Comfort Fort.
The August heat envelops the household. From noon until after
5 in the afternoon, the sun beats down relentlessly, slowing even their
breathing as they cut back all but essential activities.
Moses urges the women to retire upstairs; there they thrust
wide-open the floor-to-ceiling windows and pray for a breeze, stripping
to petticoats, prostrate in the four-poster beds which were wrapped
loosely in the ever-present mosquito netting.
Was it this hot when she was young? Elizabeth wonders. It
must have been. She remembers her mama's futile efforts at midday
to quiet her and her sisters. Maybe children don't feel the heat. Or
maybe children are too busy to feel the heat, too intent on seizing hold
of the future as though they can mold it with their hands. Do they
even hear the feeble protestations of the elderly?
In the distance, thunder promises relief. An afternoon shower
is devoutly to be wished, a sudden downpour drenching Montgomery's
muddy streets, killing the heat as it rises in steam to evaporate in the
sun's dying rays.
Moses is the only one of the family who ignores the heat which
dissolves in steam beneath the porch. He leaves the house after lunch
for his rounds. The sick and the dying do not arrange their illnesses
and their deaths to accommodate the doctor, he answers his mother's
protests with a smile. Neither do those in need of spiritual comfort wait
for the cool of the evening to turn to their minister for help.
Elizabeth is proud of her son, the doctor. He was the first
doctor in Montgomery. Moses is also a Methodist minister, the first inÔ ' Ô Montgomery. The new Union church which proudly welcomes
worshippers of all faiths speaks for his ability. Five years ago, there
wasn't a church. He and William Sayre started building it in 1824.
Today is accepted as part of the city's rapidly increasing landscape of
wooden houses, taverns and cemeteries. In both medicine and the
church, Moses follows in the footsteps of his half-brother, Elizabeth's
oldest son, Dr. William Lee. Doctoring was in his father's family. The
Fews were tobacco planters before the War. Lord knows what to call
them since. Everything changed with the War.
The Lees were among the first to practice medicine or preach
the gospel in the territory ceded by the Indians to Georgia. It was not
in Georgia that Elizabeth's memories were born, however. It was in
North Carolina. For a moment the thought of her long dead love hit
her with a pain she thought four decades had dulled. Sometimes, those
gold autumn mornings shone with a brilliancy more familiar than the
dusty Montgomery, Ala. streets she now trod.
She turned her thoughts again to Moses, amused at the thought
that by blazing new paths into unknown country he followed a tradition
two centuries in the making that of being the first settlers of an area.
How many decades, how many centuries, would this wanderlust
claim her family's hearts and souls? How long would it be until their
roots dug in so deeply that the black soil under foot anchored them to
permanence?
Maybe in Moses' generation. Against her will, the thought of
her son William came to mind, so like Moses in some ways, the image
of his soldier father in so many more.Ô ' ÔŒI am not as strong as I once was, Elizabeth acknowledge as
against her will her mind jumped from pride in the living to sorrow for
the dead.
Once, I was able to stand as a tower of strength for my
fatherless children, smiling without a tear, holding them close and
telling them we must not cry.
I did not cry, not in the daylight, not before the eyes of my
family, anyway, not for Green, not for Benjamin, not for Thomas. Her
crying was reserved for the hours of despair which haunt light sleepers
in the hours before dawn, bleak with loneliness, drawing from them
hoarse, racking sobs.
Even so, those times were easy compared to the deaths of the
recent years. Long ago, her children were young. All about them, they
saw the fathers of their friends dying also. But William and Hannah,
their deaths were different. A mother can live with any possibility other
than that of facing the death of a child.
She could not retreat from his memory, William, serious
William, her eldest. Her right arm. Her strength. William, so like his
father, the love of her youth.
Hannah was nothing like her brother. Her aunt's namesake,
was light, almost flighty. If William was her strength, it was to Hannah
she turned for laughter and for joy.
She remembered Hannah after William's death walking in to
find her mother gloomy in the twilight.
"What, no light? I can't show you my new gown without light,"
she said, never ceasing to chatter as she lit one lamp after another,Ô ' Ô succeeding, before long, in her object; her mother was laughing, holding
herr side, begging her to stop her outrageous tales, her mimicry of the
fashionable ladies and their silly notions.
Yes, Hannah would if she were here today chase the devil of
memory from my presence.
But Hannah has been dead these three long years. She
inherited the weakness of the Wheelers, Elizabeth's grandmother's
family. She died gasping for breath, pale and clinging to her mother's
hands. The Wheelers of every generation pass along this curse of weak
lungs, pneumonia claiming the young, tuberculosis waiting in the wings
later in life if they evade death's grasp as a child.
