Having Everything Right (12 page)

After this twenty-five page gap, the next entry in her book names January 1, 1903, and the tone has changed: “Thursday morning this is and we must pack. Thursday evening this is and we have packed.” Again, she writes from both ends of a day, but she has entered the rush of straight chore, whim, custom, and hope of the world. That rush includes Harrison selling the farm, a neighbor killing himself with fire, meetings for prayer and hymn, depression, moonlight, comfort, and toil.

“Harrison built our house today,” Boppums reports from their Wyoming homestead. The next day, “Harrison sawed a hole for a window in the wall.” Then, after a storm, “Harrison propped the house with a pole to keep it standing through the night.” They went broke, won back their stake, and crossed the Mojave west to the Promised Land. In the thirties once, at their little college in La Verne, California, the faculty voted to go all year without salary to save the college from ruin. This would only take a slight acceleration in their habits of thrift
and cooperation. Somehow, they made it through. Somehow, even in that year, they still gave a meal whenever a tramp knocked. Not content with sufficiency, Boppums joined the weekly Ladies' Aid Society to piece and quilt coverlets to give away for charity. Like her stories after her time, somewhere now those quilts warm others, strangers, travelers.

In the first years, the traveling years, Boppums found her own way by stories. With child a third time, she followed a particular belief to my mother's making. Someone told her she must spend each day of her pregnancy looking on beautiful things. Flowers, a pleasing shadow on the lawn, sunset, the moon over water—these the child within would need. Each evening, Boppums would put down her work and stand on the porch to help the colors of the sky nourish her child. She put the secrets of new life in her sealed book, and the secrets of beauty in her children.

At the end of their life together, Harrison and Lottie went back to live among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. A kindly woman took them in for years there. They reaped what they had sown, the sweet hospitality of the heroic age.

At my desk, I put down the Bible, take up her diary with the broken seal, and ask myself, what should I quilt and hide, and when will I finish? In this city, what secrets, what new life should I now tuck away, so children may break the seal, and witness nourishing ways?

Boppums keeps a little room upstairs in my head to do her ironing and storytelling, to mend and recite, to suffer horizontal her final illness, and then to stand up breathless the morning of her wedding when Harrison came riding on his horse, bent down at the gate, and kissed her on the mouth in front of everyone. In her room, glass curtains billow inward. The door swings open, lit by lilac and flat sunlight, then by kerosene. Threadbare travelers of grace tap at the door, drift through the house, leave their names in the Bible, and pass on. Alone, she
looks up from the hem she stitches to watch a moth batter the lamp. Then she looks down at me, drawn up by light through the small wick hatch to stand at her knee.

“Tell about the fishermen,” I say, “and the storm.”

“Nebraska?” she mumbles. The straight pins between her lips wiggle and gleam.

“Yes, Nebraska, please.” My elbows rest on her knees. The apron, safety-pinned to her bosom, hangs up a blue meadow busy with pockets. Here her thimble clatters like a little bell, and there her scissors twinkle and snip. Between finger and thumb, she spreads the pins from her mouth like a tiny fan. Her hymn-voice trembles. Pins to the cushion, story to me.

“One time, Kimney-pie, we all went out to the lake—threshing done, the barn full. The men took up their net and waded in. August, so the water ran mild. The Lord stood by us. They made a great catch of fishes, and everyone, even the children, stepped into the water to help them haul in that net. We had cottonwood fires to prepare the fish. Then men laid their black coats down over bundles of straw, and women spread a white cloth on the earth. Can you imagine—a white cloth, and everything washed by hand? We broke open the bread, and read from the Book. We prayed, we ate, we talked of the year. But as we sang, a great storm came up. I remember the lake rolling gray, and thunder. I can see lighting pricking the horizon like that.”

She pricks the back of her hand with the silver needle, red thread trailing.

“The men cried out. ‘Aaron, does lightning fall on your house there? And there, Miley, yours?' But the storm passed over us. No tornado then, no blaze. We calmed the horses. The moon rose to show us our way home.”

In my head then, Boppums bends down. She sews and hums. Her story ends, but not the sewing. Not ever.

