CREEK ROAD GANG
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Many Mansions on the Moon
Barbara Fryrearcopyright 2011
Photo by Tom Burke
Mary
Ellen Hamilton never dreamed she’d take a rocket to the moon back in
those Dust Bowl years in the Texas Panhandle. She had seen big skies,
sometimes full of stars, sometimes full of sand, when she and Walter
farmed that little piece of land in Montague County. Spring most often
brought dust storms so thick she couldn’t see the windmill, and
sometimes so thick she couldn’t read the Bible in her hand. When those
came, she’d have to shovel sand from her kitchen before she could make
biscuits and gravy, and fry up fatback and eggs for breakfast.
But on a clear night when the stars came out, and spangled the dark bowl of sky from horizon to horizon, and the moon so close you could almost touch it, Mary Ellen caught her breath with awe under God’s enormous Heaven. I don’t know if she was happy there. She loved Walter, and her babies as they came along. And anyone else who crossed her path.
I don’t think it was in her to hate the dirt. Everything blossomed at her touch. When they moved to Dallas County, she could coax bright orange and yellow nasturtiums from the impossible clay-based kaliche in her flower bed.
She said, “God gave me only one talent and that was for loving people. I just prayed He’d give me more people to love.”
I was one of those lucky people. She was my first husband’s grandmother.
When her first-born, Luvina, died of pneumonia at the age of three, Mary Ellen up there in the vast, flat Panhandle got so homesick that she found herself weeping over a cocklebur in a box from her old home in the tree-covered hills of East Texas. She had four more children, Christine, Ouida, Weldon, and Rowena. Rowena inherited their mother’s happy disposition. Plus dimples when she smiled.
Mary Ellen told me about sending Walter out in a storm for the doctor when she went into labor with one of them. “As soon as I heard the screen door slam,” she said, “I tried to call him back. I got into the bed I’d prepared and spent the rest of the time till the baby came trying to untie the laces on my high-top shoes. The doctor came in time to cut the cord.”
And I thought, if he had got there earlier, he could have cut those shoestrings.
The family deplored Walter’s lack of business sense. He farmed all during the Dust Bowl in the Panhandle until just before everyone got irrigation, then moved to Irving to raise chickens when Panhandle farmers were cleaning up. He died of heart failure the day after Thanksgiving 1957. A small man with a great big heart and a smile as ready as hers.
That Thanksgiving, the day before he died, the family came from the hospital, wiping their eyes and grim, to my house instead of his for turkey. We didn't sit around the table to eat the big bird. No one said grace that year. We'd miss his long blessings too much.
I was seven months pregnant and sick, and with a small son in a playpen still, so I contented myself with reports. They said next day that he had held on till Mary Ellen could arrive at the hospital. Before dawn he roused and asked their son Weldon where she was. Weldon told him she’d be there soon.
"I'll wait," he said, and closed his eyes again.
When in good time she came, she held his hand while his vital signs weakened. After a short while, his eyes opened and he stared toward the foot of the hospital bed.
"What do you see," she asked.
"I see the Lord," he said, and was gone.
A little over a month later, the baby I had been carrying was born but did not live past an hour. I comforted myself by picturing little Phillip running up a green hill toward his great-granddaddy's waiting arms, both of them smiling. Don’t know where I thought that hill might be. It resembled one I’d seen in an Andrew Wyeth painting. He painted in egg tempera in such exquisite detail that every blade of grass seemed alive. I guess we each have our own mental image of the after life. I’ve never understood what “many mansions” means. You know the passage: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Just can’t picture it. Maybe it suffered in the translation.
Anyway, Grandmama and I had some healing to do.
That's how in 1959 we happened to take off for Disneyland. We left baby Danny with Ouida, my husband’s mother, in Irving. We’d go first to Rowena in San Diego. You couldn’t be sad around her. In mid-July we put Grandmama and our eight- and nine-year-old daughters in the back seat of our 1957 Chevrolet station wagon, aqua with white wings on the rear fenders, rolled down all four windows, opened the little wind-deflectors, and headed out for California across the southwestern desert of the United States.
As soon as we were settled in, Grandmama pulled out a dishtowel and a paring knife and commenced peeling and slicing peaches for the girls, laughing and chatting all the while. Peach juice mopped up from their chins and the dishtowel folded away, Grandmama pointed out each passing cow and encouraged the girls to greet it with a howdy. Cathy and Pam in their bright tomato-red and yellow squaw dresses laughed and waved. On the long road across the desert we wet washrags from a thermos, wiped our faces, arms, and necks and cooled off in the wind. We called it 4/60 air-conditioning.
