Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  The County House was the poorhouse. At the time, paupers without families were cared for with county taxes. Leaving his own place empty, Roe moved his immediate family some ten miles away, to the other side of Mayfield, to a dismal house full of indigent strangers. That’s how my mother came to live at the poorhouse. She had hardly ever been to Mayfield—a few times in the wagon when the men and boys went to trade on Saturdays—and she had rarely even had a Coca-Cola, but she was growing accustomed to the strangeness of moving away from home into some new situation.

  It was a hellish hotel. The County House was a large wood-frame structure divided down the middle by a hall. Roe’s family was crowded into two rooms. Chris slept with Datha and Mary in one bed, in the same room with Roe and Rosie, and Roe’s son Mose occupied the other room with his new wife. Now Rosie was cooking for a larger group than ever, a dozen or more residents in addition to the family. The garden could not feed them all, so Roe bought food in bulk from a wholesaler at the edge of town. They had never had to buy common garden vegetables like cabbages and peas before. Aunt Rosie and the girls fixed three meals a day, cleaned the residents’ rooms, and washed their clothes. One morning Chris was running a man’s overalls through the wringer of the washing machine, and there was a turd in them—so large it hung up the wringer. The jaws of the wringer opened wide and locked, like someone gagging.

  Chris carried meals to the sick, who were deposited in a separate little building. One room smelled so foul that Chris backed off in horror the first time she entered. The woman inside had cancer of the nose. Chris had never seen anyone so pitiful as this woman with the rotten hole in her face—a face with a permanent look of terror.

  Another woman, who was very clean and fastidious, chattered about her son coming to see her. “He’s coming tomorrow morning,” she would say brightly each day.

  Two men named Shorty lived there. One called himself a rambling man, from the song. He was always talking about hitting the road, but he never did. The other Shorty always talked about money. He was so enormous he could barely squeeze through doorways. When he eventually ate himself to death, his body required an oversized casket.

  Chris knew one of the tenants as Aunt Mattie, a woman in her eighties. She was a distant Clear Springs relative who had never married. She toted an enameled pan with her everywhere she went. She carried her clothes in it, brushed her teeth in it, ate in it, even used it for a chamber pot. She was always walking somewhere. Back in Clear Springs, Chris had often seen her hiking briskly along, spurred by an inner purpose. Her sister had sent her to the County House because she couldn’t keep track of her; Aunt Mattie kept wandering away from home. But Aunt Mattie ran away from the County House too, and Roe sent Chris to find her. Chris chased after her and found her half a mile away, near the highway. Chris plucked a willow switch and herded Aunt Mattie home. When the old woman slowed down, Chris switched her along. “She was give out when you got back with her,” Aunt Rosie said to Chris the next day. “I had to carry her supper to her. Why, she’s so old it’s a wonder she didn’t have a heart attack.”

  The woman who was expecting her son any day teased Chris and called her “Cricket” because she was so fast. “You’re just a little cricket, a-flinging off that way,” the woman said.

  Her name was Hattie. Chris, admiring the woman’s cheerfulness, confided in her about her own aunt Hattie. She gave her an old dress that needed patching. Hattie repaired the dress and wore it proudly. “I want to look nice for my boy,” she said. “He’s coming tomorrow.”

  Another man at the County House loved boiled cabbage, even though it always gave him painful gas attacks. One night Rosie served it at the boarding-house table, and she warned him to be sparing. “You’ll get gas,” she said. “You don’t want another one of those attacks you get.”

  “But I love it,” he said. “I love the way you fix it.”

  He took another helping. “Better watch that, Bud,” one of the tenants said.

  “I can’t stop myself,” he said. “I love cabbage better than anything.”

  At the table, the diners exchanged looks. He kept eating cabbage, taking helping after helping.

  “Stop that, you’ll make yourself sick,” they said. But he wouldn’t listen.

