Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Chris found herself laughing naturally with these folks. They weren’t like the industrious Hickses and the austere Masons. Why, she wondered, had she been deprived of such fun-loving people? They seemed to have a relaxed freedom that she found appealing. They were poor, but apparently they had plenty to eat, plenty of firewood, and they were handy. Jimmo had split the shingles for the roof, built the house, made the furniture, done the blacksmithing work in his own shop. She wondered if he had made that baby-bed she saw at Mary’s.

  Chris’s glimpses of their place and their life were fleeting, but she was stirred. She wondered if her father could be as agreeable and full of fun. She wondered if he had ever had any feelings for her, after all. Perhaps she had been misled about him. She brushed the thought away. He was the grubworm curled against the peach seed, she thought. A thief.

  In the kitchen, Grandma Lee clasped her granddaughter’s hand and said quietly to Chris, “I remember the day you was born. I had a baby about two weeks after you was born. And it didn’t live.”

  Later, it occurred to Chris that her grandmother had lost two babies the summer of 1919—her own child and her grandchild, whom she wasn’t allowed to see.

  That night at her aunt Mary’s, Chris, cozy on a pallet on the floor by the fire, felt the unaccustomed pleasure of spending the night away from home. It was exhilarating to be away from the oblivious herd at Uncle Roe’s. For a brief time, she allowed herself to imagine what might have been. She wondered what her life would have been like if instead of Aunt Rosie and Uncle Roe the Lees had taken her in. She couldn’t help thinking it might have been so much easier. She might have had more love. But her father might have ruined it all.

  “Will you write me if I write you?” Mary asked the next morning. “I want to write you.”

  Chris said yes. She looked forward to receiving letters of her own.

  “I wish I could have knowed you before,” Mary told her.

  Mary cooked a sumptuous breakfast for her—biscuits and gravy and sausage and eggs—and fixed her a lunch to carry to school. Mary seemed happy—with her baby, with the excitement of going to Detroit. She hugged Chris.

  “You just might want to go to Detroit yourself one of these days,” Mary said. “I’ll let you know how it is.”

  Chris wondered fleetingly what her life would be like if she went to Detroit. But mostly she wondered who she would be if she had been brought up with the Lees. Would she now be so enamored of Wilburn Mason? Or would he be someone unreachable, beyond her social sphere?

  And I’m always wondering what my own life would have been like if I had been brought up in a situation like my mother’s—without books and the radio and movies and patent-leather shoes, and countless other privileges, including parents. Mama didn’t have a mother to sew for her, and to me this is an inadmissible thought. I’m haunted by the images of my mother’s youth—the Christmas orange; the thrashing, pathetic aunt; the poorhouse horrors. But more than that, I’m riveted by the orphan state of mind, with the instilled sense of inferiority, the shame inflicted by the community. The tone of her childhood has cast a spell over her children, just as the landscape and folkways of Clear Springs still exert their influence, even on those who have strayed. Eunice’s absence reaches me, too. And Robert Lee, my errant grandfather, is taking shape in my mind. I wonder about all those lanky Lees. I gaze at my own long piano fingers. Here I am, sitting with one leg tucked under me, and I wonder at the strange twist in my left leg that causes my foot to turn inward. This unexpected resemblance to long-dead ancestors is like discovering an old daguerreotype, a shadow image of a face that looks like mine.

  23

  Moving Mama is a job for archaeologists. It involves unearthing and sifting and cataloging. The history of her place is in the boxes and barrels in the junkhouse, the farm equipment and tools in the other outbuildings. All of it has to be evaluated, item by item, for its usefulness and monetary value. Mama speaks vaguely of having a sale. I know she would feel cheated if she got a penny less for an item than the price she saw in an antique shop. She would feel much worse if she sold the farm. Even if the farm brought a good price, she would still feel cheated—of its history, life, memory. It would be an insurmountable loss, to all of us.

  She declares that she ought to get rid of extraneous items jammed in the outbuildings. But the indignity of submitting her belongings to the spectacle of an auction or a yard sale is overwhelmingly distasteful. I don’t think she can bear it, and I don’t think I can either.

