Suddenly I saw my own name. Bobby G. Mason. My name, changed only slightly. A young guy with that name, my name, had died in Vietnam. I choked up. I couldn’t tell if my face was wet with tears or with rain. The rain freed my tears. As the rain washed over the wall, I was aware that I was seeing it in several different ways. I grieved for Bobby G. Mason, and for Dwayne Hughes—the fictitious soldier whose name my three characters were seeking. Everyone’s name, I thought, was on that wall. The soldiers we sent to Vietnam were not the only ones who went. We were all there. And we all had a long journey to make together to get back home.
The rain was overdoing it, I realized later. Too melodramatic for fiction.
The Hilltoppers had disbanded long ago, but lead singer Jimmy Sacca had kept a group on the road for years, especially during the nostalgia craze of the seventies. Don McGuire, one of the original Hilltoppers, had been a school textbook salesman, and now he was selling real estate in Lexington. I had been in touch with him a few times over the years.
“I want to buy a piece of Kentucky,” I told Don on the telephone from Pennsylvania in the mid-eighties.
“Mason, you’re being called home,” he said. “Was it ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ at the Kentucky Derby that got to you? Did that song speak to you?”
“More or less,” I said.
One bright fall day Roger and I visited Don and his wife, Maxine, in their large plantation-style home in Lexington. Their house had a room devoted to Hilltoppers memorabilia: autographed photos of artists the group had worked with—Johnnie Ray, Perry Como, Steve and Eydie—and photos of the Hilltoppers performing at the Chicago Theater and on Ed Sullivan’s show. The walls were covered. Hanging above the piano was a gold record, an old 78 r.p.m. platter of “P.S. I Love You.”
“We want a place with fields and forests, far from town,” I told Don.
“You’re looking for a hoot-owl farm, Mason,” said Don.
He took Roger and me riding in his black Lincoln Town Car in search of a piece of land. We went out to the Kentucky River, lined with magnificent limestone palisades that harbor endangered species of plants. We drove along a country lane, searching for the farm listed for sale.
“This is like a national park,” Roger said when we explored the place, which had caves and cliffs and giant boulders. The man who owned the farm loaded us into his pickup truck and we rode through fields of ironweed and goldenrod, festooned with the orbs of large golden garden spiders. I had not realized the geography of Kentucky was so varied and so beautiful. When I battled my way out in my youth, I felt fenced in by cornfields, uninspired by landscape.
That farm was beyond our means, but eventually, in a different part of the state, Roger and I found another place we loved. We had always lived in the country—first in Connecticut and then in Pennsylvania. Now we would claim a little corner of my homeland. I had unfinished business there. I had mercifully escaped the hardship of the old ways—no lye soap or washboards, no hog-killing. I wouldn’t have to carry water. I wanted blackberries, but not the cruel, thorny ones; botanists had developed better ones now. I had grandiose visions of an asparagus bed. I was optimistic, just as I had been when I moved to New York years before. Now I could rediscover and celebrate the Kentucky springtime. Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, and I was wary of contradicting his wisdom. I wanted to return, but not relapse. Still, it would be a relief to live in a part of the country where a restaurant marquee might say CHICKEN GIZZARDS—ALL YOU CAN EAT. I wanted to be where people got together to play cards on a Friday night and didn’t wait till nine o’clock to eat supper. Yet I didn’t want to conform. Finally, I thought, I could live there now on my own terms.
Daddy came to inspect our land. When we walked straight up a steep hill, I was surprised at his stamina. He was now seventy-two. Without having to say so, he passed judgment on this hilly patch of ground that was poor cropland, so full of rocks we couldn’t dig a well.
“Are you going to set out some tobacco?” he asked. “If a tobacco allotment comes with the land, you can raise tobacco.”
“I don’t want to raise tobacco.”
Daddy nodded. “Good. Smoking liked to killed me,” he said. “But I quit.”
“Good. Now let’s get Mama to quit.”
We reached the top of the hill, where Daddy paused to catch his breath.
