Let Us Pause to Consider What a Happy Ending Actually Looks Like
In the story my grandmother told, there was an old woman of uncertain race who lived among them but did not belong. With no land and no way to grow anything, the old woman was poorer and more desolate than the others, and they looked the other way when she slipped into their barns after dark with her candle and her rucksack, intent on taking corn. Did a barn owl startle her that night? Did a mule jostle her arm? They never knew: she never admitted to being there. The howling fire took the barn whole and then roared to the house. Neighbors saved some of the furniture in a kind of bucket line, but an actual bucket line was impossible: the water tank had stood on a wooden scaffold already lost to the blaze. There was no time to save the clothes and quilts, the food my grandmother had stored for winter, the grain my grandfather had put up for his mules. Worst of all, there was no time to save the wild-eyed mules stamping in their stalls.
In my grandmother’s story, they brought what the neighbors had salvaged to her in-laws’ house half a mile down the road, and family came from every direction to resettle things, making room. The back porch became the room where Papa Doc and Mama Alice slept. The parlor became my grandparents’ room. The nooks where my mother and her infant brother slept were upstairs, in what had been the attic.
Decades later, when my mother told stories of her girlhood, she never seemed to recall how crowded the house must have been or how the tensions surely flared. Instead she remembered my great-grandparents’ devotion. Every day Papa Doc would leave for calls with his black bag or, on slow mornings, head to the store to pick up the mail. When he came home again, he always called out, “Alice?” as soon as he reached their rose border. And she would always call back, formally, from the garden or the kitchen or the washtub on the porch, “I’m here, Dr. Weems.”
My mother’s grandparents went through the day in a kind of dance, preordained steps that took them away from each other—he to his rounds across the countryside, she to the closer world of clothesline and pea patch and barn—but brought them back together again and again, touching for just a moment before moving away once more.
But the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin. My mother was twelve when Mama Alice died. Papa Doc sat down on the porch and settled there, staring at the rambling rosebushes growing beside the road. “He just made up his mind to die, I guess,” my mother always said. “He lasted barely more than a month.”