Heartland

by Sarah Smarsh

  I spent a lot of afternoons playing catch with a baseball in the middle of a side street with Trevor, a white boy with shaggy black hair who lived next door. His dad was a Boeing factory worker who was on disability after hurting himself on the job. One day, Trevor’s dad shot himself.

  Trevor’s mom couldn’t afford a professional crime-scene-cleaning service. So Grandma and one of her neighbor friends, a former hippie who worked at an airplane factory and rode a motorcycle with her husband, who also worked at an airplane factory, went next door and wiped blood off the curtains and carpet. They did the whole cleanup job.

  A few years later, Trevor’s teenage sister would be murdered. As with the child abduction case in my part of town when I lived with Mom, her body was found in a field.

  Mom and Matt lived with Bob in a nicer, safer part of town but visited our place sometimes, and I often stayed with them on weekends. We were by no means estranged. Matt and I would resume playing together like no time had passed, but I’d begun to idolize my mom the way a little girl might idolize her cool, pretty older sister. I was mad at her, too; she treated the fact that I lived with Grandma like it was no big deal and as if I had orchestrated it, like some manipulative feat she had decided to permit. When I saw her, my stomach clamped into a confused knot.

  I was reminded every day that kids are supposed to live with their moms. School permission slips asked for her signature above a line that read “parent.” Teachers told me to tell my parents about the fund-raiser when I got home. Kids asked why I lived with my grandparents. Every family image on TV was of children in their parents’ house, or at least their mother’s. It was a sorry situation indeed, I gathered, if you weren’t even living with your mom.

  My family acted like there wasn’t any problem with the arrangement. Mom wasn’t a crack addict living on the streets. She was a smart, employed woman who charmed everyone she met and had enough for basic survival—just enough, painfully, sparely, with credit-card balances mounting, but enough.

  The problem was more about her past than our present. That past was a list of addresses, a depth of poverty that left her with no security in the years she needed it most. During the 1960s and ’70s, Betty had moved more than sixty times—up, down, and across the center of the country—with Jeannie at her side.

  Aunt Pud had described those years as a sad circus, and I grew up in the circular patches of dirt that circus left behind. Before I finished high school, I would move twenty-one times within two Kansas counties.

  Houses were foremost economic units, which people rightly treasured—none more so than I did, as I’d grow up to renovate and decorate houses with the deepest creative joy. But I’d moved so many times I knew the difference between shelter and security. One eventually blows away, and the other exists only as a formless thing.

  I would have tried to give you both, of course. But the first home you needed was one I made sure you wouldn’t enter. A mother is the first residence, and I kept the porch light turned off.

  6

  A WORKING-CLASS WOMAN

  In some ways, where I grew up there was less of a line drawn between men and women than I’ve found in more privileged places. The women who raised me cooked in cafeterias, drove tractors, waited tables, baled hay, worked assembly lines, cared for the elderly overnight as nursing assistants in small-town hospitals, moved boxes in the stock rooms of discount stores. The concept of “a lady” was laughable and almost nonexistent. My family never told me to act like one, maybe because a lady doesn’t get much done. You, too, would have had dirt under your fingernails, not for being unclean but for the way you worked.

  The men I grew up around didn’t scoff at a woman’s capability. They were from families whose females had been holding their own for centuries. When the women I knew spent money, they asked for no one’s permission. That didn’t mean they made enough money to get by, of course. A working-class woman is reliably more underpaid than a working-class man. In my households, though, there was at least as much ownership of finances and decision-making among women as among men.

  Grandma Teresa was nine years old when the Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination based on sex, was introduced in Congress in 1923. On my maternal line, Great-Grandma Dorothy was one year old. The proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution made unsuccessful rounds in Congress throughout their lives, throughout Betty’s life, and then my mother’s early life, finally failing ratification for the last time in the early ’80s, when I was a toddler.

  Kansas, however, had been the sixth state to ratify the amendment, the day after my mom’s tenth birthday, in 1972. Our state had deep progressive roots on the matter of women’s rights, reaching back to the so-called pioneer days. When you have twelve European immigrants with a wagon, some tools, and a bag of seeds trying to turn a windswept grassland into a point of commerce, and seven of those people are women with mud on their boots, circumstances have a way of leveling the opportunity for work. Often, women carried power in a small, nascent community and had the economic leverage to demand that they be able to own land, to divorce a drunk, and to vote.

  My female Kansas forebears were political trailblazers, in fact. The journalist and activist Clarina Nichols lobbied men drafting the state constitution to cut the word “male” from the suffrage clause. Thanks to her and other women’s hell-raising, Kansas was the first state in the nation to hold a statewide popular referendum on women’s suffrage, in 1867.

  The American Equal Rights Association campaigned furiously in Kansas for this and another measure for black suffrage. New York suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony joined the fight leading up to the vote. Both measures received sizable support but failed to pass. Stanton later wrote, “There never was a more hopeful interest concentrated on the legislation of any single State, than when Kansas submitted the two propositions to her people to take the words ‘white’ and ‘male’ from her Constitution.”

