Maude

I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for their
help with this book:
I thank my sister-friend Shelby Turnbull
MacFarlane, who is the witness to my life. She knows
things about me that even my children don’t. She
helped me with some of the research to call up details
in places where my memory was fuzzy and retrieved
documents to verify the story of my aunt’s death.
My editors: Lawrence Montaigne, Elaine Stubbs,
Scotty MacFarlane, Maryann Unger, and Phil
Schlaeger from Anthem Authors. The story is much
better with their assistance.
Barbara Winters, Jeane Harvey, Judy Kuncewicki
and Lawrence Montaigne, my proofreaders, who not
only make corrections, but who encourage me
constantly by reading my work.
Sandy Novarro, who now has a shelf full of
things she told me to write.
And my daughter, Melanie Mabry, who wanted
to hear this story in the first place. Boy, is she in for a
few surprises.

My parents divorced when I was three, and my
mother left me to be raised by my maternal
grandparents. For the next nine years, whenever he
wasn’t working overtime, my daddy came to get me
almost every Friday night and every school vacation.
He returned me to my grandmother’s custody the last
possible day.

My earliest memory is a winter morning when he
carried me to her house, my cheek resting against the
chilly smoothness of his brown leather jacket. I was
his almost every weekend, in summers from June to
September, and over spring and Christmas vacations.

I shared my grandmother’s room. She would read
me to sleep each night, not with stories out of books,
but with the spoken stories of her life. As we lay there
in the darkened room, I struggled to stay awake to hear
the amazing things she had to tell. At the same time,
her soft voice was a lullaby inviting me to sleep. I
wonder now if she found it her personal therapy to
murmur her burdens in the darkness to a very
interested listener.

As I grew older, and she felt I could understand
them, she revealed more of the intimate details, until
finally, when I was sixteen or so, she even talked about
what part sex played in her life.

She didn’t go in chronological order, but spoke
of whatever came to her mind. One night she would
talk of her childhood, another of the wars or the
depression. Sometimes she talked about losing four of
her five children.

It wasn’t until many years later when I repeated
some of these things to my daughter that I fully
realized how epic a tale my grandmother’s life had
actually been.

A small part of what I have written here is
fictionalized, and some of it falls back on my own
memories of later events, which may be biased. I have
included some of my grandfather’s comments, but he
mostly joked about things and wasn’t a serious person
like my grandmother.

Evelyn, my mother would tell you a different
story, but I am representing my grandmother’s point of
view.

The greater substance of this, and many of the
direct quotes, are written in my grandmother’s words,
and are what I heard from her during those long-ago
nights we shared a bed.

I was barely over fourteen years old, and it was
my wedding day. My older sister, Helen, came to my
room, took me by the hand, and sat me down on the
bed. She opened her mouth to say something, but then
her face flushed, and she turned her head to look out
the window. After a second, she squeezed my hand and
looked back in my eyes. She stopped, dropped her
gaze to the floor, and then said, “You’ve always been
a good girl, Maude, and done what I told you. Now,
you’re going to be a married woman, and he will be
the head of the house. When you go home tonight after
your party, no matter what he wants to do to you, you
have to let him do it. Do you understand?”

I didn’t understand, but I nodded my head
anyway. It sounded strange to me, the way so many
things did. I would do what she told me. I didn’t have
a choice, any more than I had a choice in being born.

I came into this world as Nola Maude Clayborn in
1892, in Perkinsville, in the northwest corner of
Tennessee, a few miles west of Dyersburg. Pinned to
the ground by a church spire at each end of the road
that cut the town in half, Perkinsville was barely a
wide space in the road. The houses were so far apart it
was almost country. It was made up mostly of farmers
and the businesses that served them.

Most of the houses had a barn in the back for one
or two horses, and a buggy to ride in or a wagon for
farm work. We all had chickens, and a cow for milk.
Every house had a vegetable garden, and most of them
had some sort of orchard with apple, cherry, and pear
trees.

There was one general store and one doctor. A
widow in town sometimes rented out sleeping rooms
to travelers, but there was no hotel, no restaurant, no
bank, and certainly, no saloon. Almost everyone still
raised their own chickens, hogs, fruit and vegetables.

I remember it partly by its smells. Walking
through town in the winter, I could smell the smoke
from the wood burning fireplaces and stoves, the farm
animals, and if the wind was right, the stink of the
chicken coops. In spring, the air was heavy with the
sweetness of fruit blossoms and freshly turned soil.

There was a Baptist church to the east end and a
Holiness church to the west. My family was Holiness,
and our lives revolved around our church. We went to
meeting Sunday morning, Sunday night, and
Wednesday night. Once a year, there would be a
visiting preacher, and a revival that would go on every
evening for a week.

The steeples of the two churches served as a sort
of city limits. You could walk from one church to the
other in less than a half-hour. There were no Catholics
and no Jews, and most of us didn’t even know that
there was any such thing as an atheist. Not one person
there would even have understood what an atheist was,
except maybe the doctor. He had more education than
most, and had lived in other places until he was in his
sixties, when his wife died, and he gave up his practice
in the city to come back to live where he grew up.

Most folks in my town were born there and died
there and maybe took one trip to Memphis on their
honeymoon.

In looks, I took after my father, Charles Eugene
Clayborn, with straight brown hair, and brown eyes. I
was big for my age and built sturdy, like my daddy.

