II : Departures
want to talk about my own mother now as talking brings her close to me. Edna Catherine Tindal Healy, born in 1897, died in 1976. She was born on Center Street here in town. Did you know that wasn’t her given name. She had been named Adrianna originally, for her paternal Grandfather Adrienne Tindal but when she was young no one wanted to be a foreigner and she called her self Edna. No one knows why she picked Edna but she did. Oh Steph, you never saw her when she was young but she had the most beautiful fine brown hair, that had a light blond streak in back; one eyebrow and eyelash was blond, while the other was dark brown.
When my mother and father were first married they lived over on Washington Street, and after some time then his family thought that he should try his hand at the farm. My dad’s mother had bought it at a sheriff’s sale along with several other properties and businesses. No one ever could figure out where she got her money, they say Grandpa made it running his card games on the Interurban, but he died just before this time.
Well this farm had absolutely no modern facilities. There was a privy, a well, no tractors, team of horses called Captain and Chester, big custard-colored Belgians. This farm was five miles out on Dixie Highway. My sister Jeanne and I were both born at Grandma Tindal’s in Blanchardville at 403 Griffin Avenue. Mother came into town to have us, but Bess was born at the farm.
So, no amenities whatsoever there, a pump, a woodstove. Neither Mom nor Dad had any experience with farming but they liked the idea of having the farmhouse, all the space; there were lovely old black walnut trees in the yard. When you went off to Oregon and you wanted to live like that with your woodstove and lanterns, I thought now haven’t we all been through this before? What’s this family got against progress anyway? Although through the first war and up to about 1922 you could make some money from farming in Ohio, as Europe was all torn up and most of its food supply was coming from here. Farming was a going concern. I remember the horses, how big around their feet were, their sharp warm smell. How mother loved the horse called Captain, and would feed him apples from her hand.
We lived on the farm for about five years, and it was when Bess was a baby that the gypsies came.
Women cooked everything from scratch in those days of course, on the woodstove, so if you wanted to make a soup or stew, well it would take some time, and it was hot in the kitchen in the summer so you would put something on and leave it to go do some other chores.
1924
Blanchard County, Ohio
It was a day like that, late summer when Mother had put a nice beef stew to cook on the stove and took the children out to the yard with her. Dad had driven into town that morning. She was hanging out the laundry by the side of the house admiring how nicely her flower border had come along on the side border this year, bachelor buttons, the blue was so noticeable, and phlox, the phlox just gave and gave its bloom, since June it had, but the red zinnias clashed with the pinks and blues. Now the lilies you could smell even over here, so tall this year, and secretly, for she thought it sacrilegious, she held the inside of the lily flower as good proof for the glory of God as anything, the delicate pink stalks topped with the dangling umbrellas of pollen, there like a Chinese festival of abundance and rain. She noticed then how her white sheets seemed to be dancing in the wind as the children began pointing at the road. She heard the sound of a waltz come spinning across the grass with a carnival sound she knew was an accordion, met a few minutes later by the jingle of the bells on the wagon horses coming along the road. She could see them from the slight rise of the lawn to the side of the farmhouse, the back of the wagons covered over with green canvas and the bottom wood painted red like a circus. On the first wagon a young man was sitting up front next to the driver, swaying and singing as his hands played over the accordion keys, his words were in a strange language but it was a catching tune. The children clapped and ran to look closer, but Mother called them back, “No, now you stay. Right here.” There were three or four covered wagons. Some boys along the side led a string of horses. They often traded horses. Dad said you could always tell the stolen horses because those were the ones they were most eager to sell before the rightful owners a few counties back might catch up. They used to stop at the small pond down the road and camp there for a few nights. Some were metal smiths, tinkers you know, they would mend a broken pot handle or a harness, they weren’t all bad.
Well mother stopped her laundry to look and called her collie dog that was barking at them terrible, back into the yard and held my hand while Aunt Jeanne hid behind her. One of the gypsy women saw her, and got off the wagon and came over pulling a flowered shawl around her shoulders. She said to Mother “I will sell you some pins for sewing.”
“I don’t need any pins,” Mom said, “no thank you.”
Well the woman kept patting Jeanne’s hair as she was very blonde, saying, “So yellow, so fat.”
Then the woman called back to the wagon, and two skinny little barefoot girls came running over to her and she pushed them in front of Mother and said in decent English, “See how small, my children. So hungry.” She put her hand to her mouth gesturing, “Sooo hungry.” Well they did look awful skinny.
