by Lisa Alther
As she collapsed on the sofa next to them, she heard a crackling sound in her pocket. She drew out the letter to Miss Head. Anguish stabbed through her. Miss Head, whom she had loved, whatever that might mean, who had loved her after her fashion, no longer wanted anything to do with her. Apparently seven years wasn’t time enough to heal the wounds Ginny had inflicted. Ginny knew that she had behaved badly. Miss Head had shared all the things that were most important to her; and Ginny had repaid her by kicking her in the teeth. If seven years weren’t time enough for Miss Head to forgive her, most likely an eternity wouldn’t do. She felt tears poised in her eyes and allowed herself the luxury of letting them overflow. She licked them off her cheeks. They tasted salty, like seawater, like blood.
Wiping her face with her tie-dyed T-shirt, she stood up and prepared to leave.
When she got to the big house, she jumped out of the Jeep and charged across the weedy front yard to the Southland Realty sign. She gave a great heave and wrenched it out of the ground and tossed it way under the spreading branches of the magnolia tree. Then she lowered her face into smooth creamy magnolia blossoms and breathed deeply of the cloying scent. The petals enveloped her face. The odor summoned up a dizzying succession of summer weddings, high school dances, holiday feasts, at which the gorgeous blossoms had always been featured as centerpieces. She broke off a couple and placed them carefully in the Jeep.
Then she strode around the house and stared with dismay at her formal gowns, which were billowing out of a trash barrel like froth on an overfilled beer mug. Resolutely, she removed from the barrel everything she had dumped into it the previous afternoon. It took several trips to cart it all back up the stairs. She replaced it in her closet and chests exactly as it had been before her neurotic seizure of destructiveness. She could imagine Wendy’s delight over the Scrooge comic books. She would pull out all the stuff and tell the fascinated child everything — well, almost everything — that she had done and expected and planned for as a girl. This room could be Wendy’s. She removed from her bookcase her favorite tattered book from her own preliterate days. Its chewed torn pages featured pictures of baby farm animals with their mothers, in poses of affection and concern — lamb and ewe, colt and filly, piglet and sow. She put it in a large brown envelope and addressed it to Wendy.
When she got to the hospital, Ginny was pleased to find her mother sitting up writing letters. Her eyes were bright, and her face didn’t look quite so puffy.
‘Hello,’ her mother said with a pleasant smile.
‘Hi!’ Ginny took a wide bowl into the bathroom and filled it with water, and floated the two magnolia blossoms. She placed the bowl on her mother’s bedside table, proud of her thoughtful initiative in the face of the almost overpowering promptings toward passivity that flooded her whenever her mother was around to arrange, handle, manage, organize.
Her mother stared at the blossoms with surprise. ‘Why, thank you, dear. They’re lovely.’
‘They are, aren’t they?’
‘I only wish I could smell them.’
‘You’ll be able to before they’ve gone by,’ Ginny assured her.
Her mother nodded in serene agreement.
Ginny glanced at her mother’s chart, which someone had forgotten to remove from the room — clotting time, six minutes; platelet count, 110,000/mm3.
‘Fantastic’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it? I almost feel as though I could endure the craft program this afternoon.’
‘Well, don’t get too carried away. Hey, the clock’s working. Did it just run down yesterday, or what?’
‘I don’t know really. Mr. Solomon did something to the spring mechanism that runs the pendulum, and it’s all right again. He’s amazing, you know. He could scarcely see the clock because of his cataracts, the poor old thing. But he was able to diagnose it and fix it almost by touch. He said it’s really a fine one. German, he says it is. I can’t imagine how my family ended up with it. That branch was mostly Scots-Irish.’
‘Well, but that kas in the downstairs hall is Dutch, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. I didn’t think you children ever listened when I told you about these things.’
‘I wouldn’t have had to listen, Mother. As many times as you ran through your heirloom routine, I’d be bound to have just absorbed all the relevant information.’
‘I wasn’t that bad.’
‘That’s what you think.’
