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June, July, August 1998 

1991 Onalee Surry, Lottie's grandmother dies @ 90 Lottie 53
1991 Ray Nell (Munroe) Childress reads shocking page in her mother's Bible
This is Ray Nell (Munroe) Childres's voice

Short Bio: Ray Nell born: 1938 (same as her girlfriend Lottie) Northwest Tennessee
 Cletus Childress born 1937 Illinois. Cletus and Ray Nell m. 1954. RN 16. Cletus 17.
Daughter Maryruth (Ruthie) born 1957 West Tennessee
Location: Small town of Fielder Tennessee (Northwest corner
The year Ray Nell is telling her story: Summer 1991
                                            


                                                                CLOSE TO HOME
                                    
   By Nancy Stafford Griesinger



Imagine a sharecropper's cat-slide home shining grey and bright, like quicksilver, in the moonlight. The building has never been painted, but it has been whitewashed and scrubbed clean with lye soap and bleach. There are roving yellow and white Honeysuckle bushes on the South side of the house breathing out a scent so strong and potent people talk of bottling it. Purple Sweet Peas meander around the front porch and orange Daylilies cover the side ditch. It is late summer, nearly midnight. It is so hot the leaves on the trees aren't even stirring. The sounds you hear are a woman's low moan and the faint call of a Whippoorwill.

One window in the house glows with lamplight. My mother is in that room giving birth to me. It is September 11, 1938. My father waits outside, filling cigarette after cigarette with homegrown tobacco, and smoking each one down to its nub. Miss Onalee Surrey is helping my mother, holding her hand, wiping her brow. The doctor will come tomorrow. He has a set of twins to deliver to Mrs. J.L. Reynolds at Mending Wall. Mrs. Reynolds is frail and may not make it. My mother is young and strong and Miss Onalee is every bit as knowledgeable as Dr. Butterworth.

Our home is three miles west of the town of Fielder Lake in a valley in Northwest Tennessee known as Cove Canyon. We are far enough from the Mississippi River that we do not flood but close enough to have fertile soil and good bottom land. 

We are a valley of truck farmers, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers.
There are six homes in the valley and four of them are farms. Mr. Jeter Jenkins has more buildings than anyone. He also owns the most land. He has two barns. One for horses and one for cows. He has a shed for the pigs he takes to market and two chicken houses.

Mr. Albert Stubblefield owns the best house by far. A mansion really. The Stubblefield house is also the oldest dwelling in Cove Canyon. It was built before the War Between The States and has withstood both neglect and abuse, but remains regal to this day like the Stubblefields themselves and like the Stubblefields the house is always cool and serene.

The Ledford place is run down and its people are lazy. They don't care about anything but drink. The Cantrells are the lowest class of white people in these parts because they are not only lazy but downright dirty in their personal habits and are as dumb as niggers. Leon Cantrell can't make change for a quarter to save his life.

The Surreys are smart enough not to have to work for other people. They hire people like my Daddy and Grover Ledford and Leon Cantrell to chop the cotton and pick the strawberries and tomatoes and okra they plant on rented land from Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Stubblefield.

The Surreys are religious people too. They attend the Methodist church with the Jenkins, and Stubblefields. The Ledfords don't ever go to church of any kind and neither do the Cantrells.

We Munroes call ourselves Primity Baptist, but we don't attend unless there's a funeral and would prefer to be Holy Rollers because of all the shouting we hear tell they do.

The truth that no one ever admits is that we'd all, the Jenkins, Stubblefields, Surreys, Cantrells, Ledfords and Munroes, would be colored on Sunday mornings, if we could, because of the beautiful hymn singing. Nobody can touch the coloreds for good Gospel singing.
Munroes are sharecroppers who make a living hiring out to the others and living on promises. We are indebted to the wealthy and, in reality, under their thumb. The differences between us and the Surreys is pure, with a capital P., Pride. It comes naturally to them. We hope for it, long for it and dream, but we are never able to stand quite as tall as the Surreys. We don't come from the same stock. But we know our place and are comfortable enough. We've talked ourselves into loving our station in life.

Cove Canyon and Fielder Lake are like a fire ignited in us ages ago that will never go out. No matter how far any of us roam, no matter how dim the flame, the spark that kindles the feeling of home in our hearts will never go out.

The cover of our Family Bible is flimsy and crackled. New black worn down to brown. It is the size of a school notebook that is stuffed with pages. The Bible pages are edged in gold and when it is opened in the middle to Psalms say, and placed on a tea towel, it has a look of elegance to it like Queen Ann's hair, parted in the middle and flowing down on either side. This was the only book we owned when I was a child. Our births, deaths, and marriages are recorded in its silken pages.
I inherited the Bible, being the only girl, and I keep it in its box the way Mama did, on a shelf in my closet, but I don't read it. The one I use for Bible study and prayer meeting is one Cletus gave me for our tenth anniversary in 1964 when he was trying to impress me so I wouldn't leave him.

I was twenty-six and Ruthie was seven. We had been restless for a long time and Cletus was no companion to me on account of the grieving he was doing over his mother, and besides, I was heading toward thirty and still hadn't lived. I was in the habit of daydreaming of a new life and although I never told him as much, he sensed that I was ready to bolt at any minute.

The Bible Mama read to us was full of mysterious words she said were sacred because they were uttered by Jesus and printed in red like his shed blood. I never touched that bible, that sacred word, until the day Daddy told me to write in Mama's name and her death date. June 29, 1947. She was twenty-six. I was nine. Pook and Sass were eight and couldn't understand why Mama was never coming back. They thought after she rested awhile in heaven she'd be as good as new. They also thought their mean tricks had caused her to go away. I thought it'd do them some good to think that, so I let them.

After Mama died Daddy pretty much left running the house up to me. Meals, clean clothes, Christmas. Sass and Pook played marbles with Jimmy Ledford and thought up ways to stay out of the schoolhouse. I adored school and secretly wished it would go on all summer. With Daddy, it didn't matter if I studied my lessons or not, but Pook and Sass, he wanted to know -- Did they understand the story problems? The geography work? Most of all, did they know their times' tables? Seems you'd never get through life if you couldn't memorize your times' tables.

Pook and Sass are not my brother's real names. Daddy gave them those names when they were babies. He played with them a good deal, Mama said and called them every baby-coochie name he'd ever heard. Somehow Sass and Pook stuck.
Sass's real name is William Herbert. Pook's is William Hollis. Two Williams I know, but that was Daddy's name, William Raymond, and Mama would have no child of his go without his name. Her name was Mary Nell and she was seventeen when I was born. Daddy was twenty-three. They named me Ray Nell Munroe. I'm not sure, but I think the Munroe family way back came here to West Tennessee from North Carolina. Most all of them died out early on except for Daddy's grandfather. He lived as far back in the woods as he could go Daddy said because he'd married a half-breed Cherokee girl and people shunned him for it. Daddy never saw either one of them. They died before he was born, but Daddy's father was their eldest and his name was Crown J. Munroe. He passed away when Daddy was twelve, so I never knew any of Daddy's people or Mama's. I don't have any idea where my mother's people came from. She wouldn't talk about them. Daddy said they'd turned on her for marrying an orphan who didn't have two nickels to rub together.

I know now that we were poor, but then, Pook and Sass and me we just lived every day as if we were the light of the world. Daddy kept the secret of our finances so close that we would have argued with a saint if we'd been told we were not well off.

There were no stores outside of town like now, and of course, we didn't get a newspaper other than the free Gazette with all the social doings of the community peppered all over the front page: "Triangle sandwiches of cucumber on light-bread and colored mints were served at the Tea Party given by Misres Albert Campbell for her grand-niece on Thursday. Attending were all of the Miss Snootie-Rooties and their friends."

That's the stuff of news in Fielder, Tennessee. We didn't even open the Gazette from its tight little band. We didn't need to waste our time reading about the Snootie-Rooties. Besides, they weren't a bit like us. They were fake people in fake houses. And they were afraid of dirt. They might as well been Chinamen as far as we were concerned.

At that time we didn't have a radio either and we used our Sears-Roebuck catalog for toilet paper. (Softer than corn shucks). We counted thrills that others took for granted like riding on the running boards of a generous passer-by.

Our great Hallelujah was the monthly visit of Peddler George. He'd sing out his spiel for us in a pure T. clean voice, like a tenor in a church choir, even though he knew good and well we'd not buy a thing.

His old nearly blind horse had bells cling-clanging all over his harness and we could hear him coming a good mile away, first with the faintest tinkle then building to a trotting chime with the pots and pans clattering to keep time.
When he came into sight from Coats's rise we ran to the lane and waited. We could hear his voice humming, warming up for us, and the sun catching the bells brought the glint so pure and sharp that we had to close one eye lest it start them both to watering. The sound began sinking down lower and lower until it came to a complete stop and there right in front of us stood Peddler George removing his cap and wiping his brow.

