The Woods at Barlow Bend (20 page)

Chapter 29

March 1963

Mobile, Alabama

A week after my high school graduation, Gordon and I moved into an apartment in Monroeville,
Alabama, north of Frisco City on Route 21. Seven dollars a month got us one bedroom, one bathroom, an eat-in kitchen, and a living room. Gordon worked as a clerk for the local grocery store. Mr. Simpson of Main Street Fashions in Uriah put in a call for me to Mr. Donaldson, owner of the largest clothing store in Monroeville, largest, of course, next to the Vanity Fair factory and offices that had opened a few years before we moved to Monroeville. After hearing Mr. Simpson’s recommendation, Mr. Donaldson hired me on the spot as an assistant in the Ladies’ Fashion Department. My responsibilities were basically the same as in Uriah, but my hours were much longer. Slowly, over the first year or so of our marriage, we furnished our first home with hand-me-downs from his family and cheap treasures from secondhand stores and classified ads in Monroeville’s newspaper. By the fall of 1938, the only new things in that apartment were my new life that I adored, and our newborn son, Ray Gordon Riley, Jr. We called him Ray and loved him to pieces.

Daddy married Farrish
Brisby in January of 1938. I have no idea why he married her. Maybe, he thought he needed to provide a better example for Meg, Billy, and Albert. Maybe, he actually loved Farrish. Maybe, she refused to play the role of wife without proper billing. Shortly after their courthouse ceremony, Daddy, Farrish, and their six children moved to a $10.00 a month rental in Frisco City. Daddy continued to peddle junk through the streets and back country roads of Monroe County. Farrish continued doing hair in the cramped, rented kitchen. Momma continued to be buried a short five minute walk down the road from the newlyweds. I wonder if Farrish knew who else was buried five minutes from her new home.

I thought it was disgusting
that Daddy moved Farrish and her three brats so close to Momma. I couldn’t believe he thought that Meg, Billy, and Albert wanted to live so close to the little white house that had brought us so much joy and then witnessed much pain. I couldn’t believe that in four years’ time, this man that I once adored, had gone from being a successful businessman living with his beautiful wife and four children in a home that he built with his own hands, to living in a cheap rental with a tired hairdresser, three brats, and the three children of his own who hadn’t left him yet. The man who once owned a hotel and café in Grove Hill now peered out his bedroom window at least four times a night to make sure his truck full of junk was still parked out front.

Within a few short years, Daddy and Farrish’s marriage fail
ed, leaving one more woman in Daddy’s wake. I never asked him why. He eventually moved south and found the last woman he would marry, Lily. Lily was actually as lovely as her name. She was respectable and, in many ways, too good for Daddy, but I guess she, like so many before her, fell for his charms. Daddy found another café in Foley, Alabama, and seemed content. He ran the café, and Lily kept the dessert counter stocked with the best homemade pies in Baldwin County. Daddy never stopped expecting me to fulfill the role of dutiful daughter.

After a couple of years in Monroeville, Gordon and I moved to Mobile where we loved each other through a couple of moves from apartment to apartment until
finally settling in a house in Toulminville, a suburb on the north side. A blonde-haired girl and a little boy with sweet, chubby cheeks came into our lives in quick succession after our move to Mobile. Gordon worked for the Mobile Bus Line for a few years. Then, like so many young men of the time, he enlisted in the Navy. While he was somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, I gave birth to another little girl. I named her after Gordon’s mother. Gordon refused to call the baby Bessie. His mother’s nickname wasn’t pretty enough for the tiny, porcelain-skinned angel. Then, after the war, we had one more girl. Gordon expected nothing but the best from his sons, and doted over his daughters.

Through the years, we had countless fights over too many hours spent fishing and not enough hours in church.
Gordon preferred the shoreline to a church pew any day of the week, but especially on Sundays. We argued over money and the kids and why, for the hundredth time, Gordon should get dressed earlier than he did each night so that he wouldn’t be late for his job as a night clerk at the Post Office. We took family vacations to the river and made sure the kids knew how to behave in public. We stretched every dime we had as far as it would go. As a thirteen-year-old girl, I had stretched out in my bed and dreamt of a simple life with a man I was wild about, a man who was crazy about me. As a woman, I made sure that dream came true, even if it was just for a few years.

