Roxanna Slade Part 19

The first time I confided my fear to Muddie, she stopped at her kitchen sink, thought a long moment, then turned and said "This child is fine, it's bound to be a girl, you'll have no trouble whatsoever. Anna, I know what I'm talking about." As it turned out she did.

I went into labor in September '39.

By then hospitals were more trustworthy in their cleanliness. At least I was hearing of fewer dead mothers. Dr. Rogers had got too old to be relied on, so Palmer drove me and Muddie to the clinic in Henderson in good safe time. August, who by then was nearly seventeen, stayed back home with Leela.

Early on the morning of September 15th with no more than forty-five minutes of pain, I

gave birth to a healthy daughter.

Muddie was proved right. Even before I could check with Palmer, I looked up to Muddie and said "We've named her Dinah after you--Dinah Dane Slade." We had never made any such decision. I did it on the happy spur of the moment, but Palmer never once complained.

And Muddie laughed then for the first time since Father died and said "Oh darlings, I was praying for that." Who she hugged was Palmer. She and I both knew that the Hebrew Dinah was an unhappy girl in the book of Genesis, but Muddie had seemed to thrive with the name, so we had slim fears.

I honestly think that Dinah Slade kept my mother alive for the next three years--Dinah growing up lovely and laughing as she did, that plus the sizable fact of Leela's long-delayed but sensible marriage in '41 and the birth of Leela's son Wilton in '42. Once Muddie had overseen that last birth to any of her children, she died on the front porch sitting in her rocker on a mild summer day, no sign of struggle, an open book untroubled in her lap. Her long kidney trouble was not the cause, though no doctor ever quite told us what was--a painless stroke or her heart simply stopped.

I was so busy, and Muddie had always been such a cool soul, that I didn't feel too sad-- not at once. It took several months for the serious loss to bite into me. I guess that was owing to baby-busyness. It had been so long since August was born that I'd lost a few skills and had to relearn them. But there was another thing at work. Ever since September of '39 when Hitler started tormenting Europe, even Americans as far off as we were could understand that we'd be at war soon.

I deeply dreaded that Palmer would have to go and bear arms. He said a few things that made me think he wanted to serve especially in the Navy. But two more uneasy years pa.s.sed. And by the time Pearl Harbor was bombed and FDR cranked up the draft, Palmer at forty-three was just too old, not to speak of being deaf. What was clear was that, a.s.suming the war didn't end unexpectedly, August would go in a few weeks or months.

He was nineteen and eager. But strange as it may sound, I didn't dread his going so much. He'd been such a lucky and healthy child, I had no

reason to doubt he'd survive. And as Palmer kept saying, the boy would learn much more in service than we could buy for him at any university.

Like most every American girl, I'd enjoyed the First War. I was seventeen and eighteen, my elder brother went but never left America. And even our crossroads took on new life with War Bond drives and the fear of Germans. There was a settlement of German farmers--famous cantaloupe growers--way out in the county, and some townspeople were crazy enough to think those hard-working people were spies for the Kaiser. Spies on what, n.o.body ever said--pine trees and crows? The nearest Army base was sixty miles off.

But with the Second War from the very first week, President Roosevelt made us all feel we were actual soldiers even in our own kitchens. There were rationing books for clothing, shoes, beef, coffee, sugar and gasoline that housewives had to manage. Women were urged to can their homegrown food and I followed suit. There were national drives underway at all times to save sc.r.a.p metal, sc.r.a.p paper, tincans, tinfoil, even bacon grease--you name it; we saved it.

We were all in cahoots to wipe Adolf Hitler's name from the Earth. This country never felt more united and aimed one way in my life till then, and that meant the air had good-willed excitement in it such as n.o.body since has ever known. Even when caring for Dinah kept me from leaving the premises most days and nights, I felt like part of a righteous crusade for as long as I could stand it.

By the sweltering summer of '42, August had left for infantry training in deepest Georgia. And Palmer was spending more time than ever on his various war jobs. Farming was important to the effort of course, especially growing extra cotton and tobacco; and timber was urgent in many new ways. Palmer was also a member of the county draft board and had to meet several nights each week to hear the appeals from various boys to stay at home with a widowed mother or to claim that hay fever or mildly flat feet exempted them from service. So with my son gone and my husband scarce, more and more I was by myself with no

one but Dinah. And while she was almost as good at age three as she'd been as an infant, she was still a moment-by-moment concern.

