—Mayfield Messenger, September 12, 1913
The past jumped out at me. I had heard that Z.Q. had gout—he used a cane and passed the time sitting on his front porch. Now my imagination took a stunned, ninety-degree turn. Locomotor ataxia, a painful hardening of the spine, is a condition associated with the third stage of syphilis. Years after infection, syphilis comes to rest in some area of the body—the spine, the heart, the brain. The siege can go on for years. Victims of locomotor ataxia typically are thin and have sad-looking faces. I remembered that Z.Q. was said to weigh a hundred and twenty-six pounds. I looked back at the photograph. Yes, his face is sad. He seems so delicate and uncertain. But his wife stands tall and staunch, her hand on the chair behind his shoulder.
So my grandmother spent the bloom of her youth dutifully caring for her father, who suffered from syphilis! I could hardly take in the thought. Did her mother contract it too? Wouldn’t Z.Q. have infected his wife? Laura looks fit and strong in the picture. But I had heard that she walked with a crooked stick and that the doctor came to the house once and used a red-hot poker to sear her spine.
What of the little boy, John? My earlier speculations are knocked aside, replaced by more terrible possibilities. Perhaps he died from congenital syphilis—passed on through his mother. Against my will, I imagine him with scabby, sore eyes; chronic sores in his mouth and nose; knoblike bulges on his legbones and head. He could have been deaf or blind. I’m horrified—I want to reject the images. Maybe Laura had gotten past the infectious stages of syphilis before the little boy was conceived.
I could find no more traces of Granny’s little brother, but I located the death certificates for both Laura and Z.Q. The disease is confirmed for both of them. Laura had it for eight years. Her death was precipitated by starvation, after she refused to eat for fifteen days. She was fifty-seven years old.
Their suffering, and my grandmother’s burden, are almost too much for me. I shudder at Granny’s pain and dread. Probably no one ever told her the specific source of her father’s illness—a trip to Cairo? a whorehouse on some back street behind the stockyards in Mayfield? an assignation with a diseased widow in bucolic Clear Springs? Granny wouldn’t have known the facts—but she knew the shame of his sin. The family’s shame, although shrouded in silence, must have been stark and heavy. And it must have preyed on her inflamed imagination. Z.Q. apparently contracted syphilis after she was born, for she and her older siblings were not infected, but maybe she didn’t realize she was free from the sickness. She might have feared that she would inherit the spinal malady her parents endured, that it would visit her in her middle age as it had them. Maybe, years later, she thought her enlarged heart was the terrible disease flaring up at last. She must have felt haunted, doomed. She may have spent her life waiting for her horrible fate to overtake her.
Syphilis! My God. Granny’s story—her worries, her silences, her breakdowns—rearranges itself completely in my mind.
Silence fell over the family when Z.Q.’s troubles began. Kinship loyalty came first, and young Ethel Arnett struggled to hold her suitor, Bob Mason, at bay while she tended to her parents’ hideous affliction. The household depended on her, for Z.Q. was incapacitated as a farmer and Laura was too poorly to keep house. Yet—whether or not he suspected the origin of the illness—Bob waited for Ethel, cheerfully pitching his woo. Ethel, fearing the taint of evil, put off her own sexual fulfillment until she was twenty-seven. Even after her marriage, she maintained a stubborn silence. Stiff, secretive, she never confided in Bob or anyone else. Her troubled heart expanded and palpitated as she ate it out from within.
At the cemetery where her parents are buried, the fecundity of her family is celebrated. William P. Arnett, Z.Q.’s father, had three wives and fifteen children—fifteen after he reached the age of thirty-five. Who knows how many others came before? He remarried each time he lost a wife in childbirth, merrily reproducing until he was sixty-seven. On a monolith at the cemetery, William P. Arnett’s photograph—a vacant-eyed man with a gray, pointed beard reaching down to his breastbone—presides over a portion of his progeny. His countenance is remarkable. His long hair is swooped up and pinned into a topknot, and on the sides it is swirled into large pin curls. He and his three wives are marked by creek stones. Z.Q. and Laura and little John lie nearby. They lie together in a row, like spectators of the future.
