“Nonsense, we’re almost there.” He drives between high rows of green cornfields.
“I hate cemeteries,” Mother mutters between puffs of smoke.
Blaine turns into the cemetery and stops at a square white stone with the name Hawkins carved on it. I am used to trampling through grass and looking at headstones. All my Iowa relatives have already had their gravestones carved, leaving a space for the death date.
Mother stands beside the car, looking disgusted. Grandpa puts flowers on the Hawkins site. There’s also a gravestone with Harrison on it. “He was your mother’s brother who died at birth.”
“Why do you have to talk about that?” Mother whines. “Linda, get back in the car and stop talking.”
“Now Josephine, let her be. Why shouldn’t she know about Harrison?” Blaine says. “And over here,” he goes on, “is where I’ll be buried. Over here, my beloved mother is laid to rest.” Grandpa lays flowers on his mother’s gravesite. “My father is over here, God bless him.” He folds his hands in prayer.
Bernie keeps an eye on Mother, whose face gets meaner each minute. “For God’s sake!” She throws her cigarette to the ground. “Let’s get the hell out of here. This is so spooky. I hate cemeteries. I don’t see why you all have to be so morbid.”
“If you believe in God, then you have nothing to fear,” Grandpa Blaine lectures.
“Oh, hell. You and your damned religion. Let’s go.” Mother paces back and forth by the car.
“Is this the Harrison that Gram told me about?” I ask Bernie.
“Yes. He was born and died in 1914, one year before your mother was born. You’ll have to ask your grandmother about the details, but I know he died at birth. I’m sure she must have been very sad, but it happens sometimes.”
“Stop talking about him,” Mother screams. “Why do you have to talk about him?”
We get back in the car. Mother hugs the door, as far away from me as she can get. The gentle connection between us since yesterday’s facts-of-life talk has disappeared. The anxious, yelling mother is back. I watch her, wanting desperately to bring back the mother with the soft voice and gentle ways. I touch her arm, and she glances at me as if she has forgotten my presence. Grandpa drives home, talking softly to Bernie.
I can’t stop thinking about what this all means. One day, there will be a stone for Mother.
The Wedding Dress and Gram’s Secrets
After Mother leaves us in peace and returns to Chicago, Gram and I stay in Iowa for the rest of the summer. I love being with my down-home farm family, where it’s a different world from our house on Park Street. I feel freer, because Gram is less strict with others around. Each morning begins with Blanche slamming around the kitchen, then going outside to do the weeding. I love immersing myself in the cozy world of her cookstove and garden, enveloped in the smells of good cooking, healthy soil, and growing things.
On this summer morning, Blanche and I have already gathered strawberries and made coffee and pancakes by the time Gram straggles out of bed. She stumbles into the kitchen in her glamorous maroon robe with silver and green flowers.
“Lazy bird,” Blanche barks. “You’re wastin’ the day away.”
Gram smiles, forcing cheerfulness. “Good morning, Mama.” She leans toward Blanche to give her a kiss, but Blanche barely stops moving on her way to the cookstove.
Blanche teaches me how to feed the fire, my face crinkling with the heat, while Gram looks on disapprovingly. Blanche is a whirlwind of productivity—already she’s done the garden chores, made a pot of soup that’s simmering on the stove, and put breakfast on the table. In her estimation Gram is lazy, “always lying abed.” I know that Gram loves her mother, but Blanche’s home-and-farm orientation is what Gram escaped long ago, seduced by the fancy clothes and higher society of the big city.
Blanche finally takes a break and sits at the kitchen table, her fingernails caked with dirt, her hair frizzed around her head. Quiet for the first time since 5:30 this morning, she reads the paper. Gram sits back with her cigarette and coffee.
Blanche grunts and reads out loud. “Listen. ‘Mrs. Thomas Trent, daughter of the late Mr. Schimmel of Muscatine, is home from Boston to visit her mother, Mrs. Gertrude Schimmel. Mrs. Trent is the former Betsy Schimmel. There’s an open house at Mrs. Schimmel’s home on Sunday at two in the afternoon.’ What do you think of that, Lula? Want to go?”
“I don’t know any Trent or Schimmel.” Gram’s voice is steady, nonchalant.
