11

Truth at the Kitchen Stove

Photos found among Ronnie’s possessions after his death show the change in his spirits from his happy, bountiful years with Polly and Roy to, a few years later, his untrusting gaze as he stood a few miles from the orphanage where our mother sent him in 1942.

Over the next many years, with Ronnie gone, my folks made a long, hard climb, me in tow, to a fingertip’s touch on the lowest rung of the middle class. Ronnie benefited not one iota. I don’t remember asking where he’d gone.

He was right about Granddaddy Bishop being a grand old man. He entertained me with his merry ice-blue eyes and that thick silver mustache I tugged on, making him yowl in comic pain. Eventually, he moved out of our house and into town for the most implausible of jobs for an old blind man—that of night watchman.

Every month or two, Mom, Daddy, and I rode the pickup to Moneta to see my other grandpa and Miss Belle, now in a farmhouse Belle’s better-off sister rented for them. All I recall is a rickety back porch, a corncrib, the purr of contented chickens pecking at the ground, a lonely clock ticking in the sparsely furnished parlor, and more love than they ever offered Ronnie.

Moneta was a revelation to Daddy and to me. All we’d ever known were rich landowners and poor grunts like Daddy who wrestled vast geographies into idyllic showplaces. In Moneta, small farmers fed themselves out of their own rugged slices of earth. They prayed for more rain or less rain, and other than that, answered to no one.

My folks made the most of our dependent circumstances. They painted our tenant house white. Daddy refloored and screened the front porch. They planted lilacs, maples, mimosas, and an elm, creating a lush oasis in the middle of pastureland. Mom culled impatiens seeds from friends’ yards, and within a few years her flowers shimmered in a thigh-high bank of purple, pink, and red in the shadow of our porch. We put tables out there, and as lightning bugs blinked across the fields, our church friends dined on Mom’s just-decapitated-on-the-stump fried chicken, and biscuits made with hand-churned buttermilk. They nibbled cobs of Daddy’s hybrid yellow-and-white corn, which he called “cream and sugar.” Mom made peach ice cream and spiked her sweet iced tea with mint snipped from our creek out back.

Except for hungry black men asking permission to hunt groundhogs on the farm, we had hundreds of acres to ourselves most days after Daddy’s farm crew went home. Nothing lay between us and the mountains. No power lines, no buildings, nothing but wind, weather, and natural spectacle playing across the bumble-buzzed fields.

When I was nine, we watched from our front porch as Hurricane Hazel bent, but did not break, the giant trees a pasture away that made possible Mommy’s trademark brown-sugar pecan cookies. Another night we stepped into our front yard for a rare Southern aurora borealis that billowed pink and green curtains of light above the Southwest Mountains.

When I was little, Mom and Daddy began a practice that would later make my knocking on strangers’ doors as a reporter feel like old times. She delivered slices of pound cake or pecan cookies whenever she heard people were sick, lonely, or grieving. I tagged along to worn plantation cabins where kitchen doorways were so low even I at an early age ducked my head. At one house, a couple’s three drooling, moaning teenaged sons’ muscular dystrophy had turned their living room into a field hospital. The boys flopped their long limbs wildly on their beds as their feet contracted from muscle spasms, and I felt lucky.

We’d started attending South Plains Presbyterian Church, a 130-year-old congregation up the road from Bridlespur. A one-room church with clear blown-glass windows and a plain interior, South Plains steeped my folks in a rigid, hardworking Calvinism—key to Mom’s plan to make us respectable. She and Daddy gave up liquor and didn’t drink again until I was out of college. (At least four of Daddy’s six brothers and sisters were alcoholics. Mom’s drunken brother died when he fell, or was conked on the head, outside his favorite Ohio bar; the ninety dollars he’d flaunted was missing from his shirt pocket.)

South Plains was a cozy little white working-class congregation, where sun-scorched farmhands bowed their lily-white foreheads in their only hatless waking hour of the week. Every Sunday morning, Mom ironed Daddy’s shirt and parted his hair, which she’d shampooed the night before as he soaked off the farm dirt in our cast-iron tub. Daddy became the church’s top elected layman.

