Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  That fall, when Granny was still recovering from her sojourn in Memphis—surely the dislocation to Memphis was more disturbing than anything else that had happened to her—Granddaddy’s younger brother, genial Uncle Bee, died. Whenever he had come to visit, he always gave me a nickel, on condition that I could work it out of the knotted end of his handkerchief. At his funeral, the rows of the church pews were like furrows in the ground. I sat in the second row, very near the open casket, where he lay browned like a peach by the embalming. He was gruesome and still, motionless like the gray cat that Daddy had backed over with the truck. Everyone was crying. The preacher talked, and the more he talked the more they cried. I steeled myself, refusing to cry. I was bursting with emotion—fear and remorse and sorrow and grief. But I would not cry. It would be embarrassing. I did not want anybody to know my feelings. Like Granny, I wouldn’t tell what I was feeling. I did not want to admit my vulnerability. I would defy death. I had already lived to be ten. I had received my ten-year cake. I was too special to die, I thought.

  7

  My other grandparents, Mama’s parents, were long dead. I never knew my grandmother Eunice, and my grandfather Robert Lee died when I was about five. He was a drunkard, everyone said. Whiskey was evil and illegal, used only in secret. In the Mason household, Granddaddy hid his pint of “medicinal” whiskey, and occasionally he made blackberry brandy in the basement. Granny would surreptitiously take a toddy if she was sick, but she wouldn’t venture near a bunch of men gathered out behind the corncrib. They might be nipping.

  Nearby towns like Paducah and Cairo, on the river, sold alcohol openly. Cairo, Illinois, had a reputation as a rough river town, and boys went there for lessons taught by whores. But our county, Graves, upheld a facade of temperance. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, alcohol had been voted in and out several times. Back then, blind tigers—houses where alcohol was sold clandestinely—kept a barrel out front as a signal. On Saturday night, a man might go to the poolroom in Mayfield, encounter some whiskey in the back room, and have to be dragged home. Or it could be worse.

  Will Sutherland and John Burnett had a difficulty at Clear Springs last Sat. night. The former was severely cut on the hand and neck. The latter was slightly wounded. Mr. Sutherland [is] on the way to recovery.

  —Mayfield Monitor, June 26, 1885

  The John Burnett in this difficulty was Mama’s great-grandfather. Such an incident could easily have occurred in the same place fifty years later. Mama was not allowed to go to the community dances sponsored by her Uncle Zeb—even though he could fiddle like anything—because there might be a knife fight. There was once a murder at one of Zeb’s dances. People didn’t go out on Saturday night in Clear Springs merely to shake and stomp. They wanted to get drunk.

  Sometimes Daddy got drunk. He drank only beer, but he couldn’t hold it. A few beers would knock him loopy. When my sister Janice was born, he arrived at the hospital staggering and laughing. Mama made him hide under the bed when she heard the nurse coming. He passed out and slept there all night. He didn’t drink regularly or openly, just on occasion when he would get in a mood and go off in the car suddenly. Sometimes he didn’t come home to milk the cows, so then Mama knew he was on a binge. She would start worrying, pacing the floor and looking out the window. After an hour or two, she and Granddaddy would go milk, for the cows would get mastitis if they weren’t milked on time. Nothing was said about why Daddy was absent. Mama spoke only of how he might have had a wreck.

  The church tried to rescue tipplers before they toppled. We attended Calvary Methodist, a small church in town affiliated with the two Methodist churches in Clear Springs. But Daddy wouldn’t go; it was up to Mama to make sure her children’s souls were safe. She was secretly afraid Daddy would go to hell. At church, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union struggled to erase thoughts of alcohol from the minds of young people. When we reached adolescence, the W.C.T.U. made us sign a pledge never to touch a drink of alcohol in our lives. I was an obedient girl, and I signed the pledge. Anyway, I figured it wouldn’t be binding after high school. But one boy refused to sign. He had already been to Cairo, and he knew something.

  When I was seven—before Granny got sick and while Mama was still at the Merit—Mama sent Janice and me to the Daily Vacation Bible School at a Baptist church for a week, so Granny wouldn’t have to tend us. Everyone called Daily Vacation Bible School by its full name, emphasizing the “Daily Vacation,” as if to stress the dreaded dailiness as well as the oxymoronic notion of school as a vacation.

