Portrait of My Mother

by ROLLO WALTER BROWN

1

STRANGELY I did not come to know the quality of my mother until I was a great overgrown boy larger than most men. She and my father were out of the same world — the world of vanishing forests — and he was austere, and I was “mother’s boy”; yet early I knew him better. There was in him a pronounced trace of the poet that a child was sure to appreciate on sight. My mother was the battler of the two, the one who accepted life where she was and settled down to the unpoetic business of making ends meet. Anyone was in danger of assuming — as I did at first — that her endless concern with everyday matters indicated content with everyday satisfactions. And that was to misunderstand her entire life.

She spent her early childhood — at the very middle of the nineteenth century—in a clearing that overlooked a modest rapids in an Ohio hill river when the sight of people moving westward, always moving westward, was something to be expected every day. She was the eldest child in a family of an even dozen — every one of whom lived to be old.

All this army of brothers and sisters except one were born before my mother was married, and of the first nine only one was a boy. The mother of all these looked upon a household as something vital and florid right out of the magnificence of a stirring cosmos. There was something of freedom and expansiveness even in the names she gave them. When everybody round about was naming children Isaiah, Ebenezer, Rebecca, or Leah, she named hers Roselba (my mother), Sylvester Byron, Lucinda, Elizabeth Alverta, Cora Ellen. Her family was a tribe pushing up into full life. It called for the ministrations of more than one mother, and the eldest daughter became a kind of associate mother entrusted with keeping track of as many as possible.

Something of this long childhood experience of being always entrusted with life, of being always thoughtful about someone other than herself, was in everything she later did in her own household. She had three sons. Out of the depths of her dark eyes — that with her cheerful countenance made her a woman of unpretentious beauty — she expressed her constant preoccupation with giving these sons more of a push into the world than she herself had known.

It was not easy. For she had become a bride in the devastating years of President Grant’s administration when the country seemed to be in the numbness of final death. Everybody needed the fruit jars, milk crocks, and butter jars that her husband turned in his bluebird potshop, but nobody possessed money.

And if the general atmosphere was dispiriting, the specific little world in which she put in her days could scarcely be regarded as a luxurious center of life. The log house in which she lived for many years had a great fireplace in which either coal or wood could be burned, a wide flagstone hearth, an oak floor of boards of enormous width covered with a rag carpet woven at a neighbor’s house, side walls covered with flowered paper that went in and out in waves over the logs to the wide border of flowers of deeper color at the top, and a ceiling of neatly hewn whitewashed beams and whitewashed rough boards — the under side of the upstairs floor.

Beside a bright blue batten door that led to the kitchen was a shelf on which a Waterbury clock announced the hours with whirring bangs, and the seconds with ticktocks that could be heard upstairs through the cracks. And opposite the fireplace by a window where the sun shone in, there was a triangular flower stand that rose in terraced shelves to make a kind of half-pyramid four or five feet high of fuchsias and bleeding heart and geraniums and begonias and night-blooming cereus and ferns and other plants grown for their foliage alone.

In this world she moved energetically and always with an awareness that said, “Of course, we are hoping for something better.” Her young life had been nourished on the stories of neighbor boys who had marched away and done great things on the battlefield, and she saw no reason why a woman might not proceed as if there were still important concerns to be occupied with. Occasionally she did one thing that gave her a look of importance in my eyes: she took her place in a sidesaddle decorated with red and tan needlepoint — or something of the sort — high on a somewhat angular horse, and with a long loose riding-skirt covering even the toe of her one foot that was in the stirrup, rode away to a meeting of some kind. My notions of great personages came from the Bible, or the pictures in the back of it, and when I saw her high on the tall horse I always thought of some beautiful queen on a camel.

2

SINCE her sons were going to be living where there would be persons of gentility, she thought they ought to be well grounded in essentials. If one of them slammed a door, or let it slam, he went immediately back and opened it and then closed it appropriately. When a son was ready to go to a neighbor’s house to carry a message, he had to repeat to his mother what he was going to say when he got there. And when he returned he did not report approximately what the neighbor said, but gave it precisely, and in the neighbor’s exact words — an experience that was almost more than the equivalent of a college education.

