Where We Are Now (24 page)

“I couldn't…. Oh, Marianne, I couldn't help it. He said I was “acting like a rabbit.”

Uncle Phillip's comparison was more apt, especially since crying had turned her nose pink and she did have a whole set of fidgets. Just then she'd twisted her white embroidered handkerchief into a tiny wet coil.

I would remain calm and try to comfort her until Uncle Phillip called and came to retrieve her. That's how that small domestic drama would play out. There would be no great upheaval. The goose would drive the rabbit home, and their lives would continue.

My mother's life had been too short, but it was lively. She had work, friends, parties. She'd given speeches, raised funds, traveled before her plane crashed. Aunt Lucy kept to Uncle Phillip's side, her house, her walled garden, her family.

I usually sat in the kitchen while she finished cooking Sunday's dinner. She favored fresh vegetables, and made certain dishes I would always consider southern—puff pastry
shell filled with sweetbreads in a cream sauce, stuffed yellow crook neck squash, snapped green Kentucky Wonder beans simmered with bits of country ham, corn scraped off the cob and sautéed with butter, egg bread baked in a blackened iron skillet and served lavishly covered with sliced chicken breast in mushroom sauce. “Lady cooking,” Fergus categorized her food. Though she knew how to cook them, turnip greens and fried chicken were seldom prepared, nor did she favor cakes. Aunt Lucy made pies of any fruit in season—blackberry, apple, peach. To these she later added chocolate meringue and chiffon pies of almost every flavor. “Mama's cloud pies,” Fergus called them when we were children. Uncle Phillip and I devoured ours happily. Her pastry was light, and when I praised it, she laughed and told me my mother had taught her how to make it.

“Mother used to tell Katherine, ‘You make the crust. Let little Lucy make the filling.' Because I was the youngest, I got the easiest job. Katherine got so tired of being the one who made the crust she showed me how.”

One afternoon Aunt Lucy gave me a lesson in piecrust making including the intricacies of latticing and edging. The instructions Mother gave me had been desultory, and I hadn't been particularly interested, but Aunt Lucy's dexterity, the way she twisted the dough to form a lattice and placed her fingers to pinch a scalloped edge made it look like a minor art form. From one of her mother's cooks, she'd learned how to make fanciful variations—twisted lattices, elaborately cutout flowers, curling spirals.

In my other life at school, I lived in a dense whirl of classes, study, committee work. There were causes to champion, speakers to invite, publicity to be done. And there were boys. By the end of my junior year, there was one boy, Marshall. Aunt Lucy who listened well and wasn't inclined to reprove, became my confidant.

She knew everything about Marshall from the color of his eyes—hazel—to the rough outline of his life which I collected as I learned it bit by bit. His family had moved West from Tennessee to Texas after the Civil War while mine had remained rooted in the South.

“Oh, honey!” She had a light, high voice. “Oh, just think … if you married him, you'd leave here!” Her eyes shone happily. Aunt Lucy, having gone as far as California when Uncle Phillip's company transferred them there, loved the idea of moving. I liked the idea myself, but I was in love which made my judgment suspect. I wanted to marry, but what if, for unknown reasons, Marshall and I later discovered we couldn't bear each other? I'd been in love before, and I knew the reverse side—despair, sometimes dislike, and finally indifference. The strength of love was the greatest uncertainty in my life. In Aunt Lucy's estimation though, my possibilities were expanded far beyond her kitchen counter where she was showing me how to weave long strands of pastry under and over each other, her wedding rings shining on the window sill, her thin fingers, moving quickly.

One afternoon while we were standing in front of the sink, she said, “You know, don't you, I married before meeting your Uncle Phillip—When I was sixteen, I ran off with a boy.”

I was watching her so closely a glass slid through my hands splashing back in the soapy water.

“We married in Columbia and went to Chattanooga.”

I dipped the glasses one by one, as quietly as possible into fresh rinse water. Glancing sideways, I waited.

“Me and Jerry Jenkins. They lived two houses up from us in Franklin.”

The glasses lay in shimmering rows in the hot water. I lifted them out and turned them upside down on a dry cup
towel. For a moment I stared out the window over the sink. There was nothing much to see, just a driveway, the red brick wall of the house next door, and one bare tree.

