Every Day by the Sun Page 3

  B.C. and I were terrified. We had never seen Papa so serious and could not have imagined that anything or anyone could scare Mama Hale. This was the woman who drove a surrey over a flooded bridge to take her five-year-old daughter to the doctor. This time, however, she was afraid. “Gypsies steal children,” B.C. whispered. The dogs crept under the house.

  “I think we better hide now,” I said. I was halfway around the house when I heard the jingling of the bells and an accordion playing. There they were at the top of the hill. The caravans were covered in designs of vivid colors. The gypsies wore bright red vests, green scarves, and blue sashes trimmed in gold. The men wore big gold earrings. Papa went to meet them. I noticed that he stretched to his full height of six feet, four inches.

  “What can we do for you?” he said. B.C. and I couldn’t understand the heavily accented reply. After a moment, Papa turned to Mama. “Pearl, they’re hungry. They’ll work. They sharpen knives and do chores. Or we can trade. They have jewelry and spools of thread.”

  “Trade!” Mama said. “Go get them a ham. I’ll take a spool of silk thread.” When Papa came back from the smokehouse Mama was holding a small spool of green thread. Then the gypsies were gone, vanishing as if by magic.

  Darkness was setting in. Papa said, “Little Feller, let’s walk B.C. home.” Hand in hand, we went down the path, B.C. on one side of Papa, me on the other, holding on tight.

  One night I was awakened by the dogs barking and chickens squawking. Papa took his shotgun and went outside. I ran to Mama’s room. “Fox in the henhouse,” she said, and put me back to bed. Another night I awoke to a bell tolling. Each farm had a large iron bell in the yard close to the house, and each one had a distinctive tone so that the urgent tolling in the middle of the night was identifiable and frightening. “Trouble at the Waiteses’,” Papa said. Someone needed help, and all who heard the bell got dressed and went to their aid.

  IN DECEMBER 1941 my mother married Jimmy Meadow, a newspaperman. I had been sent out in the country to stay with Mama and Papa while the newlyweds were on their honeymoon.

  My mother and Jimmy returned late at night. Papa had long since gone to bed. I refused to sleep, and Mama and I waited up for them. She held me in her lap in a rocking chair in front of the fire. The kerosene lamps were out. The house was dark except for firelight.

  We heard the car coming a mile away, as it turned off the highway onto the Hales’ dirt road. We watched the headlight beams glancing off the treetops while the car came closer and closer, stopping just outside the picket fence. I ran to the window and watched my mother and stepfather coming across the yard. Then I hid behind Mama. While we waited, I had been idly playing with the big pearl buttons on her nightgown. They were cool to the touch and pretty. Now, when Mama picked me up to hand me to Wese and Jimmy—no longer the Wese that I had known and had had all to myself—I instantly and forever hated all buttons.

  Late the next afternoon, Monday, December 8, 1941, we drove into town. I had overheard some of the whispered grown-up talk all day Sunday and had seen Mama shake her head at Papa whenever he started to ask Jimmy a question. I’d even heard her say, “Hush, Sanford, you’ll scare the baby.” Now I sat in the backseat clutching Janie Walker, my doll. There was a light frost and I was glad the car had a heater. Even so, I should have been up front with Wese. Then Jimmy turned on the radio. At first there was static, then I heard a clear, resonant voice say, “This is a date that will live in infamy.” I didn’t know what infamy was, but I agreed with the man. I did not know who or what a president was, but this voice spoke to me when he said that our country was at war. This sounded too good to be true. We’d probably all get shot or blown up and die and I wouldn’t have to go and live with Wese and Jimmy.

  We settled in Clarksdale, some sixty miles west of Oxford. We lived in a small apartment building on the second floor. Janie Walker was my only link to Oxford. I had packed her clothes in her doll suitcase when I left Nannie’s. Within months my identity was gone. Dean Baby Faulkner was gone. Jimmy adopted me and I became Dean Meadow and would be for twelve long years. It’s too easy to blame my mother. She always said, “I did it for you. You needed a father.” She could not have spoken truer words.

