Don't Call Me Mother

by Linda Joy Myers

  “As a woman alone, I go where the truckers go. You can always trust truckers. They eat in the best places along the way, and they would help me if I needed it.”

  Nods of agreement.

  “Humph,” Blanche gnaws on her baloney sandwich. “Good thing you’re not traveling in a covered wagon. Never fergit the time one pulled up in front of the house. The people was goin’ to Kansas.” She pauses to chew. “They came back, though. I was about twelve.”

  “When were you born, Grandma?” I ask. Gram told me to call her mother Grandma.

  “Shh. Don’t ask nosy questions,” Gram hisses.

  “I’m eighty years old, and I don’t care who knows it.” Blanche fishes peaches from the bowl. “These the peaches we canned last year?”

  “Two years ago, Mama, remember?” says Aunt Edith. “Canned two bushel baskets and made four pies for Grace’s birthday.”

  “Damn good peaches. Fill ’er up.” Willard holds out his plate with the rind from the baloney sandwich on it. Edith puts the peaches into a separate sauce dish.

  “We have to be a good example for Linda,” says Edith with a wink.

  Billy slops peaches onto his plate despite his mother’s sour face. “Oh, Papa, just got to be yerself, don’t ya?”

  “Can’t do nothin’ else. Yourself is who y’are. None of this fancying up will do any good,” Blanche chimes in.

  “Well, if you ask me, getting a good education and teaching a person good grammar isn’t too fancy.” Gram sounds angry. She scoots her chair out and lights her cigarette from the gas stove.

  “Well, just so ya know where ya came from. Can’t fergit that.” Blanche solemnly eats her peaches.

  “Now, Mama,” says Gram. They banter for a while until Blanche says, “Did you fergit your old mother, livin’ your fancy life?”

  “Mama, how can you say that?” Gram, tears in her eyes, puts her arms around her mother. Blanche wipes away a tear, too. Is it possible that this mother and daughter don’t get along either? I am disturbed somehow by this possibility.

  Uncle Willard starts telling stories, tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. “When you was little, you’d say, ‘You want to sit on my lap, Uncle Willard?’ Remember?”

  Billy chimes in. “We’d have fun pretending for him to sit down on you, and you’d say, ‘No, no. I mean sit on my yap!’” Everyone laughs hard at this; I don’t remember it, but it feels good to hear stories about me, and to find out that I have a history here.

  After lunch, Blanche sits in the rocker by the window, embroidering a pillowcase. She shows me how to push the needle in and how to loop it around to make leaves and stems.

  “Just as long as I don’t lose my eyes,” she says. “Can’t hear too well, but if my eyes goes…” She chews off the end of her thread.

  I watch while she embroiders and Edith irons cotton shirts. She sprinkles the cloth with water from a soda pop bottle, making steam rise from the cloth. Edith lets me iron handkerchiefs, teaching me how to smooth the fabric. How different their lives are from Gram’s and Mommy’s. They enjoy these daily tasks, it seems. I follow them around from room to room, eager to be included in all they do, feeling the comforting mantle of family settle around my shoulders like a shawl. I am especially curious about Blanche and attach myself to her like a small, happy shadow.

  Blanche and

  the Garden

  That afternoon, Blanche leads me to the garden. She bends over, bowed like a water witch’s wand, skirts gathering around her ankles in front, exposing cotton hose rolled under her knees in the back. She gnashes her teeth and yanks, muttering about the weeds. Glossy leaves the size of small umbrellas spread across the sandy earth.

  “See this sand—it’s part of the Island, and it’s why we have the best melons in the world. The Island used to be cut off from the rest of the area by the old slough and the river. That’s how it got named.”

  Blanche is so old that she knows everything. The heat of the July day rises up from the land. Everything smells like fresh air and earth, black and loamy. The strawberries are ripening, like red buttons beneath green leaves. Blanche snaps off a strawberry and bites into it. Juice runs down her chin. Her deep-set eyes gaze at me from behind gold-rimmed spectacles.

