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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781565126909 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill |
| Publication date: | 01/03/1991 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 182 |
| Lexile: | 1120L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Hometown:
Raleigh, North Carolina, and New York, New YorkDate of Birth:
May 5, 1960Place of Birth:
Nash County, North CarolinaEducation:
Attended North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1978-1983Website:
http://www.kayegibbons.comRead an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
What passed between Lottie O'Cadhain and Charles Davies in their beginning
"WHEN MY MOTHER WAS A YOUNG GIRL SHE spent the pinks of summer evenings sitting on the banks of the Brownies Creek, where it flows into the Cumberland River. She always sat with a ball of worsted in her lap, knitting and dreaming of love coming to her.
The man in her one dream would ride up and surprise her on his horse, and then he would reach down and take the ball of worsted from her and toss it up into the air and shoot a hole through it. Then he would reach out over the horse's head and catch the yarn and hand it back to my mother, saying her beauty pierced such a great place in his heart. Then he would ride off. He never swooped her up and galloped off to a fine house in the Shenandoah Valley and he never hopped down off the horse sheerly to kiss her. He always left. She never let herself dream the story any other way. Even in her dreams my mother denied herself the impossible.
The man who finally wooed my mother wasn't a dream man, and he didn't find her knitting on a river bank. He found her at a Quaker wedding in 1917, which was a very bold place for her to be. Her mother, Bridget O'Cadhain, had taught her daughters that the doors of English churches were the gates of Hell and that terrible things happened to Catholics who went inside, like blindness and deafness or sheerly death. My mother went to the wedding anyway because she was fifteen and therefore a slave to risk.
So there my mother was at the little church, wishing her friends well and being noticed by a young man. He probably spotted her hair right away, which she had knotted and laced with lavender on the cart road, out of her mother's gaze. He introduced himself as Charles Davies and impressed her to the point that by that evening they had decided to court a bit on the sly.
The Davies were more or less hard-boiled Welsh Quakers who had come to America in the early 1800s. They stayed up in the North and tried to farm, but when they saw they weren't making anything of themselves they started trickling west and south, branch by branch, which has forever been the human tendency. During the Reconstruction after the Slave War, my father's particular branch drifted into Bell County, Kentucky, where everybody in the world was trailing in and yanking up a square of earth, and then my father was born in 1896.
My mother's family, however, had headed to Kentucky the minute they landed in from Galway, and they more or less looked at the valley and the mountains as theirs. They only held papers for a few acres, but still everything within sight seemed to belong to them. And then came flock after flock of Quakers and Methodists and Baptists and even a Lutheran bunch or two.
My mother's people quickly scratched and dug out a little hole and crawled in it and whispered day and night about how everybody in the world, with the exception of the O'Cadhain family and the pope, had never wanted them to have anything. They believed the new people coming pulling cartloads of children and furniture into their little edge of Bell County were merely the last in a long line of snatchers and grabbers. They were very tender about this.
My mother told me a million times that Ireland and the Irish people were special, and that the O'Cadhain family in particular was the most blessed of all because it had been imposed upon without cease since the dawn it sprung up in Galway. For centuries they had been in training to have nothing, so everything was more or less working perfectly according to God's plan.
My mother was not one to glorify in tribulation, and one day she asked herself a question.
If Ireland is a jewel and our family is favored, why are we in Bell County, Kentucky, watching scrawny crops wash down the sides of hills?
She decided to trust the question to her young man, Quaker though he was, who stood and waited for her in the dry creekbed every Sunday afternoon, always holding a spray of lavender. She asked about Ireland and favor and wasted crops, and he told her that Ireland had always overjudged its merits and that her father's scrawny crops washed down hills because he refused to terrace slopes.
Charles told me that if my father would stop sitting around drunk, waiting for God to reverse his notion of water flowing downhill, that our family could be worth at least a little something. He said anything could be had with work, which is what he happened to be morally and physically outfitted for. In school he had gone up as high as the multiplication tables and then dropped himself out of his studies to work. He said that as soon as he learned to walk he became familiar with the hoe and had been in love with work ever since. He said, though, that he also loved me. Everything he said sounded reasonable and true.
Bridget O'Cadhain was no fool. She knew that my mother had taken a sport and he was far from Catholic, but she preferred to let the idea fester while she kept a tighter than usual eye on my mother. Then early one morning Bridget came in from the yard with a fire of wood in her arms and began shoving the pieces of wood in the stove. She saved out the last piece though and turned about and trotted over to the breakfast table and had my mother splay out both hands palms down. She smacked her hands good with the stovewood and then trotted back over and pushed it into the fire. When my mother met her sport that afternoon she told him she'd spent all the previous day learning to use a hammer.