17
It is a sad truth that we were all relieved when Granny died. A weight had been lifted. Before long, Daddy had a lighter step. He told Mama he realized he should never have allowed her to be burdened all those years, but he hadn’t known what else to do. His mother’s unbending will and his promise to his father had been like the commandments handed down to Moses.
Daddy set out to make it up to Mama. He was sixty-five, Mama was sixty-two. It wasn’t too late to enjoy their lives, he told her. “Do you want to move back home?” he asked her. She did, but the little house, built in 1944, would need extensive repairs. It was good enough to fix up for renters, she said, but not for themselves. They discussed building a new house. Finally, Mama decided that Granny and Granddaddy’s old house was good enough for them to live out their days in. “It would cost too much to build a new house,” she declared. With this observation, she initiated the final direction of their married life.
Granny had saved her Social Security checks for sixteen years, and my parents inherited everything. With the bounty, they splurged. They redid some of Granny’s cabinets and installed a new sink. They covered the kitchen linoleum with a dense brown rug, and they laid dark, textured carpeting throughout the house. They finished paneling all of the walls and lowered the ceilings. They enlarged the dining room. Daddy replaced the shower with a tiny bathtub and built a cabinet and pasted down some linoleum. He bought a vanity with a built-in, fake-marble sink. Mama hung up an amusing set of plaster figures—a woman in her nightgown marching with a lantern to the outhouse under the moon. They redecorated the room where Granny died.
They were tickled with their handiwork. They were acting like kids: this is how they should have started out their marriage in 1936, I thought. They began going to yard sales and auctions, picking up knickknacks and antique furniture. They stuffed the house with their gleanings. Daddy acquired a school bell from an old one-room school-house, and he set it on a post by the junkhouse.
He built a small deck out back. From the deck they could admire the fields—and the new pond, his pièce de résistance. He had hired a bulldozer to create a pond for Mama, so that she could go fishing whenever she pleased. The pond was a pocket at the intersection of two creeks. It caught the flow of one creek and spilled to the other. He worked industriously on a levee, fortifying it with heavy rocks. He battled weeds, mowed paths, manicured the banks. He stocked the pond with catfish and bream and bass.
For himself, he fashioned a shop in the junkhouse, where he worked repairing antique guns. Sometimes he created little explosions by mistake. He had been trading antique guns for some time, locating the parts he needed to restore guns for collectors. The old trade days had now become flea markets. He found it entertaining to see what junk people would buy and how much they would pay for it. He knew a man who had peddled a bushel basket full of “Indian arrowheads” he had chipped out of flint while he watched television.
Mama joined the senior-citizens group in town. Daddy would not consider joining such a group. “I ain’t old,” he said. But Mama needed friends. At the senior-citizens center she took an art class and began painting still lifes and copying paintings from magazines. She painted a portrait of him they both thought was eerily realistic. She did a painting from a photograph of the old dairy barn, which had burned a few years before—a cigarette from a passing motorist. She painted fruit bowls and flowers. Daddy was amazed at her talent. Before long, they found that they were talking, discussing things, sharing their day. They were starting over, with the privacy and the honeymoon they’d never had.
Mama still wouldn’t ride i
n the car with Daddy at the wheel, but she went traveling with the senior citizens on chaperoned tours. Daddy stayed home. He told me that fools were everywhere and he didn’t need to go out of his way to find them. And he did not feel comfortable spending the night away from home. “I want to get back to my animals,” he told me. “And sleep in my own bed.”
“Wilburn, you’re crazy!” some of the kinfolks told him. “Spending two thousand dollars on one of them trips! You’re liable to need that money someday.”
“If Chris wants to spend nine thousand dollars on a trip, it’s all right with me,” he replied. Guilt over the sacrifices she had made for his mother gnawed at him, and he was pleased to see Mama blossom, to hear her old laugh returning. He even bought her a diamond ring at a pawnshop.
