We continued in this manner—Thomas talking and I listening—until he stopped abruptly and asked, “What do you remember about your Thanksgivings, Rosie?” Glancing at me innocently, he took a sizable bite from his roll and then, chewing, shifted his gaze to the soft inside of the roll, cocking his head as if looking upon a strange and wonderful thing. I could not remember the last time he had attempted to probe into my past, and I bristled at once at his question. I felt a sudden corrugation in what had been a smooth and peaceful day.
“For the past fifteen years I have eaten Thanksgiving dinner at the very table at which we are now seated,” I said. “I am sure that your memories of those occasions are as clear as mine.”
This last utterance had slipped out. I did not for a moment believe it. Over the years I had often noted with amazement the considerable mutation that took place between an actual event and Thomas’s subsequent recollection of it. I am speaking not only of a man’s tendency to exaggerate in reporting matters such as his height, the length of a fish that he caught, or the number of attendees at a rally, but also of the total transformation of simple facts. In the retelling of a story, Thomas often altered it to an astonishing extent, although the original story was itself sufficiently unbelievable. I had never been able to determine whether his modifications were intentional—for the purpose of embellishment—or whether he simply extemporized as his memory failed him.
“But what about all the years before those?” Thomas asked me now, holding his roll as one would hold a small sponge; he pushed it about at the edges of his serving of corn pudding as if tidying it up. Looking up, he smiled at me. “Don’t you remember any Thanksgivin’s from when you were little, Rosie? Did your mother fix a turkey? Did you go to a parade?”
I could, of course, have written a book about the Thanksgivings of my girlhood. The day was always a grand occasion for my mother, and therefore for me, too. My mother was a splendid cook, and though our fare was generally limited in quantity, it was sumptuously prepared and served. I always helped in the kitchen, learning many of the culinary skills I employ yet today—for instance, the making of perfect giblet gravy, pie crust, and corn bread. The day was filled with laughter, I recall, and the two of us took walks, listened to music, and read. Often my mother recited lines of plays that she had memorized and entire poems, such as “The White Cliffs of Dover” and “Fern Hill,” and selections from Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.
I did not care to lay out such details for Thomas, however, for I feared that once I began I would not be able to stop. Remembering my mother’s love of poetry, I had wondered since my recent discovery of Archibald Rutledge whether she had known of him. I believe she had studied poetry at some point in her life, either during her years of college before leaving her parents’ home or during subsequent correspondence courses and independent reading. Since she had lived and studied in New York and the Midwest, however, her poetry courses most likely would not have included a Carolina poet whose name is not even listed in Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature.
“Here, I’ll tell you what—let me prime the pump,” Thomas said, filling his fork with yam casserole and lifting it toward his mouth, studying it with a brief, ceremonial seriousness. “I’ll tell you about something that happened the Thanksgiving I was thirteen, then you can see if you can remember that same Thanksgiving.” I felt as if a lead weight had suddenly plummeted to the pit of my stomach.
Thomas opened his mouth wide and inserted the forkful of yam casserole. After chewing a moment, he said, “’Course, that won’t work, will it? I don’t mean that same Thanksgiving ’cause you wouldn’t’ve even been alive yet, but maybe you can try to think of how you spent the Thanksgiving you was thirteen.” He did not know what he was asking!
He launched into a twisted tale of the Thanksgiving of 1938, when he had lived in Kilgore Cave, North Carolina, and his father’s four brothers had come with their families a day early so that the men could go hunting, the purpose being to provide a variety of meat for the Thanksgiving table.
“The rule was you couldn’t go huntin’ with the grown-ups until you was thirteen, so that’s how come I remember which year it was ’cause it was my first time to go out with the men,” Thomas said.
The last thing I heard Thomas say before I was swallowed by the cold, black memory of my thirteenth Thanksgiving was this: “And they had to stay for six whole days ’cause that snowstorm was the worst in fifty years—twenty-three people in a five-room house for six days!” I remember wondering vaguely whether these were accurate numbers.
In 1957, when I was thirteen, I had been at my grandparents’ house in Marshland, New York, only a few months when Thanksgiving arrived. It was an icy day. My grandmother had banned me from the kitchen, claiming that I made her nervous. The truth was, I believe, that she could brook no competition in her domain, especially from a child. When I had made corn bread for supper only days after coming to live with them that summer, my grandfather had pronounced it a triumph, exclaiming overmuch concerning its superiority to the corn bread he was accustomed to eating. I had observed my grandmother’s expression upon this occasion. It was not one of pleasure.
My grandfather had at that time a small room in the basement that he referred to as his “darkroom.” Oh, how incredibly dark it was! In those days he took many photographs with a Kodak camera—a black rectangular apparatus the size of a large file box—and most of these were mounted in a series of green albums arranged on the bookshelf in the living room. Others, I found later, were kept in a small box in a locked drawer in his darkroom. If given a set of watercolors today, I could, by mixing, duplicate precisely the color of the box. It was dark rust red, the color of dried bloodstains. That Thanksgiving Day in 1957 was the first time my grandfather acquainted me with his darkroom. As I heard my grandmother overhead plodding about in the kitchen, as I heard water coursing through the pipes of the old house, as I heard the violent thunks of the ancient furnace churning out hot air, I was silently plunged into a pit of evil from which I have never escaped.
