STELLAR

There’s an old grandfather clock in one corner of the room. It’s large, but is one of those models that hang on the wall, not free-standing. It ticks with a low hollow sound. More like a slow, solemn klok-klok-klok than a tick-tock. It truly marks the passage of time in real time in the quiet of the small-town neighborhood on the edge of the city limits and in the uncomfortable silence of this living room. Klok-klok-klok-klok...another minute passes—but who’s counting? On the hour and the half-hour, the clock makes a mechanical, whirring, gear sound, seems to hold its breath for an instant and then goes thonk, its chimes having been muted to keep them from being a half-hourly nuisance.

There’s a big Admiral console black and white TV in another corner. It’s off. Usually at this time of day, Sunday afternoon, it would be blaring away and the regular occupants of the house, my great-grandmother, Mary Landis Cavinder, and my Great-Uncle Jesse, would have turned their straight-backed wooden kitchen chairs toward the screen to watch it. Each would have been wearing a pair of the dark glasses that are in their cases on a wooden kitchen table in the middle of the room, because there have been some rumors that too much unfiltered TV-watching can make you go blind.

But TV has been foregone today because there’s company. We’re the company. I would vote for switching the TV on if anyone were to ask me, but no one does. And my mother, Reba Mae, has forewarned me to behave, to keep my mouth shut, not to ask for anything, and to speak only when spoken to. I’m six, so I’m obliged to obey, because, if not, there will be consequences.

The clock and the TV are the only things in the room that, by any stretch of the imagination, could be considered “luxury items.” Everything else here is characterized by its utilitarian simplicity and by obvious poverty—the straight chairs (three), a couple of other wooden chairs with arms on which the upholstery long ago wore out and which are now neatly wrapped in several thicknesses of disused towels, cut to size and held on with wide strips of elastic, a very carefully preserved davenport that takes up most of the wall on the opposite side of the room and that is reserved for company, an oil-burning stove for heat in the middle of the far end of the room, a small end-table strategically placed under the single sash-window, between the two wooden armchairs and loaded with the kind of magazines Uncle Jesse reads (National Geographic, Argosy, Field and Stream, and, on a small under-shelf, a several-seasons-old Sears & Roebuck catalog). And then there’s the kitchen table in the middle of the room, which is not a retro version of a country kitchen table, but the genuine article, marred and worn with decades of rural service.

Seated, my great-grandfather Job Cavinder and

my great-grandmother, Mary (Landis). 

Standing, my great-aunts Ruth and Edith.

It is all neatly ordered and impeccably clean. Even the well-trodden linoleum floor-covering is so spic and span that it shines like a mirror, except in the places here and there where it has worn through to the black backing.

This is the only room of this house that I really know. I can’t recall ever having asked for the bathroom. I don’t even know where it is, although, I assume, somewhere off of the kitchen. There’s a master bedroom off of the living room but the door is always shut. There’s a door out of the room that leads into a hallway that goes to the front door, and to the foot of a staircase that leads to a second floor, where, I assume, there are probably a couple more bedrooms. But I wouldn’t know for sure because I have never been up there. And I’ve never come in or come out of the front door because, according to country-people rules, family comes in the backdoor. The door between the living room and hall is usually open and I can see a hat-tree there that holds a couple of coats—one is obviously Grandma Cavinder’s and the other Jesse’s—as well as several hats and caps.

I have been in the downstairs bedroom, but only once, and a long time ago, when I was three. I barely remember it. My Great-Grandpa Job Cavinder had had a heart attack after a day of raking leaves. He took to his bed and never recovered. All I remember about that visit or about Grandpa Cavinder, for that matter, is how my mother took me into the twilight of the bedroom, where Grandpa Cavinder lay gaunt and pale in his bed, his ever-dark mane of hair and thick black moustache in sharp contrast with his pallor. I recall Reba Mae picking me up and holding me down close to her dying maternal grandfather so that I could kiss his brow.

The only other room I’ve ever had a glimpse of is the kitchen. Sometimes when we’ve come on one of our rare visits, the door to the kitchen, which is across a small backdoor entry hall from the living room, has been open and I’ve sneaked a peek before Grandma Cavinder shuts it. She always does. She wouldn’t want “company” seeing her “messy kitchen”, where you could literally eat off of the floor.

Job and Mary with Myrtle, who is holding my sister, Darla.

It’s a much cheerier room than the living room, with sash windows that look west and north and a lot of natural light. There are home-made, carefully painted cupboards, a sink with a hand-pump in it, a gas range, a woodstove, an antique refrigerator that dates back to the barely post-icebox era and another big square country-kitchen table, this one topped with linoleum—the perfect surface on which to roll out pie dough, egg-noodles or pot-pie.

