Enough to enable his sole son and recipient of his posthumous, or rather humus, estate, Kurbee Sluford, to implement a vision. Which he did, following it out of the scrub mountains to a small rural village in the south piedmont of North Carolina.
Kurbee Sluford. Whose dream was one of environmental pragmatism, whereby the two Carolinian contributions to the world market, the produce of alternating growth in the hard red soil, fused their separateness in an epiphanic vision granted to Kurbee. He began to manufacture cigarettes of 40 percent tobacco and 60 percent cotton. His brand, King Cobacco, was undestined, however, to rival Bull Durham. Unfortunately, no matter whether the leaves and bulbs were joined in the making or were grafted upon each other growing, people simply failed to take to the taste.
In his disappointment, he married the heiress to twelve acres of mixed vegetables, Leila Rickey.
Leila Rickey Sluford. Our Leila’s grandmother and namegiver. Herself, like her husband Kurbee, a visionary, but her epiphanies increasingly sky rather than earthbound. She cared as little for the grafting of King Cobacco as the lilies reportedly care about their raiments.
The first Leila had not always been so celestial. But she had always believed in Truth, and had an awesome faith in the hierophantic powers of language to articulate that truth, even in fact to call it into being. When she was a child, this faith rested, without sophistication, in her persistent literalization of other people’s metaphoric communications. So profound was her belief in the word, indeed, that when her mother found their dog gobbling up an unguarded side of bacon in the kitchen and said he ought to be hanged for all the mischief he’d caused, Leila knew as absolutely as St. Joan what she must do, and that afternoon her mother found the dog hanging by its leash from a barn rafter. Six months later, the family cat was drowned in a washtub out of the same conviction.
Ultimately, the Rickeys developed an almost Jesuitical care with the spoken word, watchfully avoiding hyperbolic throwaways like, “If we don’t get some rain soon, I swear I’d just as soon be dead.” But after an evangelist-inspired religious conversion at fifteen, words to Leila Rickey became The Word and Otherworldly, and the Rickeys sighed in relief for the continuation of their livestock as just that.
Once married to Kurbee, Leila now Sluford bore witness at each revival camp meeting and tent show that was reachable first by mule team, then by a Ford purchased from the canning of her inherited vegetables solely to serve as her chariot to the house of the Lord. Returning home at night in the fervor still fevering her from the laying on of sanctified hands, she conceived seven children, bore them, and left them to Christ’s protection. Despite which, the three middle ones did not endure; dying respectively at five, three, and one. For some reason, the four others (two from each end of the sequence) insisted on surviving.
These were her firstborn son, Genesis, called Gene. Her firstborn daughter, Nadine. And her twins, Esther and Amanda (who was our Leila’s mother).
Nadine Sluford. Embittered from infancy, begrudging and begrudged. Who concluded in the crib that life did not intend to treat her well (which it didn’t) and who disliked it accordingly.
Amanda Sluford. Who was not so much angry as prudent, for she knew herself to be sane, and therefore an anomaly in her family. Whose sense, she was well aware, was simply a lucky fluke, whereby the few sane genes bequeathed her (perhaps by her paternal grandfather, Buford Sluford, who had at least realized the fact of the buried treasure, if not the site) had happened to come together in a rare stable combination. Prudent because she thought herself continually vulnerable to hereditary contagion and lived in a daily plan of quarantining her mind and body from the others until she could escape the farm and acquire the immunity of a college education.
Esther Sluford. Amanda’s ripened twin. Whose acknowledged good looks our own Leila had inherited, and whom Leila compared, after I had given her the book, to Faulkner’s Eula Varner, who was uneducable by lack of need and unambulatory by choice.
In all possible ways, Esther differed from her embryonic sibling. Amanda was for doing. Esther was, one supposed, for being. Not that she couldn’t, or refused to do. If they yelled into her dream and instructed her, pushed her in the direction of a chore, she would carry it out. But then she would sit back down in her rocking chair on the front porch, in which she swayed contentedly, stared at by passers-by, the subject of gaped double-takes from whichever male walked past the house for the first time. And thus the object of Nadine’s bitter chagrin, Amanda’s social indignation.
