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Show 78 of my love for him and for them, but could understand it when I heard later that they were divorced, still later that he had come through Joseph and tried to find me. I even wondered if I had been a factor in their breaking up, because, even at twelve, I sensed the uneven yoke of their marriage: she treated him more as a mother treats a son. With this outlet for my letter-writing closed off I branched out; at this time I admired the style of a book Daddy Longlegs and adopted it in my letters home, which Mama kept. Eventually I was led gently into clapping titles on my thirty-page letters, selling them. By then, though, I had done considerably more living as a daughter, a farm hand, and as a female cowpoke. Also as a grand daughter. When Grant was a year old Grandma Rawlinson wrote that all her children would be home if Mama would come for her birthday in August. Mama hadn't see her mother for two years, but when she asked Papa to take her he exploded like a fire-cracker on the Fourth of July. It was unthinkable for a woman to ask her husband to stop in the middle of haying to take a useless trip. No, they couldn't leave the men to put it up. No, they couldn't spare the work horses. Mama sat on the back porch and cried, wiping her eyes with her apron. "Bawl! Bawl! " Papa said callously. "The more you bawl, the less you'll piss, " She never forgot that vulgarity, a new low for Papa. It may be that he was only fulfilling the role into which Grandma had cast him from the beginning. |
