North Carolina Miscellany
185
smile her wolfish smile, settle back on the ground and light a Pall Mall. This is how I remember my mother happy, this back-in-the-woods, perhaps not legal, haven. This was where she let us as close to who she was as she could stand. The used, tan Studebaker, the color of a battleship. It had protruding head lamps and in the middle of its front surface, a rocket-like protrusion with a medallion. Very modern. I don’t remember my mother liking the Studebaker, but she tended it lovingly, carrying buckets of water COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
but I think we had to climb under or over barbed wire to get onto the path that went beside a rocky, New England kind of river with boulders we could climb onto. This was not a wild and raging river, nor was it deeply broad and placid. It was more like a creek, but wider. I remember the woods around us as not being leafed out, so we must have gone there in the spring and autumn; also, I do not remember swimming or getting in the water, though I remember walking the river bed, making our way from rock to rock. My mother gave the impression of never being happier than when she was out in the woods, telling us about Indians (stereotypes we took in as The Truth) walking soundlessly without stepping on twigs and we kids in our Keds would try to do the same as we followed her down the familiar path. Charity, who did not particularly like the outdoors, came with us in her mid-calf flared skirt and her clodhopper Murray Space Shoes. We brought our dogs, letting them run loose, which we children understood as quasi-illegal. Well, outright illegal, but allowed under our mother’s code. We brought friends and classmates. I think we must have stopped going here when I was in elementary school or at the latest junior high, because the friends I remember in this spot are eager little girls in jeans and cardigans. We searched for limbs and kindling for the (illegal) fire. We searched for firm straight sticks for roasting hot dogs, which sizzled in their blackening skins and split, oozing fat. My mother didn’t truck with the niceties of s’mores, but we roasted marshmallows, some of us gently heating marshmallows to honey brown on the outside and melty ooze on the inside; others going for the conflagration, letting the marshmallow catch fire, the flames licking, until the outside had turned to carbon, blowing out the flame, plucking the meteor of sugar off the stick, burning fingers and tongue. My mother would tramp further back into the woods, where the path shrank to a trace. Where we could hear water running, where water welled up between rocks, she would gently move the leaves aside. “Ahh,” she would smile, pulling loose a few Irish green stems. “Watercress. Heaven,” she’d say, nipping off a bit and chewing it. She would hand Charity a stem and Charity might say, “Very nice, darling.” And then we kids could taste. Watercress. Pepper. Green. She would
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Heavy Lifting, 2018 (pigment print, matte medium, found objects) by Dawn Surratt
from our second-floor apartment down to Jane Street to wash it, waxing it from the tin of Johnson’s Paste Wax she kept in the trunk. In winter, she wore the ratty raccoon coat she had acquired somewhere, her embarrassingly clunky shoe boots. Like most of our cars, it was high maintenance: old hoses splitting, batteries spending their energy into copper green deposits; tires collapsing upon themselves. On days my sister and I woke to the scrape of snow shovels on sidewalks, our mother would