Mama’s letters were troubling. She wrote about having to listen to both Granny and Daddy moaning “Oh, me” to get attention. “Wilburn’s nerves are getting worse all the time. He use to set down by work—he was lazy. Now he has to keep on the move, just wears hisself out in a long run. He can’t sleep. He’s going to be just like Granny. She’s just about got me drove up the wall and now I have him to deal with. My nerves are shot.” Later, she wrote, “Granny won’t get up out of her bed. I made her an angel food cake for her birthday. She just strings food on her bed. The health nurse was here and said the only thing wrong with Granny was her laying in bed and not taking any exercise. She quit trying to use herself. Why she quit—it hurt. She just lays in a ball, that way she don’t hurt, that’s the way old people does.”
Granny’s nerve medicine muddled her mind. She thought strangers were living in the north bedroom, the one my parents had occupied at the beginning of their marriage—the room where I was conceived, the room they returned to now. Granny kept asking questions about the couple in that room. She slept with her pocketbook under her pillow. At times she didn’t seem to realize she was in her own home, because my parents had made so many changes. They redecorated the house, putting up dark paneling and painting the woodwork brown. There had been a special on brown paint, and paneling was an easy fix for much-papered walls.
“I don’t want the woodwork painted brown,” Granny told her son. It had always been white, with lace curtains on the windows. Now the large, airy rooms became dark and claustrophobic. She said, “I never liked brown. I never even had a brown dress.”
My father had always been forbearing with her, but he was getting more easily annoyed. He said harshly, “We’re taking care of you, so we’ll paint it any color we want to.”
He had never stood up to her like that in his life, but by now he was overwhelmed by the sacrifices he and Mama had made for her. Abashed, Granny didn’t persist. She told Mama, “He talked so awful to me.”
Mama heard one of Granny’s nieces say to her, “You better watch what you say, Aunt Ethel. Or they’ll put you in a rest home.”
Daddy teased his mother in a gruff way and reported their dialogues to me like jokes.
“Where’s Chris?” Granny wanted to know.
Daddy replied, “She went to mess and the hogs eat her up.”
“Did Bobbie go with her?” Granny asked.
Daddy had the freedom to get in the car and go to town, but Mama had little time to run around. She did all the cooking, washing, housekeeping, gardening, canning, and freezing. She supervised Granny’s medicine and fixed her meals. Usually, Granny ate on a TV tray beside her bed. When I visited her, I couldn’t bear to stay in the room while she ate because of the rattling of her ill-fitting false teeth. I would often stare at the raised blue veins in her hands, wondering if they were hard, like iron pipes.
Although she became bedridden, Granny had no severe medical problems. Apparently her heart was strong, in spite of hardening of the arteries. She had few visitors; most of her kinfolks were dead. Mama took her regularly to the local mental-health clinic, where doctors from Hopkinsville chatted with her and renewed her Thorazine prescription. They told her to get out more, go for rides. One of the doctors asked Mama, “How are you doing?”
Mama said, “I’m not the patient. She’s the patient.”
The doctor said, “And I asked you how you were doing.”
Mama told me later, “He knew she’d drive me crazy.”
Daddy had slowly been selling off his dairy herd as milk prices dropped. Mama wrote me, “Wilburn sold Pumpkin Seed. It like to have killed him. It’s the first time since the Masons came here from Clear Springs that the farm didn’t have cows on it. He was five when they moved here. He misses feeding her and packing water to her. I would be glad of that in the winter time. He went to an auction and bought fifty-one snuff boxes full of jewelry and a box of old odd shape glass bottles and jugs.” Daddy took a new job, driving a bus for a work center for the mentally disabled—a job he enjoyed immensely. And Mama escaped now and then. She played Rook with a group of women much older than she, but she said she felt she was their age. She also went fishing whenever she could. This was still her favorite pastime; there was no pleasure quite like reeling in a fish, worrying and working a large one toward shore until it was weak enough to bring in. When she was fishing, she felt that her life was her own. She went fishing at the lake once with a woman whose husband had made a boat out of car hoods.