“Her name is Betsy Schimmel. Are you telling me you don’t remember Betsy?” Blanche leans over the paper, glowering at Gram. I sit on the edge of my chair, my heart racing. What is going on?
“Mama, I don’t know any Betsy. Never heard of her.” Gram is suddenly edgy, though. She shuffles to the cookstove and pours herself another cup of coffee.
“That’s a good one. You don’t remember Betsy? I can’t imagine you ever forgetting her, with what she did for you.”
“Mama, I said…” Gram stands imperiously, arms akimbo, eyes sparking, glaring at Blanche. Blanche glares back. Gram stomps into the living room. I am too tense to follow. Blanche sits there stiffly, lips pushed together so tight they’re almost inside out. Gram comes back into the kitchen and blows a cloud of smoke almost in her face.
“Mama, why are you irritating me like this? I don’t know any Betsy.”
Blanche stands up and shouts, “You don’t remember the girl you borrowed a wedding dress from when you ran off to get married?”
Shocked, I stare at Gram. The look on her face tells me it’s true, but she says, “Dammit, I don’t remember any Betsy!”
“You’re lying through your teeth! You can’t forget something like that. Don’t play fancy to me. I’m your mother. I’ll never forget the shame of it. You never forget the day you can’t hold your head up with the neighbors.”
“Mama, not in front of Linda. Linda, go… go get ready for Aunt Dell’s.” Aunt Dell is Blanche’s sister who lives in a nursing home. I know that Gram is trying to get rid of me so I won’t find out anything bad about her. She’s always presented such a perfect picture of herself, as if she never did anything wrong in her life.
I leave the room but peer at the two of them from the bedroom door, holding my breath, my pulse racing. This scene reminds me of Gram and Mother. Do all mothers and daughters fight?
“I never borrowed it, Mama. I didn’t.”
“You did too, and you know it. You lied to me; you told me you were going to a party. How could you do that to us? I never got over it. Never.” Blanche starts to cry, something she almost never does. “And look what happened. Serves you right.”
Gram cries, too, clinging to Blanche. “I’m sorry, Mama, I’m so sorry. Please don’t be mad at me. I can’t stand it. Mama, Mama…”
I finally understand. When Gram was young, she lied to her family to run off and marry my grandfather Blaine in Wapello. She must have borrowed a dress from Betsy.
Gram’s hair is messed up, her face streaked with tears. Blanche stands for a few moments with her hands at her sides, then she puts her arms around Gram and pats her. Soon they wipe their faces and go off to dress for the visit to Aunt Dell. Here it is again—more proof that the past is still tripping everyone up.
Looking for Lewis
An ice-cream moon hovers over us on this velvet-black night, the voices of the generations murmuring across air laced with moisture from the Mississippi. There is no beginning and no end to this night with its soft, friendly darkness. The wind caresses my skin, whispering its ancient secrets, to me and to the ghosts who hover around us, unmoored from the past.
On a summer night like this one in Aunt Edith’s yard, I am keenly aware of the threads of connection that weave everyone here together. The family tapestry includes many others who aren’t present. I’ve heard their stories so often—aunts, uncles, and cousins to Blanche, long dead. I sense that somehow they are with us even now in the soothing darkness. Their names flit around us l
ike fireflies.
The next morning, the adults start talking about Lewis, Gram’s daddy who died so long ago. “Let’s find him,” Gram says. In a flurry, everyone gets dressed and piles into the car. How in the world can we find someone who’s dead?
Every summer the Nash Rambler carries my relatives and me down corn-rimmed roads near the Mississippi, behind the hills and byways, to the houses and farms where they all lived in earlier times. Eventually, we find ourselves at some cemetery, where the names of our kin are etched in mossy stones. I used to be scared of walking among the dead, but now I’m used to it. Cemeteries are peaceful, social places, with everyone chattering about who is who, almost as if the dead were still here, living in this stone city amid grass and birdsong.
Now we’re tramping the Letts Cemetery, where Blanche, Gram, and Edith peer at the gravestones, muttering the family names and their histories. Blanche has a big frown on her face. I ask Gram what’s wrong and she tells me that they can’t find Lewis.