This wasn’t always the Cavinder home. My great-grandparents moved here after their children were mostly grown—my Grandma Myrtle, my great-aunts Flossie, Ruth and Edith, my Great-Uncle Ivan and Jesse. There were a couple more children, I believe, but they died. No one talks about them. Back before they came to town, they farmed. And then, later on, Grandpa Cavinder had a job with the railroad. Perhaps it was then that they moved to town.

Jesse moved with his parents. He remained with them all their lives. And would take his own life another six years from now after his mother died. He had had spinal meningitis as a boy and was small and twisted. I was fascinated by his shoes, one a normal, lace-up, black ankle boot, and the other one, identical to the first but sitting atop an always shiny black platform that was a good four inches tall. Jesse still limped, obviously, but a lot less than he would have without that special shoe. This was, now that I think about it, the only other “luxury item” in the house. Thanks to the orthopedic shoe, he never used a cane or a crutch, and out on the farm, although I don’t know how, he used to carry out many of the hard tasks of family farming in those days, including walking behind the horse-drawn plow.

I never know how to act on these visits. It’s mostly a matter of sitting on a chair and being seen but not heard. So I notice things. One sight that I find fascinating is how my great-grandmother has pieces of wooden toothpicks stuck through her earlobes. I can’t take my eyes off of them—fascinating and a little horrifying at the same time. Later, my mother explains that her grandmother has pierced ears. I’ve never known anyone with pierced ears. The women in my family at this time wear either clamp and screw-on earrings. Piercing won’t be popular until I’m a teen. Reba Mae explains that Grandma Cavinder only has one pair of earrings, good ones, silver with tiny diamond sets. She only wears them when she goes out. If she doesn’t keep her piercings open, my mother explains, they’ll heal shut. So she cuts off the two business ends of a round toothpick and sticks one through each earlobe. It seems barbaric to me. But what do I know? Later, I’ll have one of those earrings which my grandmother has had a local jeweler convert into a tie-tack—a legacy from her mother to me.

My great-grandmother and 

grandmother with my mother,

Reba Mae, between them, and my 
sister, Darla, beside them.

The restroom used to be outside. It was in an unobtrusive place in the garden. Once while Grandma Cavinder was in the hospital for a few days, Jesse and my mother’s younger brother Kenny decided to give her a surprise. They installed an indoor running-water bathroom and they also installed a gas range in the kitchen, where previously there was only a woodstove. They did it all in record time, and then removed both the woodstove and the outhouse because, Uncle Kenny reasoned, she’d no longer have any use for them.

When my great-grandmother gets back home, she is more incensed than surprised. Who the devil did they think they were? What made them think she wanted them to change anything? She had never understood indoor plumbing.

“Why on earth would anybody do those things inside the house?” she demanded. “There’s a reason bathrooms are outdoors,” she said.

As for the gas range, if she’d wanted one, she’d have gotten it. Things baked in a gas oven couldn’t compare to those made in a woodstove.

Uncle Kenny would later say that the reason she had been so upset by the removal of the woodstove was because she always had a fire going in it, and it was where she spit her tobacco juice. She’d just lift up one of the burners and let fly.

“Tobacco juice?” I asked incredulously.

“Sure,” Kenny said. “Didn’t you ever notice how she didn’t talk much and always held her mouth shut real tight? Well, that was because she always had the space between her gums and her cheeks full of Mail Pouch.”

“I want my outhouse and my woodstove put back right now,” she told my uncles, “and no ifs, ands or buts about it.”

Kenny and Jesse obeyed. When Grandma Cavinder spoke, that’s what you did, if you knew what was good for you.

But they also left the new bathroom and the gas range in place. And little by little, Grandma Cavinder began to use them. Turning on the gas was a lot quicker than building a fire. And, although as Uncle Kenny described it, her outhouse was neat as a pin, it was a lot more comfortable to bathe in a bathroom than in a tub in the kitchen, and a blessing not to have to sprint across the backyard to the outhouse in winter. But both men knew better than to mention this capitulation on her part. Doing so would be a sure way to guarantee that she never used either the range or the bathroom again.

Grandma Cavinder was little—barely over five feet tall—but she made up for her size in feistiness and obstinacy. She seldom smiled. In fact, I don’t ever recall seeing her smile, but then I only really got to know her after she was widowed.

She seldom if ever had anything to say to children, beyond a cursory hello and a hug. But I remember once when I was twelve, shortly before my great-grandmother died, seeing her for Christmas at the home of my Grandma Myrtle, her daughter. I was full of joy and Christmas spirit and when Grandma Cavinder and Jesse arrived after we did, I took her by surprise by rushing to give her a big hug and to wish her a merry Christmas. I had spurted up in height that year and now wore the same shoe-size as my father. My soaring new stature was taking a lot of getting used to and now, seeing how I towered over my great-grandma, I blurted out, “Grandma Cavinder’s so tiny that I could just pick her right up.”

