Kinfolks

by Lisa Alther

  My grandfather finally agrees — to humor my father. He swings up onto the equally unenthusiastic mare. Next thing we know, Nora is leaping along the dam like a ballerina. Our mouths drop open.

  My grandfather runs Nora through her five gaits as though shifting the gears on a race car. At his command she backs up. In response to pressure from his thighs she prances sideways and then switches her lead leg in mid-stride. Attempting to copy these moves later that week on a pony we keep in the backyard in town, I will gallop under a wire clothesline and nearly decapitate myself. Trying again a couple of years later, I will ride Nora into a barbed wire fence and require thirty-six stitches in my left leg.

  Nora and my grandfather return to the cabin. He slides off her.

  “Nice horse,” he says, tossing the reins to my speechless father.

  We continue to stare at our grandfather and Nora.

  “Can we go home now?” he murmurs to my grandmother.

  Pam, Martha, and I, along with half the other kids in town, are riding the new escalator in J. Fred Johnson’s Department Store. No one could believe the advance reports of a self-propelled staircase, but it’s all true!

  As we dash through the lingerie section to the stairs that glide back down to the ground floor, we pass dozens of high school girls stalking along with textbooks balanced on their heads, weaving through armless plaster torsos clad in brassieres and girdles. The girls are students from the charm class that’s held in a room off the hair salon, where they’re learning the skills necessary to become the next Miss Kingsport. If your posture is perfect, the sky’s the limit.

  J. Fred Johnson was a revered town father. His widow lives next door to us on Watauga Street. After the War Between the States, when many in our region were starving, he teamed up with some Yankee bankers to found our town. Its nickname is the Model City. In 1918, J. Fred, as everyone calls him, invited my grandfather, William Henry Reed, from Virginia to open a hospital.

  We tear ourselves away from J. Fred’s new escalator because it’s time for the cowboy special at the State Theater. The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy — you never know which you’ll get until he appears on the screen. One of my grandfather’s claims to fame, in addition to being able to operate with either hand, is that he performed an appendectomy on Tom Mix once when Tom was in town for a wild west show.

  We amble up Broad Street, the axis of the Model City. When my grandparents moved here, the street was packed clay. There were few stores and many vacant lots. The workmen building the town lived in a city of canvas tents near where the Piggly Wiggly now stands.

  Martha is on my right. She has wavy blond hair and blue eyes. Although a year older than I, she’s a lot shorter. But she’s still the boss of the neighborhood, except when her brother Nie is around. Nie wraps his stack of comic books with a swing chain and locks it with a padlock so no one can read them without his permission.

  To my left is Pam. She’s as tall as I, with curly black hair and glasses with thick lenses. Her mother works at a grocery store, and they live with her grandmother on the street behind ours. Whenever Martha and I ask Pam where her father is, she replies, “None of your beeswax and shoe tacks.”

  Behind us is a traffic circle surrounded by four steepled churches of red brick — one Baptist, two Methodist, and one Presbyterian. My family’s church, St. Paul’s Episcopal, is a low stone manse with a door the color of dried blood. It looks as though it belongs on a windswept moor. Instead, it squats atop a hill, looking down on the other churches.

  My father used to be a Baptist, but he says he doesn’t want his children threatened all the time with burning in hell. His mother, my grandmother, Hattie Elizabeth Vanover Reed, assures me that he’s never been happy since he turned his back on the Baptists. But he seems happy to me, except when she stops by to remind him that only Baptists will pass through the Pearly Gates.

  Ahead of us is a boarded-up train station of maroon brick. Since freight trains are now the only rail traffic, there’s no need for a station except as a clubhouse for our drunks. Branded liquor is illegal, and moonshine is expensive, so they’re said to imbibe liquid shoe polish and after-shave lotion at their socials in the vacant building.

  The plaintive howls of the locomotives whistle in my bedroom late at night as I lie there fretting about marauding melungeons. The trains clatter past Riverview, where the Negroes live in low redbrick apartment buildings. Then the trains stop at the Tennessee Eastman plant by the river to unload mountains of shiny black coal and to collect camera film, ammunition, and bolts of rayon.