Grandmama had been complaining about the state of her legs. Couldn't even walk down to Grandaddy's old chicken houses in the back yard, she said. But in California she turned down the offer of a wheel chair, sat on the beach with the rest of us girls and got sunburned legs just like us. Mention sunburn after that and we each said, “Sunburn? That’s nothing. Just look at mine!” and started hiking our skirts to the panty line to compare thighs turned pink as the flamingoes at the San Diego Zoo.
Next we paraded with Rowena up to Anaheim and the new entertainment called Disneyland. We strolled down Main Street, chatted with Goofy, took a ride on the horse-drawn streetcar, gasped at the spectacle of the fairy castle rising at the end of the road.
I think my husband and the girls and maybe Rowena went on the new roller-coaster-bobsled ride down the Matterhorn. And although we’d taken a long trip across the country from Texas, the little cars of Autopia beckoned as well. After all that, Grandmama, smiling still, refused a wheelchair.
I was exhausted. Opted not to go on the Rocket to the Moon. I read about it lately on the Internet—that old moon rocket—trying to understand what brought about the remarkable change in Grandmama.
I don’t know why she chose to take that ride. She’d enjoyed everything else. Everyone said it was the thing to do at Disneyland. Maybe Charles dared her. He was working at LTV and was really interested. She’d been so gung-ho about every other adventure. I’m glad I didn’t go. Maybe the girls didn’t want to, or I was too tired. It must have been full of bleak images, with all around it the insistent happy songs and fantasy—big-eared Dumbos and tea cups whirling and a fairy castle rising nearby.
Anyway, Grandmama emerged from that rocket with an angry set to her jaw. Her smile swallowed for good, her brown eyes grim. “I don’t believe it,” she said. Nothing more. For her, Disneyland’s Magic Kingdom was over. She rode back to San Diego with Rowena.
Maybe it didn’t fit into her Bible. I wonder now if she simply couldn’t find Walter in that alien replacement for Heaven.
We stayed a bit longer to wring the last dregs from the grand adventure before heading back to Texas.
A few years later— I think that was the year I was pregnant with my last child, Frank—we took Grandmama to her old home place in Merit near Greenville. Her brother Dave still lived there. Dave was a jolly fellow with apple cheeks. They went through the organ recital old folks generally perform, the arthritis, sciatica, digestive difficulties. Dave concluded with, “Face it, Mary Ellen. That’s what we’re praying for when we ask the Lord for a long life.”
After lunch, the leftover fried chicken rested in the center of the big dining table protected from flies by a crisp white dishtowel and the biscuits stacked in a plate on the Chambers range waited for a cold supper. While some relative showed Pam how to stir the dark regions of the privy with a broomstick “to scare the snakes away,” and the others were getting a cool drink from the well, Grandmama took me out to the old porch and showed me the spot where under the eye of Heaven she had been saved.
"I've always believed in shouting,” she said, “but I didn't shout. I just fell to my knees right here on these same old splinters."
She smiled to remember, but her old knees forbade a demonstration.
“Walter, you know, was a quiet man. He didn’t hold with shouting, but when he was saved, he hollered.”
On Christmas Eve 1968, nine years after our Disneyland adventure, Apollo 8 with its crew of Bill Anders, James A. Lovell, Jr., and Frank Borman made an actual trip to the moon, the first time anyone had seen the dark side of it. There was breath-held silence until the rocket came back around. When it did, one of the astronauts quipped, “Be advised, there is a Santa Claus.”
Then the three of them in order quoted from Genesis, Lovell saying, in part: "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven." And Borman ended with "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas: and God saw that it was good.
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close, with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
With that, they gifted us with our first picture of Earthrise and called our Earth “a grand oasis in the vastness of space.”
The next day we gathered at my in-laws’ house for Christmas dinner. The whole place filled with the smell of sage and roasting turkey and sounds of happy chatter. After I deposited my pecan pie in the kitchen, between a green bean casserole and a coconut cake, I went to hug Grandmama. She seemed ecstatic.
Greeting me with a broad smile, she said, “Oh, Barbara, isn’t it wonderful how much bigger everything is than we ever imagined!”
