Clear Springs (33 page)

Because Daddy had been in the Navy, he received a military send-off from the mayor of Mayfield and another veteran, who wore V.F.W. hats and medal-studded vests. After the preacher finished, the mayor read a brief military service. Then he and his fellow vet folded the flag into a triangular package and presented it to Mama. She was cocooned in a long goose-down coat of mine from my snow-belt days. It was a bone-chilling day. Remote and preoccupied, she seemed like a chrysalis waiting until the time to emerge. We had been given our choice of “Taps” or a twenty-one-gun salute. We thought “Taps” would be easier on Daddy’s ears. We glanced around for the bugler but didn’t see anyone. Then in the background I glimpsed the mayor’s V.F.W. companion holding something at arm’s length, as if he had just found a bomb. It was a small tape recorder. He punched a button and a tinny rendition of “Taps” played.

I was outside myself. I was back in 1880, when the map delineated a simple agrarian economy. The Masons had been at the stable center of this community’s history. What they passed down seemed to have arrived intact from the two brothers who first settled this ground in the 1820s. The Mason homeplace was only a little distance to my right, beyond McKendree Church. There, the Masons took my mother in after her grandmother died. I twisted around in my seat, gazing across the farmland to the southwest, to where Mama’s grandmother, Mammy Hicks, had lived. I knew her house was still there, but I couldn’t see it through the trees. My father’s people and my mother’s were commingled on this portion of land. Now I was here, slowed to a halt, forced to consider final things. The presence of the grave outlined the circle of life’s journey. I realized that not everything had been accounted for. There was a large-scale forgetting all around me, through generations. But our history was mapped out here in Clear Springs, like the fencerows edging the fields that spread out in all directions. The history seemed to rise from the land, wrapping around me.

I knew little about our ancestors. “We came from England,” Daddy had told me. “All the Masons here have big noses, and a lot of them
have a hump. They got the hump when one of them married an Irish woman with a hump. Her whole family had humps—from being hod carriers, I reckon.” He grinned.

Now, in my head, I could hear him talking, saying something typical, like, “I think I’ll join the French Foreign Legion.” I could hear him say “Hollyhocks!”—a comical word with an inherent scoff. He pronounced it “hollyhawks.” He was sparing with words, but I realized now that usually when he spoke up, it was for the love of language.

I remembered a summer in 1975, when Roger and I explored the Borderlands—the coming together of northern England and southern Scotland. We rambled through sheep pastures, where miles of stone fences, which seemed centuries old, stretched out in all directions. Suddenly, the meaning and fact of my name struck me forcibly. Centuries of stonemasons had fashioned those walls. We came from people who built borders with stones. Over time, we had forgotten.

We left the cemetery in the Town Car. The driver backed out into the road on a blind hill, the top of Pulltight, directly across from McKendree Church. He blithely made a dogleg turn onto Panther Creek Road just as a speeding RC Cola truck, a huge eighteen-wheel rig, careened over the crest. The truck, braking, hurtled headlong behind us. We didn’t notice. The others told us later that the truck braked and swerved, and blue smoke went flying up from the wheels. “You were nearly killed,” they said.

“A handy place to get hit,” we joked. “The cemetery’s right here.”

“And we’ve got the tape of ‘Taps.’ ”

We gathered at the old Mason homeplace. I sat among the Clear Springs kinfolks, in the heart of Mason history, wondering, trying to feel back through generations, feeling a huge separation from this past, because my father was gone. I was trying to dig at his roots, hoping to find them alive, as one sometimes does when a potted plant seems to die. I saw my mother looking around at the kitchen, where her aunt Rosie had once reigned, and I thought about her deep involvement with the Mason family. This house was where my mother grew up, was courted, and had left to make her life for fifty-four years with the handsome man she once told me was “just larruping.” I could not know the vastness of this separation, her bereavement.

