Читать книгу Wild Card Quilt - Janisse Ray - Страница 11

Houses Mourn, Too

The family farm is seventy acres that Great-grandfather Walt deeded to Grandfather Arthur, in a settlement in upper Appling County peopled by the descendants of pioneers. My ancestors have lived here since white settlers forced their way into south Georgia, in 1818, displacing the Creeks from their prime hunting grounds. I own none of the farm. When my grandmother died, she divided it among her seven children. They have children and grandchildren of their own, who live in cities not so far away. My mother has a section of field and a strip of the branch past the water hole. The piece with the farmhouse, built by my grandparents in the 1920s out of heart pine, belongs to the eldest boy, my uncle Percy.

We call the place a farm because it still grows soybeans, corn, rye, and cattle for Uncle Bill Branch, really my mother’s first cousin. Southerners often use the word “uncle” as a term of respect for elder kin. Uncle Bill leases land from my aunts and uncles, although many parts of the farm are long forsaken.

The town of Baxley is located at the crossroads of two recently four-laned highways, U.S. 1, which runs from Maine to Miami, and U.S. 341, the principal artery from inland Georgia to the coast. Baxley is a place people pass through going somewhere else. At the center of town, on Main Street, is a courthouse built of marble in 1907. Four clocks, one facing each of the directions, are inset in its cupola; the four clocks do not keep the same time, and sometimes they stop altogether. The courthouse is painted every decade or so, and is now yellow and gray. On its lawn a conifer gets decorated at Christmas with blinking lights. Here on Saturday afternoons, when I was a girl, street-corner preachers would park their old trucks, equipped atop with powerful loudspeakers, and blast passionate sermons—warning against sin and predicting Armageddon—at passersby.

One block south of the courthouse, parallel to Highway 341, are railroad tracks, upon which trains run too fast to the coast with loads of pine chips, and too fast back with loads of shiny new cars. The town has a few beautiful old churches downtown, but most of the historical buildings were bulldozed in a 1970s flurry to be “progressive,” or to raze the past; during that era, both 341 and Main Street were four-laned, destroying the small-town feel, the angle parking, even the front lawns of some townspeople. A department store at the main stoplight has a mural of the town’s history on its side, from the Creeks through timber rafting down the Altamaha, through tobacco farming and turpentining. History ends at the far right of the brick wall with an image of the nuclear plant built on the river in the 1970s, not anything we are proud of, but rather a fact to be documented.

Until I was grown, Baxley had one stoplight. Now there are three, with more on the way. In my town, people still drive slow and they wave even at strangers by raising one finger off the steering wheel. If a funeral procession is encountered, they pull their vehicles off the roadway until the last mourner passes.

The farm is north of Baxley, toward the river, miles best taken in the rusty green 1972 pickup, sitting high, with the dog in the back, pecans on the dashboard next to a bird’s nest, and empty soda cans rattling back and forth in the doors (the lower panels are gone). The road from the highway is dirt, shaded by trees until it makes a ninety-degree turn around the corner of a field. Along the fencerow, Chickasaw plums and wild cherries grow among a hodgepodge of oak and sweet gum, their origin ascribed to the seed-eating birds that land on the fence.

At the house, the road narrows and turns sharply down to the branch, and you have to slow here; the road cuts on one side through a steep clay bank covered with short vegetation, vines, and fallen leaves. A third of a mile past the farm, the road splits and both paths run to paved country roads within a mile, and to more roads and to highways and to interstates.

I will warn you that if you were to see the farm, you would not see the same one I see, the place where I spent happy days as a child. Turning in, you’d see a working farm fallen into disrepair: a farmhouse half obscured by six-foot azaleas; Uncle Percy’s mildewed doublewide trailer; a huge water oak between the two domiciles; other tall, ancient trees in the yard. You’d see the outbuildings gray and weathered, rotten here and there, and the tin that covers them rusty and buckling, flapping in windstorms. You’d see a car shelter, connected to what we call the packhouse; a boiler shelter, where they used to make syrup, with a decaying washroom; a big barn where Granddaddy fixed cars; a garden-tool shed; a corn crib (the prettiest building); and a log chicken coop where I store wood. These original outbuildings are leaning, missing boards, or sinking into the ground. Others, like the privy, are gone, rotted and fallen back to earth, never to be replaced.

The house, though dear to me, is timeworn and tacked together, sided these last thirty years by sheets of brown asphalt shingles of a design resembling brickwork. What wood lies beneath we do not yet know. Poor and dilapidated it may be, but it is a falling-down place that I have known all of my life and that I love. The house is a sixty-by thirty-foot rectangle with eight rooms, two by two: living room and dining room, living room and kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, second bedroom and third bedroom, which has become a study. Each room has at least three doorways and sometimes four. Because it is very open inside—the traditional Cracker style of architecture designed for air flow—you can see straight from the front door to the back. From one front corner, you can see diagonally to the back corner. It’s a plain, unpretentious house, built quickly, with eight-foot ceilings that allow room for summer heat to lift above head level.

