Tender Graces (2 page)

I shake away the memories so I can concentrate on what’s ahead. The address Uncle Jonah gave me is easy to find, right off the highway. I park, go inside to fetch Momma, walk with my head up and my feet clomping hard. There’s no one else here. I’m alone.

Grandma Faith says, “No, you are not alone. I’m here.”

When I see how it is with Momma, I’m relieved she made Uncle Jonah take care of things before I got here. But it makes her even more unreal as I put her in the car with me and set my wheels turning towards the little white house where we all lived for a time, where Momma stayed behind alone when she let us go, one by one. I take her around the curves, down the long weaving road, between mountain and memory. Then I’m there. The two hills stand guard over the holler; my headlights glow before me as I pull into the dirt driveway.

Nothing has changed.

My sweet sister mountain waits, mysterious in the moonlight, rising up as it always did. I get out of the car and take deep breaths of clean summer air, listen to the night insects and frogs call to each other, and remember a lonely girl, who grew up to be a hopeful woman. Holding tight to Momma, I walk into the door of my childhood home and the ghosts of a thousand hurts, loves, wants, and lives rush against me. I hug on to her so I won’t drop her, and say, “Momma, I’m home again.”

She doesn’t say, “Stay awhile.”

“You can’t send me away this time, Momma.” But I know she can. She sent me away twice before.

I hurry through the shadowed house, straight to my room. I’m stunned. It’s still the same. I place Momma on my dresser, say, “There Momma. There.” I turn my back to her, head out to my car again. Outside, the cool air clears my head. Once my bags are from car to room, I don’t bother unpacking. Now that I’m here, I want to leave soon as I can.

I open the window and breathe in earth and childhood smells. A breeze lifts my hair and plays with the strands. The mountains are shadows in the distance and I shout, just to spite Momma, “Hello! Remember me? I’m home!”

I hear an echoing, “Stay awhile, Virginia Kate.” Maybe it’s only the rustle of leaves, the blowing of wind, but I smile to possibility. Pretending I’m brave, I open the journal to the page with my parents’ picture and read Grandma’s slanting words, along with Momma’s scrawled additions, by moonlight.

Our mothers and their mothers and the mothers before them do the same things over and again, even if in differing ways. Not me. I close the journal. A blast of wind rushes in, pushes against me, and causes something from the nightstand to fall over. It’s the Popsicle-stick photo frame Micah made me. My hands grow warm and tingly. The photo inside is of Micah, Andy, and me, grinning without a bit of sense. The Easter picture. We’re all dressed up—with bare dirty feet—and my bonnet is tilted on my head ready to fall off. We look so happy it makes my stomach clench.

Grandma urges, “Go to the attic, little mite. More waits.”

I put the frame back, and go out to the hall. The stairs make the same loud scrangy sound as I pull them down, the same rattle as I climb. Daddy’s old flashlight still hangs on the nail at the entrance, and I use it to look around. There are Christmas ornament boxes, book boxes, unmarked boxes, and a box with
Easter
written in big black ink.

Inside
Easter
, folded in tissue paper, is Momma’s green dress, her hatbox with the wide-brimmed hat, and her white gloves. I recall Momma sashaying down the church aisle while everyone stared at her, dim bulbs in the bright shine of her light. I press Momma’s dress to my face and inhale deep. Shalimar. I still smell it. I put everything back before too many things are remembered too soon.

Shining the light in a corner, I find the dirty-finger-printed white box. My Special Things Box. I pick my way over to it, and cradling it in my arms like a baby, take it down with me. Up and down the rickety stairs I go with pictures and mementos, until I have the things I want scattered about my room. I know now I’ll stay until I finish the remembering.

When I open my dresser drawer to put away things from my suitcase, some of my childhood clothing is  still there. Underneath the white cotton panties there is more—letters, notes, and smoothed creek stones, tucked away as if I just put them there. Inside the cedar robe are two dresses I never wore unless Momma made me. I pick up the Mary Janes and see my sad in the shine.

The room is filled to overflowing with the past—like a broken family reunion. It’s hard to suck in air; the bits of ghost-dust choke me. My eyes water, but I know it’s not time to cry. Grandma Faith wants me to remember, not to weep. She knows about truth and the pain it can heap on you if you keep hiding from it. Momma knows now, too, I bet.

