Mammy Hicks’s organ occupied a place of honor in the parlor. It was a beautiful thing, with cutwork and fancy trim and colorful insets. It had a gorgeous stool, with a crimson velvet cushion and beaded embroidery. Chris loved to fool around on the organ, pounding the keys and pushing and pulling the stops. Although both Hattie and Rosie could play by ear—church tunes and folk songs—they wouldn’t teach Chris to play. They were too busy.
Sometimes Aunt Rosie sent Chris a mile down the road to the store to get some sugar or salt or matches. Once, there was a penny left over and Chris spent it on chewing gum. Aunt Rosie whipped her with a hickory switch, but Hattie intervened.
“If she needs correcting, I’m the one to correct her,” said Hattie, who jealously guarded her niece. “She’s my baby.”
“I’m not going to have her think she can just take what’s not hers,” Aunt Rosie said. “She got that from her daddy, I’ll allow.”
Hattie had the falling sickness. A lick on the head had triggered her seizures years before. The affliction made everyone a little afraid of her, as if it could leap out like a contagion. They assumed she was touched in the head. Little was understood about epilepsy—or “elipepsi,” as some called it. They said she “had fits,” like a dog in August. Her spells often came on at the time of her period, the women claimed. Sometimes when Hattie was hoeing tobacco she would suddenly keel over and begin jerking. She drooled, her tongue hung out, and her eyes rolled back. Chris was afraid for her aunt, and she tried to anticipate risky situations, since the seizures came on so suddenly. Hattie experienced both kinds—petit mal and grand mal. The petit mal seizures were only momentary lapses, and if Chris tried to intervene during them, Hattie lashed out at her furiously. Resisting Chris’s warnings, she would deliberately sit on the edge of the high end of the porch, shelling beans and humming.
“Move away from there,” Chris said. “You’ll pitch off the edge if you have one of them fits.”
“I’ll give you a fit if you don’t watch out,” Hattie said.
Hattie loved to pick blackberries. One July morning, Aunt Rosie sent Chris along with Hattie into the blackberry thicket, as she often did, to help in case Hattie had a fit. On this occasion, Hattie did have one, and she fell headlong into the briar patch. Chris pulled and tugged on her, but Hattie was heavy. Chris ran back to the house for help, but when she returned with two of her cousins, Hattie was picking berries as if nothing had happened. That summer, she put up a hundred quarts of wild blackberries.
Hattie didn’t like to be reminded of her illness. The family didn’t want her to take chances, or do certain things—ride a horse, stay up late, eat kraut—that might bring on one of her spells. She probably was aware of the onset of a fit. Going into a grand mal seizure is said to be a strange, dreamy feeling; Hattie would feel as if she was about to throw up, or enter the gates of heaven—one or the other. It would be like escaping. It would be a sensation that something nebulous was passing over her. And then for what might have been forever … nothing. Afterwards, she would moan and cry, and as she became gradually aware of her surroundings again, it would be like climbing out of the cistern—dark and frightening. She would cry loudly during this phase. She would come to herself eventually, no doubt feeling as if she had entered through heaven’s gates but had had to exit from the gates of hell.
The residents of Uncle Roe’s big house tended to shoot each other down with hard looks and straightforward judgments, with incessant teasing and carrying on. They carried on to get attention or to get even. Carrying on could mean lamenting, complaining, harping, or teasing.
“She carried on and carried on about wanting that doll.”
“Mama, make Chris quit aggervatin’ me about that doll.”
“If y’all don’t shut up about that doll, I’m going to get me a switch.”
Chris got nothing but an orange the first Christmas at Uncle Roe’s, but the following Christmas she finally received a doll of her own. It was a large, beautiful doll with a porcelain head and hands and a soft, cuddly body. It wore pretty clothes and it could go to sleep. But one day the doll’s eyes mysteriously fell into the back of its head. Chris shook the doll, and its eyes rattled. They wouldn’t open again. She wrapped the doll up in rags so no one would see its face. She was afraid she would get a whipping. She hid the doll under a quilt, scared of what the others might say.
“You punched that doll’s eyes out, didn’t you?” Datha said when the secret was discovered. Datha was one of the cousins, eight years older than Chris.
