modern upgrades to Mamatha’s house and existence, she either filibustered the improvements or downright refused the charity.
There is still a part of me that exists in that tin-roofed, broomstraw-swept, rusting, rural, wood-fired world. But how did I, a child of the 1960s and 1970s, come to grow up in the 1930s? It was all a matter of give and take: I was “loaned” to Mamatha by Mama and Daddy to help fend off her loneliness after my grandfather Daddy Joe died in 1961, from a suite of long-lasting illnesses dating back to World War I. I was, after all, his namesake and thus the most logical substitute; she lost one Joseph and gained another. So from the age of maybe three or four until I was sixteen, Mamatha’s house was more often home to me than the Ranch. The two dwellings, the modern and the throwback, sat a few hundred yards apart from each other, well within hollering distance. But while the two structures were close together physically they were almost a century apart in mindset. The houses, and the space that lay between, were symbolic of the worlds I straddled: modern convenience and comfort versus old-time, bare-boned simplicity. Both sets of values will guide me until the day I die.
Mamatha’s house, broken down and mired in the past like an old plow mule in the mud, was the heart of the Home Place. There was in the antiquated lifestyle something solid and reassuring that comfort and the technology of the day couldn’t capture. The ties to legacy and the affection for home were reinforced by a grandmother who, in the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” somehow kept me suspended in an in-between world of superstitions, haints, and herbal remedies. Any number of apparently innocent things, I learned, might bring bad luck upon me. There were constant warnings—“Don’t step over this!” “Don’t lay that there!” Mamatha’s yard was a walk-through pharmacy, with many of the weeds and roots providing what she claimed the drugstore couldn’t. A constant dose of the Holy Bible mixed with magic made my time with my grandmother spooky and spiritually profound.
And so more than the physical structure of the house itself, there was a metaphysical underpinning that defined the character of our lives together. I heard, saw, and felt things in the Ramshackle that few, if any, of my friends have probably ever experienced. It was a universe where wonder and awe had yet to be tossed from the temple by science and cynicism. There was way more to heaven and earth than could be dreamed back then. It was a different world, one I sometimes wish I could revisit.
There are certain seasons, certain sensual prompts, that take me back to the Home Place. Now, as back then, fall is the time when nature speaks most clearly to me. In autumn one is treated to an orgy of sights, sounds, and smells that can be wonderfully overwhelming. The stifling late-summer heat is mercifully cleared by cooler air overnight. Breathing is suddenly easier and the soaking sweat evaporates. You want to inhale deeply enough to take in every molecule wafting on the wind. The tired sameness of September’s deep green fades then flames into October’s vermilion sumacs and scarlet maples, lemon-yellow poplars and golden hickories. In those days of crispness I want to linger long enough to hear every sound and look far enough to see into forever.
The season has always drawn a sort of restlessness from me. The Germans have a fine word for it: zugunruhe. A compound derived from the roots zug (migration) and unruhe (anxiety), it describes the seasonal migration of birds and other animals. In this wanderlust I want to go somewhere far away, to fly to some place I think I need to be. Nature is on the move, too, migrating, storing, and dying. Everything is either accelerating or slowing down. Some things are rushing about to put in seed for the next generation. A monarch butterfly in a field full of goldenrod is urgent on tissue-thin wings of black and orange to gather the surging sweetness before the frost locks it away. Apple trees and tangles of muscadines hang heavy. The fruit-dense orchards offer a final call to the wildlings. Foxes, deer, coons, possum, and wild turkeys fatten in the feasting. The air is spiced with the scent of dying leaves. The perfume of decay gathers as berries ripen into wild wine. Even the sun sits differently in an autumnal sky, sending a mellower light in somber slants that foretell the coming change.
The droning katydids, tired from their months-long work of filling the hot wet nights with song, hang on into October. But soon choirs of thousands dwindle to hundreds, and then just one or two. A persistent cricket tries hard to fiddle in time but the first freeze throws a wrench into his rhythm. The rustling riot of turning, falling leaves and the mysterious moonlit chirps of migrant songbirds winging their way to faraway places make my heart race. It is all so beautiful that it hurts. Almost overnight eastern red cedars suffer the savagery of hormonal surges and a ravaged stand of sapling pines point the way to the pawed-up and piss-soaked patches of ground that whitetail bucks leave as calling cards. When the moon glows in a mid-November sky like a pallid sun, I, too, am so soaked in wanting and wood’s lust that I might as well wander like a warbler in the joyous urgency of it all.
In Mamatha’s bedroom, I slept on an anemic aluminum cot just across from her high-post cannonball bed. For almost a dozen years I tossed and turned on a thin foam mattress that didn’t offer much in the way of comfort or support. The cot wobbled and creaked with each move I made. And as I got bigger it got smaller. There was a perfectly good bed in the adjoining room but Mamatha guarded the “guest” bedroom ferociously, keeping it made up in her best linens in a state of museum-like readiness for the company that hardly ever came.
The conservationist prophet Aldo Leopold once wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” If the maxim is true then I suppose we were spiritually secure on both counts. Mamatha cooked and heated with wood, not power-company watts. She was always cold, despite sleeping under several suffocating layers of heavy, hand-sewn quilts for most of the year. Even though the bedroom and kitchen were the only heated rooms, the demand for firewood never ended. A ravenous wood heater had a fire in its belly well before the first frost and wasn’t extinguished until sometime after Good Friday. In all my years at the Ramshackle that heater probably consumed hundreds of cords of the hardwood that Daddy cut. Thanks to the heater’s insatiable appetite and Mamatha’s thin blood, the little room could get hellishly hot.
Daddy’s wielding of an often finicky chain saw and his choice of the next tree destined for the stove and heater were more art than science. A dying post oak on one hillside or a blown-down poplar from the bottom meant that no stand of timber was ever depleted. He never cut pines for the woodstove because the pitch created a dangerous residue in the flues that could ignite and burn the house down. But the fat lightwood we got from old pine stumps was a coveted commodity and we used it sparingly to start fires. The sap-soaked heartwood smelled like kerosene and burned like a torch.
In addition to the firewood gathered for Mamatha, the forest freely sacrificed sturdy posts and rails of hickory for corrals and fences. Big sweetgum and elm trees were left standing because they were almost impossible to split with an axe or maul. Daddy apparently didn’t think much of sycamore as wood or building material either because I can’t remember him ever cutting one. Maybe he just thought they were too pretty to put a saw blade into.
The hardwoods and pines that thrived in the hopscotching maneuvers of Daddy’s forestry weren’t all that random. The sylvan cycle of felling, cutting, loading, splitting, and burning was a year-round thing. The industry was hard work and the genesis of my understanding that in order to have something for later, you’d best make what you have now last. Daddy’s selection of trees to cut was an illustration of a land ethic being practiced. Certain hardwoods were most valuable. Red oaks, cut up, split, and dried, made the best firewood. Inhaling the pleasantly rank odor that came from a section of scarlet oak freshly laid open with a sledgehammer and maul was like sniffing smelling salts in the chill fall air. In the wood heater or laid across the fireplace andirons (we called them fire dogs), cured red oak popped and burned hot enough to quickly take the cold edge off a room. White oaks, especially young, straight, tall-growing ones, were reserved for construction. A twelve-foot log split in half lengthwise made sturdy railings for the feedlot corral. Hickories burned well, too, but were much harder to split and so they were cut sparingly. Sometimes Daddy made tool