Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Mama is listening, with her head down. After a while she says, “Well, just because he run off, I don’t think they should have kept me from having anything to do with him.” She touches her foot to the chunk of concrete that lies on his grave. It’s like a piece of rubble tossed aside, casual and meaningless.

  We’re silent for a long while. Then Mama says, “I’ll take back what I said before. If I hadn’t had you children, I wouldn’t have had much of a life. But I did have you. I just never had a chance at anything.”

  “That’s because you didn’t have parents to bring you up—but we did.”

  She adjusts her weight, as if she has been standing too long. “If my mama and daddy could just see me now,” she says. “If they only knew how their youngun turned out.”

  “Well, I think you’ve turned out great!” I blurt.

  I don’t know what to say next. My lifelong habit of reticence holds my tongue. I don’t know how to speak my gratitude for her sacrifices without sounding sentimental—which would be fine with her. But I try. I need to make her believe her worth, to know how proud I am of her for her strength and resilience.

  “You’ve had an extraordinary life. Do you know how proud your children are of you? You’re the best mama I could have had! And where would we have ended up without you?”

  I pause, groping for more words.

  “Just look at your parents,” I say. “Look at what they missed. Robert Lee can’t be all bad, or you wouldn’t be as good as you are. I don’t want you to hate him. If you hate him, then you hate yourself, and that means you hate part of me, too. But you know you don’t hate your own children. Everything we are comes from you and Daddy. I think you and Daddy were always afraid we’d go off and not come back; you were afraid we’d get out in the world and then be ashamed of where we came from. But that’s not true. We’re grateful.”

  Mama has listened carefully. I’ve spewed all this, with an insistence that’s nearly shrill, and now she’s the one who seems speechless. Finally, she says, “You were the first one, and you were so little I was afraid you’d break.” She looks me right in the eyes. “I was scared to handle you, so I raised you by the book. The book said feed you ever four hours. You were so hungry you cried yourself to sleep, and then when it was time to feed you, you wouldn’t eat. I had to wake you up to feed you. You were never satisfied.”

  She smiles at my surprise.

  “I didn’t get enough titty? Well, that explains a lot!”

  “You were always hungry,” she says.

  “So that’s why I had food dreams.”

  One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge. I can see my mother holding the weight of her life. It is too much to sum up or dispense with or bury. I know that it was up to my siblings and me to do what had been denied her, to take the chance she offered us. It saddens me that my mother had to raise me “by the book” because she didn’t have a mother to teach her what to do. I’m aware that I am still that little child with the jigsaw puzzle, throwing a fit if the pieces don’t go together. And Mama is humoring me. But now I feel we’re closer to knowing what’s in us, guiding us and bringing us together. What comes clearest is my own need to find the Robert Lee in myself. I’m the one who needs to lighten up, kick down the stone fences.

  I’m walking away, toward the car, but when I look back I notice Mama is still at her father’s grave. Again she prods the lump of pebble-studded concrete with her foot, then stoops to touch it, as if she were fussing with a floral arrangement. I meander through a row of Hickses and some Allcocks.

  In a few minutes she joins me by the gate.

  “He was awful young to die,” she says.

  “Just imagine—what if he had lived, and we could have gone down the river on a boat with him. Wonder what it would be like if he had lived and we could have gotten to know him?”

  She smiles and shakes her head. “We’ll never know.”

  “Let’s go on a cruise down the Mississippi River,” I say, taking her hand as we head for the car. “Let’s hop on the Delta Queen and ride the river on down to Memphis.”

  “I’d have to take my fishing pole,” she says. She starts laughing then.

  I imagine Robert Lee on a towboat, towing me outward into the larger world, into the oceans, where the great migrations once rode the waves to the shore of the new continent. Some of these seekers threaded together and found their way to Clear Springs. Their history is elusive, the memory unreliable, as vague as the chemistry and flow of the ocean washing them to shore. I so much want everything to come clear. The old pieces dissolve like paper, but at last I feel I know where I am.

