Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  His cousin Mose had diabetes and wasn’t supposed to eat much bread. “What that doctor don’t know won’t hurt him,” Mose said. Daddy and Mose and all their kind continued to have eggs and fried toast and bacon or sausage for breakfast every day of their lives. Cholesterol was just another booger-man story they didn’t have time for.

  Daddy died on December 1, his mother’s birthday. He didn’t get to learn how the earthquake prediction turned out.

  His death came much too soon, before crucial things had been said. Unanswered questions flew around like moths drifting toward a pilot light. We needed to understand his perversity, his stubbornness, his passivity. We needed clarification. He had been so silent. What had he made of us? We needed to show our love, heap upon him a backlog of long-intended expressions of sentiment. What do I do now? Mama wanted to know.

  Instead of answers, we had food. Before the funeral, neighbors and kinfolks began bringing food to the house. They brought chicken buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, deli meat-and-cheese trays, loaves of white bread and pimiento-cheese spread, pies and cakes. A few made casseroles or cakes, but most brought prepared dishes from the supermarket. Store-bought costs more, so it has higher status.

  The brick, faux-plantation-style funeral home in Mayfield is positioned between Wal-Mart and Kmart. It’s an old funerary establishment, in one family for several generations. The place is dismal with its miserable purpose. We forced ourselves through its doors, dreading the private family preview of the enhanced body before the visitors arrived. We dreaded our own grief, the awkwardness of our sorrow. As we entered, our misery exploded through wads of Kleenex. The tears came like a poison we had to eject.

  But the man lying there in the three-piece suit was not Wilburn Mason, only a garish look-alike, some store-window mannequin. Mama was unable to look at this grotesque version of her husband. Later, when the guests arrived, she could not stand beside the casket and greet people as was customary. She sat far down the front row of chairs, where the casket was out of her line of sight. The visitors came to her. “He looks real nice,” they said. The rest of us mingled.

  There was a lively evasiveness among the guests. People said, “It’s nice to see you.” Some avoided the subject of our loss. The Clear Springs kinfolks swam into focus, and then the old buddies Daddy hung out with at the filling station, and guys he had played with as a boy. They told us stories, things we didn’t know, pranks Daddy pulled. The spirit grew lighter, more in keeping with Daddy’s personality. But the flowers were incongruous, not his style. Many accompanying cards listed several names of people who had “made up” (paid for) some flowers together. Some of the offerings were plastic or silk, made to endure in the elements.

  The next day, after the funeral—which was conducted at the funeral home chapel—we rode to Clear Springs in a Lincoln Town Car behind the hearse. A policeman led the procession, followed by the preacher, then the hearse, then the family. Just east of town, a red pickup truck broke into the line. The policeman stopped the procession and got out of his patrol car. He motioned for the truck to leave the line. When it failed to cooperate, he gestured more vehemently. Finally, in seeming chagrin, the truck veered out of the line and turned left into the parking lot of a motel. It blundered along, looking as though it couldn’t figure out what had happened. And then the procession continued.

  “Don’t you wish Daddy could have seen that?” we said.

  “He would have gotten a kick out of that.”

  We were seeing everything through his eyes. He loved anything that flouted convention.

  All along the highway, the oncoming traffic saw us and slowed down. The drivers didn’t whiz past, bent on their missions to the video store or the Piggly Wiggly; they pulled over and stopped on the shoulder of the road. All of them. It is the custom of the South. Some of the drivers were young people, including a few sorry-looking guys with unruly hair and rear-jacked cars. Farther down this two-lane state road, we came upon some construction work, and the oil-pavement trucks rolled out of our way. One of the workmen doffed his blaze-orange hard hat and held it to his chest.

  Our little procession probably seemed eerily appropriate to all those motorists and workmen, for death was on everybody’s mind. The earthquake was due that day. Schools were actually closed and grocery stocks were low.

