A Ticket to the Circus (10 page)

We were all dumbfounded. I had only ever heard of one other near-death experience. They weren’t widely written about yet, and the other person I knew who’d had one was my uncle B.F., my daddy’s brother, who said almost the same thing when he was on the operating table having heart surgery. His heart stopped, and he saw his mother, and he was never afraid of dying again after that.

It was strangely comforting for all of us, what my mother-in-law said. A couple of days later she died again, and this time they let her go. Her death opened up a whole new world for me, if what she said was true, and I do believe it was. Death wasn’t the scary hell and judgment scenario the preachers had always told us about. It was lovely and loving, just as I’d always hoped it would be.

Nevertheless, the death was hard on Larry, just coming from Vietnam a few months before. I tried to comfort him, but I didn’t know
how, and he was never much good at talking about feelings. He went to bed and stayed there, turning his back to me and sleeping until two or three in the afternoon, then eating, watching a little TV, and going to bed early at night. It was worse than the darkest times he’d had at Fort Campbell. Nothing interested him except hunting and fishing. Maybe it was a cure of sorts, spending long solitary days in the woods alone. It was an escape, and I guess he needed one.

Matt came down with a bad chest cold that the doctor said turned into pneumonia. While we were in the doctor’s office, the baby threw up and aspirated his vomit, and the doctor hustled me out of the room. I sat outside for what seemed like an hour, as nurses rushed in and out. I tried to get someone to at least tell me if he was alive or dead, but no one would talk to me. Finally, they let me see him and he was more or less okay. After a while they let me take him home, but for that whole night we had to sit up with him and take his temperature every half hour. If it went above a certain number, we would have had to take him to the hospital. Larry had planned a hunting trip for that night, and to my horror, he went, leaving me alone with the baby. Maybe it was a way to handle the pressure. I can’t judge him now, although at the time I certainly did. I called my mother and daddy, who came over and stayed up with me, and thank God the baby’s temperature never went too high and he recovered.

Although I was only twenty-three, I felt like I was as old as my parents, and saw nothing stretching ahead for me except more years of the same—getting older, working for a low wage, and watching my husband constantly go out the door, to work or hunting or fishing, shutting me out of his life.

Larry and I were just two different species. He found peace in his solitude, living in his own head, spending hours alone fishing or hunting, while guns scared me and I was repelled by the dead things he brought home. I needed life. I wanted to have fun. I was young.

We both adored our baby son, but we’d met as children and had grown up into two totally different people. We were never going to be compatible, and an unhappy mother and father weren’t good for Matthew. Or for us. As strange as this sounds, I always felt, in some part of me, that I was just marking time until my real life started. The
breakup was my fault. I take total responsibility, but I got to the point that I felt like I was going to smother and die if I didn’t get out of the marriage. I left him in October of 1973, and the divorce was final in February of 1974.

I was finally free.

L
arry went back to school and became a senior nuclear operations manager for Arkansas Power and Light, a job he did until he retired, and he remarried a few months after our divorce to a woman with two children, although they never had any together.

I applied for and got a full-time high school art teaching job at Russellville High School in the fall of 1973. I loved Russellville. It was where I had gone to Tech and was much closer to my mother, so taking Matthew there every day was easier. There were two thousand students in the high school, there was more space, more money, and I even had the luxury of a working artist in residence, Polly Loibner, who was a local TV celebrity. She had her own studio where she gave demonstrations and worked with the kids in watercolor and puppetry.

My methods of teaching were the same as in Clarksville, music and no written tests, and the kids loved it. The only worm in the apple was the principal—let’s call him Chip—who was a former football coach and didn’t understand what art was good for when the money could be better spent on new uniforms for the football team. As an added bonus, he hated hippies with a passion, which of course was what most of my students aspired to be. He told me I couldn’t wear jeans to class, I had to wear dresses, and I nicely explained it was hard to do that when I had to work with clay on the wheel, or crawl around on the floor, but he was adamant, so I openly defied him, which didn’t help things.

I bought myself and Matthew, then two, a three-bedroom house in Russellville, and I used one of the bedrooms as a studio for my easel and paints. The house had a big backyard and I got Matt a red-and-green swing set. We had a fig tree that produced huge ripe figs. Matt loved to help me mow the yard, and we planted marigolds and zinnias.