  “Mmm,” she mutters, gesturing for me to pick one for myself. Everything is too raw and close to the earth. I am awestricken and a little scared. Bugs and dirt are everywhere, flies are buzzing, ants crawling. Gnats fly into my mouth and stick in the corners of my eyes. Blanche tells me to go ahead and pick a strawberry, and I pluck one with a satisfying snap. Gram would definitely discourage me from eating something without washing it, afraid I would die young in her care and she’d be blamed for it, but Blanche is a pioneer woman and she tells me to eat it.

  “Come on, bite down hard.”

  “But it’s dirty.”

  “Come on. Try it. It’s good for ya. Nothin’ like the fruit of the earth.”

  I stare at the dirt in the crevices of the strawberry, still worried.

  “You got to eat a peck o’ dirt afore you die.”

  She smears juice across her chin with her sleeve. Finally I bite down on the strawberry and it bursts in my mouth. I choke, surprised, my senses flooded with the sweet strawberry juice, the sun beating down, the smell of earth. Blanche’s eyes laugh behind her glasses.

  “Good, ain’t it?” She turns around to hoe savagely at the weeds trying to take over her vegetables. It doesn’t matter that this is Edith’s garden, not her own. Here, everyone shares in the work. I grab a hoe and copy her ways.

  “See that you get that weed out, root and all. Pull ’em all the way out or they’ll take over. Just like some people I know.” She chuckles deep in her throat.

  “Who, Grandma?”

  “Now never you mind. It’s a sin to gossip.”

  I want to know more about everything. “Did you have a mother?”

  “Land sakes, girl, ‘course I did. That’s how we come into this world. My mother was Josephine, and she was born on the Island just like the rest of us.”

  “My mama’s named Josephine.” The name Josephine gives me the tingles.

  “Your mama was named after my mama.” She wipes the sweat from her face with a handkerchief. Her bony, crooked fingers with black dirt under nails are thick like a man’s, her forearms tanned and wrinkly. Everything about Blanche is interesting to me, as if she’s the only remaining exhibit of an extinct species.

  “Tell me about your mama.”

  “Oh, there’s not much to tell. Hard-workin’ woman. Delivered babies for half the county. Best blackberry jam in the world.” She pauses, leaning on her hoe. “Life was different then.”

  She turns to me, her eyebrows fierce and thick. “You got no idea, young lady. People’s lazy now, think the world owes ’em a livin’. Times was hard. But no matter what, we always had enough to eat. Yes sirree, we always had food on the table. And my papa would give his right arm to help a neighbor.”

  “Where is your mama now?”

  Blanche glances at me sharply. She doesn’t answer right away. Hardens her jaw and clamps her teeth against her lower lip. “She died near to when you was born.” Blanche stands up and rubs her lower back. “Everyone loved my mama.”

  I watch roly-polys curling up and ants marching in straight rows up and down their earth mounds. Millions of bugs are living full lives out here. I ask, “Did my mama know your mama?”

  She grunts as she hoes a patch of weeds that have gained ground. “Oh Lord, yes. When your mama was a little girl, she lived with my mama for a while in Muscatine. Your mama, Jo’tine—that’s what we called her—would come to see me at the farm where Edith and the rest was growin’ up. Such a pretty little girl she was, with those big, brown eyes. Poor little thing.”

  I wonder what she means. “She don’t do right by you, I tell ya. At least Lula has the sense to take care ’a you. But this business ’tween Lula and Josephine… well, you’re too young to understand. I don’t kn
ow about those two.” She stomps on a beetle that had been working its way toward a tomato plant. “Got to get them before they get you,” she says, winking at me and wiping her brow with a handkerchief.

  I try to imagine all these mothers. Our history, my history, reaches so far back. Blanche, Gram, Mother, and me—we all come from here. Next to Blanche I feel very small and young. I look up at her, the mother of the mother of the mother. She knows everything. I decide to stick to her to find out things. When we go into the house, the dirt caked under my fingernails seems like a badge of honor.

  The rest of the day has its rhythm. The men come in and take showers. Edith fixes a chicken dinner with mashed potatoes, gravy, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, rolls, red Jell-O with banana, and apple pie. On the hour and half hour, seven clocks chime, a beautiful music that goes with the laughter and conversation. I am part of all this. I sense the threads of our common history and like the way these good people look at me with happiness in their eyes.

