“Your momma flew over all the roses and landed in a cow pile,.” grandma would say. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about since I was just a little kid visiting during summer vacation at her old farmhouse situated on dry, Indian land somewhere between the Wilburton Mountains and the skyline of Oklahoma City, but I gathered it had something to do with my dad.
Mom had been the oldest of grandma’s four children, but her family called her Babe until the day she died, even nieces and nephews, and she wore it proudly. Once, as a birthday gift to Mom, I retouched an old photo of my young grandfather, dressed in oversized pants wearing a beret, kneeling next to my eighteen-month-old mother standing precariously in a dress and bonnet by his side as he gazed at her adoringly. They looked like characters from an old film complete with a clapboard house on barren, dusty land in the background reminiscent of a scene from Grapes of Wrath. As I filled in the large hand resting across his knee with color, I wondered what it would have been like to be her, to have his big hands lift me up to carry me, to feel his immense love through touch, to be worshipped by my daddy.
Even the passage of time and the end of their lives could not erase the affection that was not only evident in my Grandaddy’s face but from the unseen person taking the picture. Touching the details of the fading old and brittle photograph made me feel like I was indulging in a voyeuristic crime watching through the windowpane of yellow images of a happy family life. The tenderness captured in time connected to me through the art pencil I held with positioned fingers learned in a kindergarten class around a too big, yellow No. 2 pencil. Even though I was acutely aware of my imposition on their love triangle – my mother and her parents – it seemed like there was more than enough devotion to go around. Grandma’s distinctive handwriting on the back of the photo read in pencil: “Joe and his babe Bernice.”
My grandparents, who tied the knot on Christmas Day, had a good marriage, at least as far as I could tell since he died when I was quite young. What I knew of him was that he was a big man who wore overalls with small pockets stitched on the bib where he carried a pouch of tobacco, rolling papers and a box of Diamond matches. Leaning on his knee trying to nudge my cousin out of the way so I could be closest to Granddaddy, he took turns letting each of us blow out a match, an exciting event for preschoolers who were forbidden to play with fire. What I understood of him were through stories grandma would narrate from her favorite rocking chair, the same one I inherited that sits in a corner in an upstairs bedroom where I have rocked my own grandchildren feeling her presence and smiling approval. The toes from her tiny swollen feet pushed off the floor next to where I sat sending her swaying back and forth like an oversized metronome taking pause in her recollections to smack lips covered with red wine she sipped from an iced tea glass, which she said made her “sleep real good.” Mom corrected her, “Hell, momma! You’re not sleeping, you’re passing out!”
Grandma was a small woman, no more than four foot, ten inches, that wore plain, shapeless shifts, worn-out house shoes and cat-eyeglasses. A stark contrast to the picture of her as a young mother posing with my mom and her younger brother, Granddad, and an uncle around a Model T in another lifetime when she traveled the country with the men who built oil refineries. “We were very wealthy,” grandma explained, “those are very fashionable clothes.” I tried to find my grandmother in that photo, the one wearing a feathered hat and a coat that had a collar resembling a dead fox, but the woman pictured did not remind me of my grandma. Time had made her like a nice, worn-out pillow – soft to squeeze and even better to sleep with – no deceased animals in sight.
Intent I would know the love of her life, Grandma would repeat my Granddaddy’s full name for memorization on every one of my visits: Joseph Miles John Paul Peterburgh Orf, which was required of me to rattle off back to her almost as much as I was drilled on the names of the Five Civilized Tribes. Both seemed equally important.
Although his death occurred more than a decade before her own passing, I knew she always waited for the day they would be reunited in a heavenly home. Shortly after she had been released from the hospital after suffering a broken hip that had become life-threatening, she told me about his visit. According to Grandma, she had awakened from a nap in her hospital room to find my deceased grandfather perched on the windowsill. “He was there just like you and me are sitting here right now.” She was not trying to convince me of a supernatural occurrence, there was no doubt of the reality of her experience, she was just merely relating the encounter the same as if she had run into one of her children at the grocery store.
“Come on, Ruby. Come go with me,” he coaxed with an outstretched hand, but grandma refused. She could not leave, the kids still needed her. Years later he came again, and I guess we were all doing well, because this time she slipped her small hand in his and left the room.
