Falling Through Space (6 page)

I
CAN BARELY
remember the Thanksgivings of my life. They fade into the late fall whiteness between Halloween and Christmas and there they lie, lost and forgotten or awash in a sea of rice and gravy and white meat. I never did like to eat dinner with large groups of people. I am more the type to take a sandwich up into a tree and nibble around the crust while I read.

The one Thanksgiving that I do remember was one in which I created something. At that time my parents lived on a farm in Rankin County, Mississippi, and my brothers and my three sons and my six nieces were there all the time anyway, so coming to Summerwood for Thanksgiving was nothing new. It was a wonderful creative time in my life. My parents were helping take care of my children. I was back in school at Millsaps College. Life was good. The children were still small enough to be manageable and I was writing and studying philosophy.

That Thanksgiving I decided to turn the day into a family Olympics. We marked off courses and had three-legged races and sprints and throwing contests and a steeplechase that consisted of a long course around the farm, over the dam, through the woods, around a barn, up and down hills, over a fence, and down a gravel road to a tent underneath an oak tree. I had been running quite a bit that fall and I am sure the driving motivation in my mind was that I would surprise and conquer my older brother, who once came in third in the real Junior Olympics. I have forgotten what came of that. I think he refused to race. Or else he raced but didn't try and infuriated me by letting me win. When we were small, one of my greatest complaints was that he let me win. “YOU LET ME WIN,” I would scream, “YOU LET ME WIN. I HATE YOU.” “Don't hate anyone,” my mother would whisper.

Still, it was a wonderful day and we resolved to make the races an annual event. Two of my nieces were moved to write a newsletter about the day, which they copied on the office copying machine and sent around to the participants. That was so long ago. In 1967.

Recently one of the young editors found a copy and mailed it off to everyone who had been there for the first running of the Summerwood Thanksgiving Olympics. It was full of interesting interviews with the participants.

“My foot got hurt but I had fun anyway.” Kathleen Gilchrist. “Tremendous success.” Uncle Bob. I am quoted as saying, “Lovely healthy children are the greatest blessing of any year.” And I might add from the perspective of 1986, especially when someone else is taking care of them most of the time.

I
KNOW SO MUCH MORE
now than I knew then, except for a very long time ago, when I knew everything. I knew it all, where the barn was and how to ride the mules and where they kept the pound cake and how far to walk into the water without drowning, the smell of coffee and powder, the breasts of Babbie and Dan-Dan and Miss Teddy and Onnie Maud, the cold hands of Nailor. The soft bones of my mother, the bed of Aunt Roberta, how to get all the sugar I wanted, the way to Hannie's house and where the men had gone and why the women stopped what they were doing when the news came over the radio about the war.

Later, I would ride in the crop duster and be pulled on a board behind the motorboat and drive the new Buick around the pasture and wear slips that came from Memphis in boxes lined with pale pink tissue paper. I would grow up without noticing it since I had never thought that I was a child or seemed helpless or small to myself in any way.

I feared water unless they were with me and darkness and underneath the beds. I was afraid I would go rolling down the bayou bank in the car and forget to roll the windows up or down, whichever it was that saved your life. I was afraid I would be turned into a crow for lying, so I told the truth. Some of them regret teaching me that.

The black children came over in the morning to play with me. We played on the back porch and on the stairs behind the kitchen. We made doll furniture and chattered away in two languages. Their language was full of laughter. Mine was full of bossiness and warnings. I made the furniture and they admired it and ate the pound cake I got from the pantry and when it was gone they left. They wearied of watching me work so hard over nothing on such beautiful mornings with the ground so soft and fragrant beneath our feet. They would thank me very politely for the cake, then disappear. When they were gone I would put on my shoes and walk down the road searching for them. I would go to Ditty's house and ask her to find them for me. She would give me cornbread and let me watch her make spells. She was very good at making spells. She must have put a spell on me for me to be so lucky all my life. Yes, it must have been Ditty. For love of my mother she must have covered me with spells.

When we were away from Hopedale, sometimes for many months, I would write letters to them. Mrs. Stewart Floyd Alford, Hopedale Plantation, Grace, Mississippi.

In my imagination the mailman would drive his car down the gravel road from the Grace post office, past the Indian mounds and on past my godmother's house, past the shed where the crop dusters were parked and over the Hopedale Bridge and along the pasture where my grandfather's sheep grazed. He would stop the car and walk up onto the porch and hand the letter to my grandmother.