by Lee Smith
Which was Mama.
Now the funny thing about our family at that time was how the whole thing turned around her. It’s like the kaleidoscope we got that year for Christmas that Lewis Ray took such a fit over, and wanted to hold all the time and not share, and got his way, of course, like he always did.
But I remember looking in that kaleidoscope too, and how it had a bright blue spot in the middle of all the patterns, one spot that never moved no matter which way you turned it or how many pretty bright patterns came and went all around. Our family was like that, with Mama at the center, not doing anything particular but not having to either, and all the rest of us falling in place around. Whatever she was doing, it was like Mama was waiting somehow, caught up in a waiting dream. Mama was so beautiful then, and she never raised her voice. I said, she didn’t have to. There are some people like that, you know, where the whole world just gets in line to help them out. And if it’s that kind of person, you don’t mind being in that line.
Most nights, after supper, and after Amos ’n’ Andy, I’d get the lantern and Mama would get the bucket, and if it was winter I’d put on Pearl’s winter coat which was the warmest, and we’d go out to the sidetrack which ran down the mountain close by the house, and after the train came by, striking sparks off the rails, we’d go along the track picking up the coal it spilled along the track. They used to overload them at the tipple on Hurricane.
“Mama, we’ve got enough now,” I’d say finally, but sometimes she didn’t seem to hear, walking head down into the wind. “Mama!” I’d say. A lot of times, it was like she was listening to something couldn’t none of the rest of us hear. I’d run to catch up piling handfuls of coal into her bucket, and I’d pull at her hand until finally she turned back and then we’d walk the dark track together, home.
I would have done anything for Mama, and did. She called me her little right hand and swore she couldn’t get along without me, and it was true, no matter what Ora Mae thought.
Ora Mae would not leave us alone. Mama seemed to draw her too like she drew the rest of us, around and around, the only difference being that Ora Mae didn’t want to be that way, and all the rest of us did.
I grew up with Ora Mae there like anything else we had to contend with, like the flash floods that came in the spring, or how they kill your favorite hog to put meat on the table, or how they would up and lay people off at the mine without telling them first not so much as a by-your-leave.
I grew up with Ora Mae like some kind of a natural aggravation.
I didn’t care, then. We had a lot to put up with in those days and we put up with all of it and didn’t care. We were happy. This is why Billy—that’s Ora Mae’s son—he wanted to live with us instead of her, and most of the time he did. Ora Mae couldn’t hardly get him to go home at all.
Billy was curly-headed and blond, like that daddy of his we never saw nor ever heard much about, either. And he was smart. But flighty, lots of ideas and no real sense (I’ll say it—I was the only one with any sense, out of all us children, I mean. It’s true. I was. And I was the one who was good, which may be the reason that when I turned bad, I went so far the other way. But in those days, in a way I never liked, I was the one who took after Ora Mae, which may be the reason I hate her so much and won’t let her in my and Roy’s house—I wouldn’t let her come in here if she begged me, which she won’t. I’ve got her number, old Ora Mae, and she’s got mine). So Billy was flighty and silly and giggled a lot, a kind of a sissy almost, and afraid of the dark. He used to wet his bed instead of get up and go to the outhouse, even after he was a big, big boy. It seemed like me and Mama were all the time boiling sheets whenever Billy had been at our house.
Billy as a boy reminds me of a wire strung out in the wind, like those highwires Roy works on sometimes that scare me to death. When the wind blows real hard they start whining, a high-pitched terrible whine. Billy was like that. I used to think he might just fly off any day and disappear in all directions over the world.
Which he might have, if it wasn’t for Maggie, who was everybody’s favorite next to Mama. Maggie looked the most like Mama, which was probably part of it, real pretty, but also she was sweet. If Maggie didn’t have something good to say about something, why then she just never said a thing. Some people like that can drive you crazy, but not her, because all of it was natural. If it’s not natural, it pisses you off. Maggie used to keep Billy calmed down, she was not a thing like Pearl, even though when they were little, folks called them identical.
