Читать книгу The Home Place - J. Drew Lanham - Страница 10
ОглавлениеHome is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing.
The Wiz
IT WAS HOME: EDGEFIELD, SOUTH CAROLINA, A SMALL COUNTY on the western edge of the Palmetto State. The county’s name is well earned. With its western flank tucked tightly against the banks of the once mighty but now dammed Savannah River, on the edge ecologically between Upstate and the Lowcountry, Edgefield contains an incredible natural wealth of mountain, piedmont, and coastal plain.
Among South Carolina’s forty-six counties, Edgefield is not large, covering only some five hundred square miles. The political boundaries drawn by human hands give it the appearance on maps of a cartoonish chicken’s head, its squared-off comb to the north, huge triangular beak pointing east toward the Atlantic, and shortened neck jutting to the southwest. Nature sketched the westward boundary where Stevens and Turkey Creeks skirt along the raggedy rear of the bird’s head and form the long border with McCormick County. Surrounded by piedmont places to the north—Greenwood, McCormick, and Saluda—and Aiken, an upper–coastal plain county to the south, Edgefield is a transition zone, with each of the imaginary poultry’s portions harboring ecological treasures. Growing up near the bird’s scrawny neck—in the south-central part of the county, only a few miles from the Savannah River and an equidistant stone’s throw from the sprawl of North Augusta and the sleepy town of Edgefield—I was privy to the beauty and diversity of a spot most ignore.
Edgefield is many places rolled into one. With the exception of saltwater and high peaks, there’s not much that can’t be found there. Droughty sand holds onto remnant stands of longleaf pine and stunted turkey oaks in the southern and eastern extremes where the upper coastal plain peters out. In the soggy bottoms along many of the rivers and creeks, rich alluvial soils grow splotchy-barked sycamores and warty hackberries to girths so big that two large men joined hand to hand couldn’t reach around them. A few buttressed bald cypresses draped in Spanish moss sit in tea-stained sloughs. Between the extremes of wet and dry, high and low, even the sticky clay nourishes a surprising variety of hardwoods; slow-growing upland oaks and tight-grained, tough-as-nail hickories grow alongside fast-rising tulip poplars and opportunistic sweetgum. In the understory redbud and dogwood trees sit in the shade of the dominants, blooming briefly in spring before the canopy closes with green overhead.
Loblolly pine, the sylvan savior of southern soil, is everywhere. A tree that grows best in moist bottomlands, it climbed the hills out of the swamps with some help from human hands and colonized eroding lands. Loblolly is a fast grower that stretches tall and mostly straight in forests that have been touched occasionally by fire and saw. In open stands, where the widely spaced trees can grow with broom sedge and Indian grass waving underneath, bobwhite quail, Bachman’s sparrows, and a bevy of other wildlife can find a place to call home. But where flames and forestry have been excluded, spindly trees fight with one another for sun and soil and will grow thick like the hair on a dog’s back. In those impenetrable stands white-tailed deer find secure bedrooms but little else dwells.
Most of the county sits in the lower piedmont. This Midlands province stretches like a belt, canted southwest to northeast, across the state’s thickened waist. Torn apart first by agriculture, then by unbridled development, the fragmented middle sits between the more spectacular coastal plain and the mountains.
Coastward, you’ll find black-water swamps, brackish marshes, and disappearing cathedrals of longleaf pine that hide species both common and rare. Red-cockaded woodpeckers, diamondback rattlesnakes, and gopher tortoises hang on in some places where the longleaf persists. Painted buntings splash color across the coastal scrub and alligators bellow in rebounded numbers among wading wood storks.
Northward, the modest Southern Appalachians are bounded by the escarpment the Cherokee called the “Blue Wall.” The place not so long ago called the “Dark Corner” still stirs the imagination as gorges rush wild and cool with white water and a few persistent brook trout linger in hidden pools. Moist coves crowded with canopies of hardwoods sit below and among a few granite monoliths that folks flock to see. Within the memory of a three-hundred-year-old poplar this was the backcountry: a wilderness with “panthers,” elk, and wood bison roaming canebrakes and rhododendron hells. Now peregrine falcons and common ravens patrol the skies while black bears grow fat on Allegheny blackberries and the easy pickings in exclusive gated communities.
