Where We Are Now
Authors: Carolyn Osborn
A Horse of Another Color
The Fields of Memory
The Grands
Warriors & Maidens
Uncertain Ground
Contrary People
Where We Are Now
© 2014
by Carolyn Osborn
Cover photograph: photographer unknown.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-387-4 (paperback original)
E-books:
ePub: 978-1-60940-388-1
Mobipocket/Kindle: 978-1-60940-389-8
Library PDF: 978-1-60940-390-4
Wings Press
627 E. Guenther
San Antonio, Texas 78210
Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805
On-line catalogue and ordering:
Wings Press books are distributed to the trade by
Independent Publishers Group
Cataloging In Publication:
Osborn, Carolyn, 1934-
[Short stories. Selections]
Where we are now / Carolyn Osborn.
pages cm.
ISBN 978-1-60940-387-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-388-1
(epub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-389-8 (kindle-mobipocket ebook) --
ISBN (invalid) 978-1-60940-390-4 (library pdf ebook)
1. Short stories. I. Title.
PS3565.S348W44 2014
813'.54--dc23
2013045140
The stories in this book appeared originally, some in slightly different form, in the following magazines: “The Greats,” “The Weak Sister,” and “Where We Are Now,” in
Antioch Review;
“Numbers,” in
Descant;
“The Grands,” in
Wind
and
Prize Stories 1990, The O. Henry Awards;
“A Ladies Man,”in
Numen
1; “Martin Moore McNeil,” in
South Dakota Review;
“The Shape of the World” in
Texas Short Stories 2;
“First Wife” in
Witness;
“The Themes of Country Western Music” in
Southwest Review,
“The Zanies” in
The Texas Review;
and “My Kate,” in
Connecticut Review.
For Joe Osborn,
as always.
Themes of Country Western Music
Acknowledgments
I
n my mother's family
Great Uncle Ambrose is known as “the one who painted the fence blue.” He did it when he was drunk, and everyone else had gone to town one remote Saturday in the early 1930s. The fence was a typical Middle Tennessee white post-and-rail arrangement surrounding five acres of the farm's front lawn, a small pasture for children, Shetland ponies, dogs, trees and swings. No one knew why Uncle Ambrose was drunk. He was a visitor from Charleston. Perhaps he brought some sorrow with him, or some sudden joy demanded celebration. But why did he choose to paint the fence?
My grandfather, I was told, said, “By God, Ambrose, I wish you'd taken on the barn. It needed painting.” (He didn't have much leeway for comment since he got drunk and did strange things himself.)
No one could tell me if Great Uncle Ambrose finished the job. When I was six, ten years or so after the deed was done, I used to get stuck on a mean-tempered Shetland who preferred grazing a corner of the lawn to trotting children about. When I wasn't bawling for someone to come and lead the pony awayâquite logically I feared he'd bite me as he'd bitten one of my cousins alreadyâI was looking for splinters of blue underneath the white rails. Other coats of paint and weather had washed it all off. Though I inquired, no one could explain Great Uncle Ambrose's choice of color, nor could they remember why there were buckets of blue paint at the farm.
Grandpa Moore was a neat farmer. His place looked like the pictures in my first grade reader, or rather some of the outbuildings did. There was a log smokehouse, a red barn
for livestock, a gray weathered wood house where “the help” lived and a gray tobacco barn. The house was rose-red brick, two-story, ante-bellumâtoo southern for
Dick and Jane.
All was kept in good order though Grandfather collected things. Any number of half-filled buckets of paint were stored in the livestock barn along with a dilapidated buggy, old mule collars, singletrees, other bits of harness and machinery. Ambrose might have wandered in there in the midst of a drunken reverie and picked up the first bucket of paint available.
However the fence painting happened, Moore family mythology, which concentrates on deeds and neglects motivations, prevents further inquiry. And Great Uncle Ambrose, himself, returned to Charleston where he died before I was old enough to ask the right questions.
Great Aunt Eula is “the one who went to California to buy movie houses.” This was sometime before 1927 when
The Jazz Singer
signaled the beginning of “talkies.” Whatever possessed her? She was a middle-aged woman, married to an indulgent man. My grandmother said, “Maybe she was tired of playing lady up there in Kentucky.” (Her guess was reliable as any since she played lady emphatically herself.) Great Aunt Eula was also the only one of the Moores who knew anything about family history. Except for their own memories, none of them were in the least interested in genealogy. “Eula knows all that,” they would say. After a short visit to Tennessee the family chronicler arrived in Los Angeles where she did indeed buy a movie house, for she wrote to my grandparents offering them free passes to all the shows if they would only come out.
