My grandmother passed away more than a decade ago. Still, she remains changeable, complicated, hard to pin down. It’s easy to see how difficult her life was, but it’s also easy to see how she could have done better, or at least pushed her girls to try for better. I have never known my uncle Webster to call her anything other than Gracie, a name that some of the older siblings use, too. But in the family, she is more commonly Mumma. Or Grace, when people are sharing unflattering information. Or sometimes Grammy, especially when they are talking to me, or feeling generous or nostalgic. Grammy is sweet. Mumma is exasperating. Grace is wild. Gracie is both a mother and a child.
* * *
It’s 1954, and Gracie is running through a long-grassed field, cutting across its slope instead of down to the river, trying to reach her neighbor’s house. She’s in her mid-thirties, seven or eight months pregnant. She runs fast—she’s had practice. But her husband, Howard, is close behind her, and her belly weighs her down. He grabs her arm, he grabs her red hair. She stumbles as he starts pulling her down the hill. He strikes her face, adding to the bruises already blooming from the fight that started in the house. She yells, digs her feet into the singing grass. Calls him a bastard. Begs him to stop. He hollers, “I’ll friggin’ drown you! Then I’ll stop.”
But when blood comes out on her dress, it halts them both. For all his meanness, Howard gets scared. Instead of the river, they go to the hospital. They have two boys already: Wendall and Wayne. This would have been Walter.
Miscarriage is a strange word. Mis-carry. It implies that the woman did something wrong, that she didn’t hold on properly. Perhaps in this case it was the holding on itself that was the problem.
There are girls at home, too: Betty and Carol, and Gloria and Glenice. Another boy will come later, Webster, and another girl, Tootsie. Finally, the two smallest: Gwendolyn and, ten months later, Crystal.
Crystal was the third redhead, the tenth child of the household. The eleventh or twelfth or thirteenth born to Grace, depending on who’s asking, and who’s telling. At the age of eighteen—before Howard, long before Crystal’s birth—Grace had married a man named Ray Bartlett, with whom she had her first child, Keith. Soon after, Ray went into the Navy, and while he was away, rumors spread that Grace was running around behind his back. She may have been; she didn’t know how to live without a man. Ray’s parents convinced him to divorce her, and they took Keith, raised him as their own. They had money.
After Keith came another lost child: Richard, Grace’s second, his father forever a mystery. She had moved back home after her divorce from Ray, and her mother made her give him up to strangers who lived in the area. When Grace’s other kids were little, Richard was the family’s milkman. Some of them knew he was their half brother, some of them didn’t. It didn’t occur to those who knew to tell the others.
A few years after her divorce from Ray, Grace met Howard Farnum, the man who would chase her across the field and down the road and around the house, for years. He was a drinker like Ray, a fiery man with a handsome enough face. They soon married, and she stayed long enough to have most of those ten children with him. When he wasn’t away with the Army he was often in jail: assault, petty thefts, house robberies. He and his friends Hoppy and Hornet took turns running jobs and serving sentences, but they weren’t quite organized enough to be called a gang. They traded horses and conned whomever they could. They tried robbing the funeral home, even as Howard’s uncle was lying in it. But a safe is a tough thing to breach or steal; they got caught.
Each time Howard was released, he would return home in a taxi, stepping out in the new suit the prison issued upon discharge in those days, a hundred-dollar bill in his pocket. One fresh start after another. But the house didn’t match the suit. It was a camp, really, in a place called Milton Plantation, too small to this day to be called a town. One room downstairs, another upstairs, all the kids crowded into one bed, no matter how many there were. Grace and Howard’s bed just feet away. Winter heat provided by a sheet-metal stove in the center of the room, its thin walls glowing red. Crescent moon outhouse. Water from a bucket thrown down to break the ice, until Howard installed a hand pump on the well. A big step up.
* * *
When I visit the Maine State Archives in Augusta, curious about Howard’s criminal convictions, I find less and more than I expected. Just one record, just one crime: convicted of rape, October 1958. Sentence: ten to twenty years. The victim: one of his oldest daughters, age thirteen at the time.
The trial record contains only one piece of admitted evidence: a typewritten letter from the victim, retracting her original charge, saying that she’d lied to the neighbor woman she told. I suspect this was coerced. For Howard to have been convicted, in that era, especially considering this retraction, there must have been little doubt of his guilt. I later learn that she was sent away for a while, alone, to a school for wayward girls. When I ask another aunt why, she says, “I guess people wanted her out of there. People thought she’d done something wrong.” She doesn’t say quite who she means by “people.” Of course that young girl hadn’t done anything wrong. I’m sad that she was sent off alone, but I do hope that being away from that house, Howard or no, helped her.
It turns out that Grace visited the prison regularly, but never went to the school to see her daughter. And then Howard returned home after less than five years, in time to father my mother, Crystal. Grace was forty-four years old; Crystal was her last child. If Howard had served the maximum term of his sentence, or if Grace hadn’t taken him back, my mother would not have been born.
* * *