KNOWN ONLY BY THE TALES MY MOTHER HAS TOLD
by Wendel Potter
March 6, 2005
I recently received an email from a woman in Omaha who was searching for her birth mother. The Omaha woman was born in 1965 and her mother had lived in Emmetsburg, Iowa at one time.
The Omaha woman had seen a post about my columns and noticed that I hailed from Emmetsburg. Unfortunately, although she knew her birth mother's name, it did not ring any bells with me. We left Emmetsburg in 1962.
I feel sorry for the Omaha woman. She's experiencing some health problems and for her sake and that of her children, she is desperately interested in her medical history.
The Omaha woman's plight set me to thinking about ancestry. How difficult it must be to attempt to track down a relative who was involved in nourishing you through those dark, watery nine months before the light of day creased your eyes and the smarting whack of a physician made you wail like a banshee. Then she was gone.
The only address you had at that birth moment was life itself. You were carted away from your mother's arms before she could set her eyes upon your infant face, a scrunched, bawling face that begged someone to love you with a mother's love and take you home.
If God or luck or whatever was with you, you were adopted by fine folks, as was the case in the Omaha woman's story. For that, if nothing else in this unfair life, she can be grateful.
But her clock has ticked ahead to a time where she needs to know something about a birth mother named Katherine Post who was there at the beginning and then was gone with the cut of a cord. She needs to know about the man who played the farmer's role in her and her mother's life on some nameless night of passion. And then he was gone.
Pondering all of this, it occurred to me that, while I know who my parents were and have a pretty fair handle on the family medical history, I don't know a lot about personalities.
I'm especially interested in my Grandpa Mullen. My mother's father, who she referred to in her reminiscences as Papa, was Francis James Mullen. My middle name was bequeathed from his middle name. That's as close as I've been able to get to Francis James Mullen.
Mom had plenty of stories to tell about her Papa, and those stories were all I knew. He died two years before I was born.
Cancer of the liver, my mother always said and she told of the last time she saw him alive, sitting in the October Iowa sun, a demure version of the once robust and sturdily built Irishman.
Mom said she had not wanted to look at him in the casket, but one of her sisters insisted and Mom, rarely displaying much for a mind of her own under pressure, caved in and looked.
"He had lost so much weight and his skin was jaundiced from the cancer," she told me many times. "That wasn't the way I wanted to remember him."
Grandpa was a farmer near a Northeastern Iowa town called Lawler. He and Grandma had eight children, all girls. They worked on the farm like rugged boys.
"We were afraid of Papa," Mom would tell me. "But he never laid a hand on us," she was quick to add. "Mama would spank us with a switch but all my dad had to do was raise his voice and that got us in line."
She would tell how her father read the Bible every winter, when farm life had slowed down. He was Irish Catholic but twisted the rules to suit his fancy. For instance, the family would have to go to Mass on Thanksgiving morning. Yet on New Year's Day, which was and still is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Church, he skipped Mass.
"The only time he swore", she once said, "was when he would hit his thumb with a hammer or some farm equipment would break down and then he would holler, 'Humped up jumped up Jesus Christ!'"
I once asked Mom about the fabled Irish penchant for imbibing alcohol. She said there was only one time she saw Grandpa when he'd had too much to drink.
He had gone to neighbor's farm to help with the haying and apparently, after the farmers were done, they did a little drinking. She remembered him coming up the lane, laughing and sticking his pitchfork in the ground and then, while grasping the handle, jumping in the air and kicking his heels.
As the girls got older, Grandpa gave up the farm and he and Grandma moved to New Hampton, about ten miles west of Lawler. Grandpa got a job as the city's "night cop". I've seen a picture of him buttoned up in his smart, double-breasted uniform and looking handsomely broad shouldered and cocky like an Irish cop should look.
I do not recall Grandma ever speaking of my grandfather. My aunts would mention him from time to time when they would get together with Mom, but never with the tone of worship that crept into my mother's voice when she talked about her Papa.
My sister once suggested that perhaps Mom's stories were not told so much out of worship but rather as sublimation to veil the heartbreak of a hopelessly poor Iowa farm life in the 1920's with a patriarch who may have drank too much and had a far more callous personality than my mother cared to admit.
It has been kicked around among a few of us that Grandpa's liver cancer (cirrhosis is what is was) was the tragic result of hard and unbridled drinking. We can only speculate as those who knew Grandpa best are gone.
I wish I had met Grandpa. As many tales as I've heard about him, still they were only oft-repeated stories of isolated moments recalled by a partial, admiring daughter.
So I've never felt like I knew Francis James Mullen, the Man. Unlike the case of the Omaha woman, it's not vital to my welfare or that of my children to know more about my grandfather.
I would just like to know whether to worship him or forgive him.
Copyright 2005 Wendel Potter
|
|