Aunt Lucy picked up a glass and began polishing it. “Jerry was Brother Jenkin's son, Mother's preacher's son.” She said in a matter-of-fact tone. Stepping away from me, she placed the glass in the cupboard.

I went on washing cups and saucers, plates, and at last the silverware, an unchanging progression my grandmother had passed on to her daughters, and in turn to me. This was the way we did dishes. Aunt Lucy wiped the silverware. Each knife, fork, spoon rang against the others as she dropped them one by one in the partitioned drawer.

“Poor Jerry—Imagine naming a child Jeremiah in this day and age. He was as afraid of his father as I was of my mother. Somehow we were bold together, two fears to make one courage maybe.” The plates rattled as she placed them in the shelves. “We couldn't in the end—We tried, but we couldn't go against them. Papa and Brother Jenkins came down and brought us home. I'd sent Mother a wire. I didn't want her to worry. Chattanooga was written at the top of it. I didn't think about that. There weren't many hotels in Chattanooga at the time, and Jerry registered under his own name. They found us pretty soon. It was just as well. We were nearly broke.”

In the living room where he generally fell asleep after dinner on Sundays, I could hear the intermittent bumblebee buzz of Uncle Phillip's snore.

Aunt Lucy leaned against the counter watching me. “Marianne, we were ready to come back. Jerry looked through the want ads in the news and decided he might get a paper route. I read them, and all I was suited to do was to be someone's maid. We were still children, two run-away children.”

She returned to Franklin, and Jerry was sent away to live with relatives, an aunt and uncle in Atlanta. Her father and his had the marriage annulled quickly. A few months later his father moved to another church. Aunt Lucy and Jerry grew apart. She met Uncle Philip.

“Did he know about Jerry?”

“Oh, he knew there had been someone.”

She appeared resigned then. It might have been easier for her, in the long run, to do as my mother had advised. Now, still holding Jerry's letters in my lap, I see she couldn't forget him. I have been appointed, I suppose, in place of a daughter, to keep his letters although her exact motives remain as mysterious as love itself. Until now I've never read anyone else's love letters. The ones I received, I burned before I married. I remember some of their writers, but my old passions have become as hazy as smoke rising.

As for Uncle Philip's insistence that he hadn't read these letters, I don't believe him. He's read them else why is he vowing he didn't? The fact that Aunt Lucy kept them may have hurt. Obviously, since he waited so long to send them, he may not want to talk to anyone about them—me least of all. The Moore family had so many secrets, told so many stories. I've always depended on him for corroboration. I take a chance and phone him.

When I eased the conversation around to the letters he's sent, all he would say was, “Oh, Lucy's little secret. She had to have one, didn't she.”

If he was angry or if finding them had added to his grief, he hid it from me, and why not. Her foolishness was his secret too. I believe now that Uncle Philip chose Aunt Lucy, in all probability, for the same reason Jerry did; he adored her frailty.

“Lucy, do sit down,” he would order when she stood to give some other person her seat. “Lucy, you must rest this
afternoon! He'd tell her after she spent a morning weeding her garden. “Youall go on. I'll bring Lucy later,” he would direct anyone else going to see someone who was ill, visiting relatives in the hospital, or on their way to a funeral. Perhaps cutting the time short was his way of sparing her. The only difficult visits she made were trips to see her mother in the nursing home. Uncle Phillip must have taken her; she never did learn how to drive, nor did she ever learn the least thing about managing money. Uncle Phillip did all the household accounting. I used to think she merely exchanged her parents' house for his restraints. But her role suited her nature, which allowed her to love two men at once, quietly remembering one and marrying another.

W
e have a seven-week-old filly
who's an orphan. She hasn't eaten since her mother died five days ago of a twisted gut. The baby won't take a bottle with a goat's or calf's nipple on it. Yesterday I tried squirting mare's milk substitute into her mouth with a kitchen baster. It trickled out all over me and the stable floor. On one of the stall's rails Marsh has hung black plastic buckets just large enough for a foal's head, each of them filled with different food—foal pellets, oatmeal mixed with corn meal, some other strange mixture. Her mother was a gentle ten-year-old Marsh called Belle. We thought her temperament had passed down to this foal as it has to others; now we aren't sure. The grief of horses is unpredictable and worrying. They can't stand being alone long. We're keeping this foal stabled with a mare in the stall next to her. Right now a mother substitute won't suffice. First she has to eat.