When later that day the three of us sat together upstairs at the kitchen table for our Thanksgiving dinner—a great undercooked turkey occupying a large serving plate in the center of the table—I remember staring at the tabletop during my grandfather’s lengthy prayer. Hearing his deep voice quiver with emotion as he began “O dear God, we are so unworthy to partake of thy abundant goodness,” I traced my finger in tiny loops over the bright yellow Formica and took quiet, shallow breaths.
I looked about the kitchen, still pressing my fingertip upon the yellow tabletop, and was stabbed by one of those mad, brilliant thrusts of consciousness—of self-consciousness, it could be called—during which one doubts whether he really exists at that moment yet simultaneously knows and marvels that he does. Only a year ago I had been warmly havened with my mother, and now I was lost in “a hideous and desolate wilderness,” to borrow William Bradford’s words. All I could say when each dish was passed to me was “No, thank you, I am not hungry.” In my grandmother’s eyes I saw fury, and in my grandfather’s, warning.
During my silent yet intense recollection of this terrible event, Thomas pushed his chair back suddenly and walked to the refrigerator. “Here, have some more ice,” he said, dropping several cubes into my glass of tea. I could not even rouse myself to object to his handling the ice with his fingers instead of using the tongs. A few amber drops of tea splashed out onto the white tablecloth, but Thomas did not notice. When he again seated himself across from me, his face bore an uneasy expression—the solidified, uncomfortable, waiting look of a newscaster during a delay between a scripted cue and the shift to an auxiliary field report.
“Can’t come up with anything?” he asked at last.
I became the field reporter caught off guard, having missed the cue; for an instant I could not connect his question with its meaning. When I did, I merely shook my head and said, “Not at the moment, no.” It was then that I noticed my plate
. It appeared that I had cut only a thin strip from my slice of turkey, and though a few green beans lay speared upon my fork, I could not recall having eaten any. A small bite was missing from my cranberry salad. Thomas, meanwhile, was refilling his plate with second helpings.
Picking up my fork, I set about to eat. The grilled meat was delicious.
All was quiet for a while until Thomas cleared his throat. “It’s all a choice, you know, Margaret,” he said. He was serving himself creamed broccoli, messily, so that it spilled over into the green bean casserole beside it on his plate.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, though not in a challenging tone, for this time indeed I did not know what he meant.
“Puttin’ things behind you,” he said. “It’s a choice a person’s got to make. Either you forgive and forget or you don’t. Sometimes it’s mighty hard to put things behind you and move on ahead—I know it is, believe me.” He spoke kindly, neither lightly nor didactically. His words, in my opinion, were nevertheless too glib, too easy.
“I’m sorry if I opened up somethin’ you don’t like to think about,” he added. “I shouldn’t go pokin’ my nose around, and I try not to, you know I do. But I believe what I said, Rosie, and I’ll say it again. It’s all a choice. You either cut it off and leave it behind you or you drag it along like a dead weight everywhere you go. You get to pick. I know what I’m talkin’ about, Rosie.”
He paused a moment, then continued. “Forgiveness—it’s a big part of living a good life. That’s what my aunt Prissy always used to tell me. And I always suspected she’d had to do a lot of forgivin’ in her lifetime.” He leaned forward and spoke gently. “It helps to wipe the slate clean, Rosie. It’s something you can choose to do.”
I could not speak for several moments, and when I did my voice sounded distant and hollow, as if emerging from a great cavity. “Please do not lecture me about choices,” I said. “I know more about choices than I ever care to know.”
We sat in an edgy silence for some time, the only sounds being those of our silverware scraping our plates and of the ice clinking in our glasses. Something struck me during this interval that, though I had not suspected it heretofore, I realized now with an unquestioning certainty. Joan must have spoken to Thomas in private concerning me. I knew it was so. Joan had strongly intimated to Thomas, if not openly revealed, what she had discovered of my troubled past.
The choice to forgive was not a new idea to me, of course. I had read Jane Hamilton’s novel A Map of the World, a remarkably conceived piece of fiction with two central ideas at its core: first, that the briefest carelessness may bear permanent and insufferable consequences, also the premise of many other books, among them Donna Tartt’s lengthy and breathtaking novel, The Secret History, and second, that an individual chooses his response to those consequences—in short, that he may choose to forgive those responsible for his pain or, of course, he may choose not to forgive.
On Thanksgiving Day I knew that were I ever to emerge from my darkness to seek a more excellent way of living, perhaps even to explore for myself the path that Birdie Freeman had taken, this must be my first step: to choose to forgive. It was a dangerous and desperate step, but how I yearned for the respite it could afford—if indeed there were any respite to be had.
