Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  We took the ring to Mama. “Look what we found,” we said like little girls. We told her our theory.

  She examined the ring. “No,” she said. “That was a prize I won at the senior citizens, a grab-bag thing at a card game. It’s not real. Wilburn was going to see what he could get for it at trade day.”

  20

  Widows worry about grass. My mother anguishes over the upkeep of the farm. Nobody could keep it spruced up the way Daddy always had. He groomed the woods beside the road until it resembled a park. He gathered all the beer cans and fast-food packaging hurled from passing cars. He allowed no junk cars, concrete blocks, spare parts, chicken coops—nothing claptrap or trashy—to be visible from the road. He ran the Weed Eater along margins. He mowed the path along the creek to the pond. He mowed an expanse near the road, the site of his dairy barn that had burned. He circled meticulously through the small orchard of dwarf fruit trees.

  That he isn’t here to keep up the place according to his standards seems the most direct indicator of my mother’s grief. When she hires people to mow, they don’t take the time to clear the woods of leaves and fallen tree limbs. In the spring, she and Daddy always raked and burned the leaves and hauled limbs to the creek. Now she feels compelled to manage the spring cleanup alone.

  “I have to keep this place up,” she says.

  “Don’t,” we say. “It doesn’t have to be a park. Let it be a woods.”

  “But he was so proud of this place.”

  “But he’s not here now. So it’s not the same.”

  When she pauses, unsure how to respond, we add, “Nobody could take care of it the way he could. So he’s irreplaceable. You wouldn’t want to think somebody else could fill his shoes, would you?”

  But she goes out and rakes until her body feels staved in. Breathing the leaf dust aggravates her bronchitis. A mist of chicken feed in the air settles on her bare arms; it is thick enough to scrape off. She telephones Seaboard Farms and instructs the management to install a finer filter.

  What to do with the farm has become an ongoing dilemma, which prolongs itself into a basic state of being founded on inertia. Daddy had wanted Mama to live out her days on the farm, but now Mama’s widow friends advise her not to. They have moved to town, and they say they’re happier without farms to worry about. They were afraid to live alone in the country. Independent, they enjoy life in their simple little brick houses with minimal upkeep and rug-sized yards. All of them had been obsessed with grass. “A woman can’t keep up a farm like that,” they say. “You’ll sell out and move to town. You’ll wait two years and then you’ll sell.”

  She thinks this is what she has to do. But her widow friends lead considerably more ladylike lives than she ever has. They play at crafts and decorate cakes and dust their knickknacks. Mama was always more ambitious; she wants to grow things and go fishing. Crafts are low on her list.

  She waits. She keeps worrying about the grass, fretting about the pondweed. Surely she would be glad to leave Granny’s house, we think, but she won’t say what she really wants to do. We sense she is waiting for us to take the initiative, to advise her, to lead the way. She has always had bosses. She has never been on her own. She is not used to asserting her own wishes.

  Two years go by, and still she has not followed her friends into town. She edges beyond the agonized “why?” of grief to a routine she accepts. We are more and more able to reminisce about Daddy; instead of dwelling on the recent past, I ask her about when they were young. I ask her to tell me about their wartime separation.

  She shows me a postcard postmarked “Train 6, Omaha & Ogden Railroad.” He wrote, “Hello sugar, I am still riding and seeing a lot of bad and pretty country. We will get to Calif. sometime tomorrow. Love Wilburn.”

  Mama turns the postcard over. The scene on the front is a classic butte in the Green River Valley of Wyoming. “After that I didn’t hear from him for two weeks, and that was the hardest two weeks of my life. He was out on the water. I was nuts.”

  She repeats what she has often said, “He had his choice between the battleship and the destroyer and he took the destroyer. The other one sunk on the way back. It carried the bumb over. Some of the boys he trained with were on that ship. One was just a kid, under age. He was real fat.”

