When he heard his parents stir at first light, Wilburn jabbed Christy awake and quickly they pulled on some clothes. He led her from the bedroom to the kitchen. Through the tall windows Christy could see a vast, unobstructed expanse of fresh pasture and newly plowed fields. The fields, a geometric design bordered by tree lines, receded in the distance. The dew glistened in the coming sunlight. Bob and Ethel were standing in the kitchen, already dressed. Bob was stropping his razor, and Ethel was drawing a bucket of water from the cistern. When they saw her, they seemed to freeze. Slowly, Ethel lifted the bucket onto the edge of the cistern. Christy had never seen anyone thunderstruck until this moment.
Ethel steadied the bucket, and Bob let loose his leather strop. It dangled from its hook on the kitchen wall. Ethel replaced the cistern lid. They seemed to be waiting for words to come to them.
Then they said, “Well!”
Ethel said, “I’ll say!” A little smile flickered. She dipped water from the bucket into the kettle and set the kettle on the stove. The wood fire was already going.
Wilburn said, “Got enough grub? She eats like a horse.”
Christy gave him a little slap on his arm. She didn’t know what to say. What had she gotten herself into?
Many times I’ve tried to imagine this scene—the shock of the new, the embarrassment of the unspeakable, my parents as young kids daring the future with a radical act. My grandparents knew Wilburn had been courting Christy—or sparking, as they called it. They had watched her growing up over the years when they went to the gatherings at the Mason homeplace in Clear Springs. It wasn’t as though Wilburn had brought some stray home. They were pleased, actually, and probably relieved that the union had been accomplished with so little fuss and discussion. I can fairly well imagine the quiet astonishment of my grandparents—the little toss of Granny’s head as she tried to accommodate the surprise, the tickled exuberance beneath Granddaddy’s placid grin. I try to envision my parents emerging from the bedroom. He guides her by the shoulders, like a calf he’s bought at the stockyard. Her eyes are wide, as she enters her new life with a paradoxical mix of meekness and audacity. But I have trouble truly comprehending my parents’ courage in conducting this surprise incursion into the Mason household, knowing it would come to such an awkward scene. If they had the daring to spring this on my grandparents, why didn’t they have the nerve to announce their intentions openly? They can’t have been afraid the Masons would say no. Their boldness was really more like cowardice, their inhibition creating a scene that perversely fulfilled their fears of embarrassment. What could have been more embarrassing than straggling out of the bedroom together that fine morning?
I’ve gone over the scene in my mind many times. Maybe their secret act was simply a way of avoiding debate. Marriage requires a jump of faith into the unknown, but their elopement literally came down to slipping in through the back door. Of course I believe they were in love, but what that odd morning scene tells me is that people can dive into marriage for no better reason than a desire for adventure. Or perhaps, even, a sense of fate—the willing leap over the edge. An alluring, dark feeling of wonderment—what would happen if we took the plunge? Maybe it would be like flying; we wouldn’t fall. But today when she tells me about the early days of her marriage, my mother always says, “I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.”
After breakfast, the men went to milk, and Ethel showed Christy how she washed her dishes. Aunt Rosie worked in a variety of creative ways, but Ethel seemed very precise, Christy observed. She was particular about her meat-grease can and the leavings that went into her step-pedal slop-bucket for the hogs. She washed her dishes in hot water in a pan on the woodstove and scalded them in the “rinch water” in another pan, using water and soap very sparingly. She had made her soap from hog fat and ashes and lye in a kettle over a fire outside. Christy was surprised that the soap was perfumed. Aunt Rosie didn’t perfume hers.
As soon as the men returned from milking, Christy went down to the milk house and helped them bottle the milk so they could deliver it to customers in town. She watched Bob handle the cream separator; he was careful and slow, like Ethel. Wilburn slapdashed through his work with a grin—to aggravate his parents, Christy realized.