Sitting on either flank of the broad and broken piedmont, the mountains and the coast harbor opportunities for wildness that the worn-out region in between has lost to easy progress. But Edgefield County, caught in the middle of all the apparent mediocrity of the piedmont, is yet a hidden gem, a source of biodiversity that is easy to pass by on the way to somewhere else.
There are still priceless places where nature hangs on by tooth, talon, and tendril. Most of Edgefield is rural. There are trees everywhere, though most of them reside on private lands, where there is a priority set on pines over pavement. Significant portions of the Sumter National Forest’s Long Cane Ranger District lie in the county, providing public access to places where nature is the first consideration. Farming and forestry provide diversity within the tree-dominated matrix. I grew up in the southwestern outreaches of the county, in a ragged, two-hundred-acre Forest Service inholding. From heaven—or from a high-flying bird’s viewpoint—I imagine it looked like a hole punched into the Long Cane Ranger District. That gap in the wildness was my Home Place.
In the 1970s, when wild turkeys were still trying to establish a clawhold everywhere else, they were common enough on the Home Place as to be almost unremarkable. I’d often surprise a flock as they fed in the bottomland pasture. Most of the big birds would take off running for the nearest wood’s edge, but a couple of gobblers always lifted off, powerfully clearing the tree line while cackling loudly at my intrusion.
Like the wild turkeys, deer weren’t really common in the wider world. But whitetails were abundant in the woods and fields of the Home Place. To Daddy, they were pests. Handsome in their foxy red coats, the deer claimed our bean fields as their own in the summer. They seemed to know that there was security in that season, with worries of hidden hunters forgotten until fall.
Daddy put many of the Home Place acres to work growing produce. Watermelon, cantaloupe, butter beans, purple-hull peas, and an array of other crops grew fast and flavorful on the bottomland terraces and sandy soil up on the hills. Tons of melons and hundreds of bushels of beans were the product of his and Mama’s hard work. The bounty wasn’t just for us, though. Daddy would load up his truck with the fresh vegetables and sell them to city and suburban folks who craved the flavor of locally grown foods not found in grocery stores. The money was an important supplement to the paltry pay he and Mama made as schoolteachers.
The investment in the crops—the plowing, planting, and fertilizing—would all be for naught, though, if the four-legged foraging machines had their way. The garden’s only chance at survival was an eight-foot-high electric fence and a phalanx of scarecrows draped in Daddy’s sweatiest, smelliest clothes. Should the fence fail and the deer’s noses unriddle the scarecrow ruse, the last line of defense was an old British Enfield .303 rifle. Daddy would sit on the roof and try to pick off one or two of the deer but he was seldom successful. Even with his constant attention to defending the garden he’d often find a sizable portion of the new crop gone overnight, the tender seedlings neatly nipped and ruminating in the belly of a whitetail that had figured out how to breach the gauntlet while we slept.
Knowing that the Home Place was surrounded by the deer heaven of the National Forest and that our fields and gardens were open buffets in the midst of it all, a couple of Daddy’s teacher friends—Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Ferguson—asked to hunt the property. Beyond the rooftop plinking Daddy didn’t deer hunt, but he believed that any pressure exerted on the bean eaters couldn’t hurt. He said yes. The two white men became the only people I remember Daddy ever trusting to hunt on the Home Place, free to roam the property and exact the revenge that my father couldn’t. Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Ferguson showed up on Saturday mornings in fall dressed in camouflage and carrying bows or rifles. They sought the whitetails with a dawn-to-dusk fervor, arriving early and leaving late. What did they do out there all day? Where did they go? It was puzzling to see the extraordinary lengths they took—getting up before the sun did and dressing like trees and bushes—just to pursue animals that grazed casually, like so many slender brown cattle, right in our backyard. It seemed to me the hunters were making something that should’ve been easy hard. But while I don’t remember ever seeing any fruits of their labors, they kept coming back and seemed happy just to be “out there.”
Beyond the white-tailed deer and the wild turkeys, wildlife was everywhere. In every natural nook and cranny—a stump hole, a dry creek bed, or a burrow in the ground—there was something furred, feathered, finned, or scaled that scurried, swam, or flew. I was amazed by it all. Curiosity grew as I explored and learned the signs of the wild souls I seldom actually saw: the delicate doglike trace of a fox; the handlike pawprints of raccoons and opossums; mysterious feathers that had floated to earth, gifts from unknown birds.
