Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  He never trusted cars very much, and would always ride quietly beside my uncle or my father on the front seat, his hand holding on to a strap beside the door. He looked ready for anything to occur. My uncle recalled lecturing him at some length about the safety of motor cars, but about that time hearing him say, pointing out the window, “Son, there goes our wheel.” One had come off in the rough gravel and was rolling along just ahead.

  He had lived seventy years when I was born, and what a lot had already happened! He was fourteen years old when the Civil War ended. He had tried to enlist for service, saying (the one lie ever attributed to him) that he was eighteen, but no one had believed him. He had gone back to the family plantation at Teoc.

  As “the only man on the place,” he must have run it as best he could. He had memories of a difficult time. No coffee, no flour, no tobacco.

  His brother Joseph had gone off to the war. Joseph had a weakness: he fainted at the sight of blood. At the first engagement, he turned white, fell from his horse, and was left for dead, but later revived and rejoined his unit in the night, scaring everyone to death.

  What happened to the many slaves on the family land—two thousand acres in Carroll County at the base of those hills that rim the Delta—whether they ran away when freedom came or not, I never thought to ask. All one knew was that black people were there. Perhaps they never left at all.

  All the descendants of slave-holding families I have ever known believe in the benevolence of their forebears as masters. No one has ever disenchanted me of this notion about our own people, though how the black descendants might see it I can’t say. At any rate, throughout all my childhood, black people were numerous on “the place,” still working the land.

  The place lay thirteen miles northwest of Carrollton. Gan had brought his bride there, Elizabeth Young, her family being from Middleton, a town near Carrollton, which has since vanished.

  John Sidney McCain. “Mister Johnny.”

  The name continues, passed down intact through the years to two admirals, son and grandson, and so on to a great-grandson, now in the U.S. Senate.

  To his six children, he was “Father.” Four boys, two girls.

  The original family home, overlooking the flat expanse of Delta land, stood on a hill and was once described to me by my uncle Bill, the eldest son, as “impressive … in the old Southern style.” By that I could imagine a mansion if I chose, but I now think it was probably a traditional two-story plantation home. It burned down the year of my mother’s birth.

  My grandmother, proud of her Scots ancestry, had an entire set of Walter Scott’s novels, which somehow got rescued from the fire. This and a few items of furniture were all that was saved. My grandmother had named the plantation Waverley, in admiration of Scott’s Waverley novels, but the Indian name of that area prevailed, and it was always known as Teoc, from the Choctaw “Teoc Tillila,” meaning Tall Pines.

  My mother was born soon after the fire, in the only shelter the family had to go, one of the Negro houses on the place.

  These houses, as I recall them, having been constantly in and out of so many when I visited Teoc, were simple but comfortable and roomy.

  My grandmother had nine pregnancies in all, having miscarried twice and lost one child in infancy. These unfortunate three must have come between the three older and the three younger, for there was a long spread in age. William Alexander (“Bill”), John Sidney (“Sidney”), and Katherine Louise (“Katie Lou”) came first, then Harry, “Jimmie,” and Joe. My mother, “Jimmie” (p. 12), hated her name. My grandmother had called her James to honor a relative, with Mary before it, but nicknames were a sign of affection and Jimmie she remained to all but my brother and me, he having stumbled onto Mimi while learning to talk.

  Pressed for money though they were ever since the comfortable days before the ruinous war, the family never spent time discussing the matter. They seemed absorbed in their affection for one another, close to the point of clannishness, knowing pride as a rightful attribute, valuing honesty, integrity, and intelligence. They were all “smart,” that is to say, even after a lost war, they could regroup and go on with their liveliness of intellect, their unquestioned traditions of manners and friendliness. They were welcoming people.

  The house they took over after the home burned was scarcely a stone’s throw away, but at the bottom of the line of hills rather than the crest. They took it away from an old slave Negro I remember well. His name was Armistead Meuks, the surname indicating another master before the McCain connection. One notable aspect was the size of his feet—he wore size sixteen shoes, which had to be ordered specially. The other was his independent nature. He did not want to leave his house. “I’se hyere ‘fo Boss was,” he said at the time. Only God knew how old he was.