‘Well, it wasn’t all my fault. You children used to clamor around me unmercifully to bring down my pictures.’ She gestured to the photos on the wall. ‘And to tell you about “the man who got his head knocked off by the truck.”’
‘We did? You were the one who was always trotting out those pictures, Mother, as a didactic exercise about our own mortality.’
Mrs. Babcock smiled with exasperation. ‘I’m sorry, dear, but you’re wrong. The three of you, especially you, used to be obsessed with injuries and accidents and fires and theft. It used to worry me terribly. I couldn’t figure out how I’d failed you, what I’d done or not done to make you so insecure and frightened all the time. I finally concluded that it was because your father left to go off to war when you were only two months old. The world and its relationships must have seemed very tentative to you at too young an age.’
‘That’s not how I remember it. I remember you as the fearful one, Mother. “You can’t be too careful,” you’d say all the time. “If you ride your bicycle in the road, dear, expect to be run over by a truck,” — Ginny mimicked.
‘And death,’ her mother continued. ‘You used to go on and on about it. Why did people die? What happened to their bodies? How could God let people die? Would God die? Did He have a wife and would she die? Did you have to die? When would your father and I die? What would happen to you if we died right then and left you all alone? Could you have the car for your own after we died? It went on and on. It used to get so ridiculous that your father and I would finally collapse in laughter. And then you would start crying and accusing us of not caring if you died. I worried about it for years. You always used to plead with me to dig up the cats and dogs and birds that we buried in the back yard so that you could see what had happened to their bodies.’
Ginny was shaking her head no. ‘But you were the one who kept harping on death, Mother. You’d sit around all day, day after day, writing up epitaphs and obituaries and memorial services for yourself. And dragging us around every summer to family cemeteries to do tombstone rubbings and stuff.’
Mrs. Babcock looked at her strangely and frowned. ‘You’re exaggerating, dear. True, I did at one point do an epitaph and a format for a memorial service. But that’s not unusual. It’s like making up a will. You do it once to be sure that your wishes are down explicitly in writing. And you may go back and touch it up a time or two as your ideas change. But mostly you do it so that your survivors will have something to go by when they’re finally faced with the task of disposing of you and your effects. But I’ve never written an obituary for myself. I wonder where you got that idea?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ginny said lamely. ‘But what about the tombstone rubbings, Mother? You have to admit to dragging us through a hell of a lot of graveyards in pursuit of your forebears.’
‘I don’t know about “a lot.” I was interested for several years in tombstones as a sort of — you know, folk art form.’
Ginny stared at her mother suspiciously. Whose version of their shared past was accurate? And how could their versions be so different?
‘Whatever happened to those baby birds you found? Are they still alive?’
‘Yeah. I’ve been feeding them. You know that bird book? The one by a guy named Birdsall? He said you might as well kill baby swifts if you found them because they needed regurgitated food from their parents. Well, I’ve been feeding them hamburg for a week and they’re still alive.’
‘So much for the experts,’ Mrs. Babcock said grimly, thinking of her own case. But the second transfusion had
worked. Today she was feeling great. Maybe young Dr. Vogel could be trusted after all.
‘Yes, so much for the experts. It occurred to me, though, that maybe what happens in a laboratory is different from what happens in real life. I mean, my birds had to learn to cope with undigested food. And they appear to have, ahead of schedule. Does that sound possible?’
‘Certainly it does. Likely, even. You can force an apple tree to fruit by cutting a strip of bark from around its trunk. I read it in the encyclopedia. But you know these experts.’
After lunch Ginny watched ‘Hidden Heartbeats’ from the spare bed.
‘What are we doing this for?’ her mother asked with a tolerant smile. ‘Think of all the classics I haven’t read.’
‘We’re hooked.’
‘Yes, but I don’t even care what happens to these people. And I still have to know.’
‘Face it, Mother. We’re both shameless gossips at heart.’
‘We could pretend that we’re sociologists, and that we’re merely clinically interested in what keeps millions of American women glued to their television sets every afternoon.’