  26

  My mother and I are in her garden, and she is picking Kentucky Wonder beans. It is shortly after dawn. We have driven to the farm from her new house, which she has now occupied for over a year. She works bending from the waist in the timeless stoop-labor position. She parts the vines and plucks three beans simultaneously, threading the pods between her fingers.

  I like to see her in her garden. I know she misses living here at the farm. But her bones are brittle, and I am glad she does not have to climb rickety wooden steps. I wish she felt strong enough to go fishing in her pond. Several months after moving to her new house, she suffered a light stroke, so minor that for a couple of days we thought it was only her nerves. With that warning, she agreed to have the corrective surgery her doctor had recommended to unblock her carotid artery. After recovering from the operation, she was livelier and more clearheaded, with more bounce. Now she seems restored, with no lasting damage from the stroke. She has tried to quit smoking several times.

  Near the garden, the house where I was raised sits forlornly in the woods; weeds and grass and bushes are slowly strangling it. A hole has appeared in the roof, as if a concrete block has been dropped by a passing airplane. It reminds me of the hole punched in the new roof of the movie-set garage to make it look old. I’m on my way to the creek to pick blackberries, but I can’t resist circling around our old house one last time. In my gumshoes, I almost step on a nail sticking up from a shingle that is dissolving in the mud. I have spiked my feet on rusty nails on this farm before. I notice a nearby sinkhole carpeted with leaves—that was the septic tank. If I stepped there, I might disappear.

  A bulldozer is going to crush the house, flatten it, and push it a few hundred yards through the woods to a depression in the ground, an old pond site. The bulldozer will bury the house there. We don’t know when the bulldozer will arrive. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, or not until the fall. It depends. Mama has been avoiding the issue. I know she must feel sad at seeing the house go to ruin. She doesn’t mention it often, but she admits that the house is a dangerous wreck and an invitation to vandals.

  I share her melancholy. But I’m also feeling energized: the morass of loss I’ve been in is finally dissipating, like a fog clearing so a plane can take off. I feel wide awake and lightsome; I’ve come full circle—that is, far enough to know where I’ve been. Every summer now, I have an irresistible urge to pick berries.

  The fields are laid out behind the woods like quilt blocks, with the shaggy fencerows stitching them together. The landscape is an array of greens, pale and dark and misty and gold-tinged. Soybeans grow all the way to the far creek, and popcorn has been planted in the fields across that creek. This land around me has a hold on my heart, yet I wouldn’t want to live here, on a farm that has an industrial sewer pipe running beneath its fields like the bowels of a monster that has settled from outer space. I’m content to live—within driving distance—on my own piece of ground with my husband and pets.

  It feels strange to be walking on this place without Oscar. He is in retirement, too feeble now to scamper in these fields.

  Granny’s old house is rented out. Through the trees, I see two little girls bouncing on a trampoline in the yard. In a flash, I am six years old, jumping on the bed in our new house. I remember the sheer joy of jumping, trying to hit the ceiling, with the faint possibi
lity that I might just fly on up to the sky.

  The chicken tower is whirring, spinning its guts to produce food for fowl, and the vomit smell of it is laced through the air.

  In sophisticated gatherings, I’m sometimes given to conversation stoppers. I might mention the time I sang with a gospel quartet, or how my family didn’t have an indoor bathroom until I was eight years old, or how I had to sleep with a pan to catch the water from the leak in the ceiling. I might let slip that my Granny made her hair curlers out of pipe cleaners covered with scraps of leather. Usually, nobody present can identify with these memories. There’s an awkward pause and then someone striving for a sympathetic connection will mention summer camp in the Adirondacks, or they’ll say they always liked fresh, home-baked bread. So, perversely, I volunteer that we fried our toast. I have grown to cultivate my idiosyncratic revelations, now that I’m no longer humiliated by them; sometimes springing them is fun, though rather unfair of me. I time the mystified pause, then the quiet scramble back to familiar conversational territory. What is apparent, though, is that these revelations rarely get through to people. They don’t know how to categorize what I’ve said, so they continue to assume that my background was basically like theirs, with regular garbage pickup and ballet lessons. Or if what I say registers at all, they may reduce it to some pathetic image of poverty based on the movies. Which of course is not the story at all. The story is of distinctions and interweavings and shadings.

