It Will End with Us (4 page)

On the other hand, if they lingered at all it would have been at Spring Hope, since it is places and especially houses that are said to be haunted, people more rarely, though I never saw them there either.

Unless Mama is in fact showing herself as best she can.

Which would be why I can’t stop thinking about her.

She won’t let me stop thinking about her.

I want to stop thinking about her.

Yesterday, Sunday, I was alone all day. I spent a long time making two deviled eggs for lunch. I ate one and then wasn’t hungry anymore.

If I had a dog, I would have given it the other one.

I stood in the kitchen and recited Swinburne aloud. “Pale, beyond porch and portal, crowned with calm leaves she stands,” and so forth.

The time I squatted next to an anthill, holding my dress up so ants couldn’t climb on it, and watched Thornton soak the hill with gasoline from a mason jar and light it on fire. I have a clear image of the
ants swarming out of their hole right into the flames and curling up into little black balls.

I remember chanting, “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children are gone,” and tossing a ladybug high in the air to make it fly.

I remember always knowing that it was wrong to kill ladybugs.

I remember “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a nigger by his toe,” and my mother telling us we must say
bunny
instead.

The times I saw Lila and Mama carrying bucket-loads of clinkers from the fireplaces out to the backyard, adding them to the pile next to the wire incinerator.

The time I noticed that clinkers, tumbling one on another, went
clink
.

The time Edward and Thornton and a bunch of other boys were waging a battle with clinkers and hit my friend Lucille on the head with one, and Lila made them stop.

When Papa came home he made Edward and Thornton pick up all the clinkers from the yard and put them back on the pile.

We had oil heat by then but the clinker pile was still there. I don’t remember when the pile was taken away. I do remember that for a long time no grass would grow where it had been.

Riding past the post office this morning I saw a summer tanager in a crepe myrtle. I made Lester stop and back up so I could point it out to him. He wasn’t interested in seeing, but I kept pointing until he saw it.

A female summer tanager is the only greenish-yellow bird with gray-brown wings of that size found here in September, is a fact.

The image of myself on the library floor drawing birds with colored pencils, copying them from a book of Audubon paintings, is a figment.

Is a true figment, I am convinced, nonetheless.

As is the image of my mother leaning over me, inspecting my drawing.

As is the idea that my mother taught me to draw, though I have no image of that.

I do have an image of a large book called
Teach Yourself to Draw
that somebody, Edward or Thornton, had scribbled all over with green crayon, that my mother gave me to practice from.

That I was never able to draw as well as my mother is a fact.

Is an imaginary fact, of course.

James McNeill Whistler was my mother’s favorite painter.

I have never seen an actual painting by Whistler.

I have never seen an actual painting by anyone famous.

I have another image of myself on the floor of the living room, but this time I am looking at illustrations of paintings in a large, thick book called
Masterpieces of the Louvre
. There is a reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
on the cover.

I remember my mother telling me it was the most famous painting in the world.

Remembering, and feeling again now, how alien and completely
bizarre
the paintings in the book were to me then.

I remember wishing I knew how to play a trumpet.

I remember sitting at the dining room table after everyone had left, the time I decided to look at a Sears and Roebuck catalog all the way through.

If you placed the telephone to your ear a female voice said, “Number, please.”

I had no idea that we were small-town people.

I have gone out with Lester and bought a new hairbrush. It is made of blond wood and has natural bristles.

In addition to things I remember, there are things I only imagine that I remember, because I was told
about them, perhaps, or because I made them up out of whole cloth, possibly, some of them, without even knowing it.

I have a (mental) image of Thornton standing next to an airplane, and I have another (photographic) image of the same thing on a wall in my bedroom.

I am quite sure the former is a real memory of an actual event, of Thornton standing next to an airplane when he was seventeen, and not simply a mental reflection of the photograph of a similar event.

I want to say that in the former I can feel myself there, out of view, a dozen feet from Thornton, who has completed his first flying lesson and is now posing with the airplane.

Even though I know there is no discernible difference between a real memory and a fake.

Know it theoretically, I mean.

My first word was
gun
, they told me. I believe that to be true, though I don’t remember it, of course.

On the other side of the ocean there was a war going on, I know now.

I had not seen the ocean yet, though it was not far away at all.

Before actually seeing the ocean I had expected it to look the way it had in a
Little Lulu
comic strip when a huge wave rose up suddenly and knocked Tubby flat.

You could see fish swimming in the wave towering over Tubby’s head before it crashed on him.

The Atlantic Ocean did not look anything like that, I found out later.

I have a lot of memories of the ocean now, accumulated over decades and decades, but none so vivid as the one where the wave knocks Tubby down.