“No, I didn’t. They broke.”
“I believe you punched that doll’s eyes out. Mama, Chris punched her doll’s eyes out.”
Later, Datha’s brother Mose said, “I heared you punched your doll’s eyes out, Chris.”
“No, I didn’t. They fell out.” Chris started to cry.
“She’s gettin’ a sull on,” Mose said. “Like a old possum gettin’ a sull on.”
“She’s always all sulled up about something or t’other,” said Herman, Mose’s half-brother.
“How would she like her eyes punched the way she punched her doll’s eyes out?” said Uncle Roe, with a wheezy chuckle.
Chris cried and screamed. She wailed.
“Old squall-bag,” said Herman.
“She punched her doll’s eyes out, I believe,” said Datha. “I never heard of a child punching her doll’s eyes out. Have you, Mary?”
“I reckon not,” Datha’s sister, Mary, said. Mary was sweet, but she took her sister’s side.“Why would you want to punch your doll’s eyes out, Chris?”
“It’s my doll! I’ll punch her eyes out if I want to!” Chris was shrieking and stomping her feet. “But I didn’t do it.”
“She says she didn’t do it, but she acts like she did,” Mose said.
And so they carried on.
One Sunday afternoon they were playing ball. All the neighborhood children were there, lots of Burnetts and Hickses, some Tynes boys. Mose chased Chris through the field behind the house. He ran her halfway to the church, caught her, and quick as a jaybird pulled her dress up and pushed mustard down her pants. “I’ve been wanting to do that for the longest time,” he said.
“She was as mad as a old wet hen,” he reported gleefully to the others.
She was angry about that for years. Not long before Mose died, in his eighties, she asked him if he remembered the incident. She asked him, “Why did you do that to me?” He just laughed, as though remembering a moment of pure pleasure.
Chris was a fighter, with a quick temper. The boys liked to see her get mad, so they would keep on teasing her until she vibrated with fury. She was a spitfire, they said. When she fired off her temper, the family would say, “That’s the Lee in her.” Chris learned how to fight everybody except Uncle Roe, the boss. Nobody messed with Roe—he used a tobacco stick for serious whippings. He assigned tasks and then stood back watching while others worked. In the mornings, he would get up first and wake up everybody, then go back to bed till breakfast was ready.
Chris did not have to help in the kitchen. Instead, they sent her outdoors. She tended her own little garden. She fed the chickens. She ran cattle. When a cow strayed from the herd or broke through a fence, Roe sent Chris after her. Roe farmed about eighty acres—mostly corn, wheat, and hay, with two or three acres of tobacco. Like most of the farmers around, he did things the old way—the hard way. Tobacco was worked entirely by hand. It was the most difficult work on the farm—tedious and grueling. Before and after school in the spring, Chris toiled in the tobacco patch. At first she was too small to set tobacco—transplant the seedlings—but she could pull the seedlings from the seedbed and drop them in place in the row. Someone else came along behind and pressed them in the ground with a sharp-pointed peg. Seedlings had to be transplanted early in the day, while the dew still drenched the plants. She went to school shivering, wet and cold all over. Later in the season, topping and suckering tobacco—cutting the flowers and new shoots from
the plants to make them produce more leaves—were miserable chores. Chris wore a pair of men’s overalls to protect her skin from the gummy, smelly plants as she hoed the weeds out of the tobacco. When she chopped a tobacco plant down by mistake, she would bury it; but Uncle Roe caught her once and gave her a whipping.
In the fall, she helped harvest corn. They gathered the dried corn by hand, tossing it into a mule-drawn wagon. The harsh husks slit her hands. After the crop was stored in the crib, Uncle Roe sent her to the weed-choked river bottom to cut down the dried cornstalks with a sharp hoe. After all the stalks were down, he burned the field.
Robert Lee came and went, sidling around the edges of the community, visiting his parents. Aunt Rosie and Aunt Hattie were determined that Chris should not go near him. He had stolen their sister’s horse and buggy. He took advantage of poor Eunice and then left her. She wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t married him, they said. If he hadn’t taken off, she’d be living still. But no telling what he would have done to Eunice if she’d lived. Poor Eunice—maybe she was better off dead. He would have carried her to Paducah and that would have led to no telling what kind of trouble. Chris grew to hate her father.