For many weeks after the funeral I felt something that I had not known was intrinsic to grieving. It was a strange exhilaration. I couldn’t hold
my mind on the pain. Death was so painful that it knocked me out of myself into a celebration of life. Intensely aware of life’s fragility, I drove along the Western Kentucky Parkway, drinking the landscape; every detail was fresh and remarkable. The lines of cedar trees growing like weeds out of rock crevices. The icicles hugging the faces of the limestone cutaways along the roadbed. The hazy winter pastures. The sprinklings of cattle—an all-white herd scattered on moon-color ground. Frost on dead grass. Leftover hay bales like giant shredded-wheat rolls. The winter landscape was a husk, a silhouette, a promise.

Everything I saw compelled my attention, yanked me out of my myself. It was a survival mechanism, this strange buoyancy. Some archaic words came to me to describe it, words I might have read in Granny’s speller: a queer lightsomeness. I was lightsome, floating. I wondered if this was the way I was supposed to feel when I dedicated my life to Christ at the church altar when I was fifteen—charged with a new responsibility to celebrate life.

Life was a brittle frost-pattern on the window light—beautiful and fleeting. I was alive.

A farmer faces the fragility of life every day. It takes faith that his winter-dead fields will burst again with life. It takes faith to keep going, proof by habit. A farmer’s belief in the sunrise and the changes of the seasons is the essence of his creed but also of his doubt.

Oscar and I walked to the pond. Oscar seemed eager for some action. He had looked around for Daddy, then settled for my company. Earlier in the week, seven ducks had appeared at the pond—six Muscovy ducks and a white one. I brought them some corn I had found in the stable. Daddy had collected some stray ears of corn the combine had missed. He had saved them to feed the squirrels. I rubbed the ears together and shelled the kernels onto the pond bank. Today there were ten ducks. I had heard that they had been moving around the neighborhood, fleeing coyotes.

Oscar and I made a complete circuit of the farm, roaming back half a mile through the fields. The soybeans and corn had been harvested, and no winter wheat had been planted this year, so the fields would remain stubbly and brown all winter. The ground was muddy. Oscar was busy, checking out all his favorite places. We crossed both creeks, which had slowed to trickles. Oscar splashed, I rock-hopped. The back field was ragged with cornstalks and briars and some kind of wavy plant that sliced my fingers when I tried to pick a few stalks for a bouquet. Daddy had kept paths mowed around the edges of the fields,
against the tree lines. Already I could see what work needed to be done. Branches had fallen across the path in front of me. I picked them up and dragged them toward the creek. Oscar, on the lookout for rabbits, trotted ahead.

“Oscar likes to work,” Daddy would say as they took off together into the fields or to the barn. Oscar loved it best when Daddy cranked up his three-wheeler (an outlawed all-terrain vehicle). Oscar knew the creek beds intimately, all the paths and coyote dens and rabbit holes. At the end of a walk he often disappeared into a briar patch, where he’d stay and work rabbits, eventually coming home with his face bloodied by briars. He was afraid of coyotes, and each time he got a scare he’d be careful about venturing out for a time, but then after a few days he’d get brave again. Oscar was also afraid of thunder; he could hear it well in advance, in time to run home and hide. Daddy seemed just as attuned as Oscar was to the wildlife and weather of the place. Every owl or coyote sighting was news. Each change in the wind, each storm and dry spell. More news circulated in the fields and along the creek beds than on the courthouse square.

As I walked around the fields, I contemplated what I knew, what I didn’t know. My sister Janice and I had congratulated ourselves on how strong we had been. We hadn’t expected to be. We had always thought we would go to pieces when we lost a close member of the family. But we hadn’t. Looking at the farm, I thought that maybe everything Daddy was also resided in me and in the family and on this land. He gave me the seeds. I recalled sitting behind him on the corn planter, releasing the seeds and hearing “P.S. I Love You” play in my head.

Oscar and I returned from the fields. Oscar saw Daddy’s car and dashed toward it with a joyful bark, then wandered desolately around the yard. Oscar seemed without lightsomeness. A dog’s terms are clearer, more extreme. Joy or sorrow.