I craved knowledge about the wildlife that lived around us. I read every book I could about the creatures that shared the Home Place kingdom with me. I pored over encyclopedias and piled up library fines. Field guides were treasure troves of information: pictures stacked side by side with brief descriptions of what, where, and when. I went back outdoors, where I walked, stalked, and waited to see as many wild things as I could. I collected tadpoles to watch them grow into froglets; I caught butterflies and gazed into their thousand-lensed eyes. Birds were everywhere and as I learned to identify them by sight their songs sunk into my psyche, too. Nature was often the first and last thing on my mind, morning to night.
An April morning full of birdsong and the distant rumblings of gobbling longbeards was life in stereo. Bobwhite quail had conversations with one another from weedy ditches and thorny thickets. On my rambles I would usually flush a covey or two. The birds exploded from blackberry brambles, flying scattershot in every direction with wings a-whirring, to find refuge elsewhere. The sudden flurry never failed to push my pulse to pounding. Within a few minutes the reassembly calls—Pearlie! Pearlie!—drifted across the pasture to bring the clan back together again. On warm summer nights, barred owls boomed their eerie calls and cackles back and forth across the creek bottom as the numbing chants of whip-poor-wills and choruses of katydids and crickets lulled me to sleep.
Today, Edgefield is still a rich refuge for wild things. Most of them don’t attract the attention that deer and turkeys do. Hand-standing spotted skunks secret themselves in hedgerows and old fields. Webster’s salamanders hide in the litter of the forest floor. Christmas darters, Carolina heelsplitters, yellow lampmussels, and eastern creekshells won’t win any contests for charisma but the decorative little fish and trio of freshwater mussels survive in Edgefield’s creeks and not many other places. Many rare plants are found there, too. These rooted and leafed things are more often than not overlooked even though their lyrical names demand attention: adder’s tongue, streambank mock orange, shoals spider-lily, yellow sunnybell, Oglethorpe oak, eared goldenrod, Carolina birds-in-a-nest, small skullcap, and enchanter’s nightshade.
Edgefield has been less welcoming of—and less of a refuge for—human diversity. Under regressive and racist governors who fostered and promoted policies aimed squarely at exclusion and violence, the power base in Edgefield kept things stuck in a state of antebellum stagnation, separate and nowhere near equal. While the South has long laid claim to a culture that values manners, loyalty, honor, and a slower pace of living, there are other, less admirable traits that ooze out from between the niceties. A heaping of hypocrisy is often served alongside the southern hospitality. Double standards are as common as ragweed and persistent as kudzu across the region. The “good old days” that some pine for weren’t the best for all of us. But Edgefield was still my refuge, primarily because it was and is a sanctuary for creatures that aren’t subject to the prejudices of men.
My memory continues to run like a rabbit around the times spent in the small piedmont place I called home. It weaves and winds through woods and wetlands to reconnect me to my nature-loving roots. That pleasant wandering is reason enough for remembering—and returning—home.
A rusting, dented black mailbox teetering atop a decaying post marked the spot: Route 1, Box 29, Republican Road. Driving west you bore left at the mailbox, onto the dusty dirt road where the county had abandoned regular maintenance to chance and persistent complaints. If you stayed straight on that road for about a quarter of a mile, you’d see a brick house, tinted somewhere between orange and red, the hue of sun-faded clay. The Ranch was a typical 1970s dwelling, nothing spectacular, but mostly modern. It was comfortable and a place Daddy and Mama had worked hard to build. It had been a much smaller house until my parents bought an old army barracks and attached it to the little four-room affair that had been the Lanham abode. They encased the new addition in these clay-colored bricks, added a touch of distinction with white columns on the front porch, and called it home.
The porch looked out over a yard Mama had tried to cover with a slow-growing patch of carpetlike Zoysia grass. But it never lived up to her expectations, and weeds and Bermuda grass had to suffice for lawn. Behind the Ranch a huge hay shed sheltered food for the cattle, Daddy’s farm equipment, and almost everything else he thought might be of some future use. There was a chicken coop in the corner of the shed, and on the far side and out of sight (but not smell) a pigpen.
All of it—the Ranch, the hay shed with its tacked-on animal pens—was surrounded by nature. Well-tended gardens, crop fields, and rolling pastures buffered the Home Place from the government timberland. There was even a wetland of sorts, which in later years I would learn was really an open cesspool—the Ranch’s own homemade sewage system.
