Purloining the opening thought from Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, “In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood.” A raven, his talons clutching my shoulder, reared, wings a-flap, and stretched his neck the better to swallow my eye, which he had neatly plucked from its socket. He cawed roughly, a challenge, goading me to see the truth now visible in the absence of the eye.
I grimaced, suddenly sensing the pain that seared the empty socket, burning a path of fire down the severed optic nerve and into the dark core of visual cortex. I accepted the pain as my truth and settled into an understanding that decision granted. I looked about, awed. The trees of the wood stirred, leaves whispering secrets, fingered branches etching questions across the gray slate of sky. Except for the presumptuous bird, I stood alone, perched a-top a circular, layered wedding cake iced slick and black with molten tar, each level known and named in the hollow eyes of waiting gargoyles. I knew this place and wept.
The raven flew, leaving me alone to find my way. Instinctively I sought the source, the foundation of all that was to follow. I descended layer by layer finally standing, both feet firmly planted on the base, the beginning.
The platter was flat, flat as the plains of central Texas, down-home familiar as the stands of live oak gathered beside the creek, the screaming locusts, prickly pears blooming pink and yellow, nestled amid swaths of bluebonnets reflecting the blue of an even bluer sky. Conestoga’s brimming the horizon, riding the waves of a rolling sea of prairie, following any sunset to somewhere better than Severy, Kansas. The Comanches hiding in the brush along the creek, puzzled and afraid of the strangely pale new people who had built their shelter too close to the spring, fouling its ancient waters. The wars. The arduous treks into Ft. Worth, livestock and children in tow, fleeing the “trepidations of the savages”.
* * *
There is Alma Reynolds, my Great-great-greatgrandmother, a young and pretty woman in spite of the Celtic freckles bridging her nose. She invited scandal by riding astride her handsome chestnut walker all the way from Tennessee, disdaining a softer wagon berth with the women and children. There too, is Great-great-grandfather, James Giles Reynolds dashing out of the tent, a temporary shelter for the U.S. Land Office, the precious homestead contract smoothly tucked into his vest. He jumps his roan with a whoop and a slap on the rump. He reins the horse toward camp, kicking it into a fierce gallop, beard flying, cheeks flushed pink, eager to celebrate his news. He is alive, real, like I am. Did he, too, awake in the middle of the road of his life? And if so, what did he see? It is subtle, this shift in sight, more a tasting than a seeing, a sensing of things not seen.
* * *
Centered on the platter, the cake’s largest bottom layer tells of the Texas farm country north of Ft. Worth, home to my parents. My mother, Mary Opal, was fifth of eight children born to Mary Frances Walker and George Washington Tyson, she a bearer of children, he a preacher, seller of Watkins Products and occasional farmer of a few played-out acres near Decatur. George believed in a God of retribution about whom he preached on a Sunday and whose vengeance he administered as the occasion arose. He applied the strop liberally, especially to his daughter’s supple flanks, most vehemently when they were visited with the curse, a promise of harlotry to come.
Mary Opal gazed out the kitchen door, past the well house, and watched a lazy chicken hawk circle the air rising in waves of heat over the calf pasture. She was supposed to be drying the dishes. She was always supposed to be doing something; never was there a time to think, to dream, and to wonder. As she wiped the plate she sang in a clear soprano,
“Somewhere the sun is shining,
Somewhere a songbird dwells.
Hush now my sad repining,
God lives and all is well.
Somewhere, somewhere,
Beautiful isle of somewhere……”
“Opa-a-al!” Mary Frances called, her voice drawing the name out and up, her eyes squinting at the newest row of stitches criss-crossing the taut patchwork. She straightened her shoulders, adjusting the angle of the quilting frame and reached for a new length of cotton. “Go and turn on the water for Dad’s new horse. He could die of this heat. Come on, Opal! Now! Do it right now! You hear?”
“Yes, Mama,” Mary Opal sighed and started outside, pitching the towel at the dish pan. She walked out onto the low covered porch where the morning’s milking cooled under wet cloths. Flies buzzed urgently, excited by the sweet, creamy smell. Out in the side yard she spied little G.W. digging for doodle bugs, stirring the concave cone of sand with a twig until the bug, goaded to exasperation, gave away his position by kicking up a tiny pouf of sand. The boy was five now, his birthday only just last week, and it occurred to her that he was old enough to do some work. “Jimmy”, she whispered, squatting down beside him to peek into the doodle-bug hole. “I want you to go water that horse. Just turn on the spigot. Wait ’til the trough is full up, and then turn it back off.”
