Kinfolks

by Lisa Alther

  My grandfather smiles at her. They like each other. They’re similar — both smart and quiet. My grandmother’s and mother’s feelings about each other are another matter.

  We sit down at the gleaming mahogany table. As silver bowls and platters of shelly beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, molded Jell-O salad, and rolls circulate, my grandfather carves the roast beef. He can make the pieces as thick or thin, as rare or well done, as anyone wants, slicing with either hand. I’m intrigued by this talent, except when I reflect that he practices by carving similarly through human fat and muscle during the week. This involves blood, which I can’t yet bear to think about.

  On the wall beside us stretches a mural that features a white plantation house and a hoop-skirted belle who is entering a horse-drawn carriage. In the foreground, slaves on a wharf are loading cotton onto a sailing ship. But my grandmother, born in 1887 amid the coal fields of southwest Virginia, wouldn’t have known a cotton boll from a hockey puck.

  Her father farmed near a village called Darwin. When she and my grandfather first met, he was her teacher. They turned out to be second cousins. After they married, both taught in rural schools, until she persuaded him to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor (a dream perhaps fostered by his watching helplessly while both his parents died).

  My grandfather attended the University of Louisville, hopping freight trains to visit his wife, who was still teaching in Virginia. The next year he won a scholarship to the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, where he tended Confederate veterans at the Soldiers’ Home. My grandmother joined him in Richmond, where she sold cosmetics in a department store and worked as a matron at a women’s prison, once fighting off some attacking inmates with a hat pin. During the summers, my grandfather sold aluminum pots door-to-door and cut timber. He was also paid to pitch in a semiprofessional baseball league.

  As I try to picture my elegant grandmother fencing Cyrano-like with a hat pin in a prison, I listen to my father and grandfather reminisce about the preacher at their Baptist church when my father was a boy. One Sunday he demanded during a sermon that everyone who agreed that golf on Sunday was a sin stand up. The entire congregation, including my grandfather’s Sunday golfing buddies, stood except for my father and grandfather. When my grandmother saw them still sitting, she sat back down. But when she saw her bridge club standing, she stood back up. Then she sat. Then she stood. Then she sat.

  That afternoon the preacher came to pray over his two unrepentant sinners. Spotting him walking up the sidewalk, my father and grandfather raced out the back door and headed for the woods, the preacher in pursuit. They managed to outrun him. Later that week he was committed to Lyon’s View, the state mental hospital.

  My grandmother’s face is pinched. She doesn’t like this story. But the rest of us are laughing, so she says nothing.

  As time passes, so does my fear of Melungeons. Communists take their place. Some older kids from North Carolina, who’re visiting an aunt down the street, invite me to be their brainwashing victim. They tie me to a grape arbor and demand my grandmother’s name and address. They claim she’s a spy, and they plan to torture her, too. When I refuse, they threaten to drive bamboo splinters beneath my fingernails. But I will never betray my grandmother, whatever they may do to me. They push broom straws under my nails until they bleed, but my jaws remain clenched. Luckily their aunt calls them home for lunch. Untying me, they congratulate me on my courage.

  I’ve learned on the playground at Lincoln Elementary that the best defense is a good offense. Recently a trashy-fifth grader from Highland Park was standing beside me at a stoplight as I walked home from school. She was wearing a red silk wind-breaker embroidered with a dragon, which some older brother or uncle must have bought in Korea, and she was smoking a cigarette. I was nervous because some Highland kids were said to carry switchblades.

  “Are you John Reed’s sister?” she sneered.

  “Yeah,” I sneered back. “You wanna make something of it?”

  Fortunately she didn’t.

  My grandmother is a founder of our town’s Virginia Club. To be eligible you must be born in Virginia, sport a silvery blue perm, and wear white gloves downtown. Mrs. J. Fred Johnson belongs. My mother, the New Yorker, does not. The Virginia Club meets every month to discuss famous Virginians, such as Captain John Smith, George Washington, General Robert E. Lee, and Mrs. Mildred Spencer, the 1952 Pillsbury Bake-Off National Champion, the first to use mayonnaise in chocolate cake to keep it moist.

