World War II was about to begin, but Daddy was ineligible for the draft and ashamed of that. As a boy, he’d taken a wild ride on a pig that bucked him off in hard barnyard clutter. His shattered right elbow would never let him fully straighten his arm again, and scoliosis shaped his backbone into a question mark. Since he was the youngest of seven children and the last remaining as siblings moved away, it fell to him in his teens to support his mother and his father, blinded now by chemicals he’d sprayed for years in apple and peach orchards. Daddy had dropped out of school. He confided to Mom that he’d always felt inadequate. His mother told him often that he was clumsy and less skilled at physical labor than his brothers. Mom’s affectionate care of Buddy spoke to Daddy’s needy soul. He came right out and asked Mom to give him the mothering he’d never had, which, coincidentally, Mom had so little of herself.
Here was a nice man who could make her a respectable married woman. He could provide a home for her and for Ronnie. But that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
* * *
ALL OF A sudden right after Christmas, piercing through the haze of Mom’s new love, she received terrifying news: Polly and Roy were giving Ronnie back to her. Mom panicked.
Polly and Roy were at their wits’ end. Polly told me they’d rather have buried Ronnie than given him up, but that’s what they had to do. They’d been warning Mom for months that this day was coming.
But Mom couldn’t very well bring Ronnie to Keswick. She was still living at the McIntyres’, still caring for Buddy, then three, as well as getting ready to care for his baby brother. She had no home for Ronnie. Besides, nobody in Keswick even knew she had a son. How would she explain who he was? And who would care for him while she looked after the McIntyre boys?
She reached out to Nano. Mom saw her often, in Keswick, Roanoke, and Florida, and she maintained a daughterly trust in her. Nano, a member of Roanoke’s historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, calmed Mom and offered to use her influence to get six-year-old Ronnie into an Episcopal orphanage, Boys’ Home in Covington, Virginia, coincidentally just a few miles from where he was conceived.
Nano promised Mom confidentiality, even from her own son and daughter-in-law. They eventually found out, but an early note in Ronnie’s Boys’ Home file cautioned that Mom didn’t want her employers to know about Ronnie.
Daddy didn’t know either for the first three months he dated Mom. Finally, with great trepidation, she revealed her secret. “I told him everything,” she wrote in her diary, twice underlining those four words. The next day’s entry: “Even tho I know I’ve done right, I just don’t know what I will do if early don’t still love me.” Another two days, and they went out again. “Date tonight with early he paid—he still wants to see me.”
Ronnie told me that soon after, in early 1942, Mom showed up at his Blacksburg home and snatched him away from Polly. He was still in the first grade. In her diary the day before, Mom made no mention of Ronnie. She said only that she was heading west by train to see her brother. Boys’ Home records show that she removed Ronnie from Polly’s the next day. Mom and Ronnie boarded a bus for Covington, where they caught a cab out to the mountainous orphanage.
The home admitted Ronnie at 6:30 p.m. At six years old, he was already four foot four. He weighed sixty pounds. He told me that Mom sat him down on his cot in a cottage, announced that she, not Polly, was his mother, and left him there as she jumped back into the taxi for her long journey home to Keswick. I hate to think she’d treat her own child so coldly, but she must have felt cornered. Here she was poised to finally gain respectability when this boy reappears and threatens it all.
Ronnie remembered it as the worst day of his life. In photos, he went from a carefree, contented-looking boy to an apprehensive waif.
* * *
WITH RONNIE TUCKED away, Mom, now twenty-six, went on with her life. She switched her watch to “war time,” or daylight saving time. She traveled with Buddy and his family to South Carolina. She read Gone with the Wind. She went to movies with Daddy, listened to Guy Lombardo on the radio, and planned her springtime wedding. She received her first wedding gift, a white satin nightie, from Nano. In 450 diary entries over two years, Mom mentioned Ronnie only four times—the first time as “R.,” then as “Ronald.” How had she gone from “sweetest thing on earth” to barely mentioning him?
She and Daddy married in April 1942, exactly nine months after they met. Mom felt too stained by her unwed pregnancy to buy herself a white dress, so she picked out a blue suit with a little hat topped with silk roses, violets, and gardenias. At the ceremony in a minister’s home, Daddy was in a gray suit with black-and-white wing tips. Nano sent a necklace of milky blue moonstones for Mom’s trousseau, and later a fat check.