There was so much alcoholic misery in Bridget's life that you would think she'd have been thrilled to work in a Quaker here or Lutheran there to more or less water down this trait. My grandfather, Sheamus, drank fairly all day every day. He was something to behold. My mother woke up every morning to the sound of him yelling for one of his daughters to cook him an egg. He'd stand in the kitchen and shout at the ceiling, Come cook me a goddamn egg! One of the girls would rush in the kitchen and fry the egg. Then my mother's Uncle Bart would roll in and sit at the table. He was very famous in Bell County for sailing as a stowaway from Ireland and swearing incessantly on the Virgin that he consumed only hardtack and forty-two cups of coffee on his way across the ocean. My mother said also that this uncle had purely by accident crawled in the fireplace as a baby, and thus nobody enjoyed looking at him.
My grandfather would shout, Cook Bart a goddamn egg too! Both men would eat their eggs and take to smacking liquor and talking loud-mouthed. The daughters had a very difficult time keeping these men wetted down. And then Bridget would come in from the wood pile or poultry yard and see them and scream, Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Blessed Virgin, Mother of God! She would drive her husband and brother-in-law away from the table with her yardstick and then swing around and swat and sting the legs of whoever had cooked the eggs.
My mother told me once that her mother was the kind of woman who thought nothing of whipping other people's children. This has always impressed me as something a woman may long to do yet never do. Bridget, though, crossed this line fairly regularly. My mother also told me that her mother was more or less a display of curiosities. I asked her what she meant and then wished I hadn't.
She had very tiny little teeth, like little rodent teeth of some nature, and they were all squared off the same size, like they had been sawed off Zzzzt! all the way across. She trotted from spot to spot. She rarely simply walked. And she always wore black, folds and folds of black, summer and winter.
She refused to learn more than a spattering of English, and when we all sat at the table teaching each other grammar, we would invite our mother to sit down with us, but she would say she didn't need to learn. She didn't want to. Whatever English she picked up from daily living was very flat and twangy in a mountainy way. The only English thing she ever said that sounded like it was said in her true voice was Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Blessed Virgin, Mother of God. She would mix all this in with her Gaelic and chop the kitchen table with her yardstick when we couldn't understand. She had brought her family all the way from Galway to hop in the melting pot and then she refused to melt. This is how stubborn my mother was, and this is also more than likely what gave her the oompth to load everybody up and haul them across the ocean in lieu of starvation in Galway.
I can understand why my mother was perched on ready, hoping for a marriage proposal, which came in 1918. She made her life's commitment to Charles Davies at sixteen and agreed to leave Kentucky with him, bound as she still was to risk.
CHAPTER 2Lottie's first years of marriage in which she found a baby and cunningly arranged small satisfactions for herself and the child
"MY FATHER DECIDED HE AND HIS BRIDE WOULD move to North Carolina. I can see him sheerly breathless over the idea of moving himself and a young girl to a new part of the country, working six days a week from can-see to can't-see.
Work and toil may have been my father's bloodtraits but he counted overmuch in the idea that my mother should care as much about making something from nothing as he did. She promised to honor and cherish and obey and all the other, but she never saw the marriage as enrollment for torture. He didn't own her like a plow or a rake. If she wasn't prone to stay at home and let her mother tell her what to do, she certainly wasn't going to take field orders from a young man she had known for a year.
Once I asked my mother, Do you think you ever said or did anything in the creekbed, tarried and dallied or cooed, to the point he would believe he'd found a girl who'd knock herself out working on a farm?
No. Absolutely not.
I said, Then if you didn't promise to work beside him, why did he think you would pull as hard as he pulled?
Because I was a young girl and he knew I loved him, as much as a sixteen-year-old child can love a man. He had told about water flowing forever downhill and he'd told me my father was ignorant and lazy, not cursed. He knew I trusted him and would more than likely yearn for things to do in his favor. He also knew that I knew how to work because Pop drank like he did and left work to the women. He had ridden by our fields and seen me getting up fodder, and he was accustomed to the sight of me and all my sisters, the three who could work plus the three little ones, strewn out across afield like seeds.
