Growing Up (5 page)

Her sons’ wives accepted the supremacy of mother-in-law rule as the price of peace and kept their resentments to themselves. When her boys married the women she approved, their wives were expected to surrender their swords in return for being allowed to keep their husbands for the spring planting. Among them, only my mother refused to bend the knee. It’s easy to understand why the two disliked each other instinctively from the first meeting, long before the awkward question of marriage arose. One can readily imagine the scene at that first confrontation:

Ida Rebecca would have been sitting in state in the front porch rocker that served as her throne, waiting for Benny to arrive from Ep Ahalt’s with his new girl. Her porch commanded a view fit for an empress. It sat high above the road overlooking Morrisonville’s rooftops and behind them the distant rampart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Arriving visitors had to look up to her, for the road lay three steps below the level of her lawn, and after climbing those steps and passing through the whitewashed picket gate, they had to mount another set of broad stone steps before reaching the presence.

My mother could only have been impressed when she finally attained the topmost level and Ida Rebecca rose to meet her. Seated, Ida Rebecca looked much like any other country woman whose style had been formed in the 1870s. She wore home-sewn gray that enclosed her from neck to wrists to ankles and, if there was the smallest glint of sunshine, a gray bonnet with a wide bill that kept her face buried in shadow. When she stood, though, she projected physical power and moral authority. Fully erect, she was six feet tall and seemed to look down on the world. She certainly looked down on my mother, who was almost a foot shorter.

Under the enveloping gray dress were shoulders square and broad. The hands were big and gnarled. They were hands that could prepare a feast for thirty people, deliver a baby, grow a year’s supply of canning vegetables in a summer of garden toil, or butcher a hog, and they had done all these things many times long before my mother was born and many times after. The long jaw under her bonnet was combatively prominent. Her hair was a glistening silvery white. Peering through steel-rimmed spectacles were chilly gray eyes that found little to be amused by. What my mother saw was an overpowering figure accustomed to command.

What Ida Rebecca saw was a frail little creature with her hair cut in the sassy new pageboy bob. A suspicious touch of the city flapper, that haircut. Decent women let their hair grow and tied it in a knot on the back of the head. And skinny little ankles and wrists like twigs that looked as if they’d snap if they had to do any real work. What in the world did Benny see in her? She certainly wasn’t pretty. Didn’t have enough weight on her to be pretty. Hardly an ounce of flesh anywhere.

Conversation couldn’t have improved matters. Ida Rebecca’s respect for schoolteachers was slight. Her sons left school when they were big enough to work. By then they could read, write, and do sums and knew who George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were and had learned a little geography. How to find Europe on a map, and Virginia, and China. That was enough. Man was born to work, not to sit around with his nose in a book. She was totally uninterested in the proposition that a man ought to make something of himself. A man’s duty was to provide. Provide for his wife, provide for his children. And pay his duty to his mother. Beyond that … It’s doubtful she ever thought much beyond that.

My mother, always education-proud, wouldn’t have hesitated to talk too much and show off her learning. Maybe just to prove her spunk, she mentioned how backward the children around Morrisonville seemed, compared to the youngsters where she came from, for she was appalled by the unworldliness of her students. One day she asked one of them if she had ever been to Frederick over in Maryland. “No indeed, ma’am, and I don’t ever
expect to,” the girl replied. “I once went all the way to Brunswick and just about knocked my brains out
there
looking at all the buildings.”

Ida Rebecca had small book learning but highly developed sensitivity, particularly when it came to judging outsiders. In Morrisonville outsiders were under suspicion until they proved they could fit comfortably into Morrisonville society. Ida Rebecca must have sensed immediately what her eleventh son failed to: that this book-proud schoolteacher who gave herself airs about her fancy family would never accommodate to Morrisonville.

My father’s decision to defy Ida Rebecca with a marriage she hated may have been the bravest act of his life. With enough money he would probably have moved away, out toward Lovettsville or down toward Waterford, to put distance between bride and mother and to avoid being pulled and torn in their war for his loyalties. Well, there wasn’t enough money. There was almost no money at all. He was a stonemason by trade, but in a region where stone was plentiful and stonework common, stonemasons were also plentiful and earnings were small. And he was a man who liked a good time. What little he earned went into repairs for the failing Model T, flings in the urban sinks of Lovettsville, Brunswick, and Purcellville, and the moonshine Sam Reever ladled into Mason jars.

Without money he had no choice. He brought my mother to Morrisonville. Not to live with Ida Rebecca; that promised only nightmare. Temporary shelter was offered by his oldest brother, who was well-to-do by Morrisonville standards and owned his own house, which was situated a comfortable hundred yards from Ida Rebecca’s. The brother offered to keep the newlyweds until they could save enough to “go to housekeeping.”

This brother, who was my first great benefactor, was my Uncle Irvey. I was born in his second-floor bedroom just before midnight on Friday, August 14, 1925. Ida Rebecca was there, prepared to deliver me into the world when it seemed that the doctor from Lovettsville would never arrive. He did, however, in the nick of time, and I was issued uneventfully into the governance of
Calvin Coolidge. World War I was seven years past, the Russian Revolution was eight years old, and the music on my grandmother’s wind-up Victrola was “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Unaware of history’s higher significance, I slumbered through the bliss of infancy, feeling no impulse whatever to make something of myself.

When I woke from that slumber—this is my earliest memory—I was staring into two huge eyes glaring at me from a monstrous skull. I screamed, and the monster emitted a terrifying rumble. My mother came running and scooped me out of the crib.

“Get away from there!” she shouted.

The horror vanished.

“It’s just a cow,” she said.

