In Retrospect

I spent the Fourth of July at my grandparents' little brick house in Leitchfield, Kentucky. Mama Jo and Pa don't go out much anymore, so I bought three pork barbeque sandwiches at the Farmer's Mill restaurant and delivered them in Styrofoam boxes. We sat in the kitchen, at the Formica table. As my grandfather ate, sauce dribbled down his white-whiskered chin. Mama Jo swiped at it with a paper towel, leaving behind a faint red smear. I pretended not to see and ate my barbeque (a delicacy I have, for the most part, been forced to abandon: Massachusetts butchers chop their meats too finely).

Suddenly, my grandfather looked up. "Whatever happened to that lady?"

"What lady, Pa?" I asked.

"The lady in the white dress. She cooked dinner for us the other day. She's real nice. The white dress lady."

I turned to my grandmother. "Is someone cooking for ya'll?"

She shook her head and mouthed no.

My grandfather saw her and insisted, "Yes, Mom, the woman who cooked them good butter beans! She wears that white dress."

"Okay, Pa," my grandmother said. She sighed deeply and loudly. I could not tell whether the added volume was to imbibe the scene with drama or for her to hear herself if her hearing aid was off. She sighed again, louder.

Pa turned to me, his blue eyes kindly lit. "I hope you can meet her, Sarah Jo. She makes the best butter beans I ever had. Except for your Mama Jo's." He winked and patted my grandmother's hand. In turn, I patted his. For a moment, our three hands rested quietly next to the butter beans, which I knew my grandmother had soaked overnight.

I had lunch with my cousin the next day. She is a pharmacist, three years my senior. As two only children, the daughters of siblings, at this point we represent the end of the Cann line. Amber lives an hour's drive from Leitchfield and visits often. She counts out our grandparents' pills every week (Pa has seven prescriptions; Mama Jo, four), does their laundry, and goes to Wal-Mart for dish soap or Listerine or sugar-free candies.

Over sandwiches, I told Amber about the white dress lady, expecting surprise, concern, or, at the very least, comfort. Instead, she chewed her turkey club and said matter-of-factly, "Yeah, I've heard about her."

"You have?" I asked. "When?"

"Oh, he's been talking about her for a month or so. Did he ever say anything to you about the little girl in red?" I shook my head. "Well, after he had his knee surgery last fall, he kept talking about how this little girl in a red dress had come to visit him in the hospital."

I didn't know what to say. I chewed my own turkey sandwich.

Amber continued, "Here's what I think it was. When he was in the hospital, there was a little red pillow--you know, a sachet, a smell-good thing--sitting in the window. I think he must have been looking at that, and something in his brain changed it to a little girl in a red dress."

I shook my head. "That's insane."

"Brains are weird, Sarah. Did I ever tell you about seeing the Christmas fairy?"

Here I must pause and explain: the Christmas fairy is a tradition in--and perhaps, an original invention of--the Cann family. As the story goes, the fairy visits children (or maybe only Amber and me) every night for two weeks before Christmas Day. The presents start small--a pack of gum, a new toothbrush, a yo-yo--but by December 24, we were likely to find a doll or a hardcover book. She was similar to the tooth fairy in philosophy, but she left her gifts in the fireplace instead of under the pillow, and she was a lot more generous. I believed in her fully until I was seven. Amber lasted until eight and a half.

"Yeah, so I saw her. I got up to pee in the middle of night, and as I was coming out of the bathroom, the fairy was rounding the corner into the living room."

"Was she walking? Or was she--"

"She was floating," Amber said. "Or maybe flying. She had wings. Anyway, I saw her, and she saw me, and she made a little gasping sound--like, ‘Oh!'--and disappeared back behind the same corner. And I went straight back to bed because I knew I wasn't supposed to see her. I was actually really surprised the next morning when I still had a fairy present."

"That's strange," I said vaguely, unsure of the connection between the Christmas fairy and the white dress lady.

"The point, Sarah, is that I really think I saw her," Amber concluded, leaning forward.

"No, you don't," I replied, feeling a little annoyed. "There's obviously no Christmas fairy."

"Of course there isn't. I know that. What I'm saying is, I have a real and true memory of seeing the Christmas fairy. Even though I logically understand that this isn't possible, my brain contains an image of the Christmas fairy rounding our corner. My brain thinks it was real. Just like Pa's brain thinks a woman in a white dress cooks butter beans for him."