She went to Hawaii. She went out West, through the Badlands and across the Continental Divide. She cruised to the Virgin Islands. She toured Nova Scotia and New England. She traveled through Europe. There, she got a kick out of the various styles of commodes. In Germany she noticed the women working in the fields while the men lazed under a tree. She wasn’t surprised. The scene seemed familiar. The Swiss Alps scared her and the Italian heat smothered her. She hated European bread. “That bread would yank your teeth plumb out,” she said.
When she went on the New England fall-foliage tour, the trip included a two-day stopover in New York City. I traveled from Pennsylvania, where I was still living, to join her at the St. Moritz Hotel. It was the dinkiest hotel she had ever seen, she said. “The rooms ain’t big enough to cuss a cat in.”
“Space is scarce in the city,” I said. I thought for a moment about my cubicle at the Hotel Taft, when I moved to New York after college.
I went along with the group to see the Statue of Liberty. As the bus traveled down Fifth Avenue, our guide pointed out Saks Fifth Avenue, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rockefeller Center. My mother was trying to write all the names down in her notebook. I had encouraged her to keep a journal of her trips, but now she wasn’t looking at the sights. She was writing.
“I’ll write it, Mama,” I said. “You look.”
By this time, I had become a writer—belatedly, after many twists and turns while I looked over my shoulder at my childhood dreams and shook my head to get out the nightmare residue from my journey north. I had discovered that I could draw on my true sources in order to write fiction. How could I have failed to recognize them? They had claimed me all along. So much of the culture that I had thought made me inferior turned out to be my wellspring. And my mother was my chief inspiration.
A friend of mine in the city was eager to meet Mama, so she had invited us to the Four Seasons restaurant, in the dark tower of the Seagram’s Building, a landmark that appears in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—one of the movies that had originally lured me to New York. We strolled past the Picasso and Rothko paintings in the large foyer. The coat-check person wanted to take care of our parcels. “No,” Mama said, clutching a plastic Kmart bag she carried. “I want to keep this with me.”
The bag contained a painting she had done in her senior-citizens art class. She was going to present it to my friend Amanda.
The dinner was extravagant and dreamlike. We were aware that Amanda had the menu with the price list, while ours showed no prices. Mama, who tends to order the cheapest thing on a menu, was clearly uneasy at not knowing what the food cost. Nevertheless she indulged herself by ordering raw oysters.
“What do you cook at home?” Amanda asked.
“Fried chicken, ham, peas, slaw, green beans, shell-beans.” Mama named her garden crops.
We talked about her garden and her travels. Amanda is lively and brisk, and she speaks in what at home we call “a New York minute.” She has a joyous laugh that could rival Mama’s. She got Mama to laugh.
At the table next to us, a young woman was being celebrated by her parents for her promotion in a public-relations department of a major firm. She was giddy with her success. Amanda told me later in detail the conversation she had overheard. A businesswoman who herself moves in powerful circles, Amanda said, “There I was wedged between two worlds, and I heard those people talking about this big-deal promotion, and I asked myself, what was all the excitement about? What? So what? Your mother was more real than anybody there.”
“I don’t see any catfish on the menu, Mama,” I teased. We had been talking about her pond.
“I’ve never had catfish,” Amanda said.
“You don’t know what you’ve missed,” Mama said.
We ate leek soup and crabcakes and hazelnut rice and swordfish and Linzer torte. Following Amanda’s lead, Mama drank a glass of kir.
“I don’t drink, but I had champagne on my cruise,” she explained. “It bubbled up my nose.”
She opened her Kmart bag and presented the painting, a bowl of flowers, to Amanda.
“I love it!” Amanda cried.
Afterwards, we walked down Park Avenue a few blocks. The lights were magnificent—from my skewed viewpoint a bit surreal. The Cuban missile crisis flashed through my mind. I frequently carry contradictory realities in my head. Amanda too was seeing the lights and the buildings in a new way, through heartland eyes.
“Aren’t they amazing?” she said.
“Well, Mama, what do you think of New York?” I said. “We’re on Park Avenue.”
“It’s about what I expected,” she said, not terribly impressed. Then she explained, “I’ve seen tall buildings before—in Detroit.”