Mom couldn’t bear the thought of anyone going hungry, but she didn’t have much on hand. She had some summer squash in the vegetable garden, and motioned to the woman to follow. She opened the wooden gate and put the children in front of her still wary, she picked an apron full of squash with the yellow blossoms still hanging on the tips all big and bright to give her. The gypsy woman took them in a flour sack she seemed to have been carrying along but she didn’t look very happy about it.
“Hard to cook,” she said, and looked so upset.
Then Mother said, “Well, if you bring your children back later I may have some stew for them.”
That seemed to cheer them all up, and she thanked Mother and walked back toward the wagons, which were a little further down the road now.
Mother finished hanging the laundry. She had Bess in her pram and me and Jeanne whose job it was to hand up the clothespins. She was careful to keep us all with her cause there were stories of gypsies stealing children though she didn’t really believe that as they seemed to have plenty of their own. Jeanne went into the house and brought out the book of fairy tales and Mother sat on the grass and read us Thumbelina. When we were finished we gathered up the basket and walked out to the chicken coop behind the house, where I was allowed to fill the water tank in the coop from a bucket by the pump; then she scattered some corn from the bottom of her apron pocket, stopped to tie Jeanne’s shoes and to pick a good handful of fresh parsley from the herb patch out the back door, then lifted Bess from her baby carriage and put her on her hip. As she started up the back porch steps she heard the front screen door slam and wondered what that was. Well she walked into her kitchen just in time to see the back side of that Gypsy woman hurrying down the front walk with her stew pot still steaming in her hands. Mom hurried out the front door after her but there was a wagon waiting right on the road out front, and a man helped the woman with the pot into the wagon and off they went at a good trot.
Mother was livid, and walked after them yelling, “That’s not right, my husband will be after you.”
She was carrying Bess in one hand and the parsley in the other, and in the midst of her anger she thought to herself ‘damn it now that stew’s not gonna taste right without the parsley,’ but that thought made her all the madder and she threw the parsley into the road and stamped it into the dust. They weren’t just taking her stew, you see but taking her chance to give it to them, was like they stole it twice, took her good pot and her good intentions too. She stood there in the middle of the road looking back at the house where Jeanne and I stood peering off the porch, and back down the road where the wagon was rolling, looking back and forth, stomping her feet and we didn’t know which way she was gonna go.
Stay or leave us we didn’t know. And when you disappeared that time, it was like that. I didn’t know. You took something too. Well this is all related if you’ll just be patient. So many things are vivid now.
July 2, 1976
Blanchardville Hospital
Was good of Jeanne to drive up from Columbus well of course she would be here right away. Saint Jeanne, my sister who never said an unkind word about anyone, and I don’t have to talk while we sit here. Is Mother dying, I think it may be. I didn’t expect it not this month of July, just had her 82nd birthday but at least I can imagine she will go to heaven because her devotion to Mary was absolute and Early Mass at 7 a.m. every Wednesday as well as Sunday, but my Stephanie, I don’t know where she is or will go. My baby girl. Where is it she has gone, not where the old go when the heart stops beating or starts again God’s will be done. Something else controlling where she is and I don’t know what it is. My mother’s body here, her hand bruised from the IV, her bony hand purple, but warm. She responds to my touch she squeezes my hand, her face is calm, almost smiling I think. But my daughter’s body, where is she, what if someone I have never seen would take her put their grubby hands on her. I can’t lose both. What then, more than a soul can bear. They say fluid is filling her lungs now, cardiac failure, heart disease, heart’s dis-ease. Would to God this had not. I sit when I can. Jeanne is here, thank God Jeanne is here. We’re just sitting with her, not much more that we can do.
·
“Rose, have you heard anything today” Jeanne asks. Her voice is so gentle its gentleness catches in my throat, I clench my teeth to keep from crying, I do not want to sob by my Mother’s bedside.
The pump of the respirator.
“We think she went off with the older Taylor girl from across the street, she was in town with a boyfriend and they were on their way somewhere, left about the same time she did.”
“Uh huh, I bet you’ll hear something soon.”
The pump of the respirator, in and out as if wind is blowing my body away.
“She doesn’t know Grandma’s here in the hospital does she?”
“Well the day before she left Grandma was first admitted here, said she didn’t have anything to do and I said you can go visit your grandmother in the hospital…” but I couldn’t explain to Jeanne even.
“The police said they’re looking of course.”
“Chris said he would bring Bess out during his lunch hour.”
“That’s good. Is Chris still working for Sunny Delight?”
“I think so. So funny I never could stand the taste of that stuff. But I would never say that to him.”
“No.”
“She’s resting, should we go for a smoke in the cafeteria.”