The homestead was also buffered from the outside world. Mama and Daddy were progressive thirtysomethings who’d come through the 1960s civil rights movement. They were still overcoming discrimination but saw a way to provide better for all of us, improving and enlarging their condition. Inside the Ranch there were the decorative signs of 1970s progress: faux-wood paneling and sculpted carpeting in gaudy colors. My big brother, Jock; older sister, Julia (“Bug”); and little sister, Jennifer, all grew up there. For me, though, it was mostly a part-time home. A good portion of my life up until I was fifteen was spent at the other, less-than-modern house that sat across the pasture.
That house—the Ramshackle—was down another road in both space and time. My grandmother Mamatha’s place was everything the brick Ranch wasn’t. It had a rusting (and leaky) tin roof, six tiny rooms, and an exterior of brittle, white tiles that were loose or missing in places. The house had a snaggletoothed look where the black tar paper showed through the gapped tile teeth. The porch roof had a ragged hole where she’d shot blindly one night at a hooting owl she claimed was a bad omen.
The yard was Mamatha’s pride and joy. She would sit on the wood-planked front porch on warm spring days, admiring her green-thumbed handiwork. Over her five or six decades of occupancy she’d collected fieldstones of every shape and size and arranged them carefully around a huge arborvitae tree. In that dedicated space Mamatha planted all kinds of flowers, which flourished under her constant care. Much of her success depended on the tons of manure she constantly mined from our feedlot. My grandmother worked hard to control things in that little world of stone and cowshit—watering, hoeing, and weeding were never-ending work.
Outside the flower ring, however, an army of weeds crept in from the adjoining pasture. Most of what was in that tiny space was green, and from a distance looked lawn-like. There were three or four old crepe myrtles in the yard that erupted in purple and white blooms in April and May. Little copses of lemon-yellow daffodils and nodding snowdrops preceded the crepe myrtles in the new warmth of March. The last time I visited the Home Place many of those flowers, now probably a hundred years old, were still heralding spring.
In the complimentary light of a fading sunset, with your eyes squinted just so, Mamatha’s place looked quaint: the little house in the big woods. Coming closer and stepping through the ill-fitting door would reveal the truth, though. Probably built sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, the Ramshackle was almost a functional museum of the Depression-era South. The house was a shoddily constructed thing, with an interior of hastily painted Sheetrock walls and creaky, uneven floors covered by sheets of cheap, fading vinyl. In one room, a remnant piece of threadbare beige carpet provided the “luxurious” touch to an otherwise basic decor. The indoor plumbing, with exposed metal pipes and white enamel basins, was a relatively recent addition. Insulation had been an afterthought. The modern improvements included a 1950s Frigidaire that Mamatha always called an “icebox.”
In a scary, dimly lit, and moldy-smelling lower room that had probably been someone’s quick-fix idea of an addition, a coffin-sized deep freezer sat entombed in piles of old clothes, magazines, and other junk my pack rat grandmother just couldn’t bear to throw away. The freezer kept other items in an icy state of suspended animation. Plastic containers and bags filled with the bounty from gardens past sat stacked and frozen against some future famine. Foil-wrapped mystery meats and leftovers from long-ago church suppers were wedged into every nook and cranny. There was food in there that had seen several decades pass. If Mamatha had pulled a coelacanth—the prehistorically creepy, bottom-dwelling fossil-fish-amphibian—from the depths of that freezer, it wouldn’t have been a surprise. I suppose my father came by his hoarding gene honestly.
In spite of her “collecting” my grandmother kept a clean—if not neat—home. Twine-bound brooms made of the tawny stems and tassels of dead broom sedge kept the floors cleaner than any vacuum ever could. Mamatha scrubbed her floors—sometimes on her knees—and seemed always in some mopping, sweeping, or dusting mode.
My grandmother’s humble Ramshackle sat next to a dilapidated smokehouse. A notched-log structure that may have been built decades before the house itself was, it always seemed ready to give up the ghost to time and gravity. Though salt-cured pork had hung there in the past, by the time I came along the smokehouse was a dark and dank junk shed filled with all kinds of unappetizing and inedible things. My grandfather’s World War I gas mask stared out of the dim like some alien. Cloudy mason jars with God knows what in them and disintegrating old textbooks and magazines littered the interior. In spite of the eerie aura that surrounded the shed, I ventured inside occasionally when I was a kid, just to see what was in there. I never stayed for long and always felt like there was something lurking in one of the dark corners that I didn’t really want to see.
