Where We Are Now (5 page)

“I wouldn't have.”

“Some other child would've.”

“I wonder who built it?”

“We never knew. Perhaps it was added. The farmhouse was old. I forget when it was built exactly, sometime before the Civil War though.”

“Perhaps Confederate soldiers were hidden there.”

“Aren't you the romantic!”

“Or it was part of the underground railway.”

“More than likely it was meant to hide valuables, silver and jewelry, and such.”

Wasn't it just as likely that Grandpa hid his whisky there, and she knew it though she wasn't supposed to? I stared at
her. She had dark eyes, a small staunch figure. No matter what the season she wore a full corset. Her composure, her certainty about all matters of opinion, was broken only by laughter. I cannot remember seeing her cry until she was in her eighties and had had a cerebral hemorrhage. Yet I was not there to witness every moment of her life.

There were many secrets in the family, things not told for years. Grandmother never told anyone where she met Mr. Moore, not even her own children. My cousin Fergus said he bet they met on a train. Fergus is “a little wild” his mother says, but he's my only first cousin. He drove our grandmother down to Austin to my oldest child's christening, so naturally I like him. And I like his idea. Everybody rode trains then.

“How do you do, Miss…? My name is Edgar Moore. I farm down around Franklin, Tennessee.” Mr. Moore sat in the seat across from her.

“I don't know a thing about agriculture. I could hardly tell you if that was corn or cotton growing out there.” She folded her white-gloved hands on her lap and looked out the window.

“Ladies needn't know about farming. Where are you from?'

“Virginia. Most of my family lives in Richmond. I have an aunt in Tennessee.”

“Where?”

“Franklin.” She twisted her fingers together. She had never ridden on a train alone before, much less spoken to a man while riding on one, but it seemed uncivil not to speak when he was sitting just across from her. Of course she would not give him her name. Fortunately Mr. Moore recognized
the aunt when he and Miss Kate arrived at the station. In time, allowing a few days for her to recover from her journey, he came calling.

If they were both on the train from Richmond to Nashville in 1904, it was as innocent as that, I believe. How easy it is to believe one's own fictions. Perhaps they were not riding the train. Perhaps they met on some other occasion. He was an eligible bachelor, and she was a young woman in need of a husband. I'm certain they did not meet in church. Grandpa was a backslidden Methodist, one of those who attended Easter services if at all, while Grandmother was a Campbellite, a member of the Church of Christ, one of the fiercer fundamentalist groups. Drinking, smoking, dancing, gambling and card playing were forbidden. So were musical instruments in church. To tune the congregation for hymn singing, the minister blew on a pitch pipe. The only amusement during the service was reading the hymnal or lugubrious funeral parlor advertisements on one side of the cardboard fans.

Invariably the picture on the other side was of a longhaired, extremely gentile Christ dressed in a white robe vaguely reminiscent of garments worn by the choir in other churches. He was standing in a highly idealized garden of Gethsemane alone except for a number of rose bushes in the foreground and cypress trees in the background. I used to wonder about those heavy, red, symmetrical roses. They were like no others I'd seen. Finally I decided they were supposed to be heavenly flowers. The message beneath ran:
Your Friend In Your Hour Of Need.
Then there was the name and phone number of the funeral parlor. As a child with a wide experience in visiting family churches—all
kinds of Protestants plus Catholics were represented—I found Grandmother's the most dour. However, it suited her astringent needs which were most apparent in her sense of decorum. To her the simplest act—such as meeting a man—could be dangerous. One had to have a proper introduction by some family member or, lacking that, by a trusted friend. Over-trained in social conventions, she had no training at all in being a farmer's wife. How did she adapt? I wish I'd asked her during her lifetime, still the question isn't difficult. So much is already known it's easy for me to intuit her answers.

“At the farm the front porch was a good deal of trouble because children wanted to play out there. I would be in the kitchen and Mr. Moore would come in carrying George. He was about two then.”

Both Grandpa's and George's faces were red, Grandpa's from the sun, George's from bawling.

“Miss Kate, he's fallen off the porch again. Why can't you watch this child?” he shouted.

She shouted back, “I can't watch George and cook dinner at the same time. There are too many dangerous places around here. Watch him yourself.”

“I'm hiring you a cook.”

“High time!” Miss Kate turned her own reddened face back to the wood stove, a large black cast iron monster she despised every day all day every summer.

She was expecting my mother then. 1908. Pregnant, hot, often exhausted, she was in no humor to accommodate. George did not fall off the porch again. She sat on the porch swing, fanned herself, and watched him while Minnie took over the kitchen.

My grandmother and I never looked in the least alike. Our opinions seldom matched. Though I cry easily, perhaps our temperaments are somewhat the same. Children are easily influenced. I lived in the town house with her, Uncle
George and my mother during part of World War II. I wished I'd had a cook.