I remember Blanche’s story of how he died of pneumonia so young, not long after they were married. “Lewis’s father was a farmer out of Grandview. That’s where we was married.”
Memory smoothes out Blanche’s face. “Aunt Jessie stood up for me. She lives down the road.”
“Maybe she could tell us where he is,” Edith says, confirming my sense that the dead are only slightly removed from the living. Aunt Jessie might know his current address.
Blanche and Gram seem pleased to be on our way to see Aunt Jessie in Grandview. Gram tells me that Jessie is the youngest sister of Josephine, Blanche’s mother, and that she lives with her daughter now. As the youngest sister of Blanche’s mother, Jessie is a generation above Blanche, but the same age.
Aunt Jessie comes to the door this hot afternoon, her white hair flowing down her back, her crinkled-up eyes happy to see Blanche. Their thin arms cling to each other in a lingering hug.
“Oh, Blanche, it’s so good to see you.” Jessie cups Blanche’s face in her wizened hands. “So much time, so much time,” she says, shaking her head.
We come in the house where Jessie’s daughter serves iced tea and tuna sandwiches. Blanche and Jessie lean toward each other on the living room sofa, nodding their white-haired heads as they talk. I’m curled up on the floor out of the way, but close enough to listen.
Their false teeth clack as they tell the old stories. “I’ll never forget your wedding to Lewis. New Year’s Day, 1894. A beautiful sunshine day, bright with new snow. The horses’ bells jingled. There was food from all over the neighborhood. The two of you… oh, my.” She glances at Blanche, who has tears in her eyes. “Lewis, such a nice boy. The wedding was perfect. Everyone was so young. It’s a shame, it is,” Jessie says.
“We couldn’t find him at the cemetery,” Gram says.
Jessie widens her eyes. “Well, he’s out there. I saw him buried.” She pauses, then picks up the thread of her story. “Blanche sure was strong. And then you was born, Lula…” Her voice rises at the end, suggesting that this event, Gram’s birth, was the good part of the story.
Sun streams across the living room as they talk, dust motes swirling in golden light. These elders tell about things that happened so long ago there is no clue left, not even a gravestone. Somehow I am no longer a young, stupid girl, but an observer of history. Someday they will die, too. I will visit their graves and have conversations with the dead.
Blanche seems lost in memory as Gram drives us away from Jessie’s through narrow dirt roads, passing deserted houses, empty fields. After a few minutes the car pulls up in front of a shabby wooden house tilting slightly in the wind, a silent windmill carving the sky beside it.
“Here’s the house you was born in,” Blanche says to Gram.
Gram stares and then says in a stricken voice, “Oh no, Mama, where’s the orchard?”
“It’s gone, all gone,” Blanch whispers. She points to an upstairs window. “That room there is where you was born.”
Gram and Blanche have entered an invisible world together, faces reflecting their journey of memory. I wish I could click open their minds and see what they see. I can visualize the orchard that used to be over there, the climbing rose bush in front of the house.
Blanche says, “Our wedding was in the living room. Lula was born here. We lived here a few years with my papa and mama.”
Gram is speechless and pale. She doesn’t even light a cigarette. I’ve never seen her like this before. She is like the little girl I’ve seen in photographs, a forlorn-looking girl with long blonde hair. I imagine her playing with her dolls in the orchard.
Later that evening, Edith takes out a big box of photos. The faces of the dead come alive again in black and white, their eyes burning across time. “Here he is. Lewis. Now we’ve found him.”
The face of a young man looks out from the photograph. His hair is cropped short, he looks barely older than a boy. I catch my breath—he looks so much like us, with beautiful soft eyes and full lips. Suddenly, he’s a real person to me. I realize in a flash that here—once alive and breathing, once falling in love, getting married, having a child—is my great-grandfather. He’s an actual part of our family, not just a ghost from the past. The adults pick over more old photos while I go into the bathroom to stare at my face in the bathroom mirror for a long time, comparing his face to mine. He seems almost alive, shining out from our faces, my mother, grandmother, and me, that boy who died so long ago in the last century, way back in 1894 on a winter day in March.
Saved
Bringing in the Sheaves
Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve,
Waiting for the harvest and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing,
Bringing in the sheaves.
