Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (17 page)

What are they hiding? Knowing them, they probably don’t know themselves. Two blocks away, at The House, I pillage every room. Three times a week I practice on the piano there. Daddy Jack and Fanny don’t care what I do as long as I stay
out of the kitchen. She looms over the stove, madly coating everything she cooks with cayenne pepper and several shakes of Tabasco. Sometimes she cries because her husband tries to beat her. “I was running for my life last night,” she says. “Bud gets mean as a snake when he gets into the bottle.” I don’t like his name being the same as my nickname. “Fanny, why don’t you stay here? He’s mean. You could sleep in Hazel’s old room.” She shakes her head. “Oh, honey.” I stare at the cabinet lined with green and pink parfait dishes. I wish we could make ice cream right now. On the back burner, she keeps a pot of once green beans falling apart in salt pork.

I find Hazel’s tattered sheets of music, still in the piano bench even though she’s been gone from Daddy Jack’s house for twenty years. They flake as I turn the pages. In my grandmother’s desk, untouched since she died, a dozen cubbyholes must hold one secret. One paper shows Mother Mayes’s maternal family tree. Her mother, Sarah America Gray, was born on January 30, 1848—before the War Between the States.
Her
father, George Alexander Gray, was born in 1802. I don’t know what happened in history in 1802. Then the drawing branches:
His
parents, Ransom Gray and Narcissa Alexander, married in 1800. Narcissa Alexander Gray! Married to Ransom. At last, something worth knowing. I’m sure they had a great romance. Too bad this was before the days of photographs. I want to see Narcissa and Ransom. The last name, down in the taproot, says George Alexander, born in 1743, even before the Revolution. I copy the best names on the palm of my hand. Other than that: my uncles’ Georgia Tech diplomas, dull letters from Hazel
in Miami complaining about how much she missed home. I’d heard Daddy Jack’s family in North Carolina had a French maid and a place in Nova Scotia for the summers. Some family war occurred and Daddy Jack spoke to no one in North Carolina anymore. No information at The House, only cabinets of painted china, scratchy afghans folded on the twin beds, dance cards in yearbooks, a buzzer to signal the kitchen under the dining room rug, and the key to the grandfather clock, whose Westminster chime every fifteen minutes reminded Daddy Jack of England, where he was born. Because of a song I learned in kindergarten, I believed firmly that it would stop short, never to go again, when the old man died.

At home, jars of swollen pickles glint in the back corners of cabinets where the shelf paper runs out. I look in every chest for secret compartments in the backs of drawers, places to hide amethysts, love letters, and hand-drawn maps with Xs on them. I press the floor, hoping for a panel to spring open, revealing a staircase going down, down to a dirt room full of trunks, or an entrance to the underground railroad where slaves had escaped, although I know our house is not that old and that the town of Fitzgerald did not even exist during the War.

Was I always alone? Where did they all find to go in the long afternoons? I rubbed against every splinter of the house. A cat, pouncing, examining, equally curious and indifferent. Outside, I lift the iron door at the base of the chimney and let the ashes fall out into the azalea bed. I climb closet shelves to push open the attic door with my head. Nothing there but trapped light and enormous whirring blades of the attic fan exhaling
like a hot beast. In the hall, I lift the heavy lid of the cedar chest and breathe in the dark resinous smell that is death to moths. My hand knows what to push aside to feel the satin lining of my mother’s lingerie holders. I know the touch of the cold mesh evening bag she carried in college, its fragile chain, and inside, the round little mirror she’d looked in so long ago, back in her belle-hood, when her father said she was born to break a thousand hearts. In the bottom left, my fingers find the velvet box, almost soft, like a just-dead mouse, that holds a cool locket and a blood ruby ring, surrounded by chip diamonds. Among the bolts of silk and cotton and flowered chintz, I feel for notes, secret wills and deeds, but find nothing: baby clothes, sheets too good to use, report cards, my birth certificate with the brown ink imprint of my foot before it ever touched the earth.

I spy also. Move silently from pecan tree to privet hedge to outdoor fireplace to behind the barn, listening to my parents, who sit in the yard in the early evenings. My ear, against a jelly jar, presses to the wall when my mother has the bridge club. But she only says, “Lilanne was a terrible bride. What could she have been thinking of, carrying those calla lilies? She is far too short—and wide—to carry calla lilies.” Opening the door to a closet close to the dining room where they play bridge, I find mother’s friend Martha there before me, crouched down trembling. The summer thunderstorms scare her and every time she’s dummy she runs to the closet to hide. When the storms magnify and the ground shakes with thunder, she even bids three hearts from the closet floor. Adults are pitiful.