Over the next two weeks, Mom and Daddy hopped from friend to friend and kin to kin on a poor man’s honeymoon. The Hicks family in Moneta treated them to lunches and suppers. Nano hosted them in the guest quarters at Hobby Horse. From Daddy’s eldest brother’s house in Northern Virginia, they visited Washington, D.C., and the Endless Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
Midway through their honeymoon, they met Polly and drove out to the Covington orphanage with her to see Ronnie. I have one photograph, likely taken by Mom that day. Early is in his wedding suit, rumpled from all the traveling. Mom wanted to show him off to the people at Boys’ Home.
My father wears a slight smile as he peers toward the camera. He stands beside Ronnie. The two, not touching, have their backs to the exterior wall of a building. Ronnie, in light-colored shorts and shirt, squints without smiling at the woman behind the lens. His arms hang close to his sides, his thin legs tight together in a soldier-like stance.
Within days, Adria headed back to work at the McIntyre house. Nano paid for a year’s board for Ronnie at Boys’ Home. Mom agreed to send a $16.67 money order each month for his incidental needs. Daddy moved back in with his parents. He and Mom didn’t have enough money to set up housekeeping together, but soon after, Mom began making payments for a bed big enough for them to share some nights in the maid’s quarters.
She used a Zenith Radio Nurse, an early baby monitor, so she could hurry across the house to Buddy’s nursery when he cried in the night. When the monitor was in the shop and other times when he was scared or lonely, Buddy slept on the couch in Mom’s tiny sitting room.
By the summer of 1942, trouble was brewing again with Polly. She missed Ronnie and regretted letting him go. Two months after Mom and Daddy married, Polly retrieved him for a while from Boys’ Home. Once he returned to the orphanage, Polly kept writing to Mom, complaining about the place. I suspect she was also asking why Mom hadn’t taken him home with her. After all, Mom had promised that once she married, she and Ronnie would be reunited. Why wasn’t that happening?
* * *
AT BOYS’ HOME, Ronnie harvested corn, milked cows, and did all the farmwork the other boys did. “He had a melancholy look about him,” remembered a classmate, who swam in a creek with Ronnie. “Something used to bother him, but I never knew what. Seemed to be thinking about something more distant.”
The orphanage began as an outdoor Sunday school to teach mountain children to read, and it grew into a boarding school for homeless or troubled boys. The boys butchered hogs, canned tomatoes, and produced their own beef, chicken, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.
Polly soon began campaigning to get Ronnie back for good. At first, Mom wrote to the home’s superintendent, Dr. E. Reinhold Rogers, that it would be all right with her if Ronnie returned to Polly. She added, however, that she and Daddy hoped to have Ronnie with them soon. “Since my husband’s father is going blind, both his father and mother depend on him so we aren’t able to have a home of our own yet.”
It was then that Ronnie’s fate teetered most precariously. Over Ronnie’s more than two years at Boys’ Home, correspondence between Mom and Rogers revealed their growing alliance against Polly. They chafed at her charges that Mom didn’t want him and tha
t the home was neglecting him. They shared the view that Polly had spoiled Ronnie. His housemother reported that he couldn’t put on his shoes or wash his face.
The next year, when Ronnie was breaking rules, Rogers pressed Mom to take him as soon as she could: “Perhaps his chief need is for his mother’s care . . .” Rogers was pushing Mom’s guilt button.
She quickly replied,
I wish it was so I could take him, it would make me happier than anything I could possibly do. As soon as we can have a home of our own we intend to take him. My husbands [sic] mother and father both depend on him, and his father is blind—that is why I have to work and why I can’t take Ronald. It would never work out if Ronald and I tried to live with his [Daddy’s] parents, even if he made enough money to care for us all. As you know a farmer makes very little. I feel like you may think that I don’t want Ronald, but it is the one thing I look forward to most of all. My husband is very fond of him too. I hope you see what I mean. I’d never feel right to leave an old couple with no way of making a living, and at the same time I want to have Ronald with me.
Mom moved into the Bishops’ tenant house more than a mile from Bridlespur, but there again, there was no room for Ronnie. She nursed my grandmother as she lay dying of cancer. I doubt my grandparents ever knew that their new daughter-in-law had a son.