“You go Rose, but you should consider giving it up after this.”
“I know Jeanne but not now.”
“I know. Go ahead I’ll wait for you here.”
·
I’m walking down the hall of the hospital and it’s not a good place to be, smells of antiseptic. I can only think if my daughter is dying also, if death has come where I can not see it. At least here in these awful yellow brick hallways of Blanchard Valley Hospital I can see what is happening, where I gave birth to her, yes it’s true. Same place. I hear moaning from one room, look at that old man twisted in his sheets. In the elevator now, that mother has a baby has an infection in its eye, so swollen and pink. “The fever has gone up” the father says, then the baby cries, now thank God it’s the first floor.
Cafeteria that way, sign says. Sit back here at the empty table, there’s an ash tray. Up to now I’ve survived by doing whatever it was we had to do taking care of the babies and feeding them, pouring milk in the bowl, frying a dozen eggs on Sunday, making do with what you had tried to read to them send them to church what have you, none of it enough, we had to keep them fed but that is not enough not nearly, I wonder what it was.
She doesn’t have it so bad must be those drugs that make her crazy or depressed, it’s sad she said the other day “I want to kill myself.” A beautiful young girl like her what a sin to say such a thing to your mother, they must have destroyed her mind.
“Are you alright Ma’am?”
“Oh yes.”
“You had your head down on the table there I didn’t know if you passed out.”
“No, I’m just tired, could I get a coffee?”
“Why sure.”
·
Waitress in a pink polyester dress, do you know where my daughter is, could I get an answer waitress. This death I don’t know how to make do, with this not at all, if it comes I cannot say I will pay later or borrow from my sister I cannot last longer by adding powdered milk to the milk that I have or put on an extra sweater to save the heating it’s too near Labor Day it’s hot. Rose your mind’s going, that terrible fear comes over me, here in the cafeteria. I need to walk outside.
That’s better here on the bench by the zinnias. Mother always knew the names of all the flowers. Forget me not. Who are those men all dressed in black going into the hospital, everyone looks like death, I worry that he may come in a way I can’t recognize.
I have too much for death to take. That’s the problem. Oh death would make a fortune if he came to see me, death would call me a Golden Calf. I have so much life to keep from him, so many lives, some others have only one but just think how much could he get from me, what a temptation I am for death don’t think I don’t feel it. Could come from anywhere, it’s just this hospital puts me so on edge. As if the dying might linger around and take more, once it has started.
It’s just like after you have a baby the womb is open you know, susceptible to infection and you shouldn’t take a bath, or sit in water anywhere, don’t dare go in a pool or river, the womb is still open you have to be very careful. Eight weeks at the minimum, a break from your husband and you’re glad of it because being close to the baby is all the closeness you can feel at once. I don’t know why I’m thinking about babies now. After birth the womb is open. Death is the same I think but I do not know what is open. I need to know what part to keep from being entered. Is it time?
This old wooden bench is what holds me sitting up here, I could not even sit except that the bench sits and I am in it, haven’t slept much in days. Oh mister please turn off the truck motor if you’re waiting there to deliver, the diesel exhaust is nauseating. Every piece of clothing sticks to you in this heat, I’m perspiring like a pig. She could have waited and run away some other time, she knew Grandma was sick. What do you protect to keep death away? Protect your nerves is what you should do so you can pray. When death is near when you smell the antiseptic or see the purple line above the lip then light a candle get out your rosary. I think it’s in the bottom of my purse here somewhere I think it is, oh all tangled up terrible in with the house keys. I can’t even untangle it, can’t even get my rosary out to pray. Goddamn it all to hell.
When death comes near when death comes you must protect your face, protect your faith is what I mean. Don’t lose your faith then, don’t ask questions whether it is true or not that heaven waits. Let it alone, let it lie unbroken there in your mind. You must now. What is opened in death is not the gate to the body the round red gate to the inside of the body where the beating of the heart echoes in a warm current of blood, what is opened in death is the gate to the mystery of Jesus Christ and the resurrection of the flesh. What is opened are doubts are opened that lead only to a dark threshold in a sleepless night so you mustn’t let it. You must protect your faith when death comes that’s what you must protect. Let us proclaim the mystery of flesh, no I mean let us proclaim the mystery of faith. Christ has died, Christ has risen Christ will come again. But will my daughter?
·
It had been three days now you’d been missing. Bess called, and said Mother had a bad morning they weren’t sure what would happen now. So I came to sit after I finished at the paper at 2:00. I just came direct to the hospital from work. Already missed three days of work, won’t be able to eat if I don’t go. I was awful tired but I thought I could doze off there easy as anywhere I suppose. They wouldn’t allow us there if they didn’t think it was near.
