I remember most how she’d lick the spoon after she stirred my coffee, then put it back in the cup, and oddly smile. The effervescent joy she’d find in the strangest of things, an egg or a cup of sugar to sweeten her bitter fruits, dandelion greens and cranberries. Her gifts from God, I took for granted and saw as not very important at all…
She had an old photo on her writing table of a monument in Sea Bright, New Jersey. The statue was dedicated to all the brave mariners who were lost to the sea, and she told me that’s what happened to her daddy, and the little seaside park was for him and other lost and shipwrecked sailors.
I knew she was lying; I knew that, but maybe it wasn’t so much a lie as it was just a way of her owning the sadness her daddy gave her. I heard he was a mean and abusive drunk, and he didn’t die at sea, but he was beaten to death, out back of a bar, not a mile from her home. And he was such a mean and abusive drunk that the county sheriff called it an accident. The one who delivered the beating was his son and her brother.
World War One darkened her horizon, the inconceivable madness of a world at war, but it was still someone else’s war, a far-off war, in a foreign land she’d only seen in fancy postcards. News in 1916 was largely word of mouth and newspapers; radios the toys of wealthy.
She drove a farm truck and worked the fields and orchards around the home where she was born and would eventually die. A 1916 Ford truck; it was a point of pride to her that such a fine and new piece of equipment would be entrusted to a girl. She could work the Model-T pedal shifters as well as any man, better than most. But to the men she knew, girls were more suited to washing the farm hand’s clothes and making babies and supper and fucking in dark places. The fucking never spoken of once it stopped. Her brother was her armor, her shield against the ugly world of the father.
She rode the train with her brother to the docks at Hoboken. Waving from the shoreline and crying, her slippery ‘go to town shoes,’ becoming soaked in a cold, torrential rain. The young girl, not quite twenty, watched her protector sail away that day, never to return.
One late summer day, as she was loading baskets of sweet and tart Macintosh apples onto her truck-bed and smiled at the crisp air and blue sky and oranges and reds coming to life in the trees surrounding her, a man, an older man approached her. He carried a letter that said her brother was dead, a hero. He was a hero to her long before he went off to some world war in a place called France.
She knew the man with the letter. He was a friend of her dead father. This man and her daddy used to get drunk together and some nights he’d stumble drunk into her bed, but he never raped her, and to her that was a point of honor.
Soon they married and she left the orchard and her apples and her truck. A part of her died when she left that place to become a mother. The children came as did the Great Depression, and it hardened her heart more than her father’s rape or her brother’s death.
Her protector gone and alone with the stranger that would be her husband she stopped living and turned ugly in the heart and inward.
The depression years reminded her of the brutality and injustice she knew as a girl. She lost two boys to the time, 1929 and ‘31 and from the cold of the babies’ first winter, and no money to heat her home, and fever and hunger. When the second boy died, she realized her daddy’s rape stole her childhood and her memories and dreams, but the fever that took her boys killed her.
Unable to face her truth, she fabricated a better story and found that story telling suited her and allowed her to create a place where living hurt just a little less, and she was able to walk in the dark again, without fear of attack.
One day she looked in the mirror and she had no idea where the pretty young girl had gone. She realized, but never admitted to herself in that moment, in the mirror, she’d lost her mind, and it was never coming back. Everyone and everything she’d ever been was now and forever lost to the wind.
The story around the farm and the little town is that she poisoned the man she married, and then a few more, but that’s all it was, just a story. Sometimes the world doesn’t mold you like clay, it breaks you like a China cup. The cuts and rapes and beatings the world pushed in her way made her who exactly she claimed to be. Her broken pieces swept under the rug, hopelessly scattered, ignored, and forgotten.
A swindler and an opportunist, a forgotten song, a life spent in the cracks between truth and lies, her affections weaponized and contrived. Each of us afforded our own individual piece of the shattered chalice, each confused by her love.
I wonder these days if her daddy knew the weight of the damage he caused in that darkened room.
Spiraling and rudderless, she sailed into the remaining decades of her life, dead long before she knew it was time to take her last breath.
That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.
Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!
Bill