"Don't do that, mama."
Elizabeth was startled from her thoughts. Who spoke?
Moses was back. It was he who chastised her.
My face has always given away my feelings, Elizabeth thought.
But she was glad her son returned, bringing her out of her morbid
revelry. She smiled at him, seeing her father in his worried face.
"Don't do what, Moses, don't join you on the porch downstairs?"
she asked, cutting off the subject, rising, pausing in her walk from
bedroom door to stair landing. It has grown late as she indulged in
thought. The sky has darkened. But the air has cooled. She knows that
on the porch a breeze awaits her. A pleasant evening is promised.
Moses ignored her banter, offering his arm for support.
"Don't trip and fall on the rug, mama," he says, adding with a
laugh, "I'm too tired to help you if you do. I've treated so many patients
today I might set your broken arm or I might prescribe a draught forÔ ' Ô warding off the nausea of a mother-to-be."
He laughs but he is telling the truth. He is tired, she realizes,
searching his face for reassurance that the tiredness was a normal one.
I could not bear to lose him too, she thought. We know each other,
Moses and I, Elizabeth thought. I can take pride in my children. I have
failed in ways known only to me and the Good Lord, but not with my
children.
Though she loves them far more intensely than the world
allows, Elizabeth knows it is a love which had been returned to her
tenfold. She knows when the final figures have been tallied, she is
lucky.
No, I find no fault with fate, she thought. What will be will be.
Still, she pauses at the oval mirror hanging by the front door,
wondering briefly the identity of the familiar stranger who looks back
at me.
In the mirror she sees a 76-year-old woman to whom age has
been kind, nevertheless a woman who despite the many compliments
from grandchildren and great-grandchildren bears the scars of old age.
Where are the green-flecked eyes which on an autumn day
enticed a young colonel to order his men onward while he boldly
carried her into the nearby woods for stolen pleasure?
Where is the thick, golden hair which hung below her waist on
that February night she shunned her marriage bed? How awkwardly
she had stood, naked in the firelight, as he brushed her hair from her
breasts with the gentle yet insistent hand of an older lover intent upon
revealing to her that her soul did not lie with her love in a grave nearÔ ' Ô a little white church?
Had life ended long ago? She found no spark to prove otherwise
in the gray eyes which returned her mirrored stare.
Where is the fire which burned within, the flame of passion for
life which danced within from her cradle in Maryland, across the North
Carolina meadows, through low-country swamps of South Carolina and
into the wilderness of the Georgia frontier?
I ran then with hands outstretched to meet my fate, Elizabeth
thought.
Had it come to this? The self-pitying sorrow of an old woman
testy because of the heat?
She walked to the door, where Moses held open the screen. She
let herself down into the deep-seated rocking chair, glad for its needleªpoint cushion. There is a gentle breeze from the river, as she had
known there would be.
She closes her eyes. Images run through her mind as though
on a giant screen.
Where did it all begin, the ever-constant moving from place to
place? I must remember, and tell Moses, as my mother told me and as
her mother told her.
Was it when the tobacco crop failed in Maryland and father
joined the uncles and cousins in the move to the Carolina frontier?
No, it was before that. Long before that.
She opens her eyes, aware of the stir in the yard below. Two
great youths who each loom many inches over six feet approach on fast
gallops on their horses, waving and yelling in excitement.Ô ' ÔŒMoses rises to greet his nephews, Greenberry and Eley Lee,
her grandsons by son John. John is in Tennessee with his second wife
and second family. Elizabeth claimed the children of his first marriage.
"I found it," Green says exultantly. He can hardly tie his horse
for excitement. Eley is right behind it.
"You will love it, grandmama," he says. "The roads are almost
non-existent, but I got there on an old Indian trail. Rolling hills. Sweet
cleared pastures. Pine trees so big you could dance a set on the stumps
and wildflowers blooming everywhere you look. I think I'll call it The
Garden, it's so beautiful. It runs to a little creek they call Pigeon."
He paused for breathe, giving Elizabeth a chance to have her
say. She knew her grandsons
"Well, no matter how beautiful this land is, it isn't going away
in the next ten minutes. Sit down and cool off, Green. Then tell me
where your land is."
For two years, her grandsons had taken advantage of every
opportunity to explore the unsettled territory south and west of
Montgomery. The Indians had been forced to give it up after the Battle
of Horseshoe Bend and it was in the process of being sold by the
government, parcel by parcel. Eventually, it would all be sold.