Don’t know how anyone rests with all the lights and machinery going up here in ICU. It’s Jenny on duty, she’s Carolyn Lynch’s daughter that used to live next to us on Lima Avenue. Whole family over 6'2", and flaming red hair. I wouldn’t want to wake up to Jenny personally, but she’s good-hearted. Speak of the devil and he always shows.
“Hello Jenny”
“Good morning Rose, come to sit with your mom?”
“Yes I did.”
“Well your brother just left. You can take over the recliner.”
“I will, has she been awake?”
“Her lungs were clearer so we were able to take the tube out and let her breathe on her own. I think she was talking to Jim maybe, the doctor has her on a lot of sedatives because he doesn’t want her blood pressure to go up. Now you call us if you need anything, I’m on rounds.”
“I know, Jenny I will.”
“Hello, Mother it’s Rose here. I see you’re breathing on your own again.”
She’s reaching for my hand, my mother is reaching for my hand as if to comfort me, does she know of my other worry?
·
Yes, daughter give me your hand, so I can feel what a living person feels like I can feel the good warmth of living flesh not this machine incessantly beeping that sound will be what kills me if nothing else does first. Passing through little towns with the changing traffic lights, lights turning green, no hills in the entire county as far as your eye can see over the clothesline. Out hanging up clothes on the farm when you were a little one sitting by the wicker basket handing the clothespins up to me, and I clip them into the shoulder of a white shirt wondering how a shirt even without a man in it reminded you of a man, just the shape left but nothing inside, or a short white smock with a little girl’s shadow in it. I sewed the satin rosebud on the collar of that one on your first birthday there, see how the clothes-line sets right on the horizon and the horizon is straight except for the heat waves. Now you’ve dropped your doll, go looking for it between the ends of the white sheets, billowing white sheets where did you go? Now what is that sound, not the wind but like a wind, it’s knocking oh it’s the police come for the whiskey upstairs. Need to warn them to hide it. I don’t think I can climb up the stairs now. Rose can.
“Rose, go tell your father they’re here, run child and hurry,” she said, clear as a bell.
Gave me a terrible start, her talking all the sudden right out of the blue from her hospital bed. Said it clear as day, and I panicked for a second thinking where is Dad, except he’s been dead these twenty five years. Well she’d been dreaming of course.
“It’s alright Mother, everything is alright.” I said. I worried she was raving but she looked right at me with her blue eye and her violet eye and you won’t believe it but they were twinkling with merriment.
“I know it is,” she said. “Gypsies took the soup but they didn’t take the children.” She paused and smiled. “I guess I will go on then.”
Then she pulled my hand to her chest. That was the last thing she said.
But she was still dreaming and tending to her things inside that dream. I don’t know what you would call it in that place being or not, so near one to the other. When you’re there, it doesn’t much matter what you call it so much as paying attention to the way. Call this a dream but soon every dream and every day mend together along the seams of memory. Just sit still for a minute and listen.
1976
In my mother’s dream. Blanchardville
Something she had forgotten woke her. She rose up from her bed and stood listening to the rhythmic breathing of the summer night on the farm. Her husband’s chest rose and fell, the curtains on the open window blew inward then back against the soft screens. He has been sleeping for such a long time she thought, still she stepped quietly, leaving. She paused at the doorways of the children’s rooms, felt their breathing spreading through the dark hallway as ripples through water, stood in the intervals of their breath, breathed with them, smiled that their father was there to watch over them. At the front door she bent to put her shoes on then stepped out onto the wooden porch. The moon was almost full. The dog stirred from his place under the porch, but she said, “No, you stay.” And he did.
It was easy to walk on the road all white with moonlight. Poplar trees shook their silvery leaves, it was refreshing and cool where the trees held, warmer now the corn fields began on either side of the road. How obediently the corn stood in its rows like an army of thin men, stretching as far as the eye could see. Just stay there she said to the corn, if I need you I will call. She walked down the road toward the pond where the gypsies were camped.
She could see faintly now the golden shadow of a fire up ahead, a spark bursting and falling; hear the buried swell of an accordion coming and going. When she neared the widening in the road where a path led down a slight embankment toward the pond she paused. She smelled the pungent musk of the horses, heard their coughing, stomping, then made out their shapes tethered in a line. A grey horse looked up as she approached and met her eyes, nodding as she passed. Orion the Hunter visible overhead, three stars in the belt, sparks rose from the fire as she approached it.