In 1979, as Granny grew even worse, Mama wrote, “She was out of her head yesterday, talking in unknown tongue. Today I got this potty chair for her. She didn’t think much of it and kept wanting me to hide it behind the door. I wouldn’t do it. I said if she could walk that far she could go to the bathroom. She asked me four times in about fifteen minutes to put it behind the door and I wouldn’t. So the last thing she said before I left, she asked me to move it again. I just turned and walked off. So she hasn’t used it yet. oh! She wants to be petted and made over. She still thinks of me as a child and she should be boss. I don’t take it anymore and she can’t take that. oh! While I was cleaning up yesterday, she found out it was Sunday. She got up walking around, going to the table. She’s not as bad as she makes like she is. She’s just using me. Wilburn won’t fool with her.”
Even though my mother didn’t laugh much anymore, I was pleased to see traces of her humor in the little “Oh”s that always infused her letters. But I was afraid. The main note in her letters now was pain. For the first time, I began to see that my move to the North meant an abdication of responsibility. There was no solution I could see to my mother’s burdens. I felt helpless.
Limited home-health visits were covered by Medicare, so Mama enlisted a nurse to help with Granny. But when the nurse tried to bathe her, Granny refused to cooperate. My mother wrote me, “She hauled off and slapped that nurse halfway across the room. She wouldn’t have it!”
By custom, only family should attend to personal matters. The nurse did not return.
Too late, Granny tried to show affection and gratitude to her daughter-in-law. Grasping Mama’s arm, Granny would say, “Don’t let me die.”
With her pocketbook hidden under her pillow, Granny lay in bed, adamantly clinging to shreds of life. Perhaps her tenacity lengthened her life. Month after month, year after year, she held on. But eventually she wore down. She died in 1981, when she was almost ninety-four.
It was not until the night of her death that my parents spent a night alone together, in either house, in all their married life. They had stayed at motels a number of times, but at home there had always been children around, or Daddy’s parents—since 1936. The magnitude of this moment is staggering for me to contemplate. By then they were formed by habit, and I don’t imagine they felt liberated at first. I picture them sitting silently in front of the TV, stunned by the finality of Granny’s passing, drained by the ordeal, numbed by grief.
“No matter how ready you think you are, you’re never prepared to see somebody go,” Mama told me.
Only gradually had I realized what those trying years were doing to Mama. Her spirit seemed broken. She was fearful and uncertain—after being pushed around so long and uprooted on two occasions from the little house she and Daddy had built. Witnessing her shatter—quietly, far away—left me disconcerted and guilty. Mama had told me how bad her nerves were, and Daddy had complained a few times too about Mama’s growing fearfulness. They had not gone anywhere together in years, and after Granny died, Mama refused to ride in the car with Daddy at the wheel. “His driving makes me nervous,” she told me. She lost confidence in her own driving and would not dare venture onto the busy highway to Paducah.
My gentle grandmother had been such an unintentional tyrant. She hadn’t demanded privileges. Instead, she denied herself, hoarding scraps and silences. As matriarch, she was upholding a way of life—frugality and kinship loyalty—and her whole personality represented the force of this ideal.
But a tyranny can be formed from silence—the things that go without saying, the inexorable ways and rituals and expectations that form an unspoken law.
It was only after Granny died that my parents used the word “depression.” Mama acknowledged, “She was depressed, and she just gradually got worse, a little at a time.” Recently Mama told me that when Granny had been institutionalized in Hopkinsville, one of the doctors asked her, “Have you ever thought about suicide?”
“Yes,” Granny replied. “But I didn’t know how.”
Her silences were stultifying, even after she was gone. I wondered if her problem had been caused by a chemical imbalance, or if it arose directly from the psyche—an extraordinary capacity for worry, or maybe just excessive timidity. I could imagine that her failure to reach out of herself was like my own when I went to school in the North and froze in culture shock; the mental block that stopped up my mind may have been like the barrier in hers. I wondered what was going on in her imagination when she read Henry Miller—maybe something so tempestuous that only shock treatments could quell her rampaging nerves. She seemed to possess dignity and strength in her quiet, imposing, stern way, as long as she was in charge. She was self-possessed and strong until something violated her control—a worry, a foreign intrusion. Then she came apart.