In fact her being a girl had made more difference to my mind and my feelings than I could have guessed. I'd be bathing her gently in the morning and find myself dwelling more and more on the future I thought I could foresee plainly for her, years from now --a life like mine or at most like Leela's. Till then I wouldn't have dared to think, not to mention tell the public, that I'd got any less from the world than I needed. And of course I never thought to ask any man if he was steadily satisfied with his lot in the world.

I'd never have dared to tell even Leela that Dinah's perfect but delicate body, enfolded and parted in all the normal ways, was any less than an adequate dwelling for the mind and soul she'd need in the world that would come hurtling at her once this slaughter was ended--once she'd be faced with choosing a mate, maybe one from a whole generation of American boys who had killed and maimed other men and occasional women and children because they were blond or had the black tip-tilted eyes of the j.a.panese.

When such thoughts struck me, I'd even pull back and tell myself they were foolishness. I'd had a blessed life. I still think I have despite a matter I'm soon to describe. And my body, with all its normal female woes in the waterworks department, was hardly more difficult to dwell in and use than Palmer's with his bad ears and an agonizing prostate.

By fall, an endless lovely fall, I was finding myself in tears too frequently. I was napping as often as Dinah would nap and rising exhausted and pale in the mirror. I'd fallen behind in plans to can every last garden vegetable, and Palmer had actually mentioned noticing that I seemed sad. Could I please tell him why?

Had he let me down someway? Was I pining for Augustus? Maybe this was the famous "baby blues" he'd heard about?

I burst into tears and said I missed Muddie which was hardly the truth, just an alibi. I hadn't begun to let myself see that the low spells I'd had ever since childhood were deepening now into one downward trek.

When he'd cradled my head and dried my

eyes, Palmer said for the first time in our married years that I might do well to take Dinah with me and spend a few days with his mother by the river. Miss Olivia was a year short of eighty by then. She'd scarcely lost a hair or a tooth since I entered the family. And while she and I would never be close, we'd buried our hatchets years ago and could manage civility when in close quarters. Palmer understood that or would never have made the suggestion of a visit.

And to my surprise I heard myself tell him "That may be a good idea." The fact that the idea failed to turn out well--oh far from it--had nothing to do with Miss Olivia's and my relations. Even now five decades later, the thing that happened seems nothing less than an act of G.o.d or idle chance. I still wish I knew which. I'd live to ask myself a thousand times in the ensuing years what wrong I'd done to deserve such a scourging. That one entirely unanswerable question was a heavy piece of what drove me crazy, but I still have no satisfactory answer and never expect to.

I suspect it was pure coincidence that again it was early October before we made the plans and Palmer drove us up. I left my own house in good order. Palmer would take his meals with Leela and Clarence, her husband. Their son, young Wilton, was three months old. But Leela had good help in the kitchen, so I didn't feel I was leaving my husband to a diet of cold canned goods. I likewise can't recall an instant's worry that Palmer would seek other company than mine in a few days of absence. That problem was surely buried way behind us. What wasn't safely out of the way was my scorched mind.

Here lately I've heard and read a good deal about depression and mania. It's as common on TV as syphilis or AIDS, though you catch those plagues apparently from love or love's various imitations. Who do you get depression from or the wild excitement of mania? Doctors and experts can talk forever, but no one's yet explained to me where strictly mental h.e.l.l comes from.

I'm led to believe that both of those nightmares have a physical cause as real as a virus. They begin with some degree of chemical confusion that's tripped by an outside event or by the

built-in nature of your cells. Some flaw in your fabric is sent downward to you by your parents in the moment that you're conceived or by your unknown ancestors. Either way h.e.l.l comes on by slow degrees or occasionally fast.

I've started many a spring day in good strong spirits. And then at, say, noon I've paused to look out a clean window at hyacinths blooming in the sun and songbirds nesting. I'll know and even say to myself Count your blessings, Roxanna. But then I've felt a dark wind from the back of my skull press my eyes shut in under five seconds for no known cause. That wind can blow for a quick three minutes or for every instant of more than four years.

And what torments my mind to this day, though I've been spared now for a good long while, is Why? And for what? Though I'm no deep thinker and have never been a self-respecting Christian so far as church goes, I'm stuck with the faith that deeds have results, that no hard pain is entirely meaningless.