  All my life, I’ve heard the story of the choice between the battleship and the destroyer and how the battleship carried the “bumb.” The next time I see my brother, Don, I ask him if Daddy ever discussed this with him.

  “He told me he was offered the chance to volunteer for a secret mission. But he wouldn’t do it. He was no fool.” Don laughs. “Then I saw the movie Jaws and one of the characters told the story of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. The name sounded familiar. And I realized that was the ship Daddy had told me about. It was just like Daddy told it. The Indianapolis carried the bomb over, and it was torpedoed after it delivered the bomb. The story in the movie was very vivid.” His eyes widen. “They told about how the sharks ate the sailors at the rate of seven to ten an hour.”

  A rigor runs through me.

  “If Daddy had gone on that secret mission, you wouldn’t be here,” I say.

  “LaNelle wouldn’t be either,” he says. “I’ve thought about that.”

  Sailor-gorging sharks might have wrecked this landlocked farm family. But Daddy came home and our lives resumed as if nothing had happened. I check Granny’s 1946 diary again.

  MARCH 11. Clear, rather cool wind from the east. Wilburn got home last night, received his discharge from the Navy at Great Lakes, Ill., is home to stay. We gardened today. Bob went to the sales at the stockyard.

  MARCH 12. Clear, and cold wind blowing from the south. We went back across the creek and burnt off broom sedge this afternoon.

  MARCH 13. Partly cloudy, wind in south. We planted the garden. Mrs. Payne came to Christie’s to sew this afternoon.

  MARCH 14. Cloudy and rainy, wind in south. Cleaned out the wash-house and meat house. Bob went to town.

  MARCH 15. Clear and almost still, little breeze from the south. We washed a big washing, all of Wilburn’s clothes he brought home with him.

  Once he was safely home, her diary offers no evidence that the larger world exists, except for one entry from June 30. “We went down to Wilburn’s to hear about the atomic bomb over the radio.”

  Our story could have ended out there in the Pacific, and our family farm would no doubt be long gone. But my father returned, the farm endured. It is ending now, decades later. I’m aware that something larger than myself, larger than our family, is ending here. A way of life with a long continuity, tracing back to the beginnings of this country, is coming to an end.

  My mother has managed alone for a few years now. But the place is wearing on her. If the small family farm—the Jeffersonian ideal—had remained viable in America, my brother would probably be running our farm today and Mama would still be in her own house in the woods. Don does live nearby, but he works long hours for Coca-Cola and he has his own family. He and his young boys do some of the mowing around the place and tend to the pond. In this age, no one expects Don to spend the night at his mother’s house so that she won’t be alone. She herself would not allow that.

  Mama speaks vaguely about putting the farm up for sale. Daddy often talked about “selling out,” more to test the sound of the idea than to state a purpose.

  “Do you want to move to town?” I ask Mama.

  “Well, this place is too much for me to take care of,” she says.

  Beyond that, she won’t give a straight answer. She won’t say what she wants.

  During visits home, I take her to see houses for sale, in neighborhoods of small houses, in parts of Mayfield she knows well.

  “The rooms are so little,” she says. “I’m used to big rooms. Look at that tooty dining room. I couldn’t have one of my family dinners in that little hole.”

  The yards are pathetic, too small for pets. They don’t have beautiful old trees.

  “The
re wouldn’t be enough room for a garden there,” she comments of one place.

  And of another, “That one’s too close to the creek. It’ll flood.”

  We drive all over town, as the movie location scouts did a few years before. What kind of place would make her happy? I know she will not be content in a puny brick box, in spite of what her widow buddies say. And she shouldn’t live where there is much traffic, because of Oscar and her two cats, Chester and Susie. And she has to have lots of outdoor space. Country people have a phobia against houses built close together. None of the houses we see satisfy her.