Matthew liked to watch me paint, so I set up a little art table for him in my studio. He liked my oil paints in the tubes better, and once he took a tube of burnt sienna and rubbed it all over his body and clothes. I’m sure the neighbors thought I was abusing him, because he screamed bloody murder when I had to put him in the tub and scrub the paint off with turpentine.
We smelled for days. But he didn’t give up wanting to be an artist.

I had done a commissioned pencil portrait (for twenty-five dollars, real money) of a friend of mine on his motorcycle, which took several days, and as I had it lying out on the table ready to be wrapped and sent, Matthew got a crayon, climbed up on the chair, and “improved” it. After I redrew the portrait, to my horror the same scenario happened all over again, even though I’d just stepped away from the table for a minute to get some tape, but this time he only had a pencil and I stopped him before he did too much damage, and I could fix it. I knew then he was going to be some kind of artist. (When he was four, he drew several human figures, some of which were smaller than the others. He pointed it out to me and said, “These small ones are the same size. They just look small because they are far away.” The concept of perspective was a difficult one, even to some of my high school kids, and I’d never seen such a young child understand it quite like that.)

Matt under the fig tree.

The kids from my class quickly made our home their headquarters.
I would probably be thrown in jail today, but I let them keep bottles of Boone’s Farm wine in my fridge, and they got so comfortable with me that one of the girls pulled out a bag of pot one night and proceeded to clean the seeds and twigs out of it. I didn’t quite know what to do. I didn’t want to seem prim or preachy, but I was uncomfortable. So I just asked her not to smoke in the house because of the baby. I had never tried pot myself, but I didn’t want to push the limits of the teacher-pupil relationship too far. We had great evenings sitting on the floor eating spaghetti, talking, and listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Doobie Brothers, Jethro Tull, B. B. King, Eric Clapton, the Beatles, and the Stones. For me, music ended when punk rock took over, but that’s what every generation thinks. I can hear “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers today and I’m right back there in my hand-embroidered bell-bottoms and long straight hair, living the life.

Me and Bruce, a visiting potter, in art class.

I had, of course, started to date, this time having no intention of ever getting married or going steady again. One guy I was seeing was called John Cool, a bass player who was in a band at the Ramada Inn and had long black hair, a beard, and a day job running a used-car lot named Mountain Motors. He paid some of my students to make a
hand-carved sign for his business, complete with flowers and peace signs, which I counted as an art project for them. He was divorced from Cathy, another hippie who owned a head shop called the CAT. John Cool and Cathy and I all got along, and she sold my paintings, as well as paid me to paint a mural on the walls of her shop. It turned out pretty well, and made me all fired up about murals, so I got my gang of students and we painted one on the walls of my bedroom, bright enamel trees and flowers, sun and moon, peace signs and stars, a blue sparkling river flowing through it all. The room had orange shag carpet, and one of my boyfriends—he was named Wild Bill; he grew pot and looked like an extremely relaxed version of James Coburn—gave me his old water bed, where little Matt and I slept snuggled together every night, lulled by the cool water.

Matt and me in our studio.

Jean Jewell, my old friend from Tech, lived a few blocks from me on the second floor of an antebellum house. The place had a veranda that stretched all around it, pots of flowers and vines growing everywhere, honeybees buzzing around them in the sweet sunlight, and a porch swing with soft faded cotton quilts to laze around on. She had an
ancient pickup truck and would go into the woods to find roots and plants and other natural ingredients for her famous stews. One night several friends had to go to the hospital with food poisoning, but nobody blamed her. She was a true earth mother, the first in town to wear earth shoes, cook organic, and try to save the world from pollution. We and a few other friends convinced her boyfriend to pose naked for us, and we had a drawing class in her apartment every week, which was great fun.

Jean and I went to all the arts and crafts fairs, where I did pencil portraits for five dollars each, and Jean sold her clay pots. We took pictures of each other (sometimes nude) in the woods, standing in a brook or in a tree, or through the open windows of a deserted house. We painted and thought we were great artists. I dragged Matthew along to most things, or my mother would keep an eye on him when I couldn’t.

Matthew and me in an old house. Photo taken by Jean Jewell Moreno.