Clear Springs (28 page)

When Granny had her breakdowns, was she brooding over some strain of mental illness that ran in her family? Was she dwelling on some shameful secret? In her time, a simple human error—like an unwed pregnancy, or a son who “turned out wild”—could cause a trauma that colored a lifetime. It was disgrace, shame, the sense that everything one worked for and believed in and hoped for was ruined by a single misstep. One of Granny’s aunts had “turned out bad” and had left Kentucky. The family disowned her.

What was Granny really so depressed about back in 1950? If her nerves were so fragile, why didn’t she break down again when Granddaddy died, in 1965? Would the sounds of the Beatles really have wrecked her nerves if she hadn’t fled to the car in the woods? What could she bear? What were her limits? Thorazine altered her, blurred her.

Of course, having only one child made Granny overprotective and fearful. And evidently giving birth had been traumatic for her. Mama told me, “The doctor told her not to have any more children after she had Wilburn. She nearly died from a kidney infection.” Granny survived the childbed, but she probably wouldn’t risk it again. This must
have meant no more sex. “I never heard them carrying on after the light was out,” Mama told me. She couldn’t quite imagine it either. I thought about my young, handsome grandfather with his horse and buggy. I remember how he would tease Granny, saying, “Buss me, Ettie,” and she would draw back in embarrassment.

When Daddy was away in the Navy, Granny’s worry about him might have equaled my mother’s, her potential sense of loss just as great as ours. Even though he came back safely, did she sense something changed in him, something lost that she would never get back? Did the aftermath of World War II—he was out there when they dropped that big bomb—simply fester until 1950, when her nerves snapped? The threat of war had not vanished. She may have feared that her son would at any moment be sent to Korea.

Granny’s 1950 breakdown was enclosed in silence. She apparently worried herself into a black hole but couldn’t explain. She revealed only one clue. In the ambulance to Memphis, Mama kept asking her, “What’s bothering you? Tell us what’s wrong with you so we’ll know what to do about it.”

Finally, Granny uttered one sentence. “A year ago the doctor told me I have an enlarged globe in my heart,” she said.

That was all Granny would say. Apparently the doctor had not explained. She didn’t know whether she had a serious heart condition that needed treatment. She probably would not have returned to the doctor to ask questions or have him listen to her heart again. It was more common to let well enough alone, in case the doctor said something you didn’t want to hear. But from the moment the doctor spoke, she had probably imagined her enlarged heart bursting out of her chest, exploding. It could happen at any moment. What would become of her husband, her son, the family, the garden, her hens? Everything was involved in the silent storm of her worry. The whole world as she knew it revolved around the size of her heart—a heart she had thought was tight and stingy. But her heart was too big. She had to hide it, as the men hid the bull’s amorous swelling from little girls’ eyes. She had to contain her heart. She felt it beating, each beat threatening her. She could see the throb all the way to her navel. It fluttered and patted her pendulous, unsupported breasts beneath the peach ribbed-cotton camisole she wore. She could remember her heart beating like that—in excitement, in anticipation, when Bob came courting, as he had done for several years. In 1910, five years before they married, Bob was twenty-eight, and she was twenty-two. He came on Sundays and took
her riding in his buggy. She was living with her parents and her brother and his stunningly beautiful new wife. In the night, Ethel heard noises: her sickly parents moaning in pain; the newlyweds moving together in their four-poster bed, entwined in each other’s arms; and in the cot in the annex to the kitchen, the heavy breathing of Winston Tucker, the boarder, who labored on the farm. Winston was eighteen. She could hear him stir in the night. She slept lightly.

It was so cold going across the breezeway early in the morning to the offset kitchen to cook breakfast. The boarder had to be fed first, so he could get out to feed the animals and milk the cows. He saw her in the mornings, fresh from bed. She hastened to pin up the falling strands of her hair. Silently, she dipped water into the kettle. Sometimes he would have the fire started. Winston Tucker had few prospects. She, of course, couldn’t form an alliance with a hired hand. Her father—Zollicoffer Quigley Arnett—was a respectable blacksmith and carpenter and farmer. He was an invalid, and her mother was not well either. Ethel took care of them. She did not dare leave them. She needed to tend her parents. She wanted to teach school. She kept putting Bob off.

