Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  The evening after his funeral, I was watching Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return on TV. Granny said, “How can you watch such trash at a time like this?” That night in bed I was afraid of childhood ghosts; I pictured my grandfather rising from the grave. The thing I had feared throughout my childhood had finally happened. A family member had died. I could not bear to think about it. For several years afterwards, whenever he came to mind, I deliberately switched him off. Eventually, I realized I could hardly remember anything about him except the time he spit tobacco juice into my eye. I was about ten. He was walking toward me on the driveway behind his house, and when he got close, he spit toward me. He was probably absorbed in thought and didn’t see me, but when I howled with pain, he kept walking, ignoring me. This heedlessness of cruel effect—this harsh, blind innocence—was a trait I also saw at times in my father.

  Daddy had promised his father not to leave Granny alone at night, so he brought her to live at our house, in the tiny back room. Even though her house was only a few dozen yards away, it must have seemed a hundred miles to her. She didn’t have her kitchen, her things, her own home. Everything was wrong. She found fault with Mama’s cooking. Don and LaNelle were young and troublesome. Her husband was dead.

  LaNelle’s records blared out of her room. The squawks sounded to Granny as if a fox had got in the henhouse. In the spring, while the Beatles blasted throughout the house, Granny sat outside in the car to escape the sound. Granddaddy’s car, a green boxy Dodge, was parked in the woods behind the house. Granny stayed there for many hours, in her bonnet, head lowered, studying her plight. She had never learned to drive. She had not learned the areas Granddaddy had handled—the finances, the livestock trading—just as he had not learned to patch pants or work up preserves. Now Daddy was in charge of the manly jobs. She often called him “Bob” by mistake. When she talked to anyone, she repeated that the funeral expenses were $1,294.75 and the hospital bill was $1,048.45; she told how much money she had left, and how her house was deteriorating with no one in it.

  After six months of listening to Granny’s litany of complaints, Mama and Daddy and LaNelle and Don moved to her house with her. With grim resolve, my mother stored much of her furniture and belongings in one of the outbuildings. She did not fight the move, because she did not see any alternative. Besides, she figured Granny would not live long.

  Granny’s house had a large living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a closet, a recently installed bathroom, and a new gas furnace. But there were only two bedrooms. There was a large, closed-off attic, but it did not occur to anyone to remodel that space to make more bedrooms. My parents placed their bed in the living room. They stowed Don in the front hall, on a small bed, just inside the glass-paned front door. He had nightmares there, fearing ghosts and the legendary man with the hook for a hand. LaNelle occupied the north bedroom, with its high ceilings and cold drafts. Outside, long-armed spirea bushes scraped menacingly across the windows.

  The house was uncomfortable and old. The floorboards bounced. The kitchen faucet dripped. Granny’s clock struck every hour. Mama hated the clock, but Granny could not sleep without its regular announcements of time’s trek.

  Once again, my mother was living with her mother-in-law. She didn’t know what her life was going to come to now. She had sent one set of children out into the world, and she had another pair yet to raise. It was exhausting. She had little time or energy to take Don and LaNelle to the lake or the show, and she paid scant attention to their schoolwork. She was often needed in the fields, and her garden grew larger each year. To earn cash, she sewed for people, working into the night on elaborate suits and dresses. In the cramped kitchen, Granny was at Mama’s elbow, trying to direct the cooking and insisting on her scummy lye soap for the dishes.

  I imagine Mama felt she was drying up, disappearing like a pea vine in the fall. Daddy, however, began to bloom after the death of his father. He began frequenting flea markets, collecting old gun parts and piecing together collectible antique guns, which he then sold. He still enjoyed trading; it was in his nature and his history. He was curious about the world, sociable within his own class, and now he began to emerge from the slump he had suffered when Don was born. He bought some beef cows and some machinery. He was truly the man of the place now. Granny continued to call him Bob. Her nerve medicine, from Hopkinsville, fuzzed her mind. For the rest of her life, she took Thorazine to calm her nerves and to keep her head from swimming.