Then she saw him. She was at Crockett’s store, across from school. She saw a man standing by the potbellied stove with some farmers. He had his back to her. She thought he looked familiar. Someone whispered to her, “That’s your daddy.” She stared at his red-brown hair. It was an ugly color, she thought. She described it later as “piss-burnt.” He was tall and slender, yet muscular, and he had a worldly air—the way he stood by the stove jawboning with the men who lingered around the store. Hickory-smoked hams hung from the rafters, and a cat was curled up on the pickle barrel. Mr. Crockett was cutting slabs of cheese. It was a lazy wintertime scene, with dark coming on fast. Her father didn’t look at her. But she could hear his loud laugh, his rough talk, forbidden talk. She realized she had seen him before. A few times after school she had noticed this man standing at the edge of the playground. Now she wondered if he had been there trying to get a glimpse of her.
“Don’t let your daddy come close,” the Masons had said.
“Run if you see him.”
“Don’t talk to any of them Lees.”
“He done your mama wrong.”
“He drove off in her buggy. He stole her horse and buggy.”
“And he sold them. Her fine bay mare.”
“She paid a hundred dollars for that buggy.”
“That buggy and horse was worth over two hundred.”
Chris hated her father. But she wished he would come forward at the store and speak to her, acknowledge her. She saw him gaze around the store. But he turned his back.
She knew that Robert Lee had married again and had two children, but it was not clear to her if he was still married, or where his wife was. He had brought the two young children, Thelma and Bill, to live with his parents. Thelma, the older one, entered school at Clear Springs. When Thelma learned that Chris was her half-sister, she pulled on Chris’s arms, clinging to her. Thelma stuttered. Embarrassed, Chris fought Thelma off. She didn’t want to be seen with any of the Lees. They were poor, and her father was no-account. But she didn’t realize at first how Thelma was starved for love.
On the road by the school, a wagon sometimes passed. A young man with a lame leg drove the mules, and an older man sat in the back.
They hauled firewood out of river-bottom land they were clearing for one of the large landowners. The young man’s hair was dark; the older man had red hair fading to gray. They were Lees. Chris avoided them. They were not family to her.
The good, productive fields were those low-lying lands along the river, a mile from the house. The Mason men worked down there. One summer Aunt Rosie sent Chris down there every day with dinner for the men. Chris rode a horse, bareback, with the buckets of food hanging across the horse’s shoulders. She saw the wiggly snake trails in the dust on the path in front of her. While the horse drank from the river, she laid the dinner out on stumps—meat, vegetables, tomatoes, cornbread, green onions, a jug of tea. She left the fresh horse and rode back on a horse the men had been working. She felt deliciously free on those rides, as though the horse were her own and she could go anywhere. On the route, she had to ride past terrifying dogs. That summer a mad dog roved the vicinity. Dogs drooling in August, frothing and convulsing, were a common sight.
“My crack is scalded!” she told Datha and Mary when she dismounted.
Aunt Hattie was having seizures more frequently. She went on an excursion to Mississippi with a church group and wrote home a postcard in her exquisite handwriting, which wavered slightly. “Having an elephant time,” she reported. Miraculously, she made the journey without complication. But one night in the bed she shared with Chris, she began having little fits, one after another. They were quiet but continuous, like sobbing. It was as though a lifetime of heartache were coloring her dreams. Hattie twitched, like a dog dreaming. Chris waited. She knew the fits usually subsided after a short while. The bed pulsated. Chris positioned Hattie’s head so her tongue wouldn’t slide back into her throat. She knew there was nothing to be done for Aunt Hatt’s spells except to wait them out. But this time the throbbing wouldn’t stop. The seizures continued, one after another, all night. Daylight came, and still the rolling continued, gradually growing wilder.
Aunt Rosie appeared. “How long’s that been going on?” she asked Chris.
“All night, just about.”
Aunt Rosie felt Hattie’s face. Hattie’s tongue lolled against the pillow like a fish, and foamy slobber soaked the bolster case. Rosie slipped back into the bedroom to tell her husband. “Hatt needs the doctor,” she said sharply.