  But the train we kids care most about is the Santa train, which creeps down from Virginia at Christmas. The railroad workers toss candy, pencils, and toys to the children along the tracks. This mission ends in the Model City with a parade up Broad Street. Santa transfers to a hook-and-ladder truck, from which the firemen throw candy to us town kids.

  My grandfather’s first hospital was located above a drugstore down the street from the defunct train station. He had four beds in two rooms. In his teens, my father worked as a soda jerk in the drugstore. On the sidewalk outside it, some farmers now cluster for their usual Saturday in town. They wear limp-brimmed hats, pressed overalls, and high-topped work shoes. Some also wear suit jackets and starched white shirts. They talk quietly, or not at all, occasionally squirting tobacco juice into the gutter. We’ve already seen their children sadly eying the counters at Woolworth’s, which are full of wind-up toys from Japan that their mothers in housedresses sewn from floral-print flour sacks can’t afford to buy.

  The spot in which the farmers are standing is where an elephant, later labeled Murderous Mary, killed a boy in a circus parade up Broad Street shortly before my grandparents’ arrival. She stopped to pick up a piece of watermelon someone had tossed her. The boy leading her gouged her with his goad. She seized him with her trunk, threw him against a wall, and squashed him with one foot.

  The town concluded that Mary had to be executed. The sheriff shot her several times, but the bullets didn’t penetrate her hide. She was loaded on a flatbed car at the train station and transported to a town down the line called Erwin, where there was a construction crane. A chain from the crane was wound around Mary’s neck. The crane hoisted her into the air as she trumpeted indignantly. The chain snapped, and Mary crashed onto the track and broke her hip. However, a second chain didn’t snap, suspending her until her struggling ceased.

  Mary’s carcass was lowered into a pit dug alongside the track with a steam shovel. We have a newspaper photo at home of Mary hanging from the crane. Everyone makes fun of Erwin as the town that lynched an elephant.

  Every time this story comes up, my father claims to have done an autopsy on a Ringling Brothers elephant that died in Boston when he was a medical student at Harvard. He insists he and some fellow medical students cut a trapdoor in the elephant’s chest and crawled around inside her collecting specimens. Listeners always exchange glances, trying to figure out if this could be true. My father is famous for his embellishments.

  I hand the gum-chewing woman in the admissions booth at the State Theater my dime, and she returns a penny. I glance uneasily at the iron staircase outside the building, which leads to the balcony where the Negroes sit. It’s neat to sit up high like that — but it’s less neat not to get to buy popcorn or candy first. Once we find some seats, howling Indians on horses, faces painted in alarming patterns, fill the screen. They circle a flaming farmhouse, shooting arrows and hurling tomahawks. The problem isn’t the Indians, who possess a certain mute dignity. Nor is it the settlers, who are bringing dance halls and repeating rifles to the frontier.

  The real problem is a surly Indian named Two Hearts. The Lone Ranger tells Tonto that Two Hearts is “a low-down, lying, thieving, and deceiving half-breed.” Tonto, in contrast, is as loyal as a teacher’s pet. Two Hearts has incited the otherwise amiable Indians to murder and arson because he hates his white trapper father, who has rejected him and his Indian
mother. The unhappy Two Hearts is slain by the disgruntled Indians — as studded with arrows as an Easter ham with cloves. Harmony reigns in Buffalo Flats, and the Lone Ranger rides off into the sunset on Silver with Tonto by his side.

  As we stroll back down Broad Street, we discuss why the Lone Ranger is called “Lone” if Tonto and Silver are always with him. This will remain one of life’s many mysteries.

  I inform Martha and Pam that we’re walking atop a field of gore. At school I’ve studied the Battle of Long Island Flats, fought in 1776 beneath what are now the streets of the Model City. The settlers defeated the Cherokee, led by Chief Dragging Canoe, and forced them to hand over Long Island, where the redbrick factories and round holding tanks of Tennessee Eastman now sit. Long Island had been a sacred site where the Cherokee negotiated peace treaties. I offer to tell them how Dragging Canoe got his name, but they don’t care.