"Gotta thread and a needle and a pair of dice. Gotta pans and a pitcher and a good sharp knife. Need a ribbon and a lace and a sweet smelling spice? Better George than the store for a good fair price." His smokey voice would rise at the end and he would give out an "Ahh..." just like a man

We'd give him a glass of sweet tea and a couple of our breakfast biscuits we opened and sprinkled with salt, pepper, and vinegar. His sparse brown teeth bit down onto the biscuit. He chewed, swallowed and smacked his lips as if we'd given him a slice of watermelon from the creek. We'd give him that too when we had it.

He'd end up giving the boys and me some trinket. A marble for each of them, aggies or, if they were lucky, steelies, and for me a spool of thread or pack of needles and sometimes a paper of tiny gold safety pins. I loved those the best. Once, when I was twelve, he gave me a piece of hair ribbon blue as a copper bed stream. Slippery as corn silk. Wrapping the ribbon around my blond curls I learned how powerful color could be. I'd scrub my face nearly raw each night till it was clean as a canning jar and then I'd tie on the ribbon and stare at myself in Mama's hand mirror.

I found a flour-sack pattern with flowers the exact shade of blue, Forget-Me-Nots they were. I waited until I had enough goods to sew me a dress to match. It took a full year from start to finish. That's the dress I wore to my eighth-grade commencement.

Daddy was proud of me for finishing school (he had quit in the fifth grade) and even went so far as to pay Ethel Brock to take a picture of us together. Him in his white starched shirt and pair of serge pants he'd borrowed off Old Black Pewter, his coon-hunting buddy, and me standing beside him, same height as he was, my flowered dress and blue ribbon billowing.

Though the picture is black and white, memory keeps the colors true. The dress has long since been made into rags, but I've still got the ribbon tucked away in Mama's bible with the photograph. First Corinthians.
Daddy thought I was finished with school, but I was already dreaming of high school and town boys. Pook and Sass were big strapping boys, a foot taller than Daddy, and Coach Medling had stopped Daddy on the street in town more than once to say how much he was looking forward to the day they'd show up for high school football. Daddy understood it was a chance at a better life for them if they had more schooling, but when it came to me he asked, "What fer?"

I pitched a duck-dying fit, headed for the porch, slammed the screen, flew down the steps to the lane and started walking. I was so mad I didn't care if I died. I think if Daddy had run after me I'd have spit in his face.

The night had turned cool like early Spring nights are liable to do, and my nightgown whipped at my ankles like sheets on the line. I made it to the Stubblefield's front porch and was hiding behind the North column, holding my breath and knotting my gown between my legs when Daddy came rattling up in the wagon, old Alec, and Stob breathing hard enough to show their breath. Daddy's voice called out for them to halt with a loud clear, "Whoa Boys, whoa." 

Mr. Stubblefield came out and glanced sloe-eyed in my direction. Daddy flicked ash and winked at Mr. Stubblefield. (Told me years later he'd seen my blue ribbon catching the moonlight). "Ray Nell's run off. If ya'll see her tell her I said to come on home."
"Ain't seen her Raymond, but I'll keep an eye out."
"Much obliged," Daddy said as he circled Alec and Stob around. He nodded to Mrs. Stubblefield who was standing just inside the screen door.
"We'll keep an eye peeled Mr. Munroe," she called. 

Soon as the wagon faded into the darkness she said to me, not breaking her stride, "Come on Ray Nell, we're fixing to have our pie, come on." Mr. Stubblefield held the door and I walked inside.

I had passed by this huge house my whole life, past the long porch with its round white columns, its wavy windows winking in the sunlight, the front and back doorways of the dog-trot flung wide, and had even stepped upon the cement porch with Mama one time when me and Pook and Sass were small and Mama was asking permission to pick some fruit off one of the Stubblefield's trees because theirs seemed to be thriving and ours were full of worms.

It was evident to me then by the six giant white columns and the height of the lattice underpinnings that this was a grand house, but all of that paled now, as I stepped inside.
The floor of the central hall, or dog-trot, was solid as marble. Mrs. Stubblefield's tiny feet made glittering little snaps as she hurried toward the kitchen rooms. My worn loafers, second hand from Lottie, scuffed the surface like moccasins. Mr. Stubblefield shuffled along in his house slippers. Only man, I've ever known who wore slippers.

The three rooms on our left were shut off for the night, so all I saw of them were the gleaming mahogany doors with brass and glass doorknobs and enormous brass plates for keyholes the size of Bantam eggs. On my right in the first room, I glanced at what looked like a pump organ. There was a daybed under the window. Gloomy looking books lined the walls. Their colors were wine and green and midnight blue with a few somber greys peeking out, making the shelves look as though they were snaggle-toothed and grinning. This room reeked of tobacco. I breathed its cool puffed scent when we strode by.

White lace curtains were hanging at every window, even the kitchen, and there was not an oil cloth in sight anywhere. There was electricity running through the lamps giving them a steady even glow. In the room where Mr. and Mrs. Stubblefield had been sitting, wine-colored velveteen furniture sat against the wall bunched up like fat red hens. Opposite the plump chairs stood a coal-burning stove, as ornate as a circus wagon. Carpet, soft and quiet underfoot, hugged the floor. It was woven in a pattern of ferns the color of ripe muscadines. Mr. Stubblefield paused and opened the door of the stove and jiggled the red cinders. 

They almost always had a fire, being old as they were. I believe they were in their sixties, which makes me laugh now that I'm near that myself.
Mrs. Stubblefield glanced at my nightgown then, as if she hadn't noticed it before. I felt ashamed standing there in my mother's old made-over dress. No doubt they had seen Mama in it bending over a washboard or out in the field looking for Pokeweed or Ramps.
Mrs. Stubblefield disappeared across the hall and came back with a chenille robe she said she'd gotten at a roadside stand somewhere in North Carolina where her people lived. The robe was soft as down, white as any snow I'd ever seen. Tufted flowers sprang up through the skin of the cloth every so often, all purple and pink and yellow. It was by far the prettiest and most luxurious garment I'd ever had privilege to try on. I could have moved right in and lived out my days with them as pretty as you please.
Mrs. Stubblefield sashed me in tight and led me by the sleeve to their "breakfast room," as she called it though I knew they had supper at this same table most nights. She motioned for me to sit on her right-hand side. Mr. Stubblefield sat at his place at the head.

She cut the oblong lemon ice-box pie in dainty squares and placed one piece on each of our plates. She poured me a glass of milk and you could hear how ice cold it was when it entered the glass, not folding over itself like velvet, but crackling crisp and sharp like cellophane, and sounding as if it had been near the block of ice for a very long time. For herself and Mr. Stubblefield, she poured coffee. The aroma was so pure it made my teeth ache. The house was as quiet as a cathedral. The forks clinked against the plates like tiny chimes and bounced off the walls like raindrops. I took the smallest bites I could and even accepted a second piece because I couldn't bear to have the moment end.

Lottie and I had snuck over to the Stubblefield's house many times and laid out in the tall grass and watched Mr. and Mrs. Stubblefield eat. It was the best entertainment we found before we discovered dancing. The elegance of those evenings watching them clink their glasses and ping their silverware brought a fantasy to us so far removed from our plain world that when the show was over we felt like it was our duty to bring a bit of their grace and splendor back to our own homes if in nothing more than our imaginations.

Now, for this one magical moment, here I was inside the fairy tale, a princess for an hour. Mr. Stubblefield cleared his throat to break the ice and asked me if there was trouble at home. I said, "No Sir, it's merely a disagreement." He smiled. "Well," he said, "You know there's no place better than home for most of us."
"I'll go back," I said faking confidence and licking my fork, ashamed to take the third piece of pie the Missus offered, "Soon as I feel better."
"Are you ill, Ray Nell?" Mrs. Stubblefield asked.

I was so bold I started a plan working right then. I thought I could fain sickness and win their sympathy (after all they were childless and lonely weren't they?) and stay on in the fantasy forever. I'd be so sweet, so adorable, so irresistible that they'd have to take me in, be compelled to. I thought I'd come up with the most brilliant solution for my new life where I could attend high school and learn to play the organ and have boyfriends over for ice-box pie and I would read every book on every shelf in their front room not once, but twice and then some.
"No Ma'am," I answered, "Just not feeling good."