“Why didn’t you want to come back and live where you were raised?” he asked.
“I wanted to be near an airport,” I said. I realized that without even considering it, I had chosen not to go all the way home. The land we bought was a long way from Mayfield. I had to keep some distance, keep my options open.
Roger and I had the land we wanted, but it would still be a couple of years before we could leave Pennsylvania to live in Kentucky. The next time I saw that land, I had an anxious, bittersweet thought: maybe this would be the place where I would die.
18
The movie of Gone with the Wind came to Mayfield when my mother was pregnant with me. A few years ago, Mama told me that Granny wouldn’t allow her to see the movie because Clark Gable said the word “damn” in it. Granny was afraid hearing dirty words might cause Mama to have a miscarriage. “Or it might mark the baby,” she said. But I had already been subjected in utero to the unclean spirit of Biloxi and New Orleans when Mama went on the factory excursion.
I had never been interested in reading Gone with the Wind, but when I learned as an adult that the movie had been censored for me in the womb, I hurried to the video store and rented it. I hated the Southern-belle wasp-waisted view of the world so much that I couldn’t sympathize with Scarlett O’Hara’s loss or celebrate her courage in fighting to regain Tara. The Hollywood happy-humming-slave background of the movie reminded me of the Bobbsey Twins’ cheerful servants, Dinah and Sam. Scarlett seemed pathological in her obsessions. Her whole world smelled strongly of the kind of small-town aristocratic pretensions that had made me feel like an outcast in high school.
Daddy’s retreat from the movies into television was complete. He followed world news and sports and comedy shows. In the eighties, when he got cable, he roamed around the world from his La-Z-Boy chair. He was fascinated with human behavior, but his favorite shows were the animal programs on the Discovery channel. In general, animals pleased him far more than people did.
His piles of paperback mysteries and Westerns had long ago disappeared into the junkhouse. But in 1986, when William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was banned at Graves County High School (the consolidation of all the county high schools, including Cuba), he suddenly showed a surprising interest in literary matters. He said it was ridiculous to ban a book by an important American writer like William Faulkner. He fumed and stormed—and laughed. Some of the parents had complained that the novel referred to abortion, used God’s name in vain, and called a horse “a pussel-gutted bastard.” Letters to the Mayfield Messenger deplored how depressing the book was—how blasphemous and nasty. One said it was unfit for children’s sensitive nerves.
A former high-school classmate of mine named Juanita wrote a letter to the paper blasting the book ban. In her letter she mentioned—with some pride—my name as a local author, and Daddy called her to thank her. He hardly ever used the telephone; he would rather drive all the way to Paducah to buy a car part than call ahead and possibly save himself a trip. Daddy and Juanita struck up a friendly dialogue about the book controversy and telephoned each other with new tidbits and revelations. The topic of book banning had touched a nerve in him. Underneath it all, of course, he was defending me, his literary daughter.
Daddy and I began talking on the telephone more. He read me the letters to the editor. He guffawed. Some of the letters advocated returning to the good old days of wholesome reading—good books like Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.
“Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch!” Daddy scoffed. He couldn’t stop laughing.
As the news of the ban spread, a second wave of letters questioned the school board’s deci
sion. Wire services sent the story across the nation. In Oxford, Mississippi, a bookstore staged a marathon reading of As I Lay Dying in support of Faulkner—their own boy—and freedom of expression. Sales of As I Lay Dying boomed in the Paducah bookstores.
A peculiar scene entered my head. I had learned that in 1950, the year Granny was sent to Memphis for shock treatments, Faulkner was being treated for alcoholism and depression at the only psychiatric facility in Memphis. I don’t know if that was the place where Granny underwent shock treatments, but it seems likely. I couldn’t help imagining my Granny and William Faulkner conversing in the solarium—she almost catatonically reserved but finding something to say about banty hens maybe, and he saying odd things, about the mysteries of time perhaps. I tried to imagine Granny’s interior monologue as she lay dying. Would the imagery in her mind have been as dense as Faulkner’s prose?
