As I learned when I got older, my grandpa had had a terrible childhood. Born to a stern breed of Midwestern Germans, he was forced at ten years old, during the worst days of the Depression, to leave his parents and work on his grandparents’ farm, doing mind-numbing, backbreaking labor for fourteen hours a day. On his deathbed, delusional with late-stage cancer, he’d call out, “Please, don’t make me go back out there. It’s too cold tonight. I’ve killed enough chickens.” It was clearly a torturous existence.
He lied about his age and joined the Army at seventeen, and after the war worked for years as a Ford car mechanic, both before and after he lost his leg. After I learned to drive, he was always bugging me about my car. “When was the last time you checked that ‘arwl’?” He had a lot of skills. Even with one leg, he was a master trap shooter. According to Vern, he could sit in a wheelchair and hit a hundred out of a hundred clay birds at sixteen yards any day of the week.
Then alcohol and bitterness took over. By the time I first got to know him, he hardly did anything all day but drink, cuss, and make everyone around him scared or miserable. Vern likes to say that because his dad was such a slave driver, he felt like he was in the Marines when he was ten. He also had a terrible temper. He’d get mad and start throwing anything he could find at Vern’s head—one of his crutches, a pipe wrench, even a steel trash can if it was handy. My Aunt Vickie had her own strategy—lie low in the weeds and pay attention. She also got out of the house by eighteen. Grandpa was a tough old bird and I think some of that toughness rubbed off on all of us, including me.
My grandpa’s nasty attitude was often directed toward anyone who wasn’t like him. In fact, he was probably the most prejudiced, backward hillbilly I’ve ever met. And it really was just ignorance. He wasn’t a particularly bad person, he was just deeply prejudiced. And it wasn’t just toward blacks, either. Everyone, in his twisted view, was “a no-good rummy”—Irish, Hispanic, Japanese, Italian, Jewish, Catholic, people from New Jersey, it didn’t really matter. He was an equal-opportunity bigot. If you didn’t look or act like him, you were a second-class citizen in his eyes.
St. Louis, only about fifty miles away, was a foreign country to him, full of blacks and other suspect minorities who’d stab you in the back for a pack of cigarettes. As I said, many people in the small towns I grew up in felt that way towards St. Louis. They rarely ventured there for any reason. They watched the six o’clock news and only saw a city full of drug addicts, drive-by shootings, and marauding teenage gangstas. They never saw ordinary, hardworking, family people who just happened to be black.
My grandfather felt equally superior to women. Even though my grandma brought in most of the earned income in the family, he wouldn’t let her get her driver’s license, let alone drive “his” car, usually a late-model Ford or Ford truck. Driving was “man’s work,” I guess he figured, and about the only work he did for years was driving her back and forth from her paying job every day.
Despite Grandpa’s less-than-winning personality, my grandma took care of him and put up with him for forty-five years of marriage. They lived pretty much their whole life in mobile homes and trailer parks and, as they got older, small, quiet trailer parks that catered to senior citizens. The home I remember best was an old trailer situated alone in the country on Rural Route 2 outside Greenville, Illinois. The first thing you saw when you drove up the gravel road was not the trailer, but my grandfather’s big shed where he kept his tools and assorted junk. He rarely spent any time in their home. If he wasn’t gone, he was holed up in his shed, doing God knows what.
Inside their trailer, besides the big TV that everybody watched, were always two things Grandpa Vernon cherished: a giant, stuffed hundred-pound swordfish he’d once caught on a fishing trip to Florida, and an old grandfather clock. The clock was a constant source of irritation for the old man, as if he needed something else to irritate him. He was always fiddling with it, trying to get it to work right. The fish and the clock—those were his heirlooms. Uncle Vern still has them to this day.