This is the second house that was erected on this spot of ground. My great-grandparents lived in a pine house over on the highway, what is now U.S. 1, although it was only a dirt trail when Uncle Percy was a boy, with a ford at the creek marked now by concrete culverts. Walt Branch divided his land between his sons, and Granddaddy got this piece. He was thirty-one when he married Grandmama but had no house for her, so after they married she returned to her own parents’ house until he could build one. Their first home was not many years old when it burned, its pine shakes set afire by a spark from the fireplace. Walt was a renowned carpenter, so the house had been lovely. The replacement was cobbled together in a hurry to get a roof over the family’s head. That was in the early 1930s.

When I was a young girl, cramped with a sister and two brothers in a tiny frame house my father built on the junkyard, this was the house where we came to spend Saturdays with Grandmama. I remember, then, her house being endless, room after room of quiet refuge. Here we were most free, having escaped for a day the endless work Daddy demanded of us at the junkyard—long hours of hauling, toting, stripping, stacking, pulling nails, chipping bricks, digging, picking up, painting, washing, cleaning, cooking.

To earn our keep at Grandmama’s, and to ensure an invitation to return, we worked for her as well, but it was clean, easy work. My sister washed Grandmama’s short, permed hair over the bathroom sink and rolled it on pink, prickly curlers. I polished silverware with a rag and a little jar of polish, making the forks and spoons gleam. We swept the walk. Mostly, however, when we got dropped off at Grandmama’s we were at liberty to pursue frivolous interests: paper folding and recipe copying and woods looking. Nor did she have the same rules as my father, so her house was a place of freedom of thought. We could watch television and read the newspaper there. And did. We wandered and played, exploring the pasture, the water hole, the creek, the wooden bridge, the cow trails through the woods. We dared not enter the woods beyond the water hole, for there lay a bottomless head, where springs seeped to the surface through quicksand. Daddy had once plunged a cane pole twenty feet down, without hitting bottom.

Grandmama’s house was the horn of plenty. She had food that my own parents could not afford and time that Mama didn’t have to bake. A chocolate or pound cake waited under the bell-glass at Grandmama’s, or in the freezer to be thawed. Always. Grandmama’s candy jars were full. At Christmas, which was not a celebration at our house, she cut a two-foot limb of many-branching haw and stuck sugared gumdrops onto the ends of its twigs; we would gape at the candy tree, mouths watering. We yearned toward the cookie jar Grandmama kept full despite the humidity and the sugar ants. We knew better than to ask for food, so we prayed that Grandmama would offer a sweet to us. We would sit politely, as we had been taught to do, hoping beyond hope that she would ask, Did we want a lemon drop? When she was in the back of the house, or in the bathroom, one of us would check out the cookie jar in the corner cupboard and report back.

“Are there cookies in it?”

“Yeah.” At a whisper.

“What kind?”

“Kind of big and flat, with curved edges.”

“Store-bought?”

“Yeah.”

At our house at the edge of town, nothing lasted. We were forever running out of something. I know we were well fed, but we felt eternally hungry, ravenous; Mama was always trying to fill us. There was never enough food to sate us. I remember staring into Grandmama’s freezer and refrigerator, and standing before the pantry shelves, gawking.

“What are you looking for, honey?” she would ask, and I would turn away, embarrassed. “Just looking,” I would say. I could not believe such plenty.

Sometimes, unable to help ourselves, we would snitch a cookie or a piece of candy if the jar was close to full and the loss wouldn’t be apparent. If one of us took, we all did—at least we three younger, hungrier children did. Sometimes we agreed beforehand that one of us would pocket enough for all three. My sister, who was four years my elder, showed more restraint.

Grandmama was shorter than most women, so I was not yet ten when I grew taller than she and had to bend to hug her. She lived in her rich, sugary house with a younger, dapper Uncle Percy, who worked the counter at an auto parts store in town and rode a ’47 Harley. By then, Granddaddy Arthur was dead of cancer. He died when I was five. I remember him as benevolent, bringing gum and candy, the same treat for each of us. I never remember an unkind word spoken by or about him. Except for his pipe stand and gun rack, by the time I was old enough to pay attention to the depths of things, no sign of him remained in the house.

Most any week in summer or fall, Grandmama had fruit on the trees in the yard or in the lane. Tormented by visions of peppermints and candy corn, we foraged outside like bear cubs, eating dewberries, blackberries, huckleberries, plums, crab apples, apples, pears, grapes, pomegranates, peaches, pecans. Nobody cared what we ate from the vines and trees. The fruit was often small and worm ridden, but a wasp sting on a green apple was the least of our concerns.

