Taste the Red Clay

There’s even a respectable sounding word for it, geophagy, but it still means eating dirt.  People eat dirt . . . especially children . . . especially in the South, for a variety of reasons . . . maybe to get some needed nutrient . . . maybe because of poor self worth, then it becomes a form of abusive behavior . . . or maybe it just feels good, like the taste of the smell when a small summer shower settles the dust on an unpaved country road.

There’s a lot of talk these days about repressed memories.  It seems that some grown child is always accusing his mama and daddy of some “atrocity” done to him when he was little. Well, I have decided, after having been a parent myself, that most of us did the best we could under the circumstances.  Anyway, memories from my childhood keep cropping up . . . maybe when I smell fireworks and am reminded of the time I singed all my eyelashes off as I ignited a pile of powder emptied from a whole pack of Black Cat firecrackers. . . or the strong perfume of wisteria, and I find myself walking home from grade school by the two spinsters’ house, where it grew over the sidewalk in perfusion.  Or, like the other day, when I saw some old guy driving an antique ‘53 Cadillac.  I remember my big brother, George, pointing to a brand new one, when I was eight years old, and saying that some day he would have one of those “Caddies”.  The closest he came to that was a used Ford, and I recall him picking up a huge rock and heaving it at the bumper, one of the many times it wouldn’t start.  He drove that Ford and the same dent into marriage and three children.

Sometimes, before going to sleep, I try to string all these memories together in some kind of order to make sense out of my life to this point.  It always turns out to be like some disjointed home movie, you know one of those black and white, eight millimeter things you see of somebody’s family outing that makes you feel kind of weird, like maybe you were there, but you know you weren’t.  There were five of us children, along with Mama and Daddy, in our family: the twin girls, Paula and Pamela; one regular girl, Marybeth who was the oldest, George, the second child; and me, Rocky McKay, the youngest.  That’s the thing of it . . . you see, we now are all grown, with children and even grandchildren of our own, and we all have memories of how it was, some shared, yet, many not.

I still struggle with some things I do remember, and I wonder about Marybeth, who says she doesn’t remember much about her childhood.  Maybe she was lost in reading books.  Did she just tune out her childhood because of the uncertainty and turmoil around her and retreat into the life of Nancy Drew?  And the twins, inexorably locked together in a slow waltz, seeing each one’s own reflection every time they looked at one another, yet trying to establish separate identities.  I called Paula and Pamela, PauPam, when I was too little to tell them apart. 

Sitting here in the house where we grew up, since I came back to live after my failing second marriage, and trying to come to terms with growing older, sometimes the melancholy is almost too sweet to bare.  The rambling two-story house, built in the early 1900s, has been pretty much unoccupied, save the occasional renters, since Mama passed away some years ago.  We children could not face selling the place, so I became the landlord, caretaker, and now its current resident.  With my marriage on the rocks, and out of a job as well, the home place became a refuge.  Mama used to say that this house had seen a lot of living, and I guess a part of all of us could not let go of it ^_ or the memories. 

Some of the houses on the block are being fixed up as downtown dwellings, with the resurgence of a thriving tree-lined Main Street. There are even a few nice bed and breakfast residences in the once down-at-the-mouth part of town. I tell people that I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, but now I live in the Historic District ... funny, what time will do. 

This house was not a Southern mansion, but it was constructed of maple and heart pine trees off the property, when it was built by my granddaddy on Mama’s side.  The living room floor is “wormy” maple, and as a small child, Paula and Pamela told me that the marks and patterns were Chinese writing.  They would make up fairy tales that were “written” there. 

Mama was an only child, and the house came to her on her father’s passing.  Granddaddy Moses died before I was born, but I know he and Daddy never got along, and it must have prayed heavily on Daddy’s mind, his family living in the house that Granddaddy built.  Moses Dawkins was a craftsman, and his initials chiseled into the newel post served as a constant reminder of whose house it really was.