Milking the Moon (9 page)

A hurricane was party time. You couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to church, you couldn’t go to work, you had to sit there and hope that nothing would blow in. So, what do you do? You have a party. Children, of course, love a hurricane. Children like anything that breaks monotony, because they are basically wild little animals, and they haven’t been shoed yet, they haven’t been spayed, they haven’t been neutered, taught to heel with a ball and chain. So they are basically wild little animals, and any breaking of routine they love. During the ’26 hurricane, the high tide and the high wind coincided and blew water as far as Broad Street. There was a boat with a beautiful dead lady lying in it floating up Dauphin Street. I remember thinking, How exciting.

Back then when there was no radio, people watched for the Coast Guard warning signals, the little flags that flew. They would stroll down to the wharf, and when they saw the hurricane warning, they closed up everything and went home. There were other signs that people knew then, apart from the storm warnings in the port. There was bird activity. When all the little birds left town, that’s how you knew there was going to be a hurricane. And that’s how I made my name as a weather prophet four years ago. They announced a hurricane, and I said there was not going to be a hurricane. The little birds were still out there picking on the lawn. When there is going to be a hurricane, the bluejays are the only birds too dumb to leave. Those are the only dead birds you find after a hurricane. They are so busy quarreling over territorial rights, they don’t notice the storm.

We had twenty-three cats at Bayou Street—four social classes—and they all came in for the 1926 hurricane. Stable cats, courtyard cats, back porch cats, and house cats. And they did not mingle. The stable cats went to the servants’ bathroom, stayed right there except in the tub. The courtyard cats took the butler’s pantry. The back porch cats took the hall, and the house cats went in the parlor. The hurricane went on for three days, and every baking pan in that house was full of torn-up newspaper. On the third day all the cats stood in line without fighting to get out the back door. That’s how we knew the hurricane was going to end.

Baroque Roman Catholic Reformed Druid

All the family was very Catholic, and by that I mean Baroque Catholic. Catholicism in the French or the Italian sense is like a very comfortable but loose garment. Very comfortable. It is tight enough that it will keep you warm in the winter and loose enough that you can be aerated in the summer. Baroque Catholic means that you don’t go to church; you sit in a bar across the street and slip in for the last amen. That’s how they do it in France. In Italy. It’s a Mediterranean thing. Now the ladies might go to church, but the men would be in the bar across the street. It meant that you drank—didn’t mean that you got falling-down drunk—it meant that you would not have good food without good wine. When I was christened at St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the minute the priest let the holy water hit me, my grandfather stepped forward with a bottle of pear brandy and touched my lips, as his father had done for him and his grandfather had done for his father. It’s to counteract the holy water. It is usually pear brandy, which is clear. My grandfather had made this pear brandy himself from those old sand pears. It’s not antichurch. It’s just the idea that you should learn to be worldly at the same time the church says learn to be spiritual.

During the dark days of Prohibition, my grandfather, this gentle, smiling creature who never allowed water at the table, just built this thing under the house where he made beer and wine. Our house rose high off the ground, you see, with latticing between the brick supports. The drip-drip-drip from the icebox on the porch made a permanent puddle of cold water under the house, and this was as close to a wine cellar as my grandfather could arrange. When there was going to be a hurricane, the first thing my grandfather boarded up was the wine cellar under the house. That came first. Then the pantry, then the parlor and all that. A little door was cut in the lattice under the pantry window. I used to love to go and just sit quietly on a stool under the house where there were all these vats working under that cheesecloth. I would just sit and listen: plop, plop, plop, plop. I loved to listen. Music of the spheres. Spherical grapes, spherical blackberries, spherical plums. Music of the spheres.

Just as almost everybody had a little patch of garden out back, they also had some kind of wine cellar under the house. That was how Mobile got through Prohibition. I remember once during the Depression, like maybe just before the repeal of Prohibition, I went with my grandfather under the First National Bank, where there were ruins of old Fort Charlotte that the British had built. It had all been torn down, but the old huge, heavy brick arches were still underground where they stood out. Underneath everything there were still these storage halls where it was all kegs of Madeira wine belonging to the officers of the bank. I mean it was half a block long, kegs of Madeira and the smell of the oak. Baroque Catholic.

