Falling Through Space (5 page)

A poet told me that when her little boys were small she used to put her typewriter in the playpen and sit there and work while they tore up the house around her. Of course, she is an exceptionally energetic and resourceful person.

M
Y FOUR-YEAR-OLD GRANDSON
and I were uninvited guests the other morning at the wedding of Sharon James to Jacob Clayton. It was a wedding in a castle. Along with my recent campaign to cure him of sibling rivalry, I have been taking Marshall out to explore the world. This being a Saturday we left early and stopped by the Station to pick up some muffins and then, carrying our boxes, we walked down to Wilson Park to eat breakfast in the castle.

The castle is a strange thing, rising up from the ground beside a creek that runs by the baseball diamond. It was built in 1979 by a sculptor named Frank Williams and was paid for by the National Endowment for the Arts. Frank employed CETA workers and at one time or another two dozen young people worked on the project, learning to mix concrete and lay stones and divert water, learning useful skills while they created magic.

The result is a real castle, built of stone and concrete, with a throne room and turrets and a bridge and towers that are inlaid with runes and small art objects and tiles bearing symbols both sacred and scary.

I had lunch at the castle on my forty-fifth birthday. But I had never been there for breakfast. Marshall and I arrived with our boxes and found the place packed with people wearing tuxedos. Sharon James and Jacob Clayton had hit upon the idea of getting married beside the moat.

There were bridesmaids in pink cotton, a bride in white lace who looked sixteen and not a day older. A three-tier wedding cake made by Josephine Banks, and a flower girl named Janie who emerged from her mother's car wearing pale pink and long gold ringlets. Marshall went crazy when he saw her and started flexing his muscles and making his motorcycle engine noise.

“I am never getting married,” he said, when she had disappeared down the aisle beside the ring bearer. “I'm going to be an artist and paint and paint and paint.”

Marshall is going through a difficult, highly critical, and generally unattractive phase right now. “Besides,” he added, “it's going to rain.”

I looked up. He was right. Rain clouds were gathering. Rain was on its way. But the preacher had begun the ceremony. He was already to the part about in sickness and in health and forsaking all others. The bride stared straight ahead. The maid of honor scratched her arm with a lace glove. I pulled Marshall's wonderful strong little body into my own and thought about the day his grandfather and I ran away to the hills of north Georgia to be married by a justice of the peace with a sheriff in attendance. We weren't much older than the children being married by this moat. Because of that this little boy exists and my middle age is charmed and rich and full of laughter.

“When are they going to eat the cake?” he asked, pretending to have lost interest in the flower girl.

“I was thinking of making some cakes this afternoon,” I answered. “A pineapple upside-down cake and a marble cake and some cupcakes with colored icing. You want to help me do it?”

“Let's go,” he said. “Let's go get started.”

I'
VE BEEN UP
in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, watching a house being moved down the Natchez Trace. My son, Garth Walker, and his wife, Jean Verrell, have taken it upon themselves to move a hundred-year-old house from downtown Houston, Mississippi, five miles out the Trace to Jeannie's farm. The weather has not been propitious for this undertaking. First there was rain, now there is snow. But my brave children are going right along with their plans. As of yesterday, half of the house (it had to be cut in two) had come to rest underneath a circle of oak trees and the other half will be moved today.

Jeannie's farm is on land that people in Chickasaw County call the Horsenation, a plateau where the Confederate Army hid its horses during the Civil War. Later, when the war was over, it was the site of many famous rodeos.

I watched the first half of the house being moved. I drove up the Trace and got to Houston just in time to see the house coming down the main street on a flatbed truck. Two men were standing on top moving power lines out of the way, and everyone in town had come out of their houses and stores to watch the progress.

Traffic was stopped for an hour in the middle of town, but no one seemed to mind. They have known Jeannie and her family a long time and if she wants to buy an old house and move it to her farm it's okay with them. Any tree branches that were in the way were cheerfully cut down and thrown to the side. This is rich and fertile land with many trees and no one minds losing a branch or two.

The house proceeded down the main street and turned onto Highway 389 and on down to the entrance to the Trace. My son was standing on the overpass with the park ranger. They were discussing the tendency of certain overprotective mothers to come driving up the Trace to make sure a house doesn't fall on anyone.