  “Your daddy saw a lot of farms go,” she tells me. “And it always tore him apart to see the children at the auctions fighting over what their parents had worked so hard for.”

  “We won’t fight over it,” I promise.

  Clearly she cannot part with anything. The sorting and saving could occupy the rest of our lives, I realize when I see her poring over a drawer of rags and scraps.

  Impatient, and trying to be efficient, I say, “Take only the stuff you want. Put the rest in the stable, and we’ll sell it later. We can’t deal with all of it at once.”

  But in the turmoil of gathering to move, she doesn’t know what she wants to keep, what to store away.

  “Maybe these end tables are something you can replace,” I venture to suggest. “They’re not antique, and the veneer is wearing off.”

  “No,” she says flatly. “I give too much for them to get rid of them. I’m keeping them.”

  Robert and Eunice hang over the forefront of my mind like a dust ruffle on a bed. For the time being, while we maneuver the move, I’ve stopped asking Mama to review her childhood for me. The past is not a place she wants to linger in. She can discard items of nostalgic value, but she will hang on to a tattered and begrimed old plastic shower curtain because “it still has some wear in it.” My desire for simple order battles against the clutter of thrift. I’m one step ahead of chaos. Those jigsaw puzzles I worked as a child taught me to get every piece in place. If the pieces didn’t fit, Mama says I got mad and tried to pound them in place with my fist.

  Our house was always a mess. Mama was too busy to aim for a Good Housekeeping award. When someone drove up outside, we had to hurry to make the place presentable. We hurled berry buckets and toys and clothes into distant rooms. “Company’s coming! Start gathering!” What a familiar sound, my mother’s voice singing out from the past. Right now, my socks are drying on the chandelier.

  Always be saving, Granddaddy said. It’s an admirable habit, a lost art, a reverence for the resources of the planet. The habit of making do with what was on hand arose from the demands of pioneering and hardscrabble farming, long before the Depression. In one of my random sallies into genealogy, I recently ran across an estate inventory. After the death of Mama’s great-great-grandfather James R. Hicks in 1892, among the meager odds and ends at his estate sale were one set of “crockerware,” one looking glass, one bolster, and one lot of books. The books brought fifty cents. He had two beehives, with bees—commodities of great value, for sugar was scarce. He also had three lots of “tricks.” What were tricks? What did it mean that Hicks had three lots of tricks? I discovered that tricks were doodads and miscellaneous objects saved for no other reason than that they couldn’t be thrown away. Conceivably, they might come in handy (screws, buttons, pins), but tricks could also include odd, broken pieces of machinery, rusted-out cans, swatches of moth-eaten cloth. My mother has a world of tricks.

  A few days before the move, I find Mama napping in her La-Z-Boy. She is exhausted from all the sorting and packing. “I’m half dead,” she says, sitting up. “And I’ve got this Gravel Gertie throat.”

  Her hair is twirled with bobby pins under her U.K. Wildcats ball cap.

  “I’ve had some disturbing news,” she says. Her voice is hoarse from smoking.

  She shows me a letter from her doctor. The letter says her tests show that one of her carotid arteries is sixty-percent blocked. When it gets to seventy, the doctor will recommend surgery, to prevent a s
troke. The letter mentions dizziness and numbness, the symptoms of transient is-chemic attacks—T.I.A.s—or little warning strokes. Mama says that since she got the letter that morning she’s felt dizzy and numb.

  “We have to talk with your doctor,” I say, alarmed.

  She lights a cigarette and rushes out the door, the sulfur smell of the match fading in a cloud of tobacco. She’s not supposed to smoke, but she can’t stop.

  I anticipated feeling anger and impatience during the move. Now I am mute. The only important thing is not to lose her. She is my center. I’m only twenty-one years younger than she. She always says she was just a girl when she had me. I was so close to her that she often said she couldn’t wean me. Now I can’t face the ultimate weaning. I want her here. I want her to tell me now all the things I wouldn’t let her teach me in the past. She is the source of my being. How can I be, without her?

