Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Daddy’s white seabag stayed in our junkhouse for years. In the kitchen, we used two sets of forks—silver and stainless steel—he had filched from the mess hall. The handles were engraved with U.S.N. Daddy wore his summer whites out in the fields, plowing and harvesting. And he wore the uniforms he had rescued from the streets of San Francisco when the war ended. In my teen years, I wore one of the sailor hats, the circular brim turned down, for a beach hat. The pea jacket I inherited has the name “William Miller” in it.

  6

  In May, 1950, I reached my tenth birthday, the milestone of a child’s survival. Granny made me a ten-year cake, the traditional way of celebrating victory over childhood dangers and sicknesses. It was a small round three-layer cake about six inches in diameter—a white cake, with boiled white icing and a maraschino cherry on the top. It was all mine. Granddaddy would admonish Janice or me when we were selfish about something. “You ought to divide,” he would tell us. But I didn’t have to share this cake with anybody.

  I had been in the hospital with pneumonia that winter. I was alive because of penicillin. In my parents’ and grandparents’ time, children died of bloody flux and typhoid. They were swept away overnight by fevers. They had worms and boils and scrofula. They turned yellow and puked bile. Early, ugly death was so commonplace that parents often gave children the same names as the previous ones who had died.

  I was tiny and thin. When I lay flat, my hipbones rose like the knees of cypress trees. I didn’t imagine that I could die, though. None of my classmates had died—we got typhoid shots at school each autumn. I didn’t feel very sick during my stay in the hospital, and in fact I soon recovered.

  But I was afraid my grandmother would die. Although Granny was sturdy and tall, she had an almost dainty way about her. And she seemed so old. Mama never used delicate little handkerchiefs, the kind Granny carried to church. Out in the garden, Mama blew her nose with her fingers. Mama swore she would never dress like the older women. Granny dressed like the archetypal granny—in a bonnet, apron, and long dress over several items of cotton underwear. She wore heavy dark shoes and cotton stockings rolled on garters. This working costume was generations old. Women donned stiff-brimmed, long-tailed bonnets at a certain age of maturity, when they ran their own households and stopped letting their hair hang loose. They pulled it to the top of their heads with long hairpins. Yet within those old-fashioned conventions, Granny had her own style. She wouldn’t wear a brown dress. She liked delicate “figured-y” prints and costume jewelry and hats. She always dressed elegantly when she went to town on Saturdays and church on Sundays. She wore gloves, and she draped netting or veiling on her hats. It was gracefully swirled over the brim and drooped above her eyes. It might be fastened by a gay troop of red cherries or papier-mâché peach blossoms.

  Granny knew quality. She had a lovely set of blue pottery: a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, a cream pitcher, and a grease jar. Her dishes—Depression-era premiums included in detergent boxes—were white, with gold filigree patterns. She had various chipped everyday dishes with faded scenes painted on them, but she saved her good things for special occasions. She brought out her fine tablecloths at Christmas and birthdays. She never used gifts, because they were too nice.

  I loved her Chinese wind chimes, hand-painted glass panels that tinkled in the slightest breeze. On certain winter mornings, Jack Frost decorated her kitchen windowpanes with fancy designs like those on the wind chimes. She called windowpanes “window lights.” She had an orange-juice jug with a set of little glasses, painted with oranges and green leaves. Sometimes she made lemonade, and she made juice from the grapes gathered from her arbor next to the little pool Daddy had constructed for her goldfish.

  A grape arbor, a fish pool, Chinese wind chimes: Mama didn’t care a thing for such frippery. She didn’t own many superfluous objects, except the millefiori paperweight we all marveled over, wondering if the little flowers inside the clear glass were made of candy. Eventually, frustrated with not knowing, Daddy tried to bust it with a hammer to find out for us. But he only dented it—it wouldn’t shatter.

