1925: Spending the Night With Grandpa and Grandma

By Grace Cash © 1996

Issue: Summer, 1996

Editor's Note... This is the final article in this series written by Grace Cash of Flowery Branch, Georgia. Her stories are extraordinary in that they chronicle an era and everyday life of a loving farm family in detail, as they face the hardships of the early part of the 20th century.

1925 stands out in my memory as my most forgettable year. After we moved to the house on the hill, I celebrated my tenth birthday in April. I now lived in the Chestnut Mountains, having left Macedonia. The farmhouse on the hill had a white sandy yard. It seemed like a touch of heaven, especially for Mama who nearly broke herself down, sweeping and scouring at the three red land farms where I had lived since my birth.

Grandpa and Grandma lived over the hill and around the bend from our house on one of the many farms he rented after he became a "sojourner." Across the hill from our house, a family lived in a big rambling farmhouse. They had nine sons and six daughters. Each of us could pick a playmate exactly the same age.

A summer drought fell heavy over our hill farm that first year in 1925. Grandma (on Papa's side) blamed the drought on the young people, especially the young girls who were bobbing their hair and wearing knee-high dresses and painting their faces with lipstick and rouge. Even worse than that, they rode in rumble seats of black Ford Roadsters with their sweethearts. The roadsters whipped up clouds of dust on the unpaved highway fronting one of our four porches. (We had four porches at this house, and nothing happened that some of us didn't see.) I admired the grownup girls in their white felt cloche hats and pastel colored long-waisted crepe dresses, and matching pastel silk stockings.

One day that Summer I went to spend the night with Grandpa and Grandma in the big old log house that had given residence to dozens of families before Grandpa moved there. Heavy branched oak trees darkly shaded the house and yards so that you couldn't see the barns from the porch. Even on a moonlit night you couldn't see any living thing about the house except lightening bugs when they flashed on their tail lights. Grandpa had seen hundreds of land-parching, brook-drying droughts in the long years that frosted his hair, bringing attention to the shades of red on his face, almost as white as his hair. The lack of rain didn't seem to bother him.

Nobody knew why Grandpa took a notion to rent out his white house and rich surrounding farm land, and move to a rented farmhouse once a year. Grandma never complained about having to move. That was "George's business," and she pretended to like the old log house they now lived in. Grandpa and Grandma did everything they could think of to entertain me. It was my first night to spend alone away from home. Grandma fried chicken and made milk gravy and a pan of biscuits for supper. She cooked a bowl of strawberry preserves and set it beside a cake of yellow batter. I drank glass after glass of buttermilk - no dividing between six brothers and sisters. She had a surprise to touch off the supper - a tin of fresh baked teacakes, grains of sugar seeping out of the dough and standing like crystals on the crust.

After supper we sat on the porch, built of sturdy oak planks more than fifty years ago. The porch wasn't more than a frog's jump from the well curb. We would sit there a long time not saying a word. Then the Whip-poor-will started crying in the tree branches at the brook running below our house, and it was at that moment I first detected a mischievous streak in Grandpa, who claimed like a pulpit preacher, "I'm part Irish." His big broganned feet planted him as firmly on the ground when he walked as a mill stone at the well curb, and I had always thought of him as a giant who never laughed and joked with children.

The whip-poor-will called plaintively from the pine thicket, "Whip-poor-Will, whip-poor-Will." Grandpa started laughing and he said. "Grace, did you ever hear about the farmer whipping his wife?" I hadn't ever heard about any husband whipping his wife. "Well," he said. "There was this old farmer named Will Glover. He was giving his wife a good blasting, he turned her over his knees, Slap, slap, slap! The old whippoorwill in the tree hollered at him, 'Whip-her-Will! Whip-her-Will!' Old will Glover got madder than fire. He thundered out at the whip-poor-will, 'I'll let you know, I am whipping my wife and serves her right. She brought it on herself,'"

I grunted around there in the dark, so Grandpa would think he had told a funny joke. But Grandma said "Pshaw!" with all the disgust of her Dutch soul. (That was what she claimed to be.) Grandpa was just trying to make me forget I was homesick, and telling me a joke like I was grown-up, but Grandma let him know what he would get if he started acting like Will Glover.

At bedtime Grandpa bolted the outside doors, and Grandma had me help her spread fresh-washed, Octagon-smelling sheets on the backroom bed where I was to sleep. She told me the names of the men and women in the wooden framed pictures on the wall, her kinfolk's and Grandpa's kinfolk's on his side of the family. Then they got quietly off to bed, and Grandpa blew out the kerosene oil lamp, just as Grandma had done in the backroom when she covered me with the white crackly sheet, and fluffed up my feather pillow. Now the whole house was dark as pitch.

The roosters in the pine tree roost woke me up before daylight. They were already up, Grandpa out feeding his mule and bringing her to the watering trough at the well. Grandma was clattering around with pots and pans, and by the time I got to the cook room, she was setting fried eggs and ham and red-streaked gravy on the table. Grandpa came in and handed me a bluebird egg. He took his seat at the head of the table - no smile on his face, not even talking, - and he left it to Grandma to fill my plate with turned over eggs and two slices of ham.

"The biscuits are in reach," she said, and I reached for an oven hot biscuit, and Grandpa did the same. "There's jelly when you get around to it." She nodded toward a glass of grape jelly she made that summer, and a cake of yellow butter, the raised flower print dewy with the early morning dampness.

Grandpa slid a cup of black coffee from the enamel pot, setting at his elbow, and I grabbed it with both hands, and he grinned at me, knowing I wasn't allowed coffee at home. Everything was quiet till I said, "Grandpa, did that Old Man Will ever stop whipping his wife last night?"

"Well, after a while," he answered, like it was absolute truth.

Even Grandma smiled, forgetting about how aggravated she got, him joking about that man - any man - whipping his wife. She knew he wasn't anything like that Old Man Will, talking back to a whip-poor-will. They had given me at the age of ten a night that would outlast all the other nights of my life.