My time with Gordon passed too quickly.
On March 4, 1963, my war baby Beth, by then a porcelain-skinned teenager, and I waited outside Sears in downtown Mobile. I was working in the Optical Department, and Beth was enrolled at Murphy High School. Gordon worked the night shift at the post office, so he slept through the mornings and into early afternoon until it was time to pick us up from downtown. When he didn’t show up that day, I told Beth he must have overslept. But, in my heart, I knew that wasn’t true. In my heart, I knew he was gone.

Beth and I caught the city bus at Stanton Road in Mobile
, which brought us north to Osage in Toulminville. The whole time we were on the bus and then while I practically sprinted the two miles down Osage to our house, I kept telling Beth how angry I was that her father overslept. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what was really going on; that I was furious at her father for leaving me. Gordon leaving me so soon was not part of my plan. I wasn’t ready. I still loved him too much to lose him. There was so much I didn’t know yet, so much that I never had to worry about because I had Gordon. I didn’t know how to drive. I had never balanced the checkbook. Gordon managed the finances. Gordon did the grocery shopping. Gordon took care of us. I would never be able to feed and clothe the children on what I made working part time at Sears. Even with Ray off at college and one daughter married, the financial burden would be too great. And I wasn’t ready to live without him.

My anger and fear carried me down Osage
Street. I ran through the front door of our house, down the hall and straight to the bathroom. Before I saw Gordon, I knew he would be there on the floor, like his father in the cotton field in Uriah. I told Beth to call an ambulance. There was nothing the doctors could do to help, but I didn’t want Beth to see her daddy like that. That was the one thing my father got right. I never had to see Momma’s lifeless body. And Gordon was lifeless. My sweet Gordon lay on the pale pink tile of our bathroom, dead from a massive heart attack at the age of 42. For a moment, I wanted to lay next to him, to go with him. I told Beth to stay in the hallway, yelling at her to keep her away. I knelt next to him and ran my fingers through his wavy hair. I kissed him and told him that I loved him and that he made my life so much better. Then, I sat on the cold tile next to him until the coroner arrived and took him away.

Chapter 30

February 1993

Spanish Fort, Alabama

A little over three years fell between the day Momma died and the day I married Gordon.
In those three years, I learned so much about myself, the world around me, and just life in general. Without knowing, I carried those lessons and everyone who helped and hurt me during those three years through my marriage to Gordon and every day that followed Gordon’s death. I didn’t really feel the weight of their lessons until after Gordon died, and I had to figure out how to pick myself up from the pink tile floor and carry on without him.

After
several horrible months, I slowly started to mend, and I started to listen to the lessons of my past. First, there was Daddy. Daddy taught me the good, the bad, and the ugly of survival. He taught me that I had to take care of myself, that no fall from grace garnered surrender. I sat at our kitchen table and learned to balance a checkbook. I studied the little black ledger that Gordon kept on top of our dresser. The ledger included our monthly budget, meticulously calculated to last penny. I was able to make Gordon’s pension, the pension I never knew about until after his death, go further than I first thought possible.

From Daddy’s life
, I also learned that there is grace in surviving alone. Daddy drifted from woman to woman, terrified to be alone. I didn’t want that life. I never loved another man after Gordon. In fact, I never even tried. Why should I drift from man to man when I had everything I wanted from a man in Gordon? In my heart, anyone else would have been nothing more than a stand-in, a pathetic attempt to recreate what I had for twenty-six years. I made a promise to love Gordon always and to be faithful to him until death, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve kept my promise.

Daddy died in Foley,
Alabama in 1973. Our relationship was never what it should have been. He couldn’t undo everything I learned during the trial, and I couldn’t forget. He may have convinced a jury that he wasn’t guilty, but after all I learned during the trial and the years that followed, I couldn’t fully declare his innocence. We never could get back to the carefree summer days on the river near Barlow Bend. During the three years following Momma’s death, I learned too much about him to love him blindly as a daughter should love her father. I simply knew him too well.