Mamatha’s backyard, mostly compacted dirt with scattered islands of weeds, struggled even more than the front. There was a woodpile that waxed and waned with the seasons. A barn with warped split-board siding had seen its better days twenty or thirty years before I arrived on the scene. You could see through the siding. The tin roof barely hung onto the rafters. It was a quarrelsome structure that complained in the slightest wind, creaking and groaning as if afflicted by some sort of architectural arthritis. Daddy built an elevated corncrib on one side of the barn to store feed and hay. On the other side was a scrapyard museum of antiquated junk and artifacts: rusting plowshares, old singletrees, worn leather harnesses, a burlap sack full of mostly broken arrowheads and pottery made by the people who used to call the same land their home place. The arrowheads were a constant source of curiosity to me, and I used to wonder about the people ingenious enough to make such beautiful tools from stone and clay. There was enough other stuff to keep a kid—or plundering picker—searching for an eternity. The rickety building was full of the melding odors of an old farm; the metallic musk of rusting iron and fertilizer, slick scent of spilled oil, and pleasant aroma of dried corn husks and molasses-soaked sweet feed mingled with the heavy mustiness of everything else, from unknown chemicals to toxic pest-killing potions long ago soaked up by the dirt floor.
There was a barely standing chicken coop behind the barn, under a gnarled black walnut tree where the hawks would wait for a chance at chicken dinner. The Ramshackle, the smokehouse, and the potluck-landscape yard could have all been in a sepia-toned picture taken long ago. Although my father frequently offered modern upgrades to Mamatha’s house and existence, she either filibustered the improvements or downright refused the charity.
There is still a part of me that exists in that tin-roofed, broomstraw-swept, rusting, rural, wood-fired world. But how did I, a child of the 1960s and 1970s, come to grow up in the 1930s? It was all a matter of give and take: I was “loaned” to Mamatha by Mama and Daddy to help fend off her loneliness after my grandfather Daddy Joe died in 1961, from a suite of long-lasting illnesses dating back to World War I. I was, after all, his namesake and thus the most logical substitute; she lost one Joseph and gained another. So from the age of maybe three or four until I was sixteen, Mamatha’s house was more often home to me than the Ranch. The two dwellings, the modern and the throwback, sat a few hundred yards apart from each other, well within hollering distance. But while the two structures were close together physically they were almost a century apart in mindset. The houses, and the space that lay between, were symbolic of the worlds I straddled: modern convenience and comfort versus old-time, bare-boned simplicity. Both sets of values will guide me until the day I die.
Mamatha’s house, broken down and mired in the past like an old plow mule in the mud, was the heart of the Home Place. There was in the antiquated lifestyle something solid and reassuring that comfort and the technology of the day couldn’t capture. The ties to legacy and the affection for home were reinforced by a grandmother who, in the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” somehow kept me suspended in an in-between world of superstitions, haints, and herbal remedies. Any number of apparently innocent things, I learned, might bring bad luck upon me. There were constant warnings—“Don’t step over this!” “Don’t lay that there!” Mamatha’s yard was a walk-through pharmacy, with many of the weeds and roots providing what she claimed the drugstore couldn’t. A constant dose of the Holy Bible mixed with magic made my time with my grandmother spooky and spiritually profound.
And so more than the physical structure of the house itself, there was a metaphysical underpinning that defined the character of our lives together. I heard, saw, and felt things in the Ramshackle that few, if any, of my friends have probably ever experienced. It was a universe where wonder and awe had yet to be tossed from the temple by science and cynicism. There was way more to heaven and earth than could be dreamed back then. It was a different world, one I sometimes wish I could revisit.
There are certain seasons, certain sensual prompts, that take me back to the Home Place. Now, as back then, fall is the time when nature speaks most clearly to me. In autumn one is treated to an orgy of sights, sounds, and smells that can be wonderfully overwhelming. The stifling late-summer heat is mercifully cleared by cooler air overnight. Breathing is suddenly easier and the soaking sweat evaporates. You want to inhale deeply enough to take in every molecule wafting on the wind. The tired sameness of September’s deep green fades then flames into October’s vermilion sumacs and scarlet maples, lemon-yellow poplars and golden hickories. In those days of crispness I want to linger long enough to hear every sound and look far enough to see into forever.