But on a clear night when the stars came out, and spangled the dark bowl of sky from horizon to horizon, and the moon so close you could almost touch it, Mary Ellen caught her breath with awe under God’s enormous Heaven. I don’t know if she was happy there. She loved Walter, and her babies as they came along. And anyone else who crossed her path.
I don’t think it was in her to hate the dirt. Everything blossomed at her touch. When they moved to Dallas County, she could coax bright orange and yellow nasturtiums from the impossible clay-based kaliche in her flower bed.
She said, “God gave me only one talent and that was for loving people. I just prayed He’d give me more people to love.”
I was one of those lucky people. She was my first husband’s grandmother.
When her first-born, Luvina, died of pneumonia at the age of three, Mary Ellen up there in the vast, flat Panhandle got so homesick that she found herself weeping over a cocklebur in a box from her old home in the tree-covered hills of East Texas. She had four more children, Christine, Ouida, Weldon, and Rowena. Rowena inherited their mother’s happy disposition. Plus dimples when she smiled.
Mary Ellen told me about sending Walter out in a storm for the doctor when she went into labor with one of them. “As soon as I heard the screen door slam,” she said, “I tried to call him back. I got into the bed I’d prepared and spent the rest of the time till the baby came trying to untie the laces on my high-top shoes. The doctor came in time to cut the cord.”
And I thought, if he had got there earlier, he could have cut those shoestrings.
The family deplored Walter’s lack of business sense. He farmed all during the Dust Bowl in the Panhandle until just before everyone got irrigation, then moved to Irving to raise chickens when Panhandle farmers were cleaning up. He died of heart failure the day after Thanksgiving 1957. A small man with a great big heart and a smile as ready as hers.
That Thanksgiving, the day before he died, the family came from the hospital, wiping their eyes and grim, to my house instead of his for turkey. We didn't sit around the table to eat the big bird. No one said grace that year. We'd miss his long blessings too much.
I was seven months pregnant and sick, and with a small son in a playpen still, so I contented myself with reports. They said next day that he had held on till Mary Ellen could arrive at the hospital. Before dawn he roused and asked their son Weldon where she was. Weldon told him she’d be there soon.
"I'll wait," he said, and closed his eyes again.
When in good time she came, she held his hand while his vital signs weakened. After a short while, his eyes opened and he stared toward the foot of the hospital bed.
"What do you see," she asked.
"I see the Lord," he said, and was gone.
A little over a month later, the baby I had been carrying was born but did not live past an hour. I comforted myself by picturing little Phillip running up a green hill toward his great-granddaddy's waiting arms, both of them smiling. Don’t know where I thought that hill might be. It resembled one I’d seen in an Andrew Wyeth painting. He painted in egg tempera in such exquisite detail that every blade of grass seemed alive. I guess we each have our own mental image of the after life. I’ve never understood what “many mansions” means. You know the passage: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Just can’t picture it. Maybe it suffered in the translation.
Anyway, Grandmama and I had some healing to do.
That's how in 1959 we happened to take off for Disneyland. We left baby Danny with Ouida, my husband’s mother, in Irving. We’d go first to Rowena in San Diego. You couldn’t be sad around her. In mid-July we put Grandmama and our eight- and nine-year-old daughters in the back seat of our 1957 Chevrolet station wagon, aqua with white wings on the rear fenders, rolled down all four windows, opened the little wind-deflectors, and headed out for California across the southwestern desert of the United States.
As soon as we were settled in, Grandmama pulled out a dishtowel and a paring knife and commenced peeling and slicing peaches for the girls, laughing and chatting all the while. Peach juice mopped up from their chins and the dishtowel folded away, Grandmama pointed out each passing cow and encouraged the girls to greet it with a howdy. Cathy and Pam in their bright tomato-red and yellow squaw dresses laughed and waved. On the long road across the desert we wet washrags from a thermos, wiped our faces, arms, and necks and cooled off in the wind. We called it 4/60 air-conditioning.
Grandmama had been complaining about the state of her legs. Couldn't even walk down to Grandaddy's old chicken houses in the back yard, she said. But in California she turned down the offer of a wheel chair, sat on the beach with the rest of us girls and got sunburned legs just like us. Mention sunburn after that and we each said, “Sunburn? That’s nothing. Just look at mine!” and started hiking our skirts to the panty line to compare thighs turned pink as the flamingoes at the San Diego Zoo.
