OUT HOME
When I was
around fifteen, my grandmother, Florence Butler Ullery, decided I was old
enough to hear grown-up things. She told me how her father, Albert Butler, had
robbed a bank sometime after 1910. He had miscalculated what day the payroll
cash arrived, and had come home with only $30 for his trouble, followed within
an hour by the police, who dragged him off to jail. She showed me a photo of
him — a middle-aged man with a Masonic pin on his lapel — taken in Scottdale,
apparently the day he went off to serve his prison term. On the back was
written, “The pictures with both of us in them didn’t come out. Good-bye from
your Pa.” He never returned, leaving my great-grandmother Christina Butler, and
her children, to fend for themselves.
“Those were
rough years, during the First War, and then the Depression came,” grandmother
sighed. “But folks got through.”
Great-grandmother Christina had died four
years before, preceded by “Homer,” the cigar-smoking old man who boarded with
her and to whom it was said she was “secretly married.” Homer had presided over
one room, piled to the ceiling with cigar boxes, old 78 RPM records and back
issues of Popular Mechanics. Helter-skelter piles of yellowing
newspapers in English and German were hurled out of the window after his death
and burned.
My
grandmother, a wide-faced, simple woman, sat peeling onions, her chair pulled
near the “slop bucket” where the peels fell. “The truth is like this here
onion,” she said — the first and last time I ever heard her speak
metaphorically.
“What do you
mean, Grandma?”
She held the
onion out for me to examine. It was partially cut open to reveal the white
under the skin. “See here — I peeled it and there’s the white part.” She cut
some more. “Now look — there’s some dirt and another peel inside.” She cut
again, halving the onion. “Now the rest is all white. That’s the way people
talk to you. There’s always a lie outside, then a little truth, and then some
more lies, and then the inside is all true.” She asked me if I understood.
Yes, I said, there
were people in town who said one thing and did another. Like my stepfather,
“Uncle Joe.”
My parents had
divorced the previous summer. My mother took up with my father’s sister’s
husband. Two divorces ensued. “Uncle Joe” became my stepfather, proclaiming how
happy he was to have such brilliant stepsons and how he would make sure my
brother and I got to college. We moved to a new town where nobody knew us, and
Uncle Joe and my mother pretended to be married.
One Saturday
Uncle Joe came into my room and told me, “You’re not welcome here. There will
be food on the table, but that’s it, since we get child support from your
father. The day you graduate from high school, I want you out of here, and
don’t expect anything from me.” I later found out he had dumped his children by
a previous marriage in an orphanage some years before. From that time forward,
I heard nothing from him except verbal abuse. He condemned me for “sitting
around and reading books.”
To get away
from Uncle Joe and my mother, (“Gertrude and Claudius” in my own Gothic
imagination) who were quickly becoming the town drunks, I spent that summer
with Grandma, who lived alone now since my grandfather’s death. I remember
taking Grandma Butler’s old rocking chair and placing it under the huge pine boughs,
reading Poe and Lovecraft, Dumas and Hugo until it was too dark to see. I had
books to read, and woods to roam in, and a quilted bed to sleep in.
Everyone
called the four-room house, never completely finished and covered only with
black tarpaper, “out home.” A coal stove heated the kitchen and a system of
pipes and flues heated the other rooms as well. It was snug and warm in winter;
in summer, open doors and windows admitted a cool mountain draft, and a lot of
chores and food preparation moved to the back porch. There was a dark cool
cellar with what seemed thousands of jars of home-canned raspberries, peaches,
yellow string beans and apple sauce. Water was carried from the nearby spring
in buckets, and when it rained, all the washtubs were rushed into the yard:
free bath water!
Sitting in the
kitchen one rainy afternoon, I noticed something I had never seen before.
Grandma had a loaded shotgun near the door.
“What’s that
for?” I asked, alarmed. I was terrified of guns.
“It might be
for your Uncle Joe,” she said. I smiled at the thought, but assumed she was
joking. While my grandfather was alive I had never seen a gun in the house.