I was an English major in college. In four years, I took precisely two science classes: the first was a dumbed-down astrophysics course; the second was a survey of evolutionary theory. Neither addressed neurobiology, the mechanics of the mind. I came to that subject on my own, a few months after graduation. What I found, among other things, was that human memory is utterly malleable. There is no such thing as perfect, unalterable recollection. Even if one manages to collect a precise and accurate image, there is no guarantee one will retain it so. A memory can, over time, revise itself unbidden; its owner will never be the wiser that another version once existed.

Each of us has, at some time or another, proclaimed rapturously, I'll never forget this night--this conversation--this moment--for the rest of my life. Chances are we will. Luckily, we won't remember that either.

I find it difficult to argue that what the literary canon really needs is another overwrought grandparent essay. As a college admissions officer, I read such pieces with astonishing regularity. One season, as I was plowing through students' folders at the rate of approximately three per twenty minutes, I was convinced that a good fourth of our applicants were composing personal statements on grandma or grandpa (or, occasionally, both). Some of these were good: one girl wrote movingly of the language barrier between her and her Korean grandmother; a boy told, in stark and lovely prose, of visiting the concentration camp in which his grandfather had been imprisoned.

But most were not good. Most, in fact, were bad. Grandma paints. Grandpa dies. Grandma and Grandpa just moved out of their little house on the shore and relocated to a nursing home. The stories were usually sad. More often than not, I read them in under sixty seconds and made a brief note on the yellow read sheet: "Standard grandparent essay."

Even remembering all this, I am still drawn to writing a grandparent story of my own. I have always had an unusually close relationship with my mother's parents. When I was growing up, their house was a slim forty miles away, one county over. My extended family congregated there every Sunday after church for lunch and naps and clattering conversation. I was held rapt by the tales I heard there, although I still recall my father pulling me aside when I was seven and saying, "Don't believe everything your Mama Jo says, Sarah. She's a little windy."

Windy is what country people call someone who exaggerates: an embellisher of details, a massager of plotline. My grandmother told and retold her stories until they had been imprinted wholly into my consciousness. For instance, I could cite the account of a large man from Pine Knob who ate blueberry pie until his stomach exploded. He died, of course. I stopped shoving in the pie.

Although my evolutionary biology course did not affirm this theory, I have long believed that windiness is a heritable trait. My mother grew up to invent wild tales about suspicious men trailing her in shopping centers and dramatic car breakdowns that, I surmise, never really happened. For my part, I began to compose my own self-propaganda--that is, nonfiction writing--at a very early age. I have always believed it my legacy to ensure that the components of my history are burrowed deep into posterity. It has occurred to me that I may write, in part, because I know my memories are vulnerable, that eventually even the sharpest images will be softened and smoothed like windswept sand dunes.

Neither of my grandparents is a writer; in fact, I have never seen Pa so much as hold a pen. Mama Jo signs both their names on my Christmas and birthday cards. She works hard to make her spidery handwriting elegant, adding lots of loops and oversizing her capital letters. There exists a certain understanding of language and the importance of its preservation, I think, in one who takes such care with the pedestrian literature of grocery lists.

About four years ago, my grandmother turned to me and said, "You're studyin' English at Harvard, right?"

I nodded. I had just finalized my major.

"What does that mean you'll be doin'?"

"Well . . ." I began uncertainly. I had anticipated that most of my family and friends at home wouldn't understand why someone would traipse off to Massachusetts to pursue something so useless. Pa had long been hoping that I would "make a doctor" to pair with Amber, who'd "made a pharmacist."

"You could teach English," Mama Jo offered helpfully. "Betty at the shop,"--the beauty shop--"her daughter majored in English over at Western and made a teacher."

"Yeah," I agreed reluctantly. "But I don't really want to be a teacher. I don't know. I picked English because I like to read. And write."

"Well then!" Mama Jo proclaimed triumphantly. "You'll make a writer. You can write about me and Pa."

As a child, before I committed my weekends wholly to the necessities of popularity and football games and finding a boyfriend, I often spent Saturday nights in Leitchfield with my grandparents. During the afternoon, I would head to the farm with Pa. Before the pork market went bust, he and his son--Amber's father--made their livings side-by-side, birthing and raising and slaughtering hogs.