Rogers gave Ronnie, then eight, a Stanford-Binet personality and intelligence test and concluded that Ronnie was shy and inclined to distrust his own abilities. His intelligence quotient measured somewhat above average at 106.
In the spring of 1944, nearly two years after they married, Mom and Daddy, the new farm manager, moved into the isolated tenant house where they would spend the next thirty-seven years.
The farm already felt like home to Daddy. An uncle had managed the farm for other owners. Daddy earned money for his first bicycle by thinning peaches there when he was thirteen. The tenant house had turned gray as old paint peeled away. The front porch was rotten in places. But Mom at last had a place for Ronnie.
“Ronald seems to be happy and glad to be home,” Mom proudly reported in a letter to Boys’ Home after she and Daddy retrieved him.
At first, Ronnie told me, Mom and Daddy were pretty good to him. Being out of the orphanage was a huge relief. But Mom still wasn’t claiming him as her son. She told people he was her cousin.
By then she was trying to have Daddy’s child. She told me that in her first years with Daddy, she was vigilant with her diaphragm. She didn’t want to get pregnant until long after—really long after—their wedding. The arithmetic must convince even a simpleton: Yep, no doubt about it, Adria Bishop was married when she conceived. Daddy wanted six children; Mom thought they could only afford one.
Not long after Ronnie arrived and the math was good for her to put her birth control away, Mom suffered a miscarriage. I doubt that Ronnie, then only eight or nine, was aware she’d been pregnant, but Mom was bound to have been gloomy. Daddy wanted her to have his child, and she had failed. She often told me how she was about to flush the fetus down the toilet when Daddy fished it out and buried it in a shoebox in the backyard.
Right after Ronnie’s ninth birthday, Mom enrolled him in Cismont School. She was required to submit his Boys’ Home records to county school officials. She took the risk that some of them would figure out that Ronnie wasn’t really her cousin.
As she sent him off to school that fall, Ronnie told me, she grabbed him by the arm, bent down, and whispered through clenched teeth, “Don’t you ever call me Mama.”
10
Freaky Little Bastard
In my sundress and Mary Janes, I show off at my fourth birthday party in 1949 in our yard. Ronnie, fourteen, towers over us. Behind me, first and third from the left, are Byrd and Buddy McIntyre. The other kids lived on a neighboring farm.
I can imagine the intense humanity within our tenant house in the year before I was born: my just-married folks, a confused little boy, and my granddaddy, Ed Bishop. A widower now, he’d moved in too.
Ronnie was crazy about Granddaddy, and I would be later. He was a handsome old man, smart, of noble bearing. “He had a heart as big as a bushel basket,” Ronnie told me, picking the perfect metaphor for orchardist Ed, who could snap a twig off a tree and accurately predict its yield.
The tenant house was rough. The pantry lacked shelves for canned vegetables from their garden. Daddy, busy on the farm, kept putting off building them, until Mom put her foot down: No more sex until you do. Daddy built them that afternoon.
Mom was still babysitting Buddy and his little brother, Byrd, up at the big house during the day, while getting reacquainted with Ronnie in the evenings. Early was learning to be a stepdad while tackling the biggest job of his young life: supervising hundreds of acres for fastidious new owners.
The motoring gentry watched for years as Daddy worked along the dangerously narrow shoulder of the highway at Bridlespur’s residential entrance to trim ivy on the brick wall and pick up the trash that marred the ornamental gateway to the big house. One day, he found a bent-up bicycle along the roadside. Granddaddy urged him to repair it and give it to Ronnie, who’d never had a bike.
Daddy told me that he and Mom looked pitiful during their early married years. “Poor-poor” is how he described them, and he was not one for exaggeration. Their clothes were shabby. The cook at the big house felt sorry for them. Daddy fixed up the bike and sold it for ten dollars. Ronnie never forgave him. Daddy’s desperate need for that ten bucks didn’t come across to nine-year-old Ronnie. “They didn’t have any feeling for me,” he later told me.
During that period, Mom took Ronnie to Moneta to see his grandpa Emmett. They walked up as the old man was using a mechanical device to separate cream from raw milk. The cream wasn’t collecting at the top of the separator as it should. Grandpa blamed it on Ronnie’s presence. He seemed to think the bastard kid jinxed it, or that’s how it seemed to Ronnie.
