Charms for the Easy Life

Table of Contents

 

 

ALSO BY KAYE GIBBONS

 

 

This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events; to real people, living or dead; or to real locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. Other names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1993 by Kaye Gibbons

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New
York, NY 10016. Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Gibbons, Kaye, date.
Charms for the easy life / Kaye Gibbons.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-17464-7

I. Tide.
PS3557.I13917C-40690 CIP
813’.54-dc20

 

Designed
by
MaryJane DiMassi

 

 

 

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

for
LIZ DARHANSOFF

I wish to thank the people who have helped this novel endure the past two years: Frank Ward, Karen Bethune, Susan Nutter, Faith Sale, Anna Jardine, Liz Darhansoff, and as always, my children, Louise, Leslie, and Mary. A long-overdue thanks is owed my brother, David Batts, for taking me in, dusting me off, showing me the virtues of an honest day’s work, and smiling over my report cards.

I am grateful for the support and encouragement given to me by the North Carolina State University Friends of the Library and the Mobile, Alabama, Friends of the Library. I wish to recognize Ron Simpson, Dr. David Henderson, and Dr. Robert Farnham for their expert ability to answer numerous and sometimes strange questions. WPA interviews collected during the Depression and the work of Studs Terkel, particularly
The Good War,
were primary sources of inspiration for this novel.

Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All
Too
Human,
1878

A
LREADY by her twentieth birthday, my grandmother was an excellent midwife, in great demand. Her black bag bulged with mysteries in vials. This occupation led her to my grandfather, whose job was operating a rope-and-barge ferry that traveled across the Pasquotank River. A heavy cable ran from shore to shore, and he pulled the cable and thus the barge carrying people, animals, everything in the world, across the river. My grandmother was a frequent passenger, going back and forth over the river to catch babies, nurse the sick, and care for the dead as well. I hear him singing as he pulls her barge. At first it may have annoyed her, but soon it was a sound she couldn’t live without. She may have made up reasons to cross the river so she could hear him and see him. Think of a man content enough with quiet nights to work a river alone. Think of a man content to bathe in a river and drink from it, too. As for what he saw when he looked at my grandmother, if she looked anything like my mother’s high school graduation photograph, she was dazzling, her green eyes glancing from his to the water to the shore. Between my grandmother, her green eyes and mound of black hair, and the big-cookie moon low over the Pasquotank, it must have been all my grandfather could do to deposit her on the other side of the river. Imagine what he felt when she told him her name was Clarissa Kate but she insisted on being called Charlie Kate. She probably told him that Clarissa was a spineless name.

Now, some facts of her life I have not had to half invent by dream. She and my grandfather were married by a circuit rider in 1902 and lived in a tiny cabin on the Pasquotank, completely cut off from everybody but each other. My grandmother continued to nurse people who lived across the river, and soon Indian women in the vicinity came to prefer her root cures to their own. My mother was born here in 1904. She was delivered by an old Indian woman named Sophia Snow, thus her name, Sophia Snow Birch. My grandmother became hung in one of those long, deadly labors common to women of the last century. After thirty-six hours of work with little result, my grandmother decided she would labor standing, holding on to the bedpost for support, letting gravity do what it would. Sophia, however, persuaded her to be quilled, and so a measure of red pepper was blown up my grandmother’s nose through the end of a feather freshly plucked from one of her many peacocks. My grandmother fell into a sneezing frenzy, and when she recovered enough to slap Sophia, she did. Sophia slapped her back, earning both my grandmother’s respect and an extra dollar. Within the hour, my mother was born.

She told me she had a wild-animal sort of babyhood. She remembered the infant bliss of sunning on a pallet while her mother tended her herbs. Her parents kept sheep on free range in the yard, and my mother told me how she had stood by a caldron and soaked the wool down into indigo with a boat paddle twice as tall as she was. She said to me, “We were like Pilgrim settlers. Everything had to be done, and we did everything.”

