My paternal grandparents called each other “Mr. Boyls” and “Miss Ruth,” at least in public. It used to drive my mother crazy. “I just know that they must call each other by more personal names sometimes!” she fretted.
I found out what they called each other, but by then Mother had died with her question still unanswered. None of my family was ever good at saving letters, and, sadly, that includes me. I guess we gave no thought to posterity, or else figured the tedium of everyday life was nothing for the archives.
However, cleaning out a storage room one day, I found a shabby old valise that held a few yellowed and crumbling letters my grandfather had written to my grandmother during a separation of several months, when she had had to return from Maben to Greenwood to take care of her ill and aged mother. (Today I guess no one will even have a few letters. One does not save text messages for posterity, either.) These letters were dated within the first 18 months of my own life.
“Dear Sweetheart,” they began, thereby answering Mother’s curiosity. It was a dreadful time financially, during the worst days of the Great Depression. Granddaddy was a “big fish in a small pond,” a merchant and a bank president, with both store and bank teetering dangerously on the brink of ruin. (In fact, I think the situation later contributed greatly to a devastating heart attack for him, although the doctors blamed it on his teeth and pulled all of them.) Anyway, he never fully recovered and finally moved to Greenwood himself.
During those tough times I think my grandfather and I forged an incredible bond. Looking back, I suspect that as a toddler I might have provided a good diversion. I do know those few dusty letters spoke often of me.
“She comes into a room and heads straight for me,” Granddaddy wrote proudly, “and if I enter a room, she leaves whoever else is there and heads my way.”
Although I do not remember those occasions, I do not doubt their truth. For as long as I can remember, Granddaddy was a lodestone for me. Tall — at least to me — rawboned, red-headed, with high cheekbones and dark brown eyes, he stood out to me; and all his life I headed directly his way.
Both my grandfathers were a blessing for me, but because of circumstances I spent more time with this one. Both, along with my father, I was to discover, played an enormous part in influencing me to marry the kind of man I did. All loved people. All felt kindly to their fellow man, although my father was not above a bit of teasing.
This fact was demonstrated to me years later when, as a teenager, I visited some of my parents’ friends in that small pond of Maben. It was larger then, but still far from being a metropolis. One day, innocently walking down the street, I was almost accosted by an old man with a bushy, gray beard, who enveloped me in a tight bear hug, continuously exclaiming, “Oh, here is a little John R. Boyls! I can hardly believe it, but I’d know it anywhere — a little John R. Boyls!”
There was nothing I had rather be. That strong attraction to him I had as a baby never weakened. I always thought of him as my best friend.
Days on the farm
I visited those grandparents often during his semi-retirement, when he managed my grandmother’s family farms. They lived in a part of Greenwood that had grown up unattractively around them, and any playmates had to be imported. None of them trumped the pleasure of riding horseback nearly every day with Granddaddy, he on a big red mare, me on the current Shetland pony.
We took the back roads out of Greenwood, over hard, packed dirt and under shady trees strung with muscadine vines. We could reach up and pluck muscadines from the trees and eat them as we rode out to the “Home Place” or “The Point,” two of the three farms on which they grew cotton. Mema, my grandmother, packed sandwiches of boiled ham or lunch meat for us, which we ate at noon with Orange Crushes or Cokes we bought from a convenient country store. We ate with the field hands who, having toiled hard all morning, each hungrily downed a whole loaf of bread, a can of sardines, an “R-uh Cee Cola,” and maybe a Moon Pie.
Mema had made for me a little cotton sack, a miniature version of the long canvas bags the hands pulled behind them. I picked cotton right along with them, had my cotton weighed, and was paid just like the hands. Of course, I did not have to pick long, hard hours as they did, but I did learn to appreciate their work in those days before mechanical cotton pickers.
Granddaddy let me ride on the cotton trucks hauling their fluffy loads to the gin. No hay ride was ever as luxurious as riding on that cotton truck. I would hurriedly scamper off the truck at the gin before the terrifying swinging vacuum tube could suck me up with the cotton.
There may have been nothing special about those experiences, but it does make me especially sad to realize that my daughters never had the opportunity to know, to spend such times, with either of their grandfathers.
I would still, to this day, run straight to my grandfather in any crowd. I would still feel that powerful magnetism in his presence. I do feel, still, that un-named emotion that pulls me in his direction. No, I have that wrong; I can give it a name. It is love.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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