Well those twins were not identical, they were just as different as night and day. It’s funny the way I think of the twins, even now, like I was their big sister instead of it being the other way around. I was just so good then—well I said that.
But Pearl was out for blood. I mean never satisfied, not for one minute, always worrying, whether it was over a coat she thought didn’t look good on her or somebody she thought didn’t like her. If I think of Pearl even right today, with her now dead and gone, what I see in my mind is those thin pretty white hands of hers grabbing and grabbing out at the air. Pearl was the worst one for wanting, of all of us. And the biggest fool. You could see it in her eyes, pretty eyes, blue eyes, exactly the color and shape of Maggie’s, but while Maggie’s eyes were like a pool and it was restful looking into them, Pearl’s eyes were glittery and jumped around. They looked wet and kind of smeared.
Poor Pearl, she always wanted to know what everything meant, God knows why, she couldn’t sit back and take life as it comes. I remember the first time Mama caught her stealing—it was cut-glass earrings from old man Poole’s—and Mama caught her with them and held them up and said, “Why Pearl! Whatever do you want with these?” They were made to look like little diamond baskets, they sparkled and caught the light. Pearl was eleven years old. “I need them,” she said, and from the way she said it with each word coming out so sharp like it hurt her, I knew it was true, and I knew myself well enough by then to know that I would never understand what in the world Pearl needed them for.
Pearl had so many ideas. She used to sit and look at magazines by the hour, everybody around here saved them for her, and she’d cut out pictures and hide them away. Not only pictures of models in pretty clothes, either, the kind you make paper dolls out of. Pearl cut out weird pictures—a photograph of a storm is one I particularly remember, out of Life magazine. It was a farm in the midwest, plain white house with the black clouds hanging down low over it, and a wind so strong you could almost see it blowing everything down, sending chairs across the yard and lifting the roof—you could see it—off of the chicken house, and whirling a man around like a top right outside his own front door. Pearl smoothed that picture out flat on her knees and stared at it for the longest time. I was watching her.
Finally she looked up at me.
“Imagine that,” she said.
Another picture she had was this picture she cut out of the National Geographic at school, which of course you’re not supposed to do. I couldn’t see what in the world she wanted with it either. All it was, was this 110-year-old lady in some foreign country who by then looked a lot like a prune. She looked terrible. Her eyes looked like holes in her head.
“That lady has been alive for a hundred and ten years,” Pearl said.
She said this several times.
“So what?” I said.
It was the only thing to say to most of the stuff Pearl came up with.
What Pearl wanted—I’ve always thought this—was several lives. One was just plain not enough. Even when she was tiny—going back before the magazines and back before Lewis Ray was born—she used to go out behind the house with a cup and a gourd and dig for China.
“Whoever told Pearl about China ought to be horsewhipped,” Pappy said.
“Why do you want to go to China, Pearl?” Mama asked her, and Pearl said because she wanted to see all the funny hats.
Funny hats! Nobody could make her stop digging, she must of dug for a week with tha
t gourd and that little cup, and cried for another week when she didn’t get there.
And what about me, back then? Roy asked me over and over, laying on the couch with his foot in the cast stretched out on a kitchen chair, he couldn’t fit it together with the way I am now. I can see why, too.
This is me, at say twelve, big-boned and gawky, looking a lot more like Pappy’s daddy, old man Luther Wade with his big nose sticking out in the daguerreotypes, than like Pappy or Mama either one. I sure didn’t look a thing like Mama, and still don’t, which is probably a good thing and the only reason I’m still alive. Anyway some of the boys said I looked like a chicken hawk. This made me cry, not because I liked boys then, I hated them every one, but because I wanted to look like Mama and I did not. Her little right hand, she said.
I’d get up in the morning and put the water on to boil—Pappy would of poked up the fire that much earlier, before he went out to the mine—and then I’d get Lewis Ray up and get him dressed before the rest of them got up, because it used to take so long. Lewis Ray wouldn’t do a thing for himself, he’d stick his arms out straight like little poles for you to put on his shirt, which made it that much harder, he refused to tie his shoes till he was eight. By the time Mama got up, I’d have us some coffee ready, and Mama and I’d sit in the kitchen and drink it together, taking our time, while Lewis Ray threw corn to the chickens or rolled on the floor at our feet and everyone else slept on.
