When the Roses Bloom

When the Roses Bloom

“And your heart need not be sighing,
If I be among the dying,
I’ll be with you when the roses bloom again.”
-Cobb and Edwards, c.1901


She was born of cotton and tobacco. Her earliest memory was of her father and uncles shimmying up skyscraper trees and dancing amongst the branches to cause a hail of pecans. The girl’s mother and grandmother would give the children old paper bags and send them to pick up the scattered nuts. The grandmother would lead the children in songs, lusty renditions of “Dixieland” and “The Old Kentucky Fair.” The girl’s fingers became dusty and smelled of earth. And she knew where she came from.
In the fall the children picked the vegetables and herbs. And the grandmother took the lead of a different tune, “Gonna jump down turn around pick a bale of cotton, gonna jump down turn around pick a bale a day.” And like stairs the little ones would pick up where her voice died, “Oh lordy pick a bale of cotton, oh lordy pick a bale a day.” And the girl thought this the best of all.
Being the smallest the girl was often left behind. While the other cousins rode their bikes to Bennetsville or Clio, the little girl sat alone in the greatmother’s rocking chair. To amuse her, the grandmother would give her old books, which smelled like lavender and bore the marks of her father’s youth. When she tired of the books the grandmother would show her wonderful things. She learned to make a baseball by winding gummed thread around a pecan. In the warm kitchen, where tinfoil was washed and carefully folded for reuse, she learned to bake bread. She found the risen dough to be like warm resistant flesh. She kneaded it the way she rubbed her grandmother’s arthritic fingers.
There were trees that grew in the swept yard and bore purple flowers and long, fuzzy green pea pods. In the grandmothers skillful hands these pods became toys. Split in half with a sharp thumbnail, a matchstick for a mast, a bit of newspaper for a sail and they became seaworthy boats. As there was no sea in this red clay farmland the girl sailed them in the mineral springs. In the girl’s opinion, the mineral springs were proof that this was the kingdom of heaven. Even at four the girl knew that the springs pumped life into the tiny town of Bleden. Sixty of the town’s one hundred and twelve residents worked in the Bleden Ginger Ale Bottling Factory. The little girl would push the scuppernongs aside and peer through the grimy windows. The men glowed in the light of the melting sand and were reflected in the new glass. When it came time to drink the searing, spicy ale as a remedy for cold and flu, the girl could not do it. To her it tasted like the blood and sweat of farm boys pulled from the land by the industrial age.
As years passed the girl grew strong and brown in the ripe sun. She was responsible now. She and the grandmother would sit in peeling chairs on the porch and snap peas into dented silver bowls. And the grandmother would tell the girl stories of her youth, courtship and marriage. The girl learned how the family survived the civil war, the Depression and the spread of urbanity. She learned and remembered; knowing without being told that this was important.
The girl fell in love with the old cemetery. It had grown on the tops of two hills, a tangle of rain worn gravestones and fading arrangements. The same names repeated over, generations of families all slept together shaded by the Spanish moss. The grandmother sat with the girl and told her about all of these resting relatives who were a part of her. Roses grew on every grave, planted by the grandmother. There were red roses for her true love and white roses of remembrance for her father and the others. The grandmother said that the roses reminded her that she had roots. When she saw them bloom she knew that her family was with her. The grandmother looked about the old graves and finally focused on the girl.
“Little one, this graveyard is almost full. There is just enough room for the Greatmother and I to lie with our husbands and fathers. You cannot come here for your final rest.”
And the girl learned what it was to feel alone.
“But as long as you remember who you are and remember the roses you will never be alone.”
The owners of the Bleden Ginger Ale Company built a bright, shiny new factory in Bennetsville. They decided it would be easier to ship water than laborers. The girl hid behind the kudzu and watched the closings. The sound of the key in the padlock rang like the church bells that tolled for funerals. The town would be a ghost within two years.
The girl’s father earned a college degree. He packed his wife and only child into a Chevy colored with rust and left for the capital. They bought a nice house that looked like every other house on the street. The small, square yard was bare. The girl’s mother told her that she could no longer run about wherever. This was the city; there were dangers other than snakes and foxes here.
At 70 the grandmother had lived enough. She went to sleep in the bed she was born in and never woke. The girl thought it fitting that she died when the roses were in bloom. At the funeral none of the gathered kith or kin could look at her. She wore the pain of every bereaved women or child to ever continue living on a small pale face. The little girl wished that she could die. She felt that a good and beautiful part of her heart did die. The roots were cut off. She was alone.
Six months later a brother was born. The girl loved him fiercely. His eyes were the color of the furrows between cotton plants and she almost heard the grandmother in his rattling laugh. Her loneliness was both soothed and increased. The boy was a part of her; she was no longer the only child. But the grandmother had never seen the new child, never had a chance to sing with this small life and teach him where he belonged. This child would not run barefoot through a freshly plowed field or learn to search the cool underbrush for wild strawberries. For him there were no acrobatics in the pecan trees, only cold metal jungle gyms in dusty vacant lots.
