Capote (3 page)

Jennie put up with Callie’s sniping, but it was not in her nature to remain silent, and the two of them bickered endlessly. Indeed, there was almost nothing they did not quarrel about: whether they should have company for dinner, serve steak or chicken, set the table this way or that. According to a script they had followed a thousand times, Callie was invariably victorious in those small battles; but Jennie would win all the big ones, and when she did, Callie would run to her room in tears.

Two years older than Jennie and four years older than Callie, Sook was nonetheless the youngest in mind and spirit. Somewhat stout, with white hair cropped close to her head, she was so childlike that she was thought to be retarded by many people; in fact she was merely so shy and unworldly as sometimes to appear simpleminded. She had rarely left Monroe County; she had never read anything but the Bible and Grimm’s fairy tales in all of her adult years; and she had never been to a movie, never had seen Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, or any of the other stars everyone was talking about, never even noticed when the silents learned to talk. Her job was to stay home and take care of the house, and she knew little of the world outside its gates.

Only occasionally did she make longer excursions. One was on that day each fall when she went into the woods to find ingredients for her dropsy cure, whose recipe had come down to her from the Indians, or the gypsies—no one knew for sure. When she returned, she would boil all her gleanings, chiefly herbs and sourwood, in a giant washpot in the backyard, and neighbors would know from the red glow that night that Sook was making her medicine. Whatever it was, it seemed to work, and several victims of the disease praised her as they would a saint.

A second excursion also took place in the fall when she searched the woods for pecans to put into her Christmas fruitcakes. She would make a dozen or so and give them away to relatives and people she admired, such as the man who peddled tinware from a wagon or President and Mrs. Roosevelt; the Roosevelts’ thank-you note, which bore both signatures on White House stationery, was one of her most treasured possessions. Yet even the gentle, innocent Sook had a dark side, an addiction to morphine, which had been prescribed as a painkiller after a mastectomy, and her habit sometimes made her moody and irritable. “If she ran out of her medicine, she’d act wild and wouldn’t be fit to talk to,” recalled Seabon. “‘Oh! Oh!’ she would moan, and call to me: ‘Seabon! Run down to Dr. Coxwell’s and get my medicine. I gotta have my medicine!’”

Surrounded by contentious, difficult women and half-invalided by asthma, Bud, who was as tall as he was thin, kept to himself. Though he was the putative head of the clan, by both gender and age, he long since had deferred to Jennie, and much of the time he would remain in his room, breathing the acrid fumes of a cough-suppressor called Green Mountain, which he burned in a saucer turned upside down on the fireplace mantel. The rest of the time he spent either supervising the farm he owned outside of town or rocking in a chair on the front porch. Jennie and Callie had had their share of beaux, but Bud had never taken out a woman, or shown an interest in sex of any kind; no one presumed to ask why. He never spoke harshly about anyone, and the only person in the world he seemed to dislike was his younger brother, Howard, who lived with his wife on a farm nearby. Long ago they had argued over land they had inherited from their father, and they had not spoken since. When Howard and his wife came to dinner, as they did every Sunday afternoon, the two brothers would sit across the table from each other and exchange not so much as a syllable.

Yet beneath the emotional storms, the fights, tearful exits, and oddities of manners and behavior, there was a foundation of calm, order and a now-vanished simplicity to life on Alabama Avenue, and it is easy to understand why Lillie Mae, who had wanted so desperately to leave, was drawn back so often. For all their intrigues and harsh words, the Faulks were a family. They knew that whatever was said, in the end they could always count on one another. They took care of their own.

In 1930, when Truman went there to live, Monroeville was a small country town, scarcely more than a furrow between fields of corn and cotton. That year’s census listed 1,355 people, but even that tiny figure probably was exaggerated by local officials, who wanted a number big enough to qualify for a post office. There was not one paved street, and a row of oak trees grew right down the middle of Alabama Avenue. On hot summer days cars and horses kicked up red dust every time they passed by; when it rained that dust turned to mud. Without a map it was hard to know where the town began and the surrounding farmland ended. Yards were big, with two or three outbuildings, and most people kept chickens, some pigs, and at least one cow. The Faulks did not have a cow—Sook would not milk one—but they did raise chickens, and turkeys too, and every winter Bud would bring in from his farm a couple of hogs, which were soon sent to the smokehouse.

