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Le Mutt - Memoir
von: Eva Elle Rose
BookBaby, 2016
ISBN: 9781483582665 , 200 Seiten
Format: ePUB
Kopierschutz: DRM
Preis: 3,56 EUR
Chapter One
Jessie and Elbert
My mother’s maiden name was Smiley, an alias my grandfather adopted, first because it was his nickname (he reportedly was always smiling) but, more importantly, because, well, he needed an alias. Frederick Kessler, soon-to-be Frederick Smiley, had most probably killed a man – his brother, as it happened. John Kessler was ten years older than his little brother Frederick and married to Rosie Henderson, with whom he had a son, John, Jr. But when John, Jr. was five years old, Rosie began having an affair with Frederick who was all of 17.
My guess is that Rosie and Frederick were exceptions to their respective family names and not standard representatives. Both the Kessler and Henderson names were presumably well-respected ones. There are records of the Kessler family emigrating from Ireland around 1750 and the Henderson family coming over from Norway, leaving through England, in the 1800s. Both families were educated and upper class.
But whatever esteem the names might have held, it surely was lost with Rosie and Frederick. Early on the road to lifelong alcoholism, the two were in their regular neighborhood Missouri saloon one evening when John walked in and confronted his brother about the affair Frederick was having with Rosie. Probably adding insult to injury for John was the fact that Frederick and Rosie were there with John Jr. A brawl broke out. In the melee, Frederick grabbed a chair and smashed it over John’s head, cracking his skull open, most likely killing him. Rosie and Frederick didn’t wait around to find out. They scooped up John Jr. and lit out from the town on horseback, riding west across the countryside with nothing but each other and the clothes on their backs. They didn’t stop riding until they reached the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, where Frederick Kessler became Frederick Smiley, the new husband of Rosie and new father of John Jr. Rumors persisted that John survived the blow, but Rosie and Frederick, and John Jr. for that matter, never saw John again.
Frederick found work with the city of Denver as a maintenance worker, and he and Rosie soon started a family of their own. In all, they would have six children. The fourth would be named Jessie, born in December 1929. As a teen, Jessie was placed in a home for troubled girls. Somewhere along the line she had a baby that subsequently died. At age 15, Jessie married.
Her husband Elbert, 10 years her senior, grew up on a farm in Kansas, one of ten children. By the time Jessie was 16, the couple had a baby girl – Kate. The next year, another baby girl – Dorothy. In a few years, a boy followed – Samuel. At that point, Elbert had had enough, and Samuel was followed by a vasectomy. But a mere seven months after Samuel was born, Jessie gave birth to a third girl, prematurely. The baby was not Elbert’s, a fact that was never lost on him. When the baby was finally ready to come home (she’d spent her first few weeks in an incubator at Rose Memorial Hospital), Elbert made it clear that the baby girl was not wanted. My mother brought me home anyway.
I was, in other words, the love child of a promiscuous young woman who was the daughter of a fugitive killer. And she was also drinking heavily by then, following in her parents’ footsteps. God only knows why I was so eager to come into such a family that I was willing to arrive a month early. Meanwhile, Jessie wasn’t finished. Ten months after me came Frederick. Counting the baby who had died at birth, Jessie had given birth to six children. She was all of 24.
But I felt loved by Jessie, at least as a toddler. She was both attentive and protective, the latter a necessity from Elbert. Elbert hated and frightened me and I would seek shelter under my mother’s long, flowing skirts. But if my mother wasn’t around, Elbert, a small man with a Napoleonic need to compensate, would find any excuse to scream at me and hit me.
Elbert was a milkman and probably tried his best to provide, but life was a struggle and we lived in poverty. Our house in Commerce City was tiny and there was never enough to eat. We were perpetually hungry. Mother was industrious, always canning food and crocheting. But she and Elbert would start drinking the moment he came home from work.