Eventually, the complaint against As I Lay Dying was dropped, but not because enlightenment prevailed. The school and the town were being ridiculed, and that didn’t look good.
“You’ll have to read Faulkner’s book now, since you’ve gotten so involved in it,” I said to Daddy.
“Oh, I’ve read it. It’s the one where that dead woman in the coffin in that wagon has them holes bored through her forehead.”
It turned out that he had read As I Lay Dying years before, back in the forties. The vivid image of Addie Bundren’s last journey in the wagon stayed in his mind.
“I’m very familiar with Faulkner’s work,” Daddy said. “And Hemingway’s work.”
This was stunning news. I thought his head was full of football games and sitcoms. But he was familiar with works of the imagination that I had thought were my secrets. I knew he was probably overstating the breadth of his reading for my benefit, but I wondered if he had read some of those books I had left behind, as Granny had. I was afraid to ask if he had read Henry Miller.
We were both well aware that my novel In Country, which had been published the year before, was too racy for local high school classes. It was almost too risqué for The New Yorker, where excerpts from the novel had appeared. The magazine’s sensitive editor, William Shawn, ruefully acknowledged that the raw language of the characters who were Vietnam veterans was appropriate and inevitable, and I became the first writer to use the word “fuck” in The New Yorker.
My novel was not generally known in the Jackson Purchase, but then something surprising happened. Hollywood came to town. In 1988, emissaries from a movie producer appeared, with the intent of filming In Country right there in Mayfield. Scriptwriters asked my parents a thousand questions and snapped Polaroids of their stable and fields and the barbecue places in town and the courthouse. Later, P.R. people arrived to woo the mayor. Then location scouts showed up, searching for a modest old house with a good climbing tree in the yard. They drove up and down every street in town until they found the house they wanted. Then they knocked on the door and informed the shocked residents that their place had been chosen for a movie set. It was as though the family had won a home-delivered sweepstakes.
Everyone in town wanted to be in the movie, it seemed, even though there was an undertone of suspicion that the movie would portray the region in typical Hollywood possum-and-grits images. The whole town, apparently, was involved in the progress of the movie—following the movements of the crew, anticipating the appearance of the stars, gathering to watch the filming on the streets of Mayfield. A thousand townspeople stayed up late one night to watch Bruce Willis climb a tree and cuss God in a thunderstorm scene that took all night to film. A severe drought was on that summer, so the magic rain may have been the real attraction.
Always tangential to the life of the town, my family and I were now conspicuously absent. Maybe everybody thought we were too busy hobnobbing with movie stars at fancy restaurants in Paducah. Actually, Mama was working in her garden and fishing in her pond as usual, and Daddy was doing his regular farm-maintenance work. And I wasn’t anywhere around, except for a couple of visits from Pennsylvania, where I was still living. My sister LaNelle, who got a job working in the art department, was the only family member directly involved in the production. She worked on set details, such as locating the correct period wallpaper for the interiors. In search of authentic props, she brought the set decorators out to my parents’ house. They borrowed some of my mother’s paintings and family photographs.
Then the film people realized it wasn’t just the pictures and antiques in the house that were authentic goods—it was Mama herself.
The script called for a damson pie. LaNelle called home. “Mom, they want to know where they can get some damsons for a pie. Are they in season?”
“Well, they ought to be coming in about now.”
“I told them you might be able to round up some.”
“Well, I get them at that orchard east of town. They let you pick them for six dollars a bucket.”
“Could you get some? They wouldn’t know a damson from a Cheez Doodle. I told them you were the authority.”
“I reckon I could go out and pick some. I’ve been wanting some for the freezer. But they might charge six dollars and a half this year.”
“This outfit can probably afford it,” LaNelle said.
Obligingly, Mama went to the orchard and picked a bucket of damsons for the movie crew. She paid six dollars for the damsons. The pie had to be the real thing, they said.