Next we paraded with Rowena up to Anaheim and the new entertainment called Disneyland. We strolled down Main Street, chatted with Goofy, took a ride on the horse-drawn streetcar, gasped at the spectacle of the fairy castle rising at the end of the road.
I think my husband and the girls and maybe Rowena went on the new roller-coaster-bobsled ride down the Matterhorn. And although we’d taken a long trip across the country from Texas, the little cars of Autopia beckoned as well. After all that, Grandmama, smiling still, refused a wheelchair.
I was exhausted. Opted not to go on the Rocket to the Moon. I read about it lately on the Internet—that old moon rocket—trying to understand what brought about the remarkable change in Grandmama.
I don’t know why she chose to take that ride. She’d enjoyed everything else. Everyone said it was the thing to do at Disneyland. Maybe Charles dared her. He was working at LTV and was really interested. She’d been so gung-ho about every other adventure. I’m glad I didn’t go. Maybe the girls didn’t want to, or I was too tired. It must have been full of bleak images, with all around it the insistent happy songs and fantasy—big-eared Dumbos and tea cups whirling and a fairy castle rising nearby.
Anyway, Grandmama emerged from that rocket with an angry set to her jaw. Her smile swallowed for good, her brown eyes grim. “I don’t believe it,” she said. Nothing more. For her, Disneyland’s Magic Kingdom was over. She rode back to San Diego with Rowena.
Maybe it didn’t fit into her Bible. I wonder now if she simply couldn’t find Walter in that alien replacement for Heaven.
We stayed a bit longer to wring the last dregs from the grand adventure before heading back to Texas.
A few years later— I think that was the year I was pregnant with my last child, Frank—we took Grandmama to her old home place in Merit near Greenville. Her brother Dave still lived there. Dave was a jolly fellow with apple cheeks. They went through the organ recital old folks generally perform, the arthritis, sciatica, digestive difficulties. Dave concluded with, “Face it, Mary Ellen. That’s what we’re praying for when we ask the Lord for a long life.”
After lunch, the leftover fried chicken rested in the center of the big dining table protected from flies by a crisp white dishtowel and the biscuits stacked in a plate on the Chambers range waited for a cold supper. While some relative showed Pam how to stir the dark regions of the privy with a broomstick “to scare the snakes away,” and the others were getting a cool drink from the well, Grandmama took me out to the old porch and showed me the spot where under the eye of Heaven she had been saved.
"I've always believed in shouting,” she said, “but I didn't shout. I just fell to my knees right here on these same old splinters."
She smiled to remember, but her old knees forbade a demonstration.
“Walter, you know, was a quiet man. He didn’t hold with shouting, but when he was saved, he hollered.”
On Christmas Eve 1968, nine years after our Disneyland adventure, Apollo 8 with its crew of Bill Anders, James A. Lovell, Jr., and Frank Borman made an actual trip to the moon, the first time anyone had seen the dark side of it. There was breath-held silence until the rocket came back around. When it did, one of the astronauts quipped, “Be advised, there is a Santa Claus.”
Then the three of them in order quoted from Genesis, Lovell saying, in part: "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven." And Borman ended with "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas: and God saw that it was good.
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close, with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
With that, they gifted us with our first picture of Earthrise and called our Earth “a grand oasis in the vastness of space.”
The next day we gathered at my in-laws’ house for Christmas dinner. The whole place filled with the smell of sage and roasting turkey and sounds of happy chatter. After I deposited my pecan pie in the kitchen, between a green bean casserole and a coconut cake, I went to hug Grandmama. She seemed ecstatic.
Greeting me with a broad smile, she said, “Oh, Barbara, isn’t it wonderful how much bigger everything is than we ever imagined!”
* * *
Biographical Note: Barbara Fryrear’s work
has been published in Windhover, Duck Soup, CCWriter, several
issues of New Texas, The Texas Poetry Calendar and the first
issue of Wild Plum. She received the Carl Award for poetry, and
is looking for an agent for her novel about ancient Crete. She graduated
cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with honors in history from the
University of Texas in Austin in 1949. Now a Life Member of the Trinity
Writers’ Workshop, Barbara lives on an acre in Irving, Texas,
occasionally getting up from the computer to feed the feral cats and
birds, trying to keep them sorted out, and looking for her glasses. Some
day she will find time to go through her grandmother’s journals and old
family letters to which she has fallen heir. See Author Index A-K to find more of Barbara's writing.
Photo by Christine A. Dawson
