Chinaberry Sidewalks (6 page)

Cauzette

I
n 1924, Buchanan, Tennessee, was little more than a primitive Christian outpost in the heart of west Tennessee farmland. Owing its lifeblood to a red-dirt crossroads a mile south of the Kentucky border, this sharecrop populace boasted the Shady Grove Baptist Church and Cemetery, a one-room schoolhouse, and a country store. But for a single gas pump in front of the latter, there was little to suggest that the twentieth century was nearing the end of its first quarter. My mother was born in June, the seventh of Solomon Taylor and Katie Lee Willoughby’s eight children. Addie Cauzette arrived with the right side of her body partially paralyzed, the result—according to an old country doctor who didn’t examine her until she was three—of a stroke suffered in her mother’s womb. So from before birth, a pattern was set by which polio, acute dyslexia, epilepsy, the sudden death of an infant son, and a subsequent case of whacked-out nerves would join the lengthy list of maladies assaulting young Cauzette well before her twentieth birthday. In the seventy-four years and nearly four months marking her time on what she called “this crooked old Earth,” my mother rarely drew a healthy breath. Still, to say that life wasn’t fair for this awkwardly glib yet deeply religious woman would fail to take into account her towering instinct for survival. Thanks to this primal urge to thrive, she would leave this world at peace with the knowledge that physical existence was something for which she was born ill equipped. And I honor my mother by saying that it wasn’t for lack of effort that an accommodation between her sensitive soul and the poorly fitting body she wore was so very hard to come by.

In an early snapshot, taken when she was eleven, a painfully shy girl in a hand-me-down cotton farm dress stares deadpan into the camera lens. A closer look reveals her deepest inclination, that she’d rather her back were turned to the unknown photographer.

It would be untrue to say that my mother didn’t possess the fetching qualities of an attractive young woman. A picture taken on her wedding day shows a fresh-faced girl of eighteen in full but precarious bloom. A splurge of lipstick overrides the reticent clasp of a near smile, one better suited to a distant cousin of the Mona Lisa than a bride-to-be. Then there’s the well-proportioned nose and high forehead framed by a brown tumble of curls and the almost-pointed Willoughby chin that sets off her soft, sensual eyes, the message behind them whispering that she’s allowing herself a flight of girlish fancy while knowing it offers no real solution to being trapped in this particular body.

Double dyslexia and every learning disability yet to be diagnosed in the 1930s could not keep my mother from flourishing in Buchanan’s one-room country school. “I like to never learned to read and write,” she told me more than once in the daydreamy way she had of conjuring wisps of childhood joys. “But I can tell you this: If ever there was anybody born to go to school, it was me. If I close my eyes right now, I’m right back at that wooden desk listenin’ to Mr. Garland talk about England and Abraham Lincoln and all kind of facts and figures that made pictures in my mind. Even with my right foot draggin,’ I didn’t mind walkin’ them five miles back and forth, honey … and your grandma knew it.”

Because of her abilities and disabilities, my mother was chosen in the summer of 1936 to attend a state-funded girls’ school in Nashville and invited to enroll in the fall, tuition paid in full. Wanting desperately to go, she pleaded with her parents for weeks on end to allow her this one opportunity to make something of herself. Her pleas came to naught. The cruel injustice of her having to forgo education to work on a succession of failed sharecrop farms was the beginning of the long, slow dimming of my mother’s natural light.

It wasn’t her father who refused. Since she was of little use to him around the farm, “Sol T” (as folks called him) didn’t care if she went off to boarding school or not, and having one less mouth to feed was a plus. It was Katie who barred the door. Her flimsy excuse—that no one at the school could take care of my mother’s special needs—was belied by the glaring truth that she needed her daughter at home to deal with her husband.

It is an unfortunate truth that Cauzette was the only Willoughby who could reason with her father when he was raging drunk. She paid a high price for the distinction and mourned the loss late into her life. “They didn’t need me on that farm,” she told me a few weeks before she died. “Momma was too afraid to let me go.” Like my father, she never fully recovered from the heartbreak of being denied her one chance to be somebody.