I loved the farm, and I loved the pigs. I spent hours shadowing Pa through all nine hoghouses as he fed and watered their tenants. I liked Number Three--full of individual delivery rooms, where the swollenly pregnant sows snorted and pawed at the chicken wire before the labor pains hit. But my favorite was Number Seven, the halfway house for just-weaned piglets. Ten or twelve or fourteen littermates shared elevated pens, where they rolled over each other's backs like fat puppies tumbling down a hillside. I would run up and down the halls of Number Seven before deciding on my favorite litter (I liked the spotted pigs best, and usually chose accordingly). Once this had been determined, Pa would lift me by the straps of my overalls and set me in their pen. I would settle cross-legged on the cage floor, and Pa would go on to tend the seemingly endless rows of piglets, their crates lined up like so many cabbages in a garden.

Pigs are very social animals, and baby pigs are as friendly and inquisitive as a class full of kindergarteners. True, the natives would initially seem startled by my descent into their midst, but I would need only to sit still a minute before the bravest fellow would approach me on pink-tipped hooves, pushing his warm, flat nose into my open palm. Once his brothers and sisters saw that I meant no harm (and that, as an added bonus, I was handing out apple slices), they all clamored toward me, climbing into my lap and snuffing their warm cornmeal breath into my face. By the time Pa finished making the rounds through Number Seven, I would emerge exhausted but elated, grinning and covered in shit.

Afterwards, back at the little brick house, my grandmother would dunk me in the tub and scrub me with Ivory dish soap (which she still claims is superior to any regular bath product on the market) until all traces of pig had been eradicated. After supper, she would draw pictures on butcher's paper. For some reason, I always requested gory ones. Goriness could be defined as any of the following: a hangman, a graveyard, or a beheaded stick figure. Mama Jo refused to draw dead or dying animals because she loved animals too much, but any sort of human tragedy was fair game. If I had been disobedient or unruly, she might depict her own corpse lying in a coffin, with me standing off to the side and holding a bunch of flowers. A balloon would float from my cartoon mouth, proclaiming mournfully, "She was the best grandmother in the world!" or "If only I'd acted better!"

Both sets of memories--the pictures and the pigs--seem very close to me even now, a decade and a half later. I trust them, in no small part because I am a nonfiction writer and thus overconfident in the powers of my own mind. A person who chooses to write primarily about herself, who on paper attempts to adhere as closely to absolute fact as human faculties will allow, must put great stock in the authority of her recollection. She must believe that the truth, the essence of a subject, will prevail even when it is confronted with the inherent imperfections of her own neurons.

My grandparents met in 1931. At eleven, my grandmother entered a pitching contest at the Grayson County fair. "I was the only girl in the county who could throw worth a dime," she says. My grandfather, then fourteen, saw her and was immediately smitten. She asked him to hold her purse while she threw. He obliged. She won the contest. Later that afternoon, after the fair had packed up and Pa had returned to his family's farm, he told his mother, "I saw the girl I'm going to marry."

"Oh, hush up," said my great-grandmother.

My grandmother, on the other hand, says she paid little mind to the tall boy who held her purse that day, though she will occasionally admit that she'd "heard he was a good catcher." (He was, and might have gone pro had World War II not interfered.) Joanna Hudson was not accustomed to paying much mind to anyone save herself. She was born when her mother was in her late forties--a reproductive miracle in those days--and both parents, as well as her two sisters (each of whom had almost twenty years on her), coddled her past reason. She was called "the Baby" by her father until he died, although by then she had babies of her own. On my great-grandfather's deathbed, it is storied, his last words were "Where's the Baby?" Mama Jo was just in the hallway outside, but she didn't make it to his hospital room in time.

Throughout her childhood, Mama Jo was exempted from all household responsibilities. Those were reserved for her mother, Pearl Hudson, who, pictures indicate, was a great, hulking woman; or her older sisters, who occupied adjacent corners of the Hudson farmland with their husbands. Because Thayle and Theory shared the profits from their parents' tobacco crops and livestock for a time, they were still expected to pitch in with the chores. Thayle particularly bore the domestic brunt with Granny Hudson: a year before Mama Jo's birth, she "had to get married," and Granny had never quite forgiven her.

It was perhaps no accident, then, that Granny typically recruited Thayle to share the hands-down worst job on the farm: smoking sides of pork in the old meathouse on sweltering summer afternoons. To hear Mama Jo tell it, that meathouse was a sauna: a small square, tin-roofed, with thick oak boards spaced just enough that thin wisps of salty pork smoke could come curling through. "In the summertime," Mama Jo maintains, "it was awful. That roof was just like a baking pan. Of course, that's how we cured our ham so good."

