Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

15. the right snuff

Obviously, I didn’t learn to play golf at Washington and Lee, but what, then, did I learn prior to dropping out at the end of my sophomore year? (Rumor has it that I was expelled from a fraternity — some say the university — for throwing biscuits at my house mother, but in fact, while there was a dining room food fight that got a trifle out of hand, I wasn’t expelled for my role therein, merely reprimanded.) Let me see: I learned that Henry Miller could write incandescent circles around the dullards we studied in lit. class (Andrew Marvell is not marvelous); I learned to read German (not simply newspapers but Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann); learned that wearing a coat and tie could be advantageous when hitchhiking; and, well, learned to drink bourbon, although in retrospect I could have learned that back in Blowing Rock from my old granny.

Sophronia Ann Robbins, known for miles around as “Aunt Phronie” or simply “Granny,” was a mountain woman right out of central casting. Tall and gaunt, her igloo white hair pulled back in a severe bun, she wore actual bonnets, high-top shoes, ankle-length gingham dresses that she made herself; kept a cow she milked every morning, churning her own butter; kept hogs she butchered in the fall, making not only sausage and liver mush from the flesh but rendering pig fat with lye in a huge cast-iron cauldron to produce the soap with which she laundered the family’s clothes, and with which, not suffering fools gladly, she would threaten to wash out the sassy mouths of her grandkids. (Once she scolded Cousin Martha and me that we weren’t fit to lick a dog’s ass, pronouncing “ass” as “ice” — and suggesting that she could use some oral soaping herself.)

Granny carded raw wool, spun it, and fashioned quilts prized by summer people and locals alike, some examples of them ending up in galleries and museums devoted to Appalachian folk art. I wasn’t privy to the information as a child, but she was also a healer and practicing midwife of some repute: a newspaper once called her “the Florence Nightingale of the Mountains.” A lovely tribute, though it’s difficult to picture the saintly nurse Nightingale dipping snuff and downing bourbon.

In her last twenty years — and despite or because of a life of hard work she lived to be ninety-two — Granny was rarely seen without a birch twig protruding from her lips (the little sticks were used to tamp the snuff and when a snuff stick became frayed and drooped at an angle, it could be mistaken for the unlit fuse on a granny bomb). On the floor beside her old hickory rocking chair, a Maxwell House coffee can served as a spittoon, and evenings a tumbler of Four Roses straight Kentucky bourbon was ever within easy access.

My mother and my paternal grandmother had never gotten along, and that nightly glass of Four Roses became the target of Mother’s most poisonous rays of disdain. Never mind that Granny Robbins was a Bible-reading lifelong Southern Baptist widow of a part-time preacher. In Mother’s view, one could not possibly be a Christian and partake of whiskey, not even for medicinal purposes, as was Granny’s claim. Mother found Christianity — even common decency — and alcohol — even in small amounts — to be mutually exclusive.

Following my two years at W&L, I worked briefly in the mail room of a Richmond insurance company. It was a large firm, and on the last workday prior to Christmas break, there was a party in every department. As I went from floor to floor collecting outgoing mail, I would be offered at each stop a cup of cheer. Uncharacteristically prudent, I accepted but a swallow of spiked eggnog here, a sip of cheap champagne there, and when at the end of the day I rode a Trailways bus (I didn’t own a car) from Richmond to my parents’ new residence in nearby Colonial Heights, I remained by most standards sober. I did, however, smell faintly of booze, and that yeasty perfume was the stench of hell to Mother’s olfactory receptors.

Backing me into a corner beside the gaily decorated tree, she declared through teeth clenched so tight they could snap a bone in half that should I ever again attempt to enter her house with alcohol on my breath, her door would be closed to me forever. Forever!

That struck me as kind of cold. About as cold, in fact, as an assassin’s ice pick. The bartender in a Skid Road joint I, ever the romantic, frequented during my first months in Seattle, would say politely to an intoxicated customer he was asking to leave, “See ya later when you’re straighter.” Hello? A drunk in a dive is treated with a measure of respect and the promise of future congeniality, while a mother threatens to permanently disown her firstborn, her only son, should his exhalations suggest that he might have entertained a discreet swallow of wine?

I was hurt by that and held it against her much as she held against me my determination to see for myself what lies beyond dogma’s cinder-block walls. It was not until many years later, a full decade after her death in 1992, that I learned with a jolt what accounted for her rigid, relentless, and fierce opposition to adult beverages.

An elderly aunt, helping my sisters and me with some genealogical research, finally spilled the terrible beans. During an incident in which alcohol played a prominent role, my mother, then eighteen, had shot and killed her beloved older brother.

At twenty-eight, Conley Robinson was a successful, apparently charismatic Charlotte attorney. Although he’d yet to run for office, he was considered a rising star in North Carolina politics, and some thought he was being groomed for the governor’s mansion. Mother’s childhood had not been easy. Unloved and slighted by her stepmother (her biological mother had died when Mother was eight), ignored by a timorous and distracted father (another Baptist preacher), she turned for warmth to Conley, the family member she most respected and adored. In the interval between high school graduation and starting nursing training, she moved in with Conley and his wife, helping to care for the couple’s infant son.