My grandfather was as highly motivated at drinking as he was disinterested in sharecropping. His preference for binges over hard work was renowned. Some said Sol T came by his ne’er-do-well status honestly, for his great-grandfather had drunk and gambled away one of the largest single-family landholdings in western Tennessee, including thousands of acres bought later by the TVA at a premium price in order to dam the Tennessee River and create Kentucky Lake. That Sol T beat his wife and ruled his household with drunken turbulence was a communally known fact. There were the odd sober intervals in which he managed to perform as deacon of the Shady Grove Baptist Church like the upstanding pillar of the community that everyone knew he wasn’t. His skills as an old-time, do-re-mi choir leader rivaled his reputation as a sot. In the vernacular of this sharecrop culture, it was often said of him that “if he ain’t off somewhere drunk, when it comes to leadin’ the sangin’ over at the church house, you cain’t hardly beat Taylor Willoughby.”

Meanwhile, Katie and the kids worked the farm.

The spring planting of 1942 on the sixteen-acre blemish the Willoughby clan had taken over the previous November was made especially insane when my grandfather disappeared on one of his corn-liquor binges. Under the best of circumstances, with windows of opportunity prone to snapping closed like coffin lids, getting a crop in the ground hinged on the concerted effort of every available body, young and old. If any farmhand alive in the mid-twentieth century didn’t know this or, worse, didn’t care, he was probably in prison. Or, like Sol T, off somewhere drunk.

Kenneth and Raymond, my mother’s older brothers, were particularly put out by their deadbeat father, and their vow to whip the “son of a bitch’s ass” if and when he made it home foretold serious trouble. With the nationwide call to war fanning the fires of more noble pursuits on the horizon—joining the Air Force foremost among those—busting sod for their no-account daddy sat about as well with them as the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. But running away to enlist was something neither boy could do in good faith, knowing that Sol T would rather see the farm go to hell than wind his pocket watch.

My grandfather turned up the fifth day of planting, threw himself onto a straw mattress bed, and slept for thirty-two hours straight and, upon waking, demanded that my grandmother “get the hell in the kitchen and fix [him] something to eat.” A woman of exceptional kindness, despite her ruining my mother’s dreams of education, she responded, “Why, Taylor, where in the world have you been? We been bustin’ our backs sowin’ the tobacco, and you off Lord knows where.”

“I reckon it ain’t none of your goddamn business or anybody else’s where I been.”

This booming belligerence served notice to his children that Sol T was awake and in the throes of a bad hangover, and they knew only too well the shadings of his hateful disposition. Kenneth, Raymond, and Cauzette dashed into action, intending to throw their bodies into the path of the ham-fisted fury they knew was about to be aimed at their mother. He struck with the lightning reflex of a coiled rattlesnake, my mother remembered, separating Katie from one of her few remaining teeth. And then, in the kitchen of what could loosely be called his own home, Sol T proceeded to get the hell beat out of him by his two oldest sons.

My uncles attacked like kamikazes, their father swatting back at them in teetering self-defense. My mother’s death grip on one leg caused him to lurch around the room like the drunkard he’d so recently been, her shrill “Stop it, Poppa, stop it!” adding a touch of hysteria to the madness. In less than sixty seconds, this family tussle breezed past crazed frenzy into sheer insanity when my grandfather came within arm’s length of the double-barreled 12-gauge hanging fully loaded above the kitchen fireplace. Sol T grabbed it, cocked one of the rabbit-ear hammers, pointed it at Kenneth’s head, and pulled the trigger. A split second before the gun fired, Raymond threw a forearm against the underside of its barrel, sending a full load of double-aught buckshot flying past his brother’s head. Considering that it blew a hole in the wall the size of a watermelon, Uncle Kenneth got off lightly with a lifelong ringing in his left ear.

The impact of the blast shocked my grandfather back to his senses. He dropped both the shotgun and his guard, disbelieving. When he did, Kenneth buried the blade of his Barlow knife in the old man’s chest. But he missed his target, the steel entering a few inches above and to the left of what might’ve been called his father’s heart.

Something inside my mother snapped. The shotgun blast sent the essence of her nonphysical self literally flying across the room, where from a vantage point normally reserved for ghosts she watched her oldest brother stab their father in a blind rage of retaliation, thus making her neurological meltdown complete. Her out-of-body experience was brought to an abrupt conclusion when she saw the knife slice through his tobacco-stained nightshirt. “Why, son,” she would marvel when relating this story for the umpteenth time, “it was like my spirit just made a beeline back into my body. It made the loudest
thwack
you ever heard. After that, everything went blank. That was when I had my first convulsion.”

