I am ten and standing in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom. My mother is lying in her evening clothes, a cream pantsuit and heels, her towering five-foot-eight frame prone like a felled tree on the hardwood floor of the hallway. It’s almost midnight. My father is crouched beside her, one hand on his bent thigh. Murtle, our latest live-in, is crouching, then standing, then crouching again. She is in her uniform, though it is half zipped, revealing the upper part of her bare back, and she is barefoot and not wearing stockings.
“Go back to bed, Christine,” my father says, barely glancing at me.
Murtle takes my arm and gently guides me away from my parents’ room, where I had been asleep in their bed, waiting for their return from a dinner party. She leads me through the door of my brothers’ rooms and into the playroom.
“The ambulance weel be coming,” Murtle says. Her voice is lilting and soft, though the pressure of her squeeze on my arm is firm. “Your mother weel be fine.”
From the playroom I peer through the crack in the door and into the dim hallway. Murtle and my father stand as men in jumpsuits lift my mother onto a gurney, then follow the men as they push it, its wheels rolling loudly on the bare wood, away down the hall.
* * *
It’s springtime and my mother, nine, walks through her father’s orchards with Topsy, her family’s Saint Bernard. Topsy touches the back of my mother’s leg with her cold nose. When her father brought the puppy home, she was tiny with oversize paws. Now, at three, she is big enough for my mother to ride. Though the farm is filled with dogs, her mother always keeps a small dog—there have been multiple Tippys, Jippys, Trixies, Skippys, Spottys, Fidos, and two Lassies, but Topsy is my mother’s favorite. The dog never leaves my mother’s side, even standing guard across her body as she plays in the sandbox.
My mother reaches out to pet Topsy with her left arm, crooked at the elbow, the result of a fall from a stepladder when she was fourteen months old. The doctor, who had been retrieved from a Sunday night church meeting, didn’t set the bone correctly. He also administered too much ether, which resulted in ether pneumonia. By the time her parents took her to a specialist in St. Louis, it was too late to correct the set.
Girl and dog pass through the rows of fruit trees. It is the job of my mother and her older sister, Audrey, to pick the fruit for eating or canning, but it is early in the season and the trees are still heavy with blossoms. Spring is the time to catch bullfrogs and bring them home to eat, their legs still jumping in the pot while they cook. It’s a time of waiting, for the lilacs to bloom at the Nessings’ up the street, for the yellow roses to open along her mother’s trellises, and of course for the fruit blossoms: apricot, apple, peach, plum, pear. Spring brings freshness and life, the dark of the freshly plowed pasture, the feel of the smooth, slick, black soil of her father’s first furrow between my mother’s bare toes—the first plow line determining all the others, its degree of straightness being the mark of a good farmer. Spring brings the winds of March, the thundershowers of April, the tiny streams rushing down the tracks of the field road, the peachy oranges and pinks of the sunsets after a late-afternoon rain, the green-and- yellow tornadoes. It also brings the funnel cloud when the sky becomes as dark as the newly plowed earth and my mother’s family rushes to the cellar, freshly picked raspberries spilling onto the porch, a flying sheet of tin roof slicing through the air past Uncle Russell’s head, her mother holding the screen door closed while the apricot tree uproots ten feet away.