Once, when I came home from college, I learned that story had never happened. No lake, no black coats, they said. At least no one
could remember it. Did I confuse the time Jesus called the fishermen from the Sea of Galilee? Did I stitch the New Testament story to a Nebraska storm? The saints of the family fit the Bible better than they fit my first world of the 1950s. In my small head, it seems, the heroic age had snatched a story from Bible culture and pinned it to the family lore.

After Boppums died, when I lay down for sleep one night, in the fragile trance between light and defeat an odd sentence spoke to me: “If my grandmother were alive today, she would be ten feet tall.” I snapped back wakeful, wondering. Surely logic pulled that sentence out. Once I stood only tall enough to climb her lap, and listen to stories. Now that I am grown, she stands above me like ripe corn or moon, heroic goddess of age.

The family stories took on starch when I first came across Depression photographs by Walker Evans. In his images of poverty's troubling elegance, I got smuggled back alive, and saw the vague evening glow of heartland stories brightened to noon. Taken by daylight, his photographs stare nevertheless like lit night windows, and I stare back. I see through them to hidden summer, to the Great Depression where a grand, spare order of hard sunlight blooms, a secret flavor of cool interiors. In that tranquility, the human face becomes a hieroglyph for persistence. A father feeds his children by the sheer mule-pull of his face. A mother stares flat at the camera, as if it has said to her what no one ever said: “Will you rest a moment, please?” The plainest object shudders in a sacramental glow: table, broom, churn, bowl, bed. By foglight, the pool hall façade flexes its cathedral splendor. In the sanctuary, Sabbath light on the Sunday-school organ unfurls a tool for justice. In a farmer's room, the wicker chair mended with wire stands as a throne sufficient for an afternoon of eternity.

What his camera loved, I love. Through these windows, I stand in attendance there. I wait upon my people. Evans and his companion of
rumpled inspiration, James Agee, drove south to Alabama in July of 1936. What Agee called “the object of our traveling” was to form “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.” Their traveling brought them to three families in the hills, and to the making of the book
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. That book delves by the blade of light and the tools of dreaming deep into the local habits of day and night, toil and praise. Few have read Agee's night-writ prose, but every family must write such a book. By such chapters, every family lives: “A Country Letter,” “Money,” “Shelter,” “Clothing,” “Education,” “Work.”

What they did by traveling, we do by memory. We travel back by stories, forward by the hope those stories teach. We center our account where Evans and Agee set out, the heart of the thirties. What they did by giving order to a book, chapter by chapter, we do by telling troubles in the rich, thankful light of the voice. We make stories of stories by changing them. Stories from other times get pruned away from chronology and grafted onto that hard decade's stump. When Boppums hungered and wrote her Wyoming homestead diary in 1915, she rehearsed a part for our heroic age. When my own baby bottle froze solid in 1951, but I survived beside it on the back seat of the family Dodge hurled across Iowa, that story fit backward into the decade of light. We lived in a Quonset of tin. Have we done better since? At the age of eight, I tried to convince my parents we could buy an abandoned chickenhouse, trim away the blackberry vines, build a wood floor on the earth, and all move in. That house wrote my greatest dream.

History names “The Great Crash of 1929,” and history names “The Great Depression,” as if only money could give backbone to a mood, and the human spirit must lie sickened by the slack thermometer of the price index. It may have seemed so then, but family stories have it otherwise. Somehow, bitterness, if it lived then, died later. By family stories, our spirits rose up in those days and boldly walked the Earth.

What made us bold, in stories? What made us up and about when others were down and out, according to the news? For one thing, families simply do not follow the same chronology as history. The growth of calendar years, the summer-wood rings in a tree, the concentric rim on the flat scales of salmon—all play out sequential and exact. Families never do.

One night, across the mountains from home, we sat by candle-light with Mrs. Bell, a family friend. We launched our cabin through the night with stories. We told Kansas. We told Iowa. We told chickenhouse. When her turn came, she set the full spread of her family tree beside the little sapling of American history.

