Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in a town of 1500 in the San Joaquin Valley. Everyone ended up there after the war, folks from Texas and Oklahoma and Missouri. Many years later, when I settled in Tennessee, I realized I wasn’t far from home. My mother used to complain about certain men “who talk just to hear their head rattle.” Maybe she meant me.
Three Memories
He doesn’t know how his mother has learned …
the nearby field is ready for harvest. She must have looked out her kitchen window and watched the people gathered beside the road that morning. Cotton. They are going to do the work the old way, nothing mechanized. She wants a little money of her own, something she can put toward the house. Her husband, the boy’s father, is a good man, but after the war, the years overseas, it isn’t easy for some men to find their way. He works though. He doesn’t want his wife to work.
The only way his mother can go to the field with the others is to take her child, hoping the boy will find something to play with in the dirt, that he won’t cry all morning and ask to go home. He likes the record player after his lunch, just a few stories told by a man who acts them out in a high scratchy voice. She promises him the records if he will stay in the field with her most of the day.
She might have thought there would be other children who would come play. She might have thought.
One of the pickers, a woman, is speaking to him. Everything is soft about the woman. Her voice, her face, her smile. She wears a faded dress over a pair of jeans that have also lost their color. She has found a small bag for him to drag in his wake as he follows his mother down the row.
“The bag was my Eddie’s,” she says.
A second woman looks as if she wants to smile too, only she isn’t sure it’s okay to smile. This one reminds him of his grandmother, who he has seen once, a long time ago. These are old women. They have old faces. The second woman shows him how to pull the white tufts of cotton away from the plants, what he can reach.
“Just the white part,” she says. “Leave the green part.”
“It isn’t child labor,” says the first woman. “If it’s a game.”
At the far end of those rows where the field meets the highway, the man in the straw hat has parked an enormous wooden wagon, and he has propped a tall ladder against it. Before that morning the boy couldn’t know there were ladders that tall. All of the workers know about the ladder. (And his mother is a worker.) They know they are to fill their bags, take them to the scales, then climb the ladder and dump everything they have collected onto the mountain of cotton already in the wagon. Another thing a boy will remember: some of the workers are in poor health or too heavy to climb such a ladder, heavier than Mrs. Tollefson who lives next door. Mrs. Tollefson has a child who still nurses, though the child is too big for it. That’s what the boy’s mother says when Mrs. Tollefson is in the other room.
“He’s too big for that,” she says, making a face like when the milk in the carton has gone bad because it is old.
That ladder. One of the younger men puts out his cigarette and offers to climb the ladder for the boy’s mother. The boy knows she won’t like it. She doesn’t care for anyone’s help. She would climb the tallest ladder and never look down but she doesn’t want to leave her son below, alone, even for the minutes it takes to empty her bag. She has to accept the man’s offer, let him climb the ladder in her place.
A ladder might be a problem for the boy’s mother but it is not going to be a problem for a boy. He is ready to climb a ladder. He gets in line behind the others. He doesn’t go to the scales first and his bag isn’t full but he doesn’t think it matters.
He feels his mother’s hand on his arm. She is pulling him out of the line and he asks her not to pull him back, no words at first then all the words, begging her to let him follow the men up the wooden rungs. He can climb a ladder. He can climb to heaven given the chance.
He asks her one more time, and one more after that.
He is three years old working his first job! He needs to climb the ladder. From the top he’s sure you can see the whole world.
It is a thing he won’t be allowed to do.
After that morning they don’t go back to the field. He never stops wondering if it’s because of him, something he has said, something he’s done. Almost surely it is.
But—he doesn’t know this yet—there will be other fields and other farms, where men and women a few years older than his mother will say the words to encourage her.
“You’re a good worker,” they will say when they take the hoe from her hands at the end of the day.
“You can improve yourself,” they will say, watching her stand up straight or nearly straight. Her back will always seem to hurt when the time comes to go to the car.
And they will smile at her, especially the old ones, because they know how long these days are going to be for her, for the boy as well. They are the ones who know.
He comes home from the hospital …
to the house on Beechwood after having his tonsils out. The procedure is common that year. It seems everyone is having it done. It must have been painful, but he doesn’t remember that part. When you’re young, all memories are suspect, good or bad. When you’re old, it’s worse.