She looked at the Mister asking silent permission from him so that she could offer me a home, or so I thought. He shook his head, a slight twist really, but a firm, "No." She withered in her chair like a flower gone too long without water. His "no", compact as a rock, hung in the room like a rotten grape that won't fall.
My dream sailed off. If she's that weak and he's that stubborn I thought, well then, maybe not. Maybe I won't show them how sweet I can be and how much they would enjoy having me live in their home.
"I need to go home now," I said, "My Daddy'll be worried sick if I don't show up soon." I undid the sash of the robe and felt its silky softness slide through my fingers. "Thank you kindly," I said. I tried to smile. Mr. Stubblefield said he'd walk with me just to make sure I arrived safe and sound if I didn't mind.
"I'd be much obliged," I said feeling awkward and out of place. I let the robe fall from my shoulders and onto the chair like a heap of down. Mrs. Stubblefield wrapped a small quilt around my shoulders and said I was welcome at their table anytime. She picked up the robe then with two dainty fingers as if it had just been drug through the mire.
A picture of Mama hugging our bedclothes before she stashed them under our pillows came to me. She had her eyes closed and she was smiling the way she smiled when she smelled a beautiful rose. Funny, I thought, I never knew I had kept that memory. It was an ordinary scene at our house, Mama clasping tender moments to her breast and quietly, to herself, enjoying them. It was only after her death and at times like this, so cold and strange when memories such as this one came back to me. If I had been asked, when I observed my mother's tenderness, to write it down for posterity, I wouldn't have known what to write.
When Mr. Stubblefield and I had gone a few steps off his porch and walked into the black night toward the road that led home, I looked back at their house. Mrs. Stubblefield was on her screened-in lighted side porch hanging the robe on a hook to air it out.
Truth like that hits pretty hard when you are thirteen and the illusion, that though you were not as rich as everyone else you were just as valuable in God's eyes, is shattered by a gesture as small as two fingers gingerly picking up a piece of cloth which has been soiled by your brief presence. I wondered what she was going to do about my plate and fork and empty milk glass. Probably wash them in a separate pan the way we did Old Pewter's.
I never forgot that feeling, carried it home with me, nursed it, cried over it in my bed and allowed it to fade, but not disappear. I relived that scene time and again the rest of my life. If I smiled at a boy and he didn't smile back I knew immediately I wasn't his kind, wasn't the girl he'd be proud to call his.
Daddy was very kind to me that night, sensing my loss I thought. He thanked Mr. Stubblefield for seeing me home and instead of whipping me or telling me to get out of his sight, he asked me to sit with him for a spell. We talked for a good long time, him scratching at the sores on his bald head until they were raw. I fixed a balm of Vaseline and tar and rubbed it in good for him while the salve was still warm and placed a clean ironed handkerchief over his head and fastened it with a piece of twine before he went to bed. He was a calm enough sleeper (unlike me with my jerking and kicking) that the cloth would still be in place when he woke.
Daddy told me that night he reckoned it'd be all right for me to go to high school if it meant that much to me, that is, "If," he said in his stern voice, "You can do it and not shirk your work here." I promised I wouldn't shirk any of my household chores. I promised he wouldn't find a flaw anywhere. Heck, I would have promised him the moon, I was that happy and I was also faintly aware that I'd just discovered another secret. That anger, when expressed, can bring contentment. I thought about what would have happened if I'd let the matter pass and how he would not have thought much of my pouting. But, by running off, slamming the door, staying away and giving him time to think, I had saved myself. Staying and seething would have been easier at first, but in the long run, it would have smothered me.
The next year, in the Fall of 1952, I started school at Fielder Lake High School, and by the end of the first week, I hated it. Not because of the studies, they were plenty hard enough for me, but at least, I felt I was learning and improving my mind. The reason I hated it was for all of the other things I hadn't thought would matter, like how different the town kids dressed and behaved. The girls who were the prettiest and most confident wore sweaters with Peter Pan collars and wool plaid skirts. Their shoes were black and white saddle shoes and their socks were bleached so bright they hurt your eyes.
Daddy bought a coat for me when he went to Trade Days in Fulton that year. Traded one of his rifles for it to an old man who'd taken it off his wife's back before he'd left home that morning promising to get her a new one by nightfall. When it turned cold I wore it and kept it on in class even though I was burning up, because it covered my homemade cotton dresses.
My grades were good for the most part because I could take my books home and read ahead on any one of the subjects and anticipate what questions would be asked in class. I could have put my hand up nearly every time, but I didn't want to be a smart Alec.
I met Cletus that year. He'd transferred down from Illinois wearing shackled pants and slick black hair worn long on the sides and rouched back into what he called a D.A. (Duck's Ass he told me when I asked him.) There wasn't a boy in Fielder with hair like that. Most of the town boys had Butch cuts, squared off like a manicured lawn. The Peter Pan collars brushed their long nails across the top of those bristles in a casual off hand way and made the boy's hearts leap. Cletus's hair had a greasy look as if it hadn't been washed in a month. "Brylcreem," he explained, and with a coy wink, "A little dab'll do ya."
I felt a kinship with him immediately. He was quiet and funny and he was an outcast. He needed me. I thought we needed each other. We married in 1954. Went across the state line where it was legal and stood shaking in front of a sleepy old man who was a justice of the peace. Me sixteen and him seventeen. Lord, we must have been crazy. No flowers, no gown, no music, no friends. The old man's wife and daughter stood as witnesses.

That was thirty-seven years ago. Today he sits in his room and stares at the road dust as it is kicked up by a passing pick-up. His eyes don't flicker one iota as he watches the dust settle. He is mesmerized by the movement and must stare and stare until every particle has landed. It's like watching sand run down in an hourglass. If you talk to him in this state he ignores you until the dust is gone and only dry air stands between him and the road. When he answers you, if he answers you, it'll be in the form of a question. Rarely does he answer anything straight out.
I wonder if he thinks of leaving someday, taking off in a dense cloud of red dust. Does he engage in thoughts as I do of starting over in some other place? At fifty-four, he seems ready to sit still and turn old. At fifty-three, I'm sure not.
If we had grandchildren I'd probably never dream of walking away. I'd settle down and bounce grandbabies on my knee like Pearl and Daisy Belle. I'd fall head first into family and unity and commitment like they have with big family dinners. Their whole clan gathers in the dining room of that white clapboard house every Sunday.

Daisy Belle and Pearl scrub and clean and cook all week as if getting ready for Christmas. When everyone arrives the whole Kit and Kaboodle greets each other as if it's been a year they've been apart instead of a week.
Pearl Struthers and Daisy Belle Williams pluck their flower boxes until there's not a dried petal or leaf within an inch of those red petunias. They trim the new growth of the evergreen bushes down to the original nub and they water and pinch the rose bushes until they're perfect. They pick the bouquet for the table just before leaving for church and by the time dinner's ready nobody's flowers, this side of heaven could look any better.

Pearl and Daisy Belle pooled their belongings after their husbands died and then moved in together in Pearl's little house. "Being sisters," they told me, "this was always our dream, to have our own place away from Mama and Daddy and the work of the farm." I nodded, understanding more than perhaps they were saying.
There is something vastly different in living in a home with another woman, one who takes care of herself and makes no demands on you. I can understand more of Ruthie and her friend Clara than she thinks I can. Living with a man is different. He'll have a strong need to invade your mind every chance he gets and seize and conquer your time with his forgetfull and stubborn ways.
That was pretty near three years ago now that Pearl and Daisy Belle started keeping house together and I've watched their comings and goings nearly every day since. I'm fascinated by how cheerful they are living life on their own terms. Cletus doesn't watch them. Tells me not to either, but I don't do a thing he tells me. Calls out to me at six o'clock from his spot in front of his dust laden window and says he's ready for his bowl of ice-cream and expects me to trot out to the kitchen and get it for him like that's the only thing I have to do. I go to the door and tell him in a calm and even voice to help himself. "I've trotted enough," I say, and I wonder then if he sees a different me will he want to stay around? I suppose he will. Been waited on his entire life. That's his real problem, not his weak muscles or his low down mood.
Thirty-seven years ago his mother told me he was spoiled but I don't think I ever really heard what she was saying til here lately.
Cletus and I had been married about seven years in 1961 when his mother passed away. She'd been sick the whole time I'd known her, but still it was a shock, her going. Cletus was like a pitiful child clinging to me, crying into my neck and refusing to leave her graveside. I took Ruthie to the house and gave her some supper and put her to bed, then waited for Cletus to come inside.
Brother Cotton stayed with Cletus at the graveside until after dark. When the crickets started in and the mosquitos came out, Brother Cotton said Cletus thanked him for staying with him and said these words: "Might as well go Pastor, ain't nothing more we can do for her now."

I remember Brother Cotton coming in through the back door of Mrs. Childress' house and carrying his Bible in his right hand the same comfortable way he did on Sunday mornings. How relaxed he was waving the book above the pulpit, his thumb and forefinger holding his place, his mind latched onto some God-given vision.

Cletus stepped in close behind him with his head down. I imagined he'd walked that way from the small plot in the big field out back where an iron fence, long since broken and rusty, housed Mrs. Childress' resting place alongside her mother and father and shoulder to shoulder with Cletus's daddy buried miles from his own kin. I scooted a chair out for Cletus and he took it saying, Much obliged to me, like I was a stranger.

We've never belonged together I don't care what anybody says. The man doesn't have a happy nerve in his body. Likes to dwell on a subject til he can find the sadness in it, the misshapen parts and the ugly. His sister Joan is the same way, besides being a hypochondriac like her mother.
Cletus has never looked at a flower without finding its flaw. Good at giving advice too. If you paid a dollar, you should have paid a dime. If you got it for a dime it wasn't worth a plug nickel. That sort of thing. That's how he's been almost from the start.

