In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, his wonderfully miserable character, Addie Bundren, seeks to make her presence felt by beating her students. In this bizarre and maybe sadistic way, she lets them know she is significant, even if only through the welts she leaves on their legs.

Feeling significant is important to humans. We are conscious of those around us, and we are conscious of the short-lived nature of consciousness itself, and therefore we want to leave some mark. Whether it be through teaching, writing articles for a small paper in Western North Carolina, doing first descents of raging rivers, or imbuing our children with our own values so that at least those values might remain when we are no longer here, we want to make some impact.

And yet, unless we are in the early stages of being in love, or have just learned that we are terminally ill (even though we are all, as Annie Dillard reminds us in Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, terminal cases), most of us will never tell other people the impact they have on our lives.

I have been lucky in that I have lost only four people whom I’ve loved. One of them was murdered before I had the opportunity to tell her how her beauty made the world seem better. Three of them, however, died while I was in my early 20s, when I was far too busy being the center of my own universe to notice that they were about to leave it. One of them was my grandmother, who made time for me and my siblings even while rearing a mentally retarded daughter and an emotionally disturbed grandson. Another was my fierce, self-destructive, brilliant and alcoholic great uncle. And the third was my great aunt Edna, who raised my father from boyhood and moved in and out between our homes and her own rented houses. I think she was the last of the many generations of unmarried spinster ladies who wound up in their later years depending mainly upon the kindness and generosity of their families for survival. I don’t know if this was the case with Edna, because I never inquired of my father whether she could take care of herself financially. Her presence had been so tightly woven into our lives’ fabric for so many years that it never occurred to us whether or not she supplied any of the thread.

I’m not sure about my siblings, but I for one know that from the time I was old enough to recognize that Edna might not always live with us, I was determined that she and I might work out some separate arrangements for ourselves if need be. Our plan was that we should buy a trailer together, set it up some place within walking distance of Bryson (since she couldn’t drive, and I hadn’t the urge to do so), and spend all of our time reading novels, eating “Vienna Sausages” straight out of the can, and staying up late drinking Sanka and Mountain Dew. It was a good plan, but I abandoned it when I went away and got married, and then I all but abandoned her when I later went away emotionally and intellectually after my first years in college. And even though I loved her and told her so, I don’t believe she ever knew that she had so strongly affected the course of my life. Edna was not introspective, and she was mostly too cheerful and practical to have given it much thought, but I wonder now if she was aware of her significance in the lives of my two sisters, my two brothers, and myself. I doubt it.

As she helped my sisters and I wash dishes, fold laundry, string beans from the garden, or make our beds, I doubt that she thought that she was teaching us about making oneself useful. And when she read tirelessly aloud to all of us, or when she let my young brothers practice reading aloud to her, I don’t think she knew that she was showing us that children need undivided attention and unhurried spaces of time when learning something new. Or when she caught my younger sister swiping her unfiltered Camels and told her, “I’ll give them to you if you ask me for them — you don’t have to steal them,” I don’t think she knew that she was also teaching her that you don’t hold grudges (nor did she know that my sister would have extraordinary difficulty quitting later — but that’s another story). I also doubt that when she let me leave books at her house of which my parents wouldn’t approve that she was aware of allowing me to learn safely (if illicitly) about human sexuality, and also about the value of allowing people to read whatever truly interests them, and that a genuine hunger for good books can sometimes grow out of an appetite for brain candy. (I will, perhaps unfortunately, never forget Sydney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight, or the book which thoroughly educated me, A Way with All Maidens, and which taught me good British swear words.)

But none of these things were done with deliberation. None of them came to her at the recommendation of authors of books on child rearing. She was our advocate, our helper, and, sometimes — because she was just as dependent on our parents as we were — our equal because she loved us and because these were ways in which she made her own contribution, whether or not she would have articulated that this was so.

But this is not to say that she was inarticulate or simple. Edna could recite the monarchs of England, the books of the Bible, and the capitals of various countries with ease, and one of her pleasures was working the Asheville Citizen’s crossword puzzles. Her glasses, her dictionary, her Camels, and a cup of coffee were always present in any space she occupied for long. And when she was in her own space, so was a loaded .32 Smith and Wesson. All of us children knew where it was at all times — during the day, in a coffee table drawer, and at night, snugly tucked beneath her pillow.

