by Lisa Alther
Although you couldn’t go home again, you couldn’t really get away either. Without hesitation her fingers spun the radio dial to 1490, WHPT. The number was indelibly imprinted on her brain. As the radio blared country music, the Jeep shuddered and bucked up the dirt road that formed a boundary of her family’s farm. Below her she could see the land, chopped into neat blocks as though some giant had whacked the valley with a huge butcher’s cubing hammer. In an intriguing Mondrian pattern, some of the blocks were blue-green with alfalfa; others were dark brown bottom land newly planted to corn; some were pale green with tobacco seedlings; yet others were gullied red clay planted with dark green kudzu.
After a mile, she came to the Cloyds’ tenant house, which was shingled in maroon asphalt tiles and clashed hideously with the orange-red clay of the front yard. Behind and below the house were the dark brown barns and white silos and spotless gray-cinderblock milking parlor. Lined up patiently outside the milking parlor were the Holsteins. She decided not to find Clem and announce her arrival. She’d stop later, when he wouldn’t be too busy to chat.
What would Clem be like now that he had to be up at four A.M. for milking and could no longer prowl the streets on his Harley until early morning? Ginny had seen him at the Major’s funeral — looking intensely uncomfortable in a dark suit and starched shirt. But she had only exchanged greetings with him and received his condolences. The Major had praised Clem’s running of the farm. Some sort of metamorphosis must have occurred. The Clem Ginny had known could never have endured such a purposeful life.
On the radio the Piney Flats Gospel Quartet was just completing the jingle for White Rose Petroleum Jelly. Ginny smiled faintly recalling one of Clem’s pranks which involved mixing sand into the White Rose in his brother Floyd’s glove compartment.
She tooted the horn gently in the old tattoo her family had always used to indicate to the Cloyds that it was Babcocks going past to the cabin, not vandals and thieves. She drove on for another mile down the ever-narrowing dirt track through a woods of oak and sycamore and sassafras, redbud, poplar, and dogwood — a woods so different in composition from that behind Ira’s house in Vermont, with its birch and ash and sugar maples, its dozen varieties of evergreen.
Stopping in front of the aluminum gate, she got out and unlocked the chain and drove the Jeep through. She descended the hill into the kudzu-lined bowl that housed the cabin and the pond. The cabin, built of chinked logs and covered by a dull green tin roof, had a patchwork history of occupation. It had been built around 1800 by the original settler of the farm — one of the motley breed of horse thieves and adventurers and deserters who had crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, fleeing the civilized coastal regions of Virginia and North Carolina for the mountainous backwoods of Kentucky and Tennessee and southwest Virginia. By the time her grandfather, Mr. Zed, eluded his destiny as a coal miner and bought the farm, the cabin had been deserted for decades. Mr. Zed rebuilt the cabin and lived there with his wife and his small daughter, Ginny’s mother, while his pseudo-antebellum mansion was under construction. When Ginny’s mother and father were first married, they had lived in the cabin. Ginny herself had been born there. Shortly after Jim’s birth, her grandparents had traded her parents the mansion for the cabin. After her grandmother’s death, Mr. Zed had spent the rest of his life in virtual seclusion at the cabin, trying to figure out how to undo what he had spent his lifetime doing — founding Hullsport and establishing the factory.
Hence the kudzu. The kudzu vines served a double purpose: First, they held up the red clay sides of the bowl, which were always threatening to collapse into the pond; and secondly, they were an experiment with far-reaching implications in the deranged mind of the aging Mr. Zed. Kudzu was being highly touted at the time by the agricultural extension agents as the wonder vine of the century. Not only did its tenacious roots fix nitrogen in depleted soils; not only did the high-protein foliage make nutritious cattle fodder, but the plant spread so voraciously that only a few starter plants were required to take over an entire hillside.
It was to explore this promise that Ginny’s grandfather, his scramble of long white hair whipping in the breeze, had carefully placed plants all around the bowl. In no time at all, every object in sight had been swallowed up — bushes, rocks, trees, fences, an old tobacco shed, rusted equipment pans. The vines were six feet deep in spots. Her grandfather had spent most of his twilight years, when his peers were engaged in shuffleboard tournaments at Sun City, Arizona, hacking away with a machete as the kudzu threatened to engulf his front lawn. But he hacked without malice, because he saw kudzu as his secret weapon. He would plant it, under cover of night, at selected spots around the factory and the town. The vines would silently take hold and begin their stealthy spread. Before Hullsporters were even aware of their existence, the grasping tendrils would choke out all life in the Model City. The site would be returned to Nature.