Aunt Mittie lived the rest of her life in the little farmhouse she shared with Uncle Melvin.
She lived to the age of eighty, when in January 1980, Mittie Franklin passed away in Luverne, Alabama. Aunt Mittie may have lived her entire life in one county in rural Alabama, scrubbing out the stains from the laundry of generations in Luverne, but she believed I could achieve whatever I set my mind to. She also wanted me to expect more out of my life. I may have only had a high school diploma and bounced from temporary home to temporary home throughout my time in school, but I wasn’t the trash some people may have thought me to be. Aunt Mittie taught me that I was something more and deserved more.

A few months after Gordon died, I convinced my boss at Sears to promote me to a management position.
I heard Mittie coaching me, “Stand up straight and look him in the eye. Speak firmly, but be respectful. Mind your manners.” My boss agreed to promote me to a part-time management position at the new Sears store on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay.

The months and first few years following Gordon’s death were the hardest in my life, but I kept the lessons of my past close to me.
I conducted myself with dignity, to avoid the trappings of John Howard. Sometimes, my grief was so thick that drowning in the bottom of a bottle was tempting, but I couldn’t let myself fall that far. Uncle John ended up in Bryce Mental Hospital to “dry out” for a while. After that, I don’t know what happened to him, and I really don’t care.

I remember the love shown on Papa Lowman’s face when he testified at Daddy’s
trial. He knew his daughter. He knew her strengths and failures and chose to love her unconditionally. I may not have always made the right decisions in my children’s minds, but I always loved my kids the best way I could. They may tell you that my judgments of their choices were sometimes harsh, but hopefully, they will also say my love for them was unconditional.

Mostly, I remember everything Momma taught me.
A few months after Gordon died, my youngest son taught me how to drive. The heavy machinery under my control terrified me. At first, I was convinced that I would lose control of the car and plummet off a cliff, but after a few terrifying turns, I started to hear Momma’s voice. It was probably all in my head, but I think she may have been in the back seat the whole time, window down, fresh air blowing through her hair, smiling from ear to ear. Momma taught me to live without fear. She taught me to choose my own path. She taught me to find my own adventures.

One of my first adventures after Gordon died was to Frisco City.
Over two decades had passed since I last visited my childhood home and Momma. With my girls, now teenagers, in the backseat, I drove from Mobile to Frisco City. I finally had the money to put a proper headstone on Momma’s grave. The stone was simple, but lovely. I chose to engrave only her name and the word “Mother.” Any other description of her seemed untrue.

The tiny infant grave next to Momma was weathered, but still remained unmarked.
I wondered if inside the grave lay Elsie’s baby, Daddy’s bastard child and proof of his indiscretions. Surely, he wouldn’t have done that? I decided not to ask him. I said everything I needed to say about him and Momma on the day that I left Uriah to be with Gordon.

After my promotion
at Sears, I moved all of us into a pretty, three-bedroom house near Mobile Bay in Spanish Fort and started my new adventure as mother, professional, and soon-to-be Granny. I planted a vegetable garden and eventually screened in the back porch of my modest brick home. I worked at Sears, raised my children, and proudly watched as they began to raise their own families.

I think Momma would be proud of the life I built for myself.
And she would be proud of my yard and garden, even though she would say that I need more wildflowers. I prefer the flowerbeds neatly trimmed with monkey grass and perfectly planted with a variety of shrubs, roses, azaleas, and hydrangeas to Momma’s wandering wildflowers.

I know she
’s here with me. When I gather the fallen pecans from under the tree in my yard, I hear her laughing. When I sit on the back porch to snap a bushel of green beans from the garden or pick berries for a new batch of jelly, I can feel her beside me. I wish I could tell her that she taught me well and that because of her, I survived whatever happened at Barlow Bend. I wish I could tell her how much I miss her. But I can’t. So, instead, I’ve told you.