  Our Town Car was a sort of mortuary schooner. The trip to Clear Springs was a long, slow, peaceful ride through town and the countryside. I could see the landscape more clearly than I had since I was a child. We passed the old Arnett property, Granny’s homeplace, and the family cemetery next to it. When we turned down the Clear Springs road, an old 1880 map of Clear Springs—a detailed guide to the past—came to mind. The map, which I had been studying recently, showed all the old houses and the names of the families who lived in them. It occurred to me that so little had changed since then; the nineteenth century was barely yesterday. The road was paved now, but it was still a country road, with the residences spread far apart. I noticed a ramshackle tobacco barn through the trees. Only a few brick houses were new. We floated past reminders of generations of Burnetts and Arnetts and Hickses, all relations of mine. The names on the mailboxes offered hints. I wanted to know the stories. Who were those people of my past? What had happened to them? What life would I have led if my family had never left Clear Springs? We passed the road where Mama had lived as a little girl with her grandmother, Mammy Hicks. We glided up Pulltight Hill, so called because mules had to pull tight when they trudged up its steep slope. McKendree Church was at the crest of the hill, and the cemetery was across the road. Both are still part of the old Mason homeplace; the Mason family supplied the land for the church. Literally, with scant preparation, I had been thrust back to my roots. Significance seemed embedded in the very ground. The cemetery was a miniature of the 1880 map of the community, I thought, gazing around at the stones that were engraved with familiar surnames.

  Under a little blue tent, we sat on folding chairs beside the casket, which had an American flag spread over it. The preacher led a graveside service from a funeral manual—some words that didn’t much register. I thought about the earthquake. It might erupt any second. The churches had been well attended the day before, a Sunday. A lot of people had added earthquake insurance riders, made new wills, held yard sales.

  Daddy would have loved it if the ground had opened up on that raw December day and toppled him down in. He hated trappings so much, it would have been fitting if something had happened to undercut it all, to bring us all down to earth, into the earth, to show that all was folly.

  I realized that we were sitting on Granddaddy’s grave. Masons surrounded us. Herman and Bessie, Roe and Rosie, Robert and Ethel. We were on an artificial green carpet, like the astro-stuff Daddy had glued onto the front porch. The carpet had been spread over the ground; it extended down into the grave and out over the mound of dirt, as if we could not bear the sight of it. The casket was poised above the lined grave, which held a metal vault. The lid of the vault was waiting nearby. The flowers were banked on top of the carpet that covered the pile of dirt. Later the florists’ stilts and plastic baskets would be arranged on the newly filled grave.

  Because Daddy had been in the Navy, he received a military send-off from the mayor of Mayfield and another veteran, who wore V.F.W. hats and medal-studded vests. After the preacher finished, the mayor read a brief military service. Then he and his fellow vet folded the flag into a triangular package and presented it to Mama. She was cocooned in a long goose-down coat of mine from my snow-belt days. It was a bone-chilling day. Remote and preoccupied, she seemed like a chrysalis waiting until the time to emerge. We had been given our choice of “Taps” or a twenty-one-gun salute. We thought “Taps” would be easier on Daddy’s ears. We glanced around for the bugler but didn’t see anyone. Then in the background I glimpsed the mayor’s V.F.W. companion holding something at arm’s length, as if he had just found a bomb. It was a small tape recorder. He punched a button an
d a tinny rendition of “Taps” played.

  I was outside myself. I was back in 1880, when the map delineated a simple agrarian economy. The Masons had been at the stable center of this community’s history. What they passed down seemed to have arrived intact from the two brothers who first settled this ground in the 1820s. The Mason homeplace was only a little distance to my right, beyond McKendree Church. There, the Masons took my mother in after her grandmother died. I twisted around in my seat, gazing across the farmland to the southwest, to where Mama’s grandmother, Mammy Hicks, had lived. I knew her house was still there, but I couldn’t see it through the trees. My father’s people and my mother’s were commingled on this portion of land. Now I was here, slowed to a halt, forced to consider final things. The presence of the grave outlined the circle of life’s journey. I realized that not everything had been accounted for. There was a large-scale forgetting all around me, through generations. But our history was mapped out here in Clear Springs, like the fencerows edging the fields that spread out in all directions. The history seemed to rise from the land, wrapping around me.