  A few years prior to that battle, Kansas women had secured voting rights in school-district elections, laying the groundwork for the historically excellent state public school system that I would benefit from. The University of Kansas, founded in 1865, was one of the earliest to “receive both men and women on an equal basis,” at least in theory. The first black student admitted, in 1876, was a woman.

  During the Progressive Era in 1912, eight years before the women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Kansas became the eighth state and the first in its region to give women the right to vote in all elections. Along the way, Kansas women had secured the right to obtain and own property and to have legal custody of children equal to that of the father’s—rights that were largely unheard of at the time throughout the rest of the country.

  These state-level triumphs disproportionately benefited white women in the wake of slavery and the decimation of indigenous tribes. They occurred while racial segregation, violence, and economic disenfranchisement harmed women as the law of the land. But within that awful context, Kansas was ahead of the national curve on gender.

  In decades to come, women’s battles would intersect with the labor movement and leftist populist uprisings among immigrants across the country. In 1921, a pack of Kansas immigrants made national news for halting business at their husbands’ coal mines. The miners were on strike after two hundred of them had been hurt or killed that year in two southeastern Kansas counties, and the women who loved them and depended on their wages were livid. While the company bosses and scabs they had hired tried to get past, the women blocked their way. They held babies, rifles, and American flags, and sang songs in their native tongues—German, French, Slovene, Italian. They successfully shut down the mine, with support from the Kansas Coal Miners’ Union, until the National Guard was called in and forty-nine of the women went to jail.

  No one in my family was a political activist or even engaged in civic action beyond voting for president ever
y four years. No one used the word “feminism,” and no one knew much about state history. But a spirit as strong as the female prairie populism that shaped Kansas’s early years doesn’t leave a place. It reverberates through culture, through generations, whether people a hundred years later consciously perceive it or not. It would have been in you, deeper than modern-day politics and as strong as blood.

  When I was a young adult, Kansas state politics would take a hard turn against women’s reproductive rights, specifically. But as a child, for all the strains of conservatism in my state, I almost never saw a woman’s capability—to work, to think, to drive a wheat truck or run a business—called into question.

  Class and its implications for literacy and access decide what feminism looks like in action. For those of us who would have been holding rifles at the mine entrance rather than lobbying lawmakers in Topeka, one result of that legacy was that we were often the “breadwinners” of our households well before middle-class women flooded the workforce in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s. There was in our family, therefore, no semblance of the notion that a woman should or might be “taken care of.” There never had been, back to my great-great-grandmother Irene on the Boeing factory line and beyond. For the women I knew, work wasn’t a liberation from the home or a revelation of self. It was a way of life—familiar, essential, and unsung for generations.

  Yet men were the poster image for our class, clanking against pipes with wrenches or descending into mines with headlamps in the popular imagination. Dolly Parton challenged this notion with a song called “He’s a Go Getter,” in which a lazy husband’s contribution to the household was to “go get ’er” when his wife got off work.

  “He never turned a tap,” Grandma Betty would say with disdain about some man she knew who didn’t earn his keep or fulfill his responsibility to his family. Like her dad.

  Aaron had rarely paid any court-ordered child support after Dorothy divorced him in the 1950s. She was struggling as a single woman with three kids to feed when she heard through friends that Aaron was living as a regular wino in downtown Denver. She meant to wring some money out of the son of a bitch.

  Dorothy had recently ended a short marriage to her second husband, Paul, a tall, swarthy man who flipped hamburgers at the Takhoma Burger, a tiny dive offering hamburgers, chips, and a pinball machine. Working as the manager, Dorothy was closing alone one night when a stranger entered the place and raped her. One of her sisters had committed suicide, and another had been institutionalized to receive electroconvulsive therapy. It had been a very hard year. Dorothy needed money, and if the state wouldn’t enforce Aaron’s child-support requirement, she was angry and desperate enough to try to enforce it herself.

  She drove all the way to Denver, across a three-hundred-mile stretch of flat Kansas, to a street where dirty men in sweaty shirts sat on steps amid broken bottles. She got out of the car with the kids and knocked on a door. A dark man opened it.

  “Some big Indian dude,” Betty later remembered.

  They stepped into a small, clean apartment with a couple twin beds, a small bath, and a kitchen. Aaron was there without a shirt on.

  “He looked about as big as a turd,” Betty told me.

  Dorothy told him that the courts had ordered him to pay $25 a week for the kids—so where in the hell was it? But he didn’t have any money to give them if he had wanted to. Dorothy and the kids got in the car and drove three hundred miles back home.

  During those same years, Betty fell in love, at age eleven, with someone even more dangerous than her dad. She first saw him playing pinball at the Takhoma Burger, where she helped her mom after school. He was sixteen and had black hair. He carried her on his shoulders once, and she knew that someday he would be her guy. By the time she was a teenager, she was right.

  Ray was never faithful, but they always got back together—dragging Douglas Avenue through downtown Wichita with their gang of friends, hanging out at drive-ins, partying.