My mother leaves the fruit trees and heads toward the riverbank. When my grandmother married, her own mother believed her daughter was moving to Siberia. My grandmother had spent her childhood in St. Louis; her mother had been a schoolteacher, her family city folk. In her new home as a young bride, my grandmother had to carry any water she needed from the pump in the chicken yard past the coal shed and the smokehouse, where the sausages were hung, into the house. The well was set up with ropes and pulleys to draw up the milk and butter that was kept suspended just above the water in buckets to keep it cold. There was no heating, no plumbing. In the winter, when my grandmother mopped the kitchen floor, it froze. Coal was used to light the stove in the kitchen, the oil stove in the dining room. The cistern box on the roof collected just enough rainwater for washing hair or making soap, which required an interminable amount of stirring. My grandmother used the lye and all the fats and oils she had saved for several months just for this purpose. The cistern box was also a handy place for my mother and her sister to churn ice cream using the cream their mother had saved. They sat on the freezer loaded with rock salt and covered with a gunny sack and talked while they cranked the core for homemade root beer, shaking it to see who could get the most foam. After church in the summertime, my mother’s mother always cooked the same Sunday dinner: fried chicken dipped first in flour mixed with salt and pepper, mashed potatoes and milk gravy made by using grease the chicken had been fried in, adding flour to brown it slightly, and pouring the milk in until it was smooth and creamy. Vegetables were simple and incidental, always corn on the cob or something green from the garden. My mother loved these dinners, as she loved resting all Sunday afternoon, reading the funnies, playing games with the dogs. Late afternoons her family, as did most everyone else’s, went for a Sunday ride, usually to the island farm to observe the progress of the crops or to the farms of customers—my mother’s father sold tractors in addition to his farming—to compare progress. My mother’s house had been a stagecoach stop. Her grandmother told her about storing cabbages, apples, and carrots in the ground during winter; digging the burrow and laying the vegetables with hay and dirt on top so the freeze didn’t reach the food. As a little girl, this grandmother had, from my mother’s upstairs bedroom window, watched Native Americans, faces bright with war paint, canoe down Choteau Slough, which ran beside their home and served as a cutoff before a dangerous stretch of the Mississippi, where the river passes over a series of rocky ledges called Chain of Rocks Reach. The house, built by these grandparents, had been a labor of love, constructed entirely with wood and pegs. Even the spiral staircase leading to the bedroom had been assembled without nails.
At the bank of the levee, my mother checks, as she does each day, to see if the pussy willows are out. It seems like magic that from a plant stalk comes curled fur as soft as the newborn kittens in the barn. Not yet—they are green buds. At the crest of the levee embankment, dog and girl meander alongside the river. The Mississippi brought my mother’s family to Illinois. Her great-grandfather, a cabinetmaker from Switzerland, had come up from New Orleans on a riverboat. The money he’d earned for the trip was counterfeit, a fact he’d discovered only while attempting to settle his passage—at which point the riverboat captain steamed to shore and deposited him on a steep bank just south of St. Louis.
On this morning the river is brown and muscled, moving fast, riding high on its banks. My grandmother sits at the kitchen table in the mornings now, the radio on, listening to the river forecast. The past few days have been warm and the snows are melting in the north. The farm sits in a basin that centuries ago was part of the river itself. Now that it’s spring, my mother’s father and uncles police the levee daily for fox or mole holes, anything that might allow for a break. Boys from town, all the farmers within miles, and the Army Corps of Engineers help fill and carry sandbags to build the levee higher if a crest is predicted. If the levee breaks right at the house, the river will take everything in one giant roar. One morning last spring, after a levee break half a mile away, my mother woke to cold black water lapping then climbing the stairs of their basement. It filled the kitchen, the living room, and the dining room ankle-deep. Later she rode with her father in his boat across the island fields, looking down at the tops of the yellow flowers as they passed over the sunflower patch. One March, Uncle Eck, downriver, had the river change course and most of his farm washed away. But a flood is both a blessing and a curse; deafening from miles away, it carries the silt and topsoil that fertilizes the land.
My mother stops now for a moment to admire the Chain of Rocks Bridge, which spans the Chain of Rocks Reach. Here the river makes a wide curve known as Sawyer Bend, named for Tom Sawyer’s legendary adventures. For all the hours she spends with Topsy, wandering along the sandy banks of the Mississippi, my mother is most excited whenever the opportunity arises to ride in the car with her father across this one-lane bridge, which, because of its forty-five-degree turn in the middle, is, in itself, a dangerous journey. At the turn, a car has to slow, but this is what my mother waits for. Suspended over the mighty bend, she drinks in the view, both upriver and down, of the Mississippi rushing on its long journey to the Gulf. My mother often imagines Huck and Tom hanging out in the sloughs she knows so well around the islands her father farms, Gabaret Island and its neighbor, Mosenthein. But she can’t fathom the bravery, even in story, that allowed them to dare travel the long stretch of formidable river in between, and she is grateful to be crossing it on a bridge and not in a homemade raft.
