Charms for the Easy Life (11 page)

I realized fairly early into my mother’s courtship that in order to live in the same house with these two women, I would need to decide whom I would defend over what issue and when. Usually I chose my grandmother, as I believed she possessed the wisdom of the ages, and when I saw my mother buck and kick against her authority, I would gently say, “Don’t you think Grandmother’s probably been through this, and so she might sort of know what to do?” If my mother responded to me at all, it was to say something like, “She’s been through twenty more years than I have. That’s it.”

In a very bold mood, my mother announced she was not going out on any more house calls that might cause her to miss a date with Mr. Baines. My grandmother went haywireflooey. She shouted, “Suppose Sophia Snow had had a date when you were born? We’d both be in the ground!” My mother backed down, and out the three of us would go whenever a call came. My mother would tie tourniquets, set broken fingers, wrap sprained ankles, build bronchitis tents, doing everything perfectly, but with one eye on the clock. She almost always managed to make it home on time, even though more than once she met Mr. Baines at the door with dried blood still underneath her fingernails and plaster of Paris flecking the soft hair around her face.

My grandmother made her miss only one date, but at least I was able to leave the patient’s house and speed through half the county to stop Mr. Baines just as he was turning out onto the highway, looking confused and forlorn, driving slumped over the wheel, as if he had been shot in the back. I took him to our house and sat inside with him until my mother and grandmother came home, or rather, until my grandmother came in and told Mr. Baines to go lift my mother out of the backseat of their ride’s car. He looked so alarmed that I regretted having avoided telling him what had happened to my mother on the house call.

She had fainted and awakened vomiting at the home of an old man known as the Hermit Willoughby, and as she was to say later, “Yes, I did it, and with good reason.” My grandmother had been called to his house early that afternoon, and she insisted that both my mother and I go with her, as she didn’t know what she’d find when she got there. The Hermit Willoughby had lived alone since the death of his mother twenty years before, subsisting on handouts that Sunday-school classes left by his door and on whatever he could shoot or trap or cause to grow in the swampy wetlands around his cabin. The news that he needed medical help came to us by way of a rural relay of sorts that involved no fewer than three tenant farmers, a housewife or two, the postman, and a stranger who was pumping gas at a store. He showed up at our door and said, “I was asked to come here to tell you that the hermit has cut his throat.” My grandmother knew whom he meant. She rounded us up and we left hurriedly, my mother huffing because she was given no time either to call Mr. Baines or to leave him a note.

My automatic reaction upon entering the man’s house was to put my hand to my mouth and pinch my nostrils with my fingers. The place called to mind Miss Havisham’s scrambled and filthy dining room in
Great Expectations
, only a thousand times worse. My mother’s reaction was to stick by the door, which she kept propped open with one foot to give herself some fresh air. What did my grandmother do? She plowed forward, edging kittens and baby rabbits and chewed ears of corn out of her path, until she reached the Hermit Willoughby. He was sitting at a rough wooden table with his head in his hands. She said, “You smell like Satan. They’re saying you cut your throat.” And then, looking about the cabin, she added, “So why didn’t you?” He lifted his head, and when he did I saw why we were there. His throat was covered by a massive boil that seemed to have crawled up from his chest through the neck of his greasy undershirt, and if this thing had had a voice, it would’ve screamed its rage and vengeance. He didn’t say anything to my grandmother. He just blinked at her, very slowly, like a turtle. On the table beside him lay an open pocketknife, which my grandmother picked up and shook at him, saying, “Did you use this? Did you go after that boil with this?” He blinked again.

My grandmother shouted, “Come on, you two! Let’s start on him!” My mother and I dragged ourselves over to her. I resigned myself to doing anything but touching his neck. My mother glanced around the kitchen, sighed, and said, “Well, I guess rubber gloves are out of the question.” I pumped water at the sink, and my grandmother washed her hands and arms. Then I laid her sterile cloth on the table and displayed the instruments I knew she would need. As she circled the man’s chair, contemplating exactly how to proceed, she asked him to tell her how he had gotten his neck into this hideous condition.

