Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Ruth says, “Imagine a truckload of apricots. It almost seems funny that it would be turnips. You might think of apples or watermelons. You see trucks of watermelons all the time, and sometimes you hear about them rolling all over the highway when there’s a wreck. But turnips!” She picks up her shovel and plunges it into the ground. “God was being original,” she says.

  “The nectarine tree looks puny,” Barbara says abruptly. “I had my doubts about growing nectarines.”

  “That man that ran into them in his turnip truck? They said he didn’t look. He just plowed right into them. The police swore he hadn’t been drinking, but I believe he was on dope. I bet you anything—”

  Suddenly screams waft up from the house. It is Allison shrieking. Barbara rushes down the path and sees her daughter in front of the house shaking her head wildly. Then Allison starts running, circling the house, pulling at her hair, following her own voice around the house. Her hair was in ponytail holders, but when she reappears it is falling down and she is snatching the bands out of her hair. As she disappears around a corner again, Barbara yells, “Mash it, Allison! Mash that bee against your head!”

  Allison slams to a stop in front of the porch as Barbara catches her. In a second Barbara smacks the bumblebee against the back of her daughter’s head.

  “He was mad at me,” sobs Allison. “He was chasing me.”

  “It’s that perfume you’ve got on,” says Barbara, searching through Allison’s hair.

  “It’s just bath oil. Oh, my head’s stung all over!”

  “Be still.”

  Barbara grabs one of Allison’s cigarettes from the package in her shirt pocket. She pushes Allison up onto the porch, where she sits down, trembling, in the wicker rocker. Barbara tears the paper of the cigarette and makes a paste out of tobacco shreds and spit in the palm of her hand. She rubs the paste carefully into the red spots on Allison’s scalp.

  “That will take the sting out,” she says. “Now just relax.”

  “Oh, it hurts,” says Allison, cradling her head in her hands.

  “It won’t last,” Barbara says soothingly, pulling her daughter close, stroking her hair. “There, now.”

  “What’s wrong with Allison?” asks Ruth, appearing from behind the lilac bush as though she has been hiding there, observing the scene. Barbara keeps holding Allison, kissing Allison’s hair, watching the pain on Ruth’s face.

  After that, Ruth refuses to wear her glasses outdoors, because the tiny gold R decorating the outer corner of the left lens makes her think a bee is trying to get at her eye. But now the bees are hiding from the rain. For two days, it has been raining steadily, without storming. It rarely rains like this, and Barbara’s garden is drowning. In the drizzle, she straightens the Kentucky Wonder vines, training them up their poles. The peppers and peas are turning yellow, and the leaves of the lima beans are bug-eaten. The weeds are shooting up, impossible to hoe out in the mud. The sunflowers bend and break.

  With the three of them cooped up, trying to stay out of each other’s way, Barbara feels that the strings holding them together are both taut and fragile, like the tiny tendrils on English-pea vines, which grasp at the first thing handy. She’s restless, and for the first time in a long while she longs for the company of a man, a stranger with sexy eyes and good-smelling aftershave. The rain brings out nasty smells in the old house. Despite their work on the place, years of filth are ingrained in it. Dust still settles on everything. Ruth discovers a white mold that has crept over the encyclopedia. “An outer-space invasion,” Allison says gleefully. “It’s going to eat us all up.” Ruth bakes cookies for her, and on Friday evening, when Allison has to work, Ruth videotapes “Miami Vice” for her. Allison’s tan is fading slightly in the gloomy weather, and her freckles remind Barbara of the breast of a thrush.

  The creek is rising, and the dog whines under the front porch. Allison brings him onto the enclosed back porch. His bandage is muddy and shredded. She has the mail with her, including a letter from her father, who lives in Mobile. “Daddy wants me to come down this fall and live,” she tells Barbara.

  “Are you going?”

  “No. I’ve made a decision,” Allison says in the tone of an announcement.

  “What, honey?” Ruth asks. She is mixing applesauce cake, from a recipe of her grandmother’s she promised to make for Allison.

  “I’m going to quit school for a year and get a job and an apartment in Lexington.”