She followed Ethel through her routines that morning, remembering herself as a little girl following her grandmother around. She helped Ethel with the hoeing, the washing, the sweeping. Her natural high spirits surged forth; she chattered about her cousins and the others at Aunt Rosie’s. With minimal small talk, Ethel concentrated on hilling up her beans, pulling the dirt close to the stalks with her hoe.
“I’m a hard worker,” Christy said. “I can turn out work. Lead me to it. I ain’t lazy. I’m work-brittle!”
In the afternoon, after dinner, Ethel sat down on the porch to rest. She told her new daughter-in-law, “After your grandmother died, we thought about adopting you. But now we have you anyway!” She smiled, but she offered no embrace or other gesture of affection. She said, “Rosie thought you’d be better off out there at Clear Springs with some of your own people.”
Christy pondered what it would have been like growing up with Bob and Ethel and Wilburn. That was a strange idea, she once told me. She said she was glad they hadn’t adopted her; Wilburn would have been sort of a brother, then, not someone to marry. I find this a chilling thought. If they had adopted her, our family—my parents and grandparents—would have been in place. But I would never arrive.
It was common for newlyweds to live with the man’s parents. Since Wilburn was an only child, it was expected that he would stay with his parents. Besides, my mother knew that a son could not readily establish his own farm, especially during the Depression, so she did not expect to have a house of their own. She settled into her new life. Bob and Ethel were thrifty and purposeful, giving her the impression of a pair of secure, steady old workhorses. Their lives followed a firm cycle of work. But their routine was so quiet. Christy missed being around a crowd of people. She was normally sassy and full of fire. Instead of taunting her, the way her cousins had done, her in-laws were reserved and watchful. Wilburn teased her plenty, though. She fought him, and the more she fought the more he teased. He laughed at her and provoked her and got her to chase him. He behaved like a collie dog nipping at the cows’ ankles. But he was excessively shy around groups, and he would not go to church, just as he had not gone out to Clear Springs with his parents to the Mason family get-togethers. On those occasions he stayed home and explored the fields and creeks with the neighbor boys. He cared more about the natural world than he did about human events, Christy realized. He was always pointing out a bird nest or a strange bug.
Bob read only the newspaper and the Bible, but Christy could tell that Ethel had education. She didn’t say “hit” for “it” as some of the older folks did, and she owned some books. Christy dabbled in them, fearful that Ethel would catch her when she was supposed to be working. Christy wanted to learn. Wilburn often told her she was dumb, because the school at Clear Springs was inferior to the Mayfield school he had attended. But even if she had wanted to continue her education, she couldn’t now. Married people were not allowed to attend school.
The days and weeks went by. Wilburn and Bob milked twice a day, bottled the milk, and peddled it to their regular customers in town. Sweet-milk was twelve cents, buttermilk a nickel. Christy washed and scalded the narrow-necked, thick-lipped bottles in the milk house. She liked working with the bottles and the bottle-capper that snapped in the paper-plug caps printed with MASON GRADE A DAIRY. As she worked, she listened to a radio soap opera called Stella Dallas, about a mother’s love for her ungrateful daughter, who had married into society. The story was so riveting it made Christy weep. She listened to a music program with an announcer whose limpid voice she loved. She hummed along with “Pennies from Heaven” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Bob and Ethel had bought the radio so they could hear some local programming (farm and community news, and some fiddling
), but they did not care for anything that came from far away. Christy and Wilburn listened devotedly to Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos ’n’ Andy, and Charlie McCarthy.
Wilburn got work sacking feed. After milking in the morning, he walked a mile up the railroad track to the feed mill, which was adjacent to the house where the Lyon quintuplets had been born. After Wilburn started the job, Christy helped Bob deliver the milk in town while Ethel cooked dinner. To her relief, Christy was not expected to cook. Ethel’s kitchen habits were intimidatingly persnickety. She cooked certain things in certain pans and put a specific amount of meat grease in her vegetables. She often got up in the middle of the night to mix her yeast rolls to rise by morning. She cooked small amounts and was especially stingy with meat. Christy craved meat. Aunt Rosie always served chicken and ham and a large assortment of vegetables for a houseful of people, but Ethel was in the habit of cooking for only three. Supper was what was left from dinner at noon. Sometimes at night Christy and Wilburn were still hungry, so they would sneak a couple of eggs from the egg bowl in the kitchen and boil them in the fireplace in their room.
