To Gerushia, whom I never met

Gerushia and Loyd married in northwest Arkansas in the early 1900s, and she rather quickly bore him two children — a girl, and then a boy.

Loyd worked on a nothing little farm, and at a sawmill driving mules, shouting “gee!” for the left, and “haw!” for the right. Gerushia worked on the farm, too, and raised the children.

It was a hard-scrapple life to hear the stories now; Loyd liked to say that the Depression passed right on by without their knowing it because they were poor already. They did appreciate that FDR brought electricity to the Ozark hills, but fancies were few.

And then diphtheria struck the hills and the hollers, and Gerushia started showing the symptoms — the running nose, the bluish tint to her skin, the cough that sounded like a seal barking. Church ladies gathered to bathe her forehead and bring food to the frightened father and his two young children, but for all the damp towels and all the covered dishes and all the prayers, Gerushia didn’t make it. They buried her in the red clay of Pettigrew, Ark.

The children — the boy still a toddler — went to live with family for a while while the grieving Loyd kept his head down and kept working.

Among the church ladies who’d come to mop Gerushia’s brow was a woman named Marvie, short for nothing. Just Marvie. She was the last unmarried daughter in the Karr household, a big woman with a bemused smile who was quickly approaching the quarter century mark — long past her due date for marriage in the Ozarks. That didn’t seem to bother her much. She loved her nieces and nephews, loved helping her family out on their little farm, and when Loyd came calling — after the appropriate mourning period, of course — she was more than a little nonplussed. She’d liked Gerushia. They’d sang in the little church choir together, and she was sure sorry for those poor children.

Loyd was not the romantic type. His courtship manners were ragged; not long after he started showing up for dinner, he asked Marvie to marry him. He said he couldn’t offer much and he had those two children to look after, but if she was willing, well, he’d make her a good husband.

They married and Marvie gathered those two lonely children to her lap.  A third child — a daughter, my mother — followed not long after that. The family eventually moved away to northern Missouri, and then to southwest Missouri, but every year they drove back to Pettigrew, and they put flowers on Gerushia’s grave.

In my grandmother’s box of photos rested the photo posted here, and a small yellowed box that contained an empty syringe needle. That was used to innoculate my mother the next time diphtheria came through that corner of Arkansas. Loyd and Marvie took no chances.

As you can see from the photo, Gerushia is small, dark and pretty. My grandmother was big, dark — and though by general standards you couldn’t call her pretty, I thought she was beautiful. I loved and feared and respected her, and it seemed rude to ask her questions about the woman I came to think of as my shadow grandmother, and so I didn’t. I knew she lived. I knew she died. And that was it though I wanted to know more. Out of loyalty to my grandmother, I never asked — though I believe she would have told me and been fine with the telling. There was some part of me that felt sad that Grandpa had chosen her second, and I didn’t want her to feel bad, too. For my grandfather’s part, he never talked abotu Gerushia, though he used to joke that he’d married the biggest Karr on the lot, to which Marvie would smile and flap her hand at him, shooing him away like a fly.

Death did them part, and from all indications, though they bickered like crows, it was a good marriage.

And then a few days ago I get an email from a woman named Kim, a second cousin and an artist in California, who takes vintage photos like the one above and works magic with them. She’s reinterpreted Loyd and Gerushia thus:

“Gerushia’s New World” is the name of her studio. She was a little reluctant to tell me that she’d reinterpreted my grandfather as a big rabbit, but I think he would have been tickled at that. I sure was. And she has a wealth of information about Gerushia, stuff I was too polite to ask for.

I don’t know. I just love that she contacted me, and I just love that if you wait long enough, the knowledge you want will come to you. And I love this print and have ordered it — though after I did so on Etsy Kim protested that she would have sent it to me for free. But no. You don’t get rich sending your work out for free, and I can’t wait to get the print, can’t wait to frame it and can’t wait to tell the story behind it, should people ask. And even if they don’t ask, I’m going to tell the story.

UPDATE: Kim sent me this, as an explanation, though I didn’t ask:

I noticed that one of the commenters wondered why I made Loyd a rabbit.  Let me explain a bit about that.

 

As long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to whimsy and fairy tales and such.  I grew up with my nose inside of curious and colorful books. My dream was to become a writer/illustrator of Children’s books.  I still go to the children’s book section at Barnes and Noble just to peruse and salivate and dream.

 

One of my favorite types of art is “anthropomorphic animal art”.  Basically, to anthropomorphicize is to bring human personality to non human objects.  Most likely, this fascination came from my love of “Alice Through the Looking Glass” and other such surreal and whimsical tales.

 

I like to lend personality to a vintage body by re-applying a new animal head.  Simply with a certain tilt of the head or a new angle to the body I can wrangle a bit of new personality out of the “character”.

 

I’m not sure if any of this can possibly make sense to anyone but me. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m a bit kooky and odd myself.