  I knew little about our ancestors. “We came from England,” Daddy had told me. “All the Masons here have big noses, and a lot of them have a hump. They got the hump when one of them married an Irish woman with a hump. Her whole family had humps—from being hod carriers, I reckon.” He grinned.

  Now, in my head, I could hear him talking, saying something typical, like, “I think I’ll join the French Foreign Legion.” I could hear him say “Hollyhocks!”—a comical word with an inherent scoff. He pronounced it “hollyhawks.” He was sparing with words, but I realized now that usually when he spoke up, it was for the love of language.

  I remembered a summer in 1975, when Roger and I explored the Borderlands—the coming together of northern England and southern Scotland. We rambled through sheep pastures, where miles of stone fences, which seemed centuries old, stretched out in all directions. Suddenly, the meaning and fact of my name struck me forcibly. Centuries of stonemasons had fashioned those walls. We came from people who built borders with stones. Over time, we had forgotten.

  We left the cemetery in the Town Car. The driver backed out into the road on a blind hill, the top of Pulltight, directly across from McKendree Church. He blithely made a dogleg turn onto Panther Creek Road just as a speeding RC Cola truck, a huge eighteen-wheel rig, careened over the crest. The truck, braking, hurtled headlong behind us. We didn’t notice. The others told us later that the truck braked and swerved, and blue smoke went flying up from the wheels. “You were nearly killed,” they said.

  “A handy place to get hit,” we joked. “The cemetery’s right here.”

  “And we’ve got the tape of ‘Taps.’ ”

  We gathered at the old Mason homeplace. I sat among the Clear Springs kinfolks, in the heart of Mason history, wondering, trying to feel back through generations, feeling a huge separation from this past, because my father was gone. I was trying to dig at his roots, hoping to find them alive, as one sometimes does when a potted plant seems to die. I saw my mother looking around at the kitchen, where her aunt Rosie had once reigned, and I thought about her deep involvement with the Mason family. This house was where my mother grew up, was courted, and had left to make her life for fifty-four years with the handsome man she once told me was “just larruping.” I could not know the vastness of this separation, her bereavement.

  For many weeks after the funeral I felt something that I had not known was intrinsic to grieving. It was a strange exhilaration. I couldn’t hold my mind on the pain. Death was so painful that it knocked me out of myself into a celebration of life. Intensely aware of life’s fragility, I drove along the Western Kentucky Parkway, drinking the landscape; every detail was fresh and remarkable. The lines of cedar trees growing like weeds out of rock crevices. The icicles hugging the faces of the limestone cutaways along the roadbed. The hazy winter pastures. The sprinklings of cattle—an all-white herd scattered on moon-color ground. Frost on dead grass. Leftover hay bales like giant shredded-wheat rolls. The winter landscape was a husk, a silhouette, a promise.

  Everything I saw compelled my attention, yanked me out of my myself. It was a survival mechanism, this strange buoyancy. Some archaic words came to me to describe it, words I might have read in Granny’s speller: a queer lightsomeness. I was lightsome, floating. I wondered if this was the way I was supposed to feel when I dedicated my life to Christ at the church altar when I was fifteen—charged with a new responsibility to celebrate life.

  Life was a brittle frost-pattern on the window light—beautiful and fleeting. I was alive.

  A farmer faces the fragility of life every day. It takes faith that his winter-dead fields will burst again with life. It takes faith to keep going, proof by habit. A farmer’s belief in the sunrise and the changes of the seasons is the essence of his creed but also of his doubt.

  Oscar and I walked to the pond. Oscar seemed eager for some action. He had looked around for Daddy, then settled for my company. Earlier in the week, seven ducks had appeared at the pond—six Muscovy ducks and a white one. I brought them some corn I had found in the stable. Daddy had collected some stray ears of corn the combine had missed. He had saved them to feed the squirrels. I rubbed the ears together and shelled the kernels onto the pond bank. Today there were ten ducks. I had heard that they had been moving around the neighborhood, fleeing coyotes.

