“They’re good,” she said with a slight grin, looking away with a bit of embarrassment I had not intended.
I scratched her back lovingly and left it at that.
“Everything smells good, Mom,” I said changing the subject to take the focus off Ellen.
“Thanks, Sweetie. I stayed up all night slaving over the stove,” she said with a wink.
She thanked Marline for the pumpkin cheesecake and pecan pie we had brought. The kitchen island was practically overflowing with food and steaming like a hot sauna. The side counter was a bakery and candy shop of colorful desserts. Never mind the gift giving. I lived for the holidays just because of all the food.
“Let’s eat,” Mom called to everyone still in the living room. Those two words were a Christmas carol dear to my heart.
The four grandkids lined up first. Mom, Marline, and Ellen helped them with their plates and brought drinks to the kids’ table for them. Sebastian was quick in line once the kids were out of the way. Clare and Travis followed, with Marline and I right behind them. Mom finally encouraged Ellen to go ahead of her. Once we were all seated, and Sebastian was up for seconds, Mom had finally fixed her own plate and sat down with us. She was always the last to sit after making sure everyone else was taken care of, refilling drinks and bringing second helpings to the kids so they didn’t have to get up.
The White family holiday dinner was as down home as it could possibly get in this small town. We weren’t a family who went out and hunted for holiday turkey in the fields, unless you count bargain shopping at the grocery story. We were a paper plate, plastic fork, and Styrofoam cup clan instead. Mom would never admit that half the side dishes were store bought. We all knew Mr. Greer smoked the ham. Travis had even bought a fried turkey this year.
The days of a Norman Rockwell painting with a small family gathered around the candle-lit mahogany dinner table eagerly watching Dad carve and slice a ham or turkey were over. I don’t remember us ever having a holiday dinner like that, as much as television commercials and postcards pictured it being, but it didn’t matter. All of us being together for any meal was just as heart warming.
Looking around the room at my family now, enjoying the company of each other, was a nice way to end the year. It was a single time and moment to forget the things outside of this house that hindered us. Marline asked Clare about work. Mom asked Ellen how the kids were doing in school. Sebastian and I talked about football. Ellen asked Travis how things were in Memphis. In the background, the kids shared their Christmas wishes, advertisements they’d seen for new toys, and what they asked Santa to bring. These were all conversations we could have at any time of the year. We had had them. But somehow it being Christmas changed the meaning of our words entirely tonight.
No weight on my shoulders from the stresses and worries of the day could take away the happiness and love I felt right now for my family. Not even the knock at the front door could fade the smile in my heart or on my face.
Lorraine
In 1963, I was sixteen and became a mother just a year later. I was still a baby myself. I remember times were hard back then, but I don’t think kids these days have it any easier. We were much more appreciative of the few things we had then because Frank and I worked hard for them. Frank was a good man. He kept us fed and kept Martin in clean diapers. The electricity and the heat never got cut off. Outside of these needs, we did without.
My family grew up very poor. Daddy was a farmer and Mama was a housewife when she wasn’t helping out on the farm too. She tended to the chickens, collecting their eggs, and would milk the cows and pick whichever vegetables were in season. She had no qualms about ringing a chicken’s neck or slitting a hog’s throat to put meat on the table. I had three brothers and three sisters, so large families in the house were quite comforting to me by the time I was raising kids of my own.
My brothers plowed the fields and picked cotton right beside Daddy. My sisters sold vegetables at our produce stand at the end of the street, when we weren’t helping Mama with chores around the house. The farm claimed the life of one of my brothers. Jessie was sitting on top of the wheel guard of the tractor while Billy was driving and working soy beans. Jessie was going to turn around so he could look behind the tractor but he lost his footing. He fell forward and the large tractor wheel pulled him under. Billy reached for him but it was too late; the tractor rolled over him and crushed his rib cage. Billy never drove the tractor again after that day.
Christmases were small but special around the house that Daddy built. The boys got baseball cards with gum in the package. The girls got an apple, an orange, and a stick of peppermint candy. The very best year was when Mama got a new pair of shoes and the girls were given a chair. Just one chair, but it was special because Daddy and our brothers had whittled it from pieces of scrap wood using their very own pocket knives. One of my older sisters still has that chair today.
In the winter, Daddy worked down at the docks on the Mississippi River unloading steamboats for the mills. When Billy turned fifteen, he was old enough to work there too and went with him. The girls stayed home with Mama keeping the house warm and the barn clean. We fed the animals and learned how to sew, and played checkers with milk tops on a board we’d drawn on the floor with chalk. My younger brother Hank was not yet old enough to work the docks, so he stayed home and worked around the house.
One winter, Daddy was offered a job by one of the steamboat captains. His boat was low on men because of a bad case of influenza. He needed men to go down the Mississippi to Biloxi. A steel mill here and in Memphis was in dire need of a shipment that was too heavy for any other boat to haul. Daddy would be gone for twelve days, but he’d make twice what he made at the docks all winter long. My brother Billy was asked to go too and would be paid the same wage as Daddy. Hank would stay home with us to be “the man of the house” as Daddy called it.