The season has always drawn a sort of restlessness from me. The Germans have a fine word for it: zugunruhe. A compound derived from the roots zug (migration) and unruhe (anxiety), it describes the seasonal migration of birds and other animals. In this wanderlust I want to go somewhere far away, to fly to some place I think I need to be. Nature is on the move, too, migrating, storing, and dying. Everything is either accelerating or slowing down. Some things are rushing about to put in seed for the next generation. A monarch butterfly in a field full of goldenrod is urgent on tissue-thin wings of black and orange to gather the surging sweetness before the frost locks it away. Apple trees and tangles of muscadines hang heavy. The fruit-dense orchards offer a final call to the wildlings. Foxes, deer, coons, possum, and wild turkeys fatten in the feasting. The air is spiced with the scent of dying leaves. The perfume of decay gathers as berries ripen into wild wine. Even the sun sits differently in an autumnal sky, sending a mellower light in somber slants that foretell the coming change.
The droning katydids, tired from their months-long work of filling the hot wet nights with song, hang on into October. But soon choirs of thousands dwindle to hundreds, and then just one or two. A persistent cricket tries hard to fiddle in time but the first freeze throws a wrench into his rhythm. The rustling riot of turning, falling leaves and the mysterious moonlit chirps of migrant songbirds winging their way to faraway places make my heart race. It is all so beautiful that it hurts. Almost overnight eastern red cedars suffer the savagery of hormonal surges and a ravaged stand of sapling pines point the way to the pawed-up and piss-soaked patches of ground that whitetail bucks leave as calling cards. When the moon glows in a mid-November sky like a pallid sun, I, too, am so soaked in wanting and wood’s lust that I might as well wander like a warbler in the joyous urgency of it all.
In Mamatha’s bedroom, I slept on an anemic aluminum cot just across from her high-post cannonball bed. For almost a dozen years I tossed and turned on a thin foam mattress that didn’t offer much in the way of comfort or support. The cot wobbled and creaked with each move I made. And as I got bigger it got smaller. There was a perfectly good bed in the adjoining room but Mamatha guarded the “guest” bedroom ferociously, keeping it made up in her best linens in a state of museum-like readiness for the company that hardly ever came.
The conservationist prophet Aldo Leopold once wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” If the maxim is true then I suppose we were spiritually secure on both counts. Mamatha cooked and heated with wood, not power-company watts. She was always cold, despite sleeping under several suffocating layers of heavy, hand-sewn quilts for most of the year. Even though the bedroom and kitchen were the only heated rooms, the demand for firewood never ended. A ravenous wood heater had a fire in its belly well before the first frost and wasn’t extinguished until sometime after Good Friday. In all my years at the Ramshackle that heater probably consumed hundreds of cords of the hardwood that Daddy cut. Thanks to the heater’s insatiable appetite and Mamatha’s thin blood, the little room could get hellishly hot.
Daddy’s wielding of an often finicky chain saw and his choice of the next tree destined for the stove and heater were more art than science. A dying post oak on one hillside or a blown-down poplar from the bottom meant that no stand of timber was ever depleted. He never cut pines for the woodstove because the pitch created a dangerous residue in the flues that could ignite and burn the house down. But the fat lightwood we got from old pine stumps was a coveted commodity and we used it sparingly to start fires. The sap-soaked heartwood smelled like kerosene and burned like a torch.
In addition to the firewood gathered for Mamatha, the forest freely sacrificed sturdy posts and rails of hickory for corrals and fences. Big sweetgum and elm trees were left standing because they were almost impossible to split with an axe or maul. Daddy apparently didn’t think much of sycamore as wood or building material either because I can’t remember him ever cutting one. Maybe he just thought they were too pretty to put a saw blade into.
