Читать книгу Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South - Pamela Petro - Страница 12

Rosehill’s Tale

I CONTINUED ON A MORE OR LESS northerly route out of Forsyth. I had called a storyteller with the engaging name of Nancy Basket from a payphone in Cedar Key, and made an appointment to see her in Walhalla, South Carolina, the following afternoon. Walhalla is in the westernmost corner of the state, a region that has more in common with its hilly northern neighbors – North Carolina and Tennessee – than with the low country of coastal South Carolina. In fact it is officially part of Appalachia, and not a long drive from central Georgia. I had time to get there slowly.

What I really wanted was to get a pedicure. Vickie Vedder’s glamorous toenails had put the idea in my head. Besides, I thought, beauty parlors were probably breeding grounds for all kinds of local stories: what else can you do while your perm sets or nails dry but talk? Unfortunately, piney woods – I now understood why this phrase comes so easily to Southern songwriters – had the countryside in a vice-like grip, leaving towns few and far between. The first substantial one I came to was Monticello, where I stopped a noticeably well-coiffured blonde woman at another courthouse square, beneath another Islamic-domed edifice, and asked her about pedicures. She gave me convoluted directions to a little house outside town, with a hand-painted ‘Beauty Parlor’ sign out at the front.

‘No, sweetie,’ said the girl in the front room, between careful strokes of nail varnish, ‘we don’t do no ped-i-cures on Fridays. You’re outta luck.’

I went back to the Courthouse square to get my bearings, and just behind the spot where I’d questioned the woman earlier was another beauty parlor; I figured it must have been obscured by her minivan.

‘Don’t do nails. No toenails neither,’ responded the receptionist, who was wearing an old-fashioned, wraparound blue robe, hair glistening with gel. All the customers and hairdressers were black, and all were staring at me. ‘You not from here, girl, are you?’

Undaunted, I decided to try Madison, just up the road, where I parked on yet another sober, red-brick courthouse square, dominated by yet another cupola straight out of the Arabian Nights. I asked about beauty parlors in the chamber of commerce, and was told they’d all be closing about now.

While waiting my turn to talk to the woman behind the counter, I’d been fingering a book of Madison, Georgia matches – emblazoned with two messages: ‘The Town Sherman Refused to Burn’ and ‘For Safety Strike on Back’ – and reading the promotional material. Madison’s claim to fame was its thirty-five antebellum houses that had miraculously survived the Union Army’s torch-and-pillage march across Georgia (apparently a Madison resident and former U.S. Senator named Joshua Hill had not only opposed secession, but was a friend of General Sherman’s brother; a plea from him was enough to prevent Sherman from toasting the town). I learned this from a brochure with a cover photo of a handsome young couple got up to look like a Southern belle and a Confederate officer. Another version lay beside it, printed in Japanese.

‘How about storytellers?’ I asked on a whim. ‘Anyone in town with a reputation as a good talker?’

‘Am I talking too much?’ Colonel Dan McHenry Hicky (‘Laddie’ for short) asked his wife, Hattie. We both assured him he wasn’t. ‘Well, then,’ he continued, taking my arm in a courtly way, ‘let me show you this mantlepiece in the dining-room. See? It doesn’t quite fit. That’s because this is the mantle from the old slaves’ quarters. We had to sell the original during the Depression.’

Both Hickys were far too polite and attentive to be bores, but they lived in a house that prattled on with a vengeance. ‘Rosehill’, as it had once been called, was the only home in Madison to have remained in the same family since before the Civil War (Dan was the sixth-generation owner). Every room, every rug, every piece of furniture told a story, and like the parents of an accomplished but mute child, they spoke enthusiastically on its behalf, translating the sign language of beams and boards into three continuous hours of patrician-toned English. I had been referred to Hattie by the Chamber of Commerce –’ She does costume tours of town; she’s a great one for stories!’ – and given directions to their house. Typically, I missed the street and pulled into a driveway to turn around.

‘Are you the lady who wants to hear stories?’ an elderly man asked, emerging from the garage. He generated kindness and mild curiosity. I said Yes, but that I was at the wrong house.

‘Oh, this is one of our houses,’ he replied. ‘Come on in.’

The Hickys were both in their eighties. He was nearly blind from glaucoma, with thick glasses and an endearingly unhip notepad and pen in his shirt pocket. She was small and slender, self-conscious in her not-for-visitors trousers, with hair the color of champagne touched by a drop of cassis. Both had inherited homes in Madison, bringing their total in this historic town of white-columned gems to three. Of these, Rosehill was the showplace. The easy graciousness of those whose lives had been devoted to the appreciation of beauty, rather than the necessity of work, still clung to it – like an invitation to a ball.

