Misery

The house where my father's parents, Dorie and Marce Catlett, spent their long marriage was not a happy one, though I was often happy in it. It was regulated by the seasonal order of all farmhouses of its time and shared in the comeliness of that order; even so, it was not a happy house because my grandparents' marriage had been so often a collision of wills. Opposites attract, but this can be so only within limits, and Grandma and Grandpa's story had the contending themes of attraction and conflict. To all of us younger ones in the family and some who were not in it, Grandpa in his old age referred to Grandma as "your mammy," thus acknowledging their fundamental opposition: she, and not he, had borne their two sons, a fact that he held in awe. This was the honest, insoluble awe of a livestockman and farmer who had been preoccupied all his life with the fecundity of the world. She had borne their children, had suffered their births--and how far this set her apart from him! But in telling of a time he went to see her during their courtship, a time he returned to often in his last years, he would conclude, "and your mammy came out to meet me--the prettiest formed little thing." He would gaze away, seeing her again as she was, and again he would be moved. "Ay, Lord!" Thus he acknowledged the attraction.