  Poor Jimmy. He had married a beautiful young widow, a tragic figure, a lovely woman who needed him—and with her came the worst piece of would-be-royal baggage in Mississippi. Later we moved into a nice white house on a nice tree-lined street. Jimmy bought me a bicycle and taught me how to ride it. He bought me a fox terrier puppy that I named “Little Bit,” who became an integral part of my life for the next thirteen years. I taught Little Bit how to ride in the basket of my bicycle. We were a sight to behold. One Saturday afternoon when Jimmy and I were walking home from the picture show, he taught me to recite the Twenty-third Psalm, betting me a quarter that I couldn’t learn it by the time we got home.

  JIMMY: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

  ME: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

  JIMMY: “He leadeth me beside the still waters.”

  ME: “He leadeth me beside the still waters.”

  We stopped at the school playground to swing. The lesson went on. By the time we got home I could recite the psalm all the way to I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever, which to my five-year-old ears sounded like a real good place to be. I kept that quarter a long time.

  From Jimmy I also learned what the smell of whiskey on a man’s breath could mean. I learned to run fast when things got ugly and then to feel fearful and guilty about running away. He may have been a fine journalist, but he was also a world-class drunk. The first night that Jimmy hit Wese, I packed my suitcase, then I packed Janie’s. I picked her up and we left. It was very late. Wese and Jimmy had finally gone to sleep. I made it down two flights of stairs, out the front door, and two blocks down the street. There was no place to go. I sat on the curb in the dark until I stopped crying. Then I turned back to the only home I knew. Where did I belong? Where were my people? Who was I?

  MAUD BUTLER FALKNER, MATRIARCH OF THE FALKNER FAMILY and my beloved grandmother, was one of those people I thought were just born old. She was sixty-four when I came along. Recently the Oxford Eagle ran a picture of her taken by an unidentified photographer in the mid-1890s. There she sits in all her lace and ruffles, puffed sleeves falling below her elbows, a wide sash at her corseted waist, upswept hair, a small, delicate, lovely, dark-eyed figure with a childlike countenance, slightly sad, innocent and shy, and very, very young.

  This is not the woman I thought I knew. Growing up I became aware of her private nature, of the distance she kept between herself and the rest of the world—and her family—but I had no idea of the extent to which she had isolated herself. For instance, we never celebrated her birthday because no one knew the date. Though I had always understood that I was named for my father, I did not know until I was a grown woman, long after Maud’s death, that my father had been named for his maternal grandmother, Lelia Dean Swift Butler.

  The day that Maud married Murry Falkner in the fall of 1896 in Oxford, Mississippi, she gave up being a Butler and became a Falkner. It was as if she wished to eradicate everything pertaining to the Butlers, or so I’ve been told. Yet there are a few family members and Faulkner biographers who credit the Butlers for the genius of William Faulkner.

  I did not know that Maud’s mother and brother were buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery within a stone’s throw of all the old Falkners (and now of Maud herself). I was not aware that she had a brother or that they grew up in Oxford. The house where she spent her childhood still stands on what is now Jefferson Avenue. A Victorian cottage with a touch of gingerbread surrounding the porch, of light brown clapboard construction with heavy oak double doors and a backyard large enough to hold her father’s pigs, cow, and mule, it is situated a few blocks northeast of the square within shouting distance of the L. Q. C. Lamar house. The Butler and Lamar children were playmates. I like to think of her as a ha
ppy little girl sitting in the front porch swing, waiting for her father to come home for supper.

  Maud’s family arrived in Oxford long before the Falkners. According to Joel Williamson’s William Faulkner and Southern History, Charles G. Butler and his wife, Burlina, Maud’s grandparents, were living in Oxford in the early 1830s while the Falkners were still in Ripley, Mississippi. They were among the earliest settlers in Lafayette County. Charles G., an influential Baptist and prosperous property owner, was the first county sheriff and surveyor. He laid out the grid for the new city of Oxford. He and Burlina owned twenty-five acres of land, including lots on the courthouse square where, in 1840, they built a hotel named the Oxford Inn that “became the centerpiece of the Butler family’s prosperity.”

  I had no idea, growing up, that my Butler great-great-grandparents owned more property in Oxford than the Falkners. Their real estate holdings approached $12,000, “placing them comfortably among the well-to-do people in the county.” There were six children in the family. The youngest son, Charles Edward, was to be Maud’s father. They called him “Charlie.” I never heard his name mentioned.