In his photograph Grandpa, curly-headed and long-nosed, looks like a sober, industrious squire. In many ways he was. A gold watch-chain stretched across a large belly. He had three hundred acres of rich Middle Tennessee land where he raised cotton, corn, alfalfa, tobacco, and the usual barnyard produce, hogs and chickens. He also had mules to trade and property in town to tend. Until Miss Kate made him take it down, he had a sign on his front gate reading
Trade in Your Old Mules for New.
After he died my grandmother lived for almost thirty years on his investments and had some money left over to leave to their children. In part he was another sort of person which accounted for a barely suppressed smile and definite laughter in his eyes in that photograph. As a child I simply thought he looked jolly. Fergus, five years older, knew better.

“Grandpa was a rascal. He taught me to chew tobacco when I was seven.”

“Didn't you hate the taste of it?”

“Yes, but he convinced me it was something a man needed to know how to do. He taught me how to spit too. Put me up on a wagon seat with him, took me off to town to trade mules. On the way there and back he gave me cussing lessons. We had a wonderful time.”

“What did Aunt Lucy say about that?”

“Mama didn't know until too late. There was a whole side to Grandpa he didn't show to women.”

Fergus has Grandpa's long nose and curly hair. He was working on the belly, said it came naturally since he had to stay up all night eating and drinking with his clients, country musicians who swept into Nashville to play at the Grand Old Opry or hoped to play there. Like so many bats out of a cave blinded by light, they weren't really comfor
table until dark, so Fergus kept his recording studio open till two or three in the morning. We were talking in his office, the single messiest place I've ever entered—this includes the slums of Naples and my children's bedrooms. Over two desks a hanging basket of red plastic geraniums dangled from a set of longhorn steer horns partially hiding a five-foot print of a tiger serenely marching through his jungle. A round table pushed to one side held stacks of poker chips, cards, a cluster of dirty glasses and ashtrays. File boxes sat on all but one seat of a couch. Behind them plastic ferns caught dust in front of a window that was never opened.

In the next room was a well-stocked bar equally in shambles. People, most of them wearing blue jeans, wandered through the office to the bar to replenish drinks. Fergus nodded or waved as they came and went. Grandpa's gold watch, suspended under a glass globe, shone amid the chaos of papers, calculators, hunting knives and one villainous looking carved coconut rolling around between the phones on his desks. The coconut had on an eye patch, a bit of blue bandanna and an earring, all attempts to transform it into a pirate's head. I counted three broken guitars in two corners; a busted drum took up one chair. In order to sit down, I had to prop my feet on a large carton of toilet paper, not that I minded. Fergus has always been like this, a collector and a keeper. The office was his version of Grandpa's barn, a jumble of everything that ever was a piece of farm equipment. Strictly his territory. No one disturbs Fergus' clutter but him. He lives in it like a bandit chief surrounded by his spoils.

“You know, Marianne, the only woman who ever caught sight of Grandpa's carrying on was Miss Kate, and she didn't know the half of it.”

“How did they stay together all those years? Of course there were three children. But he was almost ten years older than she was—”

“People did then,” said Fergus. He'd been divorced once and seemed perpetually on the edge of marrying again though he could never quite make up his mind to it. Compared to Fergus, I've led a sedate life, married for twenty-five years to the same man, mother of three. My husband and I run a horse ranch, a place near Santa Fe where we breed and raise quarter horses.

“Of course,” Fergus reminded me, “Miss Kate was his perfect opposite. He honored her quirks—built her that house in Franklin, paid for all kinds of help—and she put up with his … his good times.”

And the bad times? Do we forget them too easily? “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Well, yes. We don't like to think of our grandparents as pitiable. They were though. For all her bossiness, my grandmother loved men, yet for thirty years she was a widow. During her last years she was quite mad. In her senility she confused me with my mother. She wouldn't fly. She had allergies, arthritis, her share of aches, fevers and anxiety attacks which she called “nerves.”

As for Grandpa? I do know a mean old sow bit him in the calf of his leg, and he had to use a cane for six months. He was aware that his only son George hated farming. He was not fond of either one of his sons-in-law. Hail flattened entire alfalfa crops. Drought destroyed the cotton. Every kind of pest invaded his fields. To the forces of nature he remained a stoic. “The earth survives all weather,” he said. To the forces within he was, I think, largely a stranger. He often drank too much when he wasn't supposed to drink at all. Diabetes made him melancholy. Some days he sat alone on the steps to the hayloft and cursed. I never saw him there, still I'm sure
he must have done it, slumped there in the dark barn, fanned his face with his hat and cursed repetitively, dully.