Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (13 page)

What do I really know about my mother’s feelings toward her own dead sister? Kathryn’s dolls had been put away; my mother was never allowed to touch them.

“I’ll never, never love one of my kids more than another!” she screamed at my father in one of her afternoons of white rage. The context is missing.

During the good years, when cattle prices were high enough to pay the year’s bills and a little extra, my mother bought wallpaper out of a catalog and stuck it to her lumpy walls. She enameled her kitchen white, and she sewed narrow strips of cloth she called “drapes” to hang at the sides of her windows. She bought a stiff, tight cylinder of linoleum at Sears, Roebuck in town and hauled it home in the back of a pickup and unrolled it in a shiny flowered oblong in the middle of her splintery front room floor.

Occasionally I would find her sitting in her front room on her “davenport,” which she had saved for and bought used, her lap full of sewing and her forehead relaxed out of its knot. For a moment there was her room around her as she wanted it to look: the clutter subdued, the new linoleum mopped and quivering under the chair legs that held down its corners, the tension of the opposing floral patterns of wallpaper, drapes, and slipcovers held in brief, illusory harmony by the force of her vision.

How hard she tried for her daughters! Over the slow thirty miles of gumbo and gravel we drove to town every summer for dentist appointments at a time when pulling teeth was still a more common remedy than filling them, when our own father and his mother wore false teeth before they were forty.

During the good years, we drove the thirty miles for piano lessons. An upright Kimball was purchased and hauled home in the back of the pickup. Its carved oak leaves and ivories dominated the front room, where she found time to “sit with us” every day as we practiced. With a pencil she pointed out the notes she had learned to read during her five scant quarters in normal school and made us read them aloud. “F-sharp!” she would scream over the throb of the Maytag in the kitchen as one of us pounded away.

She carped about bookworms, but she located the dim old Carnegie library in town and got library cards for us even though, as country kids, we weren’t strictly entitled to them. After that, trips home from town with sacks of groceries included armloads of library books. Against certain strictures, she could be counted on. When, in my teens, I came home with my account of the new book the librarian kept in her desk drawer and refused to check out to me, my mother straightened her back as I knew she would. “She thinks she can tell one of my kids what she can read and what she can’t read?”

On our next visit to the library, she marched up the stone steps and into the mote-filled sanctum with me.

The white-haired librarian glanced up inquiringly.

“You got
From Here to Eternity
?”

The librarian looked at me, then at my mother. Without a word she reached into her drawer and took out a heavy volume. She stamped it and handed it to my mother, who handed it to me.

How did she determine that books and dentistry and piano lessons were necessities for her daughters, and what battles did she fight for them as slipping cattle prices put even a gallon of white enamel paint or a sheet of new linoleum beyond her reach?

Disaster followed disaster on the ranch. An entire season’s hay crop lost to a combination of ancient machinery that would not hold together and heavy rains that would not let up. A whole year’s calf crop lost because the cows had been pastured in timber that had been logged, and when they ate the pine needles from the downed tops, they spontaneously aborted. As my father grew less and less able to face the reality of the downward spiral, what could she hope to hold together with her pathetic floral drapes and floral slipcovers?

Bundled in coats and overshoes in the premature February dark, our white breaths as one, my mother and I huddle in the shadow of the chicken house. By moonlight we watch the white-tailed deer that have slipped down out of the timber to feed from the haystack a scant fifty yards away. Cautiously I raise my father’s rifle to my shoulder. I’m not all that good a marksman, I hate the inevitable explosive crack, but I brace myself on the corner of the chicken house and sight carefully and remember to squeeze
. Ka-crack!

Eight taupe shapes shoot up their heads and spring for cover. A single mound remains in the snow near the haystack. By the time my mother and I have climbed through the fence and trudged up to the haystack, all movement from the doe is reflexive. “Nice and fat,” says my mother.

Working together with our butcher knives, we lop off her scent glands and slit her and gut her and save the heart and liver in a bucket for breakfast. Then, each taking a leg, we drag her down the field, under the fence, around the chicken house, and into the kitchen, where we will skin her out and butcher her.

We are two mid-twentieth-century women putting meat on the table for the next few weeks. Neither of us has ever had a hunting license, and if we did, hunting season is long closed, but we’re serene about what we’re doing. “Eating our hay, aren’t they?” says my mother. “We’re entitled to a little venison. The main thing is not to tell anybody what we’re doing.”

And the pregnant eighteen-year-old? What about her?

In June of 1959 she sits up in the hospital bed, holding in her arms a small warm scrap whose temples are deeply dented from the forceps. She cannot remember birthing him, only the long hours alone before the anesthetic took over. She feels little this morning, only a dull worry about the money, money, money for college in the fall.

The in-laws are a steady, insistent, increasingly frantic chorus of disapproval over her plans.
But, Mary! Tiny babies have to be kept warm!
her mother-in-law keeps repeating, pathetically, ever since she was told about Mary’s plans for fall quarter.

But, Mary! How can you expect to go to college and take good care of a husband and a baby?

Finally,
We’re going to put our foot down!

She knows that somehow she has got to extricate herself from these sappy folks. About the baby she feels only a mild curiosity. Life where there was none before. The rise and fall of his tiny chest. She has him on her hands now. She must take care of him.

