“I know you probably have a million questions,” my grandmother told me as we got into her car. “Please forgive me if I’m not all that comfortable with talking about it quite yet, but I’ll tell you what I’m able to for now. I just want you to know that Arthur was a good man.”
“Grandma, did he die?” I blurted it out without thinking.
“No,” she chuckled a moment, then sobered. “At least, I don’t think so. I thought maybe he did a long time ago, but that isn’t what happened to him or to us. Lordy, I hope he’s still alive. But maybe it would have been easier on us if he had died, I don’t know.”
“Did he love someone else?”
“Not that I know of, Dear.” She took a deep breath and let out a sigh. She was getting frustrated with my million questions, just as she did when I was little, but I was at least adult enough to understand what the sigh meant. I took a deep breath of my own and tried to relax for a moment. I knew I couldn’t push her. She told me that she would explain what she was able. I just needed to be patient. I sat back and faced forward but cut my eyes toward her to study her features as she drove. She was every bit larger than life then as she was when I was a tiny child. She had aged considerably, but she was still the exact same person I had always known.
“Arthur and I met in school. We were in the same grade, and we sat next to each other because they seated us alphabetically. I remember the first day of school still like it was yesterday, and don’t you ever tell your mother any of this,” she looked at me, panicked.
“Of course not,” I agreed.
“He was so tall and handsome. He was taller than I was by a few inches, which wasn’t very common in my school. I was one of the tallest people in school! But I knew he was watching me out of the corner of his eye, just like you do when you’re waiting for me to say something,” she grinned with a snicker. “You remind me of him sometimes.” She shifted back to driving and continued. “I guess he thought I was something worth looking at, so he did it a lot. My mama was a bit of a prude, so I got dressed in things that circled clear up to my neck and dresses nearly down to my ankles, so it’s not as though there was a whole lot of me to look at, but he liked what he could see, so he still did a lot of looking. Anyway, one day I dropped my pen, and we both went to pick it up at the same time and bumped our heads. That’s really how we met. He told me he was sorry and then handed me my pen, and the next day he was asking me if I’d like to go get ice cream.”
“And did you go?” She was so light-hearted about everything that I found it hard to understand why she didn’t talk about Arthur or want my mother to know she had someone she loved long ago.
“Of course. I’d have been stupid not to.” She laughed. “But we went in style.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, his family came from money, and they had a nice big farm on the other side of town. So Arthur had been taking flying lessons and got himself a pilot license. When he asked me to meet him at the field behind the old church near the edge of town, I had no idea what he had in mind. For a little while, I thought I might not go because I figured he just had some heavy necking in mind, and I wasn’t that kind of girl.”
“Necking?” The term was one I wasn’t overly familiar with.
“Making out, you kids would say,” she winked. I must have blushed because she patted my cheek with her right hand.
“Okay,” I ushered her onward. I didn’t want to think about my grandmother making out with some boy in a big field behind a church.
“In fact, it was that church right there,” she pointed out the window as we drove by a busy intersection. “Of course, it wasn’t this built up back then. It was just the church and a big empty field behind it. We discovered that the little building on the corner belonged to a booze runner during prohibition. Some of the neighborhood kids broke into it one night and they all came out stumbling drunk on bathtub gin. They were lucky they didn’t get blinded by the stuff,” she nodded.
Blinded by gin?” My grandmother had a way of leaving me with more questions than I knew what to do with.
“Yeah, that was a common thing during prohibition, especially here down south. People were making their own booze out of whatever they could, and that stuff could get a might bit dangerous. There was usually someone every week that would go blind from drinking bad hooch. I was glad my daddy didn’t live to see prohibition. He’d have lost his mind. He loved his drink.” I made a mental note to ask how her father had passed away before she was eight years old.
“So you met behind the old church,” I prompted her to get back on track. “What happened then?”
“I got there early,” she continued without missing a beat. “For a little bit, I wondered if maybe he wasn’t going to come at all because he was late, but then he came flying in like some hero flyboy from the Great War and landed right next to where I was standing. My hair blew all over the place and I had to hold my hat down with one hand and my dress down with the other. I feared I might show my ‘republic to the nation’ if I didn’t get a handle on things.”
“Your what to the what?” I laughed out loud.
“My republic to the nation. Your mama doesn’t say that one? I’ve been saying that all my life.” She chuckled a moment. “Anyway, he landed that plane, and I got so excited because I’d never been on a plane before. I didn’t think I’d ever have a chance to ride on a real airplane. It was only the year before when Lindberg made his famous flight. How in the world could my life suddenly be so magical that I could ride in an airplane like Charles Lindberg?
