Falling Through Space (2 page)

A writer once said that a walk becomes a journey when there is a destination. I had a destination every afternoon when I was small. I would walk from the house to the store and if my nickel had to be sacrificed to my greed that was only one more gnat or interesting rock or possibly useful leaf.

T
HE HARDEST THING
to get hold of in the world is the truth; the easiest to keep once you capture it, once you know it plain. So I believe, but then I can't stand secrets. I want all the cards on the table. I want to know what's going on.

When I was a child I lived in a world of great order and politeness. “So polite,” I once wrote, “that no one ever told the truth about anything.” That was a cruel thing to write about a world as gentle and full of goodness as Hopedale Plantation. The grown people
were
elaborately and beautifully truthful about the surface of life, details, business arrangements, promises made and kept, appointments honored, facts kept straight. A man's word was his pledge in that world, his good name the dearest treasure of his life. Still, about the dark underside of life, birth and death, sex and the river, power and the wielding of power, God and the sky, these things stayed behind a levee of polite speaking and polite behavior. Why, when I was a child, did a certain pecan tree on the front lawn seem to have the greatest shadows and why was I the only one that ever played on the flagstone terrace beneath its branches or swung in its dusty web-covered swing? The grownups stayed away from that tree. With the great intuitive knowledge of children I knew I had that tree to myself. My cousins never played there. Even the wooden picnic table was never used and I would line up pecans upon its surface and make roads with them. The swing the rest of them used was one that swung out over the banks of the bayou. It was a nice swing also and anchored to a huge live oak tree, but no nicer than the pecan tree swing. As I said, I had that one to myself.

Many years later, on a cold fall day in Jackson, Mississippi, sitting in a car with my cousin, late in the afternoon, with the sun almost gone from the sky, I began to talk about that tree.

“It's still mysterious. And lonely. I went down there with a film crew last month and they felt it. The land is so alive down there.”

“Perhaps it was the suicide?”

“What suicide?”

“A woman killed herself there. On that patio. Didn't you know about that?”

“Who killed herself? What woman?”

“Someone they knew. She had cancer and she wouldn't take whiskey for the pain. Nailor told me. She wouldn't take whiskey or any kind of dope and so she killed herself instead. At night beneath that tree.”

“My God, the things that happened.”

“I never would go near that tree after Nailor told me that.”

“I wonder why no one ever told me?”

“Because you never listened. You were always talking.”

“That's a nice thing to say.”

“Well, it's true.”

So the mystery was solved. And other mysteries open before me. A mysterious world, only fifty years away. Medical science was hard to practice when there were no drugs, no real hope to offer. My great-uncle was the only doctor in the county. He worked all day and read all night to keep up with the advances in medical science. But there was little he could do about things like cancer. When I first saw Eugene Smith's beautiful photographic essay, “Country Doctor,” I thought of Uncle Robert and wept for the mastery and courage of his life. I should have wept for the time he had to waste trying to give me typhoid shots. It would take hours of pleading to get me to stick out my arm and hold still. Hours of pleading and promises and sticks of peppermint candy and being allowed to look at the skeleton in his closet. Afterwards I would have to be put to bed for the afternoon to recover from the trauma. I wonder what he did to recover from putting up with me.

The other great secret they kept from us was about sex. Whatever the animals did in the fields had nothing to do with what the white people did in the houses. The white people and beautiful tall sober black people who helped my grandfather run the place.
Nigger
was the word they used for black people who lived like animals. Nice people got married and were faithful and brought well-loved children into the world. At great danger to themselves women bore live children into the world that the world of men might live.

The graveyard around the little Episcopal church at Greenfields was littered with small tombstones that marked the graves of infants and children. It was hard to keep children alive in a land of mosquito-borne diseases. Children were bundled up and kept inside and watched over and guarded like diamonds. They were diamonds, black and white alike. Babies, new hope for the world, new voices in the clear blue air. Lambs were born in the pasture and colts and piglets and chickens hatched in the chickenyard and butterflies emerged from the cocoons we collected in the barn and calves dropped and all things multiplied and were fruitful in that rich fruitful land. Still, the birth of children was a thing apart. They were sent by God. Delivered by storks.

