For the Rest of the Road
Genesis
They lived in what was called “The Little House” on a farm
in the middle of nowhere, outside a small farm town west of Indianapolis. The little house was built for the great
grandfather, who came to live with his son on the farm. This was after his (the
great grampa’s) second wife had died and the step-kids had taken the farm he
lived on for many years. Or, at least that’s what she was told and led to
believe. She did not know a lot about him.
She knew that he had once “tried it on” (as the Brits say) with his granddaughter
Jane, who firmly rebuffed him, and that he had somehow blown all of the money
he inherited, and most of the land. Not
uncommon in those days, but still it caused even the great-grandchildren to
wince when they looked at the Big House on the next farm over where the second
wife and her kids had lived until she died.
Was her name Bessie? We didn’t know for sure. We only knew that our
family, whose patriarch was one of the sons from the first marriage, inherited
a small farm with a small house ordered from Sears and a smaller house where
she lived until she was five.
A series of family members lived in the house over the
years. Three of the older four children (her
mother’s siblings) went off with spouses to live in Indianapolis. One daughter
and her husband lived in a small house at the end of the always dusty gravel
road that connected it to the Big House Little House farm. This was her Aunt
Edna, whose two young daughters were the first role models she had. From early
on they took her to play upstairs with BillDings and in the yard outside. There
were lilac bushes- didn’t everyone have lilac bushes?- and a small kitchen
garden. She loved those days when she
could walk down the gravel road barefoot to her cousins’ house. They were a lot older than she was (well,
three or four years) but they were patient with her and kept her
entertained. In her world, having
something to do was a huge event.
When she was two the brother arrived. Her mother, who had been raised by a woman
with severe mental health problems who was hospitalized several times during
her mother’s childhood, was barely making it with one toddler. And now that it was a toddler and an infant
she was at the edge. The Dad worked in
Indianapolis and was gone long days and nights.
As a narcissist he never thought he needed to be at home with them. He filled time with work, bowling, golf,
drinking and whatever else he wanted. All of those things came easily to
him. Being a father did not.
One day early on, she went to the kitchen door and
pushed. It flew open, so she slowly
climbed down the steps to the gravel driveway between the house and the barn
where she looked for eggs every morning.
She crossed the driveway. Stopped for a moment and looked up at the
bright blue cloudless sky. The air was
warm. She kept walking across the barnyard passing the trees and farm
equipment. She reached the field which
was not yet planted. She knew this
because in her memory the field was flat and had not been plowed and planted in
rows of either soybeans or corn, depending on the year. She did not have words to describe fear or
being lost so she kept walking. She
turned right and walked. She passed the
orchard, the sheds, and then walked toward what she realized much later was a
ditch (the little ditch).
Suddenly someone picked her up. Someone picked her up and took her back to
the little house. For many years, well
into adulthood, when she remembered this she thought it was an angel who picked
her up. She could not think of another
explanation. Much later she knew. She knew that it was her grandmother, her
wounded and non-verbal grandmother, who stood at the windows and watched
outside while she spoke to herself. Seeing the granddaughter, whom she saw every
day from the window, outside walking toward the ditch made her leave the house
and run toward the little girl. She
swooped her up in her arms and walked back to the little house. Grandmother knocked on the door and her
daughter answered. Without words she put
the little girl inside the house, then turned and went back to the big
house.
Over time, the little girl learned to spend more time with
her grandmother. She wouldn’t be missed
by her mother, who didn’t really like her, and her baby brother took all of the
time and energy that her mother had. And
this continued into her adulthood.
Years pass and walks turn into long hours away from the
little house. Hours spent with the
grandmother and the cousins, walking over rotting apples from the apple tree
between the big house and the little house.
There was no one to care for the trees, and no one to pick up the few
apples that might have been salvaged to turn into pies, cobblers, or apple
sauce. The little girl found a white cat
from among the barnyard cats. She named
it No Apple, because the cat always tried to eat the apples on the ground and
the little barely verbal girl would shout, “No apple!” as in “Don’t eat the
apple.” The name stuck. As she grew, she was with her grandfather as
much as possible. He had taken a job at
Bridgeport Brass during the war and stayed on when the younger men came
home. He stayed on while he farmed the
fields. He was left with two small
fields, enough to bring in extra money for the family- still four children at
home. With the kitchen garden that the
older girls helped with, they got by.
The little girl ran into the field to meet the tractor coming up toward
the house and begged to ride with him.
He was frustrated that her mother was not watching her more closely, but
he always let her ride with him to the end of the rows. She sat still and didn’t move. Whatever he
told her to do, she did.
The years passed. Maybe
it was boring, and maybe she should have been in town where there were schools
and other activities. Still, with all of
the time alone and little entertainment she ended up with a genius level
Stanford-Binet. Sometimes on weekends
she would go to town to visit her other grandparents. She would get her hair
washed, brush her teeth, eat at regular times, and sleep alone. The first time she remembered being sexually
abused was in that house. And it was her
grandfather. He took her panties off
(she was just starting potty-training) and told her to dance. She was dancing when her grandmother opened
the door and found them. She swooped the
girl up and took her in the bathroom.
She asked the girl lots of questions and washed her private parts with a
warm cloth. They never spoke of it
again.
Over the years the girl had symptoms of being abused. There were nightmares of wanting to scream
but not being able to open her mouth, the hyper-alertness when she heard sounds
in the night. Her grandmother continued
to bring her there on weekends, but often the girl slept with her grandma in
her bed. It all started to fit together
later when she traced it back to those days.
Back to the farm. Her
Mom got pregnant again, and her Dad was working for the big corporation after
finishing his college degree. The girl
needed to start school. It was time to
move to a town closer to Indianapolis.
The morning they moved, she awoke in the living room on the sleeper
sofa. No one had told her what was going to happen. No one ever did. Her uncles were there
helping with the furniture, and somehow they ended up in the new house. That’s where they lived for six years.