by Jon Stafford
My grandfather, born in 1875, was Ray Woodson, a big man but like a teddy bear. My mother idolized him when he was alive and later teared up whenever anyone spoke of him. She grieved for him many years after his death in late 1941. He was six-foot-four and about 245 pounds, a man as gentle as he was huge. Supposedly, he could lift the back of a Model T truck off the ground without much effort. I was the only one of us kids to see him. He died when I was five, after a long illness at a time when my father had already gone to fight in World War II. I saw him only for a number of months and was very little. I have always been sorry not to remember him more clearly.
Mostly, I recall him with his big black dog, Gus. Because I was so small, both of them looked the size of a house to me! The two of them were always together, to the consternation of Grandmother. I recall her saying things against the dog, though I did not know why. Gus was a wonderful dog, at least to me. But when I look at him now in old photographs, I see a large and shabby-looking animal who would have scared almost anyone. He looked fierce, like a black wolf, standing next to Grandfather. I recall hugging him, although I think he didn’t like it. His fur was raspy, almost like a wire brush. He would lick me in the face with a tongue so coarse that it almost hurt.
On many occasions, Gus was my nanny. If he had somewhere to go for a few minutes, Grandfather would point at Gus in a special way I can see so clearly even now. He would say, “Now, Gus, you stay right here with my little Sweetie Pie until I get back,” and Gus would. I felt completely safe and enjoyed being a “Sweetie Pie.” He would stand near me and I never saw him lie down when he was watching me. He chased off many a stray animal that I am sure meant me no harm. I was told he once faced down an escaped bull on my behalf.
My grandparents were quite a strange pair. Grandmother was the former Eva Perdue. She was not even five feet tall. A beauty queen from Des Moines, she had been runner-up to Miss Iowa in the state pageant held in that city in 1905, when she was twenty. Ray, a hulking farmer from Dorance, Iowa, 120 miles off, had seen her there.
The next year, when he came to shop for farm implements, he saw her again at her father’s store. She was a beautiful petite woman, with black hair like coal, small hands, and delicate features. She still fit into a size four dress when she died in 1963. Despite having worked very little, and knowing nothing of cooking or farming, she fell in love with and married Ray in the summer of 1906, and came to live here. Great-Grandfather Fallon was still alive and went to live in the attic.
It has been said of the Woodson women that they have great devotion to their husbands. Eva certainly fit that mold. In five generations, none of us has sought a divorce. Eva was completely unsuited to farm life. But because of her great love for Ray, she remained here, decade by decade, hating everything around her: the hard physical work of an isolated farm woman, the openness of the Great Plains, the fickleness of crops, the smells of animals, the milking of cattle, and, more than anything else, the utter lack of any social life or friends from what she perceived as her social station. She watched as her hands coarsened and she developed arthritis in them and in her back from the continual process of kneading bread and lifting things too heavy for her to lift. I recall her often being in considerable pain.
She was also not the type of woman who took naturally to the process of bearing children. But she held nothing of her situation against her husband. Eventually, on May 1, 1912, she produced her only child, a robust baby girl whom the overjoyed father named Della Francine Woodson, but always called “Dell.”
Thus began the heartbreak of my mother’s life: that Grandmother never really accepted her. Mama grew to be five-foot-nine and had her father’s physique. There was nothing in her of the delicacy that Grandmother treasured, nothing of the frilly girl who could be dressed in pretty things. Mama’s hair was a mousey brown. She had large hands and feet, and from her first breath, she loved the farm and everything that went with it.
I suppose the final blow came in 1922, when Mama was ten. While detasseling corn with a lot of other kids, she caught her left arm in the machine, wrenching it terribly. Our family doctor, Oscar Deluse Karnes, examined it. He said the ulna was too badly fractured even to be set, and amputated it just below the elbow. Grandmother had a definite eye for beauty. Now she looked at her daughter and saw a gawky child who was plain and crippled.
But Mama made the best of the world she was given. I never recall a time when supper was not on the table or housework was not done. Occasionally, when she was mixing something and the bowl would get away from her, she would say to me so sweetly, “Would you help me?” I never recall an unkind word coming out of her mouth or an unkind act of which she was a part.
Grandmother’s eye for what she perceived as good-looking gave me my father, Harry Connors. He was born in 1915, on the farm next door, the fourth child of Dour and Emma Connors. Grandmother often talked to me admiringly about Emma. “She had the most attractive features, a beautiful figure—and her black hair!”
Grandmother spent many an afternoon with Emma, perhaps to the deficit of her chores. They were not able to enjoy each other’s company for long: the influenza epidemic in the spring of 1919 ended it.