I used to love to go under the house, because it was so cool underneath the icebox with its huge blocks of ice that the man brought every other day. Mary Agnes Wolf, this darling girl, the daughter of Dr. Wolf across the street, was one of the few children in the neighborhood, and we played together a lot under the house. Her family was Catholic as mine was Catholic. And we had found a granite rock with a flat top and we’d put it by this underground lake—the puddle of ice water from the icebox under the house. In the bottom of this icebox was a pair of holes. They both had corks. But at some time of the day or some time of the night, you take the corks out and the drip would go down so that under the house under the back porch was like a tiny little icy lake. I had some funny pieces of cut glass and some tinfoil. We had a white porcelain statue of the Virgin standing in the little lake, and we always brought fresh flowers. It was Our Lady of Lourdes, or Our Lady of Mud, really. Our own little miraculous spring. And we used to sneak away with crackers and peanut butter and sit by it with our feet in that puddle and cool off on summer afternoons.

Because I went to church every morning, I had a proprietary sense of church. I went every morning at dawn, after the stove was heated, to help my grandmother arrange flowers on the altar at St. Joseph’s. I carried the buckets of water; I was the water boy. So the smell of incense and the sound of Latin is somehow as much a part of me as traffic on Government Street or television is for a child growing up in Mobile today. It was just part of my day. The Gulf Coast was more Catholic then, and everybody had thousands of children, and everybody gave a daughter and a son to the church. I don’t think there was any parental forcing, it was just the idea that one of the boys and one of the girls would most likely want to go into that field of endeavor. There were worldly priests and worldly nuns, and they were great teachers.

But then came these potato famine Irish Jesuits, whom I loathe because they are peasant Catholic, puritan Catholic. They are as bad as the Baptists. That terrible story of the last century when the Irish didn’t do any varied farming—they latched onto the potato. Then there was this plague or raw weather or something for several years and there was the great potato famine when thousands of people died of hunger. A lot emigrated. Just shiploads. So there was a certain kind of sad, skinny Irish Jesuit. We had never seen anything like that before. Their descendants came to Mobile late, late, but a lot of the dry-as-dust type did get in.

In general, the Jesuits are great educators. What they say is, “We teach you to think, and when you learn how to think, the first thing you do is question the Roman Catholic Church.” That’s what the great Jesuits always say. That’s what they’re famous for. When you apply logical thought, you think yourself out of the church. But when my grandmother saw these potato famine Irish Jesuits inking in fig leaves on line drawings in textbooks of the classical statuary of gods and goddesses in the Vatican Museum, she said, “Little Eugene is not going to school with them!” That’s why I went to public school. Of course, my grandmother was an emancipated lady in many ways. I can remember when she would go to the doctor, who was a friend of ours. He would say, “How are you feeling today, Anne-Elizabeth? Are you low in spirits?” “Oh, I’m very low in spirits,” my grandmother would say. So then he would pull out a bottle of bourbon and pour two glasses.

After school I went to the Polish nuns with mustaches for catechism. But I refused to learn it because it was written on cheap paper. Some aspect of me was born snob in a certain way. I knew the life of Christ had to be on all-rag paper. I just knew it. Catechism was printed on the same paper as the comic section of the
Register.
I knew that wasn’t right. So I wouldn’t learn it, and I got beaten across the hand with a ruler. I still have it. I stole it from Sister. The Coca-Cola Company came to every Sunday school, and the first day they gave every child a Bible, a red pencil, a green pencil, and a ruler that says “Drink Coca-Cola.” So I got rapped on the knuckles with a ruler that says “Drink Coca-Cola” by a Polish nun with a mustache who smelled like a wet collie dog for not learning my catechism.