“Naw,” he grunted. “I’m too little. Besides, Ma said for you to water ‘im.
“Aw come on, Jimmy, I’ll save you a whole spoonful when I make the cake for supper, an’ you git the bowl too. It’s gonna be lemon, your favorite. Go on now! You know you’re gettin’ to be a big boy!” She smiled, satisfied at evading a piece of work, watching as the boy hiked up his knickers and headed for the barn lot, kicking anthills along the way. But her smile changed to a rictus of terror as screams woke the sleepy farmstead. As Jimmie leaned through the fence reaching for the water valve, the horse sank his incisors deep into the boy’s chin, screaming and shaking his head. Blood mixed with foamy spittle flew in all directions.
Mary Frances came running, her raised skirts flying behind, outraged at the horse, at God for allowing bad things to happen to His people, and most of all at Mary Opal, for her disobedience. She scooped up the screaming child, blood pouring from his mangled chin, white bone visible through the torn flesh. She clutched him to her breast, choking as she spat out her words like a curse. “Opal, you are evil! Do you hear? Evil! The devil will punish you for this. It’s your fault!”
Mary Opal stopped breathing. Time stopped dead in its tracks. It must have resumed, for later she watched her father shoot the big horse square between the eyes as it stood panting, legs splayed out like a spindly colt, cords of foamy spit streaming from its mouth. The great head jerked from the bullet, its’ weight bowing the thick neck. The giant draft horse gave one massive shudder and fell as all four legs buckled as one. The beast groaned and lay on its’ side twitching. Mary Opal blanched as the wave of sound slammed her chest, the noise piercing her ears. “Go get my saw,” George snapped at C.J., his eldest, who had come running when he heard the commotion. Working together in a grim cooperation, the two men sawed off the head and wrapped it in burlap for the trip to Decatur, the grisly trophy necessary to determine if the horse was rabid.
Mary Opal prayed that God would take her to Heaven, knowing with dismal certainty that she could not live beyond this day. But God chose not to hear her prayer, no doubt because of her evil ways, and she lived to witness little G.W.’s pain as he was taken again and again to the city for rabies shots, his belly swollen, red, angry with the repeated sticks from the great needles, the life-saving serum heavy and thick. She listened as her father described her disobedience from the place of his power, high in the pulpit. After the service, she read the condemnation of family and neighbors in their quickly averted eyes. She imagined her soul rising like strands of morning mist into the loving arms of a forgiving Jesus. Many years later she would know the love of a real flesh and blood man but lose him to a world larger than her understanding.
* * *
My father’s parents lived on a farm, 340 acres west of Ft. Worth near the town of Azle, a parcel of the land originally homesteaded by James Giles Reynolds and successfully defended against the territorial imperative of the Comanches. Minnie Mae Reynolds and Harold Allen Densmore Martin lived quiet balanced lives in an added-onto log house built along lower Ash creek, a hundred yards or so south of a spring that was reputed never to go dry. Minnie loved the weight of history tying the heavily chinked log portion of the house to the land, this very land that was her home.
Harry, a secondary school diplomate, finish carpenter, and gentleman farmer, loved the smell of progress and hankered to go to California where his brother had migrated, sending back tales of endless summers and universal abundance. But Minnie Mae dug in her shapely heels and refused even to discuss leaving this place where she belonged. Harry savored vicariously his son’s adventures, details gleaned from occasional letters and even more occasional telephone communication.
Kelsey, a quiet sensitive boy turned man, had earned a name for himself as Azle’s home-grown genius. He enjoyed drawing and painting, sang baritone and played the pianoforte. He wrote poetry to acknowledge the feelings a man must never directly express and put great store by things spiritual. His plan was to become a Methodist minister, but he showed such aptitude for mathematics, along with an uncanny mechanical and electrical creativity, that he was eventually lured into the defense industry as part of Raytheon’s piece of the Manhattan Project. He invented the actuation mechanism for the Hiroshima bomb that assured it would explode at the precise elevation for maximum kill, but he refused to discuss it no matter who was doing the asking.
His marriage to my mother, Mary, was part of a religious and romantic world view that faded after his involvement in the war effort. Mary, sensing his emotional withdrawal, and forced to accept his very physical desertion, shattered into pieces of herself. Kelsey, ever non-confrontational, quietly departed, abandoning me, his own beloved daughter, to her care.