  She keeps vacillating. Finally she says, almost as if it were a secret, “I kindly hate to see the farm go, to lose the Mason family name.” She says this, knowing that no one in the family is ready to take up farming or to build a house in the shadow of the chicken tower. We realize, then, how important it is to her that the place stay in the family. A homeplace is where you were raised. This is our home. She wants us to care about it, and she doesn’t want us to fight over it. She wants us to inherit it and carry it on somehow, as children did in the old days. The fierce hold a farm family has on its members is a measure of the value and meaning of a homeplace.

  The little white house stands abandoned, too fragile for meaningful repair; and the house she lives in has sagging floors, peeling siding, termites. She is willing to make do, but we want better for her. We all live in nicer houses than she does, which makes us feel guilty. We’re worried about her safety. It bothers us that she has to cross the busy road to reach the mailbox, and that she has to climb icy exterior stairs to the porch in the winter. We don’t like her living alone on the edge of town with only the chicken tower and its spotlights for company at night. We want her to have some reward for her hard years, to have a house with conveniences that will ease her into old age. Cautiously, we are reversing our roles; we begin mothering her.

  I suspect that what bothers her is the specter of the Big Fine House. A number of folks from Clear Springs saved their money and got themselves Big Fine Houses, mostly in town. Daddy believed such houses made people snooty. The house may be no more than an average-sized brick ranch with a utility room, a kitchen with built-in cabinets, a den, and an attached garage, but with its bath and a half, wall-to-wall carpets, and laminated kitchen counter it may seem grand. Most important is central heat—no more drafty old fireplaces and hazardous woodstoves.

  In the fifties, the news that “she’s got her a washer and dryer” was a sign of liberation. Until I left home, Mama used Granny’s old wringer Maytag with the metal tubs; she and Granny built a fire outside under an iron wash kettle to heat the water. Sometime in the sixties, Mama got a washer and dryer—secondhand, some deal Daddy found somewhere.

  Mama tells me now, “Back where I was raised, in the winter or in dry spells, we’d have to pack the water from the well up near McKendree Church. That was ‘women’s work.’ The men could have dug a well down there, but they didn’t care how hard the women had to work.”

  “Water was right under the ground,” I say. “That’s why the place was called Clear Springs.”

  “The men didn’t see any need in making life easier for the women,” Mama says bitterly. “I look back and see how women were treated and what we put up with, and I just wonder why we did it. I’m amazed.”

  “Then don’t you think it’s high time you had a little something for yourself?”

  “Well, I’m too used to the old ways, I guess.”

  “Don’t you think you deserve anything better?”

  She won’t answer.

  Eventually we work out a deal. We’ll help her buy a house so that she won’t have to sell the farm. We’ve all promised to help maintain the farm somehow. She can still go fishing and have her garden there. She’ll rent out the farmhouse and continue to lease the fields to a neighbor. The crucial point is that it will remain in the Mason name.

  Again, Mama and I tour houses in town—some bigger houses than we saw before.

  “I’m just an old country hunk,” she says. “I won’t be able to wear my old clothes at a house in town. I’ll have to dress up for city folks.”

  A house with a swimming pool makes her laugh. “What do I need with a swimming pool?”

  I say, “You could raise catfish in it.”

  Mama begins noticing that all the furniture in the nicer houses is like her antique furniture, except that much of it is imitation. Hers is real.

  “Who would have thought that people in town would want that kind of old junk?” she says.

  In all the houses we see country chic—reproductions of antique washstands and cane-bottom ladderback chairs and grandfather clocks. We see genuine antiques, too—pie safes, butter churns, refinished wardrobes that double as TV armoires. Mama has originals of almost everything she sees on display. It dawns on her that Granny’s oak churn is now a prized collectible, and she regrets that she sold Granny’s pedal-powered sewing machine. Suddenly Mama’s own furniture seems legitimized, what people in town are decorating their houses with. It is no longer junk. In the end, it is the furniture in these nice houses that liberates her. She can begin to picture her things—and with them, herself—in one of these houses.

