Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Mr. Lee McMillan had fought in the Civil War. Some evenings he would walk down all the way to our house and sit on the porch talking to my grandfather, loudly cursing everything about Yankees and the North. President Lincoln was a favorite subject of hatred, also Reconstruction, and a long list I forget, though I heard it all a few times, having gone to bed in the room inside the front-porch windows. I can still hear my grandfather’s admonishing voice, like a chant: No, you don’t mean that, Lee. No, Lincoln was not such a bad man. If he’d lived it would have been a different story. No, the Yankees mainly did what the generals said. No, Lee, you don’t mean that.

  But the hatred had got to saturation point in Mr. McMillan and I suppose it never cleared out. A good many when I was growing up had this sort of fervent despising of all things Northern in the grain of their natures. It was passionate, and ran a neck-and-neck race with religion.

  We sometimes drove out to the Shaw place for grapes and other produce. It was a big house, country-style, with a wide yard and the usual cedars. A long way into town for two old gentlemen to walk. I would ride my horse alone out that way on some days. I can think of the road now, bare, smooth earth with beautiful foliage on either side, and the many times the two old gentlemen must have walked it, one tapping his way along, the other marching to martial thoughts.

  The Shaws were an exceptionally fine family with connections at the state university at Oxford, where one had been a noted professor. I remember the Shaw house in Oxford, an upright brick structure, reached by steep steps from the street and overlooking a sharp drop into a gulch where heaven trees bloomed in the spring.

  Several children, I among them, are playing in the hayloft of the barn. Hide and seek? Burying someone alive? Suddenly from below, one of the bigger boys, James Edgar Turner, high-school age, comes charging out of nowhere. He climbs up the barn ladder. He has a large fruit in his hand and a knife. “A quince,” he says. “It’s a quince.” He cuts off small slices. Hands go out for them. Then he cuts a larger slice and, smiling down at me, says, “That’s for you, you helped me …” Helped him where? I don’t know. I am proud to hold the fruit, take his notice, eat.

  The barn is where the mules are and the cattle. Bill, our handyman, comes to build fires in winter, to milk every morning and evening, all year round. He tries to teach me milking but my hands are not strong enough and the cow, peacefully munching at the stall, knows better. She won’t let go. He lets me mix her feed—cotton-seed hulls and a cup full of mustard-yellow meal stirred in. She munches in a leisurely way, nuzzle pushing my hands aside. Cows have four stomachs—I have been told that. I carry a large aluminum cup. Bill squirts in some warm milk, foaming, and I drink it. My mother’s voice calls from the porch across the back yard. “Amos and Andy!” It’s my favorite radio show. I run in through the cold. All of us gather at the radio to listen and laugh.

  My father wants me to be a tomboy. He wants me to shoot a gun. I graduate from a BB gun to a .22 rifle. I do target practice and am not bad. A shotgun—.410 gauge—is next. I walk around the property aiming and shooting at birds and squirrels. I think I want to kill anything that moves.

  My head by then is full of Tarzan books. I yearn to swing through the trees and leap down on the backs of unsuspecting lions far below. Without a doubt I would know just how to conquer. I have read all about it. Finally, I hit something. A jaybird. I follow after the fluttering creature. There it is, bleeding a little thin blood, down among the leaves in a little ditch. I feel like crying. I want to take it home and splint up its broken wing. But its head is broken into as well and so is the flesh of its neck. Its eye is still open, glazed, disbelieving, frightened. I have to kill it, not leave it to suffer. Oh, no! Somehow, I finish the job. That’s all it was—a job. I hated it.

  Guns and I about parted company then and there. But no, Dad says next I must learn to shoot a .20 gauge. All women should learn to shoot. Out in the garden, he hands me the gun. It’s relatively small, single shot. He has several .12-gauge guns that look too heavy for me to heft. “Hold it to your shoulder. Aim high.” I get the nerve from somewhere to pull the trigger. The roar explodes in my head. The kick is so strong I land on my back among the tomato plants.

