Uncle Percy on his knees beside it. Uncle Percy was holding his forearms open in front of his chest, imploringly. “Come on, Mama,” he was saying. “Come with us.” Granddaddy, too, was begging her to join them.
I had walked into the room to check on her and saw at a glance what was happening. “No, Grandmama, no.” My voice rose. “Don’t listen to them.” I began to beg her to ignore her husband and son.
“Honey, go sit in the other room,” she told me, “so I can hear what they’re saying.”
After a few minutes I rushed back into her room. The ghosts of the men were gone, and Grandmama was lying still. I ran to her, panicked, calling her name, and gathered her up in my arms.
“I’m taking you to the hospital now,” I said, knowing I needed help. Something in me was trying to keep my grandmother alive.
Now it was my duty and my honor to be the keeper of my grandmother’s house, to uphold, rebuild, and sustain it, and to decide what parts of it to replace when they deteriorated. In the house I found myself bending—to wash dishes at the low sink, to slice summer squash on the counter, to add a column of figures on the pine table Granddaddy built. I bent to enter the screen door of the front porch, to duck under the drooping branches of the pine, to water small plants. It was as if, still, I was bending to greet my grandmother, to embrace her, to keep her. In that bending I was becoming her.
The corn crib, shaded by chinaberry.
Finding Wiregrass
Out walking on the farm I found a few clumps of grass that made my heart lurch. Unsure at first, I ducked under the electric fence that keeps the cows in and put my knees into the hot dirt.
Wiregrass.
Funny how a few clumps of grass could make me want to do a jig out there in the cow pasture.
When Cracker settlers first crossed the Altamaha River into what had been Creek hunting grounds, they found a forest we can now only imagine. The entire Southeastern uplands grew longleaf pine, 93 million acres of it from southern Virginia to east Texas. Now you can find little pieces; but out of 93 million, only 3 million acres of natural forest (meaning forest that regenerated naturally, consisting of trees of all ages) remain.
The longleaf pine can’t be talked about as a tree, really, but as an intricate and intriguing ecosystem. The original forests held a legion of animals that had evolved to live in them: red-cockaded woodpeckers that bored out cavities in old-growth heart-pine trees; fox squirrels; and stunningly docile indigo snakes. Gopher tortoises, a long-lived species of land turtle, dug long burrows in the ground that became home to more than 300 other species, especially when the woods burned. Diamondback rattlers found refuge in the holes, along with gopher frogs, gopher snakes, scarab beetles.
You can’t talk longleaf without talking gopher tortoise, nor tortoise without indigo snake, nor the snake without gopher frog, nor the frog without flatwoods salamander, nor salamander without Bachman’s sparrow. You can’t talk mole cricket without talking indigo snake. The list goes on and on.
Although a pine flatwoods usually grows only a single species of tree, an incredible diversity of flora can be found in the ground cover. But one kind of grass grows most commonly beneath longleaf pines, and that is wiregrass—tough, wiry, flammable. Mixed in with the wiregrass, a panoply of grasses and wildflowers prospers: toothache grass, meadow beauty, pine lily, orange fringed orchid, Kentucky bluegrass. Per square meter, this ecosystem is as diverse as it gets. You have to crawl around on your hands and knees to see everything.
Periodic wildfires thwart the encroachment of hardwoods such as oak and sweet gum into the pinelands, so the trees have evolved not only to survive fire but to depend on it. Wiregrass has evolved toward flammability to help push fire quickly through the forest, and it needs burning in order to reproduce well. Some of the forbs that grow with wiregrass won’t even seed unless they have been scored by fire. Afterward, new ground cover springs lush and green from the ashen ground.
Just as longleaf pine is lashed to fire, a marvel of species is tied to longleaf pine, and the pine is laced to the highly diverse understory—the grasses and forbs, such as curtis dropseed and summer-farewell and blazing star—that is also bound to fire. The animal inhabitants are tied to the understory. Amazing the way everything is woven together.
Because most of the ancient forests have been cut, you don’t see red-cockaded woodpeckers or gopher tortoises or indigo snakes or fox squirrels or even diamondback rattlers much anymore. You don’t see wiregrass. But in a ribbon of woods that borders the cotton field, I found a little patch. Imagine my joy, because where a few clumps of wiregrass linger, there’s no telling what else remains.
Uncle Percy
Uncle Percy was sixty-nine when I returned to live next door. He was not a man to take risks, although it was not fear that kept him on the farm, I think, but a blindness to alternatives, having lived so well and been so loved in his birthplace. Here Percy was master of circumstance. He had imprinted on the life of a farm and was never able to ponder another life. He graduated high school at sixteen and joined the Air Force, a four-year stint that was to mark him as much as farming had. Its stories would occupy him all his life and form the lens through which he saw everything. When he was discharged, he went to the city, as all rural folks were being encouraged to do, to help rebuild the country. After six months at a factory in Jacksonville, Percy returned to the farm. I found his valise in the attic, the only relic up there—never to be used again. In that postwar atmosphere, which lured rural people to industrial centers to “be productive,” many would have considered Percy a failure. But not his parents.
Percy became the boy-child, so common in Southern families, who stayed. He moved back into his childhood room at the farm and lived there as a member of his parents’ household for most of his life. He married once, briefly. Uncle Percy was over fifty when he took up with a young divorcee new to town. He moved a doublewide trailer next door to Grandmama and married. During their brief matrimony his wife bore him a son, who after the divorce came on occasional Saturdays to visit. After the divorce, Uncle Percy moved back into the farmhouse with Grandmama; Grandmama’s sister, Aunt Linnie, made the trailer her home for a few years. Neither before nor after his ill-fated marriage had we known Uncle Percy to date, or to socialize in any way independent of church.
Short and slight, he was at all times well shaven and trim, never slovenly. He would have to announce that he’d gotten a haircut because I could not discern any change. He smoked like a winter chimney, constantly. When I first moved into the house, where Uncle Percy had not lived in almost a decade, I washed a yellowish film of nicotine off the ceilings, walls, and furniture. Entering his trailer was like crawling into the attic of a bar. Smoke had permeated and jaundiced the carpet, the curtains, the rugs, the pillows. Although I never liked it, he would light cigarettes in my house when he was visiting, and because he was its owner I couldn’t protest too loudly.
Uncle Percy’s day went like this: when he woke, he opened the doors if it wasn’t winter. He fed the horde of feral cats outside the back door. There were twelve or thirteen of them, skittish, bone skinny, and often with ears or eyes infected. They suffered only Uncle Percy to approach or pet them. “Say you like the cats?” I heard him joke to someone once. “You can take you home a sackful.” Unspayed and untreated, they bred fervently among themselves, introducing a few sickly kittens to the pride every season. Uncle Percy’s only obligation was to feed them.
Next he made himself a breakfast of sorts—usually a slice of toast and a cup of thick, black, instant coffee. He was never a big eater. Then he came out to his front steps, under the water oaks beside the trailer, and sat smoking. When I returned from ferrying Silas to school, he would be there, and I would spend a few minutes with him.
“Anything that grows here, they’s a pest waiting for it,” he would say, and talk about the worms in the peaches.