When Granny had her breakdowns, was she brooding over some strain of mental illness that ran in her family? Was she dwelling on some shameful secret? In her time, a simple human error—like an unwed pregnancy, or a son who “turned out wild”—could cause a trauma that colored a lifetime. It was disgrace, shame, the sense that everything one worked for and believed in and hoped for was ruined by a single misstep. One of Granny’s aunts had “turned out bad” and had left Kentucky. The family disowned her.
What was Granny really so depressed about back in 1950? If her nerves were so fragile, why didn’t she break down again when Granddaddy died, in 1965? Would the sounds of the Beatles really have wrecked her nerves if she hadn’t fled to the car in the woods? What could she bear? What were her limits? Thorazine altered her, blurred her.
Of course, having only one child made Granny overprotective and fearful. And evidently giving birth had been traumatic for her. Mama told me, “The doctor told her not to have any more children after she had Wilburn. She nearly died from a kidney infection.” Granny survived the childbed, but she probably wouldn’t risk it again. This must have meant no more sex. “I never heard them carrying on after the light was out,” Mama told me. She couldn’t quite imagine it either. I thought about my young, handsome grandfather with his horse and buggy. I remember how he would tease Granny, saying, “Buss me, Ettie,” and she would draw back in embarrassment.
When Daddy was away in the Navy, Granny’s worry about him might have equaled my mother’s, her potential sense of loss just as great as ours. Even though he came back safely, did she sense something changed in him, something lost that she would never get back? Did the aftermath of World War II—he was out there when they dropped that big bomb—simply fester until 1950, when her nerves snapped? The threat of war had not vanished. She may have feared that her son would at any moment be sent to Korea.
Granny’s 1950 breakdown was enclosed in silence. She apparently worried herself into a black hole but couldn’t explain. She revealed only one clue. In the ambulance to Memphis, Mama kept asking her, “What’s bothering you? Tell us what’s wrong with you so we’ll know what to do about it.”
Finally, Granny uttered one sentence. “A year ago the doctor told me I have an enlarged globe in my heart,” she said.
That was all Granny would say. Apparently the doctor had not explained. She didn’t know whether she had a serious heart condition that needed treatment. She probably would not have returned to the doctor to ask questions or have him listen to her heart again. It was more common to let well enough alone, in case the doctor said something you didn’t want to hear. But from the moment the doctor spoke, she had probably imagined her enlarged heart bursting out of her chest, exploding. It could happen at any moment. What would become of her husband, her son, the family, the garden, her hens? Everything was involved in the silent storm of her worry. The whole world as she knew it revolved around the size of her heart—a heart she had thought was tight and stingy. But her heart was too big. She had to hide it, as the men hid the bull’s amorous swelling from little girls’ eyes. She had to contain her heart. She felt it beating, each beat threatening her. She could see the throb all the way to her navel. It fluttered and patted her pendulous, unsupported breasts beneath the peach ribbed-cotton camisole she wore. She could remember her heart beating like that—in excitement, in anticipation, when Bob came courting, as he had done for several years. In 1910, five years before they married, Bob was twenty-eight, and she was twenty-two. He came on Sundays and took her riding in his buggy. She was living with her parents and her brother and his stunningly beautiful new wife. In the night, Ethel heard noises: her sickly parents moaning in pain; the newlyweds moving together in their four-poster bed, entwined in each other’s arms; and in the cot in the annex to the kitchen, the heavy breathing of Winston Tucker, the boarder, who labored on the farm. Winston was eighteen. She could hear him stir in the night. She slept lightly.
It was so cold going across the breezeway early in the morning to the offset kitchen to cook breakfast. The boarder had to be fed first, so he could get out to feed the animals and milk the cows. He saw her in the mornings, fresh from bed. She hastened to pin up the falling strands of her hair. Silently, she dipped water into the kettle. Sometimes he would have the fire started. Winston Tucker had few prospects. She, of course, couldn’t form an alliance with a hired hand. Her father—Zollicoffer Quigley Arnett—was a respectable blacksmith and carpenter and farmer. He was an invalid, and her mother was not well either. Ethel took care of them. She did not dare leave them. She needed to tend her parents. She wanted to teach school. She kept putting Bob off.