  I will be a disappointment, as my mother is already. Fishing she will accept. Hunting leaves her in despair. “Those pretty things!” she cries, feeling no triumph at a brace of quail with bloodstained feathers, a sack of stiff gray squirrel carcasses.

  There were doves and ducks as well. Whatever the pity of the fresh kill, when cleaned and cooked they were good to eat. We had to mind not to break a tooth on shot. Deer came later. Their proud heads were mounted, their glassy artificial eyes looked out at the world. Neither Mimi nor I liked to see them there. “Poor things,” we said. But the hides make wonderful bedside rugs.

  Hunting is a sign of dominance. Too busy in his younger years, now with money and leisure worked for and earned, my father became a passionate hunter.

  Roller-skating right through town with schoolmates on afternoons after school, we used to see Lawyer Tandy Yewell asleep in his office window. One warm day he was leaning way over in his swivel chair, all but falling out. We had curled-up paper whistles with feathers on the end, and skating by would blow the feathers into his ear. By the time he jumped awake, slapping at what might be a wasp, we were gone. Scolding at home when foolish enough to tell about it…

  A spring day with a riot of dogwood and redbud in the woods. We played in the yards and romped through gullies eroding in back of houses, broke off flowering branches and ran through town, shouting something about a dogwood show. My mother telephoned my father at work. He came home early. There ensued a family gathering of the severest kind. Had I lost my mind? What did I think I was doing? “Celebrating spring” seemed an answer as silly as the crazy mood had been. Though at the moment it had seemed the right response to a world so wildly beautiful with heavenly sight and smell.

  Horses.

  The first wasn’t even a horse. She was a gray donkey named Phoebe. Phoebe would let herself be bridled, but never had a saddle. Someone would lead her out from the barn lot into the yard for me and I would get on her back. She would walk a few reluctant paces but the minute she was alone with me she would stop dead still and go to sleep. I would sit on her, growing angry and frustrated, beating my bare heels into her ribs. Phoebe slept on.

  I would slide off, go in the house, wake my mother out of her afternoon nap. “Phoebe is ‘sleep,” I would say. Mimi was not so happy about this, but would get up, put on her dress and shoes, come out into the yard and find a long limb fallen from the pecan trees. I would get back on Phoebe and she would wham the limb over her rump. Then she would throw it down and go into the house to resume her nap. Phoebe would trot a few steps down the drive, but as soon as the door closed, she would stop dead still and go to sleep again.

  Following the brief dominance of the calico who ran away came the era of Dan Patch. He was named for a famous racehorse, whom he did not resemble. He was way too fat, a low Shetland with a heavy mane and a large stubborn head. He had a broad, flat back, and a number of us could get on him at one and the same time. In summers we would simply park him under a chinaberry tree where we were busy building a tree house, and use him as a stepladder, climbing up to hand boards and tools up to those among the branches above.

  He was never in a very good humor and at times would take a notion to walk away a few paces and separate the lower workers from the upper. We would have to dismount and lead him back.

  He was my pony, however, and I spent considerable time with him. I would ride him down in the pastures that lay in front of our house, reaching toward the creek bank, and take him also into our woods, where I would sometimes go with a book to read in private. He seemed to be patient, but once for no reason he turned and bit my bare leg. I wore the precise shape of his enormous teeth in purple bruises for weeks.

  Stabled among mules in the barnyard, Dan Patch would steal their food, and wh
en they turned on him to kick him, he was so low the kicks would go over his head, as he knew they would. They couldn’t hit him. But positioned to great advantage down below, his own kicking leverage was superb. He battered them ruthlessly in the belly.

  I would ride him across the bridge down to north town. My father in those years had a Chevrolet business there. Its wide showroom space was all cement floor, sectioned off at the side for the office where Miss Willie Moore, his perky redhaired secretary, sat at a desk. I would ride Dan Patch straight into the showroom to say hello. One day when I wanted to go to the drugstore, Miss Willie told me to hitch the pony there, she would watch out for him. On my return, she was surrounded by an inch-deep pool, her face as red as her hair. The salesman, the mechanic, and my father spent that whole day trying to keep straight faces.

