Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (18 page)

How brave he is. How very young. Everyone says so, over and over. My mother becomes a tireless Florence. For months, streams of visitors faithfully bring his favorite coconut cakes, lemon pies, and flowers. Soon he will be under the ground. Maggots in the candy bar. Worms in the decayed possum.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle upon your snout
. This can’t be. I reject death. Death mocks every live breath. The house is somber and sober and smells of cleansers, rotted stems, sun-dried sheets, bandages. He will just wake up one morning, well.

I stay in my room. I stand naked on the wicker dressing table stool so I can stare at my body in the mirror. My hips are smooth as an empty bowl, and I think my new breasts are astonishing. Some girls got big brown nipples; I hope I never will. I make sarong dresses from scarves my sisters left in the chest of drawers, practice casual, indifferent poses so that when I see Sonny Stone again, I can look sophisticated for an eighth grader. My mother’s sister Mary raises her right eyebrow when she is skeptical. When I practice this, I look bewildered rather
than sexy. Sonny is a junior and lives two blocks down Lemon, above a grocery store. His father has one arm, a war injury. I watch Sonny on rainy days at school when all the students whose classes are at the same hour can just dance in socks on the basketball floor because there’s no room inside for all the activities. He can really dance, and he wears only black T-shirts and fitted jeans. No one else dresses that way. I can see that the way he holds his partner makes it easy to dance with him, unlike the bobbing boys who’d been in my class since kindergarten. “Stranger in Paradise” and “Unchained Melody,” my favorites, seemed written for him—his tight mouth, skinny, muscled torso, blond hair with a hint of red.

I’d had boyfriends since fifth grade. We all gathered on Saturday night and sat on steps talking endlessly. Still children, really, we chased each other through dark neighborhoods and peered in windows. We threw triangular folded notes in class, talked on the telephone about who liked whom. But on the arm of six-foot, 110-pound Clifton MacDuffie, box-stepping to “Ebb Tide” in the humid sock-smelling gym, my thick pink angora sweater feeling more like a live rabbit every minute, I lock eyes with Sonny Stone, as he rolls by with Pamela Puny Paleface Poor Posture Peterson in his arms. I look down, then slowly back at him. His sharp elbow jabs Clifton. He doesn’t say “Excuse me” or anything, just throws his head back and winks. Then he starts talking to Pamela, who wears makeup because her mother owns a beauty shop and fixes her hair and face all the time. She has wavy hair and looks up at Sonny with a loose red smile that shows her sixth-year molars.

In my father’s last year, thinned to a boy again, he is hard to imagine as the swaggering, powerful, big boss who could scare me so much that my teeth chattered. His eyes lose all jolt and spark; it’s like looking into old campfires. I still run hot and cold on his sickness. At last, the house is peaceful. No waving of guns, no bottles thrown across the kitchen, no keys jerked from my mother’s hand at three a.m. I had wished he’d just evaporate for as long as I could remember. Still, he reached for my hand with his old warmth. “Bud, we’re sweethearts and buddies. That’s why you’re my bud.” He’d always said that but now he sounds sad. I had to check to see if he always had a fresh glass of water. He listened for the noon whistle from the mill. “They’re going to dinner,” he said, and I knew he could see the mill workers walking out under the arch he built. A sign hung from it:
THROUGH THESE GATES PASS THE BEST PEOPLE ON EARTH: OUR EMPLOYEES
. When the five o’clock whistle blew, “They’re going home.”

Every morning Mother and Willie Bell freshened his bandages and dressed him in a clean pair of pressed pajamas. They changed the sheets the way tablecloths are changed in dining cars of trains, rolling him to one side and making up the other, then rolling him onto the clean side. Sometimes I was forced to sit with him when my mother had to go out. Francis Ward, our doctor, came by frequently to shoot him up with morphine, so mostly he just lay there in a haze. Now and then, he’d rally and talk with frightful clarity about how beautiful the river was
when he was a boy and how he picked up the tiny bird arrowheads, as I still did. Long-lost events seemed to be happening again, even to me as he described them. I could see him as a child, picking the shy Confederate violets for his mother. I saw him with white doves resting on his arms the year he spent in a wheelchair. The cages still rotted in back of Daddy Jack’s house. What caused his anger in high school when he pushed a teacher and was expelled? And there was a photo of him in a uniform at military school, looking oddly small.

