(2008) Down Where My Love Lives (5 page)

When my grandfather built our two-bedroom brick farmhouse more than sixty years ago, he pieced the floors out of twelve-inch-wide magnolia planks and dovetailed them together without using nails. They were strong, creaky, marred with an occasional deep groove, and in the den where my grandparents danced in their socks to the big band music of Lawrence Welk, polished to a mirror shine.

Papa covered the walls in eight-inch cypress plank, the ceilings in four-inch tongue-and-groove oak, and the roof in corrugated tin. I have no memory of the house ever being any other color but white with green trim and shutters. Why? Because that's the way Nanny liked it, and Papa never objected.

One summer, standing on a ladder and painting the underside of a soffit for the umpteenth time, he looked down and said with a smile, "Never argue with a woman about her house. Remember that. It's hers, not yours." He waved his paintbrush toward the kitchen and whispered, "I may have built it, but in truth, we're just lucky she lets us sleep here."

Whenever I think of Nanny's home, I remember it glistening white and green under a fresh coat of springtime paint, landscaped with whatever was blooming, and cool from the whispering breeze ushering through the front and back doors, which she propped open with two retired irons.

Papa had several eccentricities. The top three were overalls, pocketknives, and Rice Krispies. The first two fit most farmers, but the third did not. He'd pull a saucepan from the cupboard, fill it to the brim with cereal, cover it in peaches, douse it with half a pint of cream, and polish off an entire box in one sitting. Not surprisingly, the first few words I learned to read were snap, crackle, and pop.

Born poor country folk, Nanny and Papa didn't make it too far in school. Born before the Depression and raised when a dollar was worth one, they were too busy working to pursue higher education. But please don't think they were uneducated. Both were studious, just in a nonacademic way. Papa studied farming, and he was good at it. For the sixty years that he turned this earth, it stayed green more often than not. His reputation spread, and people drove for miles just to rub shoulders at the hardware store and ask his opinion in between the feed and seed.

While Papa plowed, Nanny cooked and sewed. And late at night, after she had untied her apron and hung it over the back screen door, she read. We owned a TV, but if given my choice, I preferred Nanny's voice. After Walter Cronkite told us everything was all right with the world, Papa clicked the television off and Nanny opened her book.

After school, I'd spot Papa on the tractor, run across the back pasture, climb into his lap, and listen to him talk about the need for terraced drainage, the sight of early-morning sunshine, the smell of an afternoon rain, the taste of sweet corn, and Nanny. When our necks were caked in dust and burnt red from a low-hanging sun, Papa and I would lift our noses and follow the smell of Nanny's cooking back to the house like two hounds on a scent.

One morning when I was about twelve, I was standing in the bathroom, getting ready for school, listening to a loud rock `n' roll station hosted by an obnoxious DJ that all my friends listened to.

Papa walked in with a raised brow, turned down the volume, and said, "Son, I rarely tell you what to do, but today I am. You can listen to this"-he pointed to the radio, which, thanks to his tuning, was now spewing country music-"or this." He turned the dial, and hymns from the local gospel station filled the air.

It was one of the best things my grandfather ever did for me. Listen to Willie singing "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys," and you'll understand what I mean. About the same time I was flipping through the three channels we received on our dusty Zenith and came across a show called The Dukes of Hazzard. I heard the same voices from the radio singing their theme song and put two and two together.

Before long, I planned my week by what I was doing at eight o'clock on Friday nights. Nanny and Papa watched with me because Dallas followed, and they had to know who had shot J.R. But from eight to nine, the TV was mine. I fell in love with Bo and Luke Duke and amused myself by mimicking everything they did. With Papa's help I bought a guitar, learned to play "Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys," and began wearing boots. All the time.

Papa worked hard six days a week, but like most BibleBelters, never on Sundays. Sundays were reserved solely for the Lord, Nanny, and me. We'd spend the morning in church, then gorge ourselves on Nanny's fried chicken or pork chops. After a lazy afternoon nap we would walk down to the river, where we would feed hooked earthworms to the bream or listen to the wood ducks sing through the air just after dark.