Everyone followed farmers’ hours, up by dawn, in bed by eight or nine. In the Faulk household, Sook and old Aunt Liza—all elderly blacks were called “aunt” or “uncle” by the white people they worked for—would start cooking breakfast, the big meal of the day, at five: ham, eggs, and pancakes, of course; but also, in an almost excessive display of the land’s bounty, fried chicken, pork chops, catfish, and squirrel, according to the season. Along with all that, there would be grits and gravy, black-eyed peas, collards (with corn bread to sop up the collard liquor), biscuits and homemade jams and preserves, pound cake, sweet milk, buttermilk, and coffee flavored with chicory. After that cockcrow banquet Jennie and Callie would walk down to their store, Bud would retire to his bedroom, and Sook would go on to her other domestic chores, which included keeping an eye on Aunt Liza and overseeing Anna Stabler, the old black retainer who lived in a little shack in the backyard. Anna was almost part of the family, and so cantankerous that she made Jennie and Callie sound almost sweet-tempered. “Fuss! You could hear her fussing two miles away!” said Mary Ida. “A Negro didn’t sass a white person then, but Anna said anything she pleased to any white person she wanted to. Sook would cuss her out for not cleaning in places you couldn’t see, like the bottom of the piano, and Anna would just stand up and blister her back. Then they would both laugh and go on with what they were doing.” Part Indian, Anna denied that she had any black blood at all, plastering her cheeks with rouge to prove that she had red skin. Weekends she sat on her porch and played her accordion, proudly wearing her best dress and stuffing her jaws with cotton in a vain effort to disguise the fact that she had no teeth.

Jennie and Callie came home for lunch, which was usually left-overs from breakfast, then came back again for an early supper, much of which had also been part of that early-morning feast. When dinner was over, everyone wandered out to the porch, which was the center of activity most of the year; winters are short in southern Alabama and some years so mild that they are scarcely noticed at all, fall merging into spring with only the briefest punctuation in between. After a while neighbors dropped by to gossip: talk was the chief form of entertainment, and everybody knew all there was to know about everybody else. Once a week Sook and Callie invited in some friends, usually Dr. Logan and Dr. Bear, to play a card game called rook. Sook, who was the best player on the street, would mix up a batch of divinity candy for the occasion and dance around in a fever of excitement all day. Jennie was the only one who remained aloof; card games, she said, were a damned-fool business. Her only passion was her garden. Her japonica bushes were a neighborhood landmark, and she guarded them as if they were precious jewels, which to her way of thinking they were.

Even the Depression, which hit the South first and hardest, did not alter that placid routine. There were more people for Sook to distribute hand-me-downs to, and “Hoover cars,” horse-drawn wagons with rubber tires stripped off scrapped Model-T’s, were beginning to make their appearance. But money had never been as plentiful or as important in small towns like Monroeville as it had been in the cities, and its sudden disappearance mattered comparatively less. The Faulks were hurt by the hard times, but they never suffered real deprivation. There was, as always, an around-the-clock banquet in Sook’s kitchen.

F
OR
Truman, who had stayed in that house so many times before, often for weeks on end, there was nothing to get used to, there were no adjustments to be made. All that summer of 1930 he swam every day at Hatter’s Mill, which was the place, out Drewry Road, where most of Monroeville went to picnic, swim, and applaud the daring young men who dived from a window on the third story of the old millhouse. He slept in a bedroom next to Sook’s, and when he was not swimming at the pond, he was usually with her, in the kitchen, the yard, or the fields beyond. After he entered first grade in September, they had less time together. But they still had afternoons and weekends, and as the air began to stir again after the close days of summer, she taught him how to fly a kite. He, in turn, accompanied her on her autumnal forays into the woods, helping her gather the ingredients for her dropsy medicine and the pecans for her Christmas cakes. She did her best to be both mother and friend, and to a large extent she succeeded.