She told me the story many times: how everyone thought the disease would concentrate in the congested areas in the east and not hit the farm country. With deep emotion, she told of the almost daily bad news in 1918, at the end of “the war” (World War I), of troops embarking for Europe and half of a company coming down with pneumonia and dying quite quickly. Only the third wave came as far west as Iowa. One day, her dear Emma called on the party-line phone and said they were ill.
“I worried over her all that day,” she would say. “When I heard nothing the next day, I told Ray to start the Model T and we rode over to the Connors’ place. I had to go, but I wouldn’t risk my Ray’s health. I told him to wait in the truck. I walked up on the porch and called inside through the screen. I remember the wind blew softly by my face. There was no answer, so I walked in. I never can forget that smell. My eyes focused on the floor of the parlor. It was much changed, having been turned into a makeshift sickroom. There on the quilts were my dear Emma and Dour and three of their boys. My heart just broke in two for that lovely woman and her family!”
She would stop for a moment, unable to control her tears.
“All of them were dead, strewn there on makeshift beds. It was a terror. The Lord take these old eyes if I’m ever to look upon such a thing again. Despite the weakening afternoon light I could see their lips, so blue, and the purplish-blue tinge of their skin, which sent a chill up my spine. I have that chill sometimes now when I think of them. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see they had spat up blood toward the end. Then I saw movement to the right, where the light was particularly dim.
“There, sitting bolt upright in a chair, was your father! The three-year-old turned toward me, but said nothing. He needed his mother! But she couldn’t go to him!”
Grandmother’s lower lip quivered. It made me cry too.
“The least I could do was to take Emma’s boy! I grabbed him up, ran out on the porch, and tore his little clothes from him. I rubbed camphor all over his body, which at the time was thought to quell the flu’s path into the body. We washed him again in the yard when we got home, and he never showed any signs of the plague.”
With his sligh
t features and black hair, Grandmother took Papa as her own. I suppose Mama did not mind; she had her Ray.
Mama and Papa were a wonderful pair from the beginning. As an only child, Mama needed a playmate, and being three years older, she could help care for him as a big sister as well. In time, he grew to be five-foot-ten, but never weighed over 165 pounds. For all practical purposes brother and sister, they formed a bond that defied distance and logic.
One of my most vivid memories is of my mother completely disconsolate one morning during the war. It upset my little world and made me afraid. I think about it often.
I came downstairs before the others that day. I saw Mama in terrible anguish: sitting on the side of her bed, rocking back and forth, weeping and mopping her hand over her face. The bed was still made from the day before. She remained there all day, except for helping a little with dinner. In her room, she buried her face in her skirt, without any noticeable recognition of her family about her. We attempted to ask her things and soothe whatever was wrong. But she did not respond, and after a few minutes we gave up and left her alone. By evening, she was so shattered as to go to sleep with her clothes on at 5 p.m., which I saw her do only one other time, near the end of her life.
The next day she seemed to be herself again. She was making breakfast when I came down. I asked her what had been the trouble.
“Baby,” she said, “I felt something terrible was happening to your Daddy.”
She hesitated, bent a little, looked sweetly at me, and straightened. Then she had a faraway look on her face, and her voice wavered and rose at the end. “There is such a bond between us that sometimes I know he is in danger.”
She brushed tears from her eyes, looked so lovingly at me, touched me on the face, and then was again lost in her thoughts. “I don’t know how to describe it, but it comes to me, and the feeling is more than I can deal with.” She slumped in a chair. “It overwhelms me.”
“Mama, is he okay?”
“Yes, baby.” She looked up at me. “I feel the danger has passed now and he’s okay.” She teared up again. “I would know if evil came upon him.”
Later, we were to learn that on the previous day, June 14, 1943, Papa’s submarine, Mojarra, had been sunk with great loss of life, and that by the sheerest chance he had been spared.
My parents were not demonstrative of their love. Of course, they knew each other very well. I know on a thousand occasions one answered the other for a question that had not yet been asked. They kissed each other every day, sweetly, and in front of us. Occasionally I saw them hug, but their relationship was like a fine watch, sweet but efficient, caring but work-oriented. And so it remained, neither ever raising a voice to the other that any of us ever heard. When Mama died of a hemorrhage in 1986, my husband and I came back to the farm to take care of Papa, who had never fixed a meal in his life. He fell into a state of depression, but recovered and lasted three more years, dying in July of 1989.
Papa gave Mama the great adventure of her life. After graduating in 1933 as Valedictorian at Dorance High School, he obtained an appointment to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. I’m not sure that he was actually considering a career in the Navy; as he later said, that his main interest at the time was poetry and literature.
