Dear Sunny -
Coal dust smudges the skin of sweaty miners, seeps beneath fingernails, and stains trousers, jackets, and bootlaces. Is there running water? A bathtub and bars of soap? Is there a proper school, a grocer, baker, or butcher? Is there even a doctor? I imagine whitewashed wooden houses with crooked roofs, dense gardens, open cook fires, and muck and black dust everywhere. Does the sun shine through the coal dust clouds to the poor mountain town below or does is pass it by to save its rays for the bottom of the mountain where there is grass and a river that carries all the black runoff water away? Eleanora, Pennsylvania --- she can’t be found on maps today. Gram says there was a fire, but my research tells me it was abandoned.
When you are a child, great-grandmother, you and all the other children in the patch are given an orange on Christmas day by a wealthy man, probably one of the owners of the coal company or the manager of the company store. One hundred years later, I see grey juice dripping from cold little fingers, down round chins to wet jumpers and jackets and holy wool sweaters. Orange globes in the hands of poor dirty children. I wonder if the coal, ash, and soot are still there today with the rest of the remains of that forgotten Pennsylvania town.
In 1909, you are born, the sixth of seven children, to a Scottish drunken mine superintendent and your mother, who dies when you are young, but more on that later. Born, Carolyn May Hammond, later nicknamed “Sunny”, I see you like a little light in that town. Pale and pretty, squashing bed bugs when you’re sent to bed early, wondering if you’ll ever have enough to eat since your papa might be spending his pay at the company store or to bootleggers for bottles of scotch whiskey or wine or ale. But he isn’t all bad, your papa, for when you are a girl of six or seven years, you take off her coat. It is just before the start of spring and you must be warm and so, as all young girls and boys do, you remove her jacket. Someone scolds you for it, your momma or your big sister, Jean. And they are right to do so because a very short time later, maybe a day or two, you, Sunny fall ill with pneumonia, and your daddy carries you out of the company town to transportation, to a train I’d guess. And it takes you and your papa to a hospital with doctors and nurses. There he leaves you to be saved. So no, he isn’t all bad. When you are an old lady, you remember the hospital, but you can’t recall where it is, just that it must be far from home since no one in the family goes to visit you, not even Jean. At the hospital, around the year 1915, before antibiotics, a year when a child with pneumonia usually dies, doctors insert tubes beneath your arms to drain the fluid from your small lungs. You rest and recover. The nurses must like you, you think, for they give you a little birthday party at your bed when May 1st arrives. When you are well enough, it is decided that you will go live with your aunt who knows a few things about nursing.
Throughout your life, you contract pneumonia many times, but it never kills you. It weakens you, as illness is prone to do and for the rest of your life, I’m told, you are frail. However, you reach your 80th year. I remember you in your glider, swaying in the Sunday morning sunlight. When I am a small child, we often visit with you after church. You chat with Mom and Dad while we play on your clean beige carpet.
When I am a toddler, I contract pneumonia. There is a Polaroid picture of me in a hospital crib. It must be 1984 or 1985. I don’t know how or why I become so ill, but I spend a week in the hospital. My lungs are not punctured and drained like your 7-year-old body, Sunny. I am given antibiotics, Penicillin probably. They don’t make me weak, you'll, I think, be happy to hear, I’ve always been very strong.