Mama Jo never even had to pass the meathouse door, an immunity whose kindness seems never to have occurred to her. But the August after my Pa held her purse at the county fair, she was asked to watch Thayle's younger children--by now there were four of them, and the smallest were snot-nosed and squalling--while her sister and mother hung fresh cuts of pork and lit the fire beneath them. It must have been terrible inside, but it was terrible outside, too: Jean, Thayle's youngest, ripped Mama Jo's hem and screamed, "I hot!"

At that moment, to my grandmother, there seemed to be no alternative. She shut the meathouse door. She bolted it with the thick wooden latch. When Granny and Thayle realized what she had done, they screamed, "Joanna, you open that door!"

"I won't either," she said, putting her mouth to the lock. "I'm hot, and I hate these babies. You can stay in there forever for all I care."

"Joanna, you let us out of here right now!"

Mama Jo heard her sister moan, "Mother, I'll die in here." It was not yet known that she was pregnant with baby number five.

"Joanna!" Granny snapped. "I mean you to open that door!"

Suddenly, my grandmother had an idea: "I'll let you out, Mama, but only if you cuss."

The meathouse was silent. My great-grandmother, an old-time, foot-washing Methodist, had never so much as taken the Lord's name in vain.

"Cuss," Mama Jo demanded, "or I'll never let you out."

"For heaven's sake, Mother, cuss," implored Thayle.

"I won't either do it!" Granny said stubbornly. "I ain't never, and I won't never. I'd sooner die in here."

"Well, you will die in there," Mama Jo said airily. "I'm going to the pond."

"Joanna! Don't you leave us in here!"

"Cuss, or I'm going to the pond."

"Please, Mother," Thayle begged. Her voice had begun to sound as tinny as the rooftop.

From inside the meathouse, my great-grandmother bellowed, "Hellickerdamn, now let me out!"

Mama Jo was satisfied, although the swear her mother had chosen was admittedly peculiar. As soon as she unbolted the lock, Mama Jo began to run to the pond, as predicted. When her father came to give her a whipping, she ran around the water's circumference until he was exhausted and gave up. By suppertime, she figured, they'll have forgotten it and she could go home. They had, and she did.

A colleague of mine is an identical twin. He and his brother have lived in different states for years now, but he tells me that sometimes at family gatherings, he will relate some anecdote from his childhood--a Halloween costume, a science-fair award, a black eye--and his mother will turn to him and say, "That wasn't you. It was your brother."

I might ask: does it really matter?

My grandfather was a Baptist preacher. I suppose I could still use the present tense, as churches all over Kentucky would eagerly welcome him to their pulpits, but he has not stood before a congregation in some years. When he does go to church, he is mobbed by people who thank him for their souls, or sometimes for their parents' souls, and, accordingly, for their own souls, by the transitive property of salvation.

While now he is frail and subdued, as a preacher my grandfather was barrel-chested and lion-voiced, known for his "plain talk." Forty years ago, a lady asked him to preach her father's funeral. The man, named James, had belonged to one of Pa's churches--"just barely," my grandfather would probably add--but Pa had never liked him. James beat his wife, and everyone knew it. She would often flee to my grandparents' house, holding an apron to her bloodied nose. She requested prayer for her husband, but never for herself; she died, of cancer or heart disease or something equally unmemorable, the year before he did. And here was their daughter, a chain-smoking housewife, begging my grandfather to preach James's funeral.

"You don't want me to preach it, sis," my grandfather said.

"Oh, we do, Brother Cann," the woman said tearfully. "Daddy loved you so much."

"He didn't neither love me. Ask Brother Durmott. He might do it."

"But Brother Cann, our hearts are just set on you."

My grandfather relented. At the funeral, he stood behind the pulpit and said, "He wasn't much of a man. Amen." The family cried, but they were crying anyway. The rest of the attendants--sparse though they were--cheered inwardly and revered my grandfather all the more.

For fifty years, Pa inspired in his flocks a fervor I can liken only to Jonathan Edwards's stirring of the Puritans, or, for those readers unaccustomed to such religiosity, to Red Sox fans whose faith in the pennant race is unwavering. He traveled all over the tri-state area, preaching at churches with names like Pond Creek and Beaver Dam, Sulfur Wells and Steep Hollow (where my parents and I are on the membership books today, and which is typically pronounced "Holler").

