This is the lawyer who’ll contact you when I’m gone. I’ve used money left over from the farm, those investments I made, to hire a fellow to regularly clean my family’s cemetery there. The cemetery still belongs to me, I wasn’t about to let anyone steal my ancestry. I’ve bequeathed the property to the American Legion. I had to burn my journals—I realized it wouldn’t be safe to have anyone read the things I wrote. They could come after me. Or sue you.
The note is signed “Love, Dad.”
I shake my head—did I really think the end would differ from the rest?
Inside the box, carefully folded, almost lying in state, is a World War II army uniform in perfect condition, scratchy dark khaki wool a half-century old, dry-cleaned and protected from moths for decades. I hold the waist-length Eisenhower jacket up and notice how slim he was at twenty; written in ink by hand on the lining are his name and a number. A Second Infantry Division badge and three sergeant’s stripes on each sleeve. Above one chest pocket a ribboned bar is decorated with three metal stars: the stars may signify campaigns—the Invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, I don’t know what the other would be. There’s a brass rifle pin for combat experience, a cobalt blue bar I’ll later learn is a Presidential Unit Citation.
Beneath the uniform, in a rectangular leather box, is the Bronze Star Medal, a five-point star with a tiny five-point star in the center. The fourth highest award for bravery hangs suspended from a red ribbon. My father.
I pin the medal to the jacket, thinking how much a war that ended before my birth cost all of us. Staring at the smaller star within the larger, I caress the rough fabric and imagine what might have been.
Paint-box leaves—the hues of heaven—flutter into the open grave in the Brantley cemetery. I stare at the two coral maple leaves that will go into the dark cavern of eternity with my mother. As I’ve begun painting again, painting the ruins of old houses in particular, I’ve wondered if we’re more haunted by the things that happen to us or by the things that don’t, by what our parents do or by the things they don’t do. Either way, we can never take the full measure of their experience. What I know for sure is that one person’s tragic life can mercilessly draw blood from others.
The hearse pulls in slowly. It wasn’t easy, getting a judge to declare a living parent missing so I could become next of kin for the other. Various cousins have come and we stand for the short service; a woman from the church where my parents were married sings “Somebody’s Callin’ My Name.” My mother’s sheet music of that song was so worn it had to have been important to her. I gaze around the family plot. If my father ever surfaces, I’ll bury him here too. There’s only room at my mother’s feet but it’s a nice spot, right behind the Brantley suffragette—that’ll probably keep him awake until the resurrection.
As a woman sings over my mother’s new grave and yellow leaves drift onto the freshly-turned earth, I recall the day she stopped me from burying the colored leaves I loved. When the singing fades, my mother’s pecan casket, made of the same trees that guard Lincoln Street, goes down into the earth again. Home finally, to rest at the right hand of her mother.
After my mother’s second burial, I drive fifteen miles to the outskirts of another small forgotten town and pull into a dilapidated dirt driveway nearly blockaded by a jungle of overgrown vines and trees. I get out of the car and carefully pick my way across the yard filled with broken bricks, rampant weeds, fallen limbs. I reach the green iron park bench cemented to a concrete slab—to keep vandals from stealing it—and sit down and stare at the house. When I had the bench installed, the Charleston delivery men looked at me like I was from another planet.
I sit down and study the flint gray shell of the wooden house built in the late 1800s. The roof is partially caved in and only a few steps to the wide front porch remain; I once took a chance and climbed them but couldn’t go farther because the porch floor is missing, as are the railings and every single balustrade. Although the front door remains, there’s no floor inside the house either. Scavengers probably pulled up twenty-foot heart pine boards decades ago. The fireplace chimney has toppled over, and a large magnolia tree sprouts through the gaping roof. Decorative tendrils of Spanish moss everywhere. Our ghostly Southern air-plant that feeds on rain and dust and never harms the trees it embraces.
Overgrown tree limbs cast cooling shadows over me on the bench, but sunlight floods the house’s interior, stripes the century-old dark beams that supported the missing floors. The light slides like warm liquid across the magnolia’s leaves, the white blooms velvety, iridescent. The air is loamy, thick with the promises of nature. Copperheads may be lurking in the piles of broken boards and bricks behind the house, but in the old trees warbling songbirds carry on a different life.
My painter grandmother grew up in this house. My mother once brought me here: the family who owned the house had discovered several paintings in the attic and offered them to us. Stretchers so old they looked historic, supporting images undoubtedly painted by a teenager. To my mother’s delight, the owners let us wander about. The twenty acres behind the house sported tall rows of corn; now they’re a geography of weeds and brambles. Even so, sometimes what I see there are long symmetrical rows of loblolly pine trees.