  The house, expanded and embellished, became a real home place, plain at first, but tended charmingly, with verandas added. The oaks planted around it grew and flourished, forming a shady grove.

  Early in the century, my grandfather, who had held other county offices, ran for sheriff and served for six years. On this account he moved his family into Carrollton, the county seat.

  Many stories of his term in office survive. He was said to have dealt justly with black and white alike and to have been averse to violence—lynching and any such lawlessness. Yet I understood he had supervised the hanging of two convicted men. I cannot really imagine this, but duty was what it had to be called. In Carrollton, past the old coaching house, there was a hill known as Hang Hill, where the gallows had stood. Ghosts were sometimes reported.

  My grandmother, who as a Carrollton lady busied herself in the church and made lasting family friendships, died the summer I was born. By then my grandfather had retired from public life and was spending time on Teoc or living in town with my mother and father. They had moved into their own house, the one I was born in. My being named for my grandmother may have strengthened his affection. However it was, he seemed to have adopted me as his own.

  The whole McCain connection bore an aura of an outside world. They were related permanently to Teoc and Carrollton, but they knew and were known, recognized, skilled, and active in the bigger world beyond.

  My grandfather’s brother Henry Pinkney McCain (“Uncle Pink”) had gone to West Point. He was said to have fathered the draft act, and had commanded the training of the expeditionary force that sailed to fight in France under General Pershing. An enormous rotogravure-type photograph of the entire force, lined up against the Pennsylvania landscape at Valley Forge, hung in our hallway. We could barely make out Uncle Pink in the forefront of the multitude, but my little school chums and I used to stand on chairs and try to pick out individual men as being handsome or “cute,” brown-haired or blond.

  The next generation followed his lead. Bill and Sidney took competitive exams and entered West Point and Annapolis. What could they do around farms and small towns in an impoverished area, not yet healed from a civil war? The law? The church? Nothing there seemed to challenge them.

  I wonder if their dreams were fed by their reading. They favored bold adventure stories and poems—Kipling, Scott, Stevenson, Henty, Macaulay, Browning. Stuck away in trunks in the attic in Carrollton, school notebooks I came across when exploring were full not only of class notes but also of original verses that spoke of heroism and daring deeds. Their Latin texts with Caesar’s Gallic Wars were in our bookshelves. They were cavalier.

  In Scotland, I feel sure, the McCains, Presbyterian though they were, would have remained loyal to the Scottish crown. The story went that my grandmother’s family had fled to the New World because a price had been set on their heads by Elizabeth of England for their loyalty to Queen Mary. I recall that even my mother, whose dislike of Rome ran deepest of all, never failed to praise the beauty and charm of the unfortunate queen.

  I thought of my uncles years later, when I read in Henry James’s The Bostonians how Basil Ransom of Mississippi had gone to Boston in the post-Civil War years because
he was bored sitting around a plantation.

  As a child, I was in great awe of my two older uncles. Uncle Sidney came home more often than Uncle Bill, and I prized the affectionate attention he fixed on me, ready to praise whatever good he could observe. He criticized as well, but it was a kind of teasing. “When you pout, you’re the Duchess. Now smile and be the Princess.” His wife, Aunt Kate, an authoritative lady with rich brown hair, had been his teacher, eight years his senior, admirable for her high intelligence, which he, with his love of a keen mind, must have been drawn to.

  Once when he visited us alone, I remember, on a warm evening, my father being absent, he, my mother, and I, sat in our wide hallway, and he said that I must have some children’s books by George MacDonald. My mother named the many books I loved, which she was always reading from aloud.

  “Those are fine,” he said, “but these MacDonald books are not like anything I ever read before. She must have them.”

  They arrived soon after—The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. They were, as he said, a real feast.