"It's in Covington County, about 70 miles south of here," Green
explained. "The land isn't for sale yet, but we'll have a jump on
everybody else if we move in first, then grab it when it goes on the
market."
Green kept talking, but Elizabeth barely heard his words.
Instead of listening, she looked at him. He was a Lee, just likeÔ ' Ô his daddy, big and gentle at the same time, his eyes glowing softer than
a newborn kitten when he talked of his land.
A servant brought a plate with food for the boys she and
Moses and his family had eaten earlier and he absentmindedly ate
one piece of fried chicken after another. He would have a problem with
his weight if he ever stopped working so hard, she knew.
But there would be little chance of that.
Elizabeth knew what clearing new land meant. It was work. She
watched her father and brothers work in the fields of North Carolina
in the 1760s, back-breaking daylight to dusk work. She helped her
young husband in the 1770s in Georgia. She advised nephews and
nieces on plantations near Tuscaloosa before she moved to Montgomery.
Thirty minutes before, Elizabeth had wondered if her life was
over.
She had forgotten those thoughts by now, caught up in her
grandsons' enthusiasm.
Her eyes danced as Green mentioned Sara Jane Taylor, a girl
from Georgia who recently moved to Montgomery.
"You think Sara Jane would like Covington County?" she asked.
Green sobered. "I don't know. But I'm going to ask her." Eley
had been married four years. It was time Green fell in love, which she
saw by his eyes he had already done.
They talked for long minutes on the front porch that night,
optimistic talk, sprightly talk, talk of love and land and was there any
difference between the two?
Later, much later than she should have still been talking,Ô ' Ô Elizabeth yawned and Green and Eley yawned and everyone knew it
was time to look one last time at the full moon hanging in the sky and
go to bed.
"Get a good night's sleep, children," Elizabeth told her
grandsons. "Tomorrow morning we're going to get an early start. I want
to see Covington County for myself. We can stop on the way there and
back and stay with cousins in South Butler."
Green and Eley were totally enthusiastic.
Moses was totally opposed, but resigned.
"No one has ever been able to stop you from doing anything you
want to do," he told her.
"Boys," he told his nephews. "Get up early and put plenty of
cushions and food in the wagon."
Elizabeth knew she would sleep soundly that night.
She always did when she so looked forward to tomorrow.Ô à ÔElizabeth Few Lee Andrew Bush died in Montgomery in 1829.
Her children, grandchildren, cousins and their descendants
continued to move and to settle, to uproot their families and to wonder
if maybe this next generation would be the one to settle down. They
moved not by the hundreds but by the thousands, their family roots
and ties so entwined that when they moved thousands moved and when
they settled entire towns and counties sprung into existence.
It was a sister of a Greenberry Lea who married Gen. Sam
Houston and took the family along in the 1840s trek to Texas which
became so mammoth shopkeepers abandoned their stocked stores with
a sign in the window, GTT. Gone To Texas.
It was a granddaughter who sold to Jefferson Davis what
became known as the Little White House of the Confederacy.
They were ancestors of governors and senators and doctors and
writers.
And in that great swelling migration, memory was the only
victim. Great cities grew and states filled the western map like adding
pieces to a puzzle. Technology made it easier for families to move apart.
By the third generation apart from each other, grandchildren no longer
knew grandparents. Children no longer sat on front porches listening
to great old uncles. There was no one to say, "Look around. The same
families who sailed together to a new world live together in a modern
one. They just live further apart."
On a June day in 1898 on a small farm in Covington County,
the father of seven children returned from a day in the fields to the one
room log cabin he built next to Pigeon Creek.Ô ' ÔŒHis mother-in-law met him, smiling, her horse and wagon in
front of his door.
"Dr. Terry just left," she said. "Congratulations, Beth, it's
another girl."
Bethel Lunsford Lee stopped in his tracks, said a prayer of
thanks to the Good Lord, and wiped the sweat from his face with his
arm.
In the cabin, Mary Melissa Lee waited impatiently for her
husband's return.
The baby's name had been picked out in advance. Irene.
Without a word, Mary Melissa handed the baby to her husband.
Smiling he tried to hide the fact that he quickly inspected her tiny
fingers and toes and peered in her gray eyes, assuring himself she was
normal.
She was the most beautiful baby born in Covington County
since his grandfather Greenberry Lee moved there nearly 70 years
before, he told her.
She would grow up poor, he had to acknowledge. But she would
be surrounded with love and music and family.
And when it got down to it, that's about all there was in life,
wasn't it?