“Arthur hopped out and helped me to climb in with only a little grunting. I might have been a skinny kid back then, but I was still tall, which means I had some weight to me. I got up in that plane and got as comfortable as I could with no leg room and a tiny seat that felt like concrete, but then when he took off, it was the most exhilarating feeling of my life. It was as if I’d found heaven itself. I tried to hold my hat on for a bit, but I finally gave up trying and just took out the hatpins and held it in my lap. Having all that wind in my hair was amazing. I knew my hair would be terribly messy by the time I got home, and I might have some explaining to do, but I figured it was worth it to try to sneak past Mama. Or I could try to cover it with my hat. Anyway, we flew to the next town over for ice cream, and it was the best ice cream I ever had.”
“What kind of ice cream was that,” I asked, genuinely curious. My grandmother loved ice cream. If it was the best she ever had, I needed to find it for her.
“I have no idea,” she smiled and winked at me quickly. Her smile was infectious. I didn’t know how a woman of her years could still be such a competent driver and have all of her own teeth, but she was like no stereotype I had ever known. “We were eating the ice cream when he pulled out this little trinket box from his pocket and told me there was something inside for me. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, and I couldn’t figure out how to open the box, either. Then he told me he was an inventor, and the gift inside was something he’d invented himself. The box was something he’d made, too. It was a puzzle box, and it was difficult to get into on purpose. That way I could hide any treasures I wanted in it, and nobody could ever get to them except to take the box and break it. That was pretty special to me since I was the oldest of five kids, and everyone in the house was nosier than an anteater.”
“So what was in the box?” I simply had to know.
“Don’t get ahead of me,” she chastised, teasing only slightly. “Anyway, he flew me back to the church before nightfall so I didn’t get into trouble. When we landed in the field by the church, I felt like my heart dropped out of my chest because it was the first date I’d ever been on, and it was already over, I figured. But instead of just helping me out and sending me on my way, he parked the plane and wanted to walk me home. I didn’t know how I wouldintroduce him to Mama when she didn’t even know I was on a date. She thought I was studying after school with some of the other girls from class. He seemed like maybe he knew I didn’t want him to walk me all the way, and he told me to let him know where he should stop so he didn’t embarrass me. That was when I knew I was in love.
“We walked all the way back to my house, and I didn’t want him to see where I lived, and I didn’t want Mama to see him, so I made him stop just before the neighbor’s house. When I said goodbye to him, he grabbed my hand and kissed me on the cheek, and it was the most beautiful moment I can ever remember in my life. It was the best thing that happened in 1928, meeting Arthur. Maybe the worst, too.
“I didn’t even know until a year later that he watched me go all the way home from behind a big, tall juniper just to make sure I got home safe. He never mentioned anything about the dirt yard or broken picket fence or the boarded-up windows of our house. He didn’t talk about the old wooden tub sitting in the grass outside because we didn’t have indoor plumbing like the rich folk did. He didn’t care about any of that, I guess. I wish the rest of the world didn’t either. Arthur liked me for being who I was, which was good because I didn’t know how to be anyone else.”
“Did you get into trouble with your mom?”
“I would have if it hadn’t been for Jonnie,” she replied as she pulled into the parking lot of the hamburger joint. “Jonnie saw me walking up to the house and saw the shape of my hair and knew something was going on. She walked outside, ran her hand through some mud, wiped it on her dress, and went back in. I could hear her from a few yards away calling out to Mama that her dress was dirty and she’d need to get it washed before church the next day. While Mama was busy yelling at her for getting her one good dress dirty, I was able to sneak past and get to the bedroom to comb my crazy hair out.”
“Grandma,” I interrupted, not wanting it to end but also needing to know what had happened to my great grandfather, “How did your dad die?”
“Oh, Honey, I’m sorry. I skipped right over that, didn’t I? He was one of the rail car jumpers. That means that he would keep an eye on the railroad cars making sure the bums didn’t jump on at the stops or when they would slow down. It was his job to chase them off the train if they did. But one day, he didn’t jump just right, and he fell between the rail cars and got run over. Mama said he died instantly, but when I got older, she said that she thought maybe a bum actually pushed him, and he didn’t really fall between the cars, but it was deliberate. She believed a bum killed him on purpose because he wouldn’t let them ride the rails. That was back when I was only six years old. I didn’t know him very well when he died. He worked a lot and was hardly ever home. But after that, Mama changed and needed a lot of help raising the other babies. With me being the oldest, that became my job. She didn’t like me much. Never did. But I guess I didn’t need her to like me. I had my sisters to love me, and I did everything in my power to take care of them.”
“Grandma, that’s awful,” I sighed, referring to her father’s death.
“Yeah, it wasn’t easy being the mom of four other kids when I was just six, but we made it work. Let’s go get some greasy cheeseburgers,” she grinned at me and reached for the car’s door handle.