Chris got out of bed and placed pillows on the floor in case her aunt fell. She tried to push her toward the middle of the bed, but her weight was like a full feed-sack, solid and uncooperative. Hattie was beginning to jerk more forcefully.
Roe jumped in the T-model and went for the doctor, but he soon returned, cursing.
“He wouldn’t even drive out here to see about her,” Roe said, stomping through the kitchen. “He said either she’d come out of it or she wouldn’t. There wasn’t nothing he could do.”
There was no treatment for a severe epileptic attack. When a person went into continuous seizures, the violent trauma would eventually wear out the body and the heart would stop.
By mid-morning Hatt’s writhing had ceased. She was dead. She was thirty-nine years old.
Chris saw the others gather around, crying—Hattie’s sisters and brothers and all the cousins. She had seen Mammy Hicks lying dead. Now Hattie. She could dimly recall her mother lying motionless and beautiful, her dark hair a shadow on the pillow, her small, fat hands crossed at the waist.
Hattie was laid out in a casket in the living room, and the neighbors streamed in, bringing food. By custom, the family kept a vigil throughout the night, for it was necessary to watch over the body until it was buried. Chris hid in the shadows, afraid. After the funeral, at McKendree Church, one of Chris’s distant cousins—a little girl several years younger than fourteen-year-old Chris—said to her, “What are you going to do, Chris? Where will you go?” The child’s question was uncomprehending, mere chatter. She was a spoiled only child with lots of dolls. But this question stayed in Chris’s mind over time. The little cousin was looking up to her as a grown-up, someone with power. This child’s innocent question contained the glimmer of a notion that Chris might have a choice.
“What am I going to do?” she had replied, with both sorrow and hope. For a moment it was as though she had a say in her future.
With the loss of Aunt Hattie, Chris may have finished constructing that secret place in her heart where she kept herself. She had pulled away from Hattie as she was slipping into oblivion, and ever after she held herself back from everyone but her own children. Having lost her mother, her grandmother, and her aunt—everyone who might have represented any source of maternal
strength—she drove the last peg into that little chamber she fashioned to hide in, the special place within herself. She tried to be tough, and she was full of sass. But she expected everything she loved to be taken from her. She never expected to be anybody. She expected to work hard and to have little to show for it. She had seen enough of death to know what it was—final, irrevocable loss. She grew fatalistic about that. But Aunt Hattie’s death also deepened her zest for life; it sparked her sense of survival, her determination to persevere. It nourished a growing capacity for joy, and it generated a whirling-dervish maternal energy. She had resilience, verve, and what she called daresomeness. These are what saved her.
22
It was Hattie’s wish that if something happened to her, her niece Clausie should bring Chris up. Hattie had told Rosie, “Let Clausie have her; she’s got money and no younguns.” Clausie had married a well-off man and lived in Mayfield. She had a job, wore fine clothes, and drove a car.
“If she lives with Clausie, there won’t be nobody there for her after school,” Rosie said to Roe. So, without telling Clausie of Hattie’s request, Rosie and Roe decided that Chris should remain in the large household at Clear Springs. They wanted to keep an eye on her. Chris, at fourteen, was a problem. Roe and Rosie were afraid she would repeat her mother’s history—marry the wrong sort, or get in trouble. Her developing figure was attracting so much attention that all the neighborhood boys looked forward to coming over for ball games on Sunday afternoons in order to get into little teasing fights with her.
Roe Mason had greater problems than what to do with young Christy Lee. He was in danger of losing his farm, which was part of the original Mason homeplace—in the family for over a hundred years. He had never been in debt, but when the county dredged a ditch—the “drudge ditch,” everybody called it—across the river-bottom land for drainage, all the farmers had to pay the expense. Roe did not have the cash for his portion and had to borrow the money from a relative, a judge at the courthouse. When Roe had trouble making the payments, the judge told him, “I wouldn’t take your farm away, Roe. Just pay me the interest, and I’ll see what I can do for you.” The judge finagled a political office for Roe. For a two-year term he would become manager of the County House.
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