For days after he sent it to me, I kept my father’s uniform draped over a chair by a window, as though he were visiting and might enjoy the view of the Rockies. Eventually this seemed demented, so I got out the box and began refolding the heavy wool jacket. When I got to the pants, I felt something in the right front pocket and reached in and pulled out several hundred-dollar bills. I reached in again and came out with others. Had to be over two thousand dollars. Very old-looking bills. Did he hide this money here years ago and later forgot about it?
I picked up one of the bills and stared at Grover Cleveland’s face.
Good Lord. It’s a thousand-dollar bill. Is it real?
I stared at the other bills spilling across my father’s uniform. All the same. I counted them one by one. A quarter of a million dollars.
The world is kinder for those who can love unselfishly, and more colorful, more intriguing, for the idiosyncratic, the truly unforgettable who range among us. I gaze again at the tumbling-down structure from my mother’s family purchased with my father’s money. It feels like a place to come home to, a place where I belong. Symbols matter, and a ruin is not always a ruin. The house is too gone to be saved, true; I know my cousins wonder what I’ll do with a worthless old place in the middle of nowhere. Maybe I should buy a Checker cab to sit in the driveway. Likely I’ll just visit here now and again. Do a painting of the house. Walk about and see what I see. Plant a pine tree or two. I’ll have to show up from time to time to check on my ancestral holdings.
What would Mr. Blue Eyes say to a picnic at my old home place?
When I get to Columbia two hours later, before heading to the airport I drive across town to Lincoln Street and park at the renovated house we never owned. I sit and watch our lives coalesce in the air above the house and descend into the willing earth beneath it. Now we’re down there with the man-killing elephant, the carousel ladies, the wounded men in gray, the white-haired old lady with one arm. We rest in the comforting arms of our dearest possession, our history.
I wave to the barefoot young woman in a flowered dress—she’s smiling and swinging her child in a circle.
Acknowledgments
My gratitude to the following organizations for their financial support of my work: the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. Also to Lenoir Rhyne University, the Loft Literary Center, and the St. Mar Arts Group.
Individuals who made significant contributions to this book, directly or indirectly, are: Natalie Goldberg, Ellen Hawley, Constance Kunin, Brian McDermott, Rose Munns, and Rebecca Schneider. My thanks to one and
all.
To my father, my appreciation and admiration for his steadfastness, generosity, stellar wit, and an originality beyond compare.
My love to Robert Bush and to Jill Nichols Dineen, the compatriots of a lifetime.
And certainly not least: Kudos to Kieran the Retriever for his sage advice and excellent company. That dog ferries sunlight in his soul.
This book is indebted to the history of the grandparents I never knew, William Martin Lightsey and Henrietta Elizabeth Copeland. Love to all my Lightsey kin, bred in the bone raconteurs who never let a good yarn depend on fact or lack for truth.
So many people who cross a writer’s path affect who that writer becomes. A special few have been: the wonderful teachers in the Carolinas who first ignited my imagination, the New Yorker in love with Virginia Woolf, the dyslexic who made me understand reading, the bookseller who showed me St. Thomas, the fabulous mask-maker in New Orleans, the Canadian pianist whose music (and high comedy) inspired me, the British poet and our hike to the Rosslyn Chapel, the Tennessee redhead who died too young, the Taos native who let me open the acequia gates when the spring run-off came down, my Twin Cities writing students who showed up at a public lecture I gave dressed as “Southern Belles” (complete with mammoth hats) and sat in the front row.
Thank you to those who listened to the stories in this book, and to all my gratitude for so many luminous moments.
Linda Lightsey Rice
Minneapolis, 2012
About the Author
Linda Lightsey Rice is the author of the novel Southern Exposure, originally published by Doubleday, which was nominated for the PEN Hemingway Award, was a featured selection of The Literary Guild, and was compared by Kirkus Reviews and other publications to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary. An excerpt from Southern Exposure recently appeared in The American South anthology published in Germany.
The author was a 2004 recipient of the McKnight Foundation Fellowship in Creative Prose. A former newspaper reporter who also worked in the New York publishing industry, she has received artistic awards from the Jerome Foundation, Virginia Commonwealth University, the South Carolina Humanities Commission, the Loft Literary Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland.
She has taught creative writing at the University of Tennessee, Lenoir Rhyne University, St. Catherine University, and the Chautauqua Institution. She taught master classes in the novel at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she won a teaching award and led several programs for promising young writers.
A native of South Carolina, Linda Lightsey Rice has also lived in New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, New Orleans, New Mexico, and Ireland. She currently resides in Minneapolis and in Tennessee.
Southern Exposure remains available in paperback and as an eBook. For information about the author’s upcoming projects or events, please visit www.lindalightseyrice.com.
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