Mama hadn’t wanted Amanda to think she was provincial. As for me, I was remembering my younger self, spinning along Park Avenue in my Holly Golightly hat.
The trouble with walking on Park Avenue was that I couldn’t see the stars for all the lightbulbs, and there weren’t any fascinating bugs. It was time to return to Kentucky for good. For some time, voices from home had been calling to me in clear, beckoning tones—their speech unspoiled by P.R. consultants or professional jargon or the rules of grammar. Through the voices of my family, I heard the voices of my grade-school classmates who formed my first impressions of the world outside the farm. When I began to write stories, their lives were the ones I came back to.
I wondered what happened to the boy who fell on the icy steps outside the fifth-grade classroom and knocked his front teeth out. I wondered about the poor girl who never had a dime for the traveling show and wore drab plaid dresses but had a beautiful head of hair. I had heard of the girl who grew up to become a hotshot executive in Atlanta, and I had heard that Howie Crittenden and Doodle Floyd, the basketball stars, had declined to stay with the pros because the big city wasn’t for them. I knew about the smart boy a grade ahead of me who got a Ph.D. and had a nervous breakdown. I wondered about the others. What did the ones who stayed behind do for a living? Farm? Work at the tire plant? Of course I was wondering about the kind of life I might be leading if I had stayed.
I wrote about a preacher’s wife who escapes her unhappy marriage by playing video games at the church retreat; I wrote about an unemployed ex-trucker; I wrote about a guy who drives a bus for mentally disabled workers, as Daddy did; I wrote about a woman with breast cancer who falls for a devious flea-market trader. It seemed to me that the characters I imagined were slightly off balance, trying to comprehend their place in a changing world that appeared to have no room for them. But they were hopeful. I identified with their sense of jarring dislocation and also with their sense of possibility. It seemed I had to write their stories in order to try to find my way back to my own place.
Some of the voices haunted me because I was still preoccupied with all the guys who went to Vietnam. Six young men from Graves County had died over there. A novel began growing in my mind. Writing was like remembering, an act of retrieval. I wrote the story as if my family had lived it. It was about a young girl whose father had been killed in Vietnam just before she was born. She had never known her father. Now, in 1984, she was graduating from high school, and she was beginning to ask questions about him—just as I w
as increasingly asking questions about my family. She was among the first of the children of the war to come of age. The voices of the veterans whose accounts I read flipped me back into the sixties, and then back to the farm. I thought of farm boys shipping out to war, as my father had done a generation before. I remembered the Fort Campbell soldier I had met.
It was as though I were summoning voices from the past to undo the silences in my own family—my grandmother’s fears, my father’s reticence about his war, my mother’s mute pain as she was caring for her mother-in-law.
While I was writing this novel, Roger and I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. On a cloudy Sunday, we strolled down the Mall from the Capitol, past the Washington Monument, toward the hidden black gash in the earth. As we walked, I began to hear the characters in the novel, as if they were talking on a tape in my head. I could hear what they would be saying if they were ambling along beside me, on their way to the memorial. I could hear Emmett, a Vietnam veteran, speaking nervously, but holding back his feelings. I could hear the girl, Sam—scared though eager to find her father’s name engraved on the wall. I could hear Sam’s grandmother, a country woman far from home and too heavy to move fast. Her son was named on that wall. I could hear the grandmother say, “I’m afraid we won’t find his name. It might not show up good.” In Sam, I saw my younger self. I knew what all three characters would be feeling. I was trembling with their anxiety.
It began to rain. Roger and I had umbrellas, and we lifted them. It rained harder. We reached the wall, where streams of people, almost oblivious to the rain, were poring over the names on the wall.
We walked along a low section of the wall, gazing at the names, with the rain drizzling down over our reflections on the shiny black face of the wall. We had no particular name to look for; our eyes hit the names randomly. We saw a man and woman pause. “There it is,” the man said. The woman touched the name silently, mouthing the words. We moved on. The names ran before us with the water.
Clear Springs Page 22