They left Pasquotank County in 1910. The suicide of Camelia, my grandmother’s twin sister, made it impossible for her to stay there. They were so bound together that as small children, when they slept in the same crib, they awakened every morning each sucking the other’s thumb. Grief for Camelia hounded my grandmother from the place where her family had lived for five generations. Within days after Camelia’s hydrocephalic son died, his wildly sorrowful father wandered out and lay like one already dead across the railroad tracks, to be run over by the afternoon train. Camelia lost her mind immediately. My grandmother implored her sister to come stay with her, but she would not. She stayed alone in her house and handled baby clothes and wrung her hands in the clothes of her husband and baby until these clothes and she herself were shredded and unrecognizable. My grandmother would go each day and change Camelia’s soiled dresses and linens while she walked all through the house naked, moaning, “Oh, my big-headed baby! Oh, the man I adored!”

Just when my grandmother was wondering how much worse things would become, Camelia developed a fixation on Teddy Roosevelt, writing love letters to the White House which were opened at the local post office and made available to anyone who wanted a good snicker. The Roosevelt fixation continued a long time, too long, as told by the fact that when Camelia’s body was found, with great razor gashes at her neck, wrists, and elbows, there was a note from her idea of Mr. Roosevelt on her kitchen table. It said:

Among her other personal effects, my grandmother found more than a hundred notes Camelia had written to herself from Mr. Roosevelt.

My grandfather did not want to leave Pasquotank County, but the government’s decision to scrap the ferry for a modern steel bridge satisfied my grandmother’s urgent need to leave. She was so relieved that her sighs all but created wind. The only decision they needed to make was where to go. They chose Wake County because my grandfather was convinced that this was a place overflowing with gorgeous opportunities even for an illiterate barge operator. He had never been to Wake County himself, but he had ferried a great many of what he took to be highly respectable gentlemen from there. I bet they were not. I bet he simply had no basis for comparison, and that these men were just farmers in clean clothes. Southern gentlemen would not have had a call to visit the far side of the Pasquotank. There was nobody there, in short, to give them any money.

On the way to Wake County, something happened. They stopped and cut a man down from a lynching. This poor man was alive but barely, and after my grandmother rubbed voice back into his throat with her bare hands, he sat up and regarded the botched execution with great contempt. He rode with my grandparents the rest of the way to Wake County, sitting beside my mother in the buggy, telling her hoarsely again and again, “They will come and look at that tree and have to wonder. I bet they’ll bet Jesus took me down. They won’t come looking for me now, not with the power of God in me.” He thanked my grandparents with a railroad watch, a tin of excellent snuff, and an easy-life charm he pulled off a greasy thin chain around his ankle. (The charm, he said, was the hind foot of a white graveyard rabbit caught at midnight, under the full moon, by a cross-eyed Negro woman who had been married seven times.) He then walked around this part of the state for the rest of his life with a thick scar around his throat, singing my grandmother’s praises. He talked his salvation into legend.

My mother’s family didn’t arrive poor. My grandmother’s savings as well as the stock she inherited from a wealthy landowner whom she had once treated for syphilis made her a woman of surprisingly comfortable means. But because she lacked the social position commensurate with her robust financial portfolio, she couldn’t live in the surroundings she deserved. Instead, she purchased the best house in the Beale Street area, the worst part of town. My mother always approved of this, saying, “If we had moved where my mother could’ve very easily afforded, nobody would’ve played with me, Daddy would’ve had nobody to drink with, and she would’ve had to suffer notes on the door telling her she couldn’t plant that much bloodroot and sassafras in the front yard.”

My grandmother soon created suspicion within the neighborhood anyway. She woke up one morning to find a petition nailed to her front door. It read: “The redio cawsd it so git rit ov it.” Ten neighbors actually signed the petition, or rather, six signed and four X’d. The week before, she had acquired a radio, which ran off a low wire strung across the backyard, and that weekend a tornado touched down and leveled a row of shotgun houses, killing dairy cows, chickens, and (sad to say) a small boy. It reduced many people with next to nothing to nothing. And then somebody must have asked the question: What spoilt the sky? I imagine somebody recalling the strange wire stretched across the new family’s yard, and thus the petition. My grandmother solved this matter by inviting people into the house one evening to listen to an experimental broadcast of news, religious music, and inspirational poetry on her radio, and while they were there she removed warts, cut out bunions, mixed laxatives, and applied a salt-and-soda swab to a hideous case of pyorrhea. My grandfather delighted the men in the crowd with samples of Pasquotank moonshine and empty promises that there was plenty more where that came from. By ten o’clock my grandmother was having to push a host of new, loyal patients out the door, along with their inebriated husbands and my mother’s sleepy new playmates.