Before Ruthie was born, I'd find my good times by lying to him saying I was going to Lottie's to sew and instead we'd take off for Lester's Juke Joint over by Reelfoot Lake. Our county was dry so we had no such place here to go to. If Daddy had known what I was doing he'd have said that Lester's was "No such place" for his daughter. But Daddy didn't know and neither did Cletus until I let it slip a few years back when I was on an honesty kick. I think Cletus is still on a pout.

We loved to dance, Lottie and me, just had it in us, and with it being frowned on by God and everybody in our town, it was, even more, thrilling because we had to sneak around to do it. We didn't drink or smoke even, and Lord knows we didn't carry on with any men. We just danced and let the music carry us on its wings. We sailed and turned and shimmied to the beat for as long as we dared and then we jumped in Lottie's grandmother's old jalopy and rattled on home. We were girls again on a Friday night without a date in sight.

Of course, we'd had dates when we were single, a few, but not because we were in love or anything. We thought we had to have dates in order to get into the joint. By the time we realized we would have been welcomed ala carte, we were already in deep with our future husbands and they'd made us feel so protected and cared for that we listened to them when they told us they didn't want us to go there. We felt like mature women and downright virtuous for heeding their advice.

When I was eight I vowed I'd never marry. I'd been ruined I thought by Lil'yen Jenkins's step-father. Lottie and I had spent the afternoon at Lil'yen's house and while I was daydreaming Mrs. Jenkins's new husband pulled me on his lap and snagged his fingers inside my panties, roamed them around and then let me twist myself off his hands. Mrs. Jenkins was in the room at the time and I was sure she'd seen it, but she must not have for she didn't say one word. Stood facing the sink with her back to us, furiously splashing water over all her clean dishes.
Lottie saw it and knew what had happened even though it was over and done with before she looked up from her coloring. Lil'yen was in the other room getting paper dolls. She's never said a thing to this day though it's certain she had her share of time on that ugly man's lap.

I did not want anyone to know about it. I had to keep it to myself if for no other reason than to feel it again in my mind and try to figure why something so bad could feel so good. I didn't know anybody was allowed to touch you there inside your panties and when it happened and it actually felt good, I was, even more, confused. Bad things were supposed to feel bad, weren't they?
On the way home, Lottie said, "You don't have to ever go back there. It's not like living in the same house with him like J.T. and me." She was so matter of fact, I stared at her and to this day, I've not asked her to explain. J.T is her mother's youngest brother and as far as I can tell they're friends. Both of them grandparents now.

Stars are out. Hundreds of needle points knitting up the dark. There's not a cloud to cover them. Cletus has his television on low, but he's snoring. The honeysuckle vine on the porch is full of itself, the sweetness filling my lungs with every swell of night air. It'll linger all night just out of my reach. If I'm quiet I can step out there and cut a few branches, bring them in and put them in water and place them beside my bed. If I can find the scissors easily, I will. Don't want to cause a commotion and wake Cletus or he'll be up all night.

Lottie is beside herself with worry. She came here this morning, her eyes sad and swollen like she'd been awake all night. "Miss Onalee?" I asked. She's been bedridden for weeks and I know it's going to kill Lottie when her grandmother passes. I know too that I'm going to be there for her when the time comes, and while I do what I can now by carrying in food and taking a turn at Miss Onalee's bedside, my real role is as Lottie's friend. When she suffers I suffer.
Lottie shook her head. "The same," she answered and then began to sob into her hands. "Sorry," she said glancing at Cletus.

"I'll be at Pewters," Cletus said without even a how-do-you-do to Lottie. He can't abide our heart to hearts.
"She needs to let go," Lottie said, "And we all know why she can't, but it's so hard for us to give her permission to leave us." Lottie's eyes were brimming over, the tears falling in great drops. She reached for my hand and I went to her and held her head next to me as if she were my child. It was as natural as dawn. She had comforted me in my mourning over my mother in this same manner when we were children. Holding my head in her lap and stroking my hair while I wept.

"Thank you," she said, "For helping us sit up with her." It was a custom in their family to sit with tablet and pencil in hand next to the bed of the dying person and write down every word they mumbled lest it be their last.
I hugged her to me. "I wish my family'd had a custom like that when Mama died," I whispered. The writing would have fallen to me I'm certain, and I wouldn't have taken it seriously since I didn't have thought one that my mother was dying.
Mama was hale and hearty one day, robust even, and the next writhing in pain and soaking sheets with her blood. Daddy wouldn't send for a doctor. Most people didn't. "She'll be all right directly," he said. He was used to the backwoods way. A little coal-oil poured over a gash would heal it quicker than some Derby-hat pulling up in a fancy rig carrying a black leather bag. Molasses, sweetgum, and common sense could cure anything doctors could.

We couldn't, no matter how we packed rags between her legs, stop the blood from gushing out of her. She asked me to take down the friendship quilt we used as a room divider between our room and hers and Daddy's. It was dark maroon and black squares clumsily put together by Northern people who couldn't sew a straight stitch. The ones who talk so fast you can't understand a word they're saying so you stare them down and they pass the word that the South is full of dummies.

The quilt was given to us by the Missionary Ladies Guild of New York State. A Snootie-Rootie bunch if there ever was one. They shipped their cast-offs to the country people of West Tennessee once a year and there wasn't a family around here that welcomed their so-called charity.

I guess it wouldn't have been rewarding enough for them to dump their trash on some neighbor's porch in their own state. Everybody I knew was insulted. Just because some traveling preacher had carried stories back north as to our way of life, they had taken it upon themselves to become a "blessing" to us. Better they leave any blessing to be done to the Good Lord.

I figured they had a need to give far greater than was our need to receive. Their lives, I thought, were cluttered with so much they couldn't see that by contrast what they were looking at when they saw us was not want, but contentment.
I was glad to see the black thing down and its foreign names obscured by my mama's blood. It was years later when Miss Onalee explained that what my mother had experienced was called a miscarriage and it was not a word to be used in mixed company. I never did.

All Lottie would tell me this morning was that she couldn't talk about what it was that had her so upset, but it has something to do with J.T. I can tell that much. Every mention of his name sends her reeling.
He lives over by Tiptonville with his wife Myrna, and son Rudd and his wife Wanda, and their little girl, LeeAnne. They hardly ever come around here anymore. Rudd and Wanda both work, Lottie said, but she didn't know where. I don't suppose the jobs pay very much or else they wouldn't live with J.T. and Myrna.

J.T. got a job in one of the coat factories years ago and they say he did quite well during the years Rudd was growing up, but then the bottom fell out and now he spends his mornings fishing and his afternoons watching his granddaughter so Myrna can work the afternoon shift at Light's grocery.

Lottie said as soon as she could she'd tell me whatever it is that has her so worried and sad, but right now all she needs is for me to let her come here to do her crying so "Oney doesn't get upset."
"You know what Miss Onalee would want you to do?" I asked without pausing for her to answer. "She'd want you to run off to Misres Stubblefield's with me and lie in the grass under the stars with the night air around you cooling your red-hot face." She smiled. 

"In other words," I continued, "She'd want you to stop crying and have some fun. Want to go "pull a Lester?"
Lottie laughed then, her old half giggle half belly laugh. "Lester's Place has rotted and fallen into the ground just like we have you fool," she said full of the old spark.
"Well, something else then," I said. "Want a beer?"
"There's not a beer within twenty miles of this place and you know it."
"I didn't say I had any, but I know where we can go and get some."
"You are such a cut-up, Ray Nell," she said. "The last thing I need right now is to leave town in search of a beer."
I felt almost young again and rebellious and I didn't want the feeling to end. "A smoke then?" I asked.
"Here?" she asked. "What about Cletus?"
"He won't be back that soon." I fished around in my pocket and lit two at once and handed her one. "Here, for old times sake," I said.
She took a long slow drag and leaned back in her chair. The smoke clouded around her face like a veil and I left her in peace and walked over to the window so I could have a clear view of Cletus walking back from Pewters. I pulled on my own cigarette and held the silence close.
After a few minutes, Lottie laughed, "We're pretty pathetic old girl, you know that? Still sneaking around to smoke like we did as kids. Why haven't you ever told Cletus?"
The sun was out now in its full-blown fury throwing heat in through the east window. The bowed screen wire acting like a sieve dripping invisible lava. The cool morning had disappeared and this was going to be a scorcher. The white curtain puffed toward me and I switched on the fan. "I know," I said. "It is pitiful, but it's just about the only fun I have."
She laughed with me. "How do you mean?" She asked.
"I don't know, just...well I've always lived with some sort of secret. I don't believe in giving myself over entirely." It was true, and the older I get it seems I need so much more that is mine alone.
"Then you don't care about hearing any of my secrets?" she asked.
"No, no...of course, tell me anything you want to, but if you want it kept here," I touched my heart, " then it'll go no further. You have my word, Damn!"

 I saw two figures sauntering down the street with a black dog between them, the heads of the figures leaning toward each other as if one was talking, the other listening intently.
"You mean 'damn word,' not 'word damn," she laughed.
"Put out your cigarette," I said doing the same with mine and turning the fan on high and raising the window even higher. I ran a wet paper towel around the ashtray and crammed the butts down into my pocket.
Lottie looked up the street. "Damn," she said, "I'm going. Soon as we can let's quit this place, O.K. old girl?"
"Hey," I answered, "Don't put ideas in my head."