The hardwoods and pines that thrived in the hopscotching maneuvers of Daddy’s forestry weren’t all that random. The sylvan cycle of felling, cutting, loading, splitting, and burning was a year-round thing. The industry was hard work and the genesis of my understanding that in order to have something for later, you’d best make what you have now last. Daddy’s selection of trees to cut was an illustration of a land ethic being practiced. Certain hardwoods were most valuable. Red oaks, cut up, split, and dried, made the best firewood. Inhaling the pleasantly rank odor that came from a section of scarlet oak freshly laid open with a sledgehammer and maul was like sniffing smelling salts in the chill fall air. In the wood heater or laid across the fireplace andirons (we called them fire dogs), cured red oak popped and burned hot enough to quickly take the cold edge off a room. White oaks, especially young, straight, tall-growing ones, were reserved for construction. A twelve-foot log split in half lengthwise made sturdy railings for the feedlot corral. Hickories burned well, too, but were much harder to split and so they were cut sparingly. Sometimes Daddy made tool handles out of small ones because they were tough and lasted a long time. He’d save the dried hickory shavings and use them to smoke meat on the grill. Though Daddy cut trees for the services they could render, I’d like to think that he also found some soul-satisfying recognition of their beauty and usefulness as living beings.
If Mamatha’s house was the heart of the Home Place, Daddy’s hard labor was the breath that made its blood bright. Once the trees were down and chopped up, Jock and I moved in to split and load. Much of what we cut was bound for Mamatha’s old cast-iron cookstove. An antiquity even back then, it had probably been state of the art sometime in the early 1880s and stood on four stumpy legs like a black-and-white cow. The tiny kitchen where the stove stood was an orderly mess of culinary clutter. Cast iron skillets sat beside modern aluminum pots and pans. Plastic canisters and bowls covered the counters. Cabinets and a rolltop pantry overflowed with canned goods and bags of dried peas and beans. Enough food had been hoarded to feed us until Jesus came back for his next last supper.
There was other stuff in that kitchen that had probably been around for almost a hundred years. A boatlike wooden basin that had belonged to my great-grandmother Big Mama was frequently the focus of Mamatha’s kitchen attentions. Like her mother before her, she’d pour flour, buttermilk, and some shortening into it—Big Mama had probably used lard—and work it back and forth with her knotty fingers until a mound of clayey white dough emerged. The dough rolled flat, perforated with the mouth of a jelly glass, and fed into the belly of the stove became hot buttermilk biscuits. Buttered up and slathered in sticky, sweet molasses, there was nothing better. And accompanied by a plate of grits and maybe some fried calf’s liver and onions with gravy, the biscuits gave me just cause to spend most Saturday mornings at the Ramshackle before making my way to the Ranch. When I stayed for lunch, there might be fried-bologna sandwiches and potato salad.
Breakfast and lunch were always good. Dinner, though, was on a separate level of delightful gluttony. Mamatha often started cooking it right after breakfast, to take advantage of the already hot stove and to let the flavors meld and marinate for hours. Garden-grown string beans and red-skinned white potatoes, fresh tomato and creamed corn soup, fried crookneck squash and green spring onions, baked macaroni and cheese pie, roast beef, and cornbread might all make up a single glorious meal. Top that off with a crusty peach cobbler, molasses bread, lemony tea cakes, creamy sweet potato pie, or some ancient but delicious butter-drenched pound cake dug from the lower-room freezer: my waistline quickly expanded into a Sears “Husky” size.
Cooking the way Mamatha did took time and she never rushed food to the table. Convenience and impatience were not excuses for eating poorly. We always ate at the table. Even though Daddy eventually bought my grandmother an electric stove, it sat unused because she didn’t trust it to cook the “right” way. To her fast food meant the meal would be ready in an hour—or two. I’m not sure Mamatha ever touched a hamburger or fry that didn’t come from a Home Place cow or homegrown potato. If she did I’ll bet she thought that it was somehow the devil’s doing.
Mamatha never would’ve cooked so much food for herself alone. The never-ending buffet was her way of keeping me around. It was a simple formula: she cooked, I ate. The bribery mostly worked. The food was fuel for adventures to come. From the kitchen table the woods and fields beckoned.
