Growing Up (6 page)

Left to her own devices, my mother, I suspect, would not have thought of such a beautiful, ingenious machine but would have given me a book.

D
URING
all these years my father was under a sentence of death. In 1918 he had been drafted by the Army and discharged after five days with papers stating he had “a physical disability.” From his childhood it had been Morrisonville’s common knowledge that Benny had “trouble with his kidneys.” What the Army doctors found is not clear from the records. Maybe they told him the truth—that he had diabetes—but if so he kept their terrible diagnosis a secret. In 1918 insulin was still unknown. As a twenty-year-old diabetic, whether he knew it or not, he was doomed to early death.

The discovery of insulin in 1921 would have lifted that sentence and offered him a long and reasonably healthy life. If he ever learned about insulin, though, he certainly never used it, for the needle required for daily injections was not part of our household goods. Perhaps he didn’t know how seriously ill he was, but the state of medicine in Morrisonville must also be allowed for. New medical wonders were slow to reach up the dirt roads of backcountry America. Around Morrisonville grave illness was treated mostly with prayer, and early death was commonplace. Children
were carried off by diphtheria, scarlet fever, and measles. I heard constantly of people laid low by typhoid or mortally ill with “blood poisoning.” Remote from hospitals, people with ruptured appendixes died at home waiting for the doctor to make a house call.

Since antibiotics lay far in the future, tuberculosis, which we called “T.B.” or “consumption,” was almost always fatal. Pneumonia, only slightly less dreaded, took its steady crop for the cemetery each winter. Like croup and whooping cough, it was treated with remedies Ida Rebecca compounded from ancient folk-medicine recipes: reeking mustard plasters, herbal broths, dosings of onion syrup mixed with sugar. Boils and carbuncles were covered with the membrane of a boiled egg to “draw the core” before being lanced with a needle sterilized in a match flame.

When my cousin Lillian stepped barefoot on a rusty nail, my grandmother insisted on treating the puncture by applying a slab of raw bacon. When my cousin Catherine’s hand touched a red-hot wood stove, my grandmother seized her arm and with fingertips light as feathers stroked the blistering skin while murmuring an incoherent incantation in a trancelike monotone. Catherine’s screaming stopped. “My hand doesn’t hurt anymore, Grandma,” she said.

This was called “powwowing,” a form of witch-doctoring still believed in then by the old people around Morrisonville and prescribed on at least one occasion by a local medical man. This doctor, after failing to rid Lillian of a severe facial rash with the tools of science, prescribed a visit to an old woman on the mountain whose powwowing, he said, sometimes cured such rashes. “But don’t you ever dare tell anybody I sent you to her,” he cautioned. Lillian did not go for the powwow treatment; her rash subsided without help from either science or witchcraft.

Very few people ever saw the inside of a hospital. When my grandfather George had a stroke he was led into the house and put to bed, and the Red Men sent lodge brothers to sit with him to exercise the curative power of brotherhood. Red Men who failed to report for bedside duty with their stricken brother were fined
a dollar for dereliction. Ida Rebecca called upon modern technology to help George. From a mail-order house she ordered a battery-operated galvanic device which applied the stimulation of low-voltage electrical current to his paralyzed limbs.

Morrisonville had not developed the modern disgust with death. It was not treated as an obscenity to be confined in hospitals and “funeral homes.” In Morrisonville death was a common part of life. It came for the young as relentlessly as it came for the old. To die antiseptically in a hospital was almost unknown. In Morrisonville death still made house calls. It stopped by the bedside, sat down on the couch right by the parlor window, walked up to people in the fields in broad daylight, surprised them at a bend in the stairway when they were on their way to bed.

Whatever he knew about his ailment, my father made no concessions to it. If anything he lived a little too intensely, as though determined to make the most of whatever time he was to be allowed. By 1927 he had saved enough money to rent and furnish a small house of his own—the tenant house where grazing cows peered through windows—and there, that August, my sister Doris was born. In 1928 we were back in Morrisonville in a larger house, looking up at Ida Rebecca’s porch, and there my second sister was born in January of 1930. They named her Audrey.

Benny’s development into “a good family man” was evidence of my mother’s success at improving his character. His refusal to forswear moonshine, however, mocked her with the most painful failure of all. After pleasing her with long bouts of sobriety, he often came home from work with the sour smell of whiskey on him and turned violently ill. With diabetes, his drinking was lethal. He paid terribly for whatever pleasure he took from Sam Reever’s Mason jars. My mother didn’t know about the diabetes; all she knew was that drinking acted like poison on him. When he came home smelling of whiskey, she abused him fiercely in cries loud enough to be heard across the road at Ida Rebecca’s. He never shouted back, nor argued, nor attempted to defend himself, but always sat motionless as her anger poured down on his bowed head—sick, contrite, and beaten.

One evening when we waited supper long past his usual arrival time and finally ate without him, he came in while the dishes were being washed. He was smiling and holding something behind his back.

“Where have you been?” my mother asked.

“I bought a present for Doris.”

“Do you know what time it is? Supper’s been over for hours.”

All this in a shout.

Holding his smile in place, trying to ignore her anger, he spoke to Doris. “You want to see what Daddy brought you?”

Doris started toward him. My mother pulled her back.

“Leave that child alone. You’re drunk.”

Well—and he kept smiling—actually he had taken a drink along the way, but just one—

“Don’t lie about it. You’re stinking drunk. I can smell it on you.”

—had been in town looking for a present for Doris, and run into a man he knew—

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Letting your children see you like this? What kind of father are you?”

His smile went now, and he didn’t try to answer her. Instead he looked at Doris and held the present in front of him for her to take. It was a box with top folded back to display a set of miniature toy dishes made of tin, little tin plates, little tin saucers, little tin teacups.