                                                                         ********                                                                                                                                                       

Lottie ended up marrying Jimmy Ledford, the poorest boy in our class, but she didn't care, she said at the time, she loved him. Poor Jimmy. He had no home life to speak of. His father was sickly and stayed out of sight and his mother, while visible to us had a glazy stare that eliminated us.
Pook and Sass were best friends with Jimmy. They played marbles I think almost every day in the summer. Jimmy came to our place for the games on account of his mother. Mrs. Ledford was the only woman I ever heard of that drank. At least in those days. 

Jimmy hung out at Stubb's quarry quite a bit too and I remember one time when all the kids climbed up on top of the water tank. I wasn't there but Pook and Sass painted a pretty good picture for me. They said Lottie was the most scared one of all. She'd made up her mind to be brave because the children kept calling her "baby," but all that courage flew out the window when she finally reached the top and turned around. She said her heart was leaping up into her throat and her whole body went as limp as a dish rag when she saw the mouth of the quarry yawning like the red mouth of a hippopotamus.

The others were running around the tower on the galvanized wire cat-walk. She said she couldn't move and felt as if she was going to melt right through the mesh floor. She wasn't aware that the kids were climbing down until the last one cried out for her to "come on!" They left her there, every last one, and Lottie thought she was doomed to die there. Mr. Cline, her daddy, came and found her and carried her home.

She said she hated Jimmy Ledford for egging her on and then leaving her. That was around third or fourth grade. In ninth grade, they were holding hands in the picture show and passing notes in Science class.

It's been a better marriage than most. They have one daughter, Lucy. She was born the same year as our Ruthie, but Ruthie and Lucy have never been close, not like Lottie and me.

Lottie and Jimmy married in 1955, a year after Cletus and me. They both finished school even though it wasn't necessary. Most everyone considered a married couple as grown and more schooling than necessary seemed foolish. Better to get a job and start your family in earnest.
                                                       
                                                                        ****                      

I went over to sit with Miss Onalee and here she was sitting up in her chair. Her shiny hair, like an enamel cap, was piled up on her head in a top knot. She had her glasses on and was reading when I walked in.
"Miss Onalee," I said, "You're better."
"Today is a good day."
"Maybe all you needed was a little rest."
She smiled. "Come on in and sit with me anyway."
Lottie stood in the doorway with her arms folded and smiled. "Can you stay awhile Ray Nell?" she asked. I usually stayed an hour, but I could sense the 'awhile', the emphasis on it, was a plea for me to commit to the bulk of the day. I thought of Cletus. "Sure," I answered. "Take your time."
Miss Onalee looked up at Lottie. "Where you going?" she asked. There was a hesitancy in Lottie, a brief pause in her mind. Her voice waivered, her stance stiffened. "Judson's got some business in Tiptonville. I'm going along," she said. Judson is Miss Onalee's eldest. His wife's name is Jewell and she is that if there ever was one.
"Why are you all so in love with Tiptonville?" Miss Onalee asked. "Except for J.T., there's just floods and earthquakes over there. Is anything the matter with J.T.? His family?"
Lottie walked over to her grandmother and sat on the edge of the bed. She smoothed Miss Onalee's cheek. "Oney," she said. "It's only for one day. We'll be back by supper and Ray Nell will take care of you the same as if it was me. You won't know the difference."
Miss Onalee's shoulders drooped slightly in acceptance. She looked into my eyes for a long somber moment and then patted Lottie's hand. "I'll be fine," she told Lottie and then as a second thought asked, "Is Jewell going?"
"No," Lottie said, "She's busy in the kitchen. I believe she's fixing to make you some pies." Lottie's voice was smiling, floating out of her like she was her old self.
After Lottie and Judson left, Miss Onalee let her head fall back for a moment as if she was exhausted.
"Are you tired?" I asked.
"No," she said, "Well maybe just a tad."
"You can rest now," I said, "I'll busy myself."
"Thank you," she sighed.
I had read about six pages in my book when she raised her head and blinked at me. "That was a quick nap," I said. "I wasn't asleep," she said and then she stared into my eyes once more, the same as she had when Lottie was in the room. Her look was that of a child who has just learned to read, full of wonder and surprise. Then like a veil across her face it saddened.
"Do you need something?" I asked. She shook her head. "Are you sure you're alright?" She nodded, her eyes closed once more, blocking out whatever thought it was that had overtaken her. She is nearing her ninetieth birthday and her mind still rings as clear as a bell most days. It's her body that is failing. Such frustration, I thought, not to be able to move about and do things when your mind is sharp and your brain is popping with thoughts and ideas that you cannot see manifested.
"Ray Nell," she said, her eyes still closed, "Your mother was such a sweet person, you know that don't you?"
"Yes, Miss Onalee I do know that."
"She loved all of her children Ray Nell, all of them." She raised her head and opened her eyes.
"I know she did," I said.
"She did only what she thought was best, you tell everybody that."
"I will," I said.
"Help me back in the bed, Honey-Pot," she said reaching toward me. Through her gown, her breasts hung flat like socks on a line. "These ole paps," she said, "No starch left in them."
I laughed. "You wore them out," I said, "Nursing babies."

 She was voluptuous in her early days and filled with Mother's Milk. She was the one turned to when nervous young things couldn't let down their milk. Miss Onalee even nursed Lottie, her own daughter's newborn, because Miss Ilene never had any milk. She just never was the motherly type. Not like my own sweet Mary Nell.
Miss Ilene was busy traveling around trying to be a singing star. She and Mr. Charles made more than one trip North to Nashville in the early days of The Opry. She sang her heart out they said and came home disappointed every time. She gave all that up though in 1938 when Lottie Belle was born. Never regretted it she said, "Not for one minute."
"Look at that," Miss Onalee said turning her hand over. "That's my mother's hand."
"Really?" I said. She was fond of tweaking her wrinkled flesh and remarking about how she'd become old like her mother, but her mother died at thirty-six when Miss Onalee was only ten. She had dreamed up the 'old mother' out of her imagination and the idea comforted her.
Miss Onalee had told me years before how she and her mother had roamed the country-side like a pair of gypsies looking for work and a dry bed. Meals were no problem to them she said because in those days almost every farm wife would gladly hand you a plate of food especially if you were traveling with a child.
She said her mother had a dream of being a palm reader and they were working their way up from Louisiana to the palm of Michigan (good omen she said reading palms in the center of a palm) when her mother took sick in a cold rain and died. 
It was 1909. Miss Onalee was sent from Pillar to Post until at age twelve she ended up back in West Tennessee at a home for orphans.

I got her settled and went back to my reading. She fell right to sleep. Jewell came to the doorway with a cup of coffee and a fried peach pie warm from the skillet and sparkling with sugar. Jewell is the best person. She never tires of giving, it seems. The world should have more like her. When I took my plate and cup back to the kitchen she was crying. She wiped her eyes, "Sorry," she said.

 I put my arms around her. "It's been hard I'm sure," I said. She shook her head, "No," she said, "It's not Miss Oney."
"I'd better get back in there," I said, "Do you want to tell me about it?" She shook her head, "No, not now," she answered.
I'd been back in the room about an hour when Miss Onalee opened her eyes. "What's wrong with Jewell?" she asked.

 I am always and forever stunned by Miss Onalee's intuition. She has such insight and it's getting stronger the closer she gets to death. It's as if she is gazing into a crystal ball and pulling out whatever is occurring elsewhere and in the near future.
"What do you mean?" I asked and regretted the patronizing question instantly. 

Her eyes mowed me down. 

"She's upset a little," I said. "I don't know over what."
"There's something wrong with all of them," Miss Onalee whispered. "They've all got something serious and they're hiding it from me. I'm old and sick but I could handle it. I've handled more troubles than they've ever seen." 

She folded the hem of the quilt over her hands then leaned her head my way, "You tell me when you find out, you hear?"
"I will," I promised knowing I had just lied.

That evening after Lottie and Judson got home, Lottie and I went out to the old well-shed and she told me that J.T. had been arrested for molesting his granddaughter. Shocked the daylights out of me. She and Judson had gone over to see Myrna and Rudd and Judson was determined to get J.T. released. "If it'd been serious," he'd said, "I wouldn't care if he rotted in jail, but for something like this?"
"He can't see the seriousness of it," Lottie said.
"What're you going to do?" I asked. She burst into tears and couldn't stop long enough to talk though I could tell she had something she wanted to say.
"We'd better go in," she said.
"No!" I shouted. "Dammit, tell me...whatever it is!"

She pulled back her hair and wiped her eyes. They are the deepest brown, like chocolate drops floating in a stream. Her complexion is shell pink and fragile as porcelain and remains virtually unwrinkled. All those years of hats and gloves, I thought, while I was chopping cotton and picking beans in my mother's old housedress.