  “Lexington?” Barbara and Ruth say simultaneously. Lexington is more than two hundred miles away.

  Allison explains that her friend Cindy and she are going to share an apartment. “It’ll be good for us to get out in the real world,” she says. “School’s a drag right now.”

  “You’ll be sorry if you don’t finish school, honey,” Ruth says.

  “It doesn’t fit my needs right now.” Allison picks up her music and heads for the piano. “Look, think of this as junior year abroad, O.K.? Except I won’t be speaking French.”

  Barbara jerks on her rain slicker and galoshes. In the light drizzle, she starts digging a trench along the upper side of the garden, to divert the water away from it. The peppers are dying. The cabbages are packed with fat slugs. She works quickly, fighting the rivulets of water that seep through the garden. The task seems useless, but belligerently she goes on, doing what she can.

  Ruth comes slogging up the muddy path in her galoshes, blinking at the rain. She’s not wearing her glasses. “Are you going to let her go to Lexington?” Ruth asks.

  “She’s grown,” Barbara says.

  “How can you let her go?”

  “What can I do about it?”

  Ruth wipes the raindrops from her face. “Don’t you think she’s making a mistake?”

  “Of course, God damn it! But that’s what children are—people with a special mission in life to hurt their parents.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about hurt, Barbara. Do you think you know anything about that?”

  Furiously, Barbara slaps the mud with her hoe. Next year she will relocate the garden above the house, where the drainage will be better.

  The next day, the rain lets up, but it is still humid and dark, and a breeze is stirring over the ridge, as though a storm is on its way. Allison is off from work, and she has been playing the piano, picking out nonsense compositions of her own. Barbara is reading. Suddenly, through the picture window, Barbara sees Ruth in the orchard, pumping spray onto a peach tree. Barbara rushes outside, crying, “Ruth, are you crazy!”

  The cloud of spray envelops Ruth. Barbara yells, “No, Ruth! Not on a windy evening! Don’t spray against the wind!”

  “The borers were going to eat up the peach tree!” Ruth cries, letting the sprayer dangle from her hand. She grabs a blob of peach-tree gum from the bark and shows it to Barbara. “Look!”

  “The wind’s blowing the spray all over you, not the tree,” Barbara says sharply.

  “Did I do wrong?”

  “Let’s go inside. The storm’s coming.”

  “I wanted to help,” Ruth says, in tears. “I wanted to save the tree.”

  Later, when Barbara and Allison are preparing supper and Ruth is in the shower washing off the insecticide, Allison says, “Mom, when did you realize you weren’t in love with Daddy anymore?”

  “The exact moment?”

  “Yeah. Was there one?”

  “I guess so. It might have been when I asked him to go have a picnic with us over at the lake one day. It was the summer you were a lifeguard there, and I thought we could go over there and be together—go on one of those outdoor trails—and he made some excuse. I realized I’d been married to the wrong man all those years.”

  “I think I know what you mean. I don’t think I’m in love with Gerald anymore.” Studiously, Allison chops peppers with the paring knife.

  Barbara smiles. “You don’t have to be in a hurry. That was my trouble. I was in a hurry. I married too young.” Hastily, she adds, “But tha
t’s O.K. I got you in the bargain.”

  Allison nods thoughtfully. “What if you wanted to get married again? What would you do about Ruth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’d have to get a divorce from her this time,” Allison says teasingly.

  “It would be hard to sell this place and divide it up.” Barbara is not sure she could give it up.

  “What’s going on with Ruth, anyway?” Allison is asking. “She’s so weird.”

  “She used to be worse,” Barbara says reassuringly. “You remember how she was at first—she couldn’t even finish the school year.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you this, but I think Ruth’s been pilfering,” Allison says. “I can’t find my purple barrette and that scarf Grandma gave me. I bet Ruth took them.” Allison looks straight out the window at the water washing down the runoff stream, and a slight curl of satisfaction is on her lips. Barbara stares at the dish of bread-and-butter pickles she is holding and for a moment cannot identify them. Images rush through her mind—chocolate chips, leftover squash, persimmons.