Where she got her understandings of how people in other and greater places surely must act, I was never able to learn. But she said she wanted her sons to have “behavior” that would stand them in good stead anywhere, and on the assumption that she knew something of what that would be, she proceeded. She had a backlog in etiquette that if we thought enough about other people, we’d probably do about the right thing ourselves.

We bounced up from our chairs when older people came into the room, and begged them to sit. We spoke with respectfulness to every adult human being. And we were expected to appear in clean clothes and with what she called “becomingness” when we went where other people were assembled. When we were in our Sunday best and there had been heavy summer rains that had left the hill and hollow roads gutters and loblolly, she insisted that we pick our way along the roadside so that our shoes would not be all mud when we reached the church. Although I hit upon the less genteel way of carrying my shoes and socks and enjoying the elemental feel of the soft mud squashing up between my toes, and then washing my feet in the cool water below a spring within sight of the church, putting on my shoes, and appearing as mudless as if I had walked all the way on Fifth Avenue, I did accept her principle of making as decent an appearance as circumstances would allow.

Nor would she permit waste. When school might be had for the going, it was unpardonable to miss a day unnecessarily. Clothes were to be worn with care for their natural life. And food was to be eaten. If we did not eat all that was in our dinner buckets at school, we carried the scraps home for the dog or the chickens. It was a depravity not to be thought of to throw away the tiniest morsel of bread. And of course nobody had to be cautioned about throwing away cake.

We heard her admonitions, saw the reasonableness of them, and usually accepted them without so much as a question. But there was one that I could never accept even in the abstract. Since I was much younger than my two brothers, I required special cautioning. She told me not to fight. To pick trouble, she said, was very low-grade. But I could never see why these two were always mentioned together. I never picked trouble; but I had to fight. In the oncoming world of Coal in which I was obliged to operate, either a boy fought or he did not survive.

When a blustering ruffian of my own years hurried ahead to a level spot, turned to block my way, and said, “Here’s where we find out whether I’m good, or you,” there was such a healthy satisfaction in bloodying his nose, knocking him down, and sitting astride him and cuffing him with energy until he begged for mercy, that I always had to go through with it. “I hear you were in a fight again,” she would say, looking at me with penetrable sternness out of her dark brown eyes; and I would answer, “But I didn’t start it.” And there the matter would rest.

From somewhere she had gained the sure belief, too, that people’s lives should include music. A piano was out of the question, but an organ was not. She succeeded well enough with my two brothers. Eventually they played two or three different instruments in public, and one of them directed a stirring military band in college. For seventeen weeks the same teacher who had taught them struggled with me, and my mother daily released me from all other duties for a time in order that I might practice. Eventually she heard me floundering through the easy parts of “The Beautiful Blue Danube Waltzes” with long clumsy fingers — while the birds sang alluringly everywhere outside, or the Plymouth Rock and Brown Leghorn roosters met at their boundary line within full view of where I labored, and waged one of the decisive battles of the world. I worked conscientiously, but rebelliously.

I never knew where my mother learned of my true state of mind, for I was careful not to tell her. But one day when I had poison ivy on the back of my neck and she was bathing it in cool water and sugar of lead she said, “Son, you don’t have to take the organ lessons if you don’t want to.” I was so overjoyed that I generously volunteered to take up the fife instead. With the money for three organ lessons, I could get a fife in rosewood.

The whole of her sense of entrustment was revealed when she sat in the crackling midwinter firelight. The light spread out and upward from the fireplace and made the beams and ceiling boards very white over her head, and touched the great semi-pyramid of blooming flowers behind her with brightness out of a spring dawn. While she sat erect and contemplative, everybody—including my father, who at other times seemed more or less her equal — shrank into subordination.

She could never remain inactive long, and while my father sat with his page twisted round to catch the light and read with great concentration, and the others of us cracked nuts or popped corn or hung apples from the enormous hewn log that supported the chimney above the fireplace so that they would come down just close enough to sizzle and roast without burning — or burning the string—she knitted away at a mitten or crocheted a shawl or did other “easy” work that she left for evenings. But there in the firelight, even while she worked, she was the custodian and guarantor of life — there in a room where most things were either her blood or her handiwork.

