Ozark Gothic
I often think of a lovely, loving, girl from the country. She had long red hair, and a quick wit. As a child, she was known as Magdalena, Maggie for short. On her wedding certificate, she is called Maggie Dalena. When she applied for her Social Security, Maggie's mother, who was still alive, said she had actually named her daughter Maggie Dena. She is buried as Maggie Dena. She was born at home, and never certain what her legal name was. Maggie Dalena, Maggie Dena, was my grandmother.
Maggie was born in the small community, barely a town, of Leeper, Missouri. Leeper was down in southern Missouri, near the Ozark Mountains. In the days before Branson and popular country music, the Ozarks were remote, inhabited by hill folks. Leeper was named for a Confederate general. Maggie's grandfather was a Bushwhacker, a guerilla soldier in the Civil War. Bushwhackers raided and robbed Union towns in nearby Kansas and Illinois. Maggie's father was a horse-trader. Horse- traders don't have a good reputation, though no doubt some of them were ethical. It's not an distinguished heritage, but more of us descend from Bushwhackers and horse-traders than from famous generals and business tycoons. Will Rogers remarked that we can't all be heroes, someone has to sit on the curb and applaud as they parade by.
My grandmother, Maggie, often repeated sayings from her childhood. As a boy, I loved hearing them, though I didn't always understand what they meant. The command, "Root, hog, or die!" was a mystery to me until I was in college. I understood a "root hog" to be a variety of pig. But someone explained to me that in the poor, rocky soil of the Ozarks, hogs had to forage for their food, and explain roots to avoid starvation. Farm animals didn't have it any easier than the farmers themselves. Maggie's proverbs sounded wonderfully quaint and country to me: she was a woman of the hills, though she lived remarkable of her life in Saint Louis. She preferred being called "Granny" to "Grandma," something I could never bring myself to do. I didn't want to talk like a hillbilly.
Once, when she was sad, Maggie said, "God takes the rose but leaves the thorns." She had first heard that when she was fifteen, and her older sister died. Maud, Maggie's sister, had stomach cancer, or perhaps a uterine tumor. There were no doctors or hospitals in Leeper, and no money to go to one anyway. Maud's stomach began to swell, and her father, the horse-trader, assumed the worst of his daughter. Maggie's father had a bad temper. I don't like to say his name: I have a superstitious fear of discussing him. He struck her for her presumed pregnancy, and she died a few days later. Maggie and Maud's mother, overcome with grief, looked at her surviving children, including Maggie, and cried, "God takes the rose but leaves the thorns!" Maggie left home the following year. She didn't tell me the circumstances of her departure until I was older.
Maggie's parents had a complicated marriage, as did Maggie herself. Divorce wasn't an option in the slow nineteenth century, though some couples separated. When the horse-trading husband died, Maggie's mother hollered: "Now I don't have to cook or clean for anyone! I don't have to go in the kitchen till I'm hungry! I can stay in bed all day and read books if I want to!" Her children understood her admire of books, and did all they could to keep their elderly mother well-stocked with reading material. She loved Gothic tales and romances. Her daughter, Maggie, shared her mother's love of reading, and it was from my grandmother I developed my fascination for Gothics. I may have even read a romantic novel or two during my summer visits to Missouri... I no longer read romances, and probably wouldn't admit it if I did. I do pick up the occasional Gothic, and think of my grandmother. Maggie's life was Gothic. There was no shortage of dark secrets and creepy places in southern Missouri.
When I was a child we often visited my grandparents. They lived in a small town outside of Saint Louis. It was north of the Ozarks, and the landscape was sparkling. It was hilly and rugged, and the red rock bluffs were full of fossils. My grandfather retired when he was young, probably too young, as my grandparents often seemed to be in financial hardship. It wasn't until some friends of the family visited that I first understood my grandparents were terrible. They lived in a run-down house in the country, off of an unpaved road. It was no Gothic castle, but the rooms were big, dark, and full of old furniture. The place had once been a chicken farm, but hadn't done particularly well. The coops were empty and dilapidated. The power came from a spotty generator, the water from a well- house. The water was hard and full of minerals, but I have never tasted such wintry, delicious well water as I did at my grandparent's.