The gypsies sat around on stools and rugs, a dense dark ring around the red center. Mother recognized the back of the woman who had been to her house earlier by her paisley shawl, an old man on the other side of the fire saw her approaching and stood up alarmed.
Hey who is it? and they turned to look. The wind changed just then blowing smoke low into the faces of the seated gypsies, who coughed and turned.
Who are you what do you want here?
I’ve come to take my cooking pot back, Mother said.
And why do you think we have your pot, the old gypsy man asked.
Because it’s right there, Mother said pointing. Her rare and valuable French copper pot hung on a spit over the fire.
That’s my pot. It has the mark of Thomas’ forge on the bottom, I can show you. This woman stole it from me and I’ve come to take it back.
Mother pointed to the woman. Earlier today you were at my house.
I’ve never seen this woman before, answered the gypsy woman to her neighbors. Never.
You’ve seen me before and begged food for your children.
There it proves it, said the Gypsy woman, I don’t even have any children. And all the gypsies laughed.
I offered to give her soup, but she took my cooking pot instead. It’s not right.
Ha, it’s not right, the old man said to another, mimicking her voice. It’s not right, this queen of the night has come to tell us what is wrong and right. As if we are children.
She was confused for a moment, not knowing what else she should say when the warm breath of the grey horse, sudden on her shoulder, startled her.
The grey horse walked forward.
Give her the cooking pot, the horse said.
The old man raised his arm above his face as if bracing for a blow, but nodded then pushed at the curly headed boy next to him. The boy searched among the edge of the fire for a stick; he stood up and with his stick, slid the pot to the side of the spit, lifted it, to the ground.
He dumped a dark liquid into the grass.
It was only holding water, he said. It will need a minute to cool.
She stood, waiting in the glare of the fire and the other language. The half-light illuminated the fronts of their faces while the rest of their bodies were submerged in the darkness. They spoke softly now to themselves, as if they were frightened.
She took a clean cotton hanky from her pocket to pick up the handle of her pot. It was warm and clean, shining in the moonlight. She carried it toward the road, afraid to look behind her. The accordion player started up in the invisible distance.`
After climbing up the slight embankment to the smoother road she paused, took a deep breath of the night air, warm and green smelling. She lingered to hear the crickets, a dove cooing somewhere, the crackle of the fire, the crackle of the stars, the corn standing at attention in its vast formation. She looked down the road she had just come, the road to home, but turned the other way. She began walking.
It was only then, once she had started away, that she knew she wouldn’t be going home after all. She thought of her children asleep in the house, wishing she could stay with them, but knowing that was impossible now. They had their own children to tend to, in other houses in other nights than this. And truth to tell, she was curious to see what was down the road. She walked on, her cooking pot dangling from her hand. Now that she had her pot back there was no end to what she could cook, anyone could take the food who was hungry, she would just make more.
For some miles she kept walking though she could not tell how many. Walking toward a faint grayness at the horizon, must be the coming morning she thought, if I walk quickly it will arrive sooner. She tried to hurry but her feet seemed to move so slowly, and her left hip ached where it always had. I am tired, tired feet, tired knees, tired hips. Can’t fight nature she thought and slowed her steps. Suddenly she heard the pounding of hoof beats behind her, turned with a last pang of fear, then sighed. The grey horse slowed to a walk as he neared her, then knelt in the center of the road, panting softly, or was that her. A sound like a greeting came from her mouth though she couldn’t recognize the word. She climbed onto his back, wrapped her hands deeply into his wiry mane. They rose.
July 7, 1976
Pine Street, Blanchardville
My mother, your grandmother, died that evening. I kept thinking of the happiness in her eyes or had I mistaken it? Next day I couldn’t think to do more than fry an egg.
People need to eat. I have no appetite but need to keep going. Frying eggs like every Sunday. Ringing, I hear a ringing someone get the phone. Can’t be that Mother’s gone because that call came last night. Maybe it wasn’t true maybe she didn’t die, hospitals calling to say it wasn’t true. Calling to tell me.
“Luke do I hear the phone?”
“No Mom I don’t hear it, it isn’t ringing.”
I thought I heard it. Ask not for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee. Tolls for me apparently no one else can hear it. Maybe the oil sizzling there in the skillet. Or my ears ringing. Been a while now since I slept, couldn’t sleep last night after I heard. Stayed with her long as I could she wasn’t conscious at the end and Jim wanted to sit with her I left at 5 p.m. they called at 9 p.m. How can Earl sit there and read the sports page?
“You want your eggs over easy Earl?”