He told her he had started going after the boil the day before, and could not stop, driven as he was by that lurid curiosity and involuntary compulsion that makes some people incapable of leaving their bodies alone. He had used the fish-scaling, can-opening, pedicuring pocketknife that now lay beside him, and he had resorted to this only after a week’s worth of magical cures had failed him. My grandmother asked if he had learned the cures from his parents. He said he had.

According to local legend, his mother had been a true witch and his father a warlock. In order to find all the charms for his incantations, he had left his house for the first time in twenty years, and had gotten as far as the crossroads when he discovered that the world had changed so much that he didn’t know which road to choose. He remembered the old signposts—the stone well, the big stump, the owl tree—but now all these things were gone. So he stood there in the middle of the crossroads, with this boil throbbing a purple spasm on his throat, scaring the smittens out of women and children as he flagged down cars and asked after his charms: “Where is a faithful wife? Where is a blind dog? Where is a black cat, and does it belong to an old hag? Where is a white nigger with pink rabbit eyes?” He collected everything. It took him all day. He sponged his boil with the urine of the faithful wife. He caused a blind dog to lick his neck by lathering the spot with hog grease. He held the black cat’s tail and made the sign of the cross over the boil. He used the dirty handkerchief of an accommodating albino to tie a slice of raw onion around his neck. None of these things worked. When he felt worse, and when the red streak started its course toward his heart, he put a toad under a pot and walked around it three times. He swallowed lead shot to absorb the poison. He pricked the boil with a gooseberry thorn until his blood ran black to red, and then he tossed the thorn over his left shoulder. None of these things worked either. When he developed a spiking fever, he walked back down to the crossroads and sent for my grandmother, whom he had met right before his mother died, when she appeared at the door to ask permission to take herb cuttings from her yard. Upon looking at his mother, my grandmother diagnosed her with Bell’s palsy, a condition the woman attributed to the evil eye someone had cast upon her. My grandmother held forth on neurological disorders, making such an impression on the son that he remembered her for years as somebody who sounded like she knew what she was talking about. That was almost exactly what he told my grandmother: “I thought you might know what to do about me. Ma being dead and all.” She assured him that she did. He was near tears as he continued: “I did not care to die. I like being by myself too much. I’m not ready to go be around everybody that’s ever died. That’s a lot of people.”

My grandmother agreed that it was indeed, and then she told my mother to stand ready by his neck with a basin. She said, “Don’t be particular. Just grab anything you can find that’ll hold all this matter. It doesn’t have to be clean. This stuff certainly isn’t.” My mother poked around the kitchen counter and finally produced a ceramic bowl that looked as if it hadn’t been washed in years. She stood beside my grandmother, holding the bowl out as far from her body as she could. She was staring at the man’s neck sideways. She looked woozy. My job was to hand over instruments, starting first with a benzocaine swab, which my grandmother took from me and held before the hermit’s yellow eyes, saying, “You see this? This won’t hurt. Everything else will, but this won’t.” She swabbed his neck, humming as she did. Then she stood behind his chair and said, “Now lean back. Ease your neck.”

She put both her hands on his head as if it were a cabbage she was about to wash and cut up for slaw, and after much turning it this way and that, she rested it on her stomach. She seemed satisfied that it was settled in at the best angle. I asked whether she was ready to proceed, and she nodded and reached her hand flat out to me. And then, with the scalpel in her hand and so far up in the air, she looked as if she could easily and without a dash of emotion cut his throat from ear to ear. Before she brought her hand down she told him not to yell, or it would make her nervous. She said, “My hand will slip and you will surely die.” Then she told my mother to get ready. She made two rapid crossed incisions oh so close to his jugular, and then shouted, “Goddammit, Sophia! Where’s the basin?” It was clattering on the floor, where my mother had just dropped.