I tell her this. I lean over and speak to her as I'd speak to a stubborn child. You can tell if a horse is listening. By the way her ears turn, I know she is. I slide my hands through the short silky strands of her mane and touch her nose to remind her I'm here, then she turns her head away from me, from Marsh's three buckets and settles herself awkwardly in the straw on the ground, her white spindly legs sliding in a confusion of angles, her head lolling, the dark war-bonnet markings—on the crown of her head and at the base of her ears—and her dark blue eyes still visible. Her mother was also a blue-eyed paint.

In Texas when we began working with horses, the two of us trained thoroughbreds. Marsh did most of it. I helped, mainly by doing a lot of riding. Later, after we'd lived in New
Mexico a while, we decided to raise quarter horses, then Arabs. Now we're trying paints and Appaloosas, the spotted horses. Each breed has its own set of problems. We seem to alternate between the nervous and the placid ones.

I chew on a straw and wonder how I can keep this baby from getting too weak? I can't do it by will alone. It's as impossible to make a foal eat as it is to coerce a cranky child. Marsh has offered choices. I offer love. The dogs, Ruffian and Sly, chase each other through the stable and pause to give attention. The foal will have none of it. Nature, I decide at this point, has to take care of its own. It usually does. We've had orphans before, I remind myself, and they survived. We've just never had one so stubborn in its grief.

I pick up the baster and the jar of mare's milk substitute—too cool now. It has to be heated until it's between ninety and a hundred degrees to approximate the natural temperature. We use a candy thermometer to measure the heat. I find I seem to rely on ordinary household utensils. I poured the milk substitute in an old mayonnaise jar. I've noticed the same thing in other stables where I've seen horse-worming medicine stored in Mason jars and alcohol in blue milk of magnesia bottles.

Marsh who has been out watching the farrier set up, comes through the stable on his way somewhere. I always see his hair first. Dark when we married, it's completely gray now. He's still a fine looking man. I notice women glancing at him often and tell him so. He says he hasn't had any good offers lately. He glances down at the line of black buckets still full of untouched offerings and shakes his head.

“She's got to get hungry enough to eat sometime. We've never lost one before from starvation. I wish you—”

He lets his sentence dangle because we both know what he means. After we lost our only son I couldn't conceive another child, so we have the memory, and I have an
inclination toward anxiety over the very young.

Marsh wishes I didn't, particularly since we breed and raise horses. We've got two stallions and eight, sometimes ten mares. The stallions service anyone else's who'll pay the fee, so we also stable other people's mares. Marsh trains all our own horses. Now and then when he wants to make more money, he'll train other people's. This is horse racing country; there's a demand for good trainers. Marsh has the kind of will tempered by patience required for training, and he has the intuitive sense required. He knows horses, knows how they react. Generally training the ones we raise plus two or three others is enough. There are other things he has to do; take stallions to shows, make sure all the horses are exercised—the grooms and I help—and fed correctly. We have three barns, one for stabling mares, one for stallions, one for breeding, sets of pens and corrals. All those have to be maintained. But farm buildings don't usually require much time. Horses and people do. There are all the other owners with mares to breed, horses to train. I keep the records—watch over the accounts, log the births, and the deaths when they take place here. Most horses have longer recorded genealogies than humans; of course they don't live as long. In the same ledgers I also log unusual weather—two inches of rain today, a foot of snow—the names of people and when we hired them. On the back flyleaf of each new one, I list birthdays of everybody in our families. Paradoxically, for a man who loves history, Marsh remembers horses' dates better than humans'. I suppose mine is the sort of list others put in a Bible; Marsh opens the ledger more frequently. Somewhere along the way I began noting plans there too; a new hay shelter, to France this summer maybe. We built the hay shelter; we didn't get to France that year. The ledgers are my cryptic diaries full of sadness, mundanity, hope. In our beginning years, we were fortunate since early inheritances freed both of us—in some
ways—the money paid for the land, provided a little. We've always had a living to make.