He smelled awful, like a raccoon run over on the road, a smell I still feel in my nose years later. I have a horror of illness. When someone I love gets the flu, I say, “You’d feel better if you’d just get up and
do
something.” I say, “It’s not good to just
lie
there.” I’m mute at the bedsides of dangerously sick friends, can say no easy words, my heart racing at the hospital smells, the efficiency of the nurses. His skin peeled. I flicked big dry scales off the top of his hand when he was unconscious. Irresistible, but I really didn’t like to touch him, either, and would soap my hands when I left the room.

In his illness he became sweet, not wanting to cause trouble. He became the boy his mother had doted on, the “Boofa” of the family, the courageous one who took the bullet for his father. And he was silent in pain, never moaning.
Backbone made of iron
, the doctor said.
A saint
, the preacher said. When he slept, I read
The Secret Garden
, imagining hunting speckled butterflies in a walled garden. I did not want him to die with me in the room and listened for the sinewy rhythm of his breathing. Would I be able to see his death, the transparent scarf, float out
of him and out the window? Would it flutter over me as it left his body?

What my mother does the nights of those long months, I have no idea. I stay with my best friend on Saturday nights. Her parents go out to the club for supper and as soon as they pull out of the driveway, all the boys in our group appear. We make popcorn, talk, talk, talk. Edna Lula and Virgil bang out four-handed “Heart and soul / I fell in love with you,” and suddenly I like Sammy Dixon but as I lean back against the piano, laughing, my first kiss happens with Jeff Hardy. They switch to the first chords of “Blue moon / You saw me standing alone” and he quickly kisses me hard with his thirteen-year-old lips and I let him while everyone shouts and stomps. Sometimes we end up at Angela Moore’s (her parents go to the same place as Edna Lula’s for supper). There, playing spin-the-bottle, I kiss nine boys. These cold, slippery tight-lipped kisses are dry runs for the real thing—Sonny Stone, for instance. I am sure he wraps Pamela in his arms and kisses her deeply, her back bent as in movies. I imagine kissing someone so powerfully, we both pass out. But when? I practice on my ancient musical teddy bear and on the folded washrag in the bathtub.

Often at night, my friends and I walk through the Willcox’s woods to a wide stream with beautiful springs. David Willcox, more handsome than Montgomery Clift, lives a block from me and later becomes my real love who loves me back. I played kick the can with him for years. He is a natural in the woods and
loves all waters, as I do. In daylight you can see through clear water to the boils, which bubble so blue and pure far below that it seems a goddess could be born there. Such pleasure, diving through sunlight in water. Deeper and colder I swim down, my eyes open. I press my face into the icy surge, my fist into the opening in the earth. At night, it’s different. We build a fire on the bank and step out of the circle of light to change into bathing suits among palmetto bushes. In the spooky light, which just reaches to the lower tips of swaying Spanish moss, one by one we push off with a running start, swing on a vine, up, out, up, then, at the highest point, drop into the spring, darker than black. When Lard goes, howling out the Tarzan cry, I hold my breath, afraid the vine will snap. We love the exhilaration of the fall into the night, our shouts scaring away every polecat and fox. Crocodiles, rattlesnakes, and snapping turtles lie concealed among the grasses—we know they won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.

David had green eyes and was shy. His father was a doctor with a balky heart. The family went to their cabin in the woods so no one could find him on weekends. When I am invited along, David and I take a rowboat on the river, throw out an anchor, and slip in the water. I shimmy out of my suit and tie it around my ankle, and we float and swim downstream with the current for a mile or so. In places the river becomes so shallow that my bottom surfaces. David swims ahead of me as I pole myself along, hoping no fishermen are casting nearby. In a deep spot,
I slide back into my suit, red with mud. Somewhere, we crawl out and walk back through the oaks. Once, as we are bumping the rowboat into the bank, a water moccasin the size of my leg thumps down into the boat. Even in the shadows the snakeskin looks greasy and I see the sliver of black fang slipping in and out of its mouth. Instinctively I jump into the water where all its relatives hide. The live panic that seizes me as I touch the water sends me straight up onto the bank. David stuns it with an oar, finally flinging it back into the river.

