The Long Journey Home (12 page)

The undertaker, a kind man with large blue eyes, a man I’d known since we were in high school, did as I asked. Then he apologized for Harriet’s bent arms. He explained that he would have had to break her bones to get her arms to lie down in the coffin.

I don’t remember what the preacher said to those of us gathered in the living room that day. I only remember hearing a high school friend—dead for many years now—singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” her beautiful soprano voice filling the house while I stood, silent, dry-eyed, and numb. Nor do I remember the drive on the Thomasville highway to the new cemetery, where my sister’s coffin was lowered into the earth on the barren hill that rose across the road from where the slaughterhouse once stood.

I flew to Atlanta, where John met my plane and then drove me back to Athens. I told him about Harriet’s bent arms and clenched
fists, an image that I would carry inside me for the rest of my life. Then, for the first time since I’d seen my sister’s dead body, I cried.

Harriet was dead. Depression gnawed at Daddy’s days. His heart disease was getting worse. He was no longer able to bring in enough money to pay the utilities bills. Aunt Bama often paid them while wringing the last drop of self-respect from him by not giving him the money but writing checks to the utilities companies herself.

“I’m only a shell of a man,” Daddy would groan. “Only a shell of a man.”

He talked of suicide. But as sick and miserable as he was in his life, he was more afraid of death. Often he stretched out on his bed and talked about his fear of dying. I lay on Mother’s bed, watching the play of late-afternoon light on the walls. I no longer screamed at him like I’d done when I was younger—“Daddy, you’re too afraid to live!”—but listened to him with an intense sorrow I couldn’t touch with words.

In her forties, Mother was attending college again. She went to Valdosta State to renew her teaching certificate. Some weekends we drove over to visit her. More often than not, she stayed in her dormitory and studied.

My memories of that summer are a blur of Daddy’s talk about death, mounds of dirty dishes, burnt food, line after line of laundry, wet fabric clinging to my arms. By that time I smoked in front of my parents. Nicotine dulled my feeling of despair. The next cigarette became one of my major reasons to live through the days. Daddy, a heavy smoker most of his life, seemed happy to have the company. It was the thing we did together. That, and talking about death.

I’d done little of the housework or cooking in the past. “You’ll have the rest of your life to do such things,” Mother had always said to me with a sigh. “The whole rest of your life.” That summer I
learned by trial and error what it was to run a house for two adolescent boys and a depressed man. At nineteen, I was initiated, taken through my rite of passage to being a Southern housewife in the 1950s.

It was a long summer, with its hot and humid days, the air outside filled with gnats and mosquitoes, and inside the faithful drone of electric fans. Nights, our dog, Trixie, sat in the driveway howling at the moon.

When Mother came home for a weekend, I pleaded with her not to send me back to the university. I had to get away from John, I said. He frightened me. And I told her about his slapping me, and about his bizarre behavior at Posse’s that night.

Didn’t she hear what I was telling her? Didn’t she believe me? Certainly she didn’t want to believe me. How could the refined, soft-spoken John that she had met possibly do those things? Perhaps she thought I was being dramatic about nothing. “Such a flair for the dramatic you have,” Mother had exclaimed much of my life. “Such a flair!”

Whatever her reasons, after listening to my story she said in her usual controlled tone: “Margaret, if you don’t want to go with John, just tell him.”

Just tell him
. But I knew she didn’t mean it. And I wished it had been that simple. I wished I had the self-confidence, wished I didn’t have the guilt and feeling of responsibility that kept me with him. I wished I didn’t love him. And did I have a right to do other than what I knew Mother really wanted? I was her daughter. And Daddy’s daughter too. Someplace deep inside me I felt I was more their property than my own person.

I knew Mother wanted me to marry John. Then I would not go off to New York City to be a painter and live the life of a bohemian artist in Greenwich Village. “My daughter, Margaret,” she could say. “The minister’s wife.” I would be like the wooden bride doll that she had given me, the only doll of mine that she never gave away.