  In the end we talk her into buying a better house than she would have chosen for herself. We feel guilty but pleased, triumphant but edgy. It is a three-bedroom brick house with an attached garage and a great room with a cathedral ceiling. We are aware that in some sense it is all wrong—too big, too fine. Making do has been Mama’s profession. It is her habit, too deep to violate. And moving away from the farm—even a short distance, even if she still owns it—may be too much for her. I am aware of the contradictions of my own heart. Moving the elderly never works, I am informed. Their attachment to the familiar—their routines, their ways—makes the uprooting almost unbearable. But the decision is made.

  On a spring day Mama and I explore the new house, planning the furniture arrangement. The yard is spacious enough for her pets, and it is protected from busy streets.

  “There’s a grapevine in the back,” I report to Mama. “You can make jelly.”

  “Grapevines will take the place,” she says matter-of-factly.

  Liriope-bordered flower beds have been planted around the house with a landscaper’s eye to successive blooms. A graceful Japanese maple is growing up against the wall behind the house. Mama examines it closely. “That will have to be cut back,” she says. “Look how it’s growing into the gutters. It’ll work into the house.”

  Uprooted, she wants to uproot something else.

  I go to the bank with Mama. She wears a grass-green sweatsuit and running shoes and no makeup. Forgetting her role in the transaction, she has intended to sit in the car while I pick up the papers.

  “Come on, Mama,” I say. “You’re buying a house.”

  We sit with officials at a long shiny table in a private room at a state-of-the-art bank built to resemble a Southern plantation. In the preliminary idle chat, we discuss pets. The real-estate agent says he loves all animals except moles. He kills moles. All last summer he was after one particular mole that was tearing up the yards in his neighborhood. A neighbor who was especially annoyed by that mole’s backyard antics used a nine-millimeter pistol but missed. Finally the agent got it. “I put it on his dinner plate for a surprise present!”

  The banker says, “They used to use moleskin to make powder puffs.”

  Mama says, “My grandmother ruined a perfectly good knife a-skinning a mole to make a powder puff.”

  Later, I think how her comment seemed apropos. In her view, she is going to let a perfectly good farm go to ruin while she moves uptown into a ridiculous powder puff of a house.

  The old house is in upheaval, torn apart by the preparations for moving, yet I’m dawdling, asking my mother questions about her past. Every object in the house seems to invite memory, but the pictures are the most compelling. I flip through the old albums. There’s a shadowy snapshot of her grandmoth
er, a formidable woman in an apron, her face hidden beneath her bonnet brim. I can imagine her skinning a mole without a second thought.

  In one of the albums, there are some pictures of Robert Lee, Mama’s father—snapshots I’ve seen many times but never deeply considered. Both of my grandfathers were named Robert Lee—Robert Lee Mason and Robert E. Lee. How much more quintessentially Southern could such a heritage be? I was named “Bobbie” for Granddaddy, Robert Lee Mason; it was traditional to name the first son—and that was supposed to be me—for the paternal grandfather. Granddaddy was the steady one, the one whose last name implies stonework—the rock fences of civilized, contained landscapes. My other grandfather was the wanderer. Robert Lee’s face stares at me from a photograph. He is a handsome man, with thick hair and slick city clothes. There we are with him, in one of the pictures. Mama is holding Janice, who’s an infant. I’m about four, gazing squint-eyed into the distance, as if I know already I am going to take off, just as Robert Lee did. He had deserted his family, and Mama didn’t know him when she was growing up. But who was he? What did this negligent, insouciant man do to her soul—and ultimately to mine?

  “Mama, what do you remember of your father?” I ask.

  She’s busy dusting the ceiling with a towel pinned onto the broom. I remember how she used to pin a diaper on the broom and swab the cobwebs away.

  “He never loved me,” she says, with a bitterness that could etch stone.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.” She sets the broom down and fiddles with a pillow tassel.

  “What about your mother?” I ask. “I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of her.”

  “There’s a big portrait of her in the attic at the other house,” Mama says. “It got accidentally walled up behind some insulation, and I never could get it out.”

  “Oh, can we find it?”