Daddy was fond of his children, both me and the half-siblings that followed. His gentle acceptance, after he came back into my life when I was fifteen, helped me to heal from my mother’s abuse and his own desertion. I began the long hard job, still underway, of discovering myself as a viable human.
* * *
The second layer of the cake, kaleidoscopic glimpses of my own beginnings, saw me born to ride the crazy roller-coaster of my mother’s moods, her fellow traveler on the rails of her shrieking mania and mewling depression. The only constant was drama, as she threw herself with vigor into any and all projects, withdrawing with an opposite but equal intensity when her inner ballast shifted.
She organized the Glad Girls Glee Club, directing and accompanying a singing group of young neighborhood girls in performances around Ft. Worth. The little ladies sang wearing long dresses, pearls and white gloves, me tagging along, passed from lap to lap, pumped up with my notoriety as mascot. She planned and executed complex multi-media projects for my entertainment and edification, for example, photographing my hoard of dolls, each one named and mentioned ekphrastically in a poem to accompany the picture. She memorialized many of my life passages in verse,
“I have a dear, dear teacher,
Who means so much to me,
And what I’ll do without her
Is more than I can see.
I want to go to second grade,
For it’s the proper thing to do,
But teachers like Miss. Chater,
I know there are but few.
And so, My dear Miss. Chater,
I know that we must part,
But please be sure to know,
You’ll be always in my heart.”
Mother taught me to love music, to sing before an audience, to earn my place at the center of any and all attention. On Halloween, stalking the neighborhood for treats, she taught me to recite,
Hello! Hello!
I’m out to have some fun,
But never fear,
I’m here to cheer.
There’ll be no destruction.
That bagged me more than my share of goodies. Even more important, from her I learned to enter the fantastic realities found in books and to express the music of my heart in poetry. She carefully listened to and recorded my first poem, composed during my fourth year. She accorded it a literary significance that I readily accepted as its’ due.
I will build little bird nests.
I will build a lot of them.
Little birds will find them.
Little birds will like them
Little birds will live in them.
During the summer that I was nine, my dad left us. It was a time when a heavy paranoia seemed to overlay her more typical affect. I wrote a poem for her, an attempt to reassure her, and maybe myself as well, that I could make things better. She had good reason to be behaving strangely: Daddy had disappeared. Bank accounts were cleaned out. A fire had destroyed all of our stored basement “treasure”, and we were preparing to be evicted.
I’m a little sunbeam
Not so very tall.
I want to make you happy
Which is not hard at all.
Just mind you and respect you
Each minute of the day
And I will make you happy
With everything I say.
For I love you and I trust you
And I know that you love me,
And I will make you happy.
You just wait and see!
It was in the autumn of that dreadful year, that my father had left my mother and me, but he appeared at our door on Christmas Eve. He was dragging an enormous fir tree behind him, much taller than our ceiling. Mother cracked opened the door, refusing to let him in, her voice breaking as she hissed, “How could you be so stupid? That tree won’t fit in here! Take it away!”
“But it’s for Dottie. She’s got to have a tree for Christmas,” he pleaded.
“I don’t care who it’s for!” she shrieked, now past caring if the neighbors should hear. “You don’t love Dottie or you wouldn’t have left us here with no food or money. Go away! I don’t ever want to see you again!”
My father shrank, jaws clenched, tears plying salty rivulets down his cheeks. Then he bent and broke off a branch, handing it to my mother. “Please take this for her,” he said and turned away, dragging the once perfect tree down the front steps and out of my Christmastide.
Mother and I watched him drive away, quietly falling snowflakes softening the glow of the Packard’s receding tail-lights until they were no more. She pressed the branch into an urn and positioned it with a cruel irony where our holiday tree had in past years stood resplendent. I kneeled and stroked the pathetic, solitary branch, hugging it to my chest, and sobbing. Mother left me to my grief, but of course she borrowed it for a poem:
“In her arms she held the sprig of green
As though calla lily rare
Embraced in love and mourned in loss
Her heart knew much to bear.”
I felt icy fingers of resentment slip into my mind to ask what I didn’t dare formulate as words, “Why can’t I have privacy for my grief? It is, after all, mine and not yours.” But I quickly disclaimed the ugly concepts, choosing others more dutiful with which to feel a proper gratitude for the poem. Passing years taught me that my mother, too, had her very own grief to bear. I missed my father terribly but was glad that he was safely removed from our pain.