  Back at our house my mother is clipping the boxwoods up the front sidewalk with scissors. There are one hundred sixteen bushes, and she trims four a day all year round. That way we never need to pay a yardman’s exorbitant rates.

  Our house is a white brick two-story Georgian with green shutters. Shortly after moving to town, my grandmother had this house designed and constructed on the street where the Yankee plant managers were living in their white-columned plantation houses. Watauga Street runs along a ridge that overlooks Tennessee Eastman, with Bays Mountain as a backdrop. At night, thousands of factory lights down in the valley flicker romantically in the mist that creeps up the Holston River and the smoke that swirls from the plant stacks.

  While the house was being built, my grandmother didn’t like how the brick wall out back was being laid, so she fired the mason and took over herself.

  Watching her slap mortar on a brick with a trowel, the embarrassed mason said, “Excuse me, ma’am, but you can’t build a wall like that.”

  She looked up and replied, “Sir, not only can I — I am.”

  When it was finished, the architect praised my grandmother’s workmanship.

  She replied, “Mr. Dryden, I know this wall will stand because I’ve studied Thomas Jefferson’s brick walls at the University of Virginia.”

  And it’s still standing, despite the best efforts of climbing ivy to drag it down.

  My father grew up in this house. When he returned from Europe after World War II, his parents gave it to us. One of my earliest memories is of visiting my grandparents in the cabin they rented after moving out. I can picture a brown snake slithering across black-and-white-checked linoleum. My eyes are at knee level to the alarmed adults. Way overhead near the light-bulb in the ceiling I can see the handsome stranger in the olive jacket who claims to be my father. I’ve been calling him Daddy just in case it’s true. My mother says my grandfather ushered the trapped copperhead out the back door, where he chopped its head off.

  My mother stops snipping the boxwoods to ask about the movie. After our summary, we head to the backyard, rounding up my brother Bill and Martha’s brother Nie, Stacy and Stanley from the house behind ours, and Molly and Carol, who’re visiting their aunt next door, Mrs. J. Fred Johnson. Although we persuade them to reenact the movie, no one will play Two Hearts. He seems pathetic, being neither cowboy nor Indian. So we switch to Trail of Tears instead. To my amazement they agree that I can perform the Dying Eagle dance. Although everyone covets this role, I usually hog it because I own the wings.

  A father on Catawba Street has organized the boys down there into a tribe. They’ve built a huge tepee in his backyard, and they make war bonnets and armbands from the beads and feathers he orders from a catalog. Girls aren’t allowed to join. But since my brother John belongs, I’ve stolen some of his supplies to decorate my cardboard wings, which I now tape to my arms. My loincloth is a dish towel secured by a leather belt.

  My dance around the imaginary campfire is inspired as my wings lift and droop and flutter. When the soldiers (wearing the same blue caps we use for War Between the States) arrive to drag me off to Oklahoma, I swoon to the ground. It’s my finest performance yet — at least until the soldiers start piling moldy leaves on me to bury me.

  Sometimes we play circus acrobats, performing gravity-defying routines on our teetering swing set and trying to lure our lazy mutts over jumps with dog biscuits. Other days we play pioneers in Stacy’s playhouse, forcing Bill and Stanley to be either Indians or buffalo. Either way, we slaughter them with our wooden rifles. We also play World War II, dressing in camouflage clothes and my father’s too-large captain hats and crawling around the backyard with our rifles cradled in the crooks of our arms.

  But our favorite game is War Between the States. Despite the fact that my mother used to sing “Sherman’s Dashing Yankee Boys” to my brothers and me as a lullaby, nobody wants to be a Yankee. So we insist that Bill and Stanley do it as the price of playing with us older kids. We turn our tool shed into a field hospital and administer transfusions via lengths of string attached to bottles of water dyed red with food coloring. We listen to each other’s chests with one of my father’s old stethoscopes. We also fill the empty pill capsules he gives us with flour, mustard, dirt, whatever is handy. Our Yankee prisoners, heads wrapped in gauze, are required to swallow them with water from my father’s World War II canteen.