I remember a heavy stamping of boots on the upper porch moments before soldiers, who must have climbed the wisteria to get there, burst through the French doors into my parents’ bedroom.

Though I am quite certain this never happened, it remains one of the clearest of my early memories.

Edward and Thornton had stacks of war comics that I was allowed to read when I was sick, is why I have such a memory, I am sure.

German soldiers were blond, big, with handsome, cruel faces. They said “ach Himmel” when surprised and “argh” as they died.

Japanese soldiers were small, misshapen, and ugly, with large mouths and lots of big teeth. They screamed “aieeee” as they flew into the air, arms and legs akimbo, above yellow flames and the word
BLAM
!

I don’t remember anything else about the Second World War.

I don’t remember that I minded being sick.

Edward had malaria first, and then Thornton. I remember feeling proud when they told me I had malaria, finally.

I remember polio. I was not afraid, but Mama was afraid. In the end none of us got polio.

A girl in school got polio. She had one leg much shorter than the other. I didn’t know her before she got polio, when her legs were the same length. Nobody was her friend.

The time Thornton and Edward dropped Crayola crayons off the upper porch onto the brick walk. The sun made them soft, and we molded them into little balls and ate them.

It must have been summer then, though I don’t remember summer.

It was a long time before I could remember things like “It was summer then.”

I remember how crayon tastes. Like candle.

Lila’s son William was killed in the Korean War, which is all I remember about that war. I don’t remember William.

In the morning quiet I can hear someone playing ping-pong in the common room.

Thornton and Edward broke the ping-pong table at Spring Hope by jumping on it.

I remember, much earlier, digging with Thornton in the dirt behind the house and finding a dented ping-pong ball, and Thornton saying it was a snake egg.

The fact that Peter Caldwell, who was Edward’s friend, had a dog named Ping-Pong.

The time Edward said table tennis was the same as ping-pong.

The fact that Ping Pong was not the name of a Chinese person who invented ping-pong.

I have a single vivid memory of the French-Indochina war. From the back seat of a car I heard the words
Dien Bien Phu
issuing from a chrome grill in the dashboard. The words
fall of
, as in
the fall of Rome
, followed by that strange
unimaginable
name.

It was a black Chevrolet car, I am almost sure.

In the strangeness of the name Dien Bien Phu, in the remoteness of Indochina, lay a first dim awareness, I think now, that we were provincial people, that we lived in an out-of-the-way insignificant place.

The next war I remember was in Indochina again. The memories of that war, meaning of course the memories of the
news
of that war, are exceptionally clear, because I was an adult then and because of television, I suppose, and also quite meaningless.

If Edward had died in Vietnam someone would have told us, I am sure.

I learned to read at the same time as Thornton, who was two years older, I remember Mama telling a woman who had poked her head in through the car window.

I remember “My daughter, the genius,” and my mother standing behind me, gripping my shoulders while I stared in terror at the school principal.

The time I stood at a bookcase and sounded out the names on the spines, Mama correcting me when I was wrong. “Not
Goth
, honey, it’s pronounced
Gerty
.”

Scolding me when I said somebody
busted
an arm or
skint
a knee but letting Edward and Thornton say them.

My father clapping his hands and saying “well, well” the time I spelled
Wednesday
after Thornton said I couldn’t.

I was born knowing how to read, Mama said.

Thornton said
facetious
was not a word.

I was a naturally gifted child.

My mother’s brother Louis Staunton, who went to Paris to study painting and died of a ruptured
appendix before he could attend a single class, was naturally gifted.

His life was snuffed out, my mother said.

She always used the phrase
snuffed out
when speaking of the death of young artists like Louis Staunton or John Keats, whose life was snuffed out by tuberculosis.

Being snuffed out like Uncle Louis was a tragic irony, my mother said.

There was a photograph of a teenaged Louis Staunton in the library at Spring Hope. He was seated on a large white horse, a pale blond boy who looked ill, I thought.

The time I played dying with Thornton. I lay on the cracked leather sofa, beneath the picture of poor dead Louis Staunton, my hands crossed on
my chest, while Thornton intoned, “She was not yet seven . . .”

There was cotton in the fields back of the house when I was very small, followed by a green bushy crop that I think now must have been soybeans, and then just tall grass that turned pale brown and grew feathery tassels in the fall, and after a time the grass also went, overtaken by shortleaf pines, which Papa called field pines, and stunted blackjack oaks.

There are houses in the fields now, I believe, but I have not gone back to look.

The soil at Spring Hope wasn’t worth a goddamn, my father said.

Knowing even as a small child that we inhabited a poor, unfertile, unlucky land that nothing good would come from.

I remember my mother saying that the South was a
tragic
land.

I remember fields baking in the sun, the distant trees shimmering in the heat waves. I remember dust devils swirling across the fields.