Clear Springs (27 page)

She told me that she and her sister, Maud, made little houses in the woods, out of sticks, with roofs of bark and moss. “We’d use acorns for cups and leaves for tablecloths,” she said. “We’d lay moss all around. And feathers.”

I was enchanted. Later, I heard someone call such playhouses “fairy shelters.” I begged her to show me her family photographs—an album and some loose pictures in a box.

“Can I write their names on the back?” I asked as she began identifying the people for me.

“But I know who they are.”

She didn’t notice me jotting their names with a pencil.

“That’s Floyd Arnett,” she said, of one handsome young man.

“Who was he? What was he like?”

She thought for a minute. “He was a farmer.” Her knobby fingers fumbled with the pictures. “Here’s one of me when I’m about thirteen,” she said.

In the photograph, she looks older than that. She seems ladylike, in a white blouse with simple frills, with her hair piled up. She looks innocent, hopeful, unaware of her attractiveness. She has an eager countenance, but also a dignified reserve. Her ears stick out a little.

One of her photographs shows Granddaddy sitting behind a pair of
horses in a buggy, with his younger brother, Bee. Bob Mason is a handsome youth with dark hair and sharp, well-defined features. I’d say he is about to trot right into a rip-roaring Saturday night. He’s holding the reins confidently. He and Bee are parked in front of a white house with an awning. In a later generation, he might have been a young stud at the wheel of a Mustang convertible.

But Granny would not divulge her feelings about this hunk with the buggy who courted her for thirteen years before she finally married him. I suspect that in her mind her sixty-three years with Bob—years when he changed from youthful suitor to aged invalid—were a complex swirl, with no separable phases. She and Bob still were those young people in the pictures.

She told me her mother was named Laura Rhodes, and she married an Arnett.

“Where did they come from?”

“North Carolina, I believe. Or Virginia, or somewhere over yonder.” She pondered. My questions demanded a grasp of distant fog. “There were three Arnett brothers who came here—way back,” she said, waving her hand at the past. “But one of them went on to Texas and wasn’t heard of again.”

“One of the brothers was my grandfather,” she said. “My father was Zollicoffer Quigley Arnett.” She pronounced the name with a smile. It was a mouthful. “He was named Zollicoffer for a general and Quigley after a lawyer. They called him ‘Z.Q.’ or ‘Coff.’ ”

After more of my probing, she told me, “My grandfather was in the Confederate army. And his brother was in the Union army. But they got together at home and there was no hard feelings. The ladies in Paducah made quilts for the Union soldiers. And pies. And they brought all the quilts and pies in a wagon to where the boys were camped.”

She chuckled softly, but these revelations exhausted her. She heaved a sigh, directing it back across time. How could I know what these people were like, with such slim clues? They sounded impossibly far away, but I liked the names. I said them over and over to myself. “Arnett.” Pronounced
Arn
-it, the same way Southerners said “iron it.” For weeks afterwards, during waking moments, the name “Zollicoffer Quigley Arnett” would spring out of my head like a jack-in-the-box.

My mother spent the prime years of her life in the service of her mother-in-law. From 1965 to 1981, as her health declined, Granny depended
on Christy and Wilburn to take care of her. We children broke the rules. Recklessly and hopefully we grabbed at change as if it were a white sale at Penney’s. We didn’t stay around to help. Our flight was especially hard on my parents because the family was so small. My parents had no brothers and sisters, so I had no aunts and uncles, no first cousins (“own cousins”). Granny’s kin, the few who were left, were out in Clear Springs.

I had wanted to return to Kentucky after graduate school, but Roger and I couldn’t find teaching jobs there, so we settled in northern Pennsylvania, where he accepted a job teaching English at a small college. We bought an old farm and planted a garden and some fruit trees. I was in the snow belt again, near Binghamton, where spring refused to come. I began writing a novel, and I grew to love snow. I still went home to Kentucky twice a year, and I traveled other places too, but my mother, with the responsibility of caring for Granny as she grew more feeble, was tied to the family farm as surely as Daddy had always been by his cows. She didn’t even go to church much. Toward the end of the seventies, after both Don and LaNelle married and left home, our parents once again abandoned their home and moved in with Granny. She had gotten too unsteady to stay alone. For some time Mama had been carrying her meals to her, after discovering she wasn’t eating anything but cereal and fried toast. They moved in, halfheartedly, and once again they rented out their own house.