Word got around town to humor the old man as he crept around furtively planting, and scowling at the smokestacks and holding tanks, and shaking his fist at the encroaching superhighways and shopping malls and housing developments. ‘Senile,’ they would say, shaking their heads sadly. ‘Mr. Zed’s done gone mental.’
To Ginny, when she would walk up to visit him, he would shake his wild crop of tangled hair and say plaintively, ‘I never should of left Sow Gap, honey. I was a miner’s son. I had no bidness tryin’ to be nothin’ else. Lord God, I done made a mess. Virginia, honey, don’t you never try to be what you ain’t.’
‘But what am I?’ she’d ask him, reviewing her history of being born in a farm cabin in Virginia with a rural southern mother and an industrialist father from Boston, and with refugees from the coal mines for grandparents; growing up in a fake antebellum mansion in a factory town in the New South with a dairy farm out her back door; being christened ‘Virginia’ by her mother in a burst of geographic chauvinism, and ‘Babcock’ by her father, which name emblazoned the walls of a hall at Harvard. Being a human melting pot, to what one god — social or economic or geographic — was she to direct her scattered allegiances? How she had envied her friends at public meetings who could stand up and belt out a belligerent version of “Dixie’; on such occasions Ginny herself had sometimes remained seated, sometimes stood but not sung, sometimes sung halfheartedly.
Ginny had decided to put the issue of scattered allegiances behind her and start out fresh when she left Hullsport for Boston. And what had she done since? She’d married a Yankee businessman whose parents were Vermont farmers; she’d taken a hippy army deserter as a lover, if that was the right term for Hawk’s relationship to her; she’d been living a suburban life in a small town in Vermont. Given her chance at transcendence, she’d merely recreated the muddle of loyalties she’d left Hullsport to escape.
She got out of the Jeep, lugging her pack and some groceries, and stumbled over dark green kudzu vines all the way to the cabin. The vines had taken over the stone steps and were partway up the log sides of the cabin. Someone hadn’t been performing Mr. Zed’s former duties with the machete. Stepping firmly on the vines that covered the steps, Ginny wrenched open the front door, walked in, and began opening shutters.
There were veils of cobwebs in the corners and a layer of dust over all horizontal surfaces. Otherwise, the place was relatively neat and inhabitable. She threw the switch on the fuse box, and the various motors in the cabin — the pump, the refrigerator, the hot water heater — started humming on cue. After putting away the groceries in the small kitchen, cheery with its red gingham curtains and hooked rugs, she took a mop and knocked down the spiderwebs and dusted the dark wide-plank floors.
The last time she’d been here, a few months before her grandfather’s death, her cousin Raymond had arrived for a visit. Raymond was tall and painfully thin with black bags under his eyes and hollows under his cheekbones. His coloring was almost albino, like a crayfish from an underground stream. He talked very little, mostly sat hunched over wheezing. Black lung from the mi
nes, her grandfather explained later.
‘I tell you the truth, Raymond,’ Mr. Zed said, shaking his bushy white head angrily, ‘I declare, I rue the day I left Sow Gapl’
‘You’re plumb crazy iffen you do,’ Raymond gasped. ‘Sow Gap like to have killed me. Can’t do nothin’ no more ‘cept sit around tryin’ to breathe.’
‘Hullsport is worse than them mines ever was,’ Mr. Zed insisted. ‘The air’s ever bit as foul, and you can’t fish the Crockett no more.’
‘Hit beats the hell out of them slag heaps up at Sow Gap. I bet you done forgot what hit’s like in the pits, Zed. When the pumps don’t work and you’re stoopin’ over in a four-foot crawl space with water to your knees hot-wirin’ a 440 cable with maskin’ tape?’
‘You know what that damn fool Yankee son-in-law of mine is makin’ at that factory, Raymond? Bombs, that’s what. Roof falls is nothin’ compared to that. It’s these Yankee Episcopalians — hell, they’re gonna kill us all.’
