Clear Springs (6 page)

Bob read only the newspaper and the Bible, but Christy could tell that Ethel had education. She didn’t say “hit” for “it” as some of the older folks did, and she owned some books. Christy dabbled in them, fearful that Ethel would catch her when she was supposed to be working. Christy wanted to learn. Wilburn often told her she was dumb, because the school at Clear Springs was inferior to the Mayfield school he had attended. But even if she had wanted to continue her education, she couldn’t now. Married people were not allowed to attend school.

The days and weeks went by. Wilburn and Bob milked twice a day,
bottled the milk, and peddled it to their regular customers in town. Sweet-milk was twelve cents, buttermilk a nickel. Christy washed and scalded the narrow-necked, thick-lipped bottles in the milk house. She liked working with the bottles and the bottle-capper that snapped in the paper-plug caps printed with
MASON GRADE A DAIRY
. As she worked, she listened to a radio soap opera called
Stella Dallas
, about a mother’s love for her ungrateful daughter, who had married into society. The story was so riveting it made Christy weep. She listened to a music program with an announcer whose limpid voice she loved. She hummed along with “Pennies from Heaven” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Bob and Ethel had bought the radio so they could hear some local programming (farm and community news, and some fiddling), but they did not care for anything that came from far away. Christy and Wilburn listened devotedly to
Fibber McGee and Molly
,
Amos ’n’ Andy
, and
Charlie McCarthy
.

Wilburn got work sacking feed. After milking in the morning, he walked a mile up the railroad track to the feed mill, which was adjacent to the house where the Lyon quintuplets had been born. After Wilburn started the job, Christy helped Bob deliver the milk in town while Ethel cooked dinner. To her relief, Christy was not expected to cook. Ethel’s kitchen habits were intimidatingly persnickety. She cooked certain things in certain pans and put a specific amount of meat grease in her vegetables. She often got up in the middle of the night to mix her yeast rolls to rise by morning. She cooked small amounts and was especially stingy with meat. Christy craved meat. Aunt Rosie always served chicken and ham and a large assortment of vegetables for a houseful of people, but Ethel was in the habit of cooking for only three. Supper was what was left from dinner at noon. Sometimes at night Christy and Wilburn were still hungry, so they would sneak a couple of eggs from the egg bowl in the kitchen and boil them in the fireplace in their room.

On Saturday nights, in Wilburn’s rattletrap Ford, Christy and Wilburn sped to Mayfield, where they gorged on hamburgers and Coca-Colas—nothing was so scrumptious, they thought—and went to the show. Vaudeville troupes didn’t come around much anymore, now that the picture shows were so popular. At the Princess or the Legion Theater they waited in line to see triumphant Westerns and sidesplitting comedies. Mayfield was crowded with people from all over the county seeking some relief from their week’s toil. The burger joints with curb service were jammed. One of the drugstores sent
carhops all the way down the block along one side of the courthouse square. In town on a Saturday night, young people drove around the square and honked and yelled.

On one Saturday night, Wilburn and Christy went to a honky-tonk, where folks lindy-hopped to jazz and big-band records played on a Victrola. Wilburn wouldn’t dance, although he loved the music. One of Christy’s older cousins spotted her and Wilburn there. Later, the cousin told Bob Mason that his son and daughter-in-law were out dancing at the honky-tonk.

Bob confronted Christy, out by the wash-house.

“Did you and Wilburn go to that place that used to be Coulter’s School?”

She was silent, feeling the accusation in his voice. Then she nodded.

“Well?” he said. “What were you doing out there? At such a place?”

“Oh, we just wanted to see what was there,” she said. “We didn’t do anything.”

He said nothing. He didn’t tell them not to go again. He didn’t have to.

Living with her in-laws could be embarrassing and uncomfortable. Trying to get a good night’s sleep on Wilburn’s narrow bed was like sleeping with a mule, my mother often says. “He was long-legged and slept crossways.” Eventually, they borrowed a “bedroom suit”—a bed, a chest of drawers, and a dresser—from a neighbor. The bed was larger than the one that let down from the wall, but the wooden slats kept falling out of the frame beneath the mattress. Often they clattered to the floor in the middle of the night, when Bob and Ethel were asleep. Sometimes Wilburn and Christy got up and put the slats back under the mattress. At other times Christy would just sink into the hole and Wilburn would fall asleep on top of her. “Why don’t we rope the bottom so it won’t spraddle out?” she said to him once. “I don’t know,” he said. They didn’t get around to fixing the bed.