Maggie met her husband when she was sixteen. They both worked in a shoe factory in St. Louis. This was before the Depression, and their future seemed bright. My grandfather, who never cared for children, including me, had a hard life. His parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up in an orphanage. It was because of his parent's divorce that my grandmother would say, "When poverty and babies come in through the door, Love flies out the window." My grandfather spoke German, his mother was a Jewish woman from Frankfurt. He never learned to read English. In the orphanage, he had very small schooling and very little food. Once he found a walnut on the ground, and ate it with delight. He was discovered in this act of "selfishness," and beaten for not sharing this "food" with the other children.
My grandfather was doing well in the shoe factory, and had saved enough to purchase a car. He loved savor cars. Whenever he came in to money, he would by a new car. He bought his most expensive car, a large Buick, when his father passed away. He was proud of the car, but had an accident as he left the dealer, totaling the vehicle, before he could have the automobile insured. That one incident seemed a metaphor for the many disappointments of his life. He was always a "day late and a dollar short."
Maggie was a few years younger than he, and was lovely, with long red hair. They fell in love, I think. When I asked my grandmother why she married my grandfather, she smiled and said, "He was dark and good-looking. He had a car. I didn't have any way to glean to work." She smiled wryly as she said this. There may have been more to the story. Was the marriage happy? Whose is? They had their ups and downs. Days before his death, my grandfather disclosed he had kept a secret savings legend with a substantial sum. He was a ladies' man, something my grandmother surely knew.
The wedding came straight from the pages of an O. Henry story. My grandfather loved Maggie's long, lovely, red hair. The day of their marriage, she had a surprise for him. She had nick her hair, and had it bobbed in 1920's fashion. She bought a new hat. When he came to earn her, in his admire car, to go to the justice of the peace, he was aghast. The wedding almost didn't happen. They had words, got late for their appointment, and, on that windy March day, they finally had to run to the courthouse before it closed. Her fresh hat blew off her bobbed hair, and she didn't even bother to chase after it.
My grandmother musty to tell me about her long red hair, and how my grandfather loved it. When I came along, the youngest grandchild, she wore her hair short, and the red had become a faded blond. Like all of my older relatives, she and my grandfather slept in separate rooms, at opposite ends of the house. My grandmother showed her years; my grandfather never did. Grandpa seemed like Dorian Gray. His hair was full and jet black, and he had no wrinkles. Looking at old photographs, it's impossible to exclaim if he is twenty, forty, or sixty. He always looked the same. His mother, the Jewish beauty from Frankfurt, was said to be so handsome that "men couldn't keep their hand off of her." Maybe this was said to justify the divorce, and the abandonment of children to the orphanage. My grandmother, though, was sad about aging, and used to say to me, "Who would have thought such a pretty young slip of a thing could have turned in to such an ugly old woman? "
My most vivid memories of Maggie are standing next to the sink doing dishes. She loved to talk and tell stories. She told me how, when times were bad, she and my grandfather didn't have the money to buy chicken feed. Fortunately, this was during a year when the cicadas came, and the chickens kept from starving by eating the noisy bugs, who appear once every decade or so. Another time, washing dishes after church, she confided, "I don't believe for one minute in that story about Adam and Eve! If someone put me in Paradise, and all I had to do to discontinue there was to avoid eating one particular fruit, I would have been able to do that! I mean, they could eat anything they wanted. I would have gladly lived by that rule if it meant I could live in the Garden of Eden." Her life was no paradise.
My aunt, who lived with my grandparents, became Southern Baptist. My grandmother went to church with her, and I did too, when I visited. I remember fire and brimstone sermons, where the pastor would yowl and holler from the pulpit. "Why is he so angry? " I used to ask. Other times I would put my fingers in my ears when he started yelling. My grandmother was pragmatic, and never got in political or religious debates. Once my aunt took me to a tent revival, where the preacher had been former wrestler. He spent the evening telling us how physically abusive he had been to his family. I guess he was reformed, but I didn't see the point of hearing all his garbage. When I was six, woman from the Baptist church corner came and cornered me.
"Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? " she demanded. I had no view what the words meant. So my grandmother translated.
"She's just asking if you love Jesus," Grandma explained. "Tell her yes."
I did as I was told, but I was perplexed by the words and the interrogator.
Maggie had frequent encounters with travelling Roma, Gypsies, when she was a girl. She loved to tell stories about their colorful costumes, their music, their fortune-telling and advice. She didn't scream ill of those persecuted people, and had many interactions with them. Her father, the horse trader, exchanged horses with Gypsies, and had only one negative experience. He once traded an older horse of his for a beautiful, strong horse of theirs. He belief he had scored quite a coup, until he discovered the horse was "moonblind." This was some kind of eye infection or visual problem. In the days before advanced veterinary medicine, this ocular disturbance was attributed to the cycles of the moon, instead of the virus or bacteria that actually causes it.
Another time, Maggie and her sisters were weeding the rock- strewn garden. A Gypsy girl came to them, and asked why they were throwing away a particular plant.
"You foolish people don't know what you are doing," the Gypsy said. "This plant you are discarding is American ginseng. If you collect it and take it to the herbalist in St. Genevieve, you will be paid five cents a bloom."
Maggie and her sisters were dumbfounded. They quit their weeding, and began to dig up the plant. They went all around the area, and when people asked why they were digging up those weeds, they didn't say a word, just "We have our reasons." They didn't want the others to get rich doing what they were. A week later, they had bushels of the plant. They loaded up the mule cart, and went in to St. Genevieve, giddy with excitement at the thought of their impending wealth. The herbalist asked them why on earth they had brought him bushels of the plant.
"It's American ginseng," Maggie and her sisters said. "The Gypsy told us you would pay us five cents for each one."
"Well," the herbalist said, "If you had brought me American ginseng, which is rare, although some does grow around here, I would have paid you five cents a plant. You girls have just brought me a bunch of common weeds."
Maggie had poor health. Her heart was bad, though she lived to her eighties. My father had a bad heart as well, maybe it was genetic. My grandmother was advised not to have children because of her health. Having my father, the last child, almost killed her. Dad grew up hearing that over and over. In spite of her bad health, she had five children. Nervy kid that I was, I asked her why she had so many kids if her heart was bad.
"I couldn't afford birth control, even if it had been available," she said, matter-of-factly. "During the Depression, there was no money. But Planned Parenthood saved me. In those days, after you had five children, your doctor could write you a referral to view them. I went to them, and they fitted me with a diaphragm." It was too bad she had to jeopardize her health before she could see that big agency, but at least she finally could.
As the youngest grandchild, I was sometimes roughed up by older kids during family reunions. I used to dread those gatherings, when my country cousins would have fun chasing around this undersized city mouse. I would go running to my grandmother. Once, when I forgot my teddy bear at home, she made me a rag doll to comfort me. Maggie loved sewing, arts and crafts. She crocheted and knitted, and made rugs. She learned oil painting, and produced some nice canvases. Her first cousin was a W.P.A. painter of some renown in the school of Social Realism. Maggie didn't care for cooking, though. I did. She liked Mexican food. She used to ask me to "Please design those tacos," which she always pronounced "tay-cos."
Although the landscape in southern Missouri was beautiful, the weather wasn't. It was humid and muggy, and there were clouds of bugs and mosquitoes. I would go out looking for fossils and end up with chigger bites and ticks. Even the spiders there seemed scary. But it wasn't just the bugs that bothered me. The people frightened me, too. I was born in southern Illinois, which shouldn't have been so different from rural Missouri. It was, though. When we lived in the Midwest, my father was a college professor. The folks across the state line didn't seem alive to in learning or academia. The Mississippi River divided two different worlds. Those differences date from before the Civil War.
