Ethel
My attempt at a lyric essay about my great-grandmother. It's not there yet.
Nursing homes smell bad. A combination of failing flesh and chemicals meant to forestall the failure creates a distinct odor. It is a still smell, an olfactory stasis. The smell of dying and the smell of cleanliness. They don’t belong together.
One of my first memories is of a smelly nursing home, where I spent time with a woman I was told was a super-hero. People explained to me that she was important. I sat on the side of her bed, as I heard stories. I have no memories prior to sitting on great-grandma’s bed, listening to her tales and poems, sometimes told by her and sometimes told by her children. I know I’m wrong, but I think she smelled like sugar, not nursing home.
Grandpa and his sister Mildred, my first teacher, had stories about Ethel.
Ethel traveled through vast, open Montana expanses atop her steed, the gleaming white snow already blinding in its shine. Snow tamped down the dust before smothering it completely. No trees broke the searing brightness. Ethel rubbed Mischief’s neck, squinting against the snow’s obtrusion. Snow and reflected sunlight were getting in both their eyes.
Ethel seldom needed words to speak to Mischief. Horse and woman communicated more effectively through demeanor and thought. Body and mind, Mischief and Ethel. A unit assembled with purpose.
Right now, the purpose was to reach Belmont, and then on to Ryegate.
Ethel had taken the mail from the main house, where she, her soon-to-be husband J.B., her brother Art, and their friend Lou collected their outgoing missives, letters from Montana to Wisconsin and beyond. She and Mischief had visited the neighboring homesteads, traversing the dozens of miles separating houses, shacks, and domiciles-in-progress. They would need to collect the letters from town before heading to Ryegate, where the envelopes would be organized, collated, and categorized before being loaded onto the train, the letters from Painted Robe Coulee heading to the Mississippi, notes from the frontier to civilization. Ethel was a river girl. Mischief was of the plains.
Ethel and Mischief rode in the direction of Belmont, the road’s boundaries still clear despite the snow. It was getting colder, though. The snowflakes were getting bigger, fluffier, more obtrusive. Mountains surrounded them, but distantly. Frozen precipitation collected in a geological bowl containing farms and houses and Ethel and Mischief, an unfilled frozen lake.
Mischief sneezed as a flake landed in her nostril. Ethel rubbed Mischief’s neck. She didn’t need to speak to the horse. Mischief was safe with Ethel.
My memories of my great-grandmother exist in a hazy dream. She died when I was an eight-year-old child who looked like her son. “Kenny!” I remember her mutedly exclaiming, her voice quieted by age, when I entered her room in the nursing home. That’s not my name, and when my years were measured in single digits, it pissed me off to be called anything but my name. Later in life, I would learn to appreciate the comparison, but at eight, I knew my name. Someone (my mother, likely, but maybe my grandmother, Ethel’s daughter-in-law) told me not to be mad, to smile and to sit on the side of the bed. I was a little scared of the old woman with my nose and eyes, but I also wanted to be near her. She felt right, maybe because she was just a little scary. Fear was short lived, however, because great-grandma always had Neapolitan Creme Wafers on her nightstand.
Neapolitan Creme Wafers are disgusting to anyone with discernment, but they are just the ticket for 99-year-old warrior-poets and 8-year-old gay boys. When the adults weren’t looking, we ate more than we were allowed. Her crooked, gnarled fingers held the chalky, not-at-all-sweet cookies delicately, primly. My stubby little digits clumsily fumbled the plastic-molded package, aiming for the pink ones because they were the best. The antiseptic, chemical taste of pink Neapolitan Creme Wafers was sufficient to block out the smell of age and death that suffused the building. Pink, sugary-but-not-sweet wafer dust fell on Ethel’s blanket.
Belmont was a small community, a few brown, wooden buildings arranged along a rough road. It was a hub, of sorts, for the wildly dispersed homesteaders, a place to obtain supplies and human interaction and maybe a drink. Ethel, however, didn’t stop into the saloon. A suffragist, upstanding daughter of a man with grand ambitions and a slightly more modern view of women than his contemporaries, Ethel was a tee-totaler. Alcohol was a women’s issue, and the hard, violent, male realities of frontier life reinforced her hatred of drunkenness. Besides, she had work to do.
Ethel and Mischief collected the mail, shivering now. It was getting colder and the snow was picking up.