I drank coffee with Mama every day from the time I was six years old, strong coffee with lots of sugar and lots of Carnation poured in it out of the can.
I can taste it still on my tongue. There we’d be, Mama in her blue chenille robe and me already dressed in my jeans, sitting in that kitchen not saying much while it grew full light outside till you could see what kind of day it was going to be.
Now there was a lot of big things that happened in those years—when Billy fell in the well, or Lewis Ray getting born in the front room bed for instance and me right there to hold him first, Pappy so nervous he stayed over at the Stileses’ drinking liquor the whole night long. Or the disaster of 1933, that’s what they called it, when fourteen men got trapped in the Number Two shaft and it was eleven hours before they dug them out, and one of them was Pappy. We stood out on the hill with the rest all night and waited. Five men died in the Number Two mine and Pappy wrote a song about it named “Buried Alive,” you can still hear it sung today. Or the time Billy trained a bluebird to come to your hand, or we got those patent leather shoes from the Mountain Mission, or Pearl broke her arm and we got the insurance money and took a trip to Cherokee to see the Indians, or when Vashti finally died and we had to stay up all night at the wake, even the children, and Billy took a fit when they made him kiss her.
A lot of big things happened, is what I’m saying. It’s funny how you don’t remember those, though, how after the passing of so many years what you hold to is what you never thought about at the time, like Pappy out on the porch singing or me and Mama having coffee so early in the morning.
I think, even then, I had a sense that it wouldn’t last. I think, even then, I knew we had Mama with us on borrowed time, she was so clearly waiting—and patiently, too, not troubling us at all—but a place inside her was empty that we couldn’t fill. This made Maggie nicer than nice, it made Billy sissier than ever, Pearl wilder and Lewis Ray more contrary, it made Pappy sing louder and play the fool, and me? It made me work as hard as I could—I was a little girl like an old, old woman, that is probably why I turned into a woman too much like a girl—I wouldn’t for instance, for years and years defrost the refrigerator until it just killed you to see it, or make up the beds.
Anyway, whenever Mama disappeared, I’d cover up. She used to go walking, see, not so much in the first years but then more and more as time passed and we all got older. Sometimes she’d be gone for two, three hours, and sometimes more like a day. I don’t think she planned it either. A lot of times she’d be right in the middle of something like hemming a skirt, and all of a sudden she’d take off her thimble and lay down the skirt and walk straight out the door. Then I’d finish up whatever it was she was doing, and if anybody asked where she was, I’d say she had to go up the holler to sit with old Margie Ramey, or I’d say she had to go over the mountain to Johnson’s store, or something. But I didn’t know where she went either, most of the time, although when I followed her once or twice just to see, it was noplace special, down the spur line most likely, just walking along by the tracks with her head cocked a little bit like she might be listening out for the train.
I know they whispered about my mama, said things. I guess we all knew it, even Lewis Ray. Nobody ever came right out, I mean, but there’s things you know. It’s like they seep into your head the way water collects in a basement, coming from no-place at all in particular. Still, in spite of that sense of biding time, or even maybe because of it—I just thought of that—we were happy. There was a kind of life that went on in that house that was better than most, the whole time we had Mama.
Which wasn’t too long.
And I knew it was coming. I knew it all the time.
She died in 1937, when I was thirteen years old. She fell—or laid down—on the spur line, and the train cut off her head.
Everybody knows that.
This is why folks came from all around to stare at our house, for months and months after it happened, whispering and pointing. I guess they thought we were as good as Cherokee or Grandfather Mountain or Blowing Rock. They’d fill up the road of a Sunday. They’d take pictures of first one and then the other, pointing at our house.
We were a tourist attraction.
This is why, finally, we all moved over to Ora Mae’s, to the Cantrell homeplace in Hoot Owl Holler.