  I have met people who left their country origins behind, seemingly with ease and good riddance, in favor of the delights of urban fellowship and opportunity. I have dared repeatedly to plunge in over my head, but with my country reserve, I can’t casually summon the knowledge I’ve gathered and jump into intellectual conversations; I can’t serve on a committee or run for office or feel easy at a cocktail party. The rural temperament still has a hold on me that I won’t let go.

  But this is fine with me. I don’t want to enter academic discourse, don’t want to run for office. I’m beginning to understand what my father must have felt when he returned after the Navy. He had survived the war. He decided what was important. And he knew who he was. He renewed his vows to the land, even though there was little prospect of prosperity.

  I imagine his sense of resignation came down to him through history: from the pioneers, who learned to cultivate stinginess and sternness on such matters as seed corn and labor; and from the Civil War, which filled an entire culture with a profound sense of loss. After lurching through Pacific waters, my father was stilled, as a cow is held in a stanchion while being milked. Coming home, he found peace in honoring the violent necessities of the soil and the seasons, and in bowing to the authority of his father. Undeniably, his nerve failed him—in part, his resignation was a defeat. But I think he also loved his place in the scheme of things. In part, he chose his life.

  Emerging from a bank of berry bushes, I gaze around at Daddy’s fields, the margins grown ragged now. Tire tracks from giant farm machines have reshaped the mouth of the creek where the pond empties. I’m surrounded by my father’s horizons. This piece of ground fought him, and he fought back. He fought the gullies and the Johnsongrass and the blackberry briars.

  I read so much into my parents. I read the character and history of America in them as if they were a book. I read them in the ground, in the patch of grass where their barn used to be, in the sentinel yuccas by the driveway, in the lightning-scarred oak trees at the edge of the woods. I link them to the early journeys over the ocean, the revolving generations, the plow turning the furrow. While riding the rows on his tractor, Daddy mulled over the way the world works, just as I’ve done while sitting at the controls at my desk. I reach to know his mind, as I grab for a post, an anchor. But I always knew where my center was—here, on this land. This is my parents’ greatest gift—this rootedness, this grounding. It is what has let me roam. I’ve been like a hawk on a gyre, flying off, ranging as far as I can—yet always spiraling back, securely tethered to home. Unlike Daddy, I won’t come back to roost here. I want to stretch my wings farther.

  The chicken tower’s reflection shines in the still pond like a magnificent tableau from a science-fiction fantasy. It is still huffing away, like Godzilla. Lately, Mexican immigrants have moved into the area to take the low-wage jobs offered by the chicken-processing plant on the other side of town. They have traveled this far to find a better life for their families, to make money to send home. What solace and promise do they find in the sight of these green fields, so wide and welcoming, and the narrow boundaries of suspicion that sometimes greet them in the aisles of the new Wal-Mart Supercenter?

  For a long time, I’ve been preoccupied with why some folks stay and some stray. I read about a scientific study of cats in the wild. It had been assumed that cats who established a territory, or home base, were the successful ones, while those who remained roamers were the losers. The study uncovered evidence that the transients, not the residents, might be the more resourceful cats, accepting greater risks and more varied opportunities for prey and mates. It was almost as though they were exercising imagination. It’s an old question—the call of the hearth or the call of the wild? Should I stay or should I go? Who is better off, those who traipse around or those who spend decades in the same spot, growing roots?