“Wilburn bought me my first pair of silk stockings,” my mother tells me. “And I got a run in them first thing. He was surprised that I had brought so few belongings with me. ‘Is this all you’ve got?’ he said.”

From his earnings, Wilburn had to pay his father for their keep. Everything the farm brought in went back into it, into livestock and seed. Even though these were the Depression years, the Mason farm was doing well, without any debts. The farm would be Wilburn’s one day, but meanwhile Bob was in charge.

“We were just kids,” my mother says. “We wanted to play.” She learned to ride a neighbor girl’s bicycle and scratched up her knees falling onto the gravel roads. Wilburn chased her as she rode down the driveway, distracting her and getting in her way until she landed in the potato patch. “I never was so mad in all my life!” she says with a laugh. Wilburn had always wanted a bicycle, but his parents would not buy him one. He told Christy that the two things he had always wanted were a bicycle and a goat. “I’m going to get me a bicycle and a goat if it takes me the rest of my life,” he told her.

Bob and Ethel were old—Ethel was forty-eight, and Bob was fifty-four. They had married late, when both were already set in their ways. They were cautious, conservative, acutely conscious of good value. They took pride in their grooming, their clothing, their furnishings, their yard, their fields, their entire place. Although Ethel was a strong, rawboned woman, she nonetheless had delicate nerves. Bob called her “Ettie,” pronouncing both
t
’s with a light touch of the tongue. The tip of his nose wiggled like a rabbit’s. He was less restrained than Ethel, more given to chuckling and gentle teasing, but nevertheless his word was law. He was a tall, well-built man who pampered his wife.

“Bob carried her around on a pillow,” my mother says. “She had an easier life than any woman I knew. She didn’t have to do a man’s work, like I did.”

Ethel had a plainspoken way about her that was utterly unselfconscious. “She could cut you down with a word,” Mama tells me. Ethel might deliver a judgment on scouring a skillet or gathering eggs. She wasn’t polite, or sparing of feelings, and she did not know that her direct remarks hurt. Again and again, she made Christy feel worthless, out of place.

My mother entered a new phase of loneliness. Wilburn was restless. Before he married Christy, he had been in the habit of running around with his bachelor friends. Now, on a few Wednesday nights, he went to town with some of his old pals, leaving her at home with his parents. He and his friends went to the poolroom, a smoky, dark place off limits for women. “You wouldn’t like it anyway,” he assured her. She had heard there was drinking and poker in the back room.

The mantel clock kept pace with the night work. It pinged every fifteen minutes and struck every hour. Christy tried not to pay attention to it, to keep busy, to do as she was told. She hulled peas or pieced
scraps of material, trying to imagine a quilt. She was glad when eight o’clock struck and her in-laws silently prepared for bed.

On Saturdays, Christy and Wilburn went to town as usual. On the way home from the show one Saturday night, he stopped at a restaurant near the feed mill.

“You wait in the car,” he said.

It was late, and she knew there was no food being served. She suspected there was gambling and liquor in the back of the building. Alcohol was illegal in Graves County, and gambling was both illegal and sinful, she thought. She waited and waited. It was cold and her coat was thin.

When Wilburn finally returned, he was wobbly, but he insisted on driving. She had to reach across him to steer the car herself because he could not keep it in the road. When they reached home, he stumbled and fell into the coal pile beside the house. Angrily, she left him there and went inside in the dark to bed. The next morning he appeared, wearing a guilty grin. Coal dust was smudged all over his good pants and coat. He had crawled under the porch and slept there. His parents said nothing. They did not mention the coal dust on his clothes. But their silence was shattering.

The next chance Christy had for a ride back to Clear Springs, she told Aunt Rosie how Wilburn was behaving. Wilburn wasn’t bad, Christy knew. She was crazy about him. But she didn’t understand why he treated her so indifferently at times, why he wouldn’t stand up to his parents, why he left her there with them and went to town.

“Was that how my daddy treated my mama?” she asked.