  Daddy rented our little white house in the woods to Janice and her husband. He installed a water heater because Janice had a new baby, her second. He had never put in a water heater for Mama. She had always heated our bathwater in her largest stewpot on the kitchen stove. A few years later, Janice and her family moved to a place in town, and our little house became the trashing ground of a series of renters. It caught on fire once—a cigarette on a mattress. Large families stressed out the septic system.

  I usually came home at least twice a year, but I didn’t fully appreciate the strain the family lived under. I didn’t see their day-to-day life, so I didn’t realize how, for them, my visits were celebrations. Mama made cakes, and we played cards till midnight. I played games with LaNelle and Don and drove them to the lake. I watched TV shows with Daddy. We always had a great time. Granny clasped my hands tightly when she greeted me, and she wept when I went away again.

  Although in some ways I had renounced the South, I could not lose the ties to my immediate family. But I did lose touch with the kinfolks at Clear Springs. I saw them only infrequently. Over the years, Granddaddy’s sisters and brothers all died off, almost without my knowing it. I forgot about his sisters—Little Daisy, whose high-pitched voice was always cheerful, and Dove, whose strong jaw and husky voice startled me as a child. And Granny’s ancient aunt Etna, whose mile-high, featherlight angel food cakes were renowned in Clear Springs. Years later, at my parents’ fiftieth anniversary, Daddy’s cousin Herman accused me of “going off,” as if it were a sin to leave. “You forgot your kinfolks,” he said. I realized it was true. I didn’t think of them when I was away. I was free to adventure, while my loyal parents kept a place for me. I was loyal to them too, even though I was too busy to inquire into farm prices or Granny’s nerves or Mama’s burdens. I was devouring Homer and Virgil and Chaucer and Shakespeare. The sweep of Western literature offered pleasing abstractions—such as the journey theme and the quest-for-the-father theme. Was Telemachus looking for his father as much as he was looking for an idea of his father?

  In Binghamton, New York, in a small apartment with pink walls, I listened to Motown and the Beatles on a late-night Boston station and wrote papers on Milton’s Paradise Lost and Yeats’s Fergus poems. To earn extra cash, I typed term papers. I bought my first car, a 1952 Chevrolet.

  Working on a fan magazine had hardly prepared me for the rigors of postgraduate education. The English department had sent me a reading list of books I should know before arriving. There would be no exam, just an expectation of mastery. The list was a daunting array of over a hundred books, ranging through Western civilization. The Decameron, Humphrey Clinker, Tristan and Isolde, Augustine’s Confessions. Previously, I had read a handful of books from the nineteenth century, but hardly anything farther back in time. Earnestly, I labored over the list as if I were laying up a woodpile for the winter. I was stranded at a small, isolated institution in the snow belt. The snow was deep, engulfing, like my innocence.

  At Harpur College, my professors—all very large men—were tweedy impresarios. Professor Bernard Huppé spun his students through the dim beginnings and dark ages of England. Being in his class was like drifting past dioramas in a museum: Beowulf fighting Grendel; the wars of the Angles and the Saxons against the Danes; sassy pilgrims on donkeys hightailing it to Canterbury. Professor Huppé, whose white forelock bounced along with his enthusiasms, guided us on our journey through the history of the English language with joy in his heart. Professor Seymour Pitcher spent a trimester toiling o
ver his translation of Aristotle’s Poetics with us. “Was this word a happy choice?” he inquired. The exact word for what is usually translated as “catharsis” troubled him throughout the term. What was a catharsis anyway, I wondered. Does art make us feel blown out and purified, as from a purgative? Or is it intended to have a calming effect, like that of cows chewing cud in a more complex digestive process?

