Hot Springs, Arkansas: An article from Southern Cultures 17:3, The Memory Issue

By Keith Maillard

Hot Springs, Arkansas
by Keith Maillard

World War II-era Hot Springs is the foundation for this author's story, a tale about his family's crumbling dynamics in troublesome times.

"'Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,' my mother says, the tone of her voice adding,What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was a Sunday. They'd never heard of Pearl Harbor."

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807882818

Keith Maillard

Keith Maillard was born and raised in West Virginia. Currently the Chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, he is the author of thirteen novels and one poetry collection. "Hot Springs" is based upon a chapter from his forthcoming memoir, Fatherless.

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ESSAY

Hot Springs, Arkansas

by Keith Maillard

Although the name of the town—Hot Springs, Arkansas—has been in my head for as long as words have been in there, it never occurred to me to think about the meaning of those words, to say to myself, ‘Oh, there must be hot springs’—as, indeed there are. The thermal waters flow from an ancient watershed at over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but if my mother ever soaked herself in them, she never told me about it. Men drinking mineral water at hot spring no. 29, ca. 1906, Hot Springs, Arkansas, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Although the name of the town—Hot Springs, Arkansas—has been in my head for as long as words have been in there, it never occurred to me to think about the meaning of those words, to say to myself, "Oh, there must be hot springs—as, indeed there are. The thermal waters flow from an ancient watershed at over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but if my mother ever soaked herself in them, she never told me about it. By the time that she and my father, Gene, were living there in 1942, the town had been transformed from a popular spa for folks with arthritis into a rehabilitation center for sick and wounded servicemen—but she never told me about that either. The Hot Springs I heard about is the town as she remembered it—a miserable rural dump in the middle of the ignorant, stinking hot, crapped-out, nowhere South. She agreed to go there with Gene, she told me, to save the marriage."

There was no great love between us . . . either Gene for me or me for him. It was a matter of convenience at that point. I was pushing thirty and panicking. The fellas that I had run around with in Wheeling, I didn’t want to marry. They were . . . stupid. I don’t know. Gene had been around and in things. He was a different personality. We got along all right. But I couldn’t live with his damned tight . . . His worshiping the dollar is what broke us up.

That is her summary, her official public statement delivered a lifetime later, but she also said, Mother’s the reason that your dad and I didn’t get along, and even once, dropped as a sad aside while she was talking about something else, I don’t know what happened to us.

To say that they were trying to save the marriage implies that they’d