  After dinner, everyone sits outside in chairs under the elm trees, murmuring in the darkness about family, the weather, the cost of food, and how much better things used to be. Fireflies hover, giving off pieces of light in the velvet night. I swoop smoke into Uncle Willard’s empty tobacco can. He lets me sit on his lap, his big paw hands holding me up. Gram seems different here. Lula, as they call her, is not the same as the Frances who lives in Enid. She is her plain self, yet different from everyone else, with her fake accent and haughty ways. But this is family, and she is Blanche’s daughter and Edith’s sister.

  At ten o’clock, as if with one mind, everyone rises and goes into the house, muttering about the mosquitoes and looking forward to ice cream. The men get out the ice cream and chocolate sauce while Edith puts plates of homemade cookies on the table. The room fills with the clink of spoons and the sounds of pleasure. When all the clocks chime eleven, everyone yawns.

  Edith tells me that I will be sleeping with Blanche upstairs in the room across from Billy. I feel special, getting to sleep with her, and glance in her direction. She merely gives me a little nod. Smiles do not rest easily on her thin lips. Clump, clump, clump go Blanche’s black shoes with their thick heels up the wooden stairs to the bedroom. The fluffy, high bed seems to rise halfway to the ceiling. The air is thick with heat and the smell of the past. Faded dresses hang on hangers, rifles lean against the flowered wallpaper. Blanche peels away her clothes, her ample flesh rippling and swinging.

  I turn away, blushing. Seeing all that flesh is not something I’m used to, but she doesn’t seem to mind. How can she be so free with all this? She turns her body as she pulls on the white cotton nightgown, exposing round lumps hanging at her waist. I have never seen breasts like that. My mother’s are soft and round; Gram’s are pouchy and hanging. Blanche’s feet have thick, yellowed toenails. Her skin is puckered with thick blue veins.

  When she’s got her nightgown on she turns to me. “You gonna sleep standin’ up?” she asks, pulling back the chenille bedspread.

  “The bed is so high.” It reaches to the top of my shoulders.

  “It’s a feather bed.”

  “Feathers? What kind of feathers?”

  “Duck, goose. Nothin’ like a feather bed. Been sleepin’ in ’em all my life.” She pounds the thick mattress with her fist.

  “Feathers?” My finger pokes at the softness of the bed.

  She hauls her body into the high bed and lies back, her nose pointed at the ceiling. I pause, not wanting to get undressed in front of her. “Well, gonna sleep in your clothes?”

  “Can I turn off the light?” I mutter, shyly.

  “Wiped a lot of baby’s butts in my life. Skin don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

  I snap off the light. Her casual attitude about bodies amazes me. I slip on my summer nightie, and clamber over her bony shins to tuck myself along the wall. The idea of sleeping with Blanche seemed wonderful at first, but now this large ship of a woman—her hips curving high, her bony shoulders sticking up, her eighty-year-old smells—seems too real.

  Then the cadence of her voice lulls me as she tells stories that will stay imbedded in me for the whole of my life. She tells stories about life on the farm—getting up in the morning before dawn, slopping the pigs, milking the cows; how the men had their chores, and the women had theirs. She baked bread several times a week, gathered firewood, and cooked three meals a day for a family of eight. In the summers she fed ten or more hired men, too. She tended a huge garden all summer, and in August she canned the vegetables and fruit to put in the cellar for winter.

  She always did the washing on Mondays. “The big black iron kettle sat in the front yard. We fired up the wood, got it to boilin’, and threw in them clothes, stirred the boiling pot with the washin’ stick. We used lye soap I made myself, and the washboard to get everythin’ clean. No self-respectin’ person puts a wash on the line for the neighbors to see that’s not clean. After the washin’—then the rinch water.” (She says it that way: “rinch.”)