My sister, Helen, was eleven years older, and
took after our mother, Faith. They were both small and
trim. Daddy used to say they weren’t as big as a
minute. They were fair, with sparkling blue eyes and
hair of a pale blonde shade.

Helen’s hair hung in waves over her shoulders,
but Momma wore hers pinned up in a bun at the back
of her neck, the way all the married women did. I loved
the way little wisps of curls would escape the pins.
When Momma was outside, they would flutter in the
breeze, like butterflies dancing on her neck.

Helen had an hourglass figure, and the neighbors
used to say that she had a waist a man could clasp his
hands around. Those ladies would smile kindly at me
and pat me on the head as if to comfort me. I hated
that. I knew early on that I was plain. I got used to it.
My mother fussed over Helen all the time, making her
pretty dresses, tying ribbons in her hair. Other than
telling me what to do, she didn’t pay me any mind.

It really didn’t bother me all that much. I was a
daddy’s girl. He ran the livery stable directly across the
street from our little house. He trained a few horses to
sell, rented out horses and buggies, and boarded
traveler’s mounts. He was up and gone to tend the
stock before I got out of bed in the morning.

When he came home for dinner he would give
Momma a kiss and then scoop me up in his strong arms
and give me a big hug. Then he’d sit me on his knee
and talk to me, just me, until dinner was on the table.
He’d look down at me and smile, and ask me about
school and my friends. He’d tease me about liking
James Connor, who lived down the road from us.

Daddy was a big man, his chest and arms thick
with muscles from lifting bales of hay. I’d lean my
head against his chest and smell the horses and the feed
on him. I found the only comfort there was for myself
in his attention. He was my world.

After dinner, he would go back to the barn to
settle the animals for the night. I was usually asleep
when he got back. It was precious little time he was
able to give me, but it was enough.

As 1899 came to an end, everyone was excited
about the New Year, 1900, and a new century. I found
the number interesting, but didn’t see what all the fuss
was about. Wouldn’t things be just the same the day
after as they had been the day before? It was all people
talked about for weeks. I listened to them at school and
at church and at the store. I didn’t really feel it had
anything to do with me. I didn’t think the coming
century would change my life much, but it did. That
year turned my life upside down.

I was seven, and Helen eighteen, in April of
1900, when Helen married Tommy Spencer. He was
one of the nicest young men. His parents owned the
general store, and they were about the richest family
in town. Helen packed up her things and moved to the
pretty little house Tommy had built just for her. It had
a porch all the way across the front, like ours, with
another one across the back so you could sit in the sun
or the shade at any time of day. Tommy had a water
pump right there in the kitchen so Helen wouldn’t have
to go outside to get water. There was a washroom in
the back, a bedroom on each side, and a parlor in the
front.

People kept trying to make me feel better about
being alone after Helen married, but I didn’t miss her
all that much. I visited her from time to time and saw
her at church every meeting. Her moving out meant
that I had a room of my own, and my life was quieter
without the young people that hung around my sister.
Before she left, it seemed to me that they were always
at the house. Helen’s girlfriends were there almost
every day after school. They sat on the front porch,
drinking iced tea and giggling and whispering into one
another’s ear about some boy or the other, mostly
things that they didn’t want me to hear.

The boys made up excuses to stop by, asking
about school or church, falling quiet if I came in
earshot. My sister’s friends either looked at me like I
wasn’t welcome, or looked right past me, as if it
weren’t my porch, too, or my house, as if I didn’t have
any right to be there.

With Helen married and gone I got real attention
from my mother for the first time that I could
remember. She set about the job of making me a fit
wife for some man, someday. We planted the spring
garden together, rows of lettuce, greens, tomatoes, and
corn. She talked to me all the while in a way she never
had before, like I was a grown-up. We hoed the
ground, and she showed me how to poke my finger
into the soft soil to make a little hole to drop the seeds
in one at a time. With Helen out of the house, Momma
and I became a team.

We cooked together in the kitchen on the big
wood-burning stove, with me standing on a little stepstool my Daddy made for me. I got to mix the sugar
and spices for the apple pies, and watched how Mom
rolled out the piecrust, talking all the while about how
to use the coldest water to mix the dough.

She taught me how to listen for the sound of the
chicken frying in the pan, how when the sound of the
cooking changed from a murmur to a crackle, it was
time to turn it over, how to salt the potatoes before I
cooked them and the chicken after. She showed me
how to make light dumplings and good biscuits.

In the fall, I learned how to can fruits and
vegetables from the big garden my mother kept. I wore
an apron, folded up in a pleat at the waist to make it
fit, and sat at the table stringing the green beans,
popping off the top end the way she showed me, and
pulling the strings down to the bottom, then snapping
the bean into four sections. Mom put them in the big
pot on the stove with some fatback bacon, where they
would cook all day before they went into the Mason
jars.

In the afternoons, we would sit on the porch
where the sun shone bright and sew. Mom showed me
how she cut the fabric so there wasn’t much waste.
When she finished cutting out a dress, she could hold
the scraps in the palm of her hand. She taught me how
to make tiny, even stitches that wouldn’t pull apart, and
how to pull the thread over a candle before I started
sewing so it wouldn’t tangle. I learned how to knit,
crochet, and embroider a chain stitch, and to make
flowers and an alphabet with the needle.