The next day,
a car came up the long driveway and grandma called me in and told me to turn
off the light and duck down in her bedroom. She turned off the television and
all the other lights, locked the door, and came into the room and crouched down
on the carpet.
I heard the
chickens scattering in the yard, then a single set of footsteps on the porch. A
light knocking on the door, then louder. Then an angry pounding.
“God-damn it,
Florence — I know you’re in there! I just want to talk!”
It was Uncle
Joe’s voice. He must have known I was in there, too, but he didn’t call my
name. (I can’t recall him ever addressing me by my name).
He called
“Florence!” one more time, pounded again, cursing. We could hear his angry
breath puff out. He stood for a while. He waited; we sat in silence. Then the
footsteps tromped down off the porch. There were chicken noises again — a loud
one as the rooster went for him and he likely kicked it; anther round of
cursing as the rooster followed him to the car;
and then the car started up and did the turnaround to retreat back to
the mountain road. We waited until everything was quiet again.
“What did he want?”
I asked.
Grandmother
was livid. She shook with a combination
of rage and fear.
“He comes out
here, on days when he’s supposed to be working. He wants me to go to the
courthouse and sign my property deed over to your mother. I told him ‘No’
twice. I have three children and this will always be home for all of
them. He wants to use me and your mother to get this house. Your Uncle Ron and
Uncle Bob will always have a home here, and your mother too. When Joe comes in
the daytime like this, I just turn out the lights and hide.”
That night I
dreamt of Grandma shooting Uncle Joe dead. It was a good dream.
* *
*
A few days
later, while peeling potatoes over the slop bucket, Grandma bent her head
toward where the gun stood, and she saw me looking at it, too. She took a deep
breath and told me another story.
“My mother —
your grandma Butler — lived here for a long time after my Pa went to jail. You
don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in the country, running a house all
alone. Your husband’s in jail, or in the war, or dies, and there are all these
men sitting around in roadhouses reading the paper, and they see the name, and
they remember you. They know you’re alone — men you haven’t seen since you were
a little girl in school.
“One day a car
comes up the drive and it’s two or three men. They see there’s no car in sight,
and no man anywhere around, so they get out. They’re real polite and
respectful. They knock on the door with their hats off. They bring a big sack
of groceries. They come in and sit down and have some of your bread. There’s a
bottle of whiskey in that sack, so they say, ‘Let’s open it and have a drink.’
And you want to be polite, so you get the glasses out.
“And then one
of them says something about how lonely it must be out here without a man
around. And they laugh and make jokes until you blush. And then they suggest
something, and if you had a whiskey with them and you’re a little silly and you
give in —“
She paused and
looked at me, not sure if I, at fifteen, knew what she was saying. I knew. I
just looked at her and waited for the rest.
“And if you’re
dumb enough to do that, then there’s no stopping it. They tell their friends,
and pretty soon they come by the carload. That’s the other reason I keep the
shotgun there. That’s the kind of thing that happens to … women.”
I had visions
of my grandmother — and her mother before her — fending off rednecks with the
shotgun, and I never forgot the story.
* *
*
My grandmother
Florence has been dead for many years now. Her oldest son Ron, a tall lanky man
with speech as slow as melting tar, lived far away and didn’t look like anyone
else in the family: he’s dead too. Her son Bob lived in the house until his
passing a few years ago, a recluse. My stepfather, “Uncle Joe,” finally moved
there with my mother, and gasped his last from emphysema in the run-down shack
he had so coveted. The porch sagged in and collapsed. New tarpaper was nailed over
the roof while the windows and doors began to rot. My mother is long gone, too,
having spent her last years in a high rise where no one had to carry water in
buckets from a spring or trek to an outhouse.
Curiosity
about Great-Grandma Butler and her Alsatian ancestors led me into some
genealogical research a few years ago. I discovered cousins I never knew, and
some of them visited the house and sent me photographs. The roof had crumbled
and the house was now a ruin. Through the wreckage of the house I could see
tattered curtains and the frame of my great-grandmother’s bed.