I've said it's a belief not an algebra problem, but the faith still grips me. I can't believe we're chemical recipes that some cook can ruin with the slightest swerve at the mixing bowl. Somebody or some thing--ourselves, our parents or mates or children or strangers or G.o.d--trips the dreadful switch. And if, as people used to believe at the time I was undergoing my ordeal, we either bring that suffering on ourselves in ignorance or laziness or the need to be noticed or G.o.d sends it on us in punishment, then the pain is equal whatever the cause. Or so I found.

Notice the fact that children mostly don't get it till they're in their teenaged years, not unless they lunge into drugs and other bodies prematurely. It can't afflict innocence apparently, or it chooses not to. That last possibility--a punis.h.i.+ng G.o.d, a fatherly bookkeeper with a crus.h.i.+ng hand--was what I believed had me in his claws. And I was very far from alone in knowing that. In fact if I could only have seen my fellow sufferers, I'd have understood I was one of a great crowd across the whole Earth of the living d.a.m.ned as I'd still be today if the hand hadn't lifted. Or been thrown off. I've never told a soul till now, but I may have finally thrown it off by a choice of my own.

That October day in 1942, as I saw the Slade place rise into sight, I honestly thought a change would help me. Miss Olivia would give me some relief with Dinah's needs. I'd eat the good cooking she'd always served. I'd get some exercise that consisted of more than lifting or bathing a three-year-old. I could walk up the road which was still unpaved and almost as deserted as ever, and I could strike a little way into the woods on the narrow deer paths and let myself see a world of things beyond the requirements of one girl child and the family propped around her.

By then in the forties, a few youngish women were wearing slacks for country living and Palmer had suddenly bought me a pair on a business trip to Suffolk. He'd often bought me clothes through the years--just something he'd see in a window and ask for, knowing my size. But when he'd showed me the navy blue slacks he got for me that very summer, I'd hesitated to wear them outdoors. He'd teased me mercilessly for my shyness and claimed I was aging way too soon. So mostly to please him and surprise Miss Olivia, I wore them publicly for the first time to ride to the river.

And Miss Olivia approved on sight.

She'd seen us coming and was already down the steps trotting toward us when we opened the doors. Dinah had always loved her grandmother almost too much. Sundays, whenever we'd drive up for supper, we'd need to wait till Dinah was napping and take her out to the car asleep; or she'd cry inconsolably at parting from her grandmother.

Now they ran to meet one another. And old as she was, Miss Olivia leaned and scooped up Dinah like a light load of towels. By the time I'd reached them, they both were laughing. And Miss Olivia said "I like the britches, Anna. You look like a sport."

For that one moment my mind and heart lifted. I thought I might get through this present hard patch with little more trouble.

That hope survived through the next two days. My forty-second birthday and the twenty-second anniversary of Larkin's death had pa.s.sed the previous week, so we had no special attention to pay to those mileposts. Miss Olivia, completely on her own without help,

had mounted a ladder and painted the kitchen and dining room a pale lemon color that cheered the place. And with Coy too crazy to go on working, she'd found a treasure that was truly beyond price, a new young cook named Mally Shearin who had the kind of bone-deep sweetness that nothing explains but a saintly grace.

Mally's face and frame were as handsome as her nature, and her skin was the finest I've ever encountered--pure and unseamed as a length of the sheerest pale beige cambric. She might have been any age from the upper teens to the early thirties.

When Miss Olivia introduced us, she smiled at Mally and said to me "Would you ever guess this was Coy's grandchild?"

I had to say No, not this young woman as fine as a doe out of poor old Coy's bent crushed-down bones.

But so she was, though the first thing Mally said was "I barely remember Mama Coy." I've mentioned that Coy lost her mind not long after helping me bear August, and she'd died soon after.

Miss Olivia said "You missed an education --Coy taught us a lot. Didn't she, Anna?"

I couldn't imagine what I'd learned from Coy, but I said "Sure did."

That was on a Sat.u.r.day morning. The plan had been that we'd stay six days, then let Palmer know if we meant to stay longer. Both houses had telephones by then. And Palmer had said that, at the least sign of friction with his mother or of me feeling worse, I should just say the word and he'd fetch me at once and take me to Durham for a thorough checkup at Duke Hospital. He didn't allude to doctors as a threat to keep me at his mother's, but in fact Palmer knew I dreaded doctors worse than death. So I took great pains to make those days go smoothly.