When I was nineteen years old, after having read thousands of books, on the night before I ran away to get married in the hills of north Georgia I sat up all night reading a book about how to have sexual intercourse. It was a book I had bought that afternoon at Rich's department store in Atlanta. I bought a white piqué dress with tiny pearl buttons all the way down the front. A white silk nightgown and robe, some white high-heeled shoes, and a book about sexual intercourse. That's how well the world in which I was born guarded the secret of sex.

I was contemptuous of that when I was young and cruel. Now I am older and I think I understand what was going on. It was how they protected us from being impregnated. They didn't want that to happen to us. They didn't want us to swell up with children and maybe die and begin the terrible hard work of being mothers in a world where malaria flew in the open screen doors or typhoid fever or yellow fever or diphtheria or whooping cough or any of the terrible diseases that filled the cemeteries while the land was being cleared and the Mississippi Delta turned into farms, into a place where people could live.

I
USED TO GO
to the coast every Easter, to a frame house on a peninsula beside a bayou that becomes a bay that runs into the Gulf of Mexico at the exact point where the state of Alabama meets the state of Florida. There were seven houses on our peninsula. With pine trees and white sand beaches. The sun shone like diamonds on the blue water and in the early mornings dolphins came into the bayou and swam past the pier in pairs, rolling and touching, pushing and caressing each other with their snouts.

During the summer months the houses would be filled with my cousins, but the place was deserted at Easter and I would go there to be alone and think things over at the point where winter meets spring in my imagination. Well, not really alone for I would have my children with me. But almost never my husband, as I was usually “separated” from him. I was young and confused during those years and I would run home to my parents every time another child was born.

So it would be Easter and I would be alone on the coast. It is still cold there that time of year and I would lie in the sun covered with Bain de Soleil and goose bumps and read the
Four Quartets
out loud to myself while my wild redheaded children fought and built fires and collected firewood and drank Cokes and dyed eggs and wrote on themselves with ball-point pens and turned their backs the color of sunsets from bending over on the beach to build castles.

The
Four Quartets
. Thomas Stearns Eliot's great paean to the days of Easter. “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” “Little Gidding.”

I would look up from my book, too young to know what all that meant. Too easily influenced to know there are other ways to grow old, that it can mean having the world grow simpler, clearer, more beautiful, less complicated. I would look down the beach. The children would be tearing into the sand with their shovels, launching their homemade kites, hauling up crab traps with their long, skinny, amazingly strong arms. They were all good swimmers. I never worried about them near the water. The real danger at Cotton Bayou was from the sun.

“You better get a shirt on,” I would call out. “Or put on some suntan lotion. It won't be my fault if you get burned. Don't come crying to me when your skin falls off.”

“As soon as we're finished,” they would call back. “As soon as we get through.”

“All right,” I'd say. “I warned you. Don't say I didn't warn you.” I would return to my book.

“Momma,” someone would cry out. “Marshall spit at me. Marshall and Garth said they're going to drown me.”

“He got some wood from under the Johnstons' house,” another voice would yell. “He stole the Johnstons' firewood.”

“I did not. Besides, he stole my crabs. He let my crabs go”

“I did not!! Besides, the crabs belong to everybody. All the crabs are everyone's in the world.”

“Momma said if I put out the crab traps the crabs were mind.
Didn't you, Momma. Didn't you say the crabs were mine!!”

“Why don't you go in the house and get some Cokes,” I would advise. “Get out the Hershey's and make some fudge for lunch. And leave me alone a minute, won't you. Can't you see I'm studying poetry?”

The concert would subside.

The Coke brigade would file past me up the stairs. I would return to Eliot.

Four Quartets
. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday. The days slipped through my hands like music while the children's backs grew redder, the supply of Cokes smaller, the piles of wet clothes higher.

Sometimes other divorcées and their children went with us to the coast. The women and I would walk the lonely beaches talking about the men we had married and failed to love and stolen the lovely sunburned children from. We were full of brittle justifications. We could not figure out what had gone wrong. We had been so beautiful and gifted and polite. We had meant so well. There had been so much of everything. How could we be unhappy? How could we be alone?

The coast was a refuge for us during those hard years, a place of healing and reflection. We would walk the beaches together like women whose men have gone to war. Beside us the great pounding heart of the ocean, the sea breeze in our hair, the voices of our children rising and falling in the distance. We would walk the beaches and tell our stories until they assumed the qualities of myths… “Momma,” a child's voice would call out from behind a sand dune. … “I found a sandpiper's nest. … I found a cowrie shell. … I found a conch. … I found a red triton and Marshall says it's his. …”