We accumulate a collection of arrowheads, as my father did as a boy. We search for Yamacraw burial grounds or middens, and I watch for unusual contours along the ground. We fish under bridges, climb up the sides of an abandoned granary, complete with waterwheel, and cross the swamp on a railroad trestle, hoping we won’t have to jump into the water hyacinths and alligators below. We hunt in waders at dawn in cold duck blinds, taking warm birds out of the jaws of the dog. The cabin was my favorite place to be. Geneva, his mother, cans fruits. His father rests under the scuppernong arbor reading Robert Service’s murderous poems of the Yukon out loud. We fill milk bottles with blackberries growing out of graves in a cemetery and his mother bakes cobblers.

One night, walking back to the cabin where Geneva is cooking ducks full of buckshot on the outdoor fireplace, we stop. The sand road, once on the bottom of the prehistoric sea, glows white as the surface of the moon. What stops us is the pure perfume of honeysuckle, rampant along the barbed wire fence. My father loves gardenias, roses, honeysuckle. When we drove to
the mill, he’d always slow at a low dip in the road, where tangles of honeysuckle bloomed. He always said the same thing, “Smells better than a million dollars.” When he came home with roses, he put them on the kitchen counter and said, “See there, we don’t even have to go to heaven.” The soft road at night and the fragrance seem like heaven. David never thought of kissing before, even as an experiment. We kiss twice, lips closed, chaste and amazed. He breaks off a sprig and sticks it behind my ear, then we kiss again, closer this time, our lips slightly open, just long enough that I feel his breath enter my mouth.

The last summer of my father’s life, my sister Nancy married. I had a case of poison ivy that looked like leprosy and everyone was mad because I was supposed to wear pink tulle in the wedding, to be a lady, even though I’d only recently come down out of the trees. Heavy creamy invitations went out to a thousand people, and all Mother’s friends went into a frenzy of luncheons, showers, teas for the bride. My father made his last trip out of his room to see her wedding presents on sheet-covered tiers in the dining room. He braced himself on the back of a chair and surveyed the rows of glittering silver flatware, pitchers, and trays. “God Almighty,” he said, then turned back into the hall, slowly making his way back to bed, totally exhausted. For weeks, the wedding took over everything, and he had to lie there dying on the edge of the celebrations. We all got new dresses prettier than Princess Elizabeth’s, who was going to become queen as my sister married. Flowered drifts of voile, peach
linen with panels of pleated silk, aqua cotton, pale as the Gulf. My sister’s wedding dress fanned out into an immense train. Her fiancé came with droves of people from Atlanta, probably amused to be down in the sticks for a country wedding. I was just learning to flirt, the art southern girls are destined to practice throughout their lives. That I already wanted all the boys to love me did not produce any sense in me that I could return the feeling. The object was romance, something like David felt about hunting. Jeb Stuart. Tristan. The Snow Prince. My friends and I knew our bodies were semidivine, never to be bestowed except in an Irish castle, on the moors, or at least in Atlanta, on the wedding night in a glamorous hotel, with the trousseau overflowing from a trunk, flowers filling the room with a secret sweetness, a white peignoir that floated as one walked toward the bed, like the robes of an angel lighting on earth. Yes, we were short on realism.

Meanwhile, kissing would do. I wasn’t exactly sure why anyone would want to do those other contorted things, so awkward and comical.

The adorable blond groomsman, just out of college, flirts back, though I am in the eighth grade. He wants to play golf and I hear myself telling him I play often and will take him to the club. He ties a sweater with a crimson insignia around his shoulders and wears monogrammed shirts and baggy Bermudas. Possibly Sonny’s tight black T-shirts aren’t so great. Forest Ripley Harley III has been to Paris, France, and the real Vienna, not the Georgia one pronounced Vie-anna. He’s never seen sand greens before; I don’t know any other kind exist. I hardly
know my way around the course, having played only twice with my mother. The last time, I’d swung back with a driving iron, my eye on the fairway rather than the ball, and thwunked my mother in the forehead, knocking her cuckoo. Forest must be already used to women acting incompetent at sports; he doesn’t seem to notice how often my balls pop fly toward the rough, or disappear into the pond. On the seventh hole, by pure fluke, I hit a hole in one. Forgetting to be cool, I’m thrilled and jump up and down, waving the club.