Clear Springs (14 page)

The kinfolks from Clear Springs showed up, although they kept the children away, in case of contagion. Mose, Herman, Mary, Datha—my parents’ cousins—were in and out, dressed up for town and joking
and teasing me, while I held court. They brought ice cream and candy. They all said to Mama, “Well, Bobbie Ann’s got enough books to run a school.”

“All those books will break you, Chris,” they said.

“I paid a dollar apiece for them things,” Mama said. “She says she’s going to write her own books so we won’t have to buy any.” Mama laughed so loud she had to grab her big stomach to hold it still.

The doctors and nurses humored me along. Dr. Ellison praised my mystery novel and encouraged me to learn science. I was writing a new Carson Twins book called
The Mystery at Pine Lodge
. I had never seen mountains or a pine lodge, but I could visualize the small mountain village, the pine-scented lodge, the bushy-headed criminal, the pair of girl detectives who snooped in his room at the lodge. I had created a place I had never been, and it was tantalizingly real.

“I’m on pins and needles to find out what’s going to happen next in that book you’re writing,” Dr. Ellison said.

“Me too,” I said.

“You should study journalism when you get to college,” he said. “But don’t forget science.” He gave me a list of words to study:
molecule
,
cell
,
atom
. He said he was going to cure me of my annual pneumonia.

Molecule
. I said it over and over to myself. It was a lovely word.
Mole
plus
cule
.

King George died while I was in the hospital. And Daddy accidentally killed our collie dog, Boots. He didn’t mince his words. “I backed the truck over Boots,” he began. I had been reading all of Albert Payson Terhune’s books—about Buff and Lad and Wolf and Bruce and Lochinvar, the whole Sunnybank cast of noble, heroic collies. I was sad about Boots; and my old dog Rags, dead on the highway, was still a vibrant memory; but the immediate reality of the hospital made events at home seem distant. And the sentimentality of the Terhune books surpassed any emotion about real, flesh-and-fur dogs.

I was getting well, and I no longer imagined that my own life was in danger. But I overheard Daddy say to Mama, “If she keeps this up, she won’t live to be fifteen.” But fifteen seemed so far away, years and years. I didn’t even wonder if there was a special cake for a fifteenth birthday. In retrospect, I see how oblivious to suffering I was, there in my little pleasure-dome. I was enacting a typical Mason trait—retreating into my playhouse, the way Granny retreated into her mind, and the way Daddy retreated to the farm after the war.

Either Dr. Ellison or puberty cured me, and I’ve hardly been sick since. He gave me vitamin pills to build my strength. I liked to lick off the sugar coating and taste the mysterious flavor beneath. It was much like Fletcher’s Castoria, a staple patent medicine of my childhood.

That summer, when I was well and running barefooted over the farm, Mama invited Dr. Ellison to supper. Janice and I had a new little sister, named LaNelle, and Mama was healthy and busy, operating at her usual speed. She cooked ham and field peas and scalloped potatoes and double-chocolate dump cake for our guest.

Dr. Ellison wanted to go out and walk in the fields, which I thought was unusual. He was from Detroit and he said he was enchanted by the country, an attitude that mystified me. The country was so ordinary, I thought. We climbed a stile over a fence into a pasture. He threw out his arms to embrace the landscape. “This is a wonderful place,” he said. “It is beautiful, a treasure. You should always appreciate it.”

“This place?” I said. I couldn’t imagine he meant grass, blackberry briars, cow manure. I wanted to go to Detroit, where there were concrete sidewalks and tall buildings and traffic. Everything was so green here, and nothing important ever happened. Mama’s aunt Mary and uncle Rudy came to visit from Detroit each summer. Mama fried chicken for them, and they loved the chicken so much they picked the bones clean and then sucked on them. They couldn’t get good, tender chicken like that in Detroit, they said. They missed beans and cornbread and onions. But I thought they were ridiculous to come back. Detroit was an intriguing place, with Yankees, who spoke another language and ate different food—Detroit food. That’s what I wanted.

Food was the center of our lives. Everything we did and thought revolved around it. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it—endlessly, day after day, season after season. This was life on a farm—as it had been time out of mind.