Mom was recruited for top roles, but she declined. She didn’t tell them why, but it was Ronnie. “I wasn’t worthy. I sinned,” she explained later. Still, she’d slip into her brown-and-white spectator pumps to lead the church women and the local home economics club. In the years following Ronnie’s departure, she was finally recovering from the taint of having had him.

Daddy was mentored by our minister, a progressive, pipe-puffing intellectual of Scottish descent, the fifth generation in his family to minister to humble farmers. The two men leaned on Bridlespur’s fences for hours to talk about nature, God, and agriculture. I was mentored by his wife, Fanny, a college-trained biologist who showed me the design of spiderwebs and the life cycle of Lunaria annua, the money plant, with seedpods like silver dollars. She introduced me to National Geographic, cranked up her Metropolitan Opera records, and encouraged my folks to think about piano lessons and college for me. Before my teens, I was banging out an off-tune “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” on the church’s tinny upright.

Fanny was the first woman I knew who shunned permanents, girdles, and stockings. Ladylike, with her bare knees together and her skirt tucked around them, her shiny brown hair carefully pinned into a bun, she was lovely without makeup. I’d sit by her in church and watch as she observed birds through the windows during her husband’s long prayers.

The women of South Plains found her odd. They whispered as she slipped their home-baked ham biscuits into her purse at potlucks so she wouldn’t have to cook that night. Farm wives took pride in fattening their husbands; a man’s beefy frame advertised his wife’s good cooking. Fanny was so thrifty that she’d cut a slice of Wonder Bread in two—the long way—for a sandwich so thin the tomato showed pink through the bread. Her husband was skinny. Visiting a friend’s bathroom, she once sprinkled powder into her shoes, only to discover, as the skin of her soles began to pucker, that it wasn’t talcum; it was dental adhesive.

I wanted to be like Fanny—my own authentic, quirky self, not so concerned with what people thought. This plan didn’t align with Mom’s for me.

She and I would wrestle for the next sixty years over the tension represented by the church ladies and Fanny—between behaving conventionally and feeling free to be our own true selves. Mom needed people, especially other women, to approve of her, and as part of that, she needed me to be a docile yes-ma’am kind of girl. I strained at that leash. I was Exhibit A of her attentive mothering. She was forever straightening my collar and fussing with my hair. Couldn’t she see that all that self-consciousness was no way to live?

* * *

CHRISTMAS MORNINGS, WE’D put on our Sunday best and ride the pickup over to the McIntyres’ to admire their tree and sip eggnog from silver cups. They might give us a jar of kumquats from their new winter place in Florida, or in the heyday of John F. Kennedy, an authentic Massachusetts rocker like his. Later on, they shocked us with the gift of a hundred shares of General Motors stock, millions of which, because of an antitrust controversy, were being divested by du Pont descendants like Anne McIntyre.

Mom was trying to squelch her self-doubts, but she never learned to drive. She practiced in the stick-shift pickup on the farm road until she crashed through a gate. A dog leapt out the back and ran away. Daddy and I teased her: Even the dog’s scared of your driving. She quit. We robbed her of self-respect. Driving would have done wonders for her confidence.

She took charge anyway. There wouldn’t be enough money from Daddy’s check for my college tuition, so when I was eleven, she signed on as a department store clerk. Another downtown worker out our way drove her for a dollar a week. The cook at the big house who’d felt sorry for us because of our worn clothes cheered the new outfits bought with Mom’s store discount.

I’d linger along the aisles of the high-ceilinged main floor, inhale cologne spritzes wafting from the perfume counter, take in the pleasant chatter of women shoppers talking with the clerks, and savor this twinkly scene of midcentury commerce. Mom was doing so much better that she urged other Keswick women and their daughters to work there, giving them all a leg up.