“Over easy, but don’t overcook them.”
Don’t overcook them have half a mind to throw the whole skillet on his head. No consideration from him don’t know why I’d hope for it. Day after my mother died he might be kind but why hope that. Cauldren-Crates they said, the funeral home we always use, tomorrow at noon and five, don’t know what I have to wear that’s black maybe that navy skirt, but it’s wool, be awful hot in this weather.
It is ringing now I hear it, again.
“Luke the phone is ringing, isn’t it. Get the phone.”
July 1976
Near Oxford, Mississippi
Their voices had come through the unpainted wood slat wall like splinters, waking you from sleep. “No, please don’t,” that was your friend Katie’s voice, then her boyfriend Dale’s slowly, “I’m gonna use this gun see, I have these guns for a reason.”
You tried to pretend that you couldn’t hear, turned your back to the bare wall in that old Southern cabin, pulled the covers over your head, afraid to listen. Afraid not to listen. They stopped for some time. Maybe it was just a dream.
Then it started again, their voices growing into a solid something, wrong. All the doubts you had about Dale in the past few days, the drugs, his paranoia about strangers, talk about the end of the world, why he wanted to come here to his grandmother’s old homestead in rural Mississippi, Katie’s submission, you understood.
A light shown under the door that led from your room to theirs, you knew the door was locked from the other side, he always locked it. You thought maybe if you listened hard enough you could be in the room there with them, you could stop them by your hoping, Katie would know you were hearing wouldn’t she? You tried to picture what he was doing, in the light, holding her, or hurting her, then his shouting.
“What I wanna know about this arrangement is what am I getting outta this deal, what do you do for me? What do you give me?”
“I give you my love.” Katie answers, but her voice is too meek and hopeless, you know she’s doomed now. You want to tell Katie, don’t answer like that, don’t act as if your love is nothing. Then his reply.
“I don’t know what I can do with that.”
Their voices pausing, then going on. More threats, pleading.
It went on until you could hear something else, the shape of a story unfolding, and a role in the story that was yours. It had to do with going, with rising up and going away into the darkness of the night. You saw that leaving home had started this going but it was not the end, and you saw all the going you would do, all the leaving you were assigned to in that night, felt it come for you clearer than any dream. Still, you lay there a minute longer as if to tell the going that you were still acting on your own time.
The darkest hours had passed, there was a pale lightening somewhere distant that gave you the courage to go. You realized you had been waiting for a little glimmer of light. Trying to be as quiet as possible, before he heard you, before that other door opened, you rose from the bed. There was no time to find your shoes, the room too dark for that. You put on your overalls, found your shoulder bag, your wallet with a few dollars.
Passed their locked door trembling, held your hands out in front of you to find the doorway into the front room then to the front door, the knob turning. Outside there was a just enough light to show you the three stairs leading down from the porch, a mist cowering against the ground. You didn’t know where you were going, or what you were looking for, but there was story you felt yourself inside of, it said go get help now, save yourself, save your friend.
The hard packed clay of the road was cool on your bare feet. In half shadows, skinny pine trees rose up on either side, their shape engulfed by a smothering tangle of kudzu vines, a rampant grasping growing whose power you felt as it threatened to cover you too. You walked slowly because you didn’t know where you were going. What was in the shadows, you’re worried, wondering in your worry, what might be happening to Katie. But you did not fear for your own life, you felt your own life in this story unfolding even as you walked.
You walked until real morning came, and watched the mothering light of the rising sun embrace the trees, the pastures fence posts, the green grass by the road, yourself. A lightening of all darknesses ever descended, ascended. You felt that morning had come as a gift to you alone in the whole world and you wept to see it. Stood there in the middle of the road, your face raised up weeping and smiling overjoyed in the profound blessing of plain daylight.
You slipped out of the haze made of fear and there you stood, in front of the driveway of a farmhouse with a gate. It seemed like you had been there by that gate for a long time, like you had always known it.
Then you saw the sign on the fence that said Beware of the Dog, and you laughed at the sign, couldn’t help but laugh because you knew the universe was telling you that Dale and every evil thing like him was the dog you would have to beware of, oh the world was talking to you that morning. The other sign said No Trespassing and that threw you off, that didn’t make you laugh, maybe they would want to shoot you too. People around here were like that.
You stood there looking down the driveway toward a house you could just make out, hoping to hear or see someone. You didn’t hear anyone, you lost your nerve, walked away. Turned around, walked back. Thought well you weren’t trespassing, there’s no crime in asking to use a phone is there. They can’t shoot you for asking to use a phone. Just go ask. You were still walking back and forth by that gate when a real dog began to bark. The woman that lived there pulled up in a station wagon back from sunrise service with the Baptists and rolled down her window.