“Shit!” said Aunt Rosie, almost under her breath. That was a word men said when they thought women weren’t listening. “You’ve made your bed,” Aunt Rosie said with finality. “You have to lay in it.”

“Well, why does he go polly-foxing around like that?” Christy asked her aunt. “Why doesn’t he take me with him? I like to have a good time.”

“That’s menfolks,” Aunt Rosie said. “They have to go off once in a while in a bunch. Just leave them alone. It don’t concern you one bit. You just have to put up with it. It’ll be all right as long as he comes home and don’t run off and steal you blind, the way your daddy did your mama. Bob and Ethel will keep you. And don’t forget you’ve got a roof over your head.”

“I don’t have a thing for anybody to steal,” Christy said.

Christy had inherited none of her mother’s things, but now Rosie
gave her one of Eunice’s preserve stands—a large, lidded glass thing on a pedestal.

“That’ll hold enough preserves for a wheat threshing!” Aunt Rosie told her.

“Just what I need,” Christy said. But she was glad to have it.

The work was regular—milking, washing and scalding the bottles, drying apples on a screen door laid out on the milk-house roof, setting chickens on their nests, dehorning cows, working mules. Christy helped gather corn and field peas. Bob commented to Wilburn, “I wouldn’t let my wife work in the fields like that.” Yet it seemed to Christy that Bob would think up things for her to do, just to watch how hard she worked.

“It makes me so mad I could spit,” she told Wilburn. “They seem just amazed at how I can turn off work. They just stand there and watch!”

“They can’t believe their good luck,” he said with a grin. “They don’t have to hire.”

They had often boarded a hired hand, but now they did not. Christy threw herself into the work on the farm in a perverse effort to show how valuable she was. She labored spitefully, directing her youthful temper at weeds and shucks and mud. She tried to adjust to her married life, but she kept a little distance, saving herself, and gradually Wilburn saw it. He saw that flame of independence she hoarded—as if her mind were somewhere else, free. What he didn’t know was how often she wondered if she should have gone to Detroit with her aunt Mary instead of marrying him.

Many women, even farm women, were entering what they called public work—a job outside the home. In 1938, after two years of marriage, Christy began working in Mayfield at the Merit Clothing Company, which manufactured men’s suits. Bob and Ethel were scandalized, but Wilburn didn’t object. The factory was a multistory brick building with oiled wood floors and hundreds of paned windows. Its enormous rooms were filled with whirring machines that hummed and buzzed and click-clacked. People were intently absorbed at these machines, working as if they were privately engaged in a fascinating puzzle. Christy was thrilled.

She spent her first week making set-in pockets and welts for vests. But she didn’t catch on to the work at first and couldn’t meet the production quota.

“I was so young,” she tells me. “I didn’t know how to put out the work. This floor lady was supposed to teach me, but she had the hots for a foreman and she didn’t take enough time with me. Her job was to teach the new ones and keep tabs, but she was too busy flirting with the foreman. I did a bunch of work and done it wrong and had to take it out and do it over. They didn’t have repair hands then, to go along behind and fix mistakes. So all I made was a dollar and a half for the whole week!”

She bought a dress with that first paycheck. It was white eyelet, with a gathered skirt and ruffles around the neck. It was the first dress she had ever owned that wasn’t handmade.

“I hadn’t been working there long, and I still wasn’t making my average when the manager called me in and bawled me out. He talked to me like I was a dog, and I went out crying. He said, ‘I guess you know I should fire you, but I’m going to give you another chance, and if you can’t handle it, you’ll have to go.’ ”

The manager sent her to a simpler job, sewing labels inside coats. She did that easily, and in time she performed a variety of other tasks: she cleaned coats; she ran tacking machines; she mastered vest welts.

“People worked hard to hold on to their jobs,” she tells me. “Everybody knew how lucky they were to have them.”

The world of the factory dazzled her. The place was steaming hot, the air was filled with lint. The pressers worked in a cloud of steam that flushed their faces. Gigantic overhead fans swept the air. Christy sat proudly on a high stool and guided heavy material through her machine. She loved being out in the world, going to town, earning money. She felt important. “The people I worked with was really something,” she tells me. “There were all kinds of personalities, and I learned how to stand up for myself.” She learned not to be afraid to be herself. She gabbed and giggled and kidded. She bloomed.