Nadine believed Esther would disgrace the family sooner or later simply by the fact of her physical attributes, and that belief, like most of Nadine’s other dour predictions, brought her, by its imminent fulfillment, Cassandra’s sullen comfort—the right to remark in the midst of catastrophe, “I told you so.”
It could be claimed, however, that Nadine’s phrasing of her prophecy was misleading in the sense that Esther (or more simply, Esther’s looks) proved to be only the inactive recipient of the disgracing action. Genesis, his mother’s first creation and her chosen favorite, was the causal agent. Or, rather, the predetermined proximity in time and space of how Esther looked and how Genesis responded.
Genesis Sluford. Shared with his mother that indomitable fevered thirst for ecstasy that comprised and defined Mrs. Sluford’s integrity. It was sublunary in him, however, and honed toward earthly milk and honey, of which Genesis realized (in his congenitally granted epiphanic moment) that his then fifteen-year-old sister, Esther, was the true incarnation.
He made no plans; he just believed that he knew where the incarnate godhead lay. This certainty grew upon him for the full fasting year of his novitiate, through which his mother coddled with sugared treats, this chosen of her brood; and during which Esther (allowing fried pork rinds to dissolve in her mouth) ripened further on the front porch, swaying in her chair.
Then the moment that came to Saul on the road to Damascus came to Genesis. One July evening, sent on a chore to the barn, he found Esther there lying drowsed on a hay rick, three apple cores beside her, for she had been directed some hours previously to bring back a basket of apples to the kitchen. Esther was not sullen or uncooperative; she would go if asked and do if watched. Otherwise she simply came to a stop, being unable to retain instructions in any mechanism of memory, and waited with a somnolent patience until retrieved by a member of the family.
When he saw her there, Genesis knew himself ready for union with the host, and rushing to the fragrant golden altar with as much certainty as his mother had swooned to the platform of a revival tent, he reached for the wafers of that spirit-containing flesh, grabbed the chalice, and gulped it down. His capacity to find the actualized objective correlative (Esther) to fit the symbol (the host of the Lord) was yet another of the mother’s gifts to her son. This particular act, however, was a pure apostasy, for Mrs. Sluford had given Genesis a strictly Protestant upbringing, and it had been over this very issue of transubstantiation that his ancestors had broken with the Pope centuries ago.
Esther, the manna in question, had not been made wise by the apples in her womb, but somehow this assault had at least brought her to the realization that she had a self to be assaulted. And she spoke out of that knowledge. And she began to scream, “SSSS-STAUUPPIT, GENE, STAUPPPP!” And she kept on.
Their mother, tired of holding supper for them, and coming out to select the apples herself, was given to witness this communion ritual at the instant of consummatio, whereupon without thought, she reached for the long-deceased Arvid Sluford’s rabbit gun hanging in the tack room and shot the communicant. With which salvo, she fired Genesis out of temporal bliss and into eternal, so that he died unabused of joyful belief.
Later opinions differed as to Mrs. Sluford’s motivations. Most people believed that she had failed to recognize her son and had maternally shot a presumed intruder. A few (Nadine) thought, quite in opposition, that Mrs. Sluford had
not failed to recognize her son and had jealously shot a betrayer. Those who had known her as a child (the few surviving Rickeys) wondered whether there had been time or opportunity for anyone in the vicinity to have said to her, “The simple truth is any boy who would defile his own sister like that ought to be shot!”
Unfortunately, Mrs. Sluford’s own comments were not available accessories to clarification, for while she spoke a lot afterward, she spoke in tongues unintelligible to the secular from whom thereafter she wholly distinguished herself. As a matter of fact, from the instant of that shot (unpremeditated, but reverberate with the doomed mischance of all the Slufords), she never said another word in Southern Americanese or in any other branch of the IndoEuropean root.
Instead she rose from the dead (after pulling up his overalls, which she neatly buttoned) and ascended into garble.
Genesis was buried in the family plot without further unearthing of treasure deposits. A deputy sheriff accompanied the small funeral cortege led by the father, Kurbee Sluford (more bewildered now than by the failure of King Cobacco to become a household word), followed by the deflowered victim of outrage, Esther (possessed of a self but bereft of a brother), and by her two sisters, Nadine and Amanda—neither of whom expected to be able to hold up their heads anywhere in the county again. This expectation decisively grew in them when their mother rose to her feet midway through the Baptist minister’s eulogy (commending Genesis for his regular attendance at Sunday school), and insisted on delivering the funeral oration herself, perhaps (though no one present could translate it) taking as her text, “The mother gaveth, and the mother tooketh away.”