  The Baptists were not our religion, so I didn’t know what to expect, but the week that followed was one of delightful mornings of coloring books, stories, songs, and cutouts. I enjoyed coloring Joseph’s crazy-quilt coat and filling in angel wings with the essence of cake-icing white against the off-white of the coloring booklet’s pages. I liked Daniel in the lions’ den. The lions didn’t seem especially ferocious. Goliath was more frightening than any lion, and clean-cut David seemed no match for the shaggy giant. We sang “This Little Light of Mine.” (“Hide it under a bushel—no!”) Daily Vacation Bible School was like regular school, except for all the praying. I didn’t know how to pray out loud and was afraid of being called on. Grown-ups prayed effortlessly, snatching prayerful phrasings out of thin air when the preacher called on them. Silently, I prayed for a bicycle to replace my velocipede.

  When Daily Vacation Bible School was over for the day, Granny fed us and then rested, reading the paper in her wicker chair. She gave us scraps of material to sew together and pictures to cut out. On those hot summer afternoons, with the breeze wafting through the hallway, I felt charged up and special. And safe.

  On Friday, Mama fixed us a picnic of pimiento-cheese and tuna-fish sandwiches. Cookies and drinks awaited us at the celebratory picnic at the end of Daily Vacation Bible School. (In the South, soft drinks are still usually just called drinks, as if hard liquor did not exist.) All morning we yearned for the picnic. But before they would let us have it, the adults assembled us in the hot auditorium in the church basement and talked to us. They preached for an hour or more, describing hell and urging us toward the brink of salvation. We hungered for heaven, where there would be music and manna, which was like bread and dessert rolled into one. The teachers stood watchfully against the wall. Here and there a child raised a hand. A teacher rushed over then and spoke quietly and compellingly to the child until tears streamed and grief poured out. The teacher spoke in grave and urgent tones. I could hear the teacher saying “Jesus loves you” and “He’s in your heart” and “Let Him in.” I was frightened. This was scarier than banshees flying into your soul in the dark, I thought. This was public, where everyone would know your sin. The teachers led several children, one by one, to the altar and made them kneel; then the preacher bent over and whispered to them. All over the auditorium boys and girls were altar-bound. I heard them confessing their crimes. They had committed every sin; they were little wretches; they had hurled rocks through windows; they had put chewing gum in little sister’s hair. But if they had the courage to walk to the altar, they would be saved. Being saved meant you were reborn, and you would walk in a new way. You would walk with Jesus by your side. Nobody could see Him, but you would know He was there.

  I feared that sooner or later they would get to me. I squirmed and fidgeted. Daddy had said the Baptists would get ahold of me and try to wash my feet. He said they didn’t think anybody’s feet were clean enough. I knew they baptized people by holding them underwater. Baptists were called dunkers. I was afraid of getting dunked. I longed for a pimiento sandwich. The sandwiches were in a paper sack at my feet. The room was sweltering. Janice was sobbing. She was only three, and fretful. “Be quiet,” I whispered. “Or they’ll come and carry you up there in front of everybody.” She kept trying to get into the picnic sack.

  I waited them out. I didn’t cry. I didn’t repent. I didn’t raise my hand. I knew that the other children who were raising their hands
were older than me. Also, I went to a different church—nobody could expect me to get baptized here. I sat silent and rigid. I wouldn’t raise my hand. I wouldn’t cry.

  Afterwards, children with tear-streaked cheeks wolfed sandwiches as if they were manna and jelly. I didn’t see any of them walking in a new way, but a couple of freckle-faced boys who had just been saved got into a little fight over a chocolate-marshmallow cookie.

  Methodists didn’t dunk. They sprinkled. And they tended not to pressure children with the promise of a picnic. Other than that, it was never quite clear to me then what Methodists stood for, in contrast to Baptists or Catholics or Church of Christ devotees, whom Daddy called Campbellites in a mocking tone that was supposed to convey an obscure meaning. I thought he said “camelites,” so I had a mental image of people on camels riding through the desert, perhaps to Bethlehem.