  Granny had an Oriental three-monkeys statue: Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil. It truly reflected her character. She didn’t reveal or explain. Plain facts sufficed. She reserved her imagination and her sense of the world’s complexity for her creations—her embroidery, her delicate cooking, her quilts. She sewed a fine seam, working with great care on her modest undertakings. She made a yoyo quilt out of satin ribbons she collected from the floral arrangements left at the cemetery on her homeplace. She tatted lace trim for aprons, collars, dresser scarves. Mama didn’t tat. But she could produce winter coats (made of gabardine and worsted remnants she got at the Merit), school costumes, entire school wardrobes, Sunday frocks, Easter outfits, choir robes. She whipped out circle skirts, dresses with dropped yokes, ruffled pinafores.

  Mama’s view of Granny as a domineering fussbudget was so different from mine. I didn’t realize how my mother suffered at the hands of her in-laws, because she had learned how to hold her tongue around them. Eventually she learned an almost superhuman forbearance under the Mason regime. Granny tried to make Mama do everything the way she did it; she enforced her particular and peculiar methods for every task, from shelling beans to making cakes to killing chickens. Granny even bossed Granddaddy, manipulating him into doing her wishes. He always consulted her on matters about the farm, except on bulls and vehicles.

  From Granny, I got the notion that I could have things just the way I wanted them, according to my own rules. From Mama, I got the notion that I could do everything. Granny was patient and forceful and certain. Mama was hurried, harried, rushed along by the stream of time and necessity. She slung out meals, gardens, crops, babies. She could cook supper and work all the buttonholes on a coat in the time it took Granny to boil out her stove burners.

  One hot night in July of my tenth year, some men came to go frog-gigging with Daddy. Beneath a large oak by the road, I sat gazing across the field in front of the barn at swallows wheeling and dipping in the twilight. The train went by, the lights already shining in the passenger cars. Now and then a vehicle passed on the road, a neighbor on the way home from town. As the darkness grew, I had one of those feelings of eerie dislocation, when things are out of the ordinary, a routine broken. Everything was thrown into a new perspective. The men out frog-gigging struck me as deeply strange, mysterious. I could see their silhouettes moving around the pond, their flashlights briefly beaming, and hear the occasional mumbling rush of their voices. Mama was in the kitchen. She had turned the light on. She was working up green beans—breaking them and canning them in jars in her pressure canner. Tomorrow night she would fry a mess of frog legs for supper. Tonight Janice and I were going to sleep outdoors under a tent Daddy rigged up by roping his Navy blanket to three trees. It wasn’t much of a shelter, but he said it would keep owl mess from slapping us in the face as we slept.

  Everything was irregular. Staying up late. Sleeping outdoors in the front yard under the trees. Listening to owls and frogs and the choir of cicadas. I was seeing from a new angle, a sidling glance that charged everything with new meaning. I sought and cherished such moments.

  Actually, I was afraid of the dark. The grown-ups had always told us ghost stories, to humble us and make us mind. The stories left me helpless in the night, fearful of something unseen that might get close to me and smother me, suck my breath the way a cat was supposed to suck a baby’s breath. Banshees were messengers of doom. They turned all the air into sound. They shrieked—eeeeeeeeee!—a sound like their name. The sound would draw your breath from the roots of your lungs.

  The summer light lasted until nearly eight o’clock, but in winter it was dark when I washed the milking equipment (the “milk things”) for Daddy, one of my regular chores. I was afraid to walk to the milk house and back in the dark. We rarely kept a workable flashlight. I followed a path through the woods, climbed a stile (two stumps) over a fence,
then made a straight run up the creek-gravel driveway to Granny and Granddaddy’s. Returning home, I outran the booger-man.

  The men came in now, carrying their frog gigs—poles with sharp metal points they used to stab frogs in the back—and I saw them from our makeshift tent. When Daddy peered under the blanket to check on us, Janice had already gone to sleep. He showed me the bucket of frogs, pulsating and bloody. He carried them to the house for Mama to dress. While Daddy and the men stood under the trees and smoked, I saw her in the back-porch light dressing the frogs—chopping off their long fat white legs and skinning them and dropping them into a bowl. I imagined the partial frogs twitching in the bucket. She took the frog legs inside, and later she reappeared and poured a pan of wash-water out the back door onto the rose bush.