  After Charles G. died in 1855, Burlina, “a woman of impressive managerial skills,” was able to double her husband’s real estate holdings. A successful businesswoman and a “slaveholder of significant proportions,” she, along with her sons William and Henry, owned real estate holdings worth some $95,000, nearly twice that of the Falkner fortune.

  Then the Butlers fell on hard times. During the war, General A. G. “Whiskey” Smith burned Oxford to the ground. Burlina, according to Williamson, “escaped from her burning hotel with nothing more than the clothes on her back.” Until then, the Butlers and Falkners had led parallel lives, comfortable and financially secure. They also shared a penchant for violence, which was a source of pride for the Falkners, shame for the Butlers.

  Very little is known about any Faulkner ancestors before the “Old Colonel,” William Clark Falkner, for whom William was named. He was larger than life with an extraordinary career: lawyer; veteran of two wars, Mexican and Civil; owner of extensive land holdings in Ripley, Mississippi; builder of the first railroad in north Mississippi; and published writer, best known for The White Rose of Memphis and Rapid Ramblings in Europe. He served as the prototype for several of William’s aristocratic characters, such as Colonel John Sartoris and Major de Spain. In many ways William emulated his great-grandfather by living as a gentleman farmer with horses and dogs on an antebellum estate, and by writing, of course.

  The Old Colonel was the most violent of the Falkners. It was generally known in north Mississippi that his “Bowie knife and pistols [were] consistently about his person.” In May 1849, one Robert Hindman made the fatal mistake of calling Falkner “a damned liar,” then pointing a revolver at him. As the two men struggled for the pistol, it misfired three times. Falkner drew his knife and stabbed Hindman through the heart, killing him instantly. The inscription on Hindman’s original tombstone read “Murdered at Ripley, Miss. By Wm. C. Falkner May 8, 1849.” The Old Colonel was tried and acquitted. “Murdered” was changed to “killed.”

  Two years later, the Old Colonel shot and killed a friend of the Hindman family, Erasmus W. Morris. Again, an argument had led to violence. Falkner pulled his pistol and fired at Morris’s head, killing him instantly. Once again he was tried for murder and acquitted.

  Then Colonel Falkner and Thomas Hindman, Jr., the brother of the murdered—or killed—Robert Hindman, drew up an agreement to fight a duel in Arkansas, where it would be easier for the survivor to avoid prosecution. The agreement read: “Each man is to have two revolvers, take stands fifty yards apart, and advance and fire as he pleases” (italics mine), which is the strangest dueling procedure I’ve ever heard of. Fortunately, a mutual friend intervened and the duel never took place.

  On November 5, 1889, Colonel Falkner was shot dead on the public square in Ripley by his former business partner, Richard Thurmond. The two had run against each other for a seat in the state legislature, which Falkner won by a landslide. Presumably embittered by the loss, Thurmond came looking for Falkner. The local newspaper reported that “Thurmond used a .44 caliber pistol to do the work.” Thurmond was indicted for manslaughter and was released on his own recognizance after he posted a $10,000 bail. His trial was postponed for a year. When the jury came in after a short deliberation, the verdict was “Not guilty.” Guilty verdicts were obviously hard to come by in those days.

  A statue of the Old Colonel, which he himself commissioned in Italian marble at a cost of $2,022 (paid for by his heirs), stands today in the Ripley cemetery—in Williamson’s words: “Eight feet in height and one quarter larger than life. It rests atop a fourteen foot pedestal.… The right forearm thrusts forward from the elbow, hand open, palm up” as though “explaining earnestly, patiently, things that can be made clear to thoughtful persons.”

  When I was a girl and a not-so-thoughtful person, I organized a midnight ride to Ripley to offer my respects to the Old Colonel. All was quiet in the cemetery. The moonlight was bright enough for us to read the inscription on the tombstone.

  COL. WILLIAM FALKNER

  BORN

  JULY 6, 1825

  DIED

  NOV. 6, 1889

  It took a few moments and a little help from my friends for me to climb his statue. They handed me a cold Budweiser already opened. I carefully placed it in his palm.

