The Christmas Letters (8 page)

“Well . . .” Mama said. She kind of let it trail off. “I was just thinking that you might have heard from him,” she said. She was looking at me with her head cocked to the side like a bird. It was the first time she had mentioned Joe in I don’t know how long. Then she slapped her thighs in that familiar getting-down-to-business gesture. “It’s a good thing you came up here today,” she announced. “I can
use
you, Miss Mary!” and before I knew it, she had stuck an apron on me and had set me to cutting up green tomatoes and onions at the same old white enamel kitchen table I remember so well from childhood.

“How come we’re making so much of this pickle relish?” I thought to ask when I’d been chopping for almost
an hour. Mama looked at me darkly from the stove, where she was stirring up the first batch. “Why, Mary,” she said, “you know perfectly well that Mr. Hughes won’t eat a thing without it!” So that was that. Mr. Ray Hughes, who runs Hughes Hardware Store across from the courthouse, had been coming to Birdie’s Lunch every day for 20 years.

We sweltered all afternoon in that hot kitchen, breathing in pickles until our eyes watered. Of course Sandy had insisted upon air-conditioning Mama’s house years before, but Mama refused to turn it on, claiming that air-conditioning was bad for her arthritis, a medical notion she had gotten from
Parade
magazine. We cooked while it got darker and darker outside, then windy, as a thunderstorm came up all of a sudden out of nowhere, rolling in across the fields from the coast. We cooked while the air grew heavy and the light failed, and thunder crashed over our heads, and lightning branched across the sky. Then the rain fell hard for ten minutes, pounding on the roof. In an instant I was transported back to the world of my childhood on the farm, when Joe and I used to huddle under an old blanket on the porch glider during thunderstorms, caught up in delicious fright, telling each other long, complicated stories that scared us both to death. I kept on chopping tomatoes.

After a while I looked up to see Mama smiling at me. “You’re cutting them up too big, honey,” she said, and I started cutting smaller. I don’t know where the afternoon
went. Before I realized it, we were done, the jars in a glistening row on the windowsill, the green tomato pickles glowing from within, like jewels. I kissed Mama good-bye but paused in the doorway to look back and see her searching those bookshelves again—for what? I will never know. There is so much that we can never know.

I headed north on the “ghost road” toward Raleigh with a warm, full heart. I imagined Mama getting ready for prayer meeting, exchanging her house slippers for those old black lace-up shoes that the twins called her “witch shoes,” powdering her face with the same loose powder she had used since time immemorial, Lord knows where she still bought it, and driving that old green Buick over to church as she had done twice every Sunday for so many years, through a long succession of preachers whose names I could never remember (she had taken to calling the most recent one, Mr. Trimble, “that nice little boy-preacher”).

The next day she went to the dime store as usual. She fed some of the new pickle relish to Mr. Ray Hughes, who was heard to pronounce it “damn fine.” Then she came home from the store, complained about the newspaper to Mrs. Muncey, watched—I am sure—the news and “Major Dad” on TV, and went to bed. I’m also sure she said, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” as she always did when putting Joe and me to bed. I do not say this prayer myself, nor have I taught it to any of my
children. I don’t know why not, actually. But now this strikes me as awful. I have always envied Mama her faith, and now I envy it more than ever, as I struggle to go on without her. I keep forgetting she’s dead—whenever something happens, I automatically reach for the phone to tell her about it. I guess I will go on doing this for a while.

Sandy says I should consider it a blessing in disguise, as Birdie’s Lunch was due to be closed this coming spring along with the dime store, a new Wal-Mart out on the highway having put them out of business. James Grady had been running the store at a loss for the past two years— mainly, I suspect, to give Mama something to do. He was just about as fond of her as we are.
Were.
As we were.

Anyway, it is hard to imagine how we will face Christmas without her, since she always made the gravy for the hen, and brought the Sticks and Stones and pound cake with her. I have already made the pound cake and the Sticks and Stones, but I don’t know how I will make the gravy. I never could make gravy worth a damn. I believe it is a lost art among my generation!

But on a happier note, we have had lots of other changes in the Copeland household, too. The biggest news is that I have gone back to school. I have always had a secret dream of doing this, have long held this possibility in the back of my mind. And all of a sudden, after Mama died, I just did it! I drove across town and registered at the
McKimmon Center for Continuing Education at N.C. State. Technically I am classified as a special student. But if all goes well, I will become a regular student, starting second semester. This thrills me beyond belief. I guess I have realized that we don’t live forever, and that the only time to do what we really want to do is
now.
This is the thing about a parent’s death—especially the
second
parent’s death— suddenly there is no other person standing between you and the great beyond, that darkness, the grave. I know I sound morbid, but it has been such an illuminating insight for me that I have to share it with you. Listen:
the time is now. We are the next in line.

I guess you think I am being pretty dramatic when all I’ve actually done is sign up for a few classes! But to me this is a
big deal.
My stomach was actually turning flip-flops when I turned in my first paper. I was terrified! My humanities professor is a young man named Dr. Winters, from up North. (I can just hear Mama now—“that little boy-teacher,” she would have called him!) He is a thin, moody, intense young man not much older than my Andrew, very smart, and he is a
Marxist!
I have never met one before. It is quite interesting in class, because everything we read, we have to look at the economics and the politics of the time. Dr. Winters believes that any book is primarily a product of its time. I am not used to thinking of things this way, and at first I just bit my tongue, but now I feel free to argue with Dr.
Winters, who actually seems to
like
it when people disagree with him!

