tobacco farming and turpentining. History ends at the far right of the brick wall with an image of the nuclear plant built on the river in the 1970s, not anything we are proud of, but rather a fact to be documented.
Until I was grown, Baxley had one stoplight. Now there are three, with more on the way. In my town, people still drive slow and they wave even at strangers by raising one finger off the steering wheel. If a funeral procession is encountered, they pull their vehicles off the roadway until the last mourner passes.
The farm is north of Baxley, toward the river, miles best taken in the rusty green 1972 pickup, sitting high, with the dog in the back, pecans on the dashboard next to a bird’s nest, and empty soda cans rattling back and forth in the doors (the lower panels are gone). The road from the highway is dirt, shaded by trees until it makes a ninety-degree turn around the corner of a field. Along the fencerow, Chickasaw plums and wild cherries grow among a hodgepodge of oak and sweet gum, their origin ascribed to the seed-eating birds that land on the fence.
At the house, the road narrows and turns sharply down to the branch, and you have to slow here; the road cuts on one side through a steep clay bank covered with short vegetation, vines, and fallen leaves. A third of a mile past the farm, the road splits and both paths run to paved country roads within a mile, and to more roads and to highways and to interstates.
I will warn you that if you were to see the farm, you would not see the same one I see, the place where I spent happy days as a child. Turning in, you’d see a working farm fallen into disrepair: a farmhouse half obscured by six-foot azaleas; Uncle Percy’s mildewed doublewide trailer; a huge water oak between the two domiciles; other tall, ancient trees in the yard. You’d see the outbuildings gray and weathered, rotten here and there, and the tin that covers them rusty and buckling, flapping in windstorms. You’d see a car shelter, connected to what we call the packhouse; a boiler shelter, where they used to make syrup, with a decaying washroom; a big barn where Granddaddy fixed cars; a garden-tool shed; a corn crib (the prettiest building); and a log chicken coop where I store wood. These original outbuildings are leaning, missing boards, or sinking into the ground. Others, like the privy, are gone, rotted and fallen back to earth, never to be replaced.
The house, though dear to me, is timeworn and tacked together, sided these last thirty years by sheets of brown asphalt shingles of a design resembling brickwork. What wood lies beneath we do not yet know. Poor and dilapidated it may be, but it is a falling-down place that I have known all of my life and that I love. The house is a sixty-by thirty-foot rectangle with eight rooms, two by two: living room and dining room, living room and kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, second bedroom and third bedroom, which has become a study. Each room has at least three doorways and sometimes four. Because it is very open inside—the traditional Cracker style of architecture designed for air flow—you can see straight from the front door to the back. From one front corner, you can see diagonally to the back corner. It’s a plain, unpretentious house, built quickly, with eight-foot ceilings that allow room for summer heat to lift above head level.
This is the second house that was erected on this spot of ground. My great-grandparents lived in a pine house over on the highway, what is now U.S. 1, although it was only a dirt trail when Uncle Percy was a boy, with a ford at the creek marked now by concrete culverts. Walt Branch divided his land between his sons, and Granddaddy got this piece. He was thirty-one when he married Grandmama but had no house for her, so after they married she returned to her own parents’ house until he could build one. Their first home was not many years old when it burned, its pine shakes set afire by a spark from the fireplace. Walt was a renowned carpenter, so the house had been lovely. The replacement was cobbled together in a hurry to get a roof over the family’s head. That was in the early 1930s.
When I was a young girl, cramped with a sister and two brothers in a tiny frame house my father built on the junkyard, this was the house where we came to spend Saturdays with Grandmama. I remember, then, her house being endless, room after room of quiet refuge. Here we were most free, having escaped for a day the endless work Daddy demanded of us at the junkyard—long hours of hauling, toting, stripping, stacking, pulling nails, chipping bricks, digging, picking up, painting, washing, cleaning, cooking.
To earn our keep at Grandmama’s, and to ensure an invitation to return, we worked for her as well, but it was clean, easy work. My sister washed Grandmama’s short, permed hair over the bathroom sink and rolled it on pink, prickly curlers. I polished silverware with a rag and a little jar of polish, making the forks and spoons gleam. We swept the walk. Mostly, however, when we got dropped off at Grandmama’s we were at liberty to pursue frivolous interests: paper folding and recipe copying and woods looking. Nor did she have the same rules as my father, so her house was a place of freedom of thought. We could watch television and read the newspaper there. And did. We wandered and played, exploring the pasture, the water hole, the creek, the wooden bridge, the cow trails through the woods. We dared not enter the woods beyond the water hole, for there lay a bottomless head, where springs seeped to the surface through quicksand. Daddy had once plunged a cane pole twenty feet down, without hitting bottom.
Grandmama’s house was the horn of plenty. She had food that my own parents could not afford and time that Mama didn’t have to bake. A chocolate or pound cake waited under the bell-glass at Grandmama’s, or in the freezer to be thawed. Always. Grandmama’s candy jars were full. At Christmas, which was not a celebration at our house, she cut a two-foot limb of many-branching haw and stuck sugared gumdrops onto the ends of its twigs; we would gape at the candy tree, mouths watering. We yearned toward the cookie jar Grandmama kept full despite the humidity and the sugar ants. We knew better than to ask for food, so we prayed that Grandmama would offer a sweet to us. We would sit politely, as we had been taught to do, hoping beyond hope that she would ask, Did we want a lemon drop? When she was in the back of the house, or in the bathroom, one of us would check out the cookie jar in the corner cupboard and report back.
“Are there cookies in it?”
“Yeah.” At a whisper.
“What kind?”
“Kind of big and flat, with curved edges.”
“Store-bought?”
“Yeah.”
At our house at the edge of town, nothing lasted. We were forever running out of something. I know we were well fed, but we felt eternally hungry, ravenous; Mama was always trying to fill us. There was never enough food to sate us. I remember staring into Grandmama’s freezer and refrigerator, and standing before the pantry shelves, gawking.
“What are you looking for, honey?” she would ask, and I would turn away, embarrassed. “Just looking,” I would say. I could not believe such plenty.
Sometimes, unable to help ourselves, we would snitch a cookie or a piece of candy if the jar was close to full and the loss wouldn’t be apparent. If one of us took, we all did—at least we three younger, hungrier children did. Sometimes we agreed beforehand that one of us would pocket enough for all three. My sister, who was four years my elder, showed more restraint.
Grandmama was shorter than most women, so I was not yet ten when I grew taller than she and had to bend to hug her. She lived in her rich, sugary house with a younger, dapper Uncle Percy, who worked the counter at an auto parts store in town and rode a ’47 Harley. By then, Granddaddy Arthur was dead of cancer. He died when I was five. I remember him as benevolent, bringing gum and candy, the same treat for each of us. I never remember an unkind word spoken by or about him. Except for his pipe stand and gun rack, by the time I was old enough to pay attention to the depths of things, no sign of him remained in the house.
Most any week in summer or fall, Grandmama had fruit on the trees in the yard or in the lane. Tormented by visions of peppermints and candy corn, we foraged outside like bear cubs, eating dewberries,