  The words, the stories, in church mystified me. Although the preacher took pains to draw a moral and to connect the long-ago tales of a distant land to our everyday life, it was the unfamiliarity—the strangeness—of the stories that affected me. The magic of the loaves and fishes; Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt; Abraham about to bring down the ax on Isaac’s neck, as if his son were a rooster destined for the dinner pot. The prodigal son was a favorite of mine.

  In a trance, I sat through the responsive readings, the mysterious doxology, the wide-ranging prayers. In our small church, there was little to look at: the tally board of attendance and offerings, the funeral-parlor fans, the mimeographed programs. The wooden pews were hard; the slick wood sucked at our bare legs in hot weather. We couldn’t see out. The windows were cloudy bathroom glass, not stained glass.

  But I loved the singing. All the young people sang in the choir, whether we wanted to or not and whether we could sing or not. I had a weak voice, but I could blend in with the others and freely warble and croak without fear of being heard. Earnest Mrs. Roberts in her Easter hat pumped the pedals of the piano along with “Up from the Grave He Arose” until we thought we would rise up on Easter, too. At Easter we wore corsages and the new spring outfits Mama sewed for us. And on Mother’s Day you wore a red carnation if your mother was alive and a white one if not; Mama’s white flower always seemed sad to me. We had a baby-sprinkling now and then (a wet rose shaken on a baby’s head). We had communion once a month, but we children did not go to the altar until we had officially joined the church, and when we did, we were disappointed to learn the holy snack was just grape juice and bits of a papery substance that tasted like the fish food Granny gave her goldfish. As we sipped, we imagined wine and blood. I loved the round silver tray of minuscule tinkling glasses nesting in their little holes like the marbles in Chinese checkers.

  During the offering, the collection plate swam up and down the rows, the quarters thunking the felt lining and the paper tithing envelopes rustling discreetly. Granny and Granddaddy tithed, but we did not. We offered.

  Daddy simply stayed home. He would have none of it. Mama claimed that he believed in Jesus and the whole works but preferred to avoid the social side of church. Stretching the truth, she said he worshipped privately. But her heart grieved because he wasn’t a good churchgoing model for his children and because she feared for his soul. Sometimes before a prayer, the preacher asked us to raise a hand if we were praying for someone’s soul. And I saw her raise her hand, her head bowed. I knew she was thinking about those times Daddy didn’t come home to milk the cows. I remembered her walking the floor, aching with worry, fearing he’d had a wreck. I sensed that Mama thought he might shape up if he started going to church. But I knew he would be out of place there. He told me once that his parents were always taking him to funerals when he was little. “That soured me on churchgoing,” he said. “Funerals give me the heebie-jeebies.”

  8

  When I was in the first grade, a washtub of hot sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper arrived at the classroom each day at noon. We had hamburgers, hot dogs, and barbecued mutton. On Fridays, invariably, we had liver—ground into a paste and stewed in gravy and stuffed into a bun. These juicy, smelly sandwiches never appear on the buffet tables of my recurring food dreams. The following year the school built a new lunchroom, and Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Edwards and Mrs. Rhodes cooked plate-lunches of meat and vegetables and deep-dish pie. I belonged to the Clean Plate Club—we earned gold stars for eating everything on our plates.

  Before I started to school, Mama read fairy tales to me and taught me the alphabet. I attended kindergarten—for a day. While Daddy was away in the Navy, Mama enrolled me at a place in Mayfield. She dressed me up in a smart little plaid outfit and deposited me amidst a bunch of city children who had played together all their lives. Mama might as well have dropped me among the bulls at the stockyard. I didn’t know which way to run. I had not been around other children, except for a few cousins on occasion. I had played a couple of times with a neighbor girl a few houses down our road. The class formed a circle for “Go In and Out the Window,” and I was too terrified to follow directions. Every move I made was wrong.

  When Mama returned for me, the teacher asked her if I could talk. “The cat’s got her tongue,” Mama explained. Crying, I followed her to the car.

  Mama hugged me close. “You’ll like school better,” she promised me. “Kindergarten’s just playing.”