Iris Murdoch said that beauty ‘unselfs’ us. ‘The sight of a bird, or a bank of sweet peas, or a lovely cloud formation,’ she wrote, ‘breaks us out of our narrow egos.’ She believed that anything that promotes ‘unselfing’ is conducive to goodness, and that the best example is beauty. I bring this up because while some people are swept away by sweet peas and others by ankles and calves or particular shades of table linen, I am seduced by architecture. Beautiful houses encourage imitation. The harmony of design that makes them calm makes me want to be calm; their lack of rough edges makes me want to shed whatever ill emotion is pricking my skin like a stubble of thorns. Their sure lines guide my eye on a seamless journey up pilasters and over eaves, into corners, down staircases, through spaces dark and secret, light and open. Murdoch said this is the accomplishment of beauty, to lure the eye off the self. Stories do the same thing, and equally well; they, too, draw me out of the easychair of the ego and into motion along a route of words – calisthenics for the soul. Storytelling houses are the ultimate exercise.

‘We have a ghost livin’ next door,’ said Hattie, giving ‘door’ a well-bred Southern ‘ah’ at the end, rather than the West Country ‘r’ most Americans chew on at the ends of their words. ‘McCooter is her name. She was murdered on the property. And she likes to drink. If you have a party and don’t leave a drink out for McCooter, she’ll knock the slats out of your bed … Sure enough, a new family moved in and didn’t know the story, had a housewarming party. That night, didn’t the slats fall right out of their bed!’

We left the front porch and its Egyptian Revival doorway – the Valley of Kings transposed into white clapboard – and entered a world decorated by the dead. ‘As a little boy I couldn’t wait to get new furniture,’ said Dan. I had no sympathy. The front parlor was cavernous, swallowing up a crystal chandelier, several pieces of immense Empire furniture, a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror, and a rare nineteenth-century piano. The carpet dated to the 1840s, purchased by an ancestor of Dan’s from a travelling peddler with a sewing machine.

‘That’s my grandfather, John McHenry,’ said Dan, pointing at a pastel portrait of three children from 1859.

‘It was made while the family was taking the Grand Tour,’ interrupted Hattie. She got up to show me John McHenry’s ancient passport. ‘See, it goes into great detail. Forehead: Full. Eyes: Light. Nose: Aquiline. Chin: Oval. Complexion: Dark. And then it says here, “Accompanied by Wife.”’ She made a face.

‘See, in the picture,’ Dan pointed but didn’t look, ‘he’s wearing the uniform of the Georgia Military Institute. His whole class enlisted in the Confederate Army on March 20, 1864, when John was fifteen years old. He was put on sentry duty: his first post. It was dark, and he heard a rustling in the bushes. He hollered “Halt!” but there was no answer. So he hollered again, but the noise just got louder. So he fired his musket at the noise, and he heard something drop. It was a pig. His only casualty in the Big War.’

‘Now, see this picture,’ Hattie showed me a hand-tinted photograph. ‘This is Laddie at seven, with his head on that little boy’s lap. Only the little boy was an old man by then. It was taken in the nursery upstairs.’

We moved into the entrance hall. It had been added in 1848 to what was once the outside of the house, in effect becoming the central hallway when another wing was built on the other side. One half of the house has closets, the other doesn’t.

‘During the Big War,’ began Hattie, ‘the town was occupied by Northern troops. One elderly man from Madison – Mistah Smith – was escorting two ladies downtown when they were accosted by a drunken Yankee. While trying to protect the ladies’ honor, Mr. Smith was shot and mortally wounded. He was brought here to die. See, he passed away right there, on the third step.’ She patted a stair-tread and I instinctively spun the melodrama in my mind’s eye, giving it lots of blood and weeping.

‘Another Yankee rode his horse up and down the hallway,’ tisked Dan. ‘Ruined the black and white checkerboard floor.’