Now I stood ironing Bubba’s summer shirts, two each day—one
for work and another for going out in the evening. He kept bringing them back to me—a wrinkle in a collar, a puckered hem. That summer something took my dreams away. I learned to iron a shirt without a single wrinkle. In my mind my sister’s clenched fists were always rising from the coffin.

I made plans to marry John, who said he needed me, who said he’d take his own life if I didn’t give him mine. But now so little about that summer stands out—ironing mostly, and my embarrassment when my father asked me to cook his hamburger again because blood kept leaking onto his plate.

J
OHN AND
I
WERE MARRIED ON
S
EPTEMBER 15, 1956
. B
Y THE TIME WE
finished college I was several months pregnant. The day of our graduation ceremony I felt nauseated and didn’t want to face the crowd and the heat. I couldn’t have cared less about receiving a diploma for a degree in education. If anything, it embarrassed me, since I had little respect for the course requirements for that degree. Mother was pleased though. She and Daddy attended along with John’s parents. I stayed home and cooked dinner for all of us. I was upset when I burned the carrots, but John’s father said he was glad I burned them because he hated carrots more than anything. When I remember that day, the first thing that always comes to mind is the image of those carrots at the bottom of the burnt pot.

After graduation we moved to Ila, a small town near Athens in which John had served for the past year as student minister in the Presbyterian church. A perceptive member of the congregation told me that she believed he would end up being a teacher rather than a minister, which is what happened. While John enjoyed preaching, he found visiting members of the congregation at home and relating to them burdensome and uncomfortable. By the time we moved into
the manse (the house supplied by the church for its pastor), John had already received a Danforth Fellowship to do graduate work in philosophy. He agreed to preach Sundays until he finished his master’s at Emory University on the outskirts of Atlanta. In the meantime, he continued his study of logic with Rubin Gotesky, one of his professors at the University of Georgia. They spent an evening each week together.

Our son John Elder was born August 13, 1957. He was named after the grandfather John had loved so dearly. There were no tests then to determine the sex of a baby before it was born, but almost from the beginning I felt certain our baby was a boy, and we named him before seeing him.

Waking the morning of the twelfth, I knew he was coming soon. I packed my bag, including an outfit for him to come home in. Then I spent much of the day washing clothes, cleaning the house, and packing maternity outfits away in boxes. After dinner I took a shower and changed clothes for the trip to Athens.

John left me with friends for several hours while he had his weekly meeting with Professor Gotesky. I remember nothing about my time spent waiting for John except that I was having contractions. When he picked me up, we immediately went to Saint Mary’s Hospital.

The contractions had grown intense and my doctor insisted on giving me “twilight sleep,” a combination of morphine and scopolamine that was supposed to give me amnesia so that I wouldn’t feel or remember the pain of childbirth. I was in extreme pain and still remember most things about the labor and my baby’s birth. I also remember the doctor telling John that I would remember nothing and that he should go home to bed. Which he did.

It was a long, lonely, and torturous night. Shortly before breakfasttime I was taken to the delivery room. My feet were fastened in stirrups and my hands were strapped down. I felt frantic with claustrophobia. After struggling unsuccessfully to free myself of the constraints, I calmed myself as I watched the doctor lift the baby by his
feet and smack him hard on his bottom, eliciting a piercing howl. I flinched at what felt like a violent act.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

He was born two weeks late, just as my sister had been, and I’d spent those long two weeks praying that he wouldn’t be brain-damaged.

“He’s fine,” the doctor replied, and a nurse whisked him out of my sight.

It was much later before a nurse brought him to me and I saw the deep forceps marks on both sides of his extremely elongated head. His experience of his birth had to have been at least as difficult as mine, probably more so. The thought haunted me. But more than anything, I clung to the doctor’s words that he was “fine.”

After our first night in the hospital, the nurse who brought him to me told me he’d screamed all night. She had never heard a newborn scream as much and as loudly as he did; it was the topic of talk among the nurses that night. She didn’t mention anyone holding him, and certainly no one brought him to me. It hurt to know how much he’d suffered. When I finally saw him he was exhausted. He didn’t have the energy to nurse but fell asleep in my arms.