Lottie's family was well off at least by our standards. She was one of the Peter-Pan-collared wool-skirted bunch and we really didn't get to know each other until after Mama died. I remember the day of Mama's funeral how Lottie stayed close to me and even put her arm around me at the graveside. We had barely spoken before that day.
I had a bunch of flowers in my hand to throw into the grave and I pulled one out and gave it to her. When we tossed them into the grave Miss Onalee and Miss Ilene, Lottie's mother, could not stifle their cries, no matter how they tried. 

Something was sealed between Lottie and me in that moment. Something strong and beautiful and true. We would be friends forever. A week later we made a blood pact by scratching our arms just above our wrists with a straight pin and mingling our blood.
"I wonder how many others there were," she said, "after me I mean and before Lee Ann."
"I assumed it had stopped with you," I said.
She let her hair fall. It was limp with oil and sweat. "Me too," she said softly, "Me too." Her backbone stiffened. She held her head up and with a new found determination said she was going to tell Judson about it and ask him to try and find out if there had been others. Tell the lawyers to investigate and find out for sure, and if there were, see if they would come forth.

Judson made the trips to Tiptonville by himself after that telling Lottie he'd take care of everything. One day he came in and announced proudly to Lottie, "We got him off." Lottie was stunned. "Did you tell the judge about me?" she asked. 
"Naw," Judson said, "Don't nobody know."

All of her confessing and hoping and praying had done no good. She had trusted him with the truth of her long-held secret, and he had given it no significance whatsoever. Judson had treated her requests as if they had been mere comments and any other incidents, as well as Lottie's, had been swept aside because of family pride. Judson had one agenda and that was to see that his brother was not jailed.
Lottie was furious and said to me, "I'm ready."
"Ready?" I questioned, not having any idea what she was referring to.
"To put on my Lester coat."

Legend had it that Lester, a derelict from the olden times, in the days before he came into money enough to open his juke joint, roamed the town in a coat made of feathers. It seems he started collecting feathers and sewing them onto his coat for warmth since he spent his nights sleeping under the stars. He became a fixture in town and people joked about how he always looked like he was about to fly away. The joke became shortened into the phrase "pulling a Lester" when somebody, child, man, woman or beast took off for a better place. Lottie and I had used it all our lives. The movie Thelma And Louise made us talk about "pulling a Lester" for months after we'd seen it.

We dreamed of living someplace where there was joy and excitement where we could laugh ourselves silly. We dreamed of movie stars and fancy restaurants, bright lights and no one telling us what we ought or ought not to do. It was our dream as youngsters to pack up one day and go. It was always simmering inside us, just below the surface.

We had even made serious plans one time to leave our husbands, but of course, never went through with them. "Life happens" as the ball cap says. She was happy enough with Jimmy she said but had a longing for more. She called it a dull ache just below the breastbone. Mine was a fire. I wanted to leave Cletus because I was plain bored with him.

He is sweet enough and a nice guy, but that I think is the problem. How do you leave a nice guy? How do you say you left because he was too good? It's like he's full of ice and if he could, he'd douse every fire I started.
Miss Onalee is much improved, but Lottie says they'll never tell her about J.T. "It'd break her heart if she knew," she said.

That old soul is very much on the mend. A miracle of sorts. Sits up some every day. Seems to want to talk about my mother each time I stop by. I think I've told her every story there is to tell. She keeps steering me on to the subject of my mother's old Bible and always says I should read it. "Promise me," she begs while picking at the sheets with her fingers. This, as we all know, is a sure sign that death is near. She says my mother's Bible is the truth. She thinks it's a different version than mine I think, but of course, it's not. They're both King James, red letter editions.

Yesterday she asked me again to promise to take Mama's Bible down from the shelf in my closet and read it, and then she said, "Tell Lottie..." Lottie looked at me, tears shining in her eyes and wrote down her grandmother's words.

My friendship with Lottie has been, come to think of it, the one true and dependable thing in my life. A comfort like a mother's love is a comfort; like a deep undercurrent of faith in the heart. She and I have developed a kind of third eye. I don't know what to call it, but it's like a spirit there apart from each of us yet within each of us. The first knowledge I had of this feeling happened the night before Mama's funeral.

I was looking in Mama's mirror and my eyes were red and swollen, but yet clear as two blue peeries. My face and light hair became illuminated by the glow of the moonlight shimmering through the window. A kind of knowing then settled in on me and I remember feeling as if Mama had just embraced me. I never told anyone about it except Lottie for fear of being thought strange.

Lottie came to visit me every day after school that first winter. It was the year we were in the fourth grade. She even pitched in and helped me with the chores, though she hardly knew how.

I had to laugh at her more than once for the way she churned butter, moving the dasher sideways back and forth for three or four minutes then peeking under the lid to see what she'd produced. I said, "No Silly, this way," and I dashed the thing up and down in a slow even rhythm and gave the handle to her. She laughed, took the dasher and started in, awkward and self-conscious at first but pretty soon she had the pace.
"How long?" she asked.
"Til the sun moves halfway across Coats's rise," I answered, "about an hour." I'll never forget the look on her. Big chocolate eyes floating out at me, chin dropped and then her giggle like the twitter of a bird.
"You made that up," she said.
"How does Miss Onalee churn?" I asked.
"She buys bags of this white creamy stuff and breaks an orange capsule into it and kneads it into butter."
"Well...I'll Swannie," I whispered shocked at the marvelous way the other half of the world lived.

The next day Lottie brought a glass churn to our place. It had a metal gear attached to the wooden dasher and a handle with which to turn the gear. The whole contraption screwed onto the top of the glass canister where you put the milk. Now we could make our butter in half the time and the clean-up was slick as you please.

She had found it in the back of Miss Onalee's cabinet and said she'd asked permission to bring it to me. I doubt if she did that. Lottie was never one to ask permission for anything. That's another reason I love her. She's taught me by her example and I've tried to mimic her ways. They don't always fit on me, but that's all right. She's seen so much more of the world than me.
There was a spell in 1949-50 when her family couldn't stay put. I don't know what they were running from or to, but they roamed as far north as Illinois. Lottie hated it so.

 They'd settle in for a month or two and Mr. Cline would hire on at a warehouse in the city and Miss Ilene would waitress at a cafe while Lottie was sent off to school with strangers and Miss Ilene was not the type to stay home so she could cook a hot meal. Lottie never knew what it was to run home to a big plate of bean soup and cornbread. She told me she cried every night they were out of Tennessee and that the best thing that happened was she got selected to wash up the dishes from the teacher's lunches and whatever was left over she could eat. The strangest foods too. Yellow broth with little green specks and something they called 'noodles.' It came in a package she said and you boiled it in water and ate it with store bought crackers.

Lottie has been small in stature her whole life and she said she must have looked like death warmed over because she was sent off with all the poor students to a room where they were shown movies about nutrition and given extra milk and more crackers. She said the milk was warm and the crackers stale and the food on the screen showing what not to eat looked better than what they showed you should eat.
The 'bad' food was usually black-eyed peas and cornbread or collards with ham-hocks so she said she'd munch on her cracker and dream of her grandmother's table piled high with fried okra and corn, butter beans and tomatoes. The 'good' food they were taught to eat was things like oranges and beef-steak. "How do you suppose those teachers thought we were suppose to grow oranges and beef-steak in a third-floor apartment in Chicago, Illinois?" she asked me.
I shrugged and hoped she'd go on telling me more of these worldly happenings. It was all so strange sounding. She said there was a boy in the seat next to her that called his thing a 'blister' and she fell for it when he asked if she'd like to see it. She thought he was wanting her to stick it open so it could run, but when she said, "Sure," trying to be helpful, he poked it out of an open button in the fly of his dungarees. She didn't know for a second what to do so she yelled, "I need a pin!" and the boy pushed it back inside his pants and moved to a seat two rows over from her.
See, that's what I mean about guts. She's little, but she doesn't ever seem to know it. Unlike me. I talk and think and plan, but I don't do anything. It's too easy for people like me to swallow hard and make do. Lottie's got courage. I'm hoping that by now some of it has rubbed off on me.

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Part of my trouble is the fake life we lead. We don't likhe mess of life, so we buy silk roses because they don't shed, artificial trees at Christmas are easier for the same reason and our fireplace logs are ceramic with an even flowing perfectly constant blue flame.

We've sold the truth of the things we've loved for convenience. We've traded the crackle and sparkle; the fresh clean scent and sweet aroma, for styrofoam and plastic. And Cletus doesn't care enough to hold a conversation on the subject. When I talk this way he walks out of the room.

I've been saving up money. I dream of walking into his room and telling him I need some money and watching his face drop when he hands me a ten dollar bill and I say, "No Cletus, what I need is ten thousand," and when he asks, "What on earth for?" I dream of saying "for starting my new life."
He's not hurting. He's got twice that much. I figure we could split it. He thinks I don't know since he's got only his name on the account. He thinks I've never seen a statement, thinks my mind can't grasp the concept, but he's wrong. I keep up with things and I know his pension check comes faithfully and is twice what he tells me it is.