  That night, Allison has gone out to a movie, and Barbara cannot sleep. The rain is still falling lightly, with brief spurts of heavy rain. It is past midnight when Allison’s car drives up. The dog barks, and Ruth’s light switches off, as if this were all some musical sequence. Earlier in the evening, Barbara glimpsed Ruth in her room, shuffling and spreading her pictures on the bed like cards in a game of solitaire. She keeps them in a box, with other mementos of Kimberly and Richard. Barbara wanted to go to her with some consolation, but she resisted, as she resisted mothering Allison too closely. She had the feeling that she was tending too many gardens; everything around her was growing in some sick or stunted way, and it made her feel cramped. As she hears Allison tiptoeing down the hall, Barbara closes her eyes and sees contorted black motorcycles, shiny in the rain.

  Early the next morning, Allison calls them outdoors. “Look how the creek’s up,” she cries in a shrill voice.

  The creek has flooded its banks, and the bridge is underwater, its iron railing still visible.

  “Oh, wow,” Allison says. “Look at all that water. I wish I was a duck.”

  “It’s a flood,” Barbara says matter-of-factly. Her garden is already ruined, and she has decided not to care what happens next.

  At breakfast, a thunderous crack and a roar send them out to the porch. As they watch, the bridge over the creek tears loose and tumbles over, the railing black against the brown, muddy stream. The violence of it is shocking, like something one sees in the movies.

  “Oh, my God,” Ruth says quietly, her fingers working at her shirt.

  “We’re stranded!” says Allison. “Oh, wow.”

  “Oh, Lord, what will we do?” Ruth cries.

  “We’ll just have to wait till the water goes down,” Barbara says, but they don’t hear her.

  “I won’t have to work,” Allison says. “I’ll tell McDonald’s I can’t get there, unless they want to send a rescue helicopter for me. Or they could send the McDonald’s blimp. That would be neat.”

  “Isn’t this sort of thrilling?” Barbara says. “I’ve got goose bumps.” She turns, but Ruth has gone indoors, and then Allison wanders off with the dog.

  Barbara heads out through the field. From the edge of the woods, she looks out over the valley at the mist rising. In the two years Barbara and Ruth have lived here, it has become so familiar that Barbara can close her eyes and see clearly any place on the farm—the paths, the stand of willows by the runoff stream that courses down the hill to feed the creek. But sometimes it suddenly all seems strange, like something she has never seen before. Today she has one of those sensations, as she watches Allison down by the house playing with the dog, teaching him to fetch a stick. It is the kind of thing Allison has always done. She is always toying with something, prodding and experimenting. Yet in this light, with this particular dog, with his frayed bandage, and that particular stick and the wet grass that needs mowing—it is something Barbara has never seen before in her life.

  She continues up the hill, past the woods. On the path, the mushrooms are a fantastic array, like a display of hats in a store—shiny red Chinese parasols, heavy globular things like brains, prim flat white toadstools. The mushrooms are so unexpected, it is as though they had grown up in a magical but clumsy compensation for the ruined garden. Barbara sidesteps a patch of dangerous-looking round black mushrooms. And ahead on the path lies a carpet of bright-orange fungi, curled like blossoms. She reaches in the pocket of her smock for her garden diary.

  On Tuesday the sun emerges. The yard is littered with rocks washed out of the stream, and the long grass is flattened. The bumblebees, solar-activated, buzz through the orchard.

  From the orchard, Barbara and Ruth gaze down the hill. The runoff stream still rushes downhill, brown and muddy, and Barbara’s trench above the garden has widened.

  “The apricots are falling off,” Ruth says, picking up a sodden, bugpocked fruit.

  “It’s O.K.,” Barbara says, toeing the humps of a mole tunnel.

  “I thought I’d fix up a room for Allison so she won’t have to sleep in the living room,” Ruth says. “I could clean out the attic and fix up a nice little window seat.”

  “You don’t need to do that, Ruth. Don’t you have something of your own to do?”

  “I thought it would be nice.”

  “Allison won’t be around that long. Where is she, anyway? I thought she was going to try to wade the creek and meet her ride to work.”

  “She was exploring the attic,” Ruth says, looking suddenly alarmed. “Maybe she’s getting into something she shouldn’t.”