“I had some trouble, and maybe I could use your phone.” That was how you put it, “I had some trouble.” She was a nice woman, said I thought we heard some noise from over there, like they’d heard trouble from there before.
“You might as well get in or the dog’ll chase you.” You told her you had run away from home but had changed your mind now.
She took you into her kitchen that smelled of sausage and coffee, her mother and husband and two grown sons were eating breakfast, and looked up awful surprised as you came in.
“You want a cup of coffee?” she asked. “She needs to use the phone to call her family, telephone’s over there.”
July 7, 1976
Pine Street. Blanchardville
“Yeah it’s ringing now. I got it.” I hear my son Luke answer. “Hello? Stephanie! (Mom it’s Stephanie.) Yeah where are you? She’s coming.”
Turn off the stove don’t burn the house down on top of everything else, I’m coming, I’m coming down the hallway give me the sound of her voice living, here please give me her voice in my ear.
“Hello, yes, where are you?”
You may remember this. You said I’m in Mississippi, I want to come home, things haven’t gone so well, you said things haven’t gone so well, understatement of the year. Are you alright, I said and you said yes. You sounded nervous but not hurt. Oh I could hear it all in a minute, hear it all in your voice. You still trying to sound nonchalant but I could hear what had happened. The people at the farmhouse agreed to take you to the closest town, which was Oxford Mississippi, they had to go that way anyway, when they were finished eating.
Would you like another cup of coffee they asked and you said yes. They were having Sunday breakfast, eggs, sausage with grits, gravy and biscuits, they offered and you accepted. You sat there in your hippie overalls and braids, no shoes on your feet. What they must have thought. But they were quiet people, didn’t say too much among themselves, Praise the Lord and nobody ask any questions. You felt awkward alright. Sitting there thinking how you really did understand Faulkner and Flannery O’Conner in a whole new way now, and you wondered had these people read Faulkner too?
Well you were thinking of Faulkner of course because he lived in Oxford, you knew that. You had agreed to wait there at the police station. The policeman there was kind to you, even though you asked him right off if he was a redneck, oh you had no fear that’s for sure. Your father had called and left word he was on his way, so the policeman arranged for you to stay with a woman in town for the night, because it would take that long to get down there. She picked you up at the police station and took you to her Victorian house, she had six children herself and a drunken husband though they were all very religious. She wore a nylon dress, printed with red and blue Liberty Bells for the Bicentennial and that stuck in your mind a long time her dress covered with Liberty Bells. You’ve remembered that dress a long time, and that night because of how near to an end it was but you never felt that end, you felt that you would rise up in the night and dawn would come and you would get help and you did and saved Kate Taylor’s life on top of it.
Might as well tell. You were still asleep in that woman’s house around 11:00 a.m. when your father got there. The two of them were out front talking when you were woken up and you walked out. “How much do I owe you?” your father was asking her? He was always so polite.
“Oh ten dollars is fine.”
No kidding he paid ten dollars for you.
As you got in the car he told you. “Your grandmother died, night before last.”
Then he drove you back to Dale’s house because you still needed to get Kate.
That was when Dale came out onto the porch with his shotgun.
“What do you want here?” he yelled. Then he just stood by the door and started shooting.
“Get down behind the car,” your dad shouted and pushed you down by the shoulder but he didn’t seem to be afraid at all did he?
Dale kept shooting into the air over your heads into the trees, how long would he go on. “This is my house” he yelled. “I’m defending my property, you get off my property.” Then he shot into the air some more.
“We’re gonna do that sir, we’re gonna go as soon as we pick up our friend here.” Your dad yelled. Then Kate came out and she too was brave all the sudden.
“Dale stop shooting, please.” And he looked at her as if he had never seen her before and put his gun down a minute.
She went inside to get her things.
Then he started shooting into the air again, looking up, just shooting at the sky. Without rhyme or reason.
It took a few minutes for Kate to pull her suitcases onto the porch and your dad helped her load up her stuff, and then you were all gone from there.
v
It was the strangest thing. Once your father called to let me know you were on your way back, I could feel Mother leaving me then. I could feel her body start to recede into the distance like she was walking away, each step wrenching my bones with the force of her pulling away. Oh I knew it’s all attached somehow my mother leaves my daughter returns. There is a thread that runs between them needs be, tug of war across the river Styx.
