Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 2.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Nod off.  Nod away.

Fall down gently like autumn's first lightly settling snowflakes into sleep, sleepy sleep.  Forgetful sleep.  Slip into effortless, unintended slumber.  Float away.

Forget.

Did he simply forget it, the young boy wondered.  He couldn't remember what Ma described.  Maybe memories could evaporate like a puddle after several days in the hot sunlight.  He thought he ought to remember, and it bothered him that he couldn't.

Outside the tiny, rude shack that was their home the late afternoon was beginning to tip over toward evening.  Ma had gone with the bucket to fetch water for the string beans, leaving Tom with Mary, who next month would be four years old.  Tom was the oldest; he'd turned seven in January.

Cutter was out in the fields somewhere.  It was spring and the evenings were still pleasant, although soon the nights would be growing cooler and then cold.

Mary and he were under the table.  She had a little brown doll that Ma had stitched together out of cloth.  The doll was full of rice grains, but there was not enough rice, because Mary could easily squeeze all of it out of an arm or leg that then hung limp and withered.  Tom was idly watching her play.  His mind felt lazy and dreamy.

Over in another corner Frank sat on the floor doing nothing, his back to them.  Tom looked at him.  He must be cold, Tom thought, because he was by the fireplace, and the cool air came down the chimney there.  Frank was six years old, but he was bigger than Tom.  Bigger and meaner.

Hiram, who was just two years old, was asleep in the crib.

Frank had also been listening to Ma's kinfolk tales, smirking into the shadows, Tom knew.  Frank was always my special Christmas present.  But Frank was bad.  Tom didn't like him.  Frank was always poking at Tom and Mary, or pushing them down when no one was around to see.  Tom always tried to protect Mary from him.

He thought about Ma's story.  What puzzled Tom was that he could recall other glimpses of his Missouri days, but not something so important that he ought to remember it.  Little lingering flashes of his dirt-smeared boyhood companions and their hearty pioneer deer hunter play came back to him now, and savage Indian clashes and tumbles.  They'd blazed trees through the nearby woods like Daniel Boone.  They'd startled up sudden secretive flocks of prairie chickens and collected their eggs, careful always of the snakes that also wanted the eggs.  No need to tell their Mas about the snakes, because they'd just worry, and then the kids would have to stay closer to home.  Sometimes in the evenings they would see deer in little clearings in the trees, and one time they saw five or six Indians moving silently toward the setting sun.  The golden summer sun on the high plains and the rosy sunsets, those he recalled, and the low roll of hills so that whenever the wagon came up to the top of one there was always another wide, shallow depression before you with yet another hill or ridge mounting up at the horizon beyond in the frozen knee-deep waves of lapping earth.  He remembered infrequent, crude farmhouses carved out of the wilderness, not so different from this one where they lived now.  Wispy white clouds looking impossibly near to hand. . . .

Then he thought of grim Isaiah Cutter out in the fields.  Why grim?  Because he was always grim, like some dismal thing had happened to him once upon a time and he could never escape the consequences that unfolded forever and ever after.  It was all very hard to understand.  Cutter always smelled like sweat and dirt.  His face was sunburnt, and he had dirt on his neck and under his cracked yellow fingernails.  His dark hair was always spiky, his beard rough and uneven, his cheeks sunken, and his hazel eyes hollow.  He always made Tom think of a dangerous animal in a cage that would watch you closely because it was always looking for a way out.  At mealtimes Cutter scarcely said a word to Ma or the children.  Sometimes like today when Cutter was still off in the fields, or when he was away talking to Clogan, Ma would talk to them about when she was a girl in Tennessee, and then she would always end by telling them about Missouri.  She would talk about her friend, the other Nancy, and then finally about how her two little angels, Tom and Mary, had been dressed up in their nice new clothes even though they were barefoot in the soft grass.

"Were Uncle Ezra and Aunt Louisa there?" Tom had asked today.

"Oh no, they were not there."

Just then she came back inside through the heavy blanket on the door and carried the bucket over to the table.  He could hear it sloshing when she banged it down and the heaviness of her breathing.  She should have sent Frank for the water, he thought.  She didn't need to be doing that.

"Francis, can you get a fire going," she said in a minute once her breath had returned.  She was sitting in one of the rickety chairs at the table.  Mary had scooted around and was marching her baby doll over and over again across Ma's feet, saying:  "Da da da da da."  Ma didn't care.

Tom looked across the room.  The other boy didn't move where he sat with his back to them.  Ma had to ask him two more times before he sighed and got up to do as he was told.

Tom was trying hard to remember.  He recalled the shady, ribbony river-stream curling down out of the north in a wide swale.  From a distance it had looked like a river of trees running down across the prairie.