  *

  Our family is driving along the Holston River. John is lying on the backseat shelf. I’m stretched out on the backseat, and Bill lies on the floor, legs propped up on the hump in the middle. Michael is up front between my parents.

  I sit up so I can see the huge house where my grandfather set up his second hospital. It’s been turned into the Boatyard Apartments. Down the road is the Netherland Inn, which housed travelers in the nineteenth century when the port for which Kingsport was named was flourishing. The early settlers headed west in flatboats from its docks. The road we’re on was a path other settlers followed to the Cumberland Gap.

  We pass beneath forested cliffs. This is where I’ve pictured the caves of the Melungeons. But I don’t see any people at all among the trees — six-fingered or otherwise.

  We turn off the highway and wind up the hill to my grandparents’ new house. Originally a nightclub owned by a moonshiner who was sent to prison, it has a wide porch that overlooks the river and the country club golf course on the far bank, with Bays Mountain beyond.

  My grandfather is standing in the side yard, still dressed in his Sunday slacks and monogrammed silk shirt. A golf ball is teed up before him. Getting out of the car, we watch him drive the ball across the river to the fairway of the ninth hole. He used to be a semiprofessional left-handed baseball pitcher, and his smooth, powerful swing is the envy of the club. Because there’s no bridge for five miles, he keeps a boat chained to a tree along the riverbank so he can row over for a quick game whenever he can escape my grandmother’s plans for him. He’s been written up by Ripley’s Believe It or Not as someone who can drive a golf ball onto a green from his yard but has to drive his car twelve miles to reach the course.

  As my parents and grandfather stroll toward the house with a toddling Michael, John, Bill, and I detect the roar of an approaching train. We race for the wall above the valley through which the tracks run. We get there just as the train does. It clatters past, coal cars mounded high with black chunks, some of which dribble over the sides to bounce along the tracks. Other cars carry huge tree trunks bound for the paper mill in town or bales of cotton for the textile mill. The boxcars have names stenciled on their sides. Many say “Carolina, Clinchfield, and Ohio,” the company that owns this line. But some stray cars read “Frisco Line,” “Atlantic Coastline,” “Louisville and Nashville,” “Central of Georgia,” “Denver and Rio Grande.”

  The brakemen on the porch of the caboose wave to us as they vanish around the bend, off to experience adventures in a vast world about which I know nothing. I vow that I’ll go there some day. I find this notion both thrilling and terrifying.

  In the echoing silence that follows, the names
painted on the cars continue to parade through my brain to the beat of the wheels pounding on the steel tracks. They recur time after time, like a nagging tune you can’t get out of your head. Or like the rhythm of “idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura” when I lay in that hospital bed.

  In the kitchen, my grandmother, wearing an apron over her Sunday suit, is molding a ball of dough into a Parker House roll. Two dozen others, brushed with melted butter, are already rising beneath a damp dish towel. She hands me some Saltines, and I go back outdoors to the fishpond and crumble the crackers into the water. The giant goldfish are lurking beneath the lily pads, pretending they’re invisible. Cautiously they glide toward the floating crumbs, waving their filmy fins and tails. Then, throwing caution to the winds, they battle to see who can gulp down the most Saltines.

  I join my parents and my grandfather on the porch to look down at the river, which is frothy from a chemical spill at Eastman. Dead fish are bobbing in the current.

  My mother says that if we’d been standing here in 1779, we’d have seen a flotilla of thirty flatboats passing by, beginning their thousand-mile journey to Nashville. The boat in the rear carried settlers with smallpox. Downriver, some Cherokee attacked and killed them, much to the warriors’ later regret, because they too came down with smallpox, passing it along to their entire village.

  She points to Bays Mountain. Its forested ridges are fluted with coves like a pinched green pie crust. She explains that the mountain was named for a bay stallion who used to roam free there in the nineteenth century and lure domesticated mares into the wild. She’s like a walking Encyclopaedia Britannica (which she’s read from A through Z). I’ve never asked her a question she can’t answer.