I imagine Granny through her twenties, living in the same household with the dark, muscular boarder, getting up at dawn and traipsing in her nightgown to the cold kitchen to build the fire and start the biscuits. I imagine the fire of her youth, burning so slowly and so deeply that she was hardly warmed by it. Maybe she wasn’t as passionate as she should have been about patient Bob. Maybe the real love of her life married someone else, unable to wait while she cared for her parents.

When she was twenty-six, her father died, and she married Bob a year later. I wonder if Ethel insisted on waiting until after her father’s death. Did Z.Q. disapprove of Bob? Was she too embarrassed or frightened in the face of his grim authority to make the sexual leap into marriage? When he died, maybe her mother, Laura, mindful of the biological exigencies, urged her to plunge ahead. Perhaps it was her mother’s encouragement that enabled her to leave home finally, to join her long-suffering suitor. But what if Ethel had still wanted to teach school, which she couldn’t do if she married? Did Laura push Ethel into marriage against her desires?

Ever since my grandmother’s death, I have pondered the mystery of her mind. I remember my own mind during late childhood and adolescence.
I was afraid of fire and brimstone, afraid of death and the dark. My mind is hers, in part. The imagination connects me with her as surely as eye color and hair texture. I see myself in Granny’s face. I can almost imagine her feeble, bedridden last days, as she lay in silence replaying her life, retreating, reliving her dark secrets.

Recently a photograph of her parents, Laura and Zollicoffer Quigley Arnett, came to me. I had never seen their likenesses before. Laura is big-boned and upright; Z.Q. is thin, delicate, fair-haired. He is sitting in a straight-back chair, and she is standing beside him like a porch post. I can see my grandmother in Laura—her will and strength; the fine, upswept hair. Granny had her father’s large ears.

Laura and Z.Q. are buried together in the Arnett family cemetery. When I went there not long ago, I discovered a small stone next to theirs. It is the marker for Granny’s little brother, John. He died when he was four. I never knew Granny had a younger brother. She didn’t tell me about him when I was so full of questions. My mother, who was part of Granny’s household for forty-six years, did not know about the child, either. So here was one more secret. Maybe, I thought, a big one. Granny was eight when her little brother was born. At that age, she would have had a large role in the family—learning the household chores and helping to care for him. She would have felt pride as she washed the baby’s dresses on the washboard and helped to feed him spoonfuls of potatoes and beans she had mashed up. She might cream some chicken too. Maybe she would sing songs to the baby while she watched out for him, to see that he didn’t burn himself in the fireplace or fall into the cistern or eat bluing or caustic soda.

He didn’t live long enough to get his ten-year cake. I don’t know how little John Arnett died, but losing a little brother must have been traumatic for my grandmother, who was twelve. And it is conceivable that she blamed herself for whatever happened to him. My imagination seizes the bare fragments of names and dates, with their tantalizing implications. I fill in the colors, the way I did in my coloring books long ago. Maybe John fell into a vat of boiling water while she was supposed to be watching him. Or maybe he died of one of those deadly overnight fevers that swooped in on children so often in those days. That would not be her fault, but she could have found a reason to feel guilty anyway—especially if she had let him get a chill because she took him outside on a rainy day. Her mind, always busy, could concoct outrageous scenarios.

But my mind wants a grounding, a few facts to anchor my imaginings.
Nosing around for more clues, I came upon the obituary of Granny’s father.

The past jumped out at me. I had heard that Z.Q. had gout—he used a cane and passed the time sitting on his front porch. Now my imagination took a stunned, ninety-degree turn. Locomotor ataxia, a painful hardening of the spine, is a condition associated with the third stage of syphilis. Years after infection, syphilis comes to rest in some area of the body—the spine, the heart, the brain. The siege can go on for years. Victims of locomotor ataxia typically are thin and have sad-looking faces. I remembered that Z.Q. was said to weigh a hundred and twenty-six pounds. I looked back at the photograph. Yes, his face is sad. He seems so delicate and uncertain. But his wife stands tall and staunch, her hand on the chair behind his shoulder.