The area around Clear Springs, on Panther Creek, was one of the first white settlements in the Jackson Purchase. In the spring of 1820, Peyton Washam, his fifteen-year-old son Peter, and a third man whose name has been forgotten came to Panther Creek from Virginia with a plan to build a cabin and plant some corn. Mrs. Washam and the seven other children, whom they had left in a settlement about a hundred miles away, would come along later. Before the men could begin building, they had to slash a clearing from the wilderness. It was tougher than they expected. They had plenty of water, for the place abounded with springs, but they soon ran out of food and supplies. They sent for more, but before these arrived they were reduced to boiling and eating their small treasure (half a bushel) of seed corn—the dried corn that would have let them get out a crop. Then Peyton Washam came down with a fever. He sent for his wife to come quickly. She arrived late at night and got lost in the canebrake—a thicket of canes growing up to thirty feet high. Frightened in the noisy darkness, she waited, upright and sleepless, beneath an old tree till daylight, according to the accounts. She hurried on then, propelled by worry, but when she reached her husband’s camp, she was too late. He had died during the night. Afterwards, she lived out his dream, settling in the vicinity with her children. The area her husband had chosen eventually grew into the community where a dozen branches of my family took root.

This story vexes me. What a bold but pathetic beginning! What careless, untrained pioneers. How could Peyton Washam and his cohorts
have run out of food so soon? If they arrived in the spring, they should have planted that seed corn before long (between mid-April and mid-May). Why, in a mild Kentucky spring, did they not get a garden out right away? How could they have run out of supplies before they got their corn in the ground? Of course they had to clear some canebrake, which wasn’t easy. But it wasn’t as hard as clearing trees. You can even eat cane like a vegetable. In May, there would have been a carpet of wild strawberries. If Peyton Washam was too sick to forage, why didn’t the kid and the other guy go pick something? What kind of pioneer eats his seed corn? Why didn’t they shoot a squirrel?

Mrs. Washam is the hero of the tale. She survived and her children joined her. She probably could handle a gun. I’m sure she knew how to get out a garden. I picture her coming alone with a basket of cornbread and fried pies, looking for her sick, hungry husband, trying to follow directions scribbled on a piece of paper. Turn left
before
the canebrake. Follow the creek to the large old tree. Or maybe Peyton Washam’s handwriting was bad—maybe he meant an
oak
tree.

This was the rough and foolhardy beginning of Clear Springs. The expedition was a man’s notion, with a woman coming to the rescue. The men were starving without her. It makes perfect sense to me, in light of everything I know about the rural life that came down to me from that community. When I think of Clear Springs, I think first of the women cooking. Every Christmas we went out to the Mason homeplace for a grand celebration dinner that included at least a dozen cakes. And in the summer we went to big homecoming feasts—called dinner-on-the-ground—at nearby McKendree Methodist Church, which was on Mason land.

One day Mama and Granny were shelling beans and talking about the proper method of drying apples. I was nearly eleven and still entirely absorbed with the March girls in
Little Women
. Drying apples was not in my dreams. Beth’s death was weighing darkly on me at that moment, and I threw a little tantrum—what Mama called a hissy fit.

“Can’t y’all talk about anything but food?” I screamed.

There was a shocked silence. “Well, what else is there?” Granny asked.

Granny didn’t question a woman’s duties, but I did. I didn’t want to be hulling beans in a hot kitchen when I was fifty years old. I wanted
to
be
somebody, maybe an airline stewardess. Also, I had been listening to the radio. I had notions.

Our lives were haunted by the fear of crop failure. We ate as if we didn’t know where our next meal might come from. All my life I have had a recurrent food dream: I face a buffet or cafeteria line, laden with beautiful foods. I spend the entire dream choosing the foods I want. My anticipation is deliciously agonizing. I always wake up just as I’ve made my selections but before I get to eat.

Working with food was fraught with anxiety and desperation. In truth, no one in memory had missed a meal—except Peyton Washam on the banks of Panther Creek wistfully regarding his seed corn. But the rumble of poor Peyton’s belly must have survived to trouble our dreams. We were at the mercy of nature, and it wasn’t to be trusted. My mother watched the skies at evening for a portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign. Our livelihood—even our lives—depended on forces outside our control.

