Prairie Gothic: The Story of a West Texas Family

Chapter Seventeen: The Currys

127 Chapter Seventeen: The Currys When I was young, it never occurred to me that my grandparents had anything less than an ideal marriage. Marriage problems, if they ever occurred (and we know they did) were not considered a subject that children or grandchildren needed to hear about. But one night in 1970, when I was twenty-six years old and had a family of my own, Mother and I stayed up late, talking in the living room, and she told me some stories about Buck and Mable that I had never heard before. She said that they were not an ideal match. Like her father, Mable was fastidious, while Buck tended to be sloppy in his habits. Both were strong-willed and neither showed much talent for compromising. Mable wanted to postpone having children, but Anna Beth came soon and was a breech baby (turned backwards in the womb). Local midwives did all they could and finally sent for a doctor in Midland, more than a hundred miles away. He came in a horse-drawn carriage and said that both mother and child would surely die. Grandmother suffered terribly. Finally exhausted, she fell asleep and her body relaxed enough so that Anna Beth made her entrance into the world. Mable took a long time recovering from her ordeal—a “fallen womb,” Mother called it—and wasn’t anxious to go through it again. But she became pregnant with my Aunt Mary, and the atmosphere inside the Curry house turned frosty. Buck and Mable argued long and loud, and one night in a fit of anger, Mable told Buck she wished she’d never married him. This hurt 128 Chapter Seventeen him deeply, and twenty years later, when my mother was about to marry, he took Anna Beth aside and said, “Don’t ever say that to your husband. It’s the kind of thing a man will never forget.” Buck and Mable continued to occupy the same house but drifted farther apart. In those days, divorce was almost unheard of, yet they seemed to be moving toward such a calamity. Buck took an interest in a young woman who worked in the bank, and Mother even suggested, to my astonishment, that Mable had her eye on a nice young man. When Buck heard about that, he told Mable to take the children and move out. He wanted a divorce. Grandmother didn’t know what to do or where to go. She couldn’t tolerate the idea of crawling back to her father’s house, so she wrote to the Mother Superior at Mercy Academy in Stanton, asking if she could bring her two children and work as a cook at the school. The Mother Author’s mother, Anna Beth Curry, as a baby with her parents Buck and Mable Curry, circa 1916. Photo courtesy Martha Marmaduke and Barbara Whitton. 129 The Currys Superior wrote back, saying that Mable’s place was with her husband and in her home, and that she should find a way of saving the marriage. Mable swallowed her pride and remained in the house. Years later, she told my mother that it was the most humiliating experience she had ever known. Buck and Mable came to a reconciliation in a way they couldn’t have anticipated. Little Mary Curry, who was still a baby, came down with pneumonia and whooping cough, and seemed close to death. Buck and Mable kept a vigil at her bedside for twelve days, and by the time Mary’s fever broke, they had decided to make a fresh start. Theirs was never a perfect marriage, but they stayed together until Buck died in 1947. (Anna Beth Erickson interviews, 1976 and 1970; Bennett Kerr interview, 1972) It makes me uncomfortable to write on this subject. My kinfolks have always held tightly to their deepest feelings and have considered such things nobody’s business. I respect that attitude, but the story of Buck and Mable would be less than honest if I portrayed their marriage the way I wished it had been, rather than the way Mother and Aunt Bennett remembered it. Mother said little about Buck’s family back in Milam County, only that Mable didn’t care for them. Buck’s father was “shiftless” (that was a favorite Sherman adjective) and an alcoholic, and Buck’s mother was sickly, shrewish, and whiney. Like many of the people...