3

JUST as sure, too, as her feeling of entrustment was her sense of practical adequacy. Her world was not a world of gadgets; there was little “to do with.” But a part of the business of being intelligent, she supposed, was to make much of little. When she and her father-in-law philosophized together, she always approved his remark that the true pioneer could go into the woods with an axe, horse, and a plow shovel, and proceed to the growing of a crop and the establishment of a farm. She thought a woman likewise should be resourceful.

So she made any garment worn by a man or a woman — including a man’s cap and a woman’s hat. She knitted or crocheted mittens, mufflers, socks and stockings, shawls, wristlets, fascinators, ear-muffs, and lace of amazing beauty. She made, too, all kinds of woven or hooked or plaited rugs, quilts of the most complicated design and recurrences of color, crazy-quilts of ingenious variations in fancy stitching, stand covers, table covers. When a boy needed a suit of clothes, she carefully studied an old suit and then made the new one. Her aptitude seemed most startling, though, when she saw casually at church a new style of hood which she liked, and went home and proceeded to make one.

In addition to the everyday cooking done in a household, she made all sorts of jellies of the clearest colors and the most trembling consistency, grape marmalade, blackberry and raspberry jam, strawberry preserve, peach butter, the special Ohio kind of apple butter, melting yellow cakes with deep icing, mincemeat of her own proportioning that all the neighbors bought ravenously from her as long as she would sell, butter with such a distinct tastiness that an important industrialist who had known her when he was a boy had her — through some arrangement that he was able to make—provide him with a pound every week until she was eightyfive years old. But the dish which she herself professed greatest pride in was a strangely pungent pie made of green tomatoes and half-ripened grapes, and spices, including nutmeg.

Her day began at four-thirty in the morning, summer and winter, and ended whenever there was a stopping place in her work. Yet she never worked at anything as if it were the only thing she had in mind. She would pick up a volume from the table when she was tidying the living room, see something that interested her, drop into a chair, read the shortest possible section that would enable her to understand, and then go on with her work. But there was a cheeriness in her face which told that something out of the book had contributed to the encompassing enterprise of her life.

After she had taken a nap on a couch at noon —and there was no noise—she would sit up with startling suddenness and move off vivaciously into her work as if the nap had only given her a little clearer view of what she must always be about. She was quick-tempered, but always after the flash of hotness over the immediately vexing matter, she seemed more than ever a contemplative person occupied with inclusive concerns.

In her capacity to hurry and to think at the same time she equaled any commanding general. If a family came just at mealtime, she revealed a kind of magical dexterity in bringing a meal together for extra people in the twinkling of an eye. Nor was she flustered by people who were supposed to be important. A Governor of Ohio walked through the mud before daylight one morning to see her. He was a big boyish person who knew country life and country people, and was known to her somewhat through her sons. He went to the back door in the foggy half-light, and when she answered his knock he asked her if it would be possible for a hungry man to get a handout of some kind. “I guess it will,” she replied; “so come on in.” And then as he stood like a giant chuckling affectionately over her she added, “But for a half cent I’d box your ears for coming to the back door.” Whereupon he became for the rest of his life a kind of fourth son in his devotion to her.

4

SINCE I was the youngest I was in time much in her immediate world after my brothers had more or less left it. It was then that I began to see the importance of the contemplative and less obvious side of her life. In solitude she considered the place that such a humble life as hers held in the world. The best she could do was to send emissaries out. That was what she had been busy doing. She said little, but sometimes she said enough to reveal her true intent. In a letter that through all the years escaped destruction she once wrote, “Now it affords me great pleasure to deny myself for my sons.”

And once when we were alone and I had fallen full length and had struck my head with a terrific jolt and she thought I was at the end of my life, though I was only dazed, I heard her say, when she thought she spoke alone to the Infinite out of her heartbreak, what she thought of me, and of my brothers, and of the purpose of living.

But when the emissaries had gone, here she would be still — probably, for she as well as my father was of a tough breed. She would have to know how to live in solitude. And it was her adequacy in solitude that became more and more noticeable. It was in her manner while she worked; it was in her face when she reflected; it was in her eyes when she turned to you with a look that seemed to come from the experience of a thousand centuries.