A chilly October morning is an undeniable temptation to any wild-loving seeker. But a Saturday with ice-frosted fields and storms of colorful leaves swirling about makes the undeniable irresistible. Unchained from school obligations, there were only my chores to struggle through. I tried to fly through the bed making, wood chopping, floor sweeping, and whatever else Mamatha dreamed up, to get outside as quickly as possible. Like cooking and eating, though, housework was not a place for rushing. I can still hear her mantra: “When a job is once begun, never leave it ’til it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”
When the chores were finally done, however, I could break free of the house and enter a fantasy world of earth and sky. The path to those places wound past a big pecan tree, where roving gangs of noisy blue jays conducted morning raids to gather a share of nuts. Pecans were a coveted Home Place commodity, since they yielded sweet holiday pies. The bold jay mobs disrupted that flow and Mamatha took it personally, frequently blasting away at the birds with her .410 shotgun. A few paid for the robberies with their lives but the raids never ended and the pies kept coming, too. There seemed to be enough pecans to go around. Just beyond the pecan tree there was a mucky, smelly feedlot where Daddy fattened up steers for slaughter. Luckily for me, a boy who had more than enough work to keep him occupied, we were spared the squeezing and squirting that milk cows demanded.
Much of the Home Place was fenced. Walking the cow path through the pasture and the creek bottom was a quick way to check the fence line for breaks without interrupting the day’s exploration. If I couldn’t somehow splice a repair or prop up a leaning post I’d report the broken place to Daddy when I finally got to the Ranch. Before I got too deep into the woods, I might take a few minutes to lie in the pasture lane, enticing the “buzzards” to investigate. I lay as still as I could and did my best imitation of something stinking and dead. Once or twice the ruse worked and I could almost count the feathers in the broad black wings and see the bare red heads twisting to investigate before my nerve shriveled. I miraculously revived to run away before the vultures could peck my eyes out, like Mamatha had warned me they’d do. I felt closer to flight by bringing the birds nearer to my earthbound existence. Watching those scavengers tracing circles in the sky was hypnotic. I often wished we could trade places, that I could sail as effortlessly on the wind as they did.
Teasing vultures and imagining flight, I strolled along pasture paths and through forests and fields. The days seemed endlessly long and way too short at the same time. I’d walk for hours before showing up at the Ranch and no one would ask me where I’d been. Days, weeks, months, seasons, and years on the Home Place passed and every moment offered new lessons. It was a time of freedom and discovery.
On the Home Place there were rolling fields of waist-high green rye and sun-ripened wheat to run through. I sometimes pretended that the cows in the pasture were a herd of bison on a western prairie. I was a Plains hunter, Lakota, stalking the woolly beasts. And then some days I was “Jim”—Jim Fowler, the young, brave wildlife adventurer on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Jim was always being sent into danger by the show’s white-haired, whiny-voiced host, Marlin Perkins—wrestling huge anacondas or wrangling rhinos. There were mysterious creeks with hidden creatures lurking underneath the water’s surface and endless blue skies with hawks soaring in plain sight. I wanted to see it all.
I can still hear the quail calling and the foxes barking. I can still taste the sweetness of blackberries plucked fresh off the bramble and smell the rain coming on the approaching rumble of a summer-evening storm. All that and the land were mine back then. I was the richest boy in the world, a prince living right there in backwoods Edgefield. Two hundred acres. The Lanham family’s land was a boyhood barony—our kingdom. It was a place where the real wild things dwelled.
The memories run deep. The Home Place was where Cheves Creek snaked foamy and quick and where Daddy taught us to fish. Wetting a line, hoping for a bream to take a wormy hook; calling the cows in from evening pasture; picking butter beans on a sweaty summer’s eve, with a trip to the Augusta Exchange Club Fair hanging in the balance; stacking heavy bales of sweet-smelling Bermuda hay; watching a flock of wary wild turkeys grazing the spring growth; busting up the side-hill covey of quail for the hundredth time; dirt-clod wars with Jock and Bug that I never seemed to win; mowing an acre of grass for a dollar; a toddling little sister meandering into the strawberry patch to pick her own sweet treats; the belly-filling satisfaction of homegrown food and thirst-slaking coolness of spring water; the awe of a whitetail leaping the blacktop road in a single bound; the wonder of finding an ancient arrowhead in a newly plowed field; the breathtaking beauty of the bluest jay against golden hickory leaves. All of these Home Place things haunt me pleasantly. They are ghosts I conjure up from time to time to help me understand who I am and perhaps recapture who I need to be.
They say that home is where the heart is. Now with that place far removed in time and space and my present life firmly planted in suburbia and lethargy-inducing convenience, I recall those times and most of what came with them wistfully. My heart has moved on to love other people, places, and things like I never thought I could. But that first place I knew as home will always be locked within.