  I wasn’t ready for the elusive and false trails of advanced learning. From the depths of the roaring river of illusions and prismatic images of literature, I was expected to gig a metaphorical frog, color it, name it, and defend it—all out loud, with a Northern accent. There was no joy in that challenge, in that realm of territorial skirmishes—scholars clashing on a darkling plain. I loved books, but I didn’t want to argue about them. Instead of embracing what they read, other graduate students, in their competitiveness, rejected. They would say “Fitzgerald’s vision was limited by his status consciousness” or “Nabokov’s introverted style prevented him from being universal.” How could a novice blithely quibble with greatness? How could anyone even hint at superiority to those supreme artists? I balked. There seemed no room for genuine admiration in this new game. Bob Hazel had revered the great writers; he invited his students for strolls through the pantheon. I began to see what he had meant about academic study. It was adversarial. It assumed no heroes. The pressure to speak up made me feel, not for the first time in my life, that the cat not only had my tongue but had eaten it. Everybody was smarter than I was! I was sure this was so, since I couldn’t think of what to say. I had had no practice in debate and discussion. Other students spewed out opinions, stating positions in the time it took for me to say, “Huh?” I felt soft-headed, like those tiny soft-shelled eggs that hens sometimes laid by mistake. There I was, in the North—disoriented, out of my element, but determined to plow through.

  From the South I brought an ingrained sense of shame. The mannerisms came with me—the disingenuous smile and “the down look,” the lowered eyes of self-effacement. My overconfident self, forged on the farm and at Cuba School, shattered in that Northern intellectual climate. I was invisible, voiceless, stupefied by my naïveté. All around me were Yankees, the foreigners of the Little Colonel books. If they noticed me at all, they gazed at me penetratingly, pinning me on the spot as if I were a specimen of bug. My accent betrayed me.

  Worst of all, I was expected to teach. I was a teaching assistant, assigned to conduct a freshman survey of Western literature from Homer on up. In sweet little wool suits and breakneck heels, I faced a classroom of fiercely bright kids from New York City. Some of them were only sixteen or so; they had skipped grades. They dressed sloppily, they wore long hair in the Medusa mop-top style, and they were glib and serious. I had had no teacher training, but suddenly I was supposed to be a guide to the great books of Western civilization. My students zigzagged around me like the Jets from West Side Story as I stumbled and bumbled in incomplete sentences, trying to recall my diligently prepared notes.

  The professor I assisted tried to share his passion for the Greeks with me, so that I could stimulate this sharp gang of valedictorians.

  “I read Plato’s Republic to my wife on our honeymoon,” he said. “There are parts of it that are so beautiful.”

  I couldn’t imagine reading Plato on a honeymoon. I couldn’t think of what to say to the professor. I studied The Republic assiduously. Plato said throw out the poets. He said nothing—a table, a refrigerator—was real, but it had an ideal form somewhere. I pictured the ideals in orbit, like Sputnik.

  I had the wrong gear for this venture. I was like one of those catfish that can sort of walk on land—awkwardly, using their whiskers like elbows. Previously, I had floated from one enthusiasm to another, and I had often been in charge, with the illusion of power. Now I felt like Granny in Hopkinsville, or Daddy in the Pacific. I was in alien territory and there was a war on. But I persevered, while trying to lose my accent.

  After the dramatic snow season, I expected daffodils and forsythia. Nothing happened. The days continued cold and gray. I yearned for the long, languorous springtime of Kentucky. I craved the mellow air that seemed to caress every pore. I wanted tulips and redbud and dogwood blossoms.

  Except for my frivolous year in New York City, I spent the decade of the sixties in school. I didn’t know what to do except to continue my plodding pilgrimage toward a teaching career. But graduate study at Harpur College was monastic, and I had little awareness of what was going on in the world beyond those wooded mountain ridges along Route 17. I was getting restless, worried that I faced a lonely future teaching at some junior college. I wanted some action—or at least a boyfriend. So I transferred to the University of Connecticut, a much larger school with less intellectual pretension and more mating possibilities.

  But in Connecticut, I found myself wading into a maelstrom. Everything—even the worth of literary study—was in question. The growing youth rebellion against middle-class values gathered me up and whipped me around like a wind ripping into sheets on the clothesline. I had aspired my whole life toward such amenities as central heat and running hot water, and suddenly they were the wrong goals. The new goals included living in a yurt or a dome, dressing in ragbag fashion, randomly coupling, and just plain grooving. The Vietnam War twisted everything around. The prized became trivial, and the ordinary became exalted. The war itself seemed distant to me. I didn’t know a soul in it, and I still had no TV. I listened to rock-and-roll on WBZ and subscribed to Newsweek and Life. The images of mud-spattered, grungy G.I.s with their M16s, dazed or lying dead in a jungle, seemed unreal. Yet those soldiers were the same age as my freshman students, the same age as all of the vociferous, long-haired students around me. These kids looked dazed, too.