I watched the house move up the ramp and turn left onto the Trace. A chandelier in a bedroom swung gaily on its chain and I thought, Someday I'll be sleeping in one of those bedrooms holding a grandchild in my arms and I'll be telling him or her about the time I watched his house being moved along the Natchez Trace to his mother's farm.

I thought too of the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which was moved stone by stone from a little port on the Nile River to a glass-covered room on Fifth Avenue.

Man and his dreams, Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China and the Temple of Dendur and the Pyramids. The urge to civilization is to conquer or to build.

As I was trying to remember the rest of that quotation my son's house passed the Aberdeen exit and disappeared into the trees.

I
N THE LONG HOT SUMMERS
of my so-called youth I used to put on plays. I put them on in treehouses and on porches and in basements. Basements were the best. In the first place they were cool, in the second place they were mysterious, and in the third place there was always a coal bin that the actors could use for a dressing room.

The most memorable play I produced was in the basement of a house in Harrisburg, Illinois. My co-director was Cynthia Jane Hancock, who would grow up to become a head cheerleader and drum majorette and, later, a finalist for Mrs. Illinois. She was made for the stage. I, alas, was not.

This particular performance was a variety show. Cynthia, dressed as Wonder Woman, would tap dance to “Meet Me in Saint Louis.” Dressed as Cat Woman, I would follow her singing “The Desert Song.” Our audience consisted of six or seven neighborhood children and the son of the Harrisburg newspaper editor. He was there with his camera, ready to record for all time the premiere performance of
The Main Street Review
.

It was ten o'clock on a Saturday morning in the very heart of July. The audience was seated on a line of old footlockers. The show began. Cynthia stepped up on the wooden stage and wowed them with her rendition of “Meet Me in Saint Louis.” They screamed for more. She did “East Side, West Side” and left the stage with a curtsy and a bow. It was my turn. My Cat Woman costume was a green one-piece bathing suit with a gold cummerbund and a black hat. I stepped up on the stage. I opened my mouth to sing. It was my favorite song. I had sung it a thousand times. Blue Heaven, I began. Blue Heaven, Blue Heaven. What was next? I could not remember. No words came. Blue Heaven, I began again. The audience waited politely. They ate their popcorn and drank their Cokes. I tried again. Blue Heaven. Blue Heaven and You and I. Blue Heaven. The audience looked down at the floor. I can't do it, I said. I can't remember the words. Cynthia stood up. I guess the show is over, she said. You can go home now if you want to.

I
HAVEN'T HAD
a vacation from writing in ten years. Ever since the afternoon in 1975 when I pulled my old portable typewriter out of a closet and went off to the Caicos Islands to write poetry, I've been writing or wishing I was writing every single day from dawn to noon.

Now, suddenly, the spell is broken and I've been wildly happy for three weeks — first I lost six pounds. Then I bought some makeup. Then I decided to move back to Mississippi into the bosom of my wild, beautiful family.

Don't get cocky and think you can go home again, a friend warned me. Well, I'm going home anyway. If my father wants to get up in the middle of the night and argue with me about the Federal Reserve system, I'm ready.

If my grandchildren boss me around unceasingly, I'm ready. If I have to fight for everything I've struggled to learn and believe in, I'm ready.

Because I miss the state of Mississippi with its wonderful fields and trees and rivers and bright-eyed imaginative children.

Fayetteville, Arkansas, has been good to me. The quiet beauty of the Ozark Mountains has given me the strength to write three books of fiction and a book of poems and a play.

Now it's time to go home to the real material. To the place where I was born and the beautiful musical language that I first learned to speak. What you hear on the radio is only a ghost of those long vowel sounds. It is a language that's more like singing than like talking. So I'm going home. I'll fly back to Fayetteville and start packing up my papers and closing my little house on the mountain where I tried to be a slave to literature. That didn't work out for me.

I kept thinking about a poem by Louis Simpson called “The Springs of Gadera” about a man in publishing who dreams he is pushing a huge stone around a circle. One day he kicks his desk drawer shut and gets up and walks out. He looks back over his shoulder and imagines he sees some other poor guy pushing the same stone around the same old worn-out circular path. As for me, I'm tired of being a nun to art. I'm going to go live in the capital city of the state of Mississippi and find out what's going on in the modern world.