I taste all the sharp pink medicines and liver pills in the
bathroom and know the sour bush whiskey someone from out in the county brought my father. He calls it monkey rum and won’t touch it because it could make you blind. I even sample the cloudy cordials Great-Aunt Bessy sends over from Vidalia, syrupy concoctions steeped from elderberries and scuppernongs.

I’m interested in steaming open letters over the coffeepot, but nothing arrives except bills from Rich’s and the Nifty Shop. My red diary with a small key I keep in code. Since the letter “e” occurs 131.5 times in every 1,000 letters, I try to use as few
e
’s as possible. My own privacy must be maintained. I want to break wax seals. When I walk on the beach, I keep my eyes open for bottles with messages curled inside:
I have been on this island many years
.

I was reading under the covers late, late one night. Not that anyone cared how late I read, but I preferred the blue light my blanket made. This year, sixth grade, we studied the War Between the States. I kept a notebook of the battle plans of Gettysburg and Shiloh. Jeb Stuart was all action, my favorite man. I would love someone like that but no one else, except possibly Heathcliff.
I was stirred by Jeb’s cavalry troops singing “Kathleen Mavourneen, the gray dawn is breaking …” as they rode off to battle, how he saved the day for Lee. I could relive the time, envision it so strongly that I broke into time. I didn’t see myself as a plantation belle burying the silver tea service in the back forty as the Yankees arrived. I loaded a gun
and took slow aim, dressed wounds on gangrenous legs, stuck my hand in blown-open stomachs to probe for bullets. Since I often went bird hunting with my father, I knew how to shoot. He had given me a BB gun of my own. The war also held some secret—something happened that could not be undone, and I wanted to know. We were branded “Southern” because of the war, different—better, really—from every other part of the country. I had to find out everything. I knew Robert E. Lee’s birthday was January 19, and the name of his horse Traveller. My mother was a Davis and I looked at the Confederate president’s face for family resemblances. His wife, my mother said, was known to be notoriously unattractive.

Breaking into my reverie, the voices of my parents in the kitchen made a low rumble. I was reading about Judah Benjamin, brain of the Confederacy, much more interesting than their late-night snarls of accusations, denials, ups and downs. What would they talk about into the night if they were not angry? As though under the anger a deep silence waited.

“You’re walking on thin ice,” I heard my father say, “and you’d better be careful.”

“If I were on thin ice,” she answered, “I’d skate as fast and with as much style as I could. If you’re slow,” she said pointedly, “you will fall through.” Her logic was maddening but I often agreed with it. I knew neither of them ever had seen any ice. But I could imagine her skimming fast across a frozen lake in a red skirt, the cracking ice always just behind her. I heard the bench of the kitchen table scrape back. “Besides, you
knew
that was the song and you didn’t come to me.” She flings supper dishes into the sink.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“On the radio. They were playing ‘When Day Is Done.’ ”

She sings in an awful tremolo “When day is done and grass is wet … I think of you.” She is close to tears.

But then the tone of my father’s voice changes. Instead of rising and rising again, as usually it did in their long night sieges, it falls. “All you can think about is some idiotic song.” He slams down his glass on the table. “I am dying, God damn it. Dying.” There is silence then. I throw off the blanket and sit up. I shine the flashlight out the window into the backyard. A gold panel of light from the open back door falls across the lawn. Beyond that, only the spring night. Nothing moves.

The panther came into my dreams when I was twelve and never left. In my dream, I am sleeping. I wake up and find the panther along my body, its black back to me, my arms around it, my hand curled around a big paw. The claws are retracted but I feel their possibility. I lie totally still, thrilled, terrified, hardly breathing. The ropy, oily suppleness of the body of the sleeping animal, my face against the back of its head. When light starts to slant into the room, I slowly tie a blindfold around the panther’s eyes and slip out of bed.

My father was a nuisance with his illness. All his operations were performed at a Catholic hospital in Atlanta. He’d linger for weeks, with my mother staying in the Henry Grady Hotel. I had to live with Daddy Jack, friends, or my aunt and uncle.
Finally he needed treatments for so long that my sister came home from college to take care of me. We thought they were going to cut off a leg in one operation. Whatever he had was spreading. When I visited him in the hospital right after that, he said it felt good to wake up and reach down and feel his leg. Nuns fluttered around him and he flattered them and flirted even then. I had never seen a nun, and found their wimples and starched white robes apparitional.