My mother and Topsy head down from the levee, back through the pastures, to the house and the barn. Before Topsy, my mother had loved Puzzums, named by her mother after a dog in the Barney Google cartoon strip. My grandfather hacked off all their small dogs’ tails at the second joint, but Puzzums was born a natural bobtail. My mother dressed the little dog in doll clothes, gave her rides in her doll buggy, and set up the play table where Puzzums sat at her own place mat with her own cup of tea. One afternoon a carful of teenagers, driving on the roadway in front of my mother’s house, swerved their convertible at the dog, who liked to chase passing cars. Laughing, they doubled back and ran her over as my mother and Audrey watched in horror. My grandmother consoled my mother with a doll she had stored away for Christmas. Puzzums was buried in the doll’s box, beside the sandbox, the spot outlined with stones. Later a river flood caved in the dog’s grave.
My mother now reaches her grandfather’s potato field, which sits on a portion of her father’s land. On summer nights she sits inside the screened-in porch, watching the fireflies hover over the long rows of dark green plants. Her grandfather grows potatoes, as his father did before him. When she visits his farm, my mother walks out to the tomato field, holding a tin can with a wire handle to collect the green tomato worms off the plants. On the hottest days, her grandfather drives his hay wagon filled with watermelons to the workers in the fields who are hired from the neighboring town of Venice. These workers aren’t allowed on the streets in white towns after dark, but she has noticed how much they love her grandfather. As they stroll along the field road, my great-grandfather sings their spirituals to her:
I’m a comin’, I’m a comin’,
for my head is bending low;
I hear the angel voices calling
“Old Black Joe.”
* * *
My mother and Topsy reach the barn. Just in front of the hay entrance, Jack, the hired hand’s German shepherd, is gnawing a bone. Topsy trots over and Jack reluctantly gives up the bone to the bigger dog. My mother squats to put her arm over Jack’s shoulders to console him. Rather than allowing himself to be soothed, the dog lunges, grabbing her face in his jaws. She sees his tongue and throat as he shakes her like a doll.
“Jack!” Uncle Russell roars. He had been setting up a combine nearby. The German shepherd drops my mother, and Russell picks her up and runs with her, her face bloodied, into the house.
In town, the doctor cauterizes the slashes below both eyes, the teeth marks on her eyelids and over her jugular vein; the gash was deep but spared the vein.
That night my grandfather announces he is giving Topsy to a farm four hours away. Once, my mother had been throwing rocks against the side of the coal shed to make her terrier, Scotty, bark at her. Topsy, ever protective, grabbed the animal in her jaws and shook the smaller dog until she was dead.
“He feels Topsy can be unpredictable, too. She could do the same, or worse,” her mother says. “To you or to a neighbor child.”
My mother pleads for him to change his mind, tells him Topsy, unlike Jack, would never hurt a child. But her father, a staunch, practical man, is unmoved. Two days later he packs Topsy into his Ford and heads off, tires crunching across the gravel.
* * *
My mother, eleven, is riding, her legs dangling, on a two-ton trailer behind the tractor Audrey is driving through the cow pasture. It’s July, and she and her sister are helping their father transport the last load of hay into the barn before the dark clouds overhead open, the forecast calling for a massive rainstorm. This hay crop is doubly important, since her father’s main source of income, his soybean crop, was wiped away by a big flood two weeks before. Later my mother will tell me that her father was an organic farmer before the techniques he employed were identified as such. He used the rotation system, green cover crops, and wheat-spread manure. He kept his own grain for seed, thus insuring that there were neither weeds nor herbicides. He was the first farmer in his area to plant alfalfa, and gauged its superior nutritional value by the shining health of his animals. Other farmers gathered to buy his seed and soon clamored for it until it became a standard crop. He was the first to farm soybeans, noting that this crop added nitrogen to the soil. His crops always looked twice as green and full as the fields of the farmers who used other methods.
Now my grandfather reaches his hand out and taps my mother’s knee. Be careful, he tells her, pointing to the taller-than-he-is wheel just in front of her legs. “If you fall, you’ll go under the wheel.” But he isn’t worried. Audrey, four years my mother’s senior, stays close in the kitchen, helping her mother with the cooking and cleaning. It is my mother, blond-haired, blue-eyed, who follows him in the fields, picking peaches from the trees while he plows, often riding beside him in the tractor.