Mama’s letters were troubling. She wrote about having to listen to both Granny and Daddy moaning “Oh, me” to get attention. “Wilburn’s nerves are getting worse all the time. He use to set down by work—he was lazy. Now he has to keep on the move, just wears hisself out in a long run. He can’t sleep. He’s going to be just like Granny. She’s just about got me drove up the wall and now I have him to deal with. My nerves are shot.” Later, she wrote, “Granny won’t get up out of her bed. I made her an angel food cake for her birthday. She just strings food on her bed. The health nurse was here and said the only thing wrong with Granny was her laying in bed and not taking any exercise. She quit trying to use herself. Why she quit—it hurt. She just lays in a ball, that way she don’t hurt, that’s the way old people does.”

Granny’s nerve medicine muddled her mind. She thought strangers were living in the north bedroom, the one my parents had occupied at the beginning of their marriage—the room where I was conceived, the room they returned to now. Granny kept asking questions about the couple in that room. She slept with her pocketbook under her pillow.
At times she didn’t seem to realize she was in her own home, because my parents had made so many changes. They redecorated the house, putting up dark paneling and painting the woodwork brown. There had been a special on brown paint, and paneling was an easy fix for much-papered walls.

“I don’t want the woodwork painted brown,” Granny told her son. It had always been white, with lace curtains on the windows. Now the large, airy rooms became dark and claustrophobic. She said, “I never liked brown. I never even had a brown dress.”

My father had always been forbearing with her, but he was getting more easily annoyed. He said harshly, “We’re taking care of you, so we’ll paint it any color we want to.”

He had never stood up to her like that in his life, but by now he was overwhelmed by the sacrifices he and Mama had made for her. Abashed, Granny didn’t persist. She told Mama, “He talked so awful to me.”

Mama heard one of Granny’s nieces say to her, “You better watch what you say, Aunt Ethel. Or they’ll put you in a rest home.”

Daddy teased his mother in a gruff way and reported their dialogues to me like jokes.

“Where’s Chris?” Granny wanted to know.

Daddy replied, “She went to mess and the hogs eat her up.”

“Did Bobbie go with her?” Granny asked.

Daddy had the freedom to get in the car and go to town, but Mama had little time to run around. She did all the cooking, washing, housekeeping, gardening, canning, and freezing. She supervised Granny’s medicine and fixed her meals. Usually, Granny ate on a TV tray beside her bed. When I visited her, I couldn’t bear to stay in the room while she ate because of the rattling of her ill-fitting false teeth. I would often stare at the raised blue veins in her hands, wondering if they were hard, like iron pipes.

Although she became bedridden, Granny had no severe medical problems. Apparently her heart was strong, in spite of hardening of the arteries. She had few visitors; most of her kinfolks were dead. Mama took her regularly to the local mental-health clinic, where doctors from Hopkinsville chatted with her and renewed her Thorazine prescription. They told her to get out more, go for rides. One of the doctors asked Mama, “How are
you
doing?”

Mama said, “I’m not the patient.
She’s
the patient.”

The doctor said, “And I asked you how
you
were doing.”

Mama told me later, “He knew she’d drive me crazy.”

Daddy had slowly been selling off his dairy herd as milk prices dropped. Mama wrote me, “Wilburn sold Pumpkin Seed. It like to have killed him. It’s the first time since the Masons came here from Clear Springs that the farm didn’t have cows on it. He was five when they moved here. He misses feeding her and packing water to her. I would be glad of that in the winter time. He went to an auction and bought fifty-one snuff boxes full of jewelry and a box of old odd shape glass bottles and jugs.” Daddy took a new job, driving a bus for a work center for the mentally disabled—a job he enjoyed immensely. And Mama escaped now and then. She played Rook with a group of women much older than she, but she said she felt she was their age. She also went fishing whenever she could. This was still her favorite pastime; there was no pleasure quite like reeling in a fish, worrying and working a large one toward shore until it was weak enough to bring in. When she was fishing, she felt that her life was her own. She went fishing at the lake once with a woman whose husband had made a boat out of car hoods.