Standing in the graveyard at Belmont, now a true ghost town, I couldn’t focus on locating the tiny, broken markers that indicated the rotting bodies of my ancestors. The sky was vast and foreign. The dry, dusty, brown dirt was pockmarked by ominous orifices. “Snake holes,” my dad told me. That’s all I can remember from that place. Ruins of old buildings that must have been rickety when they were inhabited. Dust below too much air. Holes in the ground hiding representatives of my single phobia.
Ethel is not buried there. Her body is in Wisconsin. Her headstone rests among grass and flowers, far from Painted Robe Coulee. Up the street from the River. Next to the University. Across town from her father’s Frankenstein’s Monster of a house, which is still there, inhabited by someone else’s family’s ambitions. She is buried in the city in which she—and I—grew up. Ethel’s grave is not dusty. Life surrounds it.
Ethel and Mischief left Belmont in the direction of Ryegate. The road was no longer clearly boundaried. Violently reflective snow covered the landscape beyond the buildings in town, leaving a uniform sheen disguising the uneven surfaces, the rock formations, the scraggly, dormant flora. Mischief’s hooves kicked up the snow, though, forging a new path upon the established one.
A little twitch of concern entered Ethel’s otherwise methodical brain. Years later, back in Wisconsin, that brain would concoct a scheme to convince the company her husband worked for to move their entire house across town. On the company dime. She was always smarter than the businessmen. She learned that from her huckster father. She urged Mischief to pick up the pace.
Ryegate was a larger town than Belmont, but neither could have straight-facedly been called more than a village. It did, though, contain the post office that Ethel, more and more urgently, needed to reach. Mischief, rolling her eyes with mild irritation, carried them there, snow falling in larger chunks, drifting down around them, filling the uneven surfaces of the Coulee. It was getting colder.
I don’t remember Ryegate at all, even though, unlike Belmont, it is still a functioning community. I was too rattled by the ghost town and the graveyard and the presumed snakes underneath the earth, mingling with my family’s dead bodies in dry earth. It was so upsetting that my mind has flipped the towns, in fact. We went to Ryegate first because we couldn’t find Belmont. We had to ask old timers in Ryegate where the Belmont cemetery was. We had to go backwards to find Mischief and young Ethel’s route. We had a car, which goes faster than a horse.
Ethel hitched Mischief outside the post office and jumped to the ground. Her feet disappeared into the snow. It was getting deep. Mischief’s pace had masked how much snow had fallen between Belmont and Ryegate. She entered and hurriedly emptied her bag on the counter. The postal worker was looking out the window, paying little attention to Ethel. “Weather doesn’t look good.”
She collected the outgoing mail, knowing it would have to wait until tomorrow. She and Mischief needed to get home.
The exact process of my ancestors’ migration from Connecticut to New York to Wisconsin to Kansas to Montana and—for some of them—back to Wisconsin is hazy to me, just like my memories of my great-grandmother. My great-grandfather J.B. and his soon-to-be brother-in-law Art, along with their friend Lou, left their manufacturing jobs in La Crosse, WI, to pursue a grand adventure. In 1909, the Homestead Act was expanded to double the amount of land an individual could claim, and in 1912, Congress reduced the length of residence required to claim land to 3 years. A few years later, J.B., Art, and Lou initiated their colonial adventure, claiming their plots, building little homes, and beginning work on a shared house at the intersection of their land.
Ethel came later, having stayed with her family in Kansas City, where they had moved from Wisconsin based on an undoubtedly poorly conceived get-rich-quick scheme of her father, a congenital and charming entrepreneur (possibly charlatan) who named dropped his (actual?) friends Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley to further his ambitions. A doctor told Ethel dry air would help her respiratory problems, so she went to Montana to complete the fourth quadrant of the collective homestead at Painted Robe Coulee.
Ethel’s youngest brother didn’t join her. According to my mother, Ethel described Don as “thoughtful,” “intelligent,” and “sensitive,” compliments that gay men sometimes hear through verbal obfuscation. Multi-syllabic words provide many opportunities for tonal nuance. My family put Don in an institution in Kansas City, where he would soon die. His cause of death was also a euphemism.
By the time they left Ryegate, neither Ethel nor Mischief could see beyond the vast white—on the ground, in the endless sky, on their bare faces, in their eyes. They set out toward the homestead, but the distinction between road and not-road was no longer clear, and no amount of galloping or stamping on the part of Mischief could clarify it. Ethel’s skin was contracting, freezing. They rode forward, in the direction of the house at the intersection of four plots of land, three claimed by Ethel’s husband, brother, and their buddy, and a fourth, in addition to even more land, claimed by her.