“Takes three days to get down there. We’ll spend three or four days down there loading. Two days back to Memphis. We’ll spend a day or two there unloading. One more day to get back here and a day to unload the rest down at the docks,” Daddy told Mama.
She didn’t want him to go. They’d never spent a night apart since the day they married, but she knew how important the money was to him. She knew what it meant to the family.
“With making this much money, I could take the rest of the winter off and be at home with you. We could put Billy’s pay into savings,” he said to allure her.
“Come back to me,” she told him.
“I will. I’ll come back to all of you,” he said.
I remember all of us standing on the dock next to Mama waving good-bye to Daddy and Billy as the steamboat rolled away from land. Thankfully, it had been a mild winter and the river had not frozen across. Thin layers of fragile ice clung to the banks but broke apart when waves from the steamboat’s paddle reached land. I took a small polished pebble from the banks of the river and slipped it into my pocket as a souvenir from that day.
Two or three days passed quietly, until one night Hank was out in the barn late. With four women in the house and him being the only man around, Mama didn’t worry about him. She said he needed his time away from us and the house. Inside the house, we had all settled down to rest when there was a loud knock at the door. Mama did not call out because she thought it might have just been Hank locked outside. But then, the knock came again.
“Hank! Why are you knocking so loud? The door is unlocked,” Mom called out opening the door.
When the door opened, Hank rushed in carrying a young woman in his arms. He said he heard the dog barking at something at the end of the road and he walked down to the mailbox to investigate. He found the woman lying unconscious in the road that led up to our house. She was wearing a raggedy yellowed nightgown with holes in it. It was stained with fresh blood between her legs, and her stomach was swollen like a watermelon. She was about to give birth. Mama grabbed some extra bed sheets from the cupboard and covered our dinin
g table so that Hank could put her down.
We did not own a telephone, so Mama gave Hank the keys to the truck and told him to drive to the sheriff’s house which was just a few miles down the road. She summoned us to start boiling large pots of water. I washed the woman’s face with a cold rag while Mama gently slapped her face to get her to wake up. A burst of agony filled the air as the woman came to. She jerked and pulled under the weight of God because we could not see anything or anyone holding her down. Besides the vocal screams and grunts that escaped the woman’s mouth, Mama determined the poor woman could not speak.
Mama hushed her and pulled the hair from her face, telling her to push gently. My sisters and I stood there in horror. We had never seen a woman give birth before. The limp and shiny body that appeared from between her legs glistened like a fat catalpa worm. Mama used her cutting shears to snip the slimy hose that kept the baby attached to the woman. She sent us away to pull the pots of water off the stove and to fill a dish pan to prepare a bath for the baby. I watched over my shoulder as Mama pulled mucous from the infant’s mouth with her own hands. She held the baby over her shoulder and gave him a swift tap on the back. The baby cried. The woman on the table fainted.
By the time Hank had returned with the sheriff, we’d helped Mama wash the goo from the baby. It was a little girl. We were watching her sleep in Mama’s arms while the woman on the table was sleeping too. The sheriff pointed to the woman and Mama called him over with her finger. She whispered in his ear and then he whispered to Hank. Hank and the sheriff wrapped the bed sheets up around the woman and carefully carried her outside. We never saw the woman again.
After asking everyone around town, the sheriff could not find anyone to identify the poor lady and claim the infant. She was buried in a pine box in the small cemetery which was lost in the woods down the road. Upon Daddy and Billy’s return, to their surprise Daddy had a new daughter and Billy had a new sister. Daddy did not believe Mama when she told him the odd story of how the woman had come to us that night, but we all vouched for her.
“Another mouth to feed,” Daddy groaned.
“I can’t give her up to an orphanage, Paul. God sent that woman to our doorstep for a reason. I just know this baby is a blessing,” Mama said.
Mama named her Benita, which meant “blessed one.”
Benita was raised in our house never knowing she wasn’t related to us by blood, and none of us ever treated her any differently. Her childhood was no different than ours. Mama and Daddy loved her like another daughter. We fought and made up with her like another sister. When Benita became a young girl, it was then that she turned very different toward the family.
She developed a habit of raising up her skirt or dress and exposing herself to Hank or to any male friend that was around. She laughed at it as being funny, but she wasn’t usually wearing undergarments underneath so it could be quite embarrassing. A school nurse suggested that Benita was suffering from a psychiatric problem known as anasyrma. It was something neither Mama nor Daddy knew the meaning of, much less could pronounce correctly. The nurse explained that it was better known as “flashing.” Daddy thought it was a bit funny, but the nurse took it quite seriously.
“Exhibitionism, or flashing, is exposing yourself for your own gratification. Anasyrma is doing it for the reaction from onlookers,” the nurse explained.
Daddy did not take Benita’s condition too seriously until he went into the barn one day and discovered Benita sitting on top of Hank in the hay loft. She’d pinned him down and was attempting to have sex with him. Daddy blamed Hank and gave him a beating, but Hank said he’d tried to get out from under her but when he pulled her off of him Benita would bite his fingers. By then, Benita was acting out at school and it was suggested that she stay home.
