Clear Springs (37 page)

“Don’t let your daddy come close,” the Masons had said.

“Run if you see him.”

“Don’t talk to any of them Lees.”

“He done your mama wrong.”

“He drove off in her buggy. He
stole
her horse and buggy.”

“And he sold them. Her fine bay mare.”

“She paid a hundred dollars for that buggy.”

“That buggy and horse was worth over two hundred.”

Chris hated her father. But she wished he would come forward at the store and speak to her, acknowledge her. She saw him gaze around the store. But he turned his back.

She knew that Robert Lee had married again and had two children, but it was not clear to her if he was still married, or where his wife was. He had brought the two young children, Thelma and Bill, to live with his parents. Thelma, the older one, entered school at Clear Springs. When Thelma learned that Chris was her half-sister, she pulled on Chris’s arms, clinging to her. Thelma stuttered. Embarrassed, Chris fought Thelma off. She didn’t want to be seen with any of the Lees. They were poor, and her father was no-account. But she didn’t realize at first how Thelma was starved for love.

On the road by the school, a wagon sometimes passed. A young man with a lame leg drove the mules, and an older man sat in the back.

They hauled firewood out of river-bottom land they were clearing for one of the large landowners. The young man’s hair was dark; the older man had red hair fading to gray. They were Lees. Chris avoided them. They were not family to her.

The good, productive fields were those low-lying lands along the river, a mile from the house. The Mason men worked down there. One summer Aunt Rosie sent Chris down there every day with dinner for the men. Chris rode a horse, bareback, with the buckets of food hanging across the horse’s shoulders. She saw the wiggly snake trails in the dust on the path in front of her. While the horse drank from the river, she laid the dinner out on stumps—meat, vegetables, tomatoes, cornbread, green onions, a jug of tea. She left the fresh horse and rode back on a horse the men had been working. She felt deliciously free on those rides, as though the horse were her own and she could go anywhere. On the route, she had to ride past terrifying dogs. That summer a mad dog roved the vicinity. Dogs drooling in August, frothing and convulsing, were a common sight.

“My crack is scalded!” she told Datha and Mary when she dismounted.

Aunt Hattie was having seizures more frequently. She went on an excursion to Mississippi with a church group and wrote home a postcard in her exquisite handwriting, which wavered slightly. “Having an elephant time,” she reported. Miraculously, she made the journey without complication. But one night in the bed she shared with Chris, she began having little fits, one after another. They were quiet but continuous, like sobbing. It was as though a lifetime of heartache were coloring her dreams. Hattie twitched, like a dog dreaming. Chris waited. She knew the fits usually subsided after a short while. The bed pulsated. Chris positioned Hattie’s head so her tongue wouldn’t slide back into her throat. She knew there was nothing to be done for Aunt Hatt’s spells except to wait them out. But this time the throbbing wouldn’t stop. The seizures continued, one after another, all night. Daylight came, and still the rolling continued, gradually growing wilder.

Aunt Rosie appeared. “How long’s that been going on?” she asked Chris.

“All night, just about.”

Aunt Rosie felt Hattie’s face. Hattie’s tongue lolled against the pillow like a fish, and foamy slobber soaked the bolster case. Rosie
slipped back into the bedroom to tell her husband. “Hatt needs the doctor,” she said sharply.

Chris got out of bed and placed pillows on the floor in case her aunt fell. She tried to push her toward the middle of the bed, but her weight was like a full feed-sack, solid and uncooperative. Hattie was beginning to jerk more forcefully.

Roe jumped in the T-model and went for the doctor, but he soon returned, cursing.

“He wouldn’t even drive out here to see about her,” Roe said, stomping through the kitchen. “He said either she’d come out of it or she wouldn’t. There wasn’t nothing he could do.”

There was no treatment for a severe epileptic attack. When a person went into continuous seizures, the violent trauma would eventually wear out the body and the heart would stop.

By mid-morning Hatt’s writhing had ceased. She was dead. She was thirty-nine years old.

Chris saw the others gather around, crying—Hattie’s sisters and brothers and all the cousins. She had seen Mammy Hicks lying dead. Now Hattie. She could dimly recall her mother lying motionless and beautiful, her dark hair a shadow on the pillow, her small, fat hands crossed at the waist.