The depth and continuity of their knowledge stunned me. Generation upon generation, harboring the same memories in the same house, of a war fought on their doorstep, carried, even, into their front hallway: it was completely alien to my experience of the United States. Half my ancestors were peasants who would have been smarting under the thumb of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while the American Civil War was in full swing, and the other half, though probably in the States, are shadowy figures who lived out their lives in unknown locations. The intimacy of the Hickys’ relationship with the past – both the personal and the national past, intertwined into a breathtakingly accessible history – fascinated but gave me goose bumps at the same time. My reaction to their stories reminded me of staring dispassionately into a gaping hole in my leg after an accident, and thinking, how interesting, it looks like the pith of a carrot, even while alarmed that it was my own bone and flesh I was seeing. No wonder so many pilgrims to the South return with reports that the War Between the States, as Southerners call it, or better yet, The War for Southern Independence, lingers so vividly in the contemporary mind. In Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horowitz quoted an Oklahoma man working in North Carolina, as saying ‘In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago. Folks here don’t see it that way. They think it’s still half-time.’

We moved into another parlor where there was framed Confederate money on the wall, a tiny set of scales used to measure ore during the California Gold Rush, a silhouette of someone who had danced at General Lafayette’s ball, and a photograph of another ancestor who went down with the Titanic. Showing me an elegant little powder keg, Hattie, eyes glinting with wicked pleasure, said, ‘If our little mother-in-law [Zoe] were here, she’d say, “Dahlin’, I do apologize, but this is what we kept the gunpowder in when we were shootin’ at you.”’

The wonders continued. I saw Hattie’s grandmother’s wedding dress, with a waist just about the circumference of my upper thigh. I learned that glass used to be shipped in cylinders to prevent it breaking, then re-heated to be stretched flat and cut (which is why there are so often bubbles in old glass); that Zoe’s mother’s name was Philoquia; that Hattie had a Yankee grandmother from Nashua, New Hampshire. I saw chests stuffed with muffs and boas and velvet hats from winters long past, and a desk of Georgia pine that had survived a fire in Arizona, the heat from which had resurrected long-dormant insects which woke, gnawed, and gave a fabulously ornate burling to the wood.

Hattie showed me the pink satin ‘Southern belle’ dress she wears for summer tours. I asked if it had been specially made. She burst out laughing, glanced conspiratorially around, and whispered loudly, ‘Forty dollars, off the rack. It’s a prom dress, from the Juniors department!’

Dan wanted me to look at his poetry. One poem was about a dog, another a sensitive meditation on the sky from his perspective as a fighter pilot in World War II. As we poured over his work, Dan knowing by heart what he could no longer see, Hattie turned on the radio and began a kind of private, swaying dance, singing along to ‘Summertime’ in a breathy alto. Then they wanted to take me out for fast food, but I was exhausted, and badly needed to make sense of my notes. Suddenly sad at the idea of leaving them alone in their beautiful temple, I ran to the car and fetched a crumpled bag of what Granny Griffin would have called sorry-lookin’ peaches that I’d bought earlier to give to Nancy Basket, and presented it instead to Dan and Hattie by way of thanks.

‘He didn’t bore me. That’s why I married Laddie,’ Hattie said as she saw me out. ‘It doesn’t do to be bored in life.’

The next day in the breakfast room of Madison’s Days Inn (set on a commercial strip a respectable distance from the historic downtown), I ate my Cheerios under an amateur watercolor of Rosehill. The contemporary painting imagined the house in pre Civil War days, with several Uncle Remus-looking figures toiling – they were too picturesque to be merely working – in front. Yesterday Dan Hicky had said that an old man, a former slave, had knocked on the door around the turn of the century and told his grandmother that the house used to have a balcony in the shape of a heart leading to a second story porch. The painting, however, portrayed mid-nineteenth-century Rosehill in its current incarnation, with a traditional porch stretched vertically across the façade. I felt smug for hours.

I also read a booklet Hattie had given me that she’d written about Madison – I was trying to avoid several elderly members of a bus tour who were holding bagels over their eyes like Lone Ranger masks – and learned two things: how to make ‘Georgia’s Coke-Cola [sic] Salad’ (red Jello, crushed pineapple, Bing cherries, cream cheese, and ‘two cans Coke-a-Cola’), and that the former owner of Cyclorama had lived in Madison. This was big news.

A house near the Hickys’ called Luhurst – another monument of white-clapboard respectability, with a wraparound porch – had once been home, appropriately, to Lula Hurst, who had an amazing talent. She could levitate people and objects. Her most famous feat was to stand on cotton scales and unaided hoist two grown men in a chair over her head while the scales showed only her own weight. Her father contacted Paul Atkinson, who chaperoned the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama around the country along with other marvels, and arranged for Lula to join the act. Before long, however, Paul and Lula were married, and moved back to Luhurst to levitate no more.