Does he actually recall waking up in the hospital, the tall, thin doctor leaning over his bed, or is that a moment he has talked himself into imagining? He remembers the doctor’s name—Schmidt—a good name to say. You hardly have to move your lips. For years, he will be convinced he has seen the good doctor take a step away from his bed so he can throw the tonsils away. Small tonsils, crumpled and soft like tissue paper, the doctor can hold them in one hand. A large receptacle sits next to the bed, a white cannister. If you step on it at the bottom, the lid raises up, and that is how you throw things away. The cannister is there for tonsils and for half-eaten paper cups of ice cream and for the wooden sticks the doctor likes to press against the boy’s tongue. Of course, the can is big enough for other things. You could probably throw a toy away in that can or a boy’s arm if it isn’t a good arm, even a leg if that’s what you need to throw away.
When they bring him home that evening it is dark. It might be wintertime or it might just be late in the day. Hospitals have their way of drawing out the process of releasing a small boy when he hasn’t finished his ice cream. Once they have a boy tucked away in one of their rooms, they are sorry to see him go. For being a good patient, he receives a present from his parents, a set of pint-sized garden tools. A small rake and a shovel. He is not imagining the shovel. He hasn’t gardened much but he knows most of the work involves a shovel.
Working in the garden, that is relaxation for the father. He drives a handful of wooden stakes into the ground and he grows beans that twine their way up those stakes until the plants are taller than a boy. He plants corn and cantaloupe too. Tomatoes of course. Why have a garden if you don’t plant tomatoes? The mother, who works in the fields to get money for the boy’s school clothes, seldom goes out to the garden after dinner. Imagine: if you spent all day looking at children’s tonsils, you probably wouldn’t care to look at them some more when you go home in the evening, just for fun. It is like that for the mother and the garden.
The boy doesn’t visit a hospital again for years and years nor spend a night in one. And when he does, the doctor is a different doctor, and a woman, and she doesn’t bother to check on his tonsils, see how that earlier surgery turned out. She is after something else this time, a few tired parts from an old man. The boy, the man, wakes up early each morning, expecting Dr. Schmidt to come into his room and lean back from his bed and throw something soft and white into the trash can, but that doesn’t happen.
That night long ago, when he comes home from the hospital, he discovers a large toad lying up against a cornstalk at the farthest end of the father’s garden. The father has planted a single row of corn, and the toad lies very still in the dark. The toad has an enormous fat belly and he knows they are onto his presence, but he doesn’t run away, or even walk fast. The toad sits there a long time so they will remember him.
That churchyard …
is quite small. When the crooked-leg man comes to mow the grass, it takes him half an hour, all by himself. He brings his gas mower from home every week between March and November—the church doesn’t own a mower—lifting it clumsily from the trunk of his car, setting it down by the red gas can. The boy lives close by. He watches the man mow, his crippled leg a horrible thing to see. The man trims the grass from the edge of the street right up to the heavy front doors of the building, circling the only tree in the yard, the smoking tree, where the other men stand together just before Sunday service and afterwards too. It is okay if a man smokes, although that tree doesn’t seem to grow the way a tree should grow.
Already the boy knows there are worse things than smoking. For instance there are some words you shouldn’t say. You can say hell and damn if you are a grownup man and you are at home, but never while you are standing under the smoking tree. The men speak in low voices before church, but the boy would know if somebody used a word like damn. He would remember it.
There are other bad words. Fool is an exceptionally bad word. Never say thou fool. Never ever say it. You can say Jesus as long as you are praying. You can probably say I’m a fool for Jesus. There are loopholes.
The loopholes come later.
It will be important not to get the later parts mixed up with the earlier parts.
Like the Sunday morning he stands by the roadside. This is an earlier part. The grass has been cut the day before, and the boy is overcome suddenly with a new feeling. His heart is breaking and he doesn’t know why. That is the worst of it. The men have abandoned the smoking tree, and they have gone up the steps and into the church where they are going to place their hats on the shelf in the very back of the room with the piano on the left and the organ on the right. The boy and his family sit on the piano side. It seems important, which side.
It is a year when men still wear good hats. It is not the year of the new minister, the one with the wart on the back of his head. The preacher can’t see it back there, so he must think nobody can see it. It isn’t the year when the Indian boy comes to lead the singing either. The Indian boy sings without waving his hands. The mother likes that. It might be the year she makes matching red-checkered shirts, one for the father, one for the boy. It is not the year the boy is told in no uncertain terms it is never okay to hit a girl in the stomach. That is a few years later. A person can be sure the subject is serious if it is presented in this way, in no uncertain terms.
And what is there to be so sad about? Why does he cry by the side of the road and refuse to be led back inside the church? Why does he beg to be taken home? You might think you have the answer to that question. If you do, I wish you would tell me. I really would like to know.