We loved this place that was not our life. We loved its normalcy and the flowers that bloomed all over the place. We loved the fact that our grandmother looked and acted like other grandmothers. She did not mean to withhold that which we craved—she had no way of knowing how much we longed for her treats, and for her grandmother-liness. At midmorning she would commence to preparing dinner, the midday meal—creamed corn, fried ham, biscuits, boiled okra, green beans, stewed squash, rice, and tomatoes. The vegetables came from the garden, which she plundered before breakfast, before we arrived. We ate until we could hold no more, but not piggishly. We were on even better behavior at Grandmama’s than at our own iron-ruled house.

The ancient longleaf pine outside the concrete steps of the back door dropped piles of needles, making a rug around itself, and it was often our job on Saturdays to rake the straw up. Grandmama kept her tools in good working order, so when called to rake we might choose from many instruments—bamboo and flimsy, iron and heavy, tin and light. A heap of leaves and straw is irresistible to a child, who will run and leap into it, over and over, and sometimes burrow to the ground, emerging covered with pine debris, looking like a porcupine. Especially when cousins were visiting, we made ourselves houses from the pine straw. We outlined rooms like an architect’s plan—kitchen, living room, bedrooms—constructing the walls of pine straw, leaving gaps for doors between the rooms and for doors to the outside. We piled the walls as high as they’d go.

When our house of straw was built, we played charades through the rooms, cooking in the kitchen, making beds, sweeping with our rakes. We sat in the rooms and talked about what we would become one day, teachers and nurses and engineers and truck drivers. In our imaginary house under the blue sky, we lived out not our dreams, for we were too young to know dreams beyond those inherited from our parents, but a continuation of the lives we had already entered.

As an adult, I walk the same yard where I pretended to sleep on a straw bed, and I walk through walls I would not have dared ignore when I erected them of nothing, and now I do not live in the imaginary house but in the real house the imaginary one was modeled on. It is a dream I never dreamed, and if someone, an aunt or my grandmother, had told me that it would come to pass, I would not have believed them. As a child I never would have believed it would be my great fortune to live in the real house, the one made to last lifetimes, not an afternoon, the one full of chocolate pie and gingerbread, and endless peace.

What is it in us that wants to return to the dream of childhood, to reenact it or fix it? What is it in us that keeps coming back to that potent place? Sometimes I am afraid the house will burn to the ground, the way the original house burned, the way we were finally forced by oncoming dark to destroy our imaginary houses and haul the straw in Uncle Percy’s wheelbarrow to the burn pile.

The outhouse fell. The smokehouse fell. Three of the pines in the yard blew over in a storm, like towers of cards. An apple tree fell. The chicken coop fell. The sassafras in the field fell. My grandmother fell. I don’t think the house is a dwelling anyone ever thought would last. Yet it stands, and because it represents what lasts, or what so far has lasted, I was happy to live in it. Something from long ago was yet alive, both inside and outside of me. Finally, the two were one.

Living on the family farm, I was surrounded by all the ghosts of my ancestors, with their undying desires, although all I knew about most of them was the stories that were told, long after their deaths. How all my mother remembers of my birdlike great-grandmother, Mary, was one glimpse she got standing on tiptoes, peering into her casket. Mary’s husband, Walt, was a tall man who loved to work with wood. By day and by night I could feel the presence of those who had also known and loved this land, who had brought my life into being, whose names were written in stone in the graveyards or lost forever. I lived much closer to the dead than the half mile to the cemetery would indicate.

I had a dream once in which my grandmother, who was as small as a child, was lying in a sickroom, close to death. My grandfather and Uncle Percy were in the room as well, but as ghosts, Granddaddy hovering tall over the foot of the bed, and Uncle Percy on his knees beside it. Uncle Percy was holding his forearms open in front of his chest, imploringly. “Come on, Mama,” he was saying. “Come with us.” Granddaddy, too, was begging her to join them.

I had walked into the room to check on her and saw at a glance what was happening. “No, Grandmama, no.” My voice rose. “Don’t listen to them.” I began to beg her to ignore her husband and son.

“Honey, go sit in the other room,” she told me, “so I can hear what they’re saying.”

After a few minutes I rushed back into her room. The ghosts of the men were gone, and Grandmama was lying still. I ran to her, panicked, calling her name, and gathered her up in my arms.

“I’m taking you to the hospital now,” I said, knowing I needed help. Something in me was trying to keep my grandmother alive.

Now it was my duty and my honor to be the keeper of my grandmother’s house, to uphold, rebuild, and sustain it, and to decide what parts of it to replace when they deteriorated. In the house I found myself bending—to wash dishes at the low sink, to slice summer squash on the counter, to add a column of figures on the pine table Granddaddy built. I bent to enter the screen door of the front porch, to duck under the drooping branches of the pine, to water small plants. It was as if, still, I was bending to greet my grandmother, to embrace her, to keep her. In that bending I was becoming her.

The corn crib, shaded by chinaberry.