·
I thought so many things at once, I was glad you’d be back in time for the funeral, so I wouldn’t have to explain losing my daughter to everyone trying to console me for losing my mother, why that would have been just vulgar, to lose that much in one week. Ask not for whom the lord giveth and the bell tolls. Oh what’s the verse. “Job arose, and rent his mantle, fell down upon the ground. Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return, the Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Or the telephone.
Whatever else you might want to say about your father remember that he didn’t hesitate on that occasion to drive a day and a half to come after you and get himself shot at into the bargain. You make your own peace on that.
Your father dropped you in the front yard so he could go round back to park.
“Your Mother’s waiting for you.”
You walked up the three steps. You opened the screen door and came in.
I was standing in the room alone, facing the door, waiting.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I said. We embraced briefly, but you turned your face away.
You didn’t know what to say, because you were trying to decide just who I was. I looked like a stranger to you I know, my face all ravaged by grief and worry. Dark shadows around my eyes the kind of shadows that looking at death leave, my skin dry and cracked over my bones like the parched earth of a long drought. A drought you sensed was of your making. I was so much thinner. Smaller.
You saw the fragile girl inside of me inside of every woman, a small wounded creature in place of your mother who had always before in all difficulties stood solid and fierce. But then I was a child who had lost her mother, but I was also a mother who had believed her child lost. I was a grotesque, a crossroad curiosity, that’s what you saw. Standing right there in the living room. All the sudden I remembered that quote from Dante: “The long theme drives me hard and everywhere the wondrous truth outstrips my staggering pen.”
“I’m sorry I worried you,” you said. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“Are you okay.”
“I’m okay.”
“Please tell me you won’t do that again, I couldn’t bear that again.”
“I won’t I’m sorry.”
“We can work out whatever it is, I don’t want you to be so unhappy.”
“It’s not your fault.” You said not knowing what else to say.
·
You didn’t know enough to say the truth. I didn’t either at the time. You didn’t know to say I had to go mother I was trying to find my life, trying to find where life was. You shouldn’t have worried see. Here I am in my overalls, my bag, here on my shoulder, my body, my long hair hanging down. I knew I would not die, you didn’t know but I knew.
You stood there at sixteen and saw for the first time that some damage cannot be taken back or fixed; and the realization of that came over you like a chill. You put your head down and cried. That was worse than any punishment I could give. You knew a bond had been broken, and you broke it. Snapping it underfoot as you left. Didn’t even stop to look, so eager were you to get away. Hoping to break the bonds of this town but you broke our bond. Or at least bent it to where the mark would show through.
·
Well seems like you’ve stood there for thirty years now, looking into my ravaged face wondering what part of that pain was you.
Is that what you left here to get away from? The closeness of death in my face, and something else small in the corner, you could see it too, the mark of your own death. Erased for this time but still showing through. I think that’s what it was. You were young to have seen that. But there it was.
And now look at yourself, raving through the graveyard. A full-grown woman with a husband and a child. Never chose to live close by when I was alive and now all the sudden desperate to find me, to find that heartbroken woman. Is this what you came to tell me? To stand there again. And still the answer not clear?
You did ruin forever my hope that some love could run a smooth course, that’s true. But in time I did forgive you, a mother’s love is deeper than forgiveness. Problem was you didn’t forgive yourself. And you stayed away from here because of that. Maybe.
I think in that headlong rush of yours to find who or what you were you left the only person who knew.
But you couldn’t see that then. You didn’t know it was me you were trying to talk to, it was your mother you were trying to ask. Who am I. See me. Tell me.
So you’re asking me now. I can only say what I know.
·
Do you remember the story As I Lay Dying. Comes to mind by coincidence, but of course the Oxford connection reminds me and I know you loved Faulkner. Do you remember the story. The family is trying to bury their mother, but the husband is so shiftless and stupid that he ruins everything he touches. Trouble is piled on trouble until you have vertigo from all the bad one fool man can do. By the time they finally get the mother buried one son is crippled, the daughter has been raped, the other son in the insane asylum and the husband gets a new wife. It all begins again.
But I think now, we can step outside if we like. Was it Herodotus who said “the same river twice?” How did that go? A river is the same then as now, or there is only one. It goes backward to lead us to the future as the Blanchard flows into the Maumee flows into the Ohio flows into the Mississippi on currents that move like the summer into autumn which is a shift isn’t it of light more than anything, a milder light, clear and blue. What if we are the stream that stays time together, a cord in the center of the rope wound round and round. Still I think the world, in its hands, its light, bones, water, trees, has memories of its own. Sometimes I can hear my great-great-grandfather, his voice like the sound of rushing water.