One night Mommy had roughly awakened me and dragged me into the bathroom where Daddy was seated, tugging groggily at his lowered pajama bottoms, attempting to cover himself. He, too, was sleepy but was evidently sick as well. “I want you to know just how bad your father smells,” Mommy spoke, jaw tense, her face blotched with anger. “Smell him! He’s sickening! He makes me want to vomit!” I was embarrassed for him, and was shamed by my mother’s deficiency of grace, a concept for which I had no verbiage, but a completely adequate vocabulary of feelings.
The end of this period is marked by my mother’s hospitalization which followed an eventful period of paranoia, during which she flushed down the toilet many casseroles donated by concerned neighbors. She feared the gifts were poisoned. A welder, attempting to remove a no-longer-utilized oil tank from our basement, started a fire that destroyed all the precious plunder stored there. Mommy decided that it was the will of God to punish our sins because she saw “plain as day” the word “Will” etched in soot on the basement door. My Aunt Judy was sent for. She rescued me, and I was saved. Driving cross country from Boston to Dallas with Judy and her husband, Wesson, I was overwhelmed by an intense optimism. When Judy lamented the death of a still-glowing lightning bug that had splatted our speeding windshield, I quipped, “Well, at least he died with his light on!”
* * *
The cake’s next layer harbored the confusion of my sojourn in the home of my Aunt Judy, whom I adored, and Wesson, her fat, cigar chewing, and aggressively unfriendly husband. Judy, a beautiful, statuesque, and successful purveyor of upscale ladies ready-to-wear, provided a luxurious standard of living for herself, for Wesson and for me, while Wesson dabbled at various sales and blue-collar jobs. He immediately pegged me as dangerous, noting the seriousness with which Judy undertook her task as guardian ad litem. Forgetting that children grow vigorously, that first season she bought thirty-two Bobbie Brooks blouses for me while attending a trade show. She seemed to be delighted by this opportunity finally to have a child, even one not of her own blood and belly.
Wesson was a horse’s derrière of a different color. He was clever to never accost me when Aunt Judy could hear. “You think you’re something special, Little Miss Priss,” he would sneer. “Mommy’s sweet little thing! Your crazy mother is the only one who thinks you’re worth anything.” Of course I hated him. This was a new uncomplicated kind of hate. It was sweet to taste its purity, unlike the bittersweet complexity of the love/hate I felt for my mother. Wesson arose early, and disdaining the civility of robe or dressing gown, he swaggered fatly in his boxer shorts, his long, soft, pink thing flapping below. I saw him, and he knew I saw him, so expose himself to me, a repeated act at once lascivious and aggressive. Whenever, at my request, Aunt Judy prompted him to adjust his pants, he feigned a shocked surprise, modesty affronted that I should have noticed.
Wesson enjoyed manipulating me to do things that inspired terror. Once each year at the Texas State Fair I was required to ride the big roller coaster, always in the lead car, wedged in between Judy and the press of Wesson’s sweaty bulk. “You have to ride it just one time,” he crowed. “It’s good for you. Keeps you from being a namby-pamby. Come on. Let’s get it over with.” And afterward, “Now was that so bad? You should listen to your old Uncle Wesson!” He insisted that I climb the giant pecan tree, whose luxuriant limbs shaded our backyard. He cut and installed wooden rungs to provide purchase for my slippery tennis shoes on the featureless lower trunk.
Victory over the tree won for me a new confidence, and I climbed it often until I was permanently grounded due to the onset of my menses. At the first sight of blood, Judy declared me a woman, bought me a training bra and instructed Wesson to stop trying to make me into a tomboy. That was his cue to begin dropping suggestive references to my tentatively burgeoning breasts. I cringed, slumped, hugged my books, and walked lightly, a parody of the invisible.
Succumbing to Wesson’s nagging, Judy several times put me on an airplane, destination pinned to my blouse, and sent me and my suitcase to live with my mother in her Boston rooming house. The experiment always ended badly, local authorities indignant, and I was returned to the comfort and relative security of Judy’s Dallas home, not a bad arrangement if I could steer clear of Dear Uncle Wesson.