So did Miss Olivia and Dinah. Dinah slept with her grandmother, spent almost all of each day with her and barely leaned on me for anything. I'd brought a stack of magazines and the book of Gone With the Wind. I was the only live woman in the United States who still hadn't read it, though I'd seen the movie twice with Leela who thought it surpa.s.sed all human entertainment. I've mentioned that Leela read more than me in our

early lives. But in recent years as life had grown calmer, I'd read more and more. It was mostly decent novels, occasional trash and as much about North Carolina history as I could find in the county library. I never ceased to be amazed and troubled by realizing how near the distant past was to me when to others it seemed like eons ago.

For instance Thomas Jefferson died only ninety-four years before I was born, the span of two not-very-long lifetimes; and he was talked about in school like somebody far off as Charlemagne. Yet my grandfather Dane was reared near Charlottesville, Virginia. He always said that, in his boyhood, he'd seen Mr. Jefferson ride his horse into town with streaks of auburn still in his hair. And Grandfather Dane knew me in my cradle.

Stranger still, people seldom mentioned the Civil War when I was young, though I'd been born only thirty-five years after General Lee's surrender which occurred not a hundred miles from my birthplace. Six hundred thousand men died in that war, a fact I still can barely believe. I heard a man explain on TV last week how, proportionally speaking, that would be the equivalent of killing off ten million boys today which is a good deal more than the whole population of New York City.

Even more terribly, slavery hadn't ended, not formally till thirty-five years before my birth. Former slaves were all around me in my early life. Some were still living in the 1940's, every one of them pleasant as your favorite old cousin. Yet I never heard one single person, white or black, allude to the awful fact of their bondage which was still in many ways unrelieved. Slavery and its leavings were like a slow dream too hard to recall much less dwell on but deep in us still. I always suspected that everybody I knew, of whatever color, had the dream of slavery every night of their lives. Either armed black men were coming to kill you, or white maddogs were tearing black children to ragged bits. But n.o.body dared to mention the fact.

We just convinced ourselves that local black people had all the blessings we took for granted--decent schooling, enough money--and any time they let us down (by politely declining to work on Sunday, say), we told ourselves we couldn't comprehend such

ingrat.i.tude. Very little of that has changed an iota. Even to this day an honest person will have to admit that slavery's still with us and more vicious than rabies even here at the end of the twentieth century.

So while Miss Olivia and Dinah spent their days together, I'd sit on the porch and read about Scarlett O'Hara and her grit and gall. Then every afternoon when the others were napping, I'd walk up the road as I'd intended and into the woods (the Slades had long since sold off their horses). The leaves had only just started to turn, and the foliage and briars hadn't yet thinned themselves. The days were almost too warm for my slacks. But I wore them anyhow and felt a small but actual pleasure in getting to practice with n.o.body watching, a way to wear them with the confidence they called for.

In saying that much I'm sure that never for one quick instant did I want to be a man. I'd had enough time to see how men's lives were at least as full of trouble as women's and in many cases were much shallower rooted. No, what I liked about wearing slacks was the absolute difference from female styles. I'd enjoyed the women's clothes of my youth without quite going as far as Leela.

In recent years watching English TV, I've realized that what we wore was a country version of Edwardian style--long dresses, big hats--and we did look good for our part of the world. But the coming of pants in the 1940's was a new brand of leeway, all the odder because pants actually concealed your legs which dresses hadn't done for years.

Far better than any novelty clothes, my mind when I was on those walks seemed all but ready to clear itself. I was pretty well convinced that my blues were owing to Muddie's death, to August being drafted and the generally desperate news of the world. Everybody with eyes and ears knew of the awful heat of the fighting in Europe and the South Pacific. But n.o.body I knew had anything like a clear idea of the merciless torment underway for children abroad plus millions of old people, Jews, Gypsies and a.s.sorted other tribes of folk.

Anybody who read a daily paper had known for years that Adolf Hitler despised everybody who was not his brand of human whatever that was. But the

cattle cars were his darkest secret from Americans on the home front at least. Word of them came in newsreels and magazines as ghastly shocks to people like me within a few days of the n.a.z.i surrender in the spring of '45.