In 1979, as Granny grew even worse, Mama wrote, “She was out of her head yesterday, talking in unknown tongue. Today I got this potty chair for her. She didn’t think much of it and kept wanting me to hide it behind the door. I wouldn’t do it. I said if she could walk that far she could go to the bathroom. She asked me four times in about fifteen minutes to put it behind the door and I wouldn’t. So the last thing she said before I left, she asked me to move it again. I just turned and walked off. So she hasn’t used it yet.
^oh!
She wants to be petted and made over. She still thinks of me as a child and she should be boss. I don’t take it anymore and she can’t take that.
^oh!
While I was cleaning up yesterday, she found out it was Sunday. She got up walking around, going to the table. She’s not as bad as she makes like she is. She’s just using me. Wilburn won’t fool with her.”

Even though my mother didn’t laugh much anymore, I was pleased to see traces of her humor in the little “Oh”s that always infused her letters. But I was afraid. The main note in her letters now was pain. For the first time, I began to see that my move to the North meant an abdication of responsibility. There was no solution I could see to my mother’s burdens. I felt helpless.

Limited home-health visits were covered by Medicare, so Mama enlisted a nurse to help with Granny. But when the nurse tried to bathe her, Granny refused to cooperate. My mother wrote me, “She
hauled off and slapped that nurse halfway across the room. She wouldn’t have it!”

By custom, only family should attend to personal matters. The nurse did not return.

Too late, Granny tried to show affection and gratitude to her daughter-in-law. Grasping Mama’s arm, Granny would say, “Don’t let me die.”

With her pocketbook hidden under her pillow, Granny lay in bed, adamantly clinging to shreds of life. Perhaps her tenacity lengthened her life. Month after month, year after year, she held on. But eventually she wore down. She died in 1981, when she was almost ninety-four.

It was not until the night of her death that my parents spent a night alone together, in either house, in all their married life. They had stayed at motels a number of times, but at home there had always been children around, or Daddy’s parents—since 1936. The magnitude of this moment is staggering for me to contemplate. By then they were formed by habit, and I don’t imagine they felt liberated at first. I picture them sitting silently in front of the TV, stunned by the finality of Granny’s passing, drained by the ordeal, numbed by grief.

“No matter how ready you think you are, you’re never prepared to see somebody go,” Mama told me.

Only gradually had I realized what those trying years were doing to Mama. Her spirit seemed broken. She was fearful and uncertain—after being pushed around so long and uprooted on two occasions from the little house she and Daddy had built. Witnessing her shatter—quietly, far away—left me disconcerted and guilty. Mama had told me how bad her nerves were, and Daddy had complained a few times too about Mama’s growing fearfulness. They had not gone anywhere together in years, and after Granny died, Mama refused to ride in the car with Daddy at the wheel. “His driving makes me nervous,” she told me. She lost confidence in her own driving and would not dare venture onto the busy highway to Paducah.

My gentle grandmother had been such an unintentional tyrant. She hadn’t demanded privileges. Instead, she denied herself, hoarding scraps and silences. As matriarch, she was upholding a way of life—frugality and kinship loyalty—and her whole personality represented the force of this ideal. But a tyranny can be formed from silence—the
things that go without saying, the inexorable ways and rituals and expectations that form an unspoken law.

It was only after Granny died that my parents used the word “depression.” Mama acknowledged, “She was depressed, and she just gradually got worse, a little at a time.” Recently Mama told me that when Granny had been institutionalized in Hopkinsville, one of the doctors asked her, “Have you ever thought about suicide?”

“Yes,” Granny replied. “But I didn’t know how.”

Her silences were stultifying, even after she was gone. I wondered if her problem had been caused by a chemical imbalance, or if it arose directly from the psyche—an extraordinary capacity for worry, or maybe just excessive timidity. I could imagine that her failure to reach out of herself was like my own when I went to school in the North and froze in culture shock; the mental block that stopped up my mind may have been like the barrier in hers. I wondered what was going on in her imagination when she read Henry Miller—maybe something so tempestuous that only shock treatments could quell her rampaging nerves. She seemed to possess dignity and strength in her quiet, imposing, stern way, as long as she was in charge. She was self-possessed and strong until something violated her control—a worry, a foreign intrusion. Then she came apart.