One of the film’s stars turned to Mama, too. Peggy Rea—a woman of large dimensions—had played Boss Hogg’s girlfriend in The Dukes of Hazzard, my parents’ favorite TV show in the 1970s. When Peggy learned that her role in In Country was partly based on my mother, she came to the farm to meet Mama. She brought along a photograph of herself in her Dukes of Hazzard outfit, with a white cowgirl hat. Mama and Daddy would have been embarrassed to spend time with silk-shrouded Hollywood stars who couldn’t milk a cow if their lives depended on it. But Peggy was delightful. She was down-to-earth, full of fun. After that first visit, she came back often, and my parents enjoyed her company. Daddy wasn’t afraid to kid her about her size.
During one of my own visits home, Peggy came over for one of Mama’s fried chicken dinners. We ate outside on a rickety picnic table that Daddy had reinforced by wiring a gun barrel onto the frame. LaNelle and I sat down on the built-in benches, and the whole structure wobbled. As we watched Peggy and Mama approach with their plates, LaNelle said under her breath, “This is not going to work.”
Peggy saw the precariousness of the situation immediately and laughed. She said, “I’m afraid if I sit there, we’ll all end up on the ground.” Quickly, LaNelle found a chair for Peggy.
Mama said, “Well, if I didn’t forget to bring my tea, then I’m not here.”
“That’s my line!” cried Peggy with a roar of laughter. “In my scene tomorrow I have to say, ‘If she didn’t wear her high heels out in the pasture, then I’m not here!’ ”
Peggy and my mother became friends. They were about the same age, and Peggy was in high spirits because her In Country role had reenergized her flagging career. “Out here, I feel I’m in the world of the characters,” she said. Mama was pleased.
Peggy invited my mother to the set one morning. Mama was late because she had to go get her hair fixed. (She had won a hula contest at the senior-citizens center, and a hairdo was the prize.) When she arrived at the old house in town where the filming was taking place, she found the streets blocked off and enough trucks to haul a circus congregated around the house. The crew had reinforced the floorboards of the porch, slapped a new roof on the garage, and then punched a hole in the roof to make it look shabby. The greensman on the crew had painted the drought-browned grass green. Mama’s hanging plants, which the company had borrowed, were lined up on the front-porch overhang.
“Those plants need watering,” Mama observed.
In the scene being filmed, Bruce Willis, as Emmett, the Vietnam vet, is digging a ditch alongside the foundation of his house after a rain. E
mily Lloyd, the teenage British actress playing the lead character, Sam, comes to the door and greets her grandparents, who drive up in a truck. Willis digs on the ditch during the scene. “He didn’t really dig that ditch,” Mama told me later. “He just shoveled on it when the camera was on.”
In the scene, Peggy gets out of the truck carrying the damson pie.
“It was a double-crust,” Mama explained to me. “I like to make a damson pie like a cobbler, with the top open some. Why, you couldn’t see a damson in that pie. They could have put prunes in that thing and you wouldn’t know the difference. I told Peggy they could have substituted a cow pile. She got in and out of that truck with that pie a hundred times. I knew that pie wouldn’t be eat. I knew it would go to waste.”
Mama had lunch with the movie crew in the gymnasium of the senior-citizens center, which the crew had rented. The caterers served Cornish hens. “You could have all you wanted to eat,” Mama reported to me. “I never saw so much good stuff.”
Emily Lloyd was cute and friendly, Mama said. “But she jabbered so fast I couldn’t make out half of what she was saying. She could talk right when the camera was on, though.”
Most people in town adored Emily because she didn’t put on airs. But the general opinion was that Bruce Willis wasn’t friendly because between takes he retreated to his black camper-van with his wife, Demi Moore, who was expecting their first baby. Late in the summer she gave birth to a baby girl in Paducah. As part of her job, LaNelle created an oil painting of the courthouse square, a commemorative of the Mayfield summer, to welcome the new baby.
One Sunday I was at home, spending a slow afternoon with my parents and LaNelle. Peggy was visiting. Mama fried a chicken and cooked some vegetables from the garden. She spread the table with one of Granny’s nice tablecloths. Daddy wouldn’t eat with us because he was watching a football game on TV.
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