  “Before them new-fangled washin’ machines, we wrung the clothes out and pinned them on the clothesline. Did the wash for eight workin’ men and six kids. You don’t know dirt until you live on a farm. It took all day. God help ya if it rained.” She shakes her head, her gray curls rasping against the pillowcase. I can see it all—Blanche in the yard, children scampering. Dirt and dust, pigs and cows. Pillows of fresh-baked bread with churned butter. I want to be there, too.

  “Did Gram live there then?”

  “Lula? Gosh sakes no. That girl—always one for gallivantin’. A lot of the time she lived with Josephine, my mother, in town, went to high school there ’cause the country school only went to eighth grade. Things was far away then. You walked or rode your horse, or you didn’t go. We was poor people, lived seven miles from town on the Island. I drove the wagon into Muscatine to deliver milk and eggs to the rich folks.” Blanche takes a deep breath.

  “That Lula always was so different. A dreamer. She had a different papa, Lewis. After he died, I married Mr. Shannon and had your great-aunts and uncles.” Blanche pauses for a long time. I wonder if she’s gone to sleep.

  Soon she begins again in a changed voice, picking up speed. “You know, life is full of sorrow. I’ll never figure out some things, no matter how hard I try.” She sighs. “I delivered the neighbors’ babies. Never fergit the night one died. Two days of labor. Nowadays, that baby would have lived. But there’s no way to outsmart God.”

  “Why did Lewis die?”

  “He breathed his last right ’side me. One day he was fine. The next, dead of twenty-four-hour pneumonia. Seems like yesterday. Can’t believe I’m eighty. Life goes so fast. Don’t you fergit that. Don’t you miss a minute.”

  “He was Gram’s daddy?” I feel sorry for Gram. I know what it’s like to miss your daddy.

  Blanche turns over onto her back. “Lewis was only twenty-two. I can’t never fergit it, no matter how much time is passed. Too much dyin’. Always too much dyin’.” She sighs and turns her head in my direction. “You’re too young to understand.”

  Her breathing keeps me awake. I’m more awake now than ever before in my whole life, cast back in time, into the nineteenth century. Looming large in my mind is Lewis, who died so young and left my grandmother without a father.

  I picture Blanche back then, old, the way she is now, but then I realize that she was young then, at the beginning of her life. By now she is marked so much by time, she is different for having lived it. The history she just told me happened sixty years ago, so far back I can’t grasp it, but it pulls at me.

  The headlights from the highway make light and dark patterns across the ceiling. Blanche’s great white form snores beside me. I am catapulted beyond my child self and perceptions. The past seems to expand and loosen up, trailing behind me, enticing me to follow its threads and find out more about these people and this place, the bones and the land that I’m descended from.

  Ghosts of the Past

 
The next morning I ask Edith if we can look at family pictures. “After lunch,” she tells me. At noon we have cheese sandwiches and cottage cheese and the applesauce she canned last year, and then Edith hauls out the cardboard boxes. Hundreds of black-and-white and sepia photographs spill onto the table. She names the ghostly faces in the pictures, people who wear funny clothes and stare at the camera in stiff poses. The women wear long dresses, the men overalls. In one picture, my mother is about seven years old, standing by a car with Josephine, Blanche’s mother. Blanche stands nearby, at that time a dark-haired woman in her fifties who was still raising children on the farm. Chickens strut through the crowd in the picture.

  Now everyone gathers around and talks at once, lifting out a picture, telling a memory to anyone who wants to listen. Blanche lifts out a piece of paper with a handwritten poem on it:

  Preserving Children

  Take one large grassy field, one half dozen children, all sizes, three small dogs, one long narrow strip of brook, pebbly if possible.

  Mix the children with the dogs and empty them into the field, stirring continually.

  Sprinkle with field flowers, pour brook gently over pebbles; cover with a deep blue sky and bake in a hot sun.

  When the children are well browned they may be removed.

  Will be found right and ready for settling away to cool in the bathtub.

  —Josephine Dickerson Stineman

  Suddenly the dogs start barking. Everyone goes to the window to see who is visiting. Two cars drive up, honking, spilling out two large ladies and two men. Hellos and laughter clatter into the room, the screen door flapping behind them. One beefy man with a big stomach bellows, “Hello, Mama. What’re ya doin’ sittin’ round on your can?”