Maude

  Maude

  by

  Donna Mabry

  Acknowledgements

  I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for their help with this book:

  I thank my sister-friend Shelby Turnbull MacFarlane, who is the witness to my life. She knows things about me that even my children don’t. She helped me with some of the research to call up details in places where my memory was fuzzy and retrieved documents to verify the story of my aunt’s death.

  My editors: Lawrence Montaigne, Elaine Stubbs, Scotty Curran, Maryann Unger, and Phil Schlaeger from Anthem Authors. The story is much better with their assistance.

  Barbara Winters, Jeane Harvey, Judy Kuncewicki and Lawrence Montaigne, my proofreaders, who not only make corrections, but who encourage me constantly by reading my work.

  Sandy Novarro, who now has a shelf full of things she told me to write.

  And my daughter, Melanie Mabry, who wanted to hear this story in the first place. Boy, is she in for a few surprises.

  FOREWARD

  My parents divorced when I was three, and my mother left me to be raised by my maternal grandparents. For the next nine years, whenever he wasn’t working overtime, my daddy came to get me almost every Friday night and every school vacation. He returned me to my grandmother’s custody the last possible day.

  My earliest memory is a winter morning when he carried me to her house, my cheek resting against the chilly smoothness of his brown leather jacket. I was his almost every weekend, in summers from June to September, and over spring and Christmas vacations.

  I shared my grandmother’s room. She would read me to sleep each night, not with stories out of books, but with the spoken stories of her life. As we lay there in the darkened room, I struggled to stay awake to hear the amazing things she had to tell. At the same time, her soft voice was a lullaby inviting me to sleep. I wonder now if she found it her personal therapy to murmur her burdens in the darkness to a very interested listener.

  As I grew older, and she felt I could understand them, she revealed more of the intimate details, until finally, when I was sixteen or so, she even talked about what part sex played in her life.

  She didn’t go in chronological order, but spoke of whatever came to her mind. One night she would talk of her childhood, another of the wars or the depression. Sometimes she talked about losing four of her five children.

  It wasn’t until many years later when I repeated some of these things to my daughter that I fully realized how epic a tale my grandmother’s life had actually been.

  My daughter said to me, “Why don’t you write it down for me?”

  So this book is dedicated to my Melanie and to the great-grandmother that she knew only as an infant.

  A small part of what I have written here is fictionalized, and some of it falls back on my own memories of later events, which may be biased. I have included some of my grandfather’s comments, but he mostly joked about things and wasn’t a serious person like my grandmother.

  Evelyn, my mother would tell you a different story, but I am representing my grandmother’s point of view.

  The greater substance of this, and many of the direct quotes, are written in my grandmother’s words, and are what I heard from her during those long-ago nights we shared a bed.

  Maude

  Prologue

  I was barely over fourteen years old, and it was my wedding day. My older sister, Helen, came to my room, took me by the hand, and sat me down on the bed. She opened her mouth to say something, but then her face flushed, and she turned her head to look out the window. After a second, she squeezed my hand and looked back in my eyes. She stopped, dropped her gaze to the floor, and then said, “You’ve always been a good girl, Maude, and done what I told you. Now, you’re going to be a married woman, and he will be the head of the house. When you go home tonight after your party, no matter what he wants to do to you, you have to let him do it. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t understand, but I nodded my head anyway. It sounded strange to me, the way so many things did. I would do what she told me. I didn’t have a choice, any more than I had a choice in being born.

  Chapter 1

  I came into this world as Nola Maude Clayborn in 1892, in Perkinsville, in the northwest corner of Tennessee, a few miles west of Dyersburg. Pinned to the ground by a church spire at each end of the road that cut the town in half, Perkinsville was barely a wide space in the road. The houses were so far apart it was almost country. It was made up mostly of farmers and the businesses that served them.

  Most of the houses had a barn in the back for one or two horses, and a buggy to ride in or a wagon for farm work. We all had chickens, and a cow for milk. Every house had a vegetable garden, and most of them had some sort of orchard with apple, cherry, and pear trees.

  There was one general store and one doctor. A widow in town sometimes rented out sleeping rooms to travelers, but there was no hotel, no restaurant, no bank, and certainly, no saloon. Almost everyone still raised their own chickens, hogs, fruit and vegetables.

  I remember it partly by its smells. Walking through town in the winter, I could smell the smoke from the wood burning fireplaces and stoves, the farm animals, and if the wind was right, the stink of the chicken coops. In spring, the air was heavy with the sweetness of fruit blossoms and freshly turned soil.

  There was a Baptist church to the east end and a Holiness church to the west. My family was Holiness, and our lives revolved around our church. We went to meeting Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. Once a year, there would be a visiting preacher, and a revival that would go on every evening for a week.

  The steeples of the two churches served as a sort of city limits. You could walk from one church to the other in less than a half-hour. There were no Catholics and no Jews, and most of us didn’t even know that there was any such thing as an atheist. Not one person there would even have understood what an atheist was, except maybe the doctor. He had more education than most, and had lived in other places until he was in his sixties, when his wife died, and he gave up his practice in the city to come back to live where he grew up.