  Oscar and I made a complete circuit of the farm, roaming back half a mile through the fields. The soybeans and corn had been harvested, and no winter wheat had been planted this year, so the fields would remain stubbly and brown all winter. The ground was muddy. Oscar was busy, checking out all his favorite places. We crossed both creeks, which had slowed to trickles. Oscar splashed, I rock-hopped. The back field was ragged with cornstalks and briars and some kind of wavy plant that sliced my fingers when I tried to pick a few stalks for a bouquet. Daddy had kept paths mowed around the edges of the fields, against the tree lines. Already I could see what work needed to be done. Branches had fallen across the path in front of me. I picked them up and dragged them toward the creek. Oscar, on the lookout for rabbits, trotted ahead.

  “Oscar likes to work,” Daddy would say as they took off together into the fields or to the barn. Oscar loved it best when Daddy cranked up his three-wheeler (an outlawed all-terrain vehicle). Oscar knew the creek beds intimately, all the paths and coyote dens and rabbit holes. At the end of a walk he often disappeared into a briar patch, where he’d stay and work rabbits, eventually coming home with his face bloodied by briars. He was afraid of coyotes, and each time he got a scare he’d be careful about venturing out for a time, but then after a few days he’d get brave again. Oscar was also afraid of thunder; he could hear it well in advance, in time to run home and hide. Daddy seemed just as attuned as Oscar was to the wildlife and weather of the place. Every owl or coyote sighting was news. Each change in the wind, each storm and dry spell. More news circulated in the fields and along the creek beds than on the courthouse square.

  As I walked around the fields, I contemplated what I knew, what I didn’t know. My sister Janice and I had congratulated ourselves on how strong we had been. We hadn’t expected to be. We had always thought we would go to pieces when we lost a close member of the family. But we hadn’t. Looking at the farm, I thought that maybe everything Daddy was also resided in me and in the family and on this land. He gave me the seeds. I recalled sitting behind him on the corn planter, releasing the seeds and hearing “P.S. I Love You” play in my head.

  Oscar and I returned from the fields. Oscar saw Daddy’s car and dashed toward it with a joyful bark, then wandered desolately around the yard. Oscar seemed without lightsomeness. A dog’s terms are clearer, more extreme. Joy or sorrow.

  The car was a small, red Suzuki. Daddy favored unusual foreign cars. He had owned a Fiat and a Renault, and he had bought one of the first Volkswagens in the county. Just before I moved to Kentucky, I had traded my little Ho
nda CRX for a station wagon. I got two thousand dollars trade-in from the dealer. Daddy was disappointed when he heard what I’d done.

  “Why didn’t you sell it to me? I was looking for a little car like that. I couldn’t find one around here for less than three or four thousand.”

  “But I didn’t know you wanted it,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t know you were selling it,” he said.

  This was so typical of us—misunderstandings and missed connections arising from silences.

  Not long before that, he had gone to a car dealer in Paducah. He had found a used Honda he wanted in the lot. When he went into the office to buy it, a salesman talked at him for a while. Then the salesman said, “How do you intend to pay for it?”

  Daddy bristled. He assumed the salesman didn’t believe he could afford a car and would have to borrow. He was a farmer, in his jeans and feed cap.

  “I was going to pay for it with money,” he said, his hand clutching his wad of bills. He turned toward the door. “But I’ve changed my mind.”

  So instead, he bought the Suzuki, from a different dealer.

  Now, in the glove compartment of the car, I found tapes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, and Muddy Waters. I remembered the foot-stomping old music we had listened to together from WLAC in Nashville.

  Under the tapes, in a crevice, I found a small cardboard box. Inside was a ring set with what looked like diamonds. I showed it to LaNelle.

  “I don’t know diamonds from sequins,” I said. “Is this real?”

  “I don’t know,” LaNelle said. “Do you think he was going to give it to Mama for Christmas?”

  We liked that thought. His way of romancing Mama was always off-key, a little tawdry. He brought her presents from flea markets—used appliances and antique oddities. Could he have bought this ring for her for a surprise? Would he have been that romantic?