I've managed to put a little aside out of the grocery allowance and the Christmas money for two years now and I've got close to two thousand dollars safely hidden. The stores around here have sidewalk sales every August. I stock up on dry goods the same as I do on groceries.

Lottie and I ride the train to Memphis at Christmas time and pretend to shop for Ruthie and Lucy and our Sunday school children and Miss Onalee and our husbands and Lottie's uncles and aunts and cousins and my brothers and their wives and their children.

Truth is we don't shop at all. We've pretty much already done that all year long. What we do is rent a cheap room and drink cheap wine and play cards and talk ourselves to death. We go to a cute little place and sing on Karaoke nights and we feel alive.

We've made some serious plans for leaving our dull lives. You can plan a lot when you're giddy. We have to wait 'til the time is right we say, but it gives us something to keep to ourselves and make inside jokes about. Thelma and Louise live! Lottie's wanting to take off as much as me. She has the same wanderlust I do and Jimmy, she says, spends more time with his computer than with her.

"He won't know I've gone, she says, until he runs out of clean underwear."
It's always the men who find those machines so fascinating, whether it's television or car engines or pinballs. It's all the same. Nowadays it's computers. All they need in the world is a little machine to carry them away into their Never, Neverland.

To tell the truth, I wonder if I'll ever be able to leave. I've always lived so close to home.
That's what gets me. I'm actually sitting here now on the same spot where my birthplace stood. The house is new but still narrow and stifling.

When Cletus and I married we moved in with Daddy and Pook and Sass. Actually, it was Cletus who moved in with us. Shoot, I'd never left.
Cletus was full of promise then, saying he was going to take me away from all this. He hired on with Mr. Stubblefield and did well enough farming for him that Mr. Stubblefield put him in charge of his mill business and ended up making Cletus a partner. That's when he made his good money.

Cletus pretended not to like his work, but when the mill closed and he was forced into early retirement all he could talk about was how it felt to lose a job. Cletus complains no matter what happens. It's just his way. No doubt he'll want me back when I've gone.

Cletus and I tore down the cat-slide house in 1960 and had Ralph McCumbria build this one on the same spot. It's comfortable enough and feels more like home than the old house ever did, but here lately it's not felt right to me. No joy. Again I'd say the reason being that it's not the real thing.
Oh, I don't know, it's all me I guess. I've always felt a longing I can't explain. Like there is something missing.

Here lately I've discovered books and that helps some. The library is the first place I think of going when I get the car. I can't tell you how many new things I've learned. I wonder if it is a college education that I long for. I sometimes think if I'd finished high school it would have kept me from rushing headlong into married life and I might have had enough courage to go off by myself somewhere and really live by my own rules. Whether or not I would have thrived is not known, but it makes up a dream vision for me to nibble on nowadays and smile a little to myself.

I wouldn't have known Ruthie I know, and that is sad, but I would have married I think and most likely had other children and just as most likely be sitting writing regrets in the moonlight in some other house I would call 'home.' And, life being what it is, I would still, most likely, feel like a puzzle with a missing piece.

In the beginning, I talked to Cletus about it. It took me about two years to be able to do that and Cletus said it was just a part of growing up and taking on new responsibilities. I was lonely then thinking about what he'd said and looking at my lot in life, nothing more than a cook and cleaning woman for four men.

Pook and Sass treated me like their mother instead of their equal. They'd run in and yell out some orders to me that they'd need supper early on such and such a day or they'd need their practice uniform cleaned for a practice game. Their main uniforms were cleaned professionally by coach Medling's brother who owned a laundry and Pook and Sass were always chiding me about the stains I couldn't scrub out. I spent all my time slaving away and feeling guilty.
Daddy compared my cooking with his memory of Mama's. My biscuits weren't as fluffy or cornbread as crisp and the chicken I fried and cobblers I fixed were never as juicy or as crisp as hers had been.

And then there was Cletus swaggering about with Daddy like he owned the place. I couldn't put a voice to my feelings. I plodded through each day like a zombie and had bad dreams of being trapped in a large house with many winding staircases and twists and turns and cubby-holes. The house was falling down around me and I was unable to crawl out of the debris. Sometimes there was somebody else caught in the house and my job was to pull them out and save them and I couldn't do it. I could never quite make out who it was that was trapped.
It's hard to believe, but one of my dearest treasures is a picture of the little cat-slide house I stole from Miss Onalee's big leather bound album when I was fourteen.

Lottie's family had a camera that shot black and white film and somebody had taken a picture of J.T. and Lottie when they were little. Lottie was sitting in the front yard grass of Miss Onalee and Mr. Judson's house and J.T. was lying alongside her propped up on his elbow and there on the hill in back of J.T.'s smiling face was my birthplace. I was sure it was the only picture alive, so I sneaked it out and stuck it up my sleeve.
I didn't even let Lottie know until years later. She said Miss Onalee had mentioned the missing picture and then forgotten it. I trimmed around J.T. and Lottie and today, believe it or not, it sits in a pretty gilded frame on my desk. I don't know, can't say really, why I love it so.
　
Lillian Jenkins has moved back home. She's bought the old Stubblefield house. The land was sold off years ago, but the house has remained in the family though empty and hollow as a well.

Children, through the years, have made forts in the rooms and camped out in tents on the porch tying flags of torn red and blue rags to the splotchy grey pillars.
They've played War Between the States games and made you sit up and take notice with their tinny Rebel yells. Weeds have grown through the fancy lattice work now and scattered their wild seeds about until the yards and lanes are obscured. But yet for some reason, Lillian Jenkins bought it.
We noticed scaffolding set up last week and we thought the Stubblefield nephews were getting it ready for salvage, but now that scaffolding is attached to the sides clear around the mansion and today it is holding workers who are sanding and painting and hammering, like shock treatment, life back into the old place.
Lottie ran into Lil'yen at Miss Kate's dress shop and talked to her. She told me that Lil'yen has the northern brogue now, and it was like talking to a stranger.
"She was quick to say she wanted to be called 'Lillian' properly - not 'Lil'yen' our old fashioned way," Lottie said. "And...she's moving here alone," she went on, "divorce settlement I'd guess."
I was stunned at the news. "Why would she come back here?" I asked.
Lottie shook her head, "Evidently home means more to you after you've lived away."
"But she, you know, her mother..." I stammered.
We knew, as did everyone else in the canyon, the kind of house her mother ended up running. We weren't blind. We saw the basket on the table outside her bedroom door filling with cash after a few of her 'counseling' sessions. We saw the type of dandy who came to see her in the early days, but none of us ever told what all we saw in the dump behind Lil'yen's mother's house. The empty whiskey bottles and used rubbers strewn among the bloody Kotex waiting to be burned.
Lottie and I didn't know what the rubbers were. We just knew there was a connection between those slimy things and the whiskey and the basket with the money and the men. It took good old Jimmy Ledford to explain it to us. We didn't believe him at first of course, but we took him at his word. Jimmy was our authority on things like whiskey and sex, and in those early childhood days and even with his rough home life, he didn't know too much. He told us the whiskey made the women bold enough to do 'it' and the 'it' was explained by saying the rubbers were used when the men peed inside the women. Well, after all, I guess that's not so far off.

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August 1992

A year's gone by since I last sat down to write. It's been a hard year. One of turmoil and trade-offs. That day when Cletus and Pewter came walking toward the house with Pewter's prize hound, Black Boy, striding along between them they had an announcement to make.

The Fulton Trade Days were coming and they had decided to take Pewter's camping trailer and spend the whole three days in the woods outside Fulton. The Crabtrees were going as well as the Overtons and the Futrells. There was to be a coon-hunt contest on the last night so they wouldn't be home until late Sunday.
They had decided to take Black Boy along and enter him in the contest and they were sure of winning, they said because Black Boy was known far and wide as the best treeing dog around. That three-year-old pup had the prettiest mouth, they said, of any they'd ever heard. They mimicked the dog by throwing back their heads and yowling and exaggerating their voices until they were nearly yodeling. Black Boy pranced around them, his slick black coat tossing streaks of sunlight. Both their faces were gleaming with smiles and they reminded me of children on Christmas morning.

When they won, Pewter said, he'd split the money with Cletus fifty-fifty because Cletus is the one who gave Black Boy to Pewter. Black Boy was one of seven pups that lived out of a litter of twelve that came out of Missus, the female Daddy had given to Cletus in 1979 for Cletus's forty-second birthday.
Daddy had treated Cletus as a son when we first married and had introduced him to the sport of coon hunting. It was a sport then anyway, with hunters gathering in a deep woods after dark and letting the dogs follow their noses to find the raccoons and on treeing the rascals, standing with their front paws upon the trunk of the tree and calling with what the hunters called the "prettiest music this side of heaven," and the real excitement coming when they'd shine a light in the eyes of the animal and then shoot him out of the tree. And sometimes they'd let the dogs have a tussle with one of the coons and brag and swat one another at whichever dog proved the most vicious.

Today it isn't like that. Today the animal is drug along in a wire cage just out of reach of the dogs and pulled up in the tree by a couple of men operating a pulley. The sport of the chase has been eliminated. Now it's how fast and accurate the hound and Black Boy they said was no doubt going to be the new champion.
Since Cletus would take the car to pull the camper and I would be at home for three days by myself I took the car and hurried uptown to the library for a new supply of books.

