“MY FATHER DECIDED HE AND HIS BRIDE WOULD move to North Carolina. I can see him sheerly breathless over the idea of moving himself and a young girl to a new part of the country, working six days a week from can-see to can’t-see.
Work and toil may have been my father’s bloodtraits but he counted overmuch in the idea that my mother should care as much about making something from nothing as he did. She promised to honor and cherish and obey and all the other, but she never saw the marriage as enrollment for torture. He didn’t own her like a plow or a rake. If she wasn’t prone to stay at home and let her mother tell her what to do, she certainly wasn’t going to take field orders from a young man she had known for a year.
Once I asked my mother, Do you think you ever said or did anything in the creekbed, tarried and dallied or cooed, to the point he would believe he’d found a girl who’d knock herself out working on a farm?
No. Absolutely not.
I said, Then if you didn’t promise to work beside him, why did he think you would pull as hard as he pulled?
Because I was a young girl and he knew I loved him, as much as a sixteen-year-old child can love a man. He had told about water flowing forever downhill and he’d told me my father was ignorant and lazy, not cursed. He knew I trusted him and would more than likely yearn for things to do in his favor. He also knew that I knew how to work because Pop drank like he did and left work to the women. He had ridden by our fields and seen me getting up fodder, and he was accustomed to the sight of me and all my sisters, the three who could work plus the three little ones, strewn out across afield like seeds.
Charles rolled all these ideas and sights of me together in his hands and opened them again and saw me there helping him break field boulders with a pickax, saying if we worked like this for the rest of our lives we might die thriving. But instead, when we got to the place in North Carolina I had to tell Charles outright that I had worked in Kentucky and now I wanted a rest. He had very short patience with this. This is certainly not what he had planned. I had thought that marrying him and leaving my school and my sisters would be as plain as spoken words, that I was saying without actually saying, I’m marrying you for love and rest.
I was so young and I already needed to be spelled from labor. Not only did I seek rest, I needed a little baby to help find the rest. In my home, I had always treated my mother’s new babies like dolls. I had always taken the least baby to bed with me. Sleep was impossible without a baby in the crook of my arm. Sleep was denied me all night and in the mornings Charles urged me to help him cut down trees and coarse vines all day.
But even if I could’ve figured out how to get back home, I don’t think I would’ve left. I’d made my choice, and when I was tempted to go back to Bell County, I seemed to hear across the woods and mountains my father screaming for his egg and my mother screaming at me for cooking it. So I decided to stay with Charles and see what would happen to me, and until I understood that I had a hand in making whatever happened happen, I was a very sad young girl.
My father told her that working with him would take her mind off a baby, which was more or less like asking her to sing for her supper. I wouldn’t have advised him to do this. During all the time he made her hold out waiting she became very indifferent to him, and in her thinking she began to go her own way. Finally, in 1920 she found her baby, and this was me. By then her affections for my father were all but spoiled.
She did, though, the following year try for another child, but then lost the little fellow within three weeks of the birthing. Thus I actually got to be the baby twice when this one born next to me died. My mother could then have no other babies due to feminine obstacles, but I was not a lonesome child. She was a grand companion. She loved to tell me about myself. I was apparently as good as pie and rarely cried.
And you had one twig of auburn hair. I sewed you a beautiful white cotton petticoat of many layers and a long white gown of piqué. You were never sick a day as a tiny baby although I told your father that your ears were too tender for the wind and thus you couldn’t be taken out to the fields. When he believed your ears had had time to harden off, he said, What about now? And I said, No, not now. I told him you had difficulty breathing outdoors. As far as your father knew, you went from ear to eye to nose and throat troubles, and taking you out to a cotton field strapped to my chest would have been your kiss of death. He didn’t like you very much from the start, and this is my fault all around. But you weren’t liking him very much either. You cried whenever he picked you up. He had big hard hands.
I probably cried because I was accustomed to being held in a happy fashion, and the way I bunched up around my father didn’t stop when I was out of his arms and then crawling and then walking. He put me off continuously. I remember one afternoon sitting on a rug, drawing pictures from out of a book and enjoying my mother chitter-chattering when he came in from work. When the door closed behind him, I thought, He’s come home to ruin our day. I assumed this was his intention. This was my first original thought of my father.
He was only happy once a year, after a crop was in and sold and after he’d squeezed every bit of gristmill money he could from his customers. By the time I was six or seven, I linked September and dry maple leaves blowing across our yard with my father’s only time of pleasure.
He’d sit at the supper table and say, Yes, this time-a-year all I’m thinking about is who all do I owe money to and who all and how much is owing me.
Then he’d take out his pocketbook and give my mother and me money and tell us that would be all the money we’d see for another year. But we knew better. My mother always managed to come up with more than her allowance, and she always managed to explain her doings nicely.
My mother loved fabric, and since my father would never have known the price difference between organdy or chintz or chiffon, she educated him as she saw fit. In September when he was so enthusiastic about life and the world and even his wife and child, my mother would take the money he gave us to town and buy something like a beautiful length of chintz and come home and school him.
Charles, the gingham was through the roof. Through the roof! So I did you a favor and bought this. I know it seems incredible that a simple cotton runs more than chintz. I could hardly believe it myself. But the looming mills, from what I understand, have had a hard time getting rid of chintz, it being so bold, and they’ve had to mark the bolts down to almost nothing. I’m not thrilled with it, but the gingham was high as a cat’s back, and Betty’s simply splitting out of her old clothes like a grasshopper. She had to have something to wear! I don’t mind going about gaudy to save you money, and neither does she. We’re both glad to do it.
He’d mumble and grumble about how his mother would never have worn anything so ugly, and then he’d go back out and work, work, work the rest of the year, waking at four and calling it morning, leaving home and coming home daily in the dark. When September came back around my mother and I would go out again and handle every bolt of fabric in town and come home with Venice lace passing for irregular eyelet and beaded English netting passing for outdated and unwanted millinery stock.
The two salesladies we dealt with understood that this was our folly, and often we would get home and see that buttons and ribbon had been hidden in the bottoms of our boxes. We occasionally sat with these two women behind the counter and ate candy, unpaid for, and scrutinized pattern books. This is where, I’m sure, I learned to recognize style, and I still tend to link style with Butterick’s and McCall’s pattern books and lovely piece candies pressed into shapes.
I know that for myself I felt very guilty at times about the deceit, but when my mother and I were pinning and basting a lovely chintz up on each other and I saw how happy she was, I felt nothing but pleasure. There was no pleasure in life for my father, but that wasn’t our fault. We didn’t plant in him a thirst for work. He said God and his family inspired him to strive, in spite of the fact that he didn’t keep up with his relations and he never went to church. His gristmill served as church, and he’d go there on Sunday and sweep and repair, wishing it was Monday.
I more or less slipped into his work-and-earn-all-you-can frame of mind when I was about nine or ten, though just for a moment. From the back of Grier’s Almanac I secretly applied for a case of rosebud salve, which avowed to do marvelous things for the complexion but merely smelled good. I grew lazy and uninterested, as children will, and let it set and set and didn’t sell it. It sat unopened on the pantry shelves with all the beets and pickles and stewed tomatoes, and then my father decided he’d like a jar of something and, very out of character, got it himself. And, of course, there was the box. My mother hopped in on my behalf and promised I would sell the salve immediately, and in one afternoon she got rid of the entire case. She sold a few jars at the store, though most of the salve she sold to herself, and thus my mother smelled of roses well into the Depression.