  But not all of the shooting was overseas. Images of racial violence and bigotry flooded the newsmagazines—ugly scenes of beatings and murders, especially in my homeland. More than ever, I felt ashamed of being from the South. I feared that when people saw me, they imagined a walking, mute mannequin of Southern Gothic horror in high heels and a beehive—or worse, a baton twirler with a police dog. I was afraid my teachers and colleagues thought of hillbillies eating Moon Pies and swigging moonshine on the way home from a lynching. I remembered one of Daddy’s cousins talking once about the significance of the date August 8. “That was the day Abe let the niggers go,” he said, as if he actually remembered the emancipation. I didn’t want to be Southern anymore. But my metamorphosis wasn’t forthcoming. I was caught in a paralyzing culture shock.

  It was stopping up my mind. I couldn’t think. I questioned my intelligence, my sanity, my identity. I believed wholeheartedly in my own inferiority, and people treated me accordingly, like a wadded-up dishrag. A few defining episodes stick out among memories I’d like to banish.

  I became involved with a fellow graduate student I’ll call Larry. He was one of those guys whose soul was too sensitive for the Army to make use of him. He was an artist, passionate about what was tasteful and genuine. When he scoffed at the curtains I’d bought at a discount place, I saw instantly, through his eyes, that they were inauthentic, like something in Lucy Ricardo’s kitchen. The design was tasteless, the colors too loud.

  “I want to show you my quilt,” I said to him a few days later, when he came over to my hopelessly bourgeois apartment for coffee. I brought out the star quilt I had helped Granny make when I was a child. It was supposed to be my marriage quilt, but she had given it to me when I left for college, perhaps to celebrate the opportunity for education that she had not had for herself. I had washed the quilt until the edges were frayed. I laid it across my bed. I wanted to impress Larry because he seemed to like things that were lovingly crafted. (He threw pots on a wheel.) But instead he was taken aback by this simple creation with its five-point stars, pieced from the print dresses I had worn as a child.

  What Larry said was “Ugly!”

  “My grandmother made it,” I said in a faltering voice. Of course I cou
ld see, now that he mentioned it, how crude and primitive it was. Granny hadn’t been to art school. I had so much to learn.

  There was another contretemps with Larry. I made supper for him. In a new casserole dish I had obtained with Green Stamps, I baked chicken thighs and sliced potatoes in mushroom soup. My cooking was part imitation and part intuition. After we finished eating, Larry lifted the empty dish and walked around with it, talking about how he would have made the dish differently on his pottery wheel. We stood on a little balcony that extended outside my kitchen door, looking onto a lawn in front of birch trees. Larry held the dish out over the balcony railing as if he were trying to consider it as part of the landscape.

  “I wonder what would happen if I dropped this dish,” he said in a contemplative voice. He was regarding the dish, turning it, judging it. Clearly, he disapproved of it.

  “Why would you drop it?”

  The dish fell from his hand, as if it had dived of its own accord. I watched in disbelief as it cracked on the concrete patio below.

  “The dish won,” he said with a little blurt of laughter.

  I was confused and hurt, but I didn’t show it.

  “That’s all right,” I said. I dismissed Larry’s act, feeling I deserved to have such an inferior dish broken, even though it was hard-earned and very useful. But Larry was testing me, cruelly and deliberately. I realized later that I was supposed to get angry, show some fire. I was supposed to be real, authentic. But Southern girls aren’t taught to be real. I had learned modesty and submissiveness, the veneer of my rebellious streak.

  None of that was clear to me at the time. I grew ever more withdrawn and hesitant, fearful of saying the wrong thing. I learned, to my distress, that what was expected of me now was precisely the opposite of what I was equipped to do. Instead of expecting me to conform and please, people here expected me to be myself. But what was that? I seemed to have lost sight of who I was; I was only a vague presence. I felt I was judged for being a Southerner and then judged all over again for trying not to be a Southerner. Where did that leave me?