Papa was never real vocal about his faith, but for some reason, he loved putting up church steeples. In the fifteen years I lived with Nanny and Papa, I saw him organize twelve steeple-raising parties for nearby churches. Pastors from all around would call and ask his help, and as far as I know he never told one no. The denomination of the church mattered little, but the height of the steeple did. The taller, the better. The closest stands a mile from our house, atop Pastor John Lovett's church-a rowdy AME where the sign out front reads, "Pentecost was not a onetime event."

After attending my fourth or fifth raising, I asked him, "Papa, why steeples?"

He smiled, pulled out his pocketknife, began scraping it under each fingernail, and looked out over the pasture. "Some people need pointing in the right direction," he said. "Myself included."

Nanny grew sick my junior year of college. When we knew it was serious, I broke every posted speed limit on the drive home. I bounded up the back steps just in time to hear Papa hit his knees and say, "Lord, I'm begging You. Please give me one more day with this woman."

After sixty-two years, the music stopped, the lights dimmed, and their dance atop the magnolia planks ended. The loneliness broke Papa, and he followed three weeks later. The doctor said his heart simply quit working, but there's no medical terminology for a broken heart. Papa just died. That's all.

Growing up, I had always wanted to travel out west. When Nanny and Papa died, I found my excuse, so I dropped out of school and drove toward the setting sun. I had grown up watching Westerns with Papa, so all that wide-open space held some attraction. Besides, that's where the Rockies were. I spent weeks driving through mountain after mountain. Saw the Grand Canyon; even sank my toes in the Pacific Ocean. I'm pretty low maintenance, so I ate a lot of peanut butter and slept in the back of the truck with Blue. We kept each other warm.

When I got to New Mexico, I came pretty close to running out of money, so we loaded up and came home. When I finally made it back to Digger, almost a year after Papa's death, the vines and weeds had almost covered the house, a few shutters had blown off, the paint had flaked, and a fence post or two had fallen, pulling the barbed wire with it. But the well water still tasted sweet, the house was dry, and Nanny's breeze blew cool even on stagnant August afternoons. Papa knew what he was doing when he built the place.

I spent six weeks cleaning, painting, sanding floors, repairing the plumbing, oiling doorknobs and hinges, and fixing fence posts and barbed wire. I also spent a lot of time on the tractor, just trying to get it working again. The sound reminded me of Papa, but it had sat up too long and a few of the hoses had rotted. I drained the fluids and changed the plugs, distributor, and hoses. After some careful cussing and a few phone calls to Amos, she cranked right up.

On a trip to the hardware store, I bumped into Maggie. We had known each other in high school but never dated. In hindsight, that was really dumb. But I was too busy hunting, fishing, or playing football. At any rate, I wasn't dating, or studying, for that matter. That came later.

Papa once told me that before he met Nanny, his heart always felt funny. Like a jigsaw puzzle with about two-thirds of the pieces missing. When I met Maggie, I realized what he was talking about. Most guys talk about their wives' figures, and yes, mine has one, but it was her Audrey Hepburn hair and Bette Davis eyes that stopped me.

After two or three more "accidental" hardware meetings, I got my nerve up and asked her out, and it didn't take long. If I had had any guts, I would have proposed after two weeks, but I needed six months to work up the courage. I bought a golden band, we married, and somewhere on the beach at Jekyll Island beneath the stars, she persuaded me to finish my degree.

I enrolled and started night school at the South Carolina satellite campus in Walterboro. If Nanny and Papa's deaths had taken the wind out of my sails, then Maggie helped me hoist anchor, raise the sails, and steady the rudder.

For most of my life, and thanks in large part to Nanny's prodding, the only thing I was any good at was writing. When I enrolled as a freshman at the University of South Carolina, I registered in the English program and started down the track toward a creative writing degree. It's what I was good at, or so I thought.

During my first three years of college, I wrote some stories and sent them off to all the magazines you're supposed to send stuff to if you're a writer. The Saturday Evening Post. The New Yorker. I've still got a folder of all my rejections. Once my folder got pretty full, I quit sending my stories.

