Clear Springs Read Free Page B

supposedly comes from her grandfather, “Jimmo” Lee, who had red hair and an Irish or Scottish burr in his voice. (Nobody remembers whether he was Irish or Scottish, but about half of the settlers were Scots-Irish, Protestants who came to America long before the Great Famine.) My mother uses idioms that are dying out with her generation, right along with the small family farms of America. Her way of talking is the most familiar thing I know, except maybe for the contours and textures of this land. Mama’s language comes from the borderlands of England and Scotland and from Ireland, with some other English dialects thrown in, and it is mingled with African-American speech patterns acquired along the way. It is much like Mark Twain’s language in
Huckleberry Finn
. It’s spoken, with variations, in a band of the upper South stretching from the mid-Atlantic states across the Appalachians to the Ozarks. In the Jackson Purchase, this old dialect rested in the farmlands and changed with the weather and the crops and the vicissitudes of history as news filtered in from other places. Today there’s a good chance you won’t hear many people under sixty say, “If that don’t beat a hen a-rootin’.” It’s an expression that comes from a deep knowledge of chicken behavior. Mama has contended with many a settin’ hen. On free-range chickens, she’s an expert.
    Mama casts out a long rubber lure, a sort of Gummi Worm, and reels it in. She’s casting for bass. “I’d rather fish for bream because they bite like crazy,” she says.
    The beanfields are leased out to a neighbor, and Mama frets about their proper cultivation. Dense growth from the creeks is creeping out into the fields. She hates weeds, insects, snakes, and bad weather. And she rails against the haphazard and violent methods of mechanized farming. A crop-spraying machine called a highboy straddles several rows, and the driver rides on tall wheels. One year, the combine missed so many soybeans that I imagine she was ready to go gather them up in a bucket and carry them to the mill herself. Another year, she chopped out all the pokeweed that had infiltrated a soybean field. She was afraid the pokeberries would stain the feed. “Them beans would have been purple by the time they went through the mill!” she said. “I don’t know if hogs would appreciate purple feed. And pokeberries is poison.”
    Now it’s winter. A tree is down, blocking the path across the creek. It has split, rotten at the center. I remember when that little tree hollow was a good hiding place for secret messages in fantasy girl-sleuth games—forty years ago. At the creek, a jumble of memories rushes out, memories of a period in my own lifetime which links straight back to a century ago, and even further: hog killing; breaking new-ground; gathering dried corn in the fall; herding cows with a dog; churning; quilting. I have a snapshot of myself as a child, sitting on a mule. I know the textures of all of these experiences.
    What happened to me and my generation? What made us leave home and abandon the old ways? Why did we lose our knowledge of nature? Why wasn’t it satisfying? Why would only rock-and-roll music do? What did we want?
    With my family, the break started in 1920, when Granddaddy moved away from Clear Springs to find land, and we ended up living right on the edge of town. The stores around the courthouse square were tantalizingly near. Who wouldn’t rather go shopping than hoe peas? And the radio told us that we weren’t quite so isolated: we were in Radioland! The highway called us, too. Our ancestors had been lured over the ocean to America by false advertising—here was the promised land, literally—but once arrived, they had to clear rocks and stumps and learn to raise hogs. We inherited their gullibility. We wanted to go places, find out what was out there. My sisters and I didn’t want to marry farmers; we were more interested in the traveling salesmen. By the time