  In the night, they could hear his groans. They could hear the rumbling fireworks of the gas. He got so sick he could not move from his bed. The next morning Roe sent for the county doctor, but the man soon died. Chris thought sadly of Aunt Hattie’s ordeal, but she braced herself. Death was so ordinary, she observed. Children died from diphtheria and bloody flux. Anyone could die from locked bowels or lockjaw. Fevers and agues claimed people overnight; T.B. was pandemic. Women died in childbirth, and often the children died too. Chris was thankful to be alive, and she looked ahead.

  The other Hattie’s son never came to see her, and she died still hoping. No one claimed her body. Chris attended three or four burials in the two years she lived among these poor strangers. If their bodies weren’t claimed, they were buried in wooden crates in an area at the edge of a field. The bodies were not embalmed. Seeing the unfortunate, the friendless, end their lives in poverty kept Chris from feeling sorry for herself. In nightmarish moments, she could imagine ending up homeless and unloved and perhaps crazy, but she fought that vision. Most of the time she felt a secret gladness, for she was better off than the people she waited on. She vowed that she wouldn’t let herself end up like them. She was young. She was adventuresome.

  An undercurrent of excitement churned through her. The place was so odd, with uncommon individuals whose life stories startled her. She was awed by anything new she encountered. She wore eagerness like a cloak. She walked a mile down the road to the eighth grade at Sunnyside, a two-room school. The students were country kids, like her, and she fell in easily with them. She giggled with the girls, played ball with the boys.

  When fall came, she walked two miles in her too-tight, hand-me-down shoes to the city high school. But she found that the city kids were stuck-up, snotty. They mocked her worn shoes and her plain dresses, their eyes labeling her a country girl. They didn’t invite her to parties or clubs. Sometimes she approached a bunch of girls, but when they saw her, their happy buzz halted. Yet she liked school and did well in her subjects. More than that, walking along the dirt farm road to town gave her a sense of independence. She liked venturing out, having her own life. She wasn’t just Roe Mason’s spindle-shanked ward. She was herself. She was headed somewhere.

  Chris’s cousins Datha and Mary found work in town and bought themselves some new clothes. The styles were changing—skirts and blouses and sweaters. Datha and Mary gave Chris their cast-off dresses. She wore them with long cotton stockings, which were always falling down, even though she tied them up with strings. Her lanky body was uncoordinated—tall and limber and top-heavy. She tagged along to play-parties with Datha and Mary, who were needing husbands. A play-party was a gathering where young people could dance when they didn’t have a fiddler or a Victrola. They would sing “Liza Jane” and “Polly O” and swing each other around in circles to the music of their own voices. One night Chris went to a play-party at a neighbor’s. Long after the party began, a young man with dark, oil-slicked hair slipped into the noisy house. He resembled an Indian, with high cheekbones and a long, pointed nose. His eyes were deep-set and brown. He stood around with his mouth hanging open. He wouldn’t dance. He wouldn’t talk. He was bashful and awkward, but he also seemed bemused, a little bit devilish. He was larruping, Chris thought—good-looking enough to eat. She knew who he was. She had seen him on his porch when she walked to school. He had been convalescing after scarlet fever, lounging on his front porch like a gentleman of leisure.

  He was Uncle Roe’s nephew, the only child of Roe’s brother, Bob. Bob and Ethel Mason had often been out to visit Roe, but Wilburn had not come with them, so Chris had never met him before. Now, when she and Wilburn finally tiptoed into a clumsy conversation, he told her he had watched her wa
lk along the road many times. She blushed. She loved to dance and she wished he would join the dancing with her. She couldn’t keep still. He just stood there and grinned at her, as if he had a secret or was aiming to play a prank.

  A few days later a boy at school told her that Wilburn Mason had said he was going to marry her. She was overcome with a tantalizing possibility that had never before entered her mind. For the first time, she began to have some real hopes for the future. When she walked past his house again, he was there, watching for her, and she waved.

  “Where are you traveling to on them long legs of yours?” he asked, joining her.

  As the days went by, he walked along with her. He lay in wait for her on Sunnyside Road as she walked home from school. He gave her rides in his jalopy. Soon they were going together. She felt as though she were holding her breath.