  I don’t know what the stress of this move is doing to her. I stand back and watch my mother go through this cultural shock treatment, this uprooting, this clinging. And I don’t know what I can do to ease the transition. Compared to the final journey into oblivion, moving to another house seems minor to me. But for her the subtext of this move is loss, a premonition of mortality.

  When we talk on the telephone with her doctor, he is reassuring. He suggests that in about six months she ought to consider having elective surgery, just to be sure. He says he would have T.I.A. symptoms too if he got that letter. Anxiety, he says. He says third-year med students, when they study diseases, always develop the symptoms of anything they are studying.

  “We don’t have to worry about it now,” I tell Mama. “Let’s just take it easy.”

  She feels much better then. Her symptoms seem to vanish, and we plunge ahead, packing and sorting. Still, I keep an eye on her and wonder if moving is the right thing for her at this point. What if she doesn’t live to enjoy her new house?

  “That’s stuff I’m getting rid of,” she says of a few shopping bags in the center of the bedroom floor.

  “Is that all?”

  “You’re just as bad as I am,” she says, laughing. “You save ever little string and sack. You’re just like Granny.”

  It’s true, of course. But most of my possessions take the form of information, stuff I think I need to know. Books, magazines, pamphlets, catalogs, brochures, bulletins, journals, maps, letters, schedules, newspapers, clippings, file folders of outdated data. I stockpile words the way she hoards scraps of cloth and cracked pickle crocks.

  Mama and LaNelle are talking on the telephone. LaNelle is in California, and I am on the extension phone.

  “I think I’ll have Granny’s old clock restored and put it on the mantel of the new fireplace,” Mama says. She noticed old clocks on mantels when we toured houses for sale.

  “But you always hated Granny’s clock,” LaNelle reminds her. “The way it struck all night long, and the way she couldn’t live without it.”

  “It’s not hers now,” Mama says. “It’s mine.”

  “Now it’s an antique,” I explain to LaNelle. “It’s in style.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if you took that old clock and dumped it in the creek,” LaNelle says. I sense her shudder across the miles.

  When LaNelle and I talk privately about Mama’s health, I ask, “Do you think this is too much for her?”

  “I don’t know. But being physically active will help her.”

  Mama and I continue our assault on the past. I nag her too much about smoking. I’m exhausted with resistance, with getting upset over the difficulties of the move. The work overwhelms us. Because I do not have a regular job with a boss and a time clock, I am available to help. At some point during the week, I express frustration at not getting any of my own work done.

  “What work is that?” Mama asks.

  “I write books.”

  “Oh.” She has forgotten. She ponders. Then she says, “I hate for you to have to keep on writing, book after book. You need to rest and enjoy yourself. You’ll burn yourself out.”

  Most of my childhood writings became landfill long ago. Daddy, who once advised me never to throw away anything I wrote, accidentally dumped a box of my scribblings into the creek, along with a jumble of glass and tin—trash to fight erosion.

  We’re awash in stuff. We lose track of what’s worth keeping, and we can’t find what we’ve saved.

  “I spend the biggest part of my time hunting for something,” Mama always said.

  Anything we were looking for always seemed to be inaccessible, stored away somewhere at the bottom of a pile, or stuffed into one of the outbuildings, where it was exposed to the elements. For years, I kept a brassbound trunk in the corncrib. The trunk contained a stack of college newspapers, folders of my writings from my college years, all of Mama’s letters to me when I was away at school, and souvenirs of my first trip to New York (swizzle sticks, Playbills). Now it is time to salvage this trunk, but when I open it, I discover that the wooden bottom has rotted through. I transfer the trunk’s contents to some cardboard boxes. At the bottom of the trunk are my mother’s letters. Some kind of insect has tunneled precise mazes through stacks of them, eating up her words like the most delectable nourishment. It is as though a jigsaw has been used to cut her letters into puzzles. I open one of them. Crumbs fall from the envelope. The letter unfolds like a chain of paper dolls. I read: “Yesterday——cows——since——all the way——never——hot peppers.” My mother’s precious words, the documentation of a decade, have been carved into a bizarre minimalist poetry. I am dismayed, angry at the way the most valuable things we squirrel away seem to be the most vulnerable. There is no way to save what is of real value. What endures is peripheral and empty.