Grandpa had his favorite pastimes, and NASCAR was one of the biggest. Like all diehard NASCAR fans, he connected with certain drivers, Bill Elliott being number one in his mind for a good twenty years. Other than that, for most of my childhood, Grandpa’s only “job” was to collect Social Security and disability from the government, and drink. He’d get up early, drive down to the VFW Hall in Greenville, and sit and drink with his veteran buddies all day. Meanwhile, my grandma worked like a dog to make ends meet. She worked forty, fifty hours a week for most of her life. Work paid the bills but it was also a way for her to escape from the madhouse of her personal life. For a long time she was a waitress at a place called the Round Table in Collinsville, Illinois. At one point, she even filled in at Big O’s, the bar where both my mom and I worked for years. Like Diane Jackson, she ran the whole damn show.
I was just a little girl and from my perspective, it was a strange situation. My grandma and grandpa lived their whole life hating each other—I mean, truly hating each other—and yet he couldn’t live without her, and she really had no interest in living without him. He didn’t so much abuse her as ignore her, taking her efforts for granted and spending or hoarding money as he saw fit. As far as I can recall, she never got a birthday present or even a Christmas card from the old man, let alone a night out on their anniversary. He’d give her $40 at Christmastime to buy presents for everyone else in the family, but not herself. There’s never been a present under the tree that read “From Vernon to his loving wife, Frances.” Never.
They never even slept in the same room. In fact my grandma would pile stuff on her bed in her little bedroom and sleep every night on the couch in the living room. Grandpa would just go to his room, slam the door, and not be heard from again until morning. It’s as if they had signed a lifelong pact to stick it out together, no matter their feelings. It was not a “modern” marriage.
I’m sure that there were times when my grandmother didn’t know what kept her going. In moments of pure frustration, she’d yell, “Who in the hell else would put up with all this if I didn’t?” She just figured she had to, I guess, and then didn’t give it a second thought. She was stubborn and took pride in toughing it out. Her attitude was, “By God, I don’t care what in the hell life hands me, I’ll find a way to deal with it. I’ll keep moving forward.” That’s the kind of thinking I got from her.
I mean, what else was she going to do? She had no father or mother or siblings to go home to. Grandpa and the rest of our little clan was all the family she had in the world. She didn’t even know where she came from.
Though she could never make the decision to pack up and move away from the old man, it got to the point a time or two where Grandma made plans to bump him off and put both of them out of their misery. This was not some TV show; this was real life when a drastic situation called for drastic action. She later told me all about it. On one such occasion Grandma had the bright idea of sneaking into Vernon’s room before he got home from the VFW and spraying down his bed with Lysol laced with some household poison. The plan was that he would slowly inhale the fumes, die a quiet respiratory death in his sleep, and no one, at least in and around Greenville, Illinois, would detect the cause. Of course he didn’t die in his sleep. He just got up the next morning, coughed a little, cursed the world, and took off for another day of leisure.
On another occasion, she tried to kill him by putting motor oil in his soup. Just a touch, I guess, to make him deathly ill and keel over from a ruptured intestine or massive diarrhea or something. She even told me beforehand that she was going to try this deadly scheme. I didn’t think it was going to work, since he’d probably taste the oil and spit the whole thing out, but I didn’t say anything. When I asked her later how it went, she replied, deflated, “Oh, it didn’t do nothing but give him the shits.”
For all those years when my grandfather drank constantly, my grandma, though never an alcoholic, liked to have a beer as well. I
’d take her to lunch when she was well into her sixties and she’d asked me if I was going to have a beer. I’d ask her if she wanted one and she’d always answer, “Well, I’ll have half a beer.” Of course she’d end up drinking three or four “half” beers, but she’d never indulge herself and ask for a whole one. It was hilarious.
It was a madhouse over at their trailer. As crazy as it was in my own home, with my mother’s life constantly in turmoil, it was even crazier over at Grandma’s. It was more of a comic crazy. Besides a one-legged alcoholic husband, my grandma also had to take care of his mother, old Grandma Heuer, who moved in after her own husband passed away. The state paid them $40 a week to keep her instead of putting her in a nursing home, and along with Social Security and disability, this allowed my grandma to stop working in her old age. Not that taking care of Grandma Heuer, sinking slowly into senility, wasn’t a job. They built a huge room adjacent to the back door of the trailer to house her. It was the biggest room in the whole trailer, like sixteen by twenty. When I stayed with Grandma, I slept on a cot in that room.