After ten years, though, Mom was fed up with the low pay. She saw old women working there on wobbly legs because their meager Social Security wouldn’t allow them to retire. Mom became a medical records clerk at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, with health insurance, a pension plan, and a credit union. At lunch break on her first payday, she rode the bus all the way back to the store to show her friends her pay stub.

Because of Mom, I went to college—the first in her family—and because I went to college, I went to graduate school and earned two master’s degrees. Because of her, she and Daddy traveled to Canada, the Great Lakes, and New England, and because of her, they eventually bought their first home, paying it off in an astonishing six months.

* * *

IN THE MIDDLE of June 1978, I came home to Bridlespur. I was getting ready to wander around Europe for five months, something I don’t think even the McIntyres had done.

For all my misgivings about Keswick, once I moved to noisier, dirtier places like Washington, New York, and Philadelphia, I came to appreciate the place. I would return and collapse like everybody else into the peace of its calming hills.

I was at the top of my game. I was thirty-two and divorced, having saved myself from an unhappy marriage. I was an up-and-coming investigative reporter in the heady era after Woodward and Bernstein drove Richard Nixon from the White House. I’d earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and gone to work for the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, a paper dedicated to fearless journalism. Now the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Observer’s big sister in the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, wanted to hire me.

Newspapers had pushed through my shyness. Either I got out there and interviewed people, or I’d wind up in a secretarial pool. Before long, I liked nothing more than rapping on doors on backstreets and country roads, taking in the wringer washers on porches, the long johns on the clothesline, the linoleum worn to wood in front of the kitchen sink from a lifetime of dishwashing.

For the Observer, I’d written a biographical series on Charlotte’s favorite son, evangelist Billy Graham, and it was about to be made into a quickie hardback by a New York publisher. For a week’s worth of rewrites, they’d paid me $10,000, more than enough for Europe.

* * *

I ARRIVED AT Bridlespur late one evening, my Volkswagen Beetle stuffed with clothes to sort through for my trip. I hugged and kissed my folks, dropped my luggage at the bottom of the narrow stairs, and hurried up to my old room to bed.

Sleep at our house was limb-stretching bliss. Our two upstairs bedrooms, my folks’ and mine, shared a common chimney that pierced the middle of the century-old house. Each spring, Daddy installed fans in the fireplace of each bedroom. We opened windows at the heads of our beds, set the fans on reverse, and slept all summer with cool mountain air flowing across our mattresses while the day’s heat flew up the chimney. I’d wake up to the songs of meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds, descendants of the grassland nesters that scored my childhood’s soundtrack.

Over the next few days, I bragged to the folks that I would wander around whatever countries I spontaneously chose, and I would do this all alone. That I had the cash, the freedom, the guts, and especially the sense of worth to make this trip amazed them. They savored my supper-table bravado with tickled glances at each other, a wordless celebration: They’d helped their only child position herself to cross the Atlantic for no other reason than her own curiosity.

One reason I was there was that I needed a passport. It would take days for my application to clear, and what sweeter place to wait? I’d lost my birth certificate, a primary requirement for a passport, and Mom didn’t have a copy. So one pleasant Wednesday morning I headed out in my navy-blue Bug for an hour’s drive to Richmond and the state health department’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. The clerk took little time in making a certified copy for me.

I don’t remember when it was that I took a good look at the yellow, black, and blue document—maybe as soon as I got in my car, maybe during a gas station stop on the way home to Keswick. I recognized Mom’s careful longhand on the certificate. In 1945, when I was born, Virginia’s birth certificate was essentially a questionnaire filled out by the mother: the father’s name, race, birthplace, occupation, age at the time of the baby’s birth, and all the same information for the mother. Daddy was twenty-seven; Mom was twenty-nine. She wrote my name—Mary Carter Bishop—centered on a line and stretched out in a proud, confident script, like, ta-da, she was introducing me to the world.

Then I reached section 21, headed “Children Born to This Mother.” The question was “How many other children of this mother are now living?” After this, my mother wrote a clear, unequivocal numeral “1.”

