A Cure for Dreams

by Kaye Gibbons

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A story that traces the bonds between four generations of resourceful Southern women through stories passed from one generation to another.

Release date: January 3, 1991

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 192

Sample

“WHEN MY MOTHER WAS A YOUNG GIRL SHE spent the pinks of summer evenings sitting on the banks of the Brownies Creek, where it flows into the Cumberland River. She always sat with a ball of worsted in her lap, knitting and dreaming of love coming to her.

The man in her one dream would ride up and surprise her on his horse, and then he would reach down and take the ball of worsted from her and toss it up into the air and shoot a hole through it. Then he would reach out over the horse’s head and catch the yarn and hand it back to my mother, saying her beauty pierced such a great place in his heart. Then he would ride off. He never swooped her up and galloped off to a fine house in the Shenandoah Valley and he never hopped down off the horse sheerly to kiss her. He always left. She never let herself dream the story any other way. Even in her dreams my mother denied herself the impossible.

The man who finally wooed my mother wasn’t a dream man, and he didn’t find her knitting on a river bank. He found her at a Quaker wedding in 1917, which was a very bold place for her to be. Her mother, Bridget O’Cadhain, had taught her daughters that the doors of English churches were the gates of Hell and that terrible things happened to Catholics who went inside, like blindness and deafness or sheerly death. My mother went to the wedding anyway because she was fifteen and therefore a slave to risk.

So there my mother was at the little church, wishing her friends well and being noticed by a young man. He probably spotted her hair right away, which she had knotted and laced with lavender on the cart road, out of her mother’s gaze. He introduced himself as Charles Davies and impressed her to the point that by that evening they had decided to court a bit on the sly.

The Davies were more or less hard-boiled Welsh Quakers who had come to America in the early 1800s. They stayed up in the North and tried to farm, but when they saw they weren’t making anything of themselves they started trickling west and south, branch by branch, which has forever been the human tendency. During the Reconstruction after the Slave War, my father’s particular branch drifted into Bell County, Kentucky, where everybody in the world was trailing in and yanking up a square of earth, and then my father was born in 1896.

My mother’s family, however, had headed to Kentucky the minute they landed in from Galway, and they more or less looked at the valley and the mountains as theirs. They only held papers for a few acres, but still everything within sight seemed to belong to them. And then came flock after flock of Quakers and Methodists and Baptists and even a Lutheran bunch or two.

My mother’s people quickly scratched and dug out a little hole and crawled in it and whispered day and night about how everybody in the world, with the exception of the O’Cadhain family and the pope, had never wanted them to have anything. They believed the new people coming pulling cartloads of children and furniture into their little edge of Bell County were merely the last in a long line of snatchers and grabbers. They were very tender about this.

My mother told me a million times that Ireland and the Irish people were special, and that the O’Cadhain family in particular was the most blessed of all because it had been imposed upon without cease since the dawn it sprung up in Galway. For centuries they had been in training to have nothing, so everything was more or less working perfectly according to God’s plan.

My mother was not one to glorify in tribulation, and one day she asked herself a question.

If Ireland is a jewel and our family is favored, why are we in Bell County, Kentucky, watching scrawny crops wash down the sides of hills?

She decided to trust the question to her young man, Quaker though he was, who stood and waited for her in the dry creekbed every Sunday afternoon, always holding a spray of lavender. She asked about Ireland and favor and wasted crops, and he told her that Ireland had always overjudged its merits and that her father’s scrawny crops washed down hills because he refused to terrace slopes.

Charles told me that if my father would stop sitting around drunk, waiting for God to reverse his notion of water flowing downhill, that our family could be worth at least a little something. He said anything could be had with work, which is what he happened to be morally and physically outfitted for. In school he had gone up as high as the multiplication tables and then dropped himself out of his studies to work. He said that as soon as he learned to walk he became familiar with the hoe and had been in love with work ever since. He said, though, that he also loved me. Everything he said sounded reasonable and true.

Bridget O’Cadhain was no fool. She knew that my mother had taken a sport and he was far from Catholic, but she preferred to let the idea fester while she kept a tighter than usual eye on my mother. Then early one morning Bridget came in from the yard with a fire of wood in her arms and began shoving the pieces of wood in the stove. She saved out the last piece though and turned about and trotted over to the breakfast table and had my mother splay out both hands palms down. She smacked her hands good with the stovewood and then trotted back over and pushed it into the fire. When my mother met her sport that afternoon she told him she’d spent all the previous day learning to use a hammer.

There was so much alcoholic misery in Bridget’s life that you would think she’d have been thrilled to work in a Quaker here or Lutheran there to more or less water down this trait. My grandfather, Sheamus, drank fairly all day every day. He was something to behold. My mother woke up every morning to the sound of him yelling for one of his daughters to cook him an egg. He’d stand in the kitchen and shout at the ceiling, Come cook me a goddamn egg! One of the girls would rush in the kitchen and fry the egg. Then my mother’s Uncle Bart would roll in and sit at the table. He was very famous in Bell County for sailing as a stowaway from Ireland and swearing incessantly on the Virgin that he consumed only hardtack and forty-two cups of coffee on his way across the ocean. My mother said also that this uncle had purely by accident crawled in the fireplace as a baby, and thus nobody enjoyed looking at him.

My grandfather would shout, Cook Bart a goddamn egg too! Both men would eat their eggs and take to smacking liquor and talking loud-mouthed. The daughters had a very difficult time keeping these men wetted down. And then Bridget would come in from the wood pile or poultry yard and see them and scream, Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Blessed Virgin, Mother of God! She would drive her husband and brother-in-law away from the table with her yardstick and then swing around and swat and sting the legs of whoever had cooked the eggs.

My mother told me once that her mother was the kind of woman who thought nothing of whipping other people’s children. This has always impressed me as something a woman may long to do yet never do. Bridget, though, crossed this line fairly regularly. My mother also told me that her mother was more or less a display of curiosities. I asked her what she meant and then wished I hadn’t.

She had very tiny little teeth, like little rodent teeth of some nature, and they were all squared off the same size, like they had been sawed off Zzzzt! all the way across. She trotted from spot to spot. She rarely simply walked. And she always wore black, folds and folds of black, summer and winter.

She refused to learn more than a spattering of English, and when we all sat at the table teaching each other grammar, we would invite our mother to sit down with us, but she would say she didn’t need to learn. She didn’t want to. Whatever English she picked up from daily living was very flat and twangy in a mountainy way. The only English thing she ever said that sounded like it was said in her true voice was Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Blessed Virgin, Mother of God. She would mix all this in with her Gaelic and chop the kitchen table with her yardstick when we couldn’t understand. She had brought her family all the way from Galway to hop in the melting pot and then she refused to melt. This is how stubborn my mother was, and this is also more than likely what gave her the oo. . .