  When Roe Mason’s term at the County House ended after two years, he campaigned to be reelected. At the courthouse, a board convened to elect several officers. While waiting for the meeting to begin, Roe left to get a plate lunch across the street. While he was eating, his opponent bought off the votes and Roe lost the election. “Roe went to eat and it cost him the vote,” the family teased him. “The dog would have caught the rabbit if he hadn’t stopped to mess,” they said.

  Chris was disappointed. When Uncle Roe moved the family back to Clear Springs during the first week of 1936, she was in love. She didn’t know how often she would get to see Wilburn, or if he would come to visit her. He had asked her to marry him, but she hadn’t known what to tell him. She was embarrassed, afraid of what Roe and Rosie might say. Now she was afraid they wouldn’t let him come to the house. They probably wouldn’t let her marry him, she thought.

  The winter farm work resumed. The family helped neighbors strip tobacco, working in stuffy barns permeated with the heavy odor of dark-fired tobacco, which had been cured over slow-burning hickory fires.

  Chris drifted through daydreams. There were good reasons to marry, she thought, although she had not worked out a rational plan. She was not thinking at all. She was feeling and imagining life with Wilburn, who was twenty and out of school. Marrying would be a way out of her drudgery, she thought. She had trouble adjusting to the Clear Springs high school; the subjects were different from those at the city school, and the teachers were less qualified. She was out of step. Nobody encouraged her to stay in school. Datha and Mary and the boys had all graduated, but no one pushed Chris.

  Uncle Roe didn’t seem to approve of any of the young men who came around his daughters, Mary and Datha. He’d been a young hellion himself and knew what could happen. But he did not give Chris the trouble she expected. Wilburn was welcome because he was family. Chris and Wilburn weren’t themselves blood kin, although they had mutual cousins; Datha and Mary and Mose were cousins to both of them. Roe and Rosie had treated Chris as someone beneath their station—she was a Lee—but now they were allowing a courtship not only within their station but in their own family.

  On Sunday afternoons, Wilburn came to court Chris in the parlor. They sat on dark, fuzzy upholstery and giggled and punched at each other. He teased her incessantly. He told her that when he first saw her walking past his house, he thought she had the awfulest walk, so lanky and long-legged, striding along with that belt pinching in her figure. And then he told her she had the awfulest laugh, that high-pitched “hee-hee-hee-hee-hee.” He grinned the whole time he was dishing out these jibes, which were his way of bestowing compliments, and she understood, seeing the mischief in his eyes.

  He said, “Well, are you going to marry me or not?”

  An unusual thing occurred then—an easing of the ban on the Lees. Aunt Rosie learned that Robert Lee’s sister Mary was moving away to Detroit with her husband and little girl. Mary had inquired of Aunt Rosie whether she could have Chris over to spend the night before she moved away. “I want to at least meet my niece before I go off,” she said. Like many other tenant farmers in the area, Mary and her husband were leaving to find work up north. They lived in a small rented house up the hill toward Clear Springs.

  “I reckon you can go,” Aunt Rosie told Chris. “That way you can just walk down the hill to school the next morning instead of riding in the bus.” The bus was a truck that went through the neighborhood picking up schoolkids. Chris was skipping school frequently by this point, and perhaps Rosie was concerned about that. But the real reason Rosie let her visit Mary surely lay elsewhere. She no longer needed to protect Chris. Chris was nearly grown, and Robert Lee’s danger to her was passing.

  Chris had never spoken with her aunt Mary, although she had seen her occasionally at the store. A handsome, angular woman with a good head of dark hair, Mary was outgoing and natural, and she was ambitious.

  “I went back out to work in the cornfields too soon after I had my baby,” she told Chris. “The blood was just a-running down my legs. But I kept on.”

  She was tired of the futile hand-to-mouth labor that faced them in Clear Springs. She and her husband, Tom, hoped to find work in the auto plants. Actually, people who had moved away from Clear Springs were now returning, whole families of them, because they had lost their jobs. They drifted back home to be fed by their kinfolks, who had land and food but not much else. Yet Mary was hopeful of finding something in Detroit.