In the uniform halls of the public schools she learned shame. Whistling “Dixie” and bringing biscuits for lunch made one “country.” The girl could not understand. In her world being country folk meant you rose early, worked hard and loved the land. In the city world it was a synonym for white trash. So she carried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Doritos, she learned to sing Pearl Jam songs and traded in her boots for a pair of black dress shoes. She pushed everything that was her to the back and became someone else. Later in school she would learn words like bucolic and pastoral. She never thought to apply these words to her former life.
The little girl became a woman. She left for college in the steel jaws of New York City. As one of the two southerners she received the instantly identifying nickname of Carolina. The other southerner was dubbed Kentucky. Her shame grew and she buffed at her smooth drawl until it dwindled to nothingness. All traces of a hick upbringing were hidden under nice clothes and hip sensibilities. She only visited at Christmas and she did not return to the woods or fields. The woman shuttled from the subway, to class and the bare room she called home. These streaked, drab streets were not where she belonged. But she had been sent into exile from the red clay land of her birth. She belonged nowhere.
When the call came she was not surprised. The Greatmother had out-lived all of her siblings and children. The woman had a twinge of nostalgia, but it was distant and far away, like a dream faded by sunlight. She flew home and was wedged into the car with her family and three heavy glass casserole dishes of macaroni and cheese, the southern remedy for illness, death and “troubles.”
They milled about the church, mingling in the cloying scent of death flowers and old lady talcum powder. The woman saw these faces, men and women, she had loved in her youth, and they were only faces now. She saw her Aunts Sissy and Gladys moving towards her. Aunt Sissy was not a real aunt, but an old family friend. She was an old woman with a face like a knife, all planes and angles. She was one of those people who are always speaking of nooses in houses where people have hung themselves. Sissy loved to pull out people’s misery and try it on like a comfortable old housedress. Aunt Sissy stood in front of the girl and studied her.
“Little one, Lord how you’ve grown.” Her face shifted as she searched for the quick and the kill. “The last time I saw you was at your grandmother’s funeral. Lord, that was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. You cried as though your little heart would break. You looked so alone, like you’d lost all of the love you’d ever hoped to have. It isn’t good to hold so to earthly things, they all end and we have to accept it.”
The woman became a girl again. She forgot her new found sophistication, her shame and how cool she had become. The girl only knew that she pined for the love without reservation that had once been hers. The pain she kept bottled somewhere in her stomach popped the cork and bubbled up, tinged sharp with anger.
“What would you know about true love you old harpy? You like other people’s misery so much, taste some of your own. Does it bother you to know that no one will cry like that when you pass?”
The woman who was still a girl turned on her expensive New York shoes and fled the den of death. The brother was the only one to follow and the only one she would let close. He found her sitting on the trunk of the car. She was staring out at the sand hills and scrub pine that only a Carolinian could find beauty in. The little boy climbed up next to her and snuggled in.
He spoke quietly, with wisdom beyond his years, “Did you love her very much? Did you have fun? What did you do together? Was it nice living here?”
His sister turned towards him with such passion in her eyes that he feared she would scream again. “Come with me. I’ll show you.”
They linked hands and the sister led him quickly away from the old church. She saw her father standing in the doorway, watching the son who looked like his mother and the daughter who loved her dart from the dirt road. They disappeared into the woods. The woman led the little boy to the mineral springs. She showed him how to make boats from pea pods and baseballs from pecans. The boy learned how to find ripe scuppernongs and glean one sweet, glistening drop from a jasmine flower. They shed their tight shoes and dressy jackets and romped through creeks. As the day began to die he followed her to the old graveyard. They sat down close to the heap of clean earth on the Greatmother’s new grave. The sister told the brother how the family had survived the Civil War because the evil General Tecumseh Sherman had not considered the little town worth the bother. And how the great-grandfather would bring the old brown radio onto the front porch so that the black sharecroppers could listen to Joe Lewis box. He learned that he had his grandmother’s eyes and laugh, and that he inherited his gift for mimicry from his Great-Uncle Sonny. The boy listened and remembered, he knew without being told that this was important.
She taught him the old songs, which he belted with great spirit if not skill. As he lay with his head pillowed on her knee she told him about the roses and they made a promise to each other. While the boy slept she looked at her grandmother’s grave. The little slip of a white rose she had planted so long ago had grown tall with deep roots. It bore two flowers. One a half-opened bud, the other had just that day become a full blossom. She bent close to her brother’s brown head and whispered, “Your name is Michael Allen Fore. You carry the names of two grandfathers’; you are the grandson of Louise Marie Fore, the only son of John and Elizabeth Fore. This is the land your family grew from.” She paused a moment and listened to the evening song of the birds.
She whispered as if to the wind, for she knew they would hear her, “My name is Louise Lee Fore. I was named for a grandfather and a grandmother. I have loved this land and I know why the roses bloom.”
And she began to sing; “I wish I was in the land of cotton, where the past is not forgotten…” She knew that one-day a slip would be taken from her grandmother’s rose bush and placed above her. And she too would bear white roses.