  The men left, and after a while Mama turned out the kitchen light. It was completely dark. Janice and I slept on old feather bolsters, with only a little sheet over us. I could hear frogs at the pond starting to croak again, triumphant yet diminished. I lay there feeling fear and celebration at the same time. I was so thrilled to be alive that I couldn’t go to sleep. The night was full of howls and hoots and wails. Mosquito sirens pierced my ears.

  One night not long after that, I was in my room getting ready for bed when I thought I heard a screech out in the woods. It was a banshee screaming its head off. I told myself it was only imagination, but I waited fearfully, not daring to tell what I had heard. Mama was in the kitchen working up tomatoes. Daddy was reading a Zane Grey Western. The radio was playing, a dance-band program.

  I heard the banshee rush down the path through the dark. Then Granddaddy burst through the back door. He had to go through the two bedrooms to get to the main room. We had no hallway.

  “Ettie’s fell,” he cried.

  Daddy rushed out, and Mama followed, wiping her hands on the tail of her blouse. They called for me to stay behind with Janice. We stood in the kitchen. Two years before, our parents had added a few rooms, including a bathroom and a large kitchen. Now the house seemed large and empty, the radio playing disembodied voices. We waited uneasily.

  Granny wasn’t physically hurt when she fell, but she cried piteously and rolled up into a ball, as if she had to contain some internal anguish. Mama and Granddaddy took her to the hospital then, leaving Daddy to see after Janice and me. He made us go to bed, but I didn’t sleep. Two hours later, Mama and Granddaddy came home, but Granny remained at the hospital. Nothing was explained to me, but later I realized that it was not clear to anyone what was wrong with her. For some time she had been nervous. She had retreated into silence, and her hands entwined each other and picked at her apron hem. I hadn’t really noticed. Now I understood only that she was dreadfully sick. The suddenness of her collapse weighed on me. Everything I counted on now seemed tenuous, as loose as a feather floating to earth.

  “She’s worried about something and she won’t say what it is,” I overheard Mama say.

  Granny was so sick she had to be transferred to a hospital in Memphis. There, she got shock treatments. An electric current shot through her head, skewering her mind. I was terrified that she would die in that far-off hospital. Mama and Daddy had ridden with her in the ambulance and then left her there among strangers while they rushed home to their work. It was July, and the garden was coming in. Janice and I went to the Merit Clubhouse again for a few weeks that summer, while Mama filled in for employees on vacation. This time, I discovered the Clubhouse library, a little white house thick with the enchanting smell of dusty old books that had been donated for the factory children. I could see this dust in the sunbeams that crossed the room. I discovered a row of old-fashioned books by Louisa May Alcott. I began reading Little Women, and I longed to share it with Granny. But Granny had vanished.

  Granddaddy read aloud to me a letter he wrote her. I sat in their bedroom by the oak wardrobe where he kept his cache of candy and the horehound sticks for his throat. He doled out his treasure—a peppermint stick or a few candy corns—for special treats.

  His letter told about the weather and the local news and the cows and the crops and her garden and what Janice and I were doing. He had dug the potatoes, and Christy had canned more green beans and picked five gallons of berries. There was a big rain. He went to the stock sale and looked at shoats. He and Wilburn were “laying by” the corn. Wilburn helped cut hay over at Mrs. Shelton’s. Roe and Mary and her girls came to pick berries. They had a little picnic with Bobbie and Janice.

  Granddaddy wrote, “Now, Mama, don’t you fret, times are hard, but they will get better by and by. You are ever in our prayers, and the Lord will heal thy suffering.” His letter was soothing and lovely. His language was musical. It was biblical—phrases like “standing on the verge of a brighter day,” “when our cares are gone,” “the woes on earth vanished.” It was the language of the songs in church, not actual talking. For the first time I heard strong emotions expressed in writing—not just in a story, but here at home. Granddaddy’s voice was strong and eloquent. I didn’t understand how he had found the words, because he could not read some of the books I was reading. It was as if by reading less he left his mind clearer for expression. I loved his letter, but it chilled me too, for I could hear the undertone. Granny was going to die.