I say in my croaked voice, “Crying is for weaklings. Crying is for little girls in pigtails.” I know I speak strong to the spirits who are watching me. I want to show them what I’m made of. I do.

I empty my Special Things Box onto the quilt. Inside are items I thought important when I was innocent. I up-end paper sacks, a cigar box, envelopes,
Easter
. I’m a crazy searching woman as I go through years in a gulp. The wind blows in and scatters papers. I hear laughter. Everything is willy-nilly as if there’s no beginning and no end.

All around me are child’s drawings, Daddy’s old Instamatic camera, photographs, a silver-handled mirror and comb set without the brush, school notebooks, river and creek rocks, letters, diaries, a bit of Spanish moss, whispers, lies, truths, crushed maple leaves, regrets, red lipstick, losses, loves, a piece of coal—all emptied from dark places.

Everything will be emptied from dark places, even the urn of ashes full of Momma’s spirit that can’t be contained. Momma always said she never wanted anyone to see her look ugly, and Momma would think
dead
was ugliest of all. She made Uncle Jonah burn her down before anyone could say goodbye. That’s what she wanted, that’s how she is.

I stop my mad tossing aside, pick up a photo of Grandma standing next to her vegetable garden. She’s holding Momma when she was a baby. The same West Virginia breeze that rustles the secrets on my bed pushes Grandma’s dress against her long legs. The sun behind her shows the outline of her body. I can sense the smiles that would be there if she had been given a chance to breathe. She reaches out to me. We are connected by our blood and love of words and truth. She’s chosen me to be the storyteller. I can feel her. I can.

I will start with a beginning, before I slid down the moon and landed in my momma’s arms, those same arms that let me go without telling me why, or at least a why I wanted to hear.

“The stories are made real by the telling,” Grandma whispers.

I smell apples and fresh-baked bread. I inhale them into my marrow.

Gazing out the open window, I wish on falling stars of hope. Far off a flash of lightning breaks through the night—a coming storm? I want to remember my life as falls, springs, and summers. I don’t like seeing things in the winter’s dead and cold. I’m like Momma that way.

I situate myself cross-legged on the bed and the ghosts guide my hands where they need to go. I dig deep into the secrets. I will begin with Momma and Daddy the day they met. The beginning of them is the beginning of me. I hear a hum of voices, like dragonflies and cicadas buzzing.

I’ll record our lives, my life, as Grandma Faith wants me to. I look out my childhood window at the moon and the stars, at my mountain, at the rest of my life stretched before me, and the one behind me. Spirits urge me; a clear path opens, up to the top.

My life begins again.

Chapter 2

Out, out, brief candle!

1954-1961

The air smelled clean and new and ripe. Ghosts of old mountain men looked after lost children, their lullaby whispers blowing through the trees that grew wild and deep into the mountainside. It was a day when nothing bad could happen. A day thick with good things to come. The day my parents, Frederick Hale Carey and Katie Ivene Holms, met and fell deep and hard into each other.

Momma looked as if she came from an ancient palace in Egypt instead of a slanted house deep on a mountain in West Virginia. She didn’t belong, even with her thin cotton dresses and dirty bare feet. Everyone knew it. It was in the pictures buried in Grandma Faith’s journals. It was in the men’s faces whenever my momma sashayed by, leaving her trail of Shalimar and sex. It was in Daddy’s face when he met her across Grandma Faith’s kitchen table.

She was barely eighteen and he was well into twenty-two when they eloped on a stormy Saturday afternoon. Didn’t matter to Grandpa, he was tired of chasing off boys who howled outside his daughter’s window as if she was a dog in heat. One less hungry mouth. One less womb to worry about some boy filling while under his nickel, that’s what Grandpa always harped on about. Grandma only wanted something good to happen for her daughter. Something good meant anything different. Momma was ready to leave. She was always itchy with a restless spirit.

Daddy had made his way up the old logging trail to sell his kitchen utensils. He cleared his throat and knocked on the beat-up door. Old one-eared Bruiser sniffed his britches, let out a huff, and crawled under the house, his days of chasing away strangers long a memory. Daddy kept his back straight as he tipped his hat to the dark-eyed woman who answered the door. Her face had been pretty once, but life had placed lines of worry and sadness over her pretty. She held one hand on her hip, and the other on the door, ready to slam it against him. Her dark hair came loose from its bun, long thick strands whirling in the breeze.