  “We had this one chick friend with some sort of pharmacy connection,” Betty told me. “We called her Vitamin Vic ’cause she could find all kinds of drugs.”

  Betty and her friends wore miniskirts before they were considered acceptable in society. Their boyfriends didn’t like it.

  “My best friend had this one dress that every time she wore it she got her ass whooped,” Betty said with a shrug.

  By then, Ray was a legal adult, five years older than Betty. He no longer got sent to boys’ reformatories for petty crimes. He had gone to the state penitentiary for burglary in the late 1950s when he was eighteen or nineteen.

  “He always ran with gangster-type kids,” Betty said. “They just went from kids to adults. He got sent to the joint. He met a lot of people up there.”

  Ray joined the Army to get his act together. He was stationed in Nebraska. It wasn’t clear how long he’d be there. It was the summer of 1961; Berlin was building a wall between east and west, and President Kennedy was putting National Guardsmen on active duty.

  In jerky script with dramatic loops, Ray wrote to Betty as Aaron had written to Dorothy from his barracks sixteen years earlier. He was “in some little hick town making our pad on the baseball field,” Ray wrote. He won a little money playing poker, he said, and his division might get sent to Germany. He signed it, “loving you always,” and added a postscript: “P.S. Do me wrong and I’ll break your head.”

  Betty was back in Kansas missing her period.

  “That was the surefire kicker,” she told me, meaning that getting pregnant was the moment that bound her to Ray forever. She was sixteen.

  Ray never went to Germany. He made it only as far as Camp Ripley in Minnesota. When he got back to Kansas, they married at the county courthouse with Dorothy as their witness. There was no romance to it, no honeymoon, and no celebration. Just a baby in Betty’s belly and a plan to live the life of a military family.

  Betty moved in with Ray in a family housing unit on a military base in Junction City, Kansas, a bleak dot surrounded by prairie in the middle of the state. Everyone called it Junk Town. It was her first time living outside of Wichita away from her family and friends. The Army base was too small and boring for her taste. Ray did more drugs than ever and gave Betty her “first real beating.” He knocked her to the floor when she was eight and a half months pregnant.

  When I was in my twenties, I would work as a grant writer for a legal-aid organization that served the whole state of Kansas. The majority of cases our pro bono attorneys represented involved abused women who needed to file restraining orders but couldn’t afford a lawyer. Their plight was as much about economic disparity as gender disparity. The grant funds I helped manage reached those women through state programs funded by the federal Violence Against Women Act—passed more than thirty years after Betty got together with Ray. Back then, Betty had neither money nor public policy on her side. She had only her willingness to try to escape.

  Betty left Junk Town and moved back to Wichita, back in with Dorothy, her stepdad Joe, and her sister Pud. But, like her mother on that tear to Denver just a few years prior, Betty found herself dependent on an unreliable man for money. Once, after Ray had abandoned his military post and found a bartending job in Wichita, she stopped by during his day shift to get cash for baby formula. She found him kissing one of her friends. Betty took the woman into the restroom and held her head in the toilet until someone ripped the lock off the door and pulled her away.

  Meanwhile, Ray wanted say over whom Betty could and couldn’t date. After Betty hung out with one of Ray’s friends, someone showed up at his house, threw gasoline on his face, and lit a match, Betty told me. He needed reconstructive surgery.

  “People didn’t want to be on Ray’s bad side,” Betty said.

  The people Ray had met in prison, she thought, found him work as a gun-for-hire for bosses in Chicago and Oklahoma City. He got a job driving a rig, hauling timber
from the Rocky Mountains to Kansas for Eagle Pass Lumber Company; he would work as a trucker for decades to come. Betty suspected he used the truck to move drugs and guns. Ray didn’t talk about his unofficial job, but he wore it through the expensive clothes and jewelry his family couldn’t afford.

  Ray and Aaron were the sort of men I wouldn’t have let anywhere near you. But the ways in which women before you had no choice but to rely on them—and be vulnerable to them—would have been part of your life, to some extent. It is perhaps the aspect of your life I feel most triumphant about having prevented.

  In 1969, when Betty was twenty-four and back from her years in Colorado—where she’d married twice more, given birth to a son, and lost custody of him—Ray still came around now and then. She tried to avoid him, but sometimes they’d end up in the rack. One day he sat in her living room smoking a cigarette and dangling a .22-caliber handgun from one finger. The gun was Betty’s. She kept it to protect herself and Jeannie, who was in the front yard playing on the gas meter.

  “I think I’ll just shoot you,” Ray said.

  “If you do it, do it good,” Betty said.

  From a few feet away, he pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit Betty’s left upper arm, not far from her heart.

  “Did it hurt?” I asked when, at age twelve or so, I finally uncovered the story behind the splotchy white scar on her arm that I’d touched many times.

  “Hell yes, it hurt!” she said.

  Blood pumped out of her left bicep while Ray’s sister drove her to the emergency room, where someone called the police. Betty told a cop the gun had gone off by accident while she was handling it.