Charms for the Easy Life (2 page)

My grandfather scrounged around for work. Finally he took a job he loathed, saying it was thoroughly beneath his dignity. The longer he worked this contemptible job, the more dignity he imagined he had lost. He was, for want of a better term, a gofer for a blacksmith. He wasn’t allowed to shoe the horses, just tote the ashes. As he became more and more frustrated with his life, he became, understandably, more and more unbearable. My grandmother secretly withdrew her affection and offered more of herself to caring for my mother and her patients and achieving local fame for hygienic improvements in not only her home but others’. Although improvements such as sidewalks and modern plumbing were common in other parts of town, the mill district had been neglected because, as my grandmother put it, “the people there didn’t count as people.” She shamed the owner of the textile mill into installing wide boardwalks beside two particularly soupy streets by asking him point-blank how he slept at night knowing children were wading to school through mud and the gore from the meat-packing house up the hill. As for bringing the area onto the city sewage lines, she succeeded by reminding the city council of a fact it was (shocking to say) not aware of: that the residents of this tiny district were all white, not a colored person among them. Years later she told me, “It shouldn’t have made any difference to them. That it mattered one iota was criminal.” After the sewer lines were installed, the director of the public works department wrote her a note of commendation in which he actually said that if he had realized the Beale Street area was all white, he would’ve installed the lines long before.

Whenever someone had a toilet put in, a message would be sent for my grandmother to go and give a lesson. For many people, a toilet remained a long time as something they stared at. My grandmother was to be remembered for many achievements, from campaigning for in-school vaccinations to raising money to buy prosthetics for veterans of the World War, but in the Beale Street area of Raleigh she lives in the memory of an old few as the first woman anybody knew with the courage not only to possess a toilet but to use it.

She developed a fantastic trade, with sick people coming forth like the loaves and the fishes, putting one real doctor in such danger of losing patients that he sent her a nice note and a ten-dollar bill. This only encouraged her. She put the word out that she knew how to fix teeth, even though she did not. What she knew was that everybody in 1910 needed this done, and once they were at the house, she inquired after their other ailments and cured what she knew how to cure, and astounded people into forgetting about their teeth. When she finally branched out into dentistry, she did so because, as she said, it was easy money. Her instruments were needle-nose pliers and a wrench, both ordered from Sears, Roebuck, her anesthesia was chloroform ordered from a veterinary supply firm, and her technique came straight from
Dr. John C. Gunn’s Domestic Medicine: The Poor Man’s Friend in the House of Affliction, Pain and Sickness.
What is most fascinating with regard to her dentistry is that she would put women patients under, but work on the men as is. She believed that although women, as a rule, could stand more pain and take more punishment than men, they should not have to and would not ever suffer under her care. She told me that her women patients loved chloroform, the feeling of falling backward and forgetting for a while about diapers and laundry and supper. The degree to which a woman looked tired in the face dictated the amount of chloroform she received, and sometimes when my grandmother recognized that a woman was too taxed by her life, she did her the favor of knocking her out to the point that she could neither lift her head nor say her name the rest of the day. She said, “Some of these women, if they didn’t have me work on their mouths, they’d never have gotten off their feet.”

My mother, during this time, was happy as pie, going to elementary school, coming home and wrapping bandages, pressing pills, helping with supper, doing her homework by the fire. She first witnessed an operation performed by her mother in 1911, when she was seven. So much blood was involved that they could never fully scrub it out of the cracks in the kitchen linoleum. A man from the sawmill in back of their house suffered a horrible accident, and as the company doctor was not to be found, the man was rushed to my grandmother’s kitchen table. She sewed him up with the only thread she had, red cotton, and nursed him back to health. He slept in my mother’s bed and ate liver three times a day for a week. My mother slept on a warm pallet by the woodstove, waking up those mornings with the odor of liver burning her nose. The man taught my mother how to play whist and also how to make the spirits rap under the card table. For payment, my grandmother requested that the sawmill hire the best carpenter in town to build a lovely addition onto her home. Otherwise, she said, the world would know about the loose blades, loose belts, and unoiled machinery that she’d heard about as the victim ate his dinner.

As time passed, my grandparents had less and less to say to each other. There was no fighting, since they couldn’t find anything between them they cared enough to fight about. My grandfather would come home from a day of toting ashes at the livery stable, eat, and then sit and watch his wife grind herbs or read used medical textbooks. He would fall asleep watching her, and eventually she stopped bothering to wake him to go lie down in his comfortable bed. She would let him sleep upright in a chair all night and would walk out of the room when he complained of a stiff neck in the morning. My mother told me, “He would sit there and sigh and shake his head, watching her become better and better at what she loved. He admired her, I think, but all the same, he couldn’t bear it.”

After just two years in Wake County, they were at the point of completely wordless meals, wordless evenings, wordless Sundays. My grandfather was destined to leave this sort of situation, so he left. He left the way sad men leave: he did not come home from work. Maybe he missed a river, because this is where he went—not to the Pasquotank, as there was nothing there for him, but west to the Ohio. I imagine he went there without stopping. I think of him not eating or sleeping until he got there. (That sort of hurling oneself at a desire is a family trait, and has made convicts, scholars, lovers, and dope fiends out of us from way back.) He reportedly had a grand time on the Ohio without his wife. Travelers carted home tales of my grandfather’s loving Ohio Valley women galore.

How did my grandmother react when her husband let his supper get so cold? She let his dishes sit at his place overnight, and then the next morning she threw them in the sink and broke them every one, yelling, “To hell with him!” She left his clothes in the closet, which was a sign to my mother, even so young. My grandmother had no friends or acquaintances other than her patients, so there were no rounds of explaining to be made. Nobody would be watching her to see how she managed. Nobody would note the breadth of her pride. Well, nobody except my mother, who watched and learned. This is what she learned: A man will leave you.