Ginny had returned to Miss Head in Boston the next week more intent than ever on a career as a scholar, so that she need have nothing more to do with either slag heaps or holding tanks. But then she had met Eddie Holzer.
Ginny took her grandfather’s machete from over the huge stone fireplace. She went outside and hacked away at the kudzu, tearing it one vine at a time off the cabin and severing it at ground level with a rhythmic sweep of her arm, like Ira’s practice golf swings. Gradually she chopped a no-man’s land of several feet around the cabin. She was imagining as she swung what it would feel like to live in a rain forest in the Amazon Basin: If your perseverance flagged even briefly, you would disappear in the encroaching undergrowth. Soon she was splattered with pale green kudzu blood. The summer sun was hot; it hung midway between its noon position and the rim of the red clay bowl on the far side of the pond. It would set that evening behind the very spot on the ridge where Mr. Zed was buried, his headstone now swallowed up by the kudzu. Ginny walked down to the pond, stepping carefully through the tangled vines, whose relatives she had just executed. A layer of chartreuse scum covered at least a third of the pond surface. She threw off her peasant dress, unlaced her boots, and walked into the water, sinking up to her ankles in the squish on the pond bottom. Farther out, scum clinging to her pubic hair, she lowered herself into the water and began a stately breaststroke, sweeping scum out of her path as she went.
Crockett Valley Community Hospital was a boxy, unadorned three-story building of the same omnipresent red brick as the rest of the structures in Hullsport. The bricks themselves were made from the red clay of the surrounding countryside.
‘It’s very sensible,’ the Major used to assure Ginny during the Cold War when she would complain about the drab uniformity of the red brick factory. ‘If enemy bombers fly over, we’ll be camouflaged. They won’t be able to pick us out from the landscape.’
‘But why would anyone want to bomb us?’ she’d demand indignantly.
The hospital lobby was jammed with people in various states of decay and collapse, most of them acutely anxious and suffering. It looked like the waiting room for extreme unction.
The volunteer receptionist, dressed in a pink and white striped pinafore, eyed uneasily Ginny’s peasant dress and combat boots. Tm Mrs.. Babcock’s daughter,’ Ginny said reassuringly. ‘Really I am.’
‘Room 307,’ the woman finally disclosed.
As Ginny clomped down the septic vinyl-floored hallway, several patients rushed to the doors of their rooms to inspect her. It occurred to her that she was probably the most interesting arrival since their post-breakfast enemas.
The door of room 307 was tightly closed. Pausing outside it to brace herself for this meeting with her mother, she heard a male voice coming from the room next door. It was droning the same thing over and over again, like a stuck record: ‘Can you do that for me? I need me three new men out there right now. Can you do that for me? What did you say? Can you do that or not? Can you send me three new men out there right now? Or not?’
Out of the doorway across the hall shuffled a large old woman in a pink dressing gown. Her gray hair was oily and hung in her eyes. Drool dribbled out of one corner of her mouth. She took Ginny’s arm and shook it,
‘Hi,’ Ginny said with an uncertain smile, inching away. The old woman pointed at the floor, grunting. Ginny looked down. The woman was wearing new red slippers, the kind that made people’s feet look twice as big as they really were. ‘Beautiful,’ Ginny assured her. ‘They’re just great.’ The woman nodded with satisfaction and shuffled slowly back to her room. As she did so, Ginny realized who she was — Mrs. Cabel, her primary class Sunday school teacher, the woman who had taught Ginny right from wrong, the woman who had repeatedly assured her that Jesus loved all the little children of the world.
Ginny gritted her teeth and knocked softly on the door of room 307. The last time she had seen her mother had been a little more than a year ago, at the Major’s funeral, prior to any suspicion that Mrs. Babcock was seriously ill herself. Her powerful mother vulnerable after all? The idea was so new that she simply didn’t know how to deal with it.