  The violent streak passed over the next generation only to be inherited by Murry Falkner, the Old Colonel’s grandson and William’s father. According to Williamson, Murry “in an overly aggressive attempt to defend the honor” of a young woman (not Maud) “got into a fight with a local man with a dangerous reputation.” Murry won the fight, but the next day the man found him in a drugstore on the square and shot Murry “from behind with a twelve-gauge shotgun.… Then, while Murry lay on the floor, pointed a pistol at his face and shot him in the mouth.” His mother, Sallie Murry Falkner, rushed to the scene as soon as she heard about the shooting. She used asafetida to induce vomiting. Murry threw up the bullet, the story goes, and his life was saved. A miracle.

  Growing up I heard about Falkners good and bad, but the Butlers were seldom mentioned. I knew, for instance, that my father’s generation called the Young Colonel and his wife “Grandfather and Grandmother Falkner.” Murry was referred to as “Big Dad.” My cousins Jimmy and Chooky called their uncle William “Brother Will,” though my cousin Jill and stepcousins Cho Cho, Malcolm, and Vicki—and I, of course—called him “Pappy.” Maud was “Sis Maud” to her in-laws, “Granny” to Vicki and Jill, and “Nannie” to Jimmy, Chooky, and me. This confusing array of nicknames demonstrates once again the Falkner propensity for failing to agree about almost anything. And yet only one such name survived in the Butler family: “Damuddy” was her grandchildren’s pet name for Lelia Dean Swift Butler, Maud’s mother.

  There were, as I was to discover, reasons for this omission.

  Charlie Butler—Maud’s father—and Murry’s father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, were contemporaries, both born in 1848. In 1885, J.W.T. moved his family to Oxford, set up a law practice, and later became the founding president of the First National Bank. At the same time, the war and its aftermath had taken a serious toll on the Butlers. Before he was twenty, Charlie became head of the family. His father and two older brothers were dead. On July 31, 1868, Charlie and Lelia Dean Swift applied for a marriage license in Lafayette County. They were married on August 2.

  Little is known about Lelia Dean Swift. It was said that she came to Oxford from Arkansas, that she had studied sculpture and painting, that she was a staunch Southern Baptist, and that she had been offered a scholarship to study art in Italy, which she declined because by that time she had two children: Sherwood, born in 1869, and Maud, born in 1871.

  Maud rarely spoke of her mother, but when she did it was with admiration for her talent. All of Oxford, it seemed, knew of Lelia’s ability to carve a pound of but
ter into a swan, or chisel dolls from blocks of ice. She was considered an intelligent, talented woman, yet, as far as I know, only one of her paintings survives.

  In 1875, Charlie Butler had to borrow money to support his family, but the next year his circumstances improved vastly. He was appointed town marshal by the mayor and board of aldermen, a position he would hold for nearly twelve years. According to Williamson, as town policeman, a job similar to that of his father, Oxford’s first sheriff, Charlie’s duties included the arrest of “anyone drunk or committing a nuisance, or exhibiting a deadly weapon or using profane or obscene language or acting disorderly or violating any ordinance of this town.”

  In addition to keeping the peace, Williamson continues, Charlie served as tax collector. His salary was $50 a month and 5 percent of all taxes collected. In 1876, city taxes totaled $3,000 and Charlie earned $150, a sum that quadrupled over the next few years as Oxford grew. Charlie was also responsible for enforcing quarantines during epidemics, for “disinfecting privies with lime, and the never-ending, exasperating chore of rounding up livestock that had escaped into the streets. He was paid 50 cents for catching a pig, 25 cents for keeping it, 25 cents for removing a dead dog.”

  Charlie filled an office later called “town manager,” and with it his duties grew. His “place in the Oxford community seemed very secure.… He was seen as an energetic and engaging young man … who moved about town doing its business effectively and efficiently.” He joined the Masonic Order in 1878.

  Charlie’s downfall started in 1881, when he came up $2,000 short in reported tax revenues. The board of aldermen showed leniency, however, and allowed him sizable deductions for expenses. He ended up paying the city $138.05.

  The next problem was far more serious. On May 17, 1883, the Oxford Eagle reported that Charlie had killed Sam Thompson, the editor of the newspaper. On the day of the shooting, court was in session and Charlie was acting as bailiff. It was his job to summon defendants to court. He called for a man named Sullivan. At that moment Sam Thompson, also waiting to be summoned, was slumped on a bench outside the courthouse, very drunk. Each time Charlie called Sullivan’s name, Thompson answered, “Here!” Then he staggered about, pretending to be the bailiff, calling his own name.