THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

My Mother’s Coat - 1948

37 1948 My Mother’s Coat We are a small family surviving within a tiny existence. My father works two jobs and has to travel into the next county. He goes to work early and comes home late and sometimes, when he has not been paid and there is no gas for his crippled car, he does not come home at all. I sometimes wonder why he does not come home. I am a child filled with no knowledge and a vivid imagination and I feel that I do not belong here. At every opportunity I run away. But there is no place to run to. We no longer live on Black Hawk Ridge or near any of our relatives. I can only run into the brooding hills or down along the muddy river. But that does not stop me. I run away. It is what I do. And I have done it again. This time, I have run to the woods because I imagine I have suffered some slight. My imagination, and my fearful, rigid sense of littleboy -right-and-wrong. I would show her. I’d make her sorry. I ran to the woods. But now I am cold and hungry and I know that it is time to leave the hills. But when I come crashing down out of the woods and stumble Lee Maynard 38 through the chill of weak evening light to the ramshackle clapboard house on the riverbank, she is gone. My mother. Mothers are not supposed to be gone. I charge through the small rooms, breathing in the scent of her, knowing that she has been here, waiting for me. There is no fire in the stove and the house is chilled. She is gone. Without her, the house has no meaning. I run outside and circle the house, my feet thumping on the hardpacked clay. A dog I have never seen before slinks under the porch, but I am not interested in dogs. I run to the small shed where I keep treasure, flotsam I have pulled from the river, iron things found on the railroad tracks, things I will never part with. Maybe my mother is waiting for me here, knowing that each day I check to see that my treasure is safe. I pull open the sagging door, the rusty hinges squealing. Nothing alive is in the shed. I run hard along the riverbank, stiff little tines of river brush whipping across my face. I come to a neighbor’s house, a quarter-mile down the river. No, boy, yer ma ain’t here. Come by when hit was full light. Jist went on by. Said . . . well, didn’t say much thet I can re-call. Jist run off in a right hurry, like. Run off. Why? Maybe she has wanted to run off for a long time. What is she doing in our clan, anyway? What is she doing out here in this place, where there is no piano to play, where no one sings, where no one can hear the lilt of her voice? And why did she leave me here? Mothers are not supposed to run away. Only I can run away. The Pale Light of Sunset 39 I run back to the house, dark now, dead with the absence of my mother. I sit on the rocks that form the steps to the back porch and wrap my arms around myself against the chill; I listen to the river and try to control my imagination. Finally, I wander to the edge of the riverbank and throw clods of dirt out into the weak light, watching them burst below me in a narrow cane field that has just been cut. On the far side of the field, river willows guard the water and I try to throw the clods into the willows. And then I see, dangling from one of the willows, my mother’s ragged coat. I crash down the riverbank and across the cane stubble to the coat. I can’t see any tracks in the dim light but—my imagination explodes—I know where she has gone. She has run away to a dark and foreign land. She has crossed the river into Kentucky. I storm my way down through the willows and crash into the water and flail out into the river yelling for my mother and yelling and yelling until...