“Daddy brought you a set of dishes.”

Delighted, Doris reached for the box, but my mother was quicker. Seizing his peace offering, she spoke to him in words awful to me. It wasn’t bad enough that he wasted what little money he had on the poison he drank, not bad enough that he was killing himself with liquor, not bad enough that he let his children see him so drunk he could hardly stand up. He had to squander our precious money on a box of tin junk.

In a rage she ran to the kitchen screen door, opened it wide, and flung Doris’s present into the darkening twilight. My father dropped onto a chair while I watched this unbelievable waste of
brand-new toys. When I turned back to see if he intended to rescue the dishes, I saw that he was just sitting there helplessly.

Doris and I ran out into the gloaming to recover the scattered dishes. While we scrambled on hands and knees groping for tiny cups and saucers, the sounds of my mother’s anger poured from the kitchen. When the shouting subsided, I crept back to the door. My father was slumped on the chair, shoulders sagging, head bowed, his forearms resting lifelessly on his thighs in a posture of abject surrender. My mother was still talking, though quietly now.

“For two cents,” I heard her say, “I’d take my children out of here tomorrow and go back to my own people.”

I sneaked back into the darkness and found Doris and tried to interest myself in the dishes for a while. The screen door banged. My father was silhouetted against the light for an instant, then he came down the steps, walked toward the pear tree, and started vomiting.

There were also sweet times in that house. On breathless summer nights my parents brought blankets down from the steamy upstairs bedroom to make a bed on the living room floor. The summer I was four years old my mother bought me my first book and started teaching me to read. One night at bedtime she and my father stretched out on the blankets for sleep, but before dousing the lamp my father wanted to see how I was progressing with the written word.

They placed me between them with the opened book. I knew a few words, but under pressure to perform forgot everything. It was beginner material: “cat,” “rat,” “boy,” “girl,” “the.” I didn’t recognize a word.

My mother was disappointed that I could do nothing but stare stupidly at the printed page. My father saved my pride. “Have a little patience with him,” he said. Taking the book in hand, he moved me close against him and rubbed his cheek against mine. “Now,” he said, pointing to a word, “you know that word, don’t you?”

I did indeed. “‘The,’” I said.

“You’re a smart boy. I bet you know this one too.”

“‘Boy,’” I said.

When I read most of the sentence without too much help, he said to my mother, “You’re doing good with him. Maybe we ought to send him to college.” Pleased, my mother reached across me and kissed him on the cheek. Smiling down at me, he said, “You want to go to college?” They both laughed a little at this. Maybe he liked the extravagance of the idea as much as she did. Then he turned off the kerosene lamp. That night they let me sleep between them.

The occasional outbursts of passion that flickered across my childhood were like summer storms. The sky clouded suddenly, thunder rumbled, lightning flashed, and I trembled a few moments, then just as swiftly the sky turned blue again and I was basking contentedly in the peace of innocence.

Morrisonville was a poor place to prepare for a struggle with the twentieth century, but a delightful place to spend a childhood. It was summer days drenched with sunlight, fields yellow with buttercups, and barn lofts sweet with hay. Clusters of purple grapes dangled from backyard arbors, lavender wisteria blossoms perfumed the air from the great vine enclosing the end of my grandmother’s porch, and wild roses covered the fences.

On a broiling afternoon when the men were away at work and all the women napped, I moved through majestic depths of silences, silences so immense I could hear the corn growing. Under these silences there was an orchestra of natural music playing notes no city child would ever hear. A certain cackle from the henhouse meant we had gained an egg. The creak of a porch swing told of a momentary breeze blowing across my grandmother’s yard. Moving past Liz Virts’s barn as quietly as an Indian, I could hear the swish of a horse’s tail and knew the horseflies were out in strength. As I tiptoed along a mossy bank to surprise a frog, a faint splash told me the quarry had spotted me and slipped into the stream. Wandering among the sleeping houses, I learned that tin roofs crackle under the power of the sun, and when I tired and came back to my grandmother’s house, I padded into her dark cool living room, lay flat on the floor, and listened to the hypnotic beat
of her pendulum clock on the wall ticking the meaningless hours away.

I was enjoying the luxuries of a rustic nineteenth-century boyhood, but for the women Morrisonville life had few rewards. Both my mother and grandmother kept house very much as women did before the Civil War. It was astonishing that they had any energy left, after a day’s work, to nourish their mutual disdain. Their lives were hard, endless, dirty labor. They had no electricity, gas, plumbing, or central heating. No refrigerator, no radio, no telephone, no automatic laundry, no vacuum cleaner. Lacking indoor toilets, they had to empty, scour, and fumigate each morning the noisome slop jars which sat in bedrooms during the night.

For baths, laundry, and dishwashing, they hauled buckets of water from a spring at the foot of a hill. To heat it, they chopped kindling to fire their wood stoves. They boiled laundry in tubs, scrubbed it on washboards until knuckles were raw, and wrung it out by hand. Ironing was a business of lifting heavy metal weights heated on the stove top.

They scrubbed floors on hands and knees, thrashed rugs with carpet beaters, killed and plucked their own chickens, baked bread and pastries, grew and canned their own vegetables, patched the family’s clothing on treadle-operated sewing machines, deloused the chicken coops, preserved fruits, picked potato bugs and tomato worms to protect their garden crop, darned stockings, made jelly and relishes, rose before the men to start the stove for breakfast and pack lunch pails, polished the chimneys of kerosene lamps, and even found time to tend the geraniums, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, dahlias, and peonies that grew around every house. By the end of a summer day a Morrisonville woman had toiled like a serf.