On this day a stray baling wire, looped on both ends, lies unseen in the pasture just ahead of the tractor. As they pass over it, one loop catches my mother’s foot. As the other end of the wire vanishes under the rolling wheel, it pulls my mother, before my grandfather can grab her, off her seat and drags her under the trailer. My mother sees the wheel coming and throws her head out of the way at the last minute. The wheel pushes her body a few inches into the moist ground as it rolls directly over her chest. She struggles to her knees, unable to take in a breath. Ray, the hired hand who had been walking beside the trailer, reaches her first. Without waiting for instructions, he kneels, puts his mouth over hers, forces his hot breath into her crushed lungs, one breath, two breaths, three. Ray, her father, and Audrey wait for my mother to draw the tiniest sip of thin, ragged air, though her chest feels as if the weight of the trailer is still upon it. Then Ray lifts her, heading through the pasture toward the house as my grandfather runs to get the car. In Ray’s arms my mother begins to pray silently over and over, Please, dear God, don’t let me die.
My mother holds tightly to the hand strap in the backseat of her father’s ’41 bright blue satin-interior Chrysler New Yorker, where the year before she had thrown up pineapple soda during a whooping-cough attack. Now the road to town is almost inaccessible. Filled with ruts and ditches from a flood a few months before, each bump is an explosion of white fire in her chest. The pastures out the window are going in and out of focus, and the black, framing her periphery, is closing in.
“Am I going to die?” she asks.
“Not if you’re a very good girl,” her father says.
At the hospital my mother loses consciousness. The doctors tell my grandparents that her heart and windpipe have been pushed to one side, and one entire lung and half of the other are crushed. They say she will not live through the night. One doctor wants to operate; the other, a specialist from St. Louis, does not. The specialist wins—there will be no surgery—an outcome, my mother will later say, that most likely saved her life.
Outside her room, where her parents and sister hope for news that she has awakened, Audrey attempts to hug her mother and knocks my grandmother’s only pair of glasses from her face. They shatter on the floor.
In her unconscious sleep, my mother whistles for her dogs all night long.
* * *
My mother spends the summer in the hospital. Benny Miller, who owns the drugstore in town with the soda fountain, gives her carte blanche for anything she wants. She orders only once: a cherry nut sundae with whipped cream and three kinds of ice cream. Sulfa drugs, the forerunners to antibiotics, have just been discovered, and my grandparents are told how lucky they are to have the miracle drug to keep infections at bay. Later my mother will say that even at that time she felt these drugs were unnecessary and merely polluted her body and no doubt contributed to her total loss of appetite. In the fall, the doctor instructs her to strengthen her lungs by blowing balloons or playing a wind musical instrument, so upon entering high school, she joins the band, choosing to play the same instrument as Audrey: the bassoon. The following spring, my mother performs Mozart’s B-Flat Concerto for the bassoon, which she transposed note by note by ear from a recording, wins a statewide contest, and is chosen Outstanding Woodwind Soloist. Also that spring she has begun to notice unexplained headaches, a rash here and there. The doctor suggests chlorinated water is detrimental to the sinuses and recommends she stay away from the community pool. He administers a scratch test and determines she is allergic to berries, wheat, grass—a majority of basic foods. The doctor does not offer suggestions for alternative diets, however. It’s 1944 and he doesn’t know any. My mother, already uncomfortable in the water, is happy to avoid swimming. Her parents encourage her to wear shoes when she walks through the pasture, to avoid direct contact with grass.
My mother is thirteen when the Army Corps of Engineers, her family’s ally through many floods, delivers the news that the United States government, through the power of eminent domain, has allocated most of her father’s farm for the purpose of building a canal that will bypass the dangerous Chain of Rocks Reach. The acreage allocated for the canal amounts to two-thirds of the farm and will be taken out of the very middle of it. For remuneration, the government offers to pay my mother’s father one thousand dollars. Moving to a new farm marked the beginning of an irrevocable separation between her and the world of nature, my mother would later write in private notes. Although her father continued to farm close to one thousand acres at various other locations, the new home farm contained only one hundred acres, which put my mother close to neighbors on almost all sides. Though soon, in high school, she discovers her new love, music and high school band, as she grows into a beauty and is elected May Queen her senior year. She is accepted to Lindenwood College, twenty-six miles away, where she majors in music and plays field hockey, wearing a special mask to protect her mouth for the bassoon. In college, her struggles with her health continue. She finds herself falling asleep at inopportune times: in her humanities class after lunch, and during orchestra practice, where she dozes off during the sixteen-bar rests, falling asleep while counting measures, a sixth sense waking her up just in time for entry. Her parents order tests, including a basal metabolism test that requires the wearing of a claustrophobic mask she has to breathe in and out of. No cause for her inability to stay awake is found.