  The way I see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally. The answer is the mingling of sunlight and shadow; it’s ambiguity, not either-or. The best journeys spiral up and around—the journey of Odysseus on the wine-dark sea or Bloom in the winding streets of Dublin. In the Zen journey, when you return, you know for the first time where you came from. We’re always yearning and wandering, whether we actually leave or not. In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home, a notion that something—our point of origin, our roots, the home country—is out there. It’s a place where we belong, where we know who we are. Maybe it’s in the past—we dream of our own clear springs—or maybe it’s somewhere ahead. In its inception, the idea of America was heaven on earth. Now that dream is fractured and we’re looking for the pieces. Maybe we’ll never find what we’re looking for, but we have to look.

  After all my comings and goings, now I see that I am my mother—and all of my forebears. I am plainspoken like Granny. Sometimes I realize I am talking to myself the way Granddaddy used to do—as if there were two of me. Sometimes I have a thought that I know Daddy must have had. Sometimes I think I have an original idea, but I know that some great-great-grandmother hunched over a quilt frame quite likely had that same thought. I feel Robert Lee in me, surging downriver. I am so much my mother that I can feel myself inside her head, feel her in me. From this berry bush I can see Mama in the garden, working the soil just the way she learned from Mammy Hicks and Aunt Rosie. I feel the ache in Mama’s bones, the promise of young Eunice, Aunt Rosie’s need to mastermind, and Daddy’s shy detachment, his sly asides.

  I think of something I want to tell Mama. Recently, I saw a hummingbird fly into my living-room window, its long beak stabbing the glass. Stunned, it fell to the ground and lay on its side, still breathing. It was a female. Her feathers were green and gold—iridescent, like a peacock’s. The minuscule feathers overlapped like fish scales. The bird lay there, her exquisitely designed clothing on show. When she began to stir, I set her upright in a hanging flowerpot. Eventually she gathered the strength to buzz away like an oversized bumblebee.

  A country person’s social isolation can be stunting, but then again he may have a chance at clearer glimpses of the ultimate—like the hummingbird that slammed into my window. A city dweller has more faith in human possibility and can dream up a skyscraper, but a rural person knows life’s limits. It occurs to me that the sorrow of this knowledge is the basis of the large-scale forgetting of our past, the loss of memory that has perplexed me so much. In agriculture, the individual is lost in repetition; the world recycles. Memory seizes only what is out of the ordinary.

  My berry box
is almost full. I head back across the field toward Mama.

  Mama always knows where the moon is, and when to plant seed potatoes, and what potion to paint on a sick child’s chest. She knows how to read the sky. My father knew when to expect birds to arrive or cows to calve; he knew how to fix almost anything without spending a cent. He could tell time in his head. He claimed he could approach any dog without fear.

  I can’t sew up a chicken’s injured craw. I can’t drive a tractor or cook worth beans. I can’t put in a zipper. I tat words and save hummingbirds and come home to pick berries. Then I get eager to leap outwards again. Maybe someday I’ll move to Vermont. I’m planning to take up piano, and I’m going trekking in Ireland, and then maybe I’ll study lepidoptery. Or why not math? It turns out that the ultimate mysteries may be there. There’s more than was dreamt of in Miss Florence’s philosophy. I’ll give chaos theory a whirl. Wonders are crashing into me, birds striking my window. I can’t catch my breath. A summer dawn hits me nowadays like a stun-gun.

  Maybe I’ll just sit still and grow quiet and contemplate what is close to home. It would be a good time to let the colored-glass bits and floating feathers and song snatches in my head settle, so that some clear light can shine through. I recall Mama writing me that Granny, bedfast and obstinate, was driving her up the wall. What will I do if Mama requires such care? All I know is that I imagine I will do what needs to be done, even though I think I can’t.

  At the garden, I see that Mama has filled her buckets with beans, and now she is scraping some weeds that are popping through the dirt around her okra. She can’t abide the weeds coming through. She doesn’t let them get over a tenth of an inch high—barely visible. She scrapes the crust of the soil and turns it to aerate it.