It was, then, also from Edna that we learned how adults deal with fear, because Edna had many fears. They were usually matched to the environment in which she was living. When we lived briefly in Tampa, she was afraid of rattlesnakes, hurricanes, alligators, and the ocean. When she lived in a big house by the railroad tracks in Bryson City, she was afraid of vagrants, hoboes, and the violence of her brother when he was drinking. (It was there that I learned a house isn’t secure for the night until a bureau has been shoved against the bedroom door and the cylinder checked in the .32.) When she lived in the two trailers that my father renovated to make one dwelling large enough to house her and her furniture, she was already very old, and she feared loneliness, death, and becoming a burden. But Edna’s primary fear, and one which followed her wherever she went, was her pathological fear of thunderstorms.

During thunderstorms Edna cowered on a chair or the corner of a sofa, covered her face with her hands, and cried or moaned softly until the storm was over. I remember our mother was particularly concerned that none of us should learn this fear, and so I grew up to love storms of all kinds, and perhaps what I loved most about them, and still love perversely, is their capacity to create terror. But Edna did not love them, and sometimes, when she was assured that a storm was completely over, she would tell me about the man she had seen killed by a lightening strike, and how she could never afterwards bear thunder and lightening.

She also had little love for black people, although in this she was also complex and contradictory. She told us stories about the chain gangs, mostly African-American men (though she would NEVER have called them that), who had come through working on U.S. 19 when she was a young woman still living at home with her parents. She told how hard they worked, and how she and her mother would sometimes take them water. And she also told how a hungry black man had once appeared on their doorstep, and how they had fixed him a plate of food, and then how she herself had insisted they throw the plate away afterwards. She was never apologetic or shy about her opinions, and my siblings and I argued with her as we grew older and more opinionated ourselves concerning racism and bigotry.

Her contradictions were many and fascinating. Although she liked to tell how she survived fine as a logging camp cook, was the first woman to wear pants in Bryson (I don’t know if this is true, but she claimed it), and never married because she “never found a man she liked well enough to let him boss her around,” she also believed that women should know their “place,” should take care of their husbands, and should never hold political office or become ministers. Her religious beliefs were, I know, Christian, although religion never seemed to interest her as much as history, and almost all she read in her last years were biographies and historical romances.

The last months of her life she spent hunched over on her favorite couch, where she also slept, in a corner of her trailer. My younger sister more than repaid her debt to Edna by spending time with her, washing her, talking to her, helping her use the toilet, cleaning her up afterwards, and bringing her the sweets (Little Debbie cakes, Reeses’ Cups, Mountain Dew) and cigarettes she loved so much. My older sister lived in Florida with her husband and daughter by this time, my brothers were in the military, and I was caught up in applying to graduate schools, looking into joining the Peace Corps, and generally trying to figure out where my place was in the universe, (which I might have done much sooner had I realized none of the planets were revolving around me).

The last time I saw Edna, she was irritated with me because I couldn’t see that having a baby was far more important than pursuing another degree or traveling. She wanted me to have a baby so that she could know it before she died, but I didn’t comply. I think now about how much my daughter would have enjoyed Edna’s subversiveness and irreverence, how disturbed she would be by her racism, and the many things she might have gained from Edna’s style of teaching that she will never learn from me or my husband or either set of her grandparents, all still wonderfully alive. But I’m not sorry I refused to have a child before I was ready, even though I can only tell my daughter the significance Edna had in my life.

I do, however, look at the trailers situated all around Western North Carolina, and I think about mine and Edna’s plan. I wish occasionally that I was in one of those trailers with a very old, very needy woman, arguing about feminism and minorities, or reading some pure trash novel, or bringing her another cup of instant coffee, or, best of all, reading her any one of the many pieces of writing I’ve done in which she figures so largely. I didn’t tell Edna the mark she left on me. But since she was the one primarily responsible for my love of words on paper, I try instead to make amends with these inadequate marks I can see.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches in Swain County and lives in Cullowhee. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)

 

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