Multiple Heartbreaks

I was born and spent my first eight years in Dayton, Ohio. Both my mother and my father had been born in eastern Kentucky but had ended up in Dayton where my brother and I were born. I had several other Kentucky kinfolk around me; many of them had moved out of rural Kentucky to Dayton to find work.

So my family lived there in Dayton but Dad’s parents still lived on Anglin Branch in Owsley County, Kentucky. As often as possible, my parents would load my brother and I into the car and we would go down to Kentucky to visit Grandpa and Grandma.

Those visits were like adventures to my brother and I. Going to visit them was like we were traveling back in time. Grandma and Grandpa had electricity, but they didn’t have indoor facilities. There was a faucet at a kitchen sink, but that water was used for washing dishes. Grandma drew crisp clear water from a well just off of the back porch to drink and cook with. She poured it into a metal bucket that held a communal dipper and everyone drank from that dipper.

Bathing usually entailed a sponge bath from a metal dishpan filled with warm water, a washcloth, and a bar of soap. I remember that they used Camay soap and there was a little cameo embossed into the bar. The big washtub would have to be pulled out into the middle of the kitchen floor and filled with warm water if the sponge bath wasn’t enough.

You had to walk down the lane to the outhouse to take care of your business. There an old Sears and Roebuck catalog replaced Charmin. At night, when it was dark and no telling what critters you might run into along the path to the outhouse, a large empty metal lard stand could be slid from beneath the metal springs of the bedstead. I can close my eyes and almost hear the music of pee hitting the bottom of that tin. The strangest things can trigger the sweetest of memories!

Grandpa and Grandma raised pretty much what they needed to survive. They had a big garden, they raised chickens for meat and eggs, they had a cow for dairy products, hogs for pork, fruit and nut trees, and a mule to help plow the garden. From these sources they didn’t just survive, they thrived on food that they raised and prepared with their own hands.

 

For years, really up until about ten or so years ago, I knew that my dad had three brothers and three sisters. I had grown up knowing those aunts and uncles and their families. I never knew that Grandma and Grandpa had had four other babies who had died before they were even a year old.

Their firstborn had not been my Uncle Dale as I had thought, but a baby boy that they had named Paul. Paul had lived not even two months. He left little mark in this world, save a certificate in a record keeper’s drawer, a name carved on a small stone, and a hole in his parents’ hearts. He was Grandpa and Grandma’s first baby and I cannot imagination the pain that they must have felt when the joyful anticipation of their first child’s birth was replaced by the gut-wrenching sorrow of his loss.

 
                                                      

In 1923, less than a year after the loss of Paul, Grandma and Grandpa had another son, my Uncle Dale. Their third born son followed in 1925 and like Paul, he lived less than two months. He left a record of birth, a record of death coldly stating that he had been “found dead in bed”, and another small stone with his name etched upon it. He also left tears running down the cheeks of his parents. Even that carved name, Glen Smith, would not survive. Thoughtless young boys with slingshots would erase his name with their stones. 

Glen’s birth and death were followed by the births of my Aunt Hortense, Aunt Carmen, Aunt Davilee, and Uncle Wallace. They, like Uncle Dale would live to have families of their own, cousins who I would grow up knowing.

Their eighth child was born in 1936 and was a little girl. I don’t know how long she lived as I have found no death certificate. She left a record of birth, her name Wanda Smith carved in stone, broken hearts and vague memories in the minds of older siblings. Her stone, as did that of her brother Glen, became a target for slingshot wielding boys. It no longer serves as proof that she did indeed pass through this world. 

My father was the ninth child of Grandpa and Grandma and was born in 1937. Their tenth child was a baby girl named Janie Joyce, born in 1940. She lived nearly ten months and left more records in a drawer and another stone carved with her name. I was excited when I found her on the 1940 census; she wasn’t here long, but the world has a record that she once lived! And because she lived for nearly ten months, she left more memories to impress themselves upon the minds of older siblings, and more broken hearts 

Grandpa and Grandma’s last child was my Uncle Gayle and he was born in 1944. His family would live with Grandpa and Grandma for a while so I would see them whenever we visited. My cousins, my brother, and I would catch crawdaddies in the creek during the day and lightning bugs from the yard at night.

And up until just a few years ago, I never knew about the heartache that Grandpa and Grandma had known. Since finding out, I’ve heard of how Nancy would ride a mule to the home of her mother Rhoda every Sunday. She would walk up to the little graveyard on the hill behind Rhoda’s house where her babies were buried. Perhaps she found some kind of solace in visiting, in remembering that these babes did indeed pass through this world. They were here so briefly that those graves may have served as proof that they were not just dreams.

I never knew about these babes when as a child I visited my grandparents, Dave and Nancy Middleton Smith. Knowing about them now makes me tear at the thought of the sorrow these gentle folks had to bear. And I am revisited by a memory of my grandma making butter by rocking a gallon jar filled with cream over her knee. I wonder if while rocking that jar, she didn’t think about those four babes she had rocked so briefly all those years before.