Mother's Day, 2013
This is a remembrance of a time on the eve of World War II, and a tribute to my
mother, who pushed and prodded five children through the hardest of times. She did it with love, and was reasonably satisfied with her
efforts. As she said to me not long before she died, “At least none of you was
ever in jail.”
Three of us survive and I’m happy to say, we are still at
large.
“White Petunias” was published in the RED DIRT BOOK FESTIVAL ANTHOLOGY, OKLAHOMA CHARACTER, Winter 2009.
WHITE PETUNIAS
By Pat Browning
In the
gloaming … my mother sang in harmony with remembered voices … oh, my
darling ...
In that long blue shadow left by the retreating day a bird fusses in
the Bradford pear tree. Leaves flutter. The
neighbor’s cat drops down to a ledge on the fence that separates our back
yards.
Shifting
to a more comfortable position on the chaise lounge I let my gaze settle on a
red clay pot filled with white petunias. They gleam in the fading light and the
years fall away.
Summer,
a rural community in Hughes
County, before the big
war … a real place, a pause in time, with some names changed for the privacy of
the living and the dead.
It
was a Sunday night ritual, girls marching self-consciously into the rickety
little crossroads church, boys watching from a stand of hickory trees across
the road. Shadows hid their sunburned faces. Their white shirts gleamed, open
at the throat, sleeves turned back at the wrists. Here and there a cigarette
glowed.
Outside,
muffled voices and laughter mingled with the creak of wagon wheels and the soft
snuffling of horses. The smell of dust and dung, fresh hay and old leather hung
on the air.
Inside, the
crowded pews were fragrant with shoe polish, starched cotton and talcum powder.
Cardboard hand fans whispered to Brother Henry’s hypnotic cadences as he herded
us on a long trip through several books of the Bible. His breath came in long
bursts when he finally emerged from a Hell peopled with murderers,
whoremongers, idolaters and liars.
My sister
Carolyn gave me the elbow and I looked around. Orvie, the boy of my occasional
dreams, peered through a side window, nose pressed to the screen, hands cupping
his soulful blue eyes. It was a sure sign that he was working up nerve to walk
me home after church. I gave him the full benefit of my classic profile.
The pianist
struck a thunderous chord. A baby squalled. Someone dropped a songbook as we
stood to sing. I gave silent thanks for the close of the sermon and a chance to
let a little air get at my sweaty limbs. Squall. Cough.
“Amazing
grace!” Brother Henry shouted. “How sweet the sound!”
That was the
cue for the saved to line up onstage in front of the pulpit. The preacher never
closed a service without lining up the saved to shame the sinners. A gaunt and
faded old woman known as Aunt Perlie led the reluctant shuffle toward the
stage. Her dress had stuck to her bottom and she tugged at it as she moved
forward.
I shuffled
along with the others, mainly because my mother would not want me to stay in my
seat. I knew that for a fact. God, I could bargain with. Mother had certain
expectations. Assembled, we stared down at the miserable few still stuck to the
pews.
“Rock of Ages!”
the preacher shouted. “If you want our prayers, raise your hands now. Every
head bowed, every eye closed … God bless you, brother … God bless you, sister …
God bless you ...” We were dismissed with an “Amen!” that echoed and shook the
rafters.
Carolyn and I
had barely cleared the front steps of the church when Orvie came alongside,
slipped his hand under my elbow and said, “Walk you home?”
I might have
fainted except for his firm grip on my arm and the bracing smell of his
clothes—starched cotton, line-dried in fresh air, dampened and ironed. And so
we started off, walking through moonlight and shadow, past the graveyard, here
and there a darkened house or barn, with Carolyn tagging along behind.
We made the
kind of useless talk only 12-year-olds could make. If
Japan invaded
China,
if bombs fell on
London, if someone packed up
and moved to
California,
it had nothing to do with us. Our world was a dirt road in the moonlight.
After a while a
familiar pasture came into view and I could see my own house just ahead. We
stopped there in the middle of the road. Orvie made a move to kiss me and
missed my face completely. Then he wheeled around and loped off back the way we
had come.
Carolyn and I crossed the big grassy yard
at a half-run, slowing down as we approached the front porch where my father
dozed in a rocking chair. He opened his eyes, closed them again. No lights
burned in the living room or bedroom. The little ones—Beth, Frankie, Tommy—were
down for the night.
I stepped onto the porch, and through the
screen door I saw my mother. She stood at the ironing board in the kitchen,
lifting a flat iron from the top of the wood stove, testing it with her
fingertip, and I heard her singing.
***
Memories come
in bits and pieces.
We were seven
people living in a three-room house, sleeping two or three to a bed. Sometimes
after supper we lay on pallets in the front yard, breathing the cool, green
smell of grass while Daddy talked about the stars in the sky, the places he had
been, the sights he had seen. Some days we picked dewberries or smashed hickory
nuts with a rock, digging out the meats with a hairpin. On Sundays we polished
our black patent leather shoes with biscuits.
In those hard
times Mother lived on hopes and dreams and found a way to make most of them
come true. Her father was an old-time fiddler who played for dances almost
until the day he died. She and her sisters sang like angels. Surely, she
reasoned, her children had inherited musical talent.
She went into
Holdenville and bought a Hallett-Davis spinet for $300, to be paid in
installments, plus $10 for the bench. Spinets were new, a stretch for the
budget but just right for a small living room. When I could ripple through the
scales with relative ease I was assigned the thankless task of teaching Tommy
to play the piano, either by persuasion or coercion.
Freckle-faced,
tow-headed Tommy spent his days outside in the dirt and heat, chasing chickens,
climbing trees, running up and down the road, sweating like a pig. If he could
be coaxed inside he climbed onto the piano bench and scooted his bony little
bottom next to mine, smelling to high heaven, kicking at the bench with his
dirty little feet, plinking the piano keys with his grimy little fingers. As it
turned out, neither of us had a lick of musical talent.
Too
soon, those years passed into the deepest recesses of memory, taking everything
with them: My parents and the old house, the barn, the smokehouse, the
outhouse, even the ruts in the road. Carolyn went back not long ago and found
nothing left to suggest that we were ever there. We might as well have dreamed
it, and perhaps we did.
Only
a piano proves otherwise. The little Hallett-Davis spinet survived. It went
down the family tree to Beth, who hauled it with her through several states,
and eventually deposited it with her daughter in Alaska. It’s an heirloom, an artifact from
the old days, tangible proof that we didn’t dream them after all.
Like Emily in
Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” I sometimes wish to go back again, just for
a day, any ordinary summer day with the sun shining and the wind blowing and
puffs of white cloud drifting across a blazing blue sky. I might nab a piece of
cold fried chicken and spend the afternoon sitting under a pear tree, reading
A
Tale of Two Cities.
It wouldn’t
work, even if it were possible. Like Emily, I would be heartbroken by the
carelessness of love, the transience of youth. There’s an invisible line
between past and present. Memory is the only bridge where we can cross in
safety.
The world seems
to pause before a cataclysmic event, as if gathering itself for what is to
come. So it was that summer, in that small rural community, before the boys in
their Sunday clothes scattered to fight a global war in places they had never
heard of.
The Sunday
nights are gone, and everything with them, the church, the friends and
neighbors, even the hickory trees. All gone, except for that pause in time and
the boys in the shadows, where white shirts gleam and laughter lingers, brought
back to me now in the twilight of a summer day, by a pot of white petunias.
© Pat Browning 2009
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