  When I started to school, a year later, she went with me the first day. “Bobbie already knows her ABC’s!” she said proudly to the teacher. I felt I was on the verge of something important. I had just had my first permanent. I wore a new dress and new shoes. I weighed forty pounds. It was August 20, 1946. School started early because it was lay-by time for the crops, a lull before the harvest began in the fall. The playground was dusty, and the air was still. Beyond the school, there was nothing to see except fields and a church and a graveyard.

  Sunnyside School, the neighborhood school my father had attended, had burned the year before, so I went to Cuba School, down near the Tennessee border. The hamlet of Cuba (two general stores and a doctor) was established in 1858, when the slave states demanded that the United States annex the slaveholding island of Cuba. Old-timers called the community “Cubie.” A whole different set of country people lived down there, people we didn’t know. Cuba was forty-five minutes away on the school bus, piloted by amiable, apple-cheeked Mr. Bob Jones. Mr. Bob drove us deep into the country, through woodlands and past miles of corn and tobacco fields. Honeysuckle vines hugged fencerows and smothered the ramshackle sheds of aging farms. At a curve, the bus stopped before a magnificent two-story house with columns supporting a balcony. No children boarded there; the bus used the grand driveway to turn around in. This antebellum mansion was an anomaly, like something from a storybook plunked down in someone’s potato patch.

  Farther on, the Tucker children—a dozen of them, scattered throughout the grades—rumbled onto the bus like a herd of cows. You had to watch out for them because they might step on your foot or knock you down without even noticing. If any Tuckers caught you staring, they would say, “Hope you get your eyes full.” They were full of mischief and wild tales about dead men they found in the woods. They sang country songs—whining, nasal laments I had heard on the radio. Another boy on the bus played the fiddle on a local radio show broadcast Saturday afternoons from the courthouse. But I didn’t like country songs. Country singers sounded too much like regular people I knew. Hank Williams sounded like Uncle Roe would sound if he decided to sing for a living—a ludicrous thought. Daddy didn’t like country songs either. He liked “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop.”

  Miss Christella, my first-grade teacher, wore a rounded rat in her hair and a smooth, puffed pompadour. Her eyes twinkled behind wire-rimmed spectacles. Her belief in children was absolute. She knew we needed to sing. We sang rounds—“Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” She turned us into a marching band for the high school basketball team, the Cuba Cubs. I played tissue-and-comb, savoring the pleasant bee-buzz so
und numbing my lips. For our performance at a game, Mama made me a majorette outfit—a satin skirt with a gold-trimmed weskit, and a tall hat with tassels. She fashioned the hat from a Quaker oats box.

  Miss Christella assigned me to be a daffodil in a pageant. Mama bought the yellow crepe paper to make the daffodil dress.

  “This won’t do,” she said doubtfully when she spread the length of crinkly crepe paper next to me. “Yellow’s not your color.”

  Mama drove to school and informed Miss Christella that yellow was not my color. Blue was my color, because of my eyes. Yellow made me look sickly. “She has to be a bluebell,” Mama said firmly. “Bobbie’s not a March flower.”

  Mama exchanged the yellow crepe paper for blue and I became a bluebell.

  I could be anything Mama wanted me to be. But only Miss Christella could be an artist. She drew an enormous full-feathered tom turkey on the blackboard for Thanksgiving, with resplendent bands of color on his fanned tail feathers. Miss Christella eventually slaughtered the smudged and fading turkey with the blackboard eraser, but in its place a confident and corpulent Santa Claus appeared, in a loud red suit, with a pack of colorful presents. For a while, his face was black, but she worked on him diligently with red and white chalks until she turned his face pink and she gave him a milk-white beard. Miss Christella’s artistry was magic. I had never known anyone who could draw. Everyone said drawing was a talent that you either had or didn’t have, a quality like dimples.

  Miss Christella played “Little Black Sambo” on a phonograph and handed out purple line-drawings of a tiger for us to color. The purple ink of the ditto sheets smelled nice, like alcohol on a shot. We read the adventures of Alice and Jerry, Dick and Jane’s country cousins. Their dog was Jip. They ate sandwiches and cookies after school and taught Jip to roll over. The printed word “sandwich” perplexed me. A sand witch? What fairy tale had a sand witch? Of course we didn’t say “sandwich.” We said “samwidge.”