* * *
The next layer of the cake is Aunt Judy’s debilitating illness and my chagrin at being sent away to boarding school, resentful that my exile spelled victory for Wesson. It was a private Catholic school where, now thirteen and exhibiting a penchant for questioning authority, I was sure to encounter corrective discipline. But at St. Joseph’s Academy I found only a firm constancy quickly recognized as love.
The nuns, identical black and white starched penguins, patiently endured my exchange of salt and sugar in their private refectory, and affected a studied silence when I unrolled the toilet tissue from Mother Superior’s lavatory, down the hall and through the high school classrooms. They even withheld comment on my dragging the bubble gum machine from its place in the courtyard and installing it in the nun’s chapel between the altar and the votive light dispenser. I finally ran out of energy for pranks and settled into a pleasant and well-ordered life as boarding school student.
The nuns became individual friends and mentors, their own distinct personalities overcoming the anonymity of the veil. I especially loved my seventh grade teacher, Sister Rose Marie, doing my very best to please her. She commented favorably on my advanced vocabulary, so I bought a pocket notebook in which to record new and even more resplendent words to be used conspicuously at every opportunity. She was a favorite of many of the students. At recess we clustered about her like puppies, vying for a place beside her on the big double swing glider.
One beautiful spring morning, happily occupying one of the favored spots on either side of her, I hugged her deliciously fat arm, burrowing my face into its warmth, as we all rocked and sang. Suddenly she jumped up, shook her arm free and barked, “Leave me alone! Let go of me!” She ran sobbing into the building, long black veil riding the turbulence of her wake.
I was mortally embarrassed, sure I must have done some heinous thing to have so upset her. I hid the rest of the day in the attic of the convent, my refuge discovered finally by Mother Superior. “Don’t be afraid, my dear, ” she cooed, proffering her smile, which never failed to light up her wrinkled face. “I’m so glad to have found you. We have looked simply everywhere. Sister told me what happened, and it wasn’t your fault. Sister Rose Marie was just feeling sad because she will never be able to have a daughter of her own. She does love you, you know.”
I wept then, both sad and happy, for Sister Rose Marie’s loneliness, and for the gift of Mother Superior’s kindness. I observed the world to be a fearsome place, tenderness rare and exceeding precious. Mother Superior took my hand, gave it a squeeze, and retracing her steps through the shadowy, spider web draped loft, she led me out to join the others.
* * *
The layers piled upward, each level a repository of feelings disavowed, dumb struck orphans of the heart. One guards the anguish of my too-young first marriage, ending in the cold finality of divorce. One treasures the life of my small daughter cut short on a West Virginia byway. Another celebrates the rough beauty of my three sons and the relationships that gave them life, the kind and gentle stand-in fathers who guided them to a validation of themselves as men. Still another traces my career as student and later as engineer in aerospace, self consciously echoing the perceived accomplishments of father, a pathetic redundancy, the hollow victory of his goals achieved yet once again.
* * *
Piled still higher, a lovely light-filled layer chronicles Fahrenheit 451, my bookstore, coffeehouse, and arts forum, as I begin finally to chart the course of my own life in a career inspired of my own passion. I listened to my heart, making mistakes and suffering in consequence, but satisfied that they were my failures, compost for the garden of my own soul.
* * *
On top of the cake once again, this time seeing consciously the choices made, acknowledging all of the feelings, the lovely and the shameful, embracing the poignant humanity of those hated as well as those loved, I savor peace.
Now a shadow crosses my sight, portending the raven’s return. Excited, he climbs and dives, climbs and dives, swooping again and again across my gaze, thwacking my head with his pinions at every pass. “Look!” His scream slices the air. “Look! Look!”
I look, and the world I view is lit by rainbow light. The sky is the endless blue of bluebonnet meadows and my baby’s eyes. Once murky meadows glow, sunlight dappling the gentle greens of springtime’s past and springtime’s yet to come. The cake, no longer iced with tar, titters with the laughter of a million remembered birthday’s, its crystal icing glowing pink and green and white and yellow, sugary rose-buds sparkling in every hue, nestled sweetly where before were only gargoyle glares following me with empty eyes.
The metaphor is now complete. I stand where I belong, at the apex of the tel my living has laid down, its strata a toast and testament “To Life!” I am the bride! Like Dante, I stand alone, yet not alone, at the top of this mythic wedding cake in the middle of the road of my life. My groom, that part of self I had denied, stands at my side. Hands of friendship, real and strong, reach for me, and I reach back.
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