So my grandmother spent the bloom of her youth dutifully caring for her father, who suffered from syphilis! I could hardly take in the thought. Did her mother contract it too? Wouldn’t Z.Q. have infected his wife? Laura looks fit and strong in the picture. But I had heard that she walked with a crooked stick and that the doctor came to the house once and used a red-hot poker to sear her spine.

What of the little boy, John? My earlier speculations are knocked aside, replaced by more terrible possibilities. Perhaps he died from congenital syphilis—passed on through his mother. Against my will, I imagine him with scabby, sore eyes; chronic sores in his mouth and nose; knoblike bulges on his legbones and head. He could have been deaf or blind. I’m horrified—I want to reject the images. Maybe Laura had gotten past the infectious stages of syphilis before the little boy was conceived.

I could find no more traces of Granny’s little brother, but I located
the death certificates for both Laura and Z.Q. The disease is confirmed for both of them. Laura had it for eight years. Her death was precipitated by starvation, after she refused to eat for fifteen days. She was fifty-seven years old.

Their suffering, and my grandmother’s burden, are almost too much for me. I shudder at Granny’s pain and dread. Probably no one ever told her the specific source of her father’s illness—a trip to Cairo? a whorehouse on some back street behind the stockyards in Mayfield? an assignation with a diseased widow in bucolic Clear Springs? Granny wouldn’t have known the facts—but she knew the shame of his sin. The family’s shame, although shrouded in silence, must have been stark and heavy. And it must have preyed on her inflamed imagination. Z.Q. apparently contracted syphilis after she was born, for she and her older siblings were not infected, but maybe she didn’t realize she was free from the sickness. She might have feared that she would inherit the spinal malady her parents endured, that it would visit her in her middle age as it had them. Maybe, years later, she thought her enlarged heart was the terrible disease flaring up at last. She must have felt haunted, doomed. She may have spent her life waiting for her horrible fate to overtake her.

Syphilis! My God. Granny’s story—her worries, her silences, her breakdowns—rearranges itself completely in my mind.

Silence fell over the family when Z.Q.’s troubles began. Kinship loyalty came first, and young Ethel Arnett struggled to hold her suitor, Bob Mason, at bay while she tended to her parents’ hideous affliction. The household depended on her, for Z.Q. was incapacitated as a farmer and Laura was too poorly to keep house. Yet—whether or not he suspected the origin of the illness—Bob waited for Ethel, cheerfully pitching his woo. Ethel, fearing the taint of evil, put off her own sexual fulfillment until she was twenty-seven. Even after her marriage, she maintained a stubborn silence. Stiff, secretive, she never confided in Bob or anyone else. Her troubled heart expanded and palpitated as she ate it out from within.

At the cemetery where her parents are buried, the fecundity of her family is celebrated. William P. Arnett, Z.Q.’s father, had three wives and fifteen children—fifteen after he reached the age of thirty-five. Who knows how many others came before? He remarried each time he lost a wife in childbirth, merrily reproducing until he was sixty-seven. On a monolith at the cemetery, William P. Arnett’s photograph—a vacant-eyed man with a gray, pointed beard reaching down to his
breastbone—presides over a portion of his progeny. His countenance is remarkable. His long hair is swooped up and pinned into a topknot, and on the sides it is swirled into large pin curls. He and his three wives are marked by creek stones. Z.Q. and Laura and little John lie nearby. They lie together in a row, like spectators of the future.

It is a sad truth that we were all relieved when Granny died. A weight had been lifted. Before long, Daddy had a lighter step. He told Mama he realized he should never have allowed her to be burdened all those years, but he hadn’t known what else to do. His mother’s unbending will and his promise to his father had been like the commandments handed down to Moses.

Daddy set out to make it up to Mama. He was sixty-five, Mama was sixty-two. It wasn’t too late to enjoy their lives, he told her. “Do you want to move back home?” he asked her. She did, but the little house, built in 1944, would need extensive repairs. It was good enough to fix up for renters, she said, but not for themselves. They discussed building a new house. Finally, Mama decided that Granny and Granddaddy’s old house was good enough for them to live out their days in. “It would cost too much to build a new house,” she declared. With this observation, she initiated the final direction of their married life.