Daddy flashed his good white teeth to her, said, “Ma’am, before you close the door, I want you to think about the last meal you cooked.”

“The last meal I cooked?”

“Yes Ma’am.” Daddy used his Gregory Peck voice. He always said no woman could resist The Peck Voice. “I have kitchen conveniences, right here in my case. May I enter your lovely home?”

“Well, I reckon you better come on inside before you drop everything.” She stood back, smiled, said, “By the by, I’m Faith Holms.”

“Frederick Hale Carey at your service, Ma’am.” He followed Grandma to the kitchen, and flipped the case open onto the kitchen table.

Grandma ran an index finger over the wooden spoons, spatulas, hand mixers, and sharp shiny knives.

Momma came in from the woods and sat in the chair across from Daddy. She tucked one leg under her, and slowly swung the other back and forth, pretending to be bored.

“That’s my daughter, Katie Ivene.” Grandma picked up a spatula and two wooden spoons and put them aside. “I’ll take these, Frederick.” From the glass flour jar, she took a small linen bag that held the money she made selling salt-rising bread and apple butter, counted out the right amount, handed it to Daddy with flour-dusted fingers. She tried not to think about how much more bread she’d have to bake or how many more apples she’d have to cook to make enough money to replace what she’d given Frederick. Some things had to be done. Even if it meant a longer wait to cross that door for the last time. Even if it meant one more day, or two, or three—as many as it took. She asked, “Why don’t you come back for Sunday supper, at five?”

“I would be honored, Ma’am.” Daddy tore his eyes off Momma while he closed the clasp and the sale. “Thank you, and I’ll be seeing you on Sunday then.”

“And we’ll be setting here waiting for you.” Momma swung that leg, a smirk pulling at her full lips. Her black hair spilled over her shoulders in a wild mess, her cheekbones rode high, her eyes dark as an undiscovered pyramid, and her skin when scrubbed clean of mountain dirt was smooth and fine with possibility. There was an electric feel in that kitchen that day and Katie Ivene throbbed with it.

The next day, Grandma took more of her secret money to buy her daughter material for a dress. It was a long walk to town, and the townsfolk didn’t much like her kind, but Grandma had a mission, a way out for her best daughter, and that was that. There’d always been talk about Grandma Faith’s momma. The whispers of how her daddy had married what they called a mixed breed. When Grandma Faith asked her daddy what her blood was mixed with, he’d only grabbed her in a hug and said, “Why, your blood is mixed with sugar, honey.” And he’d tickle her and get her to laughing and she’d forget about her momma being just a little bit darker than her daddy, just a bit. She’d forget how people whispered. Grandma Faith would forget how her momma told her to stop asking questions for things that didn’t need answers. Life was supposed to be about mysteries, was what Grandma Faith’s momma always said, just like her momma had said to her, same as her momma before her, just like Grandma Faith would tell her own.

Grandma Faith considered the life she led on the mountain away from her long gone parents and knew that crying wouldn’t do a soul a bit of good. She sucked up the tears into her body and imagined her insides were drowning, while her outsides cracked open like a dry desert. She concentrated on her task of the moment—finding the perfect material for her daughter’s way-off-the-mountain dress.

Momma chose red silky fabric, and draped it over her. Grandma watched her daughter twirl, looked at the price tag and her heart near fell to her toes. She squared back her shoulders. “Do you like that, Katie?”

“Oh, yes! I love red. Can I get some red lipstick, too?” Momma couldn’t get her mind off the page with Ava Gardner grinning all pretty and fair-faced. She’d ripped it out of
The Saturday Evening Post
she’d found in her momma’s underwear drawer. Momma folded and folded the page until it was small and fit inside her shoe; its pages were wrinkled and fading away. She took it out, smoothed it, showed it to Grandma Faith. Momma wanted lipstick just like that, but more red, brighter red, the reddest red. “See how pretty her lips look?” she asked. “I want to be pretty like a movie star.”

“You’re already pretty, Katie Ivene.”

Momma stuck out her lip and widened her eyes.

“Well, I believe I have enough for some lipstick.”

“And red nail polish? I can do my nails and my toes.”

Grandma spilled a bit of her money from its pouch, touched the coins, felt how cold they were against her palm, how crisp and dry the dollar bills were as they scraped her skin.