"My Mother, Climbing Her
Family Tree" by Donna Doyle, 1st prize
| When I write to my mother
asking about relatives,
especially her mother, who died when I was four, she replies, telling me not to forget one of my ancestors, Sir James Douglas, who was killed while trying to carry King Robert Bruce's heart to the Holy Land. She writes of ancestors who died on the Sultana, my great great great grandfather named Pleasant Moment Johnson, a more distant grandfather who fell from his horse at Bull's Gap, the Bayless part of the family sailing to America on a ship named True Love. And, there is more she writes. Samuel Henry drowning when his red scarf caught on a tree while crossing a floodng river, a relative told not to kill any more Indians who said as long as he was alive he would kill Indians, slave of Hugh Henry writing from Alabama, asking permission to be buried in the family plot overlooking Little River, a child who fell on scissors and died. I am remembering other stories. How my grandmother started drinking after my grandfather left leaving her with three young daughters, no high school diploma, and beauty, endless beauty. There would be other men, buying presents and drinks, just one more drink, keeping her from home, past her oldest daughters' determined curfews when they locked 0 the doors and windows. Those nights, my grandmother tapped on my mother's window, crawled in and slept with her, while mother stayed wide awake waiting for the inevitable, her mother wetting the bed, and in the morning my mother still protecting, taking the blame, pretending the accident was her own. Other nights, my grandmother did not return home, was gone once for three days, electric bill unpaid, power turned off. What little food there was could not be cooked. Hungry, my mother opened a box of Jello, licked the pahn of her hand, poured the powdery crystals there, licked and poured and licked and poured until there was nothing left, but her hand, sticky stigmata-stained fist, waiting, always waiting to welcome her mother home. What would have changed history, would lead toward believing this is a wonderful life? When a GED, an essay award, a decent job, and three children could not keep my grandmother sober, would anything have been enough? From the open casket, my grandmother's blue dress, red lipstick, and long pearl strands still bum bright, shadowy images dancing on a wall of pale memories, reminders of how carefully I drink, how after a man leaves me I am frightened by craving and grocery store beer aisles. As much as what I do not know about my grandmother haunts me, I understand why my mother climbs her family tree reaching for outermost branches, further and further away from her mother's unsteady touching and untouching, why King Robert Bruce's heart is carried close in her own. Wearing my grandmother's pearl ring does not change history, inspires me to transform the legacy, beauty emerging from dark roughness, a phone call to my mother asking if she thinks genetic memory, Mary Queen of Scots, is why I am so uncomfortable wearing turtlenecks, is why my first favorite color was red as the dress she wore to the guillotine. She reminds me how Mary hid her dog under her dress, how close I am to my dog. The next time I see my mother I will hug her and the child inside her climbing toward mysteries of lives she never came close to knowing. I will not let go until I tell her she is enough, how when she dies I will carry her heart daily, through the holy, holy land we are living in now. |