Honoring the Stories: Floyd

Last week, I came across a writing prompt at Peter Pollock's One-Word Writing Carnival. The word was "farm." I had written about my grandparents' farm not long ago, so I didn't join in the fun. The prompt got me thinking about the farm again, however, and I realized I had no idea how it came to be a part of my family's history. So I asked my mom, and her stories started flowing. Mom's stories were rich, with incredible, odd, and historic details, and I knew I had to write them down and preserve them.

The emphasis of this piece is on my mother's brother Floyd and my goal is to honor his life and his story, as well as those of my hard-working, God-fearing grandparents. The story is rough, and I'm not sure what to do with it, which, I think, makes it a good candidate for Imperfect Prose:

Believing the city was no place to raise a family, my grandfather purchased a hundred and thirty-four acre farm including a house, a barn, two granaries, and a chicken coop for two thousand Depression-era dollars. Somehow Grandpa had put aside half the purchase price and then, for his service in the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps during World War I, received a five hundred dollar bonus. His neighbor agreed to let the farm go for fifteen hundred dollars, the two men shook hands, and Grandpa’s farm became a fixture in the history of my family.

My grandparents moved into the farmhouse, which was in desperate need of repair, only to find that bees had moved in ahead of them. Honey dripped from hives in the upstairs bedrooms. Conveniences were few on the farm. Grandma asked a neighbor to drive her into town and to the home of an aunt, a nurse, when it was time to give birth to her youngest child. At the time, Grandpa had an old Essex sedan which didn’t have a back seat or a proper rumble seat. In order to show them their new baby sister, Grandpa drove my mother and her sister into town in the trunk of the car with the lid down.

The Essex was not the first family car. My grandfather first had an old Model T which he never drove. My mother’s older brother took it apart and rebuilt it as a truck which he used to run up and down the old dirt roads out in the country. Apparently, the local cops were always out after him.

My grandparents had six children, one of whom died at age fifteen. Diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, Floyd quit walking at the age of eight and was confined to a wheelchair for the remaining seven years of his life. My grandparents were unable to afford a wheelchair for him but were able to borrow one from a family in a nearby town whose son had succumbed to the same disease.

My mother remembers her younger sister frequently asking Floyd to read to her. Having few books in the home, Floyd would read the same stories to his sister over and over again until finally saying, “And that’s the last time I’m going to read it to you.” My mother sometimes played checkers with her brother but says, “One of my regrets is that I didn’t think enough to help him occupy his time.” She was twelve years old at the time of her brother’s death.

As Floyd’s disease progressed, he lost more and more strength throughout his body. He used to put his head down to his hands at the table in order to eat.  Once, Mom’s younger sister stepped up onto the foot rest of Floyd’s wheelchair, tipping it over. Having no way to steady himself, Floyd fell out of the chair and onto the floor. “She felt awful about that,” Mom said. For seven years, Grandma stayed at home with Floyd, lifting him in and out of the wheelchair and onto the cot where he slept.  There was no indoor plumbing in the house, and the outhouse was too far away for Floyd to use. When he needed to go to the bathroom, Grandma had to lift him onto a can kept in the house for that purpose.

Mom’s family attended a little local Methodist church not far from their home. Because Floyd was unable to go to church, someone in the congregation asked if he was retarded or something. The question crushed Mom’s older sister. She thought it cruel that people didn’t take the time to figure out Floyd had a physical thing which kept him home. One time, however, the Methodist preacher came to visit Floyd and talked with him about his soul. He prayed to receive Christ and, Mom said, “He read his Bible clear through at least one time before he died.” The preacher also got Grandma listening to The Old-Time Gospel Revival Hour on the radio. “Mom was always so thankful for that preacher,” my mother said.

Mom remembers being in the eighth grade at her little one-room schoolhouse on the day her brother died. Her older sister was a freshman at the nearby high school. About that day, Mom said, “I don’t know why I had that uneasy feeling. I don’t remember much of anything other than that I had a man school teacher and I saw him staring out the window at the road up to our house. I don’t know why that stuck with me. I didn’t know Floyd was that sick. I never really knew he would never get better.” Mom walked over to meet her older sister at the high school not knowing anything had happened but, she said, “When we got home, then we knew.”

“Dad had a premonition the end was near and didn’t go to work that day. Floyd’s breathing got shallow and Mom tried to go in and Dad said, ‘No.’ Floyd said, ‘Oh, Dad, I’m going to die.’ Dad asked, ‘Are you afraid to die?’ He said no. He stopped breathing and Dad tried to breathe into his lungs like they did.”

Mom doesn’t remember how her family got ahold of the undertaker because they didn’t have a phone. She does remember her older sister running to the neighbor’s house and crying.  The weather was bad, and Mom remembers the hearse getting stuck on the old dirt road and the undertaker having a heart attack.

And before he left to serve during World War II, dropping paratroopers in Normandy ahead of the invasion, the eldest son in my mom’s family dug his brother’s grave by hand in the frozen March ground.