We kids played in the street and I was often dressed in nothing more than ragged underwear. Sometimes the neighbors would take pity on me, especially a couple who lived a few doors down from us, Marcy and Luis Garcia, who would often bring me into their home and feed me and sometimes even buy me clothes. I remember pretty little dresses. The Garcias had three children. Their oldest, Clay, scared me. He was 18 and played on his high school football team and seemed huge to me. Typically, Clay wasn’t around. But one day I happened to be at the Garcia’s when Clay was there, and on that day Marcy and Luis decided to run out to the neighborhood market and leave me with Clay. Luis went into Clay’s room where Clay was lying on his bed listening to music and told him to keep an eye on me until they got back. “Sure,” I heard Clay say, “I’ll keep an eye on her.”
I ran after Luis and Marcy to tell them I wanted to go with them, scared of being left alone with Clay. I stood at the screen door, barely tall enough to look out the window of the door and I watched them get into their car and drive off. Then I waited there, with my two hands on the window, watching for their return. Soon, Clay called me into his room to tell me he had something to show me. I remained motionless at the door. Then his voice rose and he sternly told me to come into his room. Reluctantly, I walked towards his door. He was on his bed, covered by a blanket and he told me to come closer and when I did so, he pulled the blanket aside. “Do you want to touch it?” he asked. I was probably not even three. The sight terrified me and I ran out of the room. Luis and Marcy came home soon after and Clay, of course, behaved as if he’d been doing nothing more than listening to his music in his room. I never said anything, but I distinctly remember never going over to the Garcia house again when Clay was around. Soon, Clay went off to college where one can only hope his attention gravitated more toward coeds and less toward little girls. For me, it wouldn’t be the last time as a little girl that I’d find myself the target of a warped mind.
Around the house I adored my mother as little girls do, and she adored me, at least in her own way. I was her baby doll, and she’d fix my hair in curls like Shirley Temple. But her interest and attention progressively waned as I grew from baby to toddler to little girl. Her interest in Elbert had waned years earlier, and I remember being no older than three and seeing my mother repeatedly leave in the evenings for places unknown, coming home late at night. Often Elbert would lock her out and I remember a few nights in particular when Mother rapped on the basement window where my bed was, pleading, “Eva, please go unlock the door and let me in.” But Elbert would see her, see her being dropped off in front of the house by yet another strange man, and as I would run upstairs to the door, Elbert would threaten to spank me if I so much as made a step towards the front door. Please let Mommy in! I would cry, but it was wasted breath. Mother would eventually leave and where she ended up going on such nights, I have no idea. Probably back to whatever bar in which she’d been drinking to find someone to spend the night with.
I also remember, at about that same age, a man coming to the house one afternoon and talking to Elbert on the front porch. Words were exchanged and Elbert seemed agitated by the conversation. I remember the man’s car out on the street in front of the house, and I remember him asking for me by name, and I remember Elbert yelling for me to get away from the door and to get back in the house. Later in life I would put it together and realize the man was my father. In my late twenties, sometime before that snowy night in Denver with my suicide kit, I would try to find that man.
As Jessie and Elbert’s marriage began to disintegrate further, things quickly became physical. One night, when I was three, Elbert knocked Jessie’s front teeth loose, punching her squarely in the mouth. I have no recollection of what brought the fight on. Probably it had to do with Jessie’s new boyfriend – George Duncan. Whatever the reason, Elbert hit Jessie about the head, and the hairpins she was wearing penetrated her scalp. Blood flowed down her head and from her mouth. The neighbors heard the commotion and called the police, who arrested Elbert and took him away. I don’t know why Mother wasn’t taken to a hospital. Maybe she was treated at the scene, I don’t remember. I just remember all of us kids sitting in a semicircle around the bathtub as she lay in the tub washing the blood off her face and body, doing so slowly and calmly, with the demeanor of someone who might be taking a bath on a Sunday morning before church.
Elbert spent a couple days in jail and when he was released, Mother, fearing for her life, knew she had to get out. There was no telling what Elbert might be capable of doing. George came by and got her. She walked out the front door with her suitcase in her hand and me hanging onto her skirt, sobbing...
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