I wonder how mama would view
the world we live in today. Probably she wouldn't like it very much and
say half the people in it are wicked and destined to spend eternity shoveling
coal into the furnaces in Hellsville, Kansas, which she believed was the
real Hell.
A God-fearing Missouri Baptist who migrated
with her family to Montana on a boxcar with a couple of neighbors in 1909,
bringing with them a cow for milk, a cage of chickens for eggs and fryers
and an accent that would take a knife to cut through her twang and idioms
such as: “I'll be swanned,” “I'll pick cotton all day
but won't sleep under the wagon at night,” “Don't that beat
all?,” “I'll be switched,” “Mark my words, God will
strike that boy dead for what he did to that girl and made her fat. And
I swan, his soul will wind up in that terrible devil's den in Hellsville,
Kansas.”
Back in that era when this happened to
young girls, their mothers put them on a train and sent them to an aunt's
in St. Paul, Butte or Fargo, telling everybody they had tumors growing in
their bellies. Usually, after nine months, when the tumors were removed,
they weighed 6-1/2 to 7 pounds.
As a boy, I always wondered if there
was a Hellsville, Kansas and when I learned to read, looked it up in an
atlas and found there is no such town, although I suppose the atlas people
could have erred in leaving it out.
Anyhow, I asked Mama what part of Kansas
Hellsville is in and she told me, “What difference does it make? The
whole state of Kansas is hell.”
I do not know what she had against Kansas,
although when I traveled through there in 1942 in the back of an Army truck
in the blistering summer heat on the way to New York City for embarkation
on a troop ship to Europe during the big war to turn the lights on again
all over the world and make the world safe for democracy, I could see how
someone could think that. I mean, the part of Kansas I passed through was
kind of like the country between Bakersfield and Maricopa.
Mama was about as devout a Southern Baptist
as anybody could be.
“Lips that touch liquor will never
touch mine,” she often said when we rattled by the town tavern in
our back-firing Model T Ford. And when we passed Mr. Saude's Barber Shop
and saw him trimming a man's moustache, she'd say “It ain't natural
for a man to let hair grow on his face. If it was, God would have seen to
it that all babies were born that way.”
“Girl babies, too, Mama?”
I asked.
She'd look around at me and said, “You're
too young to think about girls.”
Well, I suppose I was. I mean I was only
9 or 10, but I thought about girls quite a bit, actually a lot. That is
why when we drove past the neighbor's place on wash day she'd quickly put
a hand over my face and that of my little brother who was only about six
so we wouldn't see their undergarments.
“If you look at them bloomers and
petticoats blowing on the line, God will strike you dead and you'll spend
the rest of eternity in Hellsville, Kansas,” she warned.
And just to make certain there was no
other avenue that would expose us to girls – and women in girdles
and brassieres for that matter – she always ripped out the women's
underwear pages from last year's Monkey Wards catalogue before taking it
to the backyard privy.
She had no idea that papa had stashed
some risqué magazines – at least for that time – The
Police Gazette, College Humor and Esquire, in the tack room of the barn
and which often I thumbed through.
One day, she found them and wow, did
papa catch you-know-what!
Papa and Mama argued a lot, especially
over his snoose chewing, refusal to go to church and for being a lecherous
old man for looking at “dirty” magazines and corrupting her
sons, as well as trying to look down the blouses of just about every comely
girl he saw on the sidewalks of the county seat.
One day, she became so angry when he
told her that she was a nag and wouldn't be happy even if she got to sleep
with Joe Louis, she slammed her coffee cup hard against the kitchen table
and said: “Well, that's the final straw! You don't love
me and the kids don't love me and nobody loves me and after all I've done
for you all, working my fingers to the bone and elbows to the grease. So
I'm leaving. I'm going to pack my bag and walk to town and catch a train
back to Shelbina, Missouri. And don't anybody try to stop me because my
head is made up.
“I'm going to strike out across
the meadow and if a wolf comes along and eats me up and all that's left
of me is bones you'll be sorry. And I say, don't you try to stop me because
I'm leaving and that's final and you can put that in your pipe and smoke
it!”
Well, we didn't have to worry about a
wolf eating her because there hadn't been one in these parts for at least
50 years.
Anyhow, she packed up an old satchel
and stood in the kitchen doorway and warned us again: “And I say,
don't nobody try to stop me. Wild horses can't stop me now” and headed
for the meadow.
In a few minutes, she was back.
“Well, I know you all want me to
leave, but just to spite you I'm not going to and you can put that in your
pipe and smoke it.”
“It's a god thing you came back,”
Papa guffawed, “you were going in the wrong direction. Instead of
to Shelbina, Missouri you were heading for Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.”
She was so angry she threw the satchel
at him and he almost swallowed his snoose.
Well, to return to the premise of this
dissertation, I don't think mama would like one bit of what's going on in
the world today, women wearing low-cut blouses and walking around all day
with cell phones to their ears; girls having babies instead of tumors; young
people with rings dangling from their tongues and heaven only knows where
else and men with tattoos on their arms and chests with words so foul if
I were to print them here this page would explode in your face.
Want to know what I think she'd say?
Well, something like: “I swan,
one day God is going to strike everybody dead and their souls will end up
in Hellsville, Kansas and put that in your pipe and smoke it!”
(Comments:vallefox@accessbee.com)