I can see I’ll have to start again. It’s hard, you know, to find the beginning. This is not it either, of course—nothing ever is—but this is where we’ll start. It was summer. Let’s start here. Mama was putting up stewed tomatoes. She had a big black kettle full of them which she had been cooking since morning. When Mama cooked, the stove heat made her yellow hair come loose and curl up all around her face, it made her face flush pink and she was just so pretty. She had me in there by late afternoon, boiling the Mason jars. Pearl never helped, of course, and neither did Maggie. Lord it was hot in the kitchen. It would of been hot enough in that house already, without all the cooking. Sweat was just pouring off of my face in a half an hour, but you’ve got to can tomatoes, you know, when they’re ready to can. You can’t wait for some cool day. We had put up twelve pints, two batches, when the thunder came.
The thunder rolled so hard it shook the house.
And all of a sudden outside it got dark, so dark it was just like night, and a cold wind came up out of nowhere straight in the back screen door where we were, and blew all around the kitchen.
I was taking out the Mason jars one by one.
“It’s fixing to storm,” I said.
The wind flopped the towels by the kitchen sink. It felt good, that wind after all the heat. You could smell the funny sharp smell in it like you get in a summer storm, a mostly chemical smell. “Mama?” I said. “It’s fixing to rain.”
When I turned back around, she was gone.
She had left the pot of tomatoes boiling on the stove, steam coming up in a funnel. She had laid the big spoon down right by it, dripping red tomatoes all over the stove, and the sugar jar was out too where she had left it, top off, beside the stirring spoon. That was the first thing I had to deal with, whether or not she had put in the sugar yet or whether I ought to put it in. So I had to get me a spoonful of tomatoes, and blow on it to cool it off, and taste it, and then add the sugar and some salt and cook it down before I could put it in the jars. All the time the wind was rising, and the storm was coming on, and I had an awful empty space in my stomach because I knew that something was wrong. Finally I finished canning the tomatoes that had been cooking, sealed them and turned the jars upside down, and left the
rest of the ripe ones in the basket on the floor.
It was just about dark by that time. Right after the rain hit, Maggie came running in the door with her hair blowing every which way, pulling Lewis Ray along by the hand. I fixed him a peanut butter sandwich. Maggie and I sat in the kitchen chairs at the table while Lewis Ray ate and the rain came down. Maggie got up to turn on the light but I said not to, that lightning might hit. You know how you turn everything off in a storm. It got dark in the kitchen and every now and then the lightning flashed and then we’d hear the thunder.
“Must have hit someplace over on Snowman,” Maggie said, meaning the lightning. You can count from the time the lightning flashes to the time you hear the thunder rolling right afterwards. You count slow—one boy scout, two boy scouts, three boy scouts—and however many boy scouts you get up to before it thunders, that’s how many miles away the lightning hit.
“I reckon,” I said. I sat there feeling awful, tracing the pattern on the linoleum on the table even though it was too dark to see it—roses that used to be red, climbing over a brown fence that ran in squares all over the table—the linoleum on the kitchen table is the first thing, I think, that I remember, so I didn’t have to see it to trace it out.
“When did she leave?” Maggie said.
I had never talked about Mama and how I felt we had her on borrowed time, or how she took off walking, with Maggie or anyone else. I had covered it up as I said. But when Maggie said that, I knew that she knew, too. Maybe they all did. I felt so stupid, Mama’s little right hand that worked so hard and couldn’t do anything, really, to help. In a way I was glad that Maggie knew. I looked at her across the table, couldn’t hardly see her there in the dark, but she was the spitting image of Mama, I knew that, and I could feel her there like something warm across from me.
“Upwards of an hour ago,” I told her.
We sat in the dark and the rain came down, making the awfulest racket on our tin roof—when it rained just a little bit, I loved to hear it, and still do, which is why I made Roy put a tin roof on our bedroom addition in spite of how funny it looks—but that rain was loud and terrible. We put the dishpan in the corner to catch the leak and then we kept having to get up and empty it. Pappy came in after while and sat—they had let them off early, afraid of slides—and Billy came in and went and got in somebody’s bed which is what he always did when it stormed, and then Pearl came back too from Lucy Rasnake’s house sopping wet with her blue eyes glittering.