Bringing in the sheaves,
Bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing,
Bringing in the sheaves.
Back home in Enid, at the Baptist church on Broadway Street, I learn all about the war between God and the Devil. The Sunday School class gathers in a circle in the concrete-block basement classroom. Boys with buzz cuts sneer, slapping their knees and throwing spit wads when the teacher isn’t looking. The girls pretend to be listening, but they are mostly interested in writing notes on their palms. I sit with my hands folded in my lap, trying to hide my shaking knees.
We find out that both the Devil and God are dangerous. The devil is evil incarnate—that means evil in a body, the teacher says—a threat to us day and night. God in his omniscience knows everything we’re thinking, and the devil is always tempting us, so we can’t really trust our own thoughts. The devil is sneaky; he could be anywhere, scheming to set us on the path to hell.
“How do you know it’s not the devil whispering in your ear?” the teacher says ominously. She says if God hears a thought the Devil puts in your head, he’ll punish you like the Israelites in the desert. Or send a plague of locusts. Terrifying.
The teacher says we’re in real danger if we don’t come to church and learn to pray and believe in God. The devil is sneaking around at this very moment, tempting us and our families to serve him instead of God. Hell is a place you don’t want to go after you die—it’s sweltering and tortuous. We must do anything, everything, to avoid it. The devil will try to get us to play cards, to dance, kiss, or go to movies. The devil will tempt us to cheat or lie to our parents. “The devil waits for you, innocent little you,” the teacher warns, “just to trip you up.” She says he wears a black suit, has a forked tail, and leers with beady black eyes. He lives in a red hell made of fire, and delights in stealing people away from God.
The teacher drones on, scaring us all to death. You have to fight this devil all the time. You have to be on the lookout for him. He wants to possess you; he wants to suck you up into his maw and make you suffer for eternity. He lives in smoke and heat, his breath stinks, and his fingers are claws. He’ll talk sweetly
to you or he’ll yell and scream and scratch you. And when you die, you will never have another chance to be good. You will suffer for eternity.
The big church is upstairs, with rows of polished wooden benches and a wooden cross in the front. Bibles and songbooks are tucked into holders on the backs of the pews. The church fills up with noisy families, mostly people who seem to know each other. Gram gave me special permission to attend “real church” with my friend Janille. A thin woman with a bun, glasses perching on the tip of her nose, bangs out hymns on the piano.
The preacher starts off with a very long prayer, like Grandpa’s, going on about sin and forgiveness, the temptations of the devil, and God’s mercy. During the sermon he’s red-faced and shouting, punching the air and yelling about a righteous God. We have to accept Jesus as our savior or we’ll go to hell and burn forever in eternal agony. Scary. I want everyone to be happy and things to be good and beautiful.
When the preacher talks about sin, I know it’s in my family, in me, in our history. Lying, adultery, anger, and general meanness—it’s all there in abundance. I feel hopeless. When they die, my relatives will go to hell for sure. It makes me want to cry, but I mustn’t, not here in front of my friends.
“Come up, come on up, and let Jesus in your hearts. He’ll take away your pain; he’ll soothe your worries. Put your burdens on him. He’ll hold them for you. He’s the answer. Lord, show these sinners the way.” The preacher invites us, his voice silky smooth, the sweet hymns going straight to my heart.
I peek at the others going forward. A limping old woman with tightly curled white hair goes up and leans against the preacher, whispering in his ear. A red-faced, lanky-limbed boy goes up with his mother. Are they telling him their sins? Are they embarrassed? He lifts his arms to pray them into the fold. I watch carefully to see what happens when you give up your life to God. The preacher says, “Let the Lord hold your burdens. He died for you, for you. Bring your sorrows up and lay them at his feet.”
The music and the sound of the preacher’s voice fill me with a longing I don’t understand. Tears run down my face. I wipe them quickly so no one will see. The congregation sings a gentle, lilting invitation. My foot moves forward a little against my will, but I’m too scared and embarrassed to go to the preacher. In slow motion, I pull my foot back, staring straight ahead. The people sing sweetly, swaying to and fro. There is something here that I want so badly, but I can’t have it. I can’t be like these other people. They seem too happy.
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