But that happy ending was not true for both of her daughters. Back then, a bad marriage was just as accepted as a good one—choosing a spouse was a lottery of sorts, kind of a Forest Gump arrangement since “you never know what you’re gonna get”—but one thing was for sure, being single (especially a single mother) was unthinkable.
My mother’s little sister, Poos-y, was born Barbara Ann but no one ever referred to her given name, except her abusive husband. The odd nickname had come about in a weird historical way in that when my grandmother was pregnant, Native Americans in the area had made her a papoose in which to carry the infant. It had made her mad, she said, but I thought it unusual for Indians to make a white woman something so cultural. My favorite place in her tiny four room house was the back bedroom where this artifact hung on the wall. I was not allowed to touch it, but often she would take me to that special gift and point out the beautiful details appreciating the intricacies of its handiwork made from tree limbs tied together with care. Grandma had placed a baby doll where her child would have been cuddled by the colorful red-hued blanket that danced with brilliant linear designs. I loved it, and I think, secretly, grandma did too.
Tragedy seemed to surround my Aunt Poos-y like foggy days in Seattle. Not too long ago, it was revealed to me by a family member that she had been a ‘bad girl’ forced to marry to “give the baby a name.” For the rest of her days, she would endure a drunken, drug-addict truck driver of a husband who hit her on a regular basis, whether she was pregnant or not. My aunt led a neglected life dying way before her time of pneumonia because she did not receive medical attention until it was too late. I always wondered why she felt underserving of a better life.
There were many times grandma would look intently into my upturned face and command, “Don’t you ever let a man hit you. If a man hits you, you wait until he falls asleep and then you hit him over the head with a baseball bat.” If I had ever been in an abusive situation, I would not have hesitated to carry out her instructions. It just never occurred to me that I might get into legal trouble because it seemed like such a practical solution. That was before I knew that there was little justice for battered women. Nowadays, I wonder if motivation for this advice came from my Aunt Poos-y’s predicament.
I do not think my grandmother had many details about my mother’s wedding day since, from what I gathered, she eloped, which was evident of the wedding photos that were void of my grandparents. It was odd that grandma’s version of my parent’s marriage involved her crying for days and that my paternal grandfather had promised my grandparents that, as long as he lived, he would never let my dad hurt their daughter. “That’s a bizarre promise,” I thought. Nonetheless, I never tired of her retelling of the time my momma married dad and how my granddaddy lectured her sternly to stop crying all the time because it was going to make her sick. “I don’t know how to stop,” she admitted to him, to which he replied, “Well, just do like me. Stay busy all day and keep your mind off of it.”
The next day she took his advice to heart working hard around the house leaving no time to dwell on her sadness. From the kitchen window, just beyond the worn wooden outhouse, it was her normal routine to watch granddaddy chugging past the frame in an old red tractor across the swaying golden wheat field, but today she had not seen him in quite some time. Wiping her hands on the flour-caked apron, she left the house as the creaking screen door slapped back into place, and beelines back to the barbed-wire fence that separates yard from field as white chickens with dangling red chins dart out of her way clucking to voice their displeasure. She hollers “Joe!” before opening the spring-loaded door to check occupancy of the two-hole outhouse. The same place where grandma would hold me with weathered-hands placed under tiny arms as my bottom teetered over the splintered wooden edge of a make-shift toilet seat as I expressed mild hysteria that I was pretty sure my butt was going to be bitten by a snake, “Honey, nothing wants to live down there” she tried to reason.
Although I had no problem envisioning whacking an abusive sleeping husband in the head with a baseball bat (would this be something that would be around the house, or something I would need to purchase, or a wedding gift? I was never sure.) believing her no-biting-critters-in-the-outhouse-hole theory was always difficult to digest. But just as that smelly place was void of sneaky asps living in a home of mounting dung, my grandfather was also absent from the crude bathroom. When Grandma walked around the back of the barn for a better look at the fields, she found him sitting in the overgrown soft green grass leaning against the graying, weathered siding with his head bent over sobbing into those big, loving hands that once held his Babe Bernice.
