Things Which Are Buried

My Grandmother Maude, was considered a spinster when she got married. She was 19 years old, a working woman in a world where women got married at 16 or sometimes younger.

My grandmother gave life to five girls and one boy. The boy, however, didn’t make it and died in his early years. Life for my grandmother was a hard one. In her day, when women usually stayed at home with their children, she worked in a factory. My Grandfather Oakie wasn’t much help except for making her life a living nightmare. She would work all day in the factory, come home to work around the house (before the convenience of microwave meals and dust busters), and do for her daughters. A typical day would be her finding Oakie in the living room, drunk, with some roadhouse floozy that he brought home to flaunt. While he plopped his daughters on his lap introducing them to their ‘new mommy’ of the hour, my Grandmother would grit her teeth and go about her chores. That wasn’t a sign of weakness because my Grandmother was a fighter. For her own safety, though, and for that of her daughters, it was best to stay quiet because Oakie carried an Evil in him that was fatal.

Maude had her jaw broken seven times. She was beaten regularly and not with a slap here or there. Her face, showing the grit of her years with him, had been broken and bloodied by a hard fist. She had been thrown down stairs into a concrete floor. She had the gas turned on while she and her daughters were sleeping. Fires were started, physically and mentally.

I asked my Grandmother once, "Why didn’t you call the sheriff?"

She said, "In those days when you called the Sheriff, the only thing that would happen was him sitting on the front porch drinking a beer with the abusive husband."

Eventually my Grandmother did what women didn’t normally do. She divorced him. After she signed for all her daughters, except one, to be married, she left. She met a man named Maxie and remarried. Sadly, she didn’t find her road to happiness.

I rarely remember my Grandmother smiling. She was however, the glue that barely held our family together. No one wanted to mess with my Grandmother, not even her daughters. Her daughters, however, grew up with their own mental and physical problems. They would fight with each other in the worst of ways. Some clung to the bible but still had that wicked streak of their father. They would brutally beat down another sister for some stupid reason during the week and run to church on Sunday to be forgiven. The only reason they did not kill one another was the fact that somehow my Grandmother was able to pull them back. None of the five sisters are close. They might draw close to one or the other for a time but it never lasts long. Their dysfunctional stories could fill at least fifteen novels.

When they lowered my Grandmother into the ground two summers ago at the age of 82, I knew that whatever thread held them together as a family was being buried with her. The only thing that I am thankful for is that about five or so years ago my Grandmother met a man Ken who finally made her happy. I remember sitting in a restaurant soon after they started dating on our birthday (I was born on the day she was).

She looked at me bright eyed and said, "Ken is taking me on a romantic weekend to the beach. I’ve never been on a romantic anything. What do you think that means exactly?"

She was asking me, a Grandchild who had felt the strike of her switch more times than once growing up, for boyfriend advice. She was glowing and she was smiling. I had never seen my Grandmother glow and rarely had I seen her smile. Ken moved in with her not long after and they did things together, simple things but things all the same. He stayed with her until the end and every morning he goes to her grave, even after all this time, sits there, take her coffee and bread (her favorite morning thing) talks to her and reads the newspaper.

Unfortunately some of her daughters turned against him to, once Grandma died. As I said, whatever held her family together, no matter how thin of a thread was buried with her. I know that as I write this, my own mother’s health has finally started to diminish and not one of her sisters are concerned except for one who can’t be there because of her own health reasons no matter how much she wants to. I know if my Grandmother was alive, she would be here threatening to take a switch to my mother if she didn’t get up and fight it like she did all those years. In the end, though, these are the things which are buried, yet I have never forgotten them.