One evening after working late, Conley stopped by a party at a social club, where he proceeded to get rather thoroughly plastered. When he arrived home, an argument ensued and Conley commenced, first verbally then physically, to abuse his wife. At one point, for reasons known only to a certain species of American male, he felt compelled to interject into the disagreement that metallic expression of the testosteronic imperative, a handgun. By then, Mother, awakened by the commotion, had come to the wife’s aid, and in the struggle that followed, Conley was shot dead.

Arrested, Mother spent at least one night in jail, though the shooting was eventually ruled either accidental or self-defense: details remain spotty. It was all the information I needed, however, to place my mother’s zero tolerance policy toward alcohol in a more forgiving perspective. How she must have suffered with that secret her entire adult life, taking refuge in the Bible and decaffeinated coffee. I’d like to think that had I known the truth, I might have been a kinder, more loving person. If only we knew the Truth, mightn’t we all?

Unless they’ve enjoyed an unusually close relationship, men do not regularly dream of their grandmothers, so it’s hardly unusual that Granny Robbins has appeared in my dreams only once as best I can recall. Dreams swim up and down my subconscious fish ladder in great profusion every single night, yet no matter how lurid, enchanting, or disturbing, they seem to vanish completely and permanently within hours if not minutes after waking. The dream in which Granny plays a role, however, I still clearly remember even though it occurred in my late teens. It remains one of the two or three most vivid, memorable and perhaps significant dreams of my long somnolent career.

It unfolded like this: I am a passenger on a large wooden raft that is slowly ascending up to and beyond the clouds. There are thirty or forty other people aboard, but the raft is by no means crowded. The people, all strangers to me, are friendly and cheerful, not in the least perturbed by the altitude or the absence of guardrails or seats; they’re just sociably milling about, a few listening to an old upright piano that’s being plunked at one end of the otherwise bare raft. At some point it becomes clear to me that the raft is on its way to heaven.

In the dream, I haven’t died nor have the other passengers been resurrected from their graves. It’s just Judgment Day, apparently, and we collection of living souls, presumably as a reward for our piety, have been provided free transportation to God’s promised paradise. Nobody is singing hymns or shouting hallelujah, there are no blaring trumpets, no posse of angels riding shotgun, it’s all rather low-key, but there is little doubt that the lot of us are glory-bound for the kingdom on high. Then, a funny thing happens: I fall off the raft.

It’s kind of a shock but it isn’t scary, because rather than tumbling head over heels, I fall slowly, gracefully. I’m worried about hitting the ground, naturally, but eventually find myself gliding and realize that I’m lying belly-down on a sled, a children’s sled, my own private Rosebud. The sled lands gently on a steep snow-covered road in Blowing Rock, a hill familiar to me as it’s right around the corner from the Robbins family homestead. The snow peters out, the sled continuing to coast over gravel and dirt for a few more yards before coming to rest. I stand up. It’s very, very quiet. Not a person is in evidence — which makes perfect sense: it’s Judgment Day and the entire population has been airlifted to heaven or jerked down to hell, depending on their résumés.

Feeling like humanity’s lonely orphan, unsure what to do next, I turn the corner and walk down deserted Rainey Street. Then I see her! Granny Robbins, in her long granny dress and Frankenstein shoes, is standing in the expansive front yard next to her prize hydrangea bush, matter-of-factly raking leaves. So what if it’s Judgment Day? She’s got chores to do. As I walk up and greet her, the dream abruptly ends.

Now, I’ve never attempted to analyze that dream, never consulted a Jungian psychologist or one of the popular dream manuals. I’m unconvinced, in fact, that dreams have a lot of meaning. When we fall asleep, our mind is relieved of duty, it goes on recess, takes a play period, starts looking around for recreation. In that playful mode it snatches up images, figures, and locales from our memory vault and rearranges them, often randomly, usually out of context, for its own amusement or stimulation, trying different incongruous combinations just to observe the results. Your memory bank is your sleeping mind’s toy box. Sometimes these art projects, these little private movies and impromptu skits, require themes to legitimize them, so the mind will seize on our current worries or deep-seated fears for subject matter, and because our mind isn’t completely confined to our brain but extends, abridged, throughout our organism, biological urges (say we’re hungry, horny, or have to pee) will sometimes intrude upon the dream show, adding a touch of stark reality to what is essentially a surreal production.

Okay, but having said all that, I’m left with the still-lucid recollection of that particular dream, puzzled why it, among tens of thousands of other dreams, would have made such a lasting impression that sometimes even now “during the solemnity of midnight when every bosom is at rest except that of love and sorrow” (as they characterized insomnia in more poetic times), I’ll picture Granny and me alone on Judgment Day and wonder if there is some wider meaning there, some cryptic message from a hidden dimension, from the Other, from the Over Self. Or if it was simply that heaven didn’t want us and hell was afraid we’d take over.