“You do,” she said, “and it’ll be the last thing you ever pick up.”

I believed her.

My mother said that although her grandma had never exactly been the life of the party, she’d gotten a lot sterner and sadder after Grandpa Job died. She and my great-grandfather had shared a quiet contentment that was uncommon, my mother said. Even with the hard work of the farm, they had always found a quiet time for each other that didn’t include children or grandchildren or anyone else but them.

“She was never much of a talker,” my mother said, “and Grandpa Cavinder was so soft-spoken that you sometimes only realized he was talking when you saw his moustache moving.

“But I’ll never forget this one time when I was a young girl,” Reba Mae said, “when I was visiting them on their farm and I heard them get up and go out early to do the milking. Since I helped Mom with the milking at home, I decided to go out and see if I could give them a hand.

“It was still dark and kind of chilly. I could see the light of the coal-oil lantern coming from the barn. For some reason I knew better than to just burst in. And what I saw made me stop and just stand there in the dark watching. I saw their two milking stools a few feet apart. Grandma was sitting on hers and Grandpa was standing next to her as she gently milked a sweet-looking Guernsey. He took his pouch of tobacco out of his barn coat pocket and offered her a chew. She accepted, stuffing the leaves into her mouth, and he served himself. Then he pulled his stool over next to hers and as the milk from the Guernsey pinged into the metal bucket, they just sat there chewing and chatting in that quiet, quiet tone of theirs.

“I still remember it as something very beautiful to watch.”  

Jesse

Why I remember this particular Sunday, though, is because of Uncle Jesse and something very special he gave me that day. Jesse’s illness had made him shy and withdrawn. But it had also left him with a childlike quality that was endearing to me. I liked it during these infrequent visits when, although quiet at first, he would grow almost as bored as I was and would discreetly motion me over to the table to show me something while my mother made mostly one-sided conversation with her grandmother.

He had an entire collection of treasures that he had discovered in the furrows of his plow as a boy. He had kept them all and consulted books, magazines and local historians to learn more about them.

“Know what this is?” he would ask. And when I shook my head, he would say, “This here’s a real injun tomahawk head. Some was sharper than others. Depended whether they was a-choppin’ trees or people. You had your work tomahawks and your war tomahawks.”

Then he’d rifle around in the shoeboxes where he kept these precious objects and come up with another collector’s item. “This here’s a scraper,” he’d say. “They used these to scrape the meat loose from the leather of the deer they killed. They never wasted nothin’. They ate the meat and innards and used the skins for their shelters and clothes. They was real smart people, the Shawnees here abouts.”

But today, on this particular Sunday, he leaves the room and then comes back with something extra-special.

“Know what this is?” he asks. I shake my head. But my eyes are already trained on the strange object. He puts it on the table for me to ponder over and then takes his time, taking out his pouch and paper, rolling himself a smoke and lighting up. He takes a big draw on his cigarette and says, “Go ahead, pick it up.”

I oblige. It’s very strange. It fits neatly in my two hands but is very heavy for its size. “Heavy, ain’t it?” Jesse asks, watching the wonder on my face.

It looks almost man-made. Perfect in shape. Like a globe that has been evenly pressed in the middle to make it into a thick, well-rounded disk shape. Its surface is covered with small, evenly distributed, nearly uniform craters. The words impeccable and pristine come to mind.

“Is it like some grinding stone the Indians made?”  I ask.

Jesse grins, shakes his head and says, “Nope, that there used to be a star. A star maybe bigger than the earth. And then it fell out of the sky and burned and burned and burned until this here’s all that’s left of it. And for some reason, it picked my dad’s cornfield to fall into. And I just happened to hit it with my plow.”

I turn the meteorite over and over in my hands, enjoying its uniform roughness. In my mind, I try to imagine it as a star. A star bigger than the earth. And the thought intrigues and amazes me. Jesse has uncovered a star with his plow, and now I’m holding it in my hands.

“What do you think?” Jesse asks me.

“I think it’s amazing. I love it!”

“Well, you can take it home with you, if you like.”

“You mean it? You’re giving it to me?”

“Well, lending it to you at least. If I ever need it back, I’ll let you know. But if you like it, you can have it.”

That day, I took a piece of another world home with me. It was an alien world, but it also formed part of Jesse’s lonesome but rich and special world. And he’d given it to me. He’d given me something more precious than I’d ever had before. My very own star.