That in any case is what the deputy sheriff did with Mrs. Sluford. And after a long and presumably unsatisfying interrogation, she was charged by the state to be taken on the thirtieth day of July to the place of institution and there to be deranged in the head until she was dead. And they did, and she was.
Nadine, the following year, met and married, largely to punish him for being innately good-natured, a mild salesman of pharmaceutical supplies. They moved to Earlsford, North Carolina, where over the years, his disposition not so much darkened as contracted to two solaces, both of which he kept in the basement: a collection of pet rabbits and a collection of rye whiskey—the latter of which diminished as the former increased.
Esther, burdened with an identity now, relieved herself of its weight by bestowing it with developing frequency on the town’s yeomen, knights, and landed gentry. But her democratic nonchalance in this matter so appalled Amanda that she (Amanda) felt only relief when Esther ran off with a man who said he owned a nightclub in Baltimore and who promised to star Esther in his floor shows; relief even though she (Amanda) felt quite certain that the man’s terminology in regard to clubs and shows was highly euphemistic.
Amanda, valedictorian of fourteen graduating seniors, was awarded an Elks’ scholarship entitling her to study home economics at the state agricultural college, accepted it, took the family’s sole remaining suitcase (her mother, Nadine, and most recently Esther had made use of the other three), and telling her father to use his head for a change, left home.
She studied with diligence and prospered in knowledge, worked as a waitress, made her own clothes, kept herself aloof from the frivolities of her peers, and in her second year received a cable from her mother’s sister:
COME HOME. YOUR PAPA’S TROUBLES ARE OVER. CAUGHT IN TOBACCO MACHINE. HOPE AND PRAY HE DIDN’T SUFFER LONG. GONE TO HIS MAKER. ALL SYMPATHY IN HOUR OF LOSS. YOUR AUNT, LUCEEN.
But now, just when one would think she had escaped infection (by the death, incarceration, or departure of all her blood except Nadine—least likely to mortify her), Amanda herself came down with the Rickey-Sluford fever for ecstasy which she had so assiduously avoided for nineteen prudent years. She fell in love.
Brian Beaumont was a senior and now at his sixth college in seven years. He might actually have graduated this time had events gone otherwise, for he was inherently a bright young man, and now he had Amanda to settle him, encourage him to attend a few of the more important classes, write for him on time the papers he undoubtedly would have eventually gotten around to himself. More than quick, Brian was handsome. Blond, but unlike all the Slufords except Esther, not the bleached eyes and skin of the paradigmatic southern towhead; no, Brian sparkled with bright northwestern blondness. Someone had told him once that he resembled F. Scott Fitzgerald, and from then on, he modeled his appearance, as well as his drinking problem, on the analogy. However, unlike the writer, Brian never suffered a moment’s remorse—not that anyone ever heard of or saw, at least. He was always joking, laughing, talking in a patter of bright, quick sparkle.
Amanda had erected protective walls so far outside herself that, never expecting anyone to smile his way inside her defenses (nor anticipating her own vulnerabilities), she had planned no tactics for battle within the fortress. Outmaneuvered by Brian’s surprise assault on her heart, or whatever muscles, nerves, chemistry she preferred to think it, she managed only to insist on a ceremony with a South Carolina justice of the peace the afternoon prior to her final capitulation. That in itself was no slight achievement for one of her youth and inexperience.
But it ultimately proved a Pyrrhic victory, this through no fault of Amanda’s tactics, but as the result of a technicality: a prior, uncanceled marriage of Brian’s at an earlier university insisted on by an earlier young woman strategist. This very important information Amanda did not even receive until she might have predicted it anyhow, being an authority by then on the subject of Brian Beaumont’s perfidies. Which misdeeds included impregnating Amanda and leaving seven months later unencumbered by either diploma or his heavily laden illegal bride.