Eventually, you return to your momma and papa in Eleanora. Around this time, the youngest child in your family, Marion, falls from her highchair into the fireplace. She is burned badly. I remember her, a little old woman from my own childhood. She looks like you. I don’t remember any burns, but perhaps that’s because her papery wrinkled skin hides them well. You blame one of your sisters for pushing Marion and for the rest of your life, you never speak to her again (even when Marion begs for a reunion). After her fall, your sister, Marion is sent away. She lives with relatives, sweet people she recalls, who treat her like their own child. A couple years after you are home from the hospital, your mother dies. She is pregnant with her 8th child. No one knows why or how now, but the thought of my great-great-grandmother, bearing a child and taking her last breath, inhaling that dirty air, while her soul slips from her tired malnourished body, a body with a belly that is hoarding water and scavenging nutrients for her newest developing baby, torments me. What is her husband, your father, like when he drinks? Does he see his wife as his property, taking her body whenever he wants? Or are they lovers and life partners pinned to their place in the world by addiction and poverty? I’ll never ever know. But after your momma dies and the babe in her belly dies with her, your papa remarries and when he does, he sends Jean away. Does he marry his second wife because he needs someone home to raise his children and keep house? I’m sure he can’t afford to pay a nanny. Does he decide then to marry one of the town’s known spinsters or a hungry childless widow or an aging prostitute, a flirtatious bootlegger? None of you children like the stepmother, but your pop isn’t married long. He dies a couple years later. Does he drink himself dead? Does he suffocate underground, choking on earth and dark? Does his heart break beneath the weight of his failures? Or does a fire in the mine snuff him out? When he perishes, does he fall ill by an infected wound or by the flu or pneumonia? ….Is his death sudden or foreseen? The young children who are still home are sent away. You are 13 years old and go on to live with a woman, not a relative, in Philadelphia. She isn’t very nice. She makes you go into the city to run errands for her. Years later, you realize that these peculiar jobs she sends you on are to retrieve stolen bottles of perfume, which this woman then illegally re-sells. I imagine you’re told: Go to this address. You will meet this person. Take the box. Bring it home straight away.
Your daughter, my grandmother, Nancy, writes, “These were her teenage years and I faintly remember her mentioning once about being assaulted by a man visiting the house. There are many dark corners in her life that we were never told about.”
You are an orphan living with a strange woman in the city, which is a new city to you. It is a busy city with trolley cars and automobiles and tall buildings and railroads and shops. You wander these wide roads, completely alone. Do you make any friends here? Is there anyone you can talk to or meet with? Who is this man who hurts you? A friend or the husband of the woman with whom you live? Does he sneak into your room at night? Force himself into the apartment when he knows you, a young girl, are home alone? Do you fight him off? Or are you too embarrassed and frightened to scream, kick, bite and claw his entitled skin until he gets off of your body, because it is your body, Sunny, a body you have worked so hard to keep living. Perhaps he presses a knife to your slender throat. Perhaps he has a rope. Perhaps he has the strength to hold you by the wrists and steal from you your dignity as if you were a box of perfume he could take and re-sell in the city. However it happens and whatever it is that does happen, I’m sorry. I wish I could be there. I wish I could slip into the past and protect you.
You start smoking cigarettes in 1924. You are 15 years old. Tobacco smoke blackens your fragile lungs all your life. You never quit. I can’t imagine this helps your health, your proneness for pneumonia. I wonder if you think it’s worth it, this trade. Maybe these nagging urges feel necessary for your sanity: a constant distraction from the real problems that threaten to suffocate and torture you.
Sometimes I make an entire pot of coffee and drink it all day long. Cup after cup. I drink it black now. Once in a while, I'll drop in a little cream, but usually, I take it as it comes.
After you complete your high school education, you enter a program to become a nurse. Do you want to help children who are alone like you? Paint birthday signs, wrap little gifts and blow up balloons for hospital bed birthdays? Tell them they’re going to be all right as you bring them supper or tend to their wounds or hold their bodies as they weep from fear or loneliness or pain? I’m sorry to hear you are unable to complete the training. That the physical labor of scrubbing floors and changing beds and cleaning bedpans and lifting limp bodies is all too much for you.
When you are 17 years old, while working in a dry cleaners shop, a happy handsome young man from a wealthy Main Street family enters. He is charismatic and good-looking with light hair and clear blue eyes. You are charming and pretty. I like to imagine you dancing home from work the day you meet him, your future husband. His name is John. You tell him that your name is Carolyn. I wonder if you blush with excitement and possibly even passion as you feel, maybe for the first time in your life, hope.
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