We Have All Gone Away

11. These Mothers

11. These Mothers Father's three sisters were childless and looked upon us as their family; with Lizzie and Carrie that made five mothers altogether . In 1918, Aunt Anne accompanied Lizzie when she traveled east to Jamaica, Long Island, to visit her fiance, Jack, who was stationed at Camp Mills, and there Anne met Ernest, fell in love, and married soon after the Armistice. Father loaned Ernest and Anne a thousand dollars to start them farming, in Minnesota, but the venture failed along with the marriage and Anne did penance for her mistake by working as a short-order cook and waitress in a railroad restaurant. The small, southern Minnesota switching town was safely removed from the home scene, and the truth about her grass-widowhood might never be known. Only wicked, ungodly people were divorced; she'd made her marital bed and would hence lie on it. Decades passed but she never told her mother that her husband wasn't living with her, yet Grandma knew. When Christmas gift tags were inscribed to us "Uncle Ernest" as well as "Aunt Anne," we caught the fakery but also understood her pride and, without having to be told to keep mum, bolstered her up by pretending to believe the lie. For years Ernest hovered on the edges of our life like a 160 We Have All Gone Away wizened, unpredictable wolf: tall, rangy, gray-haired, grinning, with a whiny voice and pockets full of Dentyne chewing gum. He'd show up now and then, hoping to get a foothold among us, but we gave him short shrift; once the dismissal was so abrupt Ernest drove to the neighbors' and slept the night there, paying for his keep by telling sly tales of his mistreatment. At sixtyfive , Aunt Anne retired on Social Security and came home to live with Grandma, the marriage mess still never discussed between them. When Grandma died, Ernest pounced at once. In secret whereabouts a hundred miles away, he heard the news (who phoned him, we wondered?) and arrived in time for the funeral, to walk soberly down the aisle with his wife, Anne, to the mourner's pew, where he proceeded to weep his silly head off, sobbing all through the service. We were determined he'd not get a penny of the family money. Uncle Jack, drawing upon old Army days, persuaded him to sign quit-claim papers so that he'd never fall heir to a portion of the farm. Ernest did outlive Anne, but avariciousness was weak in him by this time and what little estate she possessed had been safely consigned to her surviving sister, and he didn't try to contest it. When Uncle Jack lived alone in the big farmhouse, Ernest saw his chance to move in, live cozy under a comfortable eave, be looked after. "But I wouldn't have that good-for-nothing bum on my hands! Sure, he'd like nothing better! But I told him to get moving." Ernest's casual catch-jobs had included taking care of a town ball park, janitor in a school, and work as an orderly in a state mental hospital--or perhaps he was a patient there. We heard rumors he'd been arrested for molesting children and may have done time in prison. When he was dying, finally, in the Veterans Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Jack drove up to visit him, for the hospital social worker wrote to him as "nearest kin." Curious, won by the story-in-it, Jack had to see the tale of Ernest through to the very end, since he was the only one left at home to do it. I'd have done the same--for the old fool. Whatever hell Ernest caused Aunt Anne, she refused to soil the home nest with it, for a thing unacknowledged did not exist; These Mothers 161 in the warm glow of our farm life, the reality of seedy Ernest faded. We sensed in her a great need for love, the reflex from anguish making the need deeper than in our two other aunts, for they remained maidens who'd kept themselves free of emotional scourgings, perhaps wisely. We'd rush our sugarplum selves toward Aunt Anne to assuage her pain, to fill out her love grief. The year I was nine, her birthday present to me was oddly enough a new striped overall...