But Maggie continued to believe in me. One day while I was finishing my senior year at the satellite, she printed a few of my pieces and sent them to Virginia along with an application for graduate school. For some reason, they accepted me into their master's program and even said they'd pay for my classes and books. I don't know if that's because I wrote well or because I couldn't afford it, but either way, they paid for it.

So Maggie and I charted a new course, and I returned to school. It was not long after, though, that my grand illusions of plumbing the deeper meanings in storytelling, fired by Nanny's love of reading, were shattered. Graduate school was no lighthouse. If it weren't for Victor Graves, a gnarly old professor who laughed like a rum-drunk sailor, I'd have never made it. Vic took me under his wing and helped me navigate.

After I wrote my thesis, Vic encouraged me to apply to the doctoral program. With little hope but no other direction, I did. Three weeks later I received my acceptance letter, which Maggie framed and hung above my desk. I couldn't believe it. Me? A doctoral student? You've got to be kidding. I'm the guy who didn't study in high school. But the letter said they wanted me, and once again they said they'd pay for it-which was nice, because without the financial backing, I wasn't going. They gave me a fellowship, and I got to work.

Thanks to Vic, lightbulbs began clicking on like a Fourth of July celebration, and it was there that I really discovered just how smart Nanny really was.

It wasn't easy, but we made it. We lived in an upstairs, oneroom apartment, and while Maggie waited tables, I worked the morning preload at UPS. I woke early and she worked late, so for about two years, we didn't see each other much.

Despite Vic's best encouragement, I quickly found that my grandmother had forgotten more stories than most experts would read in a lifetime. And not only did she understand them better, but she had a knack at helping others do the same. Just because you know something, or think you do, doesn't mean you can teach it.

Beneath the sly, academic facade, and hidden behind their glossy degrees, most of my teachers were just frustrated hacks who couldn't write a great story if their lives depended on it. Out of the void of their own missing talent, they found a sick joy in tearing others' apart. Maybe I could do better, I hoped. Maybe I could teach Nanny's wonder through Papa's pocketknife practicality and shield the students from the poisonous cynicism around me.

I accepted an adjunct position at my university, teaching freshman and sophomore English. I enjoyed the classroom and the interaction with the students and even helped click on a few lightbulbs myself. All I wanted to do was introduce other people to the power and wonder of language. But all the covert backstabbing and infighting along the tortuous path to tenure drove me to the brink of drinking. If the pen is mightier than the sword, it's also a good bit bloodier. Instead of finding Nanny's fireside wonder shared amid my colleagues, I found ivory-tower experts ripe with stoic discontent and bent on tearing down castles they could never rebuild, simply for the sake of saying something.

While I struggled to help kids look for universal truths and themes that great stories revealed in unforgettable waysthemes like love, humor, hope, and forgiveness-and maybe encourage them to transpose those through their fingers and onto paper, my colleagues stood on soapboxes with raised brows and asked, "Maybe, but what is hidden?"They reminded me of pharmacists who crushed their pills into powder and studied the contents under a microscope while never bothering to swallow the medicine.

Caught in a postmodern pinball machine, I became pretty well disillusioned. I never voiced it to Maggie, but she could read me. She knew. After graduation, she gave me a good talking to. So I swallowed my disgust and filled out twenty applications for schools scattered about the South. I licked the stamps, dropped them in the box, and hoped the grass grew greener in some other pasture. When the last "we'resorry-to-inform-you-letter" arrived from my own hometown junior college, we quit our jobs, packed up my books, and came back here.

Virginia is pretty, but it can't hold a candle to South Carolina. We hadn't even walked in the front door when I realized that my love for farming had much deeper roots than the shallow shoots I'd put down in academia. As I looked out over those fields where I had passed many a happy day, I knew I'd miss the students, the lively exchange of ideas, and the sight of lightbulbs turning on, but little else. I was glad to be home.

The well water smelled like eggs, the faucets dripped like Chinese water torture, and both toilets ran constantly, but Maggie never complained. She loved the narrow, coal-burning fireplace, the front and back porches, and the two swinging screen doors that slammed too loudly and squeaked in spite of oil. But her two favorite pleasures were the tin roof beneath a gentle rain and Nanny's breeze.