‘Let’s.’
That afternoon’s installment was a shocker. Frank had discovered that his cherished little daughter had actually been fathered by his wife’s brother-in-law’s great-uncle, and that his wife was still seeing the old man and receiving gifts from him on the sly — giant stuffed animals from F. A. O. Schwartz’s for the child, for instance. In a heart-wrenching scene, Frank turned Linda out of his house, vowing never to let her see the little girl again. Parts of the ridiculous plot were hitting uncomfortably close to home for Ginny.
During the commercial, as an anthropomorphic white tornado swirled around a startled housewife’s toilet bowl, Ginny said, ‘You know, I’m really shocked. I thought that Frank knew all along that he wasn’t Marty’s real father.’
‘You did? Why would you think that? No, I never felt that he knew.’
‘Still, he’s reacting somewhat excessively, don’t you think?’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Well, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I mean really, is sex, or who people have it with, all that important?’
Mrs. Babcock looked at Ginny thoughtfully, expecting what she was going to say to outrage her. ‘I think that extramarital sex is vulgar. It makes sex both too important and not important enough.’
Just as Ginny was about to reply angrily, the program resumed, and they fell silent, absorbed in the moral dilemmas of modern America. The half hour ended with Frank’s trying to explain to the pitiful little girl that her mommy was gone forever. Ginny was profoundly moved by the child’s incredulous distress, the more so as she recalled from her psychology texts at Worthley how the early loss of a significant love object predisposed someone to incapacitating depressions as an adult.
Gruffly, Ginny said, ‘I don’t really think a child that age knows the difference. As long as there’s someone responsible around to care for it.’
Her mother studied her, then said quietly but with conviction, ‘Small children need their mothers.’
‘Garbage! Any warm body will do!’ She was close to tears.
That night Ginny climbed the path to the springhouse alongside Clem. Maxine followed. The springhouse from the outside looked just as it always had — built of weathered boards and listing away from the hillside. The door was still chained and locked, but hanging on it was a crude hand-lettered sign that read ‘Holy Temple of Jesus.’
Half a dozen people stood chatting outside. Ginny didn’t know any of them, though they were prototypes of people she’d known all her life, or that portion of her life spent in Hullsport — the area farming families. The men wore clean pressed work clothes, dark green or khaki. Their hair was neatly combed and parted and slicked down. Some carried instrument cases. The women wore bargain basement flowered housedresses and white socks and flats. Their hair was tied back into frizzy ponytails. Although most looked older, they treated Clem and Maxine with a respect bordering on deference, and kept referring to them as Brother and Sister Cloyd. Ginny hadn’t heard unrelated people call each other brother and sister since she’d left the Free Farm. She was seized by a bout of culture clash.
This faded quickly when Brother Cloyd began introducing her around as an old friend. She was well aware that Clem was counting on her not to divulge to his brothers and sisters in Christ the fact that he and she had ‘known’ each other in the true biblical sense on the floor of their Holy Temple not ten years earlier. Ginny had cleaned up her act for the evening, had rejected her various inflammatory T-shirts, and was wearing her patchwork peasant dress. She had even wetted her hair down in a feeble effort to subdue it.
Inside, lined up across the stone floor, were several rows of crude benches that faced a raised dais. Ginny noticed that the furniture Clem had made when they were kids remained; the bookshelves where he had kept his pornographic paperbacks now held tattered hymnals. The small table she had perched on the last time she had been here, right before leaving for her freshman year at Worthley, had been converted into an altar. It was covered with a clean white fringed cloth. Hanging on the wall above it was a simple wooden cross. And the stream continued to gurgle along in its stone channel, giving the place a refreshingly damp cool feeling on the hot summer night.