Though Gypsies and Jews were scarce in the South of my early life, I'd still had glimpses of their faces and lives. Gypsies were the strangest people we saw in our black-and-white world. They'd arrive in a line of old patched-up cars with no warning in even the smallest towns once or twice a year. They'd wear peculiar heavy clothes, knock at your back door, gaze at you with black hawk-eyes, then offer to sharpen your knives and scissors. And they sometimes had tough ragged dwarf horses or one of their battered cars for sale. Most people declined their services and used them only to scare bad children-- The Gypsies will steal you if you don't behave--though n.o.body ever heard of a local child disappearing.

Jews in our part of North Carolina were almost as rare but were very hardworking, stationary, religious, civic-minded and kept very much to themselves in the evenings and on their Sabbath day. So there seemed to be very little feeling against them except in the usual starved-out fringe of pitiful Scotch-Irish white men who joined ugly clubs like the Ku Klux Klan.

I've mentioned that Father sold his business to a Mr. Pizer whose family had come from Poland years back. His daughter and two sons were strikingly handsome with their dark hair and eyes. The high school absorbed them with no sparks or fire, not that I ever saw. So I was spared in those quarters at least by never hearing people speak hatefully of any variety of human being except black people. And by the time August entered the Army, I was having what felt like night-long dreams of being a crippled old Jewish woman with numerous children entrusted to her. In her ruined body I was trying to flee from swarms of Germans and lead my starving children to safety through snow or dark water--savage nature, pitiless as wolverines.

--All that much then to say why, despite its entertainments, the Second War was harder on the minds of people who stayed at home than some other wars. It may also half explain why I'd just a.s.sumed the war would keep me low till my son

was home again and Hitler was wiped from the face of the planet with his monstrous henchmen. Nonetheless on my first afternoon walks out from the Slade place, I told myself that the sight of nature in mid October--preparing both to die and revive before my eyes--was a sign for me that I had valuable work left to do and the power to do it. For eighteen years still to come at least, I must raise a strong and open-handed daughter. We'd raised such a son. And I must certainly ease whatever years or decades remained to my big-handed baffled well-meaning husband who had now retreated into silence and distance.

It was on the Wednesday after reaching the Slade place that I tripped a downpour which all but swamped me. I was walking farther than I'd ever walked on this old road. I was feeling as if I'd truly rounded some final bend onto, not a new world but a washed spruced version of the world I'd known. It knew my name and my modest talents. It wanted me back at full strength.

Five days ago I'd almost begged my husband to take me to Durham and let doctors strap me down to a bed and give me that new electrical shock which might wipe out the piece of my memory that was weighing me down or else burn out my mind entirely. Now as the fall air parted like water to let me forge on up the blank road, I knew I'd live for a long time to come.

That far I was right. It was five decades ago, but I'm seeing it still as sharp as it was the moment it struck me. What happened was, I rounded a wide bend. And after an hour of seeing no form of life but birds, I was faced with somebody standing in my path in the midst of the road. At first I thought it was a left-over tramp. During the long Depression years, even the sticks saw a great many tramps.

They were always men of various ages from twelve to ancient. They were generally white, surprisingly clean and they all were hungry. They'd knock on your back door, ask for food and I could never refuse them. But since they often looked woolly as bears, I'd say "You walk to the back of the yard where I can see you out of the window. I'll put you a plate on the steps right here and lock the door. Then you come get it." I'd always apologize for being scared of them. They'd mostly

say they understood, even the ones with faces keen as any straight razor.

But this one today in the midst of the road had raven tresses of l.u.s.trous hair halfway to the waist. A few old white men wore their hair shoulder-length in those years, but hair like this was unheard of. I stopped in my tracks and thought of turning back but then realized the man was a woman and maybe a young one. What I'd registered as long dark trousers was a close-cut dress that raked the dust, and the cotton work s.h.i.+rt was loose as a shroud. The face that was set in that abundant hair had the severe cutting look of an Indian --high broad cheekbones and a long roman nose. The skin that I'd first thought was sunburned mahogany was clean and unlined and naturally dark. I spoke up finally. "Splendid day."

At first the woman seemed to hear no sound at all. Her black eyes went on consuming my face. Then her right hand came up, touching her lips as if to part them. She said "Splendid for you." She laughed a dry burst, then lost control and hacked away at the pit of her chest for a painful minute.

At once I thought Tuberculosis. It was common then as hives. All my life I'd heard such laughs as a sign of death, more nearly a cough or a dull little chop like a hatchet on hard wood.