Charles rolled all these ideas and sights of me together in his hands and opened them again and saw me there helpinghim break field boulders with a pickax, saying if we worked like this for the rest of our lives we might die thriving. But instead, when we got to the place in North Carolina I had to tell Charles outright that I had worked in Kentucky and now I wanted a rest. He had very short patience with this. This is certainly not what he had planned. I had thought that marrying him and leaving my school and my sisters would be as plain as spoken words, that I was saying without actually saying, I'm marrying you for love and rest.
I was so young and I already needed to be spelled from labor. Not only did I seek rest, I needed a little baby to help find the rest. In my home, I had always treated my mother's new babies like dolls. I had always taken the least baby to bed with me. Sleep was impossible without a baby in the crook of my arm. Sleep was denied me all night and in the mornings Charles urged me to help him cut down trees and coarse vines all day.
But even if I could've figured out how to get back home, I don't think I would've left. I'd made my choice, and when I was tempted to go back to Bell County, I seemed to hear across the woods and mountains my father screaming for his egg and my mother screaming at me for cooking it. So Idecided to stay with Charles and see what would happen to me, and until I understood that I had a hand in making whatever happened happen, I was a very sad young girl.
My father told her that working with him would take her mind off a baby, which was more or less like asking her to sing for her supper. I wouldn't have advised him to do this. During all the time he made her hold out waiting she became very indifferent to him, and in her thinking she began to go her own way. Finally, in 1920 she found her baby, and this was me. By then her affections for my father were all but spoiled.
She did, though, the following year try for another child, but then lost the little fellow within three weeks of the birthing. Thus I actually got to be the baby twice when this one born next to me died. My mother could then have no other babies due to feminine obstacles, but I was not a lonesome child. She was a grand companion. She loved to tell me about myself. I was apparently as good as pie and rarely cried.
And you had one twig of auburn hair. I sewed you a beautiful white cotton petticoat of many layers and a long white gown of piqué. You were never sick a day as a tiny baby although I told your father that your ears were too tender for the wind and thus you couldn't be taken out to the fields. When he believed your ears had had time to harden off, he said, What about now? And I said, No, not now. I told him you had difficulty breathing outdoors. As far as your father knew, you went from ear to eye to nose and throat troubles, and taking you out to a cotton field strapped to my chest would have been your kiss of death. He didn't like you very much from the start, and this is my fault all around. But you weren't liking him very much either. You cried whenever he picked you up. He had big hard hands.
I probably cried because I was accustomed to being held in a happy fashion, and the way I bunched up around my father didn't stop when I was out of his arms and then crawling and then walking. He put me off continuously. I remember one afternoon sitting on a rug, drawing pictures from out of a book and enjoying my mother chitter-chattering when he came in from work. When the door closed behind him, I thought, He's come home to ruin our day. I assumed this was his intention. This was my first original thought of my father.
He was only happy once a year, after a crop was in and sold and after he'd squeezed every bit of gristmill money he could from his customers. By the time I was six or seven, I linked September and dry maple leaves blowing across our yard with my father's only time of pleasure.
He'd sit at the supper table and say, Yes, this time-a-year all I'm thinking about is who all do I owe money to and who all and how much is owing me.
Then he'd take out his pocketbook and give my mother and me money and tell us that would be all the money we'd see for another year. But we knew better. My mother always managed to come up with more than her allowance, and she always managed to explain her doings nicely.
My mother loved fabric, and since my father would never have known the price difference between organdy or chintz or chiffon, she educated him as she saw fit. In September when he was so enthusiastic about life and the world and even his wife and child, my mother would take the money he gave us to town and buy something like a beautiful length of chintz and come home and school him.
Charles, the gingham was through the roof. Through the roof! So I did you a favor and bought this. I know it seems incredible that a simple cotton runs more than chintz. I could hardly believe it myself. But the looming mills, from what I understand, have had a hard time getting rid of chintz, it being so bold, and they've had to mark the bolts down to almost nothing. I'm not thrilled with it, but the gingham was high as a cat's back, and Betty's simply splitting out of her old clothes like a grasshopper. She had to have something to wear! I don't mind going about gaudy to save you money, and neither does she. We're both glad to do it.
He'd mumble and grumble about how his mother would never have worn anything so ugly, and then he'd go back out and work, work, work the rest of the year, waking at four and calling it morning, leaving home and coming home daily in the dark. When September came back around my mother and I would go out again and handle every bolt of fabric in town and come home with Venice lace passing for irregular eyelet and beaded English netting passing for outdated and unwanted millinery stock.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Cure for Dreams"
by .
Copyright © 1991 Kaye Gibbons.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
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