Ginny sat on a bench in back and tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, which wasn’t very. She was still stunned by the transformation in Clem. Not only that his crippled leg had regenerated itself — she was getting used to that major miracle. Primarily she was amazed by the change in Clem’s manner. She remembered him as a sour, antisocial, borderline-pathological boy. And now here he was at the door of his springhouse, greeting his parishioners — transformed into a warm, self-confident man. He had spent his adolescence pursuing death and had escaped it only by divine intervention. But here he was now, running a large and successful farm, raising a family, ministering to his flock. How was it possible? Ginny had known that human beings were flexible organisms, but she hadn’t known that they were this flexible. Perhaps there was hope for the species after all.
Three men were on the front platform unpacking their instruments — a bass fiddle, a guitar, drums. Another man who had just come in carried a large black box to the altar, set it down reverently, and backed away.
Eventually, there were some twenty people sitting on the benches. Maxine was standing on the podium in front of the men with the instruments, just as she had stood on the platform at the Bloody Bucket all those years ago wailing ‘When My Pain Turns to Shame.’ The golden cross wedged between her mammoth mammaries flashed in the light from kerosene lanterns as she led songs Ginny didn’t know — gospel songs in close harmony pleading with sweet Jesus to show the Way. Gradually, the tempo of the songs began to pick up, and soon there was a lot of clapping and dancing in the aisles. Some young girls beat on tambourines up front. People began shouting over the music, ‘Yes, Lord!’ and ‘Sweet, sweet Jesus!’
The rhythmic clapping was exercising a hypnotic effect on Ginny. From the start she had been clapping and trying to sing along, just to fulfill the requirements of polite guesthood. She had fully expected to find the evening tedious, was in attendance solely in order not to hurt Clem’s and Maxine’s feelings. What she had not expected was to be caught up in the flood of emotion surging through the room. She had not expected to find herself clapping with cheerleader-like enthusiasm. And she had especially not expected to launch into a version of the Hullsport High chicken scratch in front of her bench. Nor had she expected to be watching with sympathetic comprehension when a woman dancing in the aisle next to her fell to the floor and began twitching spasmodically and babbling.
Most of all, she had not expected to see Clem walk up to the dais and light the wick sticking out of a Dr Pepper bottle filled with kerosene. The hard-driving gospel music continued: ‘It’s God all over the ocean./It’s God all over the sea./It’s God all over creation/And it
’s God all over me.’ Two parishioners were now speaking in tongues, and several more were shouting to Jesus fervently and snapping their bodies at the waist like whips.
Clem called out over the din in a calm voice, ‘Remember, brothers and sisters. Only those anointed by the Spirit. Don’t misread the signs, brothers and sisters. If you do, you’ll get hurt. The devil is lurkin’ here tonight jes waitin for a chance to deceive. So don’t misread your state of grace.’
Then Clem slowly ran the fingers of one hand through the flame from the Dr Pepper bottle. He held out the bottle, offering it to the audience. A man in green work clothes, the one who had set the black box on the altar, came forward. He took the bottle and ran his hand back and forth through the flame. A couple more men came forward — and passed the bottle back and forth as though it were a joint at a pot party.
Then Clem walked calmly to the mysterious black box and unlatched it. Reaching in, he pulled out a snake. Ginny gasped.
She could see even from the back of the room that the snake, patterned in varying shades of brown, was a copperhead. Every southern child, Ginny and Clem no exceptions, grew up terrorized by copperheads. Their protective coloration allowed them to blend into the leaves of a forest floor. And unlike rattlesnakes, they gave no warning prior to striking. The Major had considered it his personal crusade to instill in his children a healthy horror of copperheads, such that Ginny, even now and in Vermont, where it was too cold for copperheads, spent all her time on woodland walks scouting the ground diligently for color irregularities that might indicate a lurking copperhead. She knew from the Major how to slash X’s with a pocketknife over the fang marks in order to suck out the venom.
She stopped clapping, stopped mouthing words to the unfamiliar gospel songs, stopped doing the chicken scratch, and gaped in fascinated horror as Clem took the copperhead gently in his two hands and held it up to his face. With one little finger, he turned the copperhead’s head — and its fanged mouth — until he and it were gazing into each other’s eyes. There was a faint smile on Clem’s dark Melungeon face.