That was odd. She’d had that miscarriage a year or two before I was born. But how could my extremely cautious mother confuse a long-buried fetus with a living child? She handled bureaucracy with dead seriousness. She wouldn’t have slipped up on her only child’s birth certificate.

* * *

I GOT HOME around five thirty. Mom was frying chicken at the electric stove. “How’d it go?” she asked.

“Good.” I watched as she flipped the legs and the thighs. Through the window beside her, tall field grasses moved in the wind.

I needed to know about that birth certificate. I fished it out of my purse in another room and brought it to her. I expected this question to be resolved in a few seconds.

“How come you put a one here?” I pointed to the section on other children. She wiped her hand on her apron and looked at the certificate before handing it back. She didn’t raise her voice or look startled when, while turning over a sizzling thigh, she nonchalantly said, “You know who that is.”

I stared at her, my face searching hers. “No, I don’t know who that is.” She laughed stiffly and looked back at the frying pan. How could she think I knew?

Then, with a hint of “you must know” impatience, she uttered two words that sent my worldview reeling:

It’s Ronnie.

She dispensed this information as lightly as the flour she was now sprinkling into the pan to make the gravy.

Ronnie Overstreet? That skinny, unhappy kid who lived on the farm when I was little? The boy she said was my cousin?

She told me at the stove that she’d gotten pregnant at eighteen, years before she met Daddy. “I made a mistake,” she said, lowering her voice.

Over the next day or so, she revealed that before they married, she told Daddy about Ronnie. Daddy promised never to mention her first pregnancy again, she said, with tears in her eyes, and that he never did. To Mom, his silence on the subject was a badge of love.

Daddy came into the kitchen from late-day chores. She whispered something to him. Head-to-head, they shared a private, muted, uncomfortable laugh. The secret they’d kept for decades was out of the cupboard and flitting among us like a moth.

We didn’t talk about it at supper. I’d stepped in something sticky. I wanted to scrape it off.

* * *

IN THE WAY we often underreact to the biggest news in our lives, I absorbed all this in silence. I wandered away from my folks. I went to my room and fiddled with clothes for my trip.

My God. Ronnie Overstreet was my brother. My half brother. But still, my brother.

He was the gloomiest person I’d ever seen. When I was just venturing from my playpen, he was a hunch-shouldered, greasy-haired, asthmatic boy of twelve. He wore rough dark-plaid jackets and hunting caps with the earflaps down, a melancholy boy hidden in sad clothes.

On the rare occasion he was in our house, he quietly glared at us, fuming at our cozy life. In my contentment, I never bothered to wonder where he slept, who fed him, or who took care of him. It was clear my parents were uncomfortable with him around.

This woman, this mother of mine, I didn’t know her after all.

Of all the mothers in the world, how could this all-giving one of mine, this overprotective, selfless parent who on so little money dressed me like a little empress, scraped together dollars to rent my high school band clarinet, and packed me off to summer camp, also be the mother of that miserable boy?

* * *

THAT NIGHT, I lay in the bed where I’d slept as a child. Of the two upstairs rooms, I had the better one. Daddy needed to be able to look out over the dairy barn, the stables, the cows, the sheep, and to listen for the burglar alarm at the big house. He and Mom took the room on that side.

From my bed I could lie on my stomach and gaze through the window at the head of my bed, across the fields to Sugarloaf Mountain in the distance. In winter, I’d fall asleep in the most delicious of circumstances—snug under quilts and watching snow silently creep over the ridge, knowing I would awake to hear the Motorola radio atop the fridge downstairs announcing there’d be no school.

But that June night when my brother was born in my mind, I lay sleepless in the cool darkness, wondering about Ronnie, who his father was, and how it could be that I had a brother out there somewhere. Even then, I knew Ronnie had it hard; even then, I knew the contrasts between us. The very day I’d felt so cheeky, I’d been pulled back into the family shame.