  There were horses later, usually two or three, nothing so remarkable, until Cousin Ernest Spencer from Jackson began sending good Tennessee walking horses up for me to enjoy. These were fine animals, and I wished for a life where there could always be a horse or two to turn to.

  There is something soothing about being able to get on a horse and ride out of town. They go best on country roads, hard-packed dirt without gravel. Trees and bushes go by, and open fields. They like to ford streams that are not too deep, and stop midway across for drinking, nudging aside whatever trash may be in the way. They also will drink at well troughs. They enjoy water. If alone, you can talk to them and they listen, or seem to, ears flicking back. There is real companionship.

  Throughout the fall from September on, the cotton gin went pounding. It was a sound all from the South of that era will remember as a part of the air they breathed. Dad owned a gin in north town, and after school I played in all its parts and divisions throughout the lingering summer heat that refused to let go.

  The wagons would line up, sometimes for a half mile, loaded to the top railings with cotton picked by hand in the hill farms out from town. With the tall white load looming up behind, the mules looked small and patient as they waited to move forward. Someone was perched up top to drive, and there was usually a small boy sound asleep on a lofty bed. This slow progress led to the big suction pipe, two feet across, which drew the cotton up into the vortex of the gin. There was every year the story of the little boy who slept through it all, but had his hat sucked up in the process.

  Above, the floors were throbbing with the beat of the machines, the noise so loud you could not be heard. Finding someone to speak to with confidence of who he was would be hard anyway; all were covered with fleecy lint, as though just out of a snowstorm. They had whiskers they had never grown and heads of white hair, were frosted all over like cakes, but waved at me and swung me bodily aside when I got in the way.

  Three gin stands stood on revolving circles of flooring. You could see the picked cotton coming into the first, metal teeth working through the first process of combing out the seeds, discarding the trash. And in the last, what joy to watch the pure white cotton emerge. Waved out in silent generous bunches and batches by polished wooden blades, combed, pure, almost shining, a docile triumph, the end of so much hope and labor. Cotton. Here I am!

  The press then descends on that gorgeous fluff. Down it comes with authority, pressing and rising time and again, until the blades shed out the last shreds, and all the motors in the building hush down to a muted throb. The gin stand revolves on its base. I ride it round. Around the new birth, the hemp baling drops in place from above. Flexible metal bands gird the whole.

  Then, sudden release. They open the frame—out she comes. Four, five, or even six hundred pounds in one package, code-painted in purple letters, ready for weighing on the outer platform, for tossing down to lower levels with all the others, bouncing in to find a place. The same wagon that had brought in the load might be down below to carry it away, the mules waiting, the driver seated low before an empty bed, a hatless little boy perched beside him. But other bales stayed, sold on the spot, ready for taking to the compress.

  Falling from above, the bales always landed in irregular piles. I would climb over them, these soft boulders, bulky, with a musty fragrance that stays with cotton fabric, wherever it appears.

  A small house across the drive from the gin was the office. Farmers went there to settle up, and Cot Sanders, Dad’s right-hand man through the years, would be within, back of the ledgers. This was the business end.

  But in the other direction was a large building connected to the gin by a long metal pipe. This was the seed house. Once detached, the seeds were valuable, yielding cottonseed meal, cottonseed oil, cottonseed hulls. It was mysterious, gloomy, in there, with a huge gray mountain of seed hulking in one corner, and long draperies of dust hanging from lofty rafters.

  It was quiet, immense, cathedral-like. I used to feel poetic, and loved burrowing into the seed mountain, half-burying myself, though it must have been as stifling as a quilt in July.