The car was a small, red Suzuki. Daddy favored unusual foreign cars. He had owned a Fiat and a Renault, and he had bought one of the first Volkswagens in the county. Just before I moved to Kentucky, I had traded my little Honda CRX for a station wagon. I got two thousand dollars trade-in from the dealer. Daddy was disappointed when he heard what I’d done.

“Why didn’t you sell it to me? I was looking for a little car like that. I couldn’t find one around here for less than three or four thousand.”

“But I didn’t know you wanted it,” I said.

“Well, I didn’t know you were selling it,” he said.

This was so typical of us—misunderstandings and missed connections arising from silences.

Not long before that, he had gone to a car dealer in Paducah. He had found a used Honda he wanted in the lot. When he went into the office to buy it, a salesman talked at him for a while. Then the salesman said, “How do you intend to pay for it?”

Daddy bristled. He assumed the salesman didn’t believe he could afford a car and would have to borrow. He was a farmer, in his jeans and feed cap.

“I was going to pay for it with
money
,” he said, his hand clutching his wad of bills. He turned toward the door. “But I’ve changed my mind.”

So instead, he bought the Suzuki, from a different dealer.

Now, in the glove compartment of the car, I found tapes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, and Muddy Waters. I remembered the foot-stomping old music we had listened to together from WLAC in Nashville.

Under the tapes, in a crevice, I found a small cardboard box. Inside was a ring set with what looked like diamonds. I showed it to LaNelle.

“I don’t know diamonds from sequins,” I said. “Is this real?”

“I don’t know,” LaNelle said. “Do you think he was going to give it to Mama for Christmas?”

We liked that thought. His way of romancing Mama was always off-key, a little tawdry. He brought her presents from flea markets—used appliances and antique oddities. Could he have bought this ring for her for a surprise? Would he have been that romantic?

We took the ring to Mama. “Look what we found,” we said like little girls. We told her our theory.

She examined the ring. “No,” she said. “That was a prize I won at the senior citizens, a grab-bag thing at a card game. It’s not real. Wilburn was going to see what he could get for it at trade day.”

Widows worry about grass. My mother anguishes over the upkeep of the farm. Nobody could keep it spruced up the way Daddy always had. He groomed the woods beside the road until it resembled a park. He gathered all the beer cans and fast-food packaging hurled from passing cars. He allowed no junk cars, concrete blocks, spare parts, chicken coops—nothing claptrap or trashy—to be visible from the road. He ran the Weed Eater along margins. He mowed the path along the creek to the pond. He mowed an expanse near the road, the site of his dairy barn that had burned. He circled meticulously through the small orchard of dwarf fruit trees.

That he isn’t here to keep up the place according to his standards seems the most direct indicator of my mother’s grief. When she hires people to mow, they don’t take the time to clear the woods of leaves and fallen tree limbs. In the spring, she and Daddy always raked and burned the leaves and hauled limbs to the creek. Now she feels compelled to manage the spring cleanup alone.

“I have to keep this place up,” she says.

“Don’t,” we say. “It doesn’t have to be a park. Let it be a woods.”

“But he was so proud of this place.”

“But he’s not here now. So it’s not the same.”

When she pauses, unsure how to respond, we add, “Nobody could take care of it the way he could. So he’s irreplaceable. You wouldn’t want to think somebody else could fill his shoes, would you?”

But she goes out and rakes until her body feels staved in. Breathing the leaf dust aggravates her bronchitis. A mist of chicken feed in the air settles on her bare arms; it is thick enough to scrape off. She telephones Seaboard Farms and instructs the management to install a finer filter.

What to do with the farm has become an ongoing dilemma, which
prolongs itself into a basic state of being founded on inertia. Daddy had wanted Mama to live out her days on the farm, but now Mama’s widow friends advise her not to. They have moved to town, and they say they’re happier without farms to worry about. They were afraid to live alone in the country. Independent, they enjoy life in their simple little brick houses with minimal upkeep and rug-sized yards. All of them had been obsessed with grass. “A woman can’t keep up a farm like that,” they say. “You’ll sell out and move to town. You’ll wait two years and then you’ll sell.”