“You feel it, too?” Drambuie asks. “Yeah, I do,” I reply with some sadness. It is more than a tug of the heartstrings. I felt hollow like an eagle bone whistle. And I had this horribly bitter taste in my mouth.
Drambuie and I both fall into silence as we follow the path to the Serpentine Road. Drambuie’s hooves clip clopping on the well traveled surface and the motion of riding upon his back lulls me into an alternate state. I feel the need to “unravel my heart” to help ease the ache.
While Drambuie and I physically travel away from the Valley of the Bones, my soul returns to a pile of bones that spell out my name in the heart of the valley. I kneel nearby and hear the whispers of women who call me by name; women of my blood who came before me. There are two in particular that are louder than the others and I am startled when I realize I recognize my maternal and paternal grandmothers.
Sarah Julie Elizabeth Gregg was born in West Virginia in 1884. Sometime between the ages of 18 and 24, my paternal grandmother saw a newspaper ad “young women 18 to 30 years of age, of good character, attractive and intelligent, as waitresses in Harvey Eating Houses on the Santa Fe Railroad in the West.” My grandmother became a Harvey Girl. Harvey Girls were wholesome, moral girls hired by Fred Harvey to provide food to railway passengers from the many resteraunts built along the Santa Fe railway line. These women braved the uncivilized west and its perils in exchange for adventure, $17.50 per month, room and board, and generous tips. The only catch was they had to sign contracts for six, nine, or twelve months promising they would not marry. If they did, half of the salary they received to day would be returned.
It is said that over 100,000 women became Harvey Girls over the years. These women changed the history of the west as over 20,000 of them eventually married their regular customers who were cowboys, bankers, ranchers, railmen, etc.
In a time when women stayed home until married, my grandmother left the proper life of an eastern woman and became a Harvey Girl. I don’t know the details, but she apparently chose New Mexico as her station; possibly because of her Native American cousins, the Rainwaters. Regardless, she fulfilled her contract and married my grandfather in 1909.
Grandma Sally had three daughters before my grandfather left. She was 41 when my father was born after my grandfather paid her a visit. At the time of my birth, Grandma Sally was 72. I remember her as a strict, religious woman who ate vegetarian chicken from a can and hand made beautiful quilts. She claimed to have hearing problems, but seemed to have no problems hearing all the naughty things her grandchildren whispered. I guess her hearing was selective or would come and go…
I liked to hang out with Grandma Sally even though summers meant going to bible school. She had a piano (which I now have and found out she traded for my father’s trumpet) and I got to help her quilt. She taught me to crochet and knit. I became very interested in reading the bible and religion. She would answer some of my religious questions while ignoring others.
Grandma Sally swore man would not walk on the moon in her lifetime as it was just so ungodly. She passed away three days before Neil Armstrong took his giant step for mankind. In the weeks prior to her passing, my aunt said Grandma Sally was completely deaf. However, she could hear angels singing and told my aunt of the sweet songs being sung to her. I’m glad that heaven opened those pearly gates and those deaf ears to her before her passing so she wasn’t afraid.
Thelma Louise Keith [?] Hill [?] Webster was my maternal grandmother, but we called her Dima. Dima was a beautiful, elegant woman who worked almost all of her life on construction sites. Dima had two daughters and was widowed twice by the time she was 25. Her father, brother, sister, and both husbands lived and worked in a logging/lumber community called Somoa in Northern California near the Oregon border.
When Dima was married to Ellwood Hill, my grandfather, she had uterine cancer. My mother was born two months early weighing just over two pounds. By the day after my mother was born, Dima’s blood had seeped through the mattress and pooled under the bed. Mom was put in a dresser drawer with a warm brick and Dima was put on a train to San Francisco to the hospital.
My mother is a survivor and that will to live started at birth. She and my grandmother were reunited and life went smoothly until my mother was three and her father died of tuberculosis. At this point in my family’s history, it gets a little fuzzy. For some reason, my grandfather’s family, the Hills, tried to take my mother away from my grandmother. That wasn’t going to happen. They left Eureka.
