldn't be the same. Something in her would be broken, something that could never be repaired. It would be inside her and would follow her the rest of her life. Anyone who had not been betrayed this early in this way would never understand. Andy would shut herself off from the world; her body would become a shell, but what Andy was would no longer be there. I knew instinctively, as well as if I had been there, how the mind would react defensively.
When Andy came back to school, she was pale and looked hastily away when I tried to smile at her. The other kids in the family were equally evasive. I recognized they just didn't want to talk. At recess, they would hurry away and find a place off by themselves. Andy kept dodging my attempts to lock unto her eyes. After a while, I stopped trying, deliberately averting her eyes when Andy passed. I came to realize gradually that what Andy and I had shared was over. It was an early death. A sadness came into me for all the things I did not understand; it swept into my deepest being with force. I was to experience that feeling again, at much later points in life. At first, it would announce itself as sweet, and I would want something back, something lost, something treasured... but holding onto it would make me sick, and I would shudder and turn away.
The next school year, some of the old one- and two-room schools were consolidated. Andy went to one school, and I went to another. It was almost a relief that we did not have to see each other. Andy had changed-had grown into a taller shadow of what I had known. Her face was pale, making her freckles stand out. She looked sick-as if the blood had drained from her face. I had changed, too; I had become somehow old, exuded a knowledge taken inside myself, held myself in reserve and announced an outward invulnerability. Andy and I would meet again briefly in high school, but we would never again be intimate. The child in both of us had died, and a guilt had replaced innocence. We knew too much; we had learned how to hurt and how to turn the hurt inside upon themselves.
One learns to submit to the violence of living, to weather the bruises, learns to be afraid of the darkness inside the self. Through it all, my heart continued to beat furiously, defiantly within my breast. I took inflictions upon myself, becoming guilty for my own nature, feeling being itself was wrong. Still, I aspired beyond myself, finally leaving the family, the mountains I had come to love.
With opportunity, I sought to answer what it was to be a self. I learned I could not run fast enough, far enough, for the old self would always be there, never farther than the dreams that returned me home. I knew it as a blood intimacy I could not escape. I faced outward, but I was always returned inward, a magic land in which my secrets had been made known and from which life teemed even when it revealed itself squirming in the rot itself. I knew in the intimacy of being that life fed upon decay, rot, and death; only with a force of will could I girt up my loins into the acceptance of womanhood and marriage and birth.
For the longest time, I saw God removed from the fecundity of his own creation and resisted succumbing to creative force, yielding fully only after long years of communion with the past and Mama, to find all of it softened in face of the life it had created. In time, I could embrace life, my husband, and children fully-glad to have been born and to have borne life.
Chapter 5 A Puddle of Muddy Water
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 forkful 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 us children from knowing we were poor, or it could have been we lacked the opportunity to compare ourselves to anyone other than other mountain people just like ourselves. All of them were proud: they didn't take handouts; they were close to the earth, and the earth provided what they 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's had triplets when she was forty, and I was the last one born. Since Mama couldn't breastfeed 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 their 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, drove 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 not to "tell stories," and not 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, "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.
Chapter 6 Hog Killing
Mama always said Daddy's barn was a "Por' excuse for a man." Daddy laughed, not paying much attention to the remark. The barn served the purpose he had in mind, two stalls for the mules, another smaller one for the cow or two he kept when winter days and nights got too severe, a hayloft for feed. He would sometimes crawl up into that loft and go to sleep himself, "Jest t' git away from the woman's jawin'," he would say. I learned early that the world was divided into halves: man's and woman's-and that the two could not be crossed over lightly. While I disliked the endless repetition of household chores, I knew that Mama had fled to it in part as a way to escape some of the harsher realities of the struggle for survival. Men took to the "kill to survive" much more easily than women.