Mother came to help me for a few days when we went home to Ila. John Elder screamed or cried much of the time. I was breast-feeding him, and Mother was convinced that he was crying so much because my breast milk was inadequate. Desperate, I came to believe her, stopped breast-feeding him, and gave him a bottle. Mother went home to Daddy, and I finished packing our belongings for our move into an apartment in Mudville, a group of old army barracks that had been made into apartments for graduate students at Emory University.

When John Elder was two weeks old we moved. We had a small bedroom, a small living room, and a breakfast bar separating it from the kitchen, where my old wringer washing machine stood next to the sink.

John Elder continued to cry and scream.

I was puzzled, frustrated, and exhausted. When he was six weeks old, I took him to a pediatrician. I told the doctor that he screamed or cried much of the time and I didn’t know what to do. He responded: “Just get used to it. He was born this way.”

I had no other place to turn for help.

I thought of Harriet, who spent the early weeks of her life screaming because of pressure on her brain. By walking back and forth in my parents’ bedroom I had been able to calm her so that she fell asleep in my arms. Now I held my own baby in my arms and walked back and forth in our Mudville apartment. My baby screamed. I sat down and rocked him. He screamed. I got up and walked him. He screamed. I walked him some more. He screamed. He must have given up and fallen asleep eventually, but what I remember now is the screaming. That, and my despair.

John couldn’t tolerate our son’s screaming. By this time he had begun to drink, and he stayed out late nights, talking with his fellow philosophy students and drinking in a local tavern. Once he came home late, hit me, and threw me to the floor. When I tried to talk to him about what he’d done, he went to bed and uttered nonsensical phrases the way he’d begun to do when, according to his mother, he was a child wanting to escape his alcoholic father, who physically abused both of them. There was no way to get through to John. After sitting in the living room for a while, smoking a cigarette to calm myself, I too went to bed, and eventually to sleep.

That year at Emory, John’s anger intensified as my sense of resignation settled in. I wouldn’t have called myself depressed at the time; I was too busy to know how I felt. But looking back, my depression is evident. When I got up in the night to feed John Elder, I began to
feed myself as well. I ate cookie after cookie, as if cookies could comfort my lost, lonely feeling.

When John Elder was old enough to stay awake and crawl around the floor and play with his toys, he finally stopped screaming during the day, but he still screamed every time I put him to bed, either for a nap or for the night. The pediatrician told me to let him cry himself to sleep; otherwise, he warned, I would spoil him. I tried to let him cry for fifteen agonizing minutes before I went into the bedroom to find him sweaty and exhausted. He and I were both so upset that I never did that again. Clearly he was too distressed to be left alone—this had nothing to do with spoiling or not spoiling him. For some reason my son had an intense discomfort that I could not understand, but I wasn’t going to make it worse by abandoning him.

Mother spent her entire life suffering guilt and remorse because, when I was a baby, she left me closed up in my room, crying for hours until I fell asleep from exhaustion. She treated me the way she was taught, never picking me up except to feed me, and feeding me on a prescribed schedule that had nothing to do with my hunger. Whether I remember my suffering or think I do because of Mother’s recounting it to me, I was as haunted by those experiences as she was. When, in middle age, I went to a hypnotherapist, I remembered—or thought I remembered—how cold Mother’s touch was, and how hungry, lost, and frantic I felt when closed in that room. I didn’t want to give my own baby such memories.

Early one morning John Elder woke crying. I did everything I could to get him back to sleep, but he continued to cry. Finally, he began to mutter what sounded like the word
car
. He was much too young to talk, so I thought I must have misinterpreted his sound. But
after he repeated it several times, I wrapped him up in a blanket and took him out to the car. As soon as I put him inside he stopped crying.

Had he really said
car
?

He was only eight months old; the idea seemed ridiculous.