  The Virginia Club also discusses the superiority of Virginia over Tennessee and the number of acres in each member’s ancestral land grants from King James I. A feature in our town newspaper has reported that the Virginia Clubbers come from “old Virginia bloodlines and money.” My grandmother refers to them as “those fine Colonial ladies.” It’s not unheard of for a member, upon going into labor, to insist that her husband drive her the eight miles across the state line so her baby can be born a Virginian.

  Yet we never go to Virginia, despite the fact that my grandparents between them have fourteen brothers and sisters there, plus many aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and cousins. My grandmother’s mother died of pneumonia when my grandmother was thirteen, and my grandmother didn’t get along with her stepmother. Could this be why we’ve never met her family, or even seen photos of them? When my father was a boy, the drive took ten hours on unpaved roads. The road is paved now, but we’ve gone only once. I recall picking through a slag heap at a coal mine to find amazing fossils of prehistoric plants and insects, but I don’t remember any relatives.

  My father has mentioned a Cherokee ancestress. When I ask my grandmother about this, she speaks of the recent rainstorm and current warm spell.

  As I continue to bug her, she finally snaps, “My family may be a tiny bit Indian. But it’s not a Cherokee. It’s Pocahontas. Pocahontas was a Virginian.”

  Not only have I not been born in Virginia, I am now a left tackle on the Longview Losers. Our coach, the father of Sam (who will go on to become a quarterback at West Point), tells my team, all of them boys but Ellen and me, that if they’d play with my grit, we might win a game or two. I don’t tell him that it’s not grit, I just like the body contact.

  One stormy afternoon we play a team from the mill village called the Stampede. Joe, their captain, is a son of the butcher at the Piggly Wiggly. I slog through the mud with my usual fervor, but the final score is 96-14 in their favor. In parting, Joe says sympathetically to Johnny, one of our halfbacks (who will soon become my first boyfriend, bringing me a real stuffed baby alligator from Florida), that it must be hard to have girls on your team. As the rain pelts down, our team, caked in orange clay, turns as one to gaze at Ellen and me, and we realize that our gridiron days are numbered.

  The boys have an ally in my grandmother, whose silver Cadillac is lurking in our driveway when I get home. I tromp into the living room in my muddy uniform to find her perched on the sofa in a suit of raw silk. Her permed hair encases her head like a helmet of silver feathers. Her face contorts as she struggles to convey her displeasure without frowning, since she’s trying to starve her frown lines. I’m hurt. I’ve endured broom straws under my fingernails for her. But clearly she’s a Two Hearts, not a Tonto.

  I’m standing on the rose-and-aqua Persian carpet in my grandparents’ living room, surrounded by adults I don’t know. I’ve figured out that the tall, lanky men who look uncomfortable in their suits and ties are my grandfather’s cousins from Virginia — Reeds and Artrips. Others are doctors or patients, plant executives, Virginia Clubbers, all come to pay their respects to my grandmother.

  My father looks as though he might start crying. He adored his father, who took him on house calls once he was old enough to help. My father administered ether during operations on kitchen tables in remote hollows.

  He credits this with helping him through World War II. While assigned to a troop ship in the north Atlantic, he had to perform an appendectomy during a German
submarine attack. After strapping himself to the operating table to prevent his being hurled across the room by the depth charges, he discovered that the ship hadn’t been supplied with medical instruments. Using a trick he’d picked up from his father during those house calls, he transformed dinner forks into retractors.

  In France, my father had to climb down a ladder into a deep pit full of German prisoners to treat the ill and injured. But he says it was no different from confronting a houseful of mountaineers, who might bury you in an unmarked forest grave if you botched an operation on one of their kin. Once he was operating on a German prisoner when German paratroopers landed outside the tent. They burst in, waving their rifles. But thanks to the sangfroid he’d learned from his father, he just kept operating. Realizing that the patient was one of their own, the paratroopers thanked my father in perfect English and left.