  In the corncrib I find Daddy’s broken bootjack, which he had repaired with a piece of plywood. For years I’d tried to find him a new bootjack. Now I realize that even though his plywood repair job was crude, it had worked perfectly well for him. I also find Daddy’s moth-nibbled Navy blanket, the one Janice and I used to sit on in front of the car at the drive-in theater. And then a while later I come across his seabag, out in the part of the junkhouse that he used as his gun shop. The seabag is white canvas, cinched at the top by a rope tied in a sailor’s knot. The bag has probably not been opened in years. I hate to undo the knot. I will not know how to tie it up again. But I can’t resist. I take the bag outside on the grass and open it carefully, for fear of black widows.

  Inside, I find several shirts rolled up tightly and tied with twine. I pull out a pair of wool sailor pants with the initials W.A.M. on the inside pocket and my father’s full name inside the leg. But most interesting is the fishing-tackle kit, given to sailors for an emergency—if the ship sinks and they’re huddled in life rafts. It is made of an olive-green cloth like a carpenter’s apron, with many pockets and strings to tie it up in a roll. Most of the tackle is missing, but there are some feather jigs and a wee harpoon and some fishing line. With the kit is a folded piece of thin paper—fishing instructions. The warnings about sharks give me a shiver. I imagine the frightened sailors on the cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis frantically trying to read this little pamphlet, which looks as though it might dissolve in the sea. “Splashing with an oar or striking at it will usually drive a shark away. The tenderest spot in a shark is the end of his nose. His gills come next.”

  The fishing instructions range over a variety of survival options. You could eat seaweed, you could dry fish, you could skin birds and make a cloak. You could eat turtles, if you were careful. “After a turtle’s head is cut off, the head may bite and the claws may scratch. Watch out.” You could eat snakes, “even poisonous ones, if they have not bitten themselves.”

  I think of Daddy out in the Pacific, not knowing from moment to moment if he might have to begin fishing from a raft. He would have been belowdecks in the destroyer, a flimsy metal hulk known as a tin can; he would have been passing ammunition, unaware of what was happening above, the sounds of war like a million-a
mp rock concert. I wonder if he dreamed about those tender shark noses. I imagine him rehearsing his aim, practicing with that little harpoon.

  Under the heading “Whales,” the sole instruction is “Do not worry about whales.”

  Mama spends days emptying the outbuildings. She salvages a scythe and an ox yoke; the metal washtubs she and Granny used for years; the old iron wash kettle itself; a calf weaner; the milk cans I washed every day when I was growing up. She finds the stovepipe cover, the metal plate used to cover the hole in the ceiling when the coal stove was moved out of the house for the summer. It has Jesus’ face painted on it.

  She salvages a cast-off outdoor thermometer, a broken garden hose, cans of leftover glue and paint. She finds pieced quilt blocks bundled and tied with strips of selvedge. And tricks by the gross. In despair, I realize that all of this is making its way to her new home in town. She is afraid burglars might break into the outbuildings if she leaves anything here. I suggest putting out a welcome mat. I know that in trying to be lighthearted, I am unfairly dismissing the worth of her life. But the worth of her life is what I value most, and it bothers me that she’s worrying about these bits of flotsam.

  “I need to have a sale,” she says.

  She hires a man to haul off the trash. It all fits into one small trailer.

  She’s thrown out only items that are truly ruined and useless—the mouse-stained, the moth-eaten, the sodden and rusted and rotted. There is a bucket of thawed catfish and vegetables discarded from the bottom of the freezer, food dating back to 1985.

  On moving day, Mama wears hot-pink pants and a pretty short-sleeved sweater embroidered with flowers. These aren’t her everyday clothes. “I’ll have to look like a rich bitch if I’m moving into a Big Fine House,” she explains.

  I realize how nervous she is, moving into a place where the houses are close together and where the neighbors might look down on her country clothes. Mama assumes that people in Big Fine Houses are in society, and she is afraid they will be unfriendly. She’s in a tizzy, her cigarette smoke swirling behind her as she moves.