Twenty-eight years of the most violent epileptic seizures imaginable was the price my mother paid for being the one person in her family who could handle this drunken beast. Those of us who helped her shoulder the burden of his excesses didn’t get off cheap either.

Grandma Willoughby kept the lead watch on my mother’s condition until she died in 1961. That’s when I inherited her rudimentary epilepsy first-aid kit: an old rag for the grinding of her teeth and a spoon to keep her from swallowing her tongue as she writhed on the floor.

My father had a sixth sense when it came to my mother’s epilepsy, and when one of her spells came on he had a knack for being gone. In fact, his absence was the main precondition for her convulsions. As far back as I can remember, she never once had a seizure in his presence. Epilepsy was the pink elephant in their married life as long as my grandmother and I were around to keep it covered up.

When I began fourth grade, my mother landed a job as a janitor at Jacinto City Elementary School. To bolster her self-esteem, “fourth-grade custodian” is how, when asked, she framed her lowly position. In her mind, “custodian” sounded a lot better than “janitor” and also camouflaged that she was squarely, shamefully, in the fifty-cents-an-hour wage bracket. I wasn’t happy about her new job no matter what she called it, since it brought with it the prospect of her having fits right there at my school.

It’s hard to escape unwanted attention when this scene unfolds: Mr. Wallace, the principal, or perhaps another teacher knocks discreetly on Mrs. Smith’s classroom door and asks if I might be excused from class. This means my mother’s on the floor somewhere, in the hallways or the janitor’s closet, contorting violently, foaming at the mouth and grinding her teeth. And feeling thirty-one pairs of nine-year-old eyes burning holes in your back as you leave the room is nothing when compared to walking back into class and facing those stares head-on.

In this situation, adults were useless. They acted as if she were a dog with rabies and, fearing her bite was infectious, kept a prudent distance. Mr. Wallace gave me the impression that a man in his position couldn’t risk getting down on his knees because it might wrinkle the creases on his gray wool suit pants; to deal with an epileptic in the clutches of a grand mal seizure, you might, in fact, have to loosen your tie and maybe even roll up your sleeves. The others kept back respectfully, like friends of friends at a family wake. That made wading through the garbage cans and dust mops to fish my mother’s tongue from halfway down her throat exclusively my responsibility.

Keeping her alive was something I became good at. The time came, however, when I just couldn’t do it anymore. On an otherwise normal day in 1970, unloading thirteen years of frustration, I told her: “I’ve had enough of your fucking convulsions. As far as I’m concerned, you can die during the next one. I’m through taking care of you.” This venting actually worked. In the last twenty-eight years of her life, my mother had only two minor seizures.

Anyway, as the story goes, my grandfather hardly bled a drop from his stab wound, nor did he go to a doctor. Since he’d been guzzling corn liquor for four days, no doubt his blood carried the alcoholic equivalent of ten tetanus shots. Supposedly, my grandmother kindly smeared axle grease on the wound and then he stomped off to get drunk for another two or three days. My mother maintained that he never once acknowledged the incident. Judging by his nonchalance, nearly blowing his son’s head off and then having that same son come even closer to killing him were practically everyday occurrences.

The tobacco and corn did get planted that year, thanks to Grandma and the kids. When Kenneth finished his work that season he left the farm, never to return. Rejected by the Air Force for medical reasons, he found a factory job in Independence, Missouri, that was short-lived because he spent four years there hospitalized with a rare heart-and-lung ailment. He was sickly for the rest of his life. And for me, frail health and a kindly demeanor define his character. I can easily imagine his brothers Porter and Raymond getting in a knife fight with their father, but to frame Kenneth in such a violent picture has always seemed troubling to me.

Various effects lingered from this incident in the spring of 1942: my mother’s spells and, if less conspicuous, my uncle’s heart troubles. Strangely, the chill between my grandfather and his sons wasn’t at all obvious, and but for my mother’s incessant telling and retelling of her family’s darkest secrets, I might never have sensed how bitter their acrimony actually was. Still, given what I knew, in the presence of Sol T and my uncles I made it my business to locate every unblocked exit. With that bunch you just never knew when all hell would break loose.