Even though the barn was clearly man's territory, much of what I learned about life, I learned at the barn. As a child, I rebelled, resenting Mama and the house, fleeing the dreariness into the sunshine and the world it represented. Behind the barn, Daddy kept a pig or two in a pen. In the spring, there would always be newly born calves, chickens, and pigs. Daddy would always take us girls down to see the newborn, and occasionally, even Mama could be coaxed into walking down to the barn with us, even if largely she considered this a man's domain. As I got older, I would hang around the barn, whether or not I was being "unlady-like." I learned there a great deal about the fierce give and take between the species, the brute show of strength, the eventual submission to a continual breeding game. Mama, I knew, wanted to guard me from this reality, to keep me innocent as long as possible. Played out in the barnyard was the drama of an entire universe caught up in a thrust-counter-thrust travail in which life and death united and from which new life emerged. I didn't understand then, and I don't understand now, but I know instinctively it is my destiny, as it was Mama's, a destiny I will never be able to outrun, a destiny to which I've already submitted.
The barn gave off a muddy-sweet smell outdoing even the dank manure in the mule stalls. Most times, boars were kept separated from the sows, but we kids learned, nonetheless, about breeding. I'd watched the sows mounted, understanding their necessary submission. It is a submission of levels, animal-to-animal, female animal to male animal, animal to man, and from their continual struggles, life finds and sustains itself. People hide most of the brutal struggle from themselves, dressing it up in social rituals and facades, but get beneath the thinly gilded surface, and what you'll find is life squirming out of the manure. The pigs' snouts had rings to keep them from rooting out from under the pen. I had watched as my brothers cornered pigs and held them down while Daddy used pliers to close the rings, piercing the soft flesh, the pigs squealing frantically, the dark blood trickling from their snouts. Daddy and my brothers would laugh crudely, it seemed to me, uttering oaths when the pigs urinated on them. The truth was they didn't like this any better than I did, but men did what they knew they had to do, and the pigs had to have noses' rung to keep them from rooting out from under the pen. Daddy always told us girls, "Don't hurt 'em none," but I knew better. The hayloft not only was a refuge for Daddy, but it also was a place where hens built their nests, and we girls were warned not to go "messin' round up there." Still, my sisters and I learned to climb the crude pole ladder and to lean into a soft-foot fall the whole seven feet down.
That barn still leans crazily in upon itself; it stands, like the house stands, full of shadows and past sounds, but it's mostly empty and falling down. The rail fence is still there, too, as is the crib. Weeds are waist high, and the wind blowing through them mourns hauntingly. Even the pasture just behind the barn is overgrown and holds only the memories of kids slipping down to the pond they'd been warned to stay away from. Daddy and my brothers had cleared this "new ground" of brush and dug the pond by hand. In the fall, sage grass overgrew the field, and it was an adventure to wade through it, the wanderer beating a clear path as the grass yielded to the intrusion. I had my share of adventures in this field; I liked to watch the small life that would scurry out of the grass before me-mice, lizards, all species of insects, occasionally a rabbit or larger animal, and once it had been a red fox, its tail hoisted high. I was apprehensive of stepping on a snake, but this fear heightened my sense of adventure. One late evening, I watched a cat creep stealthily upon a rabbit; the rabbit's death cry, the only sound the rabbit makes in its life, curdled the air. I wondered why I didn't intervene, but even if I'd tried, could I have stopped it; would it have done any good?
Another time, I followed a soft lowing into the tall grass; there, I found Ol' Brindle having a calf. I watched Brindle's heaving labor, her rippling contractions pushing the calf down and out. Until then, I had been shielded from the birth process. I watched the calf emerge, hearing Brindle's soft moans growing louder with each push. The calf emerged head-first, its bloody, filmy hammock coming with it; its hooves were already sharp, and I wondered how Brindle could endure, for she was stretching tremendously as the calf bulged out of her and dropped. I watched Brindle lick and chew away the bloody gray of the filmy sack. Within minutes, the calf stood awkward and knobby-kneed, wobbling. I couldn't tell Ma