The thought of being alone in my home with no one making demands on my time or my mind was kindly appealing, to say the least. Nothing of any importance to do, but read and take my scheduled time at Miss Onalee's bedside.
With Miss Onalee so close to dying Lottie preferred to stay as close to home as possible so we weren't planning any wild trips of any kind. In fact, the whole of Cove Canyon had taken on the cloak of mourning. It was already as quiet in the middle of the afternoon as it was at midnight or daybreak.
The library too that day was silent as a fog with only one other car in the parking lot it shared with the Fielder Lake Banking Company.
Bynum House Fielder, the original, had once owned all the land for miles around the lake and it was the lake in the early days before truck farms were established, that drew the people. The lake had formed after the quake of 1830 had caused the mighty Mississippi to flow backwards the same as Reelfoot Lake had formed later in the same century. Only Fielder Lake wasn't nearly as big.
It was in harnessing the power of the lake to run cotton mills that brought fame and wealth to this part of Tennessee and the original Bynum House Fielder did the job of harnessing the waters, therefore, creating jobs. Truck farming that gave my family a living was merely a sideline.

I nodded to Miss Lila, the librarian, and went to a table and hung my sweater and purse on the back of a chair. She smiled at me. She was familiar with my routine. I took a wide variety of subjects to the table and, after glancing a few pages in each, picked out six to take home.

One I especially liked on female anatomy, which I had checked out before, I had found fascinating since going through the "change" myself.
Also, there was a chapter in that book which I wanted to read a second time. It was on fraternal twins, which is what I'd decided Pook and Sass must have been since they hardly looked anything alike anymore. Pook having gotten portly with a hairline rapidly receding while Sass still has a full head of hair and is as thin as a rail.

Turns out that was the only library book I cracked open the whole three days. I took great pleasure just sitting alone with my thoughts in the mornings and moving through the afternoons at my own pace. When I crawled into bed that first night I thanked God for the quiet house with no shout or drone from Cletus's television set finding its way into my room. It was a relief to just breathe deeply or sigh hard and not have it noticed and questioned.

In the middle of the second day, I took my place at Miss Onalee's side, but she was no longer speaking so I didn't have anything to write. I just watched her face as she slept. Her forehead was unfurrowed and her lips were in a contented smile. 

Lottie said she'd been like that the day before too and all that morning. They were feeding her teaspoons of broth each time she woke. And she hadn't had any since four that morning. It was the only thing they could get down her. It seemed to me they knew the time was near and they couldn't stand to let her go hungry.

I ate dinner with Jewell in Miss Onalee's kitchen because the rest that were going to eat had already done so. We had fresh tomatoes peeled and sliced, and they were blood red upon the ironstone plates alongside tender green onions and bright yellow corn cut off the cob and skillet fried. There was crisp fried okra, crowder peas, sweet hot-water cornbread and iced tea.
Jewell and I ate in silence piece after piece of the round sweet cornbread.
"Can I tell you something?" I asked.
"Sure, Ray Nell, of course, you can," she smiled and dipped more peas onto her plate.
I told her of the time Lottie came to my house and she asked for the plate of hot-water cornbread to be passed and I wouldn't let her have any because I thought she didn't know what it was and she'd make fun of us if she tried it. Jewell laughed along with me as I told it and things seemed almost right again. "Silly," I said, "how youngsters feel about such things?"
"Yes," she said, "but at the time, you probably thought Lottie was too fancy to like 'plain' cornbread as we used to call it."
"I know that was it," I said. "It being just meal and sugar and boiling water seemed like there wasn't much to it to serve to company."
"Yet there's nothing better is there?" she smiled as she picked up another piece all ridged with her finger marks like grill marks and just like Mama's used to be.
"Nothing in the world," I said and scooted my chair back from the table.

I took my time strolling home. I even lit up a cigarette because I knew I'd be going home to an empty house with no one there to notice and scold.
I did a lot of thinking on that walk of all the changes that had come about in Cove Canyon and Fielder Lake since Mama and Daddy had died. Daddy had seen a lot of the changes. It had only been ten years since his passing, but Mama died in 1947 and since then there had been many.

When I arrived at the house a feeling came over me of belonging to this place, of loving every quirky thing about it and of never wanting to leave it again. I felt in charge of myself and my life and knew I could do anything I wanted to do.
A surge of energy burst in upon me and I thought I'd take down the curtains and start washing them and clean out some closets and re-arranging the furniture. I felt like I wanted to do something productive that would give an outward appearance that I had changed. I started with the closet in my bedroom.

The first thing I took down off the shelf was Mama's old Bible. It didn't look as if it shouldn't be touched as if it was some holy thing to be kept hidden away and honored and, therefore, elevated to a place I could not touch. It looked real to me. And it looked neglected.

I lifted it from the box and laid it on the dining room table. It wasn't at all awesome. It was Mama's and I had such a strong desire to touch it, thumb its pages and let my eyes fall upon the same words hers had fallen on.

I took a section and let the pages flutter through my fingers like the wings of a delicate bird. Angel wings, I thought. I turned to First Corinthians, chapter thirteen, Mama's favorite: "Love is perfect, love is kind," I read, and with the words came such a sadness for all my years of fearing to ruin this book by reading it, when I knew in my heart that this moment was what my mother had always been hoping for. Just to touch its pages knowing this is where my mother's hand had rested, her finger slowly underlining the words, brought tears I couldn't hold back. I felt as if I'd never really read the words before.

I had asked Daddy years before he'd died if he'd ever read Mama's Bible or any Bible. One of those conversations you have whereas a grown-up you can ask things you'd always wondered about. He was a spiritual man, always misquoting some verse to prove a point, but "No," he told me, "the words never came through to me very well. It was your mama who was the reader in the family."

I hugged the book to my chest knowing it was truly mine now to read whenever I wanted to. I went to bed and slept soundly until I was awakened by the voice of my father calling to me sharply, as clear as if he'd been by my side, "Ray Nell, Ray Nell." I sat up startled. The house was still. Not a creak anywhere. Like the whole place had been dipped in paraffin. I looked at the door to Cletus's room and realized it was the feeling of being completely alone. My heart was racing. I looked at the time. It was two a.m.

I stepped out of bed and made my way to the kitchen. Starlight, like a gauzy veil, fell across Mama's bible. I paused by the table and laid my palm on the worn cover. How she had revered this old book. Daddy used to tell of how when the house had caught fire when I was around two months old and Mama had gathered me up in her arms and placed this Bible on my tiny lap and snuggled both me and the book in a tight wrapped blanket and fled. "There was nothing more precious to your mama," he'd said, "than her baby and her Bible."

I opened the book in the center and there was my pretty blue ribbon and that picture of Daddy and me at my eighth-grade graduation. I pulled the ribbon out and placed it around my neck. I stared at the photograph, then picked up the second half of the Bible and thumbed its pages.

The light had dimmed and as I thumbed the back pages, something odd caught my eye, like handwriting that was out of place. My heart leaped in my chest. Had Mama written a note? Was it a favorite prayer? I hurried to find it and then there it was. A paragraph at the top of one of the blank pages. Its petite curls and ques of grey lead begged reading. This was my mother's hand.

I could see her bending over carefully placing the letters upon the page. She had no doubt used the same lead pencil she had used to keep the notations about how much cotton she had picked or okra or strawberries. Suddenly I could see her there in the field trimming her pencil with a pocket knife and wetting the lead on her tongue to make her mark darken on the paper.

This writing, I knew, was far more serious and had been written here in this place for safe keeping. My heart was pounding. I picked up the Bible, my hands shaking, and carried it to the lamp beside the old brown chair. I clicked on the bulb. In a moment, I would be reading something my mother had written that most likely no one else had ever seen. I wet my forefinger and turned the tissue-thin pages.

The writing was so small it was almost obscured as if the writer had not wanted the words to overwhelm the page or perhaps to take up too much room. Was this to be her favorite verse? A profound thought? I leaned toward the light and read:





"It grieves me to write this. May God forgive me, but I cannot bear it alone any longer. 
The plaintive voice of my mother, like the call of a dove, came into my head. My little girls born healthy but not strong, Raebelle especially. She is the one my heart breaks for, for she will never know how much I love her. Miss Onalee says I'll be able to see my baby any time I want to, but I won't be able to hold her close and comfort her when she cries. That joy will be given to Ilene. Raymond says it's the only way and even the doctor Miss Onalee fetched says the little thing has a chance this way. We can't hardly make it the way it is and with two mouths to feed it would starve us out and her so puny, but still my baby...my baby. She is fragile as a teacup and will take more good doctoring than we can ever hope to pay for. Miss Onalee and Mr. Judson Surrey are good people and Ilene and Charlie Cline have been wanting a baby, but still...my heart breaks for Raebelle and her twin Ray Nell. May God forgive me this day of September 12, 1938."           Mary Nell Munroe. LOVING MOTHER