Grandma Heuer didn’t know where she was half the time. I’d go over to visit her and she’d look right at me and say, “There’s some middle-aged woman who keeps coming in here and stealing my sweaters.” And my own grandma would chime in, “Well, jeez, Grandma, that’s me. I’m not stealing your sweaters, I’m washing them!” Toward the end I remember visiting the old lady and she’d point to my picture on TV and say, “You know, that little girl comes to visit me every once in a while.” I’d try to let her know that the woman on the TV was me and that I was standing right there, but I’m not sure she ever made the connection.
The craziness around there escalated at dinnertime. My grandma had a Mexican Chihuahua named Daisy that was the meanest dog I’ve ever encountered. She was solid black and had huge ears—she looked like a miniature elephant. Daisy curled up on a pink fuzzy blanket in the closet in my grandma’s room, and if you were a kid, you didn’t go near that closet. That little nipper with the giant ears might bite your finger off.
So that was my grandma’s daily charge—a one-legged alcoholic, a doddering eighty-plus-year-old, and a pint-sized version of Cujo. It took me a while, but I finally figured out why both the dog and Grandma Heuer seemed to be getting crazier as time went on. I started to observe a strange ritual that would happen almost daily at dinnertime. My grandma, having fixed dinner entirely by herself, would call everyone to the table, and once we were all seated, she’d point out to Grandma Heuer that, like always, her daily dose of pills was sitting in front of her in her spoon. My own grandma would turn to start passing out the food or something, and Grandma Heuer would, almost like clockwork, look around for her pills in the spoon, get confused, and then flip the spoon on the floor, spilling all the pills. Who do you think would gobble up those pills within seconds of them hitting the floor? Daisy the deranged Chihuahua.
Now a six-pound Fido full of strange medication, Daisy would then make a mad dash to her pink fuzzy retreat in the closet and stand guard, probably hallucinating giant phantom raccoons and squirrels from all the drugs she just swallowed. Open the closet door and she would snarl at you like a man-eating pit bull. I watched this little comic scenario take place almost every night and no one really knew about it except me and Daisy. Only later did I realize this could have been fatal to one or both of them. Grandma Heuer’s mind just kept slipping away, something the medication might have helped, and everybody just thought Daisy was the world’s meanest water rat of a dog. That might have been true, but she had a lot of help from that daily spoonful of mind-altering chemicals.
Pills aside, dinner was always a treat because my grandma would cook a big meal every night, even after working a twelve-hour shift at the Round Table. Fried chicken, rhubarb pie, or when things were tight, maybe squirrel or rabbit, but it was always a lot of food, made with love. Sometimes, when things were especially tight, Grandma would fix possum three times a week. We ate our share of catfish, too, and lots of frog legs. The truth is, I always hated frog legs, and wasn’t exactly crazy about some of those other dishes. Maybe that’s one reason why I’m such a big McDonald’s fanatic to this day.
After dinner Grandpa would retire to his recliner without even clearing his own plate and start to drink his nightly round of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. He had a system wherein he would finish a can, then hand it to me, and grumble, “Go put this in the box for Vern to smash.”
My Uncle Vern was still living at home at the time and that was one of his jobs, along with burning the trash and gutting the rabbits and other wild game. Vern would take the used beer cans, smash them flat with a sledgehammer, then fill up an old refrigerator box full of smashed cans and haul them off to the recycling center to collect money on them. The box, Vern fondly remembers, held 285 cans, which is a good indication of how much my grandpa drank. Vern would return the money to Grandpa, who would of course spend it on more beer. It was its own little alcoholic ecosystem and the old man himself never had to leave his recliner.
