In 1916, when my great grandfather died at the age of eighty-two in Gallatin, Missouri, he left each of his fourteen children, or their surviving heirs, a farm or its equivalent. By 1935 almost all was lost. The name of the game had become survival. They abandoned the land, as they felt it had abandoned them, and moved to find jobs in nearby cities or halfway across the country. Some went to California. Some to Canada. Few stayed. My parents went to Kansas City where Dad found work. And Mother had three more children.
In the year 2000 my sister, Ruth, on what proved to be her last visit home from California, wanted to visit the old place at Gallatin, where she was born. Two miles down the graveled road, west off of Highway 13, we pulled up in front of the old house and got out of the car.
At our back and on both sides lay an unending landscape of North Missouri prairie. Other than the old house before us, and the shed behind it, there was not a structure or dwelling in sight. The thought came to me that this scene must be exactly as it was seventy years ago, in 1935, when Mother, as a young woman, lived here.
My ninety-two-year-old mother walked between my sister and I, while my brother, Jay, who had been our chauffeur for the trip, led the way through clumps of tall fescue and swatches of drying thistles toward the old house. Brick-patterned tarpaper, peeling from its front and sides, sagged halfway to the ground in places, showing the aged and rotting wood beneath it. The wooden window frames were grayed and crumbling.
Mother and my dad, and their first four children, had lived in this small house with Dad’s Uncle James and his wife, Verna, and their four children, one of whom was disabled. They sharecropped. Mom and Dad had one room for their living space downstairs, and another room in the upper half-story, for sleeping. Dad’s Uncle James and his family had the same. They shared the lean-to kitchen, the outhouse, the well, a milk cow, a team of horses and the endless farm work.
Mother stood fidgeting, raising and lowering her left shoulder in a kind of circular motion. She often did this when she was anxious about something or trying to hold her temper.
Finally, in clipped, edgy tones, gesturing toward the old-fashioned well with its tall, rusted pump, she spoke.
“That’s the old well, for all the good it ever was,” as if it had done her a personal wrong at some long-ago moment.
“It must have been a life-saver back then, during all that drought,” I offered.
“Pschhhht.” The old German exclamation of disgust brought our childhood back like nothing else could. It generally meant the subject was beneath her and almost always meant she had no more to say on the matter.
But I couldn’t leave it alone.
“What was it like here, Mama?”
She didn’t answer.
I tried again. “That little abandoned schoolhouse we passed on the way in. Did the kids go to school there?”
A moment passed. “Yes, they went to school there. Patty Lou and Kathryn and Lawrence. Uncle James’ two girls went there too.”
I waited, hoping for more. Slowly and grudgingly the words came. Her eyes, once a piercing blue, now faded almost white, grew blank with remembering.
“We were always hungry. You couldn’t grow anything. It was so dry.” She ran her tongue over her lips, as if feeling the dryness. “The well gave just enough to make coffee in the mornings and tea once in awhile. And to fill the water bucket every morning for drinking and doing dishes.” She stopped.
We couldn’t think of anything to say. When no one said anything, she continued.
“Once, a fire started upstairs. I don’t remember how. Vernie ran to get your dad and Uncle James from the field. I was trying to pump water from the well but it wouldn’t come. No matter how hard I pumped, the water never came.”
“Your dad stopped me, pushed me away from the pump handle. ‘Don’t waste the water’,” he said. ‘Don’t waste the water. I’ll get the fire.’ I wasn’t getting any water anyway. He ran up the stairs and rolled up the bedding that was burning. He kicked it down the stairs and out the door. He and Uncle James stomped it out.” She fell silent.
My brother, trying to lighten the mood, said, “I don’t know how you lived, without a McDonald’s, Mom.”
I don’t think she got the joke. “No, we didn’t have a McDonald’s. Vernie and I, we walked into Gallatin once a month…right up that gravel road…but it was dirt then. We took a shortcut through the woods to town. We went on Thursdays. That’s when the government handed out stuff. What people call commodities now.”
I tried to remember how many miles we were from Gallatin. Six? Seven? And I thought how hard that would have been, for my proud mother, to ask for food.
“Vernie always had to carry Albert.” The words now came in a rush, like some dam had been breached. “He was crippled, you know. Poor little thing. He cried a lot. We were both pregnant, Vernie and me.” She turned to my brother. “I carried you, Jay Richard.”
I wanted so badly to sit down and bawl my head off for her and that young family. I squeezed her shoulder. I kissed the top of her head. “Well, I’m glad you got out of here, Mom.”
“We never, not once, made a good crop here.” She turned to face the east where the land now lay fertile and green, covered by a healthy growth of pasture grass. “Years…and not one good crop.”
Fiercely…defiantly, “So we left.”
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Laura was also the winner of the 2023 Best in Rural Writing Contest. Listen to her read her winning essay “Leaving,” and please consider subscribing to The Milk House’s Youtube channel.
(Photo by author, the Gallatin Farmhouse)
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