Grazing against the house, the cow had raised its head to look through the open window at the crib, she explained. Cows were nice. They didn’t hurt people. Would I like her to carry me outside to look at it?

I understood her perfectly. Sometime during my slumber, when I seemed to be aware of nothing at all, I had learned to understand English.

We’d moved from Uncle Irvey’s by then, and were living in a tenant farmhouse near Ep Ahalt’s farm. When I next noticed the world, we were living in a yellow frame house in Morrisonville directly across the road from Ida Rebecca’s high front porch. Looking up, I saw my grandmother across the road looking down upon me. I liked that because I loved my grandmother dearly and knew she loved me just as much. She was not comfortable on my mother’s side of the road, and my mother was uneasy when she crossed to Ida Rebecca’s, but I happily occupied both worlds. Walking through Morrisonville to survey her kingdom, my grandmother took my hand and led me beside her. In her vegetable garden she taught me how to pick potato bugs. In her dark cellar kitchen she showed me how to lay the kindling and pour kerosene to fire her wood-burning stove. When a summer thunderstorm roared off the mountain, she scurried into the road, dragging me
behind her, to scoop up newborn chicks soft as cotton wool in the hand and so fragile they could be pelted to death by the rain. When we hurried back to her house and the storm struck with a blast of hail on the tin roof, we sat behind sealed windows in her stonewalled sitting room and watched the lightning dance in the fields and shuddered when the thunder boomed like heavy artillery. We were two people alone in a fortress under siege, but she sat calmly in a rocker by her cast-iron stove teaching me about the perils of storms.

“Don’t sit there,” she cautioned. “You’re right between the door and the fireplace.”

And that was a dangerous place to be?

“Lawsa mercy, child, it’s the worst place in the room during a thunderstorm. I’ve seen lightning bolts come right down the chimney and roll across the floor in a ball of fire and go right on through the door.”

My mother, frantic about my safety, was impatient when I came in after the storm and told her I’d been at grandmother’s. “Why don’t you stay on this side of the road where you belong? I was scared half to death about you.”

My grandmother thought my mother kept me under too much discipline and delighted in taking me to her cellar pantry and stuffing me with forbidden treats. One afternoon she took me down there in the darkness to feed me on her homemade bread. Slicing a thick piece for each of us, she laid on a coat of butter, then said, “You want jelly on top of it?”

“Yes ma’am, please.”

She took a jar from the shelf and removed the wax and had the knife poised to plunge in when we were caught.

“Russell, what’re you doing back in there?” My mother was silhouetted in the doorway.

“Grandma’s fixing me a piece of jelly bread.”

My mother spoke to Ida Rebecca. “You know I don’t want him eating between meals.” Her voice was terrible with anger.

So was Ida Rebecca’s. “Are you going to tell
me
how to raise a boy?”

“I’m telling you I don’t want him eating jelly bread between meals. He’s my child, and he’ll do as I tell him.”

“Don’t you come in here telling me how to raise children. I raised a dozen children, and not one of them ever dared raise their voice to me like you do.”

I cowered between them while the shouting rose, but they had forgotten me now as the accumulated bitterness spewed out of them. Finally my mother noticed I was still standing there with the buttered bread in my hand.

“I want you to stay on the other side of the road where you belong,” she said to me.

“He belongs over here just as much as he belongs over there,” my grandmother exclaimed.

The anger seemed to drain suddenly out of my mother. She started to leave but turned at the door and said, very much in control of her temper, “You can eat the butter bread, but I don’t want any jelly put on it.”

At this Ida Rebecca jabbed her knife into the jar and smeared the bread with a thick coat of jelly, all the time glaring at my mother.

“Eat it,” she commanded.

I waited until my mother marched out, very near tears, I judged, and then I ate it while Ida Rebecca watched. I didn’t dare not to.

Not going to my grandmother’s side of the road was an impossibility, and my mother acknowledged it, and went frequently herself in calmer moments, for Ida Rebecca’s house was the capitol of Morrisonville. Once in the middle of a winter night my parents shook me awake to announce that we were going across to grandmother’s. My father carried me, still in bedclothes, up the broad stone steps, across the porch, and through cold black rooms until we came to the parlor, the grim, forbidding parlor that was never used except for funerals and which I believed to be haunted with the ghosts of the dead who had lain there. There my father opened the door on a baffling scene. In one corner I saw his sister, several of his brothers, and my grandmother standing in a group, most of
them in nightclothes. Somebody held a kerosene lamp. They were staring at a tree.

I had never seen my grandmother looking so strange. She wore a nightgown, and her silvery hair streamed free over her shoulders. She was smiling at me. I had never seen her smile before. Smiling like that, she looked more like a girl than a grandmother.

“Look who’s been here,” she said to me.

They were all smiling, and at me. This was very, very strange. They were not people who smiled much, least of all at children.

By the dim kerosene lamp I saw that the tree’s branches were filled with objects of many colors and odd shapes. Someone held the lamp close against the branches so I could see its light reflecting from these glistening objects.

“Merry Christmas!” my grandmother said, taking me from my father and thrusting my nose against the pine needles. “Kris Kringle’s been here. Look what he brought for you.”

On the floor I saw a toy steam shovel with black sides and a red roof. The shovel itself had metal teeth so it could bite into a pile of dirt. With a string mechanism, the shovel could be lifted into the air and its bottom released to dump the dirt back onto the ground.

To my grandmother and father and uncles it must have seemed like an educational toy. Metalworkers, stonemasons, carpenters, people with a tradition of craftsmanship and building, they naturally assumed that giving me a toy steam shovel was giving me something more lasting than a toy. They were also giving me a way to start thinking about my life.