Hattie was laid out in a casket in the living room, and the neighbors streamed in, bringing food. By custom, the family kept a vigil throughout the night, for it was necessary to watch over the body until it was buried. Chris hid in the shadows, afraid. After the funeral, at McKendree Church, one of Chris’s distant cousins—a little girl several years younger than fourteen-year-old Chris—said to her, “What are you going to do, Chris? Where will you go?” The child’s question was uncomprehending, mere chatter. She was a spoiled only child with lots of dolls. But this question stayed in Chris’s mind over time. The little cousin was looking up to her as a grown-up, someone with power. This child’s innocent question contained the glimmer of a notion that Chris might have a choice.

“What
am
I going to do?” she had replied, with both sorrow and hope. For a moment it was as though she had a say in her future.

With the loss of Aunt Hattie, Chris may have finished constructing that secret place in her heart where she kept herself. She had pulled away from Hattie as she was slipping into oblivion, and ever after she
held herself back from everyone but her own children. Having lost her mother, her grandmother, and her aunt—everyone who might have represented any source of maternal strength—she drove the last peg into that little chamber she fashioned to hide in, the special place within herself. She tried to be tough, and she was full of sass. But she expected everything she loved to be taken from her. She never expected to be anybody. She expected to work hard and to have little to show for it. She had seen enough of death to know what it was—final, irrevocable loss. She grew fatalistic about that. But Aunt Hattie’s death also deepened her zest for life; it sparked her sense of survival, her determination to persevere. It nourished a growing capacity for joy, and it generated a whirling-dervish maternal energy. She had resilience, verve, and what she called daresomeness. These are what saved her.

It was Hattie’s wish that if something happened to her, her niece Clausie should bring Chris up. Hattie had told Rosie, “Let Clausie have her; she’s got money and no younguns.” Clausie had married a well-off man and lived in Mayfield. She had a job, wore fine clothes, and drove a car.

“If she lives with Clausie, there won’t be nobody there for her after school,” Rosie said to Roe. So, without telling Clausie of Hattie’s request, Rosie and Roe decided that Chris should remain in the large household at Clear Springs. They wanted to keep an eye on her. Chris, at fourteen, was a problem. Roe and Rosie were afraid she would repeat her mother’s history—marry the wrong sort, or get in trouble. Her developing figure was attracting so much attention that all the neighborhood boys looked forward to coming over for ball games on Sunday afternoons in order to get into little teasing fights with her.

Roe Mason had greater problems than what to do with young Christy Lee. He was in danger of losing his farm, which was part of the original Mason homeplace—in the family for over a hundred years. He had never been in debt, but when the county dredged a ditch—the “drudge ditch,” everybody called it—across the river-bottom land for drainage, all the farmers had to pay the expense. Roe did not have the cash for his portion and had to borrow the money from a relative, a judge at the courthouse. When Roe had trouble making the payments, the judge told him, “I wouldn’t take your farm away, Roe. Just pay me the interest, and I’ll see what I can do for you.” The judge finagled a political office for Roe. For a two-year term he would become manager of the County House.

The County House was the poorhouse. At the time, paupers without families were cared for with county taxes. Leaving his own place
empty, Roe moved his immediate family some ten miles away, to the other side of Mayfield, to a dismal house full of indigent strangers. That’s how my mother came to live at the poorhouse. She had hardly ever been to Mayfield—a few times in the wagon when the men and boys went to trade on Saturdays—and she had rarely even had a Coca-Cola, but she was growing accustomed to the strangeness of moving away from home into some new situation.

It was a hellish hotel. The County House was a large wood-frame structure divided down the middle by a hall. Roe’s family was crowded into two rooms. Chris slept with Datha and Mary in one bed, in the same room with Roe and Rosie, and Roe’s son Mose occupied the other room with his new wife. Now Rosie was cooking for a larger group than ever, a dozen or more residents in addition to the family. The garden could not feed them all, so Roe bought food in bulk from a wholesaler at the edge of town. They had never had to buy common garden vegetables like cabbages and peas before. Aunt Rosie and the girls fixed three meals a day, cleaned the residents’ rooms, and washed their clothes. One morning Chris was running a man’s overalls through the wringer of the washing machine, and there was a turd in them—so large it hung up the wringer. The jaws of the wringer opened wide and locked, like someone gagging.