  One day I heard a distant rattle which quickly turned into a roar. Seed in a deluge poured from the gin pipe. I was peppered all over, half-buried, and had to struggle free. I never told. It seemed a silly thing to do, thinking poetic thoughts in a seed house, and those friendly men who, up at the gin, tossed me around like a minuscule bale would certainly have told my father he’d do better to keep me at home.

  12

  THE DAY BEFORE

  WHEN I started to school, my grandfather and the neighbors next door—Miss Henrietta, Mr. Dave, also another brother, Mr. Dick, who sometimes stayed there—took a great interest in the event, so important in my life, and tried to do everything they could think of for me. One bought me a lunch basket; another planned just what should be put in it, and Miss Henrietta had made me a book satchel out of green linen with my initial embroidered on it in gold thread. Somebody even went uptown to the drugstore where the school books were sold and got me a new primer to replace an old one, still perfectly good, which had belonged to my cousin. And there was a pencil box, also green, with gilt lettering saying PENCILS, containing: three long, yellow Ticonderoga pencils, an eraser—one end for ink, the other for lead—a pen staff, two nibs, and a tiny steel pencil sharpener. My grandfather laid the oblong box across his knees, unsnapped the cover, and carefully using the sharpener, began to sharpen the point. After doing one of them and dusting off his trousers, he took out his penknife, which had a bone handle, and sharpened the other two in the manner that he preferred. Then he closed up the box and handed it to me. I put it in the satchel along with the primer.

  Mr. Dave, having made a special trip uptown in the August heat, came in to say that copybooks were not yet on sale as they had not arrived, but they could be bought for a nickel from the teachers on opening day. “Here’s a nickel right now,” said Mr. Dave, digging into his trousers’ pocket. “I’ll give her one,” said my grandfather. I was spoiled to death, but I did not know it. Miss Henrietta was baking ginger cakes to go in my lunch basket. I went around saying that I hated to go to school because I would have to put shoes on, but everybody, including the cook, laughed at such a flagrant lie. I had been dying to start to school for over a year.

  My grandfather said that the entire family was smart and that I would make good grades too. My mother said she did not think I would have any trouble the first year because I already knew how to read a little (I had, in fact, already read through the primer). “After that, I don’t know,” she said. I wondered if by that she meant that I would fail the second grade. This did not fill me with alarm, any more than hearing that somebody had died, but made me feel rather cautious. Mr. Dick called me all the way over across the calf lot to his house to show me how to open a new book. I stood by his chair, one bare foot on top the other, watching him while he spread the pages out flat, first from the center, then taking up a few at a time on either side and smoothing them out in a steady firm way, slowly, so as not to crack the spine, and so on until all were done. It was a matter, he said (so they all said), of having respect for books. He said that I should d
o it a second time, now that he had showed me how. “Make sure your hands are clean,” he said. “Then we can go eat some cold watermelon.”

  I remember still the smell of that particular book, the new pages, the binding, the glue, and the print combining to make a book smell—a particular thing. The pencil box had another smell altogether, as did the new linen of the satchel. My brown shoes were new also, a brand called Buster Brown. The name was invariably printed above a picture of a little round-faced child with straight bangs and square-cut hair who was smiling as though he was never anything but cheerful. Certainly I didn’t look like that!

  Could I wear my new tennis shoes to school, and if not new ones, then old ones? My mother said no to tennis shoes of any description, and when I proposed going barefoot, she said not to be crazy. My grandfather said I had to mind her. I felt that he was only saying what he had to. My parents never seemed as intelligent as my grandfather, Mr. Dave, Mr. Dick, and Miss Henrietta.

  After dinner that day it was hot, and when everybody lay down and quit fanning themselves with funeral-parlor fans because they had fallen asleep, some with the fan laid across their chests or stomachs and some snoring, the two Airedales that belonged to Mr. Dave had running fits. If a relative was visiting, or any stranger to our road, which was a street that didn’t go anywhere except to us and the Welch house, they were liable to get scared to death by those Airedales because the way they sometimes tore around in hot weather, it looked as if they had gone mad. It was something about the heat that affected their brains and made them start running.