Why not an abortion?

Because the thought never crossed her mind. Another suspicious absence, another void for memory to skirt. What she knew about abortion was passed around the midnight parties in the girls’ dormitory:
You drink one part turpentine with two parts sugar
. Or was it the other way around?
…two parts turpentine to one part sugar. You drink gin in a hot bath…

She has always hated the smell of gin. It reminds her of the pine needles her father’s cattle ate, and how their calves were born shallow-breathed and shriveled, and how they died. She knows a young married woman who begged her husband to hit her in the stomach and abort their fourth child.

Once, in her eighth month, the doctor had shot her a look across his table. “If you don’t want this baby,” he said, “I know plenty of people who do.”

“I want it,” she lied.

No, but really. What is to become of this eighteen-year-old and her baby?

Well, she’s read all the sentimental literature they shove on the high school girls. She knows how the plot is supposed to turn out.

Basically, she has two choices.

One, she can invest all her hopes for her own future in this sleeping scrap.
Son, it was always my dream to climb to the stars. Now the tears of joy sprung at the sight of you with your college diploma
…

Even at eighteen, this lilylicking is enough to make her sick.

Or, two, she can abandon the baby and the husband and become really successful and really evil. This is the more attractive version of the plot, but she doesn’t really believe in it. Nobody she knows has tried it. It seems as out of reach from ordinary daylight Montana as Joan Crawford or the Duchess of Windsor or the moon. As she lies propped up in bed with the sleeping scrap in her arms, looking out over the dusty downtown rooftops settling into noon in the waning Eisenhower years, she knows very well that Joan Crawford will never play the story of her life.

What, then? What choice is left to her?

What outcome could possibly be worth all this uproar? Her husband is on the verge of tears these days; he’s only twenty himself, and he had no idea what trouble he was marrying into, his parents pleading and arguing and threatening, even his brothers and their wives chiming in with their opinions, even the minister getting into it, even the neighbors; and meanwhile his wife’s grandmother firing off red-hot letters from her side, meanwhile his wife’s mother refusing to budge an inch — united, those two women are as formidable as a pair of rhinoceroses, though of course he has no idea in the world what it took to unite them.

All this widening emotional vortex over whether or not one Montana girl will finish college. What kind of genius would she have to be to justify it all? Will it be enough that, thirty years later, she will have read approximately 16,250 freshman English essays out of an estimated lifetime total of 32,000?

Will it be enough, over the years, that she remembers the frozen frame of her mother’s face over the rinse tub that day after Christmas in 1958 and wonders whether she can do as much for her son as was done for her? Or that she often wonders whether she really lied when she said,
I want it
?

Will it be enough? What else is there?

Charles Bowden

 

CHARLES BOWDEN
, a recipient of the Lannan Foundation award and a contributing editor to
GQ
magazine and contributing writer to
Mother Jones
, is the author of many books, including
A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior
;
Down by the River: Drugs
,
Money, Murder and Family
, a
New York Times
Notable Book;
Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground
;
Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future
;
Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America
;
Desierto: Memories of the Future
;
Red Line
;
Blue Desert
; and
Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions
(with Michael Binstein). His next book is
Café Blood: Going over Jordan
.

 

I can’t tell much from her silhouette. She’s sitting off to one side, her shoulders hunched, and toward the front is the box with the teddy bears. Or at least I think they’re teddy bears. Almost twenty years have passed, and I’ve avoided thinking about it. There are some things that float pretty free of time, chronology, the book of history, and the lies of the experts. In the early eighties I went to a funeral as part of my entry into a world, a kind of border crossing.

It started as the gold light of afternoon poured through the high, slit windows of the newsroom. I had no background in the business and I’d lied to get the job. I was the fluff writer, the guy brought on to spin something out of nothing for the soft features and the easy pages about how people fucked up their marriages or made a quiche or found the strength to go on with their lives because of God, a diet, or a new self-help book. Sometimes they wrote the book, sometimes they just believed the book. I interviewed Santa Claus, and he told me of the pain and awkwardness of having held a child on his fat lap in Florida as ants crawled up his legs and bit him. One afternoon the newsroom was empty, and the city desk looked out and beckoned me. I was told to go to a motel and see if I could find anything to say.

The rooms faced a courtyard on the old desert highway that came into town and were part of a strip of unhappy inns left to die after the interstate lanced Tucson’s flank. When I was twelve this belt still flourished, and my first night in this city was spent in a neighboring motel with a small pool. I remember swimming until late at night, intoxicated with the idea of warm air, cool water, and palm trees. My sister was fourteen, and the son of the owners, a couple from the East with the whiff of Mafia about them, dated her; later, I read a newspaper story that cited him as a local purveyor of pornography. But the row of motels had since lost prosperous travelers to other venues and drifted into new gambits, most renting by the day, week, or month, as old cars full of unemployed people lurched into town and parked next to sad rooms where the adults scanned the classifieds for a hint of employment. The children always had dirty faces and anxious eyes. The motel I was sent to was a hot-sheet joint, with rooms by the hour or day, and featured water beds (
WA WA BEDS
, in the language of the sign), in-room pornographic movies, and a flock of men and women jousting through nooners.