As remote as the small town where my grandparents retired to was, Leeper, the town my grandmother came from, was far more forsaken. It wasn't until I was in high school that my grandmother shared more stories of her childhood, and how glad she had been to flee the hills. In the early twentieth century, Leeper was a rough and lawless position. Some of her experiences were chilling, Gothic. When she left Leeper, she severed many ties. She rarely allowed her children to visit down there. My father visited his mother's family only once as an adult, and was careful to be far away from Leeper by sundown.
I've never been there myself, and I don't have a desire to go. My father brought back a home movie. It is wonderfully green and lush, like a jungle. The roads are unpaved. The small houses are crumbling, the community in decay. The yards and gardens are full of non-working cars and trucks. The scenery is eerie. It seems to be devoid of people. One frame of the video is obscured by a black cloud of mosquitoes. The hotel where my grandmother once worked was turned in to apartments, and, though the stone structure still stands, it looks ghostly. My father filmed the graves of his ancestors in the small town cemetery. I wouldn't want to be buried in that god-forsaken graveyard, overgrown with vines and trees, and neither did my grandmother. Maggie is buried near St. Louis. She wouldn't return to Leeper in death.
Some of my grandmother's siblings ended up in prison. A few of those that didn't should have. There was one cousin of hers in particular who terrified her, Buster Pyle. Buster Pyle made Jesse James look like St. Francis of Assisi. Jesse James robbed the rich, and was kind to women and children. Some may have considered him a political activist, a Robin Hood. Buster Pyle, another Missouri-based outlaw, was just a murderer and a thief.
Maggie went to work when she was fifteen, after her older sister Maud died. Leeper only offered education up to the eighth grade. By that age, girls either went to work or got married. Maggie got a job as a house cleaner in the town's hotel. One night, when all was smooth and dark, she was cleaning one of the hotel rooms. She heard the sound of raised voices. Quietly Maggie went to see what was going on. She tiptoed to where she heard the arguing. She saw her cousin, Buster Pyle, talking to a man who was counting a large stack of bills. She held her breath, and tried to keep still. She wished she hadn't come to see what the noise was. She knew Buster Pyle was concern.
She never told me what the two men said to each other. It probably involved a good number of curse words, things you wouldn't tell your grandson. Buster Pyle turned, as if to leave. She stepped back, and a floorboard creaked. The men looked up. Maggie was in shadows, and she prayed the men hadn't seen her. There was no worthy reason for them to have that much money. Just before Buster Pyle left the room, he whirled around, drew a knife from his belt, and stabbed the man in the stomach. The man made a gurgling noise as he fell forward. Maggie gasped in spite of herself. Buster Pyle looked her way, and took the stack of bills.
Maggie never knew if Buster Pyle had seen her. She ran home, packed her suitcase, told her mother goodbye, and boarded the next negate to St. Louis. She didn't say farewell to her father or brothers. She didn't trust them to keep her destination a secret. The rest of her life, Maggie worried that her murderous cousin had seen her, and would advance to waste her. When she was alone, or with her exiguous children, and there was an unexpected knock on the door, her heart would jump. Relief only came when, years later, she had word that Buster Pyle had been killed.
Maggie had five children, but had given birth six times. A few years before my father was born, she had a difficult pregnancy. Her heart was bad. She was visiting her mother in Leeper, and something went wrong. She gave birth prematurely, and lost the baby. She went into a deep depression, and never completely recovered from that loss. These days, if a baby is born too soon, there are better options for treatment. In those days, there was nothing to be done, especially in Leeper. Although her mother called the doctor, there was nothing he could do.
Maggie's mother, like most women of that generation, had delivered her children at home, with the assistance of a mid-wife. My aunts, Maggie's daughters, told me that when they married, their grandmother took them aside, and had a talk about pregnancy, and how to give birth, what to do with the umbilical cord, and what to do if there were complications. Maggie's mother cared enough about her female descendants to make sure they would be prepared for any eventuality.