  There’s a fresh snowfall, so my mother sends my bored brothers and me outside to play. As we careen down the icy hill on our sleds and saucers, I try to figure out what it means that my grandfather is dead. He’d had a heart attack and then cancer, so he’d been even quieter than usual lately. But I’d thought that since I’d gotten better after my nosebleeds, he would, too. I feel indignant at the notion of never seeing him again.

  My mother says that when my father departed for boot camp right after my birth, my grandfather insisted on holding me whenever he was home. And he was sad when my mother, John, and I hit the road in an old Ford, following my father to army bases in Wyoming and Texas. When my father was shipped to Europe, we drove back to Tennessee and then to New York to stay with my mother’s family. Upon my father’s return for a stint at Walter Reed Army Hospital, we drove to Washington, D.C., to join him.

  We moved seven times in my first two years. (As an adult I will suffer from chronic wanderlust.) My car seat was an orange crate on the floor of the backseat. My mother says that when she removed me from it at day’s end, I’d just sit motionless in my playpen like a baby Buddha. Chipmunks would climb through the bars and eat my teething biscuits as I watched in silence. Although this sounds to me like someone who needed medication, it may be when I learned to prize solitude — and kind people like my grandfather, with sad smiles and sky-blue eyes.

  Our parents didn’t let us attend the funeral at the Baptist church because my grandfather’s casket was going to be open. They said they wanted us to remember him as alive and active, not as a waxy corpse wearing bad makeup. Without seeing his inert body, it’s hard for me to believe he’s dead. But maybe that’s what our parents hope we’ll feel — that although my grandfather’s body may be dead, he himself is still with us.

  2

  My Inner Hillbilly

  WHAT I MISS MOST ABOUT THE LONGVIEW LOSERS is the camaraderie. Being pounded into the mud by hoods from across town on a weekly basis is a bonding experience like no other. Because of my early years alone in the orange crate, I have a great longing to belong, coupled with an inability to do so. Consequently, I will join almost any group, but only briefly.

  To prove that I’m now one of the girls, I accept a bid from a sorority at my high school named the Queen Teens. Our nickname is the Q.T.s, pronounced “cuties.” Our archrivals, the Devilish Debs, sometimes call us the Cooties. They’re envious because, although we’re regarded as trashier than they, we throw better parties.

  Each Q.T initiate is instructed to submit a bra and panties. These are returned dyed purple, the club color, with holes cut out for the nipples and the crotch. At the initiation slumber party, we new members model our lacerated lingerie for the old members. Many old members are Baptists who are going steady with the burly footballers with whom I used to butt helmets. But the erotic charge in the small ranch house during this twisted fashion show is palpable as the smoke from their mentholated Salems wreathes the old members’ bouffants.

  Meanwhile, I’ve experienced a religious conversion. I’ve announced to my parents that I don’t believe in God. The truth is that I no longer believe in the Episcopal God. I’ve come to believe instead in my grandmother’s Baptist God because He provides hayrides for His youth groups. The Baptist Youth have been reared to regard anything fun as a sin, so they think sin is fun.

  After a few quick verses of “This Little Light of Mine” for the benefit of the chaperones in the truck cab, each Baptist boy piles up a barricade of hay bales while his Baptist girlfriend hollows out a nest in the loose hay that pads the truck floor. As the truck creeps slowly along the country roads, driven by someone’s salacious dad, the Baptist Youth have been known to make a believer out of more than one lapsed Episcopalian.

  I’ve also joined the marching band. In our town, the Friday-night high school football game is almost as important as church on Sunday. It’s certainly more entertaining. I play the clarinet. I’d have preferred the trumpet, but our family owns an ancestral clarinet, so everyone who wants to play something must play that. John played it before me, and Bill will play it after me.

  I’d also have preferred to play sports rather than the clarinet. But when a group of us girls presented the school board with our plan for a basketball team, the head of the board informed us that competitive sports were injurious to the emotional health of young women. (She will be hospitalized for bipolar disorder several years later, despite never having played basketball.)