“Take my grandfather,” she said, sipping red wine. “He was alive when George Washington was President. Think not? Hah! I know it's hard to believe.” The fire rattled and the wind bent low. How many winters could fill a man's life? You had to do more than die to fit the pantheon.

“You see,” she said, “he was born in 1796, grew up on the family's New Jersey farm, but he was not in haste to marry. His parents died, he ran the place alone. The Civil War came, and the story says Grandpa was working his hayfield when two blue soldiers came riding by, whipping their horses to foam and shouting the alarm.

“‘Lincoln dead—shot dead by assassin!'

“‘Fine!' shouted Grandpa back. ‘About time someone got the old buzzard!' And he swung his scythe with happy spite. Oh, he was an odd one. But with the War done then, and Grandpa ripened to seventy, he courted and won a young lass of twenty-three. She planned, no doubt, to inherit his farm and live on past his timely end. Not so. She bore three children to him—my father the third—and then she died.”

Mrs. Bell sipped again. Out across the meadow, a coyote lingered howling on a word, and soon others joined in all along the creek. In her story, the middle of the nineteenth century seemed closer than the coyote's frosty message. Abe nudged us. George gave us his firm grin. Our candles burned low.

“Well,” she said, “Grandpa tyrannized the children four years past his hundred, before they laid him under the hill. Father was fifty when he married, in 1920, and that puts me here before your very eyes, never mind how old.”

Her face startled the candlelight, bold as wine. She sipped. We sat back marveling. Statistics proved her story probable. How do things go? In our simple daze of wine and midnight, the family table between us billowed wide as a century, and contracted to a coffin pod. Story by story, the lips of Mrs. Bell made the proud scroll of the calendar dwindle away.

Stories work to make us more than citizens. A story does to history what a nickname does to a friend. Nothing can stand quite so proud without constantly proving its worth. “What are Indians used for?” my brother asked when small. My parents wrote that down in the family notebook called “Lost Words,” but later changed to “Voices Remembered.” Then, curiosity spoke. Later, he studied anthropology. He tried to learn why the question was wrong and true. Saved stories make us flexible. A good story makes a tool handy as that famous device patented in 1862, the “Improvement in combined house, bridge, boat, and wagon body.” We inhabit, cross over, drift away, and haul stories home. In the Walker Evans photograph of the sweat, sorrow, and tenacity of the Gudger family, August 1936, light bit silver black and saved them for eternity. In our stories, conviction bites my soul.

On a hot August day in a strange town, I reached back for the strength of family ways. I reached back for the decade that brought balance to the world—the balanced trade of shriveled possession for a swell in the power of being. When I approached an apartment building, stern matriarch of brick between Main and Arthur streets in Pocatello, Idaho, I saw it all by the heroic flame that lit so many family travels: to move,
find, celebrate. The lettering above the door shone gold on black, but dark gold burnished with decay, mottled by the sun: THE FARGO. The steps to the heavy glass door took a grand, chipped sweep, and the knob polished my hand green with brass. Then the long carpeted hush of the hall unreeled my shadow like a rope, each door a varnished lid for the particular joys and desperations of one life.

Halfway down the hall the wide stairs rose, the carpeted spiral of the stairs a four-sided cage of dark wood climbing into the past. My hand on the banister touched the spot where everyone, living and dead, had gripped this silk wood for the first heave upward. Even the young men courting, taking the climb three steps at a time then skipping back down, grabbed here. And the railroad pensioners, the old women with their laundry duffel, tramps looking for a carpeted sleep in the hall took their hold on the same palm-sized bump of mahogany. Down from the skylight, a pillar of sunlight stood cool with dust.

For me, that three-story box of stairs held the holy hush and honest age of the thirties. I climbed that chamber of human time, surging upward in the wing-harness of family myth. I climbed counterclockwise, in the spiral gyre not of progress but of sloughing off, of shucking prosperity for happiness. In such a place, Utopia would rise up, a neighborhood among us: the kindly, jabbering Toombs sisters in 101; Rex the railroad handyman always on the prowl to help; and the man everyone called Old Holy Socks camped in the cellar.