  I loved books from the first, imaginative stories and fairy tales, Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, the pictures of Roman legionnaires in the Latin books, ladies in long draped robes, King Arthur stories, Robin Hood. But the MacDonald stories were different, mystical, with walks in the twilit woods, mysterious stairways in the castle, an ancient princess in the tower, spinning at her wheel.

  There came a time when all “the boys,” my uncles, came home together at one time, no wives with them. This occurred because my grandfather had become very ill with pneumonia and was not expected to live.

  I found it incredible that Gan could be sick. From the time I could walk, every day before I was school age, we had taken our walk together, downtown and back. Not liking to stick me alone in the huge “company room,” my parents had allowed me to sleep in his room. I loved to watch the shadows from the fire leap on the walls and ceiling. A collie dog named Bob had come out of nowhere and taken up with us. He slept right beneath our window. If anything startling was heard in the night, sounds from the extensive yard or from the fields beyond, my grandfather would say, “Everything all right, Bob?” Thump went the tail. We were safe.

  But now came this sickness.

  Mr. Johnny loved his boys, and they knew it. They all dropped everything. From far-off Yankeeland, from Washington, Philadelphia, Wisconsin, they came.

  By the time they had assembled, however, he had taken a turn for the better, and the visit turned into a joyous reunion. He was still in bed, but the boys—two high-ranking Army and Navy officers, and a third, Uncle Harry, assistant manager of a department store in Wisconsin, and of course Uncle Joe, there from Teoc—all gathered in his room and began one of the world’s more curious contests. With my grandfather’s great fleece-lined bedroom slippers at either end of the room as targets, with a scoreboard propped up on the mantelpiece, they had begun a game of pitching dollars, always a favorite plantation sport.

  Afraid of being in the way, yet eagerly curious to watch them, learn them by heart—these brave, laughing men, wearing their marvelous thick Yankee overcoats for “outside,” teasing and joking when their eyes fell on me—I clung about in corners and doorways, but even when farther away than that, I could hear their hoarse voices, while from the bed my grandfather could also be heard: “I gannies! It’s a tie score! … Pitch ‘em, Bill! Missed, goldarn it!”

  In summer my grandfather sat out in the yard in the shade of a large tree we all loved, though its particular kind was a puzzle. It had small, hard, bitter nuts, and because only pigs could have stomached them, it got the name pignut tree. But it was too beautiful to be called such a name as that. Some said it was a white hickory, which sounded better. It had a barked trunk, but at about six feet up, great smooth limbs sprang skyward, rising to a fine, satisfying height. I used to climb it, as high as I could go.

  Mr. Dave Welch from next door would come over and sit in the shade in the afternoons with my grandfather. When Mr. Dave was absent, Gan would often simply sit there, walking cane laid across his knees, and I would know that he was thinking over some deeply felt thing from the past. He sometimes spoke to me of my grandmother, “Miss Lizzie.”

  All his boys, to my mother’s constant worry, had a weakness for drink. It was told of him that my grandmother would have a toddy ready for him when he came in from the fields on Teoc. One day she forgot to make it and he struck her. He was so overcome with remorse at what he had done that he gave up drinking from that day.

  I had a pony named Dan, a calico somewhat larger than I should have been riding at my age. One afternoon I had ridden him far up the road toward town and back. At the head of our road something spooked him. He shied and bolted.

  Before I could regain control, he was streaking in a headlong gallop, straight for the drive that swept around our house, and had entered a stretch between two fences overgrown with vines, leading to a high wooden cattle gate that closed off the barn lot. Once he was between those fences there would be nothing to stop a crash into the gate.

  My grandfather ran from his chair in front, through the house to the back yard. As we plunged into the stretch, there he stood before us, right in the path of the horse, his arms raised and waving. The horse stopped so suddenly I was hurled to the ground. Gan scooped me up and ran back to the house. I was all right except for a few bruises and a bad scare. But I never forgot the sight, a life risked to save me, without an instant’s debate, hesitation, or fear.