My sister was the sweetheart of Phi Delta Theta at Georgia, and taking care of me was not what she imagined. Even though she hadn’t yet graduated and was only nineteen, she got a job teaching fifth grade ten miles away in Ocilla. Since I was in sixth, I was able to grade her papers for her. One of her pupils said Lax was the capital of Georgia and another said the Flint was the largest river in the world. Willie Bell took care of us. This suited me fine but finally Daddy came home and never worked again. I saw his stomach when my mother changed the bandages. He looked as though he’d been torn at by a wild animal. His big suppurating wound would not heal.

Daddy was a bleeder. My own blood goes scarlet and viscous, thickens even as I’m cut.
Nothing, I’m nothing like him
. “Blue blood,” he always said when he nicked his face, the sink swirling with pale blood and water. “Blood like the English royalty, all of them hemophiliacs.” His dull nails were almost square, beautiful really, with fine long fingers. Soft hands that never did a lick of work. When we went on a trip, Drew loaded the car. My father did not even lift a suitcase. My thumbs are square like his but the rest of my nails are oval with clear moons. I don’t have
his flat bottom, his flat feet, his eyes the color of crude oil. Is he really my father?

Whoever he was, I was not. A point of definition. But we all came out of the landscape. In the Carter years, the Yankee journalists were dumbfounded by Plains, just down the road from Fitzgerald. They tried every whichaway to condescend but the place, so completely itself, confounded them. One columnist finally said the stars were so bright they could drive a person mad. I knew he was on to something but he dropped it right there.

Up close, like the trees on the edge of the riverbank, our roots are too exposed to thrive. A vast shallow sea used to cover this land; it left us swaths of silky white sand, with chinks of ancient shells. Prehistoric looking garfish meditate on whatever fish meditate on in the brackish sloughs. Leaning oaks and pines trailing their moss in the water are romantic from a distance; up close the branches twist out like arms and legs. The far distance was in our eyes, all of us. A high school photograph of me shows a pure uninterrupted face, but my eyes look like the eyes of someone blind from birth. Cypresses grow in standing black water. We are like that, trees growing out of their own reflections.

He dies for three years while I rise, making my escape from childhood. He gets pains at the table, and I don’t know whether to stop until the waves passing over his face subside or to keep chewing. Before he takes to his bed permanently, he rests in
the afternoons. Sometimes he calls me but I play Elvis over and over in my room, ignoring him. He could call Willie Bell with the little button by his bed that buzzes the kitchen. I can hear her: the good sound of pots and pans clattering. Separated from him by a hall, I lie on my bed reading and eating peanut butter cookies. The afternoon perfectly quiet. One window open and the curtain lifts, falls, billows, ripples. “Frances … Bud, do you hear me?” he calls. Sunny light. I adjust my three pillows, hug my book to me: This is my secret and pleasure. I have a new stack from the library: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Frances Parkinson Keyes’s
Joy Street
, Emily Brontë. I have a fine-tip pen with purple ink. There’s a blot of it on the pink linen bedspread. In my black speckled notebook, I copy “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / I have forgotten, and what arms have lain / Under my head till morning; but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight.” Willie Bell comes in with a stack of laundry. The hairs on her arms are little black curled wires. My skin, white as a lightbulb, my leg jutting out, faintly blue, my shoulder with light freckles like beach sand. She flashes her gold when she speaks. “Don’t you hear your daddy calling you? Him lying in there and you won’t answer. Shame.”

Everyone but me seems to forget his terrorist past, holding a match under the kitchen curtain, saying the house would explode like fatwood; clicking his change in his pocket after you’d asked him to stop; ripping in half the new too-expensive blouse. I never could have friends stay over because of the unpredictable night escapades. His violence never turned toward me and I know he adored me, but I do not, will not, forgive
him. Somewhere Chekhov says that it would be strange not to forgive. But was there no one in Russia like my father? He’s losing his life, losing us, leaving us. Visceral fear of his wasting body assaults me when I go near his room. My love for him is something I must hide, like notes from Calhoun Bruner, in an outgrown coat pocket. If only a wild bolt of lightning would strike him in the head. What if he lifts from the bed, a wafting spirit who never leaves the house? This illness is endless. And isn’t it just like him?