I didn’t know what to do, and I looked for my grandmother to tell me. She told me to pick up the basin, catch the drainage, and swab the wound so she could have a clearer view of things. “Let’s hurry this along,” she said. “Just straddle Sophia while we finish.” So I stood with one foot on either side of my mother’s chest and swallowed back what I felt to be a gallon of saliva while I cleaned the hermit’s wound with iodine and hydrogen peroxide. My grandmother then began hurriedly coating his neck with ichthammol salve, glancing down at my mother every few seconds, getting more salve in his hair than on the wound. She was very distracted. It was the first time I had seen her rush through a routine procedure. I offered to take over. She nodded and told the man to sit still while she tended to my mother, cold as death as she was, still unconscious among pet rabbit droppings, dog hair, and the other decayed or decaying matter of a hermit’s life. She awakened when my grandmother passed ammonia under her nostrils, and then she turned her head to the side and vomited. When she was through, she looked up at me and said, “Go tell Richard I’m dead. I can’t go to the movies.” Once again, I looked to my grandmother for instruction. She said, “Go ahead. Drive home and tell him she’ll be late. I’ll drag her home before long. I’ll go to the crossroads and flag a ride.”

So that would account for why Mr. Baines blanched when he opened the car door and saw my mother in a heap on the backseat. The man who had given them the ride looked as though he expected to be paid, and Mr. Baines opened his wallet and gave the man more money than he probably made in three months. Mr. Baines carried my mother inside, slung across his shoulder as if he were taking her off a battlefield, and in a way I guess he was. When he laid her across her bed, she started to whimper that she never wanted to go through that again. When he asked how she had gotten in this shape, my grandmother said, “Sophia’s always been weak about running infection. Plus she didn’t eat breakfast this morning.” Then she excused herself to the kitchen, saying, “I think I’m going to fix a little glass of whiskey. I think that would be in order.” I heard ice hit the glass, and then I heard her shout out loud, “Mr. Baines! Would you care to take a drink? Sophia’s already made you too late for the movies. Might as well have one.” My mother and I were shocked at this miraculous offer. She motioned for Mr. Baines to go on to the kitchen, saying groggily, “My mother has lost touch with her reason. Take advantage of it.” He left the room, and as I helped my mother out of her dress and into a sandalwood-flake bath, we heard more miracles, my grandmother laughing with him, telling funny stories about delivering backwoods babies.

My mother and I never asked my grandmother why she so suddenly changed her attitude about Mr. Baines. If we had asked her, either she would’ve told us it was none of our business—a response we could’ve tolerated because we always had--or she would’ve started ignoring him again out of some childlike mixture of defiance and embarrassment over having flashed a light into such a rarely seen corner of herself. We didn’t want this to happen. Days later, when my mother’s curiosity had eaten a nearly visible place in her, I volunteered an answer. I told her she had looked dead there on the floor, as dead as a person could appear and still be breathing. Her face was pale from having the blood rush downward so quickly. Her lips were blue. It would’ve been disturbing for any mother to see her child crumpled on the floor like that, but in this case it was much worse, because my grandmother was so familiar with death, and there it seemed to lie by her feet. And while I hesitate to romanticize the event by saying that my grandmother realized how suddenly she could lose her daughter, and thus made some sort of silent promise to try to let her have the life she wanted, I’m convinced this is what happened.

T
HE DAY of my senior dance in March 1940, my mother and grandmother received a large brown envelope from the school principal. He was concerned that I had not yet applied for college, and so he had taken it upon himself to acquire brochures from the schools he believed most suitable for me. His list was impressive : Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, Radcliffe, Bennington, Bryn Mawr, and Goucher. When they showed me the letter, I was somewhat discomforted to see how excited he was over the idea that I would be the first woman in recent years to graduate from Coopers High School and go on to something more challenging than Hardbarger’s Secretarial College. It was as if he were taking personal responsibility for my grades and what he called my “modesty, excellent goodwill, and temperate disposition.” I didn’t sound very interesting, nothing like my grandmother. I was worried that she would heap ridicule on the letter and shout things like, “Good God, Margaret! You sound like Pollyanna!” But she did not. She read the letter through several times, smiling broadly. My mother asked me which of these schools I wanted to attend.

I said, “I have absolutely no idea. If I had to make the decision today, I think I’d just stay at home.”