On Saturday nights, in Wilburn’s rattletrap Ford, Christy and Wilburn sped to Mayfield, where they gorged on hamburgers and Coca-Colas—nothing was so scrumptious, they thought—and went to the show. Vaudeville troupes didn’t come around much anymore, now that the picture shows were so popular. At the Princess or the Legion Theater they waited in line to see triumphant Westerns and sidesplitting comedies. Mayfield was crowded with people from all over the county seeking some relief from their week’s toil. The burger joints with curb service were jammed. One of the drugstores sent carhops all the way down the block along one side of the courthouse square. In town on a Saturday night, young people drove around the square and honked and yelled.
On one Saturday night, Wilburn and Christy went to a honky-tonk, where folks lindy-hopped to jazz and big-band records played on a Victrola. Wilburn wouldn’t dance, although he loved the music. One of Christy’s older cousins spotted her and Wilburn there. Later, the cousin told Bob Mason that his son and daughter-in-law were out dancing at the honky-tonk.
Bob confronted Christy, out by the wash-house.
“Did you and Wilburn go to that place that used to be Coulter’s School?”
She was silent, feeling the accusation in his voice. Then she nodded.
“Well?” he said. “What were you doing out there? At such a place?”
“Oh, we just wanted to see what was there,” she said. “We didn’t do anything.”
He said nothing. He didn’t tell them not to go again. He didn’t have to.
Living with her in-laws could be embarrassing and uncomfortable. Trying to get a good night’s sleep on Wilburn’s narrow bed was like sleeping with a mule, my mother often says. “He was long-legged and slept crossways.” Eventually, they borrowed a “bedroom suit”—a bed, a chest of drawers, and a dresser—from a neighbor. The bed was larger than the one that let down from the wall, but the wooden slats kept falling out of the frame beneath the mattress. Often they clattered to the floor in the middle of the night, when Bob and Ethel were asleep. Sometimes Wilburn and Christy got up and put the slats back under the mattress. At other times Christy would just sink into the hole and Wilburn would fall asleep on top of her. “Why don’t we rope the bottom so it won’t spraddle out?” she said to him once. “I don’t know,” he said. They didn’t get around to fixing the bed.
“Wilburn bought me my first pair of silk stockings,” my mother tells me. “And I got a run in them first thing. He was surprised that I had brought so few belongings with me. ‘Is this all you’ve got?’ he said.”
From his earnings, Wilburn had to pay his father for their keep. Everything the farm brought in went back into it, into livestock and seed. Even though these were the Depression years, the Mason farm was doing well, without any debts. The farm would be Wilburn’s one day, but meanwhile Bob was in charge.
“We were just kids,” my mother says. “We wanted to play.” She learned to ride a neighbor girl’s bicycle and scratched up her knees falling onto the gravel roads. Wilburn chased her as she rode down the driveway, distracting her and getting in her way until she landed in the potato patch. “I never was so mad in all my life!” she says with a laugh. Wilburn had always wanted a bicycle, but his parents would not buy him one. He told Christy that the two things he had always wanted were a bicycle and a goat. “I’m going to get me a bicycle and a goat if it takes me the rest of my life,” he told her.
Bob and Ethel were old—Ethel was forty-eight, and Bob was fifty-four. They had married late, when both were already set in their ways. They were cautious, conservative, acutely conscious of good value. They took pride in their grooming, their clothing, their furnishings, their yard, their fields, their entire place. Although Ethel was a strong, rawboned woman, she nonetheless had delicate nerves. Bob called her “Ettie,” pronouncing both t’s with a light touch of the tongue. The tip of his nose wiggled like a rabbit’s. He was less restrained than Ethel, more given to chuckling and gentle teasing, but nevertheless his word was law. He was a tall, well-built man who pampered his wife.