* * *
My mother is twenty-eight and visiting New York City for the first time with the only friend we will ever meet from her childhood, Jean Bilbrey. Jean’s fiancé owns the St. Louis Cardinals. He has a friend in New York, my father, who can show them around town. Without taking the time to meet them, my father puts them in the care of one of his producers, Ty Lubell, and goes off to Bermuda to fish. My mother is driven around New York City, looking up openmouthed at the skyscrapers through the open roof of Ty’s blue Ford Thunderbird convertible. She will later laugh that while waiting at curbs to cross the street with Jean, she paces, misunderstanding the meaning of the NO STANDING signs.
Meanwhile, my father is battling a two-hundred-pound blue marlin. The fishing guide is young. He drives the boat too far to the left as the giant fish pulls the line under the bow to the right, torquing my father’s shoulder, pulling muscle from bone. When my mother and Jean stop by my father’s office on their last day to say thank you to Ty, my father is there, his arm in a sling, back from his trip a day early.
At five foot eight, my mother looks every bit what she is: a model and, as Miss Missouri, five years before, a Miss America beauty pageant top-ten finalist. On this day, her shining chestnut hair bounces at her shoulders. She wears dark red lipstick, a white cotton two-piece knit dress trimmed in red and navy that she proudly sewed herself, red high heels, and red stockings. My father, who had never believed he was good-looking, must have imagined himself with my mother on his arm. My mother, who will tell me she fell in love with my father’s intellect, must have imagined herself living the glamorous life of a broadcasting executive’s wife. For one year they travel back and forth cross-country. My father visits my mother’s family’s farm. She makes trips to his bachelor apartment on Fifth Avenue. In New York she proudly wears her home-sewn outfits from the Vogue and McCall’s patterns she elaborates on with her own touches to produce stylish two-piece knits, knee-length skirts with gold-buttoned matching jackets. In New York she shakes off any last remnants of her Missouri farm-girl childhood to reveal the elegant being she has known herself all along to be.
They talk of eloping. The weekend before they are supposed to marry, my father calls my mother to tell her he is feeling unsure. She reassures him, “I’ll come up anyway,” since this is a visit they have already planned and she already has her plane tickets. She tells him, “No pressure,” they can have their visit, a visit that doesn’t have to mean anything more. A month later she learns she is pregnant with me.
* * *
My mother and father have been married for three months. They sit at Joe’s, somewhere on the outskirts of New York, my father’s favorite restaurant, facing each other across the square wooden table. Their laminated menus are lying open across their plates.
My mother has mentioned my father’s working late on Tuesday nights. Once a week, on Tuesdays, Shirley, my father’s only sibling, comes over to their small Fifth Avenue apartment for dinner.
Shirley lights cigarette after cigarette and fills my mother in on all the hometown Long Beach, New York, gossip. My mother listens politely as Shirley goes on about the Shuman family’s garage sale, an eighty-year-old cousin’s asthma, the neighborhood drugstore closing after four generations, and the Levys’ new baby that weighed almost twelve pounds. Finally my mother stands, walks over to open a window, her head throbbing from the cigarette smoke.
“I think you feel guilty,” my mother has just told my father, “about not really wanting to spend time with your sister. But I don’t feel it’s fair that you expect me to entertain her.”
She has hit a nerve. My father responds, though she doesn’t hear everything he says because as his voice grows more and more high-pitched, the diners at the small tables around them are beginning to look over at them.
My mother shifts in the hard wooden seat. He is pointing at her now, jabbing at the air, the thrust of each sentence, his voice tight and loud and relentless, matching each thrust of his arrow-straight finger.
“You-will-entertain-my-sister-it’s-the-least-you-can-do-my-sister-raised-me-took-in-boarders-to-feed-and-clothe—”
My mother excuses herself to go to the bathroom. She leaves her coat, brings her purse. By the kitchen, she asks a waiter if there is a back door. He points down the hall. My mother slips out into the street, slick with rain, raises her hand, and stops a cab.
My father sits for a half hour before he realizes she isn’t coming back.