My other class is Narrative and Expository Writing, and here I am having a “field day.” My teacher is an old fat rumpled fellow past retirement, Dr. Rutledge, who seems “out of it” much of the time yet occasionally fixes us with his bleary old eye and says something I know I will never forget, something I have to write down in my notebook and mull over for days, like I used to do with Gerald Ruffin. Dr. Rutledge has been extremely encouraging about my writing, as well. All this writing (we have to do weekly compositions, with revisions) has taken me right back to myself as a child, to Joe and me and those
Small Reviews
we used to sell in the neighborhood, to myself and how much I used to love to read and write. It’s like a string that was broken has been re-tied, or re-attached—suddenly I feel a sense of continuity between that child I once was and the woman I am now. I did not realize how completely I had been cut off from her, and for how long. Obviously I will major in English, as I started out doing so long ago, but I will have to struggle through the other courses too, of course. I’m sure it won’t hurt me a bit! Though I have never felt so ignorant.

One of my first assignments in my composition class was to write about a
process,
so I wrote about how to take out a stain. It was the only “process” I could think of. And I can get a stain out of anything, as Sandy will tell you! Hair
spray removes a ballpoint-ink stain, for instance. Put meat tenderizer on fresh bloodstains, and salt on red wine stains. White vinegar and water for pet urine. Mr. Rutledge was simply astonished. He gave me an A, commenting upon both my writing and my “esoteric area of expertise.” (I had to look up “esoteric.”)

Well, I don’t mean to blither on, but all this has been enormously exciting for me. Also it is so easy to “blither on” now that Sandy has gotten me this new computer and printer (which will make me as many copies as I ask it to!), an early Christmas present. (Sandy has been very supportive of my going back to school, once he got used to the idea. At first he couldn’t believe I was serious.) The kids seem real proud, too. In fact, if all goes well, son James might be starting out at N.C. State about the same time I finish (too bad he can’t major in girls!). The other kids are fine, and so are we all.

Love,
Mary Copeland

MAMA’S GREEN TOMATO PICKLE RELISH

½ peck green tomatoes (20)

2 stalks celery

10 green peppers

24 large white onions

2 large cabbages

8 pounds brown sugar

3 tablespoons whole cloves

16 tablespoons mustard

2 teaspoons cinnamon

½ teaspoon red pepper

1 cup salt

3½ quarts white vinegar

8 tablespoons ginger

Pare tomatoes and chop fine; cut stem from green peppers, remove seeds, and chop fine; shred the cabbage; chop onions and celery fine.

Mix ingredients. Add salt and let stand 1 hour. Drain. Make a syrup of vinegar, brown sugar, and spices. Scald the syrup, add the chopped mixture, and simmer, after it has been brought to boiling, for forty minutes. Yield 8 pints.

Feb. 6, 1991

To our dear family and friends,

First let me apologize for the lack of a Christmas letter from the Copelands this year! I
know
this has never happened before, but listen:

I’ve got some good news, and I’ve got some bad news.

The bad news is that Sandy had to have a triple bypass on December 15th.

The good news is that the surgery was completely successful and he is
just fine,
so he is very lucky—we are
all
very lucky!

The most alarming thing about this is that Sandy felt perfectly okay, exhibiting
no symptoms at all.
And you know he has always kept his weight down, as opposed to Yours Truly. Anyway, what happened was that Sandy had to go to Duke University for a complete physical as required for insurance purposes. (Johnny Cook, Sandy’s partner in the new developments down at the coast, insisted that the company take out this huge policy on him.)

Well, things were going great until the stress test. They took him off the bike and sent him straight to a hospital room —wouldn’t even let him come back home for one minute! I had to pack his things and take them to the hospital for him. (Of course I took all the wrong things, I was so rattled. . . .) They did an angioplasty the next morning, and operated two days later. Sandy was
fit to be tied,
of course! Not that it mattered. You know how those doctors at Duke are. (This is why we didn’t come to any Christmas parties, in case anybody was wondering. Mystery solved! Sandy wouldn’t let me tell anybody except the kids until it was all over.)

But he has been a model patient ever since, and now we are both involved in this very arduous program they recommend. (Actually they do
more
than recommend— they tell you flat out that you have to change your lifestyle if you want to stay alive!) So we are both doing all of it— the diet, the walking, etc. I’m sure it is good for me, too. Every other day we go over to the Life Center so they can
monitor Sandy and we can be in a support group. Honestly, it’s just like AA! Naturally, Sandy
hates
this part, he’s so private, and feels that people ought to keep their own worries and concerns to themselves. He says he doesn’t want to hear about anybody else’s life! not to mention sharing his own. You know how men are—no wonder they have the most heart attacks. But I’m learning a lot, let me tell you. Also Sandy bemoans so much time spent “just walking,” as he puts it. (At first he was carrying his cellular phone, but the doctor took it away from him.)

Naturally Christmas was somewhat disorganized this year, as you can imagine, but I had done some cooking ahead, of course, and the twins pitched in with the rest. I am not even ashamed to say that we had a delicious smoked turkey from the Catering Company! And we certainly had a lot to be thankful for on this holiday.