  Most folks in my town were born there and died there and maybe took one trip to Memphis on their honeymoon.

  There were some colored folk too, but they lived down the road, a short distance from the larger part of town.

  In looks, I took after my father, Charles Eugene Clayborn, with straight brown hair, and brown eyes. I was big for my age and built sturdy, like my daddy.

  My sister, Helen, was eleven years older, and took after our mother, Faith. They were both small and trim. Daddy used to say they weren’t as big as a minute. They were fair, with sparkling blue eyes and hair of a pale blonde shade.

  Helen’s hair hung in waves over her shoulders, but Momma wore hers pinned up in a bun at the back of her neck, the way all the married women did. I loved the way little wisps of curls would escape the pins. When Momma was outside, they would flutter in the breeze, like butterflies dancing on her neck.

  Helen had an hourglass figure, and the neighbors used to say that she had a waist a man could clasp his hands around. Those ladies would smile kindly at me and pat me on the head as if to comfort me. I hated that. I knew early on that I was plain. I got used to it. My mother fussed over Helen all the time, making her pretty dresses, tying ribbons in her hair. Other than telling me what to do, she didn’t pay me any mind.

  It really didn’t bother me all that much. I was a daddy’s girl. He ran the livery stable directly across the street from our little house. He trained a few horses to sell, rented out horses and buggies, and boarded traveler’s mounts. He was up and gone to tend the stock before I got out of bed in the morning.

  When he came home for dinner he would give Momma a kiss and then
scoop me up in his strong arms and give me a big hug. Then he’d sit me on his knee and talk to me, just me, until dinner was on the table. He’d look down at me and smile, and ask me about school and my friends. He’d tease me about liking James Connor, who lived down the road from us.

  Daddy was a big man, his chest and arms thick with muscles from lifting bales of hay. I’d lean my head against his chest and smell the horses and the feed on him. I found the only comfort there was for myself in his attention. He was my world.

  After dinner, he would go back to the barn to settle the animals for the night. I was usually asleep when he got back. It was precious little time he was able to give me, but it was enough.

  As 1899 came to an end, everyone was excited about the New Year, 1900, and a new century. I found the number interesting, but didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Wouldn’t things be just the same the day after as they had been the day before? It was all people talked about for weeks. I listened to them at school and at church and at the store. I didn’t really feel it had anything to do with me. I didn’t think the coming century would change my life much, but it did. That year turned my life upside down.

  I was seven, and Helen eighteen, in April of 1900, when Helen married Tommy Spencer. He was one of the nicest young men. His parents owned the general store, and they were about the richest family in town. Helen packed up her things and moved to the pretty little house Tommy had built just for her. It had a porch all the way across the front, like ours, with another one across the back so you could sit in the sun or the shade at any time of day. Tommy had a water pump right there in the kitchen so Helen wouldn’t have to go outside to get water. There was a washroom in the back, a bedroom on each side, and a parlor in the front.

  People kept trying to make me feel better about being alone after Helen married, but I didn’t miss her all that much. I visited her from time to time and saw her at church every meeting. Her moving out meant that I had a room of my own, and my life was quieter without the young people that hung around my sister. Before she left, it seemed to me that they were always at the house. Helen’s girlfriends were there almost every day after school. They sat on the front porch, drinking iced tea and giggling and whispering into one another’s ear about some boy or the other, mostly things that they didn’t want me to hear.

  The boys made up excuses to stop by, asking about school or church, falling quiet if I came in earshot. My sister’s friends either looked at me like I wasn’t welcome, or looked right past me, as if it weren’t my porch, too, or my house, as if I didn’t have any right to be there.

  With Helen married and gone I got real attention from my mother for the first time that I could remember. She set about the job of making me a fit wife for some man, someday. We planted the spring garden together, rows of lettuce, greens, tomatoes, and corn. She talked to me all the while in a way she never had before, like I was a grown-up. We hoed the ground, and she showed me how to poke my finger into the soft soil to make a little hole to drop the seeds in one at a time. With Helen out of the house, Momma and I became a team.

  We cooked together in the kitchen on the big wood-burning stove, with me standing on a little step-stool my Daddy made for me. I got to mix the sugar and spices for the apple pies, and watched how Mom rolled out the piecrust, talking all the while about how to use the coldest water to mix the dough.

  She taught me how to listen for the sound of the chicken frying in the pan, how when the sound of the cooking changed from a murmur to a crackle, it was time to turn it over, how to salt the potatoes before I cooked them and the chicken after. She showed me how to make light dumplings and good biscuits.

  In the fall, I learned how to can fruits and vegetables from the big garden my mother kept. I wore an apron, folded up in a pleat at the waist to make it fit, and sat at the table stringing the green beans, popping off the top end the way she showed me, and pulling the strings down to the bottom, then snapping the bean into four sections. Mom put them in the big pot on the stove with some fatback bacon, where they would cook all day before they went into the Mason jars.