My grandfather scorned the idea as “one of Eula's notions” though Grandmother Moore wanted to go, a desire that categorized her as being as great a daydreamer as Eula. California was a good place for her, but no one else was
supposed fall under her spell. Grandmother Moore did allow my mother to answer Eula's summons. “Come on out and I'll get you in the movies,” she said. Mother went to L.A., was photographed intensively by a friend of Eula's and came home after a month without even seeing a movie. Years later she said, “There was never time. We always had to rush off to meet someone or other who made a lot of promises.” The statement was made without rancor. Apparently she'd had a good time and she'd never believed Aunt Eula's expectations could turn her into an actress.
“You know Eula. She had to have her way.” So say present-day survivors. She was, according to them, headstrong and inclined to overreach herself in business matters. When she was quite old one of her nephews had to rescue her. He found her sitting on a sofa surrounded by the rest of her furniture in the yard of a house she was renting. She refused to use the word “evicted” to describe her problem. “Temporarily low on funds,” she explained. She died in California, and as far as I can find out, no one in the family ever entered one of her movie houses, if, indeed, she ever bought more than one.
I don't think they were particularly angry at her. Great Aunt Eula simply left their sphere. My grandfather owned land, real estate in town, mules, horses, hogs. A woman who wanted to buy movie houses was, in all senses of the term, “outlandish” even though she was his sister.
She was gone before I ever got to California, but I like to think of her sitting in a darkened movie house in Los Angeles watching Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Theda Bara, Rudolph Valentino, and all the rest. And I also like to believe she enjoyed seeing
The Mark of Zorro
and
The Three Musketeers
a whole lot more than she liked icing tea cakes and collecting dates for the Moore family tree, especially since they disdained her efforts.
Great Aunt Eula and Great Uncle Ambrose vanished. Great Uncle Howard, who ventured out of the mountains of East Tennessee, is peculiarly still with us. He was visiting my grandfather and died “of a fever” while staying at the farm. As children my cousins and I used to try to guess which of the house's four bedrooms he died in and what fever he died of. Was it typhoid, poliomyelitis, meningitis? No one could tell us. “People died of fevers back then,” said my grandmother, exasperated by such scientific research. (Self-interest was involved. We were all terrified of polio and wanted to keep away from dormant germs.) Neither could anyone tell us exactly where Great Uncle Howard was buried. “Somewhere in the family plot,” they all said. The family plot has a general tombstone proclaiming
MOORE;
however, again for reasons no one can explain, he has no private stone, so when anyone dies Uncle Howard is “the one who has to be found.” Some cemetery worker must probe the ground with a rod until Uncle Howard's casket is located. Why wouldn't my grandfather buy his brother a tombstone? Did he dislike him? Was he hiding him from the law? Or was the tombstone merely one of those details Grandpa didn't get around to taking care of before his own early death?
I thought once to ask for contributions for Uncle Howard's stone, but I realized that the family preferred to let him stay as he is. Finding Uncle Howard is a welcome distraction when somebody else dies. And it is a ritual.
Though careless of ancestry, the Moores accept him as they do the other greats, their eccentric, willful, and finally, mysterious kin.
E
dgar has died
. Kate's letter came yesterday. He'll be buried by now. We were never close, but I'll miss him being in the world. I've kept Kate's secret all this time. Poor Kate. Edgar left her too much alone. She was so young. How old? Twenty-one, not that young after all. Young in worldliness though. She hadn't much family, only her parents, and the one brother who ran off somewhere. She left Virginia for the first time to marry. She and Edgar hadn't been married but six months when he had to leave home for that short trip. Edgar was so much older than Kate, nine almost ten years. He should have known. He was a man of true imagination. When our brother Richard went to the pen, Edgar imagined him nearly out of the family, told Kate, told people around Franklin his own brother was distant kin, made him out to be a third cousin. Edgar didn't know the least thing about tables of kinship, first cousins twice removed or any of that. He had to ask me how we were related to people. Generally he didn't ask.