Chris carried meals to the sick, who were deposited in a separate little building. One room smelled so foul that Chris backed off in horror the first time she entered. The woman inside had cancer of the nose. Chris had never seen anyone so pitiful as this woman with the rotten hole in her face—a face with a permanent look of terror.

Another woman, who was very clean and fastidious, chattered about her son coming to see her. “He’s coming tomorrow morning,” she would say brightly each day.

Two men named Shorty lived there. One called himself a rambling man, from the song. He was always talking about hitting the road, but he never did. The other Shorty always talked about money. He was so enormous he could barely squeeze through doorways. When he eventually ate himself to death, his body required an oversized casket.

Chris knew one of the tenants as Aunt Mattie, a woman in her eighties. She was a distant Clear Springs relative who had never married. She toted an enameled pan with her everywhere she went. She carried her clothes in it, brushed her teeth in it, ate in it, even used it for a chamber pot. She was always walking somewhere. Back in Clear Springs, Chris had often seen her hiking briskly along, spurred by an
inner purpose. Her sister had sent her to the County House because she couldn’t keep track of her; Aunt Mattie kept wandering away from home. But Aunt Mattie ran away from the County House too, and Roe sent Chris to find her. Chris chased after her and found her half a mile away, near the highway. Chris plucked a willow switch and herded Aunt Mattie home. When the old woman slowed down, Chris switched her along. “She was give out when you got back with her,” Aunt Rosie said to Chris the next day. “I had to carry her supper to her. Why, she’s so old it’s a wonder she didn’t have a heart attack.”

The woman who was expecting her son any day teased Chris and called her “Cricket” because she was so fast. “You’re just a little cricket, a-flinging off that way,” the woman said.

Her name was Hattie. Chris, admiring the woman’s cheerfulness, confided in her about her own aunt Hattie. She gave her an old dress that needed patching. Hattie repaired the dress and wore it proudly. “I want to look nice for my boy,” she said. “He’s coming tomorrow.”

Another man at the County House loved boiled cabbage, even though it always gave him painful gas attacks. One night Rosie served it at the boarding-house table, and she warned him to be sparing. “You’ll get gas,” she said. “You don’t want another one of those attacks you get.”

“But I love it,” he said. “I love the way you fix it.”

He took another helping. “Better watch that, Bud,” one of the tenants said.

“I can’t stop myself,” he said. “I love cabbage better than anything.”

At the table, the diners exchanged looks. He kept eating cabbage, taking helping after helping.

“Stop that, you’ll make yourself sick,” they said. But he wouldn’t listen.

In the night, they could hear his groans. They could hear the rumbling fireworks of the gas. He got so sick he could not move from his bed. The next morning Roe sent for the county doctor, but the man soon died. Chris thought sadly of Aunt Hattie’s ordeal, but she braced herself. Death was so ordinary, she observed. Children died from diphtheria and bloody flux. Anyone could die from locked bowels or lockjaw. Fevers and agues claimed people overnight; T.B. was pandemic. Women died in childbirth, and often the children died too. Chris was thankful to be alive, and she looked ahead.

The other Hattie’s son never came to see her, and she died still hoping.
No one claimed her body. Chris attended three or four burials in the two years she lived among these poor strangers. If their bodies weren’t claimed, they were buried in wooden crates in an area at the edge of a field. The bodies were not embalmed. Seeing the unfortunate, the friendless, end their lives in poverty kept Chris from feeling sorry for herself. In nightmarish moments, she could imagine ending up homeless and unloved and perhaps crazy, but she fought that vision. Most of the time she felt a secret gladness, for she was better off than the people she waited on. She vowed that she wouldn’t let herself end up like them. She was young. She was adventuresome.

An undercurrent of excitement churned through her. The place was so odd, with uncommon individuals whose life stories startled her. She was awed by anything new she encountered. She wore eagerness like a cloak. She walked a mile down the road to the eighth grade at Sunnyside, a two-room school. The students were country kids, like her, and she fell in easily with them. She giggled with the girls, played ball with the boys.