  In the afternoons, we would sit on the porch where the sun shone bright and sew. Mom showed me how she cut the fabric so there wasn’t much waste. When she finished cutting out a dress, she could hold the scraps in the palm of her hand. She taught me how to make tiny, even stitches that wouldn’t pull apart, and how to pull the thread over a candle before I started sewing so it wouldn’t tangle. I learned how to knit, crochet, and embroider a chain stitch, and to make flowers and an alphabet with the needle.

  Even though I was usually fidgety when I had to sit still, like in church, I loved needlework. There’s a peacefulness that comes over you when you sew. I guess that it’s because you don’t think about any of your worries, you just let your mind work on the fabric and the thread. When you concentrate on one small section at a time, it’s almost a surprise when it’s finished and you see it as completed work. When I sewed other things, long after my mother was gone, I could almost hear her voice at times, telling me to knot the end tightly, or to twirl the needle just so to untangle the thread. As long as I lived, I remembered everything my mother taught me, and not just about sewing.

  One Saturday night, not long after Helen left, my mother curled my hair for the first time. She stood me up on a chair and ran a wet comb through my hair, rolling up the strands in white cotton strips she had torn from a flour sack. It wasn’t easy to fall asleep that night, with the knots pulling at my scalp, but when my mother untied the strips the next morning and combed it out, my stiff, straight hair lay in soft waves, just like Helen’s.

  I ran to the kitchen to show my daddy. He swooped me up off the floor and gave me a big hug. “Look how pretty you are this morning,” he said.

  It was something that no one had ever said to me in my life. He held me close to his chest and swung me back and forth before he set me down.

  I expected that everyone in the church would o-o-oh and a-a-ah over how I looked, but Helen was the only one who noticed. She treated me nicer, now that she was out of the house.

  I asked Momma to roll up my hair again that night, but she said it was too much trouble to do every day. I tried to do it myself, but it came out all crooked, wavy in parts but with the ends still straight. I decided I would be satisfied with having it curled for Sunday service. Being pretty, even just once a week, would make me happy.

  The first year of the new century ran right by me without notice, but one day the next summer, when I was eight years old, I was spending the afternoon at Helen’s house. Helen was seven months into carrying her first baby, and not having an easy time of it. She still threw up about ten times a day, and lifting anything made her feel lightheaded. For the last few months, I’d been sent over on weekends to help with the cleaning.

  I loved doing it. While I did the chores I pretended it was my own home and that my own husband would come home from work and greet me with a kiss just the way Helen’s husband did.

  I was in the back yard hanging a load of clothes on the line when I heard a short scream, like a hurt animal, come from the house. I dropped the towel I was holding back in the basket and ran to the house. Helen’s husband Tommy and the town doctor, who had delivered all three of us, were there and Tommy was holding Helen in his arms. She leaned against him and looked like she was about to fall. I grabbed Helen’s skirt.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  Tommy looked panicked. He pulled my hands away from her. “Go wait in the bedroom.”

  I obeyed, just as I always did, going into the bedroom and sitting on the bed. Someone closed the door after me, and I strained to hear the voices from the living room, but couldn’t make out any of what they were saying. After what seemed to me to be forever, the door opened and Tommy carried Helen in the room. She was passed out. Doctor Wilson folded down the covers and Tommy laid Helen on the bed and pulled the blankets up over her. Then, the doctor motioned to me and Tommy to go to the living
room, and we followed him out, closing the door after us.

  I clutched Tommy’s hand. “Is she going to be all right? What’s the matter with her?”

  He looked at me with sad eyes, and then looked over at the doctor. Tommy dropped his head and went to the kitchen. Doctor Wilson sighed loudly, took my hand in his and told me the most horrible thing I ever heard. “There was an accident, Maude,” he stopped, like he was searching for the right words.” Something caught fire in the kitchen of your house. When your dad heard the neighbors yelling, he ran in the house looking for your mother.”

  I felt the panic run through my entire body. It shot from my head to my toes. All of a sudden, I was freezing cold. My body shivered, and I clutched my arms around myself. “Is my Daddy all right? Is he burnt up?”

  Doctor Wilson patted me on the shoulder, “I’m sorry, Maude, it was an old house, all wood frame. They didn’t make it out in time.”

  For a split-second, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The sound of my heart pounding roared in my ears and made me almost deaf. Then it dawned on me that both my momma and daddy were gone.

  I searched for words, but couldn’t find any. I dropped both hands to my sides and just stood there, staring at the floor and shaking. The doctor patted me on the back again, turned, and went to the kitchen. He and Tommy were talking quietly, I was still standing where they left me when I heard a strange, weak cry come from Helen in the bedroom.

  I ran in the room. The smell of the blood and something else I didn’t recognize filled the room. I let out a screech, and Tommy came bursting through the door with Dr. Wilson right behind him. They pushed me out of their way and I pressed myself against the wall. The doctor jerked the covers off Helen.

  “Her water’s broke,” he said, “get my bag.”