When she became loud and disrespectful toward Mama and Daddy, it was decided that she should be sent away to a special school for children who misbehaved. As oddly as Benita came into my family’s life, she went out of it. Benita was only twelve years old, and I was jealous because she got to take a train ride. I’d never been on a train before. Mama accompanied her and was gone for four days, returning without Benita.
Mama and Daddy received letters in the mail notifying them of Benita’s condition. It worsened, and medical tests confirmed Benita was slightly mentally retarded. I had written to Benita twice a month since the day she left, until after I met and married Frank. She never once wrote back. Daddy and Mama passed away within months of each other just after I turned twenty-one. My sister, Sheila, died less than a year later. She was hit by a car. My other two sisters and two brothers each married and started their own families. We all forgot about Benita, the unruly little girl with a one-way train ticket. It was easy to do since she wasn’t our blood, but it was wrong of us because we were the only family she ever had. I tried hard not to forget her, although my letters to her eventually dropped to just one a month, and then maybe once or twice a year.
In 1980, at the age of thirty-three I gave birth to Sebastian. Travis was four years old. Ellen was ten, and Martin was sixteen. The kids loved having another baby in the house. Neither Frank nor I had thought about a fourth child, so Sebastian was a surprise. Sebastian would definitely be the last, but that all changed nine years later. In 1989, a letter came from Ringgold, Georgia. Ringgold is just across the state line, south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The letter was from the assisted living home where Benita had been living after her stay at the psychiatric hospital in Summerville.
Benita was dead.
Like her mother so many years ago, Benita had died giving birth to a daughter. An orderly had taken interest in Benita. The letter did not say if he had raped her, only that he had been fired when it was discovered she was pregnant. The baby was a girl and had been turned over to an orphanage in Savannah. In going through Benita’s things when cleaning out her room, a nurse had found a large box of all my letters. She decided to take time to write to me to let me know what happened.
Frank knew of Benita, but I had never spoken about her to any of the kids. At the age of forty-two, I had long forgotten about raising another child but I could not leave that baby to possibly be raised in an orphanage. Weeks passed and I was riddled with guilt over having left Benita in institutional care for all these years. Frank and I decided to contact the orphanage about adopting the baby. It was the only way to make things right. I owed that much to Benita for not having been a presence in her life.
We flew into Chattanooga and rented a car. The drive across the Georgia state line was beautiful. Autumn had just set in across the countryside, turning the trees from green to fire red and burnt orange. It made me wonder what it had looked like so many years ago to Benita sitting on that train next to Mama, not knowing it was the last time she’d ever see Mama again. In Ringgold, I was impressed with the living facility. It was clean and the staff was friendly. It did not resemble a cold hospital or bleach-tainted retirement center as I had pictured. The rooms were carpeted and looked like small apartments filled with personal items, photos, and comfortable furniture to make the inhabitants feel more at home. Instead of bleach, the air was filled with the sweet fragrances of mint and honeysuckle.
“Who paid for this?” I asked a nurse, while waiting at the front desk for someone to collect Benita’s things for us, in awe of how accommodating and relaxing the center was.
“Her parents did,” the nurse said, in a heavy Georgian accent.
“What? I never knew of that.”
“A lot of long term patients live off donations given to us or government aid if they never worked or have no family, but Benita’s parents left quite a bit of money to the facility for her care. She lived quite comfortably during the years she spent with us,” the nurse explained.
I was amazed. Mama and Daddy had never talked about money for Benita, and there was no mention of her in either of their wills.
“Comfortably? What about the orderly and the pregnancy?” I asked.
“Mr
s. White, Benita and that orderly were in love, but their relationship was against company policy. Since he was not related to her, he could not discharge her, and employees are forbidden to marry patients who live here. We all knew of their bond, but they kept it hidden as best they could. Her pregnancy was exciting, but also unfortunate for both of them.”
“For both of them?”
“He lost his one true love, ma’am.”
“Since he’s the father, did he not want the child?” Frank asked.
“After losing Benita and being dismissed from his job, I’m afraid he took his life, sir. That’s why the baby was turned over to the orphanage. There are no other living relatives besides you and Mrs. White.”
There were just three boxes of Benita’s belongings. Two were filled with my letters. She’d kept every single one. The center offered to ship them home to us. We thanked them for all of their generosity. Before leaving, I asked what had happened to Benita.
“Cremation. Would you like to have her ashes?” the nurse asked.
I thought about it and decided no. This had been her home for so many years, so I felt she belonged here among the people who knew her better than I did.
“We were going to spread her ashes next to him. He’s buried in a cemetery not far from here,” the nurse said.
“The orderly?”
“Yes.”
“That sounds like a good idea to me. I’m sure they both would like that. By the way, what was his name?” I asked.
“Jeffrey Clare.”
The drive to the orphanage in Savannah was long and tearful. I was ashamed of myself. How could I have gone all these years being absent from Benita’s life?
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Frank asked.
“I have to,” I answered.
Two days later, there were three of us on the plane leaving Savannah. We flew into Memphis, where Martin had driven everyone down to pick us up and to meet their new baby sister.