“Bob carried her around on a pillow,” my mother says. “She had an easier life than any woman I knew. She didn’t have to do a man’s work, like I did.”
Ethel had a plainspoken way about her that was utterly unselfconscious. “She could cut you down with a word,” Mama tells me. Ethel might deliver a judgment on scouring a skillet or gathering eggs. She wasn’t polite, or sparing of feelings, and she did not know that her direct remarks hurt. Again and again, she made Christy feel worthless, out of place.
My mother entered a new phase of loneliness. Wilburn was restless. Before he married Christy, he had been in the habit of running around with his bachelor friends. Now, on a few Wednesday nights, he went to town with some of his old pals, leaving her at home with his parents. He and his friends went to the poolroom, a smoky, dark place off limits for women. “You wouldn’t like it anyway,” he assured her. She had heard there was drinking and poker in the back room.
The mantel clock kept pace with the night work. It pinged every fifteen minutes and struck every hour. Christy tried not to pay attention to it, to keep busy, to do as she was told. She hulled peas or pieced scraps of material, trying to imagine a quilt. She was glad when eight o’clock struck and her in-laws silently prepared for bed.
On Saturdays, Christy and Wilburn went to town as usual. On the way home from the show one Saturday night, he stopped at a restaurant near the feed mill.
“You wait in the car,” he said.
It was late, and she knew there was no food being served. She suspected there was gambling and liquor in the back of the building. Alcohol was illegal in Graves County, and gambling was both illegal and sinful, she thought. She waited and waited. It was cold and her coat was thin.
When Wilburn finally returned, he was wobbly, but he insisted on driving. She had to reach across him to steer the car herself because he could not keep it in the road. When they reached home, he stumbled and fell into the coal pile beside the house. Angrily, she left him there and went inside in the dark to bed. The next morning he appeared, wearing a guilty grin. Coal dust was smudged all over his good pants and coat. He had crawled under the porch and slept there. His parents said nothing. They did not mention the coal dust on his clothes. But their silence was shattering.
The next chance Christy had for a ride back to Clear Springs, she told Aunt Rosie how Wilburn was behaving. Wilburn wasn’t bad, Christy knew. She was crazy about him. But she didn’t understand why he treated her so indifferently at times, why he wouldn’t stand up to his parents, why he left her there with them and went to town.
“Was that how my daddy treated my mama?” she asked.
“Shit!” said Aunt Rosie, almost under her breath. That was a word men said when they thought women weren’t listening. “You’ve made your bed,” Aunt Rosie said with finality. “You have to lay i
n it.”
“Well, why does he go polly-foxing around like that?” Christy asked her aunt. “Why doesn’t he take me with him? I like to have a good time.”
“That’s menfolks,” Aunt Rosie said. “They have to go off once in a while in a bunch. Just leave them alone. It don’t concern you one bit. You just have to put up with it. It’ll be all right as long as he comes home and don’t run off and steal you blind, the way your daddy did your mama. Bob and Ethel will keep you. And don’t forget you’ve got a roof over your head.”
“I don’t have a thing for anybody to steal,” Christy said.
Christy had inherited none of her mother’s things, but now Rosie gave her one of Eunice’s preserve stands—a large, lidded glass thing on a pedestal.
“That’ll hold enough preserves for a wheat threshing!” Aunt Rosie told her.
“Just what I need,” Christy said. But she was glad to have it.
The work was regular—milking, washing and scalding the bottles, drying apples on a screen door laid out on the milk-house roof, setting chickens on their nests, dehorning cows, working mules. Christy helped gather corn and field peas. Bob commented to Wilburn, “I wouldn’t let my wife work in the fields like that.” Yet it seemed to Christy that Bob would think up things for her to do, just to watch how hard she worked.
Clear Springs Page 4