  My new plan for escaping the family clarinet involves becoming a flag swinger. At halftime the drum major leads the band onto the football field, followed by the school mascots, an Indian brave and squaw, both dressed in feathered headdresses and fringed buckskins. Our squaw is Jewish. Her father owns the nicest clothing store in town. The band director insists she’s the only student who looks Indian enough for the role. (As an adult, this woman will move to Atlanta and become president of the Hadassah.) After the Indians come the majorettes in their white boots, short shorts, and uniform jackets, led by the head majorette, who twirls the fire baton once the bonfire is lit and the stadium lights are extinguished.

  Behind the majorettes come the half dozen flag swingers, also clad in white boots, short shorts, and uniform jackets. Their maroon-and-gray flags (the school colors) are the size of bridge tablecloths. They’re attached to four-foot staffs with bulb handles. By grasping the bulb you can wave and swirl the flag in hypnotic patterns, making snapping sounds. This is done while marching with your knees brought so high that your thighs are parallel to the ground. It’s like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time.

  One of the flag swingers, although a Devilish Deb, is willing to break ranks and help me realize my dream. She teaches me the routines in my backyard. I march up and down the driveway practicing them for months. The toddlers from next door watch me with round eyes. The dogs try to shred my flapping flag. My family members snigger from the windows of the house.

  The day for the tryouts arrives. My flag swinger pal tells me I’ve got it made: grades count in the final computations, and I’m second in my class. Although I perform my routine flawlessly before the band director and the gym teachers, when the list of winners is posted, my name isn’t on it.

  As I turn to walk away, I realize why. My grades are high, and as I march my knees nearly touch my chin. But the flag swingers and majorettes are drop-dead gorgeous. I’m okay-looking in a wholesome, camp-counselor kind of way. But I’m not perky or frisky. I’m awkward and shy. Worst of all, I lack vim.

  For the first time, I turn to the balm of writing, soon discovering that those prevented from living the life to which they aspire can write about it instead. I produce my first short story. I’ve been reading Faulkner novels from the town library, and I’m entranced by stream of consciousness. In the fourth-grade play, I was Miss Noun, who was married by the preacher to Mr. Verb. It is exhilarating to learn that a famous author writes in phrases that sometimes divorce the two.

  My story is told from the perspective of Nathan Hale on the morning of his hanging by the British for spying during the American Revolution. He watch
es through his prison bars as the boots of the approaching soldiers crush the autumn leaves, and he reflects on the brevity and futility of life. Through Nathan Hale I express my own despair at having failed in the flag-swinging competition, at facing another tedious football season playing the family clarinet in the fourth row of the marching band.

  “Leaves falling. Rust and scarlet and gold. Boots tromping, smashing, crushing. In front of the courthouse, dangling above the scaffold in the red from the rising sun, a noose….”

  The story is published in the school newspaper because I’m also the feature editor to whom I’ve submitted it. But when it appears, I don’t recognize it. It reads, “Brightly colored leaves were falling to the ground outside the bars across Nathan’s window. The soldiers marched through them on their way to the jail to escort him to the gallows….”

  I race into the classroom of the faculty adviser, Mrs. Hawke, who’s my English teacher and the wife of a local sheriff. She’s tall and bony with a face that always looks pained. I say, “Mrs. Hawke, something awful has happened to my story!”

  Looking up from her desk, she says, “I bet you think that story was pretty good?”

  “I didn’t think it was so bad that it needed to be completely rewritten.”

  “Well, let me tell you something, little lady: that story wasn’t even written in complete sentences.”

  After a long pause, I say, “Mrs. Hawke, if you’re going to rewrite my story, you should put your name on it, not mine.”

  “And if you’re going to speak to me in that tone of voice,” she replies, “you need to march right down to the office and see what our guidance counselor has to say about students who are rude to their teachers.”

  She writes out a referral slip and hands it to me. I stomp to the office. The guidance counselor suggests that I go home for the rest of the day and contemplate the consequences of being disrespectful to my superiors.