  The little rented house with its tacked-on kitchen and vine-covered porch posts reminded Chris of the house where she had lived with her mother and Luther Moore. Mary’s little girl was asleep in a baby-bed. Chris wanted to hold her close. She noticed that the baby-bed was finely crafted, with wooden pegs and dovetail joints.

  “What will you do with this littlun up there?” Chris asked.

  “If we can both get work, we’d make enough money together, so maybe we can get somebody to take care of her,” Mary said, lighting a cigarette.

  Chris had not seen a woman smoke before.

  “I got a surprise for you, Christy,” Mary said after supper. Her eyes danced, and the smoke swirled around her like a filmy scarf.

  Mary’s husband, Tom, carried them for a ride in his car. Mary jiggled the fretting child in her lap as they traveled north through Clear Springs, past the school and the store and up the next hill. They turned left on a narrow dirt road, which was choked with weeds along the ditches. Chris felt she was going somewhere wild and forbidden. They drove a short way to the place where Mary’s parents, the Lees, lived. They were Chris’s grandparents. She had never spoken to them.

  “My heart commenced to thumping,” she told Mary later. “I wondered if my daddy was going to be there.”

  The Lees’ house was a small unpainted cabin, much like the one Mary was living in, with a porch and a hickory split-shingle roof. In back, there were some outbuildings for corn and the mules and tools. A small blacksmith shop stood amid an orchard. The soil was weak and eroded, Chris realized, because the farm was situated up on the hill. The fields were odd-shaped and tree-studded, not spread out and regular. A patch of horseweed grew alongside the house.

  She remembered seeing “Jimmo” Lee and his son Rudolph, Robert’s lame brother, in the wagon going down the road. Jimmo was usually hunkered down on one leg in the center of the wagon, with the other leg stuck out straight in front of him. Rudolph drove a pair of mules, his helpless right leg dangling off the side of the wagon. She had never seen her grandmother before. Mary Luellen Lee was a large woman with stout legs and a jutting jaw and a coil of fine hair. Jimmo had faded red hair and a comical soup-strainer mustache that shielded his lips like a curtain.

  Gushing with warmth, both of them took a lively interest in Chris. They joked with her. What impressed her most was their humility and their easygoing, jovial nature.

  “Look at her,” they said. “Now who does she favor?”

  “Turn around there, youngun. Let’s look at you good.”

  A number of people were visiting, but Chris did not know who they were. Robert Lee was not among them, but his younger children, Thelma and B
ill, were there, along with some other scattered relations. Among this clan, Chris felt an eerie combination of the familiar and the foreign, as if she had gone to the courthouse square on a Saturday and found that everyone in the throng of strangers was related to her. Here, the Lees were all staring at her expectantly.

  Rudolph, Mary’s other brother, was about twenty-seven and unmarried. A leg brace protruded from his pants leg. He walked with a hickory stick worn smooth from use. Jimmo used a stick, too; his left leg seemed gimpy. Looking at the Lees, searching for resemblances, Chris soon realized that she got her tall, slender build from them. She recognized their long fingers, as if they were all meant to play the piano.

  Someone said, “Jimmo, tell about what Robert was a-doing on that last job. Where was he that time when he come back this winter?”

  “He went down the river with a bargeload of tobaccy. He went way yander to New-braskie!” Jimmo’s high-pitched voice rose even higher as he reached the climax of his remark. There was an explosion of mirth at the top of the scale, like the tone achieved by a country fiddler. Then he laughed.

  The instant she heard Jimmo laugh, she recognized the sound. It was like the cadence of Uncle Roe’s car engine after the ignition was switched off.

  “Everybody always told me I had the Jimmo laugh,” she said. “And sure enough, I do!”

  They laughed together, distinctive “hee-hee-hee-hee-hee”s that started high and petered out. They tried it again. Jimmo’s voice was musical, with an old-timey twist to his words. Someone had said he was Irish.