There was no answer to her knock, so she slowly pushed the door open. The room was pale green, with windows all along one wall. Fresh flowers stood in several vases on the windowsills — summer flowers of white and yellow. The other walls were stark. A TV, two imitation Danish modern armchairs, a couple of matching dressers cluttered with the paraphernalia of sick rooms, and two beds, one with a woman asleep in it. For a moment, Ginny thought she was in the wrong room. This sleeping woman wasn’t her mother. But as she tiptoed closer, she decided that it was her mother after all. The formerly auburn hair had gone almost completely gray and was beginning to thin on top. All the familiar lines in the face — the frown lines between the eyes and the laugh lines around the mouth — had deepened into permanent crevices. The entire face with its sharp attractive features and prominent cheekbones had altered subtly: It had a yellowish tinge and was fuller and puffy, almost rounded. The nostrils were packed with cotton, and she was breathing raspily through the mouth. The arms, which lay outside the bedcovers, were covered with large bruises of different colors — black and blue, or red, yellow, and green. They looked like the smeared palette of an insane painter, of a Van Gogh. This woman, who for years had served Ginny sometimes as honored exemplar, sometimes as loathed and resented antagonist, was now lying here, asleep and helpless, giving off a stale, musty odor from her bruised flesh.
Stunned, Ginny sat down at the foot of the bed, relieved to have this opportunity to accustom herself to her mother’s appearance unobserved by her mother, who always seemed able to interpret Ginny’s every thought — by the way her mouth twitched, or by the angle at which she held her head. And right now the shock and distaste she was feeling were probably showing quite openly on her face. Could her mother be looking much worse than she really was? Christ, the poor woman looked like the descriptions of plague victims from the Middle Ages. It was incredible that anyone could look so awful and live to tell about it.
A crisp nurse in a pert cap like a blanched potato chip whirled through the door like a dervish and started briskly rearranging the things on the bedside table.
When she finally noticed Ginny, she reprimanded her in a loud whisper. ‘Mrs. Babcock is not supposed to be sleeping now. It’s time for her craft program.’
‘Craft program?’ Her mother was definitely not the craft program type. Or hadn’t been.
‘Craft program.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Mrs. Babcock is embroidering a sampler.’
‘I didn’t even know she could embroider,’ Ginny said, wondering at how little she really knew about this woman with whom she’d spent eighteen years. The nurse handed her an embroidery frame from the foot of her mother’s bed. Apparently her mother couldn’t embroider. The frame was a mess — colors and stitches all scrambled together in no apparent pattern. Unless it was a new folk art form.
“Who’s the man next door?’ Ginny asked in a whisper.
The nurse looked at her suspiciously. ‘Bicknell,’ she replied out of the corner of her mouth, with a nervous glance around the room to see if she’d been overheard. ‘He was Coach over at the high school before Coach Sparks.’ Ginny’s heart leapt with terror at the nearness of her old enemy. ‘He’s had a stroke.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Ginny said with scarcely contained pleasure. ‘I used to know him.’
‘Won two hundred and three football games and lost eight. Can’t beat that, can you? He was a great athlete and an outstanding coach.’
But a lousy son of a bitch, Ginny thought as she nodded solemnly — and then, suddenly, felt uncharitable. The poor man was a demented vegetable now — no threat to her any longer, if he ever really had been. Why should she corrode her heart by harboring an enduring hatred for him? And yet…if she gave up her grudge, wouldn’t that be admitting that all the burning loves and hatreds of her life were nothing but fleeting whims in the face of ultimate mortal frailty?
As the nurse whisked out the door, a whirlwind of white-starched competence, Ginny could hear Coach’s disembodied commands still floating up and down the hall: ‘Now, you listen to me right now: I need me three men out there on that field right now. No more, and no less. Can you get me those men? I need three men…’ The door sucked shut and all was quiet.
Ginny stood up and walked over to her mother’s bedside table. It was littered with magazines. Volume 22 of the family’s encyclopedia lay on top of the magazines, a marker at the two-thirds point. Her remarkable mother had read the whole set straight through in the past nine years and was now a storehouse of all kinds of fascinating, if useless, crumbs of knowledge. Also on the table was a large syringe, poised for action, which the nurse had just left.
Carefully, Ginny opened the table drawer, thinking of her promise to her mother years ago to put her out of her misery and hoping to find huge bottles crammed with pain-killing tablets and capsules of all kinds that she could slip to her mother if that was what the situation required. But there were no bottles, only a worn Bible and an Anglican prayer book. The central commissary was elsewhere. Ginny tried picturing the alternatives -smuggling a pistol in under her poncho, concealing a razor blade in her Afro. She could see the spotless sheets and septic walls splattered with her mother’s blood…