Smooth another regret Maggie had about her lost child was that he was buried in Leeper, next to her horse-trading father. It was far for her to visit the grave. When my father was a young man, unprejudiced married, he made definite that lost brother of his had a respectable gravestone. So many of Maggie's family lie in unmarked graves, or graves where there is only a wooden defective. There is a picnic table in that country cemetery. On Memorial Day, what they customary to call Decoration Day, the family would meet in the graveyard, share food, and clean the weeds and leaves away. Now the cemetery is overgrown, remembered by only a few. There are no family picnics, almost no one lives in Leeper anymore.
Weeks before her death, Maggie was visited by a handsome young man carrying a itsy-bitsy baby. Maggie was lucid until the very end. Her bedroom had its own door to the outside. When she told her family about this visitor, they didn't know what to say. They hadn't heard anyone knock, but maybe the man had been quiet.
"Who is it? " her daughter asked. "Why doesn't he stop in and see me? Is he bothering you? "
None of her family ever saw the mysterious stranger with the baby. Once, during his visit, Maggie called to her daughter. When her daughter got there, the man was gone. Maggie was crying.
"He won't let me possess the baby," Maggie said tearfully. "He won't let me hold the baby unless I go with him."
Naturally her daughter was upset and confused. "Who is this man, and where does he want you to go? "
Maggie said nothing, but her daughter had the feeling that Maggie did indeed know the man, and that there was something she was not saying. How could the stranger vanish in the seconds it took for her to come to her mother's room?
Maggie wouldn't talk about it, and fell into a deep sleep. She had been troubled with insomnia all her life, but was finally able to rest deeply. When she woke up, she called her daughter.
"I know who the man is," Maggie finally said, her eyes wet with tears. "I know who the baby is, and I know where he wants to steal me." Her daughter stood in the doorway, silent, waiting for her mother to explain.
Maggie realized that the man was a messenger from the next world, and that the baby was hers. If she wanted to hold her baby again, she would have to leave this life, and go in to the unknown. It was the only way she could fill her lost baby again.
I am not qualified to drawl about visitors from another world. This man, though, brought great comfort to my grandmother. Because of this vision of her lost baby, she was able to find her rest. It's not recent for people, toward the destroy of their lives, to see things the rest of us cannot see. Maybe at this time, there is a heightened awareness, and people are less willing to dismiss shadows and visions the rest of us don't have time for. Before my father, Maggie's son, passed, he too saw things others didn't.
Once, when I was visiting his hospital room, he asked me if I knew the couple standing by the window. I couldn't see a couple standing there, and I told him so. My father smiled to himself, and said, "They must be ghosts. I see those two standing there a lot."
"Do they frighten you? " I asked.
"No, not at all. I just wonder who they are," he answered. My father believed, he told me, that phantoms sometimes manifested themselves in places where they had traumatic experiences. Hospitals were such a place. Emotions run high in those facilities. He told me that he sometimes heard unexplained voices, and while he could not distinguish the words, he thought these were the echoes of the expressionless. Ghosts, he came to believe, were a kind of residue, an imprint. Just as you can see the outline of someone where they lay on a bed or sofa, so you can sometimes discern the faint pattern left by someone who has left this life.
My grandmother had a difficult life. She was a loving wife and mother, though few things in her background would have taught her how to admire. She was self-taught. She was an example to my father, who was a good and loving man. Maggie escaped the cycle of violence she was raised in. She left Leeper, both geographically and emotionally. Some of her siblings were unable to do that. Maggie taught my father the trajectory of escape, and he left rural Missouri. My father was the first in his family to complete a post- graduate degree. Like his mother, he left his childhood both geographically and emotionally.
Dear Maggie, your life and your love have been a beacon for all those who knew you. You taught my dear father, and you taught me. Through your life and words, you are a link to history, a bridge between my life and the world of the rural Ozarks. Your sayings and your experiences have not been forgotten, and the lessons you learned have been passed on. Thank you. May you rest in peace eternal, safe with your lost baby, and with my father. The light of your appreciate still shines, and helps me collect my design in the dark.
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