I’d helped take care of her. Most of that time she wasn’t able to even speak. My aunt reached down and touched Grandmama, smoothed her hair, fingered her elfin ears. The undertaker had fixed her hair in precise, neat curls like a short-haired doll might wear, and my grandmother would’ve liked the way it looked. I touched the curls, my hand following my aunt’s. Grandmama’s hair felt the same as when she was alive, rough and wiry. Her ear was cold, frozen and unbending. Her hands were stiff and bloodless, and holding one of them I remembered with satisfaction that a few days before I’d removed fingernail polish a nurse had painted on. Grandmama never in her life enameled her nails.
We sat and sat. People started to arrive at the funeral parlor: neighbors from Spring Branch Community who’d known Grandmama all their lives. Nieces and nephews. Distant kin. “You have to be Lee Ada’s daughter,” someone said. “You look exactly like her.” I tried to meet them all, following genealogical lines until I was exhausted, fitting people into a framework of history and place that embraced me.
During the last rites the next day, I sat beside Uncle Percy. Most of the time, he twiddled his thumbs round and round, motion without purpose, but once I looked over to see a tiny spring flowing from his eye. On my left, Aunt Fonida’s body rocked and shook with silent tears. Uncle James, a Baptist minister, recited Grandmama’s favorite verse, Ruth 1:16. “And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
I rode with Aunt Fonida in the slow burial procession, following a glossy black hearse from Spring Branch Church along a clay road that turned toward Carter Cemetery. Behind us, a snake of cars crept past farms that Grandmama had passed all her life, houses where she’d stopped to visit. This was her world, and now she made her last journey through it, back to a clay hill where we would bury her beside Granddaddy, among the dead of that country. At ninety-three, the matriarch of my mother’s side of the family, my last living grandparent, the elder of the clan, was gone.
After the interment, after everyone had proceeded back to the house and eaten the last helpings of chicken-and-rice and pineapple cake, and then fled to their new cars and left the history that was no longer relevant to their lives, I drove away to graduate school in Montana with my young son.
“You won’t be back,” friends said. “You’ll fall in love with the West, and one of those cowboys.”
“I’ll be back,” I replied.
One night on the Montana prairie, I dreamed of my grandmother. All night the coyotes had been singing. They had two camps, one to the east and one to the west, and their songs passed back and forth: bays, trills, barks. The wild dogs seemed to never stop howling. Theirs was a night tongue, calling interdependence and belonging. I lay awake listening and understanding none of it.
Toward morning I dreamed I was haying a field on my grandmother’s land. I was riding the vintage John Deere and the sun was close and brilliant, but not oppressive the way it usually is in late summer in the South. I was practically flying, bare armed, over this field. I knew that although my grandmother was dead, she was watching from the line of water oaks at the edge of the pasture. Yet her body seemed to be the hayfield itself. I dreamed this so wholly that when I woke I thought I was there, in my grandmother’s grassy arms.
The morning I urged the U-Haul out of Montana, I dashed into the sidewalk cafe we frequented to grab a bagel, and there was my friend Davy, drinking coffee and waiting, newspaper scattered about.
“Sweetmeats,” he greeted me. Davy is easy in his body, slim, his neck-length hair plowed by finger lines. Although he is openly gay, we are very flirtatious.
“Babydoll,” I answered, jovial. “I’m on my way out.” He knew I was homeward bound.
“Know how women in the South wear blue jeans cut off short, and they sew lace to the hem?” Davy asked with false innocence. He’s a Charleston native, so he knows only too well the poignant stereotypes and untruths of the rural South.
“They got big hair and when they walk their pantyhose go swish, swish, swish,” he drawled. “And the men, they drive around with Confederate flags stuck all over their trucks and there’s a dead deer lying in the back they’ve poached. And they live in house trailers with a pile of beer cans in the yard that they’ve thrown out the window as they emptied them. And it’s ‘nigger this’ and ‘nigger that.’”
He paused, looked directly at me.
“Girl, you gone come out the house and there’s a big ole rattlesnake coiled up on your front porch showing its teeth at you.” Davy opened his mouth wide, somehow managing a vulgar, lustful expression. He has the most expressive lips ever put on a man.
“Wild pigs come out in the morning from the swamp—watch out when you go rambling or they’ll get you, get your boy, and get your little dog, too. Don’t go swimming in no river, ole alligator’ll drag you under.” He drew in a quick breath. I dropped head to hands.
“And it’s so hot down there you’ll have to shave your legs.” Davy took a sip of coffee and banged his mug down, coolly picking up a section of paper. I sat in the sweet sunshine, feeling behind me the beautiful people drinking their organic, hazelnut-flavored, songbird-friendly coffee, and beyond them the lovely enlightened town, and even beyond, the majestic mountains washed in green, rising past the cafe window.
“What you want to go back down there for?” Davy asked.
How can one explain the potency of the past? Like a shad finning toward the certain muskiness of birthplace, or a homing pigeon with a message around its neck, I went home. Mostly I went home because I was afraid of losing what could have been mine. I don’t mean property. I mean the fat drops of dew that fall from the maple. I mean two brilliant redbirds, both male, in a nearby holly, and the red-shouldered hawk, whose very ancestors perhaps had circled high over the branch, whistling, causing my own ancestors to raise their faces.
I was of two minds about the return: either I would fail and leave after a year or two or I would revitalize my grandmother’s farm, buying it piece by piece from aunts and uncles, and I would die where seven generations of grandmothers had died before me. Maybe, just maybe, if I could slay the demons of childhood memory, knowing what I now knew, I could carve out a life that would be courageous, and gratifying, and of a piece.
In August of 1997, seventeen years after I fled my hometown for good, eager to quit its smallness and its unfor-givingness, my son and I moved into my grandmother’s heart-pine house, amid tobacco fields and cow pastures in Spring Branch, a farming section of northern Appling County, Georgia.
Restoration
The day after we arrived was the first day of school. I enrolled Silas in third grade and set to work, packing Grandmama’s dusty and cobwebbed past into boxes marked “linens” or “kitchen.” During the last hot, dry, sun-searing days of August, I emptied her things from cabinets and cupboards and replaced them with ours. The water to the house was off because of busted lines, so I hauled water from an outside spigot to clean. Within a couple of days, Daddy came and helped me fix the water line, so we had running water.
For a week I washed shelves, walls, and ceilings. I relined the kitchen cabinets with fresh newspaper, and laundered curtains and linens. I vacuumed the dead wasps. Before a week was out, I set up the computer and dared, with a house in chaos, to write in the mornings.
The first weeks were hard. I was alternately full of fear and full of peace. Afternoons, when I heard the school bus struggle to a stop to let off Silas, I turned off the computer, unplugging it and shutting the window behind it against a chance of sudden thunderstorms. Daddy would show up with Mama to work in the ninety-five-degree heat while Silas positioned his plastic action toys on battlegrounds of weedy flower beds. Uncle Percy would emerge from his trailer to join the activity—the proposing of solutions, the fetching of tools,