I don’t know if my family ever thought about the people who lived in Painted Robe Coulee before they got there. The people who once lived there had been slaughtered by the United States government. My family acquired land as a direct result of that genocide. I imagine the land could grow valuable crops, but just not for my ancestors. The dry air was good for Ethel’s respiration but not as good for the crops my family—river people—tried to grow. The people who knew what and how to grow in the Coulee were largely gone, murdered or displaced, so my family’s Montana farm failed.
I don’t know if many of the homesteaders in and around Painted Robe Coulee thought about the genocide that provided them their land. I think Ethel did, though. I might be wrong and simply extracting that assumption from the glowing words emanating from my family’s lips, but I think Ethel thought about those things.
She probably thought about Don, rotting away in a State hospital in Osawatomie, Kansas. The hospital was erected in 1866, 10 years after the town was the site of the largest battle of the Bleeding Kansas conflict, a prequel to the Civil War in which John Brown and his band of abolitionists fought back pro-slavery militants from Missouri. Don died there of “general paralysis of insane,” which I take to mean suicide. “Abandonment” seems more accurate to my gay self.
The snow was thick, in the air and on the ground and around their faces. The distant ridge was no longer visible. The geological bowl no longer had shape. It was dimensionless, simply white. Endless, dense white. Ethel realized she wasn’t sure what direction Mischief was trudging, the horse’s legs slowing against the weight of the wet whiteness.
Ethel’s analytical brain clicked frantically. She tried to breathe deeply, a difficult task on top of the quivering, shaking Mischief. Ethel looked back, hoping to reorient herself, but the buildings of Ryegate were invisible against the thick snow. She was lost. Or she might be on exactly the right path. She didn’t know. Not knowing was an uncomfortable and uncommon state for Ethel.
She used words, now needing clarity in her communication with Mischief. She leaned forward. “Mischief, take us home,” she whispered, her cheek resting against the horse’s neck.
There’s a picture of my great-grandma riding a horse. I don’t think it’s Mischief. It’s a different horse. I can tell by Ethel’s muted smile. She’s wearing a skirt. I can’t figure out how she rode such distances in a skirt, but I also don’t know much about horses or riding them, only ever having ridden a horse once as a child. His name was Thunder. He bit me. Repeatedly. I don’t ride horses.
At any rate, it seems like it would be uncomfortable and irritating to ride a horse in a skirt. But I have a picture of my great-grandmother, clearly in a skirt, smiling a non-Mischief smile, riding a horse. Skills are not passed down genetically. I like to think, as a girl, Ethel might have met Annie Oakley, who after all knew Ethel’s father, as I’ve been told more times than I can count (I’m choosing to believe that part). Maybe Ethel learned how to ride from Annie Oakley. Maybe she learned how to shoot from her, as well. As I’ve also been told more times than I can count, Ethel carried a six-shooter to take out rattlesnakes. My grandfather (“Kenny!”) told me once that she shot a buffalo. That one I know is a lie.
Mischief took Ethel home. That part is true, otherwise I wouldn’t exist. The story my grandfather told me about that day is a fiction, but only partly. As a postmaster (I’ve always been told “post-mistress,” but that’s stupid) in that sparse and vast part of Montana, Ethel certainly rode through her share of snowstorms. But, she also knew what she was doing, horse or no horse. The magical stories about Ethel and Mischief are deeply important to me and my family. They are grand myths, and they matter.
They also run the risk of diminishing my great-grandmother, putting her agency on a horse. A wonderful, clever, legendary horse by all accounts, but still a horse. I didn’t know the horse, but I did know the brains of the operation.
The myth also masks the pain of migration, fear, abandonment, and death that accompanied my ancestors through a pandemic and economic destitution. It also masks the horror and death of the people who preceded my family’s adventure. The myth holds more than I was told.
My family tells stories about Ethel. She’s story-worthy. As an 8-year-old kid, I didn’t just sit on her bed eating gross Neapolitan Creme Wafers. While we sat and talked and snarfed down bad cookies, she asked me to hand her a notebook that was also on the nightstand. It was a notebook of her poetry. She had dozens, maybe hundreds of notebooks filled with her poetry. She would read to me, or ask me to read to her, her own words.
Some of her poems were about Mischief. I don’t remember any of them. I just remember the dust of the wafers and her slanted handwriting.