Did my mother miss him? She told me that at the time she did not. I asked how a child could not miss her father. She said, “I was busy. I was highly involved in the life of my second grade.” What she meant is that she had learned to read. She was the sort of curious child, I would think, who is transformed by school. These children become adults too soon, but seemingly happy ones, and content. But then, later in her life, when she needed a memory of tenderness to reconcile what she lacked with my father, she must have relived the evening her father’s dinner sat waiting, and that next morning, and the next night, and on and on and on.

My mother spent much of her childhood riding back and forth to funerals in Pasquotank County. Although the suicide of my grandmother’s sister had driven her away from home, she was called back several times to wash the bodies of other relatives who had done the same thing. In 1917 she buried two cousins who became despondent after they read their father’s name on a wartime casualty list at the train station. The ground opened up and swallowed them, standing together reading the wall. That evening at supper somebody broke a pitcher, and these girls secreted the glass into their bosoms and went down to the root cellar and used the fragments. Double blood flowed everywhere, soaking the bottoms of the wooden baskets that held all the family’s winter food. A few days after my grandmother returned home, her aunt hired a gypsy to conduct a silly and desperate midnight seance, and after he was told the story of all the blood in the basement, he said that potatoes had eyes and had not only seen but soaked up the sight of the two girls in the back corner. He volunteered to relieve the family of this evil food, promising to burn the bushels in a fire on sacred ground somewhere, together with a lock of hair of John the Baptist or some other saint. As gypsies were inclined to do, he rode away with the family’s winter food and was never seen again. When my grandmother was asked to send money so they could eat that winter, she would not. She let them grieve hungry.

Her family did not speak to her until they needed her again, a year later, for another burial. She went, taking my fourteen-year-old mother with her to sit at the wake and occupy her mind writing morbid poetry in her diary. The uncle my grandmother washed and laid out had spent the last five years of his life so bent down and twisted back on himself with arthritis that parts of his body that had ceased to get light and air had molded. He hated his life, and told everyone he knew how anxious he was to end it. After supper one evening he wandered off into the woods, where he was found the next morning, stretched out as if sleeping, with a basket half full of the kinds of things he had eaten: death-cap mushrooms, yew bark, juniper berries, a sliver of root from the mayapple, and much, much more. My grandmother’s family had, by this time, become so embarrassed over their remarkable suicide rate that they denied the old man had died of anything other than natural causes. For all time, they would say, “He didn’t kill himself. He died of arthritis. ”

This dismissal of the truth angered my grandmother so much that she vowed not to speak to her family again, no matter who was dying or dead. She would let them rot in Pasquotank County. My mother remembered her standing on her aunt’s porch and screaming, “You can all jump in the goddamn river and drown and see if I come and lay you out!” My mother remembered how she stood there in the middle of the yard, how she could see her mother’s back and her hands on her hips, and how, behind the house, the Pasquotank River roared. She told me that the first thing she figured out about life was why none of these relatives jumped in that river, convenient as it was. She said, “I knew I was smart when I checked my answer with my mother, and she said I was right. She bought me a bag of hard candy as a reward for reasoning out a bit of the universe.”

This is why, as my mother imagined, six members of my grandmother’s family used variously violent and painful means to kill themselves, without a thought of jumping in the river that ran by their doors: They threatened to kill themselves in the river all the time. They used the threat in arguments with each other. They said the words without thinking, which was something my mother had already noticed that every adult in the world, except for her mother, did.
If you don’t stop it with that other woman, I’m going to jump in the river. If you don’t stop chewing with your mouth open, I’m going to jump in the river.
But they didn’t go in the river, because the river was life to them, life all surging and all crashing into white foam on river rocks they had known their whole lives, and the thought of throwing themselves into a familiar current and banging choked and goggle-eyed against rocks they had stood on and courted on and fished and dreamed on, and sat in the sun and dared to open their blouses and nurse their babies on, this was not something they could do. They would walk fifty miles and jump in some other person’s river, but not their own.

F
OR MY MOTHER to have been so smart so young, her powers of reason failed her in 1922, when she married a cad. To assuage a great deal of the blame I at times placed on her for not having supplied me with a more intelligent, thoughtful, and attentive father, I told myself that the marriage was the natural and inevitable consequence of her father’s disappearance.

When he married my mother, my father wore a pair of yellow shoes he acquired from a pickpocket being held in custody in the magistrate’s office where their vows were hurriedly spoken. He thought this was funny, and had my mother been of the same mind, maybe it would’ve been. Instead, she was horrified, and if she had not been so stubbornly committed to the marriage, she would’ve left him at the altar, such as it was. The chief scent at her wedding was raw onion, the odor carried by the deputy sheriff who served as witness and goaded my father into trying on the yellow shoes. “They were all having a jolly time,” she told me. “I felt like I wasn’t there.”

The person who really was not there was my grandmother, who saw through all things and knew that my mother was marrying this man because he was witty, clever, and good-looking and because he didn’t turn back the affection that my mother heaped on him. He was just what a young woman who was lonesome for a father craved. His ego was as vast as her passion, which had threatened her scholarship and caused the headmistress of Miss Nash’s School for Young Ladies to remark on several occasions that my mother’s boundless energy, her refusal to hide her ankles, and her insistence on reciting Oscar Wilde at assembly was almost more than she could bear. She asked my grandmother to check her daughter’s tendencies toward free-thinking, as this would cause her a life of general unease and calamity. My grandmother did nothing of the sort. She encouraged my mother in all endeavors except when it came to her choice of suitors.