Another photo
came a few years later: the land had been sold for taxes and the farmer next
door acquired it. Nothing remains of the trees around the house, and of the
house, there is now only a slight rise where the foundation and cellar had
been.
The cousins
interviewed some of the neighbors and found one farmer who remembered all his
parents’ stories about the Butlers. He knew about the bank robbery, and that
Albert Butler was part of a gang of three robbers, all of whom went to prison.
After Albert
Butler went to prison, the neighbor farmer reported, Christina Butler supported
herself by making and selling moonshine, all through the Prohibition and for
some years thereafter.
“Yes, she sold
moonshine there,” the farmer reported. “But she didn’t just sell moonshine. She
sold herself — and her daughter Florence.”
Truth is an
onion. My grandmother, at its white heart, had prepared me to understand it
when the time came: “the kind of thing that happens … to women.”
But was it as
simple as that: men taking cruel advantage of women?
What did I
know about Christina Butler? Once, after sharing a slice of the best bread in
the world, fresh from the oven, she showed me a picture of her grandfather,
standing in his grape arbor in Alsace. She told me he had been a water-boy for
Napoleon on one of his campaigns. “We all loved Napoleon,” she told me,
“because he overthrew the monarchs.” (Napoleon loved
his Alsatian troops. He said of them, when questioned about their loyalty:
“They speak German, but they saber in French!”) She died when I was
eleven, and as I seldom visited her, I do not remember much else.
More papers
came my way, and they were startling. Christina was married twice. First, she
had married a man from Lorraine named Georges Jaquillard, who divorced her
saying she had committed adultery “with numerous persons on numerous
occasions,” a charge not contested in the divorce. So Albert Butler was her second
husband.
It also turns
out that the mining towns around Pittsburgh were a hotbed of anarchism in those
days. The IWPA was started there and its “Pittsburgh Manifesto” urged violence
against capitalists and a maximum of personal freedom for both men and women.
“Free love” was one strong component of the movement. Emma Goldman had toured
not only Pittsburgh but the coal and coke towns, fomenting radicalism. Freiheit,
the German-language anarchist newspaper, was everywhere. Was Butler’s bank robbery a political act?
Did Christina have to make a bonfire of anarchist literature after the failed
heist?
Christina
practiced “free love,” and apparently did so for profit when she had to. And
what should one make of the two men, old “Homer” and my grandfather, who made
“honest women” of Christina Butler and her daughter Florence? Homer was a
classic recluse, the type of what happens to old anarchists. Who knows what
ends their “marriage” served?
My
grandfather, averse to labor to the very end, lived off “relief” all his days.
Once a year, when it came time to pay property taxes, he would trek off, with
dread and disgust, to work in a coal mine, but only long enough to raise money
to pay the tax bill.
A profound
distrust and hatred of politicians prevailed in my grandparents’ house, and church-going
was treated with mockery. “They dress up on Sunday,” my grandmother recalled
bitterly, “and they make fun of you for what you wear. And then they talk about
you behind your back.” I am not even certain that my grandparents were legally
married to one another.
These values
carried over to my mother, who seemed averse to any public activity. I think
she even dreaded going to the post office. I was brought up being told, without
explanation, that we were not the kind of people who could go to church, or
join things. Not even the Boy Scouts for me.
Not one place
I lived in as a child remains standing. Yet in my mind I always knew the
Diebold-Butler place was there, a last resort and refuge. “Out home,” you could
grow your own corn, tomatoes and radishes, keep a few chickens, and steal
electricity by climbing the power pole and attaching your own wire. Water
always filled the spring, and the rains always came. A “relief” check came once
a month, and once in a great while, someone had to go and buy new tarpaper to
redo the roof.
At night, you
closed the windows tight and a carpet of desperate moths covered the glass on
the outside. Whippoorwills echoed back and forth, and, once in a while,
something large would lumber through the darkness, making the dogs howl. If you
took your name off the mailbox on the road, no one would even know you existed.
What you did there, and with whom, was nobody’s business.
I would not
and could not have gone back there, but it will never leave my consciousness. I
look at the photographs of the ruined house, with sorrow and loss. “Out Home”
is gone forever.
