Charms for the Easy Life
By Kaye Gibbons
Putnam, 256 pages, $21.50
Kaye Gibbons (author of the novels “Ellen Foster” and “A Cure for Dreams”) is equal parts storyteller and ventriloquist. Essential to her narratives are the wonderfully peculiar, slightly off-center, typically Southern and rural voices she uses to relate them. The voice telling this story belongs to Margaret, a girl who stands not so much in the shadow as in the sunlight of her grandmother, Charlie Kate-a midwife who, without benefit of conventional education or licensing, becomes one of the most respected healers in rural North Carolina.
On her way from Pasquotank County to Wake County, near Raleigh, Charlie Kate and her new husband cut down a hanging man who repays them with “an easy-life charm he pulled off a greasy thin chain around his ankle. The charm, he said, was the hind foot of a white graveyard rabbit caught at midnight, under the full moon, by a cross-eyed Negro woman who had been married seven times.”
In a way, the charm works. Charlie Kate’s husband eventually leaves, but her life does prove if not precisely easy then at least productive and ferociously interesting. When her daughter Sophia’s husband also runs off, Charlie Kate moves in with her and her granddaughter Margaret, and the three generations of women form a sort of a healing SWAT team, rushing out in the middles of nights to deliver babies or cool fevers or lance formidable boils. Charlie Kate traffics in a catholic range of cures, mixing and matching surgery, harrowing pharmaceuticals like antipyrin, and herbal remedies such as evening primrose oil and ichthammol salve. She extends her services to sex education for local teenagers and instructions on working the new indoor toilets that are coming in with the sewage lines. She draws the boundaries of her work only at voodoo.
Margaret relates, “Once I watched her throw a young man out of her house because he would not accept her refusal to conjure his wife. He wanted to hire her at an inflated rate to toss a bag of cemetery dirt into his yard at midnight. His wife had been unfaithful and this particular hex he believed would keep the woman in a constant state of disappointment. My grandmother said, `If she’s living with you, she’s that way already.’ “
Their all-female preserve is eventually invaded by a sincere suitor. “Mr. Baines was glory in my mother’s life,” Margaret relates. “He came to our house almost every night for dinner, always showing up in one of his beautiful suits, his straight white teeth gleaming, giddy as a forty-year-old man could be without appearing drunk, retarded, or foolish.” Eventually Mr. Baines wins over even Charlie Kate, which is pretty much a requirement in this house where she reigns.
Although Sophia takes a semi-independent stance toward her mother, Margaret’s love of her Charlie Kate is without reservation, as is her trust. “Everything she had ever said had been true, and I had long since learned to do whatever she told me to do. Trusting her to guide me in this circumstance was like falling backward, like her chloroformed women, knowing that not only would I be caught, I would be caught before I realized I was falling.”
Of course, Margaret’s problem is one common to all the mesmerized-thrall is not terribly easy to break free of. Even when she graduates at the head of her class and is offered the possibility of one or another elite college, Margaret can’t quite find the wherewithal to leave her cocoon of unreserved approval or the sweet pursuits of reading for pleasure and casual auto-didacticism or the excitement of the nocturnal rides out to the bedsides of the ailing.
The novel in which the narrator (and most likely the author) adores the subject takes the same risk as the fawning biography-that the reader will not be quite as charmed by the subject as the writer is. Gibbons mostly stays shy of this line, although I could have stood a few fewer pronouncements from Charlie Kate, and did subversively long on a couple of occasions for her incredibly shrewd diagnoses to turn out wrong, and for those 30-year-old shoelaces of hers (soaked in linseed oil every Saturday night) to snap.
When Sophia and Mr. Baines elope, Margaret worries for her mother’s fate in the house where he lives with his ancient mother. “I had my grandmother, but all my mother would have while Mr. Baines worked was the old woman, the radio, volunteer work, books, and magazines. There would be a gap where my grandmother had been. Especially where my grandmother had been. She took up quite a bit of room in one’s life.”
Implicit in that statement is “for better or worse,” but we see none of the worse. Instead Margaret lives happily in her soft confines, then is freed from her swoon as easily as if it were a slipknot by the near simultaneous arrival of a love interest and the death of her grandmother.
Near the book’s end, Charlie Kate gives Margaret the lucky charm to pass on to her new boyfriend for Christmas. “Tell him it works, depending on your definition of easy.” Something akin to this could be said of “Charms for the Easy Life,” which is delightful as far as it goes.
However, in keeping always to the light and charming, the story skirts any of the darker aspects of growing up in the overwhelming presence of someone like Charlie Kate. And in this way Gibbons may miss the true fullness of her terrific and terrifying subject.