Another time, on a hot day, Mom left Ronnie and a dog sweltering in a car while she attended a long service inside her childhood church. She didn’t want to have to explain who he was. “She didn’t know what to do with me. She couldn’t cope,” Ronnie later told me. As Ronnie perceived it, when people looked at him, they thought, You freaky little bastard. When Daddy’s favorite brother visited from out of town, Mom sent Ronnie to his room. Ronnie felt like an outcast.
Mom beat him “hard and often,” according to Ronnie. Many times he’d done nothing wrong, but when she was anxious or frustrated, such as when riding in the back seat of that lead-footed brother-in-law’s speeding Buick, she’d haul off and whack Ronnie on the head. Somehow the head whacks when she was under pressure felt true to me, even though I hadn’t been a victim of them.
* * *
SOME YEARS AGO, I drove two hours to the funeral of one of my favorite old ladies from our former church in Keswick. I was at the reception afterward when an elderly woman greeted me from a chair, “Mary Carter Bishop!” Then she said four surprising words: “I taught your brother.” I had never before found anyone in Keswick who knew that Ronnie was my brother. Gladys Leake, Ronnie’s teacher at Cismont School and an occasional principal by the time I got there, learned from a Moneta friend that Ronnie was Mom’s son, not her cousin. Gladys kept that secret for sixty years, until she heard from her friend that I was writing about Ronnie. Soon after that funeral, I went to see Gladys.
“He was one of my very favorite children. He was smart, sweet, clean, neat. I thought he had potential, really, to be great,” she told me. But Ronnie had a thick shell around him.
One day, Gladys announced to the class that an attendance officer would be visiting the following morning. The man traveled round the school system giving kids pep talks about concentrating on their studies and not missing school. Ronnie brought a knife in his sock the next day and laid it on his desk. He told Gladys he was afraid the man might take him away.
Gladys presented this to me as a more or less harmless incident, but on
e of Ronnie’s classmates told me later that the knife was about eight inches long and that Ronnie was plunking it menacingly into his wooden desk. Gladys deputized several big boys to wrestle it from Ronnie. Another time, when kids were outside during recess, he went back inside and turned all the desks upside down.
Gladys tried repeatedly to break through Ronnie’s walls. “I said, ‘You should open up and talk about your problems with people.’ He said, ‘But she . . . ,’ and then he must have thought, ‘I won’t say any more.’ He never said a word about your mother. Just the ‘but she.’ He’s been on my mind all these years. I loved him dearly. I still love him. But he was someone I couldn’t help.”
* * *
ANY ATTENTION RONNIE got from Mom and Daddy shrank immediately upon my birth in 1945. From that day forward, Ronnie moved to the permanent back burner in the Bishop household.
At last, Adria was a legitimate, seal-of-approval mother. That she named me Mary signaled her hope that I’d be pure and saintly. Her community cheered my birth. Anne McIntyre’s mother, Julia Sophie du Pont Andrews, sent a sterling silver baby cup engraved with my name and birth date. Nano McIntyre sent a decorated white flannel Christmas stocking from FAO Schwarz in New York. Mom’s Roanoke friend and landlady Mallie Moran sent a tiny brush and comb, and a pink silk jacket.
When I was ten months old, Mom took a picture of Ronnie and me in the side yard at our house. I’m standing in my diaper and a light-colored dress inside a wooden playpen that was elevated—raised, I suppose, so chickens, dogs, cats, and snakes couldn’t reach me while Mom did her housework. Rolling hills and the Southwest Mountains stretch behind us. Thin, long-limbed Ronnie, ten years old, wearing a plaid shirt, shorts, and a faint smile, stands beside the pen with his left hand supporting my back.
When I was about four and Ronnie around fourteen, Mom ordered him to take off all his clothes and stand naked in our tiny front foyer. Ronnie’s head dropped forward and his eyes were cast down as Mom dusted him head to toe with what I remember being an asthma powder, but it could have been a pesticide because by that time he was sleeping in the barn. She delivered it with a pump-action duster that she worked vigorously, as if she were killing those tobacco worms back in Moneta. Her eyes blinked rapidly and her face was angry, as if she didn’t want to see Ronnie’s skeletal frame. He looked as humiliated as any kid I’d ever seen. It was my first glimpse of Mom as another kind of mother.
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