Grandma's Hands

I look down at the keyboard and see my grandmother's hands, her large, gnarled, knobby hands.  This was a woman who could crochet doilies out of the finest linen thread, following the patterns in her head; a woman who spent every days cooking, cleaning, canning, tending her garden, harvesting her trees and beating her youngest son with her always busy, utterly capable hands. She would send him out to cut a switch and, if he brought back a switch that was too small, she would beat him with it and send him back out to cut another.

He said she hated him, that she worshiped his brother L.E. but hated him, said it often, especially when his manic-depression swung towards the dark end of the spectrum. His sisters proclaimed that she was a saint, the sweetest mama ever. I only knew two of his five sisters, Bobbie and Idelle. Bobbie's name was Margaret, but dad called her Bobbie when he was little and it stuck.. Each took me aside when I was a kid, completely unbidden, to tell me they knew what he said about their mother, but it was untrue and/or exaggerated. I remembering wondering, where did that come from.

What do we know of another's past, even our parents'? Stories told years after the fact by my emotionally broken father, refuted by his sisters, both of whom had a dog in the fight. We all have a version of our life that we project and defend. We tailor our narrative to put ourselves in the best possible light. What is truth, asked Pilate.

It's easier to maintain your own version of events if you keep moving like Smitty did. Whenever his present began to reek of his past, he hit the road.  From Alabama to the war, back to the south and then on to another war, back to the south again and then out to California with the law at his heels, on to Oregon, back to California and then off to Illinois. It was in Illinois that the massive abuse he had done to his body caught up with him. He got sick a few years after they arrived and never regained enough health and vigor to make another move. He had lived in California and Oregon, two of the most beautiful places on the planet. He loved the beach, loved to swim in the ocean and was good at it. He loved the forests and rivers and trees (mostly from the windshield of his car.) He loved the hustle and speed of Los Angeles and had worked all over the U.S. And, he spent the last 20 years of his life far from the ocean or mountains, stuck in a tiny, dying Southern Illinois town where the rivers are brown and the horizon is flat. Small town life has its charms; I live in a small town. But, this was a railroad town that the railroad had left behind, a town that had been drying up for at least a decade and completely died shortly they arrived, a bitter, ugly, racially divided, economically depressed, crystal and heroin infested town. This is where my parents spent the last twenty years of their lives.

I barely knew my grandmother, only met her a handful of times as a child and once as an adult after she had her stroke. I remember her as a steely woman, straight as a ramrod, her steel gray hair pinned to her head with mean looking metal bobbie pins. She belonged to an obscure religious sect that forbid her from cutting her hair. I once traveled to her house with my aunt Idelle while the rest of the family stayed in Arkansas. One night, as we were getting ready for bed, I saw my grandmother with her hair down. It dropped past her knees, gray as ashes and straight as a string. It was one of the scariest things I ever saw in my life.

But, I remember her hands, her big, strong, busy hands. They never hit me, but they never caressed me either.

My dad carried a lot of pain, a lot of damage, for which he blamed his mother.  I lived with his emotional scars, so I tended to believe him. Maybe she did hate him, what do I know?  But, Idelle and Bobbie clearly worshiped him.  Idelle was a bit of a wild child, his sibling soul-mate.  Bobbie was named after her mother, emulated her upright style, followed her religion, and kept herself pure for the lord. Bobbie "ain't never been married or nuthin," my dad used to say, emphasizing the last two words with a wicked grin. But, where grandma was grim, Bobbie was bright and funny, always quick with a laugh and a hug and something good to eat.  She doted on her brother and Smitty never failed to make her laugh. That was his gift, and we all loved him for it.