Again, the history fades and the only facts that are clear are that Dima marries a man from a town near Sacramento. He is a man with secrets and schemes. They move, possibly to hide from the law, into a chicken coop. With the help of his sister, Dima, my mother and her older sister get away from this man, Mick, and begin anew.
Dima goes to work for a construction company. Through the years, her oldest daughter gets married young and leaves. She leaves my mother with other people depending on the where the job takes her. World War II comes and they end up in San Francisco. It was a frightening time for women who are unprotected. One night on a dark street, a man steps in front of the car and they run over him. They are too afraid to stop.
I have happy memories of my grandmother and the grandfather I remember, Pops who eventually adopted my mother when she was in her forties. We would visit them at various construction jobs. My sister and I would play in Dima’s jewelry box.
Things changed somehow when my parents divorced. The change was subtle and I didn’t always notice. I do recall, though, my older sister and younger brother receiving birthday cards while I did not. I got married and my father didn’t come to my wedding. I got divorced.
I met and fell in love with Scott. We moved in together and my mother told me, “why buy the cow when you get the milk free.” Several months later I called Mom and said, “Mom, he’s buying the cow!” At a visit with my mom and grandmother, I knew something was up. I could feel something coming. My grandmother asked me who was going to give me away at the wedding. I said my dad was. My grandmother turned real cold towards me after that. Shortly after that, I heard through my sister that Mom wouldn’t be coming to my wedding.
My sister, grandmother and I went out for drinks a few months later. Dima bragged to other people about how beautiful her granddaughter was and introduced my sister. She spoke to me very little despite my attempts to engage her.
When I returned from my honeymoon in Bora Bora, I went to visit Dima. I wasn’t quite in a place or frame of mind where I could see Mom yet. I told Dima about Bora Bora and brought her a present. I then asked her if I could have a tea cup or handkerchief; something that I could have and say, “My grandmother gave me this.” She told me no. It was devastating. I knew that she had given my brother and sister several things already. I had no idea what I ever did to her to make her so hurtful towards me. Maybe it was the simple fact that I was my daddy’s girl and she hated my father.
My grandmother had a stroke during a time that my mother and I hadn’t quite worked things out after I got married. Mom called and told me Dima had a stroke but not to come down. She wouldn’t know me. I went out into the back yard and had a serious talk with Dima. Of course, I did all the talking just like I would have if I had gone to see her. I told her how hurt I was by her the things she said, her absence at my wedding, her refusal to give me a tidbit of hers. I let it all out. She died soon afterward.
It was her death that began the healing between my mother and I. Mom wanted me to be with her the next day when she drove to the place my grandmother would be remembered and buried. Although Mom was heartbroken, it was a day unlike any other I had ever had with her. We talked about many spiritual things, feelings, and life though stayed far away from the wedding.
I guess Dima thought she got the best of things by refusing to give me anything of hers. But I came out ahead. It was because of her that I began to get my mother back.
The love I was feeling for my mother snapped me back into my body. I realized how difficult her life was as a child spending periods of time without her mother. Her life was difficult later on when she and my father developed their feud and mutual desire to make each others’ lives miserable in every way possible. But now I had the relationship with Mom I had always dreamed of having and my heart was so full of love.
I had unraveled my heart and it no longer ached. I had picked through the last of the bones that needed my attention. The bitter taste in my mouth was gone and I thought about all I had learned about healing…that bitter tasting foods were very good for one’s digestion…
“Ya ready now, my gal Sal?” I heard as donkey lips nuzzled my lower leg. “I am, my ham Dram.” I replied wrapping my arms around Drambuie’s neck. “Then let’s make like a bananna and split!”
“Let’s make like a tree and leave!”
“Let’s blow this popcicle stand!”
With a little buck, a donkey fart, and a “yahoo!” we got stepped on the Serpentine Road. I gagged…got back on the saddle, rode down the road with a fist in the air, an unraveled heart, and a bitter free being.
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