A few minutes later I cut into the pecan pie and lifted out the pieces to place them upon two white dessert plates. The secret of my pecan pie, as well as of my hickory nut pie, is in the preparation of the nuts. They must be lightly toasted before the pie is baked. As I served the pie I thought of Birdie’s honest brown eyes. I thought of her contentment and of her homely radiance, and I knew that I wanted what she possessed to be forever mine.
Part Three
When From These Woods I Part
21
A Little Oil in a Cruse
But forgive whom? The thought of forgiving my grandfather was unthinkable, for to my mind forgiveness carried with it an absolving of responsibility and a willingness on my part to forget the crimes, to put them behind my back and never again to look or reflect upon them. On the one hand, I felt that such complete remission for such grievous acts of horror was humanly impossible, while on the other I suspected that I had grown so attached to my bitterness that I could not bear to give it up, for its amputation would utterly disable me.
Like inhabitants of war-torn countries who refuse to flee their homes, unable to imagine life in any other place, I had grown to depend upon my wrath. It was my homeland. Though its hills and valleys were deeply marred and though the view from all sides was bleak, it was nevertheless familiar to me.
While I wanted to believe that my grandfather’s sins exceeded the act of redemption, something told me that it was I and not he who stood in the way of forgiveness. For he had most urgently requested my forgiveness. I will tell of this later.
After we finished our Thanksgiving dinner, Thomas helped me clear the table. He sliced the rest of the turkey, and I wrapped it in packages for later use—some for sandwiches, some for casseroles, soups, and so forth. The smoked flavor would alter the taste of my usual post-Thanksgiving dishes, such as turkey divan, turkey and rice soup, and turkey tetrazzini, but perhaps the change would not be unpleasant. Thomas also set aside a number of entire slices to take to our duplex neighbors, the Purdues, next door. He said that Nick Purdue had shown an ardent interest in his backyard grilling earlier in the day, hobbling down the steps a number of times to look on and offer comments.
“I’ll be switched if he didn’t almost start droolin’ one time when I lifted up the lid so’s he could see,” Thomas said. “I mean it, Rosie, he had to lick the corners of his mouth where it was startin’ to collect!” He chuckled. “Guess what Thelma was throwin’ together inside didn’t hold a candle to what he was smellin’ from our side.”
While we had eaten our servings of pecan pie earlier, Thomas had not entreated me further to talk about my past. We had eaten in silence for several minutes before he had begun telling a story he had heard from a customer at the hardware store the day before. Having finished a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, the woman, Betty Earle Fosdick by name, had carefully slid it onto a sturdy board, loaded it into the back of her station wagon, and taken it to a framing shop to have it dry-mounted and framed for display. As she was turning into the parking lot of the framing store, her station wagon was rear-ended by a Jeep. “The tailgate flew up and them puzzle pieces ended up all over the inside of her car and out on the pavement,” Thomas said, “and Betty Earle said some of ’em even landed on the hood of that cotton-pickin’ Jeep! Can’t you just see it—all that work right down the drain!” Though I did not join in his laughter, I was nevertheless relieved that he had turned his conversation from me to the misadventures of others.
But to return to the matter of forgiveness, the idea pushed itself into my mind as I moved about the kitchen storing leftovers, scraping plates, and brushing crumbs from the tablecloth that perhaps it was God whom I must forgive. No sooner had the thought shaped itself, however, than I dismissed it. Though it was true I had long borne a grudge against God for what I considered his thoughtless dealings with me in my youth, I knew in that moment that for me to grant forgiveness to God was a presumption past imagining.
I had not thought of it until then, but it came to me now while I filled the sink with hot water, that my very anger against God was testimony to my belief in his existence. Were I an atheist, I would never give form to so many thoughts of God, ill thoughts though they were. No hazy mental ramblings were mine but oftentimes direct conversations along this order: “You left me alone. You turned your back upon me when I was most helpless. When I was smitten with fear and pain, you were not there.” Often my questions were spoken in mockery, as the words of Elijah to the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel: “Were you in a conference with the other members of the Trinity discussing your plans for the universe? Had you embarked upon a journey far from heaven, perhaps to renumber the stars? Or perhaps you were exhausted from cosmic
concerns and were taking a rest?”
I remember well the aftermath of guilt in my earliest rantings against God, though over time I became inured to such stirrings of the conscience and closed my mind to the verses from the Book of Job that sprang forth in refutation of my charges against God—questions put to man by God, such as “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” and “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?”
Now, on Thanksgiving Day, the thought of forgiving God was set aside as quickly as it offered itself for consideration. Over and over the following words, again from the Book of Job, repeated themselves to me: “Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him?” To my knowledge I had neither read nor heard these words since I was a teenager.
I found myself, therefore, in a peculiar dilemma. How could there be healing without the cleansing act of forgiveness? I was angry with both my grandfather and with God yet could forgive neither. I could not forgive my grandfather, for besides the fact that I was as yet unwilling to liberate him, he was dead. Furthermore, I had now discovered that I could not forgive God, for to do so would denigrate his deity. If he were God, he did not stand in need of man’s pardon. The knowledge that I still believed in the existence of God, even defended him against myself, was curious indeed, unsettling in one sense yet strangely comforting in another.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 28