I wouldn’t say that I have thought myself out of the church, but I don’t know that I believe in the conventional God as that silly ole boy in a white nightgown moving around in the sky. And I think Jesus was probably a pretty nice guy and obviously a wonderful carpenter, but let’s not take it too far. I mean, I think he was a boy with some pretty good ideas. He was antigovernment, antichurch. But no one yet has ever followed his two main ideas, which are Do unto others and Love your neighbor. When people come to my door and tell me they want to share a few thoughts about Jesus, I say, “Honey, don’t talk to me about Jesus—I’m a Baroque Roman Catholic Reformed Druid, and on Sunday mornings I go out in my garden and contemplate the lizards.” It works every time.

But now if I thought I was going to do a deathbed scene, I would get on that phone to the archbishop, and I’d want the archbishop and twenty-four altar boys swinging their censers. I’d want a full production number. I do believe that there is some light, some blinding light, or some deafening noise, or some inconceivable dimension, up, out, way up, way out, way off, way down. We don’t begin to understand anything about it. So, religion should be, for the intelligent person, a conscious seeking to understand everything. Even to understand a little of everything. And I suppose for me
RC
doesn’t stand so much for Roman Catholic as it does for Rare Comprehension.

Saturdays

On Saturday mornings I would often go shopping with my grandmother. She’d put on her white gloves and clanking amethyst beads, because ladies, when they went downtown, even though it was just a few blocks away, wore their white gloves. They could go up the block to the neighbors’ without their gloves or hats, but you didn’t go more than a few houses away from where you lived without your hat, your demiveil, and your gloves. Two buttons or three. White gloves.

The first stop was a seed store. They had these wooden drawers filled with loose seeds, and there was this wonderful smell of onion and garlic and celery seeds and God knows what all. We’d stop and gossip. Then we went to the grocery store, although there was not an awful lot to get there, maybe a certain number of tinned things and dried beans. You had an account and paid once a week. When you paid you got “nappe,” from
lagniappe,
a Creole word meaning something extra. That meant that if you bought twelve, you got a thirteenth, or if you bought a pound, you got an extra ounce.

Then we’d continue down to the fish place. After you chose it, you’d leave it there on ice to pick up on your way back. Then you went to the shop that had pheasants and ducks and guinea hens (oh, the blessed and forgotten guinea hen!) hanging in the window. They’d just been killed that morning, and their feathers were still clinging to them. You’d say, “I like the looks of that one,” and boy, those feathers would fly. And you left that to be picked up on your way back.

If I close my eyes, I can still smell the heady aroma of Kress’s five-and-ten-cent store. It was a blend: one could recognize some kind of pine oil solution used to clean the wooden floors (all the downtown stores had wooden floors) as well as the smell of the yellow and orange corn candy and the faint odor of the cardboard boxes used to pack all the “Made in Japan” stuff.

There were dishes and tea sets of either white or pale green. An endless number of toys. Dozens of inch-high towers, bridges, stone lamps, figures of fishermen, ladies with parasols, to make “dish gardens.” Dozens of different kinds of yo-yos. Unbelievable roses made of waxed paper. And the “switch” counter: racks of switches—strands of real human hair—hanging limply from stainless-steel racks. I used to stare at them. They were uniform in length, uniformly marcelled, arranged in color gradations, and I never, in a decade of every-Saturday visits, saw anybody buy one.

Then the counter of cardboard signs: DIPTHERIA, MEASLES, BAD DOG, INFORMATION, FOR RENT, FOR SALE. And, back in the days when people read books, a surprising book counter. There used to be a publishing company in Racine, Wisconsin, called Whitman Co. which published ten-cent books in vast quantities, and then went highbrow with twenty-five-cent books with colored illustrations. I still remember one ten-cent series about a boy who ran away from home and joined the circus and toured the world. His name was Joe Strong, and there was this endless series about him.
Joe Strong the Boy Magician, Joe Strong with the Circus, Joe Strong Goes to Sea.
I’d buy one every Saturday and read it in time to finish the next Friday. I still have a very fine anthology of American poetry put together by Harriet Monroe. Ten cents at Kress. And the picture books had illustrations by the likes of Willy Pogany and Maxfield Parrish.