I first noticed this depth from which she looked when we one morning picked berries together in the late dewiness down by the deep woods below the locust thicket where the sun scarcely entered. We had filled one large bucket and I took it to the house to empty it. When I returned, the birds were singing in every treetop, the crows scolded in the locusts, and two great turkey buzzards sat on the leaning steeple of a white oak so near that I could study their bare red vulture heads. My mother stood obliviously with one arm outstretched to a briar bending with berries, intent in reflection. Suddenly I was seized by a strange conviction that I had never seen her before; that she was a woman out of the Bible; that she was neither young nor old, but only representative and timeless. But when she saw me there in the edge of the walnuttree shade, and asked me what time it was up at the house, we were both back where obviously we belonged.

There was nothing morbid in her solitude. It was only that she did not always feel sure of herself in the noisiness of big gatherings, and she did feel sure of herself when she could work things out alone. In consequence, she let her husband represent her more and more at gatherings, until in the end she quit going altogether. She had to write at least three letters every Sunday, anyhow. Thus it came logically that for twenty-one years in her late life she was never off the Ridge where she lived.

In these years she developed a great serenity. She was a part of something expressed everywhere about her. She would stop when she walked, look about in content at the clouds, and the wind in the trees, and the sun on the hillsides, and then stand contemplatively for minutes. She would put her hand against the stout trunk of a pushing young shellbark hickory, look at it as if she and the tree were on very good terms, and then walk on without a word.

She became, too, without any noticeable effort on her part, a special friend of creatures-a custodian of good relations between them and the representatives of mankind round about. Cows thrust their heads through the bars to have her — and no one else — soothingly rub their faces. When she started on one of her afternoon or Sunday morning walks out to the woods pasture, where there was a long vista through the hills, her hens would come running, sometimes half flying, until they were a great accompanying body. They were not hungry; they were expecting no feed; they only chose to go along. In winter she hung ears of yellow corn in an apple tree by the front porch and tacked strips of suet to the body of the tree and had several pairs of cardinals for company throughout the season.

And the environs of the house every spring and summer became a bustling wren sanctuary. If she hung her raincoat on the outkitchen porch and left it there for a few days, there was certain to be a wren’s nest in one of the pockets. When she put a cracked old-style iron teakettle on a low shelf in the coal house, she discovered within a day or two that a wren was using the wide spout as an entrance and was building a nest. She could lift the lid later and exhibit the wren family.

Once when she was eighty she said a bit proudly to one of her sons, “Come out here to the milk bench and I’ll show you something.” She had turned a milk crock upside down and one edge of it extended an inch or two over the end of the bench. Within twenty-four hours a wren was building a nest under the crock. And now when she unhesitantly turned the crock up, seven lively-looking young wrens, about ready to fly, watched her intently, but did not move. She had been turning the crock up for a look at least once every day.

She knew, too, where to find every beautiful thing that existed in her world. She knew which redbuds in the thicket always bloomed a little ahead of the others, which dogwoods first began to lose their greenish cast and become pure white, where to find the prize patch of sweet williams, when to look for the black-haw bush in full bloom, when to expect the first odor of locust blossom, when in July to watch for an unfailing field lily on the hillside, where always to find the softest and greenest moss, where to look for the first maple brunch that bespoke autumn, where to go for flint stones that had the most interesting spiral markings on them.

Whenever her friends from town came to see her — and they were always coming, as many as fifteen or twenty on one Sunday afternoon — she reverted to her more customary role of giver. They walked out to the locust trees, on out to the woods pasture, down to a romantic old orchard close in the hollow where one could still find fragments of Staffordshire blue tableware by the site of an early house, back up the hill to sit for a time in a clean pasture field and enjoy such quiet as they did not know existed. And when they were ready to go she placed something in their hands to be carried away — some fruit, some bittersweet, some slips of ruddier begonia, something out of the vegetable garden, some flowers from the profusion in which they grew from the first peonies to the last chrysanthemums.

To give — was not that what life was? That was the easy summary: twenty years or so given to younger sisters and the like; two thirds of a century and a little more given to her own family. She had given.

But what she had achieved within herself seemed more. In a world where life was always hard and often cruel, she met the requirements without ever flinching, without ever thinking of running away to some remote place in pursuit of an evasive happiness. Just to have remained steadfast in itself would have been much. But she persisted until she made a greater usefulness of the hard conditions. She persisted until she saw herself in relation to things, to all things, and, right where she stayed, came to know the deeps of a serenity from which she could look out on whatsoever and be undismayed.