  “What do you mean, Ruth? Are you afraid she’ll get in your box?”

  Ruth doesn’t answer. She is striding toward the house, calling for Allison.

  Allison appears on the porch with a dusty cloth bundle she says she has found under a loose floorboard in the attic.

  “Burn it!” Ruth cries. “No telling what germs are in it.”

  “I want to look inside it,” Allison says. “It might be a hidden treasure.”

  “You’ve been reading too many stories, Allison,” says Barbara.

  “Take it out in the driveway where you can burn it, child,” Ruth says anxiously. “It looks filthy.”

  Allison fumbles with the knot, and Ruth stands back, as though watching someone light a firecracker.

  “It’s just a bunch of rags,” says Barbara skeptically. “What we used to call a granny bag.”

  “I bet there’s a dead baby in here,” says Allison.

  “Allison!” Ruth cries, covering her face with her hands. “Stop it!”

  “No, let her do it, Ruth,” says Barbara. “And you watch.”

  The rags come apart. They are just stockings wound tightly around each other—old stockings with runs. They are disintegrating.

  “My old granny used to wear her stockings till they hung in shreds,” Barbara says breezily, staring at Ruth. Ruth stares back with frightened eyes. “Then she’d roll them up in a bundle of rags, just like this. That’s all it is.”

  “Oh, crap,” says Allison, disappointed. “There’s nothing in here.”

  She drops the stockings on the damp gravel and reaches in her pocket for a cigarette. She strikes a match, holds it to her cigarette and inhales, then touches the match to the rags. In the damp air, the flame burns slowly, and then the rags suddenly catch. The smell of burning dust is very precise. It is like the essence of the old house. It is concentrated filth, and Allison is burning it up for them.

  IV

  Beginnings

  The radio, girl detective books, and Louisa May Alcott were my early escapes from the isolation of country life. I wanted to go to radioland. I wanted to drive a roadster and solve mysteries. I couldn’t sing or play a guitar, but Alcott showed me the true direction. She and her energetic character Jo March wrote books.

  —BAM

  FROM The Girl Sleut
h (1975)

  Writing is the closest you can come to being a girl detective in real life at that age. I wrote the Carson Girls series, and I still have The Carson Girls Go Abroad. A glance at my little mystery story reveals no child prodigy, no creative imagination blossoming, only a frustrated but nevertheless determined child who was busily resisting the Honey Bunch/Junior Miss model. My little story reveals a desperate dependence on escapist fantasies. It was an amalgamation of Nancy Drew, the Danas, the Bobbseys, Vicki Barr, and Cherry Ames. I couldn’t even think of an original name for my girls. I took it simply from Nancy Drew’s father, Carson Drew.

  The Carson Girls Go Abroad was about twins, Sue and Jean, whose father was a famous detective and whose mother was significantly nonexistent. The girls had a modest flair for solving mysteries. Jean was the serious, practical twin—grimly mature and already latched to a boyfriend. Sue, the more adventurous, tomboyish twin (a thin projection of myself), was resentful of her sister’s boyfriend and had no plans to marry. She wanted to be an airline hostess and she bought a book, How to Become a Stewardess in Five Easy Lessons. Jean planned to be a nurse: she was more feminine, good at making beds and fixing food. As the book opened they were choosing their careers and celebrating their eighteenth birthdays with a surprise party (with ice cream, dainty sandwiches, pickles, candies, puddings, cakes, and pies) and a trip to the State Fair in Louisville (with cotton candy and candied apples and lemonade) where Sue had a narrow escape from the Snake Woman. Nothing happened to Jean, who was protected by her boyfriend.

  The mystery was about a stolen stamp collection (the fictional version of my own dime-store album). A prominent citizen had his valuable collection stolen but it was mysteriously returned the next day. Then the Carson Girls heard a burglar in their own house and soon afterward discovered that one of their stamps, an odd Romanian portrait of a bespectacled man whose hairline was askew, had faded. The Carson Girls, according to the newspaper, theorized that a ring of counterfeiters was operating in the vicinity, “borrowing” stamp collections and making copies of valuable stamps.