My mother says she rarely saw Pa in her childhood. He rose at three in the morning to drive an egg delivery truck on a route from Leitchfield to Indianapolis; from late morning to afternoon, he tended hoghouses One through Nine back on the farm; at night, he led revivals all over the countryside. He would slip into deep, dreamless sleep around eleven, and then he would wake well before sunrise the next morning to begin the cycle again. He never complained or said he was tired. His was the work of the Lord.

During these decades, my grandmother was a secondary character: a good mother, to be sure, and a relatively successful businesswoman. Mama Jo was the first female proprietor in Grayson County. Her country store still stands, although it has changed hands several times since she sold it in the seventies and has not been repainted since.

It was a brave thing in her day, to work full time, especially doing something so unabashedly masculine. The position required Mama Jo to haul paint cans, hammer nails, and, perhaps most shocking of all, actually handle cash money. She was not revered in the same way that Pa was, but she built a reputation all the same. If you wanted a good deal on paint, you saw my grandmother. If you wanted to find God, you asked, instead, for her husband.

Stories about my grandparents as my grandparents--those images I have collected myself, with my own senses--are one thing. Tales about them as children, as young adults, as individuals who had not anticipated that I might one day exist, are quite another. I have already admitted that my own memory is fallible, but I have also tried to gain my readers' trust in its abilities to oversee faithful and accurate narration. To relate something I did not witness, to add another remove between myself and the truth, is trickier business. Even so, I feel it is my responsibility to leave behind some fragment of my grandparents' lives. To most people, I realize, the Canns may seem rather unremarkable; but to me, their stories are at least as worthwhile as my own. When I am feeling sentimental, their stories are my own.

These days my grandparents live quietly. Pa sleeps more than fourteen hours a day--perhaps catching up on all those years of lost slumber. Only occasionally will he rise with the sun, put on his old overalls, and hobble out to his pickup truck to cover nonexistent hog feed from the rain showers in his dreams. Mama Jo panics at his moments of dementia, as I used to. Lately, I have tried to think of them as kindnesses, gifts of the subconscious, gentle suggestions that his body and mind are again strong and able. In some ways, perhaps, Pa's old brain is looking out for the rest of him.

My grandmother paces the floors at night, counting and recounting pills, calculating the chances of an overdose. Occasionally, she wakes Amber with questions. She follows the Braves rabidly; during our twice-weekly phone calls she will pepper me with statistics and highlights from the last game. I follow baseball myself and know that often her recaps are inaccurate, that in fact Ortiz pitched, not Maddux; or that the Braves won by two runs, not eleven. I let these things slide.

Today my brain and I are twenty-three years old. Mentally, I like to think I am at the peak of my game. Yet I recall a disturbing conversation I once had with a science-major friend of mine, who had just finished some sort of advanced biochemistry class.

She said, "Isn't it strange to think that, when you're talking to someone and looking right at them, their face is decomposing right before your eyes? That they're losing brain cells that will never regenerate?"

I didn't know how to respond, but I remember wondering if it would ever be possible to freeze-dry anything: a thought, a sound, a sight. It would, of course. Later, I took out my pen and began to write.

Perhaps it sounds trite, but I believe that the pictures of the mind are beautiful, in all their grainy imperfection. Sometimes, too, my recollection seems sharper than ever: at this very moment, sitting on a plane to Boston, seat 15C, I can handily conjure the scent of growth-formula piglet feed. How wonderful, I think, that the mind is not limited merely to recreating the visual--though I have wondered whether sensory images are weakened in replay or made more vibrant by our return to them.

Eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume once commented that "the most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation." But when I think of my grandmother, and how for years that meathouse has gotten hotter and hotter in the telling, I begin to believe that perhaps the worlds and histories we create for ourselves might trump those actually given to us.

It is August. Kentucky is hot and humid. If there were still pigs on the farm in Leitchfield, my grandfather would be watering them around the clock to prevent dehydration or even heat stroke, a condition to which fair-skinned swine are particularly susceptible.

In two weeks, I will be home again. I dream at night that one of my grandparents will die before I can return to the little brick house. These are the visions my mind cannot discard; the images buzz easily between my neurons, intact and humming. Never mind that they have yet to be realized; one day, they will. At that time, I will probably have trouble distinguishing the past dreams from the present reality. I will record what I can and strive in writing to separate truth from invention. As it turns out, we all have our white dress ladies.

On the Forth of July, after the table had been cleared, my grandmother turned to me and asked, "Did I ever tell you about the time I locked Mama and Thayle in the meathouse?"

"Tell me," I said.