  4

  A CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

  IT was a Sunday like no other, for we were there alone for the first time. I hadn’t started to school yet, and he had finished it so long ago it must have been like a dream of something that was meant to happen but had never really come about, for I can remember no story of school that he ever told me, and to think of him as sitting in a class equal with others is as beyond me now as it was then. I cannot imagine it. He read a lot and might conceivably have had a tutor—that I can imagine, in his plantation world.

  But this was a town he’d finally come to, to stay with his daughter in his old age, she being also my mother. I was the only one free to be with him all the time and the same went for his being with me—we baby-sat each other.

  But that word wasn’t known then.

  A great many things were known, however; among them: I always had to go to Sunday school.

  It was an absolute that the whole world was meant to be part of the church, and if my grandfather seldom went, it was a puzzle no one tried to solve. Sermons were a fate I had only recently got big enough to be included in, but I had been enrolled in Sunday school classes since I could be led through the door and placed on a tiny red chair, my feet not even connecting to the floor. It was always cold at the church; even in summer, it was cool inside. We were given pictures to color and Bible verses to memorize, and at the end, a colored card with a picture of Moses or Jesus or somebody else from the Bible, exotically bearded and robed.

  Today I might not be going to Sunday school, and my regret was only for the card. I wondered what it would be like. There was no one to bring it to me. My mother and father were not in town. They had got into the car right after breakfast and had driven away to a neighboring town. A cousin had died and they were going to the funeral. I was too little to go to funerals, my mother said.

  After they left I sat on the rug near my grandfather. He was asleep in his chair before the fire, snoring. Presently his snoring woke him up. He cut himself some tobacco and put it in his mouth. “Are you going to Sunday school?” he asked me. “I can’t go there by myself,” I said. “Nobody said I had to take you,” he remarked, more to himself than to me. It wasn’t the first time I knew we were in the same boat, he and I. We had to do what they said, being outside the main scale of life where things really happened, but by the same token we didn’t have to do what they didn’t say. Somewhere along the line, however, my grandfather had earned rights I didn’t have.
Not having to go to church was one; also, he had his own money and didn’t have to ask for any.

  He looked out the window.

  “It’s going to be a pretty day,” he said.

  How we found ourselves on the road downtown on Sunday morning, I don’t remember. It was as far to get to town as it was to get to church, though in the opposite direction, and we both must have known that, but we didn’t remark upon it as we went along. My grandfather walked to town every day except Sunday, when it was considered a sin to go there, for the drugstore was open and the barbershop, too, on occasions, if the weather was fair; and the filling station was open. My parents thought that the drugstore had to be open but should sell drugs only, and that filling stations and barbershops shouldn’t be open at all. There should be a way to telephone the filling station in case you had to have gas for emergency use. This was all worked out between them. I had often heard them talk about it. No one should go to town on Sunday, they said, for it encouraged the error of the ones who kept their stores open.

  My grandfather was a very tall man; I had to reach up to hold his hand while walking. He wore dark blue and gray herringbone suits, and the coat flap was a long way up, the gold watch chain almost out of sight. I could see his walking cane moving opposite me, briskly swung with the rhythm of his stride: it was my companion. Along the way it occurred to me that we were terribly excited, and the familiar way looked new and different, as though a haze that had hung over everything had been whipped away all at once, like a scarf. I was also having more fun than I’d ever had before.

  When he came to the barbershop, my grandfather stepped inside and spoke to the barber and to all who happened to be hanging around, brought out by the sunshine. They spoke about politics, the crops, and the weather. The barber, who always cut my hair, came over and looked to see if I needed another trim and my grandfather said he didn’t think so, but I might need a good brushing; they’d left so soon after breakfast it was a wonder I was dressed. Somebody who’d come in after us said, “Funeral in Grenada, ain’t it?” which was the first anybody had mentioned it, but I knew they hadn’t needed to say anything, that everybody knew about my parents’ departure and why and where. Things were always known about, I saw, but not cared about too much either. The barber’s strong arms, fleecy with reddish hair, swung me up into his big chair, where I loved to be. He brushed my hair, then combed it. The great mirrors sparkled and everything was fine.