Mary

Shortly before my father died, he started writing down memories of his childhood in Missouri. Guv was a powerful writer, but the tumor had done its work, chewing away portions of his brain, and his memories came out flat and fragmented. A couple of them were about his Aunt Mary, his mother's older sister.

Gramma and Mary had both married German men. Mary's husband was a farmer named Frank Hollenbach. They had two sons, Francis and Verne; Verne was just a few years older than Guv and they spent a lot of time together when they were growing up.

Later in life, Mary had another baby. Here is the story that Guv wrote, six or seven months before he died:

I was kneeling over by the statue of Saint Francis when Sister Olga hurried down the aisle coming toward me through the dim light of St Mary’s side altar... She pointed with the rosary end of her crucifix and handed me a piece of paper torn out of an exercise book. “Someone is very sick,” was printed in pencil on the note. She whispered, pointing outside where Sister Perpetua and my mother were standing by the sacristy door.

My aunt Mary had had a stillborn baby.

His fragment stops there and goes on after an empty half-page, picking up another memory about Mary chastising her little brother Tomy for drinking too much, and Tomy defying her by opening up more and more bottles of beer. There was no more information about the dead baby.

I heard a different version of the dead-baby story when I was growing up, though I can no longer remember where I heard it. I do remember that back when I was peppering Verne with questions about family history, Guv forbad me from asking him about this story. Mary, after all, was Verne's mother, and he might not know the story--or might not want the story known.

As I remember it: Mary and Frank had not been getting on. Frank had taken up with other women, including a young woman who worked right there on the farm. The young woman got pregnant. So did Mary. Mary was angry and resentful and hurt and depressed. She did not want this baby; she had no love for the father and no energy for its upbringing. She was also hardworking, Catholic, and poor.

She dressed in overalls to conceal her pregnancy.  When her time came, she gave birth alone in an upstairs bedroom. She put the newborn baby--a girl, her only daughter--in a shoebox and placed it under the bed until it died.

Which version is true? Who knows?  I do know that after that third baby, Mary left the farm. She and Frank never divorced--they were Catholic, after all--but Mary moved to California to live with her older son. She came back to Missouri only occasionally. That's her on the right in the picture at the top, next to Gramma.

The unnamed baby was buried on the farm. Its grave is long since lost to wind and rain and seasons, and the baby herself must be part of the natural world again. Its story is murky, lost to the memory and guilt and protection of family, but the baby herself was real, and is remembered.