Truman had only one other real companion, and that was Harper Lee, the youngest daughter of the family next door. By local standards, the Lees were considered bookish. Mr. Lee, who was a lawyer, had once been part owner and editor of the Monroe
Journal
, and he had also spent some time in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, as a state senator. His wife, the same Mrs. Lee who had played the piano at Arch and Lillie Mae’s wedding, was a crossword-puzzle whiz, a woman of gigantic proportions who sat for hours on her front porch, intently matching words and boxes. Her mind was not altogether right, however. She wandered up and down the street saying strange things to neighbors and passersby, and twice she tried to drown Harper—or Nelle, as she was then called—in the bathtub. “Both times Nelle was saved by one of her older sisters,” said Truman. “When they talk about Southern grotesque, they’re not kidding!”

Harper survived the dunkings to become the tomboy on the block, a girl who, as Mary Ida phrased it, could beat the steam out of most boys her age, or even a year or so older, as Truman was. Indeed, he was one of her favorite targets. But that did not stop them from becoming constant companions, and a treehouse in the Lees’ chinaberry tree became their fortress against the world, a leafy refuge where they read and acted out scenes from their favorite books, which chronicled the exploits of Tarzan, Tom Swift, and the Rover Boys.

The bond that united them was stronger than friendship—it was a common anguish. They both bore the bruises of parental rejection, and they both were shattered by loneliness. Neither had many other real friends. Nelle was too rough for most other girls, and Truman was too soft for most other boys. He was small for his age, to begin with, and he did not enjoy fighting and rolling in the dirt, as most boys around there did. Without meaning to do so, Lillie Mae, who sent him his clothes by mail, dressed him too well, and his freshly laundered shirt and crisp linen shorts made him as conspicuous as Little Lord Fauntleroy. People often remarked that with his white-blond hair and sky-blue eyes, he was pretty enough to be a girl. He was, in short, regarded as a sissy.

There are photographs of Truman at that age—a tiny towhead with a huge grin—but Harper provided the best picture thirty years later. She modeled one of the characters in her novel
To Kill a Mockingbird
after him, and described him as a true curiosity: “He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us [an] old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead…. We came to know [him] as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”

Although he was not much appreciated by most of his contemporaries, he was an affectionate and beguiling child, this pocket Merlin, and if they did not take to him immediately, as Sook had done, Jennie and Callie soon did so. “I fear if there is such a thing, we all love him too much,” Callie confessed in one of her reports to Arch’s mother. “He is a darling sweet boy,” she added later. “We do enjoy having him. He is the sunshine of our home.” He was uncommonly bright, and Callie, the old schoolteacher, took pride in his budding mind, remarking that she and Sook read to him every night—and he to them. “I just love to see his little mind developing and taking in things,” she said.

As the self-appointed guardian of morals on Alabama Avenue, Callie also assured his grandmother that he was doing well in Sunday school—had, in fact, been promoted with honors—and that he was receiving proper spiritual guidance at home as well. “We give him every pleasure that we can,” she wrote, “but of course we do try to teach him that there is a right way to have pleasure. I tried to get him interested in memorizing the 23rd. Psalm, also the Ten Commandments. So I told him (he almost knew it anyway) that it was a low standard of teaching, but if he would memorize the 23rd. Psalm perfectly, I would give him 25 cents—but not to do it just for the 25 cents, but for the love of God and the love he had for God. So he readily agreed that he would memorize it because it was right for him to do so. He did perfectly and I gave him the 25 cents and Sook added a bit to it. Now, he has commenced on the Ten Commandments. I told him just to take one each day and it wouldn’t seem so hard.”

Despite Callie’s assurances, Truman was not happy. His own descriptions of his life in Monroeville are almost grim, and Callie might have been surprised at how unfavorably she was remembered. Compared with Sook, both Callie and Jennie were viewed as cold and unloving, as purse-mouthed and pinchpenny spinsters. He probably expected too much from them, or he may have been misled by Jennie’s gruff manner and wearied by Callie’s righteousness; his own memory of his religious instruction saw him constantly being marched off to church, with no more choice than the prisoners who worked in chain gangs on the roads outside town. Still, it is hard to imagine what more the Faulk sisters could have done for him. Although Lillie Mae and—on rare occasions—Arch paid most of his expenses, it was that peculiar family that actually took care of him.