Amanda, despite having suffered these assaults upon her dignity, reasoned that Brian’s misconduct resulted purely from insanity (a disease she knew to be prevalent) and that steps had to be taken by someone responsible, i.e., herself. Not steps to recover Brian (whom she dismissed as one would a lapsed illness), but steps to insure her own diploma, that certificate of immunization she had stupidly almost forfeited.
Learning Brian’s father’s address from an unopened letter in his dresser, she wrote to the elder Mr. Beaumont, who immediately took a train from St. Paul, Minnesota, all the way to her side, full of indignation at his son (whom they later learned had traveled overseas courtesy of the Canadian Air Force) and full of warm support for his new daughter-in-law. Mr. Beaumont was a widower, lonely and alone, except for his housekeeper. Amanda would come and live with him. So two months later, our Leila was born, not in the South at all, but among the alien corn and wheat of her alien father’s fatherland.
Six months after Leila’s birth, Mrs. Amanda Beaumont (as she preferred to call herself) informed her husband’s (as she preferred to call him) father that she was returning to school and that, in all justice, he should meet the costs, since had he not been initially and directly responsible for the mendacious Brian’s existence, she never would have lost her Elks’ scholarship in the first place.
He agreed. And, having loved Leila before she was born and knowing himself enthralled once he held her in the expansive crook of his arm, he also agreed—more than willingly—to keep the child. For it was clear that Amanda would not be able to manage a bachelor of arts hood and motherhood simultaneously.
In fact, in his efforts to make things right, Mr. Beaumont went so far as to marry his housekeeper, and Leila lived for six years in St. Paul, Minnesota, believing this quickly assembled and adoring elderly couple to be her mother and father.
Meanwhile Amanda graduated, received a small sum from her mother’s death, bought a car, and drove it to Norfolk, Virginia, where she took a position as the purchasing agent for a V.A. hospital. There the fatal genes of Gene and the other, as she called them, fools of her bloodline caught up with her again. She met a man.
Jerry Thurston, an outpatient at the hospital, was sufferi
ng from periodic arthritis. The result, he told her, of seventy-four hours in the North Sea, where he had been shot out of his carrier. This ordeal had been followed by two years in a damp P.O.W. camp.
Thurston was dark, quiet, and without sparkle. Amanda at least knew enough not to repeat an identical mistake. He was an older man, thirty-eight. He told her he was on the verge of several million-dollar real estate deals in Daytona, Florida. How could she know otherwise, having only her agricultural college knowledge, which had little to say about the economics of speculative magnates? She had only been out of her native state twice in her life prior to coming to Norfolk: once, to the superfluous justice of the peace in South Carolina, and once, pregnant to St. Paul. How could she judge such possibilities? She had only her rural world’s myth that Florida was a magically rich place. So she believed him. So she married him.
Mr. Thurston’s enterprises remained on the verge as long as Amanda knew him. And she (who believed so firmly that education was the key to safety) was the victim again of lack of knowledge. Imagine, then, her deepened sense of injustice when she subsequently discovered that Jerry Thurston, like the distant Brian before him, was already married. To a Florida live bait stand owner. It really was enough to give Amanda Nadine’s gloomy attitude toward life to learn that she, so humble a supplicant to respectability, should find always a bigamist, never a groom. Her single consolation was that no one need ever know of her unsanctified status, not even Nadine: in fact, especially not Nadine. The world, Amanda discovered, asked for certificates less often than she had anticipated, though—just in case—she still kept her high school and college diplomas and both her marriage certificates (which appeared as substantial and proper as anyone could ever ask of pieces of paper) in her top dresser drawer, along with her savings account book.
Then Mrs. Amanda Thurston (as she preferred to call herself now) journeyed to St. Paul, and to the bewilderment of the happy family there, claimed her six-year-old child. She would soon have a home for Leila, she announced, a home with a daddy in Daytona Beach, Florida. Leila belonged to her, she told the elderly Beaumont couple, she had never signed any documents, as they well knew, renouncing her legal rights. And they would have to accept that, because should they try to prove otherwise, she would be forced to go to court, which would of course be a traumatic experience for the child. Whom, she added, Mr. Beaumont had meanwhile spoiled rotten and allowed to practically ruin her teeth by a poorly balanced diet.
The Delectable Mountains Page 10