"Ma, remember one time," Tom said, "when it rained so much the hills poked up like islands from all the water?"

"I remember," she replied.  "That was a couple years ago.  All those poor animals trapped with us.  But that flood was nothing compared to forty-nine."

Under the table he pictured the miles-wide silvery flat inundation, just the crowns of some of the trees sticking out.  They couldn't go anywhere until the water went away.  "Better keep an eye out for Noahy's ark," Uncle Ezra had said to him with a wink.  Tom remembered that.  Uncle Ezra wasn't Tom's uncle, but Ma's uncle, her only kinfolk who had also come from Tennessee, not counting the Shumers.  He remembered the animals trapped up on the hills with the people, the cows and sheep, and even rabbits and deer.

Up on the table top he could hear Ma with a knife now chopping the beans.  Frank was blowing on the coals.

"Ma," Tom said.

"Yes, Thomas?"

"Do people eat feathers?"

At the fireplace Frank grunted.

"Do people eat feathers?" Ma said.  "Why would you say such a thing?"

"Because of that song.  Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his hat and it was macaroni.  And you said macaroni was something the Aye-talians eat."

She laughed.

"It's just a song, Thomas.  It don't mean nothing."

"Oh."

He watched Mary playing with her doll for a few more minutes.  The house was quiet except for Frank blowing on the coals.  Tom pressed on his eyes, hard.  It was something he had learned how to do a long time ago before they came to Iowa.  Directly he could see, emerging out of the blackness, the usual myriad of squares, golden squares, brown-tan like toasted bread, brightly glowing squares varying in size.  Interspersed among them at regular intervals were patches of perfect blackness.  Square black holes that were only an absence in the shimmering goldness.  If someone could make a drawing of that, he thought, what a strange picture that would be.  Except that the squares changed, swelling and contracting.  They turned and twisted.  They moved.  You couldn't draw moving things.  Nobody could.  Why not?

He heard Frank moving around, and he moved his thumbs from his eyes.  At first he could see nothing, but then his vision cleared.  He saw Frank had got a little fire going.  Frank stood up and without looking back he hurried out the door, the blanket chuffing down behind him.  Ma called after him but he kept going.  Ma didn't go after him.

Tom remembered one summer afternoon in Missouri when the sky grew swiftly dark purple, and the hail came so cold and hard and dreadful, but it was short-lived, stopping suddenly.  The sky menaced a sickly mustard green color that felt so cold and close and dangerous.  Ma was scared, and they ran ran ran to Aunt Louisa's and Uncle Ezra's house.  It seemed such a long way to run.  Ma was in her long skirt clutching very tightly baby Hiram wrapped against the cold and pleading with him to keep up, please hurry, please run faster.  Faster, Tom!  Because she hadn't been able to find the pony.  And where was little Mary?  Already at the Scott farmhouse.  And where was Cutter?  Away in Maryville doing nobody any good.  And how tiring it was to run so far, and exciting in the darkness when they all hurried into the root cellar.  Then gravely-voiced Uncle Ezra said hush up hush up be quiet, him peering up through the gap at the top of the door.  In the sallow light Tom had seen Uncle Ezra's stretched scrawny turkey neck and his fearful bulging blue eyes like a bird's eggs watching urgently until it was all over.

Ma finished her chopping and Tom heard her sweeping the beans into the bucket, and the splashing in the water.  "I hope that boy's gone to find Isaiah," Ma said as she got up to her feet.  "Dinner will be ready soon."

From where he was under the table, Tom watched her come around, carrying the bucket with both hands.  It was heavy for her because she was so big with the new baby.  In another month, maybe, she said he would have another brother or sister.

She managed to hang the bucket on the hook above the flames.  She pushed back her hair and then came back to her chair, falling down into it.  He could tell how tired she was.

He frowned, thinking of the end of Ma's story.  He tried to imagine it, to see whether the pictures that came from her singsongy voice into his mind matched up with any true memory, but they did not.  He was afraid that if he imagined it too well it might become a counterfeit memory that afterwards he would think was true.  He often grew sleepy from Ma's baby-cooing when she told them those stories, imagining the green grass and a tall, funny-looking man in a big black coat standing under a shingle oak tree with a Bible.  He thought for some reason that the funny man must have a splotchy red face.  Little Mary he imagined was there next to him, and he was holding her hand.  But where was baby Hiram?  And where was Frank?  He didn't know.  Ma never mentioned them.

All the things he could recall, but no trace of memory remained of the most important event of them all.  Had it rotted out somehow or dissolved away from his mind?

Try as he might, Tom never could remember Ma's wedding.