But these were very bad years on the Great Plains, the terrible years of the Dust Bowl, when year after year of drought saw top soil blown away by high winds. Dust storms reached Chicago, hundreds of miles to the east. Many thought the region would never be restored agriculturally. Though it was worse in other areas of the Plains than Iowa, Papa told me he thought it was a good time to go because then there would be one less mouth to feed. Besides, the truth was that he longed for a little adventure! This presented Mama with a dilemma. She loved my father but had no wish to go East. In the end, they compromised as they always did, and she made the laborious trip to see him twice during his four college years.
A story shows the great dedication Papa felt to her despite his wish to “see the world.” During one of her trips to see him, the two attended a Christmas ball. Mama had taken much care in choosing new outfits, so that she looked the part of a socialite. But because of her missing arm, she did not fit in with some of the nation’s elite young ladies.
According to a story that got back to her through a friend, a lady named Forbes, Papa’s best friend, Walter Wood, was not too sure about him marrying Mama. Having heard of her for months before he’d seen her, he’d commented to Papa, “Dell’s great, but you need to date other women. Why not try someone else?”
Obviously, this had never occurred to Papa. He quickly responded, “Why would I want to do that?”
Papa never talked much about himself, so I know very little else of his schooling at Annapolis. He proved a good student, especially in mathematics. Too slight to be much of a footballer, he made his way in track as a reasonably good miler, he was an especially good swimmer. He had very few demerits, I suspect because he had no wish to see women by sneaking off campus and because he was basically a rule follower. He graduated in the upper third of his class in the spring of 1937. My parents got married the day after graduation in the chapel at Annapolis. For the next two years, the young couple went from one naval educational facility to another, enjoying their wedded bliss in a life very unlike what they had known before.
Mama returned to the farm under very unfortunate circumstances in the fall of 1939. The following Western Union message reached her at the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii:
FATHER IS SICK STOP COME HOME STOP
—MOTHER
She made it to the farm on November 2, never to leave again. My parents would be separated for the next six years, except for the three times Papa made it home—two before the war and one during.
Grandfather’s death the next month and then the attack on Pearl Harbor a few weeks later on December 7 changed much at the farm. All of us knew that Papa would not be coming back soon, and Grandmother became embittered for many years. She worked some about the house, but became as much of a burden to Mama as a help.
Billy sat back for a few minutes, watching some birds lazily flying in circles over one of the fields not too far away. I hope that was okay on my parents. Now, I suppose I had better talk about us kids since I am the only one still around who knows just how our mother accumulated us! She chuckled out loud.
I came to the farm just before the war under very strange circumstances. Dr. Karnes was well aware that Mama could not have children of her own but wanted them. On February 26, 1940, he called and then came to the house, with me! I was almost four. Mama related the story to me a hundred times.
“Dell, I want you to take this child,” Dr. Karnes said. Then he looked at his watch and mumbled, “Oh, I’ve only got five minutes.”
Mama said she was truly speechless, and mumbled something like, “Where does she come from? Who are her people?”
He responded that she was not to worry about it, and also that he could not tell her much because he had been sworn to secrecy.
“But what about the child . . . ?”
“Dell, I’m in a terrible rush.”
He must have seen the puzzled look on Mama’s face. “Dell Woodson Connors!” he trumpeted. “I brought you into
this world and have known you all of your life, from a little bit of a thing to now, a grown woman. I need for you to take this child from me right now!” He lowered his voice, perhaps not wishing Mama’s parents to hear. “I need to say this to you. If word of this ever reaches a living soul, I could lose my license.” The gray-haired country doctor then straightened up.
“I need you to take this child this instant! Mrs. Pedderson is in labor in my office with number, ah? What number is it? I can’t think. Anyhow, knowing her, she won’t last an hour. Betty [his long-time nurse] is there by herself.”
I can imagine the shocked look on Mama’s face and how weakly she must have responded.
As he handed me over, she recalled that Dr. Karnes said along the lines of, “I pledge to you that no one has been hurt in any way by this.”
“I know you would not do that,” she said, holding on to me. Tears of joy poured down her face as she looked down upon what she had prayed to God about for so long.
“And I promise you on the Bible that the legal part is fine. This child is now yours. No one,” he emphasized, “no one will ever come here to take her from you! But don’t ever, ever ask me anything about this. I’ll have to deny that I had anything to do with it. When people ask you how you got her—and you know they’ll line up to do so—just make up something.”
“I don’t understand,” Mama said.