This routine went on for years. Then one night I couldn’t take his arrogant attitude anymore and told him so, loudly. I must have been about eleven or twelve years old and not really big enough to take on anyone, let alone a grandpa with a mean temper. In any case, about the time he ordered me that evening to get him his third or fourth beer from the refrigerator at the same time I was to deposit the empty out back, I just lost it. I stood right in front of his chair and cussed him out. I said, “I don’t give a damn if you’re one-legged or crippled or whatever, you can just get up and get your own damn beer. I’m sick of getting your beers, while all you do is sit and gripe and bitch and moan at everybody.” Remember, I was eleven and female. He must have been as shocked as I was with what was coming out of my sassy mouth.
My grandma’s own mouth was hanging open throughout this whole rant and I remember my Uncle Vern quickly backpedaling into his bedroom; he didn’t want to get hit when my grandpa started whacking people in the head with his crutches, which is what he often did whenever he got mad. I was afraid of getting hit, too, but I was ready to stand my ground. The old coot had just pushed me over the edge.
My grandpa slowly got out of his recliner and cussed me right back in my face. He then walked straight down the hallway of the trailer to his bedroom and slammed the door. He went to bed around seven that night and you could hear him cursing and yelling all night about his smart-ass eleven-year-old granddaughter who had the gall to tell him to get his own damn beer. The rest of us tiptoed around the trailer that night, afraid to set him off even more.
The next morning he got up as usual, got dressed, drove down to the VFW Hall, and ordered an orange Sunkist soda. He was apparently through with drinking and never had another drop of alcohol until he started dying of colon cancer many years later. He quit drinking cold turkey the day after I told him he was a loser. As mean as he often was, I think I embarrassed the hell out of him and made him feel small enough that he felt he had to change his drunken ways to maintain even a shred of personal dignity.
My grandpa remained more or less sober for the next twenty years. He was always an ornery cuss but he ceased being downright mean. He was even fun to be around at times. He was stingy, though. He hoarded money like Scrooge McDuck and if he spent any, it was usually on a new gun or set of tools for himself. He had a little can where he would stash $2,000 or more and squirrel it away in a secret hiding place. He didn’t trust anyone with his money—the banks, the government, and probably his own relatives. You’d look out the window and see him skulking around the yard, looking for a site to bury his treasure. If he caught you looking, he’d move it around to throw you off the scent—he’d lock it in his toolbox, or stick it under the washer and dryer, or under his bed.
My grandma, on the other hand, would work three times as hard, pinch every penny, and spend very little on herself. I remember one time when I took her to see the Eddie Murphy movie Harlem Nights. She had saved up $5 for the tic
ket by stashing it away, a dollar here and a dollar there, and she couldn’t possibly tell the old man where she was going. First of all, he would want the money for his can in the backyard, and secondly, he’d go completely berserk if he found out she was going to a movie starring a black man. Next thing he knew, she was liable to bring one home! In his twisted brain, seeing an Eddie Murphy comedy was like a personal betrayal. That would have set him off more than the money.
My grandpa wouldn’t even watch black-centered TV shows like The Jeffersons or The Cosby Show. Of course a lot of things on TV bothered him. We all remember what would happen when a tampon or feminine hygiene commercial would come on. He would start to clear his throat and then cough like he was about to die. The coughing would drown out the sound so he couldn’t hear about Feminique or easy-day tampons.
On another occasion I took my grandmother to the movies at the theater in Highland, the only one in town. We were standing in line and I said, “Grandma, do you want a Coke or some popcorn or something like that?” She immediately reached into her purse and pulled out this mangled, smashed-up paper cup that she had saved. She started to straighten it out and as she was doing that, she said, “Here. You can use this. Now you don’t need to pay for another one of those. You just tell them this is a refill and they’ll give it to you for free.”
I was both taken aback and impressed. She had been saving that measly paper cup in her purse for months, waiting to use it again to save the price of a Coke. That’s how poor she was, and resourceful. If you took that same purse and shook out the contents, you’d find Sweet’N Lows from every trip she ever made to a restaurant, and napkins, and little packets of ketchup, and anything else she could quietly tuck away. Whatever it took to get by, she did. She was going to make it through, come hell or high water.
Redneck Woman Page 4