I imagine Granny through her twenties, living in the same household with the dark, muscular boarder, getting up at dawn and traipsing in her nightgown to the cold kitchen to build the fire and start the biscuits. I imagine the fire of her youth, burning so slowly and so deeply that she was hardly warmed by it. Maybe she wasn’t as passionate as she should have been about patient Bob. Maybe the real love of her life married someone else, unable to wait while she cared for her parents.
When she was twenty-six, her father died, and she married Bob a year later. I wonder if Ethel insisted on waiting until after her father’s death. Did Z.Q. disapprove of Bob? Was she too embarrassed or frightened in the face of his grim authority to make the sexual leap into marriage? When he died, maybe her mother, Laura, mindful of the biological exigencies, urged her to plunge ahead. Perhaps it was her mother’s encouragement that enabled her to leave home finally, to join her long-suffering suitor. But what if Ethel had still wanted to teach school, which she couldn’t do if she married? Did Laura push Ethel into marriage against her desires?
Ever since my grandmother’s death, I have pondered the mystery of her mind. I remember my own mind during late childhood and adolescence. I was afraid of fire and brimstone, afraid of death and the dark. My mind is hers, in part. The imagination connects me with her as surely as eye color and hair texture. I see myself in Granny’s face. I can almost imagine her feeble, bedridden last days, as she lay in silence replaying her life, retreating, reliving her dark secrets.
Recently a photograph of her parents, Laura and Zollicoffer Quigley Arnett, came to me. I had never seen their likenesses before. Laura is big-boned and upright; Z.Q. is thin, delicate, fair-haired. He is sitting in a straight-back chair, and she is standing beside him like a porch post. I can see my grandmother in Laura—her will and strength; the fine, upswept hair. Granny had her father’s large ears.
Laura and Z.Q. are buried together in the Arnett family cemetery. When I went there not long ago, I discovered a small stone next to theirs. It is the marker for Granny’s litt
le brother, John. He died when he was four. I never knew Granny had a younger brother. She didn’t tell me about him when I was so full of questions. My mother, who was part of Granny’s household for forty-six years, did not know about the child, either. So here was one more secret. Maybe, I thought, a big one. Granny was eight when her little brother was born. At that age, she would have had a large role in the family—learning the household chores and helping to care for him. She would have felt pride as she washed the baby’s dresses on the washboard and helped to feed him spoonfuls of potatoes and beans she had mashed up. She might cream some chicken too. Maybe she would sing songs to the baby while she watched out for him, to see that he didn’t burn himself in the fireplace or fall into the cistern or eat bluing or caustic soda.
He didn’t live long enough to get his ten-year cake. I don’t know how little John Arnett died, but losing a little brother must have been traumatic for my grandmother, who was twelve. And it is conceivable that she blamed herself for whatever happened to him. My imagination seizes the bare fragments of names and dates, with their tantalizing implications. I fill in the colors, the way I did in my coloring books long ago. Maybe John fell into a vat of boiling water while she was supposed to be watching him. Or maybe he died of one of those deadly overnight fevers that swooped in on children so often in those days. That would not be her fault, but she could have found a reason to feel guilty anyway—especially if she had let him get a chill because she took him outside on a rainy day. Her mind, always busy, could concoct outrageous scenarios.
But my mind wants a grounding, a few facts to anchor my imaginings. Nosing around for more clues, I came upon the obituary of Granny’s father.
Z. Q. ARNETT, aged about 58 years, died Thursday morning at his home, three and one-half miles east of the city. Mr. Arnett, who was a well-known farmer, had been an invalid for twelve years, suffering from locomotor ataxia, but a few days ago he developed pneumonia and his death came quickly. He was born and raised near where he breathed his last and is survived by a wife and three children.
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