I think this dependence on nature was at the core of my rebellion. I hated the constant sense of helplessness before vast forces, the continuous threat of failure. Farmers didn’t take initiative, I began to see; they reacted to whatever presented itself. I especially hated women’s part in the dependence.

My mother allowed me to get spoiled. She never even tried to teach me to cook. “You didn’t want to learn,” she says now. “You were a lady of leisure, and you didn’t want to help. You had your nose in a book.”

I believed progress meant freedom from the field and the range. That meant moving to town, I thought.

Because we lived on the edge of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we grew our food and made our clothes, while they bought whatever they needed. Although we were self-sufficient and resourceful and held clear title to our land, we lived in a state of psychological poverty. As I grew older, this acute sense of separation from town affected me more deeply. I began to sense that the fine life in town—celebrated in magazines, on radio, in movies—was denied us. Of course we weren’t poor at all. Poor people had too many kids, and they weren’t landowners; they rented decrepit little houses with plank floors and trash in the yard. “Poor people are wormy and eat wild onio,” Mama said. We weren’t poor, but we were country.

We had three wardrobes—everyday clothes, school clothes, and Sunday clothes. We didn’t wear our school clothes at home, but we could wear them to town. When we got home from church, we had to change back into everyday clothes before we ate Mama’s big Sunday dinner.

“Don’t eat in your good clothes!” Mama always cried. “You’ll spill something on them.”

Mama always preferred outdoor life, but she was a natural cook. At harvest time, after she’d come in from the garden and put out a wash, she would whip out a noontime dinner for the men in the field—my father and grandfather and maybe some neighbors and a couple of hired hands: fried chicken with milk gravy, ham, mashed potatoes, lima beans, field peas, corn, slaw, sliced tomatoes, fried apples, biscuits, and peach pie. This was not considered a banquet, only plain hearty food, fuel for work. All the ingredients except the flour, sugar, and salt came from our farm—the chickens, the hogs, the milk and butter, the Irish potatoes, the beans, peas, corn, cabbage, apples, peaches. Nothing was processed, except by Mama. She was always butchering and plucking and planting and hoeing and shredding and slicing and creaming (scraping cobs for the creamed corn) and pressure-cooking and canning and freezing and thawing and mixing and shaping and baking and frying.

We would eat our pie right on the same plate as our turnip greens so as not to mess up another dish. The peach cobbler oozed all over the turnip-green juice and the pork grease. “It all goes to the same place,” Mama said. It was boarding-house reach, no “Pass the peas, please.” Conversation detracted from the sensuous pleasure of filling yourself. A meal required meat and vegetables and dessert. The beverages were milk and iced tea (“ice-tea”). We never used napkins or ate tossed salad. Our salads were Jell-O and slaw. We ate “poke salet” and wilted lettuce. Mama picked tender, young pokeweed in the woods in the spring, before it turned poison, and cooked it a good long time to get the bitterness out. We liked it with vinegar and minced boiled eggs. Wilted lettuce was tender new lettuce, shredded, with sliced radishes and green onions, and blasted with hot bacon grease to blanch the rawness. “Too many fresh vegetables in summer gives people the scours,” Daddy said.

Food was better in town, we thought. It wasn’t plain and everyday. The centers of pleasure were there—the hamburger and barbecue places, the movie shows, all the places to buy things. Woolworth’s,
with the pneumatic tubes overhead rushing money along a metallic mole tunnel up to a balcony; Lochridge & Ridgway, with an engraved sign on the third-story cornice:
STOVES
,
APPLIANCES
,
PLOWS
. On the mezzanine at that store, I bought my first phonograph records, brittle 78s of big-band music—Woody Herman and Glenn Miller, and Glen Gray and his Casa Loma Orchestra playing “No Name Jive.” A circuit of the courthouse square took you past the grand furniture stores, the two dime stores, the shoe stores, the men’s stores, the ladies’ stores, the banks, the drugstores. You’d walk past the poolroom and an exhaust fan would blow the intoxicating smell of hamburgers in your face. Before she bought a freezer, Mama stored meat in a rented food locker in town, near the ice company. She stored the butchered calf there, and she fetched hunks of him each week to fry. But hamburgers in town were better. They were greasier, and they came in waxed-paper packages.