  Death was on my mind a lot, partly because I had had pneumonia, but mainly because of Beth’s death in Little Women. Maybe Granny’s mind was diseased, I thought, from reading. I had heard her niece say Granny had read too much when she was younger. “Aunt Ethel’s mind was always too active,” the niece said. People tended to think that you could disease the mind by what you allowed into it. They were afraid of studying. Any smart, bookish person who died young of a brain tumor or apoplexy was suspected of studying too much. Granny herself may have thought that her reading was dangerous. She had read Gone with the Wind. Earlier in the summer, I had been fooling around with that large red-covered book myself. Granny may have been worried that it would corrupt me. But I didn’t understand the story at all. The proximity of possum hounds and crinoline-understoried ball gowns was surreal. In my imagination I transposed Tara to our farm, my frame of reference, and the opening scene with the possum hounds took place in the driveway of my grandparents’ house. It didn’t make any sense. I turned to Nancy Drew, who could be relied on to make sense of everything, and to Jo March, the heroine of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. I would be Jo, the writer. Not Beth, the shy little sister who died.

  Granny was so homesick she begged the doctors to let her out of the hospital. She could not bear to be so far away from everything she knew. I imagine she may have dwelled on her Aunt Ella, stranded at her son’s in Detroit a few years before while her husband’s body was sent home to Kentucky for burial. Refusing to have any more shock treatments, Granny returned to us, and she stayed in bed until fall. Mama spent many hours up there, seeing after her and keeping house for Granddaddy. Twice a day Mama gave her shots with a large steel needle that she boiled in a stewer. I glimpsed Granny’s exposed buttocks, large and white.

  Granny had changed. She was quiet, and she cried easily. She couldn’t remember the stories we had read together in my schoolbooks. She didn’t want to play with our albums. She went to the hospital again for a short period, but not in Memphis. She refused to have any more of those lightning bolts in her head. The lightning would clear out her brain’s passageways, they said, so she could think more clearly, so her brain wouldn’t swirl—but today I think that maybe she secretly wanted her brain to swirl, while she lay there with her eyes closed, watching a turning kaleidoscope that followed the cycle of the seasons. Her nerves were tangled up like a pile of baling twine. Her fingers would work busily in her lap, rubbing and twisting the edge of her apron.

  What happened that night when the scream came hurtling through the dark? Was it merely that she fell out of bed? No one explained. She had to have some treatments. She needed rest. But that was all. Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil. It was a mystery, something she kept f
rom my parents and something they kept from Janice and me. Apparently there was much that wasn’t meant to be said.

  The Mason household was, I realize now, filled with silences and euphemisms. My sister and I weren’t allowed near when the cow had her calf. Sometimes Mama told me, a thrill in her voice, “Guess what? The sow found her little pigs last night! She’d been looking and looking for them, and she found ten little pigs.” The bull’s dalliances with the cows were not general news at our place. His courtships were hidden. The he-cow, as the bull was called, was so Victorian in his practices that Janice and I never knew he was up to anything. I saw Mama Cat having her kittens once, chasing her tail as the kittens popped out. She growled and pounced, as if the birth were an unexpected attack from the rear. She chased her tail like the tigers in the Little Black Sambo tale I had read in the first grade. The tigers turned to butter; the colors in Mama Cat’s calico dress blended together as she spun after her tail.

  Mama says now that Granny would never explain what was bothering her. Depression wasn’t acknowledged then, especially in a community where strong survival instincts made depression seem like a deliberate, luxurious choice. What unspeakable horrors tormented her? Was she still upset because we had moved out of her house? Had Daddy’s long absence during the war gradually worn her nerves raw? Was her own mind a horror for her? Had any of her people—parents, cousins—ever lost their minds? Was there a secret locked in her mind, chained there like an idiot child hidden in the attic?

  Granddaddy and my parents talked about sending her to Hopkinsville. This perfectly respectable little western Kentucky city was identified in everyone’s mind with its insane asylum. If you said you had been to Hopkinsville, people would say “How long were you in for?” or “How did you get out?” The asylum was a vast brick fortress of a place, confused in my mind with the state penitentiary, which had an electric chair.